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ASHEVILLE, N.C. – A North Carolina man has been sentenced to six months in jail for illegally harvesting a significant amount of American ginseng from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, marking his fifth conviction for ginseng poaching.
Jill Westmoreland Rose, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina announced today that U.S. Magistrate Judge Dennis L. Howell sentenced 47-year-old Billy Joe Hurley, of Bryson City, N.C., for illegally possessing ginseng. Hurley was convicted at trial on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2015 and was ordered today to serve six months in jail for the illegal possession or harvesting of American ginseng from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
“The illegal harvesting of American Ginseng poses a threat to this precious national resource and it is a crime our office takes very seriously,” said Rose. “We will continue to work closely with the rangers of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to protect wild ginseng from extinction and to prosecute those who profit from the illegal harvesting of ginseng roots.”
Acting Chief Ranger Joe Pond and Superintendent Cassius Cash of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park join Rose in making today’s announcement.
“Ginseng is a threatened natural resource, protected by law within Park boundaries,” Pond said. “Unfortunately, rangers are finding that poached ginseng roots seized during criminal investigations are younger than in years past, as older roots become much harder to find. This is not good for the viability of the plant. Rangers work extremely hard to thwart the efforts of those who steal from public lands and we hope that this case serves as a deterrent for anyone considering this activity.”
According to filed court documents and court proceedings, on June 28, 2015 in Swain County, Hurley Illegally possessed more than 500 American ginseng roots he had illegally dug from areas in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Court records show that Hurley had filled a backpack with the roots and attempted to hide it behind a guardrail beside a hiking trail.
Hurley has been in custody since July 2015.
Park rangers of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park handled the investigation of the case. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Asheville handled the prosecution.
Court records show Hurley was previously sentenced to five months and fifteen days in jail for the illegal possession or harvesting of American ginseng from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in August 2014. Today’s conviction marks Hurley’s fifth such conviction. Staff of the National Park Service replanted the recovered viable roots but estimate that at best, 50% of the replanted roots are likely to survive.
At Hurley’s 2014 sentencing hearing, a National Park Service botanist testified that the American ginseng species is under severe pressure from poachers in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and may not be sustainable if it continues to be harvested illegally. During that same hearing, a special agent with of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also testified that financial gain is likely to continue to drive poachers and that fresh ginseng can bring up to $200 per pound on the black market.
To report illegal harvesting activities of American ginseng within the Smokies, please call the Law Enforcement Desk of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park at 1-865-436-1230.
American ginseng is a native plant in the Smoky Mountains. These wild roots are also a highly prized tonic, particularly in Asian markets. Dried ginseng roots are used in medicines, teas, and other health products. American ginseng was recently placed in North Carolina’s Watch Category 5B, which includes generally widespread species that are in commercial demand and are often collected and sold in high volume. This category was created to bring attention to the issue, since such high volume collection is unsustainable in the long run.
Ginseng harvest in the park has always been illegal. It is legal to harvest ginseng outside the park on private lands or with a permit in certain Forest Service areas during the harvesting season. Park scientists have realized these slow-growing native plants could disappear because harvesting means taking the entire ginseng root. Each year law enforcement rangers seize between 500 and 1000 illegally poached ginseng roots. Over the years, park biologists have marked and replanted over 15,000 roots seized by law enforcement. Monitoring indicates that many of these roots have survived and are again thriving in these mountains.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office and the National Park Service remind the public that gathering ginseng on federal lands, such as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is a federal crime. The Smokies are the largest fully protected reserve known for wild ginseng. This plant was formerly abundant throughout the eastern mountains, but due to overharvesting, populations have been significantly reduced to isolated patches. The roots poached in this park are usually young, between the ages of 5 and 10 years, and have not yet reached their full reproductive capacity. In time, the park’s populations might recover if poaching ceases.
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park uses root-marking techniques to combat ginseng poaching. |
Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them. Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals. Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty: Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy. It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.” A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance. In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread to almost all parts of the country. They helped racists in the South circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks, and even in immigrant-rich New York a 1921 law required new voters to take a test if they couldn’t prove that they had an eighth-grade education. About fifteen per cent flunked. Voter literacy tests weren’t permanently outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement had discredited them. Worry about voters’ intelligence lingers, however. Mill’s proposal, in particular, remains “actually fairly formidable,” according to David Estlund, a political philosopher at Brown. His 2008 book, “Democratic Authority,” tried to construct a philosophical justification for democracy, a feat that he thought could be achieved only by balancing two propositions: democratic procedures tend to make correct policy decisions, and democratic procedures are fair in the eyes of reasonable observers. Fairness alone didn’t seem to be enough. If it were, Estlund wrote, “why not flip a coin?” It must be that we value democracy for tending to get things right more often than not, which democracy seems to do by making use of the information in our votes. Indeed, although this year we seem to be living through a rough patch, democracy does have a fairly good track record. The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has made the case that democracies never have famines, and other scholars believe that they almost never go to war with one another, rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently than other regimes do. Still, democracy is far from perfect—“the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” as Churchill famously said. So, if we value its power to make good decisions, why not try a system that’s a little less fair but makes good decisions even more often? Jamming the stub of the Greek word for “knowledge” into the Greek word for “rule,” Estlund coined the word “epistocracy,” meaning “government by the knowledgeable.” It’s an idea that “advocates of democracy, and other enemies of despotism, will want to resist,” he wrote, and he counted himself among the resisters. As a purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid objections. First, one could deny that truth was a suitable standard for measuring political judgment. This sounds extreme, but it’s a fairly common move in political philosophy. After all, in debates over contentious issues, such as when human life begins or whether human activity is warming the planet, appeals to the truth tend to be incendiary. Truth “peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate,” Hannah Arendt pointed out in this magazine, in 1967, “and debate constitutes the very essence of political life.” Estlund wasn’t a relativist, however; he agreed that politicians should refrain from appealing to absolute truth, but he didn’t think a political theorist could avoid doing so. The second argument against epistocracy would be to deny that some citizens know more about good government than others. Estlund simply didn’t find this plausible (maybe a political philosopher is professionally disinclined to). The third and final option: deny that knowing more imparts political authority. As Estlund put it, “You might be right, but who made you boss?” It’s a very good question, and Estlund rested his defense of democracy on it, but he felt obliged to look for holes in his argument. He had a sneaking suspicion that a polity ruled by educated voters probably would perform better than a democracy, and he thought that some of the resulting inequities could be remedied. If historically disadvantaged groups, such as African-Americans or women, turned out to be underrepresented in an epistocratic system, those who made the grade could be given additional votes, in compensation. By the end of Estlund’s analysis, there were only two practical arguments against epistocracy left standing. The first was the possibility that an epistocracy’s method of screening voters might be biased in a way that couldn’t readily be identified and therefore couldn’t be corrected for. The second was that universal suffrage is so established in our minds as a default that giving the knowledgeable power over the ignorant will always feel more unjust than giving those in the majority power over those in the minority. As defenses of democracy go, these are even less rousing than Churchill’s shruggie. “Yours was the blue Prius with the two stoners passed out in back, right?”
In a new book, “Against Democracy” (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown, has turned Estlund’s hedging inside out to create an uninhibited argument for epistocracy. Against Estlund’s claim that universal suffrage is the default, Brennan argues that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To counter Estlund’s concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the public’s welfare is more important than anyone’s hurt feelings; after all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent. As for Estlund’s worry about demographic bias, Brennan waves it off. Empirical research shows that people rarely vote for their narrow self-interest; seniors favor Social Security no more strongly than the young do. Brennan suggests that since voters in an epistocracy would be more enlightened about crime and policing, “excluding the bottom 80 percent of white voters from voting might be just what poor blacks need.” Brennan has a bright, pugilistic style, and he takes a sportsman’s pleasure in upsetting pieties and demolishing weak logic. Voting rights may happen to signify human dignity to us, he writes, but corpse-eating once signified respect for the dead among the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. To him, our faith in the ennobling power of political debate is no more well grounded than the supposition that college fraternities build character. Brennan draws ample evidence of the average American voter’s cluelessness from the legal scholar Ilya Somin’s “Democracy and Political Ignorance” (2013), which shows that American voters have remained ignorant despite decades of rising education levels. Some economists have argued that ill-informed voters, far from being lazy or self-sabotaging, should be seen as rational actors. If the odds that your vote will be decisive are minuscule—Brennan writes that “you are more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row”—then learning about politics isn’t worth even a few minutes of your time. In “The Myth of the Rational Voter” (2007), the economist Bryan Caplan suggested that ignorance may even be gratifying to voters. “Some beliefs are more emotionally appealing,” Caplan observed, so if your vote isn’t likely to do anything why not indulge yourself in what you want to believe, whether or not it’s true? Caplan argues that it’s only because of the worthlessness of an individual vote that so many voters look beyond their narrow self-interest: in the polling booth, the warm, fuzzy feeling of altruism can be had cheap. Viewed that way, voting might seem like a form of pure self-expression. Not even, says Brennan: it’s multiple choice, so hardly expressive. “If you’re upset, write a poem,” Brennan counselled in an earlier book, “The Ethics of Voting” (2011). He was equally unimpressed by the argument that it’s one’s duty to vote. “It would be bad if no one farmed,” he wrote, “but that does not imply that everyone should farm.” In fact, he suspected, the imperative to vote might be even weaker than the imperative to farm. After all, by not voting you do your neighbor a good turn. “If I do not vote, your vote counts more,” Brennan wrote. Brennan calls people who don’t bother to learn about politics hobbits, and he thinks it for the best if they stay home on Election Day. A second group of people enjoy political news as a recreation, following it with the partisan devotion of sports fans, and Brennan calls them hooligans. Third in his bestiary are vulcans, who investigate politics with scientific objectivity, respect opposing points of view, and carefully adjust their opinions to the facts, which they seek out diligently. It’s vulcans, presumably, who Brennan hopes will someday rule over us, but he doesn’t present compelling evidence that they really exist. In fact, one study he cites shows that even people with excellent math skills tend not to draw on them if doing so risks undermining a cherished political belief. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. In recent memory, sophisticated experts have been confident about many proposals that turned out to be disastrous—invading Iraq, having a single European currency, grinding subprime mortgages into the sausage known as collateralized debt obligations, and so on. How would an epistocracy actually work? Brennan is reluctant to get specific, which is understandable. It was the details of utopia that gave Plato so much trouble, and by not going into them Brennan avoids stepping on the rake that thwacked Plato between the eyes. He sketches some options—extra votes for degree holders, a council of epistocrats with veto power, a qualifying exam for voters—but he doesn’t spend much time considering what could go wrong. The idea of a voter exam, for example, was dismissed by Brennan himself in “The Ethics of Voting” as “ripe for abuse and institutional capture.” There’s no mention in his new book of any measures that he would put in place to prevent such dangers. Without more details, it’s difficult to assess Brennan’s proposal. Suppose I claim that pixies always make selfless, enlightened political decisions and that therefore we should entrust our government to pixies. If I can’t really say how we’ll identify the pixies or harness their sagacity, and if I also disclose evidence that pixies may be just as error-prone as hobbits and hooligans, you’d be justified in having doubts. While we’re on the subject of vulcans and pixies, we might as well mention that there’s an elephant in the room. Knowledge about politics, Brennan reports, is higher in people who have more education and higher income, live in the West, belong to the Republican Party, and are middle-aged; it’s lower among blacks and women. “Most poor black women, as of right now at least, would fail even a mild voter qualification exam,” he admits, but he’s undeterred, insisting that their disenfranchisement would be merely incidental to his epistocratic plan—a completely different matter, he maintains, from the literacy tests of America’s past, which were administered with the intention of disenfranchising blacks and ethnic whites. That’s an awfully fine distinction. Bear in mind that, during the current Presidential race, it looks as though the votes of blacks and women will serve as a bulwark against the most reckless demagogue in living memory, whom white men with a college degree have been favoring by a margin of forty-seven per cent to thirty-five per cent. Moreover, though political scientists mostly agree that voters are altruistic, something doesn’t tally: Brennan concedes that historically disadvantaged groups such as blacks and women seem to gain political leverage once they get the franchise. |
Exclusive: Since the end of World War II, what some call the “deep state” has taken hold of the American Republic, stripping the citizens of meaningful control over national security issues, with CIA Director Allen Dulles playing a key early role, according to David Talbot’s new biography reviewed by Lisa Pease.
By Lisa Pease
David Talbot’s new book The Devil’s Chessboard is an anecdotal biography of not just Allen Dulles but of the national security establishment that he helped create. Talbot gave himself the monumental task of summing up a 25-year slice of important history.
Because Talbot has a keen eye for both the absurd and the darkly humorous, he managed to make the disturbing history of that period not only eminently readable but engaging and at times downright entertaining.
I have consumed dozens of books on Allen Dulles, the CIA and Cold War history, yet I was still surprised by numerous revelations in Talbot’s book. He often covers well-known episodes through a less well-known set of incidents and characters.
Talbot writes about the ratlines (escape routes from Europe to Latin America for Nazis), but in the context of one particularly Machiavellian character. He writes about Lee Harvey Oswald from the point of view of one of his friends who sold him down the river to the Warren Commission, likely at the behest of the CIA, a friend who later ostensibly committed suicide just as a member of the House Select Committee on Assassinations was about to interview him. Talbot talks about the CIA’s mind-control programs in the context of Allen Dulles submitting his own son to those horrors.
Talbot and his research associate Karen Croft, to whom he dedicated his book, have found all sorts of nuggets in Allen Dulles’s papers, his appointment calendar, oral histories, and other less-used sources. In addition, Talbot infuses his book with anecdotes from interviews he personally conducted. While I found some points I could nitpick in various episodes, overall this is a worthy addition and a much-needed perspective that elucidates how we came to have two governments: the elected one and the one that doesn’t answer to the elected one.
Talbot’s presentation is not linear but episodic, jumping back and forth like a checker on the chessboard in his title to keep subjects thematically together. Doing this allows him to introduce the character of Allen Dulles quickly, by showing him handing over a World War I girlfriend, “a young Czech patriot,” to British agents who suspected her of being an enemy spy, after which, Talbot tells us, she “disappeared forever.”
Talbot demonstrates that Dulles always found a way to do what he wanted, regardless of what he had been asked to do, even from his entry into the World War II’s Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s forerunner. OSS chief William “Wild Bill” Donovan had tried to assign Dulles to London to exploit Dulles’s cozy relationships with high-net-worth individuals like the Rockefellers whom Dulles served as a lawyer at Sullivan and Cromwell. But Dulles instead got himself assigned to Bern, Switzerland, at the near center of Europe and a financial Mecca for secret bank accounts.
Allen Dulles’s older brother John Foster Dulles had funneled “massive U.S. investments” into Germany post-World War I that flowed back to the U.S. as war loans were paid off. Both Dulles brothers enabled the Nazis financially and socially, with John Foster Dulles at one point defending the character of a Nazi lobbyist who threw a party in New York City to celebrate a Nazi victory in France.
Sparing the Nazis
Talbot makes the case that Allen Dulles was all but a “Double Agent” for the Nazis during World War II. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew how close Dulles was to the Germans but thought Dulles, as an American, would do the President’s bidding, serving as a lure for high-profile Nazis so they could be identified and neutralized.
In pursuing victory, FDR pushed for an unconditional surrender, but Dulles had other plans. He told an agent of SS leader Heinrich Himmler that the Allies’ declaration of the need for unconditional surrender was “merely a piece of paper to be scrapped without further ado if Germany would sue for peace.”
Roosevelt had assigned Dulles to support Project Safehaven, a program to identify and confiscate Nazi assets stashed in neutral countries. But instead Dulles, aided by his friend Tom McKittrick, the head of the Bank for International Settlements, sought to protect his German client’s accounts.
Insubordination to presidents was a running theme in Dulles’s life. But the younger Dulles brother did not yet have the power he would command later in life, so FDR’s policies won out over Dulles’s covert challenges.
Money and the power that money enabled, not ideology, was the predominant motivator for Dulles and his ilk. As Talbot noted, “It is not widely recognized that the Nazi reign of terror was, in a fundamental way, a lucrative racket, an extensive criminal enterprise set up to loot the wealth of Jewish victims and exploit their labor.”
Dulles did not appear to have a problem with the decimation of the Jews. Instead, Dulles believed the real enemy were the Communists, who had the potential to shift the balance of financial power. So Dulles found natural camaraderie with the Nazi elite, who also viewed the Soviets as their biggest threat. Dulles ignored or downplayed the reports he was receiving from escapees and journalists regarding the burning of human beings in concentration camps.
Dulles’s declassified communications showed little regard for the killing of the Jews and much more interest in psychological warfare tricks, “such as distributing counterfeit stamps behind enemy lines depicting Hitler’s profile as a death’s skull, and other cloak-and-dagger antics,” Talbot tells us.
When one reporter took a detailed report of what was happening to Dulles, the journalist said Dulles was “profoundly shocked” and thought action should be taken immediately. Yet Dulles had been receiving similar reports for more than two years and had done nothing about it, and he did next to nothing with this report as well.
Dulles wasn’t the only one keeping the atrocities from being reported, of course. First, the Nazis operated in as much secrecy as possible, so credible reports were hard to come by. But even when they came, many others in government, such as Secretary of State Cordell Hull, turned a blind eye. Hull was one of those who advised President Roosevelt not to allow the St. Louis, a ship of German Jewish refugees, to dock at an American port and who had blocked an important, detailed, first-hand account of what was going on in the camps from reaching the President.
In Italy, Dulles pursued his own secret peace agreement, which he dubbed Operation Sunrise, which flew in the face of FDR’s stated policies. And while Dulles presented himself to people as a personal representative of FDR, the absurdity of that was not lost on some of Dulles’s targets.
Launching the Cold War
During the Nuremberg trials, again, Dulles took the side opposite of what FDR had wanted, the meting out of stern justice for such egregious crimes. Where Roosevelt and other Allied leaders saw war criminals, Dulles saw potential spies to be rescued.
Talbot devotes several chapters to Dulles’s cooperation with and protection of the Nazis. One chapter is devoted to Dulles’s bringing the “Gehlen organization” into the fold of U.S. intelligence, with dubious results.
And, Talbot describes how James Angleton appeared to have blackmailed his way into his position of Chief of Counterintelligence by promising not to expose Dulles’s hiding of Nazi funds. That would explain how Angleton rose to such a key position despite his dubious fitness for the job. The paranoid Angleton ruined the lives of many intelligence officers whom he suspected falsely of being foreign spies, while missing the fact that his good friend in British intelligence, Kim Philby, was a Soviet double-agent. But Allen Dulles was ever Angleton’s protector.
Due to the scope of the topics covered, Talbot is necessarily unable to go in great depth into any of them. His coverage of the Hiss case feels superficial to one who has read a great deal on the subject. For example, Talbot speculates that Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official accused of spying for the Soviets, didn’t want to recognize Whittaker Chambers, the chief witness against him, because the two had perhaps engaged in a homosexual liaison.
While that may be true, I’ve always found Hiss’s own reasons compelling: Chambers had gone by another name when he had first known him; it had been many years since they had met; and Chambers’s weight had changed dramatically. That seems to better explain why Hiss claimed he didn’t know Chambers until he had a face-to-face meeting with him. Then, he recognized his long-ago tenant.
Talbot sprinkles a little sexual innuendo throughout the book. Personally, I find that takes away from the telling of history because anyone can say anything about someone else when the person is no longer alive to dispute it. In most cases, these suspicions are neither provable nor relevant. Fortunately, these are minimal interruptions to the overall tale.
Talbot makes a compelling argument that a lot of the abuses of the intelligence apparatus that we are dealing with now had their genesis under Allen Dulles’s version of the CIA. He traces the notion that the CIA is “above the law” and unanswerable to oversight to the McCarthy hearings, where Dulles earned the undying loyalty of the CIA by refusing to turn over Sen. Joe McCarthy’s targets for questioning.
McCarthy was clearly overreaching in his pursuit of suspected Communists and homosexuals as alleged national security threats but there should have been another way to deal with that than by claiming the CIA was above the law. That single act of defiance, perhaps more than anything else, paved the way to the egregious CIA abuses that have occurred in the years since, including the illegal wiretapping of elected officials, opening them up to blackmail.
In another part of the book, Talbot details the rise of Nixon under, in part, Dulles’s sponsorship. Most of us know that Nixon received illegal campaign donations when he was running for president. But Nixon also shook down those who wanted him to run for Congress, claiming he couldn’t afford to live on the salary of a Congressman and that he’d need supplementary income if he were to run. These are the kinds of juicy details Talbot’s book provides in spades.
As CIA Director
President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Dulles as the fifth CIA director and the first civilian director in 1953, but, as Talbot makes clear, Dulles overrode some of Eisenhower’s wishes by collaborating with his brother, John Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State. By and large, Eisenhower was okay with letting the Dulles brothers run U.S. overt and covert foreign policy as they helped shape the worsening Cold War.
Their hard-line anti-communism and sympathy for colonialism included organizing coups in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954 and blocking a political settlement of the Vietnam conflict that would have involved elections leading to the likely victory of Ho Chi Minh. (John Foster Dulles died in 1959. The international airport outside Washington D.C. is named in his honor.)
One chapter focuses on the killing of “dangerous ideas” in the form of a lecturer at Columbia University, Jesús GalÃndéz. He and compatriots had fought in the Spanish Civil War and fled to the Dominican Republic, only to find that they had “left Franco’s frying pan and landed in Trujillo’s fire.” GalÃndéz later escaped the Dominican Republic for America and wrote a damning 750-page essay called “The Era of Trujillo,” as his PhD thesis.
Talbot reveals the role of CIA operative Robert Maheu and ex-FBI agent John Frank in the kidnapping of GalÃndéz and his delivery to Trujillo, who tortured him, boiled him alive and fed him to the sharks. With the help of Dulles’s CIA, GalÃndéz died in 1956.
Talbot also argues that the CIA was “too modest” when it claimed it was not responsible for the death of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba who was assassinated just days before John Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961. The CIA basically handed Lumumba over to the people who killed him, making the Agency, at the very least, strong accessories to the plot, and hardly the failed-plot-bystanders, the story that CIA officials sold to the Church Committee.
Though Eisenhower had given the Dulles brothers a long leash for their foreign policy schemes, President John F. Kennedy had different ideas. As president, he wanted to run his own foreign policy, and this deeply rankled Allen Dulles. However, in his first months in office, Kennedy acquiesced to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Furious that he let the CIA sell him on the scheme that was hatched under Eisenhower, Kennedy vowed to rein in the freewheeling CIA.
Dulles hadn’t had to answer to anyone for a long time. But his sloppy Bay of Pigs operation cost him all credibility with Kennedy, who took the high road publicly, refusing to blame the CIA outright. But in private, he made it clear the Agency was not to be trusted and that he wanted to shatter it into a million pieces. The enmity between the pair grew.
Allen Dulles also defied Kennedy’s wishes when the President promoted an opening to the Left in Italy. Under Dulles, the CIA continued working against those same forces while supporting the Right as the spy agency and its predecessor, the OSS, had done since World War II.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy was so suspicious of Dulles’s secret reach that after the Bay of Pigs fiasco he found Dulles’s sister working in the State Department and had her fired. President Kennedy ousted Dulles in November 1961, replacing him with John McCone.
But Dulles did not go quietly into the cold night, as Talbot tells it, but ran, essentially, a government in exile from his home on the Potomac. Talbot details some of the comings and goings and how Dulles may have used his own book tour to help plan and plot the assassination of President Kennedy.
The JFK Assassination
Toward the end of the book, Talbot focuses nearly as much on President Kennedy and the plot to assassinate him as he does on Allen Dulles, with mixed results. While Talbot has the facts right in the broad strokes, if not all the small details, his focus was, in my opinion, a tad misplaced in spots. For example, he appears to believe E. Howard Hunt’s deathbed “confession,” which many in the research community do not.
Hunt, a career intelligence officer who became infamous as a leader of Nixon’s Watergate burglary team, implicated President Lyndon B. Johnson in the plot to kill Kennedy, which has never made sense to me. If LBJ was so ruthless that he killed his way to the presidency, why did he decide not to run again in 1968? Historically, when people have killed their way to the throne, they do not voluntarily abdicate it.
And Hunt’s “confession” seemed motivated more by the goal of leaving his family a little money after his death than by a desire to tell the truth. Indeed, even Talbot is puzzled at things Hunt appears not to know that he would necessarily have known had he been privy to the inner workings of the plot.
Clearly, Talbot focuses on Hunt because of Hunt’s well-documented long-term friendship with Dulles. And, I do believe, from my own research, that Hunt was likely in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, presumably as paymaster, his usual role in operations, based in large part on the fuller evidence from which Talbot created his abbreviated summary on that point. But I’m not persuaded, by this presentation or my other research, that Hunt knew the details of the actual plot.
From my own 25-plus years of research into the documentary record of the Kennedy assassination, I have come to believe it more likely that Richard Helms, James Angleton and David Atlee Phillips were the top plotters, not Dulles. But, to Talbot’s point, all of these men were beholden, at different levels, to Dulles; in fact, Angleton carried Dulles’s ashes at his funeral in 1969.
David Atlee Phillips gained power in the CIA because of his successful operations during the 1954 overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala under Dulles. Helms was apparently insulated from the Bay of Pigs disaster in April 1961, perhaps by Dulles to keep a loyal person at the upper echelon of the CIA.
Given the hostility between Dulles and Kennedy, it remains a historical anomaly that Dulles managed to finagle his way onto the official investigation of Kennedy’s assassination. In that position, Allen Dulles was more responsible than anyone for the deliberate obfuscations of the Warren Commission. Dulles spent more minutes working for the commission than any other member. I agree with Talbot that the body should more appropriately have been named “the Dulles Commission.”
Talbot repudiated the recently resurfaced canard that Robert Kennedy had asked LBJ to appoint Dulles to the commission, a point lawyer and former House Select Committee investigator Dan Hardway has also recently made in detail recently with additional evidence. (See Section VIII in Hardway’s article “ Thank you, Phil Shenon .”)
Dulles really did have ties to the family of Ruth and Michael Paine, the couple that housed the Oswalds in the months before the assassination. And Dulles really did monitor New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw through the man Garrison had hired to provide “security,” Gordon Novel.
One of the most interesting people Talbot examined in the latter part of his book was JFK adviser and historian Arthur Schlesinger, who apparently had a distaste for Dulles and the CIA’s actions professionally while maintaining a personal and even warm relationship with Dulles though Schlesinger came to question that friendship in later years.
One of Talbot’s chapters, “I can’t look and I won’t look,” is named for something Schlesinger said when confronted with evidence of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination. Here was a man so wedded to his circle that he did not want to believe someone he knew and admired could be responsible for such a heinous crime.
Toward the end of his life, Schlesinger reflected on his “truce” and friendship with Dulles’s protégé Richard Helms and later CIA Director William Casey. Talbot quoted Schlesinger as saying, “I did wonder at one’s [meaning his own] capacity to continue liking people who have been involved in wicked things. Is this deplorable weakness? Or commendable tolerance?”
The same must be asked of the public’s tolerance of secret operations that run counter to the principles of democracy in an open society. Is it commendable to tolerate assassinations and the darker deeds in the name of preserving the republic, or, more accurately, protecting the holdings of corporate leaders in the republic, or is it our weakness, as citizens of a democratic republic, that we have not raised our voices in protest of a secret, parallel government that has and no doubt will continue to pursue an independent path, out of control of our democracy?
That is the question that Talbot’s book asks between the lines. The Devil’s Chessboard gives us essential information to ponder before we make our answer.
Lisa Pease is a writer who has examined issues ranging from the Kennedy assassination to voting irregularities in recent U.S. elections. |
The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a British environmental advocacy group that focuses on business sustainability, said Wednesday that 343 companies listed on the S&P 500 participated in its carbon survey this year, adding that their results show a “tipping point” has been reached when it comes to corporate acceptance of climate change.
The group’s annual S&P 500 Climate Change Report (PDF) found that 92 percent of the participating companies conducted “board or executive-level oversight” on climate change strategies, and that 83 percent incorporated climate strategies into risk management portfolios. Both of those numbers are up over 2011’s report.
In all, 81 percent of the companies identified physical risks due to climate change, and 74 percent “identified climate change opportunities” that simultaneously boost efficiency and profits. In one of the biggest shifts the CDP noticed, 52 percent of the survey’s respondents actually reported making emissions reductions, up by 23 percent over last year’s survey.
Some of the largest companies CDP cites for not responding include Apple, Amazon.com, Tyco International, Caterpillar, Metro PCS, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Priceline.com, General Dynamics, Tyson Foods, Sysco, Marathon Petroleum and Berkshire Hathaway.
The CDP’s 2012 report also gave special recognition to companies that disclosed the most information about their emissions and took the largest steps toward better environmental stewardship. Their list of “disclosure and performance leaders” includes Microsoft, Google, Sprint, AT&T, Home Depot, News Corp., Best Buy, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, ConAgra Foods, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Johnson & Johnson, UPS and Lockheed Martin, among others.
“The best interests of investors are catalyzing US companies to improve the management of environmental risk, which is vital if we are to forge a more sustainable economy,” CDP chairman Paul Dickinson said in a media advisory. “This report shows us that the powerful American corporation is responding to a growing market demand and increasingly understands that transparency and action on climate change is a business imperative. Failure to act could result in a competitive disadvantage.”
The CDP’s 2012 results seem to largely reflect attitudes among nearly half of the world’s business investors, if a recent Bloomberg poll is to be believed. That survey found about 49 percent of investors agreed that moving to limit the pollution that drives climate change will have “not much impact” on profits. A full 78 percent also said they believe climate change is a moderate or severe threat. Just 19 percent said they didn’t think climate change posed a threat at all.
Among the general public, concern about the threats posed by climate change has been waning even though almost 70 percent of Americans accept that climate change happening — a number that’s risen dramatically of late due to recent increased awareness of extreme weather events like hurricanes and droughts.
——
Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved. |
We’re asking divers and boaters to report any damage they observe to the coral reef ecosystem offshore of Delray Beach and Boynton.
March 2, 2013, the Texas, the largest dredge in the US, moved into position to begin the massive Delray beach renourishment project. The project which runs roughly from Linton Blvd. north to Atlantic Ave., will add 1.2 million cubic yards of sand to 1.9 miles of beach. The project is expected to take 30 to 45 days for completion.
March 1, was the beginning of sea turtle nesting season, but the contractor was granted an extension to allow dredging to continue during the nesting season. The contractor was also granted a variance from the State to extend the turbidity silt plume to 1000 meters (3280 ft.) from the beach discharge point, because they argued they could not comply with the standard 150 (492 ft.) meter zone due to extremely high pumping rates and silt content in the offshore dredge borrow area.
This is the first beach renourishment project since this area was designated by the federal government as habitat critical to the survival of staghorn coral, which was added to the Endangered Species list in 2008. Oddly the permit issued for this project makes no mention of staghorn coral, but does address sea turtles and manatees as ESA listed species that occur within the project area. There is abundant growth of staghorn coral on Seagate Reef, less than 500 ft. from the offshore sand dredging location.
Silt accumulation on the reef can severely affect the survival of the resident staghorn coral. We are asking local divers and boaters to keep a close eye on this area and report any abnormalities to Reef Rescue.
To add insult to injury the Boynton Beach Inlet dredge project is starting the same time as Delray. This project last performed in 2008, had numerous permit violations documented by Reef Rescue that resulted in enforcement action being taken. These two projects encompass over 7 miles of coastline. That’s a lot to monitor. And that’s why we are asking for your help. Report your observations by calling (561) 699-8559. If you get an answering machine, leave a message, we are in the water and will get back to you ASAP. Your information is invaluable.
26.509905 -80.002441
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Many web applications allow users to store images for later. For example, you may want to allow users to upload a profile picture that gets displayed later on in the application. This post demonstrates how to upload an image to a web application and store the image in a database. Then we will see how to display that image in a browser.
PersistedImage
The key to storing an image in a database is to use @Lob annotation in JPA and make the datatype as a byte array. Here is an example class that stores byte array in the database.
@Entity data class PersistedImage(@field: Id @field: GeneratedValue var id : Long = 0, //The bytes field needs to be marked as @Lob for Large Object Binary @field: Lob var bytes : ByteArray? = null, var mime : String = ""){ fun toStreamingURI() : String { //We need to encode the byte array into a base64 String for the browser val base64 = DatatypeConverter.printBase64Binary(bytes) //Now just return a data string. The Browser will know what to do with it return "data:$mime;base64,$base64" }
Kotlin has a ByteArray class. In Java you would use byte [] . The effect is the same either way. When persistence provider scans this class, it will store the byte array as a Lob in the database. Nevertheless it’s not enough to simply store an image in the database. At some point in time, the user will most likely wish to see the image. That’s there the toStreamingURI() method comes in handy.
The first line uses DatatypeConverter to convert the byte array to a base64 string. Then we can append that string to “data:[mime];base64,[base 64]”. In our example, we use Kotlin’s String template feature to build such a String. We start with the data: followed by the mime (such as /img/png). Then we can add the base64 string created by DatatypeConverter. This string can get added to the src attribute of the html img tag as shown in the screen shot below.
The browser knows how to display this string as an image.
File Uploads
It’s worth while to discuss how files are upload in Spring. Spring has a MultipartFile class that can get mapped to the a file upload input tag in the form. Here is how it looks in the HTML code.
There are a couple of things that are critical for this to work. First, we have to set our applications.properties file to allow large file uploads.
spring.http.multipart.max-file-size=25MB spring.http.multipart.max-request-size=25MB
Next our form tag has to set the enctype attribute to “multipart/form-data”. Finally we have to keep track of the name attribute on our input tag so that we can map it to the server code. In our example, our input tag has it’s name attribute set to “image”.
On the server end, we use this code get an instance of MultipartFile.
@RequestMapping(method = arrayOf(RequestMethod.POST)) fun doPost( //Grab the uploaded image from the form @RequestPart("image") multiPartFile : MultipartFile, model : Model) : String { //Save the image file imageService.save(multiPartFile.toPersistedImage()) model.addAttribute("images", imageService.loadAll()) return "index" }
We annotate the multipartFile parameter with @RequestPart and pass to the annotation the same name attribute that we set on our input tag. At this point, the container will inject an instance of MultipartFile that represents the file that the user uploaded to the server. The MultipartFile class has two attributes that are critical to our purposes. First it has a byte array property that represents the bytes of the uploaded file and it has the file’s MIME.
We can use Kotlin’s extension functions to add a toPersistedImage() method on MutlipartFile.
fun MultipartFile.toPersistedImage() = PersistedImage(bytes = this.bytes, mime = this.contentType)
This method simply returns an instance of PersisitedImage that can get stored in the database. At this point, we can easily store and retrieve the image from the database.
Application
The demonstration application is a regular Spring MVC application written in Kotlin. You can refer to this post on an explanation on how this works. Here is the Kotlin code followed by the HTML code.
Kotlin Code
package com.stonesoupprogramming.streamimage import org.hibernate.SessionFactory import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller import org.springframework.stereotype.Repository import org.springframework.stereotype.Service import org.springframework.ui.Model import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMethod import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestPart import org.springframework.web.multipart.MultipartFile import javax.persistence.* import javax.transaction.Transactional import javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter @SpringBootApplication class StreamImageDbApplication fun main(args: Array) { SpringApplication.run(StreamImageDbApplication::class.java, *args) } @Entity data class PersistedImage(@field: Id @field: GeneratedValue var id : Long = 0, //The bytes field needs to be marked as @Lob for Large Object Binary @field: Lob var bytes : ByteArray? = null, var mime : String = ""){ fun toStreamingURI() : String { //We need to encode the byte array into a base64 String for the browser val base64 = DatatypeConverter.printBase64Binary(bytes) //Now just return a data string. The Browser will know what to do with it return "data:$mime;base64,$base64" } } //This is a Kotlin extension function that turns a MultipartFile into a PersistedImage fun MultipartFile.toPersistedImage() = PersistedImage(bytes = this.bytes, mime = this.contentType) @Configuration class DataConfig { @Bean fun sessionFactory(@Autowired entityManagerFactory: EntityManagerFactory) : SessionFactory = entityManagerFactory.unwrap(SessionFactory::class.java) } @Repository class ImageRepository(@Autowired private val sessionFactory: SessionFactory){ fun save(persistedImage: PersistedImage) { sessionFactory.currentSession.saveOrUpdate(persistedImage) } fun loadAll() = sessionFactory.currentSession.createCriteria(PersistedImage::class.java).list() as List } @Transactional @Service class ImageService(@Autowired private val imageRepository: ImageRepository){ fun save(persistedImage: PersistedImage) { imageRepository.save(persistedImage) } fun loadAll() = imageRepository.loadAll() } @Controller @RequestMapping("/") class IndexController(@Autowired private val imageService: ImageService){ @RequestMapping(method = arrayOf(RequestMethod.GET)) fun doGet(model : Model) : String { model.addAttribute("images", imageService.loadAll()) return "index" } @RequestMapping(method = arrayOf(RequestMethod.POST)) fun doPost( //Grab the uploaded image from the form @RequestPart("image") multiPartFile : MultipartFile, model : Model) : String { //Save the image file imageService.save(multiPartFile.toPersistedImage()) model.addAttribute("images", imageService.loadAll()) return "index" } }
application.properties
spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=create-drop spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.current_session_context_class=org.springframework.orm.hibernate5.SpringSessionContext spring.datasource.driver-class-name=org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver spring.http.multipart.max-file-size=25MB spring.http.multipart.max-request-size=25MB
index.html
Conclusion
Spring and Kotlin make it easy to embed images in a database and display those images in a browser. The main take away is to define a byte array property as a Lob on persisted image and then convert it to a base64 String when you wish to display it. Here are some screen shots of the working application.
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You can get the source code for this project at my GitHub here or watch the video tutorial on YouTube |
by
Nazareth.
For more than 15 years, the Middle East “peace process” initiated by the Oslo accords has been on life support. Last week, United States president Donald Trump pulled the plug, whether he understood it or not.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu could barely stifle a smile as Trump demoted the two-state solution from holy grail. Instead, he said of resolving the conflict: “I am looking at two states or one state … I can live with either one.”
Given the huge asymmetry of power, Israel now has a free hand to entrench its existing apartheid version of the one-state solution – Greater Israel – on the Palestinians. This is the destination to which Netanyahu has been steering the Israel-Palestine conflict his entire career.
It emerged this week that at a secret summit in Aqaba last year – attended by Egypt and Jordan, and overseen by US secretary of state John Kerry – Netanyahu was offered a regional peace deal that included almost everything he had demanded of the Palestinians. And still he said no.
Much earlier, in 2001, Netanyahu was secretly filmed boasting to settlers of how he had foiled the Oslo process a short time earlier by failing to carry out promised withdrawals from Palestinian territory. He shrugged off the US role as something that could be “easily moved to the right direction”.
Now he has the White House exactly where he wanted it.
In expressing ambivalence about the final number of states, Trump may have assumed he was leaving options open for his son-in-law and presumed peace envoy, Jared Kushner.
But words can take on a life of their own, especially when uttered by the president of the world’s only superpower.
Some believe Trump, faced with the region’s realities, will soon revert to Washington’s playbook on two states, with the US again adopting the bogus role of “honest broker”. Others suspect his interest will wilt, allowing Israel to intensify settlement building and its abuse of Palestinians.
The long-term effect, however, is likely to be more decisive. The one-state option mooted by Trump will resonate with both Israelis and Palestinians because it reminds each side of their historic ambitions.
The international community has repeatedly introduced the chimera of the two-state solution, but for most of their histories the two sides favoured a single state – if for different reasons.
From the outset, the mainstream Zionist movement wanted an exclusive Jewish state, and a larger one than it was ever offered. Some even dreamed of the recreation of a Biblical kingdom whose borders incorporated swaths of neighbouring Arab states.
In late 1947, the Zionist leadership backed the United Nations partition plan for tactical reasons, knowing the Palestinians would reject the transfer of most of their homeland to recent European immigrants.
A few months later they seized more territory – in war – than the UN envisioned, but were still not satisfied. Religious and secular alike hungered for the rest of Palestine. Shimon Peres was among the leaders who began the settlement drive immediately following the 1967 occupation.
Those territorial ambitions were muffled by Oslo, but will be unleashed again in full force by Trump’s stated indifference.
The Palestinians’ history points in a parallel direction. As Zionism made its first inroads into Palestine, they rejected any compromise with what were seen as European colonisers.
In the 1950s, after Israel’s creation, the resistance under Yasser Arafat espoused a single secular democratic state in all of historic Palestine. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Palestinians’ growing isolation in the early 1990s, did Arafat cave in to European and US pressure and sign up for partition.
But for Palestinians, Oslo has not only entailed enduring Israel’s constant bad faith, but it has also created a deeply compromised vehicle for self-government. The Palestinian Authority has split the Palestinian people territorially – between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza – and required a Faustian pact to uphold Israel’s security, including the settlers’, at all costs.
The truth, obscured by Oslo, is that the one-state solution has underpinned the aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians for more than a century. It did not come about because each expected different things from it.
For Israelis, it was to be a fortress to exclude the native Palestinian population.
For Palestinians, it was the locus of national liberation from centuries of colonial rule. Only later did many Palestinians, especially groups such as Hamas, come to mirror the Zionist idea of an exclusive – if in their case, Islamic – state.
Trump’s self-declared detachment will now revive these historic forces. Settler leader Naftali Bennett will compete with Netanyahu to take credit for speeding up the annexation of ever-greater blocs of West Bank territory while rejecting any compromise on Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, Palestinians, particularly the youth, will understand that their struggle is not for illusory borders but for liberation from the Jewish supremacism inherent in mainstream Zionism.
The struggle Trump’s equivocation provokes, however, must first play out in the internal politics of Israelis and Palestinians. It is a supremely clarifying moment. Each side must now define what it really wants to fight for: a fortress for their tribe alone, or a shared homeland ensuring rights and dignity for all.
A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi. |
By Will Grant
BBC News, Caracas
Mr Chavez is seeking greater economic independence from the US
Venezuela has announced a $16bn (£10bn) investment deal with China for oil exploration in the Orinoco river.
The move comes shortly after Venezuela signed a similar agreement with Russia, which is estimated to be $20bn (£12bn).
President Hugo Chavez said the deals would boost oil production in Venezuela by about 900,000 barrels per day.
Investors in Venezuela's oil industry have complained for months that a lack of government investment in infrastructure has hurt production.
Multi-polar world
Speaking on state television, Mr Chavez said the deal with China was over three years and that the investment would go towards developing heavy crude oil resources in the Orinoco River belt.
For President Chavez it is part of a wider effort to increase his base of bilateral partners in the oil industry.
The socialist leader often speaks of what he calls a "multi-polar world" in which Latin American countries are less dependent on Washington.
However, US companies and the US government are still the mainstay of the Venezuelan energy industry.
The Venezuelan leader will hope that these multibillion dollar deals, signed with countries which are more friendly to his "21st Century Socialist Revolution", will give him further economic independence from Washington. |
For the first time, astronomers have snapped photos of auroras lighting up Uranus's icy atmosphere.
"The last time we had any definite signals of auroral activity on Uranus was when NASA's Voyager 2 probe swung by in 1986," said study leader Laurent Lamy, an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris in Meudon, France.
"But this is the first time we can actually see these emissions light up with an Earth-based telescope."
Uranus Auroras Seen in Stroke of Luck
Auroras are light displays often seen at the highest latitudes of Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn—all of which all have magnetospheres that act as shields against incoming solar storms. (See "Photos: Multicolored Auroras Sparked by Double Sun Blast.")
Auroras tend to surround a planet's poles, where magnetic field lines converge and funnel incoming charged solar particles into the planet's atmosphere. There, the particles collide with air molecules, making the molecules glow.
Scientists tried unsuccessfully to detect auroras on Uranus in 1998 and 2005. In September 2011, Lamy and his team learned of an impending solar storm directed toward Uranus, which sits about 2.5 billion miles (4 billion kilometers) from Earth.
The team timed their Hubble observations specifically to coincide with the solar storm, and about six weeks later, Hubble spotted the auroras flaring up in Uranus's upper atmosphere. (Related: "Solar Flare: What If Biggest Known Sun Storm Hit Today?")
"We definitely had luck on our side to catch these faint flashes," Lamy said.
Oddball Planet May Influence Auroras
The auroras' unusual appearance might have something to do with the planet's oddball orientation.
Unlike the other seven planets, Uranus's magnetic axis is 60 degrees off from its spin axis. In addition, spin axis itself has a bizarre 98-degree tilt relative to the solar system's orbital plane. In other words, the planet seems to roll around on its side as it orbits the sun.
Uranus's auroras are very short-lived, and Lamy speculates that's because of the difference between the orientation of the incoming solar particles and the planet's unusual magnetic field.
"These auroras will offer clues as to the exact location of the magnetic axis ... which then allow us to tell for the first time which parts of the magnetosphere is active," Lamy said.
"There is no doubt Uranus is a mysterious planet. We just don't know too much about [it]—especially its magnetosphere—but it's finally slowly revealing its secrets."
Uranus Observations "Urgent"
Now that his team has proven that Hubble can spot auroras on Uranus, Lamy hopes to get more of Hubble's observation time.
"We have had virtually no observations of these events for nearly a quarter century, but now we know we have a unique tool at our disposal," he said.
"Unfortunately Hubble is nearing the end of its life, so it's quite urgent we get as many opportunities as possible to observe these distant auroras before it closes its eye for good." |
From 1d4chan
Black Dragons Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination Battle Cry Fire and Bone Founding 21st Founding Successors of Unknown (believed to be the Salamanders, possibly tyranids as well) Successor Chapters None Chapter Master Volos Primarch Possibly Vulkan Homeworld Gauntlet (semi-mythical, Chapter is officially Fleet-based) Specialty Assault, having pointy retractable arm-blades Allegiance Imperium of Man Colours Black with a white Aquila and markings
The Black Dragons are a Space Marine Chapter in Warhammer 40,000. Part of the 21st or Cursed Founding, the Black Dragons suffer from mutation like the other Chapters of that founding. Specifically, they suffer from a mutated Ossmodula, which causes some gnarly bone growths to grow out of their forehead and forearms. It's unknown what mutation the Adeptus Mechanicus was trying to cure, as their Parent Chapter is unknown (they might've actually been trying to make them bigger and stronger- seems lots of Black Dragons are too large to fit regular Power Armour). Heavy speculation is that the Black Dragons are descended from the Salamanders, and those with more pronounced bone extensions are noted to have darker skin, reminiscent of the Salamanders' mutated melanchrome. The "osseovirus" responsible for the mutations was later isolated by the Haemonculus Coven known as the Hex and used to create the bone-mutating weapons known as the ossefactors.
Black Dragons: The official chapter of Baraka and Dudepeel
Interestingly, rather than try to cure the bony crests, the Black Dragons instead embraced the mutation, having those with forearm blades coat said blades in adamantium and then inducted into special squads known as "Dragon Claws", and having them serve as Assault Marines (Space Marines + Wolverine/Baraka = awesome). They also incorporate this embracing of the mutation into their worship and doctrine as a chapter: such as the Chaplain calling upon the Emperor to "Curse thy servants" during prayer. This has raised more than a few eyebrows among the Inquisition, and several Chapters of Space Marines, such as the Dark Angels and the Marines Malevolent, have refused to fight alongside them (as if anyone wants the MMs anywhere near them, especially Salamanders descendants). Despite this, the Black Dragons are one of the few Chapters of the Cursed Founding still active as part of the Imperium of Man in late M41, where they committed nine of their ten companies to the 13th Black Crusade. They'd probably get on well with the Space Wolves.
They appear to have gained Primaris reinforcements with the dawn of the Dark Imperium, despite being a Cursed Founding (Or due to being so badass). The new KillTeam release mentions Black Dragon Reivers, and their prominent bone blades being used in KillTeams.
There is a novel featuring them, The Death of Antagonis. Quite a nice read, even while the description is misleading; the front and back covers feature Black Dragons fighting zombies, and while that does happen it's barely a third of the book. The last zombie "disappears" around page 90, and Exterminatus is declared 20 pages later; the next 200 pages take place on city world Aeghis Mortis and the main enemies are Tzeentchian marines lead by a Rogue Cardinal who is on a jolly trip to discover a world engine. One member of the chapter gets convinced by an Inquisitor to try and purge his mutated brothers, but when they both fall to Chaos he gets his ass killed for treachery and not embracing his brothers' mutations as a means to be even more effective killing machines. Not to mention the asshole Inquisitor got his stomach slit open by a pissed off Canoness. |
When Rob Wise left the Marine Corps to join the Army a decade ago he may have looked forward to a better life, starting a family and receiving support from the people he worked for.
The Marines have been known to be less than accepting of new wives and fledgling families. I've met more than one soldier who left the Corps for the Army after hearing that if the Marines had wanted him to have a wife, it'd have issued him one. After all, the hard charging, oft-deployed life of a junior Marine can take its toll on girlfriends, wives, and troops alike.
That's worth mentioning because Andy-Lee Fry at The Leaf Chronicle in Clarksville, Tn., where Wise and his wife Ashley are stationed, tells a story all too common in the military—and Ashley's dedicated response.
Following Rob's second Iraq combat tour he started having flashbacks. Vivid moments of surprising intensity that mentally flung him back to battle when hearing a loud noise, or catching a sudden movement from the corner of his eye.
Ashley told Fry the situation demanded professional attention when Rob took all the weapons he had in their home, some booze, went to a local hotel and after she called him, told her, "Life's just really hard, I might do something stupid."
She called the Army's Family Advocacy program, an organization that supports families in crisis. After the counselor put her hand on Ashley's arm, told her she was in a safe place and to trust her, Ashley opened up. "I hadn't slept in over 24 hours," she told me on the phone. "It's the only reason she got me."
What she meant was that as soon as she outlined the difficulties she and Rob had been going through, the session stopped, the advocacy worker got up and Rob was promptly picked up by the Military Police.
Rob was now facing 72 hours confinement, domestic assault charges, and a dishonorable discharge that would cause the family to lose all the benefits they were entitled to. It didn't take Ashley long to realize Army officials were preparing to make her and Rob the "civilian sector's problem."
None of this is unusual, but facing few options Ashley did something that's started a viral Facebook movement, garnered thousands of followers, and has so far saved her family. Without a voice and ignored, she wrote a pledge on her back, took a picture of it holding Rob's M4 assault rifle over her head and uploaded it.
The response from other wives watching their husbands suffer post traumatic stress was immediate, and the sudden interest in her case from Rob's command soon followed.
The Facebook Group Battling BARE was born and now receives pictures from military wives around the country silently screaming the same pledge on their naked backs.
A few of the photos are below, but you can check out the page here and see the movement in its entirety.
Rob is now on staff at with the Army Warrior Transition Battalion at Fort Campbell.
I spoke with Ashley on the phone following this post and we've agreed she and Battling BARE will join our pool of Smoke Pit contributors at BI Military & Defense immediately. Look for the amazing things they're doing posted here in the coming days.
Ashley Wise — Battling Bare Facebook via Ashley Wise
Broken by battle, Wounded by war, I love you forever
Facebook via Battling Bare
To you this I swore: I will quiet your silent screams, Help heal your shattered soul
Facebook via Battling Bare
Until once again, my love, you are whole. |
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli police clashed with Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem’s Old City, the occupied West Bank and Gaza on Friday, reflecting growing tensions over an increase in Jewish visits to the al-Aqsa mosque compound.
A man plants a Palestinian flag during a during a graduation ceremony for Palestinian militants in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip September 27, 2013. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem
Palestinian militants and youth groups have called for a general uprising in response to the entry by Jewish groups under police escort to the Jerusalem holy site, which is revered by both Muslims and Jews.
Police threw stun grenades to disperse small crowds of youths outside Jerusalem’s medieval walls, and dozens of protesters marched on a crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip before being driven back by volleys of tear gas.
Protests also flared in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, at an Israeli-manned checkpoint outside the northern city of Nablus and in the flashpoint holy city of Hebron, where a Palestinian sniper shot dead an Israeli soldier on Sunday.
Witnesses reported several injuries in the clashes and police said they had arrested 12 Palestinians in Jerusalem for throwing stones at security forces.
Palestinian protests over a visit to the al-Aqsa mosque compound by then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon in September 2000 spiraled into deadly clashes and a five-year Palestinian uprising, known as the second Intifada.
Palestinians oppose Jewish worship at the plaza, which overlooks Judaism’s Western Wall, seeing it as a first step toward restricting access to the area for Muslims and a deepening of Israeli control over the Old City.
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators resumed U.S.-brokered peace talks in late July, ending a three-year stalemate.
Related Coverage French diplomat recalled after scuffle with Israeli troops
But friction on the ground has risen during September’s Jewish festivals, with Palestinian leaders complaining about swelling numbers of Jewish visitors, saying some of them try to defy an effective ban on praying on the vast esplanade.
THIRD INTIFADA?
“The uprising (in 2000) erupted when al-Aqsa mosque was stormed. They (the Israelis) are now raiding al-Aqsa every day,” a senior official with the Islamist Hamas group, Mushir Al-Masri, told thousands of supporters at a Gaza rally.
Activists burnt effigies of Israeli leaders and set fire to three coffins, one bearing the words “Death to Israel”.
“We call upon our people to revolt against tyranny and aggression. Let a third Intifada be declared because this is the best way to teach the aggressors a lesson,” said Masri, adding that “every Jew” would be extracted from Jerusalem.
Despite his calls for a revolt, the protests within Hamas-controlled Gaza were low-key. There was also little sign of major confrontation looming in the West Bank, where Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas exercises partial rule.
In a speech at the United Nations on Thursday, Abbas made a public appeal for a halt to the al-Aqsa visits.
“There must be an end to the near-daily attacks on the religious sites in Occupied Jerusalem, at the forefront of which is al-Aqsa mosque, where the continuation of such attacks will have dire consequences,” he said.
Slideshow (5 Images)
Allies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been among the most vocal advocates of Jewish prayer at the 35-acre site and the government has done little to stem the flow of visitors to the area.
Religious Jews revere the compound as the location of their ancient biblical temples. For Muslims, it is the place where Prophet Mohammed is believed to have ascended into heaven - the third holiest site in Islam.
Israel captured the site, along with the rest of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in the 1967 Middle East war. The Jewish state then annexed East Jerusalem as part of its capital in a move never recognized internationally. |
It just occurred to me that since Git stores full tree states, the easiest way to split a commit would be to make a copy of the final tree repeatedly, and in each copy cancel away some changes relative to the previous amended copy of the tree. It turns out you can actually do the procedural steps fairly mechanically.
For the sake of this example, I want to split out the combined changes to the files foo , bar , baz and quux over four commits. The parts you have to fill in are bolded; the rest is mechanical.
