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Abbott's $4.6b slug to business
By Peter Martin
November 5, 2012 — 3.00am
THE Coalition's tax policies will cost Australian businesses $4.57 billion in their first full year of operation, according to the Commonwealth Treasury.
Prepared as Treasury attempts to come to grips with a suite of Coalition policies yet to be announced, the analysis includes only those to which it has publicly committed. Excluded are policies with a negative but uncertain impact on business, such as winding back the recent increase in the employee tax-free threshold from $6000 to $18,200.
The three policies identified by Treasury are the Coalition's commitment to impose a 1.5 per cent tax levy on big firms to fund paid parental leave, its decision to axe instant asset writeoff and other tax breaks for small business funded from the carbon tax, and its decision to axe the ability for businesses to "carry back" losses and obtain refunds for tax already paid funded from the mining tax.
The analysis excludes the benefit to some businesses from axing the carbon and mining taxes.
Treasury finds that businesses would lose $4.57 billion in the first full year the Coalition's three commitments were operational, accumulating to $17.2 billion over four years.
Its calculations suggest manufacturers would pay an extra $1.34 billion a year, retailers an extra $930 million and the construction sector an extra $860 million a year.
Although business as a whole would benefit from the Coalition's policies because of the removal of the $6.6 billion a year carbon tax and the $2 billion a year mining tax, the analysis suggests that outside of the few big companies paying those taxes the rest of Australian businesses would suffer.
Treasury's responsibility for costing opposition policies in the lead-up to elections has been transferred to the new Parliamentary Budget Office, but it still maintains a watching brief on behalf of the government. During the 2010 campaign it found errors and differences of opinion over Coalition costings amounting to $11 billion.
On Monday, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said that taxes on business would be less under a Coalition government than under the Labor government.
Mr Abbott said that the Treasury analysis had been "misused" by the government and did not take into account "the fact that the carbon tax has gone, the mining tax has gone and there'll be a modest company tax cut [under a Coalition government]".
"I don't think that the government should be misusing Treasury analysis in this way," he told reporters in Canberra.
Trade Minister Craig Emerson said it wasn't unusual for Treasury to cost opposition policies.
Asked whether the costings took into account the impact of the abolition of the mining and carbon taxes on business, Dr Emerson said: ''They are treasury costings and we stand by those costings.''
Dr Emerson the Coalition's policies represented ''a massive redistribution away from businesses travelling in the slow lane — that is, small businesses — in favour of businesses that are travelling in the mining industry fast lane''.
Finance Minister Penny Wong told the ABC on Sunday the Coalition was being irresponsible by attacking government moves to keep the budget in surplus while not detailing how it would fund its own promises to axe the carbon tax and the mining tax.
"I'm not sure it's very responsible to talk about the importance of bringing a budget to surplus and the importance of fiscal discipline but not telling people what your cuts are," she said. "And I'm not sure it's responsible to talk about the ending of the age of entitlement but then oppose the tightening of benefits such as the baby bonus, and family tax benefits."
Coalition finance spokesman Andrew Robb attacked Senator Wong for refusing to guarantee the budget would be in surplus.
"Wayne Swan alone has declared on at least 150 occasions the government will deliver a surplus in 2012-13 come hell or high water," he said.
"If Labor walks away from this commitment it would sit alongside Julia Gillard's infamous promise there would be no carbon tax."
In budget analysis to be released Monday, Deloitte Access Economics says sliding mining revenues make the forecast surplus unlikely. It expects a deficit of $4.2 billion this financial year, followed by a deficit of $5.1 billion in 2013-14.
"China has slowed and that hurts the budget," Access says. "While we cheer the genuinely tough decisions in the budget update - notably the cut to the baby bonus and to indexation of subsidies to private health insurance - the budget is still in search of a surplus."
with Judith Ireland, Dan Harrison
Follow the National Times on Twitter
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INVASIVE SPECIES ALERT!!!! Please report me I am an invader
Monday, 26th February 2018
Tephrocactus articulatus (Spruce Cone Cactus)
Why is it a problem?
Tephrocactus articulatus is originally from Argentina. It was introduced in Phoenix the city of Arizona where it has become invasive. The plant species was probably introduced to South Africa as garden ornamental. This species has a speedy growth rate, an ability to double its segments numbers. It has small spines that pose a significant threat to livestock. This species forms dense stands that are difficult to penetrate, preventing human and stock movement. Dense infestations can replace grasses in rangelands and other indigenous vegetation. The species is a threat to biodiversity, livelihoods, economy and agriculture.
Cylindropuntia pallida (Thistle Cholla)
Why is it problematic?
Cylindropunita pallida is originally from Texas and Northern Chile. It was introduced to Australia and Spain, where it has become invasive. This species was probably introduced to South Africa as garden ornamental. It has now naturalised from garden escapees. The plant has a speedy growth rate, an ability to double its segments numbers. Cylindropunita pallida has needle-sharp spines that pose a significant threat to livestock. Once they penetrate the skin the spines are not easily removed due to tiny barbs on the spines. The plant forms dense stands that are difficult to penetrate, preventing human and stock movement. Dense infestations can replace grasses in rangelands and other indigenous vegetation. The species are a threat to biodiversity, livelihoods, economy and agriculture.
SANBI’S BID taking action
The South African National Biodiversity Institute’s (SANBI) Biological Invasions Directorate (BID) aims to identify and address the threat posed by these invasive alien species, which have the potential to negatively affect not just biodiversity but also human livelihoods and economic development.
The strategy of prioritising the early detection of emerging invasive species populations allows for effective monitoring of the species. By rapidly responding to emerging invasive alien plant species before they become widespread, costs are kept to a minimum and priceless natural habitats are preserved. The programme is currently researching for these species with the aim to eradicate existing populations.
SANBI’s BID has initiated a project to assess the invasiveness of these species and a management plan is in progress. Initial surveys conducted by the team have revealed new populations in the Eastern Cape. The programme is currently implementing a communication strategy to encourage the public to report new sightings of these species.
If you see these plant species, please report them to the SANBI’S BID. Please provide us with a locality, pictures, and your contact details.
Contact details: Kanyisa Jama k.jama@sanbi.org.za, Sihle Manzana S.Manzana@sanbi.org,za, Phakamile Phehlukwayo P.Phehlukwayo@sanbi.org.za
Tel: 043 726 7450, 043 726 7492
The South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) is mandated to conserve South Africa’s rich biodiversity. Its Invasive Species Programme, funded by Working for Water, aims to reduce the threat of biological invasions through detection, post-border risk assessment and management planning.
© Blue Crane Route Tourism - 2021 | Links | List / Manage Your Business | INVASIVE SPECIES ALERT!!!! Please report me I am an invader
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Sony SupportDCR-DVD308
What is the difference between the AVCHD format and the MP4 format?
The Advanced Video Codec High Definition (AVCHD) format is suitable for creating AVCHD or Blu-ray Disc® recordings and watching on an HDTV. Whereas, MP4 is much easier to move, copy and upload to web sites or for playing back on portable devices.
Differences with the specifications for both formats are provided in the table below.
Specifications AVCHD MP4
Image size (Aspect ratio) 1920 x 1080/60i, 50i (16:9)
1440 x 1080/60i, 50i (16:9) 1440 x 1080/30p (16:9)
1280 x 720/30p (16:9)
640 x 480/30p (4:3)
Audio channels / Sampled frequency 2 channels/48 kHz
5.1 channels/48 kHz 2 channels/48 kHz.
File extension .M2TS .MP4
Compatible with the Blu-ray Disc format
Compatible with several recording media devices such as a hard disk drive (HDD) or a Memory Stick® media
Compatible with xv.Color technology
Compatible with Windows® 7 operating system and above natively support AVCHD
Compatible with the Apple® QuickTime® format
Compatible with various recording media and networks including the PlayStation® Video by the PlayStation Network
Compatible with the Windows 7 operating system and above natively support MP4
What do 60i and 60p in the recording format AVCHD 60i/60p stand for?
What is Audio Video Coding High Definition (AVCHD)?
What are the video format standards used in different countries worldwide?
What file formats are supported in PlayMemories Home?
What are the differences between Picture Motion Browser and PlayMemories Home?
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Yo-Yo Ma & Kathryn Stott Announce New Album Songs Of Comfort And Hope Available December 11 — Preorder Now
NEW YORK, Oct. 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Kathryn Stott come together again, this time for Songs of Comfort and Hope, set for release on December 11, 2020 on Sony Classical. Available now for preorder, Songs of Comfort and Hope is inspired by the series of recorded-at-home musical offerings that Ma began sharing in the first days of the COVID-19 lockdown in the United States. Throughout the spring and summer, Yo-Yo Ma’s #SongsofComfort grew from a self-shot video of Antonín Dvořák’s “Goin’ Home” into a worldwide effort that has reached more than 18 million people.
Ma and Stott mark the next chapter in the project with this new album, offering consolation and connection in the face of fear and isolation. The album includes 21 new recordings, which span modern arrangements of traditional folk tunes, canonical pop songs, jazz standards, and mainstays from the western classical repertoire. “Songs are little time capsules of emotions: they can contain long-lost dreams and desires, and feelings of great spirit, optimism, and unity,” Ma and Stott write of Songs of Comfort and Hope.
“Songs bring a sense of community, identity, and purpose, crossing boundaries and binding us together in thanks, consolation, and encouragement. It had long been our wish to explore this medium further, but we could never have imagined that the catalyst would be a pandemic that fundamentally rearranged our ways of living. This is music that tells stories, that marks occasions private and public, that gives voice to celebrations, remembrances, and all of life’s mysteries. These are songs that pay tribute to musical champions of social justice — like Paul Robeson and Violeta Parra — and to the troubadours of our joy, imagination, and sorrow — like Francis Poulenc, Wu Tong, and Benjamin Britten.”
Among the new takes on old favorites are Pulitzer Prize® winner Caroline Shaw‘s artful and eloquently arranged “Shenandoah”; Australian composer Harry Sdraulig‘s “Fantasia on Waltzing Matilda”; pianist Stephen Hough‘s lush arrangement of “Scarborough Fair“, and two-time Academy® Award-nominated icon Jorge Calandrelli’s re-imagining of a pair of songbook treasures: “We’ll Meet Again” by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles, and Violeta Parra‘s “Gracias a la Vida.“ See the full track list below.
Ma and Stott‘s recording partnership began in 1985, and includes Soul of the Tango and Obrigado Brazil, each of which garnered a GRAMMY® Award for “Best Classical Crossover Album.“ Most recently, in 2015, they released the critically acclaimed Songs from the Arc of Life, of which NPR wrote, “Over those many years, they’ve developed a wonderfully warm and mutually responsive musical partnership that has blossomed in performances that are both generous and incisive.”
Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott share the warmth of decades of music making again with Songs of Comfort and Hope, offering audiences new paths into treasured musical memories and a few notes of hope for a better future.
Sony Music Masterworks comprises Masterworks, Sony Classical, Milan Records, OKeh, Portrait and Masterworks Broadway imprints. For email updates and information please visit www.sonymusicmasterworks.com.
CONNECT WITH THE ARTISTS
YO-YO MA
WEBSITE: http://www.yo-yoma.com/
FACEBOOK:https://www.facebook.com/YoYoMa
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/yoyoma
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/yoyo_ma
YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/user/YoYoMaVEVO
KATHRYN STOTT
WEBSITE: http://www.kathrynstott.com/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/kathystott
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/stott.kathryn
1. Amazing Grace, Prelude
Arranged and produced by Graham Fitkin
11. Fantasia on Waltzing Matilda
Harry Sdraulig
2. Ol’ Man River
from Showboat, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II
Arranged by Roderick Williams
12. Scarborough Fair
Arranged by Stephen Hough
3. Shenandoah
Arranged By Caroline Shaw
13. Solveig’s Song
from Peer Gynt, Edvard Grieg
4. Goin’ Home
from Symphony No. 9 in E minor, “From the New World” Antonín Dvořák
Arranged by William Arms Fisher
14. Les Chemins de l’Amour
5. Jewish Song
from Jewish Life, No. 3
Ernest Bloch
15. Marietta’s Lied
from Die tote Stadt, Erich Wolfgang Korngold)
6. Zdes’ khorosho, Op. 21, No. 7
Sergei Rachmaninoff
16. Thula Baba
Traditional Zulu lullaby
7. Moscow Nights
Vasily Solovyov-Sedoi and Mikhail Matusovsky
17. The Last Rose of Summer
Arranged by Benjamin Britten
8. Over the Rainbow
from “The Wizard of Oz,” Harold Arlen
Arranged by Tom Poster
18. Londonderry Air (Danny Boy)
Arranged by Fritz Kreisler
9. Rain Falling from the Roof
19. Gracias a la Vida
Arranged by Jorge Calandrelli
10. Song Without Words, Op. 109
20. We’ll Meet Again
Ross Parker and Hughie Charles
21. Amazing Grace, Postlude
ALBUM ARTWORK (FOR MEDIA USE): DOWNLOAD
Larissa Slezak | Jamie Bertel – Sony Music Masterworks
Amanda Ameer – First Chair Promotion
SOURCE Sony Music Masterworks
@SonyMusic
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Philips Hue Review
Geoffrey Morrison | Feb 17, 2013
Lighting is a powerful thing. Lighting can set a mood consciously, and perhaps subconsciously too. Does anyone like the green, cold bluish look of a florescent-lit cubeland office? How about a candle-lit dinner? By a fireplace? What about a cool winter morning, or a hot summer sunset?
The color of light plays a significant role in our lives, and most of the time, we barely notice. The comely nature of incandescent light bulbs has been disappearing for years, replaced by CFLs that despite a similar color temperature, offer little of their predecessor's warmth (literally).
Enter LEDs: Energy efficient sure, but more importantly, with red, green, and blue diodes, able to generate any color imaginable. If only someone would hook one up to an app. Oh wait!
The Philips Hue, available only via the iTunes store, is everything you need for remote-controlled multi-colored lighting in a single box. For $199 you get three LED light bulbs, each with a wireless transceiver built in, plus a wireless bridge unit you plug into your home's router. The app you download for free via iTunes.
Setup is easy. The bulbs are normal size, fitting anywhere a standard light bulb would. They can go all in the same room, or in different rooms. The base unit connects to your router via Ethernet, and comes with a small A/C wall wart for power.
The bulbs are bright, brighter than many CFL lamps I've had. In the "default" mode (i.e. if you just turn them on), they're a warm white, perhaps slightly cooler color temp than the warmest CFLs (which in turn are cooler than incandescent).
If you want to go wacky, you can dial in all manners of color, and the smooth transitions from one color to another is really slick. Green for a wacky party, blue for a crazy movie night, deep red to freak out the neighbors, all are possible. Once you get over that, you can dial in more moderate tones to set a mood, including various temperatures of white. Presets (called "Light Recipes") in the app labeled "Concentration," "Relax," "Reading" and so seem to be reasonably named.
Ah yes, the app. The interface, at first, seems decent. It's attractive, and has lots of other presets like "Sunset," and "Energize" that offer vastly different ambiances. Dragging up the screen reveals a second menu that gives you sliders to adjust the brightness, plus a color palette to choose specific colors or color temperatures (accessed by turning your iPhone/touch sideways). Honestly, this is less intuitive than it sounds. I'm sure the app's designers were trying to make the app easy to use for everyone, but they dove right past that and made it clumsy. Once you get past the novelty of switching from "Deep Sea" to "Beach" presets, actually getting the app to do what you want is needlessly difficult. There are always multiple steps between what you want to do and how you're able to do it. You can't, for example, just turn on a "white" light. You'd need to choose a preset first, then adjust it.
It gets worse. You can't just make a Light Recipe preset for funky colors from scratch. You either have to load an image, take a photo with the camera, or stick with four white base-presets with different color temps. You can't just make a "red" preset. It's clunky, to put it nicely.
And really, would a color wheel, a color palette, or even an image with buckets of paint be too hard for someone to understand? For example,check out the LIFX app mock-up. Simple, easy to understand. Not forcing you to use the bulb/app in the convoluted way some Philips designer thinks is the best for you. Then there's all the features that should have been there, like syncing the lights to music, like AmbiLight used to do? Or a slow rotation through colors. Cool for a party, right? Nope. None of that.
Other aspects, like timers, randomly stop working for some users. This is a pretty big deal, as one of the coolest uses for these would be to make it seem like you're at home when you're not, turning the lights on and off, even having a blue color temp like someone's watching TV. Even if it does work, there's no scheduling function. So whatever you set, it's like that every day. No weekend/weekday options, so be wary if you're considering these for a bedroom. Sure a slow fade-in of light is a great way to wake up, but not on your day off. I wasn't able to test it, but apparently syncing the preset/light recipes across different devices is a nightmare.
The current ranking of the app, with 139 reviews on iTunes, is 2/5 stars. The majority are 1 or 2 star rankings. It's clear I'm not the only one disappointed at what could have been. What's interesting reading the reviews (and you should, just so you have a heads up at how crappy the app is), is that everyone loves the bulbs. It's the app that's the problem. And since it's been nearly 2 months since the last update, I'm concerned Philips has given up.
Lastly, and it's not a huge deal, but the blue LEDs on the wireless bridge are exceptionally bright, and can't be dimmed. Sure you can tuck it away anywhere, but it seems an odd oversight.
I like the Hue. Or I should say, I want to like the Hue. The bulbs bring a warmth to the room, and the color possibilities make certain you have the right light for the right mood. However, it narrowly misses being a "great" product with lazy app design, and a real lack of exploiting the potential of this is product. With the pieces Philips has created, this could have easily been a revolutionary lighting product. Instead, it's some neat colored LEDs you control with an app. Cool, that, but not amazing. So close...
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Canelo Alvarez Claims That He Could Beat Floyd Mayweather In A Rematch
Published 9:57 PM, Thursday August 06 2020 GMT+1
Canelo Alvarez is confident that he could avenge his only defeat to Floyd Mayweather if they set up a blockbuster rematch.
The 30-year-old Mexican became a four-weight world champion after beating Sergey Kovalev last November at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.
And Alvarez is adamant that a rematch with Mayweather, who is now retired, would be much different compared to their initial encounter.
"It's different now," he said. "I'm [a] different fighter.
"I think he's good too but I'm a different fighter now.
"Maybe [it would be a] different fight."
Mayweather put on a masterclass performance against the Mexican star in 2013 and picked up a comfortable victory on points.
Alvarez, who has managed an incredible 53 wins in 56 professional fights, has beaten down the likes of Kovalev, Gennady Golovkin, Miguel Cotto and Amir Khan since his defeat to Mayweather.
But his clash with the American was incredibly one-sided and saw 'Money' showboat throughout.
When Floyd Mayweather Humiliated Canelo Alvarez With His In-Ring Showboating
Canelo Alvarez Warns Gennady Golovkin He Would KO Him And 'Do Some Serious Damage'
Floyd Mayweather Fires Fresh Shot At Saul 'Canelo' Alvarez Over Fight Contract
Canelo Alvarez Slams YouTuber Fights Like Floyd Mayweather Vs Logan Paul
Logan Paul Will Earn '5000 Per Cent More' Than Originally Thought For Floyd Mayweather Fight
Floyd Mayweather 'Knows He'd Lose To Conor McGregor' In A Rematch
Alvarez loaded up and swung in the 11th round, violently hitting the top rope after missing Mayweather - who glided away then bent over and stared out of the ring in exaggerated fashion, as if watching the punch sail to the back of the arena.
Many criticised Mayweather for cunningly picking off Canelo before he reached his peak, but the sport's highest-earning fighter gave a brilliant response to that theory on his UK tour this March.
"When I was 21 and I fight a guy who's 30, you know what they say?" he asked in London's York Hall. "He was over the hill; Floyd beats fighters who are over the hill.
"Now if I'm 36 and Canelo is 23 - I'm more than 10 years older than him, and you're better when you're younger.
"But when I beat someone younger, then guess what? It [the story] becomes: I got too much experience. OK. How about the guys I beat who are my age?"
It's safe to say that the two stepping into the ring once again would create fireworks.
How do you think a second fight between Canelo and Mayweather would play out?
Sound off in the comments below.
Featured Image Credit: PA Images
Topics: Boxing News, Boxing, Legends, Rivalries, Canelo Alvarez, Floyd Mayweather
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Resources & Groups
Be Careful What You Wish for You Just Might Get It. Part Two Continued.
by Roxanne Dubarry
in Fairy Tale
November 25th 2020 | 4152 | 21m | 2 | 0 | 0 |
Dialogue:
Submitted: November 25th 2020
Reading Time: 21 mins
Suitability: Some Strong Language
Genre: Fairy Tale
Diamond, the handsome male genie, just decided to set himself free from his servitude at the harsh hands of the Monroe household.
Mark, welcomes all the acclamation and all of the praise he was receiving. However, he was not hungry, but he was very tired. As a direct result, he badly needed his well deserved rest. Of course, Mark felt himself fading in and out. The two feds who were assigned directly to him, noticed it and produced his antique genie bottle. Mark was glad to enter into his bottle, and change into his resting attire, before safely falling fast asleep. He was unaware of the lid to his bottle being placed on it; neither was he aware of a threatening phone call the feds were receiving because of him.
They were being given specific instructions where they were to leave his bottle and they were instructed to drop it into the closet large body of water. If they knew what was good for them, they were to leave mediately. One thing they were unaware of, the feds had attached a hidden tracking device. Thereby enabling them to always keep track of Diamond's genie bottle.
It was only when the feds were completely out of sight, two female scuba divers jumped off of a yacht. Quickly locating Diamond's navy blue antique bottle, they fished it out of the water and sped away in the private yacht.
In the meantime and in between time, Diamond, the teen male genie slept on. It was the next morning, when Diamond awoke. His female abductors took the lid off of his antique genie bottle, and told him to come out. Diamond, came out of his bottle in dark blue violet smoke. Next, they watched him appear in his elaborate male teen genie costume. He bowed himself down before him, and folded his hands together.
It was accomplished in act of complete submission and subservience. "Ladies, I am yours to command, and I will willingly obey you. Because your slightest wishes are my commands." Diamond blushed a bright red when he noticed his female abductors were only wearing the briefest of French bikinis.
Quickly, he averted and lowered his eyes, and they noticed it. "Ladies, would you like me to provide you much more appropriate attire? Diamond asked very meekly.
"Just how old are you anyway, Diamond?" The ladies asked him point blankly.
"I am currently sixteen years old." Diamond calmly replied.
"We have heard you have an alter ego, and we command you to show us effective immediately!" The ladies grinned at him.
Without uttering a single word of resistance, Diamond folded his arms, bobbed his head and blinked his eyes. Of course, the ladies were well pleased, when a sixteen year old boy reappeared wearing nothing but swimming trunks.
"What name do you now go by, Diamond?" They clearly desired to know.
"My real name is Mark Allen Sears." Mark told them.
"How did you become, Diamond, the heroic genie? The ladies asked him plainly. "
Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it," Mark replied. "And now would all of you lovely ladies do me a really big favor and put some more clothes on?"
"And what if we don't Mark? What will you do about it?" They mocked him.
"You just wait and see," Mark answered them. He folded his arms, bobbed his head and blinked. Transforming himself into dark blue violet smoke, he reentered into his bottle. And he made certain he had the lid to his own bottle.
Inside his bottle, Mark changed into Diamond, the genie. Once he accomplished it, he caused caused his bottle to rapidly spin around in circles and vanish into thin air.
Finally, the ladies got his message, and put more clothing on. After they did so, his bottle instantly reappeared. And as Diamond, the submissive teen male genie, he exited his bottle. Once his dark blue violet smoke cleared, he willingly submitted himself to them. After all weren't genies suppose to be submissive?
There was a large Coast Guard Cruiser who contacted their yacht, and demanded they immediately release, Diamond the genie to them! Because they did not want any problems with the Coast Guard, they commanded Diamond to turn himself over to them.
Diamond reentered into his navy blue antique bottle, and caused it to spin around in circles. It resulted in his bottle taken flight and landing on the Coast Guard Cruiser. The Commander of the Cruiser triumphantly held Diamond's bottle in his right hand, and all the crew aboard loudly cheered his victory. Diamond, was considered prize property because the young teen male genie had a perfect track record of performance for his current masters.
Diamond, exited his bottle in his dark blue violet smoke, and reappeared in his elaborate genie costume. He bowed down before them with folded hands and lowered eyes in complete submission to them. "Masters! I will pledge myself on my sacred honor as a genie, to both hear and obey you! Your slightest wish is my command. I will consider it a very high honor indeed to be in your service for as long as you require my services!" Diamond extended his offer to them.
"Diamond, look at this picture of this family. Their boat has been missing for three full days now. Diamond, continue being the very good genie that you are, and lead our cruiser to their boat."
The Coast Guard Commander requested. "Your slightest wish is my command!" Diamond smiled warmly at his own rescuers. They all watched Diamond fold his arms, bob his head, and blink. Thus he was well able to rapidly lead the Coast Guard's cruiser to the stranded family!
When the family saw the cruiser, they thanked God for their timely rescue. But it was Diamond, they warmly embraced. "God bless the day you became a genie, Diamond, and God bless you."
Of course they extended their blessing to the Coast Guard as well. And, of course, the Coast Guard thanked and blessed Diamond also. "Diamond, be the very good genie that you are, and return to the ladies. They probably require your services."
The Coast Guard Commander politely commanded him. "Do not worry, masters I will both honor, and obey your requests!" Diamond the genie replied.
Weren't the ladies surprised when Diamond reappeared on their private yacht and home? Diamond informed them, he had to help the Coast Guard locate a missing family.
"Why did you decide to return to us and offer your services, Diamond?" They grinned at him.
"Because that's the way the Coast Guard wanted it, they told me you probably required my services as well. Do not become alarmed, I am not here as a spy for the Coast Guard. What do you have to worry about in the first place when you haven't broken any laws! Except one when you demanded the feds release me into your custody, but I am not spies for them either!" Diamond grinned back at them and he was glad they had more clothing on.
"Diamond, you have our permission to sit down. We need the money very badly, and we have decided to auction you off to the highest bidder at a closed auction. But we, of course, will record the necessary data of your new owners.
"Diamond, do we have your permission to auction you off?" They pleaded with him. "How can I possible refuse your honest requests, ladies. Yes, of course you may auction me off as soon as you are able to do so." Diamond smiled at them. "I will gladly sign my release of ownership forms, may I please return to my bottle?"
Diamond handed the ladies its lid. All of the ladies nodded their heads yes, and watched Diamond renter his own bottle. Once he was safely inside, one of the women, put back on its lid. Only then did Diamond change into his lounge wear, eat, drink and fall fast asleep. He opened his eyes very briefly, and saw a miniaturized angel hold him tightly. It was the angel who put Diamond safely back to sleep.
After they reached their destination, one of the ladies put Diamond's bottle into a large handbag with a secure zipper and locked mechanisms. Diamond still remained fast asleep. The attractive young woman took Diamond's bottle out her secured handbag, and handed it an armed female security guard. Whereas, she placed Diamond's bottle inside a concealed safe.
She was thinking silently to herself. "Diamond, you may be a very good young male genie. But I hope you understand, I am just trying to keep you those around you safe. That's the bottom line, because it's my job and it's what I was trained to do!" However, Diamond remained completely oblivious to his surroundings, with the notable exception of his very own special angel.
"Diamond, you will be alright! But I am being summoned by my master, and I must leave you now!" He told Diamond. However, it was not until after the angel left him for a season, that Jasmine and Fiara were able to return. Diamond opened up his eyes and smiled at his welcomed feminine companionship. "Diamond! Genie! Don't be afraid, just like the angel said. Wherever you go and wherever you lodge ,we will go with you. And your new human masters won't even have a clue about us! You better eat and drink something, and change into a new and more elaborate genie costume." The advised him carefully. "It is because it will up the starting biding price, and you must not interfere at all. Just act very meek, very submissive, avert and lower your eyes. Y'all know what we mean anyway." They meandered on.
Finally, the moment of truth had arrived for Diamond, the genie to be brought and sold to the highest bidder. He waited for his cue to leave his bottle in dark blue violet smoke. And after he took on solid form, he meekly submitted himself. He bowed very low and folded his hands, and lowered and averted eye contact with the bidders.
"And now I will check the obedience level of Diamond, the young handsome, teen aged male genie!" The auctioneer loudly proclaimed. "Diamond, I want you to transfer back into yourself for the very last time you will permitted to do so!" The auctioneer loudly proclaimed.
Diamond, the genie was changed back to Mark Allen Sears, for what they believe to be for the very last time. Thereby demonstrating to his vast audience, he did not need his genie costumes to performed assigned tasks. When he was told to transform himself back into Diamond, he did so at once.
Next he was ordered back into his bottle, and the auctioneer explained he should always be kept inside it. Unless, he had to grant wishes for his new masters. The auctioneer told the people, to always keep the lid on his bottle, and to place his bottle into a secure and concealed location. Because whoever posses his bottle, posses Diamond.
"Diamond is not a dangerous genie, it is for his sake and yours, such necessary precautions become enforceable." Strongly advised the auctioneer.
Finally the bidding started and a extremely wealthy family paid a substantial amount to the ladies. It was because they won Diamond at the closed auction to the general public.
The ladies in turn gave a portion of their new money to the former owner of the yacht, thereby paying him off in full. The vast majority of the money went to pay off long over due past expenses and bills. The remainder, they used for maintenance of their private yacht and themselves.
They entered the vast, private and concealed estate. The legal representatives of the Monroe family's financial empire, proudly produced Diamond's bottle to his new master's family. Never the less what was the fun of owning their own genie, if he had to spend most of his time cooped up in his bottle?
Henceforth, they released his lid and they released Diamond, the genie. "Diamond! Genie! Please continue being the good, meek, obedient and submissive genie that you are! For you were purchased for a substantial price! And all of us will get along just fine! Diamond, forthwith we command you to get out of your bottle effective immediately."
They issued him a direct command. Diamond exited his antique navy blue glass bottle in a cloud of dark blue smoke. His smoke transforms itself into a teen male genie, dressed in an extremely elaborate costume. Slowly, he decides to prostate himself, and averted and lowers, his eyes. It was because of his new masters' wealthy, powerful and inspirational life styles. Since they brought him at a great price! And they wanted him to be submissive, he would not disappoint them. His nerves started tinkling and instantly he knew, they not only wanted a genie, they wanted a slave! "
There, there Diamond, genie you have our permission to rise! He placed his hand and cupping his chin, once he did arise. Even then Diamond lowered and averted his eyes.
"Diamond, I know you are trying very hard to be a good genie! But by the grace of Almighty God, when I address someone, I expect to make eye contact with him. That is the very last time you will prostrate yourself before any one us! Do we make our selves perfectly clear!"One of His owners bellowed!
Diamond looked him directly in his eyes, smiled, and nodded his head once for yes.
"Diamond, I clearly wanted a yes or no answer do you read me?" He bellowed once more.
"Yes Masters, I both hear and obey!" replied Diamond very meekly. After he answered he looked his masters in their eyes, and smiled. But afterwards, he averted and lowered his eyes, folded his hands together, and bowed down low before all of them. They explained to him there would no more bowing or indirect eye contact tolerated!
And once more Diamond replied," Yes Masters, I both hear and obey." "Diamond, you may be our genie, but the grace of Lord God Almighty! We are not your masters and you are not our slave! The only time you have to do your well rehearsed submissive genie routine, is when it is required. And Diamond, change out of that genie outfit for a more appropriate one."
Diamond turned into wearing the uniform of their male servants. However, his new masters were not in the least impressed. Finally, at long last, Diamond transformed himself into a fabulous wealthy young teen male. It was the final time, his new masters were welled pleased.
They asked him his real name and he told them Mark Allen Sears and that he was a sixteen year high school junior.
Hence forth, they called him Mark. Whereas, the servants called him, Mister Mark. Not only would he successfully complete high school, he would also receive a college education at no cost. As for his bottle, Mark was ordered to make it disappear.
His new owners also knew Mark did not have to become Diamond to grant their wishes and requests. Fortunately, Mark clearly understood, they would still treat him as a genie! The Monroe family would have Diamond perform not only for them, but for their uninvited and invited guests. However they understood just how throughly exhausted Mark was because of Diamond.
Mark was escorted to his wonderful living quarters. He even had his own servants to attend to him. His male staff members assigned to serve him, helped him out of his ensemble, into his fine bed clothes. The female servants served him warm milk toast; which he devoured, and fell fast asleep for several days. Since they were worried about the young man, they had their very own private physicians carefully exam him. In their professional opinions, this particular young man was throughly physically and emotionally exhausted.
Quite frankly he badly needed undisturbed rest and complete privacy. Of course, the Monroe family strictly followed their sound advice. Eventually, Mark awoke in strange and luxurious surroundings! After he releaved himself, he went back to bed and ringed his buzzer. After he ate, drank, and had a luxurious bath, his male servants helped him into elaborate morning attire.
"In heavens name! What is the sense of having a healthy young handsome male genie! If we only treat him as a member of our family?"
Mark felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach! He had a really good thing going for him, but it was only allowed for a very brief time period! From now he would act like he was suppose to behave, as a combination genie and slave!
Mark was being observed by the servants and they could not help but see the light of hope leave his eyes. Those that were able to observe him, watched him fold his arms, bobb his head, and blink his eyes. How could they help but notice his dark blue violet smoke enter into his bottle? The servants put the lid back on his bottle.
Because they were well aware just how subservient Diamond, the genie was when he first was released from his bottle. Diamond changed into yet another elaborate young male genie costume. They were the garments of his bondage and captivity once he was back inside his bottle. Because his bottle was sound proof, he wept bitter tears of grief and misery. Looking at his reflection in his antique mirror, he saw the tracks of his tears, and his sad and unhappy face. It would never do to let them observe the dept of his misery and despair.
Because he was a genie, he rapidly changed and disguised his misery. When their masters asked to see Mark, their servants showed them Diamond's antique glass genie bottle.
"What's this happy nonsense, why is Diamond, the genie back inside his bottle? Especially since we strictly ordered him not to do it!" They bellowed. They ordered their servants to comply.
Their servants handed, the senior member of the Monroe family's house hold, Diamond's bottle and withdrew from the room. He opened up Diamond's bottle, and once more he became the very subservient genie. In complete and total alarm, they watched him prostrate himself before them. They observed in horror as he averted and lowered his eyes. The youngest male member present, cupped Diamond's chin upward, and desired to look inside his eyes. But alas all Diamond did was to close his eyes completely!
"Diamond! Open your eyes effectively immediately and obey me genie!" He ordered him harshly. Diamond obeyed and he looked in horror into the young genie's eyes and saw the light of hope no longer there!
Matilda Monroe reentered the room by bursting into it. "In heaven's holy name, what in God's green earth, is going on here!" She shouted loudly. "Are you satisfied, Auntie dearest Matilda? You wanted Diamond, the genie to be nothing more but a slave! Why not take a good look at his eyes!"
Auntie dearest Matilda not only observed no light of hope in his eyes, but also his unhappy countenance and the many tracks of his tears!
"Oh my God in heaven, what have I ever done to you, Diamond that caused you such grief and misery?"
"Auntie dearest Matilda he probably over heard you! And decided to give you what you wished for. A young slave of a genie! Did you honestly expect him to welcome his new and harsh bondage! Diamond may be a genie, but he is also a badly frightened teen aged boy!
Because some ladies were in trouble, Diamond allowed himself to be sold to us just because we were the highest bidders! You don't deserve Diamond's family loyalty to us!" Her nephew harshly told her the truth and put his arms around her and she started started crying.
Diamond did not rise, but maintained his submissive prostrating himself. They raised Diamond to his feet, and he looked at his new masters, but did not speak. Gently they told the genie to return to his bottle, and Diamond placed his bottle in the attic.
The servants followed him, and placed his bottle in his quarters. When he was released from his bottle, he started weeping uncontrollably. The servants held Diamond tightly and reassured him every thing would turn out be alright after all.
How could the entire household help but know, but that Diamond was weeping over the harshest of his prolonged captivity! Very carefully, the male servants helped him into some fresh bed clothes, and put the young genie back to bed. One of the female servants served him fresh warm milk toast, and helped put him back to sleep.
Auntie Matilda Monroe tip toed into his chambers and watched the unhappy young man sleep.
She whispered into his right ear, "Diamond, I am very sorry, I was going to mistreat you so very cruelty! I know you are getting some well deserved rest! Young man, please excuse a very stupid older woman! When you awake, I promise things will be a lot different around here, Mark." She kissed him on his forehead and silently left his chambers.
"I'm so sorry I waited to apologize to Diamond until he fast asleep again." She told the other available members of the household. "It's gonna be alright, Auntie Matilda!"
They hugged their aunt and she started bawling. Once Mark awoke he was somewhat surprised to see himself back in his personal chambers. After he releaved himself, and cleaned himself up in his own private restroom, he returned to his bed. He allowed himself to waited on hand and foot and be served a nice breakfast in bed.
Once his tray was removed, Auntie Matilda Monroe, smiled at him, embraced him warmly and apologized to him! Mark accepted her apology especially when she told him to make his bottle invisible! Mark hugged her back and went back to sleep again.
"Get all the sleep you need Mark, after all you are a growing boy." She kissed him on his forehead and left his chambers. Mark awoke only to releave himself and be served his meals in bed. Gradually though he started rising from his bed and looking around at his luxurious surroundings.
"Dear Lord God whatever did I do to deserve such happiness as this!" He praised and thanked God!
When he buzzed his man servants, they helped him get dress. They took him to the private office of the senior member of the Monroe household. Martin Monroe looked at the transformation of Mark Allen Sears and was well pleased. "Mark earlier I made some promises to you which I fully intend to keep!" Come here boy and let me take a good look at you!"
How unfortunate it was for Mark that he did not live long enough to keep any of his promises! He passed away the same time as Auntie Matilda did! It was after the funeral that there was a changing of the guard at the Monroe household.
The younger new head of household, succeeded in having Mark once more become, Diamond the genie. Diamond was expected to prostate himself, avert and lower his eyes. It was a short time later, Diamond was securely back into the confines of his bottle sanctuary. Jasmine, the genie and Fiara, the butterfly fairy visited Diamond inside his antique glass bottle.
They both kissed Diamond on his forehead, and warmly embraced him. Then they showed him a note about his resignation from the harsh servitude of the Monroe family. Very gladly, Diamond signed both of his names. They left his letter of resigned pinned to a mirror in his former chambers.
However, his letter of resignation was burned by a cigarette lighter by a lesser member of the Monroe household. Diamond, watched her burn his letter. and he made his bottle invisible.
When the Monroe household tried to locate Diamond, they could not find him. And when they vainly called out his name many times, they received no answer. Diamond did much more than make his bottle invisible, he left the Monroe household.
Love in Christ Jesus!
Roxanne Lea Dubarry
Roxy Lea 1954 Roxy
1954/ October Country November 23 &24, 2020
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The State AG Report
Editors Lori Kalani and Bernard Nash
News AG Election Tracker AG Candidate Q&As Guide to State Attorneys General Contributors State AG Practice Resources
News AG Election Tracker AG Candidate Q&As Guide to State Attorneys General Contributors State AG Practice
Topic 2016 AG Elections 2018 AG Elections 2019 AG Elections 2020 AG Elections Antitrust Breaking News Campaign Finance Cannabis / Marijuana Charities Climate Change Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Consumer Protection Cozen in the News Data Privacy & Security E – Cigarettes Energy Environment False Claims Act Financial Industry For-Profit Colleges Gaming/Gambling Health Care Insurance Intellectual Property Labor & Employment Medicaid Fraud Mortgages/Foreclosures Pharmaceuticals Securities State AGs in the News State v. Federal Unclaimed Property Upcoming Events Utilities
Month January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015
Thursday, May 21, 2015 | Breaking News, For-Profit Colleges, State v. Federal, CA, DC, KY, MI, MO, NC, NY, OH, SD, TN, TX, WA
The State AG Report Weekly Update May 21, 2015
By JB Kelly, Milton Marquis
FTC, All Fifty States, and DC Sue Four Cancer Charities for Deceptive Practices
The Federal Trade Commission and Attorneys General and other law enforcement personnel from all fifty states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against Cancer Fund of America, Inc., Cancer Support Services, Inc., Children’s Cancer Fund of America, Inc., The Breast Cancer Society, Inc., and officers and directors of the four charities for allegedly defrauding consumers out of more than $187 million.
