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A proposal to construct a 180-kilometre long conduit from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea is economically and environmentally feasible, according to draft studies posted online last week by the World Bank.
Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority asked the World Bank to look at the plan in 2005. Channelling water downhill to the salty Dead Sea would help to refill the shrinking lake (see ‘New life for the Dead Sea?’, Nature 464, 1118–1120; 2010). Fears that the Dead Sea might disappear altogether are not unfounded: Israel and Jordan are now diverting water that previously flowed into it, and research in 2011 found that the Dead Sea has disappeared completely in the far-distant past (see ‘The Dead (and departed) Sea‘).
At the same time, water flowing down the conduit would also generate hydroelectricity to run a desalination plant. And — no small thing — the project might aid regional cooperation.
Drafts of the World Bank’s studies on the economics and environmental and social impacts of the idea show that three main concepts were considered: a tunnel, a tunnel with canals in parts and a pipeline. The latter is the recommended project, at a cost of around US$10 billion.
Final reports are expected in April, after a series of public meetings next month. |
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
April 4, 2016, 12:35 PM GMT / Updated April 4, 2016, 1:38 PM GMT By Mark Murray, Chuck Todd and Carrie Dann
First Read is a morning briefing from Meet the Press and the NBC Political Unit on the day's most important political stories and why they matter.
What Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary will tell us (and what it won’t)
Ahead of tomorrow’s Wisconsin primary, for both the Republicans and Democrats, it’s worth noting what Tuesday’s results will tell us -- and what they won’t. What they will tell us:
If the “Stop Trump” forces can finally notch a big win: Since Mitt Romney delivered his anti-Trump speech a month ago, the “Stop Trump” forces haven’t been able to beat the real-estate mogul -- outside of Ohio (John Kasich’s home state), Idaho, and Utah. So a win in Wisconsin would be a real victory for the #NeverTrump folks.
If Ted Cruz can narrow his delegate deficit with Trump: Wisconsin awards 42 delegates, and it’s possible that Cruz can win all of them -- given that they’re allocated winner-take-all by both statewide vote (15 total delegates) and results in individual congressional districts (three delegates in each of the state’s eight districts). So Trump’s current lead could shrink from 275 delegates to 233 (if Cruz wins all of the delegates). Or it could shrink to around 260 (if Trump is able to win some of the congressional districts). And in race where EVERY delegate matters, this is important.
If Bernie Sanders can truly cut into Hillary Clinton’s delegate lead: Unlike the GOP side, all Democratic delegates are allocated on a proportional basis, which means a two- or four-point Sanders win (as the current polling reflects) won’t really alter the math in the Democratic race. If Sanders wants to overtake Clinton in pledged delegates, he needs to win in Wisconsin (as well as New York and California) by MUCH bigger margins.
What tomorrow’s Wisconsin primary won’t tell us
If a loss dooms Trump’s path to the magic number of 1,237 delegates: Wisconsin awards 42 delegates on the Republican side. But New York (on April 19) gives out 95, and Connecticut/Delaware/Maryland/Pennsylvania/Rhode Island (April 26) offer 172, which means that Trump can more than make up for a Wisconsin loss as the GOP contest turns to the Northeast.
If Cruz really has the momentum: Similarly, while a Cruz win tomorrow would certainly boost his campaign, it wouldn’t tell us if the race has fundamentally changed. For that to happen, Cruz would need to overperform in the Northeast.
If Clinton is in real trouble: Make no mistake: A Sanders win in Wisconsin would launch another round of tough stories for Hillary Clinton and her campaign. But for Team Clinton to truly be in trouble -- and for the Democratic alarm bell to sound off -- Sanders has to beat her in New York in two weeks.
Is the Sanders campaign all but admitting defeat?
The question is whether this kind of story -- the Sanders campaign all but admitting to the New York Times that Sanders is unlikely to beat Clinton -- ends up hurting him in Wisconsin and New York. “Mr. Sanders is now campaigning more effectively than many expected, exposing Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate, and is positioning himself to win contests like the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday. But allies and advisers of Mr. Sanders say they missed opportunities to run an aggressive political operation in 2015 that would have presented more of a challenge to Mrs. Clinton. She has now firmly built a big lead in delegates needed to clinch the nomination — a margin that would be smaller if Mr. Sanders had run differently last year, according to interviews with more than 15 people who are on his team or close to him.” It’s hard to sustain a revolution when the revolutionaries are admitting that the war is over and that they lost. And that’s the impression you get after reading the story. Will this affect Sanders’ voter mobilization, his grassroots donor base, and his attacks on Clinton on the campaign trail?
An important reminder: Delegates -- not the voters -- select the presidential nominee
On “Meet the Press” yesterday, RNC Chair Reince Priebus made an important acknowledgement: The people who choose the GOP presidential nominee aren’t the voters – but rather the delegates who will be headed to Cleveland in July. “The nomination is won on the floor in Cleveland by the majority of delegates that get empowered and by the vote of the people,” Priebus said. “So the voters in these states, their votes end up causing delegates to be bound to candidates, and those delegates will have to vote for those candidates on the floor.” And in that delegate race, there were some developments over the weekend: “Ted Cruz’s preferred candidates won the vast majority of convention delegates available in North Dakota over the weekend, taking 18 of 25 slots in the state in another show of organizational strength over Donald Trump,” Politico writes. But NBC’s Decision Desk gives Cruz seven delegates to Trump’s 1, with the other 20 uncommitted. And in Tennessee, NBC’s Alex Jaffe and Vaughn Hillyard report, the state party filled Trump’s delegates with non-Trump people. Priebus responded to that on “Meet” yesterday. “Donald Trump has 33 delegates in Tennessee. And they're bound to Donald Trump, not just for one vote, but in Tennessee, they're actually bound for two votes. And nothing can change that.” But here’s the rub: What happens on a third vote? It’s another reminder that if the GOP nomination goes to a second (or third) vote, Trump probably won’t be your 2016 GOP nominee.
Trump, Cruz forces team up to block Kasich from Cleveland
MSNBC’s Ari Melber has more GOP convention/delegate intrigue. “The Donald Trump and Ted Cruz campaigns are working to prevent John Kasich from appearing on the ballot at the Republican National Convention in July, MSNBC has learned, an aggressive strategy suggesting the GOP's leading candidates are girding for a contested convention to select the party's nominee… Both campaigns are backing a rule that would require candidates to achieve a minimum amount of support to get on the ballot, which could block Kasich in Cleveland. That would effectively end his campaign. Kasich cannot mathematically win the nomination through the primaries, so his only hope is to win on a convention ballot.”
Sanders flips two delegates in Nevada (for now)
When it comes to the delegate race on the Democratic side, here’s Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston: “Despite losing the state on Feb. 20 in the caucus, Bernie Sanders' campaign swarmed the Clark County caucus and probably flipped two delegates from Hillary Clinton's camp... That is expected to switch two delegates to Sanders, giving Clinton an 18-17 lead in Nevada.” But per NBC's Decision Desk, it is critical to remember that the At-Large/PLEO numbers can and probably will change at the Nevada state convention on May 14-16. These county convention results do NOT change the winner of the Nevada caucuses. Clinton won Nevada, based on the Feb. 20 results. The results of the succeeding levels do not change that.
Where the Democratic delegate race currently stands
Here are NBC’s updated delegate numbers after accounting for the two flipped delegates in Nevada.
In pledged delegates, Clinton holds a 255-delegate lead over Sanders
Clinton 1235 (56% of delegates won)
Sanders 980 (44%)
In overall delegates (including superdelegates), Clinton holds a 680-delegate lead over Sanders
Clinton 1692 (63%)
Sanders 1012 (37%)
Clinton must win 34% of remaining delegates to hit 2383 magic number
Sanders must win 66% of remaining delegates to hit 2383 magic number
Where the GOP delegate race currently stands
Trump has a 275-delegate lead over Cruz
Trump 750 (47% of delegates won)
Cruz 475 (30%)
Rubio 172 (11%)
Kasich 143 (9%)
Trump must win 56% of remaining delegates to hit 1,237 magic number
Cruz must win 88% of remaining delegates to hit 1,237 magic number
Kasich must win 126% of remaining delegates to hit 1,237 magic number
On the trail
Hillary Clinton campaigns in New York, while husband Bill stumps in Wisconsin… Bernie Sanders also spends his day in Wisconsin… As does Donald Trump, who hits La Crosse and Superior… Ted Cruz campaigns in Waukesha, WI and Madison, WI… And John Kasich is in New York. |
By John Zajac
The Pyramids. According to common perception they were built, with the begrudging help of great armies of slaves, by the ancient pharaohs of Egypt as tombs for preserving their royal bodies. Pyramids were meant to be monuments to the pharaoh's greatness, filled with great treasures for the afterlife. To construct these massive shrines, the pharaoh's copied the oldest and largest pyramid of all, the Great Pyramid of Giza. But the Great Pyramid itself contains no pharaoh's body, no treasure chamber, and no treasures. Who, then, designed it and built it? What was its purpose? Let us begin our tour by considering a few basic facts about the Great Pyramid. The Last "Wonder of the World" Thirty times larger than the Empire State Building, the Pyramid's features are so large they can be seen from the Moon.
Its base covers 13.6 acres (equal to seven midtown Manhatten city blocks), each side being greater than five acres in area.
A highway lane eight feet wide and four inches thick could be built from San Francisco to New York and put inside the Great Pyramid.
The oldest structure in existence, having been started 4,617 years ago, it is the sole remnant of the Seven Wonders of the World. Journey to the Center of the Earth Only a solid stone mountain could endure the Pyramid's immense weight. And indeed, a flat solid granite mountain happens to be located just beneath the surface of the ground directly under the Pyramid.
It is built to face true North.
The Pyramid is located at the exact center of the Earth's land mass. That is, its East-West axis corresponds to the longest land parallel across the Earth, passing through Africa, Asia, and America. Similarly, the longest land meridian on Earth, through Asia, Africa, Europa, and Antarctica, also passes right through the Pyramid. Since the Earth has enough land area to provide 3 billion possible building sites for the Pyramid, the odds of it's having been built where it is are 1 in 3 billion. Construction Unequaled by Modern Technology Like 20th century bridge designs, the Pyramid's cornerstones have balls and sockets built into them. Several football fields long, the Pyramid is subject to expansion and contraction movements from heat and cold, as well as earthquakes, settling, and other such phenomena. After 4,600 years it's structure would have been significantly damaged without such construction.
While the bulk of the Pyramid's core was constructed of 4,000- to 40,000-pound blocks of soft limestone, the outer layer of the Pyramid was made of a beautifully bright, protective layer of polished stone. These outer "casing stones" are missing today because about 600 years ago they were stolen by Arabs, (This accounts for the very worn appearance of the Pyramid today, since the inner limestone blocks are not immune to attack by the elements-wind, rain, and sandstrom.) This protective covering was made up of 100-inch-thick, 20-ton block of hard, white limestone, similar to marble but superior in hardness and in durability against the elements. The Great Pyramid did not always look as "rough" as it does today.
Originally it was encased with a layer of tight-fitting, highly polished 20-ton stone slabs. The casing stones, 144,000 in all, were so brilliant that they could literally be seen from the mountains of Israel hundreds of miles away. On bright mornings and late afternoons, sunlight reflected by this vast mirrored surface of 5-1/4 acres distinguished the Pyramid as being visible from the moon. (Note: For those interested in possible symbolic significance, in Bible prophecy 144,000 is the number of people-12,000 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel-who are supposed to evangelize the world at the endtime.)
The people of the area had viewed the Pyramid and its polished stones with awe for centuries. But when a 13th century earthquake loosened some of these casing stones, the Arabs recognized a great quarry of precut stones that could be used to finish off palaces and mosques. For instance, the casing stones were used to rebuild the new city of El Kaherah plus Cairo mosques and palaces, including the Mosque of Sultan Hasan.
Amazingly, the outside surface stones are cut within 0.01 (1/100th) inch of perfectly straight and at nearly perfect right angles for all six sides. And they were placed together with an intentional gap between them of 0.02 inch. Modern technology cannot place such 20-ton stones with greater accuracy than those in the Pyramid.
Even more amazing is that the 0.02-inch gap was designed to allow space for glue to seal and hold the stones together. A white cement that connected the casing stones and made them watertight is still intact and stronger than the blocks that it joins. Let's pause from our tour for a moment's rest and reflection. Whoever built the Pyramid used a technologly that we still do not possess today to cut, move, and cement stones. Whoever built it also had some knowledge of the Earth, because it was built in the right spot-one of the few places that would support such a great weight. The builder also knew where the greatest land mass of the Earth was in both the North-South and East-West directions.
Amazing. But we had better keep going. And joining us on the leg of our tour will be none other than Sir Issac Newton ... The Cosmic Yardstick The Great Pyramid is one of the most comprehensively surveyed buildings in the World. Scientists over the centuries have taken thousands of measurements in their quest to find out more about its mysteries. Among those intrigued by the incredible accuracy of the Pyramid's construction was the great scientist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. Attemping to formulate his famous law of gravity, Newton needed to know the diameter of the Earth. However, in the 1600's no measurement was accurate enough, especially since Newton theorized that the Earth's spin would cause an equatorial bulge. Having heard legends claiming that knowledge of the Earth, the past, and the future were contained in the Pyramid, Newton set out to investigate. After studying the detailed measurements made by the investigators before him, Newton recognized that many key measurements would be in round numbers if the standard unit of measure was just 0.001 (1/1,000) inch larger than the British inch-which just happens to be the Sacred Jewish Inch. (The Sacred Jewish Inch, 1/25 of a cubit, equals 1.00106 British inches.) This discovery allowed the secrets of the Pyramid to be unlocked and revealed unmistakable and mathematical relationships. For instance: We know from geometry that there is a universal relationship between the diameter of a circle and its circumference. Consider this: The height of the Pyramid's apex is 5,812.98 inches, and each side is 9,131 inches from corner to corner (in a straight line). If the circumference of the Pyramid is divided by twice its height (the diameter of a circle is twice the radius), the result is 3.14159, which just happens to be pi. Incredibly, this calculation is accurate to six digits. So the Pyramid is a square circle, and thus pi was designed into it 4,600 years ago. Pi is demonstrated many times throughout the Pyramid.
Other numbers are also repeated throughout. Each of the Pyramids four walls, when measured as a straight line, are 9,131 inches, for a total of 36,524 inches. At first glance, this number may not seem significant, but move the decimal point over and you get 365.24. Modern science has shown us that the exact length of the solar year is 365.24 days. All of the evidence in the Great Pyramid shows that 4,600 years ago somebody knew a great deal about the Earth. But it gets better, much better: The average height of land above sea level (Miami being low and the Himalayas being high), as can be measured only by modern-day satellites and computers, happens to be 5,449 inches. That is the exact height of the Pyramid.
All four sides of the Pyramid are very slightly and evenly bowed in, or concave. This effect, which cannot be detected by looking at the Pyramid from the ground, was discovered around 1940 by a pilot taking aerial photos to check certain measurements. As measured by today's laser instruments, all of these perfectly cut and intentionally bowed stone blocks duplicate exactly the curvature of the earth. The radius of this bow is equal to the radius of the Earth. This radius of curvature is what Newton had long been seeking.
The Great Pyramid is located on the far right. Clearly, whoever built the Pyramid had access to information beyond that which earthlings possessed at the time, at least earthlings as we know them. Now, one can argue that we were visited by scientifically advanced beings from outer space who taught us their technology. That is possible from the evidence presented, perhaps even likely. If so, these advanced beings had the paramount goal of leaving behind a message that would endure for eons. Suppose these beings decided to leave a message. The message would have to be universal yet simple. It would have to survive the centuries and be understandable by all the Earth's inhabitants despite language and cultural differences. The message would have to be understood by many languages that would not come into existence for centuries after the message was written. So far the message indicates that whoever built the Pyramid knew the Earth well: the length of the year, the radius of curvature, the standard measurement techniques, the average height of the continents, and the center of the land mass. They were able to consruct something that we still cannot construct today, and they were able to tie all these things together in this single structure. Were they extraterrestrial, or perhaps even supernatural? The answer is not yet clear. However, thus far we have examined only the outside of the Pyramid. |
I saw Joss Whedons “The Avengers” last week. Did I like it? Let me just say, I may end up marrying it. Yes, movie-to-man marriages are highly controversial in many ways, but love always finds a way. Keep in mind though, that nothing is decided as of yet. For one thing I want to keep my options open for Nolans forthcoming “The Dark Knight Rises“. Everybody knows you can only marry two or three movies in a lifetime. I’ve already exceeded this limit by at least 20 or 30. Safe to say that’s way too many and people are starting to talk.
Meanwhile fellow web-cartoonist – the exceedingly talented Mr. Brendan Boughen – suggested this might be a good time to cash in on the temporary electric buzz surrounding the Avengers by featuring them in a comic ( this was by the way only his exact words in opposite land). Of course I had no patience for such ideas at the time. Unfortunately I suffered a minor black-out and woke up a week later with this comic all done. What happened?
On a serious note, when the special edition Blu-ray of the comic comes out, you will hear the commentator track state that the original title was “Caught in a trap I can’t walk out Because I love you too much baby “. This is a downright lie!
When you’re done reading Anyone for Rhubarb? I highly recommend checking aforementioned Brendan Boughens work out on Cartoons by Jim. http://cartoonsbyjim.com/ It’s not very funny …in opposite land! |
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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
It was January 15, 2004, and TomDispatch had only been in existence for a year when Chalmers Johnson, author of the prophetic book Blowback (published in 2000 and a bestseller after the 9/11 attacks), did a piece for this site entitled "America's Empire of Bases." He wrote then: "Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order."
It was a benchmark essay for TomDispatch and a theme -- the unprecedented way Washington was garrisoning the planet -- that Johnson would return to repeatedly and that others of us would take up. This mattered because, despite the crucial role that Washington's empire of bases played in the American way of war and its dreams of global dominance, bases were then, and remain today, a phenomenon largely ignored in the mainstream media.
In 2004, the Pentagon was, for instance, already building the first of its 505 bases, the biggest among them meant to be "enduring," in Iraq -- American ziggurats, I called them at the time. Some of these were large enough to qualify as full-scale American towns, with PXs, fire departments, bus routes, the usual range of fast-food joints, internet cafes, and the like -- and yet it was the rare American reporter who saw a story of any sort in them, even when visiting one of them. The same was true in Afghanistan, where the U.S. was building (and is still upgrading) 400 or more bases. No one even bothered to try to count them up until Nick Turse did so in February 2010 for this site. (Ann Jones took TomDispatch readers onto one of them in August of that same year.)
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In his books and at TomDispatch, Johnson put significant effort into trying to come up with a number for the bases the Pentagon garrisoned outside the United States. In January 2011, Turse returned to that task and found that number to be well over 1,100. Again, it's not a figure you normally see reported in the mainstream. In March 2010, John Feffer reminded TD readers of just how far the Pentagon would go to hang onto a single major base, among so many, on the Japanese island of Okinawa.
One of the last essays Chalmers Johnson published at this site before his death in 2010 was entitled "Dismantling the Empire" and it was concerned with just how the U.S. could downsize its global mission and end its empire of bases. David Vine, anthropologist and author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, has been touring American bases for the past three years. In a major survey of the changing shape of our Baseworld, he suggests that unfortunately it isn't shrinking at all, and that "dismantling" isn't yet on the American horizon. This means that -- until the mainstream finally stumbles upon the import of this story -- TomDispatch has little choice but to stay on the bases beat for the foreseeable future. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Vine discusses his experiences with the Pentagon's empire of bases, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
The Lily-Pad Strategy:
How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War
By David Vine - Advertisement - The first thing I saw last month when I walked into the belly of the dark grey C-17 Air Force cargo plane was a void -- something missing. A missing left arm, to be exact, severed at the shoulder, temporarily patched and held together. Thick, pale flesh, flecked with bright red at the edges. It looked like meat sliced open. The face and what remained of the rest of the man were obscured by blankets, an American flag quilt, and a jumble of tubes and tape, wires, drip bags, and medical monitors. That man and two other critically wounded soldiers -- one with two stumps where legs had been, the other missing a leg below the thigh -- were intubated, unconscious, and lying on stretchers hooked to the walls of the plane that had just landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. A tattoo on the soldier's remaining arm read, "DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR." I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming from Afghanistan, he told me. "A lot from the Horn of Africa," he added. "You don't really hear about that in the media." "Where in Africa?" I asked. He said he didn't know exactly, but generally from the Horn, often with critical injuries. "A lot out of Djibouti," he added, referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main U.S. military base in Africa, but from "elsewhere" in the region, too. Since the "Black Hawk Down" deaths in Somalia almost 20 years ago, we've heard little, if anything, about American military casualties in Africa (other than a strange report last week about three special operations commandos killed, along with three women identified by U.S. military sources as "Moroccan prostitutes," in a mysterious car accident in Mali). The growing number of patients arriving at Ramstein from Africa pulls back a curtain on a significant transformation in twenty-first-century U.S. military strategy. These casualties are likely to be the vanguard of growing numbers of wounded troops coming from places far removed from Afghanistan or Iraq. They reflect the increased use of relatively small bases like Camp Lemonnier, which military planners see as a model for future U.S. bases "scattered," as one academic explains, "across regions in which the United States has previously not maintained a military presence." - Advertisement - Disappearing are the days when Ramstein was the signature U.S. base, an American-town-sized behemoth filled with thousands or tens of thousands of Americans, PXs, Pizza Huts, and other amenities of home. But don't for a second think that the Pentagon is packing up, downsizing its global mission, and heading home. In fact, based on developments in recent years, the opposite may be true. While the collection of Cold War-era giant bases around the world is shrinking, the global infrastructure of bases overseas has exploded in size and scope. Unknown to most Americans, Washington's garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls "lily pads" (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and prepositioned weaponry and supplies. Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia's tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more.
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Image caption The Flag Institute said the design should be simple and distinctive
A campaign has been launched to design a flag to celebrate the "cultural heritage" of County Durham.
The county, spanning from Tyne and Wear down to Darlington, is the only one in the north of England without a flag, according to the Flag Institute.
Adventurer Andy Strangeway from Yorkshire, wants people to design a flag expressing what the county means to them.
The winning flag will be registered in the Flag Institute's UK Flag Registry.
Mr Strangeway has already established flags for the historic East Riding, North Riding and West Riding of Yorkshire.
He said the flag would be a public symbol to "raise recognition and awareness" of the ceremonial county, express "pride" in the local community and celebrate the "cultural heritage" of County Durham.
The Flag Institute said the design should be simple and distinctive, with meaningful symbolism and basic colouring.
Legends and folklore, traditional emblems and colours and local people, achievements and industries should be considered when designing the flag.
A panel of senior county councillors would choose the top six designs which would then be put to a public vote.
The first County Durham flag will be walked down the River Tees in 2014.
Entries for the flag competition have to be submitted by 18 August. |
DATE: For any publication date in the near future
LOCATION: GalNet, or Daramo, Achenar, Alioth, Sol
TITLE: The Independence of Independents
DESCRIPTION:
Independent talk show 'Affairs of State' political commentator Walter Astoria followed up on the fallout from the recent conflict in Daramo on last night’s broadcast.
“Admiral Yorke made it a point to remind the Federation’s 'enemies that they cannot simply take whatever they want.’ I would like to emphasize that those ‘clueless colonists on Achenar 6d’ taught the Federation that same lesson when it ‘controlled over a thousand systems.’ In a way, the Empire represents the first successful independent movement.”
“I would like to impress upon our viewers how deeply the independent realms are affected by Federal-Imperial relations. Should the Empire come away the worse in a war, the balance of power will drastically shift. Independent systems may be compelled to sacrifice some of their independence. The Alliance may experience a surge in member systems. New coalitions may form. Or we may soon be writing our new Congressmen...”
SUBMITTING COMMANDER:
Corrigendum
INSPIRATION: |
Photo: Michael Sears
I am very excited to be there but not expecting any results. I know these other guys have been competing a lot and it will be tough. I'm just doing it because I want to do it.
About Carlson Gracie
The IBJJF Masters Worlds starts just over a week from now, and the tournament will see the long-awaited return of a man with jiu-jitsu in his blood.Carlson Gracie Jr. is the only son of the legendary Carlson Gracie, an integral figure in the history of jiu-jitsu and MMA.The fifth degree black belt's last match was 18 years ago, but he recently dedicated himself to training and signed up to compete at the Masters Worlds."It's because of the 10th year anniversary [of his father's passing]. I thought it would be nice to honor my father by competing. This is also about the team coming together to forget about the past and focus on the future."47 years old and head of the Carlson Gracie HQ gym in Chicago, 'Junior' put his name forward and will compete in the Master 4 medium heavyweight division."Masters Worlds is the tournament that fits my profile -- of course I can't come back at the adult Worlds," says Gracie Jr. But I am feeling good, and maybe I will do more tournaments after this."He has lost around 40lb (18kg+) in the last year and has been preparing for the tournament by rolling with his students and doing strength and conditioning with Tony Williams, one of his black belts.As part of the tribute to Carlson Gracie, many affiliated teams with links to the Carlson Gracie Team will sign up under the same banner in the hope of winning the team trophy.The Carlson Gracie Team took first place team trophies in both gi and no-gi at the recent Chicago Open.Carlson Gracie, eldest son of Gracie jiu-jitsu co-founder Carlos Gracie, fought jiu-jitsu and MMA contests in the 1950s and 60s, and would later go on to train some of the most influential figures over the last 40 years of jiu-jitsu, including past world champions such as Mario Sperry and Ricardo Liborio, and innovative teachers such as Ricardo de la Riva, among many more. |
Raw is shockingly mediocre these days when compared to how much more entertaining smackdown has been these last few weeks? What is your opinion on that
I honestly don’t watch either anymore. Between the mix of repeated commercials (I fucking hate the restaurant Sonic and I don’t even have one near me) and 90% of the the stuff going on being a chore to get through with the occasional diamond, I just stopped even watching. Because I wanted to watch wrestling and most of WWE’s airtime on USA is NOT WRESTLING.
I learn what’s happening by either looking up the occasional stuff I heard was good or watching Wrestling With Wregret on Youtube.
But, it doesn’t surprise me. Smackdown’s always been the more wrestling fan oriented show. Raw is the ‘entertainment’ show. Remember the Smackdown Six? Yeah.
Problem is that I still like wrestling because it CAN be good. I have a lot of favorite matches I could list of and go back and watch!
Anyway. I could go on and on about what I don’t like about WWE today or what stuff I do like, but I doubt anyone wants to hear that. xD |
Searchkit is a React UI framework to simplify building great search applications with Elasticsearch. Its open sourced under Apache 2.0 licence.
Since our last blog post, we’ve attracted alot of attention from Github, Hacker News, Reddit and Product Hunt. A big thank you for everyone who upvoted or starred Searchkit on these sites!
Over the last few weeks, 1.8k developers have starred Searchkit on Github and was consistently in the top 5 trending projects. Hundreds of developers every day are using Searchkit. As more developers use Searchkit, the better our releases become. The feedback that we have had has been invaluable in shaping Searchkit as a compelling framework.
Today we’re releasing Searchkit 0.9. This release consists of a couple new features, few improvements and bug fixes to our components.
Layout Components
In this release, we are introducing layout components to make it easier to take advantage of Searchkit’s default theming. This is also a precursor to making the Searchkit’s theme being responsive to different devices.
http://docs.searchkit.co/stable/docs/theming/using-searchkit-theme.html
Multiple Field Sorting Support
Searchkit can now support multiple field sorting via fields prop.
http://docs.searchkit.co/stable/docs/components/sorting/sort.html
Dynamic Range Filter Component
When using the Dynamic Range filter, the min / max values are calculated from the data we have in the index and no longer are you required to specify a min and max.
http://docs.searchkit.co/stable/docs/components/navigation/dynamic-range-filter.html
Overriding QueryBuilder
You can now customise the query object that is sent to Elasticsearch. See Elasticsearch documentation on the query DSL.
TagFilter Component
Now you add filters from Search results easily with the TagFilter component. It works by making a list of values on a search result actionable.
http://docs.searchkit.co/stable/docs/components/navigation/tag-filter.html
CheckboxFilter Component
You can now add toggles based on a filter query. Useful for toggles such as “In stock” feature.
http://docs.searchkit.co/stable/docs/components/navigation/checkbox-filter.html
InputFilter Component
You can now filter results using a text search field.
http://docs.searchkit.co/stable/docs/components/navigation/input-filter.html
THANKS
Thank you to everyone who contributed! Check our Github page at www.github.com/searchkit/searchkit and please star the project if you haven’t yet! |
Friends of a Dallas man who was shot and killed are speaking out. 33-year-old Joshua Tubbleville was found dead inside his Mercedes near Oak Lawn and Lemmon early Friday morning. (Published Saturday, May 31, 2014)
Friends of a Dallas man who was shot and killed are speaking out.
Joshua Tubbleville, 33, was found dead inside his Mercedes near Oak Lawn and Lemmon early Friday morning.
Police said someone shot him inside his car, which led him to crash at the Shell gas station there.
Stacy Woodward and Bob Thomas were with Tubbleville the night before he was killed.
Video Man Found Shot in Crashed Mercedes Dies
"I don’t think there’s anything you can say to describe the way you feel when someone you’re close with, something like this happens to somebody you’re close to," said Woodward.
Thomas said it was unreal that he was picking out his friend's funeral outfit on Saturday.
"That’s hard to know that you’re picking out your friend’s, what he’s going to be buried in. You smile because you know that he’s looking down from heaven going, 'I’m really hoping you pick something good for me,'" he said.
Homicide and crime scene units visited Tubbleville’s town house looking for clues. Woodward said it’s just a matter of time before the shooter will be brought to justice.
"They have witnesses, there’s people who say, ‘I saw the guy, I came face to face with the guy. I could pick him out,'" she said.
As the investigation continues, Thomas is urging anyone with information about this tragedy to step forward and help bring closure to his loved ones.
"To have a friend die so tragically and so suddenly ... his mom and dad and his brother are suffering a lot too," he said.
Tubbleville's brother and parents are all in Houston. His brother is making funeral arrangements. |
Drexel University professor Ken Lacovara has recently unveiled a new supermassive dinosaur species he discovered and unearthed with his team between 2005 and 2009. Weighing in at nearly 65 tons, Dreadnoughtus schrani is the largest land animal ever found of calculable mass and also the most complete skeleton ever found for a dinosaur in this mass range. (Courtesy of Drexel University)
Scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of a new long-necked, long-tailed dinosaur that has taken the crown for largest terrestrial animal with a body mass that can be accurately determined.
Measurements of bones from its hind leg and foreleg revealed that the animal was 65 tons, and still growing when it died in the Patagonian hills of Argentina about 77 million years ago.
“To put this in perspective, an African elephant is about five tons, T. rex is eight tons, Diplodocus is 18 tons, and a Boeing 737 is around 50 tons,” said study author and paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara at Drexel University. “And then you have Dreadnoughtus at 65 tons.”
Dreadnoughtus, meaning “fears nothing,” is named after the impervious early 20th century battleships. Although it was a plant-eater, a healthy Dreadnoughtus likely had no real issues with predators due to its intimidating size and muscular, weaponized tail.
But its enormous bulk also had a downside. Based on the width and strength of its skeleton, toppling over would likely spell death for such a heavy animal.
“If you look at its really big ribs, there's no way they're going to withstand 65 tons of weight on top of them,” he said. “It would have been a catastrophic event in the life of a Dreadnoughtus if it fell over.”
However, it probably didn't do much walking around since its 37-foot-long neck could already provide access to a wide bounty of vegetation.
“How do you come up with a body size that is so enormous when you're a terrestrial animal?” said Luis Chiappe, director of the National History Museum of Los Angeles's Dinosaur Institute, who was not involved in the study. “You need to have a structural design that allows you to support a body like that, and you have to be potentially adapted to eat 24 hours a day, nonstop, with a minimal amount of sleep.”
The study was published online Thursday in Scientific Reports.
Lead researcher Kenneth Lacovara holds a toe bone. (Meeri Kim)
On the first day of the 2005 field season in southern Argentina, Lacovara spotted a little lump of bone sticking out of the ground. It was maybe the 20th fossil he had found that day, so he didn't think much of it. As he kept digging, he realized it was a massive dinosaur femur that stretched over six feet long.
Lacovara still wasn't all that thrilled — isolated bones are found all the time — until more and more pieces started popping up. By the end of that first day, he had added a tibia, a fibula and a half dozen tail vertebrae to his collection.
“At that point, I'm pretty excited,” he said. “But I had no idea that we were going to walk away with 130 bones.”
The huge creature also had a smaller companion, which Lacovara and his colleagues also dug up. Both got caught in quicksand, which is how their bones became so well-preserved.
“This is clearly a spectacular find, and I know what it takes to collect these things,” said Chiappe. “It's grueling work.”
The skeleton of Dreadnoughtus schrani is remarkably complete for a dinosaur of this size — over 70 percent of the bones were dug up, excluding the head. Typically these long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs (called sauropods) have tiny skulls, so those bones tend not to survive. For instance, Dreadnoughtus's was probably about the size of a horse's head.
Lacovara and colleagues assemble vertebrae at Drexel University in Philadelphia. (Meeri Kim)
Also, such massive giants tend to leave only fragments of their skeleton behind, making their weight hard to pin down. In general, the smallest circumference of the humerus and femur tend to correlate well with an animal's weight, so paleontologists use this method for estimation.
So there may be more massive dinosaurs out there than Dreadnoughtus, but their masses can't be accurately calculated without those particular bones. The previous contender for biggest land animal with a mass that could be determined by bone circumference was another Argentine titanosaur called Elaltitan lilloi first described in 2012. It was estimated at 47 tons.
To look for hints of age, Lacovara and his colleagues looked for any traces of bone growth. As the animal gets older, parts of the skeleton will fuse together, and its bone growing cells will morph from fluffy to flat.
“With Dreadnoughtus, there's no indication that there was any cessation or slowing of growth [in the bones],” he said. “When it died at 65 tons, it was growing fast, which is kind of scary.”
Titanosaurs, a subgroup of sauropods that includes Dreadnoughtus, are thought to grow rapidly and reach full adult size in only 20 or 30 years. But surprisingly, their eggs are not overly large. The largest dinosaur eggs found have been about the size of a soccer ball.
“The hatchling from an egg the size of a football is not very big,” said Chiappe. “But in two decades, the hatchling would grow to become an enormous animal the size of two, three school buses put together.”
Chiappe, who has worked in Patagonia for a number of years and is originally from Argentina, discovered a large sauropod hatchery in 1997 that served as evidence that these dinosaurs laid eggs and huddled together in large nesting colonies.
“I would imagine [Dreadnoughtus] would have had a very similar nesting behavior: the congregation of hundreds or thousands of 60-ton females gathering together to nest in a lost valley somewhere,” he said.
The researchers have a whopping 10 Dreadnoughtus papers in the pipeline, four of which are already written, that take the analysis a step further. One of the upcoming studies looks at the dinosaur's locomotion through robotic and computer simulations, using 3D scans of the bones that are publicly available for free download along with the current study.
“Kids are going to be able to download the Dreadnoughtus bones and play with them,” said Lacovara.
Due to its monstrous size, Chiappe expects Dreadnoughtus to join the ranks of popular sauropod favorites such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus on the road to “Jurassic Park”-like stardom.
“This is the kind of creature that will soon make it into Hollywood,” he said. “You can guarantee that the next documentary on dinosaurs will feature this new creature.”
A pair of bones, called a chevron, occur along the bottom of the tail. In Dreadnoughtus, the lower portions of the chevron bones have an unusually large surface for muscle attachment, indicating that this dinosaur’s tail was extremely muscular and powerful. (Kenneth Lacovara)
Scientists unearth the tail, with neural spines to the left and chevrons to the right. (Lacovara)
Lacovara lies next to the right tibia, shin bone, to show scale. (Lacovara)
Kim is a freelance science journalist currently based in Philadelphia.
Read more:
Shrinkage determined dinosaur survival
All dinosaurs had feathers? Yes. It's possible.
Scientists call the new dinosaur 'The Chicken From Hell' |
EXCLUSIVE: The Men in Black are back. Sony Pictures has fast tracked a spinoff of its billion-dollar alien franchise. The studio today will stake out a May 17, 2019, release date for an untitled film that has a script by Matt Holloway & Art Marcum, the writers of Iron Man and Transformers: The Last Knight.
Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones aren’t expected to reprise, but the film acknowledges and builds on the world they inhabited. Holloway & Marcum have scripted a contemporary sci-fi pic about the black-clad secret force that protects earth from the alien scum of the universe, focusing on new characters chasing villains that put the picture on more of a global scale than the two previous films. The ambition is akin to the way that Jurassic World rebooted and expanded that franchise. The MiB spinoff film is being produced by Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald and executive produced by Steven Spielberg. They are actively involved in meeting with top directors right now and expect to land one quickly.
Image Courtesy of Sony
The project is a surprise, because it was expected that the next Men in Black movie would be a mashup with another Sony Pictures hit franchise, 21 Jump Street, with Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill’s characters donning the black suits. That idea remains in development, but the spinoff is moving quickly and will come first. Sony, which separately is rebooting its Charlie’s Angels reboot with Elizabeth Banks directing and Kristen Stewart and Lupita Nyong’o in talks.
The studio also is moving on multiple fronts with its Spider-Man universe, working simultaneously on a Phil Lord & Christopher Miller-scripted animated film for Christmas 2018, as well as the Ruben Fleischer-directed Tom Hardy-Michelle Williams starrer Venom to be released October 5, 2018, and Silver & Black, with Gina Prince-Bythewood directing the two female superheroes in the Spidey universe for February 8, 2019. There is also the sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming, with Jon Watts directing Tom Holland and the Zendaya-led ensemble. That will be released July 5, 2019.
Parkes confirmed the Men in Black spinoff. “It’s so rare to get to the end of the script and know you’re holding a movie in your hands, but Art and Matt have written a spinoff that somehow is true to the core of the MiB world and yet expands the franchise to a fresh new place,” he said.
David Beaubaire is overseeing for Sony. |
State regulators on Thursday granted Pacific Gas & Electric a $120 million rate hike over the next four years to pay for the repair and maintenance of its natural gas system, but will now require the utility to report what it does with the money.
Average residential customers will see their bills go from about $51.60 per month to $51.96 this year, a roughly 0.7 percent bump. But charges could climb as high as $58.16 by 2014, according to an estimate.
The increase has been in the works since before last year’s deadly San Bruno explosion, and the utility is considered likely to seek additional rate hikes once the scope of post-San Bruno repairs becomes clear. But concern over pipeline safety pushed the California Public Utilities Commission to require the utility to begin detailing which projects it is spending the money on and why.
As part of the unanimously approved plan, PG&E will have to file the reports twice a year. Until now there was no requirement that PG&E provide a detailed accounting of how it uses money from ratepayers. Critics said that lack of follow-up allowed the utility to delay projects at will, possibly at the expense of public safety.
The first report is due Oct. 1, said Commissioner Timothy Simon. “I assure you that any issues detected with regard to PG&E’s prioritization and spending will be brought to the attention of the full commission,” he said.
The utility got $461.8 million in gas revenue in 2010 and, under the terms of the deal approved Thursday, is slated to bring in $514.2 million this year, $541.4 million in 2012, $565.1 million in 2013 and $581.8 million in 2014. That is significantly less in each year than the utility initially requested.
While the commission documents don’t offer details, they indicate the money will go primarily to work on the company’s transmission lines and storage facilities.
PG&E declined to say if other rate hikes are in the offing, but given the scope of the pipeline repair and replacement program the utility unveiled in the aftermath of the San Bruno explosion, it is almost certain to request additional increases to pay for it. The utility has proposed testing or replacing much of its older gas pipeline and is in a vigorous discussion with regulators about how far that work should go.
But PG&E spokeswoman Christine Cordner said the utility welcomes the reporting requirements.
“We’re happy to do it. It’s something we expected,” she said. “This is providing more information and making it public.”
Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, who represents San Bruno, supported the commission’s move toward greater accountability, but he remains concerned ratepayers will end up on the hook for the utility’s shortcomings.
“It’s about time they hold PG&E accountable for the ratepayer money they have collected in the past,” he said. “But if it turns out their maintenance plan was negligent or ineffective, it shouldn’t be our responsibility.”
Hill said forcing ratepayers to cover the cost of fixing pipes that may have been “negligently maintained” is akin to making them pay for the costs of the explosion in San Bruno. He said customers aren’t responsible, but the company and its shareholders should be.
After the Sept. 9 explosion, critics pointed out that the utility had twice justified rate increases using a pipeline segment just a few miles north of the section that exploded. Even though PG&E said in documents to the commission that the segment of line 132 had an unacceptably high risk of failure, the pipeline work that the rate increases were granted for was not done.
Lawmakers and San Bruno residents demanded to know at a December town hall meeting what happened to the money. Utilities commission Executive Director Paul Clanon said he was sure it had been spent on pipeline work, but had no proof.
PG&E spokesman Joe Molica said the effort to replace that roughly 7,400-foot segment is under way. The utility has begun doing the engineering work and plans to break ground in 2012.
According to PUC documents, the commission also plans to tackle the training for fire crews on the locations of gas lines and their shut-off valves.
San Bruno fire Chief Dennis Haag acknowledged at a National Transportation Safety Board hearing in March that he had not known a large gas line ran through his city.
The commission also said it will take on the question of ensuring PG&E workers are dispatched quickly to ruptures. It took the utility nearly 90 minutes to stop the flow of gas to the 30-inch diameter pipe.
No word was immediately available Thursday on a timetable for rules on those issues
Contact Joshua Melvin at 650-348-4335. |
As we pass the 14th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, its chief progenitor is suddenly beloved by the mainstream media again.
Every time former President George W. Bush pops up somewhere these days, media pundits gush about how good he looks now, compared to Donald Trump. Recently, for instance, he described himself — and was dutifully portrayed as — a great supporter of the free press.
“I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy,” he told NBC’s Matt Lauer in early March. “That we need the media to hold people like me to account. I mean, power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive and it’s important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power, whether it be here or elsewhere.”
The same week, he similarly assured a gushing daytime talk show host Ellen DeGeneres that “I’m a big believer in free press.”
The headlines were rapturous.
But in reality, Bush was anything but a friend of the press during his presidency. Maybe he didn’t demonize it as much as Trump does — but he actively manipulated it and bullied it far worse and far more effectively than Trump has, much of it in the service of selling his marquee policy: the war in Iraq.
That illegal war destabilized Iraq and took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the lives of over 4,000 American soldiers — many more in both countries continue to live with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, among other war wounds. Over the course of the conflict, the United States has spent over $2 trillion.
And although Trump is trying hard to delegitimize the press, which is highly dangerous and not to be underestimated, there’s little evidence his behavior is getting the press to back away from its accountability mission — like Bush did.
Photo: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
The Run-Up to War
By far the biggest and most tragic example of Bush making of mockery of the free press was the cascade of lies he and Dick Cheney told — and got away with — in the run-up to war in Iraq.
Almost all of the American mainstream media was cowed by the nationalistic fervor expressed by Bush in his November 2001 invocation that the nations of the world are “either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” The White House attacked those who raised too many questions as unpatriotic; newsroom leaders and their corporate masters were afraid of appearing out of step with the country.
There were plenty of what Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway calls “alternative facts” in the pattern of manipulation and deceit Bush used to build his case for the war in Iraq.
Among major print outlets, only Knight Ridder Newspapers, which today is part of McClatchy, aggressively challenged the case for war. “There wasn’t any reporting in the rest of the press corps, there was stenography,” John Walcott, who worked with Knight Ridder at the time, would later say. “The administration would make an assertion, people would make an assertion, people would write it down as if it were true, and put it in the newspaper or on television.”
Bush White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan would himself later write that the war was sold with a “political propaganda campaign.” McClellan said the push to war was “all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage,” which is something the administration used the news media to do. “Through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers,” he wrote of the press’s role in the debacle. “Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it.”
“Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge,” the New York Times’ editors wrote in May 2004.
Photo: Amr Nabil/AP
Demonizing Al Jazeera
President Trump has referred to mainstream television networks like CNN as the “enemy of the American people.”
But those are just words. By contrast, the Bush administration actively suppressed the one television network that was a thorn in its side during the initial phase of the war in Iraq.
Qatar-based Al Jazeera’s critical coverage of the invasions of Afghanistan and particularly of Iraq — featured in the documentary Control Room — set off a viperous reaction from the Bush administration. Trump complains of “fake news,” but Bush’s Pentagon falsely accused Al Jazeera of purposely staging scenes of civilian casualties in Iraq.
When the network obtained exclusive footage of videotaped addresses by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice asked five major U.S. television networks to limit their coverage of the tapes. The New York Times called it “the first time in memory that the networks had agreed to a joint arrangement to limit their prospective news coverage.”
The administration also imprisoned an Al Jazeera journalist in Guantánamo Bay for several years, one of many innocent people who ended up at the camp.
Alongside this campaign of demonization and attempted suppression, the Bush administration bombed the network’s offices twice — ostensibly by accident. First, they struck the network’s bureau in Kabul in 2001, which destroyed the office but left the staff unharmed. In April 2003, a U.S. missile struck the Baghdad office, killing Al Jazeera cameraman Tarek Ayoub.
Author Ron Suskind, in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” suggests the Bush administration was not too upset following the bombing in Kabul. “Inside the CIA and White House,” he writes, “there was satisfaction that a message had been sent to Al Jazeera.”
In 2005, the Daily Mirror published the minutes of a 2004 meeting between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, describing how the American president suggested bombing Al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar.
The memo suggests that Blair talked Bush out of it. But the Bush White House never directly denied the story.
Cowing the Press About Torture
When the American people learned that the U.S. government had set up a global network of secret prisons where it tortured detainees, the Bush administration set out to manage the media fallout by insisting that the brutal techniques that it had authorized — including waterboarding — were not torture.
“I’ve said to the people that we don’t torture, and we don’t,” Bush told interviewer Katie Couric in 2006. Vice President Dick Cheney referred to the torture techniques as an “alternative” form of interrogation, and Attorney General John Ashcroft also insisted that waterboarding isn’t torture.
The media went along with it. Mainstream outlets instead used the government’s euphemism, “enhanced interrogation,” or other more polite phrases rather than using the word torture.
New York Times Washington editor Doug Jehl in 2009 explained that because Bush didn’t call it torture, that made it a “matter of debate.” In 2011, executive editor Bill Keller said that referring to the CIA techniques as torture would be “polemical.” In 2014, the Times finally decided to finally call it torture — eight years after it let Bush tell the nation it wasn’t.
Punishing Skeptics and Leakers
The administration also took harsh steps to punish those who challenged its official narratives.
Recall the 2003 outing of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame after her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote a New York Times op-ed contradicting a false claim the Bush administration made about Iraq’s acquisition of uranium from Niger. The administration’s leak of her name to columnist Robert Novak was largely seen as payback for Wilson’s defiance.
There’s also the example of the groundbreaking New York Times story about Bush’s warrantless surveillance program. It was published in late 2005, even though it was ready for publication in the fall of 2004.
“We had the White House, at the highest levels, insisting that this program would harm national security were we to write about it,” the Times reporter who broke the story, Eric Lichtblau, later explained. “The concern from the editors was would we be … outing an operational program that was on a firm legal foundation, and they made the decision that we could not do that at that point.”
This successful intimidation removed a key scandal from the playing field right before an election that Bush only narrowly won.
The administration also pursued numerous cases against leakers under the Espionage Act. Although the prosecution was not completed until the Obama administration, it was the Bush administration that began the investigation into NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, a military veteran whose career prospects were ruined even though the espionage charges against him were eventually dropped.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A Healthier Media Under Trump?
So far, Trump’s approach to the media has been to endlessly insult them — calling them everything from “fake news” to the enemies of the American people.
And White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held one press gaggle where he disinvited CNN and a few other outlets that have reported critically on the administration.
But the name-calling and other petty tactics have hardly cowed the American press. Unlike during the Bush years, the media has not been intimidated by the president’s outbursts. Instead — with a few exceptions, such as when the administration deploys anonymous sources to make terrorism-related claims — it has been emboldened. By being so adversarial to the press, Trump has made them more adversarial.
For example, when President Trump talks about possibly waterboarding detainees, the news media now has no problem referring to it as torture.
And while the news media compliantly repeated the Bush administration’s lies used to take the country to war in Iraq, Trump’s lies are more aggressively challenged, as the media has started to make fact-checking the president a major part of its operations.
The difference between how the two administrations dealt with the media is also illustrated in how they approached the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, a long-time D.C. tradition where the president, other political elite and the press corps and celebrity guests revel in each others’ company.
In late February, President Trump announced that he will not be attending.
Many interpreted the move as an attempt by Trump to further antagonize the media outlets who attend the event — which is very different than Bush’s approach, which was to cozy up to journalists.
But consider how in 2004, Bush narrated a series of pictures of him at the White House looking for the weapons of mass destruction he falsely claimed Iraq had — as the crowd of journalists and politicos laughed with him:
It’s much healthier for American journalism when the president is insulting journalists and refusing to play nice than making them laugh with him about a war based on lies. |
Matt Prior has played 79 Tests for England
England wicketkeeper Matt Prior has co-founded the new professional One Pro Cycling team.
The 32-year-old, who took a break from the England set-up in the summer to recover from injury, said cycling was a "huge passion" of his.
One Pro Cycling aims to compete at UCI Continental level, two tiers below Team Sky.
"It's a big challenge," said Prior. "We could potentially do something very special and that excites me."
The 12-rider squad is led by Yanto Barker and features a number of riders who came through the British cycling ranks.
"It's a dream come true," Prior told BBC Radio 5 live. "The important thing we want to do is create an environment for these riders that allows them to get the absolute best from themselves.
"The professional cycling team is the exciting part but there is a lot more coming from One Pro Cycling in the future."
Prior, who has played 79 Tests, was criticised by former England team-mate Kevin Pietersen when he took a bike on a tour of New Zealand.
Pietersen wrote in his autobiography: "You don't need to take your bike with you. They have bikes in New Zealand.
"Who the hell takes a bike? If Cheese (Prior) wasn't a top genius cricketer, Cheese would have been a world-class cyclist. Obviously." |
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Star Citizen development continues to progress. The latest development is that the PC space game's Alpha 2.4 update is now available, developer Cloud Imperium has announced.
This is described as a "major update" for Star Citizen's persistent universe. Among other things, it introduces the first version of in-game persistence and shopping, while it also adds "major changes" to how the game controls. Additionally, the update makes tweaks to the in-game ships (one example is the Starfarer is now available to fly with), while it also fixes bugs and makes a number of balance changes.
Overall, this is the "biggest and most important" update to Star Citizen since Alpha 2.0, which came out in December 2015. The Star Citizen website has many more details on the update, including information about the new ships.
The Starfarer, for example, starts at $300, while a Gemini version of it goes for $340. "These massive tankers have multiple decks and crew support for seven people, making it our largest flyable ship in-game so far," Cloud Imperium said.
In terms of Star Citizen's new in-game persistence, the update unlocks new backend functionality that changes the game so that what you do in one session will carry over to the next. This includes things like hostility level, the items you buy, and Alpha UEC balance, among other things.
"Adding persistence is a huge milestone and a crucial addition to the game that will affect nearly every aspect of Star Citizen, and this is only the beginning," Cloud Imperium said. "A ton of backend work was completed in order to make this possible and we are looking forward to the updates to come as we continue to expand and flesh out this core foundation of the game."
For lots, lots more on Star Citizen Alpha 2.4, be sure to read the full blog post, while you follow the links below to learn more.
Star Citizen is the most successful crowdfunded project of any kind in history. By the latest count, the game has raised more than $115 million. |
1. Observe.
From this second onwards, observe every detail around you. From the way a stranger is signing his check at a restaurant, to the way the dust piles up especially peculiarly in one corner of your room, to the way the sun through the blinds creates a layered mathematical dance of shadows on the wall.
Observation is the most important method of information acquisition. As humans we do it instinctually, but we are rarely mindful enough to catalogue what we observe, especially seemingly drab details of everyday life. So flex the observation muscle: it needs to be trained and built up over time so that you are able to quickly (most of the time subconsciously) access a huge reservoir of human and world data.. Actions, details, patterns all combine to create a toolbox of references that you will use down the road to create products, campaigns and solutions that are authentic, relevant, and HUMAN.
And don’t just look: listen, touch, feel, preferably with eyes closed.
2. Get really good at math.
I’m not joking. And I can see your Calculus teacher smiling quietly in our general direction. I cannot tell you how useful my mathematical background has been in my journey. The corners of your brain that are used to solve complex equations and study structure, shape, and change, are forever re-wired. For the rest of your life, your brain functions a bit differently. And for the better — you can never unlearn a method for solving a problem.
And if I can’t convince you that this will impact every part of your life, then at least let me convince you that it will allow you to provide clever and ingenious tactics and ideas for your design projects, especially those of the product flavor.
3. Study science.
No, don’t just study it, understand it. For all the same reasons as the ones mentioned above. And if you can get as good at it as math, then even better. Okay, I’ll hesitate a step further and say: study Physics. Physics is essentially the application of mathematics (what you’ve already gotten really good at) to the study of how everything around you works. As a Creative Director you will be creating beautiful things, for the PHYSICAL world. And this includes the internet and your cutely animated mobile interactions that bounce just right mimicking a hypothetical force of gravity…
Understanding how the world around you works provides you with an unparalleled foundation for you to build upon.
And for you to demolish.
Once you learn the rules of the physical world, you will know which rules to cleverly break.
4. Study art.
Know your shit. Study art history (I’m bad about this, but include in that the history of design), learn from the greats and about the rules they broke and how they broke them. Learn how they viewed society and how they responded to society so you can better equip yourself to do the same for the present day. Familiarize yourself with contemporary conceptual artists who are pushing boundaries — art has no rules, it is always new, changing, mutating, evolving while acting as a mirror to individuals’ minds and our society as a whole. Studying art trains you to become skeptical, especially of established paradigms. It teaches you to always question, investigate, and to discover the truth behind all motivations.
Select starting points: Lucas Samaras, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter
5. Be mindful and kind.
This one is obvious. You will get nowhere in life if you are not kind, you know this. But in this industry it is paramount. Feelings, thoughts, intuitions go haywire, especially during crunch time, or the inevitable 9 to 9 that you will work. You MUST always keep this perspective at the forefront of your mind: Everyone means well, no one is out to get you or anyone else for that matter (don’t go into fashion), no one intends to harm purposefully, and you should practice similar mentalities accordingly.
