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Edmonton's arts scene will have a new, underground home inside the Bay Enterprise Square LRT station, if arts enthusiast Bradley Biamonte has his way. The station's retail bays, located beneath Jasper Avenue, have stood vacant for more than 30 years, and Biamonte would like to see them transformed into artist studios and gallery space. "It's quite a large, and quite an eerie space. I find it really disconcerting when I walk through there," said Biamonte during a Monday morning interview with Edmonton AM radio show host Mark Connolly. "You couldn't find a more dead space in Edmonton. It would bring that space alive." With only minimal investment, Biamonte said more than 30 studios could be carved out of the retail bays, creating a community hub in a space that has sat stubbornly unused since 1983. "Once artists show and do their thing, it creates a vibe. People will show up because of the vibe, and once you have people and artists in there, businesses usually follow," Biamonte said. "But in the meantime you would have what I like to call "Edmonton's underground arts scene." Biamonte has been pitching the idea to city council, transit officials, the Edmonton Arts Council and some prominent artists for the last couple of years, but has struggled to make any progress. He hopes the idea will gain traction with the ongoing revitalization of downtown. "We keep talking about the Arts District, but it's such a formal arts district. This would be an informal space for budding artists, the kind of artists who are messy and really interesting." What do you think? Should the Bay Enterprise Square mall area be converted into artist studios? Let us know in the comments below. |
Knocking on wood – in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland the phrase is touch wood – is an apotropaic tradition of literally touching, tapping, or knocking on wood, or merely stating that one is doing or intending to do so, in order to avoid "tempting fate" after making a favourable observation, a boast, or declaration concerning one's own death or other unfavorable situation beyond one's control. Only the spoken party (a singular person) is to actually "knock on wood" at a time. Origin [ edit ] The origin of the custom may be in German folklore, where in supernatural beings are thought to live in trees, and can be invoked for protection. One explanation states that the tradition derived from the Pagans who thought that trees were the homes of fairies, spirits, dryads and many other mystical creatures. In these instances, people might knock or touch wood to request good luck, or to distract spirits with evil intentions. When in need of a favour or some good luck, one politely mentioned this wish to a tree and then touched the bark, representing the first "knock". The second "knock" was to say "thank you". The knocking was also supposed to prevent evil spirits from hearing your speech and as such stop them from interfering. Alternatively, some traditions have it that by knocking upon wood, you would awaken and release the benevolent wood fairies that dwelt there.[citation needed] Similar traditions in other cultures [ edit ] In Indonesia and Malaysia, when someone is saying bad things, the one that hears it would knock on wood (or other suitable surface) and knock on their forehead while saying amit-amit (Indonesia), choi or tak cun tak cun (Malaysia). (Indonesia), or (Malaysia). In Italy, tocca ferro ("touch iron") is used, especially after seeing an undertaker or something related to death. [ unreliable source? ] [1] ("touch iron") is used, especially after seeing an undertaker or something related to death. In Iran, when one says something good about something or somebody, he or she might knock on wood and say بزنم به تخته چشم نخوره bezan-am be taxteh, cheshm naxoreh ("[I] am knocking on wood to prevent he/she/it from being jinxed"). The evil eye and the concept of being jinxed are common phobias and superstitious beliefs in Iranian culture, and Iranians traditionally believe knocking on wood wards off evil spirits. ("[I] am knocking on wood to prevent he/she/it from being jinxed"). The evil eye and the concept of being jinxed are common phobias and superstitious beliefs in Iranian culture, and Iranians traditionally believe knocking on wood wards off evil spirits. In Egypt, إمسك الخشب emsek el-khashab ("hold the wood") is said when mentioning either good luck one has had in the past or hopes one has for the future. When referring to past good luck the expression is usually used in hopes of the good thing continuing to occur via its spoken acknowledgment, as well as preventing envy. ("hold the wood") is said when mentioning either good luck one has had in the past or hopes one has for the future. When referring to past good luck the expression is usually used in hopes of the good thing continuing to occur via its spoken acknowledgment, as well as preventing envy. In old English folklore, "knocking on wood" also referred to when people spoke of secrets – they went into the isolated woods to talk privately and "knocked" on the trees when they were talking to hide their communication from evil spirits who would be unable to hear when they knocked. [ citation needed ] Another version holds that the act of knocking was to perk up the spirits to make them work in the requester's favor. [2] Yet another version holds that a sect of monks who wore large wooden crosses around their necks would tap or "knock" on them to ward away evil. Another version holds that the act of knocking was to perk up the spirits to make them work in the requester's favor. Yet another version holds that a sect of monks who wore large wooden crosses around their necks would tap or "knock" on them to ward away evil. In Romania, there is also a superstition that one can avoid bad things aforementioned by literally knocking on wood ( a bate în lemn ). Wood tables are exempted. One of the possible reasons could be that there is a monastery practice to call people to pray by playing / knocking the simantron. [3] ). Wood tables are exempted. One of the possible reasons could be that there is a monastery practice to call people to pray by playing / knocking the simantron. In Bulgaria the superstition of "knock on wood" ( чукам на дърво chukam na dǎrvo ) is reserved for protection against the evil, and is not typically used for attracting good luck. Usually people engage in the practice in reaction to bad news, actual or merely imagined. In most cases the nearest wooden object is used (in some areas, however, tables are exempt); if there are no such objects within immediate reach, a common tongue-in-cheek practice is to knock on one's head. Knocking on wood is often followed by lightly pulling one's earlobe with the same hand. Common phrases to accompany the ritual are "God guard us" ( Бог да ни пази Bog da ni pazi ) and "may the Devil not hear" ( да не чуе Дяволът da ne chue Djavolǎt ). ) is reserved for protection against the evil, and is not typically used for attracting good luck. Usually people engage in the practice in reaction to bad news, actual or merely imagined. In most cases the nearest wooden object is used (in some areas, however, tables are exempt); if there are no such objects within immediate reach, a common tongue-in-cheek practice is to knock on one's head. Knocking on wood is often followed by lightly pulling one's earlobe with the same hand. Common phrases to accompany the ritual are "God guard us" ( ) and "may the Devil not hear" ( ). In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia there is also the habit of knocking on wood when saying something positive or affirmative about someone or something and not wanting that to change. Frequently the movement of knocking on nearby wood is followed by da pokucam u drvo / да куцнем у дрво ("I will knock on wood"), or sometimes by da ne ureknem / да не урекнем ("I don't want to jinx it"). [4] / ("I will knock on wood"), or sometimes by / ("I don't want to jinx it"). In Poland, as well as in Russia, there is a habit of knocking on (unpainted) wood (which may be preceded by saying odpukać w niemalowane drewno or simply odpukać , literally meaning "to knock on unpainted wood") when saying something negative – to prevent it from happening – or, more rarely, something positive – in order not to "spoil it". In Czech Republic, this is often accompanied for stronger effect by knocking on one's teeth, a piece of building stone, or metal, reasoning that these (as opposed to wood) survive even fire. or simply , literally meaning "to knock on unpainted wood") when saying something negative – to prevent it from happening – or, more rarely, something positive – in order not to "spoil it". In Czech Republic, this is often accompanied for stronger effect by knocking on one's teeth, a piece of building stone, or metal, reasoning that these (as opposed to wood) survive even fire. In Georgia, a ხეზე დაკაკუნება kheze daḳaḳuneba ("knocking on wood") is performed when one mentions a bad possibility that could take place in future. Usually the person knocks and imitates spitting simultaneously and does it three times. It is also done when one experiences a bad Omen. ("knocking on wood") is performed when one mentions a bad possibility that could take place in future. Usually the person knocks and imitates spitting simultaneously and does it three times. It is also done when one experiences a bad Omen. In Turkey, when someone hears about a bad experience someone else had, he/she may gently pull one earlobe, and knock on a wood twice, which means "God save me from that thing". In the United States in the eighteenth century, men used to knock on the wood stock of their muzzle-loading rifles to settle the black powder charge, ensuring the weapon would fire cleanly. [ citation needed ] In Spain tocar madera and in France toucher du bois ("to touch wood") is something that you say when you want your luck or a good situation to continue, e.g. Ha ido bien toda la semana y, toco madera, seguirá bien el fin de semana ("It's been good all week and, touching wood, the weekend will stay good"). and in France ("to touch wood") is something that you say when you want your luck or a good situation to continue, e.g. ("It's been good all week and, touching wood, the weekend will stay good"). In Latin America, it is also tradition to physically knock a wooden object. A variant requires that the object does not have legs ( tocar madera sin patas ), which rules out chairs, tables and beds. [5] ), which rules out chairs, tables and beds. In Brazil, bater na madeira ("knock on wood") is something actually done physically, three knocks are required after giving an example of a bad thing eventually happening. No verbalization is required, just the three knocks on the closest piece or object of wood. In the absence of wood, someone can say bate na madeira , to prevent the bad thing to happen. People do not actually believe knocking three times a piece of wood will really protect them, but it is a social habit and it is polite to do so to demonstrate that ones doesn't want that bad thing they are talking about to actually happen. ("knock on wood") is something actually done physically, three knocks are required after giving an example of a bad thing eventually happening. No verbalization is required, just the three knocks on the closest piece or object of wood. In the absence of wood, someone can say , to prevent the bad thing to happen. People do not actually believe knocking three times a piece of wood will really protect them, but it is a social habit and it is polite to do so to demonstrate that ones doesn't want that bad thing they are talking about to actually happen. In Greece the saying χτύπα ξύλο chtýpa xýlo ("knock on wood") is said when hearing someone say something negative in order to prevent it from happening. ("knock on wood") is said when hearing someone say something negative in order to prevent it from happening. In Lebanon and Syria the saying دقّ عالخشب duqq ‘al-khashab ("knock on [the] wood") is said when hearing someone say something negative in order to prevent it from happening. It is also largely observed when saying something positive or affirmative about someone or something and not wanting that to change. ("knock on [the] wood") is said when hearing someone say something negative in order to prevent it from happening. It is also largely observed when saying something positive or affirmative about someone or something and not wanting that to change. In Israel the saying בלי עין הרע b'lí 'áyin hará' ("without the evil eye") is said when someone mentions good things happening to themself or someone else, or even when mentioning a valuable things they own. This expression is a superstition that is used in the hope that a good thing will continue to occur even after it's mentioned, and as a way to prevent envy ( hasad حسد Evil Eye, as they believe that Envy can harm other people. ("without the evil eye") is said when someone mentions good things happening to themself or someone else, or even when mentioning a valuable things they own. This expression is a superstition that is used in the hope that a good thing will continue to occur even after it's mentioned, and as a way to prevent envy ( Evil Eye, as they believe that Envy can harm other people. In Norway the saying is "knock on the table" ( bank i bordet ), which usually was made of wood. ), which usually was made of wood. In Denmark the saying is 7, 9, 13 / syv, ni, tretten (usually accompanied by knocking under a table), as these numbers have traditionally been associated with magic. See also [ edit ] Alomancy, related to throwing salt over the left shoulder Crossed fingers Evil eye Jinx |
A whole host of pre-holiday polls show that Ted Cruz is about to have a very merry Christmas. For the first time since the collapse of Ben Carson, Donald Trump has some real competition. Nationally, a new Quinnipiac poll shows Trump leading with 28%, but the Texas Republican Senator is right on his heels with 24% support. This same Quinnipiac poll shows Cruz tied with Hillary Clinton at 44%. Trump loses to Clinton 40% to 47%. What’s interesting is that Clinton is a very well known figure, one of the most famous politicians in the country, and even against Trump she tops out at 47%. In South Carolina, where Trump has dominated forever, Cruz has tied things up at 27%. Should Trump lose Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina was seen as his firewall. In New Hampshire, Trump leads with 24% support. Cruz is now in second at 16%. Cruz has jumped to second place in Florida. Trump is still in first with 29%, Cruz sits at 18%. According to the most recent poll out of Iowa, Cruz is outright beating Trump, 40% to 31%. While there is no question Trump is still in the lead, Cruz definitely has the wind at his back. The other big story out of this latest round of polls is the continuing collapse of the Republican Establishment, specifically favorite son Marco Rubio. Nationally, in the Quinnipiac poll, Rubio, at 12%, lost -5 points; while Cruz surged +8. Between Trump, Carson, and Cruz, the anti-establishment garners an astounding 62% national support. Trump and Cruz alone eat up 52%. Assuming Cason doesn’t rebound, that 10% is almost certainly going to go to either Trump or Cruz. Jeb Bush and Chris Christie only have 8% nationally to leave to an Establishment candidate. The two governors sit at 4.5% and 3.5%, respectively. Trump, Cruz, and Carson eat up 53% of the vote in Florida. Not-so-favorite sons Bush and Rubio languish with a total of 27% support, 10% and 17% respectively. The same is true in South Carolina, where the anti-Establishment vote practically runs the table with 65% support. Rubio sits at a pathetic 12%. Even in the Establishment Firewall of New Hampshire, Cruz and Trump earn an impressive 40% support. Bush, Christie and Rubio together only reach 36%. What this tells us is that with the possible exception of New Hampshire, even if the GOP Establishment does consolidate around a single candidate, which is unlikely until after South Carolina, it might not work. As of now, with about 5 weeks until the actual voting begins, 2016 is looking like a race no one imagined: Donald Trump vs. Ted Cruz while, with bitter tears streaming down their plump cheeks, the Establishment presses its snotty nose against the glass wondering why voters won’t ask them to come out and play. Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC |
Aaron James, Professor of Philosophy at UC-Irvine, has written a new book, Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of Meaning. It addresses major questions in philosophy from his unique perspective as both a philosopher and former surfer. James argues that the surfer mentality offers a unique perspective on philosophical issues because: Surfers often have a certain natural lightness about being, about the meaning of their personal existence. Those more at sea existentially can certainly appreciate the surfer’s good fortune. And it is hard to dislike people so thoroughly enthralled by living … Surely most of us could learn to live lighter, by sliding over life’s problems. (4) One of his salient themes is that “what the surfer knows suggests that we should … get used to an even more leisurely, surfer-friendly style of capitalism, in which we all work, but a lot less …” (5) He claims that working less is an ethical imperative because work “as we now practice it emits gases … that are steadily warming the planet. So … as long as we do something less consumptive of ecological resources than working … we contribute to society by making the climate change problem a little less terrible … ” (6-7) Leisure activities are thus “a new model of civic virtue. The real troublemaker is the workaholic, whose labor-intensive striving makes the problem of global warming worse …” (8) And these issues are of profound ethical importance: “If climate science is even roughly correct … would it be morally okay for us to further enrich ourselves in work, without limitations, if many billions of living or future people are thereby put at grave risk of profound injury? Or are we obliged to adapt?” (8) Would it really be so hard to work less, and enjoy life more he wonders. While most of us derive a sense of self from our work, it doesn’t have to be that way. The Protestant work ethic nurtured capitalism, but now we should reject both and use our time more productively than for destruction of the ecosystem. This is the main point of the book, that the surfer mentality is “on the right side of history.” (9) We should adapt our lifestyles to a changing planet. The book devotes most of its pages to the surfer mentality’s insights regarding philosophical problems, using Sartrean philosophy as its foil. Key insights include that: 1) being in the moment provides more comfort than material possessions; 2) we should choose the surfer mentality; 3) intense pleasure and self-transcendence can be experienced by being in the flow; and 4) a hyper-competitive society destroys humanity and nature. This leads James to state: In a more leisurely capitalism, we’d have a less competitive way of life … and we’d spend more of our time getting attuned, living from love, practicing for its own sake, and transcending status preoccupation for a happier contentment. (288) The book’s epilogue relates its insights to the question of life’s meaning. But he changes that question to: “What are the meanings, plural, of life. If that’s the question … then we just enumerate the many different ways life can have meaning … Friendship. Worthy projects. Creative activity. Music. Surfing. Nice parties. Or whatever … ” (292) James rejects the view that there must be one meaning to explains all these multiple meanings. So for James the meaning of life “can be nothing more than the various ways life is meaningful to us …” (292) The hard part is choosing from the many ways that life can be meaningful. Of course, this analysis ignores the question of the meaning of the cosmos itself. But even if we could discover such a super meaning—say the super meaning was to enjoy an eternal feast in heaven—then we could just ask about the meaning of heaven. Maybe we would like heaven, maybe we wouldn’t. But independent of our answer to the question of universal meaning, James points out that there is already plenty of meaning in life. Still James admits that many people won’t be satisfied because they want to be “part of something bigger ….” (293) Here he recommends that we just add that meaning to our list, and connect our daily activity with that meaning: “being part of a collective enterprise could never be more than one source of meaning among many on a long list … So our list of meanings can grow longer … to cover big parts of history.” (295) In fact, “… many of our activities would come to seem much less important to us if we came to know that an asteroid would destroy the planet soon after our death.” (298) So being part of history is already an important part of meaning in our lives.1 Considerations about the future are connected with James’ concern about the destruction of the biosphere. We living people are enjoying the carbon-based prosperity party. And though we’ll be dead before our emissions completely befoul the global ecology, if we don’t take rather dramatic steps to control their production, our story will be one of having indulged in the feast and skipped out on the check, without paying our bit, let alone helping with the dishes. This really would not be cool. It would be a gross human failure, or, if you will, a great stain, or sin. (299) Capitalism has produced great things, yet it encourages the self-interest that contributes to the destruction of the planet. So should we continue to enjoy the party and despoil the environment, or live a more leisurely, happier lifestyle? The sun’s light and heat brought us a planet teeming with life, but we now trap its heat in our atmosphere. Will we continue to bury our heads in the sands, or will we make a heroic effort to change things and save the world for future generations? Let’s hope we do the latter. James’s book is carefully and conscientiously crafted and deeply thoughtful. I would like to thank him for his contribution to the philosophical literature. _______________________________________________________________ 1. The philosopher Samuel Scheffler made a similar point about our concern for future generations. |
