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You won’t have to guess Kid Rock’s feelings on people who take a knee during the National Anthem.
Let’s just say he’s not shy …
"F*ck anyone who takes a knee or sits during our national anthem!" – Kid Rock https://t.co/bFCXHM0WkY — David Hookstead (@dhookstead) September 11, 2017
From The Daily Caller:
Amidst a lengthy, expletive rant about a variety of topics, the outspoken rockstar blasted players who are continuing Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest in his absence in the league. He didn’t sugarcoat it either. “F**k ANYONE who takes a knee or sits during our national anthem!,” the 46-year-old performer said.
He continued:
“Pretty sure if Russell Wilson or Tom Brady were doing it they would have no problem finding a job playing for any team they wanted in the NFL! So cut the bullsh*t!”
That.
All day long.
People! Pay NO attention to the garbage the extreme left is trying to create! https://t.co/FHUGyhgm2L — Kid Rock (@KidRock) September 11, 2017
Gonna get interesting, folks.
Meanwhile , #WhatsHisName remains seated during our national anthem… pic.twitter.com/g2tEK6IhJ4 — James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) September 10, 2017
Heh.
Related:
DAAAMN! David Frum gets his ass HANDED to him for comparing ‘spirit of 9/11’ to Charlottesville |
ANDY KING/Associated Press
Few athletes have left as deep an imprint on their sport as Kevin Garnett has on the NBA. As KG celebrates his 39th birthday, a collection of players, coaches and executives recount what made him such a unique and transformational figure over the last 20 seasons.
This is Part 2 of B/R's oral history of Garnett's NBA career. Part 1 is here and accessible through the links below.
Click to Other Sections
• Workout wonder
• Preps-to-pros pioneer
• Intensity is a constant state of mind
• What could have been
• Money makes the NBA go 'round
• Getting under everyone's skin
• Trouble with the Timberwolves
• Bound for Boston
• At long last, a ring
• Quirks, habits and virtues
• A joyous homecoming
Though Garnett quickly evolved into a dazzling, dominant player in Minnesota, he grew frustrated with the Timberwolves' postseason failures, opening the door for a career-changing trade to Boston, where he found ultimate success while honing a reputation as one of the league's most interesting characters.
Timber-woes
For most of his Minnesota career, Garnett was a superstar surrounded by bit players, a solo act in search of a worthy co-star.
The Timberwolves granted Stephon Marbury's wish on March 11, 1999, sending him to the Nets in a three-team trade that brought point guard Terrell Brandon, a two-time All-Star, to Minnesota. Though talented, Brandon was undersized (5'11"), and his career was cut short by injuries.
The next co-star to audition was Wally Szczerbiak, a sweet-shooting forward drafted with the sixth pick in 1999. But the chemistry was poor from the start and their relationship bottomed out when Garnett and Szczerbiak scuffled in the trainer's room in November 2000.
Chauncey Billups spent two years on the roster, from 2000-02, but he did not reach stardom until years later, in Detroit. Tom Gugliotta had his best seasons alongside Garnett, in 1996-97 and 1997-98, but the Timberwolves let him go after the 1998 lockout to save salary-cap room, presumably for Marbury.
Meanwhile, Garnett's behemoth contract, which was grandfathered in after the lockout, made it extraordinarily difficult for Timberwolves officials to acquire elite talent. And the Timberwolves sabotaged themselves along the way, agreeing to an illegal deal with Joe Smith that cost the franchise multiple first-round picks as part of the NBA's punishment.
Andrew D. Bernstein/Getty Images
Despite his immense talents, Garnett became a playoff footnote, losing in the first round seven straight years from 1997 to 2003, never winning more than 51 games in a season.
Flip Saunders, Timberwolves coach, 1995-2005; 2014-present: It was difficult. We traded Steph, we got Terrell, who was pretty good. We also got Wally Szczerbiak in the deal, who became an All-Star. What you have to have is not just a star, but you have to have two dynamic stars. To get a guy that maybe can be an All-Star—that might not be good enough back then.
Steve Aschburner, Timberwolves beat writer for Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 1994-2007: I think [Garnett] felt like Wally was overrated, I think he resented that this guy that was sort of becoming his sidekick without any real chemistry and not enough chops. … There was no chemistry there between them, at all.
Sam Mitchell, Timberwolves teammate, 1995-2002: A lot of that stuff is overblown. Kevin respected Wally, because Wally could play. Wally loved to play. Now, Wally wasn't the greatest defender, but when it came to scoring the basketball, Wally can score.
Kevin McHale, Timberwolves general manager 1995-2008: They were different people. They never seemed to have great chemistry, [but ] I don't think it was as bad as everybody said it was. They had their moments. Wally made an All-Star team with Kevin. He wasn't a great passer, wasn't a great creator. [But] he played well with Kevin. In my time there, nobody played better with Kevin than Gugliotta. You can look at some of the stuff they did together. Very, very impressive.
Flip Saunders: KG's the most unassuming superstar, in that he had more gratification passing the ball than scoring. So he didn't care about shooting, where Wally, that's all he cared about. So he got Wally a lot of shots.
Fernando Medina/Getty Images
Steve Aschburner: When Wally got his extension, [the media] broke the news to KG before shootaround. The look on Garnett's face—he was working his molars over the fact that this guy's going to be here long-term now, and being paid a whole bunch of money and that's going to get in the way of certain kinds of improvement they could make in that team.
Andy Miller, Garnett's agent since 1995: I think that that was the thing that probably caused the most turmoil. … Kevin always wants to be successful, always wants to win, wants the team to have success, wants everyone to shine. When you have constant frustration, always trying to plug a hole, and every year you end up with the same results, it's extraordinarily frustrating.
Terry Porter, Timberwolves guard, 1995-98: We just didn't have enough weapons. … You know, [Garnett] wasn't the type of guy that was going take over a team and carry a team back then. And they were in the Western Conference, so it became more of a challenge early on. I remember us playing Houston in the first round. He had a great series; we just didn't have enough.
Steve Aschburner: Glen Taylor pissed off his peers by signing Garnett to that contract, but nobody's team suffered worse than Glen Taylor's.
Finally, in 2003, the Timberwolves made two dramatic trades, acquiring point guard Sam Cassell from Milwaukee and swingman Latrell Sprewell from New York, providing Garnett the best supporting cast of his Minnesota career. The Timberwolves won 58 games, a franchise record, and Garnett won the Most Valuable Player award after averaging 24.2 points, 13.9 rebounds, 5 assists, 2.2 blocks and 1.5 steals.
NIKKI BOERTMAN/Associated Press
That spring, Garnett won the first two playoff series of his career, leading the top-seeded Timberwolves into the Western Conference Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, who had added Karl Malone and Gary Payton to the Shaquille O'Neal-Kobe Bryant core. But Cassell entered the series with a badly injured hip, sustained in the second round, and his play suffered. He sat down for good after Game 4 of the series, with the Wolves trailing 3-1. The Lakers prevailed in six games, and Garnett lost his best chance to bring a title to the Twin Cities.
Despite a 44-win season, the Timberwolves missed the playoffs the next year, then parted ways with Sprewell and Cassell. They have not made the postseason since.
Flip Saunders: We would have won that year. … We were the No. 1 seed. I still believe, if Sam wouldn't have got hurt, that we would have beat the Lakers and I think we probably would have beaten Detroit (in the Finals) that year.
Glen Taylor, Timberwolves owner: We went out and [acquired] those guys, [and spent] more money than we could afford. … I think everything went the way we planned it, except the injuries. And that's been our misfortune ever since, the god-darn injuries.
Dwane Casey, Timberwolves head coach, 2005-07: In conversation, [Kevin] would let it be known that that was something that he was frustrated with, that they broke up the team that had gone to the Western Conference Finals.
Steve Aschburner: He was really fed up. He wasn't the one raising his hand or making demands in the media to exit, because he is a very loyal person. But I think he felt kind of betrayed by the inability of McHale and the organization to come through for him.
Catherine Steenkeste/Getty Images
Terry Porter: [Garnett] knew at the end of the day, he was going to be judged by his playoff appearances.… He cares about how he's looked upon and what his legacy looks like.
Kevin McHale: He thought, "I have to do more. I have to do more." Really, there was nothing more he could do.
Steve Aschburner: I remember after the Boston-Cleveland [playoff series in 2010], when LeBron got eliminated by the Celtics. And Garnett told us from the podium, about how he told LeBron about how fast things go. To me, that was Garnett basically saying, "I wish I hadn't signed that last extension, because look how long it took me to get somewhere where I really could win." That was pretty telling.
The Trade
Charles Krupa/Associated Press
By 2007, Garnett and the Timberwolves had reached a crossroads.
The Sam Cassell-Latrell Sprewell era had been short-lived, with each star alienating the front office over contract demands. At age 31, Garnett's window to chase a championship was diminishing. And the Timberwolves, stymied by their own missteps, and handcuffed by Garnett's massive salary—and with another contract extension on the horizon—decided it was time to set a new course.
What was once inconceivable became essential: The franchise would have to trade the greatest player to ever have graced the uniform.
Glen Taylor: I said to Kevin, "It's gonna take us a while again." … And I think he kind of says, "I'd like to win." I say, "I'm not sure I'm gonna get you that here as fast as you want." So I would say that he kind of was unsure.
Kevin McHale: It was hard on everybody. That really came down to just our owner having—and I think Glen was more than fair with everybody—a number he wanted to sign everybody with, and he tried to get the cap more cap-friendly. Kevin, just said he wanted X amount. It came down to a financial decision. It was hard.
Glen Taylor: I think now he says, "Glen you traded me. I didn't want to be traded." But I'm not sure it was quite that clear. I think he sent me some messages that "I want to get on a [contending] team."
Nathaniel S. Butler/Getty Images
Danny Ainge, Celtics GM: Because Kevin and I were such close friends, we had numerous conversations over the years [about Garnett]. We realized that Paul [Pierce] and KG would be a great combination. We thought that they really complemented each other well. So we discussed the possibility of Paul going to Minnesota or KG coming to Boston, like which way is the best way to do it.
Phil Jackson, Lakers head coach, 1999-2004; 2005-2011: When I realized that [Garnett] was available and wanted to leave Minnesota, I put a big push on (to acquire him).
Andy Miller: Cleveland was involved. They were a distant third in the whole thing.
Glen Taylor: L.A. really wanted him. Well, I didn't know if I wanted him in the West. I thought I was getting better players. I thought L.A could not give me the players that Boston did.
The Lakers offered a package built around multi-skilled forward Lamar Odom and 19-year-old center Andrew Bynum, a promising second-year player who would eventually become an All-Star. Odom had a history of flaky behavior, however, and Bynum was unproven.
The Celtics' package was built around another talented, but still-developing young center, Al Jefferson, along with several other young players and draft picks.
Phil Jackson: Dr. [Jerry] Buss came to me and said, "I have a handshake agreement with Taylor, that he's going to come to L.A. But McHale hasn't concurred yet." So I said, "Well that's a good excuse." You always, as an owner, say, "I'll do this, but …" So I kept that hope out there, that he was gonna be a part of the Laker organization.
Taylor: Odom, I was a little afraid of. I thought Bynum was gonna be a star.
Miller: I think that what McHale was looking for, on top of picks, was a core young piece, and he was infatuated with Al Jefferson at the time.
David Sherman/Getty Images
Glen Taylor: It became the Lakers, and it became Boston. And they both said, what does [Garnett] want to get paid? And I told them what he wants to get paid. I told them the kind of contract. And those two teams said they would do it.
On July 31, 2007, the Timberwolves sent Garnett to Boston, in exchange for Al Jefferson, four other players and two first-round picks. Many experts considered the Lakers' offer of Odom and Bynum to be the stronger package. The deal between Ainge and McHale, close friends and former Celtics teammates, stoked suspicion that McHale was acting more in the interests of his former franchise.
Phil Jackson: I've always kind of hinted that, in fun. … Of course, it's easier to make a deal with someone you know. But the (main) thing was, get him out of the conference, get him to the East Coast, get him away from us, so we don't have to deal with him four times a year. So that makes sense. So that's understandable.
Glen Taylor: We went to Boston, and I got a deal with Boston and took it to Kevin, and he says, "No, I don't want to be traded." … Then they went out and got [Ray] Allen. I went back to Kevin and said to him, later on, "Well, they're still here, they want you." I thought he said, "OK" to me. I really did. … I don't know if he remembers it that way quite or not. Because he has said at different times, "I wished I could have stayed there." But I thought I asked him. I thought he agreed. In thinking back, my guess is Kevin wasn't sure which way he wanted to do it, and I made the decision for him, rather than he probably felt that I should have asked him again.
KG, Fulfilled
Brian Babineau/Getty Images
Ultimately, the chance to join two other future Hall of Famers, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen, persuaded Kevin Garnett to accept a trade to the Celtics, and to say goodbye to Minnesota, the only NBA home he had known.
In Boston, Garnett's impact was immediate and profound. The three stars were branded as co-equals, each dependent on the others to fulfill their championship dreams. But Garnett was the linchpin to the partnership, instantly becoming the Celtics' defensive conscience, their strongest voice and their emotional pulse.
The story of the Celtics' 2007-08 championship run is one of individual sacrifice. Garnett set the tone from Day 1, demanding a total commitment from everyone, then setting the example himself, by surrendering shots and individual glory.
The veterans all respected Garnett, and the Celtics' youngest starters, Kendrick Perkins and Rajon Rondo, were instantly drawn to his unique magnetism. They followed his lead in everything, and reflected his steely on-court persona.
Doc Rivers, Boston Celtics head coach, 2004-13: It was before our first practice—our first meeting with Paul, Ray and Kevin. The first thing he talked about is, "Hey, we all say we're going to win a title, but what are you going to give up?" He challenged us right away. He was not f-----g around, and I love that about him.
Andrew D. Bernstein/Getty Images
Sam Mitchell: I remember when I was coaching in Toronto (in 2007), and we played the Boston Celtics in an exhibition in Rome. And Doc Rivers and Ray Allen pulled me to the side. They was like, "Man we need you to talk to KG." I was like, "What's wrong?" They said, "Man, he's just so intense. He don't need to do all that." So they thought he was trying to impress them. I said, "Doc, Ray, he's like this every day. Every day."
Danny Ainge: He changed everybody, from coaches to trainers to massage therapists, to the entire organization. I think that it was just his energy and enthusiasm. But also, it was the fact that he believed. He had this strong faith in what the team could be.
Paul Pierce: It wasn't about no bulls--t now. … The attitude around there was very boot camp-like. We're gonna go in here and do our work every day, and the laughing and the joking, that's out the window until maybe after practice or on the bus.
Brian Scalabrine, Celtics forward, 2005-10: Over the course of 82 games, or 110-some games like we played, a lot of guys can get real loose. He never allowed that. One day Leon Powe and I were cracking up on Eddie House's tattoo. … [Garnett] was like, "C'mon, Scal, it's time to rock! What the 'F' are you doing?" And I was like, "You know what? You're right. It is time to rock." We're about to play the Dallas Mavericks and we're over here messing around. It was 55 (minutes) on the clock or something like that. He was locked in and focused. That's how it is with him. If you want to be on the team, that's how it is going to be.
Paul Pierce: It probably made some guys uncomfortable, maybe [some felt he] need[ed] to tone it down. But I'm like, "No, that's Kevin. Y'all tell him to tone it down like it's a weakness, but that's his strength. He's gotta be like this. He's getting ready."
Steve Babineau/Getty Images
Glen "Big Baby" Davis, Celtics forward, 2007-11: I think he goes down as one of the best leaders of all time, somebody that led by example, but also policed his teams and said what was right all the time, in spite of what other people think. You talk about a guy who made a sacrifice coming to Boston—his role changed, he was more of a defender. He was a guy that kind of facilitated and kept us all together.
Danny Ainge: Doc would harp on him every day, like, "You gotta score more, you gotta shoot more. You gotta quit passing and you gotta shoot." KG, it just wasn't in his nature. He was such a team guy, and he cared so much about his teammates, and he cared about the camaraderie and the unity of our team, and was greatly affected by people that went off the reservation.
Doc Rivers: He's the best superstar role player I've ever seen. He's a superstar that can do everything, yet he gave himself to the team and played a role for the team to win, no matter what that took away from his individual stuff. I don't know if there's any superstar I've ever been around that is that unselfish.
Danny Ainge: Kendrick (Perkins) was a very important piece to a championship puzzle. Kevin knew that. He sort of took Perk under his wing and he loved Perk for how hard Perk played. Paul was always a great player. But Paul, all of a sudden, didn't have to carry the load (as the sole leader). … KG's presence just took a burden off of Paul, and freed him up to be what he was, which was a great scorer.
Brian Babineau/Getty Images
Doc Rivers: He was prepared, you better be. If you messed up in shootaround, he knew it. So he kept me on the edge because you knew he was as prepared as the coaches, and it's rare you see that.
At the time the Celtics created their New Big Three, there were legitimate concerns about fit and chemistry, and legitimate questions about how long it might take for three towering talents to mesh. The answers came quicker than anyone could have predicted. The Celtics started the season 8-0, then ripped off two nine-game winning streaks, pushing their record to 29-3 on Jan. 5.
The Celtics finished with 66 wins, their best mark sine 1986. After a strenuous run through the Eastern Conference playoffs—it took seven games to beat Atlanta and Cleveland, six to beat Detroit—the Celtics landed in the Finals against their oldest rival (and the loser in the Garnett stakes), the Los Angeles Lakers.
Boston dominated, claiming the championship in six games and unleashing a raucous celebration at the new Boston Garden. Garnett averaged 18.2 points, 13 rebounds, three assists, 1.7 steals and one block per game in the series, while harassing the Lakers' Pau Gasol and piloting a Celtics defense that had the Lakers flummoxed.
As the green confetti fluttered, Garnett took the microphone and unleashed a primal scream for the ages, an instantly iconic moment in Finals history: "Anything is possssibllllle!"
Tyronn Lue, longtime friend of Garnett's, Cavaliers assistant coach: The proudest moment for me was when he won that championship, and I got a chance to see his emotions and how he reacted. It was the best thing for me.
Paul Pierce: Oh, man, he started crying. He broke down. When you saw that, it was just like, man, you felt him. You felt him. … And then he went to the ground. That's when you knew. When a guy breaks down, a guy with the personality of KG, [who] is so strong, and [he] breaks down, then it means something. It means something to you.
Jesse D. Garrabrant/Getty Images
Chris Webber: I talked to him before he went to Boston. I knew what that was about. Think about it, that was his only chance. … That goes down as one of my favorite sporting moments, seeing him win the championship, because I knew what he was saying.
The era of the New Big Three would last another four seasons, but Garnett, Pierce and Allen would never reach that pinnacle again. Their title defense was undermined by a knee injury that forced Garnett to miss the entire 2009 postseason. The Celtics returned to the Finals in 2010 to face the Lakers again, but they lost Perkins to an injury in Game 6 and lost an epic Game 7 that went down to the final minute.
Age and injuries eventually took their toll and the Celtics' preeminence soon faded as the power shifted to a new Big Three rising in South Beach.
Paul Pierce: I had no doubt in my mind—we probably would have won 70 games that year (2008-09) if KG was healthy. And the rings. So it's all a lot of what-ifs, but you have that through history, with a lot of teams who didn't stay healthy after they won.
Danny Ainge: It would have been nice to win two. We were close. … Kevin, he gave hope to our franchise every day for six years.
Quirks, Habits and Virtues
Winslow Townson/Associated Press
What do you see when you look at Kevin Garnett? Over the years, he's alternately been viewed as a warrior and a bully, a fierce defender and a dirty player, a kind spirit and a mean person, an intimidator and a mentor. He is a tough opponent—playing on the edge and sometimes over it—but a fiercely loyal teammate. His intensity sometimes seems to border on insanity. His game-day rituals are legendary and quirky.
Before introductions every night, Garnett will sit in solitude on the bench. Before tipoff, he will skip around the court, bellowing to the crowd. And he will bang his head into the basket stanchion several times, while muttering to himself and tying his shorts.
"He's still a little nuts," said former Nets teammate Mason Plumlee. "Even on the court, he's different, but in a good way, man."
Good, bad or otherwise, Garnett's personality is as unique as his game.
Sam Mitchell: He's gonna do the same routine. He stretches the same, he sits down on the floor in front of his locker at the same time. He has his hot packs for his knees at the same time. He puts his shoes on a particular way.
Kendrick Perkins, Celtics teammate, 2007-11: Before the jump ball, he goes to the sections of the fans and is like [pounding his chest several times], "Motherf-----s!" He'll say a whole lot of [stuff]. And the fans just go crazy. And then he started getting cheers and, and you feed off that, right?
Jim LaBumbard, former Timberwolves PR director, now with Toronto: Even when he comes into town with visiting teams, I would never go say hi to him pregame, because I knew he was just locked in in just that way. It would just be like talking to a wall.
Sam Mitchell: He's game mode, all day. You keep waiting to say, is he gonna burn out doing it? But he doesn't, man.
Paul Pierce: He's gonna eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Every game. We didn't even have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches until he got to Boston. So then he made our ball boys make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for everybody. When KG was eating them, everybody started eating them.
Mary Schwalm/Associated Press
Doc Rivers: Before Game 6 in the (2008) Finals when we beat the Lakers, I walked in the locker room, and Kevin gets [hyped] up to where sometimes he goes over the line. You could see it. I had him come in my office and sit. He's sitting there five, 10, 15 minutes. I don't say a word. I just go back to work. He's moving around and finally he says, "I'm in a timeout. I'm in timeout." I didn't even respond. You could hear him: "Phew" (exhaling). But you think about a guy who has been in the league that long and is still that jacked up for a game that you literally have to calm him down. That's my favorite story.
Kendrick Perkins: It was in a playoff game. So we were down 10 or something in the third, double figures, coming back in the fourth. I remember him coming back on the defensive end. And you know how you get into (a defensive stance), you want to get low, like before the man crosses halfcourt. He literally about crawled on the ground and got up off his knees, like "Let me see it!" that type of [thing]. It was like, damn.
Tyronn Lue: A lot of people do all their howling on the court and they're faking just for attention, but what he does is genuine. So one day we were at his house and we were watching Puff Daddy's show Making the Band, and in one of the scenes, some new guys came in and were trying to sing and were trying to compete against the guys who had been there. And KG just got so hyped, "Motherf----r, you've got to stand up for yours! You've got to fight! Motherf----r, you've got to come together!" He's going crazy, he's sweaty. And he just head butts the wall and put a hole in the wall of his house.
Paul Pierce: Most guys, you get warmed up but you're gonna have a slight sweat. Well, he'd have a full sweat, like he already played four quarters of a game. That’s just him getting his mind right, getting his body right, ready to go. Everybody's got their routine. That's his routine.
Flip Saunders: He hates change. If he had a chance, he’d keep 20 guys on the roster, and he'd pay those last five guys we had to cut. … He'd become attached to somebody in one week and didn’t want them to leave. So you’d always have to talk to him and kind of reason with him why you might be trading someone. And it’s funny, because many times the lower-end guys are the guys he has more of a soft spot, to try to help those guys out even more.
Sometimes, even opponents are graced by that softer side. For a young Dwyane Wade, it was when Garnett went out of his way to encourage him early in Wade’s rookie season, in 2003. Garnett followed up the next summer, too, seeking out Wade in Miami to offer his guidance and support. Countless young players have been mentored by Garnett over the last 20 years.
Nathaniel S. Butler/Getty Images
Dwyane Wade, Miami Heat guard, 2003-present: I was a young kid. This is Kevin Garnett, MVP of the league. But he believed in me at that time. He wasn't my teammate. I didn't even know him that much. …But he pulled me aside, he talked to me for that weekend, and he let me know that I can be a star in this league. So that confidence from a guy like that, man, just went a long way.
Mason Plumlee, Garnett teammate with the Nets, 2013-15: The first time I met him, he just told me, "Look, I've done it all. I've been an All-Star, I’ve been MVP, I've won a championship." So he’s like, "Everything that I tell you is for you. It's coming from a place of success, a place of—you know I want you to do well, because I've done it all." He's like, "I want to play and still be good, but I don't have to prove myself anymore." It's funny, he says that and then he plays as if to prove himself each night. I always remember that. That just gave me trust in everything he told me, that it wasn't for anything but my betterment.
Doc Rivers: He tries to teach the young guys professionalism first—not basketball. … He bought them suits. He'd bring them in and get them all wired up and buy two or three suits for them, so they're dressed right. He told them, "If you're coming to work, you're coming in a suit and tie. You come to go to work." I never had to tell our young guys about being on time with him. You had him doing it.
The ultimate Kevin Garnett quirk? He refuses to accept the fact that makes him so unique: that he's a 7-footer with the skills of a guard. Since his first day in the NBA, Garnett has insisted—to every coach, trainer and public-relations official—that he be listed as 6',11".
Sam Mitchell: Oh, he'd get mad. He never wanted to be 7-foot. I think he always felt like if you list him at 7-feet, you'd put him at center. He never really wanted to play center.
Flip Saunders: He doesn't like labels. He didn't want to be labeled a center. So I used to call him 6-foot-13, because he's really 7'1".
Jim LaBumbard: He was adamant, from Day 1. ... I think we just kept him at 6'11". We just rolled with it. We've had other people come to us with requests on weight and things like that. To me it wasn't that big a deal. I just kind of laughed at it.
Flip Saunders: He never let anyone measure him.
The Return
Jim Mone/Associated Press
Though notoriously change-averse, Kevin Garnett has waived his no-trade clause three times. He went to Boston in 2007 to chase championships. When that window closed in 2013, he moved to Brooklyn, to join another team with title hopes. And when that pursuit fizzled, Garnett consented to one last move: back to the place he calls 'Sota.
On Feb. 19, with the trade deadline approaching, the Nets shipped Garnett to the Timberwolves in a swap for 26-year-old forward Thaddeus Young. For the Nets, it was strictly a basketball move, a chance to get younger and more athletic. For the Timberwolves, it was strictly about Kevin Garnett—his past and his future.
There was sentimentality in the deal, sure, and perhaps some marketing strategy at work, too. Amid another losing season, the Timberwolves needed a move to reenergize the fan base. But Garnett's value now transcends stats, ticket sales or winning percentages.
Jordan Johnson/Getty Images
The Timberwolves wanted Garnett for his influence, for his ferocity and for his self-discipline, for the impression he will make on their promising young players—Andrew Wiggins, Anthony Bennett, Zach LaVine, Gorgui Dieng and Ricky Rubio.
Flip Saunders: I said, "You know, Kevin, you won a championship in Boston, but when people think about you, they're always going to think about you as a Timberwolf. That's when you were MVP, All-NBA, All-Defensive (team)." I thought that maybe there was a chance that he might want to come back and finish, because he never really did want to leave here.
Paul Pierce: I thought he made a good decision. I told him, "The people of Minnesota are really going to appreciate you more than they do in Brooklyn." And I think he felt that.
Jerry Zgoda: Basketball-wise, it made no sense, giving up a guy 26, Thad Young, for this guy. But here, it was a little bit of a fairy tale, him coming back. I was actually surprised how (positively) people reacted to it. I don't know if that was so much that they were hoping that it was the same guy they traded away in 2007, or just the fact of it's just a good story.
Glen Taylor: I'm happy. And I told him.
David Sherman/Getty Images
Andrew Wiggins, Timberwolves rookie: The first couple games we had, there were a lot of fans here at the beginning of the year. Then it started fading away a little bit. Then when KG came back, it was a packed house. A lot of fans came out, a lot of new faces, and you could just feel a different energy in the gym.
Jerry Zgoda: The night he came back was magic. You don't see that that much, especially in that arena. It was special.
Paul Pierce (who, as a member of the Wizards, played against Garnett in his first game back): Oh man, it was unbelievable. I haven't seen Minnesota like that since he left. It used to be one of the loudest buildings in the league when he was there. Then he left, it was like a ghost town.
Flip Saunders: The first road trip we came back on…the young guys were all in the back, three seats on each side. It was Lorenzo [Brown] and Zach and Wig. … So KG started talking about stories and different things, concepts and games. And these three guys were sitting there, like this [Saunders rests his chin on his crossed arms, staring intently]—their eyes, it was like they just saw Santa Claus. If I had a picture—they were riveted to their seats.
Anthony Bennett, Timberwolves forward: He's always a hard worker, always intense, always talkative. Everything about his vibe changed the locker room. … Someone missed a shot, he'll go to them, bring them back up. Just the little things, but it goes a long way for other players.
Flip Saunders: We're trying to get guys that are 20 to start playing like they're 23 or 24. … No one says it like he does. Even the players we have that are the veteran guys, like Gary Neal, say, "I never imagined that KG was this type of leader."
Jim Mone/Associated Press
Paul Pierce: He's going to give them an attitude. … He might not be that dominant KG, the MVP, the one dominating games. But his voice is louder than ever, in that locker room moreso I think than in Brooklyn.
Jerry Zgoda: He was having a dialogue with Zach LaVine quite a bit of time before (a game in Utah), giving him grief as much as anything. … Zach goes out and hits two big shots. I heard Garnett was going crazy in the dressing room watching it, saying, "That's my guy."
Flip Saunders: What KG brings, the other things, how he might help these other guys analytically be better, is more important than a low first-round pick or whatever it is.
Those who know Garnett best believe he will play another season or two, as a role player and mentor. After that, many believe Garnett will be given a share of the franchise, or perhaps seek to purchase the club himself, with an investment group. However the next chapter unfolds, it appears Garnett is back in Minneapolis to stay.
Paul Pierce: Let me tell you something, I heard KG say he was going to retire four years ago. In Boston. After like 2010 or '11, he was like this is it, this is it. He's still here.
Jerry Zgoda: I think he's going to be the next owner. He won't put the big money behind it, but he'll be the face of it, like Magic Johnson is with the Dodgers. I think that's why he agreed to do this.
Jim Mone/Associated Press
Sam Mitchell: He came home. You think about it, he's the only Timberwolf, period, in history that really means anything. … He's everything. He is everything.
Jerry Zgoda: There's not much to be proud of if you're a Wolves fan for the last 20 years, but he's the guy that defines all that is.
Howard Beck covers the NBA for Bleacher Report and is a co-host of NBA Sunday Tip, 9-11 a.m. ET on SiriusXM Bleacher Report Radio. Follow him on Twitter, @HowardBeck.
CREDITS
Howard Beck interviewed Danny Ainge, Paul Pierce, Flip Saunders, Sam Mitchell, Glen Taylor, Dwane Casey, Terry Porter, Christian Laettner, Jim LaBumbard, Phil Jackson, Gregg Popovich, John Hammond, John Nash, Jerry Zgoda, Steve Aschburner, Jonathan Abrams, Russ Granik, Ron Klempner, Kevin Johnson, Jose Calderon, Andy Miller, Mason Plumlee, Andrew Wiggins and Anthony Bennett.
Ethan Skolnick interviewed Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, Dirk Nowitzki, Chris Webber, Kendrick Perkins, Henry Walker and Tony Allen.
Ric Bucher interviewed Sonny Vaccaro, Brian Scalabrine and Alvin Gentry.
Jared Zwerling interviewed Doc Rivers, Glen Davis, Zach Randolph, Chris Bosh, Tyronn Lue and Joe Abunassar.
Kevin Ding interviewed Sam Cassell and Doc Rivers.
Jonathan Feigen interviewed Kevin McHale. |
African Traces in Central Mexico
About a hundred years ago Romualdo García was the photographer of choice in Guanajuato [GWAN-A-WHA-TOE], a wealthy mining town on the high central plateau of Mexico. As these images show, many of his subjects clearly had some African ancestry.
Usually Afro-mexicans are associated with the two coasts of Mexico. But they were never limited to the coasts. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they were brought to Guanajuato as slaves.
At that time, the area around Guanajuato was then the “Wild West” of New Spain, at the border between the great pre-hispanic civilizations of the center of Mesoamerica and the desert country of the nomads.
One of the richest silver veins in the world ran below the mountain ridges surrounding the town. Already it was pecked with mines. In the river valley below, the silver ore was crushed and refined, to be taken by mule to Veracruz on the east coast for shipment to Europe and to Acapulco on the west coast for shipment to Asia. On the hillsides, cowboys herded cattle, valuable as much for their hides which were turned into leather sacks to transport the ore as for their meat. And in the rich lower areas, huge haciendas were set up to grow the maize that fed the city and to breed horses and mules.
At once the end of the world and a central node in the world economy, at once rural and industrial, Guanajuato was a place settled by migrants from all over.
Fortune seekers–Spaniards, particularly Basques and Castellanos, Portuguese (possibly crypto jews), and French, and the odd German from the silver mining areas of Saxony–made their way to the area.
They were desperate for men to work the haciendas, mines and refineries, to be cowboys and muleteers, and for women to grind the maize that was the dietary staple.
Nahuas, Michoacanos, Otomis, and Chichimecas were brought from other parts of Mesoamerica. And they were joined by African slaves.
According to a document that appears to date from the 1580s, in the mining area of Guanajuato there were 400 Spanish, 500 horses, 800 mules and 800 slaves.
Although slavery was not officially abolished in Mexico until 1829, many Africans gained freedom much earlier. Some were freed by their owners, some bought their own freedom, and other simply escaped to the rough country around the Cañada de Negroes (Valley of Blacks).
In these rough frontier conditions, there was much mixing of the different groups. By the late eighteenth century when the Spanish crown ordered one of its periodic censuses, the priest in charge of filling out the forms for Marfil, a suburb of Guanajuato dominated by refineries, simply threw up his hands. It was just impossible to assign the local population to neatly divided racial categories.
It was equally impossible to make neat equations between race and class as these images make clear. María Elisa Velázquez who selected these and more from the archives in the Museo Alhóndiga de Granaditas in Guanajuato, points out that their clothes and bearing show them to have been “workers, hacendados, entrepreneurs, nurses, rancheros, servants, housewives, bureaucrats” of different social levels.
The research on Afro-mexicans in Guanajuato was pioneered by I Maria Guevara Sanguines who published her conclusions on the their long, tangled history there in her book, Guanajuato diverso. I was hugely privileged to attend her marvelous graduate seminar on colonial Guanajuato when I lived there.
I’m posting these images simply because I like them and readers are always so interested in the topic of Afro-Mexicans. But this is supposed to be a food blog, so what about their food? Maria always wanted to pursue this but I don’t think she ever had the opportunity.
And it’s really difficult to do so. The intermixing is one reason. Another is that the Africans would have found the long dry winters and brief rainy summers of this plateau at 7000 feet very different from the humid forests or grasslands of their homelands. Unlike the Africans who ended up on the coasts of Veracruz, this was not a climate hospitable to root crops or even to rice.
One possible trace of African food that has always intrigued me and that I have posted about before is the use of black eyed peas in areas close to the Cañada de Negros . True, black eyed peas could have been introduced from Spain or the Philippines as well as from Africa. But wherever they came from, it’s at least possible that their popularity in this particular area is one trace of African heritage since they are not widely used in Mexico.
Chiefly, though, enjoy these lovely images.
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Littlewood's law states that a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (defined by the law as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month.
History [ edit ]
The law was framed by Cambridge University Professor John Edensor Littlewood, and published in a 1986 collection of his work, A Mathematician's Miscellany. It seeks among other things to debunk one element of supposed supernatural phenomenology and is related to the more general law of truly large numbers, which states that with a sample size large enough, any outrageous (in terms of probability model of single sample) thing is likely to happen.
Description [ edit ]
Littlewood defines a miracle as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million. He assumes that during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, a human will see or hear one "event" per second, which may be either exceptional or unexceptional. Additionally, Littlewood supposes that a human is alert for about eight hours per day.
As a result, a human will in 35 days have experienced under these suppositions about one million events. Accepting this definition of a miracle, one can expect to observe one miraculous event for every 35 days' time, on average – and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.
See also [ edit ] |
Josh White • Two Little Fishes (and Five Loaves of Bread)
During this months investigations, I’ve been reminded a reoccurring theme throughout the Buddha’s teachings. Refraining from breaking the precepts is only half the journey. Positive actions just as important.
Here are some inspiring quotes from the Buddha, shared on Access to Insight;
Never underestimate the power of small gifts
“Even if a person throws the rinsings of a bowl or a cup into a village pool or pond, thinking, ‘May whatever animals live here feed on this,’ that would be a source of merit.”
Giving even one’s last meal
“If beings knew, as I know, the results of giving & sharing, they would not eat without having given, nor would the stain of miserliness overcome their minds. Even if it were their last bite, their last mouthful, they would not eat without having shared, if there were someone to receive their gift. But because beings do not know, as I know, the results of giving & sharing, they eat without having given. The stain of miserliness overcomes their minds.”
The rewards of giving
“These are the five rewards of generosity: One is dear and appealing to people at large, one is admired by good people, one’s good name is spread about, one does not stray from the rightful duties of the householder, and with the break-up of the body at death, one reappears in a good destination, in the heavenly worlds.” |
Winners at Sunday night’s Creative Arts Emmy Awards included actors Bob Newhart, Carrie Preston, Melissa Leo, Dan Bugatinsky and Lily Tomlin and reality hosts Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn, along with the reality show “Undercover Boss” and the variety special “The Kennedy Center Honors.”
Steven Soderbergh‘s “Behind the Candelabra” was the biggest winner, with eight Emmys.
The awards were handed out at the Nokia Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, and will be aired on FXX in an edited version on Saturday, Sept. 21, the day before the Primetime Emmys.
Also read: Creative Arts Emmys: ‘Behind the Candelabra’ Ruled the Night, But Bob Newhart Stole the Show
The nominees and winners:
Outstanding Host For A Reality Or Reality-Competition Program
Ryan Seacrest, American Idol
Betty White, Betty White’s Off Their Rockers
Tom Bergeron, Dancing With The Stars
Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn, Project Runway * WINNER
Cat Deeley, So You Think You Can Dance
Anthony Bourdain, The Taste
Outstanding Guest Actor In A Drama Series
Nathan Lane, The Good Wife
Michael J. Fox The Good Wife
Rupert Friend, Homeland
Robert Morse, Mad Men
Harry Hamlin, Mad Men
Dan Bucatinsky, Scandal * WINNER
Outstanding Guest Actress In A Drama Series
Margo Martindale, The Americans
Diana Rigg, Game Of Thrones
Carrie Preston, The Good Wife * WINNER
Linda Cardellini, Mad Men
Jane Fonda, The Newsroom
Joan Cusack, Shameless
Outstanding Guest Actor In A Comedy Series
Bob Newhart, The Big Bang Theory * WINNER
Nathan Lane, Modern Family
Bobby Cannavale, Nurse Jackie
Louis C.K., Saturday Night Live
Justin Timberlake, Saturday Night Live
Will Forte, 30 Rock
Outstanding Guest Actress In A Comedy Series
Molly Shannon, Enlightened
Dot-Marie Jones, Glee
Melissa Leo, Louie * WINNER
Melissa McCarthy, Saturday Night Live
Kristen Wiig, Saturday Night Live
Elaine Stritch, 30 Rock
Outstanding Variety Special
The Kennedy Center Honors * WINNER
Louis C.K.: Oh My God
Mel Brooks Strikes Back! With Mel Brooks And Alan Yentob
Saturday Night Live: Weekend Update Thursday (Part One)
12-12-12: The Concert For Sandy Relief
Outstanding Writing For A Variety Special
The 70th Annual Golden Globe Awards
Louis C.K.: Oh My God * WINNER
Night Of Too Many Stars: America Comes Together For Autism Programs Saturday Night Live: Weekend Update Thursday (Part One)
66th Annual Tony Awards
Outstanding Directing For A Variety Special
Louis J. Horvitz, The Kennedy Center Honors * WINNER
Bucky Gunts and Hamish Hamilton, London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Louis C.K., Ceremony Louis C.K.: Oh My God
Don Mischer, The Oscars
Michael Dempsey, 12-12-12: The Concert For Sandy Relief
Outstanding Special Class Programs
The 70th Annual Golden Globe Awards
London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony
The Oscars
Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel (Live From Lincoln Center)
66th Annual Tony Awards * WINNER
Outstanding Special Class – Short-Format Live-Action Entertainment Programs
Between Two Ferns
Burning Love
Childrens Hospital * WINNER
The Daily Show Correspondents Explain
Super Bowl XLVII Halftime Show Starring Beyoncé
30 Rock: The Webisodes
Outstanding Special Class – Short-Format Nonfiction Programs
Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee
Jay Leno’s Garage
The Office: The Farewells
Remembering 9/11 * WINNER
30 Rock: The Final Season
Top Chef: Last Chance Kitchen
Outstanding Interactive Program
Bravo’s Top Chef Interactive Experience
Game Of Thrones Season Three Enhanced Digital Experience
The Homeland SHO Sync Experience
Killing Lincoln
Night Of Too Many Stars: America Comes Together For Autism * WINNER
The Team Coco Sync Multi-Screen Experience
The Walking Dead Story Sync
Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media – Original Interactive Program (Juried award)
The Lizzie Bennett Diaries * WINNER
Outstanding Children’s Program
Good Luck Charlie
iCarly
Nick News With Linda Ellerbee – Forgotten But Not Gone: Kids, HIV & AIDS * WINNER
The Weight Of The Nation For Kids: Quiz Ed!
A YoungArts Masterclass
Outstanding Reality Program
Antiques Roadshow
Deadliest Catch
Diners, Drive-Ins And Dives
MythBusters
Shark Tank
Undercover Boss * WINNER
Outstanding Documentary Or Nonfiction Special
All the President’s Men Revisited
Crossfire Hurricane
Death and the Civil War (American Experience)
Ethel
Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Bin Laden * WINNER
Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series
The Abolitionists (American Experience)
American Masters * WINNER
The Men Who Built America
Through The Wormhole With Morgan Freeman
Vice
Outstanding Informational Series Or Special
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown * WINNER
Brain Games
Inside The Actors Studio * WINNER
Oprah’s Master Class
Stand Up To Cancer
Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking (Juried award)
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God * WINNER
Outstanding Writing For Nonfiction Programming
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain
The Dust Bowl, Dayton Duncan
Ethel, Mark Bailey
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God , Alex Gibney * WINNER
The Men Who Built America • A New War Begins, Stephen David, Patrick Reams, David C. White, Keith Palmer and Randy Counsman
Outstanding Directing For Nonfiction Programming
American Masters: Mel Brooks: Make A Noise, Robert Trachtenberg * WINNER
Ethel, Rory Kennedy
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God, Alex Gibney
Survivor: Live Finale And Reunion (Caramoan: Fans Vs. Favorites), Glenn Weiss
Survivor: Live Finale And Reunion (Philippines), Michael Simon
Outstanding Animated Program
Bob’s Burgers : O.T.: The Outside Toilet
Kung Fu Panda: Legends Of Awesomeness: Enter The Dragon
Regular Show: The Christmas Special
The Simpsons: Treehouse Of Horror XXIII
South Park: Raising The Bar * WINNER
Outstanding Short-Format Animated Program
Adventure Time: Simon & Marcy
Clarence
Disney Mickey Mouse Croissant de Triomphe * WINNER
Regular Show: A Bunch Of Full Grown Geese
Robot Chicken: Robot Chicken’s ATM Christmas Special
Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation (juried award)
Adventure Time: Puhoy, Andy Ristaino * WINNER
Disney Mickey Mouse Croissant de Triomphe, Jenny Gase-Baker * WINNER
Dickey Mickey Mouse Crossant de Triiomphe, Joseph Holt * WINNER
Disney TRON: Uprising, Alberto Mieglo * WINNER
Dragons: Riders of Berk, Andy Bialk * WINNER
The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror, Paul Wee * WINNER
Outstanding Voice-Over Performance
Lily Tomlin, An Apology To Elephants * WINNER
Seth MacFarlane, Family Guy
Alex Borstein, Family Guy: Lois Comes Out Of Her Shell
Bob Bergen, The Looney Tunes Show: We’re In Big Truffle
Sam Elliott, Robot Chicken: Hurtled From A Helicopter Into A Speeding Train
Seth Green, Robot Chicken DC Comics Special
Outstanding Art Direction For A Multi-Camera Series
The Big Bang Theory
How I Met Your Mother
MasterChef * WINNER
Two And A Half Men
2 Broke Girls
Outstanding Art Direction For A Single-Camera Series
Boardwalk Empire * WINNER
The Borgias
Downton Abbey
Game Of Thrones
True Blood
Outstanding Art Direction For A Miniseries Or Movie
American Horror Story: Asylum: I Am Anne Frank (Part 2)
American Horror Story: Asylum: Welcome To Briarcliff
Behind The Candelabra * WINNER
Phil Spector
SEAL Team Six: The Raid On Osama Bin Laden
Outstanding Art Direction For Variety Or Nonfiction Programming
Dancing With The Stars
London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony * WINNER
The Oscars
Saturday Night Live * WINNER
The Voice
Outstanding Casting For A Comedy Series
Girls
Modern Family
Nurse Jackie
30 Rock * WINNER
Veep
Outstanding Casting For A Drama Series
Downton Abbey
Game Of Thrones
The Good Wife
Homeland
House Of Cards * WINNER
Outstanding Casting For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special
American Horror Story: Asylum
Behind The Candelabra * WINNER
The Hour
Political Animals
Top Of The Lake
Outstanding Cinematography For A Multi-Camera Series
The Exes
How I Met Your Mother * WINNER
Mike & Molly
Two And A Half Men
2 Broke Girls
Outstanding Cinematography For A Single-Camera Series
Boardwalk Empire
Breaking Bad
Game Of Thrones
Homeland
House Of Cards * WINNER
Mad Men
Outstanding Cinematography For A Miniseries Or Movie
American Horror Story: Asylum
Behind The Candelabra
The Girl
Parade’s End
Top of the Lake * WINNER
Outstanding Cinematography For Nonfiction Programming
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown * WINNER
Ethel
Manhunt: The Inside Story Of The Hunt For Bin Laden
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God
The Men Who Built America
Outstanding Cinematography For Reality Programming
The Amazing Race
Deadliest Catch * WINNER
Project Runway
Survivor
Top Chef
Outstanding Commercial
The Chase • Grey Poupon
Inspired • Canon * WINNER
Jess Time • Google Chrome
Jogger • Nike
Outstanding Costumes For A Series
Boardwalk Empire
The Borgias * WINNER
Downton Abbey
Game Of Thrones
Once Upon A Time
Outstanding Costumes For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special
American Horror Story: Asylum
Behind The Candelabra * WINNER
The Girl
Killing Lincoln
Parade’s End
Phil Spector
Outstanding Costumes for a Variety Program or a Special
The 55th Annual Grammy Awards
The Men Who Built America
Portlandia * WINNER
Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing For A Drama Series
Breaking Bad: Dead Freight
Breaking Bad: Gliding Over All * WINNER
Game Of Thrones: The Rains Of Castamere
House Of Cards: Chapter 1
Mad Men: The Collaborators
Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing For A Comedy Series
Arrested Development: Flight Of The Phoenix
Louie: Daddy’s Girlfriend (Part 2)
Modern Family: Party Crasher
The Office: Finale * WINNER
30 Rock: Hogcock! / Last Lunch
Outstanding Multi-Camera Picture Editing For A Comedy Series
The Big Bang Theory: The Love Spell Potential
The Colbert Report: Episode 9082
Conan: Occupy Conan
Hot In Cleveland: Magic Diet Candy
How I Met Your Mother: P.S. I Love You * WINNER
Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing For A Miniseries Or A Movie
American Horror Story: Asylum: Nor’easter
Behind The Candelabra * WINNER
Killing Lincoln
Phil Spector
Top Of The Lake: Part 5
Outstanding Picture Editing For Short-Form Segments And Variety Specials
The Colbert Report: CGI University (Episode 9083)
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart: Australia & Gun Control’s Aftermath (Part 3) (Episode 18092) * WINNER
London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony
Louis C.K.: Oh My God
Saturday Night Live: Lincoln (Host: Louis C.K.)