To help yourself get there, practice mindfulness — love of yourself will allow the love of others to flourish. Love of yourself, will allow you be honest with yourself, down to the very little details you hate. Which brings me to the next point:
6. Be confident, but lean on others.
Your opinion is important, know that. But that doesn’t mean that you can be cocky; you don’t know it all, nor will you ever. In fact, the more you continue on this path the less you will know. Younger designers will teach you some of your most important lessons. You will need to lean on others almost every step of the way; ask for help when you need it. There is no such thing as truly creating something by yourself, no idea is yours alone. Your entire future will be collaborative, get used to it now. But while you develop these symbiotic relationships, make sure you continue to trust yourself and trust your past. Trust your intuitions, listen to your gut feelings, know that your entire life’s experience is relevant and affects every aspect of the choices that you are making today.
7. Speaking of younger designers, manage up.
I am good friends, still, with nearly all of my previous bosses. And I would like to think that I was good friends with them long before now. They are my mentors, for work and for life.
Managing up doesn’t necessarily imply that your bosses are bad, in fact, I’ve been blessed to have had very few bad bosses, but I have still “managed up” — be warned, this may involve some subterfuge.
Your relationship with your boss is like any other relationship: it is symbiotic. If they don’t know this, and are truly dreadful, then what in the world are you doing to yourself (aka get out)? But otherwise, you have the opportunity to create an incredibly rewarding connection for both individuals.
Your boss is a human. Like with all humans that you chose to spend 9–12 hours a day with (think about that for a second) you want to make sure you feel comfortable and appreciated, but at the same time you want to make sure THEY are comfortable and appreciated. Usually this involves learning something about them (god forbid), e.g. what does your boss constantly worry about? It’s probably 10,000% more important and hectic than whatever you’re dealing with. Why are they acting the way they are? There is always a good reason, and it usually has nothing to do with you. Do you honestly know how much time he/she spends on x, y, and z? The answer is no. Make sure THEY are happy. And after working your ass off, doing great work, and learning what appeals to them, speak up. Tell them how you feel. Be open and honest. Make sure they know how you want to be treated and talk to them openly and constructively about your ideal working environment.
Be responsible. Be responSIVE. Be adaptive, flexible, open hearted, empathetic and kind. It’s a marriage, sorry. But it’s probably the most informative marriage you’ll ever have. And that type of support is hard to come by, but once achieved will undoubtedly accelerate your career to places you didn’t even think were possible.
Oh and maybe you’ll get a really decent friend out of it.
8. Work for free.
When I started my career as a designer I worked a full-time job (in fashion retail no less) and worked a side design job in the evenings and weekends, for free. I immersed myself in the start-up world and started helping people wherever they would let me. Can you imagine the lessons I learned about myself (my value and self-worth), time management, and business strategy in general by working for free?
The first benefit you’ll see is the womb of fire and passion you’ll suddenly find yourself surrounded by when working with individuals who are also working for free (if you don’t, I should have prefaced: work for free, but work for something you care about, and work with people who care even more about it). These individuals will be your mentors, even though they don’t know that yet.
Secondly, this will create a space for experimentation and for self-education. Working for free creates a space with very little expectation, allowing your creativity to run wild. You will be able to make mistakes without fear of repercussion. Interested in product design but have always been a marketer? Jump into the start-up world: offer your services to design an app, but do actually take the time to learn how to do it properly.
Okay, now it’s about it get interesting.
9. Stop reading this article.
There is no right path, and ultimately no advise will help you get to where you want to go except for perseverance, faith, and a shit ton of hard work. But you know this, and more than likely, if you’re reading this article and remotely interested in heading up creative, you already have what it takes. And you’ll do whatever feels right to you, regardless of what anyone has to say about it. So, don’t be afraid to go your own way. Dedicate your time to what you love, and do it well, and you will find yourself falling backwards into what will ultimately be a true calling. But it might not happen by the time you’re 25…and be okay with that, because otherwise… here comes #10.
10. Quit.
You’re chasing a title. Stop. You’re going to be unhappy, trust me (or don’t trust me, you just read #9, you’re going to do whatever you need to do regardless of what I have to say about it).
Don’t get me wrong, some CD positions might be everything you expected, but more than likely if someone is hiring a 25 year old Creative Director, they don’t know what the hell they are doing, and neither do you. They won’t treat you the way you deserve to be treated, and you won’t know what to do with that situation to make it happy for all involved.
Quit, because you’ve reached your hypothetical ultimate goal of being “Creative Director” and well…now what? You’re going to be unhappy because you have more than likely been chasing the wrong thing.
And you probably haven’t been paying enough attention to your real life to even know what the right thing is. If you’ve done 1 — 8, you’ve done amazing things already, and nothing will bring you truer happiness than finding your calling, a calling without a title attached — but what is your calling? Do you know? Because I didn’t (don’t). I was a Creative Director at 25 and I didn’t know shit about what I truly wanted. All I had was a pressure from above, be it societal, parental, masochistic, to blindly chase what everyone else told me I should want.
So quit. Take some time for yourself. Relish, and I mean really relish, in some hearty solitude while diving deeply into your soul. What you will more than likely find is that you need the right people and the right direction, and that’s really all you need. Find people who care and feel as deeply as you do. Who share your world-views and visions for society as a whole, who will be there by your side to fight the fight.
Work, if done properly, in my strange and potentially skewed humble opinion, has the potential to create the most beautiful relationships…marriages, partnerships…
Don’t look for a title (and definitely not a salary).
Look for your people
This article first appeared on Medium.com and has been republished here with Jana’s permission |
“The cost of transparency cannot be discouragement of people’s participation in the process,” said Mr. Bopp, who has argued several prominent cases challenging campaign-finance laws in California and other states. “The highest value in the First Amendment is speech, and some amorphous idea about transparency cannot be used to subvert those rights.”
The election law in question, the Political Reform Act of 1974, was approved by California voters as Proposition 9, and gay rights advocates say there is rich irony in supporters of Proposition 8 opposing the earlier ballot measure.
“They believe in the will of the people if it’s in tune with what they believe,” said Jennifer C. Pizer, marriage project director with Lambda Legal, the gay rights legal organization, in Los Angeles.
Photo
Opponents of Proposition 8 are also suspicious of the intent of trying to prevent donors from being identified. “Do they want to hide something?” said Shannon P. Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights in San Francisco.
Mr. Schubert insisted that there was “no smoking gun” and that the filing would show only “modest in-kind contributions” from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Church members contributed millions to the “Yes on 8” campaign, and the California Fair Political Practices Commission is investigating accusations that the Mormon leadership neglected to report a battery of nonmonetary contributions, including phone banks, a Web site and online commercials on the behalf of Proposition 8.
The lawsuit is just one part of the continuing legal wrangling over Proposition 8, whose constitutionality is being reviewed by the State Supreme Court. The court legalized same-sex marriage in May, a decision that was overturned by Proposition 8.
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The court is expected to hear arguments on the proposition as soon as March, and will probably also decide the fate of some 18,000 same-sex marriages that were performed in the state.
Several prominent groups filed or signed on to briefs in recent days expressing opposition to Proposition 8, including civil rights and women’s rights organizations, labor and religious groups, and Google, which created the mapping technology.
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In his suit, which is also being argued by the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal group, Mr. Bopp alleges a wide range of acts against supporters, including “death threats, acts of domestic terrorism, physical violence, threats of physical violence, vandalism of personal property, harassing phone calls, harassing e-mails, blacklisting and boycotts.”
In one instance, a supporter found a flier in his neighborhood calling him a bigot and listing his employer. In another, white powder was sent to a Mormon temple and a facility run by the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic group, which contributed more than $1 million in support of Proposition 8. Other supporters, including the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, Richard Raddon, have been forced to resign because of their backing of the measure, while some businesses have been boycotted because of Proposition 8.
Mr. Bopp also said that the level set under California’s campaign law for public disclosure, anything above $100, was too low.
“There certainly would be an amount that would influence more than a few voters,” he said. “But it’s way above $100.”
Opponents of Proposition 8 have condemned any attacks on supporters, but noted that those claiming harassment are already protected by laws. “Violence and vandalism are illegal, and those laws should be enforced,” Ms. Pizer said. “And sadly people on both sides of this issue have experienced some of that.” |
“Sunday” Chicken – So easy we make it on Fridays
Edit: Got some requests for a picture, I’ll make it tonight and have a picture in the morning – yep its that easy 🙂
Summary: Slow Cooker Miracle. There has never been a food so easy and so good.
Active Time: 1 Minute
Passive Time: 4 Hours
Total Time: 4 Hours
Servings: 3-6
Features:
High Calorie Per Dollar (711 CPD)
High Protein Per Dollar (44g PPD)
Delicious
Fail-Proof
Easy
Low Effort
Great For Busy Days
Ingredients
– 5 Chicken Thighs (Chicken Breasts Can Be Swapped Without Any Loss; There Is Enough Fat In This
Recipe)
– 1 (10½ Oz) Can Cream Of Chicken Soup
– 1 Packet Of Dry Italian Seasoning (Find It Near The Salad Dressing)
– 1 Package Of Cream Cheese
– 2 Cups Uncooked Rice
Instructions:
Put Chicken, Dry Italian Seasoning, and Can of Cream of Chicken Soup in a Slow Cooker for 6
hours on High or 8+ hours on Low. Start Rice and follow package directions. Add Cream Cheese. Stir and break up the meat. Don’t turn it into mush. Serve on top of Rice.
Yes, it really is that easy 🙂
Post Notes: If this ever gets boring, swap out the Can of Soup with Cream of Mushroom or something new. Swap out the Dressing Packet; try Dry Ranch Dressing.
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The day after a 16-year-old girl was stabbed near a tent village before she fought off her attacker, Gatineau police charged a 49-year-old with trying to kill her near a tent village behind her school.
Marc Bellfoy, 49, was charged Wednesday afternoon with attempted murder, two counts of aggravated assault, assault with a weapon and two charges of breaching bail conditions in the attack of a girl who was on her way home from École secondaire de l’Île. The investigation was continuing and more charges could be laid, police said.
On Wednesday, Gatineau police said Bellfoy’s last known address was at Le Gîte Ami, a nearby homeless shelter at 85 Rue Morin.
A relative of Bellfoy told the Citizen that the man had struggled with a drug addiction for years but declined to comment further. Melissa Bellfoy said she hasn’t spoken to her cousin in 20 years, but back then he drank heavily and was often violent when he was intoxicated.
“I’m shocked,” she said after learning the charges. “Wow.”
Investigators believed the attack was a “crime of opportunity,” taking advantage of the fact the teen girl was alone. Police said the girl didn’t know Bellfoy.
The girl remained in hospital Wednesday but her condition was considered non life-threatening.
A suspect, who was injured when the girl fought him off before he was taken down in a “citizen’s arrest,” also remained in hospital.
The area where the attack happened is close to a tent village where there have been 50 to 60 dangerous confrontations in the past year between homeless people and students who must pass the camp to go to school, the head of Gatineau’s main school board said Wednesday morning.
Now Johanne Légaré, the president of Commission scolaire des Portages-de-l’Outaouais, said the board wants the city to shut down the camp, which is just outside the school property, permanently.
She was on a path that some 200 students take each day to cross Brewery Creek, and it leads past the homeless camp near the Robert Guertin Arena.
“I’m very concerned that the security of our students was compromised by an event like this,” Légaré said in an interview. “The campers would often intimidate them and yell at them. And we’re talking here about young kids.
“This is a high school and some of them are maybe 11, 12 years old. Especially the girls. They were very intimidated walking through that campsite.”
Légaré said the board advised Mayor Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin in October about its concerns.
Gatineau officials took down the tents along Brewery Creek last fall. More took their place within weeks. On Wednesday, the small camp was dismantled again, and its residents were told to leave.
One resident, Pat, 38, said he feels helpless with no other place to stay after he was kicked out of the area on the banks of the Ruisseau de la Brasserie. He said he lives on the street because he went broke trying to save his daughter when she ended up sick in the hospital.
He said police had gone through the camp two weeks ago and told them that as long as there were no parties and they kept the place clean, they could stay there.
Légaré said that in the past year, students and school staff alike have been threatened by people from the tent village. She said she was unaware of any injuries before the stabbing.
“It’s really sad” that it took a stabbing to get action on the camp, Légaré said.
“All through the winter there were actually people living there… It was tolerated by the municipality,” she said. “And now with the nice weather there were more of them.”
Last week, the board requested an urgent meeting with the mayor because it was concerned no decision had been made about allowing the tents to return. By Wednesday, no meeting had been scheduled.
Légaré said homeless people overflowed into school property as the camp grew because it was “overpopulated.”
“They were all over the place and it was obvious that the measures they had put in place (for safety) were not sufficient,” Légaré said.
A spokesman for the mayor said the city had, in fact, dealt with the problem by ordering the tents removed last fall, and that city council will decide soon what to do this spring and summer.
The tent village began in 2014, populated by people overflowing from Le Gîte Ami. The shelter only accepts people for two weeks.
At the time, Pedneaud-Jobin acknowledged that drugs, violence and lack of sanitation became a problem as the camp grew, but he was hoping to find a way to let it continue.
Luc Villemaire, general director of Le Gite Ami shelter, called Tuesday’s incident “appalling.”
He said the response of authorities previously has been either heavy handed or to ignore the problem.
“Society has difficulty finding solutions to the problems of mental health and drug addicts,” Villemaire added.
On Wednesday morning, police were mounting increased security near the high school. Counsellors were also expected to help students.
With files from Meghan Hurley, Bryson Masse and Tyler Dawson
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1 |
Happy Friday!
Now, I’d consider myself a pretty big nutella lover. There was a time in college when my roommate and I would sit and watch Lifetime movies with a jar of nutella between us and a box of graham crackers on my lap. That was fun.
I also have enjoyed more than a few nutella crepes in my day. In my mind, there’s really not much better than a warm crepe filled with oozing nutella and maybe a few banana slices.
But nutella hot chocolate?
How I have lived on this earth for almost twenty six years without trying such a thing? How have I dared to call myself a true nutella lover without trying this simple heavenly creation?
If you’re anything like me you look for every excuse to eat a spoonful of nutella. It pretty much goes on anything from oatmeal to graham crackers to fingers. I can’t get enough of this stuff.
On to nutella hot chocolate. All you need are two ingredients—nutella and milk! Well, and whipped cream. But that’s a given.
Nutella hot chocolate tastes like regular hot chocolate, but with the subtle hint of hazelnut. I absolutely love it, especially alongside a few linzer cookies.
Make this tonight. It’s a much better option than beer and will leave you feeling wonderful and lively in the morning to boot!
Quick and Easy Nutella Hot Chocolate
serves 1
Print this recipe!
1 T nutella
1 cup milk
Whisk nutella into milk and bring to a simmer on the stove. Serve in your favorite mug with whipped cream and marshmallows.
Nutella, I love you. |
As the Winter Solstice approaches in the north, we notice the changes: the days of light are shorter, the darkness is longer, the weather is cold, the trees are bare, and snow is often on the ground. John Matthews, who has lectured widely on Celtic and Arthurian traditions, has written this lyrical passage about Winter Solstice:
"The Solstice is a time of quietude, of firelight, and dreaming, when seeds germinate in the cold earth, and the cold notes of church bells mingle with the chimes of icicles. Rivers are stilled and the land lies waiting beneath a coverlet of snow. We watch the cold sunlight and the bright stars, maybe go for walks in the quiet land. . . . All around us the season seems to reach a standstill — a point of repose."
Here are a few activities and spiritual practices to do in celebration of Winter Solstice.
Book Excerpts
This is an abbreviated excerpt of "A Celebration of Winter Solstice" from The Circle of Life by Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr.
"There is a tendency to want to hurry from autumn to spring, to avoid the long dark days that winter brings. Many people do not like constant days bereft of light and months filled with colder temperatures. They struggle with the bleakness of land and the emptiness of trees. Their eyes and hearts seek color. Their spirits tire of tasting the endless gray skies. There is great rejoicing in the thought that light and warmth will soon be filling more and more of each new day.
"But winter darkness has a positive side to it. As we gather to celebrate the first turn from winter to spring, we are invited to recognize and honor the beauty in the often unwanted season of winter. Let us invite our hearts to be glad for the courage winter proclaims. Let us be grateful for the wisdom winter brings in teaching us about the need for withdrawal as an essential part of renewal. Let us also encourage our spirits as Earth prepares to come forth from this time of withdrawal into a season filled with light.
"The winter solstice celebrates the return of hope to our land as our planet experiences the first slow turn toward greater daylight. Soon we will welcome the return of the sun and the coming of springtime. As we do so, let us remember and embrace the positive, enriching aspects of winter's darkness. Pause now to sit in silence in the darkness of this space. Let this space be a safe enclosure of creative gestation for you."
Spiritual Practices
Give thanks for the darkness which is the yin to the yang of light. Think of how soothing darkness is when you are exhausted and want to take nap. Recall how irritated you were in a hotel or motel where you could not block out the bright lights from outside when you wanted to sleep.
Personal Explorations
"Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again," Simon and Garfunkel sang in a popular song years ago. Make a special effort today to greet darkness and share some of the feelings that arise in you when you think about darkness.
Ponder the darkness as a spur to reverencing the mysteriousness of God. What place have you made for the darkness of the divine as fertile and transformative in your spiritual path?
Poetry
Read this poem aloud. It is by William John Fitzgerald from his book Blessings for the Fast Paced and Cyberspaced.
Black Can Be Beautiful
O God, black can be beautiful!
Let us be aware of black blessings:
Blessed be the black night that nurtures dreams.
Blessed be the black hole out of which creation sprang.
Blessed be the black cave of imagination that births creativity.
Blessed be dark wombs that cradle us.
Blessed be black loam that produces nourishing food for our bodies.
Blessed be black jazz that nourishes our souls.
Blessed be black energy that swirls into gracefulness.
Blessed be black coal that heats us.
Blessed be black boiling clouds hurling down lightning and cleansing rain.
Blessed be even our own darkness, our raw, undeveloped cave of shadows.
O God, help us to befriend black and not deny its power.
Help us not to cover over the dark with fear but to open to it with your grace and to be open to your life within the dark.
May we discover the blessings that lie deep within our holy dark so that we may freely affirm that
Black is beautiful indeed!
Here is a meditative poem by Joyce Rupp "Winter's Cloak" from The Circle of Life which she co-wrote with Macrina Wiederkehr.
Winter's Cloak
This year I do not want
the dark to leave me.
I need its wrap
of silent stillness,
its cloak
of long lasting embrace.
Too much light
has pulled me away
from the chamber
of gestation.
Let the dawns
come late,
let the sunsets
arrive early,
let the evenings
extend themselves
while I lean into
the abyss of my being.
Let me lie in the cave
of my soul,
for too much light
blinds me,
steals the source
of revelation.
Let me seek solace
in the empty places
of winter's passage,
those vast dark nights
that never fail to shelter me.
Prayers & Mantras
End this special once-a-year-day with this prayer by Edward Hays from Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim.
A Winter Solstice Prayer
The dark shadow of space leans over us. . . . .
We are mindful that the darkness of greed, exploitation, and hatred
also lengthens its shadow over our small planet Earth.
As our ancestors feared death and evil and all the dark powers of winter,
we fear that the darkness of war, discrimination, and selfishness
may doom us and our planet to an eternal winter.
May we find hope in the lights we have kindled on this sacred night,
hope in one another and in all who form the web-work of peace and justice
that spans the world.
In the heart of every person on this Earth
burns the spark of luminous goodness;
in no heart is there total darkness.
May we who have celebrated this winter solstice,
by our lives and service, by our prayers and love,
call forth from one another the light and the love
that is hidden in every heart.
Amen. |
In purely political terms, the highest praise possible for Mike Nesbitt’s dramatic exit from the Executive is that it is almost certainly what Peter Robinson would have done if he had been in this position.
In fact, Mr Robinson – a masterful exponent of opposition politics – did something remarkably similar to what happened on Wednesday when he and Nigel Dodds quit the Executive in 2002 after the exposure of an IRA spy operation at Stormont.
Although Mr Robinson will not appreciate the comparison, the similarities with the two situations do not stop there. At that point, a weakened David Trimble’s response was to seek a meeting with the Prime Minister, although he conceded that the gravity of the situation was likely to collapse the Executive.
The two scenarios are not entirely analogous, but the DUP is giving every indication that it wants to stay at the Executive table, despite the growing cross-party belief that the days of this present Stormont are numbered.
The DUP response to the UUP – which came four hours after the news broke, and from Mr Dodds rather than from Mr Robinson – gave no suggestion that the party was preparing to follow the UUP out of the Executive and included a request for an “urgent meeting with the Prime Minister”.
A significant section of DUP members – and more significantly, its voters – do not want to see the party remaining in government with a party linked to an IRA which still has guns and which uses them to carry out murder.
But rather than walking away from the Executive, the DUP leadership is instead arguing for as yet unspecified sanctions against Sinn Fein, saying that it is republicans – not unionists – who ought to be punished for the alleged actions of IRA members.
An exclusion motion in the Assembly would simply be vetoed by Sinn Fein, and after that the DUP would seek to pressure the Government.
In a move which could well define Mike Nesbitt’s leadership, the UUP is now likely to formally quit the Executive on Tuesday and has seven days to nominate a replacement minister, after which the Assembly would have to be convened and the DUP – who are next in line for the seat – would be asked to nominate a minister.
That gives Mr Robinson limited time, and makes his favoured tactic of stalling for time – such as over the on-the-runs issue – more difficult.
Mr Nesbitt has provided maximum political discomfort for his DUP rival and if Mr Robinson comes under sufficient pressure to quit the Executive then that will be the end of this Stormont.
If that was to happen, history suggests that there will be several wilderness years of direct rule.
After the 2002 suspension of Stormont it took five years for devolved government to return – under new leaders of unionism and nationalism. |
Heat forward LeBron James rose high to block Spurs center Tiago Splitter on a dunk attempt at the rim during the fourth quarter of Miami's 103-84 defeat of San Antonio in Game 2 of the NBA Finals on Sunday.
"Basically, I told myself, you'll end up on SportsCenter one way or another, either getting dunked on going to get a block," James said. "Luckily I was on the good side of the Top 10."
Heat coach Erik Spoelstra singled out James' selflessness on the play, what with the looming possibility of a YouTube posterization.
"A lot of players wouldn't go for that," he said. "[There's] the possibility of getting dunked on and being on a highlight film. He's been on that highlight film both ways. It takes great courage to go up and make one of those plays."
With a little more than eight minutes remaining in the fourth and Miami leading 86-67, James darted over from the right baseline, leaving Kawhi Leonard to meet a driving Splitter right in the middle of the paint. Splitter attempted a right-handed slam over the top but James rose and capped the shot with his right hand, knocking the ball free and allowing Chris Bosh to recover it for Miami. James celebrated the play with a flex, a chest pound and a scream.
"I was, I guess, the last line of defense," James continued. "I just pride myself on that side of the floor."
This was the definition of a bang-bang sequence, as Splitter didn't hesitate in attacking the rim at full force after diving to the hoop from the free throw line as he received a pass from Tony Parker. James' quick burst from the weakside put him in great position to make the play, and there wasn't much question he would win the hangtime battle against Splitter.
"He blocked it," Heat guard Mario Chalmers said. "I mean, we seen that coming. I know I kind of figured he was going to block that one, just the angle he had. That's why he's First-Team All-Defense."
The Heat used a 15-0 second-half run to blow open Game 2. James started slowly in the first half, scoring just four points by halftime, but his fingerprints were all over Miami's strong second-half performance. The Heat scored eight straight points after James' block on Splitter, pushing their lead to an insurmountable 27 points.
"Just wanted to make an impact some way," James said, after scoring 17 points (on 7-for-17 shooting) and tallying eight rebounds and seven assists. "Offensively, it was a struggle for me. Couldn't make a shot, missed layups."
The rejection of Splitter was James' second big-time defensive highlight of the night, as he got his fingertips on a Tim Duncan shot in the first half, too.
James also had a massive block of Pacers guard George Hill during Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals.
The Spurs defeated the Heat 92-88 in Game 1 on Thursday. The series shifts to San Antonio's AT&T Center for Game 3 on Tuesday. |
After months of widespread anticipation, Canonical on Thursday released Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, a new Long-Term Support version of its popular Linux distribution that promises the extended support often sought by business users, in particular.
Bundled with five years of free security updates, the software aims to deliver a seamless migration path for organizations upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04, the previous Long-Term Support version.
Both desktop and server versions of Ubuntu 14.04 made their debut this week, each chock-full of powerful new features. Ready for some of the highlights? Here's what you can expect.
On the Desktop
A slicker experience awaits users of Ubuntu 14.04 on the desktop as a result of improvements to the Unity user interface, Canonical says, but there's also the option to test out convergence-minded Unity 8, which currently runs on Ubuntu phones and tablets. With support for multitouch track pads and touch screens as well as high pixel density screens, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will be part of the first commercially available Ubuntu tablets.
Launching hard on the heels of Windows XP's end of life, meanwhile, Canonical is also pitching the new release as a compelling alternative for many businesses. That may not be an unreasonably optimistic proposition, either: A full 70 percent of CIOs will change their technology and sourcing relationships in the next 2 to 3 years, Gartner predicts.
“The 14.04 LTS release offers a solid, intuitive experience which is easy to manage,” said Canonical CEO Jane Silber. “It is a viable and affordable alternative for organizations considering a switch from Microsoft, and specifically those replacing XP or Windows 7 as they come to the end of life.”
Tools enabling the remote delivery of applications are included in the desktop version of Ubuntu 13.04, as is compatibility with Windows file formats, browser-based cloud solutions and the Microsoft Office-compatible LibreOffice suite.
In the Cloud
Of even greater interest to many enterprises, though, is the server version of Ubuntu 14.04, which is Ubuntu’s third LTS cloud release.
Not only is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS packed with Docker and OpenStack Icehouse, but it also introduces support for IBM Power Systems and POWER as well as for 64-bit ARM servers.
New versions of Juju and MAAS are also added to the mix "to design, deploy and scale services faster than any other platform available today, on cloud or bare metal," Canonical says. The new release integrates Open vSwitch for networking and Ceph for storage as well.
In short, "Ubuntu is now the enterprise platform supported on the widest range of modern architectures – IBM POWER, ARM64, x86, and x64," the company says.
Global enterprises including AT&T, Bharti, British Telecom, China Telecom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Korea Telecom, NEC, NTT, Orange France, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, Netflix and Instagram all use Ubuntu, Canonical notes.
“Ubuntu is the primary platform for cloud – public, private or hybrid," said Ubuntu and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth. "In this release, our third LTS with deep roots in cloud, we raise the bar for efficiency and orchestration at scale." |
Does it matter that the power Britain relies on to make the country glow and hum no longer belongs to Britain? After all, the lights still shine. The phones still charge. Does it matter that the old electricity suppliers of eastern and north-west England and the English Midlands, the coal-fired power stations of Kingsnorth, Ironbridge and Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the turbine shops at Hams Hall, the oil and gas stations on the Isle of Grain, Killingholme, Enfield and Cottam are the property of E.ON of Düsseldorf? Is it of significance only to sentimental Little Englanders that the former electricity boards of Tyneside and Yorkshire, the power stations at Didcot in Oxfordshire, Fawley in Hampshire, Tilbury in Essex, Littlebrook in Kent, Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, Little Barford in Bedfordshire and Staythorpe in Nottinghamshire belong to RWE of Essen (the last being the only one the German company built itself)? Is it a sign of some atavistic hostility to the Other – nationalism, chauvinism, even racism – to find it strange that the one-time public purveyors of electricity in North Wales, Merseyside and southern Scotland, along with another set of large power stations, are owned by Iberdrola of Bilbao? Are you an enemy of liberal principles if you question the fact that, when local electrical engineers dig up the roads in London, they’re working for East Asia’s richest man, the Hong Kong-based Li Ka-shing? In north-east England, they work for Warren Buffett; in Birmingham, Cardiff and Plymouth, the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company; in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund.
More than anyone, you’d think, it would matter to the people who made these arrangements possible in the first place. What has happened is not what they promised or intended when they put Britain’s state-owned electricity industry on the block. Before this year is out, politicians, regulators and corporations will make a set of decisions determining the electric life of Britain for the next half century. They will decide how the country keeps the lights burning and the wheels of industry turning for the next fifty years without severely affecting the climate or impoverishing us. But as a result of actions taken a generation ago by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives – a party whose nationalist programme promised independence from Europe – the decisions aren’t Britain’s alone. Thatcher promised less state involvement in industry but the future of Britain’s energy supply now hinges on state-owned French companies based in Paris: Electricité de France, better known as EDF, and Areva, maker of nuclear power stations. Will EDF and Areva build a fleet of new nuclear reactors in Britain or won’t they, and if they do, how much will it cost the British and French public?
Defending her record in Parliament on the day she resigned in 1990, Thatcher spoke in patriotic tones of how, with millions of people buying shares in former state industries, privatisation was giving ‘power back to the people’, and how competition at home and open markets in Europe would free British enterprise to lead the world. Now, in 2012, it’s clear that the result of electricity privatisation was to take power away from the people. Small British shareholders have no influence over the overwhelmingly non-British owners of the firms that generate and distribute power in Britain. The fact that individual households and small businesses can choose to switch from the confusing tariff of one oligopolistic supplier to another doesn’t protect them from sharp, unpredictable swings in prices. In overseas chanceries the Thatcher doctrine came up against ambitious leaders who were no less patriotic, but not so arrogant and naive. Unlike Thatcher, they didn’t assume that if their country levelled its playing field, others would level theirs. The problem with the ideal of competition is that there are winners and losers. The electricity competition has now been held. It is over, and Britain lost. From the point of view of technology and capital, electric Britain is no longer a centre. It is another centre’s province.
The most unexpected consequence of selling the country’s electric legacy, the consequence that most directly contradicts what the Thatcherites were trying to do, was the gradual absorption of swathes of the industry by EDF. Beginning with the takeover of London Electricity in 1998, exploiting the Thatcherites’ open-door market structures and their decision to split the electricity industry into small, easy-to-swallow chunks, France in effect renationalised the industry its neighbour had so painstakingly privatised. Renationalised it, that is, for France. As well as being one of the six dominant UK suppliers of energy, EDF now owns a fat portfolio of British power stations, including the fleet of nuclear reactors that still provides around a sixth of the country’s electricity.
It was a setback for the pro-market ideologues. Unlike E.ON and RWE, EDF is a state-owned monolith with a near monopoly on the production and supply of electricity in France, run by technocrats and members of a powerful trade union, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT). Its mission is to empower France in foreign markets, and the government agency that owns it, L’Agence des participations de l’Etat, isn’t embarrassed to say so. In her foreword to the agency’s 2010 report, Christine Lagarde – then minister for economic affairs in François Fillon’s cabinet – boasted that the state would be more active than ever in building ‘champions capable of competing with global market rivals’. In Thatcherite terms EDF was a public sector mammoth that would inevitably be hunted to extinction by the hungry and agile competitors of post-privatisation countries like Britain. The laws of economics said so. And yet the opposite happened. The mammoth thrived, and Britain failed to produce new competitors, agile or otherwise.
If the power of EDF in Britain is an embarrassment to neoliberals, does that mean it’s good for their opponents, the pastel-shade socialists of the legacy left? Unison, the British union that represents electricity workers, seems happy. Greg Thomson, Unison’s head of strategic organisation, told me that since it crossed the Channel EDF had gone against prevailing management orthodoxy by reinstating a final salary pension scheme for workers. Unison was given seats with the CGT in an EDF/union body, a ‘European Works Council’, and enough leverage over EDF management to get union recognition for previously non-union workers at a call centre in Sunderland. ‘When London Electricity was privatised, we adopted a policy of returning it to public ownership, and I’m pleased to think I delivered on that,’ Thomson said. ‘Obviously to the wrong nation, but you can’t be too picky.’
Yet EDF’s foreign adventures make Unison’s French counterparts suspicious. They don’t understand why Britain gave away its native electricity industry so easily. A colleague of Thomson’s told me that the CGT was ‘apoplectic’ that Unison didn’t resist in 2010 when EDF sold off the local networks of cables and transformers it owned in East Anglia, London and south-east England to Li Ka-shing, in order to fund its purchase of Britain’s nuclear stations. ‘When the sale went through they were absolutely pissed off because we had done nothing to stop it. They voted to man the barricades.’ Thomson remembered an early trip to a European Works Council meeting in Paris, when one of the CGT men said to him at lunch: ‘There’s only one country that’s stupid enough to sell off its electricity industry, and that’s Britain.’
*
How did we get here? In 1981, with inflation and unemployment at 10 per cent plus, with the recently elected Conservative government forced to yield to the demands of the miners, public spending cuts provoking general outrage and Thatcher’s prime ministerial career seemingly doomed to a swift, ignominious end, a 38-year-old economist from Birmingham University called Stephen Littlechild was working on ways to realise an esoteric idea that had been much discussed in radical Tory circles: privatisation. Privatisation was not a Thatcher patent. The Spanish economist Germà Bel traces the origins of the word to the German word Reprivatisierung, first used in English in 1936 by the Berlin correspondent of the Economist, writing about Nazi economic policy. In 1943, in an analysis of Hitler’s programme in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the word ‘privatisation’ entered the academic literature for the first time. The author, Sidney Merlin, wrote that the Nazi Party ‘facilitates the accumulation of private fortunes and industrial empires by its foremost members and collaborators through “privatisation” and other measures, thereby intensifying centralisation of economic affairs and government in an increasingly narrow group that may for all practical purposes be termed the national socialist elite’.
The gung-ho free marketeers who rode to power with Thatcher in 1979 don’t seem to have been aware of the Nazi prelude, although they would have known of later privatisations in Pinochet’s Chile. Until Bel’s recent research it was Peter Drucker, in his writings about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of Guildford, Foreign Office minister, still in government at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David Cameron, alongside his son-in-law George Osborne.)
The 1979 Conservative manifesto barely mentioned privatisation, or denationalisation, as it was sometimes called. In 1968, when an internal party think-tank called the public sector of industry ‘a millstone round our necks’ and proposed some sell-offs, Thatcher was sceptical. ‘One could not have two rival enterprises,’ she said, ‘seeking to sell electricity in competition one with another.’ Littlechild disagreed. And in the ferment of the 1979 election victory theorists like himself saw a rare chance to test their ideas in a real, live, industrial society of fifty million people. In October 1981 he published a paper in the house journal of the radical free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs called ‘Ten Steps to Denationalisation’. Appearing alongside articles with such titles as ‘Why Recession Benefits Britain’ and ‘The Tumbril and the Classroom’, Littlechild’s proposals would have seemed to most politicians and business people of the time like the ravings of a revolutionary dreamer. As the mainstream right talked warily of selling off parts of the steel industry, Littlechild jumped ahead to what few others imagined could be the future: to the privatisation of the railways and the Post Office. ‘What the Post Office needs,’ he wrote, ‘is an imaginative asset stripper.’
His most extreme ideas, by the standards of the day, were about electricity. In Britain at that time electricity was produced and distributed by a state organisation with a no-nonsense Attlee-era moniker, redolent of brown paper envelopes and blotched stencils and corridors smelling of disinfectant: the Central Electricity Generating Board, the CEGB. Littlechild suggested splitting the National Grid off from the power-generating side of the CEGB, privatising regional electricity boards, letting private companies build power stations to compete with the state, and forcing the CEGB to sell or lease its coal and nuclear plants. It turned out these were not dreams, but prophecies packaged in an implementable plan; all were to come about within a decade.
As the great shift from public to private ownership of Britain’s technological veins and sinews gathered pace through the 1980s – telephones in 1984, gas in 1986, airports in 1987, water in 1989, leading up to electricity and the railways in the 1990s – the public perception was that Britain was becoming more like the United States, where, it was popularly believed, everything, including electricity, was provided by competing private companies. No autobiography of a British free-market thinker was complete without an American epiphany, a journey across the Atlantic to where Ronald Reagan’s United States seemed to hum and sparkle in a virtuous free market circle of efficiency and prosperity.
Apart from the reality that, for most Americans, it didn’t, the problem was that extreme pro-privatisation Brits like Littlechild thought that the US hadn’t gone far enough. So radical were the Thatcherite free market evangelicals that they thought America’s electricity system was all too similar to the neo-Soviet horrors, as they saw them, of the CEGB. In 19th and early 20th-century Europe, only the earliest nodes of new-technology networks – piped water, gas, electricity, railways, telegraph and telephone communications, services that societies very quickly became dependent on – were built as capitalist ventures. Gradually the networks were taken over, completed and run by national or local government. The United States took a different route. America let private companies carry on providing vital services like electricity; it also let them have local monopolies. But in exchange for being protected from competition, the companies accepted limits on their profits. The limit was worked out as a percentage of the amount the company and its shareholders had invested in the company – in building a power station, for instance – and how much it would have to invest in future to keep the system running. It was called ‘rate of return regulation’, and it set a ceiling on the profits capitalists were allowed to make on an investment in something society couldn’t live without.
It wasn’t perfect. There were regular disputes over how much the companies should invest and how much customers should have to pay. But the arrangement gave American society a generally robust set of networks that powered it through its 20th-century transformation. Looking ahead, in the 1980s, to the great sell-off that few Britons knew was coming, Littlechild concluded that Britain could be more free-market than America. He had a powerful ally in Alan Walters, Thatcher’s economic adviser, and when it came to the first of the big privatisations – the sale of British Telecom – Littlechild was commissioned to come up with new rules for governing the private companies on which the country would depend in the new, profit-led world.
The formula he came up with in 1983 sounded benign enough when it was presented to the public. Few knew or cared what it meant, still less how radical a departure it was: it seemed a minor detail compared to the enormity of privatisation itself. Littlechild’s formula, known as ‘RPI minus X’, isn’t the only reason Britain’s private power industry is now, thirty years later, an overwhelmingly foreign-owned oligopoly. But it is key. The trouble with the American system, Littlechild thought, was that it didn’t reward electricity companies (or phone, water or gas companies) for being more efficient: for sacking superfluous workers, using cheaper materials or cutting back on luxuries like research. On the contrary, it encouraged them to invest in high technology and fancy experimental kit, because the more they invested, the more profits the regulator would let them keep. This, in turn, led to higher prices for customers. To an efficiency-obsessed theorist like Littlechild it all smacked of what he saw as the ghastly mix of bureaucrats, engineers, unions and politicians running the CEGB.
Littlechild’s solution for Britain was to replace the American ceiling on profits with a ceiling on prices. Privatised companies would only be able to increase their prices each year by an amount equal to inflation, measured by the Retail Price Index, RPI, minus an X-factor, which the regulator would set every five years. Prices were supposed to fall, in real terms, every year: it sounded like a good deal for the customer. But what wasn’t obvious to most people was how huge the opportunities were for privatised electricity companies to cut costs, and not just by laying off workers. In The Queen of the Trent, published in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees:
There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the stores, even if you found you’d got the wrong bits, you couldn’t sign them back in. The system didn’t allow that. There was nothing to do but put the parts straight in the skip.
Under RPI-X, there was a big incentive for managers to root out such practices. But there was no need for them to pass on the gains to customers in the form of lower prices, or to invest them in research and new plant. As long as they kept their prices in line with the X-factor, managers could bank the profits they made from cost-cutting, or pass them on to shareholders, jacking up their own salaries along the way.[*]
Littlechild, who became the privatised electricity industry’s first regulator, thought this was a good thing. He was happy to see the privatised electricity companies make fat profits in the early years, thinking that this would draw in new competitors eager for a slice of the pie. They would build new power stations, eating into the incumbents’ profits, poaching customers by offering lower prices. The least efficient electricity firms would go bust, the most efficient would thrive, and electricity would be cheaper. As old power stations wore out, they would be replaced because it was profitable to replace them: the market would organise itself to produce as much electricity as customers were prepared to pay for. To begin with, before full competition was established, he, the regulator, imagined he would act as a surrogate, a kind of State Competitor General, enforcing occasional price cuts to keep the private companies on their toes. In the end, he thought, the need for regulation would largely wither away. What Littlechild, an academic with no business experience, didn’t fully take on board was that the reason private companies compete with each other isn’t that they like competition. They hate it, and will only compete if forced to do so. Rather than competing with a rival on price or product or revenue, they’ll try to eliminate the rival firm and take over its territory by buying it; or reach an unwritten agreement on an oligopolistic cartel of a few big firms, carving up the market between them.
*
Electricity isn’t a commodity like copper or coffee or water. It’s the only commodity that is both essential to modern life and impossible to store. An electricity system must be able to manufacture and transport as much power as the society it serves demands at every given moment, and not one watt less. The only efficient way to achieve this is for society to invest vast amounts of manpower and resources over generations to plan, build and maintain a network of power stations and supply cables, with excess capacity to deal with breakdowns and peaks in demand.
Britain built just such a network in the mid-20th century, and by the time it was privatised it was a creation of devilish intricacy, even before the government sliced it into pieces, replacing central planning with commercial contracts between sellers, makers and transporters of power. The local sellers of electricity, the 12 regional English electricity boards, were privatised as 12 separate companies in 1990. They would now buy their electricity wholesale, supposedly at market rates, mainly from the three big privatised concerns that made it: National Power and Powergen, which took over the CEGB’s big coal-fired power stations in 1991, and British Energy, owner of the newest nuclear stations, which was floated on the stock market in 1996. Holding it all together, transporting electricity between power stations and from region to region, was the National Grid, owned jointly at first by the 12 local electricity firms; after 1996, it was an independent commercial player in its own right.
But once the privatisers factored in the costs of spare capacity, and the different profiles of different kinds of power station, they came up with a system for setting the wholesale price of electricity so complicated that the only people who understood it were the people who ran the companies in whose interest it was for it to be as high as possible. In the course of the 1990s, the cost of oil, gas and coal fell and aggressive management made power stations much cheaper to run, mainly by cutting workers. And yet the wholesale price of electricity stayed the same. The big private players found ways to manipulate the market to keep prices high. They were able to game the system by declaring, for instance, that a certain power station was temporarily unavailable to generate electricity. The price of electricity would then rise – at which point the power station magically came back online. One company fingered for doing this – in an early report by Littlechild – was Powergen, headed by Ed Wallis, a former CEGB official who ran the operation to get coal to the power stations during the 1984-85 miners’ strike. But however unethically it was behaving, Powergen wasn’t breaking any law. It was simply taking advantage of the opportunities for bilking customers that were built in to the rules.
There were many other tactics. In the privatisation carve-up, Powergen inherited two small coal-fired power stations: Hams Hall, outside Birmingham, and Ferrybridge B, near Pontefract. They were used only in emergencies or during maintenance on the local electricity network, when it couldn’t handle the voltage from the National Grid. Soon after Powergen took over, it announced that, as a commercial decision, it was going to close both stations. This forced the Grid to upgrade its transformers in the area, to make sure local people and businesses never risked a blackout. But while the upgrade was being carried out, the Grid couldn’t be accessed, and Ferrybridge B and Hams Hall became indispensable to Yorkshire and Warwickshire. The stations’ electricity had to be bought by suppliers, no matter how much it cost. While similar stations elsewhere in the country were charging between £20 and £30 per megawatt-hour, Powergen hiked Ferrybridge and Hams Hall prices to £120. According to the calculations of Littlechild’s statistical elves, this abuse of market dominance brought Powergen an extra £88 million in profits – an extra £88 million, that is, carved out of customers’ electricity bills.
Wallis was pilloried in the media in the mid-1990s as the classic bureaucrat-turned-fat-cat for his £460,000 salary and lucrative share options, but his career and establishment reputation don’t seem to have been tarnished by the conduct of the company he ran. He’s now chairman of the Natural Environment Research Council, responsible for handing out government money to scientists researching climate change.
As well as rewarding management and shareholders for cutting costs, RPI-X rewarded them for cutting corners. Unlike water and rail, which badly needed investment when they were privatised, the privatised electricity companies benefited from half a century of high investment in an over-engineered, lovingly maintained power system that produced more electricity than the country needed. In the early years they could slash investment without anyone, apart from their staff, being aware of the effects. Over-investment switched to under-investment, but the consequences of this wouldn’t become clear until later.
RPI-X also allowed companies to reap the benefit of windfalls that were the result of luck rather than smart management. Since electricity is one of those things, like food, that people need whether there’s an economic slump or not, the companies did relatively well out of the recession of the early 1990s. Their overheads were half what the experts predicted. The companies paid out generous dividends to shareholders and were still swimming in cash. Littlechild could have stepped in to lower prices, but he held back, fearful of intruding on managers’ RPI-X nirvana. When he did act, the stock market found the price cuts he ordered so laughably mild that the companies’ share prices shot up. In December 1994, the property conglomerate Trafalgar House tried to buy Northern Electric, one of the privatised electricity companies. It offered £11 a share: four times what the civil servants and City advisers had sold it for a few years earlier. Northern Electric’s cash mountain was so large that it was able to give each shareholder a fiver for every share they owned in order to prevent the takeover. The economist Dieter Helm, in his book Energy, the State and the Market, writes: ‘Northern Electric in effect revealed that it could have given its domestic customers a year without paying any bills and still have been able to finance its functions.’
The privatised electricity companies’ minuscule debts and the fat profits they were making under RPI-X drew predators from across the Atlantic, and when the government’s golden share in the firms lapsed in 1995, the Americans pounced. Just as California was making the disastrous decision to imitate the British model in opening up its own electricity system to competition, companies from Ohio, Nebraska, Texas, Georgia, Colorado, Louisiana and Virginia spent £10 billion buying up British firms. As the Americans began to flood in, Labour took over from the Conservatives, and Gordon Brown slapped a windfall tax of £1.5 billion on the electricity firms as punishment for their excess profits. It was easy for the Americans to borrow the money to pay, because their new acquisitions had so little debt on their books. But the windfall tax was a sign that US executives, caught up in the more-testosterone-than-sense expansionist passion that brought about the downfall of Enron, had misjudged the risks of investing in British electricity.
They tried the same tricks as their British predecessors. Edison Mission Energy of California, for instance, bought two big coal-fired power stations from Powergen in 1999. In 2000, it announced that it was closing one of the generating units at its Fiddlers Ferry coal station in Cheshire because, it said, it cost too much to run. In fact, it could have been run at a profit. But by taking 500 megawatts of the power it generated off the market, Edison Mission drove up the price of electricity, which meant more money for Edison Mission, and for the other owners of power stations. The customers paid the price. Edison Mission eventually brought the unit back online after pressure from Littlechild’s successor as regulator, Callum McCarthy. The writing was on the wall for the Americans. The windfall tax suggested there’d be a tighter regulatory regime under Labour, and shortly after the American buying spree began, wholesale prices for electricity plummeted. There was a rush for the exit. In desperation, the Americans cast around for somebody willing to take their British electricity assets off their hands.
McCarthy was indifferent to the rout of the Americans. He was only interested in price, and claimed partial credit for the sudden cheapness of electricity: he attributed it to Neta, a wholesale electricity trading system that he favoured and the government backed. The New Electricity Trading Arrangements were designed to bring prices down by making the electricity market fairer and more open. On the face of it, Littlechild had cause for satisfaction, too. He could point out that the fate of the Americans – some, notably TXU of Houston, lost their shirts in Britain – gave the lie to the notion that the privatised electricity system was a licence for capitalists to print money. In reality, the fall in the electricity price had little to do with Neta and much to do with Littlechild’s endorsement in the late 1990s of the ‘dash for gas’ – the rapid construction of gas-fired power stations, cheaper to build and run at the time than coal or nuclear. This led at the turn of the century to an electricity glut.
New power stations, an electricity surplus, lower prices, companies going bust because they weren’t competitive: it sounds as if everything Littlechild planned had come to pass. Yet the result wasn’t at all what he’d imagined. Just because the American companies’ shareholders, and their customers back home in the US, got stiffed by their adventures in Britain didn’t mean that Britain benefited. In the first place, the electricity surplus was a political and industrial disaster. The new wave of gas-fired power stations took enough market share from the coal and nuclear stations to bring them to the edge of bankruptcy, but didn’t have the capacity to replace them if they actually went bust. It wasn’t just that the livelihoods of thousands of miners and engineers loyal to Labour were on the line: a system that could bring the country to a halt in a fraction of a second was subjected to market shocks that had no market solution. Blair’s government had already intervened to slow down the switch from coal to gas; in 2002 it had little choice but to bail out British Energy, the private company that owned the nuclear stations.
And there was a deeper, less visible problem. Neta was fantastically complex. There is no evidence to suggest that any elected politician has ever understood how it worked (any more than they understood its byzantine predecessor, the ‘Pool’). Some specialists believe civil servants don’t understand it either. How could they? Its arcane codexes are intelligible only to corporate lawyers and accountants. Yet there was one important clue to how Neta worked: the electricity companies were all for it – this, despite the fact that McCarthy championed it as a means of bringing them to heel. And when Neta – the electricity trading system we still have today – was introduced, it gradually became clear why. It was even more opaque than the Pool. And although its introduction coincided with a sharp fall in wholesale electricity prices, customers saw no change in their bills.
It was true that the ‘dash for gas’ had brought about a squeeze in profits for the companies that generated electricity. But the main beneficiaries of this weren’t customers: they were the firms that distributed and sold the power. Excessive profit margins simply shifted from one set of electricity companies to another. The inevitable next stage was for the companies that distributed electricity to merge with the companies that generated it: this was ‘vertical integration’, just the kind of cosy arrangement, with all its potential for price-fixing and abuse of market dominance, that Littlechild wished to avoid. The introduction of Neta shed no light on the real costs to companies that sell customers electricity they’ve ‘bought’ wholesale from themselves. There was only one set of companies rich, powerful and experienced enough to take advantage of Britain’s burgeoning oligopoly. In 1998, as the Americans began their withdrawal from Britain, Continental Europeans arrived to take their place. The first bid from across the Channel, only seven years after the CEGB was destroyed, came from Electricité de France, the French CEGB.
*
I met Stephen Littlechild at a hotel in Dorridge, near Birmingham. He’s still busy in the obscure world of utility regulation, still attached to Birmingham and Cambridge Universities. Gently sunburned, with white hair and beard, he’s almost seventy; he has a Puckish energy, an enthusiasm more postgraduate than professorial, and a way of punctuating his conversation with a falsetto giggle. He once said that instead of RIP, the inscription on his gravestone should read ‘RPI-X’.
Privatisation, he told me, had been a matter of achieving clarity. ‘In the nationalised industries … nobody had a clue what anything cost. The government just gave them money, and sometimes didn’t … What has happened is that a price has been put on everything.’ He blamed two groups for the problems that followed the electricity privatisation. One was the City analysts who mistakenly characterised investment in long-established public electricity enterprises as ‘risky’, thus underestimating how cheaply new owners would be able to borrow money. The other was the politicians, who never gave him the powers he wanted to obstruct the anti-competitive mergers of electricity makers and electricity sellers.
In 1995, Scottish Power, which was integrated from the moment of privatisation – it both sold and generated electricity from the big coal stations at Longannet and Cockenzie – became the first privatised producer to take over a privatised seller when it bid for the former Merseyside and North Wales Electricity Board, renamed Manweb. Littlechild said he had tried to persuade Tim Eggar, energy minister at the time, to intervene. Instead of worrying about the power over customers the takeover would give the Scottish firm, Eggar said he wanted to give Manweb ‘a kick in the pants’. Both companies now belong to Iberdrola of Spain.
It seemed odd that Littlechild, the great free marketeer, should be upset about a private Scottish firm taking over a privatised electricity board, yet quite relaxed about a state-owned French company taking over the private London Electricity in November 1998. That first foray by EDF was followed in 2000 by its purchase of Cottam; in 2002 EDF added the old electricity boards in south-east and south-west England to its portfolio, and in 2008, with the purchase of British Energy, it bought most of Britain’s working nuclear power stations. As age shuts them down the plan is to replace them, starting in 2019, with a French-designed reactor known as the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR). With the abolition of the CEGB Britain no longer has the skills to design and build nuclear power stations.
‘People naturally feel some pang of regret that something made in Britain is no longer made in Britain,’ Littlechild said. ‘But the reason it happens is that a better service has been provided elsewhere.’
Didn’t it invalidate the privatisation of the CEGB and the old electricity boards if they could just be renationalised by the French, without British firms being able to do anything similar in France?
‘People are better off,’ he replied, ‘even if it means some jobs move overseas, because we specialise in other industries and other sectors where we have an advantage, like financial services. The argument that Adam Smith and others made for free trade did not depend on other countries accepting it as well. You appear to think that you should not let foreigners compete in this country unless our companies are able to compete in their country. I’m saying we stand to gain by letting anyone who wants to compete in this country – at least customers stand to gain.’
Littlechild seemed reluctant to accept that EDF’s move into Britain undermined the rationale for electricity privatisation and I was surprised, just before I left, when he looked at me sadly and said that, yes, he did regret what had happened, only a month before his term as regulator came to an end. ‘I think it was not possible for the regulator to stop it … I didn’t want an important reform being compromised by a company from overseas that was still state-owned, very large, not subject to competition, its actions not determined by meeting the needs of customers but by, well, its plans.’
*
It wasn’t that nobody tried to stop EDF’s move into Britain. But in 1998, Labour was working with the set-up it had inherited from the Tories. In her notorious Bruges speech ten years earlier, Thatcher had warned overweening Eurocrats: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level.’ The same year, in another, forgotten speech, she boasted to an audience of businessmen that her government had forced Europe to break down the barriers to cross-border business. By supporting a single European market in goods and services, she said, the Conservatives were taking action ‘to secure free movement of capital throughout the Community’. She saw no contradiction: those who claim to be her heirs still don’t. But implicit in Thatcher’s support for the single market was the acceptance of a single Brussels-based regulator as the ultimate arbiter of fair competition in Europe. Since then the EU Competition Directorate has had more impact on Britain than any other EU body. And France has proved an adept lobbyist. Brussels has let the French protect EDF from competition at home, allowed EDF to borrow money at low government rates, and let it expand into the open arena of Britain.
A strong, cunning negotiator capable of schmoozing the Eurocrats was required if the Department of Trade and Industry was ever to make the case in Brussels against the EDF takeover of London Electricity. On 30 November 1998, when news of the deal broke, exactly such a man was in charge at the DTI: Peter Mandelson. New in the job and eager to prove he was more than just a master of the political dark arts, he claimed he modelled himself on a Tory predecessor, Michael Heseltine, who had pledged to ‘intervene before breakfast, lunch and dinner’ on the side of British industry. But Mandelson never had a chance to put the case. A few weeks after EDF made its move, he was on the brink of tears, listening to Tony Blair telling him over the phone that he had to resign. Details had emerged of an undeclared £373,000 loan Mandelson had taken from the Treasury minister Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house in Notting Hill, an untenable conflict of interest. Mandelson quit, and after a sojourn on Corfu with his ‘old and good friends’ from the Rothschild banking family, passed into his personal Golgotha: a small flat, a Fiat Punto instead of a ministerial car and Friday nights shopping in Hartlepool Tesco’s.
