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A yearly festival that showcases the South’s most renowned chefs and local farmers brought over 1,500 people to The Goat Farm on Sunday to raise money for two causes that are close to Atlanta’s restaurant industry and the local community .
The Attack of the Killer Tomato Festival, started by chef Ford Fry, kicked off its sixth year and brought attention to Georgia Organics and to bring the community together with local farmers and find a connection with the food they eat. “We are attempting to break down barriers of organic food and also teach our kids about where their fruits and vegetables come from,” said Kate Klein, development coordinator of Georgia Organics.
The organization holds various programs such as “My Market Club” to introduce people to local farmers markets and launched the 5 Million Meals Campaign, a statewide effort to get 5 million meals served with locally grown food in K-12 cafeterias in the 2012-2013 school year.
For the first time, the festival also raised money for The Giving Kitchen, a nonprofit started to help provide crisis grants to members of Atlanta’s restaurant community facing unanticipated hardship. The nonprofit was started after the city’s well-known chef Ryan Hidinger was diagnosed with late stage cancer.
“We were excited to partner with them and think it is a great way for our community to be a part of the restaurant community,” said TGK’s executive director Stephanie Galer. “Whether you’re a diner, a waiter or a chef, we are all touched by the restaurant industry, and we want TGK to be an important resource for our hospitality community.”
The nonprofit is less than a year old and has already distributed over $50,000 in grants to restaurant professionals in the city. TGK gives grants to help people in the hospitality community pay rent, bills and other costs when they come across a hardship so they don’t have to worry about losing their jobs.
The festival introduces the causes to the community, but the organizations are always looking for volunteers to help year-round. Georgia Organics needs volunteers to spread the message of the organization, be volunteers in the office or embrace the outdoors at one of the many farms around Georgia.
And The Giving Kitchen wants the Atlanta community to be ambassadors for its mission, and “spread the word to people in the hospitality industry that we are here to help them through a tough time,” added Galer.
The festival raised approximately $120,000 which will benefit Georgia Organics and The Giving Kitchen.
In other news: The Fragile Kids Foundation was awarded a $125,000 grant from the James M. Cox Foundation to support the expansion of the organization’s statewide medical loaned equipment program. The funds will allow the FKF to purchase 70 additional pieces of therapeutic and rehabilitative equipment, expanding its equipment inventory available for loan by 25 percent. The James M. Cox Foundation provides funding for capital campaigns and special projects in communities where the company operates. The Foundation concentrates its community support in several areas, including conservation and environment, early childhood education, empowering families and individuals for success and health. |
On Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, political comedian and talk show host Bill Maher ripped into Donald Trump’s immigration plan and the Republican party overall. Maher defended his belief that many conservatives are “stupid and racist” and boldly stated that America doesn’t have an immigration problem.
“All the conservatives complain about me, and most liberals, that we are dismissive of conservatives. The rednecks, the tea party, we think they’re stupid and racist. And I say they are stupid and racist. Tell me what I should do in a week like this, where the unparalleled leader of the party, Donald Trump, unveiled a plan that is so stupid and racist and its not even addressing a problem that really exists, because there is not a real immigration problem in America, net immigration has been close to 0 for the last 7 or 8 years, and if his plan went into effect, lettuce would cost $25 a head. So, when the party is embracing him and that plan, what does a person like me, who’s tempted to say its stupid and racist, do?”
Panelist Charles Cooke, a conservative author, admitted Maher should “gloat to an extent” and even criticized Trump.
“I’ll say this. I don’t think he’ll be the nominee. I don’t think he’ll win a single primary. I do think he’s worrying. It’s worth saying he’s not like by 75-percent of the party, and the Republican’s have to decide, are they going to be party full of classical liberals, in the old sense of the word, who believe in freedom for everybody and opportunity for everybody. Or are they going to be the party of white identity politics, and Donald Trump unfortunately is tapping far more into the latter.”
Maher pointed out that other Republican candidates, like Ben Carson, are taking on Trump’s style.
“The other candidates are now trying to imitate him. They are trying to out Trump Trump. Ben Carson says he’d use drones on the Mexican border. I’m not kidding. He’d incinerate the mother f*ckers from the sky.”
Maher went on the lambast the Republican party as a whole.
“But is it fair to say that the Republican party in general gets involved in these fantasies about things that will never happen? None of what he’s proposing will ever happen, we are not going to deport 11 million people. The CBO says it would cost $300 billion, take 40 years and send us into a horrible recession. There’d be people outside Home Depot looking for work, but they’d be white.”
[Image via Getty Images] |
While many Republicans are calling on their party to be more inclusive after stinging losses in the 2012 election, the director of issues analysis of a conservative fundamentalist Christian organization says that it’s time to “clamp down” on immigrants because Hispanics voted for President Barack Obama.
“Hispanics are not Democrats, don’t vote Democrat because of immigration,” the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer said in video posted by Right Wing Watch on Tuesday. “It has to do with the fact that they are socialists by nature. They come from Mexico, which is a socialist country. They want big government intervention, they want big government goodies.”
“Now they want open borders — make no mistake — because they’ve got family and friends that they want to come up and be able to benefit from the plunder of the wealth of the United States, just as they have been able to do.”
He continued: “Republicans can pander all they want to Hispanics, to immigrants and it will not work. There is no way on Earth you care going to get them to leave the Democratic Party. It’s one reason we got to clamp down on immigration.”
Watch this video from American Family Association’s Focal Point, broadcast Nov. 13, 2012. |
Tomorrow night’s episode of Dark Matter, “She’s One Of Them Now”, is directed by the lovable Jason Priestley. Some BTS pics of the man in action…
Aware of my notorious temper, he gets things off on the right foot, showing up with an excellent bottle of scotch.
Concept meeting. He and his right hand man, 1st AD Brandon Tataryn, run the room!
I would often find him in his office, with that quizzical look on his face that said: “This script doesn’t make any sense!”
Relaxing on set, wondering what they’re going to service for lunch.
Pictured above: about to enter transfer transit so his clone can direct second unit
Spotting mermaids off the port bow.
“Okay, guys, I want a good clean fight…”
Challenging Shaun Sipos to a grappling match.
Hey, check out this great interview with actress Melanie Liburd (Nyx Harper):
Dark Matter: Melanie Liburd On Buildilng Trust With Nyx
“I think they see something in each other; they realize their hardships and they’ve both gone through struggles. They identify in that way and I think they’re almost kindred spirits, which happens quite early on. Even in the prison, Nyx and Two come up against each other and fight, and they’re impressed by each other. They develop that mutual respect for each other, and that helps her trust Nyx.”
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China has agreed to buy seal meat and seal oil from Canada, according to the federal fisheries minister.
"[We are] natural partners in the seafood industry," Fisheries Minister Gail Shea said Wednesday during a trade mission to China with Newfoundland and Labrador Fisheries Minister Clyde Jackman.
Shea said the deal between Canada and China will be signed Thursday.
P.O.V.: Do you support Canada’s new deal to sell seal meat to China? Take our survey.
"For the most part, our sealing industry derives its income from the sale of pelts," said Shea, in Beijing during a conference call with reporters.
"They don't get a lot of return from the sale of meat and oil, but what we are hoping to do because China is such a large market is work with our industry to support them in developing new products … so there is a lot of optimism in the industry today."
The price for seal pelts, which was at a high of more than $100 each a few years ago, sank to as low as $15 last year.
Gail said it is not possible to say what the value of the deal is now. She said the market will determine that.
Relief after a European ban
Seal hunters in Eastern Quebec are welcoming the deal after the European Union imposed a ban on imports of Canadian seal products in 2009.
Magdalen Islands Sealers' Association head Denis Longuépée says the deal will ease the financial losses for sealers brought on by the European ban.
"With this signing this morning, we're happy that countries like China decided not to follow those other countries, and sign with Canada. The population is so high in China that if everybody buys some pelt or product from seal, we won't have to trade anymore with Europe. So it's good news for us," said Longuépée.
The new deal covers edible seal products, but Longuépée believes it will stimulate sales of seal pelts as well.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare denounced the agreement, calling the seal hunt cruel, and saying it plans to launch a campaign against it in China.
Seal products from traditional Inuit hunts for subsistence are exempt from the ban, but Inuit groups challenged the general ban, arguing it would make it more difficult for them to sell their products. That argument was rejected in October by European Court of Justice Judge Marc Jaeger, who said the Inuit didn't provide evidence to justify their fears.
Animal protection groups applauded the decision.
Earlier this year, the Canadian government said the ban is unacceptable. It’s pursuing a complaint at the World Trade Organization.
Research by the federal Fisheries Department has found that the harp seal population of Atlantic Canada is now at between eight and nine million animals. A 2004 assessment of seal stocks estimated the harp seal population in the area at between 4.6 and 7.2 million. |
Gatekeeper is the new security feature introduced by Apple for the new (Mac) OS X update known as Mountain Lion. The idea is to enforce security for downloaded applications when users try to install them on their Apple PCs, but some critics described the feature as the beginning of the end for the user’s proper ownership of the OS behaviour and functionality on Apple machines.
Pretty ironically, this somewhat harsh criticism comes from a company working in the security field – the same one Apple is trying to cover more than ever within its latest consumer (and consumption) oriented products: on its corporate blog, Finnish antivirus company F-Secure dissects Gatekeeper and exposes some interesting findings about it.
The new OS X security feature restricts installation of Mac “apps” based on their sources, F-Secure explains, allowing applications downloaded “from Mac App Store”, “Mac App Store and identified developers” or “Anywhere”.
Under the new Gatekeeper regime, F-Secure states, Mac software developers will be pushed to sign with Apple ($99 per year) “to reduce friction”. And even if the user allowed installations of software downloaded “Anywhere”, The Developer ID program suggests that Gatekeeper could complain about the install operation anyway.
According to F-Secure, Gatekeeper is beginning “to solidify Mac’s walled garden”: “In the future – the F-Secure blog states – when Apple decides to further close its platform, device drivers could also be required to use Apple Developer IDs. Apple is famous for its focus on user experience, and it isn’t really very difficult to imagine it revoking third-party peripheral drivers in order to ‘secure’ that experience”.
Gatekeeper isn’t as much about more control “for” you, F-Secure concludes, as "more control – over – you". |
Tony Verna, a television director and producer who invented instant replay for live sports 51 years ago, has died. He was 81.
Verna died Sunday at his Palm Desert home after battling acute lymphoblastic leukemia, daughter Tracy Soiseth said.
CBS used instant replay for the first time in the Dec. 7, 1963 Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia, after Verna developed a method to cue the tape to pinpoint the play he wanted to immediately air again. He said he was looking for a way to fill those boring gaps between plays during a football telecast
The concept was so new that when Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh scored a touchdown, announcer Lindsey Nelson had to warn viewers: “This is not live! Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again!”
Instant replay quickly became a staple of sports broadcasting, and Verna’s innovation gave fans a new way to look at the games.
“Not many things you can do in life where you can change the way things were happening before,” Verna told The Associated Press in 2008.
Verna would go on to produce or direct five Super Bowls, the Olympics, the Kentucky Derby and even “Live Aid.”
His lasting legacy, though, is pulling back the curtain on sports and revealing what really goes on.
Verna is survived by his wife of 45 years, Carol, daughters Tracy Soiseth and Jenny Axelrod, son Eric Verna and three grandchildren. |
This article may be outdated due to metagame or patch changes. Help us by revising it.
e ][ h Cauthon Build Strategy Information Matchups: TvZ Type: Opening Creator: CauthonLuck Popularized by: CauthonLuck
Overview [ edit ]
The 111 Tech Banshee rush is aimed at catching the Zerg off-guard with very early Banshees. It also hard counters mass Roach and most FE Zerg builds.
Basic Build Order [ edit ]
Have 2 or 3 Marines ready by the time your Starport finishes in order to defend against early Zergling/Roach rushes and Overlords. If the Barracks/Factory Wall is not enough to block your choke point completely, (which is absolutely essential), use your Starport to close it up completely. If a small space is left open in your choke point, a Zergling rush could prove devastating. When your Supply Depot finishes, start pumping Banshees and resume SCV production.
You can build the Tech Lab add-on via the Factory while the Starport is in production. If your are on a large map such as Tal'Darim Altar it is possible to proxy the Starport. Doing this will mean slower production for the first Banshee (as you have to build the Tech Lab)however this will be countered by the closer flight path as well as reduced times on all subsequent Banshees.
The Attack [ edit ]
Start the harass as soon as possible. Banshee wins 1v1 with a Queen. Banshees win 2v1 with a Spore Crawler. The point of this build is to damage the Zerg to the point of losing, or severely enough that you can expand and transition. If you scout 1 base Lair, stop producing Banshees and begin the transition into another build (see below).
Transitioning [ edit ]
If you do not win outright with this build, you have a few options:
vs 1 base Lair, you can toss down 2 more Barracks and switch to a standard 3 Barracks build.
vs fast expand into fast Lair, throw down more Refineries and another Factory with Tech Lab and begin Thor+Hellion production.
vs fast expand with a second Queen or army production, (coming soon)
If you see early gas with a Baneling Nest, throw up a Bunker by the weakest part of your wall and begin producing Marines,as a Baneling bust is coming.
Countering [ edit ]
2-3 Spore Crawlers with good positioning can hold off Banshees (or kill them outright) and still allows fast Baneling bust if the Terran wall uses Supply Depots or the Tech Lab
Map Specific Notes [ edit ]
This build is extremely weak on Scrap Station due to the very short aerial path Overlords can take to scout it. In addition to the large ramp, a Zergling or Speedling run-by will easily shred this build.
On Blistering Sands, this build can be tricky. You must sacrifice some econ until you plant the Supply Depot in order to keep an eye on the rocks, which can throw off the timing of the build.
On Metalopolis, if the Zerg does not take his natural, Banshees will have easy access to the mineral line.
This works well in 2v2 matches well enough as long as you're not playing on Twilight Fortress, which has a huge ramp and is commonly plagued by double-rush strategies.
Despite the short Overlord scout path, Desert Oasis is a strong map for this build due to the huge ground path and small chokes.
Videos [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
As of patch 1.1.2 this build is no longer as effective, although it still works, as a Supply Depot is required to be built before a Barracks can begin construction. |
Recently, representatives from the Omaha Tribe, Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, Nez Perce, Choctaw Nation, Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, Ponka Tribe of Oklahoma signed the Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion.
Greenpeace Canada
The Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion is an "expression of Indigenous Law prohibiting the pipelines/trains/tankers that will feed the expansion of the Alberta Tar Sands" through the territorial lands and waters of the signatories.
The tribes and nations that signed the historic accord recently now join over 150 nations and tribes that have endorsed the treaty.
They stand together in a fierce wall of opposition.
"Along with our Indigenous allies all along the KXL route like the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) and all over Turtle Island (North America), we recognize the grave dangers in allowing this 'Black Snake' to enter our homelands," said Chairman Larry Wright Jr. of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. "As the State of Nebraska stands poised to make a potentially life-altering decision about permitting this poisonous bitumen to be inflicted on its population, we stand poised to protect all life now and in the future."
The treaty is an assertion of Indigenous law and a clear statement that tar sands pipelines (Keystone XL, Line 3, Trans Mountain, and Energy East) do not have the consent of all the nations and tribes whose lands and waters they seek to cross.
Bloomberg via Getty Images Handmade anti-pipeline signs are seen on the side of a road in the First Nations village of Old Massett, B.C., on Aug. 25, 2016.
One of the primary rights enshrined in the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) — which the prime minister of Canada, premier of Alberta and premier of British Columbia all claim to support and want implemented into law — is the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC).
Taken on its own, the term consent is a pretty straightforward one. Google dictionary defines consent as both a noun and a verb:
noun 1. permission for something to happen or agreement to do something.
"No change may be made without the consent of all the partners."
verb 1. give permission for something to happen.
"He consented to a search by a detective."
Reading these everyday definitions, it becomes clear at very basic level that none of the four proposed tar sands pipelines (KXL, Trans Mountain, Line 3 or Energy East) have the consent of all the nations and tribes that any of pipelines would pass through.
Governments and companies have a history of making decisions that impact Indigenous communities without their permission.
But, it's also important to take the other parts of FPIC into considerations.
For consent to be "free" it must be given without pressure, coercion or fear or repercussions. For consent to be "prior" it must be given prior to resource development and official approval of such development. For consent to be "informed" communities must be given all information needed to make a decision that is in their best interests; this includes not only logistical and financial information, but information on the environmental and social considerations of a project in an accessible and digestible format and language.
Paying lip service to UNDRIP will only get us so far. Any leader who supports the adoption of UNDRIP from international to national law must support FPIC. Any leader that wishes to uphold their commitments to Indigenous peoples and UNDRIP therefore cannot support any of the four tar sands pipelines that violate this foundational right to consent or the tenets of free, prior and informed consent.
Treaty Alliance Against Tarsands Expansion
It may not be a popular opinion for those seeking to win the influence of the oil industry or votes among its workers, but it's a necessary step in the path to reconciliation.
From colonization, to residential schools, to pipeline approvals, governments and companies have a history of making decisions that impact Indigenous communities without their permission. This practice needs to end before true healing can begin. Governments can't build the trust and relationships essential to reconciliation until they begin to truly respect the voices and rights of Indigenous Peoples, and start living up to the commitments they have already made to the First Peoples of these lands.
Over 150 nations and tribes have made it clear that they do not consent to tar sands pipelines.
It's time we listened.
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Richmond real estate lawyer Hong Guo says Chinese police have charged two of her former employees in connection to the disappearance of about $7.5 million that Guo alleges was stolen from her firm’s trust account, laundered through B.C. Lottery Corp. casino accounts, and transferred to China in the form of casino chips.
At a press conference Monday, Guo claimed that through her own investigations in B.C. and China, she has forwarded sufficient evidence to Chinese police authorities in order to secure charges against her former employees.
Guo claimed that through court actions, she has obtained B.C. casino transaction records to support her case.
Postmedia News has reported extensively on Guo’s case since late 2016. However, Guo’s allegation that suspects exploited weaknesses in B.C. Lottery Corp. accounts in order to launder funds stolen in Richmond and to transfer the criminal proceeds to China, will receive heightened scrutiny in the midst of an independent review into allegations of transnational money laundering in B.C. casinos. The first recommendations of Attorney-General David Eby’s reviewer Peter German will be released Tuesday.
In legal documents, Guo alleges that her former employees developed an inappropriate relationship in the office, and through a complex scheme, in March 2016 drained her trust account by forging her name on cheques, and then deposited millions in bank drafts into BCLC client accounts. Cash was withdrawn from casino accounts and somehow ended up in China, Guo’s legal filings allege.
On Monday, Guo added new details, alleging that suspects made massive cash and playing chip withdrawals from New Westminster’s Starlight Casino before fleeing to China.
“The facts I know, is (a female employee) took cash from her account every day, for a short period of time … $700,000, and $800,000. It’s a large amount. So the casino doesn’t think something is wrong?” Guo said.
Guo claimed that she also interviewed a New Westminster casino manager about her concerns.
“The manager said that, if you give us bank drafts into our account, the policy is you can (withdraw) as much cash as you like,” Guo said. “As long as it is a bank draft (deposit) you can withdraw cash.”
Even further, Guo claimed her investigation showed that gamblers can transfer BCLC casino chips to casinos in Asia, in order to exchange the B.C. gambling chips for cash outside of Canada.
Guo issued a statement saying: “Evidence obtained by Hong Guo through court order and Freedom of Information requests show (a female employee) transferred the money in the form of casino chips from her account at New Westminster’s … casino to casinos in China where they were turned into cash.”
Related
Guo said that for legal reasons, she could not provide casino transaction records to Postmedia. As Guo did not provide documents from China naming her former employees in connection to charges, Postmedia has decided not to name the man and woman.
The BCLC has claimed that patron gaming fund accounts, such as the one allegedly used by Guo’s former employee, have greater protections against money laundering, compared to large cash deposits. However, B.C. gaming enforcement branch documents raise concerns that bank drafts deposited into BCLC accounts are not adequately vetted for source of funds.
On Monday, Guo said that she believes in her case, these concerns about bank draft deposits and the vetting of funds in BCLC client accounts were proven true.
BCLC did not respond Monday to Postmedia’s request for comments on Guo’s allegations.
Guo also repeatedly accused the RCMP of failing to adequately investigate her case.
A confidential B.C. Gaming Enforcement Branch “Section 86” report obtained by Postmedia confirms that B.C. Lottery Corp. in April 2016 received a complaint at Starlight Casino in New Westminster, about the female suspect named by Guo.
“There were concerns that an unknown number of bank drafts submitted by (the suspect) for gambling purposes derived from a third party involved in fraud,” the document says. The suspect’s gaming privileges were cancelled and two banks, CIBC and BMO, investigated the alleged transactions, the document says. And several days later, a Richmond RCMP officer “confirmed he was investigating a $7.5 million fraud involving a law firm in Richmond,” the Section 86 report says. “(Suspect) is believed to be the recipient of some of those funds.”
Postmedia pointed to this document on Monday, and Guo responded: “I’m not aware of any action (RCMP) took … They didn’t help me at all.”
The RCMP did not respond to Postmedia’s requests for comment on Guo’s allegations.
Guo also claimed on Monday that a B.C. Law Society investigation of her trust fund shortage case has found no issues at her practice.
In response to questions from Postmedia after Guo’s press conference, Law Society spokesman David Jordan said: “Our investigation of Guo continues and details of any investigation remain confidential unless and until a citation is authorized.”
scooper@postmedia.com |
In captivity, tortoises often grow faster than their conspecifics in the wild. Here, we document growth (measured as change in body mass) in three individual Geochelone sulcata over an exceptionally long period of nearly 18 years and use growth data (measured as change in carapace length) from the literature on free-ranging animals for comparison. Body lengths almost reached a plateau in the animals due to the long observation period. After transformation of body length to body mass for data from wild animals, logistic growth curves were successfully fitted to all data. The resulting functions yielded a 1.4–2.6 times higher intrinsic growth rate in captive than in wild individuals. The logistic growth model estimated the inflexion point of the growth curve at 6–9 years for the captive animals. This coincided with age at sexual maturity, respectively observations of first egg-laying of a female and the masturbation of a male. The inflexion point of the growth curve for free-ranging individuals was estimated at 15 years. Raising tortoises on intensive feeding regimes in captivity may considerably shorten generation times during the breeding stage of restocking programmes, and slow-growing animals are more likely to thrive after release into the wild. Investigations on the health of offspring from fast-growing parents are lacking.
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The Two Row Wampum is one of the oldest treaty relationships between the Onkwehonweh original people of Turtle Island North America and European immigrants. The treaty was made in 1613
Andy Mager, Hickory Edwards, Netherlands Consul Rob de Vos, Chief Jake Edwards and Faithkeeper Oren Lyons reaffirm the Two Row treaty
The Two Row Wampum Treaty, also known as Guswenta or Kaswentha and as the Tawagonshi Agreement of 1613 or the Tawagonshi Treaty, is a mutual treaty agreement, made in 1613 between representatives of the Five Nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) and representatives of the Dutch government in what is now upstate New York.[1] The agreement is considered by the Haudenosaunee to be the basis of all of their subsequent treaties with European and North American governments, and the citizens of those nations, including the Covenant Chain treaty with the British in 1677 and the Treaty of Canandaigua with the United States in 1794.
The treaty is spiritually and culturally revered and widely accepted among the Indigenous peoples in the relevant territories, and documented by the wampum belts and oral tradition.[1] However, in more recent years the authenticity of the later, written versions of the agreement have been a source of debate, with some scholarly sources maintaining that a treaty between the Dutch and Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk Nation) did not take place or took place at a later date.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] In August 2013, the Journal of Early American History published a special issue dedicated to exploring the Two Row Tradition.[10]
Background [ edit ]
At the start of the 17th century, the Iroquois Mohawk and the Mahican territory abutted in what is now known as the mid-Hudson Valley. Soon after Henry Hudson's 1609 exploration of what is now known as the Hudson River and its estuary, traders from the United Provinces of the Netherlands set up factorijs (trading posts) to engage in the fur trade, exploiting for extractive purposes the trade networks that had existed for millennia. The Dutch traded with the indigenous populations to supply fur pelts particularly from beaver, which were abundant in the region. By 1614, the New Netherland Company was established and Fort Nassau was built, setting the stage for the development of the colony of New Netherland.[11]
Kaswentha [ edit ]
According to Jon Parmenter:[12]
Kaswentha may best be understood as a Haudenosaunee term embodying the ongoing negotiation of their relationship to European colonizers and their descendants; the underlying concept of kaswentha emphasizes the distinct identity of the two peoples and a mutual engagement to coexist in peace without interference in the affairs of the other. The Two Row Belt, as it is commonly known, depicts the kaswentha relationship in visual form via a long beaded belt of white wampum with two parallel lines of purple wampum along its length – the lines symbolizing a separate-but-equal relationship between two entities based on mutual benefit and mutual respect for each party’s inherent freedom of movement – neither side may attempt to "steer" the vessel of the other as it travels along its own, self-determined path. A nineteenth-century French dictionary of the Mohawk language defined the very word for wampum belt (kahionni) as a human-made symbol emulating a river, due in part to its linear form and in part to the way in which its constituent shell beads resemble ripples and waves. Just as a navigable water course facilitates mutual relations between nations, thus does kahionni, "the river formed by the hand of man", serve as a sign of "alliance, concord, and friendship" that links "divergent spirits" and provides a "bond between hearts".
The treaty [ edit ]
"Contemporary Haudenosaunee oral tradition identifies the original elaboration of kaswentha relations between Iroquois nations and Europeans with a circa 1613 agreement negotiated between Mohawks and a Dutch trader named Jacob Eelckens at Tawagonshi, as a precursor to the formal establishment of Dutch Fort Nassau at nearby Normans Kill."[13] According to Parmenter, "Dating of the original agreement prior to circa 1620 finds support in [a] 1701 recitation, in which Haudenosaunee delegates described their original agreement with the Dutch occurring 'above eighty years' prior to that date, and in 1744 Onondaga headman Canasatego dated the origin of the relationship to "above One Hundred Years Ago'."[14]
Parmenter has investigated the extent to which Haudenosaunee oral tradition is corroborated by surviving documentary (written) records and found that "the documentary evidence, considered in the aggregate, reveals a striking degree of consistency over time in the expression of fundamental principles of the kaswentha tradition by Haudenosaunee speakers", with "the fullest single written source that corroborates the early seventeenth-century origins of a kaswentha relationship between Iroquois nations and the Dutch appear[ing] in [...] 1689".[15] And the earliest record of Haudenosaunee speakers explicitly mentioning or reciting the kaswentha tradition before Anglo-American and French colonial audiences dates to more than 30 years before this, in 1656 (43 years after the putative origin of the treaty in 1613).[16]
While the evidence that the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch entered into some kind of political or economic agreement in the early seventeenth century is overwhelming, some historians have found reasons to be cautious about assuming the nature of that agreement was formal and treaty-like. The Dutch, for example, may not have recognized their agreement with the Haudenosaunee as a "treaty" in the way that Haudenosaunee tradition remembers it, and may instead have seen their agreement as something less official and more contingent. Mark Meuwese has examined the history of Dutch-Indigenous relations in Africa and Brazil and found that, before 1621, "Dutch traders did not conclude treaties with Native peoples in the Atlantic world. Various agreements and alliances were made, but these took place only when specific factors were involved — the threat of Iberian intervention and the presence of centralized political orders among Indigenous peoples, factors that were not present in North America."[17] Similarly, examining Dutch language sources pertaining to early Dutch trade voyages to the Hudson River and other areas in the mid-Atlantic region, Jaap Jacobs finds that "Dutch traders would have had no need to make a treaty with local Indian groups on behalf of the Dutch nation and there is no indication that they did so. On the other hand, there is good reason to believe that Dutch traders and local Native people would have made some sort of agreement as indicated by the Dutch building of the Fort Nassau on native lands and the Kleyntjen affair."[18] Jacobs concludes (along with Paul Otto) that[19]
whatever agreements or negotiations traders such as Jacob Eelkens and Hendrick Christiansen may have made with Native peoples, these could not be construed, at least in European terms, as diplomatic treaties between sovereign nations. [... This] does not, however, discredit the tradition of an agreement between Dutch and Iroquois representatives that would later became the basis for Anglo-British and then American negotiations with the Iroquois. The historical context does make it unlikely, at best, that such an event happened in the 1610s. The claim that 2013 is the four-hundredth anniversary of a first covenant is therefore not corroborated by historical research. However, after the 1621 establishment of the West India Company and particularly after the end of the Mohawk-Mahican War four years later, the context for such an enduring agreement is far more probable.
Nevertheless, Haudenosaunee tradition records not only the existence of a treaty, but its specific meaning, in the form of a Haudenosaunee reply to the initial Dutch treaty proposal:[20]
You say that you are our Father and I am your Son. We say 'We will not be like Father and Son, but like Brothers.' This wampum belt confirms our words. [...] Neither of us will make compulsory laws or interfere in the internal affairs of the other. Neither of us will try to steer the other's vessel.
The treaty is considered by Haudenosaunee people to still be in effect.[1] The Haudenosaunee tradition states:[21]
As long as the Sun shines upon this Earth, that is how long our Agreement will stand; Second, as long as the Water still flows; and Third, as long as the Grass Grows Green at a certain time of the year. Now we have Symbolized this Agreement and it shall be binding forever as long as Mother Earth is still in motion.
The Wampum Belt(s) [ edit ]
Wampum belts of the two-row style are merely one of many methods of representing in physical form the diplomatic and economic agreements implicit in the kaswentha relationship.
There is clear evidence of Haudenosaunee use of wampum for diplomatic functions during the pre-contact period,[22] while the post-contact period saw "increasing significance of wampum as a material form to facilitate communication across cultural boundaries".[23] Early evidence for wampum in the region indicates that the dominant style was a relatively simple, monochrome design, often with discoidal beads strung together (rather than tubular beads woven together). Historians debate whether or not the technology required to construct the sophisticated two-row style wampum belt (including, most importantly, tubular purple beads) was available to communities in the region prior to 1613;[24] however, Parmenter indicates that archeological evidence does not rule out the possibility that two-row wampum belts may have featured in the initial treaty negotiations between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee.[25]
The significance of the two-row style of wampum, according to Parmenter, is that it captures the original "ship and canoe" metaphor present in the Haudenosaunee understanding of the kaswentha relationship. Parmenter explains how this "ship and canoe" metaphor is one of many "media" by which the Haudenosaunee have represented pictorially their relationship to European newcomers over the centuries, with other media including "a piece of tree bark or rope" and (later) images of an iron chain and, eventually, a burnished silver and/or covenant chain.[26] But of these, it is the "ship and canoe" conception of the kaswentha relationship that is the deepest and most significant, and it is the two-row wampum that is understood to represent this conception most powerfully, with two rows of purple wampum beads against a background of white beads,[1] each row representing a parallel river, down which the respective vessels of each people travel, independently but in mutual support of each other.[27]
The question of what materials — wampum or otherwise — were exchanged at the initial negotiations of the treaty cannot be answered definitively. While it is possible that a two-row wampum belt featured in the initial treaty negotiations, there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. There is, however, evidence in the form of Haudenosaunee oral tradition that wampum belts featured, if not in the original negotiations, then at least in the earliest rituals of renewal (of which there were many) between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch (later the British). According to Parmenter:[28]
Three of the Haudenosaunee recitations (1656, 1722, and 1744) associate the agreement directly with wampum belts, and Johnson punctuated his 1748 recitation with a "large Belt of Wampum". Exchanges of wampum belts also occurred commonly in association with renewals of the alliance at treaty negotiations in which neither Iroquois nor New York authorities were recorded making explicit recitations of the kaswentha tradition. On two such occasions the sources refer to a "Chain Belt," but no documented example provides a specific correlation with a Two Row-patterned belt.
While most of the earliest recorded recitations of the kaswentha relationship between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch do not mention wampum belts specifically, descriptions "of wampum belts in documentary sources, particularly from the early period of contact, are notoriously vague."[29] Moreover, as artifacts wampum belts were extremely prone to deterioration and disassembly,[30] so there is no expectation that early belts should have survived had they in fact been exchanged in the early seventeenth century.
In any event, by 1870 the image of the two-row wampum belt had come to symbolize for the Haudenosaunee their ongoing treaty and kaswentha relationship with the Dutch crown.[31]
Beyond the direct evidence represented by the recitations, additional documentary sources amplify our confidence in the deep roots of the fundamental concepts of the kaswentha relationship: its beginnings in the early decades of the seventeenth century, its rhetorical framing in terms of an "iron chain" forged and renewed with the Dutch prior to 1664, and its early association with the "ship and canoe" discourse present in the explicit "Two Row" articulations of the tradition that appear after circa 1870. It is important to point out that the while the language of the "chain" connecting the two peoples persisted in recitations of the tradition over time, it never supplanted the "ship and canoe" language characteristic of Haudenosaunee understandings of kaswentha. As illustrated in the recitations [...], the idea of a rope, and later a "chain" of iron, then silver represented a critical component of the tradition that bound the two peoples together in friendship as a necessary precursor to the kind of relationship embodied by two vessels travelling along a parallel route. The latter idea, in other words, related to the former concept – the two were neither incompatible nor mutually exclusive.
Diana Muir Appelbaum has written that:[32]
there is no evidence that such a thing as an "original" two-row wampum belt ever existed. Nor is there any evidence of the existence of a 1613 treaty beyond a claim traceable to a document forged in the 1960s by a historian who collected and wrote about old manuscripts.
Indeed, no documentary evidence (including wampum, which is very fragile) survive from the original treaty negotiations of 1613. But, as Parmenter points out:[33]
Evidence of Haudenosaunee and European recitations of the kaswentha tradition indicates clearly that the remarkable durability over time of ideas associated with a Two Row relationship does not depend on the legitimacy of a single document and that Haudenosaunee and contemporary Europeans "verbalized" these ideas long before the late nineteenth century. [...] Kaswentha relations were not static – they evolved over time as ties between the Iroquois and the Dutch (and the latter's English and American successors) deepened and sociopolitical circumstances grew more complex – but they did exist. Indeed, [...] it is incumbent upon all scholars considering the historicity of indigenous (not only Haudenosaunee) oral traditions (especially regarding something as fundamentally significant as kaswentha), to do more than simply identify a single document as a fake, or to set the bar for evidentiary proof of a concept's existence to practically impossible standards – such as requiring a surviving "physical" Two Row belt from the colonial era that can be explicitly associated with a documentary source.
Oral tradition [ edit ]
Onondaga leaders state that the oral tradition which accompanies the wampum belts is evidence that an agreement was made in 1613.[1] Andy Mager of the Syracuse Peace Council was quoted in The Post-Standard as saying “We believe the Haudenosaunee oral history of the treaty...We believe the basic outlines of a treaty and that a treaty was negotiated between representatives of the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee in or around 1613.”[1]
Interpretations of the treaty [ edit ]
Oren Lyons describes the Two Row Treaty at the UN, August 9, 2013.
The Netherlands have been called upon as allies by Haudenosaunee in international affairs, notably at the League of Nations in 1923 in a conflict with Canada over membership and at the United Nations in 1977, requesting the Haudenosaunee passport to be honored internationally. The Dutch government honored the passport until 2010. It remains unclear if the policy will be changed in recognition of the 400th anniversary of the treaty.[34] In September 2013, three Haudenosaunee leaders traveled to the Netherlands for an official visit in recognition of the anniversary, traveling on Haudenosaunee passports.[35][36]
The Two Row Wampum continues to play a role in defining the relationship between citizens of New York State and Haudenosaunee residents of the region. In 2006, a dispute over whether Onondaga Nation students could be permitted to wear native regalia at their graduation ceremony at Lafayette High School in LaFayette, New York, was resolved in part through the school board's consideration and application of the principles of the Two Row Wampum.[37]
Larger disputes concerning extant treaties based on the Two Row Wampum, such as the Treaty of Canandaigua, remain unresolved through litigation and pending land claims.
The Two Row Treaty contradicts the 15th Century papal Doctrine of Discovery, which decreed that Christian European nations could seize lands of non-Christian peoples whom they encountered in the New World. Modern legal rulings, including a 2005 decision by the US Supreme Court against Haudenosaunee plaintiffs, continue to hinge on that religious doctrine, and Two Row Treaty supporters promote the treaty as a legal standard to replace it.[38][39]
Supporters of the Two Row Wampum Treaty note that it conveys a respect for the laws of nature and thus an obligation for ecological stewardship. The treaty has been cited as an inspiration to clean up polluted waters such as Onondaga Lake and the Mohawk River. “Water is sacred, like all parts of creation,” said Freida Jacques, an Onondaga Clanmother. “All life relies on it. It has a sacred duty, given to it by the Creator, to give all creation clean, fresh water.” [40]
Controversial written document [ edit ]
The Tawagonshi document. New York State Library/Manuscripts and Special Collections, L.G. van Loon Collection (SC16677).
The existence of an alleged written version of the treaty was first made public in an article in 1968 by documents collector L.G. van Loon.[1] He claimed to have acquired it from an unnamed person on the Mississaugua reserve[which?] in Canada.[1]
In 1987, academics Charles Gehring, William Starna, and William Fenton published an article in the New York History journal entitled “The Tawagonshi Treaty of 1613: The Final Chapter." Their theory is that this written version is a forgery because it contains what they argue are grammatical anachronisms; that a blend of handwriting styles from the 17th and 20th centuries is used; that the names of villages and not chiefs are used; and that the writing is "too smooth" to be made by a 17th-century quill pen.[1] Herkens writes that the document contains c. 40 grammatical anachronisms, and that on grammatical grounds it is likely that the text was written in the 20th century.[41] Given that Van Loon forged other pieces from the same period, they point to him as the most probable forger.[42][43] In 2013, linguistic experts Harrie Hermkens, Jan Noordegraaf, and Nicoline van der Sijs submitted the document to further linguistic and historical analysis, including its provenance and connection to Lawrence G. Van Loon. They also found the document to contain "a significant number of anachronisms making it impossible for the text to have originated in 1613. Nor is it possible that it is a later copy of a document since lost."[44]
Robert Venables, a retired Cornell University professor, is among those who remain convinced that the document version is also valid,[1] and concurs with other scholars who point out that any inconsistencies in language and pen strokes can be explained by the fact that it was copied by hand years after 1613.[1]
The document was given to the Onondagas and remains near Syracuse, New York.[1]
400th Anniversary Celebration [ edit ]
First paddlers arrive at Kanatsiohareke, with Sakokwenionkwas Tom Porter, July 2013.
In July and August 2013, hundreds of Native Americans and their allies took part in a river journey to recognize and renew the Two Row Wampum Treaty. Canoeing and kayaking across New York State, the participants called attention to the treaty and its significance for native land rights and environmental protection. The paddlers traveled from Onondaga, birthplace of the Haudenosaunee league, along the Mohawk and Hudson rivers to New York City, ending at a special session at the United Nations. The anniversary journey brought world attention to the Two Row Treaty.[40][45][46]
Organized by the Onondaga Nation and Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation (NOON), the renewal journey covered over 300 miles, with public events at sites including Kanatsiohareke Mohawk Community, Albany, Poughkeepsie, and Beacon NY, where Native leaders and public officials discussed the treaty and its bearing on current issues. On August 9, the paddlers arrived in New York City to attend a UN session for Indigenous Peoples Day with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and member state representatives. At the session, UN officials underscored the UN’s role as a peacemaker, negotiator, and advocate for treaty rights. Oren Lyons, a diplomat from the Onondaga Turtle Clan, described the Two Row Treaty as the foundation for all Haudenosaunee treaties, many since broken by New York State, the US and Canada. UN representatives from Panama and Bolivia described their work to restore land to native ownership and protection. The UN Secretary for Human Rights outlined the UN’s goal to redress treaty violations, treat them as human rights violations, and help enforce treaties like the Two Row in the future.[47][48][49]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ] |
(CNN) -- The San Francisco, California, Board of Supervisors banned most McDonald's Happy Meals with toys Tuesday. Despite objections and ridicule from opponents, the vote overrode the mayor's veto and officially approved the ban.
The new ordinance, which requires Happy Meals and other fast food with toys to meet new nutritional standards or else be removed from menus, goes into effect December 1, 2011.
The law is the first of its kind for a major American city, and San Francisco officials said they hope other cities would follow. The ordinance seeks to battle a child obesity epidemic by forcing fast-food chains to make any meal with a toy more nutritious for kids.
McDonald's and the restaurant industry contended the government regulation was unwanted by parents. Supporters of the measure, however, said the use of free toys, often tied to characters or themes in new movies, pandered to kids, to get them to buy meals high in fat and calories.
If restaurants want to offer toys as incentives, the meals must meet new nutrition standards, officials said.
Under the new regulations, food and beverages must contain fewer than 600 calories, and less than 35 percent of the total calories would be allowed to come from fat. The meal must contain half a cup of fruit and three-fourths a cup of vegetables, and offer less than 640 milligrams of sodium and less than 0.5 milligrams of trans fat. Breakfast will have the option of offering half cups of fruit or vegetables.
Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoed the "healthy meal ordinance," but the Board of Supervisors had enough votes -- 8 out of 11 --to override that veto Tuesday, as expected.
"From the Institutes of Medicine to the World Health Organization, we know that reducing the consumption of junk food by kids could spare the health of millions and save billions of dollars to our overstrapped public health system," said Supervisor Eric Mar, sponsor of the legislation.
"That's why pediatricians, educators, parents, community health advocates, and thousands of individuals lined up to support this ordinance," Mar added.
When he vetoed the measure, Newsom said, "Parents, not politicians, should decide what their children eat, especially when it comes to spending their own money."
"Despite its good intentions, I cannot support this unwise and unprecedented governmental intrusion into parental responsibilities and private choices." |
President Donald Trump, who spoke at a closed-press fundraiser in Greensboro, did not pinpoint any lawmakers for criticism. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Trump vents to wealthy donors about failure to repeal Obamacare
President Donald Trump told a gathering of wealthy donors in North Carolina on Saturday evening that he is determined to push forward on health care reform — but acknowledged that he is facing serious obstacles in doing so.
At a time of widespread frustration in the Republican Party about its repeated failure to repeal Obamacare, the president said he wants to restart the talks. But, according to two people present for the remarks, he underscored the challenges of getting a majority of support for any legislation in the Senate, noting that a small group of GOP holdouts opposed the repeal efforts.
Story Continued Below
The president walked the group through what had been attempted so far. No matter how you approached it, Trump said, getting to the 50-vote threshold was tough.
Trump, appearing at the Greensboro home of Republican Party donor Louis DeJoy, did not pinpoint any lawmakers for criticism, as he has done previously with Arizona Sen. John McCain and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, both of whom have balked at getting behind the specific repeal efforts. Trump also chose not to attack Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, another past target of his frustration, the two attendees said.
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The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Trump touched on a variety of topics during the fundraiser, including the looming fight over tax reform, his past experiences on the campaign trail, and hurricane relief efforts. At one point, the president attacked the media for his recent trip to Puerto Rico, expressing frustration over its coverage of him tossing paper towels, basketball-style, to storm victims.
But he spent much of the evening discussing health care reform. Several people in attendance said the president did not rule out the possibility of working with Democrats to get something done.
Trump earlier on Saturday had tweeted that he had called Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Friday to see whether Democrats wanted to work together on “a great HealthCareBill.” Schumer later said in a statement that Trump had suggested another Obamacare repeal-and-replace effort, a non-starter for Democrats.
The issue is a sensitive one for Republican Party donors, many of whom spent the past eight years cutting checks to the GOP in hopes of repealing Obamacare. Some influential contributors have said they will not open their wallets until the party passes something.
The North Carolina event raised about $2 million for the Republican National Committee and Trump’s reelection efforts. It drew a number of prominent GOP figures in the state, including former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory. |
The April 8th release of an NSA hacking toolkit by the group known as the Shadowbrokers shook technology circles when it was revealed that serious exploits targeting Microsoft may have been used to attack global banking systems.
In the aftermath of the revelations, BBC News was called out by Wikileaks editor Julian Assange for misrepresenting the degree to which Microsoft has already addressed such serious vulnerabilities.
The Shadowbrokers hacking tools are a significant, serious event. CNN has stated that the leaks put “a powerful nation state-level attack tool in the hands of anyone who wants to download it to start targeting servers.” Fortune reported that the Shadowbrokers release had severe security implications, and that there appeared to be at least several dozen exploits, including zero-day vulnerabilities in the release. Some of the exploits offer a potential “God Mode” on select Windows systems which would give an intruder total control.
Microsoft released a security update in response to the news, which stated that it had already patched “most” of the vulnerabilities. When discussing “nation state-level attack tools,” this is a critical distinction. Microsoft’s statement made it clear that it was not claiming to have wholly resolved the issue or to have made itself completely invulnerable.
BBC News ran an article on the leaks titled: “Microsoft patched ‘NSA hack’ Windows flaws before leak” which deliberately misquoted Microsoft’s security update in order to imply that the company had entirely resolved the issue.
The BBC referred to the exploits as “addressed,” and “already fixed,” specifically misstating the reality of Microsoft’s remaining vulnerabilities which the company itself admitted were only “mostly” addressed.
The state-run media company was immediately called out by Wikileaks founder and editor Julian Assange on Twitter, who said the publication was full of “breathless dolts.”
The episode is the latest in a long history of scandals to hit the BBC over time, including false reports concerning Ethiopian arms purchases, faking footage of child laborers in Bangladesh and actively working to cover up the Jimmy Saville abuse scandal.
Disobedient Media has previously reported on a similar instance of misrepresentation during Wikileaks’ Vault 7 release where Buzzfeed exaggerated statements made by Apple to imply that they had fixed the newly revealed security exploits when this was not the case.
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The treatment of hundreds of patients with hepatitis C with potentially lifesaving drugs has been abruptly halted due to funding problems.
The national hepatitis C programme has told hospitals not to make any further applications for funding support for patients until treatment numbers are “realigned”.
Just six months into the year, the €30 million allocated by the Government to the programme is virtually spent and treating doctors have been told that only their sickest patients will be approved this year. The programme manager said the new arrangements are interim.
The freeze on funding is being blamed, in internal correspondence seen by The Irish Times, on a “significantly increased and unpredicted” number of claims for reimbursement for hepatitis C treatment in June.