According to the complaint, the charities allegedly used false and deceptive claims to obtain donations, including, inter alia, that donations would be used to provide direct support to cancer patients, children with cancer, and breast cancer patients in the United States, when allegedly the vast majority of donors’ contributions have not directly assisted cancer patients in the United States or otherwise benefited any charitable purpose.
The complaint, which seeks, among other things, a permanent injunction, restitution, rescission or reformation of contracts, attorneys’ fees, and civil penalties, alleges that the charities violated federal and state statutes by (1) engaging in false and deceptive practices, (2) filing false and misleading financial statements with state charities regulators, and (3) using telemarketers to misrepresent the nature, purpose, or mission of a charitable entity in violation of the Telemarketing Act, which authorizes AG enforcement.
Washington Attorney General Announces $63 Million Settlement With LCD Manufacturers
Washington AG Bob Ferguson settled with the remaining nine LCD manufacturers named in a 2010 complaint that alleged that the LCD manufacturers participated in a price-fixing conspiracy from 1998 through 2006 that increased prices by as much as 20 percent.
The companies involved in the settlements (and the amounts) are: Samsung ($12.94 million); AU Optronics ($12.5 million); Chi Mei Optoelectronics ($8.75 million); Sharp ($7.75 million); Epson ($2.7 million); Toshiba ($950,000); and Chunghwa Picture Tubes ($350,502). LG and Hitachi previously settled for $13 million and $5.2 million, respectively.
CFPB Seeks Information on Student Loan Servicing Practices
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) has solicited public comments on student loan servicing practices with respect to student loan repayment, the applicability of consumer protections from other financial products (i.e. credit card and mortgage servicing) to the student loan servicing market, and the availability of data on borrowers and repayment.
The CFPB’s inquiry follows President Obama’s “Student Aid Bill of Rights,” a Presidential Memorandum directing the Department of Education, Department of the Treasury, and CFPB to provide recommendations for statutory or regulatory changes to improve consumer protections in the student loan market by October 1, 2015.
Public comments are due by July 13, 2015.
Thirty-One Attorneys General Settle With “Big 3” Credit Reporting Agencies
31 AGs announced a settlement with Equifax Information Services LLC, Experian Information Solutions Inc., and TransUnion LLC to resolve an investigation regarding the credit reporting industry that was initiated by Ohio AG Mike DeWine in 2012.
Under the terms of the settlement, the credit reporting agencies have agreed, among other things, to monitor providers of credit reporting information, stop direct-to-consumer marketing during dispute phone calls, implement escalated processes for handling complicated disputes, and prohibit certain information from appearing on a credit report.
The settlement also requires the credit reporting agencies to pay the participating states $6 million.
Michigan Attorney General Reaches $2.2 Million Settlement With Payday Lenders
Michigan AG Bill Schuette reached a $2.2 million settlement with South Dakota-based Western Sky Financial, LLC and California-based CashCall, Inc. for allegedly making and servicing unlicensed loans with illegally high interest rates.
The agreement, in part, automatically reduces the interest rates on all loans owned by the companies to Michigan’s legal rate of 7% and establishes a $2.2 million settlement fund to be distributed to Michigan consumers who have overpaid on their loans.
This is the latest in a string of actions taken against Western Sky and CashCall, after failed attempts by Western Sky to assert that its loans were immune from state laws under tribal sovereign immunity because it was based on an Indian reservation and owned by a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Other actions against these companies include New York AG Eric Schneiderman’s January 2014 settlement with both companies; Missouri AG Chris Koster’s settlement with Western Sky and other companies in March 2015; and the CFPB’s complaint against CashCall in December 2013.
Thirty-Eight Attorneys General Reach Agreement on RadioShack Bankruptcy Sale of Personally Identifiable Information
A coalition of thirty-eight AGs, led by Texas AG Ken Paxton, partnered to reach a settlement with General Wireless Operations Inc. (“General Wireless”) after the company sought approval from the bankruptcy court to purchase RadioShack’s customers’ personally identifiable information, as well as its e-commerce business, trademark, and intellectual property.
Under the terms of the settlement, General Wireless only can retain the customer email addresses of those who specifically requested product information in the last two years. The settlement further prevents the company from selling or sharing its customer information with any other entity.
In March, the bankruptcy court approved General Wireless’s purchase of 1,750 stores out of the bankruptcy.
For-Profit Colleges
Twelve Attorneys General Send Letter Expressing Concerns to the U.S. Department of Education Regarding For-Profit College Students
Twelve AGs, led by Kentucky AG Jack Conway, have sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Education (“DoE”) expressing concerns about DoE’s guidance to former students of Corinthian Colleges, Inc., which recently announced the closure of its schools.
In the letter to DoE, the AGs expressed concerns about DoE’s list of transfer opportunities for affected students, which include other for-profit schools that are currently under investigation, and DoE’s failure to warn students that, if they transfer their Corinthian credits to another school, they will not be eligible for certain loan forgiveness programs. The letter also requests that DoE provide guidance for students to raise Corinthian’s alleged fraud as a defense to repayment of their federal student loans.
This letter follows a similar request from a group of nine AGs last month that DoE step in to relieve student debt for loans incurred to attend Corinthian schools and establish a “clear system” for student borrowers to seek relief from loans when a school is deemed to have violated the law.
AG Conway leads a 37-state working group, which is reviewing the practices of some for-profit colleges.
State v. Federal Government
North Carolina Attorney General Petitions Fourth Circuit to Overturn FCC Order
North Carolina AG Roy Cooper filed a petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, asking the court to overturn an order issued by the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) preempting certain state laws that regulate the manner in which municipalities can offer broadband services.
North Carolina state law limits publicly-owned broadband Internet service providers from offering services to customers outside of municipal boundaries. The FCC found the law to be in conflict with Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which requires the FCC to remove barriers to broadband investment and competition.
AG Cooper’s petition alleges that the FCC Order violates the United States Constitution, exceeds the FCC’s authority, and is arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion under the Administrative Procedure Act. A similar petition was filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit by Tennessee AG Herbert Slatery earlier this year.
◂ The State AG Report Weekly Update May 15, 2015
The State AG Report Weekly Update May 28, 2015▸
Bernard Nash
Lori Kalani
We report on Attorney General stories and trends that matter. Our team's insight and analysis come from decades of experience representing clients in every industry and state.
Our State AG Report spotlights the roles of Attorneys General as both law enforcers and policymakers and how they impact legal and policy issues affecting companies around the country.
Upcoming AG Events:
Feb 28 - Mar 2
RAGA Winter National Meeting
Mar 3 - Mar 4
DAGA Williamsburg Policy Conference
Williamsburg Lodge, Williamsburg, VA
Apr 1 - Apr 30
RAGA Senior Staff Retreat (Victory Fund, ERC and Capital Club are invited to participate)
Nashville, TN (Exact Dates in April TBD)
RAGA Refresh Series
(Exact Dates in April TBD)
Apr 12 - Apr 14
NAAG Attorney General Symposium
Hilton Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia, PA
RAGA General Counsel Summit (Victory Fund, ERC and Capital Club are invited to participate)
St. Regis, Atlanta, GA
RAGA Spring National Meeting
RAGA Victory Fund & ERC Retreat (Victory Fund and ERC are invited to participate)
DAGA Kansas City Policy Conference
Kansas City Marriott Downtown, Kansas City, MO
AG Alliance Annual Meeting
The Grand Wailea, Maui, HI
Jul 9 - Jul 11
DAGA Presidential Partners Retreat (Open to Presidential Council Partners & Special Guests)
Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn, Sonoma, CA
Aug 13 - Aug 14
RAGA Tech Summit (Victory Fund, ERC and Capital Club are invited to participate)
RAGA Summer National Meeting
Hotel del Coronado, San Diego, CA
DAGA Minneapolis Policy Conference
Minneapolis Marriott City Center, Minneapolis, MN
Sep 30 - Oct 2
NAAG Presidential Summit
Oct 1 - Oct 31
RAGA Fall National Meeting
Location TBA (Exact Dates in October TBD)
Nov 17 - Nov 18
DAGA Scottsdale Policy Conference
Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch, Scottsdale, AZ
Dec 1 - Dec 31
RAGA Holiday Party
(Exact Dates in December TBD)
(Exact Date in December TBD)
DAGA Holiday Party 2021
The Conrad, Washington, D.C.
Dec 6 - Dec 8
NAAG Capital Forum 2021
Capital Hilton, Washington, D.C.
Hyatt Regency Austin Downtown, Austin, TX
Sun Valley Resort, Sun Valley, ID
Charity Shenanigans | Virtual In-Game Rewards Not Real | Apps’ Data Privacy Lapses
2022 AG Elections, Charities, Consumer Protection, Cozen in the News, Data Privacy & Security, GA
Google Faces 2 Antitrust Suits | “Made in USA” Glue Isn’t | Mortgage-Backed Securities Settlement
Antitrust, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Consumer Protection, Data Privacy & Security, Financial Industry, CO, CT, MD, NY, TX
Credit Score Use Without Notice | Financing Bad Landlord Behavior | § 340B Mandated Pharma Discounts
COVID-19, AR, CA, CT, KS, MA, NE, NY, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Data Privacy & Security, Financial Industry, Labor & Employment, Pharmaceuticals
Razors Raise Antitrust Worries | $86 Million Mortgage Servicing Settlement | Creative Alleged Tax Avoidance
AGs In The News, 2020 AG Elections, Antitrust, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Consumer Protection, False Claims Act, CA, DC, MA, ME, MT, NY, VA
AGs Urge CARES Act Extension | iPhone Throttling Settlement | Consolidation in Web Listings Service Market
COVID-19, Antitrust, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Consumer Protection, Cozen in the News, Financial Industry, AR, AZ, IN, MA, NY
State v. Federal
State AGs in the News
2018 AG Elections
Cozen in the News
E – Cigarettes
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Mortgages/Foreclosures
Other Blogs and Podcasts
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How Emily Ratajkowski Is Supporting Kim Kardashian’s Nude Photo
Sexual Health + Identity
“Women can still be sexual."
By Lily Puckett
Instagram (@emrata)
Another celeb just joined Kim Kardashian in the fight for her right to publicly love her body. In a newly posted Instagram, Kim joins forces with model and actress Emily Ratajkowski to shut down the haters and kill it at the same time.
“We are more than just our bodies, but that doesn't mean we have to be shamed for them or our sexuality. #liberated,” Emily wrote in her caption. Kim added her own, calling back to the original selfie that broke the world’s joke: “When we're like...we both have nothing to wear LOL”
In a series of accompanying tweets, Emily expanded on the idea behind the topless double bathroom selfie, writing, “However sexual our bodies may be, we need to have the freedom as women to choose when & how we express our sexuality. Even if being sexualized by society's gaze is demeaning, there must be a space where women can still be sexual when they choose to be.”
https://twitter.com/emrata/status/715253055491432448
Emily is no stranger to the fight for open sexuality and gender equality. After nearly a decade of work in TV and modeling, her career got a giant boost when she starred in the controversial music video for “Blurred Lines." She’s been actively fighting against slut-shaming ever since, and tweeted immediate support in the form of her own semi-nude photo for Kim after the original black bar selfie. Kim responded by sending her flowers, which eventually led to their bathroom meet-up.
We’re loving the constant stream of support for women who choose to do whatever they want with their bodies, in every form it takes. We’re always better off supporting each other, learning from each other, and giving each other the space we all need to be exactly who we want to be. Here’s to more and more #liberation, in whatever form it means for anyone who wants it. Empowerment is a personal thing, and that can mean celebrating yourself by covering up or showing some skin.
And until women everywhere start calling out the various male celebrities on social media for flaunting their shirtless torsos, we're going to let Kim and Emily have their black bars. (Though we don't necessarily recommend you try it at home.)
Related: Ariel Winter Says Kim Kardashian’s Nude Photo Is Promoting Body Positivity
Sex Ed 101:
Keywordsselfiesnudesslut shamingliberated
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What the Delevingne sisters did next: Introducing Della Vite, their brand new prosecco
The titans of fashion join forces for the first time to launch their own fizz
By Annabel Sampson
DELLA VITE
The Delevingne sisters are inherently elegant beacons of cool. Chloe, 35, Poppy, 34, and Cara, 28, the daughters of Charles and Pandora Delevingne, are genuinely close, but have all pursued their different callings, from acting to modelling via medicine. Now, the three stratospheric forces have united under the umbrella of prosecco. Poppy, a Chanel ambassador, explained in an interview with the Telegraph that: ‘As long as I can remember, prosecco was something that whenever we got together we’d drink’. Cara, one of the biggest names in the past decade of fashion, added: ‘With break-ups and things that were going on, it was through those moments that we could get together and share.’
The Delevingne sisters had reportedly been eager to unite as a trio for some time. However, it was only when childhood friend, the businessman Numa Heathcote, introduced the sisters to the Biasiotto family of winemakers, that a plan to create their own prosecco brand began to take shape. The girls are calling it Della Vite, the Italian version of their surname, meaning ‘of the vine’, and it’s Poppy whose handwriting appears on the bottle.
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Following a pandemic-induced delay (they had hoped to launch in spring), they are beginning with two wines, the Della Vite Prosecco Superiore (DOCG) that has ‘hints of star fruit and ripe crap apple’, while the Treviso Prosecco (DOC) is ‘packed with perfume of peach, pear, red apple and wild strawberries’.
Speaking about the launch, Cara told the Mail Online: ‘Placing sustainability first and using agricultural methods that don't rely heavily on industry is at the core of Della Vite’s values. We spent four months looking for the perfect winery to align with our vision and are so proud to have created two exceptional Proseccos that are both sustainably produced and 100 per cent certified vegan.’ The sisters also took part in a glamorous photo shoot in Italy to launch the wine, dressed in chic monochrome between the wine vats and in the Italian hills.
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The sisters are aware of prosecco’s reputation as a girly champagne equivalent, but, Poppy explained: ‘We want to show that there is more to prosecco than you might assume, it can be beautifully created, which our product is. The winery where it is made doesn’t use industrial methods, the grapes are all hand-picked, the fermentation process is 60 days instead of 30 days [a method that makes the wine extra dry].’
‘We are trying to give it the respect that it deserves; it’s made with the same art as champagne,’ says Cara, as reported in the Telegraph. ‘And I think that one of the nicest things was that we were able to keep it in the family and extended family. It didn’t feel like work whatsoever.’
Buy Della Vita at Selfridges or online at dellavite.com
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Uber Eats conducts tests for food delivery via drones
Varun Kesari Apps Jun 14, 2019, 4:00 am
Credit: Unsplash/@charlesdeluvio
Uber Eats is testing the first commercial application of food delivery via smart drones in high-density urban areas, as announced during the Uber Elevate 2019 Summit, held on June 11 and 12, in Washington, DC, which is a sample of what the future of food delivery will be like.
After testing food transfer via drones in the open, over the sea and finally in low-density cities, the firm is ready to start a pilot program with the McDonald’s fast food chain in the city of San Diego, with the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States.
As part of the pilot program, Uber designed the drone that will be delivering the food to the users, in order to increase safety levels, comply with regulations, avoid sudden movements that alter the food and improve the user experience. The company says its future plans are to land the drones on top of Uber Eats vehicles parked near the delivery locations and secure them to the vehicle for the last part of the delivery.
The goal is to leverage all the data and experience of the Uber Eats delivery platform to facilitate and create delivery points in order to open more restaurant opportunities or delivery points. At the same time, all the data generated by the food drones service will serve as the basis for Uber Air’s shared areas trips in the future – Luke Fisher, Flight Operations Manager, Uber
Uber’s proposal is to fly the food from the restaurant, in this case, McDonald’s, to the specific points in the cities where a human deliveryman can collect the food and take it to the final point or land on the roof of specific and special vehicles by Uber Eats. The firm expects to soon expand the service to other cities and with more restaurant options.
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ASUS ZenFone 7 (Pro) official: borderless with special ‘flip camera’
August 27, 2020 by Habibur Rahman
The ASUS ZenFone 7 and the Pro version have been launched. They come with flagship specs and the signature ‘flip camera’ that lets you use the main camera for selfies too. The devices are probably not coming to the Netherlands.
ASUS ZenFone 7 (Pro)
ASUS has announced its top devices. The ZenFone 7 and ZenFone 7 Pro are real eye-catchers again because of their camera setup on the back that can also be used for selfies. This time ASUS comes with an improved motorized mechanism that takes up less space in the phone but is also more durable at the same time. The company promises that you can use the phone for five years if you move the camera 100 times a day. The ‘flip camera’ can also move a weight of up to 35 kilograms.
The advantage of such a pop-up mechanism is that a screen notch for the selfie camera can be omitted, and the ZenFone 7 and the Pro version each have a borderless 6.67-inch AMOLED screen. The panel is Samsung-made and it supports a 90 Hz refresh rate. ASUS also uses Corning Gorilla Glass 6 and the maximum brightness is 1000 nits.
The fingerprint scanner on these devices is not under the screen but on the side. It is also remarkable that the phone has room for two SIM cards and a microSD card. There is no 3.5 mm audio jack available with the devices.
Performance and 5000 mAh battery
If we look at the chipset, we find a Snapdragon 865 for the ZenFone 7 and the more recent Snapdragon 865 Plus with the Pro version. ASUS previously used the latter in its gaming phone, the ROG Phone 3. These chipsets also support 5G. Furthermore, the devices work with the ZenUI 7 shell, which is very close to a bare Android experience and they work with Android 10.
The ZenFone 7 has 6 GB or 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage, while the ZenFone 7 pro only comes with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB storage. The manufacturer uses the fast UFS 3.1 storage together with LPDDR5 RAM for both devices.
The phones also each have the same battery and fast charger, namely a sturdy 5000 mAh battery and a 30-watt fast charger. As with the ROG Phone 3, ASUS comes with its own software that should benefit the life of your battery. This way you can stop charging at a charge of 80 or 90 percent. The phone comes without wireless charging.
Flip camera
Which brings us to that flip camera. ASUS chooses Sony’s IMX686 sensor as the main camera for its devices. That’s a 64 MP camera with an f / 1.8 aperture. In addition, the 8 MP telecamera brings 3x optical zoom and there is also a 12 MP wide-angle camera.
The latter comes with advanced autofocus and it is also used for filming with the ‘HyperSteady Video mode’, which promises stable images. Filming is possible in a maximum of 8K resolution, and that also applies to selfie videos.
The only – but not unimportant – camera difference between the ZenFone 7 and the Pro version is that the latter uses optical image stabilization (OIS) for the main camera and telecamera. You can read all about the importance of OIS here.
Due to a lost lawsuit in the Netherlands, ASUS has withdrawn all its phones from our market. It is therefore very unlikely that the phone will be available from us. In any case, ASUS had no information about its availability. The ZenFone 7 costs 635 euros converted, while you pay about 800 euros for the Pro version.
Categories Asus, News, Smartphone
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(VIDEO) LaFerrari prototype arrested by the cops in Dubai!
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Fatboy Slim / You’ve Come A Long Way Baby 20th anniversary reissue
February 20, 2018 by Paul Sinclairtags: 1990s, fatboy slim
No bonus audio • ‘Meal Deal’ deluxe set delivered in pizza box
BMG will issue a 20th anniversary edition of Fatboy Slim‘s 1998 album You’ve Come A Long Way Baby as in March.
The album was a big success when it was released (reaching number one) and delivered four UK top ten hits: The Rockafeller Skank, Gangster Tripping, Praise You, and Right Here, Right Now.
Unlike the two-CD 10th anniversary edition of 2008, and even though these are being described as ‘deluxe’ editions, this reissues delivers no bonus audio at all, with BMG repackaging it as one of their ‘art of the album’ reissues with new sleeve notes (by Ralph Moore).
It will be available as a single casebound book CD edition, a 2LP vinyl package (which includes a six-page 12-inch booklet and an art card of the album cover) and a special ‘meal deal’ combo set which includes the CD, the 2LP vinyl and an XXL T-shirt in a pizza-style box set. The latter is exclusive to the Official Fatboy Slim Shop (as is the standard CD right now).
There’s no mention at all about remastering (not that it really needs it) and to be honest it’s all rather underwhelming; having a T-shirt in a pizza box that is probably not going to fit you (“in authentic Fatboy XXL size”) just about says it all, really.
You’ve Come A Long Way Baby will be reissued as a 20th anniversary edition on 16 March 2018.
You've Come A Long Way Baby - 2LP vinyl
You've Come A Long Way Baby - 2008 2CD deluxe
Amazon uk 29 Order
Amazon fr 4.2 Order
Amazon it 4.2 Order
Amazon es 4.2 Order
CD track listing
01. Right Here Right Now
02. Rockafeller Skank
03. Fucking in Heaven
04. Gangster Trippin
05. Build It Up, Tear It Down
06. Kalifornia
07. Soul Surfing
08. You’re Not from Brighton
09. Praise You
10. Love Island
11. Acid 8000
2LP vinyl track listing
A1. Right Here Right Now
A2. Rockafeller Skank
A3. Fucking in Heaven
B1. Gangster Trippin
B2. Build It Up, Tear It Down
B3. Kalifornia
C1. Soul Surfing
C2. You’re Not from Brighton
C3. Praise You
D1. Love Island
D2. Acid 8000
29 responses to Fatboy Slim / You’ve Come A Long Way Baby 20th anniversary reissue
Andrew B says:
What no pizza in the box, no deal
colm47 says:
Pizza box sold out
eric Slangen says:
What a useless rerelease.
Mo Lester says:
Considering how great some of the videos to this LP are it really was a must to have dvd/blu ray in a deluxe edition….
Not a waste of space pizza box for and extra £20….
Wow, a T-Shirt and Pizza Box, just what I always wanted to go with all my other CDs and Vinyl – NOT! Thank goodness I bought the 2CD Set a few years back as much better than this bundle of tripe being called a deluxe edition.
Pizza box… things are really getting out of control in this reissue/repackage dark age. I miss the 90s!
Martin Power says:
Perfect chance for an SDE of this classic – But what a ‘meh’ release. Not for me shame really
Eamonn says:
As the cover says, why try harder? Or at all?!
probablyrustin says:
Seriously… What on earth is the point of this reissue? Do they expect it to sell? Would it have been so difficult to round up tracks that were previously released across different formats? Here’s hoping the label takes a loss and learns a lesson.
Mark Phillips says:
What the hell, Norman? What a load of carp.
It could’ve easily been a 2cd plus DVD package. There’s really no excuse for this rubbish.
A load of Crap as well. LOL
Mark had it right. Something fishy about this reissue. It stinks :)
Kauwgompie says:
Wow, what a snooz-fest reissue. Why not do a 2cd/dvd re-issue with the 2cd being the same as the now out of print 2cd and offer up a 5.1 mix on dvd or blu-ray. That album would sound awesome in surround sound.
Astounding how some of these reissues so miss the mark. I finally played the a-ha Unplugged blu-rays and they are not even surround sound!!! Same with the George Michael Listen Without Prejudice 3cd/dvd. No surround sound. So I’m not talking about the already criminally missing 5.1 regular album mix but the stuff that is on the blu-rays and dvd is in stereo as opposed to multichannel!! So disappointing.
Craig Hedges says:
Save money and pick up one off the hundreds of copies of this album at poundland or your nearest charity shop
Your Canadian link in the widget is going to the 2008 CD.
Wait, I see that was intentional now. Ooops.
Yes, I know. All the links in that widget go to the 2008 CD. I thought people might like it since it’s much better than the 2018 version (which isn’t on Amazon – hence no widget).
Chopdog and Jules - One and the Same says:
Why won’t they do a full decent deluxe release of the two Beats International albums in 1990 and 1991 I think. They are long overdue a good wash down, and all the extras and mixes.
Particularly as their fun second album had a disastrous CD mastering glitch on it….
I asked the label. They said ‘maybe sometime but not now’. Are they waiting for the anniversaries?
Paul Saunders says:
Im sure that this underwhelming package is marketing for marketing sake.
Who will be the first reissue deluxe package to offer less than the original format ?
There is plenty of second hand vinyl out there to extend and excite the collector this really does look tired .
Auntie Sabrina says:
Bloody hell, twenty years have flown by…
Richey Estcourt says:
Plenty of fun at the time, but it’s a dated album. I daresay Moby will want to hawk his Play album again next year.
Either way, I’m not buying this.
RJS says:
I enjoyed some of this album at the time, especially the Camille Yarborough sampling ‘Praise You’ and its accompanying video but I think it’s an album of its time. One for the box collectors!
Tom M says:
Looks like this deluxe edition went on a diet. You could always stick a broom under the shirt and use it for a tent.
Michalis says:
You had me at “no bonus audio”. I’m gonna pass, then.
Stan Butler says:
A pizza box. Good grief! That will look great on the shelf.
How can they call this “deluxe”?
Do they think the public are stupid? (that’s a rhetorical question).
Mark S says:
2,000 copies on sky blue with coffee splatter coloured vinyl from “Vinyl Me Please” subscription club.
Andrew M says:
Unfortunately this is probably the first ever recorded instance of a release where I’ve thought “Finally, a shirt that would fit me” :(
Mark H says:
I feel your pain man!
Leave a Reply to Paul Saunders Cancel reply
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Regarding General Grievous and Darth Vader
SithSauce
on November 8th 2019, 2:02 am
Message reputation : 100% (1 vote)
O-Siri brought up an excellent point about how people here are ignoring Vader's legends feats in favor of G-Canon, however we have another character similar to Vader in which there are two different interpretations of the same character.
It's clear that George Lucas's intent for Grievous was to be nothing more than a cowardly theatrical Villain who retreats when cornered by the good guys. And Filoni continues that same trend in TCW, obviously following Lucas's vision. In Legends, he is a completely different animal. We've seen him solo multiple jedi at once on Hypori, and even contend with the likes of Mace Windu. Most here would ignore G-Canon Grievious, as it doesn't fit with the (obviously superior) legends incarnation. However, the opposite effect is on Vader. People here ignore his legends Vader as it doesn't fit with G-Canon. If that's the case, how is it fair to harp on Vader for his showings/statements in G-Canon, but when it comes to Grievous, "lets hype him because of how sick he is in legends, and ignore shitty asthma Grievous from G-Canon"?
lorenzo.r.2nd
Re: Regarding General Grievous and Darth Vader
lol i suppose i agree? i view him as both tbh. take ROTS. he is cocky, gets a good fight in against obi wan, BUT AFTER HE 'LOSES', he runs away. kinda like, inbetween cars here.
Zenwolf
How is Grevious a coward in G-Canon? We barely saw him, when he fought Obi-Wan, he did the smart thing and retreated because he had just lost 2 of his hands and then Force Pushed which caused him to lose his other 2 lightsabers, along with Commander Cody and the 212th Attack Battalion coming in. Prior to getting pushed, he still seemed wanting to fight Obi-Wan even still before the Clones came in.
you are clearly new here, Vader is a saggy old man who be gettin like some serious mechanical shitz
greviouz is like so goo d that he can contenderize with Obiwan and Mace windu LMAO what a scrub, quit star wars debating noob
George’s vision for Grievous changed around 2004-2005. In the 2003 OCW commentary track, Gennedy Tartakovsky & co state that George’s vision was clearly different to what they had previously been told, which was that Grievous was a highly capable Jedi killer. George was indecisive with what Grievous was supposed to be, going back and forth for a while until he decided that Grievous was gonna be a coward and not very skilled, which is why we were all disappointed in the ROTS movie that Grievous was useless.
And this is why I don’t understand why some people on this site combine old EU Grievous and George’s Grievous together. I don’t even get why people put the Old Eu and TCW together, as George shifted in his vision for Star Wars, with TCW being in-line with what he had in mind. Use one or the other imo
O-Siri
TBH I don't blame Lucas for going with the direction he took with Grievous in the movie. Grievous is only a minor villain in the grand scheme of things. The grandiose portrayal, true to his EU roots, works in novel format because it's an extension of the EU as well as an adaptation, but a setpiece like that would have been too much of a show stopper in the movie IMO.
on November 8th 2019, 10:37 am
@Zenwolf wrote: How is Grevious a coward in G-Canon? We barely saw him, when he fought Obi-Wan, he did the smart thing and retreated because he had just lost 2 of his hands and then Force Pushed which caused him to lose his other 2 lightsabers, along with Commander Cody and the 212th Attack Battalion coming in. Prior to getting pushed, he still seemed wanting to fight Obi-Wan even still before the Clones came in.
Lucas explicitly stated that he saw Grievous as " a moustache twirling old style villain who runs away when cornered by the heroes". I'm paraphrasing, but I'll try and find the quote.
Latham2000
on November 8th 2019, 12:19 pm
Yeah but in RotS novel and script, which are both G Canon, Grievous hard pressed Obi-Wan Kenobi, so I wouldn't say that George Lucas's Grievous is incompetent.
@Latham2000 wrote: Yeah but in RotS novel and script, which are both G Canon, Grievous hard pressed Obi-Wan Kenobi, so I wouldn't say that George Lucas's Grievous is incompetent.
The ROTS novel is filled with tones of legends stuff. Sure it is based of GL's script, but that doesn't mean Stover didn't have his own input.
on November 8th 2019, 3:24 pm
@SithSauce wrote:
I'm pretty sure Grevious losing all 4 lightsabers, losing 2 of his hands and then Clones coming in would justify him as being cornered by the Heroes and then running away...that's smart, not being a coward.
I'm sure anyone with half a brain who doesn't have anyway to defend themselves while being handicapped, would have ran.
Lucas approved of all of Stover's words in the final draft of the RotS Novel.
@Zenwolf wrote:
Yup. Grievous wasn't being a coward, he was using his common sense. He would've died if he tried to fight an armed Obi-Wan while being unarmed, just like how an injured person with no weapons would lose against a swordsman.
on November 10th 2019, 2:30 pm
@Latham2000 wrote:
But George Lucas said himself he is a coward, Windu says he is as well.
BreakofDawn
Just saying, in canon he tore through half a dozen Mandalorians with his bare hands when he was forced to fight. Being a coward isn't necessarily a bad thing. More often than not, retreating when the odds are against you is the best course of action.
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In Hualien’s Makotaay village, along Provincial Highway 11, where it is home to the Amis people lies Tamorak, Taiwan’s first Amis school. Tamorak was founded in 2015 by former public school teacher, Nakaw, who after witnessing her indigenous students struggle in a public school setting saw the need for a school that not only centered its education on indigenous culture and tradition, but one that is taught in native language knowing that language is the basis of cultural preservation. Read more.
Chair Stanley C. Yen speaks at the 2020 Global Views Leaders Forum
5th November, ACF Chair Stanley C. Yen was invited to speak at the 2020 Global Views Leaders Forum. He described how present-day Taiwan is the result of the education in place 30 years ago and its overdevelopment of universities. Academic degrees no longer hold the same value as it once did, and he urges that Taiwan cannot continue to apply a 30-year-old education model. Chair Yen believes that the education today must prepare youths with the ability to adapt to the fast-changing world equipping them for the future 20-30 years forward. With Taiwan soon lowering its voting age to 18-years-old, for example, Chair Yen shares the urgency of fostering civic education and developing critical thinking skills in senior high.
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A Dialogue between Music and Dance
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A New Visa for Children exhibition:
Date: 3 December 2020 – 31 January 2021
Venue: Fullon Hotel Tamsui Fisherman’s Wharf
Taiwan Connection:
Music Salon at Acer Inc.
5th November, Trio d’Anches Sen conducted a music salon at the headquarters of Acer Inc. in Xizhi, New Taipei City performing in front of 80 staff members. They played the Overture and Der Hölle Rache from W. A. Mozart’s renowned opera, The Magic Flute. With musicians sharing the back story of the selected pieces, staff members felt it narrowed the distance between them. At the music salon, the three members of Trio d’Anches Sen challenged themselves to fulfill the symphonic richness in songs usually played by an orchestra.
Through music salons, Taiwan Connection hopes to reacquaint people with classical music, and to shift the serious impression of the genre.
Paul Chiang Arts & Cultural Foundation:
Paul Chiang speaks at the National Taiwan Normal University
25th November, for the first time since graduating 60 years before, artist Paul Chiang returned to National Taiwan Normal University to speak under the invitation of the Department of Fine Arts. Speaking in front of an audience of 150, Chiang encouraged students and teachers to ask questions. He shared experiences and listened to the creative processes of his audience. When asked to summarize his 60-year artistic journey, Chiang responded with the words ‘struggle’ and ‘loneliness’. Despite knowing what he didn’t want, he described the struggle of creating what he did want. Chiang believes that no two people will walk the same path, he encouraged students to go forward with their ideas, and in time they will find their unique expression.
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Religious Traditions, 2010
Evangelical Protestant Mainline Protestant Catholic Other Unclaimed
Congregational adherents include all full members, their children, and others who regularly attend services. The 2010 reports contain incomplete counts of congregations and adherents belonging to the eight largest historically African-American denominations. These denominations are not included in the 2000 reports and are largely missing from the 1990 and 1980 reports.
[More information on the data sources]
1980-2010 Change
Religious Bodies
American Baptist Churches in the USA Mainline Protestant Baptist 0 +30 +45.5%
Catholic Church Catholic Catholicism 0 -358 -11.9%
Church of Christ, Scientist Other Christian Science 0 --- ---
Episcopal Church Mainline Protestant Episcopalianism/Anglicanism 0 -258 -35.9%
National Association of Congregational Christian Churches Mainline Protestant Presbyterian-Reformed 0 +57 +15.7%
Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations Other Liberal 0 -52 -20.6%
United Methodist Church, The Mainline Protestant Methodist/Pietist 0 +47 +142.4%
Totals: +0 -534 -12%
The population of Nantucket County, Massachusetts was 6,012 in 1990; in 1980 it was 5,087. The total population changed 18.2%. The adherent totals of the religious groups listed above (4,438) included 73.8% of the total population in 1990.
The population of Nantucket County, Massachusetts was 10,172 in 2010; in 2000 it was 9,520. The total population changed 6.8%. The adherent totals of the religious groups listed above (4,065) included 40.0% of the total population in 2010.
* In an effort to better match the ASARB standards for adherents, a few religious bodies changed the way their adherents were reported in 2010, including the Catholic Church, Amish groups, Friends groups, Jewish groups, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Non-denominational Christian Churches, and the United Methodist Church. This change does not affect any of the data in the newly released 2010 U.S. Religion Census: Religious Congregations & Membership Study. In fact, the data for these groups are now more comparable to that of other bodies than it was in previous decadal reports.
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2010 data were collected by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB) and include statistics for 236 religious groups, providing information on the number of their congregations and adherents within each state and county in the United States. Clifford Grammich, Kirk Hadaway, Richard Houseal, Dale E. Jones, Alexei Krindatch, Richie Stanley and Richard H. Taylor supervised the collection. These data originally appeared in 2010 U.S. Religion Census: Religious Congregations & Membership Study, published by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB). [More information on the data collection]
†The adherence rate provides the number of adherents of a particular group per 1,000 population. For example, in 2010 the Episcopal Church had an adherence rate of 7.6 in Autauga County, Alabama. This means that about 8 out of every 1,000 people in Autauga County were Episcopalian.
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New COVID-19: Imo Postpones Schools Resumption Until Jan 25
New COVID-19: Imo Postpones Schools Resumption Until Jan 25 PDP Condemns Abduction, Killing Of Security Operatives, Charges Buhari To End Terrorism In Nigeria “I Will Reposition NDLEA” – Marwa After 5-Day Shutdown, Uganda Restores Internet Services Zamfara: Troops Kill 35 Bandits, Recovers Stolen Cows VIEW ALL
Why I Endorse The 'Clueless' President For A Second Term
Mrs. Buhari Will Vote For President Jonathan
The Figures That Convince Me President Jonathan Is The Man For 2015
by Breaking Times on January 15, 2015
By Adeyemi Johnson
Recently, some APC stalwarts principally the party’s chairman claimed that Nigeria has deteriorated under the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan and that APC offers a better solution, but is that true ? Rather than make subjective claims, it is better to examine the facts by global verifiable standards.
The most acceptable global composite standard for judging progress or development is the HDI Index. Many accept that Nigeria has not moved as fast as it should in this index. It measures three basic dimensions of human development, such as long and healthy life, knowledge and a descent standard of living.
The highest development is measured as 1, and anything below from 0.9 to 0.01 are a continuum from very high to very low respectively. But if we examine the facts from this measurement, in 2013 the Nigerian measurement on this index is 0.504. ln 2010 when Jonathan assumed office the Nigerian measure was 0.492, but in 1985 when Buhari left office Nigeria was second from last at the bottom of the table with our rating at 0.421. So, although Nigeria has not reached the highest ratings such as 0.810 to 0.870, under the Jonathan administration, it has moved up the Index since the time of Buhari. But to show that this is a factual measure, If we examine some of the key indicators which make up this index such as life expectancy, which measures how long a person will live if all the prevailing conditions at his/her birth remains so throughout the person’s life, we also see that, in 2012 the life expectancy of a Nigerian was 52.7, in 2010 it was 51 when the Jonathan administration assumed office. There are some who will say that this is an effort to polish the image of the administration, but these measures are not conducted by Nigeria but by independent organs allied with the United Nations to measure the progress of mankind, and they often speak frankly to developing nations to let us know that where we are presently is far from the ideal and we should keep aspiring to that ideal. But what is the APC offering? Looking back at the life expectancy of Nigerians in 1985 when Buhari left office, it was 47.18years and by 1999 when the civilians took over from the military that claims to have come to correct the ills of democracy, the life expectancy of Nigerians had actually fallen to 46.71years.
READ Tribunal takes 30 minutes recess over @Atiku, @officialPDPNig’s application for Bulkachuwa’s Disqualification
Moreover, it must also be pointed out that, although the national average in terms of HDI measurement is used as the standard for a country, it does not reflects the lived reality of everyone or the reality everywhere in a country. This is especially true for some of the indicators used to measure the HDI such as the standard of living which usually takes account of things like poverty rate and distribution of poverty. If we take the national distribution of poverty, low life expectancy and low literacy rates in Nigeria, it is discovered that the worst indicator measurements can be found in states that were formally ANPP.
The leadership value of ANPP can be directly associated with the leading presidential candidate that APC is offering as an alternative to the Jonathan administration. And the APC is saying publicly that the development that Nigeria is boasting about does not reflect on the people, but in actual fact, it is states under the leadership of the legacy members of APC which is pulling down the national average. The data from states under Buhari’s former legacy parties, are pulling down the national average. If we take away the data from these states, we might fare a lot better, what this means therefore is that what has worked better in other states should be emulated by these states, not the other way round. So ,the question is: What is APC offering Nigerians? Is it progress or regression? Because apart from these quantitative facts, the APC is also offering qualitative expectations. They tell us that Buhari is an upright leader without administrative blemish. But many have pointed to the public records not political statements to verify this claim.
READ The Farce of Making Money Online an article by Tony Ogunlowo
They point to human rights abuses. For example, Tai Solarin spent 17months in jail arrested with an illegal warrant of arrest which had only a photocopy of the signature of the Chief of Staff Supreme Headquarters. A Nigerian journalist, Vera Ifudu published that she was informed by the late Chief Olusola Saraki who was then in the Nigerian senate when the matter was probed that, the 2.8Billion United States Dollars which was missing at the NNPC under the Obasanjo regime while Buhari was Minister for Petroleum was traced to Buhari’s private account’at the Midlands Bank in the United Kingdom. She was forced to resign because of this story without evidence to refute her story. While late Fela Ransom-Kuti was arrested for possession of Foreign exchange by the Buhari regime, money that was meant for the upkeep of his band on a foreign tour.
READ Another Set of High Profile Boko Haram Commanders renounce Terrorism (PHOTOS)
He was forced to spend 18months in jail, by a judge who was forced to imprison him by the Buhari regime, whereas on the same matter of illegal foreign exchange, when the Buhari regime was kicked out, his head of security, Lawal Rafindadi was found to have operated several personal foreign accounts, and until he died he was still fighting to unfreeze the accounts seized from him.
Also,Buhari and his deputy, Tunde Idiagbon made a law for Nigerians, that no one, under 18years should go on pilgrimage to the holy land Mecca but Idiagbon himself was found returning from Hajj with his 14year old son, when they were dethroned. Buhari was aware that Idiagbon went on hajj with his under-aged son. So they made one law for themselves and another for Nigerians. Similarly, while Buhari was Chairman of PTF, an audit of the Agency found that over 25 billion Naira was missing though the agency, his relative Ahmad Salihijo, whom he appointed as the soleconsultant in charge of all the transactions of the agency, died when the audit committee was constituted, some say he committed suicide to hide the facts, we will never know. But the audit report found many cases of clear over-invoicing and importation of expired products by the agency.