Outstanding Picture Editing For Nonfiction Programming
American Masters: Mel Brooks: Make A Noise
Crossfire Hurricane
Ethel
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God * WINNER
Richard Pryor: Omit The Logic
Outstanding Picture Editing For Reality Programming
The Amazing Race: Be Safe And Don’t Hit A Cow
Deadliest Catch: Mutiny On The Bering Sea * WINNER
Project Runway: A Times Square Anniversary Party
Project Runway: Europe, Here We Come
Survivor: Zipping Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Outstanding Hairstyling For A Single-Camera Series
Boardwalk Empire: Resolution *WINNER
The Borgias: The Wolf And The Lamb
Downton Abbey: Episode 4
Game Of Thrones: Second Sons
Mad Men: The Doorway
Outstanding Hairstyling For A Multi-Camera Series Or Special
The Big Bang Theory • The Bakersfield Expedition
Dancing With The Stars • Episode 1608
The Oscars
Saturday Night Live • Host: Jennifer Lawrence * WINNER
The Voice • The Live Shows (Part 1) (Season 3)
Outstanding Hairstyling For A Miniseries Or A Movie
American Horror Story: Asylum
Behind The Candelabra * WINNER
Liz & Dick
Phil Spector
Political Animals
Ring Of Fire
Outstanding Lighting Design/Lighting Direction For A Variety Series
American Idol: Finale
Dancing With The Stars: Episode 1605
Saturday Night Live: Host: Martin Short
So You Think You Can Dance: Season 9 Finale
The Voice: Live Final Performances (Season 3) * WINNER
Outstanding Lighting Design/Lighting Direction For A Variety Special
Andrea Bocelli: Love In Portofino (Great Performances)
London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony
The Oscars
2013 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Induction
Super Bowl XLVII Halftime Show Starring Beyoncé * WINNER
Outstanding Main Title Design
American Horror Story: Asylum
Da Vinci’s Demons * WINNER
Elementary
Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn
The Newsroom
Vikings
Outstanding Makeup For A Single-Camera Series (Non-Prosthetic)
Boardwalk Empire
The Borgias
Game Of Thrones * WINNER
Glee
Mad Men
Once Upon A Time
Outstanding Makeup For A Multi-Camera Series Or Special (Non-Prosthetic)
Dancing With The Stars
How I Met Your Mother
Key & Peele
The Oscars
Saturday Night Live • Host: Justin Timberlake * WINNER
Outstanding Makeup For A Miniseries Or A Movie (Non-Prosthetic)
American Horror Story: Asylum
Behind The Candelabra * WINNER
Liz & Dick
Phil Spector
Ring Of Fire
Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup For A Series, Miniseries, Movie Or A Special
American Horror Story: Asylum
Behind The Candelabra * WINNER
Game Of Thrones
Saturday Night Live • Host: Jennifer Lawrence
The Walking Dead
Outstanding Music Composition For A Series (Original Dramatic Score)
Arrested Development
The Borgias
Downton Abbey * WINNER
House Of Cards
Last Resort
Mr Selfridge (Masterpiece)
Outstanding Music Composition For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special (Original Dramatic Score)
The Girl
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God
Parade’s End
Restless
Ring Of Fire
World Without End * WINNER
Outstanding Music Direction
Christmas In Washington
The Kennedy Center Honors
The Oscars
Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel (Live From Lincoln Center)
66th Annual Tony Awards * WINNER
Outstanding Original Music And Lyrics
Nashville: I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive / Song Title: Nothing In This World Will Ever Break My Heart Again
The Neighbors: Sing Like A Larry Bird / Song Title: More Or Less The Kind Of Thing You May Or May Not Possibly See On Broadway
Smash: The Parents / Song Title: Hang The Moon
Smash: The Bells And Whistles / Song Title: I Hear Your Voice In A Dream •
30 Rock: Hogock! / Last Lunch / Song Title: Rural Juror
66th Annual Tony Awards • Song Title: If I Had Time * WINNER
Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music
The Americans
Copper
Da Vinci’s Demons * WINNER
Elementary
Hemlock
House Of Cards
Outstanding Sound Editing For A Series
Boardwalk Empire * WINNER
Breaking Bad
Game Of Thrones
Nikita
Vikings
Outstanding Sound Editing For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special
American Horror Story: Asylum * WINNER
Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome
The Bible: Beginnings
SEAL Team Six: The Raid On Osama Bin Laden
World Without End: Medieval Life And Death
Outstanding Sound Editing For Nonfiction Programming (Single Or Multi-Camera)
The Amazing Race
Crossfire Hurricane
The Dust Bowl: The Great Plow Up
History Of The Eagles
The Men Who Built America: Bloody Battles * WINNER
Survivor: Create A Little Chaos
Outstanding Sound Mixing For A Comedy Or Drama Series (One Hour)
Boardwalk Empire * * WINNER
Breaking Bad
Game Of Thrones
Homeland
Mad Men
Outstanding Sound Mixing For A Miniseries Or A Movie
American Horror Story: Asylum
Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome
Behind The Candelabra * WINNER
The Bible: Beginnings
Phil Spector
Outstanding Sound Mixing For A Comedy Or Drama Series (Half-Hour) And Animation
Modern Family
Nurse Jackie * WINNER
The Office
Parks And Recreation
30 Rock
Outstanding Sound Mixing For A Variety Series Or Special
American Idol
The Colbert Report: Episode 8137B
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart: Episode 17153
The 55th Annual Grammy Awards * WINNER
The Oscars
Outstanding Sound Mixing For Nonfiction Programming
The Amazing Race
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
Crossfire Hurricane
Deadliest Catch
History Of The Eagles * WINNER
Survivor
Outstanding Special Visual Effects
Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome
Defiance
Falling Skies
Game Of Thrones * WINNER
Hemlock Grove
Last Resort
Outstanding Special Visual Effects In A Supporting Role
Banshee * WINNER
Boardwalk Empire
The Borgias
Da Vinci’s Demons
Revolution
Vikings
Outstanding Stunt Coordination For A Comedy Series Or A Variety Program
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia
Modern Family
Supah Ninjas * WINNER
Workaholics
Outstanding Stunt Coordination For A Drama Series, Miniseries Or Movie
Blue Bloods
NCIS
Revolution * WINNER
Southland
Outstanding Technical Direction, Camerawork, Video Control For A Series
The Big Bang Theory * WINNER
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Dancing With The Stars
Jimmy Kimmel Live
Saturday Night Live: Host: Martin Short
The Voice
Outstanding Technical Direction, Camerawork, Video Control For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special
The Kennedy Center Honors
The Oscars
2013 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony
Super Bowl XLVII Halftime Show Starring Beyoncé
66th Annual Tony Awards * WINNER |
One of the oddest features of the 2016 presidential race is that the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, emerged on the political scene this decade by repeatedly questioning whether President Barack Obama was born in America — and yet it seems Trump’s embrace of this crackpot conspiracy theory has hardly been discussed during this campaign.
Yes, the GOP nominee was the highest-profile "birther" for much of 2011, and continued to perpetuate the movement’s debunked nonsense for many years afterward, despite it being fringe racist nonsense.
Now, though, the Washington Post’s Robert Costa has elevated the subject again. In an interview with Trump on Wednesday, Costa asked the candidate whether he now believed Obama was born in Hawaii, and Trump refused to answer. "I’ll answer that question at the right time," Trump told Costa. "I just don’t want to answer it yet."
And when Costa followed up by pointing out that Trump’s top adviser, Kellyanne Conway, has said that Trump now believed Obama was born in the US, Trump was noncommittal. "It’s okay. She’s allowed to speak what she thinks," Trump told Costa. "I want to focus on jobs. I want to focus on other things."
Hours after Costa’s story was posted on Thursday, Trump adviser Jason Miller sent out a statement claiming that "Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States." Furthermore, Miller ludicrously tried to give Trump credit for bringing "this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate," as if he were doing some sort of public service.
Finally, on Friday, Trump himself begrudgingly gave an extremely brief statement that "President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period," and again dishonestly blamed Clinton for supposedly starting the controversy. But he shouldn’t be allowed to worm out of this so easily, because birtherism is in many ways the urtext of Trump’s presidential campaign. It demonstrates his willingness to mainstream fringe racism, his desire to flout the norms of political discourse, his ability to play the media, and his imperviousness to facts. And Trump has never truly been held to account for it during this campaign.
What is birtherism?
The US Constitution requires that the president of the United States be a "natural born citizen." Obama is one, by virtue of having been born in Hawaii (to a US citizen mother). But birthers raised the question ... what if he wasn’t?
When Obama first ran for president in 2008, he had a very different background from all previous presidential nominees. He wasn’t white, his middle name was Hussein, and he had lived abroad for several years as a child. And the fever swamps of the internet responded to this by letting their imaginations run wild. One fringe theory was that Obama was a "secret Muslim." Another was that he was lying about having been born in Hawaii, and was in fact born in another country — likely Kenya — and was therefore ineligible for the presidency.
This chatter first emerged during the contentious 2008 Democratic primary, but was limited to chain emails and such rather than being associated with anyone prominent, according to Politico. It then continued during the general election and Obama’s presidency and was embraced by little-known fringe figures like Orly Taitz and Philip Berg, and the right-wing pundit Jerome Corsi.
It never made a lick of sense. In the summer of 2008, the Obama campaign released his shortform birth certificate from the Hawaii Department of Health. Fact-checkers examined it and were satisfied that it was authentic. Furthermore, there were contemporaneous announcements of Obama’s birth printed in Hawaiian newspapers at the time. Then in 2011, Obama finally dredged up his longform birth certificate. But since conspiracy theorists are conspiracy theorists, they invented all sorts of reasons to dismiss and disbelieve all this evidence.
What was Trump’s role in the birther movement?
As Trump publicly considered a presidential campaign against Obama in 2011, he gained media attention and popularity on the right by becoming the highest-profile "birther" ever. Here’s the timeline:
February 10, 2011: Trump gives a speech to CPAC in which he says he’s thinking about running for president, and dips his toe into birtherism. "Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere," he told the crowd. "In fact, I'll go a step further: The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don't know who he is. It's crazy."
March 23, 2011: Trump says on The View : "I want him to show his birth certificate. I want him to show his birth certificate. ... There's something on that birth certificate that he doesn't like."
: "I want him to show his birth certificate. I want him to show his birth certificate. ... There's something on that birth certificate that he doesn't like." March 28, 2011: Asked on Fox & Friends whether he thinks Obama was born in this country, Trump responds, "I am really concerned." He went on to speculate that the birth announcement for Obama in a Hawaii newspaper could have been planted "for whatever reason."
whether he thinks Obama was born in this country, Trump responds, "I am really concerned." He went on to speculate that the birth announcement for Obama in a Hawaii newspaper could have been planted "for whatever reason." March 30, 2011: Trump says on The O’Reilly Factor , "If you are going to be president of the United States you have to be born in this country. And there is a doubt as to whether or not he was. ... He doesn't have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there's something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want that. Or he may not have one. But I will tell you this. If he wasn't born in this country, it's one of the great scams of all time."
, "If you are going to be president of the United States you have to be born in this country. And there is a doubt as to whether or not he was. ... He doesn't have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there's something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want that. Or he may not have one. But I will tell you this. If he wasn't born in this country, it's one of the great scams of all time." April 7, 2011: Trump claims on NBC that he has sent a team of investigators to Hawaii to study the matter. "I have people that have been studying it, and they cannot believe what they're finding," he said. "You are not allowed to be a president if you're not born in this country. Right now I have real doubts."
April 15, 2011: A poll shows Trump in first place in the Republican primary race (though he hasn’t announced a candidacy and won’t end up doing so).
April 19, 2011: In a statement that is hilarious in retrospect, Trump tells ABC he would "love" to release his tax returns, and that he’d "maybe" do it once Obama released his birth certificate. (More than five years later, Trump has still never released his tax returns.)
April 25, 2011: Trump tells Anderson Cooper, "I've been told very recently, Anderson, that the birth certificate is missing. I've been told that it's not there or it doesn't exist. And if that's the case, it's a big problem."
April 27, 2011: President Obama releases his original longform birth certificate, attempting to at long last put the matter to rest. Trump responds by ... simply changing the subject to Obama’s college records. "The word is, according to what I’ve read, that he was a terrible student when he went to Occidental. He then gets to Columbia; he then gets to Harvard," Trump said. "Maybe that’s right, or maybe it’s wrong. But I don’t know why he doesn’t release his records."
Okay, but after Obama delivered his birth certificate, Trump moved on, right?
Who are you kidding? It's very hard to convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong with evidence, because they will just invent new reasons to disbelieve any piece of evidence they don't like. Plus, this is Donald Trump we’re talking about.
So contrary to his campaign’s transparently false statement that Trump brought "closure to the issue" in 2011, Trump continued to spread nonsense about it for years afterward and come up with new bogus reasons not to believe the document Obama released:
Let's take a closer look at that birth certificate. @BarackObama was described in 2003 as being "born in Kenya." http://t.co/vfqJesJL — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2012
An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2012
Why do the Republicans keep apologizing on the so called "birther" issue? No more apologies--take the offensive! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2012
Wake Up America! See article: "Israeli Science: Obama Birth Certificate is a Fake" http://t.co/f7esUdSz — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2012
How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s "birth certificate" died in plane crash today. All others lived — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2013
Attention all hackers: You are hacking everything else so please hack Obama's college records (destroyed?) and check "place of birth" — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2014
But other than all that, there was closure!
Wait, though — Trump has repeatedly blamed Hillary Clinton for starting the birther movement. He wouldn’t lie to me about this, would he?
Just remember, the birther movement was started by Hillary Clinton in 2008. She was all in! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2015
There’s no evidence that Hillary Clinton or her 2008 campaign had anything to do with the birther theory — none. Nonpartisan fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked this claim, as you can see at PolitiFact, FactCheck, CNN, and the Washington Post.
Now, the small grain of truth here is that a few Clinton supporters did circulate the theory online during the contentious 2008 primary, according to Politico’s Ben Smith — though it's not really clear that they were the first to do so (as Smith claims), since there was contemporaneous chatter about this in right-wing circles online at the time too. But once the primary concluded and Obama first released his birth certificate that summer, this chatter quieted down in Democratic circles, and moved instead to more conspiracy-focused and right-wing precincts.
Update: This piece was updated with Trump's statement on Friday, and some new links on the origins of the birther controversy in 2008.
Watch: Trump on his role in the birther movement |
The official opening of the main conference was today, Tuesday. The conference is now in full swing until Friday.
Opening
Attendance at the conference is flat – Terry Yoo gave no precise numbers, but at least it's not shrinking. I figure they don't want to release precise numbers in the hope that there's just a bit of statistical fluctuation. It's a bit of a departure from previous years, though.
As in previous years, the opening presentation slides were straight out of the 1980s: blue gradient background, white text. We've moved on from red text on blue background at least, but it still blows my mind how this sort of thing is considered the right choice at a visualization conference. And not even just a visualization conference, but VIS.
Keynote: Dr. Ricardo Hausmann
Hausmann is an economist at Harvard and runs the group behind the The Atlas of Economic Complexity. The Atlas is the embodiment of Hausmann's theory that the wealth gap between nations (and also between regions within countries) can be modeled by network effects.
The talk was really fascinating. Hausmann started by pointing out the enormous gap between countries today (about 250:1 between the richest and the poorest). His argument is that that difference is largely due to technology and the tacit knowledge people have – the kind of knowledge that is not encoded and easily available, but that needs to be acquired by every individual. He also talked about the exponential growth that results from a country making a number of different things that can be combined into many more things (much like Scrabble letters let you make a lot more words when you add just one). That growth depends on the things being technology though (in a wide sense), not natural resources (which are a dead end).
There was a lot more in this excellent talk, but it's a bit too much to describe here.
InfoVis
InfoVis had 37 papers accepted this year out of 165 submissions, for a 22.4% acceptance rate. This is up slightly from previous years, which is not a bad thing. Pushing too hard on the acceptance rate is not healthy for the field.
Visualization by Demonstration: An Interaction Paradigm for Visual Data Exploration by Bahador Saket, Hannah Kim, Eli T. Brown, and Alex Endert shows an interesting new idea for how to construct visualizations. You show the system what you want to see in terms of encodings, and it figures out how to get there. This works well for things like size encodings, etc., where this would let you explore the data in a very unusual way: rather than trying to find the right measure that leads to what you need, you sketch what you want to see and it finds the fitting data.
It's certainly an unusual idea, but it has some limitations. There are a few interactions that seem a bit odd, like how to indicate that you want a bar chart when you're dealing with a scatterplot (by stacking points in the scatterplot) or the other way around (by moving points out bars).
Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics by Arvind Satyanarayan, Dominik Moritz, Kanit Wongsuphasawat, and Jeffrey Heer received the Best Paper award this year. Vega Lite is a sort of successor to Vega, which allows you to specify visualizations in a declarative way. Vega Lite is much more concise however, because it fills in defaults for things that are not specified, and provides many complex things out of the box (like a selection based on a Voronoi diagram, zooming and panning, brushing, etc.)
Vega is open source, and there is an online playground to try it out. This is based on an earlier version than the paper presented though, but they hope to release an updated version soon. They are also seeing others build infrastructure on top of Vega-Lite, like a set of friendly Python bindings called Altair.
HindSight: Encouraging Exploration through Direct Encoding of Personal Interaction History by Mi Feng, Cheng Deng, Evan M. Peck, and Lane Harrison shows users their own histories to increase interaction and engagement. This is somewhat similar to the way browsers indicate visited links, but richer and with more of an idea of an Information scent.
Since I'm a bit sick, I ended up only attending a handful of talks and had to skip VisLies and the Art Show opening. Hopefully this will get me back into shape for more extensive reporting tomorrow, though. |
2 But for many early LDS coverts, learning about trut h was a second rank endeavor. Instead, seeking for a personal visionary experience was prima ry. According to LDS scholar, Richard Bushman, ea rly Mormon converts were “seekers” whose … greatest hunger was for spiritual gifts like dreams, visions, tongues, miracles, and spiritual raptures.
2
These early Church members sought direct experience with God and be lieved that Joseph Smith had the power to grant the ir desires. Confidence in their Prophet was not misplace d. Between 1830 and 1836, under the supe rvision of Joseph Smith, many early Mormon converts enjoyed heavenl y visions and spiritual raptures. However, after Joseph’s death in 1844, the great v isionary period of Church history came to an end.
3
Apostle George A. Smith Ogden Tabernacle, 1864 Twenty years later, in 1864, members would ask Church leaders, “why it is that we do not see more angels, have more visions, that we do not see g reater and more manifestations of power?”
4
The mystery seems to center around Joseph Smith himself. According to Richard Bushman, it was Joseph Smit h himself that connected converts to heaven by some power that he possessed, a power that remains a mystery to this day. |
Some say all press is good press because it brings attention to an issue, idea, or person. Venezuela is getting a lot of press these days, but there is nothing good about it.
Media coverage continues to detail the desperate economic conditions plunging Venezuelans into poverty and despair. The Atlantic ran with the title “The Tragedy of Venezuela,” and the Washington Post declares, rightly, “Venezuela is on the brink of a complete economic collapse.”
We live at a time when we can look at history and see the havoc and violence centrally-planned societies unleash on ordinary citizens. We should know better, but we don’t. Perhaps we think it can never happen to us. We should ask Venezuelans what they think.
The Fastest Route to Poverty
Here’s the situation: Venezuela is a country rich in oil and human capital. But bad economics, poor policy decisions, and terrible institutions will trump the engines of human creativity and entrepreneurship every time.
Let’s give the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez the benefit of the doubt and presume he pushed the policies of two-cent gasoline and free housing because he cared about the poor. But caring for the poor is only a necessary condition for helping them and not a sufficient one.
If we want to help the poor, we shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds them. This is what socialist, centrally-planned policies do. Despite the best of intentions, people are left without food, security, or freedom.
The assumption behind such policies is that we can wave a magic policy wand and make things free and eliminate prices – and, somehow, this is a good thing!
It’s counter-intuitive, but prices are the best tool for rationing scarce resources. When allowed to emerge within well-defined, well-protected property rights, prices help us do more than just “not run out of stuff.” Prices help us “get more stuff than we could imagine.”
Eliminating prices and making things free or nearly free is the fastest road to poverty and ruin. Making something free doesn’t make it less scarce. It just means we have to find another way to finance those free things.
Historically, for Chavez and others, this meant encouraging monetary inflation. That’s fancy economics talk for printing money. Inflation is usually a last-ditch effort of a tyrant near their demise. It often results in hyperinflation, which is devastating. Venezuela is predicted to experience a 2016 inflation rate of 720 percent.
What does that mean in real-world talk? It means a dollar isn’t worth a dollar anymore. So much money is circulating so fast it’s devaluing. This causes extremely high, prohibitive cost increases for basic items. You could go to bed with a loaf of bread costing $2 and wake up with it costing $100. That price will continue to rise as money continues to lose its worth. You can see why this is so damaging to the poor.
Economic freedom and personal autonomy are the costs of these damaging policies. Out of 157 countries, Venezuela ranks dead last in global economic freedom.
This hurts everyone, but it hurts the poor especially because they don’t have the extra income to withstand the loss of currency value and the loss of freedom resulting from inflation.
We Know Better
The tragedy of Venezuela’s current economic and political situation is that it is entirely unnecessary. We know how to increase prosperity. We know how to acquire and increase economic freedom. Yet there are still many global examples of countries who have lost both these things.
This happens because we often do not have a biblical understanding of how we fit into God’s design and what he desires for his creation. We were created to use our God-given talents to create value for others. When we do this, we increase flourishing and glorify our Creator.
To do this well – and foster it in places like Venezuela – we must not dampen economic freedom and trade. We need prices where there are none instead of destroying prices where they already exist.
Prices are powerful market signals. Policies aiming to eliminate them are the surest, quickest way to poverty.
Venezuela can change. It can recover economically and politically. Doing so requires good, biblical thinking about fostering human creativity and eliminating the policies that amount to biting the hand that feeds us. |
Masha Gessen: I think Donald Trump was brought to power by Americans. They voted for him.
Goldberg: Do you think we are overemphasizing Russia’s nefarious—either intent or actual—actions in this moment?
Gessen: These are leading questions, but yes. Absolutely. I do think that we’re overemphasizing it. And I think we’re overemphasizing it at the expense of actually being able to think about the election.
Goldberg: What do you mean?
Gessen: Americans voted for Trump. A lot of people in this country feel the system of representative democracy hasn’t worked for them for a long, long time. And those are the issues that this election gives us an unfortunate opportunity to engage with. And engaging instead with the Russia conspiracy takes up that bandwidth.
Goldberg: Is the Russia conspiracy real?
Gessen: I don’t know. I mean, we don’t know, right? But it’s not a terribly important question or answer.
Goldberg: Whoa. Wait, why?
Gessen: Well, because ultimately it doesn’t matter what Russia wanted. Right? What matters is whether there was an actual arrangement with the Trump campaign. That’s the part we actually don’t know yet.
Goldberg: Let me just push back a little bit and say that if a foreign power is actively trying to meddle in an American election it still seems to matter, no?
Gessen: Okay, let me give you an example. The weekend before the election I was in Philadelphia with my daughter, canvassing for Hillary. And there was this church where they handed out the clipboards. And so we’re standing in line for clipboards, and a busload of Dutch tourists get off and get in line. And my first reaction was like, Oh these people are Dutch. They shouldn't be canvassing. And then I thought, okay, these people over in Amsterdam—if Donald Trump is elected, they will live on this planet that will risk being annihilated by a nuclear holocaust and damaged by irreparable climate change. And do they have less right to ask the people of Philadelphia to vote in a particular way than I, as a New Yorker, have to ask the people of Philadelphia to vote in a particular way?
Goldberg: So you’re not a huge fan of sovereignty as a concept.
Gessen: As a concept, no, not a huge fan.
Goldberg: As someone who does believe in American sovereignty, I’m offended by the idea that any country would try to interfere in our domestic affairs. But even more so when you have a government that is adversarial.
Gessen: Russian attempts to sow discord—first of all, they’re predictable. Second of all, they’re ridiculous. They’ve been doing pretty much the same thing for at least 50 years. American political reality has moved a lot closer to the Russian perception—what used to be a really distorted perception, it used to be a total caricature—which I think is a little disturbing.
Goldberg: We are becoming more like Russia? |
Sometimes when news breaks it is actually a precursor of what could end up being much larger news.
Just before the New Year, Willamette Week's Nigel Jaquiss reported the Timbers have approached the Multnomah Athletic Club and the City of Portland about an expansion of the south side of Providence Park that would increase the stadium's seating capacity by an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 seats by, at the earliest, the 2018 season. Although, as Jamie Goldberg of The Oregonian reported, the Timbers remain in the design phase of the south end expansion, the additional seating could very well make Providence Park a more attractive option for luring international competition to the stadium.
This is, of course, good news, as the south-end expansion would likely enclose the south side of the park and bring with it a material increase in seating capacity. But what was revealed from the Twitter conversation involving Timbers owner Merritt Paulson that spun off of Jaquiss's report may in the long term end up being much, much more significant news.
Here is what we know today that we didn't previously: The Timbers have investigated a significant expansion of the east side of Providence Park, concluded that it is architecturally feasible, and determined that any such expansion would take the form of an upper deck added on top of the current east-side stand.
In the end it seems likely that such an expansion of the east side of Providence Park could allow the Timbers to expand the capacity of the stadium to over 30,000, certainly making the Timbers' home ground one of the largest soccer-specific stadiums in the United States.
Any east side expansion, of course, is a much longer-term project than the south end development currently in the works. And there are still significant challenges that face any east side expansion, including financing, stadium infrastructure expansion, and a design-review process that prevented the Timbers from building above the 18th Street-level in 2010.
But on Wednesday we found out such a project is possible, even if the odds of seeing it completed in the first half of the 2020s would only arouse optimism in Lloyd Christmas.
So what would an expanded Providence Park look like? Let's stretch out the imagination.
To start with, as Portland history nerd and Stumptown Footy contributor emeritus Michael Orr pointed out on Twitter, the idea of a two-tiered Providence Park is nothing new.
Since the west and north sides of the stadium took their modern form, various Portlanders have drawn up plans to complete the horseshoe and build an upper deck. And, as the pictures Orr shared demonstrate, it could also be done while preserving the overall architectural affect of the historic stadium, something that should be a priority for any expansion of the Park.
Although expanded capacity would be a primary purpose of the expansion, the opportunity for the club to install additional lucrative premium seating would be just as important. Accordingly, any expansion on the east side would almost certainly include significant additional suite-quality seating, likely at the top of the existing east grandstand as part of a building that would provide part of the anchor for the new stand.
As for the second deck of the east stand, it would very likely have its own concourse, restrooms, and concessions on the upper evel. Concourse space is famously limited at Providence Park (although this is a bigger problem on the north and west sides than it is on the east side), so any additional capacity would require additional concourse space. Ingress and egress to the east-side upper deck would be an architectural challenge, but probably a surmountable one.
The expanded capacity, however, may also allow the Timbers to alleviate concourse congestion on the west side. As currently configured, some of the seating on the west side is covered by tarps to mitigate the concourse limitations. With added capacity in the east end (and perhaps as soon as the apparently nearer-term south end expansion), the Timbers could take out these tarped rows of benches as well as several hundred seats worth of additional bleachers to be replaced by open-air, secondary premium seating similar to what the Portland TrailBlazers have installed in the 300-level of the Moda Center.
The secondary premium seating would kill two veritable birds with one stone; it would reduce the number of people in the west concourse (and because food and drink would be hosted in this seating also reduce the number of people using the west-end concessions), and add more high-margin seating for the Timbers.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing an expansion of Providence Park would be accommodating parking for an additional 10,000 fans. Although the stadium's presence in the city center has significantly mitigated Providence Park's parking problems with easy access to transit, the notion of a 30,000-plus-capacity stadium without any significant dedicated parking seems farfetched.
Difficult as this problem may be, though, it also seems solvable with several lightly utilized blocks east of Providence Park including the soon-to-be-vacant Oregonian printing facility. Moreover, with increased development starting to take place on the west side of I-405 near Providence Park but little parking in that neighborhood, it seems very possible that partners for a parking project near the stadium could be out there for the Timbers to team up with.
And, finally, there are the political hurdles. The design-review process around Portland can be tedious, as the city can be (often for good reason) very protective of neighborhood interests and accommodating to those who want their voices heard. Without question, many would have input -- and not all of it positive -- to provide regarding an expansion of Providence Park and any serious parking project in the neighborhood. So the political process would undoubtedly be long and difficult.
But so was the political process to bring MLS to Portland in the first place. And the Timbers have never had more muscle than they do right now coming off of a championship season. The time to dream, therefore, is now.
So, while a major expansion of Providence Park is undeniably difficult, we now know that it’s possible. And with plausibility comes the ability to dream about what the Timbers’ home ground could become in the near and distant future. |
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LGBT rights activist Bisi Alimi has received death threats upon announcing his hopes to enter Nigerian politics.
The campaigner has been a prominent spokesperson for LGBT rights and HIV awareness in recent years, and was the first Nigerian to come out as gay on national TV. He has called the UK his home ever since successfully seeking asylum in 2009.
Alimi has now turned his attention to entering Nigerian politics, a potentially risky aspiration considering the country’s anti-gay laws.
Both men and women are forbidden from engaging in same-sex relationships in Nigeria, where the punishments for homosexual acts range from 14 years in prison to death by stoning.
After much thinking for over 2yrs, I have decided to throw my hat into Nigeria politics. In what capacity? Will declare later — Bisi Alimi (@bisialimi) November 19, 2016
Alimi announced his plans on Twitter on November 19 and was met by a ferocious backlash from anti-gay Nigerians, according to Nigerian Newspapers Today.
Alimi followed up his original announcement with a tweet reading: “It’s not going to be easy and threats will be made, but Nigeria belongs to all of us.”
He has reportedly received the following horrific threats after his announcement:
Victor E. J. Marshall: “The thunder that will fire ya fagged anus is still gaining pressure in mountain of fire redemption camp.”
John Fayar Optional: “Tell him to come on time so that he can put things in place before the campaign.pleas don’t forget to come with the first lady . So that u both can die together….Na silent pistol I go buy wait whona.”
Muoghalu Simon: “We are happily waiting. We shall gather our hands and beat you to stupor.”
Alimi has yet to publicly confirm what exactly his political aspirations are, or respond to the threats made against him. |
Five weeks into the search for Eric Frein, Canadensis resident James Tully knows the drill. Stop when a police officer approaches. Show identification. Be cooperative.
Tully, 39, doesn't own a car and must walk five miles along heavily wooded Route 447 — directly through the search area — twice each day on his way to and from his second-shift job at a metal fabrication plant.
He said he's been stopped more than 20 times by officers who thought he might be Frein, the self-styled survivalist and expert marksman suspected of shooting two state police troopers, killing one. In fact, Tully said, he was stopped seven times in one day.
An encounter last week, which Tully said left him shaking with fear after a gun was pointed in his face, mirrors the frustration of a community caught in the middle of the police manhunt for Frein, a search now in its second month.
Residents live daily with the fear that a man whom police describe as an armed and dangerous murderer might be in their midst, a man who has managed to elude capture despite an unprecedented number of law enforcement officers on his trail.
After staying open Monday following another reported sighting of trooper-slaying suspect Eric Frein, Pocono Mountain School District closed Tuesday. After staying open Monday following another reported sighting of trooper-slaying suspect Eric Frein, Pocono Mountain School District closed Tuesday. SEE MORE VIDEOS
"I haven't had a good night's sleep since this whole thing started," Tully said. "I don't have a choice; I have to walk through here. I can't miss work. I can't afford it."
He said most of the encounters he's had with police on his way to and from work have ended peacefully, with an officer looking over his identification and sending him on his way with a warning to be careful.
That changed Thursday night, he said, when a man dressed in camouflage jumped out of a silver sport utility vehicle and pointed a rifle at his head.
"I had my ID out, but he just kept yelling at me 'Get on the ground, get on the ground!' I was scared. I just thought to myself: Just let me live through this," Tully said.
He said he tried to show the man his work identification and driver's license, which he wears on a lanyard around his neck, but the man with the gun kept shouting. Tully claims the man used a knee to hold him on the ground, and said it seemed as if his spine were breaking.
Tully said he was too stunned to ask the man to identify himself, but believes he was a law enforcement officer of some kind because a uniformed state trooper intervened, telling the man that Tully was a local.
He said the incident sent him to a hospital emergency room with severely bruised ribs, and has added to the daily stress of living in the search area.
State police spokeswoman Connie Devens said she was unaware of the incident, noting that Tully had not filed a complaint with state police.
Tully said his family and friends have urged him to contact an attorney, but what he mostly wants is an apology.
His trek to work takes about two hours each way. Walking home alone at night was already scary, Tully said. Unlike some of the bounty hunters who've flocked to the Poconos hoping to claim the $175,000 FBI reward, he's just hoping he doesn't meet up with Frein in the woods.
"What would I do? I would try to hide, try to avoid being seen by him. I would definitely notify police if I did see him," Tully said.
Frein, 31, of Canadensis, remained at large Tuesday despite the massive police presence in the Poconos and the bounty on his head. The Pocono Mountain School District closed Tuesday as a flurry of police activity descended on Swiftwater, slightly south of the initial search area. Police reported no confirmed sightings of Frein.
Frein is suspected of killing Cpl. Bryon Dickson, 38, and wounding Trooper Alex Douglass, 31, on Sept. 12 at the Blooming Grove state police barracks in Pike County. Douglass is recovering at a rehabilitation facility after being released from a Scranton hospital last week.
Police have not publicly identified a motive for the ambush-style shooting, but say Frein has a long-standing grudge against law enforcement.
Tully said he and his neighbors are growing weary of the seemingly endless manhunt and are starting to lose confidence in police. He believes that some of the so-called "credible sightings" police cite in their reasons for staying in the area are prompted by false tips called in by people sympathetic to Frein to "throw off" the hunt.
Tully also said he couldn't understand why police keep looking at him as the possible suspect, when he's just 5 feet 8 inches tall and Frein is 6 feet 1 inch tall.
Tully, a father of two who has lived in Canadensis since 2001, said the town in northern Monroe County is usually tranquil except for hunting season. Now he's worried about letting his two daughters, ages 11 and 4, play outside.
"I have enough difficulties in my life already. I don't need this stress."
lmason@mcall.com
Twitter @LehighCourts
610-820-6506 |
AT&T killed all-you-can-eat wireless data. Which sadly was inevitable. But if I'm paying for bytes like I do for minutes, why don't I get rollover data, too?
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The premise of AT&T's new wireless data plans is simple. They've gone to the same pricing model for data that they've always had for voice. Just like paying $40 for 450 minutes of talk time or $60 for 900 minutes, you pay $15 for 200 megabytes, or $25 for 2 gigabytes of data. You're buying a set amount of data for a fixed price, so you pay per byte, just like you pay per minute. Same deal. It breaks down like this:
AT&T is the only major carrier in the US to offer rollover minutes as a standard perk. Any minutes you don't use "roll over," banking them to use later, like on a rainy day when you're really bored and just want to sit on the phone for hours. You pay for 1400 minutes a month, but only talk for 950. Those leftover 450 minutes are added to your general pool of minutes, so you'd have 1850 to use the following month. The net effect is that you're legitimately buying the minutes, in the same way you purchase a 12-pack of soda for $5.
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If AT&T is going to count bytes like minutes, you should get rollover bytes. If you pay for 2 gigs of data, you should get 2 gigs of data. If you only use 500 megabytes that month, the leftover 1.5GB should rollover to the next month. Particularly since there's no middle ground between the two new plans—there's a massive gulf, 1000 percent wide, between 200MB and 2GB. So a lot of iPhone users are stuck, since they use somewhere between 200MB and 2GB of data—not skimpy enough to grab the cheaper $15-a-month plan, but not anything approaching 2GB. (A $20 500MB plan would be dead on for most iPhone owners, I think—which is probably why it doesn't exist.)
Rollover data would make AT&T's argument that the new plans are about value—not simply strangling the most hardcore data users taxing the network—way more convincing, since it would make the plans address the issue of network capacity in a tangible way.
Unfortunately, it's highly unlikely that AT&T is particularly interested in fairness, or at least in the idea of you actually using all the data you pay for. AT&T senior VP of data and voice products Mark Collins' response about why they're charging $20 extra for the privilege of tethering says it all:
That capability is enabling something you can't do today. You can use one device and get multiple connections so it's more useful to you. You're going to use more data so the price is based on the value that will be delivered. [emphasis mine]
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That doesn't make any sense at face value, because you're paying for every byte of data you consume, and the tethering fee doesn't give include additional data—it comes out of the 2GB you're already paying for. The subtext is that AT&T doesn't actually expect most people to use that 2GB, and in fact, they don't want you to—which is they make it more expensive to make it easier to use.
Look, I'll pay per byte. Just give me all the bytes I pay for.
Hat tip to Giz reader Ryan Henson for throwing this suggestion our way
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Radical sci-fi by social activists 'decolonizes the imagination'
Can science fiction be a form of social activism? Walidah Imarisha thinks so, and she's recruited everyone from LeVar Burton to Mumia Abu-Jamal to help her prove it.
"Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in an exercise of speculative fiction," writes Imarisha in Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, an anthology of short sci-fi stories co-edited by her and Adrienne Maree Brown. "Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds, so what better venue for organizers to explore their work than through writing science fiction stories?"
Although the anthology features established names and writers like LeVar Burton, Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal—who shares an essay about Star Wars and imperialism—the editors reached out to lesser known social activists and organizers as well, including some who had little to no experience with fiction and science fiction.
Some were initially hesitant to participate, but Imarisha says that simply creating the space for them had a powerful impact, and that most responded within a few weeks with "incredible ideas and some with dozens of pages already written... The writers in this collection just need a little space, and perhaps permission."
The editors were also particularly interested in including the voices of people from marginalized backgrounds in Octavia's Brood. "For those of us from communities with historic collective trauma, we must understand that each of us is already science fiction walking around on two legs. Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us."
The anthology's title is a reference to the celebrated black science-fiction writer Octavia Butler, whose work often explored issues of inequality and identity. As with many anthologies, some of the stories in Octavia's Brood are hit or miss, but most are quick, short-story trips to distant or disturbingly familiar worlds that offer insight into our own.
Highlights include "Revolution Shuffle" by Bao Phi, a story about a work internment camp for people of color set during a zombie apocalypse, and "The Long Memory" by Morrigan Phillips, about a society rejecting the wisdom of the intergenerational memory-keepers who act as their historians—and their conscience.
Imarisha calls the progressive strain of sci-fi in Octavia's Brood "visionary fiction," defined by its insistence on imagining freer and more liberated worlds or critiquing injustice, rather than uncritically recreating the power structures of the world as we know it in fantastical garb.
"Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always towards justice," writes Imarisha. "We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, for the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is, for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless."
For more from Imarisha, read her recent article "Rewriting the Future" in Bitch magazine or watch her give a talk titled "(Re)Writing the Future: Social Justice and Science Fiction" at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, Oregon: |
click to enlarge Photo by Danny Wicentowski
Protesters gathered outside the Ferguson Police Department on September 26, 2014.
During the Ferguson protests, police repeatedly turned to a convenient, versatile charge they could use to lock up protesters who otherwise didn't seem to be breaking any laws."Interfering with an Officer, Unlawful" is the catch-all section of a St. Louis County ordinance that forbids people from obstructing a police officer's work "in any manner whatsoever."Maggie Ellinger-Locke of the National Lawyers Guild argued this morning in front the Eastern District of the Missouri Court of Appeals that the county ordinance is unconstitutional, violating the rights to free speech and due process."It's critical that we enshrine the right to protest," Ellinger-Locke told the three-judge panel of the state appellate court.Hundreds of protesters have been charged under the ordinance. Yet it's written so broadly, the attorney says, that police could arrest people just for angering police. She gives the hypothetical example of lawyers calling out legal advice to someone being taken into custody. As soon as officers decide official duties are being interfered with, they can make an arrest."This ordinance is absolutely unconstitutional, and I think the case law bears that out," Ellinger-Locke says.Although the case began with the unrest in Ferguson three years ago, using controversial ordinances to charge protesters has come up again with a new wave of demonstrations following the acquittal of ex-St. Louis police Officer Jason Stockley. During the first weekend, police blasted protesters for vandalism and allegedly assaulting officers, but the vast majority of those arrested were charged with failing to disperse, a violation of a municipal ordinance that relies heavily on police interpretation.The appellate case that was argued this morning dates back to 2015 when Ellinger-Locke and attorney Brendan Roediger of the Saint Louis University Law Civil Litigation Clinic sued the county, county Counselor Peter Krane and then-Attorney General Chris Koster on behalf of the Rev. Melissa Bennett and audiologist Koach Baruch Frazier, who were arrested during a 2014 protest outside the Ferguson Police Department. The lawyers argued the language of the ordinance was unconstitutional and should be removed from the books.Circuit Court Judge Gloria Reno ruled against them in February, saying in her decision that the terms were clear, commonly understood and legal. The attorneys appealed, and Ellinger-Locke presented the case this morning in the courtroom inside the Old Post Office on Olive Street.Attorney Carl Becker, representing the county, argued that no one is getting locked up simply for saying the wrong thing to a cop. He told the judges that the interference is paired with conduct and isn't meant to stifle free speech. To make his point, he suggested a scenario of an officer prevented from rendering first aid because someone is screaming in his ear, keeping him from communicating with a patient."The Supreme Court recognized that you have to draw the line somewhere," he told the judges.Each side had fifteen minutes for their oral arguments while the judges asked questions. There is no schedule for a decision. |
Libertarians often bemoan the expansion of the federal government over the centuries and cite Thomas Jefferson’s quotation, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild [sic], and government to gain ground.” Of course, there have been important advances for liberty in the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries too, yet overall, government’s impact on the economy has increased dramatically. In his book, The Rise and Decline of Nations, political economist Mancur Olson theorized that the simple passage of time permitted the accretion of more and more interest groups (“distributive coalitions”), who would lobby government to increase their share of the economic pie at the expense of the total size of the pie. Therefore, more stable societies would see relative economic decline.
I have always been skeptical that the mere passage of time was an important predictor of interest-group power and bad economic policy. Indeed, all of Olson’s data came from the post-World War 2 period, and he had good things to say about France and Japan, particularly in relation to Britain, that do not ring true 30 years after he wrote the book.
However, as I investigate the economic history of early modern Europe, I am struck by what looks like a “law of political entropy,” that is, a tendency for relatively “associational” governments that act as agents for the taxpayer to become ossified, oligarchic, “predatory” states that exploit the taxpayer. Consider the Dutch Republic and Switzerland, probably the two most “associational” states in early modern Europe.
During the Dutch Golden Age, the highly decentralized federation acted as an agent of the provinces, who in turn were federated associations of the towns. The towns were ruled by the principal merchants. There was a semi-hereditary “stadtholder” position at the central level, demanded by the monarchical ideology of the day, but the real political power lay with the great taxpayers.In fact, during the period of the Republic’s most rapid economic growth, there was no stadtholder, just an elected “grand pensionary,” the proto-liberal Johan de Witt, who supported free trade, republicanism, and religious toleration, opposed imperialism and military meddling, and strongly endorsing the doctrine of provincial (and town) sovereignty over Republic-level control.
Unfortunately, after the French and English launched a combined sneak attack on the Republic in 1672, de Witt was overthrown and lynched, and the stadtholders returned. Although the Dutch escaped that war with their independence, over time the political system became more ossified, and by the end of the 18th century English GDP per capita had caught up with Dutch. According to Wikipedia,
At first the lower-class citizens in the guilds and schutterijen could unite to form a certain counterbalance to the regenten, but in the course of the 16th, 17th and 18th century the administration of the cities and towns became oligarchical in character, and it became harder and harder to enter their caste. From the latter part of the 17th century the regent families were able to reserve government offices to themselves via quasi-formal contractual arrangements. Most offices were filled by co-option for life. Thus the regent class tended to perpetuate itself into a closed class.
Similarly, Switzerland started off as an extremely loose confederation of republican cantons in the late Middle Ages (individual cantons could even declare war). The cantons themselves were originally established by peasants who had thrown out the Habsburg aristocracy, winning a bloody victory over their knights at the Battle of Morgarten:
When the Confederates attacked from above with rocks, logs and halberds, the Austrian knights had no room to defend themselves and suffered a crushing defeat, while the foot soldiers in the rear fled back to the city of Zug. About 1,500 Habsburg soldiers were killed in the attack. According to Karl von Elgger, the Confederates, unfamiliar with the customs of battles between knights, brutally butchered retreating troops and everyone unable to flee. He records that some infantry preferred to drown themselves in the lake rather than face the brutality of the Swiss. This established the Confederates’ reputation as fierce and barbaric fighters.
Though its geographic isolation and poor soil helped keep Switzerland fairly poor, it was an oasis of relative religious toleration and peace during the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War. But over time, the cantons became more oligarchic:
Political power congealed around the 13 cantons of the old confederation. During this era, the patrician families decreased in number but increased in power. Some patrician families were drawn from leadership in the guilds or trading groups within the town, while other families grew from successful mercenary captains and soldiers. The trend toward increasing authoritarianism conflicted with the history of public expression which grew out of the Swiss Reformation. In many regions the patrician families were unable to suppress the public assemblies but they did dominate the assemblies. The tradition of inviting the people to express their opinions died out mostly during this era. During this time, changes to the membership of city councils became increasingly rare. Throughout the Middle Ages a seat on the town council was normally a lifetime appointment. However, plagues, battlefield deaths, and conflicts over the Reformation guaranteed a regular turnover in the city councils. During the early modern era, growing scientific knowledge and relative peace reduced the number of open seats in the cities. At the same time, council members were increasingly able to fill the council with relatives. The population in Europe began to expand again following the Thirty Years’ War. This led to population pressure that hadn’t been experienced in several generations. For protection and help against the rising number of immigrants and landless peasants many villages began to draw closer to neighboring towns, eventually coming under the authority of the larger towns. During the 17th century seats in the councils became increasingly hereditary. There were between 50 and 200 families that controlled all the key political, military and industrial positions in Switzerland. In Bern out of 360 burgher families only 69 still had any power and could be elected by the end of the 18th century. However, the aristocracy remained generally open, and in some cities new families were accepted if they were successful and rich enough.