Reimbursement claims for June alone reached €10 million, up from €3 million in January and February.
No further applications for funding are being considered and no further patients will be started on treatment, according to a note to specialists by Michele Tait, the manager of the programme. The measures will also affect patients whose treatment is approved but has not yet started.
More than 600 registered patients, whose treatment has not started, are affected, but doctors say hundreds more have been diagnosed recently and will also be affected. Some have severe cirrhosis of the liver and could die unless they receive treatment or a transplant.
Ms Tait says the new arrangements are interim, and designed to ensure the programme operates within budget and that clinical effectiveness is maintained.
“The rug was pulled from under the feet of some of our clients from one day to the next,” says Nicola Perry, manager of Community Response, an alcohol and liver health service in Dublin’s south inner city. “They are angry, and disheartened. People living with addiction often feel disenfranchised by the rest of society, and this showed that, once again, they don’t matter.”
Seriously ill
The freeze has caused concern among doctors treating hepatitis C patients, many of whom are seriously ill and had been given dates for treatment. They were forced to turn away patients who turned up at a scheduled appointment for their treatment.
Dr Orla Crosbie, a gastroenterologist in Cork University Hospital, warned Ms Tait that many of her patients may deteriorate while awaiting therapy. Her patients include a health worker who acquired hepatitis C through a needle stick injury and patients with cirrhotic livers. “Several have been given dates to start therapy, with many changing drugs. Many have made work and care commitments for children to facilitate therapy in the autumn.”
The HSE confirmed new applications were not being taken at present due to an “unprecedented volume of patients being commenced on treatment in May and June”. The programme must operate within its budget, it said.
The realignment of the programme will be concluded within weeks after which new patients prioritised by their doctors will start treatment, a spokeswoman said.
About 30,000 people are living with hepatitis C in Ireland. Most acquired the disease through injecting drugs but 1,300 were infected by contaminated blood products provided by the State.
In recent years, newly developed anti-viral drugs have transformed the treatment of the disease, with cure rates of up to 90 per cent . Prices have dropped as generic versions have come on the market, but treatment still costs more than €20,000 a patient.
Ms Tait says the restrictions would remain in place “until such time as the programme is fully informed on the funding and therefore volume of treatment which is available to the year end”. |
A Charleston County probate judge Irvin G. Condon began accepting marriage license applications for same-sex couples on Wednesday morning. The judge was asked Thursday morning to refrain from releasing those licenses until the Supreme Court made a decision on the issue.
This latest move comes as the same-sex couple from Charleston who were the first to apply for a marriage license continues to wait for their license following the lapse of a 24-hour waiting period.
Charleston County Councilwoman Colleen Condon, 44, and her fiance, 43-year-old Nichols Bleckley, who were at the Supreme Court and the Charleston County marriage license office, respectively, said they weren't surprised to hear the latest news, but they were disappointed.
"This is exhausting," Condon said. "I'm an elected official, so luckily I'm used to dealing with the press. I'm a lawyer, so at least I'm used to dealing with the law, but this is overwhelming."
Condon went as far to compare Attorney General Alan Wilson to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who famously and personally blocked several African-American students from entering the University of Alabama during the height of the civil rights movement.
"While there is no one physically standing in the way of giving us our marriage license, Alan Wilson as far as I'm concerned is doing the exact same thing," Condon said. "He might as well be standing in front of the door of this very building telling me I can't get my marriage license. It's the exact same thing."
Wilson asked the courts for a decision late Wednesday evening after Judge Condon accepted 25 same-sex marriage applications with approval for a license following the waiting period.
Condon also filed a motion against Wilson on Thursday morning."I was certainly disappointed Alan Wilson decided to get involved and say somehow the [Bradacs vs. Haley] case about benefits -- I love it -- benefits for a state trooper are the same as my right to get married, but that's different from getting a marriage license from the state of Virginia," Condon said.
Copyright 2014 WIS. All rights reserved. |
Donald Trump will assemble a group of high-powered lobbyists Thursday, so they can pitch him on their special interests behind closed doors at Trump Tower.
The “Trump Leadership Council,” as it has been dubbed, was formed to provide the presumptive Republican nominee with guidance on various industries. Thursday’s multi-hour meeting will include whirlwind rounds of presentations by America’s powerful defense, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and commerce industries, according to a source involved with planning the meeting.
But this gathering signifies a distinct change in the Trump campaign.
The business mogul has previously spurned lobbyists: in the early days of his campaign he bragged that he didn’t need to raise money from powerful special interests. “I don’t want lobbyists. I don’t want special interests,” he told CBS in August of last year.
Trump “turned down $5 million last week from a very important lobbyist,” he said in August, “because there are total strings attached to a thing like that. He’s going to come to me in a year or two years and he’s going to want something for a country that he represents or for a company that he represents.”
But in recent months he has sung a different tune, hiring Paul Manafort as a senior aide, despite his work for the so-called torturers’ lobby and bringing a bevy of other politicos with lobbying connections into the fold.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Thursday’s meeting is also straight out of a Bernie Sanders supporters worst nightmare. Sanders, of course, has run a campaign opposed to the “millionaires and billionaires” that he believes have far too great a role in American democracy—and as such Trump’s outreach to lobbyists runs contrary to Trump’s outreach to the Vermont senator’s supporters.
“To all of those Bernie Sanders voters who have been left out in the cold by a rigged system of superdelegates, we welcome you with open arms,” Trump said Tuesday, as Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination.
The Aerospace Industries Association will lead the pitch on national security issues: founded nearly 100 years ago, the AIA represents many of the major aerospace and defense firms in the United States.
The association has been an outspoken opponent of defense spending cuts.
“Most members of the industry have decided that AIA was the most appropriate group to go do the briefing,” a defense industry source told The Daily Beast. The AIA declined to comment for this story.
Joining the delegation will be representatives of some of the country’s most influential defense contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon.
“We were asked to participate and we will have a representative there,” said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for Boeing. “We interact with campaigns of both parties up and down the ballot to provide them our views on issues that impact our business and employees.”
Other large defense firms declined to comment on their participation—while some on condition of anonymity said that their organization chose not to directly participate, despite an invitation to do so.
There was some significant hesitancy among some defense firms to get involved—they didn’t want to signal any endorsement of Trump’s candidacy, but are positioning themselves to maintain influence should he beat Hillary Clinton for the presidency.
Their timidity is accentuated by how controversial Trump’s candidacy has been lately—most recently due to his racist remarks about an Indiana-born judge of Mexican ethnic heritage—but money transcends politics.
—with additional reporting by Olivia Nuzzi. |
In honor of Mathematics Awareness Month I will take an idiosyncratic look at mathematical aspects of complexity, in particular some history of mathematical approaches and insights into this subject...
Joseph Malkevitch
York College (CUNY)
malkevitch at york.cuny.edu
Are tax forms complex? Is the world wide system of selling stocks a complex one? What about the Mandelbrot set?
Figure 1 (Mandelbrot set - Courtesy of Wikipedia)
What is a complex system? How can we measure complexity? Is complexity "good" or "bad?"
One of the features of mathematics is that it likes to streamline the insights that it has obtained and present its ideas in an organized and transparent manner, often starting from first principles. Yet many people do not see mathematics as a sleek or simple subject. They see it as a very complex subject.
Every year, to try to put in perspective the important contributions mathematics makes to America, we celebrate Mathematics Awareness Month. This year the theme for Mathematics Awareness Month is Unraveling Complex Systems. One particular aspect of complex systems that mathematics has helped illuminate is the way a system which has many parts organizes so that it often shows regularities that evolve over time. An example of this is when one sees a flock of birds take off and soon after they are airborne, one sees an organized pattern rather than the pandemonium of the flock taking to the air. Another example of this genre is the phenomenon of fireflies "blinking" in unison. Sometimes things which are disorderly assemble themselves into an orderly array, but sometimes the opposite occurs. Sometimes things we are used to working in concert, such as an electrical network or communications system (cell phone network), go into disarray. This can occur because of the failure of some critical backbone to a complex system which, when it fails, causes smaller subunits of the system to go down and eventually can bring the whole system to a halt.
In honor of Mathematics Awareness Month I will take an idiosyncratic look at mathematical aspects of complexity, in particular some history of mathematical approaches and insights into this subject.
History
As the importance of a topic matures it is often useful to look back and see the roots of the subject and how it evolved with time. It is not an accident that deterministic systems were studied before stochastic ones. For systems that have a mixture of deterministic and chance elements, it is common to take on the deterministic parts first. One source of complexity is that chance events are are harder to sort out. Or so it seemed until relatively recently - more of this in a bit. Thus, algebra and geometry were developed in many sophisticated directions (in Egypt, China, Babylonia, India, etc.) before a systematic approach to probability theory started to emerge in the 17th century in the work of Pascal and Fermat. Another early pioneer in the complexities that chance events cause in the understanding of our work was Thomas Bayes.
Figure 2 (Reverend Thomas Bayes)
Whereas until relatively recently a frequentist-based approach to making decisions was the norm, more and more discussions are being made of the use of ideas implicit in Bayes work for making decisions and reaching conclusions. For example, suppose one wants to argue that a certain die, which looks very symmetrically manufactured, is a fair die. One might roll this die 60 times and record the relative frequency of one dot, two dots, ..., six dots. However, it not very likely that each number of spots will occur equally often. If 6 occurs slightly more often than the other numbers of spots, does this mean a slight bias towards 6 appearing? A Bayesian approach might use the "data" from the 60 tosses as input for further work to try to give an answer to the question as to whether or not the die is fair.
It would seem that systems that involve randomness would raise "complexity issues" beyond those of deterministic systems, so it was a big surprise when it emerged that deterministic systems could show behavior of such complexity that had not been dreamed of! This type of behavior has now come to be called "chaotic" behavior to distinguish it from systems that are subject to "genuine" randomness. The discovery of deterministic chaotic systems motivated a renewed interest into how to tell if a system was truly random, and how to design systems that looked as if they were random but were "pseudo-random."
In retrospect there were a variety of examples of deterministic "chaos" in the work of Poincaré before the more recent work put chaos "on the map." Relatively recent contributions were made by Robert May, James Yorke (who coined the use of the word "chaos" to describe complex deterministic behavior), Mitchell Feigenbaum and others. May called attention to the complexities of ecological systems. A hallmark of this period was the complex behavior associated with the logistic map.
Figure 3 (Bifurcations of the logistic map - courtesy of Wikipedia)
This involves the iteration of computing from a given input x, the value r(x)(1-x) (where r is a fixed constant) as an "output" and then using this output value to compute r(x)(1-x) again. The fact that a quadratic equation could show this level of complexity was quite a surprise. It was Robert May (now Lord May of Oxford) who in 1978 first called attention to the complexities of this map in a variety of simple models motivated by questions in biology.
Figure 4 (Lord May, Courtesy of Wikipedia)
The mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz had in essence called attention to a similar phenomenon in what is seen in difference equations for differential equations. It was Lorenz who coined the term "butterfly effect." This notion suggests that something as minute as a butterfly's flapping its wings can be responsible for much more dramatic effects separated from the original action in time and space. In the area of chaos people also speak of sensitive dependence on initial conditions. For example, if one runs a simulation of a system (based on a differential equation or difference equation), one needs to have initial conditions to indicate the starting state for the system. The difference equation then can be used to see what the future state of the system would be. It had been thought that a small difference in the starting conditions for running the simulation would lead to similar long term outcomes. This turned out not to be true. Two simulations that differed in the initial conditions that varied in the 10th decimal place might have nothing to do with each other after a very small number of time steps! Lorenz noted this phenomenon in the context of weather predictions.
Computers and complexity
One of the major tools people use to deal with complex systems are computers. It is often difficult to understand the relation of computer systems to humans these days because humans have come to depend so much on complex systems that can be run only by computers. For example, trades are now routinely carried out on stock markets much more quickly than could be done by humans without computer systems. Historically people have taken comfort in the fact that computers do impressive things because of their speed but that they don't seem capable of feats that seem to involve "thinking" or "creativity." Traditional examples of seemingly unique human skills are playing checkers, playing chess, and other "games" that seem to require thinking and intelligence. First, a checkers-playing program was developed which played checkers better than any human opponent. IBM developed a computer system known as Deep Blue which beat Gary Kasparov in a well-publicized match. Although Deep Blue was "retired," modern chess playing programs are amazingly good.
To deal with hard and technical problems humans have turned to machines - computers - to help them. While such computing machines have a long history, it was only in the 20th century that dramatic progress was made. Two major figures in this work were John Von Neumann and Alan Turing.
Figure 5 (Photo of John Von Neumann)
Von Neumann was a pioneer in developing the theory and implementation of early stored program digital computers. Turing's interest in computers was spurred by his World War II efforts to use computers to help break German codes.
Figure 6 (Photo of Alan Turing)
Turing, one of the pioneers of computer science and the complexity questions that became a part of computer science, invented a simplified "conceptual" computer now known as the Turing machine. The Turing machine is a conceptual device which marks symbols on an infinite tape which can be advanced in either direction from the cell that is currently being "looked at" by a "head" or reader. Turing was able to show that any problem that could be solved on a "standard" computer could also be solved on a Turing machine. Thus, this "standardized" device enabled one to talk about complexity without talking about the hardware of an actual machine. A supercomputer can solve problems more quickly than a Turing machine when they can be solved, but it cannot solve any problem that a Turing machine cannot solve!
The Turing machine can be used to investigate which problems a computer could solve and which are too hard/complex for computers. This is a curious turn of phrase because it is not customary to frame discussions of computers with what they cannot do! However, it has been shown using human ingenuity that there are indeed such problems. One of the best known of such problems is the halting problem. Turing showed that the halting problem could not be answered by a computer in 1937, though the name "halting problem" is due to the mathematician and computer scientist Martin Davis. The result asks for an algorithm which, when given to a Turing machine, will answer yes or no to this question: Will a given program terminate in a finite amount of time? It turns out there is no such algorithm. Such questions are known as algorithmically undecidable. Questions such as this are related to the fundamental questions about "decidability" in mathematical systems that Kurt Gödel studied.
Complexity classes
In discussing the complexity of different kinds of problems, the problems involved can be placed into different categories. Even for experts who are trying to stay abreast of developments in this rapidly emerging field, there is a complex alphabet soup of classes and types of problems considered. Here I will try merely to address some issues related to the best known of these classes and ideas. Among the kinds of questions that are considered are decision problems (ones that have a "yes" or "no" answer) and optimality problems (problems where one is seeking a "best" solution with respect to some objective function). When talking about complexity it is common to use the phrase "instance" of a problem to refer to a particular case of the problem involved. For example, if one's problem is to sort a list of n integers from smallest to largest, an instance of size 6 would be to sort the six numbers 5, 9, 23, 3, 1, 100 and an instance of size 10 would be to sort 1, 5, 2, 7, 90, 30, 200, 38, 2, 11. One might talk about the problem of factoring integers with n digits and an instance of this problem for n = 8 would be to factor 81,123,121.
The complexity class P consists of problems which can be solved in terms of a natural parameter of the problem n in a polynomial (in terms of n) amount of time (work) . For example, for a list of n positive integers one can ask how long it will take to sort these numbers into a list from smallest to largest. Sorting positive integers is an example of a problem in P, since there are known algorithms which accomplish this in polynomial time. We are not considering which is the best polynomial time algorithm, only whether there is a polynomial time algorithm or not. Clearly, it is of interest for a particular kind of problem like sorting to know "optimal" algorithms. However, in many cases it is valuable merely to know that there is a polynomial upper bound for the effort needed in solving a problem.
The complexity class NP (non-deterministic polynomial) refers to problems where it is possible to check that a proposed answer to an instance of such a problem can be solved in polynomial time. For example, consider the number 81,123,121. While this number may be "hard" to factor, if someone gives a proposed factorization (29 x 83 x 33703) it is quite speedy to check that is indeed a correct factorization. NP is the complexity class of problems for which one can check answers to instances of a problem in a polynomial time amount of work in terms of the size of an instance of the problem. The question of the complexity of factoring is of particular interest because there are cryptological systems whose security depends on the fact that factoring some large integers into primes seems to take a lot of computer time. Currently, it is not known if factoring can be done in polynomial time. Until relatively recently it was not known if one could check if an integer was a prime in polynomial time, but this was done in 2002. However, the algorithm which showed that prime testing was in P is not as practical as other algorithms for checking if a specific number is prime. There are still important natural questions (factoring, graph isomorphism) whose complexity is not fully understood.
When discussing the complexity of instances of a problem, some instances of the problem may be much easier to solve than others. This leads to the distinction between worst-case complexity questions versus average-case complexity. There may be some situations where there are very hard instances of the problem but on average the situation may be much better. For example, there are linear programming problems which require an exponential amount of "work" to solve using a particular algorithm, although "typical" linear programming instances may be answerable using the algorithm rather quickly. As complexity theory has developed, results about the worst-case behavior of problems has typically come earlier than results about the average-case complexity of the same problems. Because some problems come up in applications a lot, there are also issues about finding approximate answers which are "good enough" quickly.
What is your intuition? Are the classes of problem P and NP the same or different? What is being asked is are there problems which belong to P but not to NP? Are there problems which are in NP but not in P? Many people find it easy to imagine that there are problems which are easy to check if one has a proper answer but for which finding an answer might not be easy to do. However, rather astonishingly, we don't know if P = NP or not. This problem is of sufficient importance that it is viewed by many as the most important unsolved problem in computer science and mathematics. The Clay Foundation has offered a million dollar prize for the resolution of this problem.
However, there is a bit more to the issue of P versus NP. Within the class NP there is a class of problems which are called NP-complete. NP-complete problems are problems which have the property that if any one of them could be shown to be in P, then all of them would also be shown to be in P. Thus, from the viewpoint of how hard NP-complete problems are, they are all alike. Either all of them can be solved in polynomial time or they all require exponential time algorithms to solve. Again, if one NP-complete problem could be shown (proved) to require an exponential amount of effort in terms of n, the problem-size parameter, then all of them would require this effort as well. Another term one sometimes sees is NP-hard. NP-hard problems are those that are sometimes informally described as being at least as hard as any problems in NP. What happens if it should turn out that P ≠ NP? In this case the NP-hard problems cannot be solved in polynomial time. Should it be the case that P = NP, the question as to whether or not NP-hard problems can be solved in polynomial time would still be unresolved. Note that despite the appearance of NP in the NP-hard term, there are NP-hard problems that are not in NP. This is a sad artifact of the terminology as it evolved and unfortunately the clock cannot be turned back. In retrospect, a less arcane collection of definitions could have been selected here. When new ideas emerge very rapidly, sometimes terminology doesn't get set optimally. It is a result of Richard Ladner (1975) that there are circumstances where there are problems which are outside the NP-complete problems and the P problems which are in NP. Thus, should it be shown that P and NP are not the same, there would be problems which are neither in P nor are NP-complete. These problems, to add to your list of terminology, are sometimes called NP-intermediate. The example Ladner found is not considered a "natural" question, however. Investigators are still looking for natural examples, that is, one's that come up in mathematical practice.
Here is another intriguing aspect of complexity within computer science and mathematics related to proofs and algorithms. There is a tendency for proofs of mathematical theorems to get more streamlined after a first proof has been found. There seems to be a psychological hurdle such that after a theorem is shown to be true, especially for "important theorems," shorter and more insightful proofs often are found. However, for algorithms for particular problems it is often the other way around. Algorithms sometimes get more complex in attempts to find an algorithm which answers a question "faster." Thus, there may be a conceptually straightforward quadratic-time algorithm for a problem, while one might need to have much more sophisticated ideas (and sometimes data structures) come into play to find an algorithm which improves over quadratic time. Thus, there are algorithms which will sort integers that are quadratic algorithms. These algorithms are not optimal, however, even if they are quite easy to understand. For sorting numbers it is fairly well understood how many different approaches to sorting perform in the worst case and, on average, and they will do better than quadratic complexity. The optimal speed for the solution of particular classes of problems is often extremely difficult to find. For example, an initial algorithm for a problem may be designed to attack all comers - all types of instances within the problem that is under investigation. However, one might be able to find a way to partition the instances of a problem so that different schemes are used to solve an instance within the different partition classes. Thus, one would have a specialized fast algorithm for each class, while no algorithm would run that quickly on any particular instance chosen without regard to the partition.
Evolving ideas
The part of mathematics and computer science concerned with complexity theory has had many major contributors. However, two individuals responsible for a major breakthrough were Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin.
Figure 7 Photo of Leonid Levin (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Figure 8 Photo of Stephen Cook (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
It was Cook and Levin who pioneered (independently) the notion of NP-complete problems. Though their work was first done in different countries and in different languages and the details of the approaches they used were also different, they got to the same place. In what is now called the Cook-Levin Theorem, they showed that the problem known as SAT belongs to the complexity class now known as the NP-complete problems. A Boolean expression is one that can be built up from the logical connectives "and," "not" and "or." For example: (x and not y) or (z and not x) is a Boolean expression involving the three variables x, y and z. A Boolean expression becomes true or false when the variables in the expression are assigned the truth values true or false. SAT is the question: Given a Boolean expression, is it always true that there is a truth assignment to its variables so the whole expression is true? Cook and Levin showed that this problem was in NP and that for an instance of any other problem Q in NP, there was a polynomial time algorithm for a (deterministic) Turing machine which would transform this instance of Q to an instance of SAT. It followed that NP-complete problems are ones such that they can be transformed to each other using a polynomial time algorithm. If one of these problems was shown to be in P, then all of them would be in P. There still remains the major (million dollar!) question, already mentioned, as to whether or not P and NP are really the same class!
Many investigators fleshed out the ideas that Cook and Levin pioneered. In a surprisingly short amount of time there emerged many new astonishing ideas. In particular, Oded Goldreich, Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Michali, and Avi Wigderson have done fascinating work. The have shown connections between complexity ideas and cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, randomness and pseudo-randomness to name just a few of the exciting issues these researchers have explored. For their efforts they have won many important awards in computer science and mathematics. In particular, they have explored issues involving complexity classes where "randomness" plays a role. At the heart of these problems is the issue of whether algorithms that use randomness in an essential way (randomized or probabilistic algorithms) are more powerful than algorithms which are deterministic.
Figure 9 Photo of Oded Goldreich (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Figure 10 Photo of Shafrira (Shafi) Goldwasser (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Figure 11 Photo of Silvio Michali (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Recent news
We all know from personal experience that computers have much more storage and are much faster than they were in even the relatively recent past. We are also rightly impressed with the success of researchers at IBM in designing a computer system, Watson, that successfully defeated the best human opponents at Jeopardy!. The nature of playing Jeopardy! requires knowing a tremendous amount of very diverse "facts" as well as the ability to interpret ordinary language often given in terms of puns.
Figure 12 The "avatar" for IBM's "Watson" (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Interacting with natural language seems not to be on the radar of the computer systems we interact with on a daily basis, so the accomplishment of Watson is all the more impressive. What seems to have made Watson's accomplishment possible was a combination of hardware--processors that could do computations with incredible speed and memory units to store tremendous amounts of data--put together with ideas from machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Watson was programmed so that the more it played Jeopardy!, the better it got. This is the goal of researchers in machine learning, an area which overlaps with artificial intelligence. It has been hard to define artificial intelligence but loosely speaking the idea is to get computers to do things which seem to display "intelligence/creativity."
Not long after Watson won its competition against human opponents on Jeopardy!, Leslie Valiant won the prestigious Turing Award from the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) for 2011. The citation mentions his many contributions to complexity theory and machine learning.
Figure 13 Photo of Leslie Valiant (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Mathematics and computer science will continue to look at the issue of complexity in attempts to sort out not only the relative difficulty of solving various problems, but using insights into complexity to understand our world better. April will be a good month to ponder all of these exciting issues!
References
Alligood, K., and T. Sauer, J. Yorke, Chaos: An introduction to dynamical systems, Springer-Verlag. New York, 1997.
Arrow, H., and J. McGrath, J. Berdahl, . Small groups as complex systems: Formation, coordination, development, and adaptation, Sage, Thousand Oaks, Ca., 2000.
Aurora, S., and B. Boak, Computational Geometry a Modern Approach, Cambridge U. Press, New York, 1999.
Bar-Yam, Y., Dynamics of Complex Systems.: Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA., 1997.
Cambel, A., Applied chaos theory: A paradigm for complexity, Academic Press, San Diego, 1993.
Cormen, T., Introduction to Algorithms, (Second Edition), MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001.
Flake, G., The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer explorations of fractals, chaos, complex systems, and adaptation, MIT Press, Cambridge 1998.
Garey, M. and D. Johnson, Computers and Intractability, A Guide to NP-completeness, W.H. Freeman, 1979.
Gell-Mann, M., The quark and the jaguar: Adventures in the simple and the complex. W.H. Freeman, San Francisco:, 1994.
Goldreich, O., Computational Complexity: A Conceptual Perspective, Cambridge U. Press, New York, 2008.
Goldwasser, S. and Micali, S. Probabilistic Encryption. Special issue of Journal of Computer and Systems Sciences, 28 (1984) 270-299.
Gaston, G. and R. Baeza (eds.), Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison Wesley, 1991.
Hubbard, J. and B. West, Differential Equations: A dynamical systems approach, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1991.
Lorenz, E.., The Essence of Chaos, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1993.
Mainzer, K. . Thinking in Complexity: The Complex Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind. New York: Springer-Verlag., 1994.
Nicolis, G., and I. Prigogine, Exploring Complexity: An Introduction, W. H. Freeman., San Francisco, 1989.
Nielsen, M. and I. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge U. Press, New York, 2000.
Papadimitriou, C., Computational Complexity, Addison Wesley, 1994.
Peak, D., and M. Frame, Chaos under control: The art and science of complexity, W. H. Freeman, New York, 1994.
Peitgen, H.-O., and H. Jurgens, D. Saupe, Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992.
Pickover, C. (Ed.), Fractal horizons: The Future Use of Fractals.: St. Martin's Press, New York, 1996.
Prigogine, I., The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, The Free Press, New York, 1996.
Prigogine, I., & Stengers. (1984). Order out of chaos: Man's new dialogue with nature. New York: Bantam.
Rasch, W., & Wolfe, C. (Eds.), Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000.
Ruelle, D., Chance and Chaos, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993.
Sipser, M., Introduction to the Theory of Computation, PWS, Boston, 1997.
Smith, P., Explaining chaos, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1998.
Stewart, I., Does God play dice? The new mathematics of chaos (Second ed.), Blackwell, 2002.
Van Leeuwen, J. (ed.), Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. A: Algorithms and Complexity, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990.
Waldrop, M., Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992.
Wolfram, S., A new kind of science, Wolfram Media Champaign, 2001.
Those who can access JSTOR can find some of the materials mentioned above there. For those with access, the American Mathematical Society's MathSciNet can be used to get additional bibliographic information and reviews of some of these materials. |
UPDATE: OCT 22, 2008This image features all Supergirl costumes that Kara has used. before doing this, I made a simple rule:- It has to be Kara. (altough I broke this rule just once)That because I don't consider any other to actually 'be' Supergirl.The order of appearance is:1. Original version, Action Comics #2522. Action Comics #260 JANSupergirl becomes Super-baby.The following costumes were submitted by fans in the 70s, that why there are so many of them in a very short period of time.3. Adventure Comics 397, SEP 1970Made by joining the designs of- Louise Anne Kelly- Jean Bray (Springlake, Michigan)4. Adventure Comics 412, NOV 1971* no credits for design5. Adventure Comics 407, JUN 1971Made by Anthony Kowalsky (Harvey, Illinois)6. Adventire Comics 408, JUL 1971A variation in color from the previous costume(printer error ??)7. Adventure Comics 409, AUG 1971Made by Margaret Berg (MY, NY)8. Adventure Comics #402 FEB 1971Supergirl goes to on a date9. Adventure Comics 410, SEP 1971Made by John Sposato10. Adventure Comics 411, OCtuber 1971Simplified by DC staff.. I think..12. Adventure Comics 415, FEB 1972* no creditsEnd of costume sent by fans.11. Superman 376 (Preview for The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl) OCT 198213. The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl(later re-title Supergirl) NOV 1983credited to a fashion designer.. couldn't find the name)14. Supergirl MAR 1984Modification for the headband and curly hair.She stayed in this costume until her death on Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985.15. Supergirl Motion Picture 1985Made for the movie, in the DVD you can see test screens of Helen Slater using the previous costume.16. Superman/Aliens #1 JUL 1995Before the re-introduction of Kara, Superman finds a 'Kara' with an origin very similar to the original Kara.17. Elseworlds Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl #1 - 1998There's no Batman or Superman in this world.18. Superman Animated SeriesEpisode "Little girl Lost"19. Justice League UnlimitedEpisode "Chaos at Earth's Core"20. Kingdom Come.She lives in the 30th Century with the LOSH here. There's another one here but not described as 'Kara' so I didn't include her.21. Supergirl One Million.Supergirl #79 - 2003I may have to include another one here.. SG 1000000 uses a different colors, the one here is how she was depicted as Ariella, the daughter of PAD's Linda, the only non-kara Supergirl that I ever like, that's why she's here.22. Supergirl #80 - 2003Final shot of Ariella at the end of this series, same costume as SG 1000000, some differences in costume color and hair style.23. Superman/Batman 13Design by Michael TurnerRe-introduction of Kara Zor-El as Supergirl.24. Tiny Titans #8 - 2008A kids book of the Teen Titans + other young superheroes.25. Supergirl 33 - 200826. Kara from Smallville, season 7th.27. Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the Eighth Grade #1 - 2008Another comic for kids featuring Supergirl... I don't like the blue leggins..28. Superman/Supergirl:Maelstorm #2 - 200829. Supergirl #??Coming design from Jamal Igle.Note: I included here the animated costumes because when BT and company wanted to introduce Supergirl in the animated series, they wanted the real one: Kara, not the blob of protoplasm named 'Matrix', DC said 'no' so they created a Kara from a planet in the same solar system as Krypton that got destroyed too when Krypton exploded. Her name was initially Kara in-Ze, not a pure kriptonian, not affected by kriptonite (for example) but as time passed, she was slowly transformed into the kriptonian Kara, including her vulnerability to kriptonite. So.. it's Kara.Please report errors or omissions |
NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Wednesday upheld the policy of Indian Airlines to ground overweight airhostesses.
A bench headed by Justice A K Sikri dismissed the petition filed by some Indian Airlines airhostesses, who were grounded due to putting on weight excessive to the limit fixed by the airlines.
The court had on May 5 reserved its judgement on a bunch of petitions of Indian Airlines' airhostesses challenging their grounding for being overweight.
The petitioners had also challenged the Airlines' circular of withdrawing permissible overweight limit of 3 kg over and above the upper limit as laid down for the cabin crew.
Challenging the grounding of air hostesses due to their weight, advocate Arvind Sharma appearing for the petitioners had contended that the action was arbitrary and illegal.
"There is no connection between weight and performance of duty when one is medically fit. Weight is not criteria of fitness," Sharma had contended.
The petitioners had challenged the judgment of single bench of the High Court which had upheld the Airlines' policy of grounding overweight airhostesses.
Additional Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium appearing for the Airlines' had contended that the action taken against them was justified.
"It was clearly mentioned in their contract that their job could be terminated in case they put on weight above the permissible limit and they have just been grounded on a condition that they would be allowed to fly after losing weight," Subramanium had said. |
According to a new report from the Globe and Mail which has been confirmed by BlackBerry, Dan Dodge, co-founder and CEO of QNX Software Systems has resigned from the BlackBerry subsidiary, and will retire at the end of the year.
We are grateful for Dan Dodge's contributions to QNX and BlackBerry and his work building a start-up to an undisputed leader in embedded software. With Dan's retirement, John Wall, who has been instrumental to the success of QNX as Chief Operating Officer, will transition into the role of Senior Vice President and Head of QNX. We're appreciative of Dan's 35 years of dedication to QNX and wish him all the best in his retirement.
As Dodge notes in the article, "My decision to leave was my own," he said. "I threw my own party, invited everybody from QNX that I've known over the last 35 years and we had a grand time". Dan Dodge and Gordon Bell began work on QNX as students at the University of Waterloo in 1980 and by 1982, the first version of QNX was released. In 2004, QNX Software Systems was sold to Harman International Industries and was already widely used in the automotive industry for telematics systems.
On April 9, 2010, QNX Software Systems was then sold to then Research In Motion which then used it to power the BlackBerry PlayBook, BlackBerry 10, the BlackBerry IoT Platform and continues to grow it through various sectors such medical devices, industrial automation systems, network routers, and other mission- or life-critical applications as well as the automotive industry where it's currently used in over 50 million vehicles. Enjoy your retirement Dan, and thanks for everything! |
The latest piece of the Board Of Canada puzzle falls into place.
The story so far: last weekend, a copy of a mysterious 12″ credited to Boards Of Canada, was found in New York record store Other Music, containing 20 seconds of music, a mysterious six digit number and cover art reading “—— / —— / —— / XXXXXX / —— / ——”. Other 12″ editions subsequntly cropped up across the globe, including London’s Rough Trade East, bearing the same number. Another clue was then reported to have emerged through YouTube , where a breadcrumb trail of private links and codes led to a cryptic video with another six digit code. BBC Radio 1 subsequently broadcast a third piece of the code, and NPR followed suit with a another new number (although the position of their six-digit number has yet to be placed on the keycode).
As BoC Pages report, the next clue has been hidden in the belly of the beast – the Boards Of Canada messageboards, where fans have spent the last week furiously hunting, parsing and arguing.
In the early hours of this morning, Boards Of Canada updated their official Youtube playlist, moving three Twoism-inspired videos to the top of the list. A user on the unofficial messagboard Twoism quickly spotted that one of the rotating banners on the unofficial message board Twoism had been altered from this:
To this:
The new image features a strange pattern, which corresponded with the previously spotted video above.
Another user subsequently opened the .gif banner in Notepad, revealing the following code:
,-Dy/ 0twb 7{H R689 a XEYE <g!:= b*! csch,hexagon sun,boc,hell interface,boards of canada,music70,boctransmission,hexagonsun,fyt,twoism http://snd.sc/11W7vpv http://snd.sc/11W726Q there is another… GIF89ai $##”!!! )))(((&&&%%%$$3222111000///…—,,,+++**?>>>===<<<;;;:::99988877766655544433UTTTSSSRRRQQNMMMLLLKKKJJJIIIHHHGGFEEEDDDCCCBBBAAA@@@??zyyyxxxwwwvvvuurqqqpppooonnnmmmllhgggfffeeedddcccbb`___^^^]]]\\\[[[ZZZYYVUU ~|||{{{uuussskkkjjjiiiaaaXXXWWWPPPOOOGGGFFF””” @->d $z8 |bHF k<p. Ff`Y
The above led to two private Soundcloud links (here and here) on what looks like an official BoC’s account, both of which feature music buried under distortion. When combined, the tracks resemble the snippets already dug up across the world so far, and include a new number 628315. Pasting the code from “GIF89a” onwards into a hex editor reveals this image, which confirms the placement of the number.
So, current state of play is: —— / 628315 / 717228 / 936557 / —— / 519225. The unplaced NPR code is 699742.
Intriguingly, having uploaded the links into a text editor, the following was revealed which revealed,which looks liks a Mac source folder:
RIFFX WAVEfmt bextZ RPP:/Volumes/graphics/Boc Graphics/Record Sleeves/Cosecha Teaser/TH Cosecha Numbers Station Trail/Cosecha Clue 2 for fans/Cosecha Clue 2 for fans.RPP REAPER lumes/graphics/Boc Graphi 2013-04-2522-10-33 junkJ data `#Y
Note that the file includes the phrase “Cosecha clue”, which some are reasonably inferring could be the title of a new track or album.
For the full background to the BoC Easter Egg hunt, head here. |
Originally published by PJ Media.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
A decade after U.S. leadership declared a “war on terror,” all it has to show for it is the creation of the Islamic State—an Islamic body that has taken terror and atrocities to a whole new level.
How did this happen?
A key factor often overlooked is the intelligence community’s failures concerning what fuels the jihadis.
Consider Michael Scheuer, author of the 2004 national bestseller Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. Scheuer’s credentials as described in that book are impressive: “For the past seventeen years, my career has focused exclusively on terrorism, Islamic insurgencies, militant Islam… I have earned my keep and am able to speak with some authority and confidence about Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, [and] the dangers they pose and symbolize for the Unites States…” Indeed, Scheuer also served as Senior Adviser for the Osama Bin Laden Department and Chief of the Sunni Militant Unit.
The fundamental thesis of his book was that al-Qaeda’s terrorism is a reaction to U.S. foreign policies: “Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world,” wrote Scheuer.
As proof, he regularly quoted bin Laden’s messages to the West, which did in fact validate Scheuer’s assessment. He went on to compare bin Laden, that jihadi terrorist, to heroes like Robin Hood and even Saint Francis of Assisi, and concluded that al-Qaeda’s war revolves around “love”:
Bin Laden and most militant Islamists, therefore, can be said to be motivated by their love for Allah and their hatred for a few, specific, U.S. policies and actions they believe are damaging—and threatening to destroy—the things they love. Theirs is a war against a specific target, and for specific, limited purposes. While they will use whatever weapon comes to hand—including weapons of mass destruction—their goal is not to wipe out our secular democracy, but to deter us by military means from attacking the things they love. Bin Laden et al are not eternal warriors.
American liberals, academics, politically correct media, politicians, and government—in a word, the establishment—willingly embraced and regurgitated this Muslim grievance thesis which, while not original to Scheuer, certainly received a boost thanks to his book.
It was in this context that I sought to translate al-Qaeda’s Arabic writings that I discovered in 2004 while working at the Library of Congress. As opposed to the carefully crafted communiques al-Qaeda was sending to the West—which were presented without context and accepted hook, line, and sinker by many so-called “experts”—these arcane writings were directed to fellow Muslims. They made perfectly clear al-Qaeda’s ultimate motive in attacking the West: Islam’s commands for Muslims to hate and subjugate the non-Muslim, or “infidel.”
Here’s a sampling of what bin Laden was writing to fellow Muslims, even as he was duping Western analysts with talk of “grievances”:
As to the relationship between Muslims and infidels, this is summarized by the Most High’s Word: “We renounce you. Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us—till you believe in Allah alone.” So there is an enmity, evidenced by fierce hostility from the heart. And this fierce hostility—that is, battle—ceases only if the infidel submits to the authority of Islam, or if his blood is forbidden from being shed [i.e., a dhimmi], or if Muslims are at that point in time weak and incapable [in which case, bin Laden later clarifies, they should dissemble (taqiyya) before the infidels by, say, portraying their violence as a product of “grievances”]. But if the hate at any time extinguishes from the heart, this is great apostasy!… Such, then, is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred—directed from the Muslim to the infidel—is the foundation of our religion (The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 43).
Bin Laden also asked and answered the pivotal question:
Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: either willing submission; or payment of the jizya [tribute], through physical though not spiritual submission to the authority of Islam; or the sword—for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live.
How does one square such clear assertions with Scheuer’s claims that “None of the reasons [for al-Qaeda’s antipathy] have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy”? I raised this question in a 2008 article criticizing Scheuer’s claims about al-Qaeda’s motivations.
In response, Scheuer lashed out in the comments section of my article (see my full response to him here). Instead of acknowledging that al-Qaeda’s own words damned his thesis, the man who insisted Islamic terrorism was a product of “imperial hubris” exhibited a sort of impervious hubris—impervious to facts and reality, that is. He sarcastically wrote:
Mr. Ibrahim’s Al Qaeda Reader is an excellent example of what passes for solid analysis and intellectual honesty among Neo-conservatives…. In this highly selective collection, Mr. Ibrahim picks and chooses from the enormous corpus of writings, statements, and interviews by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to produce a slim volume which he claims will once and for all prove that Al Qaeda and its allies are bent on imposing a worldwide Caliphate to be governed by what the Necons are pleased to call Islamo-fascism… [T]he book deliberately misleads an America public…
For the record, my “slim volume” is 320 pages long. As for it being a “highly selective collection,” the book is actually the most balanced of its kind, as it presented al-Qaeda’s releases to the West and its exhortations to its Muslim followers. For example, whereas Bruce Lawrence’s Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden (2005), complemented Scheuer’s grievance paradigm by only presenting al-Qaeda’s propaganda communiques to the West, The Al Qaeda Reader juxtaposes both the terrorist group’s doctrinal writings to fellow Muslims (as quoted above) and its grievance claims to the West, giving the reader a more complete picture.
At any rate, now, a decade later, the “why do they hate us” question has been settled by those best positioned to settle it: the Islamic State, or al-Qaeda 2.0. In a recent article titled “Why We Hate You & Why We Fight You,” the Islamic State gives six reasons. Reason number one says it all:
We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah – whether you realize it or not – by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son [Christ], you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices. It is for this reason that we were commanded to openly declare our hatred for you and our enmity towards you. “There has already been for you an excellent example in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people, ‘Indeed, we are disassociated from you and from whatever you worship other than Allah. We have rejected you, and there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone’” (Al-Mumtahanah 4 [i.e., Koran 60:4, the same verse bin Laden quoted above]). Furthermore, just as your disbelief is the primary reason we hate you, your disbelief is the primary reason we fight you, as we have been commanded to fight the disbelievers until they submit to the authority of Islam, either by becoming Muslims, or by paying jizyah – for those afforded this option [“People of the Book”] – and living in humiliation under the rule of the Muslims [per Koran 9:29].
It is only in reasons five and six that ISIS finally mentions “grievances” against Western foreign policies—only to quickly clarify:
What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. […] The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you [emphasis added].
It is this unrelenting hatred that many Westerners cannot comprehend; a hate that compels Muslim husbands to hate their non-Muslim wives and America’s “friends and allies,” such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to publish government sanctioned decrees openly proclaiming their hate for America, because it is not Islamic.
And it was always this hate that fueled al-Qaeda’s jihad—not grievances.
Incidentally, it’s worth noting that in Scheuer’s response to me, he mocked the idea that the caliphate would be resurrected—which I had predicted—claiming that “the Islamists know that it is as unlikely to appear in their or their grandsons’ lifetimes as Christians know that a uniform world of turning-of-the-cheek or loving-thy-neighbor is at best light years over the horizon.” Likewise in Imperial Hubris he wrote: “At this point in history, we need worry little about the threat of an offensive and expansionist jihad meant to conquer new lands for Islam and convert new peoples to the faith” (page 7).
Really? Tell that to the many non-Muslims and non-Sunnis—Christians, Yazidis, Druze, Shia—who have been enslaved, raped, slaughtered, burned and buried alive, as the caliphate expanded into their territories over the last couple of years.
All of this was enabled by the West’s embrace of the “grievance” theory, championed not created by the likes of Scheuer. It ran its course and was behind abysmal policies meant to pacify aggrieved Muslims—such as wholesale support for the “Arab Spring,” which saw the Obama administration turn its back on 30-year-long allies such as Egypt’s secular Mubarak in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood. The grievance theory is partially responsible for why, a decade after the U.S. started bringing “freedom and democracy” to this and that Muslim nation—Iraq, Egypt, Libya, ongoing in Syria—specifically by ousting secular dictators long experienced at suppressing jihadis, all that the most powerful and freedom loving nation in the world has to show for it is the creation of the Islamic State.
Even so, the impervious hubris continues. Instead of accepting the hard facts—Islamic hostility is a product of Islamic teachings—the Obama administration, including the CIA, continue invoking the “grievance” and related memes concerning ISIS. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that it’s important to be “showing respect even for one’s enemies, trying to understand and insofar as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view,” that is, empathize with their grievances?
Clinton said this at Georgetown University, which is fitting. For, you may ask, where is Michael Scheuer now—this man who did not have to wait for our “grandsons’ lifetimes” to see just how much he got wrong? He’s where all who excel at denying Islam has any connection to violence for the other: teaching a future generation of “terrorism experts” at Georgetown University. |
According to an article posted on The Recorder Online by Chris Demorro, the Toyota Prius, the most popular hybrid is not actually that efficient. Their ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer.
In order to fully understand this argument, you need to know the overall architecture of the Prius powertrain. The car consists of two engines, a 1.5L gas engine and an electric motor. The electric motor is capable of propelling the car up to 25mph and from there the gas engine kicks in. Therefore the car saves fuel by turning the gas engine off when it is idling and driving in traffic. The battery for the electric motor is recharged through the braking system.
When the current Prius was released for the 04′ model year, Toyota boasted about the car’s estimated 60 mpg in the city and 51mpg on the highway. Consumers ate this information up and flocked to Toyota dealers in droves. Soon after its release consumers began to complain about the fact that their cars were not achieving the claimed mpg. This was due to the out of date EPA tests that the government uses to estimate a car’s mpg. (The new tests will be applied to 2008 models) In most real world applications the Prius only manages to achieve 45 mpg, which is not much higher than most subcompact economy cars (Aveo, Yaris, Scion).
That is the first main issue with the current Prius. Second is the issue with the actual production of the batteries for the hybrid cars. It is only slowly being revealed that the nickel batteries that hybrids use are not environmentally friendly. The nickel for the Prius is produced in Sudbury, Ontario. According to Demorro, " This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles." Toyota produces 1,000 tons annually. The production of the batteries does not end in Canada, the nickel is then sent off to a refinery in Europe and then off to China and finally it ends up in finished form in Japan. This in turn uses more energy to create the batteries since it involves many factories all over the world.
When you factor in all the energy it takes to drive and build a Prius it takes almost 50% more energy than a Hummer. In a study by CNW Marketing called "Dust to Dust", researchers discovered that the Prius costs and average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles (the expected lifespan of a hybrid). On the other hand the Hummer costs $1.95 per mile over an expected 300,000 miles. Which means that the Hummer will last three times as long and use less energy than the Prius. ( I am not sure about the claim that the Hummer will last three times longer…)
This also doesn’t take into account the problem with disposing of the used batteries. Most of the hybrids have not been on the market long enough to be disposed of yet, but when it does happen there are going to be more environmental implications.
Basically to sum this up, the Prius and all hybrids for that matter are not exactly what the public perceives them to be. Hybrids for the most part do not have huge gains in gas mileage over their gas powered counterparts. There is also a premium to buy a hybrid and there is a large chance that the premium will not be offset by the time you get rid of the car. According to Demorro, "It takes five years to offset the premium price of a Prius. Meaning, you have to wait 60 months to save any money over a non-hybrid car because of lower gas expenses." Then there are the issues with the batteries and their effect on the environment.