Ar nosurge Plus Limited Edition Ar nosurge™ Plus is a Fantasy, Sci-fi, '7 Dimension' RPG, that takes place in a world where music and song can create magic. It tells the compelling story of a civilization that lost their planet and has been roaming the edge of space for 2000 years in search of a new home. In Ar nosurge Plus, the player follows two sets of characters: Delta and Casty, whose goal is to protect humanity and save the world, and Ion & Earthes, who are trying to find Ion a way home to Earth. The player can interchange between both pairs and soon discover a way to combine their storylines and strengths to eventually solve the mystery that shrouds their ongoing struggle. *Some screenshots are from the PS3™ version of the game, Ar nosurge: Ode to an Unborn Star |
"Sweets and Sour Marge" is the eighth episode of The Simpsons' thirteenth season. It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on January 20, 2002. In the episode, Homer gathers several of Springfield's citizens to participate in creating the biggest human pyramid in the world. It fails, but they instead learn that Springfield is the world's fattest town, prompting Homer's wife Marge to sue Garth Motherloving's sugar company. "Sweets and Sour Marge" was written by Carolyn Omine and directed by Mark Kirkland. It was dedicated to the memory of Ron Taylor. Omine conceived the episode after hearing about smokers who sued tobacco companies. While its plot is loosely based on Erin Brockovich, the episode also features references to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Butterfinger. It also features Ben Stiller as Garth Motherloving. In its original broadcast, the episode was seen by approximately 7.5 million viewers, finishing in 34th place in the ratings the week it aired. Following its home video release, the episode received mixed reviews from critics. Plot [ edit ] Homer buys a book on world records published by Duff at a library sale. After boring everyone with world record trivia, Homer decides to break a record himself. He gathers the whole town to build the world's tallest human pyramid. After Jimbo and Kearney move their hands just before the record is claimed, the pyramid collapses into a giant sphere that rolls through town, taking in Agnes Skinner, Hans Moleman, and a suicidal man about to jump from a ledge onto the street. The entire town rolls to a truck weighing station and the Duff record book officials say that Springfield is the world's fattest town, ahead of Milwaukee. The townsfolk are happy to have made it in the record book, but Marge is worried that the whole town is overweight. She discovers that there is sugar in nearly everything Springfielders eat. After complaining to Garth Motherloving, head of the "Motherloving Sweets and Sugar Company" (voiced by Ben Stiller), Marge decides to sue the sugar industry with the help of Gil and Professor Frink. Judge Snyder sides with her and bans all sugar products in Springfield, angering Homer and most of the town. The whole town goes cold turkey and begins to suffer from intense sugar withdrawal. Homer joins a secret group led by Garth Motherloving, who is determined to illegally bring sugar back to Springfield. Homer then embarks with Bart, Apu, Mr. Burns, and a cartoon vampire named Count Fudge-ula to smuggle sugar from the island of San Glucos. After arriving back in Springfield, and evading a police boat, Homer brings the sugar to the docks. Marge pleads Homer to dump the cargo. There Homer is presented with two choices: to obey Marge and press the button Drop Cargo or bring the sugar to Garth Motherloving by pressing the button Obey Bad Guy. After contemplating, Homer drops the cargo and all the sugar falls to the Springfield docks' water. All Springfielders, even those who seemed happier and healthier without sugar, jump into the harbor and drink the sugar water. Judge Snyder then declares the sugar ban over and dives in with everyone else. Marge is upset and she thinks about giving up changing the world. However, Homer tells her that he loves her when she tries to make a world a better place. Production [ edit ] "Sweets and Sour Marge" was written by Carolyn Omine and directed by Mark Kirkland. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on January 20, 2002. The idea for the episode was pitched by Omine, who based it on a lawsuit at the time, wherein smokers sued tobacco companies for selling harmful wares. Omine found it "kinda weird" that the people did not take responsibility for their own health, and joked that, in the future, people might sue food companies for "making them fat", which eventually became the episode's plot.[1] While making the episode, the Simpsons writers decided to compile a list of Springfield's fat residents. According to Omine, the list "never ended", and when the writers realized the amount of fat people there were in Springfield, they decided that the residents should try and "go for the world record" in the "fattest people" category.[1] The writers then decided that the residents were trying to set the world record for largest human pyramid, and then accidentally set the record for fattest population. The episode features the first appearance of Cletus' cousin Dia-Betty.[1] The character was animated by Kirkland's assistant Matt Faughnan, who has since become a regular director for the series.[2] Garth Motherloving, the head of the "Motherloving Sweets and Sugar Company", was portrayed by American actor and comedian Ben Stiller.[3] At one point in the episode, the Springfield residents try to set the record for largest human pyramid, which fails when the pyramid collapses, causing the people to roll into a giant ball. According to director Kirkland, the scene, which the staff members refer to as the "people ball", was very difficult to animate, and it "almost gave [him] a migraine" determining how to implement it in the episode.[2] While trying to figure out how to animate the "people ball", Kirkland spray-painted a globe with white primer and assigned layout artist Paul Wee to draw the Springfield citizens on it with black ink. Normally, the Simpsons animators each draw ten scenes per week, but because he drew the "people ball", Wee was excused from these duties. Since drawing the "people ball" by hand would have "murdered" the animators, they soon decided to photograph it for each frame of the scene.[2] The photographs were taken in Kirkland's garage and were then photocopied using a Xerox photocopier.[2] Executive producer and current showrunner Al Jean stated that the technique for animating the "people ball" was "extremely interesting", although it has never been used again in the series.[3] The "master drawing" of the human pyramid, which Kirkland also stated was very complicated, took animator Matthew Schofield a couple of days to draw. The drawing then became a reference for the other animators to use when animating the scene.[2] Cultural references [ edit ] "Sweets and Sour Marge"'s plot is loosely based on the 2000 drama film Erin Brockovich, which revolves around Erin Brockovich's legal fight against the US West Coast energy corporation Pacific Gas and Electric Company.[4] The Duff Book of World Records is a parody of the annually published reference book Guinness Book of World Records.[5] Cereal mascot Count Fudgula is a spoof of the General Mills cereal mascot Count Chocula (who, in turn, parodies fictional character Count Dracula). After sugar becomes banned in Springfield, the town's police force can be seen burning confiscated sugar products. However, when they throw an amount of Butterfinger candy bars in the fire, the bars start to glow and are left intact. Disappointed, police chief Clancy Wiggum explains "Butterfingers. Even fire doesn't want them." For a long time, The Simpsons characters starred in Butterfinger commercials, which helped the series get launched by earning revenue from the commercials. Around the time "Sweets and Sour Marge" was written, the series contract with Butterfinger was terminated, and the staff therefore decided to make fun of it. "If it had still been in existence, we wouldn't have done it", Jean said in the DVD commentary for the episode.[3] Cletus' cousin Dia-Betty is loosely based on Darlene Cates' character Bonnie Grape in the 1993 film What's Eating Gilbert Grape.[3] During the boat chase when Wiggum pursues Homer for the sugar cargo (narrowly avoiding two boats transporting a huge glass pane and a mother and child riding a combined jet ski-stroller), the Miami Vice Theme is played. Before he agrees to hand the sugar cargo to Motherloving, Homer demands that he gets to see an Oompa Loompa, a character from the 1964 children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The Oompa Loompa's design is based on the version used in the 1971 film adaptation Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, which Kirkland watched in order to "get [the design] right."[2] Release [ edit ] In its original American broadcast on January 20, 2002, "Sweets and Sour Marge" received a 7.3 rating, according to Nielsen Media Research, translating to approximately 7.5 million viewers. The episode finished in 34th place in the ratings for the week of January 14–20, 2002.[6] On August 24, 2010, "Sweets and Sour Marge" was released as part of The Simpsons: The Complete Thirteenth Season DVD and Blu-ray set. Al Jean, Carolyn Omine, Matt Selman, Tom Gammill, Max Pross, Mark Kirkland and Matt Warburton participated in the audio commentary of the episode.[3] Following its home video release, "Sweets and Sour Marge" received mixed reviews from critics. Colin Jacobson of DVD Movie Guide gave the episode a positive review, writing "What would Marge do on the show if she didn’t stage campaigns to tell others what to do? Despite the risk of redundancy, 'Sweets' actually works quite well." He praised Stiller's appearance in the episode, as well as the "exploration of the records book". He concluded his review by considering it "one of Season 13's stronger programs".[7] Nate Boss of Project-Blu was favorable as well, calling the episode "A funny take on class-action suits (particularly those concerning other consumer products willingly purchased, like tobacco), as well as prohibition."[8] DVD Verdict's Jennifer Malkowski gave the episode a B rating, and wrote that the "library's 'Yes, we have pornography!' banner" was the episode's "highlight".[9] Giving it a more mixed review, Ron Martin of 411Mania called the episode "uneven at best, mediocre at worst".[10] Andre Dellamorte of Collider described it as a "redress" of the season 8 episode "Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment", in which Springfield is faced with prohibition.[11] Giving the episode a negative review, IGN's R.L. Shaffer wrote that "Sweet and Sour Marge", along with "Homer the Moe", "The Frying Game", and "The Old Man and the Key" "represent some of the worst of The Simpsons".[12] |
Video Saudi Arabia's Major General Mansour Al-Turki, Ministry of Interior spokesman has denied that Saudi Arabia has ever funded any terrorist organisation but said there had been a 'misuse of our financial system'. According to WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton had claimed Saudi Arabia was very significantly funding Islamist militant networks around the world. But General Al-Turki, told HARDtalk's Stephen Sackur: "We did not fund any terrorist organisations. We did not fund any." But in the last decade there had been a "misuse of our financial system" but "that was long before any terrorist organisation existed". People had been convinced they were providing money to help the poor when in fact the funds were going to finance al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Watch the full interview on BBC World News and BBC News Channel on Tuesday 2 February 2016. |
Browse, and you'll see that the Internet is littered with a few arguments that ScHoolboy Q is, on the low, the most interesting member of TDE, better than even the golden child Kendrick Lamar. Most of these arguments span 2012 through summer 2013, until Big Sean released "Control," featuring Kendrick Lamar, who humiliated his peers. After that coup, Kendrick was Superman. "Kendrick Lamar is everybody's favorite rapper," Q told Fuse in 2013. "That's my brother, I love him to death, but I'm better than all them niggas in Black Hippy." Some of us here agree. Writing for us a couple years ago, the critic Dave Bry proposed that ScHoolboy Q and Kendrick Lamar "are diametrically opposed in style and tone," with Q hanging as loose as Keith Richards, "about as far from tight as a human being can get." Kendrick Lamar, in contrast, is "a high-strung classist." Me, personally: I'm uptight. Maybe that explains why I prefer Kendrick by a wide margin, especially now that the obsessive introspection and self-immolation of To Pimp a Butterfly has set a new high score for "high-strung" hip-hop. Still, I do wonder where the hell this nigga ScHoolboy Q has slid off to. Ideally, he's just been too busy raising his young daughter. In which case: good on him for taking a break from us. POST CONTINUES BELOW We're fans, however, selfish by nature. We require new music. Since Top Dawg is outchea fabricating studio scuffles between Kendrick and Q in order to get the latter rapper's name back into the mix, I'm hoping this at least means that the label is preparing to rollout a new ScHoolboy Q album, a mixtape, a single—something. My spirit is ready. We spent last year listening to relatively tense, paranoid projects from Kendrick Lamar and Jay Rock. I, for one, am eager to hear a change of pace and tone from TDE's freest libertine spirit. For a while, you might could've made a case that TDE was, pound-for-pound, project-for-project, the strongest clique in the game. This was a few years back, in 2012, when TDE was firing on almost all cylinders: ScHoolboy Q dropped Habits & Contradictions at the top of the year, Ab-Soul released Control System in the spring, and then Kendrick Lamar dropped good kid, m.A.A.d city in the fall. This was before TDE signed Isaiah Rashad, but when Jay Rock's buzz was still loud. This was back when any given member of Black Hippy might've been, or might've become, your favorite rapper. POST CONTINUES BELOW The state of play has changed; the rankings have shuffled, and Kendrick Lamar now eclipses the field. More than anyone else in Black Hippy, ScHoolboy Q is overdue for renewal. His three hit singles from Oxymoron aside, Q has yet to drop another project that feels as fully imaginative and robust as his 2012 album, Habits & Contradictions. Now that he's taken such a long, presumably rejuvenating break from prominence—and now that he's settled into hip-hop's esteemed dad class—it'd be interesting to hear his updated perspective on drug culture, lean addiction, fatherhood, and whatnot. In general, TDE could stand to show some hi-powered, hit-making solidarity these days, à la YMCMB on Nicki Minaj's last few hit singles, or Dreamville on any given day. With Kendrick Lamar having blown the fuck up in the years between then and now, the stakes have shot higher and higher for ScHoolboy Q—and for the rest of Black Hippy—in 2016. |
In the battle between Scott Brown and Russ Feingold over financial reform, Scott Brown appears to be winning. Senate staffers tonight are hammering out the shape of the so-called Volcker rule, which would limit insured financial firms’ ability to take speculative bets with their capital, or prohibit it altogether. Brown for weeks has been seeking a carveout in the legislation–originally authored by Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR)–that would allow banks to invest a portion of their profits in hedge and private equity funds. And as the 60th vote for financial reform, his demands carry a lot of weight. Enter Feingold, who opposed financial reform from the left. After discussions with, and public pressure from, pro-reform groups, Feingold has toyed with the idea of changing his vote from ‘no’ to ‘yes’, becoming the new 60th vote and robbing Brown of his leverage–if the Volcker rule survived loophole free.Multiple sources tonight say that in all likelihood the hedge fund loophole (known as a ‘de minimis exemption’) will be included in the offer that the conference committee considers this week. “I think Senator Dodd’s doing a wonderful job,” Brown said tonight. “We’re trying to address everybody’s concerns. Obviously it’s important…for Massachusetts businesses, and businesses throughout the country to continue to operate as they have as many many years.” I asked whether any of those businesses are getting input into the crafting of the final Volcker rule. “Of course they do,” he said. “Of course they do.” Now, it remains unclear what the terms of the exemption will be once the language is drafted. An carveout allowing banks to invest a very small amount of capital, governed by strict trading rules might meet muster with reformers, who generally worry that the loophole could dramatically undermine the entire Volcker rule. We should know more tomorrow. |