Had his desire for a nice house not forced him out of office, would Mandelson have made the effort to lead a concerted lobbying effort in Brussels against the EDF takeover? We’ll never know. He was, proudly, the grandson of a patriarch of nationalisation, Herbert Morrison, and as such a kind of familial opponent to George Osborne, son-in-law of David Howell, patriarch of privatisation. Mandelson claimed in his memoirs that his house purchase was ‘nesting, rather than socialising’. But by moving to Notting Hill and hanging out with the Rothschilds he passed into Osborne’s territory.
Tucked away in Mandelson’s account of his 1998 downfall is a tortured paragraph, part confession, part self-justification, which could stand as the heart’s cry of New Labour – the agony that wells up in the soul of an ambitious, sensitive socialist who suffers because he can’t live like the hedge fund people, those people who are so much more charming than one has been led to expect. ‘A bit of high living had definitely crept into my soul,’ Mandelson wrote.
I saw what others enjoyed and I wanted to share it. Not glamour, or luxury, or swank. Just comfort and smartness. I had absolutely no desire to show off. Social life was always secondary. Work always came first. But I cared about money because I didn’t have it. I wanted my own savings, my own ability to spend on myself and others. I have never been greedy for riches. And yet it was my eyes getting too big for my stomach that brought me down.
With Mandelson gone and his replacement, Stephen Byers, coming to terms with the job, the baton passed to civil servants and to a junior minister responsible for energy, John Battle. Battle was from Leeds, a Catholic and an activist for social justice whose life until that point – studying the poetry of William Empson, training for the priesthood, setting up Church Action on Poverty to campaign for a minimum wage and mastering Labour’s housing brief in opposition – hadn’t obviously pointed him towards the energy portfolio in government. Today he is no longer an MP, and has returned north to a life of good works. I met him in the Tiled Hall Café in Leeds, where he recalled the day in 1997 he first walked into the DTI building as minister. He was met by a reception committee of civil servants.
‘I was asked which room I wanted, and whether I needed anything. I remember asking for a whiteboard, and being told I wouldn’t need one. I asked for a bookcase and they said: “Minister, if there are any books you want to read, you’ve got civil servants now, just get one of them to read the book and they’ll give you a précis.” I didn’t understand that “Is there anything you need?” was code for “What do you want in your drinks cabinet?”’ He asked the civil servants if they would draw up a report on the new energy markets and fuel poverty. ‘I was told fuel poverty was not a concept recognised in the department; it was the concern of the Department of Social Security.’
Battle was well aware of the unfairness of the French takeover, but was under the impression that Littlechild was happy to see it go ahead. The civil servants who might have told him otherwise don’t seem to have made a fuss about it; the DTI’s permanent secretary at the time, Michael Scholar, told me in an email that the EDF takeover ‘was not in the department a cause célèbre’. Battle now regrets not challenging Littlechild and the other regulators. ‘The regulator was completely fixed on price mechanism as the be all and end all, and opening up to new entrants. On paper it sounded fine. But in the real global economy, we couldn’t buy a French power station, and they could buy ours. We didn’t get a grip on the regulators. We left the framework to them. We should have changed the remit. We were too cautious and nervous about questioning the market. Why was it that we had to lose our nationalised industries in order to hand them over to nationalised industries from other countries? They could buy into us, but we couldn’t buy into them. The French said they wanted to open up their markets but they never did.’
The DTI asked Brussels to let Britain’s own competition authorities decide on the EDF bid. The European competition commissioner, the late Karel van Miert, refused, and soon afterwards issued an eight-page judgment clearing the EDF takeover. Ignoring EDF’s monopoly in France, he focused instead on the cross-Channel cable through which EDF already sold Britain a relatively small amount of power. Such a piddling market share, he concluded, hardly threatened dominance.
It was as if UEFA had been asked to consider the fairness of a French football team becoming the 21st member of the Premier League and, after scrupulous examination of the relative strengths of the existing 20 English teams, announced that the French would have no special advantage playing in England, ignoring the detail that when the English teams visited the French side at home, the French goal was boarded up with plywood. ‘The DTI,’ Helm writes,
simply assumed that the British model was the one Europe should follow, and that its superiority would be evident from the results … The failure to prevent EDF’s acquisition of London Electricity or its subsequent incremental acquisitions reflected not just an ignorance of how to work the Commission, but also of how to play the system. Whilst RWE, Ruhrgas [now part of E.ON] and EDF invested in the politics and processes of Brussels, the DTI relied on general principles. Its team was systematically outclassed.
*
I arranged to meet some of the agents of the Robin Hood group, L’Association des Robins de Bois – a clandestine network of French subversives working within EDF on the company’s home territory – in Montbéliard, in Franche-Comté, where the Peugeot family began making things for sale, starting with coffee mills and bicycles in the 19th century. While I waited for my contact outside the railway station, a freight train clanked past bearing a seemingly infinite number of new Peugeots. Here was France’s well-lubricated machine a-running, its state-planned network of nuclear reactors pouring out cheap, low-carbon electricity to power world-renowned Franche-Comté companies like Peugeot and Alstom, and to power the network of state-planned trains à grande vitesse that connects the country. ‘Bienvenue à Belfort Montbéliard – Territoire d’énergies’ reads a poster at the TGV station.
But Peugeot is struggling to compete at home and abroad; France’s 58 nuclear reactors, all built between 1971 and 1991, are coming to the end of their working lives, with no certainty as to how they will be replaced; and the new Belfort-Montbéliard TGV station, which opened last year, deposits arriving passengers in the middle of the countryside, several miles away from both Belfort and Montbéliard. As for cheap electricity, it is no use, if you are French, knowing that EDF electricity is cheaper in France than EDF electricity in Britain (which it is) if you can’t afford it.
My Robin Hood contact, P, had worked directly for EDF for 15 years, then spent another 15 in the CGT union, still, under the French system, on the EDF payroll. Over lunch, he explained the Robin Hood group: a loose association of electrical engineers and co-ordinators who step in when EDF managers order a customer to be cut off for non-payment. In certain cases, if they can’t help the customer any other way, a Robin Hood EDF engineer will return to the property and clandestinely, illegally reconnect the supply. Five years ago EDF electricians discovered that some government officials whose work was tied to the company were getting electricity for nothing. They promptly disconnected them. ‘That was the birth of Robin Hood,’ said P.
The group does what it can to protect its members and impoverished EDF customers from prosecution – making sure the reconnecting engineer is not the same as the disconnecting engineer, and that the meter never stops running, so that the bill continues to rise, at least nominally. Where possible they call in social services to help the customer rather than cut them off, or invent a reason not to do the job.
‘We want an engineer to have the right to refuse to cut somebody off,’ P said. ‘It used to be easier to come up with excuses not to do it, because there weren’t so many jobs. Now one engineer’s doing ten disconnections a day, you can’t refuse them all.’ It was dangerous work, he explained. ‘You need to know how to do it. If you make a mistake when you try to restore electricity, you’re dead. If you create a short circuit you can blow your head off. You need special gloves, a special mask, a visor.’
Rather than use the tactic EDF and other electricity firms have adopted in Britain – replacing non-payers’ meters with a meter requiring power to be paid for in advance – the homeland EDF will sometimes install a ‘trickle meter’, rationing poor customers to a thousand watts at a time. ‘A thousand watts. It’s too little,’ P said. ‘You can’t live with that. If you have the light on in the evening, the TV and the washing machine, that’s it.’
P described the Robin Hood group’s activities as ‘a legitimate act of resistance’, echoing the origins of EDF in the undercover planning for postwar France carried out by the National Council of the Resistance during the Occupation. At the CGT’s headquarters in Paris, in a modern brick building hollowed out by a vast atrium, I found the same description of France’s electricity supply as a part of la patrie that had somehow been taken over by outside forces. ‘For us,’ Denis Cohen, the communist head of the CGT until 2003, told me, ‘energy is like culture; it’s not a private good.’
It was puzzling. From this side of the English Channel, it had seemed clear enough: although some shares in EDF have been sold, and the management has been given a measure of commercial freedom, EDF looks like a state company, owned, controlled and supported by the French state, subject to French political control, and thus to the French electorate. It has taken over a large chunk of the British electrical system, though EDF doesn’t answer to me and my fellow voters. Yet ordinary French people don’t seem to feel it is under their control either. My efforts to arrange an interview with the company’s supposed owners, the French state, in the form of the Agence des participations de l’Etat, were rebuffed. As a last resort I turned up unannounced at the APE’s headquarters in the government offices in Bercy, a forbidding building resembling a cliff face of beige stone and tinted glass. I was shown the door.
‘It’s a funny company,’ Thibaut Madelin, energy correspondent of Les Echos, told me. ‘Obviously it’s a state-owned company, and you can argue it’s controlled by the government, and the union plays a big role, but I think the real power is within EDF. I’ve covered energy for four years and I’ve found no one can actually challenge it. The civil service and the regulator try somehow to control EDF but they can’t. It’s very hard to define where the power comes from.’
*
One spring morning I took the train from London, north through Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, to Nottinghamshire. The trackside was sprinkled with blackthorn blossom and when the sun flashed between the rainclouds the fields of rape flowers shone a dizzy yellow. Just before Newark-on-Trent the track began to cross lines of six-armed National Grid pylons, heaving their cables over the sheep and hedgerows like devas converging on a sacred site. We passed between Sherwood Forest and the River Trent and clusters of steam-headed cooling towers rose on the horizon, signalling the approach to England’s great electric estate.
The five coal-fired power stations that spread out in an arc along the Aire and Trent valleys have been there since I was a boy: the squat towers, seen from the window of express trains hurrying between London and Scotland, seem as natural in the landscape as flat green fields and comfortable houses of dark red brick. Most of them were built by the CEGB in the 1960s, in the heyday of state planning, to use local coal. The quintet of West Burton, Cottam, Drax, Eggborough and Ferrybridge still run. With their turbines spinning at full tilt, they can make a fifth of the electricity Britain needs on a cold winter’s day.
Inside the noisy room at Cottam that houses four 164-foot high boilers, Stephen Rawlinson, the plant’s mechanical maintenance manager, beckoned me up a set of metal steps and opened a tiny hatch. We were like insects under the grate of a coal fire, sparks and orange-hot cinders the size of my head shooting into heaps of ash. Looking up, I saw the inferno itself, a vast fireball coiling and erupting, fed by jets of pulverised coal, ground finer than talcum powder in enormous rotating drums filled with steel balls. Here was the elemental fury behind the green charging light and the whine of the washing machine.
Cottam coal station (there’s also a gas station, owned by a German company, on the same site) was privatised in 1991 and bought by EDF in 2000. When I asked the predominantly middle-aged engineers how they felt about working for the French, they told me their first loyalty was to the power station itself. But beyond that, working for EDF reminded them of the old British public service they started out in. ‘It’s very much along the lines of the CEGB as we knew it years ago – very structured procedurally, which is a good thing to have,’ said Dave Owen, a boiler engineer. He took me inside a boiler that had been shut down for cleaning. The mass of hot dust had been vacuumed out but every surface was still covered in brown powder. A gut-tangle of tubes and steam condensers at the top resolved itself into a vertiginous shaft lined with a delicate layer of tightly packed tubes that parted at the base to take coal from the feeders.
‘I don’t mind it going to other countries, but I believe there should be an engineering base in the UK,’ Owen said. ‘As a country we’re losing out, from engineers who design to people who maintain.’
Boyd Johnson, who looks after the mass of machinery – itself the size of a large factory – that strips polluting sulphur from the gas given off by the burning coal, said that Powergen, the company that inherited Cottam from the CEGB, hadn’t seemed committed to the future: it never invested in the full anti-pollution gear. EDF was different. ‘As engineers, we’re all about investment in the kit.’ Being with EDF, he said, was ‘like going back to the CEGB, but a little bit crisper.’ France, to be sure, had different priorities, but ‘at the end of the day, the French are investing. OK, you could say that in the future, when all the nuclears are built, they’ll get quite a large say in how the industry is run. But then we have government regulators.’
Chris Wild, in charge of milling the coal into powder, showed me the troughs where conveyor belts deliver the raw mined nuggets into the plant. I asked where the coal came from. The last deep mine in Nottinghamshire, Thoresby, is twenty miles away. ‘We have such a varied diet,’ he said. ‘I think this is from Kentucky.’ Wild was among the last batch of apprentices taken on by the CEGB before it was broken up and sold. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I don’t think “My boss is wearing EDF overalls” if he rings up at two in the morning and says some bit of kit’s broken down.’
Cottam operates with hundreds fewer staff than it did in the CEGB days and no apparent problems. ‘If this downsizing had been done under the auspices of the CEGB, would it have worked?’ Wild asked. ‘How do you measure the loss of such things as the Hams Hall workshops and the apprentice workshops at Burton on Trent, or the CEGB engineering programme? It makes you wonder if it could have remained as a privatised, streamlined CEGB. Would it have been better?’
*
The decisions on where electric Britain goes next, decisions in which Paris plays a key role, can’t be put off any longer. The cumulative effects of Littlechild’s RPI-X regime, two decades’ idealisation of shareholder capitalism, and the relentless promotion of the notion that it is socially acceptable for senior managers to be motivated by nothing other than a desire for personal enrichment, have left the electricity system on which Britain relies worn out. A fifth of the British power stations running today are due to close by the 2020s, and the government wants some mix of new nuclear, wind and gas, together with a smattering of coal and a rejig of the Grid, to make good the shortfall. Presenting a draft energy bill to Parliament in May the energy secretary, Ed Davey, said the figure of £110 billion often bandied about for how much this would cost was only the beginning.
The new imperative to be good world citizens by burning less fossil fuel makes matters harder. Our nuclear power stations are clapped out, our coal and oil stations are greenhouse gas factories, and since we’ve burned through most of our own North Sea reserves we have become reliant on shiploads of liquefied gas from Qatar, routed through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran promises to close if foreign powers give it trouble. Onshore wind farms are unpopular with rural Tories; offshore wind farms are expensive and far from the Grid, and besides, wind power needs to be backed up with alternatives, since the wind doesn’t blow all the time.
Of the three main sources of Britain’s future electricity supply – gas, wind and nuclear – the first two don’t require such urgent attention as the third, though we can expect any amount of rhetoric from the gas and wind lobbies while the energy bill is debated. The gasbags (of whom Osborne is one) will argue that the worldwide shale gas revolution is going to make gas cheaper and more widely available, that gas-fired power stations don’t need subsidies, and that gas is environmentally friendly because it’s less filthy than coal. The windbags, led by Davey, will argue that improving technology will make offshore wind cheaper, that it’s far cleaner than gas, and that wind energy makes Britain less dependent on imports from risky regimes. It’s an argument that Britain would be having whoever owned our electricity industry and it seems inevitable that the gradual end result will be more gas, more wind, and less coal. New nuclear power stations, however, are not only central to the government’s hopes: the companies who would build them say that the decision to proceed must be made by the end of the year.
The original idea, formulated under Labour and inherited by the coalition, was to unleash the pent-up atomic yearnings of the private electricity sector by giving the go-ahead for four new nuclear stations, each with a pair of reactors. Two pairs would be built by EDF at Hinkley Point in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk; two would be built by the Germans, E.ON and RWE, at Wylfa on Anglesey and Oldbury in Gloucestershire. At least four and possibly all eight would be a single model, the efficient, super-safe EPR designed by Areva of France. Making all eight of one type would reduce costs: they would effectively be mass-produced. It was argued by the nuclear lobby that since nuclear power stations, like wind farms, don’t produce greenhouse gases once they’re up and running, they should benefit from the same sorts of subsidy as wind. If the French and Germans were being asked to pony up the billions, it was reasoned, they needed some guarantee of payback over the decades of the stations’ working life. Hinkley Point would go online in 2019, and within a few years nearly a quarter of Britain’s peak electricity demand would be supplied by safe, clean, reliable new nukes.
And what was wrong with that? Almost everything, it turns out. The triple meltdown of reactors at Fukushima after the earthquake in Japan last March prompted the German government to shut down its nuclear sector entirely, which in turn led RWE and E.ON to abandon nuclear investment in Britain. Areva is now cobbling together a joint bid to build EPR reactors on the Wylfa and Oldbury sites with a Chinese firm, China Guangdong Nuclear Power Company. But it faces competition from its Japanese rival, Toshiba Westinghouse, which together with another Chinese company, the State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation, also wants to take over the former German projects, and proposes building a different reactor, also said to be efficient and super-safe, the AP1000. The French achieved economies of scale in the 1970s and 1980s by building nearly sixty reactors of identical design. Eight reactors for Britain already sounds more like an artisanal than an assembly-line product; four of one and four of another sounds frankly experimental.
And experimental is what the new reactors are. They are untried. No EPR or AP1000 is or ever has been operational. Two EPRs are being built in China, one in Finland and one at Flamanville in Normandy. None is close to switch-on. The Finnish and French EPRs will cost at least twice as much as they were supposed to. The Chinese reactors are said, by the firms involved, to be on schedule, but Flamanville is running four years late. Recently the local electricity company that ordered the Finnish reactor cancelled the latest opening date – 2014, already five years behind schedule – without giving a new one.
The French themselves seem to be cooling on the EPR. François Hollande wants to cut the nuclear component of France’s electricity from 75 to 50 per cent. In a 2010 report on the future of the French nuclear industry François Roussely, a former head of EDF, warned that the EPR was too complex, needed a redesign, and that customers should be offered a smaller, simpler reactor called the ATMEA. The previous year, taking over as the head of EDF, its current boss, Henri Proglio, mocked Areva for pushing the EPR abroad. ‘Do you know how many companies have just one product in their catalogue?’ he sneered. ‘There was Ford and his Model T. But that was a hundred years ago, and at least he knew how to make and sell it.’ Proglio now says he wants to build EPRs in Britain. His comments were widely interpreted in France as a power play within the febrile world of French industrial politics, and it is this world – a world over which the British electorate has no control – to which the British public is being shackled.
*
Britain’s prospective investment in the EPR, and possibly the AP1000, is disturbingly reminiscent of the prelude to the catastrophic demise of Railtrack, the privatised company that had to be renationalised in 2001. There, too, the government allowed a private network on which the country depended to invest in an unproven technological fix, despite warnings from Europe that the technology wasn’t ready. In the free-market utopia envisioned by Littlechild and Lawson, this shouldn’t have been a problem. In their vision, state planners don’t know what people want: people know what people want, and entrepreneurs will invest and compete to supply those wants. If the product or service supplied is underused, useless or too expensive, it’s the entrepreneur who loses out, not the customers. This perspective takes no account of people’s susceptibility to marketing, yet it’s a reasonable principle, and applied to restaurants, or cars, or furniture, there’s much to be said for it. Were banks to face real competition it would be a good thing. Applied to Britain’s electricity industry, however, it gives rise to two formidable problems.
The first is that a nuclear power station isn’t a restaurant. When the café I own on the market square goes belly up, my livelihood suffers, but the townsfolk won’t lack for coffee. If the National Grid pencils in 13 gigawatts of nuclear electricity for the 2020s, however, and it doesn’t arrive, the country is in peril. It’s a variant of the old joke about you having a problem if you owe the bank a hundred pounds, but the bank having a problem if you owe them a billion. If Henri Proglio plans to move into a new house by Christmas and it isn’t ready, Henri Proglio has a problem. If Henri Proglio’s new reactor isn’t ready for 2019, Britain has a problem. A wind farm that is nine-tenths finished is nine-tenths operational. A nuclear power station that is nine-tenths finished is a £3 billion white elephant.
The possibility that companies might get part-way through building a set of new nuclear reactors in Britain and have to stop due to cost overruns is less likely than the other variant: that, once begun, the new nukes will be finished whatever the cost. Which is the second problem. Expensive to build and difficult to dispose of, nuclear reactors aren’t profitable. The only reason nuclear power is on the table is global warming. The only way it can be financed is by government subsidy. By the end of this year, the British government must decide how big a subsidy it is prepared to give EDF and Areva; EDF and Areva, in consultation with their main shareholder, the French government, will have to decide whether that’s enough.
But the subsidy won’t come from general taxation. It will come, as wind farm subsidies already do, from British customers’ electricity bills. It’s a stark illustration of the realities of privatising essential services – that what is being sold is not infrastructure, but bill-paying citizens, and what is being privatised is not electricity, but taxation. Effectively the French government is buying the right to tax British electricity customers through their electricity bills; to use British money and British sites to finance a world showcase for unproven French nuclear technology. And because the hidden taxes in electricity bills take no account of people’s ability to pay, the poorer you are, the bigger contribution you make to the programme.
That’s not to say the French people will be winners as a result of the deal (although Hollande has at least acknowledged that in France electricity bills are a form of taxation, and should be adjusted according to income). Given that all the options are expensive and politically charged, the British government might still decide the EPR is too risky and allow extra gas stations to take up the slack, while assuaging the green lobby with continued offshore wind subsidies and promises of esoteric future technologies: tidal power, clean coal, thorium reactors, a European supergrid linking northern windmills and Mediterranean solar farms, a cable feeding green electricity from Iceland. In which case the French people will be on the hook for EDF’s expensive acquisition of British Energy and its existing, worn-out British nukes.
Free marketeers like Littlechild and Lawson might argue that, left to its own devices, the market would never have built nuclear power stations; it would always have gone for the cheapest option. But this is disingenuous. With electricity, the market can never be left alone. Coal might be the cheapest option, but it’s too dirty. Gas might be the cheapest option, but the more the country relies on gas, the more emergency reserves it will have to keep in storage – which the market won’t pay for. Helm’s most devastating point about electricity (and gas) privatisation in Britain is that these are not naturally public industries; nor are they naturally private. ‘It is extraordinary,’ he writes, ‘that anyone could have regarded these as anything other than political industries.’
Electricity privatisation hasn’t been a success in bringing down prices. Most recent figures suggest that British prices are typically right in the middle of the European average – higher than France’s, lower than Germany’s. It has been a failure in terms of British industry and management; the best measure of the scale of folly and betrayal by politicians of both parties is the simple fact that a reliable, badly run British electricity system was destroyed, rather than being reformed, only so that a large part of it could be taken over by a foreign version of the original. And it has been a failure in terms of clarity, in the sense that in order to fund investment, governments that boast about not raising taxes, or of taking low-earners out of the tax bracket, permit predominantly foreign-owned electricity companies to collect flat-rate taxes that hit the poor disproportionately.
*
How to explain the sense in this country that EDF is a manifestation of the French state, and the sense in France that it is and it isn’t – that by expanding abroad it somehow eluded the people who are supposed to own it? ‘EDF is the biggest electricity company in the world but it is still Franco-French,’ Denis Cohen said, expressing the paradox. ‘The strategy of this company, even though it is Franco-French, is to try to get out of France.’
What matters about EDF’s enormous acquisitions in Britain is not that it’s French, but that by crossing the Channel so decisively it has become something that is neither altogether French nor altogether British. It has become one of those transnational entities that uses national jurisdictions as conveniences, in the same way as the wealthy use national jurisdictions as conveniences for tax avoidance. By presenting itself in France as a champion of French national interests, sheltering behind the shield of the French state, while presenting itself in Britain as committed to the global free market and fair competition, it is taking advantage of the fact that the two countries’ governments, electorates and media are separate: the two eyes of supervision are attached to divergent brains, and EDF can exist in a state of institutionalised hypocrisy.
EDF is still the French CEGB, though more technically skilled than its former British counterpart. Tony Cooper, who in the 1990s headed the union representing electricity managers, told me that when EDF took over Britain’s old nuclear power stations in 2008, ‘a lot of people were saying: “Christ, at last we’ve got someone who knows how to run these bloody things.”’ But by lurching into the tax-gathering business overseas EDF has become a hybrid – a French CEGB crossed with a French version of Enron. One long-time observer of the French energy scene described accompanying a group of EDF executives to an Enron trading room at the hubristic height of that company’s success. She was taken aback by the gleam of fascination and envy in the eyes of the énarques as they watched their American counterparts trade gigawatts on the screens.
Just because EDF is beset by Robin Hoods in France and has planted its standard at Cottam, hard by Sherwood Forest, doesn’t make it the Sheriff of Nottingham. And yet there is an echo, in the conduct of the electricity oligopoly, of the popular notion of medieval social injustice that has defined the background to the Robin Hood legend: a country where the symbol of the nation’s best interests, in the form of the king, is far away, and in his absence, a rootless elite that has no concept of duty or service except to itself is busy taxing the poor. It is as if national boundaries are for the little people, the global peasantry who pay their taxes, not for great men and the great transnational corporations they run.
Still, the lights haven’t gone out. At least that’s what an MP told Dieter Helm a few years ago when he was giving evidence in Parliament. People warned there would be blackouts the previous winter, the MP said, and there weren’t. With unusual passion, Helm put him straight. If you define the problem as the lights not going out, he said, you misunderstand everything about the way the new world of electricity markets works. The ideal situation for private electricity firms is one where there is only just enough electricity to go round. Then they can charge as much as they like, and people will have to pay. ‘People think insecurity of supply means will the lights go off or not – but that is not the issue,’ he said. ‘It is what happens just before the lights go off.’
More than twenty years after the great electricity experiment was launched, it can be seen that although it was an act of privatisation – of taxation, principally – it was most significantly an act of alienation, lowering an impenetrable barrier of complexity, commercial secrecy and sheer geographical distance between the controlling interests of electricity companies and the customers they serve. It’s easy to switch suppliers. But behind that barrier citizens and small businesses have no way of knowing that they aren’t being fleeced as egregiously by the cheapest provider as they are by the most expensive. The consumer-peasants of Britain bring their tithes to the locked gates of the great electrical estates and wonder who lives in the big house now, and whether they are at home, or in one of their other estates around the world. No wonder Denis Cohen, old communist, heir to the Communards and the sans-culottes, hates what the company that pays him is doing abroad. ‘I was very surprised to see the British trades unionists were not very opposed to this,’ he said, meaning privatisation and foreign takeover. ‘We, with our culture, would have fought until death to prevent it.’ |
2016 is the new hottest year on record – how NASA takes the planet’s temperature
NASA announced on Wednesday that in 2016, Earth experienced the hottest surface temperatures in modern history. Separate, independent analysis at NOAA provided the same conclusion. This makes the third year in a row that Earth experienced record high temperatures.
These record years are part of a concerning long-term trend of increasing global temperatures. In fact, 16 of the 17 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.
“2016 is remarkably the third record year in a row in this series. We don’t expect record years every year, but the ongoing long-term warming trend is clear.” Gavin Schmidt, Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director
So how does NASA take the Earth’s temperature?
Well, for starters, NASA’s Global Temperature video below (which you’ve probably seen shared with any article on climate change) is based on a network of over 6,000 sensors set up on land, sea, and in Antarctica.
The animation above shows higher than average temperatures in red and lower than average temperatures in blue. The map does not show temperatures itself. This is why the poles are much redder than, say, the equator. Multiple research studies have shown that the poles are warming twice as fast as other parts of the planet due to a number of factors including the amplified effect that melting ice caps have on the ability to reflect (rather than absorb) sunlight.
Dr. Gavin Schmidt, the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies elaborates on this topic telling TechCrunch that, in addition to their vast sensor network, NASA leverages a system of Earth-Observing satellites to get a full picture of the climate.
“We need many additional sources of information to be able to put these changes in context. We use GRACE satellites to track the mass loss from the ice sheets, JASON2/3 to track the sea level rise, CloudSat and Calypso to track shifts in the clouds, TRMM and GPM for the shifts in rainfall, SSMI for sea ice extent etc.” Gavin Schmidt, Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director
It’s also important to note that temperatures in the record-setting years of 2015 and 2016 were intensified by a weather pattern known as El Niño. An El Niño is one of the most well-known climate patterns and occurs every three to seven years. During an El Niño year, a number of things happen. For example, some parts of the world will experience higher than average rainfall while other areas will experience more extreme droughts.
An El Niño also causes temperatures in the Pacific Ocean to rise as high as three to five degrees above average. Because of this, some (including the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology) have inaccurately reported that without the El Niño, there would be no cause for concern.
Instead, researchers estimate that the El Niño only increased the annual global temperature in 2016 by 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit. To put that in perspective:
2014 was initially the hottest year on record with average global surface temperatures 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the late 19 th century average
Fahrenheit higher than the late 19 century average 2015 replace 2014 as the new hottest year on record with average global surface temperatures 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the late 19 th century average
Fahrenheit higher than the late 19 century average 2016 is now the hottest year on record with average global surface temperatures 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the late 19th century average
So, even without the 0.2 degree Fahrenheit contribution from El Niño, 2016 would still be among the top three hottest years in recorded history.
“Phenomena such as El Niño or La Niña, which warm or cool the upper tropical Pacific Ocean and cause corresponding variations in global wind and weather patterns, contribute to short-term variations in global average temperature.” NASA Press Office
This news comes just days before the new President takes office – an administration with a reputation for downplaying the effects of climate change (or ignoring its existence entirely).
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012
In an Op-Ed for Space News, Donald Trump’s senior advisers Bob Walker and Peter Navarro wrote that “NASA should be focused primarily on deep space activities rather than Earth-centric work.” Their belief is that climate science should be handled by other agencies.
In a separate interview for The Guardian, Mr. Walker explained that President-Elect Trump is set to eliminate all climate change research conducted by NASA in an effort to crack down on “politicized science.”
As the Earth continues to warm and a new administration takes office, many will be watching out for policy changes that could affect our ability to monitor the planet’s climate altogether. |
2 city cops fired in connection with assault on paraplegic in February
YOUNGSTOWN — Police Chief Jimmy Hughes has fired two officers involved in a Feb. 27 incident in which a paraplegic complained he was dragged out of a sport utility vehicle, assaulted by a police officer and left lying face down in the snow.
The chief announced today the terminations of Officer Robert Jolliff, the alleged assailant, and Officer Jay Fletcher, who allegedly failed to react properly as events unfolded at the scene.
Jolliff “was terminated because of the allegations of excessive force and conduct unbecoming an officer,” Hughes said. The chief added he believes Jolliff was not truthful in his comments during the internal affairs investigation.
Jolliff had prior complaints and some prior discipline in his personnel file, but his termination was almost entirely due to the Feb. 27 incident, Hughes said.
Fletcher was fired because of the combination of the Feb. 27 incident and prior discipline in his file, the chief said.
Jolliff and Fletcher may appeal their termination.
For the complete story, see Friday's Vindicator and Vindy.com |
RESUMEN Super Smash Bros Ultimate Nintendo Switch
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Nintendo Switch
Luchadores y mundos de juego míticos colisionan en el enfrentamiento definitivo: ¡una nueva entrada de la serie Super Smash Bros. para Nintendo Switch!
Nuevos luchadores, como los inklings de la serie Splatoon y Ridley de la serie Metroid, hacen su debut en Super Smash Bros. junto a todos los personajes de las entregas anteriores. ¡Todos!
Un combate más ágil, nuevos objetos, nuevos ataques, nuevas opciones defensivas y otras muchas sorpresas mantendrán la batalla al rojo vivo cuando y donde quieras.
Características
· Nuevos luchadores, nuevos escenarios… ¡y todos los personajes de las entregas anteriores! ¡Todos!
· Se unen al plantel los inklings de la serie Splatoon.
Ridley de la serie Metroid también se apunta al combate.
· Entre los luchadores que vuelven destacan Wolf, Ice Climbers y el Entrenador Pokémon.
· Eleva la experiencia Super Smash Bros. a cotas antes inalcanzadas con un combate más ágil, nuevos ataques, nuevos objetos y nuevas opciones defensivas.
· Enfréntate en un Todos contra todos para 4 jugadores o eleva esa cifra con el Smash para 8.
· Todas las figuras amiibo de la colección Super Mario Bros. (a la venta por separado) son compatibles. |
State senator also feeding at federal trough to tune of $161K per year
Sen. Doug Ericksen, R-Ferndale, left, defender and advocate for the...
State Sen. Doug Ericksen, R-Ferndale, is being paid at an annual rate of $161,900 for what he has insisted is a temporary posting as part of the Trump transition team making deep cuts in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Ericksen is working 30-40 hours a week at his Washington, D.C., job, according to pay stubs obtained by Oregon Public Broadcasting under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents show that Ericksen was paid $11,434 between Jan. 22, 2017 and Feb. 18. He told OPB that he was "still not really aware, to be honest with you," how much he is being paid.
The Whatcom County lawmaker, who co-chaired Trump's campaign in Washington state, has insisted he can do his $45,474-a-year job in the Washington State Legislature as well as his Washington, D.C., posting at the EPA.
Ericksen has said he would forego the $120 per diem in expenses paid to members while the Legislature is in session. But records suggest he has taken the money when in Olympia.
Ericksen is chairman of the Senate Energy and Environment Committee in the Legislature. He has insisted that he has kept up, by using the internet, with the panel's work. The committee's vice chair is state Sen. Tim Sheldon, a Democrat from Potlach who votes with Republicans and gives the GOP control of the Legislature's upper chamber.
Ericksen did bring a climate change denier to testify at a recent Senate hearing in Olympia. He decried as "hatchet jobs" critical news reports.
He has been dubbed "double-dipping Doug" by critics in his 42nd District. They have posted critical comments on his Facebook page, only to have the remarks deleted. Ericksen has blocked a number of his critics.
Ericksen is rumored to be a finalist for the post of Region X director of the EPA, which includes the Northwest and Alaska.
He has been a defender and advocate of railroads as well as the two oil refineries in his district. He also has been a vociferous critic of Gov. Jay Inslee's environmental agenda, notably the governor's proposal to make the state's major polluters pay for their carbon emissions.
Ericksen appeared with Trump at a rally last May at the Northwest Washington Fairgrounds in Lynden. The other state co-chair, former state Sen. Don Benton of Vancouver, is in a more senior position as the EPA transition team's liaison with the White House.
The news on Ericksen's pay came on a day of bad news for the EPA.
The Trump administration is proposing to cut $2.6 billion, or 31 percent, from the agency's current budget of $8.2 billion. The $5.7 billion budget, adjusted for inflation, would be the lowest since the Environmental Protection Agency was created under President Nixon in 1970.
The cut is among the deepest of any federal agency.
In the Pacific Northwest, EPA money has helped coastal cities build sewage treatment plants. It recently delivered a detailed, critical analysis on impacts of a giant proposed mine between two prime spawning streams for the giant salmon fishery of Alaska's Bristol Bay.
Washington has four members on the Senate and House Appropriations Committees, which will decide whether to go along with the deep cuts proposed by Trump.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is a senior Democratic member on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Two Republican lawmakers, U.S. Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., are members of the House Appropriations Committee. Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., also sits on House Appropriations. |
A thoughtful reader commented on the “Racism in the Book of Mormon” post about a presentation which has been given by a group of Black LDS men which gives a whole new way to look at the Book of Mormon to demonstrate that what people think are racist aspects in the scripture are not in fact racist. I reviewed their presentation and this post is my response. It takes the form of a conversation you might see take place between someone who subscribes completely to this new way of looking at the Book of Mormon and a member of the younger generation who is investigating the church with a socially conscious and analytical mindset. Flip through this presentation to follow along. Highlighted words can be clicked to go to appropriate references.
The Conversation
Direct Link
Why these rationalizations are wrong
Members of the church will see what is taught in these firesides as a great service – they are expunging the stain of racism from their hallowed scriptures. Outsiders who have no reason to hold the church, its leaders or scriptures as divinely inspired will see these efforts as ludicrous linguistic acrobatics. To illustrate what I mean – lets consider a cartoon that was recently put on auction. It is an illustration drawn by the beloved children’s author and illustrator Dr. Seuss. you can see it here:
If you examine the last frame, you can see the the highly revered Dr. Seuss was guilty of creating a horrendously offensive, ignorant and racist illustration:
There are so many terrible things wrong with this illustration, starting with the stereotypical blackface depiction of black men, the use of a highly offensive racial epithet and the trivialization of human life by including these men as the punch line of a highly offensive idiom.
Now imagine that parents who believed it impossible for Dr. Seuss to have ever held this despicable worldview about fellow humans tried to make an argument, similar to the ones above, in order to defend Seuss.
“The blackface caricature was just a metaphor for the struggles of the black man! We know that black men don’t really look like that so we can’t imagine that Dr. Suess was trying to convey that.”
“The epithet here is really just an abbreviated form of the word ‘niggardly’ which means someone who is stingy with money – since many black men were not financially well to do, this cartoon simply depicts the difficult fiscal state of the black man in early 20th century!”
“The idiom about someone in your woodpile is an allusion to concealing escaped slaves who were trying to reach freedom through the underground railroad. This cartoon actually honors the memory of abolitionists who help freedom loving black men and women escape the bonds of slavery!”
“Dr. Suess’ books about equality such as “The Sneeches” and “Horton Hears a Who” show that he was not racist. As such, there is no way that this cartoon he drew is really racist and these other explanations demonstrate that it is not!”
It is safe to say that nobody would take such arguments seriously. They are clearly ridiculous attempts to protect the reputation of Dr. Suess at the expense of reasonable standards of logic and reality. Outsiders who see the above arguments about the Book of Mormon would see it in much the same light.
The hurtful aspect of such arguments is that they have the effect of minimizing or denying the reality of the racist ideas and language that did in fact exist and adversely impacted the lives of men and women at the time. It is akin to denying that the holocaust existed, and attributing the stories of what took place in the concentration camps to idiom and metaphor. It is a grave insult to the people who experienced it at the time and diminishes the warning message of those historical accounts.
To the extent that that these rationalizations take pressure off the church leadership to make a full and undiluted acknowledgement and apology to black members these ill-conceived arguments actually hurt the church by preventing the full measure of healing and reconciliation that such an apology would bring.
Appendix
Here is the Presentation
Here are the basic points made in the presentation and direct links to where they are discussed:
Humans were not divided by race in terms of “black” and “white” skin color until a German physician named Johan Blumenbach wrote a thesis on it in 1775. (10:54)
There is no such thing as race – the various changes of skin color are a manifestation of God’s love for man – not a punitive curse. (14:25)
Certain words in the Book of Mormon imprecisely convey their original meaning from “reformed Egyptian”. These are called ‘idioms’. When we read them, what they mean to us is not what they were originally supposed to mean. (4:47)
The term “skin” in the scriptures refers to the “spirit” of a man – not to his cutaneous outer surface. (28:42)
The term “curse” refers to the separation from God, His path or ways which men bring upon themselves when they sin – not an unjust arbitrary divine punishment. (21:19)
Several revelations indicate that the Priesthood should be inclusive of all men. (39:58)
Changes to footnote and headers of the Book of Mormon made in recent decades demonstrate the proof of all the foregoing points. (31:31)
The terms “black and white” refer to gloominess or righteousness – not to skin color. (23:39)
When we face challenging issues such as racism in the scriptures we experience cognitive dissonance. Each of us resolves this one way or another and then we don’t accept any evidence that would disprove our conclusion. (8:46)
Prophets are not expected to be perfect (18:48) |
For the worst country in the world, Liberia looks lush. All along the long road to Fish Town, the sumptuous rainforest on either side is a comfort, a green bath to soothe the dreadful red dust that is constant and the potholes that cause nose-bleeds, head-bumps and nausea even in this well-cushioned Toyota Land Cruiser belonging to WaterAid. We are scrunched into this car for days, because that's how long it takes to get to Fish Town, only a few hours from Liberia's capital Monrovia if you're a crow, but 36 hours otherwise, because the country has only one decent main road.
To get there, we must loop north, brushing the border with Guinea, before swooping back down to a town that isn't much of a town, the joke goes, and doesn't have much fish. But it's busy these days because NGO 4x4s such as ours are zooming through on their way to help refugees escaping from Ivory Coast, the latest poor sods in this region to be kicked out of their country by war.
We, though, are not zooming towards refugees but towards something far less newsworthy. It is my sixth visit to Liberia. The first was in 2004, six months into the country's first peace in 20 years. Liberia had suffered years of stunningly brutal civil wars, orchestrated largely by Charles Taylor, now on trial in the Hague for war crimes (a man who once sued a journalist for saying he had eaten a human heart, and lost); and by other warlords with names such as General Butt Naked, General Peanut Butter and Devil. And this war's stories were more horrific than most: mass rape; boy soldiers kept going by drugs, looting and raping; parents killed by their own boys; checkpoints made from intestines. Imagine the worst and, if you looked, you'd find it here doubled.
By 2003, when the Economist called Liberia the worst country in the world, it was wrecked. Yet it hadn't always been that way. Founded by freed American slaves in the 19th century, Liberia had had good times. Its ex-slave colonists built graceful mansions, installed themselves as rulers over local tribes and instituted a Liberian English that still has the infectious drawl of the American South. They named their capital after US president James Monroe; they called their currency the dollar; they let the US use them as a listening station in the second world war. Liberians – flying a US-lite flag of stripes and one star – thought they lived in the 51st state, or "Bitty America". But it was a one-way relationship: during battles so terrible that they were called world wars I, II and III, a US warship holding 2,000 marines anchored itself on the horizon and did nothing to help. Only when rebels attacked Monrovia was Taylor persuaded to leave and a UN force brought in.
The receding war left ugly tides. At least 70% of women raped. Nearly the entire population refugees of one sort or another. A huge brain drain. No functioning electricity grid. A decimated healthcare system. And, thanks to the plundering Taylor, a national debt of $4.9bn. In 2004, when I first visited, all Liberia seemed to have was 9,000 UN peacekeepers and some cautious hope.
But the world's worst country has been busy. In 2006, it elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to be its president. A Harvard-trained former World Bank economist, Sirleaf is Africa's first female head of state, Ma Ellen to three million or so Liberians and a president with a dizzying to-do list. Eighty-five per cent of Liberians have less than a dollar a day to spend. A dollar goes further in Liberia, but not that far, when rice costs $45 a bag. You can always find a decent Club Beer in Monrovia, but you won't find a post office, electricity grid, sewage treatment, taxes or decent road system. One suburb of the capital is called Red Light, because it used to have a traffic light. It doesn't any more.
How do you fix a ruined country? Start with the money. If you can, get that $4.9bn of debt forgiven. Increase the national budget from $80m a year to $360m. Then figure out how to earn more. Open for business and sell everything you can: oil, gas and mineral rights; timber concessions. Open your ports and improve your roads for all the mining and logging equipment to trundle down. Talk about developing tourism. Invite the Chinese, so that after hours on a road to the remotest part of the country, you'll find young Chinese lads taking a break from building bridges to take each other's photograph, as well as new universities and hospitals with suspiciously Chinese-looking roofs.
All that is basic nation-building. But there is also something that's not on most nation-building lists. Liberians elected a woman who understood that something basic could save millions of dollars, something most people don't want to talk about. Most people, but not Ma Ellen, the only serving head of state to have written in a major newspaper about the need for toilets. That's right. Toilets. Because of that, I request an interview with her; and because I am here with WaterAid and have written a book about toilets, she grants it.
We meet in the foreign ministry, where the president moved after the executive mansion caught fire. Ma Ellen's personal guards, female Indian peacekeepers, stand at the gate like statues. (Someone tells me he saw them beat up rioters one day, then go to church in their saris the next, "looking so sweet and lovely".) Monrovia's mayor is also a woman, as is the director of the port, a crucial position. Sometimes I feel as if I've landed in a Patricia Cornwell novel, where all positions of authority are held by women. It's great.
In her spacious office, impeccably dressed in her trademark African cloths and turban, the president is warm and gracious, despite a stern reputation. I have been warned to stick to the agreed topic of sanitation. Stray off it – to accusations of endemic corruption, nepotism and human rights issues, for example – "and you will see her change in an instant", a Liberian friend tells me.
Most Liberians have grown up in the countryside, where the idea of a bush toilet is second nature. But their proximity to water supplies and homes can prove deadly. Photograph: Aubrey Wade for the Guardian
Sirleaf took a while to understand the place of good sanitation. Like countless Liberians, she grew up on the family farm, where the only toilet was the bush. "It came naturally," she says, when I double-check that the president has just admitted to open defecation – or, as Liberians say, doing poo-poo in the bush. "That was what it was."
Like the six out of seven Liberians who still do the same thing, or the 2.6 billion worldwide who have no toilet, Sirleaf didn't see what was wrong with it. All that forest: what harm can a little poo-poo do? Now she knows better. She knows that diarrhoea – caused largely by people ingesting water or food contaminated by human waste – kills more children worldwide than HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined. She knows that even the greenest, widest forest can't prevent faecal particles being tramped into a village on feet and flies and fingers, to be dipped into food and water, to become diarrhoea, dysentery or cholera. She knows, as an economist should, that good sanitation could reap millions of dollars a year in savings. India, where two-thirds of the population are toiletless, loses $58bn a year in wages and medical bills to the 50 diseases that can travel in human excrement. Half the hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa are filled with people suffering the consequences of bad sanitation. But, of course, the president sees endless statistics. Only when she looked into why so many Liberian women were dying in childbirth, and why children were dying of something as banal as the squits, did she realise "there is a relationship with water and sanitation. I needed to understand why that was so, and partly it's because people don't have access to clean water. That was an eye-opener for us."
Ma Ellen is amazing, but she is a politician. She is fluent in euphemism. When she says "clean water", she really means "water without human excrement in it". That's what "clean water" means, because that is what dirty water is dirtied with.
At the end of a long, red road, a bone-shaking hour's ride from Fish Town, we arrive at Jaytoken, an ordinary village like thousands of others, with huts grouped around a green football pitch and surrounded by that ever-so-green forest. Women do chores; men are at the farm or the illicit gold-mine nearby. The closest clinic is a four-hour walk away. The road is so bad only motorbikes or 4x4s can negotiate it in the dry season; hardly anything can pass in the rains. People walk and walk and walk. The only fat bellies here are the ones filled with worms. Why? Because of the creek.
The creek is everything. It carried dead bodies in times of war. It still carries animal carcasses. Boas swim in it. It carries the excrement of upstream villagers who use it as a toilet. It provides drinking and washing water. And it brings death – it is the water into which hopeful mothers with diarrhoea-afflicted children mix oral rehydration salts, dispensed for free by that clinic four hours away, without boiling it. I don't know why they do that – they have had countless hygiene lessons.
Rev Charles Saylee and his wife Dorris, whose infant daughter died after a bout of diarrhoea. She took three days to die from what, in the western world, is considered a relatively harmless stomach bug. Photograph: Aubrey Wade for the Guardian
They tell me their dirty water causes "running stomach" and that running stomach sometimes causes death, such as that of Marie Saylee, nine months old, who got sick last November. I ask her father, Pastor Saylee, why she wasn't taken to the clinic. There was no time, he says. He goes to fetch the country medicine he would have given her, had she been older. It is a leaf called wudirrubu, or "goat-eat leaf", because goats eat it. You pound it, mix it with creek water – again, unboiled – and drink it. Marie's mother gave her pepper soup, coconut milk, clean water from the hand-pump. Nothing worked. Marie took three days to die from something most of us consider a stomach bug.
The people of Jaytoken, like people in countless other villages, knew that creek water was deadly water. And still they didn't boil it. They had soap for sale cheaply in the local shop, along with affordable water-purification sachets, but nobody bought them. They could build their own houses; they crafted chairs and lovely bamboo window shutters – but they would not build latrines. Like the president, going for poo-poo 60 years ago, they didn't see the necessity. They had other things to think about, such as not having a decent road or clinic or money. Sanitation was a luxury. So along came WaterAid, trying to reshuffle those needs into a list that puts sanitation near the top. Jaytoken's green fields are atop rock, so they brought rock-breaking equipment to sink water pumps. But the villagers kept going to the goal-pole latrine in the bush – so-called because it is formed of a perch that looks like a goal – so WaterAid brought in a Liberian NGO to perform a process known as community-led total sanitation (CLTS). That jargon hides a fascinating concept: that people are stubborn and so must be shocked out of their wrong behaviour. The NGO does this with tricks. By dipping a hair they say has been dipped in shit into a glass of water and then asking people to drink it. No? How is that different from the water they drink every day? Or by putting food next to a piece of excrement and watching the flies jump from one to the other. Are they different flies? No? By that point, the penny is supposed to have dropped. "The basic assumption," says the CLTS handbook, "is that no one can remain unmoved once they have learned that they are ingesting other people's shit."
Liberians don't use that word. "Poo-poo" is bad enough. But not bad enough for the president to be shy about it when I ask what language she uses to talk about sanitation. "I say poo-poo," she says. "Of course. If you tell people 'defecate', they won't understand."
CLTS is wildly popular in the world of poo-poo activists. It has been hugely successful in many parts of the world. When it works, it works dramatically. People rush off to build latrines, then they clean up the rest of their villages. They are encouraged with prizes and – in India – awards handed out by the president and covered on national TV. WaterAid is one of dozens of NGOs currently using the technique.
But it doesn't always work. The trouble with sanitation is that it involves human nature. People don't usually respond well to health messages or nagging – many doctors smoke when they know they shouldn't, for example. At Jaytoken school, the blackboards are covered with appropriate hygiene messages, written especially for our visit. A young woman named Grace puts up her hand when I ask if anyone has ever been bitten by a snake while going to the latrine. She is a 24-year-old in a primary school, because her school years were swallowed by war. She was bitten by a snake because the school was built by a Liberian charity that gave up before providing toilets. Snake bites are one risk; sexual assault is another. None of the women of Jaytoken admits to being raped, but it is endemic, and using latrines in the bush leaves them vulnerable. Water may be life, goes the slogan, but a decent toilet is dignity.
Villagers in Nyonken, Liberia, collect water from the river for cooking, washing and drinking, even though they know human waste from villages upstream may have contaminated it. Photograph: Aubrey Wade for the Guardian
Dignity doesn't get the attention that clean water does, though. The people of Jaytoken and nearby Nyonken – a three-hour walk away – are proud of the new pumps provided by WaterAid. But, like seven out of 10 other Liberians, they still haven't built latrines. Far too many NGOs rush to provide a clean water supply without bothering to install sanitation along with it. If there is a better method for polluting a clean water supply than having little fingers covered with faecal particles, I don't know what it is.
I ask the president about this disparity. Sanitation makes economic sense, after all. CLTS, for example, is cheap – no expensive concrete latrines, no sewerage systems, just some clever persuaders changing people's hearts and minds.
"The problem is," she answers, "these public services don't have a high profile. People want to see their footprint – a building that everyone can see, or a road. No one pays attention to the three-room latrine in the back yard. There has to be a whole change of consciousness."
And not only by donors. In the welcome meetings, villager after villager stands up with a petition. Thank you for the water, they say, but give us more. Give us roads. Give us a clinic. They don't ask for latrines. A man from the ministry of works expresses what I'm thinking: "You can build your houses. Why don't you build latrines? If a hinge falls off a door, will you expect an NGO to come and fix it?"
The president would be unimpressed, but unsurprised. "People say they want health clinics," she says, "but they don't ask for sanitation. They say their children get malaria or dysentery, but they don't ask for sanitation. We have to bring to their consciousness that sanitation is linked to health."
On the way back to Monrovia, with the roof of the truck now holding a live chicken that the villagers of Nyonken gave us to honour us (and which ends up in a pot in a Fish Town restaurant), we pass more 4x4s zooming towards the border and the refugees. I feel frustrated. In Monrovia, ministers and NGOs hold a weekly crisis meeting about refugees, but not about the 18% of Liberians who die because they have no toilets or clean water.
Towards the end of our interview, I ask the president why that is. We had followed in her footsteps to Fish Town because she had also gone to see the state of the Ivorian refugees, most of them welcomed by Liberians who had to think back only a few years to a time when they were themselves refugees. Ma Ellen is too polite to shrug, but her words do. "The humanitarian system responds to these things that get sensational," she says. "They want to be seen as responsive. The ordinary village, that no one is taking care of, that doesn't come to mind." And with that she takes her leave, to get back to the job of fixing her country, one latrine at a time. |
A Muslim woman was strangled when her hijab got caught in the conveyor of a bakery in Toronto where she worked. The employer was fined $300,000. Yet if he had refused to hire her because she wore the leading symbol of Muslim oppression of women, he would have been sued for a lot more by designated terrorist group CAIR’s army of litigation jihadists.
PointdeBascule (h/t Marvin W) The death of a Muslim employee, Amina Diaby The death of a Muslim employee,, in an industrial accident in Toronto and the fine of her employer for negligence will give other reasons for employers to rethink twice before hiring Muslim women. wear the hijab.
The $ 300,000 fine was imposed on Fiera Foods after the Ontario Ministry of Labor ruled that the employer ” f ailed to ensure that any worker who was near an entanglement source had fixed his clothes And what would have happened if this employer had discriminated against this veiled Muslim woman by forcing her (she and not the other employees) to wear a lab coat preventively and she complained about discrimination with the Human Rights Commission?
Perhaps the employer would have won, but the goal of an employer is not to dedicate significant resources to win avoidable court cases but to do everything possible to avoid being confronted with such situations.
Why would an employer take the risk of hiring an employee who wears the hijab near machines that could hurt her (or worse, kill her) or risk her pursuing it because it preemptively and discriminates against her wearing a hijab? a coat that covers his hijab when he has the option to avoid both risks by hiring unveiled and non-Muslim women?
In 2016, Radio-Canada reported that 48% of Muslim women wear the hijab in Canada (38% in 2006)
This is a large contingent of potential candidates whose applications will be systematically rejected by several employers first because they fear being confronted with requests for religious accommodation, and then for reasons of safety at work, such as that highlighted in this bakery in Toronto.
The bad faith of the Islamists in these matters is without limit. In 2010, a young Muslim woman died in Australia when her headscarf was caught in the go-kart wheel she was driving. A woman was injured in Quebec in the same circumstances.
However, when a California amusement park wanted to prohibit its customers from wearing the hijab to avoid accidents of this kind, designated terrorist group CAIR Islamist lobby filed lawsuits to counter the company’s move in the name of the fight against discrimination. went after In 2010, a Muslim woman evenan amusement park in the Netherlands after getting injured after her hijab got caught in the wheel of her go-cart.
