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I just saw this from GNOME Recent Changes, and I couldn’t find much more details about it. It seems that Jim Nelson from Yorba is working on a new calendar application for GNOME 3. Judging from the previous projects of Yorba (Geary, Shotwell) we should expect something good coming! Above is the Gnome-Calendar App. It looks great, but it also seems a little bit forgotten.. Gnome-Calendar This is California Calendar. It requires GTK 3.12 (for popovers) and currently isn’t a really working application. It uses EDS (Evolution Data Server) and it is written in Vala. Planned Features Modern, clean interface Quick setup (if any is required at all) Uses EDS for calendar access, potentially other specialized backends (i.e. GData) Desktop notification of events Copyrights go to Yorba Foundation, but California so far is a personal job of Jim, at least according to Git-logs. First commit made this January, so it is a pretty new application and under heavy development. California Page Both applications above are built today from upstream against GNOME 3.12
A NEW British political party has been formed. It has not attracted much attention yet, but it has a good name—the Honesty Party—and it boasts three punchy, distinctive policies. Here they are: We want fewer regulations for the City We want fewer laws protecting workers against long hours and other impositions We want to make it harder to extradite people who have been accused of crimes Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. The Honesty Party is, of course, imaginary. With such a manifesto, how could it possibly be otherwise? Take the proposals in turn. The first is surely out of tune with public opinion: bankers are so disliked that few would vote for lightening their regulatory burden. The second is dicey. Although bosses might desire fewer employment regulations, that probably doesn’t sound too good to employees. And employees greatly outnumber employers. The third policy is the worst of all. Surely it should be made easier to ship criminals out of the country, not harder? The party is made up. But the manifesto is not. What the Honesty Party wants is, in effect, what Eurosceptics want. Read the Fresh Start Project’s “Manifesto for Change” and it is all there, just not expressed so baldly, and cloaked in a lot of talk about Brussels. The Fresh Start folks (mostly Tory MPs) do not actually say they want weakened employment laws, for example. But it is not hard to join the dots. They complain about how the European Working Time Directive is a burden on business and constricts Britain’s labour market. They could easily add that Parliament should replace the European regulation with a British one offering similar protections. But they don’t. It sounds like they want to get rid of it entirely. Eurosceptics will protest that the Honesty Party is a crude caricature of their position, and that they are not hung up on specific policies. What they really want is for Brussels to have less sway over Britain. The first point is entirely correct: this is a crude caricature. But that should not be reassuring. Politics involves a lot of caricature. Most people do not follow politics at all closely. Any idea that is not expressed very simply is unlikely to get through to voters. And if you do not express your ideas simply, one of your enemies will do it for you. Here, for example, is the website of a new campaign group set up to oppose a weakening of extradition and other international criminal-justice agreements. This group makes an exceedingly straightforward point: since crime crosses borders, justice must also cross borders. This is arguable. But at least it is understandable. Justice Across Borders has the support of Charles Clarke, Labour’s home secretary between 2004 and 2006. Mr Clarke was a great one for getting on the right side of public opinion. I suspect he has done so here, too. The Eurosceptics’ second objection, that what is really important is bringing back powers from Brussels, is also fair. But it is beside the point. Trimming the EU is not a distinctive position: every party (even the Liberal Democrats) say they want to do that. Similarly, everybody wants the EU budget to stop growing so quickly. Banging on about that will not impress anyone. This is the paradox of Euroscepticism. Its broad argument is exceedingly popular. Most people want Brussels to get its nose out of their affairs, and quite a few of them are prepared to walk away from the EU altogether. If you tell people that the City should be protected from new regulations made in Brussels (as opposed to just new regulations) they are likely to agree. But if you don’t—if you simply translate Eurosceptic demands into crude domestic policy prescriptions—they suddenly sound rather odd. Over the next few years this paradox will be exposed. Those who want to transform Britain’s relationship with Europe will be pressed to explain what powers they want to repatriate, and whether, having brought them back, they would throw them out or pass very similar laws. This will be tricky. It is commonly argued that the problem with trying to repatriate powers from Brussels is that other countries won’t allow it. The real problem might turn out to be public opinion at home.
A ballot paper for a first-past-the-post voting system, with the voter required to mark only one candidate A first-past-the-post (FPTP and sometimes abbreviated to FPP[1]) electoral system is one in which voters indicate on a ballot the candidate of their choice, and the candidate who receives the most votes wins. This is sometimes described as winner takes all. First-past-the-post voting is a plurality voting method. FPTP is a common, but not universal, feature of electoral systems with single-member electoral divisions, and is practiced in close to one third of countries. Notable examples include Canada, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as most of their current or former colonies and protectorates. Overview [ edit ] Countries that use a first-past-the-post voting system First-past-the-post voting methods can be used for single- and multiple-member electoral divisions. In a single-member election, the candidate with the highest number (but not necessarily a majority) of votes is elected. In a multiple-member election (or multiple-selection ballot), each voter casts (up to) the same number of votes as there are positions to be filled, and those elected are the highest-placed candidates corresponding to that number of positions. For example, if there are three vacancies, then the three candidates with the greatest numbers of votes are elected. The Electoral Reform Society is a political pressure group based in the United Kingdom that advocates abolishing the first-past-the-post method (FPTP) for all elections. It argues FPTP is "bad for voters, bad for government and bad for democracy". It is the oldest organisation concerned with electoral methods in the world In the U.S., all states (except for Maine and Nebraska) and the District of Columbia use a winner-take-all form of simple plurality, first-past-the-post voting, to appoint the electors of the Electoral College; Maine and Nebraska use a variation where the electoral vote of each Congressional district is awarded by first-past-the-post, in addition to the statewide winner taking two votes. In winner-take-all, the presidential candidate gaining the greatest number of votes wins all of the state's available electors, regardless of the number or share of votes won, or the difference separating the leading candidate and the first runner-up.[2] The multiple-round election (runoff) voting method uses first-past-the-post voting method in each of two rounds. The first round determines which candidates will progress to the second and final round. Illustration [ edit ] Under a first-past-the-post voting method, the highest polling candidate is elected. In this real-life illustration from 2011, Tony Tan obtained a greater number of votes than any of the other candidates. Therefore, he was declared the winner, although the second-placed candidate had an inferior margin of only 0.35% and a majority of voters (64.8%) did not vote for the declared winner: Effects [ edit ] The effect of a system based on plurality voting is that the larger parties, and parties with geographically concentrated support, gain a disproportionately large share of seats, while smaller parties with more evenly distributed support are left with a disproportionately small share. It is more likely that a single party will hold a majority of legislative seats. In the United Kingdom, 18 of the 23 general elections since 1922 have produced a single-party majority government; for example, the 2005 general election results were as follows: Summary of the 5 May 2005 House of Commons of the United Kingdom election results (parties with more than one seat; not incl. N. Ireland) Seats Parties with over one seat, for Great Britain only Seats % Votes % Votes Labour Party 355 56.5 36.1 9,552,436 Conservative Party 198 31.5 33.2 8,782,192 Liberal Democrats 62 9.9 22.6 5,985,454 Scottish National Party 6 1.0 1.6 412,267 Plaid Cymru 3 0.5 0.7 174,838 Others 4 0.6 5.7 1,523,716 628 26,430,908 In this example, Labour took a majority of the seats with only 36% of the vote. The largest two parties took 69% of the vote and 88% of the seats. In contrast, the Liberal Democrats took more than 20% of the vote but only about 10% of the seats. Another example would be the UK General Election held on 7 May 2015: Here, the Conservatives took 51% of the seats with only 37% of the vote. Of the smaller parties, the SNP received a greater share of seats than votes, whereas UKIP and the Liberal Democrats gained very little representation compared to the share of the vote they received. Benefits [ edit ] The benefits of FPTP are that its concept is easy to understand, and ballots can more easily be counted and processed than in preferential voting systems. First past the post has the tendency to produce majority rule[6] allows a government to pursue a consistent strategy for its term in office and to make decisions that may have socially beneficial outcomes, but be unpopular. Tony Blair, defending FPTP, argued that other systems give small parties the balance of power, and influence disproportionate to their votes.[7] Allowing people into the UK parliament who did not finish first in their constituency was described by David Cameron as creating a "Parliament full of second-choices who no one really wanted but didn't really object to either."[8] Winston Churchill criticised the electoral outcomes of the alternative vote as "determined by the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates."[9] Supporters also argue that electoral systems using proportional representation (PR) often enable smaller parties to become decisive in Parliament, thus gaining a power of leverage against the Government. FPTP generally reduces this likelihood, except where parties have a strong regional basis.[10][11] Criticisms [ edit ] Tactical voting [ edit ] To a greater extent than many others, the first-past-the-post method encourages tactical voting. Voters have an incentive to vote for a candidate who they predict is more likely to win, in preference to their preferred candidate who may be unlikely to win and for whom a vote could be considered as wasted. The position is sometimes summarised, in an extreme form, as "all votes for anyone other than the runner-up are votes for the winner."[citation needed] This is because votes for these other candidates deny potential support from the second-placed candidate, who might otherwise have won. Following the extremely close 2000 U.S. presidential election, some supporters of Democratic candidate Al Gore believed that one reason he lost to Republican George W. Bush is because a portion of the electorate (2.7%) voted for Ralph Nader of the Green Party, and exit polls indicated that more of them would have preferred Gore (45%) to Bush (27%).[12] This election was ultimately determined by the results from Florida, where Bush prevailed over Gore by a margin of only 537 votes (0.009%), which was far exceeded by the 97488 (1.635%) votes for Nader. In Puerto Rico, there has been a tendency for Independentista voters to support Populares candidates. This phenomenon is responsible for some Popular victories, even though the Estadistas have the most voters on the island, and is so widely recognised that Puerto Ricans sometimes call the Independentistas who vote for the Populares "melons", because that fruit is green on the outside but red on the inside (in reference to the party colors). Because voters have to predict in advance who the top two candidates will be, results can be significantly distorted: Some voters will vote based on their view of how others will vote as well, changing their originally intended vote; Substantial power is given to the media, because some voters will believe its assertions as to who the leading contenders are likely to be. Even voters who distrust the media will know that others do believe the media, and therefore those candidates who receive the most media attention will probably be the most popular; believe the media, and therefore those candidates who receive the most media attention will probably be the most popular; A new candidate with no track record, who might otherwise be supported by the majority of voters, may be considered unlikely to be one of the top two, and thus lose votes to tactical voting; The method may promote votes against as opposed to votes for. For example, in the UK, entire campaigns have been organised with the aim of voting against the Conservative Party by voting either Labour or Liberal Democrat, depending on which is seen as best placed to win in each locality. Such behaviour is difficult to measure objectively. Proponents of other voting methods in single-member districts argue that these would reduce the need for tactical voting and reduce the spoiler effect. Examples include preferential voting systems, such as instant runoff voting, as well as the two-round system of runoffs and less tested methods such as approval voting and Condorcet methods. Effect on political parties [ edit ] A graph showing the difference between the popular vote (inner circle) and the number of seats won by major political parties (outer circle) at the 2015 United Kingdom general election Duverger's law is an idea in political science which says that constituencies that use first-past-the-post methods will lead to two-party systems, given enough time. Economist Jeffrey Sachs explains: The main reason for America's majoritarian character is the electoral system for Congress. Members of Congress are elected in single-member districts according to the "first-past-the-post" (FPTP) principle, meaning that the candidate with the plurality of votes is the winner of the congressional seat. The losing party or parties win no representation at all. The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger's Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections. from Sachs's The Price of Civilization, 2011[13] However, most countries with first-past-the-post elections have multiparty legislatures, the United States being the major exception.[14][15] There is a counter-force to Duverger's Law, that while on the national level a plurality system may encourage two parties, in the individual constituencies supermajorities will lead to the vote fracturing.[16] Wasted votes [ edit ] Wasted votes are seen as those cast for losing candidates, and for winning candidates in excess of the number required for victory. For example, in the UK general election of 2005, 52% of votes were cast for losing candidates and 18% were excess votes – a total of 70% 'wasted' votes. On this basis a large majority of votes may play no part in determining the outcome. This winner-takes-all system may be one of the reasons why "voter participation tends to be lower in countries with FPTP than elsewhere."[17] Gerrymandering [ edit ] Because FPTP permits many wasted votes, an election under FPTP is more easily gerrymandered. Through gerrymandering, electoral areas are designed deliberately to unfairly increase the number of seats won by one party, by redrawing the map such that one party has a small number of districts in which it has an overwhelming majority of votes, and a large number of districts where it is at a smaller disadvantage. Manipulation charges [ edit ] The presence of spoilers often gives rise to suspicions that manipulation of the slate has taken place. A spoiler may have received incentives to run. A spoiler may also drop out at the last moment, inducing charges that such an act was intended from the beginning. Smaller parties may reduce the success of the largest similar party [ edit ] Under first-past-the-post, a small party may draw votes away from a larger party that it is most similar to, and therefore give an advantage to another less similar large party. Safe seats [ edit ] First-past-the-post within geographical areas tends to deliver (particularly to larger parties) a significant number of safe seats, where a representative is sheltered from any but the most dramatic change in voting behaviour. In the UK, the Electoral Reform Society estimates that more than half the seats can be considered as safe.[18] It has been claimed that MPs involved in the 2009 expenses scandal were significantly more likely to hold a safe seat.[19][20] However, other voting systems, notably the party-list system, can also create politicians who are relatively immune from electoral pressure. Distorted geographical representation [ edit ] The winner-takes-all nature of FPTP leads to distorted patterns of representation, since party support is commonly correlated with geography. For example, in the UK the Conservative Party represents most of the rural seats, and most of the south of the country, and the Labour Party most of the cities, and most of the north. This means that even popular parties can find themselves without elected politicians in significant parts of the country, leaving their supporters (who may nevertheless be a significant minority) unrepresented.[21] Impact on party policy and campaigning [ edit ] It has been suggested that the distortions in geographical representation provide incentives for parties to ignore the interests of areas in which they are too weak to stand much chance of gaining representation, leading to governments that do not govern in the national interest. Further, during election campaigns the campaigning activity of parties tends to focus on marginal seats where there is a prospect of a change in representation, leaving safer areas excluded from participation in an active campaign.[22] Political parties operate by targeting districts, directing their activists and policy proposals toward those areas considered to be marginal, where each additional vote has more value.[23][24] Voting method criteria [ edit ] Scholars rate voting methods using mathematically derived voting method criteria, which describe desirable features of a method. No ranked preference method can meet all of the criteria, because some of them are mutually exclusive, as shown by results such as Arrow's impossibility theorem and the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem.[25] Majority criterion [ edit ] Y The majority criterion states that "if one candidate is preferred by a majority (more than 50%) of voters, then that candidate must win".[26] First-past-the-post meets this criterion (though not the converse: a candidate does not need 50% of the votes in order to win). Although the criterion is met for each constituency vote, it is not met when adding up the total votes for a winning party in a parliament. Condorcet winner criterion [ edit ] N[27] The Condorcet winner criterion states that "if a candidate would win a head-to-head competition against every other candidate, then that candidate must win the overall election". First-past-the-post does not[27] meet this criterion. Condorcet loser criterion [ edit ] N[27] The Condorcet loser criterion states that "if a candidate would lose a head-to-head competition against every other candidate, then that candidate must not win the overall election". First-past-the-post does not[27] meet this criterion. Independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion [ edit ] N The independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion states that "the election outcome remains the same even if a candidate who cannot win decides to run." First-past-the-post does not meet this criterion. Independence of clones criterion [ edit ] N The independence of clones criterion states that "the election outcome remains the same even if an identical candidate who is equally-preferred decides to run." First-past-the-post does not meet this criterion. List of current FPTP countries [ edit ] The following is a list of countries currently following the first-past-the-post voting system for their national legislatures.[28][29] List of former FPTP countries [ edit ] See also [ edit ]
Dungeons & Dragons: Which race should I choose? Greetings gamers! Karthas here, and today I’m back with another guide for all you new players out there: which race should you choose. Dungeons & Dragons has many different races to choose from and once you start digging into some of the expanded content, you may get overwhelmed! But don’t worry, I am going to keep it simple, today we are just going to look at the races in the Player’s Handbook . I will make some suggestions of good classes or builds that each race might have, but the reality is you can pick any race you want to. If you want to be a Half-Orc Rogue, do it! If you want to be a Halfling Barbarian, go for it! There is no best race, all that matters is that you have fun while you play! The suggestions I make are based purely on the ability score increases and other features each race may get. And if you are looking for some pre-made D&D characters, be sure to subscribe to our site to gain access to our Dropbox folder where we are always adding more characters! Before we get started As I go over each race I will mention a few words you may not be familiar with, below you will find a small guide to what these words mean in game. Ability Scores I created a detailed guide for abilities here, but below is a quick summary Strength: Pretty self explanatory, but in-game it plays into how much damage you do with melee weapons, how much you can carry, how athletic you are, and how easily you are to push around. Dexterity: How quick you are and how good your reaction time is. In-game this plays into damage you do with ranged weapons (bows) and even certain melee weapons (rapier, dagger, etc), how sneaky you can be, and how acrobatic you are. Constitution: This primarily deals with how much health, or hit points. To put it simply, the higher the constitution, the harder you are to kill. Intelligence: This mostly has to do with certain skills. Intelligence is different than wisdom in that Intelligence is typically book knowledge, how many facts you know. So it plays into skills like: history, magic, religion, and even how well you understand nature. Additionally Intelligence plays into the damage that spells do for certain classes. Wisdom: This has to do with skills as well, but is different from intelligence in that it has to do with “worldly knowledge”. So for example, how well you can read people, you’re understanding of medicine, and how well you can read a situation. For some classes Wisdom plays into the damage their spells deal. Charisma: This has to do with how well you can do in social situations or the strength of your “inner-self”. Mainly plays into skills like how well you can lie, how well you can intimidate people, how well you can persuade people, or perform in front of people. For some classes charisma plays into the damage their spells deal. Additional Features Darkvision: Able to see in the dim light up to 60ft (Dark Elves can see 120ft). Skill: These are areas of expertise for your character such as historical knowledge, knowledge of medicine, feats of strength, affinity for animals, etc. Critical Hit: Rolling a 20 on the D20. This is great for you! Proficiency: This represents the familiarity you have in a particular area (weapons, armor, skills, etc) that you add to your rolls. At level 1 it is +2. Advantage: This means you roll the D20 twice and take the higher result. Saving Throw: This is typically done to resist something. You roll a D20 for the result. Cantrip: A spell that can be cast as many times as you’d like. Resistance: Take half damage. Feat: An area of expertise. These are little upgrades you can get and they are very strong. Dwarves Stubborn yet hardy, a Dwarf is one of the most loyal companions you can have. Thematically Dwarves are skilled warriors, miners, and workers of stone and metal. Though they are a bit shorter than the other races, their courage and endurance makes them a valuable asset to any party. They can live to be more than 400 years old and typically belong to a clan within Dwarven society. In-game Dwarves make great warriors. All Dwarves get an increase to Constitution and know how to use certain weapons like a battleaxe or warhammer. They also have Darkvision, advantage on saving throws against poison, and resistance against poison damage. Finally they gain proficiency in a set of artisan’s tools (smith’s tools, brewers supplies, mason’s tools), and can add double their proficiency bonus on history checks regarding the origin of stonework. Subraces Dwarves have 2 main subraces to choose from Hill Dwarf and Mountain Dwarf. Hill Dwarves are known for having keen senses, deep intuition, and remarkable resilience. They get an increase to Wisdom and they gain 1 extra hit point each time they level up. Mountain Dwarves are strong and sturdy. They get an increase to their Strength and can wear light or medium armor regardless of class. Good classes for a Dwarf: Barbarian, Cleric (Hill), Druid (Hill), Fighter (Mountain), Paladin, & Ranger. Elves Slender & graceful, Elves are a mystical race. Thematically Elves are lovers of the arts but also fierce warriors. Typically they can be found in one of their woodland kingdoms but many Elves venture out into the world. They are about the same size as humans with more angular features, but live much longer than humans (750 years). In-game Elves are good at a wide array of roles. All Elves get an increase to their Dexterity, have Darkvision, gain proficiency in the perception skill, and have advantage on saving throws against being charmed and can’t be put to sleep by magic. Unlike many of the others races, Elves do not need to sleep. They enter a trance instead remaining semiconscious during it, making for excellent watchmen. Subraces Elves have 3 different subraces to choose from: High Elf, Wood Elf, & Dark Elf. High Elves have a keen mind and a mastery of the basics of magic. They get increase to their Intelligence as well as 1 free cantrip. They gain proficiency with the longsword, shortsword, shortbow, & longbow. Wood Elves have keen senses and intuition. They get an increase to their Wisdom score, & gain proficiency with the longsword, shortsword, shortbow & longbow. Additionally they get an increase to their base walking speed and can attempt to hide when lightly obscured. Dark Elves are mysterious yet deadly. They get an increase to their Charisma score and get Superior Darkvision allowing them to see twice as far as other races. They get access to some spells, have proficiency with the rapier, shortswords and hand crossbow. But because Dark Elves are use to living dark areas, they get some penalties when they stand in direct sunlight. Good classes for an Elf: Bard (Dark Elf), Cleric (Wood Elf), Druid (Wood Elf), Fighter, Monk (Wood Elf), Ranger (Wood Elf), Wizard (High Elf) Halfling s Kind & curious. Halflings are a practical race, seeking only to find a quiet place to settle and live their lives. Although some set out on adventures to see the world around them. Thematically Halflings are a cheerful people making friends with those they come across. They value community & friendship. Very rarely will you find one who isn’t excited to make new friends. Halflings can live to be around 250 years old & typically stand at 3ft tall and weigh about 40 pounds. In-game Halflings make excellent thieves due to their small stature. All Halflings get an increase to their Dexterity and are able to move around the battlefield easily, taking advantage of their size. Additionally Halflings have exceptional luck, allowing them to re-roll a 1 on certain checks or abilities. Subraces Halflings have 2 main subraces to choose from: Lightfoot & Stout. Lightfoot Halflings are more prone to wanderlust than Stout Halflings, giving them an increase to their Charisma score. They are also better at hiding, being able to hide behind bigger creatures. Stout Halflings are hardier and more resilient. They get an increase to their Constitution score, have advantage on saving throws against poison, and are resistant to poison damage. Good classes for a Halfling: Barbarian (Stout), Bard (Lightfoot), Fighter, Monk, Paladin (Lightfoot), Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer (Lightfoot), Warlock (Lightfoot) Humans Adaptable & ambitious. Humans, though short lived, create legacies that last for ages. Thematically Humans are a young race in a world of elder races. It may be due to their shorter lifespans that humans strive to create a name for themselves, as if they have something to prove to the other races. Their daring ambition may come across as being brash to an Elf or Dwarf, but their success is a testament to their drive. Humans rarely reach age 100 and stand between 5-6ft tall. In-game Humans are the most versatile race. They can literally be good at anything. When it comes to human traits there are 2 options, we will call them the variant & non-variant options. The non-variant option increases every ability score by 1. The variant option increases 2 ability scores by 1 and allows you to choose a feat. Good Classes for a Human: Honestly…any class. Since you either get an increase to all stats or, if you are using the Human variant, get to choose which stats to increase and get a feat. Dragonborn Self-Sufficient and skillful. Dragonborn seek excellence in all that they do. Though they look like dragons, a Dragonborn can be as honorable as any Dwarf. Thematically Dragonborn live for their clan, without their clan they may struggle to find purpose. They are larger than humans weighing about 300 pounds and standing at 6 1/2 feet tall. Their scales typically reflect their heritage, which may be a good thing or bad thing. Typically Dragonborn seek mastery of some skill, finding companionship with those who strive for the same goal. In-game Dragonborn make great melee characters as they get an increase to their Strength & their Charisma. Additionally they get an ability called Breath Weapon which lets them attack enemies with either acid, cold, fire, lightning, or poison damage. This damage is dependent upon which type of dragon they are descended from. This also gives them resistance to that type of damage due to their draconic ancestry. Good classes for a Dragonborn: Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Fighter, Paladin, Sorcerer, Warlock Gnomes Energetic and vibrant. Gnomes squeeze every moment out of life. They always find something of interest no matter the task. Thematically Gnomes love to understand and explore the world around them. At times they may struggle to get all of the thoughts in their head out of their mouth. Their curiosity typically leads them to become engineers, alchemists, tinkers or inventors. They are willing to make mistakes and even take bold risks in the name of dreaming large. Gnomes can live to be between 350-500 years old, stand between 3-4ft tall, and usually weigh about 40 pounds. In-game Gnomes do well with magic. All Gnomes get an increase to intelligence, have a base walking speed of 25 feet, Darkvision, and have advantage on all Wisdom, Charisma, and Intelligence saving throws against magic. Subraces Gnomes have 2 subraces to choose from: Forest Gnome & Rock Gnome. Forest Gnomes have a knack for illusion magic and are inherently quick and stealthy. They get an increase to their Dexterity ability score, know the minor illusion cantrip, and are able to communicate with small creatures. Rock Gnomes have a natural inventiveness & hardiness. They get an increase to their Constitution ability score, get to add double their proficiency when they make a history check on magical items, alchemical objects, or technological devices. Finally they can spend an hour and some gold crafting a small device such as a clockwork toy, fire starter, or music box. Good classes for a Gnomes: Barbarian, Fighter, Ranger (Forest), Rogue, Wizard Half-Elves Diplomats & wanderers. Half-Elves are stuck between two worlds. Some say they combine the best qualities of Humans & Elves. The curiosity, inventiveness, and ambition of humans, tempered by the refined sense of a love of nature and the arts from Elves. Thematically Half-Elves are diplomats and wanderers. They don’t truly belong to either race, thus they are use to being the outsider. This typically leads Half-Elves across the land until they find a place they can fit in. Half-Elves typically live to be around 180 years old, and are about the same size as Humans. In-game Half-Elves can fill many roles. Their human ancestry gives them some versatility while their Elven heritage grants them some affinity toward magic. Half-Elves get an increase to their Charisma score and 2 other ability scores. They have Darkvision, advantage on saving throws against being charmed and magic that would put them to sleep. Finally they gain proficiency in 2 skills of their choice. Good classes for a Half-Elf: Most classes due to freedom in choosing ability score increases, but Bard, Paladin, Sorcerer, Warlock Half-Orcs Scarred & Strong, Half-Orcs are similar to Half-Elves in that they don’t truly belong anywhere. Thematically Half-Orcs are either fighting their Orcish desires or giving in to them. They feel emotion powerfully, laughing heartily & feeling the shame of defeat strongly. Some live among their Orcish brethren living in their clans, while others may seek to make a name for themselves among the more civilized races. Half-Orcs rarely live longer than 75 years, usually weigh about 250-300 pounds, & are between 6-7ft tall. In-game Half-Orcs make great melee fighters, getting an increase to their Strength & Constitution. They also have Darkvision and gain proficiency in the Intimidation skill. They are able to keep standing after taking a hit that would drop them below 1 hit-point & deal extra damage when they score a critical hit. Good classes for Half-Orcs: Barbarian, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, & Paladin. Tieflings Self-reliant and suspicious. Tieflings are the result of a pact long ago that infused their human ancestors with the essence of the overlord of the Nine Hells, Asmodeus. And while they may have the physical characteristics of a devil, they are still mostly human. Thematically Tieflings are outcasts. They are looked upon by some with distrust while others outright despise them. Their horns and tails remind many of the horrors and atrocities committed by creatures of the Nine Hells. Because of this, Tieflings often grow up on the fringe of society, becoming common thieves or swindlers. Tieflings live a little longer than Humans, and are about the same size as Humans. In-game Tieflings can do well in many different roles. They get an increase to their intelligence & their Charisma. Their infernal blood gives them an innate connection with magic and a resistance to fire. They have Darkvision and learn a few spells as they level up. Good classes for a Tiefling: Bard, Paladin, Rogue, Sorcerer, Warlock, & Wizard Final Thoughts So that wraps up my guide on the core races from the Player’s Handbook. If you did not find a race that interested you, you can check out the Elemental Evil PDF which is free, or pick up Volo’s Guide to Monsters for more playable races. Please let me know your thoughts below in the comments! And be sure to subscribe to our site to stay up to date on all the latest! Email Address First Name Birthday Leave this field empty if you're human: Like this: Like Loading...
Intel Compiler Patcher is a comprehensive piece of software developed to offer you the means of tweaking certain EXE files that were compiled using Intel C++ Compiler from your computer and optimize them for your processor by deactivating their CPU Dispatcher, thus increasing their general performance when run on other types of CPUs. Simple yet practical looks The interface of the application is very basic and straight-forward, making it very easy to work with, even for those with minimal experience in using such tools. The main window features a toolbar comprising the available functions, namely 'Scan', Stop', 'Patch' and 'Options', while the 'File List' panel displays the scan results, allowing you to select the ones you wish to process as well as view additional 'File Info' in the lower part of the window. Scan your folders and choose the files you want to patch To begin using Intel Compiler Patcher, you will first need to run a 'Scan', by selecting the targeted directory on your computer, then proceeding with the operation. Depending on the size of the folder, this can take quite a while, but you have the possibility of adjusting the analysis to meet your needs by customizing its 'Options'. The 'Options' section of the program enables you to determine the minimal and maximal file size, allowing you to exclude the items that do not fit within that range. Moreover, you can input the targeted 'File Extensions', as Intel Compiler Patcher scans for EXE, DLL, ACM, AX, CPL and OCX by default. After locating the files that you wish to enhance in terms of performance, you can select them then click on the 'Patch' button, and Intel Compiler Patcher will execute the operation within moments, displaying the result in the status bar. Note that certain utilities strictly forbid any alterations from being performed onto their code, which is mentioned in their license agreement, as such you should first consult the document to see if these are permitted, and only then proceed with the patching. Handy CPU Dispatcher disabler To summarize, Intel Compiler Patcher is an efficient and intuitive application whose main purpose is to help you enhance the speed and performance of your computer software by disabling their CPU dispatcher.
All eyes were on Shayne Oliver as he stepped into a sweltering Bronx church in the heat of summer, 2000. The lanky teenager shuffled into the vestibule wearing a short white crop top, exposing his taut midriff. Blots of black skin poked through hand-tattered jeans that were so tight he had to cut them up and safety-pin them back together to get them on. Shayne's outfit set him drastically apart from the men of the congregation, who wore boxy suits. He and his mother hadn't even taken seats in a pew before the preacher started spewing a diatribe of venomous, homophobic remarks from the pulpit. It took a moment before Shayne realized the preacher was attacking him. "Basically, the pastor ran me out of the church," he told me recently. "I stopped going after that." Shayne's now 25 and the designer of menswear label Hood By Air, whose provocative styles—along with brands like Telfar and Third Floor—are carving out a new and empowering palette of masculinity for young black men to paint from. At Shayne's shows, it's not out of the ordinary to see his models stalk the runway in makeup and dresses. Their bellies are often exposed, and half the time you can't tell whether they're men or women. But far from sissiness, the looks exude the visceral power of a lineman crushing a quarterback, or two swords clashing in an action film. This time last year, at Shayne's debut New York Fashion Week runway show, the scene was so thick I had to stand on my tiptoes to catch a glimpse of his powerful vision of androgynous modern menswear. With macho gangster rapper A$AP Rocky on the catwalk, and stars like Kanye West and Waka Flocka Flame in the crowd offering up their adulation, the show was the birth of a new epoch in the evolution of black masculinity. There have been others who've pushed similar boundaries in the past. Before Kanye and A$AP, black artists like Sly and the Family Stone in the 60s and Cameo in the 80s wore gear that looked like it was straight out of the Folsom Street Fair. In the 90s, Tupac walked in a Versace fashion show in a flamboyant gold suit. But one of the things that sets this new wave apart from what came before is that straight men like Kanye and Rocky have no problem recognizing that some of their looks might have originated in the gay community. This kind of inclusiveness and openness is one of the many elements that signifies a shift in the way black men comport themselves in an age when the old notions of machismo, which were burdened with the baggage of 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow, continue to be chipped away. Shirt by Hood By Air Hypermasculinity has long been a way for some black men to deal with the stature and privilege they've historically been denied in this country. It's a reaction to the institutionalized de-masculation that was a crucial part of slavery, in which grown men were reduced to terms like "boy" and "nigger," subjected to castration, and often forced to watch their wives and daughters get ravaged and raped without recourse or retaliation. That emphasis on machismo in black culture has spawned criticism of the more androgynous new styles hitting the streets courtesy of designers like Shayne. Hip-hop forerunner Lord Jamar, of Brand Nubian fame, recently released a vicious diss track titled "Lift Up Your Skirt," which refers to Kanye as a "fag" for wearing a "dress" and introducing "skinny jeans to the rap scene." "I think [these reactions] have to do with the whole fight of being black and being afraid that it shows weakness and offers a weak image of the black community," Shayne told me. The systematic emasculation of black men in American culture is such a serious topic, it's been talked about as a concerted white conspiracy in nearly every black barbershop I've set foot in. And considering the farcical and hurtful caricatures portrayed in popular culture—from minstrelsy back in the day to Tyler Perry today—it makes a lot of sense why. After he left his show on Comedy Central, Dave Chappelle told Oprah, "When I see that they put every black man in the movies in a dress at some point in their career, I start connecting the dots." The comedian recalled a time when the writer, director, and producer of a film he was working on all tried to convince him to get in drag out of the blue. "I don't need to wear no dress to be funny! What is this, Brokeback Mountain in here?" It might seem ridiculous for one man to get so up in arms about the cut and silhouette of another man's garments, but fashion—going all the way back to the antebellum South—has played a major role in the way some black men express their masculinity. Dr. Akil Houston, a professor of cultural and media studies in the Department of African American Studies at Ohio University, broke down its historical importance for me over the phone. "You have to remember," Dr. Houston said, "black men were considered three-fifths of a person for voting purposes during slavery. There weren't many viable ways for them to assert their manliness. But what they could do was use their body, and historically many black men went to fashion to do that." Luar Zepol shorts, Conflict of Interest shirt, Nike sneakers The clearest manifestation of this is the tradition of blacks putting on their "Sunday best" for church. Six days a week, enslaved men toiled endlessly in rags not fit to clean the inside of a chimney. Sunday granted them an opportunity to cleanse themselves of the filth of a week's work and exhibit pride—an essential aspect of masculinity, but a most dangerous emotion to express for a piece of human livestock who wasn't even granted the freedom to read or write. The specter of slavery has long had a resounding impact on the masculinity of black men. During slavery, stereotypical qualities of black men—that we are volatile, libidinous, stupid, brutish—were propagated to help justify the practice. Portraying blacks as animals made it more acceptable for them to be treated like animals. And unfortunately, these tropes still rear their ugly heads as a justification by the powers that be today for everything from the execution of stop-and-frisk in New York to the unfair application of Stand Your Ground in Florida. In black men, these lies can manifest in what W. E. B. Du Bois called a double consciousness, which he described in an 1897 issue of the Atlantic Monthly as the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." The phenomenon of this double consciousness can often put black men on two distinct paths of masculinity—either to define oneself in direct opposition to those stereotypes or to acquiesce and embody them. In the black ghettos of America, it's not rare to see more of the latter than the former. "On the streets, there is a distorted concept of masculinity... When you have holes in your shoes and you see someone getting money, they become your first heroes," said Daniel "Dapper Dan" Day in the living room of his regal Harlem brownstone. "But real masculinity is not being able to inflict pain. It's being able to take it." Dan was a Harlem hustler who became a fashion legend in the 80s for the luxurious, bespoke menswear garments of his eponymous boutique. The clothes, sported by black celebrities like Mike Tyson and crack kingpins like Alberto "Alpo" Martinez, were emblazoned with the monograms of European fashion houses—Gucci, Fendi, Louis Vuitton—at a time when those companies were mainly producing leather goods and accessories. Eventually, when those fashion houses got wind of what Dap was doing, they sued him out of business but subtly reappropriated his style, which has served as a blueprint for high-end menswear and streetwear alike. Hood By Air jacket, Native Danger shorts, adidas Originals sneakers "I [was so] angry, I didn't even know how angry I was," he said in revelatory astonishment. Given his impact on the way we dress today, it's hard to understand why he didn't become something more than a street legend. Sitting on a lush couch across from me in a rust-colored lambskin leather vest and pants of his own design, Dan tried to explain. "The only thing that ever held me back was... you know, my color didn't even hold me back as much as my perception of my color." The weight of history and the very real racial strife that existed during his day stopped him from seeking alliances with people who might have helped him continue to build his dream. "I will never allow myself to limit myself to only people like myself again" he said. "There is no growth in that. You need to be [with the] gay, straight, white, black, Spanish, English, everything..." Then he looked over to his son, Jelani, who sat on the opposite couch in all-black sweats and a towering afro, and said with pride, "But my son is not like me, he's different. He didn't grow up angry at everything." What Dan said about his son echoed so much of what I saw among this new wave of creative artists, who seemed to be aware of the past but not scarred by it. Their distance from the history that shaped men like Dapper Dan have helped them be braver and more equipped to break new ground. This was evident to me when I met with Darryl "CurT@!n$" Jackson, the brand director of the burgeoning luxury-streetwear label En Noir. When I tried to ask him about blackness and masculinity, he balked. "I've never really thought racially. I know that I am black, but what is black?" Hood By Air shirt, Phlemuns shorts, adidas Originals sneakers, Luar Zepol face mask At first, I was taken aback by CurT@!n$ But I realized, through our talk, it wasn't that CurT@!n$ denies the existence or history of racism; he simply refuses to allow it to infect his image of himself or the world around him. "If you say, 'I can touch the ceiling,' that thought lives in your mind. Even if you can't physically touch it, you always think you can touch it, you just think, I haven't done it yet." In terms of broadening the scope of masculinity, we haven't done it yet either. Even Kanye admits he was scared to death of wearing his leather kilt in his hometown Chicago, and Shayne told me that he thinks even today, more than a decade later, that Bronx church would still run him out for his unique look. As James Baldwin brilliantly wrote in his 1955 essay "Stranger in the Village," which reflects on the legacy of slavery, "People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." But if he's right about that—and I think he is—when this new movement of designers and artists eventually becomes our history, it will have the ability to foster a new level of freedom and self-expression. Hopefully we will feel liberated enough to just be ourselves instead of a mere reflection of the pain of the past. WORDS BY WILBERT L. COOPER PHOTOS BY AWOL ERIZKU STYLIST: IAN BRADLEY ART DIRECTION: ADRIAN PHILLIPS Stylist Assistants: Dawn Nguyen, Dennine Dyer, Tyrone Walls Grooming: Michael Anthony Hair: Triana Francois for Hair Models: Aly Ndiaye and Randy Bowden at Boss Models NY, Anthony Ruffin at RED, Jeremiah Phiniezy at St. Claire, Keem White, Magor Mbengue, Renald Seme, Ro¯ze Traore, Yunis Torres Fashion credits for lead photo: Third NYC pants, Nike sneakers, Native Danger backpack; Hood By Air shirt, Luar Zepol shorts, adidas Originals sneakers; Luar Zepol pants, adidas Originals sneakers; Conflict of Interest shirt, Native Danger shorts, adidas Originals sneakers
The chefs behind Hotbox are opening a full-scale restaurant in Avondale called the Wooden Goat. Construction on the restaurant at 4100 3rd Ave. S. - the former Prestige Auto Imports building - will start as soon as the contractor is available, Chef Matt Ralph said. The food will largely be similar to Hotbox, the restaurant in a converted Airstream trailer he and Ryan Champion operate in the backyard of Parkside. "We do a lot of international food and stuff like that at Hotbox and it's kind of an evolution of that - a little Thai, Vietnamese, stuff like that," Ralph said. "We've developed a style over there, and we're going to turn that into a concept." Wooden Goat earned approval from the Birmingham Design Review Committee on Wednesday. Scott Phillips of Boomhover Phillips Architecture is the architect. The pair aim to have Wooden Goat open by early Fall. The restaurant will feature a large outdoor seating space, and about 40 seats will be partially covered. "It's going to be right there on 41st Street, so there will be some good people watching," Ralph said. Hotbox will stay open when Wooden Goat opens. Ralph said he and Champion both live in Avondale, and chose to open Hotbox in Parkside because of the unique, relatively low-investment opportunity. But the proximity of the two projects will allow the two to help each other, Ralph said. It's the latest in a string of announcements in the Avondale area, including Saturn, a new music venue, and Rowe's Service Station, a restaurant concept by the owners of 41st Street Pub and Aircraft Sales. "It's interesting to us to see how many people are traveling down to this neighborhood as a destination, which is weird for some of us who live here," Ralph said. "Eventually, there probably will be a threshold for how much this neighborhood will withstand, but we feel like we're not there yet." This article has been corrected to reflect the correct name of the architect on the project.
I won’t be watching the Bundy Tapes on Netflix. Instead I will be reading and thinking about Ted Bundy’s victims. I wonder where their movies are. I wonder why their names aren’t raised. I wonder why we don’t hear about Lynda Ann Healy, a 21 year old psychology major about to graduate that semester. Lynda worked with handicapped children and got up early every day to report on the skiing conditions for local radio. I wonder why we don’t hear about Debra Kent, a 17 year old aspiring social worker who was known for always having change to feed parking meters for strangers. I wonder why we don’t hear about Susan Curtis. Susan was only 15 years old and was riding her bike to church that day. She was a star on her high school track team. In a world filled with kind, beautiful people, I wonder why we all know Ted Bundy’s name. I wonder if that isn’t giving him and people like him exactly what he wanted. And frankly I’m sick of hearing people talk about him. I’d like to talk about 12 year olds Lynette Culver and Kimberly Leach, neither of whom turned 13 because Ted Bundy stole their innocence and their lives from them. Kimberly had just been elected first runner up “Valentine Queen” by her peers and never got to wear that pretty new dress. Do you think her parents still have that dress, hanging in the back of a closet? I bet they do. I bet her dad sits with it in his darkest moments. You ever thought about him when you hear the name Ted Bundy? Let’s talk about 19 year old Susan Rancourt, who had a 4.0 GPA. 17 year old Laura Aime. 18 year old Georgeann Hawkins. 23 year old Janice Ott. 26 year old Nancy Wilcox. 23 year old Caryn Campbell. 17 year old Melissa Smith. 19 year old Donna Manson, who was an excellent flute player and by all accounts a bit of a goth. 20 year old Kathy Parks. 22 year old Brenda Ball. 20 year old Lisa Levy. 21 year old Margaret Bowman. 25 year old Denise Oliverson, who had just gotten into a spat with her new husband and had gone for a walk to clear her mind. Denise weighed 105 pounds. She was bound, gagged, raped, mutilated and thrown from a fast moving car. Have you ever considered what HIS life has been like since that day? How many hours of his life do you think have been spent on the floor, clutching the ring he had given her, apologizing into thin air? These stories are real. These people are REAL. I get that Ted Bundy was handsome and his eyes were very blue but please. Please stop glamorizing him like this. He ended and ruined lives. Nothing about him is cool or worthy of emulation. Ted Bundy raped, tortured, mutilated and strangled over 30 females, including 12 year old girls. None of his victims weighed more than 115 pounds. Ted Bundy was a pathetic man. Emulate Lynda. Emulate Debra. Raise their names and their voices to those around you. Honor them. They were very real people with promising lives and futures stretched ahead of them, stolen. Please don’t elevate or whitewash this kind of rampant violence against women. I assure you the world is harsh enough for us without a new generation thinking Ted Bundy is a cool, fascinating guy. Thanks.
Opaque Media Group, a Melbourne-based VR studio, recently announced Earthlight, an upcoming first-person space simulator that places you in the flight suit of a current day astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS). If Earthlight’s 360-degree teaser trailer is any indicator, the game is going for a stark realism that aims to catch you up in the mystique of the oft discussed ‘overview effect‘, a marked cognitive shift that astronauts experience when they see the Earth from space for the first time. Along with the stunning life-like scenery, the studio is calling it the “most realistic depiction of the International Space Station used in a consumer-oriented VR application to-date.” While Earthlight hopes to impress with its high level of realism, Opaque isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to the nitty gritty of working aboard a low orbit science vessel like the ISS. Although the team is working with cognitive psychologists and researchers in a variety of STEM fields “to create a pleasant user experience despite the complexity of the VR design,” Earthlight is taking real-world microgravity physics into account as daily tasks like undoing a simple screw become complex physics puzzles. See Also: SpaceVR Passes $100k Kickstarter Goal, VR is Going to Space Earthlight is targeting the big three consumer-grade VR headsets; the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Playstation VR with the intention of supporting their respective hand controllers (Oculus Touch, SteamVR Controllers and PlayStation Move). Gamepads with dual analogue inputs will also be supported. “Earthlight is not just a game set in space, it is about giving the players an experience of what it’s like to be an astronaut.” Says Norman Wang, the Project Lead on Earthlight. “And to make sure that we create an authentic experience, we will be developing Earthlight in collaboration with NASA, with astronauts, and with the people who train and support them.” “Visiting the International Space Station, floating freely in space, is a dream of many but a reality experienced by only a few,” said Professor Christopher Fluke, Coordinator of the Swinburne University-based Virtual Reality Theatre at the Centre of Astrophysics and Supercomputing during a pre-release demonstration of Earthlight. “Earthlight is a genuinely engaging experience. I am excited by the potential for interactive virtual experiences to play a greater role in bringing dreams of space exploration to life.” Although we don’t expect Earthlight to stay 100 percent true to the astronaut’s grueling regime of system checks, 6 hour-long spacewalks, and constant isometric exercises to combat the inevitable muscle atrophy associated with microgravity environments, the implications of being able to step aboard a realistic recreation of one of the least populated science stations in the universe—only seeing a little over 200 people in it’s 17 year existence—is pretty incredible to say the least. We’re looking forward to getting our hands on a copy of the game when it’s publicly released in Q1 2016, which will come to SteamVR, PlayStation VR and Oculus Rift. The HTC Vive-based version Earthlight will be available at the Opaque Media Group booth (#3324) at PAX Australia 2015. You can sign up for updates on Earthlight’s website.