Basically if you want to save gas and pollute less you should buy a subcompact with a PZEV rated engine. It will save you more money in the long run and the earth will thank you.
This may all change in the coming years as technology gets better and the price of hybrids drop.
Full Article:
The Recorder Online by Chris Demorro |
The year is ninety-four, in my trunk is raw
In my rear-view mirror is the motherfuckin' law
Got two choices y'all, pull over the car or (hmm)
bounce on the Devil, put the pedal to the floor
And I ain't tryin' to see no highway chase with Jake
Plus I got a few dollars, I can fight the case
So I, pull over to the side of the road
"Son, do you know why I'm stoppin' you for?"
Cause I'm young and I'm black and my hat's real low
Or do I look like a mindreader, sir? I don't know
Am I under arrest or should I guess some more?
"Well you was doin fifty-five in the fifty-four;
license and registration and step out of the car --
are you carryin a weapon on you? I know a lot of you are"
I ain't steppin out of shit, all my papers legit
"Well do you mind if I look around the car a little bit?"
Well my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk in the back
And I know my rights, so you gon' need a warrant for that
"Aren't you sharp as a tack! You some type of lawyer or somethin, somebody important or somethin?"
Child I ain't passed the bar, but I know a little bit
Enough that you won't illegally search my shit
"Well we'll see how smart you are when the canine comes"
I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one
Hit me!
Fairly valid, although it depends on the state; I'm not familiar with the laws of 1994, and the location is unspecified, but from the video, possibly Brooklyn, NY.Here's my take on the song:Not running from the police seems like excellent advice.In general, not volunteering information at a traffic stop is great advice.Unless the cop can testify to reasonable suspicion [RS] that the defendant is armed -- in which case he can search the driver and immediate vicinity for weapons for self protection -- you shouldn't need to get out of the car. Pushing back on this makes sense, if only to ensure whatever RS grounds would be documented, so they can get the case thrown out later. If the RS was invalid or not present, all evidence coming after that is "fruit of the poisoned tree" and discarded.Consenting to a voluntary search is never a good idea, especially if you have felony weight on you. The standard to search the glove compartment is actually fairly low in California, since it's accessible to the driver. Even though it is locked, the tenth circuit court of appeals has found that during a protective search of the vehicle (i.e., looking for weapons with RS), the glove box can be searched since it being locked may not prevent the driver from gaining control of a weapon. (1) The trunk can be opened if the car is impounded, for inventory reasons, which is a common way to get evidence. However, a locked case inside the trunk will not be opened (depends on the state).A canine can only be used during a routine traffic stop if it doesn't unduly delay the driver -- it's reasonable to walk back to your cruiser to get a dog, but you can't wait to call one in. This all goes out the window if reasonable suspicion is developed.(1) US v. Palmer, 360 F. 3d 1243 - Court of Appeals, 10th Circuit 2004 |
LOS ANGELES >> The best basketball player in Los Angeles began Friday night’s game with a steal and a layup.
She ended Friday night’s game with a simple rim-run, from baseline to baseline, so she could finish a fast break, when her team led by only one point.
The Sparks beat San Antonio, 71-65, and ended the WNBA regular season with a 26-8 record. Coach Brian Agler was asked his choice for MVP of the league by people who already knew the answer was Nneka Ogwumike.
“First, she’s having a historic offensive season, the most efficient season in the history of the league,” Agler said. “Then you take the things I see with her leadership every day.
“Then she’ll probably be All-Defense on top of everything else. Who’s done that in the past? Tamika Cathings and Lauren Jackson, and that’s it. Think about that.”
Ogwumike put up 17 points, 10 rebounds and four assists against San Antonio. She averages 19.8, eight and three. She ranks third in the league in scoring and third in rebounds, in her third WNBA season, and her league-leading field goal percentage actually took a hit when she went 6 for 10, falling to .664.
At Dallas on June 11, she made all 12 shots from the field and all seven from the foul line. Against Chicago three nights later, she made 12 of 14.
Her workplace is the deep paint, but those aren’t easy shots when you’re 6-foot-2. Ogwumike scores with either hand and from all existing angles, and she’s strong enough to get to the line 168 times. She makes 86.5 percent of those.
Ogwumike might sneak up on the box score, but her nonstop motion captures all eyes. Rest assured she is a lot closer to the top of her league than anybody else around here is to hers, or his.
“My goal was to be more a leader this year,” Ogwumike said Thursday, after a Sparks practice at USC’s Galen Center. “I always prided myself on being a team player. But I also realized I’m no longer a rookie. I’m a veteran, so I can affect things on the court. Lead by example, hold people accountable. I guess I wanted to be more assertive.
“My teammates are the ones who told me about going 12 for 12. A big part of my game has always been efficiency. But at times when I focus on that, I’m not always as aggressive. I can’t be afraid to miss.”
Agler likes the way Ogwumike diversifies the Sparks’ defense by guarding the top gun every night. He cites a game against league-leading Minnesota in which she periodically checked Lindsay Whalen (5-9), Maya Moore (6-0) and Sylvia Fowles (6-6).
Minnesota is seeded No. 1 in the upcoming playoffs. The Sparks are No. 2. The Olympic break forced a different playoff matrix, in which both teams get a bye into the semifinals, which will be best of 5. The first two rounds are one-game knockouts, like the NCAA Tournament, which most WNBA players know well. Stanford went to the Final Four in all four of Ogwumike’s seasons.
Her dad Peter came from Nigeria to Houston and runs an information technology business. His wife Ify is an executive in the Houston school system. Nneka and Chiney Ogwumike both went to Stanford and both were taken No. 1 in the WNBA draft, the only siblings besides the Mannings to do that. Chiney averages 12.7 points with the Connecticut Sun.
Nneka’s wintertime job is with Dynamo Kursk, a Russian team coached by an American, Bo Overton. While there she plays and against WNBA players and lives a global life that the pioneers of the women’s game could not have imagined.
“Kursk has more of a suburban feel to it, and it’s a bit antiquated,” she said. “We practice twice a day, play two games a week and travel once a week, so it’s pretty regimented, but we go to cool places. This year we’re going to Prague, Krakow, Istanbul, which is always nice. Going to Mersin, on the Mediterranean coast, in Turkey.
“It’s fun because you meet new people who, in the WNBA, you might not normally be acquainted with. You make different friends, learn new languages. Although I only speak enough Russian to get through the day. I’m not having conversions. But I always indulge in different cultures. I look forward to it.”
Of course, you miss the NBA season in L.A. when you do that. Ogwumike leaves that up to Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, DeAndre Jordan and any Lakers who aspire. She’s done all she can.
Three facts:
1. Nneka Ogwumike had a career-high 38 points against Atlanta on June 30.
2. The Sparks began the season 14-0, then lost to Minnesota on June 21.
3. Ogwumike passed the career 2,500 point mark on Friday in the Sparks’ win over San Antonio. |
The political and humanitarian crisis in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero marks a new low in a country marred by corruption and drug violence. More than a month after the disappearances of 43 students there is still no sign of them, while official government search efforts are laced by ambiguities to say the least.
At the same time the disappearances have stirred up a hornet’s nest that has taken the form of an unparalleled and broad social movement in all corners of Mexico.
Mexico, with Guerrero at its epicenter, seems torn between despair and hope. Despair from the horror of the atrocious events in Iguala, and hope from the structural change promised by the societal response. Which social and political processes have erupted, exactly, and what does this mean for the possibilities of social change in Mexico?
A breeding ground for revolutionaries
The entrance of the Rural Normal school in Ayotzinapa welcomes her students with murals of Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels, and Carlos Marx. The disappeared students come from a school with a history of left politics embedded in a special national education program set up to train primary school teachers. Started in 1920, this program has the express goal of social emancipation of the poor. The school has produced two of Guerrero’s most important guerrilla leaders in the seventies and, unsurprisingly, has gained the reputation of being a breeding ground for radical activism.
Contemporary students are the children of farmers and indigenous families living in the poorest and most marginalized areas of Mexico. The school’s position as a hotbed of activism has not gone unnoticed and has constantly forced students to face state repression in the form of chronic underfunding, police violence and criminalization.
The disappearances
On September 25, a group of Ayotzinapa students went to the nearby town of Iguala to organize transport to the remembrance protest of the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre. For lack of money, the students appropriated three buses on the fateful night; in response, the mayor of Iguala gave orders to stop the buses “no matter what.” Enforcing the orders, the local police opened fire on several buses, killing six students and bystanders and leaving 25 wounded. The night deteriorated into a head-hunt for the fleeing students, 43 of whom were eventually abducted in police vehicles never to be heard of since.
The response of the government was riddled with exceptional incompetence, as the following events reveal. The day after the drama, the responsible mayor of Iguala requested a leave of absence and went on the run. Meanwhile, the governor of Guerrero and the president of the republic have been involved in a ping-pong game of finger pointing to avoid responsibility. The respected human rights center Tlachinollan, located in Guerrero, has pointed out the serious deficiencies in the official investigation and the search for the students. Consequently, the parents of the disappeared students have announced to only trust the findings of a foreign team of investigators. Mexicans have lost all trust in the authorities to bring the crisis to a just end.
A public secret revealed
The Iguala events have irrefutably revealed ties between powerful drug cartels, the local police force and the responsible mayor. The interwoven nature of local governments with organized crime is no secret. But the revelations brought to light by the recent events have forced the government to break with their policy of official denial. As president Peña Nieto stated at a press conference, “the Iguala events have revealed the naked truth.”
Ayotzinapa has become the paragon of institutional ties with drug cartels and represents the sickness that has been ailing Mexican society in the form of corruption, extreme violence and impunity for years.
The movement that has risen in response to the Iguala events breaths a certain sense of relief. A family member of an Ayotzinapa student who disappeared a few years ago, relates how the movement has helped her: “Without Ayotzinapa our voices would still be shrouded in silence.”
Where people used to whisper, they now openly agitate against the narcogobierno [drugs government]. This sea change must not be underestimated in the context of the extreme violence and repression which would normally make a public expression of this nature a dangerous act. Ayotzinapa has finally laid bare this public secret.
The perfect storm?
The disappearance of the students has mobilized and brought together diverse local groups from all social strata and regions of Mexican society. Committees of support have been set up in the most remote corners of Mexico, the Zapatistas have held a silent march in Chiapas and famous Mexican actors have declared their solidarity. However, the heart of the movement is located in Iguala, in the Asamblea Nacional Popular (ANP) headed by the parents and schoolmates of the disappeared students.
The strength of the Ayotzinapa movement is based in the coalition of student and teachers organizations. This coalition seems to be the recipe for a perfect storm. Both are at the forefront of the struggle and are flooding Mexican streets with staggering numbers, of which the 50.000 strong demonstration on October 22 in Mexico City has been the largest so far.
In Guerrero, epicenter of the struggle, highways are blockaded daily, government buildings are torched and radio stations occupied and taken over. Students and teachers of leading universities have called various strikes, and there is talk of a general strike to come. To top all this off, teachers associations have set themselves the goal of taking over all of Guerrero’s town halls. At the time of writing the count is set at 22 out of a total of 81.
In recent Mexican history, teachers and students have been the vanguard of social struggles, which has given them an important symbolic value. It also provides the current movement with the needed practical experience and organizational structures to build upon.
Roots of the movement
Mexican universities are well known for their militant and radical student movements. The latest revival took place in the form of a national movement called #YoSoy132 (#IAm132). The movement started during the presidential election campaigns of 2012 when the students agitated for the democratization of the media because of their their partial reporting, which favored erstwhile presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto. The movement is organized horizontally and made up of 130 local and autonomous assemblies spread all over Mexico, coordinating in its national Interuniversitaria, which has now taken up the cause of the Ayotzinapa students.
Just like #YoSoy132, the radical teachers organizations besmirched the start of the presidential term of Peña Nieto with large-scale protests when he announced controversial neoliberal reforms in education, energy and telecommunications. The democratic section of the national teachers union CNTE, well known for their role in the Oaxaca uprising of 2006, has led the protests against the attempt to privatize Mexican education.
In Guerrero, these militant protests were led by the teachers organization CETEG, which has united the forces of farmers, indigenous people, students and community police, thereby broadening the struggle against the entire neoliberal offensive of the new government. Besides the education reforms, they protested the privatization of the energy sector, destructive mining projects, repression of political activists and the lack of public security.
The Interuniversitaria, CNTE and CETEG are the motor of the current Ayotzinapa movement.
Insecurity unites a diverse movement
“Alive they took them, alive we want them back.” Recurrent in all protests, this slogan expresses the most important demand of the movement: the unharmed return of the students and the punishment of all those responsible for their disappearance. Banners and social media also often show the hash-tag ‘#AyotzinapaSomosTodos’ [#WeAreAllAyotzinapa]. This sends the clear message that this ‘could have happened to anybody in Mexico’. This sad reality of the structural insecurity caused by the deep ties between the corrupt government and organized crime speaks to a diversity of Mexicans and is the glue that binds the Ayotzinapa movement.
A current in the movement articulates Ayotzinapa as a systemic problem. It is mainly the radical teachers organizations which are determined not to settle for the usual course of events in Mexican political crises, namely a reshuffling of the political cards and then back to business as usual. The protesters’ response to the resignation of Guerrero’s governor says it all. “It will not solve anything,” was the loud response after which the mobilization and protests continued with unrelenting zeal. Indeed, the appointment of an interim governor of Guerrero was answered immediately with the demand for his dismissal since he was not chosen by el pueblo, the people, but by the federal government. On their own terms, the Ayotzinapa movement demands the dissolution of the municipal, state and federal governments. As they say in Mexico, “The cob must be stripped of all its corn.”
The broad coalition that makes up the Ayotzinapa movement has its internal complexities and tensions. The issue of insecurity speaks just as well to people who want a properly functioning liberal democracy as to radical groups that would like to see far-reaching political change. This is evident from the following examples.
A few days after the disappearance of the students, shopkeepers and merchants of Guerrero’s capital Chilpancingo joined the protest demanding the resignation of the governor. The extreme violence in the region has been seriously affecting commerce in Chilpancingo, leading to this groups’ participation. Under a similar pretext of insecurity, 200 striking police officers in Acapulco joined the struggle. While the middle classes focus on the issue of insecurity, a group of socialist students of the Ayotzinapa movement choose a more fundamental focus.
The students have decided to temporarily occupy two mega-stores in Chilpancingo to hand out food and basic supplies. Electronics and luxury items remain untouched, which makes it different from ordinary plundering, but rather sends a clear political statement that inequality is at the root of the problems in Mexico. This message also resonates in many of the highway blockades, where the Ayotzinapa movement gives civil vehicles free passage but denies it completely to the trucks of multinationals like Coca Cola and BIMBO, symbols of the inequality of the capitalist system.
The different currents that feed the Ayotzinapa movement are its strength because of the broad support. At the same time, the divergent currents carry with them the risk of fragmentation.
From de-escalation to militarization
During the first month of protests, the government was surprisingly peaceful in its response. Even when more militant actions occurred, like setting fire to government buildings or occupations of town halls, the authorities did not intervene. The government seemed to be hoping for a fiery but short lived movement that would burn out by itself. Besides, this de-escalation strategy was at the time the only realistic course of action since a new victim of state violence would only have heightened the flames of discontent.
However, the government did employ its usual tactic of discrediting the students and teachers by labeling them as dangerous and radical vandals. More recently they have even stooped to the level of accusing the Ayotzinapa students of being allied to a drug cartel. Strikingly enough, these accusations have not had the sought-after effect on the people.
On October 29, more than a month into the protests, the first violent confrontation with the military police forces took place when teachers of CETEG attempted to occupy the Casa Guerrero, the White House of Guerrero. Meanwhile, the government is taking over control of the cities of Guerrero as well as twelve municipalities. A large-scale militarization of the region is taking place, denounced by the teachers organizations as an attempt to suppress the movement. Now that more and more anger is directed towards the president himself, the chances of a violent intervention are growing by the day.
Self-organization: leading by example
The long-standing community police forces of Guerrero are an inspiration to the Ayotzinapa movement. When people speak of real solutions to rising insecurity, they are quick to refer to the self-organized community police, “where the people do it themselves.”
Indigenous communities, mostly, have organized their police groups based on their own culture and organizational structures. The police are directly responsive to the community which governs and controls their activities. The areas where the community police is active are seen as the safest places in Guerrero.
UPOEG is one of the community police organizations which has gained a lot of respect by immediately organizing search parties for the disappeared students, coordinating their efforts with the parents. As such, UPOEG is filling the void left by the government and shows the power and possibilities of self-organization. Besides its policing role, UPOEG is also putting forward a plan to create a ‘fourth level of government’ next to the existing federal, state and municipal structure of Mexico. This would take the shape of a ‘council of community leaders’ with the aim of pulling political power to the bottom of Mexican society: the communities.
Self-organization in Guerrero is referred to by the Ayotzinapa movement as an example of what another Mexico might look like.
The importance of international pressure
The fear that political instability will disrupt Mexican commercial interests makes the country highly susceptible to international pressure. This was apparent when the Zapatistas rose up in 1994 during the implementation of the NAFTA free trade agreement. The pressure exerted on Mexico as a response to the international solidarity movement was of crucial importance in the course of the Zapatista struggle.
The Mexican government does not want to lose her image as ‘stable’ and ‘open for business’. The protesters in Mexico are well aware of this fact. They have made a satirical version of the cover of the influential Time Magazine and spread it far and wide via social media. The image parodies an edition of Time with Peña Nieto ‘Saving Mexico’ on the front cover. The parody depicts the president as Death with a scythe in his hand, accompanied by the text “Slaying Mexico.” This is a firm call for international pressure.
International intellectuals supported the struggle with a critical open letter to president Peña Nieto signed by Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco and more than two-thousand other academics.
Once more, it is of crucial importance that the eyes of the world are turned to Mexico to restrain its government from using all-out repression against the Ayotzinapa movement. The course of struggle is unclear, and a burst of violence lurks in every corner, just like the possibility for social change. One thing is certain: a diverse group of Mexicans is envisioning Another Mexico, which now more than ever, is possible. |
Karolyn Coorsh, CTVNews.ca
As a sweeping anti-terrorism bill winds its way through Parliament, former prime ministers and former Supreme Court judges are expressing concerns that Canada’s security agencies don’t have adequate checks and balances.
Last week, Parliamentarians debated Bill C-51, which gives more sweeping investigative powers to Canada’s security agencies, including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair said last week that the NDP will not support the legislation, calling it “dangerous” and “over-reaching.”
The NDP are not the only ones concerned that the legislation does not boost oversight of Canada’s spy agency.
In an open letter published last week by The Globe and Mail, former prime ministers Joe Clark, Jean Chretien, John Turner and Paul Martin called for more accountability and independent oversight for the country’s security agencies.
The prime ministers said that a “lack of a robust and integrated accountability regime” makes it difficult to “meaningfully assess the efficacy and legality” of the country’s security activities. This absence, they said, could ultimately lead to problems around public safety and human rights.
Former Supreme Court Justice John Major, one of the letter’s signatories, told CTV’s Question Period that he’s “puzzled” at the government’s “reluctance” to ensure oversight.
“When we speak of oversight, I don’t think any of us think the agencies are going to deliberately extend their reach. But the fact is they have a job to do, they think it’s important, they get over-enthusiastic when they think they’re hot on the trail of something, and it’s very easy to slip over the edge,” Major said. “We’ve seen it with police forces, we’ve seen it in the past with CSIS.”
Speaking on Question Period, Defence Minister Jason Kenney said that the government is providing protection to civil liberties by ensuring that the additional powers being proposed are vested in the courts.
“The security agencies can go and obtain orders to interrupt potential terrorist activities, to detain a suspected terrorist for up to seven days, but they can’t do it on their own, it requires the approval of a judge,” Kenney said.
However, Major says there is little worry about procedures where warrants must be granted by a judge.
“There’s a wide range that these agencies, day-to-day, are engaged in, and it’s that part of their activities that’s outside courts and provisions that draws some concern,” Major said.
Critics are also asking why government doesn’t implement parliamentary oversight, similar to U.S., U.K. and Australian systems. Kenney said that the Conservatives feel a “non-political approach” is more appropriate.
“And that’s what governments before have felt as well,” Kenney said. “That an objective, independent group of experts that are not part of Parliament or politics should be taking a look at the operations of CSIS.”
Former Supreme Court Justice Michel Bastarache, who also added his name to the open letter, says there are models that experts feel are superior to Canada’s system.
“I think what we’re saying is, why not examine what we have in light of what exists elsewhere and see whether we have the best system possible to ensure confidence of the public in the system, but also the image of Canada throughout the world,” Bastarache told Question Period. |
PITTSBURGH -- What in past years could have been hailed as the way to finish a run has instead taken a bite out of Jonathan Dwyer’s wallet.
Dwyer has been fined $21,000 for using the crown of his helmet in the Steelers’ 40-23 loss to the Chicago Bears last Sunday night. The fourth-year running back did not draw a penalty on the play but an NFL review of it resulted in a fine.
Wide receiver Antonio Brown, meanwhile, received separate fines totaling $15,750 for unnecessary roughness.
Brown was flagged for unnecessary roughness after grabbing a facemask during a punt return. He received the same penalty after making a tackle following a Ben Roethlisberger interception near the end of the game.
Brown said he plans to appeal the fines.
Dwyer’s fine is a result of a rule change enacted during the offseason. Players are no longer allowed to use the crown of their helmet to strike a blow against defensive players.
The rule change that is part of the NFL’s player-safety initiative has drawn its share of criticism.
One player-safety issue that cropped up with the Steelers this week won’t be investigated by the NFL.
Running back Isaac Redman told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he played in the Steelers’ 20-10 loss at Cincinnati after sustaining a concussion on the opening kickoff. Redman said he lied to doctors so he could get back into the game.
The Steelers have refuted Redman’s claim and said they followed the mandated protocol when a player suffers a possible concussion before clearing Redman to return.
The NFL said it is satisfied with how the Steelers handled Redman’s injury though ESPN NFL analyst Louis Riddick wonders how Redman could have fooled doctors so easily.
Riddick, a former NFL safety, said it is not uncommon for players who have sustained a concussion to do everything they can to stay in a game.
But a league that is doing everything it can to minimize dangerous head hits has to also protect concussed players from themselves. |
ONE ENTRANCE: CTA's proposed 'compact station' concept for the Blue Line reduces passenger entrance points to one. This image replaces an image incorrectly attributed to CTA. (Courtesy CTA)
By Jean Lotus
Editor
The CTA issued a statement Thursday saying that the transit agency is not considering "compact station" options for any Oak Park or Forest Park train stations in its Blue Line upgrade plan. The clarification came after Wednesday Journal and the Forest Park Review published an article Wednesday pointing out CTA documents which showed a "compact station" option was being considered for stops at Harlem, Oak Park and Austin.
"Based on Blue Line Vision Study findings and public feedback, the CTA is not presently considering compact stations for any of the Oak Park and Forest Park stations," said a statement from CTA Media Representative Lambrini Lukidis.
"The agency is still very early in this process and is reviewing and collecting public feedback regarding other design options with regards to the remainder of stations along the I-290 corridor," the statement continued.
"The CTA continues to welcome all comments and continues its collaboration with the Illinois Department of Transportation."
Documents on the CTA's http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/planning/CTA_Blue_Line_Boards_FINAL_100813.pdf website showed the three Oak Park and Forest Park stations as candidates for the "compact station" design, which would have meant mean eliminating "minor" entrances at Lombard, East and Circle Avenues.
All 12 stations along the Blue Line are slated for complete replacement in the CTA's Blue Line Vision Study.
Thursday morning, State Senator Don Harmon sent an email saying he had contacted CTA planners and had been assured that Oak Park and Forest Park's stations would not be considered for "compact" CTA station designs.
"CTA clarified for me that, in fact, its own planners are against the idea of closing the second station entrances at those locations," Harmon said. "The CTA planners recognize that such steps reduce transit access."
Wednesday Journal wrote the article after former IDOT Citizens Advisory Committee Chair Fred Branstrater pointed out the CTA's own documents showed local train stations being considered for the "compact" design, which would have reduced entrances from two points to one.
These diagrams were displayed at an April 22 joint presentation by IDOT and the CTA at Proviso Math and Science Academy in Forest Park.
Harmon said he has been following the CTA Blue Line plans very closely.
"Transit greatly benefits our community, helping us avoid traffic on the roadways, providing environmental benefits, and providing affordable transportation options for all households," he wrote.
Contact:
Email: jlotus@forestparkreview.com Twitter: @FP_Review |
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are scrambling to find a legislative fix for the embattled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as it faces a crucial legal challenge.
DACA grants a work permit and protection from deportation to about 750,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.
Ten states, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), have threatened to challenge DACA in the courts unless the Trump administration cancels the program by September 5.
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The Trump administration has not said if it will defend the program in court.
Concerns that the program could be terminated by the administration or court ruling has led to a flurry of legislative proposals over the last two weeks designed to protect immigrants under the program, commonly known as Dreamers, through legal status or a path to citizenship if the program ends.
House Democrats presented the American Hope Act Friday, garnering 117 co-sponsors within the Democratic Caucus, so far.
And in a bipartisan move, earlier this week, Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Lucille Roybal Allard (D-Calif.) presented a new version of the Dream Act, a bill that was first presented in 2001.
It's similar to a bill presented in the upper chamber by Sens. Lindsey Graham Lindsey Olin GrahamHouse to push back at Trump on border Trump pressures GOP senators ahead of emergency declaration vote: 'Be strong and smart' This week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration MORE (R-S.C.) and Dick Durbin Richard (Dick) Joseph DurbinKids confront Feinstein over Green New Deal Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl Overnight Energy: Trump ends talks with California on car emissions | Dems face tough vote on Green New Deal | Climate PAC backing Inslee in possible 2020 run MORE (D-Ill.).
A bill presented by Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) in the House in March, the Recognizing America's Children (RAC) Act, is gaining support among centrist Republicans.
"There's an added urgency to deal with the Dreamers. As you know there's all these lawsuits out there now," said Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a co-sponsor of the RAC Act.
In order to apply for DACA, potential beneficiaries were forced to register with the government, admit to being in the country illegally, and pass a background check.
That process has supporters of the program worried that the administration could turn that information into a deportation list if the program is ended administratively or by the courts.
"The administration has said they don't want to deport them, but the reality is if those lawsuits happen and succeed, then these are folks that have registered, so they're in a really precarious situation," said Díaz-Balart.
Trump renewed the program in a June memo but cancelled two other Obama-era executive orders on immigration, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) and an expansion of DACA.
Both of those programs were previously halted by their courts, so Trump's decision didn't directly affect any immigrants.
But immigrant-rights activists are making it a priority to protect DACA, and are pushing administration officials to weigh in on a legislative fix to protect Dreamers.
The appeals targeted John Kelly as Homeland Security secretary. Kelly on several occasions expressed his support for Dreamers while also questioning the legality of the program. But Kelly never supported any specific bill and was named Trump's White House chief of staff Friday, replacing Reince Priebus.
Before the Senate bill was unveiled, a White House spokesman said the administration had not supported earlier bills and was unlikely to do so.
"The fact that the president indicated he wouldn't sign it means to the secretary that it's not a viable option," said David Lapan, Kelly's spokesman, Tuesday. "[Kelly's] not going to support any legislation that’s not going to become law."
Still, Ros-Lehtinen and Roybal Allard unveiled their bill in hopes of sparking debate in the House.
Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez Luis Vicente GutierrezDHS to make migrants wait in Mexico while asylum claims processed Coffman loses GOP seat in Colorado Trump changes mean only wealthy immigrants may apply, says critic MORE (Ill.), a vocal advocate on immigration, has proposed his own bill, the Hope Act.
"Defense [of Dreamers] includes putting legislation that charts a way forward," said Gutiérrez at a press conference Friday.
Gutiérrez added he would support any of the bills put forward if they kept in place protections for DACA recipients and other young immigrants in similar situations.
Between 750,000 and 800,000 people have received DACA benefits and a Migration Policy Institute study found over one million people would benefit from the House version of the Dream Act.
Supporters of the bills insist they would pass if they received a floor vote.
"This doesn't have to be complicated," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.). "The speaker makes the decision on what gets voted on, on the floor."
"I am confident that if the speaker makes a decision to put this bill on the floor we have time to debate it and pass it," she added.
A spokeswoman for Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) said any bills would have to make it through committee first.
Curbelo said it's his priority to convince the Republican Conference to bring a bill protecting Dreamers to the House floor.
"It's one of my goals for this Congress," Curbelo told The Hill earlier this month.
But it's unclear if lawmakers will be able to coalesce around any one bill.
Díaz-Balart said having multiple bills is a good first step.
"It's good to have markers out there. I think I have an idea as to how maybe we can get something done -- it is going to require that the stars line up," said Díaz-Balart.
"I think there may be opportunities, hopefully this year, to actually see some legislation take place," said Díaz-Balart. |
International supply chains are increasingly at risk from production losses due to heat stress, study says
By Megan Rowling
BARCELONA, June 10 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The globalisation of the world's economy this century has made it far more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme weather, including heat stress on workers, scientists said on Friday.
A study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Columbia University showed production losses caused by high temperatures, predicted to rise further with climate change, now spread more easily from one place to another as they ripple through global supply chains.
In just a decade, the susceptibility of the world's economic network to heat stress - which causes workers to tire quickly among other physical effects - has doubled, researchers found.
This is because production has become more interlinked since the turn of the century, said co-author Anders Levermann, a top climate change expert at the Potsdam Institute.
The first decade studied, from 1991 to 2001, did not suffer increased production losses, in contrast to the decade from 2001 to 2011, he noted.
"Weather extremes are not really factored into the thinking of a lot of industries, and in particular not weather extremes far away," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "But our study shows it's really one world with respect to climate impacts."
The researchers looked at the effects of small daily disruptions to production from extreme temperatures leading to heat stress among workers in construction, agriculture and other economic sectors.
They covered economic flows between 26 industry sectors and final demand in 186 countries, running computer simulations of heat-stress consequences to find out more about how production losses are propagated along supply chains.
"It is really a global phenomenon - whichever sector... is hit by weather extremes is going to have the same response, the same problem," said Levermann.
The researchers said the findings, published in the journal Science Advances, pointed to the need for societies and businesses to adapt to more intense weather extremes.
For example, they could make better use of insurance against production failures or expand their pool of suppliers, Levermann noted. But for that to happen, there must be greater awareness of climate change and its effects on the global economy, he added.
FLOOD LINK TO CLIMATE CHANGE
Work is underway, meanwhile, to strengthen evidence on the links between extreme weather events and climate change.
This week, scientists collaborating on the World Weather Attribution (WWA) programme concluded that human-caused climate change played an important role in the heavy rains that pounded parts of France in late May and early June, triggering flooding and destruction.
The probability of three-day extreme rainfall in this season in France has increased by at least 40 percent because of global warming, they said.
For the Seine river basin, it is likely to happen roughly 80 percent more often than in the past, and for the Loire around 90 percent, they added.
But there were no conclusive results from a similar analysis of late-spring thunderstorms in Germany, they noted.
In parts of central and northeastern France, historic flooding of rivers led to widespread power outages and forced Parisian landmarks like the Louvre art museum to close. The deluges are reported to have killed at least 18 people in Germany, France, Romania and Belgium, the WWA team said.
"These latest lethal floods in Europe illustrate the rising impact of extreme weather events, including (on) developed and well-prepared countries," said Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.
"Sadly we saw that even advanced infrastructure and water management cannot prevent some areas and neighbourhoods being overwhelmed and people sometimes dying."
(Reporting by Megan Rowling; editing by Ros Russell. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. |
A new survey from YouGov finds that millennials have more favorable views of socialism than of capitalism.
As Santayana said, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Less than two decades after socialism seemed to have been confined to the dust-heap of history, another generation may have to learn hard lessons.
The survey, taken at the end of January, found that 43 percent of Americans under 30 had a favorable view of socialism. Less than a third of millennials had a favorable view of capitalism. No other age or ethnic demographic preferred socialism over capitalism.
Seniors, unsurprisingly, had the most favorable view of capitalism. Just 23 percent of Americans older than 65 had a positive view of socialism. Sixty-three percent of seniors, though, had a favorable view of capitalism.
Seniors, after all, experienced the long-standing intellectual battle between capitalism and socialism played out in real life. They witnessed a post-war economic euphoria grind down into a socialist malaise, only to be reinvigorated by a global embrace of disruptive technology, deregulation, and global trade.
In the past 20 years, the number of people living in poverty worldwide has fallen by half. In 1990, 43 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. In 2013, the United Nations estimated that just 22 percent of the world’s population continued to live in extreme poverty.
“Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast,” the UN Human Development report said.
Even if millenials aren’t swayed by the dramatic improvement in worldwide living standards, one would hope they would see the benefits of capitalism in the products and services that inhabit their world.
They live, and thrive, in a consumer-driven, on-demand society. They have immediate access, at their fingertips, to more knowledge, art, music, and communication than the wealthiest oligarch just a few decades ago.
Each and every one of the products and services they use every day was developed by someone chasing profit and market-share. It is a cliche to say that capitalism has powered the technological and scientific innovations that have improved all our lives. Apparently, however, it is a cliche that bears repeating.
On a postive note, every other demographic block in America still prefers capitalism over socialism. Well, Democrats, perhaps naturally, are evenly split between the two economic systems. At least Democrats, though, have slightly higher unfavorable ratings of socialism than capitalism.
The danger, of course, is that the demographic in America that does prefer socialism is also the future of the country. Of course, they have the luxury of looking positively on socialism, since any impact on their lives is restricted to dusty history books.
The finding also presents something of an existential dilema for the conservative and libertarian movement. Since the 1980s, the institutional infrastructure of the conservative and libertarian movement has grown exponentially.
Aside from dozens of national think tanks and advocacy organizations devoted to propogating conservative and free market views, there are more than a hundred free-market think tanks in states across the country.
It is safe to say that billions of dollars have been spent over the past two decades promoting and educating the public on the benefits of capitalism and free markets. There are publishing imprints, media companies and new conservative news sites everywhere. Yet, something has gone horribly wrong.
Many in the commentariat have watched the rise of Bernie Sanders with a certain touch of condescending nostalgia. “Oh, look a socialist is running for President, isn’t that cute,” you can almost hear them type.
For many, Bernie’s label as a socialist was something he would have to overcome to make a serious run for the White House. It may now be, however, something he needs to more warmly embrace. |
Recently, Paren took on its first mobile project using ReactNative. As a web developer, I’m excited to move into the mobile world. However, this transition came with a lot of frustrations. In this article I share my thoughts on the current state on React Native and its ecosystem from my perspective as a web developer. What follows are the most common ReactNative questions asked of me by my web developer friends.
Is ReactNative stable and ready for real world use?
Yes, ReactNative is ready for real-world use. There are a lot of production apps written using ReactNative.
But stability is subjective. Compared to React, ReactNative is still very new. Web development (with or without React) is also a lot more mature than mobile development. Therefore, ReactNative tooling is not nearly as stable as web development tooling. To put React and ReactNative maturity into perspective: React currently has over 66k stars on Github and fewer than 600 issues while ReactNative has fewer than 50k stars but over 1,200 issues. React is a lot more stable and has a more adoption.
What sort of apps is ReactNative good for?
If you want to build an app that doesn’t use a lot of mobile-specific or complex functionality, like tracking footsteps, ReactNative and community libraries should cover most if not all of your requirements.
However, if you want to build a more complex app and ReactNative doesn’t provide the APIs you need, you would have to write native bridges to expose the native functionality. You can also rely on open source projects to provide native bridges for you, but that is not guaranteed to provide a complete solution.
In this project, we are using Expo. Expo is awesome; it helps us move fast (and not break things, hopefully). Here are some of the things Expo provides:
Additional APIs and components not provided by ReactNative
A GUI and CLI that eliminate the need for XCode and Android Studio
An iOS and Android app for running Expo apps
Hosted infrastructure for instant deployment
The biggest problem with Expo is that, to fully benefit from Expo’s features and infrastructure, you cannot use custom native code. Most good ReactNative open-source libraries are incompatible with Expo because they use native code. We discussed tradeoffs of using Expo in more details in our talk.
Is ReactNative good for prototyping?
Yes, ReactNative is great for prototyping and with Expo it is even better. Expo makes ReactNative mobile development more like web development. When you make JavaScript-only changes, you can push directly via Expo, instead of going through Apple’s or Google’s approval process. Expo uses Ngrok during development, allowing you to open and hot-reload builds on any device, just like you would with a website and any browser.
If you already know and use React, getting started should be pretty easy. Surprisingly, styling proved to be the most challenging aspect for me. I say “surprisingly” because I know CSS quite well. However, there is no CSS in ReactNative; everything is styled with JavaScript. Inline styles are the only way to style components. If you aren’t familiar with inline styles, I encourage you to view these slides.
Inline styles do not cascade. The cascading property of CSS allows one to easily set global styles. For example, in CSS you could do something like * {font-face: helvetica} and that should cascade to all DOM elements. In ReactNative, you would have to create a text component with the font styling that you want, and reuse that throughout the app. This makes sharing generic components in ReactNative more challenging than in React.
On the bright side, with ReactNative, you don’t have to deal with CSS insanity or supporting old browsers.
How much Objective C or Java do I need to know?
As long as you are willing stay within the bounds of the ReactNative community, none. That’s one of the points of ReactNative. You only need to know how to write JavaScript with ReactNative. Although, a little bit of background in iOS and Android ecosystem would certainly help. If you decide not to use Expo you may occasionally need to do some configuration with Xcode or Android Studio.
How much code can I realistically expect to share between iOS and Android?
There are significant differences between iOS and Android which we talked about at Clojure/west. Each came with its own default styling, APIs, and UI components. Some behave similarly on both, some don’t. If you are building a generic app that doesn’t require a lot of native functionality, then almost all of the code can be shared.
How should I structure the code base to support iOS and Android builds?
If you plan to use Expo like we do, you won’t have to worry about this. Without Expo, you will need to have two entry points; one for iOS and one for Android. You can start a basic Expo app by using create-react-native-app .
Conclusion
If you already know React and choose to use Expo, it should be pretty easy to get started. ReactNative is far from perfect but it’s good and getting better quickly. Giving it current stage and its cross-platform strength, it is hard to beat. For web developers who are already familiar with React, the pros definitely outweigh the cons. |
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While the smartphone has, for many, supplanted dedicated GPS hardware in the car, Garmin hopes its latest navigation device, Garmin Speak, will change your mind. It brings together the company’s GPS navigation service with Amazon Alexa, providing voice-controlled music streams, audiobooks, news and weather, as well as access to compatible smart home devices.
Perhaps the major surprise is that the Garmin Speak delivers these features without the large, color touchscreen that you typically associate with in-car navigation. Instead, the device resembles a tiny Echo Dot that mounts to your windscreen and displays directions via a small, black and white OLED screen. Use voice commands to ask questions you need answered on the road about navigation, entertainment control, or the latest NBA results, and Alexa will get right on it.
Priced at $150 and, at launch, available only in the United States, Garmin Speak is a compact, well-constructed device that includes the iconic blue Echo LED ring and two buttons on the left for manual control (if desired – the idea is to use voice commands throughout, though). There’s a mic button at the top for privacy, while the action button on the bottom can be used to confirm instructions.
Garmin Speak delivers these features without the large, color touchscreen
Powered by your car’s 12V connector, the device is designed to affix to your windscreen via an adhesive, magnetic mounting pad. It holds the Speak firmly in place, but means you’ll be left with a dark blob on the windshield at all times, which is pretty ugly. Worse still, with no integrated battery, you’ll need to find a neat way to hide the long cable that connects the device to your car’s power socket. Garmin suggests unhooking your car’s ceiling panels and tucking the cord away, but it all feels a bit painful for what is, essentially, a wirelessly controlled device.
Once powered on, you pair Garmin Speak with your phone and car stereo over Bluetooth, allowing the device to respond to requests over your car’s speakers. Older cars without Bluetooth audio can connect to Speak using an AUX connection. If you’re desperate, Garmin has integrated a tiny speaker in the device, but you really wouldn’t want to listen to it for too long, The integrated speaker is small, and has lots of treble but little bass, as you’d expect on such a small device. Output is audible, but quite shrill and is an inferior option to connecting to your car’s stereo. From there, download and install the Garmin Speak app and you’ll be guided through configuration. Link up your Amazon Alexa account, enable the Garmin skill, ask Alexa to ask Garmin to activate your device and, some time later, you’re ready to go. Garmin has done its best to make setup as simple as possible – an achievement considering you’re hooking up three pieces of hardware to two distinct software services, but it’s still work and a great reminder why your smartphone is simply a magical device.
If you’ve previously used Amazon Echo or another Alexa-enabled device then you’ll be right at home with Garmin Speak. The device has full access to the Amazon assistant’s core features and third-party skills, so it offers a convenient way to play music from an Amazon library, Spotify or supported Internet radio service, hear the latest news and weather reports, switch on the thermostat at home and even stock up on Tide as you drive past the supermarket.
Here, a device like Garmin Speak proves how useful it can be to have Alexa (or another personal assistant) available in the car for certain tasks. Whether you need a dedicated, $150 microphone hooked up to your smartphone to perform these tasks, I’m not so sure. Many of these tasks can already be performed on the road by Google Assistant and, if you’re deeply integrated in Amazon’s ecosystem (and I’d suggest you’d need to be to really benefit from the Garmin Speak), you could always drop an Echo Dot into a cup holder for just $50. It’s not as cute, but it’s a heck of a lot cheaper.
Of course, alongside standard Alexa features, Garmin Speak is a voice-controlled navigational device. We’ve previously been a big fan of Garmin’s excellent in-car GPS devices, which are generally simple to use and offer intuitive features such as Real Directions, which uses landmarks to make turn-by-turn instructions clearer. Adding the Garmin skill certainly aces a standalone Echo Dot in the car – the question is how well Speak serves for in-car GPS.
Well, it works, but using Garmin Speak for navigation can be an awkward experience. First, GPS support is delivered through an Alexa skill. So that means you’ll need to ask Alexa to “ask Garmin” to find your location. It’s a double hop that can become wearing, like those times when you get into an argument with your other half and you stubbornly converse via the kids. “David, ask your mom whether we need to turn at the next block or the one after.”
Garmin Speak’s microphone does a decent job of picking up your voice, even on noisy roads, but attempting to set destinations using voice only can be tricky without the confirmation of a screen. If we missed the response to a destination command, we were immediately worried we were heading in the wrong direction. In cases where we needed to visit a particular store with several branches in the vicinity, we really missed the ability to bring up a list of potential locations and simply tap the one that we needed. With Garmin Speak, we found ourselves having to remember the store’s street address or intersection to be assured we would be directed correctly.
In these situations, you can open up the Garmin Speak app on your phone and check where you’re headed. Here you can also configure home, work and school addresses as shortcuts. But you’re back to using your phone as the GPS, making you question what Garmin Speak is really bringing to the table. Over time, perhaps we could re-learn how best to direct a GPS device via voice, or grow to trust Alexa/Garmin Speak a little more. But over the course of a few days with the device, we didn’t feel compelled to switch away from our integrated in-car GPS, or Google Maps and Waze on our phones.
In an attempt to reinvent the in-car GPS, Garmin Speak adds utility with a personal assistant but at the same time removes the simplicity and clarity of a touchscreen user interface. We have no doubt that personal assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant will become an essential feature in car entertainment systems of the future, but we’re not convinced a dedicated GPS device is the way to deliver them.
Our Take
Garmin’s imaginative reinvention of the GPS proves the benefit of a connected personal assistant on the move, but the loss of a touchscreen makes Garmin Speak less convincing than a traditional GPS, or your smartphone’s navigation app.
Is there a better alternative?
Certainly, Garmin Speak is a cheaper alternative than buying a new BMW or Mini with Alexa integration, but it’s three times the cost of simply dropping in an (admittedly larger) Echo Dot, if you really need Alexa in your vehicle. Depending on your smartphone, you may be able to replicate many of the device’s features with Google Assistant and have the bonus of a large touchscreen interface.
How long will it last?
Garmin Speak is undoubtedly a brave move to reinvent a category – dedicated in-car GPS – that’s in decline. Amazon Alexa is here for the long term, no doubt, but if Garmin Speak fails to gain traction, the question would be how long the hardware and Garmin Alexa service would be supported.
Should you buy it?
If you’re deeply committed to the Amazon ecosystem and you need Alexa as your co-pilot, then you can expect to see a range of in-car integrations heading your way over the next few years. Garmin Speak delivers many of the Amazon Echo’s features (and more) in a small, compact and mobile device. Just don’t be surprised if its novelty factor fades quickly. |
References to Watergate, impeachment, even Richard Nixon, are being tossed around these days as if they were analogous to the current so-called scandals. But the furors over the IRS , Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation of the Associated Press, don’t begin to rise—or sink—to that level. The wise and pithy Matt Dowd, a former Republican operative, said recently, “We rush to scandal before we settle on stupidity.” Washington just loves scandals; they’re ever so much more exciting than the daily grind of legislation—if there is any—and the tit-for-tat between the president and the congressional Republicans over the budget was becoming tedious. Faux outrage is a specialty here.
Obama, anxious not to be seen defending everybody’s punching bag, the IRS , quickly ceded ground on what could be perfectly defensible actions. He may come to regret taking what seemed a trigger-happy decision to order a criminal investigation of the Internal Revenue Service, a sure way to drag people who may have—may have—simply made errors of judgment through a long and expensive legal process that is likely also to keep the agency from examining the validity of the application for tax-free status of any group with powerful allies. If, following the Citizens United decision, there is a sudden doubling of the number of new organizations with similar names and missions, and these organizations apply for tax exempt status—and also the right to hide the names of their donors—might it not make sense to use a search engine to find them? This what the just-fired sacrificial acting IRS commissioner, testifying before a congressional committee on Friday, termed a “grouping” of the cases that had already been almost universally condemned as “targeting,” which he insisted it wasn’t. But this simple explanation wouldn’t do, didn’t warrant the term “outrage” routinely conferred on the IRS case. Could it just possibly be that the Tea Party and their allies see a great benefit in making a stink over this? How better to freeze the IRS examinations of these groups?