Just a few examples of accidents caused by hijabs:
From Telegraaf (April 8th, 2010): NETHERLANDS Muslim woman pursues amusement park after her hijab gets caught in the wheel of her go-cart
Glenda Kwek (The Sydney Morning Herald – April 9, 2010): AUSTRALIA – Young mother dies when her hijab gets caught up in the go-kart wheel she drives
PR Newswire (April 28, 2014): CAIR Islamist lobby sues California amusement park for hijab
Hugo Gye (Daily Mail – October 12, 2013): GREAT BRITAIN – A woman dies when her hijab catches fire as she cooks on a gas stove (According to the article, it was the fourth time the hijab of the woman caught fire while she was cooking
MONTREAL – A woman [Naima Rharouity] dies strangled when her hijab is caught in the mechanism of a metro escalator
Dailymotion: VIDÉO Motorcycle accident caused when the passenger’s hijab got caught in the wheel
Radio-Canada (July 9, 2017): GATINEAU – A young woman was rushed to hospital after her hijab got stuck in the wheel of her go-kart
Radio-Canada (September 14, 2017): TORONTO – Death of a worker whose hijab was caught in the conveyor of a bakery |
1. No one ever really dies in the SEC East.
Had none of us ever watched a Georgia-South Carolina game before? Did we not know that nothing in that series ever makes sense? Of course the team that got destroyed in Week 1 outlasted the team that had entered College Football Playoff projections all over, including ours.
The Gamecocks literally won by inches, 38-35 -- no, far less distance than that. But they showed their young secondary can hold up against passing attacks less explosive than Texas A&M's (which is almost all of them), that Dylan Thompson is still a good-enough quarterback (271 yards, three touchdowns, and one pick), and that their hyped offensive line is still a force (the Dawgs managed just one sack after notching five against Clemson). Carolina met its kryptonite in Week 1, but right now must be considered a co-favorite for Atlanta.
The other is Missouri, the current SEC East belt-holder. The Tigers' defensive front is up to Missouri standards, and that's saying a lot. Maty Mauk has Mizzou's customary wide range of weaponry, with three receivers already combining for 11 touchdowns. The Tigers travel on Sept. 27 to South Carolina, which ended Mizzou's run to perfection last season, and that could be the division's biggest game going forward.
And, in case we're still neglecting the lessons of the UGA-Carolina series, let's remember this is actually a good omen for the Dawgs' SEC Championship chances: the loser of the Dawgs-Cocks game has finished ahead of the winner in the standings three years running.
And, in case we're really not in tune with the crazy yet:
An important reminder that math is an artifice created by man. pic.twitter.com/qqQcRe4kof — Ryan Nanni (@celebrityhottub) September 14, 2014
2. The Pac-12 South: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Matthew Emmons, USA Today
UCLA, a preseason College Football Playoff pick by many, is somehow both 3-0 and looking shakier by the week, in different ways each time. "The offense didn't make the trip to Virginia two weeks ago, and against Memphis last week, it seemed as if the defense hadn't made the trip home," Bill Connelly wrote last week, and now quarterback Brett Hundley's injured following a grimy, 20-17 win against Texas.
He should return, and the Bruins appear to have a capable backup (Rick Neuheisel's son!), but it's amazing to think this team is favored to arrive at any particular end out of 1,000 possible ones. A win at Arizona State after a bye would soothe concerns.
A week after lucking out a win at Stanford, USC got smashed to paste on the ground at Boston College, a team that lost to Pitt a week prior, spoiling Playoff chances for both the Trojans and the Cardinal. And now the hard part of USC's schedule begins, including Notre Dame in the out-of-conference.
ASU has excelled against nothing in particular, but has a major worry in injured quarterback Taylor Kelly. Arizona's defense remains a friend to the late-night viewer and to the television network alike, reliably turning should-be blowouts into fourth-quarter drama. Colorado is still the Colorado of recent years, with signs of life.
And then there's Utah, which blasted its two weak opponents so far, Idaho State and Fresno State, by a combined 115-41. The Utes were far better than their 5-7 record last year, and could be combining both a classic Kyle Whittingham defensive front (a nation-leading 21 tackles for loss entering the weekend) and a balanced offense led by quarterback Travis Wilson. If Wilson can cut down on his prized erraticism (so far, so good -- he was one of only four quarterbacks with six or more touchdowns and no interceptions through two weeks), the Utes will make a run. Next up are Michigan and Washington State, and wins against that spastic duo would probably teach us ... not a whole lot.
The Pac-12 South could use a strong Utah, if it can get one. Otherwise, Oregon could just run away with this conference.
3. 59 teams are now chasing East Carolina.
Jeremy Brevard, USA Today
That's how many other teams are in the American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, and Sun Belt. Those teams all compete for the non-power conferences' designated spot among the marquee post-BCS bowls. And right now, one team has the inside track.
The East Carolina Pirates went into Blacksburg Saturday and took care of a No. 17 Virginia Tech team that was fresh off a road victory over Ohio State, putting up over 500 yards of offense on the Hokies in the 28-21 win. It took a frantic comeback for Tech to get that close in the first place -- East Carolina led 21-0, and the Hokies tied the game with just 80 seconds to play. Pirates quarterback Shane Carden (427 yards, four total touchdowns in the game) ran it in from one yard out with 16 seconds to play, giving ECU the huge victory and moving them to 2-1 on the season.
Carden's one of the most productive quarterbacks in the country (43 total touchdowns last year, already eight this season) and he has a pair of talented targets in Cam Worthy (11 receptions, 302 yards) and Justin Hardy (23 receptions, 267 yards). The running game is strong, as well. The Pirates still pass the ball a whole lot more, but Breon Allen (7.9 yards per carry), Marquez Grayson (10.2), Chris Hairston (7.6) and Anthony Scott (5.8) have all performed in that rotation this season.
East Carolina lost to South Carolina 33-23 in Week 2, but that loss is looking a whole lot better after the Gamecocks' victory over Georgia. Many of the other preseason non-AQ frontrunners have already suffered worse losses: Louisiana-Lafayette, UTSA, UCF, and Fresno State have each lost multiple games in a row, while Boise State, Bowling Green, and Utah State were all blown out in Week 1.
There are other non-AQ schools still lurking near ECU, such as Northern Illinois, Marshall, and Cincinnati, but none has a win nearly as impressive as the Pirates' victory Saturday.
NIU's best win is at Northwestern, and if it can add a win against an Arkansas team that just demolished Texas Tech, ECU will have strong competition. The Thundering Herd are 3-0 with blowout victories over Miami (Ohio), Rhode Island, and Ohio, but can likely count 2-1 Middle Tennessee State, 0-2 Rice and 2-1 UAB as their toughest remaining games on the schedule. The Bearcats did not open the season until this past Friday, cruising to a 58-34 victory against Toledo. They'll have some tougher tests before the year is out: they travel to Ohio State September 27 and host East Carolina November 13 in a game that could decide which non-AQ team goes to a major bowl.
Scores
No. 2 Oregon 48, Wyoming 14 (recap)
No. 3 Alabama 52, Southern Miss 12
No. 4 Oklahoma 34, Tennessee 10 (recap)
No. 24 South Carolina 38, No. 6 Georgia 35 (recap)
No. 7 Texas A&M 38, Rice 10 (post-game thoughts)
Boston College 37, No. 9 USC 31 (recap)
No. 10 LSU 31, ULM 0 (first impressions)
No. 11 Notre Dame 30, Purdue 14 (recap)
No. 12 UCLA 20, Texas 17 (recap)
No. 14 Ole Miss 56, Louisiana-Lafayette 15 (recap)
No. 15 Stanford 35, Army 0 (recap)
No. 16 Arizona State 38, Colorado 24 (recap)
East Carolina 28, No. 17 Virginia Tech 21 (recap)
Virginia 23, No. 21 Louisville 21 (recap)
No. 20 Missouri 38, UCF 10 (recap)
No. 22 Ohio State 66, Kent State 0 (recap)
Abilene Christian 38, Troy 35
Air Force 48, Georgia State 38 (recap)
Arizona 35, Nevada 28 (recap)
Arkansas 49, Texas Tech 28 (recap)
Boise State 38, UConn 21 (recap)
Bowling Green 45, Indiana 42 (recap)
Colorado State 49, UC Davis 21 (recap)
Duke 41, Kansas 3 (recap)
Florida 36, Kentucky 30 (3OT) (recap)
Florida Atlantic 50, Tulsa 21 (recap)
Georgia Tech 42, Georgia Southern 38 (recap)
Hawaii 27, Northern Iowa 24 (recap)
Indiana State 27, Ball State 20 (recap)
Iowa State 20, Iowa 17 (recap)
Marshall 44, Ohio 14 (recap)
Miami 41, Arkansas State 20 (recap)
Michigan 34, Miami (Ohio) 10 (recap)
Middle Tennessee State 50, Western Kentucky 47 (3OT)
Mississippi State 35, South Alabama 3 (reaction)
Navy 35, Texas State 21 (recap)
Nebraska 55, Fresno State 19 (recap)
NC State 49, USF 17 (recap)
Northern Illinois 48, UNLV 34 (recap)
Oklahoma State 43, UTSA 13 (recap)
Old Dominion 17, Eastern Michigan 3 (recap)
Penn State 13, Rutgers 10 (heartbreak)
Pittsburgh 42, Florida International 25 (recap)
Syracuse 40, Central Michigan 3 (recap)
TCU 30, Minnesota 7 (reaction)
Tulane 35, Southeastern Louisiana 20
UAB 41, Alabama A&M 14
Utah State 36, Wake Forest 24 (recap)
UTEP 42, New Mexico State 24 (recap)
Vanderbilt 34, UMass 31 (recap)
Washington 44, Illinois 19 (reaction)
Washington State 59, Portland State 21 (recap)
West Virginia 40, Maryland 37 (recap)
Western Michigan 45, Idaho 33 (recap) |
Battlefield 4 has looked very impressive so far. But you need some serious hardware to play it.
With only a fortnight until Battlefield 4 releases, it was inevitable that DICE and EA would bring the open beta to a close sooner or later. Nevertheless, gamers have racked up thousands of hours of game-time, helping the developers to iron out some of the more frustrating issues.
DICE published a changelog recently outlining some problems that the open beta allowed them to fix. According to the post on the official Battlefield 4 blog, the developers were able to correct bizarre CPU usage spikes, frame rate jitters, players from being catapulted into the air by elevators, and issues with the server browser for consoles.
As expected a string of balance changes were introduced too, one of the most notable being a fix to the fire rate of the AK-12 while in burst fire; the gun was already favoured by many for its low rate of recoil, but the fire rate in burst mode made the gun an excessively formidable powerhouse in the eyes of many.
Balances and tweaks aside, there was plenty of opportunities for some great moments and gamers have been filling up YouTube with their exploits.
Battlefield 4 will be playable on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 from October 31, and will become available on the Xbox One and PS4 from November 22 and November 29 respectively.
Alex Walker is the regular gaming columnist for ABC Tech + Games. You can follow him on Twitter at @thedippaeffect. |
Danny Espinosa has more competition for the Nationals’ backup infielder spot. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
The Nationals reunited with veteran infielder Jamey Carroll, agreeing to terms with the former National on a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training, where he will have “a really good chance of making the team,” a person familiar with the situation said. The deal will include incentives, which are still being worked out.
Team officials have said all winter they plan on Danny Espinosa to be their utility infielder. Carroll provides another option who has experience with a bench role. The Nationals have sought more experience for their bench this winter after several young reserves scuffled for them last season. In 121 career at-bats as a pinch hitter, Carroll has hit .339 with a .417 on-base percentage.
Carroll, who turns 40 in February, hit .211 last season, mostly as a second baseman and third baseman, with the Twins and Royals. Carroll plays excellent defense, but last season was one of the least productive offensive players in the league, posting a .267 on-base percentage while slugging .251.
Carroll lives in Viera, Fla., right around the corner from Space Coast Stadium, the Nationals’ spring training home. In recent seasons, he has worked out with Nationals players during informal workouts before heading off to his own team.
Carroll was a member of the inaugural 2005 Nationals, a sparkplug utility infielder and favorite of Manager Frank Robinson. Back then, if you had to guess which six original Nationals would still be active eight years later, the sawed-off 31-year-old who slugged .284 might not have made your list.
But Carroll’s positive clubhouse demeanor and defensive versatility have kept him in the league. He jumped from the Rockies, Indians, Dodgers, Twins and Royals, keeping alive a major league career that did not begin until age 28 with the Expos.
The other five 2005 Nationals still in business: Marlon Byrd, Endy Chavez, Jon Rauch, Luis Ayala and Ryan Zimmerman, who debuted as a September call-up after getting drafted that summer. |
Adrien Broner was on The Breakfast Club early Wednesday and, during his interview, he answered a series of questions with roughly the level of thought you'd expect from a guy who's made a living off taking punches to the head.
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Broner told the skeptical Breakfast Club hosts that he plans to vote for Donald Trump because, according to him, "everything he's saying is crazy, but everything he's saying is correct." A simple fact check may undercut that reasoning, but this is Adrien Broner, not Stephen Hawking, so what are you going to do?
When Broner was told that "Mexicans [are] going to hate you" for that quote, Broner pointed out that it doesn't matter because they already hate him.
When pressed further on the logic behind his Presidential choice, Broner also told host Angela Yee that his decision is based on his bank account.
"Man, what I'm saying is this man, he gonna lower them taxes," Broner said. "That's what I'm with, for real, because taxes have been kicking my ass."
When told that paying at a higher tax rate means you make a lot of money, he was unmoved.
"So what?" he said. "Lower them shits."
And sooner after saying that, he added: "The rich gonna get richer, and the poor gonna stay poor. Oh well."
POST CONTINUES BELOW
Outside of talking about Trump, Broner answered questions about that staged video of him throwing change in a Wal-Mart line, posing with guns on Instagram, Floyd Mayweather, and whether or not his criminal record even allows him to vote (somehow it does). There's a lot of ground to cover with this guy. He was also able to duck questions about the recent accusation that he robbed a man outside a bowling alley.
The clip above is more than worth setting aside five minutes for, if for no other reason than to see Broner try (again) as hard as he possibly can to play the heel. |
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Clake said on ABC's 'This Week' roundtable that the FBI's decision to reopen the Clinton email case hit DNC chair Donna Brazile "like a Mack Truck."
STEPHANOPOULOS: And, mayor, this seemed to hit the Clinton campaign, take them completely by surprise, as well. Our calls all Friday afternoon, they had no idea what was going
on.
STEPHANIE RAWLINGS-BLAKE, MAYOR OF BALTIMORE, MARYLAND: I've talked to our chair, Donna Brazile, and she said she felt like she was hit by a Mack truck understandably.
I think Director Comey owes the American public more. This is crazy that you would come with this type of letter to congressional members and to your staff and not have anything to back it up. We have one person saying, well it's clear that the FBI believes this, or it's clear that. Nothing is clear.
The only thing that's clear is that he's under pressure and he got shook. He acted under pressure that is really Trump-esque recklessness to do something like this nine days out, or 11 days out and not have anything to back it up. |
Romania's ambassador to Britain has mocked MPs and rightwing newspapers that gathered at airports on New Year's Day to interrogate an expected influx of his countrymen, comparing them to tragicomic characters from Samuel Beckett's masterpiece Waiting for Godot.
Ion Jinga said that politicians and journalists at Luton airport were desperately waiting for the arrival of millions of unemployed Romanians only to be greeted by two new entrants, both of whom already had jobs.
His intervention follows an intense debate in Britain over the expected migration of Romanians and Bulgarians after transitional controls were lifted on 1 January. Anti-immigration politicians, including Ukip's Nigel Farage and several Tories, have claimed that Britain cannot absorb a large number of new migrants from eastern Europe.
MigrationWatch, the pressure group, released a briefing paper on New Year's Eve claiming that 50,000 people from both countries would enter Britain every year for the next five years.
Writing for The Huffington Post, Jinga said: "It seems that a new version of Waiting for Godot is being reinvented by part of the British media and by some politicians who are desperately waiting for the arrival of millions of Romanians after 1 January 2014.
"Journalists and distinguished British MPs who went to Luton airport on the 1 January ... discovered that only two Romanians came to the UK to take advantage of the lifting of border restrictions, and both having [sic] firm job offers - one washing cars, the other as a doctor in Essex. The overwhelming majority of the passengers were Romanians returning to jobs after having enjoyed Christmas with their families at home, or Britons coming home after skiing in the Carpathians," he said.
He added that an "insulting media campaign against Romanians" has been launched by sections of the British media that was not based on evidence.
"Most Romanians who came to the UK did so for work, not for benefits. We also plead in favour of honest, hard-working people, who pay taxes and contribute to society.
"It comes as a great surprise to see how attitudes towards Romania have become so easily formed by misguided and biased opinions."
The article in the Huffington Post later appeared to be amended to remove mention of politicians.
On New Year's Day, Keith Vaz, who chairs the home affairs committee, and Mark Reckless, a fellow member, told reporters they had come to the airport "to see for ourselves" the procedures in place. What they found was a plane three-quarters full, with the majority of the 146 passengers returning to jobs in Britain after spending Christmas with their families at home.
Jinga said that he, like many Romanians, had invited other Romanian friends over for Christmas. "As all these three persons will be leaving Britain in the next few days, I therefore hope they will not be counted to the millions of Romanians expected to invade the island."
Romania joined the EU in 2007, and Jinga said that most of those wanting to work abroad had already done so.
"Taking into account the near-exhaustion of Romania's potential to 'export' workers and the fact that my country is now the fastest-growing economy in the EU, lifting restrictions on 1 January 2014 is unlikely to lead to a massive increase in the number of Romanians coming to the UK," he said.
Reckless, the Tory MP for Rochester and Strood, laughed at the comparison to Beckett's anti-heroes Vladimir and Estragon, adding that said the committee would continue to examine the issue of immigration closely and might recall Jinga for another interview.
"The committee might be waiting for another visit from the ambassador. We will continue to work in this area to monitor how many Romanians do come." |
A creed wasn't the only thing Harry missed when he left the church. Nearing 40, he longed to find people, not just authors or online avatars, who shared his new beliefs.
He quickly found one fellow atheist.
A salesman in Harry's business and one of his closest friends, Joey Carabetta, had been a committed nonbeliever ever since a hospital in California insisted on sending chaplains to his then-wife's room when she miscarried.
Talking on the phone one night, Harry and Joey decided to seek out other atheists, and were happy to see a group on MeetUp.com that gathered for "heathen happy hours" and other social events.
If you're going to be an atheist in North Carolina, where 86% of the population calls itself Christian, it helps to live in the Research Triangle. The region's tech companies and universities – including Duke, North Carolina and North Carolina State — draw highly educated and often secular-minded transplants from across the country.
Attending Parenting Beyond Belief play dates and local lectures on atheism, Harry bonded with fellow atheists who shared a sense of being islands amid an ocean of faith, their shores pounded by wave after wave of believers: The evangelists who were invited to their children's schools. The conservative politicians who hold sway at the state Capitol in Raleigh. The neighbors who casually slip church-talk into conversations.
One night, several couples Harry had met through Parenting Beyond Belief gathered at a house in Wake Forest, where they confided their stories about becoming atheists, described how they "came out" to family members and talked about the challenges of raising secular children in the Bible Belt. Looking around the table, Harry thought: These are my people.
Charlotte, though, often stayed home. She was suffering from depression and didn't feel like socializing. Why did her husband need play dates with atheists, anyway?
She also worried about upsetting Harry's parents, who knew he'd left the church but didn't yet know that he was an atheist. What if they asked her about it? What if they asked if she was an atheist, too? At the time, Charlotte tried to embody the Southern image of the perfect wife, doting daughter and self-possessed mother. If people knew she was an atheist, she thought, that portrait would be marred.
Charlotte and Harry had talked about atheism, of course, and all the books he was reading. (Charlotte, who is dyslexic, didn't read as much.) He shared his strongest arguments against God, and often she agreed.
But Charlotte clung to certain religious comforts, especially the idea that she would see her grandmother, Grace, again in the afterlife. "It took me a long time to grieve the loss of that wonderful idea."
It was Grace, her daughter, who convinced Charlotte that she was an atheist. It wasn't a question about Catholicism this time. It was driving lessons. As Grace turned 18 and starting leaving the house with keys in hand, Charlotte found herself praying for her daughter's safety.
One day, it dawned on her: Here she was, asking a God she didn't believe in to protect her daughter. It might help ease her anxieties, she laughed to herself, but it wasn't real.
Eventually, Charlotte agreed to tag along for a few atheist lectures and "heathen happy hours," and, as she met actual atheists, her thinking changed. These people didn't seem to fit the stereotypes she'd been raised to believe. They were open and kind, raising happy, healthy children. She needed to be just as open about her beliefs, Charlotte thought, for the sake of her own family.
"It is who I am, and I need to own it, for myself and to be a good role model to my kids, so that they know that I really believe the things I'm teaching them."
The Shaughnessy children are sharp. They knew something was awry when their Sunday mornings became church-free. But Charlotte and Harry hadn't wanted to explain their beliefs until they were sure they were finished with faith.
When that day came, they sat Grace, Todd and Brennen down in the living room for a family chat — and blamed all of their angst on Grace.
No, they didn't do that.
Rather, Charlotte and Harry explained that Grace's question about confession inspired them to take a hard look at the religious traditions they'd inherited.
The Shaughnessys never had another family meeting about religion. It's wasn't their style to stay serious for very long. Instead, they relished Harry's ability to invent goofy games and Charlotte's readiness to play along.
Still, Harry and Charlotte seized everyday opportunities to teach their children to be open-minded and skeptical about religion.
If a commercial about Scientology played on TV, Harry told them that it was founded by a sci-fi writer.
If they were learning about American history, he might mention that Mormons believe Jesus once traveled to America.
If they were driving to a family Christmas party, Charlotte listed the pagan traditions, like the Christmas tree, borrowed by Christians.
And if the children wanted to go to Vacation Bible School with their friends or Mass with Harry's mother, Harry and Charlotte let them.
Atheism is what we believe, they told their kids. But they gave their children permission to research and explore religion on their own. If they decided to be religious, Charlotte said, they would have her blessing.
Not that Harry would stand by and watch his children turn into evangelicals. He made sure Grace, Todd and Brennen understood why he found fault with each and every faith.
All three embraced atheism.
Raising atheists Grace, 22, is almost a carbon copy of Harry, sometimes to her great chagrin. She's funny, silly and smart as heck. At the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, where she graduated last December with a degree in women's studies, Grace was president of the Secular Student Alliance, a campus group for young atheists. Todd, 19, says he's an atheist but doesn't really care about religion or atheism. By the time he had grown up, his parents had stopped going to church, so he never developed an attachment or antipathy to faith. Brennen, 16, says he's the only atheist at his high school but doesn't feel out of place. "I'm out to everyone." The kids in gym class called him "co-pilot" after he wore a T-shirt that said "Science is My Co-Pilot," but Brennen brushed the sobriquet aside. "I ignored them," he says, "because they're idiots."
Harry wants his kids to resist conforming to the South's overwhelmingly Christian culture. Few things tick him off more than people proselytizing to children, so he carefully monitors school calendars and has protested evangelical events that target toddlers. Each year, Harry takes Todd and Brennen to Camp Quest, a secular summer camp where Harry is a counselor.
All this may be too late for Grace, though, who says she can't wait to kick the Carolina clay from her heels and light out for a secular city like Seattle.
Charlotte said she suspects a few parents canceled sleepovers with her children after learning that the Shaughnessys no longer spent Sunday morning in church. Grace and Brennen say they've experienced some awkward moments as the only open atheists at school – but nothing too serious.
The serious difficulties came from Harry's family.
Harry's mother, for one, did not give up on her son and his family. In various ways, some more subtle than others, Marjorie urged them to return to the fold. She told them she prayed for them. She scheduled family events around Mass, hoping they would attend.
When the extended family gathered for dinner, Harry tried to disappear during the pre-meal prayer. He couldn't stomach pretending to pray and would walk out of the room, waiting for his family to finish, hoping they would notice his lack of interest in participating.
Harry's brothers, Jim, 50, and Tim, 42, are believers but don't regularly attend religious services. Jim says their parents were devastated by Harry's break with Catholicism.
Harry's sisters, Ursula, 46, and Trish, 40, are active Catholics married to devout men. Both said they weren't comfortable talking to me for this article.
Both sisters tried to persuade Harry and Charlotte to give the church another try, suggesting books by C.S. Lewis and taking them out for lunch to talk about religion and raising children. Harry and Charlotte say the concern came from a good place. They know Harry's family cares about their souls. Still, they found it irritating.
At Grace's 13th birthday party, her Aunt Trish told her to come to the basement for a special present. There, she gave Grace a set of rosary beads and told her not to tell her parents. At the time, Grace says, she still believed in God. But the present deeply upset her.
Grace took the beads, walked back to the party and promptly gave them to her parents. Then she ran up to her room and cried.
"I was upset because, at this point, there were a lot of mean things happening in my family, and now I was being dragged into it — on my birthday of all days."
Harry and Charlotte were livid.
Harry says his sister felt bad, and it never happened again. But he and Charlotte couldn't help but read the message this way:
Here, please take this gift so you'll become more religious.
I want to save you.
But don't tell your parents.
That last part most troubled Harry and Charlotte.
"Do you really want adults to say to kids, 'Here's something for you and don't tell your parents about it?'" Harry asks. "We don't want to teach our kids to keep secrets."
Harry told his family to stop giving the children religious gifts, and says he returns the favor. He avoids talking about religion with his Catholic nieces and nephews, even when they ask why he doesn't go to church.
But Harry is no saint. He started an online spat with a brother-in-law that led to a serious family feud.
Harry posted something about the Pope on Facebook. Exactly what, Charlotte and Harry can't – or won't – recall.
Ursula's husband, Rod Ruiz, posted a response, and Harry rallied his new atheist friends to join his side. They piled on, and the thread got painfully personal.
Ursula and Rod didn't attend the family Christmas celebration that year. Harry's mother, who lives to have her children together on the holidays, was devastated.
"None of us liked seeing her so upset," Grace recalls. "My dad and everyone else realized: This needs to get better."
Marjorie still sends cards to Harry and Charlotte every Easter, a quick note to let them know that she's arranged to have a Mass said for them. But she has stopped trying to persuade Harry and his family to come back to the church.
I visited the Shaughnessys' church, St. Joseph's, in Raleigh, this winter to talk with their pastor, hoping to understand more about families who disagree about religion. Monsignor Jeffrey Ingham said neither Jim nor Marjorie Shaughnessy had confided in him about Harry, but many other families have sought his advice in similar situations.
"There's only one thing they can do," he said, "and that's pray for their son. It is possible to bring him back to the church, but not by argument — only by example."
Ingham noted that the day we met – December 14 — was the feast day of St. John of the Cross, the 16th-century Spanish friar who wrote about his spiritual crisis in the poem "The Dark Night of the Soul."
John of the Cross suffered intensely, writing some of his poems while imprisoned by fellow friars, but he allowed his agony to goad him closer to God, Ingham said.
"We experience the blahs, the emptiness, the sense that things aren't the way they're supposed to be. But that's all part of God's grace. He's calling us to something deeper."
For many doubters, their angst is sharpened by a sense of isolation, a feeling that nobody knows the trouble we've seen, in the words of the old spiritual. But Harry comes from a large and loving family, which, as he well knows, suffered alongside him. That's especially true of his mother, Marjorie.
"She told me she cries every day," Harry says. "That's painful to hear – but at least she told me."
I asked Harry if anything could change his mind about atheism. He said he's always open to new information but tried to believe in God for a long time.
"My mother says faith is a gift," he says, "and I just don't have that gift."
As he became more involved in atheism, Harry felt the closeness he'd shared with his mother slipping away. He decided to set a monthly lunch date with her.
At first, he says, it was awkward. The chasm between them was hard to bridge. But they found other topics to talk about, like Grace's success at college and Brennen's interest in writing.
After lunch one day, as Harry and his mother walked through the parking lot, she noticed that they both had bumper stickers on their cars.
Hers said "JMJ," which stands for Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the Holy Family.
His: "Imagine No Religion."
Mother and son shared a laugh. |
You think I’m kidding, but no: This is happening. While LEGO City sets have long included some off-the-wall models — including, but certainly not limited to, the Space Shuttle — 2012 will see a more back-woods flair coming to the world. This seems to include highway patrol officers, bears, police dogs, abandoned gold mines, and hillbillies.
Now, “hillbilly” is a bit of a loaded term. However, if what’s pictured above isn’t a secret moonshine shack, then I don’t know what is. Also, the preponderance of slack-jawed looking crooks with tricked-out vehicles simply begs the comparison.
If that’s not your kind of thing, there are now LEGO bears, and that’s worth a lot in its own right.
Finally, LEGO enthusiasts will be able to recreate their favorite scenes from CHiPS.
(Eurobricks via Brothers Brick)
Relevant to your interests |
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A top Pentagon official has said the only sure way of eliminating North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities would be by putting U.S. boots on the ground — a move that some worry could prompt Pyongyang to use biological, chemical and even nuclear weapons against Japan and South Korea.
“The only way to ‘locate and destroy — with complete certainty — all components of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs’ is through a ground invasion,” Rear Adm. Michael J. Dumont, vice director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote in a blunt assessment to U.S. lawmakers that was released Saturday on the realities of reining in Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.
Dumont’s letter came in response to questions by U.S. Reps. Ted Lieu of California and Ruben Gallego of Arizona in regards to military planning and casualty estimates in the event of conflict with the nuclear-armed North.
Dumont said that a detailed discussion of U.S. capabilities “to counter North Korea’s ability to respond with a nuclear weapon and to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons located in deeply buried, underground facilities,” would be best suited for a classified briefing.
The military, Dumont wrote, “would be happy to join the Intelligence Community to address these issues in a classified briefing.”
His letter also noted that the North “may consider the use of biological weapons as an option, contrary to its obligations under the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention,” adding that it continues to bolster its research and development capabilities in this area.
North Korea, the letter went on, “has a long-standing chemical weapons program with the capability to produce nerve, blister, blood and choking agents and it likely possesses a CW stockpile.”
The country “probably could employ CW agents by modifying a variety of conventional munitions, including artillery and ballistic missiles, though whether it would so employ CW agents remains an open question,” Dumont said, again noting that a detailed discussion would need to be held in a classified setting.
The Pentagon also said it was “challenging” to calculate “best- or worst-case casualty estimates” for any conventional or nuclear attack, citing the nature, intensity and duration of any strike, as well as how much advance warning is given.
In a joint statement in response to the letter, 16 U.S. lawmakers — all veterans — called the prospect of a ground invasion “deeply disturbing.”
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff has now confirmed that the only way to destroy North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is through a ground invasion,” they wrote. “That is deeply disturbing and could result in hundreds of thousands, or even millions of deaths in just the first few days of fighting.”
These estimates echoed a report by the Congressional Research Service released late last month that said renewed conflict on the Korean Peninsula could kill hundreds of thousands of people in the first few days alone, a figure that excluded the potential use of nuclear weapons.
Even if North Korea “uses only its conventional munitions, estimates range from between 30,000 and 300,000 dead in the first days of fighting,” the report said, citing North Korea’s ability to fire 10,000 rounds per minute at Seoul.
More pressingly for Japan, the report noted is that “Pyongyang could also escalate to attacking Japan with ballistic missiles, including the greater Tokyo area and its roughly 38 million residents.
“The regime might see such an attack as justified by its historic hostility toward Japan based on Japan’s annexation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, or it could launch missiles in an attempt to knock out U.S. military assets stationed on the archipelago,” the report said. “A further planning consideration is that North Korea might also strike U.S. bases in Japan (or South Korea) first, possibly with nuclear weapons, to deter military action by U.S./ROK forces.”
ROK is the formal name for South Korea.
U.S. leader Donald Trump, who kicked off his first trip to Asia as president with a visit to Japan on Sunday, has regularly noted that all options, including military action, remain on the table.
The global community has been ramping up pressure on North Korea after it conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test so far on Sept. 3. In September, the U.N. Security Council strengthened its sanctions, including export bans as well as asset freezes and travel bans on various officials.
For his part, Trump, together with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has taken an approach of “maximum pressure” in dealing with Pyongyang.
But Trump, known to derisively refer to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “rocket man,” has also variously threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” and to “totally destroy” the country of 25 million people if the United States is forced to defend itself or its allies, including Japan.
This possibility of military action has stoked alarm among allied nations and within the U.S. Congress, including questions about planning and the aftermath of such a move.
“It is our intent to have a full public accounting of the potential cost of war, so the American people understand the commitment we would be making as a nation if we were to pursue military action,” the 16 lawmakers wrote in their statement.
The Trump administration, the lawmakers said, “has failed to articulate any plans to prevent the military conflict from expanding beyond the Korean Peninsula and to manage what happens after the conflict is over.”
“With that in mind, the thought of sending troops into harm’s way and expending resources on another potentially unwinnable war is chilling,” they said. “The President needs to stop making provocative statements that hinder diplomatic options and put American troops further at risk.”
The United States has roughly 50,000 troops stationed in Japan and 28,500 based in South Korea.
“Invading North Korea could result in a catastrophic loss of lives for U.S. troops and U.S. civilians in South Korea,” the lawmakers said. “It could kill millions of South Koreans and put troops and civilians in Guam and Japan at risk.
“As Veterans, we have defended this nation in war and we remain committed to this country’s security. We also understand that entering into a protracted and massive ground war with North Korea would be disastrous for U.S. troops and our allies,” they said. “The Joint Chiefs of Staff, it appears, agree. Their assessment underscores what we’ve known all along: There are no good military options for North Korea.” |
Moscow and Washington have reached an understanding that further US strikes similar to the one carried out against Syria's Shayrat Air Base "should not occur again," the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
Lavrov emphasized that this issue was raised during his discussions with the US Secretary of State on Wednesday when Rex Tillerson was visiting Moscow.
Read more
“We have discussed this issue with the US Secretary of State in details yesterday and agreed upon the fact that a similar [strike] should not occur again,” he told journalists ahead of his meeting with his Syrian counterpart, Walid Muallem, in Moscow.
Lavrov further underlined that the US missile strike against the Shayrat Air Base played “a highly provocative role.”
He went on to say that the US confirmed its commitment to the idea that there is no other option of resolving the Syrian conflict other than the political dialog, adding that this offers hope for the future of the peace process.
“It is encouraging to some extent that Rex Tillerson confirmed yesterday that [the US still holds] the opinion that there is no alternative to the political process [of the resolution of the Syrian crisis] despite all the recent negative developments,” he said.
A “right and responsible step” is how Lavrov described the Syrian government’s decision to invite experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to conduct an investigation of the chemical weapon incident in Idlib province.
READ MORE: 63% of American voters want more US intervention in Syria – poll
He said the “hysteria” around the alleged Idlib chemical weapons attack should not impede efforts made in Astana and Geneva, which are aimed at resolving the Syrian conflict.
Read more
The Russian Foreign Minister warned that there are forces still trying to “bust up the ceasefire regime brokered in Astana and welcomed by the UN Security Council.”
Earlier, Lavrov said that failing to institute an international inquiry into the chemical attack in Syria's Idlib would mean that the international community is not interested in establishing the truth about the matter.
He reiterated that Moscow considers the US claims concerning the chemical weapons being used by the Syrian government “unfounded” and “lacking evidence,” speaking at the joint news conference with Tillerson on Wednesday following talks in Moscow.
Lavrov also denounced attempts to hamper cooperation between Russia and the US as “shortsighted.” The two diplomats also announced the creation of a joint expert group tasked with analyzing bilateral relations and addressing sources of mutual concern as they revealed plans to improve ties between Moscow and Washington. |
A Free-Thinking Republican Woman
Kathy Potts had a complicated introduction to gay people, even by the standards of her Mississippi upbringing and Bible school education. She remembers that her maternal grandparents, whose last name happened to be “Gay,” received hate mail and phone calls in the 1970s after the Stonewall riots brought national visibility to the burgeoning rights movement. When her uncle’s wife left him and came out as a lesbian, family members joked that his ex had only married him for the surname. Her first in-depth discussions about homosexuality occurred in the early 1980s with a neighbor who identified as “ex-gay.” And there was a time in the not-so-distant past when she would not watch Ellen DeGeneres on TV because she did not want to be “influenced to be like her.”
All that changed three years ago when her son met and married a young woman whose mother was in a long-term lesbian relationship. Potts met her future in-laws shortly before the wedding and left the meeting embarrassed about the stereotypes she had carried to the encounter.
“I was just freaking out: ‘This just can’t happen,’” she recalls thinking before their first conversation. “And then it dawned on me, this wasn’t worth losing my son over. And then once I started hanging around with them, I’m like, ‘This is insane.’”
A Charismatic Christian who now attends church sporadically, Potts attributes much of her former bias to her faith experience. Her conversations with other Christians focused almost exclusively on sexual activity and dehumanized gay people.
“I just thought it was all about sex,” she said. “That’s what everything was based on: sex, sex, sex, sex. You were expecting that they were constantly going to be hanging on each other and making out. I’d never thought of anyone as people. It was just all based on sex.”
The viewpoint did not extend to her son or three other children she raised with her husband, Tom. His employment brought the family from Mississippi to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“I raised my children to be independent, thank God, so they didn’t necessarily go with everything I said,” said Potts.
Unconvinced of her mother’s sudden transformation, her daughter challenged gay friends to befriend her mother on Facebook. As Potts acquired more and more gay friends online and in person, the former Republican chair for Linn County started to understand their struggles in terms of her core political beliefs.
“It’s just plain freedom,” she said. “I don’t want anyone telling me what to do.”
Potts wrote about her evolution last month in an op-ed for the Iowa Gazette. The piece, “Stand Together,” offered a stinging assessment of the Iowa caucuses that took place in January.
“I heard a lot of rhetoric about gay and lesbian Americans that didn’t fit with what I know to be true and what many Republicans believe,” she wrote. “As an evangelical Christian Republican, I know many people who hold conservative values like equality and freedom, but those voices were lost this year. However, I believe in my heart that things are changing. If it weren’t for the loud voices of a few in our party, I do believe more Republicans would stand up in support of marriage equality.”
In an interview with The Advocate, Potts said that many Republicans in Iowa support marriage equality but fear they could be “ostracized” if they speak up. She said that one husband of a party insider told her that he was glad she wrote the op-ed because it reflected his own feelings.
“The party here is being led by strong right-wing people right now,” she said. “A lot of them would like for it just to be church. They’ve very antigay, and with the abortion issue, too, they’re extremely loud spoken about it.”
The Iowa Supreme Court ruled unanimously for marriage equality in 2009, and since then, the state Senate has resisted Republican-led attempts to pass a constitutional ban. Some same-sex marriage opponents, including former gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats, have built platforms around the issue, but Potts said the court decision has also sparked discussions that reveal large numbers of people are not opposed.
Individuals embracing marriage equality include former state senator Jeff Angelo, who once sponsored a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Last year, he founded Iowa Republicans for Freedom, which “supports individual liberty for same-sex couples seeking civil marriage recognition from our government.” Potts was asked to be an advisory board member, but there was one problem. She was serving as a committee chairwoman for the Rick Perry for President campaign at the time. The campaign asked her to postpone the announcement of her board membership until after the caucuses, and she agreed.
“I don’t really feel like I can make a difference if they put me on the outside,” she said. “I was trying to see which way would be the best for me to make a difference. If I’d been put on the outside, I would never have had that opportunity.”
Her moment arrived in December, when the candidate released the disastrous video ad, “Strong,” that proclaimed, “there's something wrong in
this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids
can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in schools." Potts was asked to
spend time with Anita Perry during the Texas first lady’s stop at a
college, and as they chatted for 10 minutes, the campaign chairwoman
mentioned the commercial.
“I said, ‘I think the campaign’s been
hurt some by the ad that came out,’” recalls Potts. “‘I was extremely
uncomfortable with it. I understand the message that we’re trying to put
out, that everybody ought to have freedom, but that’s not the way it
came out. It came out as an antigay message, and a lot of people just
assumed that you hated gay people.’”
Mrs. Perry insisted that was not
the case, and she told Potts about the friendships she and the governor
have with gay people. She talked about meeting Suze Orman and her
partner at the Texas Conference for Women, an event sponsored by the
first lady where the finance expert spoke.
Potts never discussed the issue with Governor Perry, but she said that she believes the response of his wife.
“You
can usually tell if somebody’s just giving you a line,” she said. “She
was very sincere. They may quote some of the Republican Party line, but
it’s kind of mixed signals.”
Potts thinks that Perry received
“poor counsel” on the commercial, and she continues to feel he would
have been the best candidate among the Republican field on LGBT issues.
“I
think the fact that you could have a conversation with him and maybe
sway him with it,” she said. “I think he would be open minded. I think
he could change.”
When Perry left the race following a weak
showing in Iowa, Potts failed to develop a similar affinity for any of
the remaining candidates. She worked for Mitt Romney in 2008 but said
she "caught him in too many lies" to continue with the campaign. The
ascent of Rick Santorum, who suspended his bid on Tuesday,
"shocked" her, given that she found the former Pennsylvania senator’s
inclination to judge people and set strict limits on contraception
“repulsive.”
“Santorum is such a whiner,” she said. “He’s just way out there.”
Potts
said that her dissatisfaction with the Republican presidential field
would “probably” lead her to consider voting for President Barack Obama.
“He’s looking better than any of them,” she said. “I don’t see a
candidate that can beat him right now. I would have to consider it.”
Her
outspokenness and frustration bring to mind other Republican women who
recently announced they would leave politics over disgust with polarized
dialogue and extreme ideologies. The fed-up voices include Senator
Olympia Snowe of Maine, a proponent of “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal,
and New York Assemblymember Teresa Sayward, an early backer of the
marriage equality bill in her state legislature.
“They may just be tired,” said Potts. “It’s a hard fight. I think we can make a difference.”
Data
underscores her optimism, particularly with regard to equality, where
recent polls show that more women than men support same-sex marriage,
sometimes by as much as 10 percentage points.
“[That’s] probably
just because of relationships,” said Potts. “With me, it was with my
son. It got down to, ‘What’s really important?’ It gets down to a
personal issue a lot faster. For women, it becomes a personal issue.”
As
for her own political career, Potts said that she holds ambitions to
run for office one day. Some of her fellow Iowa Republicans would oppose the prospect, but she refuses to be silenced.
“I’m active in the party and they wish I’d shut up, but I’m not going away,” she said. |
WASHINGTON -- Elizabeth Warren isn't all the way on the Piketty line.
The Democratic Massachusetts senator has nothing but good things to say about economist Thomas Piketty's new, massive trove of data, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but that doesn't mean she's ready to embrace two of his key recommendations to put the brakes on spiraling income inequality -- a wealth tax and a cranked-up inheritance tax.
Piketty's book crunches through more than 100 years of economic data and finds that the value of amassed wealth tends to outpace the value of doing work -- with unfortunate consequences -- unless something intervenes.
The interventions can come from disasters like the Great Depression and war, or from government. Piketty thinks progressive taxation, larger inheritance taxes and a tax on overall wealth would do the trick, and give labor earnings a chance to keep pace with returns from the treasure hordes of the super rich.
But asked by The Huffington Post if she, as a U.S. senator, would back a wealth tax or larger inheritance tax, Warren dodged.
"I want to put it this way: We need to take a hard look overall at our approach to taxation," Warren said. "That includes every part of it -- [the tax code] has become so riddled with loopholes and exceptions that were lobbied in by powerful corporations and individuals with buckets of money. You don't want to start with any one part of it, because that isn't the point. The point is the whole thing has to be on the table at once."
Warren didn't specifically cite politics in her response, but the reality is that opponents have scaled back taxing inheritance, calling it a death tax, and new taxes of any kind don't fare well in Congress. Warren's answer also follows from the approach Warren has tended to take in the past, such as pushing for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with its broad power over all consumer lending, rather than adding diffuse bits and pieces of that responsibility to existing agencies.
Warren put her tax stance in the context of what she believes the nation needs to do with its revenue, including investing more in education, student loans and infrastructure, among many other things that she said are desired by both sides of the political aisle.
"Here's the interesting point, because I really think this is the heart of the point," Warren said. "It's not that anybody on the Republican side stands up and says 'I'm opposed to education -- [at least] there are not many who would say it that way -- 'I'm opposed to education,' or 'I don't want to invest in medical research.'
"It's that they say 'There's no money.' But why is there no money?" Warren said. "Why is there always money to protect loopholes for giant corporations? Why is there money to subsidize the oil industry that made tens of billions of dollars in profits last year? Why is there money for those who already have money and power, but not money to build a future a for ourselves and our kids?"
Warren added that all those things need to be considered together.
"It's about how these pieces are linked to each other," Warren said. "We've had a tax conversation for too long that just focuses on one piece at a time. But the real question is overall -- our spending should align with our values. And that's true whether we're talking about spending through tax loopholes or spending by investing in education and infrastructure."
Warren may get her wish for a tax overhaul after this year's midterm elections, with many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle angling for such a move.
In that debate, Warren thinks Piketty's tome can make some important arguments about easing income inequality, and why Congress has the ability to intervene.
"The point Piketty makes that I think is a powerful point is that it's not a law of nature. It's not like gravity, always there," Warren said. "It's a consequence of the policy the government follows. More progressive taxation can help level the playing field. More investment in giving every kid a chance to build something helps to level the playing field."
While Warren declined to sign onto Piketty's proposed wealth tax, she was effusive about his book, which has spent much of the past week at the top of the Amazon best-seller list with her own memoir, A Fighting Chance. She said they are coming at the same problem from different angles.
"I bought it, I read it maybe two weeks ago, and I would just turn the pages and think 'Yes, yes,' as I was reading," Warren said with a laugh. "I'd say, 'Oh I didn't know that piece of data, I didn't know that historic example.' But that's what it is. He's saying in effect the same thing -- the game is rigged."
Michael McAuliff covers Congress and politics for The Huffington Post. Talk to him on Facebook. |
DUBAI (Reuters) - Qatar got into a war of words with some Gulf Arab allies on Wednesday after it said hackers had posted fake remarks by its emir against U.S. foreign policy, but their state-run media reported the comments anyway.
Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani meets with U.S. President Donald Trump in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 21, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The development suggested behind-the-scenes disarray among U.S. Gulf allies just days after President Donald Trump visited Riyadh and signaled a possible revival of a 2014 rift between Qatar and its neighbors over Doha’s backing of Islamists.
Qatar and it Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have used their oil and gas revenues to influence events in other Arab countries, and rifts between them can alter the political balance in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Qatar’s official news agency reported on Tuesday that Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, at a military graduation ceremony, criticized renewed tensions with Tehran, expressed understanding for Hezbollah and Hamas, and suggested U.S. President Donald Trump might not last long in power.
Doha issued a robust denial that the remarks had ever been made, but Gulf Arab countries including oil giant Saudi Arabia permitted their state-backed media to run them throughout the day on Wednesday quoting Qatar’s official news agency.
A government spokesman told Reuters the emir had not made any comments at the graduation ceremony for Qataris doing national service.
But Saudi Arabia’s Okaz daily thundered: “Qatar splits the rank, sides with the enemies of the nation.” Riyadh’s Arab News said the comments sparked “outrage” among other Gulf states.
A Qatari Foreign Ministry official expressed “surprise at the position of some media and satellite channels”.
DISUNITY
“The Qatar News Agency (QNA) website has been hacked by an unknown entity. A false statement attributed to His Highness has been published,” a government statement said early on Wednesday.
Qatar will track down and prosecute the perpetrators, the statement continued. QNA was inaccessible throughout the day.
Authorities in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) blocked the main website of Qatar’s al Jazeera television, which Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have often seen as being critical of their governments. Al Jazeera says it is an independent news service giving a voice to everyone in the region.
Both dismissed the Qatari claims of a hack. Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television ran a story titled “Proof that Qatar News Agency was not hacked,” which noted that the statement had also run on Qatari state television and the QNA Instagram account.
Al Arabiya also reported, without elaborating, that an unidentified source in the Emirati foreign ministry had confirmed the blocking of all Qatari media websites.
The incident happened days after Qatar complained it was the target of “an orchestrated barrage” of criticism by unknown parties, in the run-up to Trump’s visit, that alleged that the Gulf state supported militant groups in the Middle East.
“The reality is that the region is on the verge of further escalation,” a Western diplomat in Doha said. “It’s total chaos and no one has vision.”
The falling out is especially awkward for the Gulf Arab states after their leaders met Trump last weekend at a Riyadh summit of Muslim nations meant to showcase solidarity against Sunni armed militant groups and Shi’ite regional adversary Iran.
In Riyadh, Trump renewed his assertion that Iran was a leading state sponsor of terrorism. Iran denies that and says Saudi Arabia, the dominant GCC power, supports militant Islamist armed groups such as al Qaeda and Islamic State.
Riyadh, in turn, denies that accusation.
Ties between Qatar and other Gulf Arab states suffered an eight-month breach in 2014 over Qatar’s alleged support for the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group whose political ideology challenges the principle of dynastic rule. |
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During the late December media lull, the USDA didn’t satisfy itself with green-lighting Monsanto’s useless, PR-centric “drought-tolerant” corn. It also prepped the way for approving a product from Monsanto’s rival Dow Agrosciences—one that industrial-scale corn farmers will likely find all too useful.
Dow has engineered a corn strain that withstands lashings of its herbicide, 2,4-D. The company’s pitch to farmers is simple: Your fields are becoming choked with weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. As soon as the USDA okays our product, all your problems will be solved.
At risk of sounding overly dramatic, the product seems to me to bring mainstream US agriculture to a crossroads. If Dow’s new corn makes it past the USDA and into farm fields, it will mark the beginning of at least another decade of ramped-up chemical-intensive farming of a few chosen crops (corn, soy, cotton), beholden to a handful of large agrichemical firms working in cahoots to sell ever larger quantities of poisons, environment be damned. If it and other new herbicide-tolerant crops can somehow be stopped, farming in the US heartland can be pushed toward a model based on biodiversity over monocropping, farmer skill in place of brute chemicals, and healthy food instead of industrial commodities.
Yet Dow’s pitch will likely prove quite compelling. Introduced in 1996, Roundup Ready crops now account for 94 percent of the soybean crops and upwards of 70 percent for soy and cotton, USDA figures show. The technology cut a huge chunk of work out of farming, allowing farmers to cultivate ever more massive swathes of land with less labor.
But by the time farmers had structured their operations around Roundup Ready and its promise of effortless weed control, the technology had begun to fail. In what was surely one of the most predictable events in the history of agriculture, it turned out than when farmers douse millions of acres of land with a single herbicide year after year, weeds evolve to resist that poison. Last summer, Roundup-resistant superweeds flourished in huge swathes of US farmland, forcing farmers to apply gushers of toxic herbicide cocktails and even resort to hand-weeding—not a fun thing to do on a huge farm. A recent article in the industrial-ag trade journal Delta Farm Press summed up the situation: “Days of Easy Weed Control Are Over.”
Dow’s new herbicide-resistant product promises to bring those days back. In its petition to the USDA to approve 2,4-D-resistant corn, the company explicitly pitched it as the answer to farmers’ Roundup trouble. The 2,4-D trait will be “stacked” with Monsanto’s Roundup trait to “generate commercial hybrids with multiple herbicide tolerances,” the petition states. Note that the new product marks a point of collusion, not competition, between industry titans Dow and Monsanto—they plan to license the 2,4-D and Roundup traits to each other to form “stacked” hybrids.
And once they do, farmers can douse their fields with both 2,4-D and Roundup—and 2,4-D will kill whatever weeds Roundup can’t, and leave the crop pristine. Farmers’ growers will be able to “proactively manage weed populations while avoiding adverse population shifts of troublesome weeds or the development of resistance, particularly glyphosate- [Roundup-] resistance in weeds,” the petition promises.
The USDA, for its part, is buying what Dow is selling. Its Draft Environmental Assessment (PDF) offers no critique of Dow’s claims, and recommends that the product be deregulated. The agency is currently seeking public comment on the matter; the comment period ends February 27. Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me that when the USDA brings a GMO product to the comment stage after having recommended deregulation, it “almost always” green-lights the product. “The only times I’ve seen the USDA hold off at this stage is when there’s a lot of public pushback,” Gurian-Sherman says.
Dow’s new GM corn merits just such a public uproar, it seems to me. A just-released paper from a group of researchers led by Pennsylvania State University crop scientist David A. Mortensen makes a strong case that new herbicide-tolerant crops will lead US agriculture down a path of ever-increasing addiction to agrichemicals. (The abstract is here; I have a PDF of the full paper but can’t upload it because it’s under copyright.)
The authors note that even by Dow and Monsanto’s reckoning, a new stacked 2,4-D/Roundup-resistant product would immediately lead to an increase in herbicide use, because the companies have been advocating an herbicide program that combines current rates of Roundup use with a roughly equal amounts of 2,4-D. That’s good for sales, but not so good for the environment.
And wouldn’t such an herbicide cocktail just lead to weeds that defy both 2,4-D and Roundup? No need to worry about that; Dow and Monsanto claim that it’s extremely unlikely for weeds to survive two different herbicides that attack them simultaneously in entirely different ways.
The authors shred that argument. They retort that resistance to two or more herbicides isn’t a rare occurrence at all: Globally, no fewer than 38 weed species across 12 families show resistance to two or more herbicides—”with 44% of these having appeared since 2005.”
They add that on millions of acres of farmland in the Midwest and South, many weeds will only need to develop a single resistance pathway, because they’re already resistant to Roundup. That is, when farmers apply 2,4-D at will to weeds that are already resistant to Roundup, they’ll essentially be selecting for weeds that can resist both.
All in all, the authors conclude, chances are “actually quite high” that Dow’s new product will unleash a new generation of superweeds that resist both Roundup and 2,4-D. If 2,4-D resistance does indeed emerge, farmers will likely respond just as they responded to the advent of Roundup resistance—by applying ever higher doses.
Thus the authors project that 2,4-D use will surge decades after the new seeds reach market (see chart, left). Their main ecological concern with an explosion in 2,4-D use is pesticide drift: They say the compound is quite volatile and prone to be carried in air, where it can do damage to non-target plants like the neighbor’s vegetable farm. “Landscapes dominated by synthetic auxin- [2,4-D]–resistant [crops] may make it challenging to cultivate tomatoes, grapes, potatoes, and other horticultural crops without the threat of yield loss from drift,” they write. They also fear that if you’re a farmer determined not to use a stacked 2,4-D/Roundup seed, you could be forced to if your neighbor’s 2,4-D spray keeps knocking down your corn.