“If you have a compliant and helpful administration, I think you can just tear it down,” said David Schnare, another panelist who served on the Trump transition team. “If you’ve got an administration that does not want to go down that road, I think it’s very much like a marathon.” The conference participants, too, recognized that gutting the policy would be tough. But under Trump, they see an opportunity that might not come around again, and are gearing up for a legal battle. To many legal experts, the endangerment finding is untouchable, or close to it. “I would be hard-pressed to guess at or articulate a theory whereby the Supreme Court would take the position that this wasn’t already decided as a final matter,” Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard’s Environmental Law Program and a former EPA official, told BuzzFeed News . Other speakers strategized a lofty goal for the rest of the Trump presidency: reversing an EPA declaration known as the “endangerment finding.” Under the Obama administration, the agency concluded that climate change poses a danger to public health. It’s the foundation of the agency’s authority to regulate carbon emissions as an air pollutant, and has been backed up by the Supreme Court. “It’s like Christmas with all the things that have happened in the last year and all the things that are going to happen next year,” he said. “I can assure you none of us feel like we wasted our time,” David Stevenson, a member of Trump’s EPA transition team, said on the “Reforming EPA” panel. The meeting’s mostly celebratory panels focused on climate myths, fossil fuels, and the dramatic shift in environmental policy under Trump: his announcement to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, the proposed repeal of pollution rules for power plants, and EPA’s overhaul of its science advisory boards . The America First Energy Conference drew several federal officials. The Interior Department’s counselor for energy policy, Vincent DeVito, gave a keynote over dinner; Richard Westerdale II, a senior energy adviser at the State Department, was a panelist; and Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, addressed attendees in a pre-taped video. At an energy meeting of the Heartland Institute last week, some of the nation’s most vocal climate deniers gushed about the Trump administration’s rapid rollback of environmental and climate rules and set their sights on a far more ambitious plan: gutting the policy that allows the EPA to treat carbon as an air pollutant. HOUSTON — A controversial free-market think tank, after years on the political fringe, has found an audience in the Trump administration. “If you have a compliant and helpful administration, I think you can just tear it down.” Although the Heartland Institute has held many conferences questioning the scientific consensus on man-made climate change, this was its first to focus on energy more broadly, with the agenda designed specifically around Trump’s America First energy plan, according to spokesperson Jim Lakely. The motley crowd of about 220 people included academics, a couple dozen Republican state lawmakers, free-market supporters, federal energy officials, and executives from small energy companies. Big Oil was notably absent. (In fact, it was still a sore spot at this conference that some corporate donors, including ExxonMobil, walked away from Heartland between 2007 and 2012.) The keynote speeches and about half of the 12 sessions dealt with energy, mostly about removing regulatory red tape to produce more coal, gas, and oil. “The war on American energy is completely over,” said DeVito, who joined the Interior Department to help coordinate its energy portfolio in May. He boasted there’s been an increase in coal mining and new land has opened up to oil and gas drilling under Trump. The other sessions, however, centered around climate denial or reducing environmental protections, and most participants openly questioned whether man-made climate change was real. Sometimes it was an odd mix. On the “Energy and National Security” panel, former NASA engineer Hal Doiron and former Navy admiral Thomas Hayward talked about “climate alarmists” being a national security threat. They shared a stage with Westerdale, a top energy official at the State Department who outlined the Trump administration’s plan to become “energy dominant,” such as expanding US energy exports and related technologies. But he did not mention climate change. Pruitt, who while head of the EPA has repeatedly questioned the link between human activity and global warming, also didn’t mention it in his video address. “So I want to say to you at the Heartland Institute, thanks for what you are doing to advance energy,” Pruitt said. “Thank you for what you are doing to advance natural resources. We’ve been blessed immensely as a country to whom much is given, much is acquired.” But Pruitt’s team, according to Lakely, has reached out to the Heartland Institute for a list of scientists and policy experts who are skeptical of catastrophic man-made global warming. Some of those names ended up on the list of the agency’s new science advisers released earlier this month. “Stanley Young was one of the people — we told the agency he was good on the ideas,” Lakely said, and now the North Carolina statistician is on the board advising Pruitt on science policy. Another new EPA adviser, Robert Phalen of the University of California, Irvine, was also at the meeting. Both Young and Phalen have argued that pollution standards for small particulates in the air (called PM2.5) are too restrictive. Referring to these two new appointments, Steve Milloy, a third EPA transition team member, said to the crowd: “We are making progress.” The attendees had differing priorities for the Trump administration. Some advocated abolishing the EPA, as Trump once suggested on the campaign trail. Others just wanted it slimmed down. Other suggestions included redoing the EPA’s valuation for a human life, rolling back standards for small particulates and ozone, and updating the cost-benefit analysis of new regulations to include job impacts. The most urgent goal, though, seemed to be eliminating the endangerment finding. “The endangerment finding will hamstring the full exploitation of fossil fuels,” Harry MacDougald said at the “Endangerment Finding” session. He was part of the legal team that unsuccessfully challenged the finding at the DC Circuit Court in 2012, and then failed to convince the Supreme Court to take up the case in 2013. Speaking about the Trump administration, he added, “they don’t understand how strong it is. We are doing our best to help [Pruitt] understand.” Last month, EPA head Pruitt told Bloomberg that any review of the endangerment finding would take time, and did not mention any immediate plans to do so. MacDougald encouraged audience members to write their own petition to the EPA to undo the policy, or write letters in support of existing petitions: On January 20, the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council petitioned the agency to reconsider the finding, arguing its underlying science is wrong. MacDougald helped write the submission. About a month later, two other groups filed a similar petition. A third petition, one challenging the legal rather than scientific basis of the finding, was filed in May by an Austin-based conservative think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation. MacDougald noted that Kathleen Hartnett White, Trump’s pick to run the Council on Environmental Quality, comes from the Texas Public Policy Forum. “If you are trying to pick the winner in this horse race, you might want to put your money on them.” If petitions don’t work, the panelists said, there’s also a plan to sue. “We’re going to do that,” Schnare said. “I think we’re going to look at specific farmers — large farmers — who are harmed by reductions in CO2.” Schnare didn’t explain exactly how farmers were being harmed, but the idea that carbon dioxide helps plants grow was a popular talking point at the conference.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch repeatedly dodged and deflected specific questions Tuesday on the FBI’s probe of Hillary Clinton’s email use, referring Republicans to the FBI director instead of answering them herself – and leading to heated exchanges with top Republicans over the course of several hours of testimony. Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said Lynch’s “lack of clarity is bad for the republic.” During questioning before the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, also asked about the legality of sharing classified information outside the proper channels and other issues. Lynch said it would be unfair to give a blanket answer. “I think you’re sending a terrible message to the world,” Chaffetz said. “The lack of clarity that you give to this body … is pretty stunning.” The exchanges were in keeping with the tense tone of a hearing where Republican lawmakers struggled – over and over – to draw detailed answers from the nation’s top law enforcement official regarding the decision not to pursue charges against Clinton over her email use. She repeatedly deferred to FBI Director James Comey’s comments on the case, declining to elaborate herself. “I would refer you to those statements,” Lynch said. “I, as attorney general, am not able to provide any further comment on the facts or the substance of the investigation.” Even as Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., noted it was her conclusion in the end on whether to act, Lynch would not comment in detail, specifically when pressed on Comey findings that conflicted with Clinton’s public statements on her email use. Republicans, though, ramped up their criticism not only of Clinton but of the Justice Department’s handling of the case. Goodlatte said the conclusion not to pursue charges “defies logic and the law” -- and once again criticized her for meeting on a tarmac in Phoenix with former President Bill Clinton just a week before the decision was announced. “The timing of and circumstances surrounding this announcement are particularly troubling,” he said. Goodlatte suggested that and other factors could have been grounds for recusal, but Lynch rebuffed the notion. And she insisted that the discussion with the former president was “social” and did not pertain to the email investigation. Lynch has nevertheless expressed regret for the meeting and acknowledged that it had "cast a shadow" on the public perception of the Justice Department's independence. Her limited answers on facts of the case, meanwhile, prompted some tense exchanges with lawmakers later in the hearing. Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., repeatedly pressed Lynch on whether there was some legal prohibition on her discussing the case that did not apply to Comey, who has discussed the probe at length. In a rapid-fire exchange, Lynch said she could not provide the same level of detail and they had “very different roles” in the case. “There is no legal prohibition that can be cited here,” Forbes countered. As they did last week when Comey was grilled by House Republicans, Democrats criticized their GOP colleagues for holding Tuesday’s hearing. “The criminal investigation is closed. There was no intentional wrongdoing,” said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., top Democrat on the panel. Meanwhile, a new poll reflects widespread public unease about the FBI decision. The ABC News/Washington Post poll showed 56 percent disagreed with the FBI’s recommendation not to pursue charges. Just 35 percent approved. A separate NBC News tracking poll showed the Democratic presidential nominee’s lead over Republican Donald Trump narrowing to just 3 points. Meanwhile, Lynch addressed police interactions with minorities in the aftermath of a violent week that brought that issue to the forefront. The attorney general last week appealed for calm one day after a sniper who said he wanted to kill whites fatally shot five police officers in Dallas. The attack began during protests over the police killings of Philando Castile, who was fatally shot near St. Paul, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling, who was shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after being pinned to the pavement by two white officers. Lynch, who was sworn in as attorney general on the same day as racially tinged riots occurred in Baltimore, has repeatedly said that one of her top priorities in office is to improve relationships between police and the communities they serve. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
As we usher in the new year and the first primary event of the election kicks off, Americans are concerned primarily with two intertwined issues: the economy and our debt. Rightfully, these issues were at the heart of our politics in 2011 and due to the numerous failures of our government to fix them, look to take front stage in 2012 as well. Meanwhile, legislation that has been signed into law and another bill being debated have gone unnoticed in the popular eye despite the fact that they can radically alter the face of our nation and potentially destroy our most basic rights under the Constitution. On New Year's Eve Day, President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with reservations. While the NDAA outlines military funding and policy, it also solidifies the government's authority to detain American citizens without trial. The NDAA grants this authority while not "limiting[ing] or expand[ing]" the authorities provided by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) or existing laws regarding detainment. In his signing statement, President Obama states that the section is unnecessary because it merely affirms authorities previously established and upheld by the Supreme Court in accordance with the AUMF. However, the AUMF does not specifically mention detaining U.S. citizens without trial. Therefore, the NDAA does not limit or expand the government's ability to detain U.S. citizens, but retroactively grants this ability under the AUMF. One can argue that President Lincoln already did this when he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, however, he at least placed a time constraint on this policy for "the insurrection," whereas the NDAA does not. For his part, President Obama has stated that he will not use the provisions to detain American citizens without trial, however, the precedent has been set and reaffirmed so that future presidents can do so. Perhaps the scariest part of this legislation is that multiple amendments to include language protecting citizens under the constitution were rejected by the Senate, such as: "(f) Extension to United States Citizens and Lawful Resident Aliens.--The authority of the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons under this section extends to citizens of the United States and lawful resident aliens of the United States, except to the extent prohibited by the Constitution of the United States." While NDAA has been signed into law, Congress is set to resume talks on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) on January 24. While online piracy does hurt our economy and is certainly worth combating, SOPA is overkill and could have everlasting repercussions on free speech. Here's a more in-depth analysis of SOPA, but SOPA and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Senate's version Protect IP grant the government the ability to shutdown and/or block websites for concerns over copyrights. While internet powerhouses have mostly banded together against it, Hollywood and the record industry have significantly outspent them in lobbying for the bill (one can't help but wonder how 2010's landmark Citizens United ruling has played a role so far and how it will effect the outcome). The essence of SOPA is that if a website user infringes upon a copyright, the website, not the user, is held responsible and could be shutdown or blacklisted. Aside from the personal security concerns that this raises for those surfing the web due to breaking DNSSEC standards, and the potential to stifle innovation and development in the internet sphere (one of the few growth markets in the U.S.), SOPA could be used to severely weaken the first amendment. The fundamental flaw of SOPA is making the website solely responsible for its users' actions. Instead of allowing sites to act in good faith with the copyright holder, it will punish the site rather than the user. This is akin to issuing speeding tickets to GM for drivers going too fast. The fundamental problem is that this could be completely arbitrary and be used to target specific sites. If I were to engage in copyright infringement in this piece, the Huffington Post could be shut down. Anyone who posted it to Twitter or Facebook could potentially get those sites shutdown as well. As more Americans receive their news, magazines, and books online, the ramifications of shutting down websites expand exponentially and infringe upon the freedom of speech and the freedom of press. As e-readers and tablets continue their rapid replacement of brick and mortar stores, shutting down Amazon or Barnes & Noble's website would instantly kill distribution of books and knowledge: key elements of novels such as Fahrenheit 451 and 1984. The government has already proven that what a citizen reads can be important to them in section 215 of the Patriot Act which allows the government to collect, among other things, library records of individuals (side note: the Patriot Act as a whole has been used in at least one copyright infringement investigation as well). The reasons why we fight against numerous attempts by various groups to ban certain books are nothing new, nor is the idea of book burnings: a tactic used by Nazi Germany, Castro's government in Cuba, radical religious groups and even recently by the U.S. Government. Shutting down a website due to copyright infringement by one of its users is a dangerous step that could easily be misused to devastating effects. The status of copyright violation regarding First Use (basically when you buy a DVD you can loan it to your friend without getting permission) could also further enhance the ability for copyright infringements to shutdown sites after the 2009 New York district court ruling Pearson Education, Inc. v. Ganghua Liu. The court ruled that First Use rights for the purchaser do not extend to items legally manufactured outside of the U.S. and then brought into the U.S. If a DVD or book is legally made in Europe and the original purchaser sells it to someone in the U.S. through Amazon, under SOPA, Amazon could be shutdown for copyright infringement.
With Arsenal linked with a move for Bayern Munich midfielder Luiz Gustavo in today’s newspapers, blogger Gooner Daily gives us a statistical look at what the player could offer if he makes a move to the Emirates. While Bastian Schweinsteiger and Javi Martinez were the regular first choice pairing in Bayern Munich’s midfield last season, there were times when the manager summoned the services of Luiz Gustavo, the Brazilian powerhouse with a style of play that reminds me of ex-Gunner, Gilberto Silva. In simple terms, Luiz Gustavo is the type of player that does his “dirty work” in a very clean way and his tenacious style of play in Bayern’s midfield caught the eye last season. The Brazilian was signed from Hoffenhiem in the winter transfer window of 2011 and he featured regularly in his first full season for the Bavarian outfit in the 2011/12 campaign (46 apps) but the big-money acquisition of Javi Martinez from Athletic Bilbao ensured that his game time diminished, as Schweinsteiger was a vital cog in the midfield engine. Despite not being a regular in Heynckes’ first-team sheet, Luiz Gustavo’s versatility made him a valuable asset for Bayern Munich last season, as he also provided cover as a center back and a left back when the need arose. After a successful 2012/13 campaign with Bayern Munich, Luiz Gustavo was called up by Felipao in this summer’s FIFA Confederations Cup and he was an integral part of the Samba Boys squad that won the tournament in grand style following some inspired performances from Julio Cesar, Neymar and Fred. With some assistance from stats kings like Who Scored and Squakwa, the table below shows the key performance metrics for Luiz Gustavo in the Bundesliga, UEFA Champions League and 2013 Confederations Cup. STAT Bundesliga Champions League Confed. Cup Appearances (Subs) 16 (6) 3 (7) 5 (0) Goals Scored 4 – – Assists 1 – – Overall shots (Shots per Game) 13 (0.6) 9 (0.9) 2 (0.4) Bookings (Yellow / Red) 6 / 0 2 / 0 2 / 0 Total Tackles (Tackles per Game) 54 (2.5) 15 (1.5) 10 (2) Total Interceptions (Interceptions per Game) 33 (1.5) 13 (1.3) 15 (3) Total Fouls Committed (Fouls per Game) 37 (1.7) 10 (1) 14 (2.8) Aerial Duels (Attempted/Won) 36 / 16 12 / 6 6 / 5 Total Passes (Accurate Passes) 940 (874) 205 (183) 233 (214) Pass Completion % 93 89.3 91.8 Total Long Balls (Accurate) 97 (82) 26 (25) 22 (20) Total Through Balls (Accurate) 3 (2) 3 (2) 0 For a player that wasn’t a key part of Bayern Munich’s squad last season, Luiz Gustavo’s stats are jaw dropping to say the least. In the 2012/13 Bundesliga campaign, he amassed just 26 appearances but he managed to rake up an impressive pass completion percentage of 93 percent. He also notched up a decent amount of tackles and interceptions in each game he played and as expected from a tenacious holding midfielder like him, he had his fair share of fouls committed and bookings. With a frame of 6′ 2″, Luiz Gustavo was also involved in some aerial battles in the middle of the park and he had close to a 50 percent success rate in the Bundesliga and Champions League but in the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup, Luiz Gustavo basically won every header he attempted which showed how he used his height to great effect for his nation. With Schweinsteiger and Javi Martinez clearly above the Brazilian in the pecking order, his cause wasn’t helped when Pep Guardiola successfully acquired the services of Thiago Alcantara from Barcelona, a player he managed in his Barcelona B days. Unlike Heynckes that successfully utilized the 4-2-3-1 tactical setup with Schweinsteiger and Martinez in the double pivot, Guardiola is adopting his traditional 4-3-3 formation that worked wonders for him in his Barcelona trophy hauling days. Martinez will assume the deep-lying playmaker role that was successfully manned by Sergi Busquets, Schweinsteiger / Thiago would assume the Xavi Hernandez role while the mercurial Mario Gotze, on his return from injury, would be at the tip of the midfield triumvirate (Andres Iniesta’s role). This clearly indicates that Luiz Gustavo would be surplus to requirements and according to the Daily Mail, Arsenal is about to table a £14m bid for the Brazilian after Arsene Wenger admitted that his squad is thin-bare and he wanted new reinforcements. Unlike in Bayern Munich where Luiz Gustavo’s chances of featuring now hangs on a thin thread, it would be a different case at Arsenal but in all honesty, I don’t expect Luiz Gustavo to walk into the Arsenal first-team setup. If he arrives at the Emirates, he would be that strong enforcer in midfield the fans have been craving for since Alex Song, but Arsenal has two players that have blossomed in the holding midfield roles. Following the departure of Song to Barcelona, Mikel Arteta assumed the role of Arsenal’s holding midfielder, curbing his attacking instincts to take one for the team and Arsenal fans can attest that he was a revelation last season. After playing as a jack-of-all-trades, Arsene Wenger finally gave Aaron Ramsey a chance to strut his stuff in central midfield and his energy and work rate aided his team’s surge to a fourth place finish in the last campaign. I’m going to juxtapose between Luiz Gustavo’s key performance metrics and Arsenal’s personnel in the successful double midfield pivot of last season, Aaron Ramsey and Mikel Arteta. I’ll also cull some stats from Who Scored for both players. According to Who Scored, listed below are Aaron Ramsey and Mikel Arteta’s stats in the Premier League last season. STATS (EPL Only) Mikel Arteta Aaron Ramsey Appearances (Subs) 34 (0) 21 (15) Goals Scored 6 1 Assists 3 2 Overall shots (Shots per Game) 19 (0.6) 46 (1.3) Bookings (Yellow / Red) 6 / 0 5 / 0 Total Tackles (Tackles per Game) 108 (3.2) 71 (2) Total Interceptions (Interceptions per Game) 97 (2.7) 44 (1.2) Total Fouls Committed (Fouls per Game) 74 (2.2) 48 (1.3) Aerial Duels (Attempted/Won) 67 / 35 37 / 14 Total Passes (Accurate Passes) 2750 (2517) 1934 (1705) Pass Completion % 91.5 88.2 Total Long Balls (Accurate) 205 (179) 139 (103) Total Through Balls (Accurate) 15 (6) 21 (11) Unlike Luiz Gustavo that plays like a traditional water carrier in holding midfield, Arteta and Ramsey are very comfortable with the ball on their feet and it’s also worth noting that Arteta total passes (2,750) were almost three times Luiz Gustavo’s (940) despite playing in the same role with the Brazilian. In Gustavo’s defense, Arteta played more games than the Brazilian with age slowly creeping in on the Lego-haired Spaniard, Gustavo can come into the club and he would definitely be touted as Arteta’s long-term successor. At the age of 26, Luiz Gustavo’s best years are well ahead of him unlike Arteta that probably has two or so years left in him before he decides to end his playing days in his native Spain or maybe the MLS to earn some big bucks. Even if everybody is firmly focused on Luis Suarez and his transfer shenanigans, Arsenal’s pursuit of Luiz Gustavo is a stroke of genius by Arsene Wenger. This post was originally published on Gooner Daily – you can check out their Facebook page here.
Sally Kern (born November 27, 1946) is a former Oklahoma state legislator, and former schoolteacher from Oklahoma City. Kern, a member of the Republican party, represented House District 84 — including parts of Bethany, Warr Acres, Oklahoma City, and Woodlawn Park until leaving office on November 16, 2016, after not seeking re-election in the 2016 elections. A former schoolteacher, she graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington and East Texas State University. She is known nationally for her opposition to equal rights for lesbian/gay/bisexual people.[2] She is married to Steve Kern, pastor of Olivet Baptist Church in the Oklahoma City area.[3] Political career [ edit ] Kern authored a bill, which passed the Oklahoma House of Representatives in March 2008, mandating that students who believe in Young Earth creationism still receive passing grades in Earth science classes.[4] After being passed in the House, it was voted down in a Senate committee without reaching the floor for debate.[5] Kern co-authored the Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act that included the provision "Students shall not be penalized or rewarded on account of the religious content of their work", which was vetoed by Governor Brad Henry.[6] In 2011, she published her memoir The Stoning of Sally Kern: The Liberal Attack on Christian Conservatism – and Why We Must Take a Stand.[7] Statements on homosexuality [ edit ] In March 2008, Kern made national headlines when she stated, in part: Studies show that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades. So it's the death knell of this country. I honestly think it's the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam – which I think is a big threat, okay? 'Cause what's happening now is they are going after, in schools, two-year olds ... And this stuff is deadly, and it's spreading, and it will destroy our young people, it will destroy this nation![8] After receiving attention for the remarks, Kern said "I said nothing that was not true" and refused to apologize.[2][8][9] She received a standing ovation from fellow Republican legislators in a private meeting a few days later.[10] In response to Kern's comments, hundreds of gay and lesbian rights supporters protested at the Oklahoma State Capitol.[11] Over 1500 people later turned out at the Capitol to support her.[12] Kern claimed to have received death threats that caused her to hire a bodyguard.[13][14] The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation officer who reviewed Kern's emails said, "I wouldn't characterize them as death threats."[15] Kern authored an op-ed counterpoint piece in the June 24, 2009 issue of the Oklahoma Gazette in which she argued, "Granting marriage status to homosexuals who comprise little more than 3 percent of the population would be like granting all applicants admission to a prestigious college just because a few meet the qualifications. That school's status would fall. Likewise, the status of marriage will fall if same-sex marriage is legalized."[16] In late June 2009 Kern authored the "Oklahoma Citizens Proclamation for Morality" implicitly blaming gay marriage and President Barack Obama's official acknowledgment of Gay and Lesbian Pride Month (among other things) for the economic crisis which was then ongoing. During her 2010 re-election campaign, Kern made the sexual orientation and gender of her opponent a topic of her campaign.[17] In an interview on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, she correlated homosexuality with HIV/AIDS, and reiterated her claim that homosexuality is a greater threat to the United States than terrorism, saying "It's more dangerous, and yes I think that it's also more dangerous because it will tear down the moral fiber of this nation."[18] In January 2015, she introduced three bills in the state legislature which would permit businesses to deny goods, services, or other forms of public accommodation to lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people; prohibit the state from interfering if parents put their children through so-called "conversion therapy"; and to fire any state employee who grants (such as authorized by the district court ruling in Bishop v. Oklahoma) a same-sex marriage license.[19] Statements on minorities and women [ edit ] On April 27, 2011, while debating in favor of SJR 15, a proposed constitutional amendment that would eliminate Affirmative Action in Oklahoma, Kern said: We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that's tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don't want to study as hard in school? I've taught school, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn't study hard because they said the government would take care of them.[20] During the same debate, Kern also stated that Women usually don't want to work as hard as a man ... women tend to think a little bit more about their family, wanting to be at home more time, wanting to have a little more leisure time.[21] On May 2, 2011, The Oklahoma State House of Representatives publicly reprimanded Kern for the comments she made which some people interpreted as unflattering to blacks and women during a debate on affirmative action. Rep. Mike Shelton, D-Oklahoma City, made the motion to reprimand her. A member objected, and the House voted 76–17 to reprimand Kern.[22][23] Election history [ edit ] 2004 Race for Oklahoma House of Representatives – District 84[24] Name Votes Percent Outcome Sally Kern, Rep. 8,815 67.65% Won Ronald E. Wasson, Dem. 4,215 32.35% Lost 2006 Race for Oklahoma House of Representatives – District 84[25] Name Outcome Sally Kern, Rep. Won (Unopposed at filing) 2008 Race for Oklahoma House of Representatives – District 84[26] Name Votes Percent Outcome Sally Kern, Rep. 7,230 57.95% Won Ron Marlett, Dem. 5,247 42.05% Lost 2010 Race for Oklahoma House of Representatives – District 84[26] Name Votes Percent Outcome Sally Kern, Rep. 5,717 65.90% Won Brittany M. Novotny, Dem. 2,958 34.10% Lost In 2012, she was opposed in the Republican primary by small business owner Curtis Moore, but defeated him by 1500 votes to 507 for Moore; she was unopposed in the general election.[27] In 2014 she was unopposed in both the primary and general elections.[28] In 2016 she did not seek re-election.[29]
In a surprise decision Tuesday morning, the United States Supreme Court vacated an earlier ruling by a lower court in the case of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, who was convicted of bribery and honest services fraud in 2006 in a case that has widely been criticized as politically motivated. The ruling was vacated in light of a ruling last week in the case of former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling which partially struck down the so-called “honest services” fraud statute. On the heels of that decision, the Supreme Court issued a surprise ruling in the Siegelman case on Tuesday morning: 09-182 SCRUSHY, RICHARD SIEGELMAN, DON E. V. UNITED STATES The petitions for writs of certiorari are granted. The judgment is vacated, and the cases are remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit for further consideration in light of Skilling v. United States, 561 U.S. ___ (2010). Siegelman’s attorney for the Supreme Court appeal, Sam Heldman, told Raw Story, “We are very pleased with the Court’s ruling. This is an important step towards a complete victory for Governor Siegelman.” Siegelman’s case will now be remanded back to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit for a second consideration. It doesn’t mean, however, that Siegelman is out of the woods. In March 2009, the Eleventh Circuit upheld bribery, conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges against Siegelman and refused a request for a new trial. They could easily do so again. In what many have alleged was a politically-motivated prosecution orchestrated from the top echelons of the Republican PartyÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s power structure, Siegelman, a Democrat, was convicted in 2006 of selling a seat on an Alabama hospital regulatory board for $500,000 to former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, by way of donations to a 1999 Siegelman sponsored state lottery campaign, for which Siegelman received no profit and no campaign financing. The case has come under public scrutiny because of allegations that former Bush White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, was behind the prosecutions for political motives. Leura Canary, the US Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama and who prosecuted Siegelman is married to RoveÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s long-time friend and business partner William Canary. Siegelman’s gubernatorial opponent at the time of his indictment, Bob Riley, had hired William Canary as a campaign advisor. Rove, who was subpoenaed three times by the House Judiciary Committee as part of their investigation into the Siegelman case, failed to show for each of the hearings and only agreed to testify on the condition that he be not under oath and not in public, which the Judiciary granted. In March 2009, a three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit Court reversed two out of the seven charges of corruption and bribery relating to SiegelmanÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s conviction. The Supreme Court decision today vacates the Circuit Court’s ruling and remands the case back to them to reconsider in light of last Thursday’s ruling in the Skilling case. Scott Horton, Columbia University law professor and contributor to Harper’s is not surprised by today’s ruling, telling Raw Story early this morning that if the Circuit Court approaches the Siegelman case fairly, they will vacate the conviction entirely. ‘This is not surprising, indeed, it’s the outcome I anticipated,” wrote Horton in an email Tuesday morning. “The Supreme Court’s majority allowed honest services fraud to continue on seriously narrowed grounds, basically reduced to clear cases of bribery, while a powerful minority wants to strike it altogether expressing sharp dissatisfaction with the Justice Department’s management of honest-services fraud, particularly in ‘political’ cases,” he added. “The Eleventh Circuit should now apply this to the Siegelman case. If they do so fairly, the Siegelman case is over. Moreover, the Justice Department should read the Skilling decision carefully. If they do and follow the spirit of the ruling, they will simply abandon the Siegelman case, which they should have done long ago.” Related stories: Part One Ã¢â‚¬â€œ The Political Prisoner Part Two Ã¢â‚¬â€œ Exclusive interview with jailed governorÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s daughter, Dana Siegelman Part Three Ã¢â‚¬â€œ Running Elections from the White House Interview with Dana Jill Simpson and alleged Rove smear campaign Part Four Ã¢â‚¬â€œ How Bush pick helped prosecute top Democrat-backed judge Part Five Ã¢â‚¬â€œ Mississippi Justice: Bush US Attorney targeted my wife, supporters and friends Part Six – Break-ins plague targets of US Attorneys Justice Department investigating two US Attorneys for political prosecution Part Seven – Justice for Sale: How Big Tobacco and the GOP teamed up to crush Democrats in the South Government opposes appeal by imprisoned attorney to visit dying wife Democrat claiming political prosecution appeals decision to prohibit visit to dying wife Judge who ruled on appeal of prosecuted Democrat was Karl Rove protege Supreme Court ruling may not help Democrats targeted by Bush US Attorneys Editor’s note: Because of a legal misinterpretation, the original version of this story asserted that the Supreme Court had vacated Siegelman’s conviction entirely. In fact, they vacated a narrower part of the case, a recent ruling by the Eleventh Circuit denying Siegelman the right to a new trial. This version has been updated to correct those misinterpretations.
Sometimes when you go birding you don’t find what you hope to see. But sometimes you see something unexpected that is just as great. And sometimes it’s not even a bird. Last Saturday the Friends of Fish Creek Society birders explored the Votier’s Flats area of Fish Creek Park. Our goal was to find a Northern Pygmy-Owl, which is always a treat to see, and which several members of the group had never seen. The owl has not yet been reported in the park this fall but in the last few years it has first been sighted at about this time. We didn’t find an owl, but someone spotted a writhing mass at the side of the path that turned out to be a family of Least Weasels – a mother with eight young. Photo by Dan Arndt The nine little mammals moved through the undergrowth in a mass, over and under each other, but always in contact. In his report on Albertabird, Gus Yaki described them as “travelling together so close that they seemed to be a single organism.” Pat Bumstead says that they probably were making one of their first forays outside their natal den, and were exploring their surroundings. Photo by Wayne Walker The mother crossed the trail near us, and the young separated amongst our feet. They showed no fear of us. I put my hand down, and briefly had one in my gloved hand. The shots below show just how small Least Weasels are. These young are as big as an adult, or nearly so. Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker The juveniles eventually crossed the trail to reunite with their mother. Photo by Dan Arndt Although they are impossibly cute, weasels are carnivores, capable of killing animals many times their size. In these photos they show off their teeth. Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Anne Elliott We were very lucky to see such an amazing sight. If you’re like me, you can’t get enough of looking at these little guys, so below there are some more pictures for you to enjoy. (To see an additional Birdscalgary post about another species of weasel, click here.) (To see a YouTube video that uses some of these pictures, with music, click below:) Here are the rest of the photos: Photo by Dan Arndt Photo by Dan Arndt Photo by Anne Elliott Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Photo by Wayne Walker Thanks to the three photographers who contributed these great pictures: Wayne Walker, Dan Arndt, and Anne Elliott. Posted by Bob Lefebvre Advertisements
College graduates of the class of 2015 left campus with an average of $30,000 in student debt, a 4 percent jump from the previous year, according to a report issued on Tuesday by The Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS). “We need to make college more affordable and debt less burdensome for students and families,” said TICAS president Lauren Asher in a written statement. Average college debt in California was $22,000, the third lowest in the nation. But college debt is going up in California at about the same rate as it is nationwide. Topping the California colleges list is National University, where students graduate almost $53,000 in debt. Student debt at University of California campuses ranged from $17,869 at U.C. Berkeley to $22,580 at U.C. Santa Cruz. At California State University campuses debt among graduates ranged from $10,872 at Fresno State to $23,973 at Humboldt State. The institute admitted there’s a big gap in the report: The debt averages don’t include information from for-profit colleges because those schools often don’t reveal how much debt their students are graduating with. “Actual state averages may be even higher than they look,” said Diane Cheng, TICAS associate research director. “Our state averages are based on what colleges voluntarily report about their graduates’ combined federal and private loan debt. Schools with high debt levels can opt out of providing data, and schools that do report may not know of all the private loans their students have.” The institute has gathered U.S. Department of Education data to reveal that in 2012 student debt for graduates at for-profit colleges was about $40,000. The report recommends, among other things, that states use financial need as the driving factor to award publicly funded grants for college students so they rely less on loans, notify students of their college loans to help them decide whether to take out more, and follow California’s lead by requiring colleges to tell students about untapped federal aid before approving private loan requests.
Image caption The study linked physical activity levels with academic performance in school children How well children perform in the classroom could be linked to how physically active they are, suggests a Dutch review of previous studies. Writing in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, researchers said they found strong evidence of a link between exercise and academic performance. The review looked at 14 studies involving more than 12,000 children. Exercise may help by increasing blood and oxygen flow to the brain, it said. But the authors of the study, from VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, said more accurate and reliable measurement instruments were needed to examine the link in greater detail. Dr Amika Singh and colleagues were prompted to look at the relationship between physical activity and academic performance because of concerns that pressure to improve children's school marks could mean they spend more time in the classroom and less time doing physical activity. So the authors identified 10 observational and four interventional studies for review. Twelve of the studies were conducted in the United States, one in Canada and one in South Africa. Sample sizes ranged from 53 to about 12,000 participants between the ages of six and 18 years. Children who learn to participate in sport also learn to obey rules. This may mean they are more disciplined and able to concentrate... Dr Amika Singh The period of follow-up varied between eight weeks and more than five years. Two of the studies reviewed were rated as being of high quality, the study says. Blood flow Researchers said they found strong evidence of a "significant positive relationship" between physical activity and academic performance using those two studies as evidence. The study said this could be because exercise helps cognition by increasing blood and oxygen flow to the brain. Physical activity could also reduce stress and improve mood, making children more likely to behave in the classroom. Dr Singh said: "Children who learn to participate in sport also learn to obey rules. This may mean they are more disciplined and able to concentrate better during lessons." The researchers said more studies examining the exact relationship between physical activity and academic performance were needed. "People always ask, 'How much exercise do I need to do to get an A?' We don't know that but we would like to find out," said Dr Singh. "Children should be active for at least one hour a day, for health reasons. But we also need to look at other things, like what kind of activities they should do, when they should do them and for how long." Reliable and valid measurement instruments were also required to assess the relationship accurately, the study added. No study in their systematic review used an objective measure of physical activity. Many of the studies required children or their parents to note down how much exercise they were doing.
It's accepted wisdom on Wall Street. That carving up bloated companies is a good thing while on the eve of Scotland's historic vote on independence. We've been thinking about whether the same economic argument could be made. For countries. Rob Cox you've learned of columnists were right that defined well I mean look I mean the arguments that the philosophical underpinnings for for many of these independence movements and developed world are. But our governments are no longer response that people like they're bloated they cost too much all those kinds of things. I mean Scotland is slightly different they are you know they've been lot of political -- lot of cultural you say with Catalonia Spain. But I thought but -- it if that's similar to sort of the arguments we hear an activist investors or shareholders that they say -- companies not responsive to. Customers that responses to shareholders not responsive to marketplace. Well and that's actually proving quite true I mean you've seen so many examples where. Companies that spun off divisions -- -- up. And the companies are better managed more accountability in the last five years yes sure -- -- like -- like get out of it and you know according talked with Davis millennium British citizen facility. Why can't take the same argument to cut two countries and that sort of that was sort of it was a thought experiment right. And you certainly can't because the arguments are very similar -- but of course the dynamics are very. You know you don't well Villa in might be revolutionary in that shareholding of Fortune Brands and it's hard to see how you can. It perform that function for for our country but. If you take -- it to it's logical these certain conclusion that you can actually make it's and there are people actually out there in the US are examples that are thinking this way -- and don't tell us a little I talk -- -- -- this thing called them Montpelier manifesto view from on the sections of Vermont you know -- signed a few years ago you know and these you know these folks are quite emboldened by what's happening obviously in Scotland and what may happen. Catalonia in November. -- and they see that the arguments in the United States for session. Are there are a different they're not cultural in the same way that they are running -- -- color -- are with saint -- it was an independent country until 77 -- Right so so but the the the economic underpinnings are that they arguments that make -- kind of persuasive. Particularly in some of the states Vermont maybe that's let. Some of the states that aren't you in net payers and to the federal system. And would actually be able to hopeful some of that back but there but look at me in the United States is still pretty united. People don't see you know but once people start to think about the lack of responsiveness the failure of congress to active. Do the things that you want as you see people -- and their faith institutions. And credibility in your government institutions are rented. He wouldn't surprise me to see. Particularly if you see an independent Catalonia and independent Scotland and -- we'll see what happens there but the -- I don't know maybe it's an idea that catches on. Will lobby looking at that story as well as others at breaking news in the mean time stay tuned for more breaking news. Tomorrow.
I’m not going to sugarcoat this at all. We are in for a full-blown assault on LGBTQ rights the likes of which many, particularly younger LGBTQ people, have not seen. Progress will most certainly be halted completely, likely rolled back. And it’s already underway. First, forget any of your thinking that Donald Trump is from New York City, probably has gay friends, sent Elton John a congratulatory note on his civil union in 2005, used the term “LGBTQ” (in pitting gays against Muslims at the Republican National Convention, when he vowed only to protect us from a “hateful foreign ideology”) or any other superficial things you may have read or heard. Ronald Reagan was from Hollywood, and he, too, had many gay friends, including legendary actor Rock Hudson. Reagan even came out against an anti-gay state initiative while he was governor of California. But once Reagan made his pact with the religious right leaders in his 1980 successful run for the presidency ― for him, among them was Jerry Falwell, Sr., for Trump it’s Jerry Falwell Jr.― he had to bow to them if he wanted to get re-elected in 1984. That meant letting thousands of gay men, transgender women, African-Americans and members of other affected groups die from AIDS (including his friend Hudson) without even saying the word “AIDS” until years into the plague, let alone take leadership on fighting the epidemic with government dollars and research. That was then, and this is now: Earlier in the year, before Mike Pence was chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, using Trump’s analogy of running a business to explain how he’d run the country, told HuffPost’s Howard Fineman that the vice president of the Trump administration would really be the “CEO” or “COO” ― or, the president of the company ― while Trump would be more like the “chairman of the board”: “He needs an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do. He seems himself more as the chairman of the board, than even the CEO, let alone the COO...There is a long list of who that person could be.” That person turned out to be Pence, and, before and after the election, there’s been some analysis and commentary suggesting that Mike Pence could be “the most powerful vice president ever.” And now, just days after the election, his power has increased tenfold as he is replacing Chris Christie as chairman of Trump’s transition team, filling all the major positions in the incoming Trump administration. Mike Pence is perhaps one of the most anti-LGBTQ evangelical Christian political crusaders to serve in Congress and as governor of a state. Long before he signed the draconian anti-LGBTQ “religious liberty” law in Indiana last year, he supported “conversion therapy” as a member of Congress, and later, as a columnist and radio host, he gave a speech in which he said that marriage equality would lead to “societal collapse,” and called homosexuality “a choice.” Stopping gays from marrying wasn’t biased, he said, but was rather about compelling “God’s idea.” Ben Carson, who compared homosexuality to pedophilia and incest, is a vice chairman of the transition team and so is Newt Gingrich, who has attacked what he called “gay fascism” and, in 2014, “the new fascism” around LGBTQ rights. And right on cue, already appointed to lead domestic policy on the transition team is Ken Blackwell, formerly the Ohio secretary of state. Blackwell has compared homosexuality to arson and kleptomania, which he called “compulsions.” In an interview with me at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in 2008, he explained: “Well, the fact is, you can choose to restrain that compulsion. And so I think in fact you don’t have to give in to the compulsion to be homosexual. I think that’s been proven in case after case after case...I believe homosexuality is a compulsion that can be contained, repressed or changed…[T]hat is what I’m saying in the clearest of terms.” Expect each of these individuals and more religous bigots to have prominent positions in the Trump administration. It may or may not be difficult or unrealistic to overturn marriage equality over time, though the anti-equality National Organization for Marriage, which backed Trump in the election, has sent Trump a plan. But by passing bills like FADA ― already introduced in the Republican-controlled Senate and House ― and others yet to come, gay marriage can be made into a kind of second-class marriage. Clerks like Kim Davis can be given exemptions from giving marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. Federal employees would be able to decline interactions with gay and lesbian married couples. Businesses such as bakers and florists, who’ve become flash points in some states where they refused to serve gays, could be granted the ability to turn away gays under federal law, and all that could head to a much more conservative Supreme Court if challenged. Trump has said he would overturn what he saw as President Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders, and those could include Obama’s orders on LGBTQ rights, such as banning employment discrimination among federal contractors. Mike Pence, as Dominic Holden at Buzzfeed points out, has already said that he and Trump plan to withdraw federal guidance to the states issued by the Obama administration protecting transgender students: “Donald Trump and I simply believe that all of these issues are best resolved at the state level,” he said in an October radio show with Focus on the Family’s James Dobson. “Washington has no business intruding on the operation of our local schools.” No one should take solace in the fact that gay billionaire Peter Thiel, who spoke at the GOP convention, is on the transition team. Thiel has never been a champion of LGBTQ rights, and is now most noted for bankrolling a lawsuit against Gawker -– shutting it down ― in an act of revenge because the site reported the widely-known fact that he is gay. If Trump treats the presidency the same way he treated the GOP convention in Cleveland, he’ll make gestures ― like giving Thiel a role in his administration or using the initialism “LGBTQ”― that will feed the media notion that he is somewhat pro-LGBTQ, while giving the nuts and bolts of halting or rolling back progress on LGBTQ rights to others. While Trump was onstage at the convention uttering “LGBTQ” (and had used Thiel’s speaking slot as a bit of window dressing too), the platform committee of the RNC had just hammered out the most anti-LGBTQ platform in history in the basement of the convention center. Tony Perkins, head of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, told me at the RNC that he was “very happy” with the platform, which, as a member of the committee, he made sure included the promotion of “conversion therapy.” Trump was hands-off on the platform when it came to queer issues (unlike on the issue of trade or, in what seemed like deference to Russia, on aid to Ukraine), letting people like Perkins push an extreme agenda, and knowing he needed to court them. He spoke at the FRC’s Values Voter Summit in September, promising to uphold “religious liberty,” and a large majority of white evangelicals did turn out to vote for him on Tuesday ― comparable to, or greater than, every other GOP presidential candidate in recent years. He will need them if he wants to get re-elected, and that means he’ll have to give them some big things now. And evangelical leaders told The New York Times this week they expect him to deliver: [W]ith Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, an evangelical with a record of legislating against abortion and same-sex marriage, as vice president, Christian leaders say they feel reassured they will have access to the White House and a seat at the table. “I am confident he will do as president what he said he would do as a candidate,” said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, who helped mobilize Christian voters for Mr. Trump. If Trump is thus as hands-off on LGBTQ issues as president as he was at the RNC, letting people like Pence ― again, possibly the most powerful vice president ever ― get his way, along with people like Carson, Blackwell, Gingrich and likely many others, you can bet that the assault on LGBTQ rights is already underway. It’s only a matter of time before we know the full magnitude. And that’s why we must pull ourselves out of grief, get fired up, and begin the fight right now. Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the location of the 2016 Republican National Convention. This has been fixed.
Under the Radar Blog Archives Select Date… January, 2019 December, 2018 November, 2018 October, 2018 September, 2018 August, 2018 July, 2018 June, 2018 May, 2018 April, 2018 March, 2018 February, 2018 Then President-elect Donald Trump and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach met to discuss homeland security issues during the transition on Nov. 20, 2016, in Bedminster Township, New Jersey. \| Getty Trump immigration adviser ordered to turn over briefing document A federal magistrate has ordered one of President Donald Trump's key campaign advisers on immigration to turn over a document he used to brief the president-elect during the transition. Magistrate Judge James O'Hara issued an order Wednesday requiring Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to give the court a copy of the memo he took into a meeting with Trump at the president’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club last November. The meeting was private, but a portion of the front page of the document—titled "Department of Homeland Security: Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 Days"—was captured by press photographers as Trump and Kobach posed for pictures. Images of the document showed that it included proposals for registration of citizens of high-risk countries, extreme vetting of foreign visitors, a ban on Syrian refugees, deporting aliens charged with crimes (apparently without regard to whether they've been convicted) and building a border wall with Mexico. At the time of the meeting, Kobach—a well-known immigration hawk—was being widely discussed for nomination or appointment to a top Trump administration post. No such assignment has materialized. O'Hara has not ruled that Kobach must turn the document over to those who requested it: the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging Kansas' proof of citizenship requirements for those registering to vote. For now, the magistrate is requiring that the memo be produced to the court for in camera review. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach holds a stack of briefing documents on Nov. 20, 2016, as he prepares to meet with then President-elect Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. \| AP Photo O'Hara noted that Kobach has claimed that "the photographed document is protected by the executive privilege." The magistrate termed the question of whether it is should be subject to discovery in the lawsuit "a very close call" and he said he'd address the privilege claim after looking at the memo to see if it has potential relevance to the suit. Kobach could object to the magistrate's ruling and appeal to the district court judge overseeing the suit. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the decision. Spokespeople for the White House and for Kobach did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Spokespeople for the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit on behalf of the League of Women Voters and several Kansas residents, also had no immediate response to queries about the ruling.
The morning after Roy Moore’s loss, Nathan Mathis was in the mood to celebrate, though quietly with the memory of his beloved lesbian daughter Patti at the forefront of his mind. Both of Mathis' children have died (he also had a son, Joey), and he speaks with a gravelly, straightforward openness about loving and losing both of them. “I’m very, very happy we didn’t get Roy Moore,” Mathis told The Daily Beast by phone of Doug Jones’ stunning victory over Moore in the Alabama Senate race. “I sure am. I’m very happy about that. It will be so much better for our country that Roy Moore is not up there. It will be so much better. We would have had a mess if we’d had Roy Moore in the United States Senate. You’d never know which wall he would have come off the next day.” Footage of Mathis, 74, speaking while holding a deeply personal protest sign outside an event Moore spoke at on Dec. 11, went viral. The sign read: “Judge Roy Moore called my daughter Patti Sue Mathis a pervert because she was gay. A 32-year-old Roy Moore dated teenage girls aged 14 to 17. So that makes him a pervert of the worse kind.” Moore’s virulent homophobia has been long-held and well-known. On the day of the election his spokesman told CNN that he “probably” believed that homosexuality should be illegal. Moore also concurred with an opinion, as Alabama Supreme Court’s Chief Justice in 2002, that “homosexual behavior” was “a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it.” (This was in a case where he sought to deny a lesbian custody of her children.) He denounced the SCOTUS ruling for same-sex marriage in 2015 as “an immoral, unconstitutional and tyrannical opinion” and encouraged officials in Alabama to ignore it. Moore also blamed the LGBT community for the multiple sexual-misconduct allegations against him. Mathis told The Daily Beast that Patti had committed suicide in 1995, at age 23, in the mobile home she lived in near the family home in Wicksburg, Alabama, where Nathan and his wife Sue still reside. Mathis found her body. She had shot herself. “Even though my daughter was dead, when Roy Moore took the stance he did against gay people calling them perverts and then abominations, and even went as far as saying it’s a crime to be gay... I don’t know, I just couldn’t sit there any more. I just had to say something,” said Mathis. “Even though my daughter is deceased I still don’t like nobody saying negative things about her because my daughter was a good person. My daughter: She was gay but she was no damn pervert.” “ There’s no way they were going to get a fair shake with Roy Moore, so thank god Roy Moore is not going to be going to Washington. ” What would Mathis say to Roy Moore today? Mathis paused, then said with some force: “Look Roy, if you want forgiveness for what you’ve done you better tell the truth to God. You better get down on your knees, you better pray to your God to say ‘Please forgive me. I know God, you know what I did. I can’t lie to you because you know what I did, and I’m sorry for what I did and I’m going to change and I’m not never going to let this happen again.’ “And he needs to quit lying about it, that's what he needs to do.” Mathis said he couldn’t stand by to see Moore’s homophobia receive the sanction of senatorial office. “I already feel bad about the way I acted towards Patti when I found it [her sexuality] out, but it just really made me hurt all over. Here we were fixing to send someone [like Moore] to Washington, D.C. “Gay people would not have had a chance on any bill with him up there as a United States senator. There’s no way they were going to get a fair shake with Roy Moore, so thank god Roy Moore is not going to be going to Washington.” Mathis was modest when asked about his sudden stardom. “It wasn’t about me. I had a lot of favorable and some that wasn’t so favorable about what I did. It was about Patti being gay and the other gay folks who are still citizens of the United States. Gay people have rights just as people who are not gay. The Constitution (in fact, it’s the Declaration of Independence) says all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Had Moore been elected, said Mathis, “he would have held his hand up and sworn to uphold the Constitution. It would have been a lie. He wouldn’t have done it. He wouldn't have upheld the Constitution, that gay folks have the same rights as everybody else. That’s why I did what I did.” Patti didn’t tell her father that she was gay, he said. A friend of hers came to their home to tell him. “When I confronted her with it she admitted it,” Mathis told The Daily Beast. “I said bad things to her, because I had been to church all my life, and sat there many times and heard preachers preach against gay folks from the pulpit. She even heard it. She went to church from when she was a small child right on up. “It’s just something I couldn’t believe. I sat there all those years and not known my daughter was gay and when I found out I said mean things to her. It’s because of the way I had been taught. I even went so far… I told Patti that I’d rather my child was dead rather than have a gay child. I regret I said that very much but I did say that.” “ I told Patti that I’d rather my child was dead rather than have a gay child. I regret I said that very much but I did say that. ” At the time Patti was finishing her senior year at high school. I asked Mathis how she responded to what he said to her. “It hurt her real bad,” he said. “When I came back home that day from work, she had moved out of the house and moved over to a friend of hers’ house. She stayed there about 3 months.” Then one day, her father said, Patti had come to him and said, “Daddy, I don’t want to be gay any more. Would you help me get some help?” Mathis said: “She was crying. I said, ‘I sure will,’ and this shows how naïve I was about it, I called up the UAB Hospital in Birmingham Alabama, and made an appointment, and took Patti up there.” The doctors, said Mathis, “did all kinds of tests on her that day,” and finally at about 3:30 in the afternoon a doctor called both father and daughter into his office and said, recalled Mathis, “Young lady, there is not a thing we can do you. You can’t help the way you are.” Mathis thought, “Man, this doctor must be crazy, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” but the pair saw other doctors and psychiatrists “and they all told Patti,” said her father, “’You can’t help the way you are. You’re who you are. There’s nothing we can do about it.’” “That just opened my eyes a little bit,” said Mathis. “Instead of her being in the wrong, I was the one in the wrong.” Mathis does not think Patti intended to kill herself. She had stopped at a local gas station and charged the bill to his account, he said. She had told the attendant she was heading to Panama City, but first she had to cut some grass. “When I found her, she had the clothes on that she would cut the grass in,” recalled Mathis. “She would wear earphones when she rode the lawn mower.” A neighbor told Mathis they had seen her talking to another young woman in the yard for a couple of hours. Mathis was contacted by Patti’s niece to say she had knocked on Patti’s mobile home door and heard music, but Patti had not responded. Mathis went to the mobile home, opened the door and found his daughter dead. At the time of her death she had been attending nursing school for a year. The mobile home had a little bar in the kitchen, Mathis said. “It appeared to me she had put a little pillow there on the end of the bar. I guess she thought she was going to shoot herself and lay her head down and go to sleep. Of course, when she shot herself her body recoiled and she ended up halfway across the room. She shot herself in the neck and the bullet clipped the main artery, and so once she pulled the trigger it was all over.” Her father called 911. “ Do I sit and watch Roy Moore keep lambasting gay folks, or do I try and do something about it? Somebody needed to do it, and so I did it. ” “I felt terrible. I still do feel terrible about it,” Mathis told The Daily Beast. “I felt like I had failed my daughter. But once that happened I couldn’t change anything. I had no more control over it any more. I just had to live with it. And so do I sit and watch Roy Moore keep lambasting gay folks, or do I try and do something about it? Somebody needed to do it, and so I did it.” Since Patti’s death, Mathis said he had built a 70-acre lake, situated between Wicksburg and Slocomb, dedicated to her. It is named Lake Patti Sue. People come to fish there, and enjoy themselves, he said. “It was a way for me to keep Patti’s memory alive. That’s what I was trying to do. It’s real beautiful. We’re still working on it, and trying to make it even better.” Mathis is certainly all too acquainted with tragedy. He said he isn’t good with ages or dates—“I try not to remember dates”—but that his son Joey had died 4 or 5 years after his daughter, aged around 37. Some time after Patti’s death, Mathis said, Joey had tried crystal meth, “which messed him up.” Then Joey took two Oxycontin tablets, “and it had paralyzed him. He needed to roll over and throw up his vomit, but couldn’t. So he drowned in his own vomit.” “He was a real nice, handsome young man, married with two children,” Mathis said, “and what made him try crystal meth I don’t know but once he did it was out of his control from then on. That drug had control over him.” Mathis said he was a peanut farmer, growing cotton, corn, and running cattle. He has been trying to retire, and his grandson has been farming the property for the last 3 years. He also has a farming supplies business, Mathis Farm Service, and his nephew owns the lease of a restaurant he owns, Nate’s Oyster Bar, in Slocomb. Sue runs Wicksburg’s senior citizens’ center. “She’s not real favorable of it,” Mathis told The Daily Beast of his fame-garnering activism. “She just grieves in her own way. Everybody grieves differently. I had to do what I did, and I hope she forgives me and not holds it against me. But if it was left for her she would never mention anything about Patti dying. She would just keep it to herself. That’s the way she would deal with it.” Mathis laughed. He recalled that Patti had been nicknamed “Peppermint Patti,” and that she still retained the scoring record at Wicksburg’s High School for girls’ basketball; he said that she had also got a scholarship at Enterprise State Junior College (now known as Enterprise State Community College) in softball. She was the captain of the team, and organized all the team’s events and parties. “Everybody liked her, the girls and boys,” said Mathis. Before Patti died, she knew her father supported her, Mathis said. “When she died she knew that I loved her,” Mathis said. “We had made our peace about it. I had told her I was sorry. I believe she had forgiven me for my actions. I really honestly believe that.” “ Don’t do like I did. You need to hug their neck and say, ‘Look you are who you are and I love you regardless.’ ” Mathis said he would continue with LGBT activism, if required. “I will do anything I can do to help. All people need to realize that what happened to my child… it could be your child next or your grandchild. Don’t do like I did. You need to hug their neck and say, ‘Look, you are who you are and I love you regardless.’ “And we need to realize that gay folks have rights just like people who are not gay, and we need to quit letting politicians lambast gay folks every time they have an election, trying to get votes. That’s all it is. Most of it is hypocritical by politicians, anyway.” “ I believe had Patti still been alive, she would have been out there holding up that sign herself. ” What would Patti have said to Mathis about his activism? “I believe Patti would have appreciated what I did,” her father said. After she died, he found among her possession a scrapbook containing articles about LGBT events and LGBT rights. “I believe had Patti still been alive, she would have been out there holding up that sign herself.” Mathis said, “I don’t know what fighting I can do but I’ll be a voice if someone wants me to tell my story. I’ll be glad to do that. Any way I can help people who are not being treated according to the Constitution, I’ll certainly try to do it.” What would Mathis say to Patti if he could? He paused again, and then his voice cracked. “That’s hard. ‘Patti, it’s good to see you, and I love you so much and I missed you so much, and I love you, and I want you to know it. I missed you like crazy.’ “I know she’d be proud of what I’ve done,” Mathis added quietly.