According to press reports none of the Tea Party groups have as yet been denied 501(c)(4) status, though this has happened to some liberal organizations. The real problem is that the process takes a long time and the questions are excessive, some even ridiculous. Pinning the whole thing on Obama—pinning all that they can of these “scandals” on him—gladdens most Republicans’ hearts. I say “most,” because such prominent conservative commentators as Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol have urged the Republicans to proceed with more caution, fearing that as often happens they will overdo it. And Republican congressional leaders have begun to worry that the troops may go too far, inviting the sort of backlash that smacked Newt Gingrich and his fellow revolutionaries in 1998, following their reckless impeachment of Bill Clinton, losing them seats and costing Gingrich his Speakership. It’s quite possible that some lower-rank government employees did some stupid things, and it’s clear that the agency had poor leadership (under a Bush-appointed director) but there is no evidence that any of this was directly or indirectly on the president’s orders.
Meanwhile, new information about what happened in Benghazi keeps coming in, changing that story. The Talmudic scholarship that’s been applied to the administration’s talking points—what the various agencies urged that a representative of the administration should say on the Sunday talk shows—has led to the conclusion that that mushy and somewhat misleading statement was the typical product of a typical inter-agency struggle over blame-shifting. The omission of some material from an original draft—on the not unreasonable ground that the terrorist groups that perpetrated the attack shouldn’t be put on notice that the US knew who they were—hardly ranks as a cover-up. Was the administration confused or was it anxious to avoid the acknowledgement that the US consulate in Benghazi was attacked by terrorists from the start, by saying that they came in later? The administration later released all of the emails among the agencies to Congress but few members bothered to go to the briefing or read the material. And as it turned out, the White House didn’t play a hand in doctoring what the talking points would say.
In order to stoke the conspiracy theories, Republican congressional aides leaked false versions of the interagency emails and ABC ran with them without checking. Republicans focused the controversy on Hillary Clinton rather than David Petraeus, the CIA director at the time, though Petraeus also agreed to the talking points and was responsible for hiring the local defenders who melted away at the first shot, and the misinformed intelligence on what happened that night was a failure by the CIA. (But Petraeus was most unlikely to run for president in 2016.) That the US presence in Benghazi was essentially a CIA operation was kept quiet. The inability to adequately protect our foreign missions has been a bipartisan failure and Congress’s stinginess with funds for the protection of our assets in foreign countries also bears some responsibility. In any case, the Republicans might be well advised to tread carefully on the matter of ignored warnings. So far, the George W. Bush administration has got by amazingly with their obvious failure to act on indications months before September 11, 2001, that a major terrorist plot was in the works .
The Justice Department clearly overreached—even its own guidelines were ignored—in its effort to gather information about a leak to the Associated Press about the CIA foiling a terrorist plot in Yemen—a leak which the AP delayed publishing at the request of the White House and the CIA, and only ran when it heard that the White House was going to release information. But this doesn’t reflect a crusade against the press—though the news media make a lot of noise about such actions, and perhaps rightly so. It is true that Obama has been especially fierce (if selectively) about national security leaks, but there’s a long history of administrations going too far to stop leaks and intimidate potential leakers. Even if the president urged Attorney General Eric Holder, a close friend, to go after the AP, does anyone seriously believe that he spelled out how it was to do so?
Thus far, not one of these so-called scandals has reached the Oval Office. Even in the event, which seems unlikely now, that one of them does, it still wouldn’t come close to the pattern of actions taken by Nixon and his aides that nearly undid our democratic system of government four decades ago. Barack Obama couldn’t be Richard Nixon if he tried. No one could. Nixon was, fortunately, sui generis. So, what was Watergate about, and how does it differ from what is going on now?
Compared to Watergate, on the basis of everything we know about what are the current “scandals” amount to a piffle. Watergate was a Constitutional crisis. It was about a pattern of behavior on the part of the president of the United States abusing power to carry out his personal vendettas. It was about whether the president was accountable to the other branches of the government; it was about whether the Congress could summon the courage to hold accountable a president who held himself above the law. It was about a president and his aides who were out of control in their efforts to punish the president’s “enemies.”
It was also about, though this has still gone largely unrecognized, an attempt by a sitting president to determine the nomination of the opposition party’s presidential candidate. Potentially strong challengers were spied upon, their offices broken into and files disappeared, their campaign events disrupted by what were diminished by their categorization as laughable “dirty tricks.” It was about black bag jobs and paying criminals to carry out ideas that sprang from the fevered brain of a president who saw opponents, political and otherwise, as enemies, and then trying to hush the whole thing up. The attempt, not unsuccessful though not exclusively their doing, to try to get the opposition party to nominate its weakest candidate was a step along the road to fascism. It was a putsch by a head of state.
Nixon’s extraordinary abuse of his new power started almost as soon as he had put away his Inaugural finery. In February 1969 he told his staff that he wanted private funds raised to establish an intelligence unit within the White House to carry out around-the-clock surveillance of political opponents. This led to the hiring of a group of fanatics, bums, fools, and losers—most of them paid for with private funds but run by White House aides and right out of the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. Some were of Cuban origin and had participated in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; to motivate them Nixon instructed that they be told that their mission was to root out Communists in the Democratic Party. (He even ordered that they be required to read the chapter of his memoir Six Crisis that recounts his exposure of Alger Hiss as a spy for the Soviet Union. But Nixon was always telling people, even Mao, to read Six Crises. The shrewd Mao had beat him to it.).
The following year Nixon signed off on a plan (the “Huston plan”) that included not just wiretaps also but break-ins and intercepting mail; the plan was so extreme that even the powerful FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, no civil libertarian, objected; though Nixon said that the plan had been rescinded parts of it were implemented. The list of “enemies” he ordered John Dean to draw up, was considered by many who were on it funny and even a point of pride, but it was a chilling exercise of power: the president used the levers of government, including the IRS , to audit and harass his opponents, a wide swath of people in public and private lives. Nixon was often heard on the tapes telling his aides he wanted them to “get the goods” on this or that perceived enemy. Edward Kennedy, presumably Nixon’s most powerful opponent for reelection, was put under twenty-four hour surveillance for a time by one of the clowns hired by the White House to carry out Nixon’s plan.
Nixon’s most serious problems arose out of his obsession about the leak of the Pentagon Papers, in 1971. This led—shortly after the Papers were first published in The New York Times—to the establishing, four days later, the White House “plumbers” office in the EOB . A sign saying PLUMBERS was on the door. But even before the plumbers office was fully set up Nixon’s aides implemented “Special Operation No. 1”: in a first step toward punishing the leaker, Daniel Ellsberg, the White House sanctioned the gravest offense—a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to get the files of this particular patient. A raid of the office of the psychiatrist of a private citizen on the orders of the president of the United States. This clear flouting of the Fourth Amendment protection of private property from searches and seizures was the most disturbing act during this extraordinary period and it shook even conservative senators; Nixon knew that its discovery was the single greatest danger to him, and this was what he was so frantically trying to cover up. As it happened, even though one of the plumbers had cased the place, the psychiatrist’s office contained no files at all.
The obsession over the leak of the Pentagon Papers also led to the mad suggestion by the president of the United States that the offices of the Brookings Institution be firebombed in order to get to the safes in the offices of former Kissinger aides, Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin, who were suspected of keeping the drafts of some unpublished chapters of the Pentagon Papers. The president could be heard on the tapes instructing his aides: “Godammit. Get in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” You see, Kissinger had ordered up the study. Ellsberg had been assigned by Kissinger to do a super-secret study on the papers and had been given access to them, which were stored at Rand. Though one of the burglars had searched Brookings and reported that the files existed, there were none. In any event, some White House aides thwarted that plan before it was fully carried out.
In this context the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building on June 17, 1972 was almost routine. This one, when the burglars were caught, which started the unraveling of Nixon’s secret plots against his enemies, was actually the burglars’ fourth attempt: in the first attempt they faked a banquet to get into the building but ended up locked in a closet; the second time they couldn’t break the lock on the DNC office door; the third time, on Memorial Day, they got into the DNC office but put a bug on the wrong phone, so on they went back to fix it. Perhaps because breaking in had become so habitual they got sloppy and left the immortal piece of tape on a door. That the plumbers were stumblebums doesn’t negate the sinister nature of what they were told to do.
In October 1973, Nixon rattled through a series of beheadings of those who got in the way of his desperate attempts to prevent the tapes into which he had sealed his own fate—as he was oddly aware—from being turned over to the prosecutors. He first ordered the attorney general, Elliott Richardson, to fire Archibald Cox, the Independent Prosecutor who had subpoenaed the tapes and got a court order that they must be released. Richardson, a Boston Brahmin, also refused and was fired by the president; the next in line, Bill Ruckelshaus, a popular environmentalist, also refused and was fired. Finally, the next in line, Robert Bork, agreed to fire Cox. The prosecutors’ staff was barricaded in their offices trying to protect their files from the FBI , who had surrounded them and told them they could not remove their papers. As the bulletins rolled in, one after another on that dark Saturday night, it felt as if we were living in a banana republic and now there were grounds for fearing a President who was irrational and out of control. There was a run on the bookstores to buy legal scholar Raoul Berger’s Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems (1969). No one knew how to impeach a president.
When the House Judiciary Committee took up its work at the beginning of 1974, trying to impeach a sitting president who still had a fairly strong political base was a daunting prospect. Impeachment had not yet been cheapened by the zealots who conducted a trivial pursuit of President Clinton. The triumphalism came later, spurred on by the myth that Watergate was a victory of the good guys over the bad guys. It was about something far deeper: whether our constitutional system would survive. If the Committee did vote for articles of impeachment by a bipartisan and definite majority it was probable that the House would agree and vote to impeach—indict—the president. Next would come a trial in the Senate. And the president remained defiant. The committee had to get it right.
Almost forgotten is the part played by an obscure New Jersey congressman, Peter Rodino, who had been chairman of the committee for only a year. (Inevitably once the spotlight fell on him, rumors circulated, without any evidence, that he must have ties to the mob.) Rodino was not the most articulate member by far but the miracle of the Judiciary Committee’s adopting on a bipartisan basis three articles of impeachment was due to the fact that ordinary people rose to the task and did extraordinary things; Rodino’s choices made a critical difference.
Showboat attorneys or flashy advisers were turned away. As it was, Rodino had to struggle against some committee members who wanted to conduct a prosecution of the president. The two people who along with Rodino shaped not just the committee’s action but the history of the downfall of Richard Nixon were a twenty-seven-year-old Francis O’Brien, who had no prior experience in such matters but was recommended to Rodino for his uncommon judgment, and John Doar, the counsel whom O’Brien had found. Doar had served in the Eisenhower Justice Department and then was a civil rights hero in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. He was methodical and low-key and built the case against Nixon brick by brick, slowly earning the trust of committee members, the press, and the public.
These three men had concluded that if there were to be articles of impeachment that would be accepted by a still-divided country they had to be seen as arising from a fair process, be bipartisan and come from the center of the committee members: those on the right who defended Nixon to the end and the most partisan Democrats on the committee had to be contained, and moderate Republicans and southern Democrats had to be convinced that voting for articles of impeachment was necessary and urgent. James Madison’s writings and the Federalist Papers became as familiar in the discussions as morning newspapers.
The atmosphere in Washington was unlike anything that had gone before or has happened since. We lived in fear. Knowing that the telephones of some of the presidents’ “enemies” were being tapped, we joked in our telephone conversations about our phones being bugged. (No Internet then, but just think of the Nixon people’s probable temptation to trace emails.) One Sunday morning when the newspaper delivery was late, a perfectly sane woman I knew said, “They’ve stopped the papers.” It got to the point where, near the end, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger felt compelled to send a memo to military commanders to obey no command that came from the White House to dispatch the troops to restore order.
This brings us to the strange character of Richard Nixon, probably the most peculiar person to serve as president of the United States. He was also an unlikely successful political figure. He didn’t particularly like people and few people liked him. He had very few friends, trusted almost no one. He was awkward in many ways, from his odd motions at times to his virtual inability to make small talk. Nixon’s confusion of opponents with enemies and his indulging his long nurtured grievances gave us a president who came to office filled with hatreds and was willing to use the instruments of government to “get” them. The president was a dangerous man.
But even then, we didn’t know just how dangerous were Nixon’s personality traits. Not until I was doing research for a book about him for the American Presidents series did it become clear that he was often drunk, barking out orders in after-midnight calls to his aides, his words slurred, and they would have to decide whether to carry them out. Worse still, on the advice of a wealthy backer who kept him stocked, Nixon began to take Dilantin, an anti-convulsive drug, on the grounds that it would lessen depression, though it had never been approved for that. Dilantin served to enhance the effects of too much alcohol: mental confusion, slurring of words, physical clumsiness. Often Nixon was holed up with his best and only close pal, Bebe Rebozo, outside the White House, in Key Biscayne or at Camp David. On the eve of the “incursion” into Cambodia, a disastrous spreading of the Vietnam War, the two men were at Camp David and one or the other would call Kissinger to make sure that the incursion went forward. “It’s your ass, Henry,” said one of them, their drunken voices hard to distinguish.
So contrary to the myths that have been built around it, or the use that later politicians want to make of it, Watergate wasn’t about the mistakes of a bureaucracy, it wasn’t a cops and robbers story, or about courageous journalism. It was about a pattern of acts by a president that threatened the constitution, the law, and the Bill of Rights.
Nothing happening now comes close to that. |
As Sony prepares to unleash The Amazing Spider-Man 2, producers Matt Tolmach and Avi Arad are busy plotting the expansion of the studio’s Marvel franchise with spin-off movies for The Sinister Six and Venom, and during a chat with SFX the duo have revealed a little about their plans to develop a fully-fledged Spidey movie universe.
“It’s a challenge in every sense,” said Tolmach with regards to The Sinister Six. “Obviously questions of traditional hero/villain dynamics have to be looked at. At the same time it’s an awesome challenge, because some of the greatest characters are in fact villains, and how you construct that is so much fun. People love those bad characters if they’re good bad characters, and love to watch them. And nobody’s all good, nobody’s all bad, and so where we end up with that story, I think, is a really awesome challenge, and we all smile when we think about what you can do. It’s definitely a bad-ass group of people and I think it’s going to be a ton of fun to watch them.”
Meanwhile Arad offered a few thoughts on Venom and how they plan to position the fan favourite as an antihero: “Venom hated only one guy – Spider-Man. He wasn’t innately bad, he was a shortcut guy, not really into fighting hard for achievement. That’s the Venom story. Can he also be a good guy? As you know, Venom was also called ‘lethal defender of the innocent’. We had a great history with him, especially caring for the homeless, which is a very sensitive issue and something that many of us are very concerned with. Our villains all represent a different side of the misunderstood, and some of them unfortunately turned to the dark side. Venom happened to be a phenomenal character. With Eddie Brock, or if you do Flash Thompson, it doesn’t matter who is going to be inside the suit – what’s important is that a man like him is going to realize there comes a time when you wake up in the morning and say ‘How did I get here? There must be a better way.'”
It’s still early days for both movies, with Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods) busy writing The Sinister Six and Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jeff Pinker (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) working on Venom. Meanwhile the franchise will continue with the release of The Amazing Spider-Man sequel, which swings into cinemas on April 18th in the UK and May 2nd in the States, followed by The Amazing Spider-Man 3 in 2016 and The Amazing Spider-Man 4 in 2018. |
Colorless Fireforger's Puzzleknot Artifact When Fireforger's Puzzleknot enters the battlefield, it deals 1 damage to target creature or player. {2}{R}, Sacrifice Fireforger's Puzzleknot: It deals 1 damage to target creature or player.
Dynavolt Tower Artifact Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell, you get {e}{e} (two energy counters). {T}, Pay {e}{e}{e}{e}{e}: Dynavolt Tower deals 3 damage to target creature or player.
Ballista Charger Artifact Whenever Ballista Charger attacks, it deals 1 damage to target creature or player. Crew 3 (Tap any number of creatures you control with total power 3 or more: This Vehicle becomes an artifact creature until end of turn.)
Skysovereign, Consul Flagship Artifact Flying. Whenever Skysovereign, Consul Flagship enters the battlefield or attacks, it deals 3 damage to target creature or planeswalker an opponent controls. Crew 3 (Tap any number of creatures you control with total power 3 or more: This Vehicle becomes an artifact creature until end of turn.)
White Impeccable Timing Instant Impeccable Timing deals 3 damage to target attacking or blocking creature.
Fairgrounds Warden Creature When Fairgrounds Warden enters the battlefield, exile target creature an opponent controls until Fairgrounds Warden leaves the battlefield.
Revoke Privileges Enchantment Enchant creature. Enchanted creature can't attack, block, or crew Vehicles.
Skywhaler's Shot Instant Destroy target creature with power 3 or greater. Scry 1.
Captured by the Consulate Enchantment Enchant creature you don't control. Enchanted creature can't attack. Whenever an opponent casts a spell, if it has a single target, change the target to enchanted creature if able.
Cataclysmic Gearhulk Artifact Creature Vigilance. When Cataclysmic Gearhulk enters the battlefield, each player chooses an artifact, a creature, an enchantment, and a planeswalker from among the nonland permanents he or she controls, then sacrifices the rest.
Fumigate Sorcery Destroy all creatures. You gain 1 life for each creature destroyed this way.
Blue Aether Meltdown Enchantment Flash (You may cast this spell any time you could cast an instant.) Enchant creature or Vehicle. When Aether Meltdown enters the battlefield, you get {e}{e} (two energy counters). Enchanted permanent gets -4/-0.
Malfunction Enchantment Enchant artifact or creature. When Malfunction enters the battlefield, tap enchanted permanent. Enchanted permanent doesn't untap during its controller's untap step.
Confiscation Coup Sorcery Choose target artifact or creature. You get {e}{e}{e}{e} (four energy counters), then you may pay an amount of {e} equal to that permanent's converted mana cost. If you do, gain control of it.
Shrewd Negotiation Sorcery Exchange control of target artifact you control and target artifact or creature you don't control.
Black Die Young Sorcery Choose target creature. You get {e}{e} (two energy counters), then you may pay any amount of {e}. The creature gets -1/-1 until end of turn for each {e} paid this way.
Subtle Strike Instant Choose one or both — • Target creature gets -1/-1 until end of turn. • Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature.
Underhanded Designs Enchantment Whenever an artifact enters the battlefield under your control, you may pay {1}. If you do, each opponent loses 1 life and you gain 1 life. {1}{B}, Sacrifice Underhanded Designs: Destroy target creature. Activate this ability only if you control two or more artifacts.
Essence Extraction Instant Essence Extraction deals 3 damage to target creature and you gain 3 life.
Make Obsolete Instant Creatures your opponents control get -1/-1 until end of turn.
Eliminate the Competition Sorcery As an additional cost to cast Eliminate the Competition, sacrifice X creatures. Destroy X target creatures.
Tidy Conclusion Instant Destroy target creature. You gain 1 life for each artifact you control.
Demon of Dark Schemes Creature Flying. When Demon of Dark Schemes enters the battlefield, all other creatures get -2/-2 until end of turn. Whenever another creature dies, you get {e} (an energy counter). {2}{B}, Pay {e}{e}{e}{e}: Put target creature card from a graveyard onto the battlefield under your control tapped.
Noxious Gearhulk Artifact Creature Menace. When Noxious Gearhulk enters the battlefield, you may destroy another target creature. If a creature is destroyed this way, you gain life equal to its toughness.
Red Spark of Creativity Sorcery Choose target creature. Exile the top card of your library. You may have Spark of Creativity deal damage to that creature equal to the exiled card's converted mana cost. If you don't, you may play that card until end of turn.
Chandra's Pyrohelix Instant Chandra's Pyrohelix deals 2 damage divided as you choose among one or two target creatures and/or players.
Harnessed Lightning Instant Choose target creature. You get {e}{e}{e} (three energy counters), then you may pay any amount of {e}. Harnessed Lightning deals that much damage to that creature.
Aethertorch Renegade Creature When Aethertorch Renegade enters the battlefield, you get {e}{e}{e}{e} (four energy counters). {T}, Pay {e}{e}: Aethertorch Renegade deals 1 damage to target creature. {T}, Pay {e}{e}{e}{e}{e}{e}{e}{e}: Aethertorch Renegade deals 6 damage to target player.
Welding Sparks Instant Welding Sparks deals X damage to target creature, where X is 3 plus the number of artifacts you control.
Chandra, Torch of Defiance Planeswalker +1: Exile the top card of your library. You may cast that card. If you don't, Chandra, Torch of Defiance deals 2 damage to each opponent. +1: Add {R}{R} to your mana pool. −3: Chandra, Torch of Defiance deals 4 damage to target creature. −7: You get an emblem with "Whenever you cast a spell, this emblem deals 5 damage to target creature or player."
Fateful Showdown Instant Fateful Showdown deals damage to target creature or player equal to the number of cards in your hand. Discard all the cards in your hand, then draw that many cards.
Furious Reprisal Sorcery Furious Reprisal deals 2 damage to each of two target creatures and/or players.
Incendiary Sabotage Instant As an additional cost to cast Incendiary Sabotage, sacrifice an artifact. Incendiary Sabotage deals 3 damage to each creature.
Green Take Down Sorcery Choose one — • Take Down deals 4 damage to target creature with flying. • Take Down deals 1 damage to each creature with flying.
Nature's Way Sorcery Target creature you control gains vigilance and trample until end of turn. It deals damage equal to its power to target creature you don't control.
Hunt the Weak Sorcery Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature you control. Then that creature fights target creature you don't control. (Each deals damage equal to its power to the other.)
Multi-Color Unlicensed Disintegration Instant Destroy target creature. If you control an artifact, Unlicensed Disintegration deals 3 damage to that creature's controller. |
× Expand Desmond Cole, right, with Ford supporter William. Photo by Jonathan Goldsbie
I set out for Ford Fest on July 25, the latest in a series of public picnics held by Mayor Rob Ford, with a mission: to engage black Ford supporters, and only them, in conversation about our mayor's consistent expressions of anti-black racism.
Many of the hundreds gathered at Thomson Memorial Park in Scarborough were people of African and Caribbean descent.
But of the 30 or so I spoke with, very few were willing (or able) to problematize Ford's use of the word "nigger," his description of blacks as "fucking minorities" or his claim that no one has helped black people more than him.
A middle-aged woman named Sheila, who attended with her husband, Roy, bristles at my questions.
"He's not racist," she said definitively. "The people don't like him, so they would say anything about him."
I asked if those who reported Ford's language had simply made it up. "Yes, they would do that," Sheila quickly responded.
A young man named Mark and his friend Steve were similarly eager to explain away Ford's bigotry.
Said Mark, "I use the same words and I'm black, so how am I going to knock him for it?"
When I asked if white people have licence to call blacks "nigger," he said, "It depends on what context they use it in."
"If there's anger behind it, then there's a problem," Steve added. Does he believe Ford's "fucking minorities" comment betrayed anger? "That's his opinion," he said. "And technically speaking, that's what we're considered as: minorities."
Mark added, "Maybe he meant minorities in an economic sense. I'm sure everybody else in politics is using even more derogatory words. It's just not publicized."
Kevin, who came across the city from Etobicoke with his wife and young children, said he's supported Ford since his early days on city council. His son clung to his leg and listened as I asked about Ford's discriminatory remarks.
"I'm a teacher, and I've heard a lot of other teachers use the N-word at school," he offered. "I say it's more ignorance... a lack of knowledge. Rob Ford probably doesn't know the meaning of the word. People use it as a friendly term."
Kevin added that the media are out to get Ford "because he opposes gay marriage," a stance the teacher said he appreciates.
The unwillingness among Ford's black supporters to confront his racism seems extremely nuanced and strategic. As black Canadians, they've experienced racism first-hand and know how badly it stings. When these folks deny, obscure or ignore Ford's racism, they're delivering a grim message: all politicians look down on black people, but at least Ford will occasionally grace them with the privilege of his presence.
Everyone who spoke with me suggested that our politicians and the system they serve are generally corrupt and specifically racist or indifferent toward black people.
Such low expectations of public service make Ford a hero for offering his black supporters a hamburger and a little attention. A woman who gave her name as Flavour told me passionately, "I've been living in Scarborough for many years, and this is the only mayor I've ever gotten to shake hands with."
This sort of desperation and insecurity would be comic if it weren't so consistent among the blacks I interviewed.
Ford may not be perfect (I heard this at least a dozen times), he may even be racist sometimes, but he performs token positive gestures toward blacks that others won't, and that's good enough for many.
Those I spoke with sounded resigned to some racism in politics. For them, Ford's divisive brand represents an awkward but acceptable compromise. Despite the depth of disillusionment among many black people about our status in this city and country, it is naïve to assume that we are universally intolerant of anti-black racism.
Black Torontonians are, we cannot forget, facing a disproportionately grim set of social and economic circumstances: as children we're more likely to be kicked out or suspended from school; as adolescents we're the targets for non-investigative stops by police; as adults we're less likely to find good jobs. Many blacks identify with Ford as victim, as someone whose behaviour is over-scrutinized, and they jump on his bandwagon.
The consequences of black disillusionment played themselves out in a powerful way at Ford Fest. While I conducted interviews, a group of LGBTQ protesters arrived at the picnic. A large and angry throng of Ford supporters, including many black people, taunted the queer protesters and chanted at them to "go home."
This is civic engagement Ford-style, and the mayor has employed the same rallying cry against black people in different circumstances. Only two years ago, he used a shooting in Scarborough to propose his race-baiting suggestion that the city deport people convicted of gun crimes. This is how Ford repays the unwavering loyalty of his black supporters, but many of them are too caught up in his game of patronage to fight back.
I did meet a couple of dissenters. A man named Andrew said he was loyal to Ford and repeated the opinion that his bigotry has been taken out of context. But when I asked black people who support Ford should still condemn his language, he gave a reply I hadn't heard all evening.
"Definitely [they] should. Because there is a racial boundary. We came from very far, and some wounds never heal. So because of who he is, it's not right even for him to say it, even though I support him."
A woman named Josine spoke with me just after her daughter had her photo taken with Rob's brother Doug, who'd been working the crowd for hours.
Her response to the Ford brothers' repeated comments that no one has helped black people more than the mayor? Josine wrinkled her nose and said, "They haven't done anything for our community... but I don't know anything."
news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto |
’91-’92 Pittsburgh Penguins (39-32-9, 87 points (3rd in Patrick), STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS) ’90-’91 Pittsburgh Penguins (41-33-6, 88 points (1st in Patrick), STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS) ’08-’09 Pittsburgh Penguins (45-28-9, 99 points (2nd in Atlantic), STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS) ’07-’08 Pittsburgh Penguins (47-27-8, 102 points (1st in Atlantic), Lost in Stanley Cup Final) ’12-’13 Pittsburgh Penguins (36-12-0, 72 points (1st in Atlantic), Lost in Conference Final) ’95-’96 Pittsburgh Penguins (49-29-4, 102 points (1st in Northeast), Lost in Conference Final) ’00-’01 Pittsburgh Penguins (42-28-9-3, 96 points (3rd in Atlantic), Lost in Conference Final) ’94-’95 Pittsburgh Penguins (29-16-3, 61 points (2nd in Northeast), Lost in Conference Semifinal)
The ’12-’13 Pittsburgh Penguins were the 10th seed in the inaugural Ultimate NHL Playoff. They had a First Round Bye, but were then swept in the Second Round by eventual Quarterfinalists, the 23rd-seeded ’79-’80 Buffalo Sabres.
Players to Watch:
F – Mario Lemieux – He’s “Super Mario” for a reason. 690 goals, 1,033 assists and 1,723 points in 915 games.
– He’s “Super Mario” for a reason. 690 goals, 1,033 assists and 1,723 points in 915 games. RW – Jaromir Jagr – Second in Penguins history in scoring to only Mario. He has 1,079 points in 806 games.
– Second in Penguins history in scoring to only Mario. He has 1,079 points in 806 games. C – Sidney Crosby – This is quite a trio. He’s gonna pass Jagr soon for second all-time in franchise scoring and it’s only because of recurring injury issues that he’s not already second behind Mario.
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Three teen police cadets are in custody on suspicion of having stolen LAPD black-and-white patrol vehicles and they may have also impersonated police officers, Chief Charlie Beck said Thursday.
Investigators realized two cruisers were missing about 5 p.m. Wednesday, and immediately focused their suspicions on a 16-year-old female cadet assigned to 77th Street Division, Beck said.
At 9:30 p.m., the two missing vehicles were located, being driven in tandem within the station’s patrol area. The drivers refused to pull over for police, Beck said.
A chase began, with the vehicles ultimately going different directions. Both vehicles crashed and the occupants were taken into custody – the two drivers and a passenger.
One of the stolen vehicles crashed into an unrelated driver, Beck said.
Beck revealed Thursday that those in custody were all cadets, ages 15, 16, and 17. Their names are not being released because they’re juveniles.
They were booked on suspicion of charges related to the theft of the vehicles and “other property.”
During an inventory of the 1,800 black-and-whites owned by the Los Angeles Police Department, one more vehicle was discovered missing, the chief said. That was soon tied to the cadet suspects, and interviews with them led to the discovery of the vehicles near 76th Street and Central Avenue.
The cadets may have impersonated police officers, Beck said, asking for the public’s help.
“We would like anybody that has information about that kind of activity being conducting by very young-appearing male and female partners to call the Los Angeles Police Department,” Beck said.
Such incidents might have occurred in the south or central parts of L.A. or areas to the west, such as Inglewood, he said.
No police firearms were missing, Beck said, but investigators recovered two LAPD Tasers, two police radios and an expired bullet-resistant training vest, which was being worn by one cadet.
The cadets were familiar with tracking systems and were able to sign the vehicles out of an automated vehicle inventory system, logging in as a vacationing sergeant, Beck said.
“The cadets were sophisticated enough to sign these cars out … not in their own names, but in the names of police officers who had a right and a responsibility to use these cars,” Beck said. “They gamed that system.”
It’s unclear how long they had the vehicles, but one may have been out for two weeks, Beck said.
“We do daily inventories of equipment. It obviously didn’t work in this case,” the chief said.
However, a watch commander did notice a vehicle missing and came across a video showing a “young-appearing female” fueling up at an LAPD gas pump, Beck said.
There are more than 2,300 active cadets, many of whom come from “difficult” neighborhoods and are seeking mentorship and increased opportunity, the chief said. The cadet program will be completely reviewed, as will equipment management systems.
“We’re very proud of our cadet program and I don’t want the actions of these three individuals to reflect negatively on the other 2,300,” Beck said.
He said the investigation is in its preliminary stages and many interviews still need to be conducted.
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Scientists at the University at Buffalo are developing a graphene-based composite that will hopefully serve as a rust-proofing alternative to the toxic coatings that are now being used. The researchers believe graphene’s hydrophobic and conductive properties may help prevent corrosion, repelling water and stunting electro-chemical reactions that transform iron into iron oxide.
Buffalo, New York — University at Buffalo researchers are making significant progress on rust-proofing steel using a graphene-based composite that could serve as a nontoxic alternative to coatings that contain hexavalent chromium, a probable carcinogen.
In the scientists’ first experiments, pieces of steel coated with the high-tech varnish remained rust-free for only a few days when immersed continuously in saltwater, an environment that accelerates corrosion.
By adjusting the concentration and dispersion of graphene within the composite, the researchers increased to about a month the amount of time the treated steel can survive in brine. (Because brine is an extremely harsh environment, the coated steel’s survival time in the real-world would be many times longer.)
The UB chemists leading the project are Sarbajit Banerjee, PhD, an assistant professor, and Robert Dennis, a PhD student. Their next step is to use a $50,000 grant from the New York State Pollution Prevention Institute to enhance the graphene composite’s lasting power, as well as the quality of its finish.
Tata Steel, an international company that has provided past funding for Banerjee’s projects, has been helping the scientists test larger sample sizes, Banerjee said.
Bringing the coating to the market could not only benefit public health, but also save jobs, said Dennis and Banerjee.
“Our product can be made to work with the existing hardware of many factories that specialize in chrome electroplating, including job shops in Western New York that grew around Bethlehem Steel,” Banerjee said. “This could give factories a chance to reinvent themselves in a healthy way in a regulatory environment that is growing increasingly harsh when it comes to chromium pollution.”
Graphene, the thinnest and strongest material known to man, consists of a single layer of carbon atoms linked in a honeycomb-like arrangement.
The material’s hydrophobic and conductive properties may help prevent corrosion, repelling water and stunting electro-chemical reactions that transform iron into iron oxide, or rust, Banerjee said.
UB’s Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach (STOR) has submitted a provisional patent application to protect the coating Banerjee and Dennis are refining. As sponsors of the research and due to inventive contribution by Tata employees, Tata Steel also has certain rights to the technology.
“Tata Steel has always displayed leadership in motivating innovative research and product development by leveraging partnerships with universities. UB has been one of our choices for cutting-edge coatings technology development on steel substrate,” said Debashish Bhattacharjee, PhD, Tata Steel’s group director for Research, Development and Technology.
“The development of an environmentally friendly alternative to hexavalent chromium would truly revolutionize this sector,” said Anahita Williamson, PhD, director of the New York State Pollution Prevention Institute (NYSP2I), a research and technology transfer center funded by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “The metals plating industry identified this as a high-priority research project and NYSP2I is excited to support UB researchers in their efforts to develop solutions.”
The New York State Pollution Prevention Institute, headquartered at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), is a partnership between RIT, Clarkson University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, UB and the state’s network of Regional Technology Development Centers.
Banerjee, a materials chemist, has worked closely with industry and STOR to commercialize his research since joining UB in 2007.
In addition to his work on graphene, Banerjee has spoken to companies in the building materials industry about his research on vanadium oxide, a synthetic compound that could be used in “smart” windows that reflect heat from the sun only on hot days.
“UB 2020, our university’s long-range plan, asks faculty to take an active role in translational research, and our rust-proofing project is an example of research that benefits communities on both a global and local scale,” Banerjee said.
Images: University at Buffalo |
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) mocked congressional Republicans’ investigation of that group’s potential collusion with federal regulators Thursday.
In a post on NRDC’s blog, David Goldston, its top lobbyist, said he received a letter from Sen. David Vitter David Bruce VitterBottom Line Bottom Line Top 5 races to watch in 2019 MORE (R-La.) and Rep. Darrell Issa Darrell Edward IssaThe Hill's Morning Report — Shutdown fallout — economic distress Former congressmen, RNC members appointed to Trump administration roles Senate throws hundreds of Trump nominees into limbo MORE (R-Calif.) asking for all of the group’s communications with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding its carbon pollution rule for power plants and the Pebble Mine in Alaska.
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“The more one reads the letter, the more it seems like self-parody, at best,” Goldston wrote. “At worst, it’s a transparent effort to silence anyone promoting policies with which the right wing disagrees.”
Vitter, the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Issa, chairman of the Oversight Committee, launched the investigation Tuesday into allegations of collusion between the group and the agency. It came after a July New York Times story saying NRDC wrote the framework for June’s major climate rule proposal.
Goldston argued in his blog post that the NRDC’s communications with the EPA were no different from other meetings and conversations the agency had with stakeholders and outside groups.
“NRDC’s climate experts developed a proposal, publicly released it, and then met with everyone we could about it — news media, utilities, EPA; you name it,” he said. “EPA took the proposal into consideration — it didn’t adopt it outright, and indeed NRDC will be publicly pushing for changes in what EPA proposed.
He questioned how the Republicans define collusion and “outsized influence,” because numerous other groups met with the EPA before it released the proposal.
But Goldston was also concerned about Republicans finding a problem with a group like NRDC influencing government policies.
“Those trying to influence public policy using the normal tools of government should not have to fear investigation from those who oppose their proposals,” he said.
The EPA has been similar defensive of its policies since the Times story was published.
Shortly after it ran, EPA head Gina McCarthy Regina (Gina) McCarthyOvernight Energy: Joshua Tree National Park lost M in fees due to shutdown | Dem senator, AGs back case against oil giants | Trump officials secretly shipped plutonium to Nevada Overnight Energy: Ethics panel clears Grijalva over settlement with staffer | DC aims to run on 100 percent clean energy by 2032 | Judges skeptical of challenge to Obama smog rule Judges skeptical of case against Obama smog rule MORE sent a memo to her staff mocking the Times.
“According to an article from Monday, you just cut and pasted a particular [non-governmental organization’s] proposal and called it a day,” she wrote. “If you're laughing right now, it's because you know just how preposterous that is.”
The EPA has also pointed to the hundreds of meetings it had with stakeholders, state and local officials and others before proposing the rule. |
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“One could easily say this is an execution because they were not being attacked,” Burris, Family Attorney for the deceased.
Another Black man joins the police ‘execution list’ as cops will never cease taking Black lives. The victim, who is identified as Joseph Mann, is described as a peaceful young man, who has had no records of violence in the vicinity.
Joseph Mann, 50, used to work for the Department of Corrections until he had a mental breakdown in 2011 after the death of his mother. Since then, this mentally ill man has peacefully lived on the streets of Sacramento — until last month when he was shot 18 times and killed as he fled from police.
A wrongful death suit has been filed by the family of the deceased against the Sacramento police. But surprisingly the police have narrated a totally different story about the murder of Mann.
Luckily a recorded phone video on that fateful day has refuted claims and narrations by the police that Joseph Mann was armed with a knife and a gun. That is a blatant lie as no gun was found at the scene of the incidence. Well, the video speaks for itself and tells how incredibly well the police Department can fabricate lies to cover up their irresponsibility and total negligence.
As to the evidence the video brings out, it is a dangerous path the police has taken. They now shoot their vulnerable innocent victims in the back. What is it, cowardice or lack of professionalism?
Honestly, the “back-shooting” position of the victim is a proof of a wrongdoing. A man, who is facedown or is running away, cannot be a deadly threat in any way possible. Just like Joseph Mann, many other Blacks have been killed in the same position proving the helplessness of the victim, yet the police will tell a completely different story.
Kindly SHARE this article on any social media of your choice to combat Police brutalities and racism. |
The Daily Times, Augusta Liddic/AP Ricky Gilmore, 49, shows the pair of pants he was wearing when he dragged himself four miles down a road for three days last week near Tocito, N.M. after a man and woman he met while he was hitchhiking left him without his wheelchair, Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012 in Farmington, N.M.
When Ricky Gilmore recovered, he realized he had been flung out of a truck by a couple whom he had wanted to invite home for steaks.
Gilmore, who lost the use of his legs in a car accident 19 years ago, was hitchhiking from his home in Newcomb, N.M. to a liquor store in the nearby town of Shiprock, when a couple pulled over to give him a ride. He remembered the man to be in his mid-20s, with cursive writing tattooed on his neck. The woman looked plump and 20 years older than her male companion, he later told the Farmington Daily Times. Gilmore says they dropped off his wheelchair at his house, where he’d offered to make them dinner, and then went for a joyride — which is where things turned ugly.
The couple became angry after Gilmore refused to share his alcohol. The tattooed man grabbed Gilmore by his paralyzed legs and tore him away from the truck, abandoning him on a rarely used road in the New Mexico desert.
Gilmore began to scoot himself with his hands and hips across the scrubland. When the temperature plunged overnight, he shelterd behind a bush from the desert winds.
Gilmore spent the entire next day dragging himself along the road. Twice, cars passed him by, but the drivers did nothing but honk at the 49-year-old as he waved for help.
He woke up sore and dejected after another night in the desert. There was no water, no food, no one.
“I could have easily gave up and said forget it, but I said I’m not going to freeze out here and I just kept on going,” Gilmore later said to the Associated Press. Which is what he did — dragging himself an estimated four miles from where he was abandoned until a man in a blue pickup spotted him and called an ambulance.
The doctors at Northern Navajo Medical Center in Shiprock found Gilmore’s wrist sprained and the flesh of his left leg and buttock cut to ribbons. The exertion and lack of water had left him with acute kidney failure. Holes riddled his jeans and shirt from days of rubbing against dirt and rock.
Gilmore said he has successfully hitchhiked for 19 years, but from now on, he will take a break from getting a ride from strangers. |
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WHEAT RIDGE, Colo. -- A 10-year-old service dog had one of her legs amputated after being shot while defending her owner during an assault at a motel last week, the Wheat Ridge Police Department said Friday.
A male and a female broke into an occupied room at the American Motel near Kipling Street and Interstate 70 about 11:30 p.m. on Nov. 10, police said.
The male suspect allegedly assaulted one of the victims with a handgun. The victim's service dog Nalla was shot while defending her owner, police said.
The suspects stole some personal belongings, then fled the motel, police said.
Nalla was found in the parking lot by Wheat Ridge officers and taken to a veterinarian. She survived, but lost one of her legs. Nalla is recovering well, police said.
Police posted photos of the suspects to their Facebook page in the hopes of capturing them.
Anyone who can identify either of the suspects is asked to call police at 303-237-2220.
A GoFundMe page has been set up to help pay for Nalla's recovery. |
In a full-page advertisement in the Sunday October 23, 2016 edition of the Los Angeles Times, the union representing Los Angeles teachers, challenged the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) to a "public debate on key educational issues relating to equity, access and accountability." United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) also posted the challenge in Spanish in Hoy and La Opinion.
The advertisement, written as an open letter to parents, attacks CCSA for "indefensible tactics, such as trying to shield charters from financial accountability and lobbying to defeat a bill protecting charter students from unfair expulsion."
According to Alex Caputo-Pearl, UTLA President. "We believe it is time for the community and parents to hear CCSA explain why they oppose financial transparency, student equity and access, open meeting laws and a democratically elected oversight body in schools that are funded by taxpayers. While charter schools use taxpayer money, they are privately run. This has led to documented cases of financial malfeasance, self-dealing and profiteering."
Groups associated with the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) are pouring money into legislative campaigns trying to elect a pro-charter majority in California. According to California's Secretary of State pro-charter forces spent more than $3 million on contested races. More than $1 million is being used to influence voters in just one state senatorial district. According to Colin Miller, acting Senior Vice President for Government Affairs at the CCSA, the group's top legislative priority is to make it easier to open new charter schools and expand existing schools.
With support from private philanthropy, the number of charter schools in the L.A. Unified school district has exploded to 225, the most in any American school system, attracting about 16% of enrollment. Many educators in traditional schools worry that this expansion could force L.A. Unified into bankruptcy, hurting public school students.
CCSA is a lobbying organization for the charter industry. UTLA charges that it "promoted an environment that is rife with discriminatory enrollment practices and biases against special needs students and English language learners at many charters across the state."
CCSA is funded by Eli Broad, the Waltons of Walmart, and other wealthy privatizers. CCSA and its Super PAC spend millions each year to promote the unchecked expansion of charter schools at the expense of neighborhood schools and the public education system.
Charter school operators in Los Angeles have recently come under fire from elected oversight agencies. On Oct 18, the Los Angeles Unified School Board refused to renew operating agreements for five charter schools, three campuses operated by Magnolia Public Schools and two others run by Celerity Educational Group. Some district officials were concerned with Magnolia's past practice of importing teachers from Turkey with their families and using taxpayer funds to pay their immigration fees. Magnolia officials also have ties to a controversial Turkish cleric implicated in a failed coup in Turkey last summer.
Other Los Angles charter schools have also been in trouble recently. Alliance College-Ready Public Schools (Alliance), the largest charter school chain operating in Los Angles, California faces an investigation for using public funds to while trying to defeat a teacher-led union drive at its schools. State Senator Tony Mendoza (D), who initiated the move against Alliance charged, "The purpose of those funds is to educate children inside the classroom -- not to intimidate teachers and parents." The LAUSD Board is now pushing for the resignation of the executive director of El Camino Real Charter School for misuse of school funds. In spring 2016
In spring 2016 The Los Angeles Times published a list of the 100 lowest performing high schools in Los Angeles County based on student performance on SAT tests. Eight of the ten worst performing schools, including one that has already been closed, were charter schools. This included the Animo Locke Charter High School #1 operated by the Green Dot Corporate Charter Schools chain whose founder, Steve Barr wants to run for mayor of Los Angeles in 2017 based on his record of educational "success."
The advertisements are part of UTLA's "We Are Public Schools" campaign to hold charter schools accountable and to fight to build community schools. The campaign web site includes a petition to get CCSA to debate UTLA representatives in a public forum.
Carol Burris, Executive Director of the Network for Public Education, and Valerie Strauss have produced a four-part in-depth expose of problems with California charter schools for the Washington Post. Among other findings, the South California branch of the ACLU and a group called Public Advocates charge that more than 20% of California charter schools have enrollment policies that violate state and federal law. |
Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safe, concurrent, and fast. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Send me an email! Want to get involved? We love contributions.
This is the busiest week in This Week in Rust’s history, and the pull request queue isn’t getting any shorter. This is a mixed blessing: tons of work is getting done, but it takes forever to get merged.
What’s cooking on master?
89 pull requests were merged this week. This is the most pull requests merged in a week, ever. 10 1.0 issues were closed this week, and 0 opened.
Breaking Changes
Other Changes
New Contributors
Axel Viala
Craig MacKenzie
Douglas Young
Dylan Braithwaite
Ehsanul Hoque
Sterling Greene
Weekly Meeting
The weekly meeting discussed the Hash changes, debug assertions, and commit log administrivia.
This Week in Servo
Servo is a web browser engine written in Rust and is one of the primary test cases for the Rust language.
This week, we landed 15 PRs.
Notable additions
Sankha Narayan Guria made drawing a single line much more efficient in #1709
Lars Bergstrom removed the last of the @mut s not in script in #1712
s not in script in #1712 Junyoung Cho fixed up a bug where we were removing s in #1727
s in #1727 Youngmin Yoo added support for the <object> element in #1664
element in #1664 Keegan McAllister made use of the border box more consistent in layout in #1699
Peiyong Lin fixed up the naming of some of our flow methods in #1693
Simon Sapin refactored the cascade methods in #1706
methods in #1706 Adam Sinnett corrected the parent type names of Text, Comment, and PI types in #1702
Patrick Walton added some inlining that sped up flow contruction even more in #1602
New contributors
Peiyong Lin (lpy)
Adam Sinnett (quandrum)
Meetings
We did not have a meeting this week because of President’s Day in the US.
Announcements, etc |
Hello everyone!
It's been a pleasure creating the first "What is Monero?" promotional video. The custom music, art, and project files have all been open sourced, and we greatly enjoyed the process.