As the exact circumstances of events in the Nairobi shopping mall attack continue to unfold, international investigators are starting to pursue a new line of inquiry: one that asks whether the celebrated 'white widow,' Samantha Lewthwaite, a Muslim convert already wanted in Kenya on terror charges , could have been directly involved. Al Shabab, the group that has claimed responsibility for the attack, has denied Lewthwaite's involvement and more generally there have been denials that Westerners were involved at all. A senior Whitehall source, by contrast, said it was "likely" that a white woman was among the killers. The fascination with Lewthwaite, whose husband was involved in one of the 7/7 suicide bombings in 2005 and killed 26 people, has grown rapidly in the last two years while she has been sought in East Africa. There is something compelling about any story of women and murder, in part because it seems to go against all we know, or assume we know, about women and about crime. The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men; and within this the smaller subset of religiously-motivated crime is even more male-dominated. Mutters of 'what woman could ever do such a thing' have been rife on comment sections and forums whenever the subject of the 'white widow' comes up. How, the thinking seems to go, could a woman even conceive of associating herself with a terror group? The assumption is at its heart a sexist one, in the category of 'benevolent sexism': women are presumed to be not only the weaker sex - therefore incapable of carrying out such a crime - but also the more sentimental one, incapable of even contemplating it. Thus the women who murder, the Myras, Rosemarys, the black widows and mothers, are presumed to be so far outside what is 'normal' female behaviour that they are reviled in a way that their male counterparts rarely are. Murder planned and committed by a woman is seen not just as a crime, but a crime against nature. Myra Hindley, and her partner Ian Brady, were responsible for the murders of five youngsters in the 1960s (PA) And those are the ones we demonise the most. In our own time, Myra Hindley has been the iconic murderess, a figure so recognisable it was only a year ago (after living in the UK some 13 years) I saw a picture of Ian Brady and realised I wouldn't have been able to say who it was. Myra's defiant stare and white bouffant, by contrast, are instantly recognisable. Would the furore over Marcus Harvey's portrait of her made using casts of infants' hands have caused such a sensation if it had been Brady? It's certainly true to say that without weapons, few women have the physical power necessary to commit an opportunistic murder 'of passion'… but our own criminal history shows the current notion of women as innocents is far from the truth. Who could forget the case of Mary Bell, who became infamous at the age of 11, after strangling two small boys to death “solely for the pleasure and excitement” of killing? In the 1830s, Mary Ann Burdock, a charming landlady, shocked Bristol when she was convicted of poisoning a lodger for her inheritance. In the 20th century, Amelia Dyer, who took payments from single mothers and others who "farmed" their unwanted children out to the countryside for a good healthy childhood, was found to have been murdering many of her charges. Of course, those murders were motivated seemingly by money alone. Lewthwaite's motivation is a more basic, more obvious one; her nickname of the white widow says it all. She is motivated by a particular version of religious jihad, and by the great pain of losing her husband. She is motivated by emotion. But regardless of motivations, the female killer remains a far more potent and somehow enthralling concept than a male murderer. Maybe it’s a hangover from Agatha Christie’s novels; maybe it’s the idea that only women can bring life into the world; or maybe society is still processing that women’s desires, however wrong and sick they may be, can be just the same as men’s. |
Tuck Collection The Tuck bed is Casa Kids’ modern and minimalist improvement of the classic Murphy Bed. Tuck may be mounted either horizontally or vertically, which means it will perfectly adapt to virtually any living space. Instead of the typical unattractive Murphy Bed exposed bottom, Tuck features a fresh and uniquely attractive bottom comprised of either a magnetic face or a chalkboard. The Tuck collection also features optional modular shelving units in case you need more versatility and storage space. Super Space Saving Once Tuck folds up, it takes up just 12 precious inches of floor space, leaving plenty of room for kids to play or for adults who simply want to do more with what little space they have. Because it tucks away, Tuck is ideal for small spaces, shared sibling bedrooms or works well to accommodate an impromptu overnight guest. Tuck Options Tuck beds come in Twin and Full sizes. Customers may choose between a shiny and modern magnetic face or a chalkboard surface that allows kids to get creative. Because the beds can be mounted horizontally or vertically they’ll work in any home and the optional shelves are perfect for books, toys and other items. Eco-friendly Materials Like all Casa Kids beds, the Tuck collection is constructed of all-natural birch plywood. Casa Kids uses baltic birch plywood, a material certified by both the FSC (Forest Steward Council) and CARB (California Air Resources Board) for most of their products. This company uses zero particle board and their bonding glue is formaldehyde-free. All finishes are water-based, non-toxic, acrylic and have no VOC’s (volatile organic compounds). Casa Kids Safety Safety is a top priority at Casa Kids. Their furniture is manufactured entirely onsite in their own woodshop in Brooklyn, meaning the company, not a third party, controls the building process from start to finish. All Casa Kids products meet or exceed the U.S. mandatory and voluntary safety standards developed by the ASTM. Casa Kids also works hard to remember that safety goes far beyond compliance and materials. For example, Casa Kids keeps in mind that kids tend to climb on furniture, yank on bookshelves and fly into pieces at top speed, so they build with how kids act in mind, additionally rounding all edges and installing rails that are higher than what regulation demands. Ordering Information The Tuck collection is fairly affordable, considering its space-saving benefits, eco-friendly materials and longevity. Tuck Twin is $1,800.00; Tuck Full is $2,200; and side cabinets may be added for $800.00. Delivery and installation in NYC is $400.00, while shipping outside of NYC varies in price, so you’ll need to contact the company for information. To learn more about Tuck, visit Casa Kids. If you’d like to place an order you may send an email to [email protected] or call 718-694-0272. + Tuck Collection |
(This October 28 story has been corrected in 13th paragraph to fix 100 mph metric conversion to 160 kph from 60kph) By Joe McDonald and Phil Stewart EXCHANGE, Pa./WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A high-tech U.S. military blimp designed to detect a missile attack came loose on Wednesday and wreaked havoc as it floated from Maryland into Pennsylvania while dragging more than a mile of cable and knocking out power to thousands. The U.S. military scrambled two armed F-16 fighter jets to keep watch as the massive blimp traveled into civilian airspace after coming untethered from its base at Aberdeen Proving Ground, a U.S. Army facility 40 miles (65 km) northeast of Baltimore. Pentagon officials said they were unsure why the 242-foot-long blimp broke free at 12:20 p.m. Military officials wrestled for hours over the best way to bring it down safely, but eventually it deflated on its own. The blimp, part of a $2.8 billion Army program, landed in a rural, wooded area in Exchange, Pennsylvania, a community outside Bloomsburg, about 150 miles (240 km) north of the Aberdeen Proving Ground. John Thomas, a spokesman for Columbia County emergency management agency, said there were no reports of injuries but had no more details about the landing. Pennsylvania police and military officials guarded a wide safety perimeter around the blimp, which settled amid farmland in the remote area. Residents, including members of an Amish community, watched them work under steady rainfall. The blimp’s travels caused widespread damage, officials said. At one point, 30,000 Pennsylvania residents were without power, the governor’s office said. “The tether attached to the aircraft caused widespread power outages across Pennsylvania,” said a statement from Governor Tom Wolf’s office. The blimp’s travels were a sensation on social media, with hashtags like #Blimpflood and #Blimpmemes ranking among the top trending topics. At least two Twitter parody accounts sprung up, gaining nearly 2,000 followers in just under two hours. The attention was unlikely to be welcomed by the Army, which calls the program the Joint Land-Attack Cruise Missile Elevated Netted Sensor System, or JLENS. The program was restructured after it overran cost estimates, the Government Accountability Office said in 2014. The program is comprised of two blimps, each 242 feet long. The second blimp will be grounded until the military inspects it and finishes an investigation into the unmooring, said Navy Captain Scott Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. military’s North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD. The system itself is still in a testing phase. Manufacturer Raytheon Co's (RTN.N) website says it would become part of the defenses that help protect the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area. (Link: rtn.co/1PUJnjY) Raytheon’s website says the blimps are meant to be tethered to the ground by a “11/8 inch thick super-strong cable,” which should withstand 100 mile-per-hour (160 kph) winds. Electricity runs up the cable and powers the radar, the website says. A high-tech U.S. military blimp designed to detect a missile attack is pictured coming to the ground in Montour County, Pennsylvania, October 28, 2015. REUTERS/SECV8, a segment of Service Electric Cablevision NORAD said the blimp became untethered while at an altitude of 6,600 feet, far below its maximum recommended altitude of up to 10,000 feet. By early afternoon, it had climbed to 16,000 feet as it traveled into Pennsylvania. NORAD said the system was designed to defend against threats beyond cruise missiles, to include drone aircraft and “surface moving targets” such as swarming boats and tanks. |
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia and Indonesia said on Wednesday they would offer shelter to 7,000 “boat people” adrift at sea in rickety boats but made clear their assistance was temporary and they would take no more. More than 3,000 migrants have landed so far this month in Malaysia and Indonesia. Together with Thailand, they have pushed away many boats that approached their shores despite appeals from the United Nations to take them in. In a joint statement in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Indonesia emphasised that the international community also had a responsibility to help them deal with the crisis. The migrants are mostly Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladeshis - men, women and children who fled persecution and poverty at home or were abducted by traffickers, and now face sickness and starvation at sea. “What we have clearly stated is that we will take in only those people in the high sea,” Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman said. “But under no circumstances would we be expected to take each one of them if there is an influx of others.” Both countries said they would offer “resettlement and repatriation”, a process that would be “done in a year by the international community”. The United Nations, which has been calling on governments in the region to rescue those drifting at sea, welcomed the move and urged that people be brought to shore without delay. [ID:nL5N0YB250] The United States was prepared to provide financial and resettlement aid to help deal with the crisis, Acting State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf told a briefing in Washington. Washington was also prepared to take a leading role in any multi-country effort organised by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to resettle the most vulnerable migrants, she said. [ID:nL1N0YB1MW] THAILAND OPTS OUT Aman said temporary shelters would be set up, but not in Thailand, a favoured transit point for migrants hoping to work illegally in Malaysia. Thai authorities have said they will allow the sick to come to shore for medical attention, but have stopped short of saying whether they would allow other migrants to disembark. Still, Thailand said on Wednesday that it would not force boats back out to sea. “Thailand attaches great importance to humanitarian assistance and will not push back migrants stranded in the Thai territorial water,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. Thailand has called a regional conference on the issue in Bangkok for May 29. “We maintain our stance that we are a transit country,” Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha told reporters in Bangkok. Rohingya and Bangleshi migrants wait on board a fishing boat before being transported to shore, off the coast of Julok, in Aceh province May 20, 2015 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. REUTERS/Syifa/Antara Foto Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch welcomed the joint statement, which he said “should mark the end of the region’s push back policies against Rohingya and Bangladeshi boat people”, but added it was disturbing that “Thailand was missing in action”. Hours before the ministers met, hundreds of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants landed in Indonesia’s Aceh province. [ID:nL3N0YB0OS] “We have to find ways to resettle them as soon as possible without creating a new moral hazard,” Dewi Fortuna Anwar, political adviser to Indonesia’s vice president, told reporters in Jakarta. “If migrants start thinking of Indonesia as a transit point or as having a higher chance of getting resettled, that would create another problem that we have to prevent.” She said the main responsibility lay with Myanmar, which the United Nations said last week must stop discrimination against Rohingya Muslims to end a pattern of migration from the corner of the Bay of Bengal into the Andaman Sea and Malacca Strait. “ROOT CAUSES” The United States echoed these calls, with a senior U.S. official pointing to conditions in Rakhine state as driving Rohingyas to flee. “Ultimately (Myanmar) must take steps to address the root causes that drove these people (to sea) and we need long term sustainable solutions, development, protection of basic human rights if we’re really going to answer the problem,” Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a conference in Jakarta. Blinken is due to visit Myanmar on Thursday to discuss the unfolding crisis. Slideshow (3 Images) Most of Myanmar’s 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims are stateless and live in apartheid-like conditions. Almost 140,000 were displaced in clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in 2012. Myanmar terms the Rohingya “Bengalis”, a name most Rohingya reject because it implies they are immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh despite having lived in Myanmar for generations. Myanmar’s foreign ministry said in a statement published by state media on Wednesday that the government was making serious efforts to prevent people smuggling and illegal migration. This included patrols by the navy and air force in Myanmar’s territorial waters, it said. |
Diablo 3 is in development for Xbox One, producer Alex Mayberry told Videogamer. Mayberry said that, although an Xbox One version being created, he doesn't know the specifics of any contract between Blizzard and Microsoft. "I don't know where we are with Microsoft right now so I can't really comment on what that contract looks like," Mayberry said. "The point is we are developing for Xbox [One] and PS4 simultaneously. We hit those major platforms and then our goal as a development team is to make them run." Diablo 3 launched first on Mac and Windows PC and later made its way to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. An interview with developers published last June said that the game was in development for next-gen systems, though it was later updated to clarify that they were referring to PlayStation 4. Diablo 3 developers told Polygon at E3 2013 that the game was in development for PS4. Blizzard Entertainment's development pipeline allows the company to create an Xbox One version alongside the previously announced PlayStation 4 port, just as it did with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the action role-playing game. "We have that pipeline worked out," Mayberry said. "We've already done it with the 360 and PS3, so that team knows how to develop at the same time for both of those platforms. That's just what we do. And then Blizzard and Microsoft can work out whatever they work out." Diablo 3's first expansion, Reaper of Souls, will launch on Mac and Windows March 25 for $39.99. The game and its expansion will hit PS4 at an unannounced date with features exclusive to the console, and Blizzard will bring a playable PS4 demo of Diablo 3 to PAX East next month. You can learn more about Reaper of Souls' Adventure Mode in our interview lead designer Kevin Martens. Read Polygon's Diablo 3 review for our take on the console and PC ports. Update: A Blizzard spokesperson told Polygon today that the developer's goal is "to bring Diablo 3 to as many players as possible," though it isn't making any announcements now. "Our goal has always been to bring Diablo 3 to as many players as possible," the spokesperson said. "We're excited about launching the Ultimate Evil Edition for PS4 later this year, but we don't have any further platform announcements to share at this time." |