Brockton says it has right to divert water from Monponsett ponds to Silver Lake without panel's approval BROCKTON – Last December, a regional water commission demanded Brockton stop diverting polluted water into Silver Lake, the city’s main source of drinking water. Brockton listened. Fast forward to this spring, and a similar order has fallen on deaf ears. In recent days, the city has been diverting water from West and East Monponsett ponds into Silver Lake, despite regional officials’ insistence that the water poses environmental dangers and that the law is on their side. Members of the Central Plymouth County Water District Commission say the city began diverting water May 13 as an effort to get Silver Lake as close to capacity as possible before Brockton’s water diversion period ends June 1. They say the city did this despite an order by the commission not to send water to Silver Lake from the ponds, which are contaminated with cyanobacteria – also known as “blue green algae.” The algae produces toxins that can be harmful to humans and animals. “Unfortunately this ‘topping off’ comes with a public health and environmental health risk in the form of cyanobacteria that is moved from West Monponsett Pond to East Monponsett Pond and Silver Lake,” commissioner Paul Collis wrote in an email last week to state and local officials. “Diverting water in this season of rising temperatures is a recipe for algae growth,” Collis wrote. “Stakeholders like the towns of Halifax and Hanson, the Monponsett Watershed Association, and the Jones River Watershed Association have consistently asked Brockton not to divert water in these circumstances.” Brockton’s water systems manager, Brian Creedon, denies that bacteria levels are at a high enough level to pose a public safety danger. The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, which had an advisory out about the bacteria last year, does not currently have one issued. Creedon also said the city is within its rights to move the water because it comes within a time period – from October through May – that state law allows diversion into Silver Lake. “They don’t have the right to stop us, nor should they have,” Creedon said. “Since the re-formation, we’ve been working with the commission. But in this case, it’s not their decision.” In 1899, the state Legislature allowed the city to tap Silver Lake, a 640-acre lake in Pembroke, Kingston and Plympton. A 1964 law subsequently allowed Brockton to move water from West Monponsett Pond and East Monponsett Pond into Silver Lake to control water levels. That law also established the regional commission, and a related advisory board that appoints members to the commission. The commission had been dormant until last spring, when it began resuming its role as overseer of regional water issues. Collis, an attorney from Halifax, said in an interview that the 1964 law must be looked at as a whole. It gives Brockton the right to divert water – as long as it doesn’t overfill Silver Lake or reduce the ponds to untenable levels – but also says the district “shall be under the direction” of the commission. “You can’t look at it just in isolation that Brockton has a right to divert between these dates no matter what,” Collis said. “I think the legislation realizes there needs to be a check and balance.” Even without a DEP advisory, commissioner Jack O’Leary of Plympton said the cyanobacteria poses problems. “As time passes, the nutrient levels will build up in these lakes, which could trigger larger and larger cyanobacteria blooms in these lakes,” O’Leary wrote in a separate email. “These algal blooms can pose potential health problems not only to recreational users of these lakes, but to nearby residents and water systems...” Collis said it is unclear for now what the commission can do if its orders are disobeyed. He said the three-member commission – which includes recent appointee Patrick Quinn of Brockton – may seek an opinion on its authority from the state Attorney General’s office. Joseph Markman may be reached at jmarkman@enterprisenews.com.
A new isomer with a half-life of 23.0(8) ms has been identified at 2406 keV in Pd 126 and is proposed to have a spin and parity of 10 + with a maximally aligned configuration comprising two neutron holes in the 1 h 11 / 2 orbit. In addition to an internal-decay branch through a hindered electric octupole transition, β decay from the long-lived isomer was observed to populate excited states at high spins in Ag 126 . The smaller energy difference between the 10 + and 7 − isomers in Pd 126 than in the heavier N = 80 isotones can be interpreted as being ascribed to the monopole shift of the 1 h 11 / 2 neutron orbit. The effects of the monopole interaction on the evolution of single-neutron energies below Sn 132 are discussed in terms of the central and tensor forces. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.042502
Toronto FC takes its shot at the Major League Soccer championship on Saturday, and that rumbling roar you hear in the city is thousands of fans jumping on the bandwagon. If you're just getting started — even if you're one of those Torontonians who think MLS is only a real estate thing — here's a guide to the big game and how to sound smart while you're watching Toronto soccer history unfold. Above all, know this: Toronto FC is playing in its first championship game ever. The team may enter the game as favourites, but after years of misery and heartbreak, true fans won't be able to relax until the team is lifting the MLS Cup. Whatever you do, don't jinx this. Now that we have that covered, let's go over the basics, shall we? Toronto battles the Seattle Sounders FC at BMO Field on Saturday at 8 p.m. ET in a winner-take-all finale. Can I get tickets? Probably not, they sold out in three minutes. What do I call the team? Toronto FC. TFC. The Reds. Practise yelling this sentence: "Come on, you Reds!" to fit in. Oh, and FC stands for Football Club, obviously. If TFC fans thought the weather was bad in the thrilling eastern final, wait until Saturday. (Vaughn Ridley/Getty) There are several big storylines heading into the game, and the safest one for non-footie people is, of course, the weather. Environment Canada is predicting it could be between –1 and –5 C at game time, and there could be snow, too. "I'm hoping that it will warm up a little bit," TFC Head Coach Greg Vanney told reporters this week. Good thing scarves are part of nearly every fan's attire. Some fans actually think the sub-zero temperature could benefit TFC, which has eight players from the GTA, plus one from Edmonton. Who are TFC's best players? Sebastian Giovinco: Don't take your eyes off this Italian forward (striker), who scored 17 goals and had 15 assists this season. He's nicknamed the "Atomic Ant" because of his height, five foot three. Sebastian Giovinco, the Atomic Ant, is thrilling to watch on offence. (Frank Gunn/Canadian Press) Jozy Altidore: The American forward is all power and has been red-hot in the playoffs so far. Quote from the commentator after he scored against Montreal: "He can't stop scoring right now." Michael Bradley: The midfielder, also from the U.S., is the team's captain, a title he takes seriously. "Being captain or a big player on a team in this city carries extra weight and responsibility. And I've loved every second of that," he told reporters earlier in the playoff run. What Seattle players should we fear, or, you know, boo? Seattle captured the western title by beating Colorado in two straight games. (Harry How/Getty) TFC fans are worried about the offensive prowess of Nicolás Lodeiro, a Uruguayan midfielder. Meanwhile, Jordan Morris, a young American, has been dubbed "Stanford Messi" — a nod to his alma mater and Lionel Messi, one of the world's best players. Stefan Frei, Seattle's goalkeeper (just say "keeper," if you want to sound more like a footie fan), may avoid the fans' wrath because he spent five years with TFC. Speed round, for soccer newbies Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment expanded BMO Field in the offseason, a move that now looks prescient. (Vaughn Ridley/Getty) Both teams get 10 players — arranged however the coach likes — plus a keeper. There are three substitutions per game. How long is this game? It's 90 minutes, divided into two 45-minute halves. What's injury time? The refs clock every game stoppage and add that time (roughly) to the end of each half. Yellow card? Player gets a warning. Red card? Player gets ejected and not replaced. How far do these guys run? Most players cover an estimated 11-15 kilometres each game. Chant along with the faithful Toronto FC fans will start chanting early in the game and just won't stop. (Vaughn Ridley/Getty) Soccer fans around the world have their own special chants, and TFC is no exception. Most, like Marching In, go along with classic tunes. Luckily, the Red Patch Boys club, has some recordings. Dichio 24, however, is a specific honour for former TFC forward Danny Dichio who scored the club's first-ever goal in Toronto. So now you're ready. Whether you're one of the 30,000 fans crammed into BMO Field or you're watching the game at home, hold those scarves high and enjoy the final.
It took nearly two decades, but the guilt of murder finally became too much for Trevell Coleman. Wednesday night, after years of living with the burden, Coleman, 36, walked into the 25th Precinct and shockingly confessed to the very cold case, the sources said. The career criminal — once signed to superstar rap mogul Shawn “Diddy” Combs’ record label — was just 18 when he fatally shot a Queens man outside an East Harlem housing project in 1993, police sources said. “I shot and killed someone 17 years ago,” Coleman told a cop in the station house. As Coleman continued to reveal more details of the Oct. 19, 1993, murder of John Henkel outside the James Weldon Johnson Houses — things only the killer would know — the officer reached out to investigators at the 23rd Precinct, where the crime took place. “It was just eating away at him,” said a police source. Coleman, who grew up in the projects, told cops he was riding a bike when he rolled up on Henkel, 32, on Park Avenue and East 114th Street and announced a robbery. Coleman told Detective William Dunn that Henkel resisted and grabbed his .40-caliber gun. He allegedly admitted that he pulled away and shot his victim three times in the chest. Coleman said he fled and tossed the weapon into the East River. Henkel was rushed to St. Luke’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. When the detective reviewed the cold-case file, he was amazed to discover that Coleman’s tale matched up. Coleman, who has racked up more than 25 arrests since 2003 for drugs, burglary and grand larceny, was charged with murder, and is being held without bail. “My client is presumed innocent, and the case is going to grand jury,” said Coleman’s lawyer, Michael Alperstein. Coleman, who rapped under the name “G-Dep,” was signed in 1998 to a $350,000, five-album deal with Combs’ Bad Boy Records. His first album, “Child of the Ghetto,” was released in 2001. The song “Let’s Get It” featured Coleman trading rhymes with Combs and fellow Bad Boy artist Black Rob. Coleman no longer has ties to the label, a spokewoman said.
Sooooo . . .yush . . .it’s been a while A long while 😦 I’m very VERY sorry that I’ve been away so long, there’s been a lot of crap going on in my life that has kinda taken me away from the game. But, I’ll try to be more diligent and post more things up here so that people can get a sense for what’s going on with Derpy once again. Well, the shot version is, I moved to NY for a bit, decided that wasn’t going to work, so now I’m back in Georgia, LOL! Sweet Georgia! Much better here than NY, for a multitude of reasons. But I’m considerably happier now. So let’s just jump to the present. A group of buddies and I do these Monthly Mountain Runs that are really fun. We’ve closed the group now but we will start to open it up once the kinks and bugs are worked out of the system. I’ll post some pictures from that below. Derpy had some issues with oil and boost, all have been resolved and she’s running better than ever now. Lots of responsive power and tons of peppy tail-happy handling that we love so much about her. She’s a good girl and I plan on keeping her that way. Ummm, trying to think of anything else IMPORTANT! Umm, not really much going on. The mountain runs have been a blast, getting her fixed and going on a few shakedown runs has been awesome. But that’s really it! OH! I plan on driving her up to New Jersey for a show. So stay tuned for THAT! It’ll be amazing! AAANY WAY! Pics: The Monthly Mountain Run: Such a fun FUN car! I can’t wait to get back out there! Our next run is on the 27th of October! I hope to see some of you out there for one of these! -Dave Advertisements
If there's one industry that has consistently demonstrated its staying power over the years, it's the brewing business. After all, good, consistent beer always keeps consumers coming back for more. And brewing companies are more than happy to oblige. But it's also no mystery all beers are not created equal. And when it comes to the question of America's favorite beer, the answer might surprise you. According to the recently released 2017 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index from Brand Keys, a New York-based brand engagement and customer loyalty research consultancy, America's favorite beer is Coors. Here's what's at stake To be fair, "favorite" is a subjective term. So to better quantify what Coors' victory here means, note that the index looks at "brand engagement" -- something Brand Keys president Robert Passikoff describes as a "measure of how well a brand meets expectations consumers hold for the path-to-purchase drivers in a given category." And in fact, keeping in mind that the index examined 740 total brands across 83 categories, Coors was one of only 15 companies to show up for the first time in its respective category as a brand engagement champion. Passikoff elaborated, "These drivers and expectations can be measured against a category Ideal (100%), with brands best meeting consumers' expectations generating greater loyalty and profits. Brands that cannot meet expectations lose customers and market share." (Emphasis mine.) And you can bet that Coors brand owner Molson Coors Brewing Company (NYSE:TAP) will do everything in its power to sustain this momentum. Last month, Molson Coors pledged to continue investing heavily in its legacy brands by bolstering sales capabilities and further improving execution as a supplier, including a suite of cutting-edge sales technologies and tools rolled out across all of its markets. The timing of Coors' win is also impeccable considering Molson Coors only just closed on its $12 billion acquisition of SABMiller's 58% stake in MillerCoors last October -- a transaction SABMiller was required to facilitate to receive regulatory approval for its own megamerger with fellow industry giant Anheuser-Busch InBev (NYSE:BUD) last year. Molson Coors emerged as the world's third-largest global brewer by enterprise value in the process, and it can look forward to even greater economies of scale, cost synergies, and wider distribution opportunities for its brands as a result. Competition is still steep But you can also be sure other brewers will continue their own relentless quests to fill the bellies of thirsty consumers. For example, AB InBev confirmed last week that it now boasts an incredible 18 beer brands that each generate at least $1 billion in annual sales, and outlined its own path to generate more than $2 billion in post-merger synergies as it continues its integration with SABMiller. Incidentally, AB InBev also commanded six beers on Brand Keys' top-10 list, including Corona (No. 2), Michelob (No. 4), Budweiser (No. 5), Busch (No. 7), and Stella Artois and Miller (tied for No. 9). Meanwhile, Yeungling and Boston Beer's Samuel Adams tied for third place, Heineken's Dos Equis brand and its namesake lager took sixth and eighth, respectively, and Pabst rounded out the list at No. 10. If one thing is clear in the end, it's that this impressive slate of brewing industry leaders will only continue to jostle for higher sales and greater market share going forward. But for at least a little while, Coors can stand tall as America's favorite beer.
Yet more information is trickling out on the BushCo torture regime. Via Jeralyn, the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research (the watchdogs on the bogus released-prisoners-turned-terrorist numbers) have issued a new report [pdf] on the FBI and DoD role in torture at Guantanamo. From the press release: Newark, NJ - Today Seton Hall Law delivered a report establishing that military officials at the highest levels were aware of the abusive interrogation techniques employed at the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay (GTMO), and misled Congress during testimony. In addition, FBI personnel reported that the information obtained from inhumane interrogations was unreliable. Professor Mark Denbeaux, Director of the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research, commented on the findings: "Who knew about the torture at GTMO? Turns out they all did. It's not news that the interrogators were torturing and abusing detainees. We've got FBI reports attesting to this. But now we've discovered that the highest levels knew about the torture and abuse, and covered it up. "Abu Ghraib was the flashpoint and provoked the FBI to formally hand its reports to the DOD, which in turn forced the DOD to respond with what became known as the Schmidt Report. Schmidt's investigation was essentially a whitewash, but, ironically, the abuse was so pervasive that his team turned up still more incidents. To conceal the problems documented by both the FBI and the military, the DOD published an incomplete, sanitized report, culminating in Schmidt testifying before Congress that there was no torture or abuse at GTMO. "Five generals were either complicit in the abusive interrogation techniques or were central figures in their cover-up. They concealed these practices from Congress, to which they are ultimately accountable. They undermined our democracy, and undercut America's claim to the moral high ground in the fight against terror." The information Professor Denbeaux and his students have used to compile this, and twelve other Guantanmo reports, comes from government documents obtained through FOIA requests. And that doesn't include the remaining toture memos that the Justice Department seems reluctant to release. It seems that the truth, or at least parts of it, will out. These kinds of revelations will come out in dribs and drabs, from dedicated groups like the Seton Hall students and the ACLU, and from a variety of investigative journalists, perhaps even conscience stricken whistleblowers. It's inevitable that more and more damaging information will come to light. Which argues again for our Congress and Obama's Justice Department to be proactive rather than reactive in dealing with it. Set aside the fact that we are legally obligated under international treaties to investigate potential war crimes. Forget that an official accounting of crimes committed in all of our names is the moral, ethical thing to do. Looked at through a purely political prism, every report like this, every news story about a foreign country investigating American torture, makes it increasingly worse for us in the eyes of the remainder of the world for there to be no official American government investigations.
The Dallas Mavericks announced today that they have assigned Jae Crowder, Bernard James and Shane Larkin to the Texas Legends of the NBA Development League. Crowder (6-6, 235) is a second-year man out of Marquette and was originally the 34th overall pick in the 2012 NBA Draft. Crowder has played in 58 games this season with 8 starts. He is averaging 4.8 points and 2.4 rebounds. James (6-10, 240) was the 33rd overall selection in the 2012 NBA Draft. The former Florida State Seminole is averaging 1.1 points and 1.5 rebounds in 24 games this season. Larkin (5-11, 176) will be seeing his second stint in the D-League this time around. The 2013 first-round pick has seen action in 40 games for the Mavericks and is averaging 3.0 points, 1.6 assists and 1.0 rebounds in 11.1 minutes per game. Additionally, the Mavericks have recalled Ricky Ledo from the Legends. Ledo most recently joined the Legends on Jan. 31 and has seen action in 27 total games with averages of 12.5 points and 5.7 rebounds per contest. All three Mavericks will join the Legends and be available for tonight’s game when they take on the Los Angeles D-Fenders at 7:00 pm CT at the Dr. Pepper Arena in Frisco.
A BBC poll gauging sentiments in Britain’s Muslim community following the Charlie Hebdo massacre found that more than a quarter harbor some sympathy for the motives behind the Paris attacks that left 17 people dead. A similar number, 24 percent, suggested that violence against those who publish images of Muhammad can be justified, while 11 percent felt sympathetic towards people who want to fight against Western interests. A total of 1,000 Muslims in Britain were interviewed in the telephone poll over the course of February. The results were published Wednesday. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up Over 45 percent said that Muslim clerics who preach violence against the West are not out of touch with mainstream Muslim opinion, while one in five believe that liberal, Western society can never be compatible with Islam. Six percent of those polled said that they feel “disloyalty” toward Britain while the same number said that Muslims should not always obey British laws. The picture painted by the poll corroborates what analysts believe is an increasingly radicalized core of European Muslims adopting Islamist ideologies — amid a backdrop of local support for terror outfits such as the Islamic State, returning jihadis, and an escalation of Islamic-inspired anti-Semitism engulfing the continent. More than 46 percent feel that being a Muslim in Britain is difficult due to prejudice against Islam, and the same proportion said that Britain is becoming less tolerant of Muslims. Two high profile terror attacks — in Paris in January, and in Copenhagen this month — that were directed against Jewish and free-speech targets were perpetrated by local-born Muslims with suspected links to jihadist organizations. Along with the slayings at the Charlie Hebdo offices, the Paris terror spree saw four Jewish men killed by an Islamist gunman at a kosher supermarket. In Copenhagen, a Jewish security guard standing outside a synagogue was shot dead at point black range.
Cheryl Strayed: What’s really interesting to me about your situation, Scared, is that your desire for your partner returned once you realized how much he meant to you, not after he lost weight. You thought you weren’t attracted to him because he became a bit chubby, and then you found yourself attracted to him again. That tells me that there might be something else going on here — something more internal than how your boyfriend’s face looks after he’s put on a few pounds. Perhaps it isn’t his weight gain that’s causing you to question your relationship, but rather your own notions about what the ideal man should look like. There are so many messages we receive in this culture that tell us that people who are overweight are undesirable, so it’s no surprise you would internalize that and feel conflicted when you see your boyfriend’s body changing. Only you can answer the question of whether or not your reservations about this relationship are self-sabotage or a sign that it isn’t meant to last, but as you grapple with it, I encourage you to deeply examine the difference between the ideas about body weight you’ve received from the culture and your experience of loving — and sometimes desiring — your boyfriend. SA: We get so many letters from people who are struggling with negative feelings about their bodies, or those of their lovers. So much of it has to do with living in a society that sets up impossible standards of beauty, particularly for women but also for men. Think about how much of our consumer culture is predicated on the illusion that we can purchase our way to thinness, to eternal youth, to perfect abs and no wrinkles. Our doubts are what underwrite that industry, so companies do everything they can to stoke those doubts. And we wind up carrying them into our relationships. You worry that you “have issues,” Scared, but the point is, our entire culture has issues. CS: That’s not to say physical attraction doesn’t matter. It absolutely does — and you’re correct that it matters even more in a long-term relationship, Scared. But a good part of our desire for others starts with the self. The onus is on us to identify what we want in our intimate relationships. Is your boyfriend’s weight a deal killer for you? It might be. You have a right to your preferences. But you’re going down a dangerous path when you hitch your wagon to an erotic ideal. No one can maintain it over the long haul, even if we achieve it for a short while. Ask any 80-year-old who’s still sleeping with the person they married at 30. We all change in appearance as we age, whether it’s weight gain, wrinkles, gray hair or something more significant. Part of loving someone over time is loving those changes. Long-term relationships thrive when the people in them are open to repeatedly seeing their partners anew, physically and otherwise. SA: One thing you know, Scared, is that you tend to sabotage yourself. That can be a tough mandate when you feel such overriding and unprecedented emotional connection. So maybe finding fault with this guy’s weight is the best you can do to mess things up. But as Cheryl points out, the first time this happened you were able to step back and think deeply about what this man meant to you, and suddenly the cloud of doubt in your head — can I love a guy who’s likely to gain more weight? — evaporated. That’s no coincidence. You’re a deeper person than you realize.
Parry writes: "A shadow foreign policy apparatus built by Ronald Reagan for the Cold War survives to this day as a slush fund that keeps American neocons well fed and still destabilizes target nations, now including Ukraine." Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. (photo: unknown) A Shadow US Foreign Policy By Robert Parry, Consortium News he National Endowment for Democracy, a central part of Ronald Reagan's propaganda war against the Soviet Union three decades ago, has evolved into a $100 million U.S. government-financed slush fund that generally supports a neocon agenda often at cross-purposes with the Obama administration's foreign policy. NED is one reason why there is so much confusion about the administration's policies toward attempted ousters of democratically elected leaders in Ukraine and Venezuela. Some of the non-government organizations (or NGOs) supporting these rebellions trace back to NED and its U.S. government money, even as Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior officials insist the U.S. is not behind these insurrections. So, while President Barack Obama has sought to nurture a constructive relationship with Russia's President Vladimir Putin especially in hotspots like Iran and Syria, NED has invested in projects in Russia's close neighbor, Ukraine, that fueled violent protests ousting President Viktor Yanukovych, who won election in 2010 in balloting that was viewed by international observers as fair and reflecting the choice of most Ukrainian citizens. Thus, a U.S.-sponsored organization that claims to promote "democracy" has sided with forces that violently overthrew a democratically elected leader rather than wait for the next scheduled election in 2015 to vote him out of office. For NED and American neocons, Yanukovych's electoral legitimacy lasted only as long as he accepted European demands for new "trade agreements" and stern economic "reforms" required by the International Monetary Fund. When Yanukovych was negotiating those pacts, he won praise, but when he judged the price too high for Ukraine and opted for a more generous deal from Russia, he immediately became a target for "regime change." Last September, NED's longtime president, Carl Gershman, took to the op-ed page of the neocon-flagship Washington Post to urge the U.S. government to push European "free trade" agreements on Ukraine and other former Soviet states and thus counter Moscow's efforts to maintain close relations with those countries. The ultimate goal, according to Gershman, was isolating and possibly toppling Putin in Russia with Ukraine the key piece on this global chessboard. "Ukraine is the biggest prize," Gershman wrote. "The opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help. The United States needs to engage with the governments and with civil society in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova to ensure that the reform process underway not only promotes greater trade and development but also produces governments that are less corrupt and more accountable to their societies. An association agreement with the European Union should be seen not as an end in itself but as a starting point that makes possible deeper reforms and more genuine democracy. "Russian democracy also can benefit from this process. Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. … Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself." Shadow Structure In furtherance of these goals, NED funded a staggering 65 projects in Ukraine, according to its latest report. The funding for these NGOs range from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars and created for NED what amounted to a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn't act as desired. This NED shadow structure, when working in concert with domestic opposition forces, had the capability to challenge the decisions of Yanukovych's elected government, including the recent coup - spearheaded by violent neo-Nazis - that overthrew him. Presumably, NED wanted the "regime change" without the neo-Nazi element. But that armed force was necessary for the coup to oust Yanukovych and open the path for those IMF-demanded economic "reforms." Beyond the scores of direct NED projects in Ukraine, other major NED recipients, such as Freedom House, have thrown their own considerable weight behind the Ukraine rebellion. A recent Freedom House fundraising appeal read: "More support, including yours, is urgently needed to ensure that Ukrainian citizens struggling for their freedom are protected and supported." Freedom House meant the "citizens struggling" against their elected government. So, over this past week, a policy dispute about whether Ukraine should accept the European Union's trade demands or go with a more generous $15 billion loan from Moscow escalated into violent street clashes and finally a putsch spearheaded by neo-Nazi storm troopers who took control of government buildings in Kiev. With Yanukovych and his top aides forced to flee for their lives, the opposition-controlled parliament then passed a series of draconian laws often unanimously, while U.S. neocons cheered and virtually no one in the U.S. press corps noted the undemocratic nature of what had just happened. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Cheering a 'Democratic' Coup in Ukraine."] An Incipient Civil War On Wednesday, Yanukovych insisted that he was still the rightful president and his supporters seized government buildings in the eastern, ethnically Russian part of the country, setting the stage for what has the look of an incipient civil war. Meanwhile, the U.S. government appears nearly as divided as the Ukrainian people. While neocon holdovers in the State Department, particularly Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, helped instigate the crisis, President Obama has seen his collaboration with Putin to tamp down crises in Syria and Iran put at risk. That cooperation was already under attack from influential neocons at the Washington Post and other media outlets. Then, last December, Nuland, the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, reminded Ukrainian business leaders that, to help Ukraine achieve "its European aspirations, we have invested more than $5 billion." She said the U.S. goal was to take "Ukraine into the future that it deserves," meaning out of the Russian orbit and into a Western one. On Jan. 28, Nuland spoke by phone to U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt about how to manipulate Ukraine's tensions and who to elevate into the country's leadership. According to the conversation, which was intercepted and made public, Nuland ruled out one opposition figure, Vitali Klitschko, a popular former boxer, because he lacked experience. Nuland also favored the UN as mediator instead of the European Union, at which point in the conversation she exclaimed, "Fuck the E.U." to which Pyatt responded, "Oh, exactly …" [See Consortiumnews.com's "Neocons and the Ukraine Coup."] Yet, the larger question for Americans may be whether NED and its slush fund have helped create not only shadow political structures in countries around the world but whether one now exists in the United States. Though NED has always justified its budget by focusing on what it will do in other countries, it spends much of its money in Washington D.C., funding NGOs that pay salaries of political operatives who, in turn, write American op-eds often from a neocon, interventionist perspective. Indeed, it would be hard to comprehend why the American neocon power structure didn't capsize after the disastrous Iraq War without factoring in the financial ballast provided by NED and other neocon funding sources. That steady flow of NED funding, topping $100 million, gave the neocon movement the staying power that other foreign policy viewpoints lacked. Cold War Relic NED was founded in 1983 at the initiative of Cold War hardliners in the Reagan administration, including then-CIA Director William J. Casey. Essentially, NED took over what had been the domain of the CIA, i.e. funneling money to support foreign political movements that would take the U.S. side against the Soviet Union. Though the Reagan administration's defenders insist that this "democracy" project didn't "report" to Casey, documents that have been declassified from the Reagan years show Casey as a principal instigator of this operation, which also sought to harness funding from right-wing billionaires and foundations to augment these activities. In one note to then-White House counselor Edwin Meese, Casey endorsed plans "for the appointment of a small Working Group to refine the proposal and make recommendations to the President on the merit of creating an Institute, Council or National Endowment in support of free institutions throughout the world." Casey's note, written on CIA stationery, added, "Obviously we here should not get out front in the development of such an organization, nor do we wish to appear to be a sponsor or advocate. … We would be pleased to make suggestions on the composition of the Working Group and Commission." To organize this effort, Casey dispatched one of the CIA's top propaganda specialists, Walter Raymond Jr., to the National Security Council. Putting Raymond at the NSC insulated the CIA from accusations that it institutionally was using the new structure to subvert foreign governments - while also helping fund American opinion leaders who would influence U.S. policy debates, a violation of the CIA's charter. Instead, that responsibility was shifted to NED, which began doing precisely what Casey had envisioned. Many of the documents on this "public diplomacy" operation, which also encompassed "psychological operations," remain classified for national security reasons to this day, more than three decades later. But the scattered documents that have been released by archivists at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, reveal a whirlwind of activity, with Raymond in the middle of a global network. Who Is Walt Raymond? Reagan's White House was so nervous that the press corps might zero in on Raymond's CIA propaganda background that it prepared guidance in case anyone should ask, according to a document recently released by the Reagan library. If a reporter questioned White House claims that "there is no CIA involvement in the Public Diplomacy Program" - by asking, "isn't Walt Raymond, a CIA employee, involved heavily?" - the scripted answer was to acknowledge that Raymond had worked for the CIA but no longer. "It is true that in the formative stages of the effort, Walt Raymond contributed many useful ideas. It is ironic that he was one of those who was most insistent that there be no CIA involvement in this program in any way." As for the role of CIA officials, the guidance asserted, "they do not want to be involved in managing these programs and will not be. We have nothing to hide here." But if a reporter then "pressed about where [Raymond] last worked," the answer was "he retired from CIA. … If pressed about what his duties were: His duties there were classified." Indeed, sources say Raymond was the CIA's top expert on propaganda and psychological operations. As NED took shape, Gershman was in frequent contact with Raymond, who oversaw a network of inter-agency task forces that implemented a global propaganda and psy-op strategy. Documents also make clear that Raymond kept CIA Director Casey periodically informed about the project's developments. In effect, NED took over many CIA responsibilities but did them more openly. The U.S. government also took steps to insulate NED from the resistance of targeted countries. Governments that objected to NED's presence were deemed anti-democratic and thus subjected to other pressures. But governments that permitted NED to function often found themselves facing internal political pressures from NED-funded NGOs to shift those countries' policies to the right by eliminating social programs deemed "socialistic" and hewing to "reform" demands from international bankers, which usually meant ceding some sovereignty to the IMF or other global institutions. [For more details on Raymond's operation, see Robert Parry's Lost History.] A Hand Out Documents released by the Reagan library also reveal that one of the first organizations to put a hand out for U.S. government largesse was Freedom House, which describes itself as a human rights organization. For instance, on Aug. 9, 1982, Freedom House executive director Leonard R. Sussman complained to Raymond that money problems had caused Freedom House to consolidate two of its publications, stating: "We would, of course, want to expand the project once again when … and if the funds become available. Offshoots of that project appear in newspapers, magazines, books and on broadcast services here and abroad. It's a significant, unique channel of communication." Once NED was up and running in 1983 and beyond, Freedom House became a major recipient of grants as it frequently echoed U.S. propaganda themes, though the public had little knowledge about the behind-the-scenes relationships. But the network that Casey and Raymond built has outlived both of them and has outlived the Cold War, too. Nevertheless, NED and its funding recipients have pressed on, trying to implement the strategies of hardliners such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, who wanted not just the dismantling of the Soviet Union but the elimination of Russia as any kind of counterweight to U.S. hegemony. Indeed, the momentum that this three-decade-old "public diplomacy" campaign has achieved - both from NED and various neocons holding down key positions in Official Washington - now pits this shadow foreign policy establishment against the President of the United States. Barack Obama may see cooperation with Vladimir Putin as crucial to resolving crises in Iran and Syria, but elements of Obama's own administration and U.S.-financed outfits like NED are doing all they can to create crises for Putin on his own border.
By SentinelOne - Earlier this week, it was discovered that the group known as APT28* (and several other monikers including Fancy Bear and Sofacy) that is believed to be behind the U.S. election hacking has now turned to Japan. After investigating smaller name servers routinely used by APT28, researchers discovered this latest campaign in Japan – dubbed “Snake Wine” – has been running since August 2016. Snake Wine is highly adaptable and it is believed these attacks will continue to increase in skill and intensity. Knowing this, SentinelOne’s research team acted quickly and has determined that our Endpoint Protection Platform can catch this threat before any damage is done. Spear Phishing as Primary Attack Vector Spear phishing attempts have been the attack vector of choice for Snake Wine. When the victim opens the LNK file, it executes a PowerShell command via ‘cmd.exe /c’ to download and execute an additional payload. The LNK file will contain encoded Powershell Cmdlet: Once decoded the Powershell appears like: SentinelOne was able to reconstruct the attack as shown below and detect it with 1.8.4.3505, and most likely earlier versions as well. Shellcode-Based Backdoor During the investigation, JPCERT identified that the ChChes backdoor was written in a style so it could be run as shellcode. Because of this identifier, SentinelOne’s behavioral engine is able to recognize the attack through testing an agent from around July 2016, a late 1.6.2 version. If the attack were to be left undetected, it would be used to download files from compromised machines. Once inside, more damage could be done through running commands and using its position to pivot and move laterally in the network. SentinelOne Has You Protected As defense against this attack continues to rise, we anticipate the group will begin using new tactics. SentinelOne will continue to track the APT, but for now, those that are currently running our Endpoint Protection Platform are safe from the threat. If you are not currently using our product, schedule a demo today. *UPDATE: 3/6/2017 10:00 a.m. PT – There has been some discussion on Twitter and other social channels about attribution for this particular attack campaign with some researchers suggesting that this is the work of APT10. To clarify, the intent of this post is not to cite attribution but rather to inform that the SentinelOne Endpoint Protection Platform can successfully detect and block the attack regardless of its origination. We apologize if it was interpreted differently.
Flickr / Ian T. McFarland Eating out is so common we don't really think about the work that goes into creating a fine dining experience. Yet behind the scenes, menu engineers and consultants put careful thought into the way you choose what foods you eat. Here are 11 of the sneakiest psychological tricks restaurants use to make you spend more money: 1. They don't use dollar signs. A dollar sign is one of the top things restaurants should avoid including on a menu, because it immediately reminds the customers that they're spending money. According to research from the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, guests given a menu without dollar signs spent significantly more than those who received a menu with them. Even if the prices were written out with words instead of numbers, such as "ten dollars," guests spent less money because it still triggered the negative feelings associated with paying. 2. They are tricky with their numbers. Menu designers recognize that prices that end in 9, such as $9.99, tend to signify value, but not quality. In addition, prices that end in .95 instead of .99 are more effective, because they feel "friendlier" to customers. Most restaurants just leave the price without any cents at all, because it makes their menu cleaner, simpler, and to the point. 3. They use extremely descriptive language. Research from Cornell University revealed that items described in a more beautiful way are more appealing to and popular with customers. According to further research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, descriptive menu labels raised sales by 27%, compared to food items without descriptors. On an NBC "Today" show interview, menu engineer Greg Rapp poses an example of Maryland Style Crab Cakes. They are described as "made by hand, with sweet jumbo crab meat, a touch of mayonnaise, our secret blend of seasonings, and golden cracker crumbs for a rich, tender crab cake." This brings the ultimate sensory experience to the reader, and the descriptive labeling will make customers more likely to be satisfied at the end of the meal. Interestingly, brand names in menu descriptions also help sales, which is why chain restaurants such as T.G.I. Friday's use Jack Daniel's sauce or Minute Maid orange juice on their menus. The more adjectives, the better. 4. They connect food to family.Customers are especially drawn to names of relatives, such as parents and grandparents, on menus. For example, people are more likely to buy Grandma's warm, homemade cookies or Aunt Margo's famous potato salad. It also can add a hint of nostalgia. 5. They use ethnic food terms to make their food seem more authentic. According to Oxford experimental psychologist Charles Spence, an ethnic or geographic label, such as an Italian name, draws a person's attention toward a certain feature in a dish and brings out certain flavors and textures. 6. They visually highlight things. When foods are bolded, listed in a colored or fancier font, accompanied with photographs, or singled out in a box, they look far more special than the other dishes. However, high-end restaurants tend to avoid this strategy, because it can make them look tacky. 7. They use expensive items to draw you to the cheaper items. According to Rapp, restaurants use extremely expensive foods as decoys. "You probably won't buy it, but you'll find something a little cheaper and it'll look more reasonable," he says. According to William Poundstone, author of "Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)," in a New York Magazine interview, "The main role of that $115 platter — the only three-digit thing on the menu — is to make everything else near it look like a relative bargain." 8. They offer foods in two portion sizes. This strategy is called bracketing. The customer has no idea how much smaller the small portion is, so they assume it's the best value price because it costs less. What they don't realize is that the restaurant wanted to sell the smaller portion at the lower price all along, and simply used the bigger portion with the higher price as comparison. 9. They analyze your reading patterns. Restaurants consider scanpaths, which are a series of eye fixations that can be studied to see how people read certain things. According to a Korean research study, a third of participants are likely to order the first item to which their attention is drawn. As a result, restaurants will put the most profitable items in the upper-right corner, because it is where people's eyes go first. This strategy is based on the primacy effect, which means people remember the items at the beginning of a list better. Another reason this works is that seeing a really expensive dish at first glance will make the rest of the menu appear reasonably priced in comparison. Restaurants put the most focus on their main servings. According to a Cornell research study on eye movements on restaurant menus, most customers quickly scan the entire menu like a book, but focus the remainder of their attention on the entrees. 10. They limit your choices. Through features such as "try all" samplers, tapas, or fixed menus, restaurants remove the heavy responsibility people feel when choosing what to eat. It is much more effective for restaurants to limit their selection. Apparently, the optimum number of menu items is six items per category in fast-food restaurants, and seven to 10 items per category in fine dining establishments. 11. They set the mood to spend. According to psychology research from the University of Leicester, playing classical music in restaurants encourages diners to spend more, because it makes them feel more affluent. Meanwhile, less sophisticated pop music caused people to spend 10% less on their meals.
When I started organizing my recipes and writing this blog, I realized that I’ve been making this dish for so long that I’m on autopilot. I honestly throw everything together and no longer measure the ingredients. Luckily, I have shared this appetizer over the years with many friends and was able to get my exact recipe back. This is one of those dishes that you just cannot mess up! It always comes out delicious. Before serving, put the Baba Ganoush in the refrigerator for at least four hours to let the ingredients combine. Enjoy! Simple Baba Ganoush Dip Save Print Prep time 5 mins Cook time 40 mins Total time 45 mins Author: Momma Chef Serves: 6-8 Ingredients 1 large eggplant 2 tbsp. mayonnaise 2 tbsp. olive oil 2 cloves of chopped garlic 2 tbsp. lemon juice ½ tsp. salt Instructions Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and preheat to 425 degrees. Place eggplant on aluminum foil and prick in several places using a fork. Bake eggplant 20 minutes on each side until eggplant is very soft, baking a total of 40-45 minutes. While eggplant is cooking, mix other ingredients together in a large bowl. Remove eggplant from oven, split open down the middle and scrape out the flesh, Mix eggplant into the bowl with remaining ingredients, stir well. Let the baba ganoush cool in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours before serving. Tips: When serving, I like to sprinkle with some fresh chopped parsley or paprika. This baba ganoush will stay good in the refrigerator for up to one week after preparing. 3.5.3226 Like this recipe? Pin it!
Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. WHEN Barack Obama signed a sweeping set of health reforms into law on March 23rd 2010, he knew it was a historic moment—and not just because Joe Biden, the vice-president, whispered into his ear that it was a “big fucking deal”. He had successfully ridden the wave of popular support that brought him into office to deliver universal health coverage, a feat that eluded all his predecessors. But the reality of politics has obstructed that grand dream. Republican leaders in Congress are trying to repeal the law outright. Several federal judges have ruled that one of the central provisions of the new reforms, an “individual mandate” requiring everyone to purchase coverage, is unconstitutional. And a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a non-partisan outfit, revealed that hostility to the laws among politically vital independents has shot up sharply. One year on, how fares Mr Obama's proudest achievement? The chief strategy used by the administration to win over sceptics and to undermine legal challenges is to present the new laws as an unstoppable juggernaut. For example, when Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, spoke about the reform to the Senate Finance Committee on March 16th, she pointed to evidence of an “enormous difference it has made in the lives of Americans”. True, the administration has rushed into force provisions affecting consumers directly, in an effort to win popular support. For example, some forbid insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions, or imposing lifetime payout caps on anyone. The new laws also already require insurers to cover children up to 26 on their parents' policies, which will benefit some 1.2m young people. Nearly 48m people on Medicare, the government health scheme for the elderly, are to get free preventive services such as colonoscopies and mammograms. In 2010 nearly 4m of them got $250 tax-free rebates to help pay for drugs. All that seems impressive, but here's the rub: many Americans do not believe Mrs Sebelius. Roughly half of those polled by KFF thought Obamacare had already been repealed or were unsure of its legal footing. It remains the law of the land. The administration is also forging ahead with less visible aspects of the new laws. By 2014, when the bulk of the reform's provisions kick in, states are required to have put regulated insurance exchanges in place so that consumers can buy plans that meet minimum standards for coverage. All would be required to buy insurance, but the less well-off will get subsidies. The federal government is offering technical assistance as well as money to states to nudge them towards establishing such market-places. Alas, in this too Mr Obama has hit snags. Some Republican-led states, first among them Alaska and Florida, are refusing to take the money, while many others are demanding flexibility in implementing the rules. To the surprise of some, Mr Obama announced at a recent meeting of governors at the White House that he supports a plan—first proposed by Ron Wyden, a sparky Democratic senator—to grant “innovation waivers” starting in 2014. As long as states meet general goals on covering more people and curbing costs, they will be given flexibility in how they set up their local insurance markets. That compromise comes only at the point of a gun, however. And Republican attacks on Obamacare will increase as next year's presidential race gets under way. That points to a second question: can such attacks actually kill the reform? It seems unlikely. While Mr Obama is president, he would veto any such bill. So the legislative path to “repeal and replace”, as conservatives call it, hinges on winning back both the Senate and the White House. But that is far from a certainty, and the short-term strategy of defunding bits of the scheme looks more likely to score points than actually stop the law. The other great hope for enemies of reform is that the Supreme Court will declare that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, and that this will lead directly to the unravelling of the dread laws. This too may prove unsatisfying for conservatives. For one thing, the court may not immediately take up this matter, giving boosters of the laws the chance to dig in their heels. For another, the individual mandate can be replaced with other policies—a mix of carrots and sticks to get punters to buy insurance—that imitate it. So such a ruling would be a political nightmare, but need not be a death blow to reform itself. Given all this, what will be the likely long-term impact of Obamacare? Critics say that if the law stays in place, it will destroy employer-provided health coverage. Boosters insist that if it is given a chance to work, it will bring costs down, and not merely extend coverage. Both camps are probably wrong. Republicans have often claimed that employers will scrap corporate insurance, preferring to pay a fine and dump their workers on the subsidised exchanges. That sounds plausible, but two new studies—by the RAND Corporation and the Urban Institute, both non-partisan think-tanks—debunk the argument. In fact, the boffins at RAND calculate that the new reforms could even increase employer-sponsored coverage, as employees confronted with the new mandate clamour for (tax-assisted) coverage from their employers now that they are obliged to have it. As for costs, Mr Obama's reforms deserve praise for expanding coverage, but they do this by adding millions of people to an unsupportably expensive system. Analysts estimate that America's health spending will continue to soar under the reforms (see chart). That is a point hotly contested by Mr Obama's team, who usually point to theoretical future efficiency gains and innovations that will save pots of money. So it came as a shock when Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts and one of Mr Obama's closest friends, took a different tack. Asked recently about the pioneering health reforms in his state, which served as a model for the national reforms, he first gave a backhanded compliment to Mitt Romney (the state's former Republican governor, now distancing himself from those reforms as he repackages himself to run for president in 2012). Mr Patrick then revealed the dirty little secret of Obamacare: “What these folks did in Massachusetts is frankly the same thing that the Congress did, which is to take on access first, and come to cost-control next.” In other words, America will soon have no choice but to come to grips with costs. Whatever one thinks of Mr Obama's reforms, there is no denying that they have brought that day of reckoning closer.
In jails across Mississippi, some accused are held behind bars more than a year without ever being indicted. The U.S. Sentencing Commission is considering changes that would shorten average sentences for nonviolent drug offenders by roughly one year, a 17 percent sentence reduction for the average offender. File photo/Hattiesburg American The holding cells at Sumrall's historic municipal court house and jail is pictured on Friday. Renovations on the landmark have recently been completed, including a new roof which Hurricane Katrina ruined. (Photo: Bryant Hawkins/Hattiesburg Ameri, Bryant Hawkins/Hattiesburg Ameri) Octavious Burks has been in the Scott County Jail since Nov. 18, 2013. Joshua Bassett has been there since Jan. 16, 2014. A grand jury has yet to indict either man. They are far from alone. In jails across the state, some are held behind bars more than a year without ever being indicted. "This is another poor man's curse in Mississippi," said J. Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law. "It sounds like something that happens in a Third World country." On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi and the MacArthur Justice Center filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of these men against Scott County officials, saying the men have been "indefinitely denied counsel." These are far from isolated incidents, said State Defender Leslie Lee. "Nobody is advocating for these people. Nobody is investigating these cases." Mississippi is the only state in the Southeast without a statewide public defender system and one of only seven states in the U.S. without such a system. "There are so many crucial things a lawyer needs to be doing, way before indictment," Lee said. But under Mississippi law, a lawyer isn't appointed for an indigent defendant until that person has been arraigned on a grand jury indictment. Under the current system, "our office has no jurisdiction over county public defenders, other than educating them," Lee said. "We have really upped our training, but our problem is it's not mandatory." With a public defender's system, she said a public defender in each county could monitor the list of those being held in jail and make sure no one falls between the cracks. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans rebuilt its public defender system, making it possible for a lawyer to represent a defendant after arrest, she said. Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon said most people in Scott County are able to make bond. "I try to set it low enough where they can make bail, but there are a number of them who can't make bail," he said. Those in jail are presumed innocent until proven otherwise, he said. Lee agreed. People sitting in jail have no way to investigate what they are accused of but have yet to be indicted on, she said. "You don't have anybody. You don't have an advocate." This isn't the first time Burks has been held in jail for a lengthy period without being indicted. He was held for nearly 16 months on suspicion of aggravated assault and disturbing the peace. He was finally indicted in late 2010, nearly a year after his arrest, but his charges were dismissed months later. He stayed behind bars for nearly a year after being arrested in 2012 on a charge of possession of a firearm by a felon. He has never been indicted. This time he has spent 10 months in jail, now charged with attempted armed robbery, possession of a weapon by a felon, disorderly conduct, and possession of paraphernalia. Again, there has been no indictment. This means that Burks has spent nearly three years in jail since 2009 on three separate charges. He has never been tried or convicted on any of them. Burks' bond has been set at $30,000, and the bond of Bassett, charged with grand larceny and possession of methamphetamine, is $100,000. Neither man could afford bond, much less an attorney. Neither had a lawyer representing them during their initial appearance. The lawsuit points out that because the state of Mississippi doesn't impose a limit on how long a district attorney has to present a case to the grand jury or how long a defendant may be held in jail without indictment, a defendant can be held in jail indefinitely. Because an initial appearance is a critical stage of criminal prosecution in Mississippi, defendants should be entitled to legal counsel under the U.S. Constitution, the lawsuit says. Lee said it's troublesome that while courts recognize the right to counsel, it's not being provided to some people. "They go to jail," she said. "They lose their jobs." At the end of nine months or a year when the defendant is finally indicted, "he says to his lawyer, 'I just want to get out,'" she said. "There is tremendous coercion to plead guilty to just get out of jail. You can't blame them." Contact Jerry Mitchell at jmitchell@jackson.gannett.com or (601) 961-7064. Follow @jmitchellnews on Twitter. Read or Share this story: http://on.thec-l.com/1snYeJX
When Naomi Parker-Fraley first saw the iconic Rosie the Riveter poster, she recalls, “I did think it looked like me, but nobody ever mentioned it.” Knowing that she was one of more than 6 million women who entered the workforce during World War II, she figured she was far from alone in seeing herself in the image that has become a symbol of modern feminism. Then, in 2009, Parker-Fraley, now 95, and her sister Ada Wyn Parker-Loy, now 92, were at a reunion at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park when they noticed a photograph of Parker-Fraley proudly displayed as the likely inspiration behind the poster – then they read the caption. “I couldn’t believe it because it was me in the photo, but there was somebody else’s name in the caption: Geraldine,” Parker-Fraley tells PEOPLE. “I was amazed.” The photo, showing 20-year-old Parker-Fraley sporting her signature red-and-white-polka-dot bandana and working on a turret lathe, was taken in 1942 by a photographer touring the Naval Air Station in Alameda, California, and featured in newspapers and magazines nationwide. “It ran in newspapers from San Francisco to Washington,” Parker-Fraley says. “I even got fan mail!” Naomi Parker-Fraley in 1942 Corbis/Getty It was also believed to have caught the eye of artist J. Howard Miller, whose 1943 Rosie the Riveter poster bears a striking resemblance to Parker-Fraley’s photo, right down to the bandana. Parker-Fraley spent decades unaware of her connection to the poster, mostly because another woman named Geraldine Hoff Doyle, who worked in a factory in Michigan, had been labeled “the real-life Rosie the Riveter” since she believed she saw herself in an un-captioned reprint of Parker-Fraley’s photo in the 1980s. Because Hoff Doyle bore a striking resemblance to Parker-Fraley, no one questioned her claim, and her story traveled around the world. Once Parker-Fraley learned her photo had been misidentified for almost 30 years, she tried to set the record straight by sending a newspaper clipping of her photo and its original caption to the park service. But it was too late. Hoff Doyle’s place had already been cemented in history. Parker-Fraley was devastated. “I just wanted my own identity,” she says. “I didn’t want fame or fortune, but I did want my own identity.” Her cause remained hopeless until 2015, when she met James J. Kimble, a professor of communications at Seton Hall University in New Jersey whose six-year quest to identify the woman in the photo had led him to straight to her door. “She had been robbed of her part of history,” Kimble says. “It’s so hurtful to be misidentified like that. It’s like the train has left the station and you’re standing there and there’s nothing you can do because you’re 95 and no one listens to your story.” Get push notifications with news, features and more. Kimble was eager to hear Parker-Fraley’s story when he visited the Redding, California, home she shares with her sister in February 2015. Even better, he promised to do everything in his power to set the record straight. The professor shared Parker-Fraley’s story with the academic world in a 2016 article in the journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs and others soon took note. Now, Parker-Fraley, who was divorced once, widowed twice and spent most of her life working as a waitress, is ready for the spotlight. “The women of this country these days need some icons,” she says. “If they think I’m one, I’m happy about that.”