Make sure you are at the root level directory of your repository’s working copy. Set a bookmark on the commit you want to split so you can refer to it easily: git branch splitme 007dead Now, interatively rebase the current commit series, starting at the parent of the commit you want to split: git rebase -i splitme^ When your editor comes up with the rebase todo list, mark the 007dead commit for editing. Once you have been dropped back into the shell, undo all changes except the ones you want in the first of the split commits, then amend the commit: git reset HEAD^ quux baz bar git commit -m 'change foo' --amend Here, you undid the changes to quux , baz and bar ; the amended commit therefore contains only the changes to foo , which the new commit message reflects. Now comes the point where you create extra commits. Each follows the same steps: git checkout splitme . git reset HEAD^ quux baz git commit -m 'change bar' git checkout splitme . git reset HEAD^ quux git commit -m 'change baz' git checkout splitme . git commit -m 'change quux' This step is where the magic happens: you repeatedly check out a copy of the final state of the tree into the index and working copy (using checkout with a path, which is . i.e. the project root directory) and commit it after undoing progressively fewer changes (using reset ). In the last step no changes are undone, you just need it to write a new commit message. The secret sauce is that splitme always refers to the final state of the tree and HEAD^ always refers to a state missing some of the changes. Finally, continue the rebase. Once it’s finished, you can drop the bookmark. git rebase --continue git branch -D splitme
That’s it. |
Guatemalan subjects of US medical experiments A US court has dismissed a lawsuit by Guatemalan citizens against US officials in connection with unethical medical experiments conducted by American researchers in the 1940s. Lawyers representing the plaintiffs vowed to appeal the 14 June decision.
The semi-secret research project, which Nature reported on in “Human experiments: First, do harm”, involved a group of US medical researchers who established a lab in Guatemala to study treatments for syphilis, gonorrhoea and other diseases. They experimented on more than 5,000 Guatemalans — including military personnel, residents of mental hospitals and prisoners — without their consent and exposed at least 1,300 to sexually transmitted diseases. After details of the experiments emerged in 2010, President Barack Obama apologized to Guatemala and launched an investigation by the presidential bioethics commission, which issued a series of reports condemning the experiments.
In the court case, Guatemalans who contend that they were victims of the medical experiments (or their legal heirs) sued eight US federal officials. On Wednesday, Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled in favour of the US government, which argued that it was immune in this case. In his decision, Walton said, “This court is powerless to provide any redress to the plaintiffs. Their pleas are more appropriately directed to the political branches of our government, who, if they choose, have the ability to grant some modicum of relief to those affected by the Guatemalan study.”
Terrence Collingsworth, a lawyer representing the Guatemalan plaintiffs, said in a statement: “We are disappointed by the decision and strongly disagree that these doctrines of immunity apply under the extreme circumstances of this case. We plan to appeal and will continue to seek justice for the victims of these atrocious human rights violations committed by the US Government.” |
TRENTON -- Writing to say he wants New Hampshire law enforcement to know "exactly what kind of governor Chris Christie has been back home in New Jersey," New Jersey State Policemen's Benevolent Association President Patrick Colligan on Tuesday sent an open poison-pen letter to officers in the early voting state.
Christie, a Republican presidential candidate who in December referred to Colligan last year as a "pension pig," has made securing the endorsements of New Hampshire's sheriffs and police chiefs a top priority for his campaign but struggled to win more of them.
In an interview with NJ Advance Media on Tuesday, Colligan fired back, saying he hoped to convince New Hampshire's law enforcement officers that the governor was "as far away from being a law enforcement candidate as you can get."
In his association's open letter to New Hampshire police and uniformed officers, the 24-year veteran of the Franklin Township police accused Christie of actually committing, not preventing, crime.
The governor "diverted our increased pension contributions to offset other spending in the state budget. He called it 'property tax relief,'" Colligan wrote. "As you know, when one person takes money promised by law for one reason and uses it for something completely different, we call it fraud."
Colligan said Tuesday that "the combination of increased pension and health care contributions have literally had us in a reverse slide in pay back to 2006."
His letter to law enforcement in New Hampshire, where many experts say Christie's White House bid hinges, is designed to prevent any further endorsements of the governor. In July 2015, Christie secured the support of Sheriff Scott Hilliard of Merrimack, the state's third-most populous county, but he has struggled to gain any further sheriff endorsements in the crowded field.
Colligan acknowledged that many in his group had actually backed Christie when he first ran for governor in 2009, but he is now determined to prevent New Hampshire police officers from doing the same.
"If he's going to walk around this country and say he still enjoys the support of law enforcement," Colligan said, "then I invite anybody from anywhere else in the country to call a New Jersey police officer and ask them what they think of Gov. Chris Christie."
Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. |
MIA > Archive > Connolly > Index
James Connolly
Labour In Irish History
Chapter XI
An Irish Utopia
“Were the hand of Locke to hold from heaven a scheme of government most perfectly adapted to the nature and capabilities of the Irish nation, it would drop to the ground a mere sounding scroll were there no other means of giving it effect than its intrinsic excellence. All true Irishmen agree in what ought to be done, but how to get it done is the question.”
– Secret Manifesto (Ireland), 1793.
In our last chapter we pointed out how the close of the Napoleonic wars precipitated a commercial crisis in Great Britain and Ireland, and how in the latter country it also served to intensify the bitterness of the relations existing between landlord and tenant. During the continuance of the wars against Napoleon, agricultural prices had steadily risen owing to the demand by the British Government for provisions to supply its huge army and navy. With the rise in prices rents had also risen, but when the close of the war cut off the demand, and prices consequently fell, rents did not fall along with them. A falling market and a stationary or rising rent-roll could have but one result in Ireland – viz., agrarian war.
The landlords insisted upon their ‘pound of flesh,’ and the peasantry organised in secret to terrorise their oppressors and protect themselves. In the year 1829 a fresh cause of popular misery came as a result of the Act granting Catholic Emancipation. Until that year no Catholic had the right to sit in the English House of Commons, to sit on the Bench as a Judge, or to aspire to any of the higher posts in the Civil, Military, or Naval services. As the culmination of a long fight against this iniquitous ‘Protestant Ascendancy’, after he had aroused the entire Catholic population to a pitch of frenzy against the injustices inherent in it, the Catholic leader, Daniel O’Connell, presented himself as a candidate for the representation in Parliament of the County Clare, declaring that if elected he would refuse to take the oath then required of a Member of Parliament, as it libelled the Catholic Religion. In Ireland at that time open voting prevailed, every elector having to declare openly before the clerks of the election and all others who chose to attend, the name of the candidate for whom he voted. In Ireland at that time also, most of the tenants were tenants-at-will, removable at the mere pleasure of the agent or landlord. Hence elections were a combination of farce and tragedy – a farce as far as a means of ascertaining the real wish of the electors was concerned, a tragedy whenever any of the tenants dared to vote against the nominee of the landlord. The suffrage had been extended to all tenants paying an annual rental of forty shillings, irrespective of religious belief, but the terrible power of life and death possessed by the landlord made this suffrage ordinarily useless for popular purposes. Yet when O’Connell appealed to the Catholic peasantry of Clare to brave the vengeance of their landed tyrants, and vote for him in the interests of religious liberty, they nobly responded. O’Connell was elected, and as a result Catholic Emancipation was soon afterwards achieved. But the ruling classes and the British Government took their revenge by coupling with this reform a Bill depriving the smaller tenants of the suffrage, and raising the amount of rent necessary to qualify for a vote to ten pounds.
Up till that time landlords had rather encouraged the growth of population on their estates, as it increased the number of their political adherents, but with the passage of this Act of Parliament this reason ceased to exist, and they immediately began the wholesale eviction of their tenantry and the conversion of the arable lands into grazing farms. The Catholic middle, professional and landed class by Catholic Emancipation had the way opened to them for all the snug berths in the disposal of the Government; the Catholics of the poorer class as a result of the same Act were doomed to extermination, to satisfy the vengeance of a foreign Government and an aristocracy whose power had been defied where it knew itself most supreme.
The wholesale eviction of the smaller tenants and the absorption of their farms into huge grazing ranches, thus closing up every avenue of employment to labour, meant death to the agricultural population, and hence the peasantry struck back by every means in their power. They formed lodges of the secret Ribbon Society, made midnight raids for arms upon the houses of the gentry, assembled at night in large bodies and ploughed up the grass lands, making them useless for grazing purposes, filled up ditches, terrorised graziers into surrendering their ranches, wounded and killed those who had entered the service of graziers or obnoxious landlords, assassinated agents, and sometimes, in sheer despair, opposed their unarmed bodies to the arms of the military. Civil war of the most sanguinary character was convulsing the country; in May, 1831, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and a huge military force accompanied by artillery marched through Clare to overawe the people, but as he did not stop evictions, nor provide employment for the labourers whom the establishment of grazing had deprived of their usual employment on the farm, the ‘outrages’ still continued. Nor were the professional patriots, or the newly emancipated Catholic rich, any more sympathetic to the unfortunate people. They had opened the way for themselves to place and preferment by using the labourer and cottier-farmer as a lever to overthrow the fortress of religious bigotry and ascendancy, and now when the fight was won, they abandoned these poor co-religionists of theirs to the tender mercies of their economic masters. To the cry of despair welling up from the hearts of the evicted families, crouching in hunger upon the road-side in sight of their ruined homes, to the heartbroken appeal of the labourer permanently disemployed by the destruction of his source of employment; to the wail of famishing women and children the politicians invariably had but one answer – “Be law-abiding, and wait for the Repeal of the Union”. We are not exaggerating. One of the most ardent Repealers and closest friends of Daniel O’Connell, Mr. Thomas Steele, had the following manifesto posted up in the Market Place of Ennis and other parts of Clare, addressed to the desperate labourers and farmers: –
“Unless you desist, I denounce you as traitors to the cause of the liberty of Ireland ... I leave you to the Government and the fire and bayonets of the military. Your blood be upon your own souls.”
This language of denunciation was uttered to the heroic men and women who had sacrificed their homes, their security, and the hopes of food for their children to win the emancipation front religious tyranny of the well-fed snobs who thus abandoned them. It is difficult to see how a promised Repeal of the Union some time in the future could have been of any use to the starving men of Clare, especially when they knew that their fathers had been starved, evicted and tyrannised over before just as they were after the Union. At that time, however, it was deemed a highly patriotic act to ascribe all the ills that Irish flesh is heir to, to the Union. For example, Mr. O’Gorman Mahon, speaking in the House of Commons, London, on February 8, 1831, hinted that the snow-storm then covering Ireland was a result of the Legislative Union. He said: –
“Did the Hon. Members imagine that they could prevent the unfortunate men who were under five feet of snow from thinking they could better their condition by a Repeal of the Union. It might be said that England had not caused the snow, but the people had the snow on them, and they thought that their connection with England had reduced them to the state in which they now were.”
Another patriot, destined in after years to don the mantle of an Irish rebel, William Smith O’Brien, at this time, 1830, published a pamphlet advocating emigration as the one remedy for Irish misery.
On the other hand a Commission appointed by the House of Lords in 1839 to inquire into the causes of the unrest and secret conspiracies amongst the poorer class examined many witnesses in close touch with the life of the peasantry and elicited much interesting testimony tending to prove that the evil was much more deeply rooted than any political scheme of Government, and that its real roots were in the social conditions. Thus examined as to the attitude of the labourers towards the Ribbon Association, one witness declared: –
“Many look to the Association for protection. They think they have no other protection.” Question: – “What are the principal objects they have in view?” Answer: – “To keep themselves upon their lands. I have often heard their conversation, when they say: –
‘What good did Emancipation do for us? Are we better clothed or fed, or are our children better clothed or fed? Are we not as naked as we were, and eating dry potatoes when we can get them? Let us notice the farmers to give us better food and better wages, and not give so much to the landlord, and more to the workman; we must not be letting them be turning the poor people off the ground.’”
And a Mr. Poulett Scroope, M.P., declared in one of his writings upon the necessity for a Poor Law: “The tithe question, the Church, the Grand Jury laws, the more or fewer Catholics appointed to the Shrievalty or Magistracy – these are all topics for political agitation among idle mobs; but the midnight massacre, the daily plunder, the frequent insurrection, the insecurity of life and property throughout agricultural districts of Ireland, these are neither caused by agitation, nor can be put down with agitation".”
It will be thus seen that the opinion of the independent Member of Parliament coincided with that of the revolting labourers as to the relative unimportance to the toilers of Ireland of the subjects which then, as now, bulked most largely in the minds of politicians.
This was the state of things political and social in Ireland in the year 1831 and as it was in Clare the final effective blow had been struck for religious emancipation, so it also was Clare that was destined to see the first effort to discover a peaceful way of achieving that social Emancipation, without which all other freedom, religious or political, must ever remain as Dead Sea fruit to the palate of Labour.
In 1832 the great English socialist, Robert Owen, visited Ireland and held a number of meetings in the Rotunda, Dublin, for the purpose of explaining the principles of Socialism to the people of that city. His audiences were mainly composed of the well-to-do inhabitants, as was, indeed, the case universally at that period when Socialism was the fad of the rich instead of the faith of the poor. The Duke of Leinster, the Catholic Archbishop Murray, Lord Meath, Lord Cloncurry, and others occupied the platform, and as a result of the picture drawn by Owen of the misery then existing, and the attendant insecurity of life and property amongst all classes, and his outline of the possibilities which a system of Socialist co-operation could produce, an association styling itself the Hibernian Philanthropic Society was formed to carry out his ideas. A sum of money was subscribed to aid the prospects of the society, a General Brown giving £1,000, Lord Cloncurry £500, Mr. Owen himself subscribing £1,000, and £100 being raised from other sources. The society was short-lived and ineffectual, but one of the members, Mr. Arthur Vandeleur, an Irish landlord, was so deeply impressed with all he had seen and heard of the possibilities of Owenite Socialism, that in 1831, when crime and outrage in the country had reached its zenith, and the insecurity of life in his own class had been brought home to him by the assassination of the steward of his estate for unfeeling conduct towards the labourers, he resolved to make an effort to establish a Socialist colony upon his property at Ralahine, County Clare. For that purpose he invited to Ireland a Mr. Craig, of Manchester, a follower of Owen, and entrusted him with the task of carrying the project into execution.
Though Mr. Craig knew no Irish, and the people of Ralahine, as a rule, knew no English – a state of matters which greatly complicated the work of explanation – an understanding was finally arrived at, and the estate was turned over to an association of the people organised under the title of The Ralahine Agricultural and Manufacturing Co-operative Association.
In the preamble to the Laws of the Association, its objects were defined as follows: –
The acquisition of a common capital.
The mutual assurance of its members against the evils of poverty, sickness, infirmity, and old age.
The attainment of a greater share of the comforts of life than the working classes now possess.
The mental and moral improvement of its adult members.
The education of their children.
The following paragraphs selected from the Rules of the Association will give a pretty clear idea of its most important features: –
BASIS OF THE SOCIETY That all the stock, implements of husbandry, and other property belong to and are the property of Mr. Vandeleur, until the Society accumulates sufficient to pay for them; they then become the joint property of the Society. PRODUCTION We engage that whatever talents we may individually possess, whether mental or muscular, agricultural, manufacturing, or scientific, shall be directed to the benefit of all, as well by their immediate exercise in all necessary occupations as by communicating our knowledge to each other, and particularly to the young. That, as far as can be reduced to practice, each individual shall assist in agricultural operations, particularly in harvest, it being fully understood that no individual is to act as steward, but all are to work. That all the youth, male or female, do engage to learn some useful trade, together with agriculture and gardening, between the ages of nine and seventeen years. That the committee meet every evening to arrange the business for the following day. That the hours of labour be from six in the morning till six in the evening in summer, and from daybreak till dusk in winter, with the intermission of one hour for dinner. That each agricultural labouring man shall receive eightpence, and every woman fivepence per day for their labour (these were the ordinary wages of the country, the secretary, storekeeper, smiths, joiners, and a few others received something more; the excess being borne by the proprietor) which it is expected will be paid out at the store in provisions, or any other article the society may produce or keep there; any other articles may be purchased elsewhere. That no member be expected to perform any service or work but such as is agreeable to his or her feelings, or they are able to perform; but if any member thinks that any other member is not usefully employing his or her time, it is his or her duty to report it to the committee, whose duty it will be to bring that member’s conduct before a general meeting, who shall have power, if necessary, to expel that useless member. DISTRIBUTION AND DOMESTIC ECONOMY That all the services usually performed by servants be performed by the youth of both sexes under the age of seventeen years, either by rotation or choice. That the expenses of the children’s food, clothing, washing, lodging, and education be paid out of the common funds of the society, from the time they are weaned till they arrive at the age of seventeen, when they shall be eligible to become members. That a charge be made for the food and clothing, &c., of those children trained by their parents, and residing in their dwelling houses. That each person occupying a house, or cooking and consuming their victuals therein, must pay for the fuel used. That no charge be made for fuel used in the public room. That it shall be a special object for the sub-committee of domestic economy, or the superintendent of that department, to ascertain and put in practice the best and most economical methods of preparing and cooking the food. That all the washing be done together in the public washhouse; the expenses of soap, labour, fuel, &c., to be equally borne by all the adult members. That each member pay the sum of one half-penny out of every shilling received as wages to form a fund to be placed in the hands of the committee, who shall pay the wages out of this fund of any member who may fall sick or meet with an accident. Any damage done by a member to the stock, implements, or any other property belonging to the society to be made good out of the wages of the individual, unless the damage is satisfactorily accounted for to the committee. EDUCATION AND FORMATION OF CHARACTER We guarantee each other that the young children of any person dying whilst a member of this society, shall be equally protected, educated, and cherished with the children of the living members, and entitled, when they arrive at the age of seventeen, to all the privileges of members. That each individual shall enjoy perfect liberty of conscience, and freedom of expression of opinion, and in religious worship. That no spirituous liquors of any kind, tobacco, or snuff be kept in the store, or on the premises. That if any of us should unfortunately have a dispute with any other person, we agree to abide by a decision of the majority of the members, or any person to whom the matter in question may be by them referred. That any person wishing to marry another do sign a declaration to that effect one week previous to the marriage taking place, and that immediate preparations be made for the erection, or fitting-up of a suitable dwelling house for their reception. That any person wishing to marry another person, not a member, shall sign a declaration according to the last rule; the person not a member shall then be balloted for, and, if rejected, both must leave the society. That if the conduct of any member be found injurious to the well-being of the society, the committee shall explain to him or her in what respect his or her conduct shall continue to transgress the rules, such member shall be brought before a general meeting, called for the purpose, and if the complaint be substantiated, three-fourths of the members present shall have power to expel, by ballot, such refractory member. GOVERNMENT The society to be governed, and its business transacted, by a committee of nine members, to be chosen half-yearly, by ballot, by all the adult male and female members, the ballot list to contain at least four of the last committee. The committee to meet every evening and their transactions to be regularly entered into a minute book, the recapitulation of which is to be given at the society’s general meeting by the secretary. That there be a general weekly meeting of the society; that the treasurer’s accounts be audited by the committee, and read over to the society; that the Suggestion Book be also read at this meeting.
The colony did not use the ordinary currency of the country, but instead adopted a ‘Labour Note’ system of payment, all workers being paid in notes according to the number of hours worked, and being able to exchange the notes in the store for all the necessities of life. The notes were printed on stiff cardboard about the size of a visiting card, and represented the equivalent of a whole, a half, a quarter, an eighth, and a sixteenth of a day’s labour. There were also special notes printed in red ink representing respectively the labours of a day and a half, and two days. In his account of the colony published under the title of History of Ralahine, by Heywood & Sons, Manchester (a book we earnestly recommend to all our readers), Mr. Craig says: – “The labour was recorded daily on a ‘Labour Sheet’, which was exposed to view during the following week. The members could work or not at their own discretion. If no work, no record, and, therefore, no pay. Practically the arrangement was of great use. There were no idlers”. Further on he comments: –
“The advantages of the labour notes were soon evident in the saving of members. They had no anxiety as to employment, wages, or the price of provisions. Each could partake of as much vegetable food as he or she could desire. The expenses of the children from infancy, for food or education, were provided for out of the common fund. “The object should be to obtain a rule of justice, if we seek the law of righteousness. This can only be fully realised in that equality arising out of a community of property where the labour of one member is valued at the same rate as that of another member, and labour is exchanged for labour. It was not possible to attain to this condition of equality at Ralahine, but we made such arrangements as would impart a feeling of security, fairness and justice to all. The prices of provisions were fixed and uniform. A labourer was charged one shilling a week for as many vegetables and as much fruit as he chose to consume; milk was a penny per quart; beef and mutton fourpence, and pork two and one-half pence per pound. The married members occupying separate quarters were charged sixpence per week for rent, and twopence for fuel.”
In dealing with Ireland no one can afford to ignore the question of the attitude of the clergy; it is therefore interesting to quote the words of an English visitor to Ralahine, a Mr. Finch, who afterwards wrote a series of fourteen letters describing the community, and offered to lay a special report before a Select Committee of the House of Commons upon the subject. He says: –
“The only religion taught by the society was the unceasing practice of promoting the happiness of every man, woman, and child to the utmost extent in their power. Hence the Bible was not used as a school-book; no sectarian opinions were taught in the schools; no public dispute about religious dogmas or party political questions took place; nor were members allowed to ridicule each other’s religion; nor were there any attempts at proselytism. Perfect freedom in the performance of religious duties and religious exercises was guaranteed to all. The teaching of religion was left to ministers of religion and to the parents; but no priest or minister received anything from the funds of the society. Nevertheless, both Protestant and Catholic priests were friendly to the system as soon as they understood it, and one reason was that they found these sober, industrious persons had now a little to give them out of their earnings, whereas formerly they had been beggars.”
Mr. Craig also states that the members of the community, after it had been in operation for some time, were better Catholics than before they began. He had at first considerable difficulty in warding off the attacks of zealous Protestant proselytisers, and his firmness in doing so was one of the chief factors in winning the confidence of the people as well as their support in insisting upon the absolutely non-sectarian character of the teaching.
All disputes between the members were settled by appeals to a general meeting in which all adults of both sexes participated, and from which all judges, lawyers, and other members of the legal fraternity were rigorously excluded.
To those who fear that the institution of common property will be inimical to progress and invention, it must be reassuring to learn that this community of ‘ignorant’ Irish peasants introduced into Ralahine the first reaping machine used in Ireland, and hailed it as a blessing at a time when the gentleman farmers of England were still gravely debating the practicability of the invention. From an address to the agricultural labourers of the County Clare, issued by the community on the introduction of this machine, we take the following passages, illustrative of the difference of effect between invention under common ownership and capitalist ownership: –
“This machine of ours is one of the first machines ever given to the working classes to lighten their labour, and at the same time increase their comforts. It does not benefit any one person among us exclusively, nor throw any individual out of employment. Any kind of machinery used for shortening labour – except used in a co-operative society like ours – must tend to lessen wages, and to deprive working men of employment, and finally either to starve them, force them into some other employment (and then reduce wages in that also) or compel them to emigrate. Now, if the working classes would cordially and peacefully unite to adopt our system, no power or party could prevent their success.”
This was published by order of the committee, 21st August, 1833, and when we observe the date we cannot but wonder at the number of things Clare – and the rest of Ireland – has forgotten since.
It must not be supposed that the landlord of the estate on which Ralahine was situated had allowed his enthusiasm for Socialism to run away with his self-interest. On the contrary, when turning over his farms to the community he stipulated for the payment to himself of a very heavy rental in kind. We extract from Brotherhood, a Christian Socialist Journal published in the north of Ireland in 1891, a statement of the rental, and a very luminous summing-up of the lesson of Ralahine, by the editor, Mr. Bruce Wallace, long a hard and unselfish worker for the cause of Socialism in Ireland: –
“The Association was bound to deliver annually, either at Ralahine, Bunratty, Clare, or Limerick, as the landlord might require, free of expense – Wheat 320 brls. Barley 240 brls. Oats 50 brls. Butter 10 cwt. Pork 30 cwt. Beef 70 cwt. “At the prices then prevailing, this amount of produce would be equivalent to about, £900, £700 of rent for the use of natural forces and opportunities, and £200 of interest upon capital. It was thus a pretty stiff tribute that these poor Irish toilers had to pay for the privilege of making a little bit of their native soil fruitful. This tribute was, of course, so much to be deducted from the means of improving their sunken condition. In any future efforts that may be made to profit by the example of Ralahine and to apply again the principles of co-operation in farming, there ought to be the utmost care taken to reduce to a minin um the tribute payable to non-workers, and if possible to get rid of it altogether. If, despite this heavy burden of having to produce a luxurious maintenance for loungers, the condition of the toilers at Ralahine, as we shall see, was marvellously raised by the introduction of the co-operative principle amongst them, how much more satisfactorily would it have been raised had they been free of that depressing dead weight?”
Such is the lesson of Ralahine. Had all the land and buildings belonged to the people, had all other estates in Ireland been conducted on the same principles, and the industries of the country also so organised, had each of them appointed delegates to confer on the business of the country at some common centre as Dublin, the framework and basis of a free Ireland would have been realised. And when Ireland does emerge into complete control of her own destinies she must seek the happiness of her people in the extension on a national basis of the social arrangements of Ralahine, or else be but another social purgatory for her poor – a purgatory where the pangs of the sufferers will be heightened by remembering the delusive promises of political reformers.
In the most crime-ridden county in Ireland this partial experiment in Socialism abolished crime; where the fiercest fight for religious domination had been fought it brought the mildest tolerance; where drunkenness had fed fuel to the darkest passions it established sobriety and gentleness; where poverty and destitution had engendered brutality, midnight marauding, and a contempt for all social bonds, it enthroned security, peace and reverence for justice, and it did this solely by virtue of the influence of the new social conception attendant upon the institution of common property bringing a common interest to all. Where such changes came in the bud, what might we not expect from the flower? If a partial experiment in Socialism, with all the drawbacks of an experiment, will achieve such magnificent results what could we not rightfully look for were all Ireland, all the world, so organised on the basis of common property, and exploitation and mastership forever abolished?
The downfall of the Association came as a result of the iniquitous land laws of Great Britain refusing to recognise the right of such a community to hold a lease or to act as tenants. The landlord, Mr. Vandeleur, lost his fortune in a gambling transaction in Dublin, and fled in disgrace, unable to pay his debts. The persons who took over the estate under bankruptcy proceedings refused to recognise the community, insisted upon treating its members as common labourers on the estate, seized upon the buildings and grounds and broke up the Association.
So Ralahine ended. But in the rejuvenated Ireland of the future the achievement of those simple peasants will be dwelt upon with admiration as a great and important landmark in the march of the human race towards its complete social emancipation. Ralahine was an Irish point of interrogation erected amidst the wildernesses of capitalist thought and feudal practice, challenging both in vain for an answer. Other smaller communities were also established in Ireland during the same period. A Lord Wallscourt established a somewhat similar community on his estate in County Galway; The Quarterly Review of November, 1819, states that there was then a small community existent nine miles outside Dublin, which held thirty acres, supported a priest and a school of 300 children, had erected buildings, made and sold jaunting cars, and comprised butchers, carpenters and wheelwrights; the Quakers of Dublin established a Co-operative Woollen Factory, which flourished until it was destroyed by litigation set on foot by dissatisfied members who had been won over to the side of rival capitalists, and a communal home was established and long maintained in Dublin by members of the same religious sect, but without any other motive than that of helping forward the march of social amelioration. We understand that the extensive store of Messrs. Ganly & Sons on Usher’s Quay in Dublin was the home of this community, who lived, worked and enjoyed themselves in the spacious halls, and slept in the smaller rooms of what is now the property of a capitalist auctioneer.
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Last updated on 12.8.2003 |
American Freedom Defense Initiative Geller Fellow Nonie Darwish explains the trouble with moderate Muslims:
President Obama told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that 99.9 percent of Muslims are peace-loving and reject jihadist Islam. This is a common statement by many of the so-called “moderate Muslims” in my country of origin, Egypt. That statement is incorrect in many ways, and is designed to confuse Americans and save face of Muslims and their defenders.
It is hard to believe that President Obama believes what he says about Islam, because the day Osama bin Laden was killed was a day of mourning all over the Muslim world. When Obama realized that, he had bin Laden’s body buried at sea so the Muslim world could not erect a monument in Mecca for him.
So why is Obama so passionate about telling us how wonderful Islam is? What does he mean by defending Islam as moderate and peaceful?
It defies logic that only 0.1% percent of Muslims are causing all this never-ending worldwide havoc, and unspeakable mayhem, torture, burning and beheading of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. If they are only 0.1% of the Muslim population, how come the brutal Islamic legal system is unable to round the jihadists up and behead them in the infamous public squares of Saudi Arabia? How come moderate Muslims, the 99.9%, are unable to explain away their passivity with jihadists while those jihadists are brutalizing, honor killing and terrorizing apostates?
How many jihadists have been declared apostates by Saudi Arabia? How many were beheaded in the Saudi or Iranian public squares? Why has the “moderate” largest Islamic university in the world, Al Azhar, never issued a fatwa of death against ISIS fighters and anyone who joins ISIS? They issue fatwas of death on apostates and women who have sex outside of marriage all the time, so how come none against those jihadists who supposedly ruined Islam’s reputation and caused the world to fear Muslims?
How come President Obama did not demand just that from Al Azhar or from Saudi Arabia, to prove to the anxious American people that the 99.9% of Muslims are on our side?
Obama claims to have the support of a coalition of moderate Muslim governments to fight ISIS. But we see no Muslim armies moving to Syria to rid the world of the 0.1% Muslim jihadists in ISIS. In fact, the real reason why Muslim leaders are not waging war on ISIS, even though they are capable of doing so, is because at least half of the Muslim army will defect and join ISIS. Those nice moderate Muslim armies do not want to violate Sharia law and destroy the newly declared Caliphate, which is at the center of Islam’s religious goals.
There is no doubt that some Leftist Western leaders, who constantly defend Islam, also do not want to go down in history as the ones who destroyed the Caliphate. The war against ISIS is obviously a defensive one, but somehow Islamic history will eventually portray it as an invasion by the West, the same way Muslims today have twisted the mission of the Crusades to portray them as an aggression, when in fact they were a reaction to Islamic terrorism at the time.
If jihadists and terrorists were only 0.1%, we would not have the worldwide Islamic terrorism of today. The number of the criminal population in most societies, Western and non-Western, is certainly more than 0.1%, and most societies, especially in the West, are perfectly capable of controlling their criminal population, and are capable in creating law and order and safety and security for their own citizens.
How come the 0.1% of radical Muslims is capable of causing millions of Muslim refugees, and how come rich Arab countries are not taking care of them?
Survey after survey keeps confirming our fears that the majority of Muslims are for killing apostates. A majority supports Sharia and believes in jihad as a main requirement and obligation for Muslims. Muslim citizens keep electing Islamist groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to power. The majority of the commandments of Islamic holy books command Muslims to kill, terrorize, humiliate and subjugate non-Muslims. Over 64% of the Quran is obsessed with non-members of the religion.
Now let us examine the so-called “moderate” Muslims in the West, who keep accusing jihadists of being un-Islamic, and insist, “not in the name of my religion,” or “they do not speak for Islam.” But what they fail to tell America is that many of the so-called Muslim reformers in America are considered apostates throughout the Muslim world.
Even the eloquent and well-intentioned Dr. Zuhdi Jasser is considered an apostate in many parts of the Muslim world and the Arab media. I once saw an Arabic-language article written about him, Walid Phares, Walid Shoebat and me. The headline of the article says in Arabic: “Four Arab Americans were accused of leading a media campaign to promote hatred of Muslims in America.” The article stated that 42 million dollars were allocated to these four Arab Americans to promote this hatred. The article said it got this information from “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of The Islamophobia Network In America” — which is a Leftist propaganda piece defaming foes of terror.
Such an article is not unusual. The Arab media is full of similar articles, so as to encourage fatwas against the four people mentioned in the article and any other critics of Islam, simply because we speak the truth about Islam and express our love for America.
I have yet to see fatwas of death against jihadists in the Arab media or from Muslim political and religious leaders. It is clear where the heart of those who call themselves moderate Muslims is. It is not against jihadists, but against those who speak against jihad.
Moderate Muslims are confused people, and have been violently and harshly trained over centuries to never think for themselves. Moderate Muslims are suffering from a pathology that allows them to believe in two opposite ideas at the same time and feel perfectly comfortable with them. In their minds, there is no contradiction at all when they say: “Islam is a religion of peace,” and they have no problem with commandments in the Quran to kill and terrorize the infidels.
The confusion in the West about moderate vs. radical Islam is not by accident, but by design, because no one wants to do anything about it; not Western leaders, and not even the 99.9% of nice Muslims.
ABOUT NONIE DARWISH
AFDI Geller Fellow Nonie Darwish is the author “The Devil We Don’t Know” and president of “Former Muslims United,” a program of the American Freedom Defense Initiative.
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on PamelaGeller.com. To stay on top of what’s really happening please follow Pamela on Twitter and like her on Facebook here. |
What is Object Subscripting
Subscripts are shortcuts for accessing elements from a collection, sequence or list. They are used to set and retrieve values by index without needing separate methods for setting and retrieval. A type can have multiple subscripts and subscripts can have more than one dimension. To access elements via subscripts write one or more values between square brackets after the instance name.
Two example types that use object subscripting are Array and Dictionary :
var array = [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 5 , 8 , 13 ] print ( array [ 0 ]) print ( array [ 1 ]) print ( array [ 2 ]) print ( array [ 3 ]) print ( array [ 4 ]) print ( array [ 5 ]) print ( array [ 1 .. 4 ]) // 1..4 is the range from 1 to 4 without 4 print ( array [ 1 ... 4 ]) // 1...4 is the range from 1 to 4 including 4 // prints: // 1 // 2 // 3 // 5 // 8 // 13 // [2, 3, 5] // [2, 3, 5, 8] var dictionary = [ "We" : "❤ Swift" , "❤" : "Swift" , "Swift" : "❤ You" ] print ( dictionary [ "We" ]) print ( dictionary [ "❤" ]) print ( dictionary [ "Swift" ]) // prints: // ❤ Swift // Swift // ❤ You
How to implement Object Subscripting
The syntax is similar to that of computed properties. You declare a subscript using the subscript keyword and then specifying one or more inputs and the return type. Subscripts can be read-write or read-only.
The general syntax of a subscript:
class YourSubscriptedClass { ... subscript ( < parameters > ) -> < return type > { // the getter is required get { < statements > } // the setter is optional set ( < setter name > ) { < statements > } } }
Let’s create a simple subscript that outputs true if a string contains a substring and false otherwise.
extension String { subscript ( pattern : String ) -> Bool { get { let range = self . rangeOfString ( pattern ) return ! range . isEmpty } } } var aString = "We ❤ Swift" aString [ "❤" ] // true aString [ "Hello World" ] // false
And here we have a similar example that can replace substrings using subscripts:
extension String { subscript ( pattern : String ) -> String ? { get { let range = self . rangeOfString ( pattern ) if ! range . isEmpty { return pattern } else { return nil } } set ( replacement ) { let range = self . rangeOfString ( pattern ) if ! range . isEmpty { self = self . stringByReplacingCharactersInRange ( range , withString : replacement ! ) } } } } var aString = "We ❤ Swift" print ( aString [ "❤" ]) // ❤ print ( aString [ "Objective-C" ]) // nil aString [ "We" ] = "You" print ( aString ) // You ❤ Swift
Note: you can use newValue instead of replacement in the setter. newValue being implicitly declared in setter functions.
extension String { subscript ( pattern : String ) -> String ? { ... set { let range = self . rangeOfString ( pattern ) if ! range . isEmpty { self = self . stringByReplacingCharactersInRange ( range , withString : newValue ! ) } } } }
Usage
You can use object subscripting to make code easy to read. For example Swifter uses subscripting to declare routes in an elegant manner.
Create your own DSL for making queries on CoreData models or implement an XPath-like language for getting elements from your user interface. The sky’s the limit.
As NSHipster said “Here be dragons.”, be careful what crazy things you do with subscripting.
Challenges
extend the String class and add a subscript(pattern: String) -> String? for pattern matching using regular expressions
class and add a for pattern matching using regular expressions implement a matrix class
implement a chessboard class
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Diary of a Prison Architect – Evening 3, Power Crisis
Dear Diary,
Things appear to be running smoothly! Our prisoners have begun working in the new workshop, the workmen have built the new laundry building and it seems pretty calm right now. First order of business is to order in the washing machines and other assorted essentials for the laundry. A simple task for our excellent workforce.
The Warden has been liaising with the Foreman and they have completely reworked the daily schedule for the prisoners. they have worked in a full eight hour working day and arranged for some of the better behaved inmates to have some kitchen duties. they may be well behaved now but these criminals will have access to knives and other such dangers. Installing metal detectors has now become a high priority.
Those workers didn’t’ take long to get the metal detector installed. Every prisoner will pass through here on their way from the canteen to the cell block. Amazingly, not one alarm went off as the prisoners went back after dinner. A pleasant surprise.
Disaster! After installing the metal detector and the new washing machines something shorted at the power station. We’ll have to add some more capacitors ASAP otherwise we’re going to have some angry inmates to deal with. Well at least the prisoners can enjoy a good nights sleep while the lights are out. We’d better have flowing water by the morning though.
Fixed by 1AM. We also got our first load of license plates shipped out, just over $700 worth. Pretty meagre but it was only a two hour shift with a partially filled workshop. With some more development this could be quite profitable for us.
Some new staff arrived early this morning, two janitors and two guards. The janitors will basically take care of themselves and the new guards will be stationed in the workshop and laundry. Those places have been a significant capital investment and we don’t need the prisoners mistreating the machines, or each other.
Ah darn-it, another batch of prisoners. Our funds are getting lower and lower and we don’t have a cell block for these guys yet. They’ll have to stay in the holding cell for tonight but today we can get them working in the workshop. These guys can move into cells as soon as they earn us the money to pay for the construction.
We may also have to take a look at that final government grant… I’ll be in my office.
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South Park: The Fractured But Whole may be a game about super heroes, but it’s still an RPG. You will still find many elements of fantasy role-playing games in its structure, and one of those elements are classes. What class you choose and how it affects your player, however, is much different from South Park: The Stick of Truth.
At the game’s opening, after you’ve customized your character, you choose between three classes: Brutalist, Blaster, and Speedster. Each of those classes has four abilities. The Brutalist is the strong class, the Blaster is the ranged class, and the Speedster is the fast class. After you make your choice, Cartman explains your backstory and you get a quick tutorial on the abilities of your chosen class. You can actually try each class out before making your final decision, which is indicative of how classes play out for the rest of the game.
You level up your base stats as you progress through the game, like power and health, but you are not upgrading your abilities, or pouring points into stats related to a specific class. This means you are never locked into a class and can always change. You likely won’t be changing constantly, however. "It's a little more of a measured choice than that,” senior producer Jason Schroeder says, “Cartman is your dungeon master, or your game master, so you kind of need to go to him to change it. So it's a little bit of a choice you need to hold on to."
After you’ve picked your class and made your way through the game’s first narrative day, Cartman gives you the option to start multi-classing. "You can say, ‘I’m going to take two Brutalist powers, a Speedster power, and the Speedster Ultimate and make a character mixed toward that direction.” Schroeder offers as an example of how to mix and match abilities. Other classes will open up later in the game, as well as the option to mix and match between more than just two classes. We don’t know the full list yet, but we know Elementalist and Mystic classes will appear, as well as psychic and healing classes.
The whole idea of shuffling class abilities is to make your character more malleable and customizable. "As your understanding of the tactics games becomes more sophisticated, the classes give you a different range of tactical choices you could be making," Schroeder says. You can even choose to shift your class make-up to complement your buddies, who’s abilities are set in stone when they join your party. You can’t edit their abilities, but you do get a chance to rearrange the party at the start of every fight if there are certain abilities you need to take advantage of in a particular fight.
As part of your character’s development, you also have a character sheet you are filling out through the course of the game. It functions as a progress tracker, with your missions and side-quests showing up on one side, and your character definitions on the other. You have stats like Spunk (your magic and special abilities), Brawn (your physical strength), Dexterity (aiming and accuracy), Speed (how much you can move in the tactical grid, and where you place in the turn order), and Fortitude (defense).
The sheet also details your character’s custom aspects like race, gender, religion, as well as who your arch enemy is, what your kryptonite is, and your power source, which is always your butt. Some of those aspects you can declare, but others, like holy alignment, are based on how you play the game and will affect dialogue and cutscenes, though it doesn’t have major bearing on the overall direction of the story.
There is also an economic level on the character sheet that has to do with how much money is in your pocket, and how much you have in savings. Schroeder didn’t go into too much detail about the economic level, but referenced the season 13 Margaritaville episode of the show, which examined the complicated process of attempting to save money. We didn’t learn more about it, but the character sheet also tracks your detective level.
You also earn a name beyond simply the new kid, and it changes throughout the course of the game. Cartman is always trying out different names on you, nearly all of them themed around butts or farts, but the public learns to identify you as the Farting Vigilante.
Ideally, the malleability of the class system should let players have more control over how to play the game, and maybe even allow you to build your way up to Cartman’s class. "The Coon is a Ninja Maninal, so that one's pretty hard.” Schroeder says, “He's not super enthusiastic about having another Ninja Manimal on the team."
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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced during a New York Times interview that the Holy Bible is the book that made her who she is today.
“If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?” asked The New York Times, in a book review questionnaire.
“At the risk of appearing predictable, the Bible was and remains the biggest influence on my thinking,” Clinton said. “I was raised reading it, memorizing passages from it and being guided by it.”
“I still find it a source of wisdom, comfort and encouragement,” she added.
Clinton explained that she was a voracious book reader, naming off multiple writers who made an impact on her.
“I’ve got a pile of books stacked on my night stand that I’m reading — or hoping to get to soon,” she said.
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Sometimes in legislating, timing is everything.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) championed a measure last week to roll back, at least temporarily, trucking-safety regulations intended to prevent highway accidents. Her proposal enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of the trucking industry, but drew sharp criticism from a trucking union, vehicle-safety advocates, a group called Parents Against Tired Truckers, and regulators at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
When Collins’ measure was taken up in committee last week, very few noticed. Yesterday, however, as NBC News’John Schoen explained, it’s the topic of considerable conversation now.
The New Jersey Turnpike crash involving an allegedly sleep-deprived Wal-Mart truck driver, in which comedian Tracy Morgan was injured and his friend killed, comes just days after the trucking industry won Senate support to roll back new rules designed to make sure truck drivers get enough rest. Kevin Roper, 35, was expected to appear in a New Jersey court on Monday on charges of vehicular homicide, assault and reckless driving in connection with the crash that killed one passenger and left Morgan and two others in critical condition. Roper had not slept for more than 24 hours before the accident, according to the complaint. The high-profile crash comes days after a Senate panel approved a proposal to roll back new rules, first proposed in 2010, forcing truck drivers to pull over and log a minimum number of hours for rest.
The new regulations, which the Obama administration considers “common sense” safeguards, would require long-haul drivers to honor “hours-of-service” rules, working no more than 70 hours per week – down from 82. The regulations would also force drivers to follow “restart” rules that require at least 34 consecutive hours of downtime between work weeks.
Collins and the trucking industry want to suspend both measures for at least a year.
And their efforts were proceeding according to plan, right up until this weekend.
Instead of smooth legislative sailing, the deadly crash in New Jersey has given the debate “ new urgency .”
On Monday, Parents Against Tired Truckers, the Truck Safety Coalition and the Teamsters union said that U.S. truck crashes kill about 4,000 people each year and injure 100,000 more, at a cost of some $87 billion. The groups hope that the fatal crash involving Morgan will persuade Congress to reject an amendment that a Senate committee approved Thursday to restore older rest rules for commercial truckers. “A lot of people don’t know about Susan Slattery but a lot of people care about Tracy Morgan,” said Ed Slattery of Cockeysville, Md., whose wife Susan was killed in August 2010 in a truck crash. His two sons who were traveling with her were critically wounded, and Slattery said he retired from his job to care for one son who was in a coma and is now permanently disabled. “No other industry can get away with killing 4,000 people every year. This has just got to stop. It’s got to stop.”
To be sure, many of these activists were deeply concerned about Collins’ measure last week, too. The difference is, now they have a spotlight they didn’t have before.
Joan Claybrook, former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, held a conference call with reporters yesterday, and the media showed up
“This is a major moment, really, to stop the trucking industry from using its major clout,” Claybrook said. “It seems no matter what we do, in terms of pushing to get safer trucks on the road, the trucking industry uses its clout to undo those improvements or stop any ones we push…. We are vehemently opposing the Collins amendment.”
As we talked about yesterday, the Maine Republican believes the current rules “have presented some unintended and unanticipated consequences that are not in the best interest of public safety, truck drivers, or the businesses and consumers that depend on their services.”
Anne Ferro, who helps lead the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, argued last week that Collins has it backwards. “We carefully considered the public safety and health risks of long work hours, and solicited input from everyone who has a stake in this important issue, including victims’ advocates, truck drivers and companies,” Ferro said. “Suspending the current Hours-of-Service safety rules will expose families and drivers to greater risk every time they’re on the road.” |
Three young male suicides occur on average every day in the UK, according to a national British charity. The Campaign Against Living Miserably claims the public are hardly aware that “suicide is the single biggest killer of young men in the UK.”
CALM, which was set up to prevent male suicide in the UK, has informed that in 2011 suicide accounted for the deaths of more young men in England and Wales than road death, murder and HIV/AIDs combined.
The Campaign Against Living Miserably insists that gender is key to tackling the UK’s suicide rate. The statistics speak for themselves.
In 2011 there were 6,045 suicides in people aged 15 and over in the UK, 4,552 male suicides and 1,493 female suicides, according to the Office for National Statistics.
There were 1,242 suicides of men aged 15-35 in the UK in 2011. This compares to 377 suicides of women aged 15-35 the same year.
The highest suicide rate was meanwhile seen in males aged 30 to 44 (23.5 deaths per 100,000 population in 2011).
According to the official data, the suicide rate in males aged 45 to 59 also increased significantly between 2007 and 2011 (22.2 deaths per 100,000 population in 2011).
It’s believed that hundreds of male suicides could be prevented in the UK if men didn’t feel ashamed to ask for help when they desperately need it.
According to the Campaign Against Living Miserably, there is a “cultural barrier” preventing men from seeking professional help. Modern society expects them to be unbreakable and immune to nervous breakdown; failure to be in control of things 24/7 is seen as an embarrassing loss of masculinity.
Research by the University of Liverpool shows the recent recession in the UK has caused about 1,000 additional suicides in England - 846 among men and 155 among women. The analysis showed that increases in male unemployment were associated with about two-fifths of the rises in suicides among men.
A study conducted by the Samaritans charity, aimed at reducing suicide in the UK, has also concluded that “you are far more likely to die by suicide if you are of low socio-economic position and a man,” for many reasons “because of the way society expects men to behave.” |
In the latest clash between a US internet company and Brazilian law enforcement authorities, police in São Paulo have detained the regional vice-president of Facebook for failing to provide information requested by a criminal investigation.
Diego Dzodan was taken into custody at Garulhos airport on Tuesday and is now being questioned about Facebook subsidiary WhatsApp’s alleged non-compliance with a court order.
According to the court, WhatsApp had been ordered for more than a month to reveal messages relating to a suspected drug-trafficking ring. After the company denied three related requests by federal police, the judge first imposed a daily fine on the US company of 50,000 reais (£9,000), then a daily penalty of 1m reais (£180,000), and finally ordered the arrest.
“In the face of repeated non-compliance, the judge Marcel Maia ordered the arrest of a representative of the company in Brazil, Mr Diego Dzodan for obstructing the police investigation,” a court spokesman wrote in an email.
Facebook called the police action “extreme and disproportionate”.
It says WhatsApp – which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 and has no staff based in Brazil – operates independently so Dzodan should not be held responsible. Moreover, it notes that the WhatsApp messaging service does not store content, which is encrypted by users at either end. The courts, it says, are requesting information it does not have.
This is different from information found on the Facebook social network, which is archived and can be provided on a case-by-case basis if requested by Brazilian law enforcement officers and approved by the company’s lawyers.
“Facebook has always been and will be available to address any questions Brazilian authorities may have,” a company spokesman said.
This is not the first controversy regarding WhatsApp, which has been the most popular download in Brazil over the past two years and is used by about half of the 200 million population.
In a separate case in December, a court issued an injunction for WhatsApp to be shut down for 48 hours for twice failing to comply with its orders.
That injunction was overturned after an outcry by users and an intervention by Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who described the shutdown as “a sad day for Brazil”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The main entrance gate of the Provisional Detention Centre in São Paulo, Brazil, where Facebook’s Diego Dzodan, is being held. Photograph: Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images
Adriano Mendes, a lawyer who specialises in digital law but is not directly involved in the current case, said such disputes were caused by differences in data protection regulations and knowledge.
“Sometimes judges here think that Facebook and Google are responsible to store all the information they have. But those firms don’t always have it after a month or a year,” he said. “A poor understanding of how technology works creates a lot of problems in Brazil. The judicial system is not equipped to deal with these issues.”
He predicted the case against Facebook would shortly be overturned by a higher court as was the case last December.
A spokesman for WhatsApp said the company had cooperated with investigators “to the full extent of our ability”.
“We are disappointed that law enforcement took this extreme step. WhatsApp cannot provide information we do not have,” the spokesman said.
A spokesman for Facebook decried the arrest, saying that the company had always been available to answer questions by the Brazilian authorities.
“We are disappointed with the extreme and disproportionate measure of having a Facebook executive escorted to a police station in connection with case involving WhatsApp, which operates separately from Facebook,” the spokesman said.
As in other countries, the debate in Brazil over individual privacy and digital monitoring by the authorities has gathered pace in recent years. Interceptions of personal communications – mostly in the form of phone taps – are widely used by the police in criminal cases with court approval.
But there was outrage in 2013 when leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the US National Security Agency was spying on the emails and phone calls of President Dilma Rousseff and senior executives of the state-run oil company Petrobras. |
Johnny Football doesn't quite know where he'll be playing next year yet.
Texas A&M star quarterback Johnny Manziel says his decision on whether or not to return to the school will be impacted by his draft stock projection and whether or not the league thinks he'll be taken in the first round:
Manziel was asked on The Dan Patrick Show what he would do if his draft projection isn't first-round favorable, Manziel paused before answering, then said: "I don't know what I would do. It would be a decision I would have to make with my family, and see what was best for me. It would probably mean returning to A&M another year. I still have a big choice ahead either way."
After becoming the first freshman ever to win the Heisman award in 2012, Manziel had a strong sophomore campaign, even though his statistics dropped. The sophomore led the Aggies to an 8-4 record with 41 total touchdowns and more than 4,400 total yards -- slightly down from his 47 touchdown, 5,000-plus yard performance last season.
Many quarterbacks are expected to be taken early in this year's draft, and our own Mocking the Draft has Manziel going 20th to the Arizona Cardinals.
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‘The poet,’ Gu Cheng wrote in 1987, ‘is just like the fabled hunter who naps beside a tree, waiting for hares to break their skulls by running headlong into the tree trunk. After waiting for a long time, the poet discovers that he is the hare.’ These words turned out to be prophetic; six years later, his terrible and sordid crash against the tree would nearly obliterate what had come before. He had been a major cultural figure in China; now his poems were being read as flashbacks from his death.
He was born in 1956 in Beijing, the son of a well-known poet and army officer, Gu Gong. At 12, he wrote a two-line poem, ‘One Generation’, which was to become an emblem of the new unofficial poetry:
Even with these dark eyes, a gift of the dark night
I go to seek the shining light[1]
In 1969, the Cultural Revolution sent his family into the salt desert of Shandong Province to herd pigs. The locals spoke a dialect Gu Cheng could not understand, and in his isolation he became absorbed in the natural world: ‘Nature’s voice became language in my heart. That was happiness.’ His favourite book was Jean-Henri Fabre’s 19th-century entomological notes and drawings; he collected insects and watched birds; he wrote poems in the sand with a twig, poems with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’. Like John Clare, he found his poems in the fields and wrote them down. ‘I heard a mysterious sound in nature,’ he later said. ‘That sound became poetry in my life.’ He wrote that his ‘earliest experience of the nature of poetry’ was a raindrop. His childhood was a vision of paradise from which he never recuperated.
He returned to Beijing in 1974, and worked in a factory. He wrote furiously, even – like Charles Olson – on the walls of his room. He hated the city, ‘those small light-filled boxes, the crucibles in which age-old humanity is melted down.’ He thought of himself as an insect, ‘pinned to a board with its legs dancing’. But he fell in with a group of poets, Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Yang Lian, Mang Ke, Shu Ting and others, most of them seven or ten years older than him, who were producing China’s first samizdat magazine, Jintian (‘Today’). The literary expression of the new Democracy Wall movement (their first ‘issue’ was a series of broadsides surreptitiously plastered on walls in Beijing), the group had rejected socialist realism, with its epics of revolutionary heroes and glorious harvests, to write first-person, introspective and imagistic lyrics.
Grey sky
grey road
grey buildings
in the grey rain
Through this wide dead greyness
walk two children
one bright red
one pale green
This, one of Gu Cheng’s earliest poems, was attacked by an official critic as menglong, and the word became attached to the group as a whole. Menglong literally means ‘misty’, but without the sentimental and ephemeral associations the word has in English: ‘obscure’ would be a more accurate translation. Bei Dao has suggested that they should simply be known as the Today Group, but unfortunately the Misty Poets has stuck in English. As Gu Cheng said at the time, ‘it’s not misty at all. In fact, some things are becoming clearer.’
They became the conscience of the generation and its pop stars. They read their poems in stadiums packed with young people, and had slapstick adventures, straight out of A Hard Day’s Night, escaping the throngs of adoring fans. Officialdom didn’t know what to do with them. Their work was banned, and they were condemned in the Anti-Spiritual Pollution and Anti-Bourgeois Liberalism campaigns. Gu Cheng’s father, Gu Gong, wrote an essay that begins: ‘I am growing more and more incapable of understanding my son’s poetry. I am getting more and more annoyed.’ Full of phrases such as ‘the more I read, the more angry I get,’ ‘I became furious,’ ‘I became disappointed, miserable,’ the article finally attempts a half-hearted reconciliation: Well, we must try to understand this new generation.
Gu Cheng’s work took a crazy leap from introspective lyricism in 1981 with ‘Bulin’s File’, the first of his poem sequences. Bulin is a trickster figure, much like the Monkey King of the classic Chinese novel, The Journey to the West – Gu Cheng himself was born in the Year of the Monkey – and ‘Bulin’s File’ is a set of goofy fairy tales and deranged nursery rhymes that seem to have been written by a child who accidentally ate some hallucinogenic mushrooms:
Everyone with long golden fingernails
should have them cut
because Bulin is out of work
the newly sprouted moon is thin and curved
because bars of gold and blocks of ice
are about to be wed
every home needs a combination lock
every purse, a zipper
because danger is born
the crab and round brown cupcake crawl
out of the film studio
down to the beach
‘Bulin’ was unlike anything that had ever been written in Chinese, but Gu Cheng didn’t considered it a breakthrough. That was to come a few years later.
In 1983, he married a pretty student poet he had met on a train, Xie Ye. On their wedding day, he said to her: ‘Let’s commit suicide together.’ She was vivacious and practical; he was lost in a dream and often melancholic. He persuaded her to drop out of school so that they would remain inseparable.
In 1985, he had a revelation. Before, he had ‘tried to be a human being’, but now he realised that the world was an illusion, and he learned to leave his self behind and inhabit a shadow existence. Before, he had written ‘mainly lyrical poetry’. Now he ‘discovered a strange and unique phenomenon: that words themselves acted like drops of liquid mercury splashing about, moving in any direction’. He called one of his long sequences ‘Liquid Mercury’. ‘Any word may be as beautiful as water so long as it is free of restraints,’ he wrote.
In an interview with the translator Simon Patton, he said:
I thought the important thing about language at that time was not to change its form, not a question of how you used it – it wasn’t a matter of taking this piece of wood and making a plank out of it … The important thing was to rap it – it turns into glass; rap it again and it turns to brass; again and to water. Changes in the texture of language.