By John O'Brien and James T. Mulder jobrien@syracuse.com jmulder@syracuse.com Syracuse, NY - Doctors at St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center were about to remove organs for transplant from a woman they thought was dead. Then she opened her eyes. She was alive. The state Health Department found St. Joe's care of patient Colleen S. Burns in 2009 unacceptable and a federal agency criticized the hospital for not properly investigating the cause. The hospital's mishandling of the case was part of the reason the state Health Department fined St. Joe's $22,000 last September -- the largest fine levied against a Central New York hospital since 2002. St. Joe's was fined $6,000 over the Burns case and $16,000 for leaving a patient unattended before she fell and injured her head in 2011. The state could not find a case similar to the Burns case after reviewing the past 10 years of inspection records, a spokesman said. A series of mistakes that began shortly after Burns arrived in the emergency room suffering from a drug overdose led to the near catastrophe, the investigations showed. A review by the state Health Department found: *Staff skipped a recommended treatment to prevent the drugs the patient took from being absorbed by her stomach and intestines. *Not enough testing was done to see if she was free of all drugs. *Not enough brain scans were performed. *Doctors ignored a nurse's observations indicating Burns was not dead and her condition was improving. The hospital made no effort to thoroughly investigate what went wrong until it was prodded by the state. The investigation did find, however that St. Joe's had acceptable organ procurement policies and procedures. Burns, 41, of North Syracuse, recovered from her overdose of Xanax, Benadryl and a muscle relaxant and was discharged from the hospital two weeks after the near-miss in the operating room. But 16 months later, in January 2011, she committed suicide, said her mother, Lucille Kuss. Having her daughter mistaken as dead and nearly cut open at the hospital was a horrible experience for the family, Kuss said. The doctors never explained what went wrong, she said. "They were just kind of shocked themselves," she said. "It came as a surprise to them as well." Burns, who had three daughters, was never upset about the incident, her mother said. "She was so depressed that it really didn't make any difference to her," Kuss said. Neither Burns nor any of her relatives sued St. Joe's. St. Joe's officials would not discuss the specifics of the case. Burns' family asked them not to, hospital spokeswoman Kerri Howell said. "St. Joseph's goal is to provide the highest quality of care to every patient, every time," Howell said in an email to The Post-Standard. The hospital works with Finger Lakes Donor Recovery Network to follow strict policies and procedures for organ donation, she said. "These policies were followed in this case, which was complicated in terms of care and diagnosis," Howell said. "We've learned from this experience and have modified our policies to include the type of unusual circumstance presented in this case." St. Joe's officials thought Burns suffered "cardiac death" in October 2009, according to documents obtained by The Post-Standard under the state Freedom of Information Law. Her family had agreed to allow doctors to withdraw life support and remove her organs after they were told she was dead. The day before her organs were to be removed, a nurse had performed a reflex test on Burns, scraping a finger on the bottom of her foot. The toes curled downward - not the expected reaction of someone who's supposed to be dead. There were other indications that Burns had not suffered irreversible brain damage, as doctors had determined. Her nostrils flared in the prep area outside the OR. She seemed to be breathing independently from the respirator she was attached to. Her lips and tongue moved. Twenty minutes after those observations were made, a nurse gave Burns an injection of the sedative Ativan, according to records. In the doctors' notes, there's no mention of the sedative or any indication they were aware of her improving condition. None of those signs stopped the organ-harvesting process. It wasn't until Burns was wheeled into the OR on Oct. 20, 2009, opened her eyes and looked at the lights above her that doctors called it off. Burns had been in a deep coma from taking an overdose of drugs. Hospital personnel misread that as irreversible brain damage without doing enough to evaluate her condition, the state Health Department found. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services criticized St. Joe's response to the incident. "Despite this sequence of events, intensive objective peer review and root cause analysis of the case was not done by the hospital's quality assurance program until prompted by the Department of Health," the federal agency's report said. The state started investigating the case in March 2010 in response to an inquiry from The Post-Standard. It wasn't until the day after the state made a surprise inspection that St. Joe's did any investigation, the state report said. And even then, it was cursory - a one-page document that cited "perception differences" without analyzing the cause of the mistake, the investigative findings said. "The hospital did not undertake an intensive and critical review of the near catastrophic event in this case," the federal agency's report said. St. Joe's officials did not "identify the inadequate physician evaluations of (Burns) that occurred when nursing staff questioned possible signs of improving neurological function." Burns did not suffer a cardiopulmonary arrest and did not have irreversible brain damage, as St. Joe's had determined, the state's report said. "The patient did not meet criteria for withdrawal of care," the report said. Hospital officials didn't wait long enough or conduct enough tests to determine that all of the drugs were out of Burns' system before deciding whether to take her off life support, the state said. Lisa McGiffert, director of Consumers Union Safe Patient Project, said there is no way of knowing how often near-catastrophes like the Burns case happen because there is no system in place to collect information from hospitals about medical errors. "These sorts of things do happen," McGiffert said. "It's pretty disturbing." Her organization believes states should require hospitals to report all such incidents soon after they happen. "That would require people to think about how to prevent it in the future," she said. "If you don't have to account for it, that doesn't always happen." Two medical experts who reviewed the case for The Post-Standard found it shocking, and questioned why the hospital didn't do more to ensure other patients aren't put in the same position. "Dead people don't curl their toes," said Dr. Charles Wetli, a nationally known forensic pathologist out of New Jersey. "And they don't fight against the respirator and want to breathe on their own." Once those signs of life appeared, the organ-harvesting process should've stopped, Wetli said. Wetli wondered why, after seeing signs that Burns was alive, a nurse would give Burns a sedative. Dr. David Mayer, general and vascular surgeon and an associate professor of clinical surgery at New York Medical College, also reviewed the records and found the use of a sedative perplexing. "It would sedate her to the point that she would be non-reactive," Mayer said. "If you have to sedate them or give them pain medication, they're not brain dead and you shouldn't be harvesting their organs." The hospital erred four or five times, Mayer said. He called the case a gross deviation from all prevailing and accepted standards of care. St. Joe's submitted a plan to correct problems identified in the investigation to the state Health Department in August of 2011. At that time the state fined St. Joe's $22,000 and ordered it to hire a consultant to review the hospital's quality assurance program and implement the consultant's recommendations. The hospital also was ordered to hire a consulting neurologist to teach staff how to accurately diagnose brain death. Contact John O'Brien at jobrien@syracuse.com or 315-470-2187. Contact Jim Mulder at jmulder@syracuse.com or 315-470-2245. U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services report on St. Joe's |
Home: 9 LGBTQ Writers Reflect after Orlando Contributors: Veronica Scott Esposito, Rooze Garcia, Gabriel Garcia Ochoa, Melissa Febos, Jill McDonough, H. Sharif “Herukhuti” Williams, Mary Meriam, Annie Won, and Hannah Baker-Siroty. Editor’s Note We at The Critical Flame shared the heartbreak, anger, and confusion at the recent mass shooting of members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer community in Orlando, where a lone gunman killed more than fifty LGBTQ-identified and Latinx people at Pulse nightclub. The shooter likely intended to silence and marginalize the LGBTQ/Latinx community. It has been heartening to see many writers responding with such expansive humanity. Justin Torres writes about the particular joy found in Latinx spaces in a full-throated piece in The Washington Post, for instance, and Rigoberto González writes about finding a home in similar spaces for BuzzFeed. These are only a few examples, but their reflections seeded the idea for our feature. It has been a year too full of tragedy, mourning, and anger. Over just the past week, we’ve witnessed the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling at the hands of law enforcement officers, as well as the nation’s 228th mass shooting since the beginning of the year—this time of police officers and Black Lives Matter protesters in Dallas. Creating a more peaceful, more just society will require all our righteous anger, activism, ballots, and safe spaces. It will also require an articulation of what that society will look like. Every person should be able to make a home in this life, to be at home in their own identity. To remake the world so that’s not only possible but presumed and universal, we’ll need to articulate that future in policy, in practice, and in word. This is literary journal. Language is our medium. So, in an effort to create more space for healing and solidarity, to help articulate a more peaceful and just world, CF has invited a number of LGBTQ-identified writers to respond to this question: Can you tell us about a time that you felt at home in your identity? Home is a complicated notion, as several of our contributors note, and it’s ultimately inadequate to the task of realizing justice—but it is a powerful idea. A person can find home in a community, in a relationship, at a nightclub, in writing, etc. I’m so grateful to our contributors for their generosity, careful reflection, and honesty. I am also deeply indebted to both Alison Lanier, CF Conversations Editor, and Ricco Siasoco, CF Contributing Editor, for their guidance in the formulation and curation of this feature. In peace and solidarity, Daniel Evans Pritchard Editor VERONICA SCOTT ESPOSITO The Bay Area Rapid Transit system has long been a strangely charged environment for me. For several years now I have ridden it three times per week as I commute into and out of San Francisco for my work at Two Lines Press. For reasons I do not entirely understand, I have experienced panic attacks while on BART, and I also once saw a woman (perhaps experiencing her own attack) faint right next to me (she had been riding there by my side for at least 20 minutes). Such sudden medical emergencies are not uncommon on BART (I know because they stop the trains and tell us every time one occurs). Even when my experiences do not reach such extremes BART is often a contentious place, with rush hour commuters regularly jockeying for position, the occasional eruption of a sudden argument, the constant negotiation of right and privilege in a confined space, and even the infrequent but very noticeable psychotic passenger. When I first began to express my gender identity more openly, BART became a place of regular humiliation and anxiety. There is little else to do than stand there, head stuffed into a book that you are not actually reading because you can only think about all of the eyeballs that must be staring at your bizarre appearance. For roughly 42 minutes per day I would endure this shame, feeling the blush on my cheeks and frightened to imagine what the normal people were thinking about this man who wanted to be feminine. So it was an accomplishment of some measure when I began to feel “at home” on BART. The fact is, I have long known that 99.9% of the disapproval I felt on BART was entirely in my head, even the double-takes that I notice from time to time based more in curiosity and envy than any sort of negative emotion. I have long known this, so coming to feel at home on public transit was a measure of how my own deeply rooted disapproval of myself was coming unknotted. There are places and people who have made me feel much more understood and much more welcomed than BART, and they have played their own essential roles in the development of my identity. I deeply, profoundly value their affirmations. It is BART that I appreciate for its indifference, its utter inscrutability, which has ultimately forced me not to think about how others have regarded me but how I have regarded myself. I cannot discount the immense import that the ideas of others hold for our identities, but it is in our own self-approval, our own self-regard, our own self-respect that our identities must be founded. Veronica Scott Esposito is the author of The Surrender (Anomalous Press, 2016) a book-length essay on his exploration of gender. ROOZE GARCIA I was seven and she was cute in her baseball outfit. Her bookshelves filled with Black Beauty books, I hid my fear of horses. I wanted her close, wanted her to feel my galloping heart when we kissed. Like a switch turning on, I knew. I did not yet know “queer” or “dyke” or “lesbian” but I knew. ~ Seeking a sense of home—both in the world and within my skin—is a thread continually pulling me towards something not yet completely woven. Something that unravels every time I think I’ve figured out the pattern. ~ A complete tomboy in a culture where girls had their ears pierced as infants and always wore dresses, my identity has always disrupted any sense of being at home. Like rocks hitting a windshield, my differences would chip away at my place in the family. Unlike the families of some of my friends, the glass would at least hold. But the spider-line cracks of “other” would continue to spread. I left home at 18 and returned only for brief visits, loving my parents the way that they loved me: deeply but with complications. ~ Even more than two decades after moving to Portland, where queers are almost as common as raindrops, I’ve never forgotten being escorted to my car because some skinheads at my Orlando high school threatened me. Or the tension at my first political rally, protesting the firing of a sheriff because he was gay, where we were circled by guys in sheets waving KKK signs out the windows of the air-conditioned cars they drove around us. Or the everyday micro-aggressions of glares and loud whispered insults. ~ Dyke bars, Pride marches, ActUp protests: through the years, they have each been grounding points. None has ever felt safe enough to be home. While being alone in a straight space is uncomfortable, being in a large group of queers has always felt like standing in the center of a bullseye. In a culture where hatred is preached from the podium and the pulpit, is it even possible to be queer and feel safe? Is it possible to weave a world where we are home? ~ I keep beginning again. What else is there to do? Rooze Garcia’s poetry and photography have been published in American Tanka, Anatomy and Etymology, World Haiku, Raven Chronicles, (em), and on the cover of Carve Magazine. Her ongoing exploration of liminal poetics can be found at genrequeer.org. Information on her work and other projects can be found at roozecentral.com. GABRIEL GARCIA OCHOA I feel at home between languages. When I was growing up in Mexico City, there wasn’t a single positive word in Spanish for homosexuality. That was hard. I didn’t know how to think about myself in a way that wasn’t negative. English was the language of the classroom, spoken by my teachers who were mostly British, and perfectly polite. It was the language I smuggled out of the library, in poems, and atlases and novels. A language my parents (my father in particular) struggled with. I could hide and breathe in English. In other words (both literally and figuratively) English gave me the space to be myself. One word at a time, one sentence at a time, one book at a time, I started cobbling together a perception of who I was that made me proud. In English I found the freedom, and perhaps the courage too, to be me. Bigotry is surprisingly tolerant. Anyone can be a bigot. Ignorance and hatred can take root in any human heart. In English too there was bigotry, of course, homophobia, but I hadn’t experienced it. Perhaps I didn’t want to see it. In any case, by the time I did see it, it didn’t matter. I was in love. I loved English so deeply I could forgive it anything. When my infatuation with English began to give way to a more mature, sedate love, I also rediscovered Spanish. I had to leave Mexico and live on the other side of the world, in Australia, for almost a decade, to understand the beauty of the Spanish language. During my teens I read Dickens, Chesterton, J.K Rowling, Shakespeare, Terry Pratchett, but in my late twenties I met Borges, García Márquez, Fuentes, Carpentier and Cortázar. Spanish is in my bones but English is in my heart, and denying either would be denying myself. Home for me is a strange place for others. I live in-between. A figurative shore, a figurative midnight, a figurative translation. Is there a more beautiful in-between than language? That bridge connecting the world inside us with the world of touch, gravity, and perception, the world where we shiver in the presence of the beloved. To grow past bigotry we need love, of course, fraternity, but we also need imagination. Bigotry is poverty of imagination. Empathy is emotional imagination. Generosity is hopeful imagination. To imagine there are ways of being other than one’s own, and to understand such difference is fine, is the basis for respect. For me, languages are the places where imagination happens. I have the privilege of living between two. Author and translator Gabriel Garcia Ochoa is at work on his first novel. He is a faculty member at Monash University. MELISSA FEBOS It was Somerville, late nineties. Boston summer hot as fuck, winter so cold I’d corral all the cats into the pantry, where my twin mattress took up most of the floor, and wake up smelling like their pee. I was still a gold star at 17, in overalls and wife-beaters, no bra, no tattoos, no idea how bad it would get after I graduated from crystal meth to coke to heroin to New York. But before that. Before Ariel went crazy, before she ODed and never woke up, before I ever slept with a man, but after I’d already fallen in love with three girls. It was Monie—the beautiful half-Lebanese raver queen—and me and Kareem and Caroline and Celine and whatever queers were crashing on our couches and floors. Whoever had run away or been kicked out or broke up or broke down. Monie did hair from our kitchen or the salon in Porter Square, and was so mad when I shaved my head that he didn’t speak to me for two days. I scooped cones at Toscanini’s all day and partied all night, woke up with my forearms sticky and sweet, glued to the sheets with old ice cream. If Monie didn’t have a boy over, he and I slept half naked, back to back in his bed, or sometimes three or four or five of us piled like puppies, like dirty spoons curled in a drawer. It was Jacque’s Cabaret, Club Cafe, The Pit in Harvard Square, Hubba Hubba, and Charlie’s, but mostly it was our place on Jackson Road, where one night I dressed up in Monie’s platforms and vinyl mini and let Ariel put makeup on me. Where one Valentine’s Day we stayed up all night playing Cyndi Lauper’s cover of Prince’s “When You Were Mine” on vinyl and dancing with the fury of the young and finally free. When daybreak glowed our slick faces, we tacked blankets over the windows, turned on Oldies 103, and kept dancing. The radio DJ said they were having a contest for the most romantic call-in, so Monie called in and put on a thick Somerville accent and proposed to me. Girl, he said, you’re kinda sorta my best friend. We all rocked with silent laughter and then I called in and said Yes, a thousand times yes. And we won. And now, 18 years later, after Ariel and Jay and so many of us are dead by their own hands, after I have loved a dozen more girls, after a stranger has shot up a whole room full of us, I am still here, still dancing, still singing, I love you more than I did when you were mine. Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press, 2010) and the forthcoming essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury, 2017). JILL MCDONOUGH “Lucky Ladies Sestina” —for Josey, on her 50th birthday I wake up with you, warm in the dark blankets, safe our whole lives but still sort of surprised. Lucky ladies, living together, up in our own damn house. No sick babies, no hunger, getting yelled at, getting hit. We get to be alive now, rescued by here, by us. Some equity, our plenty of time. Back then my grandma’s mom got given away, parents too poor to keep her. My grandfather lived in a Masonic Home for Poor Widows and Orphans, dropped off by his dad when an unsafe abortion killed their mom. They never knew. Back then button hooks, bleeding out in bathtubs: the family’s ladies knew all about it, but nobody told the men. Now nobody dies. Here. Because of that. But plenty of babies go unwanted, and whole families leave Syria, bring babies we seem to think are proto-terrorists. Humans! Poor humans, so sure we deserve everything we have now. Plus more. Sure everything’s earned, nothing sacrified to be safe as houses here. I like to think of the ships and tenements, loony bins, ladies hating staying home but doing it, saddled with proto-us. And then think of our problems: the oil bill, AAA, overdraft charges, UPS. Back then we’d probably be whores, or witches, all our rape-babies born to die young. We read about corpse meditation, meet ladies for lunch in museums, choose new wines. I meditate on prison, the poor prisoners, flourescent quiver of those classrooms, their chill. Safe to say I’m spoiled. A car! A dishwasher! A dryer! We hustled. Now we hunker down. You know every decent bartender in town now; most of them you trained your sweet self, your swole knees. Back then I taught seven classes, you pulled shifts through pneumonia, only safe with that money coming in. I teach deeds dancing in a green bay, bees being buccaneers of buzz, make Sestina Worksheets for my poor students: hungry grad students, undergrads working four jobs, ladies on probation in the Southie Court House, cafeterias full of ladies still in jail. Even they, alive today, can’t understand me now, how I was confused when a guard yelled at me, explained to the poor ladies Nobody tells me what to do. They were stunned, said Dag, then we got back to work. Their essays on Desdemona, Lady MacBeth’s babies. You and I decide what we want for dinner: someplace new or something safe, a Caesar salad, roast chicken. Ladies love chicken, a glass of red wine. Then we nestle down with our books, silken sleep. Now we sleep like babies, safe as houses, for all those poor babies before us, who never got to be safe. Three-time Pushcart prize winner Jill McDonough teaches in UMass-Boston’s MFA program and directs 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center online. Her books include Habeas Corpus and Where You Live; Alice James will publish Reaper in 2017. H. SHARIF “HERUKHUTI” WILLIAMS “Home Is Where You Make It” A Play in One Act THE CRITICAL FLAME As a writer who identifies as LGBTQ, can you tell us about a time that you felt at home in your identity? THE BLACK BISEXUAL MALE-BODIED QUEER GENDERED WRITER Which identity? THE CRITICAL FLAME Uh, your LGBTQ identity. (pause) Wait, let us be more inclusive. Which ever identity feels more relevant to the question given that we want to include your answer in a dedicated space to LGBTQ writers in the forthcoming July/August issue of our journal in response to the recent mass shooting of members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer community in Orlando. THE BLACK BISEXUAL MALE-BODIED QUEER GENDERED WRITER Ok. What do you mean by home? THE CRITICAL FLAME We want you to define home. THE BLACK BISEXUAL MALE-BODIED QUEER GENDERED WRITER Interesting. THE CRITICAL FLAME Yeah, we thought so too. So can you tell us in 300-400 words. (pause) Keep in mind you’ve already used up about 160 words already. THE BLACK BISEXUAL MALE-BODIED QUEER GENDERED WRITER Being queer is costly, even on the page. (looks around to see if anyone caught the multiple meanings) I’ve never sought home in any of my identities. So it feels like a strange question. As a kid, I found home in my mother’s arms until she decided that it would be better for me if she stopped hugging me, loving me with those arms. Even though I had uncles, a grandfather, and stepdads around who provided me with male nourishment and I never complained about getting too much mother love, she, a single-parent raising a Black male child, decided it was in the best interest of my masculinity for her to withdraw her physical affection. Home was very different thereafter. I’ve created home wherever I’ve set down roots. When I was in college and the crushing weight of whiteness, wealth, and privilege threatened to mash me to pieces, I founded an organization of people of African descent and made home there. I became a stepfather at 22. My girlfriend had two kids age 3 and 6 when we met. Home was the four of us, the cat and the dog. She and I would go to Sound Factory Bar on W 21 Street to dance, sweat, grind and revel to deep house music. In 2002, I opened up a sex party for Black and brown men on the first floor of a building she purchased for us to live. I held, loved on, and fucked men in that space while Tweet, D’Angelo and Maxwell boomed along past our moans. (checks the word count) Sorry, home takes up more space for me than you provided. I just got started. H. Sharif “Herukhuti” Williams aka Dr. Herukhuti is a playwright, poet, performance artist, sexologist, and educator who works at the intersections of culture, art, sexuality, and spirituality. He’s the founder and chief erotics officer of the Center for Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality as well as the center’s webjournal, sacredsexualities.org. MARY MERIAM When I was a lesbian child and teenager, “home” was unthinkable for lesbians. We were exiles, outcasts, freaks. There was a dead silence around the word “lesbian.” I only heard the word as a dirty slur or joke, never mentioned in school or books or movies or songs. I didn’t know or couldn’t accept that I was a lesbian. I tried to force myself to feel at home in the world, and shoved my identity underground. Little by little in my teens as girls kissed me, I was teased awake. Then one night, I had a “fast, hot, cloudy, strong” dream about Elaine Scott Banks, and I told her those exact words about it. She asked for more description, but I only had those words. I was deep in the rural outskirts of everything and hadn’t heard of Stonewall. But I was brave enough to tell Scotty my dream about her, just as I was graduating from high school, where she was the choir conductor and music teacher. I went away to college for a year, but hated its glorification of booze, boys, and football, so I went back home and sang in Scotty’s choir. One night after choir practice, she took me to the Swan Hotel for a drink. I still wasn’t at home. I didn’t know yet that New Hope, Pennsylvania, was a new gay hotbed. Scotty took me dancing, and showed me the beginning of the world, and it was our world, though I still didn’t know for sure I belonged, or still couldn’t accept it. Was my world limited to drinking and dancing in bars? We didn’t talk about it, but I loved dancing with Scotty on a disco dance floor crowded with these adorable people. At some point, I stumbled on an issue of The Village Voice with Jill Johnston talking about LESBIAN NATION. I was floored that this hateful slur was important and cool enough for the Voice, and that there could be a whole nation of us. Scotty drove me home one night in her green Fiat. Along the winding road next to the Delaware River, I put my hand on her hand on the gearshift. I was emerging from my shell, coming out. Then on the flowered couch in the dark, I stretched out with Scotty and kissed her, and kissed her again and again, and I was home at last. Mary Meriam contributes to The Gay & Lesbian Review. Her first collection, Conjuring My Leafy Muse, was nominated for the 2015 Poets’ Prize and her second collection, Girlie Calendar, was selected for the 2016 American Library Association Over the Rainbow List. ANNIE WON What is it about bodies? It is July 4 and there are fireworks. We like to watch the violence of airborne bodies. As a friend remarked today, we Americans celebrate the outcome of war, which is independence, with the violence of explosive matter into the sky. Do I feel more independent today. I did not attend the fireworks. I huddled in the company of queer POC-inclusive artist space, exchanging the currency of homemade pies and related foods because it is the Fourth of Jupie. We focused on food with containers that can be eaten. I often feel like food without a container. Liquid. What space do I fill? What dimension of body defines my gender? Measuring tape my body, around and around. I think of Orlando, of Pulse, of the media’s fixation on Isis or not Isis and the largely media-enforced momentary, largely erased flipbook of faces of people who no longer share living space with us. And what were their names. And who were they. These are our people. Do they feel more independent today, liberated from the violence of this earth. With every colored explosion, we remember. We LGBTQI POC-inclusive ally-inclusive community, create a kind of church, as we acknowledge and transcend societal containers of consciousness. We refrain here. The boundary of gender, amen. The boundary of race, amen. The boundary of immigrant, amen. The boundary of minority status, amen. The boundary of legality, amen. The boundary of safety, amen. The boundary of seeing, amen. The boundary of being seen, amen. The boundary of being real, amen. The boundary of physical presentation, on the street, in the club, at home, with one’s partner, with oneself, amen. The boundary of life, amen. Amen to the right to remain silent. Amen to the right to speak. Amen to the right to remain queer. Amen to the daily existence of my LGBTQI brothers and sisters and gender queer allies and Amen to my fellow POC brothers and sisters and gender queer compatriots who struggle with eye level existence with our fellow American citizens who sometimes forget that We are all citizens in our own bodies. Our basic human right is to remember that we are all human and we can all exist in this shared space, that we can be brave bodies in shared space, even beyond the violence we do to our own bodies and the violence that others do to us. Respect. Amen to that. Amen. Annie Won is a poet / chemist / yoga teacher who lives in Medford, MA, and writes with text and images at the intersections of body, mind, spirit, and page. Her work has appeared in venues such as New Delta Review, Apogee Journal, decomp, Entropy, TheThePoetry, TENDE RLION, and others; her critical reviews can be seen at American Microreviews and Interviews. HANNAH BAKER-SIROTY When I was a junior in college I studied abroad in Dublin, Ireland. There were many significant things about this time in my life, but the most significant was that this was the first time I was out to every single person I encountered. I had spent the previous year slowly coming out to everyone in my life, and it was amazing and refreshing to not have this enormously intense interchange anymore. I landed in Dublin and I was out of the closet. I was not the only queer person in my program, and I was with a lot of actors, so nobody really gave my sexuality much thought. This is, I think, how it should be. I recently read about a petition to make Queen Elsa have a female love interest in the new Frozen movie, and while I think it’s an awesome idea—it even gave me pause, made me think twice. I cannot imagine a Disney character being gay, and yet, maybe this is exactly what our society needs to normalize queer identity. I realize that not all Disney princesses need to be finding their prince—I certainly wasn’t looking for a prince. I should also say that I am perfectly fine with Elsa having no love interest, and I’m not really even sure why there is a need for coupling. These are stories for children, and not all children grow into the kind of adults that find princes. What would be refreshing is any alternative to what we usually see, because it shows our kids (and us) that there are so many different shades of normal. One of the hardest parts of growing up queer (even if you grow up in a place that is welcoming, as I did) is that feeling of something being “wrong with you.” It was not until I accepted myself that I really truly began to feel at home—at home in my skin and at home in the world. The incredibly freeing feeling of being who you are, and not feeling as though you are locking parts of yourself away is something I hope people never have to struggle with. The reality is that we live in a place that tells us there are particular ways to be, and if we are not each and every one of those ways, there are parts of us that we hide. When I landed in Dublin I stopped hiding a part of myself and because of it a whole world opened up for me. A world of people like me and not like me, and I began to feel more alive than ever. Hannah Baker-Siroty is the Director of the writing program at Pine Manor College and is working in a series of poems about Vice Presidents. She lives with her wife and children outside of Boston. |
Nick Gubbins has yet to make a century in his 22 first-class appearances Specsavers County Championship Division One, Kia Oval Surrey v Middlesex, day one Surrey: Yet to bat Middlesex 298-7: Gubbins 91 Surrey 2 pts, Middlesex 2 pts Match scorecard Nick Gubbins top-scored for Middlesex before a middle-order collapse pegged them back on day one against Surrey. Openers Gubbins and Sam Robson, dropped on nine by Kumar Sangakkara, made 126 together before Robson (53) fell after his fourth score over 50 this summer. Gubbins (91) and Dawid Malan (58) set the visitors up before the latter was caught behind off James Burke [2-56], the first of five wickets for 51 runs. All-rounder Tom Curran took 3-80 as Middlesex closed on 298-7. But there is concern for Surrey, as their leading wicket-taker this summer Ravi Rampaul had to go off with an injury midway through an over. Shortly after Malan's dismissal, Adam Voges fell just short of his half century on 47 before John Simpson, who has made three fifties this summer, went for 12. Then Paul Stirling and Ollie Rayner both fell to Curran as Surrey will begin day two at The Oval looking to mop up the tail end of their opponents. Surrey all-rounder James Burke told BBC Radio London: "It was a difficult surface but the boys pulled together for the last session and for the first time probably this season we worked as a unit. "Losing Ravi was obviously a big blow, he's been our main strike bowler. So it was up to us to hold our hands up and step up. "It's a difficult wicket, the ball's quite up and down but I think if you apply yourselves there's definitely runs to be had and we're definitely happy with how we left the day." |
Stoicism is renowned to be the most practical of all philosophies. If you are not familiar with the teachings of stoicism and the word "philosophy" makes you cringe, don’t worry! Stoicism is not one of those eerie fairy-tales or rituals but a life-changing guide! A practical guide to help you live a life of virtue. Once you've understood its principles, you will be saying to yourself, “Why didn't anyone tell me about this before?” As Thoreau put it: “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school…it is to solve some of the problems of life not only theoretically, but practically.” Stoicism focuses on the following: How to become a better version of yourself How to live a fulfilling and happier life How unpredictable and brief our life can be Stoicism was founded by Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BC and was practised by the likes of Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. Bill Clinton rereads Marcus Aurelius every single year, while Wen Jiabao, the former prime minister of China, claims that Meditations is one of two books he travels with and has read it more than one hundred times over the course of his life (Tim Ferriss is also a huge fan of stoicism! I recommend reading his materials: Stoicism 101: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs) Below are my top 5 stoic principles that I live by and how I implement them in my everyday life. 1. Ethical Mindfulness The word used by the Stoics for mindfulness was prosochē, which means paying attention. Living in the present moment is a practical way of living a life of effectiveness. Your current life situation is a net product of your past thoughts and decisions; your actions today are responsible for your future. Stoicism teaches that there is no use in dwelling in the past or daydreaming about the future. What's most important is now and you should pay attention to the task at hand. |
WASHINGTON -- Many undocumented immigrants who pay taxes would be able to access Obamacare under a long-shot bill introduced Wednesday by Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.). The Affordable Care Act currently limits access to its exchanges and subsidies to those "lawfully present." That means the approximately 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are not eligible for Obamacare, nor can they shop on the exchanges if their employer does not provide them with coverage. Gutiérrez's bill would open the exchanges and extend the subsidies to undocumented immigrants who provide proof of state residency and tax filings. It would also subject everyone to Obamacare's individual mandate, which doesn't currently apply to those not lawfully present. "The goal is to make integration and inclusion real for millions of families that are locked out under current law," Gutiérrez said on the House floor. "As it stands right now, undocumented immigrants are not subject to the individual mandate and cannot buy into health insurance exchanges even if they use their own money. My legislation will change that. It says that we stand for inclusion." If passed, the immigration reform advocate's bill would take effect on Dec. 31, 2015, in time for 2016 enrollment, although his speech did not suggest optimism. "I don't think the speaker, even as a lame duck, will allow a vote," Gutiérrez said, referring to the fact that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is stepping down at the end of October. Gutiérrez argued that his bill would strengthen the insurance pool and keep premiums low since undocumented immigrants tend to be young and healthy. According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 72 percent of undocumented immigrants are aged 19-44, compared to only 36 percent of the total U.S. population being aged 18-44. Last year, California state Sen. Ricardo Lara (D) introduced similar legislation to open California's exchange to the state's estimated 1 million undocumented residents lacking insurance. He dropped the effort earlier this month, citing difficulty in rallying support. But the state's health program for the poor, Medi-Cal, was extended this year to cover those under age 19 regardless of their immigration status. Introducing his bill on Wednesday, Gutiérrez cited the pope's address to Congress last week. Pope Francis invoked the "Golden Rule," urging lawmakers crafting immigration policy to treat people as they would want to be treated. |