NUMBERS 11:16-30 « Numbers 10 \| Numbers 11 \| Numbers 12 » Elders Appointed to Aid Moses 16 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Gather for me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them, and bring them to the tent of meeting, and let them take their stand there with you. 17 And I will come down and talk with you there. And I will take some of the Spirit that is on you and put it on them, and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, so that you may not bear it yourself alone. 18 And say to the people, ‘Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, and you shall eat meat, for you have wept in the hearing of the Lord , saying, Who will give us meat to eat? For it was better for us in Egypt. Therefore the Lord will give you meat, and you shall eat. 19 You shall not eat just one day, or two days, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, 20 but a whole month, until it comes out at your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you, because you have rejected the Lord who is among you and have wept before him, saying, Why did we come out of Egypt? ’” 21 But Moses said, “The people among whom I am number six hundred thousand on foot, and you have said, ‘I will give them meat, that they may eat a whole month!’ 22 Shall flocks and herds be slaughtered for them, and be enough for them? Or shall all the fish of the sea be gathered together for them, and be enough for them?” 23 And the Lord said to Moses, “Is the Lord ’s hand shortened? Now you shall see whether my word will come true for you or not.” 24 So Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord . And he gathered seventy men of the elders of the people and placed them around the tent. 25 Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the Spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders. And as soon as the Spirit rested on them, they prophesied. But they did not continue doing it. 26 Now two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad, and the Spirit rested on them. They were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in the camp. 27 And a young man ran and told Moses, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.” 28 And Joshua the son of Nun, the assistant of Moses from his youth, said, “My lord Moses, stop them.” 29 But Moses said to him, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord ’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” 30 And Moses and the elders of Israel returned to the camp. « Numbers 10 \| Numbers 11 \| Numbers 12 »
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Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? The House Republican tax bill unveiled today is like a just-completed airplane rolling out of its hangar. Soon lobbyists and lawyers will pick over its provisions and try to salvage parts seen as critical to its clients. For now, all we have is the current blueprint, which will likely grow more forgiving to powerful interests. And it’s already extremely generous on that front. Ad Policy Here are some of the main features of the bill, known as the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” which really isn’t that much better than the “Cut Cut Cut Act,” Donald Trump’s favored title. It reduces the number of income brackets from seven to four, keeping the top marginal tax rate at 39.6 percent but increasing the threshold for that to $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for couples. It cuts the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent and, while some business deductions are eliminated to make up for that, others are expanded. It does away with the estate tax, doubling the threshold to start and then phasing it out over six years. And it repeals the Alternative Minimum Tax, which affects high-income households. These are raw giveaways to the richest people in America, who see more favorable rates on much of their income, no restrictions on passing their money to heirs, and significant drops in the rates for the corporations they own and invest in. On the flip side, there’s almost nothing here for anyone in the lower tiers of income. Sure, the doubling of the standard deduction will shield up to $24,000 for a couple from taxation; but rates actually go up on the first $18,000 of income. Those who already don’t pay anything in federal tax still won’t, but there are no new refundable tax credits to increase their benefits. A $300-per-person family credit phases out after five years. The Child Tax Credit is enhanced, but new indexing for tax brackets that will make taxes marginally more expensive over time will offset that. Overall, the help the middle class will see in this bill pales in comparison to the gifts for the rich. There are also two important pieces of the bill that could open up huge loopholes for the wealthy and corporations to shelter even more of their money. The bill reduces the tax rate for “pass-through” income, earned from businesses like partnerships, to 25 percent. This creates incentives for the rich to set up corporations and take advantage of that far lower rate. The bill also converts to a territorial tax system, which doesn’t tax corporations on income earned overseas. Presently the United States does tax foreign income, but only when it’s brought back to the United States, which many corporations fail to do. The incentives here run in the direction of claiming as much income as possible was earned overseas—for example, through patents or other intellectual property registered in a low-tax foreign country. Tech firms and pharmaceutical companies practice this consistently, and others will surely follow their lead if the law changes. So the baseline of this bill is a slew of money going to the wealthy and corporate treasuries. But Republicans have a problem. Because they don’t want any Democratic input to this bill at all, they must use the budget-reconciliation process, which prevents any deficits from the bill outside the first 10 years of its effect. In addition, the budget resolution limits deficits in those first 10 years to $1.5 trillion. So, somehow, Republicans had to pay for these tax cuts, because what I just described would result in over $5 trillion in deficits in that budget window. The associated problem here is that Republicans are fond of promising tax cuts for everyone, without anyone ever having to feel the pain. But when you actually put words to paper, that pain becomes apparent. For instance, Republicans scaled back the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, which particularly affects the upper middle class in high-tax states like California, New York, and New Jersey (and some red states too). It happens that Republicans represent many of those districts; in particular, this bill is a killer for the seven House Republicans fighting to keep their jobs in California. While property taxes can still be deducted up to $10,000, state income or local sales taxes cannot. Because of Proposition 13, California’s property taxes are rather mild compared to state income tax. So Californians lose the biggest tax deduction of the bunch, while keeping a less lucrative one. Current Issue View our current issue The bill also caps the mortgage-interest deduction at $500,000 instead of the current cap of $1 million. This theoretically hurts upper-middle-class folks in high-priced real-estate areas; in other words, the same Republican-led districts as the SALT repeal. If it reduces home prices, the effect is salutary, but I’m not sure it will. One work-around is to have people seeking mortgages for between $500,000 and $1 million in property get two loans, one for $500,000 and one for the rest, and take the interest deduction on each. I saw this kind of split mortgage repeatedly during the housing bubble, usually to get around down-payment requirements. This enriches real-estate brokers (and nickel-and-dimes those GOP districts) but does nothing much for the US Treasury. Where the money scramble really hits home is in things like the elimination of the deductions for student-loan interest, or moving expenses, or medical expenses. Elderly people in nursing homes and struggling students lose benefits so the rich can get a tax cut. This could be really consequential for people with 24-hour care or in nursing homes, who spend the majority of their income on medical expenses. Other nips and tucks actually sound good in isolation. Businesses lose some deductions for interest payments. (Real-estate companies—like the one of a certain 45th president of the United States—are exempt from that restriction). There’s a 10 percent tax on high-profit foreign subsidiaries, a stab at preventing the shifting of business income abroad. Businesses would no longer be able to deduct “performance-based” executive compensation over $1 million, a loophole which has led to runaway stock options and short-term CEO thinking. Big banks lose a tax perk on FDIC payments. The tax-exempt status of bonds that build sports arenas would be repealed. Large university endowments would pay an assessment on investment income. These sound great, until you realize that the savings will just be shoveled to the tax cut for the rich and corporations. We’ll have to wait for detailed assessments, but if the end result is that one way the wealthy benefit is just replaced by another, I wouldn’t exactly call that progress. Another loophole, designed to bring aboard religious conservatives, would repeal the Johnson Amendment, which prevents churches from engaging in political activity. But because this also affects all “C3” organizations, it could provide another dark-money funnel, giving donors not only a secret channel to donate but a tax-deduction present. Will this pass? Republicans are obviously unified in wanting to help out wealthy contributors. Where it might fall down is on a maddeningly complicated issue: pass-through income. Sensitive to the charge that accountants will game the rules to make anyone with high earnings a pass-through corporation, reducing their marginal rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent, the bill put in “guardrails” that raise the final amount of tax paid. Expect a huge fight over that, as partnership corporations argue they’re losing out. With all the talk of jobs and perks for the middle class, the fate of the tax bill might come down to whether Republicans made a loophole too tight.
Thursday's evening rush hour on Rockville Pike in Bethesda did not look much better than Wedneday as work continued to fix a water main break. News4 Transportation Reporter Adam Tuss monitored the repair progress Thursday and reports on why warning systems set up by WSSC did not work in this case. (Published Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2015) Traffic Mess on Rockville Pike for Second Day After Water Main Break All lanes of Rockville Pike in Bethesda, Maryland, are expected to be open for the Thursday morning commute following a major water main break Tuesday afternoon. Crews had completed repairs to a broken 16-inch water main beneath Rockville Pike at Cedar Lane by about noon Wednesday. At least one northbound lane and one southbound lane were kept open between Cedar Lane and Pooks Hill Road through the Wednesday evening rush hour as paving crews repaired the road, according to the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC). There are four lanes in each direction. Drivers were advised to avoid the area Wednesday. "...[W]e need people to plan for an alternate route," WSSC spokeswoman Ayoke Blandford said Tuesday night. The break in the 74-year-old pipe closed multiple lanes of the thoroughfare for hours Tuesday, slowing traffic to a crawl and filling streets with a rush of muddy water. Crews shut down the water flow by 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, WSSC said. Water service was restored Wednesday to about 250 affected WSSC customers. However, the WSSC said customers may have discolored water, which is common after water main break. Those affected should run their cold water taps for five minutes to allow the discolored water to flush out. Walter Reed National Military Medical Center advised patients, staff and visitors to allow extra time for their Wednesday morning commutes. Hospital operations are normal, a representative said. Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic college prep school for girls, opened two hours late Wednesday, with school starting at 9:50 a.m. for the lower school and 10 a.m. for the middle and upper schools, the school said online. The PSAT scheduled for Wednesday morning was postponed. The J2, J3 and J9 Metrobuses were detouring around the area, and some stops were not served. See Metro's website for more information.
'Dead' man surprises family by walking into his own funeral - while identical looking murder victim lies in casket Gilberto Araujo had not been seen by his family for four months when police called to say he had been killed on Sunday Brother, Jose Marcos Araujo, mistakenly identified similar looking Genivaldo Santos Gama and took body home for wake on Tuesday The 41-year-old car washer from Alagoinhas, Brazil was told the family believed him dead by a friend in the street A family gathering to mourn the death of a relative were shocked to tears and fainting when the deceased man in question pitched up at his own funeral on Tuesday. In a bizarre case of mistaken identity, news of car washer Gilberto Araujo's murder had been relayed to the family by local police in Sao Paulo, Brazil on Sunday. Shortly after, when the wayward vagabond's brother was called into the morgue to make a positive identification on the body, he saw his brother lying on the table and took the corpse home so his family could hold a wake. Scroll down for video Family and friends of Gilberto Araujo (right) had spent the night grieving beside his open coffin. But the body they were weeping over was that of a workmate (left) who relatives say looked uncannily like 41-year-old Gilberto Jose Marcos Araujo was so fooled by the likeness of fellow car washer Genivaldo Santos Gama to his brother Gilberto, that he mistakenly confirmed the body to be his sibling's. Police inspector Roberto Lima said that Jose Marcos took the body to his mother's Alagoinhas home where a wake was held on Tuesday 'The confusion started when news started circulating that a car washer had been shot dead,' Jose Marcos' wife, Ana Paula, told the UOL Internet news portal. 'Police called my husband and told him that his brother had been killed and his body was at the morgue,' she explained. Mother's love: Gilberto Araujo's mother, Marina Santana, was shocked and overjoyed to see her son after a friend told the man that his family thought he was dead and he should go and let them know he was okay Lima said the confusion was 'understandable.' 'The two men closely resembled each other and both worked as car washers,' Lima said adding that no further information on Gama was immediately available. According to Gawker, the family had not seen or heard from Mr Araujo in the four months before the vexing case of mistaken identity. A few hours before the Monday burial 'a friend of Gilberto's saw him walking down the street and told him that his family was mourning him,' he said. Relief: Family gather outside Mr Araujo's mother's home in Alagoinas, Brazil, after many fainted and ran away at the sight of the car washer walking into his own funeral on Tuesday 'So he went to his mother's home to let everyone know he was very much alive.' When Araujo showed up at his wake 'some people fainted and others were so scared they ran away. It was a big shock,' family friend Maria Menezes told the G1 online news site. Gilberto's mother Marina Santana told reporters: 'I am overjoyed. What mother wouldn't be after being told that her son is dead and then sees him alive.' Watch video here
This video is no longer available This video was hosted on Vidme, which is no longer in operation. However, you might find this video at one of these links: Video title: Is VidMe a cult? Upload date: July 7 2017 Uploaded by: crua9 Video description: #FreeKentantino In this video we cover why you shouldn't allow you company to have a cult mentality, and we use a real world example on why it can kill your company. Note: it's best to fire or at least demote a person like shown in this video. This tends to happen when employees don't get away from the company for long periods of time. links The channel that was messed over: https://vid.me/Kentantino The video where the guy talks about him being messed over: https://vid.me/N9aO The video why video messed him over: https://vid.me/B9Da What is a cult from Dr Arthur Deikman's book on cult behaviour, The Wrong Way Home: https://youtu.be/htqOIjzi-jE Twitter feed that I shown: https://twitter.com/CrazyR0cky/status/882808069012430848 Duffy from Vidme twitter: https://twitter.com/vidmeduffy Vidme's ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blhk8P0749w Vidme's verification befits: https://vid.me/verified Me talking about Vidme banning me from their Reddit page: https://vid.me/6SR4 _-_-_-Please feel free to ask questions, and sub_-_-_ Email↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ CraigBennettII@techreviewsandhelp.com Links that help us if you check them out ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigbennettii Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TechReviewsAndHelp/ Git: https://github.com/crua9/ Our website: http://techreviewsandhelp.com Our channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TechRHelp Donate: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=Y6HZMBNDG5ZJ4 Patreon/donate: https://www.patreon.com/TechReviewsAndHelp https://twitter.com/TechRHelp Total views: 179
Oh No! When U.S. And Canada Face Off, 'Loser Keeps Bieber' Sure, a chance to play in Sunday's gold medal game is at stake when the men's hockey teams from the U.S. and Canada face off Friday in Sochi. Game time: noon ET. NBC Sports Network is broadcasting it in the U.S. But while Olympics glory is up for grabs, a shipping company in Skokie, Ill., has pushed the stakes even higher: "Loser Keeps Bieber" reads the electronic billboard hanging on the headquarters of Command Transportation. That would be Justin Bieber, of course, the nearly 20-year-old Canadian pop star who's become something of a bad boy in recent months with an arrest for allegedly driving while drunk and a charge of assaulting a limousine driver. Judging from Command Transportation's Twitter page, the company likes to use its billboard to poke fun at politicians, celebrities, athletes and sports teams that Chicago fans love to hate. Its newest message, though, has really hit home with many: #LoserKeepsBieber has been trending on Twitter. Now, as for the big game at noon: -- ESPN.com says Team USA is a slight favorite because the Americans "are playing the best hockey of any of the four remaining teams, and have done so against the best competition." Sweden and Finland are facing off in the other semi-final game. -- The CBC seems to agree. It has posted a column by Hockey News senior writer Mike Brophy, who says that "if Team Canada is to repeat as gold medalists in men's hockey, it will have to get past the best team in the tournament thus far from the United States." Will Team USA triumph? Will Beliebers see their hero sent back home to the Great White North? We'll keep an eye on the news from Sochi.
A friend recently asked me whether Example 1 below is legal, and if so what it means. It led to a nice discussion I thought I’d post here. Since it was in close to GotW style already, I thought I’d do another honorary one after all these years… no, I have not made a New Year’s Resolution to resume writing regular GotWs. :-) JG Questions Q1: Is the following code legal C++? // Example 1 string f() { return "abc"; } void g() { const string& s = f(); cout << s << endl; // can we still use the "temporary" object? } A1: Yes. This is a C++ feature… the code is valid and does exactly what it appears to do. Normally, a temporary object lasts only until the end of the full expression in which it appears. However, C++ deliberately specifies that binding a temporary object to a reference to const on the stack lengthens the lifetime of the temporary to the lifetime of the reference itself, and thus avoids what would otherwise be a common dangling-reference error. In the example above, the temporary returned by f() lives until the closing curly brace. (Note this only applies to stack-based references. It doesn’t work for references that are members of objects.) Does this work in practice? Yes, it works on all compilers I tried (except Digital Mars 8.50, so I sent a bug report to Walter to rattle his cage :-) and he quickly fixed it for the Digital Mars 8.51.0 beta). Q2: What if we take out the const… is Example 2 still legal C++? // Example 2 string f() { return "abc"; } void g() { string& s = f(); // still legal? cout << s << endl; } A2: No. The "const" is important. The first line is an error and the code won’t compile portably with this reference to non-const, because f() returns a temporary object (i.e., rvalue) and only lvalues can be bound to references to non-const. Note: Visual C++ does allow Example 2 but emits a "nonstandard extension used" warning by default. A conforming C++ compiler can always allow otherwise-illegal C++ code to compile and give it some meaning — hey, it could choose to allow inline COBOL if some kooky compiler writer was willing to implement that extension, maybe after a few too many Tequilas. For some kinds of extensions the C++ standard requires that the compiler at least emit some diagnostic to say that the code isn’t valid ISO C++, as this compiler does. I once heard Andrei Alexandrescu give a talk on ScopeGuard (invented by Petru Marginean) where he used this C++ feature and called it "the most important const I ever wrote." And this brings us to the Guru Question, which highlights the additional subtlety that Andrei’s code deftly leveraged… Guru Question Q3: When the reference goes out of scope, which destructor gets called? A3: The same destructor that would be called for the temporary object. It’s just being delayed. Corollary: You can take a const Base& to a Derived temporary and it will be destroyed without virtual dispatch on the destructor call. This is nifty. Consider the following code: // Example 3 Derived factory(); // construct a Derived object void g() { const Base& b = factory(); // calls Derived::Derived here // … use b … } // calls Derived::~Derived directly here — not Base::~Base + virtual dispatch! Does this work in practice on real compilers? Yes: Every compiler I have access to calls the correct Derived destructor, including even ancient Borland 5.5 and Visual C++ 6.0 (and Digital Mars, though DM calls the destructor at the wrong time, as noted above). Andrei leverages this subtlety (of course) in his ScopeGuard implementation to avoid making the implementation classes’ destructors virtual at all, which is okay in that case because those classes otherwise have no need for one. Updates:
Derek Drouin won Canada's second gold medal of the world track and field championships Sunday when he was the only man in the men's high jump final to clear 2.34-metres. His victory took the country's tally to a national record of eight medals. The 25-year-old from Corunna, Ont., was among four men to have cleared 2.33m – he was flawless through that height. None of the athletes could make the next height of 2.36m, so the bar was lowered to 2.34m for a jumpoff. Whether it was fatigue, or, the mental impact of watching him hit 2.34m on his first attempt, the defending world champion Bohdan Bondarenko of the Ukraine and Chinese favourite Guowei Zhang could not equal Drouin's performance and were each awarded a silver medal. Another pre-meet favourite Mutaz Barshim of Qatar, who leads the world rankings at 2.41m, could manage only fourth. Drouin joins pole vaulter Shawn Barber as Canadians to win gold at the Beijing world championships. "I was definitely telling myself if there was ever an opportunity, this was it," Drouin said. "I felt like I was the one to beat." "I told myself so many times 'you can win this, you can win this,' and when it finally happened, it was a relief." Minutes after Drouin leaped to the historic feat, he was trending on Twitter, prompting this response from Athletics Canada. Derek Drouin now owns Olympic bronze, World Championships bronze & gold, Pan Am & Commonwealth Gold <a href="https://twitter.com/ddrouin10">@ddrouin10</a> <a href="http://t.co/QeeybGvYIw">pic.twitter.com/QeeybGvYIw</a> —@AthleticsCanada Drouin won the Pan Am Games in July with a season best of 2.37m, a height he matched a week later at the London Anniversary Games. A year ago, he had jumped a Canadian record 2.40m in April before most of his competitors had even started the season. This time, he and coach Jeff Huntoon ensured he peaked at the right time. Rain washed 'take off' mark away A torrential downpour had covered the jumping apron and conditions were less than ideal but Drouin has proven himself time and time again that he is a championship jumper, winning bronze medals at the 2012 London Olympics and again at the 2013 world championships in Moscow. "The nice thing about Mondo [tracks] is it doesn't get too slippery," Drouin said. "It was a little frustrating when it hadn't rained all week and then it finally did today because I felt I was in a good place after the prelims. I knew exactly where my [take off] mark needed to be for the final for things to go smoothly. The rain washed all those preparations aside. I had to start back at ground zero." Before the final started on Sunday, Drouin thought the wet conditions would see the height needed for a medal reduced to around 2.33m. "I felt I was capable of a little bit higher. I was disappointed to miss 2.36m. I feel I missed a really great opportunity," he lamented. "It's funny because a few months ago I was just so frustrated with the season. I went about a month and a half without clearing 2.30m, playing with a new approach and trying to peak at the end of the season. "I got to the point where I just wanted the season to be done and forget about world championships. Luckily, I was patient and things finally worked out and things clicked and when they clicked they really clicked. I felt like I was in a really good place coming into here." Drouin now heads to Zurich where he will compete in the Diamond League Finals on Thursday. He's aiming to get beyond the 2.40m mark and break his Canadian record. Canadians held off podium in javelin, 4x400m Liz Gleadle of Vancouver, B.C., who had thrown 64.02m in the prelims struggled in the final of the women's javelin. She wound up 11th with a throw of 59.82m. "It hurts and it's my worst meet of the year," said Gleadle. "But it's going to make me really hungry because I'm really upset right now." Kathrina Molitor of Germany took gold with a world leading throw of 67.69m. Huihui Lyu of China thrilled the enormous crowd with an Asian record of 66.13m for the silver medal. The Canadian women's 4x400m team finished eighth in the final in 3:27.69. They had squeaked into the final with a time of 3:26.14, the slowest of all qualifiers. Jamaica won a close finish in 3:19.13 with the U.S. second in 3:19.44. Great Britain was third in 3:23.62. Leadoff runner, Carline Muir of Toronto, was upbeat about the Canadian result and pointed out that the team has now qualified for the 2016 Rio Olympics. "We all wanted to be in the top three and get a medal," said Muir, who is returning from numerous injuries. "I think we all did a great job out there and ran our hardest and you couldn't ask for anything else."
Amid the drama of the Jamaican team's world record time in the 100m relay, which I was fortunate enough to witness in person, few noted Usain Bolt's post-race comments on tax. Asked why he did not compete in Britain more often (he refused to appear at Crystal Palace in 2010, for instance), Bolt cited our tax laws. "As soon as the law changes I'll be here all the time," he said. Bolt's objection is to a law that allows the government to take a cut of his sponsorship and endorsement earnings as well as his appearance fee, which is currently taxed at 50 per cent. For instance, were he to take part in 10 meetings worldwide, with one in Britain, the Inland Revenue would tax him on 10 per cent of his worldwide sponsorship earnings. None of which is objectionable. Without tax funded events such as those in Britain, Bolt, who earns around £10m a year, would have no platform on which to perform and, consequently, no sponsorship. Those countries that don't tax non-resident sports people, as Britain does, should do. The law was waived for the Olympics at the behest of the IOC (one wonders if we would have seen Bolt otherwise) and the government is now under pressure to permanently suspend it. But given the revenue it would lose from those athletes who do grace us with their presence, it is understandably reluctant to do so. Instead, it is Bolt who should reverse his stance and accept that it is legitimate for him to pay a proportion of his worldwide earnings to the British government. After all, having spending £9bn on the Olympics, we could do with the money. Bolt's management complain that "his tax liability in the UK would exceed his appearance fee". Yet if true, that is only because his sponsorship earnings are so exorbitant to begin with. In any case, is it utopian to hope that athletes might be motivated by something other than money? Update: Here's what the Treasury had to say on the subject in this year's Budget.
Public clouds are based on the economics of sharing. Cloud providers can charge less, and sell computing on an hourly basis without long-term contracts, because they’re spreading costs and skills across many customers. But a shared model means that your application is competing with other users’ applications for scarce resources. The pact you’re making with a public cloud, for better or worse, is that the advantages of elasticity and pay-as-you-go economics outweigh any problems you’ll face. Enterprises are skeptical because clouds force them to relinquish control over the underlying networks and architectures on which their applications run. Is performance acceptable? Will clouds be reliable? What’s the tradeoff, particularly now that we know speed matters so much? We (Bitcurrent) decided to find out. With the help of Webmetrics, we built four test applications: a small object, a large object, a million calculations, and a 500,000-row table scan. We ported the applications to five different clouds, and monitored them for a month. We discovered that performance varies widely by test type and cloud: Here are some of the lessons learned: All of the services handled the small image well. PaaS clouds were more efficient at delivering the large object, possibly because of their ability to distribute workload out to caching tiers better than an individual virtual machine can do. Force.com didn’t handle CPU workloads well, even with a tenth of the load of other agents. Amazon was slow for CPU, but we were using the least-powerful of Amazon’s EC2 machines. Google’s ability to handle I/O, even under heavy load, was unmatched. Rackspace also dispatched the I/O tests quickly. Then again, it took us 37 hours to insert the data into Google’s Bigtable. In the end, it’s clear that there’s no single “best” cloud: PaaS (App Engine, Force.com) scales easily, but locks you in; IaaS (Rackspace, Amazon, Terremark) offers portability, but leaves you doing all the scaling work yourself. The full 50-page report is available free from Webmetrics. Web performance and cloud architecture will be key topics at this week’s Velocity conference.
Years ago, on a whim, a friend led me into a New Age bookstore in Los Angeles. At the time I was a committed rationalist and knew nothing about paranormal phenomena except what I'd read in skeptical, debunking books. Unlike my friend, who found the bookstore's atmosphere amusing, and who enjoyed pointing out the bizarre titles and covers, I felt distinctly ill at ease. There was something disturbing about being immersed in all that occult literature. I felt as if I'd ventured into unknown territory - dangerous territory. And I was glad to leave. Later, as I became interested in the paranormal and began to grasp the extent of the evidence for such phenomena, I chalked up my earlier reaction to a form of culture shock. There I was, a rather repressed rationalist, coming into close contact with ideas I found threatening to my worldview. After all, there was nothing actually dangerous about that little bookstore - was there? Maybe there was. Over the years, as I've studied this subject, I've encountered a fair number of cautionary tales. People who become unduly interested in psychic phenomena - interested to the point of obsession - can find their mental health deteriorating, their relationships fragmenting, and their social status undermined. Of course, obsession is a bad thing regardless of its focus, but I suspect that it's easier to become obsessed with the paranormal than with, say, stamp collecting. Something about this field of inquiry tends to draw people in and make them vulnerable to harm. Since I'm a writer, I take particular interest in the case of Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was one of the most popular writers of his day, and his Sherlock Holmes stories are still widely read and dramatized. Fairly late in life he became convinced that it was possible to communicate with the dead through mediums. As his interest grew, he neglected his fiction writing and spent most of his time traveling the world to attend séances and deliver lectures on spiritualism. His reputation suffered, and he was the target of ridicule from some quarters. He had a widely publicized feud with the debunking magician Houdini. Editors began to dread getting Doyle's manuscripts in the mail, for fear that his latest contribution would be yet another essay on the talkative dead. Doyle's fame was such that his essays were invariably published, but his editors weren't always happy about that fact. With the passage of time, Doyle's critical faculties suffered. He became more credulous, more willing to vouch for even the most dubious phenomena. Many of the mediums he endorsed were later exposed as fakes. Doyle refused to accept some of these exposures. Famously, he even accused Houdini himself of using psychic powers, since - he felt - there was no way the escape artist could have carried out some of his stunts without paranormal gifts. Most embarrassing was the often retold affair of the Cottingley fairies. Two girls, ages 16 and 10, shot some photos of "fairies" they'd allegedly found in their garden. The fairies were paper cut-outs, and the photos were obvious fakes. Nevertheless, Doyle endorsed the photos as genuine, even publishing an article in The Strand Magazine with the regrettable title "Fairies photographed – an epoch-making event." Later he put out an entire book devoted to the subject, The Coming of the Fairies. Skeptics have enjoyed skewering him for his gullibility and foolishness ever since. James Randi devotes a chapter of his debunking book Flim-Flam to a detailed dissection of the Cottingley case. And yes, there is something funny about a presumably worldly and sophisticated man, rich and internationally famous, falling for a rather inept hoax perpetrated by two young girls. At the same time, there is something about it that's both sad - and troubling. How could Doyle's rational faculty deteriorate so badly? Critics suggest that he was never much of a thinker, but I've read a great deal of his work, as well as Daniel Stashower's excellent biography, and my impression is that Doyle had a more penetrating intellect than his detractors admit. Trained in medicine, he traveled around the world as a ship's doctor, acquiring a range of knowledge and experiences that made him far more intellectually interesting than his closed-minded Victorian colleagues. He resisted prejudices - women and minorities are generally treated with respect in his work - and had an appreciation of exotic cultures and variant points of view. In short, Doyle was a sensible, astute observer of the world around him - until he got caught up in his obsession with mediums. At that point his mental and emotional stability began to suffer, and he became increasingly fanatical, blind to any interpretation of the evidence but his own. If this were an isolated case, it would not be very important, but it is far from isolated. Some cases, in fact, have much worse consequences. One of these is described in anguished, agonizing detail in Joe Fisher's Hungry Ghosts. Fisher joined an amateur circle that met regularly to "channel" information from spirits. Initially skeptical, Fisher was soon won over by the information that came through. He and his friends became increasingly obsessed with the meetings, while the woman who ran the circle began to exercise an unhealthy degree of control over some group members, exploiting them and attempting to coerce them into sexual liaisons. As Fisher became convinced that he was in contact with a female spirit guide who'd been his lover in a previous lifetime, he lost interest in his real-life relationships, an attitude that led to the break-up of his marriage. Eventually he went to Europe, intending to verify the information he'd been given. Instead, to his shock, he discovered that much of it was false. Shattered, he returned to America and shared his findings with the group - only to be met with hostility and denial. The group members were so caught up in their shared fantasy that they could not tolerate the intrusion of facts and evidence. Fisher left the group and eventually concluded that he had been victimized by what the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls pretas or hungry ghosts - malign spirits who deceive and corrupt their human interlocutors. He warns his readers to be wary of involvement in the supernatural, and on this note of caution the book ends. But this was not the end of Joe Fisher's story. He continued to obsess on his experience. Eleven years after the publication of Hungry Ghosts, he confided to a friend that he believed the spirits were out to get him for publicizing their activities. They would not leave him alone. In 2001, at age 53, he made his escape. He threw himself off a cliff, ending his life. There are at least two ways of interpreting this bizarre story. Either Fisher became unhinged as a result of his participation in the séances, and eventually fell victim to his own paranoia; or he actually did come into contact with malevolent spirit entities, against which he had no protection. Fisher wasn’t the only person in the medium's circle to suffer psychological damage. Everyone in the group was affected to some extent. This is not uncommon. Immersion in the occult can have unpredictable effects on the dynamics and psychology of a group. An example that comes to mind are the ITC experiments described by Mark Macy in Miracles in the Storm. ITC is an acronym for Instrumental Transcommunication. This activity, which has gained a surprising number of adherents, involves using technology to contact the dead. It evolved out of EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomena, a field of amateur research in which "spirit voices" are supposedly picked up on tape recorders. ITC is more high-tech, employing video cameras, TV sets, fax machines, and computers. Enthusiasts claim they have received images and messages from another dimension, and that they are in regular contact with like-minded "experimenters" from beyond. Macy's book details a group effort to establish and maintain contact with these forces. Such contact is said to require harmony among members of the experimenting groups on both sides of the veil. Unfortunately, such harmony proved difficult to come by, at least on the earthly side, and much of Miracles in the Storm concerns the in-fighting and mutual suspicion that led to the group's downfall. Organizational chaos is remarkably common among those who explore the paranormal, and the fate of Macy's group is unsurprising. Although the experiments documented in Macy's book have ended, Macy and some of his colleagues have attempted to renew their work. He reports that his team has made contact with a group of spirits who live on the extradimensional planet Marduk. According to these spirits, "Marduk is watered by only one large stream flowing with many bends across a great part of the planet," a watercourse called the River of Eternity. "We live here together with other forms of life," they explain, "with men [who had] lived on other planets before their bodily death, with dwarfs, giants and gnomes, and with bodiless entities, too." (Quoted from www.worlditc.org/c_04_s_bridge_28.htm .) The spirits have what seem to be physical bodies, all in the prime of youth and health. Among the spirits inhabiting Marduk is Sir Richard Francis Burton, the 19th century explorer and linguist. Burton and his spirit colleagues, calling themselves the Timestream group, established a transmission station on Marduk, by means of which they were able to send video images and text messages to their earthly counterparts. At one point, a rival group of spirits with evil intentions seized control of the transmission station, but the Timestream faction mounted a daring counterattack and regained control. If all this sounds like science-fiction, there's a good reason. It is science-fiction, or at least it was - in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. Beginning with To Your Scattered Bodies Go in 1971, the Riverworld books feature an intriguing premise: When we die, we are resurrected on an earthlike planet bisected by a single vast river. Both good and evil individuals - human, prehuman, and nonhuman - abide in this land, restored to youth and vigor. As we make our way along the river, we must form alliances and ward off enemies, sometimes in physical combat. And our hero in this adventure? None other than Sir Richard Francis Burton! I will admit that there are differences between the ITC messages and Riverworld. Farmer's story provided a technological, rather than supernatural, explanation for humanity's resurrection, and dealt extensively with a super-advanced race of humans dubbed the Ethicals who were controlling this vast experiment. None of this relates to the ITC communiques. And other famous figures who appear in Farmer's saga - Mark Twain, Hermann Goring, and King John of England, among others - have not made any appearance in the messages from Marduk, as far as I know. Nevertheless, the vast river, the physical resurrection in youthful form, the rival alliances and mortal combats, and the presence of Burton himself all combine to create the strong suspicion that the ITC messages are only fiction. Indeed, the whole situation seems reminiscent of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, in which the players submerge themselves in a virtual world based on science-fiction archetypes - a world that can begin to seem very real. A couple of years ago I e-mailed Mark Macy to ask him about the parallels between Riverworld and his group's findings. I received brief replies from both Macy and one of his colleagues. Neither of them was interested in pursuing the issue, and neither saw any problem in the similarities I'd mentioned. No problem? Suppose I were to tell you that, by paranormal means, I'd established contact with the crew of an interstellar starship in the 23rdcentury. Excitedly I report that the ship's captain is James Tiberius Kirk, his first mate is an alien named Spock, and the ship's doctor is McCoy. You point out to me that these characters are all found in the 1960s TV series Star Trek. "So what?" I say. "I don’t see a problem with that." I'll bet you'd decide that my critical faculties are not quite what they should be. How can presumably serious people be willing to overlook such an obvious difficulty? I suggest that wholesale immersion in the paranormal can gradually erode one's capacity for appropriate skepticism. Arthur Conan Doyle came to believe in fairies; Joe Fisher's marriage collapsed because he fell in love with his "spirit guide"; Macy and his co-workers are caught up in what appears to be a replay of a science-fiction saga from the 1970s. A wealth of similar cases can be found in George P. Hansen's authoritative study, The Trickster and the Paranormal, which takes a highly original interdisciplinary approach to the question of why psychic phenomena - and people associated with such things - tend to be marginalized in society. Hansen's book is too complex and densely argued to be summarized in its entirety, but one of his major themes is that long-term, active involvement in the paranormal often produces personal or collective dissociation from reality. Hansen identifies a constellation of attributes that folklorists call "the trickster" - a mythical figure found in most ethnic traditions, whether as Coyote in Native American lore or the god Hermes in Greek mythology. The trickster is deceitful, playful, disruptive, irrational, unpredictable, often sexually adventurous or perverse, sometimes malevolent, and always to be approached with caution. He is a marginal figure among the other deities, and those humans who are associated with him - shamans, mediums - typically occupy a marginal place in society. He resists institutionalization. He hovers outside the establishment, functioning as both an escape valve and a threat. Hansen doesn't believe, of course, that the trickster figure actually exists. Rather, he uses the image of the trickster to stand for a collection of disparate qualities. And he makes the point that paranormal phenomena not only exhibit these same qualities but often induce them in persons who immerse themselves in the field. Like the trickster, psychic phenomena are playful and maddeningly elusive. They are irrational, in the sense that they fall outside the purview of rationalistic thinking. They are disruptive - sometimes overtly so, as in the case of poltergeist outbreaks. They are unpredictable, a fact that has led many a legitimate psychic to supplement his talents with trickery. They are sometimes malevolent - as with Fisher's hungry ghosts, not to mention the rich tradition of malign spirits in every culture, including the devils of Judeo-Christian theology. They are sometimes associated with bizarre or coercive sexual practices, as witnessed in many rituals and in the strange private lives of many mediums and psychics. They resist institutionalization; despite widespread public interest in psychic phenomena, no large institutions exist to study the field, and the only major institutional studies of psychic powers were undertaken by spy agencies, which are themselves immersed in a culture of ambiguity and deceit. Hansen observes that people who directly engage the paranormal, or try to, sometimes fall into the role-playing trap mentioned above. A role-playing game, he writes, "can become a shared fantasy, wherein the players voluntarily suspend normal, rational considerations ... The games give more direct contact with supernatural ideas than does literature alone. Live people are involved; they participate in a drama; props may be used, and some physical action is required ... Cheating is frequent despite there being no winners or losers in the game ... Players can identify with their characters, and sometimes they prefer not to separate themselves from those roles ... [O]ccasionally the 'game' becomes obsessive and interferes with real-world pursuits." (pp. 264-266) Reading these words, I find it hard not to think of the purported messages from Marduk. There is, then, a dark side to the paranormal. It is not all benevolent angels and comforting words from deceased relatives. There can be obsession, deterioration of rational thought, shared fantasy, even a descent into madness. There can be hungry ghosts. There can be channelers who sexually exploit their followers. There is always the risk that inquiring too deeply into these matters will lead to one's own marginalization - a fate that has befallen even prominent researchers in the field, who have seen their reputations suffer and their prestige stripped away. Much in the paranormal is worthy of study. But if you choose to examine it, proceed with caution. And if you run into trouble, don't hesitate to turn back. After all, I felt a lot better when I'd left that bookstore. Sources BOOKS Hungry Ghosts, Joe Fisher; reissued in 2001 as The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts: A Riveting Investigation Into Channeling and Spirit Guides Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions, James Randi Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, Daniel Stashower To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer The Trickster and the Paranormal, George P. Hansen Miracles in the Storm, Mark Macy WEB SITES American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena site - aaevp.com/ Cottingley fairies articles - www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/cooper.htm and www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/cottfair.htm Joe Fisher obituary - www.anomalist.com/milestones/fisher.html George P. Hansen's site - www.tricksterbook.com/ Mark Macy's site - www.worlditc.org ; survey of Macy's work at www.worlditc.org/h_05_results_overview.htm
The Investigation On April 28, 2016, twenty-three members of the Alabama House of Representatives introduced HR367 which proposed two articles of impeachment against Governor Robert Bentley. Proposed Article I (“Willful Neglect of Duty”) states that Governor Bentley has “willfully neglected his duty as Governor by failing to faithfully execute the laws of this state and by refusing to perform his constitutional and statutory duties.” Proposed Article II (“Corruption in Office”) states that Governor Bentley has “unlawfully misused state property, misappropriated state resources, and consistently acted in violation of law to promote is own personal agenda.” Pursuant to House Rule 79.1, the proposed articles of impeachment were referred to the House Judiciary Committee to investigate the allegations and to recommend to the full House whether cause exists to impeach the Governor. The Committee was to adopt rules, gather information and submit a report to the full House. The Committee Rules authorized the retention of a Special Counsel to aid in the Committee’s investigation. After a search process, the Committee retained Jack Sharman with Lightfoot, Franklin & White, LLC in Birmingham, Alabama, to serve as its Special Counsel. This page sets out the Special Counsel’s Pre-Hearing Submission, as well as exhibits and other documents relevant to the investigation.
Just when you think the world can’t get any surprise you any more, you learn that there are sharks swimming around in a volcano. Truth really is stranger than fiction: Syfy brought us Sharknado and then the universe counters with Sharkcano, otherwise known as Kavachi. This very, very active volcano off the Solomon Islands is 60 feet underwater, and sharks and rays have apparently been hanging out in its caldera between eruptions. From National Geographic: It’s a dangerous place though. “Divers who have gotten close to the outer edge of the volcano have had to back away because of how hot it is or because they were getting mild skin burns from the acid water.” So the team strategically deployed their instruments—including disposable robots, underwater cameras, and National Geographic’s deep-sea Drop Cam—to get a broad look at the whole volcano, including what the bottom looks like. Their biggest surprise was that hammerheads and silky sharks showed up on their deep-sea Drop Cam footage—in numbers. … “These large animals are living in what you have to assume is much hotter and much more acidic water, and they’re just hanging out,” Phillips says. “It makes you question what type of extreme environment these animals are adapted to. What sort of changes have they undergone? Are there only certain animals that can withstand it? It is so black and white when you see a human being not able to get anywhere near where these sharks are able to go.” Despite the fact that Kavachi was not actively erupting, the video shows carbon dioxide and methane gas bubbles rising from the seafloor vents, and the water appearing in different colors due to reduced iron and sulfur.
I spent all but £1 of my hard-earned cash on champagne and prostitutes so I needed to totally cook something amazing on a mega tight budget. I figured vegetables are cheap so I went down to the local grocery store and bought an onion, an orange and some carrots… All hail carrot and orange man! Soon to be painfully dismembered and chopped to bits and then tossed into a pressure cooker like an unwanted puppy. I begin by chopping the onion and add to a pressure cooker along with 2 cloves garlic: And I figure some spices would be nice: 1/2 tspn of fennel, cumin 1/4 tspn cardamom seeds. Next, I chop the carrots and add them to the pressure cooker along with the juice of the orange and a pint of water. After 15 mins pressure cooking we have: The final step is to add the zest of the orange… After blending I serve: And how’s it taste? I just knew I had put too much zest in; usually I’ll add about half that amount but I was all like super confident and stuff. Suffice to say it’s a tad orange flavoured, which is annoying because it would have turned out really nice instead of just nice but orange-y as hell. Ingredients 1 orange, juice and half its zest (HALF!) 1/2 tspn fennel, cumin seeds 1/4 tspn cardamom pods 1 white onion 2 cloves garlic 4 carrots 1 stock cube (which I forgot to tell you about) Method To a pressure cooker add 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil and bring to a medium heat. Add the seeds and fry for 3 mins. Chop the onions and garlic and fry for a further 5 mins until they have softened. Chop the carrots and add along with the juice of the orange and 1 pint water w/the stock cube. Place lid on pressure cooker and cook for 15 mins. Remove lid, add zest, blend. Jobs a good ‘un. So, have YOU tried carrot/orange soup? Do you use ginger? Chicken stock cube? Why don’t you use the comments section and tell me! Also on twitter And help me win this if you like my blog. Advertisements
CORAL GABLES, Fla. -- Shawn Eichorst is leaving his job as athletic director at scandal-ridden Miami for Nebraska, where he accepted a five-year contract to succeed Tom Osborne and oversee the Cornhuskers' program. The schools made simultaneous announcements on Thursday, and for Miami, Eichorst's departure comes at a particularly curious time -- both with the Hurricanes set to play Notre Dame in the rekindling of a huge college football rivalry on Saturday, and as the school braces to receive potentially crippling NCAA sanctions sometime in the coming months for compliance violations. Former Maine athletic director Blake James will become the acting AD at Miami, filling the role that Eichorst held for just under 18 months. "I am deeply disappointed in Shawn's departure to the University of Nebraska as I thoroughly enjoyed working with him," Miami president Donna Shalala said in a statement. "We wish Shawn and his wonderful family the very best at their new post." Eichorst's departure from Miami was reported earlier by ESPN's Brett McMurphy. Eichorst's starting salary at Nebraska will be $973,000 annually, believed to be a significant raise over his Miami deal. As a private school, the Hurricanes typically do not release contract information. At Nebraska, the 75-year-old Osborne -- one of college football's legendary coaches -- announced late last month that he will retire Jan. 1 after five years on the job. He'll become athletic director emeritus and stay involved in department operations through July 30 at Nebraska, where he won 255 games and 13 conference titles as football coach. Eichorst will start at Nebraska on Oct. 9, first as a special assistant to Chancellor Harvey Perlman, then assume Osborne's role on Jan. 1. "I am humbled by both the responsibility and opportunities that lie ahead and I hope to carry on the rich tradition of Husker excellence set by Coach Osborne and so many others," Eichorst said in a statement released by Nebraska. Eichorst has not spoken with Miami reporters in months, citing the ongoing NCAA investigation as the reason why requests were declined. Eichorst was hired by the Hurricanes after serving as Wisconsin's Chief Operating Officer for athletics, overseeing a $90 million budget and being closely involved with a $100 million construction project for ice hockey, swimming and football. Eichorst was highly recommended for the Miami job by his one-time boss at Wisconsin, athletic director Barry Alvarez -- a close friend of Shalala. Alvarez is also a graduate of Nebraska. Eichorst arrived with Miami's athletic department in flux: Funds were being raised for facility upgrades, and the school was in the process of hiring a basketball coach to replace Frank Haith, eventually deciding on bringing in Jim Larranaga. Quietly, though, the Hurricanes were also under NCAA investigation over their compliance practices, which wound up overshadowing everything Eichorst did at Miami. The story over Miami's NCAA mess broke publicly in August 2011, when claims made by former booster and convicted Ponzi scheme architect Nevin Shapiro -- now serving a 20-year prison term for his role in bilking investors out of $930 million -- were published by Yahoo Sports. Shapiro said he provided dozens of Miami athletes and recruits with impermissible benefits over an eight-year period starting in 2002. The NCAA is expected to provide Miami with its notice of allegations later this year. Once that happens, sanctions typically follow in about 90 days. Miami's athletic director for the period of some of those alleged violations was Kirby Hocutt, who left for Texas Tech last year. And now, the person who replaced him -- and vowed to help clean up the NCAA mess -- is also gone. Eichorst was believed to be working closely with the NCAA during the joint inquiry into the athletic department, so his departure comes at a difficult time for both the department and the university, which is already dealing with a number of issues unrelated to the investigation, such as dwindling football attendance and major financial problems involving its highly touted medical school. Eichorst addressed the scandal in a roundtable interview with Miami reporters on Nov. 1, 2011. "I'm not making any excuses. I'm not asking anybody to feel sorry for me or anybody else," Eichorst said. "I've got a job to do and I'm only looking forward. I'm not looking backwards." Now, he's looking at a new beginning. "I was impressed with Shawn's credentials and experience but more importantly his respect for and appreciation of the tradition of the Nebraska Athletics program," Perlman said. "He expressed from the onset his hope to draw on the experience and knowledge of Tom Osborne and the rest of the current staff in working to continue the department's success both on and off the field." Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
Scientists discovered a wealth of 445 million-year-old sponge fossils preserved in a thin layer of mudstone in China. Photo by J. Botting, et al./Current Biology Feb. 10 (UPI) -- Scientists in China have unearthed a treasure trove of sponge fossils, their fragile skeletons and soft tissues neatly preserved. The find offers a rare glimpse of life as it was 445 million years ago in the second-largest mass extinction. Roughly 85 percent of all species disappeared during the end-Ordovician crisis. An ice age and then rapid warming, accompanied by dramatic changes in the chemistry of the ocean, followed. Little is known about life in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. The only other post-crisis deposit is South Africa's Soom Shale, a Late Ordovician strata showcasing life as it existed in a glacial lagoon. The new fossil fauna, dubbed Anji Biota, showcases life in the deep ocean. It consists of a thin layer of mudstone found in the forests of China's Zhejiang Province. So far, scientists have identified 100 different species. Analysis of the Soom Shale has suggested most post-extinction survivor species were small and stunted. The Anji sponge fauna feature larger, more complex species. Though it appears sponges dominated, scientists also identified a few conical-shelled nautiloids and one sea scorpion. "We think the sponges thrived because they can tolerate changes in temperature and low oxygen levels, while their food source -- organic particles in the water -- would have increased enormously by the death and destruction all around them," researcher Joe Botting said in a news release. The discovery was detailed in the journal Current Biology.