The problem of figuring out how to break out of this cycle of political entropy seems to recur throughout history. Napoleon’s invasions certainly changed both the Netherlands and Switzerland fundamentally, though in the former case not for the better. In the case of England, renewal came through a bloodless revolution — but by the 20th century, the law of political entropy had smitten Britain as well. |
In what may be one of the most significant foreign policy decisions of his first year in office, Trump is shutting down the CIA's covert program to arm rebels fighting the Syrian government. This would constitute a monumental shift in terms of US priorities in Syria which throughout most of the 6-year long war have focused on removing Bashar al-Assad. The Washington Post reports:
Officials said Trump made the decision to scrap the CIA program nearly a month ago, after an Oval Office meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster ahead of a July 7 meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The move is consistent with signals coming out of the White House over the past months, as well as in keeping with Trump's early campaign promises that he would seek to wind down the war in Syria by making ISIS the only objective, and not the removal of Assad. There have been additional hints at willingness to work closer with Russia in a strategic anti-terror partnership in Syria. Secretary of State Tillerson's said in an April interview with ABC News, as well several weeks ago, that Assad's fate would be up for the Syrian people to decide, adding that:
In that regard, we are hopeful that we can work with Russia and use their influence to achieve areas of stabilization throughout Syria and create the conditions for a political process through Geneva in which we can engage all of the parties on the way forward, and it is through that political process that we believe the Syrian people will lawfully be able to decide the fate of Bashar al-Assad.
Image via Syrian opposition social media/ The Blaze
Tillerson has made similar remarks throughout the summer. But there were at times contradictory statements being issued from other areas of the administration, especially the State Department and ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who often continued to reiterate the "Assad must go" line - a policy put in place when Obama first uttered those words all the way back in summer of 2011. The divergent statements left pundits confused as to what America's future role in Syria would look like. The Trump administration has from the start faced an uphill battle against hawks and neocons in D.C. regarding Syria, who are already accusing the president of appeasing Assad and "falling into the Russia trap."
After the al-Qaeda linked Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham accused Assad and Russia of committing the April 4th chemical attack against civilians in Khan Shaykhun, immense pressure was ramped up on Trump to attack and remove Assad. According to an investigative report by Seymour Hersh, Trump's national security team presented the president with multiple plans after the murky incident in which Russia, Syria, and the al-Qaeda affiliate traded blame. Trump reportedly shot down the military's "decapitation" plan right away (removal of Assad), but opted for what many saw as his merely "symbolic" strike on Shayrat air base southeast of Homs.
Meanwhile, many analysts have for years pointed to the CIA covert operation, called Timber Sycamore, as really nothing more than a replay of 'Operation Cyclone' - the 1980's CIA program to arm Afghan and Arab mujahideen fighters against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That secretive years long operation resulted in an unprecedented rise in international Islamic terrorism, the installation of the radical Taliban government in Afghanistan, the rise of al-Qaeda itself, and the 9/11 attacks. On Syria, pro-regime change hawks have tended to downplay the size and impact of the CIA's Syria weapons program, but a recent investigation by a prominent national security reporter concluded the following:
A declassified October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report revealed that the shipment in late August 2012 had included 500 sniper rifles, 100 RPG (rocket propelled grenade launchers) along with 300 RPG rounds and 400 howitzers. Each arms shipment encompassed as many as ten shipping containers, it reported, each of which held about 48,000 pounds of cargo. That suggests a total payload of up to 250 tons of weapons per shipment. Even if the CIA had organized only one shipment per month, the arms shipments would have totaled 2,750 tons of arms bound ultimately for Syria from October 2011 through August 2012. More likely it was a multiple of that figure.
The program originated under Obama and its details were unknown to the general public and even to many in Congress. The Washington Post reported in 2015 (based on Snowden documents) that it was “one the agency’s largest covert operations, with a budget approaching $1 billion a year” (one-fifteenth of the CIA’s total budget according to the leaked documents).
Yesterday we published sections from a 2016 whistle blower report recently unearthed from a restricted access special forces online platform in which Green Berets and other elite operatives slammed what they called a CIA jihadist training program in Syria. US military eyewitnesses testified that:
Many [US military trainers overseen by CIA officers] are actively sabotaging the programs by stalling and doing nothing, knowing that the supposedly secular rebels they are expected to train are actually al-Nusra terrorists.
Indeed Trump himself, while on the campaign trail decried the Obama White House's covert activities in Syria, even tweeting a declassified Pentagon document pointing to both Obama's and Secretary of State Hillary's role in empowering terrorists in order to overthrow Assad.
An: Media fell all over themselves criticizing what DonaldTrump "may have insinuated about @POTUS." But he's right: https://t.co/bIIdYtvZYw — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2016
In prior years, long before he began campaigning, Trump had consistently revealed his thinking on Syria. In 2013 he referenced the armed opposition in Syria as "radical jihadi Islamists who are murdering Christians" at a time when news of the CIA's program was slowly breaking, and questioned, "why would we ever fight with [alongside] them?"
Today's news of shutting down the CIA program comes on the heels of a new Syria-Russia-US ceasefire deal in southwest Syria in what's seen as a broader policy of deescalation in Syria. All attempts at de-escalation in Syria have been widely panned by the neo-con lobby in Congress, headed by John McCain and various other warhawk politicians, whose Military-Industrial Complex donors realize that the surest way to a sliding stock price for an weapons-maker is through peace. |
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PUTNAM -- It might be poor fashion choice.
A man arrested for driving under the influence early Monday after an accident, had his mug shot taken while he was wearing a t-shirt that said "Hold my beer and watch this."
State Police said around 1:20 a.m., troopers were called to a one car accident on Wilson Road in Putnam. Troopers said the car was traveling east on Wilson Road when it struck a stone wall.
Police said the vehicle was unregistered, uninsured and the registration plates on the car belonged to a different vehicle.
Harrison Wootton, 25, of Woodstock, was charged with operating an unregistered motor vehicle, failure to have insurance, misuse of plates, failure to drive in the proper lane and operating under the influence of alcohol/drugs.
Wootton is scheduled to appear in court on April 20 and was released on a $500 bond. |
The X-37B is a kind of robotic space plane, built by the US. It’s been in Earth’s orbit for more than 500 days. And its real purpose is a complete mystery. Intrigued?
Here’s what we do know about X-37B
Constructed in California, the Boeing-built X-37B Orbital Space Vehicle was built for the US Air Force as a test vehicle; not intended to reach production. It is a quarter the size of the Endeavour Space Shuttle. It is equipped with heat-shield protection for re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere.
Currently the X-37B is orbiting at 28,044km/h, at a distance of around 350km in the sky. It can land, but no one will say when that will be.
“I’ll give you my standard line on X-37,” General William Shelton, commander of the Air Force Space Command told Space.com in May. “X-37 is doing great. I can’t tell you what it’s doing, but it’s doing great.”
It’s been in the sky before, after being launched on April 22, 2010, on a rocket. It then landed on December 3, 2010 – blowing a tire and suffering minor damage to its underbelly.
It took off again from Cape Canaveral on December 11, 2012 – now reaching 500 days in orbit.
The Air Force also launched a second model of X-37B on March 5, 2011. Described by the U.S. military as an “effort to test new space technologies”, it landed safely at Vandenberg Air Force Base on June 16, 2012, after 469 days in space. This third mission has now smashed this previous record.
X-37B’s actual functions are still heavily classified.
As you’d imagine, conspiracy theorists are having a field day, and here’s why:
Powered by a solar panel that unfurls once in orbit, X-37B can open with small, shuttle-like payload bay in its middle – think of a clamshell opening from underneath. There’s room for more than just a solar panel too. Exactly what items it carries, and why they need to be in space so long, has proved elusive for analysts, the space community, and the media.
To add further intrigue, the plane is classified as a secret project, yet maker Boeing has released pictures and more than two pages of details on the X-37B. That’s not how secrets are usually dealt with. By contrast, the secret Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird was not declassified until decades after it had been flown in the Vietnam War.
The X-37 started life way back in 1999 when NASA asked Boeing’s Phantom Works division to develop an orbital test vehicle. This was a civilian project, and the X-37 was originally spec’d as an unmanned, robotic spacecraft that would rendezvous with satellites to refuel, repair them, or crash them back to Earth once their lifecycle was complete. But in 2004 the project was transferred to DARPA and since then, it has been highly classified.
The amateur skywatching community that documents satellites say it’s orbiting between 43.5 degrees north latitude to 43.5 degrees south latitude. That’s a band around the middle of Earth that takes in much of the US, Middle East, and Asia, but is away from Russia, and Europe. Spotters suggest that at the altitude of 350km, it is ideal altitude for spying, but too low to refuel or fix other satellites.
It’s versatile, and has worked well enough that Boeing is contracted to create the next model, the X-37C. It will be at least 65 per cent larger and have the ability to carry up to six astronauts, while operating unmanned.
What we can guess
The two most popular theories suggest the vehicle is simply running an extended duration test – a marathon in space. The other theory is that the two previous missions prove the testing phase is complete, and it is now on an extended operation running a mission, or multiple missions.
The long endurance run theory has credit; proving that new, experimental critical components can work reliably for a long-duration in space, close to Earth.
The running-mission has credit too – with two previous missions complete, X-37B can now operate at length. And perhaps it is – observing, spying, experimenting, hosting space-weapons, or collecting data for the NSA. We just don’t know.
Both theories are plausible.
Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, told Space.com, “While the classified nature of the X-37B has raised some concerns about its intended operational purposes, technically, the program must be commended for doing something new… and successfully.”
She speculated X-37’s payload would include new sensors and satellite hardware to be tested.
What it isn’t
Plenty of conspiracy theorist have posed the question of X-37B carrying a nuclear payload, to guarantee a ‘first strike’ opportunity (or to have a counter-option in place).
If you have any hope for humanity, that can’t be right. The US is a signatory to The Space Treaty, which is no joke. Space-based weapons of mass destruction are banned.
(One curious example of a space-based weapon that isn’t banned is a Kinetic strike, where objects whizzing around the Earth at great speed are intentionally sent to the ground, causing a meteorite-like impact and widespread damage. This type of attack is also known as ‘Rods from God’.)
General characteristics
Crew: None
Length: 8.9m
Wingspan: 4.5m
Height: 2.9m
Loaded weight: 4,990kg
Powerplant: 1 × Aerojet AR2-3 rocket engine (hydrazine)
Power: Gallium arsenide solar cells with lithium-ion batteries
Update: We have touchdown! After 674 days in space, X-37B landed. We have all the images and information for you here.
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In 1931, a trawler called the Colinda sank its nets into the North Sea, 25 miles off the coast of Norfolk, and dredged up an unlikely artefact — a handworked antler, 21cm long, with a set of barbs running along one side. Archeologists identified it as a prehistoric harpoon and dated it to the Mesolithic age, when sea levels around Britain were more than 100 metres lower than they are today, and the island’s sunken rim, at least according to some, was a fertile plain.
As long ago as the 10th century, astute observers noted that Britain’s coastlines were fringed with trees, visible only at low tide. Traditionally, the ‘drowned forests’ were regarded as evidence of Noah’s flood — relics of an antediluvian world whose destruction is recorded in the most enduring of all the stories of great floods that sweep the earth and drown its people. At the beginning of the 20th century, another explanation was proposed by the geologist Clement Reid. In his book Submerged Forests (1913), Reid argued that ‘nothing but a change in sea level will account’ for the position of trees stretching from the high water mark ‘to the level of the lowest spring tide’. Observations on the east coast of England led him to conclude that the Thames and Humber estuaries were once ‘flanked by a plain, lying some 40-60 feet below the modern marsh surface’.
Turning his attention to a substance known as ‘moorlog’, dredged up from the bed of the North Sea at Dogger Bank, Reid identified nothing less than a time capsule. Moorlog consists of the compacted remains of animal bones, shells, wood, and lumps of peat, and Reid’s sample contained a variety of bones, including bear, wolf, hyena, bison, mammoth, beaver, walrus, elk and deer. He concluded that ‘Noah’s woods’ once stretched far beyond the shore, with Dogger Bank forming the ‘edge of a great alluvial plain, occupying what is now the southern half of the North Sea, and stretching across to Holland and Denmark’.
The Colinda antler appeared to confirm Reid’s theory, for it came from a freshwater deposit, meaning that it had not been dropped by a sea voyager, but by someone living in the landscape. According to Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch and David Smith — the trio of archaeologists at the University of Birmingham who have made the most sustained attempts to build on Reid’s research — this was ‘the first real evidence that the North Sea had been part of a great plain inhabited by the last hunter-gatherers in Europe’.
mankind’s wickedness upset the sun-god Nákúset so much that he wept a global deluge
The area, now called Doggerland, was gradually submerged as the last Ice Age came to an end, and the melting glaciers raised sea levels. Only around 5,500 BCE did Britain finally become an island. The rediscovery of the great plain that formerly connected it to mainland Europe is one of the most remarkable scientific stories of the past decade, yet there is a sense in which it should not come as a surprise at all. Doggerland addresses one of our oldest preoccupations; for we have always told stories about lost civilisations, hidden beneath the waves.
Tales of great deluges evolved for obvious reasons: the earliest human civilisations appeared in Mesopotamia (‘the land between the rivers’), and the deltas of the Yellow River, Indus and Nile. The Egyptian year — the basis of our calendar — divided the seasons by the pattern of rainfall, the season of inundation being when the Nile rose, flooding the surrounding fields. Water was the source of life but also destruction and, as such, it inspired the earliest recorded version of the most famous ‘flood myth’ of all. The story of a Utnapishtim, a just man who is instructed by a god to build an ark so as to survive a flood, appeared in The Epic of Gilgamish. In the Bible Utnapishtim is Noah, and in Greek mythology he is Deucalion, a son of Prometheus who recreates the human race by throwing his mother’s bones over his shoulder. There is a Hindu Noah, an Incan Noah, and a Polynesian Noah. A First Nation version of the legend maintains that mankind’s wickedness so upset the sun-god Nákúset that he wept a global deluge.
Some creation myths — Genesis, for example — depict God creating land from a primeval waste of water, but another frequently recurring story reverses the process. In Plato’s dialogue Critias we have the oldest surviving account of a land that sinks beneath the waves: the lost continent of Atlantis. In Plato’s original rendering, Athens is said to have ‘checked a great power that arrogantly advanced from its base in the Atlantic Ocean to attack the cities of Europe and Asia’. That power was Atlantis — an empire ruled by descendants of Poseidon, ‘a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings’. Athens rose up and subdued Atlantis, but her triumph was overtaken by natural disaster: in ‘a single dreadful day and night, all [Athens’s] fighting men were swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis was similarly swallowed up by the sea and vanished’.
Scholars often insist that we’re not meant to take accounts of Atlantis literally. ‘The idea is that we should use the story to examine our ideas of government and power,’ says the philosopher Julia Annas in Plato: A Very Short Introduction (2003). ‘We have missed the point if instead of thinking about these issues we go off exploring the sea bed.’
The exact location of Atlantis aroused little interest in antiquity, and early modern writers such as Thomas More and Francis Bacon explored Platonic ideals of the good society, in Utopia (1516) and New Atlantis (1624) respectively, without becoming bogged down in questions of geography. Yet recently we have renounced the challenging task of interpreting Plato’s layered inquiry into the nature of the good society in favour of millennial fantasies about drowned worlds.
In the children’s novel The Water-Babies (1863) by Charles Kingsley, Atlantis is merged with the legend of Tír na nÓg or ‘St Brandan’s fairy isle’, a ‘great land’ that sank beneath the waves to the west of Ireland. Kingsley’s story suggests that the surviving traces of Atlantis are not the sunken trees of ‘Noah’s woods’ but the ‘strange flowers, which linger still about this land’, such as ‘the Cornish heath, and Cornish moneywort’. He described the flowers as ‘fairy tokens left for wise men and good children’. Other writers have imagined the survival of more substantial remains of the sunken world.
In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Jules Verne describes the occupants of the submarine Nautilus climbing through a sunken forest on the slopes of an erupting volcano on the bottom of the Atlantic until they find themselves looking down on a ruined town — ‘its roofs open to the sky, its temples fallen, its arches dislocated, its columns lying on the ground’. For the benefit of the submariners, Captain Nemo chalks a single word onto a rock of black basalt: ‘ATLANTIS’. Aronnax, the marine-biologist who narrates the book, is transfixed by the thought that he’s standing ‘on the very spot where the contemporaries of the first man had walked’.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle offered another version of the legend, though his Atlantis was not, like Verne’s, a ‘perfect Pompeii escaped beneath the waters’ but a miraculously preserved and inhabited world. The underwater explorers of his short novel The Maracot Deep (1929) are assailed by a giant crustacean that snips the cable of their ‘bathysphere’, plunging it to the bottom of the sea. They are rescued by the surviving Atlantans and taken — as curiosities — to their submarine city.
The occultists were right in one respect: we live on the edge of drowned worlds and are descended from their inhabitants
Conan Doyle threaded his spiritualist beliefs throughout the tale in a way that illustrates how lost worlds might allow us to improve upon the real one, if only in imagination. But the Atlantis myth also allows us to rehearse our fears and fantasies of collapse and decay. In his novel After London (1885), the Victorian naturalist Richard Jefferies portrayed Britain as a kind of Atlantis, its capital reduced to a putrid swamp, its interior covered by an inland sea. Similarly, J G Ballard’s early novel, The Drowned World (1962), pictures futuristic London as a tropical lagoon. Ballard’s characters welcome the re-emergence of a primeval world: we fear the flood, his book implies — and yet embrace it too.
In 1954, the American science fiction writer L Sprague de Camp said that the number of novels and stories about lost continents was ‘beyond count’. Yet the treatment of the subject was not confined to books that advertised themselves as fiction.
The great champion of Atlantis as ‘veritable history’ was an American politician called Ignatius Donnelly, who served as a congressman and state senator for Minnesota at various times in the late 19th century. Donnelly was also a land speculator, farmer and fantasist, who proposed three equally striking and implausible theories — that Bacon had not only written Shakespeare’s plays but embedded a cipher within them; that great events in the Earth’s history, such as the Ice Age, were brought on by ‘extraterrestrial catastrophism’; and that Atlantis was a fragment of a once vast oceanic continent.
In Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), Donnelly identified Plato’s Atlantis as source of all humanity’s lost paradises: ‘the Garden of Eden; the Gardens of the Hesperides; the Elysian Fields’. It represented ‘a universal memory of a great land, where early mankind dwelt for ages in peace and happiness’. Donnelly believed that a few lucky survivors of Atlantis’s drowning had escaped ‘in ships and on rafts’ to populate surrounding continents, citing, as proof, resemblances between European and American plants and animals, culture and language. Sprague de Camp notes that ‘most of Donnelly’s statements of fact… either were wrong when he made them, or have been disproved by subsequent discoveries’. And even if they hadn’t been wrong, he would still have drawn the wrong conclusions from them: the fact that people on both sides of the Atlantic used spears and sails, customarily married and divorced, and believed in ghosts and flood legends ‘proves nothing about sunken continents’.
Of course, being wrong is rarely a bar to success, especially in the realms of fantasy and conspiracy. Donnelly’s book was reprinted 22 times in the eight years after publication, becoming ‘the New Testament of Atlantism’. And Donnelly attracted a curious following among 19th-century occultists such as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky believed that Atlantis was one of several lost continents on which humanity had evolved. She claimed that her esoteric magnum opus The Secret Doctrine (1888) was originally dictated on Atlantis, and that part of humanity was descended from another ‘root-race’ who lived on the vanished continent of Lemuria.
Blavatsky did not invent the name ‘Lemuria’: it was proposed in 1864 by the English zoologist Philip Sclater as a way of explaining the presence of Lemur fossils in Madagascar and India, but not in Africa or the Middle-East. Lost land bridges were often invoked to explain how species had travelled across continents separated by water, and Sclater believed that India and Madagascar had been conjoined on a continent that broke apart into islands or sank beneath the waves.
For Blavatsky, Lemuria was ‘the cradle of mankind, of the physical sexual creature who materialised through long aeons out of the ethereal hermaphrodites’. In The Lost Lemuria (1904), her fellow theosophist William Scott-Elliott offered a vivid description of this ‘creature’:
His stature was gigantic, somewhere between 12 and 15 feet… His skin was very dark, being of a yellowish brown colour. He had a long lower jaw, a strangely flattened face, eyes small but piercing and set curiously far apart, so that he could see sideways as well as in front, while the eye at the back of the head… enabled him to see in that direction also.
The theory of continental drift, accepted in the early 20th century, obviated the need to conjure a Lemuria that explained the spread of fossils, but the idea has continued to fascinate occult writers. The American writer Frederick S Oliver pulled Lemuria into an orbit of spiritualist ideas, including spirit guides, astral travel and channelling. His 1905 novel A Dweller on Two Planets (1905), supposedly written under ‘spirit guidance’, tells the story of a community of sages who escaped from Lemuria and settled on Mount Shasta, near Oliver’s home in northern California.
Oliver’s book has been surprisingly influential. The idea of a Lemurian community living on Mount Shasta was frequently reported during the 1920s and ‘30s, and acquired a surprising degree of detail. There were said to be 1,000 magi, living in a ‘mystic village’ built around a Mayan-style temple. Occasionally, they appeared in neighbouring towns, clad in long white robes, ‘polite but taciturn’. They paid for supplies with gold nuggets and, every midnight, they rejoiced in their escape from Lemuria in ceremonies that bathed the mountains in red and green light. Various Californian luminaries, such as the actress Shirley MacLaine — who recalled a past life as an androgynous Lemurian in her memoir I’m Over All That (2012) — and Guy Warren Ballard, founder of the flamboyant religious movement I AM, were both inspired by Oliver’s novel. It still informs the philosophy of a New Age organisation called the Lemurian Fellowship, which maintains that ‘the continents of Atlantis and Mu [often synonymous with Lemuria] did exist, and still do, sunken beneath the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans’.
The British occult writer James Churchward claimed to have learnt about Mu from ancient tablets discovered in temples in India. His book The Lost Continent of Mu: Motherland of Man (1926) was one of the last great manifestations of our preoccupation with lost worlds. It was published just five years before Pilgrim E Lockwood, skipper of the Colina, hauled up his handworked antler. The wild imaginings of the 19th-century cult of Atlantis were starting to be displaced by a picture of a lost world that was scarcely less astonishing, and which had the advantage of being true.
As early as 1936, only a handful of archaeologists went against the grain of thinking that Dogger Bank was a mere ‘land bridge’ to speculate that its ancient plains would have been ‘especially favourable for settlement’. Over the last decade, however, their ideas have gained credence. In 2001, researchers at the University of Birmingham decided to investigate further. Using seismic data collected by Norwegian oil companies, the archeologists Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch and David Smith constructed 3D rendering of ‘shallow deposits’ lying only metres beneath the seabed. They revealed the course of a river, large as the Rhine, that once ran across Dogger Bank. The scale of the lost territory has astonished the three researchers. They do not exaggerate when they write in Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland (2009) that they’re exploring ‘an entire, preserved, European hunter-gatherer country’ — a lost land that, at its most extensive, was as large as the UK. The team has now mapped the contours of Doggerland and identified 1,600km of river channels and 24 lakes or marshes. The emerging picture is that of ‘a massive plain dominated by water’. To the modern eye, this environment might appear featureless, even unattractive, yet to Mesolithic communities, it offered rich living.
Gaffney, Fitch and Smith understand that, with or without the science, Doggerland remains one of the most ‘enigmatic’ archaeological landscapes in the world, and that our lack of historic knowledge about the people who inhabited it will prove attractive to fantasists and conspiracy theorists alike. Besides, Doggerland is not the only lost continent to be rediscovered. There’s Sundaland, the coastal shelf in the south China Sea, and Beringia, the land bridge that joined Asia to Alaska. Although yet to be explored in any detail, their existence confirms that the occultists were right in one respect, at least: we live on the edge of drowned worlds and are descended from their inhabitants.
Yet one thing has changed: archaeologists now believe that Doggerland’s hunter-gatherers didn’t settle the British Isles until they were forced to abandon their traditional homes on the low-lying plain. Humanity, of course, has always lived with the threat of great floods; but as water levels begin rising once again, we should remind ourselves that our densely inhabited world contains no comparable havens to which we might retreat. |
Dolphins could teach humans a thing or two about finding Nemo. The aquatic mammals may pinpoint prey hidden in bubbles by using mental math.
By adjusting the volume of sonar clicks, then processing the incoming echoes, dolphins might have solved a problem that still stymies man-made sonar: how to peer through frothy water. Using clicks that mimic an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, scientists devised a system that weeds out sound clutter from underwater bubbles.
“It’s really ingenious, actually,” says oceanographer Grant Deane of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “I think it’s very clever work, and there are a number of significant applications for it.”
Using something like a fireman’s hose, researchers shot bubbles into a huge water tank set underground. The bubbles cloaked a submerged target: a steel ball slightly smaller than a baseball. Then, the researchers sent out short bursts of so |
Xyara Asplen (Photo: Provided)
It's been over a month, now, since we first learned that the Blue Ridge Landfill in Estill County had become the dumping grounds for illegally imported radioactive fracking waste...and so far, things seem to be business as usual.
When the land men showed up last year, looking to lease our mineral rights for fracking, one of my first concerns was that my home would become convenient disposal for the huge quantities of poisonous water and sludge generated by the oil and gas industry. And now, in the county where I grew up, and possibly across this beautiful state, it already has.
Despite hundreds of folks from our community in Estill County and beyond showing up to demand accountability and answers, both have been in mighty short supply. It's no secret among the locals that trucks creep in and out of the dump at all hours of the night, and I grew up hearing a lot of speculation as to what they were burying in there.
And then, suddenly, it wasn't speculation anymore. At least 2,000 tons of concentrated radioactive tailings from out-of-state oil and gas fracking operations (something we've been fighting to keep out of our own foothills) had slipped in "under the radar" and been dumped loose from the containers it was brought here in -- and no one seems to even know just exactly where, let alone have a plan for recovery.
No one seems to know, either, how much of that loose radioactive particulate matter may have become airborne during the time the dumpings occurred (several months, July through November of last year); how much of it may have drifted across the road to the frighteningly close middle and high schools. I attended that middle school the year it opened, and you sure can smell the dump from there. When we smell something, it means we're breathing in its particles. This thought keeps me up at night, and I'm not even a mom.
The Blue Ridge Landfill is neither equipped nor allowed to accept this sort of waste. TENORMs, they call it, for Technologically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material. The half-life on the stuff is more than a thousand years, so when we're told, "Oh, the air tests came back fine, don't worry about it," it's a little insulting. The liners at the landfill last about 30 years, and are partway into that already. The landfill is near the Kentucky River, a pretty major watershed in these parts (don't forget, once it gets in the water, it's in all our backyards).
So you'd think there'd be outrage that we (and our future generations) have been put at this kind of risk, and that our officials on all levels would rally to shut down these privately owned corporations that acted illegally (Blue Ridge Landfill is owned by Advanced Disposal, and then of course there are the companies that brought the waste in).
But, unfortunately, we live in a state where our Energy and Environment Cabinet is headed up by the recently retired president of Eastern U.S. Operations for Arch Coal, Charles Snavely, whose attitude toward regulations can be summed up by his statement that, as the new regulator, he'll make sure “we are not a hindrance to any industry.” When he says about the fracking waste dumped in Estill County, "We will hold the violators accountable to the law just as we would in any situation under our jurisdiction,” I'm not reassured enough to just sit back and assume it's taken care of.
When our regulatory agencies are deeply beholden to the same industries they're supposed to protect us from, I suppose the officials have the difficult choice between working for the people whose communities are being poisoned, or the people who made them rich. It's not hard to see which way that decision usually goes.
And so it's business as usual. There were a couple of "Notices of Violation" issued, stating essentially that "if you don't stop this sort of thing, we might have to do something about it!" The Attorney General's office opened an investigation, but there hasn't been much noise since.
And meanwhile, no fines have been issued, no charges filed and the trucks still come and go across from the schools. The owners of the Blue Ridge Landfill rest easy knowing that the money continues to flow; the fracking operations continue to produce uncountable quantities of toxic sludge; our government continues its lip service while turning a blind eye -- or maybe that's a wink.
So now the question is this: Will Estill County -- our land, our water, our kids -- be written off as just another cost of doing business, or will this terrible tragedy serve to ignite the flame that burns through decades of government complacency and industry exploitation, and demands, once and for all, that the wellbeing of our community take precedence over the tired old expectation of "business as usual?"
Xyara Asplen is a second generation artisan, homesteader and advocate for local resiliency who grew up in Estill County, Kentucky, and now lives in the Red Lick Valley outside of Berea.
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When the Vegas Golden Knights take to the ice for their inaugural NHL season later this year, it will be unlike any hockey experience Las Vegas has ever seen. And in some ways, that will be a shame.
The NHL might be new to Las Vegas, but hockey has a decades-long history in the city. No fewer than eight professional and semi-pro teams called Vegas home in the 50 years preceding the incoming NHL iteration, and some proved just as freewheeling and glitzy as the city they represented.
No team exemplified the joie de verve of Las Vegas more than the Wranglers of the ECHL, who played at the Orleans Arena from 2003-14. The Wranglers were arguably the most successful franchise to call Las Vegas home, and held that distinction both on an off the ice, perhaps known best for its imaginative, if not irreverent, promotional themes. When you promote a game to coincide with the Rapture, you’re operating on another level.
More on that later. Las Vegas’ journey to the NHL actually began in 1968, when a semi-professional team called the Las Vegas Gamblers debuted in the regionally-specific California-Nevada Hockey League, playing at the International Ice Palace. While the Gamblers only existed for three seasons, the league it played in would endure, transitioning to the Pacific Southwest Hockey League before establishing itself as the West Coast Hockey League, which existed for decades before becoming part of the expanded ECHL in the mid-1990s.
A second semi-professional team replaced the Gamblers in 1971, with the Las Vegas Outlaws taking the ice for two seasons. However brief, the Outlaws left a mark in the city, going 29-8-4 in the first of two seasons for one of the best single-season records among any of the Las Vegas franchises.
But when the Outlaws skipped town, the city would go two decades without a pro hockey presence. It would take an appearance by the Great One in 1991 to infuse new life into Vegas ice.
While the Winter Classic has become an annual tradition in the NHL, it was nothing more than a preseason promotional gimmick in the early 1990s. And Las Vegas certainly didn’t shy away from hosting such a spectacle, welcoming the New York Rangers and Los Angeles Kings for an exhibition game on an outdoor rink at Caesars Palace before a crowd of 13,007. Despite 85-degree temperatures, the game played on and Wayne Gretzky scored for the Kings in a 5-2 victory.
Within two years, as the NHL began its Southwestern migration, hockey returned to Las Vegas with the Thunder of the IHL. While the Wranglers would later garner much fanfare, it was the Thunder that truly put Las Vegas on the hockey map. Playing its games at UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center, the Thunder drew an average of more than 8,000 fans in a debut 1993-94 campaign, and flourished in its six seasons, with several future NHL stars dotting its roster, including Alexei Yashin, Radek Bonk and Curtis Joseph.
The Thunder were not just some Vegas side show. The team won a pair of division titles, in 1994 and ’96, reached the IHL conference finals twice, in ‘95 and ’96, and had a development deal with the Phoenix Coyotes of the NHL.
But when UNLV refused to negotiate a lease extension with the Thunder after the 1999 season, the team was left without a place to play and folded. But the Thunder’s six-year run left an indelible impression and the franchise is credited with sparking initial interest in bringing an NHL franchise to the city.
Toward that end, the NHL began hosting an exhibition series between the LA Kings and the Colorado Avalanche in Las Vegas called “Frozen Fury.” The annual game, which continues to this day, began in 1997 and was played at the MGM Grand Garden through 2015. In 2016, the series moved to the T-Mobile Arena, where the Golden Knights will play their home games.
Throughout the 1990s, several teams attempted to join the Las Vegas hockey landscape alongside the Thunder, but proved one-year wonders. The Las Vegas Aces played one season (1994-95) in the Pacific Southwest League, while the Las Vegas Ice Dice never actually made it to the ice in 1995.
Two summer roller hockey franchises emerged in 1993 and 1998, playing in a Roller Hockey International league that featured celebrity owners, including Mark Messier and Tony Danza. The Las Vegas Flash played one season in 1993-94 and were coached by “Miracle on Ice” 1980 U.S. Olympian Ken Morrow. The Las Vegas Coyotes rolled for one year, in 1998-99.
And then, there were the Wranglers. Debuting in 2003, the Wranglers had the longest tenure of any Las Vegas team, concluding their run in 2014. In 11 seasons, the Wranglers featured 19 NHL-bound players and had 11 winning seasons. But the Wranglers will always be remembered for their imaginative promotions.
The team hosted Rapture Night on October 21, 2011. That was the date predicted by doomsayer Harold Camping as the last night on Earth, and the Wranglers weren’t going out without a party. The date was also the night of the Wranglers’ season-opener, and that’s all team COO Billy Johnson needed.
“This is a low-risk proposition,” Johnson famously said. “If it doesn’t go as planned, it’s not the end of the world.”
The team went all out, even giving away T-shirts.
“Nothing says Rapture like a T-shirt night.” Johnson said.
The Wranglers also hosted “Dick Cheney Hunting Vest Night” in 2006, giving out orange hunting vests to patrons that read, “Don’t Shoot, I’m Human!” in homage to the Vice President’s infamous hunting accident.
Then there were the prison uniforms the team wore on Rod Blagojevich Night, in tribute to the disgraced former Illinois governor who faced jail time for influence peddling. “Over 18” night featured uniform tops that made the players look like a scene out of “Magic Mike.”
And then there was the annual Midnight game that started … you guessed it … at midnight, so that local casino workers who normally were on shift during Wrangler games could see the team play.
The Wranglers finally went the way of all the other Las Vegas hockey franchises, giving way to the Golden Knights, as the Las Vegas dream of the big leagues was finally realized with the NHL.
Rapture Night? Call it heaven on ice.
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Next time you hesitate in taking the wheel after getting sloshed, get inspired by the true story of Salman Khan.
But for the minor inconvenience of having a breath analyzer thrust down your throat and getting a small ticket-which can be managed if you are lucky to find somebody waiting for chai paani -there is very little to fear.
Get drunk, drive like a Formula One racer and don't bother stepping on the brake. In case you notice human beings on the road, don't worry about Being Human. Bear in mind singer Abhijieet's advice: 'kutta road pe soyega, road pe marega.'
The latest twist in the story of Salman's hit-and-run case has just one moral: the faster you can drive, the more money you can burn, the farther you can run from the law.
While the court took 13 years to send Salman to jail, his lawyers took just a few hours to get him out on bail. Indeed, a great advertisement for drunken driving!
The Bombay High Court is justified in suspending Salman's 5-year sentence. When a convict approaches a higher court with an appeal against a lower court's judgement, the judge is right in granting bail till the case is decided to ensure that an innocent man doesn't suffer. This is the established procedure in India and the High Court has followed the standard practice.
But the problem with the system is that it works best for the rich and the privileged. For many others, securing bail is impossible even when they have not been convicted and are just facing trial.
A few years ago, The Hindu had revealed that more than 75 percent prisoners in Indian jails are undertrials. More than 3200 persons out of the nearly 2.8 lakh undertrials have already spent five years in jail.
Compare this with a celebrity like Salman Khan, accused of repeat offences. Around ten years ago, Salman was sentenced to a year in jail for poaching protected animals in Jodhpur. Some months later, he was sentenced again — this time for five years.
The five-year sentence in the hit-and-run case by the Mumbai court means Salman has been convicted thrice so far, he is facing a combined sentence of 11 years. Yet, he has spent just a few days behind bars.
Salman's hit-and-run case has often been compared with that of Alistair Anthony Pereira's, who was sent to jail for three years for driving his car over six persons in Mumbai. Though a lower court had let off Pereira with just six months in jail, the Supreme Court had later upheld the tougher punishment granted by the Bombay High Court. It had also commented that the punishment in such cases should be much more. Pereira, like Salman, was found guilty under Section 304 (2) of the IPC.
It would be relevant to quote a part of the SC verdict on Pereira.
"The object should be to protect society and to deter the criminal in achieving the avowed object of law by imposing appropriate sentence. It is expected that the courts would operate the sentencing system so as to impose such sentence which reflects the conscience of the society and the sentencing process has to be stern where it should be."
The court will be failing in its duty if appropriate punishment is not awarded for a crime which has been committed not only against the individual victim but also against the society to which the criminal and victim belong.
The punishment to be awarded for a crime must not be irrelevant but it should conform to and be consistent with the atrocity and brutality with which the crime has been perpetrated, the enormity of the crime warranting public abhorrence and it should "respond to the society's cry for justice against the criminal."
Even the Supreme Court would be wondering if we have learnt the right lesson from its verdict in Pereira's case: that fear of severe punishment will deter people from drunk driving.
Or, if Salman's story has a more powerful message: drink, drive; don't worry about the punishment.
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David Barton, who is a celebrity in Christian right circles but mostly unknown outside them, is worried about cartoon animals. You or I may think cartoon animals of the sort you see in Disney pictures are a harmless bit of entertainment, but Barton believes they are something far more sinister: A gateway drug to Babylonian pagan worship.
During a rant on is "Wallbuilders Live" radio show on Monday about how "we've gotten away from a Biblical culture" and that's led to the supposed evil of the animal rights movement, Barton turned on Disney cartoon animals.
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"Now I'm a huge Disney fan," Barton argued. "But when Bambi comes out and suddenly, Bambi is a human. Bambi's daddy gets shot and man, it's like having your own daddy shot."
(It's telling that Barton remembers it as Bambi's father, when everyone knows that it's actually Bambi's mother that dies. The casual disregard for the lives of women in the Christian right runs right down to the cartoon animal level.)
Barton's co-host agreed, arguing that "Bambi" is the first example of an anthropomorphized animal. "Before that, you had Old Yeller. Before that, you had Black Beauty," he said. "Bambi was not the first time an animal was not just an animal."
Even in the fact-free zone that is any religious right program, this one is a hell of a whopper. "Bambi" was released in 1942 and "Old Yeller" was published in 1956. And prior to Bambi you had, off the top of my head: The Peter Rabbit books (1902), "Winnie-the-Pooh" (1926), the Grimm Brothers fairy tales (first published in 1812), and "A Wind in the Willows" (1908).
But never mind the facts, there is some bizarre paranoia that needs whipping up.
"If you look back at the time of the Bible, a lot of the idols back then were actually animals," Barton ominously warned. "Dagon was the fish God."
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"The Bible tells us that you are to be kind to your animals," he added, in case you weren't piecing together his insinuations on their own, "but you don't worship your animals, you don't make a Dagon god out of them and that's what we've now done."
Dagon is a Bablyonian fertility god in the shape of a fish and clearly a grave threat to Barton's emotional stability, despite the fact that he hasn't been worshipped in a couple thousand years.
Please don't anyone tell Barton about furries. He might never recover.
Listening to these fools who are so insecure that they feel jealous when kids cry over Bambi's mom dying is amusing, but it should also be troubling. That's because Barton isn't some random dude, sitting in a corner, worried that Mickey Mouse is turning kids towards the ancient Babylonian faith. He's a hugely influential (and I hate to use this word) thinker on the religious right, a man whose invariably false ideas about American history have had an enormous impact on the goals and ideals of the religious right today.
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As the Southern Poverty Law Center lays out in their dossier on Barton, he's built his career as a self-styled "historian" who is actually a propagandist who has spent his life trying to construct the notion that the Founding Fathers intended the United States not to be the secular democracy described in the constitution, but a Christian nation built on his interpretation of the Bible. To bolster this claim, he has published a series of books making bizarre arguments based on extremely shady and often outright fabricated evidence.
In 2012, "All Things Considered" aired a devastating expose of Barton his bizarre idea that the Founders based our constitution and system of governance on biblical ideas. He argued that the constitution, which doesn't even mention God, is constructed out of biblical quotations.
"You look at Article 3, Section 1, the treason clause," he had recently declared on Trinity Broadcast Network. "Direct quote out of the Bible. You look at Article 2, the quote on the president has to be a native born? That is Deuteronomy 17:15, verbatim. I mean, it drives the secularists nuts because the Bible's all over it!"
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"We looked up every citation Barton said was from the Bible, but not one of them checked out," the NPR reporter said, before going on to lay out how Barton repeatedly and aggressively lies flat out in his claims that men like Thomas Jefferson intended our government to be religious to the point of Christian theocracy.
Barton had his book on Jefferson pulled from shelves by the publisher in 2012, due to over-the-top dishonesty, but conservative forces are clearly still being influenced by his decades of work put into pushing the fantasy that the U.S. has a secret history as a Christian nation that liberals and secularist have covered up.
The echoes of that belief are all over, for instance, the recent controversy in Tennessee over the Bible. The legislature in the state narrowly passed a bill making the Bible the official state book, and it's up in the air whether the governor will have the cojones to veto something so obviously in violation of the First Amendment.
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In justifying this bill, one state senator argued that "the very founding of our nation, the very form of government we have to today" is based on the Bible.
Anyone who has followed the history of the religious right knows exactly where that idea comes from: David Barton and his Wallbuilders organization, the single most aggressive force for decades now in popularizing the idea that the Founders were somehow trying to create a Christian nation built on biblical principles.
While it might seem like a small thing to make the Bible the official state book, this sort of thing is clearly being rolled out as a test of the legal boundaries, which is not only pointlessly expensive, but if successful, will surely lead the way to other, more aggressive efforts to dismantle the wall between church and state. This is about constructing the entirely false narrative that the Bible is an important document in history....one that will therefore have to be taught in schools with misleading narratives about it being a foundational document.
While they're teaching kids that the Bible is a foundational document of American history, they might as well teach Barton's beliefs that love of cuddly cartoon animals leads to worshipping forgotten Babylonian gods. The two beliefs, after all, have about the same amount of truth to them. |
Nestled in the contravened alleys and a cluster of tightly constructed houses in downtown Srinagar, is the deserted polling booth at Malikyar, Fateh Kadal area of Srinagar, where 29 people out of 576 people have voted till Sunday afternoon.
It is a frightening sight! Every person moving towards the alley leading to polling booth, which otherwise is a library and community marriage hall, is mocked and locals counting every person entering the booth. The mood at this polling booth is reflected on almost all the polling stations in Srinagar and Budgam area.
The huge queues of voters were missing from the almost all the parts of the Srinagar city, and here at the Malikyar polling both in old town of Srinagar, the question was not how many people will vote, but who dared to come first.
“At 6:45 am, 15 minutes before the polling was to start, almost a dozen people came and wanted to vote, but we told them to go back and come at 7:00 am. They stayed in the courtyard till 7:00 am, voted and left immediately,” presiding officer, Suhaib Ahmad, told Firstpost.
As the lanes leading towards Malikyar polling station remained deserted, people peeped through their house. A pin-drop silence in the surroundings made things only worse for the polling staff inside. Stray dogs roamed in groups and three CRPF soldiers remained alert to keep an eye on every moving object in the vicinity of the polling station.
“Are we in the main Srinagar,” a paramilitary forces soldiers guarding the polling both asked this reporter. “I have not seen more than 30 people since morning”.
The fringes of the old town of Srinagar have traditionally been the supporter of National Conference but who is going to benefit from the nearly deserted polling station of Srinagar city this time, no one knows.
“If there are seven voters who took the risk of voting for National Conference. These are people who did not get afraid when militancy was at its peak, so how would they get afraid this time,” Nazir Mir, who stood outside the polling both number 31-C in Khanyar area, told Firstpost.
The polling was held under tight security as the election commission had deployed more then 15,000 additional para-military forces for the first phase of parliamentary by-polls to ensure peaceful polling in Srinagar Parliamentary constituency, which is spread over three districts of Srinagar, Budgam and Ganderbal.
The unprecedented security arrangements were made after militants carried out three attacks in Srinagar in last two weeks in the summer capital.
“I have given election duty four times but this is the toughest one I am seeing,” a women polling officer, said inside a booth in the old town of Srinagar.
Violence was reported from all the three districts after the protests broke out in Budgam district, four people were killed during the clashes after hundred of youth came out to protests against the polling.
One youth was injured in Dalwan village of Chrar-e-Sharif in Budgam district he later succumbed to his injuries in hospital. Earlier, two youths were killed in clashes near the polling stations in Dalwan and Rathsun villages of the district.
The angry youth entered a polling station and started beating the polling staff in Khan Sahab area of Budgam were two staff members, both teachers, on poll duty were injured and shifted to hospital. Clashes were also reported from other places of the Budgam district were twenty protesters were hit by pellets in Soibugh village of central Kashmir. Two polling stations were closed after witnessing heavy stone pelting in Khag tehsil in the same district.
Till 1.00 pm Srinagar Parliamentary Constituency saw 4.98 percent votes were cast out of total electorate of 1261395. By 1.00 pm 62891voters had exercised their right to vote.
Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Shantmanu said that fourteen EVMs were either damaged or snatched by mobs during by-polls through out the three districts.
The Jammu and Kashmir government has snapped the internet service in three districts falling under the Srinagar parliamentary constituency.
“Around 46 votes have been polled at out polling till 4:00pm. Now the question is how will we go back home in the evening,” Suhaib Ahmad, the returning officer, said.
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The Twins have agreed to a deal with former Tigers reliever Joel Zumaya, pending a physical, a major league official confirmed today.
The agreement was first reported by MLB.com.
Zumaya, 27, is expected to take his physical sometime late this week, perhaps Thursday or Friday, and the Twins plan to be careful not to comment publicly until after everything checks out OK.
The physical will be key because Zumaya has had a history of arm issues. In 2010, he posted a 2.58 ERA in 31 appearances before breaking his right arm on a pitch at Target Field.
But the Twins had scouts on hand for his workout in Dallas recently when he was throwing 92-95 mph, easily, on every fastball.
One key note is that Zumaya has agreed to a non-guaranteed major league deal. This means he'll be given a spot on the 40-man roster, but the Twins would be able to cut him in spring training and not be on the hook for all of the guaranteed money if something doesn't look right.
The contract would pay Zumaya about $800,000, with up to about $900,000 in additional incentives, which are usually based on games pitched.
On the surface, this appears to be a nice low-risk, high-reward deal for the Twins. If Zumaya is throwing anywhere near as well as he was before the injury in 2010, the Twins are getting a steal. |
Netflix’s Lost in Space remake has found its female lead in Deadwood and House of Cards actress Molly Parker.
Parker will star as brilliant aerospace engineer Maureen Robinson, who makes the decision to bring her whole family to space. The role was first played by June Lockhart in Irwin Allen’s original 1965-1968 series and by Mimi Rogers in the 1998 movie.
The actress will star alongside Black Sails' Toby Stephens as her hubby, astrophysicist John Robinson, who is also the expedition commander. Maxwell Jenkins will play their son Will, the youngest child in the family, and Taylor Russell will play eldest daughter Judy. I gotta say, I'm really digging the sci-fi series' casting so far, and it's shaping up nicely.