Last week many western commentators scrambling to interpret the protests in Lhasa found that they did not need to work especially hard. Surely the Tibetans are the latest of many brave peoples to rebel against communist totalitarianism? The rhetorical templates of the cold war are still close at hand, shaping western discussions of Islam or Asia. Dusting off the hoary oppositions between the free and unfree worlds, the Wall Street Journal declared that religious freedom was the main issue. "On the streets of Lhasa, China has again had a vivid demonstration of the power of conscience to move people to action against a soulless, and brittle, state." This is stirring stuff. Never mind that the rioters in Lhasa were attacking Han Chinese immigrants rather than the Chinese state, or that the Chinese authorities have been relatively restrained so far, one cautious step behind middle-class public opinion - which I sensed in China last week to be overwhelmingly against the Tibetan ethnic minority. As for religious freedom, the Tibetans have had more of it in recent years than at any time since the cultural revolution. Eager to draw tourists to Tibet, Chinese authorities have helped to rebuild many of the monasteries destroyed by Red Guards in the 1960s and 70s, turning them into Disneylands of Buddhism. Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have even inspired a counterculture among Chinese jaded by their new affluence. Indeed, Tibet's economy has surpassed China's average growth rate, helped by generous subsidies from Beijing and more than a million tourists a year. The vast rural hinterland shows few signs of this growth, but Lhasa, with its shopping malls, glass-and-steel office buildings, massage parlours and hair saloons, resembles a Chinese provincial city on the make. Beijing hopes that the new rail link to Lhasa, which makes possible the cheap extraction of Tibet's uranium and copper, will bring about kuayueshi fazhan ("leapfrog development") - economic, social and cultural. Tibet has been enlisted into what is the biggest and swiftest modernisation in history: China's development on the model of consumer capitalism, which has been cheer-led by the Wall Street Journal and other western financial media that found in China the corporate holy grail of low-priced goods and high profits. Tibetans - whose biggest problem, according to Rupert Murdoch, is believing that the Dalai Lama "is the son of God" - have the chance to be on the right side of history; they could discard their superstitions and embrace, like Murdoch, China's brave new world. So why do they want independence? How is it that, as the Economist put it, "years of rapid economic growth, which China had hoped would dampen separatist demands, have achieved the opposite"? For one, the Chinese failed to consult Tibetans about the kind of economic growth they wanted. In this sense, at least, Tibetans are not much more politically impotent than the hundreds of millions of hapless Chinese uprooted by China's Faustian pact with consumer capitalism. The Tibetans share their frustration with farmers and tribal peoples in the Indian states of West Bengal and Orissa, who, though apparently inhabiting the world's largest democracy, confront a murderous axis of politicians, businessmen, and militias determined to corral their ancestral lands into a global network of profit. However, Tibet's ordeal has been in the making for some time. Before the railway line speeded up Han Chinese immigration, China's floating population of migrant workers, criminals, carpetbaggers and prostitutes conspicuously dominated Tibetan cities such as Lhasa, Gyantse and Shigatse. Half of Lhasa's population is Han Chinese, who own most of the city's shops and businesses. Chinese-style development, which heavily favours urban areas over rural ones, could only exacerbate economic inequality and threaten traditions, such as nomadic lifestyles. Not surprisingly, Deng Xiaoping's post-Tiananmen gamble - that people intoxicated with prosperity will not demand political change - failed in Tibet. Like predominantly rural ethnic minorities elsewhere, Tibetans lack the temperament or training needed for a fervent belief in the utopia of modernity - a consumer lifestyle in urban centres - promised by China. Far from losing his aura during his long exile, the Dalai Lama has come to symbolise more urgently than ever to Tibetans their cherished and threatened identity. It has also become clear to Tibetans that they pay a high price for other people's enhanced lifestyles. Global warming has caused the glaciers of the Tibetan plateau, which regulate the water supply to the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Thanlwin, Yangtze and Yellow rivers, to melt at an alarming rate, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of millions in Asia. Woeser, a Tibetan poet and essayist, told me that not even the cultural revolution undermined Tibet as much as the feckless modernisation of recent years. The rail link to Lhasa has further deepened the Tibetan sense of siege. No Tibetan I met last year in Lhasa had any doubt that the railway was devised by and for the Han Chinese, thousands of whom had already begun to pour into the city every day, monopolising jobs and causing severe inflation. In the past two decades, new railways have economically integrated China's remote provinces of Qinghai and Xinjiang, making them available for large-scale resettlement by the surplus population. China, its leaders insist, will rise "peacefully"; and they may be right in so far as China refrains from the invasions and occupations that Japan resorted to in its attempt to modernise and catch up with western imperial powers. But it is not hard to see that China has employed in Xinjiang and now Tibet some of the same means of internal colonialism that the US used during its own westward expansion. Propelled by an insatiable global thirst for consumer markets and natural resources, China has done little to allay the fear that Tibetans could soon resemble the Native Americans languishing in reservations - reduced, in the words of the Tibetan novelist Jamyang Norbu, to a "sort of broken third-rate people", who in some years from now will be reduced to "begging from tourists". The most surprising thing about the eruption of Tibetan rage is that it didn't occur sooner. Televised images of Tibetans assaulting Han Chinese immigrants now stoke a middle-class nationalism in the rich cities on the Chinese coast. Well-off Chinese supporting harsh suppression of the "ingrate" Tibetans echo the middle-class media commentators in Delhi and Mumbai who egg on the police to "crush" those daring to resist their dispossession. But then corporate globalisation has rarely been more successful in inculcating a culture of greed and brutality among its most educated beneficiaries. Western commentators may continue to tilt at the straw man of communism in China. Tibetans, however, seem to have sensed that they confront a capitalist modernity more destructive of tradition, and more ruthlessly exploitative of the sacred land they walk on, than any adversary they have known in their tormented history. · Pankaj Mishra is the author of Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond kannauj@gmail.com |
RANCHI The Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological fountainhead RSS would like to see more people who subscribe to their ideology at the helm of educational institutions in Jharkhand, where the party is in power. A meeting of the BJP and its affiliates held in Ranchi during the visit of party president Amit Shah on Saturday discussed the issue of “religious conversions at schools and colleges run by Christian missionaries and decided to press the state government to check their growth,” said an RSS leader who attended the close door meeting. It was agreed at the meeting top press the BJP-led government of chief minister Raghubar Das to scrap affiliation of educational institutions that are allegedly directly or indirectly engaged in religious conversion, he said. Besides the BJP and RSS, representatives of Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP), Seva Bharati, Vidhya Bharati and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) attended the meeting that was chaired by Shah. “The meeting emphasised on improving the quality of education in both rural and urban areas by deputing officials who believe in Sangh’s ideology at the helm of the educational institutions,” said the RSS leader, who spoke on condition on anonymity. Historically, Christian missionaries have had a strong presence in the tribal-dominated Jharkhand. They ran most of the prominent schools and colleges in the impoverished state, until the government expanded its educational network. In recent decades, as the political influence of the BJP grew in the region, Jharkhand has also seen a strong expansion of educational institutions run by groups associated with the RSS, which is increasingly challenging the presence of the Christian missionaries, alleging they indulge in religious conversion under the pretext of offering education and other social services. Earlier this year, the Jharkhand government rechristened the state’s oldest “Ranchi College” to “Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee University”. Mukherjee was the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangha, the forerunner to the BJP. The renaming sparked angry protests from tribal students, who accused the government of “saffronising” higher education by suppressing students’ opinion and issuing diktats to please the RSS. Saturday’s meeting of the Sangh affiliates also hailed the 1000-day old Raghubar Das government for its decision to introduce the controversial anti-conversion law, and resolved to implement the same effectively. The Jharkhand Religious Freedom Act, 2017 put severe restriction on religious conversion. As per its provisions, anyone found violating the legislation would be imprisoned for three years and fined Rs. 50,000 or both, and four-year imprisonment and Rs 1 lakh fine, or both, if the person converted is a minor, woman or schedule caste or schedule tribe. It also mandates a person converting willingly to inform the deputy commissioner about details such as time, place and the person who administers the conversion proceedings. Pro-Christian tribal groups and opposition parties have condemned the law describing it another step by the RSS-BJP combine to victimise minorities in the state. First Published: Sep 16, 2017 16:44 IST |
I was a young fool in love and she had a 1992 black Mazda Miata with all the trimmings: removable hardtop, BBS lace wheels, tan skins and Nardi wood shifter. One was high maintenance, the other a car. That first-generation roadster, known as the NA (released in 1989 as a 1990 model), lives in memory and all those crossword-puzzle words that it brought to mind: yar, spry, bandy, caper. Getting after a mountain road in that tiny roadster was nothing but mechanical joy. You could let the car drift fearlessly, pitch the tail around to get the nose pointed right and cane it like a Jeddah shoplifter. It was easy. It was fun. The steering was perfect, like a high-price go-kart. The 1.6-liter naturally aspirated four-cylinder with a five-speed manual had 116 horsepower and 100 pound-feet of torque at the crank, but it would shed blood to please. When the roads straightened and the fence posts fanned, that car buzzed something marvelous, like a swarm of bees. The Miata in spirit was the reliable British roadster that you couldn’t buy from Britain. Twenty-six years and nearly 1 million cars later, the MX-5 Miata—Mazda tried to drop the “Miata” name in favor of simply “MX-5,” to no avail—has returned to first principles. The fourth-generation MX-5, the ND, is significantly leaner, lighter (by about 150 pounds depending on options) and a bit down on power (by 12 hp, to 155 hp) compared with the previous model. In fact, at 154.1 inches in length, the new car is 4 inches shorter than the previous generation and even a shade shorter than the original a quarter-century ago. Darty. Tempestuous. A car that turns like a cat chasing his tail. The new Miata embraces power-to-weight minimalism and stick-and-rudder driving in a way not seen since the NA model. They could have called it the Déjà Vu. Let’s start with a number: 2,332 pounds. The curb weight of the U.S.-spec 2016 MX-5 is almost what the car weighed 20 years ago. To hit that mark Mazda gouged and sweated grams out of every corner of the car: The use of aluminum body panels (except for doors, rear fenders and windshield pillars) saved 45 pounds. Whittling down the cast-aluminum transmission housing and workings saved 16 pounds; light-weighting of suspension parts (front wishbone/rear multi-link) kicked in 26 pounds. The convertible-top mechanism is 20% lighter thanks to the use of aluminum bow stays. It is also the cleverest in the universe. To open it, you grab the latch at the headliner, over the mirror, and throw it over your shoulder. The top folds in an instant to form its own canvas tonneau. You only need to reach back to push-pop it into the secure position. To raise the top, you push again. It pops up and you can attach it to the headliner in about two seconds. Brilliant. And, very much central to the driving experience: Replacing conventional padded and sprung, steel-frame seats, the Miata’s seats are like Aeron chairs, with a lightweight, high-tech fabric stretched across the aluminum armature. These seats are both lighter (17 pounds apiece than the alternative) and more comfortable than stiff-backed composite shells. To eliminate the weight of a seat-height adjuster, the seat rails are inclined so that as occupants slide forward the seat rises gradually. To save a bit of gear, the steering column tilts but doesn’t telescope. The windshield and cabin have been pushed rearward along the fuselage, and the spandex seats put the driver’s rump nearly an inch closer to the ground and a bit closer to the centerline. The visual effect is a longer hood, a longer axle-to-dash and a bit more raffish silhouette, at the same time moving the driver’s inner ears closer to the center of rotation. All this happens even though the car is actually 4 inches shorter than the previous model. Also, glad news for anyone 6-feet tall or better: the MX-5 redesign gives a bit more refuge behind the now slightly raised windshield. Entry and exit of the car with the top down is easy and natural. Getting in with the top up requires a bit more patience lest you bang your left ear on the partially retracted side window. Fiat-Chrysler will begin production of a Fiat roadster based on the MX-5, much as Subaru and Scion have conspired on the BRZ/FR-S. The Fiat 124 Spider will have its own sheet metal but Mazda’s suddenly sexy silhouette is in a great place to start. For its product Mazda invoked the design mood “Kodo—Soul in Motion,” which I guess includes the car’s dangerously mischievous face. This Pokémon space catfish is coming to eat you. Those are compact, weight-saving LED headlamps and running lights, like channel-set zircons in the lateral front bumper. The close-cropped nose and surprisingly low hood line afford good sightlines past the muscular front fenders, shades of an Opel GT. The MX-5 is surprisingly leggy. Minimum ground clearance of our Grand Touring tester ($30,885 delivered), with the 17-inch alloy wheels, was 5.32 inches. Wheel arches clearances are ample, and the truth is the Miata suspension tuning is anything but laced down and hard core. Driven in haste around an autocross course, the Miata rolls and gimbals like a ship’s compass in a storm. Mazda Motor Corp. I have on occasion white-knuckled a 12-cylinder, seven-figure streamliner to more than 200 mph, flirting with the turbulent vortices of chance. That was fun, I guess. And then there is the kind of fun where you come home with your license and your life. That’s the Miata. You wouldn’t think that would be a recipe for motor-sports glory, and yet: My friend Ezra Dyer (Yahoo Autos, Popular Mechanics) and I went to an autocross event last weekend sponsored by the local Porsche club. The course was laid out on a tar-crazed, broken parking lot—a synecdoche of America’s crumbling infrastructure?—and right in the middle was a speed bump cars had to cross twice. Porsche Boxsters and 914s had to slow to walking speed to get over this lump of asphalt. Me and my borrowed Miata, with practical ground clearance and nothing much by way of front aero, hit it full throttle in second gear, fairly leaping over it and landing with its white hinder up in the air, like a woodland creature. Erza logged a time of 41.7 seconds in a fire-breathing, world-beating 650-hp Corvette Z06. The MX-5 gave up 495 hp to the ‘Vette. Elapsed time? 41.7 seconds. So there is more nuance to the “Is it fast?” question that one might credit. The 2.0-liter “Skyactiv” direction-injection four pulls for all its worth. Overall engine torque is up a bit (8 lb-ft) and that grunt is available across a lower, broader rpm. The short-throw shifter is peachy. The three-pedal positioning, perfected over decades, makes it easy to heel and toe, if you remember how. Rev-matching isn’t available. Of course, Mazda designers were careful to retain the car’s blatty, Sopwith Camel exhaust out of dual silver-tipped pipes. Compression ratio? A spitting 13.0:1. Is the MX-5 fast? Relatively, it’s a slug. Zero-60 mph is around 6 seconds (that same ‘Vette is 2.95 seconds) and you would be a brave soul to take it over about 110 mph. That’s the genius of it. I have on occasion white-knuckled a 12-cylinder, seven-figure streamliner to more than 200 mph, flirting with the turbulent vortices of chance. That was fun, I guess. And then there is the kind of fun where you come home with your license and your life. That’s the Miata. 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Now The Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo) is a Dylan cover that I don’t think was over-played by the Dead seeing that it was only played 59 times between 1985 and 1995. Plus, it’s a great singalong song. The chorus is something that everyone knows and can belt out with the band and it’s a great way to end an evening of rock festivities. The only other version on a Grateful Dead release was on the bonus disc of Postcards of the Hanging, which included the first ever performance of the song on 12/30/85 so this is a bit of a rarity among officially released Dead material. Ultimately, this was a simple pick because The Mighty Quinn is a fun song and who doesn’t like fun?! Jerry plucks out the pick up notes and Vince adds an organ patch that sounds like something from “Like A Rolling Stone” which is appropriate for this Dylan cover. Bruce tickles the ivories here adding some nice, clear textures. Pretty much everyone with a microphone gets in on the chorus. That’s not always a good thing, but by the second time the chorus hits things are a bit better in that regard. The instrumental break after the second verse/chorus is short. Bruce adds a few thoughts there but it seems like everyone is waiting for someone else to step forward. Instead back to the third verse/chorus combo. After this Jerry takes a few laps around the melody with embellishments from Bruce. This leads to an a cappella chorus followed by another pass through with the full band. The transitions here are a bit clumsy, but everyone is having fun. A good way to go out indeed. Complete Setlist 9/25/91 |