As for its toxicity to people and animals, the study’s authors take at face value the EPA’s assessment that 2,4-D and other chemicals in its class have “low acute and chronic toxicities to mammalian, bird, and fish model organisms; degrade fairly rapidly in the soil; and are not known to bioaccumulate.”
However, as I’ve reported before, the advocacy group Beyond Pesticides points to both epidemiological and lab-based evidence linking it non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other cancers. It’s also an endocrine disruptor, Beyond Pesticides reports, meaning it can “interfere with the body’s hormone messaging system and can alter many essential processes.” And in 2004, a coalition of more than a dozen environmental and social justice groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Action Network, wrote a letter to the EPA rebuking it for underestimating the health risks of 2,4-D—in particular, its carcinogenicity. The EPA, it goes without saying, brushed those concerns aside.
The frustrating part is, there no reason to send a flood of this stuff onto US farm fields, where it will likely run off into ground water, as both Roundup and Syngenta’s toxic herbicide atrazine already has.
As the authors of the Bioscience paper show, a simple program called Integrated Weed Management could rescue US farm fields from Roundup-resistant superweeds without recourse to more herbicides. The approach relies on low-tech techniques like crop rotation, cover crops, tillage, and targeted herbicide applications. IWM would mean bringing skill and thought back to farming, and it would push farmers into planting more crops than just corn and soy.
The biggest obstacle to IWM over the Dow/Monsanto vision doesn’t lie in efficiency or economics. The authors cite research showing that “cropping systems that employ an IWM approach can produce competitive yields and realize profit margins that are comparable to, if not greater than, those of systems that rely chiefly on herbicides.”
Rather, the obstacle lies in political economy: the power of the agrichemical companies to set the research agenda both in public universities and at the USDA, and to use farm supports to reward farmers for growing a narrow set of crops. Farmers have been using Roundup technology for nearly a generation; they will grope for the next fix to it until our public ag-research complex shows that them there’s a better, cheaper way.
And here’s where we get to the crossroads in our agriculture. If the agrichemical companies manage to ram through the regulatory process a bunch of patches to Roundup Ready farming, then their herbicide-drenched vision will continue dominating huge swathes of prime farmland throughout the country for the foreseeable future. We don’t have to go that way. It’s time to raise hell.
In the graphic below, Penn State ag-scientist David Mortensen and his co-authors lay out what they see as the crossroads facing US agriculture. |
Oldest known stone axe found in Arnhem Land
Updated
A piece of stone axe found in the Northern Territory has been dated at 35,500 years old, making it the oldest of its type in the world.
The piece has a series of marks which archaeologists say proves it comes from a ground-edge stone axe.
Monash University's Bruno David led the international archaeological team, which made the find during an excavation in Arnhem Land in May.
Dr David says the find shows the Jawoyn people were the first to grind axes to sharpen its edges.
"We could see with the angled light that the rock itself has all these marks on it from people having rubbed it in order to create the ground-edge axe," he said.
"We already knew that the oldest evidence of axes in the world were in the late 20s of thousands of years ago.
"Very soon after that we received a carbon result of 35,500 years ago for that piece."
Dr David says it is an important step in the evolution of modern humans.
"It means that you're creating a tool that is far more efficient than what you had before, and that you also have to create a tool not just through a simple series of actions of hitting against it," he said.
The two-week dig was held at a rock art gallery on the traditional lands of the Jawoyn people.
Lost ancestors
The Jawoyn call it Gabarnmung, which means "hole in the rock", and it is covered in paintings depicting animals and spirits.
The site was rediscovered three years ago and is one of thousands that have been found across Jawoyn country in recent years.
Jawoyn traditional owner Margaret Katherine invited the archaeologists to the site so she could find out more about her lost ancestors.
"They study about rocks and bone and everything and I wanted to know the truth," she said.
"Now that I know the truth I am very happy deep inside."
Jawoyn Association spokesman Preston Lee says it is a find that means a lot to the Jawoyn people.
"We've been told by our elders and our ancestors that we've been in the area for a very long time and now the scientific research come back and now it's saying the same thing we've been saying all along," he said.
"Pride is the best word to say. Everybody is very proud of our heritage and it just goes to show we're out there, we are Jawoyn people, we are proud to be Jawoyn."
Historic partnership
To find out about the discoveries from the excavation, a Jawoyn delegation spent a week at Monash University in Melbourne.
During the visit, the Jawoyn also signed a landmark agreement with the university which allows the archaeologists to continue their research at rock painting and other cultural sites.
Monash University's deputy vice-chancellor, Adam Shoemaker, says it is a partnership where real things will happen.
"This is something very much about the future," he said.
"The document talks about respect, talks about collaboration. It talks about doing things together, it talks about training.
"All of that is something which we really believe in."
Dr David says he is excited to be able to continue the important research at Gabarnmung as well as at other sites in the area.
Topics: archaeology, sacred-sites, human-interest, darwin-0800, australia, nt
First posted |
Xenotolerance Profile Joined November 2012 United States 464 Posts #301 Don't forget about Team Yeoul who may have submitted without posting in here www.alonetone.com/xenotolerance
The_Templar Profile Blog Joined January 2011 THE FUTURE 52439 Posts #302 Oh yeah, we'll be announcing the prizes some time next week. Moderator I'm actually a
NewSunshine Profile Joined July 2011 United States 3814 Posts #303 On February 12 2015 19:51 Arceus wrote:
So many weird and innovative maps. I hope the prize goes to the likes of Rao Mesa, Korhal Killzone and Neo Emerald Plaza
Other favorites include Lyote, Station 22, Ammonite and Chronograph
Please no more Dual Sight/Daybreak remix with some twists So many weird and innovative maps. I hope the prize goes to the likes of Rao Mesa, Korhal Killzone and Neo Emerald PlazaOther favorites include Lyote, Station 22, Ammonite and ChronographPlease no more Dual Sight/Daybreak remix with some twists
You mean like Standard maps? Maps that should be the cornerstone of any map pool?
Also I don't know what to tell you if you think any recent maps resemble Dual Sight, in any meaningful way. You mean like Standard maps? Maps that should be the cornerstone of any map pool?Also I don't know what to tell you if you think any recent maps resemble Dual Sight, in any meaningful way. "If you find yourself feeling lost, take pride in the accuracy of your feelings." - Night Vale
OtherWorld Profile Blog Joined October 2013 France 17328 Posts #304 On February 13 2015 02:31 NewSunshine wrote:
Show nested quote +
On February 12 2015 19:51 Arceus wrote:
So many weird and innovative maps. I hope the prize goes to the likes of Rao Mesa, Korhal Killzone and Neo Emerald Plaza
Other favorites include Lyote, Station 22, Ammonite and Chronograph
Please no more Dual Sight/Daybreak remix with some twists So many weird and innovative maps. I hope the prize goes to the likes of Rao Mesa, Korhal Killzone and Neo Emerald PlazaOther favorites include Lyote, Station 22, Ammonite and ChronographPlease no more Dual Sight/Daybreak remix with some twists
You mean like Standard maps? Maps that should be the cornerstone of any map pool?
Also I don't know what to tell you if you think any recent maps resemble Dual Sight, in any meaningful way. You mean like Standard maps? Maps that should be the cornerstone of any map pool?Also I don't know what to tell you if you think any recent maps resemble Dual Sight, in any meaningful way.
Don't you see the Dual Sight clone in Pantanal? Pretty obvious to me. Don't you see the Dual Sight clone in Pantanal? Pretty obvious to me. Used Sigs - New Sigs - Cheap Sigs - Buy the Best Cheap Sig near You at www.cheapsigforsale.com
NewSunshine Profile Joined July 2011 United States 3814 Posts #305 I hope that's a joke -.- "If you find yourself feeling lost, take pride in the accuracy of your feelings." - Night Vale
OtherWorld Profile Blog Joined October 2013 France 17328 Posts #306 It is d: Used Sigs - New Sigs - Cheap Sigs - Buy the Best Cheap Sig near You at www.cheapsigforsale.com
SidianTheBard Profile Joined October 2010 United States 2198 Posts Last Edited: 2015-02-12 18:28:20 #308 On February 13 2015 03:18 Uvantak wrote:
Complete Map List
Wrong overview for Korhal, you have my initial version!
+ Show Spoiler +
Wrong overview for Korhal, you have my initial version! Creator of Abyssal Reef, Ascension to Aiur, Battle on the Boardwalk, Habitation Station, Honorgrounds, IPL Darkness Falls, King's Cove, Korhal Carnage Knockout & Moonlight Madness.
Uvantak Profile Blog Joined June 2011 Uruguay 1380 Posts #309 Fixed. I built upon Meavis list and i didn't update much, so if any map is missing or outdated just hit me up. @Kantuva | Mapmaker | KTVMaps.wordpress.com | Check my profile to see my TL map threads, and you can search for KTV in the Custom Games section to play them.
Ej_ Profile Blog Joined January 2013 44306 Posts #310 So many good maps submitted, can't pick a favorite this time.
Good to luck to all and let's pray we get decent ladder map pool next season! "Technically the dictionary has zero authority on the meaning or words" - Rodya
Ragoo Profile Joined March 2010 Germany 2423 Posts #311
Finalist Candidates
Neo Emerald Plaza by Iezael
Sanctuary by Timetwister
Orichalcum by Iezael
Hyperlink by Timetwister
Sol Dios by NewSunshine
Moonlight Madness by SidianTheBard
Daydreams by eTcetRa
Korhal Killzone by SidianTheBard
Station-22 by Ragoo
Rago Mesa by ScorpSCII
Ganymede by Uvantak
Samarra Mines by Uvantak
Operon by NegativeZero
Apotheosis by NegativeZero
Trapped under ice by Mereel
Good Maps
+ Show Spoiler +
Exosphere by NegativeZero
Cassiopeia by Xenotolerance
Demon's Claw by NewSunshine
Winter Station by lefix
Evergreen Terrace by lefix
Echo by Uvantak
Sugar Free by NotAPlexaSmurf
Monterey by Timetwister
Dark Matter by Antares777
Purify by Mereel
Graveside by eTcetRa
Lyote by ScorpSCII
Coda by Iezael
Mossfire by NotAPlexaSmurf
Ancient Realm by Antares777
[Desert Map] by Mereel
Kylskada by eTcetRa
Annihilation Station by Meavis
It's okay
+ Show Spoiler +
Red Space by lefix
Cactus Valley by Ferisii
Brimstone by NewSunshine
Color Crush by SidianTheBard
Paralda by ScorpSCII
Broken Promises by OtherWorld
Alizé by Icetoad
Everything else I didn't rate was either shit, or I missed it (unlikely) or for other reasons (SeinGalton breaking the rules). My rankings for the submissions roughly in order, so the judges know what not to pick:Neo Emerald Plaza by IezaelSanctuary by TimetwisterOrichalcum by IezaelHyperlink by TimetwisterSol Dios by NewSunshineMoonlight Madness by SidianTheBardDaydreams by eTcetRaKorhal Killzone by SidianTheBardStation-22 by RagooRago Mesa by ScorpSCIIGanymede by UvantakSamarra Mines by UvantakOperon by NegativeZeroApotheosis by NegativeZeroTrapped under ice by MereelEverything else I didn't rate was either shit, or I missed it (unlikely) or for other reasons (SeinGalton breaking the rules). Member of TPW mapmaking team/// twitter.com/Ragoo_ /// "goody represents border between explainable reason and supernatural" Cloud
OtherWorld Profile Blog Joined October 2013 France 17328 Posts Last Edited: 2015-02-12 19:12:29 #312 On February 13 2015 03:31 Uvantak wrote:
Fixed. I built upon Meavis list and i didn't update much, so if any map is missing or outdated just hit me up.
You have the wrong overview for mine as well, this is the correct one.
+ Show Spoiler + You have the wrong overview for mine as well, this is the correct one. Used Sigs - New Sigs - Cheap Sigs - Buy the Best Cheap Sig near You at www.cheapsigforsale.com
IeZaeL Profile Joined July 2012 Italy 962 Posts #313 Since ragoo already narrowed the list a lot , I'll list my own dream finalists!
Daydreams by eTcetRa
Apotheosis by -NegativeZero-
Exosphere by -NegativeZero-
Neo Emerald Plaza by IeZaeL
Echo by Kappatak
Paralda by ScorpSCII
Sol Dios by NewSunshine
I have no shame in putting my map into the list Author of Coda and Eastwatch.
TheSkunk Profile Joined September 2010 82 Posts #314 I kind of hope there is an honorary mention for maps with cool or unique visuals like Color Crush and -Phoenix-, I think it would be nice if they were recognized even if the maps weren't good enough to make it to the finals.
OtherWorld Profile Blog Joined October 2013 France 17328 Posts #315 On February 13 2015 04:22 TheSkunk wrote:
I kind of hope there is an honorary mention for maps with cool or unique visuals like Color Crush and -Phoenix-, I think it would be nice if they were recognized even if the maps weren't good enough to make it to the finals.
If Phoenix doesn't get on ladder this TLMC is officialy a joke If Phoenix doesn't get on ladder this TLMC is officialy a joke Used Sigs - New Sigs - Cheap Sigs - Buy the Best Cheap Sig near You at www.cheapsigforsale.com
TheSkunk Profile Joined September 2010 82 Posts #316 You're not doing it right OtherWorld, you have to promise to eat an article of clothing like your hat or shoe if it doesn't make it!
Aquila- Profile Blog Joined April 2011 515 Posts #317 Why are the thirds impossible to take on almost all maps? Map makers clearly play Zerg?
Jer99 Profile Blog Joined April 2011 Canada 8155 Posts #318 You guys will see my list soon enough :D Strategy TaeJa #1 || @TL_Jer99 || "seeker seeked out his seeking"
OtherWorld Profile Blog Joined October 2013 France 17328 Posts #319 On February 13 2015 04:27 Aquila- wrote:
Why are the thirds impossible to take on almost all maps? Map makers clearly play Zerg?
Because this TLMC is a conspiracy led by dirty Zerg mapmakers to make the life of every non-Z a nightmare. All of this being orchestrated by The_Templar (who is in fact The_Infestor) and Plexa. Because this TLMC is a conspiracy led by dirty Zerg mapmakers to make the life of every non-Z a nightmare. All of this being orchestrated by The_Templar (who is in fact The_Infestor) and Plexa. Used Sigs - New Sigs - Cheap Sigs - Buy the Best Cheap Sig near You at www.cheapsigforsale.com
-NegativeZero- Profile Joined August 2011 United States 2066 Posts #320 On February 13 2015 04:27 Aquila- wrote:
Why are the thirds impossible to take on almost all maps? Map makers clearly play Zerg?
because unnecessarily easy (aka "standard") 3rds lead to boring games because unnecessarily easy (aka "standard") 3rds lead to boring games i maek map
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The LCD Soundsystem producer teams up with the director again, for the movie starring Ben Stiller and Beastie Boys' AdRock
James Murphy will collaborate with Noah Baumbach again to write the score for the director’s new film While We’re Young.
The film, according to The Film Stage tells a story of a middle-aged couple whose career and marriage breaks down when a younger couple come into their lives. It stars Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts in the lead roles, along with Amanda Seyfried, Adam Driver and Beastie Boys’ Adam (AdRock) Horovitz.
Murphy and Baumbach previously worked together on 2010’s Greenberg, which also starred Stiller.
Among his many musical projects, Murphy recently brought his Despacio soundsystem – a collaboration with Soulwax duo David and Stephen Dewaele – to Glastonbury Festival. Murphy put together the huge rig with John Klett, a veteran New York sound guru who helped build his former DFA Records studio.
Back in February, Murphy also revealed a brief preview of his plan to make every New York subway station have its own music, so that people will later associate each location with a specific sound. |
Sleeping Beauty is one of our very favorite Disney animated classics. It doesn’t look like any other animated film (ever) and that bold stylization translates into idiosyncratic story choices. As such, we wanted to take a look back at the movie’s long and involved production and release, searching for things that, even the biggest Sleeping Beauty devotee might have missed (possibly while sleeping).
1. It took a long time to make.
When Sleeping Beauty was released in theaters in 1959, it was advertised as being “six years in the making,” except that wasn’t exactly true, since work was formally underway on the project way back in 1951. This was an expensive, time-intensive production, full of opulent design work and complex technology (more on that in a minute). And Walt himself, who had originally envisioned the project as his masterpiece, became disinterested and distant as he became more involved in his California theme park. This also explains why …
2. Sleeping Beauty Castle was used as a promotional tool.
Disneyland opened in 1955, almost four years before Sleeping Beauty was released. That means there were almost four years of visiting tourists asking, “What is that castle from?” Eventually, in 1957, a walkthrough exhibit was installed in the castle. But what is really cool is that since the film was still in production when the exhibit was installed, it featured some sequences that didn’t make it into the final version of the film. It was like a living collection of deleted scenes.
3. It was the last animated film to feature traditionally inked cels.
The films that would come after Sleeping Beauty would employ then cutting-edge Xerox technology to make cels, which is a somewhat less painterly process but allowed for the animators’ line drawings to actually make their way to the big screen.
4. Several characters from Sleeping Beauty also appear in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Maleficent has been utilized in a number of scenarios, including the Kingdom Hearts videogame, fireworks shows and, of course, her own spin-off movie, but Maleficent’s little goblin henchmen appear in the Maroon Cartoon studio lot in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and the bluebirds from the film appear to circle either Roger Rabbit or Eddie Valiant’s heads in two separate sequences.
5. The film is very similar to the fairy tale, except with fewer fairies.
While the story for Sleeping Beauty is based largely (and rather faithfully) to the 17th century Charles Perrault fairy tale (translated into “The Beauty Sleeping in the Wood”), one of the major changes is that there were originally seven fairies, reduced down to three. It’s a fairy tale with fewer fairies.
6. It was the last animated Disney fairy tale movie until The Little Mermaid.
The initial box office disappointment of Sleeping Beauty led to the studio holding off on producing another animated fairy tale until The Little Mermaid 30 years later. That’s a long time for the Disney princesses to be asleep.
7. It was screened in a giant format.
One of the bigger technological challenges on Sleeping Beauty involved the film being released in Super Technirama 70 mm, meaning the artists could achieve a higher level of detail and stylization since they were drawing on giant pieces of paper the size of bed sheets. Of course, since the movie took so long to develop, by the time it was released, 70 mm had largely fallen out of favor and it was mainly released in standard 35 mm, robbing many theatrical exhibitions of the grandeur that Walt and the artists had intended.
8. The theatrical release was accompanied by an experimental, Oscar-winning live-action short.
Accompanying Sleeping Beauty’s theatrical release was a 29-minute experimental live action short called Grand Canyon that was based on a 1929 musical suite composed by American pianist Ferde Grofe. More a live-action segment of Fantasia than an actual documentary short, it contained no dialogue or narration. Its boldness was rewarded, however, when it won an Academy Award. Walt was obviously a fan of the Grand Canyon; it debuted in Disneyland the year before Sleeping Beauty was released (see above).
9. It was re-released 4 times.
Sleeping Beauty would eventually make money; all in it wound up being the second most profitable movie of 1959 (after Ben-Hur). But this was only after several splashy theatrical rereleases (in 1970, 1979, 1986 and 1995).
Do you know any Sleeping Beauty trivia? Tell us in the comments!
Posted 4 years Ago |
Donald Trump deflected charges from Hillary Clinton that he was Russia’s “puppet” while blasting Clinton for her Middle East policy on Wednesday night in the third and final debate before the November 8 election.
Neither candidate appeared to make inroads into each others’ supporters as they at times angrily reiterated positions they’ve taken throughout the campaign. Clinton goes into the election with leads in key states, making her the favourite three weeks from now.
In what was another highly contentious match, the candidates clashed in Nevada on a number of foreign policy issues, including the operation to liberate Mosul, U.S. policy in Syria and relations with Iran.
Trump’s position on Russia again took centre stage. Clinton has been under fire for damaging revelations in her campaign chairman’s emails, which have been published by Wikileaks. To deflect attention from them, Clinton and U.S. intelligence claim, without producing proof, that the “highest levels” of the Russian government are responsible for the hacked emails in an effort to help Trump get elected. Evidence is evidently not required when it comes to blaming Russia.
Sparks Fly
Clinton’s charge sparked a dramatic exchange. “What’s really important about Wikileaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans,” she charged. “They have hacked American websites, American accounts of private people, of institutions, then they have given that information to Wikileaks,” she said.
“This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government, clearly from [President Vladimir] Putin himself, in an effort, as 17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election,” Clinton said.
“Will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in this election?” she asked.
Trump responded by saying that Clinton had “no idea” if it was Russia, China or anyone else who had hacked into the accounts. Some former U.S. intelligence officials contend that the emails were leaked, rather than hacked.
The Republican candidate said he favoured good U.S.-Russian relations and that the two countries should form an alliance to fight ISIS. “I don’t know Putin,” Trump said “He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good. If Russia and the United States got along well and went after ISIS, that would be good. [Putin] has no respect for [Clinton].”
“Well, that’s because [Putin would] rather have a puppet as president,” Clinton shot back.
“You’re the puppet,” Trump interjected.
“You are willing to spout the Putin line,” Clinton retorted, “sign up for his wish list, rake up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favourite in this race.”
If Russia prefers Trump it is probably because he wants dialogue with Moscow, while Clinton has called Putin “Hitler” and made bellicose statements towards the country.
The U.S. and Russia on September 9 concluded such a deal that Trump wants to jointly fight ISIS but it collapsed after the U.S. said it “accidentally” killed about 80 Syrian soldiers near Deir ez-Zor in Syria.
“She doesn’t like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way,” Trump said. “All you have to do is look at the Middle East. They’ve taken over. We’ve spent $6 trillion. [Russia has] taken over the Middle East. She has been outsmarted and outplayed worse than anybody I’ve ever seen in any government whatsoever.”
At one point Trump said Russian had “taken over territory” in Syria, though Russia has no ground troops in the country, a statement that shows Trump’s shaky command of facts.
Clinton again recklessly called for a safe area and a no-fly zone in Syria, though the chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, told Congress this month that that would mean war with Russia. And in one of her leaked emails she admitted a no-fly zone would “kill a lot of Syrians.”
At Odds Over Mosul
The two candidates also sharply disagreed on the operation launched this week by the Iraqi Army, the Kurdish peshmerga and Shiite-dominated militia to retake Mosul from ISIS.
Trump blamed Clinton for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq when she was secretary of state. “We had Mosul,” said Trump said though he insists he opposed the 2003 invasion. “But when she left, she took everybody out, we lost Mosul. Now we’re fighting again to get Mosul.”
Without going into details, Trump said Iran would benefit most by the liberation of Mosul. “Iran should write us a thank you letter,” he said. “As I said many years ago, Iran is taking over Iraq. Something they’ve wanted to do forever. But we’ve made it so easy for them.”
Trump also claimed that ISIS leaders had already fled the Iraqi city because the U.S. had incorrectly advertised the operation months in advance. “Whatever happened to the element of surprise?” Trump said.
Clinton rejected Trump’s allegation that the timing of the Mosul attack was aimed at helping her get elected. “I’m just amazed that he seems to think that the Iraqi government and our allies and everybody else launched the attack on Mosul to help me in this election,” she said.
Victory in Mosul would boost Barack Obama’s legacy, that vanity outgoing presidents become obsessed with. It would also undermine Trump’s argument that the Clinton-Obama policies in Iraq have failed.
“We need to go after the leadership, but we need to get rid … of their fighters, their estimated several thousand fighters in Mosul,” Clinton said. “They’ve been digging underground. They’ve been prepared to defend. It’s going to be tough fighting. I think we can take back Mosul and move on into Syria and take Raqqah”, ISIS’s stronghold there.
Trump landed a few zingers, exposing Clinton’s hypocrisy in defending women’s rights while cozying up to the Saudis. He pointed out that Saudi Arabia had given $25 million to the Clinton Foundation. “You talk about women and women’s rights. So these are people that push gays off buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly. And yet you take their money. So I’d like to ask you right now why don’t you give back the money that you have taken from certain countries that treat certain groups of people so horribly? Why don’t you give back the money?” Trump said.
Domestic Differences
The debate then moved on to other topics, but there were no questions about climate change, government surveillance of citizens, energy policy, police violence or tension in the South China Sea.
On domestic issues, the candidates disagreed on abortion, guns, immigration, health care and the economy. Trump and Clinton differed on abortion, with Clinton supporting Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision making it legal nationally, while Trump wants the individual states to decide.
Trump strongly defended the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Americans the right to own guns, while Clinton said that right should be limited by government regulation. This is one of Clinton’s strongest points.
Trump again called for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants while Clinton said they should be offered a path to citizenship. On health care, Clinton defended Obama’s national plan, while Trump again vowed to scrap it but again didn’t say what he’d replace it with.
And on the economy Trump said he wants to cut taxes on all Americans including the wealthiest, while Clinton said she’d make the rich and big corporations pay “their fair share.” It will certainly bear watching whether she follows through on this pledge should she win, given her very strong ties to Wall Street.
Then Trump made the remark that sent the corporate media into hysteria. He said he wouldn’t know until the election results were in whether he would accept them as free and fair. Over the past week he’s repeatedly warned that the election process would be “rigged.”
The 2000 and 2004 elections were marred by evidence of election fraud and a close result in three weeks could again open the results to contention.
Circling the Class Wagons
Corporate media, which has decided it is their imperative to defend their class interests and those of their bosses, and not practice journalism, led all of their broadcasts and front pages with this remark in their best display of herd mentality. They are reading into this that Trump will use violence to prevent the sacred “democratic transfer of power.” Yet given what happened in Florida and Ohio it is a completely reasonable position for Trump to take.
Feeling threatened by the anger in the land their policies have created, the Establishment has circled the wagons around Clinton, whose comments in a speech and in leaked emails reveal her disdain for ordinary Americans.
Class anger has underscored the entire 2106 campaign. Americans who have suffered under neoliberalism since Ronald Reagan are fighting back. Unfortunately, they have yet to find the right leader. Sanders was certainly on the right track, railing against Wall Street, the trade deals, college debt and other issues, and he was without Trump’s baggage. But he promised to support Clinton (and save his standing in a deeply corrupt Democratic Party), rather than become head of the Green Party ticket to make a viable independent run, taking votes from both Clinton and Trump.
Trump is the wrong leader because he’s a billionaire demagogue whose commitment to the interests of the ruined middle class are untested. For instance he wants tax cuts for people as rich as he is, peddling the lie that that will create jobs. Demand creates jobs and that means putting money in people’s pockets. He denies climate change and wants to expand torture, and he’s shown extreme intolerance towards Mexicans and Muslims.
There’s been overkill on the story, but Trump’s sexual misconduct certainly undermines his character. His strongest suit has been his foreign policy rhetoric, especially regarding Russia, but even that is flawed, for instance when he accused Russia of taking over the Middle East and “territory” in Syria. And he wants to increase military spending when the U.S. spends as much as the next ten countries. He has talked about Japan and South Korea getting nuclear weapons, as Clinton pointed out in the debate.
And when Trump is right on a point he fails to make the right arguments. He never demanded to see the evidence against Russia, and never presented evidence showing the Obama-Clinton foreign policy team’s role in fostering the rise of ISIS,
It’s going to be a very long four years as we wait to see if America will explode in social unrest. |
California continues to stay at the nation-leading edge of legal activity concerning marijuana use.
In 1996 it passed the first national initiative to make marijuana available by prescription to relieve pain, nausea, and other physical maladies. In July of this year, Oakland became – by a wide margin (80 percent to 20) – the first US city to assess a tax on the sale of marijuana.
Now, a new initiative that will allow local governments to oversee and regulate cultivation, distribution, and sales – and to determine how and how much cannabis can be bought and sold within area limits – will be on the November 2010 ballot. National advocates say that regardless of the vote – signature gathering went fast and easy, according to reports – a major corner has been turned in national acceptance of marijuana use.
“Regardless of what the voters decide in 2010, the genie is not going back in the bottle,” says Paul Armentano, deputy director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). “A majority of west coast voters, and an estimated one-half of the national public, are demanding that we replace our nation’s seven-decade-long policy of marijuana prohibition with one of controlled regulation, taxation, and education.”
Armentano says the citizen’s initiative is evidence that despite the growing public support for marijuana reform, a majority of elected officials still perceive the issue to be a political liability rather than an opportunity.
“As a result, it will be the voters, not the politicians, who will ultimately determine the direction of our nation’s modern marijuana policies,” he says.
Other states take up the issue
The California initiative comes amidst a flurry of activity nationally in the past two months after nearly two-decades of inactivity, according to Bruce Mirken, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington D. C., which advocates legalization of marijuana. California has a legislative bill in the offing, he says, as does Washington State while New Hampshire has recently introduced a bill and Rhode Island has adopted a commission to study ideas.
“There are signs all over the place that this has reached critical mass,” says Mirken, citing the photograph of Olympic superstar Michael Phelps last summer. He also says that law enforcement agencies have begun to realize the high cost of arresting, trying, and incarcerating marijuana users – money that could be better spent elsewhere. [Editor's note: The original version of this story mischaracterized the situation involving Mr. Phelps.]
“There is growing recognition that through our policies of prohibition, we have not stopped people from using marijuana, but rather handed this lucrative consumer market to some rather unsavory characters, including Mexican gangs,” says Mirken. “There’s a reason you don’t see Mexican wine cartels planting fields of cabernet sauvignon in Sequoia National Park, and people are beginning to understand that there really is a fundamental irrationality to laws that tolerate the far more dangerous substance of alcohol.”
Substance abuse activists say the headlong rush to legalization in this initiative has other motivations that ripple out in negative ways.
“Proponents of the proposed legislation are using the California fiscal crisis to say this will be a revenue-generating solution,” says Jim Hall, Director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Drug Abuse at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. “What has been largely ignored in the legalization meta-debate, however, is the impact the legislation could have on young people.”
“We have developed a clear model with alcohol, but when we debate the legalization of marijuana, we don’t address the potential lifelong impact that earlier and easier access will have on young people,” says Hall. “While the proposed legislation might generate a few tax dollars, we need to ask what the cost to society will be for a whole generation exposed to the risk of lifelong substance abuse.”
'Right of passage' for adolescents?
He says there needs to be a better way to change patterns of marijuana use as a rite of passage for adolescents. “Clearly, affording legal access distorts the message of why young people should not use marijuana. If it’s legal, what’s the big deal? So goes the mindset.”
Hall points out that for the last 20 years, nearly two-thirds of all first-time marijuana users have been below the age of 18. Statistics also show that the younger a person begins marijuana use, the greater the risk of substance abuse later in life, he says. Therefore, it’s important to ask a host of questions: Who is going to determine or regulate how marijuana is produced and distributed? Who will it be distributed by? How is the state going to collect the taxes? Will it really have an impact on the illicit trafficking and production of marijuana? Will this lead to proposals to legalize other drugs?
“This is a largely unexplored policy that raises important questions and potentially dire social risks,” says Hall. “Before changing policy, let’s honestly and thoroughly explore these questions.”
Initiative advocates point to safeguards
Dan Newman, spokesman for the proposed Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act, counters that the initiative does includes significant safeguards and controls. For example, it will increase the penalty for providing marijuana to a minor, expressly prohibit the consumption of marijuana in public, forbids smoking marijuana while minors are present, and bans possession on school grounds.
He also says that studies by state tax experts – the Board of Equalization and the Legislative Analyst Office – show that the initiative will generate billions of dollars in revenue to fund schools, public safety, and other critical needs at a time when the state is desperate for resources.
“For those reasons, and the fact that most Californians understand that the current drug laws aren’t working, several recent polls show the initiative [will win] support from a majority of voters," says Newman. “We’re building a broad and diverse coalition that includes law enforcement professionals who understand that regulating marijuana will put street drug dealers and organized crime out of business, while allowing police to focus on protecting the public by preventing violent crime.”
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Story highlights Special Forces could be used for more counterterrorism operations
Military options could include increasing the training, advising and assisting of moderate forces
Washington (CNN) The Obama administration is holding internal discussions on military options if the ceasefire in Syria fails, including the possibility of increasing the number of Special Forces on the ground in Syria, though no decision has been made, a senior U.S. official told CNN.
Other potential options include training and assisting local forces, recruiting help from other countries and establishing a no-fly zone or safe zone for refugees.
The options are part of the so-called Plan B should the ceasefire that takes effect this weekend falls apart, the official said.
So far, "Plan B" is more an idea than a specific course of action and nothing has yet been agreed to, several administration officials said.
Special Forces could be used for more counterterrorism operations, as well as increase work with moderate opposition forces on the ground.
Read More |
Manama: Prosecutors in the Saudi capital Riyadh are looking into the death of a seven-year-old girl from the violence inflicted on her by her father.
Yara died reportedly a few hours before Eid Al Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, one of the most auspicious occasions for celebrations by children in the Islamic world.
“The family conflicts between men and my former husband had led to our separation,” Yara’s mother said. “Yara moved in with me and I took care of her until she reached seven. Her father refused to allow her to live with me and three months ago, she went to live with him in Riyadh as per the regulations. She did not wish to move in with him, and she was very unhappy,” she told Saudi daily Al Watan.
According to a statement by one of the prosecutors to the mother, Yara on the day of her death was beaten up by a hose and a cane.
“He used a hose that he snatched from the air-conditioning unit and beat her all over her body. They believe that the fatal blow occurred when he hit her hard on the head,” the mother said. “He started beating her simply because she told him that she did not love him. He was furious and locked her inside a room. She burst into tears and had an uncontrollable crying fit. When he unlocked the room, he noticed she was in a bad condition and drove her to hospital. However, she died on the way,” the mother said.
The father reportedly attributed the beating to his wish to “educate” her. A lab test proved the father was not on drugs.
“The case is still being probed and the investigation is moving as per the rules and regulations until the file reaches the stage of the court,” Saeed Al Qahtani, the mother’s lawyer, said. “Prosecutors have been listening to all parties concerned, and they have covered a lot of ground. We are now waiting for the final medical report and for the prosecutors’ charges,” he said.
Social media users said they were shocked by the savage violence inflicted on a seven-year-old girl, and called for stringent action against the father.
“This is a most heinous crime and the criminal should be buried alive,” Abu Nawas said.
According to Noora, the punishment should be severe and prompt. “People spend the day before Eid praying and supplicating God, and this criminal used it to kill his innocent daughter. He should be put to death without delays,” she said.
Another user, writing under the moniker of Father, said that he was appalled by the crime.
“Some hearts have hardened beyond hope for repair and some people have turned into evil forces devoid of feelings and emotions,” he posted. “May God grant Yara eternal peace and may this criminal be punished severely,” he said. |
English [ edit ]
Etymology [ edit ]
From Latin valētūdinārius, from valetudo (“state of health, health, ill health”), from valere (“to be strong or well”) + -an
Pronunciation [ edit ]
IPA (key) : /ˌvæ.lə.ˌtuː.də.ˈnɛɹ.i.ən/
: Audio (US)
Adjective [ edit ]
valetudinarian (comparative more valetudinarian, superlative most valetudinarian)
sickly, infirm, of ailing health The valetudinarian habit of discussing his health had grown on Rose... -- Florence Anne Sellar MacCunn, Sir Walter Scott's Friends, 1910, p. 234 Macaulay The virtue which the world wants is a healthful virtue, not a valetudinarian virtue. being overly worried about one's health
Synonyms [ edit ]
Translations [ edit ]
Noun [ edit ]
valetudinarian (plural valetudinarians)
A person in poor health or sickly, especially one who is constantly obsessed with their state of health The most uninformed mind, with a healthy body, is happier than the wisest valetudinarian. -- Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, July 6, 1787 in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Paul Leicester Ford (ed.), Vol. 5, pp. 300-01 (NY: 1904). 1950, Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast Are you a mere valetudinarian, my dear Ladyship, or some prolific mendicant whose bewitched offspring she hopes I can return to human shape? The evil of the actual disparity in their ages (and Mr. Woodhouse had not married early) was much increased by his constitution and habits; for having been a valetudinarian all his life, without activity of mind or body, he was a much older man in ways than in years; and though everywhere beloved for the friendliness of his heart and his amiable temper, his talents could not have recommended him at any time. Jane Austen, Emma, Vol. I, Ch.1 (1815). She affected to be spunky about her ailments and afflictions, but she was in fact an utterly self-centered valetudinarian (Louis Auchincloss) The American Heritage Dictionary The cuisine, of course, would not be such as would raise water bubbles in the mouth of a valetudinarian; the carniverous propensity will mostly be gratified by steak which, when cut, will resemble the Mudhook Yacht Club burgee of rouge et noir; and savory soups and luscious salmon will be luxuries only obtainable in "cannister" form. -- Dixon Kemp, A Manual of Yacht and Boat Sailing (4th Ed.), 1884.
Synonyms [ edit ]
Derived terms [ edit ]
Translations [ edit ]
person obsessed with state of health French: hypocondriaque (fr) m
Greek: υποχόνδριος (el) m ( ypochóndrios ) (ypochóndrios) Spanish: hipocondríaco (es) m
Synonyms [ edit ] |
So often we see angry young people in conflict. Here are 10 who are peace-building:
Emma Watson, UK. Actress Emma Watson became a UN Ambassador for Goodwill at the age of 24. When her speech for the HeforShe campaign went viral her passion for women’s rights rsonated with advocates around the world. (Photo by Kingsley Huang, CC)
Victor Ochen, Uganda. Victor grew up surrounded by conflict in the Lira district in northern Uganda, but he chose to be a peace activist. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and is a UN Global Goals Ambassador. His organization, the African Youth Initiative Network (Ayinet), helps thousands of victims of the Ugandan civil war get treatment and overcome the traumas of the war. (Photo by U.S. Institute of Peace, CC)
Nino Nanitashvili, Georgia. Nino has dedicated her career to peacebuilding and development through evolving technologies. She founded the first technology-oriented professional community in Georgia and directs a project that brings Georgian and Abkhazian youth together through online games. (Photo by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs)
Chris Eigeland, Australia. Chris is the Australian youth representative to the UN, founder of The Schoolbag initiative, and director of Global Voices – a not-for-profit providing pathways for young Australians to contribute to international diplomacy. (Photo by UnYouth)
Omang Agarwal, India. Omang is the Asia Representative for the Commonwealth Youth Peace Ambassadors Network. He founded Youth for Peace International and is a big believer in peace through education. (Photo by Your Commonwealth)
Khalida Brohi, Pakistan. Khalida is the founder of Sughar Women (now Sughar Empowerment Foundation), a nonprofit empowering women in 23 villages across Pakistan. Through a six-month course with Sughar, women gain business skills and graduates get small loans to start businesses and help connecting to markets. (Photo by TEDX)
Ahmad Shakib Mohsanyar, Afghanistan. Ahmad wants to counter the narrative that youth need to leave Afghanistan to improve their lives. He founded a social media campaign titled “Afghanistan Needs You”, which strives to make Afghanistan a better place for young people. (Photo by Kelsey Brannan ECAPASC US Department of State)
Esra’a Al Shafei, Bahrain. Esra’a is an advocate for freedom of speech and civil rights. She founded Mideast Youth, an online forum that amplifies the voices of dissent in the Middle East and North Africa, to promote social justice. (Photo by TEDX)
Basel Almadhoun, Palestinian Territories. Basel believes debates can change people’s ways of thinking, so he organises debates in Gaza. He received wide-spread media attention for his work organizing TEDx talks in Gaza to bring dialogue to a wider audience. (Photo by Kelsey Brannan, ECA/PASC, U.S. Department of State)
Malala Yousafzai and Shiza Shahid, Pakistan. You have no doubt heard of Malala, the young woman shot by the Taliban who went on to found The Malala Fund, but you also need to know about the fund’s co-founder and CEO Shiza. She has been beside Malala through it all, and is a driving force behind the fund’s good works. (Photo by Shiza Shahid)
All around the world, youth like these are working for peace right now to build a better future.
Reprinted with permission from Peace News.
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In September 2012, writer-illustrator Andrew Hussie – the man behind the long-running, lengthy and popular Homestuck webcomic series – announced a Kickstarter project, to raise funds for a video game set in his universe. It hit the $700,000 (about Rs. 4.48 crores) funding goal in less than two days, and had amassed over $2.4 million (about Rs. 15.37 crores) by the time the Kickstarter closed, making it the most successful comic-related campaign of all time.
But it ran into some problems, like many other major crowdfunding projects. The point-and-click adventure Homestuck game failed to deliver on time, missing its intended release period multiple times. By June 2014, the original release date put forth in 2012, it didn’t even have a name. Instead, Hussie announced that development was moving from an outside studio to the illustrator's in-house company, What Pumpkin.
In October that year, the game got a name, Hiveswap, along with the news that there would be two episodic games (the aforementioned Hiveswap, and a second one called Hauntswitch), which would have parallels between them, but could be played in either order, with your saved games carried over. More than a year later, Hussie posted an update saying it was moving away from the 3D graphics shown in the Kickstarter teaser, to a 2D system, for cost-efficiency and quicker production schedule.
Last year, a new release date was announced: January 2017; a date the game clearly missed. Things changed just a little over two weeks ago, with Hussie marking September 14 as the launch date for the first of two episodes. This time the developer is keeping its word, with Hiveswap: Act 1 now available for Windows and macOS.
The game is set in the world of Homestuck, but it has its own characters, and a storyline that is only loosely tied to the comics. You begin your adventure as a teenager in 1994 named Joey Claire, the elder sister of a nerdy boy called Jude Harley. The difference is last names is owing to the death of their mother, with Joey adopting her maiden name in her memory. Their father, described as a man who likes shooting and stuffing animals, is rarely at home.
What begins as a quaint day in the backyard of their sprawling mansion turns into creepy horror minutes later when a serpent-like monster shows up out of nowhere, chasing Joey into her room upstairs, while Jude escapes to his geeky treehouse. More monsters - each with a hideous green eye - show up later adding to your troubles.
Stuck in your room, you must figure out a way to contact your brother, and how to survive the day. Being a point-and-click adventure, gameplay in Hiveswap mostly consists of observing your environment, and clicking objects to figure out if you can do anything with them. In other words, moving your mouse around until it changes into a hand cursor.
While most items have a "look" option, some can be opened, searched, or fiddled with. This allows you to obtain things you need to progress in-game, be it taking out batteries out of a busted radio to put them in a flashlight, or getting milk out of a fridge to serve it to a "deercat", a fictional monster that Joey meets on an alien planet later in the game.
The puzzles also extend to keenly reading or picking up clues on sheets of paper in your immediate surroundings, and then using those to figure out your next move. But these puzzles are rarely ever complex, and you won't likely be scratching your brain at any moment during the first act of Hiveswap. If anything, we were left wishing that solutions weren't always as obvious as they seemed, since the 90s point-and-click games Hiveswap is based on were renowned for their convoluted logic.
And then there are the game's combat sections – Hiveswap calls these "strife" – which are triggered whenever you come across a monster. Except they don't resemble combat in the traditional sense, as you'll be tasked with figuring out a way to escape your precarious situation, which makes them another type of puzzle really. They could consist of tap-dancing and ballet (Joey likes to dance), or throwing treats or kitchen spices to distract a monster.
Comic first, game second
Hiveswap benefits from Hussie's experience as an illustrator, and the game's backgrounds are vibrant, colourful, and rich in detail. And Undertale developer Toby Fox has contributed to the game's music (because Hussie has worked with him before on Homestuck), which adds to the atmosphere of creepiness in parts.
On the story front, there are definitely some interesting nuggets of mystery and intrigue – at the centre of which is a portal that causes Joey and an unseen alien troll, who will be seen in Hauntswitch, to swap places – but it takes too long to get there. For what it's worth, it's bolstered by the kind of self-aware and self-referential dialogue that Hussie has shown with Homestuck, though that too can get tedious.
The bigger problem though is that Hiveswap suffers from a terrible imbalance on nearly every front, be it the art, music, or gameplay. While everything is brightly coloured, the central protagonist Joey wears only grey and black, and her face is completely white. Yes, it might be in keeping with the webcomic's look, but that doesn't make it appealing. The facial animations have their own issues, with the expressions not always corresponding to the situation the characters find themselves in.
Moreover, while most things are drawn in a modern style, others are pixelated as a homage to 8-bit years, which creates a rather jarring experience. It's possible that the game's switch from 3D to 2D had something to do with this, and it comes in the way of Hiveswap coming across as a "love letter to 90s adventure games", when compared to other games such as Thimbleweed Park, whose full retro tilt made you feel right at home.
Meanwhile, the game's music is organised into collections depending on what room you're currently in, rather than what section of the game you're playing. While that might work in an open-world scenario, it ends up being disorienting in a serialised story like Hiveswap, as you're never quite sure what mood it's trying to create. The game also suffers from terrible sound transitions, as moments of gameplay that intercut with cutscenes are devoid of any cohesion.
All those troubles contribute towards what feels like a unpolished experience, or one that's been cobbled together with no central vision. It almost feels like Hussie story-boarded the entire game as though he were making any other Homestuck comic, and then asked game developers to stitch it together to create Hiveswap.
That's in addition to the game's technical troubles, which includes no autosave function, the lack of keyboard support, and support for 16:9 resolutions only. In 2017, those are unacceptable compromises, the most egregious of which is the first. During our first playthrough, we assumed that Hiveswap would naturally have autosave, only to return the next day to find out our progress had disappeared.
Ultimately, Hiveswap is a let-down for fans of point-and-click adventure games, but much more so for fans of Homestuck, especially for those that contributed the millions that went towards its making. Some will just be happy with another addition in their beloved universe, but Hussie's newest creation is not just a far cry from its initial promise – it's also not enjoyable.
Pros:
Colourful background art
Self-aware adventure story
Cons:
Tonal imbalance in art, music
Puzzles are humdrum
No cohesive vision
Lack of autosave, keyboard support
Rating (out of 10): 5
Gadgets 360 played a review copy of Hiveswap on PC. The game is available via Steam for Windows and macOS at $7.99 (about Rs. 500). |
In a span of just more than 13 seconds, redshirt freshman Devon Allen cemented his status as a player to watch when the Oregon Ducks open the season this fall.
The nimble wide receiver won the 110-meter hurdles title this weekend in the NCAA track and field championships at Hayward Field, surprising even his track coach.
Article continues below ...
Allen leaned in to finish two-hundredths of a second in front of USC senior Aleec Harris, then thrust his hands into the air in victory.
”I tried to show no emotion, but I had to,” he said. ”I was just really excited to win and to score some points for my team.”
His time of 13.16 seconds set a record for the NCAA championships, besting Olympic gold medalist Aries Merritt’s mark of 13.21 set in 2006 for Tennessee. Allen is the first freshman to win the national title in the event since San Jose State’s Dedy Cooper in 1976.
Allen also has the fastest collegiate time since Renaldo Nehemiah set the NCAA record of 13.0 in 1979 while running for Maryland.
On top of that, Allen’s victory in the event propelled the Ducks to the team’s first national championship since 1984. Top-ranked Oregon finished with 88 points, 18 ahead of runner-up Florida.
While Allen reveled in the Ducks’ team victory, he already was looking forward to football season.
”I had a good day today,” Allen said after his run. ”But it’s still football first for now.”
Allen first grabbed attention during the Ducks’ annual spring game in early May, catching a pair of touchdowns and earning MVP honors.
Oregon needs him. Josh Huff, who set an Oregon record with 1,140 yards receiving last season, has graduated along with fellow receiver Daryle Hawkins. And De’Anthony Thomas, who played at receiver and running back, left school a year early to go pro.
Allen joins a receiving corps that includes senior Keanon Lowe and junior Bralon Addison, who was injured in the spring, as well as sophomores Dwayne Stanford and Chance Allen. Basketball player Jonathan Lloyd, who had an additional year of eligibility outside of hoops, also plans to play at receiver next season.
None of the returning receivers caught more than 20 passes last season.
Allen, who redshirted last year, never thought he’d be vying for a track title. But as the season went on his confidence grew.
”It’s just a lot of training,” he said. ”I was doing so much at the beginning of the year that I think my body was kind of tired. I had to lose about 20 pounds from football season to be able to run efficiently and as the year started going I was feeling better and getting faster.”
Track coach Robert Johnson was as shocked at Allen’s win as everyone watching. All the Ducks needed at that point to win the team title was a point – which Allen would earn just by finishing.
”I say to myself as soon as the gun goes off, `Just get through the hurdles. That one point will be our 24th point and I don’t care what they do after that,”’ Johnson said. ”Then he passes me, I’m sitting at hurdle six, and he’s probably in third. Then I look at the monitor and he’s in second, and then he runs off that last hurdle better than most.”
Johnson said that Ducks football coach Mark Helfrich helped Allen realize his goals on the track, excusing him from some of his other obligations.
Many of Allen’s football teammates went to Twitter to note the feat.
”Wow!!Congrats to Devon Allen for winning nationals in the 110 hurdles you are amazing! Honored to be your friend and teammate (at)DevonAllen13,” posted offensive lineman Doug Brenner.
Oregon finished 11-2 last season, capped by a 30-7 victory over Texas in the Alamo Bowl. They were ranked. No. 9 in the final AP Top 25. |
Witness Universal Studios Singapore‘s gradual transformation into a world of terror, directed by the vision of The Minister of Evil, in the HHN4 Before Dark photo reports.
Dejiki.com’s Before Dark series is a day-time photography log showcasing the elaborate creative work behind Universal Studios Singapore’s frightening blockbuster event, Halloween Horror Nights 4. Check out past years’ Before Dark features here.
◂ Minister of Evil ▸
The entrance of Universal Studios Singapore is now adorned with two grim pillars, welcoming guests to the new world ruled by the The Minister of Evil.
These solemn stone pillars have the HHN4 logo embedded into them and are likely to glow at night.
Hollywood Boulevard: Under new management.
Big screen in the middle, ensuring a decent view of the new leader, for all.
I’m sure we’ll all be blinded with envy of the Minister’s prowess… in some ways or another. Look at all those lights!
◂ Demoncracy ▸
Lady Liberty falls, while demonic forces rise at New York zone.
The props bring nothing but a promise of a dark future.
◂ Bogeyman ▸
Sting Alley (Water Street of New York zone) is now crammed with countless cupboards and cabinets. Terrifying surprises will await guests at every turn.
It’s just furniture. But is anyone else feeling the chills?
More curious, gigantic toys and a twisted playground lie ahead towards the path to Sci-Fi City.
At least the artwork here is cute.. so far.
Beyond closets, cabinets and playgrounds: A trail of iron meshes lining a cramped corridor for the damned.
And more cubes.
More.. stuff. Did all of these come from House No. 13?
◂ Canyon of the Cursed ▸
Yet to be cursed. Enjoy it while it lasts.
◂ Scary Tales ▸
Minimal stuff to report here. Well, except some wires appearing around the area:
The frayed, broken ropes around the canopy at the entrance to Jurassic Park have even replaced.
Fixtures are installed at two sides, probably to light up the giant storybook pages at this scare zone.
◂ The Haunted Houses ▸
Construction is ongoing at all haunted houses. Unless the park is kind enough to extend a behind-the-scenes tour for us, we’ll only have these limited shots from the outside. I must warn everyone, DO NOT trespass, please! Construction is going on at these backstage areas, so for your own safety, don’t wander about. Unless you don’t mind having something haunting you for the rest of the year.
One of the military buildings at MATI CAMP. Some metal fences (from Total Lockdown, in 2012?) spotted at the bottom left.
Looks like there’s no running from Jing’s Revenge, with that maze-like layout! Can’t wait.
Some alien spaceship thing spotted at The L.A.B.
Stay tuned for the next BEFORE DARK…
Want more updates on Halloween Horror Nights? Subscribe to dejiki.com or Like Dejiki.com on Facebook today!
Are you brave enough..?
Ever thought of attending Halloween Horror Nights 4? Get all the event and ticketing information you need at the 2014 Guide to Halloween Attractions in Singapore here! |
It wouldn’t be a proper World Cup if a Premier League club weren’t being linked with potential starlets after a couple of promising performance off the bench, and Divock Origi is the latest and greatest to fill that void for us.
With some fine movement and a confident finish against Russia, the 19-year-old striker booked Belgium’s place in the knockout round with a 1-0 victory that masked yet another lethargic display from the Red Devils in general.
The key for Marc Wilmots’ side has been that while they have lacked the verve and flair of the likes of Netherlands so far, they have yet to get out of first gear and are already through to the last-16.
Belgium have so much attacking talent and defensive strength that should they finally hit their stride, they could well be the ‘dark horses’ that practically everybody predicted them as before Brazil.
With Romelu Lukaku struggling badly against both Algeria and Russia, Origi has been entrusted to come on and change the game – and Liverpool are said to be suitably impressed, with Tony Barrett of The Times suggesting that Liverpool are reportedly closing in on a deal for the striker.
Liverpool are closing in on a deal for Belgium international Divock Origi. Spurs are also interested but Liverpool lead the race. — Tony Barrett (@TonyBarretTimes) June 25, 2014
Tottenham are also said to be interested, though Brendan Rodgers’ side leads the race according to Barrett, given that they can offer Champions League football.
Given that there is such a clamour for the youngster’s signature, it would be prudent to see how he has performed so far for his club Lille.
Origi played 29 times for the Ligue 1 side last season, scoring five goals. Two of those strikes came from outside the box, though the striker is also a threat in the air, scoring a header as well. He also created 18 chances, and his passing accuracy of 78 percent is respectable for a young forward.
The Belgian looks to be a clever striker, with 72% of his shots finding the target: he has scored five of 18 efforts on goal, and does not look to shoot when the chance is not on.
Origi effectively played the role of super-sub during the last campaign, coming off the bench in 18 of his 29 appearances, and he played just one full game in the French top-flight. If Liverpool do secure a move for him, it is clear that much work will need to be done in order to make sure he is up to the demands of the Premier League.
The striker is keen on a battle though, winning 11 of 19 tackles, though succeeding in just 23 of 54 aerial battles suggests he will need to pick and choose his battles – with a muscular frame and standing at 1.85m, those figures should be higher. He did, however, win 21 fouls and give away 20, showing he can se his frame to his advantage to win set-pieces high up the field. He posted a commendable Squawka Performance Score of 216, and won four Squawka Awards for Best Attack.
An impressive 22 successful take-ons shows that Origi is more than comfortable with the ball at his feet, and his goal against Russia highlighted his excellent movement off the ball to lose experienced opponents at the highest level.
In his two World Cup appearances, Origi’s two shots have both been on target – one of which was, of course, the goal – and has won two of his three headers, as well as four of seven attempted take-ons.
A passing accuracy of 64% is nothing to shout about, but given that he is effectively a substitute for a top-three side in France, that will improve given more training and confidence.