Therefore, looking at the quantitative progress of HDI indicators since 1985 and qualitative evidence the farce of Buhari’s mythical uprightness, it is hard to understand, where the confidence of the APC lies that it is offering Nigeria a better choice for 2015
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
APCGoodluck JonathanMuhammadu Buhari
Hold PMB, APC Responsible For Nigeria Ills – PRP National Chairman To Nigerians
2023: APC May Lose Jigawa — Gov. Badaru
Stanley Nwokocha
Whoever owns BreakingTimes is not smart at all. No media that will last starts like this. What happens after Jonathan. Everything everything is why I will vote jonathan, why i endorse jonathan, mrs buhari will vote jonathan, the figure that made me support jonathan bla bla. Why should somebody looking for objective reporting and comments come here? Rubbish!!!
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2016 Millionaire Chess Satellite (Lagos, Nigeria)
Jul 23rd, 2016 by Daaim Shabazz
Young guns…FM Daniel Anwuli &
Omishakin Praise Akinloluwa
All photos by Boyo Paul Kehinde
Lagos, Nigeria hosted the second MC satellite tournament with the defending champion IM Bunmi Olape attempting to defend his title. Nigeria is a country of 175 million inhabitants brimming with intellectual talent comparable to any country. However, a complicated past creates an environment where talent cannot fully be nourished. Nevertheless, chess continues to grow in the country and the Millionaire Chess Open touted more than 17 players with Elo ratings of over 2100. There are a number of International Masters and the rising 19-year old star FM Daniel Anwuli.
Only two of Nigeria’s IMs joined the field, the defending champion, Olape and Oladapo Adu and constant favorite to win any Nigerian tournament. Going into the event, Adu had won six tournaments in a row. However, both IMs would be challenged by experienced veterans and wily junior players. The field was also graced by the presence of a number of women and girls. Before recounting the action, here are a few examples of the work being done in Nigeria.
In the first seven rounds, top qualifiers would go to the knockout round and vie for the MC title. Dapo Adu stood on +4 after seven rounds after a tense draw with Anwuli. Adu and FM Onovughe Ochuko were on 5.5/7 and seven other players on 5/7. The top eight on tiebreaks would go onto the knockout phase. The knockout would consist of two rapid games and two blitz games. Adu beat Udeme Edet took three straight wins to advance to the semifinal. He then defeated CM Adeyinka Adesina with same result and would face other finalist in Anwuli.
The two finalists had drawn in round seven in a very tough battle. Calling his 19-year old opponent a “young gun,” Adu certainly afforded Anwuli with due respect. In fact, Adu was down a game after the rapids and was in a must-win situation. After winning the first blitz battle, he needed at least a draw to head for an Armageddon game. However, Adu won the last game to win the match ending with a knockout score of 8.5/10.
IM Oladapo Adu receiving his 1st place prize from Nigerian Chess Federation President Lekan Adeymi.
According to interview by This Day Live, Adu stated, “I needed to win the two blitz games to become the overall tournament with a 2.5-1.5 thereby securing the ticket to the Millionaire Chess championship in Atlantic city, New Jersey, USA.” He later posted on Facebook how important it was to finally be able to compete in a Millionaire Chess Open. Mr. Lekan Adeyemi, President of Nigeria Chess Federation, commended all the participants for their competitive spirit all through the four-day event.
Photos (Kehinde): https://www.facebook.com/boyo.p.kehinde/photos_all
Results: https://www.chess-results.com/tnr230274.aspx?lan=1&art=1&rd=9&wi=821
Media: https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2016/07/20/sicilian-master-adu-wins-millionaire-chess-championship/
The 2016 Millionaire Chess Open
Thursday, October 6th through Monday, October 11th 2016
Harrah’s Resort (Atlantic City, New Jersey)
CONTACT: MILLIONAIRE CHESS
email address: contact@millionairechess.com
website: https://millionairechess.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HighStakesChess
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/millionairechess
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MillionaireChess
Posted in Africa, Media Stories, Millionaire Chess, Nigeria, Tournaments | 3 Comments
3 Responses to “2016 Millionaire Chess Satellite (Lagos, Nigeria)”
on 23 Jul 2016 at 7:16 am1 Daaim Shabazz
Photos from the
2016 Millionaire Chess Open (Nigeria)
Tension action in the Open Section!
The most beautiful smile in the hall!
on 04 Aug 2016 at 1:55 pm2 Lionel Davis
Oh Chess’scues me for a moment but IM Dapsay is on chess.com right now and Um Challengin him to play some chess havent gotten a response yet, I dont want him to think UM just writing KTAZY nonsense to Rochelle Ballentyne when i tell her UM the STRONGEST BLACK CHESS PLAYA IN THE WORLD. hahaha Do i Adia? dunno why eddie didnt tell him this, also wish you all well and keep workin!!!!
on 06 Aug 2016 at 12:23 pm3 Lionel Davis
Goodmorin we bout the work today? u Know to be great in chess ya gotta put in daily work? Adia its quiet in Buffalo NY. they not talkin all that gm genius talk to me anymore, finally i shut them up after 20 years of gm talkin in my face. Adia and when u EARHUSTLIN what UM postin on Susan Polgar site and U think UM bein disrespectful to her Remember when shes readin my post she learnin just like u. and the chessdrumma readin this post righ now, we learninwith Daaim. Now if u want me to explain my post so u can learn something all u had to do wuz call me on the phone like u normally do cuz when u make an assumption about the ULTRAMODERNIST ur probably gunna be wrong, Daaim developed this site so we can get to know our accomplishments in chess and he still dont know about the true strength and accuracy of ULTRAMODERNISM and u been right next to him at all these traditional practice events and apparently u havent told him how unique we r. Now that can be perceived as DISRESPECTFUL TO THE ULTRAMODERNISM, fortunately this site is here and WE LEARNIN RIGHT NOW, IN REAL LIFE. ULTRAMODERNIST.
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Over 2.3 million infections and 13 families of Ransomware detected on Windows in Q2 2017
Quick Heal Security Labs detected over 2.3 million infections and 13 families of Ransomware on Windows in Q2 2017. According to the Quarterly Threat Report released by Quick Heal Technologies, malware detections saw a drop of 23%, but continued to emerge over 1700 times every minute. With the advent of Ransomware attacks such as WannaCry and Petya (a.k.a NotPetya), Quick Heal Security Labs observed that attackers are now shifting their attention towards attacks that make them more money and in an easier way as Ransomware campaigns have higher returns compared with data stealing and other malicious campaigns. Quick Heal Security Labs continuously monitors the threat landscape and provides quality intelligence to Home users and Enterprise users under the brands ‘Quick Heal’ and ‘Seqrite’ respectively.
Apart from WannaCry and Petya, the active ransomware families which emerged in the quarter include Jaff, Crisis, Cry128/Cry9 among others. Trojans continued to rise with 37% detections followed by Infectors, Worms and Adware & Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUA). According to the report, attackers are increasingly using Remote Desktop Services (RDS) feature to enter into targeted systems by acquiring weak login credentials, password stealer software and credential access techniques. RDS is a key feature that allows Windows users to take control of a remote computer over a network connection.
On the Android platform, Quick Heal Security Labs received over 1 million malware infections – a decline of 21%, while ransomware grew 16% in comparison to the first quarter. Android Banking Trojan witnessed a massive growth of 166% as digital payments gained traction and became a popular source for banking transactions.
Sanjay Katkar, Joint Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer, Quick Heal Technology said, “Although malware detections on Windows and Android saw a decline compared to last quarter, ransomware attacks have increased - WannaCry and Petya being the notable ones. This trend proves that cyber criminals are working on attacks that require fewer resources but at the same time, give higher returns. Even novice cyber criminals who may not be able to create a ransomware are outsourcing crimes through Ransomware-as-a-Service. WannaCry couldn’t have been the biggest attack in history if people were prudent enough to keep their operating systems up-to-date with security patches released by Microsoft way before the attack happened. It’s about time people paid heed to warnings, understand the types of digital threats, be wary of sharing their personal details and treat our digital lives in the same manner as we treat our real lives – with a sense of security.”
www.qui
Trends and Predictions:-
Windows:-
1. Ransomware
• With more users adopting the cloud to store their data, ransomware attacks on cloud server are expected to show up in the near future. There is an increased likelihood of massive attacks like WannaCry due to individual users and businesses failing to keep their systems patched and up-to-date.
• Ransomware attacks might increase on health care organizations.
• Newer, destructive and more advanced variants of the Wannacry and Petya are expected to surface.
2. Adware
Like fireball, we are expecting more and high-impact adware campaigns in the future. In these campaigns, adware might be used to spread ransomware.
3. Targeted Attacks
• Targeted attacks by using fileless and memory-based malware are expected to increase in the coming days. IoT (Internet of Things) devices are expected to be targeted at a higher scale as it was evident in the case of Mirai and Persirai botnet attacks.
• As digital payment gets increasingly mainstream, businesses running on digital wallet programs can become hot targets for attackers in 2017.
Android:-
1. Fake applications are a major concern
Scammers are distributing fake apps, labeling them with popular keywords to trick users into downloading them. These apps are mostly developed by novices are not coded properly which leaves security vulnerabilities in them. These ‘weak’ apps are then used by seasoned attackers to target mobile users. Faked applications are expected to increase in volume not only in third-party app stores but Google Play as well.
2. Ransomware is growing
As observed in the earlier sections, the top 10 Android malware list has included an Android ransomware and Q2 has registered a 16% spike in the malware compared to Q1. This only adds to the prediction that ransomware is going to get worse in the coming days.
Cybersecurity quick heal security
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Jordan Spieth feels no pressure to complete the career Grand Slam
maddogmurph55
Last week Jordan Spieth finished the WGC Bridgestone Invitational tied for 13th, which is good but definitely was not his best stuff. The 24-year-old may have been coming off the emotional-high he experienced after winning The Open in such dramatic style two weeks prior.
Spieth now faces the loftiest expectations of his career, which is to win the PGA Championship and stand alone as the youngest golfer to complete the career Grand Slam. Winning a major is a tall task, adding the pressure to complete the career Grand Slam isn’t something Spieth wants to think about right now.
“Expectations, I don’t really feel any,” Spieth said during Wednesday’s press conference. “[Yes] this a is a chance to complete the career Grand Slam. I mean I’m here so I’m going to go ahead and try. But I believe I am going to have plenty of chances throughout my career. I’m young enough to believe in my abilities, that it will happen at some point. Do I have to be the youngest? No. I don’t feel that kind of pressure.
“I don’t come to a tournament unless I plan on giving it my all in preparation to have a chance to ultimately close the tournament out.”
That last sentiment sounds strangely familiar, possibly like a young Tiger Woods? Yeah.
11 wins before he was 24.
This week, @JordanSpieth is chasing history. pic.twitter.com/650mLHluAT
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) August 9, 2017
Quail Hollow is known to be a course that favors players who have more length to their game, especially with the driver. Take for example Rory McIlroy who holds the course record at the site of this year’s PGA Championship. McIlroy plays extremely well when given the chance to pound drives deep and not worry about shaping shots off the tee.
A key for Spieth this week will be to focus on keeping his drives consistently in the fairway, something he struggled with during The Open. A course like Royal Birkdale is more forgiving than a Quail Hollow because the links course has almost no trees, making scrambling a little less of a hassle. If Spieth can keep his drives straight and throw darts with his irons then there is no doubt he can contend with the lengthy players.
“Recently we’ve put more work into the short game and trying to find more fairways,” Spieth said.
“Last week (at the WGCB) was a good week, I didn’t quite have my best stuff, but I come into Quail Hollow here on a very very difficult track. One that’s going to be kind of wet and long, which puts more of a premium on finding the fairway. I love these Bermuda greens. I feel like they are a good style and speed of greens to get my putting right where I want it.”
You could tell that not only was Spieth tranquil on Wednesday when speaking to reporters, but the 24-year-old had a look in his eye. Like he was chasing something that was so close he could almost taste it.
How's your touch @JordanSpieth? pic.twitter.com/KMgz22Swa8
— The European Tour (@EuropeanTour) August 10, 2017
The three-time Major champion admitted he felt as though he won The Open without putting well until the final 6 holes of the tournament. So you can only imagine what he will be like with the flat iron when he has his stroke down. He also talked about how he hasn’t been this relaxed going into a tournament since the 2015 U.S. Open – by the way that was his second major victory.
“There will be pressure, this is a major championship,” Spieth added. “This is one of the four weeks pivotal weeks of the year that we focus on. So there will certainly be pressure. I’m simply stating there won’t be added pressure.”
If his drives are straight, expect Jordan Spieth in one of the final pairings come Sunday afternoon.
Michael Murphy
Basically, I'm Johnny Drama, but wishing he was Ari Gold. On a serious note I have been published in a few publications during my career including CSNPhilly.com and The Eagles Wire of USA TODAY SMG.
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CofE priest enters a same-sex marriage
on Sunday, 13 April 2014 at 4.52 pm by Simon Sarmiento
categorised as Church of England, equality legislation
Updated again Monday evening
There are numerous media reports today about this event.
Guardian Gay marriage first for chaplain in defiance of C of E
Sunday Telegraph Church of England faces ‘crisis’ as gay priest weds and also Gay Anglican priest marries his boyfriend. He’ll be the first of many
Mail on Sunday First gay clergyman to wed plunges Church into crisis: Archbishop under pressure to sack canon who flouted ban on same sex marriage
BBC Chaplain defies gay church wedding ban
Independent Gay priest defies Church of England ban on same-sex marriage as senior vicar warns of ‘crisis’ and
Gay marriage: Anglican critics say canon’s same-sex union ‘defies God’
Daily Mirror Gay priest first to break Church of England ban on same-sex marriages – to wed his partner
Savi Hensman has this analysis: Another crisis for Church of England, newspapers warn
Andrew Brown has this view: The gay Anglican wedding exposes a creaking compromise within the church
Fr Paul
Heartfelt congratulations Jeremy and Laurence!
Dan BD
Important detail that he’s a chaplain, since his employers are the NHS trust – surely for the Bishop to remove the Trust’s deputy head chaplain’s PTO would be catastrophic for relations?
Congratulations to Canon Pemberton and Mr Cunnington! May this be but the first of many equal marriages (*) celebrated by Anglican couples in the birthplace of Anglicanism!
As Canon Pemberton faces possible “discipline” from the C of E Sanhedrin, I hope he will remember the words of St Peter: “We must obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29).
(*) I wish the Guardian would stop using “gay marriage”! It’s just “marriage” … or, if one must, “equal marriage.”
Jeremy,
Heartiest congrats.
Revd Laurie Roberts
Our congratulations too Jeremy and Laurence.
I remember Jeremy when he was a keen conservative evangelical curate. I was taken aback by the article and photograph.
There is neither ‘crisis’ nor ‘defiance’.
Just adults going about grown-up things, like making one’s own decisions, and living out one’s life.
Many of us will be joining them, when we are ready. The bishops are a complete irrelevance after years of neglect and refusal to help lgbt.
He has shown a blatant disregard for both church teaching and the authority of the Bishops. He is simply trying to make himself a martyr for the cause. The Church’s Disciplinary Measure will hopefully be enacted in this case.
Anthony Archer
This may well be not a good test case for the Bishop of Lincoln to engage with. It is far from clear that the making of an equal marriage by a clergy person is “conduct unbecoming or inappropriate” under the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003. In addition, as has been noted, the clergyman (who I met at a dinner party with his then wife more years ago than I can remember – both most charming) is now in the employ of the NHS, although this may not be relevant for CDM purposes. The House of Bishops has got itself in a… Read more »
Mazel Tov and TBTG! 😀
FD Blanchard
Congratulations to the happy couple!
“I was taken aback by the article and photograph.”
We are everywhere.
Martin Reynolds
Wonderful news about these two. Love and congrats to you!
Can anyone tell me what Damian Thompson was doing at a party entirely populated by gay men? Let alone priests with their boyfriends and one bishop with his much younger Italian lover!
How come, I never got invited to such gatherings?!
And where do these Italian lads hang out ……?
Drat, is that one of the perks of episcopacy?
Rod Gillis
@ Benedict, you may wish to review the “Bridge-keeper” scene from Python’s “Holy Grail”.
Leonardo Ricardo
FELICIDADES! LeonardoRIcardo/LeonardClarkBeardsley, Guatemala
“He is simply trying to make himself a martyr for the cause. “
Sounds to me like he is trying to live his life. No one decides to get married in order to be a martyr. He and his partner want what everyone else wants.
Now there’s a problem, if ever I saw one, for Bishop Edward King’s successor! I very much doubt if the Clergy Discipline Measure, now written more than a decade ago, foresaw having to cover or assist in making a decision about what took place at an undisclosed location on 12th April 2014 A. D. Thanks to Cameron’s Law things have moved on apace since 2003 A. D. What is Bishop Lowson to do? Remove Canon Pemberon’s PTO and thus make him a martyr for the cause or do nothing and make himself out to be a paper tiger? That’s what… Read more »
Turbulent Priest
Removing his licence or PTO by whatever process will create huge problems in relations between the Church of England and the NHS.
“He is simply trying to make himself a martyr for the cause. “ As for Benedict’s extremely unkind remarks I would just like to point out that you cannot organise a formal wedding in April in under 8 weeks. Venues get booked up months in advance. So rather than this wedding plunging the church into crisis this was a case of the church plunging wedding plans into crisis. No-one could have imagined that the bishops would be so unbelievably stupid as to issue this “Pastoral” Statement. What is a couple to do – cancel their plans, tell people to bin… Read more »
Interested Observer
“The Church’s Disciplinary Measure will hopefully be enacted in this case.” One of the more boring grammatical pieces of pedantry, that these days seems to have died down, was the insistence that “hopefully” is only an adverb and never a sentence adverb. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/hopefully Never has that trivial dispute been more significant than in the quoted sentence. The writer presumably means he hopes that the CDM will be enacted. An older reader might take him to mean that it will be enacted, but with hope in the hearts of the people doing so. Indeed, perhaps more hope than expectation. They would… Read more »
rjb
I suspect many in the Church will have mixed feelings about this, as I do. In principle I fear such actions are premature and are probably ill-advised at the present time. I’m also wary about acts that might be seen as intended to provoke a reaction from traditionalists. I await the outcome of this drama without much anticipation and without enthusiasm.
On a personal level, however, I find it difficult to offer anything except my sincerest congratulations to Jeremy and Laurence. I wish them every happiness.
I cannot see what rationale would be used to discipline this priest. Christian Marriage at present is understood as it has been in the past, and there is agreement across the main denominations. Civil Marriage is now clearly a different thing, and it is this that will undermine (possibly) the traditional teaching. These two priests are not responsible for the new legislation and are simply exercising their civil rights. They may or may not wish for Christian Marriage to be open to same sex couples, but surely nobody would claim what they have done so far is Christian Marriage?
My hearty congratulations to Jeremy and Laurence. Is there to be (or has there already been) a pastoral conversation and the offering of prayers? Of course we can not call it a Blessing!
Congratulations to you both. I hope you are not having too tough a time with the bishops and the press…..”in all things lawful and honest”
Once again the diocese of Lincoln hits the headlines. I am thinking that it is not so very long ago since the relationship between Dean Brandon Jackson and Sub Dean Rex Davis was in the news and that definitely wasn’t a match made in heaven.
One response to a bad law – not the only response but a perfectly honourable one – is to break it. We shall see what we shall see, but I don’t believe there will be any disciplinary consequences here, the bad law will be weakened, and others will be still more encouraged to break it.
David Runcorn
Fr David – ‘not so very long ago’ – er that’s the story that began in 1989? Your point is?
american piskie
” surely nobody would claim what they have done so far is Christian Marriage?”
I would.
I’ve never thought of my own marriage of 40+ years, contracted in Hampstead Town Hall, as being other than a christian marriage.
I have read Dryden — “ere one to one was cursedly confined” and Shelley — “With one chained friend –perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go”, but I have never heard of someone marrying in order to be a martyr! As to Damian, Martin, in distant Tokyo I seem to be more abreast of things; it is sweet so see him being so frank.
Neil makes an excellent point. Scenario 1: the traditionalists claim that same-sex marriages are invalid and meaningless. In which case, the defence would be “we are not married in your eyes, so you cannot discipline us for marrying, as we didn’t.” Scenario 2: the traditionalists claim that same-sex marriages are valid and meaningful (which would itself be quite the admission), but are denied to priests in the CofE. In which case, the defence would be “Article 32, now let’s go to the pub”. Constructing an argument by which same-sex marriage is valid enough to constitute an offence (it’s very, very… Read more »
Laurence Cunnington
I am not entering into this discussion but would like to list the following facts: 1. The wedding was booked with the Registration Service (on a conditional basis, as the law had not come into effect) some months prior to the issue of the Bishops’ Pastoral Guidance 2. The wedding took place in a Register Office and not an hotel 3. The wedding took place in Nottinghamshhire and not Lincolnshire 4. A very brief interview and one photograph were given to a Mail on Sunday reporter the day before the wedding. We had not wanted any publicity but, given that… Read more »
john not mccain
The only people these two are in “defiance” of are the anti-Christian goons who can no longer keep them from getting married. Congratulations!
As I have written before, there is power in the CofE to bring this issue to the right conclusion. Thank God that brave people are beginning to use that power.
To Jeremy P and Laurence: Heartiest congratulations!
Savi Hensman
It is amazing that Rod Thomas can, with no apparent sense of irony, call for stricter discipline. Jeremy Pemberton has, on one matter of deep personal significance, gone against the bishops’ advice. Rod Thomas has been closely involved with the Anglican Mission in England, which flouts the authority of Church of England bishops completely, indeed encourages priests to ‘excommunicate’ their bishop if he does not conform to their expectations! It is like someone driving in the wrong direction up a motorway calling for heavy penalties for another driver who has, in what he regards as exceptional circumstances, parked on a… Read more »
Nathaniel Brown
“He has shown a blatant disregard for both church teaching and the authority of the Bishops. He is simply trying to make himself a martyr for the cause. The Church’s Disciplinary Measure will hopefully be enacted in this case.” Oh dear, Benedict: this is hardly “blatant disregard for church teaching,” when half the body of the church and most of the public no loner believe those teachings – and when bishops are wrong, surely it is the duty of Christians to disregard them? The bishops, after all, are the servants of all – or ought to be. Your second sentence… Read more »
James Byron
Excellent point, Savi. Evangelicals in the church benefit no end from lax discipline: all those services conducted sans robes and liturgy, all those “statements of belief” used as a precondition for “membership.”
If there’s to be “discipline,” will those happy-clappy “pastors” please step forward to don cassock, surplice and tippet? Sauce for the goose …
A Reform which is planting Churches in dioceses without the permission of the bishop, and also ordaining without local approval. Jesmond Parish Church has a plant in the diocese of Durham and has clergy serving not licensed to the Bishop of Newcastle.
Now there’s disobedience.
Andrew Brown’s article is risible–it detects a “delicate, creaking compromise” where no such thing exists.
Rather, we are at a tipping point. The momentum for equal marriage, even for CofE clergy, is unstoppable.
Brown is correct, however, when he writes that “Open change will be immensely difficult to get through the synod.”
This only highlights how unrepresentative Synod is, and how it has been captured by the conservatives.
Liberals need to be much more energetic and strategic around the next Synod elections. At the very least, all Synod members who vote against the WO measure should be vigorously opposed.
Chris H.
@Turbulent priest and Interested Observer, Why wouldn’t they be able to remove him from NHS? In the States many/most prisons and hospitals require chaplains to be in good standing with their denominations. If the priest is censured for some reason they can be fired. That’s one of the reasons why priests/pastors who are actually atheists continue the charade; they don’t want to lose their jobs even at secular locations. Others with training in psychology or social work become counselors/therapists if their ties to the church are broken. What makes this different from the local hospital firing the (straight) Catholic priest… Read more »
Chris: I think it’s because the NHS is a public sector organisation in the UK and has well-developed equality policies. As a public body it’s also under a legal duty to promote equality. Sacking someone for entering an entirely legal marriage would seem to contravene both this legal duty and the equality culture which the organisation as a whole promotes. I can’t imagine that senior management at the NHS Trusts involved would countenance such a sacking, no matter what the church said, though I’m not a lawyer. It could precipitate a horrible stand-off between the NHS as a Government organisation… Read more »
Nathaniel – yes civil marriage can be a Christian marriage and personally I agree that same sex marriages can equally be a Christian marriage. However, remove the indefinite article, and Christian marriage at the moment remains as it has been traditionally understood across the vast majority of denominations.
In the particular case of this priest and his husband it looks as if Laurence Cunnington would not wish his marriage to be understood as a Christian one, and I doubt Fr Jeremy Pemberton would regard what has taken place as ‘Christian marriage’.
An interesting point by Chris H. As a catholic in hospital, I would not accepot the ministratiions of a Catholic priest ( except in a matter of life and death) who was not so authorised by the local bishop.Such a person would not be a catholic priest but an ex Catholic priest of a denomination of his own making.
Not all opponents of WO are against equal marriage; and some supporters of WO are opposed to equal marriage and enthusiastic about clergy discipline!
Chris: I don’t know the details of any individual contract, but if the NHS cooperates with the C of E in any appointment, and if it expects Anglican chaplains to be in good standing with the C of E, then a likely consequence of church discipline against Jeremy is that no NHS trust in the land will continue the arrangement for a future appointment. This is not because of narrow equalities legislation but because the NHS actually takes its equalities policy seriously. The C of E will have taken another step towards becoming an inward looking sect. An interesting twist… Read more »
Thank you, Laurence for your bravery in making your statements which are very helpful, especially in putting into context the various reports in the Press. I wish you and Jeremy much happiness. I learned very many years ago not to believe what is written in the papers when a war was reported in a town in West Africa where my father was living at the time. It took four days to get a phone call to him (does anyone else remember dialling O for the Operator and asking for trunks and then booking a call?) When we got through he… Read more »
Do bear in mind, that same sex couples have been married in church too, under the new legislation.
Or do TA commentators over-look weddings in Free Churches ?
The new arrangements include ‘civil marriage’,
but include Churches which wish to avail themselves of the new legal freedoms, and join-in the celebration – in every sense !
fr.rob
‘Not all opponents of WO are against equal marriage, and some supporters of WO are opposed to equal marriage and enthusiastic about clergy discipline’
But surely both opponents of WO who support equal marriage and supporters of WO who oppose equal marriage are worryingly hermeneutically inconsistent in their approach to Scripture and Tradition? A good reason, surely, for being wary of their presence on Synod?
Jeremy has demonstrated quite clearly what (who) his priority is. I sincerely hope the couple are very happy. And I hope the bishop has the spine to discipline and remove him right away. I am sure Jeremy can continue serving as a chaplain for a religious organization that blesses and affirms his lifestyle. My guess, however, is that the bishop will send him a sad, dithering and confused letter with no real discipline. Such actions, which will be repeated across the church, will send the church into a chaotic season of lawlessness. “Everyone did what was right in his own… Read more »
Susannah Clark
As a nurse, my first and immediate question is: Why is Jeremy’s work, caring for people who are sick in hospital, in any way effected by arrangements in his private life? I am a transsexual woman, and my ‘diversity’ does not trouble my patients, providing I am caring, practical and helping people with their needs when they are ill. Jeremy will be equally accepted in his caring work with the sick. Surely, in Christian ministry, it’s about the people we are trying to help, isn’t it? It’s not about the church or the bishops or the attempt to impose a… Read more »
“Such actions, which will be repeated across the church, will send the church into a chaotic season of lawlessness.”
I believe that I can honestly say that this is the first time I’ve ever heard marriage described as a lawless behavior.
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Laird seals deal to sell Draftex
By Malcolm Withers
Updated: 19:00 EST, 22 October 2000
The strategic move by engineer Laird to exit the automotive parts business to concentrate on equipment for the hi-tech IT business was boosted today by its sale of car body seals division Draftex to US-owned GenCorp for £142m. Laird Group shares responded with a 15p spurt to 245p.
The cash will be used to pay for Laird's £178m purchase in August of US-based Instrument Specialities, which makes protective shields to prevent radio waves interfering with other equipment.
Draftex employs 5,000 people worldwide and had operating profits of £11.9m last year. Chairman Nigel Keen said that the group hoped to sell the remainder of its automotive parts division, which makes engine mountings, 'within the next few months'.
This division was responsible for about 45% of total automotive sales and the cash raised would be used to make more acquisitions in the electronics industry, he said.
GenCorp's purchase of Draftex will make it the No 2 manufacturer of car body seals in the world. Last year Laird shares hit a low of 125 1/2p before Keen changed strategy for the engineering group.
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paul@thisisplum.co.uk
Paul McCabe
Does Marketing Have an Image Problem?
Marketing people, departments and agencies serve as the primary source of creative problem-solving ability for most organisations.
That is not to say every marketing project achieves such a big impact, or even that all those that do make a net-positive impact on the world. Like any powerful force, marketing can be used for good or for evil, but what’s undoubted is its ability to make something out of nothing.
Marketing: A powerful, but misunderstood force
Brand reputation makes up 84% of the market value of S&P 500 businesses. The companies behind the most awarded marketing campaigns every year average +26.1% stock market growth vs the +7.5% average. Different strategies in the domain of marketing can multiply profitability by 12x (creativity has the largest effect). There can be no doubt that good, creative, well-executed marketing works.
Out in the wider world, marketers aren’t particularly popular. In 2018, Brits ranked Advertising Executives as the least trustworthy profession behind politicians, estate agents and bankers.
In the news too, mentions of marketing are mostly negative. These range from the banal – such as Facebook passing off an ALL CAPS logo change as a rebrand – to the more serious, like VW Germany drawing accusations of racism. Then you get to the downright sinister world of political advertising, where Cambridge Analytica and accusations of Russian bots on Facebook impacting elections came to the fore.
How did an industry whose sole job it is to build and promote reputations end up so distrusted? How did marketing get to the stage that it only hits the headlines when a minority get things very wrong?
Part of it might be that ads simply aren’t as good as they used to be. Since the 90s, consumers (in the UK at least) have been telling us that ads are getting worse all the time.
But that can’t be the whole story. For one, we know from the stats that there is still plenty of creative, well-liked and effective marketing going on out there. For another, if the work is getting consistently worse, there must be a reason.
The psychology of playing it safe
The science of how marketing works is counterintuitive. In the corporate world, it can take some real brass to forgo any product messaging and create a marketing campaign that is just a gorilla playing the drums (Cadbury) or some moody black and white imagery of people surfing (Guiness). Even though, as Cadbury and Guinness have demonstrated, that’s often the best way forward. If you do that and it doesn’t work, you’ve got to explain to your boss why you didn’t put a single explicit reason to buy in your campaign.
Guinness’s ‘Surfer’ ad by AMV BBDO is generally lauded as one of the best adverts ever and contains no product claim whatsoever.
On the contrary, if you create an ad that rationally explains how great your product is and that doesn’t work very well, it’s much easier to put the bad performance down to other factors. Logically, it seems like you did all the right things.
Marketing is a business not of communication, but of telling-you-why-you-should-do-something. That’s much narrower and ignores a whole load of value that professional communicators could add to a business (or even Government health guidance during a pandemic).
There has been a renewed focus in marketing on figuring out exactly how what we do works and challenging conventional wisdom in the name of making our work more effective. We’ve never known as much about how to make great marketing as we do now.
Unfortunately, rather than pushing the discussion around evidenced-based marketing (or just getting on with making great work), some marketers seem intent on clinging to old or unhelpful ways of thinking.
Let’s not go back to normal
The world is hopefully starting to leave COVID-19 lockdown, no longer in the depths of the crisis, but not out of it either. Talk throughout has been about ‘normal’. When will we go back to normal? Will we ever have our same ‘normal’ ever again? All of it assumes that our old normal was a good thing, the best we can hope for. But we should do better.
NEW COMPANY? LOOKING FOR A FRESH START? TIME FOR A CHANGE TO REFLECT YOUR GROWING BUSINESS?
How Las Vegas was designed (or at least it's famous sign)
Print isn’t dead, it’s just adapted to change
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Raku Pottery Collection
IMPROVED PRICE POINTS FOR 2015
How Raku is made
About 20 years ago a South African Lorraine Marinkowitz started experimenting in the production of Raku beads. Influenced by the natural beauty of the wildlife in South Africa she expanded her creative talents to producing animals and birds. Colour also plays a large role in African life, the Ndebele tribe paint their houses in geometric shapes with bright colors.
Although the manufacturing process lends itself to earth tones only, Lorraine developed a technique to achieve bright geometric shapes which completes the connection between the wildlife and its people. Her wonderful pieces are known as Raku Art and are treasured by collectors through the world.
Each piece of Raku pottery passes through the hands of at least eight different skilled crafters, many of whom etch or paint their initials on the bottom of each item making it a truly unique ‘one of a kind’. If you would like to see how they are made, please take a look at our Production Process section.
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LondonChange city
Photograph: Vudi Xhymshiti / Shutterstock.com
Londoners told to wear face coverings in enclosed public spaces and on public transport
Masks, coverings and scarves suggested in government document outlining the ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown
Laura Richards
Posted: Monday 11 May 2020, 3:58 pm
After weeks of ambiguity, Londoners finally have an answer to the question: should I be wearing a face mask in public?
In a 60-page document called Our Plan to Rebuild – which has been released as a follow-up to the prime minister’s address to the nation last night (Sunday May 10) – the government has shared the next steps for the UK to come out of lockdown. And within the document, guidelines have been given on the wearing of face masks and coverings in public.
Although it’s still not enforced in public, the government advice is now to ‘aim’ to wear a form of face covering in busy and enclosed public spaces, which would mean public transport in London, as well as in busy supermarkets and shops.
‘As more people return to work, there will be more movement outside people’s immediate household. This increased mobility means the government is now advising that people should aim to wear a face-covering in enclosed spaces where social distancing is not always possible and they come into contact with others that they do not normally meet, for example on public transport or in some shops,’ says the document.
Our Plan to Rebuild also outlines best practices for people when going outdoors, moving around and then coming back inside, stating that people should avoid crowds, keep their hands and face as clean as possible, keep indoor places as well ventilated as possible and wash their clothes regularly.
Find all 60 pages of guidelines here.
- Notting Hill Carnival has been cancelled for the first time ever
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- The National Theatre is streaming a free play every Thursday
- These local London garden centres will deliver plants to your door
- Warburtons just shared the recipe for its legendary crumpets
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SIA adds more lunch and dinner sessions for A-380 experience
Besides being able to enjoy international dishes and a Peranakan menu customised for the temporary restaurant, diners will get perks such as KrisShop discounts and a goodie bag. PHOTO: SINGAPORE AIRLINES
Airline acts after 900 seats for its Restaurant A380 @ Changi dining experience sells out within 30 minutes
Ng Keng Gene
Singapore Airlines (SIA) has added more lunches and also dinners for its Restaurant A380 @ Changi dining experience, after the initial 900-odd seats available were sold out within 30 minutes after bookings opened at midnight on Sunday.
It had offered lunches on its A-380 planes on Oct 24 and 25.
In a Facebook post last night, the airline announced that it would add lunches on two more days - Oct 31 and Nov 1 - as well as dinners on all four days.
Thanking customers for their "overwhelming support", SIA said it has reopened a wait list for customers who could not make a reservation after 12.30am yesterday.
Those on the wait list will be contacted if more seats are available.
Mr Lee Lik Hsin, SIA's executive vice-president (commercial), said: "We are grateful for the extremely strong support from our customers, and we look forward to welcoming them to Restaurant A380 @ Changi."
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Among those who managed to buy a lunch ticket was Ms Amy Tay.
The 34-year-old auditor, who considers herself an SIA fan, said she got a suite ticket for herself and her one-year-old daughter.
Tickets for children aged two and below could be purchased for $1.
"I might never get a chance to fly as an SIA Suites Class passenger, and thought this would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to experience this cabin product," she said.
The three-hour lunch costs $50 in the economy cabin, $90 for those who wish to sit in the premium economy cabin, $300 for business class and $600 for the suites.
Scalpers started to list tickets for resale on online marketplace Carousell yesterday morning.
One listing offered two adult tickets in the economy class for $188, while another was asking for a total of $3,000 for two suite tickets.
On Sept 28, SIA announced that members of the public could still experience the airline's service - albeit on the ground - through three initiatives that would be launched.
Two A-380 planes parked at Changi Airport will be converted into a restaurant on Oct 24 and 25, it said.
While the superjumbo can carry up to 471 passengers, only about half the seats will be filled to observe social distancing measures.
The menu will feature international dishes. There will also be a Peranakan menu customised for the temporary restaurant.
Each meal will come with two free alcoholic drinks and a free flow of other beverages.
Diners will get other perks, such as KrisShop discounts and a goodie bag.
Those who turn up in traditional heritage wear, such as a sarong kebaya, cheongsam or sari, will get an extra gift.
Read articles by Ng Keng Gene
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2.2 Stage 2: Screening and Initial Decision Making
This chapter covers how to raise a safeguarding concern and where to send it, and screening referrals.
RELEVANT CHAPTERS
Stage 1: Identifying Harm, Abuse, Neglect or Exploitation
Stage 3: Planning Discussion or Meeting
Chapter 14, Safeguarding, Care and Support Statutory Guidance (Department of Health and Social Care)
1. What is a Referral?
2. Where to Refer and how to make a Referral
2.1 Contacting the police
3. Receiving a Referral and Checking the Information
3.1 No Safeguarding Response
3.2 Other Safeguarding Response
3.3 Formal section 42 enquiry
3.4 Closed by the Community Screening Team
4. Trafford Emergency Duty Team
5. Decision to Move to the Planning Phase
A referral is the direct reporting of an allegation, concern or disclosure of harm, neglect or abuse as outlined in Stage 1: Identifying Harm, Abuse, Neglect or Exploitation to the Community Screening Team in Trafford Council (see Local Contacts) using the Safeguarding Adult Concern Referral Form (see Local Forms, Leaflets, Letters).
A referral begins a process of assessing the level of harm experienced, gathering facts, assessment of the allegation, assessment of the adult’s needs and a risk assessment to decide whether the statutory safeguarding adult duty applies.
Where possible and / or appropriate this should be done in consultation with the referrer and any relevant organisations. The decision about whether the safeguarding adults procedures apply must be made on the same working day or within 24 hours of the referral reaching the appropriate health or social care team during normal operating hours.
Out of hours, the responsibility for this decision will fall to the Trafford Emergency Duty Team (see Local Contacts) and will be made on the same day the referral is received. Where the referral meets the criteria, as described in Stage 1: Identifying Harm, Abuse, Neglect or Exploitation, Trafford Council, must make or cause an enquiry to be made under Section 42 of the Care Act 2014.
Staff and volunteers from all agencies should make written referrals, using the Adult Safeguarding Concern – Referral Form to the Community Screening Team at Trafford Council (see Local Forms, Leaflets, Letters.). The referral form must be completed as fully as possible to avoid any potential delays in decision making.
Please note: Staff cannot make an adult safeguarding referral by telephone unless in an emergency. The referral should be made by the person raising the concern, or their line manager if appropriate. In certain circumstances this can be delegated, however it is the person raising the concern that retains responsibility to ensure that the information reported is accurate.
If members of the public or relatives, friends, neighbours or representatives have concerns, they can contact Trafford Council (see How to Report Concerns about an Adult). Members of the public, relatives and friends can make anonymous referrals by telephone, but, they should be offered the opportunity of a meeting to discuss the referral they are making. The Community Screening Team must make a report to the police where a crime is alleged, suspected or disclosed as part of a referral from a member of the public, a relative or friend.
In an emergency staff should call the police on 999.
For a non-emergency police response staff should dial 101.
If the referring person or the Community Screening Team reasonably believes a crime has been or may have been committed, they should refer immediately to the police unless the adult involved has mental capacity, does not want a report made and there are no overriding public or vital interest issues. The police may also be contacted later, if more information becomes available and it becomes apparent that a crime has been committed.
On receipt of a referral, the Trafford Community Screening Team will take the following action.
Check that all of the necessary information is included on the referral form. Necessary information is a level of information that will enable the receiving team to be able to immediately and effectively screen the referral. The safeguarding concern will be screened against the three statutory criteria (see Section 1, What is a Concern? Stage 1: Identifying Harm, Abuse, Neglect or Exploitation).