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Like cigarettes, plastic bags have recently gone from a tolerated nuisance to a widely despised and discouraged vice. Last month, the New York City Council passed a 5-cent-per-bag fee on single-use bags handed out by most retailers. Two weeks ago, the Massachusetts State Senate passed a measure that would ban plastic bags from being dispensed by many retail businesses and require a charge of 10 cents or more for a recycled paper or reusable bag. The Massachusetts proposal may not become law this year, but it’s the latest sign that the plastic bag industry is losing this war. Already in Massachusetts, 32 towns and cities have passed bag bans or fees. So have at least 88 localities in California, including the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, plus cities and towns in more than a dozen other states and more than a dozen other countries. The adverse impacts of plastic bags are undeniable: When they’re not piling up in landfills, they’re blocking storm drains, littering streets, getting stuck in trees, and contaminating oceans, where fish, seabirds, and other marine animals eat them or get tangled up in them. As longtime plastic bag adversary Ian Frazier recently reported in The New Yorker, “In 2014, plastic grocery bags were the seventh most common item collected during the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, behind smaller debris such as cigarette butts, plastic straws, and bottle caps.” The New York City Sanitation Department collects more than 1,700 tons of single-use carry-out bags every week, and has to spend $12.5 million a year to dispose of them. Bag bans cut this litter off at the source: In San Jose, California, a plastic bag ban led to an 89 percent reduction in the number of plastic bags winding up in the city’s storm drains. Fees have a smaller, but still significant, effect. Washington, DC’s government estimates that its 5-cent bag tax has led to a 60 percent reduction in the number of these bags being used, although that figure is contested by other sources. Is plastic really worse than paper? But advocates of these laws and journalists who cover the issue often neglect to ask what will replace plastic bags and what the environmental impact of that replacement will be. People still need bags to bring home their groceries. And the most common substitute, paper bags, may be just as bad or worse, depending on the environmental problem you’re most concerned about. That’s leading to a split in the anti-bag movement. Some bills, like in Massachusetts, try to reduce the use of paper bags as well as plastic, but still favor paper. Others, like in New York City, treat all single-use bags equally. Even then, the question remains as to whether single-use bags are necessarily always worse than reusable ones. Studies of bags’ environmental impacts over their life cycle have reached widely varying conclusions. Some are funded by plastic industry groups, like the ironically named American Progressive Bag Alliance. Even studies conducted with the purest of intentions depend on any number of assumptions. How many plastic bags are replaced by one cotton tote bag? If a plastic bag is reused in the home as the garbage bag in a bathroom waste bin, does that reduce its footprint by eliminating the need for another small plastic garbage bag? If your chief concern is climate change, things get even muddier. One of the most comprehensive research papers on the environmental impact of bags, published in 2007 by an Australian state government agency, found that paper bags have a higher carbon footprint than plastic. That’s primarily because more energy is required to produce and transport paper bags. “People look at [paper] and say it’s degradable, therefore it’s much better for the environment, but it’s not in terms of climate change impact,” says David Tyler, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon who has examined the research on the environmental impact of bag use. The reasons for paper’s higher carbon footprint are complex, but can mostly be understood as stemming from the fact that paper bags are much thicker than plastic bags. “Very broadly, carbon footprints are proportional to mass of an object,” says Tyler. For example, because paper bags take up so much more space, more trucks are needed to ship paper bags to a store than to ship plastic bags. Looking beyond climate change Still, many environmentalists argue that plastic is worse than paper. Climate change, they say, isn’t the only form of environmental degradation to worry about. “Paper does have its own environmental consequences in terms of how much energy it takes to generate,” acknowledges Emily Norton, director of the Massachusetts Sierra Club. “The big difference is that paper does biodegrade eventually. Plastic is a toxin that stays in the environment, marine animals ingest it, and it enters their bodies and then ours.” Some social justice activists who work in low-income urban neighborhoods or communities of color also argue that plastic bags are a particular scourge. “A lot of the waste ends up in our communities,” says Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, an environmental and social justice-oriented community organization in Brooklyn. “Plastic bags not only destroy the physical infrastructure,” she says, referring to the way they clog up storm drains and other systems, “they contribute to emissions.” And she points out that marine plastic pollution is a threat to low-income people who fish for their dinner: “So many frontline communities depend on food coming from the ocean.” That’s why her group supported New York City’s bag fee even though it’s more of a burden on lower-income citizens. A single mom, or someone working two jobs, is more likely to have to do her shopping in a rush on the way home from work than to go out specifically with a tote bag in hand. But for UPROSE, that concern is outweighed by the negative impacts of plastic bags on disadvantaged communities. Increasingly, environmentalists are pushing for laws that include fees for all single-use bags, and that require paper bags to be made with recycled content, which could lower their carbon footprint. The measure now under consideration in Massachusetts, for example, would mandate that single-use paper bags contain at least 40 percent recycled fiber. That’s the percentage the Massachusetts Sierra Club has advocated for at the state level and when lobbying for municipal bag rules. It’s complicated But what if reusable bags aren’t good either? As the Australian study noted, a cotton bag has major environmental impacts of its own. Only 2.4 percent of the world’s cropland is planted with cotton, yet it accounts for 24 percent of the global market for insecticides and 11 percent for pesticides, the World Wildlife Fund reports. A pound of cotton requires more than 5,000 gallons of water on average, a thirst far greater than that of any vegetable and even most meats. And cotton, unlike paper, is not currently recycled in most places. The Australian study concluded that the best option appears to be a reusable bag, but one made from recycled plastic, not cotton. “A substantial shift to more durable bags would deliver environmental gains through reductions in greenhouse gases, energy and water use, resource depletion and litter,” the study concluded. “The shift from one single-use bag to another single-use bag may improve one environmental outcome, but be offset by another environmental impact.” But studies conducted in Australia or Europe have limited applicability in the US, particularly when you’re considering climate impact, because every country has a different energy mix. In fact, every region of the US has a different energy mix. “There’s no easy answer,” says Eric Goldstein, New York City environment director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which backed NYC’s bag fee. “There are so very many variables. Here’s just one tiny example: Does the paper for paper bags come from a recycled paper mill on Staten Island or a virgin forest in northern Canada? As far as I know, nobody has done the definitive analysis, which would necessarily need to have a large number of caveats and qualifications. Also, this question is something like asking, ‘Would you prefer to get a parking ticket or a tax assessment?’ It depends on the specifics, but it’s better to avoid both wherever possible.” Goldstein is confident that if people switch to reusable bags, even cotton ones, and use them consistently, that will ultimately be better for the environment. The ideal city bag policy would probably involve charging for paper and plastic single-use bags, as New York City has decided to do, while giving out reusable recycled-plastic bags to those who need them, especially to low-income communities and seniors. (The crunchy rich should already have more than enough tote bags from PBS and Whole Foods.) The larger takeaway is that no bag is free of environmental impact, whether that’s contributing to climate change, ocean pollution, water scarcity, or pesticide use. The instinct to favor reusable bags springs from an understandable urge to reduce our chronic overconsumption, but the bags we use are not the big problem. “Eat one less meat dish a week—that’s what will have a real impact on the environment,” says Tyler. “It’s what we put in the bag at the grocery store that really matters.” |
Next Game: vs. Baylor 3/24/2017 | 9:30 p.m. ESPN2 LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) - Mariya Moore 's awareness of her NCAA Tournament shooting struggles made her especially determined to put them behind her. Extra practice finally paid off with the breakout performance the Louisville junior guard always knew was capable of, ignoring leg cramps to get it done with a big fourth quarter that helped send the Cardinals to the Sweet 16. "My mindset was we've come so far, we can't give up now," Moore said after making all five 3-pointers for 19 points as Louisville beat Tennessee 75-64 Monday night in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. "I needed to do whatever I could to make sure our team pushed through." Moore certainly had room for improvement with career shooting averages of 29 percent from long range and 38 percent overall. She entered this tournament on a 1-of-21 slump shooting 3s. Those numbers seemed like a distant memory after she made 7 of 10 from the field and grabbed nine rebounds a game after scoring just six points in a first-round win over Chattanooga. Moore's perimeter shooting provided a lift on a night that fourth-seeded Louisville (29-7) had to work hard late to finish 44 percent from the field. She scored the Cardinals' first eight points of the fourth quarter with back-to-back 3s for a 54-47 lead before Asia Durr followed with seven of their next eight points to make it 62-51 with 4:07 remaining. "She didn't want to lose and I think she showed that when she came up clutch with those two threes in a row," said Asia Durr , who scored 23 points to become the 28th Louisville player to reach 1,000 career points. Fifth-seeded Tennessee got within five but no closer as Louisville earned its first Sweet 16 berth in two years and seventh overall under coach Jeff Walz . The Cardinals will face top-seeded Baylor on Friday in the Oklahoma City Region semifinal. Jaime Nared had 28 points and 11 rebounds for Tennessee (20-12), which shot 33 percent in losing its first second-round tournament game in program history. Diamond DeShields had 15. THE BIG PICTURE Tennessee: Foul trouble by DeShields seemed to have the Lady Vols out of sync at times while she was on the bench and for a while they hurt themselves at the foul line. They were 3 for 8 at one point but finished 19 of 27, which could have made a difference against the Cardinals. Shooting 3 of 18 in the fourth quarter was the biggest reason they're going home. Mercedes Russell had 11 points and 13 rebounds. "I thought we had good looks, we just missed shots," coach Holly Warlick said. "We got good position to get some looks and just didn't finish it." Louisville: The Cardinals finally found their touch in the fourth quarter, making 9 of 14 (64 percent). Hines-Allen added 14 points and 13 rebounds (12 defensive), which was key down the stretch. Moore's outside shooting helped them finish 7 of 16 from long range. NEW MEMBER Needing 10 points for 1,000, Durr quickly got within a point of the milestone before going cold and appearing to press at points. The sophomore made a layup early in the third quarter and saved her best for the fourth despite finishing 8 of 22 from the field. "I just had to focus on stop, score, stop," said Durr, who gave Louisville three 1,000-point scorers besides Moore and Hines-Allen. She's only the fifth to do so in her first two seasons. "We came up with some huge efforts and I'm glad that took place." TOUGHING IT OUT DeShields was down for several moments late in the fourth quarter after colliding with Moore under Louisville's basket, hitting her head on the basket stanchion as she fell. She was examined and returned 19 seconds later to finish the game. "I had already fallen in the first half," said DeShields, adding that she did not feel any concussion symptoms. "(In the fourth quarter) I fell on my back and hit my head. It was more of precaution to make sure I was OK." UP NEXT Louisville faces Baylor in the Oklahoma City Regional semifinal on Friday in a rematch of the Cardinals' 2013 upset of the Bears. |
The video will start in 8 Cancel Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Boeing has taken the wraps off a new type of spaceship that could act as a half-way-house between Earth and Mars . Called the Deep Space Gateway, it would hang about on the far side of the moon and act as a docking station for spaceships on their way to the red planet. It would allow ships to refuel and resupply before beginning the gruelling mission to Mars. Boeing says it hopes to launch the habitat in four different parts through NASA's powerful Space Launch System (SLS). (Image: Boeing) (Image: Boeing) “The ability to simultaneously launch humans and cargo on SLS would allow us to assemble the gateway in four launches in the early 2020s,” confirmed Pete McGrath, director of global sales and marketing for Boeing’s space exploration division. Using solar panels for power, the Deep Space Gateway would: "support critical research and help open opportunities for global government or commercial partnerships in deep space, including lunar missions." The company also revealed its plans for a Deep Space Transport vehicle that would actually carry the adventurers to Mars. Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now "The transport vehicle would be equipped with a habitat specifically designed to protect passengers from deep space’s harsh environment and its own robust SEP bus," said Boeing's Kelly Kaplan in a press statement. "In fact, both of Boeing’s concepts leverage proven solar electric propulsion technology and hardware design from the 702 satellite family," she said. |
Among those that appear to occupy the front of the grid, Mercedes' and Red Bull's aerodynamic philosophies couldn't be more different - while Ferrari has seemingly risen to the challenge with something in the middle of the spectrum. Daniel Ricciardo, Red Bull Racing RB13 Photo by: XPB Images The first major obstacle we have to overcome in understanding the different philosophies in play is understanding rake. It's a phrase that has become almost synonymous with Red Bull because of the team's extreme nose-down attitude and the fact its whole aerodynamic philosophy is built around it. But we must also understand why others don't chase the same extreme concept when designing their cars. Running in this configuration can be beneficial on several fronts provided you can maintain the correct ride height and overcome some of the compromises. Of course, Red Bull, under the tutelage of Adrian Newey, have been perfecting the aggressive raked stance since the introduction of the 2009 regulations and while the prevailing regulations have been altered somewhat throughout the last eight years, the raked stance has been a mainstay. The 2017 regulations actually accentuate the raked philosophy, given the reduction in length of the T-Tray/Splitter by 100mm, allowing the designers further scope with which to evade a collision with it and the tracks surface. It's fair to say at this point that while Red Bull continue to push on with its high rake philosophy, so too Mercedes continue to run at the opposite end of the spectrum with very little rake present in its set-up. Ferrari, meanwhile, appears to have edged closer to Red Bull, maximising changes to certain areas of the regulations in order to improve the aerodynamic seal necessary to expand the diffuser's area. Starting at the front The nose down attitude is good news for the front wing too, as it tilts the wing toward the track surface where it can sit at a more optimal height in order to maximise ground effect, enhancing the downforce and flow structures it creates. Mercedes W08 vs Red Bull Racing RB13 vs Ferrari SF70H Photo by: XPB Images That's one of the main divergences you'll note when viewing the Red Bull and then comparing it with the Mercedes and Ferrari front wings in action. The RB13's wing is much closer to the ground due to the rake angle and this should help drive the airflow toward its intended target, with more efficiency and with less need to remedy it downstream. Take the Y250 region for instance. This section of the wing (which spans 250mm either side of the car centreline) was made 'neutral' by the FIA in 2009 but ever since then the teams have been trying to influence it to make gains, be it with the placement of the camera housings the shape of the nose or its height in reference to the ground. For 2017, Mercedes and Ferrari have continued to follow the same development path as they had in previous seasons, with the flaps arched over to make a point (blue arrow), in order to interact with the Y250 vortex being generated by the flap and neutral juncture below. In Mercedes' case, the team has exacerbated the shape of the vortex being created by pinching the Y250 juncture too, whereas Red Bull has a very different approach as the RB13 features a much flatter connection of the flap and neutral section. This year the flaps have been repositioned so that they arch in the opposite direction (blue arrow), undoubtedly reshaping the Y250 vortex too. The differences continue in the way they treat the airflow, as it washes across the front face and around the outside of the tyre. Red Bull and Ferrari assist the front wing in this instance, with their blown axles used to help reshape the wake shed by the front tyre. Mercedes' outwash tunnel design is the same as the one introduced during 2015 and while Red Bull's concept is also very similar in the outwash region to its predecessor, one area of interest is the arched footplate (red arrow), as it is no longer perpendicular to the endplate along its entire length, changing how airflow is received, conditioned and sent on its way. Getting out of the way Mercedes W08 front suspension Photo by: Giorgio Piola Mercedes have opted to displace its front suspension upper wishbones for 2017, with a horn sprouting from the upright, in order to place it much higher than is ordinarily viable (red arrow). This will not only have an effect from a kinematic point of view but is also driven by aerodynamic considerations, with the wishbone's height, shape and angle pivotal in deciding the airflow's direction as it moves down the car, which is even more important when we consider the complexity of the aero appendages placed just behind it and ahead of the sidepod. Ferrari SF70H and SF16-H front view comparison Photo by: Giorgio Piola Ferrari has looked at this problem laterally and, rather than change the suspension kinematics, as the team is likely happy with how it performs, it's decided to change how the airflow is collected by the sidepod inlet and in doing so has also improved the airflow's performance around the sidepod, too. Comparing the SF70H with the SF16-H, you'll note the higher inlet presents the airflow with an almost unobstructed pathway to the radiators and electronics that need to be cooled within. This also offers a much more sculpted surface for the airflow to follow, as the team looks to entice it rearward into more desirable positions. Ferrari SF70H turning vanes, detailed Photo by: Giorgio Piola This is all made possible by the way Ferrari has looked at the change in regulations and the effect those could have on the overall shape of the car. The regulations were written in such a way that the leading edge of the floor and sidepods be angled away from the car, in order to satisfy the aesthetic appeal that was part of the FIA's mandate when instructing the regulations would be amended. This angle is considered undesirable to the designers in terms of the shape of the cooling inlet and so most of the teams have set the sidepod back slightly, allowing them to circumvent the geometric requirement. Ferrari has taken this route too, but the sidepod is obfuscated by numerous airflow conditioning devices, in order to make use of the area. This has also allowed the team to compartmentalise the cooling outlet, introducing an upper inlet (blue arrow) which likely feeds the internal framework which surrounds the radiator to improve both the internal and external sidepod airflow. Nose job's Mercedes W07 "S" duct Photo by: Giorgio Piola Mercedes' nose solution, similar to that of last season (above), is using the vanity panel to overcome the packaging issues that the team faced, especially as it was ducting airflow from a more prominent position than just under the nose/chassis juncture. Red Bull RB13 nose Photo by: Giorgio Piola Red Bull, who took a year's sabbatical from the 'S' duct, returns to the solution this year, having studied the designs used elsewhere. The team continues to use the thumb tip-style nose though, rather than the slender one preferred by Mercede. However, Red Bull has stole a march in this respect by taking advantage of the cross-sectional rules to open up an inlet in the front face of the tip. This falls within the scope of the regulations as the vertical strakes within allow a slice to be taken through the nose at any point without exposing a hole. The idea is that although the thumb tip is physically present, to the airflow it isn't, as any airflow taken in is directed out of a hole on the rear face of the thumb. It's a nice