Link to the Final Video
Link to the Github Repo
We (my wife and myself) worked over 40 hours on the video over the course of creating a storyboard, illustrating artwork, animating the art, and making the music. We also coordinated with the whole community via Reddit and Slack channel to make any edits, and welcomed any feedback.
We want to thank people who helped us with the script and edits:
needmoney90 SamsungGalaxyPlayer bitsofic
(I'm sorry to say we lost few names due to Slack history issue. Sorry guys!)
We want to keep our rates as low as possible (we need to eat something!), so we're asking for $10 per hour worked. In total, that is $800 (~110 XMR) between the two of us. We already have some contributions, mainly from needmoney90 and SamsungGalaxyPlayer, for 38 XMR in total. This brings the remaining requested funding down to 72 XMR. If you enjoyed our work, and would like to see more of it in the future, please help fund this request.
We are looking forward to making more videos for Monero in the future, including an explanatory animation on Ring Signatures. Once a proposal has been created for that, we will link to it here.
Thank you for all the community support. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to send me a message on either Slack/IRC (@savandra), or by email (savdeyev at gmail dot com) |
ARKFORUM.DE - ATLAS / ARK GameUserSettings.ini Generator
command description value
[ServerSettings]
allowThirdPersonPlayer Enables 3rd Person view
AllowCaveBuildingPvE If set to True, allows building in caves when PvE mode is also enabled.
alwaysNotifyPlayerJoined Players will always get notified if someone joins the server
alwaysNotifyPlayerLeft Players will always get notified if someone leaves the server
bAllowFlyerCarryPvE Allows flyers to pick up players and dinos
bDisableStructureDecayPvE Disable the gradual (7 days) decay of player structures
DayCycleSpeedScale Specifies the scaling factor for the passage of time in the ARK, controlling how often day changes to night and night changes to day. The default value 1 provides the same cycle speed as the singleplayer experience (and the official public servers). Values lower than 1 slow down the cycle; higher values accelerate it. Base time when value is 1 appears to be 1 minute real time equals approx. 28 minutes game time. Thus, for an approximate 24 hour day/night cycle in game, use .035 for the value. - Calculate your values here
DayTimeSpeedScale Specifies the scaling factor for the passage of time in the ARK during the day. This value determines the length of each day, relative to the length of each night (as specified by NightTimeSpeedScale. Lowering this value increases the length of each day. - Calculate your values here
NightTimeSpeedScale Specifies the scaling factor for the passage of time in the ARK during night time. This value determines the length of each night, relative to the length of each day (as specified by DayTimeSpeedScale. Lowering this value increases the length of each night. - Calculate your values here
DinoCharacterFoodDrainMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaurs\' food consumption. Higher values increase food consumption (dinosaurs get hungry faster).
DinoCharacterHealthRecoveryMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaurs\' health recovery. Higher values increase the recovery rate (dinosaurs heal faster).
DinoCharacterStaminaDrainMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaurs\' stamina consumption. Higher values increase stamina consumption (dinosaurs get tired faster).
DinoCountMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaur spawns. Higher values increase the number of dinosaurs spawned throughout the ARK.
DinoDamageMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the damage dinosaurs deal with their attacks. The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values increase damage. Lower values decrease it.
DinoResistanceMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the resistance to damage dinosaurs receive when attacked. The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values decrease resistance, increasing damage per attack. Lower values increase it, reducing damage per attack. A value of 0.5 results in a dino taking half damage while a value of 2.0 would result in a dino taking double normal damage.
globalVoiceChat Voice chat turns global
HarvestAmountMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for yields from all harvesting activities (chopping down trees, picking berries, carving carcasses, mining rocks, etc.). Higher values increase the amount of materials harvested with each strike.
HarvestHealthMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the \"health\" of items that can be harvested (trees, rocks, carcasses, etc.). Higher values increase the amount of damage (i.e. \"number of strikes\") such objects can withstand before being destroyed, which results in higher overall harvest yields.
MaxStructuresInRange (OUTDATED) Specifies the maximum number of structures that can be constructed within a certain (currently hard-coded) range.
noTributeDownloads Disables downloading characters from other servers
PreventDownloadSurvivors Prevents the download of survivors
PreventDownloadItems Prevents the download of items
PreventDownloadDinos Prevents the download of dinos
PlayerCharacterFoodDrainMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for player characters\' food consumption. Higher values increase food consumption (player characters get hungry faster).
PlayerCharacterHealthRecoveryMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for player characters\' health recovery. Higher values increase the recovery rate (player characters heal faster).
PlayerCharacterStaminaDrainMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for player characters\' stamina consumption. Higher values increase stamina consumption (player characters get tired faster).
PlayerCharacterWaterDrainMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for player characters\' water consumption. Higher values increase water consumption (player characters get thirsty faster).
PlayerDamageMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the damage players deal with their attacks. The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values increase damage. Lower values decrease it.
PlayerResistanceMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the resistance to damage players receive when attacked. The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values decrease resistance, increasing damage per attack. Lower values increase it, reducing damage per attack. A value of 0.5 results in a player taking half damage while a value of 2.0 would result in taking double normal damage.
proximityChat Only players near each other can see their chat messages
ResourceNoReplenishRadiusPlayers Defines the distance where there are no resources respawning when being close to a player
ResourceNoReplenishRadiusStructures Defines the distance where there are no resources respawning when being close to a structure
ResourcesRespawnPeriodMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the respawn rate for resource nodes (trees, rocks, bushes, etc.). Lower values cause nodes to respawn more frequently.
ServerAdminPassword If specified, players must provide this password (via the in-game console) to gain access to administrator commands on the server.
ServerCrosshair Shows crosshair
serverForceNoHud HUD always disabled
serverHardcore Enables hardcore mode (player characters revert to level 1 upon death)
ServerPassword If specified, players must provide this password to join the server.
serverPVE Disables PvP, enables PvE
ShowMapPlayerLocation Show each player their own precise position when they view their map
StructureDamageMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the damage structures deal with their attacks (i.e. spiked walls). The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values increase damage. Lower values decrease it.
StructureResistanceMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the resistance to damage structures receive when attacked. The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values decrease resistance, increasing damage per attack. Lower values increase it, reducing damage per attack. A value of 0.5 results in a structure taking half damage while a value of 2.0 would result in a structure taking double normal damage.
TamedDinoDamageMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for tamed dinosaurs damage. A value of 2.0 doubles the inital amount, a value of 0.5 halfes it.
TamedDinoResistanceMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaurs fortitude. A value of 2.0 doubles the inital amount, a value of 0.5 halfes it.
TamingSpeedMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaur taming speed. A value of 2.0 doubles the inital amount, a value of 0.5 halfes it.
XPMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the experience received by players, tribes and dinosaurs for various actions. The default value 1 provides the same amounts of experience as in the singleplayer experience (and official public servers). Higher values increase XP amounts awarded for various actions; lower values decrease it.
EnablePVPGamma Allows or disallows usage of gamma on PVP servers
EnablePVEGamma Allows or disallows usage of gamma on PVE servers
SpectatorPassword To use non-admin spectator, the server must specify a spectator password. Then any client can use these console commands: requestspectator and stopspectating. See patch 191.0 for more information and hotkeys.
DifficultyOffset Specifies the difficulty level.
PvEStructureDecayPeriodMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the decay rate of player structures in PvE mode. The specific effect(s) of this option and its range of valid values are unknown as of this writing.
PvEStructureDecayDestructionPeriod Specifies the time required for player structures to decay in PvE mode. The specific effect(s) of this option and its range of valid values are unknown as of this writing.
Banlist Uses the global banlist of ARK to disallow players\' access who have been identified as cheaters
PvPStructureDecay Activates (true) oder deactivates (false) the structure decay on PVP servers
DisableDinoDecayPvE Deactivates the unclaiming functions for dinosaurs on PVE servers
PvEDinoDecayPeriodMultiplier Multiplier value for the unclaiming speed of dinosaurs
AdminLogging Enables the output of cheat commands that admins used (will be shown in chat)
MaxTamedDinos Defines the maximum amount of tamed dinos on the island
MaxNumbersofPlayersInTribe SOTF setting: Defines the maximum player limit per tribe
BattleNumOfTribestoStartGame SOTF setting: Defines how many tribes must have been created before the countdown for game start begins
TimeToCollapseROD SOTF setting: Defines the time period for the force field to collapse
BattleAutoStartGameInterval SOTF setting: Defines the length of the countdown before match begins
BattleSuddenDeathInterval SOTF setting: Defines the time before sudden death starts
KickIdlePlayersPeriod Time period until an idling player will be kicked from server
PerPlatformMaxStructuresMultiplier Defines the multiplicator for structures on saddle plattforms (Please use with caution - too high values may lead to a massive lack of performance)
StructureDamageRepairCooldown Defines the cooldown time when a previously damaged structure can be repaired again. (0 allows the structure to be always repaired)
bForceAllStructureLocking Server Option to allow Locking All Item Containers
AutoDestroyOldStructuresMultiplier Server Option to allow Auto-Destroying Structures after sufficient \\\\\\\"no nearby Tribe\\\\\\\" time has passed (defined as a multiplier of the Allow Claim period)
bUseVSync Deactivates the VSync setting (can reduce GPU problems in some cases)
MaxPlatformSaddleStructureLimit Defines the maximum number of structures on top of the saddle platform
bPassiveDefensesDamageRiderlessDinos Wild dinos or dinos without a rider can take damage from defense structures like spikewalls if this setting is activated
RCONPort Under which port RCON should be available?
AutoSavePeriodMinutes After which time period (in minutes) the server should auto-save the game? (Hint: A more frequent interval may lead some lags)
RCONServerGameLogBuffer How many chat lines should be available in RCON?
OverrideStructurePlatformPrevention Determines if turrets are allowed on moving platforms or not. Yes will prevent it. No will allow it
PreventOfflinePvPInterval Defines the time period of being offline so that a player will be really considered as being offline.
bPvPDinoDecay Determines if dinos of a player/tribe are also protected in the activated offline raid protection
bPvPStructureDecay Determines if structures of a player/tribe are also protected in the activated offline raid protection
DisableImprintDinoBuff Deactivates (no) the bonus stats for a dino if you raise the baby by yourself
AllowAnyoneBabyImprintCuddle Allows everybody to kuddle with the dino baby
EnableExtraStructurePreventionVolumes Prevents the building of structures on places which are rich of resources
ShowFloatingDamageText Shows dealt damages in a RPG style
DestroyUnconnectedWaterPipes If active, it will destroy the pipes automatically after two real-time days, if unconnected to any non-pipe (directly or indirectly) and no allied player is nearby.
OverrideOfficialDifficulty Overwrites the difficulty settings
TheMaxStructuresInRange New value for the maximum allowed structures nearby
MinimumDinoReuploadInterval Number of seconds cooldown between allowed Dino re-uploads (defaults to 0, set to 43200 on Official Servers which is 12 hours). Remaining cooldown time is displayed on the Dino Upload UI.
PvEAllowStructuresAtSupplyDrops Use "true" if you want to allow being able to build structures nearby supply drop. "false" will disable it.
NPCNetworkStasisRangeScalePlayerCountStart a new Wild NPC Stasis Range scaling-for-player-count option to scale server performance for more players
NPCNetworkStasisRangeScalePlayerCountEnd a new Wild NPC Stasis Range scaling-for-player-count option to scale server performance for more players
NPCNetworkStasisRangeScalePercentEnd a new Wild NPC Stasis Range scaling-for-player-count option to scale server performance for more players
MaxPersonalTamedDinos Quantity of dinos that a tribe is allowed to have (Default on official PVE servers is 500)
AutoDestroyDecayedDinos Option to auto-destroy claimable decayed dinos on load, rather than have them remain around as claimable. Official PvE servers now have this enabled.
ClampItemSpoilingTimes Will clamp all spoiling times to the items' maximum spoiling times. Useful if any infinite-spoiling exploits were used on the server and you wish to clean them up. Could potentially cause issues with Mods that alter spoiling time, hence it is an option.
UseOptimizedHarvestingHealth Server custom "HarvestAmountMultiplier" now works as it used to, to bias towards yielding rarer items. This is more costly for server performance, so if you want a more "optimized" server with high HarvestAmountMultiplier (but less rare items), you can launch with "yes" in this setting here.
AllowCrateSpawnsOnTopOfStructures Servers can now allow from-the-air Supply Crates to appear on top of Structures, rather than being prevented by Structures. Enabled on Official Servers.
ForceFlyerExplosives Made all Flyers except for Quetz and Wyvern become 'grounded' if you put a C4 on them. To disable this behavior, launch server with "yes"
PreventOfflinePvP Enables ORP on PVE/PVP servers if set to "yes"
AllowFlyingStaminaRecovery Flyer Nerf (to allow server to recover Stamina when standing on a Flyer, run with "yes"
AllowMultipleAttachedC4 Limited one C4 attached per dino, unless you choose "yes" to allow more than one C4
OxygenSwimSpeedStatMultiplier Use this to set how swim speed is multiplied by level spent in oxygen.
bPvEDisableFriendlyFire When using "yes", you are now able to harvest a slaughtered Ovis.
ServerAutoForceRespawnWildDinosInterval This will force respawns of dinos on servers to prevent certain dino types (like the Basilo and Spino) from becoming depopulated on long running servers. Specify a value in seconds (86400 means a forced respawn after one day (realtime) for example)
DisableWeatherFog Server option to disable fog.
RandomSupplyCratePoints Server Option to make Supply Crates random
CrossARKAllowForeignDinoDownloads This allows you to download Non-Aberration Dinos on Aberration
PersonalTamedDinosSaddleStructureCost Defines how many tame slots are being used by a saddle platform (with structures) - Default: 19
[/script/engine.gamesession]
MaxPlayers Specifies the maximum number of players that can play on the server simultaneously.
[SessionSettings]
SessionName Name of your server
[MessageOfTheDay]
Duration Specifies the duration of the welcome message
Message Defines a welcome message |
Edith was a common name in Anglo-Saxon England, and it’s hard to keep them all straight. You are more likely to see this name spelled Ealdgyth, Editha, Aldgyth, Eddeva, Aldyth, Eadgyth, Edyth…I’m sure I missed a few. I like to think of her as Edith Godwindottir, but she is rarely found under that name. Why Edith of Wessex? She was Queen of England, not Wessex. She did not belong to the House of Wessex like her husband Edward the Confessor. Since her father was first Earl of Wessex, I suppose that is why the name stuck, though I do find it puzzling.
I also find it ironic that one our primary sources of the period, the Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster was commissioned by Edith herself (admittedly called a work of propaganda), and yet she’s been largely overlooked in favor of her illustrious brother Harold II. Try finding any artwork about her; oh yes, there is one memorable depiction of Edith warming Edward’s feet on his deathbed in the Bayeux Tapestry. If you look really hard you can see a female figure. There’s another depiction of her in a MS illum. next to her husband. But that’s about it. Nonetheless, according to Wikipedia, at the time of her husband’s death she was the wealthiest woman in England and the fourth wealthiest person in England after the King, Archbishop Stigand, and her brother Harold. Of course, by the time William was through with her, I imagine some of that great wealth had dissipated.
As was natural for a noble-born daughter, Edith didn’t have any say in her marriage plans. She was a very important pawn in her father’s ambitions, and I imagine Godwine didn’t even consider that she would object to becoming queen of England. But King Edward was at least 20 years older than her, and it seems to be common knowledge that he wasn’t terribly friendly toward her father. It’s pretty clear that Edward held Godwine responsible for the violent death of his brother Alfred, no matter how much the Earl protested his innocence. I wonder who was more unwilling: the bride or the groom?
So what kind of marriage did Edward and Edith have? It is thought by some that Edith commissioned Edward’s Life as an attempt to save face concerning her barren marriage. After all, a woman was always held responsible for a lack of children, and England’s fate relied on her. If she could portray Edward as too saintly to be anything but celibate, then she was off the hook. Was this really the case? Or did Edward find her guilt-by-association too much to overcome? Did they ever consummate the marriage? Or was one of them merely infertile? Hmm, one of the great mysteries of the eleventh century.
One thing is for sure: once Earl Godwine was sent into exile in 1051, poor Edith was trundled off to a nunnery at the earliest opportunity. It is said that if Archbishop Robert of Jumieges had his way, Edward would have annulled his marriage. But the King stopped short of this; perhaps he feared the consequences. On Godwine’s return, Edith was reinstalled as well, and for the rest of his reign she was treated with respect. On his deathbed, Edward said she had always been like a loving and dutiful daughter. Of course, those could have been her propagandist’s words, but they do put some distance between man and wife.
Edith does seem to have a reputation as a well-educated woman, speaking many languages; she made sure Edward’s appearance was always exquisite, outfitting him with fine accessories and jewels. She is also thought to be demanding and possibly ruthless; there was an assassination at the Christmas Court in 1064 which has been pinned on Edith, who allegedly ordered the murder of a certain Gospatric (or Cospatric) as a favor to Tostig, her closest brother. It must have been difficult for her to be sidelined after Edward died, but in those challenging times maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to fade into the background. At first Harold treated her as befit her station, then after the conquest William pretty much left her alone, provided she didn’t make any trouble for him. William even buried her in Westminster Abbey beside her husband. In the end it could be said that she fared better than her more illustrious siblings. |
One argument against new housing in popular cities is the “induced demand” argument—the idea that new housing merely creates demand for more new housing, thus ultimately raising housing prices.
As journalist Tim Redmond argues: "When you build a new luxury housing complex, new residents move into it. For the most part, they result in net additions to the number of people in the city: If the person who buys a new condo moves out of a rental unit, someone else will move into that rental.…The people with high disposable incomes who fill those condos or luxury rentals will spend money in town, creating a demand for jobs – restaurant workers, grocery clerks, cops and firefighters, bank tellers…and those people will also need a place to live."
In other words, if the city permits 1,000 new housing units (other than government-subsidized housing, which is somehow exempt from this rule), dozens, or even hundreds, of people will magically appear from elsewhere in the United States to occupy those units. And the consumer spending of these new residents will create service-industry jobs, which in turn creates additional housing demand, thus raising housing prices. (Or in plain English: the only thing worse than new housing is new jobs.)
Why do I find this theory implausible? First, I find it hard to believe that a resident of a new apartment building has moved from Sacramento or Des Moines just because a new apartment was built in San Francisco; after all, when San Francisco adds a new building, Des Moines residents aren't likely to know of the building's existence, let alone move to San Francisco because of the new building.
It seems to me more probable that the new building's residents already lived in the city (or perhaps one of its suburbs). They might have been living with roommates, or in less desirable buildings in the city, or in suburbs that are also part of the region’s housing market. So it seems to me unlikely that new apartments create a significant number of new city residents—unless, of course, the apartments actually lower other buildings' rent enough to make city living more popular (in which case the entire "induced demand" argument is wrong, because new supply in fact lowers rents rather than raising them).
Second, the "induced demand" argument assumes that new affluent residents lead to new working-class residents. But even if the new residents spend enough money to create new working-class service jobs, it seems hard to believe that large numbers of people will move to high-cost San Francisco to be grocery clerks (unless labor demand is so high as to induce significant wage increases and thus make housing more affordable rather than less affordable). It seems more likely that these jobs will be filled by existing residents lured off the unemployment rolls, and that if urban housing prices are high, these residents will live in low-cost suburbs.
Third, "induced demand" doesn't fit the data. If new housing really increased prices, places that would allowed lots of new housing would consistently have higher prices, and thus the most affordable places would be places where new construction was virtually impossible. But in reality, it appears that places that build a lot of housing, and that impose fewer restrictions on building, seem to have lower housing prices—which is why some high-growth Sun Belt cities are less expensive than San Francisco. (See for example the graph of the bottom of this trulia.com post.)
Redmond cites a decade-old study prepared for the city's planning department. The study states (p. 7): "An underlying assumption of the study is that households that rent or purchase new units represent net new households in the city of San Francisco." In other words, induced demand is not a conclusion of the study, but an assumption of the study. If you assume that new buildings mean new residents, of course you will find that new housing means new demand for housing. In short, garbage in, garbage out.
Moreover, this study was hardly an impartial examination of evidence. Rather, it was a "nexus study"—that is, it was designed to show that there was a nexus between new housing and the need for inclusionary zoning. Why was the study necessary? Because, under state law,* if there is no reasonable relationship (or "nexus") between a development fee imposed by the city (such as inclusionary zoning) and the impact of development, the fee is illegal. So if the city's consultants had failed to find such a nexus, they would have found that the city’s program would be illegal—a result not conducive to the consultants getting hired in the future.
In sum, the old-fashioned conventional wisdom of economics stands—more supply still means lower prices, and less supply means higher prices.
*In particular, the study references California's Mitigation Fee Act. |
Creed Bratton of 'The Office' proud of his 'cult following'
'The Office' gave his music and acting careers a big promotion
Some of those details are true both of the actor and character. Creed Bratton is the actor's name. And the real-life Bratton, like the Dunder Mifflin worker, had been a hippie, went through financially difficult times and created great music as a member of the 1960s pop-rock group The Grass Roots.
Bratton will separate fact from fiction, as well as play music from "The Office" and the six solo discs he released since leaving The Grass Roots, when he performs 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Sellersville Theater 1894.
"The Creed character has got this cult following," Bratton says in a phone call from California. "The college kids just love this guy. I hope sometimes they're not too disappointed to find out I'm actually an actor playing him."
Bratton says fanatics aren't likely to be disappointed with the live show. "I will bring him out on stage to annoy the people, for sure," he says with a laugh. "I tell them how to be Creed, basically. How to Creed-up their life a bit, you know? Creed-ify their existence."
Bratton says the show will be a "Samuel Clemens-y, hopefully humorous" series of anecdotes about his life, from "all the crazy stuff I went through before The Grass Roots even happened, then The Grass Roots, then all the very down periods — which there's always humor in that, too."
He'll talk about "The Office," the mockumentary show that became a cultural phenomenon, ranked atop many critics' lists, and won four prime time Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series in 2006. He'll punctuate each tale with a song.
If the stories are anything like the real Bratton's life, they're sure to be interesting.
Bratton, 71, became a professional musician during his college years, and played throughout Europe before forming The 13th Floor in 1966.
A year later, producers/songwriters P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri were scrambling to find a band to play songs they recorded themselves as The Grass Roots, including the hit "Where Were You When I Needed You." The 13th Floor became The Grass Roots.
Bratton's group lost its bassist to the Vietnam War draft and brought in new vocalist Rob Grill, who sang on the group's biggest hits, "Live For Today" and "Midnight Confessions." Bratton recorded four albums, appeared on "American Bandstand" and toured with The Grass Roots as it set a record for most continuous weeks having a song on the charts.
But Bratton says he became disillusioned when producers chose to have famed Los Angeles studio musicians The Wrecking Crew play on the albums rather than the real band. The iconic guitar riff on "Let's Live for Today," for example, was Sloan's, Bratton says.
"The other guys were fine with it; I was not fine with it," Bratton says. "Because I play, I'm an artist. It's not the ego as much as it's, 'Hey, this what I do,' and I take pride in it. So c'mon. So anyway, that was the big bone of contention why I left the group, basically." |
Photo by: CUNY
A group home for young runaways run by a prominent nonprofit is under scrutiny as current and former residents say staffers there used excessive force, engaged in sexual misconduct and mismanaged residents’ finances.
The Administration for Children’s Services tells City Limits that it is investigating the allegations leveled against the Gramercy Residence run by Green Chimneys.
Up to 40 percent of homeless youth are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, and the unique needs of that population were the focus of a recent White House-sponsored conference. Green Chimneys is a leader in the field of supporting at-risk youth.
The organization did not speak to us on camera, but while the the video report below was being edited, did provide the following statement:
“The care and safety of the youth at our Gramercy group residence is the primary concern of Green Chimneys’ New York City division staff and agency administration. We take all allegations very seriously and have done a careful investigation into the recent claims. We have a consistently strong record of service and a long history of providing care and support to our residents. Our fully trained staff follow all agency and program policies and procedures, which serve to maintain a safe and supportive environment for our youth, and we immediately address any reported issues as mandated by the City and State agencies to which we are accountable.” |
Here we have the Gubor Winter Apfel, which I discovered on a shopping trip to TK Maxx recently. They sell an array of interesting European chocolates there but this caught my eye as it looks similar to Terry's Chocolate Orange . But because of the name "Winter Apfel" I thought it might be apple flavoured. How cool would that be?! Unfortunately, it isn't. Boo hoo! In reality it is "Finest milk chocolate with hazelnut and gingerbread flavour" in the shape of an apple, and is made by German company Gubor
I loved the presentation of this. It comes in a little box similar to chocolate orange, but once opened it fans out:Looks cool, huh? It also has a little "apple leaf" decoration in the top of the "apple". For some reason this brought out the kid in me, I love novelty stuff like this! :)When I removed the wrapper I found this isn't a "solid" chocolate that needs slamming on a hard surface to break it up, like with Chocolate Orange. Instead it comes in individually separated pieces:The word "Gubor" and some little stars are imprinted onto each piece, adding to the special feel of the product. You get the sense that Gubor have put a lot of care and attention into the Winter Apfel.Onto the taste then. The chocolate is smooth and creamy and melts very easily in the mouth, which reminds me a bit of Lindt Extra Creamy. However, I wasn't too impressed with the flavour. It tasted almost exactly like Lebkuchen biscuits, which I have never really liked. Strong notes of ginger dominated the chocolate, which personally I found a bit sickly. I couldn't detect any hazelnut.This Winter Apfel set me back £2.99 at Tk Maxx which isn't cheap, but if like me you love novelty products I'm sure you'd love these. There was a chocolate and orange version which I wish I had picked up too - I'm sure it would've been more to my taste. Hopefully they're still around and reduced in price in the new year.Overall I would say this is an excellent product, both quality and novelty-wise, and would surely bring a smile to any scrooges face! Personally I would opt for the orange version next time. Now, if only they did an actual *apple* flavoured version...Have you tried the Winter Apfel before? If so what did you think? |
FILE PHOTO - The Ford logo is pictured at the Ford Motor Co plant in Genk,Belgium December 17, 2014. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir/File Photo
(Reuters) - Ford Motor Co (F.N) said on Wednesday it was recalling about 91,000 vehicles worldwide to replace faulty fuel-pump parts that could potentially cause a car to stall without warning.
Ford said it would replace fuel-pump control modules in about 88,151 vehicles, including certain of its 2013-15 model year Ford Taurus sedans, Ford Flex crossover utility vehicles, Lincoln MKS sedans, Lincoln MKT SUVs and Ford Police Interceptor sedans. (ford.to/2bOOxjg)
The company also said it would recall about 2,472 Ford Transit vans to replace fuel-injection pumps in certain models manufactured in the year 2015-16.
The carmaker said it was additionally recalling 23,150 Ford Escape SUVs of 2017 model year to update power-window software.
Ford said is was not aware of any accidents or injuries associated with the issues.
(This version of the story has been corrected to say the recall is ‘worldwide’, not just in ‘North America’) |
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is not backing down in her battle with President Barack Obama over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive, 12-country trade deal that has divided the Democratic Party and triggered a volley of critical statements between the Massachusetts Democrat and the commander-in-chief.
‘The history of these agreements betrays a harsh truth.’ Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)
“The history of these agreements betrays a harsh truth: that the actual enforcement of labor provisions of past U.S. [free trade agreements] lags far behind the promises,” the report claims. “This analysis by the staff of Sen. Warren reveals that despite decades of nearly identical promises, the United States repeatedly fails to enforce or adopts unenforceable labor standards in free trade agreements.”
RELATED: Democrats wage civil war over trade deal
I’ve joined @SenatorHeitkamp, @Sen_JoeManchin, & 12 other senators on an amdt: No Fast Track on any deal with ISDS: http://t.co/2wTmOt5oMh — Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) May 18, 2015 Broken Promises: Decades of Failure to Enforce Labor Standards in Free Trade Agreements,” takes the United States to task for consistently failing to enforce labor protections in its trade deals, and points to ongoing labor-related human rights abuses in 11 of the 20 countries with which the U.S. currently has free trade agreements. “The TPP is being hailed as the strongest free trade agreement yet. But this is not the first time this claim has been made,” the report concludes, seeking to undermine Obama’s claim that TPP would be “the most progressive trade bill in history.”
Obama, who is pushing Congress to approve so-called “fast-track” authorization for the trade deal, which he is still negotiating with 11 South American and Pacific Rim countries, has called liberal critics of the agreement “just wrong.”
“They’re making this stuff up,” Obama said earlier this month in response to Warren, who has said the TPP would make it easier for corporations to ship jobs abroad and could allow Wall Street to weaken provisions in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. “This is just not true.”
RELATED: Obama on Elizabeth Warren: It’s not personal
The president later emphasized that his disagreement with Warren “has never been personal,” as the rift grows between pro-trade Democrats and the party’s progressive wing, threatening to spill out into the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s heir apparent to the presidential nomination, has avoided taking a stand either way on the trade issue as the intra-party conflagration continues. |
by LetsRun.com
February 18, 2015
Previous versions of The Week That Was – our weekly recap – can be found here. We already gave many of our thoughts on the great action at the 2015 NYRR Millrose Games when it took place.
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What goes up, must come down…..
Isaac Newton once said, “What goes up, must come down.”
Since we’re not sure if Newton was a sports fan, over the years we’ve taken that phrase and applied it to the sport and particularly running with our line of “everything averages out to be average.”
What are we talking about?
There seemed to be one overarching theme last week at the 2015 NYRR Millrose Games: hardly anyone ran as fast as they wanted.
American miler Shannon Rowbury , who had run a 4:22.66 mile on a flat track coming in, only managed a 4:24.32 mile on the quick, banked Armory oval.
, who had run a 4:22.66 mile on a flat track coming in, only managed a 4:24.32 mile on the quick, banked Armory oval. Cam Levins , who had looked invincible in completing a 3:54/8:15 double at the Armory two weeks ago, looked at best mediocre in running 13:33.
, who had looked invincible in completing a 3:54/8:15 double at the Armory two weeks ago, looked at best mediocre in running 13:33. Nick Willis , who had run a 3:51.61 mile in his season opener in Boston, winning by a ton, only managed a 3:51.46 at the Armory in a losing effort – a time he was disappointed with as not only did he have competition, but he also told us he thinks the Armory track is a few seconds faster than Boston’s.
, who had run a 3:51.61 mile in his season opener in Boston, winning by a ton, only managed a 3:51.46 at the Armory in a losing effort – a time he was disappointed with as not only did he have competition, but he also told us he thinks the Armory track is a few seconds faster than Boston’s. Erik Sowinski, who 2:19.12 for the 1k a week before at the NBIGP in Boston only managed a 2:21.18 in New York.
“Everything averages out to be average.”
Often in track and field, you’ll see someone run a huge early-season time and think, “man, imagine what they’ll run later in the season,” only to be disappointed that the bigger improvement doesn’t come. Similarly, you’ll often see a person make a huge breakthrough in a given year and think, “imagine what they will do next year,” only to see that they regress.
Whenever someone makes a huge breakthrough, either from year to year or within a season, one thing we are very much aware of is everything had to go right for the breakthrough to occur.
In terms of indoors, the runners above likely all overachieved in their first efforts. Shannon Rowbury wasn’t expecting to run 4:22 on a flat track, she was just hoping for 4:25. So she overachieved but then expected to continue to improve off of that overachievement, which is probably unrealistic. More likely than not, if you overachieve one week, you underachieve the next.
In 2010, Andrew Wheating went from 3:38.60 to 3:30.90 in the 1500 and people started speculating, “imagine what he’ll do in his first year as a full-time pro in 2011.” The reality was, he improved by nearly eight seconds in 2010. Everything had to go perfectly for that to happen so the odds of it going even better the next year weren’t good (Wheating’s best 1500 in 2011 was 3:34.39).
So who had a monster year last year?
One guy that comes to mind is Hassan Mead. Will Mead, who ran 13:02.80 last year, become just the seventh American under 13:00 in 2015? We hope so, but doubt it. He’s had two monster years back-to-back, going from 13:28.45 to 13:11.80 in 2013 and then from 13:11.80 to 13:02.80 in 2014. Having three in a row is very hard to pull off.
###
One last thing about Millrose. Almost everything about Millrose was incredible from our perspective– the press conference, the fields (particularly the men’s NYRR Wanamaker Mile, one of the greatest indoor mile fields ever assembled), the races — except for one thing that baffles us, there definitely were some empty seats. The fans who were there were definitely into it, but not all the seats were full. Now many of these seats were behind the weight throw cage with poor views, so many people “sitting” there moved down and stood track side as meet organizers told us there were just a “handful” of unsold seats and more than 5,000 in the building.
But come on New Yorkers. Millrose, the best pro indoor track meet in the US, should sell out months in advance. The fact that a city of 8.4 million can’t sell out a 5,000-seat venue is a bit depressing for our sport. Yes, there were a lot of things working against Millrose this year – it was during a 3-day holiday weekend, it was on Valentine’s night and the NBA All-Star game was in the city. Plus it was Fashion Week.
But track as a spectator sport continues to struggle in the US (editor’s note: and this despite the fact Millrose was an advertiser on LRC trying to pack the Armory). If you’ve got suggestions on how track meets (in particular in NYC) can get more butts in the seats, email us at [email protected] Or if you are a track fan in the NYC area and didn’t go to Millrose we’d like to know why as well too.
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Florence Kiplagat Does It Again
The winning times for the mid-d and distance races may have been a tad disappointing at Millrose (we really want to see that sub 3:50 mile) but Florence Kiplagat more than made up for it in Barcelona. At the 25th Mitja Marató de Barcelona, she broke her own women’s half marathon world record of 1:05:12 by running a 1:05:09, setting world records at 15k (46:14) and 20k (1:01:54) en route.
Her 5 km splits were 15:39, 15:33 (31:02), 15:12 (46:14) and 15:40 (1:01:54). At 15k, she was 22 seconds up on her time from last year but had to ease off a bit and missed the sub 1:05 barrier. She told the IAAF:
“I began to believe I could break records at 11km, then I got to 15km and through that was enough, especially as I am preparing for the London Marathon. I also had to ease back twice in the next five kilometres so I was amazed I was still on world record pace at 20km.
“In the final few hundred metres, my coach (Renato Canova) was yelling at me, ‘C’mon, you can do it’, so I just said to myself, ‘Right, we are going for it!’”
It will be interesting to see how the 27-year-old Kiplagat, who initially got into athletics hoping to get a scholarship to a U.S. university, does in London.
Given her CV, which includes a World XC title and the Kenyan national 10,000 record of 30:11.53, both achieved in 2009, it’s surprising that her fastest marathon was the first one she’s finished — 2011 Berlin (2:19:44) — when Kiplagat became at the time just the second woman in history to finish her first marathon under 2:20 (now three have done it).
Last year, she was the runner-up in both London and Chicago but winning 2015 London won’t be easy as Mary Keitany is in great shape as shown by her 66:02 win at the RAK Half on Thursday.
More: Florence Kiplagat Runs 1:05:09 To Break World Half Marathon Record At Mitja Marató de Barcelona That’s 4:58 pace. An amazing run as the course has turns and no other woman has come within 41 seconds on a legit course.
*SPIKES Gives A 13-Point Timeline Of Florence Kiplagat’s Career Leading Up To Her 1:05:09 13.1-Mile WR
*Full Coverage of 2015 RAK Half
*MB: The Future Is Here: Drone Used to Film the RAK Half Marathon
*RAK Half Live Thread!!!
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Video of the Week
Annually, the RAK Half Marathon is the richest and often one of the fastest — if not the fastest — half marathons on the planet. Here, you can read about last week’s race, where Ethiopia’s Mosinet Geremew (60:05) got the win on the men’s side alongside Keitany. More than who won, the race for us will forever be remembered as the first pro race that we’ve seen employ a drone to shoot video. Boy, was the footage stunning.
We’ve contacted the race organizers to see if we can get more footage as the two video clips below don’t come close to showing you how great the footage was.
Here is three seconds of the drone:
And eight more seconds:
Other races apparently have used drones like the St. Olaf Cross Country Invitational in the States, but the drone in the RAK got very close to the runners and got incredible closeups. Liability concerns in the U.S. likely are a huge issue moving forward.
More:*Full Coverage of 2015 RAK Half
*MB: The Future Is Here: Drone Used to Film the RAK Half Marathon
*RAK Half Live Thread!!!
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Email of the Week / Free Training Advice: Break Up With Your Girlfriend / Start Dating A Boy
On Thursday, we received the following email which included a guaranteed Millrose win for one athlete. The email was right on the money.
I ran for Steve Spence at Shippensburg University. He used to tell us the best way to get ready for a big race was to break up with your girlfriend. He said it would clear your mind and get you motivated. I think he was 49% serious. He might say otherwise. One year I tried it. It worked great. I was angry, I was motivated, I was free. I ran great.
Move forward to **Name Redacted**. He was dating track hottie **Name Redacted** (come on guys we need more track TMZ). This was obvious via some Instagram posts and such. Over winter it seems they have broken up. **Name Redacted** was even seen subtweeting (look it up) on Twitter about it. Since then he has set the track on fire. He has a clear mind, he’s focused, and about to win the Millrose Games because of it. Trust me.
For the record, this email’s prediction was right on the money.
When LetsRun.com co-founder Robert Johnson was coaching at Cornell, the conclusion that he and many coaches came to was college-aged males did best when they were on the prowl (being recently broken-up counts, unless the guy was totally devastated). College-aged women were the opposite — they did better when they were in a relationship.
So if there was a courting process between a guy on the team and a woman on the team, the men’s and women’s coaches both benefited -p just at different times. The men’s coach benefitted until it became a relationship — the women’s coach afterwards.
It may be total BS. Let us know what you think on our messageboard.
MB: True or False: Young men run better when on the prowl/recently broken up – Young women run better when in a relationship
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Speaking of the messageboard, we always laugh when people say pros “don’t go on there anymore.” We know they do as many complain privately to us about the criticism they get on the boards — failing to realize that fan stands for fanatic and that megastars like Tom “Cheater” Brady and Lebron “Choker/Not Clutch” James get ripped all the time. Getting criticized by fans means you are big enough that they care how you do.
Proof that the pros still very much lurk on the messageboard appears below:
MB: Emma Coburn only learned her AR wouldn’t be ratified from postings on the LetsRun Message Board
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Getting Ready For World Cross Country Championships
The 2015 World Cross Country Championships are coming up in Guiyang, China, next month and we’re starting to get pumped for the purest event in all of running.
The Kenyan Trials were last week and taking a quick look at the Kenyan and Ethiopian teams on the men’s side, we are giving the early edge to Ethiopia.
Credentials Ethiopia Kenya # Sub-13 or Sub-27 Guys 2 1 # Sub-60 or Sub-2:07 Guys 2 1
Ethiopian Top 6 At XC Trials / PBs
1 Tamirat Tola 35:08 – 28:24 road/61:27/2:06:17
2 Bonsa Dida 35:08 – 13:41/28:03 road/61:12/2:12:33
3 Atsedu Tsegaye 35:12 – 27:28/58:47
4 Hagos Gebrehiwet 35:18 – 7:30/12:47
5 Tesfaye Abera 35:20 – 28:21 road/60:32/2:09:46
6 Muktar Edris 35:25 – 12:54 Kenyan Top 6 At XC Trials / PBs
1. Bedan Karoki, 35:08 – 13:15/26:52
2. Geoffrey Kamworor, 35:19- 13:12/27:06/58:54/2:06:12
3. Leonard Barsoton, 35:28 – 13:19/27:20
4. Moses Mukono, 35:51 – 13:19 (World Jr. bronze)
5. Phillip Langat, 35:55 – 27:28 road/61:05 half
6. Joseph Kiptum, 36:02 – 13:30/28:11/60:26/2:09:56
We learned at World XC in Kenya in 2007 that many Kenyans take way more pride in having the individual male champ than the team champ. The individual male champ is the king — like the lion in the jungle. There is no dominant favorite in the list above.
More: IAAF Recap of 2015 Ethiopian XC Champs
*IAAF Recap of 2015 Kenyan XC Champs
*LRC Archives From 2007: 2007 World Cross Country Championships Recap in Mombasa, Kenya: Controlled Chaos
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Tweet / Stat of The Week
36 sub-4 minutes miles yesterday is the best ever. Previous best was 29 on Feb 11, 2012. Best outdoors is 26 on May 31, 2014. #milestats — Mirko Jalava (@mjalava) February 15, 2015
Saturday was quite the day for the mile as a record 36 men broke 4:00 — all of them at meets in the United States. Twelve guys did at BU, 10 at Millrose, eight at Iowa State, and six at Washington.
Currently at the NCAA D-I level, 26 guys have broken four this year (29 are sub-4 with flat track/altitude conversions). The milers still have a little work to do as the most NCAA D-I sub-4s in a given year is 31.
Number of NCAA D-I Sub-4 Milers
2015 – 26 (29 counting flat track/altitude conversions).
2014 – 18 (26 counting flat track/altitude conversions).
2013- 27 (30 counting altitude conversions).
2012 – 31 (33 counting altitude conversions)
2011 – 21 (22 counting flat track conversions)
2010 – 20 (22 counting flat track/altitude conversions)
If you like the indoor mile, you might also enjoy this article from last week: Extensive Interview With US Miler, Jim Beatty, The First Person To Run A Sub-4:00 Mile Indoors. Beatty ran 3:58.9 on February 10, 1962, a little less than eight years after Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4:00 mile outdoors.
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More Mile Facts
Georgetown leads the way with four sub-4 milers so far this year. They all did it in a single heat last week at BU. That’s the good news for the Hoyas. The bad news is only one of the four is in the top 16 on the NCAA list – Amos Bartelsmeyer, and he’s at #16 (16 guys will race at NCAAs in the mile).
More: MB: 12 guys – including 4 Georgetown Hoyas in the same heat – go sub-4 at BU!!
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Hard to believe, but before last weekend distance powerhouse Colorado, which has traditionally focused on longer distances, had a grand total one, yes one, sub-4 miler in school history. Before Saturday, only one runner ever broke 4:00 indoors in a CU uniform: Stephen Pifer, who ran 3:59.55 in 2006. They now have two as Jake Huysz ran 3:58.13 in Washington (three counting outdoors, a LRC visitor wrote that on June 01, 1974, Ted Castaneda ran 3:58.4 a week before finishing second in the 6-mile at NCAAs).
It’s worth noting that CU’s Blake Theroux (who has no indoor eligibility and competed unattached) ran 4:00.84 on Saturday at UW (at the Husky Classic), then came back the next day and tried again at the UW Indoor Open and ran 4:00.71. Tough luck for him, not getting under.
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Speaking of distance powers, Oregon’s got three sub-4 milers this year and a new school record of 3:56.43 (Edward Cheserek at Millrose) but that time would only be #3 all-time at Montana State.
Montana State’s Cristian Soratos went into last weekend with a 4:05.18 mile pb (3:43.73 1500 pb), but left with a 3:55.27 pb after running the NCAA leader in Washington. Amazingly, Soratos’ 3:55.27 pb will be only listed as the #2 time on the Montana State website as Pat Casey ran 3:59.76 in Bozeman, Mont., in 2011 (elevation: 4,820 ft), which converts to a 3:54.59 at sea level. Before you think the sea level conversions are absurd, please realize that the NCAA converted Soratos’ 4:05.18 to 3:56.87 (giving him time for having done it both at 4,820 feet of altitude and on a flat track; when Casey ran his time, the track was banked) much to the chagrin of quite a few messageboard posters, who thought the conversion was far too generous. Soratos showed the conversion has merit with his 3:55.27.
The conversions have merit but we know one thing, school records should list the absolute fastest time run. Soratos should be the school record holder at Montana State.
More: MB: Soratos (Montana State University) Runs 3:55.xx!
*January: MB: Cristian Soratos MSU – Runs 3:56 mile
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The sub-4 talk for HSer Grant Fisher will die down for a little bit as he was just third in a college mile in St. Louis last weekend in 4:06.72.
More: MB: Grant Fisher 3rd in 4:06.72 *Video
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Lastly, we do have to point out one thing. Ole Miss has zero sub-4 guys.
Why did we point that out? Well Ole Miss has had a great year in 2014-15. They made NCAA XC for the first time in the fall and then when they had five guys run 4:05 or faster in January, one messageboard poster got carried away and asked, Ole Miss – Best mile school in the country?
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On the women’s side, the biggest significant pb of the weekend went to Florida State’s Colleen Quigley, who ran a 5+ second pb of 4:29.67 in the mile at BU (previous pb: 4:34.80) to move to #1 in the NCAA (and #5 all-time).
More: MB: Florida State’s Colleen Quigley runs 4:29.67 in mile at BU!! Moves to #5 in NCAA history.
Wanamaker Mile Men: Centrowitz Wins Wanamaker Mile In Thrilling Stretch Run Over Willis As Year Of Lagat Continues
Wanamaker Mile Women: A Wobbly Shannon Rowbury Hangs On To Win Women’s Wanamaker By Over 3 Seconds
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Photo of The Week
Since we are talking about the mile, might America have selected its first 2040 Olympic 1500 runner?
More: Did America Just Get Itself a Gold-Medal Contender in the 1500 at the 2040 Olympics? Wife of 2012 Olympic 1500 Bronze Medallist Abdelaati Iguider Gave Birth To A Son, Mohamed Mourad Iguider, On Friday in Philadelphia
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Recommended Reads
Bob Hersh Responds To USATF Board’s Memo That He Claims “Contains Many Incorrect And/Or Misleading Statements” You can discuss Hersh’s memo here.
* RunnersWorld: USATF Versus Its Critics: Who’s Off Track?
NY Times: “Forget Barefoot; New Trendsetter, If Not Pacesetter, Is Cushioning” Articles on Hoka One One running shoes and the new “maximalist” shoe fad. Includes quotes from Leo Manzano and Lauren Fleshman.
Kenyan 2:34 Marathoner Hyvon Ngetich Crawls To 3rd Place In The Austin Marathon; RD Is So Inspired Gives Her Runner-Up Prize Money (includes video) She was winning by a good margin, but collapsed around 2-blocks from the finish and crawled the rest of the way, refusing a wheelchair that was offered to her. The race was won by Cynthia Jerop in 2:54:22. The race director awarded Ngetich the 2nd place prize money despite her 3rd place finish.