It must be identified if the person has consented to the referral and / or if the person lacks capacity to make a decision about the referral. If the latter applies it must be determined who has assessed the person’s capacity to decide, and made the best interest decision to raise the concern and on which date.
Initial contact is to be made with the adult (where safe / appropriate to do so) to establish their views and to obtain and record the outcomes they wish to achieve from the safeguarding process. Immediate safety concerns need to be considered.
Some suggested questions for consideration:
Any immediate safety issues?
Type of harm? If there are any injuries, has treatment be sought? If so, GP, health care practitioner views?
Any children or other adults at risk or experiencing abuse or neglect?
Are there wider public interest concerns/alleged perpetrator in a position of trust?
Where did the abuse take place? Is it Trafford to lead on the enquiry?
Any witnesses?
Is the alleged perpetrator still in contact with the person?
What are the adult’s health and social care needs?
What action has already been taken?
If this the first referral of this nature or similar? Are there other adults / residents with similar concerns?
It must be identified at this time if the adult has the mental capacity / substantial difficulty to engage in the safeguarding process. A decision now needs to be made to determine if the three safeguarding statutory criteria are met. Decision making will be influenced by the information gathered including: consent, immediate safety concerns and the actions taken by the care provider / other agencies and recommendations from the Community Screening Team. The Community Screening Team will then reach a decision how best to proceed by applying the three following local authority outcomes.
This outcome can be recorded where:
the person does not meet any of the three safeguarding eligibility conditions;
the referral is inappropriate or malicious (for example an ambulance report where a person has become physically unwell as a direct result of a natural condition)
consent has not been provided for the local authority to make further enquires and there are no wider public interest matters or concerns regarding the person’s decision making ability;
the person has been signposted to other agencies, for example, NHS, Department of work and Pensions (DWP) etc.
The local authority still retains a duty to offer advice / guidance (including financial advice. See Information and Advice). Any referrals and actions need to be dated and recorded on the individual’s electronic case file.
This outcome can be recorded in the following:
this is a concern where there is not a s42 enquiry duty, (the person does not meet all the safeguarding threshold) but it is believed that it is proportionate to carry out an enquiry to enable the local authority to promote the person’s wellbeing and support a preventative agenda. Examples include:
it has been determined that the person is not at risk / experiencing abuse as a health professional has provided evidence that the injury is consistent with an accident and there are no wider concerns regarding others the person is in contact with;
consent has not been provided for the LA to make further enquires and there are no wider public interest matters or concerns regarding the person’s decision making ability, but advice and guidance is requested.
The local authority still retains a duty to offer advice and / or guidance. This may be:
an assessment of need;
carers assessment;
alert to the CQC;
formal complaint;
direct work with the family;
referral to partner organisations;
1:1 intervention with the person.
The person considered to be at risk and / or their representative / the referrer is informed of the recorded outcome and advised that should further concerns regarding this person / organisation should be brought to the local authority’s attention, then this concern may be reconsidered to inform future decision making.
All actions should be recorded under the heading ‘Safeguarding Protection Plan’ and the CQC, Commissioning and the person’s GP should be informed.
This outcome is recorded on the safeguarding episode and should be recorded when all three statutory safeguarding conditions are met.
This is where there are safeguarding concerns under s42 of the Care Act (where the safeguarding threshold is met), but they do not necessarily require a formal s42 enquiry. The course of action is clear and appropriate action has been taken by the care provider / partner agency and the advice given by the Community Screening Team has been sufficient to mitigate further risk / occurrence.
The Community Screening Team are satisfied that the information received corroborates information on the referral form and risks are mitigated.
The care provider is afforded 24 hours from the time of request for additional / supporting information. If the information is not provided in a timely manner the enquiry will be referred to the corresponding locality team for follow up / further enquiry and the CQC alerted of the Community Screening Team’s decision making.
The adult and / or their representative / the referrer is informed of the outcome and advised that should further concerns regarding this person / organisation be brought to the local authority’s attention, this concern may be reconsidered to inform future decision making.
The CQC, Commissioning and the person’s GP should be informed of the initial referral and decision making.
All actions should be recorded under the heading ‘Safeguarding Protection Plan’.
Where there are no commissioned services involved, this will result in the referral being passed to the Social Care Team to allocate a suitably qualified enquiry lead to make, or instruct others to make, enquiries.
If the three statutory safeguarding criteria are met and there are commissioned services in place, the course of action is clear; a risk management approach can be applied at the screening stage.
Once the Community Screening Team practitioner is satisfied that they have received sufficient or insufficient information, the concern meets the safeguarding threshold for a formal s 42 enquiry and cannot be safely managed by the Community Screening Team; it will be referred immediately to the appropriate team or service to make, or cause others to make enquires. This approach would be required where further exploration and / or a multi-agency approach is required to identify additional information and / or risk mitigation strategies.
All actions taken by the Community Screening Team will be recorded as an ‘Interim Safeguarding Protection plan’ and will require regular review through the process to ensure suitability / effectiveness.
The adult and / or their representative / the referrer will be informed of this outcome by the Community Screening Team.
The Community Screening Team will ensure that all adult safeguarding concerns are processed within 48 hours of receipt. In circumstances where referrals are received after 16:00 hours Monday to Friday, on a Saturday or Sunday all day and on public holidays (all day) the Trafford Emergency Duty Team (see Local Contacts) are responsible for screening and triage of any and all Safeguarding Adults Concerns Referral Forms.
The Emergency Duty Team (EDT) will screen referrals and determine that:
all of the necessary information is included on the referral form. Necessary information is a level of information that will enable the EDT to be able to immediately and effectively screen the referral;
the three statutory criteria will be applied to all safeguarding concerns received by the EDT;
where there are no immediate safety concerns the safeguarding concern will await processing by the Community Screening Team on the next working day;
where an urgent response if required to safeguard the adult, the EDT will determine the response needed and, where necessary intervene immediately;
Where serious concerns of abuse / neglect are identified, the EDT will contact the senior manager on Call for Trafford Council for further advice Where an adult is referred during the period monitored by the EDT and they are not known to Adult Social Care, the EDT practitioner will create an Electronic Social Care Record for the adult.
The Emergency Duty Team practitioner will make an entry in the Electronic Social Care record of every case referred during the period monitored by them. This entry will include the reason for referral, and their professional opinion following application of the three statutory Section 42 safeguarding criteria:
no further action is required and the referral can be closed and recorded as information only and passed to the relevant day time team;
there are no immediate safety concerns for the adult in which case the referral it will await processing by the Community Screening Team on the next working day
where the s42 duty is engaged and the adult requires an immediate response, EDT will identify and act upon the relevant actions and record this appropriately on the safeguarding episode to ensure accurate follow up by the Community Screening Team on the next available working day;
where serious concerns of abuse and / or neglect are identified, the EDT will contact the senior manager on Call for Trafford Council.
EDT practitioners will be required to mobilise, consider the use of wider community, NHS and other resources when they intervene to protect adults during the hours in which they operate. EDT practitioners will ensure that they have completed the relevant Safeguarding documentation and standard Safeguarding and care management documents before the end of each shift and will send a formal handover to the receiving health or social work team for the next working day to enable continuous, uninterrupted support for the adult.
Where the safeguarding concern is referred to the social Care team, the concern must proceed to the planning phase for further consideration. At this stage there does not have to be a formal meeting, a planning discussion with the senior social worker and / or team manager may be sufficient.
The purpose of a planning meeting is to determine what next steps are required and is usually undertaken in a multi-agency context.
Where wider public interest concerns are indicated, action must be taken under these procedures, even if the adult does not want any action taken. The adult must be informed of this decision, the reason for the decision and reassured that they will not have to contribute to the enquiry if they choose not to. Every effort will be taken to minimise actions which affect them personally without their involvement.
See Local Forms, Letters, Leaflets
Body map;
MARAC risk assessment;
Trafford Adults at Risk Group (TARGet) Referral Form;
Adult Safeguarding Concern – Referral Form;
Safeguarding Adult Public Concern Form.
Reading Confirmation
Signature*
The information submitted above will not be given to any third parties. See our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
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Kingham Hill School
Kingham Hill School is in the heart of the glorious Cotswold countryside on a 100-acre estate for 350 girls and boys from 11-18 years. Half of the pupils are full boarders and the School is just 80 minutes by direct train from London Paddington. It is the first school to offer the American High School Diploma alongside a British curriculum.
Enquire about the school
We can provide you with resources and advice, arrange prospectuses to be sent to you, or provide information on a particular school.
Contact the school directly to request further information.
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We take your privacy seriously and will only use your personal information to provide the services you have requested.
With just over 350 pupils Kingham Hill remains small to allow the school to sustain its caring, home-from-home community where every child is nurtured, challenged and inspired to succeed academically and within their personal lives.
Our boarding houses are spacious yet cosy, with an average of just 25 pupils per house. Likewise, our small class sizes provide tailored usppot t our pupils, helping them to achieve excellent academic results.
Helping every pupil fulfil their potential has been a hallmark of the School for many years, and progress and success are fundamental to what we do. Education is, however, about so much more than qualifications.
The range of experiences and co-curricular provisions on offer make for happy and resilient young people who have an appetite for discover an ambition to make their mark on the world.
“A Top Small Independent School for A level results” – The Telegraph
Kingham is also accredited by the US Department of Education and the Middle States Association (MSA) to deliver a unique American High School education taught by dedicated experts, coupled with the rich cultural experience of learning within a British school that has been educating and developing young people for over 130 years.
Category: Senior, Sixth Form
Pupils: Co-Education
Type: Day & Boarding
Roll: 200 Boys / 151 Girls
Day pupils: 166
Boarder Number: 185
Situated on the borders of Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire, between Cheltenham and Oxford and with easy access to both the M40 and M4. Direct train link from Kingham Station (5 minutes from School) to London takes 80 mins and to Oxford 20 mins.
Headteacher: Mr N Seward
Contact for enquiries:Mrs Helen Cope
Kingham, Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire
Email: registrar@kinghamhill.org
www.kinghamhill.org.uk
Cited as ‘the most beautiful campus in all of England’, Kingham embraces the beauty of the Cotswold Countryside with a School Farm that all pupils enjoy.
A new Library, Science and Maths Building and Sports Centre have all been built in the last 4 years.
To use the interactive map of the school click HERE
The School offers Academic Scholarships for pupils joining in the Year 7, Year 9 and
Lower Sixth Forms. In addition, the school offers Organ Scholarships for pupils joining in the Lower Sixth.
Exhibitions are offered to pupils primarily in Music (for Year 7 and Year 9 entry)
and Sport (for Year 9 and Sixth Form entry), although an Exhibition may be offered in any field of
performance where excellence on a national level has been demonstrated.
After registration, children will be invited to attend an assessment and informal interview with the Headmaster. The assessment covers English, Maths and General Reasoning skills. No revision is required.
Day fees from £5,965 to £6,795 per term.
Boarding fees from £8,450 to £11,450 per term.
Affiliations/Memberships
ISC association The Society of Heads, AGBIS, ISBA
Affiliations BSA, CReSTeD, The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, Middle States Association (US Education Department)
CReSTeD Report 2019
ISI Inspection 2017
All visits are welcome, please contact the school
Open Day: Saturday 6 Feb 2021 -
Open Day: Saturday 12 Jun 2021 -
In these uncertain times, when things are changing day by day, Kingham Hill school remains steadfast in its resolve to provide the very best education in a safe, secure and caring environment. And although we cannot show you around the school in person at this time, we would very much like to show you what Kingham Hill can offer you and your children. So please do get in touch, either by phone (01608 658999) or using the form here
Families are welcome to visit the School by contacting our registrar by email registrar@kinghamhill.org
What’s been happening at the School?
All posts by Kingham Hill School
Latest news from Kingham Hill...
To view the latest news from Kingham Hill School please click HERE
Riding High – Kingham Hill...
Congratulations to our 3rd Form pupil Alice Frampton (pictured) who competed for Kingham Hill School at the Schools Equestrian Games at Swalcliffe, qualifying for the finals in Broadway on October 6th. We wish her every success. Well done Alice!
Try, try and try again…...
Congratulations to the 1st XV boys rugby team who won a stunning victory away to Rendcomb. The boys played a superb game and racked up an extremely high score, winning the match 50 points to nil. Jamie Quick (Year 11) was one of the players to have his first game for the 1st XV and...
School recognised in the Parliamentary...
With Kingham Hill School being recognised in the Parliamentary Review as an example of outstanding academic and pastoral practice, Headmaster Nick Seward and his wife Hannah attended the Parliamentary Review Gala in London last night. Founded with The Rt Hon David Curry as chief editor to share and promote best practice across the public and private sectors, The Parliamentary...
Sixth Form Celebrates Fourth Year...
For the fourth year running, Kingham pupils are celebrating record-breaking examination success, with 45% of all grades achieving A* or A. “Coming first in the Oxfordshire league table for Sixth Form academic qualifications last year was a tough act to follow, but I am delighted that our pupils and their teachers have secured record-breaking results...
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Home Equality Opinion: ‘black-washing’ in Marvel’s Thor Ragnarök
Opinion: ‘black-washing’ in Marvel’s Thor Ragnarök
Opinion Piece: 'black-washing' in Marvel's Thor Ragnarök and why its important! Opinions of the author are those alone and do not necessarily reflect anyone else associated with United Politics
By Simon Clarke -
Comic book movies, love them or hate them, are the current champions of Hollywood. As other genres of movies have peaked in different eras, nobody can argue that we are currently in the era of the ‘Superheros’ with many of the highest grossing movies of all time being based on characters from Marvel and DC Comics respectively.
Let me start by saying I am indeed a ‘comic-book geek’ familiar with the lore of key marvel properties including Thor; Valkyrie and Heimdall, like all Asgardians whom are based on Norse Mythology, are white.
Why does this matter? Why can’t she be black played by the talented and beautiful Tessa Thompson? Why did nerds across the West cry outrage at the casting of the equally gifted Scarlett Johanson being cast as Major in Ghost In The Shell? Some people may think Valkyrie is not an important character in Thor’s universe however IGN voted her 30th in their ‘Top 50 Avengers’ and ’65th sexiest woman in comics’. Period.
Is this hypocrisy because of a racist anti-white sentiment in the West or as a black university student told me this week ‘the limited number of roles for poc going to white people isn’t a problem but obviously its a problem when we barely get any roles to begin with and the few we do get are changed and given to a white person. We don’t start on a level playing field so the argument doesn’t work both ways.’
Personally, while I find this person to be a racist favoring different treatment based solely on skin colour, I want to believe that the main issue with casting actors who are not obviously the ethnicity of the beloved character is that it is disrespectful to the fans of the character who have loved this character for far longer than the average cinema viewer has enjoyed the MCU. This is the same issue I had with the original casting of Hellboy reboot with Ed Skrein playing an Asian character. The public outrage of that casting was evident and rightly so, however, where were those people with Valkyrie?
It’s the inconsistency I have difficulty understanding. Surely the SJW movement doesn’t stand for discrimination against white people? Do you agree with me? Am I missing the point?
Let me know by tweeting at me on Twitter @demonofth3light , sharing this article and commenting below. If you want to hear a variety of other perspectives on political and social issues, follow us on Twitter @United_Politics. Lets help raise awareness that discriminating against anyone based on skin color, even actors, is not acceptable whether you are: white, black or blue!
Highest-grossing movies with Worldwide Box Office
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Transformers: Age of Extinction
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
SOURCESimon Clarke
casting choices
Previous articleThe Betrayal of Catalonia
Next articleDangers of Political Correctness
Simon Clarke
An ENTJ personality type with a marketing degree and an interest in how politics influences the gaming industry and other technological markets. Not loyal to any particular party but aligns with the one that matches my perspective on key issues such as: same-sex marriage, EU and the myth of white privilege.
Tuition Centre, Mental Health and our Future Generation
The 2010’s: B is for Blurred Lines
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Harry Potter’s Jessie Cave Gives Update on Newborn Son’s Health After COVID Diagnosis
Courtesy Jessie Cave/Instagram
Recovery mode. Jessie Cave’s 3-month-old son, Tenn, is “home now” following his coronavirus battle.
“Thank you for all the well wishes and messages of support,” the actress, 33, captioned a Thursday, January 7, Instagram slideshow with her baby boy. “Be safe everybody. Amazing care from everybody at Chelsea and Westminster.”
The cartoonist’s social media update came two days after she announced her little one had tested positive for COVID-19.
“I watched the news about lockdown from an isolated room in hospital,” the Harry Potter star wrote on Tuesday, December 5. “Poor baby is COVID positive. He’s OK and doing well but they are being vigilant and cautious, thankfully. This strain is super powerful and contagious so I do hope that people take extra care in the coming weeks. Really didn’t want this to be the start of my family’s new year. Really didn’t want to be back in a hospital so soon after his traumatic birth. Once again, I’m in awe of nurses and doctors.”
The English star went on to praise her brother and father for their careers in the medical field, concluding, “Please wish baby a speedy recovery. He’s 9lbs 7 now so he’s a stronger and bigger boy than he was when we were last in a hospital room (and the needle went into his hand with louder more powerful screams.)”
The newborn reached his 11-week milestone at the hospital in an animal-printed onesie. Tenn watched ocean footage in Instagram photos captioned, “If you can’t go to the aquarium bring the aquarium to you.”
Cave and her partner, Alfie Brown, are also the parents of son Donnie, 6, and daughter Margot, 4. Their third child arrived in October 2020.
“Our baby boy was born in the early hours yesterday morning just 40 minutes after my waters were broken,” the “We Can’t Talk About That Right Now” podcast host captioned her Instagram announcement at the time. “Slightly extreme but so were his kicks throughout the pregnancy! This has been a very different experience to my first two births. Much more humbling, terrifying and out of my control. We are currently in the neonatal unit, but he’s a strong boy and it’s the safest place for him right now.”
Keep scrolling for an inside look at Tenn’s hospital stay amid the pandemic.
Listen to Us Weekly's Hot Hollywood as each week the editors of Us break down the hottest entertainment news stories!
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Rule 58A. Entry of judgment;abstract of judgment.
(a) Separate document required.Every judgment and amended judgment must be set out in a separate documentordinarily titled ?Judgment??or, as appropriate, ?Decree.?
(b) Separate document not required. A separatedocument is not required for an order disposing of a post-judgment motion:
(b)(1)for judgment under Rule 50(b);
(b)(2)to amend or make additional findings under Rule 52(b);
(b)(3)for a new trial, or to alter or amend the judgment,under Rule 59;
(b)(4)for relief under Rule 60; or
(b)(5)for attorney fees under Rule 73.
(c) Preparing a judgment.
(c)(1)Preparing and serving a proposed judgment. The prevailing partyor a party directed by the court must prepare and serve on the other parties aproposed judgment for review and approval as to form. The proposed judgmentshall be served within 14 days after the jury verdict or after the court?sdecision. If the prevailing party or party directed by the court fails totimely serve a proposed judgment, any other party may prepare a proposedjudgment and serve it on the other parties for review and approval as to form.
(c)(2)Effect of approval as to form. A party?s approval as toform of a proposed judgment certifies that the proposed judgment accuratelyreflects the verdict or the court?s decision. Approval as to form does notwaive objections to the substance of the judgment.
(c)(3)Objecting to a proposed judgment. A party may object to theform of the proposed judgment by filing an objection within 7 days after thejudgment is served.
(c)(4)Filing proposed judgment. The party preparing a proposed judgmentmust file it:
(c)(4)(A)after all other parties have approved the form of thejudgment; (The party preparing the proposed judgment must indicate the means bywhich approval was received: in person; by telephone; by signature; by email;etc.)
(c)(4)(B)after the time to object to the form of the judgmenthas expired; (The party preparing the proposed judgment must also file acertificate of service of the proposed judgment.) or
(c)(4)(C)within 7 days after a party has objected to the formof the judgment. (The party preparing the proposed judgment may also file aresponse to the objection.)
(d) Judge?s signature; judgment filedwith the clerk. Except as provided in paragraph (h) and Rule55(b)(1), all judgments must be signed by thejudge and filed with the clerk. The clerk must promptly record all judgments inthe docket.
(e) Time of entry of judgment.
(e)(1)If a separate document is not required, a judgment is complete and is enteredwhen it is signed by the judge and recorded in the docket.
(e)(2)If a separate document is required, a judgment is complete and is entered atthe earlier of these events:
(e)(2)(A)the judgment is set out in a separate document signedby the judge and recorded in the docket; or
(e)(2)(B)150 days have run from the clerk recording the decision, however designated,that provides the basis for the entry of judgment.
(f) Award of attorney fees. Amotion or claim for attorney fees does not affect the finality of a judgmentfor any purpose, but under Rule of Appellate Procedure 4,the time in which to file the notice of appeal runs from the disposition of themotion or claim.
(g) Notice of judgment. Theparty preparing the judgment shall promptly serve a copy of the signed judgmenton the other parties in the manner provided in Rule 5 andpromptly file proof of service with the court. Except as provided in Rule ofAppellate Procedure 4(g),the time for filing a notice of appeal is not affected by this requirement.
(h) Judgment after death of a party. Ifa party dies after a verdict or decision upon any issue of fact and beforejudgment, judgment may nevertheless be entered.
(i) Judgmentby confession. If a judgment by confession is authorized bystatute, the party seeking the judgment must file with the clerk a statement, verifiedby the defendant, as follows:
(i)(1) If the judgment is for moneydue or to become due, the statement must concisely state the claim and that thespecified sum is due or to become due.
(i)(2) If the judgment is for the purposeof securing the plaintiff against a contingent liability, the statement muststate concisely the claim and that the specified sum does not exceed theliability.
(i)(3) The statement must authorizethe entry of judgment for the specified sum.
Theclerk must sign the judgment for the specified sum.
(j) Abstract of judgment. Theclerk may abstract a judgment by a signed writing under seal of the court that:
(j)(1)identifies the court, the case name, the case number, the judge or clerk thatsigned the judgment, the date the judgment was signed, and the date thejudgment was recorded in the registry of actions and the registry of judgments;
(j)(2)states whether the time for appeal has passed andwhether an appeal has been filed;
(j)(3)states whether the judgment has been stayed and whenthe stay will expire; and
(j)(4)if the language of the judgment is known to the clerk,quotes verbatim the operative language of the judgment or attachesa copy of the judgment.
Advisory Committee Note
Effective November 1, 2016.
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Major supermarkets staging prime-time ad break takeover in stand against racism
By Steve Farrell2020-11-26T10:38:00+00:00
Source: Sainsbury’s
Sainsbury’s Christmas ad was greeted with racist comments on social media
A string of major UK supermarkets are to stage a collective Channel 4 ad break takeover in a joint stand against racism.
Aldi, Asda, Co-op, Iceland, Lidl, M&S, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose are working together after a Sainsbury’s Christmas ad featuring a black family was met with racist comments on social media.
A Co-op ad featuring black characters also attracted racist comments this week.
Ads from the nine supermarkets are to air back-to-back – something they usually actively avoid – throughout two prime-time breaks on 27 November.
It’s the first time the supermarkets have come together in such a way, and will carry the hashtag #StandAgainstRacism. A Channel 4 introduction will explain: “Channel 4 stands up against racism. After the reaction to this year’s Sainsbury’s Christmas commercial, retailers have put their usual festive rivalries aside across two ad-breaks tonight to stand side-by-side with us too.”
The takeovers are to happen at about 8.15pm during Bake Off: An Extra Slice, and 10.15pm during The Last Leg. Both will feature the full 60-second version of the Sainsbury’s ad.
“We’re with you, Sainsbury’s,” said an M&S spokeswoman. “Christmas is about bringing everyone together, and we absolutely stand together against racism with our fellow retailers.”
The supermarkets are also coming together on social media, where the ad breaks will be published at the same time as the TV activity.
“We won’t stand by when we see racism happening and we’ll speak out and act against it,” said Co-op CEO Steve Murrells. “I am crystal clear that we must be anti-racist in everything that we do and we’ll work to eliminate individual, institutional and systemic racial inequalities that currently exist.
“We are proud to stand in solidarity with our peers.”
Yesterday the Co-op tweeted: “In regard to the racist comments about our ad. Online communities shouldn’t welcome these views, neither should society and we definitely don’t welcome shoppers who think it’s ok to post racist tweets.”
In regard to the racist comments about our ad. Online communities shouldn’t welcome these views, neither should society and we definitely don’t welcome shoppers who think it’s ok to post racist tweets.
— Co-op (@coopuk) November 25, 2020
Channel 4 chief revenue officer Verica Djurdjevic said: “As an anti-racist organisation we are incredibly proud to stand together with Sainsbury’s and our retail partners against racism, using our national platform to call out the unacceptable reaction to Sainsbury’s Christmas advert.”
1 Readers' comment
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Iceland has said that in light of abuse of shopworkers, it does not expect staff to ’confront the small minority of customers who aggressively refuse to comply with the law’
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October 28, 2020 No CommentsJonny AI
Nik Milanovic Contributor
Nik Milanovic is a fintech and financial inclusion enthusiast, with a decade of work across mobile payments, online lending, credit and microfinance. The opinions expressed in his articles do not reflect those of his employer(s).
Access to information in the United States is fragmenting along social lines. This goes beyond the fuzzy, qualitative feeling many of us have that people can’t agree on key issues anymore — data show that people are increasingly breaking into disconnected ideological camps. While this is commonly viewed as a left/right issue, the reality is much more pernicious: It is a rich/poor issue.
Americans today are exposed to fundamentally different facts based on their news sources. Data are often arranged to fit narratives rather than the other way around. This effect spans the political spectrum: It is as relevant to The New York Times as it is to Fox News. One of the contributors to this information split is the rise of site-wide paywalls, which divide access to information along socio-economic lines.
As one magazine editor eloquently puts it, “The truth is paywalled but the lies are free.”
It’s time for us to think critically about how we can build business models that reunite information bubbles, so that people consistently get access to all sides of the story.
Ringing the division bell
Media polarization is not a new phenomenon. Studies have shown for over a decade that, when it comes to news, people have been dividing themselves into information camps. Social media platforms — quickly replacing publishers as the “front end” of news — act as an accelerant, using likes and reads to pattern-match content to readers. However, these studies often address the left-right split; little is said about the more fundamental difference in beliefs driven by a difference in ability and willingness to pay for news.
The pivot by major publishers to erect site-wide paywalls is a recent phenomenon, an answer to the “grand ad-supported content bargain.” These paywalls have grown in popularity, driving people to subscriptions as an alternative to ads revenue. In doing so, they have undoubtedly helped stem (and maybe reverse?) the decline in news revenues driven by the internet.
How bad has this decline been? Just see this OECD visualization of how circulation, titles and revenues have dropped over time.
As Rupert Murdoch said, “… sometimes rivers dry up.” From 2007-2009 alone, the U.S. saw a 30% decline in newspaper publishing. Staff layoffs have become the norm for smaller and midmarket news services, which find themselves driven to consolidate into larger news orgs in order to bring down prices and expand the reach necessary to attract ad spend.
The message is clear: If people want to continue consuming news, they and media companies need to work together to develop a business model that can support it. Yet, as news bookmarking service favor.it notes, “There is now a real cost to the user associated with acquiring accurate, insightful and well-produced news. [ … ] Exacerbating the problem is the fact that there is now serious competition to real news. Free, less-reliable news sources and aggregators that can push articles into a [F]acebook Newstream that go viral in a matter of seconds whether they are completely true, or properly researched, or not.” The data bear this out: an MIT study across 126,000 stories found that fake stories proliferate on average 6x quicker than true ones.
The new iron curtains
Across six European countries and the United States, the average price for paywalled news is about $15.75 per month. In a time where half of Americans are working low-wage jobs and many are experiencing a severe savings crisis, most don’t have the available funds to shell out for a $15 monthly news subscription — much less a subscription for each outlet they want to access. Free news and clickbait headlines on social media, much like fast food, are the easiest and most freely available options to a swathe of people who have neither the resources nor the energy to do the fact-checking for themselves.
A perennial suggestion is that outlets syndicate their content into a “Netflix for news” bundle. Indeed, aggregator initiatives like Apple News have grown to over 100 million users. Yet this still doesn’t solve a fundamental problem, which is that, in an age of instantly available free online media, most people are not willing to pay even for bundled news.
As Don Richard, senior PM at Shopify, puts it, “I just don’t think the mass appeal for a text-content bundle is as high as many tech folks believe it is [ … ] most people view text content as a less-valuable medium than TV and music — valuable being defined as worth paying for based on your personal needs and preferences. And when people have other expenses they have to pay for, paying for a text-content bundle will be hard to justify. Since a text-content bundle doesn’t exist today, the money for a text-content bundle has to come from somewhere else in the monthly budget for most people. That means the bundle price has to take share-of-wallet over something else. Basic needs (food, shelter, utilities) aren’t being reduced for a text-content bundle.”
So we end up with two fundamentally different types of media: On the one hand, free media, supported by independent journalists, freelancers and threadbare content teams; on the other, paywalled media, supported by more robust fact-checking teams and editors. As Robinson puts it, “It costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.”
Coming back to the accelerating polarization of the American public, this media divide is not without consequence. People can always reasonably disagree about beliefs and ideas, so long as they have the shared context of facts. They cannot have productive debates if the facts are in-question.
This is where claims of “fake news” originate: Dividing the world into free facts versus paywalled facts means we are increasingly talking past each other. As favor.it puts it, we’re “moving toward a situation where there will be haves and have-nots in the very critical area of having basic, accurate information about what is going on in the world.”
It is clear that the internet media model predicated on paywalls needs to be revisited due to these shortcomings. But what are the alternatives? Targeted ads have been shown to have their own disadvantages and provoke reader ire.
While this is not a comprehensive answer, here are a few suggestions:
Free facts, upsold details. Pull the key facts out of news stories and make them freely available to people, upselling the deeper and richer storylines. TechCrunch has found an elegant middle-ground of this format: The core news stories on the website are free, while the value-added analysis, investigative deep-dives and richer opinion content are available to subscribers.
The New Paper is another, newer service experimenting with a condensed version of news headlines to combat newsletter and information fatigue (albeit one that still plans to charge $5 monthly). This is something being spearheaded by the rise of platforms like Substack today for independent journalists; content producers with a good following or smart coverage can create self-sustaining businesses.
Could newspapers take a page from Scandinavian ticketing practices and charge based on income? A tiered subscription price adjusted to payroll could allow wealthier readers to create a public good for poorer ones.
Yet, when people pay for news, they should not just be paying for stories — they should be paying for the knowledge that an army of editors, fact-checkers and investigative journalists uncovered the truth behind a story. That is a good that Substack likely cannot provide.
Develop a publicly available, consensus-driven score for fact-based news outlets and prioritize this score in algorithms. The way we access information has changed; aggregators now sit at the top of the news funnel. This has created a significant user surplus — people are able to locate information by story, without being constrained by outlet. However, it has also created an ad-revenue-driven model that prioritizes unique views, which are in turn driven by people’s search for sensationalism and confirmation bias in media. Search engines, social media platforms, and aggregators should come together to develop a public, transparent scoring mechanism for information quality in news and implement that to drive more viewers to more trustworthy sources. An independent rating for factuality that becomes a key input into search and social rankings could significantly help curb the virality of fake news stories, but it would need to take into account the sometimes long half-life of the truth.
Public initiatives. The government needs to re-enter the business of protecting the quality of journalism.
One step is for the FCC to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine, which required journalists to represent both sides of a given story.
Another is to increase funding for public news sources of all stripes: liberal, conservative, etc., and for those sources to submit to routine information quality audits. Every area in which we’ve taken public institutions and allowed people to pay their way out of the default option — healthcare, education — has led to wild underinvestment in the public option; news is no different.
The library model is surprisingly effective for those who select it as an option: well-funded and maintained public libraries still provide an amazing, information-rich resource to those who avail of their services. Digitizing library resources and allocating partial budget to make information not just available, but also surfaced at the right contextual moment could combat misinformation.
A last option would be to implement information quality scores, similar to public health and safety standards. A score could be as simple as an A-F grade on a restaurant or a calorie count on a fast food menu.
Micropayments and stories a la carte. As long as news media has been dealing with internet-related pressure, technologists have proposed micropayments as the answer. The desire to read an individual news story is stochastic, while media subscriptions are continuous. Few people, myself included, have the willingness to submit to a monthly or annual news subscription just to access the content in one article. Publishers should offer individual stories, sold in exchange for micropayments of, for example, $0.10 per story (10x the payout of some publishers to their content creators). Digital wallets embedded into browsers (see Metamask and Brave Browser as examples) can support these micropayments fluidly, either with opt-ins for each story or working in the background, to allow readers to move seamlessly around the internet, so that readers aren’t asked to pay for each story. As futurist Jaron Lanier noted 10 years ago, “Digital technology … unsettled the so-called ‘creative class’ — journalists, musicians, photographers” when access to information became free; micropayments (and royalties) could help rebuild that class of jobs. With that said, there’s a discrepancy between the amount that periodicals spend to publish a story (e.g., $100) and people’s propensity to pay (e.g., $0.10); unlike songs and movies, people only consume news stories once.
Alternative revenue streams. Media companies should again explore whether events, classifieds, paid editorials, in-depth research and other information-related services could allow them to offer “just the facts” as a loss leader. The New York Times, famously, launched The Daily podcast and spun off its cooking and crossword products into standalones. Publications should reinvest in hyperlocal journalism with local sponsorship.
The truth is that, as site-wide paywalls continue to be erected, there will be a real divide of news into haves and have-nots. There is no silver bullet solution to this problem. The public benefits from open news; factual reporting creates positive externalities. Yet we have not found a commercial structure to support these organizations. The answer is probably a combination of the above along with other revenue streams (including, yes, ads). But it is paramount to the strength of our social fabric that we continue to search for that answer.
We should ask ourselves what surplus is created by good news coverage, by deep investigative research and honest reporting? Who benefits? At this critical juncture when the stress fractures in our fragile democracy are beginning to show, it is obvious that all of us benefit from that surplus as a society. So let’s work together to support it, for the sake of society.
Thank you to Danny Crichton, Danny Zuckerman, Jason Wardy and Orion de Nevers for reviewing this piece.
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Appleby's dunk earns No. 1 play on SportsCenter Top 10
Sean Isabella
sisabella@thenewsstar.com
Louisiana Tech senior guard Raheem Appleby nearly brought down the Thomas Assembly Center on Thursday night with a posterizing dunk over George Fant.
The dunk instantly went viral, and ESPN paid homage to the slam as the No. 1 play on SportsCenter's Top 10.
Appleby's dunk was more than just a highlight, it helped thwart Western Kentucky's final attempt at a comeback by making it 62-51 with 4:00 left.
"I didn't think I'd get No. 1," Appleby said Friday. "I figured I might make it but when I got No. 1 I started hearing from everybody back home everybody here just made me feel like it was a big accomplishment."
Appleby said he received more than 100 text messages Thursday night and into Friday as the video hit the Internet and TV.
After Alex Hamilton and Speedy Smith hit a pair of 3-pointer to extend the lead back to double-digits, Western Kentucky got within eight before Appleby energized the crowd with his one-handed slam.
Appleby took a pass in the corner, drove baseline and rose up over Fant, who tried to slide in and take the charge.
"I knew I had to jump high. He was going to block it," said Appleby, who scored 17 points to help Tech hand WKU its first conference loss. "That's the only reason I jumped that high."
Appleby did show some remorse, though, noting that he would have done the same thing Fant did.
"I would have took that charge," he said with a grin. "I thought it was a charge."
Teammates mobbed Appleby after the dunk, including fellow senior Michale Kyser who could repeatedly be seen shouting 'Oh my god, oh my god' after the dunk.
Appleby's dunk also made Fox Sports 1.
About an hour after the game, Appleby sat in an empty TAC with Kyrser, constantly checking his phone. As he left, Appleby said his phone had been blowing up non-stop due to the dunk.
Tech coach Michale White got his first glimpse of the play following his postgame interview and was impressed with how high Appleby got up.
The dunk is the second time Tech hoops has made SportsCenter's Top 10 in the past year. Speedy Smith's game-winning shot last March against Iona in the first round of the NIT also made the list.
Appleby has no immediate plans to compare his dunk with Smith's buzzer-beater, but some trash talking could be in store.
"I might, I probably will down the road," Appleby said. "If we play well Saturday I'll probably talk about it a little bit then."
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Google Inc (GOOGL)’s Price Target Cut By Credit Suisse Group AG (ADR) (CS), Analysts Bullish Before Quarterly Earnings
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) did not had an excellent financial year with lower than expected growth in all four previous quarters. Just ahead of its fourth quarter earnings release, Credit Suisse Group AG (ADR) (NYSE:CS) has cut the price target for search engine company to $700 from previous $722. Despite of the lowly financial year, some analysts are still bullish on the stock.
In its target cut for the search engine giant, the analysis firm cited several reasons including increased capital expenditures, heightened research and development spending and increasing competition in its core search engine business. Stephen Ju, Credit Suisse Group AG (ADR) (NYSE:CS)’s analyst, estimated revenues of $12.1 billion for Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s website.
Mr. Ju further added,
“We assume modest growth over the next five years for Google’s advertising business, as strong growth from YouTube and DoubleClick offset our forecast for a linear deceleration path for Google’s more mature search business. However, a growing mix-shift away from network search and continued growth of Google’s ‘Other’ revenue line should result in … low-to-mid teens growth of net revenue.”
Credit Suisse Group AG (ADR) (NYSE:CS) is not the only analyst cutting price targets for Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) as Stifel, investment bank, downgraded the search engine company amid increasing competition. Some of the primary competitors in front of Google in the search space include Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), and Yandex (NASDAQ:YNDX) from Russia.
At the same time, the Android operating system from Google is facing stiff competition from the increasing sales of Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
However some analysts are still on the search engine’s side and Brian Wieser, Pivotal Research, said,
“many of the negative considerations we have been focused on – including compressing margins, investment of capital away from the company’s core competencies and government relations among others – have become more widely held among the investment community and make Google attractive at current price levels.”
Wieser revised his price target to $610 from an earlier $620 target.
This article has been written by Prakash Pandey.
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STORYBOOK COVE
BOOKS & MORE FOR CHILDREN & ADULTS!
1984 (Signet Classics) (Hardcover)
Kobo eBook (October 17th, 1983): $9.99
For use in schools and libraries only. The great modern classic of negative utopia portrays life in a future in which a totalitarian government watches over all citizens and directs all activities.
Publisher: Turtleback Books
Series: Signet Classics
Science Fiction - General
Paperback$9.99
Paperback (April 1st, 1983): $17.00
Paperback (June 1st, 2020): $24.99
Hardcover (December 1st, 2017): $25.99
Paperback, Large Print (April 5th, 2017): $14.99
Hardcover (April 4th, 2017): $22.00
Paperback (Spanish) (August 1st, 2002): $11.90
Hardcover, Large Print (April 5th, 2017): $22.99
Compact Disc (May 1st, 2007): $29.95
Hardcover (October 15th, 2005): $37.95
Audio Cassette (April 1st, 2007): $65.95
Hardcover (Chinese) (August 1st, 2004): $10.50
Paperback (November 1st, 1972): $26.95
Paperback (Korean) (March 20th, 2013): $22.95
Hardcover (May 1st, 2003): $29.95
Compact Disc (April 12th, 2007): $81.00
Mural by K.J. Bows, Nov. '94. It may no longer fit on our walls, but we wanted to continue to share the fantasy & joy of books it represents!
Copyright © 2010-2020 STORYBOOK COVE, 775 Washington Street, Suite 2, Hanover, MA 02339, 781-826-6060. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
LINK TO PRIVACY POLICY
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Turquoise = Victory
Persian turquoise has long been a part of turquoise in America. Among the first turquoise known in the west came from the famous gem merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier who made his fortune selling gemstones to Louis XIV during the mid-17th century. While most famous as a diamond merchant, including the Hope Diamond, he first entered the trade introducing turquoise to the French court. At that time turquoise was considered on a par with other colored gemstones including rubies and emeralds.
The name in French, pierre turquoise (Turkish stone), comes from the misconception that the stone originated in Turkey due to the most common trade routes of the time. Turquoise remained popular in jewelry but the trade was restricted to the aristocracy until the Victorian period when the development of an affluent middle class created demand for Victorian jewelry. This demand extended to the young United States and New York jewelers, including Tiffany & Company, created ornate jewelry using small calibrated cabochons of clear sky-blue turquoise set in cluster settings with other gemstones. The source for turquoise, as for Europe, remained the old trade connections with Persia.