Introduction CheckInstall keeps track of all files installed by a "make install" or equivalent, creates a Slackware, RPM, or Debian package with those files, and adds it to the installed packages database, allowing for easy package removal or distribution. Use CheckInstall instead of just running "sudo make install", as that will likely put files all over the filesystem, with no easy way of removing them if things go wrong. If in the future you try to install a package that contains the same file as the software you are compiling, you will receive errors and the software you compiled may stop working. (In fact, checkinstall can keep track of files modified by any command line, not just a "make install", so you can use it for any type of installation task outside of apt, and it will keep track of the installation in the package manager.) CheckInstall is not designed to produce packages suitable for distribution. Do not use it to produce packages intended for the Ubuntu archive or PPAs. Instead, follow the Packaging Guide. From the checkinstall README: "The Debian support in CheckInstall is still new, so handle it with care. It has been reported to work OK in some Debian systems and it certainly works OK in my Slackware development system with dpkg installed. Your mileage may vary." Installation Install the package checkinstall from the Repositories. For help on installing software in Ubuntu, see InstallingSoftware. A quick method via the terminal for those who like to copy and paste: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install checkinstall Usage Instead of sudo make install you will use sudo checkinstall When called with no arguments, checkinstall will call "make install". If you need other arguments, they can be supplied: sudo checkinstall make install_package The installed package can then also easily be removed via Synaptic or via the terminal: sudo dpkg -r packagename Example: sudo dpkg -r pidgin Note that the .deb package it creates can also be used elsewhere, which simplifies installation of the same program on many machines. Use CheckInstall with auto-apt You can use auto-apt when you want to build a simple package from source with checkinstall. You need to have auto-apt installed! Instead of ./configure you use: auto-apt run ./configure If the dependencies are available, a dialog box opens and ask you to install them. The rest remains the same make sudo checkinstall CategorySoftware CategoryCommandLine
By According to Berry, the woman was detained without incident but Shaver did not comply with officers. Police said Shaver reached toward his lower back several times. Berry said an officer believed there was a threat and fired his weapon, hitting Shaver. He was pronounced dead at the scene. No weapons were recovered from his body. Investigators located two pellet rifles in the hotel room, which they later determined were related to Shaver's pest control job. The officer who fired the fatal shot has been with the department for more than two years, Berry said. As dictated by police protocol, he has been put on administrative duty but police have not released his name. Sweet described Shaver, the father of two girls ages 6 and 3, as a "people pleaser" with a laid-back demeanor. "Everyone's in disbelief he could have supposedly done something so aggressive that the cops could have gone straight to using a weapon and shoot to kill," Sweet said. In a statement, police promised the incident would be fully investigated. "The investigation is currently on going and all evidence and statements are being completed to be presented to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office for an independent review. A key piece of evidence of this case is the on-body camera video which captured the incident." It was not clear if Shaver at some point displayed one of his pellet rifles out a window. Berry said he could not comment on any statements made by the woman who was detained or disclose anymore details. Sweet said her husband had been talking with a man and a woman. But she did not know if it was work-related or he had just met them at the hotel. She last spoke with him about two hours before the shooting. She is also angry that police did not contact her until four days after the shooting, despite her leaving numerous messages inquiring about her husband. According to Berry, the closest next of kin investigators found was Shaver's father. Police spoke with him Tuesday morning and he said would inform Sweet and other family members about Shaver's death. There was no indication that Shaver and Sweet were legally married, Berry said. "In Texas, we are legally married and that's the end of it," Sweet said. "There is no reason for them not have called me." Police agencies across the country have been under scrutiny for use of deadly force, especially cases that result in the death of an unarmed person. A fugitive wanted in Phoenix was fatally shot by police in Las Vegas last month after officers mistook the cellphone he was carrying for a weapon. EDITORS NOTE: "I could not see my husband doing anything irrational " Maybe you couldn't see him cheating. But he wasn't in that Motel room with you. The police are not going to give you a fair investigation, these are the very same pigs that took your husbands life and left you to raise two girls alone. The pigs will always claim: "The drunken idiot aimed a rifle (no one knew at the time it was a pellet gun) and refused to comply with police commands when confronted." It is always their same story, isn't it? Everybody knows the police lie, but no one ever does anything about it. WARNING: For your own safety- Do Not call 911 for anything. Take Action : Sign up at Underground Newz Forum (updates, direct actions, boycotts, sabotage-tactics, hacktivism) and be a part of change, today.
Michael Jordan paid $200K in property taxes in 2012 on suburban Chicago home Michael Jordan paid $200K in property taxes in 2012 on suburban Chicago home Michael Jordan paid nearly $200,000 in property taxes in 2012 on his Highland Park home. And now, he’s having trouble getting the property off his hands. Interested buyers had the opportunity to own the six-time NBA champion’s 56,000 square foot Highland Park home at auction on Monday – if they had $250,000 to throw down... Michael Jordan paid nearly $200,000 in property taxes in 2012 on his Highland Park home. And now, he’s having trouble getting the property off his hands. Interested buyers had the opportunity to own the six-time NBA champion’s 56,000 square foot Highland Park home at auction on Monday – if they had $250,000 to throw down just to enter bidding. Jordan listed the fully furnished estate in March 2012 for $29 million. At the time, it was the highest-priced home in Chicago. The sky-high property taxes on the home make the already-expensive estate a hefty burden to maintain financially. Though Jordan’s home is an anomaly, the sticker shock that comes each year with his property tax bill is all too familiar for homeowners in Illinois. The state’s property tax rates have skyrocketed since 2010, according to analysis done by the Tax Policy Center. The survey examined the 23 Illinois counties with populations exceeding 65,000. The average property tax rates as a percent of home value has soared 18 percent from 2010-2012. Illinois’ average 2.28 property tax rate is second only to the average rate New Jersey residents pay, which is 2.32 percent annually. According to the Tax Policy Center, the average Illinoisan had an annual property tax bill of $4,469 in 2012. Jordan and prospective buyers of his multimillion-dollar home aren’t the only ones with sticker shock when it comes to Illinois’ outrageous property taxes – average homeowners are tapped out, too.
Cormier vs. Jones Woodley vs. Maia Evinger vs. Justino Cerrone vs. Lawler Manuwa vs. Oezdemir MMAjunkie readers’ consensus picks 2017: 70-55 Jones (66%) Woodley (59%) Justino (91%) Lawler (66%) Manuwa (71%) Dann Stupp @DannStupp 2017: 78-47 2015 Champion Cormier Woodley Justino Lawler Manuwa Matt Erickson @MMAjunkieMatt 2017: 78-47 Cormier Woodley Justino Cerrone Manuwa Simon Samano @SJSamano 2017: 77-48 Jones Woodley Justino Cerrone Manuwa Brian Garcia @thegoze 2017: 76-49 Cormier Woodley Justino Lawler Manuwa Steven Marrocco @MMAjunkieSteven 2017: 74-51 Jones Woodley Justino Lawler Manuwa Fernanda Prates @nandaprates_ 2017: 70-51 Jones Maia Justino Lawler Manuwa Ben Fowlkes @BenFowlkesMMA 2017: 72-53 2016 Champion Jones Woodley Justino Lawler Manuwa John Morgan @MMAjunkieJohn 2017: 70-55 Jones Woodley Justino Cerrone Oezdemir George Garcia @MMAjunkieGeorge 2017: 70-55 Cormier Woodley Justino Lawler Manuwa Mike Bohn @MikeBohnMMA 2017: 70-55 2014 Champion Jones Woodley Justino Lawler Manuwa (This story originally appeared Friday, July 28, 2017, at MMAjunkie.) The UFC puts on one of the biggest cards in its history today with three title fights at the top of the bill, including one of the most anticipated rematches ever. UFC 214 takes place at Honda Center in Anaheim, Calif. The main card airs on pay-per-view following prelims on FXX and UFC Fight Pass. (Click here to open a PDF of the staff picks grid in a separate window.) In the main event, light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier (19-1 MMA, 8-1 UFC) takes on former champ and heated rival Jon Jones (22-1 MMA, 16-1 UFC). The two fought at UFC 182 more than two years ago, and Jones won a unanimous decision when he was champ. Things have changed plenty since then. Jones was stripped of the belt and Cormier won it. Then Jones won an interim title, only to have that stripped, as well. Still, despite just one fight since he first fought Cormier, Jones is more than a 2-1 favorite at the sports books. He also has the edge in the picks from our 10 MMAjunkie editors, writers and radio hosts, but just by a 6-4 margin. In the co-feature, welterweight champ Tyron Woodley (17-3-1 MMA, 7-2-1 UFC) defends his belt against Demian Maia (25-6 MMA, 19-6 UFC). Maia brings a seven-fight winning streak into his title shot, but Woodley is the favorite, and he’s the pick of nine of our 10 staff members. The night’s first title fight will see the vacant women’s featherweight title get a new home. Former Invicta FC featherweight champ Cristiane Justino (17-1 MMA, 2-0 UFC) is more than a 13-1 favorite against former Invicta FC bantamweight titleholder Tonya Evinger (19-5 MMA, 0-0 UFC). And not surprisingly, with odds stacked that highly in her favor, “Cyborg” is the lone unanimous pick at the event. Also on the main card, Donald Cerrone (32-7 MMA, 19-4 UFC) takes on former welterweight champion Robbie Lawler (27-11 MMA, 12-5 UFC). Lawler is a slight favorite, but he’s getting a 7-3 nod from our crew. And to open the main card, light heavyweight contender Jimi Manuwa (17-2 MMA, 6-2 UFC), who may get the next title shot with a win on Saturday, takes on Volkan Oezdemir (14-1 MMA, 2-0 UFC). Manuwa is close to a unanimous pick, but has to settle for a 9-1 margin. In the MMAjunkie reader consensus picks, Jones, Woodley, Justino, Lawler and Manuwa are the choices. Check out all the picks above. For more on UFC 214, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.
Please enable Javascript to watch this video HENRICO COUNTY, Va. - The mother of a 12-year-old boy with autism says the "creepy clown" who scared drivers in Virginia was her son -- and he is sweet, not creepy. Holly Brown tells News 6 her son Angus is a huge Stephen King fan and recently got the Pennywise clown costume for Halloween. Brown, who had been out of town, said her son dressed up in the clown costume to surprise her when she got home from her trip. Angus' grandmother was driving the child to his mother's home Monday when Angus rolled down the window and waved at other drivers, Brown said. Given recent headlines about "creepy clown" sightings up and down the East Coast, Angus' gesture freaked out at least one driver and her daughter. They took a photo of Angus and shared it on social media and with CBS 6 News. "There was no malicious intent. He's just a kid excited about his new costume," Brown said about her son. "He was never a threat, and is in fact a very sweet child with autism and a new found love of Stephen King stories, hence the 'It' costume." Since the photo of her son spread online and in the news, Brown said they have had a talk about the costume. "We all agree that he must save his Halloween costume to be worn at Halloween functions only due to the current scary-clown-sighting situation," she said. "This clown was simply a little boy in a new toy." It is against the law in Virginia for anyone over the age of 16 to wear a clown mask, any other mask or hoodie over the face to conceal their identity.
Robin McAlpine is the director of the Scottish left think-tank Common Weal. As he revealed in a podcast this weekend (listen to the last couple of minutes), I have written a White Paper on taxation in the series that they are producing on preparation for an independent Scotland. The White Paper is, in his opinion, radical. It also, and perhaps inevitably, promotes the idea of Scotland having its own currency, with that currency and the tax system being inextricably linked in the process of managing the Scottish economy. There will be more on this soon. The launch will, I gather, be in the next couple of weeks. I will be in Scotland on 14 August, but not for this. I am back on 5th to 8th October for a series of events, some very definitely on this issue. There will be more details as soon as I know them.
San Francisco slightly increased the proposed transit impact free on development Monday while opposing more significant rate hikes amid opposition from developers that could have generated millions of more dollars for Muni. As proposed, the Transportation Sustainability Fee would expand to impose a transit impact fee on residential development for the first time and generate $14 million annually more a year for Muni. But transit advocates and more progressive members of the Board of Supervisors say that’s not enough. Last week, the board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee postponed a vote on the proposal amid a debate over increasing the transit impact fee, among other changes. Amid those talks, developers warned the board that rate hikes in the impact fee could have a chilling effect on housing development. On Monday, the committee approved eight amendments to the legislation. When it came to increasing the fee rates, supervisors Scott Wiener and Malia Cohen opposed the rate hikes proposed by Supervisor John Avalos, instead supporting more modest ones. “I feel like we left a lot of money on the table today,” Avalos said after the vote. The difference in proposals was clear. Avalos’ proposed changes with the rate hikes would generate an additional $13.5 million annually and one-time revenue of $35 million in changes to grandfathering provisions. What Wiener and Cohen supported would generate about $4 million annually with $7 million in one-time fees for grandfathering provision changes. “The mayor cut a deal with developers, and now that we are in the public part of the legislative process, the developers are trying to protect the deal they made in his office,” Avalos said. Wiener declined to comment on discussions he may have had with the Mayor’s Office. The Mayor’s Office did not respond to a request for comment. Wiener said he was not bowing to the interests of developers. “The developers were very clear they did not want the fee to increase at all. I supported increasing it,” Wiener said. “We went against what the developers wanted on a number of these issues.” The fee rate increase supported by the committee keeps the current proposed rate at $7.74 per square foot for residential developments under 99 units and increases it to $8.74 for every unit in excess of 99 units. The City’s nexus study found that transit impacts caused by development could legally justify a residential fee, for example, of $30.93. “Someone can always come forward and say, “Make the fee higher,’” Wiener said. “The higher we make the fee it starts to impact the feasibility of the projects.” Wiener also amended the proposal with the support of Cohen to increase the commercial rate for projects in excess of 100,000 square feet from the proposed $18.04 per square foot to $19.04. Avalos had proposed that rate to increase by $6 to $24.04. “You can’t just keep raising it forever. We drew the line at the appropriate place,” Wiener said of the fee rates. The committee also eliminated the exemption for nonprofit hospitals, added an exemption for post-secondary school student housing and eliminated a credit for area plans where impacts fees are higher than the rest of The City. The committee is expected on Oct. 19 to vote to send the legislation to the full board, where additional debate is expected. Click here or scroll down to comment
Remember that better Scotland we all prattled on about during the referendum campaign? Where we tackled poverty, inequality and injustice head on and built a fairer, more equal society? The Yes movement massively re-energised progressive, radical forces in Scotland but the huge ground we won could be snatched away if we’re not careful. Since the vote, we’ve had a plethora of terrible, if predictable happenings – to add to those documented here, I’d add the fact we’re going to be fracked to fuck and have our human rights completely removed (although apparently not in Scotland #unionism). We are now being encouraged to sign petitions calling for people to not have already lied to us, by a man who has already lied to us. It all seems a bit hopeless for “the45” (possibly the least well thought out name in history) as the baddies at Westminster, who we’ve always insisted run everything, are now having their way with us. Where next? What now? Who can we blame and say has always been a secret unionist? The navel gazing, retrospection, planning and pointless paranoia continues (and yes, we’ve done lots of staring into the political near distance too). With the immediate teary dust now settling, I’m more focused than ever on helping to build the Scotland we had a rare opportunity to discuss as a result of this campaign A Yes vote was one way to make the battles we are about to take on that bit easier, not the end game. We had fuck all before the vote and we have fuck all now but we can, Yes we (still) can, create the kind of country we want to live in. While a group of loyal nationalists declare themselves “the 45%”, let’s not forget that our noble Yes movement is far greater than 45% in one pretty important area – the democratically elected Parliament of Scotland, where “we” (the SNP, Greens and independent MSPs Jean Urqhuart, John Finnie and John Wilson) make up 53.5% of the floor of the chamber. We’ll call it the 54%, in the new spirit of optimism. Holyrood already has a vast array of powers over many areas – not enough, and for me, enough will only ever be all of them. So what could “we” do while we impatiently wait for Westminster? Well, quite a lot actually…. 1. Land Reform The issue of land ownership wasn’t a massive part of the referendum debate, not least because Holyrood already has the power to deal with our feudal hangover. Less than 500 people own over half of Scotland’s land, land that regularly generates vast subsidies for its usually selfish, private use. The recent land reform review group offered a whole number of proposals including limiting the amount of land any single owner can have, a statutory right of certain tenants to be able to buy their land or improve their chances of doing so and setting up a permanent Commission to ensure the public interest and the principles of the common good actually mean something when decisions are made about who owns what and for what purpose. This is good news for those living in rural communities owned and operated by feudal lairds and provisions in the forthcoming Community Empowerment Bill will mean community organisations may be able to force sales from landlords intent on negligent hoarding. Meaningful legislation on protecting public space could also impact on our favourite urban tyranny, Glasgow City Council, who love threatening us with draconian punishment for daring to go to the park and flogging off things when they think we’re not watching. 2. Land Tax It’s not like they were nice to us! Let’s finally introduce a progressive land value tax, to ensure that land which is of no use to fucking toffs and lairds at least makes some doh for our new Revenue Scotland. Large supermarkets and retailers regularly buy up land merely to stop their competitors building on it, leaving it privately disused where it could be put to better use. We need to tax large landowners who keep land for no reason to the point where it doesn’t make economic sense to do so. That way, we can slowly transform ownership and control of one of our most basic resources, and make loads of money to spend on people who’re not Dukes. 3. Scrap the Council Tax It’s such a shame the SNP didn’t get that majority Government in 2007 and so they were never able to finally reform the hated Council Tax. But then they did get a majority and then…a freeze. The Council Tax was a Thatcherite policy, written on the back of a fag packet to stop the country degenerating into full on class war as the Poll Tax crumbled. While it’s dubbed a property tax, it’s nothing of the sort, it’s a tax on existing. Those renting are also forced to stump up, based on the value of an asset that isn’t even theirs which has no relationship with their ability to pay. Those staying in a Castle pay around twice what someone in yer bog standard Band D does, despite what would be vast disparities in income, so the Council Tax is just a half poll tax. Local services need to be paid for but surely a local income tax is better than a regressive one based on what the place you stay in cost in 1991. The council tax freeze means a real terms cut in public spending and public services which are delivered by councils. They may be hailed as “Tory cuts” because they can be connected to a reduction in the block grant (and the Scottish Government’s decision to freeze rather than fix the system) but we could change the way councils are funded, lift thousands out of an unfair tax and be able to increase public spending at local level. 4. The Childcare plan from the White Paper Much as I detest children on both a theoretical and practical level, I can’t help noticing that one of the big promises in the White Paper is something we already have the power to do. The White Paper promised, by 2024, that every child from age one to school age will be entitled to 1,140 hours of childcare per year, the equivalent of the amount of time kids spend at school. As well as the 35,000 more jobs this would create, it would massively benefit families who’re struggling to afford childcare in the crucial first years of their children’s lives and allow parents options to work or not to work which they simply don’t have. Given that women are disproportionately responsible for care provision, decent childcare could be one critical tool in beginning to bridge the gender pay gap. 5. A wage for more than staying alive Speaking of pay, the Scottish Parliament has legislative competence over public sector pay. The gold standard appears to be the “living wage”, currently £7.65. Call me a dreamer if you will but I’d say we can do a tad better than merely allowing public servants to live. You don’t have to be alive to work here – but it helps. An amendment in Parliament to ensure it was paid to all those who worked on public contracts, not just those employed by the state directly, was voted down in Holyrood, incase Brussells didn’t like it. If those bidding for public sector contracts prefer their workers dead, they shouldn’t be running public sector contracts. We should fight for a decent wage, not a living wage for the public sector and those doing jobs that should still be in the public sector – a tenner, at least. We can’t legislate for private sector pay, yet, but we can ensure those who do things for the mutual benefit of our society are paid a wage which maybe lets them go on a holiday, as opposed to just not ending up in the morgue. Continued public sector wage deflation, as confirmed in the recent Holyrood budget, suggests the Scottish Government will continue to actively engage in attempting to force wages down rather than using public sector pay and the pay of public sector contractors as an economic lever, to force wages in the private sector in the right direction. 6. Abolish Help to Buy and invest in public housing Having finally abolished the “right” of local authorities to make a quick buck flogging housing stock, it’s time the Scottish Government got the fuck away from the Tory policy of subsidising middle class home ownership and encouraging another generation into debt, based on the inflated value of housing. Under the current scheme, your poor wee buyers get much needed help to buy the £400,000 home of their dreams, paid for by the rest of us. All this really means is that developers chuck a bit more on the top of their prices and inflate the rest of the market and we end up subsidising those least in need of help – developers and the banks, who we’ve given quite enough public assistance. If it costs anyone not far off half a million for a house, I’d suggest they were doing it wrong, if that someone includes the taxpayer, we’re doing it very wrong. We could instead be providing much needed aid and employment by investing in locally driven, publicly owned house building and repair projects to make house prices go DOWN instead of up all the time – if people GOT a fucking house for a small rent, like they used to, getting yourself into a lifetime of debt for one is less eye catching. Instead we’re creating an inflationary false market which freezes out the exact people (poor folk with no savings) it alleges it intends to help. Hundreds of thousands of Scots will never, ever live in a house that is fit for their needs and that’s an utter disgrace. We can and should fix that if we are ever to make the bold claim, as the Scottish Government do, that housing is a right. ————————————————————- While 2 of these ideas cost money (childcare and better pay), the economic benefits in the long-term are immense – and they could be paid for in the short term by land tax and/or a progressive local income tax. Land reform could transform ownership and scrapping right to buy subsidies for the rich would free up revenue to invest in social housing, lifting people out of privately rented slum housing. But this is not a question of money, it’s a question of political will and political choices; of whether our Scottish political class are actually brave enough to say Yes to a better kind of country when they have the chance. It’s entirely correct to focus on the baddies at Westminster but we must also ensure Holyrood live up to the hype and uses every available power to build a society capable of offering real alternatives to Westminster’s misery. We must demand radical steps to transform Scotland right now, while continuing to fight for powers to be devolved, to as local a level as possible, with a view to building a truly independent nation. That’s a nation where being independent and developing alternatives means changing things, not a hopeless society where things aren’t challenged in case that gets in the way of independence. Don’t ever give up on that sweet dream but let’s also make sure our Scottish political class eat their vegetables. ——————————————————————————————— Further Reading: ——————————————————————————————— Find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AThousandFlowers Follow us on Twitter @unsavourycabal ———————————————————————————————
In the previous post, we talked about bash functions and how to use them from the command line directly and we saw some other cool stuff. Today we will talk about a very useful tool for string manipulation called sed or sed Linux command. Sed is used to work with text files like log files, configuration files, and other text files. In this post, we are going to focus on sed Linux command which is used for text manipulation, which is a very important step in our bash scripting journey. Linux system provides some tools for text processing, one of those tools is sed. We will discuss the 31+ examples with pictures to show the output of every example. Understand sed Linux Command The sed command is a non-interactive text editor. Sed Linux command edits data based on the rules you provide, you can use it like this: $ sed options file You are not limited to use sed to manipulate files, you apply it to the STDIN directly like this: $ echo "Welcome to LikeGeeks page" \| sed 's/page/website/' The s command replaces the first text with the second text pattern. In this case, the string “website” was replaced with the word “page”, so the result will be as shown. The above example was a very basic example to demonstrate the tool. We can use sed Linux command to manipulate files as well. This is our file: $ sed 's/test/another test/' ./myfile The results are printed to the screen instantaneously, you don’t have to wait for processing the file to the end. If your file is huge enough, you will see the result before the processing is finished. Sed Linux command doesn’t update your data. It only sends the changed text to STDOUT. The file still untouched. If you need to overwrite the existing content, you can check our previous post which was talking about redirections. Using Multiple sed Linux Commands in The Command Line To run multiple sed commands, you can use the -e option like this: $ sed -e 's/This/That/; s/test/another test/' ./myfile Sed command must be separated by a semicolon without any spaces. Also, you can use a single quotation to separate commands like this: $ sed -e ' > s/This/That/ > s/test/another test/' myfile 1 2 3 4 5 $ sed - e ' > s/This/That/ > s/test/another test/' myfile The same result, no big deal. Reading Commands From a File You can save your sed commands in a file and use them by specifying the file using -f option. $ cat mycommands s/This/That/ s/test/another test/ 1 2 3 4 5 $ cat mycommands s / This / That / s / test / another test / $ sed -f mycommands myfile Substituting Flags Look at the following example carefully: $ cat myfile $ sed 's/test/another test/' myfile The above result shows the first occurrence in each line is only replaced. To substitute all occurrences of a pattern, use one of the following substitution flags. The flags are written like this: s/pattern/replacement/flags There are four types of substitutions: g, replace all occurrences. A number, the occurrence number for the new text that you want to substitute. p, print the original content. w file: means write the results to a file. You can limit your replacement by specifying the occurrence number that should be replaced like this: $ sed 's/test/another test/2' myfile As you can see, only the second occurrence on each line was replaced. The g flag means global, which means a global replacement for all occurrences: $ sed 's/test/another test/g' myfile The p flag prints each line contains a pattern match, you can use the -n option to print the modified lines only. $ cat myfile $ sed -n 's/test/another test/p' myfile The w flag saves the output to a specified file: $ sed 's/test/another test/w output' myfile The output is printed on the screen, but the matching lines are saved to the output file. Replace Characters Suppose that you want to search for bash shell and replace it with csh shell in the /etc/passwd file using sed, well, you can do it easily: $ sed 's/\/bin\/bash/\/bin\/csh/' /etc/passwd Oh!! that looks terrible. Luckily, there is another way to achieve that. You can use the exclamation mark (!) as string delimiter like this: $ sed 's!/bin/bash!/bin/csh!' /etc/passwd Now it’s easier to read. Limiting sed Sed command processes your entire file. However, you can limit the sed command to process specific lines, there are two ways: A range of lines. A pattern that matches a specific line. You can type one number to limit it to a specific line: $ sed '2s/test/another test/' myfile Only line two is modified. What about using a range of lines: $ sed '2,3s/test/another test/' myfile Also, we can start from a line to the end of the file: $ sed '2,$s/test/another test/' myfile Or you can use a pattern like this: $ sed '/likegeeks/s/bash/csh/' /etc/passwd Awesome!! You can use regular expressions to write this pattern to be more generic and useful. Delete Lines To delete lines, the delete (d) flag is your friend. The delete flag deletes the text from the stream, not the original file. $ sed '2d' myfile Here we delete the second line only from myfile. What about deleting a range of lines? $ sed '2,3d' myfile Here we delete a range of lines, the second and the third. Another type of ranges: $ sed '3,$d' myfile Here we delete from the third line to the end of the file. All these examples never modify your original file. $ sed '/test 1/d' myfile Here we use a pattern to delete the line if matched on the first line. If you need to delete a range of lines, you can use two text patterns like this: $ sed '/second/,/fourth/d' myfile From the second to the fourth line are deleted. Insert and Append Text You can insert or append text lines using the following flags: The (i) flag. The (a) flag. $ echo "Another test" \| sed 'i\First test ' Here the text is added before the specified line. $ echo "Another test" \| sed 'a\First test ' Here the text is added after the specified line. Well, what about adding text in the middle? Easy, look at the following example: $ sed '2i\This is the inserted line.' myfile And the appending works the same way, but look at the position of the appended text: $ sed '2a\This is the appended line.' myfile The same flags are used but with a location of insertion or appending. Modifying Lines To modify a specific line, you can use the (c) flag like this: $ sed '3c\This is a modified line.' myfile You can use a regular expression pattern and all lines match that pattern will be modified. $ sed '/This is/c Line updated.' myfile Transform Characters The transform flag (y) works on characters like this: $ sed 'y/123/567/' myfile The transformation is applied to all data and cannot be limited to a specific occurrence. Print Line Numbers You can print line number using the (=) sign like this: $ sed '=' myfile However, by using -n combined with the equal sign, the sed command displays the line number that contains matching. $ sed -n '/test/=' myfile Read Data From a File You can use the (r) flag to read data from a file. You can define a line number or a text pattern for the text that you want to read. $ cat newfile $ sed '3r newfile' myfile The content is just inserted after the third line as expected. And this is using a text pattern: $ sed '/test/r newfile' myfile Cool right? Useful Examples We have a file that contains text with a placeholder and we have another file that contains the data that will be filled in that placeholder. We will use the (r) and (d) flags to do the job. The word DATA in that file is a placeholder for a real content which is stored in another file called data. We will replace it with the actual content: $ Sed '/DATA>/ { r newfile d}' myfile 1 2 3 4 5 $ Sed '/DATA>/ { r newfile d}' myfile Awesome!! as you can see, the placeholder location is filled with the data from the other file. This is just a very small intro about sed command. Actually, sed Linux command is another world by itself. The only limitation is your imagination. I hope you enjoy what’ve introduced today about the string manipulation using sed Linux command. Thank you.
Near the England-Wales border, over remote and craggy hillside tracks that have been re-routed to end in their back garden, three siblings ride their bikes. Not an uncommon activity, the family bike ride. The exception, in this case, being that the family have often had cause to pop each other's dislocated shoulders back into place. Dan, Gee and Rachel Atherton are at the forefront of the breakneck world of mountain biking. Gee, 24, is the downhill world champion (he had to have his shoulder popped back in by sister Rachel after a crash last December). Dan, the eldest at 27, is a top-10 competitor who specialises in eye-catching jumps (he reset Rachel's shoulder after she rode into a truck in California in January). And Rachel, the youngest at 21, is the downhill women's world champion and winner of last year's season-long World Cup (she's still in recovery from the Californian accident). A decade of tearing down the world's mountains hasn't only made the Athertons the best biking family in the world - it has just about qualified them as freelance surgeons. "If you ever pop your shoulder," says Gee, "give us a call." The three are at home in their Welsh cottage before the UK leg of the World Cup in Fort William on 6 June. If the 2008 season was all thrills - Gee winning the men's downhill title in June after his closest rival crashed out on the final bend, Rachel triumphing on the same day and becoming the first Brit to win the women's world title - 2009 has been more stilted. Her shoulder injury means Rachel is yet to wear the rainbow jersey she earned last year; Gee won the first race of the season but has wavered since, and needs a win in Scotland this month to reboot his title defence. "But we bounce off hype, having everyone watching," says Gee. "And magazines tipping us for wins," says Rachel, finishing his sentence. "It's because we live way out here in the country," adds Dan, "starved of attention and affection." They moved here, to the one-shop village of Llangynog, Powys, in 2004, buying the family home from their mother and transforming it into a bike rider's haven, with a workshop in the front room and a bike track in the garden. They convinced a local farmer to open up his land for competitions, and now riders make the pilgrimage here from all over the country. The willingness of British riders to travel so far to enjoy the terrain is one reason that we have had so much success in world competition recently, says Gee. "Because we don't have as many mountains, we have to work harder to find them and to train. In California or the south of France it's all there for you, but kids in the UK have to want it." Dan was the first to "want it" - he bought a reluctant Gee his first BMX when they were kids so that he would have someone to ride with, and later persuaded Rachel to compete too - but he is the only one in the family not to have won a world title. "All my life I've looked out for Gee and Rach," he says. "Not necessarily a good thing as a professional athlete, because you have to be quite selfish. I'm learning to look after myself a little bit more." Dan has had some decent results this season, but is eyeing up a grander competition. "The three of us have been approached about converting to BMX for the Olympics in London," he says. "The other two are focused on downhill, but it's been on my mind quite a lot." He'll make a decision at the end of the season; meanwhile he's getting into shape in the gym the siblings built in their garage. "I'll need bigger thighs for 2012," he says. "More like Rachel's size." Gee guffaws, Rachel gives him a punch, and then the three grab their bikes and make for the nearest mountain. Today they will tackle a 45-degree incline of loose slate that constantly shifts under-wheel and sends sharp chips of flint shooting up at their ankles. Just another family bike ride. • For more info, go to athertonracing.co.uk; fortwilliamworldcup.co.uk
Our natural creative genius is stifled from the time we are born. At TEDxTucson, Dr. George Land dropped a bombshell when he told his audience about the shocking result of a creativity test developed for NASA but subsequently used to test school children (see the full video below). NASA had contacted Dr George Land and Beth Jarman to develop a highly specialized test that would give them the means to effectively measure the creative potential of NASA’s rocket scientists and engineers. The test turned out to be very successful for NASA’s purposes, but the scientists were left with a few questions: where does creativity come from? Are some people born with it or is it learned? Or does it come from our experience? The scientists then gave the test to 1,600 children between the ages of 4 and 5. What they found shocked them. This is a test that looks at the ability to come up with new, different and innovative ideas to problems. What percentage of those children do you think fell in the genius category of imagination? A full 98 percent! It gets more interesting But this is not the real story. The scientists were so astonished that they decided to make it a longitudinal study and tested the children again five years later when they were ten years old. The result? Only 30 percent of the children now fell in the genius category of imagination. When the kids were tested at 15 years the figure had dropped to 12 percent! What about us adults? How many of us are still in contact with our creative genius after years of schooling? Sadly, only 2 percent. And for those who question the consistency of these results — or think they may be isolated incidences — these results have actually been replicated more than a million times, reports Gavin Nascimento whose article first alerted me to this amazing study and its shocking implication: that the school system, our education, robs us of our creative genius. “The reasoning for this is not too difficult to apprehend; school, as we plainly call it, is an institution that has historically been put in place to ultimately serve the wants of the ruling class, not the common people. “In order for the so-called elite to maintain their lavish life styles of overt luxury — where they contribute the least but enjoy the most — they understand that children must be dumbed down and brainwashed to accept (and even serve) their rapacious system of artificial scarcity, unending exploitation, and incessant war,” writes Nascimento. What now? Can we recuperate our creativity? Land says we have the ability to be at 98 percent if we want to. From what they found from the studies with children and from how brains work, there are two kinds of thinking that take place in the brain. Both use different parts of the brain and it’s a totally different kind of paradigm in the sense of how it forms something in our minds. One is called divergent — that’s imagination, used for generating new possibilities. The other is called convergent — that’s when you’re making a judgement, you’re making a decision, you’re testing something, you’re criticizing, you’re evaluating. So divergent thinking works like an accelerator and convergent thinking puts a brake on our best efforts. “We found that what happens to these children, as we educate them, we teach them to do both kinds of thinking at the same time”, says Land. When someone asks you to come up with new ideas, as you come up with them what you mostly learn at school is to immediately look and see: “We tried that before”, “That’s dumb idea”, “It won’t work” and so forth. This is the point and this is what we must stop doing: “When we actually looking inside the brain we find that neurons are fighting each other and actually diminishing the power of the brain because we’re constantly judging, criticizing and censoring,” says Land. “If we operate under fear we use a smaller part of the brain, but when we use creative thinking the brain just lights up.” What’s the solution? We need to find that five-year old again. That capability that we as a five-year-old possessed, never goes away. “That is something you exercise every day when you’re dreaming,” Land reminds us. How do you go about finding that five-year-old? Land challenges us all: Tomorrow, you take a table fork, turn your five-year-old on and come up with 25 or 30 ideas on how to improve on the table fork. NOW READ: MasterClass review: Are their online classes worth your money? This man just sued the school system. What do you think of his case? NOW WATCH: Do you want to live a creative life? DON’T “set intentions”! Find out why in the video below
There are many ways to abuse yourself: excess alcohol consumption, overeating, and being addicted to shopping or gambling are just a few of them. Any activity you compulsively pursue which harms you in a significant way is self-destructive. As a teen my destructive behavior consisted of spending whole days in front of the computer, overeating, and totally avoiding any physical activity. When I turned eighteen I was drafted to the military service. This forced me to completely and immediately cut these negative patterns out of my life. After leaving the army I fell back on my old self-destructive ways. This took a while to happen because at first I tried to make the most out of my new-found freedom. I was eager to see the world and find my place in it! That I did. Still a year and half later I found myself spending more and more time being immobile in front of the computer while also gaining weight (after losing more than 90 pounds in the army). This went on for several years until I couldn’t take it anymore. It made me miserable, lifeless and depressed. So I set out once more, to change my life for the better. Only this time it was my will that fueled the process, instead of the compulsion to conform to an unforgiving environment like the army. It wasn’t long before I managed to lose most of my excess weight and get rid of almost all of my addictions. Most importantly, unlike before, these positive changes I made in my life were sustainable! I want to share with you the key factors that effectively helped me get rid of my self-destructive tendencies. Begin by cultivating the right attitude for a change I learned that it’s important to start the process by forgiving yourself for pursuing self-destructive activities. Feeling guilty or hating yourself for it will actually give you more reasons and drive to continue behaving self-destructively. These negative feelings also tell your subconscious you wish to continue harming yourself. By forgiving yourself you break the ongoing circle of guilt and self-hate, which leads to self-abuse, which leads to more guilt and self-hate. It also tells your subconscious you wish to approach this part of your life in a more constructive and empowering way. Accept that you are not alone in this; every person abuses himself in one way or another. Life is hard and we are not born with an instruction manual on how to go about it. Instead, we learn how to live properly as time passes and there’s no way to avoid making mistakes along the way. Sometimes these mistakes stick and become a part of us. It happens. Stop comparing yourself with other people who you view as perfect. Chances are they are just good at hiding their faults. Even if they are less self-destructive than you are, they didn’t become like that overnight. If you still find yourself comparing you will be better off to use them as inspiration rather than a reason to reject who you are. The antidote for self-destruction is love and self-acceptance. It makes a lot of sense doesn’t it? Most people don’t realize it though, and try to fight self-abuse by directing more of it at themselves in the form of self-rejection. Don’t. You can’t build a better life for yourself based on negativity. Practical tips for weeding out self-abuse from your life 1. Take responsibility for your actions Acknowledge that your self-destructive habits are the outcome of your decisions and actions in the past. Know that you can create new empowering habits in much the same way and make a conscious decision to do so. This way you will stop being a helpless victim and become a purposeful leader of your life. This step is crucial as self-destruction is often used as a way to escape your inability to deal with parts of your life. When you stop feeling helpless, and start taking charge of your life you wouldn’t need to turn to destructive behavior anymore. 2. Know your enemy There’s no use charging blindly forward and trying to change your bad habits by will power alone. The more you learn about your problems, their causes and ways of solving them – the better. Luckily for you, attaining such knowledge these days is not a problem. The Internet is filled with detailed advice written by people who succeeded in what you’re striving to achieve. You never know what treasures of insight or inspiration you might find. 3. Eliminate as many self-destructive habits as you can at the same time This goes against the popular approach of gradually making changes in your life. I admit this step is not suitable for everyone, but it is super effective! In my experience self-destruction breeds and supports more of its kind. In the past when I tried to tackle only one of my issues at a time I found it hard to maintain and the results were short lasting. For example: I tried to be more productive in my spare time, before attempting to get rid of my addiction to sugar. Now, consuming sugar makes me moody, lowers my energy and harms my concentration. Needless to say, it was hard for me to change my habits and be productive under these circumstances, and so I gave up after a while. Getting rid of all of your bad habits all at once is hard at first, but is much easier on the long run then the gradual approach. This way you leave no doors open for your self-destruction to use in order to creep back into your life. This means less struggling for you. Also, since getting rid of addictions usually starts with nasty withdrawal symptoms – why not suffer all of them all at once instead of finishing with one before moving on to the other? 4. Deal with the root causes of your bad habits As I stated earlier, self-abusive behavior is usually a form of escapism. Observe your life; what are you running away from? What are the issues you can’t deal with? Maybe you are in an unhealthy relationship you don’t know how to change, or you do know but your partner is not cooperating with you. Maybe you can’t deal with all that life demands of you. Maybe you’ve been hurt so many times that you’ve got stuck in survival mode. These are just a few examples. Whatever the roots of your self-abusive behavior may be, identifying and dealing with them will do you a world of good and make the process much more effective and sustainable. Try to talk about it with your friends, as they are likely to see things that you are not aware of regarding your problems. In case you have big scary issues to deal with don’t hesitate to see a professional about them. There’s no shame in wanting to improve your situation. Life is too interesting and fun to miss out on just because you are too proud to seek help. 5. Don’t feel deprived Don’t tell yourself that you can’t indulge in the things you’re trying to avoid (TV, cigarettes, eating junk food). It will only make you feel deprived, which in turn will make you want to compensate yourself by giving in to your craving. Instead, think about the negative impact these things had on your life in the past and say to yourself “I can have them, but I choose not to.” This is a very effective advice that helped me resist temptation on many occasions. I believe I learned about it from Jon Gabriel. 6. Replace bad habits with their opposites I’ve heard about many people who have tried to compensate themselves for quitting smoking by letting themselves eat as much as they want. Self-destructive behavior is a way for us to “deal” with hardships in our life, by making things worse. If you got rid of one bad habit just to replace it with another one, you’ve done nothing. Instead, strive to replace your destructive habits with constructive ones and after a while you will never want things to go back to the way they were! What self-destructive behaviors do you have? How are you dealing with them? Please share your experiences in the comments below. Photo by martinak15
Icelandic whalers, fed up with animal welfare groups telling them to stop killing whales, have found a new way to make money and persuade people of their point of view. From next month they will invite tourists to go out to sea with them to watch minke and other whales close-up. The holidaymakers will then get to "experience" the life of a whaler, see and hear harpoons being fired, touch a whale tail, inspect the internal organs of whales and sit down for a tasty meal of blubber and whale meat with the captain. "We won't actually kill any whales", said Gunnar Jonsson, the manager and owner of Hrefnuveiðimanna, Iceland's Minke Whalers Association. "The idea is to take people out in the close season to give them an idea of what we do. This is cultural tourism. There has been a lot of interest. We have bookings from groups in England and Germany." The news comes as more than 100 pro- and anti-whaling countries prepare for the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting in Jersey next week. They will hear that the Japanese tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear accident in March may have impacted heavily on whale populations in the north Pacific. According to French conservation group Robin des Bois, large numbers of young minke whales were passing close to the Fukushima reactors around the time of the accident. Apart from the massive debris and pollution from destroyed industrial facilities, nuclear company Tepco has admitted dumping tens of thousands of tonnes of highly radioactive water into the sea since the tsunami. Two minke whales caught off the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido have shown elevated values of caesium–137. Japan – which along with Norway and Iceland is one of the few countries to allow commercial whaling – is believed to be reconsidereing its whaling position following the tsunami, which wiped out one of the country's main whaling ports and seriously damaged its ageing fleet. Jonsson hopes to charge tourists visiting Iceland between $200-$300 and take them out in groups of 15 to 20. "We have seen that people enjoy whale-watching, and many people ask us how whaling is done, but we are not going to push whaling. Now they can learn about the culture." But the unusual tourist offering was dismissed by Iceland's whale-watching industry as "not welcome". "We are not happy with this. There is not much profit in whaling these days so we think it is a way to drum up their business which is selling whale meat," said Rannveig Grétarsdóttir, head of IceWhale, the Icelandic whale-watching association. From only a few tourists 10 years ago, nearly 200,000 foreigners now go whale-watching off Iceland every year, says the government's tourist ministry. But the boom in numbers has also led to an unexpected surge in whale-eating, with more than 100 restaurants and shops now offering tourists whale as an exotic meat. This is very distressing for conservation groups which this week appealed to tourists to watch whales – but not to touch them. "Iceland's whalers are putting more effort into promoting the sale of whale meat and are now offering smoked and marinated whale meat in addition to whale steaks for grilling. Sadly, we are seeing increasing numbers of tourists walking off whale watching vessels and straight into restaurants that serve whale meat. They are inadvertently helping to keep the cruel whaling industry afloat," says Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society spokeswoman Vanessa Williams-Grey. "We ask that people resist the temptation to give the meat a try despite whatever they may be told by local whale hunters. The fact is that only a small percentage of Icelandic people eat the meat these days. The whales suffer a long and slow death, they are not suitable as a species for human harvesting and, contrary to myth, they are not responsible for reducing local fish stocks." There is also increasing evidence that whalers and whale watching companies are now chasing the same whales, giving tourists an unexpected insight into the industry. "On at least one occasion this season, the minke whalers killed and processed a whale in waters designated as a protected area in Faxaflói Bay, near Reykjavik, also a prime whale watch area," said Williams-Grey.
When, a decade ago, Slovenia was about to join the European Union, one of our Eurosceptics offered a sarcastic paraphrase of a Marx brothers joke about getting a lawyer: Do we, Slovenes, have troubles? Let us join the EU! We will have even more troubles, but we will have the EU to take care of them! This is how many Slovenes now perceive the EU: it brings some help, but it also brings new problems (regulations and fines, financial demands to help Greece, etc). So is the EU worth defending? The real question is, of course, which EU? A century ago, Gilbert Keith Chesterton clearly deployed the fundamental deadlock of the critics of religion: "Men who begin to fight the church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the church … The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them." The same holds true for the advocates of religion themselves. How many fanatical defenders of religion started out attacking secular culture and ended up forsaking any meaningful religious experience? In a similar way, many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they end up flinging away freedom and democracy themselves. If the "terrorists" are ready to wreck this world for love of another world, our warriors on terror are ready to wreck their own democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are even ready to legalise torture – the ultimate degradation of human dignity – to defend it. And does the same not hold also for the recent rise of the defenders of Europe against the immigrant threat? In their zeal to protect the Judeo-Christian legacy, the new zealots are ready to forsake the true heart of the Christian legacy: that each individual has an immediate access to the universality of the Holy Spirit (or, today, of human rights and freedoms); that I can participate in this universal dimension directly, irrespective of my special place within the global social order. Christ's "scandalous" words from Luke point in the direction of a universality which ignores every social hierarchy: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes even his own life – he cannot be my disciple" (14:26) Family relations stand here for any particular ethnic or hierarchic social link that determines our place in the global order of things. The "hatred" enjoined by Christ is therefore not the opposite of Christian love, but its direct expression: it is love itself that enjoins us to "disconnect" from our organic community into which we were born, or, as St Paul put it, for a Christian, there are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks. No wonder that, for those fully identified with a particular way of life, the appearance of Christ was perceived as ridiculous or traumatic. But the impasse of Europe reaches much deeper. The real problem is that the critics of the anti-immigrant wave, who should defend this precious core of the European legacy, instead tend to limit themselves to the endless ritual of confessing Europe's own sins, of humbly accepting the limitations of the European legacy, and of celebrating the wealth of other cultures. The famous lines from William Butler Yeats's Second Coming render perfectly our present predicament: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists, Muslim as well as our own, Christian. "The best" are no longer able fully to engage, while "the worst" engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism. How can we break out of this deadlock? A recent debate in Germany may indicate the way. Last October, the chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared at a meeting of young members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union: "This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other, has failed. Utterly failed." With this, she was echoing the debate about Leitkultur (the dominant culture) from a couple of years ago, when conservatives insisted that every state was based on a predominant cultural space which the members of other cultures who live in the same space should respect. Instead of bemoaning the newly emerging racist Europe, such statements announce, we should be self-critical, asking to what extent our own abstract multiculturalism contributed to this sad state of things. If all sides do not share or respect the same civility, then multiculturalism turns into legally regulated mutual ignorance or hatred. The conflict about multiculturalism already is one about Leitkultur: it is not a conflict between cultures, but between different visions of how different cultures can and should co-exist, about the rules and practices these cultures have to share if they are to co-exist. One should thus avoid getting caught in the liberal game of "how much tolerance can we afford": should we tolerate it if they prevent their children going to state schools? If they force their women to dress in a certain way? If they arrange marriages or brutalise gay people? At this level, of course, we are never tolerant enough, or we are already too tolerant, neglecting the rights of women, gay people etc. The only way to break out of this deadlock is to propose and fight for a positive universal project shared by all participants. Struggles where "there are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks" are many, from ecology to the economy. Some months ago, a small miracle happened in the occupied West Bank: Palestinian women who were demonstrating against the wall were joined by a group of Jewish lesbian women from Israel. The initial mutual mistrust was dispelled in the first confrontation with the Israeli soldiers guarding the wall, and a sublime solidarity developed, with a traditionally dressed Palestinian woman embracing a Jewish lesbian with spiked purple hair – a living symbol of what our struggle should be. So, perhaps, the Slovenian Eurosceptic missed the point with his Marx brothers sarcasm. Instead of losing time with the costs and benefits analysis of our membership in the EU, we should focus on what the EU effectively stands for. Mostly, it acts as a regulator of global capitalist development; sometimes, it flirts with the conservative defence of its tradition. Both these paths lead to oblivion, to Europe's marginalisation. The only way out of this debilitating deadlock is for Europe to resuscitate its legacy of radical and universal emancipation. The task is to move beyond mere tolerance of others to a positive emancipatory Leitkultur which can sustain authentic co-existence. Don't just respect others, offer a common struggle, since our problems today are common.