The question is where he would fit in at Liverpool should the reports be true; Rodgers is well-stocked for forwards given the signing of Rickie Lambert, but with the future of Luis Suarez once again uncertain following his reported bite on Giorgio Chiellini at the World Cup, it would be no surprise to see the coach planning for a future without the Uruguay star.
Due to his age and the form of Suarez, Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling, Lambert was presumably signed to offer the Anfield side something different off the bench – and if Origi made the switch, he would likely fulfil the same role. The 2014-15 season will be a long one for the Reds with the added strain of Champions League football and travel, and should they want to launch another Premier League title challenge as well as have an interest in the cups, Rodgers will need all the help he can get.
With Iago Aspas disappointing and Fabio Borini set to be offered to Southampton as a potential makeweight in the deal for Adam Lallana, Rodgers would appear to be trimming his squad, cutting the fat and making it a tougher proposition for the season ahead.
It would be wrong – as, undoubtedly, many Liverpool fans have already done on social media – to think to Origi will simply sweep into Anfield and set the place alight. After all, a number now place the 19-year-old’s ability above Lukaku for the sheer reason that the Chelsea forward has struggled in Brazil, conveniently forgetting his excellent goalscoring displays on loan for both West Brom and Everton over the past two years.
Origi, though, has given us a taste of what he could be for both Lille and Belgium. The striker has displayed fine movement, a willingness to run for the ball and battle to get it back, and a clear eye for goal. There is no doubt that Rodgers would be once again paying for potential, and such deals can go either way for a multitude of reasons. But though the World Cup inevitably sets the wheels in motion on many a poor deal, Origi looks like he could well be the real deal – given time, that is. 67 minutes do mot make a man, but with the coaching of Rodgers, Divock may well be one Red Devil that Liverpool fans come to love. |
This story originally appeared in our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review. Buy back issues of the magazine here.
In the summer of 1963, a tenor saxophonist named Albert Ayler moved into a room in a flat owned by his aunt, across the street from St. Nicholas Park in Harlem. It wasn’t the 27-year-old’s first trip to New York City, but this time he’d come intending to stay. Ayler was heading into the New York jazz epicenter as a complete unknown. It was a tumultuous time for a music in the process of splintering into fragments, building on its storied past but unsure where it would go next. Giants of bebop like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk were alive and well and cutting important records (the latter would in another year be on the cover of Time); Miles Davis was in a transitional period, but was on the verge of making some of his finest work, with his second great quintet right around the corner; Charles Mingus was humming at a creative peak, and Duke Ellington had been canonized but was still busy. If you wanted to be someone in jazz during this era, a time when the music still commanded attention, New York, then as now, was the place to be. |
Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, has won the praise of many conservatives because of his judicial record, but he’s also getting some blowback from the far right because of his church affiliation.
“Be advised: Gorsuch attends a church that is rabidly pro-gay, pro-Muslim, pro-green, and anti-Trump,” Bryan Fischer, the rabidly anti-LGBT American Family Association radio host and columnist, tweeted today. This came even though AFA president Tim Wildmon has lauded Gorsuch.
Gorsuch does attend a liberal church: St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colo., The Washington Post reports. The Episcopal Church as a whole has become LGBT-affirming over the past several years, blessing same-sex marriages and ordaining LGBT clergy. The denomination has also ordained women priests for decades, and it is concerned about environmental issues and opposes discrimination against people of any faith — views that meet with approval from liberals, moderates, and even some conservatives, but are anathema to far-right outliers like Fischer.
And St. John’s clergy often take what could be characterized as liberal stances, while recognizing that there is a diversity of views in the congregation. The day after Trump was elected, the Rev. Susan Springer, St. John’s rector, wrote to members urging them to behave in a godly fashion and spread hope even though “the world is clasping its head in its hands and crying out in fear,” the Post reports.
After the mass shooting at the Pulse LGBT nightclub in Orlando in June, church officials decided to ring its bells 49 times, for each of the 49 people killed, each Wednesday until Election Day to call on Congress to take action against gun violence, according to the Post. “Some of us are pro-gun and some of us are anti-gun. Even so, as people of faith we share in common an aversion to gun violence,” read a post on the church’s Facebook page. “We hope the ringing … compels our elected lawmakers to hear and remember their solemn duty to both the dead and the living: to stop political posturing and to work together to pass legislation that fosters greater safety.”
On the day of Women’s Marches around the world, January 21, Springer attended one in Denver, the U.K.’s Daily Mail reports. And St. John’s, like the Episcopal Church as a whole, encourages members to be concerned about climate change — the Boulder church has solar panels on its roof — and is LGBT-welcoming. Clergy members have also spoken out against anti-Muslim discrimination.
Gorsuch, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, based in Denver, is active at St. John’s, often serving as an usher, the Post reports. His wife, Louise, sometimes leads prayers and reads Scripture, and their daughters participate in services as acolytes.
He would be the first Protestant justice on the Supreme Court since John Paul Stevens retired in 2010. Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Anthony Kennedy are Catholic, as was the late Justice Antonin Scalia, whom Gorsuch would replace. Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan are Jewish.
Despite his affiliation with a liberal church, Gorsuch’s rulings have been largely conservative. He has, for instance, asserted the right of employers to exclude contraceptive coverage from group insurance plans if this conflicts with the employer’s religious beliefs. And he has some unpublished rulings that are hostile to the rights of transgender people. Many LGBT and progressive groups, along with Democratic senators, oppose confirming him to the high court.
Another conservative evangelical, Rev. Rob Schenck, has a more measured view than Fischer of Gorsuch’s church membership. In a recent blog post for his group Faith and Action, Schenck wrote that many Episcopal beliefs would “make Antonin Scalia roll over in his grave,” but added, “In my estimation, the Gorsuch church story suggests at the very least that the prospective Supreme Court appointee can get along with a wide swath of people, including social and religious progressives.” That may allay liberal fears about him while planting doubts in conservatives, remarked Schenck, who still supports Gorsuch, as do most conservative religious types. And most liberals still oppose him, going on his record rather than his religious affiliation. |
The host, a woman known by the pseudonym Ms Marmite Lover, regularly holds themed evenings at her home which she has recently transformed into new dining experience "The Underground Restaurant".
The not-for-profit event, which has been renamed "Generic Wizard Night", was to have a menu of dandelion wine, pumpkin soup and Dumbledore's favourite - mint humbugs. Guests would have been led down 'Diagon Alley' by the side of the house and been met by a portrait of the "Fat Lady" who would have demanded a password before they could be let in.
But the plans were scuppered when Warner Brothers heard about the themed dinner.
A letter from their legal and business department said: "Dear Ms Marmite Lover. While we are delighted you are such a fan of the Harry Potter series, unfortunately your proposed use of the Harry Potter properties... without our consent would amount to an infringement of Warner's rights."
Responding to the letter Ms Marmite said: "I understand that you need to protect your rights, but this is two dinners, one-offs, from which I am not making a profit, inspired by the books and the mentions of food in them. My daughter is a huge fan, even an obsessive." |
Here’s my book! Okay it’s really a novella – a love story set against the backdrop of the Shanghai metro. I’ve already moved about 50 copies and the response has been satisfactory so far. It’s illustrated by photos from Tom Carter, photographer behind one of the my favorite China photo books, China: Portrait of a People. You won’t find any foreigners in this book, just Chinese people. And I wager you won’t look at the subway the same way again.
I’m selling copies for RMB100 – which is just enough to cover production costs – plus shipping if you need it shipped. There’s no e-version of this one. Each comes numbered and signed. Support your local arts!
Email me at leeallenmack@gmail.com or you can message me through my Wechat OA – ConfuciusSez. |
Journalist-Registration Bill Is Modeled On Gun Law, S.C. Lawmaker Says
Enlarge this image toggle caption John Bazemore/AP John Bazemore/AP
Criminal background checks and assurances that a person "is competent to be a journalist" are among the requirements put forth by State Rep. Mike Pitts in a new bill in South Carolina's Legislature. The bill would also create a responsible journalism registry.
Titled the South Carolina Responsible Journalism Registry Law, the bill quickly drew condemnation from rights groups after it was introduced Tuesday (when it was also referred to a committee).
The bill is "another (unconstitutional) waste of tax dollars," says the South Carolina branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"We would fight it tooth and nail," says Bill Rogers, the executive director of the South Carolina Press Association.
Rogers doesn't believe the measure has much of a chance to move forward, but via email he also says the issue "highlights the importance of NOT having the government regulate journalists."
Rogers also notes that some of the bill is patterned on gun registration laws — something Pitts, a Republican from Laurens, S.C., has acknowledged.
The bill lays out fines — and prison time — for a "person who works as a journalist without registering," culminating in a maximum punishment of either a $500 fine or a 30-day prison term. Those who head media outlets that hire unregistered journalists would be subject to the same penalties.
"Basically, it is the (concealed weapons permit) law with journalists and pens instead of guns," Pitts tells the Greenwood, S.C., Index-Journal.
"My real issue is simply to start to debate about all of your constitutional rights. And that they are all equally important, and they are all separate," Pitts tells the newspaper. "This was an easy parallel."
According to the Index-Journal, Pitts "does not necessarily want the bill to pass," but he wants to generate a debate over First and Second Amendment rights.
Of course, Pitts isn't the only lawmaker to use a bill to make a point. Earlier in the same legislative session, State Rep. Mia McLeod, a Democrat from Columbia, submitted a bill establishing new requirements on prescriptions for drugs that treat erectile dysfunction — including obtaining a notarized affidavit from "at least one of the patient's sexual partners."
According to The Post and Courier, McLeod "acknowledged the idea is likely to go nowhere but wanted to send a message to the male-dominated and Republican-controlled General Assembly about laws governing women, including restricting their access to abortion." |
Mitt and Ann Romney after his concession speech on election night. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Immediately after the November election, all of the reporting suggested that the Romney camp was in total shock. “Shell-shocked,” said one news report. It quoted a Romney senior adviser saying, “I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming.”
Well, that wasn’t true — even within the Romney campaign. In “The Gamble,” Lynn Vavreck’s and my new book on the 2012 presidential race, we report that the Romney campaign’s own internal data showed that it would lose. We write:
One senior Romney strategist told us that his simulations based on the campaign’s internal polls gave Romney an 18% chance of winning by the end.
This same strategist told us that these simulations never showed Romney being more likely to win than Obama, even after the first debate when the polls narrowed.
This is a very different story than what emerged after the race. Then, the story was that the Romney campaign and the Republican party had bad polls:
Sources familiar with Romney’s polling say that it underestimated the Democrats’ 6-point voter identification edge, nationally, and put far too much stock in what one Republican operative called “false signs of Republican enthusiasm.” Multiple Republican pollsters also acknowledged that they misjudged how many young people and minorities would show up to vote.
And maybe Romney’s polling did underestimate how well Obama would do. But it didn’t forecast that Romney would win.
The bigger problem within the campaign seemed to be that some strategists put folklore and instincts before their own data. Another passage from “The Gamble”:
“We’re picking up steam,” a tired but enthusiastic Romney campaign staffer told Vavreck in September. “The rallies seem really energized. People love him. We’re going to win this thing!”According to a top Romney strategist, staff who traveled to battleground-state rallies from the campaign’s Boston headquarters came back and said the same thing as Election Day approached. One staff member who attended a rally in Philadelphia said, “That is not what a losing campaign looks like.”
Of course, there was no reason for the Romney campaign to say publicly that it was losing. Losing campaigns always put on a brave face. But after losing, the surprise and dismay within the Romney campaign seemed to stem less a failure of its own polls and more from a failure to let those polls take precedence over instinct and subjective judgment.
You can buy “The Gamble” here, and read more about it here. |
In the very early days of developing for iOS (or “iPhone OS” as it was then called), designing a UI was relatively simple - with just one screen size to design for, it was possible to create a pixel-perfect design. Fast-forward to today and there are many more screen sizes, making old UI approaches completely unscalable. Apple has introduced a few different techniques to deal with this fragmentation however, primarily the concept of Adaptive Layout.
In this talk at GOTO Conference CPH 2015, Sam Davies dives into what Adaptive Layout is and runs through several live examples to cover the concepts of Adaptive Layout, as well as some tips for using Interface Builder. He also discusses some best practices to deal with multiple screen sizes, taking inspiration from the web, Android, and iOS.
My name is Sam. I am @iwantmyrealname on the Twitters, and I work for a company called Razeware that is responsible for the small company behind the massive team effort that goes on for raywenderlich.com. Let’s talk about some Adaptive UI!
In The Beginning, There Was… (1:16)
Back in the dark ages when we developed for “iPhone OS,” as it was called, back in the dark ages, there was one size we had to build for: the nice, old 3.5 inch iPhone, and designing layouts was easy. Realistically, you did also have to deal with landscape, but that’s only two sizes. If you were on an iPhone, more often than not, you would just say you’re not allowed to do it landscape, it has to be portrait. Those were the days.
Then came along the iPad, this massive slate of stuff that was revolutionary. The difference in size between the iPhone and the iPad was huge. You could just build two completely separate apps, or potentially build the same app and do different layouts, but they were two separate apps.
Then came along the 4 inch iPhone, with the iPhone 5 and 5s. This was the same width as the 3.5 inch, it just got this extra little bit at the bottom. Perfect size to stick an ad in, and that was quite often what happened. Just stick something along the bottom, It doesn’t really matter. Quite often, if you still had a 3.5 inch phone, the design was for the four inch, and you would just end up with losing some stuff off the bottom and the app just wouldn’t work. Nobody really felt the need to worry about that kind of thing, we didn’t care about these people with old phones.
Then along came the iPhone 6 last year, copied from the form factor of Android. That was at 4.7 inches, and then the 5.5 inch, the massive iPhone 6 Plus, and 6s Plus now, copied from the world of dinner plates.
Finally, coming up soon, the iPad Pro is enormous, and it is yet another form factor we’ve got to deal with.
If you account for portrait and landscape, that is 12 different form factors that you’ve got to design for now.
In days gone by, we would’ve written code like this:
if UIDevice . currentDevice () . userInterfaceIdiom == . Pad { if UIDevice . currentDevice () . orientation == . LandscapeLeft || UIDevice . currentDevice () . orientation == . LandscapeRight { doSomething () } else { doSomethingElse () } } else { if UIDevice . currentDevice () . orientation == . LandscapeLeft || UIDevice . currentDevice () . orientation == . LandscapeRight { yetAnotherAlternative () } else { theFourthWay () } }
You would just investigate in your code what type of device was being used, then go and write some layout code. Or, maybe we’re in landscape, then we need to do some other particular bit of code. This behavior will not scale. You cannot continue to do that for 12 different form factors; it just doesn’t work.
Introducing Adaptive Layout (4:53)
This is why Apple released Adaptive Layout, a layer on top of the existing way that we do layouts. It abstracts the layout away from design specifics. We no longer care about the device type or orientation. Instead, we group all of these concepts together in hand-wavy things called “size classes.”
What are size classes? Rather than saying “You’ve got this many pixels or this many points,” we’re talking in terms of how much space there really is. How much room have we got to fit things in?
We divide size classes up into two different categories: compact or regular. Compact means there’s not much space, and that we’re restricted in some kind of way. Regular means there’s a normal amount of space, whatever that means.
We also talk about size classes in two different dimensions: horizontal or vertical. For example, you can be horizontally compact, and vertically regular. It’s just a way of specifying, the amount of space in a particular view.
Size Classes on Devices (7:34)
How do these concepts map to actual devices?
Horizontal Vertical iPad Portrait Regular Regular iPad Landscape Regular Regular iPhone Portrait Compact Regular iPhone Landscape Compact Compact iPad 6[s] Plus Landscape Regular Compact
When you take an iPad or an iPad Pro, it’s always regular in both dimensions. There’s always loads of space vertically and horizontally; there’s never any time on an iPad where you can’t fit the amount of content in that you want.
However, when you look at an iPhone in portrait, we say that it’s compact width; there isn’t much room, width-wise, on an iPhone. Then, when you turn it landscape, there’s not much space vertically. That’s now compact. If you’re reading lots of content or something on an iPhone in portrait, there’s plenty of room because you scroll up and down, but if you rotate it to landscape, you don’t scroll left and right. Nobody ever reads something and then scrolls all the way across to one side, and then scrolls all the way back to read the beginning of the next line. So, can say that it’s compact.
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With iOS 9, this starts to make a little bit more sense with the advent of multi-tasking. For example, an iPad is always regular/regular, irrespective of which orientation it’s held in. However, when you start doing multi-tasking, which is new in iOS 9, you can swipe in from the right and have another app come in on the right hand side. If you’ve got a new iPad, you can pull it further across and have two apps side by side. At that point, effectively, you’ve got an iPad running two iPhone apps next to each other. It may be an iPad app, but running in the configuration it would use if it were on an iPhone, with compact horizontal size class and regular vertical size class.
Then, in iPad Pro, I believe you can have two regular/regular apps side by side. By this point, we’ve abstracted it away from just device-specific dimensions. We can now have different things running on a device.
Adopting Adaptive Layout (11:16)
What is a sensible process for adopting Adaptive Layout? The end goal is that I create one storyboard that rules everything. You can use one storyboard that will run on an iPad, an iPhone, and all of the different iOS devices. We no longer have this problem where we’ve got four different storyboards, and we have to make sure we update every single one of them. Updates to one of them will then mean that everything updates appropriately. How do you go about it? I have a five-step approach I would recommend.
Build Base Layout This is the “let’s get everything that we want on the screen” step, or the layout that we want to happen most of the time. Choose Size Class Override Uninstall Irrelevant Constraints We’re talking Auto Layout here. You’ve got these constraints which determine the size and position of different views, and you can do this thing called uninstalling them. We’ve chosen a particular size class, and I want to take these constraints and throw them away. Add New Constraints Specific to Size Class This is to make sure that we get the layout we actually want in this new size class. Rinse and Repeat The important thing is to not go into your storyboard and build an iPhone portrait layout, then an iPhone landscape layout, then throw everything away before you move to iPad, etc. That doesn’t really help you at all. The approach is to start with a base layout, then work on top of it.
I gave a demo of this approach at GOTO Copenhagen 2015, which you can watch above. I explain how to shift a layout across different devices from a single base layout by installing constraints.
What types of things are adaptive? Constraints, for one. You can take a constraint and you can decide if you want it in this particular size class or not. That way, you can realign and reorganize your layout in many different ways, which is cool. But that’s not all that you can do with Adaptive Layout! Other things are adaptive as well.
You can also change the constant on a constraint. If you have a constraint that says, “The spacing between two views should be ten points,” then I can say, “If I’ve got enough space, then actually that should be a hundred points.” I can do that without having to delete that constraint and create a new one. Weirdly, you can’t change the constraint multiplier, though: if you need to change the multiplier, then you do actually have to uninstall the constraint and create a new one.
You can also change the font. If between an iPhone and iPad I want to change the font size to make it bigger on an iPad, I can do that fairly simply.
Finally, view installation, which is also quite important. If you have a layout for an iPhone that you want to reuse on an iPad, you’re probably not just going to want to change the font size and the spacing. You’re quite likely to want to add new views too, which is easy as well.
Size Classes and Fonts Demo (27:23)
Here is another demo I gave about changing size classes and fonts. Click here to watch it above!
Doing Battle With Code (31:12)
How does this all work in code? You can get a long way in Interface Builder, but you’re going to want to get in there and do battle with code eventually.
public class UITraitCollection : NSObject , NSCopying , NSSecureCoding , NSCoding { ... public var userInterfaceIdiom : UIUserInterfaceIdiom { get } public var displayScale : CGFloat { get } public var horizontalSizeClass : UIUserInterfaceSizeClass { get } public var verticalSizeClass : UIUserInterfaceSizeClass { get } @available(iOS 9.0, *) public var forceTouchCapability : UIForceTouchCapability { get } }
All this stuff exists in this new class alled UITraitCollection , which was introduced last year. It is now the place to find out different things about the device, including the user interface idiom (is it an iPhone, and iPad, etc?). You can get the display scale, which will give you one, two or three, depending on the number of pixels per point. You can get the two size classes, so if I can get hold of a traitCollection , I can find out what my current size class is. Then finally, if you’ve got an iPhone 6s or a 6s Plus, you can find out whether or not you’ve got 3D Touch, so you can determine how hard you’re pushing your finger through the screen.
You get a traitCollection by using trait environments. UITraitEnvironment is just a protocol that has a traitCollection property on it.
public protocol UITraitEnvironment : NSObjectProtocol { public var traitCollection : UITraitCollection { get } public func traitCollectionDidChange ( previousTraitCollection : UITraitCollection ?) }
UIScreen , UIWindow , UIPresentationController , UIViewController and UIView adopt the protocol, so that means if you’re inside any of those things, you can find out what your current traitCollection is, and hence, what size class you’re in. You just have to ask for the traitCollection , and then you’ll have what you need to know.
You’ll also notice this traitCollectionDidChange function. That would get called whenever the traitCollection has changed, but when would that happen? If I took an iPhone in portrait and rotated it, then the traitCollection of every view, view controller, presentation controller, the screen and the window will all receive traitCollectionDidChange because you’ve rotated it. You’ve gone from regular height, compact width, to compact height, compact width, or, on an iPhone Plus, regular width. You could use that to handle rotation or to handle any code-type things that you want to do when the traitCollection is altered.
Overriding Size Classes (33:44)
You can override size classes, but why would you want to do this?
extension UIViewController { public func setOverrideTraitCollection ( collection : UITraitCollection ?, forChildViewController childViewController : UIViewController ) public func overrideTraitCollectionForChildViewController ( childViewController : UIViewController ) -> UITraitCollection ? }
You could have built a view controller that has a particular layout for a given size class, and then you realize, “I’m on an iPad, but I’ve built a container view controller and I’m putting this other view controller in it. I defined the layout for compact width, because this view controller is so small, so I want a container view controller.”
In this case, you can use this traitCollection instead for this particular child view controller. I’m on this massive canvas of an iPad, but one of my child view controllers is quite tiny (i.e. compact width).
You could use the code above, and it’s quite simple to use: you build yourself a traitCollection with the overrides in it that you want, and you pass it to the child view controller through this method, which is on UIViewController .
The last protocol I want to introduce is UIContentContainer . This is a slightly more fine-grained way of dealing with transitions between traitCollection .
public protocol UIContentContainer : NSObjectProtocol { ... public func viewWillTransitionToSize ( size : CGSize , withTransitionCoordinator coordinator : UIViewControllerTransitionCoordinator ) public func willTransitionToTraitCollection ( newCollection : UITraitCollection , withTransitionCoordinator coordinator : UIViewControllerTransitionCoordinator ) }
Say you get a traitCollectionDidChange . All of a sudden, you’re just being told the traitCollection has changed, re-lay yourself out. How do you deal with making sure you’re handling the animations in a nice way? That’s where you want to use these methods that are on UIContentContainer .
UIContentContainer is adopted by UIViewController and UIPresentationController . These have this willTransitionToTraitCollection . Before the transition happens, you get told you’re going to move to this traitCollection , and within that, you get a transitionCoordinator .
transitionCoordinator allows you to say, “I want to do an animation, and I want to do it at the same time as whatever animations the system is doing.” This is really handy.
The other method on here is viewWillTransitionToSize . The question that everybody asks is, “My iPad is regular/regular irrespective of the orientation? That doesn’t make any sense.” This viewWillTransitionToSize method is helpful here. This gets called whenever the view controller changes size. Before iOS 9, that would only be on rotation, unless you were doing some complex view controller containment yourself. When you rotate an iPad, the top method of that will be called. Because the size will change, the bottom method won’t be called.
Rotation Deprecation (36:41)
extension UIViewController { @available(iOS, introduced=2.0, deprecated=8.0) public var interfaceOrientation : UIInterfaceOrientation { get } @available(iOS, introduced=2.0, deprecated=8.0, message="Implement viewWillTransitionToSize:withTransitionCoordinator: instead") public func willRotateToInterfaceOrientation ( toInterfaceOrientation : UIInterfaceOrientation , duration : NSTimeInterval ) @available(iOS, introduced=2.0, deprecated=8.0) public func didRotateFromInterfaceOrientation ( fromInterfaceOrientation : UIInterfaceOrientation ) @available(iOS, introduced=3.0, deprecated=8.0, message="Implement viewWillTransitionToSize:withTransitionCoordinator: instead") public func willAnimateRotationToInterfaceOrientation ( toInterfaceOrientation : UIInterfaceOrientation , duration : NSTimeInterval ) }
In iOS 8, these lovely old methods for dealing with rotation were all deprecated. You shouldn’t be using willAnimateRotationToInterfaceOrientation or didRotateFromInterfaceOrientation . But how do you deal with rotation now?
Use willTransitionToSize instead. Here is an example of that method being used:
override func viewWillTransitionToSize ( size : CGSize , withTransitionCoordinator coordinator : UIViewControllerTransitionCoordinator ) { super . viewWillTransitionToSize ( size , withTransitionCoordinator : coordinator ) let image = imageForAspectRatio ( size . width / size . height ) coordinator . animateAlongsideTransition ({ context in // Create a transition and match the context's duration let transition = CATransition () transition . duration = context . transitionDuration () // Make it fade transition . timingFunction = CAMediaTimingFunction ( name : kCAMediaTimingFunctionEaseInEaseOut ) transition . type = kCATransitionFade self . backgroundImageView . layer . addAnimation ( transition , forKey : "Fade" ) // Set the new image self . backgroundImageView . image = image }, completion : nil ) }
Don’t think of rotation as moving a device. Instead, think of it as your view controller changing size, because from the user’s perspective, that is what is happening. This example here uses a transition coordinator, and it calls animateAlongsideTransition on there. That allows it to say that when the rotation happens, the system will take your view controller and rotate it and re-size it for you in an animation.
Stack Views (37:57)
Stack views are new in iOS 9. If you haven’t used Auto Layout before, now’s a good time to get into it, because stack views will save you a lot of grief. Imagine I have a white view with three views inside it. How would I do that with constraints?
First, I’d need to pin the top one to the top and to the left and right hand sides. I’d need to pin the bottom one to the bottom. Then I’d need to add some constraints to space them as well. I’d also align them all along the middle, so that they’re all center aligned with each other. Finally, I want to specify their relative widths, and maybe say that the middle one will just use its intrinsic content size. That’s a lot of constraints, especially to build something so simple.
With stack views, I can reduce this effort from about 12 constraints to just a few. A stack view has properties on it, so I tell it what axis I’d like it to be oriented on, and I set some things like the spacing. I can say that they’re all aligned down the middle. I do have to use some constraints, because I have to position this stack view somewhere within its wider view. I could even add two more constraints if I wanted to pin it exactly to a specific size.
In Xcode, learn to love this button that looks like an arrow falling down stairs. That creates a stack view. From there, you can alter all kinds of different things.
The interesting thing about stack views is that they play very well with adaptivity. That means I can add size class overrides for things like the axis. For example, I can change it from being vertically aligned to horizontally aligned just by adding a size class override on the stack view. I can also change the alignment, distribution, and spacing really, really simply using adaptivity. They are quite really quite powerful when used with adaptivity, and are definitely worth a look.
Adaptivity Tips (41:17)
Get to Know Auto Layout There is a bit of a learning curve, but it’s not impossible, and it’s worth the effort. It’s not as hard as it might seem at first. Use Adaptive Layout for Broad Strokes You can’t expect to be able to do all of your layout using these adaptivity tools. They are there for you to get the layout pretty much right, then you can drop into code and start using the fine grain things that you want to do, like that view or transition to size stuff. Start with Base Layout and Then Override Never ever, ever go into a storyboard and say, “Well, I want an iPad, so I’m going to start with regular/regular. Now, I want to do an iPhone in portrait so I’m going to go regular/compact.” Instead, start the base layout with nothing, and then work out, thinking about what you want to change for this particular override. Life is Easier with Stack Views If you can use iOS 9, go and investigate them. If you can’t, there are some open source things out there that will be equivalent. They make layout so much easier. If you nest stack views together, it will make life so much easier.
Now is the time to get Adaptive. As I said, you’ve got 12 different layouts to do at the moment. You could do that with several different apps, you could do that with multiple storyboards. Give Adaptive Layout a go, and see whether or not you can get anywhere.
As a reminder, I am @iwantmyrealname on the Twitter, and you can grab the code for the demos I mentioned above at my GitHub.
Q: How do you deal with assignments? We’ve been used to them wanting everything pixel perfect.
Sam: That’s one of the major challenges associated with this adaptivity, and it’s something I think the web world went through several years ago with this kind of idea. I remember when I first did web design, I spent a very long time trying to make it look pixel perfect between Firefox and Internet Explorer and…I guess it was before Chrome, so Opera or somethin. You’d be there trying to work out why x was not identical to y, and eventually we seemed to have gotten over that phase into this idea that the content is the important part.
But what we don’t necessarily have is, I want a pixel perfect design here, here and here. That certainly seems to have worked in the web world. I think we need to do the same kind of thing. It’s all to do with education. If you say to your designer, “Yes, you can have pixel perfect designs, now design me 12 different designs, or more in fact.” If you tell them that they’ve got to design 20 different pixel perfect designs for that one app, then they might start to get some kind of idea of what this adaptivity does.
It becomes a matter of what elements you want in the design, i.e. “When it gets this narrow, how should we rearrange it?” Because that’s exactly what happens in the web, right? You lose that big menu bar across the top, and it becomes a hamburger drop-down thing that takes up the entire screen on an iPhone. That’s not necessarily the right solution, but the only way of doing is it is to demonstrate this stuff. Demonstrate getting out of the pixel perfect world and into a focus on content, while trying to make it look as good as we can in these different ways. |
You never expect school trustees to be in it for money and power. That's for big-league politicians, with their giant egos and insatiable appetites for control. School boards are supposed to be about concerned parents and citizens coming together for sake of the children.
But any journalist (including this one) who's ever been assigned to cover a municipal school board will gladly disabuse you of that wholesome notion. Instead of grassroots democracy in action, school board meetings often seem like they're taking a page from Lord of the Flies.
Petty, vindictive, crass, unsophisticated and self-interested are the descriptors that most come to mind after witnessing the antics of countless school trustees over the years. Such behaviour would be unacceptable from Grade 6 students, much less those entrusted to run their schools.
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A few years ago, after a string of expense and governance scandals, the Ontario government sought to clarify in law the responsibilities of school trustees. Job 1 was to be improving student achievement. Boards had to set up audit committees to make trustees accountable for their spending. The fix was in, or so we thought.
If anything, the situation has only gotten worse. School boards may well be the lowest form of representative democracy that exists, a function of anemic voter turnout (making for easily manipulated results) and candidates driven more by revenge or ideology than better test scores.
Nowhere is this mix more toxic than at the Toronto District School Board, the country's largest, with a $3-billion budget, more than 230,000 students and 30,000-plus employees. In the latest episode of the TDSB soap opera, war has broken out between several trustees (many recently defeated in the October election) and the board's top bureaucrat over the latter's apparent refusal to (1) explain an undocumented $200,000 payment to a catering company and (2) provide the board with a copy of her employment contract, which she negotiated with the discredited ex-board chairman who resigned amid controversy in June.
The provincial government has been called upon to intervene. The police already have. Last week, they laid charges against a retiring trustee accused of forcibly confining the top bureaucrat in a meeting room. The bureaucrat is alleged to have told the trustee: "I'm going to get you. I'm going to sue you."
Being a trustee doesn't pay much – about $25,000 at the TDSB – but the job comes with a $27,000 expense account. An internal audit revealed how one trustee expensed hand lotion, another $11.30 worth of chocolate bars. One bought an iMac since she found the board-issued Dell too heavy. One trustee spent almost $4,000 to go to Israel. It apparently had something to do with prayer space for Muslims at TDSB schools. She tweeted during "the entire trip," she explained.
The last TDSB chairman resigned in June after concluding a deal with China's state-controlled Confucius Institute to set up a Mandarin language and cultural program in Toronto schools. The deal, since cancelled, was just the final straw in a series of dubious decisions by the since-departed chair.
Trustees are supposed to decide which schools to close – or, in the TDSB's case, not close. A hundred and forty of the TDSB's 600 schools are less than 60 per cent full. Unlike the board's offices, dozens of schools are in a pitiful state of disrepair. But many trustees get elected on an explicit pledge not to close schools, since that's critical to winning a coveted union endorsement.
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Indeed, organized labour just had a banner election. At least 10 union-endorsed candidates won TDSB seats in the October vote, including several former staffers to New Democratic politicians. One new trustee is a particularly outspoken critic of Israel whose views are likely to create sparks at board meetings. The union-backed group ran under a banner vowing to overcome "oppression in all forms" at the TDSB.
If you're wondering why Toronto City Council is a mess, it's because many of the airheads and ideologues on council started out at the TDSB. School-board politics is often a gateway drug to higher office.
Unless things get dramatically worse, don't expect Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne or Education Minister Liz Sandals to do much to fix the dysfunction. Both women, themselves former school trustees, are wedded at the hip to the same unions that elected the new TDSB slate.
It's too bad for the kids. At least they're getting a lesson in democracy at its worst. |
The Associated Press
TAMPA, Fla. -- Former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan sued a disc jockey, the DJ's ex-wife and a gossip website Monday after a sex tape involving Hogan and the woman was posted online.
Hogan said in two lawsuits that he had consensual sex with his best friend's wife, Heather Clem, about six years ago in the Clemses' home, but he did not know he was being secretly recorded.
"Mr. Hogan had a reasonable expectation of his privacy, just as all Americans have a reasonable expectation of their privacy in their bedrooms," attorney Charles Harder said.
The video was posted on the online gossip site Gawker. Hogan is seeking $100 million in damages from the New York-based media company, which declined comment.
It's unclear who gave the video to Gawker.
In the suit against the Clemses, Hogan claimed the video caused "severe and irreparable injury which cannot be adequately compensated by monetary damages." Hogan is seeking the rights to the video in both lawsuits.
Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, wore a tight black T-shirt, black pants and dark sunglasses as he stood outside of the federal court in Tampa while his attorneys spoke to the news media. He did not comment.
It's not clear whether Hogan and Bubba the Love Sponge Clem are still friends. The Clemses have since divorced.
Hogan acknowledged on various TV talk shows recently that he had sex with Heather Clem while he was married to Linda Hogan. The Hogans have also divorced.
Hogan, his ex-wife and the couple's son and daughter have appeared on the reality show "Hogan Knows Best."
Stephen Diaco, a lawyer for Bubba the Love Sponge Clem, said Hogan was the best man at the Clemses' wedding and he is also a godfather to their child.
"My hope is that these two can preserve their friendship," said Diaco. "I can't comment on the suit. This has caused harm to Bubba and he didn't release it, he didn't condone the release of it. He wants to find out who did that and he wants that person to be held accountable."
It is illegal in Florida to record someone without their permission, but Hogan waited too long to file criminal charges. |
Kashmir was always a conservative society. I remember the culture shock I got in 1985, when my dad’s transfer brought me from the national capital to the ”backwaters of a backward region in a Third World country” (my coinage). After the callous poverty and misery on the streets of Delhi, and the grime of the hot dusty plains, Kashmir seemed exactly like the picture postcard Paradise of pristine beauty with its clear lakes, snow covered mountains and the breathtaking landscapes. It took a good part of three decades to find out the slime, grime, and filth of Paradise in the minds and hearts of my fellow compatriots which is famously dubbed as ”crab mentality”, after the well-known observed behaviour of crabs in a pot.
(AFP photo)
I was privileged enough to belong to what would be termed a fairly liberal family in the sense that they believed in the education of daughters and promoted studiousness and personal libraries. But yes, there were lines drawn on certain habits and lifestyles even though 1990 was far away yet. I must have disturbed my cousins a lot. My tomboyish manners and fearless attitude, what I call my ” Dilliwajaen’ (belonging to Delhi) view must have been a pain in their neck and in hindsight I amusingly see their Kashmiri ”kaekgi” (sarcasm) as pathetic attempts to break me knowing I lived life on my own terms.
So wearing skirts as a sports uniform for my school basketball team, prancing around in jeans/trousers, hobknobbing with boy cousins flying kites, and playing cricket and later discussing everything political and religious was at best tolerated with seething lips, gnashing teeth and clenched fists by the elders. But come 1990 and the burqa diktat by militant organizations enforced through acid attacks, my extended family got a license to further subdue my spirit they had not been able to break.
I still remember how the fear of militants was used to solve property or marital disputes, forcibly get unwilling girls married to arranged grooms and stop any inter-caste, inter-religious marriage with the open threat of ”sending militants after the Hindu or Sikh boy who had dared to lure our girl”. The advent of Islamo-fascism through Pakistan’s Shadow War / proxy war let loose a reign of terror and permanently cast a shadow over the aspirations of many women in the Kashmir Valley.
Yet like flood waters, nothing can stop the flow of progress. Just like the generation of our grandmothers had successfully shed the shuttlecock burqa made famous by foreign photographers such as Bernier in travel magazines, etc, as a regressive practice, the same way successive generations were progressing in small changes such as less number of children, sending all girls to school, allowing boys to take up unconventional careers and even opening up to the idea of girls and women leaving home to study/work in Indian and foreign cities. This is a considerable achievement for a region in the grip of Wahhabism/Salafism since the 1990s and constantly being pulled back to the 7th century by fatwas of mullahs and the misogynistic media and social networks.
We can muse all we want of how – had Kashmir not been used as a launching pad for Jihad against India (Ghazwa-e-Hind) by those who still believe in the unfinished business of Partition”, how much forward and progressive the Paradise might have been. But musing is self-indulgence and we do not have the time to do that when our youth are falling prey to the real threat of indoctrination and regressive altered Arabised history in the grand scheme of establishing meta-narratives. The thing is, as civilizations do, regressive practices that were once seen as a part of culture are being questioned the world over and the advent of technology has made it possible to get windows into every country and geographical region of the world.
Hence the narratives that my generation grew up with – that Pakistan was the land of the pure, that Arabia was the epitome of ethics and human rights, that Muslims did not live dignified lives in India, that the Ummah has always been a peaceful, tolerant one and had spread through the benevolent Kings, the Sufi mystics and the power of reasoning, so on and so forth, are shattering on a daily basis now. Hence the ” Oppression Olympics” of Muslims that closet Islamists in the guise of scholars, academicians, media spokespersons of upright citizens of the community like to peddle do not hold water, and incidents like the Pragash controversy, the Zubin Mehta concert fiasco, the Literary Festival cancellation, and the recent Zaira Wasim trolling lay bare the actual extent of the damage that Kashmir’s psyche has undergone in 27 years.
It may seem like harmless trolling to many apologists but they can never imagine how real trolling on the streets of Srinagar and other districts can seem like and what exactly women undergo if they wear pants/trousers, ride a scooty, walk alone with uncovered hair, without escorts or even dream of joining the fashion and entertainment industry. Though because of awareness and an improvement in police-public relations and the stigma attached to a harassed woman, physical violence is minimal – a far cry from the acid attacks and knee-cappings of the 1990s, yet the verbal abuse, the harassment in workplaces and families once a woman becomes prominent should give a visual of why Zaira felt the need to put up those deleted posts in the first place.
Misogyny has no borders in South Asia. It would be dishonest to say that Afghanistan is the most dangerous place for women, or that Pakistan is now cracking down on Taliban forces who shoot school going girls in the head, or that New Delhi / Bangalore is becoming safer for women. But the first step is acknowledging the deep rot which has set in our society since extremist forces took over and long before when it was taboo to question regressiveness in a particular community or culture. Women in the movies or as singers and dancers especially from Muslim backgrounds were always looked down upon and frowned on as ” nautch-girls”. It hasn’t been that long ago when one of India’s talented actor Shabana Azmi was termed as a ” naachne-gaanewali” by the so-called well-wishes of the Indian Muslims – the mullahs.
If the UN proclaimed adage that countries will progress only if their women are empowered is to be taken seriously then we need to take a stand against this mindset that women should not be seen or heard. Do not let the token Liberalism of apologists or two-faced, dishonest community leaders who work for interfaith harmony with the unwritten rule of ”you-do-not-point-at-regressive-practices-in-my-religion-and-I-will-leave-yours-alone” rule fool you. Women need to be upheld according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and not against some divine text, or centuries old, unconfirmed and heard sayings.
This is not just about women but men too. Patriarchy hurts men too and if future mothers are to bring up well-balanced, stable and respectful sons, then the mullah-politician-military nexus needs to be called out as well as the hypocrisy of the Right wing morality brigade and Left-wing postmodern moral relativism. |
One of the hobbies that I really enjoy is target practice. It requires focus and lots of practice. But most importantly, you need track your improvement (or lack of) objectively.
What better than using the Wolfram Language capabilities to do so!
The following image is a sample of a target placed about 10 yards away.
The first two objectives are:
Obtain the coordinates of the center of the target
Obtain a list of the positions of each impact for further calculations.
Finding the target center
Let's use an image of the bullseye to locate the center of the target. Using ImageCorrelate will help us do so.
findCenter[img_, kern_] := Module[{data}, data = ImageData[ ImageCorrelate[img, kern, NormalizedSquaredEuclideanDistance], "Byte"]; Rest@Reverse@First@Position[Reverse@data, Min[Flatten[data]]]] kern = Import["C:\\Users\\Diego\\Documents\\Documents\\Shooting\\10 \yds\\kernel.jpg"]; target = Import["C:\\Users\\Diego\\Documents\\Documents\\Shooting\\10 \yds\\scan0008.jpg"]; findCenter[target, kern] (*{761, 799}*) Show[target, Graphics[{Green, Disk[findCenter[target, kern], 10]}]]
Obtaining the distance of each impact to the center of the target
Using the morphological image processing capabilities of WL we can proceed to extract the positions of each shot. Based on the scanner resolution used to capture the image, the values returned are in cm.
shots[img_, kern_] := Module[{src, red, shotValues, center, values, data}, red = ColorSeparate[img, "RGB"][[1]]; shotValues = DeleteCases[DeleteCases[ Last /@ ComponentMeasurements[ MaxDetect@DistanceTransform@ColorNegate@DeleteSmallComponents@ Binarize[ Closing[ImageAdjust[Blur@Blur@Blur@red, {1, 1}], 2]], "Centroid"], {0.5, ___}], {___, 0.5}]; data = ImageData[ImageCorrelate[img, kern, NormalizedSquaredEuclideanDistance],"Byte"]; center = Rest@ Reverse@First@Position[Reverse@data, Min[Flatten[data]]]; values = (# - center)/100 & /@ shotValues]
Exploratory Data Analysis of a practice session
Now that we the functions needed we can process all targets of a given set.
files = FileNames["C:\\Users\\Diego\\Documents\\Documents\\Shooting\\10 \yds\\scan*.jpg"]; imgs = Import[#] & /@ files; results = Flatten[shots[#, kern] & /@ imgs, 1]; kde = SmoothKernelDistribution[results]; Show[ContourPlot[PDF[kde, {x, y}], {x, -5, 5}, {y, -5, 5}], Graphics[{Dashed, Line[{{0, -5}, {0, 5}}], Line[{{-5, 0}, {5, 0}}], Circle[{0, 0}, #] & /@ {1, 2, 3}, Red, PointSize[0.03], Point@Mean@kde}], ImageSize -> Large, PlotTheme -> "Detailed"]
Although the mean is located 0.6 cm to the left of the center, shots are slightly to the lower left cuadrant. I'm a lefty, so my defect would be the equivalent to shooting down and to the right for a right handed person.
Let's see what the marksmanship tutorial chart has to say about this issue.
I'm tightening the grip too hard while pulling the trigger. Will need to work on this more.
Now, what is the probability that I would hit the center within a radius of 0.5,1, 2 and 3.5 cm?
NProbability[ EuclideanDistance[{0, 0}, {x, y}] <= #, {x, y} \[Distributed] kde, PrecisionGoal -> 5] & /@ {0.5, 1, 2,3.5} (*{0.0349262, 0.139871, 0.491972, 0.856485}*)
Given that an commercial apple is about 7cm in diameter. I've got a 86% chance of hitting it from a distance of 10 yards. |
Truck load of marijuana plants seized from illegal grow operation in Placentia. #abc7eyewitness pic.twitter.com/y0EbMTZj5t — Marc Cota-Robles (@abc7marccr) October 16, 2017
A marijuana grow operation and thousands of plants were discovered in Placentia after firefighters responded to a report of a power pole on fire in the area.Placentia police received a report of the fire at around 3:18 p.m. Sunday. When fire crews arrived, they found out there was an electrical fire that had started on a telephone pole near the 700 block of S. Melrose Street near Orangethorpe Avenue.Police said the surrounding area experienced a power disruption due to the electrical fire.During the fire investigation, authorities determined there was a marijuana grow operation at a nearby building. Southern California Edison were able to trace the cause of the fire to a power surge coming from the building.Investigators said it was partly the smell that tipped them off.Authorities found up to 3,400 plants at the location, along with unsafe wiring and various chemicals, which prompted the Orange County Fire Authority to call its hazmat team to the scene to investigate.The value of the operation was estimated to be worth several million dollars, Placentia police said."It's one of the bigger ones I can remember, and we've had quite a few over the years," said Sgt. Bryce Angel with Placentia police.Officials believe the grow operation had been going on for several months."There's quite a few surveillance cameras on the outside of the business and a lot of secured mechanisms inside...it took the officers quite a while to get through the entire business, going through all the locked doors and whatnot," Angel said.An investigation was underway to find out who is behind the operation. No arrests have been made.Paul Saito, who lives down the street from the bust, has been involved in the medicinal industry for the last year, focusing on natural botanicals."It's OK to go and drink, but someone goes home and smokes a joint after work, you know, it's deemed bad from society," Saito said. "I think we need to change that outlook."Under California law, people can have up to six plants on their property. It doesn't allow for anything like what was found on Monday.So, can such large, illegal operations be stopped?"I don't think so in today's day and age. Unfortunately, there's too much money involved in the business," Angel said.Melrose Avenue between Orangethrope and Crowther Avenue was closed due to the investigation.If you have any information about this incident, you're urged to contact Placentia police at (714) 993-8164. You can also submit anonymous tips by contacting Orange County Crime Stoppers at (855) TIP-OCCS. |
How fast does a cheetah take off? Apparently so fast that some times it runs out of juice during the middle of a run and needs to take a break. That’s the case today as Busch Gardens Tampa’s latest coaster, Cheetah Hunt has Tampa fire and rescue working to get people off the coaster as one of the trains on the coaster has gotten stuck.
Cheetah Hunt is the latest coaster built at Busch Gardens Tampa, the coaster opened in 2011 to rave reviews. It’s a multi-launch coaster that uses LIM (Linear Induction Motors) that uses magnets to push the coaster off at high speeds. According to WTSP(click here for breaking news), the coaster became stuck with 16 riders on board in an area “hard to reach”. The coaster is in an area between launches, and is stuck on the track. The term is commonly referred to as “valleying”, which is simply when the coaster can’t make it between two break points. Mostly the term refers to a coaster that can’t make it up to the top of the next hill, though sometimes it can happen when conditions on the track, or with the wheels cause the coaster to stop suddenly.
It’s a relatively common problem, and nothing to be alarmed about. The media tends to blow coaster malfunctions out of proportion, simply because they happen so frequently. Coaster malfunctions do happen from time to time, but it’s hardly an every day occurrence. Serious injuries on coasters happen even less frequently. The last major accident on a coaster happened in 2013 when a woman fell out of the “New Texas Giant” at Six Flags Over Texas. The cause of that accident is under investigation, though it is believed (at this time) to be a combination of rider and manufacturer error, and generally considered to be a freak accident.
While Cheetah Hunt getting stuck is a rare occurrence, it does happen from time to time. During the media preview for Cheetah Hunt the coaster stopped without warning on the track, while we were on it.
Video-Cheetah Hunt stops on tracks at Busch Gardens Tampa
So, it does happen from time to time. Still, it shouldn’t sway you from riding, as we were right back on our way moments later. This time the coaster just didn’t stop in a convenient place, and it was made even worse by an approaching storm.
Update 5:33p.m.
Fire rescue are taking people off of the coaster, though it’s a slow process. At this time the coaster has about 13 people still on the ride. As expected, no injuries have been reported.
Update
Busch Gardens Tampa has released an official statement via their Facebook page:
At approximately 2:30 p.m. the Cheetah Hunt roller coaster unexpectedly stopped mid-ride with 15 guests on board. At the time the ride launched, weather conditions were clear and no storms were present. There was no indication of any operational issues with the ride prior to the launch. After attempts to shift the car back to its station proved unsuccessful, the decision was made to evacuate the ride. With the help of Tampa Fire Rescue, all passengers were safely evacuated and no injuries have been reported. The exact cause of the ride stoppage has yet to be determined. Busch Gardens takes the safety of its guests and employees very seriously and will conduct a thorough review of the coaster and its systems before reopening the ride.
It seems the coaster will be down until the park can figure out what caused the stall.
Update
Another official update from Busch Gardens Tampa confirms what we suspected, Cheetah Hunt will remain closed until they figure out what caused the stop.
Update: out of an abundance of caution Busch Gardens has decided to delay the opening of Cheetah Hunt to conduct additional testing to confirm the ride is operating as designed. Once the testing is complete, we will reopen Cheetah Hunt.
Update
Cheetah Hunt is now open, after a day of being closed.
Busch Gardens has confirmed Cheetah Hunt is operating within its design parameter and is open for guests today, Feb. 14. Safety systems for the ride performed as designed and all guests are able to safely disembark from the ride. All ride attractions are inspected daily by trained technicians to ensure they are operating properly. The safety of guests and team members is Busch Gardens’ highest priority.
So the coaster is deemed safe, and the rollback was just an odd occurrence.
Stay tuned for more information as we follow the story, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @BehindThrills for the latest updates!
For more information about Busch Gardens Tampa, including Cheetah Hunt, visit the official website by clicking here! |
Shocking and gory details have emerged out of the investigations in the suicide of a 14-year-old boy in Mumbai. The suicide could possibly be India's first case of death linked to the social media challenge called Blue Whale.
Mumbai Police said the boy was addicted to the game. Blue Whale is a challenge-based underground game with a shadowy history, and has previously been linked to suicides in Russia and other countries.
India Today accessed the exclusive picture which the teenager took just before committing suicide. The photo was taken by the boy sitting on the terrace parapet. In the photo, the boy's legs can be seen, and the photo was captioned, "Soon the only thing you would be left with is a picture of me."
Manpreet Sahans, the boy who committed suicide, jumped from his seven-floor building's terrace Photo: Saurabh Vaktania Manpreet Sahans, the boy who committed suicide, jumped from his seven-floor building's terrace Photo: Saurabh Vaktania
The boy who committed suicide lived in Sher E Punjab in Andheri East. The boy jumped from his seven-floor building's terrace on Saturday. The teenager, a class nine student of an international school in Andheri, stayed with his parents and two elder sisters.
He dreamed of becoming a pilot and had expressed a desire to go to Russia for training. Russia is the country from where the Blue Whale Challenge is believed to have originated.
Mumbai Police has given advisory to all parents in the city to be more vigilant with their children. Mumbai Police said, "Parents are in a state of shock. Two people watched boy jumping from terrace. We advise people to look after their children and keep tab on their behaviour."
CHILLING DETAILS OF THE SUICIDE
According to investigations, the teenager had been using the internet to search for ways to jump from the terrace. This search was done by him two days before he committed suicide. An insider informed that he, while leaving school on Friday, had told his friends that he wouldn't be coming to school on Monday.
the teenager's behaviour had changed completely from a week before. His parents had doubts about his intentions but they did not expect him to commit suicide. They are now in a state of shock.
On the day of the suicide, he went up to the terrace and sat on the parapet for over 20 minutes. While sitting on the parapet he was continuously speaking to his friends on social media where he informed that he is going to commit suicide, but no one took him seriously and thought that it might be a joke.
A police officer, who is part of the investigation said, "A person from another building saw him sitting on the parapet and kept asking him to get down. The teenager even took a selfie with the person from where he was sitting and posted it on the group. He told his friends that one person was stopping him from committing suicide and that he would jump once he goes down."
The man on the other building left from his terrace to save him, but the teenager jumped off the terrace when he saw the person coming his way.
The boy had already jumped by the time the man reached. The man took him to a local hospital but was declared dead there.
BLUE WHALE
Blue Whale Challenge is a social media phenomenon said to have originated in Russia and its creator was reportedly arrested by Russian police earlier this year.
The game gives players a series of 50 quests, with the final task asking them to commit suicide. The game also asks players to document the completion of each task in the form of photographs.
The players are supposed to send the evidence of their completion to the game's administrator who then qualifies them to attempt the next task. Blue Whale's tasks range from the seemingly harmless - watching a scary video at 4 AM - to the disturbing - writing/drawing on arms with sharp objects.
For the final task, players are directed to jump off a terrace building and document the final act in the form of photos/video as well.
Blue Whale Challenge has spread across several countries and taken lives of hundreds of teenagers. The Andheri suicide, however, would likely be the first such case in India.
Following the suicide, a WhatsApp message warning parents about Blue Whale Challenge is doing the rounds in Mumbai. The message, seen by India Today, talks about the Andheri suicide and warns parents and advises them to be wary of handling their childrens' mobile phones or other devices that could allow them to access the online challenge.
ALSO READ:
Exclusive: Mumbai teen kills self, could be first Indian case of Blue Whale suicide challenge
Man, blinded by heartbreak, commits suicide by jumping off Bandra-Worli Sea Link
WATCH: This is What a Social Media 'Like Farm' Looks Like |
AP Photo State’s Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy leaves, spurring confusion about U.S. diplomacy in region
The State Department unit that deals with Afghanistan and Pakistan has lost its top official and its fate is uncertain, even as President Donald Trump weighs increasing U.S. military presence in the region.
The development has spawned confusion inside and outside the State Department about the future of the section known as the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, or SRAP.
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Diplomats were initially led to believe that SRAP was being shut effective Friday and absorbed into the South and Central Asian Affairs Bureau of the State Department, which has seen its own leadership decimated. But late Friday evening, hours after POLITICO and other news outlets pressed for comment, and as criticism mounted, State Department spokeswomen Heather Nauert announced that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had not yet decided what to do about SRAP.
Nauert confirmed, however, that Friday was the last day in office for Laurel Miller, the acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Separately, sources confirmed that Friday was also the last day for a top Miller aide, Jonathan Carpenter, the acting principal deputy. People affiliated with SRAP held an impromptu farewell Friday afternoon, believing the unit would soon be part of the South and Central Asian bureau.