‘Many of the characteristics of Gu Cheng’s previous work (predictable rhyme, organisation into stanzas, recoverable metaphor, recognisable themes),’ Patton writes, ‘were jettisoned in an effort to forge new principles of organisation. These principles – which include homophony, homography, graphic association (exploitation of various features of written Chinese characters), parataxis, deviant syntax and nonsense strings – were all inspired by an intensely anti-lyrical desire.’
One of the ‘Liquid Mercury’ poems reads:
The overturned pail is seen from afar
dee dee da
delicate fish
dancing in the air dee dee da dee da fish bring trees into the air
Dee dee da Fish bring trees into the
air
rust coloured legs sticking up in the
air
It is extraordinary that Gu Cheng, largely ignorant of Western Modernism – the few poets he knew and admired in translation were Lorca, Tagore, Elytis and Paz – independently recreated much of the Western literary history of the 20th century. From the Imagism and Symbolism of the early lyrics, he moved on to Dadaism or one of the Futurisms. (Two earlier translators, Sean Golden and Chu Chiyu, said they were continually reminded of Gertrude Stein, whom Gu Cheng had never read.) He ultimately landed in a completely idiosyncratic corner of Surrealism. It is probably safe to say that Gu Cheng was the most radical poet in all of China’s 2500 years of written poetry.
In 1988, Gu Cheng and Xie Ye moved to New Zealand. At first, he had a job at the University of Auckland, teaching conversational Chinese. He would sit silently staring at his students, waiting for them to begin the conversation, and they would sit waiting for him to speak. Soon the students stopped coming to class, and when eventually this was discovered, he was fired.
The couple moved into a dilapidated house without electricity or running water on Waiheke, a small island in the Bay of Auckland. It was Gu Cheng’s attempt to regain the paradise of his childhood. They gathered shellfish and roots and berries – he wouldn’t let Xie Ye cook – and got ill from eating the wrong things; they made spring rolls and crude pottery that they tried to sell in a local market; they had a son whom they named Mu’er (‘Wood-Ear’), after a fungus that grows on rotten wood, common in Chinese cuisine. Xie Ye typed and edited all Gu Cheng’s manuscripts, and he paid her in gold and silver play money that he painted. He refused to learn English, or any other language: ‘If a Chinese person learns another language,’ he explained, ‘he will then lose his feeling of the existence of the Self, his being.’ He ruined their kitchen pots making lead casts of their footprints. He was always seen wearing a tall cylindrical hat that had been made from the leg of a pair of blue jeans.
This was more or less what I knew about Gu Cheng, and what was generally known, when I met him in 1992. That year, he was living in Berlin on a DAAD fellowship, and was visiting New York with four other poets from the Today Group, in connection with an anthology of their earliest poems, A Splintered Mirror, edited by Donald Finkel and Carolyn Kizer (who referred to them as the ‘Misties’).
The first night, Gu Cheng, Xie Ye and I went to a restaurant in Chinatown. As we sat down, my first question, predictably, was about his hat. He told me that he always wore it so that none of his thoughts would escape his head. Xie Ye said that he also slept in it, in order not to lose his dreams.
Gu Cheng picked up the menu and chose a dish. Xie Ye was amazed. He had never before ordered anything in a restaurant, preferring to eat whatever he was served. She then put a tape recorder on the table. She told me that everything Gu Cheng said should be preserved.
We talked for hours, but I understood little of it. Every topic immediately led to a disquisition on cosmic forces: the Cultural Revolution was like the chaos before creation in Chinese mythology, before things separated into yin and yang, and Tiananmen Square represented their continuing imbalance; Mao Zedong, in a way I couldn’t follow, was somehow the embodiment of wubuwei, Taoist non-non-action. Xie Ye gazed at him adoringly the whole time, and both of them radiated an innocent sweetness. I felt I was in the presence of one of those crazy mountain sages of Chinese tradition.
Somewhere in the evening, Gu Cheng left for the bathroom, and as soon as he was out of sight, Xie Ye turned to me smiling and said: ‘I hope he dies.’ She explained that, in New Zealand, he had forced her to give their son to a Maori couple to raise, as he demanded her undivided attention and wanted to be the only male in the house. ‘I can’t get my baby back unless he is dead,’ she said. I had met them for the first time just a few hours before.
Their private travails would soon become public knowledge. Before leaving for New Zealand, Gu Cheng had fallen in love – but had not yet had an affair – with a student, Li Ying, known as Ying’er. They continued to correspond, and Xie Ye came up with the scheme that by inviting Ying’er to Waiheke Island, she could be replaced as wife, leave Gu Cheng, and be reunited with her son. She paid for Ying’er’s ticket. Gu Cheng, however, wanted to live the life of the hero of The Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as The Story of the Stone), as the prince of the ‘Kingdom of Daughters’, surrounded by women improvising poetry in a pleasure garden far from the world. (Women, he said, were only beautiful when they did nothing.) Ying’er, in turn, though she did become Gu Cheng’s lover, was appalled by their living conditions. After a year, Gu Cheng and Xie Ye left for Berlin to earn some money to fix up the house. Ying’er was supposed to wait for them, but disappeared, supposedly with a much older English martial arts instructor.
In Berlin, Gu Cheng wrote one of the strangest books ever written: Ying’er, which he called his ‘dream of the Gu Cheng chamber’, a barely fictionalised account, with long passages of physical detail, of the love affair and its break-up. It is obsessive and hallucinated, narcissistic and self-pitying, precise and incoherent, kitschy and terrifying – in the end perhaps more of a document than a piece of literature, and now impossible to read at a purely aesthetic distance. Gu Cheng dictated the book on tape, and Xie Ye transcribed it, adding some paragraphs and chapters of her own. She also began seeing another man. ‘My way is the way of death,’ she told a friend.
At the same time, Gu Cheng was writing some of his best poetry, particularly his last sequence, Cheng (‘City’), a panoramic and simultaneist evocation of the Beijing he had hated and lost. (Under the chestnut trees in a park that summer, Gu Cheng was heard muttering to himself over and over: ‘I wonder what China looks like now.’) The poem was autobiographical in ways that were not always apparent. The title was the Cheng of his name, and at a public reading he introduced the poem by talking about his ‘horror of bus trips across Beijing, when the conductor yelled out, “Next stop, Forbidden City (Gugong),” for it sounded like “Next stop, Gu Gong,” my father.’ (‘Family,’ he once wrote, ‘is the place where destruction begins.’) Its occasional moments of violence are now read as auguries:
They watched you
they were not wearing clothes
you did not feel it lasted long
you were not wearing anything either
I said there would be other programmes that night I put my hand under my shirt
one of my knives was gone I didn’t believe leaving would be like this
the knife was too short
I let you walk ahead as swiftly as the wind
The most annoying thing about committing
murder is finding the opportunity
she caught up with us
what the hell was she doing
I stared at her in the hallway
girls cannot be killed But yesterday they killed four
two in the bedroom two at her door
you showed her the knife
saying you were going to die
she smiled asking how many kids you had
But, most of all, its collage of vignettes – as though written by a hallucinated William Carlos Williams – were meant to be self-erasing illusions in an illusory world. ‘In my poetry,’ Gu Cheng once wrote, ‘the city disappears and what appears instead is a piece of grazing land.’ In its way, it is the Taoist version of the slogan the Situationists had written on the Democracy Walls of Paris in 1968: ‘Under the pavement, the beach.’
By all accounts, Gu Cheng had grown increasingly megalomaniacal and violent. He had taken the parables of Chuang Tzu too literally and turned them into a kind of ‘all things are permitted’ to the Nietzschean superman. In a speech in Frankfurt, he said: ‘He who follows the Tao is entitled to kill, to kill himself, and in fact to do anything, as he is actually engaged in doing nothing.’ Asked about Buddhism in an interview, he replied: ‘Buddhism is for those who don’t know. If you already know, then it no longer exists … But,’ he characteristically added, ‘everything is yours.’ He announced that he had stopped writing and spent a great deal of his time sleeping: that was his real work. ‘I only realise how cold the human heart is when I wake up.’ He claimed that his favourite book, after Fabre, was now Othello. He talked about buying a gun, tried to strangle Xie Ye, ended up in a mental hospital, and was released a few days later when she refused to press charges and assumed responsibility for him. He said that his greatest happiness would be if Xie Ye killed him.
They returned to New Zealand via Tahiti, where they visited the grave of Paul Gauguin, and arrived back on Waiheke Island on 24 September 1993, Gu Cheng’s 37th birthday. On 8 October, he murdered Xie Ye with an axe and then hanged himself.
Ying’er was published in China a few weeks later, and the story became a sensation for highbrows and lowbrows. In New Zealand, it was treated as an extreme example of spousal abuse, but in China it was seen as symbolic of the spiritual desolation of the generation that had come of age in the Cultural Revolution, or the tortured life of the exile, or the tortured life of the artist, or the oppressiveness of the Chinese male, or the tragic life of the muse. It seemed that everyone who had ever known them weighed in with a book or article, some calling Gu Cheng a monster, some saying Xie Ye had turned him into one. Gu Cheng’s mother said that the troubles had begun when he fell out of a window as a child and suffered brain damage. Ying’er herself wrote a book called Heartbroken on Waiheke, which had a preface by an ex-boyfriend to show that Gu Cheng was not the only man in her life. There was even a drippy movie, The Poet, with a beautiful unclothed Japanese starlet as Ying’er. Gu Cheng and Xie Ye had become the Chinese Ted and Sylvia.
It is a Taoist paradox: When you forget about Gu Cheng, you can begin to read him. There are five books available in English translation. An excellent Selected Poems, going up to 1987, edited by Sean Golden and Chu Chiyu, was published by Renditions in Hong Kong in 1990. Ying’er (with the subtitle ‘The Kingdom of Daughters’), translated by Li Xia, oddly appeared in Dortmund (1995) and is almost impossible to find. Li Xia, the leading Gu Cheng scholar in English, has also compiled Essays, Interviews, Recollections and Unpublished Material of Gu Cheng, 20th-Century Chinese Poet: The Poetics of Death (1999) – a useful collection that also includes contradictory accounts of Gu Cheng and Xie Ye’s last months.
Two new books have just been published simultaneously. Nameless Flowers, edited and translated by Aaron Crippen, takes its title from a poem Gu Cheng wrote at 15 and, from the thousands of poems he wrote, favours the corniest short lyrics (‘I will give my love pollen/to the first wild bee’), omits all of the major sequences, and ends early, five years before his death. Crippen, alas, seems to believe that Ernest Dowson was the last word in poetic language: ‘I doff my straw hat’; ‘lowly I have spoken your name’; ‘alone I smile in the mountain wild.’ Flowers waft their fragrance, poets gravely gaze, and no one sleeps when they could slumber.[2]
Despite its equally bad title, Joseph Allen’s Sea of Dreams is far superior.[3] The book surveys the poetry from beginning to end; all the sequences are present in their entirety; and there is a short selection from Gu Cheng’s essays, interviews and stories, as well as a brief excerpt from Ying’er. The translation is in contemporary American English. (Where Crippen has ‘gloaming’, Allen has ‘evening’.) Allen’s Gu Cheng is, as he should be, colloquial, wacky, startling, and sometimes incomprehensible.
In one of his last letters, Gu Cheng wrote: ‘If you read my book, you’ll know that I’m completely mad. Only my hands are normal.’
He wrote: ‘When I walk the road of my imagination, between heaven and earth there is only myself and a type of light green grass.’
He wrote: ‘The deepest of me has never been more than eight years old.’ |
Fingerpicking patterns make your chord progressions really come alive. It’s a beautiful musical element that can give a song just what it needs. The amount of fingerpicking patterns are infinite. If you are just starting out you might want to check out the 16 legendary fingerpicking patterns first. If you got the basics down and you’re ready to step up, check out the alternating bass fingerpicking patterns in this post.
With the alternating bass fingerpicking technique the thumb of your fingerpicking hand is constantly alternating between two or more bass notes while in between your fingers are playing the higher notes. It sounds like you’re playing two guitars at the same time.
Today I will show you two patterns that you can use for your own songs and apply to many popular songs.
Tips:
– Practice slowly in the beginning. Be patient and don’t rush at the start!
– Memorize the pattern for each chord.
– Make sure every notes sounds clean and clear.
– When you feel comfortable playing it slow, gradually build up your speed.
– Practice the pattern using the chord progression.
– Practice regurarly
Enjoy!
Alternating Bass Fingerpicking Pattern I
Next time (Part II) I will show you two more beautiful and challenging patterns. To be continued… |
Digital DNA, the 7-foot-tall egg-shaped sculpture made of computer circuit boards installed in Lytton Plaza, will be removed from the city's public-art collection, the Public Art Commission voted unanimously Thursday night, after a report from city staff made the case that the piece is damaged, made of materials unsuitable for outdoor installation and too costly to keep restoring.
Artist Adriana Varella, who's started a crowdfunding campaign to fund restoration and possible rehoming of the piece, counters that the city is actually set on getting rid of the sculpture because of the way the piece encourages reflection upon the darker side of technology.
Varella's attorney requested that the vote be rescheduled for a time when Varella could be present, while two members of the Raging Grannies, a social-justice and activism group, spoke in favor of keeping Digital DNA, including Ruth Robertson, who read a statement on behalf of the artist and the recently formed Friends of Digital DNA group. The statement was written from the point of view of the sculpture itself, and in particular accuses the commission of purposely scheduling the deaccession vote on a date in which Varella was unable to attend, and of censoring art for political reasons.
"The real reason there is a push to remove me is not my state, but instead my content — the political message embedded in me which talks about how our modern technology can enslave us," according to the statement. "When a Public Art Commission starts using tricks of process and bureaucracy to facilitate removal of art for political reasons, it stops being an art commission, and becomes a censorship committee."
Robertson handed out printed photos of a new piece Varella is currently exhibiting in New York that includes photos and biographies of members of the art commission and identifies them as the "Censorship Committee of Palo Alto."
According to the statement, "I was designed to be in the heart of Palo Alto from its conception. I inspired the Twitter egg, and have become a focal point for gatherings in Lytton Plaza. Removing me from this location will rob my message of contextual meaning and be a desecration."
The statement also accuses the city of not allowing enough time for public awareness and comment about the deaccession, although Palo Alto Public Art Director Elise deMarzo noted that it had been a topic of discussion at numerous previous meetings.
"The city of Palo Alto has really tried to find a solution. I do believe the piece is deteriorating and we aren't able to maintain it in a good state for the public to be around it," Commissioner Loren Gordon said.
The big egg is not the only maternity-symbol-sculpture on the chopping block. Marta Thoma's Go Mama, currently located on California Avenue, will likely soon be gone, as the commission voted on deaccession for it as well. The piece, a figure with a doll-like head and a baby's face in its midsection, was originally commissioned at a time when "public art didn't have to go through so strenuous a process as it does now," deMarzo said, noting that the piece has become unstable and structurally unsound, and damaged by years of people climbing and spilling food on it, especially after the California Avenue streetscape redesign. The city, she said, "cannot guarantee the safety of the piece."
Deaccessioned artwork may be returned to the artist at the artist's expense, sold or donated by the city, or destroyed.
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Bleeding Cool’s newest columnist, John Babos, has been blogging about comics and pop culture for over a decade. In addition to his weekly weekend column “Comics Realism” at Bleeding Cool, he continues to write “Demythify” a Monday weekly column for Comics Nexus. The title Comics Realism is inspired by the theory of Fictional Realism that asserts that all fictional characters exist out there, somewhere, for real.
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Comics Realism. This is intended be a weekly weekend column where I talk comics, pop culture and whatever else comes to mind. I’m rather opinionated, but I try to be fair. I hope to hear from you about the topics discussed here.
Before I get into this week’s topic, I’ll introduce myself. I’m John Babos and I’ve been comics blogging for over a decade and reading comic books for two decades longer than that. I’m not the blogging pioneer like Rich Johnson, but he was one of the folks that inspired me to put my thoughts to pixels years ago. Otherwise, what else would I do with all my accumulated comics trivia and percolating opinions?
In addition to this weekly weekend column at Bleeding Cool, I also write a Monday weekly column over at the Comics Nexus called ”Demythify”. Please kindly check me out over there too.
Before you let loose with keyboard courage infused vitriol, let me note that while I read comics from a lot of publishers monthly, particularly Valiant, IDW, Dynamite, Image, Marvel and DC, the bulk of the books I read come from DC. I started out reading DC from the corner store spinner rack; those comics – particularly their house ads – were gateways for me to the direct market in the 1980s and books from Marvel and other publishers. I come at this topic from love, not hate.
While many, but not all, long time DC Comics fans responded with worry and anger over DC’s New 52 reboot at the end of 2011’s Flashpoint, I reserved passing judgement at the time. I have read comics long enough to know that with DC in particular they have had a reboot, relaunch, whathaveyou, every decade or so since at least the mid 1940’s. Some have been smaller scale, like tweaks to the Superman origins like readers learning that he used to be Superboy (1945), that “Clark” was a family name (1948), that he had a dog named Krypto when he was toddler (1958), etc. Others were larger in scope impacting the DC Universe like those stemming from the 1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths (COIE) wholesale reboot. What I liked about COIE was that was an in-continuity vehicle for changes to continuity. It seemed like a win-win for new and older fans alike.
2011’s Flashpoint follows in the tradition of 1986’s COIE and actually resulted in what some execs at DC hoped would have happened, but didn’t in the mid-1980s: a relaunch of its superhero publishing line from issue #1 for all titles.
I have no significant issue with Harley Quinn’s New 52 costume changing, Amanda Waller dropping a person or two in weight, Superman no longer wearing underwear on the outside of his costume, etc. These are cosmetic and not substantive changes; although, reflecting on Waller in particular, I would note that I do think reflecting different body types of characters in the DC Universe is just as important as reflecting different genders, races, orientations, etc.
With the wholesale reboots and subtle resets I mentioned earlier, every decade’s generation has its own Superman. That’s a fact. For that reason, Flashpoint fits in with a long tradition of DC publishing.
From a content perspective, DC has taken several creative risks in the last few years. While the Batman and Green Lantern family titles were strong sellers pre New 52, the rest of the publishing line had been spotty sales wise despite some “gems” like Gail Simone’s Secret Six.
The New 52 afforded DC the opportunity to reframe many of its franchises, integrate its WildStorm and Vertigo superhero properties with the rest of the DC pantheon, and re-establishes the Justice League as its core team book featuring its biggest pop culture guns – the jury is still out on Cyborg though – by its top tier creators.
Hoping other titles would get the “Justice League” rub, DC bundled several seemingly disparate titles under the Justice League family tent pole; some made sense like Flash and Wonder Woman as they were in the League and others did not like Captain Atom, Firestorm, Hawkman, among others.
That said, while “placement” in/under the various tent poles can be criticized, I actually like the idea from a marketing perspective of bundling books the way DC generally has: Justice League, Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Edge, Dark and Young Justice.
Not all of DC’s creative content risks have found an audience as several books have been axed during various waves of cancellations and new replacements since the Fall of 2011. DC has tried to diversify the voices in its line with books like All-Star Western, Sword of Sorcery, Threshold, Earth 2, its various failed military books like G.I. Combat, and others.
I don’t fault DC for trying creatively and failing financially at times. I’m glad not every team book has “Justice League” in its title for example. While Marvel is doing well sales wise with its own Marvel Now branding-reboot, I don’t think they have tried as much to diversify the voices in their line. In fact they are galvanizing around what brand names sell. Several Avengers books flood the stands and now they’re creating mini-tent pole twosomes with two core X-Force titles, two core X-Men titles, etc.
Perhaps I’m being unfair a bit to Marvel. The cover titles of the Marvel books shouldn’t be the exclusive quality barometer; the interior story and art matter in large measures more. However, I have gotten a bit jaded with so many of the same named books on the shelves. That said, Marvel has learned what DC had not from a branding perspective: use familiar and sellable comic book titles to bring people into the book, and then let the interior story wow them whether it “fits” or not with the title on the cover.
That is an important takeaway for DC for Marvel.
Where DC has failed from a marketing perspective has been with their sustained “DC The New 52” branding. Maybe it would have been appropriate in year one so readers can know they have 52 core ongoing superhero books to choose from, but after one year it should have been retired. “New,” still, really?
On the “52” side, there will be a few months this Spring / Summer where DC’s core hero books won’t even total 52. That is a branding fail because content does not align with brand. And, you know what? A lot fans and bloggers (ok, I had to type that too) are focused more on the summer of the “New 49” or “New 50” and asking whether DC remains committed to publishing 52 ongoing cape and cowl books, than on the stories themselves.
Branding is the hook not the substance of the sale.
The other reason the New 52 is a branding failure is because it positions everything else DC publishes as being unimportant or at best less important. A great example of this would be the various limited series DC has published that have not found a large audience, despite solid content: James Robinson’s The Shade maxi-series, Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray’s various Freedom Fighters related mini-series, and others. Even ongoing super hero books like Batman Beyond Unlimited and others are seen as being less important than DC’s other super hero books; and comparative sales reflect that.
If DC knowingly or unknowingly brands some of its books as important and doesn’t corporately support the others in any meaningful way, why should readers care to sample those “other” books?
If The New 52 is the crown jewel of DC Comics, why should fans bother with picking up any other DC super hero book that doesn’t have the New 52 of the cover? Branding and solid picture-stories are what makes comic books profitable not one or the other; it is one AND the other as Marvel has learned.
Valiant has even knows that. They only used the “Summer of Valiant” branding for their 2012 summer launches. Maybe they’ll use it again in the Summer of 2013. At least that makes sense.
I want DC to succeed. I want DC to continue to take creative risks because we need more diverse comic book voices – even of the super-hero kind – on stands. I also want DC to change its branding for the its fans, its creators, and for the all-mighty bottom line.
Thanks for reading. All feedback welcome.
Please follow me on twitter and kindly friend me at Facebook too. BabosScribe is the handle.
About Rich Johnston Chief writer and founder of Bleeding Cool. Father of two. Comic book clairvoyant. Political cartoonist.
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Some may say that younger voters only have themselves to blame, given their higher propensity for disengagement from the political process, unlike the boomer generation, who have generally been more active. A recent report by the Audit Office found that 39 per cent of 18-19 year-olds had failed to enrol to vote (up from 32 per cent in 2010). But there are some signs that the tide may be about to turn. Some may say that younger voters only have themselves to blame. Credit:Tanya Lake While I am on the wrong side of 40, I teach macroeconomics to first- and second-year undergraduate students. In recent years I have noticed these student cohorts becoming increasingly angry about the state of federal economic policy, as evidenced by their questions, comments and feedback in class. It is apparent many of them believe they are getting royally screwed on the intergenerational deal, suspicions echoed by respected economic commentators such as Chris Richardson and Ross Gittens. This political time bomb is ticking loudly. They are starting to realise that in order to make themselves heard, they have to get serious, get organised and even get militant. Rather than merely complain about Canberra's shortcomings, a call to arms should be issued for them to form their own party.
Obviously, the more politically-minded in this age group were not organised in sufficient time for a tilt at the 2016 poll, but I suspect that such a party could be established in time to make a run at the 2019 vote (assuming no early election), especially if 150 James Mathison types emerge around the country. This new ticket may be called the "Intergenerational Fairness Party" or something similar (its founding members will probably coin a far more captivating name). Whatever the branding, their policy agenda will include purposefully and unapologetically 'smashing' house prices via whatever means necessary. This means campaigning for axing property (and similar) taxation concessions, inclusion of primary residence in the age pension asset test, state-based land value taxes, and so on; perhaps even reconsidering the inflation-targeting monetary policy framework. Flux, registered on March 29, was founded by some younger (by modern Australian parliamentary standards) tech-savvy operators. But Flux is motivated by influencing the decision-making process, rather than hitching to a political movement, such as the youth one. Admittedly, no third political force in Australia has made any lasting impact into disturbing the Coalition-Labor duopoly, which has resisted all newcomers for decades. It took the Greens nearly 20 years to achieve their best-ever showing at the 2010 election. While they have often acted as a de facto party for the young, this core constituency of theirs may now be amenable to a dedicated alternative. |
After Wednesday night’s debate, in which Donald Trump would not commit to honoring the results of November’s election, Hillary Clinton slammed him for “undermining the pillar of our democracy.”
It's appalling that a presidential nominee of a major party is undermining the pillar of our democracy—just because he hates losing. pic.twitter.com/ZQhoighCAl — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 20, 2016
Trump wouldn't say if he'll accept the outcome of the election. That’s horrifying—but part of a pattern. https://t.co/OrT9W4bSGW — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 20, 2016
One problem; only last week, Clinton smiled approvingly as Al Gore insinuated that he had won the 2000 election against George W. Bush.
Gore told the crowd, “Take it from me, it was a very close election. Elections…”
That prompted the crowd to chant, “You won! You won! You won!”
As Clinton sat behind him, smiling and nodding, Gore continued, “Here’s my point. I don’t want you to be in a position years from now where you welcome Hillary Clinton and say ‘Actually you did win, it just wasn’t close enough to make sure that the votes were counted’ and whatever. Elections have consequences.”
Clinton just kept smiling and nodding.
On Wednesday, asked by moderator Chris Wallace if he would honor the November results, Trump answered, “I will look at it at the time. I'm not looking at anything now. I'll look at it at the time.” When Wallace asked him again, Trump replied that he would "keep you in suspense" about his decision.
"Trump wouldn't say if he'll accept the outcome of the election. That’s horrifying." Hillary Clinton
Gore contested the 2000 results in court for a month, finally accepting the results after the Supreme Court ruled Bush won the election. But during that month, things got heated; on November 26, the state canvassing board certified Bush the winner of Florida's electors by 537 votes. Gore contested the certified results, prompting a state court to rule against Gore. That was reversed by the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered a recount. The U.S. Supreme Court then ruled that a recount of votes "of questionable legality does [...] threaten irreparable harm" as "each manual recount produces a degradation of the ballots." Gore finally conceded on December 13, 2000. |
THE INFIDEL PrintCompanion
The Infidel THINK print
My First Graphic Novel
"Dirty Harry as a waiter."
My FIGHT Print
My Essays on Islam, Jihad, Mohammed & Muslims:
Calling Islam "Islam"
My Name is Bosch and I'm a Recovered Muslim
Killian Duke & Salaam Duka, the twins at the center of my graphic novel, The Infidel, featuring Pigman.
....
“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” -George Orwell
"No stronger retrograde force exists in the world." -Winston Churchill on Islam
"He who dares not offend cannot be honest." -Thomas Paine
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”-Albert Einstein
"Bad ideas must be fought at their origins - and at every moment thereafter." -Heather McDonald
'The first man to raise a fist is the man who's run out of ideas." -H.G. Wells
"Muslims are the first victims of Islam.......To liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him." -Ernest Renan
"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." -P.C. Hodgell
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech" –Benjamin Franklin
"To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true." -Ayn Rand |
GE Renewable Energy has been selected to supply equipment for what it says will be the first commercial integrated solar-wind hybrid power generation project in the U.S.
The 4.6 MW, community-based project will be situated in Red Lake Falls, Minn. Developed by Juhl Energy, the project will use two 2.3-116 wind turbines from GE’s onshore wind business and 1 MW of solar conversion equipment from GE’s current business. GE expects the project to enter commercial operations in August.
GE will also provide its Wind Integrated Solar Energy technology platform, developed through the company’s global research center. The platform will integrate the solar panels through the wind turbine’s converter directly.
According to GE, the hybrid design will enable the project to produce power when it is most needed: Basically, the solar provides summer peak energy, and the wind provides winter peak energy.
“Most energy experts agree that distributed generation will play a major role in the implementation of renewable energy in the U.S. electrical market in the years to come,” says Dan Juhl, CEO of Juhl Energy. “Juhl Energy’s package design with the GE hybrid technology can economically blend clean, renewable energy into the grid at lower cost, plus add reliability to the system.”
Pete McCabe, president and CEO of onshore wind for GE Renewable Energy, adds, “By leveraging the complementary nature of wind and solar, this unique project shows how GE is driving technology innovation that will help customers deliver more renewable energy in an even more efficient manner.” |
Simple Tricks to Unstick Your Plot: Where Is Everyone?
Last Friday, I talked about my first go-to method when I inevitably get stuck in a draft. I lay out my character’s emotional dominoes and see where they ought to fall (which is often not where I’ve made them fall)…
But that trick doesn’t always work. Sometimes it’s not an emotional/goal issue that’s halted my story. Sometimes it’s plot-related, and I really have no idea what external event should be happening next.
This problem tends to hit to me during the first 40-50K words of the novel (i.e., the first half). Why? Because up until the midpoint, the characters in a story tend to be reacting more than they are acting.
Note: I am NOT saying that your characters are passive but rather that they are still acquiring the necessary skills and information to fully face the antagonist. The antagonist is throwing stones at your protagonist, and your protagonist is really just trying to get out of each scrape alive enough to keep fighting and honing his/her skills. (Obviously, if you’re writing something less action-focused, there will be less fighting for one’s life and more fighting for one’s sanity and/or beliefs.)
Up until the midpoint, a lot of the events are dictated by the world in which the protagonists lives and by what the antagonist is doing.
For example (and I warn you, there might be a few spoilers about to follow!), in Something Strange and Deadly, much of where Eleanor goes and the events in which she finds herself are dictated by external forces. Her mother makes her go on a carriage ride with a suitor or attend operas, while the antagonist keeps popping up with an army of walking dead. Not until the midpoint (when Eleanor gets a critical piece of information and faces off with a creepy spirit) does she finally see how to shift the odds in her favor. After that, when the antagonist throws stones, Eleanor throws them right back. She’s on the offensive.
And once my characters are on the offensive, I can usually ride my domino effect smoothly to the end of the book…One event clearly causes the next.
But getting to that midpoint can sometimes be tricky for me. I usually have to slowly reveal information as my character uncovers it (and information can be so hard to reveal in a compelling manner), and I need to let my character’s grow–their flaws and emotional well-being needs to be constantly challenged as well. So coming up with events that both allow my protagonist to be active and still be learning/growing can be hard.
Which is why I rely on my next trick:
Where the heck is everyone?
I don’t mean my protagonist–I mean everyone else.
When I’m stuck and don’t know what event and/or setting should next arrive, I turn to my secondary characters and my antagonists. Where are they right now? Where have they been since the last time I saw them? And what were all their emotional/goal dominoes throughout the previous scenes?
Here’s an example that I wrote a few weeks ago. Simon is the love interest, and since one of my magical cookies in this story is the romance, I knew that I wanted to get Simon on the page with my protagonist…But for the life of me, I could not figure out how.
So I started from Simon’s very first scene in the book and mapped out exactly where he was during my heroine’s scenes.
<insert picture>
And as I wrote out this stuff, I uncovered some REALLY cool and really unexpected things about Simon’s character–about his emotional growth and backstory. Once I reached the spot in which I was stuck, I could feel how Simon’s emotional dominoes would dictate what needed to come next for my protagonist.
It’s not just the love interest that I do this trick with, though. I’ve also mapped my antagonist’s whereabouts/shenanigans and emotional dominoes in order to see what might come next in the plot. I might learn that my antagonist has been gearing up this whole time, and is now ready for an attack–so my next scene for my protagonist would become a run-in with the bad guy.
Other times, I’ll move to other important secondary characters and see where they were and what they were doing. Almost always, I’ll eventually reach an “aha!” point and see exactly what event needs to come next.
And sometimes, I’ll find that my emotional dominoes for other characters aren’t falling properly–that, like I mentioned last week, I’ve gone astray at some earlier point in the manuscript. For example:
Wait, the love interest wouldn’t be willing to forgive my heroine so quickly! He’d probably still be furious and refuse to join her at the park in that last scene…which would mean her best friend would have gone with her instead–and oh! If her best friend is there, then I can introduce this important piece of information earlier which lets me use this next scene as a turning point…
You get the idea. 🙂
You tell me: Have you ever done something like this–looked at where your characters are behind the scenes? Or are you, perhaps wise, and do all this before/while drafting? |
In times of unrest, we often unthinkingly reach for preconceived ideas. It is early evening. An hour earlier, a man in a shirt too large for his body asked that the patrons of a Vietnamese restaurant in east London pay immediately and then leave. On the other side of metal shutters pulled in front of his establishment, Hackney’s Dalston is quiet.
UK riots five years on: share your experiences and memories Read more
These were the hours, the days, of the 2011 London riots. Of social unrest, burned and looted shops – of a kind of chaos I recognised innately, but which did not belong to me. Perhaps if you are from London, or it has lived on your skin for long enough, you will recognise that to survive it means to not be fearful of it. On a bus to Green Lanes, the driver stopped abruptly, and ordered us off. A mile or two away in Wood Green, police cars sped beyond Turkish restaurants, the shopping centre, the knock-off phone repair stores, and back again. Windows were by now boarded with a kind of naive hopefulness. Many were broken. Groups, mostly young, moved together with a collective energy I have seen in bar fights and on dancefloors.
I cannot remember now which friend I was texting. I began to type my dread as I started the 30-minute walk to where I was staying in Haringey. My head was down when he stepped towards me. Tall, bandana wrapped across his face, eyes only just visible, a piece of wood in hand, hood pulled high – and immediately I remembered every newspaper clipping, every headline, every whisper that he will take your phone, your handbag. I did not look at him. I simply anticipated the moment it would happen: his face against mine, flesh almost touching, how still my expression, how rigid his body, how close his breath. And he said: “Put your phone away – before somebody hurts you.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hadn’t the Brixton riot of 1985 also started with the police shooting of Cherry Groce? Photograph: PA
Presumption replaces routine where all at once there is none. Recognition was forgotten for a moment. Of course, behind the mask, he was raised to love.
Even so, the London riots became known to some as an outpouring of greed, thuggery and mob destruction. Perhaps, in some cases, this was true. But erased from this narrative was a declaration on gross consumerism reserved for the wealthy, yet pushed upon the working classes who simply couldn’t afford what they have been instructed to believe is necessity. The riots occurred one year into a new government, a Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition that made drastic cuts, as well as impending monumental rises to tuition fees. And, of course, only days before, Mark Duggan had been shot and killed by police in nearby Tottenham, an area whose history is steeped in clashes between law enforcers and the local black community. It is a place that still carries in its marrow the Broadwater Farm riot of 1985.
Hadn’t the Brixton riot of that same year also started with the police shooting of Cherry Groce? Again, the 1995 Brixton riot after the death of Wayne Douglas in police custody. People may well set their homes ablaze, if they believe the solution is in the ashes.
Don’t call them riots. That dismisses the anger over Rashan Charles’s death | Franklyn Addo Read more
In the last few weeks we have learned the names of Rashan Charles and Edson Da Costa, both black men from east London, both dead after being apprehended by the police. There have been, as we often see, no arrests or suspensions, so far.
A week ago, in the days building up to the sixth anniversary of the 2011 riots, London played out an almost identical scene. Outside the store Charles had been chased into by police and held to the ground, demonstrators assembled. Wheelie-bins were overturned, bottles thrown at police, windows were broken in shops beside the Vietnamese restaurant I had to leave six years ago under the very same circumstances.
Forcible protests do not appear from nowhere. Rather, they are a direct result of police brutality on the black community, born of an understandable anger that nothing is changing.
I walked home that night with the feeling that I was safe. Amid the chaos, it seemed, our community was still looking out for its individuals. After all, wasn’t this the point in a revolt? To challenge that which doesn’t work, for the greater good of more? Private citizens were not the target of that riot, nor the ones before, or those that will sadly come after. I had forgotten this. I had allowed newspaper headlines to remove the individualism and historical pain.
Behind a bandana wrapped across his face, I was reminded how human their need to uprise. Reminded how human their collective movement was. Reminded that a young man in a bandana, grasping a piece of wood, was not a reason for me to be afraid. The system that was killing young men like him was the only reason to be.
• Chimene Suleyman is a writer and poet. She has written on race and gender for Media Diversified and the Quietus |
Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd has weighed in on the controversy over Cecil the lion. Watson takes aim at those of us who make the point that there is absolutely no morally significant difference between killing animals for sporting pleasure and killing animals for palate pleasure, and that our objecting to the killing of Cecil requires us to reject killing the other 60+ billion animals (not counting sea animals) we kill to eat.
In “The Cult of Competitive Purism,” Watson maintains that those of us who take this position are “elitist” and guilty of “purism.”
Watson’s position comes as no surprise. But a simple examination of his position shows why he is in error.
Cecils on the Land and Cecils in the Water
Sea Shepherd is a large organization that brings in considerable amounts of money from donors all over the world, many — perhaps most — of whom are not vegan. Many — perhaps most — Sea Shepherd donors look at whales and other marine mammals in the same way that others look at Cecil the Lion and lament their exploitation at the same time they continue to consume other animals. They think marine mammals are special, in part because they are endangered or protected, and think that marine mammals count for more than do other animals as a moral matter. They think that just as Cecil died a horrible, prolonged death, marine mammals are killed in an inhumane way and are treated worse than the animals we eat.
And guess what? That’s exactly what Paul Watson has been telling them.
Here’s what Watson had to say in an interview in the The Guardian:
You cannot compare the killing of animals in a domestic slaughterhouse to the killing of a whale. What goes on with those whales – or dolphins, say, in Taiji – would never be tolerated in a slaughterhouse. Those slaughterhouses would be shut down. It takes from 10 to 45 minutes to kill a whale and they die in horrific agony. That would be completely intolerable and illegal in any slaughterhouse in the world. Also they’re an endangered and protected species – pigs and cows are not. They’re part of an ecosystem, which pigs and cows are not. It always bothers me that that comparison is brought up. And especially when it’s brought up by the Japanese, who eat more pigs, cows, and chickens than all people of Australia and New Zealand combined. Only one percent of the Japanese people eat whales; for the most part they eat cows and pigs and chickens. It’s a ridiculous analogy.
Note: Watson says:
1. The exploitation of farm animals is less cruel than the exploitation of marine mammals.
We are not sure whether Watson has ever been in a slaughterhouse, but they’re hideous places and animals suffer a terrible death in the long process from arrival at the facility to their actual death on the killing floor. And the distress that those animals experience during that slaughtering process is palpable and every bit as bad as the physical pain they suffer.
Moreover, Watson’s comparison between the time it takes to kill a marine mammal and the time it takes to kill a farm animal is itself problematic. Marine mammals are not domesticated animals who spend their entire lives suffering; marine mammals live in the wild until the time they are killed. We certainly think that the killing of marine mammals or any sentient nonhuman is morally objectionable. But Watson’s statement that the analogy between the suffering of marine mammals and farm animals is “ridiculous” is itself ridiculous and suggests that Watson thinks that the suffering of marine mammals counts for more morally. That is just plain speciesism.
2. Watson is “bother[ed]” by the comparison between farm animals and marine mammals because the latter are “endangered and protected.”
So what? Does that make marine mammals more morally valuable? Not as far as we are concerned. An endangered marine mammal values her or his life just as a cow or pig or chicken or fish values her or his. It is just as wrong to kill a cow (or other sentient nonhuman) for no reason other than palate pleasure as it is to kill a marine mammal for palate pleasure or any other frivolous reason. What Watson is saying would lead to the conclusion that killing marine mammals would be less morally wrong if they were not endangered or protected. Maybe he would accept that conclusion. We wouldn’t.
In any event, Watson is operating a very wealthy charity that has all sorts of non-vegan donors who think of marine mammals as a group of Cecils who live in the ocean. They want to protect the Water Cecils as they continue to eat their animal products. Watson jumps to their defense.
Watson objects to our making crystal clear that there is a blatant moral inconsistency between objecting to the killing of Cecil the lion and continuing to consume animals because he does not want anyone saying that to those who fetishize marine mammals in addition to, or instead of, lions. In other words, Watson does not want anyone telling his donors that they are morally obligated to go vegan.
That’s no surprise.
What’s Really At Issue Here: Support for Single-Issue Campaigns and Vegansim as a Moral Imperative
We certainly agree with Watson that we should never treat as “inferior,” demean, or ridicule anyone who objects to the killing of Cecil, or the killing of dolphins or whales, or the eating of dogs in China or Korea, or the exploitation of any animal in any situation. That is why we spend a considerable portion of our time discussing animal ethics with people and groups who are not part of any “animal movement.” That is why we wrote Eat Like You Care: An Examination of the Morality of Eating Animals. We believe that anyone with a moral impulse or moral concern for animals is ripe for a consideration of the ethics of consuming animals and a candidate for the adoption of veganism as a moral principle.
But we do believe that we have an obligation to be crystal clear and to educate those who are concerned about particular acts or forms of animal exploitation that, if they are not vegan, they are active participants in the very conduct that they claim to decry. That is what we owe to the human who is, by expressing concern about a particular situation, trying to find her or his moral compass. That is what we owe to nonhumans, who are victimized in the hundreds of millions every single day.
We stress that vegan education — the clear, patient, comprehensive discussion of the ethical principles at issue — is the most effective act of activism that any individual can do to move the issue forward. Not yelling, not shaming, but discussion and education. At the same time, we are concerned that the “business model” of the large animal charities has a need for donations that steers them to animal welfare reforms and single-issue campaigns.
Sea Shepherd is an organization that promotes variations of the same single-issue campaign: the protection of marine mammals. What really concerns Watson is that those whom he denigrates as “elitists” and “purists” will not support such single-issue campaigns that are his stock in trade. In other words, those who express concern about Cecil, or whales and dolphins, or seal cubs, or whatever animal is being exploited should be “nurtured.” And what does that mean? It means that those people should be funneled into the web of groups like Sea Shepherd or one of the countless other groups who will “nurture” compassion by soliciting donations for their single-issue campaigns and never confront donors with the reality: Veganism is not an option; it’s a moral imperative. If animals matter morally, we cannot justify eating, wearing, or using them, and until we go vegan, we are active participants in institutionalized animal exploitation.
Single-issue campaigns — however different — are structurally identical. They all involve coalitions of people many of whom engage in behavior that is not morally different from the behavior that is the target of the single-issue campaign.
So a single issue campaign focused on the Taiji dolphins will have many people who object to the killing of dolphins but who shovel animal products into their mouths as they voice their concerns. The only way that such people are going to support such a campaign is if they are made to feel comfortable about their exploitation. And they are made to feel comfortable by an insidious pretense that the target of the campaign is immoral and their own conduct is not immoral, or is so much less immoral that they can never be thought of in the same way as the people who kill the dolphins. This makes people feel more comfortable about their own behavior that exploits animals and perpetuates it — and it also means that they donate.
As part of providing the comfort level that encourages support, these campaigns demonize those people who are involved in the targeted behavior in an effort to distinguish between them and the “good” people who are protesting the killing of the dolphins. This often results in and reinforces racist, ethnocentric, and xenophobic conduct on the part of “animal people.” One need only look at the sorts of vile anti-Asian comments that appear almost immediately following any story about Taiji, Japanese whaling, or the eating of dogs in China and Korea. The campaign against Andre Robinson elicited horribly racist slurs, as did the campaign against Michael Vick.
Watson thinks that to not support and to criticize these campaigns is “elitist” and represents “purism.” He’s wrong. Abolitionists just refuse to participate in and perpetuate the unjust fantasy that there is a difference between killing a dolphin and killing a chicken so that people who care can become “nurtured” by Sea Shepherd and other groups and never be confronted with the moral reality. Abolitionists want to promote the idea that if animals matter morally, veganism is the only rational response. Abolitionists want to promote the idea that we cannot justify treating any sentient nonhuman exclusively as a resource.
Watson disagrees with all of this. He admits that he thinks that marine mammals are special. He makes clear that Sea Shepherd is “promoting veganism not for animal-rights reasons but for environmental conservation reasons.” It can’t get any more clear than that. He rejects the very foundation of the abolitionist movement, which is that all sentient beings are equal in that all should be accorded the moral right not to be used as human resources. And that we ought to make that crystal clear today, right now.
We’re delighted that Watson serves vegan meals on his ships even if he does so for reasons of conservation alone. But go to the Sea Shepherd website. We did. We were unable to find anything that even hinted at the moral obligation to go vegan if one thought that killing marine mammals was morally wrong. We found one essay by Watson where he said:
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is one of the very few, if not the only marine conservation organizations in the world that actively promotes and practices veganism. Why? Because we see the connections between animal husbandry and pollution in the ocean, diminishment of life in the seas, the destruction of the rainforests and climate change. Veganism is real conservation in action. It goes beyond talking about climate change and diminishment of biodiversity and actually does something to address the problems.
But he made clear that veganism has nothing to do with any moral obligation that we owe other animals (apart from marine mammals):
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not a vegan or vegetarian organization however, nor are we an Animal Rights or an Animal Welfare organization. We are a marine wildlife and habitat conservation movement. So why are all the meals on Sea Shepherd ships vegan? The answer is because vegetarianism and especially veganism are powerful alternatives to eight billion human beings and their domestic animals eating the oceans alive.
Watson’s environmental arguments for veganism are terrific, but they do not in any way involve getting “compassionate” people to see that there is no difference between killing a whale and eating a chicken. Indeed, Watson rejects that position.
Do Chickens Matter as Much as Whales?
Watson claims that:
Social revolutions do not happen overnight. I have watched the vegan movement grow from something no one had ever heard of to the dynamic and ever growing movement it is today. The growth in awareness has been incredible. What we don’t want to do is isolate or discourage potential advocates of veganism.
We have been involved in this movement for about the same period of time that Watson has. We like Watson; we just disagree with him.
We could not disagree more that the vegan movement is doing well, as he seems to think. On the contrary, the vegan movement has been hijacked by the “happy exploitation” movement that is now ubiquitous. Peter Singer, the so-called “father” of the animal movement, declares himself to be a “flexible vegan” and all of the large groups reject veganism as a moral baseline and promote it only as a way to reduce suffering — along with cage-free eggs, crate-free pork and the Whole Foods Animal Welfare Rating program. Abolitionists are trying to create a vegan movement of people who see veganism as a principle of fundamental justice.
Watson seems to think that we cannot make the abolitionist argument because “there are lots of stupid people out there” who just don’t see the connections and who must be “nurtured.” Putting aside that Watson’s characterization of everyone as idiots is curious given that he claims that vegans are “elitists” who look down on others, abolitionists believe that people are not stupid and that most, or at least a great many, care about nonhuman animals. People also know that animal products do not grow on trees and that animals suffer and die in order to end up on our plates. They may not know the particulars of what happens in raising and killing animals and that’s the point — the particulars are irrelevant. Going vegan should not depend on whether there are “abuses” at the slaughterhouse or on the factory farm. Going vegan should depend on a simple fact: that animals die so that we can eat and wear them. Just as those objecting to the killing of Cecil or to the killing of marine mammals would not stop objecting even if the killing process were made more “humane,” the morality of eating or wearing animals does not rest on how the animals are treated but only on that the animals are used in the first place.
We have an obligation to make clear that single-issue campaigns miss the point by perpetuating the fantasy that there is a difference between a whale and a cow, or between fur and wool. And it’s not a matter of “elitism.” Indeed, there is nothing more elitist than the idea that it is acceptable for us to exploit vulnerable nonhumans — and that is exactly what single-issue campaigns perpetuate.
So whenever we see stories in the news involving Cecil or any similar situation that elicits an outcry, we ought to use that story as an opportunity to engage in creative, nonviolent vegan advocacy and make clear that there is absolutely no difference between what those of us who are nonvegans do and what the people who have engaged in behavior to which we object do.
We wholeheartedly agree that a person who looks at an animal like Cecil and wants to kill him — indeed, pays a great deal of money to have the experience — seems to have disturbing psychological problems. Yet, as we all know, the animals who were killed for food or clothing were once living beings, no less important morally than Cecil, with their own interests, families, and biographies. Why does the act of ordering a hamburger or eating an ice cream cone, make us any less petty, oppressive, unjust, or cruel? If we do not squarely confront our relentless, ubiquitous, pervasive use of animals for palate pleasure or fashion, nothing will ever change.
So, we have no more excuse, no more justification for our actions than did Walter Palmer, who killed Cecil. We are all Walter Palmer. We need to stop the carnage. We need to stop the injustice. We need to shift the paradigm from property to moral personhood and the only way that we can do that is by working tirelessly to bring about a vegan world. The stronger an abolitionist movement becomes, the more animal exploitation of all sorts will end. Vegans will not go to zoos or sea parks; vegans will not go to the circus or rodeo; they will oppose the slaughter of any marine mammal, other aquatic animal, or land animal; they won’t wear any animals. Cut off the exploitation at the root and we won’t need countless single-issue campaigns, which, some 40 years into the modern animal “movement,” have had no impact.
Watson observes:
The reality is that most vegans were once not vegan. Many vegans started with feelings of compassion for their pets, or for animals they liked. These seeds of compassion, if nurtured by thoughtful education, can be inspired and motivated through positive encouragement.
This is the same old tired nonsense that we get from all of the animal welfare groups: “We’re all on the ‘journey’ and and as long as we are ‘compassionate,’ it’s all fine and no one should say otherwise or they’re just ‘purist’ or ‘elitist.'”
All of the large groups take this position. And it is explicitly speciesist. In order to see this clearly and easily, imagine the following: John was raised in a racist community. For the first 20 years of his life, John uttered racist epithets to every person of color he saw and he considered them to be inferior to whites. And then, one day, John, for whatever reason, saw that racism was wrong. John now wants to work for social justice and equality. Should John adopt the position that because he took 20 years to stop being racist, rejecting racism is a matter of being on a “journey” and that we cannot say that racism is morally wrong and must stop immediately? Of course not. John should take the position that we must educate people about racism but that we must be crystal clear that racism is morally wrong and must stop.
The fact that it may have taken someone a while to see that something is morally odious does not mean that we should not be unambiguously clear that it is morally odious and must stop. We don’t respond to racism with a campaign for “Racist-joke-free Monday.” We respond with a demand for justice.
Abolitionists are not criticizing individuals who are grappling with a new understanding of animal ethics. Where there are instances of personal clashes, that is unfortunate. What we are talking about, and planning for, is a redirecton of the message put out by the large organizations that dominate the arena — those groups that send out the countless solicitations for donation with the atrocity of the day and the appeal, “Help us stop [fill in the blank]. Send your donation for the animals!”
It is sad that Watson thinks that it’s fine — indeed, obligatory — to spend millions equipping, staffing, and operating ships to save a whale but that a sense of urgency and efforts to make clear that there is no moral difference between the whale Watson saves and the many billions of animals that supposedly “compassionate” people consume represent “purism” or “elitist.” Action, including ramming other ships, is fine where whales are concerned. But insisting on veganism as a moral imperative is not.
So, in the end, the question becomes: Does the chicken whose corpse is sold for $1.99 per pound matter as much morally as the whale Watson seeks to save?
We think she does.
**********
If you are not vegan, please go vegan. Veganism is about nonviolence. First and foremost, it’s about nonviolence to other sentient beings. But it’s also about nonviolence to the earth and nonviolence to yourself.
If animals matter morally, veganism is not an option — it is a necessity. Anything that claims to be an animal rights movement must make clear that veganism is a moral imperative.
The World is Vegan! If you want it.
Learn more about veganism at www.HowDoIGoVegan.com.
Gary L. Francione
Board of Governors Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University
Anna Charlton
Adjunct Professor of Law, Rutgers University
©2015 Gary L. Francione & Anna Charlton |
Chinese History for Beginners
Condensed China is an introduction to Chinese history. It exists to inform, enlighten, and attract netizens interested in China. It is not a complete history of China; I deliberately skipped over and left out a lot of information. This is more like ''Chinese History: the Cliff Notes version" or "Chinese History's Greatest Hits" than a full-fledged history. If I left out something you feel is important, please email me and I will put it in the next time I revise the text.
Table of Contents
Condensed China has become substantially more popular than I had dared hope when I first put this up; I'm averaging more than 6,000 hits a month, no doubt due to being linked from the Washington Post, Popular Science, and GameSpot, as well as from all the major online libraries of Chinese and Asian links. It was also selected as Hong Kong Supernet's first ever "Super exSITEment" user site of the month.
I know, I'm way behind in updating the site. Hong Kong handover coverage will be added soon. My new excuse is that I'm waiting for the Party Congress to finish.... |
Marco Moeller’s “Hind Ki Rani” has already been celebrated online, but it was Marco’s wife Antje that brought HKR to our attention on The Bike Shed, with her take on the build; “from Trash to Treasure” and a new set of photos taken in the parched dry desert by Colin Handy.
What really stands out on this Enfield 500 Bullet is the work that has gone into the metalwork with hundreds of hours spent hand-chiseling patterns into the raw metal, but take a step back and she also has a superbly balanced silhouette. We can see how “she” has made her mark on Marco & Antje’s lives.
Marco is German and based in Dubai. Having not ridden a motorcycle for years he took pity on the bike when he came across her three years ago in a very distressed state in his boss’s backyard. The desert heat hadn’t been kind to the little Bullet but Marco could see beyond the filth & grease. He wanted to build something unique, that suited him as a person, but also helped reflect 60 years of Indian heritage.
The bike was initially fixed-up and rebuilt to a decent standard, so Marco entered her into a local competition in Dubai. The bike won the best customized European category trophy at the Gulf Bike Expo 2011, but this was only the beginning, as Marco’s vision was far from complete. This was when all the craft-work started in earnest and the bike began to take on a far more exotic temperament.
The donor was built in 1994, a bike pretty much unchanged for decades, and the principle work was all about restoring her to working condition and with the stance he wanted. Just getting the bike running was a bit of a mission but with plenty of help from the Internet Marco struggled through and bought her back to life. From this point onwards the guys at Classic Motorcycles sorted the engine properly and allowed Marco to start thinking about the cosmetic side of his build.
The front 19′ wheel was swapped to 18″ and the rear was reduced to a 15-incher to wear a fat back tyre, while paint was taken care of by a friend. Much of the carved metalwork is made of brass, sourced in India and then hand engraved by Marco using a hammer and chisel. Doing the same to the aluminium pieces took “an insane amount of time”.
Marco: “…it’s by far and away not finished yet. I guess you cannot put my modified Bullet in any category like bobber, chopper, café or anything else. However it was very critical that I maintained the basic features of a typical Royal Enfield as those are indeed what make her special and remarkable. I do enjoy it when people are coming up to me, showing interest, asking questions about the bike whenever I stop. But if anyone asks me, she’s not a show bike! She’s pretty much more that! She’s loud and furious, she’s moody and temperamental…”
Anyone who’s ridden an Enfield Bullet will relate to the sentiment behind this bike (and it’s temperament). It’s great to see a motorcycle inspire so much passion and dare we say it ‘love’, and even better to read about a bike that seems to have brought a couple closer together. Antje is obviously fiercely proud of Marco’s work and wants the whole world to see what her man is capable of. See more on their Facebook Page.
Antje:“HKR is anything else, but just an ordinary bike. This stunning motorcycle is loud and furious like a yob, moody and temperamental like a woman and beautiful like a fairytale Queen.”
…and who doesn’t love a fairytale ending?
Posted by [email protected] |
Imagine you're an astronaut exploring the surface of Mars, when suddenly you fall ill or injure yourself. As your team struggles to get you safely back to base, you become seriously dehydrated. With their trusty -- and ingenious -- kit, the medical officer hooks into the drinking water supply, using it to create a saline solution that they can inject directly into your blood stream for quick and safe rehydration.
That's the idea behind the Intravenous Fluid Generation for Exploration Missions, or IVGEN, investigation that was conducted on the space station over five days in the spring of 2010. Since standard IV fluid bags used in hospitals would be too costly to send and hard to keep from spoiling on long-duration space missions, the ability to make fresh saline right from the drinking water supply could save the day in emergency scenarios.