Back in 2008, the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft made a fascinating discovery when it found a metres-deep cave in the Sea of Tranquility. Amazed by the find, NASA had its orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) to have in the depth scan of the area, which came back with high res images, like the one above. Scientists believe these are actually entrances to a complex labyrinth of lunar tunnels. Now, one of the most renowned Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev claims that these caves are actually an idea spot for placing a colony. “They could be entrances to a geologic wonderland,” Mark Robinson of Arizona State University, principal investigator for the LRO camera, said in 2010. “We believe the giant holes are skylights that formed when the ceilings of underground lava tubes collapsed.” The lunar tunnels are thought to have formed during the moon’s early history, when it had active volcanoes and streams of lava used to flow in tubes. “This new discovery that the moon may be a rather porous body could significantly alter our approach to founding lunar bases,” said Krikalev. “There wouldn’t be any need to dig the lunar soil and build walls and ceilings. It would be enough to use an inflatable module with a hard outer shell to — roughly speaking — seal the caves.” The moon’s surface is extremely harsh, and any eventual based built on it would get exposed to copious amounts of radiation and meteor showers. Underground, however, such a based would be ideally placed, protected a number of hazardous factors. It would be, in fact, a lot more cost effective, as well, since instead of building walls or setting up modules, an inflatable tent would be put to use, with its hard outer shell sealing the tunnel. Boris Kryuchkov, the deputy science head at the training centre, estimates that the first lunar colony could be built by 2030. Krikalev has more than two years cumulative time in space, is the first Russian to fly aboard the space shuttle, a MIR astronaut on several missions, part of the first International Space Station crew, a return as mission commander for another crew a few years ago. source Enjoyed this article? Join 40,000+ subscribers to the ZME Science newsletter. Subscribe now!
Boy and girl expelled from strict £22,000-a-year Catholic school for having sex in a dormitory Two pupils were asked to leave a leading Catholic public school after they confessed to having sex. The boy and girl, aged 17 and 16, were caught in bed together at Stonyhurst College by a member of staff. They are understood to have admitted having sex several times previously at the strict Jesuit school. The £22,000-a-year Stonyhurst College, set in the green countryside of Lancashire, where two students have been expelled for sleeping together Headmaster Andrew Johnson They were asked to leave and chose to do so rather than being expelled. Traditionalists were outraged when girls were admitted to the school in 1999 after more than 400 years of admitting only boys. Their fears appear to have been confirmed by the scandal. Headmaster Andrew Johnson described the incident as a 'private matter'. He said: 'Stonyhurst promotes Catholic teaching on morality and relationships. If any individual falls short of the high standards we encourage, we take proportionate and timely action.' A school spokesman added that the incident occurred within the last month. A sixth former close to the couple involved said last night: 'It's sad they've been asked to leave because they have been going out together for a while. 'They live quite a distance apart so won't see as much of each other.' Another added: 'Many pupils have boyfriends and girlfriends but this type of behaviour is unusual. Relationships go on, but you don't hear of people ending up in bed together.' Full annual boarding fees at the school, which has 308 boys and 131 girls aged 13 to 18, are £22,368. Girls are provided with separate sleeping accommodation from the boys. Stonyhurst, which has magnificent grounds and buildings near Clitheroe, Lancashire, began admitting girls in the belief there was increasing demand for mixed schooling among Catholic parents. The move did indeed lead to a rise in numbers. However, difficulties soon ensued. In 2000 it was claimed there had been problems of drunkenness at the school - and that 80 boys and girls had performed an end-of-term streak. At the same time, it was claimed sixth formers had been compelled to attend a 'health for young people' presentation, where a female doctor gave advice about contraception, including the morning-after pill, which she said was available from school doctors. Commenting at the time, a school source said: 'There is a tradition in the school of endof-term japes. Some sixth-formersdo run up and down the avenue naked. But is that a sexual act? No. 'As for the allegations about the morning-after pill, these matters are confidential. Any pupil over the age of 16 is entitled to go to the doctor and discuss things in total confidence.' The school's then-headmaster Adrian Aylward claimed that the allegations were 'a gross misrepresentation and distortion of the facts'. He said: 'There is no evidence of an institutional abdication of responsibility regarding pastoral care and discipline, nor is there a crisis in discipline and moral standards.'
by Robert Devet The Sable Gully has been a marine protected area for ten years. This large and deep submarine valley or canyon sustains a wide variety of marine wildlife. Map DFO The endangered bottlenose whale is a year-round resident of the Sable Gully, a Marine Protected area. A cal for bids for oil and gas exploration adjacent to the Gully has marine biologists worried. Photo H. Moors K'JIPUKTUK, HALIFAX - Scientists fear that a recently issued call for bids for offshore oil and gas exploration is too close to the critical habitat of the endangered northern bottlenose whale. The call for bids encompasses areas directly adjacent to the Sable Gully, a world renowned Marine Protected Area, and also includes parts of the adjacent Shortland and Haldimand canyons 200 kilometres off the coast of Nova Scotia. "In this particular call for bids, we are near very sensitive areas and around very sensitive species," says Tonya Wimmer, a Halifax-based marine biologist and Species Conservation Manager with the World Wildlife Fund Canada. The Sable Gully and the two canyons are the year-round habitat of an endangered population of about 200 bottlenose whales. A wide variety of dolphins, leatherback turtles and orca also pass through the area, as do blue whales, sperm whales and Sowerby's beaked whales. Wimmer is worried about the effects on marine wildlife when blasts of compressed air are fired in rapid succession by airguns positioned on up to five ships traveling in formation – not just once in a while, but for days on end. These blasts generate seismic waves which allow scientists to map the geological strata below the ocean floor. Such seismic testing is part of all early stages of offshore oil and gas exploration. It gets very noisy, says Wimmer, who spent time doing research in the area between 2000 and 2002. "There were people in the middle of the Atlantic, and the seismic activities off our coast would be the dominant noise they would hear." "For these whales the environment is really an acoustic one," says Wimmer. "They can see fine, but sound input determines how they find their mates in the community, how they find their food at the great depths that they dive to." "I always compare it with somebody flashing a bright light into your face. How would you know not to walk into traffic, how would you know not to fall off a cliff," she adds. The Canada Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board (CNSOPB) issued the call for bids. The CNSOPB, a joint venture of the federal government and the province, manages Nova Scotia's offshore oil and gas resources. It solicits proposals and issues licenses for offshore oil and gas activities. Both rig workers' safety and protecting the ocean are within the mandate of the CNSOPB. In 2012 BP Exploration Canada paid $1-billion for the right to search for oil in an adjacent parcel. Shell Canada also is active in the Nova Scotia offshore. In an email dated May 15, CNSOPB spokesperson Kathleen Funke explains that a successful bidder is required to submit an environmental assessment, including measures to protect the bottlenose whale and other ocean wildlife from harm. "These measures would include having Marine Mammal Observers on board as well as Fisheries Liaison Officers, stopping the engines if marine mammals are spotted within a certain radius, avoiding certain areas during known migration, etc.," writes Funke. In a follow-up email, Funke states that just because the canyons are included in the call for bids does not mean they will necessarily become subject to seismic testing. That remains to be determined, she writes. Lindy Weilgart, a Dalhousie University research associate in Biology, has studied the effects of seismic testing on marine wildlife since she was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University. Whether the canyons are included or not, they are too close, Weilgart says. Sound travels. Weilgart does not think the measures suggested by the CNSOPB will be effective. For instance, avoiding the area during migration will not work because the bottlenose whale is a year-round resident. Although the presence of observers on the ships is better than nothing, Weilgart argues, they are likely to miss most of the whales present because of fog, stormy weather and seismic activities at night. "There are new studies about blue whales, who are very visible, they have that high vertical blow and they're the world's largest animals, even those sightings plummet when there is even a slight breeze," Weilgart warns. "Sightings for bottlenose whales are going to be way worse than that," Weilgart says. "The best estimates are that you will see two per cent – the ones right in front of you." Wimmer believes that we simply don't know enough about the effects of seismic testing on marine wildlife, and that therefore we should err on the side of caution. "Studies on impact on whales from loud sound sources are mostly inconclusive in the sense that there are animals that respond kilometers away [from the sound source] and others that don't respond when the sound is right next to them," says Wimmer. "But even if they don't respond, that doesn't mean that it doesn't impact them. Maybe the area is so important that they can't leave." Wimmer adds that scientists have yet to determine the safe distance between seismic activity and marine wildlife habitat. "The precautionary principle is something that guides how as a government you are supposed to behave when you don't have all the info," she says. "The idea of putting the call for bids right on to on top of the canyons and right nest to the Sable Gully protected area is counter-intuitive and not precautionary. See also Newfoundland Petroleum Board gives go ahead to oil and gas exploration in Gulf of St. Lawrence Hunt for oil in the Gulf of St. Lawrence intensifies Drilling for oil off the coast of Nova Scotia Offshore seismic testing puts wildlife at risk, biologist fears Follow Robert Devet on Twitter @DevetRobert
USDA: Warming Will Devastate Agriculture February 7, 2013 Phil Robertson is a senior crop and soils researcher at Michigan State University, and a contributing author of the forthcoming US Global Change Research Program report on climate change. I interviewed Dr. Robertson in early July, 2012, as the drought was deepening, and the realization was setting in that we were in a historically intense dry period. I clipped the middle part where we discussed drought events that were current at that moment – what’s most interesting is his generic assessment of the science on “co2 fertilization” and what deniers like to call the “greening of planet earth”. I should see Phil again next week at a Town Hall meeting in Ann Arbor, which will go over some of the key findings of the newest iteration of the Global Change Research report. One of the most absurd of Climate denial myths, and therefore one of the most cherished – is that “CO2 is good for plants” – therefore, global warming will benefit agriculture. The logic is, apparently, that Co2 is an inconsequential trace atmospheric gas that has no effect,… and is critical to all life on the planet. To follow up on this, you could, of course, poll midwest farmers to find out how all that co2 has been helping with crops during this ongoing drought, do a quick review of grain price trends.. Or, you could, as the USDA has, review 1400 technical publications on the topic. Farm Futures: …the agricultural report indicates increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, rising temperatures, and altered precipitation patterns will affect agricultural productivity. USDA says the changing climate will exacerbate the stresses already occurring from weeds, insects, and disease. Additionally, increases in the incidence of extreme weather events will have an increasing influence on agricultural productivity. Over the next 25 years, the effects of climate change on agricultural production and economic outcomes for both producers and consumers in the United States are expected to be mixed, depending on regional conditions. Beyond 2050, changes are expected to include shifts in crop production areas, increases in pest control expenses, and greater disease prevalence. Although some regions will be affected more than others, these disturbances are likely to change the structure and function of ecosystems across millions of acres over a short period of time. A special report on forestry notes how forests will be affected – anticipated changes include increased tree mortality, changes in species assemblages, and reduced water quality. USA Today: WASHINGTON — Climate change could have a drastic and harmful effect on U.S. agriculture, forcing farmers and ranchers to alter where they grow crops and costing them millions of dollars in additional costs to tackle weeds, pests and diseases that threaten their operations, a sweeping government report said Tuesday. An analysis released by the Agriculture Department said that although U.S. crops and livestock have been able to adapt to changes in their surroundings for close to 150 years, the accelerating pace and intensity of global warming during the next few decades may soon be too much for the once-resilient sector to overcome. “We’re going to end up in a situation where we have a multitude of things happening that are going to negatively impact crop production,” said Jerry Hatfield, a laboratory director and plant physiologist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and lead author of the study. “In fact, we saw this in 2012 with the drought.” By the middle of the century and beyond, adaptation becomes more difficult and costly as plants and animals that have adapted to warming climate conditions will have to do so even more — making the productivity of crops and livestock increasingly more unpredictable. Temperature increases and more extreme swings in precipitation could lead to a drop in yield for major U.S. crops and reduce the profitability of many agriculture operations. The reason is that higher temperatures cause crops to mature more quickly, reducing the growing season and yields as a result. Faster growth could reduce grain, forage, fiber and fruit production if the plants can’t get the proper level of nutrients or water. Among the biggest threat to crops from rising temperatures and accelerated levels of carbon dioxide is an increase in the cost for the agricultural industry to control weeds, a challenge that tops more than $11 billion annually, according to the study. Warmer weather provides an ideal atmosphere for weeds to thrive, but at the same time, it can stunt the growth of traditional plants like grain and soybeans. – The USDA review said climate change will affect livestock by throwing off an animal’s optimal core body temperature, which could hurt productivity and limit the production of meat, milk or eggs. A warmer and more humid weather pattern is likely to increase the prevalence of insect and diseases, further diminishing an animal’s health and output. The 146-page report, written by a team of 56 authors from the federal government, universities, the private sector and other groups, stopped short of providing answers on how to stop or curtail global warming. The analysis was done by reviewing more than 1,400 publications that looked at the effect of climate change on U.S. agriculture. US Global Change Research Program – draft report for 2013 – Chapter 18, “The Midwest” – Key messages: 1. In the next few decades, longer growing seasons and rising carbon dioxide levels will increase yields of some crops, though those benefits will be increasingly offset by the occurrence of extreme events such as heat waves, droughts, and floods. In the long term, combined stresses associated with climate change are expected to decrease agricultural productivity, especially without significant advances in genetic and agronomic technology. Below, the “CO2 is Plant Food” Crock: Advertisements
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Government forces in the heart of Homs. Paul Wood reports Syrian government forces have retaken control of the Old City of Homs after the evacuation of rebel troops. State television declared on Thursday that the Old City was "totally clean of armed terrorist groups" but officials later confirmed that the evacuation was not fully over. Earlier, Homs Governor Talal al-Barazi said more than 1,500 fighters and their relatives had left since Wednesday. The evacuation marks the end of three years of resistance in Homs. Syria's third city was once dubbed the "capital of the revolution". Much of Homs fell to the opposition in 2011, but over the past two years government forces have gradually regained control by subjecting areas once home to tens of thousands to continuous siege and bombardment. Above all, the rebels leaving Homs seemed tired. That is not surprising after being cut-off for two years, but it is a feeling you hear expressed more and more often War-weariness key to ending fight over Homs In pictures: Homs evacuated in ruins 'Secure city' Government forces took full control of the heart of Homs on Thursday, state media said, after rebels in the Old City boarded buses and were transported to rebel-held territory to the north. "Old Homs is totally clean of armed terrorist groups," state television said, using the government's term for those seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad. However, Syrian officials have since told the BBC that 280 fighters are still to be evacuated from the city, and the process will resume on Friday. Earlier Mr Barazi and UN officials were also quoted as saying the evacuation was not fully over. Mr Barazi said Homs would be declared a "secure city" once the UN-supervised evacuation was complete, and that reconstruction would begin immediately. The army is expected to move in fully on Friday, when the Old City will be swept for explosives. Image copyright AP Image caption Buses began transporting the rebels to rebel-held territory north of Homs on Wednesday morning Image copyright AP Image caption On Thursday afternoon, Syrian state TV declared that the Old City had been "cleansed of terrorists" Image copyright Reuters Image caption Homs Governor Talal al-Barazi and the UN's resident co-ordinator, Yacoub El Hillo, visited the area Image copyright AFP Image caption The withdrawal was part of a deal that also saw rebels release dozens of captives and ease two sieges Earlier, Hezbollah's al-Manar television broadcast footage of a group of rebel fighters walking past security forces personnel and boarding several green buses. There were similar scenes on Wednesday, when 980 people were evacuated. The fighters, who were each allowed to leave with a rifle and a bag of belongings, pledged to continue the armed struggle and one day return. Speaking to the BBC at the end of the first day of the operation, the UN's resident co-ordinator in Syria, Yacoub El Hillo, said he hoped Homs would now be free from violence. Battle for Homs March 2011: Anti-government protests erupt in Homs within weeks of them beginning in Deraa Anti-government protests erupt in Homs within weeks of them beginning in Deraa May 2011: Tanks sent into Homs to suppress the dissent; opposition supporters take up arms and oust security forces from several areas Tanks sent into Homs to suppress the dissent; opposition supporters take up arms and oust security forces from several areas February-March 2012: Military launches operation designed to crush the resistance in Homs; Baba Amr district subjected to month of relentless bombardment before rebels withdraw Military launches operation designed to crush the resistance in Homs; Baba Amr district subjected to month of relentless bombardment before rebels withdraw May 2012: Between 15% and 20% of Homs under opposition control, including Old City Between 15% and 20% of Homs under opposition control, including Old City March 2013 : Government launches major offensive to consolidate its control of Homs : Government launches major offensive to consolidate its control of Homs July 2013: Rebels leave Khalidiya district after government assault including Hezbollah fighters Rebels leave Khalidiya district after government assault including Hezbollah fighters January 2014: Only Old City still held by rebels; up to 3,000 civilians trapped there, without access to food and medical supplies Only Old City still held by rebels; up to 3,000 civilians trapped there, without access to food and medical supplies February 2014: UN-Red Crescent operation evacuates 1,400 people from rebel-held areas UN-Red Crescent operation evacuates 1,400 people from rebel-held areas May 2014: Rebel fighters evacuated from Old City Homs: Syrian revolution's 'capital' He expressed hope that people would be able to return to their homes, but he cautioned against rushing back because the area was "inundated with unexploded ordnance, including landmines and booby traps". The Old City was "incredibly and comprehensively destroyed" and was currently "uninhabitable", Mr Hillo said, adding that it would be a "huge task" to rebuild and restore homes and infrastructure. The withdrawal is part of a deal that will also see rebels release 70 captives in Aleppo and Latakia provinces, and ease sieges of two predominantly Shia towns in the north - Nubul and Zahraa - that are loyal to President Assad. Mr Barazi told the BBC that those released by the rebels were all Syrians, with the exception of an Iranian woman married to a Syrian man. Efforts to ensure the release of other captives were continuing, he added. The agreement followed months of negotiations between security officials and rebel representatives, reportedly mediated by the Iranian ambassador to Syria. There is now only one district in Homs - al-Wair in the north-western outskirts - that is still controlled by the opposition. However, Mr Barazi said he expected a similar evacuation deal to be reached in the coming weeks. More than 150,000 people are believed to have been killed since the uprising against President Assad began in March 2011. Another nine million have fled their homes. Despite the conflict, the Syrian government is planning to hold a presidential election on 3 June. The opposition have dismissed the poll, which Mr Assad is widely expected to win, as a farce.
NEARLY 30 YEARS after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian writers continue to channel the “Red Century” into vicious satire, bizarre fantasy, and dark prophecy. Just in time for the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution, two major post-Soviet authors — Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin — have come out with new novels: Manaraga (Sorokin) and The Lamp of Methuselah, or the Cheka’s Final Battle with the Freemasons (Pelevin). Although both novels exhibit the postmodern stylistic flourishes that made their authors famous, they temper the skepticism toward metanarratives that is one of postmodernism’s defining features. Indeed, both Sorokin and Pelevin embed their dystopian visions in that quintessential form of metanarrative: the conspiracy theory. This post-postmodern turn in Russian fiction reflects recent cultural developments both inside and outside of Russia. Far from hastening the final collapse of narrative, social-media-fueled information overload and the discrediting of traditional sources of authority have given it new life. After decades of fragmentation, emotional detachment, and winking irony, conventional storytelling is back with a vengeance. It’s in your YouTube vlogs, inspiring you to follow the lives of internet strangers with earnest enthusiasm. It’s in your fiction, getting you to suspend your disbelief and feel something real for a change. And, of course, it’s in your politics, lurking behind every newly influential Breitbart headline. In accordance with this trend, Sorokin and Pelevin center their novels on the life and death of all kinds of stories, from literary canons to state ideologies. Sorokin’s Manaraga, named after a peak in the northern Ural Mountains, takes place in a not-too-distant cyberpunk future. As one character helpfully notes, it has been 92 years since the historical rupture of 1945, meaning it is 2037 — a scant two decades ahead of the extradiegetic present. Having eked out a narrow victory in an apocalyptic conflict with an unspecified Islamic foe, the West is tentatively beginning to reconstruct itself. Desperate for entertainment after years of privation and bloodshed, the global elite has turned to “book’n’grills,” in which outlaw “chefs” prepare thematic feasts over flames kindled with first editions of literary classics, colloquially known as “logs.” Conventional books are now the purview of museums, archives, and enterprising lawbreakers, like Manaraga’s first-person narrator, Geza Yasnodvorsky. In the absence of books themselves, humanity’s thirst for narrative is undiminished. It’s just that, as Geza puts it, “the age of Gutenberg has ended with the triumph of electricity.” At first, scorching books for fun and profit was perfectly legal. Within half a year’s time, however, “humanity had to declare the book’n’grill a crime not only against culture, but against civilization as a whole.” It was then that Geza and his fellow “chefs” were forced underground, and into narrow professional specialties. Geza’s forte is Russian literature, though he has never read a single Russian novel. Luckily, he “knows all the classics by heart” — thanks to expensive subcutaneous implants known as “smart fleas.” Like Douglas Adams’s intergalactic hitchhikers, residents of Sorokin’s 2037 have centuries of accumulated knowledge at their neuron-tips, though not everyone can afford the privilege of a fully electrified brain. Geza’s own erudition comes at a steep price: he must periodically upgrade his “fleas” or risk losing the mental acuity that enables him to stay one step ahead of the law. Sorokin uses his peripatetic protagonist to take us on a picaresque tour of the brave new world of 2037. This technique recalls the gallery of grotesques Nikolai Gogol unfurls in his classic picaresque epic Dead Souls (1842), a work Geza speculates would go great with a nice rib eye. But the amusing vignettes that fill the first half of Manaraga are mere appetizers for the conspiratorial main course. As it turns out, there is a plot afoot to render the artisanal book’n’grilling perfected by Geza and his peers obsolete. Deep within frosty Manaraga, a renegade chef named Henri has created a machine that will mass-produce first editions, starting with Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada — itself an alternative history set on an anti-Earth called Demonia. After luring Geza to his lair, Henri drugs him and surgically divests him of his “fleas.” Geza’s mind becomes slow and plodding, which simultaneously frustrates Henri’s attempts to engage him in Bond-villain-style repartee and aptly illustrates the pitfalls of intellectual outsourcing. Henri’s dream of transforming book’n’grills from an illicit luxury into a widely accessible, decriminalized bourgeois amusement does not impress the purist Geza. Realizing that his rival will never join him voluntarily, Henri knocks him out again and implants him with a new, more agreeable “flea.” Resistance becomes not merely futile, but literally unthinkable. At first glance, Sorokin’s novel appears to cap off a series of postmodern experiments that began with The Norm (1979–1983), which reimagined Leonid Brezhnev’s Russia as a place where every citizen is required by law to ingest a daily “norm” of human feces. Many of Sorokin’s other novels caricature cultural consumption by equating it with cannibalism or drug addiction. No less opposed to pure aestheticism than one of his own frequent targets — Leo Tolstoy in his dotage — Sorokin has spent much of his literary career trying to break readers’ dependence on narrative convention. Marina’s Thirtieth Love (1982–1984), for example, is a seemingly ordinary bildungsroman — until its heroine joins the Party, whereupon the novel abandons all pretense of plot and dissolves into leaden bureaucratese. Since the early 2000s, Sorokin has deployed his postmodern toolkit of puns and pastiche to larger allegorical ends, as in Day of the Oprichnik (2006), another near-future dystopia that follows a member of the neo-medieval tsar’s inner circle as he goes about his daily routine of murder and rape. If Oprichnik is post-postmodern prophecy, Manaraga belongs to an equally atavistic genre: the manifesto. Beneath its postmodern trappings, Manaraga cries out against the injustice of corporate fat cats co-opting high art for personal gain. Never mind that Geza’s “art” is itself destructive, reducing to pork-flavored dust the remnants of a global cultural legacy already decimated by war and neglect. This twist demonstrates that Sorokin is still a master of postmodern irony, who is fully conscious of the cultural degradation his generation inherited. Depressingly, the virtual illiteracy of his characters only encourages their obsession with “the classics”: their obliteration of volumes by Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky is predicated on a primitive, unreflective reverence for these authors. Meanwhile, the literature Geza and his clients deem second-rate — including Soviet-era Socialist Realism and everything written after 1991 — is priced in bulk or simply left to biodegrade. By drawing a clear parallel between the technological annihilation of Geza’s consciousness and the commodification of his craft, Sorokin suggests that the grand cultural narrative ends not with a bang, but with a whimper: not in an orgy of postmodern experimentation, but with the triumph of cold, hard cash. ¤ Like Sorokin, Pelevin made his name by concocting baroque postmodern confections. His mesmerizing dreamscapes typically modulate a seemingly genuine engagement with Russian history and Eastern philosophy with heavy doses of sarcasm and pop-cultural reference. Whereas Sorokin tends to focus his attention on the present or near future, Pelevin’s works often creatively reinterpret key episodes in Soviet and post-Soviet history. The short story “A World of Crystal” (1991) attributes Lenin’s infiltration of Petrograd in October 1917 to the inattentiveness of two Oskar Spengler–quoting, cocaine-addled officers, while the novel Generation P (1999) ascribes the chaos of the Boris Yeltsin years to the political elite’s allegiance to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, locally incarnated in ads for fizzy drinks and shady financial services. The Lamp of Methuselah, or the Cheka’s Final Battle with the Freemasons is Pelevin’s most expansive project to date. The extravagantly titled four-part opus casts present-day Russia as an appendage of its own state security apparatus, especially the FSB (formerly the KGB, formerly the NKVD, formerly the GPU, originally the Cheka). The FSB, in turn, turns out to be in league with Freemasons, bearded hipsters, and otherworldly “reptiloids.” For all this apparent arbitrariness, Pelevin’s tale manages to be unusually communicative, as though the author ventured too far into the enchanted forest of postmodern irony and emerged on the other end as a sincere version of his previous self. In Methuselah, the conspiracy that links his many freakish characters and set pieces has assumed such vast proportions that it threatens to engulf the author himself. If readers can look past the surprisingly detailed descriptions of sex with planks of wood or the exhausting reptiloid monologues that occupy so many of the novel’s pages, they might find themselves wondering if Pelevin has started to believe in his own inventions. Methuselah’s plot follows three generations of the Mozhaisky family, whose best-known real-life member was Imperial Navy admiral and aviation pioneer Alexander Mozhaisky (1825–1890). At the time of his death, Mozhaisky seems to have been mere months and perhaps one more government grant away from creating the world’s first steerable aircraft. Had he succeeded, he would have beaten the Wright brothers by at least a decade, a tantalizing possibility Soviet commentators rounded up to full heroism. For Pelevin, Mozhaisky’s status as a tragic also-ran, misunderstood in his own time, epitomizes Russia’s long history of poor timing. Though Alexander Mozhaisky himself never appears on the scene, his fictional namesakes inhabit an alternative history in which his steam-powered monoplane (outfitted with parts imported from the future by time-traveling FSB general Kapustin) really does take off. One of Methuselah’s central conspiracy theories, then, merely embroiders a fanciful Soviet “what if,” underscoring the protean nature of political ideology. Wishful thinking animates many of the novel’s subplots, though it never seems to do the characters, or Russia, any good. The first part of the Methuselah charts the exploits of a self-described “minor lieutenant of Mammon,” the pornographically named Creampie Mozhaisky. A trader in gold by day, Creampie moonlights as an FSB informant and enabler of insider trading. After one of his tips robs his clients — including General Kapustin — of a significant sum, Creampie decides to commit suicide. But instead of killing him, the pills he takes transport him to an alternate dimension inhabited by giant golden beetles who obligingly return him to the world of the living. There, he finds himself barred from further gold trading and plagued by an uncontrollable lust for trees. Eventually, the beetles help Creampie overcome his affliction, and he lives happily ever after as a financial journalist on the Kremlin payroll. Part two reads like a drug-fueled rewrite of Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler. Hapless 19th-century nobleman Markian Mozhaisky, having gambled away his meager funds and alienated the lady of his heart, is drinking himself to death at his dilapidated country estate. His superfluous man routine is suddenly interrupted by General Kapustin and friends, who arrive from the future to promise Markian untold riches in exchange for his cooperation. The FSB intends to bring Alexander Mozhaisky’s dreams of flight to fruition, giving Russia a head start in its 20th-century competition with the United States. (The FSB is unable to use the actual Alexander Mozhaisky for this purpose, Kapustin explains, for complex reasons relating to the logic of time travel.) Eager to return to the roulette tables of Baden-Baden, Markian happily agrees. Soon, however, a group of 21st-century Americans shows up to call the Russians to account. We then learn that Russian Chekists and American Freemasons are fighting a proxy war between two alien civilizations: the so-called Beardos and a race of reptilian Feminazis, which Pelevin uses to immolate the straw man of “American political correctness” with Reddit-worthy zeal. Ultimately, the best-laid conspiracies of FSB agents and their bearded space patrons go awry: though the FSB succeeds in building a functional version of Mozhaisky’s aircraft, an impartial higher power neutralizes the historical intervention, leaving the present unchanged. The penultimate section of Pelevin’s opus masquerades as a review of an academic volume by the fictional historian and philosopher I. P. Golgothsky, who has uncovered the true fate of Russian Freemasonry in the Soviet era. According to Golgothsky, after 1918 the Bolsheviks imprisoned all remaining Freemasons in a special gulag on Novaya Zemlia, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Instead of dying out, the inmates began to build a mystical portal into the next world under the leadership of Markian Mozhaisky’s son Methuselah, actually an agent of the NKVD. Under that agency’s patronage, the Freemasons toiled unmolested until shortly after Stalin’s death, when Nikita Khrushchev had the site bombed to smithereens. The only artifact of this entire episode is the titular “lamp of Methuselah,” which, like Creampie’s “lumbersexuality,” is not a metaphor at all. Crafted from Methuselah’s tattooed skin, the lamp languishes in obscurity until the 2010s, when the FSB gifts it to the Western Masons in a botched attempt at rapprochement. This faux pas reignites the feud that plays out elsewhere in Pelevin’s novel — including in its final section, which sees General Kapustin taking a hallucinogenic journey to the seat of global Masonry, where his celestial overlords hasten to remind him of Russia’s insignificance. If the country disappeared, they claim, no one would notice; after all, Putin’s much-vaunted “Russian world” is “just that part of Facebook where they’re discussing the latest Star Wars film in Russian.” Russia’s role in world history, the cosmic deities continue, is neither artistic nor political. Rather, Russia is the “bear in the china shop” that creates just enough chaos to keep other nations in line. Meanwhile, it is the dollar, not the ruble, that actually rules all. Unsatisfying though this assessment may be for Kapustin and his FSB colleagues, it represents the deepest point in Pelevin’s conspiratorial hall of mirrors — an inner sanctum his previous works tended to conceal or ignore. For all its outlandish bells and whistles (philosopher beetles! time travel! feminist lizard people!), Methuselah pursues the age-old agenda of the Russian intellectual: diagnosing the ills plaguing the “Russian idea.” In the past, Pelevin’s diagnoses have read as farcical send-ups of this cultural stance: as a diagnostician, he was never as dedicated to verisimilitude as he was to puns. By contrast, Methuselah’s network of FSB psychonauts, irascible Freemasons, and space reptiles seems so dedicated to internal consistency that it reads less like satire and more like the Unabomber manifesto. Pelevin’s apparent seriousness combines with his unwillingness to offer any prescriptions for the ills plaguing the contemporary world, leaving an impression of undiluted pessimism. ¤ Like the classic 19th-century authors whose stylistic idiosyncrasies they so liberally sample, Pelevin and Sorokin take as a given that the world is fallen and see both fictional and political narrative as shorthand for civilization. Manaraga depicts a humanity that escapes extinction but fails to maintain more than the empty carapace of cultural production, while Methuselah dismisses Russia’s culture altogether as an embarrassing boondoggle. Yet their own contributions belie this diagnosis; both authors speculate on the demise of culture while taking full advantage of narrative’s explanatory potential. By building the elements of their respective stories into conspiracy theories they never get around to deconstructing, Pelevin and Sorokin implicitly acknowledge the reemergence of narrative as a useful tool for making sense of the world. Indeed, their latest offerings are perfectly suited to our post-factual moment. For if you scratch the surface of our shiny new post-truth, you will find the old anxieties lurking beneath. Fatigue with informational fragmentation may have set in, but actual fragmentation continues apace, with niche products and identities trapping individuals in their respective filter bubbles. And distaste for old metanarratives has not diminished our instinctual craving for grand explanatory schemes. The result is a hybrid condition in which a voracious hunger for coherence coexists with a lingering mistrust in “mainstream” sources of information. Far from creating savvy consumers insusceptible to the temptations of narrative, postmodernism has primed us to believe in even the most outlandish nonsense, provided it tells a good story. We are now living in the age of informational parasites, from the viral “news” story to the bizarre conspiracy theory. Against this background, Sorokin and Pelevin have transformed their own postmodernism(s) into conspiratorial realism. ¤ Maya Vinokour is a writer, editor, and translator based in New York City. She is the co-translator and co-editor (with Ainsley Morse and Maria Vassileva) of Linor Goralik’s Found Life: Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, and an Interview (Columbia University Press, 2017).
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan In recent weeks, radiation levels have spiked at the Fukushima nuclear power reactors in Japan, with recorded levels of 10,000 millisieverts per hour (mSv/hr) at one spot. This is the number reported by the reactor’s discredited owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., although that number is simply as high as the Geiger counters go. In other words, the radiation levels are literally off the charts. Exposure to 10,000 millisieverts for even a brief time would be fatal, with death occurring within weeks. (For comparison, the total radiation from a dental X-ray is 0.005 mSv, and from a brain CT scan is less than 5 mSv.) The New York Times has reported that government officials in Japan suppressed official projections of where the nuclear fallout would most likely move with wind and weather after the disaster in order to avoid costly relocation of potentially hundreds of thousands of residents. “Secrecy, once accepted, becomes an addiction.” While those words could describe how the Japanese government has handled the nuclear catastrophe, they were said by atomic scientist Edward Teller, one of the key creators of the first two atomic bombs. The uranium bomb dubbed “Little Boy” was dropped on Aug. 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the second, a plutonium bomb called “Fat Man,” was dropped over the city of Nagasaki, Japan. Close to a quarter-million people were killed by the massive blasts and the immediate aftereffects. No one knows the full extent of the death and disease that followed, from the painful burns that thousands of survivors suffered to the later effects of radiation sickness and cancer. The history of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is itself the history of U.S. military censorship and propaganda. In addition to the suppressed film footage, the military kept the blast zones off-limits to reporters. When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Weller managed to get in to Nagasaki, his story was personally killed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett managed to sneak in to Hiroshima not long after the blast and reported what he called “a warning to the world,” describing widespread illnesses as an “atomic plague.” The military deployed one of its own. It turns out that William Laurence, The New York Times reporter, was also on the payroll of the War Department. He faithfully reported the U.S. government position, that “the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.” Sadly, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his propaganda. Greg Mitchell has been writing about the history and aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for decades. On this anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, I asked Mitchell about his latest book, “Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made.” “Anything that nuclear weapons or nuclear energy touches leads to suppression and leads to danger for the public,” he told me. For years, Mitchell sought newsreel footage shot by the U.S. military in the months following the atomic blasts. Tracking down the aging filmmakers, and despite decades-old government classification, he was one of the journalists who publicized the incredible color film archives. As part of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, the film crews documented not only the devastation of the cities, but also close-up, clinical documentation of the severe burns and disfiguring injuries suffered by the civilians, including children. In one scene, a young man is shown with red, raw wounds all over his back, undergoing treatment. Despite the massive burns and being treated months late, the man survived. Now 82, Sumiteru Taniguchi is director of the Nagasaki Council of A-Bomb Sufferers. Mitchell found recent comments from Taniguchi in a Japanese newspaper linking the atomic bombing to the Fukushima disaster: “Nuclear power and mankind cannot coexist. We survivors of the atomic bomb have said this all along. And yet, the use of nuclear power was camouflaged as ‘peaceful’ and continued to progress. You never know when there’s going to be a natural disaster. You can never say that there will never be a nuclear accident.” In a poignant fusion of the old and new disasters, we should listen to the surviving victims of both. Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 950 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller. © 2011 Amy Goodman
Special Report by Michael D. Sellers for The John Carter Files on the accuracy and curious psychology of much of the reporting on Disney’s John Carter since its release on March 9, 2012. “To the schadenfreudist, an epic fail is the only just reward for such epic hubris, and thus the narrative is pre-determined and nothing short of an outright “win” at the box office will derail that narrative.” Our old friend Mr. Webster defines schadenfreude as enjoyment obtained from the trouble of others and it would seen that Andrew Stanton, Disney, and Edgar Rice Burroughs fans have all found themselves on the receiving end of an epic convulsion of schadenfreude as journalists, media analysts, and gleeful internet “trolls” trip over themselves to label a film that brought in 100m in its first three days a “bomb”, a “flop”, and the “new Ishtar”. Meanwhile the film itself, while splitting the critics more or less down the middle, has garnered a passionate fan base that, while not as large as may have been needed given the enormous budget and marketing cost, is giving the film multiple viewings, exorting one another to support Stanton’s vision, and vowing to give the film the legs it will need to gradually change the perception of flop that has been hung around its neck in the wake of its less than stellar domestic opening weekend gross of $30.1M. Where, in all of this, is the reasonable truth about the status of the film? And what are the psychological forces at play in the way the story is being reported? A pre-established narrative prior to the release The truth, most reasonable observers would agree, is, the flop/bomb/epic fail label had already been taken out, prepped, and was ready to be affixed to John Carter before opening day ever arrived. Report after report of “soft tracking” led to pre-release headlines like: “John Carter set to crater”, “Bomb in the making John Carter set for anemic opening”, and so on. But why such gleeful delight in announcing the projected weak domestic opening? And once released — why is there so little acknowledgment of the healthy $70m in foreign gross which, coupled with the $30m domestic, gives John Carter $100M in its first three days? Are the reports comparing John Carter to epic failures Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate accurate or fair, based on these actual numbers? The pre-release buzz regarding John Carter was negative in part because it is inevitably so. Whenever a studio invests “tentpole” dollars in a film that does not come with a built in “Harry Potter” or “Hunger Games” fan base, questions about the judgment exercised in taking such a gamble are just too easy to ask, and the target is just too inviting to pass up. The gleeful anticipation of failure is so strong that there seems to be an underlying psychological sense that the overall order of things will improve if risky, mega-budget movies fail. When the moment of truth comes, the narrative has already been set — and nothing, it seems, can derail that narrative one the trigger is pulled unless the film in question vastly outperforms expections–as happened with Titanic, Avatar, and a few others. In this case, the gun was cocked and ally he trigger that was needed was a less than blockbuster opening weekend of $30.1M which, while not “flop” territory for a “normal” film, was deemed to be a “flop” because of John Carter’s high budget and marketing costs. Instead of referencing actual recent films which opened around 30m, the reference point for John Carter was Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate. Are such comparisons reasonable? Not really. “Those movies lived and died on domestic box office,” says Vincent Bruzzese, president of the Worldwide Motion Picture Group, a research firm employed by many major studios. “Unless someone knows the details of John Carter’s financials, the foreign sales, the DVD, pay TV, all that, it’s very difficult to comment.” But he adds that Disney’s huge investment in John Carter placed unrealistic pressure on the movie’s box-office performance. “If you have to be Avatar or Titanic to break even, then good luck.” International grosses might be John Carter’s saving grace: The movie has already taken in over $70 million overseas. “Visually stunning movies translate into any language. And international audiences love the 3-D component as well,” says Paul Dergarabedian, a box-office analyst at Hollywood.com. “I’m still saying wait and see. Nobody makes a $250 million movie hoping for a $30 million opening. But the $100 million worldwide was not a bad result.” Entertainment Weekly But if actual expert are saying “$100m worldwide was not a bad result”, why is it that virtually every major media outlet has joined in the feeding frenzy labeling the film as a disaster, a bomb, a flop of epic proportions? The Psychology of Schadenfreude If the actual facts of John Carter’s business situation are as Paul Degarabedian has stated — and they are — then why the feeding frenzy? If it cannot be explained logically based on the business outcome, is it better explained psychologically? What is the psychology of the enormous feast of schadenfreude that is on display? James Shenton writes: “There’s something oddly satisfying about seeing a big-budget movie flop. Whenever we hear about these ambitious, special effects-laden extravaganzas going down in flames we get an odd feeling of schadenfreude. But why is this? Does it stem from the fact that we feel manipulated, almost exploited, by the movie industry? Perhaps. After all, movie studios make a lot of coin from tweaking our emotions, be it through adrenaline-filled action films or mawkishly tear-jerking weepies. Perhaps the best reason for our guilty pleasure at seeing a big-budget movie flop is the fact that we feel like we won a battle. We caught Hollywood trying to pull a fast one by releasing a bad movie and trying to hype it anyway — and we weren’t fooled. Gotcha. Better luck next time.” Does this mean that film journalist schadenfreude is somehow tied up with the notion, psychologically at least, that with such a high profile failure, a kind of rough justice is achieved? Norman T. Feather in a study in Australia in 2007 analyzed “Envy, resentment, Schadenfreude, and Sympathy: Reactions to Deserved and Undeserved Achievement and Failure” among college students. The key finding of this study was that schadenfreude about a previously high achieving student’s subsequent failure was predicted by resentment and not by envy. Sympathy was not predicted by either resentment or envy. Deservingness was a key variable in the models that were tested. In other words, schadenfreude kicked in most clearly when the person suffering the failure had previously experienced what was perceived to be undeserved success. Is such psychology in play in the response to Disney and John Carter? Is it more than ironic that the very journalists and analysts rushing to classify John Carter as an iconic Hollywood bomb are the same ones who complain that studios are too conservative, relying to heavily on sequels and failing to take risks? An Irish blogger observes: So, what happens when a major studio actually takes a chance, rather than spending money on a sequel to a tired franchise with no creative vision? We pounce on it. We mock it. We turn it into a joke as a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m not a box office prognosticator, but I am genuinely worried about the box-office returns on the film – but those numbers are so uncertain precisely because it’s not a safe bet, precisely because it’s an”out there” choice. I think that producing John Carter was a very brave move from an institution that we tend to mock for being staid and conservative, and I just find it odd that we are so quick to preemptively punish that sort of bold creativity and risk-taking, especially when we claim that’s exactly what we want. The M0vieblog.com What has all the empathy gone? If Schadenfreude is the taking of pleasure at the misfortune of others, is it not the opposite of empathy? And if so — where does empathy factor into the equation? Andrew Stanton stepped out of a perfectly successful career as an animator to spend five years of his life lovingly crafting a film adaptation of the book series that captivated his mind as a child. Why no empathy for him? More than a thousand film-makers labored heroically to bring Edgar Rice Burroughs vision of Barsoom to life on the screen? Why no empathy for them? Even Disney, an easy target to be sure, stepped out of the conservative mold and made a risky big bet on a piece of classic literature and a director whose genius was acknowledged in the animated realm, but was stepping into live action for the first time? Why no empathy for Disney? The answer, it would seem comes back to the notion that schadenfreude erupts when there is a felt perception that the failure restores balance, that a form of justice is achieved by the failure. In this case, Disney is seen as being properly rewarded for foolishly investing mega-dollars in a questionable property, and then shoving the resultant product down the throats of unwilling potential audience goers with mind-numbing, relentlessly obtuse marketing. To the schadenfreudist, an epic fail is the only just reward for such epic hubris, and thus the narrative is pre-determined and nothing short of an outright “win” at the box office will derail that narrative. Why do studios make themselves targets like this? One has to wonder, knowing the psychology – why do studios trumpet the budget of a film like John Carter? It is as if in the early stages they think that announcing a huge budget will bring glory to the film, make it seem more of an event, and so they rush to leak the budget — in this case $250m — even though doing so immediately and inevitably stokes the what one blogger called “pre-schadenfruede” — the gleeful anticipation of failure? Why? Given the fact that “announced budgets” are always a quasi fiction whose main purpose is to position a film in the marketplace, not truthfully report financials (that happens incorporate reports, and even there actual individual film budgets are obscured), wouldn’t it be better, particularly with a gamble like John Carter, to avoid triggering the pre-schadenfreude in the media by avoiding having the film labeled as a “mega-budget” effort. I mean — with Hollywood Accounting and all, did Disney really have to peg the “budget” at $250m? Is that, after all, actually the budget to get the film shot under Andrew Stanton? Or is that the total production investment including all the development costs going back to 1989, and interest on all the 1990’s development, accruing for 15-20 years? My point is–there is enough fuzzy math involved in budget-talk around Hollywood that Disney could surely have tamped down the pre-schadenfreude by simply avoiding the impulse to trumpet the film at a “biggest budget ever” blockbuster. In truth — wouldn’t John Carter have been much better off entering the marketplace as the underdog it actually was — a labor of love, no big stars, animation director, heartfelt and made with passion. If Disney had achieved that kind of positioning, we wouldn’t now be seeing the film written off repeatedly as a colossal flop – we would instead be hearing that it’s off to a slow start in the US, but with good international Disney’s investment in Andrew Stanton and Edgar Rice Burroughs may well pay off, just give it time? That is, after all, the reality — it’s not a complete bust by any stretch of the imagination and is headed for global numbers in the $350-450M range that have never previously in the history of cinema been called a flop. But a “flop” it is — just google “John Carter flop” and see for yourself. Flops Turned Classics It’s too early to tell, of course, but it is entirely possible that John Carter will eventually join the ranks of films that were considered box office failures when they were released, but which eventually went on to achieve cult and in some cases, classic status. Anyone following the intensity of the fan-love for the picture, with multiple viewings much passion being expressed for the movie from those who, as Andrew Stanton has said, “get it”, could not help but wonder if Ishtar or Heaven’s Gate (which were, after all, monuments to actor and studio egos – not lovingly crafted sci-fi epics based on beloved source material) ever got the kind of fan love that is emerging for John Carter. What of others in the sci-fi genre who may have followed a similar pattern? Blade Runner, after all, opened with a disappointing $6.1M and split the critics, only later emerging as the beloved classic it has become. 2001: A Space Odyssey split the critics when it was originally released and only made $56M at the box office — a figure which, when adjusted for inflation, comes out to $335m in today’s dollars, a figure which quite probably is at least $50m less than John Carter will eventually make. If John Carter is a flop, it may well turn out that it’s in good company. Share this: More Tweet Email
The state budget included $123 million to revitalise neighbourhoods along Parramatta Road, but said nothing about extensive plans for light rail drawn up inside Transport for NSW. Credit:Kate Geraghty The line would provide a more reliable and efficient service than the bus network, which on Transport for NSW's own analysis suffers from a lack of capacity and poor customer satisfaction. Despite the extensive plans, it is understood Transport for NSW scrapped work on the scheme in the first three months of this year. The department also said the plans obtained by Fairfax Media, which included hundreds of pages of costings, assumptions and block-by-block designs as well as multiple documents marked "cabinet in confidence", were "never considered by government." According to a "cabinet in confidence" document dated November 2016, the light rail line would have delivered multiple benefits for Sydney's inner west. The tram trip from Burwood to the city was estimated to take about 22 minutes, compared with a 39-minute bus journey along the same route. Early planning for the project assumed a tram running every four minutes in peak periods. There would be an overall improvement in traffic conditions as more commuters shifted to the light rail line. Traffic at some intersections, however, would worsen, particularly around City Road and Broadway. With an extra 220,000 people expected to live along the Parramatta Road corridor in the next 15 years, the Transport for NSW studies depicted the light rail project as helping to take pressure off the over-loaded transport network. The inner west heavy rail line, the bus network, plus the existing inner west light rail line, are "unable to accommodate already projected growth", a document prepared for a "risk workshop" says. This document notes that bus satisfaction levels in the inner west are the lowest in Sydney, and bus speeds significantly below best practice in the city. The Transport Minister Andrew Constance this year used these facts as a reason to privatise the operation of bus services in the area. The documents obtained by Fairfax Media also depict the light rail project as crucial for taking advantage of the WestConnex motorway, which will open in stages leading up to 2023. WestConnex will provide an opportunity to improve the "urban form" of Parramatta Road, "subject to other initiatives taking timely advantage of this opportunity". When the M4 East section of WestConnex was approved last year, then planning minister Rob Stokes imposed a condition that two lanes of Parramatta Road be reserved for public transport, unless a better public transport initiative was supplied. The light rail line would satisfy those conditions. It is unclear how the government plans to satisfy those conditions if it does not build the tram line. It had said it would build a metro rail line between Parramatta and the city, but has committed only to intermediate stops at the Bays Precinct at Rozelle and at Sydney Olympic Park. Mr Constance is on leave. A spokesman for Transport for NSW said the department regularly looked at transport options to consider their potential. "Only very early assessments of this potential approach were carried out and it has never been considered by government," the spokesman said. "Transport for NSW is still investigating public transport options to be implemented following the opening of WestConnex to support urban renewal and revitalisation of Parramatta Road. "Such plans will also complement initiatives to improve customer services, including Sydney Metro West, which is currently in a consultation phase." The spokesman said the decision to franchise inner west bus services was not linked to the future planning of Parramatta Road transport. It is understood the project director of the Parramatta Road light rail scheme quit Transport for NSW after work was scrapped this year. Construction of the project was timed to work around WestConnex. Construction work off Parramatta Road, for instance on a stabling yard, and in Burwood, would have happened before the completion of the motorway in 2023. Once the motorway was finished, the Parramatta Road work would start, allowing the tram line to open in 2025. A separate light rail project from George Street to the eastern suburbs should open in 2019. Construction of a tram line from Westmead through Parramatta to Carlingford should start next year.