The show's premise follows the Robinsons, who are forced to come together when they find themselves stranded light-years away from their intended destination and have to battle their new alien surroundings as well as their personal demons.
The 1965 series was set 30 years in the future, in 1997, and revolved around an attempt by the U.S. to colonize deep space by sending one family on a 5 1/2-year journey to another planet. They are, however, unaware that they have an enemy agent on board, Dr. Zachary Smith (played by Jonathan Harris in the original and Gary Oldman in the 1998 film), who sabotages the mission, causing the ship to veer off course and essentially become “lost in space.”
Slated for 2018 (Le sigh) the 10-episode sci-fi TV series hails from Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (Dracula Untold, Last Witch Hunter). Prison Break’s Zack Estrin will act as showrunner and executive producer (alongside Sazama and Sharpless), with Synthesis Entertainment’s Kevin Burns and Jon Jashni, along with Neil Marshall and Marc Helwig of Legendary TV-based Applebox. Marshall (who directed episodes of Black Sails, Game of Thrones and Constantine, among others) will serve as producing director and is said to helm several episodes.
What do you guys think of the casting of Molly Parker as Dr. Maureen Robinson on Netflix’s Lost in Space remake?
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(via Deadline) |
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday accused the United Nations chief of “stoking terror” after Ban Ki-moon said, in connection with the wave of Palestinian deadly terror attacks, that it was “human nature to react to occupation.”
“There is no justification for terrorism,” Netanyahu said. “The Palestinian terrorists don’t want to build a state; they want to destroy a state, and they say that proudly. They want to murder Jews everywhere and they state that proudly. They don’t murder for peace and they don’t murder for human rights.”
The UN has “lost its neutrality and its moral force, and these statements by the Secretary-General do nothing to improve its situation,” Netanyahu said in a furious video statement. Ban’s remarks, said Netanyahu, “stoke terror.”
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Ban had attributed the terror attacks in the past four months, in which over 25 Israelis have been killed, to “Palestinian frustration.”
“Stabbings, vehicle attacks, and shootings by Palestinians targeting Israeli civilians – all of which I condemn — and clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces, have continued to claim lives,” Ban had said earlier in the day at a session of the UN Security Council.
“But security measures alone will not stop the violence. They cannot address the profound sense of alienation and despair driving some Palestinians –- especially young people. The full force of the law must be brought to bear on all those committing crimes –- with a system of justice applied equally for Israelis and Palestinians alike,” said Ban.
“Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process,” Ban continued. “Some have taken me to task for pointing out this indisputable truth. Yet, as oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.”
In response to Ban, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said the UN chief’s comments “harm the global fight against terror, that Israel is leading, and gives legitimacy to those murderers to continue attacking.”
Addressing the UN Security Council’s periodic Middle East debate, Ban Ki-moon also urged both sides to act now “to prevent the two-state solution from slipping away forever.” He condemned rocket fire from terror groups in Gaza into Israel and called for an end to incitement. Progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians requires that Israel freeze its settlement construction, the UN secretary-general said Tuesday, calling the settlement activities “an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community.”
Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour urged the council to act. He later told reporters that all 15 council members acknowledged that Israel’s settlement building is “the main obstacle to any meaningful political process.” He said the Palestinians are meeting with all council members to assess their readiness to act this year.
Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, did not address settlement-building. He instead showed reporters what he called “terror dolls” that he said are used to teach hatred to Palestinian children. Israel seized the dolls at Haifa port last month, saying they were headed for the Palestinian Authority and were part of an incitement campaign.
“The UN Secretary-General is encouraging terror instead of fighting terror,” he said.
Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid also rushed to denounce Ban’s remarks.
“Terrorism against innocent civilians can not be justified. No one should provide excuses for it, especially not the UN Secretary-General. Terrorism against innocent civilians is the result of nothing except the murderous insanity of the perpetrators,” he said.
“There are millions of people in the world whose lives are harder than those of the Palestinians,” Lapid continued. “In Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world for whom the UN didn’t create a special body and to whom the UN didn’t send billions of dollars (and then stood to one side while a corrupt government stole it).
“For some reason those people don’t think there is anything, anything at all, which gives them license to take a knife and stab a mother of six. To take a knife and stab a woman who is five months pregnant. To take a knife and stab a wonderful 23 year old woman who had never harmed anyone.” |
Your daily summary of important news, opinions and trivia about 'Making a Murderer,' the Teresa Halbach slaying and the trial and conviction of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey
Kathleen Zellner, Steven Avery's new attorney, was Chicago Lawyer magazine's Person of the Year. She is shown on the cover of the December 2014/January 2015 edition. (Photo: Cover of Chicago Lawyer magazine)
Lots of interesting little things to get to this morning regarding reports around the Internet on the Teresa Halbach slaying, the arrest and conviction of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey and the "Making a Murderer" documentary.
►The latest from Steven Avery's tweetin' defense attorney, Kathleen Zellner:
"So it's clear we are examining the prosecutorial violations first not the defense attorneys performance. #MakingAMurderer #StayingRealBusy."
That's apparently a response to a Rolling Stone article earlier this week in which Avery's former attorneys said Zellner is leaving no stone unturned in her defense of Avery. (No punctuation marks were harmed in the making of that tweet.)
That includes considering the possibility that Avery had inadequate representation during his trial for the 2005 murder of Halbach, a photographer who had gone to Avery's property in northwestern Manitowoc County to take pictures of a car he wanted to sell.
Daily newsletter: Sign up for 'Making a Murderer' updates
Timeline: History of the Steven Avery case
Related: “Making a Murderer” coverage, archived stories and more
►Brendan Dassey-obsessed Twitter user @JustineMannin9, meanwhile, has a novel idea provided Avery's co-defendant, Dassey, is freed from his murder conviction in the Halbach killing: Dassey should be Vince McMahon's guest at a WWE event.
►'Making a Murderer," the 10-part Netflix documentary examining the arrest and conviction of Avery and Dassey, will be honoured as "Programme of the Year" at the annual Banff World Media Festival in Canada.
►If you find yourself in Los Angeles this weekend and have nothing to do (!), LA-ist has you covered with the suggestion that you go hear former Avery defense attorneys Dean Strang and Jerry Buting and their "Conversation on Justice."
It's one of the site's 20 best bets for the weekend. Other suggestions include seeing "Neil Hamburger Live" and watching a film called "Holy Hell," for what it's worth.
►If you expect to find yourself in Rockford, Ill., May 19 with nothing to do, you'll be happy to know there are PLENTY of good seats available for "Avery: Guilty as Charged."
Calumet County Dist. Atty. Ken Kratz gives his closing arguments in the Steven Avery trial on March 14, 2007 at the Calumet County Courthouse in Chilton. (Photo: AP)
The event, featuring Avery prosecutor Ken Kratz and Fox TV personality (and former judge) Jeanine Pirro, has so far sold fewer than half the seats at Rockford's Coronado Performing Arts Center, according to this handy Ticketmaster seating chart.
►Bustle says Dassey has "hope for a bright future" if he is released. The reason? He gets dozens of letters of support in prison each day.
►The stevenavery.org Internet domain name apparently is for sale. For a cool $1,000, it can be yours. Caveat emptor.
The domain name was in use earlier this year, though Dassey wrote to supporters in late February that its use was a scam.
dschneid@greenbaypressgazette.com and follow him on Twitter @PGDougSchneider
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LONDON — There are so many Jews at the top of Britain’s Conservative party, Prime Minister David Cameron once quipped, that it should be known as the Torah party rather than the Tory party.
With the announcement last Wednesday that Ian Livingston was selected as trade and investment minister and elevated to the House of Lords, Cameron has appointed to the government possibly its most committed Jew yet, and certainly its most outspoken supporter of Israel — which Livingston has called “the most amazing state in the world.”
Livingston, 48, is one of Britain’s most visible business leaders, widely credited with steering telecom giant BT (formerly British Telecom) through the global downturn as its chief executive. Wednesday’s announcement of his departure from the company, which will take effect in September, immediately wiped £400 million ($618 million) off its market value.
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In his new role as trade minister, which he will take up in December, Livingston will promote UK trade globally and attract investment in the British economy. He is replacing Lord Green, an ordained priest in the Church of England who is approaching retirement, and he was personally handpicked for the trade minister job by Cameron, who said Livingston “will bring huge talent to a vital national effort.”
Other top Jewish figures in the Conservative party include co-chairs Lord Feldman and Grant Shapps MP, who has defined himself as “quite observant,” senior treasurer Howard Leigh, a member of the Jewish Leadership Council; and former party treasurers Richard Harrington MP and Lord Fink, another member of the JLC.
Livingston leads an active Jewish life, regularly attending an Orthodox shul, Borehamwood and Elstree United Synagogue just outside London. He is a well-known supporter of Israel and of Jewish charities, in recent years hosting or speaking at events for high school Yavneh College, the United Jewish Israel Appeal, human rights NGO Rene Cassin, and Jewish business incubator TraidE, among other causes.
In October 2011, in a pre-Rosh Hashanah round-table discussion for the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, Livingston said that he keeps a kosher home and that his two children, Alastair and Emma, “have chosen a reasonably Orthodox path.” Asked to describe and rank the three key determinants of his identity, he replied, “Jewish, Scot, male.”
In that same discussion, asked for a Jewish New Year’s wish, Livingston said he hoped to see the start of “a path to peace for Israel. There is so much to celebrate in Israel. It is the most amazing state in the world and the downside or the pity of it is that it is turning into something slightly different. I don’t think there is a huge amount of time to start treading that path and I hope the next year actually starts to do so.”
According to his former rabbi, Naftali Brawer, now CEO of the Spiritual Capital Foundation, “Ian is an extraordinarily bright guy with a real sense of commitment to wider society. The fact that he’s leaving BT at the peak of his tenure in order to take up public service speaks volumes.
“He takes his Jewishness very seriously, drawing on Jewish values and texts. Chair of BT is an extremely high-profile position in the UK, but Ian and his wife Debbie are the most humble people. They are fantastic parents, great friends, and live in the community with everyone else. There are no airs about them.”
Livingston is not a supporter “of the current Israeli government,” he said during the Jewish Chronicle discussion. “If there is a Labour government in Israel, I am happier. I can be more emotionally attached to it,” he said, but he stressed that this did not dramatically change “my approach and attitude to Israel, any more than saying because I might disagree with the actions of the British government in some places, it somehow makes me less British.”
During his time at BT Livingston dismissed calls by charity War on Want for the company to disassociate itself from the Israel telecom company Bezeq, and told The Jewish Chronicle: “I have not received a single email from anyone in War on Want expressing any concerns about a relationship we may or many not have had in Syria, in Libya or anywhere else. You wonder and ask yourself repeatedly: Why is it? Is it anti-Americanism? Is it anti-Semitism? Is it anti-Zionism where they treat Israel differently? … That is a discomfort I feel just now. It is not a personal discomfort. It is a discomfort about something in society.”
Shortly after his appointment as chief executive in 2008, he hosted a dinner for 19 Israeli hi-tech firms who showcased their products in the BT Tower.
“The relationship with Israel is good for BT because it means making money,” he told guests. “It is not just Israel as a partner for innovation, but as a partner for business.”
Livingston, who was born in Glasgow in 1964, has long been regarded as a wunderkind. His mother Rhoda was the long-time secretary of Scotland’s oldest shul, Garnet Hill, while his father was a respected GP before his retirement. By age 19 he had graduated from the University of Manchester with a degree in economics, and after several years working in accounting and banking, became the youngest-ever financial director of a FTSE-100 company, the Dixons Group, at 32.
In his five years as chief executive of BT, he oversaw a program of cuts that saw the company’s debt drop by over a fifth, and share price rise from 75p to more than £3.
With much of his pay packet depending on share price performance, he pocketed almost £10 million last year, it was reported last month, but his new government position will be unpaid.
Livingston’s other great passion is Glasgow’s Celtic football club, where he sits on the board. According to someone who has known him well for many years but did not want to be identified, “He has been known to come back from places as far away as Brazil to make a match and then go back.
“If he has sharp elbows, he deployed them in the world of business,” they added. “In his personal life, he is very family-minded, quiet, self-effacing and soft-spoken. He’s a real mensch.” |
SAN FRANCISCO – Top California and San Francisco officials, along with faith, LGBT and civil rights leaders, are calling on San Francisco Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone to cancel his participation in an upcoming march and rally against marriage equality for same-sex couples.
The June 19 event in Washington, D.C. is being organized by some of the nation’s most virulently anti-LGBT organizations and leaders, including the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and the Family Research Council.
Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, State Senator Mark Leno, State Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, San Francisco Treasurer Jose Cisneros, and Supervisors David Campos and Scott Wiener are among the more than 70 leaders and organizations who have signed an open letter asking Cordileone to reconsider his participation in the National Organization for Marriage’s march and rally and, instead, “join us in seeking to promote reconciliation rather than division and hatred.”
“We respect freedom of religion and understand that you oppose civil marriage for same-sex couples,” the letter states.
“Many people of faith who have different opinions on the question of civil marriage for same-sex couples have come together in respectful dialogue and discernment to discuss those differences. Sadly, the actions of NOM and its invited speakers push us farther apart rather than bringing us together.”
The signers point to NOM’s “long and well-documented history of publishing material that connects homosexuality with pedophilia and incest and falsely suggests that gays and lesbians are trying to ‘inculcate children.’”
The Family Research Council, which is co-sponsoring the event, has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The letter notes that the actions of NOM, Family Research Council and several of the invited speakers contradict the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “which states that lesbian and gay people ‘must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.’”
Article continues below
The letter comes as Catholic bishops are being urged to expand their priorities, with Pope Francis slated to convene a meeting of senior clerics this fall to reexamine issues such as same-sex marriage.
A recent poll by Public Religion Research Institute found that 57 percent of Catholics favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry.
Other speakers at the event include former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, Bishop Harry Jackson Jr., and the Rev. Bill Owens Sr., all of whom “have repeatedly denigrated lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people,” the signers write.
An online petition asking Archbishop Cordileone not to speak at the rally is here.
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By Elliot Foster
Conor Benn will make his professional debut in the spring.
The son of former WBO middleweight and WBC super middleweight champion Nigel, 19, is set to make his bow in the paid game on a pay-per-view undercard.
Benn, who has inked promotional terms with Eddie Hearn and Matchroom Sport, will be trained by Peter and Tony Sims at the Matchroom Boxing gym in Brentwood, Essex ahead of his maiden date in the pro game.
He will box on April 9 at the O2 Arena, with his fight –– which is expected to be a four-round contest –– potentially being aired exclusively live on Sky Sports Box Office.
‘The Destroyer,’ as he will be known, will be showcased on the pay platform as part of the same card as Olympic gold medal winner Anthony Joshua (15-0, 15 KOs).
‘AJ’ will take on his toughest challenge to date as he faces IBF world heavyweight champion Charles Martin (23-0-1, 21 KOs) for the crown in only his 16th fight.
The 26-year-old British and Commonwealth champion, who made his debut at the same venue back in October, 2013, was last in the ring in December against arch rival Dillian Whyte, who he knocked out inside seven rounds.
Also on the card, Brian Rose (28-3-1, 8 KOs) and Matthew Macklin (34-6, 22 KOs) will clash in an official eliminator for the WBC middleweight title, which is currently held by Saúl ‘Canelo’ Alvárez and will be challenged for by Bolton’s Amir Khan on May 7 at the new T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Further undercard fights for the Martin-Joshua bill are to be revealed in due course. |
Strike Suit Zero will remind you of the heyday of 90's space combat, whilst simultaneously introducing exciting new mechanics to make it relevant for today’s audience. To ensure that the game brings space combat back with a bang, we’ve brought in the best names in mecha and sci-fi to really put a stamp on the genre.
This is space combat reborn.
If you're a fan of mecha, you'll be excited to learn that ship and craft designs come courtesy of Junji Okubo, who has previously lent his talents to Steel Battalion, Infinite Space, Appleseed: Ex Machina and Viper’s Creed. Working closely with the Born Ready team, Junji – who normally favours a western design philosophy – has brought some more traditional eastern traits to the Strike Suit designs.
As a special reward for Kickstarter backers, we're offering two backers the chance to have their ideas for a mech or space-craft turned into a real design by Junji himself. See below for more on this exclusive opportunity!
You can see Junji talking about his work on Strike Suit Zero in the developer diary below:
In addition to this, Paul Ruskay, who has composed the award-winning Homeworld soundtrack, has furnished the game with an original score. With its otherworldly tones and fusion of styles, Paul has created something perfect for Strike Suit Zero.
The main Strike Suit theme is a collaboration between Paul and Kokia – a Japanese singer/songwriter well known for her work with anime and videogames. Kokia has leant her vocal talents to numerous anime and games, including: Tales of Innocence, Origin: Spirits of the Past and Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino.
--
There's a fusion of cultures at the heart of Strike Suit Zero; a strong notion of East meets West. From the soundtrack, to the mechs, to the way the gameplay itself unfolds. Strike Suit Zero is a combination of sounds, designs and mechanics that have been brought together with the precise aim of making the best space combat experience possible.
In the year 2299, an interstellar war rages. Earth's dwindling forces - the United Nations of Earth (U.N.E) - repel a fearless enemy, fighting to protect a planet on the brink of destruction. You begin the game behind the front lines on a low-priority post defending a station near Earth. After repelling an attack, word comes through from Earth's command that the enemy are intending to end the war with one decisive strike.
They've amassed a colossal fleet, and are bringing it to Earth.
You're sent into deep space to join Earth's forces as they attempt to intercept the fleet....
Fast, frantic space combat: you can freely engage multiple enemies, dogfight other pilots, fight massive fleet battles and defend vast structures.
you can freely engage multiple enemies, dogfight other pilots, fight massive fleet battles and defend vast structures. The Strike Suit: strategically switch from Pursuit Mode (speed and power) to Strike Mode (a powerful, highly maneuverable combat mode)
strategically switch from Pursuit Mode (speed and power) to Strike Mode (a powerful, highly maneuverable combat mode) Multiple endings: your choices in game - for example, the secondary objectives you choose to complete - directly affect the state of Earth at the end of the game. With multiple endings, preventing Earth’s destruction is your immediate concern but preserving its future is your ultimate goal.
your choices in game - for example, the secondary objectives you choose to complete - directly affect the state of Earth at the end of the game. With multiple endings, preventing Earth’s destruction is your immediate concern but preserving its future is your ultimate goal. Capital Ship Destruction: take capital ships apart piece by piece – take out their turrets or target weak-points to blow out entire sections of their superstructure.
take capital ships apart piece by piece – take out their turrets or target weak-points to blow out entire sections of their superstructure. Vibrant and vivid universe: space is far from the dark, featureless void you'd expect. Discover the colour and vibrancy of the Strike Suit universe across 13 unique locations.
space is far from the dark, featureless void you'd expect. Discover the colour and vibrancy of the Strike Suit universe across 13 unique locations. Ship Designs from renowned Mechanical Design engineer Junji Okubo ( Appleseed: Ex Machina , Steel Battalion. )
from renowned Mechanical Design engineer Junji Okubo ( , ) Music from award-winning sound designer Paul Ruskay (Homeworld) including a collaboration with Japanese singer/songwriter Kokia (Tales of Innocence, Gunslinger Girl: II Teatrino)
"Born Ready Games have put a lot of effort into building battles that don’t entirely revolve around you. “We have almost a full combat simulation happening while you’re doing your objectives,” he says." -- PC GAMER
"...this transmogrifying technobeast took on vessels that made Battlestar Galactica look like Sputnik." -- ROCK PAPER SHOTGUN
"Strike Suit Zero has plenty to satisfy your space-mech cravings." GAMESRADAR
"...Then everyone sort of stopped making space games, and a lot of people were forced to pack away their dreams of being interstellar combat pilots. It was heartbreaking.
Thank your lucky stars, then, for Strike Suit Zero from Born Ready, a 3D space combat simulator that recalls those heady days – just with super detailed HD visuals and a touch of Anime-style mech action. " -- HOOKSHOT INC
"It has intelligent, tough enemy AI and a great Strike Suit advantage that prepares you for the challenges ahead with powerful defensive and offensive abilities. The eerie, otherworldly soundtrack is certainly no slouch either." -- DESTRUCTOID.
IMPORTANT: The first 1000 backers who pledge $50 or more will gain exclusive access to the beta later this year.
Strike Suit Zero isn’t just a game; it’s a universe, and with our tiered reward system, we’re inviting you to be a part of it. Tied into our rewards are ranks corresponding to how much you've backed. Every single pledge - be it one dollar, or ten-thousand - will get your name added to the Roll of Honour on the credits for the game.
Here’s an idea of what your money can get you:
Join the fight to save Earth and enlist for updates! Get your name added to the Roll of Honour in the credits for the game! We'll also provide you with a wallpaper pack exclusive to Kickstarter, and you'll be kept up to date with all news on the project.
The early bird gets the worm! 1000 early adopters will pay just $15 for Strike Suit Zero on the day of its release. Get those pledges in quickly!
$20 will get you Strike Suit Zero on the day of release. You'll also get an exclusive set of wallpapers - specific to this tier - for your desktop, mobile phone and tablet.
The Wing Commander tier offers the definitive Strike Suit Zero bundle. Not only will you get the game, digital art-book, soundtrack AND additional content, you'll also get the Kickstarter-exclusive Marauder Strike Suit, strictly available to our Kickstarter backers only.
THE FIRST 1000 BACKERS FROM $50 AND UP WILL BE GIVEN ACCESS TO THE EXCLUSIVE STRIKE SUIT ZERO BETA.
Strike Pilots will get their very own U.N.E apparel. The official Strike Suit Zero T-Shirt has been designed in collaboration with Insert Coin Clothing; a limited run of tees that will be the envy of space-combat fans everywhere.
In addition to the t-shirt from the previous tier, Chief Strike Pilots get the Deluxe Strike Suit Zero Artbook; a physical book with 40 pages of concept art, mecha and ship designs, with commentary from the team.
Space is cold. Layer up. The Squad Captain reward offers an exclusive U.N.E hoody - designed alongside our friends at Insert Coin Clothing - and is exclusively available through Kickstarter. At this tier, you'll also be eligible for ALL Strike Suit Zero DLC in the future.
One for the music lovers. The Fleet Conductor tier offers a physical copy of the Strike Suit Zero soundtrack, composed and arrange by Paul Ruskay. Exclusive to Kickstarter, this limited run of CDs not only features bonus tracks and commentary that isn't available anywhere else, but is also signed by Paul Ruskay himself.
The world and art of Strike Suit Zero is one of the game's shining assets. With the Commodore reward tier, we're giving you the opportunity to take that art into your home. These stunning paintings - approximately 6" x 30" are printed at the highest possible grade, and framed ready for your wall of choice.
The CAG is entitled to his or her very own Strike Suit. Standing approximately 14cm tall, these detailed Strike Suit figures are the perfect addition to the desk of any mecha or space combat fan.
Become immortalised in Strike Suit lore. Have your name and likeness added to a special mission in the game. You'll be one of the Heroes of the Fleet, and will become a permanent fixture in the lore and history of Strike Suit Zero.
The ultimate reward for connoisseurs of space combat and mecha. Based on your designs, ideas and instructions, Junji Okubo will design you your very own mech; one of only two that will ever be created. This mech will then be turned into a 3D model by the Born Ready art team, and sent for 3D printing. You'll own your very own mech, a collaboration of your ideas and Junji's design talents.
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$130,000 -- Mod Tools
- If the Kickstarter campaign reaches $130,000 we will take our in-house editing tool to the next level and open it to the community. You will be able to create your own missions - your own campaign - and share them with the community.
$180,000 -- Mac and Linux support
- Should we hit $180,000, we'll be able to offer Strike Suit Zero on both the Mac and Linux platforms. Should we reach this target, your pledge (given it's $15 or more) will get you the game - on your platform of choice - shortly after the main release of the game.
We are Born Ready, a game studio based in Guildford, UK. We’re a 25-strong team with a deeply rooted passion for not just the space combat genre – but the industry as a whole. We’ve been hard at work on Strike Suit Zero for two years, and can’t wait to get it into your hands.
The team has years of cumulative experience in the industry, having worked on the likes of Call of Duty Finest Hour, Warhammer: Firewarrior, Batallion Wars, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Dungeon & Dragons Tactics and Geometry Wars Galaxies, amongst others.
To all our backers: a hearty ‘thank you’ from everybody at Born Ready. With your help, we’re able to take Strike Suit Zero to next level; we’re able to incorporate player feedback from PAX and gamescom, and let our beta players shape the final months of development. We’re convinced that the game can be something special, and you’re giving us the opportunity to prove it. Again, thank you.
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In addition to a version number, every Android release is also associated with two other identifiers: a codename and the final commercial name – both typically named after desserts or treats. For Android L, the codename was Lemon Meringue Pie and the final name was, obviously, Lollipop. For Android M it was Macadamia Nut Cookie for the codename and Marshmallow for the final name. So what about Android N?
While Google doesn’t necessarily “officially” announce its internal codenames, these tend to have a way of creeping out to the public, usually thanks to appearances in the AOSP repository. And to no surprise, we’re now starting to see references to NYC, or what is believed to be the codename “New York Cheesecake”.
Of course, Google has never ever picked a codename to be the actual final name, and unless they want completely troll us (which isn’t impossible), odds are the final name will be something totally different. So what can we expect from the final name? We probably won’t know until Android N releases in final form, but Google’s Sundar Pichai previously joked about the possibility of a poll to figure out what to call it… and sure enough, such a thing as made its way into the Google Opinion Rewards app in the form of two questions that don’t necessarily mention Android N, but are obviously references to it.
The first question is “What tasty food comes to mind that starts with the letter “N””, the second one asks “What is your favorite tasty treat from the list below?” with choices being Napoleon, Nut brittle, Nachos, Nori, Noodles, Nougat, Neapolitan ice cream. Nori (seaweed), Nachos, and noodles aren’t exactly what I’d call tasty treats, at least not in the conventional sense, but likely that’s more just Google getting its troll on.
The bigger question is if they are really using this survey information to help in their decision, or if it’s just Google being Google, messing with our emotions. The later wouldn’t be too surprising. Anyhow, what do you think is the most likely candidate for the “N” final name? And what do you think about the new codename? Share your thoughts down in the comments.
Learn more about Android N by checking out our “Diving into Android N” series! |
File – AP Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a primary night news conference, Tuesday, May 3, 2016, in New York. His tweet and Facebook post to mark Cinco de Mayo quickly went viral on Thursday.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump celebrated Cinco de Mayo with a huge taco bowl in New York City.
Trump posted a photo of himself, posing with the dish in his office at Trump Tower, to Twitter and Facebook Thursday afternoon.
"Happy Cinco de Mayo!" the candidate wrote in the caption. "The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill."
"I love Hispanics!" he added.
The photo had garnered more than 44,000 shares and was liked more than 134,000 times in under an hour after being posted to Facebook. Thousands commented on the photo as well.
"I'm a trump supporter and I thought this was funny," said Facebook commenter Alex Earney.
It also went viral on Twitter, where some users lambasted the photo.
"C'mon man, even your Mexican food has a wall," tweeted Danny O'Dwyer, referring to Trump's promise to build a wall between Mexico and the United States.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was also quick to criticize Trump on social media, posting a video of him telling "NBC Nightly News" host Lester Holt this week that he still plans to deport all undocumented immigrants from the country if he's elected president.
Top News Photos: R. Kelly Leaves Jail After Paying Bond |
Anonymous hackers behind the @OpLastResort twitter account have hacked UK and Chinese government websites in response to the nine-hour detention of Brazilian national David Miranda, partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, at London’s Heathrow Airport.
Miranda was held by British authorities under a counterterrorism law after visiting documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras in Berlin. Poitras and Greenwald are both involved with publishing classified information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The hackers gained access to molevalley.gov.uk, a site used by the local government district in Surrey, a county in southeastern England.
More from GlobalPost: David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald's partner, detained at London airport
In an effort to satirize Miranda's detention under counterterrorism law, the Anons described the "d0x," or leaked personal information, of US military and diplomatic personnel they then posted as containing “vital, anti-terror surveillance information.” Declaring their outrage over the targeting of Greenwald’s loved ones, the hackers also posted what appears to be personal information belonging to the officials’ family members.
After several hours, the hacked molevalley.gov.uk domain was taken down, presumably by the system’s administrators. The d0x was then reposted to ptzfcg.gov.cn, the top-level domain for mainland China. The .cn domain is managed through a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry.
The @OpLastResort Twitter account wrote:
“…site down, now rehosted at http://www.ptzfcg.gov.cn/CFIDE/zomg_everyone_is_a_terrorist.html because the chinese govt are [sic] more cool on sharing things from their sites.”
The @OpLastResort account had remained dormant for several months before the publishing of classified information leaked by Edward Snowden. OpLastResort is responsible for a number of high-profile hacks against the US government, the Federal Reserve and financial institutions that took place earlier this year.
“We expect there to be many pointed questions asked in the coming days, both domestically and internationally as to how and why an already ridiculously broad and draconian act of law was ripped of its last remaining shred of legitimacy in what cannot be described as anything other than an act of pure spite and intimidation, an act intended to exert a chilling effect on a stream of high-quality journalistic reporting whose historic importance cannot possibly be overstated,” read a message posted to the molvevalley.gov.uk domain by OpLastResort Anons.
More from GlobalPost: Web-wide fear follows Tor browser exploit
“We encourage anyone who is interested in preventing terror attacks to fully investigate these spouses and siblings and mothers and fathers and son and daughters, before they too are embroidered [sic] in terrible terror plots of the most heinous variety,” read the message.
The personal information includes addresses, dates of birth and email addresses hosted at various US government domains including state.gov and army.mil. The information also includes work and personal phone numbers and ZIP codes of spouses, siblings and children.
Before Miranda was released on Monday, UK authorities seized a number of his personal effects, including his laptop, cellphone, various video game consoles, DVDs and portable USB drives.
“This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ,” wrote Greenwald following Miranda’s detention.
“But the last thing it will do is intimidate or deter us in any way from doing our job as journalists. Quite the contrary: it will only embolden us more to continue to report aggressively." |
Now that the New York Mets have lost the 2015 World Series, second baseman Daniel Murphy is likely to join the following list after his critical eighth-inning error in Game 4 led to three Kansas City Royals runs and dropped the Mets into a 3-1 hole. (Murphy's 12th-inning error in the deciding Game 5 the next night doesn't help his cause, either.)
In the meantime, in the 112-year history of the Fall Classic, here are the top 25 goats, rated largely on the impact of their misdeeds. The list includes some of the game's biggest names, many of them considered heroes as well. But just as their greatest moments are etched in our memories, their transgressions should not be ignored either.
1. Bill Buckner (1986)
AP Photo/Rusty Kennedy
One strike away from ending a 57-year title drought. A two-run lead. Champagne on ice in the Red Sox clubhouse. Then single, single, single and the game is suddenly tied. But all is not lost ... until Mookie Wilson's bouncer finds its way through Buckner's legs and into right field to cap the New York Mets' improbable Game 6 comeback and prolong Boston's agony.
2. Mariano Rivera (2001)
Harry How/Getty Images
Three outs from the New York Yankees' fourth consecutive Series title, the game's greatest-ever closer couldn't finish the job. Rivera made a throwing error, hit a batter and gave up three hits, including Luis Gonzalez's soft single over a drawn-in infield as the Arizona Diamondbacks won the title.
3. Roger Peckinpaugh (1925)
AP Photo
The Washington Senators shortstop was considered one of the finest defensive shortstops of his era. Yet he committed a World Series-record eight errors, with two coming in Game 7, leading to four unearned runs and a championship for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
4. Mitch Williams (1993)
Getty Images
Called in to preserve a 6-5 lead in Game 5, the Philadelphia Phillies' unpredictably erratic closer instead gave up a three-run, Series-clinching home run to Joe Carter.
5. George Frazier (1981)
AP Photo/David Zalubowski
The Yankees' reliever joined Lefty Williams of the 1919 Black Sox as the only pitchers to lose three games in a Fall Classic. His ERA was 17.18.
6. Neftali Feliz (2011)
Neftali Feliz, who won an American League Rookie of the Year award with the Rangers in 2010, is signing with the Pirates. Jamie Squire/Getty Images
The young closer had the Texas Rangers within one strike (twice) of their first World Series title, yet the St. Louis Cardinals rallied for two runs in the ninth to tie Game 6 and send it into extra innings, where they won on David Freese's walk-off homer.
7. Fred Snodgrass (1912)
Getty Images
In the decisive Game 8, the center fielder dropped a routine flyball that led to two unearned runs in the bottom of the 10th as the New York Giants lost the series.
8. Jose Mesa (1997)
Getty Images
The Cleveland Indians were three outs from their first Series title since 1948, but Mesa couldn't hold a 2-1 lead in the ninth, giving up a run on Craig Counsell's sacfrice fly. The Florida Marlins then won in the 11th on Edgar Renteria's RBI single.
9. Babe Ruth (1926)
Mark Rucker/Getty Images
Representing the tying run with two outs and Bob Meusel at the plate against the Cardinals' Pete Alexander, the Babe was thrown out trying to steal second base to end Game 7.
10. Don Denkinger (1985)
Rich Pilling/Getty Images
In Game 6, the umpire's blatant missed call on Jorge Orta's infield single helped the Kansas City Royals score twice and beat the Cardinals in the bottom of the ninth.
11. Lonnie Smith (1991)
Ronald C. Modra/Getty Images
Smith's Game 7 baserunning blunder on Terry Pendleton's double -- he got deked by Chuck Knoblauch and held up at third -- prevented the Atlanta Braves from scoring the run that could have won them the Series.
12. Curt Flood (1968)
AP Photo
With Mickey Lolich and Bob Gibson locked in a scoreless duel in the seventh inning of Game 7, the Cardinals' center fielder -- a seven-time Gold Glove winner -- misjudged Jim Northrup's deep flyball, which sailed over his head for a two-run triple as the Tigers won the game and series.
13. Gil Hodges (1952)
AP Photo
After being the Brooklyn Dodgers' top slugger during the season, he went 0-for-21 in the series as they lost to the Yankees in seven games.
14. Calvin Schiraldi (1986)
Getty Images
Sure, Buckner made the mother of all errors, but the Red Sox reliever lost both Game 6 AND Game 7, giving up six earned runs in three innings.
15. Ralph Terry (1960)
Getty Images
Sometimes, one pitch is all it takes. And in Terry's case, he surrendered the Series-clinching home run to Bill Mazeroski, who had the lowest slugging percentage of every Pirates regular that season.
16. Bucky Harris (1925)
Getty Images
The Senators' manager inexplicably left a tired and ineffective Walter Johnson in Game 7 as the Pirates rallied to win the game and the championship.
17. Dennis Eckersley (1988)
Ronald C. Modra/Getty Images
The game's most dominant closer at the time, Eckersley threw a two-strike, backdoor slider to the gimpy-kneed Kirk Gibson, who sent it into the right-field seats for a Series-defining walk-off homer in Game 1.
18. Jack Bentley (1924)
Hank Olen/Getty Images
The Giants' pitcher gave up two walk-off hits, including Earl McNeely's bad-hop double that won the Series for the Senators in Game 7.
19. Livan Hernandez (2002)
AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill
Starting two games for the Giants, including Game 7, Hernandez lost both and never made it past the fourth inning in either one. Overall, he gave up nine earned runs in 5 2/3 innings.
20. Aaron Ward (1921)
AP Photo
With the Yankees down 1-0 in the ninth of Game 8, Ward tried to advance from first to third base on an infield groundout and was thrown out to complete a Series-ending 6-3-5 double play.
21. Ted Williams (1946)
Mark Rucker/Getty Images
Johnny Pesky usually gets a bad rap for his double-clutch on Enos Slaughter's mad dash, but the game's greatest hitter, in his one and only Fall Classic, was a dud at the plate, hitting .200 with no RBIs or extra-base hits.
22. Mickey Owen (1941)
Bob Seelig/Getty Images
On what would have been the final out of Game 4, the Dodgers' catcher allowed a passed ball on a strikeout to Tommy Henrich, who reached first base; the Yankees went on to score four runs and win 7-4.
23. Hack Wilson (1929)
AP Photo
The Chicago Cubs' stumpy center fielder lost not one, but two balls in the sun as the A's, down 8-0 in the seventh, scored 10 runs in the frame to win Game 4 and take control of the series.
24. Willie Davis (1966)
AP Photo
Davis set an infamous Series record for one inning when he committed three errors on consecutive plays in the fifth inning of Game 2. And he also went 1-for-16 at the plate as the Dodgers got swept by the Baltimore Orioles.
25. Mark Wohlers (1996)
Stephen Dunn/Getty Images
With a 6-3 lead in Game 4, the Braves had a chance to go up 3-1 against the Yankees, but Wohlers surrendered a three-run, pinch-hit home run to Jim Leyritz that tied the game. The Yankees won in the 10th and then the next two games
Dishonorable mentions: Honus Wagner (1903); Ty Cobb (1907); Ernie Lombardi (1939); Johnny Pesky (1946); Bob Lemon (1954); Dal Maxvill (1968); Tony Perez (1970); Willie Wilson (1980); Dave Winfield (1981); Mike Schmidt (1983); John McNamara (1986); Jose Canseco (1988); Jeff Reardon (1992); Byung-Hyun Kim (2001); Evan Longoria (2008); Ryan Howard (2009); Vladimir Guerrero (2010); Mark Lowe (2011); Prince Fielder (2012); Kolten Wong (2013). |
The man who wished to be eaten seemed quite shy when he walked into a Toronto psychiatric hospital last year, asking for help.
Stephen, as he is called in a new scientific paper, was 45 years old, “socially anxious but pleasant and cooperative,” clean, cogent, casually dressed, and not psychotic. His problem was an intense desire to be “consumed by a large, dominant woman and then defecated by her.”
Even to the unflappable staff of the sexual behaviour clinic, this was baffling. Vorarephilia, from the Latin for the love of devouring, usually shows itself in the dominant desire to eat, as in extreme cases like serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. The submissive inverse of this, the desire to be eaten, is among the rarest of fetishes, the black orchid of kink, and so the psychologist who interviewed Stephen had barely any idea what to ask him.
As he shared his strange secrets, though, he offered a window into a symptom of mental illness that, to the doctors, seemed to have arisen from “a desire to never again be alone or lonely.”
“He had no obvious wish to die,” reads the report in current issue of
Archives of Sexual Behavior by James Cantor, a leading psychologist of sexual disorders at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), and Amy Lykins, who did the interview. “Rather, he reported the desire to be ‘taken in’ by someone and then expelled.”
Studies of this sort are as rare as the subject. Despite a long history of cultural intersection, only a handful of psychiatric case studies focus on the relationship between sex and food, and vorarephilia “barely receives mention,” the authors write. It is a hunger that is not usually sated “due to physical and/or legal restraints,” they write. Sometimes, though, these restraints are not strong enough.
Prior to two recent American prosecutions of would-be cannibals, the “closest approximation to [vorarephilia] in the real world,” they write, was the case of Armin Meiwes, a German computer programmer who in 2002 killed and ate at least 20 kg of flesh from the body of Bernd Brandes, a man who, strangely, had consented to it. This was the culmination of Meiwes’ lifelong fetish that had previously been expressed in role playing, which is a common outlet for vorarephilia, both for aspiring cannibals and those who would be their feast. For example, the paper describes the case of “Turkey Man,” “a travelling businessman who regularly hired a dominatrix to meet him in his hotel room to ‘cook’ him” in a cardboard “oven.”
Other outlets include fantasy writing and cartoons, in which the consumer is frequently an humanoid animal, often a wolf, cat, dragon or snake. A common theme is that the victim wishes to be swallowed whole, not damaged by chewing, and the story often focuses on the resulting full belly, which looks almost “pregnant.”
This link to birth is also thought to be psychologically significant, and related to other unusual desires such as “unbirthing,” the act of physically returning to the womb. Stephen’s desire to be eaten fits into this wish to be unborn, the authors suggest, because both represent the “total destruction of being and personhood” in a permanent physical union.
Expulsion also figured importantly in Stephen’s desires.
“He often fantasized about being feces or semen and being expelled by a person,” the report reads.
Curiously, given all this, Stephen was mostly worried he was gay. The doctors explained that, as far as they could tell, based on several tests, he was not, despite some sexual desires involving men. “Persons with paraphilic interests often report sexual arousal to both sexes in the context of their paraphilic fantasies,” they write.
They also expressed skepticism about his claims that, on several occasions at a library, he “crawled under tables, without the women’s knowledge, so that he could smell their feet.”
When he was examined, Stephen’s libido seemed to have decreased due to depression, but the doctors anticipated it would return if the depression was eased. There is no known treatment to change such abnormal desires into normal ones, however, so their recommendation was treatment to “help him adjust to, rather than change or suppress, his sexual interests.”
Failing that, they would have prescribed medication to lower his sex drive. As it happened, though, Stephen did not return to the clinic, and his fate is not known.
National Post
jbrean@nationalpost.com |
Bayern maintained their unbeaten home record against Real in Europe (9 wins, 1 draw) with an excellent team performance against a disheveled and nervy Madrid side. A late goal by Gomez decided the match after Ribery and Özil each scored earlier. In what was an exciting, albeit typically ferocious and antagonistic meeting between these two sides, Bayern took control of the game in the first half and never relented until they were eventually rewarded for their persistence. Madrid had a good spell in the opening stages of each half but never reached their best, suffering from a mismatch of tactics and some poor individual performances. In the end it was a deserving win for Bayern and a great lead going into what should be an intense second leg.
Lineups and Formations
Having rested five players at the weekend and admitting that his side had been fatigued following their midweek loss against Dortmund last week, Heynckes resumed with his preferred line up. The only exclusion was that of Müller, instead selecting a midfield of Schweinsteiger, Gustavo and Kroos playing off Gomez.
4-2-3-1 was the order of the day for Heynckes and Mourinho who also returned Coentrao, Di Maria, Alonso and Benzema after resting them over the weekend. Özil was picked to start in his 100th official match for the club over Kaka with Higuain and Marcelo benched, the latter being the only surprise exclusion at the start. Theoretically Mourinho included a more defensively sound player in Coentrao, hoping the Portuguese left back would contain Robben. Some also speculated that he would take a more defensive approach with three central midfielders like he has done in some matches against Barcelona but he decided otherwise
Heynckes said before this match that it will be more tactical than anything else and in the end he was right. Mourinho’s approach initial approach and subsequent changes ultimately hindered them against motivated and focused Bayern. This is how the match unfolded.
First Half – Bayern control the game and Madrid out of sync
Real started with the bulk of possession, which is not surprising considering they have averaged more than any other side left in the competition bar Barcelona. For the first 10 minutes Bayern could not get out of their own half and Madrid nearly capitalized on that in the seventh minute after Özil played a defense splitting through ball to Benzema but Neuer’s awareness kept the ball out. That short spell of domination was then broken when Ribery found his way into the box from the right, beat Ramos, but went to ground appealing for a penalty. Webb waved him off but Madrid were phased. Momentum slowly started swinging in Bayern’s favor.
Real Madrid have been particularly poor defending set pieces this season and they were exposed again on Bayern’s first goal. Kroos’s corner on seventeen minutes was not dealt with well by Ramos and Ribery took advantage by reacting faster than anyone else by pouncing on the loose ball and beating Casillas. It was the first time Madrid had fallen behind in the Champions League this season and it paved the way for Bayern to take full control of the game. The best chances Madrid mustered in the first half came from free kicks won outside Bayern’s box but Ronaldo never managed any of them on target. Schweinsteiger nearly doubled Bayern’s lead on twenty-one minutes after Ribery set him up but his love driven shot went just wide.
Surprisingly Bayern won the midfield battle. The problem stemmed from Özil, Di Maria, Benzema and Ronaldo constantly going wide, leaving no one to support Alonso and Khedira and ample space between their backline and midfield. Maybe Mourinho wanted to neutralize Bayern’s strengths on the wings but it had a detrimental effect elsewhere on the pitch. Kroos meanwhile dropped throughout the half, outnumbering Madrid in midfield and helping them control the flow of the match. It was an atypical performance from a side normally associated with organization. Madrid distinctly lacked synergy in their play in this match. Özil was mostly frustrated and double teamed on the right. Schweinsteiger and Alaba did a good job keeping him out of the game and rarely allowed him to cut inside or play into the middle.
Moreover, when Madrid’s players went wide there was a lack of reciprocity from the players around them. Benzema for example constantly looked to go out wide to the left but no one came into the middle to provide him with an outlet. And at times Di Maria came centrally but lacked support in front of him. Özil and Benzema regularly go out wide in La Liga but against a more organized side like Bayern and a midfield outnumbering them it was simply not effective. Meanwhile, Arbeloa was Madrid’s weak link in defense and Ribery had a go at him the whole first half and always looked like giving away a free kick in a dangerous position. It was the kind of pernicious situation that Mourinho and Madrid rarely found themselves in this season.
Second Half – Mourinho’s changes prove costly
With their performance waning in the first half Mourinho had to make adjustments at the break and Madrid came out looking like a different side. After trying several permutations in the attacking third in the first half he chose a more straightforward approach Özil no longer started from wide positions but stayed centrally where he was able to string together an otherwise disorderly offense. Without the volatility of four roaming attackers there was now more focus in Madrid’s attacks and fifty-two minutes in a Madrid counter attack leveled the game. Benzema, from the center this time, played Ronaldo through on the left, his shot parried away by Neuer. Benzema picked up the rebound and squared it to Ronaldo whose cross into the box was finished by an oncoming Özil. Bayern’s defense blinked for the first time in this match and it cost them a goal.
For a moment it looked as though Madrid were finally ready and able to take charge of the game but in a rather puzzling move, Mourinho pulled Özil and brought on Marcelo. Perhaps Mourinho wanted to inject a bit of energy for a fatigued Özil but Marcelo’s role itself was peculiar to say the least. Filling in neither in his natural left back spot nor on the right, Marcelo drifted all over the pitch with little impact other than to give away free kicks. Or maybe it was a reaction to Heynckes taking off an unfit Schweinsteiger on sixty-one minutes which meant that Kroos had to play even deeper alongside Gustavo with the more attack minded Müller on to chase a second goal. Theoretically it meant that Bayern’s numerical advantage in midfield was diminished but Marcelo’s positioning certainly doesn’t indicate a clear intention to take advantage of that. Mourinho also brought on Granero shortly after, a move that many may have anticipated earlier in the game to match Bayern’s three central midfielders and now to hold on to the draw, but by then the fallout was nearly irreversible.
Gone was Madrid’s central creative figure in Özil while Bayern’s stability in midfield only increased. The passing statistics tell the story. Overall, Bayern outpassed Madrid 334 to 288 and players who are usually strong on the ball like Alonso and Khedira misplaced a combined 13 passes. Their usual fluency was obviously missing and it may have been a case of too much tinkering by Mourinho who is rarely ever flustered tactically but against Bayern a cogent plan from the beginning seemed to be missing.