Extensive Interview With US Miler, Jim Beatty, The First Person To Run A Sub-4:00 Mile Indoors Beatty ran 3:58.9 on February 10, 1962, a little less than eight years after Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4:00 mile outdoors.
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Quote of The Day and Last Week’s Home Pages
To see the quotes of the day from last week or last week’s homepage or any homepage, go to our archive page.
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That is it, if you were gone over the weekend. We had extensive coverage and analysis of the 2015 NYRR Millrose Games when it took place.
Questions, comments, please email us or post them in our running fan forum. |
Meet Mosab Hassan Yousef. He’s the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the founders of Hamas. He’s now an evangelical Christian , living in the U.S. after being granted political asylum , and a former operative with Shin Bet, a branch of Israeli intelligence, which led to his father disowning him back in 2010
In the letter, he said his family announced its "complete renunciation" of Mosab Yousef. The father said he was sorry to take such a step but said he had no choice after his son "disbelieved in God...and collaborated with our enemies," he said. The elder Yousef, who helped found the militant Islamic group two decades ago, was humiliated last year when his eldest son announced he had converted to Christianity. Then the son told an Israeli newspaper last week that he had helped Israeli intelligence foil militant attacks and hunt down Hamas leaders — including his father.
As the Gaza conflict rages on, Yousef appeared last this week on CNN with Don Lemon where he said, “Hamas doesn’t care about the lives of Palestinians. Does not care about the lives of Israelis or Americans. They don’t care about their own lives. They consider dying for the sake of their ideology a way of worship. And how can you continue in that society?”
Lemon asked if peaceful co-existence was possible with someone who wishes to see you destroyed.
Yousef was blunt:
Well, Hamas is not seeking co-existence and compromise. Hamas is seeking conquest and taking over. And, by the way, Israel – the destruction of the state of Israel is not Hamas’ final destination. Hamas’ final destination is building the Islamic Caliphate, which means an Islamic state on the rubble of every other civilization. These are the ultimate goals of the movement. |
Adam Halverson is fast becoming the most recognizable police officer in Lino Lakes.
From July 1 to Aug. 27, he made 535 traffic stops in the north metro city of 21,000. That’s two more than the rest of the 25-officer department combined made in the same period.
If he keeps up that pace, Halverson, the city’s dedicated DWI enforcement officer, will have pulled over the equivalent of 15 percent of the city’s population in a year’s time.
During the same period, he issued 261 citations, arrested 22 suspected drunken drivers and made two drug busts. In a single 12-hour shift, he makes 10 to 30 stops. He heavily patrols Lino Lakes’ Main and Birch streets, as well as part of Interstate 35W and 35E, where they converge.
“It’s pretty remarkable. He grew up around here, and he lives around here. He cares for this community,” said his boss, Deputy Director of Police Kelly McCarthy, who said even she is more careful driving, knowing Halverson is patrolling the streets.
And that’s the point. For every traffic stop logged, dozens of other motorists driving by those flashing squad lights ease up on the gas or put down the smartphone.
"That visibility reduces crime," Lino Lakes police officer Adam Halverson said. "It makes the roads safer for everyone."
“That visibility reduces crime,” Halverson said. “It makes the roads safer for everyone out there. The driving public slows down and watches their driving, which reduces the total number of crashes.”
Anoka County has the dubious distinction of being a hotbed for drunken driving. From 2010 to 2014, it recorded 18 drunken-driving-related fatalities and 6,875 DWI arrests, according to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. It ranks second in the state for alcohol-related traffic deaths and serious injuries, after Hennepin County.
Lino Lakes, Coon Rapids and the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office all have received federal dollars for an officer dedicated to drunken-driving enforcement. The grants cover the salary of the officer, plus the cost of a squad car and other traffic safety equipment.
In Coon Rapids, dedicated DWI enforcement officer Adam Jacobson has made 30 of the department’s 70 drunken-driving arrests since June 1.
“It makes a big difference to have a dedicated DWI officer,” said Coon Rapids Police Capt. Jon Urquhart. “One out of every five people involved in a fatality are impaired, whether it’s alcohol or drugs. We get an officer solely dedicated to keeping people safe.”
The power of the traffic stop
Increased DWI and traffic law enforcement annoys some folks, but in the suburbs, dangerous driving is what bothers people the most.
“The number one complaint [the city police department gets] is traffic — speeding, passing on the shoulder, reckless and careless driving,” McCarthy said.
And she has a quick response to the question speeders often ask: “Don’t the police have anything better to do?”
“How do you think you catch murderers or rapists? Traffic stops,” McCarthy said.
Increased traffic patrols also could be deterring thieves. As the number of traffic stops climbed this summer, the number of thefts, including of motor vehicles, dropped from 56 in June to 31 in July to 17 in August, according to McCarthy.
“While we are not 100 percent sure there is a direct correlation, it is certainly good news,” she said.
Lino Lakes Mayor Jeff Reinert said he’s been happy to tap into federal dollars to help improve safety.
“This position is a new program for our city, and so far I have heard that Officer Halverson is doing a great job,” Reinert wrote in an e-mail. “Statistically, traffic stops [are] how criminals are caught. When they come into Lino Lakes, we now have a new program to catch them before they have a chance to do any harm.”
Halverson, who previously was a school resource officer, requested the traffic assignment. He said he got a taste for doing traffic stops at his first job with the Bayport Police Department, where there was time to work traffic because emergency calls were infrequent and sporadic. The Centennial High School graduate joined his hometown police department in 2001.
The most common offenses he sees are passing on the shoulder, speeding and failing to wear a seat belt.
Lino Lakes police officer Adam Halverson stopped a truck and wrote up a citation by hand.
One emerging trend that’s surprising police: the number of highly intoxicated drivers caught in the early evening hours. “It’s the happy hour crowd, which we did not expect at all,” McCarthy said.
Halverson said all but two of his drunken-driving arrests occurred between 5 and 10 p.m.
“I was surprised, too,” he said. |
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann didn’t hold anything back Wednesday when he announced the news that the “delusional liar” Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) was planning on retiring.
Lieberman, Connecticut’s state’s former Attorney General who rose to become the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee in 2000, spoke to reporters during a press conference and depicted himself as a victim of Washington’s modern brand of partisan politics.
“Along the way, I have not always fit comfortably into conventional political boxes — maybe you’ve noticed that — Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative,” Lieberman said. “I have always thought that my first responsibility is not to serve a political party but to serve my constituents, my state, and my country, and then to work across party lines to make sure good things get done for them.”
“The end of the line for Joe Lieberman, self-described ‘moderate Democrat,'” Olbermann began his show by announcing. “Don`t let the delusional liar door hit you in the delusional liar butt on the delusional liar way out.”
“Tonight, goodbye, Joe Lieberman, and good riddance,” he later said.
The MSNBC host noted that in comparing himself to President John F. Kennedy, Lieberman had implied that today’s Democrats were either anti-civil rights, anti-growth or weak on defense.
“As far as his civil rights record, he was rightly praised for helping to repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ in the Senate,” Olbermann said. “Civil rights for Muslims on the other hand? Unlike JFK, Mr. Lieberman supported the American government tossing Muslim suspects into detention, denying them Miranda rights, seeking to strip even US citizens suspected of terrorism of their basic civil rights.”
“On tax policies, Mr. Lieberman, like Mr. Bush, supported taxing the rich at the lowest rates they could get, about half of the 65 percent rate favored by President Kennedy,” he noted.
“Mr. Lieberman’s standard formulation is that he was a Republican on foreign policy and Democrat on domestic, except for the estate tax, the Bush tax cuts, school vouchers, gay marriage, homeland security, the public option, the Medicare buy-in, privatizing Social Security, and tort reform. Did I leave anything off the list?” Olbermann asked Slate’s Dave Weigel.
“That was almost complete,” Weigel replied. “I think you might have left off in 2006, when Lieberman supported — opposed a bill in Connecticut that would have forced all hospitals to treat rape victims, even if they were seen to be ovulating. It was the Catholic hospitals were against it. He took the side of them. At the time he famously said, in Connecticut, it’s only a short ride to the next hospital, in case you are going to one of these hospitals that doesn`t allow you to get the treatment you need.”
“So OK, add that to the list and I think you have got a pretty comprehensive list of reasons why liberals do not like him,” he concluded.
This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast Jan. 19, 2010.
— With earlier reporting by Sahil Kapur |
Overview Though Apple was highly-recruited out of high school, Buckeyes head coach Urban Meyer wasn't sure of what he had during the New Jersey native's first year on campus. But Apple was diagnosed with an iron deficiency that prevented him from giving full effort on the field, in the weight room, and in the classroom. Once that was under control, Meyer and the rest of the coaches saw Apple begin to fulfill his potential. Apple (whose given surname was Woodard, but changed it to honor his stepfather) started 14 of 15 games as a redshirt freshman during Ohio State's run to a national title. In fact, he sealed the Buckeyes' win over Oregon in the championship game, intercepting Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota's final collegiate pass. For the season, he totaled 53 tackles, 5.5 for loss, three interceptions and 10 pass breakups. Although Apple's statistical production decreased in 2015 (33 tackles, two for loss, one interception, eight pass breakups), Big Ten coaches recognized his ability to shut down opposing receivers by voting him second-team all-conference.
Analysis Strengths Good height, weight and arm length combination. Clean footwork in transition with natural ability to mirror and match from press coverage. Won't open hips early and rarely turned around off line of scrimmage. Has foot quickness in short spaces to maintain feel for his man. Extremely competitive when ball is in the air. Has play strength to redirect receivers from their routes. Aggressive hands in coverage and fights hard to disrupt the catch by any means necessary. Finished with 22 passes defensed over last two years. Scouts praise him for work ethic and technical improvement over last two years. Will come downhill against run and is diligent with contain responsibilities. Has optimal size/speed numbers for an early round cornerback. Weaknesses Can be slow to diagnose and anticipate quarterback's plans. Average reactive athleticism. Doesn't feature the balance or twitch to rocket forward and challenge throws if he's not shadowing his man. Won't always play to his size as a tackler. Dragged 18 yards after a catch against Penn State. Shows some stiffness as an open field tackler and allowed four broken tackles this season. Slow to turn head and find ball on deep throws. Becomes Mr. Grabs if he senses receiver is getting over the top of him or when he's trying to crowd the top of routes. Had four holding and seven pass interference penalties from 2014-2015. Draft Projection Round 1 NFL Comparison Trumaine Johnson Bottom Line Highly recruited two-year starter who is entering the draft as a draft eligible redshirt sophomore. Apple's size and strength allows him to compete against physical receivers, but he also has the talent to mirror and match as a man defender. Covering for longer could be challenging early on after playing with talented defensive fronts who ravaged quarterbacks. Apple will have to learn to trust his feet rather than grabbing so often or he'll find that quarterbacks and refs will find him often. Related Links -Lance Zierlein |
crime
Hyderabad Police on Saturday arrested an Uber cab driver for allegedly masturbating while ferrying a 25-year-old woman
Hyderabad Police on Saturday arrested an Uber cab driver for allegedly masturbating while ferrying a 25-year-old woman.
Representational Image
"The arrested accused Prem Kumar (26), is the owner and not the driver of the car. He was driving on that day as regular driver was not on duty," Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) P. Viswa Prasad told ANI.
As per the complaint, the woman boarded the cab around 7:00 am to board a flight from Hyderabad¿s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport to New Delhi. The driver slowed down the car on entering the Outer Ring Road, and the woman noticed him unzipping his pant and masturbating.
In the FIR, the complainant admitted to have felt digusted by the act, and yelled at him to stop the car. The driver, instead started to drive in a zig-zag manner. DCP informed that the accused checked on his behaviour only after the woman threatened him with Police complaint.
The woman however continued with the trip lest she should miss her flight, and later lodged a complaint at Safdarjung Police Station on October 19, after reaching Delhi.
Delhi Police forwarded the complaint to Hyderabad Police which took to action and tracked down the accused. DCP Prasad added that Uber did not respond to a mail sent by Commissioner of Police, regarding the case.
You may also like to read: BMC's legal notices to B-Town stars: SRK, Rani Mukherjee, Rishi Kapoor |
The Nevado del Ruiz volcano, pictured on January 3, 2015, erupted in an ash cloud on Sunday, prompting authorities to temporarily close two airports in the area (AFP Photo/Santiago Osorio)
Bogota (AFP) - Colombia's Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted in an ash cloud on Sunday, prompting authorities to temporarily close two airports in the area.
The civil aeronautics agency said it closed airports at Manizales and Pereira as a precaution after the 8:30 am (1330 GMT) eruption.
This resulted in the cancellation of at least 16 flights on Sunday.
A major eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz in 1985 melted the volcano's snowcap, unleashing mudslides that wiped out the town of Armero, killing an estimated 23,000 people.
The volcano, which has been active for an estimated 150,000 years, is 220 kilometers (137 miles) west of Bogota. |
The Queen's Bands cheer at the 2009 Vanier Cup (Queen's University photo)
Carleton University, with a football playoff spot at stake, is silencing one of Canadian university sport's longest-standing traditions on Saturday. .
Not that the some 80 members of the Queen's University Bands are being silent about being barred from bringing instruments to Saturday's Queen's Golden Gaels-Carleton Ravens clash in Ottawa. As per Carleton's request, they will leave the flutes, clarinets, saxophones, trumpets, trombones, French horns, sousaphones, and drums at home in Kingston. Instead, they will have another noisemaker that is permissible under Ontario University Athletics rules.
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"Our solution that we've been given, basically, is that we are bringing vuvuzelas," said Bridget Rusk, a highland dancer who is also the Bands' finance manager, referring to the notorious noisemakers that assailed eardrums worldwide during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. "We'll be very noisy, so I hope that Carleton is happy that they asked for no instruments.
"Anyone in that stadium can bring vuvuzelas, so we're going to bring them too," the third-year geography student added. "And the athletic department at Queen's is providing the vuvuzelas."
"We have pretty great lung capacity," added fellow highland dancer Laura Stemp, the Bands' operation manager.
On Tuesday, after receiving confirmation for a purchase of 80 tickets in the 4,000-seat stadium, the Bands received a friendly reminder that they would not be allowed to perform.
Story continues
The Bands — pluralized since it encompasses a colour guard, brass band, pipe band, drum corps, highland dancers, cheerleaders and a mascot, Boohoo the bear — have played at Queen's home and away football games since 1905. The organization is older than the Grey Cup. It's generally accepted among fellow Canadian football-playing schools that when the Gaels come to town, the Bands come too.
Queen's retaliatory move also includes offering a vuvuzela to any fan with a ticket.
'Keep all the home-field advantage that we can'
Carleton relaunced football in 2013 and can secure an OUA playoff berth by beating the 2-5 Gaels, who are out of playoff contention and are playing for pride. It is also trying to incorporate its own fledgling pep band, which is fundraising to buy instruments, into its gameday presentation.
The Bands say they have filed a complaint to the OUA, but it appears a century-old tradition has been benched by a second-year team with post-seasoon dreams.
"The Queen's band has been around for a really long time; our band was a little bit concerned about them coming and we wanted to make sure that our band got an opportunity," said Shannon Chinn, Carleton's manager of interuniversity sport, adding that Ravens use a 'compressed' gameday script that skips having two media timeouts in each quarter.
"They even have a hard time getting in, because of the rain we've had at a couple games and with the instruments they happen to have. So we've had a challenge getting our band into a game to date this year. They played out front a couple times and played at the Panda Game [which was held off-campus].
"Our program is on a bit of surprising upswing right now and this is an important game for us," Chinn added. "We want to keep all of the home-field advantage that we can. We had some concerns with the size – they have 80 people in their band, when we're on offence and whatnot. So our request was that we keep our home-field advantage. We spend a lot of money on our DJ and our game-day experience that we're trying to establish here."
Rusk said there has "never been an issue about us bringing our instruments" when the Bands have followed the Gaels to other OUA stadiums and they have followed rules about when to be quiet. Their performances at both Guelph and McMaster earlier this season coincided with those universities' homecoming games. Guelph beat Queen's 66-0 that Saturday, by the way.
Hence being taken aback.
"I was a bit surprised when I got an e-mail saying 'no instruments for our band,' " said Ed Charbonneau, Queen's drum major. “I had a short conversation with them regarding whether they were actually serious about this. Essentially, it boiled down to, they were very serious.
"They said it was best for our university to leave all of our instruments at home, due to the fact... well, they cited a number of reasons. The first being that their coaches that had personally requested that we not bring instruments. Other reasons that they cited was that their own university band is rather inexperienced and young and they didn't want to, I suppose, overshadow them."
Chinn cited her experience working with the CFL's Saskatchewan Roughriders, noting that its Gainer the Gopher mascot was once barred from a crucial late-season game in Calgary.
"There were many times I wasn't allowed to bring our cheerleaders," she said. "We'd gone to Winnipeg many times for the bounce-back game after the Labour Day Classic. But there were times when it there was a big game down the line where there was a lot at stake and they didn't want the visiting team to have that little bit of an advantage of getting some fans onside and getting momentum going.
"Like I said, our band is really brand-new and we're just figuring out how to get them into our game day. Our timing of the entertainement part is shorter because we run a compressed script [with no mid-quarter media timeouts]."
Chinn maintained the move was not driven by Ravens coach Steve Sumarah and his staff.
"We collaborate as a department, all together," she said.
(Speaking of collaboration in the OUA, the Bands and the Western Mustangs cheer team performed together in 2008. So anything is possible.)
Carleton and Queen's did not play during the former's first season back in 2013.
Over the years, the Bands have followed the Gaels across Canada from Halifax to Saskatoon, even performing during national semifinal games that had much higher stakes than Saturday's game. That's an exception to the rule in Canada, and they believe a rule was flouted.
"I don't think they're really within their rights to do this, it's really confusing," said Stemp, a fourth-year student who will be performing at her final football game on Saturday. "If you look at the OUA's strategic plan for this year, they've specifically emphasized that they're looking for exposure, visibility and attendance at games. And this is 80 people who are happily planning to attend and pay for tickets, bring a lot of supporters to the game whether or not they're for Carleton.
"If the OUA is looking for visibility and exposure, one way to get it is to allow us to attend and perform."
Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet. |
I’m not going to belabor this discussion; this topic is being debated all over social media and blogs today and I have just a few simple points I’m going to target and then call it good.
If you haven’t heard, Author of the Twilight Saga, Stephanie Meyer, has released (or will be releasing? I’m not sure) her rewrite of the books with genders swapped: Edward is now Edythe and Bella is now Beau.
Heads are rolling, to say the least.
From what I understand, Meyer’s rewrite was inspired by criticisms that Bella is an insecure, submissive character – she wants to prove that wrong. I actually find that fascinating because I think we sometimes unknowingly project our perceptions of gender roles onto characters based on the exact biases we’re trying to fight; it will be interesting to see if Meyer can bring this to light.
Now I’m not going to debate her motivation for this rewrite, except to say that if you think she’s completely money-focused you’ve never actually watched an interview with her; and if you think she doesn’t care about money you’re probably a tad idealistic. Yes, it’s about the money, and yes it’s about the writing, the art, and the curiosity.
The big question for me is this: is this a brilliant artistic and gender-identity literary exploration or is it a stupid attempt at sucking as much life as possible out of a successful franchise?
My background: I loved the Twilight books and saw all the movies, but I’ve never been a major Stephanie Meyer fan. I’m a bit critical of her writing ability, TBH, and I tend to like more deep and gritty explorations of characters. That said, the storyline of Twilight, I believe, VERY intriguing. I’m a bigger fan of the Fifty Shades of Grey version of the “I want to kill someone I love” concept simply because I think it’s far more layered and nuanced and dives deep into trauma psychology which I find fascinating, but Stephanie Meyer gets a lot of credit for building the first widely-appealing and jaw-dropping iteration of this storyline.
And now, she’s taking it to a new level. And I’ve officially become a fan.
I think her rewrite is huge. If you think it’s stupid and money-mongerong, consider this: it can be difficult to tell a story from the viewpoint of your opposite gender (think Grey by E.L. James). Consider now, telling the exact same story, but rather than just telling Edward’s side, tell Edward’s side as if he were a female and Bella were a male. This is not fucking easy, folks!!!
But that’s not the only reason I’m supportive of this idea – there’s lots of literary exercises that are difficult. I’m supportive simply because this approach is COMPLETELY FUCKING NEW. I know, you can complain all day that it’s the same goddamn story, but tell me, what author has ever done this before? Who has ever rewritten their story (the exact same story) with the genders switched? What are the implications on our perception of gender and gender stereotypes? This could be huge! Now, it could suck too. It could completely reinforce everything society already believes and be a complete failure. But until I read it, I’m willing to give Meyer my applause for at least taking on such a formidable task. Because who does this?? No one does, that’s who. And that’s how history is made.
And if you don’t find that convincing, let’s just consider the reaction she’s getting from her rewrite. The first three posts I saw on the subject were raving mad people who think this is the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard of. I still have yet to see someone say something positive about it.
And that’s when I knew: this might be the move that turns me into a fan.
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Time and again I run into this word in the work I do as an advocate for open space in Duluth, Minnesota: gentrification.
Nearly every time I’ve heard it, it’s been used to describe the revitalization and restoration of communities and how such restoration is pushing out the lower and middle income folks to the benefit of those with more money. Increasingly, though, this same term can be applied to the outdoor culture.
In our case, maybe it should be called “bro-ification.”
Bro-ification describes the disconnect between how outdoor recreation activities are marketed and portrayed in the media–particularly sports like skiing, climbing, and off-road cycling–and the reality of who actually does those sports, and where.
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I’ve observed how the outdoor industry and the media have portrayed getting outside for nearly my entire life, and what used to be a very “volkssport,” inclusive, hippy-like identity has transformed into a super-elitist and entitled one. The destinations presented in the media are generally so unattainable by most people that they might as well be on the moon–and don’t even bother going if you’re not wearing expensive, high-tech apparel and using modern, high-priced gear. Exotic and expensive are the norm.
Meanwhile, nearly everywhere here in the United States, we have incredible public lands that can deliver experiences on par with those in far-away locations that cost a fortune to get to. And you can walk out your door and have those experiences every day.
I have been a party to this bro-ification in the jobs I’ve held, the images I have created, and in promoting the places I worked. But I have to admit that even though I am a lifelong off-road cyclist, nordic skier, and backcountry wanderer, even I am intimidated by some of the people, images, places, and marketing campaigns thrust upon us today.
We are finally at the extreme edge of the bro-ification of outdoor recreation. The public images of the outdoor enthusiast, our playgrounds, and our experiences are those the entitled and elite. And that sense that outdoor adventure belongs to the wealthy and well-connected is pushing aside the common participant.
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Who cares, right? The answer is, we all should. We need everyone to keep our outdoor playgrounds safe and accessible–people of diversity, at-risk youth, urbanites. When even the most mundane piece of equipment is marketed through expensive-to-get-to environments with a smiling, suffering-to-live-the-dream Caucasian person, the message is that these pursuits are not for everyone. Finding adventure outdoors is only for the jetset–for the young, white and rich. The places you need to go are beyond your reach.
Okay, I’m a white guy, born and bred into these activities. But even as part of the establishment, I can see this is a problem. My bet is that the young Latino, black, or native American kid hears this messaging even louder.
The more I dig into the access work I’m doing here in Duluth, Minnesota, the less I can deny the impact of this messaging on my ability to get things done. Bro-ification is cited as a reason for cities to not get involved in access projects that would pull more people across the community into outdoor recreation. These sports, I’m told, are not for the diverse populations we have in Duluth; rather, they offer value only to an elite, wealthy segment of the population. Meanwhile, on the ground, we are actually getting more millennials interested in the outdoors and in the quality of life it brings, and the demographics of that generation tend to be more diverse, more family-oriented, and include more female participation. These are the folks of the future and the people that communities like Duluth need to survive.
Outdoor recreation has traditionally been about being accessible and simple–about getting outside to enjoy nature. Sports like skiing and cycling were created because of a need for transportation and were enjoyed by a broad spectrum of people regardless of economic status. Climbing and camping started out as simple ways for folks to enjoy the outdoors, to commune with nature out the backdoor. Simple pleasures.
These activities could be a strong tool to help cities that are down on their knees economically to stand up and take advantage of long neglected open and natural spaces, to make the lives of their citizens healthier and happier.
Equity is the new buzz word on the leadership circuit. I believe in this concept and I believe that it will drive how future leaders work in their communities going forward. If we as outdoor advocates are positioned as elitist, our work will not be seen as creating equity at all; it will be seen as the opposite, as creating divides. I have to push back constantly on what my staff sees in the media and takes for granted as how users will act or look on the trails or outdoors.
I remember a lot of jeans and flannel shirts when I was nordic skiing as a kid, and I remember the sports I grew up with had both horrible athletes and amazing ones. The primary reason for doing them was literally to just have fun. It’s been an interesting arc to witness: outdoor sports apparel went from tattered, overly loved clothing used in passionate pursuit of a simple adventure to high-tech, high-priced modernity that–if you were to believe magazines and catalogs–are best paired with billion dollar ranches and restored wooden yachts and kitted-out Mercedes Sprinter vans in Jackson Hole or Aspen or other places that are unaffordable for the majority of the population.
We have arrived at this point not only in our industry but also in some of our conservation and advocacy groups. I recently sat through a presentation given by the group called Shift. I generally agree with the conversation Shift is trying to pursue, and support the main idea of their group. However the way it was presented and the space it addresses offers very little for the grass-roots outdoor advocate in the trenches. I found myself cringing not only at the language used in the presentation but also at the imagery and the lack of actual direct action Shift was taking on its own vision. I saw nothing but privileged people living the dream and talking a good game about changing society through base jumping in Yosemite. If I were to have made a similar case in a city council meeting here in Duluth, I would have been laughed out of the room. Unfortunately, Shift is not the only group making this mistake.
It’s time that the industry and the media to pull back from the current marketing trends and begin spreading a message of inclusion and finding unmitigated fun in our own backyards–not near-death experiences in remote locations and exotic resort towns. Otherwise, we risk alienating the very people we need to grow our numbers and keep our natural playground open–regardless whether they’re wilderness areas or a more urban-oriented park.
For outdoor brands, think of the opportunity. The industry has stepped so far beyond what’s real, the brand that embraces inclusion is going to differentiate itself. The question is, in an arms race that rewards helicopters and ends-of-the-earth travel, can anyone even remember what “real” is?
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An Armenian man holds a placard at a rally in Yerevan | Karen Minasyan/AFP via Getty Images Foreign Affairs Why we need to contain the Caucasus crisis Armenia and Azerbaijan are two or three steps away from a Bosnia-style conflict that could be deleterious for the wider region.
Four days of violence in April unfroze the generation-old Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. A new truce was signed to halt the recent outbreak of violence in the Caucasus between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. But it is fragile and has already been broken. As Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan acknowledged, there could be more fighting “at any moment.”
It is no exaggeration to say that Armenia and Azerbaijan are two or three steps away from a Bosnia-style conflict that could be deleterious for the wider region. What can be done to stop that happening?
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The Karabakh conflict is as old as it is intractable. From 1991-94 Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought a hot war over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. The territory was part of Soviet Azerbaijan but its population was three-quarters Armenian. The Armenian side prevailed, leaving 20,000 dead and displacing more than 1 million.
A ceasefire was signed in 1994. Armenians were given de facto possession not just of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, but (in whole, or in part) of seven Azerbaijani regions unrelated to the original dispute. The Armenians called the territory a protective buffer zone.
The 1994 ceasefire was supposed to be a prelude to the peace agreement that never came. The international community’s eyes and ears in the region consist of just six monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
The ceasefire has been under heavy strain for a couple of years now. Azerbaijan has been building up its store of heavy weapons and both sides have engaged in rhetoric more extreme than at the height of the conflict in the 1990s.
The ceasefire finally cracked on April 2. The most likely cause was an Azerbaijani attempt to test the Armenians’ defenses and force them to negotiate from a weaker position. The Azerbaijani military regained some slivers of lost territory — and an awful lot of lost pride. But the human price was high. Officially, several dozen people were killed. Experts put the death toll nearer to 200, including many civilians.
The four-day war stirred up long-seated anger and sharpened mutual insecurities. Azerbaijanis still feel humiliated by defeats suffered more than 20 years ago. There was a patriotic upsurge of euphoria throughout the country, a useful distraction from the socioeconomic crisis that has seen its currency, the manat, devalued twice in the last year. The temptation — and, worryingly, the public pressure — to try this kind offensive again is enormous.
Armenia saw a similar surge of nationalist emotion. Caught flat-footed by fighting, the country witnessed a sobering few days. Young Armenians volunteered to join the front line.
Given the massive arsenals of weaponry both sides now possess, new fighting could easily escalate into an all-out conflict far more destructive than the 1991-94 war. Baku and Yerevan could invoke their military assistance treaties with Turkey and Russia respectively. Neither wants to get involved, but would be under big pressure to honor their commitments in the region.
Other regional neighbors are also alarmed. Georgia, in particular, could become caught in the crosshairs. Armenians and Azerbaijanis constitute Georgia’s two biggest minorities. The BP-run Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that runs through the country could also become a target.
A security vacuum has opened up around Karabakh. It will only be filled by serious peace talks — or by more fighting.
The formal peace process has been close to moribund for five years. Neither President Ilham Aliyev nor President Sargsyan has said anything constructive or conciliatory. The conflict’s three mediators and co-chairs of the OSCE’s “Minsk Group” — France, Russia and the United States — have had to limit themselves to shuttle diplomacy. Their modest ideas are routinely rejected.
The three co-chairs have said they want to launch “comprehensive negotiations.” These could take the form of a peace conference chaired by the three foreign ministers.
It’s an important step, but the two presidents want very different things. The Azerbaijani side wants new negotiations and to use its military force as leverage. The Armenian side is digging in harder — they are reluctant to agree to anything that might look like submission to Azerbaijani military pressure and have demanded “security guarantees.”
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Can this crisis be contained before it escalates? We first need to challenge one common preconception: the idea that Russia can fill that security vacuum and manage the conflict.
Russia’s top officials did swing into action and negotiate a verbal ceasefire on April 5. But Russia has done little since then. Its problem is that it has simultaneously mediated and destabilized the conflict.
The Russians have been selling arms to both sides. An estimated 85 percent of Azerbaijan’s weaponry comes from Russia, while Russia has a military alliance with Armenia, sealed by a new treaty signed in 2010.
This balancing game means that Russia is unable to set the agenda in Karabakh. Both Baku and Yerevan are skeptical of Russia’s intentions. In Armenia especially, the new backlash against Russia is significant. Because Russia has no military presence on the ground and no monopoly on the peace process, both countries can block plans for a Russian peacekeeping force that would reassert its influence in the region.
So the common belief that, if things get worse “Russia can handle it,” is misplaced. This poses a challenge to the United States and France. Neither has done enough to offer a balanced international plan.
Unless progress is made now, more fighting is likely to break out after the international spectacle of Azerbaijan’s much-coveted Formula 1 race in Baku ends in late June. We can only hope that the prospect of more intense fighting in the Caucasus, and its dangerous implications for the region, will concentrate minds on solving a conflict that has been ignored for too long.
Thomas de Waal is a senior associate at Carnegie Europe in Brussels. |
The painting known as A Charge to Keep, by W.H.D. Koerner
Wikipedia
Former President George W. Bush had his official presidential portrait unveiled at a special ceremony at the White House today. It’s fairly standard issue: Bush stands in the Oval Office, his hands on a chair, with a look that Roland Barthes noted decades ago is typical of political portraits. (“The gaze is lost nobly in the future, it does not confront, it soars and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined.”) You can see the new portrait over at Talking Points Memo.
One detail stands out, though: President Bush’s favorite painting, the one he kept by his desk, and the one for which he named his 1999 autobiography, A Charge to Keep. Bush loved to regale visitors with what he thought was the story behind the painting, telling how it depicted the famous circuit riders who in the nineteenth century spread the message of Methodism across the Alleghenies. Bush, a Methodist since the 1970s, identified with the quest of the noble cowboy missionary, and visitors often noted the resemblance between Bush and the lead rider.
There’s only one problem with that story: As Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg wrote in his 2008 book The Bush Tragedy, “that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting.”* Weisberg explains:
The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”
Whether or not Bush ever learned the true story behind the painting seems to be unclear, but if so, he’s sticking to his guns, unwanted ironies be damned. Indeed, President Bush seems determined to ride off with Koerner’s painting into history.
*Update, June 1, 2012: While Bush’s story of the painting’s origins still appears to be false, aspects of Weisberg’s account have also been disputed. As University of Illinois professor Cara Finnegan points out on her blog First Efforts, an illustration that ran with the horse thief story “The Slipper Tongue” in The Saturday Evening Post is actually a very similar-looking but different Koerner composition, also depicting a man working his way up a hill on a horse. The Google Books archive, similarly, shows the same similar-looking but different Koerner illustration.
Contacted about the dispute, Weisberg agreed that he may have confused the two illustrations, and explained that his photocopy of “The Slipper Tongue” may simply have been blurry.
Not disputed by Finnegan is the later appearance of the composition, also mentioned in Weisberg’s book, with the 1918 Country Gentleman story “A Charge to Keep.” Both Finnegan and Weisberg note that this illustration, now the first confirmed appearance of the painting, is not about Methodist missionaries either. As Weisberg points out, the story—about a son’s fight to keep his land, inherited from his father, from “rapacious timber barons”—may contain a different irony altogether. |
Ohio State lost to Michigan State to put its Big Ten East and College Football Playoff chances on life support, due in part to a weak offensive performance. Oddly, star running back Ezekiel Elliott only got 11 carries, and he railed on his coaches for that in the postgame press conference.
In case you were wondering if Zeke Elliott was being taken out context or something. https://t.co/c7DopZmPOK pic.twitter.com/RwXRJuHAzy — Matt Hinton (@MattRHinton) November 22, 2015
Elliott: "I deserve more than 11 carries. I really do. I can't speak for the playcaller. I don't know what was going on." — Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) November 22, 2015
#Buckeyes running back Ezekiel Elliott:"coaching staff didn't put us in position to win. That's a team (Michigan State) we should beat." WOW — Rick Pizzo (@BTNRickPizzo) November 22, 2015
Elliott was so upset that he claims he's not coming back to Columbus for his senior season.
Ezekiel Elliott: "Honestly, that was my last game at the Shoe. There's no chance I'm coming back next year." — Austin Ward (@AWardESPN) November 22, 2015
Enjoyed my last buckeye walk. Gonna miss all the fans who had a couple too many trying to break my hand with the high fives — EzekielElliott#⃣1⃣5⃣ (@EzekielElliott) November 22, 2015
Cardale Jones also announced that he's leaving this year. Ohio State still has a regular season game to play at Michigan. For his part, OSU linebacker Darron Lee seemed to agree with Elliott.
Truth hurts like this loss bruh https://t.co/ydJPKfCGKX — Darron Lee (@DLeeMG8) November 22, 2015
To be fair to Ohio State's coaches, Elliott's health could have been a perfectly legitimate reason why he didn't get more carries.
Elliott had a leg infection and was in the hospital for three days this week. Said he was depressed, didn't think he'd play, was crying. — Ryan Lewis (@RyanLewisABJ) November 22, 2015
Here's the video.
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SB Nation presents: Baylor and Michigan State highlight explosive Week 12 |
President-elect Donald Trump really isn’t going to like this week’s “Saturday Night Live.”
In its cold-open sketch, the show tore into Trump’s reportedly friendly relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, his misspelled tweets and his controversial Cabinet picks.
The skit began with Alec Baldwin (playing Trump) explaining to Kate McKinnon (playing his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway) why he went on his “thank you” tour and chose former Texas Gov. Rick Perry as energy secretary.
“Wasn’t that a great choice? I saw him on ‘Dancing With the Stars,’” the Trump character said.
“This guy has so much energy. Unpresidented,” he added, referring to a misspelled tweet Trump posted Saturday.
“SNL” also poked fun at Trump for reportedly having a tough time finding musicians to perform at his inauguration. Beck Bennett ― playing a shirtless Putin ― then came out of the fireplace to give Trump a special Christmas “Elf on the Shelf” gift, in reference to a CIA report that Russia interfered with the presidential election.
When Baldwin-as-Trump said he feels bad at not getting him anything, Bennett-as-Putin replied: “Please, Mr. Trump, you are the gift.”
Finally, actor John Goodman made an appearance to play Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson.
Tillerson is friendly with Putin in real life, so Goodman arrived on the scene to do a special dance with Bennett’s character before discussing business. Meanwhile, all Trump could do is talk about his meeting with Kanye West. |
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Just as the 2014 Argentine presidential race was getting under way, Ernesto Laclau was interviewed by the conservative La Nación newspaper. Asked about the prospects of neoliberal candidate Mauricio Macri, he replied, “He has the same odds of becoming the constitutionally elected president of Argentina as I do becoming the emperor of Japan.” Shortly after, Macri and his Cambiemos coalition pulled off a shock victory in the 2015 presidential race. This year, Cambiemos achieved another vital win in the August 12 primary elections. More than an election, the primaries represented a nationwide straw poll to gauge the general political mood. The largest takeaway lesson is that Cambiemos, with a firm hold on one-third of the electorate, is the nation’s minority-majority party of choice, while the remaining two-thirds in the opposition finds itself completely fragmented among a half-dozen competing parties. The Left now has to come to grips with a sobering reality: Argentina’s first democratically elected right-wing party has shown itself capable of becoming the nation’s majority political force. The results hit hardest in the camp of former president Christina Kirchner. Kirchner had gambled that, fragmentation notwithstanding, her candidacy in the Buenos Aires province was strong enough to run unopposed on her own platform and outside the Peronist political machine. Thus, focus was trained all last month on Argentina’s most populous region, with 40 percent of the electorate, where the race between Cambiemos’s conservative candidate Esteban Bullrich and Cristina Kirchner was held up to scrutiny in an attempt to divine the political future of the nation. Although the results of that race are still in dispute (a technical tie seems the most likely outcome), and even though a second-place finish in midterm general elections in October would be enough for Kirchner to take a seat in the national senate, the numbers emerging from the primary have put a damper on progressive hopes for a leftist turn-around in 2019: where the progressive candidacy of Kirchner represented a Hail Mary for the opposition, her failure to win in anything but strongest terms possible would represent a major fumble on the path to her 2019 bid for the presidency. One major current event may throw a wrench into Cambiemos’s plans: the most high-profile case of a disappeared person since the end of the dictatorship. The disappearance of Santiago Maldonado — and eyewitness accounts alleging he was captured by the militarized police — has sparked huge protests, and interrupted Cambiemos’s careful attempts to paper over the historical relationship between the Right and authoritarianism.
A Brave New World The recent election cycle has shed new light on the ambitious nature of the Cambiemos project: first and foremost, to build a governing consensus among the different sectors of Argentine society; second, Macri’s team of technocrats and business elites wants to establish itself as a beacon of reaction on the continent. As far as the latter is concerned, Cambiemos enjoys the unique privilege of being the only political force to notch an electoral victory against Latin America’s “pink tide.” As if to drive that point home, Cambiemos candidates could be seen during the recent election campaign boasting of their “republican” credentials and inveighing against Venezuela’s “socialist authoritarianism” in the same sentence. Leaving behind the halcyon years of the pink tide, Latin America finds itself entering a revanchist political cycle: in Venezuela, there are public lynchings of citizens who “look like Chavez supporters” (i.e., dark skinned), and in Brazil, the runaway popularity of presidential aspirant and hate-monger Jair Bolsonaro portends a dark future, to say nothing of the virulent racism that drives the anti–Workers’ Party rhetoric on the right; it is perhaps only in Argentina that one finds the semblance of a peaceful political transition. Yet despite appearances, in Argentina too there are mobilizations of class resentment against the perceived beneficiaries of the Kirchner’s “Won Decade,” invariably the poor and marginalized. In a recent stump speech, Kirchner’s conservative opponent Bullrich boasted that the Cambiemos project was progressing day-by-day, “laying another meter of asphalt, putting another kid behind bars.” Later dismissed as a slip of the tongue, Bullrich’s criminalization of poor youth goes hand in hand with an emerging cultural politics that sees political corruption, government welfare, and petty criminality as part of a sinister Mobius strip of authoritarian-populist-clientelism. In fact, for the last two years the government and media has attempted to stigmatize any social expression that does not walk in perfect lockstep with the neoliberal program: the popular sector is painted in broad strokes as “mafioso,” and political opposition is branded a Kirchnerist conspiracy. Before the primaries there were still lingering doubts whether Cambiemos had what it took to become a majoritarian political force. The reason, in the most immediate context, is the government’s dismal economic performance: plummeting consumption, diminished real wages, creeping inflation, rising unemployment, depressed industries, and an estimated third of the population living below the poverty line. All things considered, one could reasonably expect the kleptocratic party to be on its last legs. But the government’s economic blunders are offset by their political acumen, a fact reflected in the polls where most of the party’s major political figures enjoy approval ratings that hover consistently around 50 percent. Defying a common Argentine adage, the people clearly don’t “vote with their wallet.” Kirchner had hung her success on the eternal validity of that kind of thinking and had rebranded herself as a committed anti-austerity warrior (admittedly, she may have more right to the title than her counterparts in Brazil’s Workers’ Party). On the face of things, with successive rounds of austerity and, in the last months, a savage attack on labor and worker militancy, it seemed like a reasonable maneuver on the part of the ex-president. But the Cambiemos platform has revealed that, beyond the immediate experience of the economy, the electorate is oriented even more by the prevailing interpretation of the brute economic reality. And on that account the Cambiemos narrative has taken the upper hand.
The Cambiemos Formula Cambiemos began life in 2005 as PRO (Propuesta Republicana), a political platform with its base in the city of Buenos Aires. It was there that Macri and his main political adviser Horacio Rodriguez Larreta began to hone their formula: initially, the twin pillars of “security” and “post-material values” proved successful in capturing the sizeable middle-class vote concentrated in the nation’s capital. The latter values, including “green” initiatives, free Wi-Fi, organic food markets, bike paths, etc., spoke to the middle-class’s self-perceived commonality with their counterparts in the First World, while the security protocol would represent a cordon sanitaire against those in the slums and outskirts. The natural outgrowth of an increasingly segmented society, that platform expanded as PRO assumed a national projection in the form of Cambiemos: the crown jewel in the new “values-driven” platform was undoubtedly the “culture of work,” a meritocratic social vision that is slowly displacing Argentina’s longstanding “culture of the worker.” The Cambiemos government is neoliberal, but its particular brand of neoliberalism is tailored to the domestic balance of powers: adopting what some call a “gradualist” policy, the government’s basic tack has been to announce dramatic measures — regressive tax hikes, deep budget cuts, the redistribution of income towards the wealthiest sectors — and then backpedal as necessary in the face of popular reaction. Where the Left has regarded these about-faces as popular victories, the government has managed to capitalize and present them as a token of their conciliatory, democratic spirit. In fact, Cambiemos seems to have an inch-perfect read on public opinion: with little fuss they have preserved the outgoing government’s most popular social spending programs, and more generally, there are few outward signs of orthodox neoliberalism’s anti-government ideology on display. In a country where the neoliberal label is political kryptonite, Macri’s Cambiemos choreographs a careful dance with Argentina’s neoliberal past. Throughout the 1990s, Carlos Menem’s neoliberal government was still reading from the Peronist libretto, paying lip service to shared abundance and redistribution as it slashed government funds and privatized public utilities. The Cambiemos project, by contrast, conflates the “enthusiastic citizen” with the “entrepreneurial subject,” encouraging the precarious and unemployed to channel their civil unrest into individual, market-based solutions rather than roadblocks and strikes. Forming an even starker departure from the neoliberalism of the 1990s is the current government’s political inheritance: Menem came to power in 1989 on the heels of a massive hyperinflationary crisis that was temporarily tamed by neoliberal nostrums. By contrast, Macri assumed the mantle of a nation that was emerging from a period of unparalleled (albeit uneven) economic growth. In other words, Macri has entered the terrain on significantly more stable political and economic ground than previous administrations, with the full backing of the national bourgeoisie but also, and equally important, with considerable pushback at the level of popular resistance. One of the masterstrokes of the Cambiemos project has been to seize on Argentina’s national culture of “self-management” and translate that DIY value into a vision compatible with neoliberalism’s “culture of precarity.” From the insurrectionary response to the 2001 crisis — with its factory takeovers and horizontal assembly democracies — to the integration of informal work into micro-cooperatives during the Kirchner years, all the way up to the “neoliberal subject” of the Cambiemos project, there is a paradoxical connection between the post-2001 experiments in worker self-management and the “worker-entrepreneur” at the heart of Macri’s cultural revolution. In an important sense, the last year and a half has seen the neoliberal wheat separated from the progressive chafe: Macri has been more than happy to preserve and even expand on Kirchner’s Argentina Trabaja (Argentina Works) program, which provides a meager income for thousands of cooperatives across the nation. Despite the patina of worker control suggested by the term “cooperative,” the practical reality is that Argentina Trabaja represents the height of precarity, where beneficiaries are more like welfare recipients than workers capable of negotiating the terms of their employment. The coup de grace for Cambiemos was their ability “depoliticize” the state, to step back from the agonism that defined the Kirchner regime and present politics as a routine matter best handled by experts. In practical terms, this has meant separating government programs from any broader social vision. The Right is hastening the end of the era when social rights — rather than individual rights — framed the public’s relationship to government. |
The pall wraps Dogtown in dirt and brown. The air is burnt, acrid. Stay outside for the day and the coughing begins, a dry hack at the back of the throat that clears nothing and leaves you dry.
Every year it’s the same, the palm oil plantations are cleared, fires spring up across all of Indonesia and the smoke goes up an apocalyptic season unto itself. As heavy as the smoke lies the sense of resignation, it’s another country, the government is powerless, too much money in back pockets and brown envelops for anything to change.
“We stay indoors” say the people who can. Houses, air-conditioned cars, offices, all sealed tight and the shopping malls fit to burst. It’s a marker of status, a new culture emerging, who gets to stay indoors, who has to go out.
In the workshops and warehouses of Dogtown there is no indoors, just a roof for the rain. No one wears a mask, there doesn’t seem to be much point. This is the raw edge of environmental destruction, a hard reality and an everyday practicality, a dream of blue skies turned to brown. |
The Anonymous hacker who was exposed after leaking evidence that was used to convict two of the Steubenville, Ohio rapists is facing more time in jail than the sexual offenders he helped bring to justice.