Using the station's current recycled drinking water, the IVGEN investigation demonstrated that it is possible to produce medical-grade saline in space. Now, the focus has turned to the longevity of the IVGEN hardware and the shelf life of the solution produced.
"Basically IVGEN was a project to verify that, somehow, we could take potable or drinking water, purify it, and mix it to make a normal, medical-grade saline solution that could be injected into astronauts if the need arose," said John McQuillen, IVGEN principal investigator at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.
The IVGEN experiment relied on U.S. Pharmacopeia, or USP, guidelines for producing purified water and medical-grade saline. USP is the authoritative source for medicine and healthcare product standards.
Water from the station's Water Processor Assembly was fed through IVGEN hardware, where a series of filters removed air, bacterial contaminates, particulates, and heavy metals upstream of the heart of the system. The water then continued on through an internal deionizing resin, similar to that used in home water purifiers, removing the bulk of the minerals and organics. The experiment produced six 1.5 liter bags, or about 2.5 gallons, of purified water.
Two of the six bags were used to produce medical-grade saline. To do that, the purified water was added to a bag containing a premeasured amount of salt and a magnetic stir bar for mixing. The resulting solution then was transferred to the final collection bag through a sterilizing filter, which removed any additional remaining air and bacteria.
Once back on Earth, the two bags of saline were shipped to a Food and Drug Administration-certified lab to test whether the contents complied with USP standards. In the meantime, the hardware was placed on the shelf to undergo lifetime testing and ground studies until needed for a future mission.
"We are now wrapping up testing of the post-flight hardware. This testing was performed to see what we can learn from the current state hardware, as opposed to when it was initially launched," said Terri McKay, IVGEN project scientist at Glenn. "We are also testing the filters to make sure they can satisfy missions of multiple year durations. The pharmaceutical product shelf life needs to be documented, as well."
IV fluids have a shelf life of 6 to 18 months. The concern is not just with the saline itself. Other issues need to be considered, such as the possibility during the manufacturing process of the introduction of germs into the saline. There also are potential concerns with the IV bag, such as a punctured seal that could allow germs to get into the solution. There's even the chance that the bags themselves may destabilize over time and begin leaching chemicals or plastic into the solution. Once in space, damaged IV bags and saline cannot be replaced with a simple phone call to a distributor.
"As far as I know, there has not been much need for saline in past missions. However, if there is a need for medical care on the space station, the astronaut can be back on Earth in 24 hours. But if you're halfway to Mars, you can't just turn around," said DeVon Griffin, IVGEN project manager at Glenn.
Astronauts, particularly those on missions to distant locations, need access to a medical kit that meets their immediate needs. That includes having good saline at the ready. Flight doctors produced a list of more than 400 medical conditions they are concerned about treating in space. Of that list, 115 require saline, including severe burns, acute anemia and broken bones.
To satisfy medical requirements for long-duration exploration missions, a spacecraft could be required to carry hundreds of liters of IV fluid. Spacecraft planners can ill afford to surrender the mass and volume needed to carry that much liquid, which weighs 2 pounds per liter, according to Griffin. One NASA estimate is that a mission to Mars may need to carry as much as 248 liters of IV fluids, or about 65 gallons of liquid that may not even be used. That equals nearly 500 pounds of liquid consuming precious room and weight: weight that costs approximately $10,000 a pound just to get into space.
With operational limitations, such as launch mass, storage, and tight legroom on spacecraft, exploration missions need to minimize the amount of IV fluid they transport. Either that, or the mission will need the capability to produce purified water and saline in space. IVGEN may provide the answer, using a single filtration system capable of producing many bags of IV fluid via a device that is smaller than a single bag of ready-to-use solution.
The proposed design of the IVGEN hardware for exploration missions is pretty compact. With the exception of the accumulator, which plugs into the potable water supply to get the source water, everything else could fit inside a small laptop computer. It would be about 1.5 inches thick with a footprint of around 8 by 11 inches, making it a real option for solving the problem of saline supplies in space. |
Photo: Amy Sussman/2009 Getty Images
Photo: Amy Sussman/2009 Getty Images
It’s the one named after a city in Australia. Justin Vernon explains to Exclaim!:
The first thing I worked on, the riff and the beginning melodies, was the first song on the record, ‘Perth,’” Vernon says. “That was back in early 2008. The reason I called it that right away, is because I was with a guy that I didn’t know very well, but basically, it’s a long story, but in the three days we were supposed to spend together — he’s a music video maker — in those three days, his best friend [Heath Ledger] died. And his best friend was from Perth. It just sort of became the beginning of the record. And Perth has such a feeling of isolation, and also it rhymes with birth, and every song I ended up making after that just sort of drifted towards that theme, tying themselves to places and trying to explain what places are and what places aren’t.
The music video in question appears to be“The Wolves (Act I & II),” and the director in question appears to be Matt Amato, Ledger’s friend through the art collective the Masses. Also: “every song I ended up making after that just sort of drifted towards that theme”? So basically the whole album is sort of about Heath Ledger?
Justin Vernon Talks New Bon Iver Album and Its Heath Ledger Connection [Exclaim!] |
Despite opposition from developers and the city, the Hawaii Board of Education voted Tuesday to establish a new district along the planned Honolulu rail line from Kalihi to Ala Moana to help cover the cost of school services for the area’s anticipated population increase.
After the Department of Education conducts a fee study, first-buyers, renters or residential developers in the district would likely be required to pay fees and donate land to the department.
Opponents say that will make housing more expensive.
School impact districts already exist in Leeward Oahu, West Hawaii, and Central and West Maui.
Department of Education
The district was proposed based on the assumption that almost 39,000 new units along the 4-mile stretch will be built, according to board documents and a DOE analysis. Preliminary plans call for a $584 construction fee and a donation of .0016 acres of land for every unit.
DOE Assistant Superintendent Dann Carlson told Civil Beat that buyers who don’t want to give up any land may be charged a fee of $4,000 to 9,000, though he emphasized even that wide range was uncertain.
Based on those numbers, Carlson estimated the DOE could collect at least $210 million if all 39,000 unit owners decline to give up land. He said it’s too early to speculate about how much land the department might ultimately take in.
If all 39,000 units are built, the DOE would receive a total of 63.5 acres of land and almost $23 million, according to an earlier draft of the plan. If a fee was paid in lieu of land for all those units, the department would make more than $360 million.
Senior housing units that prohibit children would be exempted.
In testimony, Carlson said the department would consider creating different fees for each neighborhood in the district after hearing testimony at a Tuesday afternoon Finance and Infrastructure Committee meeting. But the task would be “very difficult,” Carlson said, partially because he has just one employee who can do the job.
Hawaii State Teachers Association President Corey Rosenlee testified during the meeting that the union supports the school impact fee district, arguing schools need to focus on improving their facilities.
He said when he taught at Campbell High School there were so many students that many teachers were forced to “float” from classroom to classroom. A school impact fee district could prevent that from happening again, he said.
Much of the testimony BOE received about the impact fees touched on affordable housing. Developers and the Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting oppose the fees.
At the committee meeting Tuesday, Harrison Rue of the Department of Planning and Permitting said equity was important and noted the fees for the Kalihi-Ala Moana District were more than twice as high as those in Ewa Beach.
Board of Education member Bruce Voss addressed housing costs.
“This impact fee, if it’s enacted in the $9-10,000 range, will have the most unfortunate effect of killing off affordable housing opportunities for our most needy — including, by the way, some of the parents of our students,” Voss said. “The fact is that equity and excellence in our public school facilities is going to require hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer commitment. We are kidding ourselves to pretend that this impact fee is going to make any material difference in that.”
Cory Lum/Civil Beat
In a Monday interview with Civil Beat, Rep. Matt LoPresti said it was “dumbfounding” that any BOE members would be concerned about affordable housing policy because “it’s their job to make sure students and teachers are taken care of.”
In February, LoPresti filed a complaint regarding the proposed school impact fee district with the state Ethics Commission. In it, he wrote that almost all board members had interests in real estate development and should have “disclosed … or asked for a ruling on a potential conflict of interest” in order to vote on the fee.
He partnered with Common Cause Hawaii, an organization that advocates for the public interest, and issued a press release Monday urging board members to disclose potential conflicts of interest or recuse themselves from a vote.
Board members should be elected, not appointed, LoPresti said, adding, “Monied, connected people” make decisions that favor similar people.
Impact fees would bite into developers’ profits, he said, noting the Legislature had killed bills to exempt affordable housing developers from impact fees.
Sen. Will Espero, who sponsored one of those bills, said even though the bill died, it “went to the very end” and died in conference committees. House and Senate conference committees are established to resolve conflicts over a bill.
“The majority of the members on this committee are either developers or tied to developers … and they have repeatedly delayed implementation of impact fees that benefit children,” thus helping developers, he said.
LoPresti reiterated his concerns in testimony to the board, in which he said he supported the school impact fee district. Read his full complaint here.
More Money To Be Sought From Legislature
Also Tuesday, the board also voted to approve a new weighted student formula for the next two school years.
The formula is a means of divvying up funding for Hawaii schools. It allocates a baseline amount based on student enrollment, then makes adjustments (or “weights”) based on how many students are “gifted and talented,” speak limited English, are economically disadvantaged or transient.
Cory Lum/Civil Beat
Weighted student formulas have been used in school districts nationwide, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — the three largest cities in the country.
While the WSF tends to help larger schools, it can hurt smaller schools in rural areas. The Committee on Weights, a group of mostly principals and teachers designated to set specifics for the WSF, noted these objections in its recommendations to the board.
The new formula’s baseline amount will be adjusted to reflect changes in average salaries for schools’ financial plans, which happens every two years, according to board documents. Calculations based on committee recommendations show average salary changes at various school levels could result in a net increase of $87.6 million to the WSF baseline.
Weights will be increased for English Language Learners, with different values assigned to students with levels of proficiency from fully proficient to non-proficient. ELL could receive $10 million more in support, according to the report.
If the DOE gets more money for the WSF program, homeless students will be a funding priority for the first time and ELL students will get additional support. The committee estimated this could cost $2.3 million.
Committee recommendations ask the board to seek an extra $258 million for the WSF in fiscal years 2018 and 2019, which overlap the next two school years.
Cory Lum/Civil Beat
The committee also recommended the DOE work with the state to find more community resources for students.
“Additional funds and community partnerships are critical to advance equity and excellence for all schools and every student,” the committee wrote.
The board’s Committee on Weights won’t meet again until 2019, according to the DOE website.
At the Finance and Infrastructure Committee meeting, board member Brian De Lima thanked the committee for its hard work and said asking for an extra $258 million may draw criticism. Schools can get into a routine of asking for only what they think they can get from the Legislature, he said — “not what they really want or need.”
“We’ve come to accept that in a lot of ways,” he said. “In some ways that’s the local style, ‘Hey, let’s not make waves.'” |
To prevent politicians from committing severe corruption, the death penalty will be enshrined in an organic law of the junta-backed draft charter.
On 2 November 2016, Meechai Ruchuphan, the Chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC), announced the CDC has been drafting the organic law for political parties — one of the most crucial laws of the junta-sponsored draft charter, reported Voice TV.
The chairman said that the law will impose severe punishments on politicians involved in corruption cases. Punishments will range from lifting political rights, party dissolution, life imprisonment to the death penalty.
The death sentence will be used against politicians who commit severe acts of corruption such as receiving money from abroad or in exchange for political positions, added Meechai.
“Selling off high [political] positions will destroy the whole body. This hasn’t been finalised yet. We will listen to everyone. If [the punishments] are too heavy, they will be reduced,” stated Meechai.
The Constitutional Court will have the power to rule on corruption cases to facilitate the suppression of corruption. Meechai added further that the law will also set a ceiling on the money a political party can receive from donations.
After a referendum on 7 August 2016 passed the draft charter, the CDC was appointed to draft 10 organic laws within 240 days to submit to the National Legislative Assembly — the junta-appointed lawmakers — for final approval.
Laws related to political parties, general elections, the appointment of the senate and the Election Commission will be drafted first so a general election can be held as soon as possible. |
It’s never too early for E3 news as gamers are always speculating at what might be on display at the world’s largest yearly gaming convention. This year, EA has decided to give gamers a sneak peak at some of their upcoming releases.
In a press release, EA has announced their lineup of games for EA Play 2017, their second annual event during the Electronic Entertainment Expo. From June 10-12, players can get an early hands-on with the newest instalments in the Star Wars Battlefront, Need for Speed, Madden, FIFA and NBA LIVE franchises.
Probably the most interesting news is a playable demo for the next Star Wars Battlefront, which was initially announced five months after the release of the Battlefront reboot. While EA has addressed most gamers’ criticism of the first game—the lack of a proper single-player Conquest mode, space combat and the meager amount of levels at launch—it will be interesting to see how much new content will be playable at this year’s EA Play.
EA has confirmed that Star Wars Battlefront II will have a single player mode, although this could just mean a repackaging of multiplayer levels with “objectives,” much like Battlefield 1, and a selection of content spanning both the original trilogy and the prequels, and the new Star Wars films, framing it as not only a sequel, but a reboot of the original Star Wars Battlefront II which featured similar elements.
EA PLAY will be hosted at the Hollywood Palladium with tickets being made available on Apri 20, 2017 at 9 a.m. PT/6 p.m. CET. |
Tasos Aliferis, the mayor of Tilos, held the civil ceremonies for two Greek gay and lesbian couples shortly after dawn.
The ceremonies were hailed as a step forward by campaigners in Greece, but provoked the wrath of conservative church officials and senior politicians.
One of the women involved in the civil ceremony, Evangelia Vlami, said: "From this day, discrimination against gays in Greece is on the decline. We did this to encourage other gay people to take a stand".
But Sotiris Hajigakis, the Minister of Justice, immediately declared the nuptials "illegal and invalid" and a prosecutor on the nearby island of Rhodes charged the mayor with breach of duty – which carries a maximum five-year jail sentence.
Mayor Aliferis defended the ceremonies, saying he had exploited a loophole in the law.
"I consulted the Greek civil code and the constitution and verified that there is no law against same-sex marriages," he said.
"The laws on marriage simply do not specify any genders. To me, therefore, if something is not banned by law it is not illegal."
Members of the country's powerful Orthodox Church expressed strong objections to same-sex unions.
"Who can guarantee that in the future we will not see a wedding between a man and his dog?" wrote the bishop of Kalavryta and Aigialeia in his internet blog. |
Ronald C. Arkin, "Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture," Technical Report GIT-GVU-07011. Fascinating (and long: 117-page) paper on ethical implications of robots in war.
Summary, Conclusions, and Future Work
This report has provided the motivation, philosophy, formalisms, representational requirements, architectural design criteria, recommendations, and test scenarios to design and construct an autonomous robotic system architecture capable of the ethical use of lethal force. These first steps toward that goal are very preliminary and subject to major revision, but at the very least they can be viewed as the beginnings of an ethical robotic warfighter. The primary goal remains to enforce the International Laws of War in the battlefield in a manner that is believed achievable, by creating a class of robots that not only conform to International Law but outperform human soldiers in their ethical capacity.
It is too early to tell whether this venture will be successful. There are daunting problems
remaining:
The transformation of International Protocols and battlefield ethics into machine usable representations and real-time reasoning capabilities for bounded morality using modal logics.
Mechanisms to ensure that the design of intelligent behaviors only provide responses within rigorously defined ethical boundaries.
The creation of techniques to permit the adaptation of an ethical constraint set and underlying behavioral control parameters that will ensure moral performance, should those norms be violated in any way, involving reflective and affective processing.
A means to make responsibility assignment clear and explicit for all concerned parties regarding the deployment of a machine with a lethal potential on its mission.
Over the next two years, this architecture will be slowly fleshed out in the context of the specific test scenarios outlined in this article. Hopefully the goals of this effort, will fuel other scientists’ interest to assist in ensuring that the machines that we as roboticists create fit within international and societal expectations and requirements.
My personal hope would be that they will never be needed in the present or the future. But mankind’s tendency toward war seems overwhelming and inevitable. At the very least, if we can reduce civilian casualties according to what the Geneva Conventions have promoted and the Just War tradition subscribes to, the result will have been a humanitarian effort, even while staring directly at the face of war. |
A couple of months ago, I reported that Scott Walker had politically appointed a couple of cronies - Rebecca Bradley and James Troupis - to the bench even though neither one was really qualified for the position.
On Friday, Walker announced his biggest judicial political appointee yet when he announced that he was making his own legal counsel, Brian Hagedorn, an appellate court judge:
Gov. Scott Walker said Friday that he had appointed his chief legal counsel to fill a vacancy on the state appeals court. Brian Hagedorn, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, will take the $139,059-a-year position in the District 2 Court of Appeals in Waukesha. He replaces Judge Richard Brown, who is retiring August 1 after 37 years on the bench. "Brian Hagedorn is a person of integrity who has a deep commitment to service and a passion for the rule of law," Walker said. "Brian has been a great asset during a transformative time in Wisconsin history, as we worked to bring big, bold reform to the state."
In case you missed it, Hagedorn was appointed to be an appellate court judge even though he has never been a judge.
In fact, Hagedorn has precious little in the way of experience. Before he was Walker's legal mouthpiece, he worked at a right wing law firm and a member of the Federalist Society.
Perhaps Walker felt that Hagedorn was qualified for the things he did while Walker's counsel, such as fighting open records requests or keeping Walker from being held accountable for a death he caused by negligence as Milwaukee County Executive
Then again, in Walker's eyes, Hagedorn's greatest achievement probably was sabotaging the John Doe investigation into Walker and his illegal collaboration with dark money groups.
It should be noted that Hagedorn being appointed to the appellate court in Waukesha County (or Walkersha County, if you will) is no matter of chance either. Waukesha County is where Walker's campaign is headquartered and where Walker likes to go judge shopping when he is in trouble for his misdeeds, either political or as governor. |
Liberian officials fear Ebola could soon spread through the capital's largest slum after residents raided a quarantine centre for suspected patients and took items including bloody sheets and mattresses.
The violence in the West Point slum occurred late Saturday and was led by residents angry that patients were brought to the holding centre from other parts of Monrovia, Tolbert Nyenswah, assistant health minister, said Sunday.
Up to 30 patients were staying at the centre and many of them fled at the time of the raid, said Nyenswah. Once they are located they will be transferred to the Ebola centre at Monrovia's largest hospital, he said.
West Point residents went on a "looting spree," stealing items from the clinic that were likely infected, said a senior police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the press. The residents took medical equipment and mattresses and sheets that had bloodstains, he said.
Ebola is spread through bodily fluids including blood, vomit, feces and sweat.
A health worker washes with disinfectant after dealing with people suspected of having the Ebola virus in the city of Monrovia, Liberia. The countryhas recorded more Ebola deaths, more than 400, than any of the other affected countries. (Abbas Dulleh/Associated Press)
"All between the houses you could see people fleeing with items looted from the patients," the official said, adding that he now feared "the whole of West Point will be infected."
Some of the looted items were visibly stained with blood, vomit and excrement, said Richard Kieh, who lives in the area.
The incident raises fears of new infections in Liberia, which was already struggling to contain the outbreak.
Liberian police restored order to the West Point neighbourhood. Sitting on land between the Montserrado River and the Atlantic Ocean, West Point is home to at least 50,000 people, according to a 2012 survey produced by groups including the Liberia Peacebuilding Office and the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission.
Distrust of government runs high, with rumours regularly circulating that officials plan to clear the slum out entirely.
Though there had been talk of putting West Point under quarantine should Ebola break out there, assistant health minister Nyenswah said Sunday no such step had been taken. "West Point is not yet quarantined as being reported," he said.
Kenya bars travellers from Ebola-hit countries
Ebola has killed 1,145 people in West Africa, including 413 in Liberia, according to the World Health Organization.
In East Africa, the Kenyan government took steps to prevent the disease from spreading. Kenya will bar passengers travelling from three West African countries hit by the Ebola outbreak, closing a debate in East Africa's economic powerhouse about whether the national airline was exposing the country to the deadly disease.
Ebola has killed 1,145 people in West Africa, including 413 in Liberia, according to the World Health Organization. (Sunday Alamba/The Associated Press) The suspension is effective midnight Tuesday for all ports of entry for people travelling from or through Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, said Kenya's Health Ministry. Nigeria was not included in the ban, which also allows entry to health professionals and Kenyans returning from those countries.
"This step is in line with the recognition of the extraordinary measures urgently required to contain the Ebola outbreak in West Africa," the Health Ministry said. It cited the World Health Organization's recent statement that the magnitude of the Ebola outbreak has been underestimated.
Following the government's announcement Saturday, Kenya Airways said it would suspend flights to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Kenya Airways, a major transport provider in Africa, had wrestled with the decision whether to continue flying to West Africa during the Ebola outbreak. Its suspension of flights is an abrupt reversal of its announcement Friday that it would continue flying.
Social commentators, medical experts and Kenyan politicians said they feared the airline was putting profits ahead of prudence, and that KQ, as the airline is known, would spread Ebola. The airline flies more than 70 flights a week to West Africa.
Several airlines have already suspended flights to Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, including British Airways, Emirates Airlines, Arik Air and ASKY Airlines. Nigeria became the fourth Ebola-affected country late last month after a Liberian-American man sick with the disease flew to Lagos on an ASKY flight and infected several people before he died.
Officials in Cameroon, which borders Nigeria, announced Friday it would suspend all flights from all four Ebola-affected countries. Korean Air announced on Thursday it would temporarily halt its service to Kenya despite the fact there are no cases of Ebola in the country. |
NEW DELHI: There is too much nudity on television and internet which should be controlled feels the new Censor Board chief Pahlaj Nihalani . Days after taking charge as chairman of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) Nihalani said that there was "double standards" in judging films vis-a-vis TV shows which should be "corrected." The Bollywood film producer plans to take this up as a priority with the information and broadcasting (I&B) ministry. Speaking to TOI Nihalani said, "Nudity is available online and on certain TV programs like live fashion shows. It should be in sync with the rules followed in films. There should be one policy for nudity (portrayal of sex in films)."He said that while films on TV, promos went through a certification process, many live programmes were subject to self-regulation. "The self–regulation is not being followed. There is vulgarity on TV…it should be controlled," he said.The comments are likely to stir a hornet's nest as TV is governed under the Cable Television Networks (regulations) Act over which the Censor Board has no jurisdiction. TV shows are subject to peer review with industry bodies like Broadcast Content Complaints Council (BCCC) and News Broadcasters Standards Authority (NBSA) taking note of viewers' complaints.Nihalani who in a recent interview described PM Narendra Modi as his "action hero" defended his words. "I am a big fan of BJP. I admire Modiji for his leadership qualities and people are very happy that he is in power. There are expectations from him and as a citizen of this country I am motivated to move ahead," he said.When asked whether he had been picked for the job because of his proximity to the ruling party Nihalani said, "It is a recognition of my capabilities…my social work. I am a citizen of this country. No one has brought me from Italy…"The Bollywood veteran also said that he would work towards fast-tracking online certification for films. "Fimmakers should be able to check status of their films online. We also plan to start a "tatkal" certification process for those filmmakers who are pressed for time," the producer who has films like Shola aur Shabnam and Aanken to his name said. |
Prince William will take the first public steps in his new bid to highlight the issue of male suicide when he and wife Princess Kate make a series of public and private outings next week, PEOPLE has learned.
The royals will hear multiple compelling stories first-hand on March 10 – among them that of Jonny Benjamin, whose life was saved by a stranger in 2008 as he contemplated suicide.
After receiving help, Benjamin launched the social media campaign #FindMike, together with the charity Rethink Mental Illness, to find his savior.
The campaign succeeded and Benjamin was reunited with, not a Mike, but Neil Laybourn.
William, 33, and Kate, 34, will head to St. Thomas’s hospital, on the south bank of the River Thames in London, where Benjamin was initially sent for treatment.
Then, back at their offices at Kensington Palace, the couple will watch part of a documentary about Benjamin’s experience, along with a group of about 20 children from a south London school. Later, the royals will participate in a private discussion with a group who have been bereaved in various ways by suicide.
William’s focus on the mental illnesses facing young men is partly inspired by witnessing their consequences during his work as an air ambulance pilot.
In his first months working with the East Anglian Air Ambulance last summer, William’s crew was called out to suicide cases involving young men. They failed in at least one of those cases, despite the efforts of the medical team.
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The visit on March 10 with Kate comes as the couple and William’s brother Prince Harry are spearheading a three-pronged approach to tackling mental illness: Kate is looking at where children can be affected, Harry at the issues facing service members and William is focusing on vulnerable young men and adults.
A Kensington Palace spokesman tells PEOPLE, “The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry are continuing to work with mental health experts and charities to help raise awareness of a variety of issues within the sector.” |
Not even 40 yet, but my urge to bang women is almost non-existent at this point. In my early 30’s I still had a strong desire to “get laid” as I thought doing so would somehow justify my existence. I still look at a woman with a nice rearend at times like any other guy, but the difference is, 2 seconds after I look the wheels start turning in my head. I ask myself “How many other guys has she banged this week?” or “Imagine what an absolute kunt she is” or “What if I banged her and she got pregnant. In a few months her belly would look like a watermelon. Would she still be hot then?”
Once these thoughts enter my head, it’s all but over as far as desire goes to chase/fawn/worship these creatures goes. For whatever reason sex just doesn’t appeal to me anymore. Sure a woman looks hot in a tight dress, but that same women spread eagle naked probably would not look so great. Beat up pussy, vaginal infections, YUCK! A man’s sperm stays inside a woman’s t~~~ for 2 weeks. So if you ate that hot chick’s pussy chances are you’d be licking up another man’s sperm. Unless you honestly believe she hasn’t gotten laid in 2 weeks HAHAHAHAH!!! Yeah right. These c~~~-carousel riding whores are banging different guys twice a week minimum.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back to trying to get a woman into bed. It’s over. It’s FINALLY over and I’m glad. Keep the Viagra and Cialis to yourself, I actually LOVE having a lower sex drive. Keeps me out of trouble, keeps me from making stupid choices, and it keeps me healthy. Let the “players” eat up another man’s sperm from a whore’s t~~~ when they take these dishonest hookers to bed on a Friday night. Enjoy, assholes! |
Story highlights Oscar Pistorius' conduct was "negligent," Judge Thokozile Masipa says
She says Pistorius cannot be found guilty of intentionally killing his girlfriend
In addition to the murder charge, Pistorius faces three weapons charges
The most serious weapons charge is related to ammunition found in his house
Oscar Pistorius did not commit murder the night he killed Reeva Steenkamp, a judge said Thursday.
He did not intend to kill her, Judge Thokozile Masipa said.
But his conduct was "negligent," she said before adjourning for the day, suggesting she will find the Olympian guilty of culpable homicide.
There is no minimum sentence for culpable homicide in South African law. It's up to the judge to decide.
As he fired four bullets into the bathroom of his home in Pretoria on Valentine's Day last year, he did not foresee the "possibility that he would kill the person behind the door, let alone the deceased, as he thought she was in the bedroom at the time," Masipa said.
Evidence suggests that Pistorius genuinely believed the person in the bathroom was an intruder, although that is irrelevant to the case, the judge said.
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Pistorius could have taken other actions when he thought there was an intruder, she said. "All the accused had to do was to pick up his cell phone to call security or the police," she said.
"He could have run to the balcony and screamed in the same way he screamed after the incident," she added, noting that Pistorius called security after the incident and could have done so when he heard what he thought was an intruder.
Judge: Pistorius' background no excuse
Defense arguments that his upbringing "in a crime-riddled environment and in a home where the mother was paranoid and always carried a firearm" might explain his conduct that night, but "it does not excuse the conduct," Masipa said.
"The accused had reasonable time to reflect, to think and to conduct himself reasonably," she said. "I am not persuaded that a reasonable person with the accused's disabilities in the same circumstances would have fired four shots into that small toilet cubicle."
Following the country's legal standard for determining culpable homicide, Masipa found that "a reasonable person" would have "foreseen the reasonable possibility" that whoever was in the bathroom might have been killed, and would have "taken steps to guard against that possibility," she said.
"I am of the view that the accused acted too hastily and used excessive force," she said, adding that under the circumstances, "it is clear that his conduct was negligent."
Pistorius could be seen crying at times during the reading of the lengthy verdict.
The Olympian's trial in the death of his model and law graduate girlfriend started six months ago, transfixing the world with graphic details of how he fatally shot Steenkamp.
JUST WATCHED A virtual walk in Pistorius' apartment Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH A virtual walk in Pistorius' apartment 01:45
JUST WATCHED Before and after the killing: the Pistorius I knew Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Before and after the killing: the Pistorius I knew 03:17
Before she rejected the premeditated murder charge, Masipa questioned why he fired "not one ... but four shots" into the bathroom before he went to find his girlfriend.
However, she said, the intention to shoot does not necessarily mean the intent to kill.
Judge: Pistorius knew right from wrong
"Court is satisfied that at the relevant time, the accused could distinguish between right and wrong," and act accordingly, she said.
Masipa cast doubt on witness testimony and said she believes media coverage contaminated testimonies. She doubted state witnesses, saying they were in and out of sleep the night of the killing.
"Technology is more reliable than human perception and human memory," she said.
She described the victim's wound as "immediately incapacitating" and said she believed a scream heard by witnesses the night of the killing was Pistorius,' not Steenkamp's.
The judge appeared to be accepting the defense timeline of events that the shots came first, then screaming that must have been Pistorius.
She knocked down some aspects of the state's case: the fact that Steenkamp took her phone and locked herself in the bathroom allegedly out of fear for her safety, phone messages between the couple that showed some rocky patches, and her stomach contents.
Reeva Steenkamp was shot dead on February 14, 2013, by her Olympic sprint star boyfriend Oscar Pistorius.
Barry and June Steenkamp sat expressionless a few rows behind the man on trial for killing their daughter. Her father bowed his head as he heard about his daughter's fatal wounds.
Pistorius' uncle, sister and brother also attended the hearing in the packed courtroom -- the latter in a wheelchair from a car accident.
Lesser charges
Pistorius also faces three weapons charges.
The most serious relates to ammunition found in his house when police searched it after the killing. He did not have a proper license for it, but he says he was storing it in his safe for his father.
If he is found guilty of the ammunition charge, he could face up to 15 years in prison, though the judge could opt for a lesser punishment such as a fine or the loss of his gun license.
Oscar Pistorius cries during the verdict in his murder trial in Pretoria, South Africa.
Two other charges are related to allegations that he recklessly fired a gun in public -- once in a restaurant in 2012, and again out of the sunroof of a car last year. Pistorius denies both.
The maximum penalty for each charge is five years behind bars. If he is convicted of either, he could face a lesser sentence, such as a fine or the loss of his gun license. |
Central High School is a public high school in the Logan[4] section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Central, the second-oldest continuously public high school in the United States (if one considers schools that were initially private, it is the thirty-fifth oldest public high school), was founded in 1836 and is a four-year university preparatory magnet school.
About 2,400 students attend grades 9 through 12. It consistently ranks among the top schools in the city and state. Central is regarded as one of the top public schools in the nation due to its high academic standards.This school requires exceptional grades for enrollment.[5]
Central High School is the only high school in the United States with authority, granted by an Act of Assembly in 1849, to confer academic degrees upon its graduates.[6] This practice is still in effect, and graduates who meet the requirements are granted the Bachelor of Arts degree. Central also confers high school diplomas upon graduates who do not meet the requirement for a bachelor's degree.
Due to its authority to grant academic degrees, Central traditionally refers to the principal of the school as the "President" of Central High School. The current president is Timothy J. McKenna.
Central, rather than using a general class year to identify its classes (as in "class of 2019"), uses the class graduating number system (as in "278th graduating class" or "278"). This tradition started shortly after the school's founding, when it was common to have two graduating classes per year – one in January and one in June. In June 1965, semiannual graduations were replaced by annual graduations. As of the 2018–2019 school year, the current senior class is the 278th graduating class of Central High School.[7]
History [ edit ]
An 1839 daguerreotype of Central High School is the earliest known photograph of the first school and the oldest known photograph taken in the U.S.
Central High School, first location, 1852
A postcard of the Boys Central High School, third location, 1904
Central High School of Philadelphia was founded in 1836 as "the crowning glory" of Philadelphia Pennsylvania's public school system, "the worthy apex to a noble pyramid", and the first "high" school in the state. Because city voters only reluctantly had been convinced of the need for a high school, the curriculum was carefully and publicly geared to the needs of taxpayers. Central's founders made an especially concerted effort to avoid educating students in the manner of private academies of the day, where classical languages and literature were of paramount importance.[5]
Central High School is the second oldest continuously public high school in the United States. The school was chartered by an Act of Assembly and approved on June 13, 1836. A site was purchased on the east side of Juniper Street below Market Street and on September 19, 1837, the cornerstone was laid. The school opened on October 26, 1838 with four professors and sixty-three students.[citation needed]
In November 1839, Alexander Dallas Bache, great grandson of Benjamin Franklin, and Professor of Natural Philosophy and Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, was elected the first President of Central High School.[8] President Bache resigned in 1842 to return to his professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, and was succeeded by John Seely Hart, who had been a Professor of Languages at Princeton University.[citation needed]
In 1845, two distinguished English members of the Society of Friends, James H. Tuke and Joseph Corosfield, spent several months in America investigating the school system of the United States. They devoted more than one-third of the text of their report to Central High School, that they depicted as a type of institution that had helped America and could help England.[citation needed]
An Act of Assembly, approved on April 9, 1849, provided that:
"The Controllers of the Public Schools of the First School District of Pennsylvania shall have and possess power to confer academic degrees in the arts upon graduates of the Central High School, in the City of Philadelphia, and the same and like power to confer degrees, honorary and otherwise, which is now possessed by the University of Pennsylvania."[9] In accordance with this Act, the Board of Controllers on September 11, 1849, authorized the conferring of appropriate degrees upon graduates of Central High.
On June 24, 1847, the President of the United States, James K. Polk, with Vice-President George M. Dallas and Attorney General Nathan Clifford paid a visit to the school and addressed the students.[citation needed]
In September 1854, the school transferred to a new building, located at the southeast corner of Broad and Green Streets. In 1858, President Hart resigned and was succeeded by Nicholas Harper Maguire. In September 1900, the school moved to its third location in a newer and larger building located at Broad, Green, Fifteenth, and Brandywine Streets. During the formal dedication on November 22, 1902, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, addressed the students.[citation needed]
In 1939, Central moved from its location at Broad and Green to its fourth, current, location at Ogontz and Olney Avenues. The building left behind became the Benjamin Franklin High School.[citation needed]
After 139 years of existence as an all-male public high school, Central's all-male policy was challenged by Susan Vorchheimer, who wished to be admitted to Central. On August 7, 1975, U.S. District Court Judge Clarence C. Newcomer ruled that Central must admit academically qualified girls starting in the fall term of 1975. The decision was appealed, and the Third Circuit Court ruled that Central had the right to retain its present status.[10] The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court that, on April 19, 1977, upheld the Third Circuit Court's verdict by a 4 to 4 vote with one abstention. That Supreme Court case was called Vorchheimer v. School Dist. of Philadelphia.[11][12]
In August 1983, Judge William M. Marutani of the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas, ruled that the single-sex admission policy was unconstitutional. The Board of Education voted not to appeal the legal decision, thereby admitting girls to Central High School. In September 1983, the first six girls, all seniors, were admitted.[citation needed]
In October 1987, and again in September 2011,[13] Central High School was officially named a Secondary school of National Excellence by the United States Department of Education and named a Blue Ribbon School. In March 1992, Redbook magazine named Central as one of the best schools in Pennsylvania. Central was named "Best Secondary School in Pennsylvania" by the magazine each year since they began rating the nation's best schools.[citation needed]
The multimillion-dollar art, science, and physical education addition was officially dedicated on February 17, 1994.[citation needed]
The Barnwell library is now one of the most advanced public school libraries in the United States since the $12 million renovation that was completed in 2005.[citation needed]
As of 2013, Central High School's score on the Pennsylvania school performance profile is a 101.3 out of a possible 100 non bonus point score. This ranks them as the number two public high school in the state, the other being the Downingtown STEM Academy with a rating of 101.4 out of 100 non bonus point score.[citation needed]
Philadelphia School of Pedagogy [ edit ]
The Philadelphia School of Pedagogy was a program for Central graduates who wanted to become elementary school teachers. It was the male counterpart to the Philadelphia's normal school, originally the upper division of Philadelphia High School for Girls.[citation needed]
Once a Bachelor's degree became the standard qualification for teachers, the normal schools that were run by the State System of Higher Education became colleges (e.g., West Chester, Cheyney, Indiana, etc.). However, the Philadelphia schools were run by the School District of Philadelphia, who had less money, and were located only a few blocks from Temple University[clarification needed].
Presidents of Central High School [ edit ]
A portrait of John Seely Hart by Thomas Eakins
Alexander Dallas Bache – 1839–1842
John Seely Hart – 1842–1858
Nicholas Harper Maguire. – 1858–1866
George Inman Riché – 1866–1886 (19th Class)
Franklin Taylor – 1886–1888
Henry Clark Johnson – 1888–1893
Robert Ellis Thompson – 1894–1920
John Louis Haney – 1920–1943 (100th Class)
William Hafner Cornog – 1943–1955 (146th Class)
Elmer Field – 1955–1962 (122nd Class)
William H. Gregory – 1962–1969
Howard Carlisle – 1969–1983 (162nd Class)
Sheldon S. Pavel – 1984–2012
Timothy J. McKenna – 2012–present
Guide to class numbers [ edit ]
Since graduates are usually identified by class number, the year in which they graduated is not immediately obvious. This section explains the relation between class number and graduation date.
The first class graduated in June 1842. Through much of the school's history, there were two graduating classes per year, in January and June. But in some years, including all years after 1965, there was only one graduating class, in June. The following list details the correspondence between class number and graduation date.[14]
1 June 1842 2 June 1843 3 January 1844 4 June 1844 … 2 classes per year … 75 January 1880 76 June 1880 77 June 1881 78 June 1882 79 January 1883 … 2 classes per year … 95 January 1891 96 June 1891 97 June 1892 … 1 class per year … 116 June 1911 117 January 1912 118 June 1912 … 2 classes per year … 223 January 1965 224 June 1965 225 June 1966 … 1 class per year …
Thus, for classes graduating after 1965, the year of graduation equals the class number plus 1741.
Notable alumni [ edit ] |
Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics which was launched on Facebook just a few months ago on June 2, 2014 will be shut down on 22nd October 2014. With no explanation from Disney or developer Playdom on the matter, players are now venting their frustrations on how to claim back real money that they have spent on buying in-game gold.
As a long-time player of Marvel Avengers Alliance (I started playing during the launch and view Tactics as a separate game), I am well acquainted with Playdom's format. You can either spend some time grinding to unlock content and resources (especially command points for hero recruitment, which you can obtain on a roulette after you defeat a boss in a mission) or spend real money to buy gold and exchange those for command points or to buy premium weapons for your agent, skip quests or speed up hero training.
Playdom’s support pages included this developer statement:
“It is a difficult decision to shut down this game, but this will allow us to focus on building new and more engaging games. We appreciate your support and understanding. Please understand that support for this title will be limited leading up to its closure and issues that would require additional assistance and or game fixes, will not be addressed prior to the shutdown. Please note that Playdom is not responsible for providing refunds or credits for any virtual items, in-game currency, or other items that may be no longer available once a game is shut down. More information may be found in our Terms of Use.” * Bold added for emphasis.
Of course this means that players who have spent gold on the game will definitely be worried as I know players who spend hundreds of dollars for "virtual" bragging rights. With the game shutting down so soon after releasing content up to Chapter 3 (I have played it occasionally too) it is a tough blow to the players - especially those who forked out their money.
Disney has been shutting down several other Playdom games recently – including Pirates of the Caribbean. The Playdom website version of Marvel Avengers Alliance was also shut down on 20th of April this year.
It is possible that the game was simply not ready upon release - the title seemed like a rushed job. During the launch beta, when I played the game I could not help but notice that some of the classes were not getting bonuses versus their counter class. There were also some horrible bugs, as evidenced by one of their patch logs here:
BUG FIXES
Fixed a few bugs that may have been causing some users to get a crash launching the game
Fixed a bug with the Balefire Raptor that was causing the game to crash when it used the “Melted Armor” ability
Epic Boss 1 will now launch correctly for all players - Early adopters that defeated M.O.D.O.K. and then were not able to face him again will now be able to
Fixed a bug that reset facility upgrade timers if the building was attacked during the upgrade - Long upgrades there we being restarted due to PvP attacks will now be a thing of the past
Fixed some issues related to class bonuses not working under certain conditions
Extended the PvP combat timer from 7 minutes to 12 minutes
Fixed an error that prevented the radar button in the Battle Log from taking the player to the location of the attacker
Fixed a bug with Black Panther’s Guard ability that caused him to lock up in combat if the guard higher than 7th level
Fixed a bug with She Hulk’s Defense Lawyer ability that caused it to proc when enemies were hit around her
Dr. Doom’s “Shocking Armor” no longer stacks.
Captain Marvel’s Tactical Command no longer applies Target Focus to allies.
She-Hulk’s “Defense Lawyer” passive no longer protects enemies from area attacks.
Infiltrators should no longer counter-attack random tacticians at random times.
The Light Speed status no longer stacks, and is removed correctly on use.
Black Widow can now use “Flying Kick” on an adjacent target.
With Disney shutting down a number of games, will it be Marvel Avengers Alliance next? I hope not. I still actively play the game, even 2 years after launch. We can only hope that Playdom and Disney will learn from this and do better on their next game release. |
Right now, presidential candidates are crisscrossing the country, begging primary voters for their support. So it's easy to forget that not too long ago, these voters had no say in who their party nominated for president.
But everything changed after the Democratic National Convention in 1968:
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In the nation's early days, members of Congress picked their party's nominee. And for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, party bosses told delegates at the convention which candidate to support, and everybody else found out in the papers and on TV.
But things changed in 1968. The party was split over the Vietnam War: the incumbent Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, supported it. Liberal voters were opposed. And when party elites nominated a pro-war candidate who hadn't won a single primary, all hell broke loose.
The riots, police violence, and lack of party unity paved the way for a Republican victory in the general election. And the Democrats decided they had to reform the way they picked their nominee.
Enter presidential primaries. Voters get a lot more say, but the new system is far from perfect. |
A 12-year-old vegan schoolboy hung himself after bullies threw pieces of meat at him, an inquest heard.
Louie Tom Fenton was pronounced dead after he was found hanged in the bathroom at his home in Waterford, Hertfordshire on January 19.
Hertfordshire Coroner's Court heard yesterday how Louie was bullied for his decision to go vegan at Richard Hale School, Hertford.
In a letter read out in court, his mother, Catherine Fenton, said: 'He had been bullied regularly since he arrived at Richard Hale School.
Louie Tom Fenton (pictured left) was found dead in the bathroom at home in Waterford, Hertfordshire in January this year. He had been bullied at school for being vegan
'He had regular appointments with the counsellor and he started self harming.
'They threw meat at him in the canteen because he was a vegan.'
The court heard how he would have to go outside at lunchtimes to avoid the bullies and had started smoking heavily as a way of coping with the torment.
Despite his mother approaching the school several times, the bullying continued, she claimed.
The inquest heard there was no evidence that Louie had intended to kill himself, and that there was no suicide note found.
His father Graeme wrote to the coroner, telling him he did not believe his son meant to take his own life and was just 'messing around'.
Louie was a member of the Hertford Sea Scouts, learning how to tie all the knots and knowing all their names.
The inquest heard the youngster (pictured) had to sit outside to avoid bullies and had began smoking heavily as a way of coping with the torment
Following his death his family set up a Justgiving page to raise money for the Sea Life Trust in his memory.
The page, which has collected £1,759.97 so far, reads: 'It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of Louie Tom Fenton who passed away on 19 January 2017.
'He loved the sea and was deeply committed to conservation, the environment and sea life.
'Instead of flowers for his memorial service, we know he would have preferred a contribution to this charity.'
Richard Hale School gave no evidence at yesterday's hearing, but police notes from an interview with head teacher Stephen Neate were read out.
The notes confirmed Louie was a heavy smoker and hung around with older children.
Mrs Fenton added: 'I'm concerned if he was being bullied to such an extent that he wanted to hang himself whether the school has done anything to tackle it and make sure it doesn't happen again.
'I never had the feeling that Louie was so depressed that he wanted to die.'
The Fenton family has set up a fundraising page to raise money in memory of Louie (pictured left)'s love of the sea. So far they have raised £1,759 for the Sea Life Trust
Coroner for Hertfordshire, Geoffrey Sullivan, said he would write to the school to ensure their policies for dealing with bullying and self harming were up to date.
He said: 'Given what you have said I shall write to the head teacher at the school to ask if policies are in place and up to date in respect of pupils who experience bullying and do self harm.'
Stephen Neate, Headmaster at Richard Hale School, told MailOnline the school was aware Louie was being bullied, but the meat-throwing incident was not reported to them by him or his family.
He said: 'The whole school community was deeply shocked by the death of Louie Fenton in January 2017. Our feelings are, and have always been, with his family.
'We remembered Louie through assemblies at school and in prayers with the whole school at St Pauls Cathedral. Students who have been affected by his unexpected death have been supported.
'We were aware of concerns about Louie being unhappy at school and we were actively engaged with him and his family to address these issues.
'However, at no time were we made aware of the incident in which meat was allegedly thrown at Louie.
'This was never reported to the school by Louie or his mother, has not been substantiated by any member of staff at school or by any of Louie's friends in Year 9.
Mr Neate added the school is renewing its policies to make sure 'lessons are learnt' from Louie's death.
He said: 'The safety, happiness and wellbeing of all pupils at Richard Hale is of paramount importance and the school prides itself on its pastoral care, which has been recognised in our most recent Ofsted report.
'We annually review our anti-bullying policy and advice on bullying, plus the school's response to it, is displayed in every classroom.
'We will now review our procedures, ensuring that all agencies who worked with Louie and his family, both inside and outside the school, learn any lessons from this tragic case.'
Louie was due to go on a school ski trip in the weeks after his death.
His mother and father said he was excited about the holiday and had discussed who he wanted to share a room with.
Paying tribute to him, a statement from the Fenton family read: 'Louie was a wonderful boy, much loved by family and friends alike.
'He had wide ranging interests and was very passionate about them.
'In some ways, he had wisdom and concerns way beyond his years, and in other ways he was a mischievous, enthusiastic boy to whom the world offered the opportunity of discovery and adventure.
Louie (pictured far right) was a member of the Hertford Sea Scouts. His family is raising money for the Sea Life Trust in his memory
'Louie had a wonderful sense of humour and an infectious giggle.
'On the day he died he had appeared excited by gifts he had received in the post, he mentioned a couple of issues at school but did not appear unduly troubled.
'We feel his loss deeply, he made our lives better by being with us. He still had so much to offer.'
Commenting on an online memorial page, friend Joey Green said: 'I was so sad to hear about Louie. I have lots of fun memories of him when we were little at Millmead.
'I remember at the park you tought me to swing on a swing.
'At lunch times we would meet by the toad stalls and chat, climb trees and laugh. I will always remember you like this.
'My thoughts are with your friends and family. You will be missed X'
His aunt Lucy Roper said: 'My lovely little Lou, I am going to miss you big time!
'We had so many in-depth conversations about life - our love of sharks and the fact that they get a rough deal from most and should be appreciated more.
'I could write for hours as you were such a character and there are many many lovely and funny stories to tell and remember you by.
'I'll never forget you Louie.
'Always in my heart xox'
Mr Sullivan gave an open verdict at the conclusion of the inquest, ruling that he was not convinced that Louie meant to kill himself. |
Proposed billion-dollar aged care cut to have 'huge' impact, campaigners warn
Updated
Aged care providers are stepping up their campaign against a proposed billion-dollar cut to the sector, saying a similar reduction to the aged pension would see "riots in the streets."
Key points: Providers say budget cut to reduce funding by $6,655 per resident each year
Over 500 providers say services like physiotherapy might have to be reduced
Labor promises wide-ranging review of aged care system
UnitingCare Australia commissioned a survey of 21 per cent of aged care providers to gauge the effect of the Government's plan to change the funding formula for aged care services.
The modelling by Ansell Strategic has found the budget cut would reduce funding by $6,655, or 11 per cent, per resident each year.
"The extent of these cuts are huge," UnitingCare Australia's Aged Care Network chair Steve Teulan said.
"If there had been a $6,500 reduction in the age care pension we would see riots in the streets."
He said some of the 501 providers surveyed reported they would have to reduce services like physiotherapy, and consider whether to accept residents with complex needs, if the changes went ahead from July this year.
"They would have to decide whether they would accept people or whether they believe the care which should be provided is better provided in hospitals," Mr Teulan said.
The Government first unveiled changes to the aged care funding formula in the mid-year budget update in December last year, and the latest budget decision expands on that process.
Funding model 'too complex': Health Minister
Health and Aged Care Minister Sussan Ley said funding to the sector would continue to grow, but that the changes were needed to address a projected blow-out of $3.8 billion in the cost of the payments.
"As economically responsible managers, we have to bring funding growth back to the budgeted trend over time," she said in a statement.
Mr Teulan said providers accepted the Government's costs must be carefully managed, but that a review was also needed of the true cost of providing care to older Australians.
"People do need to realise that people coming into residential aged care, their needs are increasing, as we have more people being supported in the community," he said.
"But it is still quite possible to develop sustainable models where both objectives; managing cost, and providing funding for decent care, can be achieved, and we would welcome the opportunity to work with the Government on that."
Ms Ley said she was concerned the funding model was "too complex", and that changes were needed to give greater certainty to providers and taxpayers.
She said if the Coalition won the election, the Government would consult with the sector on "potential, longer-term reform" to the funding system.
Labor has promised to conduct a wide-ranging review of the aged care system — including the funding model — if it wins this Saturday's election, but it has not promised to restoring the funding cuts.
Topics: community-and-society, aged-care, government-and-politics, elections, federal-elections, australia
First posted |
Ten miles inland from the coast of the Connecticut River, the landscape is punctuated by a picturesque horse ranch complete with leafy shade trees, white picket fences and expanses of bright green grass. But DU archaeologist Larry Conyers can show you an entirely different picture of the farm … underground.
Conyers and two graduate students, Maeve Herrick and Jasmine Saxon, used ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology to find out if an early 17th-century farmstead was once located at the site of the expansive ranch, which is now owned by a local family. The DU team ended up uncovering what may be the first archaeological evidence of cohabitation between early colonists and Native Americans.
“This is arguably the most important historic period archaeological site to be identified in the state of Connecticut,” says Brian Jones, who, as Connecticut state archaeologist, is leading the investigation of the property. “The site documents an especially poorly understood period of colonial history as the first English settlers of the Connecticut River Valley adjusted to a new way of life.”
Conyers, who chairs DU’s anthropology department, is the world’s leading expert on GPR, a technology that uses high-frequency radar pulses to create images of objects and architecture buried underground. GPR is critical to the field of anthropology because it allows scientists to avoid the often irrevocable damage to buried materials frequently associated with excavation. Rather than spend months or years digging in the ground, Conyers can safely use GPR to view what is otherwise hidden to the human eye.
Conyers and the two students determined that the Connecticut horse farm was once a multi-house colonial family settlement from the 1630s. Their research also revealed evidence that Wangunk Indians lived in or near the settlement at the same time as the colonists.
“Very few 17th-century English settlements have been identified in Connecticut, and next to nothing related to 17th-century English settlement had been archaeologically explored,” Jones says. “The presence of Native American material on the site adds to our appreciation of the complex relationship between the English and their native neighbors at this time.”
Archaeologists like Jones and historians around the world regularly ask Conyers to investigate their sites because of his masterful use of GPR technology. He has uncovered medieval Irish farming communities, African mass graves and buried pueblos. He selects projects, in large part, based on what would make good research assignments for his graduate students.
Members of the Connecticut team contacted Conyers when their preliminary site work gave them reason to believe that historically significant artifacts were located at the horse ranch. Locals had long believed the site was a colonial homestead. The property owners knew their ancestors were early settlers, and the family was curious about what might be buried there.
“It was a perfect test site for GPR because the land had been relatively untouched—it’s been used only as a working farm by the same family for centuries,” Conyers says. He accepted the Connecticut invitation, and Herrick and Saxon had their thesis projects.
In close partnership with the owners, state officials and community volunteers, Herrick and Saxon first conducted a large, magnetic, geophysical survey during DU’s spring break in 2016. This guided them to the general area of what turned out to be important buried features. Next, they collected GPR data that revealed exactly where the team should excavate to find artifacts: buried cellars of the earliest houses.
Herrick and Saxon, both of whom came to DU to study GPR under Conyers, used the radar equipment to point to the location where a rare and fully intact Native American pot was discovered. Ultimately, hundreds of pottery fragments were discovered throughout the site.
Curiously, they found the intact pot inside the cellar of a colonial home. Obtaining an intact artifact is particularly important because very few fragile artifacts are found wholly preserved. Finding it in the colonial home creates more questions than answers.
In addition, the graduate students found a possible series of Native American dwellings about 200 feet southwest of the colonialist houses. There is some indication that Native American dwellings may have stood right in the middle of the cluster of colonial houses.
“We just don’t know yet,” says Conyers as to why Native Americans and early colonists may have cohabitated. The DU team has dozens of working hypotheses that must be tested. With the artifacts already discovered providing what Jones calls “tangible proof of the close relationship between the colonials and the neighboring Wangunk people,” the Connecticut team expects to continue working at the site for five more years.
“The most memorable event was when we started to break ground at the site,” Saxon says. “Maeve and I had already run the GPR survey and had calculated the depth to the top of each cellar. When we later excavated, our measurements were exactly on. It was really exciting to take all of the GPR knowledge that we had learned and apply it to a real-life scenario, especially because we were so accurate.”
Conducting GPR research is both taxing and time-intensive. As Conyers notes, “The students must spend time every evening on site, processing and visualizing their data from that day. But the really hard work is done back on campus. It can take up to a week of analysis and processing for every day of collection in the field.”
Independent research by other archaeologists needs to be completed to verify the DU team’s findings. In the meantime, Conyers has asked his students several huge yet basic questions: “What was the pot doing in the cellar? What were the houses doing so close together?” Herrick and Saxon will attempt to answer Conyers’ questions in their theses. They also hope to abate the curiosity of the property’s owners.
Conyers, meanwhile, is delving into other GPR projects around the world. He’s done roughly 400 so far. Recent projects include searches for Neanderthal remains in coastal Portugal; Aborigine graves in Australia; temples and tombs in the Middle East; medieval castles in Ireland; and ancient Roman sites in Croatia. In spring 2017, with DU undergraduate and graduate students in tow, he ventured to a Wheat Ridge graveyard at the request of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver. Conyers helped officials there discover the location of a woman’s body buried more than 100 years ago. The church is considering making her a saint.
“All GPR projects are great. Every survey is different and a challenge, as the materials in the ground are unknown or only vaguely known,” Conyers says. “As the ground conditions are always different, what is found buried in that ground is always exciting.” |
Several weeks ago, at DreamHack Montreal, David Kim sat down with Smix and Artosis to reveal a number of planned design changes coming to StarCraft II. While the changes revealed at that event are not necessarily final, they do paint an accurate picture of the changes we’re willing to make for StarCraft II. We'd like to continue to make balance tweaks as necessary over the coming two months, and for that, we need your help! A first step towards getting more data and feedback was to make it as easy as possible for you to experiment with our balance changes, so we've gone ahead and added matchmaking for them.