This allowed Bayern to continue to press until Madrid eventually capitulated and it could not have come at a worse time. Coentrao, who was having a horrid time against Lahm, went to ground too easily in the ninetieth minutes, was beaten by Lahm and allowed to send an unchallenged cross for Gomez to tuck away. Casillas could have come to claim the cross but the writing was already on the wall well beforehand. Mourinho’s seeming satisfaction with a draw allowed Bayern to continue to play their game almost unchallenged. An analogy with Borussia Dortmund may best depict what happened. Whereas Dortmund exerted a tremendous amount of pressure against Bayern, Madrid more or less sat back and invited it. In other words, Dortmund did not allow Bayern to play their natural game, cut them off out wide and even moreso in the center. They did not need an invitation from Bayern, they went at them continuously from beginning to end. Mourinho may have taken a cue from his performance against Bayern while in charge of Inter two years ago but the same is not applicable to this Madrid side, who are more geared towards attacking an opponent than defending against them.
Final Verdict
After a forgettable week in the Bundesliga, Bayern put on their best Champions League performance against a big side in years. Heynckes came in with a clear game plan, use their strengths in wide area, namely Ribery and Robben, to exploit Arbeloa and Coentrao, and for the most part did so rather effectively. Ribery specifically was strong and won 21 duels compared to Arbeloa’s 9. Even more impressive was Bayern’s handling of the game in the middle, with and without Schweinsteiger. Kroos had another impressive showing with a match high 76 touches on the ball and completing 48 passes.
The two times Real Madrid lost a first leg 2-1 they were eventually eliminated. Mourinho rarely gets outcoached in matches, especially in the Champions League, but far too many questions have to be asked of him following this game. First, why were Madrid’s players so wide in the first half? If the instruction was to have a go at Bayern’s fullbacks why did he not readjust earlier after seeing his side struggle for half an hour in the first half? Furthermore, why was Özil withdrawn early in the second after he helped Madrid get back into the match after kickoff. Was he right to settle for the draw and set up more defensively and what was Marcelo’s role in the game? Madrid was struggling to absorb Bayern’s pressure and looked nervier with every passing minute in the second half.
Mourinho is in the unfortunate position of having the Clasico against Barcelona sandwiched in between these two Champions league fixtures, which is perhaps complicating his planning for all three. Either way, a goal down Madrid will have to outscore Bayern in Spain, a task that won’t be easy against one of Bayern’s most prolific ever sides. In the end, Barcelona may well prove to be Madrid’s undoing in the Champions League without even having to play them there.
You can an extensive reaction from Jupp Heynckes’ about the game on db.de here. |
Are you aware of your own strengths and weaknesses?
Personal value is maximized by directing your focus into the arena where you have the greatest potential for success.
The first step of this process is realizing your own INTERNAL value so you can project it outwards.
Without this drive, efforts fade into dust.
A person unaware of his own potential isn’t truly alive. He simply goes through the motions in order to barely scrape by.
Each Person Is Best Suited For A Different Arena
Attempting to force yourself into a lifestyle out of touch with your talents does the whole world a great disservice.
STEM types are most likely not cut out to be lawyers, and vice versa.
Comparing your own journey to the trajectory of another demographic will have you focus on all the wrong things. This can lead to unnecessary mental strife, ruining your progress. Regardless who you are, you must learn to play to your own strengths.
Value Can Take Many Different Forms
Highly sought-after physical goods
Positive social capital in interactions
Or simply the expression of useful ideas
Life is economics, and markets are everywhere. A finely tuned intuition can sense the value exchanges happening all around.
Due to the changing nature of the universe, abundant opportunities for investment are constantly unfolding. The only way to capitalize on your potential is to see the positive side of every situation, no matter how dire it may currently appear.
A man of value always asks himself,
what can I learn from this?
Businesses fail when they are planted in infertile ground. Trying to force value to flourish where there is no demand is like planting a garden in the harsh plains of Antarctica.
Your Valuable Time And Effort Should Be Channeled Into A Medium Most Conducive To Success
It seems daunting to develop high value, but the process is actually quite simple.
All you need to do is find your strengths via experimentation.
From there on out, everything else is simply a matter of willpower.
P.S. Click here to multiply the reach of your value. |
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has compiled a detailed topographical map using a wide range of datasets to reveal what lies beneath Antarctica's ice sheet.
Bedmap2 builds on a previous iteration called Bedmap, which was built more than ten years ago. The map incorporates decades of geophysical data from satellites, aircraft and surface-based surveys to create a much higher resolution version.
Bedmap2's image of Antarctica's icy surface NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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BedMap2 allows researchers to see many more surface and sub-ice features that were too small to be covered by the previous iteration of the map
There have been many Antarctic surveys over the last ten years, which have given researchers a large amount of data to play with.
Read next This map plugs a 500-million-year gap in the history of Earth This map plugs a 500-million-year gap in the history of Earth
The three core datasets were surface elevation (taken from Nasa's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), ice thickness data collected from an airborne radar mission called Operation IceBridge and bedrock topography data. The latter is measured by beaming radar signals down through the ice and recording the angel and timing of returning waves in order to image the ice surface, internal layering and the rocky under-layer.
BedMap2 allows researchers to see many more surface and sub-ice features that were too small to be covered by the previous iteration of the map. The map also covers more ground and in more precision -- thanks to advancements in GPS -- which means that researchers will be able to make more accurate calculations about ice volume and potential contribution to sea level rise as climate change takes effect.
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The lower-resolution map created by the first iteration of Bedmap NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
While estimates for total ice volume and sea level contribution have remained similar to those calculated ten years ago, the researchers have increased estimates for the average bedrock depth, deepest point and ice thickness.
Peter Fretwell, a scientist at BAS and lead author of the study, said that the new dataset would be an important resource for "the next generation of ice sheet modellers, physical oceanographers and structural geologists".
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Ice sheet researchers use computer models to simulate how the thick, dome-shaped formations of ice respond to changes in sea and air temperatures. The two main ice sheets on Earth cover Greenland and Antarctica. They are formed by many years of snow that gets compacted into ice and they tend to grow and spread outwards "like honey poured on a plate", in the words of Nasa ice sheet scientist Sophie Nowicki. The simulations are only as good as the data relating to ice volume and the shape of the structure of the sub-ice rock, since these affect how the ice will move.
Nasa supplied much of the data for BedMap2 for free, despite the fact that collecting it was very expensive. Fretwell said of Nasa's generosity: "We hope that other partners will also go down this road." |
Wright State votes to increase student fees Copyright by WDTN - All rights reserved Video
FAIRBORN, Ohio (WDTN) - Wright State University is holding a public presentation Thursday morning to discuss their budget issues.
Thursday's meeting will address the budget for the 2018 fiscal year following a closed door meeting.
If you missed the meeting live watch it here:
This is after the university announced financial troubles back in May when they proposed $30 million dollars in cuts to get back on track.
The cuts include slashing 70 jobs and leaving more than 100 positions that are currently filled vacant.
The university voted to increase student fees in 2018
Wright State estimates it will save about $14 million dollars annually and they release a list of goals for the new budget including to bring restoring reserves.
In addition Wright State is proposing to cut the men and women swim teams, reducing travel and overtime, and also decreasing the amount of money spent on repairs and scholarships. |
Why the Update Fever is Bad
I just got asked by a customer why there hasn't been an update for several months now for one of the software products I create . And if this means that this software is dead now. I'm really baffled by this. Especially because that product has already gotten nearly a dozen free updates, and is pretty stable and bug-free by now.I just updated Windows 10 on my main development PC with the Fall Creators Update , causing several of the software I use to have failures, or degraded performance. And worst: Some of some very old Microsoft Office tools I still have to use occasionally (for backwards compatibility for some customers) even completely stopped working after the update.Googling for the error messages I get, I find that a lot of people have the same problem. This is something new for Microsoft: Usually they won't break their own old software with updates, they are known for keeping up backwards compatibility at all costs. Wondering why this is. Purpose? Sloppyness?Software users are now trained by this behavior: An app or software now has to update at least once a week, or month, otherwise it is considered dead. If you ask the users about it, they don't even know why they want these updates. Is there a feature they are missing? A specific bug they want to have fixed? They don't know. They only want updates, because they are used to it.Especially for development software, it is better sometimes not to update that frequently: It could change a feature you are relying on, which causes a lot of work for you to adapt to that new update. Or worse: Even introduce new bugs.So for non-security critical software, it is sometimes better not to update that often. This update fever is bad both for developers and users.
fifteen comments, already:
Bug fixes and various improvements code for keeping product in your mind
Anonymous - 18 11 17 - 06:38
Just give it a new version number and push out the same software. Easy
Earl Grey (link) - 18 11 17 - 10:34
I think this cant be seen without considering how the user paid for an update. If its a (today also very popular) subscription model, the user should expect regular updates (if the user isnt paying for storage or CPU resources).
But I also think the old days are over, where a software developer releases a new version when the old one is so old it doesnt start anymore. Constant incremental updates can also be a slow update path for that nice feature you used to use to some new alternative software function (instead of a hard break with the next software release).
Its good that Windows ditches old functions/APIs finally. All that backwards compatibility has made windows a very bad system. My girlfriend installed a printer driver via INF and was presented with an Windows XP dialog which defaulted to “a:” as path .
Mark - 18 11 17 - 10:41
I agree with you.
Many beautiful programs that I love only receive a few updates each year, and customers constantly ask if they’re abandoned, even though the developers have a proven track record of yearly updates that can be very easily checked.
Nikolaus! You MUST not let your encounters cloud your mind with sadness! WITHSTAND the barrage of distress! DON’T let the encroachment of sorrow emblazon your mind with hatred! You MUST stay STRONG! You MUST stay IMPERVIOUS!
wild master - 18 11 17 - 14:05
> So for non-security critical software, it is sometimes better not to update that often. This update fever is bad both for developers and users.
Non-security oriented software may be a security issue and require an update to libopenssl or similar to close a security hole it didn’t know it opened.
Piotr Gabryjeluk (link) - 18 11 17 - 15:12
[devil’s advocate hat: on]
I don’t understand. What’s stopping you? Do you not know of any bugs in your software? Or are they all so deep and complex that they would take prohibitively long to fix? Or is your release process so inefficient you can’t ship a new version every week or two?
Asking for bug fixes (or performance improvements, or whatever) is not asking for interface changes. Surely you have bugs you can fix while maintaining your current interfaces. Your interfaces may not be perfect but you’d have to have screwed them up pretty bad for it to be impossible to improve anything else without changing them.
If you’re afraid to release an update because you’re afraid that fixing one bug could cause even more bugs, that’s a troubling statement about the repeatability of your process. How did you ever write the software in the first place, if you couldn’t tell if any solution you implemented wouldn’t cause more problems than it solved? That would make me not trust your software at all.
What does “non-security critical software” mean these days? Almost every program works with untrusted data from the internet today, like image files. Your apps aren’t sandboxed, so I would definitely consider them to be security critical. They aren’t signed or distributed over a secure connection, either, so I’m not sure how I can trust them at all.
I see a lot of hypothetical excuses, but I don’t see a good explanation for why updates are inherently bad. Microsoft had a bad release of Windows, therefore you’re not going to fix any issues with your own software?
Sam - 18 11 17 - 17:29
Had the same idea as Earl Grey… But in response to Sam, even with the funny hat on: IMHO the arguments do miss the point Niko made in the post, namely that there simply aren’t any relevant bugs to fix (at least that he knows of) – and nothing indicating a bias against security updates. So probably that hat is made of tin foil…
What in my experience does come out of the “constantly update” paradigm is not so much an incremental improvement, but even more pressure to add new features, even if they are complete shit and mostly not working, because “it is what users expect”. We can then fix it with the following updates – which rarely ever happens as these shall then include other new features, of course.
Then again: Security updates and other bug fixes are another thing entirely (and do at least ameliorate the previous point). That sometimes something goes wrong isn’t new – it is about as easy to break software with an update as it is to make not working software in the first place, and it wasn’t the first time nor will it be the last that Microsoft sent out an update that broke stuff.
It may even be intentional, even if that sounds like an evil scheme (note that this is hyperbole): If a particular interface is deemed broken beyond fix it might be best to remove it (invoke an analogy with cancer at your discretion, I won’t). Now in this case apparently it didn’t work out so well, but there have been numerous APIs over time that just disappeared, and it was for good. So while the outcry is legitimate to a point we may start to exaggerate the issue out of proportion.
And yet back to the actual issue: I still think Earl Grey has the best solution – just publish an update every couple of months with a new build number, which will without further interaction give an indication that, yes, this program is still maintained.
xaos - 20 11 17 - 07:46
Month ago im back to Win 7 after year of using Win 10, cause Win 10 is horrible OS…
Vitaliy (rolevix) - 20 11 17 - 09:43
So we should stay with Win98se because it is already stable ?? We should not compete with other engines because it just works right now ??
Seriously niko I challenge you to put status at Steam and your website saying that you wont update Coppercube anymore because there is already tons of updates and you afraid that you will break stuff up. Heck just copy paste this blog status and put at steam and your website and see the responses.
Maybe tim sweeney should just maintain unreal engine 1998. Or johm carmark should just stay with doom1 because it just works.
People buy your software not just for the software alone, we buy the software to support you and have your commitment with the product. When I found out that you are busy doing your game and just left the coppercube the way it is now , I kinda dissapointed with you. You dont even use coppercube for your games right ? Just shows something can be improve your engine. Why dont you use coppercube for postcollapse ?
labu - 22 11 17 - 05:12
Labu, CopperCube is the main product of my company. It is and will be updated. And PostCollapse is using CopperCube.
niko - 22 11 17 - 05:14
Why is it in your blog you mentions that when you tried Javascript it is too slow. So you convert it to C++ ? What version of coppercube are you using then ?
labu - 22 11 17 - 06:40
If you are using coppercube just as a level editor or placement editor for your ingame objects, that does not count the same as using Coppercube for your game development. If you dont even believe or use your own product , why should we ?
labu - 22 11 17 - 06:43
He is using CopperCube Pro. Click Help -> About, there you download the full C++ code.
erik - 22 11 17 - 06:53
If that is true, why dont he implement all the changes he made in Coppercube postcollapse c++ into the main product? He just said at his blog that Coppercube is already good and no changes are needed? The reason he changes to C++ because Javascript performance is poor. I believed he said that at this blog. So the main product does require some changes right? since he himself cant use it for his game due to low performance.
Based on his logic, maybe I should buy RTS creator on steam, you know one of the abandon software by the developer at steam. We dont need all the changes, updates and feature enhancement are bad for both developer and user.
We buy your product for your commitment and your time. If you dont bother to support us by improving the product. Might as well just be a fulltime game developer and tell the user the truth that you are busy developing your games and you dont have time to improve Coppercube anymore.
labu - 22 11 17 - 09:56 |
Lankford issues statement of support following President Trump’s congressional address
Office of Senator James Lankford
WASHINGTON, DC – Senator James Lankford today released the following statement on President Trump’s address to a Joint Session of Congress:
“Tonight, President Trump gave a moving speech to the nation in a Joint Session of Congress that hit on the heart of the issues facing all Americans. His focus on bringing a very divided nation together to build a more united States of America was an important message after a divisive election. We can disagree strongly, but we must remain civil in how we engage in our neighborhoods and communities – especially with those who think differently, look differently, and act differently from us. Our common bond as Americans must unite us more than it divides us. Our almost 250 year American experiment must continue to grow as we nurture the oldest democracy in the world.
“The President reminded all Americans that each of us plays an important and unique role in the future of this country. To unleash our national potential, Congress and the President must work together to improve the economy, lift the regulatory burden, secure our nation’s borders, and defend our country from those who seek to harm us. True regulatory reform can unleash business productivity, and lift unnecessary restrictions on families and manufacturing plants, so that the private sector can revive the economy. Oklahoma has experienced the pain of Obamacare’s increased health care costs and decreased access. I am grateful President Trump reiterated his commitment to ensure health care is more affordable and more accessible for everyday Americans. We also cannot forget that America faces very real threats every day and each of us must remain committed to national security.”
Excerpts:
Tonight, President Trump addressed a lot of issues to the nation at a joint Session of Congress. It is a unique gathering any time a President comes. It’s not just to speak to Congress, and the Supreme Court, and the Cabinet, it’s to speak to all the American people and deal with the issues that we’re facing as a nation, I’m glad he was able to bring some of those things to the nation.
On the need for national civility:
We’re in a unique time as a country. We’ve got to deal with things like basic civility, and how we disagree on issues, but be able to be able to disagree in a way that pushes us to be able to resolve it, and solve the problems as a nation.
On the benefit of legislative action:
The President can obviously take some actions, and he has already taken many actions to be able to reset the course for the nation. As we’ve seen in previous years, you can’t do long-term change in what needs to happen in the nation, to be able to resolve our issues without us working together, the Executive Branch and the American people through their elected representatives in the House and the Senate.
On regulatory reform:
It’s good to see President Trump come and be able to lay some things out, and say, here are the big issues we’ve got to be able to work together on, like regulations. Regulations can be handled by the Executive Branch, but real reform in regulations will be done through the Legislative Branch, by us actually bringing statutes up and passing them, and changing [policy] forever, allowing the American people to have more input. I have several bills that I’m currently working on in my own committee, the Regulatory Affairs Subcommittee, we are working to make permanent changes on how the American people get greater input in the regulatory state.
On national security and defense:
We’ve got to deal with national security, which has been a big issue for the President. There are a lot of things the president can do, and he laid some of them out tonight. But there is a lot that we have to work on together. Like budgeting for national defense. Finding a way to deal with national defense budgeting without taking us further into debt as a nation. So, that means smart budgeting, not across-the-board cuts. But actually, being more strategic in how we handle the budget items.
On the sluggish economy:
Last year, most people don’t know the economy grew 1.6 percent, the lowest growth that we’ve had since 2011. It was a dramatic decline again in our economy. So, while the election was happening, many people didn’t notice the economy was dragging again. We’ve got to get economic activity. That’s why I’m so pleased to hear not only tax reform, but about regulatory reform, and what we will do to give more power back to the American people, to start businesses, innovate, be more creative and prioritize what’s happening here with our economy and growth. |
The jury’s decided: with an 88% critics score, and 81% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, Blade Runner 2049 has done its predecessor justice.
35 years ago, when the original Blade Runner came out, A.I. was a hypothetical. Today, it’s a reality that leaves techies increasingly nervous – lending the sequel’s philosophical questions new relevance and plausibility. What unites the two movies across the decades, however, is their common aesthetic, dubbed ‘Neon Noir’: movies with the sensibilities of a neo-noir film, the visuals of a Tokyo strip, and the soundscape of a Berlin nightclub. Backed by a $150 million budget, Denis Villeneuve may well have taken the genre’s optics to a new level; but he nonetheless owes a debt to the neon-noir classics below, ranging from psychological thriller to existential horror.
5) The Guest
The Guest is genre-bending gem, listed on Wikipedia as an action-horror-thriller, to which IMDb tacks on mystery, and Rotten Tomatoes adds suspense for good measure. Read: boredom is not a risk. When a mysterious drifter arrives on the Petersons’ doorstep, claiming to have served with their son who died in combat, the family ask him to stay. Think ‘When You Give a Mouse a Cookie’, with considerably more shootouts. The plot is noir enough, but the neon is non-obvious. Nothing in the film’s structure demands its aesthetic. And yet the DayGlo grit and pounding electronic soundtrack never feel like they’re tacked on top. Instead, they unite a movie that’s equal parts stylish and disturbing, slow-burning and relentless.
4) Nightcrawler
In Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal greases up as sociopathic L.A. photojournalist Lou Bloom. Catering to the morbid demand of local news stations, Bloom hovers over his police scanner to catch wind of car-wrecks, screeching to the scene camcorder in hand. As a slick, nihilistic portrait of its anti-hero, Nightcrawler ticks all the LA-Noir boxes. But it also succeeds as a critique of sensationalist media, which rewards Bloom’s exploitation with exposure. As one journalist remarks: “If it bleeds, it leads”. The film’s synth heavy soundtrack and retro poster harken back to hard-boiled 1980s cinema. But what really makes Nightwatcher so watchable is its ability to evoke the past while critiquing the present.
3) Spring Breakers
If the last time you saw Selena Gomez was on the Disney Channel, you should reset your expectations before watching Spring Breakers. Consequences arise when Gomez’s spring break devolves into crime, sped along by three amoral friends and a charismatic drug dealer named Alien. A character’s moral decline is stock noir, but what makes Korine’s film really memorable is its fluorescent depiction of Florida’s underbelly. From blinking neon strips, to glow in the dark bikinis, vice has never looked so enticing.
2) Under the Skin
Under the Skin unfolds like a nightmare, full of Lynchian imagery and a distorted soundscape that would sound about right in Ridley Scott‘s Alien. While lack of plot may frustrate some viewers, few will be able to tear their eyes away from Scarlett Johannson as extraterrestrial femme-fatale, seducing unlucky men from the seat of her white van. The only out and out horror film on our list, Under the Skin is so dark it’s nearly opaque. Without spoiling anything, the ending asks more questions than it answers. Still – as both critics who love and hate it agree – the film is one of a kind, and sure to leave an impression.
1) Drive
Now to bring the list full circle with another moody Ryan Gosling neon-noir: Drive. For those unfamiliar, imagine Baby Driver with a full electronica soundtrack and no jokes. Sound fun? Well, it isn’t. But it does deliver on Nicolas Winding Refn‘s artistic vision: a stylish bit of ultra-violence with its soul in the ’80s. Fans will also appreciate Only God Forgives (Drive set in Thailand), and Place Beyond the Pines (Drive with a motorcycle).
That’s all folks. Check out a full list of neon-noir movies here, and let us know what your favorite is in the comments below! |
As part of my Doctor Who main range directorial duties for Big Finish, early in 2016 I was given a script by Mike Tucker entitled Order of the Daleks. From the moment I read it, I just knew that we had to take advantage of this amazing opportunity to create a brand new type of Dalek – one fashioned from bent lead and stained glass. I became slightly obsessive about this, and spent many weeks nagging producer David Richardson and executive producer Nicholas Briggs – asking them to let me bring the stained glass Dalek to life.
Working with Big Finish and designer Simon Holub, I enlisted designer Chris Thompson to help bring my vision of Mike Tucker’s stained glass Dalek to life.
So, now that the stained glass Dalek is ‘out there’, I asked Chris to write a little report about the process:
The Daleks are pretty awesome, iconic and well… unforgettable! Unlike the Cybermen where redesign and evolution is almost expected, the Dalek has remained the same for over 50 years with only a few alterations. Deviating from the classic silhouette (as was attempted back in 2010) is often met with anger and disappointment. So imagine my reaction when Jamie Anderson emails me asking for not only a new Dalek design, but a new Dalek made mostly of stained glass. Funnily enough, I’d always liked the idea of reimagining designs in different cultural styles, I’ve had a feudal Japanese “Samurai Dalek” that I’ve been planning to model for some time. My main thought process was to create a “Gothic” Dalek and replace all the flat surfaces with glass designs. My initial sketches had palisades, crowns, spikes and other gothic elements, but we decided to dial a lot of these back for story reasons. In the episode itself these Dalek casings are made by very primitive monks so the focus needed to be on the stained glass and not the metal elements. The cloister style neck slats and the claw holding the eye did remain to add a bit of character. The glass was the tricky part and I felt that getting a good design here was important, as it in itself could mean something. The slats on the skirt represent the seasons of the planet, the eye on the chest represents the mutant inside, the dome is entirely decorative. We decided to omit the ear lights as a way of making the design even more primitive. Luckily the idea turned out to be crazy enough that it came out well and the fans really seem to like what we now affectionately call “Dalek Stainley”. I’d like to give my huge thanks to Jamie for letting me do this, Simon Holub for the awesome cover and thanks to everyone who said nice things about it. Maybe one day Big Finish will let me have a crack at the Cybermen!
Chris did a fantastic job, and the resulting cover is absolutely stunning.
Order of the Daleks is out this November and can be pre-ordered from Big Finish’s website.
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Although a few exemptions exist, if you design, manufacture or import products with electronics inside, then it's almost definite that you're going to need to care about EMC.
1. Protection of the electromagnetic spectrum
We only have a finite amount of electromagnetic spectrum that we can use for things like radio transmission, microwave communication, x-ray machines and a huge number of other products.
Unfortunately, even electronic devices without transmitters emit electromagnetic radiation, just as a byproduct of switching currents and voltages inherent to electronic circuitry. Without limits to the amount of unintended electromagnetic radiation from electronic products, the electromagnetic spectrum could be adversely affected and frequency bands reserved for radio transmission could become compromised.
As the number of non-wireless and wireless electronic products continues to explode, the already packed electromagnetic spectrum is going to become even more crowded. Protection of this essential resource is critical to ensuring that devices continue to be able to function properly in the future.
2. Safety
For many products and industries, EMC performance can mean the difference between life and death. Many medical, military, industrial, aerospace and automotive products (and others) have safety critical applications.
If the function of those products fail due to electromagnetic phenomena such as power supply surges, ESD or radiated electric fields, then lives can certainly be at risk. Imagine 300 cellphones all transmitting 7 Watts of power on an aircraft at 36,000 feet - it's rigorous EMC testing that ensures that the electrical systems can withstand those sorts of electromagnetic environments.
3. Product performance (quality)
The function and performance an electronic product can easily be affected by external and internally generated EMC phenomena. As an example, if your internal power supply regulation is too noisy, that can adversely affect sensitive analog measurements (for sensor products), or lower the performance of a radio transmitter (for wireless products). Those are both examples of internal EMC problems.
Externally, applied EMC phenomena can negatively affect products in a virtually unlimited number of ways, from data corruption to measurement accuracy to RF performance to frying ICs. EMC testing helps to ensure that your device will continue to function as expected in the presence of a typical EMC environment and (hopefully) reduce the amount of product returns to poor EMC performance.
4. To keep test labs and government employees busy
Given the well documented variability of lab to lab EMC testing results, the large testing price tag that applies regardless of the quantity of sales or size of the company and the shear volume of non-compliant devices that enter the market every year, it's easy to see how manufacturers can get cynical about the whole process.
It's true that EMC testing can be a huge burden to small and large manufacturers alike and its effectiveness can sometimes be questionable. But the rules did emerge as a result of real problems (see history below) and the government and private infrastructure grew to accommodate and enforce those rules.
5. Fines
If you're caught with a non-compliant device on the market, the fines and actions can vary from insignificant to horrendous.
Legal firm Fish & Richardson published a summary of the FCC's legal proceedings over the last few years and the results were interesting. Most fines were related to issues with wireless transmitters, rather than unintentional radiators.
Penalties varied from 'admonishment only' to $2.2m.
Enforcement seems to be fairly minimal, as evidenced by a non-compliance rate of approximately >60% in parts of Europe on a sample size of 10,000 products.
However, there are several risk areas relating to non-compliant devices covering both civil and criminal law. You can find a good presentation on the legal aspects of compliance here.
The most likely ways to be caught with a non-compliant device on the market include competitors notifying authorities, market surveillance and finally customer complaints due to interference with other devices. |
Interviewer: Arjan Roskam is often referred to as the king of cannabis. He is the founder of Green House Coffee shops in Amsterdam. Arjan is best known as a strain hunter, and his famous strains have won over 30 cannabis cups. When he's not in Amsterdam, he spends most of his time traveling the world looking for the best strains of cannabis to be brought back to his lab with the goal of making the best strains of tomorrow. Welcome, Arjan.
Arjan: Welcome. Thank you for the beautiful introduction.
Interviewer: For people that aren't familiar with you, can you give us just a little bit of background on who you are, and how you got into the cannabis business?
Arjan: Well, my name is Arjan Roskam. I'm the Founder and Owner of Green House and Strain Hunter Companies. I started growing in '85. I grew up in Africa.
Interviewer: Huh.
Arjan: And when I was 17 I was traveling through Asia, and I met a very interesting character up in the north of Thailand who was curing heroin addicts with marijuana. And I was just a young guy passing by with my rucksack and I started talking to him. I stayed one day. I stayed three days, and I stayed seven days. When I left, I thought, "Mm, this guy's pretty crazy" but I got more and more interested in his work. And when he left, he gave me a bunch of seeds, and he said, "In the future these seeds will overthrow governments."
Interviewer: Ah.
Arjan: And I thought, "You're really crazy, you know" because I'm 49 now. So this is 32 years ago.
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: So, you know, 32 years ago was a different world, no?
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: And I went back to Holland and didn't really know what to do. So I started working in the restaurant business. I was a chef for a while, and then I picked up those seeds and started growing. And the rest of the story is history.
Interviewer: Ah, and how many packets of seeds do you sell a year now?
Arjan: A lot.
Interviewer: [laughs] Okay. And you really have a large market share, particularly in Europe. I mean, do you have an idea of what percentage the market share of your seeds take?
Arjan: Yes, between 15 and 25%, depending on the country.
Interviewer: Okay. Well, how do you think you got so much of the market share?
Arjan: Well, look, when we started Green House Coffee shops in ... Basically I started my coffee shops in'92 because I started growing in '85, and '84 basically. And '85 we started selling marijuana, and at one point I was making ... Are you still there?
Interviewer: Yes, I'm still here.
Arjan: I thought you dropped away. I heard some sound. Me and my wife, I started growing other varieties then. I started breeding and working, and I made special sativa strains, and I was bringing them to the most famous coffeeshop at that time, like four of them. And I gave my new varieties, and they all said after two months, "You can come and pick it up because nobody's buying it."
Interviewer: Huh.
Arjan: At that time the owners were friends of mine because I was selling them the regular skunk, and on the side I was selling them other stuff.
Interviewer: Okay.
Arjan: But I underestimated the intelligence of the guy who was selling the marijuana. So I thought he would put more effort in it, but he was not really interested in my marijuana because he didn't like it. So I also did advocate it to the public. So after two, three months I took it back. I got my two kilos back from each shop. I gave them all one or two kilos. So my wife said, "If you really think that the product is so good, why don't you start your own club?"
So in '92 we started our own club. And the philosophy of our own club was to make something different, not the regular coffee shop at that time. It was looking like a Jamaican hangout, with a Jamaican flag on the wall and these kind of things.
Interviewer: Right.
Arjan: So we made a very artistic cafe where your mother and my mother would possibly go inside for a cup of coffee and would not notice there's a marijuana place. It was very artistic. We made all the shop ourselves, decorations, mosaics on the wall. We made our own lives because we were pretty crazy. My wife is an interior architect, so interior designer. So this is how our first club started.
And then, again, I had the same problem because indeed the Dutch really didn't like toe marijuana that I was making.
Interviewer: Ah.
Arjan: And don't forget, 90% at that time was smoking hash until the mid-'90s.
Interviewer: Okay.
Arjan: So '93 the Kennedy family passed by on high times at that time, and they said, "Listen, would you like to join a contest Thanksgiving. November." It was the first marijuana competition in the world. And that time, of course, yeah, marijuana competition was one of the most crazy things to do. Of course, it was really illegal.
Interviewer: Right.
Arjan: So CNN came, BBC, there were like 25 television stations because which idiot in the world was going to make a marijuana contest? The cops were going to raid it. You know, the whole story, noA?
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: Well, to make a long story short, we completely forgot about the whole event because this was in April, and the event was in November. In November it was 3-400 really high Americans in front of my door. I had this little place in Toolstrat [SP] south of Amsterdam, a little neighborhood. And suddenly I was confronted with all these people there. They're lucky I didn't have good thoughts. I just thought smoking, all the Americans said to me, "Oh man, this is really great. This is really great. We've never smoked this."
So, okay, I thought, yeah, yeah, sure, you know. Yeah, you're happy now because you get something for free and blah, blah, blah, you know how it goes. But okay, five days later was the election. At that time in the Red Light there was a big hotel, and they got a club there. And then I won five of the six main prizes, main cups.
Interviewer: Oh wow.
Arjan: I was a 28-year-old boy, very young. And so full television was on, CNN and BBC from that day on, things went very, very fast. So that's a little bit of history how the Green House started and then, of course, people started asking for the seeds. So in '95 we established the seed company, and after we established three, four more clubs. Then the king of cannabis came, and the kind of cannabis was created.
Everybody thought, "Yeah, this is some marketing thing and blah, blah, blah" but I just had an idea at that time. I became A spokesman for the cannabis retailers association for 12 years, and we had a very bad vibe in that period from the public and from the press and all these kind of things.
And I wanted to look better. I already realized that at the time when I was really young, especially my father said to me, "Listen, boy, this whole story in 10 years is going to be finished because Sweden is complaining, France is complaining. Mr. Reagan is complaining. You guys are all going to get closed here. So if you want to be legal in the future, you're going to have other countries coming and support us."
So one of the ideas was, "Why don't we create a king of cannabis?" That was me. I made all the best varieties, and we started getting international famous people who smoked to Europe and to the club here and tell them our story. Tell them how good this product is. Go back to your country and help us out.
Interviewer: Sure.
Arjan: Well, that happened with Woody Harrelson who became a very big advocate who was a great friend of mind, and all these kind of people and all the rappers came, and this is why I created the kind of cannabis. And then they went back to America, and this is where Steve DeAngelo who was from Harvard, for example, who's got now 125,000 members. It's the biggest club in the States. And he saw what I was doing in the club, and one moment, guys ( Arjan is talking dutch to some people in the background, because they are too noisy). So all of those guys went back to America and started their own clubs, and from there on we created the king of cannabis.
The king of cannabis, yeah, was a thing for the regulation, and then in 2006, 2005 I came up with the idea of strain hunters. So now it's time because America's getting open and more things are happening, strain is happening. I said, "What will be really good is to show the world what really is happening on cannabis?" And then I started Strain Hunters. What I always did was go to the jungle and find species, but they said, "Let's film it." And you probably saw some of those episodes.
Interviewer: I did, I did.
Arjan: Well, one of the ideas was to show that 200 million people around the equator really depended on marijuana and how important marijuana is and to more show people what's really, really going on about marijuana. Then, of course, National Geographic picked it up, and now Vice picked it up. And we're going to make a few more episodes for Vice.
Interviewer: Good.
Arjan: It was just all part of the regulation process to make people more aware of our industry and normalize the business.
Interviewer: Okay. For people that don't know what the term "land race" means, can you describe that because that's a big part of what you're doing with strain hunting?
Arjan: Well, yeah, the discussion about land race in science is a little bit diverse, but basically it's a species that grows for a certain time, They would say, this is the argue, like minimum 30-40 years in a certain area or preferable hundreds of years that is known to this local area.
Interviewer: Okay.
Arjan: Again, there could be a Malawi, Golden Malawi or Durban Poison in Durban or whatever.
Interviewer: And it has some unique qualities that make it strong for growing in that environment so it's been able to thrive in that environment. So you want to take back that particular seed and do something with it since it's done so well in that particular environment. Is that the idea?
Arjan: Well, very partially. The idea is also that we could have different profiles in these plant profiles, cannabis profiles. It could have different tastes because of the terpene so you can use it for breeding purposes. It could have some medicinal values that we don't know now, that maybe in the future could be helpful to autistic, epileptic, or cancer treatments, or whatever. We don't really know.
It has all kinds of value. One of the other values is that in some areas it's getting really wiped out. So we have to protect it also for the future. So it has all kinds of reasons.
Interviewer: So other than ... A lot of people out there just think, "Hey, you're looking for the highest THC value possible, but there's a lot of other variables you're considering." I mean, CBDs, germinations, speed, how well it's resistant to diseases.
Arjan: Yeah.
Interviewer: What other things do you look at when you're evaluating seeds where you say, "Hey, this is something I really I think is a desirable seed."
Arjan: Well, basically all the ones you just mentioned, but also, for example, mold resistant can be a very important factor.
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: Sativas, some areas are really, really good sativas. Like in America, it's all kush. In Holland it's all Indica. In Spain, but you could mix those strains and create something really, really nice. So it has numerous interests.
Interviewer: Okay. And on the Vice episodes you were on recently, you were really excited to find the Punta Roja landrace strain.
Arjan: Yeah.
Interviewer: Can you tell us a little bit about that strain and why you're so excited about it?
Arjan: Well, first of all, there are three races there. There's Lemon Verde and the Mango Veecha. Nobody really obtained a proper one. So it's an accomplishment to have those, especially Lemon Verde. We all know there's a big war going on there for the last 25 years.
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: And basically we were the only people going in and out there without being kidnapped. So and it's a really, really good country for growing, and unfortunately a lot of cocaine took over there. And now we see marijuana coming back. One of the things we showed in that movie, "Colombia" where you see all the lights that it used to be all cocaine plantations, and now people are growing grass again, like in the '70s.
Interviewer: Well, good.
Arjan: What I see is very encouraging and very important for everybody. So this is one of the main reasons we went there is because we heard about a lot of growers are going back to pot again. And secondly, the varieties are really nice. They have some nice strains. They have some nice smoke. Basically marijuana, you can compare to wine. How many times do we drink the same bottle of wine? Rarely, huh? Every restaurant we go we get another bottle of wine.
Interviewer: Right.
Arjan: And this makes marijuana very interesting, and it's also very important for you as a smoker to smoke very diverse. If you smoke one variety all the time, at one point you have to smoke more and more of it which is not a good thing. And so personally I really advocate to smoke different varieties. So this is one of the main reasons I like to have a lot of varieties on my menu.
Interviewer: Oh good. And are you using any genetic modification techniques in your lab or is it just hybrids? How does that work?
Arjan: Oh nobody does. It's a big myth at the moment. Nobody is using genetic medication techniques in the marijuana world as far as I know. We just make hybrids and that's it, very simple.
Interviewer: Now I've heard the term "hybrid vigor" which means when you create a new hybrid, they kind of thrive in a way that's interesting. Do you witness that firsthand?
Arjan: Yes, of course, but that doesn't always work. Of course, you try to create a new hybrid with a new taste. You try to bring the best threads from both species together, and you hope that the bubble gum from one and the lemon from the other comes together, you know? But that doesn't always work, of course.
Interviewer: Right.
Arjan: This is the doctor who's working.
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: It would be too easy now if everything goes like that.
Interviewer: Right. What is your most popular strain? I guess that probably changes over time, but what do you think the most popular strain is right now?
Arjan: Well, Past [SP] the world's most famous strain is Past due to the California ones. At the start of the business it was the Skunk.
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: Later it became the White Widow, my most famous strain from the early '90s. Past was the Super Silver Haze in '98 until early 2000s. And now it's the Cheese and the Super Lemon Haze. Super Lemon Haze is probably the most famous strain ever. That one won three times the cannabis in high times. It was the most smoked, and if you go to all international seed banks every seed bank with this that's the number one seller. It's a very good sativa, a very good grower and, yeah, it's a fantastic plant and a great smoke. And that's probably your main one, to say.
Interviewer: Okay. Do you see any threats from the best seeds coming to market? Is there any entrenched market interests or big companies or governments getting in the way from the best seeds coming to market?
Arjan: Well, let's not hope. Let's not hope. I hope it will go in the same way that the wine industry went. Of course, there will be a few big players, but as in France, as in Australia, as in California, as in South America, in Chile, there's still a lot of very good little wine houses.
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: You never can stop the capitalist industry. We all know this. We have to be honest about this, but I hope guys like me will not get crushed by big tobacco companies to take over our business. But who knows? This is the future. It's getting more legal, amigo. Let's hope that Hillary Clinton gets elected in 2016 and changes the Federal Laws. You see now very good movement in America with letters coming out from the White House from Eric Holder that it's ... back off of the dispensaries and let them do their work if they're legal.
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: So you live in the center of the center. You know better than anybody else. It's going pretty good in Colorado. I understand that the first $40 million on tax has been spent on the schools.
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: So a very, very, very intelligent move from the Colorado State, and I hope it goes like that in the future.
Interviewer: Yes, I'm very optimistic. It's been going really well here in Colorado.
Arjan: Yes.
Interviewer: Who do you feel like benefits from keeping cannabis illegal?
Arjan: Politicians.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Arjan: Politicians are too stupid to organize anything or solve any problem if the economic crisis starts speaking about drugs because they can't speak about economics. Of course, a little bit of tobacco or a pharmaceutical or the alcohol industry. We can see that very, very clear in California where the alcohol industry is against us. I even heard that the owner of Starbucks is putting money in the lobby against us. So even the coffee industry is against us.
Interviewer: Oh no.
Arjan: Yeah.
Interviewer: Now you've travelled all over the world looking for great strains. How have you seen different cultures, like you mentioned in Thailand? How have you seen them use cannabis as a medicine?
Arjan: Oh well, you can see that in a lot of my movies, especially they use it for all kinds of things. First of all, they don't have anything else there. I'm from Africa. You have to understand there. Very poor families have three fields. They have a mini field that's a cornfield basically. They have a vegetable field, and they have marijuana fields. They don't have money for fences so this is the reason the children don't go to school. The children have to guard the cattle. If the cattle goes into the vegetable field, they just die of hunger.
So the marijuana they make to sell. Now one of the things they use is if the kids are really sick, for example, and they have stomach problems or they have not enough food, it's sounds a little bit contradicting because in America you get the munches when you smoke really strong marijuana. But in Africa and other places they give the kids a little bit of seeds and a little bit of marijuana because the seeds have a very high nutritional value. We all know there is Omega 3, 6 and 9 im there in there.
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: And there's a lot of seeds available in marijuana so they feed the kids seeds. We can see even the chickens are much more healthy in Africa. The eggs are much more bigger in Europe when they eat the marijuana seeds. It's a very scientific thing what you see. The meat is also much nicer of the chickens, but they use it in all kinds of ways. They make oils. They use it in all kinds of therapeutic ways, like in South America, for example. They use the cocoa leaves or they use the ayahuasca, all kinds of other herbs. In Africa they use it to treat themselves because they don't have money to obtain pharmaceuticals. And pharmaceuticals are in many ways, anyway, not the answer as we all know. We have too many people who are addicted to sleeping tablets, tranquilizers, and all kinds of other things. And they should indeed take some cannabis instead of all these bad things for you.
Interviewer: Now you recently interviewed Sir Richard Branson. I'm not sure when that was, but why do you feel his message is so important to get out?
Arjan: Well, it's the same as when I created the king of cannabis. I wanted to have all the famous actors and movie stars and singers to advocate our issue. You see my site, for example. Now Rihanna, you see these big people that are very important for young people telling, "Hey, listen, I smoke. I don't care. It's not dangerous."
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: And you can think whatever you want to about this message, but for me this is a very good message. Now there's another very, very big league, the league of Paul Allen, the league of Sir Richard Branson and these kind of people. For me this is very important because these people are respected businessmen, and now they are standing up and advocating our case. And they are also financially contributing to my organization a lot. Sir Richard Branson donated 150,000 Euros last year for our Congress and a lot of mayors attended and a lot of people from America.
And these people have money. They can help us, and they are much more creditable than us. And they are now telling the world that this is a good product. And that's why it's very important that these people come in. Unfortunately, these people are only in America and in England and not yet in the mainland of Europe and in Holland, but this is the beginning. And he's also part of the Drug Commission of the United Nations where he's with Kofi Annan and Madeline Albright.
So these people are very, very important to us for the regulation process.
Interviewer: Great. Now you've been growing plants since the '80s. Aside from new strains, is there any technology in the cannabis business that really excites you?
Arjan: Yeah, well what excites me more is, of course, the whole regulation process in America what I think is great, but, of course, yeah, you have the whole new edible industry, of course. That's very important where people don't have to smoke anymore but can take a cookie or whatever which is a new interesting thing. But I'm a real, real original grower and breeder and that's what excites me the most.
Interviewer: Is there any tips or suggestions you would give to people in Colorado and Washington that they can take away from your experience in Amsterdam, you know, with legal cannabis there that they can make sure they do here to get off on the right foot?
Arjan: The most important thing is to buy Green House seeds.
Interviewer and Arjan: [laugh]
Interviewer: Okay.
Arjan: That's a joke. Now listen, what I hope and what I hope will come to Spain one time. Yesterday we had Allison the woman who wrote the thing for Washington.
Interviewer: Okay.
Arjan: The whole proposal. I hope we can make clubs like in Amsterdam, like in Spain where you would have food, where you would have drink and where you can smoke marijuana and obtain your marijuana. I think this is the future. And you also go to a restaurant to eat food. You don't only eat food in your house. You go to Starbucks to buy your coffee. You go to Apple phone to buy your phone, yeah?
Interviewer: Yeah.
Arjan: So also when you come together and you smoke marijuana, you talk about social problems, this is very important. Holland is a very international country.
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: We're a very open country. We have legalized abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage. We are famous for showing the world in which direction freedom should go. And I think it's very, very important to understand it. In a coffee shop in Holland there's a black guy. There's a white guy, and there's a Chinese guy at one table sharing a joint and talking about daily problems. And you don't see that much in other countries. Marijuana, it's nice people. And I think that is the strongest message that we give out with those coffee shops, and that's why I think it's so important to have the coffee shop system in America in the future.
Interviewer: Great point. It would be a lot of fun.
Arjan: It's nice for this interviewer.
Interviewer: Yes.
Arjan: You probably have more questions.
Interviewer: Well, where are you up to next?
Arjan: I never mention my trips because of security reasons, I'm sorry.
Interviewer: That makes a lot of sense. I could see why after watching the Vice Colombia.
Arjan: You have to keep it a little under the radar. I hope you understand.
Interviewer: Sure. And for listeners that want to follow your work and learn more about your seeds and your coffee shop, how can they do that?
Arjan: Well, we have a very big, famous forum on the www.strainraces.com.
Interviewer: Okay.
Arjan: That's one place to log in. We have GreenHouseSeeds.nl, and these are two main websites where everybody can find us and everybody comes together there. Another nice thing is to watch us grow, HD.TV where there is a lot of people putting their little things on. And, of course, Instagram is really, really important, strain on Instagram where they can follow our trips and see a lot of nice pictures. And, yeah, that's basically the way to follow us.
Interviewer: Great. Well, Arjan, thanks so much for the interview. I really appreciate it. |
Real-time hand-tracking with a color glove Robert Y. Wang and Jovan Popović
We demonstrate real-time tracking of the 3-D pose and configuration of the hand for gestural user-input and desktop virtual reality. The only components of our system are a cloth glove and a webcam.
Gestural user input
Tracking the 3-D pose and configuration of the hand Our system is low latency (~100 ms) and can track the relatively fast motion of this sequence. Desktop virtual reality Our system can be used as an input device for desktop virtual reality. Bimanual rotation and scaling Here we demonstrate rotation and scaling of the Stanford bunny with both hands. Manipulating a virtual yoke Here we demonstrate controlling a (crude) flight simulator by manipulating a virtual yoke.
About the color glove The color glove is printed on a Lycra fabric and does not contain any obstructive sensors. The pattern is designed to be distinctive and facilitate robust tracking. |
Thomson Reuters Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing the news media in Sochi, Russia.
Twitter and Facebook will tell Congress this week that Russia's US election meddling on their platforms was wider than originally reported.
Twitter will say more than 30,000 Russia-linked accounts generated 1.4 million tweets during the final stretch of the campaign.
Facebook will say nearly 126 million people were exposed to content tied to Russia-linked accounts over a two-year period.
Twitter will tell Congress this week that Russia-linked accounts "generated approximately 1.4 million automated, election-related tweets, which collectively received approximately 288 million impressions" last year from September 1 to November 15.