The finest turquoise in Persia, now Iran, comes from the Nishapur area in the northwest of the country. Although the earliest discovery of turquoise in Persia dates to probably the 12th century, the peak of production occurred between 1370-1722 during the Timurid and Safavid dynasties. For an excellent history of Persian turquoise read Sky Blue Stone by Arash Khazeni (UC Press, 2014).
Persian classic. Photo Mike Ryan II.
The Shah controlled the turquoise mines and had first choice of the finest stones. The Persian word for turquoise, furuza, is similar to the word for victory, piruzi. The stone was considered to possess special qualities that would bring victory in battle and the Shah would put high grade turquoise onto the armor and weapons of his soldiers.
During the 1880’s, although the turquoise mines in the southwest were known, there was little demand because the east coast jewelers continued to buy from Persia. George Kuntz, a noted gemologist had a low opinion of US turquoise during the 1880's. This attitude changed dramatically by the early 1890’s when Kuntz, who also happened to be the chief gemologist for Tiffany & Company, wrote that the turquoise from Cerrillos New Mexico was among the finest in the world.
This change may be attributed, in large part, to changes in the Persian market. By the 1880’s a new Shah, wishing to modernize his backward country had hired a German to serve as his chief minister and the country was modernized in large part. While this served well in many areas of the economy, the turquoise trade, long dominated by tribal clans who did not like being employees of the State ,neglected the mines and production and quality dropped dramatically although world demand remained high thus increasing prices. This story is covered in Part One of Turquoise in America, The Great American Turquoise Rush 1890-1910.
With the end of the Victorian Age and the development of a Native American jewelry market during the first two decades of the 19th century, Persian turquoise became popular again in the American market. As the new turquoise mines of the southwest, primarily in Nevada, were developed during this early period, Indian traders, sourcing material for the artists, would often buy Persian turquoise because unlike the European market which continued to favor the classic sky-blue look, the Indian artists preferred turquoise with beautiful matrix.
Persian matrix.Photo Mike Ryan II
In this manner Persian turquoise continued to be a part of the story of turquoise in America although the influence diminished as more and more of southwest turquoise mines with amazing turquoise came to the market. This bracelet, made by Frank Patania Jr. is an example of southwest jewelry created during the mid sixties to early seventies with Persian turquoise probably purchased from Lawrence Godber.
Photo Arland Ben.
Mike Ryan II
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JACK AND ROSE FOREVER
Kate Winslet Refuses to Boycott the Oscars Because Leonardo DiCaprio Will Be There
. . . and he'll probably win.
By Julie Miller
By Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images.
One person who absolutely won’t be boycotting the Oscars come February 28? Kate Winslet. And her decision to attend has less to do with her own supporting-actress nomination for Steve Jobs than her everlasting devotion to her Titanic love interest Leonardo DiCaprio.
When asked about the Oscars boycott at the London premiere of her latest film, Triple 9, Winslet revealed why she will be attending the awards ceremony despite the lack of minority nominees.
“I feel very strongly that it may possibly be Leo’s year,” Winslet said, referring to her beloved former co-star and friend, who is favored to finally win Hollywood’s big prize for his role in The Revenant. “[H]e is my closest friend in the world and I just couldn’t imagine not being there to support him.”
She does have another reason to attend, though.
“To be honest with you, it has been such an extraordinary year for women. I’d feel like I was letting my side down if I didn’t go,” Winslet told reporters, including the BBC. “I think those are reasons enough really to show my face.”
Her points are strong, especially since Winslet has been loyally campaigning for her Titanic co-star at ever turn, even waxing poetic about the actor to People magazine for no discernible reason other than, well, Leo. (“He’s a stronger actor in this moment than he’s ever been,” Winslet said. “I think he’s more handsome than he’s ever been.”)
And besides, who else would talk to DiCaprio during commercial breaks, staging mini-Titanic reunions each time?
Who else would hug him when he wins?
And who else would celebrate with him afterward?
We can’t think of a more worthy person. Hopefully the Academy is planning its seating chart accordingly.
Kate and Leo
Julie Miller is a senior feature writer at Vanity Fair.
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1 in 5 Adults Delayed Medical Care Due To COVID-19, Study Finds
SDI productions / Getty Images
A new study shows one in five adults in the U.S. reported experiencing delayed care during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Delayed care leads to negative health consequences.
While financial barriers were reported in the study, a majority of participants reported experiencing nonfinancial barriers such as difficulty getting an appointment, finding a physician, or accessing the clinic or hospital where care would be provided.
Health systems across the United States have been increasingly overwhelmed by the surmounting COVID-19 cases after the holidays. As hospitals become backlogged, receiving any medical care becomes more challenging, much like it was at the start of the pandemic.
A research study conducted by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Public Radio found that one in five adults in the U.S.—roughly 20%—reported that their household members delayed receiving medical care or were unable to get care at all. The December study was published in JAMA Health Forum.
Delaying Cancer Treatment (or Not) Due to COVID-19
“We were really shocked," Mary Gorski Findling, PhD, lead study author and senior research specialist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, tells Verywell. "It was much higher than we expected. It’s concerning when we ask people, why aren’t you getting care? People are saying their doctor’s office wouldn’t see them, canceled their appointments, or they don’t feel safe there.”
If you are seeking medical care or are scheduled for elective surgery, contact your physician about safety protocols and COVID-19 testing to prevent a delay. In the event of an emergency, consider planning ahead by locating your nearest provider that accepts your insurance.
Consequences of Delayed Care
Of those who reported receiving delayed care, 57% said they experienced negative health consequences. Although the exact health consequences are unknown, delayed care can result in the patient becoming severely ill or worsening their prognosis, according to Nickolas Garbis, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Loyola University Medical Center in Illinois. “By delaying care, people could experience serious illness,” Garbis tells Verywell.
Waiting to receive treatment can be especially detrimental financially. A patient who becomes more ill due to delayed care can have longer hospital stays and higher costs.
What Doctor Visits Can You Skip During COVID-19?
Researchers found that there are generally three stages of delay in seeking care:
Appraisal delay: the time it takes for the patient to notice symptoms as a sign of illness
Illness delay: the time taken for one to decide whether one is ill
Utilization delay: the time from the decision to seek care until the patient goes to the clinic to utilize services
“We found that a majority of households who have people with chronic conditions also reported cutting back on care," Findling says. "Those conditions really need to be managed on an ongoing basis."
Delayed care has also impacted those seeking elective surgeries—procedures that can be scheduled in advance. One in seven adults reported that household members delayed or were unable to get an elective procedure, with 54% reporting that they experienced a negative health consequence because of it.
What to Do If You Have an Emergency During the Pandemic
“If you’re doing a hip or shoulder replacement, the arthritis can get worse and make the surgery more technically difficult with higher risk of complication,” Garbis says.
Barriers to Care
Generally, delayed care is usually caused by cost issues or health insurance problems. However, during the pandemic, nonfinancial reasons for delaying care seemed to be more prevalent. Only four in 10 people reported experiencing financial barriers to seeking care such as not being able to afford services or finding a physician that would accept their insurance.
New Tool Evaluates Risk of Delaying Cancer Treatment During COVID-19
Meanwhile, 69% of survey respondents reported nonfinancial access barriers, which included difficulty in:
Securing an appointment
Finding a physician who would see them
Accessing the location where care would be provided
Doctors like Garbis had to make some tough calls on what surgeries to prioritize. “A lot of the burden fell on the individual provider to decide where that line was, and what was important,” Garbis says.
Garbis found that testing positive for COVID-19 was also a significant barrier for some patients slated for surgery. “I’ve had patients with positive COVID-19 tests, who couldn't get the operation,” Garbis says. “It might lead them to wait a little longer before actually coming to the doctor.”
COVID-19 Is Impacting Vaccination Rates of All Ages, Including Adults
Overall, the fear of COVID-19 exposure kept many away from procedures and appointments this past year. “Some patients delay their own care because they don’t want to be exposed to COVID-19 [in a] hospital or medical facility,” Garbis says. “My elderly patients are much more nervous coming to the hospital.”
In order to encourage patients to seek out care, communication about safety protocols between the physician and patient is key. Garbis says that using telehealth and remote services might help combat delayed care. Once a doctor makes a diagnosis online, they can then reiterate the COVID-19 safety procedures so care is not further delayed. “You will probably need COVID-19 testing around the time of any procedure and surgery,” Garbis says.
Findling MG, Blendon RJ, Benson JM. Delayed care with harmful health consequences—reported experiences from national surveys during coronavirus disease 2019. JAMA Health Forum. Published online December 14, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2020.1463
Weissman JS, Stern R, Fielding SL, Epstein AM. Delayed access to health care: risk factors, reasons, and consequences. Ann Intern Med. 1991;114(4):325-331. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-114-4-325
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Futura Club Emmanuele
The Futura Club Emmanuele consists of four residential units with two floors where the housing units are located. The rooms are: Superior for 2/4 persons; two-room Superior apartments for 3/4 persons, equipped with every comfort. The village has a pedestrian area with paths that reach the sandy private beach with bar, services and showers. Every room has a reserved wooden umbrella, a beach chair and a sunbed. There is a playground for children and an amphitheater where the entertaining staff will organize shows and games, an outdoor cinema, a big pool with hydromassage, sports facilities and many courses. The Futura Club Emmanuele is dog-friendly: dogs are welcome and they also have a dedicated area on the beach, Bau Beach, and they can bathe in the adjacent free beach. Inside the village, there is the Dog City, an equipped park where animals can run free. Mandatory leash and health book. However, they are not allowed in the common areas (restaurant and pool).
Manfredonia is a nice village populated by tourists. Its centre is full of shops where it is possible to buy souvenir and typical products of the local craftsmanship like baskets, ceramics and wooden sculptures.
Castello Svevo and Museo Archeologico Nazionale. The Castle was wanted by Manfredi in the 1200 and underwent many extension works and renovations throughout the centuries. It now hosts the National Archeological Museum, where many elements that represent the history of the lagoon are collected.
The Cathedral of Manfredonia, built with a gothic style, is dedicated to San Lorenzo Maiorano, whose relics are preserved in the cathedral. Its travertine-marble facade was built in the 1960s.
The Basilica di San Leonardo, 10 km far from Manfredonia, is an artistically and historically important church. At the time, it was part of a complex of abbies and has three naves with three apses.
The Church of San Domenico, with annexed convent, rises in Piazza del Popolo and was built at the end of the 1200, wanted by Carlo II d'Angiò. In the old chapel, four frescos of the 1300 are still visible.
The Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, with an apulian romanic style, was built where there once was a pagan temple dedicated to the goddess Diana. In the basement, it is possible to visit the crypt. The church is located on the state highway 89 that goes to Foggia, 3 km far from Manfredonia.
The Convent of Santa Maria della Vittoria was built for the first time in the 1571, destroyed by the turkish invaders in the 1620 and rebuilt 50 years later. In the 1800 the convent was permanently closed and annexed to the present church with cemetery. Only a few spaces of the ancient structure are left: the most interesting one is the courtyard.
Grotta Scaloria, a cave where many tombs and ceramics where found: this led to the conclusion that it once was a necropolis, but also a place where religious rituals dedicated to the divinity of water were celebrated.
Lago Salso, part of the National Park of the Gargano, is an important naturalistic area as its muddy waters and canebrakes create the perfect environment for many water birds and fishes that populate the pond. The oasis of Lago Salso can be visited with electric boats or the tourists can observe the birds from the turrets situated along a 5-km long path.
Small animals are allowed with an additional cost.
Sunday/sunday stays.
Free services for our guests
Playground for children on the beach and by the pool.
External non-supervised car park.
Wi-Fi connection by the pool.
Amphitheater and fitness area.
Concierge service.
Reception 24/7.
It includes the use of the big pool with hydromassage and baby area with umbrellas and sunbeds, outdoor cinema, ping pong, beach volley, mulit-purpose five-a-side footbal/tennis field with artificial grass, entertaining sevice during the day with games, sports tournaments, sports group courses, gym, aerobics, stretching and during the evening with shows, music and discotheque. Beach club.
Individual sports lessons (surcharge).
Excursions by foot and by boat (surcharge).
There is a buffet service at breakfast and a waiter service at lunch and dinner with three first dishes and three second dishes, a buffet table full of side dishes, fruit and desserts, water and homemade wine included during the meals. Weekly typical dinner. The restaurant Mamaya serves typical mediterranean and regional specialties cooked with selected genuine and local ingredients.
Star Club Entertaining
In the magical world of Futurlandia, the children will have fun in a safe way with the highly-qualified staff and the mascotte Futurotto. Kids club 3-6 years: games in dedicated areas, games on the beach, sports and educational activities, sensorial laboratory, baby dance in the evening. Young club 7-11 years: games, tournaments, theatrical laboratory, educational activities, sport, shows and weekly mini show.
X Club Entertaining
An exclusive club for kids 12-17 years. Sports tournaments, team games on the beach and in the pool, shows, cabaret and themed evenings. Every day a different creative and artistic activity. Parties on the beach, themed evenings and late evenings with our staff.
Top Futura
It includes check-in in a reserved area, late check-out at 12:00, two beach towels Futura Vacanze for free, evening tidying-up of the room, first minibar supply (2 drinks + 2 juices), 2 water bottles (1/2L) a day in the room, reserved table at the restaurant, 1 Futura Vacanze gadget. Must be requested and paid during the booking.
Mandatory club card.
Medical and luggage insurance, tips and everything that is not explicitly listed.
Covered car spot € 50,00 a week.
Gazebo on the beach € 120,00 a week.
Top Futura € 84,00 a week per room.
Beach club in the first row € 50,00 a week.
Beach club in the second room € 30,00 a week.
Small animals are allowed on request, € 15,00 a night, must be paid on the spot.
Baby 0-4 years € 35,00 a week, cradle (on request) and menu meals included. Must be paid on the spot.
Mandatory club card from 03/06 to 16/09, € 43,00 a week per person, always free for babies 0-4 years. Must be paid on the spot.
Free third bed 4-12 years.
-70% fourth bed 4-12 years.
-30% third and fourth bed for adults.
Possible reductions and additional costs might be subject to variations and they will appear on the "Book" page.
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New Checklists Help Agritourism Operators Measure Risk
Opening a farm to visitors carries certain risks, but operators can be proactive by reviewing some basic questions
Farmers and landowners who open their property to the public face some unique risks and responsibilities.
To help ensure their operation is following best practices, a group of agritourism experts with Iowa State University Extension and Outreach has put together six checklists that cover the many types of liability an owner may face.
The checklists cover bio-security, emergency preparedness, food safety, pesticide safety, play area safety and negligence mitigation.
Compiled by Kendra Meyer, Visit Iowa Farms program coordinator at ISU Extension and Outreach, the checklists ask producers to mark “yes” or “no” to each question, or “not applicable.”
The checklists are not to be considered a certification, but they do help producers understand their strengths and weaknesses, Meyer said, and identify areas where they may need to improve.
“The checklists serve as a measurement tool to help guide agritourism operators through best practice techniques to use on their farm, to alleviate the risks that arise once employees and visitors come onto their farm,” Meyer said.
Topics include employee and visitor health and hygiene, employee training, recordkeeping, food preparation and storage, legal risks and much more.
The checklists were written with federal and food safety standards in mind, Meyer said, and with input from the Agritourism Destination Safety and Health Best Practicesworkshops that were held in 2018.
Input was provided by Iowa State’s Center for Food Security and Public Health, and experts from Iowa State’s Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, Center for Agricultural Law and Taxation, Pesticide Safety Education Program, and Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering.
The checklists are available for download from the ISU Extension and Outreach Store.
- Iowa State University Extension & Outreach
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Air Force developing hypersonic weapons by 2020s
Warrior Scout
An artist’s rendering of the X-51A | U.S. Air Force graphic
The Air Force will likely have high-speed, long-range and deadly hypersonic weapons by the 2020s, providing kinetic energy destructive power able to travel thousands of miles toward enemy targets at five-times the speed of sound.
“Air speed makes them much more survivable and hard to shoot down. If you can put enough fuel in them that gets them a good long range. You are going roughly a mile a second so if you put in 1,000 seconds of fuel you can go 1,000 miles – so that gives you lots of standoff capability,” Air Force Chief Scientist Greg Zacharias told Scout Warrior in an interview.
While much progress has been made by Air Force and Pentagon scientists thus far, much work needs to be done before hypersonic air vehicles and weapons are technologically ready to be operational in combat circumstances.
“Right now we are focusing on technology maturation so all the bits and pieces, guidance, navigation control, material science, munitions, heat transfer and all that stuff,” Zacharias added.
Zacharias explained that, based upon the current trajectory, the Air Force will likely have some initial hypersonic weapons ready by sometime in the 2020s. A bit further away in the 2030s, the service could have a hypersonic drone or ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) vehicle.
“I don’t yet know if this is envisioned to be survivable or returnable. It may be one way,” Zacharias explained.
A super high-speed drone or ISR platform would better enable air vehicles to rapidly enter and exit enemy territory and send back relevant imagery without being detected by enemy radar or shot down.
By the 2040s, however, the Air Force could very well have a hypersonic “strike” ISR platform able to both conduct surveillance and delivery weapons, he added.
A weapon traveling at hypersonic speeds, naturally, would better enable offensive missile strikes to destroy targets such and enemy ships, buildings, air defenses and even drones and fixed-wing or rotary aircraft depending upon the guidance technology available.
A key component of this is the fact that weapons traveling at hypersonic speeds would present serious complications for targets hoping to defend against them – they would have only seconds with which to respond or defend against an approaching or incoming attack.
Hypersonic weapons will quite likely be engineered as “kinetic energy” strike weapons, meaning they will not use explosives but rather rely upon sheer speed and the force of impact to destroy targets.
“They have great kinetic energy to get through hardened targets. You could trade off smaller munitions loads for higher kinetic energy. It is really basically the speed and the range. Mach 5 is five times the speed of sound,” he explained.
The speed of sound can vary, depending upon the altitude; at the ground level it is roughly 1,100 feet per second. Accordingly, if a weapon is engineered with 2,000 seconds worth of fuel – it can travel up to 2,000 miles to a target.
“If you can get control at a low level and hold onto Mach 5, you can do pretty long ranges,” Zacharias said.
Although potential defensive uses for hypersonic weapons, interceptors or vehicles are by no means beyond the realm of consideration, the principle effort at the moment is to engineer offensive weapons able to quickly destroy enemy targets at great distances.
B-52 carries the X-51 Hypersonic Vehicle out to the range for launch test. | US Air Force photo by Bobbi Zapka
Some hypersonic vehicles could be developed with what Zacharias called “boost glide” technology, meaning they fire up into the sky above the earth’s atmosphere and then utilize the speed of decent to strike targets as a re-entry vehicle.
For instance, Zacharias cited the 1950s-era experimental boost-glide vehicle called the X-15 which aimed to fire 67-miles up into the sky before returning to earth.
China’s Hypersonic Weapons Tests
Zacharias did respond to recent news about China’s claimed test of a hypersonic weapon, a development which caused concern among Pentagon leaders and threat analysts.
While some Pentagon officials have said the Chinese have made progress with effort to develop hypersonic weapons, Zacharias emphasized that much of the details regarding this effort were classified and therefore not publically available.
Nevertheless, should China possess long-range, high-speed hypersonic weapons – it could dramatically impact circumstances known in Pentagon circles and anti-access/area denial.
This phenomenon, referred to at A2/AD, involves instances wherein potential adversaries use long-range sensors and precision weaponry to deny the U.S. any ability to operate in the vicinity of some strategically significant areas such as closer to an enemy coastline. Hypersonic weapons could hold slower-moving Navy aircraft carriers at much greater risk, for example.
An April 27th report in the Washington Free Beach citing Pentagon officials stating that China successfully tested a new high-speed maneuvering warhead just last week.
“The test of the developmental DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle was monitored after launch Friday atop a ballistic missile fired from the Wuzhai missile launch center in central China, said officials familiar with reports of the test,” the report from the Washington Free Beacon said. “The maneuvering glider, traveling at several thousand miles per hour, was tracked by satellites as it flew west along the edge of the atmosphere to an impact area in the western part of the country.”
X-51 Waverider
Scientists with the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Pentagon’s research arm are working to build a new hypersonic air vehicle that can travel at speeds up to Mach 5 while carrying guidance systems and other materials.
Air Force senior officials have said the service wants to build upon the successful hypersonic flight test of the X-51 Waverider 60,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean in May of 2013.
The Air Force and DARPA, the Pentagon’s research entity, plan to have a new and improved hypersonic air vehicle by 2023.
The X-51 was really a proof of concept test designed to demonstrate that a scram jet engine could launch off an aircraft and go hypersonic.
US Air Force photo
The scramjet was able to go more than Mach 5 until it ran out of fuel. It was a very successful test of an airborne hypersonic weapons system, Air Force officials said.
The successful test was particularly welcome news for Air Force developers because the X-51 Waverider had previously had some failed tests.
The 2013 test flight, which wound up being the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight ever, wrapped up a $300 million technology demonstration program beginning in 2004, Air Force officials said.
A B-52H Stratofortress carried the X-51A on its wing before it was released at 50,000 feet and accelerated up to Mach 4.8 in 26 seconds. As the scramjet climbed to 60,000 feet it accelerated to Mach 5.1.
The X-51 was also able to send back data before crashing into the ocean — the kind of information now being used by scientists to engineer a more complete hypersonic vehicle.
“After exhausting its 240-second fuel supply, the vehicle continued to send back telemetry data until it splashed down into the ocean and was destroyed as designed,” according to an Air Force statement. “At impact, 370 seconds of data were collected from the experiment.”
This Air Force the next-generation effort is not merely aimed at creating another scramjet but rather engineering a much more comprehensive hypersonic air vehicle, service scientists have explained.
Hypersonic flight requires technology designed to enable materials that can operate at the very high temperatures created by hypersonic speeds. They need guidance systems able to function as those speeds as well, Air Force officials have said.
The new air vehicle effort will progress alongside an Air Force hypersonic weapons program. While today’s cruise missiles travel at speeds up to 600 miles per hour, hypersonic weapons will be able to reach speeds of Mach 5 to Mach 10, Air Force officials said.
The new air vehicle could be used to transport sensors, equipment or weaponry in the future, depending upon how the technology develops.
Also, Pentagon officials have said that hypersonic aircraft are expected to be much less expensive than traditional turbine engines because they require fewer parts.
For example, senior Air Force officials have said that hypersonic flight could speed up a five- hour flight from New York to Los Angeles to about 30 minutes. That being said, the speed of acceleration required for hypersonic flight may preclude or at least challenge the scientific possibility of humans being able to travel at that speed – a question that has yet to be fully determined.
10 New Year’s Resolutions to help you knife hand more and talk about ‘combat’ in Kuwait less
Samantha Peterson
The Recruiter
Lose the decades’ long lie of promising naive 18-year-old’s that their selected occupation specialty will be the “tip of the spear” when the next war kicks off. What’s the difference between Military Police and Delta Force anyway?
Resolve to stop using the poster of HALO school pictures of grunts in OIF I when explaining what being a cook in the Army is like. The naive kid will likely be none the wiser if you use polished, Army-approved images of Culinary Specialist AIT, and your quota gets filled either way.
The Drill Sergeant
The kinder and gentler Army is here and Drill Sergeants aren’t supposed to yell anymore. Resolve this year to strike fear in the hearts of your trainees in other ways. Never underestimate the power of a knife-hand, dark sunglasses and blank expression in any given situation.
Maybe don’t use every negative instance in your life to exert your rage onto your platoon of trainees. Maybe you’ve only slept two hours in the past two days and you got a ticket for going one mile over the speed limit on post. Take out that anger in the gym instead and turn it into gains.
Every POG Veteran on TV shows
When told, “Thank you for your service” this time, resolve not to bust into the highly suspect monologue about cooking under fire.
Try to use the phrase,“I was pretty much Infantry” a little less when explaining your military service to a civilian, especially when you detail your traumatic “deployments” to Kuwait and Bahrain. Oh, the horror…
The brand-new Second Lieutenant
It’s been exactly six minutes since you’ve arrived at your first unit and no one has saluted you or asked you about your vast experience at Ranger School? Maybe let it slide this year and also give up on demanding that the Command Sergeant Major stands at attention when talking to you.
Speaking of Ranger School, stop talking about it. You are not the first barrel-chested freedom fighter to graduate from the course and unless you want to be punched in the throat by your Platoon Sergeant or duct taped to a tree by your entire platoon, maybe try to be humble about your first Army experience.
The Infantryman back from his first deployment
Resolve to not bring up Afghanistan in every single conversation you have with civilians. Your six-month stay on tranquil Bagram Airfield where you went to the gym four times a day and left the wire exactly zero times does little to bolster your image of a stone-cold killer and the lack of a CIB on your chest isn’t fooling anyone.
10. Perhaps listen to your NCO for once and don’t marry the stripper you just met in Nashville who you suddenly feel is your soulmate regardless of how much cash you have given her in the past two hours. Remember when you bought that 2020 Ford Mustang at 26 percent interest rate? Yeah, maybe your Squad Leader was right about something.
China says it will fine US ships that don’t comply with its new rules in South China Sea
Harold C. Hutchison
By 2020, China could be setting the stage for a massive naval confrontation in the South China Sea if it tries to enforce new rules that are currently in draft form.
A helicopter attached to Chinese Navy ship multirole frigate Hengshui (572) participates in a maritime interdiction event with the Chinese Navy guided-missile destroyer Xi’an (153) during Rim of the Pacific. (Chinese navy photo by Sun Hongjie)
According to a report by Stars and Stripes, China wants to require all ships to ask permission before entering “Chinese waters” and all submarines to surface, announce their presence, and fly a flag. China has been taking steps to enforce its claims in the South China Sea, including a bomber flight and the construction of air bases on artificial islands.
Reuters has reported that China has begun construction of what appear to be facilities intended to support long-range missiles at Fiery Cross Reef, Mischief Reef, and Subi Reef. The news breaks after the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) and the guided missile destroyer USS Wayne E. Meyer (DDG 108) carried out what the Navy described as “routine operations” in the maritime flashpoint.
An international arbitration panel ruled against China’s claims last July, but the Chinese boycotted the process and have ignored the ruling against their claims. Last November, the guided missile destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG 56) carried out what were, for all intents and purposes, “freedom of navigation” exercises. This past December saw a Chinese vessel carry out the brazen heist of an American unmanned underwater vehicle.
Map of the ChiComs’ Nine-Dash Line (Illustration from Wikimedia Commons)
Quartz Media reports that the Chinese will fine any vessel that fails to comply $70,000. No word on how they intend to collect, but the U.S. has a lengthy tradition of refusing to pay such fines, going back to the XYZ Affair, when a South Carolina Rep. Robert G. Harper, famously coined the phrase, “Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute.”
It should be noted that deagel.com, an online encyclopedia of military hardware, prices a Standard surface-to-air missile at $750,000 per unit, and a Harpoon anti-ship missile at $720,000 per unit.
Marines return to their old stomping grounds
Marine Corps Recruit Training Depot Parris Island is a sacred place that shapes everyday citizens into United States Marines. The journey from recruit in training to United States Marine is unforgettable and some even describe it as the best worst time of their life. Once a Marine leaves the island, most may never return.
U.S. Marines with 2nd Transportation Battalion, Combat Logistics Regiment 2, 2nd Marine Logistics Group, were given the opportunity to visit MCRD Parris Island, South Carolina during a professional military education trip on June 14, 2019.
The day started off with the Marines visiting the famous yellow footprints, the place where the training begins. They then made their way to the receiving bay where all recruits are allotted one phone call home to let their families know they arrived safely, followed by a tour of a recruit living quarters.
U.S. Marines with 2nd Transportation Support Battalion, Combat Logistics Regiment 2, 2nd Marine Logistics Group, pose for a group photo with Brig. Gen. James Gylnn, commanding general of Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, and Sgt. Major William Carter, sergeant major of Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, S.C., June 14, 2019.
(U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Scott Jenkins)
“Going back to MCRD Parris Island was an overwhelming feeling,” said Pfc. Johnny Francis, who graduated from Parris Island on Nov. 23, 2019, now a motor vehicle operator with 2nd TSB. “It is the place that broke me, made me want to give up, but also gave me the courage to keep going and in turn allowed me to become a United States Marine.”
Marines pride themselves on being the best, and it all starts at recruit training. The Marine Corps has the longest entry level training of any of the four branches.
U.S. Marines with 2nd Transportation Support Battalion, Combat Logistics Regiment 2, 2nd Marine Logistics Group, walk down the road at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, S.C., June 14, 2019.
Recruits endure 13 weeks of rigorous physical, mental, and spiritual challenges. Under 24/7 watch and care of the Marine Corps Drill Instructor, recruits are completely stripped of their civilian habits and relearn everything the Marine Corps way.
“Getting to see recruit training as a Marine made me understand why we are held to such a high standard,” said Lance Cpl. Charlene Yabut, who graduated from Parris Island on Nov. 29, 2018, now a landing support specialist with 2nd TSB. “Those recruits don’t know it yet but they will remember everything that was drilled into their head. Being a Marine takes everything you have to offer every day and without the foundation that is laid here, we wouldn’t be the U.S. Marines.”
U.S. Marine Corps 1st Sgt. Nicholas Underwood with Company K, 3rd Recruit Training Battalion, Recruit Training Regiment, gives Marines from 2nd Transportation Support Battalion, Combat Logistics Regiment 2, 2nd Marine Logistics Group a tour of Company K’s recruit living quarters at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, S.C., June 14, 2019.
2nd TSB ended their trip on the island with witnessing 570 new Marines from P and M Company march and graduate on the Pete Ross Parade Deck.
Graduation day marks the end of recruit training; it is the culminating and most awaited day by all new Marines.
“We wanted to bring the Marines from our unit here to allow them to reflect and remind them that we all stepped foot on those yellow footprints for a reason; we all wanted to become Marines,” said Capt. Brian Hassett, Alpha Company Commander, 2nd TSB, CLR 2, 2nd MLG. “We have earned the title, but it doesn’t end there. We have to keep working hard, stay dedicated and be prepared for when America calls.”
This article originally appeared on Marines. Follow @USMC on Twitter.
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This is the largest gathering of senior non-commissioned officers in the US
More than 440 senior enlisted leaders, representing all services — active, reserve, and retired — descended on Houston, Texas, June 20-22, 2019, from all parts of the United States to attend the Great Sergeants Major Reunion, the largest gathering of senior non-commissioned officers in America.
Out of U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy (USASMA) classes 1 through 10, there was only one Sergeant Major in attendance. Gene McKinney, who served as the 10th Sergeant Major of the Army, was among the many sergeants major to participate in this year’s event. Sadly, 16 sergeants major have passed since the last gathering in 2017.
The Department of Veterans Affairs was well represented, with two Veterans Experience office employees–both retired command sergeants major (representing classes 53 and 55)–on site to share MISSION Act and suicide prevention and awareness information, and hand out the VA Welcome Kit.
CSM (Ret) Eric Montgomery speaks with SMA (Ret) Gene C. McKinney at the event in Houston.
As the conference room filled, VA staff were there to welcome attendees and hear their concerns and feedback about VA. One attendee, Larry Williams, said “the White House hotline is the best resource in place.” Others similarly expressed wishing they had this information before leaving service, and that VA’s presence at the reunion convinced several to enroll in VA. Even those still serving, or soon to be retiring as sergeants major, reported a desire to share the VA Welcome Kit information with their soldiers.
It was an invaluable opportunity to attend, to share what’s happening inside VA, knowing that these senior enlisted leaders will be VA advocates to their soldiers all over the country.
Retired SGMs from USASMA class 55 at the GSM Reunion 2019.
Command Sergeant Major (retired) Ivanhoe Love Jr., who also served three terms as the mayor of Liberal, Kansas, was the keynote speaker. His spoke about living healthy lives, the importance of annual checkups and the power of positive thinking. He also stressed the importance of having personal relationships, staying connected and informed, and how these factors impact life longevity.
Although he was not in attendance due to health reasons, fellow Sergeant Major (Ret) Ernest Colden, a World War II, Korea, and Vietnam Veteran from South Carolina who turned 95 on June 23, 2019, was recognized.
This article originally appeared on VAntage Point. Follow @DeptVetAffairs on Twitter.
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The Navy wants to know who secretly uploaded videos of sailors to Porn Hub
The US Navy is trying to find out who secretly filmed dozens of service members in a bathroom and shared the videos on the porn website Porn Hub, US military officials told NBC news.
An agent from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service found the videos on Porn Hub earlier this month. Some of the videos showed sailors and marines in uniform with visible name patches, NBC reported. The individuals didn’t know they were being recorded and officials were not aware of any sexual acts in the videos.
“We received a removal request from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to remove the material in question and we did. We are currently working alongside them to assist them with their investigation,”Blake White, Vice President of Pornhub, said in a statement to Insider and other outlets. “Here at Pornhub, we immediately remove any content that violates our terms of use as soon as we are made aware of it.”
The clips, which have since been removed, also included civilians.
The officials believe the videos were taken through a peephole in a bathroom, according to NBC.Some of the individuals in the videos were assigned to the USS Emory S. Land, a vessel that supplies submarines and is assigned to a port in Guam, the officials told NBC.
A message left by Insider for a Navy spokesperson was not immediately returned.
In the statement, White said that PornHub employs a team to scan for and remove content that violates their terms of service.
The company also uses “Vobile, a state of the art third party fingerpringing software,” to make sure new uploads don’t match videos that have already been removed from the site, White said.
This isn’t the first time that US service members have been targeted by voyeurs looking to share nude photos of them online.
In a 2017 scandal, the US Marine Corp. opened an investigation after hundreds of nude photos of female service members from every military branch had been posted to an image-sharing message board.
The discovery of the photos and investigation resulted in a change in US Marine and Navy laws banning revenge porn.
Violators who are found to have shared an “intimate image” of a colleague without their consent can face consequences ranging from administrative punishments to criminal actions.
Navy’s new strategy in Europe is allegedly confusing Russia
Truman, Lincoln strike groups practice warfighting as a pair
Soldiers to operate armed robotic vehicles from cutting-edge Bradleys
Soldiers are slated to fire at targets in 2020 using a platoon of robotic combat vehicles they will control from the back of modified Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
The monthlong operational test is scheduled to begin in March 2020 at Fort Carson, Colorado, and will provide input to the Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center on where to go next with autonomous vehicles.
The upgraded Bradleys, called Mission Enabler Technologies-Demonstrators, or MET-Ds, have cutting-edge features such as a remote turret for the 25 mm main gun, 360-degree situational awareness cameras and enhanced crew stations with touchscreens.
Initial testing will include two MET-Ds and four robotic combat vehicles on M113 surrogate platforms. Each MET-D will have a driver and gunner as well as four soldiers in its rear, who will conduct platoon-level maneuvers with two surrogate vehicles that fire 7.62 mm machine guns.
Under Secretary of the Army Ryan D. McCarthy, center left, and Gen. James C. McConville, the Army’s vice chief of staff, center right, discuss emerging technology while inside a Mission Enabler Technologies-Demonstrator, a modified Bradley Fighting Vehicle equipped with several upgrades, in Warren, Mich., Jan. 18, 2018.
(Photo by Sean Kimmons)
“We’ve never had soldiers operate MET-Ds before,” said David Centeno Jr., chief of the center’s Emerging Capabilities Office. “We’re asking them to utilize the vehicles in a way that’s never been done before.”
After the tests, the center and Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team, both part of Army Futures Command, will then use soldier feedback to improve the vehicles for future test phases.
“You learn a lot,” Centeno said at the International Armored Vehicles USA conference on June 26, 2019. “You learn how they use it. They may end up using it in ways we never even thought of.”
The vehicles are experimental prototypes and are not meant to be fielded, but could influence other programs of record by demonstrating technology derived from ongoing development efforts.
“This technology is not only to remain in the RCV portfolio, but also legacy efforts as well,” said Maj. Cory Wallace, robotic combat vehicle lead for the NGCV CFT.
One goal for the autonomous vehicles is to discover how to penetrate an adversary’s anti-access/aerial denial capabilities without putting soldiers in danger.
The vehicles, Centeno said, will eventually have third-generation forward-looking infrared kits with a target range of at least 14 kilometers.
“You’re exposing forces to enemy fire, whether that be artillery, direct fire,” he said. “So, we have to find ways to penetrate that bubble, attrit their systems and allow for freedom of air and ground maneuver. These platforms buy us some of that, by giving us standoff.”
Phase II, III
In late fiscal year 2021, soldiers will again play a role in Phase II testing as the vehicles conduct company-level maneuvers.
This time, experiments are slated to incorporate six MET-Ds and the same four M113 surrogates, in addition to four light and four medium surrogate robotic combat vehicles, which industry will provide.
(Ground Vehicle Systems Center)
Before these tests, a light infantry unit plans to experiment with the RCV light surrogate vehicles in Eastern Europe May 2020.
“The intent of this is to see how an RCV light integrates into a light infantry formation and performs reconnaissance and security tasks as well as supports dismounted infantry operations,” Wallace said at the conference.
Soldier testing for Phase III is slated to take place mid-fiscal 2023 with the same number of MET-Ds and M113 surrogate vehicles, but will instead have four medium and four heavy purpose-built RCVs.
“This is the first demonstration which we will be out of the surrogate realm and fielding purpose builts,” Wallace said, adding the vehicles will conduct a combined arms breach.
The major said he was impressed with how quickly soldiers learned to control the RCVs during the Robotic Combined Arms Breach Demonstration in May 2019 at the Yakima Training Center in Washington.
“Soldiers have demonstrated an intuitive ability to master controlling RCVs much faster than what we thought,” he said. “The feedback from the soldiers was that after two days they felt comfortable operating the system.”
There are still ongoing efforts to offload some tasks in operating RVCs to artificial intelligence in order to reduce the cognitive burden on soldiers.
“This is not how we’re used to fighting,” Centeno said. “We’re asking a lot. We’re putting a lot of sensors, putting a lot of data in the hands of soldiers. We want to see how that impacts them. We want to see how it degrades or increases their performance.”
The family of RCVs include three variants. Army officials envision the light version to be transportable by rotary wing. The medium variant would be able to fit onto a C-130 aircraft, and the heavy variant would fit onto a C-17 aircraft.
A C-130 aircraft.
(U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Rhett Isbell)
Both future and legacy armored platforms, such as the forthcoming Mobile Protected Firepower “light tank,” could influence the development of the RCV heavy.
With no human operators inside it, the heavy RCV can provide the lethality associated with armored combat vehicles in a much smaller form. Plainly speaking, without a crew, the RCV heavy requires less armor and can dedicate space and power to support modular mission payloads or hybrid electric drive batteries, Wallace said.
Ultimately, the autonomous vehicles will aim to keep soldiers safe.
“An RCV reduces risk,” Wallace said. “It does so by expanding the geometry of the battlefield so that before the threat makes contact with the first human element, it has to make contact with the robots.
“That, in turn, gives commanders additional space and time to make decisions.”
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The 5 strangest military mission names from the Iraq War
Jessica Evans
If you think Operation Inherent Resolve is a mission name that makes no sense, you’re not alone. The U.S. military operation against ISIS in Iraq and Syria was supposed to have a different name altogether. The Pentagon initially rejected OIR and only accepted it as a placeholder. Somehow it stuck, and that’s what we’re left with.
Strange, silly and absurd names shouldn’t be the standard for military operations. Or at least so said Winston Churchill back in 1943. In a WWII memo on the subject of mission names, Churchill said, “Do not suggest the character of the operation or disparage it in any way, and do not enable some widow or some mother to say her son was killed in an operation called ‘Bunnyhug’ or ‘Ballyhoo.'”
It seems that the military isn’t exactly following Churchill’s recommendation. There’s rarely a public explanation about mission names, but that doesn’t make them any more questionable. Here are a few of the most memorable mission names.
Operation All-American Tiger
Tigers are pretty amazing in their own right, but what would be more American than having an All-American tiger? That’s a question the brass asked themselves, apparently, in 2003, when they settled on this mission name during a November 2003 Iraq War mission. Operation All-American Tiger’s objective was to search and clear farms and villages around the Euphrates River in the Northern Iraqi town of Al-Qaim. Service members detained twelve people as a result, including a few who were on a “Most Wanted” list.
While it’s fun to think about what the military was considering when creating codenames for missions, this one is actually pretty easy to figure out. The nickname for the 82nd Airborne Division is “All American.” The Tiger Squadron of the 3rd Armored Cav assisted the 82nd on this mission.