Pack Receive Defenseman Steven Kampfer, McIlrath Traded (Photo courtesy of Sun-Sentinel.com) Wolf Pack general manager Jim Schoenfeld today announced that the parent New York Rangers have assigned defenseman Steven Kampfer to the Wolf Pack, following his acquisition by the Rangers in a trade with the Florida Panthers. The Rangers received a conditional draft pick from the Panthers in addition to Kampfer, sending fellow defenseman Dylan McIlrath to Florida in exchange. Kampfer, 28, has skated in 134 career NHL games over parts of five seasons (2010-11 – 2011-12; 2014-15 – 2016-17), registering nine goals and 14 assists for 23 points, along with a plus-eight rating and 60 penalty minutes. Kampfer skated in 47 games with Florida in 2015-16, tallying four assists and posting a plus-four rating. He also skated in one game with the Panthers this season, recording four penalty minutes. The 5-11, 192-pounder has played in 206 career American Hockey League (AHL) games over parts of six seasons (2009-10 – 2014-15), registering 23 goals and 66 assists for 89 points. Kampfer established an AHL career-high in goals with eight in 42 games during the 2014-15 season with the San Antonio Rampage. The Ann Arbor, Michigan native signed with the Rangers as a free agent on July 1, 2014, and he was acquired by Florida from the Blueshirts on October 6, 2014. Kampfer was selected by Anaheim in the fourth round (93rd overall) of the 2007 NHL Entry Draft. McIlrath skated in 38 games with the Rangers over parts of four seasons, registering two goals and two assists for four points, along with 84 penalty minutes. In action with the Wolf Pack this season, the fifth-year pro had appeared in four games, going scoreless with 11 penalty minutes and five shots on goal. The Wolf Pack’s next game is this Friday night, November 11, when they travel to Rochester for a 7:05 PM game vs. the Americans. All of the action of that battle can be heard live on News Radio 1410 WPOP, and on-line at www.newsradio1410.com and iHeartRadio. Video streaming is available at www.ahllive.com. The next home game for the Wolf Pack is this Sunday, November 13 vs. the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, with faceoff at 5:00 PM. Each of the Wolf Pack’s Sunday home games features the Wolf Pack’s “Click It or Ticket Family Value Pack”. The Family Value Pack includes two tickets, two sodas and two hot dogs, all for just $40. Tickets for all Wolf Pack 2016-17 home games are on sale now at the Agera Energy Ticket Office at the XL Center, on-line at www.hartfordwolfpack.com and by phone at (877) 522-8499. Season ticket information for the Wolf Pack’s 2016-17 AHL season can be found on-line at www.hartfordwolfpack.com. To speak with a representative about all of the Wolf Pack’s many attractive ticketing options, call (855) 762-6451.
A new MSN poll for Business Insider found that the majority of men and women still prefer the company of men at work. And it’s not just men supporting their own gender: One in five men and women said they would rather work with a male colleague. Perhaps this male confidence also stems from believing in their own success. Most men in the MSN poll believed that the gender gap is an issue of the past. 40% of men surveyed said that women are treated “very fairly” in the workplace while only 17% of women believed the same. This reinforces a separate study that found 58% of U.S. men in the workforce believed that “all obstacles to gender equality are gone.” That’s what researchers found in studies on confidence in the workplace: men are more confident —almost unquestioning— in their abilities and more confident that when things go wrong at work, it’s their gender, and not their performance, that’s to blame. As Ladders has previously reported, male leaders have an advantage and are better liked — across generations. Millennial men believe men make better leaders Multiples studies got the same result: men are very confident in their abilities—so confident that they suspect discrimination when they don’t get the job. Out of the 8,000 millennials aged between 18-34 that Qualtrics and Accel surveyed, 33% of millennial men believed that they had faced frequent gender discrimination at work, compared with the 21% of millennial women who felt the same way. Moreover, millennial men were 50% more likely to believe that their gender was “affecting their career opportunities,” although Qualtrics didn’t say whether the men believed the effect was positive or negative, meaning whether the men believed they received better or worse opportunities because of their gender. Meanwhile, women were more likely to believe in gender equality at work, with 41% believing that men and women are “judged by the same criteria in the workplace.” The Qualtrics study also showed vastly different views between young men and women on what makes a good boss or leader. For instance, millennial men are more likely than their female counterparts to believe that men are more effective leaders, with 38% of young men saying that compared to 14% of young women. And, while millennial men and women both mostly had no preference for their boss’s gender, they tend to favor strictly gender-limited workplaces: Two-thirds of millennial women and 72% of men prefer to work with people of their own gender, Qualtrics found. Confident that they’re right Researchers have found that the reason that men feel that gender discrimination may keep them from jobs is that that they’re more openly confident about their abilities. In other words, men are more likely to believe that if they didn’t get the job, something was wrong with the process rather than a flaw in their own abilities. One study found that in self-assessments on individual competence, men graded themselves higher than women. In fact, they’re so confident in themselves that a 2016 study found that men were more likely to be their own top expert on any subject. Looking into two decades of data on academic citations, researchers found that men self-cited themselves 70% more than women. Men are, in fact, their own consultants. These beliefs in fairness and confidence are particularly interesting because they don’t hold up to reality as measured by a plethora of studies that show women are more likely than men to be discriminated against for their gender in the workplace. The Financial Times surveyed 50 of the world’s largest banks and found that women in these positions were less likely to be promoted than men. Only 25.5% of senior bank roles in 2016 were held by women. The workplace isn’t a fair battleground for men and women when it comes to wages either. Four studies found that when women negotiated for higher pay, they were more likely to be penalized for it from both men and women. The people on the other side of the negotiation said they would be less inclined to work with a women who negotiated, more likely to call her a “bad fit” to the company. The main takeaway from these studies, which show self-image that’s contrary to reality, may be that more workplaces should train employees on how to fight their own subconscious biases on men and women in the workplace.
If the Obama administration gets its way, world leaders will reshape their countries' policies to do what's in the longer-term interest of the global economy - even if it means short-term pain at home from reduced exports, higher taxes and other sacrifices. But will politicians comply? U.S. officials and other advocates of this approach say such unprecedented cooperation could boost the world economy and help distribute gains in a way that leaves each country better off than if it had acted in isolation. The world economy could grow over time by an additional $1 trillion if countries pursue well-synchronized policies, according to officials at the International Monetary Fund. U.S. officials argue that the aim of the new framework, which leaders from top economies at a recent meeting in Seoul agreed to pursue, is realistic. They don't, for example, expect that they can create a world that is free of recessions. Rather, the aim is to come up with a set of common guidelines that major nations can agree would produce a healthier world economy and follow those guidelines in shaping domestic policy. "Any policymaker is first and foremost concerned by his own economy," IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said after the meeting. "But that is an old-fashioned way to look at economic policy." Strauss-Kahn said economic officials must become more aware of how their decisions affect the rest of the world. Getting to that point might prove difficult. Economic policymakers often look for short-term benefits and are under pressure from domestic politics. These officials also seek to maintain the independence of their central banks and other government institutions. The details of the approach are still to be worked out, with world finance ministers and the IMF hoping to produce a set of "indicative guidelines" next year. Those are likely to incorporate measures such as the value of a country's currency and the flexibility of its exchange rate, the size and nature of its trade with the rest of the world, the quality of its financial regulations, and its levels of government debt and borrowing. By creating a neutral forum to help set such standards, U.S. officials could, for example, increase international pressure on China to allow more flexible exchange rates. So far, the United States has pressed for those on a bilateral basis, aiming to reduce the advantage Chinese exporters reap from an undervalued currency, but has had only limited success. IMF officials have already produced a general critique of the major nations' economic policies - and found them to be based on overly optimistic assumptions. Moving to a more pointed, country-by-country critique won't be easy, Strauss-Kahn acknowledged. "Countries are not so happy when we come and finger-point," he said. World leaders have recently - and repeatedly - demonstrated how adept they are at casting their domestic decisions as in the best interests of the world economy and how constrained they can be by local considerations. The leaders of the United States and South Korea, for example, were unable to compromise this month on a free trade deal that both regarded as broadly beneficial but that also faced domestic opposition in both countries. The U.S. Federal Reserve announced new policies it said would help the global economy by boosting the U.S. economy, but its actions drew fire from some countries on the grounds that it would help the United States at their expense. Senior German officials, saying they were worried about the interests of the bond market, made public comments that helped set off a debt crisis in Ireland, putting much of Europe at risk. The aim of the new approach discussed at the Seoul meeting has been captured in a phrase - "strong, sustainable and balanced growth" - that the Group of 20 top economic nations has enshrined as its goal. But that might describe an unattainable economic nirvana. "It might be an impossible trinity," because growth that is overly strong might, almost by definition, be hard to sustain and not well-balanced around the world, said Kati Suominen, an economic analyst with the German Marshall Fund. And although the G-20 nations may have set a precedent by agreeing to subject their domestic policies to a sort of economic group therapy, that's not the same as changing them. "It is one thing to propose a framework and it is another to make it operational. It's a very courageous type of proposal, but to give teeth to that you need to make concessions in order to get the cooperation of others," said Domenico Lombardi, a former executive director at the IMF and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "History does not really support the view that you can reach this."
The Battle of May Island is the name given to the series of accidents that occurred during Operation E.C.1 in 1918. Named after the Isle of May, a nearby island in the Firth of Forth, it was a disastrous series of accidents amongst Royal Navy ships on their way from Rosyth in Scotland to fleet exercises in the North Sea. On the misty night of 31 January to 1 February 1918, five collisions occurred between eight vessels. Two submarines were lost and three other submarines and a light cruiser were damaged. 104 men died, all of them Royal Navy. Naming [ edit ] Although it took place during the First World War it was an entirely accidental tragedy and no enemy forces were present. It was therefore not a Battle and was only referred to as such with black humour. Operation E.C.1 [ edit ] Around 40 naval vessels left Rosyth on the Firth of Forth, Scotland on the afternoon bound for Scapa Flow in Orkney where the exercise, EC1, involving the entire Grand Fleet would take place the following day.[1] The vessels included the 5th Battle Squadron of three battleships with their destroyer escorts, the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron of four battlecruisers and their destroyers, two cruisers and two flotillas of K-class submarines each led by a surface warship. The K class submarines were specially designed to operate with a battle fleet. They were large boats for their time, at 339 feet (103 m) long and were powered by steam turbines to allow them to travel at 24 knots on the surface, to keep up with the fleet. The two flotillas were the 12th Submarine Flotilla, consisting of K3 , K4, K6 and K7, led by Captain Charles Little in the light cruiser HMS Fearless, and the 13th Submarine Flotilla, consisting of K11, K12, K14, K17 and K22, led by Commander Ernest William Leir in the destroyer HMS Ithuriel.[2] Vice Admiral Beatty had moved the 12th and 13th flotillas of K class submarines in December 1917 from Scapa Flow to Rosyth in order to ensure that they were in a better strategic location from which to undertake operations. Timeline [ edit ] At 18:30 hours the vessels weighed anchor, and the entire fleet under the command of Vice Admiral Sir Hugh Evan-Thomas in Courageous steamed in a single line nearly 30 miles (48 km) long. At the head of the line was the Courageous, followed by Ithuriel leading the rest of the 13th Submarine Flotilla. Several miles behind them was the battlecruiser squadron containing HMAS Australia, HMS New Zealand, Indomitable and Inflexible with their destroyers. After these came the 12th Submarine Flotilla and bringing up the rear were three battleships, which were accompanied by a number of screening destroyers. The initial speed was 16 knots, but Evan-Thomas had ordered his forces to increase speed to 22 knots when they passed May Island, which lay just at the entrance to the Forth estuary. All vessels were ordered to sail astern of each other, 400 yards (370 m) apart. To avoid attracting German U-boats, particularly as one was suspected to be in the area, after dark each vessel showed only a dim blue stern light accompanied by black-out shields that restricted the lights to one compass point either side of the boats' centre line, and they also were all instructed to maintained radio silence.[2] The night was clear and the seas relatively calm, but the moon had not yet come up. As each group passed the Isle of May at the mouth of the firth, they altered course and increased speed to 20 knots. At approximately 19:00 hours, Courageous passed May Island and increased speed, just as a low-lying bank of mist settled over the sea. As the 13th Submarine Flotilla passed the island, a pair of lights (possibly minesweeping naval trawlers) were seen approaching the line of submarines. The flotilla altered course sharply to port to avoid them, but the helm of the third-in-line K14 jammed for six minutes and she veered out of line. Both K14 and the boat behind her, K12 turned on their navigation lights. Eventually K14s helm was freed and she tried to return to her position in the line. The next submarine in line, K22, had lost sight of the rest of the flotilla in the mist and veered off the line, with the result that she hit K14 at 19:17 hours, severing the bow and breaching the forward mess deck, where two men were killed. Both stricken submarines stopped and carefully pulled themselves apart whilst the rest of the flotilla, unaware of what had happened, continued out to sea. HMS K12 in 1924 K22 radioed in code to the cruiser leading the flotilla to say that she could reach port but that K14 was crippled and sinking.[3] About fifteen minutes later, the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron passed the island and the two submarines. The captain of K22 ordered the firing of a red Very light, which ensured three of the four battlecruisers were able to avoid both submarines. However, the battlecruiser Inflexible bringing up the rear struck K22 a glancing blow at 19:43 hours before continuing on her way. The battlecruiser bent the first 30 feet (9.1 m) of the bow of K22 at right angles and wrecked the ballast and fuel tanks. She settled by the bow until only the conning tower showed. Meanwhile, Leir, captain of Ithuriel, had received and decoded the message about the first collision between the two submarines and turned back to help them. Leir sent an encoded message to the flag officer on HMS Australia at 20:40 hours, warning them of what was happening. "Submarines K-12 and K-22 have been in collision and are holed forward. I am proceeding to their assistance with 13th Submarine Flotilla. Position 18 miles east magnetic from May Island".[4] This could have made a difference and prevented the loss of at least some of those in the water, except that the primitive technology of the time meant that transmission was delayed until 21:20.[2] The submarines behind Ithuriel turned to follow her, and the flotilla headed back towards the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron, which then passed through the flotilla. It was only through emergency turns by both groups of vessels that further accidents were narrowly avoided. As the 13th Flotilla reached the Isle of May, they encountered the outbound 12th Submarine Flotilla. Fearless, the leader of the 12th Flotilla, loomed out of the mist, and upon sighting the 13th flotilla attempted to avoid them by going "hard astern" and sounding the related alarm, but the cruiser was moving too fast to do so and collided with the starboard side of K17 at approximately 20:32 hours.K17 then sank within a few minutes, although most of her crew were able to jump overboard. Fearless launched her boats in a failed attempt to rescue any survivors, but the few found were recovered by one of the other submarines. The bulkheads bow of Fearless had to be shored up to prevent further flooding, but she was not in any danger of sinking and returned to Rosyth at a very slow speed.[5] She was repaired and survived the war. Upon hearing the sirens raised by Fearless which signalled that she had stopped, K4 also came to a stop, but the trailing boats did not. K3 narrowly missed K4 and then stopped three cables further on, but K6, despite going full astern, could not avoid a collision, ramming the broadside of K4 at 20:36 hours and nearly cutting the latter in half. The seriously damaged K4 sank with all of her crew; while going down, she was hit by K7 at 20:38 hours. At this point the 5th Battle Squadron of three battleships and their destroyers passed through the area, unaware of what had happened, with some of the destroyers cutting down the survivors of K17 struggling in the water. Only nine of the 56 men originally on board the submarine survived, and one of these died of his injuries shortly afterwards.[6] Within 75 minutes, the submarines K17 and K4 had been sunk, and K6, K7, K14, K22 and Fearless had been damaged.[7] K14 was taken in tow by HMS Venetia and reached port. Aftermath [ edit ] The memorial to the battle, Anstruther A total of 104 lives were lost during the "Battle of May Island"; 55 from K4, 47 from K17, and two from K14. The subsequent hastily-convened Court of Inquiry began on 5 February 1918 and sat for five days. The Court of Inquiry released its final report on 19 February 1918, in which it placed the blame for the incident on Leir and four officers on the K boats.[8] They recommended that Leir be court martialed.[9] The case of negligence against Leir for the loss of K-17 was “not proved”. Both the investigation and court martial were kept quiet, with much of the information not released until 1994, by which time all of the participants had died, to avoid embarrassment to the Navy.[10] [2] A memorial cairn was erected 84 years later, on 31 January 2002, at Anstruther harbour opposite the Isle of May.[11] The Submariners' Association holds an annual commemorative service to honour loss the life.[1] Wrecks [ edit ] In 2011, surveyors conducting a detailed preparatory survey of the sea floor for the Neart Na Gaoithe offshore wind farm published sonar images of the wrecks of the two submarines, K-4 and K-17 sunk during the accident.[12][2] The site of the two sunken submarines, 100 metres apart and about 50 metres down, has long been known, but the wrecks have now been officially surveyed by divers from the specialist marine consultants EMU. See also [ edit ] Battle of Barking Creek, a 1939 friendly-fire aviation incident Notes [ edit ]
AUSTIN — You don’t know Aaron Swartz, at least not the way those assembled on Friday night at a town hall for the late Internet activist did. Colleagues, friends, associates and his partner joined on a SXSW 2013 stage to remember the complex, intense, beleaguered and sometimes troubled tech genius who took his life in January. Despite being only 26, Swartz had already done more in a quarter-century than others do in a lifetime. He helped develop RSS, helped launch (and then sold) Reddit, founded Demand Progress, was widely known as an Internet activist (one who helped stop SOPA) and, in the last two years of his life, was the subject of a federal investigation. While some stories have described Swartz as something of an Internet anarchist, he was, according to those who knew him, anything but. Each of them painted a picture of an “extraordinary” young man. A person who almost compulsively asked why and would seek to activate change. It was something computer scientist (“Father of the Internet”) Tim Berners-Lee noticed early on in the very young blogger (Swartz was just 14 when he started working with him). “He was a thinker,” recalled Berners-Lee. Swartz would think about what’s right and what’s wrong. Ultimately, said Berners-Lee, “He thought. He blogged and he took action.” “There are not that many people who do that effectively. We lost one. If you’re wondering how to spend your time, do like Aaron.” Demand Change This was a common theme. Friends and associates like David Segal of Demand Progress and Tim Wu of The New Yorker remembered Swartz with a mixture of sadness and anger. “[He was] a passionate eccentric who could have been one of the great ones. Now we’ll never know,” said Wu who still appeared shaken by Swartz’s suicide. Of those panelists assembled before an audience of roughly 300 people, most spoke angrily about the government’s case against Swartz. Wu, who wrote an emotional New Yorker article about Swartz, described him as a “young man who wanted to try things, disturb some shit and do things.” “We have a criminal justice system today that makes everyone a criminal,” said Wu, adding that at the start of their careers, Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did much more serious crimes. All agreed that the Computer Fraud and Protection Act, the 1984 law that Swartz was prosecuted under, needs serious change. Jennifer Lynch, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the audience that any change to the CFAA must include three things: It can’t be a crime to violate a private agreement that you have no say in (like a Terms of Service Agreement on a web site). It should not be a crime to access info you already have a right to just because you do it in an innovative way. Penalties have to fit the crime. Any of these changes, now known as "Aaron's Law," would have transformed the case against Swartz and possibly significantly reduced penalties. His Other Side No one was arguing that Aaron was perfect. Swartz was a person. He was, to the surprise of some, sometimes playful. Gary DeGregorio of ThoughtWorks who worked with Swartz on one of his last projects — the “Victory Kit,” a Ruby-based tool for A/B testing petitions — described Swartz as shy, but willing to kid and be kidded. Sometimes, recalled DeGregorio, he would sing Muppet Show tunes with coworkers and even “taunted me about my obsession with Twitter and trying to go viral with my Tweets,” remembered DeGregorio. No one, though, spoke more passionately about Swartz and what his legacy means than his partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. SEE ALSO: Technology's Greatest Minds Say Goodbye to Aaron Swartz As his partner for the last year-and-a-half of his life, she was witness to Swartz's arrest and the subsequent year-and-a-half of what some see as persecution by the federal prosecutors pursuing his case. Stinebrickner-Kauffman recalled his struggles, gifts and even faults. “His particular gift was of asking questions,” said Stinebrickner-Kauffman. “He noticed when things weren’t right and asked why they didn’t make sense,” she added. Swartz had no interest in becoming wealthy and had little interest in money. Even though he sold Reddit, he would sleep on friends’ floors and lived out of a backpack. “Sometimes he went too far. He thought it was perfectly appropriate for us to sleep on an air mattress in his brother’s bathroom,” remembered Stinebrickner-Kauffman with a laugh. He was a brilliant coder, though Stinebrickner-Kauffman said Swartz once told her the reason he was such a fast programmer was because he was expert at searching Google for the exact right piece of code. Yet, for all his gifts, Swartz was wrong in one way: “One thing that Aaron got wrong is that you have to be sustainable. You have to be happy,” said Stinebrickner-Kauffman. Mashable at SXSW 2013 Photo by Mashable, Boston Globe via Getty Images
Fresh off their president defending the company's design ethos, Motorola is planning to unleash something new next week, courtesy of a mysterious box being hand-delivered to the press. 9to5Google today reported that Motorola is busy emailing members of the tech press, giving them a heads-up about a mystery package scheduled to arrive on just in time for the mid-week "hump day" on February 25. Unfortunately, Motorola is playing coy on exactly what the box might contain, beyond the invitation's teaser which explains that "everything you need fits inside one box, which we will deliver to your doorstep on Wednesday." It hasn't been that long since Motorola last refreshed its flagship Moto X smartphone, and the report speculates a followup to the Moto 360 smartwatch could be what's in store, but details are otherwise scarce. Jack in the box "Motorola is making an exciting announcement next week and wants you to be in the front row. The best part? You get to choose where and when you'd like to experience it," the media invitation from Motorola reads. That will likely come as music to the ears of journalists still recovering from the CES 2015 early last month, who will soon be on a plane bound to Barcelona, Spain for MWC 2015, which kicks off March 2. Assuming none of Motorola's mystery boxes wind up leaking out before next Wednesday, we'll all have to wait and see what kind of potential new product the now Lenovo-owned manufacturer might have up its collective sleeves.
Adidas Manchester United 15-16 Home Kit Adidas Manchester United 15-16 Away Kit Adidas Manchester United 15-16 Third Kit Manchester United 15-16 Goalkeeper Kit Manchester United unveiled the new Adidas Manchester United 15-16 Third Kit on August 27, after the Manchester United 2015-16 Home Jersey was launched at midnight August 1, 2015. Whereas the new Manchester United 2015-16 Home and Away Shirts boast classic, 1980s-inspired designs, the Adidas Man United Third Kit comes with a striking fading pattern print. Manchester United announced a kit deal with Adidas last July. The German brand follow on Nike, who had been supplying United for 13 years, and pay £75m a year until at least 2025 to produce the Manchester United Kits and Training Gear. The first Manchester United Adidas 15-16 Jersey continues to boast the striking and colorful Chevrolet logo on the front.This is the new Manchester United 2015-16 Home Shirt.The Manchester United 2015-16 Adidas Home Shirt is red with white and black applications, drawing inspiration from the classy 1980s Adidas Manchester United Kits.The new Manchester United 2015-2016 Home Shirt features a simplistic design, similar to the Adidas Manchester United 15-16 Away Kit.White shorts and black socks complement the new Adidas Manchester United Kit.This is the first Adidas Manchester United 2015-16 Away Shirt.The new Adidas Manchester United 2015-2016 Away Jersey boasts a white and red color combination. The Man Utd 15-16 Kit is mainly white with the iconic three Adidas stripes running down both sleeves in red.The v-collar of the new Manchester United 15-16 Away Kit is white with black and red trim. Additionally, the new Adidas Manchester United Kit features slight tonal hoops as well as embroidered club heritage details on the hem.The Manchester United 2015-2016 Away Kit is complemented with black and red shorts and white socks.This is the new Adidas Manchester United Kit.The new Adidas Manchester United 15-16 Third Shirt stands out with striking accent colors. The black Adidas Manchester United 15-16 Third Kit features a flashy red monochromatic club badge and a red Adidas Performance logo.To add to that, the new Manchester United 2015-16 Third Kit boasts a unique subtle graphic pattern on the upper part, inspired by the classic Adidas Manchester United 1990-92 Away Jersey.Adidas uses a simplistic black crew neck collar to complete the modern design of the Manchester United 2015-2016 Third Strip.Adidas combines the new Manchester United 15-16 Third Kit with striking black and red shorts, fading to white and red socks.These are the new Manchester United 2015-16 Goalkeeper Home and Away Shirts.Based on Adidas' 15-16 goalkeeper shirt template, the Manchester United Goalkeeper Jerseys come in green and garish yellow, with club specific print details on the hem.What do you think of the first Adidas Manchester United 15-16 Shirts? Drop us a line below, and also check out all 2015-16 Kits in our kit overview
Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email SCOTLAND’S First Minister has announced every new born baby will receive a Finnish baby box - but in the country where it originated experts believe she has missed the whole point of the project. The baby box was introduced as a maternity package in the Scandanavian country to persuade Finnish mothers to access public health services and since its introduction the infant mortality rate has fallen to one of the lowest in the world. The current infant mortality rate in the UK is four per 1000 live births - double the Finnish rate. Sari Lahti is a lecturer in nursing at the Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Science and has witnessed the benefits of the Finnish baby box. But she is at pains to point out that the box alone is not responsible for the lowering infant mortality rate. She said: “A lot of people think babies sleeping in the box was what caused the reduction in babies dying but it wasn’t solely that. It was making mums-to-be attend clinics when they were pregnant to qualify for the maternity allowance which improved the outcomes. “The mum’s health is monitored throughout and after the pregnancy which has helped survival rates in infants. “ Introducing the baby box in Scotland without that qualification would be just a case of giving a nice gift. In terms of helping the health of pregnant women or unborn children it would be worthless.” Visits to maternity clinics are voluntary but to qualify for the maternity allowance - the baby box - the mum-to-be is required to make the necessary appointments. First time mums have 12 nurse appointments, one home visit and three doctor’s appointments, one of which will be a home visit, during pregnancy - a total of 16 medical interactions prior to birth. There is also an extended health check for all mums-to-be involving the whole family - mum, dad and any other children. Gymslip mums are “practically non existent” in a country where comprehensive sex education was introduced in schools more than 50 years ago. Contraception - including the morning after pill - is given free of charge from the school nurse once a child is 15 or as young as 13 “if they know what they are doing”. Sari commented: “When a baby comes it comes to the whole family, not just the mother.” There are no waiting lists for seeing a healthcare worker at one of the country’s neuvolas - a centre dealing with all aspects of childcare from ante natal until six years old. There is a weekly drop-in service for vaccinations, weighing the baby and carrying out procedures like foetal heart monitoring. Short visits like these do not need appointments but the longer, planned appointments can take between 30-45 minutes and often involves a chat with the public health nurse to ascertain if there are any anxieties or queries. Sari added: “Children’s services are a priority and all are guaranteed in law. Inequality hasn’t disappeared but a good public education and neuvola helps.” The baby box itself currently contains 56 separate items and is chosen by around 95 per cent of new mums with an alternative of €140 for those who do not want it . It was introduced for low income families in 1937 but extended to every chid 12 years later in a bid to end inequality. Olga Tarsalainen, communications specialist with the Maternity Package, said: “The value of the baby box is around €400, much greater than the cash alternative. “It is all about reducing infant mortality but it has helped influence other aspects of child healthcare as well. “We used to have a baby bottle in the package but because we wanted to encourage more women to breastfeed it was removed.” Virtually 100 per cent of mums breastfeed their children and 40 per cent continue to do so until the baby is at least six months old. Some Scots will argue there is no need for more affluent parents to receive the baby box but Olga disagrees. She said: “Here we want to show every child is equal and every child has an equal start in life no matter the background or who their parents are. We all began life sleeping in a box.” But taxation is high with most paying around 28 per cent up rising to 50-60 per cent for the bigger earners. However, parents recognise they get a good deal . Generous maternity and paternity leave means new parents are paid 70 per cent of their salary, to stay at home for about a year. Many parents opt to care for their child at home until they are three and the government pays them a generous allowance to do so. (Image: AFP/Getty) Every child has the right to eight hours childcare per day and while there is a small charge for this, it is largely covered by the monthly child allowance paid to families. There are even special sleep centres for children whose parents are nightshift workers. A Scottish Government spokesman said: “The baby box will be given to the families of all new-born babies in Scotland and will include essential items for a child’s first weeks to promote the fair and equal start we want for every child regardless of their circumstances. These will include materials which promote attachment and which help parents prepare for the arrival of their baby. “This initiative will form part of a range of government activities to ensure more of our children get the best possible start in life, including the Best Start grant. It also complements the existing support for expectant mothers and work to reduce health inequalities. “Our commitment to expand childcare is this government’s most transformative infrastructure project. Quite simply, parents and carers benefit from having access to a high quality, flexible system that helps to support them into, or stay in, work, training or further study. “The Scottish Government is committed to increasing funded free early learning and childcare to 1,140 hours by 2020 and work has already started to plan for this expansion. The expansion to 600 hours has already been fully funded.”
Story highlights "Syria has shown it will stop at nothing to undermine independent monitoring," HRW says "Syria has shown it will stop at nothing to undermine independent monitoring," HRW says Demonstrations erupt in Hama on news of Arab League observers' arrival Thousands gathered in Homs to protest the regime of Bashar al-Assad An Arab League official says observers will have free access Syrian authorities have moved perhaps hundreds of detainees to military sites to hide them from Arab League monitors assessing whether the government is upholding a commitment to end its crackdown on protesters, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday. "Syria has shown it will stop at nothing to undermine independent monitoring of its crackdown," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "Syria's subterfuge makes it essential for the Arab League to draw clear lines regarding access to detainees, and be willing to speak out when those lines are crossed." Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem told The Independent last week that the international monitors could move around the country "under the protection" of the government but would not be permitted to visit sensitive military sites. HRW said it was told by a Syrian security officer in Homs that his prison director had ordered him to transfer about 400 to 600 detainees from his detention facility to other places. "The transfers happened in installments," the official said, according to HRW. "Some detainees were moved in civilian jeeps and some in cargo trucks. My role was inside the prison, gathering the detainees and putting them in the cars. My orders from the prison director were to move the important detainees out," the official said, according to HRW. He said that officials told him the detainees were being taken to a military missile factory in Zaidal, outside of Homs. Other witnesses corroborated his account, HRW said. The Syrian security officer also said the government has issued police identification cards to military officials, according to the human rights group. HRW said it has a document that appears to be from the Syrian Defense Ministry ordering the transfer of personnel from the Defense Ministry to the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police. JUST WATCHED Thousands march, defy tanks in Syria Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Thousands march, defy tanks in Syria 01:42 JUST WATCHED Homs protest same time as observer visit Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Homs protest same time as observer visit 02:53 JUST WATCHED Homs activist: Freedom or death Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Homs activist: Freedom or death 04:03 JUST WATCHED Observers arrive in Syria amid violence Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Observers arrive in Syria amid violence 03:02 "Dressing soldiers in police uniforms does not meet the Arab League call to withdraw the army," Whitson said. "The Arab League needs to cut through Syrian government deception by pushing for full access to anywhere Syria is holding detainees." Jamal Barakat, a member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights, said he is part of the Arab League mission. He said Arab League Secretary-General Nabil el-Araby had "emphasized the importance of neutrality, objectivity and transparency of our work" during the fact-finding mission. During the mission, the areas visited will include the provinces of Homs, Idlib, Hama, Damascus and Daraa, el-Araby said. In Washington, acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that the Syrian government has used the last few days -- before the arrival of the international monitors over the weekend and on Monday -- to increase their attacks on Daraa and other cities. "They saw an opportunity prior to these Arab League monitors arriving," he said. "We obviously look to these individuals to be intrepid in their search for the truth of what's happening on the ground, and we would ask, or demand rather, that the Syrian authorities allow them full access to the Syrian people in order to carry out their mission." Inside Syria, the carnage continued, with security forces assaulting demonstrators in the Syrian cities of Homs and Hama on Tuesday, witnesses told CNN. An opposition group said 39 people, two of them children, were killed Tuesday. Four deaths occurred along the Lebanese border, 14 in Homs, three at Damascus University, four in Daraa, four in the Damascus suburbs, three each in Idlib and Hama, two in Deir Ezzor and one each in Saraqeb and Latakia, said the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, an activist group that organizes and documents demonstrations. Security forces shot tear gas and bullets at protesters at Clock Square in downtown Homs, where thousands had gathered, said Loubna, a Homs resident who cited security concerns in asking that her full name not be used. She said she saw seven people injured and dozens arrested. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition activist group with contacts across the country, said more than 70,000 protesters tried to enter the square but were dispersed by security forces. Danielle Moussa gave a similar account of events in the city's northeast neighborhood of Khalidiah, where thousands of people had gathered. "I saw several get shot and I ran," said Moussa, an opposition activist whose group was working to retrieve bodies. Some 35,000 protesters had turned up in the neighborhood of Khalidiah, reported the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, an opposition activist network that organizes and documents demonstrations. The observatory estimated the turnout of protesters in Khalidiah at 20,000. Loubna said thousands of the protesters left Khalidiah for Clock Square when they heard the Arab League observers were at the downtown location, also the site of the city's police headquarters and several government buildings. JUST WATCHED Arab League mission to monitor Syria Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Arab League mission to monitor Syria 01:20 JUST WATCHED Homs under siege Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Homs under siege 02:54 JUST WATCHED Bloodshed in Syria Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Bloodshed in Syria 04:31 The observatory also reported gunfire near the Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr. It said security forces fired at mourners attending a funeral for those killed on Monday. The LCC reported "heavy gunfire and the presence of snipers aiming at everything that moves in the orchards of Baba Amr and Jober." Alaa Shalaby, a member of the Arab League advance team, said Sudanese Lt. Gen. Mohamed Ahmed Mustafa Al-Dabi, the head of the observer mission, had returned to Damascus but 10 monitors remained in Homs. Shalaby said residents rushed toward the monitors and security forces fired warning shots. Videos from Hama showed demonstrators amid sounds of gunfire. Avaaz, a political activist group, said "mass demonstrations took place in Hama today after news reached the city of the arrival of the Arab League observers. Demonstrators attempted to reach al Assi Square but were stopped when security forces opened fire at them." The LCC had said three people were killed and "dozens injured in neighborhoods of Mourabet and Barodiyeh after security forces opened fire at protesters attempting to reach al Assi Square." The Arab League fact-finding team is monitoring an Arab League initiative that calls for President Bashar al-Assad's security forces to withdraw from cities, release detainees and end violence. The monitors arrived amid what opposition members said was a military siege in recent days against protesters in Homs, Syria's third-largest city. The observatory called the reported withdrawal of government forces a deceptive "show" for the Arab League monitors. It said at least 11 tanks had repositioned themselves inside government centers in the city from where they could return quickly to their previous positions. "It shows its (the al-Assad regime's) attempt to circumvent the Arab League mission in order to give credibility to its false stories and deny the crystal-clear fact that there is a huge political crisis and a 'popular revolution', by all the standards, by the Syrian people who are trying to regain power, freedom and dignity," the observatory said on its Facebook page. The Arab League observers "will have access to any place they want, freely," said a senior official in the league's advance group. "The protocol entails that Syrian security only escorts the monitors to the entrances of the city only. According to the protocol, any party on the ground has the right to contact the monitors as they please," said the official, who did not want to be identified because he is not authorized to speak with the media. The team is composed of 12 international monitors, the senior official said. The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported on burials of "martyrs" from the army and security forces who were killed by "armed terrorist groups" -- a phrase Syria uses to describe those responsible for violence during the uprising. The news agency said "an armed terrorist group" was responsible for sabotaging a gas pipeline in Homs province on Tuesday. CNN cannot verify opposition accounts of violence or reports of casualties in Syria. Al-Assad's government has restricted access by international journalists. The unrest in Syria began in March when protesters, emboldened by democracy movements in Tunisia and Egypt, called for open elections and an increase in political freedoms and demanded an end to brutal regime actions. The movement quickly spiraled into a call for the ouster of al-Assad as the regime cracked down on peaceful demonstrators. The uprising launched the Free Syrian Army, a rebel force composed of military defectors, and efforts to create a breakaway government. Other opposition groups, most notably the Syrian National Council, have emerged. The Arab League has expelled Syria over its crackdown. Al-Assad has been under enormous pressure from the Arab League, Turkey, the United States, and the European Union to end the violence. More than 5,000 people have died since mid-March, when al-Assad began the crackdown on anti-government protesters calling for his ouster, the United Nations said this month. But activist groups, such as Avaaz and LCC, put the toll at more than 6,000.
Story highlights Leith, North Dakota, is a town of a few dozen people, only one of whom is black Paul Craig Cobb has been trying to turn it into a white nationalist community The town's lone black resident and his wife feel threatened and uncertain The words "welcome to Leith" are etched on two wooden boards, nailed to a pair of poles stuck in the grassy North Dakota prairie. With wildflowers immediately to the front, a dirt road yards away and a few stray buildings and trees in the distance, the sign seems appropriately simple for the tiny town. Yet in the last few weeks, Leith has become anything but simple. Paul Craig Cobb wants to transform the town 70 miles southwest of Bismarck into a community that mirrors his white supremacist views. He did so quietly at first, asking residents whether their land was for sale. But recent reports from The New York Times and the Southern Poverty Law Center exposed his mission and turned it into a national story. In an interview with The New York Times, Cobb said he hoped his plans in Leith would "excite" white people and "give them confidence because we're being deracinated in our own country." "We've been very, very tolerant about these major sociological changes," he said, according to the paper. Stuck in the middle is Leith's lone black resident, Bobby Harper. He's known Leith as a nice, peaceful place where "everybody got along, we basically could leave our doors unlocked, and there was no fear that nobody wanting to harm us." Thanks to Cobb, Harper now feels under threat, and he said his townsfolk do, too. "If he can't love his fellow man, then we ask God to help him with something," Harper said Friday about Cobb. "Because I'm not very happy, and the people in this town aren't very happy." Leith is part of Grant County, which according to its official website is North Dakota's third largest county by land mass at more than 1 million acres. While the communities once buzzed with activity from nearby railroads, nowadays it's decidedly more quiet. That certainly was true of Leith. The U.S. Census bureau says it has a population of 16 people, though other estimates run higher -- though not beyond 25 residents. Among them is Harper's wife, Sherrill. Her mother grew up in Leith and, today, she and her husband call it home. "I have roots in this town," she told CNN's John Berman on Friday night, alongside Bobby. "I have a reason to be here." Sherill Harper recalls running into Cobb last year and he asked her if she had property for sale. She said no. Bobby Harper said Cobb asked him the same question. "He has the audacity to even ask me for information to buy land, and his intentions were to harm my way of life?" he said. "... That's very, very uncomfortable for me." How successful was Cobb, who is wanted in Canada on hate speech charges, in buying up the town? The Harpers say that residents have been overwhelmingly supportive of them. But the Southern Poverty Law Center notes that white nationalist April Gaede and her husband claimed, on an online message board, to have property in the town. So, too, has Jeff Schoep -- commander of the Nationalist Socialist Movement, which he describes as the "largest pro-white organization" in the United States "involved in the struggle for white civil rights." In an open letter to Leith Mayor Ryan Schock, Schoep announced that he and members of his group would be heading to Leith on September 22 and 23 with "a simple message that Craig Cobb will NOT be ousted from the community." "Craig is not breaking any laws or ordinances, and has a right to reside in Leith just as any other American does," Schoep writes, just before mentioning how he owns an old meat packing/creamery building in town. He adds later, "If anything, you should see this for what it is, a chance at revitalizing a community." These comments have been echoed on white nationalist online message boards such as WhiteNations.com and Stormfront. Posters there have applauded Cobb for "doing a great job" and jibing critics as "laughable, pathetic what this country has come to." The Harpers have felt their wrath, including a letter they received Friday that read, in part: "I want you to leave your "husband" and go join Mr. Cobb's movement. Do it now! Separation of the races forever!" The target of that missive, Sherrill Harper, says that's just one of many she's received calling her a "filthy, race-mixing white woman" and "pea-brained." "It made me afraid," she said. "If his goal is to just have only white people here, where do my husband and I go?" Sherrill has nothing but kind words for her neighbors, but that doesn't mean she knows what to do or how this story will end. She admits, "I think we're unsure as to what to do. We'll just have to wait and see." Cobb said his friends have bought or acquired some of his plots, but he does not know when they will move to the town.
Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan L. Hajnal, White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics, Princeton University Press, 2015, 241 pp., $29.95. White Backlash is actually two books. The first is a reasonably rigorous attempt to determine whether the presence of large numbers of immigrants changes the politics and policy preferences of whites. It concludes that, indeed, in states with many Hispanics, whites are more likely to vote Republican and to want to curb government benefits for immigrants, especially illegal immigrants. The other book is an expression of profound contempt for whites. The authors concede that “US society has been transformed in innumerable, deep, and perhaps permanent ways” through immigration, that there has been “a massive transformation in the makeup of the nation,” and that immigration brings “enormous social, economic, and cultural transformation.” But any resistance is pathological: “Views [of whites] on immigration have been linked to ethnocentrism, social dominance and authoritarian personality, nationalism and racial prejudice.” The authors explain that any resistance to dispossession comes from the perception of “racial threat.” The arrival of non-whites provokes “unease,” “anxiety,” and “fear,” which lead to polices that are “regressive” and “punitive.” The authors also worry that “just when the United States is becoming more racially diverse, it is becoming more racially divided.” The best solution would be for whites to overcome their fear of displacement and all become liberals, but even if they do not, the coming non-white majority will legislate “progressive” policies that will save the nation. White backlash Needless to say, the title of this book is a sensational exaggeration. Whites–not just in the United States but around the world–have been uniquely supine in turning their nations over to aliens. The few spasms of sanity that the authors call a “backlash” have occurred at the state level because Congress has been unwilling to control the borders or pass immigration legislation. As the authors note, states have introduced nearly 7,000 immigration-related bills in the last decade or so, with 1,607 such measures in 2011 alone. Not surprisingly, it is the states with the largest number of immigrants that introduce and pass the most immigration-related laws. Vermont, which by latest count, had only 5,284 Hispanics, has passed only one such law in the last five years. It was a resolution urging Congress to issue more visas for agricultural workers. The authors introduce a great deal of data that show that the larger the number of Hispanics in a state, the more likely whites are to: Cut back on education, welfare, and health spending; build more prisons; support the death penalty; vote Republican; call themselves “conservative;” call for border control, immigration restriction, and deportation; and support “regressive” sales taxes rather “progressive” property taxes. As the authors put it, they have discovered “a shift in heavily Latino states toward policies that target and often punish the disadvantaged segments of the population.” This has “distressing implications” for immigrants. The authors write as if they have discovered something new, but these tendencies got a name long ago: the Florida syndrome. For years, Florida voters, who are largely white, have cut back on school funding for a student population that is largely Hispanic. The obvious, which does not seem to have occurred to the authors of White Backlash, is that people are more willing to pay taxes for social services that benefit people like themselves. White Floridians would not mind paying for good schools if their own children and grandchildren attended them–or if at least most of the students were white. Floridians don’t want to pay high taxes to educate the children of non-white immigrants, many of them illegal. The same goes for every other element of “white backlash” the authors deplore. Sales taxes spread the tax burden to everyone–even to illegals who don’t pay income tax–whereas property taxes fall on property owners, who more likely to be white. Whites likewise resent paying for welfare benefits for foreigners. Interestingly, the authors find that all whites tend to reduce their support for government measures to reduce income inequality as their state fills up with Hispanics, but the effect is three times stronger on “less well educated” than “well educated” whites. This could be seen as the opposite of what we might expect, since less well educated whites probably have low incomes and might benefit from handouts. On the other hand, they have probably not been exposed to as much “anti-racist” propaganda, and are freer to express anger over people they think of as foreign chiselers. The authors also found that the presence of large numbers of Asian immigrants pushes whites in the opposite direction–Asians have “a liberalizing effect on white politics”–though it is not as strong as the “regressive” effect of Hispanics. The authors do not seem to realize that these findings undercut their “racial threat” analysis. Asians are just as non-white as Hispanics, but don’t cause whites to cut back on health and welfare spending or support the death penalty. Why not? “Whites tend to have different stereotypes of Asian Americans than they do of Latinos.” The authors cannot bring themselves to admit that whites are not reacting to race, but to behavior. Asians, who pull their own weight, do not provoke the same reaction as Hispanics, who join gangs and go on welfare. The wicked New York Times Why do whites who are exposed to the wonders of immigration pass “punitive” laws against it? The authors think they have found their answer in the press. They claim to have read every one of the 6,778 articles the New York Times wrote about immigration from 1980 to 2011. Of these, they claim only 12 percent had a positive tone, 49 percent were negative, and 39 percent were neutral. The authors argue that if the liberal Times is slanted, we can well imagine the anti-immigrant bias that pervades the rest of the press: “By concentrating on immigration and highlighting its negative aspects, the media not only generate fears and concerns but also increase the motivation for many Americans to side with the Republican Party.” The authors are serious about the idea that the press turns whites into Republicans: “The skewed coverage makes it difficult for the majority of Americans to consider the full spectrum of immigrants’ contributions to society . . . . [and] could well shift the white public toward the Republican Party.” Certain words, moreover, have totemic power: “Even brief uses of terms such as illegal alien, illegal, and illegal immigrant could ignite readily available criminal scenarios that in turn increase opposition to immigration.” The authors refuse to believe that negative stories about immigration simply reflect the negative reality of immigration, because they’re convinced immigration is objectively good for America. They conclude that the press promotes the “immigrant threat narrative” only because of “the profit-base incentives of the news media” drives them to publish hot-selling horror stories. Racial politics The authors conclude that just as black activism drove whites out of the Democratic Party from the 1960s to the 1980s, immigration does the same thing today. They include the graph below, which shows that during the 1950s, both parties got at least 90 percent of their votes from whites in national elections. Now, nearly half of the voters for Democratic candidates are non-white, while the figure for Republicans has settled back down to about 10 percent. In the 1950s, almost half of all whites considered themselves Democrats; now, only 25 percent do. The table below is another way of depicting the racial divide. The bars show the difference in the likelihood of various groups to vote Republican during the congressional elections of 2012. Fifty-nine percent of whites voted for Republican candidates while only 18 percent of non-whites did. The difference between those figures is huge: 41 percent. No other political divide comes close, not even the partisan difference between people who make over $100,000 as opposed to those who make less than $30,000. As the authors note: “The racial divide dwarfs divisions across class and other demographic characteristics that are supposedly central to the political arena.” This is true for elections without party labels: “Race outweighs all other demographic divides in nonpartisan local elections as well.” The authors don’t like the idea of American politics becoming a racial headcount, but what is the alternative? Whites must overcome their irrational conservatism–based as it is on “deep, enduring attitudes like ethnocentrism and prejudice”–and vote Democratic. But what has divided American politics along racial lines? Immigration. When the country was overwhelmingly white, people voted by conviction, not race. Furthermore, it is non-whites–not whites–who vote along starkly racial lines. If 59 percent of whites voted Republican in the 2012 congressional elections it means 41 percent or so voted Democrat. But if only 18 percent of non-whites voted Republican it means more than 80 percent voted Democrat. The authors also note that 90 percent of elected Hispanics are Democrats. So which group lets race dictate its choices? One marvels at the blindness and arrogance with which the authors explain that the solution is for whites to vote Democrat. But what else should we expect? As the authors explain, Democrats are “compassionate” while Republicans push “punitive and regressive policies.” This is why “the Republican Party along with its policies of exclusion, punishment, and retrenchment [on social services] should be an attractive option for these uneasy Americans [who think there is too much immigration].” Clearly, the United States has a party that stands for good and a party that stands for evil. The goodness of Democrats justifies whatever it takes to increase their share of the vote. The authors even describe the abolition of national-origins quotas as a clever Democrat strategy. “In an effort to bring in more constituents who would ultimately support the party, Democrats undertook a sharp reversal of position and supported the Hart-Celler Act of 1965.” This “would become a critically important base for the Democratic Party over the ensuing decades.” The authors are confident that immigration will continue to push the country towards virtue: “Once the size of the Latino population passes a certain threshold, Latinos should be able to mobilize to influence policy outcomes, and policy should begin to shift back to the left.” We are now witnessing whitey’s last gasp: “Thus, we believe that the pattern of immigration backlash should only hold until the Latino population becomes large enough to mobilize to effect policy change on its own.” This will usher in the millennium: If the population projections of the US Census hold, so that whites lose their majority status in a few decades, then this emerging pattern bodes well for Latinos over the long term. Latinos’ influence should only grow more pronounced and policy should become more aligned with Latino preferences. . . . [T]his potentially represents a major step forward. So there you have it: The more the country reflects the desires of Mexicans and Guatemalans the better it will be. Whites, who built the country that Mexicans and Guatemalans are destined to dominate, will have to stew in their own “ethnocentrism, social dominance and authoritarian personality, nationalism and racial prejudice” until Hispanics fix the country for them. Author Marisa Abrajano, whose origins we can only imagine from her name and appearance, teaches political science at UC San Diego. Zoltan Hajnal also teaches at UC San Diego. Zoltan is a Hungarian name, so it’s unlikely his ancestors came over on the Mayflower. White Backlash is published by Princeton University Press. This is the perfect symbol for our degenerate times. Foreigners tell the American founding stock how benighted and deserving of oblivion we are, and are published by one of the country’s most prestigious academic presses. We have work to do. Share This
NYPD officer pictured 'putting seven-months pregnant woman into a chokehold for illegally grilling outside her apartment' The incident happened Saturday afternoon, when Brooklyn resident Rosan Miller was caught illegally grilling outside her apartment The arrest allegedly turned violent with an officer pictured wrapping his arm around pregnant Mrs Miller's neck in a chokehold The NYPD told MailOnline that they are investigating the incident An advocacy group has released images which claim to show an NYPD officer putting a seven-months pregnant woman into a chokehold for illegally grilling on the sidewalk in front of her apartment. NYPD officers have been banned from using the chokehold since 1993, but an officer can be seen in the pictures wrapping his arm around 27-year-old Rosan Miller's neck in the Saturday incident. Her young daughter is also in the pictures, watching the arrest unfold. The NYPD told MailOnline that it is currently investigating the incident. Shocking: An East New York advocacy group released images this week which they say show a seven-months pregnant woman being put into a chokehold by a police officer Offense: Rosan Miller, 27,was allegedly arrested for illegally grilling outside her apartment Under investigation: NYPD officers have been banned from using the chokehold since 1993. The department says it is investigating the incident Miller's husband Moses, 34, and brother John Miller were also arrested in the incident. Moses Miller was allegedly charged with resisting arrest and obstruction while John Miller was charged with harassment and obstruction of justice. Rosan was given a summons for disorderly conduct. When former city councilman Charles Barron heard about the incident, he called the police department to complain and expedite the Miller family's release. 'This was all over a grill,' Barron told the New York Daily News. 'This is about grilling in front of her house.' Rosan Miller was given a summons to appear in court. Her young daughter was watching while he was arrested. The Brooklyn woman pictured above in Facebook photos The lieutenant involved in the incident allegedly responded to a domestic call from a different resident at 594 Bradford St on Thursday and was in the neighborhood to follow up on Saturday when he witnessed the illegal grilling.