"For our analysis, we studied the time period of September 1 - November 15, 2016 covering 16 billion unique Tweets, (i.e., excluding retweets)," a source familiar with Twitter's testimony said. "Our review was deliberately broad, capturing 189 million election-related Tweets."
In a portion of the prepared testimony, which Business Insider obtained Monday, Twitter's acting general counsel, Sean Edgett, wrote that the company "identified 36,746 accounts that generated automated, election-related content and had at least one of the characteristics we used to associate an account with Russia."
That is far higher than the number of Russia-linked accounts Twitter initially disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed-door interview last month. Twitter representatives reportedly told investigators that it had uncovered only 201 Russia-linked accounts, leading Democratic Sen. Mark Warner to tell reporters that the interview was "deeply inadequate."
When Edgett appears before the Senate intelligence and judiciary committees this week, however, he will testify that those 36,746 accounts "generated approximately 1.4 million automated, election-related Tweets, which collectively received approximately 288 million impressions."
Twitter emphasized in its prepared remarks that the nearly 37,000 accounts represented "1/100th of a percent (0.012%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time."
By comparison, Facebook will tell Congress that Russia-linked accounts produced approximately 80,000 posts on the platform from 2015 to 2017 that were seen by about 126 million Americans.
"We estimate that roughly 29 million people were served content in their News Feeds directly from the IRA's 80,000 posts over the two years," Facebook's counsel Colin Stretch wrote in the testimony obtained by Business Insider. He added that Facebook estimated that "approximately 126 million people may have been served one of their stories at some point during the two-year period."
The IRA, or Internet Research Agency, is a Russian "troll factory" that mass-produced disinformation and propaganda on social media leading up to the US election.
Twitter wrote in its testimony that it uncovered "more accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency ("IRA") as a result of our review."
"We connected the 201 accounts we initially identified with Congressional investigators to broader Russian election-focused activity on Twitter, including the full set of 2,752 accounts that we now believe are associated with the IRA," the testimony says.
Roughly 9% of the tweets from the 2,752 IRA-linked accounts were election-related, Twitter said, and more than 47% of those tweets were automated.
The company said that all 2,752 accounts had been suspended and that the company was "proactively giving committee investigators the handles of these accounts, and we have taken steps to block future registrations related to these accounts-- and we have pledged to Congress that we will inform them as we uncover more related accounts."
Twitter banned the Russian news agencies RT and Sputnik from advertising on its platform last week. The company said in its prepared remarks that it had "identified nine accounts that both had at least one criteria for Russian origin and promoted election-related content that violated existing or recently implemented ads policies. Two of those accounts were @RT_COM and @RT_America." |
The censorship of The Pirate Bay, which is slowly spreading to ISPs all around Europe, is designed to reduce the availability of unauthorized media, but the site also allows artists without a corporation-backed delivery mechanism to self publish to the world. However, since blockades are a blunt instrument, their work is being wiped out too. On this basis, the legality of a recent Pirate Bay blockade is now being questioned.
During May 2011, the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and the Finnish branch of the music industry group IFPI filed a lawsuit at the District Court of Helsinki.
The groups demanded that local ISP Elisa should start blocking The Pirate Bay in order to protect the copyrights of their members. While Elisa initially refused, a subsequent court order in October 2011 forced them to comply and last month it was initiated.
The matter is currently under appeal but in the meantime Elisa’s block must remain, which means that no content indexed by The Pirate Bay – illicit or fully authorized – is available to the ISP’s customers. For one Elisa customer, that situation is unacceptable.
Antti Laine says that the enforcement order handed down to his ISP was unlawful so he has responded by filing a complaint with the authority that sanctioned the block. His complaint states that under Finnish copyright law, any injunction should avoid collateral damage.
Such a wide block fails to consider this responsibility, Laine insists, adding that “enforcement of the decision is based on an erroneous application of law.” His complaint is being made on three grounds.
1. Laine says he has been working on a project and the media created is being distributed via The Pirate Bay. Due to the block, distribution of the content is being affected.
2. As a client of Elisa himself, Laine says that due to the blockade he can no longer download or indeed upload any material that is deemed by creators to be for free distribution. Under copyright law this legal content cannot be a target of the injunction but nevertheless its availability is being threatened.
3. Laine states that the injunction is based on an incorrect application of the law. Service providers can only be ordered to block access to infringing files, but the are huge numbers of other works being affected by the blanket censorship. Furthermore, Laine says that the blockade also affects all legal content uploaded to The Pirate Bay after it was initiated and such preemptive censorship is against Finland’s constitution.
In respect of item 3, Laine attached a list of Creative Commons, GPL and Public Domain material affected including content from Dope Stars Inc, titles such as Steal This Film, LionShare and Zeitgeist from Jamie King’s VODO, Rip: A Remix Manifesto, Finland’s own Star Trek parody series Star Wreck and many open source software applications.
“No blocking mechanism should block content that’s available legally,” Joonas Mäkinen of Finland’s Pirate Party tells TorrentFreak. “If the proposed methods can’t reasonably differentiate between authorized and non-authorized content, they should never be put in action.”
“There is no reason to block even The Pirate Bay’s website itself, as the texts and images there – a whopping 90 megabytes – are definitely not in illegal distribution per se,” Mäkinen adds.
Laine seeks a correction of the existing injunction so that it no longer breaches the Copyright Act and Constitutional Law. |
If you are objective, open minded, you will know how to appreciate this peace of art. It's standard Manowar, this time with massive orchestrations. This is totally natural thing since they were the ones who laid foundation for heavy metal's sub-genre called symphonic metal. It began with The Crown And The Ring (Lament Of The Kings), although that song doesn't have electric guitars. But still, it sounds so heavy, 'cause they are heavy metal enough even without distorted guitars. This release has lots of short introduction songs and some instrumental overtures done in classical music style, because of Richard Wagner's influence. If you know something about Manowar, then you noticed that these stories in The Blood Of Odin and Glory Majesty Unity are done in the vein of The Warrior's Prayer from Kings Of Metal album. So, they continued this epic story from 1988, and put it into this concept album, which consists of Norse Mythology, heavy metal, Manowar and their fans. Also, Warriors Of The World had short classical piece Valhalla and longer The March, so symphonic metal tendencies are not strange in Manowar's music.
Joey DeMaio fully unveiled his artistic nature and showed his ability, creativity and talent to make classical music overtures: Overture To The Hymn Of The Immortal Warriors and Overture To Odin, introduction parts: The Ascension and beginning of Sleipnir as well, and epic stories: The Blood Of Odin and Glory Majesty Unity. These songs are the ones which turned this release into a concept album, since they don't have electric guitar, bass guitar and drums, but classical instruments and choir. When you remove these introductions, overtures and stories, instead of 16 songs, them 9 are songs where you can expect standard vocals, drums, bass and electric guitars. Parts where band members are notable in these classical songs are The Ascension, which is introduction for King Of Kings where Eric starts to sing, and Joey is narrator of The Blood Of Odin story. Army Of The Dead Part 1 features Eric, along with orchestrations and choir. Army Of The Dead Part 2 has identical lyrics, and the only difference is that Part 2 has keyboards (with organ effect) intro where Joey kicks serious ass. Some can consider these songs as filler, because if you look few years back, since The Triumph Of Steel, it takes them from 4, 5 to 6 years to release new studio albums. They toured a lot few years back, they had line-up changes, so it's natural that it takes lots of time to make new material, but lack of inspiration can't be ignored too.
Manowar is a band that needs time to release new studio albums, but once they come out, they can't disappoint. It's worth waiting, since they do not release crap garbage every year, but high quality heavy metal material. What really will blow away any serious listener are these killer songs. Eric played really important role here, and did impressive job. After all these years he was still capable to do high-pitched screams in King Of Kings, Loki God Of Fire, Die For Metal, Blood Brothers and in ending of the song Gods Of War. His voice filled these songs with insane amount of power, specially mind-blowing combination with strong chorus in songs Sons Of Odin and Gods Of War, where whole thing is taken to higher level, and with symphonic arrangements these two songs sound massive, epic and orgasmic. Hymn Of The Immortal Warriors received the same blessing, and it has even more epic feel when Joey starts the narration, and when he finishes, Eric starts along with choir which always make me shudder. Eric's intonation in Sleipnir's refrains is of key importance, otherwise song wouldn't sound that great. Karl Logan made excellent guitar solos. Slow, with lots of passion to fit the mood of Blood Brothers power ballad and Hymn Of Immortal Warriors, which sounds like a national anthem. Word "hymn" in the title makes perfect sense.
Semi-furious, but technical solos are in Gods Of War, Odin and Die For Metal, and insanely furious solos full of arpeggios, sweeps and shredding in King Of Kings, with some slower parts, but with guitar rape in Sleipnir, and with use of tremolo to squeeze those notes. In Loki God Of Fire and Sons Of Odin he continued fast kick-ass playing. Odin has nice lead guitar which causes eargasm, and Loki God Of Fire has insane ending soloing along with Eric's singing, so you can't hear well some of his solo parts. It's refreshing to hear something like that, not just solos in the middle of the song without vocals. Although this release is not full of memorable riffs, Loki God Of Fire and Die For Metal have riffs which slay, and enough to leave great impression for the entire release. He placed power chords well in fast songs King Of Kings, Sleipnir, Loki God Of Fire, in mid tempo songs Sons Of Odin, Gods Of War and in slow songs Die For Metal, Blood Brothers and Hymn Of The Immortal Warriors. Joey's bass guitar is not dominant on this release, but he was dedicated to keyboards with organ effect and narrations in some parts of the songs. Scott Columbus could have done some different and more creative beats, instead of constant repeating the same pattern during the songs' durations. Songs still sound excellent, and other members covered this lack.
Good sides of this release:
This is unique symphonic metal masterpiece. Unique because Joey and Karl have custom made equipment, their own Manowar distortion, there's only one Eric Adams and because orchestration here sounds totally different than any other band in heavy metal music did. Manowar proved they can set standards for symphonic metal, after years of classic heavy metal and power metal domination. This is really epic studio album, and word "epic" should be under their copyright hold.
Bad sides of this release:
May turn off lazy asses and narrow minded people who simply don't want to listen carefully and try to appreciate these excellent classical music parts.
Highlights:
Everything. If you listen from beginning to the end, it leaves even bigger impression. |
Mr. Manafort went to work for Mr. Yanukovych and his Russian-backed Party of Regions in the mid-2000s, and during that time also entered into business deals with two oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska of Russia and Dmytro Firtash of Ukraine. Both deals, which were ultimately unsuccessful, involved the use of murky offshore companies and were tainted by allegations that cronies of Mr. Yanukovych’s schemed to funnel assets out of Ukraine.
The transaction with Mr. Deripaska, a billionaire industrialist close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, involved the attempted purchase of a Ukrainian cable telecommunications business using $18.9 million that Mr. Deripaska invested in a Cayman Islands partnership managed by Mr. Manafort. The cable business was controlled by offshore shell companies that Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators said were used by Mr. Yanukovych’s inner circle to loot public assets.
And last summer, the Ukrainian investigators announced the discovery of the handwritten ledger, said to have been kept in the offices of Mr. Yanukovych’s political party before he was ousted in 2014, which showed the $12.7 million in payments designated for Mr. Manafort.
The nature of Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine appeared to concern his family, according to text messages belonging to one of his adult daughters, Andrea, which were hacked last year and posted on a website used by Ukrainian hackers. The thousands of messages span from 2012 to 2016 and include references to millions of dollars Mr. Manafort apparently transferred to his two daughters.
In one text written in 2015, Ms. Manafort, a lawyer, called her father’s activities in Ukraine “legally questionable,” and in a separate exchange with her sister, Jessica, she worried that cash he gave them was tainted by the violent response to the uprising that ultimately led to the downfall of Mr. Manafort’s client, Mr. Yanukovych.
“Don’t fool yourself,” Ms. Manafort wrote. “That money we have is blood money.”
In addition to the money he gave his daughters, Mr. Manafort also began acquiring a number of real estate assets during the years he worked in Ukraine, several of them costing millions of dollars and bought with cash. Among them is an apartment in Trump Tower in Manhattan, bought in 2006 for $3.7 million, and a Brooklyn brownstone bought in 2012 for $3 million.
Being able to cite his Trump Tower address came in handy when he pitched his services to Mr. Trump’s campaign early in 2016. By then, Mr. Manafort had been out of American politics for many years, but he expressed a desire to get back in the game and offered to work free, suggesting that he did not need the money. |
The University of Washington has removed a poster for its cheerleading squad after the graphic received severe backlash, including may people calling it sexist and misogynistic.
The cheerleading flier featured a white woman with blond hair and was meant to give advice on how to tryout for the team. But the poster ended up being more upsetting than instructional and faced almost immediate reproach.
© Provided by Independent Print Limited uwcheerleader.jpg
“I can't believe this is real,” Jazmine Perez, a University of Washington student and a member of the student government, told the Seattle Times. “One of the first things that comes mind is objectification and idealization of Western beauty, which are values I would like to believe the university doesn’t want to perpetuate. As a student of color who looks nothing like the student in the poster, this feels very exclusive.”
But opposition came from more places than just the Seattle campus.
@seattletimes please be a Barbie doll, white christian woman or don't bother! Great message! :D — Craig Baker (@ucbooker) April 27, 2016
And here's what's wrong with America. University of Washington publishes do's/dont's list for cheerleader tryouts. pic.twitter.com/0nngE22pGL — Mike Sington (@MikeSington) April 28, 2016
In a statement, University of Washington athletics officials said they created the graphic “in response to a high volume of student questions about cheer and dance team tryouts,” the Seattle Times reported.
© Provided by Independent Print Limited image
It was removed after the department “determined that some of the details and descriptions provided were inconsistent with the values of the UW spirit program and department of athletics.” |
Citizens Intelligence Report by the American Intelligence Media
Crime 1: Her private email server hid unpublished 2009-2010 State Department contracts with Facebook managed by Dmitry Shevelenko. Crime 2: Hillary’s Facebook “election winning template” clearly violates The Hatch Act. Crime 3: Hillary’s contracts obstructed justice in Leader v. Facebook. Crime 4: Hillary colluded with Facebook to set State Department Internet policy.
Oct. 26, 2017—On May 26, 2009, Russian oligarch Yuri Milner invested $200 million in Facebook private stock brokered by his Russian partner Goldman Sachs. Milner had worked for Obama’s 2008 bailout director Larry H. Summers when he was chief economist for the World Bank in the early 1990’s as a researcher along with Sheryl K. Sandberg, who later became Summer’s chief of staff at the U.S. Treasury, then started Gmail and is now Facebook’s chief operating officer. While Sandberg started Gmail for Google, Milner started Mail.ru. The intent to takeover global communications is evident in hindsight.
On Jun. 16, 2009, Hillary Clinton approved the Vladimir Putin-controlled ROSATOM to purchase 20% of America’s uranium reserves through Uranium One. The Clinton Foundation had already received more than $145 million in pay-to-play donations from Uranium One beneficiaries.
Hillary’s treason in her compromise of America’s energy reserves using Russian surrogates is evident. That treason is compounded by a simultaneous $1 billion financing by Cisco, Intel and Google of Vladimir Putin’s Moscow, Russia technology center Skolkovo on Jun. 27, 2010, just two days before Hillary approved the uranium sale to ROSATOM. See also “Cisco Commits $1 Billion for Multi-year Investment in Skolkovo.” ThinkRUSSIA. Aug. 11, 2010.
On Jun. 29, 2010, just two days after the Cisco/Intel/Google $1 billion donation, Moscow-based Renaissance Capital paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech even though Renaissance was the lead analyst covering recommending a “buy” on Uranium One. On Mar. 30, 2011, Russian oligarch Yuri Milner overpaid $100 million for a gaudy mansion in the center of Silicon Valley in an ostentatious display of a rogue C.I.A.-inspired arrogance, after his $200 million private Facebook investment.
What is becoming equally evident is Hillary’s simultaneous compromise of America’s elections, digital networks and court proceedings through secret “election winning template” contracts with Facebook using Russian surrogates.
On Sep. 26, 2009, Hillary Clinton and the State Department entered into a secret contract with Facebook for $120,000 (GSA SAQMMA09M1870) to build “a template for winning elections using advanced Facebook marketing.” The next month, on Oct. 16, 2009, Hillary promoted Facebook on a video presentation to a U.S. State Department-funded Alliance for Youth Movements Summit in Mexico City. This contract was not known because Hillary had hidden it on her private email server in the basement of her house. It first came to light through the dogged work of Judicial Watch who obtained it in Apr. 03, 2014.
See also TIMELINE.
(Note: The Timeline takes a few minutes to download because of its file size. It may be too large to load on your phone or tablet so serious researchers should use a PC for download. It’s worth the effort! You will know it is open when red bordered boxes appear on the screen.)
Facebook contract with Office of Economic Security Information Programs
Between Sep. 26, 2009 and Sep. 30, 2010, Hillary entered into three (3) contracts with Facebook for $385,000.
This collusion with Facebook was wantonly criminal on many levels.
Columbus innovator Leader Technologies, Inc. was suing Facebook for patent infringement on Nov. 19, 2008 in Delaware federal district court. Reagan-appointed judge Joseph J. Farnan, Jr. was assigned the case.
While the case was preparing for trial, and despite four motions to compel, Mark Zuckerberg stonewalled providing his 2003-2004 Harvard computer devices and emails for review in the case. We now know that his attorneys at Gibson Dunn LLP had custody of 28 Harvard computer hard drives and emails. After stonewalling for a year, they lied to the court and said they had lost the information.
We believe Facebook and Zuckerberg hid this information because it will prove that Zuckerberg is a mere stooge of the rogue C.I.A. and was given the programming code from the IBM Eclipse Foundation to start Facebook. It will prove that IBM was given the code from James P. Chandler, III who stole it from his legal client Leader Technologies, Inc.
What Leader had no way of knowing was that Chandler was working intimately at the highest level with the Secretary for the Department of Defense’s Highlands Forum to weaponize the Internet. He held illegal private meetings with favored private companies to set policy on how the Internet would be controlled and profited from by the military-industrial complex.
This cabal of military-industrial complex criminals have used Leader’s invention for 17 years for free. Leader’s shareholders across the country are starting to file Miller Act Notice to demand that President Donald Trump pay them for using their property without compensation.
While Zuckerberg was openly lying to the court, Hillary Clinton and the State Department entered into secret contracts with Facebook to build “a template for winning elections using advanced Facebook marketing.” These contracts were managed by “Dmitry Shevelenko” whose Russian background has been obscured by the shadow government.
Obstruction of Justice
In American courts, litigants have a solemn right to a fair trial. Litigants have the right to assume that no government representative will use their position of public trust to interfere in the case in favor of either side. When a government representative interferes in a case, that crime is called “obstruction of justice” for obvious reasons. Those interfering are attempting to influence the outcome of the case in favor of one of the parties.
Election tampering
In American elections, citizens have a solemn right to a free and fair election. Citizens have the right to assume that no government representative will use their position of public trust to interfere in an election in favor of either candidate. When a government representative interferes in an election, that crime is called “election tampering” and is a violation of The Hatch Act.
Fraud & Racketeering
In American public contracts, citizens have a solemn right to transparency regarding the spending of public funds. Except in special circumstances, government representatives may not use their position of public trust to favor certain private parties in uncompetitive contracts. When a government representative enters into no-bid contracts and colludes with the General Service Agency (GSA) to hide the existence of those contracts, that crime is called “fraud.” When such fraud involves parties across state lines, that crime is “racketeering.”
Pay Leader for 17 years of free use of their social networking invention; federal government can raise $200-500+ billion in surcharge revenues from social networking without raising taxes!
In conclusion, the crimes described above alone are enough by themselves to convict an average American of racketeering and treason. The evidence of these crimes come from Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
The Russian collusion nexus between Uranium One and Facebook election rigging is stunning.
Readers are encouraged to get this article to your elected representatives.
Ask them to: (1) pay Leader Technologies for the last 17 years of free use of their social networking invention that Hillary obstructed, and (2) prosecute Hillary and her racketeers for her Uranium One and digital election rigging racketeering and treason. |
IPA Day 2015
This Thursday, August 6th, marks the return of IPA Day, the international celebration of one of the world’s most popular and iconic beer styles, the India Pale Ale. That bitter, refreshing bite we’ve all come to love has made it’s mark on the beer world in it’s many varieties, from the mild bitter of a session IPA to the rough bite of your favorite imperial IPA. Be sure to check-in to your favorite IPA (see full list of IPA styles below) on IPA Day, which is this Thursday, August 6th, and you can unlock this year’s “IPA Day (2015)” badge.
Qualifying IPA varieities:
Belgian IPA
Imperial / Double Black IPA
Black IPA / Cascadian Dark Ale
American IPA
English IPA
Imperial / Double IPA
Triple IPA
White IPA
Session IPA
You can learn more about IPA Day and its history over at craftbeer.com! |
Bo Horvat needs a contract.
The Canucks’ leading scorer last season is a restricted free agent and is angling for a significant raise on his entry-level deal. Horvat is coming off a 52-point season and is the presumed future captain of the franchise: just how much do you pay him and for how long?
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It’s a difficult question to answer. As much as he has been transitioning into a role as the team’s first-line centre, that’s as much by necessity as it is merit. The Sedins are declining, no longer capable of carrying the team on their backs offensively. The only other option for a first-line centre right now is Horvat.
That’s not to say he hasn’t been good. Offensively, he’s done everything the Canucks could ask of him, finishing second on the team in points per hour behind Sven Baertschi, hitting that nice round number of 20 goals, and breaking the 50-point barrier before his 22nd birthday. He was ranked 81st among NHL forwards in points, which already makes him a low-end first-line forward.
That puts him in the company of an interesting group of young forwards who recently signed contracts. Ben Kuzma broke down some comparable players in a recent article.
There’s the 22-year-old Jonathan Drouin, who is coming off a 53-point season. He just signed a six year deal with an average annual value (AAV) of $5.5 million. Is Horvat worth the same amount considering they’re the same age and had similar points? Is he worth more because he plays a more valuable position as a centre? Less because Drouin has a higher ceiling?
The Canucks would probably prefer something similar to Vincent Trocheck’s new contract. Coming off a 53-point season, he signed a six-year deal with an AAV of $4.75 million.
The most recent signing was Tyler Johnson. The 26-year-old re-signed with the Tampa Bay Lightning for 7 years and an AAV of $5 million. Can Horvat and his agent argue that he is more valuable than Johnson, who has a 72-point season under his belt? Arguably, yes, as Johnson hasn’t matched those numbers over the last couple of seasons.
What complicates matters for the Canucks is that Horvat hasn’t been able to match his offensive production with his defensive game. Coming out of Junior, Horvat was lauded for his two-way game, but he’s struggled in the defensive zone in the NHL.
It’s particularly noticeable shorthanded, where Horvat is one of the worst penalty killers in the league. Of forwards who played at least 100 minutes at 4-on-5, Horvat has the highest rate of shot attempts against and only Jamie Benn allowed a higher rate of goals against.
Horvat has struggled defensively at 5-on-5 as well. Using Goals Above Replacement, Horvat was ranked among the bottom-15 in even-strength defence at -2.9. That means he cost the team 2.9 goals with his defence compared to a replacement-level player. He made up for it with the best even-strength offence on the Canucks, but it is troubling.
Taking into account his defence, who does Horvat really compare to? Using Sean Tierney’s GAR visualization tool, we can find some players that are at or near Horvat’s even-strength defence and offence from last season.
There are some tremendously interesting names in there, with Nathan MacKinnon and Sean Monahan being the most intriguing. Both are first-line centres for their respective teams in the same age range as Horvat, though both are more proven than Horvat. Monahan has a couple 60+ point seasons, while MacKinnon put up 63 points in his rookie year.
And yet, both have some defensive issues that they make up for with their offense at even-strength and on the power play.
MacKinnon is particularly notable: he’s a first-overall pick with high expectations, but on a bottom-of-the-league team put up just 53 points last season. There’s a comparison you can draw to Horvat’s 52 points for the similarly terrible Canucks.
Horvat is unlikely to get near MacKinnon’s 7-year, $6.3 million contract — MacKinnon has the stronger track record and higher expectations — but their 2016-17 seasons weren’t very far apart. Likewise, Monahan’s 7-year, $6.375 million contract would be a hard ask for his agent.
But does Horvat belong in the same conversation as those two centres? Does he have the same potential to hit 60+ points and be a legitimate first-line centre?
It’s certainly possible. Horvat had 32 points at 5-on-5 last season. That’s the same number of 5-on-5 points as MacKinnon. Monahan had 34 points at 5-on-5.
The most 5-on-5 points MacKinnon has produced is 40 in his rookie season, while Monahan hit 37 in 2015-16. That’s not out of reach for Horvat, particularly if he gets deployed more as a first-line centre in this coming season with fewer defensive zone starts.
The big difference could come on the power play, where Horvat has been on the second unit behind the Sedins. He had 10 power play points last season, but led the team in power play points per hour. There’s an argument to be made that he should be getting the bulk of the power play ice time.
Monahan, on the other hand, had 17 power play points last season and 20 the season before that. MacKinnon had 17 power play points in his rookie season when he put up 63 points.
With some more offensive zone time at 5-on-5, a boost in power play ice time, and a nice break on the bench during the penalty kill, Horvat could easily have a 60+ point season next year. At that point, having him locked up for another 6-8 years at Drouin’s $5.5 million per season will seem like a steal.
On the other hand, what if he's more like one of the other comparable players on that chart: Tyler Bozak? Bozak is a competent complementary player who put up 55 points last season playing behind the likes of Auston Matthews, William Nylander, Mitch Marner, and Nazem Kadri.
You can argue that Bozak is worth his 5-year, $4.2 million contract, but certainly isn't underpaid. If, like Bozak, Horvat fits the mold better as a complementary second-line, or even third-line, centre on a good team, would the Canucks be making a big mistake by paying him first-line money on a long-term contract? |
Aug 6, 2015 | By Alec
Making challenges are always a fantastic place to find inspiring, genius and sometimes seemingly impossible designs. And Thingiverse’s Catch the Wind competition is no different, as various makers have contributed some amazing 3D printed creations capable of harnessing the power of the wind. However, perhaps the most remarkable design has sprouted from the 3D printer of Mike Blakemore, who has developed an ingeniously simple wind energy storage unit; essentially a 3D printed battery without any electronic parts involved.
Mike himself is a software developer at the startup Hyperplane Interactive, which specializes in next-generation software solutions – including a 3D development platform called Touch Control System for personalized creation. However, his 3D printed creation can also be seen as a next generation solution.Called Wind Energy Store in Gravity, this amazing concept essentially captures the energy of the wind in a few plastic parts, before releasing it at the moment of your choosing. How on earth is that possible, you wonder? Well, Mike’s creation is essentially riding on a new trend in the energy sector that tackles problems associated with wind and solar energy. For while the sun is plentiful everywhere, it isn’t exactly available in the middle of the night (and its not always windy). How do you effectively store those green energies for later use without relying on expensive, toxic batteries that need to be replaced all the time?
The solution is harnessing another power, that of gravity. ‘Using the principle of exploiting the force of gravity, it is in theory possible to store vast amounts of surplus energy, relatively cheap, environmentally friendly, maintenance free, totally safe and without disrupting landscape or taking up horizontal space,’ the team behind gravitybattery.info explain. ‘The concept of exploiting the force of gravity has been around for centuries in the form of the pendulum clock, which stores the energy that a person puts into the system and then distributes it slowly over a long period of time. The gravity battery acts in a similar way, it stores the surplus energy obtained from solar panels during long periods of time, and then delivers it whenever it is needed. It is literally the best possible way of storing large amounts of energy for an indefinite period of time.’ As you can see in the clip above, Bill Gates is also a big fan of this remarkable concept.
While this concept can take huge shapes, it is perhaps best illustrated by something as simple as Mike’s Wind Energy Stored in Gravity. This 3D printed contraption generates basic energy through the wind turbine on the left. That energy is immediately expended to lift the central plastic beam up. However, the energy equivalent used to lift it up, can also be expended at a moment of your choosing by letting it drop – powering the propeller on the right side. ‘We can use generated energy to lift heavy objects and later retrieve the energy using the weight of the lifted object to turn gears on its way back down. A gravity battery is considered full when the heavy object is lifted all the way up,’ Mike explains.
This amazing plastic battery in action.
It is, essentially, a plastic battery. Of course, on a real-world scale, this battery will be huge to get your money’s worth. ‘Real world implementations of this concept usually involve weights that are either lowered into deep holes in the ground or held in above ground silos,’ Mike adds. One of Bill Gates’ examples revolved around lifting water up a mountain and letting it flow down to generate electricity. However, even Mike’s concept can be theoretically expanded indefinitely. ‘Multiple copies of the rack gear can be glued together to increase the storage capacity of the battery indefinitely,’ he says.
As he explains to 3ders.org, Mike developed virtually all of the concept on paper, as he does with all his ideas and projects. ‘Everything after that is done in 3ds Max,’ he says. 3D printing itself took place on a Da Vinci 1.0 and took roughly three days to fully 3D print in ABS. ‘I recommend printing in ABS with .2 layer height and 30% fill. The rack gears function as the battery weight, so it might be a good idea to print them at 100% fill, and/or attach additional weight to the gear to increase torque,’ Mike explains.
The entire tool, which can be downloaded from Thingiverse here, is also completely modular and can take just about any imaginable shape. ‘I've included full models of the turbine and fan in addition to sliced versions for easier printing. You can reduce the number of fan blades, reverse them, or attach a motor/anything else you'd like,’ he says. Really the only thing that wasn’t 3D printed are a set of skateboard bearings, which you can find here.
While this Thingiverse competition only closed yesterday, we expect that this entry will definitely catch the eye of the jury. And if the quality of this project – as well as some of Mike’s other builds, like this 3D printed submarine – are anything to go by, we’ll doubtlessly see much more of him in the near future.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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(THE COURIER-JOURNAL) -- A "Mex-Mex" restaurant that replaced Tumbleweed in Waterfront Park has closed after less than a year in business.
On Monday, Jaimie Schapker of Estes Public Relations confirmed that the Falls City Hospitality Group has ceased operations for Doc's Cantina, which specialized in traditional Mexican fare.
"Our goal is to always offer the best experience for our guests," the group's management said in an emailed statement. "We have not met our high standards in executing Doc's Cantina. Therefore, we have decided to close the restaurant, effective immediately."
The hospitality group, which also runs Doc Crow's Southern Smokehouse and Raw Bar, announced plans for Doc's Cantina in May 2015 and opened the restaurant in April this year.
Since then, the business has served customers to mixed reviews, with former CJ reviewer Nancy Miller giving the site a three-star rating while Yelp reviewers gave it an average two and a half.
Representatives from the Falls City group were not immediately available to comment on the closure, but the group's statement mentioned plans to reopen the space under a new concept.
"We are disappointed in our results, but excited about the opportunity," the statement said. "Our other restaurants in Louisville and Nashville will continue their successful operations during this process. We look forward to serving you again soon." |
Dr. Dog On World Cafe
Set List "How Long Must I Wait"
"Warrior Man"
"That Old Black Hole"
"Lonesome"
Enlarge this image toggle caption Chris Crisman Chris Crisman
The Philadelphia pop-rock band Dr. Dog has continued to get better since forming in the early 2000s. The group's seven albums of layered psychedelia are deeply influenced by the best of '60s pop, adding up to a sound that's both timeless and classic.
Dr. Dog's new album, Be the Void, represents a return to rock 'n' roll roots for the quintet, and the result captures the urgency of its live shows. With its boisterous blues influences and psychedelic pop hooks, Be the Void showcases a band that continues to come into its own.
This segment originally aired on March 2, 2012. |
When Auburn upset #1 Alabama in the Iron Bowl on Saturday evening—a day after #2 Miami managed to lose by double-digits to #70 Pittsburgh (5-7)—it seemed like chaos was once again reigning over college football. And in a sense, it was. Yet, at the same time, Alabama’s loss actually helped shrink the number of teams in contention for the College Football Playoff field.
That’s because, prior to Alabama’s loss, there were a number of two-loss teams—Notre Dame, Penn State, USC, and TCU—that hoped to find a backdoor into the field of four. But now the prospect of having a second team from the Southeastern Conference make the playoff has become very real, since that second team would be the one-loss Crimson Tide—a team that would almost surely beat out any two-loss team apart from Auburn, or possibly Ohio State.
So, while Notre Dame lost later in the evening to Stanford, the Irish—and all the other two-loss teams not vying for either the SEC or Big Ten championship—were effectively eliminated by Auburn’s victory. (TCU might not have been entirely eliminated, but it seems the Horned Frogs’ only real chance at this point would be to blow out Oklahoma—and even that likely wouldn’t be enough.)
* * *
With one week to go, there are eight teams realistically competing for a playoff spot, and another one—undefeated UCF (#2 in the Anderson & Hester Rankings )—that should be. The eight teams in contention are those playing in the championship games of the Big Ten (Wisconsin and Ohio State), SEC (Georgia and Auburn), and ACC (Clemson and Miami), plus Oklahoma (playing TCU in the bizarre “championship game” of the division-less Big 12) and Alabama (which won’t play again until the playoff field is announced).
The eight teams may be clear, but where they should be ranked is not. Indeed, with the CFP Selection Committee’s #1, #2, and #8 teams all having lost this past weekend, the question is where any of the contenders should be ranked.
* * *
From 1998 to 2013 the Bowl Championship Series determined which two teams would play in the national championship game. After the first six (somewhat controversial) years, the BCS Standings were streamlined after the 2003 season, giving two-thirds’ weight to the polls and one-third weight to the computer rankings. For the ten seasons that followed, the BCS delivered the consensus national championship matchup every year, with essentially no controversy. In asking where teams should be ranked, therefore, a good starting point is to look at where teams would now be ranked by the BCS.
Approximating the BCS Standings requires using the coaches poll, the AP poll (the best stand-in for the Harris poll, which was created by and for the BCS, but which no longer exists), and four former BCS computer rankings: Anderson & Hester (which I co-created), Billingsley, Colley, and Wolfe. The two other BCS computer rankings, Sagarin and Massey, no longer publish the version of their rankings that met the BCS’s requirement that they not be based on margin of victory (a requirement instituted after the margin-of-victory-driven computers kept 1-loss Oregon out of the national championship game during the 2001-02 season).
The BCS dropped the high and low computer rankings and averaged the four in the middle. Because the highest and lowest of the four existing BCS computer rankings might have been dropped, or might instead have been among the four that were averaged (with Sagarin and Massey being dropped), I tallied the four computer rankings each way—once with the high and low rankings dropped, once without dropping any of the four—and then averaged those two tallies. This seems the best approximation of what the BCS computers would have yielded.
With all of that said, here’s how the top-ten in the BCS Standings would have looked this week, with each team’s point-value listed (the playoff selection committee doesn’t provide point values, so fans don’t have a sense of the spacing between the teams):
Approximate BCS Standings (out of 1.000):
(1) Wisconsin (12-0): #3 in the polls (.915), #1 in the computers (.995), .942 total score
(2) Clemson (11-1): #1 in the polls (.949), #2 in the computers (.915), .937
(3) Oklahoma (11-1): #2 in the polls (.936), #6 in the computers (.745), .872
(4) Auburn (10-2): #4 in the polls (.889), #8 in the computers (.740), .839
(5) Georgia (11-1): #6 in the polls (.805), #4 in the computers (.890), .833
(6) Alabama (11-1): #5 in the polls (.809), #5 in the computers (.845), .821
(7) Miami (10-1): #7 in the polls (.718), #6 in the computers (.745), .727
(8) UCF (11-0): #12 in the polls (.596), #3 in the computers (.910), .701
(9) Ohio State (10-2): #8 in the polls (.716), #10 in the computers (.660), .697
(10) Penn State (10-2): #9 in the polls (.618), #9 in the computers (.665), .634
The next six teams would have been #11 USC (.611), #12 TCU (.540), #13 Washington (.485), #14 Notre Dame (.447), #15 Stanford (.431), and #16 Memphis (.417), whose only loss is to undefeated UCF (with a rematch scheduled for Saturday).
Clearly, if the four playoff slots were based on the BCS Standings, the winner of this coming Saturday’s Auburn-Georgia game would be in. Wisconsin, Clemson, and Oklahoma would also be in with wins—and if any of those three teams lost, Alabama, Miami (with a win over Clemson), UCF (with a second win over Memphis), and Ohio State (with a win over Wisconsin) would be vying to take their place.
Hopefully the committee can produce such a solid list, with such clear expectations of what each team needs to do this coming weekend. |
Stanford University was founded in 1885 by California senator Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, “to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of humanity and civilization.”
A portrait of Senator Leland Stanford, Jane Lathrop Stanford, Leland Stanford Jr. taken in 1878. (Image credit: Stanford University Archives)
When railroad magnate and former California Gov. Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, lost their only child, Leland, Jr., to typhoid in 1884, they decided to build a university as the most fitting memorial, and deeded to it a large fortune that included the 8,180-acre Palo Alto stock farm that became the campus. The campus is located within the traditional territory of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. The Stanfords made their plans just as the modern research university was taking form.
Leland Stanford Junior University – still its legal name – opened Oct. 1, 1891.
The Stanfords and founding President David Starr Jordan aimed for their new university to be nonsectarian, co-educational and affordable, to produce cultured and useful graduates, and to teach both the traditional liberal arts and the technology and engineering that were already changing America.
Their vision took shape on the oak-dotted fields of the San Francisco Peninsula as a matrix of arcades and quadrangles designed for expansion and the dissolving of barriers between people, disciplines and ideas.
The Boston firm Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge collaborated with Frederick Law Olmsted to develop the university’s final architectural plan, with its distinctive arches, quadrangles and arcades. (Image credit: Stanford University Archives)
From the start, stewardship of the founders’ extraordinary land gift has helped support university endeavors, and has made room for a multiplicity of institutes, schools and laboratories that cross-fertilize each other with innovations that have changed the world. Computer time-sharing, the first isolation of highly purified stem cells and the first synthesis of biologically active DNA, among many other breakthroughs, all originated at Stanford.
The early years were difficult, however, as even the Stanfords’ wealth proved inadequate to their vision. After her husband’s death, Jane Stanford kept the fledgling university open through her leadership. The 1906 earthquake dealt a further blow, killing two people and destroying several campus buildings, some so new they had never been occupied.
University benefactor and trustee Herbert Hoover, future U.S. president and member of Stanford’s Pioneer Class of 1895, professionalized university operations in the 1920s and helped to put Stanford on a sound financial footing. He founded an institute to collect global political material – today’s Hoover Institution Library and Archives – and led the creation of the Graduate School of Business, both now world leaders in their respective fields.
Engineering Professor Frederick Terman, dubbed the “Father of Silicon Valley,” left his stamp by encouraging Stanford students not only to develop but also to commercialize their ideas. In 1937, physicists Russell Varian, Sigurd Varian and William Hansen developed the klystron ultra-high-frequency vacuum tube, paving the way for commercial air navigation, satellite communication and high-energy particle accelerators. In 1939, graduate students William Hewlett and David Packard developed the precision audio oscillator, first low-cost method of measuring audio frequencies, and spun it into the company now known as HP. In 1951, the university developed its Stanford Research Park to house firms led by such innovators. Varian Associates became the first tenants.
The Varian brothers and William Hansen with the klystron. (Image credit: Stanford University Archives)
The post-World War II era saw many research advances. In 1959, Stanford Medical School moved from San Francisco to the main Palo Alto campus. The 1950s also saw planning of today’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, managed under license from the U.S. Department of Energy and opened in 1962. The first website in North America went online at SLAC 29 years later. Advances in particle physics developed at SLAC led to the Linac Coherent Light Source, whose ability to capture ultra-fast images of chemical changes at atomic scale has made it a global destination for pharmaceutical research. The Cold War also gave rise to “the Dish,” the radio telescope that is a familiar landmark in the foothills behind campus. The hill housing the Dish is a conservation area open to the public, and more than 2,000 people run or hike “Dish Hill” each day.
In the foothills above campus, the Dish is a radio telescope built in 1966 and still in use today. The area’s trails are used by more than 500,000 visitors a year. (Image credit: Alex Webb)
Deep in the foothills beyond the Dish, a much smaller structure yielded epochal discoveries when it became home to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), founded by John McCarthy and Les Earnest in 1965. SAIL researchers devised the first interactive system for computer design, as well as pioneering work on computer vision, robotics, laser printing and automated assembly. The world’s first office desktop computer displays appeared at SAIL in 1971.
In the 1970s, Stanford sought new ways to transform society and preserve the environment. It severed its links to classified defense research and forged new paths for service and stewardship. Stanford reduced its dependence on the automobile by adding campus housing and the free Marguerite shuttle, named after a 19th-century horse that pulled a jitney between campus and Palo Alto. The Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve was designated in 1973 to help preserve the green “lungs” of the Peninsula and access to the biological data compiled there that helped establish the field of population genetics.
The multidisciplinary Stanford Humanities Center, first of its kind in the nation and still the largest, opened in 1980 to advance research into the historical, philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural dimensions of the human experience. At this and 30 other humanities-related centers on campus, scholars ranging from distinguished undergraduates to mid-career fellows create new understandings of the world and humanity’s place in it.
From the start, Stanford has valued experiential education. Generous funding helps its undergraduates of diverse economic backgrounds to enjoy parity of experience and opportunity. In 2015, 85 percent of students received some form of financial assistance and 78 percent of Stanford undergraduates graduated debt-free. More than 1,000 undergraduates conduct faculty-directed research and honors projects each year, while 1,000 take part in public-service projects and 1,000 study overseas, all without regard for ability to pay. Since 1992, all undergraduates are guaranteed four years of on-campus housing, in keeping with Stanford’s emphasis on residential education and the experience of a small liberal arts college within the matrix of a large research university.
A significant physical transformation followed the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which again challenged the university’s resilience and vision. Stanford’s main Green Library renovated its heavily damaged west wing as the Bing Wing, while the similarly damaged Stanford Art Museum reopened in 1999 as the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts.
In 1985, the B. Gerald Cantor Rodin Sculpture Garden opened as the largest collection of Rodin bronzes outside Paris. It became the nexus for a world-class collection of 20th- and 21st-century sculpture, nearly all of it freely accessible to the public. Today, the museum and sculpture garden are part of a Stanford arts district that includes the Bing Concert Hall, the McMurtry Building for experiential arts learning and the acclaimed Anderson Collection of 20th-century American painting.
The Anderson Collection, which opened in 2014, is one of the world’s most outstanding private assemblies of modern and contemporary American art. (Image credit: Alex Webb)
The James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences opened in 2003 as the geographic and intellectual nexus between the schools of Engineering and Medicine and the home of Bio-X, a pioneering interdisciplinary biosciences institute led by Professor Carla Shatz. Its collaboration-friendly architecture set the tone for future building, furthering the interdisciplinarity that became a hallmark of university President John Hennessy’s tenure. The environmentally sensitive construction seen in the Clark Center, the Science and Engineering Quad, the School of Medicine and elsewhere fulfills the university’s deep commitment to sustainability in research, teaching and institutional practice. In 2015, Stanford Energy System Innovations’ electric heat recovery system joined the university’s solar and geothermal power procurement initiatives to reduce campus emissions by roughly 68 percent.
The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford opened in the School of Engineering in 2005, bringing students and faculty from radically different backgrounds together to develop innovative, human-centered solutions to real-world challenges. Using techniques from design and engineering, the institute, known on campus as the d.school, instills creative confidence and draws students beyond the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines.
Development campaigns of unprecedented scope carry forward the Stanford family’s vision. The 2000 Campaign for Undergraduate Education raised $1 billion, while the Stanford Challenge concluded in 2012 after raising $6.2 billion, then the largest fundraising campaign undertaken by a university, to fund bold new initiatives. Meanwhile, the $1 billion Campaign for Stanford Medicine is rebuilding Stanford’s two hospitals for adults and children to advance the mission of precision health.
During 2016, Stanford celebrated its 125th year of transformational impact. A revamped Roble Gym opened with a dedicated “arts gym” to help make art an integral part of the student experience. “Old Chem,” one of Stanford’s first buildings, received new life as the Sapp Center for Science Teaching and Learning. The School of Humanities and Sciences launched the Humanities Core, a new certificate and minor program providing undergraduates a structured pathway to explore fundamental questions of human existence. That year, Stanford also expanded its Bing Overseas Studies Program, enhanced undergraduate research opportunities and played a pioneering role in exploring how best to use online technologies to expand access to high-quality education.
The Sapp Center for Science Teaching and Learning has reimagined the historic “Old Chem” building with an eye toward the interdisciplinary future of science research and education. (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)
Stanford University today comprises seven schools and 18 interdisciplinary institutes with more than 16,000 students, 2,100 faculty and 1,800 postdoctoral scholars. Stanford is an international institution, enrolling students from all 50 U.S. states and 91 other countries. It is also an athletics powerhouse, with 900 current student-athletes and a history of 128 national titles and 22 consecutive Learfield Sports Directors’ Cups, awarded to the top intercollegiate athletics program in the nation.
At the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit, hosted by Stanford, President Barack Obama praised the university as “a place that celebrates our ability as human beings to discover and learn and to build, to question, to reimagine, to create new ways to connect and work with each other.” |
JERSEY CITY – Gov. Chris Christie came to bury the ARC Tunnel not to praise it, and now with Caesar seemingly clumsy-footed on another issue, the purveyors of Hudson politics came to praise PATH and with that, presumably politically bury Christie.
It’s that report prepared by a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey panel, which suggests the privatization of PATH train service to and from the city that never sleeps.
Apparently in the name of bipartisanship, Christie and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo championed the report while eschewing bipartisan legislative reforms.
Tramping in from out of frigid weather beside the Grove Street PATH Station, a military tent-sized collection of Democratic Party politicians joined Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop to denounce the proposed scheme.
The political undercurrent carried repeated evocations of “North Jersey” amid proud hurrahs.
Fulop, of course, is a fledgling candidate for governor in 2017 and today’s exercise looked like a rev up of those erector set pieces that he will need to craft a northern Democratic Primary fortress.
U.S. Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) led the way, heaping praise on Fulop for organizing the show of force.
“I applaud the mayor’s leadership to join together a coalition to speak out against a travesty,” said New Jersey’s senior senator, who slammed the Port Authority, traditionally a nest for political patronage, some of which got blasted and exposed during last year’s Bridgegate crisis.
“I still think we need an independent audit,” Menendez said to hand claps.
He suggested changing the existing compact between New York and New Jersey to make the Port more accountable, bottom line, to the people.
“They forgot their core mission,” said Hudson County Executive Tom DeGise, amplifying what Menendez identified early as public transportation.
In order to help get a bloated agency under control, a 100-page plan released over the Christmas holiday weekend and championed by the bi-state governors would save $10 million by privatizing portions of PATH train service.
Menendez argued that it’s a lunatic way for an agency with a $2.9 billion operating budget to throw the burden of its so-called reform onto the shoulders of the citizens of Hudson County.