Specifically, it was the 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment from the 82nd who worked with the Tigers. The 504th even have their own absurd nickname – The Devils in Baggy Pants – taken from a diary entry of a Wehrmacht officer in WWII.
Operation Beastmaster
Doesn’t this sound like a mission from the 1980s? It feels decidedly vintage, but Operation Beastmaster actually took place in 2006. OB cleared three neighborhoods in the Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, which itself was subject to a codename, albeit one that was far easier understood. Service members in IED Alley East, as Ghazaliya was known, worked together with the Iraqi Army to uncover weapons caches and a deposit of roadside bomb-creating supplies and tools. Operation Beastmaster also captured one high-ranking (and still unnamed) official, and the Army counted it as a complete win.
Operation Grizzly Forced Entry
In the summer of 2004, U.S. service members went on a counter-insurgency raid in Najaf, Iraq, a city south of Baghdad. The forced entry part of this code name is pretty self-explanatory, as service members were tasked with entering private homes to search for high-value targets who were suspected of attacking coalition forces.
Operation Power Geyser
This counterterrorism unit included 13,000 top secret service members who served as military security to support the 2005 inauguration of George W. Bush. Taken from a video game series, the name Power Geyser refers to a character who was able to blast the ground with his fist and create a field of explosive energy around him that sent his opponents flying. In real life, these elite troops carried top of the line weaponry and lurked in the shadows around the White House and the Capitol building while the inauguration took place.
Operation Safe Neighborhood + Operation Safe Market
These 2007 missions were efforts to make residential neighborhoods, areas with lots of traffic, and marketplaces safer for Iraqis to live and work during the American involvement of the Iraq war. Service members combed these areas looking for car bombs and IEDs with a decided effort to cut down on sectarian violence in the city. The codenames were pretty easy to figure out, proof that sometimes the most basic name is the best one.
Whoever was thinking up mission names during the Iraq War was definitely trying to keep the plans top secret to ensure the missions were successful. With names like All-American Tiger and Grizzly Forced Entry, someone was trying to make sure no one knew our military’s plans.
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How the Marines would stomp the Russians in the Arctic
About 90 Marines from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Lejeune carried out a mock air assault in Iceland in October 2018 as part of the initial phase of NATO’s largest war games since the end of the Cold War.
The NATO war games, called Trident Juncture 2018, will begin on Oct. 25, 2018, in Norway and include more than 50,000 troops from 31 countries.
According to NATO, the purpose of Trident Juncture is “to ensure that NATO forces are trained, able to operate together, and ready to respond to any threat from any direction.”
But the war games are also largely seen, by the East and West, as de facto training for a fight with Russia.
Along with the carrier USS Harry S. Truman, the US has sent about 14,000 troops to the games, and the initial mock air assault was to help prepare Marines for a large-scale amphibious assault to be carried later in Norway.
But that’s not all the Marines did.
Here’s how they trained in Iceland for a potential cold-weather fight with Russia.
Marines load onto a CH-53E Sea Stallion aboard USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7) while conducting an air assault in Icelandic terrain on Oct. 17, 2018.
(Photo by US Marine Corps)
The 90 US Marines aboard the USS Iwo Jima were first loaded onto MV-22 Ospreys and CH-53 Sea Stallions.
Source: US Marine Corps
A V-22 Osprey departs from USS Iwo Jima for an air assault in Icelandic terrain on Oct. 17, 2018.
A US Marine posts security at Keflavik Air Base in Iceland on Oct. 17, 2018.
Where they set up a security post.
US Marines post security at Keflavik Air Base in Iceland on Oct. 17, 2018.
“During the air assault we landed on an airfield and immediately set up security which allowed for the aircraft to leave safely,” Cpl. Mitchell Edds said.
A US Marine aims his weapon while posting security during a mock air assault in Iceland.
“We then conducted a movement to a compound where Marines set up security to allow U.S and Icelandic coordination,” Edds said.
US Marines hike to a cold-weather training site in Iceland on Oct. 19, 2018.
A Marine adjusts a fellow Marine’s gear as they prepare to move for a cold-weather training hike in Iceland on Oct. 19, 2018.
Cold-weather insulated boots used by US Marines in Iceland on Oct. 19, 2018.
In fact, they appear to have tried out their new cold-weather boots, which were just issued by the Corps.
Source: US Marines
US Marines overlook a training area from a hill in Iceland on Oct. 19, 2018.
US Marines set up camp during cold-weather training in Iceland in October 2018.
Where they began setting up camp.
US Marines set up tents in Iceland in October 2018.
“We’re just getting the gear out — the tents, stoves and stuff like that, making sure we know how to use it … and making sure we know how to use it before we get to Norway,” one US Marine said.
Business Insider contacted the US Marine Corps to find out more about the cold-weather training they conducted, but the Corps did not immediately respond.
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The Commissary is installing plexiglass ‘sneeze shields’ amid pandemic
Military commissaries worldwide will soon have plexiglass “sneeze shields” installed in checkout lanes as a barrier between commissary employees and shoppers, officials announced today.
The 24-30 inch-wide, 36 inch-high barriers, which will be installed in all commissary stores over the next several days, are designed to “add extra protection for customers and cashiers during the COVID-19 outbreak,” the release said.
api.army.mil
The plexiglass barriers are the latest in ongoing efforts to keep commissaries open while reducing virus spread. March 18, stores stopped offering Early Bird shopping hours to give workers more time to stock shelves and clean. Officials also started 100% ID checks at commissary doors, restricting all non-authorized shoppers from entering.
Stores have also stepped up their cleaning routine, officials said in today’s release.
“At our commissaries we are wiping down checkout areas, restrooms and shopping carts with disinfectant, and practicing routine hand washing and other basic sanitation measures to avoid spreading germs,” Robert Bianchi, a retired Rear Admiral and the Pentagon’s special assistant for commissary operations said in the release.
The plexiglass barriers will be installed at all regular checkout lanes, the release said. They will not be installed at self-checkout.
As of March 27, officials said there are now 652 total cases of COVID-19, also known as the novel coronavirus, within the DoD: 309 military, 108 dependents, 134 civilians and 62 Defense Department contractors. Of those, 34 military members, two dependents and one civilian have recovered.
The first military dependent died from the virus March 26 at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia.
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What life is like for 10 countries with mandatory draft
A recent report shows that the US is looking into its draft program, weighing options from mandating service for women to getting rid of the draft altogether.
While a reinvigorated draft may alarm US citizens, nearly 60 countries around the world still have some form of conscription.
Some, like Israel, need the draft to ensure it can maintain its armed forces. Others, like China, often have enough recruits that a draft is unnecessary.
Some countries, like Norway and Israel, have allowed transgender people to serve for decades.
This is a look at 10 countries that still require every man, or every woman and man, to serve.
One year of military service is required for Russian men between the ages of 18 and 27.
The country allows for some exceptions — sons or brothers of men killed during their military service are released from conscription, for example.
Even with these exceptions, Russians have been evading the draft at alarming rates, and the government has considered forcing men to report even if they have not been selected.
Military service is mandatory for Swiss men.
As recently as 2017, Switzerland was considering adding women to its draft roles.
Israeli men must serve in the defense force for three years.
Women are conscripted for two years.
Transgender Israelis have been allowed to serve since 1993.
Norway was the first NATO country to expand conscription to include women. It was also one of the first countries in the world to allow transgender people to serve, changing its policy in 1973.
The country’s conscription is selective; everyone has to register but won’t necessarily be called to serve.
(DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley)
5. China
Although China does mandate military service, it has routinely exceeded recruitment goals and has not needed to force conscription.
6. Iran
Conscription is mandatory for Iranian men, who must serve from 18 months to two years.
7. North Korea
North Korea has the longest conscription period in the world.
Men are required to serve for 10 years, starting at age 17.
Women must serve for seven years.
Egyptian men must serve for a period of one to three years, depending on their level of education.
9. Austria
In Austria, men can choose between six months of military service and nine months of civil service.
Austria has allowed transgender troops to serve since 2004.
10. Meanwhile, other countries like Taiwan are getting rid of conscription altogether.
Taiwan pledged in 2011 to end conscription. The country is moving closer towards its goal of an all-volunteer force, but is facing hurdles as younger generations are choosing not to serve.
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The best Father’s Day gifts made by veterans
In continuation with the complete catastrophe that is 2020, voters on both sides of the aisle agree Father’s Day 2020 official theme to be, “Sorry we forgot, this gift had express shipping.”
We’re just kidding, but you’re welcome for reminding you that Sunday, June 21 is Father’s Day. Since we all know you forgot, we’ve compiled a list so good that you won’t even mind paying the extra to get it there in time.
For the veteran
Yea, we went big and bold out of the gate, but for good reason. CBD products legalized by the Farm Bill have been destigmatized over the last few years. When the carpool moms are doing it, you know it’s pretty legit. Veteran-owned CBD companies like Patriot Supreme are advocating for non-narcotic options as a better alternative for pain, anxiety and all kinds of other benefits we won’t make claims for here. Military life ages the body at warp speed, so do your veteran a favor by offering some relief.
The first step in becoming the iconic “vet-bro” is to grow yourself a mighty fine beard. How does a modern military man call himself one without? Whether they’ve got an Abe Lincoln, chin curtain, (these are legit, we promise) or are in the infantile stages of some stubble, do their face a favor with some premium product like from Warlord.
For the brand
Entrepreneurship or the fast-growing area of solopreneurship is as American as it gets. The fight, the grind and the ridiculous amount of grit it takes to run your own business, especially on the heels of steady government paychecks from military life is tough. But tough doesn’t stop veterans. If yours is even remotely considering this route, you can’t go wrong with the suggestions below. Bonus points here since these options can be “ordered” at 11:59 the day before without looking sloppy.
-Booking professional headshots
-Signing them up for conferences like MIC
For the service member
Repurposing military surplus materials into high quality, durable travel or duffel bags and more is the kind of awesome Sword Plough is all about. Repurposed .50 cal casings made into money clips make a damn fine conversation starter and something dapper for all their new beard oil you ordered.
There’s one thing you can’t go wrong with this Father’s Day and that’s trying something new backed by hundreds of raving reviews. If you haven’t already, try using the store locator feature and grabbing a bottle of Mutt’s Sauce, the universal flavor loved across generations and oceans alike. Charlie “Mutt” Ferrell, Jr’s legacy is still alive today thanks to his granddaughter and Air Force Veteran, Charlynda.
Natural products…to combat all the unknown MRE ingredients they eat
Doc Spartan has exploded since their appearance on Shark Tank. Their line of natural first aid ointments and sprays should be a go-bag staple for any military member. While you’re at it, check out their lineup of natural, aluminum-free deodorants called “armpit armor.”
Recordable storybooks
What is often gifted to kids is actually a great option for Father’s Day too. Gifting fathers with a prerecorded favorite read in the voices of their children is a deeply personal choice. Most books can be re-recorded to accommodate for growing families over the years.
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Updated: 3 US military trainers killed outside Jordanian air base
Updated with statement from U.S. Pentagon spokesman.
A shootout outside the al-Jafr air base in Jordan has left three Americans dead. The Associated Press initially reported that two were killed in the incident that left a Jordanian officer wounded as well. A Fox News alert reported that the third American had died.
U.S. and Jordanian Special Operations Forces react as a binational response force during a simulated special reconnaissance mission as part of Exercise Eager Lion 2016, May 23. Eager Lion 16 is a bi-lateral exercise in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan between the Jordanian Armed Forces and the U.S. Military designed to strengthen relationships and interoperability between partner nations. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Darius Davis/Released)
The dead Americans are reportedly military personnel assisting with training. According to the BBC, the Royal Jordanian Air Force released a statement saying that the shooting came after “an attempt by the trainers’ vehicle to enter the gate without heeding orders of the guards to stop.” The United States embassy in Jordan told the BBC that acknowledged “a security incident involving American personnel” and that they were “in contact with Jordanian officials.” According to multiple reports, the incident is under investigation
“The three service members were in Jordan on a training mission, and the initial report is that they came under fire as they were entering the facility in vehicles,” said Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook. “We are working closely with the government of Jordan to determine exactly what happened. Our thoughts and prayers are with the loved ones of these service members.”
In November 2015, a shooting at a police training center in Amman left five dead, including two Americans, and wounded seven others (including two more Americans). The shooter, a police officer, was killed by responding security personnel.
According the Royal Jordanian Air Force’s web site, al-Jafr airbase is home to Number 9 Squadron, equipped with the Northrop F-5E Tiger. Number 9 Squadron‘s roles include air defense and ground-attack. The Tiger is an older plane, having entered service in 1973. It was widely exported to a number of countries, including South Korea, the Republic of China, Jordan, Thailand, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Mexico, and Singapore.
Jordan has been part of the campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). One Jordanian F-16 pilot has been killed while that country participated. After the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Moaz Youssef al-Kasasbeh, ejected from his crashing plane, he was captured by ISIS and later burned alive.
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India speeding up to develop COVID-19 vaccine: ICMR
by Bhavana More · July 15, 2020
India is known to be the “pharmacy of the world.” Nearly 60 percent of the drugs used in the United States of America are of Indian source. These generic drugs are made in India as the country has established itself throughout the years. This is potentially known to countless people all across the globe, said (Prof) Dr. Balram Bhargava, Director General of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
Highlighting an important fact that is not known about Indian vaccines and drugs.
Dr. Bhargava emphasized on a less known but essential fact considering Indian vaccines and drugs that around 60 percent of the vaccines (like Rubella, measles, polio) provided across the globe, may it be Africa, Europe, South East Asia or any part of the world belong to an Indian source.
Hence, India is perceived as a key player in vaccines for supply throughout the globe, he stated.
“Any vaccine candidate which is being produced or developed in any part of the world will ultimately have to be scaled up by India or by China. Because these two countries are major producers of vaccines in the world and India supplies 60 percent of vaccines to the world that all developed nations are aware of it. And therefore, they are in communication with India for the vaccine distribution ultimately, if it is developed to the whole world,” Dr. Bhargava informed.
Considering the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic situation, one of the top scientist of the apex medical research body stated that in India’s view, the country has two indigenous applicant vaccines which scientists are doing their best to accelerate it as their moral duty to avoid delay of even a single day for regulatory clearances for these vaccines to stop the transfer of the virus.
“There are two indigenous candidate vaccines and they have gone successful toxicity studies in rats, mice, and rabbits. These data were submitted to the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) following which both these candidate vaccines got clearance to start the early phase of human trials,” notified ICMR Director-General.
Lately, ANI informed that DCGI has given its approval to Zydus Cadila and Bharat Biotech International Limited (BBIL), who has associated with ICMR to carry out a phase I/II clinical tests on humans for COVID -19 vaccine.
“Now, they have got their sites ready and they are doing the clinical study approximately on 1,000 volunteers each at different sites. They are trying to do early clinical testing for these two candidate vaccines. There are pre-clinical experiments as well for other vaccines being done at the National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Pune. Experts are working day and night to do these experiments and it is their moral duty to develop vaccines as fast as possible as more than half a million people have succumbed to COVID-19 across the world. So “fast-tracking” the development of COVID vaccines is more important,” informed Dr. Bhargava.
Dr. Bhargava further added: “Recently, Russia has fast-tracked a vaccine which has been successful and it is in early phases and they have fast-tracked its development. And the world has applauded it and congratulated them. China has fast-tracked its vaccine program. Meanwhile, the US and UK are looking for ways to fast track its vaccine development for human use.”
The global market for the Benzene industry and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the industry and growth, demand, trend, and the forecast for 2026.
by Rutvij Joshi · Published June 22, 2020 · Last modified August 25, 2020
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MJMeads.com Short Story Competition
Publication on the site, links to authors website/blog, free signed copy of my debut novel 'Milk'.
Word Count: Min 1500 – Max 2500 words.
Entry fee: FREE to enter.
Top Prize: Publication on the site, links to authors website/blog, free signed copy of my debut novel ‘Milk’
The theme is ‘Home’. Winner and runners up will be published on the site, all shortlisted entries are entitled to a copy of my debut novel ‘Milk’. Under 16’s can enter but should do so through a parent/guardian/teacher but it’s an adult competition, there is no separate category for children. Also under 16’s will not be provided with a copy of ‘Milk’. Feedback is available for a fee (£8/$10).
http://www.mjmeads.com/p/short-story-competition-2017.html
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Woman delivering plate of Thanksgiving food to relative dies in car crash, family says
Updated: 11:33 PM EST Nov 25, 2018
La'Shai Porter
SOURCE: GoFundMe
A 28-year-old Maryland woman died in a car crash Friday morning on her way to drop off a Thanksgiving meal to a loved one, her family said.La’Shai Porter died in a single-car accident when her vehicle struck a tree, WRC-TV reported. Authorities said icy weather conditions may have played a role in the accident.Porter’s aunt, Crystal Brooks, started a GoFundMe page to raise money for her funeral expenses.Porter leaves behind a 3-year-old daughter named Logan.“We are coming together to make sure La'Shai's daughter Logan and family receive every ounce of love and support that they need in this time of sorrow,” Brooks said on the GoFundMe page. “As the family tries to pick up the pieces of our shattered hearts, we are left to face the reality of this profound loss.”Porter’s godsister, Daisha Watson, said she had planned to go Black Friday shopping with her the morning she died.“I missed her by a few hours,” Watson told WRC-TV.More than $3,800 of a $10,000 goal has been raised on Porter’s GoFundMe page as of Sunday evening.
HILLCREST HEIGHTS, Md. —
A 28-year-old Maryland woman died in a car crash Friday morning on her way to drop off a Thanksgiving meal to a loved one, her family said.
La’Shai Porter died in a single-car accident when her vehicle struck a tree, WRC-TV reported. Authorities said icy weather conditions may have played a role in the accident.
Porter’s aunt, Crystal Brooks, started a GoFundMe page to raise money for her funeral expenses.
Porter leaves behind a 3-year-old daughter named Logan.
“We are coming together to make sure La'Shai's daughter Logan and family receive every ounce of love and support that they need in this time of sorrow,” Brooks said on the GoFundMe page. “As the family tries to pick up the pieces of our shattered hearts, we are left to face the reality of this profound loss.”
Porter’s godsister, Daisha Watson, said she had planned to go Black Friday shopping with her the morning she died.
“I missed her by a few hours,” Watson told WRC-TV.
More than $3,800 of a $10,000 goal has been raised on Porter’s GoFundMe page as of Sunday evening.
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British & Irish Football
Celtic Nations Football
Where will we finish now!?
Mise_Me_Fein
I still think we'll win this group. We have a great team, and Keane made it better but I see us drawing or beating the Cameroon and the same with Germany and beating the Saudis. That's a max of 9 points and a minimum of 5. I can see Germany going home early, i believe it's between them and Cameroon for second place.
The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven't seen the joke yet.
A true Irishman has so much respect for the truth that he uses it only in emergencies.
Irish_gunner
I think that Ireland have a good chance of winning this group and defiently coming second but I do think that germany will qualify. I think that what Keane has done is 1 of the worst ever. Matt Holland and Mark Kinsella will do the job and Lee Carsley not the most gifted player will break sum1 up if needed.
COME ON THE REPUBLIC OR IRELAND !!!
Romire
I can't predict the Cameroon game but a win over S. Arabia is a given and I think we should win against Germany. If we place first we face Paraguay who I think we can beat. If we go second we play Spain. If Spain decides to choke in the quarters as oposed to the round of 16 we could be in trouble. But on the other hand we are giant killers so who knows. If we go second and got past Spain we might face Portugal. And with 2 draws in qualifying it would be 2 close to call. The next wrung would be Italy. If we got first and beat out Paraguay we'd probably face Italy in the quarters and that would probably be it for us.
I think we can make it out of the group. On the one side (Spain) we could go home, go to the quarters or the semi's. On the other side we'd likely make it to the quarters and no further.
Murim mai bine-n lupta, cu glorie deplina, decat sa fim sclavi iarasi in vechiul nost' pamant!
It was better to die benieth an Irish sky than somewhere sitting at the bar....slavery fled our glorious dead, when you fell in the foggy dew.
Personally I'd be a bit dissapointed if we didn't make it to the quarters. I want to surprize some people.
dubh-bán
We'll sneak a 1-0 win against the Germans, a nil-all draw with Saudi Arabia is on the cards (we've got to keep our record of being involved in teh most boring game in the World Cup after Egypt in '90 and Norway in '94) and Cameroon will edge it over us in a tight match, 2-1. Then it's bye-bye.
:mute: :mute: :embarass: :embarass: :drunk: :drunk:
Are you watching enough TV?
leeds_utd_lad
No, I can still se us taking this group through 1st place. Keane wasn't the whole team, a big part maybey but we still have the other lad's and they are just as good. Steve will be an awsome Captain.
"I'm assured that if the Fowler deal goes through, there will be no other players leaving..." Terry Venables
Cokane
"Steve will be an awsome Captain."
I just can't agree with that - he pales into TOTAL insignificance when put alongside Keane. Keane is (or was) THE most inspirational captain in International football... Now we have a dour, moderately talented centre half taking his place... Inspirational ? Hardly.
It just won't be the same without Roy on the end of that line up with his steely, determined stare. The look in his eyes before a match would send a shiver up your spine - I hate to think what effect it has on the opposition. The effect it has on his team mates(and many fans) is to instill the belief that the team is actually capable of beating anyone after all...
There are those who do not like Keane - they never have, but no one can deny the impact he has on the team. We may still do well in this tournament but when the push comes to shove, I don't think there will be enough belief in this squad, without Keane, to triumph over the better teams.
Can anybody honestly tell me that Ireland would have achieved the results against Portugal/Holland without Keane??
"Keane is (or was) THE most inspirational captain in International football..."
Considering his behavior and not just the recent stuff I'd hardly call him the most inspirational captain. Hagi never abandoned his team no matter how much he hated the situation. There have been many inspirational captains in International history, Roy WON'T go down as one of them.
As far as Steve is concerned I'm not so sure myself either. I don't think we should start Steve every game and a captain should be a starter. I don't think captaincy is as important for our team since we are a cohecive unite. Hey who was the captain during the exhibitions when Roy was out?
I do not hold Keano responsible for this whole mess... You have to remember, he didnt walk out on Ireland - he was kicked out by McCarthy - it takes two to tango.
After seeing the Keane interview I fully support Keano - all he is guilty of is shooting his mouth off. Everybody judged Keane on what was in the press but that was only one side of the story... he claims McCarthy said tha he faked injury so as not to travel to tehran for the second Iran game.
After the interview was broadcast on RTE many people who had been critical of Keane changed their tune... In the Joe Duffy phone in show EVERYBODY was backing Keane...
Apparently **** never said he faked injury. He asked him why he missed so many friendlies and why he did'nt travel to Tehran (a question I asked myself at the time as well). Remember Keane played the saturday after the Tehran game. Keane read something into the question and exploded.
All this is spin at is lowest level.
The players did'nt want him there and as Quinn said yesterday, when all is said and done is was Roy Keane who caused all this and the blame lies firmly at his feet. What Joe Duffy (go on go on) and the aul wans who listen to his "show" have to say is neither here nor there , in fact its irrelevent. As are the opinions of some of the fools who I have to share an island with (I wont call them Irish cos they put a prima donna before the country).
Badge said:
Get real Badge. If the manager had to ask why he missed the Tehran game in front of the whole team, 6 months after it happened, then it is bloody clear what he was insinuating.
What Joe Duffy (go on go on) and the aul wans who listen to his "show" have to say is neither here nor there , in fact its irrelevent. As are the opinions of some of the fools who I have to share an island with (I wont call them Irish cos they put a prima donna before the country).
If that is your honest a opinion then you are the biggest fool of all my friend. Only someone who is pitifully arrogant would come out with a statement like that.
We all appreciate how highly you value your own opinion but others don't view your opinion as the glorious statement of actual fact that you seem to.
Many people want Roy Keane to play football and aren't bothered by what his personality is like and what he said to whoever - They just want to get Roy on the pitch - Is that not what is most important?? Unfortunately that did not happen and to say the players did not want him back is patently not true.
They issued their statement because they read the transcript of the interview and felt that they had to re-iterate their backing of the manager because no apology was in the text. But Quinn revealed that they all REALLY wanted him to come back but felt they had no option but to back McCarthy in the circumstances.
- Jesus - he even said himself that he was woring overtime behind the scenes to arrange his re-instatement into the team.
You obviously just don't like Roy Keane and that seems to be clouding your judgement of this whole fracas...
If it were just his personality and attitude but not put into such actions it would be fine. Roy may have been kicked out technically but it was his own bloody fault, he can come up with as many excuses and justifications as he wants but its all meaningless. As if he didn't know what the result would be. There are some things you just don't do. He abandoned us firstly by being a total SOB (by the way I'm not completely convinced he didn't know what he was doing when he blew up.) and secondly all he had to do was have a private discussion with **** on the phone and despite his actions he would be forgiven and would be back. He didn't do it, he abandoned us again. He doesn't give a sh!t about Irish soccer, he's a selfish [email protected]@rd and as it says in my signature he can go to hell.
Oh yes and GOOOOOOOO EIRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Brian Clough said he would have sent him home...in a box.
Charlton wont even say his name.
**** sent him home
The players did'nt want him back
Do I detect that Roy is not the most popular with people he's worked with.
btw a family member played and roomed with him years ago
(when he roomed with fellow humans). He did'nt think much of him either.
Now the World Cup has started and he's not there. End of story.
Badge May 31, 2002
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Galápagos Santa Cruz with North Islands 5D/4N
Puerto Ayora, Ecuador
Agencia Los Turistas
Visiting Scientific Charles Darwin, 1 Full day Island (snorkelling), choose between, Seymour Norte, Bartolomé, Plazas ó Full day Buceo. Parte Alta: Rancho + Túneles de Lava + Cráteres Gemelos, Playa Tortuga Bay, Grietas with Los Alemanes. Trip available from sunday to Thursday.
Domestic flight ticket
Guayaquil or Quito - Galapagos - Quito or Guayaquil
Land and sea transport
Airport - hotel - airport
Breakfast, lunch and dinner.
in navigable tours
Authorized by the Galapagos National Park (mandatory on each excursion)
INGALA
Tourism card USD20 per person
Ecogal transfer
Per route USD5 per person
Entrance to Galapagos
National Park USD6 national / USD50 Andean Community / USD100 Foreigners, children pay 50% of the corresponding value.
National Park USD50 Andean Community / USD100 Foreigners, children pay 50% of the corresponding value.
Dock use rate in Isabela
USD10 foreigners
not specified in the program
Galapagos Paradise Hotel
Palo Santo Galapagos Hotel
Solymar Hotel
1 Night Guayaquil30 left
1 Night Quito30 left
EconomyRegularLuxury
Arrival and Charles Darwin Station
Reception at Baltra airport and transfer to Puerto Ayora. Lunch. Visit to Charles Darwin Station, where you can maintain a very close contact with the turtles when entering the pens and giant cactus forest where several land birds live. This is the main office of scientific research, conservation and administration of the National Park. Dinner
Full Day North Island
Full Day Bartolome
Transfer from the hotel at 5H50am to the Itabaca Canal dock to board the yacht that will take the tour which includes breakfast and lunch, and then the transfer back to the hotel. Bartolomé Island or also called the geology guide, is characterized by having the most colorful landscapes of the entire Archipelago, it is without a doubt the most photographed in all the Galapagos Islands. Upon arrival, there will be a walk that lasts approximately 30 - 40 minutes to reach the summit to appreciate the spectacular landscape of the two beautiful bays Santiago Island and North Seymour whose territory is perfect to observe the Galapagos Penguins swimming in tropical waters and observe the fascinating lava formations and volcanic cones. One of the attractions of this place is Pinnacle Rock known for its huge black lava formation that has eroded over time, as a result of a volcanic eruption; You can see a number of species such as sea turtles, dry cleaners, white tip reef, tropical fish and other unique marine species. Near Pinnacle Rock you can also see two beautiful crescent-shaped beaches. Before visiting this Island, keep in mind that you will have to make a dry landing from the boat or (rubber boats), this means that the boat will leave it on land. But when you want to visit Bartolomé beach, you will need to make a wet landing, that is, the boat will leave you near the shore and you will have to walk a little in the water until you reach the beach.
Full Day Seymour Norte
Transfer from the hotel at 8:00 am to the Itabaca Channel to board the yacht that will make the trip to the North Seymour Island, located near Baltra (island where you will arrive and leave Galapagos).
Upon arrival at North Seymour Island, you will make a dry landing, that is, you will reach the mainland.
It is characterized by being a spectacular place for hiking, swimming, snorkeling among other activities, during your visit you can admire the great variety of flora and fauna such as Palo Santo trees, cacti and salt bushes, as well as seagulls, earwigs, green sea turtles and the famous sharks of the archipelago, in addition to colonies of blue-footed boobies as they pass along the circular path of approximately 2km long, showy seagulls sitting on the edges of the cliffs and admire numerous frigate birds in their nests visible throughout the year On the other side of the Island while the waves collide with the rocks, you can observe the naughty sea lions playing and surfing in the sea. DAY 3: Tortuga Bay, turtle nesting site and marine iguanas, to access this heavenly beach of white sand and surrounded by mangrove, we will make a 45-minute walk on a cobbled path where we can observe cacti, finches and lava lizards. After lunch we will go to Parte Alta (Ranch + Lava Tunnels + Twin Craters). On this visit we will go to the ranch where you can see turtles in their natural habitat and lava tunnels. Subsequently, a stop is made in the Twin Craters. Two subsidence of land, caused by a volcanic depression over the years, in this place the plants of churches, mosses and orchids predominate. Dinner.
Tortuga Bay Beach
Tortuga Bay, nesting place for turtles and marine iguanas, to access this paradisiacal white sand beach surrounded by mangroves, we will make a 45-minute walk on a cobbled path where we can observe cacti, finches and lava lizards. After lunch we will go to Parte Alta (Ranch + Lava Tunnels + Twin Craters). On this visit we will go to the ranch where you can see turtles in their natural habitat and lava tunnels. Subsequently, a stop is made in the Twin Craters. Two subsidence of land, caused by a volcanic depression over the years, in this place the plants of churches, mosses and orchids predominate. Dinner.
Las Grietas + Los Alemanes Beach
Visit to the Cracks, formed by 2 giant lava walls, crossed by an arm of brackish water, filtered from the upper part where it mixes with the sea water. Time to enjoy at Los Alemanes Beach
Return Fight
After breakfast, we will leave in the direction of the airport
Joined in December 2019
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Magdalene (Wettin) von Sachsen (1507 - 1534)
Magdalene "Magdalena, Prinzessin von Sachsen, Kurprinzessin von Brandenburg" von Sachsen formerly Wettin aka Brandenburg, von Brandenburg, of Saxony, of Brandenburg
Born 7 Mar 1507 in Dresden, Kurfürstentum Sachsen, Heiliges Römisches Reich
Daughter of Georg (Wettin) Sachsen and Barbara (Jagiellonka) Polska
Sister of Christine (Wettin) von Sachsen
Wife of Joachim Hector Hohenzollern — married 6 Nov 1524 in Dresden, Sachsen, Deutschland
Mother of Johann Georg (Hohenzollern) von Brandenburg and Barbara (Hohenzollern) von Brandenburg
Died Jan 1534 in Berlin
Profile managers: John Atkinson [send private message] and Gail Willard [send private message]
Profile last modified 4 May 2019 | Created 9 Oct 2011
Magdalene Wettin was a member of the aristocracy in Europe.
Magdalene (Wettin) von Sachsen is a member of the House of Hohenzollern.
Magdalene (or Magdalena) of Saxony was a princess of Saxony, and consort Electress of Brandenburg following her marriage.
Magdelene was born 7 March 1507 at Schloss Dresden, the youngest surviving daughter of Georg, Herzog zu Sachsen in Meissen, and his wife, Barbara Jagiellonka, Princess of Poland.[1] For more about her ancestors see the Wikipedia article
She married at Schloss Dresden, on 6 November 1524, Joachim II von Brandenburg, Kurfürst von Brandenburg in 1499 and became Kurprinzessin (Electoral Princess) von Brandenburg. He was the son of Joachim I, Kurfürst von Brandenburg and his wife, Elisabeth van Danmark, and was born 9 January 1505.[2]
They had seven children who held the title Markgraf or Markgräfin von Brandenburg;[3]
Johann Georg, born 11 September 1525, who succeeded his father as Kurfürst;
Barbara, born 10 August 1527, died 12 January 1595 Schloss Brieg, having married 15 February 1545, Schloss Berlin, Georg II, Herzog von Liegnitz und Brieg (born 18 July 1523, died 17 May 1586);
Elisabeth, born 1528, died young 20 August 1529;
Friedrich, born 12 December 1530 in Schloss Berlin, entered the church and became Bischof von Havelberg 1548, Erzbischof (Archbishop) von Magdeburg 1551, Administrator of Halberstadt 1552, he died at Halberstadt 2 October 1552, and was buried 11 October 1552 in the Halberstadt Cathedral;
Albrecht, born circa 1532, twin with the following, died young circa 1532;
Georg, born circa 1532, twin with the preceding, died young circa 1532;
Paul, born and died between 20 and 28 January 1534.
Magdalene, died either in childbirth or of the effects of childbirth[4] between 20 and 28 January 1534 and was buried in Berlin Cathedral (Dom).[5], [6]
Joachim married secondly on 1 September 1535 at Schloss Krakow, Jadwiga (in German Hedwig) Jagiellonka, Princess of Poland; who was Magdalene's niece.[7]
↑ Grossmann et al, p. 14; Von Hueck, p. 126
↑ Grossmann et al, p. 21
↑ there is no source that states this but it seems highly likely this is what happened
↑ the original date for Magdalene's death on this profile was 25 January 1534 but there is no evidence for this date, only the Wikipedia article (see link above) but it doesn't cite any sources
↑ Grossmann, et al, p. 21; Von Hueck, p. 126
Grossmann, Julius; Berner, Ernst; Schuster, Georg & Zingeler, Karl Theodor, (eds.), (1905), Genealogie des Gesamthauses Hohenzollern, Berlin: W. Moeser Buchhandlung. Digitised by Google Books
von Hueck, Walter, (ed.), (1991), 'Genealogisches Handbuch der Fürstlichen Häuser', Vol. 14, part of series Genealogishces Handbuch des Adels, Vol. 100, Limburg an der Lahn: C.A. Starke Verlag.
Wikidata: Item Q440132
Thank you to Travis Wagner, Gail Willard and Enno Borgsteede for creating this profile.
Atkinson-107 03:19, 28 June 2014 (EDT)
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Sir William (Arbuthnot) Arbuthnot of Kittybrewster Bt
Van Saksen Meissen-6 and Saxony-181 appear to represent the same person because: Also consider. Wettin-24
posted Jun 23, 2014 by Sir William (Arbuthnot) Arbuthnot of Kittybrewster Bt
Namely?
Van Saksen Meissen-6 and Saxony-181 are not ready to be merged because: There is a third profile for this person that also needs to be considered
posted Jun 23, 2014 by John Atkinson
Magdalene is 31 degrees from Dick Bruna, 21 degrees from Walt Disney, 26 degrees from May Gibbs, 22 degrees from George Herriman, 25 degrees from Tove Jansson, 28 degrees from Walter Lantz, 24 degrees from Charles Schulz, 21 degrees from Elzie Segar, 33 degrees from 治虫 手塚 and 24 degrees from Pam Cormac on our single family tree. Login to find your connection.
W > Wettin | V > von Sachsen > Magdalene (Wettin) von Sachsen
Categories: Hohenzollern-Brandenburg | House of Wettin | House of Hohenzollern
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Home News Local News Soufriere Volcano: St. Vincent and the Grenadines On Orange Alert
Soufriere Volcano: St. Vincent and the Grenadines On Orange Alert
St Kitts and Nevis (WINN): Officials in St. Vincent and the Grenadines are monitoring reports of volcanic activity related to the Soufriere volcano.
The University of the West Indies Seismic Research Unit, in a statement Tuesday (December 29), said it was monitoring the situation in collaboration with local officials and advised the public to stay clear of the area.
“The University of the West Indies Seismic Research Centre (UWI-SRC) in collaboration with National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO) reported that visual observations on 29 December 2020 confirmed a new lava dome growth located on the edge of the old lava dome from 1979, forming a “dome on rim of the dome”.
An effusive eruption of the volcano is accompanied by oozing lava and fumarolic activity.
The last eruption occurred 41 years ago as the series of explosive eruptions ejected the dome and was replaced with another.
The alert level for the volcano was raised to “orange”, as an increase of seismic activity at the volcano has been recorded since early November.
The Volcanic Hazard Map contains 4 Hazard Zones (Red Zone-Very High, Orange Zone-High, Yellow Zone-Moderate, Green Zone-Low).
The warning bulletin states that pyroclastic flows and lahars could affect a land area including offshore and the hazard zones must be envisaged as extending some distance offshore, according to UWI-SRC.
Tuesday afternoon (December 29), Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves hosted a press conference, with officials from the UWI SRU online, and announced that permission was granted by the Trinidad and Tobago government for a team from the UWI Seismic Unit to be dispatched to St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
ity of the West Indies Seismic Research Centre volcano activity update 30 December 2020
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These New Tricks Can Outsmart Deepfake Videos—for Now
How to Disinfect Everything
Symptoms and Testing
Sarah Scoles
We'll soon find it hard to know with our own eyes if a video is real or generated by AI, but new algorithms are staying one or two steps ahead of the fakers.
Alyssa Foote; Olivier Douliery/Getty Images
For weeks, computer scientist Siwei Lyu had watched his team’s deepfake videos with a gnawing sense of unease. Created by a machine learning algorithm, these falsified films showed celebrities doing things they'd never done. They felt eerie to him, and not just because he knew they’d been ginned up. “They don’t look right,” he recalls thinking, “but it’s very hard to pinpoint where that feeling comes from.”
Finally, one day, a childhood memory bubbled up into his brain. He, like many kids, had held staring contests with his open-eyed peers. “I always lost those games,” he says, “because when I watch their faces and they don’t blink, it makes me very uncomfortable.”
These lab-spun deepfakes, he realized, were needling him with the same discomfort: He was losing the staring contest with these film stars, who didn't open and close their eyes at the rates typical of actual humans.
To find out why, Lyu, a professor at the University of Albany, and his team dug into every step in the software, called DeepFake, that had created them.
Deepfake programs pull in lots of images of a particular person—you, your ex-girlfriend, Kim Jong-un—to catch them at different angles, with different expressions, saying different words. The algorithms learn what this character looks like, and then synthesize that knowledge into a video showing that person doing something he or she never did. Make porn. Make Stephen Colbert spout words actually uttered by John Oliver. Provide a presidential meta-warning about fake videos.
These fakes, while convincing if you watch a few seconds on a phone screen, aren’t perfect (yet). They contain tells, like creepily ever-open eyes, from flaws in their creation process. In looking into DeepFake’s guts, Lyu realized that the images that the program learned from didn’t include many with closed eyes (after all, you wouldn’t keep a selfie where you were blinking, would you?). “This becomes a bias,” he says. The neural network doesn’t get blinking. Programs also might miss other “physiological signals intrinsic to human beings,” says Lyu’s paper on the phenomenon, such as breathing at a normal rate, or having a pulse. (Autonomic signs of constant existential distress are not listed.) While this research focused specifically on videos created with this particular software, it is a truth universally acknowledged that even a large set of snapshots might not adequately capture the physical human experience, and so any software trained on those images may be found lacking.
Lyu's blinking revelation revealed a lot of fakes. But a few weeks after his team put a draft of their paper online, they got anonymous emails with links to deeply faked YouTube videos whose stars opened and closed their eyes more normally. The fake content creators had evolved.
Of course they had. As Lyu noted in a piece for The Conversation, “blinking can be added to deepfake videos by including face images with closed eyes or using video sequences for training.” Once you know what your tell is, avoiding it is "just" a technological problem. Which means deepfakes will likely become (or stay) an arms race between the creators and the detectors. But research like Lyu’s can at least make life harder for the fake-makers. “We are trying to raise the bar,” he says. “We want to make the process more difficult, more time-consuming.”
Because right now? It's pretty easy. You download the software. You Google “Hillary Clinton.” You get tens of thousands of images. You funnel them into the deepfake pipeline. It metabolizes them, learns from them. And while it's not totally self-sufficient, with a little help, it gestates and gives birth to something new, something sufficiently real.