Deric Lostutter leaked a viral video made by the rapists themselves that clearly showed their 16-year-old victim was unconscious and unable to consent.
The home of the 26-year-old “hacktivist” was raided by the FBI last April and Lostutter eventually admitted to distributing the clip.
Despite the fact that his involvement in the Stebenville rape case brought about the convictions of two rapists, Lostutter is facing 10 years in jail for obtaining tweets and social media posts that contained details about the rape and for threatening action against the rapists, and the school officials who have since been indicted for their roles in covering up the crime cover up the crime.
One of the convicted rapists, Ma’Lik Richmond, was recently released from juvenile detention two months early for “good behavior” after serving less than a year.
Richmond’s family released a statement about how hard the past 16 months have been for the 16-year-old. The statement failed to make an apology to the rape victim, according to her lawyer.
“Although everyone hopes convicted criminals are rehabilitated, it is disheartening that this convicted rapist’s press release does not make a single reference to the victim and her family -- whom he and his co-defendant scarred for life,” said attorney Robert Fitzsimmons.
“One would expect to see the defendant publicly apologize for all the pain he caused rather than make statements about himself. Rape is about victims, not defendants. Obviously, the people writing his press release have yet to learn this important lesson.”
[Geek Republic] [WTRF] |
GOP hopeful Mitt Romney found himself backtracking during the second presidential debate after moderator Candy Crowley challenged his assertion that President Barack Obama had not referred to recent attacks on Americans in Libya as terrorism.
“The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world we are going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror and I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime,” Obama explained following Romney’s suggestion that the president had been more concerned with fundraising than national security after the death of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
“I think it’s interesting that the president just said something, which is on the day after the attack he went in the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror,” Romney replied. “Is that what you’re saying? I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”
“Get the transcript,” Obama insisted.
“He did, in fact, sir,” Crowley pointed out to Romney.
“Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” the president asked Crowley as the audience applauded.
“He did call it an act of terror,” the moderator agreed. “It did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea of there being a riot out there about this tape to come out.”
“The administration indicated that this was a reaction to a video,” Romney said, rephrasing his attack with a slight stutter. “It took them a long time to say this was a terrorist act by a terrorist group. And — and to suggest — am I correct in that regard?”
“I want to move you on,” Crowley told the candidates. “People can go to the transcripts.”
Watch this video from CNN, broadcast Oct. 16, 2012. |
The US Supreme Court on Monday extended the constitutional protection of the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms to every jurisdiction in the nation.
The action places in serious doubt the constitutionality of a handgun ban in Chicago, and sets the stage for more legal challenges to an array of tough gun-control laws across the United States.
The 5-to-4 decision means that in addition to the federal government, state and local governments must comply with the high court’s 2008 landmark ruling recognizing an individual right to possess handguns in the home for self defense.
IN PICTURES: The debate over gun rights
Two years ago, in a decision called District of Columbia v. Heller, the high court struck down a handgun ban in Washington, D.C., ruling that it violated the right of individuals to keep and bear arms.
Because the District of Columbia is a federal enclave – rather than part of a state – the question remained open whether the newly articulated Second Amendment right would apply beyond federal jurisdictions like Washington, D.C., to states and municipalities.
That was the issue in Monday’s case, McDonald v. City of Chicago. Chicago maintains a handgun ban similar to the ban struck down in Washington. But it wasn’t clear from prior Supreme Court precedent whether Second Amendment protections extended to cities and states.
The high court has now made clear that they do.
“We have previously held that most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights apply with full force to both the federal government and the states. Applying the standard that is well established in our case law, we hold that the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the states,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the majority.
A 'fundamental' right
The majority justices said the right to keep a handgun for self-protection in the home is a “fundamental” right, deeply rooted in America’s history and tradition.
Justice Alito quoted England's Sir William Blackstone as asserting that the right to keep and bear arms was “one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen.” He said the American colonists shared that view and decided to protect it.
“The right to keep and bear arms was considered no less fundamental by those who drafted and ratified the Bill of Rights,” Alito said.
In a dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said the majority opinion overturned more than a century of Supreme Court precedent. “Although the court’s decision in this case might be seen as a mere adjunct to its decision in Heller, the consequences could prove far more destructive – quite literally – to our nation’s communities and to our constitutional structure,” he said.
“Today’s ruling marks a dramatic change in our law,” he said. “I would proceed more cautiously.”
Chicago's handgun ban on tenuous ground
The decision sends the case back to the Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago to reconsider the constitutionality of that city’s handgun ban. In effect, the appeals court judges must apply the same test the high court used to invalidate Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban.
Most legal analysts expect Chicago’s ban to be struck down.
The next major issue will be what legal standard lower court judges should apply when assessing whether a particular gun-control measure violates the Second Amendment.
A plurality of justices offered some guidance. “It is important to keep in mind that Heller, while striking down a law that prohibited the possession of handguns in the home, recognized that the right to keep and bear arms is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,” Alito wrote.
“We made it clear in Heller that our holding did not cast doubt on such longstanding regulatory measures as ‘prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,’ ‘laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,’ ” he said.
“We repeat those assurances here,” Alito said. “Despite municipal respondents’ doomsday proclamations, incorporation does not imperil every law regulating firearms.”
'Due process' is basis of majority decision
In extending the Second Amendment to cities and states, the justices declined an invitation by gun rights lawyers to overrule prior legal precedents dating to 1873, 1876, and 1886.
Lawyers for the Second Amendment Foundation had asked the justices to consider relying on the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment. But that part of the high court’s jurisprudence has remained largely dormant since the 1800s and would have required the court to announce a major shift in the law.
Only one justice, Clarence Thomas, embraced this approach. Nonetheless, Justice Thomas joined the majority in most of its decision and concurred in the result.
Alito’s majority decision relied on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, the provision most often cited by the Supreme Court when the high court has moved to enforce the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states.
The Bill of Rights was written and adopted as a check on the power of the national government. It was only later that the Supreme Court began enforcing those same rights against state and local governments. For example, state and local governments must respect free speech rights guaranteed in the Constitution, and state and local police must adhere to the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment.
But the Supreme Court has not applied all of the rights in the Bill of Rights to the states. Some state courts do not recognize a right to a grand jury indictment or a jury trial in certain civil cases. Yet both of those rights are guaranteed in federal court by the Constitution.
On Monday, the high court extended its holdings in this area to declare that the Second Amendment must now be enforced at the state and local levels.
“In Heller we held that the Second Amendment protects the right to possess a handgun in the home for the purpose of self-defense,” Alito said. “A provision of the Bill of Rights that protects a right that is fundamental from an American perspective applies equally to the federal government and the states.”
Alito was joined in the majority opinon by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas.
In addition to Stevens, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.
“The Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self-defense,” Breyer wrote. “There has been, and is, no consensus that the right is, or was, fundamental,” he said. “No broader constitutional interest or principle supports legal treatment of that right as fundamental. To the contrary, broader constitutional concerns of an institutional nature argue strongly against that treatment.”
IN PICTURES: The debate over gun rights
Related: |
Between 1908 and 1913, American filmmaker D. W. Griffith made over 400 movies. Over that time, he, along with his fellow Hollywood directors, developed continuity editing. Using such tools as matching eyelines – cutting so that the actors appear to be looking at each other across different shots – and the 180-degree rule – which keeps the actors from switching places on the screen – Griffith and his cohorts created a visual grammar that let audiences forget the film’s artifice and disappear into the story. By the time Griffith released his hugely influential (and hugely racist) masterwork A Birth of A Nation in 1915, the rules of continuity editing had more or less been worked out. This form of storytelling was so successful, and profitable, that it has been used for just about every Hollywood movie that has come out since.
Yet just as these rules were being codified, filmmakers, mostly European, looked for other ways to tell a story. German directors like F. W. Murnau and Robert Wiene experimented with cinematic depictions of the subconscious. French filmmakers like René Clair used camera tricks and odd framing to create works of formal beauty. But it was the filmmakers in the newly formed Soviet Union that really contributed a new way of thinking about film – Soviet Montage. You can watch a video about it above.
When the Bolshevik Revolution washed over the country, the number of films in the USSR dried up. One of the few movies available at VGIK, aka The Moscow Film School, was Griffith’s sprawling Intolerance (watch it online here). Lev Kuleshov, a young teacher there, started to take apart the movie and reorder the images. He discovered that the meaning of a scene was radically changed depending on the order of the shots. This led Kuleshov to try an experiment: he juxtaposed the image of a man with a blank expression with a bowl of soup, a young corpse in a coffin and a pretty girl. You can watch it below.
Invariably, audiences praised the actor for his subtlety of performance. Of course, there was no performance. The connection between the two images was made entirely within the head of the viewer. This realization would forever be commemorated in film schools everywhere as the Kuleshov Effect.
Using the French word for assemble, Kuleshov called this "montage." At the school, however, there was considerable debate over what montage exactly was. One of Kuleshov’s students, Vsevolod Pudovkin envisioned each shot as a brick, one small part that together with other small parts created a cinematic edifice.
Another student, Sergei Eisenstein, proposed a far more dynamic, and revolutionary, form of montage. Eisenstein saw it “as an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots.” An intellectual well versed in theory, Eisenstein compared montage to Karl Marx’s vision of history where a thesis smashes into its antithesis and together, from that wreckage, forms its synthesis.
Eisenstein’s greatest example of montage, and indeed one of the greatest examples of filmmaking ever, is the Odessa Steps scene from his masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. In it, Czarist soldiers massacre a group of protestors, mostly women and children. You can watch it below.
As you can see, it’s a powerful piece of propaganda. There is no way to come away from this movie and not feel like the Czarists are anything but murderous villains. (Nevermind that the movie is wildly inaccurate, historically speaking.) Shots of a grieving mother juxtaposed with images of bayonet wielding troops result in a surprisingly visceral feeling of injustice.
In his writings, Eisenstein outlined the varying types of montage – five kinds in all. The most important, in his eyes, was intellectual montage – a method of placing images together in a way to evoke intellectual concepts. He was inspired by how Japanese and Chinese can create abstract ideas from concrete pictograms. For example, the Japanese symbol for tree is 木. One character for wall is 囗. Put the two together, 困, and you have the character for trouble, because having a tree in your wall is certainly a huge pain in the ass. You can see an example of intellectual montage in the end of the Odessa steps sequence when a stone lion seemingly rises to his feet.
Eisenstein decided to push this idea to the limit with his follow up, October. The movie is deeply strange to watch now. In one famous sequence, Eisenstein compares White Russian general Alexander Kerensky to a peacock and to a cheap Napoleon figurine. It’s proved to be an interesting intellectual exercise but one that left audiences, both then and now baffled.
And below is another, slightly funnier, certainly more contemporary, example of intellectual montage.
Many of the landmark films mentioned above can be found in our collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..
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Watch Battleship Potemkin and Other Free Sergei Eisenstein Films
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Watch Ten of the Greatest Silent Films of All Time — All Free Online
The Filmmaking of Susan Sontag & Her 50 Favorite Films (1977)
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here. |
Donald Trump once again refused to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin in the final presidential debate – saying Putin has 'no respect' for his rival, Hillary Clinton.
An angry debate had some of its harshest and most rapid-fire charges yet between the two on the same stage when Wallace asked about Russia, a strategic rival to the United States.
Hacking that the U.S. government says Russia has been behind has roiled the campaign, exposing awkward emails with the release of thousands of messages by Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in recent days.
Trump once again refused to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin – who he said wasn't his 'best friend.'
Scroll down for video
Who's the puppeteer: Trump faced accusations that he was Vladimir Putin's puppet -which he rejected, saying he was not the Kremlin overlord's 'best friend'
Puppet too? Trump accused Clinton of being the plaything of her donors
'I don't know Putin. He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good,' Trump said.
Trump, who has previously said Putin is a stronger leader than President Obama, said, 'He has no respect for her, he has no respect for our president, and I'll tell you what, we're in very serious trouble.'
He continued: 'Putin, from everything I see has no respect for this person,' driving home the point.
'Well that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States,' Clinton countered.
A supporter of hers, former CIA deputy director Michael Morell, has said Trump may be an 'unwitting agent' of the Russian Federation, citing a series of campaign ties and policy positions.
'You're the puppet!' shot back Trump.
Clinton countered that Trump was willing to 'spout the Putin line' and implement his policy 'wish list' in Syria and other countries.
'You continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this race,' Clinton said.
Clinton then pivoted to the repeated hacks on Democrats, including her campaign chair and on the Democratic Party.
'This is such an unprecedented situation,' Clinton continued.
Attack: The exchange on Russia began in a discussion of immigration, veered to Wikileaks and went on to cover hacking
'Hillary, you have no idea,' Trump interjected.
'She doesn't like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way,' Trump said.
Trump at one point in the campaign invited Russia to hack Clinton's emails, but said he was being sarcastic. During the debate he brought up some of the emails, which have been dumped on WikiLeaks.
'John Podesta said some horrible things about you, and boy was he right,' Trump said.
Wallace asked Trump point blank whether he would condemn Russian hacking – and Trump did, though in language that was vague.
'By Russia or anybody else,' Trump responded – keeping alive the possibility that someone else was behind the hacking. 'Of course I condone,' he said – leaving out a direct object in his sentence instead of saying he condoned Russian hacking.
Later in the debate, Trump responded to Clinton's charge that he put NATO allies at risk with past comments that he might not jump to defend those who are owing in their dues to defend the alliance. |
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From the August 2015 issue
Take a walk around an auto show and you’ll find that every car company wants to tell you about its great new in-car electronics, its apps, and its haptics. At the New York auto show, Jaguar gave a presentation on the system in the new XF, which, according to my notes, is called MeowConnect 10.5. It looks like a nice setup, and is surely a big improvement over the Pong console that powered the old system. The new XF will let you share your car’s navigation info, which sounds useful. That way you won’t keep getting texts that read: “ETA? The salmon’s getting cold and the gazpacho’s getting warm,” forcing you to reply, via speech-to-text, “You’re the one who wanted me to take this big promotion, Evalyn.” Which comes out as, “You won hippopotamus do-dah bug lotion, Ivan!” And you send it anyway, because what does it matter? Evalyn’s as frigid as that gazpacho was.
At the XF debut, Jag did two presentations—one for the car itself and one for ol’ HAL there in the dash. That speaks to the growing complexity of our automotive electronics—a given model might have a thick owner’s manual for the car and then an even thicker one for the TouchingMeTouchingYou 2.0 Digital User Interface System 2.1 (it got upgraded since you started reading this sentence). Dare I say that maybe we’re trying a little too hard with this stuff?
Consider CUE, Cadillac’s sleek-looking system. Not many people know this, but CUE is the reason that Cadillac moved to New York. They were actually just trying to move across the street, but they put the directions into CUE and the next thing you know: Hello, Big Apple! CUE is fun because it uses a motion sensor to change the screen as your hand approaches. No, I’m not making that up. CUE is like the guy reaching out to shake your hand and then yelling, “Psyche!” and slicking his hair back instead.
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Of course, you can avoid CUE’s mysterious runes and tremors by simply telling it what you want to do—a strategy proffered by many a car company as an alternative to recalcitrant in-dash systems. “Well, have you tried the voice commands?” No, I haven’t. I don’t care how good the software gets. I don’t even like talking to my friends. I definitely don’t want to talk to my car. Not even to boss it around.
Can a Jag find Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2? An Infiniti can.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is that carmakers indulge the temptation to cram in every feature that might theoretically have a moment of utility over a car’s life span. For example, I just tried Infiniti’s new InTouch system in the Q50S. Several menus down the infotainment rabbit hole, I had the car giving me movie times for Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. A disclaimer at the bottom of the screen read, “Screening times displayed are not always up to date.” I suppose this function would be useful, if something happened to your phone—maybe you ran it over?—and you then had to use your car to find uncertain movie times. But in all likelihood, you would never miss this feature if you never had it, leaving your car and your life just a little bit simpler.
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Besides complication creep, the lead time inherent in car development means that in-dash electronics tend to be outdated the day a new model hits the lots. My own car is pretty up-to-the-moment on its driver-related electronics, including autonomous braking, radar-enhanced cruise control, and robo-parking. And yet, to load a wallpaper photo on the dash screen, you need to burn photo files onto a CD-R, which then disgorges them onto a hard drive buried somewhere in there. I thought it would be nice to surprise my wife with photos of the kids for Mother’s Day, and now two years later we’ve still got the same shots on rotation. My current laptop doesn’t even have a CD drive, presenting the possibility that the gallery on the screen now might become a permanent installation.
It delights me to think that in 15 or 20 years, my vehicle might be on a seedy used-car lot, a salesman yelling: “Hey, Bobby! Get over here! You know how to get da photos of deese here kids in da wheelbarrow off da dash screen?” And Bobby won’t know how to do that, because it looks like you need a CD or something, which is hilarious to him.
Now, lest you think I’m a grouchy technophobe, I’ll have you know that I like to Snapchat the Tinder on my Oculus Rift as much as the next guy. I completed both the original Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 2, so it’s not like I have a problem navigating the mushrooms and sewer pipes of the digital world. But I don’t need very much of that in my car. You know what you need in a car? A radio and directions.
If I designed an infotainment system, that would be the name: Radio and Directions. Sure, I’d customize it for each company—Tunz ’n Turns by Scion!—but the idea would be the same. The nav system would just be a screen that mirrors whatever your phone is doing, while the stereo would look like a Marantz receiver and mirror whatever your phone is doing. Thus freeing you to pay attention to my awesome new app: I call it “driving.” |
Who hasn’t wanted to be a pirate? Like a Hollywood-style, Monkey Island, Pirates of the Caribbean Pirate I mean. My college class on pirate history quite firmly disabused me of the desire to ever be a real pirate, because in reality it was pretty nasty and they didn’t have toothbrushes at sea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upokTRX7ubI
For those looking to live through the highlights of the pirate experience, you’ll want to check out the upcoming game Sea of Thieves. Being developed by Rare Ltd, Sea of Thieves is a multiplayer online pirate experience that aims to be unlike any other, and in their recent time visiting the port of New York Comic Con 2017, the development team behind the game shared some insights and news with lucky panel attendees. In attendance at the panel were executive producer Joe Neate, senior designer Shelley Preston, marketing art lead Pete Hentze, and design director Mike Chapman.
The panel started with an overview of the game and its goals, for those unfamiliar with Sea of Thieves already. When gamers hear the term “multiplayer,” what usually comes to mind now are trolls, bullies, insanely leveled people who have been playing an MMO for the last 8 years of their life, and microtransactions. While there are plenty of people out there who enjoy MMOs, the fact is that the toxicity of the experience can be a major turn-off for a lot of gamers, and the ridiculous amounts of leveling that are required to keep up with others can be a big turn-off to casual gamers and those pressed for time. Sea of Thieves aims to change that. Developed specifically with the intention to avoid toxic gameplay without censorship or neutering player choices, the developers also aim to create a level playing ground that doesn’t segregate players based on the amount of time put into the game.
In addition to showing a peek into the development process, the team also revealed some new information for fans in attendance. First up was the addition of a brig (pirate jail) to the hold of each ship. A new way to deal with trolls and deliberately unhelpful players, if a majority of the crew votes to send one of four teammates to the brig, off they go. It’s not an irreversible decision, however, so if a player changes their minds and decides to make nice, they can be allowed back up on deck. Or they can be left in jail to re-enact that scene from the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie with 18 Johnny Depps on screen—player’s choice.
Another exciting announcement was the addition of single or two player ships. While Sea of Thieves is still intended as a multiplayer game, the devs acknowledged that sometimes people will want to try the game out without the hassle of joining a crew and that people also want to play when their crew members are offline. These smaller ships are meant to be crewed by only one or two people and have distinct advantages and disadvantages when compared to a standard four person ship, meaning that each cater to a different playstyle and neither is inherently a better way to play.
These new features, along with others, are soon to be rolled out in the game’s currently running alpha testing mode the team announced. And after a round of fan questions, I was able to talk to the team for a more in-depth look at the world of Sea of Thieves. Interested? You’ll find it above.
Sea of Thieves is scheduled to be released in early 2018 for PC and Xbox One platforms.
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Widnes Vikings have entered into an exciting partnership with the RFL that will see the club play a leading role in the development of the Cumbria Regional Academy.
The Academy provides a career path for the elite young talent in West Cumbria and the link with Widnes Vikings will provide those players with access to the benefits that come from being part of a Super League club culture.
Widnes Vikings will also work closely with all the stakeholders in Cumbria, including Barrow Raiders, Whitehaven and Workington Town, to enhance the player development pathways in the region for the benefit of the professional and community games.
Widnes Vikings Head of Youth Phil Finney commented: “We are looking forward to working with the RFL and the Cumbria Regional Academy on a series of initiatives that will
benefit the whole sport.
“We think that we can make good use of our experience and expertise alongside the vast local knowledge within the staff and volunteers already in place in the region to provide a pathway to England, Super League and the Championships for an increasing number of Cumbrian players.
“A crucial element will be the development of strong working relationships with all of the key stakeholders in the region, including the professional and community clubs and the local schools.
“We want to forge strong working partnerships with Cumbrian community clubs and their staff and volunteers to provide further opportunity for the players and coaches across the county.”
Widnes Vikings Chief Executive James Rule added: “We are very proud of the fact that this year we received the highest possible grading in the independent Academy Audit.
“We have developed an outstanding Academy environment and working alongside the RFL we want to utilise that best practice to great effect to develop a genuine partnership with the Regional Academy and with the wider Cumbrian region.”
RFL Director of Performance and Coaching Jon Roberts said: “The Cumbria Regional Academy has made huge strides in the last two years and this four-year partnership with Widnes Vikings provides a terrific opportunity to make even more significant progress.
“Cumbria is an important region for the sport and it is essential that we do all we can to create an environment that allows every player to realise his potential. The involvement of Widnes Vikings will help us achieve that objective.
“The partnership helps create a clear pathway to the England team for every young player in Cumbria: whilst not all of them will make it that far, a great many will develop into players for Barrow, Whitehaven, Workington Town, the Super League clubs, including Widnes, and community clubs across the county.” |
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE (I) on Friday blasted President-elect Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE's reported selection of Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn for a top economic adviser role.
“It’s called a rigged economy and this is how it works,” Sanders tweeted.
It’s called a rigged economy and this is how it works. https://t.co/npoLcKQmfJ — Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 9, 2016
News outlets reported Friday that Trump has chosen Goldman Sachs president Cohn to direct the National Economic Council, which advises the president on economy policy.
Sanders, a staunch critic of Wall Street, made the "rigged economy" one of his main campaign issues during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“We’re going to transform America and create an economy that works for all of us, not just the billionaire class,” Sanders says on his website.
Trump struck a populist tone during the campaign as well, promising to "drain the swamp" in Washington.
But critics like Sanders say Trump's Cabinet selections undermine that promise, with Cohn the second figure with ties to Goldman Sachs to get a major appointment.
During a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday night, Trump defended his Cabinet selections.
“One newspaper criticized me, ‘Why can’t we have people of modest means?’" he said. “Because I want people that made a fortune. Because now they’re negotiating with you.” |
Jon Stewart highlighted Fox News' coverage from the past few days in politics on his show Thursday night, showing everything the network chose to cover rather than focusing on the economy, which correlates to voters leaning towards Barack Obama.
"I'm guessing you guys don't want to talk about the economy," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said to Gretchen Carlson on "Fox & Friends."
"Here's what Fox has been talking about just since Tuesday's debate," Stewart said, before showing clips of the following:
Megyn Kelly discussing voter fraud
Sean Hannity mentioning William Ayers
Megyn Kelly, Brian Kilmeade, and Steve Doocy discussing Newsweek's liberal bias
Sean Hannity mentioning Reverend Jeremiah Wright
Megyn Kelly referencing Obama's "deep secret ties" to the Kenyan government
"Fox & Friends" introducing country star Aaron Tippin's "Drill Here, Drill Now!"
and a collection of Bill Ayers clips, punctuated by Frank Luntz downplaying the results of a post-debate focus group that suggested Obama won the debate. |
Scott Leibrand and Dana Lewis on their wedding day, August 1, 2015. Dana Lewis On their first date, Scott Leibrand asked Dana Lewis why she was wearing a pager. This was 2013 after all.
Surprisingly, Lewis did have a pager for work because she was on-call as a communications lead for a healthcare company. But the black box sitting on her waistband was not that.
It was an insulin pump, and it wasn't the only equipment Lewis carried around to manage her diabetes.
Her date couldn't see the other device in her purse that monitored the glucose levels in her blood and would sound an alarm if her levels got dangerously high or low.
An alarm that Lewis slept through all the time.
Moving to Seattle and living on her own had been daunting for Lewis. Her friends and family worried that she would die in the middle of the night, like a number of diabetes patients do, because she wouldn't wake up to correct her levels.
So Lewis and Leibrand, a former Twitter engineer and an expert in networks, did the natural thing for two people versed in programming.
They built an artificial pancreas.
A new pancreas and a new relationship
Diabetes is a condition where there's too much glucose in the blood. Typically, the pancreas produces insulin, a hormone, to balance the glucose and help it get from the food you eat into your cells. If the pancreas doesn't create enough insulin or it doesn't work, the blood sugar levels become too high or too low — a dangerous fluctuation that can lead to death.
It's a lifelong condition with no cure. Lewis, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 14, used to manage her diabetes in a way many people do, by pricking her finger 12 times a day to check her blood or wearing a glucose monitor and an insulin pump. She also used a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), which inserts a tiny sensor with a transmitter into the skin and sends data every five minutes to a monitor. If the glucose is too low, it sets off an alarm.
The DIY pancreas project started out as only as a way to make that alarm louder.
"I had recently gotten a CGM in April around the time I started dating Scott, so we had about six months of him watching me use these devices and thinking it was a really stupid way to manage a chronic disease," Lewis said.
Making the alarm on a glucose monitor louder isn't as simple as hooking it up to speakers or transmitting it over Bluetooth. It's like trying to get an alarm on your microwave to sound on your radio.
The breakthrough came in late 2013 when another developer created a way to feed the data off of the glucose monitor and onto a computer. Lewis had always been able to view the data retroactively by uploading files from a USB-like device, but a few new lines of code let Lewis set up a Windows laptop on her nightstand and have the computer instantly read her data and sound the alarms all night long.
"Just shut up everything": An early prototype of the DIYPS shows Dana Lewis' glucose information on the computer. The system let Lewis snooze or input information on the computer screen. On Leibrand's Pebble watch, he could see the basic information on the go. Dana Lewis
They later switched to an iPad with push alerts to notify Leibrand if Lewis had slept through the alarm. If that was the case, he'd drive 20 miles to wake her up. Otherwise, she would click a button to let Leibrand knew she had taken care of it.
"I used to wake up, and I would have been low for hours and hours and hours. That's dangerous and also really frightening," Lewis said. "The immediate benefit was just peace of mind and feeling safe because he had access to my data from afar. If I didn't wake up, he could call me and drive down and check on me."
Push notifications and a louder alarm were just the beginning.
The human guinea pig
Diabetes care has always been a system of trial and error.
For years, Lewis has run the calculations in her head or on a computer of how much insulin she needs. It's a complex math equation involving current blood sugar, activity levels, and whether she's about to eat something.
"What people don't understand is that you're self-dosing insulin 24/7, 365 days a year until the day we get a cure or something else happens," Lewis said. "So people are constantly doing trial and error. Sometimes they're guessing. Sometimes they do tests. Sometimes they don't."
Looking at it from an engineering perspective, Leibrand and Lewis realized it was just an algorithm. They needed the data to train it, and they could get that data from their new alarm system.
"So, being trained as a guinea pig to push these specific buttons, we figured we might as well put in specific commands and say this is exactly what I'm doing: I'm taking insulin, I'm reducing insulin, or I'm eating something, and these are the precise amounts," Lewis said.
As Lewis put in more data, they were able to tweak the algorithm until it got more precise. Still, it took Lewis awhile to trust it, Leibrand said.
"A lot of time people say 'Oh, people with diabetes need to track all this stuff!'" Lewis said. "For the first 11 years, I tracked nothing. I never downloaded my meter. I never logged things."
The original DIYPS, in red, shows how many alarms would go off in the night. When Lewis turned on the closed loop to allow the pump to dose the recommended amounts, the number of alarms fell dramatically. Dana Lewis Leibrand added, "Just like you would figure out how to dose a drug effectively, there's gonna be trial and error in that method. It's just a learning curve of how everyone deals with diabetes."
Soon she was able to put in her blood-glucose levels into the algorithm and get predictions on what her levels would be 30, 60, or 90 minutes out. She could decide if she needed to add more or less insulin — information so valuable that she started taking the system with her during the daytime too.
Initially, Lewis was the safety check herself. If their DIY pancreas system recommended levels too high or too low, she could ignore it and administer what she thought was the correct level. Having self-dosed insulin for more than 11 years, she had an idea of what her body needed.
"There's still a human at the end of the line, making all the decisions, pushing all the buttons, validating that this is what works," Lewis said. "This system actually reduces some of the elements of human laziness because it's going to be precise, really up to date, and it will always work based on available data and not guessing. If you lose an element of data, it will tell you 'I don't have the data to perform this calculation.' That's a lot safer than me just running around doing math in my sleep."
Closing the loop
There wouldn't always be a human at the end of the line, though.
Dana Lewis A year after training the algorithm, Lewis and Leibrand started exploring how the could "close the loop" on their artificial pancreas.
If her blood glucose levels were going too high, the program would instruct the insulin pump to add the recommended insulin level from the algorithm. Lewis wouldn't need to check if that was the correct amount or push the buttons herself — she trusts it.
The only problem was that the DIY pancreas system they had created couldn't give commands to the insulin pump. Whatever it recommended, Lewis still had to push the buttons.
They soon assembled an "artificial pancreas" to manage Lewis' insulin for her.
This isn't a new organ or something inside her body, but a group of electronics that can mimic the functions her pancreas is missing. A Raspberry Pi mini computer takes data from the USB stick and glucose monitor and transfers the recommendation to the insulin pump. It's all online, so Lewis and Leibrand can track it on their watches, although she does have to carry around a stack of electronics.
"We picked August 1 to close the loop because that's our wedding date and because we thought it was funny," Lewis said. "But what was most funny of all is that two weeks later, we got it working."
The one missing piece had been finding a way to command the insulin pump to actually do something. But another engineer had figured out how to exploit a security flaw in an old Medtronic insulin pump that would let someone write commands to it. What the researcher made a big stink of as a cybersecurity scare turned out to be the missing piece for Lewis.
The company had stopped manufacturing the pump, but Lewis found one, and then let the algorithm take over for a night and keep her levels in range.
"The first live test turned into just live using it," Leibrand said. "We didn't actually turn it off after that."
Helping other patients
Like any piece of software, there are always bugs. But delivering the wrong dose of insulin is a bit more serious than a computer game freezing.
A few times, the system hasn't worked. One time it was caught in a loop and reduced her insulin for a period of time, Lewis said. Recently, Leibrand caught the system not updating in the middle of the night. He stayed up debugging a solution with other members of the diabetes community before he was able to reset it.
With the closed loop, Lewis' levels remain in range more and at steadier levels. Here, the system has been running for 12 hours even as Lewis is recovering from jet lag. Dana Lewis "We maybe had two what we would call adverse events with serious concerns like 'that wasn't supposed to happen,'" Lewis said.
"But that's going against like hundreds of bad things that would have happened if we didn't take action," Leibrand added.
To make sure a software glitch doesn't equal death, Leibrand programmed it to have a maximum amount of insulin dispensed in a period. Lewis, too, can always revert to the normal standard of diabetes care if something is wrong with the system.
Her artificial pancreas system is a better normal though, at least for her. Now they want to grow the test beyond one person.
Since February 2015, Leibrand and Lewis have been working on helping others to close the loop, too.
They've built a GitHub repository for the Open Artificial Pancreas System (Open APS) that contains pieces of the code like building blocks (not the full artificial pancreas). Ultimately, the patient has to come up with the algorithm and trust the software before it can be used.
Although there are some closed-loop systems in testing from medical companies, a movement among people with diabetes has spawned Facebook groups and Twitter hashtags to say #Wearenotwaiting. A group of engineers and fathers of children of diabetes created the NightScout project help parents see the glucose levels of their children when they're away at school, for example.
The US Food and Drug Administration is aware of these projects — and none of them are officially approved, although the FDA hasn't taken issue with them either. Lewis and Leibrand are in regular communication with the agency to make sure their work doesn't cross the line of distributing medical devices, but can still help other people with diabetes close the loop and take control of their care.
Scott Leibrand carrying the DIYPS system on their wedding day. Dana Lewis During a trip to Portugal, they found a way to take the system offline and use it without an internet connection — something that would come in handy during their two-week honeymoon.
By the time they reached their wedding day — the deadline for closing the loop — they had already spent eight months trying to help people achieve the same.
Lewis is likely the first person to get married with this type of artificial pancreas. Unlike many insulin-dependent people with diabetes, she didn't have to cut into the lining of her dress to make a pocket for her monitor. It was Leibrand who wore the monitor under his shirt.
"No alarms — no problems," Lewis said. "Diabetes wasn't in the picture during the wedding, and that was exactly how it should be." |
With the UFC gaining acceptance in the mainstream with the Fox deal it signed a year ago, there are still some media types out there who haven't grasped the appeal of it. One of these media types is CBS college basketball basketball analyst Seth Davis, who had a pair of now deleted tweet during UFC 154 on Saturday night, calling the UFC "homoerotic"…
Oh bother. What exactly separates the UFC from boxing or wrestling to earn that kind of label? Perhaps Davis thinks the same of all combat sports? I'm not sure how twisting a joint off or smashing someone's face into rubble is homoerotic, but hey, more power to you. It's not as if CBS underwent a foray into MMA years ago, before the UFC even hinted at signing a deal with Fox… oh wait, they did, with both EliteXC and Strikeforce shows taking place on the network.
To his credit, Davis fessed up to the poor taste of the tweets after being called out by MMA journalist Ariel Helwani of MMAFighting.com.
I don't know what exactly would possess a member of the mainstream media to come out and call another sport homoerotic, but at least Davis realized he screwed up and is taking the backlash like a man. As much as this was in bad taste, it's yet another example of a hurdle the UFC has to clear in its race towards mainstream acceptance as a sport.
[The Big Lead] |
Former Liverpool player Didi Hamann has told current manager Jurgen Klopp to "stop protecting" Daniel Sturridge and to give the fans the truth about the injury-prone striker's continued absence.
“The club has got a responsibility to tell the paying public what is wrong with him. If he has got a hamstring injury, an ankle injury, or whatever he may have, the people who pay for a season ticket have got a right to know what is wrong with him," Hamann told Talksport.
“Judging by the way Jurgen Klopp answered his questions [ahead of the Manchester United game], I don't think there is too much wrong with the player. If there is nothing wrong with him, it is more important to be honest and truthful with the paying public than to protect a player who has hardly played in the last 18 months, who seems to choose when he wants to play.
“He has got three years left on his contract and I don’t see any reason, if there is nothing wrong with the player, why the club should protect him.”
Hamann also recalled the time he spent alongside a young Sturridge hoping to break into the first team at Manchester City when, he claims, it was clear from a very early stage that Sturridge was not prepared to push his body to the limit.
“There was always something wrong with him on the Thursday or the Friday. His back, his hamstring, there was always something," Hamann said.
• 'Liverpool attempt to sign Barcelona's Tello'
“If you look at his record since he has played professional football he probably doesn’t average half the games a season - and it has got worse at Liverpool. I am not saying he is pretending to be injured, I’m not sure. But if he is injured, say it. Nobody knows what is going on with him.
“People have spent £800 or £1000 to watch Liverpool at home and sometimes even away, and the star player is not playing and nobody knows where he is. If there isn’t a problem with him, then it is time to stop protecting the player.”
Liverpool are ninth in the table after 22 games with Sturridge having started three of those. His best performance of the season came when he scored a brace in the 6-1 Capital One Cup win at Southampton at the start of December, but he has since managed only 28 minutes of action in any competition. |
ALLEN WEST: They are not discussing the real issues. What they continue to do, especially on the case of the Democrat[ic] Party -- the progressive socialist left -- is they obfuscate, they deny, they lie about the real issues. You know, we need to talk about the restoration of the family in the black community. When I was born in 1961, between 75 to 77 percent of the households had two parents. Today, it's at 24 percent, and you can trace that right back to a failed policy from Lyndon Johnson, where the government provided checks to women who had children out of wedlock as long as they did not have a man in the home.
STUART VARNEY (HOST): Allen, can I just jump in for a second here? What's your solution to that problem, children out of wedlock or without two parents at home? What's your solution; is it a withdrawal of the welfare state?
WEST: Well, yeah. I mean, Jason Riley wrote a great book, he is a Wall Street Journal editor, saying "please stop helping us." You know, the black community was stronger it seems during the issues of segregation; when you had families that where intact, when you had communities that were standing up, when you had better education opportunities. I think that is another important thing. |
In recent court filings, the Food and Drug Administration has asserted that stem cells—you know, the ones our bodies produce naturally—are in fact drugs and subject to its regulatory oversight. So does that make me a controlled substance?
The bizarre controversy revolves around the FDA's attempt to regulate the Centeno-Schultz Clinic in Colorado that performs a nonsurgical stem-cell therapy called Regenexx-C. It is designed to treat moderate to severe joint, tendon, ligament, and bone pain using only adult stem cells. Doctors draw your blood, spin it through a centrifuge, extract the stem cells and re-inject them into your damaged joints. It uses no other drugs. No drugs means no FDA oversight and that does not sit well with the administration.
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The FDA has since argued that a) stem cells are drugs and b) they fall under FDA regulation because the clinic is engaging in interstate commerce. That's right, a process performed at the clinic using the patient's own bodily fluids constitutes interstate commerce because, according to the administration, out-of-state patients using Regenexx-C would "depress the market for out-of-state drugs that are approved by FDA."
Funny, that sounds less like the FDA protecting the health of the country's citizens and more like the FDA defending its enforcement turf. The two parties have been at odds for over four years now, so we may have a while until we know if every American has in fact become a regulatable good subject to government regulation. [ANH-USA via Slash Gear]
Image via the AP |
The overwhelming majority of Israel’s political, military and intelligence leadership reportedly believes the time is not ripe for an Israeli military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and shares the assessment that an Israeli strike would, at best, merely set back rather than destroy the Iranian program.
While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated that a decision on striking Iran will be made in the next few months, and his Defense Minister Ehud Barak said last week that it was time to gear up to put the Iranian program to “a decisive end,” this assessment is not shared by President Shimon Peres, the chief of staff of the Israeli army and his predecessor, the head of the Mossad intelligence service and his predecessor, at least five of the most senior ministers in the government and the leader of the opposition, Kadima party chairman Shaul Mofaz, respected Israeli media analysts said Saturday night.
The issue is headline news because the former head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service, Yuval Diskin, on Friday publicly branded Netanyahu and Barak as “unfit” to lead the country in confronting the Iranian nuclear threat, and wrong in their approach to the danger, sparking a political firestorm.
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Diskin served for six years as Shin Bet chief until a year ago, and so worked closely with the two leaders in whom he said he has “no faith.” Working alongside him, as head of the Mossad, was Meir Dagan, a lifelong intelligence veteran who has repeatedly warned against the “stupid” notion of Israeli military intervention at this stage. According to Emmanuel Rosen, a respected analyst for Channel 10 news, Gabi Ashkenazi, the IDF’s chief of staff until last year, “essentially shares” Diskin’s assessment.
Peres, Netanyahu’s deputy prime ministers Moshe Yaalon, Silvan Shalom and Eli Yishai, as well as other top ministers Dan Meridor and Benny Begin, also feel this is not the time to strike at Iran, Rosen said on Saturday night, adding that the consequence would be merely to set the Iranians back a little, while ostensibly legitimizing a subsequent accelerated push by Tehran to the bomb.
Alon Ben-David, the TV station’s military analyst, who has been given wide access of late to the Israeli Air Force’s training for a possible attack, said Saturday night that the current chief of staff, Benny Gantz, also opposes an attack at this juncture, as does the current Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo.
“No decision has been taken to attack Iran,” Ben-David said. But he added that the “window of opportunity” was this summer — after the next round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 powers, at which Iran, he said, would presumably give “an unsatisfactory response” to Western demands for the guarantees and openness necessary to ensure that it was not pursuing, and would not pursue, a nuclear weapons program. |
In this small show, organized by the curator David C. Ward, images become more powerful than argument. What can be read in Lincoln’s features — of his leadership of the Union, his milestone emancipation of slaves, his rededication of American ideals based on the inalienable rights proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence? Could another figure of his age have done the same?
There is some resemblance between Lincoln and Winston Churchill in Britain in 1941, during the blitz of London. Had Churchill not used his rhetorical gifts to strengthen and unite his citizenry and cabinet, defining the character of their island nation and outlining what was at stake, the course of the 20th century might have been different.
And had Lincoln not, with almost ruthless firmness, taken the ideal of the Union as the highest good and defended it with his own rhetorical gifts, had he not believed — as so few others did — that the stakes were worth the war’s unprecedented horrors and sufferings, then the world’s greatest experiment in self-government would have failed, and questions would have been raised, as Lincoln said, about whether any nation so conceived could long endure.
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I have fallen under the spell of Lincoln, which means that for every book read, there are several lifetimes’ worth of books to follow. It is a field in which there are so many opinions that no one could ever be lonely. I walk around hearing voices — though not, perhaps, the voices that Mary Todd Lincoln sought in White House séances after her 11-year-old son died.
I have been listening to audio books of recent Lincoln works: Fred Kaplan’s “Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer” and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals.” I have even tried audio books of Lincoln’s speeches, though I have not heard a speaker do justice to the rhythms and music of those late, condensed orations, like the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural, in which Lincoln strips away all accident and incident, laying out the counterpoint of high principle.
The bicentennial will not allow much silence to intervene for contemplation of this man’s open-minded, sad nobility, but no complaints here.
The historian James Oakes, who is a contributor to Eric Foner’s valuable new anthology, “Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World,” has suggested that for a time Lincoln historians paid attention to large, abstract forces, market conditions, abolition movements or other political pressures, but that in recent years attention to Lincoln has again become almost minutely personal.
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Mr. Foner’s anthology of academic essays strikes a balance between the personal and the abstract, and a daylong conference last month at Mr. Foner’s home base, Columbia University, featured the book’s contributors and was often exhilarating. But Lincoln the man looms largest and is likely to loom larger still with the inauguration of Barack Obama, who, like Lincoln, was once an Illinois state legislator.
Mr. Obama has so identified himself with Lincoln that he invoked him while announcing his candidacy in Lincoln’s onetime political base, Springfield, Ill. He has suggested that his political career has been an extension of the arc of racial progress begun by Lincoln. In Mr. Obama’s victory speech he quoted Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. The theme of Mr. Obama’s own inauguration will be “A New Birth of Freedom,” an allusion to the Gettysburg Address. And the president-elect has admiringly cited Ms. Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” saying he has been influenced by the way Lincoln composed his cabinet.
All of this heightens the relevance of the coming flood of Lincolniana. Coming in January is a much anticipated two-volume biography of Lincoln by Michael Burlingame, drawing on the author’s discoveries of letters and newspaper writings (as well as a lost 1865 eulogy of Lincoln by Frederick Douglass).
Another new biography is imminent from Ronald C. White Jr. Lincoln’s marriage to the manic Mary Todd is the subject of the recent book “The Lincolns” by Daniel Mark Epstein. She is made an even more sympathetic figure in “Mrs. Lincoln” by Catherine Clinton — though Mr. Burlingame’s research will make further rehabilitation much more difficult.
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Mr. Kaplan’s book is a study of Lincoln’s development as a writer. James M. McPherson’s book is about Lincoln’s military prowess, and Harold Holzer’s account is of the months between Lincoln’s election and his taking office in 1861 — months in which Southern secessions began.
Yet another new book, compiled by Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr. (“Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon”), is an illustrated history of Lincoln’s posthumous image. The Library of America, in “The Lincoln Anthology,” is doing something similar in prose: Mr. Holzer compiles almost 150 years of reactions to Lincoln by writers ranging from Horace Greeley and Nathaniel Hawthorne to E. L. Doctorow and Mr. Obama.
Yet for all the detail, the probing and the analysis, something remains uncanny. If Lincoln had died in 1860, we probably wouldn’t remember him. He had failed to gain much political power during his one term in Congress beginning in 1847; he lost the 1858 election to the Senate; and while he was a diligent party man and lawyer, his legislative track record was not terribly distinguished. He was last out of four Republicans in line to get the party’s nomination in 1860.
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He would have a legacy of a few good speeches and some powerful argument in the debates with his rival, Stephen A. Douglas, but it would have been a career far less influential than that of the antislavery politician of the previous generation whom Lincoln most admired, Henry Clay.
So how is it that, within five years, Lincoln ended up worthy of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton’s comment on his death, “Now he belongs to the ages”? The closer you look, combing through these mountains of material, the more ambiguities appear.
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Beginning in the 1960s, for example, Lincoln’s stature was knocked down a few notches; he had equivocated about some issues for which he is now most admired. In one debate with Douglas, for instance, he was eager to reassure the audience that he had no intention of urging “political and social equality between the white and the black races.”
And at first, ending slavery was not one of Lincoln’s goals in the Civil War. In 1862 Lincoln said in a letter to Greeley that his ambition was to save the Union, which he would do “without freeing any slave” or “by freeing all the slaves” or “by freeing some and letting others alone.” And his grand scheme for freed slaves? Initially they were to be encouraged to migrate to a special colony in Africa.
As for the elegiac prose of his great speeches, where are they anticipated in the many stiff and uninspiring speeches of his earlier life or in his reputation for off-color joviality? Mr. Holzer points out that The New York Daily News mocked the president-elect as an “inveterate old anecdote monger.”
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“Is the precious time of Cabinet Councils to be wasted with stories?” the paper asked. “Will he go down to South Carolina and assuage her wrath” with an anecdote? It is almost as if there were no connections between the lawyer in Springfield and the president in Washington.
Of course, that is an exaggeration. Continuities abound. But what happened is still remarkable. Lincoln had a tragic vision of the world; he grew up surrounded by familial death and disregard; his marriage was difficult; two children died; his career was pockmarked by failures. He suffered greatly but acted as if he had a right not to happiness itself, but only to its pursuit.