Starting with Patch 3.6, you will see a new 'Testing' sub-menu appear in the Mutliplayer section of StarCraft II. This section will offer matchmaking where players of similar skill can play against one another in the newest version of the StarCraft II Balance Changes.
How it Works:
The version of StarCraft II that will be available in the Testing section is radically different than what is currently live on the Ladder, and to make it as easy as possible to know what you're getting into, you can now view the changes that are being tested directly within the client. This can be done by navigating to the 'Testing' section within Multiplayer, and selecting the 'Balance Info' dialogue box.
Alternatively, if you wish to dive into greater detail about why specific changes are being tested, or if you want to offer up your feedback to the community to see other players' thoughts on your observations, you can jump onto the StarCraft II forums by selecting the 'Battle.net Forums' option. Here you'll find the Community Feedback Updates which are posted weekly by the Lead Balance Designer, David Kim as he responds to numerous points brought up by the community and also provides insight into the design team’s thought processes.
Integrating the community into our design process for StarCraft II has proven to be immensely helpful as Legacy of the Void has continued to develop. We look forward to making our Balance Testing even more accessible to you, and hearing the reactions and thoughts of even more players than before. Thanks for your feedback, and we're excited to be making even more improvements to StarCraft II!
We'll see you online! |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) said on Thursday it has a “reasonable basis” to believe Yahoo Inc’s YHOO.O massive data breach of email accounts represents a material impact that could allow Verizon to withdraw from its $4.83 billion deal to buy the technology company.
The Verizon logo is seen on the side of a truck in New York City, U.S., October 13, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Verizon’s general counsel Craig Silliman told reporters at a roundtable in Washington the data breach could trigger a clause in the deal that would allow the U.S. wireless company not to complete it.
“I think we have a reasonable basis to believe right now that the impact is material and we’re looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact. If they believe that it’s not then they’ll need to show us that,” he said, declining to comment on whether talks are under way to renegotiate the purchase price.
Asked for comment, a Yahoo spokesman said: “We are confident in Yahoo’s value and we continue to work towards integration with Verizon.”
The deal has a clause that says Verizon can withdraw if a new event “reasonably can be expected to have a material adverse effect on the business, assets, properties, results of operation or financial condition of the business.”
Silliman said the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has approved Verizon’s planned acquisition of Yahoo, but it still needs approval from the European Commission and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is reviewing the proxy.
Verizon has had preliminary briefings from Yahoo but it still needs “significant information” from the company before it makes a final decision on the materiality of the hacking of at least 500 million email accounts, Silliman said.
He said Verizon is “absolutely evaluating (the breach) and will make determinations about whether and how to move forward with the deal based on our evaluation of the materiality.”
Yahoo shares ended 1.75 percent lower at $41.62, while Verizon was largely unchanged, closing at $50.29, down 0.02 percent.
Yahoo in September disclosed that it had fallen victim to a data breach in 2014 that compromised users’ names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and encrypted passwords.
The company has said the cyber attack was carried out by a “state-sponsored” actor, but some private security experts have challenged that assertion.
Several Democratic senators have pressed Yahoo to reveal more information about the hack and why it took so long to discover.
The internet firm said it learned of the breach this summer while investigating claims of a separate intrusion, but it has not provided a specific timeline of events.
Some analysts suggested Verizon may be trying to get a better price.
Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics, said “Verizon is rightfully upset about Yahoo not properly disclosing the breach.”
He said Yahoo would most likely have to consider renegotiating the price with Verizon, if it came to that.
“I don’t think it has much of a choice. Who else would want to buy them?” Entner said.
Experts said bidders who try to extract themselves from mergers using the material adverse clause face an uphill battle. No U.S. company has ever invoked the clause successfully in court to get out of a deal.
In 2013, Cooper Tire & Rubber company got cold feet about a $2.5 billion sale to Apollo Tyres and argued in the Delaware Court of Chancery that Apollo had seen a material adverse change related to union issues at a subsidiary of the company. The court rejected Cooper Tire’s claims and the deal fell apart.
A Delaware court ruled in 2001 that poultry producer Tyson Foods Inc (TSN.N) could not terminate its merger with beef producer IBP Inc over accounting irregularities. The court said the shortfall was not due to a long-term problem. |
Teenage criminals should be fitted with wifi jammers instead of being committed to prison, one of Britain's most senior police officers has claimed.
Chief Superintendent Gavin Thomas of the Police Superintendents' Association has claimed blocking the internet access of cyber criminals would be a more effective punishment than sending them to jail.
Two out of every five crimes today involves a cyber criminal.
Chief Superintendent Gavin Thomas, pictured, wants new methods to punish cyber criminals
Mr Thomas believes that a wifi jammer, but modified to be fit around the wrist of ankle of the offender would be an ideal punishment for someone who commits online crime
Mr Thomas believes such criminals could be fitted with an electronic device which will block Wifi signals in their immediate vicinity.
He said prison is not an effective way of preventing re-offending.
Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph, Mr Thomas said: 'We have got to stop using 19th century punishments to deal with 21st century crimes. It costs around £38,000 a year to keep someone in prison but if you look at the statistics around short term sentencing the recidivism rate is extraordinarily high.
'So while we might feel good about ourselves that we have put someone in prison for 12 to 15 months, the chances are that person is going to come out of prison and commit more crime.
'We can continue jailing criminals but it is not going to help the long term situation and I speak as someone who has spent a career putting people in prison.'
Some prisoners have been fitted with electronic tags which can enforce a curfew of this one which continuously monitors alcohol levels in the person's system
Mr Thomas said hacking, identity theft and other types of online fraud were 21st century crimes and needed a similar approach. |
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
Things are getting so crazy these days that it’s not just religious conservatives who are pushing back against the PC madness. Even Hollywood liberals are speaking out.
But first, the latest example of PC insanity.
At the prestigious Duke University campus, where in-state tuition is close to $50,000, “The Duke Men’s Project, launched this month and hosted by the campus Women’s Center, offers a nine-week program for ‘male-identified’ students that discusses male privilege, patriarchy, ‘the language of dominance,’ rape culture, pornography, machismo and other topics.”
So, to be clear, this only applies to men who identify as men. What is not clear is if it would apply to women who identify as men – but then again, if it did, the program wouldn’t apply to them, since it’s unlikely that a woman who identified as a man would be as rotten and misogynistic and privileged as a man who identified as a man.
It’s those biological males who identify as males. Those are the really bad apples. Shame on them for being men!
Writing for FoxNews.com, Jillian Kay Melchior reports that, “The student newspaper’s editorial board endorsed the new program yesterday, insisting it was ‘not a reeducation camp being administered by an oppressed group in the service of the feminization of American society.””
And why, pray tell, did they feel the need to defend themselves against such a ludicrous charge? Who would ever think that this wonderful new program sounded like “a reeducation camp being administered by an oppressed group in the service of the feminization of American society”?
According to Dipro Bhowmik, a junior who sits on the leadership team, “the goal of the Duke Men’s Project is for male students to ‘critique and analyze their own masculinity and toxic masculinities to create healthier ones.’”
Of course, I’m all for exposing the evils of pornography and rebuking the male abuse of women, but please. Enough with this “toxic masculinities” nonsense.
The good news is that, with the rising tide of PC madness on our campuses and beyond, more and more people are pushing back.
Charlie Nash writes that, “American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis attacked ‘PC victim culture,’ microaggressions, and campus crybabies in a long monologue of his own during the latest episode of the Bret Easton Ellis podcast.”
His words are worth quoting at length.
“If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you’ll be harmed by the reading of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor. If you feel you are experiencing microaggressions because someone asks you where you are from, or ‘can you help me with my math,’ or offers a ‘god bless you’ after you sneeze, and you feel like all of this is some kind of mass societal dis, then you need to seek help. Professional help.”
Nash notes that Ellis branded the “widespread epidemic of self-victimization” and “defining yourself” by “a traumatic thing that happened to you in the past” as an illness.
And, Ellis urged, this “is something you need to resolve before you re-enter society. What you are doing to yourself is harming yourself, and seriously annoying others around you. The fact that you can’t listen to a joke, view imagery, and that you categorize everything as either sexist, or racist, or homophobic, whether it is or not, and therefore harmful to you and you just can’t take it, is a kind of mania, a delusion, a psychosis that we have been coddling, encouraging people to think that life should be a smooth utopia built only for them and their fragile sensibility. In essence, staying a child forever. Living in a fairy-tale.”
And remember: These are the words of the author of American Psycho, not the words of the author of, say, The Conservative Christian’s Guide to Reclaiming America.
Had they been the words of a conservative Christian author, as in my made-up title, they would be vilified and rejected in the strongest possible terms. After all, what conservative Christian could get away with referring to today’s self-absorbed, hyper-sensitive, microagression madness with terms like “a kind of mania, a delusion, a psychosis”?
Nash also reports that Hollywood director Tim Burton recently “slammed political correctness in his response to criticism about the ‘lack of diversity’ in his films, claiming that he is far more offended when producers cast minority actors in their projects for the sole reason of diversity.”
The pushback is taking place on college campuses as well.
Over in Canada, “As part of an hour-long YouTube lecture on political correctness, University of Toronto professor and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson is objecting to the Trudeau government’s Bill C-16, which proposes to outlaw harassment and discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression under the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code.”
Peterson actually “compares the changes Bill C-16 would bring about to the policing of expression in ‘totalitarian and authoritarian political states,’” and he “argues against the existence of non-binary gender identities, or those that are not exclusively masculine or feminine, saying ‘I don’t think there’s any evidence for it.’”
How bold!
Indeed, “Peterson said that if a student asked him to be referred to by a non-binary pronoun, he would not recognize their request: ‘I don’t recognize another person’s right to determine what pronouns I use to address them. I won’t do it.’”
And what was it that caused this professor to speak out, potentially endangering his career? “Peterson told the National Post that he decided to make the video and go public with his views after receiving a memo from university HR outlining new mandatory anti-racist and anti-bias training. ‘That disturbs me because if someone asked me to take anti-bias training, I think I am agreeing that I am sufficiently racist or biased to need training.’”
You can expect more and more responses like this, since there’s only so far things can bend before they snap and break.
After all, when the naked emperor not only begins to flaunt his new “clothes” but orders everyone to celebrate his wardrobe, the gasps of shock will quickly turn to shouts of mockery.
A person can only disguise his nakedness for so long. |
March 14, 2011
FORT WORTH, Texas -- ESPN The Magazine senior writer Bruce Feldman has ranked TCU No. 1 nationally for its ability to develop National Football League talent.
The Horned Frogs' top ranking comes from head coach Gary Patterson being able to consistently develop NFL draft talent out of unheralded recruits.
TCU consensus first-team All-Americans Jerry Hughes (2008, 2009) and Jake Kirkpatrick (2010) were two-star recruits.
Hughes, a 2010 first-round pick of the Indianapolis Colts, won the Ted Hendricks Award as the nation's best defensive end. He was also the Lott Trophy winner. Kirkpatrick was the 2010 recipient of the Rimington Trophy, honoring the nation's top center.
Current NFL players who were also two-star recruits for TCU include tailback Aaron Brown (Detroit), offensive tackle Marshall Newhouse (Green Bay) and linebacker Jason Phillips (Baltimore).
Offensive tackle Marcus Cannon and quarterback Andy Dalton, projected draft picks this spring, were both three-star recruits. Dalton was ranked as the nation's 82nd-best quarterback coming out of Katy (Texas) High School.
Among current Horned Frogs, All-America linebacker Tank Carder and 1,000-yard rusher Ed Wesley were two-star recruits.
TCU had 24 players drafted and 48 in NFL camps through Patterson's first nine years as head coach. Thirteen former TCU players are currently on NFL rosters.
In 2011, the Horned Frogs put together their first national top-25 ranked recruiting class. |
HTC’s latest flagship smartphone may not be a One, but it’s certainly a 10 – in many ways, perhaps. The device, which has received near-universal praise for its premium metal build and powerful parts inside, comes at a time when its maker needs to score some serious sales to survive the stressful slump it has been slugging through. Sadly the fruits of its labor have yet to be realized, but from the very beginning HTC wanted to thank those customers who expressed early interest in the device.
Multiple reports around the web indicate that the Taiwanese OEM is now shipping its promised thank you gift to those customers in the USA who pre-ordered the phone directly from its website, HTC.com:
Phone Arena
As can be seen in the above picture from Phone Arena, the mystery token of appreciation is none other than an extra USB Type-C cable. While this might initially seem as a bit of a disappointment to those expecting something like a case or free Vive for example, given how many problems there are currently with third party USB-C cords, getting a free official one directly from the manufacturer of the device it’s intended for is a definitively decent doing.
With an extra USB-C cable, it is therefore possible to leave one at work, school, or even in the car, and keep the original one safely at home. The fact that it’s even packaged in an official product box no less, as opposed to simply throwing a random cord into an envelope, also serves to indicate HTC wanted to make the presentation as professional as possible.
For those who need a recap of the HTC 10, specs include the following:
Display 5.2-inch Super LCD 5 display with curved-edge Gorilla Glass
2560 x 1440 resolution
564ppi Processor 2.2GHz quad-core 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor RAM 4GB Storage 32/64GB of on-board storage MicroSD Yes, up to 2TB Fingerprint sensor Yes SIM type Nano SIM Connectivity USB Type-C
3.5mm stereo audio jack
Bluetooth 4.2
Wi-Fi: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (2.4 & 5GHz)
NFC
DisplayPort
DNLA
Miracast
Google Cast
AirPlay
HTC Connect Software Android 6.0 Marshmallow
HTC Sense Cameras Rear: 12MP HTC UltraPixel 2 (1.55µm pixel size) with laser autofocus, OIS and f/1.8 aperture
Front: 5MP (1.34µm pixel size) with OIS and f/1.8 aperture Sound HTC BoomSound Hi-Fi Edition
Dolby Audio 4 Battery Non-removable 3,000mAh battery
Quick Charge 3.0 compatible with cool charge Dimensions and weight 145.9 x 71.9 x 3.0 – 9.0mm
161 grams Colors Carbon Grey, Glacier Silver and Topaz Gold
And of course, videos of our official review of both the handset and the accessories for it can be seen below:
Were you one of the customers in the USA who pre-ordered from HTC.com? Did your free gift arrive yet? What do you think about the present in-and-of-itself? Leave a comment below! |
The growth of electronic books is simply staggering.
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has revealed that its latest stats for February show a growth of 202%. The annual figures from January/February 2010 to the same time this year is equally impressive - a 169% rise to $164m (£100m).
Print books fared badly in the last year with sales falling 25% to $442m (£270m). But there is one area that is bucking that trend, which does not show up in AAP's figures. That is the market for renting books - the printed versions, not the e-book versions.
And the audience that is the most open to this practice is arguably the most digitally literate: students. Chegg is the leading book-renter in the industry and has been dubbed the Netflix of college textbooks. Its chief executive officer Dan Rosensweig says that, for students, accessing information in what might be regarded "the old fashioned' way is all about the bottom line:
"Our mission has not been to rent textbooks or not rent textbooks. Our mission has been to save students time, money and help them get smarter," said Mr Rosensweig, who previously worked as an exec at Yahoo and at Activision Blizzard.
"The higher education market textbooks continue to be easily 98% of the market. The reason for that is the technology is only getting ready now. Books have a better battery life. You can always depend on them. But just as importantly, you can rent a textbook substantially cheaper than you can get a new textbook, or a used one, or one that you can buy digitally," said Mr Rosensweig.
"Students are looking to get access to the content they want in the easiest format and at the least expense. For the moment, that means renting books."
Chegg said that last year it reached 25% of college students and plants a tree for every book it rents out. The company has just announced that it has planted its five-millionth tree, so I will leave you to do the maths.
In cold hard cash, Chegg said in January 2010 it had saved students a total of $100m. That represented the difference between what a student would have had to pay to buy a book versus renting it.
"This is a $10bn market, with over 200 million books changing hands every year," said Mr Rosensweig.
"If a textbook was $120 new to the student it would cost $100 used and we would probably rent it for about $55. That represents a substantial saving at a time when families in the US are struggling and education becomes more and more expensive."
A number of other players vying for the attention of struggling students agree there is money to be made in second hand books.
Rival company CampusBookRentals.com said about 10% of college students rent their books.
BookRenter.com, which had a bit of spat with Chegg over just who could lay claim to the #1 slot moniker, said it serves six million students, representing about 31% of the North American market. The company also claims to be "one of the fastest growing start-ups in Silicon Valley, growing at over 725% each year".
ValoreBooks.com promises to provide the cheapest textbooks in the nation by having students sell to students:
"We are an online marketplace. What an online marketplace is is an open platform. Anybody can sell their books and any buyer can buy any book," said CEO Bobby Brannigan.
"As you get more sellers on the site it drives price down. It's basic economics."
A new competitor will enter the fray at the beginning of next month, proving the industry is booming.
BookDecay.com will allow students to review how professors use required textbooks in a class, helping others to make informed decisions as to how - or whether - they should obtain the book themselves.
"One semester I bought several books, and they sat on a windowsill and kind of decayed, if you will," Rocco Carzo told the Democrat And Chronicle.
The site will allow students to buy, swap or rent books and will link to Chegg and Amazon.
While the physical textbook doesn't seem set to be replaced anytime soon, what about its digital rival? Why have e-textbooks failed to penetrate?
"It is a matter of getting the experience right and the price," said Mr Rosensweig.
"One of the things that holds it back isn't so much the technology, which will be solved. It's that school starts once a year. If it's not this August, it's next August.
"Education is one of the areas where technology has not yet had a chance to work its magic. Like everything in technology, you can't pick the day it is going to flip but you need to make sure you are ready for it. But it is going to happen."
He is betting that 2012 is the year the digital future will arrive. |
In my last report on the Mars Science Laboratory, I mentioned that Curiosity has been on a geology “walkabout” up the slopes of the “Pahrump Hills” at the base of “Mount Sharp” (more correctly, Aeolis Mons). The zigzagging route up through the area took the rover from “Confidence Hills” and the location of the last drilling operation up to a point dubbed “Whale Rock”, the drive being used to gather information on potential points of interest for further detailed examination.
The exposed rocks in this transitional layering between the floor of Gale Crater, in which Curiosity arrived back in August 2012, and the higher slopes of “Mount Sharp” is expected to hold evidence about dramatic changes in the environmental evolution of Mars. Thus, the “walkabout” – a common practice in field geology on Earth – was seen as the best means of carrying out a reasonable analysis of the area in order for the rover to be most efficiently targeted at specific locations of interest.
“We’ve seen a diversity of textures in this outcrop,” Curiosity’s deputy scientist Ashwin Vasavada (JPL) said of the drive. “Some parts finely layered and fine-grained, others more blocky with erosion-resistant ledges. Overlaid on that structure are compositional variations. Some of those variations were detected with our spectrometer. Others show themselves as apparent differences in cementation or as mineral veins. There’s a lot to study here.”
During the drive, Curiosity travelled some 110 metres, with an elevation of about 9 metres, using the Mastcam and the ChemCam (Chemistry and Camera) laser spectrometer system to inspect and test potential points of interest for more detailed examination at a later date. Since completing that drive, the rover has been working its way back through Pahrump Hills, this time examining specific targets using the robot-arm mounted Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera and spectrometer. Once this work has been completed, specific targets for in-depth analysis, including drilling for samples will for the core activity of a third pass through the area.
So far, two specific areas have been identified for detailed examination. The first, dubbed “Pelona” is a fine-grained, finely layered rock close to the “Confidence Hills” drilling location. The second is a small erosion-resistant ridge dubbed “Pink Cliffs” the rover drove around on its way up the incline.
Another target of investigation has been the edge of a series of sand and dust dunes right on the edge of “Pahrump Hills”. In August 2014, Curiosity attempted to use these dunes as a means to more quickly access the “Pahrump Hills” area, but the effort had to be abandoned when it proved far harder for the rover to maintain traction than had been anticipated, particularly given the rover has successfully negotiated sandy dunes and ridges earlier in the mission. As a result, scientists are keep to understand more about the composition of the dunes.
On November 7th, Curiosity was ordered to venture onto the dunes very briefly in order to break the surface of one of the rippled dunes and expose the underlying layers of sand in an effort to better understand why the rover found the sand such hard going the first time around, and what might be within these wind-formed dunes that would prove to be so bothersome to driving over them. Data gathered from the drive is still being analysed.
The work in the “Pahrump Hills” area has given rise to concerns over one of the two lasers in the ChemCam instrument. As well as the main laser, known for “zapping” targets on the surface of Mars in order to reveal their chemical and mineral composition, the system uses a second laser, a continuous wave laser, used for focusing the ChemCam’s telescope to ensure the plasma flash of vaporised rock is properly imaged when the main laser fires. Data received on Earth when using the ChemCam to examine rocks on the first pass through “Pahrump Hills” suggests this smaller laser is weakening and may no longer be able to perform adequately.
If this is the case, the laser team plan to switch to using an auto-focus capability with the telescope so it will automatically focus itself on a few “targeting” shots from the main laser ahead of any data-gathering burst of fire, allowing for proper telescope calibration.
Rosetta and Philae
From November 12th 2014, ears and ears around the world were on news concerning a tiny science probe as it set out to try to land on a comet over 515,000,000 kilometres from Earth. The Philae lander, a part of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, departed it’s parent space craft on the morning of Friday November 12th, and commenced a slow drift down to the surface of comet 67P/C-G.
As I’ve reported in these pages, the landing didn’t quite go as planned, and Philae eventually entered a state of hibernation very early in the morning of Saturday, November 15th (UK / European time), being unable to charge its solar batteries. But in that time, the lander managed to achieve almost all of its primary mission goals, sending back a wealth of data to Earth via Rosetta.
That data is now being analysed, and has already revealed that on its first touch-down on the comet, Philae’s harpoons and the ice screws in its three landing pads, all designed to quickly anchor it to the surface of the comet, failed to operate as anticipated.
Philae’s final resting place, after two bounces across the comet, appears to be dust-covered ice, the thermal probe of the MUPUS science instrument detecting temperatures of around –153°C under the lander.
One aspect of the mission which may not have succeeded, despite initial data returned to Earth, is the drilling operation. While data was received showing the dill had fully deployed, and there was an apparent transfer between the drill sampling mechanism and the on-board science instruments, there is a chance that because the lander wasn’t anchored on the comet, the drill may have actually lifted it, rather than cutting into the ground under it. Further analysis of data from the on-bard science instruments is required before this is known for sure, and members of the mission team are working through images returned from Philae’s ROLIS camera, which may show whether or not the drill cut into the ice and dust under the lander.
Since the landing, Rosetta continues to studies the comet, and has, amidst all the science returns, delivered some stunning images – such as the one shown above.
Orion Readies for Flight
NASA’s next generation crewed launch vehicle, Orion, is fast approaching its first test flight. Exploration Flight Test -1 (EFT-1) will be an uncrewed mission that will see the first flight-ready Orion capsule launched from Kennedy Space Centre’s launch complex 37 on Thursday, December 4th, 2014.
During the 4.5-hour flight, Orion will orbit the Earth twice, rising to a maximum altitude of 5,800km (3,600 miles) – the furthest any space vehicle designed to carry humans has travelled away from the surface of the Earth since the Apollo lunar missions – by comparison, the space station orbits at approximately 420km (260 miles) above the Earth.
This altitude will allow the vehicle to return through the atmosphere at around 80% of the velocity of a return flight from the Moon – one of Orion’s intended future targets – a speed of around 3,2000kp/h (20,000 mph), generating temperatures of some 2,200°C as it does so.
The mission is intended to validate many of Orion’s flight systems, all of which must perform flawlessly to guarantee safe, successful missions in the future when the vehicle will be carrying up to six crew well beyond Earth orbit. As such, EFT-1 will provide critical data that will enable engineers to improve Orion’s design and reduce risk for the astronauts it will carry on future missions.
At the conclusion of the flight, Orion will splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, where it will be recovered for examination.
This initial launch will utilise a Delta IV rocket. However, its second flight – slated for 2017 – will introduce a rocket specifically built to launch Orion missions, called the Space Launch System (SLS). Together Orion and SLS are intended to form the backbone of NASA-led missions around the Moon, to an asteroid, and eventually to Mars in the 2030s.
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BEIJING (Reuters) - A government in eastern China will shelve plans to build a huge waste incinerator if it does not have popular support, in an apparent victory for protesters who had clashed with police saying they feared the plant would damage their health.
Riot policemen (R) defend themselves with shields during a protest against the construction of a waste incinerator, in the Yuhang district of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province May 10, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer
Choking smog blankets many Chinese cities and the environmental degradation resulting from the country’s breakneck economic growth is angering its increasingly well-educated and affluent population.
Similar protests have also succeeded in getting projects elsewhere in China shut down.
The eastern city of Ningbo suspended a petrochemical project after days of demonstrations in November 2012, and protests forced the suspension of a paraxylene plant in the northeastern city of Dalian the year before.
The latest demonstrations, which have lasted more than two weeks, turned violent on Saturday, with hundreds of police descending on to the streets of Yuhang, close to the tourist city of Hangzhou.
In a statement on its website late on Saturday, the Yuhang government said that all work on the incinerator had stopped, and that it would invite the public to participate in a decision
whether to press ahead with the scheme.
We will “invite the local people to participate, fully listen to and seek everyone’s opinions, and guarantee people’s right to know what is happening and right to participate”, it said.
The government added that it hoped that people would end their protests and “maintain normal social public order and jointly maintain social stability”.
It added that the protests by “several hundred people” had affected normal life, though it recognized that this was a reflection of people’s concern.
Pictures obtained by Reuters of the unrest showed police fighting with, and detaining, protesters. Other pictures, on China’s Twitter-like Weibo, showed at least two overturned police cars.
At least 10 protesters and 29 policemen were injured, the official Xinhua news agency said. One protester and one policeman were seriously injured, it added.
More than 30 cars were overturned, two police cars set on fire and another four smashed up, Xinhua said.
Hangzhou, capital of prosperous Zhejiang province and best known in China as the site of a famous lake, has seen its luster dimmed in recent years by a recurrent smog problem.
About 90,000 “mass incidents” - a euphemism for protests - occur each year in China, triggered by corruption, pollution, illegal land grabs and other grievances.
Late in March, hundreds of residents of the southern town of Maoming staged protests against plans to build a petrochemical plant there, for fear it would contribute to pollution. |
by Ronald Thomas West
‘The spirit puts into the mind of a man, to know what to do’ –Native American Proverb
The Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA and FBI, all, have sought the Native American knowledge and advanced understanding of ‘remote viewing’, the Native grasp of this phenomena having been far and away superior to any of the western psychics. Native ‘Remote Viewing’, simply put, is the ability to picture and follow events at a distance, in real time, using only the mind.
The Native ability to do this had been, prior to the enforced Anglo-centric education in modern day Indian country, truly phenomenal. And this fact, the enforced western education, is the first clue to the DIA failure. Coinciding with the western education destroying Native thought forms, is the language barrier, wherein Native concept does not easily translate to western, this is the second clue, and underlying this is the coup de grace; a world view so fundamentally different to western, to bring the understanding across would require a rare and uniquely qualified person indeed. I happen to be that person, and I don’t work for the DIA.
In the 1930s, noted linguist Benjamin Whorf postulated language shapes reality, following his learning and subsequent study of Hopi Language. His work on this observed a different concept of time and ultimately led to his (argued over by academics ever since) conclusion there is a distinct similarity in language to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Hence Whorf’s theory or variant of ‘linguistic relativity’ came into being.
Following Whorf’s pioneering (and much disputed) work, noted ‘action anthropologist’ Karl Schlesier, observed in his book ‘The Wolves of Heaven’ (on Cheyenne shamanism) the resemblance of Cheyenne world view to famed Einstein associate and theoretical physicist David Boehm’s theories. Boehm himself, altogether independently of Schlesier’s observation, entered into an exploratory dialogue on the subject of a Native American world view relationship to Quantum Mechanics with a Canadian Blackfoot Indian, Leroy Little Bear, Director of Native Studies at Harvard. Following Boehm’s death, this dialogue, now comprising a mix of mostly western scientists, some specialized in physics and others in Native American Studies (a form of Western cultural anthropology), had been relocated to SEED Open University at Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was at SEED the dialogue had hosted keynote speaker James O’Dea, then president of the Institute of Noetic Science, and by this time the entire process had been fairly hijacked by New Age influenced science and become hopelessly misguided. How this ties into the DIA will be dealt with in the narrative of this article.
Reputedly based on work initiated in part by the [then new] Institute of Noetic Sciences in the early 1970s, by 1995 the Department of Defense ostensibly discontinued funding of research into remote viewing:
“The foregoing observations provide a compelling argument against continuation of the program within the intelligence community. Even though a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory, it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated. “An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications” -American Institutes for Research, Sept. 29, 1995
The problem with this [foregoing] statement, particularly the language “..it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated” is, the Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA and FBI, all, are aware in fact it is VERY CLEAR there is ‘existence of a paranormal phenomenon, ‘remote viewing’’, based on investigations into the Native American use of remote viewing technique. Remote viewing had been taken into the lab for studies for a period of roughly two decades. Considering this had been a Defense Intelligence Agency funded study, and further considering the Department of Defense spent $350 million on brain research studies in 2011 alone, and in fact remote viewing is known to have highly detailed and reliable instance outside of the lab (in indigenous cultures), it would seem more likely the effort to exploit this indigenous knowledge had shifted away from the lab failures and amateur efforts of western psychics and into clandestine cultural anthropology fieldwork. This thought is supported by a short study on Transcendental Warfare at the United States Marine Corps War College, proposing the CIA may have done exactly that.
Bolstering this preceding thought is the fact momentous steps have been taken in the field of Quantum Mechanics since the 1980s particularly, to a point where today’s theoretical physicist Bernard d’Espagnat can state:
“The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment”
The problem faced by DIA/CIA in this instance is, all lab science to now has been based largely on Cartesian dualism relevant to matter, the scientists brains are trained up this way and suddenly the DIA finds itself dealing with an unexplored unity principle, insofar as pursuing indigenous knowledge. The vaunted laboratories of western empiricism are in fact useless to pursue what lies beyond the grasp of nearly the entire body of science on account of how the mentalities of the scientists themselves are shaped through life-long training. Suddenly it makes sense to revert to cultural anthropology in the chase for an understanding of reality beyond the present purview of western knowledge, bringing them to what I’d described in the 3rd and 4th paragraphs of this essay as a point of reference. I will propose not only did the DIA throw away much money in the lab, but continue to chase rabbit trails with their penetration of Institute of Noetic Sciences shamanic studies, where there is as much self-deceit generally, as there is in a culture particularly devoted to exploitation of phenomenal nature they had failed to grasp from the time of Plato and the inception of western science.
Native languages are pretty much ‘noun free’ languages, where everything is described in terms of process, and process is a moving thing, hence the Native differing concept of ‘time.’ The present is never static, it is always perceived as moving and you are moving with it. Past and future, both, have a present tense. Our world is perceived as a living clock of sorts, the clock is time in motion and we all are part and parcel of this clock. So, it is easy to see how the western mentality is not equipped to fathom Native thought and its attending abilities and how enforced western educations in Cartesian based or Platonic philosophies and concepts of time would destroy the abilities of the present Native generations through the deprivation of their language and its attending intelligence. Simply put, western education, from a Native Quantum Mechanics based perception of reality, dumbs people down, severely.
How is the ancient native mind shaped? From infancy, the child is included in nearly everything. An infant sleeps with their parents until they wean themselves, that could be to age three or four. A baby that does not wish to be held, must not be held. A toddler is distracted and enticed away from danger rather than shouted at. Behavior is explained, never demanded. The children are NEVER lied to. Teaching the child is primarily via setting highest ethical example. The same respect accorded the child is accorded all living things, to include trees and even stones. The is no ‘adult’ world versus a child’s world.
The result of this upbringing is the child learning to ‘see’ the world they live in, the ‘living clock’, as a state of self-integrated/ongoing process. The ‘product’ of this process is people who cannot be told what to do except that they should decide for themselves following a leader is in their best interest. Western educations, of course, kill this process, and development in the ancient Native mentality is arrested. But it was my good fortune to experience teachers in the truly ancient Native mentality, and at a point in life I was prepared to listen and discipline myself in ways westerners, as a class, are nearly incapable of, particularly the males. And so it is, over a span of three decades, I learned to ‘see.’ Once set down that road free of the constraints of western culture and education, the ‘sight’ only grows, for the entirety of one’s life. Cartesian/Platonic mentalities can never fully know this, or that is to say ‘science’ and mentalities trained in western thought. The Cartesian/Platonic disciplined mentality is ‘masculinized’ out of the ability to ‘see’ from infancy. And though it may be possible for the westerner to intellectually grasp this, it would be nearly impossible, for the males particularly, to overcome how their minds have been shaped, except they were able to authentically reject everything they have learned, a highly unlikely prospect, and begin from scratch. Ready to throw away that PhD and begin all over again at age 30-50? They can’t do it. Even were there necessarily qualified Native teachers remaining who would agree to share their knowledge, something a properly trained ‘seer’ would NEVER do for DIA, because it would take them out of alignment with the living clock and consequently out the window would go their gift of sight. Why? Recalling d’Espagnat stating human consciousness cannot be arbitrarily separated from objects, which is what Cartesian/Platonic science sets out to do.
When contrasted to the ‘living clock’ Native understanding of reality, the Native could be said to be allergic to the western concept of reality, which is almost certainly why the gifted Native cosmologist, Leon Secatero, became ill and died, following his immersion in Western culture. Leon had tried to bring related ideas from Native Quantum reality across, to among others, Seed Open University, in that organization’s attempts to ‘feminize’ the masculine western reality, but the fact remains the result is not Native reality, but instead a ‘feminized’ western masculine reality. There cannot be any honest integration of the western duality outside of the ‘living clock’, because the androgynous nature of intention in the living nature aspect we are all meant to be integrated to, cannot know separation from the self. This requirement of Cartesian/Platonic philosophy shapes the western culture’s mentalities which only know intention as manipulation exterior to any integrated to Nature experience. Nature hates you and you will die.
A short manner of restating all of this preceding is, if “the kingdom of heaven is within”, and you “must be like little children” to get there, a culture subsequently shaped by the worship of a sadistic political murder of those very ideas, can never know the experience.
Having much of my youth in close proximity to the Montana Blackfeet and knowing Indians growing up, it was a no-brainer [in my thinking] to immerse in that culture when I’d realized I was not adjusting to western culture on my return from Vietnam. Our Indian tribes have a special –and different- relationship to their veterans and the fact of my being a veteran, as well acquainted with Indians for some years already, eased my move into that culture in the middle 1970s. I immersed in the Blackfoot language community, their way of life and ceremony. I was fortunate to be initially ‘adopted’ by an old couple living on the Rocky Mountain Front, south of Browning, Montana. He was a healer, she was a ‘seer.’ Via my relationship to this old couple, I became a member of the ‘Black Door’ clan.
I gathered fire wood for the old couple, cut holes in the ice at the edge of a small lake, so their few cows could drink, made better deals for them when doing business with White ranchers to buy hay and was their driver. The old woman, the ‘seer’, was my primary teacher. I learned to play the ‘stick game’ and became perhaps the only White grandmaster, of that ancient oracle, in Blackfoot history. To be a grandmaster player of the stick game, you must be able to ‘see’ and to ‘see’ quite well. But what the old lady could do, outside of the context of that [in my case] ‘training’ game, was extraordinary. She was reminiscing one time about her younger days when she’d owned a small accordion and was thinking aloud she would like to play one again. Then she looked at me and said “Ron, you know someone who will give me an accordion.” I did not say anything, did not react, only waited for her to continue. She described a man she was absolutely certain I would know, and thinking about it, I thought perhaps she was talking about a German neighbor I’d known growing up but I’d never known him to play accordion. I drove her across the mountains to visit this man I’d not seen in several years, he welcomed us, listened to my explanation, produced an accordion from his storage closet and gave it to her.
I thought that was a pretty interesting event, but it paled by comparison to events to come. Going to this thought, I will recount one more of the old lady’s ability to ‘see’ that was nothing short of amazing. In the 1970s reservation area south of Browning, telephones were nearly unknown. Our rural house had electric lights and that was it. But with the old lady around, we did not need any form of electronic communications. One day she announced we would drive to the house of people she knew on the Blood Indian (Canadian Blackfeet) Reserve at Cardston, Alberta. We would wait there and there would be people driving from the other direction, looking for a healer skilled in the art the old man knew, and they would stop at that house to inquire. I drove the old couple to their stated destination and there we waited and in drove a car of Cree Indians from the north, looking for a healer with a certain ability and the old man was already there, waiting for them. It worked out precisely as the old lady had stated it would, consistent with our planned timeline and departure. In 1981 the old man became ill, he eventually died and she retired. Then began my next experiences, with a new teacher.
It was in 1981, having moved to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains on the border of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation west of Browning, a remarkable man knocked on my door. This man was Pat Kennedy, a Plains Ojibwa Oral Historian and Medicine Man who had married into the Blackfeet tribe 30 years before. Speaking seven native languages fluently, including the Blackfeet language, and with a fluent and creative use of the native pidgin English we held our initial conversation in, Pat had never been to school. His Irish name had been assigned to his family by the government when the apartheid system called Indian reservations had been established. When Pat had knocked and I opened the door for him, his introduction was: “I’m Pat Kennedy. I like where your house is and I would like to use it for ceremony.” For the following 24 years, until he died, I was this remarkable man’s student and became one of his close and best friends. For the first eight years of my learning with Pat, I traveled with him widely and met other masters of the Native American science based in advanced understanding of Quantum Mechanics. These people live a reality that can only be described in western terminology as sort of low key ‘lucid dreaming.’ Here again I met ‘seers’ with uncanny accuracy in describing real time events which manifest precisely as predicted, in one instance it had been announced by a ‘seer’ another medicine man was approaching in company of several persons he was not acquainted with. The old man detailed each individual precisely as they appeared on arrival. Now begins the journey of several ‘coincidence’ [noting coincidence is not a valid concept in Native American thought] that take Pat and myself to the Institute for Noetic Sciences, but first a bit more on the ‘seers’ in Indian country, and Pat’s relating experience to me about meeting the FBI and information on ‘others’ involved with seeking out Native American’s gifted with accurate real time ‘remote viewing’ skill.
Pat related to me that, some years previous to our becoming acquainted, he had been one of the Indians the FBI had expressed an interest in, on account of ‘remote viewing’ (Pat did not call it that) and he had initially been amenable to meeting with these people but soon changed his mind and decided not to work with them. The best way I can explain Pat’s and other of the valid Native seers rationale, is to state a well know fact in Indian country: “Coyote is crazy because he has a maggot in his brain.” Now, if the FBI (or for that matter, the DIA/CIA) were to hear this perfectly logical statement (to the ancient Indian mentality) given as a reason (the Indians do not provide the reasoning, they simply do not show up), they’d be stumped, because they cannot translate Native thinking to begin with, let alone Native proverbs. What has actually been stated concerning Coyote is crazy because he has a maggot in his brain in relation to the FBI is, ‘these people are killers.’ Alternatively it is a polite way of saying ‘we saw a murder agenda.’ Well, of course they would see an agenda, where any agenda might be, because they are ‘seers.’ So, in the end, the FBI, CIA and DIA investigations of the Native ‘seer’ phenomena, became stuck with the petty sorcerers, the self-employed dilettantes and out & out fakes in Indian country, because the real McCoy wanted nothing to do with them. This coyote proverb refers to an ancient method of murder in Native America, by introducing a particular larva into the nostril of a sleeping person, a method that almost invariably killed the victim, after a period of insanity. In certain contexts, Coyote represents the Mankind when at his worst behavior.
In the ‘living clock’, which has its own power of volition, there is no concept of coincidence or accident. And so it was my teacher, Pat Kennedy, had been the first Native American awarded the “Temple Prize”, for creative altruism, by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, in 1997. On first sight, the actual award was a disaster. Nominated by an IONS member so low as to be a worm, speaking of the dualistic nature of many western personalities, the man’s name is not worth mentioning here, but better consigned to the ash heap of history. Once the prize had been confirmed as awarded to Pat, his nominator had a panic attack of ego driven self-importance and the moron completely and totally hijacked Pat, in a quite literal sense. Rather than allow Pat to ‘see his way through’, which would include the route taken on the drive to Palm Springs for the award ceremony, the nominating ‘worm’ who’d manifested a side no one of us (except his ex-wife, I called her and was debriefed after the fact) had seen before, took the wheel in a fury of self-importance and direct intention he would be ‘the man.’ As it happened, I’d taken a carload of other supporting cast from Indian country, on a separate route and arrived at the IONS convention site first. Pat arrived literally shocked, battered and bruised, his ‘worm chauffer’ had hit the brakes so hard on the drive down that Pat, in a wheelchair recovering from surgery, had been sent flying across the van and crashed inside, wheelchair pounding him on top of having been violently thrown out of it. I assessed the circumstance, saw the totally changed personality and emergence of the ‘worm’ only in it for himself and stepped in as Pat’s inseparable bodyguard.
For an ancient Native mentality, to be knocked out of the timing, can be fatal. Pat was not able to recover his equilibrium but at least I was able to keep him from the ‘worm’s’ intentional self aggrandizing ego-inflation and other persons who would be pleased to exploit him. For Pat, it was all worthwhile in the end, because he was able to spend the better part of two hours in a private conversation with ‘the man who’d gone to the Moon’ [Edgar Mitchell] while I sat nearby with a near literal ‘I’ll kill you’ look for anyone who it even crossed their mind to get close to the two of them as they talked. Pat used the prize money to begin a series of annual ‘Peace Camps.’
Meanwhile, in the early 2000s, I’d taken an interest in the SEED Open University’s sponsorship of ‘Language of Spirit’ dialogues, originally initiated by the theoretical physicist and Einstein associate David Boehm, attempting reconciling Native American Quantum reality to western science. Concurrent to this I was also investigating organized crime in government related to American intelligence agencies and charter schools providing cover/training environment, for CIA officers. It is no accident the famed Anna Chapman Russian spy ring appears never to have gotten any closer to Americans with sensitive connections and information than charter schools. But if you are the USA counter-intelligence authorities and the massive push for, and funding of, charter schools as cover for intelligence embeds throughout society, this is not something you’d want to escape the ‘pound’ and most certainly the USA would prefer the Russians looked incompetent, something they most certainly are not, in matters of HUMIT (human intelligence, i.e. spies.) Meanwhile, having penetrated a charter school serving precisely this purpose, the East Mountain High School at Sandia Park, New Mexico, staffed in some part by CIA, I was also attending the SEED dialogues in Albuquerque, with a continuing interest in bridging the chasm between Native American Quantum reality and western concept, if only to try and point out to the Cartesian/Platonic science they are at a world threatening dead end, with their attitude and approach shaped by western thought.
The expression ‘as fate would have it’, a dim memory in western culture of faraway time lived in the ‘clock’ that is nature, is an apropos expression to describe what happens next.
Former Amnesty International (USA) board director Francis Boyle had stated:
My conclusion was that a high-level official of Amnesty International at that time, whom I will not name, was a British intelligence agent. Moreover, my fellow board member, who also investigated this independently of me, reached the exact same conclusion. So certainly when I am dealing with people who want to work with Amnesty in London, I just tell them, “Look, just understand, they’re penetrated by intelligence agents, U.K., maybe U.S., I don’t know, but you certainly can’t trust them
And viola! A MI6 officer, James O’Dea, in a quid pro quo relationship with DIA/CIA based on information sharing, had gone from Director of the Amnesty International’s Washington DC office, to head up the Institute of Noetic Sciences and took enough interest in the dialogues at SEED, in Albuquerque, to attend as “keynote speaker”, where we became acquainted. In fact O’Dea took a direct interest in me at this event. It was not long after this, by now I’d penetrated the spy cover at the East Mountain High School to stir a hornet’s nest of intelligence agency paranoia, I’d experienced my first brush with assassination in some years, since I’d been an civil investigator in Indian country. I had to bail out of the USA and within four months of my arrival in Germany exile, a senior CIA trainer from the school, assassin Vince Langan, made the first attempt on my life abroad and blew it because I know how to ‘see’ my way through. And although I knew James O’Dea personally, and had copied him on communications prior to sorting this, Amnesty International had shut down any hearing of my fugitive status, cold. Former Amnesty executive O’Dea, with it all falling apart, quit IONS and returned to ‘international work’, likely to assist tracking down and eliminating this reporter. Since, Amnesty International has provided new leadership to Freedom House, a CIA front fingered by rogue CIA Officer Phillip Agee, when Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn took over that organization. And so it is humanitarian organizations intermingle with intelligence agencies in support of humanitarian violence.
The nice thing is, the ‘living clock’ is failsafe, Cartesian-Platonic shaped personalities will never be able to exploit it. The DIA, CIA and FBI come out the losers, irrespective of what happens to me.
The author, Ronald Thomas West, is a fugitive anti-corruption investigator with military special operations intelligence experience. His online books are Penucquem Speaks (ranked five stars by Howard Zinn at Amazon), Napi Mephisto, and Queer Chicken Dinner (a rebuttal of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’.) Ronald presently writes folk stories, prurient social satire, and exposés revealing crimes of the power-corrupt.
On account of his past anti-corruption work, particularly in relation to CIA associated corrupt corporate personalities, Ronald is a fugitive from multiple intelligence agencies and political exile since July, 2007. |
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Forest Green Rovers, a small, entirely vegan football club based in a village in the Cotswolds (UK), have won an historic game at Wembley Arena to secure League 2 football for next season.
The club beat Tranmere Rovers 3-1 last weekend to secure their future despite playing most of their games in a tiny stadium with a 5,140 people capacity (just shy of the entire population of Nailworth – the nearest town).
The team is funded by Dale Vince, a self confessed eco warrior and multi millionaire founder of Ecotricity. When Mr Vince invested in the club 7 years ago, it was on the brink of liquidation. Over the several years that he has been at the helm, Mr Vince has introduced veganism to the players, the staff and even some of the fans. All of the food served at the stadium is vegan. In fact, the stadium itself is pretty vegan: the players train under solar powered flood lights and play games on organic turf.
The stadium, however, is looking on the decrepit side and with the press attention and bigger league football, the club expects their success to pique the interest of new fans. The plan is to move to a new stadium made of wood and called Eco Park which Mr Vince has said will be the “greenest stadium in the world”
The team is not the only sporting success story for the vegan world. Renowned England striker Jermain Defoe has spoken about his change to a vegan diet, claiming that this has had a huge impact on his recent goal scoring form. Indeed, his recent recall for the England squad and subsequent goals would support his conjecture.
It seems that the sporting world is waking up to the health benefits of a vegan diet. And the fans don’t seem to be complaining either: Forest Green’s Q pie – a Quorn and leek pie made with soya milk bechamel – won an award at the British Pie awards this year. Not too shabby.
(Image Credits: Clearly Veg, Sky Sports & Forest Green Rovers)
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Force India’s planned aerodynamic upgrade for the Spanish Grand Prix is almost as big as last year’s B-spec car, according to chief operating officer Otmar Szafnauer.
2015 saw Force India launch with an underdeveloped car for the first part of the season before the team introduced a B-spec car at the British Grand Prix. The team’s performance improved markedly from that point and it eventually secured a best-ever fifth place in the constructors’ championship.
This season has resulted in Force India taking a similar approach, with Szafnauer telling F1i the Barcelona upgrade is substantial in terms of size.
“Yeah we’ve got significant aero updates coming to Barcelona,” Szafnauer said. “Similar [to last year’s B-spec] in the amount of parts. So similar.
“It’s a significant step in performance in the wind tunnel and CFD but you never know if that translates, so we’ll see in Barcelona.”
While Force India only scored two points in Russia courtesy of Sergio Perez, Szafnauer says the team is encouraged by the pace the car showed even if circumstances again failed to turn that into significant points.
“Yeah it was really bitter after lap one with one puncture and one out. The good news is Sergio’s underlying pace was good. He fought back, overtook the Toro Rosso, couldn’t get past the Haas but I think our pace was quicker. If we had been able to get past I think we would have left him. So that’s good.
“[The pace was] very good. When Sergio was in clear air - when [Jenson] Button pitted in front of him - he was able to go one, one and a half seconds per lap quicker. And we were also trying to nurse the tyres at that point, had he not we would have been able to go even quicker. So the pace was good.”
OPINION: Why Red Bull is right to promote Max Verstappen
Silbermann says ... Red Bull Clips Your Wings
Scene at the Russian Grand Prix |
On June 22, the test stretch of the electric road will be inaugurated on the E16 in Sandviken. With that, Sweden will become one of the first countries in the world to conduct tests with electric power for heavy transports on public roads.
– Electric roads will bring us one step closer to fossil fuel-free transports, and has the potential to achieve zero carbon dioxide emissions. This is one way of developing environmentally smart transports in the existing road network. It could be a good supplement to today's road and rail network, says Lena Erixon, Director General of Trafikverket.
The technologies for electric roads have developed rapidly over the last few years, and are now mature enough that some of them can be tested. Last year, the Swedish Transport Administration, in consultation with Vinnova and the Swedish Energy Agency, decided to give support to two test facilities. The two systems differ, above all, as to how electric power is transferred to the heavy vehicles. The test on the E16 in Sandviken is being carried out by Region Gävleborg, and involves a current collector on the roof of the truck cab feeding the current down to a hybrid electric motor in the truck. Outside Arlanda, the eRoadArlanda consortium company will test a technology that involves an electric rail in the roadway charging the vehicle during its trip. For the time being, the work will take place on a closed-off road, but the plan is that the technology will be demonstrated in actual traffic next year.
- Electric roads are one more piece of the puzzle in the transport system of the future, especially for making the heavy transport section fossil fuel-free over the long term. This project also shows the importance of all the actors in the field cooperating, says Erik Brandsma, Director-General of the Swedish Energy Agency.
The tests will continue up through 2018. They will provide knowledge of how electric roads work in practice, and whether the technology can be used in the future. The experiment is based on the Government's goal of energy efficiency and a fossil fuel-free vehicle fleet by 2030, and will contribute to strengthening Sweden's competitiveness.
- Electric roads could have great significance for creating more sustainable transports in the future, and can simultaneously contribute to strengthening Sweden's competitiveness. This is also a good example of how government agencies can use procurement to stimulate new solutions, says Charlotte Brogren, Director-General of Vinnova.
The three government agencies are partially funding the project, and the participants are paying for the rest of the funding.
Swedish Transport Administration: Responsible for roads and railways in Sweden.
Swedish Energy Agency: Works for the use of renewable energy.
Vinnova: Develops Sweden's capacity for innovating sustainable growth and societal benefit.
Facts about Region Gävleborg's solution for electric roads
The test stretch on the E16 is two kilometers long. The technology is similar to light rail, with contact lines 5.4 meters over the roadway. The truck has a current conductor on the roof that feeds 750 volts DC to the truck's hybrid electric system. The current conductor can connect automatically at speeds up to 90 km/h. The test stretch is equipped with posts 60 meters apart that hold up the electric lines over one of the lanes. At a rest area, there is a transformer for low-voltage direct current of the same type as in the light rail network. Other traffic on the road will not be affected.
For more information on the electric road project: www.trafikverket.se/elvagar |
USA Soccer 2016 Logo
The US Soccer national team today finally unveiled its new logo. Following the design language established by the overwhelmingly popular centenary crest, the new US Soccer logo boasts the US national teams' iconic navy and red in a sleek arrangement. This is the new US Soccer badge, introduced on February 29, 2016.Drawing inspiration from the previous US Soccer logo's badge shape, the new USA national team crest simplifies a lot elements of the old crest, while also shifting the colors to darker and less cartoony shades of blue and red.The three stars and the ball from the 1993 crest have been ditched, making place for a bold navywriting at the top of the badge. Dynamic red stripes adorn the lower half of the new USA soccer logo.Barely changed since its creation in 1993 and often mocked for its outdated 1990s look, the US Soccer badge has been in need for a redesign for a long time. Building on the success of the centenary crest seems a very viable and logical decision, in the interest of the US national team's fans.After Nike and US Soccer renewed their kit supplier contract until 2022, the two worked side by side on the new US Soccer badge, which is set to be first used on the new United States 2016 Home and Away Kits. The new USA Jerseys are set to be worn at the first-ever Copa America on US-soil, the 2016 centenary tournament.What do you think of the new 2016 USA national team logo? Drop us a line below. |
Frontman taking squad to Naples for Europa League game
Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson is piloting the aeroplane the Liverpool squad are taking to Naples for their Europa League game against Napoli.
The reds are scheduled to play Napoli tomorrow (October 21), with Dickinson piloting the Astraeus Airlines aeroplane that was scheduled to leave Liverpool John Lennon Airport this morning.
Dickinson, whose day job is working for the airline, said he switched flights when he found out he could fly the team.
“I was originally supposed to be going to Iceland and flying down to Las Palmas and Tenerife,” he told BBC News, “but this looked a lot more interesting, so I’m flying the team down to Naples.”
He said that, although he didn’t support Liverpool, he hoped the flight would bring them luck in tomorrow’s fixture. |
The state government has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a $68 billion statewide bullet-train project that’s highly unlikely to ever get built. As the cliché goes, when you’re in a hole, stop digging. But even after two brutal court defeats on Monday, such common sense is still AWOL within Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration.
In one decision, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny ruled that the California High-Speed Rail Authority could not proceed with using billions of dollars in bond funds to begin construction because it had not credibly identified funding sources for the entire $31 billion it will take to finish the 300-mile initial segment, nor had it completed necessary environmental reviews for the segment. These requirements were among the taxpayer protections written into law by California voters in November 2008, when they voted narrowly for Proposition 1A to allow the state to issue $9.95 billion in bonds as seed money for the project. Kenny said the state must develop a plan that comports with these requirements.
In a second ruling, Kenny refused to validate a state committee’s decision to allow the issuance of $8.6 billion in bonds for bullet-train construction because it had offered no evidence of any kind that such a move was “reasonable or necessary.” “The court cannot conclude that this [approval of bonds without review] is the result the voters intended,” he wrote.
Kenny did not order all work stopped. The rail authority has been given more than $3 billion in unencumbered federal funds for the project by the Obama administration. But he rejected arguments made by the Attorney General’s Office that the Legislature — and not state law — had final say on how state bonds were used.
As a practical matter, this means construction can’t start unless the state finds $25 billion or more in solid financing — which is highly unlikely given a ban on revenue guarantees to investors. Nor can it start until the state completes all environmental reviews for the initial 300-mile segment — which could take years.
These are immense obstacles. Yet instead of acknowledging their seriousness, rail authority board Chairman Dan Richard depicted them as predictable “challenges,” and a spokeswoman said the authority would proceed with its plans to seize land for the project in the Central Valley via eminent domain.
This is in keeping with Richard's full-speed-ahead bravado. But is also unconscionable — disrupting the lives and livelihoods of Central Valley residents for a project that is now an extreme long shot solely to create an apparition of progress.
Before this happens, it’s time for a “have you no shame?” intervention in Sacramento. If Jerry Brown won’t take Richard to the woodshed, then it’s time for some senior Democratic leader to take Brown to the woodshed.