“It is really blurry,” says Lyu. He doesn't mean the images. “The line between what is true and what is false,” he clarifies.
That’s as concerning as it is unsurprising to anyone who’s been alive and on the internet lately. But it’s of particular concern to the military and intelligence communities. And that’s part of why Lyu’s research is funded, along with others' work, by a Darpa program called MediFor—Media Forensics.
MediFor started in 2016 when the agency saw the fakery game leveling up. The project aims to create an automated system that looks at three levels of tells, fuses them, and comes up with an “integrity score” for an image or video. The first level involves searching for dirty digital fingerprints, like noise that's characteristic of a particular camera model, or compression artifacts. The second level is physical: Maybe the lighting on someone's face is wrong, or a reflection isn't the way it should be given where the lamp is. Lastly, they get down to the “semantic level”: comparing the media to things they know are true. So if, say, a video of a soccer game claims to come from Central Park at 2 pm on Tuesday, October 9, 2018, does the state of the sky match the archival weather report? Stack all those levels, and voila: integrity score. By the end of MediFor, Darpa hopes to have prototype systems it can test at scale.
But the clock is ticking (or is that just a repetitive sound generated by an AI trained on timekeeping data?). “What you might see in a few years’ time is things like fabrication of events,” says Darpa program manager Matt Turek. “Not just a single image or video that’s manipulated but a set of images or videos that are trying to convey a consistent message.”
Over at Los Alamos National Lab, cyber scientist Juston Moore’s visions of potential futures are a little more vivid. Like this one: Tell an algorithm you want a picture of Moore robbing a drugstore; implant it in that establishment’s security footage; send him to jail. In other words, he's worried that if evidentiary standards don’t (or can’t) evolve with the fabricated times, people could easily be framed. And if courts don't think they can rely on visual data, they might also throw out legitimate evidence.
Taken to its logical conclusion, that could mean our pictures end up worth zero words. “It could be that you don’t trust any photographic evidence anymore,” he says, “which is not a world I want to live in.”
That world isn’t totally implausible. And the problem, says Moore, goes far beyond swapping one visage for another. "The algorithms can create images of faces that don't belong to real people, and they can translate images in strange ways, such as turning a horse into a zebra," says Moore. They can "imagine away" parts of pictures, and delete foreground objects from videos.
Maybe we can’t combat fakes as fast as people can make better ones. But maybe we can, and that possibility motivates Moore’s team's digital forensics research. Los Alamos’s program—which combines expertise from its cyber systems, information systems, and theoretical biology and biophysics departments—is younger than Darpa’s, just about a year old. One approach focuses on “compressibility," or times when there's not as as much information in an image as there seems to be. “Basically we start with the idea that all of these AI generators of images have a limited set of things they can generate,” Moore says. “So even if an image looks really complex to you or me just looking at it, there’s some pretty repeatable structure.” When pixels are recycled, it means there’s not as much there there.
They’re also using sparse coding algorithms to play a kind of matching game. Say you have two collections: a bunch of real pictures, and a bunch of made-up representations from a particular AI. The algorithm pores over them, building up what Moore calls “a dictionary of visual elements,” namely what the fictional pics have in common with each other and what the nonfictional shots uniquely share. If Moore’s friend retweets a picture of Obama, and Moore thinks maybe it's from that AI, he can run it through the program to see which of the two dictionaries—the real or the fake—best defines it.
Los Alamos, which has one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, isn't pouring resources into this program just because someone might want to frame Moore for a robbery. The lab’s mission is “to solve national security challenges through scientific excellence.” And its core focus is nuclear security—making sure bombs don’t explode when they’re not supposed to, and do when they are (please no), and aiding in nonproliferation. That all requires general expertise in machine learning, because it helps with, as Moore says, “making powerful inferences from small datasets.”
But beyond that, places like Los Alamos need to be able to believe—or, to be more realistic, to know when not to believe—their eyes. Because what if you see satellite images of a country mobilizing or testing nuclear weapons? What if someone synthesized sensor measurements?
That's a scary future, one that work like Moore's and Lyu's will ideally circumvent. But in that lost-cause world, seeing is not believing, and seemingly concrete measurements are mere creations. Anything digital is in doubt.
But maybe “in doubt” is the wrong phrase. Many people will take fakes at face value (remember that picture of a shark in Houston?), especially if its content meshes with what they already think. “People will believe whatever they’re inclined to believe,” says Moore.
That’s likely more true in the casual news-consuming public than in the national security sphere. And to help halt the spread of misinformation among us dopes, Darpa is open to future partnerships with social media platforms, to help users determine that that video of Kim Jong-un doing the macarena has low integrity. Social media can also, Turek points out, spread a story debunking a given video as quickly as it spreads the video itself.
Will it, though? Debunking is complicated (though not as ineffective as the lore suggests). And people have to actually engage with the facts before they can change their minds about the fictions.
But even if no one could change the masses' minds about a video's veracity, it's important that the people making political and legal decisions—about who's moving missiles or murdering someone—try to machine a way to tell the difference between waking reality and an AI dream.
So much genetic testing, so few people to explain it to you
When tech knows you better than you know yourself
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Topicsdeep learningartificial intelligencenuclearmachine learningDeepfakes
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GAO Slams FMSCA for Sluggish IT Effort
July 17, 2017 • by David Cullen
Image: FMCSA
The watchdog agency of Congress has roundly criticized the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for not yet modernizing its information technology systems and for failing to fully establish an “investment management framework” for IT.
A blistering report just issued by the General Accountability Office also points up the difficulty FMCSA has fulfilling its mission while its chief posts — including that of administrator — remain unfilled by the Trump Administration. Since earlier this year, FMCSA has been led by Deputy Administrator Daphne Jefferson, a career civil-service executive, after prior Administrator Scott Darling, an Obama appointee, stepped down after President Trump took office.
The GAO report states that FMCSA “lacks complete plans to guide its systems modernization efforts. Specifically, the agency’s IT strategic plan lacks key elements. While the agency has an IT strategic plan that describes the technical strategy, vision, mission, and direction for managing its IT modernization programs, and defines the strategic goals and objectives to support its mission, the plan lacks timelines to guide its goals and strategies related to integrated project planning and execution, IT security, and innovative IT business solutions, among others.”
According to GAO, the FMCSA’s chief information officer is charged with overseeing the “development, implementation, and maintenance of the IT systems and infrastructure that serve as the key enabler in executing FMCSA’s mission.” However, the report notes, currently the agency’s Office of Information Technology is “undergoing a reorganization to establish an Office of the CIO. While a revised structure has been proposed, it has not yet been approved.” And that of course means it has not been staffed.
GAO, which undertook the report as requried in the FAST Act highway bill of 2015, said FMCSA began an IT “modernization effort” back in 2013 that includes both developing new systems and retiring legacy systems for each of its four key safety process areas—registration, inspection, compliance, and enforcement.
One of the efforts the report zeroes in on is the development of the Unified Registration System, which stalled out at the top of this year. “When fully implemented,” GAO pointed out, “URS is intended to replace the current registration systems with a single, online federal system.” Upon rolling out URS, several other systems and functions would be retired to streamline the process. That is not happening soon, says the report, which notes that FMCSA’s acting CIO “stated that the agency has not determined when URS will be fully deployed.”
The report charges that the agency "lacks adequate visibility into and oversight of IT investment decisions and activities, and cannot ensure that its investments are meeting cost and schedule expectations and that appropriate actions are taken if these expectations are not being met.”
Related: FMCSA Suspends Rollout of Online DOT Registration System
Originally posted on Trucking Info
Read more about FMCSA GAO Unified Registration System Safety & Compliance Information Technology
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xenogothic
looking for an exit
Postcapitalist Desire
Buddies Without Organs
For k-punk
Geopoetics
New Colour Fields
Category: Hauntology
The Magic of Relics
on December 2, 2020 December 1, 2020 By xenogothic 1 Comment
Novelty does not necessarily belong to the new. Not anymore. Novus, as the word’s etymological root, means “new” quite explicitly, but it also means “original” or “unusual”. The newness of novelty is not absolute.
Increasingly, we might define a novelty as that which has either escaped or is newly present within the typical order of things. As the new stagnates in its postmodern crisis, we find that novelty is as applicable to the tired cliché as it is to a bold new mode of expression.
As a result, Arthur C. Clarke’s assertion that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” begins to lose its potency. Now it is more often the case that any sufficiently redundant technology is indistinguishable from magic also. Our most mundane analogue mediums are transformed by the passage of time into weird objects – not nostalgic objects but objects utterly decontextualised.
Old objects acquire a new power. They become relics, in the true sense of the world – the spiritually potent yet abandoned remains of old ideals.
Occasionally, this process provides older generations with an opportunity to laugh at their youngers, who are oblivious to the cultural power captured within these relics. There are countless videos online, for instance, in which we see parents give their children a VHS tape or a Walkman or something similar and ask them to guess how it worked. What is always captivating about these videos is that, whilst the children’s guesses as to what a given object is for may be way off the mark, their logic is often sound; they are simply approaching a past object from the perspective of an unfolding present.
“A VHS tape is for watching movies”, someone might say, offering up a clue. “Well, where’s the screen?” the child asks in response, curiously turning this opaque rectangle over and over in their hands.
We might interpret this hypothetical child’s attempt at reasoning to be a fine use of their imagination but, as François Bonnet has argued, “Contrary to popular belief, children do not have excessive imaginations.” In fact, when confronted by new sensations and experiences, “a child rapidly runs up against the limit of his imagination, then finds himself before the most radical, the most terrifying unknown.” This is most evident when a child hears something go bump in the night but, when confronted with the cultural artefacts of a previous generation, the situation is more complex. We don’t see terror but curiosity; the terror is instead projected onto them from anxious adults that corral around.
Consider the video above. The children’s innocent reactions to this strange object – a Walkman – are perfectly understandable; the incredulous adults betray a potent anxiety that lingers behind their smiles. After all, these children may not know how a Walkman works but they remain “digital natives”, always-already at home with technologies that baffle their elders.
One of the adults shares a telling anecdote in this regard, adding that his daughter recently went on his laptop and started jabbing at the screen, thinking it was touch-sensitive. “She is too used to her tablet”, he laughs, shaking his head with an obligatory and knowingly-clichéd “kids these days!”
But this clip was first uploaded online six years ago. At the time of writing, the screen of the laptop I am writing on is touch-sensitive.
Can we go so far as to argue that the contemporary intuitions of children predict the future? To watch them mocked, no matter how gently, is to see the joke backfire. A child’s lack of imagination with regards to the past comes full circle as adults find themselves just as incapable of imagining the possibilities of the present. In this sense, Bonnet’s description of a child’s terror and uncertainty when faced with a “new” aesthetic experience is just as applicable to the adults themselves, who are today routinely confronted with rapidly accelerating technological experiences that they can barely keep up with.
Keeping Up with Hauntology (Part 2)
on November 2, 2020 November 2, 2020 By xenogothic 1 Comment
An interesting comment from Padraig on the recent hauntology post:
Though it is worthwhile pointing out, I’m not so sure that the central issue here is just that of the class envy & resentment of the negatively disavowing, of the reductively class unconscious, but you are certainly right to draw attention once again to the hegemonic appeal of the revenant of patriarchy in a post-patriarchal culture (most Hollywood movies are fundamentally fantasies of patriarchal restoration, from all of Spielberg’s movies to Nolan films — even a film that Mark positively reviewed, Nolan’s Batman Begins, was a disturbingly reactionary fantasy of a return to an impossible patriarchal capitalism).
Rather, it is that the current fetishisation of holography (which has been around since the 1970s, just as 3D film has been around since the early 1950s) is another instance of Jameson’s cultural logic of late capitalism, of the obliteration of all sense of history, the fact that such holograms (even if they are a spectral trace of a departed relative) are now just vacuous ‘special effects’. Indeed, Mark wrote about this in a blog post when he was critiquing Jackson’s execrable, instantly forgettable remake of King Kong:
“In King Kong, FX have replaced history. Or rather, ‘history’ — now flattened out into a series of period signifiers — has itself become a kind of special effect. (Technology substitutes not only for history but for culture, too; in 2005, technological progress is the only faith that remains to us.) Even if the simulation were note-perfect accurate, History, in the Marxist sense of struggle, antagonism and contingency, would still be photoshopped out. The Depression is a stage-set, an inexplicable backdrop. This a museum without History, the Past as Experience, Theme Park…”
Put another way, back in the 19th century, during the very early years/decades of photography (when most people had yet to even see or snap a photograph), someone seeing ANY photo, much less a haunting photo as a ghostly trace of a departed relative, would have responded in a radically different way to a contemporary pomo subject.
I certainly see the point being made here but, then again, I’m not sure I agree with the overall argument, particularly regarding photography. Mark’s argument, too, has a ring of truth, but I think it underestimates just how bad things have always been with photographic technologies. Whether we are talking about the daguerreotype process or contemporary holography, the argument that “FX have replaced history” is applicable throughout.
Photography has always been a reactionary medium. As paradoxical as this statement seems, as a technological innovation it led to far more experimentation elsewhere (e.g., within painting) than it occasioned for itself. In fact, despite being a technological innovation in itself, aesthetic attitudes towards photography throughout the twentieth-century (and particularly in the west) have always been very conservative.
There’s a strange tension in photography in this regard. It is arguably an innately capitalist enterprise. It was not invented as an artistic medium or scientific instrument but as a way to make money. Whilst there were some initial inventors, tinkering with different chemical processes, who saw the merits of its aesthetic qualities, the name-checked inventors of the medium (most of whom were French) were essentially the winners of an arms race for government funding who pitched their competing processes as new businesses catching the wave of an emergent post-painting trend among the bourgeoisie.
From there on out, most technological innovations in the field were driven either by the military or advertising companies. (The latter is something I have long found particularly interested: aesthetically speaking, photography created for fashion or advertising has long been more aesthetically adventurous and experimental than self-described “artistic” photography — you just have to compare your average issue of Vogue to the portraits found in The Wire to see the bizarre disparity in that regard.)
Gradually, respect for photography as an artform has grown, but it was nonetheless — and largely remains — a creative industry that likes to clutch at its pearls. Colour photography, for instance, was for magazines and family albums — it was commercial; this is why black and white photography remained associated with “fine art photography” until around the 1970s (when William Eggleston came along) — and, even then, not without continued resistance. The snobbish bourgeois art crowd has always been precious about its classical and oddly painterly aesthetics.
It is worth noting that colour photography, despite being looked down upon, wasn’t widely accessible at that time. The recent rise of popular and affordable access to photographic equipment is relatively new. We forget, now that we all carry cameras in our pockets, how much of a specialist hobby it once was, and we also forget the issues of class attached to it.
Many have written on the revolution photography instigated within the realm of subjectivity — myself included. We might even argue that it was one of the central technological innovations that made neoliberalism possible. Photography, it has been said, allowed the middle class to properly look at themselves for the first time. It also established what Mark once called elsewhere “an implied bourgeois gaze” — beyond the few rags-to-riches stories, images of twentieth-century working-class life were voyeuristic visions curated by middle class photographers for the Sunday Times. Even when taken by working class lads who’d somehow gained access to a camera — here’s looking at you, Don McCullin — they were instruments of social mobility more than the social realism they were otherwise championed as being by the middle classes who predominantly viewed them.
In this sense, I agree with the quote from the k-punk blog, but I’d also want to draw attention to the following passage, in which Mark writes:
In his classic analysis, Jameson identified a waning of the historical sense as a defining characteristic of the postmodern. The ‘nostalgia mode’ is evident, not so much in films whose content is backward-looking, but whose form belongs to the past.
By form, Fisher is referring to genre tropes, but I’d argue this is innately true of photography as an artform as well. It is not only a postmodern medium but prefigures postmodernity as such.
This is to say that I think the argument that the waning of photography’s historical sense (and, by proxy, that of all the mediums it has given rise to) is not a recent development at all. Paradoxically, the history of photography itself shows us quite clearly that history became SFX at the moment of its creation, particularly in that history’s often limited scope — writing metahistory about the things we use to record history is something a lot ofacademics still struggle to navigate. (John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation is the classic text on this maybe, and it was only published in 1993.)
This paradox is epitomised by the strange lag that occurred between photography’s invention and our popular understanding of how photographic cameras function. For example — and with Fisher’s comment on history-as-theme-park in mind — we might consider the development of cinematography shortly after photography’s ascendency. The medium was primarily presented to the public at fairs for the most part; it was literally a sideshow attraction at travelling fairs and theme parks. Most famously, this included the Lumière brothers’ film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.
The film is often cited when discussing contemporary reactions to early photography because it supposedly caused great panic when it was screened before unsuspecting audiences. This story is, today, often disputed. Indeed, it seems a bit rich that nineteenth-century fairgoers would be that frightened by a moving image. If by anything, this terror was likely instigated by their failure to realise the images they were seeing were in the past rather than representative of the unfolding present.
Wikipedia notes (although without a citation) that Benjamin Bratton has speculated on this before, arguing that this terror was itself linked to technological expectations. When seeing a projection of a train, many would likely assume it was produced by a camera obscura — a well-established piece of technology at that time; handhelds camera obscuras were invented in the 1600s but there is documentation of the effect these cameras harness going back to the 4th century BC. If this were the case, of course, then the train arriving at the station would actually still have been approaching them. They were used to seeing projections and technologically produced images but it was the idea that these images could be retained, that the past could be recorded, that took some getting used to.
It was this realisation that led to photography being associated with mourning. Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, after all, is seemingly named after this same process of realisation. When he considers the famously unseen Winter Garden Photograph of his mother, his grief is manifest in the realisation that this is a moment past and not a projection. A camera lucida is what he wants; a photograph is what he has. It is the same terror, the same cognitive dissonance, echoing down the years — and this is precisely why innovations in holography are driven by our desire to resurrect the dead. As such, I don’t think our contemporary reactions to these images are all that different to the viewers of early photography — in fact, I think they are woefully predictable given how we have always approached and thought about this kind of mournful medium.
It is for all of these reasons that I think the class antagonism baked within the hologram of Robert Kardashian is central. It is, once again, the rich who find a new technology providing them with an opportunity to see themselves in a new light. It echoes the popularity of spiritualism amongst the rich and famous in the nineteenth century, driven by fraudsters who’d figured out how to do double exposures. More broadly, our tendency to associate the lingering past with grand estates and the landed gentry is no coincidence. We’re less easily tricked now, apparently, but we are nonetheless possessed by those same desires, and it is these desires that will drive the market for holograms in future.
Echoing the development of photography in the first instance, I can personally imagine a time when this novelty and its popularity amongst an upper class drives a democratisation of access to and, later, the affordability of holographic relatives when the reproductive technology for producing such images catches up and it comes to mass market.
This isn’t to dispute the ways in which holograms do epitomise the cultural logic of late capitalism but, in this instance, these are not new desires hollowed out, but old desires better fulfilled. Put another way, they are bourgeois temporal anxieties — regarding the future as well as the past — made all the more enchanting and (im)material.
Holograms, then, are the endgame for a innately — at least within its proper social context — reactionary medium. They re-establish the class antagonism innate to mourning but also haunting. Ghost stories, after all, are often cynically described as expressions of our complicated feelings about real estate, and it is typically the upper classes, the property-owning classes, who find themselves and their grand mansions haunted, either by their own bloodlines or their curse-casting serfs.
The Kardashian dynasty invoking its own spirits is nothing new in this regard; the technology has just caught up with their desires — desires the rest of us will accumulate through the cultural trickledown, and I think it is pretty predictable where this trickle takes us.
No Transformation — Hennessey
on September 12, 2020 September 12, 2020 By xenogothic
Friend of the blog and real person Leah Hennessey has an EP out this week. We’ve been engaged in a fragmentary back-and-forth ever since I lightly declared war on her project Slash back in February, following which we found ourselves torn in two and then stitched together across cyberspace. She’s been an excellent pen pal.
Earlier this week, Leah sent over the press release for her band’s first self-titled EP H ennessey, out September 11th (yesterday!) from Velvet Elk Records. I didn’t need any more of an excuse to write about her more recent activities. The EP’s first two earworms and the band’s accompanying livestreams have frequently soundtracked our flat during lockdown. To see the project fully realised is a joy.
What I remember most from that blogpost shot across the bow of the great ship Slash back in February was my somewhat barbed comment that Leah and her collaborator Emily Allen resembled “‘Nietzsche’s Last Women’ — ‘They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery'”. Leah posted this on her Instagram and added that she and Emily had never felt so seen. However, seven months later, it is clear Leah has fully embraced this gothic position at the end of history — and so she should. Frankly, it is a thrill to have written this as a critique only to now witness Hennessey owning it so magnificently. There is perhaps no better sign of the times.
I have been thinking about this repeatedly whilst listening over and over again to the EP’s truly inspired cover of The Waterboys’ “We Will Not Be Lovers”. A song from 1998 that is already a surreal and anachronistic “post-trad” folk number, Hennessey’s version swaps around eras and sends the song back a decade (whilst at the same time updating its sound?). It is a dizzying whirlpool of cultural reference points that results in a sound that feels weirdly adrift and out of time. And yet, what is revealed underneath is Hennessey’s own rootedness in our time-warped present.
This has arguably long been the function of a cover song — a way to emphasise one’s own standpoint through the words of another. Despite the words not being her own, it is Leah who shines through here absolutely. No transformation necessary.
This is a sentiment Leah gives voice to in the press release and throughout the rest of the EP, including on new single, aptly titled “No Transformation”, which she says
is a kind of hymn to acceptance. I’m starting by saying I’m too this or too that, repeating these criticisms I have of myself like a mantra, but instead of comforting myself by saying those things aren’t true or by trying to become someone else I’m realizing that I can only evolve or even be happy if I start from exactly where I am. I’ve spent so much of my life tearing myself apart in the hopes that I’ll rise from my own ashes and this is me breaking that cycle.
I can relate. In fact, I imagine many of us can after this weird year. We’re told so often that we are stuck and we are a pastiche generation, languishing at the end of history. For Hennessey, however, there is something extra smuggled underneath a song that we might otherwise assume is the epitome of a millennial harking for better times. This isn’t just “New Wave cosplay”, as she sings on “Let’s Pretend (It’s the ’80s)”; this is a moment to “remember what our parents forgot.” In so doing, we might break the present cycle.
Check out the band’s website here and find the debut EP over at Velvet Elk Records and in all the usual places.
The Philosophy and Politics of Accelerationism — Course Promo
on July 21, 2020 July 21, 2020 By xenogothic 2 Comments
Meta-Nomad very generously asked me to collaborate with him on a course about accelerationism six weeks ago. He suggested that he’d cover the philosophy of accelerationism and I could cover the politics of accelerationism. I thought this was a really interesting idea. The result is a load of content that we’re going to be releasing this Friday (24th July 2020) via his Teachable page.
I don’t want to give away too much — we’ll be sharing more info later in the week, including course outlines and costs — but we have recorded the above chat which begins a particular conversation that we hope this course will go on to further develop.
A promotional video for the second Hermitix course called The Philosophy and Politics of Accelerationism, a collaboration with Matt Colquhoun (www.xenogothic.com). The course will be a paid course consisting of 10 lectures and transcripts, with optional seminars and one-on-ones. James Ellis (Meta-Nomad) will cover the philosophical aspects of Accelerationism and Matt Colquhoun will cover the political aspects.
The Rotten Western (Part 2)
on July 7, 2020 July 7, 2020 By xenogothic 2 Comments
Spoilers for The Last of Us Part 2 from the very start. You have been warned.
← Part One
After the shock of Joel’s horrific death subsides, Ellie and Dina plan their trip to Seattle, where they hope to avenge Joel by hunting down the members of the Washington Liberation Front who are responsible for his demise. What Joel did to deserve such a death is, for the moment, unclear. “Joel pissed off a lot of people,” Ellie admits.
Before heading out, they visit Joel’s house to take on final look at the life they knew — a briefly sheltered life; a brief life with Joel. Inside what we find is not so much a house as a museum piece. It is unclear how long Joel has been gone — days; maybe a week or two? — but already his home feels like a living memorial. However, this home is very different to the homes we’ve so far seen Joel inhabit… For starters, the Old West nostalgia in Joel’s Jackson house is surprising. Whilst, at first glance, it seems to suit an idealised version of the man we’ve come to know, as I lingered amongst its decorations and detritus I also found it jarring with reality.
It was a moment that took me back to the start of the first game. As Ellie staggers around Joel’s now-vacant house, grief-stricken, I wanted to replay the first game’s prologue, in which Joel’s daughter Sarah staggers around their home half-asleep looking for her father.
Sarah and Joel’s house is recognisably modern. It’s messy too; the banal neglect — no doubt the product of an entwined teenage laziness and single-parent fatigue — is pervasive. It is also strangely haunted by a violence to come, in which we can already predict the surreality of a house in ruins, its present lived-in state foreshadowing an inevitable, soon-to-be looted state-to-come. But the house is lived in, at least. Joel’s house in Jackson feels like it has been laid out all too neatly, like it will be the future home of a Joel waxwork. It is sterile, and haunted by an unpredictable past rather than an all too predictable future.
We could argue that, post-outbreak, the entire world is haunted by the past in this way but the eeriness of much of The Last of Us‘s environments comes from the fact that these pasts are forgotten. As recognisable as the suburbs and cityscapes are to us as players, we become accustomed to seeing them as ancient ruins — that is, we see them through the eyes of the game’s protagonists. The difference between the two is, perhaps, one of grief. Whilst we might grieve the sight of a burned down house in our present, as the sight of it invades our capacity for empathy uninvited, we do not grieve the remnants of ancient civilsations.
The tension between the past, present and future in this regard has been the defining enviro-temporal tension of the Gothic for centuries, but this only makes the design of Joel’s house more surreal. It slips somewhere between the two — between the Gothic and the grief-stricken. It’s preservation jars with a narrative wherein life so often ends without legacy.
Most interesting to me, in this regard, are the paintings on the walls of Joel’s two houses. In the first game, Sarah’s room is peppered with posters for bands and films, for instance. As you head into the corridor and, eventually, to her father’s bedroom — it’s the middle of the night and he is, conspicuously, not at home — you see that the walls are decorated with various family photographs and natural vistas.
Much has been said about the snowy landscape “easter eggs” above Joel’s bed and set as his phone’s background, both foreshadowing an environment later on in the game where you first get to play as Ellie, but beyond this it is intriguing to see the majesty of nature devoid of any presence of the human.
On another wall in Joel’s room, for instance, there is a painting of horses running free. It is that stereotypical image of American natural beauty but it also foreshadows the stampede of infected and uninfected that the player is about to be caught up in. Elsewhere, there are pictures of ducks about to take flight, similarly evoking a natural tranquillity whilst also being a sight you might expect to see on the end of a gun. Humans are nonetheless absent in all instances.
In this sense, the decorations are more reminiscent of a dentist’s waiting room or my grandma’s house rather than a modern family home. It inadvertently emphasises some of the critiques of the first game — the player is left feeling more like an observer than an actual participant in the world around them — but, in The Last of Us Part 2, this changes; there are many figures in the landscapes that adorn Joel’s walls, as if the decoration now reflects the forced changes in play style. Actions have consequences. This is no longer (just) about an indifferent nature in-itself. This is a game with a Promethean edge, imploring the player to interrupt the world, even when the odds are not in their favour.
In the game’s next act, this point is made clear almost immediately. Whilst this is true within the context of the game’s new mechanics most explicitly, it is also evidenced by Ellie and Dina’s interactions with their environment. Take, for instance, the musical encounter that has already proved to be iconic in representing the game’s intensified emphasis on player agency and character development.
As Ellie and Dina trawl through downtown Seattle, they chance upon a music shop. Vinyl records fill the bins ready to be flicked through but, perhaps to our surprise, they are not some by-gone novelty for the pair; in Jackson, it is shown that they have the capacity to listen to music from the old world and they also watch old DVDs. Instead, confronted with this snapshot of an old way of life, Ellie wonders if there are people out there in the world somewhere who are making new movies. She writes new songs, she says, as well as listening to old ones, so surely there are people out there lucky enough to have the resources and know-how to make new movies too.
Though it may seem like a somewhat naive question, Ellie’s reasons for asking it are quite convincing. In a world so disconnected from itself, you can never account for how good or how bad other parts of the world might have it, and you also can’t account for what kind of cultural artefacts might remain a part of their social fabric. This is to say that, in its abject primitivism, the Fermi paradox is made wholly terrestrial.
As I play through the game, I find myself thinking about this a lot. Joel’s nostalgic nature isn’t something I want to criticise. In fact, it is all too relatable. In his role as father figure, he wants to inspire Ellie with his knowledge and expertise, showing her things about the old world that she can take with her into the new. Whilst Ellie’s excitement and curiosity in this regard is endlessly endearing, Joel’s own melancholy never quite fades into the background. And it is an understandable melancholy too. If I was able to watch old films or listen to old records depicting a world catastrophically destroyed by a zombifying pathogen, I think the cognitive dissonance would soon start to take its toll. For the younger characters in The Last of Us Part 2, however, this disconnect is taken to be a given. They don’t focus much on what has been lost but always push forwards, considering what they can do next. They seem inspired by the old world but only because it shows them the kind of cultural production possible in the new one they hope to build.
Joel’s is less focused on the future. Whilst this might seem like a cynical appraisal of his character, one look around his house makes it quite clear that, if Joel Miller had a film camera in post-apocalyptia, he’d be making Westerns. Whereas Ellie’s inner songbook contains the works of A-Ha and Pearl Jam; Joel’s starts to feel like a world of reactionary American primitivism — what Leslie Fielder once termed a “higher masculine sentimentality” — where a rugged music like the blues might suddenly makes an ahistoric comeback. After all, there are cowboys everywhere. Joel has even taken up carving them ornately into wood. But this romantic figure of man and horse — seemingly representative of a fraught if nonetheless very human relationship with nature — is far more reminiscent of the life Joel has acquired for himself after the apocalypse rather than being representative of anything that came before it.
In many ways, this is precisely the function of the Western in popular culture — a way of laundering the present through the romanticism of the past. As Sam Peckinpah, director of The Wild Bunch (among other Westerns), once said: “The Western is the universal frame within which it’s possible to comment on today.” However, in a game like The Last of Us Part 2, this sort of process is most commonly inverted — we launder the present through the horror of the future. As such, it is strange to see the Western’s original polarity contained with the game in miniature; it renders it strangely cyclonic, with overlapping feedback loops, giving rise to a kind of temporal horseshoe of cowboy metaphysics that immediately renders time out of joint.
This strange templexity is only made more apparent by the abundant references and archetypes taken directly from many a classic Wester. For example, walking around dead Joel’s house, I found myself thinking about his previous adventures and general misanthropy — at least in the first game. As I try to picture him as some archetypal cowboy, he starts to resemble Uncle Ethan in Henry Ford’s The Searchers — the coldhearted horse-riding rifleman.
The Joel we met in the first game — before Ellie eventually thawed him out — was similarly violent and cold, traversing the plains of former downtown financial districts, overshadowed by wrecked skyscrapers not unlike the geological towers of Monument Valley. However, this hardly seems like an existence Joel would want to romanticise after the fact, in the way he has done in Jackson.
But even in a film as revered as The Searchers, the cowboy’s life is deeply disturbing. Ethan the anti-hero, played by John Wayne, isn’t just cold; he’s a horrible and vindictive racist — surely even by the standards of 1956 (and this is apparent from the opening scene). The horror that often greets his actions, painted on the faces of his dysfunctional and god-fearing posse, is tellingly triggered most often by the strange disregard Ethan has for the living and the dead. He mutilates corpses out of spite, for instance; he also has no sympathy for the Indians, allowing them no respite so that they might deal with their dead and wounded after a shootout. This disturbs his fellow travellers even more than the racialised threat of the Red Man. (These attitudes are less scandalous when expressed following a zombie apocalypse, when the Indians are substituted by undead hoards, but we might note that this only normalises Joel’s familiar contempt as dead.)
Despite all of this, The Searchers, in the popular imagination at least, continues to be upheld as this classic and deeply romanticised representation of the Old West. It is as if the sheer majesty of its location quite literally overshadows the deeds depicted on screen.
Joel seems to romanticise his own life in much the same way. The majesty of the classic Western becomes a way for him to look beyond the violence of his life and revel in nature. It is an understandable compartmentalisation, considering the plant-horror of the cordyceptic pathogen, but still, the extent to which his house starts to feel like a Searchers shrine, with its paintings of gun-toting cowboys in Monument Valley, seems oddly out of place.
Why does Joel retain such a firm grasp on the Old West? Is this just Joel romanticising his own trauma in order to better deal with it? Is this him compartmentalising a life he never knew in the form of old genre tropes many of those younger than him may have never seen? Is a fall back into the Texan stereotype really all it takes to scrub the horror of his life away?
Perhaps this mournful dissonance is unescapable for Joel. After all, he seems to recognise, implicitly, that he lives in a new Rotten West, but the only way he can find hope for himself is by going backwards. Ellie and Dina, retaining a very different (post-)cultural foundation, find the West taking on a very different form — theirs is a postmodern Western, no doubt, but it is far more hauntological in that sense; that is, it is a kind of “good PoMo”, as Alex Williams once put it, compared to Joel’s “bad” form of reactionary pastiche.
I think this is because, whilst Joel has a world to mourn, it is a world that decisively dies with him. Most of what Ellie and Dina know of life is violent political factionalism and the equally violently indifference of nature. Whilst this might resemble the Wild West absolutely, they don’t seem to know that. It’s not an echo of the past for them; just the present that they know. As such, they’re still mournful, but their alienation seems to come from the fact that they don’t actually know what it is they’re supposed to be mourning. They live a hauntological existence precisely because they are mourning their own stuckness.
I’d argue that this position echoes my own (revitalised) version of hauntology quite acutely, but Alex Williams’ old critique is still worth bearing in mind. For Williams, hauntology is always representative of “a cowardly move, lusting after utopias that never were, or which are now unreachable, a retreat into childhood/youth, just as trapped in the endless re-iterative mechanistics of the postmodern as the lowest form of retroism, merely in a hyper-self-aware form.” Because of this, hauntology “cedes too much ground to what it attempts to oppose, because of an a priori assumption: that there is nothing else (at this moment in time at least), that nothing else is possible, and as such we [must] make the best of this (and that the best we can do is to hint at the possible which remains forever out of reach — with all the pseudo-messianic dimensions this involves).”
What we see in Joel’s house is precisely a “making the best of it”. The scenes represented on his walls are representations of the life he already lives, but exorcised of all horror and instead jettisoned to a few hundred years in the past. This temporal displacement is precisely an aesthetic instantiation of the a priori Williams is talking about. There is nothing else at this moment in time at least; ergo, all that is really possible is to return to a past moment, and a past moment that Joel himself has not experienced. It is a theoretical past rather than an observed one; the very definition of the Western as an ideological a priori.
So, what of the girls? Williams’ nod to Badiou in his conclusion is a factor I think most people interested in hauntology and accelerationism have forgotten. For Williams, Badiou’s “analysis of the emergence of the new” — recently discussed — “would entail a more strategic examination of precisely where the pop-musical evental sites and historical situations exist within our current time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecideable.”
This is perhaps where Ellie and Dina lie. Whereas Joel, no matter how loveable, inhabits the reactionary misanthropy of a classic Western like The Searchers, Ellie and Dina personify a more revolutionary kind of homesteader, given the fact that they do not see themselves as some sort of iteration of the past. They respond with vengeance but because they are determined to pass through their new world of grief and transform it into a world where the same thing cannot happen again.
It is an intriguing form of the categorical imperative. They act upon the world in such a way as to punish those who live amongst them and think they can act with impunity. But they do so without much consideration for the now-normalised zombie apocalypse. This is, in itself, an intriguing gulf also present in many a genre film. The characters in any Western exist on a knife edge, where the indifference of the desert and the indifference of their fellow human beings produce quite distinct (but also oddly entangled) responses. In the Rotten Western, this already fine line becomes impossibly blurred. Nature and society are no longer false dialectical opposites, as they have been since the Enlightenment — or, perhaps, it is precisely that, but the falseness of this relation now takes precedent, transforming nature/society into a kind of corpse bride, with each mirroring the other and with each causing the other to rot.
It is a gross (but also nihilistic and realist) bastardisation of the relationship that dominates Joel’s house. Whereas he sees the best in this entanglement, represented by the image of a cowboy and his bucking broncho, in a cyclonic relationship that surfs the tension between natural rebellion and societal respect, the flatline construct of body alive and body dead is perhaps a far more honest appraisal of their new reality.
The figure of the survivor on horseback is an apparition; the reality is two humans, survivor and undead, in a never-ending tussle.
The Games Industry: Accelerationism and the Hauntological in Microcosm
on June 7, 2020 July 6, 2020 By xenogothic 7 Comments
I’m currently doing a load of research into accelerationism — when am I not — for a new thing. I’ve been digging far back into the blogosphere to try and accurately trace its development from its 2007 beginnings to the present, but without all the distracting retconning of various philosophers who have at one time or other expressed an accelerationist opinion. (I found a very early Benjamin Noys post where he offers a few examples of accelerationist positions and one was a quote from Roland Barthes so I’m left feeling like just about anyone could be a Noysian accelerationist at this point.)
What I’m currently intrigued by is how the accelerationist split first emerged. (Alex Williams’ (at least I think it’s his) old blog is proving to be fascinating reading right now — straight-up red-hot Landianism over there — no surprises he’s since deleted most of it.) In fact, its split is arguably its founding gesture — an appropriate Big Bang moment for the first blogosphere when the first atom split and birthed a whole network of weird social media enclaves that just keep splitting.
Most people should know by now that “Accelerationism” as a term related to political philosophy was coined by Noys but it was arguably Mark Fisher and Alex Williams who made it what it is. (And, credit where due, Steven Shaviro’s blog was arguably the blog where the initial discussion started.) I’ve mentioned this a few times on here and on Twitter but the initial developments came from Noys writing his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative in which he critiques Continental philosophy’s obsession with affirming a certain kind of negativity. Fisher, in deftly trollish fashion, then affirmed Noys’ negative critique. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake on Fisher’s part but, for better or for worse, the name stuck and everyone has been confusing Noys’ and Fisher’s versions ever since.
It seems to me — although I’m still untangling this — that Fisher did this to demonstrate that Noys’ position as being somehow above this entanglement of negations and affirmations was a fallacy. In late capitalist society, we affirm negations and negate affirmations every day. The problem is that this process is far from the vaguely similar process first described in Marx’s dialectical materialism. This is to say that, in the 21st century, the dialectic of capitalism’s positives and negatives has become wholly impotent. This was the discussion within the blogosphere. It was not simply about how all the Conties affirm the negative but about how the negative itself was and remains in crisis.
So why not just be positive? Fisher’s argument was that that is what capitalism wants. It wants positivity all day every day. In this sense, the negative takes on a new potency but it has lost its effective charge. The question was, how can the negative produce the new? Accelerationism, in Noys’ hands, as that byword for everything “bad” about capitalism was the perfect sandbox to try this out in. Can we affirm the negatives of capitalism to produce the new?
It wasn’t as simple as that though, because nothing ever is. Accelerationism was also picked up by the blogosphere because it had obvious implications for the various and already well-established discussions around hauntology.
The relationship between the two is quite interesting, I think, and it is also far more nuanced than the usual assumption of accelerationism is fast and hauntology is slow. As Fisher noted in one post, this is not a philosophy of mind-numbing tautologies where what is negative is bad because it is negative and what is positive is good because it is positive. In fact, what seems to really galvanise discussions around accelerationism is that it is seen as the positive cultural charge to hauntology’s negative charge. Taken together, each with their own internal positives and negatives, they describe a strange tension within the 21st century.
The full argument I have about this might get hashed out somewhere else in more detail but I thought of an illustrative example of this relation that is culturally still prevalent (if not more prevalent) over a decade later but which doesn’t fit into what I’m working on: the games industry.
Accelerationism, as hauntology’s hyperactive cousin, was seen by Fisher and others as an analysis of the ever-increasing speed of technological progression under capitalism and how this was affecting human cultural production and the production of subjectivity. These issues are all still pertinent today. In fact, they can arguably be seen most readily in the microcosm of the games industry.
There, technological hardware is being improved at an astounding rate, with new devices, consoles and ways to play appearing with an increased frequency, and yet it is also an industry currently infatuated with remakes of classic games.
Why is this?