As in life, so in government. He believed that political compromise was the motor of democratic life. And the biggest compromises at America’s founding were those involving slavery. It was only by allowing slavery into the Constitution that the Constitution was made possible; it was only by settling for containment rather than elimination that the better angels of early America could even create a United States.
Lincoln, though, rose to the presidency at the very moment when that tragic compromise failed. So in this respect, the flexible politician became an absolutist. There was, in his mind, a fundamental principle that could not be abandoned: the Union. He cleaved fiercely — almost fanatically — to it because it already was a compromise, though one generated out of an ideal toward which the nation would have to move.
That conviction forced him to refine his thinking and discipline his actions. In a debate with Douglas, Lincoln referred to an “eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world.” The wrong, he said, was “the divine right of kings.” The right was “the common right of humanity.” The notion of “divine right” left a stain in the form of American slavery; the notion of “common right” was America’s founding principle.
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Those inalienable rights of humanity could be guaranteed only by something like the Union, so even when it came to abolishing slavery, Lincoln was cautious and protective, hewing strictly to the Constitution, knowing the wrong could be fully undone only with an amendment, but believing, finally, that he could at least, as commander in chief in time of war, free slaves in the rebellious territories. The Emancipation Proclamation is written in stolid, legalistic prose in which all of Lincoln’s rhetorical gifts are shunted aside. That too was done in service to the Union.
Then he was freed to define his larger vision. Andrew Delbanco, in Mr. Foner’s anthology, argues that the Civil War, for all its trauma, was unlike many other wars in that it did not produce a crisis that left the country without a sense of purpose. That is because, he suggests, Lincoln found “transcendent meaning in the carnage” and affirmed that meaning for both sides. He really became another founding father.
Look finally, in the National Gallery, at the Alexander Gardner photograph taken soon after the late-life mask was made, less than two months before Lincoln’s death. A crack shattered the glass plate, its scar running, almost prophetically, across the top of Lincoln’s head. The president’s left eye is in finely etched focus, gazing off in deep introspection, while the rest of the face softens into a gentle blur. Lincoln’s eye, surely, has seen much that haunts him.
But on Lincoln’s mouth are the hints of an enigmatic smile, as if in the closing weeks of the war, Lincoln saw, despite the struggles to come, a sign of what might be. The clarity of his gaze and the promise of his smile remain. |
For Tesla Model X owners, the Mars/SpaceX-themed Easter Egg wasn’t the only hidden feature in the latest update that the automaker started to push this week. For Christmas last year, Tesla programmed the lights and Falcon Wing doors on three Model Xs to do a light show to the sound of the Wizards in Winter by Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
At the time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the program will be an Easter Egg in the Model X, but it was never there until this week’s update.
Wizards in Winter by Trans-Siberian Orchestra has been a popular instrumental track for light shows since the 2005 internet phenomenon of Carson Williams’s 16,000 lights synchronized to the music.
Inspired by the feat, Tesla made its own light show using the Model X and its auto-presenting front doors and Falcon Wing doors.
To activate the new Easter Egg, Model X owners on the 8.0.2.50.15 software can enter “Holiday” as an ‘access code’ (holding the ‘T’ button for 5 seconds).
Update: Elon’s out with a good primer on the Easter Eggs:
To activate the Model X holiday performance, just type holidays or ModelXmas after pressing the logo. Also, Mars. pic.twitter.com/8Cy7YPlECX — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 24, 2016
The show will start after you exit the car, close all doors and press the lock button on the key fob. Tesla warns that the show “requires 6-feet of space above and around the vehicle.”
Some owners already released videos of the show:
This is the full version from Tesla staged with 3 Model X SUVs last year:
If you are interested in solar, we suggest you get quotes from more than one installer to make sure you get the best energy solution for your house or business. UnderstandSolar is a great free service to link you to top-rated solar installers in your region for personalized solar estimates for free. |
Yuru Yuri Trading Card Game [English]
Staying true to the description of the site, yes we do have content about trading cards. But not Japanese trading cards so much. More of our tcg content will be made up of custom cards I make using art from anime series.
My latest project, as you can see, is a battling sort of tcg based off of characters from the Yuru Yuri series. After subbing the show I just fell in love with it. The cards combine grapuics and stats made up by me combined with screen caps from the episodes.
Anyway, what this post is meant to do is just introduce the card game and see if it garners any interest. Usually, whenever I post about my trading cards, they don’t attract much attention at all. So depending on what happens, I may or may not continue to pursue this endeavor.
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This article is about the Confederate general. For people with similar names, see Joseph Johnston (disambiguation)
Joseph Eggleston Johnston (February 3, 1807 – March 21, 1891) was a career United States Army officer, serving with distinction in the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), and Seminole Wars. After Virginia seceded, he entered the Confederate States Army as one of the most senior general officers. (He was unrelated to Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, who was killed in early 1862.)
Johnston was trained as a civil engineer at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, graduating in the same class as Robert E. Lee. He served in Florida, Texas, and Kansas. By 1860 he achieved the rank of brigadier general as Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army.
Johnston's effectiveness in the American Civil War was undercut by tensions with Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Victory eluded him in most campaigns he personally commanded. He was the senior Confederate commander at the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, but the victory is usually credited to his subordinate, P.G.T. Beauregard. Johnston defended the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, withdrawing under the pressure of Union Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan's superior force. He suffered a severe wound at the Battle of Seven Pines, and was replaced by Robert E. Lee.
In 1863, in command of the Department of the West, Johnston was criticized for his inaction and failure[1] in the Vicksburg Campaign. In 1864, he fought against Union Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in the Atlanta Campaign. Facing an enemy with a massive numerical advantage, Johnston maneuvered to avoid having his forces surrounded or cut off from Atlanta, while looking for a chance to make a decisive stand that would turn back the tide. Although he successfully repulsed Sherman's attempt to defeat him through direct assault at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, he was ultimately outflanked again forced to withdraw from northwest Georgia to the outskirts of Atlanta. Fed up with Johnston's constant withdrawal from Confederate territory, Davis relieved him of command and replaced him with John Bell Hood. In the final days of the war, Johnston was returned to command of the few remaining forces in the Carolinas Campaign. He surrendered his armies to Sherman at Bennett Place near Durham Station, North Carolina on April 26, 1865. Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and Sherman both praised his actions in the war, and became friends with Johnston afterward.
After the war, Johnston served as an executive in the railroad and insurance businesses. He was elected as a Democrat in the United States House of Representatives, serving a single term. He was appointed as commissioner of railroads under Grover Cleveland. He died of pneumonia.
Early years [ edit ]
Johnston was born at Longwood House in "Cherry Grove", near Farmville, Virginia on February 3, 1807. (Longwood House later burned down. The rebuilt house was the birthplace in 1827 of Charles S. Venable, an officer on the staff of Robert E. Lee. It is now used as the residence of the president of Longwood University.) His grandfather, Peter Johnston, emigrated to Virginia from Scotland in 1726. Joseph was the seventh son of Judge Peter Johnston (1763–1831) and Mary Valentine Wood (1769–1825), a niece of Patrick Henry. He was named for Major Joseph Eggleston, under whom his father served in the American Revolutionary War, in the command of Light-Horse Harry Lee. His brother Charles Clement Johnston served as a congressman, and his nephew John Warfield Johnston was a senator; both represented Virginia. In 1811, the Johnston family moved to Abingdon, Virginia, a town near the Tennessee border, where his father Peter built a home he named Panecillo.[2]
Johnston attended the United States Military Academy, nominated by John C. Calhoun in 1825 while he was Secretary of War. He was moderately successful at academics and received only a small number of disciplinary demerits. He graduated in 1829, ranking 13th of 46 cadets, and was appointed a second lieutenant in the 4th U.S. Artillery.[3] He would become the first West Point graduate to be promoted to a general officer in the regular army, reaching a higher rank in the U.S. Army than did his 1829 classmate, Robert E. Lee (2nd of 46).[4]
U.S. Army service [ edit ]
Johnston resigned from the Army in March 1837 and studied civil engineering.[3] During the Second Seminole War, he was a civilian topographic engineer aboard a ship led by William Pope McArthur. On January 12, 1838, at Jupiter, Florida, the sailors who had gone ashore were attacked. Johnston said there were "no less than 30 bullet holes" in his clothing and one bullet creased his scalp, leaving a scar he had for the rest of his life. Having encountered more combat activities in Florida as a civilian than he had previously as an artillery officer, Johnston decided to rejoin the Army. He departed for Washington, D.C., in April 1838 and was appointed a first lieutenant of topographic engineers on July 7; on that same day, he received a brevet promotion to captain for the actions at Jupiter Inlet and his explorations of the Florida Everglades.[5]
On July 10, 1845, in Baltimore, Johnston married Lydia Mulligan Sims McLane (1822–1887), the daughter of Louis McLane and his wife. Her father was the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, a prominent politician (congressman and senator from Delaware, minister to London, and a member of President Andrew Jackson's cabinet). They had no children.[6]
Johnston was enthusiastic about the outbreak of the Mexican–American War. He served on the staff of Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott in the Siege of Veracruz, having been chosen by Scott to be the officer carrying the demand for surrender beforehand to the provincial governor. He was in the vanguard of the movement inland under Brig. Gen. David E. Twiggs and was severely wounded by grapeshot performing reconnaissance prior to the Battle of Cerro Gordo. He was appointed a brevet lieutenant colonel for his actions at Cerro Gordo. After recovering in a field hospital, he rejoined the army at Puebla. During the advance toward Mexico City, he was second in command of the "U.S. Regiment of Voltigeurs", a unit composed of light infantry or skirmishers. He distinguished himself at Contreras and Churubusco, was wounded again at Chapultepec, and received two brevet promotions for the latter two engagements, ending the war as a brevet colonel of volunteers. (After the end of hostilities, he reverted to his peacetime rank of captain in the topographical engineers.) Winfield Scott remarked humorously that "Johnston is a great soldier, but he had an unfortunate knack of getting himself shot in nearly every engagement." Johnston's greatest anguish during the war was the death of his nephew, Preston Johnston. When Robert E. Lee informed Johnston that Preston had been killed by a Mexican artillery shell at Contreras, both officers wept, and Johnston grieved for the remainder of his life.[7]
Johnston was an engineer on the Texas-United States boundary survey in 1841; he returned to the area, appointed as chief topographical engineer of the Department of Texas, and serving from 1848 to 1853.[8] During the 1850s he sought his previous rank, sending letters to the War Department suggesting that he should be returned to a combat regiment with his wartime rank of colonel. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, an acquaintance of Johnston's from West Point, rebuffed these suggestions, as he did later during the Civil War, much to Johnston's irritation. Despite this disagreement, Davis thought enough of Johnston to appoint him lieutenant colonel in one of the newly formed regiments, the 1st U.S. Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, under Col. Edwin V. "Bull" Sumner, on March 1, 1855. (At this same time, Robert E. Lee was appointed lieutenant colonel of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry under Col. Albert Sidney Johnston (no relation).) In this role, Johnston participated in actions against the Sioux in the Wyoming Territory and in the violence over slavery in the future state, known as Bleeding Kansas. He developed a mentor relationship and close friendship with one of his junior officers, Capt. George B. McClellan. Later McClellan faced him from the Union Army.[9]
In the fall of 1856, Johnston was transferred to a depot for new recruits at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. In 1857 he led surveying expeditions to determine the Kansas border. Later that year, Davis was replaced as Secretary of War by John B. Floyd, a native of Abingdon and a cousin of Johnston's by marriage. He had been a former guardian of Preston Johnston. Floyd made Johnston a brevet colonel for his actions at Cerro Gordo, a promotion that caused grumbling within the Army about favoritism. In 1859, President James Buchanan named Johnston's brother-in-law, Robert McLane, as minister to Mexico, and Johnston accompanied him on a journey to visit Benito Juárez's government in Veracruz. He was also ordered to inspect possible military routes across the country in case of further hostilities.[10]
Brig. Gen. Thomas S. Jesup, the Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army, died on June 10, 1860. Winfield Scott was responsible for naming a replacement, but instead of one name, he offered four possibilities: Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston (no relation), Robert E. Lee, and Charles F. Smith. Although Jefferson Davis, now a member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, favored Albert Sidney Johnston, Secretary of War Floyd chose Joseph E. Johnston for the position.
Johnston was promoted to brigadier general on June 28, 1860. Johnston did not enjoy the position, preferring field command to administration in Washington. In addition, he suffered from the pressures of the imminent sectional crisis and the ethical dilemma of administering war matériel that might prove useful to his native South. He did not yield to temptation, however, as Secretary of War Floyd was accused of doing.[11]
Civil War [ edit ]
Manassas and first friction with President Davis [ edit ]
When his native state, Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, Johnston resigned his commission as a brigadier general in the regular army, the highest-ranking U.S. Army officer to do so. He would go on to state, " I believed like most others, that the division of the country would be permanent; and that ... the revolution begun was justified by the maxims so often repeated by Americans, that Free government is founded on the consent of the governed, and that every community strong enough to establish and maintain its independence, has a right to assert it. Having been educated in such opinions, I naturally determined to return to the State of which I was a native, join the people among whom I was born, and live with my kindred, and if necessary, fight in their defense."[12]
He was initially commissioned as a major general in the Virginia militia on May 4, but the Virginia Convention decided two weeks later that only one major general was required in the state army and Robert E. Lee was their choice. Johnston was then offered a state commission as a brigadier general, which he declined, accepting instead a commission as a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army on May 14. Johnston relieved Colonel Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson of command at Harpers Ferry in May and organized the Army of the Shenandoah in July.[13]
In the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), July 21, 1861, Johnston rapidly moved his small army from the Shenandoah Valley to reinforce that of Brig. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, but he lacked familiarity with the terrain and ceded tactical planning of the battle to the more junior Beauregard as a professional courtesy. At midday, while Beauregard was still unclear about the direction his Union opponent was taking in the battle, Johnston decided that the critical point was to the north of his headquarters (the Lewis house, "Portici"), at Henry House Hill. He abruptly announced "The battle is there. I am going." Beauregard and the staffs of both generals followed his lead and rode off. Johnston encountered a scattered unit, the 4th Alabama, all of whose field grade officers had been killed, and personally rallied the men to reinforce the Confederate line. He consoled the despairing Brig. Gen. Barnard Bee and urged him to lead his men back into the fight. (General Bee's exhortation to his men was the inspiration for Stonewall Jackson's nickname.) Beauregard then convinced Johnston that he would be more valuable organizing the arrival of reinforcements for the remainder of the battle than providing at-the-front tactical leadership. Although Beauregard managed to claim the majority of public credit, Johnston's behind-the-scenes role was a critical factor in the Southern victory. After Bull Run, Johnston assisted Beauregard and William Porcher Miles in the design and production of the Confederate Battle Flag. It was Johnston's idea to make the flag square.[14]
It [the ranking of senior generals] seeks to tarnish my fair fame as a soldier and a man, earned by more than thirty years of laborious and perilous service. I had but this, the scars of many wounds, all honestly taken in my front and in the front of battle, and my father's Revolutionary sword. It was delivered to me from his venerated hand, without a stain of dishonor. Its blade is still unblemished as when it passed from his hand to mine. I drew it in the war, not for rank or fame, but to defend the sacred soil, the homes and hearths, the women and children; aye, and the men of my mother Virginia, my native South. —Johnston's letter to Jefferson Davis, September 12, 1861 [15]
In August, Johnston was promoted to full general—what is called a four-star general in the modern U.S. Army—but was not pleased that three other men he had outranked in the "old Army" now outranked him, even though Davis backdated his promotion to July 4. Johnston felt that since he was the senior officer to leave the U.S. Army and join the Confederacy he should not be ranked behind Samuel Cooper, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Robert E. Lee. Only Beauregard was placed behind Johnston on the list of five new generals. This led to much bad blood between Johnston and Jefferson Davis, which would last throughout the war. The crux of Davis's counterargument was that Johnston's U.S. commission as a brigadier general was as a staff officer and that his highest line commission was as a lieutenant colonel; both Sidney Johnston and Lee had been full colonels. Johnston sent an intemperately worded letter to Davis, who was offended enough to discuss its tone with his cabinet.[16]
Johnston was placed in command of the Department of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of the Potomac on July 21, 1861, and the Department of Northern Virginia on October 22. From July to November 1861, he was headquartered at the Conner House in Manassas.[17] The winter of 1861–62 was relatively quiet for Johnston in his Centreville headquarters, concerned primarily with organization and equipment issues, as the principal Northern army, also named Army of the Potomac, was being organized by George B. McClellan. McClellan perceived Johnston's army as overwhelmingly strong in its fortifications, which prompted the Union general to plan an amphibious movement around Johnston's flank. In early March, learning of Union offensive preparations, Johnston withdrew his army to Culpeper Court House. This movement had repercussions on both sides. President Davis was surprised and disappointed by the unannounced move, which he considered a "precipitate retreat." At about this time, Davis moved to restrict Johnston's authority by bringing Robert E. Lee to Richmond as his military adviser and began issuing direct orders to some of the forces under Johnston's ostensible command. On the Northern side, McClellan was publicly embarrassed when it was revealed that the Confederate position had not been nearly as strong as he had portrayed. But more importantly, it required him to replan his spring offensive, and instead of an amphibious landing at his preferred target of Urbanna, he chose the Virginia Peninsula, between the James and York Rivers, as his avenue of approach toward Richmond.[18]
Peninsula Campaign [ edit ]
In early April 1862, McClellan, having landed his troops at Fort Monroe at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, began to move slowly toward Yorktown. Johnston's plan for the defense of the Confederate capital was controversial. Knowing that his army was half the size of McClellan's and that the Union Navy could provide direct support to McClellan from either river, Johnston attempted to convince Davis and Lee that the best course would be to concentrate in fortifications around Richmond. He was unsuccessful in persuading them and deployed most of his force on the Peninsula. Following lengthy siege preparations by McClellan at Yorktown, Johnston withdrew and fought a sharp defensive fight at Williamsburg (May 5) and turned back an attempt at an amphibious turning movement at Eltham's Landing (May 7). By late May the Union army was within six miles of Richmond.[19]
Realizing that he could not defend Richmond forever from the Union's overwhelming numbers and heavy siege artillery and that McClellan's army was divided by the rain-swollen Chickahominy River, Johnston attacked south of the river on May 31 in the Battle of Seven Pines or Fair Oaks. His plan was aggressive, but too complicated for his subordinates to execute correctly, and he failed to ensure they understood his orders in detail or to supervise them closely. The battle was tactically inconclusive, but it stopped McClellan's advance on the city and would turn out to be the high-water mark of his invasion. More significant, however, was that Johnston was wounded in his shoulder and chest by an artillery shell fragment near the end of the first day of the battle.[20] G.W. Smith commanded the army during the second day of the battle, before Davis quickly turned over command to the more aggressive Robert E. Lee, who would lead the Army of Northern Virginia for the rest of the war. Lee began by driving McClellan from the Peninsula during the Seven Days Battles of late June and beating a Union army a second time near Bull Run in August.[21]
Appointment to the Western Theater and Vicksburg [ edit ]
Johnston was prematurely discharged from hospital on November 24, 1862, and appointed to command the Department of the West, the principal command of the Western Theater, which gave him titular control of Gen. Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee and Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton's Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana. (The other major force in this area was the Trans-Mississippi Department, commanded by Lt. Gen. Theophilus H. Holmes, stationed principally in Arkansas. Johnston argued throughout his tenure that Holmes's command should be combined with Pemberton's under Johnston's control, or at least to reinforce Pemberton with troops from Holmes's command, but he was unable to convince the government to take either of these steps.)[22]
The first issue facing Johnston in the West was the fate of Braxton Bragg. The Confederate government was displeased with Bragg's performance at the Battle of Stones River, as were many of Bragg's senior subordinates. Jefferson Davis ordered Johnston to visit Bragg and determine whether he should be replaced. Johnston realized that if he recommended Bragg's replacement, he would be the logical choice to succeed him, and he considered that a field army command was more desirable than his current, mostly administrative post, but his sense of honor prevented him from achieving this personal gain at Bragg's expense. After interviewing Bragg and a number of his subordinates, he produced a generally positive report and refused to relieve the army commander. Davis ordered Bragg to a meeting in Richmond and designated Johnston to take command in the field, but Bragg's wife was ill and he was unable to travel. Furthermore, in early April Johnston was forced to bed with lingering problems from his Peninsula wound, and the attention of the Confederates shifted from Tennessee to Mississippi, leaving Bragg in place.[23]
The major crisis facing Johnston was defending Confederate control of Vicksburg, Mississippi, which was threatened by Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, first in a series of unsuccessful maneuvers during the winter of 1862–63 to the north of the fortress city, but followed in April 1863 with an ambitious campaign that began with Grant's Union army crossing the Mississippi River southwest of Vicksburg. Catching Lt. Gen. Pemberton by surprise, the Union army waged a series of successful battles as it moved northeast toward the state capital of Jackson. On May 9, the Confederate Secretary of War directed Johnston to "proceed at once to Mississippi and take chief command of the forces in the field." Johnston informed Richmond that he was still medically unfit, but would obey the order. When he arrived in Jackson on May 13 from Middle Tennessee, he learned that two Union army corps were advancing on the city and that there were only about 6,000 troops available to defend it. Johnston ordered a fighting evacuation (the Battle of Jackson, May 14) and retreated with his force to the north. Grant captured the city and then faced to the west to approach Vicksburg.[24]
Johnston began to move his force west to join Pemberton when he heard of that general's defeat at Champion Hill (May 16) and Big Black River Bridge (May 17). The survivors retreated to the fortifications of Vicksburg. Johnston urged Pemberton to avoid being surrounded by abandoning the city and to join forces with Johnston's troops, outnumbering Grant, but Davis had ordered Pemberton to defend the city as his highest priority. Grant launched two unsuccessful assaults against the fortifications and then settled in for a siege. The soldiers and civilians in the surrounded city waited in vain for Johnston's small force to come to their rescue. By late May Johnston had accumulated about 24,000 men but wanted additional reinforcements before moving forward. He considered ordering Bragg to send these reinforcements, but was concerned that this could result in the loss of Tennessee. He also bickered with President Davis about whether the order sending him to Mississippi could be construed as removing him from theater command; historian Steven E. Woodworth judges that Johnston "willfully misconstrued" his orders out of resentment of Davis's interference. Pemberton's army surrendered on July 4, 1863. Along with the capture of Port Hudson a week later, the loss of Vicksburg gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two. President Davis wryly ascribed the strategic defeat to a "want of provisions inside and a general outside [Johnston] who would not fight."[25]
The relationship between Johnston and Davis, difficult since the early days of the war, became bitter as recriminations were traded publicly about who was to blame for Vicksburg. Davis considered firing Johnston, but he remained a popular officer and had many political allies in Richmond, most notably Sen. Louis Wigfall. Instead, Bragg's army was removed from Johnston's command, leaving him in control of only Alabama and Mississippi.[26]
The President detests Joe Johnston for all the trouble he has given him, and General Joe returns the compliment with compound interest. His hatred of Jeff Davis amounts to a religion. With him it colors all things. —Diarist Mary Chesnut[27]
While Vicksburg was falling, Union Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans was advancing against Bragg in Tennessee, forcing him to evacuate Chattanooga. Bragg achieved a significant victory against Rosecrans in the Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20), but he was defeated by Ulysses S. Grant in the Battles for Chattanooga in November. Bragg resigned from his command of the Army of Tennessee and returned to Richmond in the role as military adviser to the president. Davis offered the position to William J. Hardee, the senior corps commander, who refused it. He considered P.G.T. Beauregard, another general with whom he had poor personal relations, and also Robert E. Lee. Lee, who was reluctant to leave Virginia, first recommended Beauregard, but sensing Davis's discomfort, changed his recommendation to Johnston. After much agonizing, Davis appointed Johnston to command the Army of Tennessee in Dalton, Georgia, on December 27, 1863.[28]
Atlanta Campaign [ edit ]
The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton to Kennesaw Mountain
Faced with Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's advance from Chattanooga to Atlanta in the spring of 1864, Johnston conducted a series of withdrawals that appeared similar to his Peninsula Campaign strategy. He repeatedly prepared strong defensive positions, only to see Sherman maneuver around them in expert turning movements, causing him to fall back in the general direction of Atlanta. Johnston saw the preservation of his army as the most important consideration, and hence conducted a very cautious campaign. He handled his army well, slowing the Union advance and inflicting heavier losses than he sustained.
Sherman began his Atlanta Campaign on May 4. Johnston's Army of Tennessee fought defensive battles against the Federals at the approaches to Dalton, which was evacuated on May 13, then retreated 12 miles south to Resaca, and constructed defensive positions. However, after a brief battle, Johnston again yielded to Sherman, and retreated from Resaca on May 15. Johnston assembled the Confederate forces for an attack at Cassville.[29] As his troops advanced, an enemy force of unknown strength appeared unexpectedly on his right flank. A skirmish ensued, forcing the corps commander, Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood, to halt his advance and reposition his troops to face the threat. Faced with this unexpected threat, Johnston abandoned his attack and renewed his retreat. On May 20 they again retreated 8 miles further south to Cartersville. The month of May 1864 ended with Sherman's forces attempting to move away from their railroad supply line with another turning movement, but became bogged down by the Confederates' fierce defenses at the Battle of New Hope Church on May 25, the Battle of Pickett's Mill on May 27, and the Battle of Dallas on May 28.[30]
In June Sherman's forces continued maneuvers around the northern approaches to Atlanta, and a battle ensued at Kolb's Farm on June 22, followed by Sherman's first (and only) attempt at a massive frontal assault in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, which Johnston strongly repulsed. However, by this time Federal forces were within 17 miles of Atlanta, threatening the city from the west and north. Johnston had yielded over 110 miles of mountainous, and thus more easily defensible, territory in just two months, while the Confederate government became increasingly frustrated and alarmed. When Johnston retreated across the Chattahoochee River, the final major barrier before Atlanta, President Davis lost his patience.[31]
In early July, Davis sent Gen. Braxton Bragg to Atlanta to assess the situation. After several meetings with local civilian leaders and Johnston's subordinates, Bragg returned to Richmond and urged President Davis to replace Johnston. Davis removed Johnston from command on July 17, 1864, just outside Atlanta. "The fate of Atlanta, from the Confederate standpoint, was all but decided by Johnston."[32] (His replacement, Lt. Gen. Hood, was left with the "virtually impossible situation" of defending Atlanta [33] which he was forced to abandon in September.) Davis's decision to remove Johnston was one of the most controversial of the war.[34]
North Carolina and surrender at Bennett Place [ edit ]
Johnston traveled to Columbia, South Carolina, to begin a virtual retirement. However, as the Confederacy became increasingly concerned about Sherman's March to the Sea across Georgia and then north through the Carolinas, the public clamored for Johnston's return. The general in charge of the Western Theater, P.G.T. Beauregard, was making little progress against the advancing Union force. Political opponents of Jefferson Davis, such as Sen. Louis Wigfall, added to the pressure in Congress. Diarist Mary Chesnut wrote, "We thought this was a struggle for independence. Now it seems it is only a fight between Joe Johnston and Jeff Davis." In January 1865, the Congress passed a law authorizing Robert E. Lee the powers of general in chief, and recommending that Johnston be reinstated as the commander of the Army of Tennessee. Davis immediately appointed Lee to the position, but refused to restore Johnston. In a lengthy unpublished memo, Davis wrote, "My opinion of General Johnston's unfitness for command has ripened slowly and against my inclinations into a conviction so settled that it would be impossible for me again to feel confidence in him as the commander of an army in the field."[35] Vice President Alexander H. Stephens and 17 senators petitioned Lee to use his new authority to appoint Johnston, bypassing Davis, but the general in chief declined. Instead, he recommended the appointment to Davis.[36]
Despite his serious misgivings, Davis restored Johnston to active duty on February 25, 1865. His new command comprised two military departments: the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and the Department of North Carolina and Southern Virginia; he assumed command of the latter department on March 6. These commands included three Confederate field armies, including the remnants of the once formidable Army of Tennessee, but they were armies in name only. The Tennessee army had been severely depleted at Franklin and Nashville, lacked sufficient supplies and ammunition, and the men had not been paid for months; only about 6,600 traveled to South Carolina. Johnston also had available 12,000 men under William J. Hardee, who had been unsuccessfully attempting to resist Sherman's advance, Braxton Bragg's force in Wilmington, North Carolina, and 6,000 cavalrymen under Wade Hampton.[37]
Johnston, severely outnumbered, hoped to combine his force with a detachment of Robert E. Lee's army from Virginia, jointly defeat Sherman, and then return to Virginia for an attack on Ulysses S. Grant. Lee initially refused to cooperate with this plan. (Following the fall of Richmond in April, Lee attempted to escape to North Carolina to join Johnston, but it was too late.) Recognizing that Sherman was moving quickly, Johnston then planned to consolidate his own small armies so that he could land a blow against an isolated portion of Sherman's army, which was advancing in two separated columns. On March 19, 1865, Johnston was able to catch the left wing of Sherman's army by surprise at the Battle of Bentonville and briefly gained some tactical successes before superior numbers forced him to retreat to Raleigh, North Carolina. Unable to secure the capital, Johnston's army withdrew to Greensboro.[38]
The surrender of Gen. Joe Johnston - Currier & Ives lithograph
After learning of Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, Johnston agreed to meet with General Sherman between the lines at a small farm known as Bennett Place near present-day Durham, North Carolina. After three separate days (April 17, 18, and 26, 1865) of negotiations, Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee and all remaining Confederate forces still active in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. It was the largest surrender of the war, totaling 89,270 soldiers. President Davis considered that Johnston, surrendering so many troops that had not been explicitly defeated in battle, had committed an act of treachery. Johnston was paroled on May 2 at Greensboro.[39]
After the surrender, Sherman issued ten days' rations to the hungry Confederate soldiers, as well as horses and mules for them to "insure a crop." He also ordered distribution of corn, meal, and flour to civilians throughout the South. This was an act of generosity that Johnston would never forget; he wrote to Sherman that his attitude "reconciles me to what I have previously regarded as the misfortune of my life, that of having you to encounter in the field."[40]
Postwar years [ edit ]
Johnston struggled to make a living for himself and his wife, who was ailing. He became president of a small railroad, the Alabama and Tennessee River Rail Road Company, which during his tenure of May 1866 to November 1867, was renamed the Selma, Rome and Dalton Railroad. Johnston was bored with the position and the company failed for lack of capital. He established in 1868 an insurance company in Savannah, Georgia, acting as an agent for the Liverpool and London and Globe Insurance Company, and within four years had a network of more than 120 agents across the deep South.[41]
The income from this venture allowed him to devote time to his great postwar activity, writing his memoirs, as did several fellow officers. His Narrative of Military Operations (1874) was highly critical of Davis and many of his fellow generals. He repeated his grievance about his ranking as a general in the Confederate Army and attempted to justify his career as a cautious campaigner. The book sold poorly and its publisher failed to make a profit.[41]
Although many Confederate generals criticized Johnston, both Sherman and Grant portrayed him favorably in their memoirs. Sherman described him as a "dangerous and wily opponent" and criticized Johnston's nemeses, Hood and Davis. Grant supported his decisions in the Vicksburg Campaign: "Johnston evidently took in the situation, and wisely, I think, abstained from making an assault on us because it would simply have inflicted losses on both sides without accomplishing any result." Commenting on the Atlanta Campaign, Grant wrote,
For my own part, I think that Johnston's tactics were right. Anything that could have prolonged the war a year beyond the time that it finally did close, would probably have exhausted the North to such an extent that they might then have abandoned the contest and agreed to a settlement.[42]
Johnston was a part owner of the Atlantic and Mexican Gulf Canal Company, a canal project approved in 1876. It was intended to construct a canal westward from the St. Marys River in Georgia to connect with the Gulf of Mexico on the coast of Florida.[43]
Johnston moved from Savannah to Richmond in the winter of 1876–77. He served in the 46th Congress from 1879 to 1881 as a Democratic congressman, having been elected with 58.11% of the vote over Greenback William W. Newman. He did not run for renomination in 1880. He was appointed as a commissioner of railroads in the administration of President Grover Cleveland. After his wife died in 1887, Johnston frequently traveled to veterans' gatherings, where he was universally cheered.[44] In September 1890, a few months before he died, he was elected as an honorary member of the District of Columbia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, and was assigned national membership number 1963.
Johnston, like Lee, never forgot the magnanimity of the man to whom he surrendered. He would not allow criticism of Sherman in his presence. Sherman and Johnston corresponded frequently, and they met for friendly dinners in Washington whenever Johnston traveled there. When Sherman died, Johnston served as an honorary pallbearer at his funeral. During the procession in New York City on February 19, 1891, he kept his hat off as a sign of respect, although the weather was cold and rainy. Someone concerned for his health asked him to put on his hat, to which Johnston replied, "If I were in his place and he were standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat." He caught a cold that day, which developed into pneumonia. Johnston died several weeks later in Washington, D.C. He was buried next to his wife in Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland.[45]
Legacy [ edit ]
Johnston's personal papers are held by the Special Collections Research Center at the College of William & Mary.[46]
Joseph E. Johnston and Robert E. Lee in 1869–1870
Johnston statue in Dalton, Georgia, where he took command of the Army of Tennessee
Johnston statue at the location of the Battle of Bentonville, in North Carolina
Legacy and honors [ edit ]
Representation in other media [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ] |
We don’t see much of The Wasp in Ant-Man (much to some people’s chagrin), but we might have seen a different side of her had the costume designers gone with their original vision for her.
As seen in a YouTube video posted by Parka Blogs, the coffee table book The Art of Ant-Man contains a page featuring alternative designs for The Wasp’s look. And girl looks pretty fly in all of them. Just look at those wings in the last two!
In the comics, we’re used to seeing The Wasp with, well, wasp-like coloring of yellow and black. But the behind-the-scenes team on the movie seems to be set on her rocking red and black, much like her pal Ant-Man (and unlike Yellowjacket). The question is what was it about these variant designs that made them not worthy of the final cut of the movie?
They could have looked great on Janet or Hope, right?
(via SlashFilm)
—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—
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Arkansas state Senator Jason Rapert took to Facebook to suggest that the best way to “quickly turn things around” in territory captured by Islamic State extremists would be a “strategically placed nuclear weapon.”
“With ISIS spreading all over the Middle East and Africa and Islamic Extremists carrying out violence in Europe, the United Kingdom and even in the United States, I wonder why the civilized world just sits by when we have weapons that could wipe out these barbarians where they are concentrated?” he asked.
“I believe,” Rapert continued, “it is time to annihilate the strongholds and pursue the rest till we have them all captured or killed. A strategically placed nuclear weapon would save the lives of our soldiers and quickly turn things around.”
“It is time for the insanity to be stopped.”
It is unclear in the borders of which nominal United States ally Rapert believes this nuclear weapon should be “strategically placed,” but there is no scenario in which fallout from a nuclear explosion would not endanger lives in staunch U.S. allies like Israel.
Earlier today, Rapert took to Twitter to claim that opposition to his plan indicates that “liberals love ISIS”:
Seems liberals even love ISIS more than stopping them cold in their tracks. They truly amaze me with their anti-American arguments. Bizarre. — Sen. Jason Rapert (@jasonrapert) February 16, 2015
View his entire Facebook post below. |
When you have an abundance of attention [1], it’s very easy to ignore any one person in this craze and chaos. Say, you were lucky enough to have the privilege to give a talk to an audience of 200 people on the topic you’re both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about. The talk generates a lot of attention and lots of people start coming to you with questions or requests for photographs. Having been on both sides of the table, I first-hand know how easy it is to take this attention for granted and not give your full focus (and attention!) to any single person approaching you. It’s the trap of maximizing the width (of your reach) forgetting about something way more valuable — the depth of the connections you make. Be mindful, and don’t fall into the trap of this proverbial busy loner.
As the speaker, you should be ungodly thankful (at least I am!) that even one person cared enough to approach you. One of the hardest things in this noisy world bombarding us with new and more exciting information is having someone’s attention. If you have it, don’t blow it. Be respectful. Don’t even try to think that by ignoring this one person or half-assing your answer to her, nothing changes in the big scheme of things. In fact, everything changes — it’s the tiny drops which make up the vast and endless ocean. If you’re starting to fall in the direction of this poisonous mindset, observe it and don’t’ let that happen. As the creator of Gmail Paul Buchheit famously noted, ‘It’s better to make 100 people happy than to make 1,000,000 people sort of happy’.
If you’re part of an audience, listen carefully and take notes of the thoughts you found the most surprising or worth remembering. Even jot down your one phrase reactions to them if you have a moment to spare. But don’t just listen, engage, ask questions to deepen your understanding. Approach the speaker if you have the burning thought on the subject. Hell — approach the speaker even if you don’t have anything other than ‘Thank you. That was a super insightful talk!’ to say. Do what you’re most fearful of. That tends to lead to growth. And if something brings you to higher state of consciousness, why not to take it? Even if the speakers, you approached, are clearly sloppy about their engagement with the audience (caring about width, not depth) [2], don’t blame them — they’ll eventually realize. Just don’t repeat the same mistake. Go for depth, not breadth.
Notes
[1] Common thing at conferences.
[2] Based on a few interactions and many talks I watched, notable author and former Apple evangelist, Guy Kawasaki (in the photo above) is clearly guilty of that. More often than not, he cuts off the people asking the questions and approaches the book signing or smiling in pictures as the conveyor belt. A bit hypocritical coming from the author of “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions”. No judgements, just saying ;) Let’s write it off to his tiredness, age and, honestly, simply unbearable ‘width’ to support. He’s a great Guy — and that’s what matters. |
Courting controversy again, Tripura Governor Tathagata Roy tweeted what he called a 1946 diary entry made by Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who later founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which stated that “the Hindu-Muslim problem won’t be solved without a Civil War”. This drew sharp reactions on Twitter and several exchanges later, Roy put out another tweet, saying “couple of dozen dimwits” trolled him for “advocating a civil war”, and that “I was quoting, not advocating”.
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At 12.23 am June 18, Roy took to Twitter: “Syama Prasad Mookerjee wrote in his diary on 10/1/1946: “The Hindu-Muslim problem won’t b solved without a Civil War”. So much like Lincoln!” This was followed by sharp exchanges with some accusing him of instigating communal violence, others calling for his sacking and arrest.
Nineteen hours later, Roy tweeted: “Instantly couple of dozen dimwits began trolling that I was advocating a civil war. None stopped to ponder that I was QUOTING, not ADVOCATING.” He continued: “I was quoting a diary of 70 years back, pre-partition India. And it was prophetic. Because Jinnah unleashed that civil war 7 months later. And Jinnah won that civil war and got his Pakistan. That is ALSO something Dr Mookerjee predicted.”
Earlier, while engaging the Twitterati, Roy posted a photograph of a banner attributed to “Shyampur Masjid Committee and the residents” and wrote “See this notice. It says “All music forbidden. Violators will call forth penalties.” Not ISIS. Not Taliban, not Saudi. But West Bengal, India”.
The Governor did not respond to phone calls, email or text messages from The Indian Express for comment. This is not the first time that Roy has made controversial remarks on Twitter. In August 2015, in one of his tweets, he described people who had attended Mumbai blast convict Yakub Memon’s funeral as “potential terrorists” and said “they ought to be kept under surveillance.”
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In September 2015, replying to a tweet, he said: “Whatever gave you the notion I am secular? I am a Hindu. My state, India, however is secular since 1976.” His Twitter handle then identified him as “Governor”, “but still a proud Swayamsevak”. As of today, Roy identifies him as “Civil Engineer, Swayamsevak, Professor, Politician, Writer, Lawyer, Hindu. Now Governor of Tripura. Love travel, music; hate hypocrisy and double standards.” |
Protesters in Rome torch cars after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi narrowly survived two confidence votes Tuesday. ((Giampiero Sposito/Reuters))
Silvio Berlusconi pulled off another astonishing escape from the political dead, scraping through two confidence votes Tuesday in a dramatic parliamentary showdown.
But the Italian leader's hold on power remains precarious as his razor-thin victory makes political gridlock a near certainty — and violent street protests show growing unease with his rule.
Masked protesters torched cars and trash bins, smashed shop windows and clashed with police.
Clouds of white tear gas and orange flares engulfed streets, as shops full of Christmas goods hurriedly closed down. Employees at one bank cowered in fear as a group of stone-throwing youths swept by.
Protesters rampaged in the area around parliament and Berlusconi's residence, which had been cordoned off by heavy police presence.
By sundown, almost 100 people, both protesters and police, were reported injured, including about two dozen hospitalized. About 40 were reportedly taken into police custody.
The chaos followed speculation in recent weeks that the end of the Berlusconi era was near.
Weakened by sex scandals and a bitter breakup with his one-time closest ally, Berlusconi seemed destined to be sent packing. The split with Gianfranco Fini had eroded the premier's once comfortable parliamentary majority and left him vulnerable in the lower house.
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi applauds following a confidence vote at the lower chamber in Rome on Tuesday. ((Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press))
But Berlusconi battled back, as he has countless times when his political career seemed to be on the ropes. Tuesday's drama confirmed his status as the ultimate political survivor — but he emerges from the battle severely weakened and one top opposition lawmaker called his success a "Pyrrhic victory."
In the most dramatic and closest of the two tests, Berlusconi survived the no-confidence motion in the lower house by just three votes. Scuffles between lawmakers forced a brief suspension in the voting session.
Earlier in the day, Berlusconi had secured a more comfortable victory in a confidence vote at the Senate.
The vote's slim margin means Berlusconi can no longer count on a secure parliamentary majority for passing legislation. Some experts predict he might resign in upcoming weeks, a move that could lead to early elections, which he hopes to win again.
Berlusconi survived Tuesday's challenge by exploiting rifts inside Fini's camp — at the moment of truth, three supporters defected — and managed to sway a handful of undecided lawmakers to his side. In the process, he drew accusations of vote-buying, amid claims of cash changing hands and favours lavished. Berlusconi's allies reject the allegations.
"I'm not a survivor — I'm strong, robust," a smiling Berlusconi joked after the vote.
Pressing his case before lawmakers on the eve of the showdown, the premier argued that his government had successfully worked to protect Italy from becoming engulfed in the eurozone's debt crisis. He warned that political instability would hurt Italy as it fights for its economic future.
Italy is plagued by a high public debt level and slow growth. The country is still widely viewed as low-risk due to the low level of private debt, a relatively sound banking system and experience in dealing with high public debt levels.
Still, markets were closely monitoring the results of the votes; Italy's main bourse closed little changed on Tuesday. |
New law lets teens delete digital skeletons
State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg authored the bill to let minors request that online posts be scrubbed. State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg authored the bill to let minors request that online posts be scrubbed. Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, Associated Press Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, Associated Press Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close New law lets teens delete digital skeletons 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
Remember that dance-party photo you regretted posting online? How about the time you over-shared your feelings about your ex or made that comment about Barack Obama?
All forever etched in the annals of the Internet.
Well, maybe not - at least if you're under 18.
Legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday will require Web companies, starting in 2015, to remove online activity - whether it be scandalous or simply embarrassing - should a California minor request it.
The thinking, say supporters of the new "eraser" law, is that boys will be boys (and girls, well, girls) and that the indiscretions of youth shouldn't haunt them down the road.
"Kids so often self-reveal before they self-reflect," said James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that advocated for the law. "Mistakes can stay with teens for life, and their digital footprint can follow them wherever they go."
The bill, authored by state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, pushes lawmakers deeper into the sticky debate over online privacy. As social media soars in popularity and Web companies cull more and more information about people's lives, questions continue to be raised about what Internet firms should and should not be doing with the data.
Small win for privacy
California already allows certain people, such as victims of domestic violence, to get information struck from the online record. And a pioneering 10-year-old state law requires companies to let visitors to their websites know what information they're collecting - and whom they're sharing it with.
A recently introduced amendment to that law, which is now in the hands of the governor, would force these companies to state whether they honor do-not-track requests that users make in their Internet browsers.
If the eraser law is a win for online privacy, it's a small one. The legislation has its limitations: Teens won't have absolute certainty that Mom and Dad - or college admissions officers or future employers - won't see their photo at a keg party, even if they ask for the photo to be removed.
If the underage drinking picture is posted by someone else, for example, it's not covered by the law. If the image is copied and posted to another Web site, that would not be covered, either.
Web companies also are not required to scrub their servers clean of personal data, just remove the requested item from public viewing. Under the law, sites can offer ways for users to make the redaction directly, or provide an avenue for users to request one.
Doesn't extend to adults
There's an additional catch: the law doesn't extend to adults who want to go back and delete material they posted as minors.
Many companies, such as Facebook and Twitter, already allow users to remove their posts.
Another facet of the new law, which may have a broader effect, bars Web companies and firms that deal in mobile apps from marketing products that are illegal for minors - such as alcohol, cigarettes and firearms - if they know, or should know, a minor is logged in. The companies also are not allowed to provide identifying information on minors to vendors of these products.
Opponents of Steinberg's legislation don't take issue with the new law's intent - to protect children. But they say it's not a productive solution.
The Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C., which works for freedom on the Internet, said burdensome restrictions could deter Web companies from creating content for children and even prompt sites to ban minors entirely.
Potential problems
"There's going to be a barrier to new and innovative services that want to target an audience of minors," said Emma Llansó, an attorney with the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Another potential problem, opponents say, is that California will have a different policy than other states, creating a patchwork of regulation that could be difficult for the industry to navigate.
Similar legislation on children's online privacy has been put forth at the federal level but has failed to gain traction. Federal law already limits the information Web companies can collect from those under the age of 13 but not for older children. And it does not include an eraser clause.
Steinberg praised the governor's approval of his law Monday as "groundbreaking protection" for kids.
OK with these teens
Outside San Francisco's Galileo High School, many students said the law sounded like a good idea. They said they might appreciate a chance to make a fresh start, digitally speaking, after they turn 18.
"As a youth, you make a bunch of mistakes," said Alicia Cabral, 17. "If you put it on the Internet, it follows you everywhere."
Her friend, 15-year-old Diana Cortez, added that caution is still in order.
Even if you make sure not to post photos of yourself, you can't stop your friends from doing so, she said. "If you use drugs and there are pictures of you doing that and you apply for a job, you won't get hired." |
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