But in her statement, Nauert said the State Department will “maintain the Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs Offices, which currently report to the Office of the Special Representative, to address policy concerns and our bilateral relationship with these two key countries. The secretary has not made a decision about the future of the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
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It was not clear who would lead the SRAP office now that Miller is gone. Nauert did not directly say Miller won’t be replaced. But Tillerson has indicated he is unhappy with the number of special envoys and plans to reduce them.
The decision to phase out SRAP first came under then-President Barack Obama and the expectation was that its duties would over time be transferred to the regional bureau. A U.S. diplomat familiar with the situation said Tillerson and his staff had been repeatedly warned about SRAP’s coming phase-out and the need to transfer the policy portfolios in a proper way.
But the secretary of state appeared in no hurry to facilitate the transfer. Now, U.S. officials and other observers worry that the changes under Tillerson leave unclear who is responsible for handling diplomacy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan at a very sensitive time.
“What is alarming from a policy perspective is that the transfer of function is not clear,” the U.S. diplomat said. “We’ve long planned for SRAP to go away, but the intention was for the policy to be transferred responsibly.”
Added a State Department official familiar with the situation: “There is uncertainty about the leadership of the regional bureau given recent departures.”
Overall, the developments underscore the rapid erosion of leadership at the State Department under Trump and Tillerson and the potentially damaging effects it could have on U.S. diplomatic efforts. Trump and Tillerson have failed to fill numerous leadership positions across the State Department. The South and Central Asian Affairs bureau in particular has seen unusually high levels of top staff departures. Unlike other regional bureaus, it does not even have an acting assistant secretary overseeing it.
With no special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in place, it’s not certain who will hold the overall responsibility for overseeing the many relationships built with Afghan and Pakistani diplomatic counterparts. Such relationships need constant tending and can fade quickly.
Although there presumably will still be staffers, such as office directors, dealing with both countries, those positions do not carry as much weight as those of higher ranks. Even if one of those officials were named to a higher rank on an acting basis, he or she would still have limited sway over setting long-term policy.
Dan Feldman, a former special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, noted that the reduction in the U.S. diplomatic ranks comes as talks continue about surging U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, where the Taliban still threaten the U.S.-backed central government. Instead of beefing up U.S. diplomatic efforts, it appears the military will dominate the process.
“If the goal of that military surge is to help energize a negotiated political settlement in Afghanistan, which even military leadership acknowledges is the only long-term sustainable resolution there, how can that be accomplished with a neutered State Department?” Feldman said.
Tillerson is looking at ways to restructure the entire State Department and has indicated that one reason so many positions have been left unfilled is because he’d prefer to reorganize the building before filling all the roles. The Trump administration’s budget plan envisions a roughly 30 percent cut to the State Department, so there’s anticipation that Tillerson will try to cut many positions. In any case, because many of State’s leadership roles require Senate confirmation, it could be well into 2018 before the department’s top levels are filled out.
The South and Central Asian Affairs bureau is a good illustration of how stretched State officials are.
The U.S. diplomat familiar with the SRAP issue said the highest-ranking official at the moment in the bureau is the acting principal deputy assistant secretary, Howard Vanvranken, whose background is more in management than policy. The man who had been serving as the bureau’s acting assistant secretary, William Todd, was transferred earlier this month to help run State’s human resources bureau, which has also seen leadership turnover. The regional bureau’s Web page lists only one serving deputy assistant secretary, and he deals with Central Asian countries. |
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As a little guilty pleasure of mine, sometimes I enjoy watching tv shows where there’s a dispute of paternity involved. You know what kind of shows I’m talking about: those where the host proclaims “Trevor, you are NOT the father” and within a split second the audience is shouting, howling and/or clapping and the presumable “father” is doing something that resembles Dr. Zoiberg’s happy dance.
But how do paternity tests work?
The entire premise is quite simple; the man will provide a sample of his DNA by swabbing the inside of his cheek to collect epithelial cells and his genetic information will be compared to the one from the child. If they are around 50% similar to each other then the laboratory can attest that both parties are related.
When babies are formed they get 50% of the nucleic DNA from each parent to achieve the 100% they need to develop properly so if baby Trevor Jr. doesn’t have close to a 50% match of his DNA with Trevor Sr. then we can assume that they are not related.
However, what if I told you that there is a species in which the male that mated with the female and produced the baby was not the father? Even better, his brother (the baby’s uncle) is the father even though he never even met the mother!
This is so crazy but I can assure it’s true!
And if you are thinking that it must be some barely known species of fish or invertebrate you couldn’t be more wrong. It’s a small New World monkey, the Wied’s marmoset (Callithrix kuhlii) that lives in the tropical forests of Brazil.
How is this possible?
The reason is simple; you see, in nature there are some very special individuals that have more than one DNA set. These individuals are called “chimeras”. The name came from the Greek mythology where the chimera was a creature that was made up of parts of several others animals.
While in Greek mythology chimeras looked quite crazy with part lion, part snake and part deer (or other variations), the real life chimeras existing on our planet are less easy to spot but equality exciting and the Wied’s marmoset is a great example of it.
These South American small monkeys are very well known for almost always giving birth to fraternal twins. As embryos in the womb of their mother, the twins’ placentas get fused together from an early stage in the development thus allowing stem cells the freedom to be transferred between both siblings. These stem cells are the ones that will eventually set up groups of cells and developing specific parts of the body.
So now follow me in this situation:
Marmoset A(ndre) and B(runo) are twin brothers and both chimera (as in, they both have sets of DNA from their twin brother).
Because of them being chimeras, when they were born, Andre ended up with his DNA in most parts of his body (such as the brain, muscles, liver, etc) but his testicles developed using Bruno’s DNA that got transferred through stem cells while they were in the womb.
This means that when Andre’s testicles produce sperm, the genetic information contained in this sperm will in fact be Bruno’s DNA.
Andre and Bruno were living in a Zoo and before they reached maturity, Bruno got transferred and Andre stayed behind.
Eventually they both reached sexual maturity and Andre got a female (C)arla pregnant.
When the babies were born the Zoo wanted to check out who the father was and tested the babies.
Because Andre’s testicles were producing sperm with Bruno’s DNA, their dad, Andre was technically and genetically not the dad.
This is how Bruno managed to father some babies even though he never even met Carla!
Nature can be so complex and crazy that sometimes I wonder if I’m reading a scientific article or watching a Mexican soap opera.
In case you want to know more about this very interesting topic feel free to read the (very detailed) article published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Até à próxima!
~Sofia.
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Posted in Articles, Behaviour, Mammals, Mating, Research
Tags: Callithrix kuhlii, chimera, dna, genes, genetics, marmosets, monkeys, nature, primates, research, science, stem cells, twins, Wied's Marmoset |
We’ve just released a new patch for Heroes of the Storm that applies a few Hero and Talent balance changes, and fixes a few bugs. Check out the patch notes below.
Heroes
Assassin
Falstad
Hammerang (Q) BOOMerang (Talent) Damage increased from 121 (+4% per level) to 150 (+4% per level)
Hinterland Blast (R) Base damage increased from 411 (+4.75% per level) to 475 (+4.75% per level)
Developer Comments: We’re primarily seeing players run Basic Attack builds as Falstad, and would like to make ‘mage’ Falstad a bit more powerful. We also felt that Hinterland Blast isn’t doing enough damage with its higher cooldown, so we’re further increasing that damage.
Return
Jaina
Basic Attack damage reduced from 89 (+4% per level) to 60 (+4% per level)
Frostbolt (Q) Damage increased from 160 (+4% per level) to 190 (+4% per level)
Cone of Cold (E) Damage increased from 189 (+4% per level) to 200 (+4% per level)
Developer Comments: We’re starting to pull Basic Attack damage out of characters who don’t rely upon it, namely Jaina and Kael’thas. For Jaina, this will make less of her damage guaranteed and allow for more advanced plays. Jaina’s win rate is also a little on the low end, so we want to offset the Basic Attack nerf and add to her overall power by buffing Frostbolt and Cone of Cold.
Return
Kael'thas
Basic Attack damage reduced from 87 (+4% per level) to 65 (+4% per level)
Arcane Barrier (Talent) Shield amount decreased from 200% to 150% Duration reduced from 6 to 4 seconds
Gravity Lapse (E) Stun duration reduced from 1.5 to 1.0 seconds
Phoenix (R) Cooldown increased from 40 to 60 seconds
Pyroblast (R) Damage increased from 730 (+4% per level) to 810 (+5% per level) Cooldown increased from 50 to 100 seconds Presence of Mind (Talent) Cooldown reduction for Pyroblast increased from 10 to 25 seconds per enemy hero hit
Developer Comments: Kael’thas is a powerful hero with too few downsides. We’re nerfing several aspects of his kit, and are still planning a Talent overhaul coming soon™. The stun duration of Gravity Lapse is too long and guarantees kills more often than we would like. Reducing the stun duration makes it less frustrating to play against and adds a bit more counterplay for the enemy team. Phoenix is the drastically favored Heroic Ability right now, and it’s up far too often. By nerfing its cooldown, while also pushing Pyroblast to create more impactful moments, we expect there will be more situations where Pyroblast is the optimal pick.
Return
Nova
Snipe (Q) Damage increased from 268 (+4% per level) to 295 (+4% per level) Snipe Master (Talent) Damage bonus increased from 5% to 12% per stack Maximum stack bonus increased from 50% to 60% Maximum stacks decreased from 10 to 5
Developer Comments: While we are happy with the variety of Talent options Nova has after the rework, her overall damage is too low. We like Snipe Master, and it encourages a different playstyle, but a single miss resets a ton of progress toward the Talent’s reward. With these changes, players will get more out of Snipe Master without having to rebuild so many stacks after a miss. We’ve heard a lot of community feedback and suggestions about not removing stacks as long as your Snipe hits something. We’ve discussed this, but feel that even if Snipe misses the intended target, it still hits something the majority of the time. By making this Talent sharp, with an obvious downside, it allows us to crank up the tuning and really celebrate flawless Nova play.
Return
Thrall
Basic Attack damage reduced from 173 (+4% per level) to 165 (+4% per level)
Sundering (R) Cooldown increased from 70 to 80 seconds
Developer Comments: Thrall sits near the top of our win charts, so we feel that small nerfs to his damage and most-picked Heroic Ability are necessary. We expect this to only slightly nudge Thrall down, as we’re otherwise happy with how he is currently being played.
Return
Support
Rehgar
Ghost Wolf (Trait) (D) Basic Attack damage bonus reduced from 100% to 75%
Lightning Shield (W) Damage reduced from 36 (+4% per level) to 30 (+4% per level)
Developer Comments: Rehgar’s new Talents have opened up a number of different strategies and builds, which has been exciting to see. We like this more aggressive playstyle, but noticed that the majority of Lightning Shield Talents are now clear winners. Focusing nerfs primarily on Lightning Shield’s damage will help to reduce Rehgar’s win rate and open up even more Talent options.
Return
Warrior
Diablo
Fire Stomp (W) Fire Devil (Talent) Damage reduced from 23 (+4% per level) to 17 (+4% per level)
Developer Comments: Diablo has hovered near the top of our win rate charts for a while. We wanted to see how the Tyrande nerfs would impact him first, as we know those characters have very strong synergy together. We haven’t seen much of a dip in Diablo’s win rate, so we’re targeting a ‘must pick’ Talent with this nerf.
Return
Bug Fixes
Art
Lunar Jaina’s legs will no longer separate from her body on endgame score screens.
Battlegrounds
Dying will no longer cause the player’s Healing Well cooldown to reset.
Heroes and Talents
Fixed an issue that could cause Greymane’s Gilnean Cocktail to deal more than the intended amount of damage in certain situations.
Return |
It’s Memorial Day weekend, and that means summer is here. To celebrate, the Privateer Press Online Store is kicking things off with a Summer Sale loaded with great deals and bundles! There’s never been a better time to get into WARMACHINE and HORDES; we’re offering new 25-point starter army bundles with a free copy of WARMACHINE: Prime Mk II or HORDES: Primal Mk II! We’re also offering free international shipping on WARMACHINE and HORDES battlegroup boxes and the WARMACHINE Two-Player Battle Box. In addition, look for great deals on the Bodgers Game Scrappers and the Full Metal Battle Sport Grind!
It’s also your last chance to grab a copy of Voltron before it goes out of print forever! A complete stand-alone game, Voltron is also fully compatible with Monsterpocalypse. We’re offering Voltron at a special price and including a free limited edition gold Mega Voltron figure with every purchase while supplies last! Order your copy of Voltron before it’s gone forever!
Visit the Privateer Press Online Store now to take advantage of these great savings, and start your summer with a bang! |
WORDS
Neurofunk to me: you wake up, it’s 2pm it’s already dark, you get your breakfast and sit in front of a big computer. You don’t talk to anyone, all you can think of is yesterday’s frequency and you start working around it. It’s a lifestyle that’s similar to hackers; you’re surrounded by technology, you’re obsessed with searching. You’re inventing and you’ll never stop. You’re not social too much. You’re more of a scientist”. – Billain To me neurofunk is a way of life, since I’ve been producing it I’ve been no longer able to listen to the music in a “standard” way, you become a kind of scientist who analyzes and makes experiments in laboratory daily, you become the neurofunk”. – Maztek “To me it is just a term that tries to categorize a specific type of music you can’t really categorize. Neurofunk seems to be more of a full on movement these days. The music evolves too fast and constantly, so in my view you can’t really define the term musically anymore. That guy who wrote the neurofunk Wikipedia article actually described its very origin quite well. That old school neurofunk term to me is equal to Konflict’s Messiah or Ed Rush & Optical’s Point Blank. Whereas nowadays the sound of it is more diverse, digitized and a synthesized hybrid.” – Phace It’s the love of my life, besides my wife. For me it started in the late 90s, when I first heard the likes of Bad Company, Ed Rush & Optical, Stakka & Skynet, Konflict and the other pioneers – after experiencing their music, I knew I was hooked for life. Even when things seemed the darkest, about five years ago, when the never-ending mantra ‘D&B is dead’ was the strongest, several acts bailed and converted to dubstep – I started a neurofunk label. This how important neurofunk is to me.” – Jade It’s drum & bass that’s full – tonally and harmonically. Something that has you questioning how the hell the bass is so loud and rich and the drums are so clear and snappy, everything is clean but distorted and it doesn’t quite make any sense at all but somehow it all works. It’s almost impossible to describe without swearing or demonstrating with a shoe being thrown in a rave but if you hear something that makes you want to shout at someone next to you it’s quite possible it’s neruofunk you’re listening to.” – Xtrah
Phace describes it as the “punk rock of electronic music”, Maztek calls it “the rock & roll of electronic music”, Disprove describes it as “one of the most complete genres in electronic music”. We’re calling it one of the defining sounds in drum & bass 2015.
Cases in point: Noisia & The Upbeats winning Best Track for Dead Limit and Mefjus winning Best Album in the Drum&BassArena Awards. The success of Let It Roll Festival (lead picture) who have recently developed from their festival roots to launch their own label. The first Ed Rush & Optical album in over six years. Ed Rush’s brand new label Piranha Pool. Prolix’s new label Trendkill.
Truly unique, head-bending designs on tracks like June Miller & Mefjus – Saus and Billain – Kingston Drone. Current Value’s return from crossbreed to D&B. The Beatport dominance of Eatbrain and Blackout. The support it’s had on the most dominant D&B labels such as Critical, Shogun, Ram and Hospital.
From the ever-developing phenomenon that is Noisia to the next generation of new artists such as Signs, L 33, Zombie Cats, Doctrine, Trilo, A-Cray, Pythius, Hypoxia, the darker, techy, complex, neuro sides of drum & bass havn’t just been unavoidable but exciting, varied and progressive.
But why?
Could it be a natural knee-jerk to the poppier, commercial side of drum & bass? Could it be the influence of act such as Noisia, Mefjus, Phace and Misanthrop? Could it be the success of festivals this year? Have developments in production technology influenced the sound? We address these questions and more with the help of a wide range of the scene’s contributors and spokespeople…
I actually think that 2015 was a very strong year for Drum & Bass in general, no matter what sub-genre. For me personally 2015 has been one of the best years since I started to do my take on underground Drum & Bass music. I never released more music in one year and never have been touring that much.” – Phace To me it is the most boundary pushing and in terms of producing the most challenging kind of electronic dance music – in regards to sound design as well as rhythmical structures and time signatures without ever leaving its path in meeting top notch audio production standards and its purpose to make people dance.” – Current Value To us 2015 has definitely been a good year for neurofunk. Music-wise the quality has been there, and it seems that the genre (which is constantly in the process of being redefined) is heading in a new direction regarding arrangements, design and format … The genre is interesting, not boring at all or repeating itself in circles – it keep on opening new doors.” – Signs
Production standards, development and a disdain for stagnancy are definitely consistent themes among all producers we spoke to. In this way, neuro represents the technically-hungry, persistent and progressive foundations drum & bass was originally founded and really progressed into a world of its own 15-20 years ago with artists such as Photek and Ed Rush & Optical setting new sound design benchmarks, Goldie pushing ideas of arrangement and composition to new levels and Dillinja with his infamous mixdowns. Essentially neuro represents the original spirit of drum & bass.
Neurofunk or tech?
Before we get deeper, let’s get this clarify things; We’re calling it neurofunk. You could quite easily call it tech. We all know the type of drum & bass we’re talking about here and the more you focus on genre names the less you focus on the actual music and its creativity. But is there a line between the two descriptions? We asked Noisia so you don’t have to (really, don’t)…
That question is almost as uninteresting as it is hard to answer. What exactly is the consequence of knowing when a tune crosses the elusive Noisia-Tech-Neuro Meridian? Will opinions be adjusted? Governments overthrown?” – Noisia
Fair. Misanthrop, meanwhile, thinks that neurofunk is a stupid name and died 10 years ago…
Neurofunk to me is the combination of deep funk/jazz elements combined with dirty basslines, catchy hooks, funky drums and sci-fi sound design made mainly between 1998-2005. The newer stuff doesn´t transport the term neurofunk (very stupid name btw.) to me anymore. Which is not bad at all, because it’s fresh and sounds different. I would rather speak of techstep or tech drum and bass than of neurofunk in 2015.” – Misanthrop
Bad Taste bossman, and a quarter of the freshly reformed Bad Company, Vegas thinks the term neurofunk carries weight, although we should still see beyond pigeonholes.
To me it’s a bit of a weird word as I come from a place where it’s all called drum and bass but this word has definitely become real and what it stands for is the side of the scene that I love and have always followed” – Vegas
A new generation of producers and fans
Don’t forget about the most important people listening to this and attending the shows: they are young fans. Young fans want something strong and powerful and energetic. Neuro provides that. People give energy to music, music gives energy to them; right now they’re feeding each other.” – Teddy Killerz
With the Teddy Killerz observation in mind, neuro’s success and dominance right now is a ‘right time / right place’ thing. But Billain takes this deeper again. In his recent 2015 retrospective, he considers that the new generation of music fans have a different perception of production complexity. This is down to two things: being more technically savvy and being able to digest more and more information and the new benchmarks being set every year with tracks such as Saus or his own kickdrum-free Autonomous. Once a boundary has been broken, producers look to break the next one.
Eatbrain boss Jade, meanwhile, reckons neuro’s current success is also a kickback of dubstep…
I think a whole generation grew out of dubstep, looking for new stuff. Dubstep, even on the top commercial level, was heavily influenced by D&B. I couldn’t help but think about Noisia when I heard Skrillex’s hard growl basslines. These are speculations we have been talking about, I could be totally off as well. What I know for sure, is that there has never been so much quality neurofunk music released than this year. Thanks to especially Blackout, but RAM, Critical and Shogun have been releasing some heavy artillery as well. We also receive so many demos to Eatbrain, that it’s not even possible to get back to everyone. This means there is a new wave of young producers interested in neuro, which promises an even brighter future.”- Jade
Big Festivals & big label backing
Full-scene support with the most prominent labels in the genre is definitely key to neuro’s success. Shogun with the likes of Joe Ford and Fourward, Ram denting the spectrum with releases from Misanthrop, Audio, June Miller and the Teddy Killerz, Hospital releasing Reso’s powerful second album Ricochet.
It’s also had an exciting, successful year due to the success of big D&B exclusive festivals such as Let It Roll and its representation at some of the biggest EDM events such as EDC Las Vegas where the likes of Noisia, Ed Rush & Optical, Kasra, Enei, Foreign Concept, Black Sun Empire and State Of Mind performed.
Maybe drum & bass as a whole has grown, breaking new ground and proving that it works on festivals and big stages just as well as other genres that used to make D&B look underground? Festivals like Let It Roll really show just how massive the audience is, and what’s possible.” Noisia There are three corner stones; The really big names like Noisia and The Upbeats have really flown the flag for this type of music so there’s been a trickle down effect for newer guys like me. The festivals and shows have been incredible like Let It Roll. Before now platforms for the techier and neuro side of the music and haven’t existed on this level. And there are a lot of new young producers who want to make this music. Those are three corner stones for the progression of neurofunk. That adds up to the standing where we are. But all scenes are sinewaves; subgenres go up and down. But yeah 2015 has been incredible for all of us. It’s very refreshing.” – Mefjus
Neuro: the church of sound design
I look at it like this: if you can make the most technical music, make it sound good and know exactly how to control sound the way you want to control it, you can do what you want to the degree that you want, then that’s where a lot of electronic producers want to be…. I think?” – Xtrah
THE key characteristic of neuro: sound design. Noises you’ve never heard before, mixed at degrees of clarity previously unknown to producers before. We’ll let the masters explain why sound design in neuro is so exciting….
The quality is really high lately and I think drum & bass has always been like this. It’s research; an introspective journey through the complexity of the sound mixing energy to other emotions until you come to a unique style in the world of electronic music. From the jungle to the more modern or minimal neurofunk this music has always been unique, if that was the original mission and midset it’s still there. – Maztek Neurofunk did indeed enjoy a healthy year as we can hear more ‘daring’ or let’s call it ‘unorthodox’ sound design and arrangements. I mean this in an absolute positive way! I like how everything breathes these days… Bring back those dynamics! These are very inspiring times I think!” – Current Value I think the main reason for its success at the moment is that it’s the genre with the most advanced sound design and creative ideas. The producers are willing to question that standard D&B sound (read: amen breaks…) at the moment, which I think makes the whole genre extremely interesting. It’s a similar vibe like back in the DSCi4 Rec forum years. That said… The midrange reese filter bass could be the new amen in time…” – Misanthrop
Drum & Bass (and many other electronic music genres I can think of) always has been very connected to the technological evolution of music production. Particularly neurofunk. There is something fascinating about it. And we are living in a digital age that changed the whole production game drastically. As technology always will evolve (unless it all just blacks out one day…) the music will always progress too. The young, hungry and rebellious D&B scene always seems to strive for the next thing. That’s a very healthy attitude if you ask me. Nothing is worse than standstill.” – Phace
However, sound design is just the start. Tunes still have carry a groove, some type of funk and fresh ideas. Like Mefjus and Phace’s Bang Bang or Noisia & The Upbeat’s Mouthbreather.
The technological marvel doesn’t actually make the music any good… It’s just a way to get excited about what you’re making, which then, hopefully, transfers to the listener. It’s just a way in. What eventually makes the tune good or not, above all else, is the vibe and the groove (like any D&B subgenre). Sound design only serves to compound that. It’s a lot of fun though!” – Noisia
Is neuro’s current popularity related to the commercial success of pop D&B?
When considering this feature and speaking to artists, I wondered if neuro was the necessary bitter yin to chart-topping D&B’s sugary sweet yang? While some artists are enjoying their newfound love for songwriting, more underground artists react and make even darker, heavier, more dangerous sounding productions. “In its pure form it’s not very radio-friendly,” agrees Eatbrain founder Jade. “It’s hard to find a catchy happy melody in these tunes, which are primarily aggressive and dark.”
Sonically, it is the perfect counter to the radio-friendly commercial drum & bass. But the creative mission behind it isn’t a contrived reaction. Dark designs have been constructed long before Rudimental even started high school. If anything, commercial drum & bass has played a major role in neuro’s development as the entry point for new drum & bass fans…
The commercial world has actually educated people in this sound. People can’t help falling in love with drum and bass when they are exposed to it. Like a drug, it heads straight for your heart and makes you rush. And, like a drug, you want more. So you search and you search and then you find the refined version which makes you rush even more. Mmmmmmmmm. At the same time as this new thirst for drum and bass has arisen the production levels and musical ideas have all collided into some of the most advanced music ever created in history!” – Vegas
In this sense; it is right time, right place. All the puzzle pieces are in place for an exciting creative breeding ground for futuristic, aggressive, complex electronic music: advanced technology, fresh fans and producers with new ideas, the right environments to play the music in and, let’s face it, a politically charged world climate and paranoid sense of authority control that’s not too far away from the dystopian future we were foretold growing up.
PLUS key subgenre frontrunners who refuse to compromise and come with real character and humour. Any conversation about neuro/techy drum & bass will always refer to Noisia. London Elektricity describes them as one of the top three drum & bass acts full stop, Kasra, meanwhile, cites them for their passion for the underground, their support for new artists, their refusal to compromise and the way they compose themselves.
“Some artists who play on the biggest stages have to compromise to get there. Noisia don’t. They have character and it comes across in their artwork, on their radio show,” he states. “I think this is a key point: Music is supposed to be fun… I think we’re getting better at remembering this fact. There are other ways of presenting the music; it doesn’t have to be an all-black record cover with a skull on it. Just because music is hard it doesn’t mean it’s made by miserable people with no personality.”
The cult of personality is key: in the 90s and early 2000s drum & bass artists could sometimes be moody and reserved. In a way they had to be: the genre was in a league of its own (both tempo-wise and sonically) and the media didn’t get it so they either criticised it or cashed in on its danger factor when it pleased them… Before declaring it dead. Again. Back then you either got drum & bass or you didn’t. And those who got it enjoyed its best kept secret feeling and strove to maintain that in order to maintain some sense of purity. Even among DJs that behaviour was clear with the pimp-tight dubplate culture dictating who had what tunes.
This sense of reservation, distrust of media and tightness among crews is no longer necessary: the age of internet dominance, the sound of commercial drum & bass massaging the wider music psyche into accepting the faster, wilier dynamics and the fact that it’s a global movement and not just coming from the UK have created a different behaviour code; artists are more open, presentation has changed, new concepts are being developed and the scene – D&B at large, not just neuro – is much more open with everyone willing to help each other. “Many producers are happy to share their techniques now. It’s more of a vibe thing,” agree the Teddy Killerz. Disprove does too. We’ll leave him to sign off the debate with one clear message: 2015 has been a great year for drum & bass full stop, not just neuro… |
As I’ve gotten to know Scala better, I’ve begun to appreciate its simple power in ways which have caught me by surprise. When I picked up the language, I was expecting to be wowed by things like type inference and a more concise syntax. I wasn’t expecting to fall in love with Option .
The Option Monad
In case you don’t know, Option is a class in the Scala core libraries. It is what object-oriented developers would call “a simple container”. It simply wraps around an instance of some type as specified in its type parameter. A simple application would be in a naive integer division function:
def div ( a: Int ) ( b: Int ) :Option [ Int ] = if ( b <= 0 ) None else if ( a < b ) Some ( 0 ) else Some ( 1 + div ( a - b ) ( b ) . get )
Pretty straightforward stuff. This method repeatedly subtracts the dividend by the divisor until it is strictly less than the divisor. Of course, the fact that I wrote this as a pure function using currying, recursion and complex expressions obfuscates the meaning somewhat, but you get the drift. What’s really interesting here is the use of Option to encapsulate the result. Here’s how we could use this method to perform some useful(?) calculations:
div ( 25 ) ( 5 ) // => Some(5) div ( 150 ) ( 2 ) // => Some(75) div ( 13 ) ( 4 ) // => Some(3)
Nothing earth-shattering in the mathematical realm, but it provides a useful illustration. Each return value is wrapped in an instance of class Some , which is a subclass of Option . This doesn’t seem very useful until we consider what happens when we try to divide values which break the algorithm:
div ( 13 ) ( 0 ) // => None div ( 25 ) ( -5 ) // => None
Instead of getting an integer result wrapped in an enclosing class, we get an instance of a totally different class which doesn’t appear to encapsulate any value at all. None is still a subclass of Option , but unlike Some it does not represent any specific value. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that it represents the absence of a value. This makes a lot of sense seeing as there really is no sane value for the first computation, and the second is simply incomputable with the given algorithm.
Retrieving a value from an instance of Option can be done in one of two ways. The first technique is demonstrated in the div method itself (calling the no-args get method). This is nice because it’s terse, but it’s not really the preferred way of doing things. After all, what happens if the value in question is actually an instance of None ? (the answer is: Scala throws an exception) This really doesn’t seem all that compelling as a means of encapsulating return values. That is why pattern matching is more frequently employed:
div ( 13 ) ( 0 ) match { case Some ( x ) => println ( x ) case None => println ( "Problems" ) } // => prints "Problems" div ( 25 ) ( 5 ) match { case Some ( x ) => println ( x ) case None => println ( "Problems" ) } // => prints "5"
Pattern matching allows us to deconstruct Option values in a type-safe manner without the risk of trying to access a value which really isn’t there. Granted, the pattern matching syntax is a bit more verbose than just calling a get polymorphically, but it’s more about the principle of the thing. It’s easy to see how this could be quite elegant in a non-trivial example.
Compared to null
This is very similar to a common pattern in C++ and Java. Often times a method needs to return either a value or nothing, depending on various conditions. More importantly, some internal state may be uninitialized, so a common “default” value for this state would be null . Consider the following lazy initialization:
public class Example { private String value; public String getValue ( ) { if ( value == null ) { value = queryDatabase ( ) ; } return value; } } // ... Example ex = new Example ( ) ; System. out . println ( ex. getValue ( ) ) ;
Well, that’s all well and good, but there’s two problems with this code. Number one, there’s always the potential for stray null pointer exceptions. This is certainly less of a concern in Java than it was back in the days of C and C++, but they still can be annoying. However, let’s just assume that we’re all good programmers and we always check potentially- null values prior to use, there’s still the problem of primitive types. Let’s change our example just a bit to see where this causes issues:
public class Example { private int value; public int getValue ( ) { if ( value == ??? ) { // er...? value = queryDatabase ( ) ; } return value; } } // ... Example ex = new Example ( ) ; System. out . println ( ex. getValue ( ) ) ;
If you’re following along at home, your compiler will probably complain at this point saying that what you just wrote was not valid Java. If your compiler didn’t complain, then you have some more serious issues that need to be addressed.
Primitive values cannot be valued as null because they are true primitives (an int is actually a bona-fide integer value sitting in a register somewhere at the hardware level). This too is a holdover from the days of C and C++, but it’s something we have to deal with. One of the consequences of this is that there is no reasonable “non-value” for primitive types. Many people have tried clever little tricks to get around this, but most of them lead to horrible and strange results:
public class Example { private Integer value = null ; public int getValue ( ) { // forgot to init... return value; } }
This code will fail at runtime with a NullPointerException oddly originating from the return statement in getValue() . I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent hours sifting through code I thought was perfectly safe before finally isolating a stray null value which the compiler happily attempted to autobox.
It’s worth briefly mentioning that a common “non-value” for integers is something negative, but this breaks down when you can have legitimate values which fall into that range. In short, there’s really no silver bullet within the Java language, so we have to turn elsewhere for inspiration.
Option in Java
I was actually working on an algorithm recently which required just such a solution. In this case, the primitive value was a boolean , so there wasn’t even a conventional non-value to jump to. I hemmed and hawed for a while before eventually deciding to implement a simple Option monad within Java. The rest of the API is remarkably functional for something written in Java (immutable state everywhere), so I figured that a few monadic types would feel right at home. Here’s what I came up with:
public interface Option<T> { public T get ( ) ; } public final class Some<T> implements Option<T> { private final T value; public Some ( T value ) { this . value = value; } public T get ( ) { return value; } } public final class None<T> implements Option<T> { public None ( ) { } public T get ( ) { throw new UnsupportedOperationException ( "Cannot resolve value on None" ) ; } }
The usage for this code looks like this:
public class Example { private Option<Boolean> value = new None<Boolean> ( ) ; public boolean getValue ( ) { if ( value instanceof None ) { value = queryDatabase ( ) ; } return value. get ( ) ; } }
Once again, Java has demonstrated how needlessly verbose and annoying its syntax can be. In case you were wondering, the generics are necessary on None primarily because Java has such a poor type system. Effectively, null is an untyped value which may be assigned to any class type. Java has no concept of a Nothing type which is a subtype of anything. Thus, there’s no way to provide a default parameterization for None and the developer must specify.
Now this is certainly not the cleanest API we could have written and it’s definitely not a very good demonstration of how monads can be applied to Java, but it gets the job done. If you’re interested, there’s a lot of good information out there on how do do something like this better. The point was not to create a pure monad though, the point was to create something that solved the problem at hand.
Conclusion
Once you start thinking about structuring your code to use Option in languages which have built-in support for it, you’ll find yourself dreaming about such patterns in other, less fortunate languages. It’s really sort of bizarre how much this little device can open your mind to new possibilities. Take my code, and give it a try in your project. Better yet, implement something on your own which solves the problem more elegantly! The stodgy old Java “best practices” could use a little fresh air. |
Healthy eating just got a little more complicated.
New research from the University of Toronto shows certain vegetable oils that claim to be healthy may actually increase the risk of heart disease.
And the results mean Health Canada should reconsider cholesterol-lowering claims on food labelling, says Dr. Richard Bazinet, lead author of the new study which is available online now at the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
“This is important information for people buying certain foods because of the heart benefits when really, that’s not accurate,” says Bazinet, of U of T’s department of nutritional sciences. “While most of these foods are a good choice, there are a few notable exceptions.”
Bazinet and his team report that replacing saturated animal fats with polyunsaturated vegetable oils had become common practice for consumers, based on the understanding that such oils reduce serum cholesterol levels and help prevent heart disease. Since 2012, Health Canada's Food Directorate has allowed the food industry to use a label on the oils – and foods containing the oils – claiming “a reduced risk of heart disease by lowering blood cholesterol levels."
But researchers say it’s more complicated than the label suggests – and the problem lies in the ratio of two kinds of polyunsaturates fatty acids found in the oils.
"Careful evaluation of recent evidence, however, suggests that allowing a health claim for vegetable oils rich in omega-6 linoleic acid but relatively poor in omega-3 α-linolenic acid may not be warranted," write Bazinet and Michael Chu, Lawson Health Research Institute and Division of Cardiac Surgery at Western University in London, Ontario.
Corn and safflower oil, which are rich in omega-6 linoleic acid but contain almost no omega-3 α-linolenic acid, are not associated with beneficial effects on heart health, Bazinet says.
The authors cite a study published earlier this year in February 2013 in which "...the intervention group replaced saturated fat with sources of safflower oil or safflower oil margarine (rich in omega-6 linoleic acid but low in omega-3 α-linoleic acid). They found that the intervention group had serum cholesterol levels that were significantly decreased (by about 8%–13%) relative to baseline and the control group, which is consistent with the health claim."
However, rates of death from all causes of cardiovascular disease and coronary artery disease significantly increased in the treatment group, says Bazinet.
"When the new results were added to a meta-analysis, the net result was a borderline 33 per cent increase in heart disease risk for oils rich in omega-6 and poor in omega-3, with absolutely no evidence of a benefit as is implied by the health claim," Bazinet says.
In Canada, omega-6 linoleic acid is found in corn and safflower oils as well as foods such as mayonnaise, creamy dressings, margarine, chips and nuts. Canola and soybean oils, which contain both linoleic and α-linolenic acids, are the most common forms of oil in the Canadian diet.
“We suggest that the health claim be modified such that foods rich in omega-6 linoleic acid but poor in omega-3 α-linolenic acid be excluded," conclude the authors.
(Read the research article in CMAJ.)
Michael Kennedy is a writer with University Relations at the University of Toronto. |
Quote Let's talk about the pengui... elephant in the room If you read the above paragraph, it might not come as a major surprise to you, but we are proud to announce that we will add an Open GL implementation and support for running your EaaS games on Linux with one of our next updates. For now, Linux support will be limited to the game launcher, and the Sandbox editor will still require Microsoft Windows. And of course, Linux support will be subject to the same developer-friendly terms as on Windows: Your monthly subscription fee will allow you to sell your games for Linux in addition to Windows, with no additional fees or royalties required.
While we can't pin an exact date on this update, we wanted to give you an early heads-up so you can start planning your Linux ports today!
Today, CryTek's Brand Manager, Marcel Hatam was kind enough to push this announcement in our direction, outlining a "small, but important" update to the EULA for their Engine as a Service platform, confirming that the long awaited Linux client release of the CryEngine is near on the horizon.Details are scarce at the moment, but the announcement does state that there won't be extra royalties involved with deploying to Linux and that they won't be offering Linux support for the editor at this stage. We also have confirmation that this will be landing in a 3.x release, which hopefully means that we'll see an easier migration path for existing CryEngine 3 games than would exist if Linux support were landing in CryEngine 4.One thing worth noting, is that with the announcement being specifically about updates to the the EaaS EULA , it's unclear at this point in time whether or not full licence holders will be getting access at the same time.Below is an excerpt from the full news update It's nearly been 2 years since Crytek advertised for a Linux developer , and in the meantime, developers of games such as Evolve, StarCitizen, SNOW, Kingdom Come: Deliverance and CryTek themselves with Homefront: The Revolution have shown signs of interest in supporting Linux.It's going to be exciting to see how this unfolds across the rest of the year! |
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Court refuses trial by combat
Posted on by dighton
A court has rejected a 60-year-old mans attempt to invoke the ancient right to trial by combat, rather than pay a £25 fine for a minor motoring offence.
Leon Humphreys remained adamant yesterday that his right to fight a champion nominated by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) was still valid under European human rights legislation. He said it would have been a reasonable way to settle the matter.
Magistrates sitting at Bury St Edmunds on Friday had disagreed and instead of accepting his offer to take on a clerk from Swansea with samurai swords, Ghurka knives or heavy hammers, fined him £200 with £100 costs.
Humphreys, an unemployed mechanic, was taken to court after refusing to pay the original £25 fixed penalty for failing to notify the DVLA that his Suzuki motorcycle was off the road.
After entering a not guilty plea, he threw down his unconventional challenge. Humphreys, from Bury St Edmunds, said: I was willing to fight a champion put up by the DVLA, but it would have been a fight to the death.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
TOPICS:
Extended News
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To: dighton
classic
To: dighton
"Leon Humphreys remained adamant yesterday that his right to fight a champion nominated by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) was still valid under European human rights legislation." Anyone know if this method of settling a legal dispute is still legal as he claims?
To: Maedhros
"Humphreys, an unemployed mechanic, was taken to court after refusing to pay the original £25 fixed penalty for failing to notify the DVLA that his Suzuki motorcycle was off the road."
Sometimes you can't win for lose-first ya gotta register the damn thing to get it on the road,then ya gotta pay to let the thing sit in the garage.Samari Swords sounds reasonable in this situation-the court officers are just chicken.
To: etcetera; aculeus; general_re; BlueLancer; hellinahandcart; Poohbah; Thinkin' Gal; MadIvan
Anyone know if this method of settling a legal dispute is still legal as he claims? I'll ping my distinguished panel of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . experts.
To: dighton
his offer to take on a clerk from Swansea with samurai swords, Ghurka knives or heavy hammers Oh sure, he goes for that wuss from Swansea.
To: Drippy
Yes, Suzuki troubles to be worked out with samurai swords.
Sounds OK, but most of the swords are in collections?
May be better off with claw hammers from K-mart.
To: dighton
£25 fixed penalty for failing to notify the DVLA that his Suzuki motorcycle was off the road. I wonder if they billed T.E. Lawrence's estate for that one.
To: etcetera
I believe trial by combat only applied to felonies, which this is obviously not.
To: dighton
According to Blackstone's Commentary, the last trial by wager of battel (that's how it's spelled) was in the thirteenth year of the reign of Elizabeth I (about 1570)
This method of trial had been introduced into England by William the Conqueror.
Apparently abolished during the reign of George III (the king during the American Revolution).
So, the dude doesn't know his own law.
To: fqued; etcetera
Thank you. Etcetera, see #10.
To: DUMBGRUNT
Claw Hammers would be less glamorous than Samari Swords,but the guy said hammers would be fine,I'm sure he could have accomplished his job with one of those just fine.
To: dighton
This is the finest article I have ever read. Huzzah! for the ol' boy.... Who do I gotta f%$# to get on your ping list?
To: chookter
Who do I gotta f%$# to get on your ping list? No one. A bribe gratuity of $5,000 will suffice.
To: dighton
Just dug this up The Many Variations of Trial by Combat ------------------------------------------------------------ The variations of Medieval trial by combat were enormous. For example, 13th century English law required a robber turned "kings Evidence" to pledge to convict all his accomplices before recieving his pardon. These convictions were to be obtained via trial by combat if necessary, and the accused could challenge the turncoat robber to trial by combat before that testimony was proven. The court was pledged to pay for his outfitting to do such combat by sustaining him with a stipend and equipment for battle until his freedom or death was attained. A "bill" noted from 1190 in Lincolnshire showed an expence of one thousand ducats (15s 10d) for a certain man plus fifty ducats (1s) per diem, in addition to the 300 ducats (6s) for three combats and charges for the carts and horses to bring the accused criminals from Lincoln to London for the combat. As this was all part of the judicial process, there were many stipulations that had to be met. Each "country" or region had its own pecularities. One fairly universal requirement was the avowing that no "soceries" were employed by either combatant. In 1355 a case developed between the Bishop of Salisbury and the Earl of Salisbury, both contesting ownership of certain lands. Upon examining the combatants personages, the judges found that the champion for the Bishop had secreted many scripts and prayers into his garb. He was disqualified and the Bishop made to pay 187,500 ducats (1,500) marks for the property. A typical pledge before combat went something like this: "This hear you Justices, that I have this day neither eaten, drunk, nor have upon me either bone, stone, ne glass, or any enchantment, socery or witchcraft where-through the power of God might be strengthened or diminished, nor the devils power increased, and that my appeal is true, so help me God and his saints, and by this book." (circa 1571) The 13th century English could only bring about combat in "doubtful" cases where jury decisions were not possible. Cases of violence were settled by jury but cases of suspected poisoning had the choice of confession or combat.
To: dighton
This could get ugly. click 1) A part of the Maryland Constitution defines the common law of Maryland as the Common Law of England as of July 4, 1776 2) In A celebrated case in England in the 1850's a litigant who was due to lose a huge case in desperation issued a challenge for trial by combat to his opponents and showed up in front of the courthouse in full armor at the appointed time. When the other side failed to show up he demanded (and got) a victory by default. A reluctant judge concluded that since it never been altered by statute, trial by combat was still a valid part of English Common Law. An emergency session of Parliment was called the next week to formally outlaw the practice once and for all. 3) Maryland however, never followed suit, so technically Trial by combat remains "on the books" of MD Common Law... (Note to self, bring an armored suit when visiting Maryland.)
To: xJones
I believe that Senator Barbara Ann Mikulski is a DemonRAT. Any FReeper from Maryland want to challenge her to trial by combat?
To: xJones
..........technically Trial by Combat remains "on the books" of MD Common Law... Very interesting. If Spendenning had'nt had to leave the Governors love nest maybe we could have gotten Dr. Raoul or Sauropod to try it out.
To: etcetera
... still valid under European human rights legislation. There is some precedent. Rich twins (Scotish publishers) who own an island under the control of the Baliwick of Guernsey challenged the Baliwick's application of (interestingly) medieval law to twart the twins' inheritence scheme. They argued that the European Convention on Human Rights trumped the Baliwick law. The Channel Islands are still legally part of the Duchy of Normandy, not the UK, and thus some medieval law still prevails. I think the twins won (of course the only reason they lived in the Baliwick was to avoid income tax). This case appears opposite - defendant is attmepting to use the Convention to invoke a medieval right. I give him about as much chance as a Montana Freeman invoking (non-existent) Common Law Courts.
To: dighton
RPGs at 20 paces
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Why do people die?
What is the essence of Taoist alchemy?
Xing and Ming. Fusion of soul XING with energy MING
Why do people die, if they have no diseases? Old age is the reason, you may say. But why does this old age come, what is the mechanism of it? A man grows old and dies because he is spending his vital energy. It's like a battery in a toy, when the battery is new – the toy car runs, but when the battery has run out – the toy car stops...And what kind of "battery" is it? It is something that is located in the area of the abdomen in the human body (compare stomach and stamina).
In Chinese tradition “the battery” is called MING 命, translated as life or destiny. (“How much stamina one has?”). So, this Ming - battery otherwise known as yuanqi 元氣 in traditional Chinese medicine, but in Taoism a different character is used 元炁 - the primordial qi*. It is getting spent. And when it ends, then a "kind" man with a scythe comes.
Ming is a tangible real substance and it can be felt, given a perfected sensitivity. Ming can be replenished only by mastering the since Taoist alchemy (just to emphasize that, according to the records of our school, some other traditions also posses such an essentially identical method, ). Note that to "Die" in Chinese is written emphatically: 失命 i.e. LOST MING.
But apart from Ming there is still another substance. It is located in the chest, and any other spiritual schools strive to perfect it. All of them base their teachings on it. It is called XING 性, which is translated as nature, the nature of the heart. In Chinese it is also called 心性 XIN XING or 本性 BEN XING. All the many methods of meditations and praying, stopping the internal dialogue, etc appeal to this. The mechanism is simple in theory - it is necessary to reduce the vibrations, to remove the waves and gradually reach a full peace. If you will perfect at this even further, then you will go into a stable peace, the breath will go away, the heart will almost stop beating and A Yin spirit YINSHEN will be able to leave of the body. This is what actually called enlightenment in the late Chan Buddhism. In addition, this work may lead to the improvement of specific abilities. This spirit is something that in many cultures is called a ghost. This spirit is identical to the soul that leaves the body at death – which is also called YINSHEN.
However, in contrast to the dying person, the spirit of the practitioner is connected to the body. When this out of the body experience happens, and then the spirit returns to the body, there are the certain signs which indicate that it did really happen. However many modern practitioners do not get out of the body, and with closed eyes travel in their fantasies. And that is a different phenomenon.
All religions and the latest doctrines hope for such an out of body experience, hence the attention to MORALITY is so strong. Control the passions - that's their main slogan.
If such a practitioner has not reached the mastery, he, at his death like all the dead souls, will go to a worser world (hell - in Christian terminology). After death the life memories of an ordinary person is not preserved, but the memories of a person, who has attained perfection at YINSHEN, will be preserved. But he can’t do anything with it and he can’t be reborn as a human being again. The teacher for him can only be another Yin spirit, i.e. another being from the lower worlds. The upper worlds are closed for the YINSHEN.
Xing and Ming are the separated parts of the primordial Unity. If Xing is a Yin part, then Ming is a Yang part. The YIN spirit (i.e. Xing) is inert and has no energy, and therefore he can’t rise to higher worlds. He needs energy similarly to a rocket needing fuel for the takeoff. Using only the meditation and any methods tied to Xing only changes the Yin'S characteristics, but makes no qualitative change. The ancient Taoist tradition (and with it those that I have already mentioned) uses the energy of Ming for fusion with Xing.Thus it turns these two into a Yang Spirit , also called a Tao fetus, who has the real potential and can move to higher worlds. So it is the Fusion of the energy Ming with the soul Xing that is the essence of alchemy.
Thus, the goal of alchemy - to fuse the soul Xing with the energy Ming and creating a yang Spirit – a Tao fetus, who has the real potential and can move to higher worlds.
How to perfect Xing you can understand by yourself or from the books, but how to perfect Ming you can get only in oral precepts of your Teacher. And important question is: Why it is so? Because of the fact that the secret of Ming is the secret of Life and Death! In carrying out the practice Ming the person violates a natural law (remember the saying "studying from the nature"). This law establishes that an ordinary person SHOULD BE BORN, GROW, LEAVE OR NO AFTER HIMSELF HIS PROGENY AND HIS ACTIONS, THEN GROW OLD AND DIE. Recall the Taoist phrase: "My destiny (MING!) is inside me, it is not from Heaven!" That is, a Taoist does not follow “the Nature", but instead overcomes it and goes against it.
The method passed on by a Teacher is not so complicated, so everyone can change their destiny - Ming. You do not need a special morality, you just need hard work and persistence. An ordinary person, even talented, does not have enough time to do too much of anything – whether good or evil. At childhood and at youth there are a lot of unconscious, automatic behavior. At maturity, when you just started to get your strength, the diseases and decline start to kick in. When a person reaches the top of his comprehensions of the meaning of life, ironically there is no longer the strength to do something.
As well said by Zhang Boduan: "Human life is so much as bubble on the water; yesterday one was on a horse, and now the corpse lies in the coffin, immersed in a death dream". "Remember the Death" – is one of the principles of ancient traditions. And now you can change your destiny, prolong life. What does this mean for mankind? Is this possible without responsibility?
So, why Xing can be understood by yourself or from books? Because the mind works rather manifestly, if we just watch it, we can understand that it is useful not to be overly emotional; the calm mind brings feelings of purity and reinvigoration, etc. If you go further, you can even bring out your own spirit from the body (Yin of course). However, it should be done carefully, because if a person is weak, the spirit will not return to the body and a death will occur. Therefore, you can learn it by yourself or from the books.
As for Ming, then the person can’t understand anything. He could only feel the difference between a young age and the old one etc, but it is difficult to determine whether the energy flows out, or comes in. To see all of these processes clearly you need to be already a being with the cosmic level of thinking. Every second of life staying in the illusion of a permanence, we actually run on an invisible treadmill. What happens to the Universe, how are the energies change, who does understand this now? I.e. to replenish the Ming a new you should be able to change with the cosmos, picking what assists to this task and rejecting anything else. This is the doctrine of changes of the ancient Chinese. How can modern people understand that, living by a bland clock hours and practicing in accordingly? At any modern qigong you will hear that the time and space do not matter, that your practice of qigong helps you “go beyond the natural laws”. And this is said about ordinary people who are can’t even get rid of the laws of heat and cold, food and hunger, but presume to “get rid of the influence of the Cosmos”!
So then the modern person has no alternative, but to seek a direct transmission of knowledge , which stems from the time, when the mankind have a clear understanding of cosmic laws. Of course, we can assume that a genius who can understand these law without could be born. But such an extraordinary person will not need anything at all from this world let alone a transmission. On the other hand there exist fake methods invented by ordinary people, these methods are usually only a projection of their mind and have nothing to do with the laws of Cosmos. Here is an example: Did Someone deciphered the Yi Jing? I think the answer is obvious.
Hence stem here need for the personal transmission. In this case firstly there will be no distortions, and secondly there will be personalized training for each person. Thirdly, in order to avoid deviations the practice will be done under the oversight of Teacher (and not like today, in stadiums, where participants do anything they want). Also, a ritual of accepting a student is a promise by the Teacher to be personally responsible for his student, to vouch for him, including with teachers own destiny...
古圣有言曰命由性修 性由命立 命者炁也性者神也炁 则本不离神神则有时 离炁
Ancient sages said:
Ming is perfected starting from Xing. Because you need the true spiritual condition to find your Teacher and then to practise, i.e. you need the correct state of mind while practicing.
Xing is established starting from Ming. Without repleniching and perfecting of Ming the true spiritual work is impossible.
Qi is inherently inseparable from the Shen (the spirit). If qi ever comes apart from shen, there will be an instant death. So while the person is alive they are inseparable. (This refers to the out of body experiences of the spirit when qi remains in the body)
The author © Dmitry A. Artemyev
Notes:
* While the character reads qi in the both first and the second example, it refers to a different energy. Doctors know only the post heaven energy - houtian, while Taoists practise with pre-heaven one - xiantian... Therefore, doctors don not understand what is contained in the kidneys, mistakenly writing 元氣. Ming and the primordial qi (the Taoist one) are the same.
Xiantian – pre-heaven, given before birth and can’t be changed in the direction of the increasing by the ordinary man. Houtian – post heaven, the energy that "feeds" a man after the birth: food, water, air, external qi ... a lot of things, but the main thing is that it can’t replace the pre-heaven energy...
Ming is not located exactly in the kidneys but is closely tied to them, as the system of the kidneys is a a part of a reproducing- discharging system of the human body, so the kidneys spend their energy directly for the purpose of reproducing... |
Back Issues Back Issues discusses a major comic of the past, reevaluating its strengths and weaknesses while exploring the cultural context of its creation and how it has impacted the future of the comic-book medium and industry.
This week: The Sandman trade paperback #7, Brief Lives, covering issues #41-#49.
Plot synopsis: Dream and his siblings return to the spotlight as Delirium sets out on a quest to find her long-absent brother, Destruction. After Desire and Despair reject Delirium’s requests for help, she asks Dream for his assistance, and he agrees, eager to forget about recent heartbreak. Their journey takes them to a travel agent from ancient Babylon, a 15,000-year-old lawyer, and a stripping goddess of love before Dream ends the quest when he realizes that their mission is costing innocent lives. After a conversation with Death, Dream reconsiders his stance and resumes his search with Delirium, entering Destiny’s garden for a hefty amount of backstory and foreshadowing. The two ultimately make their way to the temple where Dream’s son Orpheus is housed, which is a short distance away from where Destruction has planted himself, along with his talking dog Barnabas. Over dinner, the reunited siblings discuss the nature of the Endless and their roles in the world, a conversation that pushes Dream to let go of the past, beginning by granting his son the death he’s been denied for centuries. Dream kills Orpheus, finally committing the act of spilling family blood that Desire has been pushing him toward for the majority of the series. When he returns to the Dreaming, Dream is changed, more sympathetic to his servants and no longer troubled by the past, but also unaware of what his actions will mean for his future.
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Oliver: How nice is it to get back to the Endless after all those issues focusing on boring stuff like storytelling and power and identity? (I kid, I kid.) The time spent away from this book’s main cast really amplifies the impact of Brief Lives, giving readers more information on the history of the Endless and their relationships with one another than ever before. This is easily my favorite of The Sandman’s storylines, not just because of how thoroughly it fleshes out the world and personalities of these characters, but because Jill Thompson’s artwork is so perfectly suited to Gaiman’s script. Her balance of realistic detail and fantastic whimsy is an ideal fit for a story centered on Delirium and Dream, two figures who fall on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum.