Slovenia's Jan-Aug foreign tourist arrivals increase 18.4% LJUBLJANA (Slovenia), September 29 (SeeNews) - The number of foreign tourist arrivals to Slovenia rose by 18.4% year-on-year to 2,458,143 in the first eight months of 2017, provisional data of the state statistical office showed on Friday. Domestic tourists totalled 925,134 in the review period, up 6.4% on the year, taking the total number of tourists to 3,383,277, up 14.8%, the statistical office said in a statement. Overnight stays by international visitors grew 16.6% year-on-year in January-August, reaching 5,998,954. Domestic tourists spent 2,822,535 nights in Slovenia in the first eight months of 2017, up 4.6% on the year. The overall number of tourist overnights in the review period increased to 8,821,489, up 12.5%. In August alone, tourist visits totalled 763,617, up 12.9% on the year, while overnight stays added 12.5% and reached a record-breaking number of 2,152,565. In 2016, tourist visits grew 9.9% to 4.3 million, while overnights rose 8.1% to 11.2 million.
Jose Mourinho will demand Juan Mata personally tells him that he wants to join Manchester United before pushing the green light on a £40million switch to Old Trafford. Chelsea are prepared to consider a £40m bid from United for Mata, but the Spaniard must make his wish clear to Mourinho in order to force through a permanent move away from Stamford Bridge. The final decision on whether to sell Mata is being left to Mourinho and he will only act once the player has approached him. Atletico Madrid want to take Mata on loan with an option to buy the 25-year-old at the end of the season. Sending the player back to Spain would be preferable to Mourinho, particularly if Chelsea can secure first option on striker Diego Costa in return. Kevin De Bruyne was put in a similar position to Mata, when Mourinho made the Belgian tell him he wanted to join Wolfsburg on a permanent deal before finally agreeing to an £18m deal. Chelsea had tried to push De Bruyne on loan to Atletico until the end of the season, before the 22-year-old and his agent met with Mourinho to state his desire to go to Wolfsburg permanently. Despite relegating him behind Oscar and leaving him on the substitutes’ bench for long spells, Mourinho has claimed he does not want to sell Mata this month, But, as in the case of De Bruyne, Mourinho is likely to reconsider that stance if the midfielder personally expresses a firm desire to leave and a big bid is accepted. It is thought the prospect of joining United interests Mata, who has been clear that he will not be forced to move to a club he is unsure about or that simply suits Chelsea. Mata’s father, Juan senior, acts as his agent and had been planning to try to secure a move to Barcelona for his son at the end of the season. But United’s interest is likely to prompt a rethink, particularly with this summer’s World Cup fast approaching. Mata’s Spain team-mate Santi Cazorla said: “If Juan doesn’t play he will want to leave Chelsea, that’s obvious.”
A commentary writer at the University of California, Los Angeles claims that, by millennial standards, Hillary Clinton is a “centrist,” and urges his peers to vote for a more progressive alternative. Guillaume Kosmala begins his latest op-ed for The Daily Bruin by noting that millennials lean further left than any other generation, especially in his home town, where 80 percent of likely voters were Bernie supporters. “The media is continually bombarding us with the message that we need to pick the lesser of two evils.” As a result, Kosmala thinks most millennials are likely pessimistic over the nomination of Clinton, who he thinks falls short of many progressive standards. [RELATED: Hillary caves, adopts Sanders’ tuition free college] First, he notes that Hillary opposed gay marriage as recently as 2013 and contends that her “measly 12 dollars per hour minimum wage” proposal is laughable, considering that some economists think it should have reached “21.72 dollars per hour by now.” He then raises her support of the Iraq War and her often-criticized connection to major pharmaceutical companies as further objections to her candidacy. “With this state of affairs, where it seems clear that neither candidate is agreeable to liberal voters, it is easy to feel alienated from the political process,” he eventually concludes. “Unfortunately we live in a two-party system and the media is continually bombarding us with the message that we need to pick the lesser of two evils.” [RELATED: Millennials reject HIllary’s extremist abortion stance] As an alternative to that bleak assessment, Kosmala suggests that millennials who want a true progressive candidate ought to vote for Jill Stein rather than “a corporate centrist Democrat like Hillary Clinton.” As proof of Stein’s progressive record, he notes that she “wants to cancel all student debt, cut military spending by 50 percent, close all overseas military bases, call for pardoning Edward Snowden, and wants to move to a single-payer healthcare system for all.” He then urges his peers to get involved in the youth effort to prevent Hillary “from moving back to the right and reneging on many of the progressive promises she’s made as a result of Bernie’s success,” adding that “UCLA is surprisingly politically unified in support of Social Democratic politics and therefore holds the potential to be a powerful voice for change.” Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AGockowski
There is a tendency to see President Donald Trump as a radical break from the past. But conservative techno-futurist Newt Gingrich sees Trump as ushering in a revolution — with a subsequent utopian space-age.Gingrich has envisioned such a breakthrough, and hopes Trump will be an agent of it, for decades. Gingrich’s vision is one stop on a straight line that goes through his friend and legendary science-fiction novelist Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer to Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars to Bill Clinton’s impeachment to Trump. Pournelle — who died earlier this month — first rose to prominence as part of an influential group of right-wing science-fiction writers in the 1970s and 1980s that also included Larry Niven, David Drake, Janet Morris, and S. M. Stirling. All envisioned the best of a militarized humanity breaking away from the evils of bureaucracy and bleeding-hearts and aggressively colonizing and conquering space, exploiting its military and financial potential. Unlike most conservatives, all were less concerned with preserving the past for its own sake than for planning for the future—their preferred future. In partnership with Niven, Pournelle’s science-fiction married aggressive military might with Atlas Shrugged-style techno-futurist fantasies and nativist paranoia, offering what in retrospect looks like an uncannily prescient portrait of the Trump era and its cultural overtones. Take, for example, the pair’s Hugo-nominated 1977 novel Lucifer’s Hammer, which depicts a small ranch of patriotic American farmers as they struggle to survive after a comet hits earth. Early on, the farmers debate how to keep out undesirables: “They'll all be here, all that can get here," Christopher shouted. “Los Angeles, and the San Joaquin, and what's left of San Francisco … How long can we keep it up, lettin' those people come here?” "Be ngers too," someone shouted from the floor. He looked self-consciously at two black faces at the end of the room. "Okay, sorry—no. I'm not sorry. Lucius, you own land. You work it. But city ngers, whining about equality—you don't want 'em either!" The black man said nothing. He seemed to shrink away from the group, and he sat very quietly with his son. "Lucius Carter's all right," George Christopher said. "But Frank's right about the others. City people. Tourists. Hippies. Be here in droves pretty soon. We have to stop them." This kind of scene — the asterisks are mine; they spelled the word out — plays on the same fears Trump stoked in his campaign of immigrants and undesirables invading the “real” America. Yet Pournelle and Niven yoked this divisiveness to an Ayn Randian view of technological progress, in which there are those who work and those who leech. In Lucifer’s Hammer, the free-thinking libertarian survivors, naturally, win the day over their wrong-thinking competition. The hippy-dippy Shire collective, who attempt to rebuild society according to principles of socialism and environmentalism, is wiped out because of its weakness, forced to submit to the cannibalistic New Brotherhood Army—led by the inhumane Sergeant Hooker, a black man. Strong leader Senator Jellison (who is white) then asks former Shire founder Hugo Beck what went wrong, and Beck says his fellow hippies just never realized how great technology and laissez-faire economics were, and now all his old friends are dining on human flesh under the thumb of a scary black communist. We also learn that the New Brotherhood Army is very politically correct—they are genuine Social Justice Warriors—and forces equality on its members: “And you never say anything bad about blacks, or chicanos, or anybody else. First couple of days they just slap you for it…but if you don't learn fast they figure you're not really converted …” One antagonist of Lucifer’s Hammer is Alim Nassor, a black man who loots during the day of the comet, then goes on to start a gang that eventually links up with the New Brotherhood Army. (At one point, he kills a follower who won’t eat human flesh.) Nassor’s name is of his own choosing: Before he was great he had been George Washington Carver Davis. His mother had been proud of that name. She'd said the family was named for Jefferson Davis. That honky had been a tough dude, but it was a loser's name, no power in it ... Alim Nassor meant wise conqueror in both Arabic and Swahili. Not many knew what it meant, and so what? The name had power…And he could still walk into City Hall and get in to see people. He'd been able to do that ever since he broke up a riot with his switchblade and the razor blades in his shoes and the chain he carried around his waist. There was all that Federal money around for a tough dude. The honkies shoveled out money. Anything for quiet in the black ghetto. It had been a damn good game, and too bad it was over. Today, Lucifer’s Hammer reads as a depiction of a post-apocalyptic war between Trump counties and Clinton counties, simultaneously promising American renewal even as it depicts unavoidable catastrophe. The comet acts as a cleansing, wiping away so much dead wood of civilization. (Feminism, too, comes in for repeated knocks.) Pournelle and Niven’s attitude toward civil-rights struggles and feminism wavers between condescension and irritation. Progressive issues are bumps on the road of progress. At their most dangerous, they radicalize lumpen segments of the population into dangerous terrorists: Antifa is one step on the way to the New Brotherhood Army. Consequently, their attitudes on race and immigration come off as callous. In 2008, Niven told a DHS conference that “The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” and then suggested spreading rumors in the Spanish Latino community that hospitals were killing patients to harvest their organs. They attempted to address race more sympathetically in 1981's Oath of Fealty, making one of the main characters, Preston Sanders, black. (“His family had never been enslaved,” they write.) But since Sanders’ first words are affirming to the genius John Galtian protagonist (named, not coincidentally, Tony Rand) that the white hero isn’t prejudiced, it’s not terribly convincing. Oath of Fealty chronicles the conflict between a futuristic, closed city—a privately-run, utopian “arcology” that elevates the best and the brightest—and the backwards-looking bureaucratic government of a Los Angeles in urban decline. The corporate-run, authoritarian arcology does an end-run around all of Los Angeles’ pesky government and regulations, which turn out to bring great benefits to Los Angeles as a side effect. When ecoterrorists led by an evil UCLA sociology professor attack the arcology, the arcology plays its trump card by harming LA’s infrastructure, which they have done so much to improve and operate. Check and mate. A nother obsession of Pournelle, who worked for years in the aerospace industry, was military conflict and how that might play out on, and beyond, our Earth. In the 80’s, he served as chair of the Citizen Advisory Council on National Space Policy. Alongside astronauts and physicists, the council included sci-fi luminaries such as Niven, Robert Heinlein, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and publisher Jim Baen. The council also included Ronald Reagan’s adviser Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, whose advocacy firm High Frontier provided the primary political push for the president’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Better known as “Star Wars,” SDI represented the ultimate science-fiction defense project, a “shield” aimed at shooting down nuclear missiles with lasers from land and from space. Pournelle’s council provided the blueprint for SDI—as the author explained, Reagan’s 1983 speech inaugurating the “Star Wars” project came from work the council had done beginning in 1980. And in 1984, Baen published Pournelle’s Mutual Assured Survival, based on the council’s reports on how to defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles—“ICBM’S [sic] WILL SOON BE OBSOLETE,” the cover declares—and blurbed by Ronald Reagan himself. SDI was only one part of a larger right-wing techno-futurist project. SDI historian Edward Linenthal cites a 1983 interview with Newt Gingrich in which the young conservative Congressman predicted that SDI would not just destroy Russia’s Communists but liberalism, too. SDI would be “a dagger at the heart of the liberal welfare state” because it destroys “the liberal myth of scarcity,” leaving only “the limits of a free people’s ingenuity, daring, and courage.” A year later, in 1984, science-fiction publisher Tor Books issued Gingrich’s first book, Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future, which had also been commissioned by publisher Jim Baen. Co-written with science-fiction writers David Drake and Janet Morris as well as Gingrich’s then-wife Marianne, Window of Opportunity has one leg firmly planted in the geek world. The preface was written by Pournelle, who praised Gingrich’s “practical program that not only proves that we can all get rich, but shows how.” Gingrich subsequently secured a job for Pournelle’s son with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher in 1994, who like Gingrich is now a stalwart space booster and Trump supporter. Gingrich’s futurist political perspective has long differentiated him from many Republicans. He distinguished himself early on with his interest in space, drawn partly from his fascination with large-scope future histories like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. When Gingrich told his aides to read the Foundation trilogy and one asked what the books had to do with politics, Gingrich replied: “I'm a figure who thinks in terms of 100-year increments and I think in terms of civilization's rising and falling over 500-year increments.” Central to his failed 2012 presidential run was the plan for an American moonbase by 2020. In their science fiction as in life, Gingrich and Pournelle shared an optimistic belief in power of technology—and an equally powerful insistence on the inevitability of conflict. They believed this required a robust, authoritarian state apparatus to preserve order and bind citizens together. Indeed, while backing Reagan, Gingrich had promoted a techno-futurism that was less conservative than it was authoritarian: he called for pruning inefficiency while aggressively promoting expansion and military technology. For his part, Pournelle published anthologies of science-fiction and techno-military essays through the 1980s under the name There Will Be War. Under Reagan, that inevitable conflict was with Red Russia. But with communism a fading threat by the late 80’s, Gingrich shifted his focus to the specter of a new enemy, arguing in 1989 that “Islamic extremism may well be the greatest threat to Western values and Western security in the world.” Such fear-mongering—Islamic extremism remains a fraction as destructive as the nuclear Soviet Union—may seem ill-suited to optimism in mankind’s future, but as a political project it can be uncannily effective. Pournelle wrote that Islam demands adherence to a principle of “Islam or the sword,” and that an aggressive military response is not only justified but demanded: we are at war with the Caliphate. Given Trump’s aggression and autocratic tendencies, it makes sense that Gingrich steadfastly supported him from the beginning, encouraging and advising his campaign. During election season, Gingrich spoke with Trump daily. Gingrich views Trump as a tool to get America to where he wants to go faster. “Trump must keep going at breakneck speed to keep his opponents off balance,” he writes. He’s also expressed hope that the Trump era will provide the conditions for future space travel: “With a few breaks and some entrepreneurial daring, Americans could land on Mars either in Trump’s last year of his second term or in the first term of his successor.” Trump’s ideology and governing style are far from a perfect fit for the conservative techno-futurists. Gingrich has expressed frustration with Trump’s lack of focus, and Trump lacks any clear vision of the future beyond making America great again. Still, for Pournelle, Trump beats anyone else out there: “Trump is not a movement conservative, but his inclination is to set goals and get people working on them, not to jail and fine them for not doing so. Compared to Hillary or Sanders or anyone in Obama’s train, I’ll take Trump any day. Trump is a pragmatic populist. I can live with that.” One of the things Gingrich admires about Trump, as he told me in an interview, is the president’s sheer capacity for change and interruption: “Trump is the personification of enormous underlying forces, an eruption of personality and capability in which you then have to reset your analysis around their reality.” In speaking to me, Gingrich also celebrated Trump as a “disruptive politician” on the order of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. In other words, Gingrich and Pournelle’s enthusiasm had less to do with Trump’s particular ambitions than with his capacity for destruction of the status quo. Much of the chaos Trump foments is, to Gingrich and Pournelle, a key feature to induce the future they want—the one where the feminists and “eco-terrorists” and university professors are soundly defeated. Gingrich has always been fond of revolution, as evidenced by one rationale he quoted for supporting Trump: “We have to kick over the table in Washington.” (Or as he wrote in 1984: “Revolutions have to occur fast or not at all.”) What Trump does is less important than the fact that he kicks over the table, strengthening America’s military state while demolishing bureaucracy and ignoring niceties. Democracy and law matter less than security and innovation. We’re back at authoritarianism—the through-line for Trump and Pournelle and Gingrich alike. Indeed, many of Trump’s online supporters refer to him as “God Emperor” with varying levels of irony, referring in part to the benevolent tyrant of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, Leto II, who transforms himself into a gigantic worm in order to direct humanity on his “Golden Path” for 3,500 years. Pournelle and Niven charted their own Golden Path in Oath of Fealty. Early in that book, black protagonist Preston Sanders, reflects on why he hates the rich white bigots of the arcology less than the preppie liberals he grew up with: Because I don't share the black experience? That's what my roommate at Howard would have said. Or because we're all doing something we believe in? We're running a civilization, something new in this world, and don't bother to tell me how small it is. It's a civilization. The first one in a long time where people can feel safe. The only things standing in the way of that Golden Path are the liberal bureaucrats and wrong-thinkers that Gingrich elsewhere termed the “prison guards of the past (who) use centralized bureaucracy, litigation, regulations, and red tape to delay or kill break through innovations in many fields. They squander America’s potential in order to protect their privileges and their old ideas, and they rely on our complacency not to do anything about it.” And those guards, in Gingrich’s view, are so wedded to their ideologies that nothing short of outright conflict will sway them. Or as Trump said of the media in his Arizona speech, “These are sick people. You would think they'd want to make our country great again, and I honestly believe they don't.” No science-fiction writer since has exerted as significant a political influence as Pournelle. But Pournelle does have a spiritual successor in Castalia House, the independent science-fiction publisher run by white nationalist Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day. Beale, like Gingrich, has said that his job is to save Western Civilization—and that it is in dire need of saving. Beale, however, is far more explicit about race. In his definition of the Alt-Right, Beale proposes the 14th tenet, “The Alt Right believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children,” stressing that homogeneous ethno-states are the only viable future for the world—and that the United States must be a white, Christian ethno-state. Though Beale has repeatedly denounced neo-Nazis, this tenet is near identical with the “Fourteen Words” of white supremacy, and its placement as the fourteenth item reads as a dog whistle. Pournelle has dissociated himself from Beale’s politics, but Castalia House’s republishing of Pournelle’s 1980s There Will Be War series (as well as publishing a new volume 10) is no mere coincidence. Rather, they are indications of a shared worldview. To these writers, civil rights, equality, and civil liberties are irritants and impediments to progress at best. At worst, they are impositions on the holy forces of the market and social Darwinism (“evolution in action”) that sort out the best from the rest. And to all of them, the best tend to be white (with a bit of space for “the good ones” of other races). If there has been a shift in thought between the 1970s and today, it’s that the expected separation of wheat from chaff hasn’t taken place, and so now more active measures need to be taken—building the border walls and deportations, for example. Trump is an agent of these active measures—an agent of revolution, or at least the destruction that precedes a revolution. The line that connects Pournelle, Gingrich and Trump is a view that the future must be secured through aggressive force, and specifically through authoritarian institutions (governmental or non-governmental) that group together humanity’s best and prevent the rest from stifling them. The difficulty, as always, lies in identifying “the best,” and in who’s doing the identification. At the bottom of Pournelle’s website is the quote, “Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.” It’s not attributed, but the sentiment is an old saw of the far right, going back at least to John Birch Society co-founder and segregationist Thomas J. Anderson in 1961. Today, Pournelle’s particular phrasing is most commonly attributed to white supremacist and anti-semite Richard Cotten. It’s one more indicator that Trump was far from the first to eliminate the line between right-wing thought and outright bigotry. Whether in the apocalypse of Lucifer’s Hammer or the quasi-utopia of Oath of Fealty, there will be war between the visionaries and the prison guards—and the visionaries will win.
Europa, the enigmatic moon of Jupiter, is believed to be home to a subsurface ocean of liquid water. This has raised many questions about the potential for life on the icy moon. However, future missions to explore Europa’s ocean may need to dig deep. Research suggests that water does not stay in a liquid state near Europa’s surface for longer than a few tens of thousands of years — the blink of an eye in geological terms. Klára Kalousová will present this work at the European Planetary Science Congress in Madrid on Tuesday 25 September 2012. Europa is mainly made from rock and iron, with a water shell around 100 km deep beneath a crust of solid ice. The ocean is warmed sufficiently to maintain its liquid state by heat produced as a by-product of gravitational pulling to-and-fro from Jupiter. Pockets of liquid water could be tantalizingly close to the surface. However, Kalousová, from the University of Nantes and Charles University in Prague, believes these would be short-lived. She explains, “A global water ocean may be present, but relatively deep below the surface — around 25 to 50 km. There could be areas of liquid water at much shallower depths, say around 5 km, but these would only exist for a few tens of thousands of years before migrating downwards.” Kalousová reached these conclusions by mathematically modeling mixtures of liquid water and solid ice under different conditions. She found that due to factors such as density and viscosity differences, liquid water migrates rapidly downwards through partially molten ice and eventually reaches the subsurface ocean. Other locations in our solar system may be analyzed using this work. Kalousová explains, “As well as helping us to better understand Europa’s water cycle, this research could provide insight into icy moons that are geologically active, such as Enceladus, and worlds that have cycles connecting the interior with a surface atmosphere, such as Titan.”
Sadly, America’s race relations are worse off under President Barack Obama, our first black president, says a passionate black graduate student who voted for him twice. She blames Obama’s eight years of divisive governance spawning dangerous narratives of hate, not President-elect Donald Trump who is wrongly labeled by elites as divisive, even before taking office. Antonia Okafor rose to prominence because of her recent NRA ad, “I Didn’t Listen.” In this exclusive video interview for The Daily Caller News Foundation, she says she voted for Obama believing the false and dominant narrative being peddled through the black community that “just because he looks like me, he is best for me.” She then realized that “his policies are harming me, not helping me.” Now, she votes for policies, not the person. She casts herself as a black conservative and is optimistic about Trump’s policies. The Trump victory, she thinks, was a broad cross-section of Americans of all races saying “enough” to the false narratives and overused labels being thrown at political opponents. As for the labels being thrown at GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Okafor says they only remind her of the disturbing and ridiculous labels given to her, like “racist, misogynist and sexist” or “deplorable” for voting for Trump. Countering feminists, too, Okafor has worked with Students for Concealed Carry and been a passionate leader for more concealed carry policies on campuses as a means of personal empowerment, especially for young women. Besides being a frequent guest on Tomi Lahren’s popular show at The Blaze, she is now a journalist with the Independent Journal Review where her focus is on liberal bias on college campuses. Okafor is “sad and disappointed” with Obama’s failures as the first black president. Instead of being a peacemaker, he gave license to a “dangerous narrative” that hateful people can do anything to whites because of their skin color. She hears others believing and promoting this disturbing belief, a belief reflected in the “heartbreaking” Chicago Facebook live video of the four blacks who tortured a white special needs boy. Instead of unifying America, Obama has “agitated” to the point where others call for “race wars” because of the power and control progressives can wield if certain voices, facts and logic can be marginalized, she explains. Okafor has lost many friends for shifting her worldview, and was even been surrounded by a hostile, threatening Black Lives Matter mob in Austin, Texas, that chanted “traitor” at her. The pushback she receives only seems to strengthen her resolve to think, use facts and logic and help others. She is optimistic that with one-on-one conversations, more lives and worldviews can be changed, as opposed to the “shout-fest” occurring on social media. Okafor knows there are many who would try to keep voices like hers silenced or marginalized because she has the capacity to credibly offer a differing point of view from the elite narratives being driven through the media. She may even be headed to law school. For more on Antonia, see her Facebook page and follow her on Twitter at @antonia_okafor. Mrs. Thomas does not necessarily support or endorse the products, services or positions promoted in any advertisement contained herein, and does not have control over or receive compensation from any advertiser. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall are seen in the parade ring on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting at Ascot, England, Tuesday, June, 14, 2011. AP (CBS) In an upcoming TV show to promote his interest in Romania's Transylvania region, Britain's Prince Charles claims he is related to Vlad the Impaler, who gave rise to the Dracula vampire stories. Apparently, so is his mother, the queen. Pictures: Prince Charles Pictures: In Royal Circles The heir to the British throne said genealogy shows that he is related to Vlad, giving him a stake in the future of Romania. The prince has long worked to conserve the forests and has bought a home in the Transylvania region. The link, it appears, is his great-grandmother, Mary of Teck, who was grandmother to Britain's current ruler, Queen Elizabeth II, and was queen during the reign of King George V. A Wurttemberg princess, Mary - the woman for whom the liner Queen Mary was named - was believed descended from two of Vlad's sons. Vlad the Impaler, the cruel 15th-century Romanian warlord who helped inspire Bram Stoker's 1897 vampire novel "Dracula," got his nickname from his favorite method of execution. His reputation for sadism and torture made him a legend in his own time. His victims have been estimated in the tens of thousands.
With all those basic questions out of the way, let us look at things one should take care of while building an Android SDK/Library Avoid multiple arguments Every android library has to be usually initialized with some arguments and to do that you would usually be passing a set of arguments to either a constructor or have an init function to setup your library. Whenever doing that consider the below Passing more than 2–3 arguments to your init() function is bound to cause more headaches than provide ease of use. Just because its hard to remember the exact mapping of these arguments and the order in which they are declared in the library code.It also is prone to more mistakes as anyone can make a mistake of passing int value in a String field or vice versa. // DONOT DO THIS void init(String apikey, int refresh, long interval, String type); // DO this void init(ApiSecret apisecret); where ApiSecret is an Entity Class, declared as below public class ApiSecret{ String apikey; int refresh; long interval; String type; // constructor /* you can define proper checks(such as type safety) and * conditions to validate data before it gets set / // setter and getters } Or you can also use Builder Pattern as an alternative approach to the above. You can read more about Builder Pattern here. JOSE LUIS ORDIALES talks in depth about how to implement it in your code, take a look here. Ease of use When building your android library, keep in mind the usability of the library and the methods you expose. It should be Intuitive For everything thats happening in the android library code , there should be some feedback either in the logs or in the view. Depends on what kind of an android library is being built. If it does something that cannot be comprehended easily, the android library basically “does not work” in the language of devs. It should do what the user of android library expects it to do without having to look up the documentation. For everything thats happening in the android library code , there should be some feedback either in the logs or in the view. Depends on what kind of an android library is being built. If it does something that cannot be comprehended easily, the android library basically “does not work” in the language of devs. It should do what the user of android library expects it to do without having to look up the documentation. Consistent The code for the android library should be well thought and should not change drastically between versions. Follow semantic versioning . The code for the android library should be well thought and should not change drastically between versions. Follow Easy to use, Hard to misuse It should be easily understandable in terms of implementation and its usage in the first sight itself. The exposed public methods should have enough validation checks to make sure people cannot misuse its functionality other than what it was coded and intended for.Provide sane defaults and handle scenarios when dependencies are not present. In short… simple. Minimize Permissions In the current times, when everyone just wants to jump the road and ask as many permissions, you should pause and think about do you really need that extra permission. Take care of these points especially Minimize your permissions as much as you can. Use Intents to let dedicated apps do the work for you and return the processed result. to let dedicated apps do the work for you and return the processed result. Enable and disable your features based off if you have the permission for it. Do not let your code crash just because you do not have the said permission. If at all , you must educate the user well before requesting the permission and that why its required. If possible have a fallback functionality if the permission isn’t approved. This is how you check if you have a said permission granted or not: public boolean hasPermission(Context context, String permission) { int result = context.checkCallingOrSelfPermission(permission); return result == PackageManager.PERMISSION_GRANTED; } Some of the devs would say that they really need that specific permission, what to do in that case. Well, your library code should be generic for all types of apps that need the specific functionality. If you can provide hooks such as functions to let users of your android library pass the data you need the dangerous permission for. In that way, you do not force the devs to require a permission they do not want to. In absence of the permission provide a fallback implementation. Simple. / Requiring GET_ACCOUNTS permission (as a requisite to use the * library) is avoided here by providing a function which lets the * devs to get it on their own and feed it to a function in the * library. */ MyAwesomeLibrary.getEmail("username@emailprovider.com"); Minimize Requisites We have all been there. We have a specific functionality that requires that the device has a certain feature. The usual way you would approach this is by defining the below in your manifest file <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.bluetooth" /> ..the problem with this is that when this is defined in the android library code, this would get merged into the app manifest file during the manifest-merger phase of build and thus hide the app in Play Store for devices that do not have the bluetooth unit (this is something the Play Store does as filtering). So basically an app that was earlier visible to a larger audience would now be visible to a smaller audience, just cause you added that to your library code. Well, that’s not we want, do we? Nope. So how do we solve this. Well what you need to do is not include that uses-feature in your manifest file for the android library but rather check for the feature during runtime in your code as below String feature = PackageManager.FEATURE_BLUETOOTH; public boolean isFeatureAvailable(Context context, String feature) { return context.getPackageManager().hasSystemFeature(feature); } .. this way there is no entry in the manifest and once it merges into the app, it won’t let the app get filtered in the Play Store. As an added feature though if the feature is not available you can just disable the functionality in your library code and have some fallback functionality in place. It is a Win- Win for both the android dev who built the library and the dev who integrates the lib in their app. Support different versions How many are out there exactly? If you have a feature that’s available in a certain version of android, you should do the check for that in code and disable the feature if the version is lower than supported. As a rule of thumb support the full spectrum of versions via defining in minSdkVersion and targetSdkVersion . What you should do internally to your library code is check for the android version at runtime and enable/disable the feature or use a fallback. // Method to check if the Android Version on device is greater than or equal to Marshmallow. public boolean isMarshmallow(){ return Build.VERSION.SDK_INT>= Build.VERSION_CODES.M; } Do not log in production Just DO NOT. Almost every time I am asked to test an app or an android library project the first thing that I have seen is that they log everything up in the open, in their release code. As a rule of thumb, never log in production. You should use build-variants with timber to help you in the process to separate logging info in production vs debug builds. A simple solution can be to provide a debuggable flag that the devs can flip to enable/disable logging from your android library // In code boolean debuggable = false; MyAwesomeLibrary.init(apisecret,debuggable); // In build.gradle debuggable = true Do not crash silently and fail fast I have seen this a lot of times now. Some of the devs would not log their errors and exception in logcat! Which basically adds a headache to the users of the android library when they are trying to debug the code. In tandem to the last tip about not logging in production, you must understand that exceptions and errors need to be logged irrespective of being in debug or production. If you do not want to log in production, at least provide a functionality of enabling logs via passing some flag when you initialize your library. i.e void init(ApiSecret apisecret,boolean debuggable){ ... try{ ... }catch(Exception ex){ if(debuggable){ // This is printed only when debuggable is true ex.printStackTrace(); } } .... } It is important that your android library fails immediately and shows an exception to the user of your android library instead of being hung up on doing something. Avoid writing code which would block the Main Thread. Degrade gracefully in an event of error What I mean by this is that when say your android library code fails, try to have a check so that the code would not crash the app instead only the functionality provided by your library code is disabled. Catch specific exceptions Continuing with the last tip, you might notice that in my last code snippet I am using a try-catch statement. Catch statement specifically catches all Exception as its a base class. There is no specific distinction between one exception vs the other one. So what one must do is define specific types of Exception as per the requirement at hand. i.e NUllPointerException , SocketTimeoutException , IOException , etc. Handle poor network conditions …this gets on my nerves, seriously! If the android library you wrote deals with making network calls, a very simple thing that usually goes unnoticed is that you should always consider a case of what happens if the network is slow or non-responsive. What I have observed is that library code developers assume that the network calls being made will always go through. A good example will be if your android library fetches some config file from the server to initialize itself. Now when developing the library the devs assume that the config file will always get downloaded. What they forget is that on a flaky network, the library code will not be able to download the config file and hence would crash the whole codebase. If simple checks and a strategy to handle such situations are built right into the android library code, it saves quite a number of people the headaches they would have otherwise. Whenever possible batch your network calls and avoid multiple calls. This also saves a lot of battery, read here Reduce the amount of data you transfer over the network by moving away from JSON and XML to Flatbuffers. Read more about managing network here Reluctance to include large libraries as dependencies This one goes without much explanation. As most of fellow Android Devs would be knowing, there is a method count limit of 65K methods for android app code. Now say if you have a transitive dependency on a large library, you would introduce two undesirable effects to the android app your library is being included You will considerably increase the method count of the android app, even though your own library codebase has a low method count footprint since you would transitively download the larger library and thus it will contribute to the method count too. If the method count hits the 65K limit, just because of your library code that transitively downloaded the larger library, the app developer will be forced to get into the lands of multi-dexing. Trust me on this, no one wants to get into the multi-dexing world. In such a scenario, your library has introduced a bigger problem than solving the initial problem. So most probably your library will be replaced by some other library that does not add to the method count or basically that takes care everything in a better way. Do not require dependencies unless you very much have to Now this rule is something that I think everyone knows, right? Do not bloat your android libraries with dependencies you do not need. But the point to note here is that even if you need dependencies you do not have to make the users of the library download it transitively. i.e the dependency does not not need to be bundled with your android library. Well, then the question arises as to how do we use it if it is not bundled with our library? Well the simple answer is you ask your users to provide that dependency to you during compile time. What this means is that not every user might need the functionality which requires the dependency. And for those users, if you cannot find the dependency as provided to you, you just disable the functionality in your code. But for those who need it, they will provide you the dependency, by including it in their build.gradle . How to achieve this ? Check in classpath private boolean hasOKHttpOnClasspath() { try { Class.forName("com.squareup.okhttp3.OkHttpClient"); return true; } catch (ClassNotFoundException ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } return false; } Next, you can use provided (Gradle v2.12 and below) or compileOnly (Gradle v2.12+)(Read here for complete information), so as to be able to get hold of the classes defined by the dependency during compile time. dependencies { // for gradle version 2.12 and below provided 'com.squareup.okhttp3:okhttp:3.6.0' // or for gradle version 2.12+ compileOnly 'com.squareup.okhttp3:okhttp:3.6.0' } A word of caution here, you can only use this functionality of requiring a dependency if its a complete java dependency. i.e if its an android library you want to include at compile time, you can not reference its transitive libs as well as resources which need to be present before compilation. A pure java dependency, on the other hand, has only java classes and they are the only ones that would be added to classpath during the compilation process. Try not to hog the startup no kidding… What I mean by this is that, as soon as the app starts up try not to initialize your android library greedily. What that would tend to do is that it will increase the startup time for the App itself, even though the app does simply nothing at startup except off course initialize your android library. The solution to such a problem is to do all work of initializing off the main thread i.e in a new thread, async. Better if you use Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor() and keep the number of thread to just one. Another solution would be to initialize components of your android library on demand i.e Load them up/initialize them only when they are needed. Remove functionality and features gracefully Do not remove your public functions between versions as that would lead the builds of many users of your android library break and they would be clueless as to why did that even happen. Solution: Deprecate the functions by marking them @Deprecated and then define a roadmap of their removal in future versions. Make your code Testable Making sure you have tests in your code isn’t actually a rule to follow. You should be doing this everywhere and for every project app or library without saying. Test your library code by making use of Mocks, avoiding final classes, not having static methods, etc. Writing code with interfaces around your public API also makes your android library capable of swapping implementations easily and in turn makes the code more testable.i.e you can provide mock implementations easily when testing. Document Everything! Being the creator of the android library you would know about your code, but the people who are going to use it won’t know about it unless you expect them to figure out by reading your source code (you should never need that). Document your library well including every detail about how to use it and detailing every feature you have implemented. Create a Readme.md file and place it at the root of your repository. Have javadoc comments in your code, covering all public functions. They should cover and explain - Purpose of the public method - The arguments passed - Return type Bundle a sample app which demonstrates a working example of how the library and its features are used. Make sure you keep a detailed change log for your changes. A good place to do that would be to add the information right in your release section for the specific version tag. Screenshot of Github Releases section for Sensey android library …and here is the link to releases section for Sensey Provide a most minimalistic Sample App This goes without saying. Always provide the most minimalistic Sample app with your library code, as that is the first thing other devs will checkout to understand a working example of using your android library. The simpler it is the easier it is to understand. Making the sample app look fancy and code complex would only undermine the actual goal of the sample app, that is to provide a working example of using your android library. Consider putting up a License Most of the time developers forget about the Licensing piece. This is one factor that decides the adoption of your android library. Say you decided to license your android library in a restrictive manner i.e Using GPL license, would mean that whoever uses your library and makes modification will have to contribute back to your codebase in order to keep using the android library. Putting such restrictions hampers the adoption of android libraries and developers tend to avoid such codebases. The solution to this is that you stick to more open licenses such as MIT or Apache 2. Read about licensing at this simple site and about need of copyright in your code here Last but not the least, get feedback Yeah, you heard that right! Your android library was built to cater to your needs initially. Once you put it out for others to use, you will come to know a lot of issues in it. Hear out your fellow devs and gather feedback. Act on it considering and weighing on the functionality to introduce or fix while maintaining the goals of the android library intact. Summary In short, you need to take care of the below points while building Avoid multiple arguments Ease of use Minimize permissions Minimize requisites Support different versions Do not log in production Do not crash silently and fail fast Degrade gracefully in an event of error Catch specific exceptions Handle poor network conditions Reluctance to include large libraries as dependencies Do not require dependencies unless you very much have to Try not to hog the startup Remove features and functionalities gracefully Make your code testable Document everything Provide a most minimalistic sample app Consider putting up a license Get feedback, lots of them As a rule of thumb follow the rule of SPOIL-ing your Library Simple — Briefly and Clearly expressed Purposeful — Having or showing resolve OpenSource — Universal Access, Free license Idiomatic — Natural to the native environment Logical — Clear, Sound Reasoning I read this sometime back in a presentation by some author I cannot recall. I took note of it as it makes a lot of sense and provides a clear picture in a very concise manner. If you know who the author is, please comment it and I will add his link and give due credit. Ending Thoughts I hope this post helps fellow android devs in building better android libraries. Android Community benefits extensively from using android libraries published daily by fellow android devs and if everyone starts to take care of their API design process keeping in mind the end user (other android developers) we would all be a step closer to an even better ecosystem as a whole. These guidelines are compiled on my experience of developing android libraries. I would love to know your views on the pointers mentioned above. Please leave a comment, and let me know! If you have suggestions or maybe would like me to add something to the content here, please let me know. Till then keep crushing code 🤓
Washington (CNN) Several key Republican senators are leaping to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's defense as the Kentucky lawmaker's relationship with President Donald Trump continues to deteriorate . Sen. John Cornyn, the second-highest ranking Republican in the Senate, voiced support for McConnell on Twitter Friday, saying that "no one is more qualified" than the Senate majority leader to advance the President's legislative agenda. "Passing POTUS's legislative agenda requires a team effort. No one is more qualified than Mitch McConnell to lead Senate in that effort," Cornyn tweeted "As Benjamin Franklin said: we can hang together or hang separately," the Texas Republican added in a separate tweet. As Benjamin Frankliin said: we can hang together or hang separately https://t.co/bomFBeS4Nx Cornyn's message was shared among several other GOP lawmakers, including Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah, Bob Corker of Tennessee, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. "@SenateMajLdr has been the best leader we've had in my time in the Senate, through very tough challenges. I fully support him," Hatch tweeted Corker, meanwhile, praised McConnell's leadership on key legislative issues such as health care and tax reform. "From health care to tax reform to infrastructure, tough issues to tackle this fall and none better than @SenateMajLdr to get a good outcome," Corker said in a tweet Tillis also backed McConnell's accomplishments in a series of tweets Thursday, commending the Senate majority leader for being "the single biggest reason why Neil Gorsuch is now a SCOTUS justice." Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul also defended McConnell in the Lexington Herald Leader on Friday, telling reporters that there are others to blame for the failed GOP health care plan. "If there's blame to go around, people from the states, the senators that promised to vote for it then didn't, that's who I think there needs to be a discussion with," Paul said. Despite Sen. Susan Collins' "no" vote on the GOP health care bill championed by McConnell, the Maine Republican expressed "broad support" for the Senate majority leader in the caucus. "Majority Leader McConnell understands the Senate is a deliberative & diverse body. He enjoys broad support in our Caucus," Collins tweeted Friday afternoon. Majority Leader McConnell understands the Senate is a deliberative & diverse body. He enjoys broad support in our Caucus. — Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) August 11, 2017 Even Sen. Jeff Flake, whose recent book slams many of his Republican colleagues' stances on Trump, threw his support behind McConnell. ".@SenateMajLdr does a tough job well. He has my support," the Arizona senator tweeted Thursday. The Republicans backing McConnell publicly are predominantly his key allies in the Senate, and their defense has been reserved to support for him while stopping short of criticizing the President. Trump resumed his public feud with McConnell on Thursday over the failed GOP effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, tweeting at him to "get back to work." When asked by reporters whether the Senate majority leader should resign, Trump said to wait and see if McConnell can get repeal and replace done. "Then ask me," he said.
Washington’s community colleges are rethinking the kind of math students must know to earn a college degree, and finding innovative new ways to teach a subject that trips up more students than any other. Dena DeYoung traces her trouble with math back to sixth grade, when a well-intended placement test showed she was smart enough to do advanced work. And for several years, DeYoung did well. But when she reached high school, math became her worst subject. Lost by the logic, unable to imagine how what she was learning would ever come into play in the real world, her math grades plummeted. “I just never got it,” DeYoung said. “I was barely scraping by. It was just a nightmare.” DeYoung eventually dropped out of her Shoreline school, and while math was not the only reason, it didn’t help. Instead of a high-school diploma, the promising student earned a General Educational Development degree, or GED. More than any other subject, math trips up students who might otherwise thrive in college, especially those who don’t plan to go into technical careers that require proficiency with numbers. Failing the state’s math test keeps hundreds of students from graduating from high school each year, even when they’ve met every other requirement. Math is the reason why half of Washington’s high-school students who enter community college must take remedial classes — which few ever pass, even after years of struggle. A lot of effort has gone into thinking — and arguing — about how best to teach math, hoping to keep it from being such a barrier to higher education. But the math problem also has caused leaders of Washington’s community colleges to ask a fundamental question: How much math, and what kind, should be required for a student to earn a college degree? Their answer, increasingly, is that there is no one answer. Students who are studying to become nurses, social workers, early-childhood educators or carpenters may never use intermediate algebra, much less calculus. Yet for years, community colleges have used a one-size-fits-all math approach that’s heavy on algebra and preps students for calculus. That’s starting to change in a few pioneering schools that are overhauling what math they teach and how they teach it. Some colleges, for example, have started to offer a math sequence that focuses on statistics, and persuaded the state’s four-year colleges to accept it as a college math credit. Others are offering a learn-at-your-own-pace approach. These experiments, to date, are small but encouraging. The word is spreading about algebra alternatives, many of which include the kind of math students are more likely to need, such as probability and margins of error in opinion polls. Students are flocking to such classes — and they’re passing at much higher rates. One study found that a statistics-focused class, identical to one offered at Seattle Central College, had triple the success rate when compared with the traditional math sequence, and students finished math in half the time. DeYoung, now 26, enrolled in Seattle Central’s version of that sequence last year, called Statway, but with the nagging concern that she’d soon hit a wall — just like in high school. But that didn’t happen. “In the first quarter, I realized there isn’t something wrong with me,” DeYoung said. “I just needed a different approach.” Strategic plan Seattle Central is one of 19 colleges nationally using Statway, which was developed by the Carnegie Foundation. (The foundation has also developed a program called Quantway that uses math skills to solve real-world problems.) It’s one of the programs highlighted in a new math strategic plan that calls for all of Washington’s 34 community and technical colleges to find new, innovative ways to approach math. “For too many students, the pre-college math experience at community and technical colleges has been frustration and failure,” the plan notes. The beginnings of that plan reach back to 2009, when the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges began its latest round of puzzling over how to help more students pass. In the plan, the State Board encourages colleges to find ways to accelerate a student’s path through math. As a result, some are allowing students to take both pre-college math and college-level math in the same quarter. Others, like Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake, offer math that doesn’t follow a rigid schedule — students do as much math as they can complete in a quarter’s time. The vexing issue of students getting stuck in remedial math is not new. It’s long been recognized as a problem, but one without a clear solution. Now colleges have models to try. So far, 14 schools in Washington have made learn-at-your-own-pace math widely available to students. Statway is offered at another three. Last winter, more than four times as many students signed up for Big Bend’s learn-at-your-own-pace math classes, called “emporium math,” as traditionally-taught and online-only courses. “Math for citizens” Statway folds remedial math and one-quarter of college math into a three-quarter series, which satisfies the requirement that students pass one quarter of college math to graduate. In Statway, students study statistics used in everyday life — in polls and studies, for example — and learn how to analyze data and make inferences. It is, simply, “the best math for citizens,” said Seattle Central Statway instructor Paul Verschueren. Verschueren believes students often struggle with high-school algebra because they’re taught to memorize formulas. And while that’s efficient in the short term, he said, students don’t develop an understanding of the underlying concepts. Statway, in contrast, aims to build math intuition. “People don’t understand how malleable numbers are,” he said. “We have petrified students who are always afraid of the wrong move.” One other possible advantage: Statway students stay together through all three quarters, and over those nine months, students get to know each other and their instructor, which helps their confidence and makes it easier to lean on one another for help. “It’s more like real-life math,” said Seattle Central student Shayla Martin, 34, who is working on a bachelor’s degree in applied behavioral sciences. “It’s the first time I’ve ever used the word ‘interesting’ to describe a math class.” It’s more like real-life math. It’s the first time I’ve ever used ‘interesting’ to describe a math class.” - Shayla Martin, Seattle Central student Should Statway count as a math credit? All of the state’s public four-year universities accept it, including the University of Washington. But the UW is doing so on a three-year trial basis. Janice DeCosmo, a UW associate dean who has a leading role in deciding which community-college courses are transferable for UW credit, calls Statway “a very engaging curriculum,” but warns that it can limit students’ career choices because it doesn’t prepare them to take calculus. To be accepted as a freshman or transfer student at the UW, all students must have intermediate algebra or its equivalent on their transcripts. That’s because many non-math courses — in sociology, geology and other sciences — depend on an understanding of algebra. The version of Statway offered in Washington’s community colleges includes extra lessons in algebra, which is why the UW accepts it as a transfer credit. (Along with Seattle Central, Statway is also offered at South Seattle and Tacoma community colleges.) Even some Statway instructors say the class — while important — isn’t really a math class. Seattle Central instructor Bryan Johns, for example, thinks of the course as a logic and communications class because the math involved is so basic. But it’s clearly helping students get beyond remedial math, and on to credit-bearing courses. The first year Statway was offered at Seattle Central, 58 percent of students passed the three-class series. By the third year, 84 percent of students passed. By comparison, only between 11 and 15 percent of students who need to take remedial classes ever finish those courses, and complete one quarter of college math by the end of one year. Emporium approach While Statway re-imagines what it means to be math literate, the emporium program at Big Bend Community College is rethinking the way math is taught. The Moses Lake college still offers traditional courses made up of three pre-college algebra classes — introduction to algebra, and algebra I and II. But it is having more success when students take those classes using videos and computers. In emporium math, topics have been chopped up into mini-lessons, and delivered through short videos recorded by Big Bend instructors. Students watch the videos, then test their understanding, entering answers in a computer program that gives them immediate feedback. In the computer lab one day in July, about 20 students worked in front of monitors as classical music played softly in the background. Some wore headphones to watch a video, and others used calculators and scratch pads to work out math problems. When they got stuck, they raised their hands, and one of the tutors circling the room came to help. Math instructor Michele Sherwood sat at the instructor’s desk, waiting for students to come to her with completed math tests — the tests are a key to moving to a next level. Sherwood walked students through problems they answered incorrectly. “I don’t know what happened here,” one student told her, pointing to a wrong answer. “Oh, I see what you did,” Sherwood said. “This is supposed to be 10.” Big Bend made emporium math part of the curriculum in 2014. By winter quarter 2015, between 61 and 69 percent of students taking math the emporium way received at least a C or higher in the three algebra classes offered. That was generally better than students taking a traditional or online class, although the emporium method did not perform quite as well with algebra I students, who did better in a traditional setting. Students also can work at an accelerated pace, and often complete two quarters’ worth of math in one quarter, said Sarah Adams, the instructor who oversees Big Bend’s emporium program. That saves them about $500, since they only pay for five credits each quarter, regardless of how much math they finish. The emporium model was pioneered at Virginia Tech University in 1997, at an off-campus shopping mall (hence the name “emporium”) equipped with hundreds of computers and dozens of roving tutors. Along with 14 schools in this state, a number of other schools around the country now use it, at both the two- and four-year level. At Big Bend, instructors have created their own lessons rather than using a commercial set that Adams said “is super expensive and wasn’t going to exactly cover what we wanted them to learn.” Emporium math has been an ideal solution for Big Bend student Mari Chastain, who often floundered in high school because she has dyslexia — a learning disability that causes numbers to reverse themselves on the page. With emporium math, she can go as slowly as she needs. The program attracts strong math students as well. Kayla Brown, a student who’s working on her nursing degree, flew through algebra, and still had time to slow down for the few concepts that stumped her. Another student — a mom with six children — reportedly blazed through the work on her smartphone, mostly at night at home. And with more students getting through remedial classes and beyond, higher- level math classes are filling up, too, along with classes that demand strong math skills. This fall, Big Bend’s engineering class is full. And for the first time ever, there’s a waiting list for calculus.

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