A decade ago, when he was attorney general, Treasurer Bill Lockyer ripped the “puke politics” of Gov. Gray Davis. Taking away folks’ homes and farms for political theater is politics at its pukiest. In coming days and weeks, we hope Lockyer, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein or some Democrat of stature has the decency to make this point. |
Winners: Côte d’Ivoire
Orange Man of the competition: Christian Atsu (Ghana)
Pepsi Highest Scorer: André Ayew (Ghana), 3 Goals with 2 assists
Best Goalkeeper: Sylvain Gbohouo (Côte d’Ivoire)
Nissan goal of the Tournament: Christian Atsu (Ghana) [3rd goal against Guinea]
Fair Play team: DR Congo
Samsung Fair Player of the tournament: Kwesi Appiah (Ghana)
Samsung Fair Player of the final match (CIV-GHA): Wilfried Bony (Côte d’Ivoire)
Orange Man of the final match (CIV-GHA): Afriyie Acquah (Ghana)
CAF Team of the Tournament
Goalkeeper: Sylvain Gbohouo (Côte d’Ivoire) – Robert Kidiaba (RD Congo)
Defenders: Serge Aurier (Côte d’Ivoire), Harrison Afful (Ghana), Abib Kolo Toure (Côte d’Ivoire)
Midfielders: Andre Ayew (Ghana), Yaya Toure (Côte d’Ivoire), Max Alain Gradel (Côte d’Ivoire), Yannick Bolasie (DR Congo), Gervinho (Côte d’Ivoire)
Forwards: Christian Atsu (Ghana), Wilfried Bony (Côte d’Ivoire) |
A plurality of Americans continue to believe that an amnesty for illegal aliens would encourage more illegal immigration to the United States, new polling finds.
A poll from Rasmussen Reports found that 41 percent of Americans say giving illegal aliens a pathway to U.S. citizenship would encourage more illegal immigration, rather than stop it. Another 39 percent said an amnesty would not encourage illegal immigration, while 20 percent of likely voters said they were not sure.
Roughly 43 percent of white Americans say that amnesty leads to more illegal immigration, the most likely of all racial groups to say this. A majority of black Americans, though, agree that an amnesty will bring more illegal aliens to the U.S., with 37 percent saying this and another 31 percent saying they were unsure.
The poll comes after a Morning Consult/POLITICO poll revealed last week that swing-voters are increasingly opposed to a year-end plan by Democrats and the Republican establishment to shut down the federal government if an amnesty is not given to nearly 800,000 illegal aliens who were shielded from deportation by the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Only about one in five swing-voters, or roughly 20 percent, want a government shut-down in order to force an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens. Likewise, 20 percent of Republican voters said the same.
Just one month ago, 23 percent of swing voters said DACA amnesty was a “top priority” for Congress, as Breitbart News reported, revealing a three percent decline in support by independents for amnesty.
Nearly Two out of Five Swing-Voters Say DACA Amnesty ‘Should Not Be a Priority’
https://t.co/2YjdoqVk3R — John Binder 👽 (@JxhnBinder) December 11, 2017
Even among Democrats, a federal government shutdown to give amnesty to illegal aliens is not popular, with less than 35 percent of left-wing voters saying they support the plan, Breitbart News reported.
In September, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the end of DACA. Since then, the open borders lobby, corporate interests, Democrats and the Republican establishment have scrambled to come up with an amnesty plan for the illegal aliens before March 2018, when DACA will officially expire.
The latest effort to pass pro-American immigration reforms — such as halving legal immigration down to 500,000 immigrants a year by ending the process of “chain migration” whereby new immigrants being allowed to bring their foreign relatives to the U.S. — is coupled with an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens.
Though the end to chain migration is tacked onto an amnesty, by greatly reducing legal immigration levels, whereby the U.S. currently admits more than one million immigrants a year, American wages would rise and blue-collar U.S. workers would be relieved from having to compete with the current immigrant-flooded labor market.
At the same time, an amnesty for illegal aliens would betray President Trump’s base of supporters, as he adamantly opposed any such plan during the 2016 presidential election. |
It’s been more than a decade since Israeli actress Sofi Tsedaka first began making music combining the languages, rhythms and chants of the three cultures in which she was raised, Samaritan, Arabic and Israeli.
Her shows with ensemble Sofi and the Baladis, including an upcoming performance in Tel Aviv on March 19 ahead of an international tour this spring and summer, are a celebration and amalgamation of those distinct groups that make up her roots.
“This show is about different languages,” said Tsedaka, sitting in her Ramat Aviv apartment on a recent weekday morning. “I grew up with those three cultures, Samaritan, Arabic and Jewish, and we’ve taken the three languages and combined them into one, to show the beauty and connection between them.”
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It’s what Tsedaka, 41, has tried to do for most of her adulthood, ever since she broke with the tiny, ancient sect she was born into and began the process of converting to Judaism at the age of 18, and completed that transition three years later.
טמאלי מעאק – סופי והבלדים מופע השקת האלבום – 19.3.2017 | 20:30 | פאפאיתו תל אביבלהזמנת כרטיסים: https://eventbuzz.co.il/baladis Posted by Sofi Tsedaka Office-סופי צדקה on Wednesday, 31 August 2016
She wasn’t the first in her family to do so; she followed her three elder sisters who also converted, leaving the sect’s compound in Holon, just outside Tel Aviv.
At the time, Tsedaka, a natural beauty with dark red hair, was engaged to a fellow Samaritan, but she ended up leaving him.
“I did it behind my father’s back,” she said. “It was only after I had my daughter, who’s now a soldier, that I could look back and realize what I did. I left from a place of rebellion.”
But she always kept parts of who she had been.
The name, Tsedaka, is the Hebrew word for charity. Tsedaka’s first name, Sofi, is the Hebrew word for final or end, as Tsedaka’s father wanted her to be the last girl in his line of daughters.
Yet when Tsedaka converted, she was told she had to change her name to Sarah, which felt strange.
“I’m Sofi Sarah on my identity card,” said Tsedaka.
She was also told she was now Sarah, the daughter of Abraham. Tsedaka’s father’s name was Baruch.
“My father had phenomenal knowledge of the Torah,” said Tsedaka. “And he gave me that love.”
Still, it was a complicated community in which to be raised.
‘A beauty in all three religions’
The Samaritans are named for Samaria, a region in the northern West Bank, and have lived in the Holy Land for thousands of years. The most common frame of reference is the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament, although the Samaritans believe they are remnants of Israelites exiled by the Assyrians. Their religion is closely related to Judaism, although they are not Jewish, and follows a version of the Old Testament.
In 2013, there were 756 Samaritans, according to the sect’s official website. Half live near the West Bank city of Nablus on Mount Gerizim, the group’s holiest place and the site of its annual Passover sacrifice. The other half live in a compound in the Israeli city of Holon, near Tel Aviv.
Tsedaka grew up in Holon and spent weekends and holidays in Mount Gerizim. She studied in Israeli schools, attending classes in the Samaritan language and religion in the afternoon, and also spoke Arabic. But she began resisting the religion’s strictures in her teens, following in the footsteps of her older sisters.
After Tsedaka’s final conversion at 21, she married a Jewish man, with whom she had her daughter, and they later divorced. Tsedaka became a successful model, and host of children’s TV shows and a soap opera star.
She now has two children, her older daughter, now a soldier in the Israeli army, and a younger, 5-year-old son. Tsedaka isn’t Sabbath observant, but lights candles on Friday night and is a “believing person,” she said, who regularly studies Torah and the Talmud in her home, where the shelves are filled with religious tomes alongside her son’s puzzles and soccer balls.
Tsedaka never returned to the Samaritan compound, but retained a relationship with her parents, although she, her sisters and her father were all excommunicated from the sect.
יא גמיל – סופי והבלאדים הבלאדים מגיעים לפאפאיתו …פם פררם פם פםביום ראשון הקרוב 19.3.2017 מופע השקת אלבום – להזמנת כרטיסים https://eventbuzz.co.il/baladis Posted by Sofi Tsedaka Office-סופי צדקה on Tuesday, 14 March 2017
It was about a decade after her conversion to Judaism that Tsedaka began working on her first album, “Berashet,” the Samaritan word for Bereshit, or Genesis. She saw it as an attempt to reconnect and make peace with her past, by telling the story of the Tsedaka family.
“I see the beauty in all three religions, and that’s what made me want to do this,” she said.
The music is a melding of traditional Samaritan sounds and dialects, as well as ancient Hebrew and Arabic dialects and prayers, set to the background of the oud and kanun, an ancient string instrument.
“They’re instruments that are beyond time,” she said.
The roots of Tsedaka’s musical journey can be traced to the making of “The Lone Samaritan,” a documentary about Tsedaka’s personal history, made by filmmaker Barak Heymann.
During the making of the film, she met a musicologist and started examining the connections between the Samaritan, Arab and Jewish languages and liturgical poems.
“It’s about connecting bridges for me,” said Tsedaka.
Tsedaka has continued her other stage work, yet finds the musical career infinitely satisfying, given its deep connections to her complicated story.
“You can choose to do this work or it chooses you,” she said. “But when you bring yourself, your family to your work, you’re the most connected to it.”
“I stand on a stage no matter what I do,” she said. “What I want, when I’m onstage, is to make you feel emotions, to give you something that you’ll take home and think about. The platform doesn’t really matter.”
Sofi and the Baladis will perform March 19, at Tel Aviv’s Papaito. They’ll be touring in Spain in May, and will reach the US next October, when they tour for a month with Arts Midwest World Fest. |
Sue MacGregor examines the work of John Freeman on the TV series Face to Face, famous for the close scrutiny of its cameras and Freeman's forensic questioning.
"Tighter, tighter!". This, the television producer Hugh Burnett tells Sue MacGregor, was a typical instruction to cameramen on the BBC series Face to Face which ran from 1959 to 1962.
Face to Face was Burnett's idea and it was simple. Each week, a public figure would join the presenter John Freeman for a half hour interview.
Fifty years on the programmes still shine, remarkable for their relentless camera close-ups and Freeman's forensic questioning, bringing celebrities to television screens as never before.
In Freeman's World, Sue MacGregor and Hugh Burnett look back on the series, beginning with its interrogation of Tony Hancock - "There's something troubling you about the world and I should like to know what it is". Critics rounded on Freeman for the tough line he took. In fact, the two men became firm friends.
Perhaps the most enduring Face to Face image is Gilbert Harding in distress as he's asked about seeing someone die (Freeman didn't know Harding's mother had just passed away). But Harding didn't cry, reveals Hugh Burnett. He was sweating under the lights. Moreover, Burnett says, he knew he was in for "a public beating."
Face to Face made John Freeman a celebrity, to his distaste. But his face was almost never seen, only the back of his head. And interviewing was just part of a life in which he has been soldier, MP, magazine editor, TV executive and high-ranking diplomat.
Freeman's World also features Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung, Dame Edith Sitwell and Sir Stirling Moss. And then there's Evelyn Waugh, aloof and ill at ease in the studio. Asked by John Freeman why he's agreed to appear on Face to Face, Waugh replies "Poverty. We've both been hired to talk in this deliriously happy way."
Producer: Chris Ledgard. |
Story highlights Annie Dookhan pleads guilty to tampering with evidence, perjury, obstruction of justice
300 drug convictions have been put on hold in one county alone
Dookhan cut corners in criminal cases, altered samples to cover up
Authorities: One person set free because of Dookhan went on to kill someone
A former Massachusetts crime lab chemist accused of mishandling evidence affecting hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of criminal cases was sentenced Friday to three to five years in prison after pleading guilty to 27 counts.
Annie Dookhan, 36, was arrested last year, accused of cutting corners by visually identifying alleged drug samples instead of performing chemical tests, and then altering the samples to cover up the practice.
More than 300 drug convictions involving Dookhan's tests -- conducted from 2003 to 2012 -- have been put on hold since last year in Suffolk County alone, Suffolk County District Attorney spokesman Jake Wark said.
Dookhan also was accused of falsely claiming, while testifying as an expert witness at a criminal trial, that she had a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts. A defendant's conviction was overturned because of this, and authorities allege he killed someone in May, after his release.
"Annie Dookhan's egregious misconduct sent ripple effects throughout our entire criminal justice system," Attorney General Martha Coakley said in a statement. "Her deliberate decision to tamper with drug evidence and fabricate test results harmed the integrity of the system and put the public's safety at risk."
Dookhan pleaded guilty Friday to tampering with evidence, perjury, obstruction of justice and falsely claiming to holding a master's degree.
She said little during Friday's hearing in Boston, other than repeatedly saying, "Yes, your honor," to questions such as whether she understood the consequences of her guilty pleas.
The judge also ordered that she serve two years of probation after serving the prison time.
Governor: 40,000 defendants could be affected
In August, Gov. Deval Patrick's administration said the cases of more than 40,000 defendants could be affected by Dookhan's tampering. Reviews of all the cases she handled are under way.
Dookhan worked as a state chemist testing drug evidence submitted by law enforcement agencies from 2003 until March 2012, when she resigned, according to the Massachusetts attorney general's office.
The attorney general's office began a criminal investigation in July 2012, after Massachusetts State Police were tipped off by Dookhan's co-workers, who alleged her work at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory in Jamaica Plain might be unreliable.
The investigation revealed that Dookhan allegedly had tampered with evidence by altering substances in vials that were being tested at the state lab, allegedly to cover up the practice of routinely "dry labbing" samples. "Dry labbing" is a term used for visually identifying samples instead of performing the required chemical test.
Authorities arrested Dookhan at her home in Franklin in September 2012.
Authorities: Released man accused in killing
Dookhan's false testimony about her credentials in a Plymouth County drug trial led to the release of a man who went on to be accused of murder, Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz said.
Donta Hood was convicted of a cocaine charge in 2009, in a trial in which Dookhan -- as an expert witness -- falsely testified that she had a master's degree, authorities said.
Hood was released in November 2012. Cruz said he wasn't able to retry Evans on the drug charge because the evidence in the case was destroyed. Storage space had been at a premium, he said, and no one thought it would be needed again.
After his release, Hood was arrested twice -- first, on a gun possession charge. While out on bail for the gun charge, he allegedly shot and killed Charles Evans in Brockton, Massachusetts, in May, authorities said.
"There's no bigger pain than somebody being released that goes out and kills somebody," Cruz told CNN.
Evans' family declined to comment.
Chemist in Massachusetts drug sample case lied about degree
Dookhan also declined CNN's request for comment about her case.
At a court proceeding earlier this year, Dookhan's lawyer, Nicholas Gordon, said that she took shortcuts in the lab to get more cases done to help her career, never considering the negative consequences it could have for criminal cases.
"The furthest thing from her mind is that this is going to ultimately cost millions of dollars, (And that) it's going to throw the entire Massachusetts criminal justice system into a tailspin," Gordon said in court.
An investigation revealed that not only did Dookhan not have a master's degree, but she never took master's-level classes, prosecutors said.
Some of the obstruction charges stem from instances in which authorities relied on tampered evidence in criminal proceedings, prosecutors said. |
BOSTON (Reuters) - Massachusetts Senate President Stan Rosenberg is taking a temporary leave of absence as his husband faces allegations that he used his political connections to sexually harass men.
Rosenberg, a Democrat, will step aside immediately and will remain away during an investigation by the Senate, he said in a statement on Monday.
“I want to ensure that the investigation is fully independent and credible, and that anyone who wishes to come forward will feel confident that there will be no retaliation,” Rosenberg wrote.
Last week, Rosenberg, 68, said he supported the investigation and that his husband, Bryon Hefner, 30, was planning to enter an inpatient treatment center for alcohol dependency.
The Boston Globe reported that four unnamed men said Hefner, had groped them or made other unwanted sexual contact. The newspaper said the men asked to remain anonymous for fear that speaking out against the powerful lawmaker’s spouse would endanger their work as political advocates.
Reuters could not confirm the allegations, which the newspaper said stemmed from incidents in 2015 and 2016.
The accusations are the latest in a wave of sexual assault and sexual harassment claims levied against powerful men in U.S. politics, entertainment and journalism. |
MIAMI — The Heat made a $50 million investment in Tyler Johnson this offseason.
Was it a good investment for a 24-year-old guard who has played in 68 regular-season games over his first two NBA seasons? It’s only the preseason, but Johnson is showing his worth as a versatile player who can be used at both guard positions.
After Miami matched Johnson’s four-year, $50 million offer sheet from the Nets in July, he worked to increase his value by improving his point guard skills.
It’s worked, as the score-first guard has excelled as a facilitator this preseason with 14 assists and just one turnover. That stat is proof of a noticeable change in Johnson’s game after he posted a 1.6 assist-to-turnover ratio (121 assists and 77 turnovers) over the first two seasons of his NBA career.
“The game is starting to slow down a little bit,” Johnson said Tuesday. “I think my first two years I looked to just score, score, score and now I’m starting look for the pocket a little bit more.”
Coach Erik Spoelstra revealed this week that he’s been using Johnson as a point guard “virtually most of the possessions in practice.” Johnson is even being used as a point guard when starter Goran Dragic goes to the bench in preseason games.
With Johnson at point guard this preseason, the Heat have outscored opponents 109-95 (plus-14) over 47 minutes.
“I need these game reps (at point guard),” Johnson said. “In practice, it’s good for me to get a feel for what guys’ tendencies are. But in the game, using my voice and being able to get guys in the right position and not just knowing where I need to be is probably the biggest difference.”
Even if point guard Beno Udrih or Briante Weber make the Heat’s 15-man roster, Johnson is expected to slide over from shooting guard to point guard this season when Dragic is on the bench.
That’s a role that Johnson struggled with just a few months ago.
With Udrih and Dragic injured during a string of games last season, Johnson got a chance to start at point guard. Johnson made four consecutive starts at the position from Jan. 17 through Jan. 22 and averaged 9.3 points, four rebounds, three assists and 2.8 turnovers per game during that stretch. The Heat lost all four of those games.
Johnson is averaging 11.6 points, 2.4 rebounds, 2.8 assists and 0.2 turnovers in 20.7 minutes per game this preseason. Those averages equal out to 20.2 points, 4.2 rebounds, 4.9 assists and 0.3 assists per 36 minutes.
“It doesn’t appear that way, but the game is slowing down for him,” Spoelstra said of Johnson. “He’s so quick, so aggressive, gets into gaps, but he’s doing it with more thought now. He’s really been working at it and I think it’s helped his overall offensive reads. He’s seeing the defense and seeing what he can do to attack and letting the game come to him while he’s still being himself.”
[Q&A with Heat general manager Andy Elisburg]
[Clean-shaven James Johnson ‘feels good’ with new look]
[Rodney McGruder in race with Beno Udrih, Briante Weber for final roster spot]
[Want more Heat news sent directly to your Facebook feed? Make sure to like our Heat Facebook page] |
The Florida Panthers finished this season with the 2nd lowest points total in the NHL and drew the 2nd lowest average attendance of 14,200 fans per home game. The team is losing $25 million annually. All of this is the exact opposite situation of the team's owner - Vincent Viola of HFT firm Virtu Financial infamy. As Bloomberg reports, Viola, whose high-frequency trading firm plans to raise millions in an initial public offering next month, is seeking tax dollars to help cover the bills for the hockey team he bought six months ago. Viola asked lawmakers in South Florida’s Broward County to use $64 million in taxpayer funds for arena bond payments owed by the team. In addition to taking over bond payments, which would be made over the next 14 years, the team wants concessions that would cost county taxpayers another $14 million in the same period.
As Bloomberg reports, officials in Broward, which encompasses Fort Lauderdale on the Atlantic Coast, disagree on how to proceed, with some saying that if they don’t pick up the tab, the team may move and leave taxpayers with $225 million in debt and an empty arena.
"If we lose the Panthers and the arena operators, we would devalue our asset," said Broward Mayor Barbara Sharief, referring to the $220 million BB&T Center arena near Fort Lauderdale. "The building could stay vacant for six months out of the year. That’s a significant loss." The value of the 20,000-seat arena would drop 70 percent if the Panthers fold or relocate, Sharief said. The arena would probably lose its concert promoter, Live Nation Entertainment Inc., and forfeit a $2 million annual state subsidy.
iola has been owner since September...
The team, in its current location since the 1998-99 season, was sold to Viola and Douglas Cifu, Virtu’s CEO, in September for $250 million, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Team CEO Rory Babich declined to comment. The team is losing $25 million annually, according to a county review.
But everyone involves expects the taxpayer handout...
With more tax money, the Panthers could recruit better players, said Babich, the team CEO. The county could share the profits, he said. In addition to taking over bond payments, which would be made over the next 14 years, the team wants concessions that would cost county taxpayers another $14 million in the same period. Babich wouldn’t say whether the team would move if it doesn’t get a bigger subsidy. He said the team expects to reach a “satisfactory’’ resolution with Broward.
So the big question is - why does Viola need US taxpayer help when his firm (and his pocketbook) is exploding with holy grail cash? Or is that, in a nutshell, how one gets rich in this new normal... take the profits and let government take the downside. |
The Belgian farmer, whose name was Henri Lejoly, was surprised at the nonchalance of the U.S. troops. Standing in the barren field outside of the town of Malmedy on that cold early afternoon in the winter of 1944, they smoked and joked with each other. Some of them had placed their hands on their helmets in a casual token of surrender to the Waffen-SS troops of Kampfgruppe Peiper—the mechanized task force commanded by the brilliant young German Colonel Jochen Peiper—as it passed by, but beyond that they seemed remarkably unconcerned.
The offhand behavior of the roughly 115 U.S. prisoners may have been because the men came from Battery B of the 285th Field Observation Battery. This was an outfit whose job was to spot enemy artillery emplacements and transmit their location to other U.S. units. It had seen relatively little frontline duty and was filled with numerous green replacements.
Most of the SS troops, including Jochen Peiper, had seen extensive duty in the grim killing fields of the Eastern Front. As Kampfgruppe Peiper passed by these Americans, an SS soldier suddenly stood up in the back of his halftrack, aimed his pistol, and fired it twice into a group of U.S. prisoners. One of them crumpled to the ground. Terrified U.S. soldiers in the field suddenly began to run. Then a German machine gun at the back of another halftrack opened up and U.S. prisoners fell screaming to the ground. Within a matter of a few minutes, the field was covered with quickly coagulating pools of blood and writhing bodies. Then the SS men began to walk among the injured and the dead, pistols out.
“A Greater Risk”
The Battle of the Bulge was the largest battle ever fought in the history of the U.S. infantry and one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, which was the most costly war in human history. The U.S. troops suffered 81,000 casualties, which included 18,000 dead, while their German opponents were hit with 70,000 casualties, including 20,000 dead. The battle lasted forty days in December and January of 1944–45, in atrocious winter weather that was the worst seen in the Ardennes region of Belgium in twenty years, and could easily have resulted in a devastating loss for Allied forces, one that might have stalemated a war that they seemed well on their way to winning.
With all of these matters of great importance, why has so much attention been paid to the killing of eighty-four U.S. soldiers in a small field on December 17, 1944? The Germans of Kampfgruppe Peiper, seventy of whom were convicted in a war crimes tribunal after the war, were surprised—executing prisoners was standard fare on the Eastern Front. So, too, were many U.S. soldiers who had done battle in the Pacific, where the Japanese treated U.S. POWs with casual brutality. Perhaps one reason for the attention paid to the Malmedy Massacre is that many Americans at the time, including, possibly, those of Battery B standing in the field that day, thought that, against the Germans at least, they were fighting a “civilized” war with adversaries who shared the same racial heritage as thousands of GIs.
Another reason for the focus on Malmedy is that, as word spread like wildfire through the U.S. frontline ranks in the immediate aftermath of the killings, U.S. soldiers vowed to take no prisoners. Within a few weeks of Malmedy, one U.S. unit had machine-gunned sixty German prisoners to death in a small Belgian village called Chenogne (see “Death at Chenogne”). As even the official U.S. military history of the Battle of the Bulge states: “It is probable the Germans attempting to surrender in the days immediately following [the killings at Malmedy] ran a greater risk.”
This official military history goes on to state that “there is no evidence that American troops took advantage of orders, explicit or implicit, to kill their SS prisoners,” but any GI fighting in Belgium in the days after December 17, 1944, could tell a very different story.
“The Ghost Front”
In a sense, the Allied war against the Germans since the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944, had gone almost too well. After a fierce fight in Normandy, the Americans and British had broken out of their beachheads at the end of July and sent the Wehrmacht reeling backwards, ceding vast areas of France and Belgium to the U.S. armored divisions of the First and Third Armies and the British Twenty-fifth Army Group. But such was the speed of the Allied advance that outfits began to outrun their supply lines. By late fall, the sixty-five Allied divisions operating in northeastern Europe were facing vital supplies shortages, especially of fuel, and their offensive had sputtered to a halt.
Digging in for the winter, the Americans and British sought to consolidate their gains and build up fuel supplies for a massive push into Germany in the early spring. The Allied lines were weakest along a 100-mile (160 km) stretch from southern Belgium into Luxembourg, a place where U.S. commander Omar Bradley took what he called a “calculated risk” by placing only six U.S. divisions—about 60,000 men—three of which were untried in battle and three of which were exhausted from months of heavy combat.
This area covered the rugged and desolate Ardennes Forest and was mountainous and remote. As December 1944 began, the Ardennes fell prey to the worst winter weather it had experienced in a generation, with temperatures hovering below 0°F/-17°C for days at a time. Snow blanketed the little towns, vacation chateaus, and deep forests of the area. The area was so thinly held by GIs billeted (if they were lucky) in Belgian inns and private homes that it was called “the Ghost Front.” The GIs knew that their German enemies were out there in the snow and fog, but believed that they would never attempt a serious attack in such conditions.
But that is exactly what the Germans did, in a massive counteroffensive personally planned by Adolf Hitler. His goal was to punch through this weakly held part of the Allied line and send his armored divisions streaking toward Antwerp. Once he had captured this vital port, he could force the Allies to sue for peace. With the greatest of secrecy, aided by winter weather that kept Allied planes on the ground, he assembled a huge force of 250,000 men, 1,400 tanks, and 2,000 artillery guns on the eastern edge of the Ardennes. And, at 5:30 a.m. on December 16, this blitzkrieg struck the unsuspecting Americans.
Jochen Peiper
Up and down an 85-mile (136 km) front, mortars, rockets, and heavy artillery shells literally blasted American troops out of bed or shook the ground around their frigid foxholes. After an hour, the barrage stopped and then, in numerous strategic places along the front, giant searchlights were turned on, blinding the Americans and turning the foggy morning a glowing white. German infantry—wearing winter camouflage clothing that most of the Americans did not possess—attacked out of the ethereal mist, firing burp guns from the hip. Behind them came the grumbling roar of massive Tiger and Panther tanks.
Many of the astonished and terrified Americans—a large number of them cooks and clerks—picked up rifles and fought back, while some threw away their arms and immediately ran away. Massive confusion was the order of the day. Even at the headquarters of the Supreme Allied Command, it was at first thought that this German attack was a feint, a prelude to another main attack someone else along the Allied lines. With the skies filled with clouds, Allied scout planes could not get a clear picture of just how enormous the attack was, and frantic reports from infantry units in the area were confused and fragmented.
In fact, the Battle of the Bulge, as it would become known for the deep indentation the attacking German forces pushed into the U.S. lines, quickly became a series of confused small actions, with isolated units engaging each other in fierce battles. Communications were terrible and no one quite knew where the Germans were. In some instances, U.S. outfits were completely surrounded by the attacking Germans while, a few miles (kilometers) away, the GIs wiped out entire German companies. However, in the beginning of the attack, the Germans possessed the element of surprise and a sense of purpose and direction—they knew what they were there for and where they were heading.
Spearheading the German attack was a remarkable twenty-nine-year-old SS colonel named Jochen Peiper. Peiper was the commander of Kampfgruppe Peiper, the leading battle formation of the First Panzer Division—he had been personally picked by Adolf Hitler to be the point person on the Sixth Panzer Army’s drive to seize the bridges of the Meuse River and capture Antwerp. Holder of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Germany’s highest military decoration; an ardent Nazi; and a hardened veteran of fighting in France, Italy, and on the Eastern Front; Peiper was admired by his soldiers, but known as a brutal fighter. He had probably ordered an attack by his unit, which caused the deaths of forty-three Italian civilians in the village of Boves, Italy, in 1943, and in numerous actions against partisans in Russia, his unit deliberately burned villages and killed Russian civilians.
And on the morning of December 17, the second day of the German attack, he was a frustrated man. Because of a heroic and determined resistance by elements of the U.S. 99th Infantry Division, his task force, which consisted of 117 tanks, 149 halftracks, and 24 artillery pieces, was already 12 hours behind schedule. Time is always important in military operations, but in the Ardennes in December 1944, it was the most crucial factor that Peiper, and by extension the entire Wehrmacht, faced. They must reach the bridges on the Meuse River before the sky cleared and the Allied planes, which enjoyed almost total air superiority, could turn their tanks into smoldering wrecks blocking the narrow roads and halting Germany’s last chance at saving itself from total defeat.
“You Know what to Do with the Prisoners”
At around 8 a.m. on December 17, a convoy carrying Battery B, 285th Field Observation Battery, set out from Schevenutte, on the border of Germany and Belgium, on its way to St. Vith, Belgium, which was about to become a focal point of one of the great clashes in the Battle of the Bulge. The convoy consisted of about 130 men, thirty jeeps, weapons carriers, and trucks and was led by Captain Roger Mills, and Lieutenants Virgil Lary and Perry Reardon.
The day was clear and cold, with temperatures well below freezing, and a light dusting of snow on the ground. Battery B reached the Belgian town of Malmedy around noon. After passing through the town, the convoy was stopped on its eastern edge by Lt. Colonel David Pergrin, in charge of a company of combat engineers who were all that were left to defend Malmedy. Pergrin warned Mills and Lary that a German armored column had been seen approaching from the southeast. He advised them to go to St. Vith by another route, but Mills and Lary refused, perhaps because ahead of them were several members of Battery B who had been laying down road markers, and they did not wish to abandon them, or perhaps simply because the route they were to take was stated in their orders.
For whatever reason, Battery B proceeded along its designated route until it came to a crossroads about 2.5 miles (4 km) east of Malmedy, which the Belgians called Baugnetz but the Americans referred to as Five Points, because five roads intersected here. There was a café there, as well as three small farms. Shortly after it passed this crossroads, the column began to receive fire from two German tanks that were 1,000 yards (0.9 km) down the road. These tanks were the spearhead of Kampfgruffe Peiper, led by Lieutenant Werner Sternebeck, and their 88-mm guns and machine guns easily tore up the U.S. column. Sternebeck and his tanks proceeded down the road, pushing burning and wrecked U.S. jeeps and trucks out of the way and firing their machine guns at U.S. soldiers who cowered in ditches—something Sternebeck later told historian Michael Reynolds that he did to get the Americans to surrender, which most of them did, since they were armed only with rifles and pistols, weapons that could not possibly fight off tanks.
Sternebeck then sent the Americans, numbering about 115 in all, marching with their hands held high back to the crossroads at Five Points. (Perhaps eleven men of Battery B had been killed in the initial attack.) He assembled the prisoners in a field there and waited with his tanks and halftracks for further orders. The delay upset Peiper. Racing to the front of the German column, he upbraided Sternebeck for engaging Battery B—because the noise might alert more powerful U.S. combat units nearby—and told him to keep moving. Sternebeck moved out, followed closely by Peiper, and the long line of Kampfgruffe Peiper began to pass the Americans standing in the field, some of whom had begun to relax, put their hands down, and light cigarettes.
After an hour or so, it must have seemed to them that the worst danger was over, perhaps the Germans were even going to leave them there as they continued on. Peiper left an SS major named Werner Poetschke in charge of the prisoners, but the men guarding them seem to have changed as unit after unit of Germans passed by on the road. However, at around 4 o’clock that afternoon, soldiers from the SS 3rd Pioneer company were detailed to permanently guard the prisoners. According to testimony at the war crimes trial, Major Poetschke was heard by a U.S. soldier who understood German telling a Sergeant Beutner: “You know what to do with the prisoners.”
“The Germans Killed Everybody!”
Sergeant Beutner then stopped a halftrack that held a 75-mm cannon and attempted to depress its barrel low enough to aim at the prisoners in the field. When the gun crew was unable to do this, Beutner gave up in disgust and waved the halftrack on, much to the relief of the now edgy and nervous Americans in the field. But then another German unit came by and those Americans who could speak German heard a lieutenant in this unit give the order: “Machte alle Kaput!” Kill the Americans. At first, the Germans present merely stared at the officer, but then Pfc. George Fleps, an ethnic German from Romania, stood up in his halftrack and fired twice at the crowd of Americans.
The Americans in the rear of the group began to run away, even as an officer yelled “Stand fast!” thinking that the Germans would shoot them if they saw them escaping. In fact, this is what happened. Seeing Americans fleeing, a machine gun on the back of a halftrack opened up, cutting down those who stood in the field and those trying to escape. The farmer, Henri Lejoly, watched in horror as the Americans screamed and cowered as the machine gun bullets tore them apart.
To this day it is uncertain if the Germans would have shot the Americans had they not tried to run—many German soldiers present later claimed they were merely killing escaping prisoners. However, surviving Americans distinctly remember the German order to kill coming before any of the POWs tried to escape. However, what the Germans did next reinforces the belief that they intended to kill the Americans from the beginning. As the GIs lay moaning on the ground, SS men walked among them, kicking men in the testicles or in the head. If they moved, the SS men would casually lean over and shoot them in the head. Some survivors later testified that the Germans were laughing as they did this.
Lejoly, who was a German sympathizer, nevertheless could not believe his eyes as he watched one SS man allow a U.S. medic to bandage a wounded soldier, after which the German shot both men dead. Eleven Americans fled to the café nearby, but the Germans set it on fire and then gunned down the men as they ran out. As this killing was going on, the German column continued to pass through Five Points, and soldiers on halftracks chatted and pointed. Some fired into already dead Americans, as if to practice their aim.
Amazingly enough, some sixty Americans were still alive in the field after the machine-gunning. As the SS massacred the survivors, they realized they had no choice to but to try to escape, and they rose and ran as fast as they could to the back of the field, heading for a nearby woods. The Germans swept them with rifle and machine gun fire, but made little attempt to chase after them. Perhaps forty made good their escape into the deepening dusk. Most of them attempted to make their way back to Malmedy, some wandering for days before they returned. However, early that evening, three escapees did encounter a patrol led by Colonel Pergrin, who had heard the shooting and was coming to investigate. The men, covered with blood, were hysterical.
“The Germans killed everybody!” they shouted at Pergrin.
Aftermath of the Massacre
That evening, Pergrin sent back word to 1st Army Headquarters that there had been a massacre of some type at Malmedy. The area around Five Points was so hotly contested that it was not until nearly a month after the massacre, on January 14, that the U.S. army was able to recover the bodies of the 84 men who had been killed in that field. Autopsies conducted on the frozen corpses showed that forty-one men had been shot in the head at close range and another ten had had their heads bashed in with rifle butts. Nine still had their arms raised above their heads.
However, immediately after the massacre occurred and well before the bodies were recovered, the news quickly spread through the GIs fighting for their lives in the Ardennes. As one historian has written, tales of the shootings “enraged the Americans and inspired them to fight with conviction and with little compassion, especially towards the SS….” Although official U.S. military histories deny this, there is strong evidence that U.S. commanders gave orders for the killing of prisoners. Before an attack against the Germans on December 21, four days after the massacre, the headquarters of the 328th Infantry sent out an order that read, in part: “No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner but will be shot on sight.”
Many of the Americans fighting in the Battle of the Bulge were green replacements who had never seen combat before, let alone this kind of vicious and bloody fighting. Many of them had run away at the first sign of the German attack. But some of these same GIs later recalled that the story of the Malmedy Massacre so angered them that they decided they would now stand and fight with everything they had. And they did.
By the time the Battle of the Bulge wound down in late January 1945, fresh Allied replacements, the tenacious stand of the battered GIs, and clearing weather (which allowed Allied airborne operations) combined to halt the German advance. Jochen Peiper never reached the Meuse, his much-sought-after goal. Of his 5,000-man force, only 800 survived to return to Germany.
By the time the war ended, the U.S. public knew all about the Malmedy massacre and clamored for revenge. On May 16, 1946, a year after the end of hostilities in Europe, Peiper and seventy of his men (almost one in ten of the surviving members of Kampfgruppe Peiper) were placed on trial for war crimes connected with the massacre. The trials were deliberately held on the site of the Dachau concentration camp, to garner maximum symbolism from the event.
Not all of the presumed guilty could be punished—both Major Poetschke and Sergeant Beutner died in action during the war. But at the end of the proceedings, all seventy of the SS men, as well as Peiper, had been convicted of war crimes by a six-man panel of U.S. officers. Forty-three of them, including Peiper, were sentenced to die by hanging, twenty-two to life imprisonment, and the rest to ten- to twenty-year sentences.
However, the trials were tainted by later testimony that the SS men had been tortured by U.S. interrogators (see “The First Guantanamo”) before their trials. All of the death sentences were commuted to imprisonment and, in 1956, Jochen Peiper became the last member of the group to walk out of jail. Peiper, who was murdered in France in 1976 by a shadow group of anti-Nazi terrorists who called themselves “the Avengers,” always claimed that he did not give express orders to kill the prisoners at Malmedy, and he probably did not.
He did testify that “after the battle of Normandy, my unit was composed of mainly young, fanatical soldiers. A good many of them had lost their parents, their sisters and brothers, during the [Allied] bombing [of German cities]. They had seen for themselves thousands of mangled corpses…after a terror raid had passed. Their hatred of the enemy was such, I swear, I could not always keep it under control.”
This may have been true, but Peiper also had a reputation for brutality to prisoners that his men certainly knew about. There were other instances of SS men under his control killing GI prisoners during his dash through Belgium, and Peiper did nothing to stop these. Though we may never completely know the truth surrounding the Malmedy massacre—who ordered it, and whether it was at least partly an attempt to stop escaping prisoners—there is no doubt that, in the end, the deaths there stiffened U.S. resolve to destroy the Nazis, and the hated SS, wherever they found them. |
All - Wade here. I want to give a big thank you to everyone that made Tortoise and the Snare a thriving reality over the last year. The trials and tribulations of running a music blog were amazing and fruitful, filled with countless, amazing interactions amongst many local people in DC I respect, and even the few chances to talk to industry greats that we all look up to.
Some of you may know I stepped down from leading the team a while back to focus on my career and other end...eavors. Since then, others on the team have moved/are moving on to other things, and I thank them so much for everything they have contributed (with no incentive, other than to be a part of the ride). I want to personally thank Carla (aka Tophatty) for everything she did for me and the blog, she was pivotal to any of the success we had. Thanks to Michael, Nick, Jake, Brandon, Meagan, and Nikita as well, the content was top notch. |
This post is the fourth in a series that covers gratuitous ARP and its relation to OpenStack. In the previous posts, we discussed what gratuitous ARP is and how it’s implemented in OpenStack Neutron L3 agent. We also set the stage for the Failure, and dismissed easier causes of it.
This post will continue discussion of the Failure beyond OpenStack components. It is advised that you make yourself comfortable with previous posts in the series before proceeding with reading this “episode”.
To recap, a bunch of tempest connectivity tests were failing in RH-OSP 11 environment when connecting to a floating IP address. Quick log triage suggested that internal connectivity for affected instances worked fine, and that Neutron L3 agent called to arping tool at the right time. Still “undercloud” node (the node executing tempest) got timeout failures.
Deployment
Before diving deeper, let’s make a step back and explore the deployment more closely. How are those floating IP addresses even supposed to work in this particular setup? Is the tempest node on the same L2 network segment with the floating IP range, or is it connected to it via a L3 router?
The failing jobs deploy Red Hat OpenStack using Director also known as TripleO. It’s not a very easy task to deploy a cloud using bare TripleO, and for this reason there are several tools that prepare development and testing environments. One of those tools is tripleo-quickstart, more popular among upstream developers, while another one is Infrared, more popular among CI engineers. The failing jobs were all deployed with Infrared.
Infrared is a very powerful tool. I won’t get into details, but to give you a taste of it, it supports multiple compute providers allowing to deploy the cloud in libvirt or on top of another OpenStack cloud. It can deploy both RH-OSP and RDO onto provisioned nodes. It can use different installers (TripleO, packstack, …). It can also execute tempest tests for you, collect logs, configure SSH tunnels to provisioned nodes to access them directly… Lots of other cool features come with it. You can find more details about the tool in its documentation.
As I said, the failing jobs were all deployed using Infrared on top of a powerful remote libvirt hypervisor where a bunch of nodes with distinct roles were created:
a single “undercloud” node that is used to provision the actual “overcloud” multinode setup (this node also runs tempest);
three “overcloud” controllers all hosting Neutron L3 agents;
a single “overcloud” compute node hosting Nova instances.
All the nodes were running as KVM guests on the same hypervisor, connected to each other with multiple isolated libvirt networks, each carrying a distinct type of traffic. After Infrared deployed “undercloud” and “overcloud” nodes, it also executed “neutron” set of tests that contains both api and scenario tests, from both tempest and neutron trees.
As I already mentioned, the “undercloud” node is the one that also executes tempest tests. This node is connected to an external network that hosts all floating IP addresses for the preconfigured public network, with eth2 of the node directly plugged into it. The virtual interface is consequently plugged into the hypervisor external Linux kernel bridge, where all other external (eth2) interfaces for all controllers are plugged too.
What it means for us is that the tempest node is on the same network segment with all floating IP addresses and gateway ports of all Neutron routers. There is no router between the floating IP network and the tempest node. Whenever a tempest test case attempts to establish an SSH connection to a floating IP address, it first consults the local ARP table to possibly find an appropriate IP-to-MAC mapping there, and if the mapping is missing, it will use the regular ARP procedure to retrieve the mapping.
Now that we understand the deployment, let’s jump into the rabbit hole.
Traffic capture
The initial debugging steps on OpenStack Neutron side haven’t revealed anything useful. We identified that Neutron L3 agent correctly called to arping with the right arguments. So in the end, maybe it’s not OpenStack fault?
First thing to check would be to determine whether arping actually sent gratuitous ARP packets, and that they reached the tempest node, at which point we could expect that the “undercloud” kernel would honor them and update its ARP table. I figured it’s easier to only capture external (eth2) traffic on the tempest node. I expected to see those gratuitous ARP packets there, which would mean that the kernel received (and processed) them.
Once I got my hands on hardware capable of standing up the needed TripleO installation, I quickly deployed the needed topology using Infrared.
Of course, it’s a lot easier to capture the traffic on tempest node but analyze it later in Wireshark. So that’s what I did.
$ sudo tcpdump -i eth2 -w external.pcap
I also decided it may be worth capturing ARP table state during a failed test run.
$ while true; do date >> arptable; ip neigh >> arptable; sleep 1; done
And finally, I executed the tests. After 40 minutes of waiting for results, one of tests failed with the expected SSH timeout error. Good, time to load the .pcap into Wireshark.
The failing IP address was 10.0.0.221, so I used the following expression to filter the relevant traffic:
ip.addr == 10.0.0.221 or arp.dst.proto_ipv4 == 10.0.0.221
The result looked like this:
Here, we see the following: first, SSH session is started (frame 181869), it of course initially fails (frame 181947) because gratuitous ARP packets start to arrive later (frames 181910, 182023, 182110). But then for some reason consequent TCP packets are still sent using the old 52:54:00:ac:fb:f4 destination MAC address. It seemed like arriving gratuitous ARP packets were completely ignored by the kernel. More importantly, the node continued sending TCP packets to 10.0.0.221 using the old MAC address even past expected aging time (60 seconds), and it never issued a single ARP REQUEST packet to update its cache throughout the whole test case execution (!). Eventually, after ~5 minutes of banging the wrong door the test case failed with a SSH timeout.
How could it happen? The kernel is supposed to honor the new MAC address right after it receives an ARP packet!
Now, if we would compare the traffic dump to a successful test case run, we could see the traffic capture that looked more like below (in this case, the IP address of interest is 10.0.0.223):
Here we see TCP retransmission of SSH, port 22, packets (74573 and 74678), which failed to deliver because the kernel didn’t know the new fa:16:3e:bd:c1:97 MAC address just yet. Later, we see a burst of gratuitous ARP packets sent from the router serving 10.0.0.223, advertising the new MAC address (frames 74715, 74801, and 74804). Though it doesn’t immediately suggest that these were gratuitous ARP packets that healed the connectivity, it’s clear that the tempest node quickly learned about the new MAC address and continued with its SSH session (frames 74805 and forward).
One thing that I noticed while looking at multiple traffic captures from different test runs is that whenever a test failed, it always failed on a reused floating IP address. Those would show up in Wireshark with the following warning message:
State transitions
Then maybe there was a difference in ARP entry state between successful and failing runs? Looking at the ARP table state dumps I collected during a failing run, the following could be said:
Before the start of the failed test case, the corresponding ARP entry was in STALE state.
Around the time when gratuitous ARP packets were received and the first TCP packet was sent to the failing IP address, the entry transitioned to DELAY state.
After 5 seconds, it transitioned to REACHABLE without changing its MAC address. No ARP REQUEST packets were issued in between.
The same STALE – DELAY – REACHABLE transitions were happening for the affected IP address over and over. The tempest node hasn’t issued a single ARP REQUEST during the whole test case execution. Neither it received any new traffic that would use the old MAC address.
If we compare this to ARP entries in “good” runs, we see that there they also start in STALE state, then transition to DELAY, but after 5 seconds, instead of transitioning to REACHABLE, it switched to PROBE state. The node then issued a single ARP REQUEST (could be seen in the captured traffic dump), quickly received a reply from the correct Neutron router, updated the ARP entry with the new MAC address, and only then finally transitioned to REACHABLE. At this point the connectivity healed itself.
What made the node behave differently in those two seemingly identical cases? Why hasn’t it issued a ARP probe in the first case? What are those ARP table states anyway? I figured it was time to put my kernel hat on and read some Linux code.
In the next post in the series, I am going to cover my journey into kernel ARP layer. Stay tuned. |
At the Samsung Developer Conference (SDC), San Francisco, the company reveals its future research plans for mobile virtual reality (VR). Well aware that the Gear VR head-mounted display’s (HMD) greatest strength is that it is untethered, the company announced that a future iteration would be an all-in-one headset that could offer a ‘Holodeck’ experience.
Injong Rhee, Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, Software and Services Mobile, acted as host for the event, and it was his duty to reveal Samsung’s future plans. He announced that the company is currently researching an untethered HMD which does utilise a smartphone, but instead is an ‘all-in-one’ device. Furthermore, motion tracking and touch sensors are part of the company’s future roadmap.
No projected release date for this technology was given, though with the Gear VR now finding itself competing against high-end VR in the form of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive a new edition can’t be too far from reveal. VRFocus will of course keep you updated with all the latest details on the Gear VR and Samsung’s future plans for the device. |
Transit staff are being asked to wade in on the touchy topic of baby strollers on crowded buses and streetcars after one rider took her complaint directly to TTC commissioners.
Elsa La Rosa, a 61-year-old Toronto resident, came to city hall Monday to urge the 11-person commission to consider limiting the number of strollers allowed on buses during peak hours and to impose a $2 charge on each one.
"Why don't we have guidelines on baby strollers during peak times?" Ms. La Rosa asked commissioners. When strollers can take up three standing spaces or straddle two seats, she said they should be limited to two at rush hour and three at other times on any vehicle. "It's a way of stopping confrontation on the TTC," said Ms. La Rosa, who also asked commissioners to lower the age for a senior's Metropass.
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TTC chair Karen Stintz said she was not aware that strollers were an issue on transit vehicles until Ms. La Rosa made her complaint. She asked staff to look at the issue and report back on solutions. Ms. Stintz predicted that the system's new, larger streetcars and buses will remedy part of the problem.
TTC head Andy Byford said the issues of accommodating strollers comes up "quite regularly" with transit staff. "Speaking with bus operators, they do have a problem, particularly if you get a collection of very large strollers," he told reporters following Monday's meeting.
Mr. Byford dismissed the idea of charging extra for strollers and also said there are problems with imposing strict limits on their numbers, especially if it means turning away someone who is using a stroller when a bus is not crowded.
"At the end of the day, people with kids are entitled to use strollers, I have no problem with that whatsoever," he said. "What we are trying to do is get the right balance between offering excellent customer service for everyone, but equally making sure that the buses remain safe for everyone."
Mr. Byford said he expects to report back to the commission on the matter within a month or two. |
ANALYSIS: The Coalition is giving corporate regulator ASIC more money and more resources. If only ASIC was any good at regulating, writes Ben Eltham.
The public hates banks. Given their mega-billions in profits, their ability to gouge fees and their constant stream of fraud and corruption scandals, you can’t blame them.
The case for a fully-fledged royal commission into the banking, insurance and finance sector is open and shut.
Since the mid-2000s there have been more than a dozen major financial scandals involving the sector, accounting for well over a billion dollars in fraud.
The most notorious scandals of the last decade include:
As you can see, the problem is more than a few bad apples. Australian banking increasingly looks like a rotten orchard.
The government had been hoping to make the run-up to the election this year all about trade union corruption and the Coalition’s superiority as an economic manager.
But the press of events, a hard-working Labor opposition, and the government’s own confusion have made that impossible.
Labor’s announcement that it would push for a royal commission into the banking and finance sector is the latest in a strong suite of policy proposals that have wrong-footed the government, forcing it to play politics on Labor’s home turf. Now Turnbull is chasing after his opponents on issues like banking regulation, hoping to make up the ground the government conceded when it abandoned the policy initiative in February.
And so yesterday we saw the humiliating spectacle of Treasurer Scott Morrison – once again looking manifestly out of his depth – announcing $121 million in new funding for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
ASIC will also get some new powers, including a relaxation on who it is able to hire, so it can perhaps persuade some corporate poachers to throw in their lot with the gamekeeper.
Of course, as nearly everyone has already pointed out, the new money merely gives back what the government took away in the 2014 budget, when it cut ASIC’s funding on the dubious grounds of “budget repair.” In fact, it’s not even giving back the full amount of funding, as the bulk of the new financing will come from financial firms in the form of higher regulatory fees.
ASIC will get this extra funding ultimately from the banks themselves, who will have to pay more for their own regulation.
Many wonder whether the regulator getting its funding source from the industry it regulates is such a good idea (ASIC thinks this is a great idea, but that is hardly a ringing endorsement).
The idea of “user pays” is a pernicious piece of neoliberalism that has spread throughout the public service, often without sustained interrogation about the likely consequences. As Alex Erskine, a former ASIC economist, told Guardian Australia today, “in the end you’ll get deals between industry and ASIC about where ASIC’s tolerance for regulatory enquiry is.”
Deals between regulators and offending banks are the root cause of the failure of US authorities to send any of the major culprits of the 2008 financial crisis to jail.
The government has refused to do anything about protections for corporate whistleblowers, who remain the most important source of information about banks behaving badly.
It was Commonwealth Bank insider Jeff Morris who first blew the whistle on the widespread fraud and malfeasance inside the bank’s financial planning division. This led to the discovery of the massive Commonwealth financial planning scandal, in which thousands of ordinary Australians were swindled out of their life savings.
Morris was forced out by the Commonwealth Bank, after bringing the issues to management’s attention. But, surprise surprise, ASIC didn’t listen to his complaints.
I haven’t heard from #ASIC since they threw me to the wolves in 2012. New WB policy for public consumption yet never contacted me. #banksRC — Jeff Morris (@jmwhistleblower) April 21, 2016
In fact, ASIC has a terrible record of investigating allegations brought up by whistleblowers, or of preventing financial scandals before they implode.
The woeful performance of ASIC is covered in excruciating detail by a 2014 Senate Report. If you read it to the end, you won’t have a lot of faith in ASIC to be a “tough cop on the beat.” Indeed, given ASIC’s disastrous ineptitude, you’d have to ask whether ASIC should be handing in its badge and looking for another line of work.
In one notorious example, the Commonwealth Bank came clean to ASIC about breaching one of the regulator’s so-called “enforceable undertakings.” ASIC took no action, apparently because it lost the paperwork.
ASIC was warned about the spectacular $176 million fraud at Trio Capital by a finance blogger, John Hempton, and duly investigated. But it failed to coordinate properly with prudential regulator APRA after its investigation commenced. Crucially, Trio’s funds weren’t frozen quickly enough. This allowed Trio fraudsters Jack Flader and Shawn Richard to transfer more $123 million dollars to a shell company in the British Virgin Islands, where the money disappeared forever.
While ASIC eventually secured a conviction against Richard, it dropped its pursuit of Flader, despite a New South Wales court finding him to be the “mastermind” of the swindle. Richard served a paltry three years.
ASIC also failed to properly investigate allegations of bribery in the notorious Securency scandal, in which a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank paid bribes across much of south-east Asia to secure lucrative printing contracts to print currency notes. ASIC failed to interview a single witness.
Nor is ASIC the only regulator that we need to worry about. There are obviously pressing problems in the prudential regulator APRA, and plenty of unanswered questions at the Reserve Bank.
You can see how ineffective these reforms are by the fact that both ASIC and the Australian Banking Association welcomed them. That’s hardly reassuring. ASIC needs root-and-branch reform to weed out the soft touches and instil a culture of efficiency and investigative nous.
Solid legal protections for corporate whistleblowers are also desperately needed, as Jeff Morris and Labor continue to point out.
Labor should keep pressing the government on banking reform. It’s shaping to be a winning strategy.
That’s because the government can’t give in to Labor’s pressure. To do so would be to alienate one of most important pillars of the Liberal Party’s support.
This government doesn’t really want to do anything about the banks. The Prime Minister is a former banker. The Assistant Treasurer is a former banker. The Cabinet Secretary is also a former banker. Perhaps just as crucially, the big banks donate generously to the Liberal Party. They dominate Australia’s economy. Taking on the big banks is the last thing any Liberal government wants to do. |
Consider last weekend a microcosm of the year to date in music. Last Friday, at the Forum in L.A., Kanye West released his video for “Famous,” the *Life of Pablo *song responsible for reigniting his bad blood with Taylor Swift and bringing out the worst in both. Did Kanye blatantly ignore claims that his work is misogynistic, or is Taylor denying her alleged approval to paint herself as a saint? Whatever the “truth” may be, Kanye is never one to shrink back when accused. What was once a cringe-inducing—and yes, wildly misogynistic—line to be ignored was blown up as the clip’s concept, complete with naked wax figures of the very famous in bed together (including Swift). Kanye called it a “comment on fame.” Really, the “Famous” video is the time capsule that our clickbait era deserves, one of those things going around that you feel the need to engage with because *how can you not, *only to ask yourself afterwards, that was it?
If this all sounds exhausting and a bit beside the point of fandom, another big music headline from last week might be more interesting to you, though I must warn you it is a little sad. (That also has been a trend this year.) Sheila E’s tribute to Prince at the BET Awards last Sunday was everywhere you looked, but it had the rare benefit of being even better than you probably expected when you clicked. Moments like this can feel like remedies, acts of artistic expression seemingly removed from the ego and fame-mongering permeating so much of music culture on the internet. This is even more of a feat given its venue, an awards show—essentially a monetized bastion of thirst.
With all due respect to her abilities, Sheila E has not been A Name in a couple decades. And yet I could not imagine any Prince fan favoring whatever it was that Madonna did in her Prince tribute at the Billboard Music Awards over Sheila E paying tribute to her friend and former collaborator with everything she had. BET had the good sense to get out of her way. Big marquee tributes to icons at televised events don’t have to be all pomp and circumstance; it’s just that stunts are easier to sell.