Delirium is one of the most intriguing characters in the Sandman mythos, originally born as the calm Delight before transforming into her current scatterbrained self. It’s revealed that Destruction helped her through this metamorphosis, and over the course of Brief Lives, it becomes clear that Destruction is ill-suited for his title; he consistently builds up his siblings during times of need. This storyline is the first time it really feels like the Endless are a family rather than an assemblage of connected immortals, and it makes sense that the rest of the Endless would miss Destruction’s jovial presence, especially when the personification of Death is the most lighthearted of the group. Would you agree with that sentiment, Noel? And on the subject of Delirium, what do you think the focus on her brings to this story?
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Noel: I have a love-hate relationship with Delirium, because I feel like Gaiman is far more attracted to these kinds of kooky, damaged waifs than I tend to be. (I’ve read that Delirium was based on Tori Amos, a musician who represented pretty much everything I hated in the “modern rock” radio genre around the time I was reading these issues.) That said, I do appreciate how in Brief Lives and in the arcs that follow, Gaiman keeps the kooky and the damaged parts of the character in balance. When Delirium is conjuring goldfish out of thin air, I find her more irritating than whimsical, but I think Gaiman writes the character such that it’s okay to find her irritating. Plus, he doesn’t shy away from the real damage she does with her impulsive flights of fancy—as when she curses a highway patrolman with “invisible insects all over you now for all your life and for ever and always.”
And that’s important to the overall thrust of Brief Lives, which as you note is about the human qualities of these Endless, and how this bickering, passive-aggressive family sometimes fails to serve humanity because they’re too busy being petty and self-absorbed. For example, for a time, it looks like Brief Lives is going to be about the charmingly absurd road-tripping adventures of Dream and Delirium, as they make their way across the mortal world using mundane human transportation, but the journey turns dark and violent early, such that Dream cuts it short, lest they continue to destroy people’s lives. (Note: In seeking Destruction, Dream and Delirium create destruction. This will be important later.) Brief Lives is the pivotal story arc in the entire Sandman series, both because the events of the plot set the end of the series in motion, and because it deals so directly with who The Endless are and why they exist.
But we’ll get to that when we talk about Dream’s remarkable conversation with his brother. First, I want to turn your question back on you: What’s your take on Delirium? Tragic figure, or loveable icon of goth fashion victims?
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Oliver: As someone who knows all the words to “Cornflake Girl,” I have no problem with Tori Amos, and it was her introduction to Death: The High Cost Of Living that turned me on to her music in the first place. But to answer your question, why can’t Delirium be both? In terms of this book’s two big loveable icons of goth fashion victims, I think Delirium is considerably more tragic than Death, and like you said, that’s the thing that makes her more than just a whimsical, rainbow-haired kid who speaks in streams of consciousness. And any irritation that might come from Delirium’s character seems completely appropriate to me, because children can be incredibly obnoxious and random, but they also have the ability to see things through clearer eyes than adults.
A quick diversion: I want to use this time to praise the work of letterer Todd Klein, who does amazing work on this series portraying character through word balloons. When Dream and Delirium finally find Destruction and have a conversation under the stars in silhouette, the variation in word balloons does such a fantastic job of not only letting us know who is speaking, but capturing the essence of each character’s worldview. Dream’s black balloons are the only ones that use lowercase lettering (perhaps because of his control of stories?), and Delirium’s multicolored balloons with different-sized lettering perfectly reflect her disjointed thought process. Destruction’s balloons are the same as any other human’s in the book, showing just how much he’s integrated into the waking world. Todd Klein has a stockpile of Eisner Awards for his work in comics, and The Sandman shows why.
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Delirium and Despair are integral to this story because they represent change within the Endless. Delirium’s transition from Delight shows how these characters transform as the ideas they represent morph into new things, while Despair’s story reveals that the Endless can be destroyed in their current forms and re-created through aspects of the others. Destruction is the person who helps his siblings through these pivotal moments in their existence, and by the end of Brief Lives, he’s also helped Dream through a considerable change in his own life. Looking at the birth order of the Endless, Destruction was created after Dream, meaning that once life forms were able to dream, they had the ability to destroy. But as Destruction tells his siblings, there are two sides to every coin, and his role in the world isn’t just to embody destruction, but to define creation.
Before we dive too deeply into destruction, I want to shift the discussion to this collection’s title and how the figures that Delirium and Dream meet on their journey fit into the concept of brief lives. Why do you think some characters like Bernie Capax and Ruby meet their ends, while others, like Etain and the Lapp Alder Man are able to escape their destruction? What do you think their individual stories contribute to the narrative, particularly when told side-by-side with the experiences of the Endless?
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Noel: When I wrote about Fables & Reflections in our last Back Issues, I singled out what I think is one of the key lines of the entire series, which appears in Brief Lives. When the 15,000-year-old Bernie Capax is crushed by a falling wall, he boasts to Death that he had a good run, and Death responds, “You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.” A lot of the stories in Sandman are about stories themselves, and in particular what gives stories meaning. The punishments of hell are effective because of the hope of heaven. Old legends matter because they’re malleable, and adapt to different cultures and eras. And the story that matters most to all of us—our own story—gains poignancy from its finality. The clock is ticking. Before it runs out, will we say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done? Or will we just mope around our dream-castles and make it rain outside because our lovers dumped us?
As Sandman plays on, the character of Hob Gadling becomes more important than he seemed to be in the one-off issue “Men Of Good Fortune.” He’s like an augur of a kind: If Morpheus feels that something he’s about to do is dangerous enough, he pops by to see Hob, in case they never meet again. But Hob also makes for a good representative of the human side of this story of The Endless. Hob lives for centuries, but admits to Morpheus that he keeps making the same dumb mistakes over and over, and acquires wisdom only incrementally. Dream too, though he has power and knowledge beyond human imagining, is still capable of being devastated by a bad break-up. In some significant ways, humans and non-humans are a lot alike in Sandman.
Oliver, you ask why some characters in Brief Lives survive while others die, and personally, I think Gaiman is emphasizing the arbitrariness. A man can be careful for a millennium and a half and still show up at the wrong place at the wrong time, while the more reckless and malicious types can skate by unscathed. Justice isn’t what gives their stories meaning; it’s the unfairness, and the failure, that adds depth. Yet I don’t find Brief Lives or Sandman as a whole to be depressing or despairing, because as you note, Gaiman does allow his characters to change. And it’s not just Delirium and Destruction. Hob Gadling figures some things out during his long journey through life; and Dream does as well. (Heck, even I’ve changed in the years since I first read Brief Lives. For example, I don’t hate Tori Amos anymore. I’m merely neutral toward her. Can we be friends again?)
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I’m fascinated by the structure of Brief Lives, which next to The Kindly Ones is the most extended single story in the entire run of Sandman—nine chapters, no interludes—and yet is also divided into individual issues in an unusual way. It lacks the cliffhanger-y narrative momentum of A Game Of You or The Kindly Ones; instead, each issue is almost self-contained, sometimes introducing characters and situations long before they come into play in the main story. There’s an unhurriedness and assuredness about Brief Lives that appeals to me, especially given the way it culminates in two of the most important issues in the series: #48, in which Dream and Delirium have dinner with Destruction; and #49, in which Morpheus kills Orpheus.
We should dig deeper into the ramifications of those concluding chapters now, though before we do, I’m curious: Which mode of Sandman do you prefer, the long-form stories or the short stories?
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Oliver: As much as I enjoy Gaiman’s short stories in this title, I’m definitely a bigger fan of the longer arcs in Sandman, which showcase Gaiman’s ability to build tension and flesh out character over an extended narrative. Both of those qualities are exemplified in Brief Lives, which gives us a thrilling story full of twists while presenting the most complete portraits of the Endless in this series. Even Desire, the closest thing this book has to a consistent villain, shows some sympathy for Dream after he kills his son. I feel that Gaiman does his best work when he has room to breathe, and the side stories he tells in Brief Lives all help strengthen the idea that life is precious and fleeting, even for immortals. And that Death line you’ve now mentioned twice is one of my favorites of the series, capturing so much with just a few short sentences.
I’ve talked at length about Dream’s pride in past Back Issues, and Brief Lives is where he’s finally broken of that. He always assumes that what he wants is the correct course of action, and like in Season Of Mists, it’s his older sister who sets him straight. After Dream abandons his quest with Delirium and sends her into a crippling depression, Death tells him that he’s projecting his own personal frustrations about his recent breakup onto his sister, who is just lonely and wants to reconnect with the person who always made her feel welcome and wanted. I like that we don’t actually learn who Dream is so worked up over (we will later); it’s not the person who matters, just the sadness after the breakup. It takes a lot for Dream to go to Delirium’s realm and admit to his sister that he was never looking for their brother, but rather his ex-lover, and it’s just one of the past mistakes he owns up to in this story.
Before we unpack those last two huge issues, I want to talk a bit about the idea that finality is what gives stories poignancy. Some of the most memorable comics of the past 25 years have come out of Vertigo, and nearly all of those landmark books (Animal Man, Preacher, Y: The Last Man, etc.) had a clear beginning, middle, and end. It’s something you don’t see much of in superhero comics, where books are kept alive until they lose readers and are cancelled. There are exceptions, of course, and also plenty of stories that tell the end of characters like Superman and Batman, but the fact that there will be a new X-Men book next month means that it’s unlikely those stories will ever reach the same heights as something like Sandman. One of the best examples of a writer achieving that poignancy in an ongoing narrative was the death of Peter Parker in Brian Michael Bendis’ Ultimate Comics Spider-Man two years ago. Peter died doing for his Aunt May what he couldn’t do for his Uncle Ben, saving her life but giving up his own in the process. The mantle of Spider-Man was passed on, but that sense of finality gave Peter’s overall story more impact.
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The dinner at Destruction’s home is one of the densest conversations in this book, telling so much about the nature of the Endless and how they relate to the world of mortals. We’ve touched on a good amount of it already, but there’s still so much to dissect. We learn that the Endless can abandon their posts, which potentially results in whatever aspect of the universe they represent becoming more chaotic, but even that isn’t a certainty. The world continues to change in spite of Destruction’s absence, except now the responsibility is in the hands of the masses instead of one main governing body. But the most telling piece of dialogue comes when Destruction defines what exactly the Endless are:
“The Endless are merely patterns. The Endless are ideas. The Endless are wave functions. The Endless are repeating motifs. The Endless are echoes of darkness, and nothing more. We have no right to play with their lives, to order their dreams and their desires. And even our existences are brief and bounded.”
Destruction is more self-aware than any of his siblings, likely because of his time spent watching mortals act without his influence. He understands his role in the world, but also that his role is arbitrary, a symbol of something bigger than all of them. How do you think the conversation at Destruction’s home changes the course of this series, and what do you think it reveals about what we’ve read up to this point?
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Noel: For me, it reveals that The Endless are a paradox. They will always exist, but only from the perspective of humankind, which conjures and charges them. Destruction abandoned his post, but “destruction” continues as a force (as does Destruction as its embodiment, albeit one that’s retired from the job). Sandman carries many themes and motifs through its 75-plus issues, some of which are abstractions, such as the nature of stories and storytelling, and some of which are more specific, such as Morpheus’ preoccupation with rules. But I believe that Gaiman is particularly fascinated by intersections and interrelations: the “soft places” where dreams and reality meet, and the ways mortals and immortals influence each other. When Dream dines with Destruction, he learns he has choices, just like humans do. The Kindly Ones will mostly be about Dream exercising that power of choice, but within the context of his peculiar sense of order.
I like what you have to say about Vertigo and endings; I think that’s true. I just received the last issue of Sweet Tooth in the mail, and was reminded how much that series has gained from being designed to have a finish line. Late last year, I wrote about how The Walking Dead board game has an edge over the comic book and TV series in that it ends. The choices players make in the game have conclusive consequences, which imbues those choices with real power. As I’ve been re-reading Sandman for Back Issues, I’ve been struck by how Gaiman started working toward the ending of the series early, putting notions and concepts in place that mean to do the seemingly impossible: complete a story about The Endless. He’s sly about it, and never seems to be in a hurry to force some artificial climax. Gaiman just fills the entire series with this sense that some important transition is happening right in front of us.
Personally, I prefer the Sandman short stories to the longer arcs—which is why I’ll be tackling Worlds’ End next week, with Genevieve—but I like Brief Lives a lot because of that structure I mentioned earlier, and because it’s a big meta “ahem,” reminding readers to enjoy Sandman for as long as it lasts, because it’s slipping away quickly. (I’m always dismayed when I get to the end of Brief Lives and realize that the series is almost over, with only one actual long story arc left.) But it’s a sweet “ahem,” given the events of issue #49, in which Morpheus grants his son a much-longed-for death—ending an ancient story at last—and then returns to his realm a changed man, with more of a sense of sentimentality.
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I have a little more I want to say about that, and about how the humans and The Endless relate to each other, but I wanted to ask you what you thought about how Orpheus’ death plays out. This whole storyline seems to be about the search for Destruction, until we find out that it’s really been heading toward Orpheus (who appears in an earlier Brief Lives chapter, seemingly incongruously at the time). And then… it’s just over. In a snap. And we’re on to something else. Personally, I find the suddenness of Orpheus’ demise poetic and germane. Do you agree?
Oliver: I absolutely agree, largely because I think the relationship between Dream and his son is one of the most interesting of the series. And poetic is such a perfect word to describe that final scene between the two men, especially with Thompson’s artwork. The silent page where Dream finally kills Orpheus is pure visual poetry, evoking an incredible amount of emotion in five still images. The first panel of Dream and Orpheus in silhouette, the father sticking his hand through his son’s disembodied head while flowers bloom in the foreground is a beautiful juxtaposition of life and death, transitioning into the image of Death’s signature ankh, glistening despite being surrounded by blackness. It’s notable that there’s no blood on Orpheus after his father kills him, but Dream’s hand is soaked in red. Orpheus is beautiful and clean, even in death, and it’s only when Dream shuts his son’s eyes with his bloody hand that Orpheus’ pure face becomes soiled. There’s so much sadness in the final panel of Dream leaning against the wall, light shining into the room behind him to suggest that this is a necessary course of action in order for both father and son to move on.
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One last comment about the artwork in that scene: On the next page, there’s a single image of Dream standing in the grass outside the temple that is split into six panels, which is just a stunning use of the comic-book medium to present a coda to Orpheus’ death scene. Scott McCloud talks at length about the use of panel gutters to depict the passage of time, and that six-panel sequence shows some masterful use of that technique, extending what could have been a simple evocative image into an entire mini-story. It begins by focusing on Dream’s body and specifically his bloody hand, then shows his cloak blowing in the wind, creating a sense of motion that carries Orpheus’ blood through the air to the ground behind Morpheus. Once the blood hits the ground, it blossoms into a new breed of flower, which grows at an accelerated rate over the final two panels, and those flowers will grow all around Dream for the rest of the sequence. Again: visual poetry.
You mention the “soft places” where dreams and reality meet, and I find it intriguing that ultimately Dream’s role in the universe is to define reality through his fictions. Merv Pumpkinhead has a great line when Dream returns to the Dreaming after killing his son: “Real life. That’s what guys like him never have to face up to. Real life.” Brief Lives is when Dream finally does have to face the reality of his situation, and the page after he washes his son’s blood off his hands and collapses in his throne is one of the most heartbreaking of the series. His throne room is stripped of the opulence that we previously saw at the start #46, now an empty white room that perfectly reflects the emotional exhaustion of the title character.
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Before you dive back into the Endless’ relationship with humankind, I wanted to know what your feelings are toward Thompson’s artwork. Like you mentioned before, this arc has no interlude, meaning that we didn’t get a guest artist halfway through. Gaiman chooses artists to fit the tone of his story; why do you think he chose Thompson for Brief Lives?
Noel: Thompson has the skill set to combine realism and whimsy, which is necessary for a story in which one of the major players is capable of “making little frogs.” (How did we get this far down in the conversation and not mention one of Brief Lives’ most memorable lines?) I’ve expressed qualms in the past about some of the art in Sandman, but I tend to think of Thompson as one of the defining artists in the series, even though she didn’t come on board until issue #40. If I had to rank my favorite Sandman artists, I’d put her third, right behind Charles Vess and Michael Zulli, and just ahead of Shawn McManus and the often (and unfairly) maligned Marc Hempel.
I don’t think I’d want anyone other than Thompson drawing Brief Lives, though. Her fusion of the fanciful and the mundane fits this story about humans who aspire to immortality and immortals who behave like humans. One of the things I love most about Sandman is that Gaiman has created this universe of gods and super-beings, and has made it plausible by considering how and why The Endless and the fairies and all of those other weird creatures came into existence. In short: Humans made them. They may act independently, but they’re here because of us—whether it’s to serve us or to mess us up or to provide us with fodder for instructive tales. (The latter will be a major theme of Worlds’ End next week.)
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Given that, why should we expect Dream to behave any more nobly than he does? Or for Delight not to sour into Delirium? Or Destiny to know where all the paths in his garden will lead? The Endless are of us. And just as we are weak and small and not long for this world, so are they.
Next week: Noel Murray and Genevieve Koski follow the series to a bar at the notional end of the world, for the collection of independent stories that make up Worlds’ End. |
Saturn’s rings are billions of years younger than we thought, say Cornell University researchers analyzing an almost forgotten set of data, collected 10 years ago by NASA’s Cassini mission.
Despite decades observing Saturn’s rings, their age remains unknown.
Following 10 years of Cassini orbiting and observing the planet, scientific thinking suggested an ancient origin, billions of years ago.
However, efforts to pin down a more definite age have stalled as researchers struggled to determine the rings’ exact composition.
Whilst we know they are predominantly composed of water ice particles, up to several meters in size, we also know these particles are continually ‘polluted’ by bombarding micrometeoroids – rocky material from the outer Solar System’s Kuiper belt – and its the proportion of these two ingredient that has proved elusive.
The ice is opaque to many wavelengths of light and therefore able to hide unknown amounts of additional rocky material.
The exact proportion is key because its accumulation should have happened in a predictable way, so combining it with estimates of the average micrometeoroid flux would give a good estimate of age.
This is why a new paper, published in the journal Icarus, from Cornell University’s Zhimeng Zhang could prove a breakthrough.
In it, Zhang navigates a set of complex data collected early in the Cassini mission by instruments intended to analyze the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan.
The Cassini Titan Radar Mapper operates at just the right wavelength in the microwave end of the electromagnetic spectrum to pierce the ice, measuring the entire ring composition, rather just that of the surface layers.
Zhang analyzed data from Saturn’s C ring, which is the most ‘polluted’ due to its relative low mass, making it easier to acquire a higher proportion of non-icy material.
“This makes the C ring ideal for investigating ring contamination and piecing together age and history,” says Zhang.
However, there was a reason the data has been be left unanalyzed for so long.
“This wasn’t low hanging fruit,” says Professor Alexander Hayes, Zhang’s supervisor at Cornell.
“It was reams of difficult to analyze data that sat there for a decade. If ZZ hadn’t come along who knows how long this would have gone untouched.”
After several months of unpicking data, Zhang showed that most regions in the C ring contained 1-2% rocky silicates. Combining this with estimates of the micrometeoroid flux gives a C ring age of somewhere between 15 and 100 million years, billions of years younger than expected.
“None of the current origin scenarios predict the rings are likely younger than 3.8 billion years old,” says Zhang. “This will force a rethinking of ring origin models.”
“It’s a very nice paper,” agrees Professor Sascha Kempf, from the University of Colorado, a proponent of an ancient age for the rings who wasn’t involved in the study.
“I find her findings about the age of the C ring quite persuasive.”
However, the data held another surprise. The analysis revealed a significant ‘hump’ of rock in the middle where silicate composition increased to between 6-11%.
According to Zhang’s models, this suggests the background micrometeoroid flux was boosted by the recent addition of a 20-km diameter rocky body, likely a Centaur from a family of mini-planets located between Jupiter and Neptune.
In her model, the centaur slowly broke up as it passed through the rings a few times, a scenario that Ryuki Hyodo, an expert on Centaurs from Kobe University, who also wasn’t involved in this paper, believes is plausible.
“I have shown recently that Centaurs can be destroyed during these extreme close encounters with Saturn,” says Hyodo. “However, the detailed process of the deposition in the ring is still unclear. We will need direct simulations.”
The centaur model sits less well with Kempf, who suggests the silicates are more likely to be from a core of a disrupted moon that was pushed inward by the spreading of the much larger, more massive ring.
A more definite answer should come from a new period of Cassini radar surveying next year when the craft will be closer to the rings than it ever has before.
To aid the collection and analysis of the new data, Zhang’s paper not only made the case for these new observations but also provides a model for how to take these tricky measurements.
“The paper is like a textbook,” says Hayes. “It describes how to calibrate and analyze the data to test and expand up ZZ’s theories during these closer passes.”
In the meantime, Zhang hopes to soon publish her own support for the new C ring age after applying her methodology and equations to Saturn’s larger A and B rings, and finding a broad agreement in age.
“It is both a nervous and exciting feeling that what we have proposed may be further proved correct in the near future,” says Zhang.
“And the proximal orbit observations next year will provide us with many more insights on the rings.”
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Z. Zhang et al. 2017. Cassini microwave observations provide clues to the origin of Saturn’s C ring. Icarus 281: 297-321; doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2016.07.020 |
The View co-host brings up Prescott Bush's Nazi ties David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Tuesday May 20, 2008
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Print This Email This When host Whoopi Goldberg raised the issue of George W. Bush's comparing anyone who wants to talk to Iran or Syria with the appeasers of Nazi Germany on Monday's edition of ABC's The View, the panel erupted into furious debate. Conservative Elizabeth Hasselbeck repeatedly attempted to question whether Bush's remarks were really aimed at Barack Obama. She insisted, "It's not always about him," and suggested Obama is being defensive because he knows his support for talks with Iran is a weak spot. "I think the president was very clear in what he meant," Goldberg replied tartly. "The Bush administration is out there talking to North Korea, talking to Syria," noted liberal Joy Behar. "Isn't that what diplomacy is about? This guy doesn't know the difference between the word 'diplomacy' and 'appeasement.' He's just stupid." "One more point," continued Behar, pulling out a prepared statement. "It's very interesting and ironic that George Bush, Senior's -- er, George Bush, this one -- his grandfather -- this one -- the late -- I don't like to speak ill of the dead, but in this case it's fun -- he was a United States senator, Prescott Bush. Okay -- he was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany." "This is his grandfather," Behar continued. "He has no business talking to Jewish people when he's got this right in his backyard." "How come you can bring up this backyard but then it's not alright to dig into Obama's backyard and family history?" was all the flustered Hasselbeck could find to say. RAW STORY 's Larisa Alexandrovna also cited the Prescott Bush connection last week. In her blog, at-Largely, she wrote: Dear Mr. Bush,
Your speech on the Knesset floor today was not only a disgrace; it was nothing short of treachery. Worse still, your exploitation of the Holocaust in a country carved out of the wounds of that very crime, in order to strike a low blow at American citizens whose politics differs from your own is unforgivable and unpardonable. ...
Well Mr. Bush, the only thing this comment lacked was a mirror and some historical facts. You want to discuss the crimes of Nazis against my family and millions of other families in Europe during World War II? Let me revive a favorite phrase of yours: Bring. It. On!
Your family's fortune is built on the bones of the very people butchered by the Nazis, my family and the families of those in the Knesset who applauded you today. ...
You family did not stop with supporting fascists and Nazis abroad, did they Mr. Bush? Surely you must know of your grandfather's role in the treasonous plot of 1933 to overthrow democracy in America? Let me remind you.
Grandpa Bush - that is to say, your grandfather - wanted fascism imported into the United States, or as you now call this type of transformation, "exporting democracy." Prescott went so far as to subsidize a coup attempt in order to achieve his dream of a fascist America. This video is from ABC's The View, broadcast May 19, 2008.
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Sen. Ted Cruz leaves after a vote at the Capitol September 5, 2017 in Washington, D.C. Alex Wong/Getty Images
The Republicans are running out of time. After seven years of promising to repeal Obamacare, it seems the GOP is headed toward failure yet again this week, unless the party leaders can somehow reverse what appears to be a growing opposition to the effort. Sen. Ted Cruz was the latest to signal his opposition to the Graham-Cassidy bill, noting it didn’t do enough to bring down the cost of health care.
“Right now, they don’t have my vote,” Cruz said during a panel discussion in Austin. “And I don’t think they have Mike Lee’s vote, either.” Cruz said that he and fellow senator Lee offered amendments to Graham-Cassidy that would decrease premiums but they weren’t included in the latest draft of the bill. But Cruz wasn’t all negative, saying the measure also has some “very good elements.”
Cruz is hardly alone. Earlier on Sunday, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine made it clear she’s unlikely to support the bill either. She had previously said she was “leaning agains” the legislation but sounded more sure of her decision on Sunday, when she told CNN it was “very difficult for me to envision a scenario where I would end up voting for this bill.” Collins said she wants to see the analysis from the Congressional Budget Office before making a final decision.
.@SenatorCollins: "It's difficult for me to envision a scenario where I would end up voting for" Graham-Cassidy bill https://t.co/56qV5RAXFX — CNN (@CNN) September 24, 2017
With Cruz and Collins that means there are at least five Republicans in the 52-member caucus that said they wouldn’t support the bill or were at least leaning against it. Sen. Lisa Mukowski has yet to give her full support to the bill and Sens. John McCain and Rand Paul have both said they would not back the measure. With the two “no” votes from McCain and Paul, a third would doom the bill since no Democrats are expected to support the measure.
Time is running out for Republicans to get support for the bill as lawmakers only have until Saturday to pass it with a simple majority rather than the usual 60 votes.
Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy both appeared on ABC’s This Week Sunday to defend their legislation and express optimism that the bill will ultimately be approved. “We’re moving forward and we’ll see what happens next week. I’m very excited about it. We finally found an alternative to Obamacare that makes sense,” Graham said. “I think we’re going to get the votes next week.” |
There are two basic problems in information theory that are very easy to explain. Two people, Alice and Bob, want to communicate over a digital channel over some long period of time, and they know the probability that certain messages will be sent ahead of time. For example, English language sentences are more likely than gibberish, and “Hi” is much more likely than “asphyxiation.” The problems are:
Say communication is very expensive. Then the problem is to come up with an encoding scheme for the messages which minimizes the expected length of an encoded message and guarantees the ability to unambiguously decode a message. This is called the noiseless coding problem. Say communication is not expensive, but error prone. In particular, each bit of your message is erroneously flipped with some known probably , and all the errors are independent. Then the question is, how can one encode their messages to as to guarantee (with high probability) the ability to decode any sent message? This is called the noisy coding problem.
There are actually many models of “communication with noise” that generalize (2), such as models based on Markov chains. We are not going to cover them here.
Here is a simple example for the noiseless problem. Say you are just sending binary digits as your messages, and you know that the string “00000000” (eight zeros) occurs half the time, and all other eight-bit strings occur equally likely in the other half. It would make sense, then, to encode the “eight zeros” string as a 0, and prefix all other strings with a 1 to distinguish them from zero. You would save on average bits in every message.
One amazing thing about these two problems is that they were posed and solved in the same paper by Claude Shannon in 1948. One byproduct of his work was the notion of entropy, which in this context measures the “information content” of a message, or the expected “compressibility” of a single bit under the best encoding. For the extremely dedicated reader of this blog, note this differs from Kolmogorov complexity in that we’re not analyzing the compressibility of a string by itself, but rather when compared to a distribution. So really we should think of (the domain of) the distribution as being compressed, not the string.
Entropy and noiseless encoding
Before we can state Shannon’s theorems we have to define entropy.
Definition: Suppose is a distribution on a finite set , and I’ll use to denote the probability of drawing from . The entropy of , denoted is defined as
It is strange to think about this sum in abstract, so let’s suppose is a biased coin flip with bias of landing heads. Then we can plot the entropy as follows
The horizontal axis is the bias , and the vertical axis is the value of , which with some algebra is . From the graph above we can see that the entropy is maximized when and minimized at . You can verify all of this with calculus, and you can prove that the uniform distribution maximizes entropy in general as well.
So what is this saying? A high entropy measures how incompressible something is, and low entropy gives us lots of compressibility. Indeed, if our message consisted of the results of 10 such coin flips, and was close to 1, we could be able to compress a lot by encoding strings with lots of 1’s using few bits. On the other hand, if we couldn’t get any compression at all. All strings would be equally likely.
Shannon’s famous theorem shows that the entropy of the distribution is actually all that matters. Some quick notation: is the set of all binary strings.
Theorem (Noiseless Coding Theorem) [Shannon 1948]: For every finite set and distribution over , there are encoding and decoding functions such that
The encoding/decoding actually works, i.e. for all . The expected length of an encoded message is between and .
Moreover, no encoding scheme can do better.
Item 2 and the last sentence are the magical parts. In other words, if you know your distribution over messages, you precisely know how long to expect your messages to be. And you know that you can’t hope to do any better!
As the title of this post says, we aren’t going to give a proof here. Wikipedia has a proof if you’re really interested in the details.
Noisy Coding
The noisy coding problem is more interesting because in a certain sense (that was not solved by Shannon) it is still being studied today in the field of coding theory. The interpretation of the noisy coding problem is that you want to be able to recover from white noise errors introduced during transmission. The concept is called error correction. To restate what we said earlier, we want to recover from error with probability asymptotically close to 1, where the probability is over the errors.
It should be intuitively clear that you can’t do so without your encoding “blowing up” the length of the messages. Indeed, if your encoding does not blow up the message length then a single error will confound you since many valid messages would differ by only a single bit. So the question is does such an encoding exist, and if so how much do we need to blow up the message length? Shannon’s second theorem answers both questions.
Theorem (Noisy Coding Theorem) [Shannon 1948]: For any constant noise rate , there is an encoding scheme with the following property. If is the message sent by Alice, and is the message received by Bob (i.e. with random noise), then as a function of . In addition, if we denote by the entropy of the distribution of an error on a single bit, then choosing any guarantees the existence of such an encoding scheme, and no scheme exists for any smaller .
This theorem formalizes a “yes” answer to the noisy coding problem, but moreover it characterizes the blowup needed for such a scheme to exist. The deep fact is that it only depends on the noise rate.
A word about the proof: it’s probabilistic. That is, Shannon proved such an encoding scheme exists by picking to be a random function (!). Then finds (nonconstructively) the string such that the number of bits different between and is minimized. This “number of bits that differ” measure is called the Hamming distance. Then he showed using relatively standard probability tools that this scheme has the needed properties with high probability, the implication being that some scheme has to exist for such a probability to even be positive. The sharp threshold for takes a bit more work. If you want the details, check out the first few lectures of Madhu Sudan’s MIT class.
The non-algorithmic nature of his solution is what opened the door to more research. The question has surpassed, “Are there any encodings that work?” to the more interesting, “What is the algorithmic cost of constructing such an encoding?” It became a question of complexity, not computability. Moreover, the guarantees people wanted were strengthened to worst case guarantees. In other words, if I can guarantee at most 12 errors, is there an encoding scheme that will allow me to always recover the original message, and not just with high probability? One can imagine that if your message contains nuclear codes or your bank balance, you’d definitely want to have 100% recovery ability.
Indeed, two years later Richard Hamming spawned the theory of error correcting codes and defined codes that can always correct a single error. This theory has expanded and grown over the last sixty years, and these days the algorithmic problems of coding theory have deep connections to most areas of computer science, including learning theory, cryptography, and quantum computing.
We’ll cover Hamming’s basic codes next time, and then move on to Reed-Solomon codes and others. Until then!
Posts in this series: |
News this week has not been kind to Millennials looking to purchase their first home. After a report revealed that the nation’s supply of starter homes has plummeted in the last four years, driving up prices, new research compiled by NerdWallet, a financial advisory site, shows that this demographic is postponing homebuying due to a host of real and perceived difficulties, especially financial issues, a stance that has profound implications for the real estate profession.
It’s clear many Millennials are renting longer and delaying the decision to buy a home; first-time homeowners currently make up 32 percent of all buyers—the lowest since 1987—compared with a historical average of 40 percent.
But something has to give, since there’s an oncoming wave of interested Millennial buyers and a marketplace that doesn't seem to be accommodating them. The median age for first-time homebuyers was 31 years in 2015, in line with the average of the last few decades (it was 30.6 in the early ‘70s). Two-thirds of millennials haven’t reached that age, and over the next decade, millennials are expected to form 20 million new households, according to Harvard demographic research.
To say there’s an opportunity out there for developers who can create affordable housing, especially in urban areas, is a massive understatement.
"There’s a strong indication that millennials do want to become homeowners, which is quite different from what we’ve heard," says Chris Ling, mortgage manager at NerdWallet. "While overall homeownership has declined, millennials do see the long-term value in owning a home."
They Want a Home as Much a Previous Generations
While often portrayed as more independent and less willing to settle down, the majority of millennials want to buy a house, according to a survey on 12,000 people conducted by finance giant Fannie Mae. The majority of respondents, aged 18-39, felt owning was more sensible and financially, and 49 percent of the renters in the survey said homebuying would be their next move. But, the survey also showed skepticism. When asked why they weren’t purchasing a home, the majority (57 percent) cited financial reasons.
Stricter Credit Score Requirements are Holding Millennials Back
Most Millennials said credit score requirement were holding them back, and data from FICO, the company that determines credit scores, suggests they’re right. Stricter credit standards are keeping millennial homebuyers on the sidelines. A majority of millennial homebuyers don’t meet the median credit score of 750 to obtain loans backed by Fannie Mae, one of the biggest players in the industry, and a third don’t meet the minimum credit requirement of 620.
"There’s a strong indication that millennials do want to become homeowners, which is quite different from what we’ve heard."
It’s the Student Debt, Right? Not Exactly
This issue with credit scores and financing must be because millennials are being crushed by student debt, right? According to the The Institute for College Access and Success, student debt has surged 56% in the past decade, to an average of $28,950 per borrower. That sounds like an insurmountable burden, but it’s not necessarily the issue, according to the study.
Even with that debt burden, Millennials should still qualify for loans. According to a 2014 analysis by New America, a nonpartisan policy institute, the average graduate with a bachelor’s degree is paying $312 a month in student loans. Considering the estimated monthly income of $2,940 for a 25- to 34-year-old millennial, this is a student debt threshold of 11%, which is a medium debt burden, according to the CFPB. Other studies cited come to the same conclusion.
The NerdWallet research suggests the debt burden isn’t insurmountable, at least when it comes to homeownership. Fannie Mae data shows that 53 percent of young renters had debts of less than $10,000 (while 10 percent have debts over $50,000). Taking into account property tax and homeowners insurance, NerdWallet’s mortgage calculator arrived on a debt-to-income ratio for millennials of 37%, which is just above the high end of the range that guides lenders.
What’s the Solution?
According to NerdWallet, it’s better education, and a real estate industry that does a better job of explaining the options available to Millennial homeowners, including Federal Housing Authority loans, which require lower down payments.
In a 2015 survey by Fannie Mae, 42% of those ages 18-34 said they didn’t know what lenders expect of them, and 73% were unaware of lower down-payment options that range from 3% to 5% of the home’s purchase price, as compared to the commonly cited lender preference of 20%.
And currently low interest rates definitely help; median mortgage payments in December 2015 were still $380 less on average than before the housing market collapse.
"Millennials — and first-time homebuyers in general — should never just assume they can’t afford a home," says Ling. "The first step to owning a home is knowing how you can finance it, so you should always research your options." |
"Yeah, he's on the radar. We're working through that at the moment," Simpson said before taking the club's first-to-fourth year players through their first pre-season session on Wednesday. "We've got to meet him and have a chat and see how he is and how he stands, but he's on the radar." West Coast played no part in the AFL's trade period this season, choosing to head into this year's draft to bolster its squad. Blayne Wilson, Ash Smith and Jacob Brennan have been delisted, while Darren Glass and Dean Cox have retired. Cox has joined the club as a full-time ruck coach, while Glass is a member of Adelaide's new look coaching panel. Alex Waterman has been added to the squad under the father-son rule, being the son of former Eagles defender Chris Waterman, while ruckman/forward Callum Sinclair has been elevated from the rookie list.
"We'll look for the (best available)," Simpson said, referring to the draft being held in the Gold Coast later this month. "We're going through all that now; I think it's pretty clear we decided to go to the draft this year and we think the draft bats pretty deep. "We'll have a look what's available." Simpson added he was very happy with the first impressions his squad's youngest members gave him on Wednesday morning. The Eagles coach said there is mounting pressure on the players to return in top shape because of the longer breaks they are getting from the club during seasons. But his first impressions were the group had stuck to their individual programs, which concentrated heavily on adding size and strength.
Dom Sheed and Murray Newman were noticeably bigger than the last time they were seen on a football field. Sheed played 10 games in his debut season of 2014, while Newman spent a large chunk of last season in jail. Simpson said Newman would start this season on a level playing field to the rest of his teammates after additional training at the club with former professional baseballer Corey Adamson since the team broke up at the end of last season. "I'm not going to single any one out, but this group in particular we want to put a bit of size on and strength over the break and then work on conditioning when we got back, so we've seen a bit of size on some players," Simpson said. "We have to be careful with that too; it's not all about bulking up. But it's a part of our program.
"First day in it feels as though there is some improvement there. "There is always a balance isn't there? But like I said, if it is going to continue like this then they are going to do a lot of work on their own and monitor their development. "What is difficult to do, is the kids who don't know what to improve and develop, they have to find a way." |
Energy-Efficient Method Of Recovering Valuable Minerals & Materials From Wastewater Developed
March 20th, 2014 by James Ayre
In addition to the new approach to recovering resources from industrial wastewater, the researchers also developed new ‘rapid tools’ for the identification of various environmental pollutants.
The new work makes the point that the cleaning and treatment of wastewater can provide more than just clean water, but can also be used as a means for procuring valuable resources — becoming a process that does not consume net energy or cause extra costs.
“Wastewater treatment and waste treatment have mainly been implemented by legal necessity. Now we should modify our way of thinking so that we would be able to regard waste disposal sites and purification plants as sources or raw materials and energy. In the near future, technology has been refined far enough to allow such waste treatment plants to operate on their own,” states Mona Arnold, Principal Researcher at VTT.
The press release from VTT provides more:
VTT has developed extraction methods for metals and minerals from waste materials. Biological extraction methods by which metals are recovered from mining, metal and recycling industry waste by utilising microbes and chemical reactions are under testing stages and they are forcasted for market uptake within the next few years.
In addition, VTT researchers developed an enzyme-assisted method by which feed products can be produced from side streams deriving from turnip rape processing in (the) food industry.
Also, VTT developed intelligent membrane materials, reducing the need of purification, for filtration purposes. Membrane solutions using only small amounts of energy were developed for water treatment purposes. VTT has collaborated with a university in Singapore to develop a method based on forward osmosis technology, by which metals and biocomponents can be recovered and concentrated from industrial process waters.
VTT also developed the previously mentioned new sensor technology — which can rapidly detect the presence of pollutants, including toxins from cyanobacteria, and also phenolic, hormone-like compounds. This technology is expected to be ready or production use within only a couple of years. |
Bubaker Habib, a local contractor for the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, speaks about his time working with Amb. Chris Stevens during the days leading up to the attack and what prompted him to tell his story. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
Bubaker Habib, a local contractor for the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, speaks about his time working with Amb. Chris Stevens during the days leading up to the attack and what prompted him to tell his story. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
Bubaker Habib was a local contractor for the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.
The last time I saw my friend Chris Stevens was at the Benghazi Airport as his body was being transferred to the plane to begin his last journey back to the United States. The great, honorable, gentle man I welcomed to Benghazi only two days earlier now lay lifeless before me on the same tarmac.
Chris had arrived in Benghazi on Sept. 10, 2012, for five days of meetings and to inaugurate an American cultural center at an English-language school under my care. A Libyan by birth and lifelong resident of Benghazi, I had for years taught English and facilitated cultural exchanges with the United States and, upon the resumption of diplomatic relations, served as an adviser and cultural interpreter for U.S. officials — especially Chris. I was also the one charged with coordinating his fateful visit to Benghazi.
I learned that I had been targeted that night and it was no longer safe for me to remain in Libya. I arrived in the United States two months later. Upon my arrival I was dismayed to find that the public conversation here had veered from memorializing a slain hero to hijacking his legacy for naked political agendas. Yet I maintained faith that, over time, the country would settle its discord, heal its wounds and return to honoring Chris Stevens, his life’s work and the noble mission for which he died.
We all know this has not happened, but not everyone will understand why. Yet I have had a front-row seat. For months, I have been approached by people seeking to persuade me to publicly endorse their false version of events that night, namely that Chris was taking part in secret weapons smuggling and that the secretary of state was responsible for letting him die.
But they do not need to pay me, threaten me, or persuade me to tell my story. I have already told the full truth, first to U.S. law enforcement, then to the State Department’s Accountability Review Board and again to the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Now, the repeated attempts to get me to endorse unfounded theories and the fact that politicians and others continue to revive false narratives and accusations have pushed me to step out from the shadows. The American people, to whom I owe such a debt of gratitude as one of the Libyans whom their country saved, deserve to know the truth and that there are people who are actively seeking to mislead them.
The truth is that Chris’s mission was to help build a partnership between the United States and the Libyan people and to help rebuild the country. That’s what brought him to Benghazi, first as a special envoy in 2011 and then as ambassador in September 2012. He knew the dangers better than anyone else, yet he believed his mission was too important not to carry out to the fullest of his abilities. The attacks that claimed his life and those of three other brave Americans were crimes and tragedies of the greatest magnitude. The blame rests entirely and unquestionably on those who carried out the attacks.
The promotion of utterly false conspiracy theories are offensive, to me, to the truth and to Chris’s memory. The political attacks based on the events of that night portray Chris not as the hero and leader that he was but as the pawn and the victim of incompetence or worse in Washington.
Chris does not deserve to have his legacy undermined in this way. The mission of the United States in Libya in 2011 and 2012 was noble, and Chris was its most lovable and effective champion. That the attack created chaos on the ground in Benghazi I know first-hand. It also left Libyans with a crisis of faith in our own politics and society. Chris’s loss was a blow to both our countries.
To allow a cloud of false and misguided allegations to remain over Chris would be to compound that loss. His memory and mission must be given the true honor and recognition they deserve. |
It only seems like every day another court strikes down a state ban on marriage equality. In reality, it’s almost every day.
Pennsylvania became the last Northeastern state to embrace same-sex nuptials on Tuesday, when a federal judge struck down an 18-year-old law defining marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, appointed by President George W. Bush, ruled that the Keystone State’s ban violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.:
“The issue we resolve today is a divisive one,” Jones wrote. “Some of our citizens are made deeply uncomfortable by the notion of same-sex marriage. However, that same-sex marriage causes discomfort in some does not make its prohibition constitutional.”
The ruling did not include a stay, suggesting same-sex couples can immediately take advantage of equal rights, though Gov. Tom Corbett (R), an often-strident opponent of marriage equality, will likely seek immediate relief from the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.
Also note, in the Pennsylvania case, state Attorney General Kathleen Kane announced last summer that she would not defend the Pennsylvania ban, agreeing with plaintiffs who argued it’s unconstitutional.
If the ruling stands, it will fill in a missing piece of a geographic puzzle: Pennsylvania is the only remaining state in the Northeast that does not allow same-sex couples to get legally married.
As for the larger trend, today’s ruling in the Keystone State comes just one day after a similar ruling in Oregon
Which came just a week after a federal court struck down Idaho’s ban on same-sex marriage.
Which came just a week after a court ruled against Arkansas’ anti-gay constitutional amendment.
This came a month after a federal judge ordered Ohio to recognize same-sex marriages from other states. The month before that, a federal judge struck down Michigan’s ban on marriage equality.
Civil-rights proponents have scored related victories in Virginia , Kentucky , Oklahoma , Utah and Texas , just over the last half-year or so.
For the right, that’s quite a losing streak. Indeed, as we discussed yesterday, how many cases have anti-gay forces won on the merits since the Supreme Court’s DOMA ruling? Zero. |
The acquisition of chat service Whatsapp for $19 billion has been the technology story of the week – but serious privacy and security questions remain over Facebook’s new messaging service.
The announcement of Facebook‘s acquisition of smartphone messaging company WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars has been the tech news headline of the day. While an analysis of the financial details of this transaction is beyond our remit, ESET’s researchers have experience with both mobile security as well as instant messaging, or chat as it’s more popularly known these days.
What’s up with WhatsApp?
If you are unfamiliar with WhatsApp, do not be alarmed. It is a cross-platform (Android, Apple iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone and Symbian) instant messaging application that allows you to send text, pictures, video and audio messages to other users of the service. While none of this may be particularly impressive to people who used instant messaging programs like PowWow or AIM in the 1990s, WhatsApp also allows you to share your current location, subject to how well your smartphone is able to determine that, of course.
Also, if you are currently a user of WhatsApp, you may not have used instant messaging back then, since most WhatsApp users were born around that time, according to sources as varied as Forbes, Forrester Research and a report from The Observer, identifying teenagers as the largest demographic for chat apps on mobile platforms as they increasingly turn away from both traditional computers and Facebook, in order to avoid not only their parents and older family members, but also their teachers. So, clearly, Facebook’s acquisition has the effect of returning a large number of departed customers back into the fold.
History of poor privacy practices and security problems
One of the main attractions to users of WhatsApp has been claims of its ability to offer secure, private communications between people. However, if that is the case, security and privacy have gotten off to a slow start in WhatsApp.
Aside from its own claims of security and dislike of advertisements, it is difficult to judge the suitability of WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption when their Terms of Service prohibit independent examination by tools commonly used by software developers and security researchers, alike. And even assuming that they are using encryption, it does not matter much if the encryption can be easily broken. Whenever a service provides no information about its encryption, concerns about relying on security through obscurity arise. Claims of secure delivery mechanisms and storage of subscriber data are also likewise difficult to assess. As a related issue, claims about not storing messages after they have been delivered may be impossible to confirm independently, or they may be more natural paranoia from security researchers. It is, however, difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate the risk of eavesdropping and storage elsewhere in an era of National Security Letters and bulk metadata collection, as discussed by Ars Technica here.
The WhatsApp service uses phone numbers for the username portion of its addresses, exactly as user names and domain names are combined to make email addresses. This means that in order to communicate, users are, to all intents and purposes, exchanging phone numbers. While this may be considered a non-issue for phone calls and texting, for which you already have to know the recipient’s phone number, instant messaging is a different type of communication, and you may not want to expose your phone number to someone you are chatting with, especially if you do not know them that well. This poor choice for a unique user identifier has caused concern among privacy advocates, and it is not helped by WhatsApp’s behavior of automatically uploading all the phone numbers from customers’ address books to its servers in order to build contact lists. A “feature” which cannot be turned off or even selectively enabled or disabled.
WhatsApp has chosen several password algorithms over the years based on information such as an IMEI or a MAC address, which can easily be obtained from a device. WhatsApp did not change these mechanisms for three years and finally did so in 2012.
Through 2011 and 2012, WhatsApp experienced a plethora of security and privacy holes in its instant messaging service, ranging from sending conversations unencrypted (and potentially making them available for anyone to read) to vulnerabilities allowing accounts to be hijacked and messages to be forged. Even as these were repaired, continued problems with cryptography allowed encrypted messages to be deciphered—it should be noted, though, that WhatsApp has fixed issues as they have been reported, and that some vulnerabilities may have required physical access to the smartphone. Once an attacker has physical access to a device, it becomes increasingly difficult to secure.
Governments on at least three continents, including the Dutch Data Protection Authority, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the Communications and Information Technology Commission of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have taken notice of WhatsApp and have publicly investigated it because of concerns about the privacy of their citizens. While those are the actions of civilian agencies concerned with privacy and telecommunications, it is not unimaginable that other, more covert intelligence and security agencies have taken notice, too, for the opposite reason. Frankly, it is likely that intelligence agencies around the world have taken advantage of the service’s initial lack of encrypted communications—and the low quality of encryption for subsequent communications—for monitoring everything from terroristic threats and dissidents to communications from journalists, conversations between attorneys and clients and perhaps even eavesdropping on foreign governments participating in trade or other delicate negotiations.
A barrel of phish, dripping with malware
Despite past concerns about privacy and security violations, WhatsApp’s usage has continued to skyrocket, growing from nothing in 2009 to having 430 million active users by January 2014. That kind of success has not gone unnoticed, either by Wall Street and Facebook, or by criminals also seeking to capitalize on WhatsApp’s success, but for malicious reasons.
There is at least one hoax being sent by email between WhatsApp users, according to computer security analyst Graham Cluley, which claims that WhatsApp will start charging them for messages sent via the service unless they forward the message to ten of their friends. Hoaxes of this kind are old, and benign when compared to malware, but the tricksters who are create and perpetuate them are responsible for clogging up your inbox with junk email.
On a more malicious note, below is a screenshot captured by ESET Senior Security Researcher Stephen Cobb on a personal computer, purporting to be a voice mail left for him on WhatsApp, and urging him to click on it to listen to the message in his web browser. Had he visited the web site, his credentials could have been stolen and his computer possibly hijacked, as well. While Stephen—like our readers—knows not to click on suspicious emails (especially when claiming to be from services to which they are not subscribed), such phishing attempts are commonplace and, unfortunately, all too often successful.
This, of course, is just one example of a phishing campaign targeting users of WhatsApp. There have also been numerous campaigns designed to deliver various forms of malware as well, according to multiple reports from Jeff Goldman of eSecurity Planet , Hoax Slayer, Softpedia, The Inquirer and Help Net Security. The malware included—but was certainly not limited to— Win32/Inject.NHN, MSIL/Bladabindi.O, numerous variants from the Win32/TrojanDownloader.Banload and Win32/Spy.Bancos families, and even malware from the ZBot and the Delf family of trojan horses. ESET detects all of these threats, and in some cases, has done so for years. This widespread use of so many different families of malware is not the result of one criminal gang, but rather an example of how numerous organized criminal groups have responded en masse to the rising ubiquitous of WhatsApp.
Fear of a dystopian future: Will WhatsApp offer up your privacy to Facebook?
Jan Koum, the CEO and cofounder of WhatsApp, has stated in a post on his company’s blog that nothing will change for its users, however, it is hard to imagine any program or service for which the user experience does not change over time, especially after such an acquisition.
Perhaps the closest parallel is Skype. Founded in 2003, the company was acquired by eBay in 2005 and subsequently acquired by Microsoft in 2011. After Microsoft’s acquisition, numerous changes were made (reported by Ars Technica here), ranging from replacing the P2P infrastructure of public supernodes on which the service runs with a cluster of Linux-based servers run by Microsoft, to integrating logins with Microsoft accounts (formerly known as Microsoft Passport and Windows Live ID). Microsoft also shares with the public some of the information about how law enforcement requests for Skype’s users are handled.
Facebook is already notorious for the erosion of its user’s privacy, constantly changing—and, in some cases, removing—privacy controls in order to generate greater revenue by selling ever-increasing details of their customers to advertisers (as reported by Electronic Privacy Information Center, the New York Times, Matt McKeon and The Washington Post here). And the assimilation of WhatsApp into Facebook’s empire represents an unprecedented opportunity to learn more about people’s daily lives—all with the purpose of targeting them with more and more detailed advertising.
Imagine letting your spouse know you are pregnant over WhatsApp, only to find that the next time you log in to Facebook you are presented with advertisements for baby furniture, diapers and college savings plans. If you think this scenario is far-fetched, remember this is how webmail providers like Google’s Gmail service have been data-mining your emails for several years in order to display advertising relevant to whatever is being discussed in each message (as described by Google itself here).
Conclusion
Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp represents a boon to that small company, rewarding not just dozens of employees for their hard work, dedication and perseverance but their customers as well, who chose to trust the company by using their instant messaging software. Trust, however, is not immutable and can be damaged, even lost, when the relationship between a company and its customers is abused. Facebook is known for playing fast and loose with the privacy of its users (who are, after all, not its customers; Facebook’s customers are advertising agencies). It remains to be seen if Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp will allow the service to continue to grow, or whether its users will flee from the combined grasp of Facebook and WhatsApp in favor of companies that offer more secure and private instant messaging.
We would be remiss if we did not point out that many of the issues ESET has explored are potential concerns based on what might happen in the future. Or, in other words: Don’t panic. If you are using the WhatsApp or Facebook apps on your smartphone right now, there’s no need to uninstall either program because of concerns about privacy in the future. However, it would be a good idea for you to review their settings as well as terms of use and privacy policies now as well as any time after each app updates to a newer version.
The author would like to thank his colleagues Bruce Burrell, Graham Cluley, Stephen Cobb, David Harley, Lysa Myers and Thomas Uhlemann for their research and contributions to this article.
Aryeh Goretsky, MVP, ZCSE
Distinguished Researcher
References and further reading
Jauregui, Paul. “What’s up with WhatsApp’s Security?” Praetorian. http://www.praetorian.com/blog/whats-up-with-whatsapps-security-facebook-ssl-vulnerabilities.
Levine, Yasha. “The problem with WhatsApp’s privacy boasts: They’re not true.” PandoDaily. http://pando.com/2014/02/21/the-problem-with-whatsapps-privacy-boasts-theyre-not-true/.
Kurtz, Andreas. “Shooting the Messenger.” http://www.andreas-kurtz.de/2011/09/shooting-messenger.html.
Page, Carly. “Facebook’s Whatsapp buy is a privacy nightmare for users, but it makes sense for the social network.” The Inquirer. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/opinion/2329985/facebooks-whatsapp-buyout-is-a-privacy-nightmare-for-users-but-it-makes-sense-for-the-social-network.
Saudi Gazette. “CITC warns Skype, Viber, WhatsApp.” http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20130401159359.
Wikipedia. “WhatsApp.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp.
Williams, Martyn. “WhatsApp could face prosecution on poor privacy.” CSO Online. http://www.csoonline.com/article/727756/whatsapp-could-face-prosecution-on-poor-privacy. |
The Phillies announced today that they have claimed left-hander Patrick Schuster off waivers from the Athletics and optioned him to Triple-A Lehigh Valley. Oakland had designated the 25-year-old Schuster for assignment earlier in the week.
Schuster made his big league debut with the A’s this season but surrendered eight runs on nine hits and six walks in 6 2/3 innings. While those numbers aren’t much to look at, Schuster has dominated at the Triple-A level this year, posting a brilliant 1.16 ERA with 39 strikeouts, 12 walks and a 44.44 percent ground-ball rate in 38 2/3 innings. Schuster was at one time the first pick of the Rule 5 Draft (2013) and has an overall solid minor league track record. He’ll give the Phillies a depth option in the bullpen and could get a chance to prove that he can be a long-term piece in their bullpen with a September call-up this season, as he remains on the 40-man roster (which is now at 40 players) after being optioned to the minors. |
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