The mayor estimated that 390,000 would be unfairly impacted by the proposed loss of PATH service from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. on weeknights.
“That’s despicable,” said state Senator Nick Sacco (D-32). “They are out of control.”
“We want the governor and the chairman [of the Port, John Degnan] to say this is off the table,” said Fulop, doubling down on a point made earlier in the program by Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer.
“No one consulted us,” Zimmer said, a loose elbow at the front office.
Others in attendance included U.S. Rep. Albio Sires (D-8), Speaker Vincent Prieto (D-32), state senators Sandy Cunningham and Ronald L. Rice, Assemblyman Raj Mukherji, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, and numerous mayors and Hudson County officials.
A reporter pointed out that Degnan has argued for bus service to duplicate those PATH train lanes now serving residents.
“It’s safe to assume that Chairman Degnan has never been on the PATH late at night,” said Fulop to claps.
The mayor said many of his constituents in Jersey City moved here with the precise purpose of taking advantage of train service. It’s a quality of life issue.
Asked if Degnan – a former attorney general who replaced the Bridgegate-disgraced Port Authority Chairman David Samson – could honestly live up to the title of robust face of change, Fulop said, “The jury’s still out. He has a great opportunity to retract that statement [about PATH}.” |
Intel's next architecture reveals its secrets
In a bit of a strange move, Intel disclosed next to nothing about its upcoming Sandy Bridge processor during the opening IDF keynote last week, which you'll know if you vigilantly refreshed the page as my live blog of the speech descended into tragic irrelevance and hairdo critiques. We've not usually been this close to the release of an Intel processorSandy Bridge-based CPUs are expected to arrive right as we ring in 2011without a sense of its basic internals for quite some time. Fortunately, Intel did finally disclose many of the architectural details of Sandy Bridge later at IDF, during the technical sessions led by Sandy Bridge architects. We had the good fortune to attend some of them, but I've been traveling and unable to gather my thoughts on what we learned until now.
The first things to know about Sandy Bridge are that it's a chip built using Intel's high-speed 32-nm chip fabrication process, with initial variants expected to have four traditional CPU cores, an integrated graphics processor, cache, and a memory controller located together on the same piece of silicon. Intel essentially skipped building a quad-core processor at 32-nm, opting to accelerate the schedule for Sandy Bridge instead. We've long known most of the above, that Sandy Bridge would include integrated graphics and would require a new CPU socket and motherboards, and we've known that it would support Intel's AVX instructions for faster vector processing of media workloads and the like. The mystery has been pretty much everything else beyond those preliminaries.
A substantially new new microarchitecture
That mystery, it turns out, is pretty juicy, because Sandy Bridge is part of the unprecedented wave of brand-new x86 microprocessor architectures hitting the market. Just weeks after AMD disclosed the outlines of its Bulldozer and Bobcat cores, Intel has offered us an answer in the form of its own substantially new microarchitecture.
Now, making a claim like I just did is fraught with peril, since new chip designs almost inevitably build on older ones, especially when you're talking about Intel CPUs. That's the thing about Sandy Bridge, though: one of its architects proclaimed at IDF that it was essentially a from-the-ground-up rebuild of the out-of-order and floating-point execution engines. Such changes were necessary to accommodate the doubled vector width of the AVX instruction set, and it means something fairly momentous. As my friend David Kanter observed, this is, at long last, the breaking point where one can finally say virtually nothing remains of the P6 (Pentium Pro) roots that have undergirded everything from the Conroe/Merom Core 2 to the Nehalem/Westmere Core i-series processors.
Not only has the execution engine changed, but nearly everything around it has been replaced with new logic, as well, from the front-end and branch predictor to the memory execution unit. Outside of Sandy Bridge's CPU cores, the "glue" logic on the chip is all new, too. The inter-core connections, memory controller, and power management microcontroller have been tailored to accommodate the presence of a graphics processor. Even the integrated graphics engine bears little resemblance to what has come before. If you're looking for a golden age of CPU design, we're living in it, folks.
The most monumental change in Sandy Bridge has to be the incorporation of graphics onto the CPU die, and Intel has almost assuredly gone further toward deep integration than AMD did in its Ontario "fusion" chips. Still, that step feels almost like an afterthought, as part of a logical progression like the integration of the memory controller and PCIe logic in the past few generations. The IGP here is more of an application-specific accelerator, not a true co-processor for data-parallel computation. Such lofty goals will have to wait for later generations. For now, the biggest opportunities for head-turning progress come from the sweeping changes to Sandy Bridge's CPU microarchitecture, where smart new logic may potentially deliver formidable increases in per-clock performance.
The CPU front-end looks fairly similar to Merom or Nehalem from a high-altitude, block-diagram sort of view. The instruction cache is 32KB in size, and the decoder that turns CISC-style x86 instructions into RISC-like internal "micro-ops" can still process four instructions per cycle in most cases. Intel's architects point to two key changes here.
The first is that rebuilt branch predictor. In most processors, the branch prediction unit uses a clever algorithm to "guess" what path a program will take prior to execution and then feeds the out-of-order engine with instructions to be processed speculatively. If it guesses right, the result is higher delivered performance, but if it guesses wrong, the results must be discarded and the proper program path must be executed instead, leading to a considerable performance hit. Modern CPUs have very accurate branch predictors, causing some folks to wonder whether pushing further on this front makes sense. Sandy Bridge's architects suggested thinking about the problem not as a question of how much better one can do when one is already at 96% efficiency. Instead, one should think in terms of reducing in mispredictions, where a change from, say, 7% to 4% represents an improvement of over 40%. With that in mind, they attacked the branch prediction problem anew in Sandy Bridge to achieve even lower rates of error. Unfortunately, we didn't get any hard numbers on the accuracy of the new branch predictor, but it should be superior to Nehalem's.
This and the other improvements discussed above should lead to general performance increases, even in familiar tasks where we haven't necessarily seen much improvement in per-clock performance in recent years.
The other innovation of note in Sandy Bridge's front end is the addition of a cache for decoded micro-ops. Old-school CPU geeks may recognize this mechanism from a similar one, called the execution trace cache, used in the Pentium 4. Again, this provision is a nod to the fact that modern x86 processors don't execute CISC-style x86 instructions natively, preferring instead to translate them into their own internal instruction sets. The idea behind this new cache is to store instructions in the form of the processor's internal micro-ops, after they've been processed by the decoders, rather than storing them as x86 instructions. Doing so can reduce pressure on the decoders and, I believe, improve the chip's power efficiency in the process. Unlike the Pentium 4, Sandy Bridge retains robust decode logic that it can call on when needed, so the presence of a micro-op cache should be a straightforward win, with few to no performance trade-offs.
To find the feature with the largest impact on Sandy Bridge performance, though, one has to look beyond the front end to the memory execution units. In Nehalem, those units have three ports, but only one can do loads, so the chip is capable of a single load per cycle. In Sandy Bridge, the load/store units are symmetric, so the chip can execute two 128-bit loads per cycle. Store and cache bandwidth is higher, as well. Removing these constraints and doubling the number of loads per cycle allows Sandy Bridge to feed its formidable execution engine more fully, resulting in more work completed. This and the other improvements discussed above should lead to general performance increases, even in familiar tasks where we haven't necessarily seen much improvement in per-clock performance in recent years.
Of course, programs that make use of the AVX instruction set may see even larger gains, thanks to Sandy Bridge's ability to process more data in parallel via wider, 256-bit vectors. AVX should benefit some familiar workload types, including graphics and media processing, where the data to be processed can be grouped together in large blocks. We've known the outlines of Sandy Bridge's abilities here for a while, including the potential to execute a 256-bit floating-point add and a 256-bit floating-point multiply concurrently in the same clock cycle. At IDF, we got a better sense of how complete an AVX implementation Sandy Bridge really has, right down to a physical register file to store those 256-bit vectors. This chip should be in a class of its own on this front, at least until AMD's Bulldozer arrives later in 2011. Even then, Bulldozer will have half the peak AVX throughput of Sandy Bridge and may only catch up when programs make use of AMD's fused multiply-add (FMA) instructionwhich only Bulldozer will support.
The pathways connecting Sandy Bridge's cores together have expanded to enable this increased throughput thanks to a new ring-style interconnect that links the CPU cores, graphics, last-level cache, and memory controller. Intel first used such a ring topology to connect the eight cores of the ultra-high-end Nehalem-EX processor. That concept has been borrowed and refined in Sandy Bridge. The chip's architects saw the need for a high-bandwidth interconnect to allow CPU cores and the IGP to share the cache and memory controller, and they liked the ring concept because of its potential to scale up and down along with the modular elements of the architecture. Because each core has some L3 cache and a ring stop associated with it, cache bandwidth grows with the core count. At 3GHz, each stop can transfer up to 96 GB/s, so a dual-core Sandy Bridge implementation peaks at 192 GB/s of last-level cache bandwidth, while the quad-core variant peaks at a torrential 384 GB/s.
Intel's Opher Kahn said his team had made significant changes to the ring interconnect compared to the one used in Nehalem-EX, and he expects it will scale up and be viable for use in client-focused processors for multiple generations. The same ring will likely be used in server-focused derivatives of Sandy Bridge with more cores and very modest graphics capabilities, if any. |
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas says the state’s current electricity system is dysfunctional.
He took aim at utilities during a news conference Wednesday in Albuquerque, suggesting that the system is focused on representing the interests of wealthy corporations and special interests.
He says many families can’t afford to pay their bills and the system needs to be revamped to include affordable clean energy.
Balderas called on the state Public Regulation Commission to investigate the value of solar and wind generation. He also directed his own office to lead in the creation of a statewide strategic energy security plan.
The attorney general also criticized a proposal for dealing with the coal-fired San Juan Generating Station in northwestern New Mexico. He wants the parties to return to the table.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. |
Commercial banks need to develop faster payment systems to counter the rise of cryptocurrencies, according to one European Central Bank executive.
Yves Mersch, who sits on the ECB’s executive board, made the argument even while dismissing the impact of cryptocurrencies during an event in Rome, according to a Reuters report.
Speaking this morning, Mersch said:
“Banks need to implement instant payments as soon as possible and provide an alternative narrative to the ongoing public debate on the alleged innovation brought by virtual currency schemes.”
Mersch reportedly added that the ECB would experiment with cash “on different digital technologies,” while more “adventurous applications” do not warrant attention.
The statements come a month after another ECB executive board member, Benoît Cœuré, indicated that the bank is not ignoring cryptocurrencies, but rather is monitoring their use.
At the same time, Cœuré maintained the bank’s long-held position that digital currencies are not a threat to the euro, saying “the amounts involved are marginal.”
Despite these claims, a 2015 report by the ECB noted that cryptocurrencies could impact monetary policy and financial stability in the Eurozone. At the time, the bank said bitcoin was more attractive than traditional financial institutions in certain areas, including remittances.
The ECB’s president, Mario Draghi, also recently said it cannot regulate bitcoin, although he did declare that EU member nations cannot launch their own cryptocurrencies.
Yves Mersch image via CoinDesk archives |
While hosting the 2015 Soul Train Awards on Sunday night, Badu made sure to throw a major diss the "Black Widow" singer's way. During her monologue, the singer made fake calls to people and pretended to invite them to the show. One of those people was Azalea.
"Uh, yes? Who is this? Iggy Azalea?" Badu said. "Yeah, hey. Oh, no, no, no, no, you can come, 'cause what you doin' is definitely not rap."
Ouch. That one's gotta sting a little.
The audience responded with thundering applause.
Azalea caused quite the stir back in May when she won the Billboard Music Award for Top Rap Artist, beating out Drake, Nicki Minaj and J.Cole, and the award for Top Rap Song (for "Fancy"). People were so disappointed, they actually started a petition to get the latter revoked. In 2014, Azalea beat out Eminem and Drake at the American Music Awards for Favorite Rap/Hip-Hop Artist and Album, which people also weren't happy about. Judging by her comments, we'd say Badu is one of those people.
But Azalea isn't one to back down, so it's only a matter of time before she speaks out on this latest beef.
Also on HuffPost: |
At about the time he hit free agency, the whispers started around the league that the Atlanta Falcons no longer thought Curtis Lofton could be an every-down linebacker.
The word was that new defensive coordinator Mike Nolan didn’t think Lofton had the quickness to be effective in pass coverage. True or not, Lofton wasn’t quickly signed to some massive contract. Although the Falcons had a standing offer for him to return, Lofton took his time and eventually signed with the New Orleans Saints at a price that was similar to what Atlanta had offered.
Saints linebacker Curtis Lofton has quickly impressed his new coaches and teammates. Derick E. Hingle/US Presswire
Lofton is a guy with a lot of pride and I think he wanted to go somewhere where he could be an every-down linebacker. I don’t think the fact he went to Atlanta’s main rival was a coincidence, either.
So far, it sounds as if the Saints have plans to use Lofton all the time. It also sounds like Lofton has done some things to improve his speed.
“Number one, he’s lost some weight and body fat,’’ New Orleans assistant head coach Joe Vitt said after Thursday’s workout. “His ability to change direction in space, his ability to drop his weight and burst on the ball, and then his angles to the ball and his closing speed have been shocking to me. They’ve been shocking to his teammates too. We know what we’ve got; we’ve got a thumper. We’ve got a guy who loves the contact, he’s a downhill linebacker. To watch his athleticism in space, his ability to flip his hips and burst, has really been a nice addition.’’
Hmm, the Falcons weren’t raving about Lofton’s athleticism back in February and March. But the Saints are doing that in May.
Assuming Jonathan Vilma’s season-long suspension is upheld, Lofton will be expected to work at middle linebacker and be in charge of the defense.
“In order to be a great signal-caller and in order to be a great teammate, you have got to put the needs of your teammates above yourself,’’ Vitt said. “And that is what Jonathan did a great job of and that’s what I see Curtis doing now. He puts himself in the toughest positions to take the burden off his teammates and that earns the respect of his teammates. Without me ever saying that, you watch him do that and it comes very naturally. I think that’s where his leadership qualities come in and that’s where his teammates being confident in him.” |
DowntownBirminghamShooting.PNG
A 17-year-old Wenonah High School student was shot to death Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017 on Second Avenue South downtown Birmingham. Police Chief A.C. Roper said the teen was shot while he was trying to buy a gun in a deal brokered on Facebook. (Photo by Carol Robinson)
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Isaiah Johnson
A young man died in the middle of a downtown Birmingham street Tuesday afternoon, despite intense efforts by Birmingham police officers to save him.
The shooting happened about 2:50 p.m. on Second Avenue South at 18th Street. in front of the Railroad Square office building. The victim was 17-year-old Isaiah Johnson, and was there to exchange guns and buy an additional gun in a deal that was brokered on Facebook.
They met in a nearby alley and one of the young men opened fire from a vehicle, striking Johnson. The suspects fled the scene.
"It is so unfortunate that some of our young people are making poor decisions and losing their lives,'' Birmingham police Chief A.C. Roper told Al.com. "For example, this victim and his group planned to buy a gun from this other group so they met in an alley. The transaction was coordinated over Facebook and the victim knew the suspects."
Johnson's slaying comes one week after another 17-year-old was shot to death. Juzahris Webb was gunned down while walking home from Wenonah High School last Tuesday. Johnson also attended Wenonah High and it appears the two were friends.
"The issue is not Wenonah High School which is a great school, but these kids carry their community issues to school with them,'' Roper said. " I feel like we are in a desperate race to save lives and the race isn't fair because we're trying to overcome all kinds of socioeconomic issues that affect crime and decision making."
"The issue of these young people resorting to crime and violence is systemic across the nation,'' he said, "but we refuse to allow it to become the norm in Birmingham when it should be the exception."
In Tuesday's shooting, nearby workers reported hearing two gunshots. Johnson was struck at least once in the chest.
Birmingham police officers, including an evidence technician, were first on the scene. Several of them gave first aid to Johnson while another performed CPR for a lengthy period of time. Birmingham Fire & Rescue Service arrived, performed an EKG and pronounced him dead on the scene.
"The odds were against us when we got here,'' said South Precinct Lt. David Rockett, one of the officers who tried to save the victim.
At least two of the victim's friends who were with him at the time of the shooting were nearly inconsolable. They told police the shooting happened during a robbery, and that three people fled in a brown car. They were taken to police headquarters for further questioning.
Earlier, at the scene, Birmingham police spokesman Lt. Sean Edwards had said that details were sketchy but it appears the victim and several of his friends met another group of people in a nearby alley.
"We're not sure who he came to meet. We know it was someone else in another car,'' Edwards said. "Some kind of altercation, some kind of engagement happened in the alley area."
After being shot, the victim ran out of the alley where he collapsed in the middle of Second Avenue South between 18th and 17th streets. "We're trying to determine what led up to this,'' Edwards said. "This is a very interesting location due to the fact that we have a lot of construction going on. We normally don't have something of this nature here. To have an individual in the middle of the street definitely has us puzzled."
Edwards said detectives were canvassing the area and trying to see if there was any video surveillance from nearby buildings. "It's obviously not a random shooting,'' he said earlier. "It's obvious this was a meeting place for the individuals involved."
He praised the officers who tried to save the victim, calling them "courageous." "We salute our officers,'' he said. "That's what we're called to do - save a life."
Multiple family members gathered at the shooting scene and were visibly emotional. Together they prayed, and one man kept shouting, "That's my baby."
After finding out more details about what led to the shooting, Edwards said this: "This is extremely unfortunate, the fact that another young person can invest the energy and effort into activities that are detrimental to their lives. Sad."
The victim is Birmingham's 11th homicide victim in 2017, and the seventh in one week. In all of Jefferson County, there have been 15 homicides so far this year.
Anyone with information about the deadly shooting is asked to call Birmingham homicide detectives at 205-254-1764 or Crime Stoppers at 205-254-7777. |
Barbie Breakout, a well-known German drag queen and DJ, has had it with Russia's anti-gay propaganda law. In a video entitled "Open Your Mouth," Breakout stares into the camera for a moment and then begins to sew her mouth shut with a needle and cotton thread. It's painful to watch but, of course, that's the point.
"The pain I felt inside when I had to see in the media what is happening in Russia was greater than the physical pain of the needle. My partner held the camera while I did it. But he couldn't look," Breakout told Die Welt. "In my youth I had more holes in an ear than through my mouth in this performance. Apart from a small bruise on my left upper lip, everything has healed up again. It was about symbolism, not about self-harm." |
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Environmentalist was killed near his house just days after colleague Berta Cáceres was fatally shot but critics are accusing government of a cover-up
Honduras has arrested a suspect in the murder of an environmental rights activist who was colleagues with a recently slain indigenous leader, officials said on Sunday.
Didier Enrique “Electric” Ramirez was apprehended for his alleged role in the killing of Nelson García, 39, who was shot dead earlier this month by at least two assailants following a dispute with local landowners, authorities said in a statement.
Nephew of murdered Honduran activist Cáceres: 'The atmosphere is terrifying' Read more
García was killed near his house in the San Francisco de Yoyoa region, 75 miles north of the capital Tegucigalpa.
He was colleagues with the award-winning environmental activist Berta Cáceres, a 43-year-old teacher who was shot and killed earlier this month by two men at her home in La Esperanza, Honduras.
García was a member of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (Copinh), the same organization that Cáceres led until her death.
Cáceres, who had received death threats for her work, won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for her efforts to prevent the construction of a $50m dam that threatened to displace hundreds of indigenous people. Her murder sparked violent clashes between students and riot police, who fired teargas into the crowds at the University of Honduras.
Honduran police reportedly apprehended a suspect in the murder, but Cáceres’ supporters have accused the government of helping cover-up an assassination, and have suggested the people behind the dam project arranged the killing.
The impoverished Central American nation has one of the world’s highest murder rates. Environmental activists are more likely to be killed in Honduras than anywhere else in the world, according to a study by Global Witness, a nongovernmental organization. |
Documentary Description
Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, a 26-part Canadian television documentary on the Vietnam War, was produced in 1980 by Michael Maclear. The series aired in Canada on CBC Television, in the United States and in the United Kingdom on Channel 4.
Maclear visited North Vietnam during the production of the series and had access to film material there. He was the first Western journalist allowed to visit that area since the war. The documentary series was consolidated into 13 hour-long episodes for American television syndication.[1] The series was released on videocassette format by Embassy and won a National Education Association award for best world documentary.[2]
Series writer Peter Arnett was an Associated Press reporter in Vietnam from 1962 to 1975. CBC aired only 18 of the episodes during the 1980-81 season because the series production was incomplete. The remaining episodes were broadcast during CBC's 1981-82 season. British audiences saw the series during Channel 4's 1984-85 season.
The show currently airs in the United States on the pay-TV network The History Channel, under the History Classics series at 6:30 AM ET every Saturday morning.
Source: Wikipedia |
On Thursday afternoon, the Green Bay Packers announced a few critical items regarding the team’s spring and summer practice schedule.
First, and perhaps most importantly, the Packers announced the dates for the start of training camp; Camp will begin on Wednesday, July 26th, with the first practice taking place the next day on July 27th. This comes two days after the Packers’ Shareholders Meeting, which was announced last week and will be held on Monday, July 24th.
The Packers will kick off training camp a bit later this year than they did last year. However, the start of 2016’s camp was accelerated due to the team’s participation in the Hall of Fame Game. (Of course, the game was cancelled due to poor field conditions brought about by issues with the paint on the turf.)
The team also revealed the dates of which practices during the spring offseason workouts will be open to the public. The full schedule for all practices can be found here, but the open practice dates are below:
OTAs: Tuesday May 23, Thursday June 1, Tuesday June 6
Minicamp: Tuesday June 13, Wednesday June 14, Thursday June 15
According to the team’s press release, all open practices are held at Clarke Hinkle Field. The OTA practices will be available for standing-room-only viewing from the fences on either side of the field, while fans can traditionally sit in the stands bordering the practice field for minicamp practices.
Stay tuned in the coming weeks, as the Packers typically announce the full practice schedule for training camp around the conclusion of minicamp. |
ISPs Reporting That UK's Web Filters Being Activated By Less Than 10% Of New Customers
from the more-porn-for-the-rest-of-us! dept
To call the UK's institution of ISP-level web filters "stupid" isn't just being blithely dismissive. For one, they don't work. They block the wrong stuff. They let offensive stuff in. They're easily circumvented. They're advance scouts for government censorship. The only people who think web filtering is a good thing are those with the power to turn pet projects into national laws.
Add one more to the list: they're hugely unpopular.
Broadband customers are overwhelmingly choosing not to use parental-control systems foisted on ISPs by the government - with take-up in the single digits for three of the four major broadband providers…
Only 5% of new BT customers signed up, 8% opted in for Sky and 4% for Virgin Media. TalkTalk rolled out a parental-control system two years before the government required it and has had much better take-up of its offering, with 36% of customers signing up for it.
Those pushing for filters would have you believe it's something the public has been clamoring for to help them protect their children from the many evils of the internet. In reality, hardly anyone appears to care all that deeply about hooking up to a pre-censored connection.There's more than simply unpopularity going on here. The numbers skew low for several reasons. At this point, the rollout isn't 100% complete and isn't being offered to every new customer (something that becomes a requirement in 2015). Virgin Media (somewhat ironically) has been hooking customers up with the filthiest internet. Techs for that company have only been presenting the "unavoidable choice" to a little over a third of its new signups. Other ISPs techs have been more thorough, presenting new customers with the option nearly every time.Many service providers say it's also possible the filtering has been activated post-installation (Ofcom's report only tracks filtering enabled at the time of install) or that customers are already using device-based filters.Despite all of these factors, I wouldn't expect adoption numbers to rise much. People generally don't like the government telling them what they can and can't access. Illegal content is already blocked at ISP level (as well as by several search engines ), so what's being added is nothing more than a governmental parent to watch over citizens' shoulders as they surf the web. Those with children would probably prefer to run an open pipe and filter content at the device level. Not everyone in a household needs to be treated like a child, which is exactly what these filters (and their proponents) do.Beyond that, activating a web filter goes against human nature, especially the exertion of free will and the general avoidance of embarrassment. Most people view themselves as "good" and uninterested in the long list of internet vices (porn being the most popular). But even if they truly believe they'd never view this content, they'd rather have it arrive unfiltered than be forced to approach their ISP weeks (or minutes…) later like a bit-starved Oliver Twist and ask, "Please, sir. May I have some porn?"
Filed Under: filters, isps, porn license, uk |
WASHINGTON — Federal food safety inspectors said a proposal by the Agriculture Department to expand a pilot program that allows private companies to take over the inspections at poultry plants could pose a health risk by allowing contaminated meat to reach customers.
Currently, the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service inspectors are stationed along the assembly lines in poultry plants and examine the birds for blemishes, feces or visible defects before they are processed.
Under the planned expansion, the agency would hand over these duties to poultry plant employees, while the inspectors would spend more time evaluating the plant’s bacteria-testing and other safety programs. The department has run the pilot program in 20 poultry plants since 1998.
But many of the agency’s inspectors said the proposal puts consumers at risk for diseases like those caused by salmonella. About 1.2 million cases of food poisoning are caused by salmonella each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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In affidavits given to the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers, several inspectors who work at plants where the pilot program is in place said the main problem is that they are removed from positions on the assembly line and put at the end of the line, which makes it impossible for them to spot diseased birds. |
When Canadian defence minister Harjit Singh Sajjan announced his first official trip to India two months ago, it reignited a sense of collective pride in Punjab with expectations of a warm welcome for the return of the native. For, Sajjan is the first Punjab-born Sikh to hold the top defence job in a foreign land, and epitomises yet another incredible success story of the Punjabi diaspora. But, Sajjan’s high-profile visit has been met with a cold reception from unexpected quarters — Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh.
The visit got embroiled in an unsavoury row even before Sajjan set foot on Indian soil on Monday.
The Captain started it all by dubbing Sajjan a “Khalistani sympathiser”, and refused to meet him during his visit to Punjab later this week. The chief minister’s outburst triggered a chain of reactions, reflecting a sharp divide in opinion on Sajjan’s credentials. While Congress MPs and MLAs were quick to come out in Amarinder’s support, his remarks have not gone down well with other political parties and the Sikh diaspora. Slamming Amarinder’s stand, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), the apex Sikh religious body, announced its plan to honour Sajjan when he pays obeisance at the Harmandar Sahib on April 20.
Sikh fundamentalist groups such as the Damdami Taksal and Dal Khalsa were quick to seize the opportunity, asking the SGPC for permission to honour the visiting dignitary. But, SGPC chief Kirpal Singh Badungar correctly grasped the sensitivity of the matter and rejected the radical fringe’s demand.
While the Canadian authorities called Amarinder’s allegations “incorrect and unfortunate”, Sajjan initially refused to join issue and stuck to the carefully-worded and diplomatically correct script. He chose his own timing and place to clear the air. “I don’t promote the break-up of any country. My job is to promote the bilateral relations,” he said, hours after his arrival in New Delhi.
That, however, is unlikely to mellow the Captain. He has stuck to his guns, citing as “evidence” the fact that Sajjan’s father has long been associated with the World Sikh Organisation (WSO), an overseas body that once espoused and funded the cause of a separate Sikh state.
It’s incredulous that as a seasoned politician as Amarinder, barely five weeks into power, has chosen to rake up the lost cause of Khalistan and used that as a ruse to distance himself from a Punjab-origin top ranking Canadian minister who ironically belongs to his own ilk. Lt Col Sajjan is a decorated war veteran of his adopted country.
In doing so, Amarinder has willy-nilly given publicity oxygen to the long-rejected Khalistani rump.
Personal pique, public posture
More than an ideological stand, the real reason for Amarinder’s snub for Sajjan seemingly stems from his personal pique. He has a bone to pick since last year when the Canadian authorities had put a spanner in his trip to the country before the Punjab assembly elections, on the grounds of legal bar on political canvassing by foreigners. In a sternly-worded letter to the Canadian prime minister, the Captain had blamed the pro-Khalistan lobby for playing spoilsport. Not surprisingly, his charge against the Canadian minister sounds like payback.
In public perception, Amarinder’s stance is not seen in good taste. From Punjab’s standpoint, he may have jettisoned any benefits accruing from the deepening bilateral ties between India and the Justin Trudeau government which has four Sikh ministers — more than the Narendra Modi cabinet. That itself is a significant marker of the sway of the half-a-million-strong Sikh diaspora in the maple country’s power politics.
It is true that the traumatic events of the 1980s continue to resonate among the Sikh diaspora and have come to be inextricably linked to domestic politics in Canada. That explains Ontario province’s extraordinary motion recently, calling the 1984 anti-Sikh violence ‘ genocide’ — a move that India has frowned upon. Yet, only a tiny section of the overseas Sikh constituency still fantasises about Khalistan. A silent majority has long moved away from the separatist mooring, as evident from the rising clout of moderates in the local gurdwara politics.
Ironically, the Captain, in 2005, was the first, and last, Punjab chief minister after Operation Bluestar to have ventured into Canada. Reaching out to the sullen Sikh community, he had audaciously addressed a gathering in a Toronto gurdwara, then in control of hot-headed Khalistanis. A controversy ensued, but he had justified his heart-warming gesture as a bid to win over the alienated Sikhs. In his second stint at the helm of Punjab, Amarinder may have lost an opportunity to reconnect with the NRIs and earn their goodwill.
First Published: Apr 18, 2017 16:10 IST |
Late Show with David Letterman led to some of Letterman's highest late-night viewership. Madonna's heavily censored appearance onled to some of Letterman's highest late-night viewership.
Madonna made an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman on March 31, 1994. The appearance was noted for an extremely controversial series of statements and antics by Madonna, which included many expletives. In particular, Madonna said the word "fuck" fourteen times during the course of the interview. This made the episode the most censored in American network television talk-show history while at the same time garnering Letterman some of the best ratings he ever received.[1]
Madonna's language and behavior—which was provocative, seemingly spontaneous at times, full of double entendres, and ended with a playful refusal to leave the set—caused a large public controversy.[2] The Federal Communications Commission received numerous complaints about the language used on the show, echoing Letterman's (sarcastic) remark that she had to stop using the bad language "because people don't want that in their own homes at 11:30 at night".
Details [ edit ]
This was not Madonna's first or last appearance with Letterman. She was a guest on Late Night with David Letterman in 1988 with comedian Sandra Bernhard. This was, however, her first appearance since Letterman moved from NBC to CBS in 1993.
When Madonna was a guest on the March 31, 1994 edition of The Late Show, it marked her first appearance on American television that year. Letterman introduced Madonna right before she entered the set in this manner:
Our first guest tonight is one of the biggest stars in the world, and in the past 10 years she has sold over 80 million albums, starred in countless films and slept with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry.
Paul Shaffer responded "she's your guest! ... Come on, she's your guest!" to which Letterman responded, "everything's fine, just relax, will ya?" Madonna then entered the stage to the sound of her 1983 hit "Holiday", clutching a pair of her underwear, which she asked Letterman to smell during the interview. "Wait a minute, aren't you gonna smell them?" she said, to which Letterman replied "I'll take care of that later," and Madonna complained to the audience "I gave him my underpants and he won't smell them!"[3][4] This sketch made the headlines of the tabloids.[5][6] The sketch was satirized in 2001 in the Italian late night show Satyricon, where guest Anna Falchi actually took off her red panties on stage, and the host went all the way to smell them, which caused scandal in Italy.[7][8]
Letterman, following up from events earlier in the program, asked her to kiss a man in the audience; Madonna refused. Letterman expressed admiration for her not succumbing to the pressure. Madonna began smoking a cigar, and as he moved to another topic, Madonna interrupted him, in an opening salvo soon to be indicative of the random provocations to come: "Incidentally, you are a sick fuck. I don't know why I get so much shit."
Letterman steered his questioning toward her private life and, in particular, the singer's reported relationships with several NBA players. Madonna replied with a series of sexual innuendos, commenting "that [overhead] microphone is really long"; Letterman responded by talking about her friendship with Charles Barkley. When Letterman abruptly changed topic and asked about her nose ring in an ambiguous way ("Did it hurt when you had that thing put in, uh, put in your nose?"), Madonna laughed and said "I thought you were going to ask me if it hurt something else ..." which spurred a collective series of nervous laughter from the studio audience.
Prior to the first commercial break (which Madonna objected to, citing that she wanted to "break the rules" and not conform to the constraints of American network television), the star asked Letterman if he was wearing a "rug"; never missing the opportunity for a joke, the host, referring to Madonna's short slicked-down hairstyle, replied by asking Madonna if she was wearing a swim cap.
After the commercial break, Madonna told Letterman that he had changed since her last visit, that he was no longer "cool" or challenging to his guests, that "Money's made you soft."[6] Letterman asked her what was really bothering her; the star told the audience that she was angry that the comedian always (in Letterman's words – "periodically") made references to her sex life on the show.
Toward the end of the interview, she also asked whether he had ever smoked "endo," a slang reference to marijuana. Looking uncomfortable, the host told the singer that he had no idea what she was talking about; Madonna called him a liar which led Letterman to make light of the embarrassing question by acting like Johnny Carson.
Refusal to leave the stage [ edit ]
When Madonna refused to leave the set,[6] there was jeering from members of the audience, including heckling to "get off". The home audience never saw Madonna leave her chair; instead, the show cut to a third commercial break, after which the singer was gone. Letterman said, "Coming up in the next half hour, Mother Teresa is going to drop by." He then looked at an index card and joked, "Oh, I see we've been canceled, there is no show tomorrow night."
Another guest, who was the United States Grocery Bagging Champion at the time, was scheduled to appear on the show that evening, but his segment was cut, due to Madonna refusing to leave the stage when her interview was over. Counting Crows concluded the show with a performance of "Round Here".
Aftermath [ edit ]
Madonna later explained her behavior as a failed attempt to make a stand against television censorship, and made up with Letterman by having him escort her onstage at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards. In an interview with Bob Guccione, Jr. in Spin magazine in the fall of 1995, Madonna further defended herself:
You can show a person getting blown up, and you can't say 'fuck'? It's such hypocrisy. The fact that everyone counted how many fucks I said—how small minded is that? ... The other thing that was ridiculous was that David Letterman knew I was going to do it. I talked to the producers of the show. Everybody was like, this will be really funny if you say "fuck" a lot they'll just keep bleeping you. Well, I came out and started doing it, and David freaked out. The way he introduced me was derogatory, so my whole thing was, okay, if that's how you want to play it, you cannot beat me at this game.[9]
In a subsequent interview with USA Today, Letterman noted how Madonna sent him a fax on his birthday, shortly after the episode aired. "It was more of the same," he revealed. "'Happy fucking birthday. Have a nice fucking day.' I know she was trying to be funny about it."[10] The fax sent April 12, 1994, reads:
Happy Fucking Birthday Dave! glad you could get so much mileage out of the fucking show. Next time you need some Fucking publicity, just give me a fucking call. love the anti-christ M. xx[11]
The incident was widely referenced in popular culture. For example, in an episode of The Critic titled "Sherman, Woman and Child", Madonna is featured as a profane guest of Humphrey the Hippo, a parody of Barney & Friends.[12][13] In the Space Ghost Coast to Coast episode "Bobcat," comedian Bobcat Goldthwait sarcastically comments to the character Moltar that Space Ghost's interview with The Ramones "is going as well as the Letterman-Madonna interview."[14]
Letterman referred to the incident frequently in the short term afterward, usually as a disaster, even though it was a ratings bonanza. In one example, while raising the topic of Madonna's appearance, he added the subordinate clause: "... or as I call it, Black Thursday ..."
Subsequent appearances [ edit ]
Following the incident, Madonna's appearances on Letterman did not end. Madonna briefly appeared in a 1995 episode when she brought Letterman candy and flowers for Valentine's Day. She then proclaimed that, "I'm a changed woman since I met you," to which Letterman excitedly exclaimed, "Yes!" Madonna then went on to add, "And I'm not going to say 'fuck' anymore." And in 1998, Madonna appeared briefly to announce number three on Letterman's top ten list that night – "Ten Things Beautiful Women Love About Dave."
Madonna returned on November 3, 2000, for her first sit-down interview with Letterman since the notorious 1994 incident to promote her new album, Music. The two of them discussed the previous interview, with a deal of humor and objectivity. Madonna chalked it up as a part of her "rebellious period", while Letterman admitted that he now understood how beaten up Madonna must have felt by the press during that time and that he contributed to that. Madonna then concluded that they were both having a "weak moment", which was met by laughter from both the audience and Letterman. Before the singer took stage to perform her latest single, "Don't Tell Me", Letterman jokingly admitted that, "I still have the panties. We had to put them in the vault upstairs, because people were trying to swipe them from me." An uncomfortable Madonna declared that, "I won't rise to that bait."
Madonna guested again on November 11, 2003 to promote her children's book, Mr. Peabody's Apples. Before she entered, Letterman stated he "just didn't want any awkward moments."
On January 11, 2007, Madonna appeared on Letterman to promote her latest movie, Arthur and the Invisibles. The two joked about the 1994 infamous episode. When David asked Madonna, "What do you think about all these celebrities such as Britney Spears, not wearing their underwear?", Madonna replied, "It's freezing outside. Maybe you can give them to Britney."
Madonna appeared for the last time on September 30, 2009 to promote her latest release, the greatest hits compilation Celebration. During this episode, Letterman and Madonna again made light of her appearance on the show in 1994. The episode concluded with Letterman and Madonna going down the street and sharing a vegetarian pizza (minus cheese at Madonna's request) and martinis together.
References [ edit ] |
The power of Game of Thrones‘ fandom is impressing the entertainment industry yet again. Sources say advance IMAX ticket sales have been strong for the premium theater chain’s highly unusual screening event showcasing two Thrones episodes along with the trailer for the show’s upcoming fifth season.
Though box office numbers are not yet available, we’re told some of the 200 theaters that have booked Thrones have sold out screenings, particularly theaters in larger cities. After an initial burst of fan interest, IMAX insiders expected sales to “hit the wall” and decline—instead, interest has been accelerating. Sources say an average weekend take for an IMAX theater is $4000-$5000 per screen, but Thrones is tracking like it’s going to easily exceed that—which is rather impressive for a screening that’s essentially a TV show’s repeats on Super Bowl weekend.
The numbers are nowhere near the enormous per-screen average of an blockbuster new release like Interstellar, of course, but they eclipse the pre-sales of nearly all of IMAX’s previous non-new-release special event screenings.
IMAX Entertainment CEO Greg Foster tells EW he booked Thrones—the first TV show to ever receive a showcase in the format — to help fill a gap during what is traditionally a very slow time of year at the box office. Foster said he had an instinct the acclaimed fantasy hit would perform well. “We announced this and our website crashed,” Foster said. “As soon as that happened, my instinct didn’t matter; [the interest] became empirical. Then a week later, we announced we were moving the date to accommodate more theaters, and the website crashed again—twice. So that was a pretty good indication.”
HBO programming president Michael Lombardo said he struck the deal to spur interest in the show’s upcoming season (which debuts April 12), rather than to generate revenue per se. His expectations were likewise relatively modest, figuring that any fan dedicated enough to attend an IMAX screening would have already have watched the episodes when they aired last year.
“If we were premiering the first episode of the new season in IMAX, I wouldn’t have been surprised,” Lombardo said. “But that’s not what we’re doing. It’s very heartening and surprising that people are willing to pay money and drive somewhere to re-experience a show they’ve already seen and now want to see again on a big screen with friends and family.”
The screening includes last year’s penultimate action-packed episode “The Watchers on the Wall” and the Emmy-nominated season finale “The Children.” Foster assures the lavishly produced series based on George R.R. Martin’s bestselling novels looks excellent after being converted to the technically demanding ultra-large screen format. “I know everybody calls Thrones a television show, but it looks like a movie,” Foster said. “It’s unbelievably cinematic. It blew us away.”
Thrones opens for a one-week engagement on Thursday night. Tickets are available through IMAX’s website—that is, assuming it doesn’t crash again. |
It's fitting that President Obama included in his big speech today a mention of Newt Gingrich, who represents a key common thread between the current presidential race and the last one to feature an incumbent Democratic president.
The purpose of the address, which was delivered to a crowd of Associated Press editors and reporters, was for Obama to present his objections to the Paul Ryan-authored budget blueprint that House Republicans supported almost unanimously last week and that Mitt Romney has called "an excellent piece of work, and very much needed." Obama derided the Ryan plan as "thinly veiled social Darwinism" that is "antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who’s willing to work for it.” Basically, this was a rehearsal for Obama, who will make this same case over and over again for the next seven months in an effort to tie Romney to congressional Republican extremism.
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The Gingrich shout-out came when Obama branded the Ryan budget "so far to the right that it makes the Contract With America look like the New Deal."
"That renowned liberal Newt Gingrich first called the original version of the budget 'radical,'" Obama reminded the crowd, "and said it would contribute to 'right-wing social engineering.' This is coming from Newt Gingrich!"
Gingrich made that statement during a "Meet the Press" appearance last May, back when Ryan's plan was limited to Medicare, which he envisioned turning into a voucher program. The withering response from conservative leaders that Gingrich's comment generated showed the degree to which adherence to Ryan's agenda has become a litmus test for the right, and explains (in part) why Romney has no choice but to embrace it. Back then, Gingrich tried, comically, to back away from his words, but it's hardly surprising Obama is recycling them now, and it won't be shocking if they work their way into Democratic talking points and television ads in the months ahead.
Obama is trying to replicate the strategy that Bill Clinton used to win a second term in 1996, when Clinton positioned himself as the last line of defense against a Republican Congress' efforts to gut the social safety net. The face of that Republican Congress was, of course, Gingrich, who became House speaker after the GOP's 1994 midterm landslide and led the party through a damaging series of confrontations with Clinton over spending on popular government programs, most notably Medicare. The Republicans' insistence on steep cuts allowed Clinton to paint them as dangerous extremists and badly wounded the GOP with some key demographic groups. In broad terms, the story that Clinton told at the 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago sounds similar to the one that Obama is telling now:
Now, last year -- last year when the Republican Congress sent me a budget that violated those values and principles, I vetoed it, and I would do it again tomorrow. I could never allow cuts that devastate education for our children, that pollute our environment, that end the guarantee of health care for those who are served under Medicaid, that end our duty or violate our duty to our parents through Medicare. I just couldn't do that. As long as I'm president, I'll never let it happen. And it doesn't matter -- it doesn't matter if they try again, as they did before, to use the blackmail threat of a shutdown of the federal government to force these things on the American people. We didn't let it happen before. We won't let it happen again.
There are many reasons Clinton was reelected in '96, including the public's widespread belief that the economy had improved substantially on his watch. But the profound unpopularity of Gingrich and the GOP Congress' agenda also gave Clinton a real boost. An exit poll on Election Day showed that 60 percent of voters had an unfavorable view of Gingrich, with only 32 percent expressing a positive view. Women voters abandoned the GOP in droves in '96, favoring Clinton by 17 points over Bob Dole -- even as men sided with Dole by a point. Analysts concluded that the perception that the GOP was recklessly endangering the social safety net (and that Clinton was committed to protecting it) was a major reason for the gender gap.
Sixteen years ago, Newt Gingrich helped a Democrat win a second presidential term for the first time since FDR. As Obama's speech today showed, he may end up providing another assist this year. |
Day after day, instances of racial abuse across the globe are increasing in number. It was only recently that we had come across the horrific video of a woman on a train in Ireland shouting racist remarks at her fellow Asian passengers. Very soon a video surfaced on Youtube bringing to light the plight of two African women who were verbally abused by the commuters in Delhi metro. Our society’s obsession with skin colour and using that as a parameter to judge a person, however irrational, remains a sad truth.
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ALSO READ | This student’s outrage over white privilege is the most honest thing you will read today
Recently, an Indian-Swedish couple were at the receiving end of the wrath of people only because both of them come from two different places and well, look different. Going by their Instagram posts and Youtube videos, Moa and Markus seem to be like any other regular couple with an adorable kid. Recently Moa, who is a blogger, had posted a video with her Indian-origin Swedish husband trying to feed their daughter.
However few users decided to look beyond what the blogger was trying to say, and instead posted some very hurtful and racist comments. From calling Markus a “subhuman trash” to referring to the baby as “ugly”, the hate messages that were spewed on the video were unimaginable. Though the comments have been taken down, an Imgur user archived the worse ones.
This is the video.
Here are some of the comments.
Do you see the hatred?
And how brutal they get, for no fault of the couple.
It just keeps getting worse.
However in what can be considered as a silver lining in the entire scenario, there are some users who sent their support both on Instagram and on Youtube.
“Hey… Jus read an article about what u and ur husband had to go through for posting an adorable video of your daughter… Please do not let haters win.. You guys are in love and ur baby is beautiful. Keep spreading love… Much love for little Mila ” wrote one, while another wrote, “Your family is beautiful. Love to you and your gorgeous child. My husband has Swedish, Slovak, Castillian, Irish ancestry and I am Bengali. We live in the United States.” |
Even Republicans are rapidly bailing on a McCain resuscitation. It’s a metaphor for the party’s collapse that on the day of the final debate both Nancy Reagan and Dick Cheney checked into hospitals . Conservatives have already moved past denial to anger on the Kubler-Ross scale of grief. They are not waiting for votes to be counted before carrying out their first round of Stalinist purges. William F. Buckley ’s son Christopher was banished from National Review for endorsing Obama. Next thing you know, there will be a fatwa on that McCain-bashing lefty, George Will.
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As the G.O.P.’s long night of the long knives begins, myths are already setting in among the right’s storm troops and the punditocracy alike as to what went wrong. And chief among them are the twin curses of Bush and the “headwinds” of the economy. No Republican can win if the party’s incumbent president is less popular than dirt, we keep being told, or if a looming Great Depression 2 is Issue No. 1.
This is an excuse, not an explanation. It absolves McCain of much of the blame and denies Obama much of the credit for their campaigns. It arouses pity for McCain when he deserves none. It rewrites history.
Bush’s impact on the next Republican presidential candidate did not have to be so devastating. McCain isn’t, as he and his defenders keep protesting, a passive martyr to a catastrophic administration. He could have made separating himself from Bush the brave, central and even conservative focus of his campaign. Far from doing that, he embraced the Bush ethos — if not the incredible shrinking man himself — more tightly than ever. The candidate who believes in “country first” decided to put himself first and sell out his principles. That ignoble decision is what accounts for both the McCain campaign’s failures and its sleaze. It’s a decision McCain made on his own and for which he has yet to assume responsibility.
Though it seems a distant memory now, McCain was a maverick once. He did defy Bush on serious matters including torture, climate change and the over-the-top tax cuts that bankrupted a government at war and led to the largest income inequality in America since the 1930s. But it isn’t just his flip-flopping on some of these and other issues that turned him into a Bush acolyte. The full measure of McCain’s betrayal of his own integrity cannot even be found in that Senate voting record — 90 percent in lockstep with the president — that Obama keeps throwing in his face.
The Bushian ethos that McCain embraced, as codified by Karl Rove , is larger than any particular vote or policy. Indeed, by definition that ethos is opposed to the entire idea of policy. The whole point of the Bush-Rove way of doing business is that principles, coherent governance and even ideology must always be sacrificed for political expediency, no matter the cost to the public good.