In some ways, the reason is practical. The technological innovations far outpace cultural development so that those foundational cultural experiences become lost as the hardware improves. Because we have memories longer than the rapid cycle of a “console generation”, we don’t just desire the new all the time. Sometimes we want the comfort of something we know. So what do you do if you want to play your old games?
There are some obvious answers. People might still own their old consoles, for example, but playing them on modern TVs can be a nightmare. (I, for instance, still lug my N64 with me wherever I go but it is increasingly temperamental.) Do I need to keep time capsules of all my old home entertainment technology if I want to enjoy something? This level of fetishism is commonplace, with people preserving old setups like vinyl nerds, but it’s hardly practical. There are other workarounds and emulators, of course, but the industry itself seems like it is only just coming to appreciate its tandem responsibilities — not only pushing out new products to feed the desire for the new and improved but also its responsibility to archive and retain access to past experiences that are in danger of being left behind and lost to the casual player who doesn’t sideline as an amateur games historian.
The main reason why this is an important consideration is that it is arguably one not shared by any other medium. Although they do get remade with a depressing frequency, a film doesn’t need to be entirely remade to be enjoyed easily in the same way that a game does. For games, it is a question of accessibility as much as aesthetics. This is to say that it is not always just a money grab but a way to celebrate the existence of something technologically maligned and also remind aging gamers of their foundational gaming experiences that they might want to enjoy for a lot longer than the rapidity of technological development may allow. Still, speed is a factor here. We’re not talking about experiences from decades ago. One decade might be all it takes for the remake treatment to become feasible. This timescale might shrink in future if nothing changes.
Here’s the problem of capitalist speed and cultural drag in a nutshell. The quick fix of just remaking old titles and making them shiny again is one way to do it but it doesn’t always solve the practical problem.
There is a further side effect from this, however. I wonder, considering how precarious gaming culture is, with technological progression and cultural instability leading to what we have at present — a frenzied stasis — isn’t it also this precarity that has led to a largely reactionary culture within the gaming community? One that salivates over superficial progression (graphics!) whilst hating real change? Is this not the very same issue that we see everywhere in society, albeit on a micro scale? That is to say, isn’t it precisely this capitalist acceleration, independent of human culture, which only causes it to drag, that leads not to a frustrated capitalism but to an increasingly reactionary subjectivity? Isn’t the fact that gamers are often such sensitive small-c conservatives a result of a sort of cultural-subcultural negative feedback loop? Stasis becomes a demand left oddly unfulfilled because capitalism cannot help but speed ahead of the lifespan of our desires.
“Well done, Xeno”, I hear you say. “You’ve demonstrated an obvious point about late capitalism using a really annoying example.” But part of me also feels like, if gamers could see themselves as the microcosm of neoliberalism that they are, maybe they’d be less sensitive about incompetence in their industry and more sensitive about how that incompetence mirrors the wider world around them.
Biden is Bethesda, you guys. Will you think a bit more about politics now?
You Are Not A Postmodernist
on March 24, 2020 March 24, 2020 By xenogothic 3 Comments
A nice little post here from the Velcro City Tourist Board, following on from my previous post on why most people who call themselves “accelerationists” are kinda missing the point. Paul Raven writes:
The point being: for the most part, though with some notable exceptions, postmodernist thinkers were not advocating for a doctrine of postmodernity so much as they were attempting to describe the contours of a new cultural condition that had been assigned that (unfortunate and contentious) moniker. As such, I’m tempted to see accelerationism as Colquhoun sees it — which, I concede, may not be a universal conception of that term — as being a condition rather than a creed, in the same sense that postmodernity was a condition rather than a creed; in both cases, the conditionality may suggest certain stances in response, but that’s a very different thing to waving a flag that says “postmodernity, yay!”
Interestingly, my original thought emerged from a post I started working on around the same time that was going to argue this exact same point. Unfortunately, I ran out of energy to complete it but the gist was: “Why are so many people on YouTube obsessed with defending postmodernism?”
The draft consisted of a single paragraph I had intended to build out:
It seems like, in a bizarre twist of fate, postmodernism has become a defendable position simply because Jordan Peterson equates it with “cultural Marxism” and whatever else the left is apparently plotting, but just because Peterson thinks its dangerous and bad doesn’t unfortunately make it good.
Lots of Breadtubers are guilty of this binary thinking and their audiences tend not to know any better to pick up on it. Nevertheless, reactively taking on Peterson’s idiocy only ends up extending it into our own discourses. It’s depressing to see.
This is an opportune moment to share Mark and Robin’s old Ccru essay on pomophobia, and from there on out the trajectory is clear. Postmodernism is absolutely a condition rather than a creed. Mark would further distil this point into his later writings on hauntology. Accelerationism was what came next.
I have an account of this trajectory written up in the first chapter of Egress. The connection between Mark’s hauntological and accelerationist writings is explicit, precisely because they are complimentary modes of writing that attempt to deal with the conflicting temporalities contained within what we used to call “postmodernity”. Keeping those modes distinct is not simply pseudo-academic pedantry on my part but an attempt to halt the trajectory I feel myself more and more explicitly fighting against — the flattening and homogenising of all critical faculties. Too many continue to do pomo’s job for it unwittingly. That’s even more depressing than Peterson’s reactionary critics.
Same Virus, New Zombies: Towards a New Hauntology
on February 19, 2020 March 19, 2020 By xenogothic 2 Comments
Following yesterday’s brief summary of some of the papers given at the Capitalist Realism: 10 Years On conference, one of the more persistent discussions surrounding Mark’s writings was on hauntology — and it was a discussion that irked me more and more as the weekend went on.
As is unsurprising these days, numerous people had problems with Mark’s arguments regarding our cultural stagnation. This ended up featuring quite heavily in my keynote and I’m planning to condense and redevelop this argument for elsewhere so I won’t rehash it here but, essentially, it drives me mad how common poor readings of this part of Mark’s thought are, particularly regarding the assumption that Mark just thought everything new was shit.
Of course he didn’t. He could see the future coming but what frustrated him, I think, was how unevenly distributed it was, with the experimental and the mainstream no longer sharing the same spaces as they once did.
Mark hated the Arctic Monkeys, for instance.
He saw their repetitive cultural pastiche as nothing more than a by-the-numbers product of pop cultural nostalgia, hauntographically ordering and describing late-twentieth century cultural signifiers on album after album. (Something which has not abated one bit over the last fifteen years.)
What Mark loved, however, was the hauntology of the Caretaker’s new modernism.
One should not be equated with the other. It’s like arguments surrounding accelerationism all over again. People are far too quick to flatten the distinction between acceleration itself and the subject affected by acceleration. What accelerationism does is observe the former and critique the latter.
Similarly, critics of hauntology flatten the distinction between repetition itself and the subject affected by repetition. Again, hauntology observes the former and critiques the latter.
This is to say that the Arctic Monkeys replicate uncritically a homogenising cultural mode at the end of history, seemingly without irony. They are repetition incarnate. The Caretaker, on the other hand, explicitly interrogates the impact of this very tendency on the contemporary subject, producing new sonic worlds in the process. Therefore, hauntology proper should be seen less as a description of the repetitive semiology of capitalist modernity and more as a study of postmodern capitalism’s innately repetitive nature and its effect on us as subjects.
Interestingly, however, the main critics of Mark’s hauntological thinking in this regard were a group of Huddersfield PhD candidates who would later perform together as a free improvisation group. There is so much experimentation going on today, they would argue, implicitly referencing activity on a campus known for its radical music department, and they couldn’t understand why Mark would ignore these other practices and potentials. (I’d argue he didn’t but, again, the distinctions within his work are flattened.)
The excitement and freedom they felt running through their musical practices made them openly annoyed at Mark, as if his critiques did nothing but shut down these potentials by demoralising his students. This was far from his intention, of course, but this was nonetheless how they felt reading Capitalist Realism for the first time ten years on.
Although I was vocal in my disagreement, I was also newly aware of my own over-familiarity with Mark. I could no longer imagine reading him for the first time without the baggage I carry around, so it was very interesting to hear the first thoughts of a PhD cohort otherwise unfamiliar with his life and trajectory. For example, most surprisingly, Capitalist Realism was interpreted as an indictment of political disengaged students, at least when compared with “their forebears in the 1960s and 1970s”.
I don’t interpret this as Mark being critical of individuals, however. He loved his students. They weren’t in his crosshairs. It was the system that encourage their disengagement that he took issue with. Mark made clear elsewhere — although I can’t remember where right now but it was in some interview — that Capitalist Realism was his attempt to change this and engage directly with and excite his A Level students. After all, he writes, through personal experience:
In Britain, Further Education colleges used to be places which students, often from working class backgrounds, were drawn to if they wanted an alternative to more formal state educational institutions. Ever since Further Education colleges were removed from local authority control in the early 1990s, they have become subject both to ‘market’ pressures and to government-imposed targets.
Here Mark is referring to the slow decline of the polytechnic — institutions known (and derided) for catering to vocational interests that fuelled radical experimentation. (Leeds University, for instance, is particularly famous for being a post-punk hot bed.) However, in 2009, at least in my experience, these reports of political disengagement ring true. The most politically active kid at my college was a smarmy cunt who became well-known as one of the youngest ever local Labour councillors but fell out of the public eye as soon as the anti-Blairite wave rose through the ranks. (He was a particularly slimy example.)
The politicisation of British students post-Millennium didn’t seem to happen until immediately after Capitalist Realism was published, which is partly why I think it had the surprise success that it did. It emerged at a time when Mark’s intended audience was suddenly very keen to listen.
The London riots and the protests around student fees in 2010 and 2011, for example, lit a literal fire under a whole generation who are, today, actively shaping cultural discourse. In 2009, however, that just did not exist. Owen Jones’ Chavs didn’t come out until 2011 — the book that single-handedly shone a light on the class consciousness of a generation who had not realised the ferocity of their own (often internalised) classism — but, as someone speaking to the future, he also appeared very lonely within the nation’s consciousness of radically left-wing political commentators at that time. Again, he was a breath of fresh air and this, too, is largely why his book started doing so well.
What is more sad, however, is that it is likely that Mark was going to continue to surf the edge of popular discourse but, since his death, his works have been criticised for posthumously falling behind. Further criticisms popped up infrequently, for instance, regarding Capitalst Realism‘s anglocentrism and its lack of diverse references. Pedro Alvarez — whose paper of Latin American protest music was great — derided Mark’s lack of engagement with the rise of neoliberalism in Latin America. It was sad to hear this criticism laid at his feet as Mark was intending to teach this topic specifically before his death. (One week of his “Post-Capitalist Desire” seminar at Goldsmiths, to take place in 2017, was to consider the “cybernetic socialism” of Chile’s Allende government, long before the West finally began paying attention during the riots of 2019.) Similarly, he derided the way that Mark’s references to Spinoza felt “second hand”, although Mark wrote repeatedly of his time at Warwick where he “spent over a year poring over The Ethics in a reading group.”
Others had issues with Capitalist Realism‘s political incorrectness — Mark’s impersonalisation of dyslexia under capitalism being seen as some affront to contemporary discourses around neurodiversity, for instance — but, no matter the concern, each complaint felt like a criticism made out of time and out of context and revealed, to me at least, the lasting impact of the very formalisation of state educational institutions that Mark was talking about in his first published book. As such, it felt like middle-class hand-wringing in response to a book that did not live up to an academic rigour that Mark ignored explicitly because he saw it as an acute barrier to student consciousness raising.
It should go without saying that criticisms of Mark’s work are, of course, welcomed and allowed, and I’ve heard some great critiques in recent years that have made me wonder what he might have said in response to them. Reading Mark’s writings, even posthumously, is to quickly learn that he was — as Dom put it last month — “a touchy sod.” I said something similar in my paper on Sunday in response to suggestions on the first day that Mark is a frustrating thinker. He absolutely is — and I wouldn’t have him any other way, personally. He’s a writer who remains wholly human in my mind, as a result. As much as we must resist “an emerging hagiography of Saint Mark”, we should also resist attempts to posthumously problematise him, at least if the reason for doing so is to subject him to the ever-increasing pressures of the dull academic landscape he stood in firm opposition to.
It is in this sense that I struggled with the perception of his books as excitingly accessible but academically flawed documents, embarrassing today for their lack of foresight about the academic trends of 2020, and yet repeatedly it felt like his conference critics had not given his work the attention they wished he had paid to their own particular bugbears. Mark’s claims of cultural stagnation are easily quashed, someone said, if you get online and have “a little curiosity” to push you into new zones. The same could be said of approaches to Mark’s own works. The books are easily accessible and digestible — as was the intention — but the meat was often found on his blog, purposefully disconnected from academia’s self-referential circuits of citation.
I don’t say these things to shit on anyone’s research after the fact — I, too, am merely a touchy sod — but one presentation in particular has stuck in my craw and has made me think a lot, over the days since, about what precisely Mark’s work was trying to critique and how those who disagreed with this at the Capitalist Realism conference were also, I’d argue, those most guilty of enacting it.
On the second day, Henry McPherson presented an interesting paper on the relationship between practices of mindfulness and improvisation. Reflecting on his own practice as an improviser, Henry considered how the corporate spirituality of McMindfulness is evidently well meaning but limited and captured. However, he argued that radical potentials are nonetheless still present within some of the less popular “presence practices”.
(After the conference, I was welcomed home to London by a galley of Matthew Ingram’s forthcoming book Retreat: How The Counterculture Invented Wellness which, interestingly, seems to draw a firm line between these two trends rather than attempt hold them in contradistinction with one another.)
However, I unfortunately found it a difficult paper to make head or tail of. Whilst the argument was incredibly clear, thoroughly referenced and carefully articulated, it felt like it was so polished that the medium immediately began to drastically undermine the message. A gesture of interrupting his own introduction by dragging a violin against the wall of the lecture hall was left subsumed by citations and reduced to precisely that — a gesture. All I could think throughout was: “What is it to present such a straight-jacketed academic paper about something as liberating as free improvisation?” It felt like mindfulness’s capture by a corporate spiritualism — a practice advertised as a paltry moment of internal freedom within the drudgery of the work day — was mirrored by a demonstration of improvisation’s capture by an academic affectlessness and propriety, providing a momentary creative outlet that nonetheless had to be justified by the REF-scoring expectations of the institution at large.
No offence to Henry, of course, who was a great contributor to proceedings throughout the weekend. As with Mark, the fault does not lie with him but rather the sort of institution that can disengage itself from the modes of critique it produces. (I had every intention of asking him about the relationship between his research and his practice but, unfortunately, we ran out of time.)
I also want to affirm that the free improvisation performance that followed the conference — intentionally and hilariously inserting a sort of bureaucratic anti-production into its set-up, where audience members were encourage to offer “performance reviews” mid-performance — was a welcome addition to the schedule, in much the same way that we have always emphasised the schism of a club night to follow the Mark Fisher Memorial Lectures, offering up the dance as an equally powerful way of articulating Mark’s beliefs and ideas beyond the propriety of the lecture theatre.
This is because Mark, too, was an “improvisor”. What is blogging, at its best, if not a rejection of academia’s “business ontology”; a kind of public writing performance through which success and failure are both potentials, equally embraced? Where writing is done for its own sake rather than to bolster your rating on Academia.edu or, again, to boost your REF score?
These free improvisors may have found Mark’s academic and musical references dated and oddly basic for someone supposedly on the cusp of cultural thinking, but what they tragically missed from Mark’s thinking was the way in which it offers those seeking new ways of living and thinking a practical tool kit through which to think differently. It doesn’t give you free improvisation on the one hand and academic propriety on the other. It is free action all the way down. It is getting our of your head through your head; getting out of the world through the world.
We might note here that, in mourning the separation of the mainstream and the experimental, Mark’s hauntological critiques apply as much to the stagnation of the avant-garde as they do to the stagnation of pop culture.
I’m reminded here of that Jerry Saltz article that left the art world shook back in 2014: “Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?” The title more or less says it all. Is the same not true of an avant-garde musical tradition? Saltz writes:
Galleries everywhere are awash in these brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less handsome, harmless, supposedly metacritical, and just “new” or “dangerous”-looking enough not to violate anyone’s sense of what “new” or “dangerous” really is, all of it impersonal, mimicking a set of preapproved influences… It feels “cerebral” and looks hip… Replete with self-conscious comments on art, recycling, sustainability, appropriation, processes of abstraction, or nature, all this painting employs a similar vocabulary… This is supposed to tell us, “See, I know I’m a painting — and I’m not glitzy like something from Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons.” Much of this product is just painters playing scales, doing finger exercises, without the wit or the rapport that makes music. Instead, it’s visual Muzak, blending in.
Saltz mention of music here stings a bit. Similarly, gestures of free improvisation do not go far enough in an academic institution, less so when draped superficially in the latest moral-academic trends. In fact, it was particularly telling that the other musics mentioned during the conference that had far more political resonance were Latin American protest songs or even something like Squarepusher’s “MIDI sans Frontières”. (The latter was mentioned alongside Aphex Twin’s face-mapping in an excellent presentation by Adrien Ordonneau who discused the relationship between embodied protest and so-called “IDM” which has surely shaked off its “armchair listening” reputation by now!). These protest songs are, effectively, pop songs. But more than that, they were musics that draw in the world outside only to push it — critically — back out again.
This is something emphasised again and again and again by someone like David Toop, who notably gave the keynote at the CeReNem “Ambient @ 40” conference last year (available to read here):
Toop, as an improvisor, appreciates the outsideness of sound, understood culturally and phenomenologically. His paper presented at Huddersfield asks a number of pertinent questions about music’s capture within capitalist infrastructures that resonate here, in ways that the Huddersfield students seemed reluctant to accept and engage with. He writes, for instance:
Last year Pitchfork magazine asked me to write an introductory essay for an ambient top one-hundred they were about to unleash. I declined and when I saw the hundred choices felt glad I had. A lot of it was genre ambient, industry ambient if you like, very little to do with the softening expansions of boundaries I was proposing in Ocean of Sound in 1995 and nothing to do with the field of possibilities that existed when I recorded for Brian Eno’s Obscure label in 1975. […] So the question now is what ambient means at this point in time. Is it ossified, cut off from change, eternally fixed as journalists’ shorthand for any droning, slow, dreamy, drifting, barely changing, consonant electronic music? Does it supply a perennial refuge for temporarily forgetting the precarity, hysteria and threat of current conditions or can it be a vehicle for engaging with those same conditions?
Regarding the last question in particular, following the Capitalist Realism conference, I am more readily inclined to agree with the former. The free improvisors engaged in a self-aware performance, for sure, in which capitalist work ethics were referents in the performance’s structure but the playing itself was hard to interpret as anything other than “a perennial refuge”. It was less critical and more panto. Their improvisation was less an attack on expectations and more of a welcome break for the academic brain.
Later still, Toop’s comments on ambient skewer the context improvisation was placed in here. Replace “ambient” with “improvisation” and the effect is the same:
So ambient was instrumentalised — it was conceived as a functional asset to well-being, an optimisation or facilitation of a thoughtful, tranquil approach to life — and given the fractious, stressful nature of most airports, any calming instrument is welcome. The music’s potential for this role is unsurprising. Ambient formed its own specialised branch, off-shooting sometimes in a reactive way, sometimes more benevolently, from a family tree that included yoga, relaxation and meditation tapes, Muzak, easy listening, background and library music and records of bird song aimed at ornithologists, the ultimate use-value lineage.
Of course, Toop knows that this is highly resonant. He adds: “The same criticism, if it is a criticism, of instrumentalisation and self-optimisation could be levelled at other genres, maybe all genres of music.”
Any highlighting of these tensions within the Capitalist Realism conference is not intended to be any comment on the skills of the performers at the conference, who were really excellent — they demonstrated collectivised attentiveness that is necessary for any good instance of free improvisation — but simply playing the space of the institution did nothing to assuage their complicity in its politically restrictive flows.
This is the lesson for cultural practitioners still to be found within Mark’s writings. Your radical practices, particularly when practiced within the bounds of the academic institution, wilt far quicker than you might think they do. But this isn’t meant to be a bleak demoralisation — a further penchant for which was also repeatedly laid at Mark’s feet. (Shout out to Nic Clear for affirming, in the final panel discussion, that Mark often made him laugh — really laugh.) This is precisely why popular modernism was so interesting for Mark, particularly when seen from within the field of academia. It takes far less effort for pop to weird itself. (A point made poignantly by John Harries, Rose Dagul & Joe Newman over Skype, in a presentation that was, very intriguing, improvisational in nature, with the structure of the paper given over to a dice throw, with a member of the trio reading a passage depending on the number assigned to it.) A contemporary post-classical avant-garde has a lot more work to do, and that work just doesn’t look like a sound use of Chicago style referencing.
This is part of hauntology’s observations about the treacle through which contemporary culture must pull itself. It is a danger that continues to stalk all cultural production even today. When Simon Reynolds described a contemporary conceptronica — with admiration we might note, but no one likes being neologismed — powerfully channelling the same sorts of cultural protest that defined post-punk, he did so as if to raise a certain awareness around experimental music’s next phase of capture that hangs like the sword of Damocles precisely in this REF-supporting mode:
The agit-prop sector within conceptual electronica is woke music, in all senses. “Using cacophony and unusual sonics, I reject the passive experience of listening, and try to use sounds that are active to wake the listener up and to bring them into the moment,” [Chino] Amobi has said. This rhetoric recalls the post-punk band This Heat, whose song “Sleep” agitated against consumerism and entertainment as mass sedation. In conceptronica and post-punk alike, there’s a similar interest in demystification and seeing through the blizzard of lies: When Lee Gamble uses the late theorist Mark Fisher’s term “semioblitz” — the desire-triggering, anxiety-inciting bombardment of today’s infoculture — I’m reminded of Gang of Four’s 1979 song “Natural’s Not In It” and its line about advertising as “coercion of the senses.”
But you can also sense some of the same problems that afflicted post-punk four decades ago, especially in its later years, when it reached an impasse. With conceptronica, there can be a feeling, at times, of being lectured. There’s the perennial doubt about the efficacy of preaching to the converted. That in turn points to a disquieting discrepancy between the anti-elitist left politics and the material realities of conceptronica as both a cultural economy and a demographic — the fact that it is so entwined with and dependent on higher education and arts institutions.
Is it possible that Mark was guilty of this himself? It may have had a part in encouraging it but he always retained one foot outside, in his immediate environment. That should not be the basis for critique if all we are going to do is do the academy’s work for it.
We’ve seen the problems with this on this blog already very recently with Slash, the Last Women of History. I didn’t think I’d see the same thing again so soon. But then, why not? It’s endemic and requires a vigilance from all of us — but especially those of us attending conferences about radicality we wish to see in the world. If you’re going to hurl critiques from such a platform, aim them firmly at the glass house that surrounds you. Anything less than this doomed to impotence.
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Announcing the Mobile Data Plan API
. We are looking forward to your comments and we are available at: [data-plan-api@google.com].
Posted by Andreas Terzis, technical lead at Google Access, & Jessica Xu, product manager at YouTube.
More than half of YouTube watch time happens on mobile devices, with a large and rapidly increasing fraction of this time spent on cellular networks. At the same time, it is common for users to have mobile data plans with usage limits. Users who exhaust their quota can incur overage charges, have their data connections turned off and speeds reduced. When this happens, application performance suffers and user satisfaction decreases.
At the root of this problem lies the fact that users do not have an easy manner to share data plan information with an application, and, in turn, applications cannot optimize the user’s experience. In an effort to address this limitation we have worked with a few partners in the mobile ecosystem to specify an API that improves data transparency.
At a high level, the API comprises two parts. First, a mechanism for applications to establish an anonymous identifier of the user’s data plan. This new, Carrier Plan Identifier (CPID), protects the user’s identity and privacy. Second, a mechanism that allows applications, after establishing a CPID, to request information about the user’s data plan from the mobile network operator (MNO). Applications communicate with MNOs using HTTPS and the API encodes data plan information in an extensible JSON-based format.
We believe the API will improve transparency and Quality of Experience (QoE) for mobile applications such as YouTube. For example, the cost of data can depend on the time of day, where users get discounts for using the network during off-peak hours. For another example consider that while users with unlimited data plans may prefer high resolution videos, users who are about to exceed their data caps or are in a busy network may be better served by reduced data rate streams that extend the life of the data plan while still providing good quality.
Cellular network constraints are even more acute in countries where the cost of data is high, users have small data budgets, and networks are overutilized. With more than 80% of views from outside the United States, YouTube is the first Google application conducting field trials of the Mobile Data Plan API in countries, such as Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Guatemala, where these characteristics are more prominent. These trials aim to bring data plan information as an additional real-time input to YouTube’s decision engine tuned to improve QoE.
We believe the same data plan information will lay the foundation for other applications and mobile operators to innovate together. This collaboration can make data usage more transparent to users, incentivize efficient use of mobile networks, and optimize user experience.
We designed the API in cooperation with a number of key partners in the mobile ecosystem, including Telenor Group, Globe Telecom and Tigo, all of which have already adopted and implemented this API. Google also worked with Ericsson to support the Mobile Data Plan API in their OTT Cloud Connect platform. We invite other operators and equipment vendors to implement this solution and offer applicable products and services to their customers.
The Mobile Data Plan API specification is available from this link. We are looking forward to your comments and we are available at: [data-plan-api@google.com].
標籤： YouTube Engineering & Developers Blog
A look into YouTube’s video file anatomy
Audio/video files contain audio and video media which can be played or viewed on some multimedia devices like a TV or desktop or smartphone. Each pixel of video data is associated with values for brightness and color which tells the display how that pixel should appear. A quick calculation on the data rate for the raw video data shows that for 720p video at 30 frames per second the data rate is in excess of 420 Mbits/sec. Raw audio data rates are smaller but still significant at about 1.5 MBits/sec for 44.1 KHz sampling with 16 bits per sample. These rates are well in excess of the 10’s of MBits/sec (at most) that many consumers have today. By using compression technology that same > 400 MBits/sec of data can be expressed in less than 5 Mbits/sec. This means that audio and video compression is a vital part of any practical media distribution system. Without compression we would not be able to stream media over the internet in the way everyone enjoys now.
There are three main components of media files today: the container, the compressed bitstream itself and finally metadata. The bitstream (called the video and audio “essence”) contains the actual audio and video media in a compressed form. It will also contain information about the size of the pictures and start and end of frames so that the codec knows how to decode the picture data in the right way. This information embedded in the bitstream is still not enough though. The “container” refers to the additional information that helps the decoder work out when a video frame is to be played, and when the audio data should be played relative to the frame. The container often also holds an index to the start of certain frames in the bitstream. This makes it easier for a player system to allow users to “seek” or “fast forward” through the contents. The container will also hold information about the file content itself like the author, and other kinds of “metadata” that could be useful for a rights holder or “menu” on a player for instance. So the bitstream contains the actual picture and audio, but the container lets the player know how that content should be played.
Standardization of containers and codecs was vital for the digital video industry to take off as it did in the late 1990s. The Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) was the consortium responsible and they are still active today. The interaction between containers and codecs has been so tight in the past that quite often the container and the codec might have the same name, because they arise from the same standards document. Needless to say, there are many different standards for the various components in a media file. Today we have MPEG and the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) emerging as the two major bodies engaged in creating new media compression and distribution technology. This is what makes the job of YouTube so challenging. We must correctly decode your content despite the endless variety, and despite the frequent errors and missing component in uploaded files. We deal with thousands of combinations of containers and codecs every week.
The plot below shows the percentage of files uploaded having the same container month on month over the last five years. Each container is associated with the same color over time. The legend is ordered from the bottom up. The container type used in the largest fraction of uploads is at the bottom.
In 2011, MP4 (.mp4), Audio Video Interleave (.avi), Flash Video (.flv), Advanced Systems Format (.asf) and MPEG Transport Stream (.ts) were more equally distributed than they are now. But over the years MP4 has overtaken them all to become the most common ingest container format. Open source formats like WebM and Matroska seem to have been slowly gaining in popularity since about 2012, which is when we started rolling out the open source VP9 codec. Windows Media files (using the .asf container) and Flash Video have declined significantly. On the other end of the scale, files using Creative Labs video containers (for instance), which were popular before 2011, are hardly ever seen in our ingest today.
The history of ingested codec types reflects the speed with which new codecs are adopted by hardware manufacturers and the makers of software editing and conforming systems. The chart below looks at the top ten video codecs back in 2011 and reveals how they have fared since then in our ingest profile. The VP range of codecs (VP6 - VP8) do still figure in our ingest today and in fact compared to 2011, VP8 ranks seventh in our top ten in 2015. Clearly H.264 is the dominant codec we see in use for upload to YouTube now, but MPEG4 and Windows Media bitstreams are still significant. This is very different from the situation in 2011 when almost every codec had a significant share of our ingest profile. This reflects how heterogeneous the video compression landscape was five years ago, with no dominant compression technology. The chart shows how rapidly the ecosystem moves to adopt a compression technology as soon as it proves itself: just five years. Uploads from mobile devices have also driven this trend as efficient codec technology enables more uploads from low power devices with low bandwidth availability. In that time we have seen the almost complete erosion of Flash Video (FLV) and MPEG1/2 video for upload to YouTube, which all appear to have reached some kind of low volume steady state behavior in our ingest.
The situation with audio codecs follows similar trends. The chart below shows the top 15 codecs we see on ingest, measured over 2015. Five years ago we saw a very heterogeneous landscape with Raw audio data (PCM), Windows Media (WMA), MPEG and Advanced Audio (AAC) all contributing significant proportions. Over the intervening time the AAC codec has grown to dominate the profile of audio codecs, but PCM, WMA and MP3 are still significant. It's interesting that we see a pretty steady rate of media with no audio at all (shown as “No Audio”), although the total proportion is of course small. The use of the VORBIS open source audio codec got a boost in 2012 when the new version was released. Although it is hard to see from the chart, OPUS follows a similar pattern with uploads starting to kick off in late 2012 once the reference software was available and then a boost in uploads in 2013 coinciding with the next API release.
But what about the nature of video and audio media itself? Is there evidence to show that capture is increasing in resolution and color fidelity? This section reinforces the law that “in the internet everything gets bigger with time.”
The chart below stacks the proportions of each resolution in our ingest against month. The legend shows the top ten resolutions by proportion of ingest as measured over the last year, with the topmost label being the largest proportion. There is always some disparity between “standard” picture sizes and the actual uploaded sizes. Those which do not fall into the labels used here are allocated to “OTHER.” Although the vast majority of our ingest shows standard picture sizes, that “OTHER” category has been persistently steady, showing that there will always be about 10 percent of our uploaders who upload non-standard sizes. The trend is clearly toward bigger pictures, with 480p dominating five years ago and HD (720p and 1080p) dominating now. It is interesting that we do not see step changes in behavior but rather a gradual acceleration to higher pixel densities. The 480p resolution does appear to be in a permanent decline however. 720p seems set to replace “vanilla” 480p in about a year.
With the 4K and 8K formats we see rapid take-up reflected in our ingest. The chart below breaks out just these two resolutions. Although understandably small as a proportion of the whole YouTube ingest profile, these formats are still significant and we notice that the take-up accelerated/spiked once announcements were made in 2013 (4K) and 2015 (8K). What is even more interesting is that the upload of 4K content started well before “official” announcement of the support. Our creators are always pushing the limits of our ingest and this is good evidence.
We observe that an increasing percentage of our media, which contain audio, contain stereo audio tracks as shown below in red. We also show here the relative amount of files having no audio (about 5 percent in 2015), and the trend is similar here as in the audio codec chart shown previously. A growing proportion of tracks contain 5.1 material but that is swamped by the amount of mono and stereo sound files. Making a linear prediction of the curves below would seem to imply that mono audio will decline to less than 5 percent of ingest in just over a year’s time.
Interlacing is still with us. This is the legacy TV broadcast practice of constructing a video frame from two half height images that record the odd and even lines of the final frame, but at slightly different times. The fraction of our content that is interlaced on upload appears to be roughly 2-3 percent averaged over the last five years and there is no sign of that actually dwindling. This is perhaps because of the small but significant made-for-TV content that is uploaded. The reasons for the observed rapid changes in some months are intriguing. One suggestion is correlation with unusually large volume TV coverage e.g. 2012 Olympics and the U.S. election.
We are continually working on our ability to reproduce color faithfully between ingest and display. This is a notoriously challenging task across the consumer display industry for TV’s, monitors and mobile devices. The first step to color nirvana is the correct specification of the color space in the associated video file. Although color space specifications have been in place for some time, it has taken a long while for file-based content to properly represent this data across a wide range of consumer devices. The chart below reflects our observations of the top five spaces we see. We started collecting information in 2012 and compared to the stability in codecs and containers, the specification of color spaces in video data is clearly still evolving. It is only in the last three years that we have started to observe more consistent color labeling of video data, and as the chart shows below, BT709 (the default color space for HD resolution) has emerged as the dominant color space definition. At the end of 2015 there was still an alarmingly large proportion of video files without any color information, more than 70 percent. Note that the vertical axis on the chart below starts from 70 percent. The trend in that proportion is downwards and if we extend our curve of the decline in unspecified color spaces it would appear that it will be about a year before we can expect to see the majority of files having some color specification, and two years for almost all files to contain that metadata. We have just started to observe files expressing the recent BT2020 color space, being ingested at the end of 2015. These of course account for a tiny proportion of ingest (< .005 percent). It does herald the start of the HDR technology rollout though (as BT2020 is a color space associated with that format) and reflects various announcements about HDR capable devices made at CES 2016.
The chart below shows how the use of a range of frame rates has actually not changed that much over time. As expected the U.S. and EU standards of 30 and 25Hz respectively, dominate the distribution. Less expected is that low frame rates of 15fps and lower also significantly impact our ingest. This is because of the relatively large proportion of educational material including slide shows, as well as music slide decks that are uploaded to YouTube. That sort of material tends to be captured at low frame rates. High frame rate (HFR) material (e.g. from 48Hz and upwards) is a steady flow especially since the announcement of HFR support in the YouTube player in 2014. Before 2014, the ceiling of our output target video was 30fps but since then we have raised the ceiling to 60fps. However the trend is not increasing as much as is say 1080p ingest itself. This possibly reflects bandwidth constraints on upload as well as the fact that most capture today especially on mobile devices still defaults to 25 or 30fps.
We continuously analyze both a wide angle and close up view of the video file activity worldwide. That has given us a unique perspective on the evolution of video technology. In a sense the data is a reflection of the consensus of device manufacturers and creators in the area of media capture and creation. So we can see the growing agreement around video codecs, frame rates and stereo audio. Color space specification is still very poor however, and some expected consensus have not emerged. For example in the area of HFR content creation, 60+ fps is not quite yet on a growth curve as HD resolution has been over the last year.
The data presented here show that even in the last five years the variability in data types and formats is reducing. However, as with many broadcasters and streaming sites we see enough variability in our ingested file profiles that we remain keen on standardization activities. We look forward to continuing engagement of the YouTube and Google engineering community in SMPTE, MPEG and AOM activities.
Even with the dominance of certain technologies like H.264/AAC codecs and the MOV type containers, there will always be a small but significant portion of audio video data that falls outside the “consensus.” These small proportions are important to us however, because we want you to be confident that we’re going to do our darndest to help you broadcast yourself no matter what device you use to make your clip.
Anil Kokaram, Tech Lead/Engineering Manager, AV Algorithms Team, recently watched "Carlos Brathwaite's 4 sixes," Thierry Foucu, Tech Lead Transcoder Team, recently watched "Sale of the Century," and Yang Hu, Software Engineer, recently watched "MINECRAFT: How to build wooden mansion."
Over 1 billion people use YouTube, watching hundreds of millions of hours of content all over the world everyday. We have been receiving content at a rate exceeding 100 hours/min for the last three years (currently at 400 hours/min). With those kinds of usage statistics what we see on ingest actually says something about the state of video technology today.
Video files are the currency of video sharing and distribution over the web. Each file contains the video and audio data wrapped up in some container format and associated with metadata that describes the nature of the content in some way. To make sure each user can “Broadcast yourself” we have spent years building systems that can faithfully extract the video and audio data hidden inside almost any kind of file you can imagine. That is why when our users upload to YouTube they have confidence that their video and audio will always appear.
The video and audio data is typically compressed using a codec and of course the data itself comes in a variety of resolutions, frame rates, sample rates and channels (in the case of audio). As technology evolves, codecs get better, and the nature of the data itself changes, typically toward higher fidelity. But how much variety is there in this landscape and how has that variety changed with time? We’ve been analyzing the anatomy of files you’ve been uploading over the years and think it reflects how video technology has changed.
Audio/video file anatomy
標籤： video files , youtube , YouTube Engineering & Developers Blog
New YouTube live features: live 360, 1440p, embedded captions, and VP9 ingestion
: About a year ago we announced the launch of 360-degree videos at YouTube, giving creators a new way to connect to their audience and share their experiences. This week, we took the next step by introducing support for 360-degree on YouTube live for all creators and viewers around the globe.
To make sure creators can tell awesome stories with virtual reality, we’ve been working with several camera and software vendors to support this new feature, such as ALLie and VideoStitch. Manufacturers interested in 360 through our Live API can use our YouTube Live Streaming API to send 360-degree live streams to YouTube.
Other 360-degree cameras can also be used to live stream to YouTube as long as they produce compatible output, for example, cameras that can act as a webcam over USB (see this guide for details on how to live stream to YouTube). Like 360-degree uploads, 360-degree live streams need to be streamed in the equirectangular projection format. Creators can use our Schedule Events interface to set up 360 live streams using this new option:
Check out this help center page for some details.
1440p live streaming: Content such as live 360 as well as video games are best enjoyed at high resolutions and high frame rates. We are also announcing support of 1440p 60fps resolution for live streams on YouTube. Live streams at 1440p have 70 percent more pixels than the standard HD resolution of 1080p. To ensure that your stream can be viewed on the broadest possible range of devices and networks, including those that don’t support such high resolutions or frame rates, we perform full transcoding on all streams and resolutions. A 1440p60 stream gets transcoded to 1440p60, 1080p60 and 720p60 as well as all resolutions from 1440p30 down to 144p30.
Support for 1440p will be available from our creation dashboard as well as our Live API. Creators interested in using this high resolution should make sure that their encoder is able to encode at such resolutions and that they have sufficient upload bandwidth on their network to sustain successful ingestion. A good rule of thumb is to provision at least twice the video bitrate.
VP9 ingestion / DASH ingestion: We are also announcing support for VP9 ingestion. VP9 is a modern video codec that lets creators upload higher resolution videos with lower bandwidth, which is particularly important for high resolution 1440p content. To facilitate the ingestion of this new video codec we are also announcing support for DASH ingestion, which is a simple, codec agnostic HTTP-based protocol. DASH ingestion will support H.264 as well as VP9 and VP8. HTTP-based ingestion is more resilient to corporate firewalls and also allows ingestion over HTTPS. It is also a simpler protocol to implement for game developers that want to offer in game streaming support with royalty free video codecs. MediaExcel and Wowza Media Systems will both be demoing DASH VP9 encoding with YouTube live at their NAB booths.
We will soon publish a detailed guide to DASH Ingestion on our support web site. For developers interested in DASH Ingestion, please join this Google group to receive updates.
Embedded captions: To provide more support to broadcasters, we now accept embedded EIA-608/CEA-708 captions over RTMP (H.264/AAC). That makes it easier to send captioned video content to YouTube and no longer requires posting caption data over side-band channels. We initially offer caption support for streams while they are live and will soon support the transitioning of caption data to the live recordings as well. Visit the YouTube Help Center for more information on our live captioning support.
We first launched live streaming back in 2011, and we’ve live streamed memorable moments: 2012 Olympics, Red Bull Stratos Jump, League of Legends Championship, and Coachella Music Festival. We are excited to see what our community can create with these new tools!
Nils Krahnstoever, Engineering Manager for Live
Kurt Wilms, Senior Product Manager for VR and Live
Sanjeev Verma, Product Manager for Video Formats
Yesterday at NAB 2016 we announced exciting new live and virtual reality features for YouTube. We’re working to get you one step closer to actually being in the moments that matter while they are happening. Let’s dive into the new features and capabilities that we are introducing to make this possible:
Live 360: About a year ago we announced the launch of 360-degree videos at YouTube, giving creators a new way to connect to their audience and share their experiences. This week, we took the next step by introducing support for 360-degree on YouTube live for all creators and viewers around the globe.
標籤： NAB 2016 , virtual reality , YouTube Engineering & Developers Blog , YouTube live
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