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As we head into the second half of 2016, it’s worth remembering that the music world’s had no shortage of stunts so far this year. In fact, no big album can be released without one. We spent 2015 wondering when Adele, Kanye, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Drake, and Radiohead would surprise-drop their massive albums. But with the exception of Adele, none of them turned up until the first half of 2016. Was there something in the air that made our biggest stars really go for it this year? ANTI*, The Life of Pablo, Lemonade, VIEWS, A Moon Shaped Pool—*are they simply the products of colliding album cycles and coincidence?
Amid this flurry of high-profile releases, two of music’s most innovative and prolific figures—David Bowie and Prince—left this earth. Each death felt like one last provocation in careers punctuated by them. Music fans mourned Bowie’s January 10th passing, following a secret cancer battle, by clinging to his stunning and meta final album, released just two days earlier, and by spending weeks delving into every facet of his career and iconography. By April 21, we were doing the same for Prince, whose drug-related death still feels like a bad dream. He was supposed to outlive us all, with his perfect 90-year-old ass suspended in chaps. In the time between these two deaths, *ANTI, TLOP, *and *Lemonade *arrived, all with little-to-no advanced warning. In the weeks following Prince’s passing, *VIEWS *finally made its debut after years of (unwarranted) hype, while *A Moon Shaped Pool *pulled back Radiohead’s curtain of slow-simmering secrecy.
I’m not saying all these events are related in a literal, cause-and-effect kind of way, so much as they juxtaposed one another more cosmically. With two crucial musicians ripped from the world so suddenly, maybe time just felt a little more precious. These albums that pop’s perfectionists had been working on over the last couple years demanded their existence now. And in their own ways, the rollouts surrounding each attempted to catch us off-guard, whether that meant hiding in plain-sight via a HBO special, updating in real time so much it made you question the state of the album as a format, or single-handedly capturing the ineptitude of Tidal.
There’s something else at hand here, though—something bigger than Bowie and Prince, if you can imagine that. Historically, art has flourished in times of immense cultural shift. Think of all the great music that came out of the latter half of the 1960s and into the ’70s, as America reckoned with ugly truths about race, gender, sexuality, and war abroad, fighting over what society had been and what it should be. Now think of where we’re at currently with race-related police brutality, with LGBT rights and the growing disassembly of gender as a concept, with violently real threats of terror, and with an election that can feel at times like a close-minded reaction to it all. It’s not hard to imagine listeners clinging more closely to music in these times of fear and uncertainty, and for musicians to feel like it’s time to put art out into the world.
Mainstream music echoed the movements of four and five decades ago, but even art that wasn’t overtly political gets tied up in the general cultural feeling of the era, especially in hindsight. Drake’s work is wholly apolitical—his ego sucks up all the available air—and though *ANTI *is her best album by far, Rihanna isn’t exactly crafting calls to action. But both Drake and Rihanna make music that feels tapped into the sound of *right now, *pop that's oftentimes dark or at least hazy and downbeat.
On the flip side, Lemonade, particularly in its film form, portrays the history of struggle that continues to define black womanhood, at times showing glimpses of Black Lives Matter and feminism in action. Although Radiohead have made more overtly political albums in the past, their informed worldview comes through on A Moon Shaped Pool: “Burn the Witch” and its accompanying video play like commentary on nativist politicians, whether Trump or those behind Brexit. And Kanye? His entire career as a capital-p, capital-s Pop Star is commentary on race, even when he’s musing about something as insipid as a model’s bleached asshole. I consider *TLOP *more of a loose document of what it means to rank among the most famous and polarizing celebrities on the planet at this strange moment in time, bedfellows with Trump in both the “Famous” video and the headlines.
Of course, industry logistics likely played a part in this convergence. Perhaps, following the astronomical numbers put up by Adele’s 25 late last year, pop's elite felt confident that they wouldn't be upstaged commercially by a Brit who can belt them all under the table. Instead they ended up nipping at each other's heels with spectacle after spectacle. Whatever the reasons behind such a notable spike in big releases—whether they trace back to the changes taking shape in wider culture, the fragility of life via our gone-too-soon icons, or music biz scheduling—we’re lucky to be reaping the benefits as listeners. Now, what's left to hear the rest of the year? |
Brownback learns hard way, teenage girls can be bad asses
‘What in the hell do you think you are doing?’ was my first thought when I heard the news that Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas, and former U.S. Senator, had demanded an apology from a spirited teenage girl named Emma who had tweeted something mean about the Republican governor.
Emma Sullivan’s high school class visited with the governor in his office at the capital in Topeka. While mere feet away from Governor Brownback, Emma, a self-described liberal, tweeted, “Just made mean comments at Gov. Brownback and told him he sucked, in person.” She did not really say that to his face, but rather was seeking to get a rise out of her network of followers.
Emma said she was “just joking with friends.”
What Emma did not reckon on was that Brownback’s aids, who are apparently charged with scouring the digi-verse to find mean things that people say about their boss, saw the tweet too, and reported it to Brownback. They made it their mission to put the young girl in her place, a mission that would fail utterly.
Camp Brownback’s ill-fated campaign to shame Emma into a public apology began with contacting her high school principal. Emma was directed by her principal to write a letter of apology to Governor Brownback. She refused, saying if she had it all over to do, “I would do it again.” She referred her principal and the governor’s office to the First Amendment.
I happen to know from experience that a strong-willed, free-thinking teenage girl is a formidable opponent, and not to be trifled with in a heavy-handed manner. I am the father of one.
They have to be placated, cajoled and bribed. If you are lucky, they can be brought around to calling a truce with a mixture of self-effacement, reason and sweetness. They must be convinced, by guile or otherwise, that you are indeed not a threat, because the more you are perceived to be one, the more vicious and conniving they become.
I got very cross-wise with my teenage girl recently, not that there is anything unique and newsworthy about that. I yelled at her. She glared at me, and clammed up. I falsely believed I had won the battle, when in fact she had gone guerilla and headed for the bush to lie in wait.
The next morning I turned the hot water on in the bathroom sink and splashed it around my face to prepare for a much needed shave. I didn’t want to go to work looking like I had just crawled out of the woods. I pulled my razor out of the medicine cabinet, but there was no shaving cream. It was gone. It made no sense that something would suddenly go missing that only I had any need of.
Four days later I was well on my way to growing a beard, and finally thought to ask if anyone had seen my shaving cream. My teenager said she had not. Though it was barely perceptible, I saw something in the way that she denied knowing anything about my shaving cream that something was afoot. It was a sudden shift in her eyes, and a malicious curl of the corner of her lips. I had been had. “Where is it?”
“I’m not telling you,” she said calmly but resolute. “You yelled at me.”
“But that was a week ago,” I pleaded.
“Say you are sorry.”
“What? But-I-you. No.”
She crossed her arms and raised her eye brows at me. She suggested if I wanted to get rid of that critter growing on my face I would do well to apologize. Her estimation was that if done properly and promptly it would be mostly painless. I apologized and within fifteen seconds I was holding the can of shaving gel with aloe vera in my hand.
In an about face, Governor Brownback’s office announced that not only had the governor dropped his demand for an apology, but that he would be issuing one to Emma.
“My staff over-reacted to this tweet, and for that I apologize,” said the defeated governor. “Freedom of speech is among our most treasured freedoms.”
Emma responded, “My school is owed an apology because his staff put pressure on our school, and I don’t think that’s appropriate. Of course their apology is trying to cover up their negative actions. Just because you say you support free speech doesn’t mean you support it. Saying sorry doesn’t mean it goes away.”
Just apologize to the school, governor, and maybe everyone will eventually forget that you got beat up by a little girl. I know it hurts, but the sting only lasts a short while, and it builds character.
Governor Brownback looking pensive and defeated. |
Recent data released by Dimitar Ouzounov and colleagues from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland highlights some strange atmospheric anomalies over Japan just days before the massive earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11. Seemingly inexplicable and rapid heating of the ionosphere directly above the epicenter reached a maximum only three days prior to the quake, according to satellite observations, suggesting that directed energy emitted from transmitters used in the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) may have been responsible for inducing the quake.
Another explanation for this strange heating — and one that, upon analysis, seems much more likely — is that it was an indication that concentrated energy was used to induce the earthquake , and not the other way around. Numerous credible reports and scientific observations reveal that HAARP technology is fully capable of being used as a scalar weapon, meaning it can emit strong electromagnetic pulse bombs that can alter weather or trigger seismic fault lines.
Published in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) publication Technology Review, the findings are presented alongside a different theory called Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling, which hypothesizes that the heating in the ionosphere may have been caused by the impending earthquake as the fault line released radioactive radon . This theory, of course, is not actually proven, but is instead presented as a possible explanation for the presence of the high-density electrons and emitted infrared radiation that was observed.
A casual glance at the graphics presented as part of Ouzounov’s research data shows near-perfect heat rings present above the epicenter of the quake. If radon emissions from the fault line were truly responsible for creating these heat zones, they would more than likely have had irregular, scattered appearances, rather than concentric circles. This anomaly by itself debunks the theory that the impending earthquake caused the heat patterns.
Also, readings from the HAARP Induction Magnetometer, which visualizes the frequency spectrum of signals detected in the earth’s geomagnetic field, show that a steady, ultra-low frequency (ULF) of roughly 2.5 Hz was being broadcast days before the earthquake. The 2.5 Hz ULF happens to be the exact same frequency as the
resonance produced by an earthquake — and since there were no constant earthquakes occurring on the days before the quake as the HAARP Induction Magnetometer appeared to indicate, the logical conclusion is that the signal was being broadcast to induce the quake
Some would argue that HAARP is not capable of producing such frequencies, especially at the
levels that would be required to induce a massive earthquake like the 9.0+ that occurred in Japan. But testimony by various governments says otherwise.
On April 28, 1997, then US Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen gave an important keynote address at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and US Strategy at the University of Georgia in Athens. When asked a question about terrorism, Cohen had this to say as part of his response about the type of technology that existed, even back then:
“Others are engaging even in an eco-type terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves” (http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=674).
This admission counters the claims made by some that no such technology exists, and that it is impossible to create seismic activity using directed energy. Clearly the technology has been around for a while, and the notion of it being used as a weapon is anything but a baseless conspiracy theory.
Then, there is the EU report on the environment, security and foreign policy, that was released on January 14, 1999 (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+REPORT+A4-1999-0005+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN). This report outlines various types of weapon threats, including a section entitled, “HAARP – a weapons system which disrupts the climate.”
The paper explains that HAARP is “run jointly by the US Air Force and Navy,” and that one of its purposes is “to heat up portions of ionosphere with powerful radio beams.” It also states the following important details:
“HAARP can be used for many purposes. Enormous quantities of energy can be controlled by manipulating the electrical characteristics of the atmosphere. If used as a military weapon this can have a devastating impact on an enemy. HAARP can deliver millions of times more energy to a given area than any other conventional transmitter. The energy can also be aimed at a moving target which should constitute a potential anti-missile system.”
Later references to HAARP describe it as “a matter of global concern,” emphasizing that most people have no idea it even exists. This was written, of course, more than a decade ago — and yet not much has changed since that time, despite several pushes to make HAARP more transparent. But if HAARP is truly responsible for helping to induce some of the seemingly natural disasters that occur in the world, it is no surprise that the program continues to be kept largely under wraps.
You can view the HAARP Fluxgate Magnetometer for yourself at the following link:
http://maestro.haarp.alaska.edu/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi |
Leaders of more than a dozen Caribbean countries are launching a united effort to seek compensation from three European nations for what they say is the lingering legacy of the Atlantic slave trade.
The Caribbean Community, a regional organisation, has taken up the cause of compensation for slavery and the genocide of native peoples and is preparing for what would likely be a drawn-out battle with the governments of Britain, France and the Netherlands.
It has engaged the British law firm of Leigh Day, which waged a successful fight for compensation for hundreds of Kenyans who were tortured by the British colonial government during the so-called Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s and 1960s.
Lawyer Martyn Day said his first step would probably be to seek a negotiated settlement with the governments of France, Britain and Netherlands along the lines of the British agreement in June to issue a statement of regret and award compensation of £19.9m to the surviving Kenyans.
"I think they would undoubtedly want to try and see if this can be resolved amicably," Day said of the Caribbean countries. "But I think the reason they have hired us is that they want to show that they mean business."
Caricom is creating a reparations commission to press the issue, said Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, who has been leading the effort.
The legacy of slavery includes widespread poverty and under-development, Gonsalves said. Any settlement should include a formal apology, but contrition alone would not be enough, he said.
"The apology is important but that is wholly insufficient," he said in a phone interview on Wednesday. "We have to have appropriate recompense."
The notion of forcing the countries that benefited from slavery to pay reparations has been a decades-long quest. Individual countries including Jamaica and Antigua and Barbuda already have national commissions.
Earlier this month, leaders from the 14 Caricom nations voted unanimously at a meeting in Trinidad to wage a joint campaign that those involved say would be more ambitious than any previous effort.
Each nation that does not have a national reparations commission agreed to set one up, sending a representative to the regional commission, which would be overseen by prime ministers. They agreed to focus on Britain on behalf of the English-speaking Caribbean, France for the slavery in Haiti and the Netherlands for Suriname.
Caribbean officials have not mentioned a compensation figure but Gonsalves and Verene Shepherd, chairwoman of the national reparations commission in Jamaica, both noted that Britain at the time of emancipation in 1834 paid £20m to British planters in the Caribbean, the equivalent of £200bn now.
"Our ancestors got nothing," Shepherd said. "They got their freedom and they were told 'Go develop yourselves'."
The British high commissioner to Jamaica, David Fitton, said in a radio interview on Wednesday the Mau Mau case was not meant to be a precedent and that his government opposed reparations for slavery.
"We don't think the issue of reparations is the right way to address these issues," Fitton said. "It's not the right way to address an historical problem."
In 2007, marking the 200th anniversary of the British prohibition on the transportation of slaves, then prime minister Tony Blair expressed regret for the "unbearable suffering" caused by his country's role in slavery.
After the devastating Haitian earthquake in January 2010, then French president Nicolas Sarkozy was asked about reparations for slavery and the 90m gold francs demanded by Napoleon to recognise the country's independence. Sarkozy acknolwedged the "wounds of colonisation" and pointed out that France had cancelled a ¢56m debt to Paris and approved an aid package that included ¢40m in budget support for the Haitian government.
Gonsalves said much more needed to be done and he hoped to begin an "honest, sober and robust" discussion with the European governments soon, championing the issue when he takes over as chairman of Caricom in January.
"You have to seize the time," he said. |
Cranberry Orange Bread with Pecans is a delicious vegan quick bread made with wholesome ingredients like coconut sugar, applesauce and whole wheat white flour. Make a loaf or muffins or both!
It’s cranberry and orange season! I’m sending y’all a delicious, warming sweet bread to kick start your frozen mornings. So many flavors are dancing around in this bread; if you like cranberries, you’re in for a treat!
I adapted my cranberry orange bread with pecans recipe from one of my go-to baking books, The Grand Central Baking Book. I’m learning more about vegan baking so I decided to try Grand Central’s recipe with some ingredient substitutions. We love the results!
I also bumped up the amount of orange zest, used 1/2 white whole wheat flour versus all, all purpose flour and instead of all white sugar, I used about 1/2 coconut sugar. Y’all know I’m a streusel fan, so I added a nutmeg pecan streusel. Optional, certainly, but it lends a very nice, yet subtle crunch to the top. I toasted a slice this morning, adding to the crunch factor… is your mouth watering yet? My neighbor was over directly, picking up a 1/2 loaf to enjoy!
Quick breads are just that. Quick. I used a stand mixer to get mine going, but this bread can be made in a bowl with a strong arm and sturdy whisk. Consider making a loaf for a gracious host or hostess gift or for a fabulous offering at the office potluck. Good for snacking in the morning or afternoon.
I’ve included instructions for both muffins and a loaf(s) to suit your baking needs. Muffins are great for a quick grab snack, and a loaf makes a nice gift or festive presentation, especially when sliced. |
Anyone who had to schedule an intercontinental phone call knows that there is no such thing as a simple time called now. What you should rather think about is a time comprised of here and now.
The Earth rotates around its own axis. When it’s solar noon (the sun is at its highest position) in one place, it’s already past noon in places to the east and it’s still before noon in places to the west.
To make communication easier, at the end of the 19th century, the Earth was divided into 24 hour-wide time zones. All places within one time zone have the same time. It was decided that the “0” time zone would be London’s time zone. The “0” time zone is nowadays called UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) or, for historic reasons, GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). In general, the time zones’ boundaries follow countries’ boundaries though some large countries are located in multiple time zones. For example, USA is located in 7 different time zones, Canada in 6, but China is in one time zone. There are time zones with offsets of 30 minutes or even 45 minutes (Nepal). To make things even more complicated, many countries also have daylight saving time: they turn the clock back or forward one hour on specific days to account for seasonal changes in daylight.
If your computer system is international, it has to be ready to handle users from different time zones. The users want to see the time of system events expressed in their local time zone:
In an online course, you want to see the assignment deadline in your own time zone. You don’t want to submit your assignment and find out that the deadline has passed.
In an auction system you want to know at exactly what time the auction ends. You don’t want to try bidding and find out that the auction ended three hours earlier.
You want to know the time when a promotion ends. Ideally, if the promotion ends on a specific day, you want the promotion to run until the end of the day in UTC-11 time zone.
All databases have types which handle both date and time. The types are called timestamp or datetime, or something similar. They usually come in two flavors: one without time zone and the other with time zone.
Timestamp without time zone is generally a fancy string value. It does not interpret the time zone. If you enter the value “2015-01-28 13:00:00,” the same value will be shown to all users.
Timestamp with time zone is aware of the time zone. When a user, a client or an application connects to the database, the database converts the value to the user’s (connection’s) time zone.
If your system works in multiple time zones, it’s best to store all your timestamps in UTC and then interpret it to an appropriate time zone.
MySQL
MySQL has two types which allow you to store a date with time:
datetime – date and time without time zone
timestamp – MySQL converts TIMESTAMP values from the current time zone to UTC for storage, and back from UTC to the current time zone for retrieval.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL has two types for storing a date with time:
timestamp without time zone (timestamp) – date and time without time zone information
timestamp with time zone – as the name suggests, it stores the time zone information
The SQL standard requires that writing just timestamp be equivalent to timestamp without time zone, and PostgreSQL honors that behavior. (Releases prior to 7.3 treated it as timestamp with time zone.)
Further reading:
SQL Server
SQL Server has four types for storing date and time:
date – stores just the date
datetime2 – date and time of day, with optional fractional seconds, no time zone offset
datetimeoffset – a date and time of day with time zone awareness
smalldatetime – a date and time of day, with seconds always zero (:00), without fractional seconds; no time zone offset
Caution:
The Transact-SQL timestamp data type is not the same as the timestamp data type defined in the SQL-92 standard. The SQL-92 timestamp data type is equivalent to the Transact-SQL datetime data type.
Further reading:
Oracle
Oracle has more types for storing date and time:
date – contains date and time in second precision, no time zone information
timestamp – date and time with fractional seconds precision, no time zone information
timestamp with time zone – the same as timestamp, but with time zone information
timestamp with local time zone – the same as timestamp. The data is converted to database’s time zone but upon retrieval it is converted to the local session’s time zone
Further reading:
SQLite
SQLite does not have types for dates and times. You can use the built-in Date And Time Functions to store dates and times as TEXT, REAL, or INTEGER values:
TEXT as strings in format “YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.SSS”
REAL as Julian day numbers, the number of days since noon in Greenwich on November 24, 4714 B.C. according to the proleptic Gregorian calendar (in simple English: the Gregorian calendar extended backwards)
INTEGER as Unix Time, the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.
HSQLDB
HSQLDB has the following types for handling date and time:
DATE – represents a date with YEAR, MONTH and DAY fields.
TIMESTAMP – represents date and time with no time zone information
TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE – represents date and time with time zone information
TIMESTAMP can have fractional second parts. For example, TIMESTAMP(6) has six fractional digits for the second field. If fractional second precision is not specified, it defaults to 6 for TIMESTAMP.
When you start to think about how to store date and time values in your database, always take into account if the users come from one time zone or from multiple time zones. If they are in one time zone, you can store your dates in this time zone. If they are in multiple time zones, my recommendation is to store the date and time in UTC and convert them to the right time zone when presenting to the user. |
BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese biotech seed firm is aiming to launch the country’s first genetically modified corn products overseas on the home turf of the world’s top agricultural companies, as Beijing’s reticence over GMO food keeps the domestic market off limits.
The name of Origin Agritech is seen through the windows of the company's headquarters in Beijing, November 27, 2015. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
The plan by Beijing-based Origin Agritech to test its technology in the United States, which has dominated the sector with GMO giants such as Monsanto, is the latest effort by a Chinese firm to enter the global industry.
Earlier this year, China National Chemical Corp sought to skirt obstacles at home and acquire a tried-and-tested GMO pipeline by bidding for the world’s top agrichemicals firm Swiss-based Syngenta.
Beijing’s GMO policy has at times appeared inconsistent - billions of dollars have been spent on developing technology it hopes will ensure supplies for its 1.4 billion people, while no major food crops have been approved for cultivation given deep-seated anti-GMO sentiment in the country. Bumper harvests in the past decade have also reduced the urgency for new technologies.
“Consumer attitude is one thing, but the government attitude is even more important,” said Huang Dafang, professor at the Biotechnology Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. That leaves firms like Origin with few options to earn revenues from GMO products in China, he added.
U.S.-listed Origin has invested more than 300 million yuan ($46.90 million) in biotech since 2005 and, without an opportunity to market its product at home, it now plans to enter the United States in 2016, according to a presentation on the Securities and Exchange Commission website.
Entering the U.S. market could take several paths from licensing its technology to setting up a unit there, Origin’s chief financial officer, James Chen, told Reuters.
But getting a foothold in such a highly competitive market will not be easy, experts warn.
TOUGH COMPETITION
Origin’s most advanced product is a corn with two special characteristics, or “traits”, that resist pests while top seed firm Monsanto already markets a GMO corn that combines or “stacks” as many as eight traits to combat pests.
“The only way they might be able to break into the market is if their technology fees are going to be cheaper than Monsanto,” said Carl Pray, professor at Rutgers University’s agricultural, food and resource economics department.
Referring to seed firm Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group’s agreement to test its technology in Argentina, Pray said competition was tougher in the United States. “It’s one thing to do this in Argentina, and another to go into the U.S.”
But Origin’s Chen sees a market for its products there.
“We think the technology has a fundamental value. Farmers are looking for alternatives to current products on offer,” Chen said, adding that Origin would likely seek partners interested in licensing its traits to stack alongside others.
The company will meet with potential partners at December’s American Seed Trade Association conference in Chicago.
But even with a local partner, the Chinese product would need U.S. regulatory approval, which could take years.
Slideshow (2 Images)
A successful U.S. test could, however, boost confidence in Chinese technology and pave the way for Beijing to roll out its products. For Origin, it could mean a better valuation than the current $33.9 million.
The company, which is looking to sell a majority stake in its conventional seed business, says it is undervalued due to the lack of a viable biotech market.
“Our valuation on Nasdaq is much lower than the valuation of seed production companies in China. If we attract investment, our valuation will shoot up,” said CFO Chen. |
It’s our 100th episode!!!
This week we have a killer episode for you with our special celebrity guest, Madeline Smith (aka Live & Let Die’s “Miss Caruso). We talk Bond and Live & Let Die. We get the skinny on what it’s like to be in bed with Sir Roger Moore and whole lot more.
Aside from the world of 007, we hear what it was like growing up and getting ‘noticed’ in the 60s. We discuss Maddy’s other TV and film credits including The Two Ronnies, The Vampire Lovers and The Persuaders.
We also bid farewell to legendary members of the James Bond family Guy Hamilton and Peter Jansen-Smith. We talk this years Bondstars event at Pinewood and the first official JBR family offshoot based in Los Angeles.
[Interview begins at: 53:38]
Listen/Watch Below…
iTunes: http://jamesbondradio.com/itunes
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jamesbondradio
Twitter: http://twitter.com/jamesbondradio |
A 5 year old boy comes in who has stuck a small unpopped popcorn kernel into each ear. My resident and I discuss different methods to try to get it out including an ear curette, tissue glue, suction, and calling the ear-nose-throat (ENT) specialist. The ear curette won’t work to get around and the kernels are smooth and hard to grasp and might cause trauma with swelling or bleeding. We quickly excluded irrigation because the kernel might swell more. Another method considered was a drop of tissue adhesive onto a q-tip stick to adhere onto the foreign body (FB) for extraction. We were a little leary of this however for fear of gluing the FB to the ear canal and suffering the wrath of ENT.
My resident prepared a 12 Fr Frazier suction catheter, which is good for ear FB’s like insects. The Frazier suction worked well enough to remove one of the kernels from one ear with a little coaxing. The other ear FB did not yield to the Frazier, presumably because the rigid end and smaller diameter does not provide a tight seal on these rounded FBs.
Trick of the Trade: Modified a 14 Fr suction catheter
After the failed rigid Frazier suction catheter attempts with the second kernel, we used a soft tipped, short suction tubing whose diameter nearly matched the foreign body. The theory was that it might provide a better suction seal. So, the standard 14 Fr suction catheter was cut short and it worked like a charm.
We liked this best because the soft catheter is less likely to cause trauma, if the patient inadvertently moves, and the better suction force that it provided. We guess that it would work equally well in the case of a nasal FB. Ultimately, we feel that suctioning works best with objects having a smooth rounded or flat surface.
Twitter peer review
After posting this trick on Twitter, we received feedback via tweets that a mini-suction made from a cut butterfly needle can work for small beads. We are not sure that would work for larger FB’s like the popcorn kernel but it looks like there are a range of catheter diameters that one can try to find the best fit!
Regarding our concern of tissue adhesive on a q-tip inadvertently gluing the FB onto the ear canal, we learned that one might use an otoscope’s speculum to protect the ear canal from the glue.
Other ear foreign body removal tricks
We’ve also described using a pediatric video laryngoscope trick to provide excellent lighting, exposure, retraction, and magnification to visualize ear FB’s for removal but that would not have helped in this case with a larger ear FB.
Reference
Heim SW, Maughan KL. Foreign bodies in the ear, nose, and throat. Am Fam Physician. 2007; 76(8): 1185-9. PMID: 17990843
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With the Illinois primary just a few days away, the Democratic presidential candidates have descended upon Chicago and its suburbs, with local Democrats rallying their hometown crowds. But there is one conspicuous absence: Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel.
The former White House chief of staff for Barack Obama is so unpopular among his constituents that he has become a political pariah on the presidential campaign trail. That’s particularly true for black voters in Chicago, who backed him in mayoral elections but are upset at the way he has handled police misconduct after several high-profile fatal shootings.
It’s no surprise Emanuel hasn’t been invited to any Bernie Sanders events, as the candidate himself said he does not want the mayor’s support. But Emanuel is a longtime confidant and friend to the Clintons, and he was nowhere to be seen at a get-out-the-vote event headlining Bill Clinton on Tuesday (March 8) in Evanston and a Hillary Clinton rally in Vernon Hills on Thursday (March 10).
“Rahm’s toxic among black voters,” wrote John Kass at the Chicago Tribune, and he “may have a contagious political illness that could threaten Hillary Clinton.”
Emanuel was excoriated for the city’s handling of a brutal shooting of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer in 2014. The video of the shooting sparked national outrage, and critics claim the mayor and his aides covered up the footage for months. In December, a police officer fatally shot a mentally disturbed man and accidentally killed a bystander.
Clinton has voiced support for Emanuel as late as December 2015, but she had more cautious words just a month later on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when asked about the mayor and the Chicago police department.
“Mayor Emanuel has said that he is committed to complete and total reform and I think he should be held to that standard,” she said. Proving his credibility is “going to be up to him and up to the people of Chicago.”
The Sanders campaign is aiming to capitalize on Clinton’s ties with the unpopular mayor with the release of a new political ad condemning Emanuel:
“In Chicago, we have endured a corrupt political system. And the chief politician standing in the way of us getting good schools is our mayor,” says Chicago school principal Troy LaRaviere. “If you have a presidential candidate that supports someone like our mayor, you have a candidate who is not willing to take on the establishment.” |
The Trials of White Boy Rick
Finalist for the 2015 National Magazine Award for Reporting
Part One Detroit, 1981. Photo: John Vranesich, Detroit Historical Society
“Good evening, everybody,” WXYZ anchorman Bill Bonds said, leaning in toward the camera. “Tonight we’re going to show you something we don’t think you’ve ever seen before on television.” It was the tail end of July 1987, the depths of a hot and humid summer in Detroit. Bonds had a toupee, a strong jaw, and a crisp voice. He was a product of the city’s white working class, with a habit of getting into bar fights, and his voice slipped easily into disdain. “Wait till you see the evidence of the arrogance that we’re talking about,” he said, “and the ha-ha-ha attitude.” The viewers tuning in to WXYZ that night, from Detroit’s poor black urban core to its tony white suburbs, had grown accustomed to bad news. The city was the homicide capital of the United States for the third year running. Crack cocaine had invaded Detroit—a virus passed hand to hand, block to block, in plastic baggies—and sent an already declining city into a steeper dive. The rising star on the local crime beat was Chris Hansen, an ambitious young reporter for WXYZ. (The rest of America would meet him years later on NBC’s Dateline and as the host of the series To Catch a Predator.) Hansen and his cameraman had been embedded with the No Crack Crew, the street unit of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and Detroit Police Department joint task force that was trying to zero in on the city’s major suppliers. Hansen had spent more than a year on patrol with the unit, and the footage he brought back was the centerpiece of the five-night special report that Bonds was now presenting to his viewers. Hansen appeared on screen, an incongruous figure on the barren street corner where he stood, with his well-kept head of sandy hair. “You are about to get closer to a drug gang than you probably want,” he said. The producers cut to a camera peering out the window of one of the No Crack Crew’s unmarked cars as it navigated the forlorn landscape of Detroit’s East Side: houses charred by arson, sagging porches, front lawns turned to thickets of brown weeds. The East Side had lost roughly half its residents, and most of its white population, since the beginning of the 1960s—the most dramatic depopulation of any urban area in the United States. They had fled to escape crime and unemployment as auto jobs migrated elsewhere or disappeared entirely. Many white residents had left, undeniably, to avoid people from the other side of Detroit’s particularly fraught racial divide. The No Crack Crew’s officers crashed through one door after another on the East Side in search of their targets. Hansen and his cameraman, wearing bulletproof vests, followed close behind. A montage of urban squalor played out on TV screens all across Detroit: Shirtless young men pinned to the floor and cuffed. Stacks of cash and a bowl of cocaine sitting on a table next to a giant boom box. Shotguns. Scales and money-counting machines. Baggies of crack rocks. Hansen’s report was rich in detail on Detroit’s new crack barons. He focused on the Chambers brothers, the first traffickers to sell the drug in the city in large volume, who were then the No Crack Crew’s principal targets. The Chambers brothers were operating a sprawling network of crack houses and grossing, by the journalist William Adler’s estimate, better than $1 million per week—enough to eclipse any legitimate privately held business in Detroit. Hansen took viewers inside the Broadmoor, a once grand apartment building that the Chambers crew had turned into a well-guarded vice emporium, with crack rocks sold on each floor in ascending sizes. In one room, the camera panned across filthy mattresses where prostitutes worked. In a home video shot by a member of the gang, a young man cavorted around in a house outfitted with 24-karat gold-plated faucets, hamming it up for the camera. “Money, money, money!” he shouted, showing off piles of dollar bills. “Should we throw away these ones since we got five hundred thousand dollars?” The influence and decadence of the Chambers brothers was extraordinary, but as crime lords they played to the WXYZ viewers’ expectations: Young black newcomers from a dirt-poor little town in Arkansas who had moved swiftly into Detroit’s underworld, they embodied a local criminal archetype. But on the fifth and final night of the series, which drew enormous ratings, Hansen unveiled a twist in his story. As the investigators were tracking the Chambers crew, another big-time player in the East Side crack trade had come across their radar. He was dealing so much cocaine, they believed, that he was supplying the Chambers brothers. His mug shot appeared at the top tier of the crew’s hierarchy displayed on the TV screen. His name was Richard Wershe Jr., and the source of his novelty was immediately apparent in the picture. He was barely capable of growing a moustache, with baby fat still filling out his cheeks and bangs flopping down over his forehead. He had just turned 18. And, virtually alone among Detroit’s major known drug figures, he was white. On the street, Hansen said, they called him White Boy Rick.
Nearly three decades later, White Boy Rick remains an iconic figure in his hometown, an enduring symbol of the height of the cocaine era. Detroiters still tell stories about his ’80s heyday, and some of them are true. Rick Wershe really did drive a white jeep with the words THE SNOWMAN emblazoned on the rear, though he had no driver’s license. He wore tracksuits and chains, mink coats, a belt made of gold, a Rolex encircled with diamonds. When another drug kingpin landed in jail, Wershe swooped in and took up with the guy’s wife—a sought-after “ghetto princess,” as one federal agent put it. In 1987, when Wershe appeared in court on charges of possessing multiple kilos of cocaine, the judge remarked that he looked like the killer Baby Face Nelson—but “as far as this court is concerned,” she went on, “he’s worse than a mass murderer.” In “Back from the Dead,” Detroit native son Kid Rock rapped, One bad bitch, I smoke hash from a stick/Got more cash than fuckin’ White Boy Rick. I first happened upon White Boy Rick’s story last year and quickly became fascinated enough to call some of the police officers and federal agents who had figured in it in one way or another. With some surprise, I discovered that while most of them remembered the story in detail, few of them had any idea what had happened to Wershe since the Reagan administration. It was as if the legend of White Boy Rick had swallowed the real person at its center. Except he wasn’t gone. I had first learned this from a column about incarceration policy published last year on The Fix, a site covering drugs and addiction. The author reported that Wershe was, in fact, more or less where people had last seen him in the late 1980s: sitting in a prison cell somewhere in Michigan. This made Wershe not only a local icon but also an anomaly, and something of a mystery, in the world of criminal justice. In May 1987, when he was 17, Wershe was charged with possession with intent to deliver eight kilos of cocaine, which police had found stashed near his house following a traffic stop. He had the misfortune of being convicted and sentenced under one of the harshest drug statutes ever conceived in the United States, Michigan’s so-called 650 Lifer law, a 1978 act that mandated an automatic prison term of life without parole for the possession of 650 grams or more of cocaine. (The average time served for murder in state prisons in the 1980s was less than 10 years.) Sentencing juvenile offenders to life without parole for non-homicide crimes was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010, by which point such sentences were already exceedingly rare; the court was able to locate only 129 inmates serving them nationwide. Michigan eventually acknowledged the failures of the 650 Lifer statute—the governor who signed it into law, William G. Milliken, has called it the greatest mistake of his career—and rolled it back in 1998. Those already serving time became parole eligible and began to be released. Wershe is the only person sentenced under the old law who is still in prison for a crime committed as a juvenile. Prominent and violent kingpins and enforcers from Wershe’s day in Detroit have long since been freed. And yet Wershe has remained incarcerated, for more than 26 years. The Fix column, written by a prison activist who is himself serving a lengthy sentence for drug trafficking, quoted some of Wershe’s own explanations for his fate. He had been an informant for the FBI, he claimed, and his handlers had pushed him into the drug trade to serve their own ends. He had later run afoul of the local police by helping the FBI expose corrupt cops. “The FBI and police lied about this for more than two decades,” Wershe said. “I just want the truth to finally come out.” Wershe’s claims seemed implausible, if not fantastical. But one detail near the end of the article caught my eye: a quote from a retired FBI agent named Gregg Schwarz. “The events surrounding the incarceration of Richard Wershe,” Schwarz said, “are a classic example of abuse of power and political corruption.” A former federal agent was backing the cause of the notorious White Boy Rick. I decided to try to get in touch with Wershe. His attorney’s office helped set up a phone conversation, and Wershe soon called from a pay phone in a prison in a remote corner of Michigan. He was polite and well-spoken; his voice occasionally rose as he tried to get across his version of events, but he did not fixate on portraying himself as a victim. He mentioned that he’d recently read Mark Binelli’s Detroit City Is the Place to Be, an excellent account of the recent history of the city published two years ago. Wershe told me he found it “sad and enlightening.” It struck me that Wershe was learning about the downfall of his hometown from a book. Detroit still talks about him, but he has not walked the city’s streets since 1988. Wershe and I have spoken dozens of times since. I have also talked to everyone I could find who knew something about Wershe’s case: Detroit police officers, investigators from several federal agencies, former Detroit drug kingpins who shared the streets with him, Wershe’s family and friends, lawyers, state and federal prosecutors, and parole-board members. Over time, claims that at first I deeply doubted proved to be true. Accounts that seemed reliable were convincingly contradicted. For months, the central mystery only deepened: Why was Wershe still in prison? By the time I thought I knew the answer, I had come to understand how much the reality of Rick Wershe deviated from the legend of White Boy Rick.
Rick Wershe’s father taught him how to handle a gun when he was eight years old. He gave his son a .22 rifle of his own so he could practice, and while Wershe’s father was off working odd jobs, young Rick and his close friend Dave Majkowski used it to shoot rats in alleyways. They were scrappy city kids who had the run of an East Side neighborhood that was emptying out fast. They would play with firecrackers. Rick had a good arm and would throw stones at frogs and birds. They would snatch wooden pallets from a disused warehouse and destroy them with power tools for fun. Rick Wershe Sr. was a tall and wiry man who rustled up cash doing this and that. He sold sporting goods, surplus electronics, satellite-TV gear, equipment to pirate cable. “I was, I would say, a hustler,” he says. He always had a new scheme. People found him a little strange, a little suspect. With him, “the almighty buck” ranked high, Majkowski told me, holding his hand at forehead height, “and morals was maybe a little lower down.” Rick Jr.’s parents argued a lot when he and his elder sister, Dawn, were kids. His mother, Darlene, called the cops on her husband more than once; on one cold night, she told me, he locked her out of the house wearing nothing but a nightgown. The parents split when Wershe was around six and she left for the suburbs, eventually remarrying. Wershe stayed on the East Side with his father and sister. The Wershes lived seven miles from downtown, on Hampshire Street at Dickerson Avenue, in a little brick house with white trim. Just a few blocks away, on the other side of Interstate 94, was a golf course. The neighborhood wasn’t the ghetto then, not quite. The workers who punched in at the auto factories during the postwar boom still had some foothold, tending lawns and gardens and keeping cars built on their own employers’ assembly lines parked in their driveways. As Wershe approached his teens in the early ’80s, however, the area went into free fall. The auto manufacturers, which had lured so many to Detroit with union jobs that promised entry into the middle class, were now in rapid decline. From 1978 to 1988, the industry shed more than a third of its Detroit-area workforce. The East Side took on the look of a cold-weather version of the South Central L.A. of the period—spacious and even green but torn up inside. “All the white people left,” Wershe told me. “That was ’81, ’82.” But it wasn’t only the white people: Almost everyone who had the means to leave was taking the opportunity. By the mid-’80s, crack had arrived in the neighborhood, and addicts could be seen walking the streets hollow-eyed at three or four in the morning. Residents lined up for boxes of food staples from a charity just down Hampshire, in a building that used to be a Chrysler dealership. In Devil’s Night, a book about Detroit published in 1990, Zev Chafets—a native—would write starkly, “The city is an impoverished island surrounded by prosperous suburbs, and almost nothing connects them. … The suburbs purr with the contented sounds of post-Reagan America while the city teeters on the brink of separatism and seethes with the resentments of postcolonial Africa.” Majkowski’s family took the well-worn path to the suburbs, but Wershe’s had deeper roots in the neighborhood. His father’s parents lived across the street, in their own modest brick house. They were relics, in a sense, of the area’s past. Before retiring, they’d both worked for Chrysler for four decades, she as a secretary and he on the factory floor. Wershe went with them to Our Savior Lutheran Church every Sunday; you had to go if you wanted to stay on the church baseball team. He became something of a star pitcher. His father coached one of his son’s teams, and they were good, Rick Sr. told me proudly. They played at Tiger Stadium once. By the time Wershe was 12, however, he wanted out of Detroit. More than once he left school and walked out past the city boundary at 8 Mile—beyond the reach of the truancy officers—and called his mother from a pay phone, pleading with her to pick him up until she agreed, telling her he didn’t want to go home to the house on Hampshire. When he was 13, his parents agreed that he would stay with his mother for a while. His father told him that if he thought life would be so much better with his mother, then fine, go ahead and pack some bags. So he did. Wershe’s mother lived in Clinton Township, a comfortable suburb northeast of the city, near Lake St. Clair. “It was culture shock, dude, like moving from hell to heaven,” Wershe told me. He couldn’t believe a high school could have a swimming pool and perfectly groomed baseball fields. An inner-city kid had novelty appeal in Clinton Township. Wershe had a romance with the daughter of a well-to-do couple who owned a big Ford dealership, who were less than thrilled that their daughter was seeing a boy whose mother lived in subsidized housing on the other side of town. Darlene’s new husband and Wershe butted heads, he says. After less than a year, Wershe’s father reentered his life and lured him back to the East Side. “He was always good when I had him,” Darlene told me when I met her recently. But Rick Sr., she said, would go out of town to do business and leave the kids alone when Wershe was 12. “That was his dad—money, money.” In 1981, Wershe’s grandparents took him down to the Miami area for a vacation. He had a cousin who lived in Coral Gables, in a rich neighborhood where drug dealers were prevalent. Hanging out with the local kids, Wershe saw what wealth could bring: backyard pools, mopeds, a Ferrari or a Porsche in the driveway. Like his dad, “Ricky liked nice things,” Majkowski says. Back in Detroit, Dawn was getting into crack and dating a small-time crook named Terrence Bell. Bell and Wershe began to spend time together, and the man showed him the ropes of petty crime, Wershe says. “I was breaking into houses,” he told me. “I probably broke into 20 of them.” Wershe’s father says now that he should have moved his parents and his family out of the neighborhood. “But, you know, you get so busy,” he told me. “I was a single parent. My wife left. I don’t know, you get lost. At that time, the only thing that mattered to me was money. “Why we didn’t move, I don’t know,” he went on. “But no excuses. My fault. I made a big, big, big mistake, OK?”
One way Rick Wershe Sr. made money was by dealing firearms. He was good at it, well connected. He would buy out a sporting goods store that was liquidating and then move the product to another dealer, or he would sell it himself. When his son was eight or nine, he started bringing the boy along to the gun shows at the Light Guard Armory on 8 Mile. Wershe was a quick study and would walk around learning tidbits from other vendors. His father also started managing a gun store downtown, but in the Wershes’ neighborhood word spread that you could just visit their house on Hampshire if you wanted a weapon. Young Rick would be humping a black gun case up the steps from the car and someone would call to him: “Your dad could sell me some guns like that?” Wershe could show you a few himself right now, as a matter of fact. He would sell customers the model they were looking for, then show them another they might like. Around this time, law enforcement officials estimated that there were more guns in Detroit then there were people. The Wershes had Glocks, MAC-10’s, MAC-11’s. Firearms and the drug trade went hand in hand, and Wershe’s father did not ask what his customers did for a living. (I learned what kind of guns the Wershes sold from a former lieutenant for one of the East Side’s principal cocaine distributors of the era.) With the influx of high-margin narcotics beginning in the late ’70s, gang life in the city had changed. What were once mostly outlets for juvenile male posturing and misbehavior turned into bigger and more sophisticated operations with the rise of heroin, then powder cocaine, then crack. Those who rose to the top had sharp business minds. They instilled rigid discipline within their organizations, secure in the knowledge that for their employees, this was by far the best job around. One dealer, Milton “Butch” Jones, built the sprawling crew Young Boys Inc. into an outfit that resembled an unusually violent Fortune 500 company. YBI also pioneered the use of underage foot soldiers, who were trickier to prosecute, and generally laid out the template that other gangs adapted as the trade diversified into new neighborhoods and new drugs. Crack represented a particularly lucrative opportunity, because even poor people could afford a hit. Now a kilo of powder could be “rocked up” and sold off in $5 or $10 packets right from a front porch. The major players grew bolder and more vindictive. After being injured in a daytime gun battle, the infamous dealer Richard “Maserati Rick” Carter was shot dead in his bed at Mount Carmel Mercy Hospital in 1988. At a memorial service covered on the local news, Carter was laid to rest in a five-figure custom casket made to resemble a luxury Mercedes, with a hood ornament, fat tires, and gleaming rims. The kingpin Demetrius Holloway, who once told Wershe he had $10 million stashed away in case of trouble, was shot twice in the back of the head in 1990 in the Broadway, a downtown clothing store two blocks from police headquarters. The hit man allegedly whistled “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” during the job. Robert DeFauw, former head of the DEA’s Detroit office, told the journalist Scott Burnstein, “I served in Vietnam in the 1960s, and that experience was the only thing I can equate to my experience working the narcotics trade in Detroit in the 1980s.” The reigning drug lords of the Wershes’ East Side neighborhood were twin brothers Leo “Big Man” and Johnny “Little Man” Curry. Johnny, whom the Detroit Free Press dubbed “the cocaine king of the East Side,” was tall, slim, and athletic, with a neat mustache. He took care with his appearance and even chose his wife’s clothes. Leo was flashy and loud, but Johnny was a sober-minded businessman who kept a close eye on the finances and strategized to avoid significant arrests. “He was like a master chess player,” Wershe says. The Curry brothers had an atypically long run for the Detroit drug trade, about a decade. They started out selling marijuana in the late 1970s, at an impressive volume—50 or 100 pounds “wasn’t nothing to them,” B.J. Chambers of the told me—and then diversified into heroin and cocaine in the ’80s. Johnny Curry lived in a large house just on the other side of I-94 from the Wershes. He avoided being in the same room with the drugs, which he did not use, and he never carried too much money. The brothers had a network of dope houses, but they took precautions with the cash that would accumulate at each one. Runners would regularly bring the money to an auto garage, Hill’s Marathon Station, at Warren and Lemay, which was unlikely to draw a raid. The Curry crew was well known on the East Side, where Wershe met Johnny and Leo’s younger brother, Rudell “Boo” Curry. Boo was nine years older than Wershe, who was only 14 at the time, but they both spoke the language of cars and motorcycles. They would drive around looking for young women to take to a cheap hotel or one of Johnny’s houses, hoping the girls would be as impressed as Wershe was with Boo’s blue Ford Bronco with the Eddie Bauer leather interior. Boo was really just a sidekick to his elder brothers, each of whom had the same Eddie Bauer Bronco in burgundy, but Wershe was flattered by his attention anyway. In the evenings, the Currys would take over a section of Royal Skateland, a roller rink just off Warren that doubled as a nightspot, with strobe lights, mirror balls, and a DJ playing Grandmaster Flash. Wershe would join Boo there when he was relaxing with the rest of the crew, including Johnny and Leo themselves. Wershe was just a hanger-on at first. He played it cool, didn’t let on how awestruck he was to be in their presence. But he hungered for the things they had, the clothes they wore. Now he was up close to the brands he used to see only in the copies of Robb Report that his dad had around the house: Rolex, Gucci, Mercedes. went back to the East Side occasionally to visit his old friend. Wershe had changed, he thought, had become more macho. Tough-looking guys gathered on his porch. Wershe’s transformation became all the more clear on the night of March 24, 1984, when he was 14. He and his sister, Dawn, had pulled up to a gas station just around the corner from their house; Dawn was driving one car and Wershe was driving another, which belonged to their grandmother. He left the keys in the ignition while he went inside to buy a soda. Suddenly, Dawn blared her horn; a man was getting into Wershe’s car with a gun in his hand. Wershe jumped into the passenger seat of Dawn’s car and they gave chase, heading west toward downtown on I-94. As their car pulled within range of the thief on the highway, Wershe grabbed a .22 revolver Dawn had in her purse and fired at the other car. It was a cheap gun and it jammed, but he got off two shots. An off-duty policeman happened to be next to them in traffic, and he pulled over Dawn and arrested Wershe. But the cop never showed up for trial, and the case was dismissed.
When the weather was nice, the would go for a drive en masse, 20 people easy, and cross the MacArthur Bridge to Belle Isle, the island park in the middle of the Detroit River. Wershe went along for the ride sometimes. They would cruise the shoreline with their radios up and their convertible tops down. The Currys always had women around them. Johnny was involved with a young woman named Cathy Volsan, whom he would later marry. Wershe was impressed. She was beautiful and dressed expensively, not provocatively. She had poise and a bit of sass. When she shopped at Lane Bryant, she’d sign her name as Janet Jackson on the credit card receipt. She had once been romantically linked to Vinnie “The Microwave” Johnson of the Detroit Pistons; before that she dated a leader of She also happened to be the niece of the longtime mayor of Detroit, Coleman Young. At the time, Wershe was seeing a girl who was close to his age, almost a decade younger than Johnny Curry, but she’d previously dated Johnny. He would give Wershe a hard time about it, but Wershe was earning a kind of respect. The kid seemed to have money—even if nobody knew exactly where it came from—and he was starting to fit in with the crew. He wore expensive Fila sneakers and Adidas tracksuits. Johnny was taking a liking to him, and people noticed: It wasn’t every day you saw Johnny Curry in his BMW with a white kid riding shotgun. Johnny even took Wershe to Tigers games. Soon enough, when a bouncer stepped in to stop Wershe—barely out of junior high—at the door to a club, one of Johnny’s people would say, “He’s with us.” Often the club was the Lady, on Jefferson and Van Dyke, or Stoke’s, on Chene Street, an underground after-hours spot where topless waitresses moved among card games and strippers. At both places, men wearing six figures’ worth of jewelry would throw down knots of cash on the tables just to show that they could. All the major names in the game would show up: Big Ed Hanserd, Maserati Rick, Demetrius Holloway. These were black clubs, but it was getting less strange by the month that Wershe was white. “You didn’t look at him and see white,” a black Detroit police officer who worked the gang squad at the time told me. “Rick was a straight-up hood rat.” Wershe’s credibility on the street was cemented one day when he was 15, when an acquaintance, another guy under the Currys’ wing, shot him in the stomach with a .357. The guy swore it was an accident, but Wershe wasn’t so sure, and neither was the neighborhood rumor mill. Wershe spent days in the hospital and was released with an embarrassing colostomy bag. What did not prove embarrassing, however, was being shot. Wershe says now that although he hung out with the Currys, he did not work for them. He did buy their cocaine on occasion, though not to use it. He snorted cocaine once, he says, and put it in a joint a few times, but there were plenty of junkies around, and he didn’t want to be one of them. He wanted to make money. So he and a couple of friends started dealing. With a limited bankroll, they started small—a gram or an eight ball (an eighth of an ounce), or a few rocks of crack—so Johnny Curry had no real reason to mind. But Wershe was always a natural salesman, his father says, even back in the days when he sold firecrackers and BB guns. By the spring of 1985, Wershe had dropped out of school and was close enough to the Currys that they invited him out to Las Vegas for the Tommy Hearns–Marvin Hagler fight at Caesar’s Palace. Hearns was raised in Detroit and had come up through the city’s ratty gyms; people called him the Motor City Cobra or the Hitman. When Hearns had a big bout somewhere, the joke was that you couldn’t find a quality drug dealer in all of Detroit—they’d all gone to see Tommy’s three-ton right hand. Now Wershe was out there in Vegas with the rest of them, walking the Strip and being seen. In his corner of the ghetto, Wershe was becoming something of a celebrity. “Oh man, he had a large crew that loved staying around him,” B.J. Chambers told me recently. Chambers is one of the who built the cocaine empire that Chris Hansen exposed on WXYZ. The brothers were later mentioned in Bill Clinton’s speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention—as fellow Arkansas natives whose turn to drugs reflected the hopelessness of rural poverty and the failure of Just Say No—and they inspired elements of the movie New Jack City; like Wershe, they remain mythic figures in Detroit. Chambers told me that when his lieutenants went to the Somerset Mall, a high-end place in the suburb of Troy, “I would get reports: ‘Man, we seen White Boy Rick. He had 15 niggas around him.’ Just exactly like that. ‘Had him surrounded. You could barely see him.’” Wershe would be out buying Gucci luggage, jewelry, whichever jeans cost the most—usually Calvin Klein or Guess. “My daughter became sick on doing drugs,” Wershe’s father says. “My son became sick on power, the excitement, the prestige, the money, and the glamour of selling. OK? He became sick.” Although he wasn’t old enough to drive, Wershe had to have a car, a status symbol with special weight in Detroit. In fact, by the time he was 18, Wershe had owned eight of them. Having no license presented no trouble; he knew auto dealers who would help fudge the paperwork as long as the money was real. He was partial to seat-rattling sound systems, so he could blast Run–DMC, maybe the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill. He bought an Eddie Bauer Ford Bronco to match the Currys’, in green and tan, though he later lost it in a bet over a pool game. He and Boo also bought twin motorcycles, 750cc Honda Interceptors, the kind of flashy, high-powered bikes they called crotch rockets. Eventually, Wershe figured that speeding wasn’t worth the risk of getting caught, but early on, when he had a Camaro Z28, it was different. Tom McClain, a former DEA agent who worked on the , recalls that his unit was once tailing the Camaro in the middle of the night when Wershe took off at around 100 miles per hour on one of the freeways that cut through downtown Detroit. McClain had a Mustang and his partner had his own Camaro, but the cops working with them had police-issued sedans and “they couldn’t keep up with him!” McClain told me, laughing. The officers backed off the pursuit. Wershe would still go with his father to the gun shows. Regulation was lax; an AK-47 went for $200, and “you could just walk off with it,” Wershe says. “No receipt, no ID, nothing.” Wershe met some Ohio state troopers at one show and started to make deals. He would drive down to Toledo to pick up guns from them to resell under the table in Detroit at a markup, sometimes cutting his father out of the transactions. Rick Sr. knew that his son was making serious money from drugs, too. Wershe had said once that he just wanted to save $50,000 and open a Foot Locker store. That’s what he’d heard it cost to own a franchise. But one day, his father found an Adidas shoebox under his bed filled with more than $50,000, and he took it away. They really had it out then. “Look, eventually everybody gets caught,” Rick Sr. told him. “Oh no,” Wershe replied. “Look at Johnny—how long they been doing it. They’re still out there. No way I’m stopping now.” He accused his father of stealing, then left and moved in around the corner with his girlfriend. A couple of days later his father rang the doorbell and threw the box of cash on the doorstep.