Like McCain now, Bush campaigned in 2000 as a practical problem-solver who could “work across the partisan divide,” as he put it in his first debate with Al Gore . He had no strong views on any domestic or foreign issue, except taxes and education. Only after he entered the White House did we learn his sole passion: getting and keeping power. That imperative, not the country, would always come first.
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One journalist who detected this modus operandi early was Ron Suskind , who, writing for Esquire in January 2003, induced John DiIulio, the disillusioned chief of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, to tell all. “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,” DiIulio said. “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”
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If politics strongarm everything, you end up with the rampant cronyism, nonexistent long-term planning and abrupt, partisan policy improvisations that fed the calamities of Iraq , Katrina and the economic meltdown. Incredibly, McCain has nakedly endorsed the Bush-Rove brand of governance in his own campaign by assembling his personal set of lobbyist cronies and Rove operatives to run it. They have not only entangled him in a welter of conflicts of interest, but they’ve furthered cynical political stunts like the elevation of Sarah Palin . At least Bush and Rove didn’t try to put an unqualified hack like, say, Alberto Gonzales half a heartbeat away from the presidency.
As if the Palin pick weren’t damning enough, McCain and his team responded to the financial panic by offering their own panicky simulation of the Bush style of crisis management in real time. Fire the S.E.C. chairman and replace him with Andrew Cuomo ! Convene a 9/11 commission to save Wall Street! Don’t bail out A.I.G.! Do bail out A.I.G.! Reacting to polls and the short-term dictates of 24-hour news cycles, McCain offered as many economic-policy reboots in a month as Bush offered “Plans for Victory” during the first three years of the Iraq war.
Now McCain is trying to distract us from his humiliating managerial ineptitude by cranking up the politics of fear — another trademark Bush-Rove strategy. But the McCain camp’s quixotic effort to turn an “old washed-up terrorist” into a wedge issue as divisive as same-sex marriage is too little, too late and too tone-deaf at a time when Americans are suffering too much to indulge in 1960s culture wars. Voters want policies that might actually work rather than another pandering, cynical leader who operates mainly on the basis of his “gut” and political self-interest.
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The former Bush speechwriter David Frum has facetiously written that McCain could be rescued by “a 5,000-point rise in the Dow and a 20 percent jump in home prices.” But the economy, stupid, can’t be blamed for McCain’s own failures, any more than Bush can be. Even before the housing bubble burst and Wall Street tumbled, voters could see that the seething, impulsive nominee isn’t temperamentally fit to be president.
That’s where the debates have come in. There may have been none of those knockout blows the press craves, but the accretional effect has been to teach the public that McCain isn’t steady enough to run the country even if the economy were sound, and that Obama just might be.
In Debate No. 1, you could put the volume on mute and see what has proved to be the lasting impressions of both candidates start to firm up. In Debate No. 2, McCain set the concrete: he re-enacted the troubling psychological cartography of his campaign “suspension” by wandering around the stage like a half-dotty uncle vainly trying to flee his caregiver. After the sneering and eye-rolling of McCain’s “best” debate on Wednesday, CNN’s poll found the ever-serene Obama swamping him on “likeability,” 70 to 22 percent.
At least McCain had half a point on Wednesday night when he said, “I am not President Bush.” What he has offered his country this year is an older, crankier, more unsteady version of Bush. Tragically, he can no sooner escape our despised president than he can escape himself. |
Considering Geraldo Rivera's penchant for threatening violence during political debates and being woefully irresponsible in his reporting when covering a war, it is perhaps unsurprising that he told the hosts of Fox News's show "Fox & Friends" that he just loves seeing the American military drop bombs on people.
"Well one of my favorite things in the 16 years I've been here at Fox News is watching bombs drop on bad guys," Rivera told his hosts.
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And I have some experience in that exact part of Afghanistan going back to December 2001, the first of my 11 assignments in that country, where we dropped what was the forerunner, maybe you call it the father of the 'mother of all bombs,' the Daisy Cutter, Daisy Cutter 15,000 pounds of explosive. This is 22,000 pounds of explosive.
He added, "Like then, now, we've had a successful hit. Almost two dozen — or more actually — three dozen bad guys killed. It's not going to win the war, but it certainly sends a message."
Rivera conveniently left out what is perhaps his most notable wartime reporting story. When he was covering the second Iraq War on the ground in 2003, he told his cameraman to show his feet and then drew a rough map of Iraq in the sand. His map not only gave away the unit's location relative to Baghdad, but also where it would be going next. Rivera was swiftly kicked out and dropped off at the Kuwaiti border.
Presumably this is not also one of Rivera's favorite moments since joining Fox News. |
The Italian parliament has voted to outlaw public displays of Nazi or Fascist symbols, following a spate of incidents across the country.
The new law, passed late Tuesday by the lower assembly, foresees jail terms from six months to almost three years for people who perform Nazi or Fascist salutes, sell Nazi-Fascist memorabilia or post Nazi-Fascist propaganda on the internet.
To enter into force, it will need approval also from the Senate before parliament is dissolved in early 2018, which may not happen given a busy legislative agenda.
The bill comes in the wake of reports that a cake shop in southern Italy displayed a Hitler cake on its store front, while the neo-Fascist Forza Nuova party is preparing a march on the 95th anniversary of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's rise to power.
According to Emanuele Fiano, a lawmaker from the ruling Democratic Party (PD) who sponsored the legislation, Italy needs to come down harder against rising Nazi-Fascist nostalgia, like Germany has done.
In an interview with Radio24, Fiano cited an Italian Facebook page, now shut down, that publicized Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' anti-Semitic speeches and had about 45,000 followers.
Right-wing critics, including the Forza Italia party of former premier Silvio Berlusconi, say the new law threatens freedom of expression.
The populist Five Star Movement also voted against, arguing it would have been better to tighten existing laws against hate speech and the refounding of the Fascist party.
Mussolini ruled over Italy from 1922 until 1943. He took Italy into World War Two on Adolf Hitler's side and passed race laws under which thousands of Jews were persecuted.
Italy was routed by the allied forces and Mussolini, also known as "Il Duce", was executed in 1945.
ANTI-IMMIGRANT SENTIMENT
Mussolini is still admired by a hard core of supporters on the far-right and posters using fascist imagery regularly appear on city billboards -- most recently in a stylized picture of a white woman being assaulted by a muscular black man.
"Defend her from the new invaders," said the poster, put up by a fringe party called Forza Nuova (New Force). The group was referring to a high-profile rape case last month when four foreigners were accused of gang-raping a Polish tourist.
More than 600,000 migrants, mainly Africans, have come to Italy over the past four years, boosting anti-immigration sentiment in the country and pushing up support for rightist and far-right parties that demand rigid border controls.
Given the political climate, the ruling PD was forced on Tuesday to delay its push to approve a contested law that would grant citizenship to the children of immigrants.
Opposition parties said the law would encourage migrants to try to come to Italy and claimed victory when the PD announced it was dropping the bill from the Senate schedule this month.
"To approve this bill we need a majority, but we don't have one right now in the Senate," said Luigi Zanda, head of the PD in the upper house of parliament. |
Yesterday, I joined one of our Mahalo employees at Federal District Court as he was sentenced to 48 months in jail for crimes related to computer security.
Before my employee John Schiefer was sentenced, a violent career criminal was facing 60 months for beating up a prison guard. I could hear John’s breathing deepening as the judge spoke–his fiancee’s leg shaking more and more as the reality of John’s situation set in. John wound up getting 48 months in prison, a number which could be reduced if he behaves himself. He goes to jail on June 1st, and maybe he’ll be out in two or three years.
We didn’t know John was convicted of infecting 250,000 computers with bots when we hired him. We have a rigorous hiring process at Mahalo, in which each candidate must go through an average of five to eight interviews, and in which at least three, but more typically five, references are checked. Our CTO, and one of my oldest friends, Mark Jeffrey, did all of this with John, and he passed with flying colors.
However, Mark screwed up by not doing a simple Google search on John’s name. If Mark had, he would have easily found out about these crimes, we would never have hired John, and I would not be writing this letter. Why would we even take the risk of hiring a felon hacker? No one would, right?
Months after John’s hiring, our VP of Operations found out about the crimes John had committed. We sat down with John and learned about what he did when he was younger, how he was abused as a child, his anger issues, and how he found some level of peace in being part of the team at Mahalo.
Now I was left with the decision to fire John on the spot and cut my losses and responsibility. This was the easy choice, obviously. If I really wanted to cover my butt, I could turn on one of my best friends, Mark Jeffrey, and fire him for making the only mistake he’s ever made working for me. The other option was to keep John on and deal with the potential firestorm of criticism that we’re now facing.
I chose to put my job and reputation on the line and keep John employed.
At this moment, I’m honestly glad we didn’t know about what John did when we hired him and I’m happy we’ve kept him on board. It’s taught me a lot about society, computer crime and rehabilitation. In John, I see almost every computer programmer from my time “hacking” on BBSes as a kid, attending hacker conferences and hiring “white hat” hackers for a living.
Almost all talented developers push the envelope when they’re young. Anyone in technology knows this dark, dirty little secret.
When I worked for Sony, I watched folks in the IT department read their bosses’ email. When I was in high school and college, I watched daily as folks explored the areas of the computer networks they were specifically told not to enter. In fact, I was fired from my first computer job for creating a partition on a hard drive in the computer lab where I stored my files.
When the Web emerged, I watched as folks created honey pots to prove they could socially manipulate people into giving away private information.
Many of these folks moved on to marketing firms which do essentially the same things–except they play by the rules. At conferences, I see people pop out WiFi sniffers and show me passwords of executives in the room. I’ve heard senior executives recount stories of putting keyboard monitor software on computers in their offices and recording all instant messaging traffic to find out what their employees are up to.
What is the difference between the hackers who put one foot over the line and the ones who race past it? Being bored? A lack of guidance? Low self-esteem? I’m not a psychologist, so I can’t tell you exactly.
However, I consider myself a fairly decent judge of character, and after spending months with John, I’m convinced he was an angry stupid kid when he launched his botnet attack (which did .000000001% of the damage it could have). Now he’s an adult who just wants to make a decent living, spend time with his significant other and breathe the clean air off the Pacific Ocean by our offices in Santa Monica.
John’s going to have to spend a couple of years in jail for what he did. Certainly we have to punish those who’ve committed crimes. But watching this go down, I wish in my heart of hearts that judge had given John a sentence from home, where we could have supervised him.
I’m hoping that the time he’s spent being a productive member of the Mahalo team inspires him to keep his head down in jail. When he comes out, I hope to be able to offer him a job and that we can work together again. Life is short, we all make mistakes and I’m glad we’ve been given the opportunity to work with someone who needs the help and guidance.
Note to Mahalo Users: John’s work is well-supervised. Mahalo follows strict security policies and we don’t store any sensitive data anyway. (Even if one of our employees did go off the deep end, the most they would have access to would be your questions and answers on Mahalo Answers–not much damage can be done there since they’re all public anyway).
Thank you for taking the time to hear me out.
all the best,
Jason |
“Fowl running at large” is a local ordinance that doesn’t get used much nowadays, but it was enforced following an unusual incident near Columbia Pike over the weekend.
An animal control officer was called to an address on S. Barton Street on Saturday evening for a report of a runaway peacock. After a brief search, the officer found and captured the rogue peacock — and located its owner, who was issued a ticket for the aforementioned “fowl running at large” violation.
The peacock and its owner may have an even bigger problem than the “at large” charge, which is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine up to $100.
The Animal Welfare League of Arlington, which runs the animal control program, said they notified the county zoning department — which enforces the county’s prohibition on keeping fowl in most residential yards — about the incident.
Flickr photo by Sadie Hart |
Guerrilla Games has taken to Twitter to proudly announce that Horizon: Zero Dawn, the action role-playing game with robot dinosaurs, has officially gone gold.
In the wee hours of the morning, at least stateside, Guerrilla Games announced via Twitter that Horizon: Zero Dawn has gone gold. This means initial development has wrapped and the game should be ready to ship next month as expected.
The posted was accompanied by a group photo of the development team holding champagne glasses and offering a virtual toast to the Internet to celebrate their hard work. The company’s managing director posted the photo with a short message:
#HorizonZeroDawn has gone Gold! I'm so proud of team @guerrilla for embracing this bold new adventure with so much courage and resilience. pic.twitter.com/azP1j9jhqV — hermen (@hermenhulst) January 31, 2017
Horizon: Zero Dawn is a curious new IP that seemingly came from nowhere, with only some leaked concept art and a few registered domain names suggesting its existence. Publisher Sony was able to keep the game under the company’s hat long enough for its debut at E3 2015 with a captivating trailer that promised to take players to a world they’ve never seen before.
Developed by the same people behind the Killzone series, this new title goes in a completely different direction. Horizon Zero Dawn is a far cry from the gritty military first-person shooter, with a colorful, open world, third-person perspective and many RPG elements.
Initially, Sony was concerned with having a female lead, until research showed that gamers were more than willing to accept a female in a lead role – in fact, they were excited for it. The game’s protagonist, Aloy, is inspired by classic tough gals like Alien‘s Ripley and Terminator‘s Sarah Connor, according to the game’s director.
As the game approaches its release date next month, more details have emerged. Something that will come as a surprise, but also a delight, to many gamers is the announcement that Horizon: Zero Dawn will not have microtransactions. No pay to win advantages with this one. Additionally, there will also be a photo mode included in the title, which will allow players to take some lovely stills of the game’s picturesque landscapes and fascinating creatures. Perhaps the developers were inspired by Final Fantasy XV‘s Prompto.
Horizon: Zero Dawn is shaping up to be a memorable new IP with fresh ideas, which is a welcomed sight amongst a sea of sequels. Now that the game has gone gold, those enamored by what they’ve seen so far need only wait another month until Horizon: Zero Dawn can be put through its paces.
Horizon: Zero Dawn is set to release on February 28, 2017 in North America, and on March 1, 2017 in the United Kingdom, but will be exclusive to PlayStation 4. |
Bizarre things happen to the dynamical-law-based approach when it’s applied to entities with counterfactual properties. Usually, this shows that the traditional conception of physics, which expresses everything in terms of initial conditions and laws of motion, is inadequate to handle them. Therefore either they are not fundamental at all; or the traditional conception is not – it must be only regarded as an approximation. However, there are also cases where the traditional conception is merely misleading and sometimes leads to paradoxical ways of reasoning about things.
A case in point is the well known Newcomb’s paradox – which we’ll consider in a slightly revisited manner. Suppose a game is set up as follows. At time t 0 , a predictor P prepares a large box with the following content: two smaller, opaque, soundproof, boxes, labeled A and B, each containing one or more puppies (to be specified below); an automaton T that is programmed to open one or both boxes at a later time t 1 , in such a way as to obtain the maximum number of puppies.
At time t 0 the small boxes and the automaton are sealed in the large box, the automaton begins to ponder its choice. Just to be clear: we haven’t yet fully specified how the boxes were filled, but no matter how the boxes were filled, given that there is at least one puppy in each, there must be more puppies in both boxes combined than in box A alone. At time t 1 the automaton T must choose to open either box A or both boxes.
The boxes are filled by the predictor P as follows:
if T is predicted to choose to open both boxes, one puppy is placed in box A and one in box B before the larger box is sealed.
if T is predicted to choose, at time t 1 , to open only box A, 3 puppies are placed in box A and again only one in box B before the larger box is sealed.
The predictor has perfect knowledge about the initial conditions of the automaton T and about the dynamical laws of everything in the box – which for the sake of argument are supposed to be deterministic.
Therefore, the rules of the game allow only two possible scenarios at time t 1 :
P predicted that T will open both boxes; Box A contains one puppy, Box B contains one; T opens both boxes and gets two puppies in total.
P predicted that T will open one box; Box A contains 3 puppies, Box B contains 1; T opens only box A and gets 3 puppies.
The paradox arises from the fact that the automaton can provide an output based on two different algorithms, derived from two different arguments, which apparently must be equivalent under the traditional conception of physics – i.e., they must lead the automaton to the same conclusion; but they seem not to.
The first algorithm leads the automaton to open only box A – so that he gets 3 puppies. This is derived from the rules of the game: if T were to open both boxes, T will only get 2 puppies.
The other algorithm instead is based on the reasoning that there are only two possible initial conditions for the boxes A and B, immediately after time t 0 (just after the preparation, when the larger box outside is sealed). One, where each box contains 1 puppy; two, where A contains 3 puppies and B contains 1. For both initial conditions, a larger number of puppies is obtained by opening both boxes, because the sum of the content of both is always larger than the content of either. Therefore, the automaton should conclude to open both boxes irrespective of everything else.
The reason why the two algorithms should be equivalent is that the rules of the preparation seem irrelevant for the decision of the automaton, in that the content of the boxes once the larger box outside is sealed is fixed and cannot be retroactively affected by T’s choices; therefore, the boxes’ initial condition is all that matters for the number of puppies that the automaton can get.
Resolution.
The reason why the paradox arises is that the account given above is incomplete. There is a crucial additional thing to be stressed about the preparation. What has determined the content of the boxes is the simulation of T that P ran in advance, before time t 0 . Let us call that simulated version of the automaton T′. It is the simulated version’s choice that sets the content of the boxes. And so the correct way of reasoning for the automaton, and for its simulation, must take this fact into account.
If there can exist a perfect simulation T′ of T, then they must both reason identically and they must have been given the same algorithm to make their decision; and the same inputs. Also, they both know about the existence of the simulation, and about how it is used to prepare the boxes, but each of them cannot know whether it is the simulation or the actual automaton.
Now under these circumstances the only algorithm that is possible is one that can be executed by both T′ and T. The crucial point is that at time t 0 , when the simulation takes place, the boxes are not yet filled with anything; and that neither the simulation nor the actual automaton know which one they are — otherwise the two automata would know different things, contrary to the assumption of the perfect simulator.
Hence the simulator T′ in particular must assume that the boxes could still be empty, to be filled according to its own choice. T′ therefore chooses to open only one box to maximize the amount of puppies T gets, thus determining the content of the boxes. Consistently with the assumption of perfect simulation, T will reason as above, and reach the same conclusion as T′ – open one box. So, there is no paradox after all.
There are two interesting side-remarks about this way of looking at the apparent paradox.
First, suppose that instead of an automaton, T is a person with ‘free will’ – which we take to be the capacity to create knowledge to make a choice about the boxes. Its behaviour must be unpredictable, which seems in contradiction with the statement that a perfect predictor exists. Well, this is not the case. What one means by saying that the creation of knowledge is unpredictable is that it cannot be known BEFORE it is created. Creating the relevant knowledge can be done only by running a simulation of the person in question. That simulation, in turn, will by definition be creative, and unpredictable, in the same sense: the prediction of its choice cannot be made in advance of the creation of the relevant knowledge.
In this particular case, the content of the boxes is not set by what choice T will make (as is misleadingly assumed in statements of the ‘paradox’) but by the choice that the simulation T′ made before t 0 ; this choice unpredictable, in the sense that the only way to predict it is to bring about a simulation of T′; and so on. Until T′ has made its choice, the content is not set; once it has made it, the choices of T are set, on the ground of the knowledge that was created in T′. What matters is precisely the fact that the requisite knowledge about what to do with the boxes, whatever that is, could not be predicted before an instance of the person T was brought about, via T′.
The second point is that this setting lends itself to explaining why the unpredictability of the creation of knowledge is fundamentally different from the unpredictability of measurement in quantum theory.
Consider a slightly altered version of the game, where the automaton T is supposed to make a choice based on the output of a measurement of the X-component of the spin on a superposition of two eigenstates of that observable. Then, there cannot be any perfect predictor for what choice T will make. This is because, if there were one, the laws of quantum mechanics would be violated. However, this has nothing to do with the unpredictability of knowledge we mentioned above. The knowledge created by T′ to make its choice is represented by a sharp information attribute of the variable ‘which box to open’; in the case of the quantum version, instead, the variable ‘which box to open’ is not sharp.
See http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=30 for Scott Aaronson’s related take on this. |
On Monday, Mayor Rob Ford - a Canadian-produced drama/comedy series that captivated audiences both at home and south of the border - will end its 4-season run, following an abrupt cancellation notice.
Series star Rob Ford, who has portrayed the role of Toronto Mayor to a mixture of acclaim and derision from critics, announced in September that he won't be returning for another season. The announcement left the door open for a spinoff with his brother, supporting character Doug Ford, taking over the starring role of Toronto Mayor. However, as we get closer to the series' final episode, it's looking increasingly unlikely that the spinoff will be picked up.
After a bombshell third season in 2013 that saw Rob Ford become a ratings juggernaut at home - including unlikely success in the U.S., where it was picked up following a buzz-worthy storyline involving organized crime and addiction - viewers have had mixed feelings on the uneven fourth season. After a cliffhanger season finale last year saw the Mayor admitting to smoking crack cocaine, viewers seemed sure that the anti-hero protagonist would get his comeuppance, especially after the introduction of fan-favourite police chief Bill Blair to the storyline. Instead, viewers were treated to a long mid-season hiatus in 2014, followed by a sudden stomach cancer plotline that critics described as a deus ex machina to tie up loose plotlines.
We've seen an advance screener of the series finale, set to air on Monday (ed. note: spoilers follow.) John Tory, the bland mayoral challenger introduced last season, ends up winning the election over Rob's brother Doug. Rob's immediate future is unclear, as the show fades to black in a device reminiscent of The Sopranos' series finale, where viewers are left guessing about our main character's fate.
Rob Ford - a larger-than-life character that critics have often likened to both Tony Soprano and Breaking Bad protagonist Walter White, for his mixture of brazen criminality and poignant pathos - ends the series out of the Mayor's office, but seemingly recovering from cancer. While the series as a whole has addressed themes of greed, pride and megalomania, the toned-down finale seems to suggest a restoration of order - of Fortinbras arriving to take the slain Hamlet's crown, so to speak.
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While some viewers will no doubt find the open-ended nature of the finale compelling, others will be left expecting more from a show that once reached such lofty heights. While the first season in 2010/2011 mostly focused on the day-to-day affairs of a bumbling oaf who lands himself in the Mayor's office almost by accident, the show slowly introduced the sort of cliffhangers and scandals for which it would later become famous.
The tone of the show has also noticeably changed over the years. Early on, Rob Ford was more of a political comedy in the vein of Veep or Yes Minister, focusing on the Mayor's pratfalls, questionable hijinks, and heavy use of stock sitcom catchphrases ("We need to stop the gravy train!") Gradually, as new characters were introduced such as beloved young Star reporter Daniel Dale and sleazy criminal associate Sandro Lisi, the show took a darker turn. By the start of this season, which opened with Rob Ford's powers as Mayor being removed in a tense City Hall scene, viewers had become hooked on the show's blend of drama and emotional poignancy. Even as some fans began seeing the show's star as a tragic hero akin to Willy Loman, others saw Ford as more of a "love-to-hate-him" classic villain - a sociopathic, criminal narcissist, lifted up just so that we could watch him fall. In other words, more Tony Montana than Tony Soprano. And ever since season 2, fans have been waiting for the final straw that would take him down.
Instead, the controversial cancer storyline has mostly been forgotten by fans. Doug Ford, the new star of the show, has been derided as a less-interesting version of the original character. Compared to the way that Rob Ford would toe the line between pathetic poignancy and sneering, villainous contempt in classic moments such as the crack video press conference episode, Doug (a fine actor in his own right) plays the role like he's performing a cheap off-Broadway knockoff version of his brother. Although this season has been peppered with great scenes and a few classic lines ("I've got more than enough to eat at home" will go down as an all-time fan favourite), viewers never warmed to John Tory as an antagonist, and the whole election storyline seems trite.
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It looks as though we'll never get the closure we all expected on the promising Project Brazen 2 storyline, or learn more about the various Somali gang members that were introduced in a subplot last season. At times, viewers said they were often confused by the large ensemble cast (even avid viewers are forgiven for mixing up Fabio Basso with Bruno Bellissimo.) Even guest appearances from major US stars like Jimmy Kimmel (rare for a Canadian production), and a companion book to the series written by Star writer Robyn Doolittle, couldn't save the show's weaker ratings this season.
While the rehab-centric episodes and the rapid introduction of characters like Mikey Ford, Karen Stintz and Shirtless Jogger offered glimpses of the show's earlier wit, they just couldn't capture the brilliance of the crack-smoking, drunk-driving, wife-swapping, flying-cheeseburger thrillride offered by a classic episode like One Wild Night In March.
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In all, Mayor Rob Ford will be remembered by fans as a slow-building, rewarding series that delivered on all cylinders when it was at its best. Despite its uneven finish and a variety of loose ends in the finale, it will be a long time before Canada can produce something this innovative, emotional, and dramatic again.
And when we tune in on Monday and the final credits roll, we'll probably miss it. |
Konami today voluntarily delisted itself from the New York Stock Exchange, effective April 24.
Konami first notified investors of plans to delist in November and filed the notice on April 1, according to SEC documents. In today's filing, Konami notes that 99.71 percent of the trading of the company's stock over the past year occurred in Japan and London.
In the April 1 filing, Konami officials said the decision to delist the company from the New York Stock Exchange was a cost savings measure. U.S. regulatory compliance costs the company a minimum of $5 million a year, analyst Michael Pachter told Polygon.
Konami remains listed in London and Toyko, and shares can still be traded in the U.S. on the over-the-counter market, according to the release.
It's unclear what if any impact this might have on the company moving forward. In today's release, Konami officials wrote that the company will still share financial statements and other information in english, though they will no longer be obligated to under the Exchange Act.
The company will be deregistered with the SEC effective July 12. Reporting obligations will be terminated July 23.
The news comes hours after the company confirmed that it had killed off Silent Hills, the latest in the survival horror franchise. The game was to involve the work of Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro and feature the likeness of Norman Reedus.
Last month, Konami removed Kojima's name and the Kojima Productions logo from the official Metal Gear Solid websites, Twitter accounts and marketing materials. That spawned reports that Kojima would be leaving the publisher for whom he has worked his entire career. |
Columnist Mike Smyth writes about the political fight in Victoria to finally bring the Uber ride-for-hire service to B.C.
The B.C. Liberals figured they had a bright, shiny, vote-winning issue before the May election when they promised to bring the popular Uber ride-for-hire service to B.C. in time for Christmas.
Just think: No more worries about getting home from the office Christmas party, when it’s impossible to get a taxi. No more temptations to drive after a glass of eggnog, when a quick-and-cheap Uber ride was just a tap away on your smartphone screen.
The Liberals’ point man on their Uber-by-Christmas promise was cabinet minister Peter Fassbender, who represented Surrey-Fleetwood in the B.C. legislature.
For some of the Liberals’ opponents in the rival New Democratic Party, this was just perfect.
The New Democrats knew the Liberals’ Uber plan was setting off alarm bells inside a taxi industry dominated by South Asian cab drivers, many of whom had sunk their life savings into their taxi licences.
“I know a lot of families worried about losing their homes,” said Harry Bains, the NDP MLA for Surrey-Newton. “They are really scared.”
The Liberals, of course, knew their Uber plan would anger taxi drivers, especially among Indo-Canadians. But they calculated many more people wanted Uber than opposed it, and the opinion polls appeared to back them up.
Now, key Liberals admit it was a mistake.
“A lot of young people love their smartphone technology and wanted Uber,” former Liberal cabinet minister Bill Bennett told me. “Unfortunately, a lot of young people don’t vote.”
For a politically sophisticated and engaged Indo-Canadian community, however, it was a different story.
“South Asians dominate the taxi industry and the Uber issue drove votes to the NDP,” said Gurpreet Singh, talk-show host at Spice Radio, an Indo-Canadian station.
“It wasn’t just cab drivers who were worried. It was their wives and their kids and their grandparents and their extended families. That’s a lot of votes.”
The New Democrats, perhaps worried the Uber issue still might work in the Liberals’ favour, issued a vaguely worded campaign promise to “support the passing of new rules to introduce ride-sharing to B.C. in 2017” while creating “a truly fair approach” with taxi drivers.
The Liberals, though, were clearly seen as the Uber party. And the risk to the Liberals in ridings with large South Asian communities became clearer as the election neared.
At the height of the campaign, I was in a taxi cab jammed with reporters heading to an event. Hitching a ride with us was Stephen Smart, the press secretary for Christy Clark, then the Liberal leader and premier.
“Oh, you guys are covering the election?” the cab driver chimed in. “The Liberals are going to get slaughtered in Surrey because of Uber!”
Smart, of course, told us the cab driver was wrong. But the cabbie was right.
Of the eight Metro Vancouver ridings with the largest South Asian populations, the NDP ran the table. The Liberals lost every one, including Fassbender’s seat in Surrey.
Which brings us to the present day, and an NDP minority government trying to figure out how to deal with this Uber thing.
Last week, Transportation Minister Claire Trevena announced yet another review of the ride-for-hire industry that won’t be completed until 2018, with a policy decision not expected until well into the new year.
That NDP campaign promise about “new rules” in 2017? Tossed out the window.
The Liberals spent the week hammering the NDP for the flip-flop.
“This is a government of broken promises, delays, reviews and dragging their feet,” interim Liberal leader Rich Coleman railed in the legislature.
But the fact is the Liberals are just as worried as the NDP about the tricky politics of Uber after the issue backfired so badly on the Libs during the election.
The only guy at the legislature with a clear and consistent position is Green party leader Andrew Weaver, who introduced a private member’s bill to allow Uber, Lyft and other ride-for-hire companies to start operating immediately.
“Vancouver is the largest city in North America without ride-sharing,” Weaver complained.
“Let’s get going on this. I don’t want to play politics with it. There’s a whole generation of millennials out there who aren’t taking taxis and who want access to this service.”
Could Weaver and the Greens team up with the B.C. Liberals to get Uber into B.C.? After all, his bill is very similar to what the Liberals promised during the election.
But now the once-bitten Liberals are being shy.
“The reality is ride-sharing is obviously controversial for people,” Coleman told me. “There are thousands of people who make a living driving a cab and a number of them are friends of mine. I know their relatives, their cousins, their aunts, their uncles who also have concerns about it.
“It has always been our position that this has to be a level playing field. If you are going to allow ride-sharing into B.C., the first and foremost thing is: ‘How are you going to support the taxi industry?’”
Translation: Don’t expect the Liberals and Greens to suddenly join forces to pass Weaver’s Uber bill, even though they have enough combined votes in a minority parliament to get it done.
And the New Democrats? They won’t call the bill for debate anyway.
One of the long-standing rules of the legislature says only the governing party can call a bill for a vote. The NDP simply won’t, and Weaver’s bill will quietly die.
At least Weaver can say he tried. As the winter rain and snow arrives, that will be cold comfort for frigid, wet travellers trying vainly to hail a cab on windswept Vancouver streets.
msmyth@postmedia.com
twitter.com/MikeSmythNews |
The Rebirth Of Rye Whiskey And Nostalgia For 'The Good Stuff'
Enlarge this image toggle caption Noah Adams/NPR Noah Adams/NPR
It used to be said that only old men drink rye, sitting alone down at the end of the bar, but that's no longer the case as bartenders and patrons set aside the gins and the vodkas and rediscover the pleasures of one of America's old-fashioned favorites.
Whiskey from rye grain was what most distilleries made before Prohibition. Then, after repeal in 1933, bourbon, made from corn, became more popular. Corn was easier to grow, and the taste was sweeter.
To be sure, rye whiskey production is only a drop compared with the rivers of bourbon produced now, although rye whiskey sales have tripled in the past five years.
You can even find rye in the tiny farm town of Templeton, Iowa. It's said to be the same taste as the bootleg brew that Templeton was known for during Prohibition. They called it "The Good Stuff." It was popular in Chicago, a favorite of Al Capone. Templeton Rye, legal these days, and sold in Iowa and 11 other states, is made from a grandfather's secret recipe. The actual production, though, takes place at a distillery in Shelbyville, Ind., with the aged whiskey shipped to Templeton for bottling.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Noah Adams/NPR Noah Adams/NPR Enlarge this image toggle caption Noah Adams/NPR Noah Adams/NPR
Templeton has one block of a downtown, with the street ending at the rail line and grain elevators. On a foggy evening I could imagine what it all looked like during the early 1930s — except for the bar where I had my first sip of the local rye and listened to handed-down stories about the government "revenuers" busting up stills. The feds rolled the kegs out into the hog lot and axed them open, they say. But naturally, they kept one or two for evidence.
Alongside the Kentucky River in Frankfort, Ky., stand the old brick warehouses of Buffalo Trace Distillery — that's a modern name for the "oldest continually operating distillery in the United States." It was even open during Prohibition, bottling pints of "medicinal" rye. Now, Buffalo Trace makes bourbon for 17 different labels. You can look up at the dusty warehouse windows and see the barrels, aging, waiting for five, six, or seven years to pass. There are a quarter million barrels in storage.
Plus, there's a few hundred barrels of Sazerac Rye — the longtime New Orleans favorite. Kris Comstock of Buffalo Trace often hears from bartenders, calling from New York City, Los Angeles — trying to find Sazerac. He says the rye's intense flavor makes it perfect for the classic cocktails. "When you mix it in a Manhattan, it doesn't get diluted by the Vermouth or the bitters."
toggle caption Noah Adams/NPR
Deeper in Kentucky's Bluegrass region, you could meet up with Chris Morris, the master distiller at Woodford Reserve and ask him about rye. Here's how he identifies the aromas that arise when the spicy rye grain is cooked and distilled: "green apple, green banana, black pepper, leather, oak, tobacco, caramel, vanilla ..."
I was lucky. I'd arrived at Woodford during the second of only three weeks the distillery gives over to rye production. The rest of the year, they're making the highly-respected bourbon, Distiller's Select. (The Chris Morris signature is on every label.)
Enlarge this image toggle caption Noah Adams/NPR Noah Adams/NPR
A while back, Woodford decided to venture into the rye market. The first barrels, aged for seven years, will be ready in 2016 and will be called "Red Rye Select." Morris clearly enjoys the brief change. He smiles when you ask about his favorite: "I think bourbon is the best whiskey made and rye is simply different."
Both the bourbon and rye are made from the mineral-rich water from the limestone aquifer that underlies the central Kentucky countryside. It's the same water the Scots-Irish frontier settlers used centuries ago. There was a still on every homestead — and that's how all this got started.
A decade ago in this country you could only find six brands of rye whiskey. Now there are more than 50. |
Hundreds of sex abuse victims have come forward in Belgium with harrowing accounts of molestation by Catholic clergy that reportedly led to at least 13 suicides and affected children as young as two, a special commission said…
”Reality is worse than what we present here today because not everyone shares such things automatically in a first contact with the commission,” he told reporters.
Adriaenssens, a child psychiatrist who has worked with trauma victims for 23 years, said nothing had prepared him for the stories of abuse that blighted the lives of victims.
”We don’t just talk about touching. We are talking about oral and anal abuse, forced masturbation and mutual masturbation. We talk about people who have gone through serious abuse,” Adriaenssens said…
The Vatican had no immediate comment. |
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Muslim allies of Saudi Arabia piled pressure on U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon over the blacklisting of a Saudi-led coalition for killing children in Yemen, with Riyadh threatening to cut Palestinian aid and funds to other U.N. programs, diplomatic sources said on Tuesday.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks during the opening ceremony of the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, May 23, 2016. REUTERS/Osman Orsal
The United Nations announced on Monday it had removed the coalition from a child rights blacklist - released last week - pending a joint review by the world body and the coalition of cases of child deaths and injuries during the war in Yemen.
That removal prompted angry reactions from human rights groups, which accused Ban of caving in to pressure from powerful countries. They said that Ban, currently in the final year of his second term, risked harming his legacy as U.N. secretary-general.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the sources said Ban’s office was bombarded with calls from Gulf Arab foreign ministers, as well as ministers from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), after the blacklisting was announced last week. One U.N. official spoke of a “full-court press” over the blacklisting.
“Bullying, threats, pressure,” another diplomatic source told Reuters on condition of anonymity about the reaction to the blacklisting, adding that it was “real blackmail.”
The source said there was also a threat of “clerics in Riyadh meeting to issue a fatwa against the U.N., declaring it anti-Muslim, which would mean no contacts of OIC members, no relations, contributions, support, to any U.N. projects, programs.”
A fatwa is a legal opinion used in Islamic Sharia law. In Saudi Arabia fatwas can only be issued by the group of top, government-appointed clerics and are sometimes commissioned by the ruling family to back up its political positions.
Responding to the allegations, Saudi U.N. Ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi said “we don’t use threats or intimidation,” and Riyadh was “very committed to the United Nations.”
Mouallimi denied any threat of a possible fatwa.
“That’s ridiculous, that’s outrageous,” he said, adding that the meeting of Saudi clerics was to approve and issue a statement condemning the blacklisting of the coalition.
On Monday Mouallimi described the annual U.N. report on states and armed groups that violate child rights in war as “wildly exaggerated” and demanded that it be corrected.
The main Saudi complaints were that the U.N. had not based its report on information supplied by the Saudi-backed Yemeni government and accused the world body of not consulting with the coalition. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric, however, said on Tuesday that the Saudis had been consulted.
Several diplomatic sources said that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) would be hit especially hard if the blacklisting were upheld. Saudi Arabia was the fourth biggest donor to UNRWA after the United States, European Union and Britain, having supplied it nearly $100 million last year.
Coalition members Kuwait and United Arab Emirates are also key donors for UNRWA, together supplying nearly $50 million in 2015.
In addition to Saudi Arabia, Dujarric said that Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Bangladesh contacted Ban’s office to protest the listing of the coalition. Diplomats said Egypt, Kuwait and Qatar also complained to Ban’s office.
The Saudi-led coalition includes Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Senegal and Sudan.
There was no indication that the United States or any other Western Saudi allies encouraged the U.N. to reverse the blacklisting of the coalition.
The U.N. report on children and armed conflict said the coalition was responsible for 60 percent of child deaths and injuries in Yemen last year, killing 510 and wounding 667.
U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said he was not aware that the United States had contacted the U.N. about the report.
“We take very seriously the protection of children in armed conflict in Yemen ... and continue to urge all sides in the conflict in Yemen to protect civilians and comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law,” Toner said.
Dujarric said the removal of the coalition was pending a review of child casualties in Yemen and could be reversed, though Mouallimi said the deletion was “irreversible and unconditional.”
Jordan’s U.N. Ambassador Dina Kawar described her country’s complaint to the U.N. chief.
“The report was accusing the coalition and of course we are a part of it,” she said. “So my (foreign) minister did contact the secretary-general and did voice his opinion that the report was biased and that they need to look into it.”
Bangladesh’s mission told Reuters that their foreign minister contacted Ban’s office prior to the reversal while on an official visit to Saudi Arabia.
One diplomatic source familiar with the situation said the Saudi fury was to be expected, adding that “the SG’s (secretary-general’s) reaction to the pushback was disappointing.”
Several diplomats cited the U.N. decision not to blacklist Israel last year over child casualties in the Gaza Strip after the Israeli and U.S. governments lobbied Ban hard, saying that it was clear the current U.N. chief was vulnerable to threats.
Another diplomatic source said the recent spat between the U.N. and Morocco over Ban’s use of the term “occupation” to describe Morocco’s presence in the disputed territory of Western Sahara had set a bad precedent.
He noted that when Morocco demanded the expulsion of dozens of civilian staff in the U.N. peacekeeping mission there earlier this year, the U.N. Security Council failed to rally behind Ban with a strong show of support. That, he added, set a dangerous precedent for the world body’s 193 member states.
“The message was clear,” the diplomatic source said. “If you get tough with the secretary-general, the Security Council isn’t going to come to his aid.” |
Jon Huntsman Sr. listens to secrets.
While the buzz right now is that Jon Huntsman Sr. might be the Republican Bain investor who ratted out Mitt Romney to Harry Reid, the man himself now insists that … he’s not. Huntsman told the Plum Line’s Greg Sargent that he has “absolutely no knowledge of Bain or Mitt Romney’s tax returns.” But while he’s on the subject, Mitt Romney is a deceptive monster and he hates the American people:
“I feel very badly that Mitt won’t release his taxes and won’t be fair with the American people,” Huntsman told me. In a reference to Romney’s father, who pioneered the release of returns as a presidential candidate, Huntsman said: “I loved George. He always said, pay your taxes for at least 10 or 12 years.” “Mr. Romney ought to square with the American people and release his taxes like any other candidate,” Huntsman said. “I’ve supported Mitt all along. I wish him well. But I do think he should release his income taxes.”
We do not think Huntsman wishes Romney well. |
10 Reasons to Teach Abroad in Egypt
By Dara Denney, The Traveller’s Cookbook
During university I used to daydream about teaching English abroad. I was an English major with few other job prospects (or ideas), but I knew I wanted to travel the world. So teaching abroad seemed like the perfect solution; I would get to travel (and live) abroad AND make money.
Before I even graduated I thought a lot about where I would go. Maybe to China for the food; or Japan for the culture. Or maybe even exotic Brazil…or Thailand. I have always wanted to live near the beach.
But I never thought about Egypt. Why? I graduated university at the end of 2013, and even though I was always fascinated by Egyptian Pharaonic culture, I was scared off by reports of instability and violence. Egypt was still trying to regain balance from the 2011 Revolution, and any headlines seemed bleak at best.
At the beginning of 2015, I finally did make my way to Egypt, for another job NOT teaching English. I was working for a consulting firm specializing in research in South Sudan and was to spend only six months in Cairo. Little did I know that I would end up quitting that job to start teaching English in Cairo, where I would be earning more than four times the amount I made at my own job.
Enticed? Here are ten other reasons why you should teach abroad in Egypt:
1. The demand is high.
Native English speakers are in high demand right now. Once in Egypt it is incredibly easy to begin tutoring or to teach full-time at a school, even if you have limited experience. A bachelor’s degree and experience will get you a high salary (even higher if you have a teaching certification!). Even if you did not graduate from university it is still possible to find positions with decent salaries because the need for native speakers is so high.
2. The cost of living is incredibly low.
I have a higher quality of life here than I ever did in New York, or even Ohio for that matter. And even though my salary would barely be livable in Manhattan, in Cairo I can afford to live in one of the best neighborhoods in the city with a great apartment, and I have a cleaning lady come twice a week. Additionally, I am able to save a few hundred USD a month, eat out several times a week, and go on vacation a few times a year.
3. The work-style is a bit more relaxed.
But in the interest of full disclosure: The children are a bit more difficult here than anywhere I have ever taught (versus USA, India, and West Africa). BUT the Egyptian mentality towards work is more relaxed and work stays at WORK. So every day when I walk out of the school doors my day is FINISHED. And professionalism, for better or worse, is a bit more relaxed. (Personally, I like that).
4. Egypt has great cities to live in.
Likely you will be in Cairo, or maybe Alexandria, and if you are lucky: Hurghada, Luxor, or Sharm el Sheikh. None of these would be anything to scoff at; there are amazing food, people, and several outdoor activities to occupy yourself at all of these locations.
5. Egyptians are fun and welcoming.
The reason why I initially wanted to stay in Cairo was because I felt like I had finally found a place where I belonged. This was after growing up in the States and living in West Africa and India. Out of all of those places, I felt like I belonged the most in Egypt. Why? The people. They always made me feel welcomed and like I was at home. (As opposed to, perhaps, France, where I was always aware that I was out of place).
6. You can learn Arabic.
If you want to learn Arabic, this is the place to do it. And why should you learn Egyptian Arabic? It is the most widely understood dialect due to the the massive movie industry in Egypt, which are shown all over the Middle East. Likely, if someone speaks Arabic, regardless of where they are from, they will understand Egyptian.
7. Travel in Egypt is incredibly cheap.
So you will get to see a lot of the country and experience once-in-a lifetime things at a fraction of the cost. (Nile cruise, anyone?) Ever since the 2011 Revolution tourism took a nose-dive from the notion that Egypt is no longer safe. An unfortunate aspect of this is that there are no lines at any of the sights and prices are significantly cheaper, especially for hotels and tours.
8. The beach is always nearby.
Cairo is an hour and a half from the beach. As is Luxor. (Hurghada and Sharm el Sheikh ARE the beach).
9. Cairo International Airport has quick connections to Europe, Asia, and the rest of Africa.
It is the perfect place if you want to explore more of the world, as there are cheap connections to just about everywhere. (FYI, Italy is less than 3 hours away).
10. Egypt will always look good on a resume.
Many people teach abroad in China, South Korea, and Taiwan. Egypt is a bit of a wildcard and will likely start a great conversation when you start seeking future employers. They will assume, rightly, that you if you can handle it here, you can handle it anywhere.
Have you ever taught abroad? Would you ever consider teaching abroad in Egypt?
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Next Game: Oklahoma State 4/21/2017 | 6:30 p.m. FSSW+
The No. 4 Texas Tech baseball team tacked on four runs in the fifth inning to take a 6-4 win over New Mexico State on Tuesday night at Security Bank Ballpark.With the victory, the Red Raiders (32-8) completed the season series sweep of the Aggies (23-15), picking up a 16-1 win in Lubbock on Feb. 21, followed by a 15-4 win in Las Cruces on April 4. It was the first time in the series Tech had not scored more than 10 runs or had more than 10 hits.The Red Raiders tallied seven hits, coming from six different hitters. Junior infielderhad a two-hit night, including an RBI and a run scored. Senior outfielder& junioreach recorded triples against the Aggies.Freshman right-handerpicked up his first start of his collegiate career on Tuesday night. The Maud native went 1.0 inning, giving up just one hit, while inducing a double play to end the frame. Tech used a total of seven pitchers against the Aggies, as junior leftyimproved to 5-1 after 2.0 frames, striking out five.The Red Raiders struck first in the bottom of the second, thanks to a two-out triple from Gardner off the right field wall, scoring, who walked earlier in the frame. With Gardner on third,hit a chopper to the right of the pitcher, who sent a throw off target to first base, allowingto reach & Gardner to score to make it 2-0.After a scoreless third, the Aggies took the lead in the top of the fourth with three runs, all with two outs, to go ahead 3-2. With the bases loaded, a strikeout to Fishback put two away, but a wild pitch on strike three allowed one run to score and the others to move up to second & third. Then, a single up the middle from Still cleared the bases to complete the three run frame.The Aggies added another in the fifth on an error after a diving play from Davis, extending the New Mexico State lead to 4-2.Tech took back the lead in the bottom half of the inning, plating four to go up, 6-4. Gardner began the frame by reaching base on an error, then moved to second with the ball skipped away and into the grass. With one gone, Long smashed a triple off the wall in right-center field, easily scoring Gardner for the first run of the frame.& Davis followed with a single & a double, respectively, to make it three-straight Red Raider hits. Jung sent a single into right field to tie it, while Davis countered with a double down the left field line to drive in Jung from first to make it 5-4. McMillon brought in another behind a bases-loaded infield single for the fourth run of the frame.It was the 22time this season the Red Raiders have scored four or more runs in a single inning.McMillon would enter in the ninth and close out on the season series, earning his fifth save of the year.The Red Raiders return to Lubbock for their second home conference series of the year, taking on Oklahoma State on April 21-23 at Dan Law Field at Rip Griffin Park. |
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