Johnny Curry was a careful man, but you couldn’t run a criminal organization as large as his and not get noticed. By 1984, a joint task force of the FBI and Detroit police had opened an investigation into the . Agents were arresting addicts and low-level dealers and squeezing them for information about the crew. Others in the trade talked in hopes of cultivating a friend in the FBI in case of future trouble—“dry-cleaning” themselves, agents called it—or just for an easy hundred dollars. Soon the task force moved on to making controlled buys from the Currys’ drug houses, assembling evidence to take to a judge for a warrant. Eventually, agents broke into Johnny Curry’s home and basement office undetected and bugged his phone. In 1987, a federal grand jury returned an indictment against Johnny and Leo, along with Boo Curry and 18 others, on an array of charges, including operating a continuing criminal enterprise. A couple of weeks after Johnny Curry went to jail to await trial, his wife, , came and knocked on the door at the Wershe house. The street was in disbelief when Wershe—just 17 to Volsan’s 24—started stepping out with Volsan on his arm. “Messing with a kid like that…,” one Curry lieutenant told me. Wershe, he said, was “just not her caliber.” Wershe knew Johnny would be irate. But “by then,” he says, “my head was so big, I didn’t care.” The relationship proved tempestuous. Once, when Volsan suspected Wershe of cheating, she drove a butcher knife into the bathroom door while he stood on the other side, he claims. (Volsan has not spoken to journalists in years, and I was unable to reach her.) But on a better day, two months into the affair, she bought Wershe a five-karat diamond ring for his birthday. Wershe had used Johnny Curry’s connections in other ways, too. In 1986, through the Currys, he met a man named Art Derrick, who truly played in the cocaine big leagues. Derrick and his partner were the leading volume dealers in the city. In an interview with William Adler—whose Land of Opportunity is the definitive account of the rise and fall—Derrick estimated that he and his partner cleared $100,000 a day in profit for more than two and a half years. They supplied the boldface names of the city’s drug trade, guys like Maserati Rick and Demetrius Holloway. At the time, Derrick—who died in 2005—was in his mid-thirties, a slovenly man with a pockmarked face and a droopy mustache. He was the only other white guy in Wershe’s orbit, a big talker who lived large. “Art Derrick kept a private jet in the ghetto, dude,” Wershe told me. Derrick had four planes, actually, one of them formerly owned by the Rolling Stones. His house, just beyond the city limits in Harper Woods, was surrounded by a seven-foot white brick wall topped with electric fencing. His basement had white marble floors and mirrored walls and ceilings. He had a speedboat and a swimming pool with his initials inlaid in the tile. Derrick took a liking to Wershe, who also knew his son, a preppy kid who sold drugs to friends in Grosse Pointe. Derrick brought Wershe on trips to Miami, renting out half a floor at the airport Hilton. Wershe bought a jet ski. They would go to a Cuban steakhouse and Joe’s Stone Crab. They’d get call girls. Derrick would bring Wershe with him to Vegas, too, where the kid—still not yet 18—would stay in Derrick’s condo at the Jockey Club. “He was almost like a son to me,” Derrick told Adler. Derrick was flying in the cocaine from suppliers in Miami, where the price was much lower than in Detroit, allowing for a serious markup. Soon Wershe was bypassing Derrick and getting his product, he says, directly from a major Miami dealer. At the height of Wershe’s career, his connection would send him and his associates shipments as large as 50 kilos, which at the time would sell in Detroit at around $17,000 per kilo. The local retail price was dropping fast. With crack at its peak, opportunists were flooding the market, trying to get in on the boom. In Wershe’s neighborhood, he recalls, a man who worked on the line at General Motors was moonlighting as a dealer. So was an assistant principal at an elementary school. Supply was outstripping demand. By now, Wershe did not generally deal to users, or even have underlings do it for him. He was not a retailer or a gang leader but a so-called weight man: He sold in quantities of a kilo or more, usually, to other dealers. If his buyers turned the cocaine into crack and sold it in small-dollar amounts, the street value of those original 50 kilos could run into the millions. “He rose all the way through the ranks,” B.J. Chambers says. “He did it just as big as me, the Curry brothers, Maserati Rick—whoever you want to name.” Wershe was now prominent enough to be a target. One day in the spring of 1987, he was riding in the passenger seat of a convertible with a friend. When they pulled up at a stoplight, Wershe noticed a van pulling alongside them, its side door sliding open. Wershe shouted at his friend to run the red light, then reached his foot over and hit the accelerator himself, ducking the hail of bullets as the convertible peeled out across the intersection. Nate “Boone” Craft, an enforcer from the notoriously violent Best Friends gang, later admitted to pulling the trigger. While rivals threatened Wershe from one side, the law was closing in from the other. In Detroit and nationwide, all eyes were now on the crack epidemic. Politicians were vying to show how tough they could be on drugs, and law enforcement in Detroit was under pressure to produce. The and the Detroit police had Wershe in their sights by 1987. He’d sold $1,600 in cocaine to an undercover DEA agent at his father’s house the previous September. Subsequent raids aimed at Wershe turned up all the makings of a serious drug operation—scales, a money-counting machine, cash, and weapons—but produced only one charge against him, for possession of a small amount of cocaine. Now the police were pulling him over on flimsy pretexts, he says, to see if they could find something on him. Wershe was a prize for any cop who could bring him down. His run couldn’t last.
On the night of May 22, 1987, when Wershe was 17, he was riding in the passenger seat of a Ford Thunderbird driven by an associate when they pulled up at a stop sign a block from his family’s house. Diagonally across the intersection was a police cruiser, and inside it was an officer Wershe says he already knew, a man named Rodney Grandison. Their eyes met. As Wershe’s car pulled through the intersection, the cruiser turned to follow, then flipped on its siren. The driver stopped next to the Wershe house, and he and Wershe stepped out of the car. Grandison noticed a Kroger shopping bag on the floor in front of Wershe’s seat and told his partner to look inside. Wershe tried to stop him; the bag contained about $30,000 in cash, and although it wasn’t a crime to have it, Wershe was convinced that it would get him arrested. He grabbed the second officer’s arm, and a struggle ensued. It was about 9 p.m. on a hot spring night, and everyone was outside. Onlookers began to gather. Wershe’s sister and father came out to the street and joined in the fracas. Somehow Rick Sr. grabbed the bag of cash and handed it to Dawn, who ran into Wershe’s grandparents’ house with it. Wershe fled on foot through several backyards. As soon as the call went out on police radio, cruisers and unmarked cars and federal agents started descending on the scene. Officers barged into the house after Dawn and searched it from top to bottom, eventually finding the cash in a linen closet. Grandison chased after Wershe and caught up with him one street over. Tom McClain of the DEA says that when Wershe was cuffed and led toward a cruiser, there were congratulations and smiles among the cops. Wershe had been roughed up, and he was taken to the hospital before he was booked. Grandison’s partner admitted to punching him during the scuffle. According to police reports, within a couple of hours officers received an anonymous tip that Wershe had stashed a cardboard box under a nearby porch before he was arrested. When police recovered it, they said, they found eight kilos of cocaine inside. Wershe posted bail, but now his business dealings were a matter of public record. Chris Hansen’s WXYZ exposé appeared not long after. The papers carried Wershe’s mug shot and noted with some bewilderment that he looked “as though he should be thinking about the prom, not prison.” When Wershe went to a Detroit Pistons game at the Pontiac Silverdome, the cameras found him and put his face up on the Jumbotron. Fans wished him luck, he says, as if he were a hip-hop star. He couldn’t believe it. He was famous. The neighborhood dry cleaner knew who he was. That October, Wershe was arrested again by members of the near Royal Skateland, this time for possession of five kilos. The day he came home from jail, the No Crack Crew simultaneously raided his father’s and his grandparents’ houses, across Hampshire from each other, and found guns and drug paraphernalia. They couldn’t pin anything on Wershe himself, but he was already in deep trouble. He was due to face trial in three months for the eight-kilo charge. And he knew that a guilty verdict meant life without parole.
In January 1988, Wershe arrived at the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, one of a grim cluster of concrete criminal-justice buildings in downtown Detroit. He walked into the courthouse flanked by his parents, his mother in large sunglasses and a long fur coat, his father looking gaunt in a gray trench coat. Wershe wore a double-breasted suit, with pleated pants, and alligator loafers. One of Wershe’s attorneys was William Bufalino II, a short and pudgy man known for his courtroom showmanship. His father represented Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters and was often accused of having links to organized crime. Bufalino had stoked attention in the Wershe case, hosting a press conference at which Wershe’s father held forth about violations of his and his son’s constitutional rights. The media, including a camera crew from 60 Minutes, turned out en masse for the trial, as did Wershe’s supporters and others in the drug trade, some of them notorious enough that the journalists in attendance recognized them. One newspaper reporter described young men congregating by the pay phones but dispersing and hiding their faces when they saw TV cameras. Deputies spoke of seeing some of them searching through wads of cash for bills small enough to pay for potato chips in the courthouse tobacco shop during breaks. Pagers went off repeatedly during the proceedings. Wershe had reason to like his chances. The neighbors had claimed that he approached their backyard with the cardboard box in his hands, but there was no physical evidence linking Wershe to the box. In the courthouse hallways, he joked with people he knew and razzed a TV reporter who had been suspended from his job for paying a source to smoke a crack pipe on camera. In earshot of journalists, Wershe complained about his lawyers forbidding him from attending any more Pistons games, where he might end up on camera. While a reporter for the Detroit Monthly was interviewing him, Wershe reached out and straightened the man’s tie. When Grandison testified that he had never seen Wershe before the night of the arrest, Wershe scowled. The prosecutor, Robert Healy, accused Wershe of giving him “the bad eye.” Wershe lashed back amid a volley of voices and objections. The judge ordered Healy to “cut out dramatics” and proceed. One of Wershe’s attorneys suggested that police had planted the drugs to cover for the beating they had delivered to Wershe, who defense witnesses said was struck with a cop’s pistol. In his closing statement, the attorney said that with all the lies and flaws in the state’s case, “it repels you and makes you want to stand up and shout, ‘No way, no way!’” Wershe now admits that in fact he was responsible for the cocaine—a shipment that had come in hours before the arrest—but says that it was a partner who lived nearby who hid it under the neighbor’s porch after hearing police sirens. In any case, the defense succeeded in casting some doubt on the matter. Deliberations took place over four days, and the jury twice sent notes to the judge reporting that they were deadlocked. Wershe continued joking in the halls. When the guilty verdict was announced, Wershe sat expressionless. His mother wept softly. His father stood up, grabbed his coat, and stormed out of the courtroom, ignoring a deputy’s orders to sit down. The sentencing hearing three weeks later was a formality; possession of over 650 grams meant life in prison. The judge remarked that he couldn’t help noting the youngsters in attendance “decked out in gold chains and dress that is common to the drug trade.” He told Wershe, “If they are lucky to survive death, they will probably join you as neighbors in your new residence.” During jury deliberations at Wershe’s trial, Rick Sr. confronted a member of the in the hallway outside the courtroom and told him, “You better not sleep too well,” according to the cop. He was swiftly arrested and charged with threatening an officer—and, for good measure, with possessing illegal silencers that had been found in one of the raids. From his cell in the Wayne County Jail, Rick Sr. agreed to interviews with several reporters in the weeks following his son’s conviction. To each one, he told a story that sounded unbelievable. Both he and his son, he said, had worked as informants for federal agents. “They used me,” he said, “and they used my son.” The Wershes had put themselves at great risk, he claimed, to help authorities gather important evidence of drug dealing on the East Side. “And now they turn around and fuck us over,” he told Detroit Monthly. It was a baffling assertion, coming at a strange time. If it were true that White Boy Rick had been working with the FBI all along, why hadn’t his lawyers mentioned it in the trial? Besides, Rick Sr. was not the most credible figure—not only was he facing criminal charges, but he had made the implausible claim that his family’s cash had come not from coke dealing but from his own legitimate income from various jobs. “I can make a million dollars this year,” the man who lived on the decaying East Side said. Few people paid him any mind. The FBI told reporters that, per agency policy, they would neither confirm nor deny any relationship with the Wershes. An assistant U.S. attorney said he very much doubted the father’s claim. “I would have been told,” he said, speaking to the Detroit News. Even Bufalino threw water on the story. “No way” was Wershe helping the feds, the lawyer told Detroit Monthly. “Maybe his dad, OK. But not the son.” At the time, Rick Sr. claimed that one FBI agent who handled the Wershes was a man named James Dixon. When a reporter asked Dixon about this notion not long after the trial, he refused to comment on the subject, though he did say that any suggestion that the law had betrayed Wershe was “ridiculous.” Dixon resigned the same year and never said another word publicly about the case. Today, Dixon lives in a Detroit suburb and fishes in tournaments. When I tracked him down by phone recently, he spoke tentatively at first and asked repeatedly about me and what I was writing. He seemed more at ease after I told him that I had spoken with several colleagues of his from the time. We began by discussing the , and Dixon mentioned in passing “an informant” he had worked with, without giving a name. “Was that informant Richard Wershe?” I asked. There was a long pause. “Yes,” Dixon said.
Part Two Detroit, 1982. Photo: Don Anderson, Detroit Historical Society
Early one morning in the spring of 1984, three years before Wershe’s arrest, there was a knock at the door of the little brick house with white trim on Hampshire Street. When Rick Sr. opened it, two FBI agents were standing outside. They asked if he had a minute. By this time, Rick Sr. had known local FBI agents for years. The downtown gun store he managed, Newman’s, was located near the bureau’s field office. Agents would come in and shop for gear, and they would talk. After the FBI formally teamed up with the DEA in 1982 to step up the drug war, bureau agents began working the gang beat alongside the police on Detroit’s East Side. The local agents had occasionally done favors for Rick Sr. before—they looked out for Dawn and called her father if she was caught up in trouble, and they once got him out of a jam on a weapons charge, he claims. Before long, agents started to think about what the friendly gun dealer who happened to live on the East Side could do for them. Rick Sr. told the agents on his front steps that he was about to take his son to school but that he could talk for a bit. He showed them into the house, where the agents pulled out some photographs. They wanted to know what he knew about the people in the pictures. The younger Wershe craned his neck from across the room, curious. As a corner-cutting weapons dealer, Rick Sr. made a habit of staying out of people’s business, so he had only so much to offer. But his son started pitching in with information. “Rick had more answers than I did,” Rick Sr. told me. Wershe wasn’t spending time with the yet, but he had some familiarity with them. He could pick out the major players. It was hard to miss Johnny Curry’s tricked-out Berlina—it was “almost like a pimp car,” Wershe says. He knew some other operators in the area, too; he’d sold his father’s guns to a couple of them. To Wershe, it seemed like the FBI agents were up to something you’d see in Scarface, his favorite movie. (“He must have watched that thirty times,” his father says.) Seeing the agents hanging on his words, Wershe told me, made him feel important. He had something the FBI wanted. On their way out, the agents thanked Wershe’s father. “Your son was very helpful,” he remembers them saying. About a week and a half later, the FBI agents came back with an envelope of money. They told Rick Sr. he should take it and become a confidential informant. Everyone on the East Side knew that snitching could get you killed, but, Rick Sr. told me, “I took the money. I wasn’t doing all that well at the time. And I thought it was the right thing—keep some drug dealers off the street and get paid for it.” FBI pertaining to the Wershes that I received show that after a “suitability inquiry” in June 1984, Richard Wershe Sr. was approved as an informant. The agency assigned him a number and a codename (“GEM”). He would collect payments, and he told his son they would split the cash. At this point, Rick Jr. was 14 years old. The attorney general’s guidelines do not explicitly forbid the use of juvenile informants by the FBI, but the rules set out age as an important consideration for eligibility, and they call for ongoing “careful evaluation and oversight.” , the former FBI agent, acknowledged years later that if Wershe’s work with the FBI had been widely known at the time, it “would have been an embarrassment to the federal government.” The redacted FBI files don’t distinguish between the father’s assistance and the son’s. But when I spoke with Dixon, he confidently confirmed what other FBI veterans and Rick Sr. had told me: Although the father was the registered informant, the younger Wershe was the true source of useful intelligence. When I asked Dixon if Wershe knew more than his father, he said yes. Then he chuckled. “Yes,” he said again. “I think the son knew everything.” Rick Sr. claims that FBI agents and Detroit narcotics cops soon began going around his back and meeting with his young son alone. That would represent a clear violation of federal guidelines, since Wershe was never vetted or approved as an informant—and, at his age, it’s unlikely anyone would even have tried. “He’d take his grandmother’s car at 14 and he’d drive and meet these guys,” his father says. (Dixon says that he never met with Wershe without the father present; Rick Jr. says that he used to meet Dixon alone in a church parking lot across town, off Livernois Avenue.) At first, Wershe just gave up isolated scraps of intelligence: the identities of the thieves who robbed a jewelry store, the name of a health clinic that was selling illegal prescriptions, the location of a cache of stolen guns. In time he grew bolder, however, and he began informing on leading crime figures. Wershe told officials about visiting a house that contained dozens of guns, a bedroom full of stolen video equipment, two punch bowls full of cocaine, and a cabinet that he was told contained a quarter of a million dollars. In February 1985, authorities raided the house, executing a search warrant obtained with Wershe’s information, and came away with almost $200,000 in cash. It was exciting, Wershe told me. “What kid doesn’t want to be an undercover cop when he’s 14, 15 years old?” Wershe told me that he would regularly meet with FBI agents and police investigators. He says he would meet them far from where he lived, so as not to be seen, then ride back with them to the neighborhood in unmarked cars, keeping his head low, pointing out dope houses and dealer hangouts. While they kept watch, he would use money they gave him to buy cocaine at drug houses, helping them amass evidence. Then he would be paid, cash in hand—a few hundred here, maybe a couple thousand for a bigger score. Wershe’s father now seems to lament allowing his son to become an informant as much as he laments allowing him to deal drugs. To him, the two are inextricably tied together. One day, Rick Sr. recalls, a narcotics cop who worked particularly closely with Wershe dropped him off in the driveway. Rick Sr. was home early and came outside, but the officer drove off without waiting. Wershe’s father could see the bulge in his son’s pocket and became upset. Wershe yelled back that he’d earned the money. “He had $2,000,” his father says. “At 14.” Wershe’s ties to the FBI and police may cast a new light on some incidents from his rise to prominence. When he was charged at 14 with shooting the .22 at the man stealing his grandmother’s car, his run could have been derailed early on, but the arresting officer never appeared for trial. Wershe says he didn’t show up because one of Wershe’s handlers, a fellow cop, told him not to—so that he could keep working with Wershe. (The officer said to have stepped in, now retired, did not respond to interview requests.) When Wershe was shot in the stomach, he says, his handlers showed up at the hospital right away; they were worried he’d been found out as an informant and registered him as a patient under John Doe. Wershe’s father was furious to find them gathered in Wershe’s hospital room. “Get away from my son!” he yelled. (The former federal agents I interviewed would not corroborate this story.) In all, Wershe estimates, the authorities paid him perhaps $30,000 for his work. FBI documents record less than $10,000, but both Wershe and his father claim that some payments he received were off the books, and that often it was police, rather than FBI agents, who handed him the cash. Wershe told me that he never dealt drugs until after he became an informant. Dixon said that when he handled Wershe in the early days, the teenager “knew a lot” and “ran with some of the people, you know, the lower-end people.” But Dixon didn’t think Wershe was involved with the drugs himself. “Nothing that I picked up on, anyway,” he told me. That soon changed. The money Wershe made from informing, he claims, helped finance his drug business. He claims that sometimes his handlers would save him a step and let him keep the drugs he bought with their money. He would turn around and sell them. He soon earned the trust of suppliers, who would front him cocaine and allow him to pay them later with the proceeds from sales. He had a knack for it, and his operation grew. “We brought him into the drug world,” Gregg Schwarz, the longtime FBI agent, told me. “And what happened? He became a drug dealer. And we’re surprised by that?”
Several of Wershe’s handlers were members of the joint FBI and Detroit Police Department task force charged with probing the . When he came to know Boo Curry and the rest of the Curry crew, Wershe says, he was already working as an informant for the investigators who were trying to bring them down. The problem was, Wershe genuinely liked Boo. He felt guilty feeding agents information on the crew, and he tried to convey that Boo was just a minor figure, not really worth gunning for. Wershe also admired and feared Boo’s older brothers—and he knew they would have no tolerance for betrayal. While he was hanging out with the Curry crowd at Stoke’s and riding shotgun with Johnny Curry himself, he was playing the kind of dangerous game a cocky kid might wander into without thinking it through. He had become a mole. And the FBI documents are unambiguous about just how useful a mole he was. One report, a request for more funds to pay the “source,” observes that he was “very instrumental in providing the exact addresses and names of certain lieutenants who operate certain ‘drug houses,’” and that a dozen search warrants were executed based solely on his information on one day in July 1985. Wershe claims that when he flew to Las Vegas for the Hearns–Hagler fight in April 1985, he did so courtesy of the FBI—that the bureau bought him a professional-grade fake ID that bumped up his age and that it paid for his airfare, hotel, and other expenses so he could keep an eye on the Currys and get information about their suppliers. It was the first time he had ever flown on a plane alone. “I was, like, in awe, dude,” he told me. “I had never been anywhere like that.” He likened the trip to the movie Home Alone. “I had a pocket full of money. I could buy whatever I wanted. I could eat whatever I wanted.” When Wershe first told me all this, the story struck me as highly unlikely. Would the federal government really send a 15-year-old boy to Las Vegas to gather intelligence on a dangerous gang? What if he got into a scrape with the law—hardly a long shot, given the circumstances—and tried to use that ID? What if he got killed? But when the FBI documents arrived in the mail and I began to pore over them, it was not long before I came across evidence that Wershe was telling the truth. One memo is an itemized request for the necessary money for the trip. In Las Vegas, the memo states, “the source will be privy to [redacted] suppliers and the methods used to smuggle the narcotics into Detroit. In light of the foregoing, $1,500 is requested to pay the source’s expenses.” Dixon told me that some of Wershe’s best tips had to do with connections between drug figures and public officials, and he recalled that some intelligence had come from a trip to Las Vegas for a marquee fight. In general, he said, Wershe’s was reliable and “very significant.” Eventually, Dixon’s supervisors took the Wershes out of his hands, but the father and son were soon put in touch with another FBI special agent, Herman B. Groman. A slim and slight man then in his thirties, Groman wore a mustache and favored French cuffs and double-breasted suits. When he first went to meet with “GEM,” he thought he was going to be dealing with a middle-aged man—the officially listed informant. Groman was taken aback, he told me, when Rick Sr. “brought this young kid along” to the meeting. “I’m thinking to myself, This is kind of a bizarre father-son relationship.” When Groman started asking questions, Rick Sr. kept turning his head toward Wershe for answers. “I noticed he would defer to the kid.” At the time, Groman was assigned to the task force that was investigating the Curry brothers. Since Johnny Curry was too smart to be busted in a room full of drugs, the task force was building a RICO case, trying to demonstrate an ongoing criminal conspiracy made up of smaller violations that suggested the big picture. With a judge’s approval, they had set up a pen register on Curry’s phone—a device that would record the destination number of outgoing calls. But as it happened, the most startling revelation that emerged from the Las Vegas trip and the pen register did not involve the Currys’ drug dealing. It had to do with a homicide. Before they flew to Las Vegas, the Currys had tasked a small-time dealer named Leon Lucas with making arrangements for their accommodations and entertainment. The Currys were displeased with the results; Lucas and his cousin had failed to get them tickets to the fight. Two weeks later, Lucas’s house in Detroit was riddled with bullets. Lucas himself was not home at the time, but his two young nephews were. One of them, 13-year-old Damion Lucas, was shot in the chest and killed. Wershe learned from the nervous talk among the Curry crew that three of Curry’s men had carried out the shooting. They hadn’t intended to kill anyone, only to shoot up the house. Wershe says Johnny called a meeting in his basement and told everyone that if the cops offered to pay for information on the Lucas case, he would pay more for silence. Wershe, who was already in touch with the cops, sat petrified. Nevertheless, steeling himself, he passed along what he knew about the Lucas killing to his handlers on the Curry task force. Wershe wasn’t just a drug mole anymore—now he was a . And he had blown the whistle on a case that would have serious repercussions in the city of Detroit. When Groman checked the log for the morning after the shooting, he found that the first two calls made from Johnny Curry’s phone were to members of the Detroit Police Department. One number belonged to a sergeant named Jimmy Harris. The other was the unlisted direct line of Harris’s supervisor, Commander Gilbert R. Hill.
Gil Hill was a well-known figure in Detroit. He had played a character not unlike himself the year before in Beverly Hills Cop, in which he was cast as Eddie Murphy’s foul-mouthed boss in the Detroit Police Department. Hill would later become the City Council president, and in 2001 he would run for mayor and narrowly lose. At the time of the shooting, he was the police department’s inspector in charge of homicide, but some veteran officers under his command were assigned to another, unofficial detail: looking after family and particularly his niece—Cathy Volsan, then fiancée. The fact that Volsan was the mayor’s niece does not fully capture how closely tied she was to Detroit’s power structure. Young treated Volsan like a daughter. When she and Curry had a child together, the baby shower was held at the mayoral mansion, where wives and girlfriends of reputed drug dealers arrived in luxury cars for the party. As Volsan became increasingly enmeshed in the city’s underworld, Young sought to protect her. As a police sergeant later testified, as many as four officers monitored Volsan and her mother, the mayor’s sister, around the clock at taxpayer expense. Jimmy Harris was the lead man, he told me, and frequently reported back to the mayor. These police looked on while Volsan socialized with the city’s drug bosses, and they tried to keep her out of potentially embarrassing situations. “Cathy started getting in more trouble than you can believe,” Harris says. Within days of the Lucas shooting, the FBI began listening in on Johnny Curry’s phone. The wire recorded Curry talking about men in his crew who “went and done a dumb … move by killin’ that little boy, man, that’s a little boy.” told the Detroit police what he knew about the homicide, but for months they failed to act on the information. No charges were ever filed against Curry’s associates. Suspicions about Hill’s alleged role in the case hung over Detroit for years. In 1992, Cathy Volsan testified under oath that Hill once warned Johnny Curry that his phone was tapped. The FBI interviewed Wershe about Hill that year, and Wershe told the agents that he was once riding with Curry in his Bronco not long after the shooting when Curry discussed the Lucas case with Hill on the hands-free car phone. Wershe could hear both sides of the conversation. Hill told Curry, “Don’t worry about nothing, I’ll take care of it,” Wershe claimed. Groman and —who also worked on the Curry case—told me that when they interviewed Johnny Curry in federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, years after the shooting, he told them that Hill had tipped him off that his crew was being targeted in the Lucas investigation. Curry said that he went to Hill’s office with Volsan and paid Hill $10,000 in cash for the heads up. Hill steadfastly denied all the allegations. “I haven’t discussed this case with Johnny Curry, period,” he told reporters in 1992. “Period.” Now 82, Hill has withdrawn from public life and has avoided giving interviews for years, and I was unable to reach him at any of his known phone numbers; he also did not respond to a request for comment delivered to his last known address. But I was able to speak with Harris, who had consistently dodged questions about the episode in the past. Breaking ranks with his old boss, Harris corroborated Curry’s account. The morning after the Lucas shooting, he said, Hill told him to bring Volsan to police headquarters right away. Harris and Volsan spoke on the phone, and when Harris picked her up, she was with Johnny Curry. Harris brought Volsan in to the homicide section, where the officers under Hill’s command were at work investigating the Lucas shooting. Curry came to the station as well, Harris said, and he and Volsan went to Hill’s office. “I remember him showing me a wad of money,” Harris said of Curry. I asked if Curry told him what the money was for. “I think Johnny just appreciated Gil keeping him abreast of what was going on,” Harris said. Although Johnny Curry and his associates had dodged a homicide charge, the investigation into his drug operation, free as it was from the entanglements of local politics, advanced apace. When the grand jury finally returned an indictment in 1987, it presented a sophisticated and damning picture of the Currys’ drug business. Johnny Curry decided to take a plea in exchange for a 20-year sentence. The other 19 defendants, ever the loyal soldiers, fell in line and took their own deals. Groman and Schwarz attended Curry’s sentencing in January 1988. As Curry was led away in handcuffs, Schwarz gave him a wave. Curry smiled back weakly and raised a cuffed wrist to wave back. The Curry organization had gone down. The of the Currys was a testament to Wershe’s value as an informant. Many significant details had come from him, gleaned in the hours he had spent in Curry’s house, in the passenger seat of his car, on trips to Belle Isle. Wershe’s “efforts were significantly instrumental to our success,” Kevin Greene, a Detroit police officer who worked on the Curry investigation, would attest years later. “His involvement was known to and supported by the FBI, the DEA, and the Detroit Police Department.” The day that Curry was sentenced, however, Wershe was in a courthouse across town, at his own trial. By the time the police had searched his grandparents’ house and recovered the money and the nearby box of cocaine eight months earlier, the authorities had ended their relationship with him. According to the FBI records, the Wershes’ handlers officially “closed” Rick Sr. as an informant in June 1986, nearly a year before his son’s arrest. They may have pulled away because they sensed Wershe was becoming a cocaine dealer of some note. At one point, Groman told Wershe’s father that they had evidence of his son’s dealing; Rick Sr. remembers Groman playing him an audio recording as proof. Whatever the reason, Wershe’s pager had gone quiet. Now he was on his own.
Wershe’s arrest and trial transfixed Detroit as the city marveled at the idea of a white teenage kingpin whom a judge had called “worse than a mass murderer.” In retrospect, however, it seems clear that Wershe’s notoriety exceeded his real significance in the trade. “The notion that an 18-year-old kid—white, black, or purple—was the boss of the streets in the city of Detroit in the ’80s is so ludicrous as to deserve no further comment,” Steve Fishman, a prominent defense attorney in the city, told me as we sat in a nearly empty bar one afternoon in downtown Detroit. Fishman emphasized that he would know: He was the go-to lawyer for the true bosses of the era, representing Demetrius Holloway, Maserati Rick, and . “It was a joke” among his colleagues, Fishman said, that people placed Rick Wershe on the same level as those men. Much of Wershe’s notoriety stemmed from his role as an alleged supplier of the . But when I spoke with B.J. Chambers—who, after a two-decade stint in prison, now lives back in Marianna, Arkansas—he told me that Wershe rarely did any business with him. If B.J. was temporarily short, he allowed, Wershe might sell him a kilo or three to hold him over, but that was about the extent of it. Wershe says he was in B.J.’s presence perhaps five times, and he had no tie to B.J.’s brother Larry, who operated the notorious Broadmoor and reaped the biggest earnings in the family. Although he reported otherwise on WXYZ 27 years ago, Chris Hansen now finds it plausible that Wershe in fact had a tenuous Chambers connection. From B.J. Chambers’s description, Wershe emerges less as a prodigy criminal mastermind than as an adolescent who had gotten in over his head, intoxicated by being in the game. Major leaguers like were using Wershe to get their cocaine to a hot local market, and Chambers says Wershe did not have the clientele or the foot soldiers to move it efficiently. What help Wershe did have was sometimes ripping him off, Chambers recalls—a common problem in the business. Wershe divvied up shipments from Miami with friends because he needed help selling it. Wershe would find himself strapped for cash more often than would be expected of a genuine kingpin, and he’d sell a kilo below the normal price to raise money quickly. That “started a lot of beef in the street,” Chambers says, because Wershe was undercutting the market and quoting different prices to different buyers. And keeping multiple kilos of cocaine in a single box, like the one found under the neighbor’s porch, was a rookie move. Chambers told me that his crew and other experienced traffickers, mindful that even 650 grams would spell the end, divided their supply and kept a judicious distance from it. “We were all kind of impressed with what the Chamberses put together,” Tom McClain of the told me. “But I don’t remember being impressed with [Wershe] and his abilities. He was just kind of like a goofy kid.” told me that there was a short period when Wershe might have been able to put together a six-figure deal but that he wasn’t near the level that others have described. He was never a supplier to the Currys or the Best Friends, as many Detroiters still believe. And because he was primarily a weight man—a wholesaler—Wershe missed out on a lot of the big profits. Other operators were vertically integrated and made huge margins further down the line—in drug houses that sold the cocaine in smaller amounts, especially in crack form. If Wershe was able to sell at full price, he says, he was buying at about $12,000 a kilo and dealing at about $17,000, maybe a little more. He claims he made about $250,000 total in his short career. His spending at the time—the cars, the lawyer bills, the jewelry—suggests that the true number is likely higher than that. But no knowledgeable source I spoke to pegged him anywhere remotely close to the Chambers brothers’ estimated gross of more than $55 million per year. While Wershe was awaiting trial, Groman and a more senior FBI agent met with him and his parents at a hotel. If Wershe was willing to divulge everything he knew and possibly testify in open court against Detroit’s major drug figures, Groman told them, the federal government would provide some kind of assistance. But Wershe turned him down. He felt sure that going on record against Art Derrick and the Currys would mean certain death. Besides, he had hired expensive lawyers with pull in the city. He decided to go to trial. Wershe says his lawyers told him they couldn’t mention that he had assisted law enforcement in court because he didn’t have proof and the police and FBI would deny it. He says that after he was convicted, Bufalino denied to the press that he was an informant in order to protect him from reprisal in jail. Bufalino, who has since died, later blamed the other two attorneys for their handling of the case. Robert Healy, the prosecutor in Wershe’s trial, told me, “Bufalino was a bit of a buffoon.” Wershe believes that Healy knew about the informing and kept silent, but Healy claims nobody told him Wershe had been working with the FBI. When I called Healy, who is now retired, and asked him about the notion that Wershe had been an informant, he said, “That is plain baloney.” If that were true, he said, “we’d have known about it. Somebody would have come to us.” When I told him that FBI and police sources and documents corroborated Wershe’s claims of assistance, Healy granted that it was possible but said, “What I do know is that the FBI wasn’t asking us to do anything about it.” When Wershe was led away to a gray cell block next door to the courthouse after the verdict, the weight of the matter had not yet hit him. As a teenager, he couldn’t quite reckon with the reality of a life sentence. And he couldn’t believe that no one was coming to his aid. visited him, and Wershe came away from their conversation with a sliver of hope that there might be some leeway in the sentencing. It took time for the reality to sink in. A lot of time has passed since.
Part Three Police photo of Richard Wershe Jr., 2008. Photo: Michigan Department of Corrections
The Oaks Correctional Facility, a state prison in Manistee, Michigan, is a four-hour drive northwest of Detroit. Manistee sits on the Lake Michigan shore and attracts visitors in the summer, but in mid-October, when I arrived, the sun doesn’t rise till after eight, and the town seemed already buckled down for the cold winter to come. The prison complex lies a bit inland and out of sight, at the end of a long driveway enclosed by the black oak trees of the half-million-acre national forest that surrounds Route 55. Inside the waiting room, a small Halloween display with discolored pumpkins and apples collected dust in a corner. My shoes and socks were searched, and I was led through a metal detector, fitted with a bracelet, marked on my wrist with invisible ink, and escorted through three locked doors and three guarded checkpoints. I finally came to a concrete-walled room, with vending machines along one wall and sets of chairs facing each other over low tables. Wershe was already there waiting for me and stood to shake my hand. His adolescent swagger was long gone, and so was his blond mop, now shaved to a stubble that revealed a receding hairline. His shoulders and chest were broad, but his legs looked thin beneath baggy jeans. (Prisoners’ legs can atrophy from prolonged confinement.) Wershe was nearly 45, and if anything he looked slightly older. He still had a smattering of freckles, but his eyes were sunken deep in their sockets. Wershe had been anxious to spill information in our first conversation, to press his case, but during my five-hour visit he was more at ease. We talked a bit about baseball. His Detroit Tigers were in the middle of a playoff series against my Red Sox. “I think you guys got us,” he said, smiling. During baseball season, he said, the time passes a little less slowly. He pointed to the paved yard outside the window to show me the pay phone he’d used to call me. In the gray morning light, a few men in blue jumpsuits milled around inside the razor wire. Over the preceding months, as I had spoken with Wershe and others about his story, the central question it posed loomed larger and larger: Why was he still in prison after all these years? As I tracked down the criminals he crossed paths with on the street, one by one, I learned that Wershe was nearly the only one among them who was still incarcerated. , go-to supplier to the major dealers in Detroit, the man who bought four planes with cocaine money, served five years in prison—less than one-fifth of Wershe’s term so far. Wershe’s Miami supplier got 16 months. received 20-year sentences, of which they served about 11. served less than 22 years of a 45-year sentence. Nathaniel “Boone” Craft, the hit man who made an attempt on Wershe’s life and testified to committing a host of murders—he once put the number at 30—got out in 2008 after serving only 17 years. And a number of 650 Lifers with violent pasts were paroled on their first try once the law was amended. Wershe’s own bids for parole have been summarily denied. When I spoke to James Dixon, the FBI agent who handled the Wershes as informants, in the middle of the conversation he suddenly asked, “Where is he now?” I told him Wershe was still in prison. “Wow,” he said, his voice growing quiet. “Wow, wow, wow… He’s been in there much, much too long, I think.” Among the handful of people who have maintained an interest in Wershe’s case, a popular theory explaining his prolonged incarceration involves an undercover operation that spearheaded several years after Wershe was convicted. The episode made national news at the time, but Groman himself stayed quiet about it, saying nothing to the press. When I called him recently, he agreed to tell me about it. In our first conversation, he said he was leaving out certain details that had never been made public, but he seemed to be dropping clues. “You can figure it out,” he said. Eventually, the full story of what the FBI called Operation Backbone emerged.
When transferred out of the FBI’s drug squad and onto the public-official corruption squad in 1989, the Damion Lucas homicide case from four years earlier still ate at him. From the pen register and wiretaps on phone, Groman had come to believe that Curry’s then fiancée, , had high-ranking allies in the Detroit Police Department who were willing to cooperate with criminals. Now he wanted to prove it. So in July 1990, he decided to pay a visit to an old informant. Rick Wershe Jr. was then serving his time in Marquette Branch Prison, an imposing old state-run sandstone building on the Upper Peninsula’s Lake Superior shore. “It looked like a dungeon,” Groman told me. In the grim visiting area, with pale green concrete walls, he sat down across from Wershe on a folding chair. Speaking softly so the other inmates wouldn’t overhear, they tried to work out a deal. If Wershe would help him uncover police corruption, Groman told him, he would try to get him moved to federal protective custody, where conditions would be better and he’d be shielded from reprisal. And if Wershe were somehow to become eligible for parole down the road, Groman would lend assistance and testify on his behalf. Wershe was not at all keen to help the FBI or Groman. When he was on trial, nobody from the agency had spoken up about their prior relationship or come forward to help him. But now that he saw what prison was like, he was desperate. Wershe says Groman was talking a big game about how helpful he would be. And Wershe liked the idea of bringing down dirty cops. He agreed. The linchpin of the plan was Volsan. Wershe had mentioned to Groman over the phone that his ex-girlfriend happened to be living nearby. She was enrolled in a rehab program in Marquette. She had split up with Wershe between his arrest and trial—her family was not happy that yet another of her male companions was facing drug charges, Wershe says—but the two had remained in touch after his conviction. They had arrived at an unusual relationship, a détente of sorts, with wariness on both sides. Wershe never told her he had informed on Johnny Curry, fearing the consequences if she turned on him and spread the word. Volsan visited Wershe in prison regularly, but he didn’t believe it was pure affection that brought her there. He suspected she wanted to stay on good terms so that Wershe wouldn’t use what he knew to hurt her and her powerful allies. Now he was about to do just that. After the meeting with Groman, Wershe spoke to Volsan on the phone and told her that his sister, Dawn, was coming up to visit him for his 21st birthday. Accompanying her, he said, was an old friend of his from Miami named Mike Diaz. Wershe told Volsan she should get together with Dawn and Diaz and go out for dinner. The word “Miami” was enough, Wershe says, to plant the idea of what kind of friend Diaz was—Volsan would assume he couldn’t explain further over a monitored prison phone. “It was like dangling a worm in front of a hungry fish,” Wershe told me. Diaz and Volsan met on July 26, 1990, over dinner with Dawn at one of Marquette’s better restaurants. Diaz told his story to Volsan, who listened attentively. He was a longtime drug “connec” of Rick’s, he said, and he looked after Wershe and his sister because Wershe never flipped on him. Now he told Volsan he was willing to pay for connections in Detroit who could protect some shipments of money he was laundering. Volsan said no one had connections like she did, Groman recalls. She bragged of her ties to Detroit police. Diaz replied that perhaps they could work together. Volsan left the restaurant unaware that she had actually met with an FBI agent named Mike Castro, not Mike Diaz, and he had recorded the conversation with a hidden microphone. Herman Groman had been sitting at a nearby table. A few months later, Volsan introduced Castro to her father, Willie Volsan. A portly man with a beard and evident intelligence, Willie Volsan wielded a lot of clout in Detroit through his family ties—he was brother-in-law. He had been an unindicted co-conspirator in the Curry case and had been linked to several federal drug investigations, but he had never been convicted. According to Castro, he would boast about how his friendship with the mayor kept him out of legal trouble. Willie Volsan, in turn, brought the police sergeant on board. The protection scheme needed a cop with clout, and Harris—an influential figure in the department with close ties to the mayor—fit the bill. Groman remembered that Harris had turned up on the Curry pen register after the Lucas shooting, and he’d had him in mind from the outset. “He was the guy,” Groman told me, and Volsan “brought him right to us.” From there, Operation Backbone snowballed. In exchange for cash, Harris and Willie Volsan enlisted more people in the plot. Five shipments followed. A team of police led by Volsan and Harris would typically go to Detroit Metro Airport to meet Castro, who pretended he had just flown in. He would be carrying suitcases purportedly filled with $1 million in drug money—in reality, cut-up paper, with a few layers of real bills on top. The police detail would escort Castro to a bank in Troy, where he would walk in and pretend to make a deposit before being escorted back to the airport. Groman and Castro kept pushing for more. Once lower-ranking cops had implicated themselves by guarding deliveries, Castro would claim to be suspicious of them and ask Harris or Volsan to bring in replacements, which they did. Upon request, one officer slipped a machine gun past security at the airport, with the understanding that it was going to be used in a homicide in Chicago. But Groman was convinced that the rot within the Detroit Police Department went still deeper and extended higher up the ranks. Because of his experience with the Damion Lucas case, he was suspicious of in particular, and Willie Volsan would often mention his ties to Hill. Through Harris and Willie Volsan, Castro and another undercover agent he’d introduced as a partner arranged two meetings with Hill. Groman’s men went to great lengths to record those meetings, as well as conversations between Volsan and Hill. At one point, while Castro kept Volsan occupied in a mall, agents temporarily stole Volsan’s Cadillac from the parking lot to wire it for recording. While the work was being done, they replaced the car with an identical model, so that Volsan wouldn’t see an empty parking spot if he looked outside. Volsan drove Hill in the bugged Cadillac to meet with the undercover agents—both wearing wires—at a Bob Evans restaurant on the outskirts of Detroit, where patrons kept approaching to ask for Hill’s autograph. According to Groman’s account, Hill indicated that he was receptive to participating in the protection scheme on tape. Afterward, back in Volsan’s car, Hill said that he was taken aback by how direct “Diaz” was about his illegal intentions but that he thought he could probably help out. “Do they have money?” he asked, according to Groman. Volsan assured him that Castro and his partner were loaded. “I’m just elated at this point,” Groman told me. “I felt like a maestro at the symphony.” After the first meeting, however, Hill proved elusive. Groman’s supervisors, he says, couldn’t agree on whether to authorize a sting targeting him. Meanwhile, Hill wavered and backed away. The investigators eventually decided they needed to make their move and arrest Harris and his co-conspirators and leave Hill out of it for now; perhaps Harris would talk in exchange for leniency. So Groman set up an audacious finale.
Late on the morning of May 21, 1991, a small turboprop descended into Detroit City Airport. The little airfield sat on the ragged outskirts of Rick Wershe’s old East Side neighborhood. Outside the perimeter fence that surrounded the lone runway stood an auto repair shop, some forlorn houses, and a shady motel. The plane taxied to a remote corner of the tarmac, and a Lincoln town car pulled up nearby. Three men stepped down from the plane, and a man got out of the car to meet them. It was . They shook hands, then got to work lugging a series of black duffel bags from the plane to the trunk of the town car. In all, the bags contained 100 kilos of white powder. Harris was running the protection operation. As an extra precaution, he had given a secure police radio to his business partners in the plane so they could follow the movements of any cops who weren’t in on the deal. The Lincoln pulled out of the airport and headed southwest beyond the city to the suburbs. Several police vehicles, a mix of cruisers and unmarked cars, followed. Finally, Harris and his associates pulled into a parking lot in the town of Monroe, where they met another car. The duffel bags were transferred to the trunk of the second car, then the two vehicles parted ways. The deal was complete. Later that day, Harris arrived at a hotel room in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. Mike Castro—the man Harris knew as Mike Diaz—answered the door. He had Harris’s payment ready: $50,000 in cash for the cops’ services. In the next room, listened to the conversation on his headphones. He had been working with a team of about 100 people to prepare this sting down to the last detail: The plane full of FBI agents disguised as drug smugglers. The buyers—also FBI—waiting in the parking lot in Monroe. The cocaine in the duffel bags—a kilo of the real stuff on top, in case a wary cop asked for a taste, and 99 more of flour. Hidden cameras and microphones had recorded everything that transpired on the tarmac. Now a special camera with microwave technology was pressed against the wall, and it showed his team a moving image of what was happening in the next room in real time. A surveillance aircraft had even tailed Harris’s car en route to Monroe. After he gave Harris the money, Castro convinced him to stay for a celebratory drink—there was some Absolut vodka in the minibar—and excused himself to get some ice from the machine in the hall. A minute later there was a knock at the door. Harris opened it and was greeted by a SWAT team. Groman knew Harris was armed and wanted to overwhelm him with a show of force. The agents pulled a black hood over Harris’s head, hustled him into a car, and drove off. When the hood was removed, Harris found himself sitting in what appeared to be the command center for a massive operation that had been watching him and his associates for months. Pizza boxes and ashtrays littered the desks. Lining the walls were filing cabinets, one labeled with his name and the others with the names of his suspected co-conspirators. Poster-size blow-ups of incriminating photos of Harris hung on the walls. It was all an elaborate set assembled in a conference room at the FBI’s local offices at the suggestion of the agency’s behavioral-science unit back in Quantico, Virginia, who thought it might intimidate Harris. But Harris would say nothing except, “This is bullshit.” So Groman’s task force moved on to Plan B. Dozens of agents, warrants in hand, fanned out across Detroit to round up the other suspects. netted 11 police officers and several civilians. It was probably the most extensive probe of police corruption ever undertaken in Michigan, Groman says. Charges against were dropped; prosecutors foresaw difficulties in convicting her, because she had been in a rehab program when the sting began—Groman and Castro say they had thought she was in school—and the defense would likely have portrayed her as a victim of an FBI scheme that reeled her back into the drug world. But she was never the target of the case anyway. Jimmy Harris, Willie Volsan, and seven others went to prison. (All of them have since been released. Harris was pardoned by President George W. Bush in 2008.) In Operation Backbone, Rick Wershe’s involvement again proved crucial. He had not only set the plan in motion with Cathy Volsan, but had continued to vouch for Castro to others in the protection scheme. “The undercover agent’s very life,” Groman later testified, “at times rested solely in the hands of Mr. Wershe.” Lynn Helland, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the corruption case, says that, at the time, Wershe “was the game in town as far as pursuing that investigation.” Mike Castro told me, “Without him, the case wouldn’t have happened.” realized he had been an apparent target of the sting and acknowledged it to the press. In the wake of the bust, Detroit journalists probed Hill’s connections to Willie Volsan and Jimmy Harris. (One reporter uncovered that they had once been partners in a failed business venture, funded by Volsan.) Wershe, meanwhile, swiftly got his transfer into protective custody. This time, his role as an informant was not going to remain a secret. His involvement in the case eventually made all the papers.
Speaking with both Wershe and the federal agents who had known him, I was struck by the similarity of the pictures they painted of the streets of 1980s Detroit—of a world where the cops and the criminals were players in the same game, more alike in some respects than they were different. They might have been adversaries, but the lines were blurry and could be crossed. This is a familiar story coming from convicts; it invites skepticism. What was remarkable, though, was the degree to which even some veterans of the Detroit Police Department seemed to agree with it. While in Detroit, I met a local police officer, still on active duty, who had worked for the department for decades. He picked me up downtown in his personal car and drove us to a bar near Comerica Park. The Tigers were playing, and the bar and the streets were unusually crowded for an eerily underpopulated city, so he parked illegally. It wouldn’t be a problem, he said. Once we’d settled in at the bar, he told me that he knew officers who had investigated Wershe years earlier. Some of them, he said, would even hang out with Wershe and smoke pot with him. When my face betrayed a measure of shock at this detail and other more damning anecdotes that he insisted I keep off the record, he would smile slyly. The officer saw fellow police give false information in affidavits in order to get a warrant from a judge. He had partners who were “dirty,” he said—who took payoffs. He said cops at the time were drunk with power to an extent that now disturbs him. “Guys looked at you wrong, you smacked the dog shit out of ’em,” he said. “This job, it fucked you up, man. It threw you into a cesspool.” Wershe had told me that senior police had pressed him for protection money, which in some instances he paid. Assistance flowed the other way, too. He said that when he was with , if he wanted to know what cops knew about him or whether his house was under surveillance, he could find out through her. In June 1987, when federal agents raided Volsan’s condo downtown, they found not only Wershe and Volsan but also the phone numbers of officers in the police department—including and —printed on a wallet-size card. They also found copies of internal police records on Wershe himself. Tom McClain, the former DEA agent, told me that the interagency could work out of the DPD’s narcotics office, but when they had sensitive records or evidence, they kept them at the local DEA headquarters; police on his crew told him there were other cops “they absolutely couldn’t trust.” Larry Chambers, the most powerful of the , has claimed that he had eight cops on his payroll during his organization’s prime. More than 125 Detroit police were under investigation for involvement in crack cocaine in 1987 and ’88. Bill Hart, the chief of police in Wershe’s era, a veteran of four decades on the force, would be convicted in 1992 of embezzling $2.6 million on the job, using the money to renovate his home and buy luxury cars for three ex-girlfriends. After his conviction, told the press, “As far as I’m concerned, Bill Hart was a good man and a good cop.” In this arena with few rules, however, there was one rule that prevailed—and Wershe broke it. Although criminals probably knew more than anybody about police corruption, they also knew this: You don’t rat on cops. B.J. Chambers spoke openly to me about his own crimes; they were long in the past, and he’d served his time. He had a generous and relaxed manner and seemed to enjoy telling war stories. But when I asked him about an incident that Wershe had mentioned, when police had allegedly seized two kilos of Chambers’ cocaine and never reported it, he just laughed melodiously. He’d “seen a lot” from cops, he allowed. But that was all he would say. Nate Craft, the Best Friends enforcer who’d tried to kill Wershe, later ended up incarcerated with him; in prison the two men made their peace. Wershe says that Craft told him that when he had agreed to cooperate with the government against his fellow Best Friends—Detroit’s most violent gang—he did so on one condition: He would not inform on police. When I asked about Cathy Volsan’s ties to police, he said, “What kind of questions you trying to ask me about that?” He knew about Wershe’s version of events, but as for his own, he said, “I don’t want to speak on that.” Wershe broke this cardinal rule not just once but many times. He talked to the FBI about Gil Hill’s alleged role in the Damion Lucas case. In Operation Backbone, he helped bring down 11 cops. And he spoke, not just in private but also in the media, about both cases. In 1992, while Hill was telling reporters that he had never discussed the Lucas investigation with Johnny Curry, “period,” Wershe was telling those same reporters that he had heard them discuss it himself.
After Operation Backbone, had Wershe transferred into a witness-protection program within the federal prison system, which eventually delivered him to a medium-security facility in Marianna, Florida. The rollback of the 650 Lifer law in 1998 gave Wershe a ray of hope; suddenly, convicts he knew back in Michigan were being paroled. When his own hearing before the Michigan Parole Board finally arrived, at a Detroit courthouse on March 27, 2003, Wershe told the board, “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one, but living in a six-by-nine cell that sometimes smells like urine and stuff like that, it’s no place… I’d rather be dead sometimes.” The hearing was his best chance yet for a reprieve from his life sentence. Filling in the seats, waiting for their chance to testify, were family members and an eclectic array of supporters—everyone from FBI agents and attorneys to Kid Rock, who had developed an interest in Wershe’s case. Herman Groman attended the hearing and gave the board a detailed account of Wershe’s role in Operation Backbone, as well as some later information that Wershe had passed along while in federal custody. But although he said that he had met Wershe when his father was an informant, he did not go further into Wershe’s work with the authorities when he was a teenager. spoke of Wershe’s good character and remorse for his crimes, as Groman had, citing his personal relationship and frequent phone calls with Wershe during his incarceration. But Schwarz did not handle him as an informant prior to his arrest, and though he mentioned Wershe’s having given timely and accurate information to the FBI, he did not specify when. Schwarz and Groman left the courthouse after speaking, optimistic that the proceedings might actually go in Wershe’s favor. After they had gone, however, several prominent Detroit Police Department figures took the stand to testify. This was unusual. People do not typically speak out against the inmate at a parole hearing unless they have a personal tie to the case. And these cops had worked in homicide in Wershe’s day, not narcotics; they had never encountered him before. Still, together they built an unsparing case against letting Wershe go free. Dennis Richardson, a recently retired police commander, derided the notion that Wershe was remorseful, calling him “very manipulative” and citing a 2001 affidavit in which Wershe rather foolishly overstated his own case by proclaiming his innocence, describing himself as “a product of various state, local and federal agencies who used me to distribute, solicit, buy and supply narcotics.” “I don’t know Richard Wershe,” Richardson told the board. “I was never involved in any of his cases.” William Rice, a veteran and former chief inspector of homicide, spoke of the dark times in Wershe’s era and mentioned the names of the drug gangs that controlled Detroit’s streets then, tying Wershe to them implicitly. Like Richardson, Rice did little to explain why he was present at the hearing. Wershe’s name had never crossed his desk. The tide of the hearing undeniably turned. There was almost no discussion now of the crime for which Wershe was in prison, a possession charge. One DEA agent who had served alongside the Detroit police on the claimed that an associate of Wershe’s had told him that Wershe had directed an attempt on his life—an incident in which no charges were ever filed. Several law-enforcement witnesses claimed that Wershe was responsible for the distribution of hundreds of kilos of cocaine per month—an implausible figure by virtually every informed account I’ve heard. “To this day you have kids who wasn’t even born yet,” a DEA agent named Gregory Anderson testified, “but they can tell you about White Boy Rick, Maserati Rick … the Best Friends, and that’s what that era did to our community.” In the end, the board decided to “take no interest” in recommending parole. Explaining their reasoning, the board cited the “compelling adverse testimony” of “numerous law enforcement officers.” In the 11 years that have passed since, their position has not changed. |
Pope Francis has approved a new Vatican department to hear cases of bishops who fail to protect children from paedophile priests.
The unprecedented move marks the biggest step yet the Vatican has taken to hold bishops accountable for covering up, or not preventing, child sex abuse in the Catholic church.
The Vatican said that Francis had approved proposals made by his sexual abuse advisory board. The international commission is made up of clerics and lay people - nine men and eight women - whose role is to help dioceses put in place "best practices" to prevent abuse and work with victims.
Victims' groups have long campaigned for the Vatican to establish clear procedures to make bishops more accountable for abuse in their dioceses, even if they were not directly responsible for it.
While no bishop has ever been forcibly removed for covering up for guilty clergy, in April, Francis accepted the resignation of a US bishop who had been convicted of failing to report a suspected child abuser. |
German business confidence fell only marginally in July, the latest report by the Munich-based Ifo economic research institute revealed.
The monthly index based on a survey of about 7,000 companies, dropped to 108.3 points from 108.7 points in the previous month.
["The slight drop] was due to less optimistic business expectations on the part of companies," Ifo President Clemens Fuest said in a statement. "Assessments of the current situation, by contrast, improved slightly; the bottom line is the German economy proves resilient."
Engine not sputtering
Fuest told reporters on Monday that the British decision to leave the European Union would cost the German economy 0.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2016, with the long-term impact of the move hard to gauge.
"We've seen this in the past few weeks - German companies have reacted to the pro-Brexit vote with a lot ease," Dekabank economist Andreas Scheuerle told Reuters.
KfW analyst Jörg Zeuner agreed that the Brexit scenario, terror attacks and recent developments in Turkey have not had a devastating effect on the German economy.
"While there's no lack of bad news and uncertainty arising from it, economic growth is not in danger because of strong domestic demand in Germany," Zeuner predicted.
hg/sri (AFP, Reuters) |
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