interpretation of the regulations, much like the 'Cobra' nose used by Force India in order to imitate a high nose. The 'S' duct inlets can be found just behind the front wing pillars and, like Toro Rosso had done last season, Red Bull has given them a NACA shaping. This puts the inlet, much like Mercedes' solution, in a much more desirable position to collect airflow than under the nose, especially as the nose is 200m longer this year. Driver cooling is still taken care of by the inlets in the corner of the chassis. Kimi Raikkonen, Ferrari SF70H Photo by: Giorgio Piola Ferrari has adopted an 'S' duct for the first time since 2008, taking on board the design implemented by Mercedes and Toro Rosso last year and placing the inlet just behind the front wing pillars and ejecting the air it takes in over the upper surface of the chassis. The exit is flanked by two winglets either side of the chassis, which not only help to define the direction of the exiting airflow but are also used to control the air upwashed by the front suspension elements. Turning point Red Bull Racing RB13 and Mercedes AMG F1 W08 detail comparison Photo by: XPB Images Under the nose/chassis is another area where the Mercedes and Red Bull divergence peaks, with Mercedes turning vanes a much more complex expression of its aerodynamic philosophy. Note, for instance, the introduction of a new more horizontal vane (red arrow). Red Bull, meanwhile, has added another vertical vane in behind their turning vanes, almost creating a tunnel as the appendages reach back to where the bargeboards are sited. Mercedes opts for a staccato solution - shorter, more aggressive working of the air, whilst Red Bull's legato approach uses long purposeful strokes to entwine aerodynamic structures so that they need less work as they move down the car. Mercedes W08 w-floor Photo by: Giorgio Piola Mercedes began testing with a simplified version of its floor and bargeboard configuration (inset), waiting until the second test to show its hand. The W08 was then furnished with a revised axehead that features the W-Floor-style floor strakes protruding from it (red arrow), while the vertical slots that became a familiar sight on the W07's bargeboards are now also in use (blue arrow). Red Bull Racing RB13 & Ferrari SF70H bargeboards Photo by: XPB Images The complexity needed to make the airflow work that much harder at the floor's leading edge on the Mercedes is not followed by the more highly raked pair of Red Bull and Ferrari. In fact, the RB13 is quite barren in that respect - more so than the SF70H, which tries to marry the best of both solutions. This is primarily because of the way the airflow has been set up until this point and also due to the nature of how the the various teams want to try and 'seal' the diffuser area in order to increase the rear downforce being leveraged from it. Sidepods Daniel Ricciardo, Red Bull Racing RB13 Photo by: LAT Images The RB13's sidepods are another area where we can see Red Bull moving away from convention as they don't have the flat upper surface we are used to seeing. Instead, they have a bowed surface which doesn't extend to the new full-width available in the regulations, which leads to an extremely tapered flank and leaves an enormous section of floor exposed as the engine cover curves toward the coke bottle region. Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes AMG F1 W08 Photo by: XPB Images In comparison, the W08 does have full-width sidepods and a flatter upper surface but features a much more aggressive undercut in order to make space for the air to move around the sidepods, before tightly narrowing into the coke bottle region. We've already looked at how Ferrari has maximised the new regulations in this area due to how its philosophy is intrinsically linked to the airflow passing over and around the front suspension - but the diverse nature of the designs in this area does also point toward a very different internal architectural layout from team-to-team, which will be fascinating to see when the covers inevitably come off in the coming months. Diffusing the situation Red Bull Racing RB13 and Mercedes AMG F1 W08 diffuser comparison Photo by: XPB Images The diffuser has been dramatically increased in size for 2017, now 50mm wider, 50mm taller and, most importantly, starting 175mm ahead of the rear wheel centreline, rather than on it. This increase in diffuser area will provide the teams with a large chunk of the downforce needed to achieve the FIA's remit of cars that are five seconds per lap quicker. When this is combined with additional rake angle, the diffuser area continues to soar providing the airflow can be contained, something that Red Bull has excelled at, even though the use of exhaust blowing tactics like we saw between 2010 and 2013 have been curtailed. Red Bull's exploitation of increased rake angle and downforce via the diffuser means that the team is able to reduce the rear wing's role in creating downforce, as is easy to observe from the much shallower angle of attack it employs when compared with its rivals. Mercedes is looking to overcome some of the drag penalty that comes from running a steeper angle of attack on its rear wing by utilising a gentle spoon-shaped mainplane, which reduces the drag being created at the wing tip. Ferrari SF70H diffuser Photo by: XPB Images Meanwhile, Ferrari have maintained a level of design parity when it comes to their diffuser, opting to retain the complex stack of fins on the outer portion (arrowed), something that was revised slightly during the first two tests. Like Mercedes, they seem to be a little more concerned with lining up the diffusers outer flow structures with those of the brake duct winglets and the wake created by the rear tyres as they deform too. The sharks are circling Christian Horner has been vocal in his derision of the shark fin engine covers that feature up and down the grid - and his team did attempt to have them outlawed at the last Strategy Group meeting. This is political posturing, given the appendage is much less effective, owing to Red Bull's raked philosophy. For other teams who run with less rake angle, the lower position of the rear wing this year means it would be subjected to more turbulence from the airbox and engine cover if it were not for the shark fin. The fin erodes some of these issues by re-aligning the airflow, whilst also capturing airflow that might otherwise go unused in yaw. The highly raked RB13 features a shark fin, but you'll note it's not as aggressive as some of the other interpretations, as the disturbances to the rear wing are lessened by the angle of the rear wing given the rake angle. Mercedes AMG F1 W08 engine cover T-Wing Photo by: XPB Images Allied to their shark fin engine covers, both Mercedes and Ferrari have decided to exploit a mistake in the last draft of the 2017 regulations that has allowed the teams to use T-Wings. These winglets can occupy a 50mm space ahead of the rear wing up to 950mm above the reference plane like the previous rear wing, whereas the rear wing in 2017 cannot exceed 800mm in height. The designers are using these T-Wings in order to reshape both the airflow ahead of the rear wing and the upwash that occurs as a consequence of the airflow being worked by the rear wing and diffuser, in order that the aero structures connect more effectively. Suspended sentence Mercedes W07 front suspensions details Photo by: Giorgio Piola All of this aero work is for nought if the aero platform moves around too much, which is the reason why we've seen a swing toward development in this area, with Mercedes leading the way with its hydraulically assisted suspension. Development has primarily been focused around the use of a hydraulic heave element, stabilising the chassis' compression when needed and improving the car's balance during transitional phases. Mercedes has run a hydraulic heave element since the latter part of 2015 but it was noted that Red Bull also opted to do so in the latter part of last season, replacing the Belleville spring arrangement it's been using for several years. During the development phase for 2017, Ferrari was clearly investigating the use of a similar system and asked the FIA for clarification of certain criteria in order that it didn't push development beyond the limit of what the governing body consider legal. This has led to a bit of pushback from the FIA but all of the teams on the grid seem to be of the opinion that their suspension systems are compliant as we head toward the season opener. Rubbering in Make no mistake - the role that Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari played in the development of 2017's tyres will have helped the trio big time when compared to their competitors, even if measures were installed whereby data was shared with the rest of the field and a certain amount of blind testing was done. First-hand knowledge of how these wider tyres perform on your own challenger and the chance to use that to design the 2017 car will have been invaluable, not only from a kinematics point of view but also in understanding their aerodynamic impact. No cookie cutter solution If you had to compare their approaches to moving airflow around their respective cars, Red Bull's would be akin to using a tack hammer, while Mercedes' is a sledgehammer job. This is not new. Both teams have opted to run in these differing configurations for several years now but the way in which they do so seems to become a little more radical year-on-year. Meanwhile, while Ferrari has previously often concentrated too heavily on one or two aspects of its car rather than looking at it as an entire package, the SF70H appears to buck that trend. While it's not as extreme as the other solutions, it may well have taken the best of both. |
My father had a heart attack a week ago. I say this not to invite sympathy—there are few things I hate more than discussing my family life online—but just to explain where I’ve been. Because the internet is a machine engineered to produce anxiety, which I manage to produce plenty of on my own, I took Twitter (and Slack) off my phone while I was visiting my father in a hospital halfway across the country. While I’ve been offline, my podcasting partner Matt Taibbi has been asked to reckon with his past once again. He reached out late last week to let me know he has decided that we should end our podcast, The Tarfu Report. If it weren’t for my own situation, I might have argued against it, but I’m not feeling very funny at the moment myself. As of today, I’m back to work, and back online. I’ve never thought it was appropriate for me to speak for Matt, and he’s never asked me to defend him, but I still ought to explain myself to everyone who’s asked me about him over the last week (and earlier). When he first approached me about working with him at First Look Media a few years ago, I was well aware of the Exile stories. But he told me then, and has told me numerous times since then, that the worst shit described in that book simply didn’t happen—that it was fabricated by his former collaborator, who thought it was funny or cool or satirical or something else completely unclear. I believe Matt. Maybe that’s naive or self-serving of me, and maybe you don’t believe him, but based on everything I know about the people involved, I do. This doesn’t explain or excuse every single dodgy thing Matt’s ever written—or not written, but attached his name to—over the years, but it’s why I’m comfortable working with him. As far as I’ve ever known, there’s no long line of accusers or “open secrets” about his behavior, just dumb shit he wrote, and worse shit his former partner wrote, that he regrets. I don’t think Matt is the character he played in the ‘90s. I think he said and did some idiotic shit, but nothing monstrous. And I know he sincerely regrets it, and has spent years working to be a better and more enlightened journalist and human being. I’ll miss doing the show with him and I hope you enjoyed it. |
First lady Melania Trump arrives at the East Room of the White House prior to a joint news conference on Feb. 15 in Washington. Alex Wong/Getty Images Press pool reports may have gotten spicier since Donald Trump’s election, but a dispatch from the first lady’s visit to the pediatrics unit at New York-Presbyterian Hospital on Thursday is beyond. Four hot peppers! Extra rice advisable. Melania Trump spoke to doctors and children to celebrate National Read Across America Day, as well as the birthday of Dr. Seuss. Here is how the White House described the meeting: To recap: Mrs. Trump shared the joy of reading with children. She gathered with children in the pediatric playroom and read to them from her and her son’s favorite book. She instilled some lovely life lessons about the importance of reading. She uttered some beautiful sentences, including, “Dr. Seuss has brought so much joy, laughter, and enchantment into children’s lives all around the globe for generations. Through his captivating rhymes, Dr. Seuss has delighted and inspired children while teaching them to read, to dream, to care.” MOMENTS AGO: First Lady Melania Trump reads to children in New York City https://t.co/5Vm0uigWk5 pic.twitter.com/5w0oATnx2W — CBS News (@CBSNews) March 2, 2017 And here is how the pool reporter/sushi chef described the visit/diced the first lady into raw, quivering pieces: Almost every statement in this document is a cut, a stroke of restrained contempt liberating an extremely stilted and uncomfortable Melania statue from the marble. The tone, though, is also tragic. The report conjures a bonanza of unbearable awkwardness—of silence, looking, forced-smiling, and waiting—that derives in part from Trump’s seeming despair. In a small room … First Lady Melania Trump sat in a wooden chair and looked at several children in the room. I already feel embarrassed. Does she know how to sit on a hard surface? Why is she just staring at the sick kids? “We will read some books today,” said Trump. “So do you know what is today?” she said. The children looked at her blankly. Wow, she’s really connecting to her audience. She has a politician’s touch! And, given her advocacy for the written word, not the best grammar. She was wearing black stilettos, a soft, blue sweater, and a long black coat. She had a huge diamond ring on her left hand …. Huge! When she got to a passage in the book about a “slump,” she looked at the children and said, “So sometimes you don’t feel good, right? But then – what do you do?” The children waited. Perhaps the FLOTUS and the kids are about to find some common ground. She’s just admitted (poignantly) that sometimes she is sad. They are in a hospital, which means they probably don’t feel awesome. So what’s her advice? “You go places where you feel better,” she told them. Hmm, that doesn’t sound very motivational. Also, what if you can’t get in to the better place because of the travel ban? She read: “You’ll be as famous as famous can be,” and continued: “With the whole wide world watching you win on TV.” She smiled at them. Wait a second. That is a terrible moral! Of all the quotes to pull from Seuss’s poem, our pool reporter has chosen to highlight lines about fame and media exposure as a possible consolation for unhappiness. Is the idea that the White House is a place you can go to “feel better” about marrying a gross misogynist maybe-despot? Are we to believe that the world’s attention fills a void in the first lady’s heart, or just humiliates her? A moment later she read: “Remember that life’s a great balancing act.” This is getting so real. Remember, kids, that life is a series of dispiriting compromises in which you sacrifice your integrity and desires for money and security. After she finished, she looked at the children and said: “Do you like the book?” Anyone? One girl held up her hand. Fake news. Trump gave her the book and said: “I encourage you all to read a lot—to get educated.” Perhaps there are lessons in books that could save you from my fate! Then she posed for pictures with several of the children. Woof. More like National Read Melania’s Tush to Filth Across America Day. |
Stinky tofu, made by soaking fresh tofu in a brine of fermented milk, meat or vegetables (recipes vary and are somewhat secretive) is something of a national obsession in Taiwan. Known affectionately as the blue cheese of tofu, stinky tofu can be served barbecued, stewed, braised, steamed or deep fried. Each method is distinctive in odour, taste, texture, and colour, and an entire afternoon could be spent sampling the different styles. One of the best places to try this often misunderstood delicacy is on the Shenkeng Laojie (Shenkeng Old Street) in the town of Shenkeng, just a few kilometres east of Taipei. The Taiwanese have been identifying this narrow street (and its dozens of shops and stalls) with stinky tofu for many years. And after a newly complete three-year restoration project, the street is now as big a draw as the food. Imagine rows of late 19th- to early 20th-century red brick shops with lattice windows, hanging eaves, arcade-style walkways, all interspersed with ornate temples or European-Chinese fusion-style mansions. And of course almost all serving one just thing: variations of stinky tofu! Begin the tour with barbecued tofu on bamboo skewers at Jin Da Ding (金大鼎), reportedly one of the oldest stalls on the street, dating back around five decades. Order skewers of what they call “traditional recipe tofu" served with pickled spicy shredded cabbage, sit under the nearby banyan tree and dig in. The dish is delightfully fragrant, with a tender exterior and creamy centre, and the pungent and spicy cabbage topping contrast well with the nutty tofu flavour. For the next taste test, stroll 50m up the road to number 140, Gu Zao Cuo (古早厝), a three-storey mansion fronted by roiling woks of tofu and a rack of succulent yellow chicken. The signature dish of stewed stinky tofu with spicy duck's blood is pleasantly odorous, with a mild peppery bite and varied textures (think gelatinous duck blood, spongy tofu and crunchy dried fish). The next stop is at the Mansion of the Six Aunties (六嬸婆), almost directly across the road at number 139, known for its creative fare. Try the Six Aunties Tofu, a layered slab of chewy stewed tofu with hints of wild mushrooms and shrimp, served in a thick green soup of creamed Chinese mustard. For something uniquely Taiwanese, Wang Shui Cheng (王水成) at number 122, sells what is rumoured to be the original mala (an oily spicy sauce) tofu shop on the street. The stewed tofu is the colour and shape of a small baked abode brick, topped with pickled mustard leaves and red chillies. Its melt-in-the mouth spongy texture and peppery rather than spicy flavour fades onto hints of stewed tomatoes and Sichuan peppercorns. As a final treat, buy some soft swirling tofu ice cream from one of the ice cream shops at the end of the street to help settle stomachs that, though highly satisfied, just can’t take any more heat and spice. Most shops are open from around noon to 7 pm. |
Remote working is the future, and it should be the present Blair Reeves Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 1, 2016 I wish I’d tried this. Two of the tech industry’s biggest limitations today are recruiting talent and improving the diversity of its workforce. We see constant and legitimate complaints about both, and it’s time to come to terms with the fact that neither is going to markedly improve without some systemic change. What I’m about to suggest is not a complete fix for either, of course, and nor is it easy; but it is a straightforward and, I believe, inevitable step forward for both issues. What is it? Remote working. It’s coming to a workplace near you, probably whether you like it or not. We’re blessed to live in this era when the tech industry is constantly creating new tools for people to communicate, collaborate and share ideas more effectively. Yet most industries, including the tech industry, are still operating as if long-distance calling rates and pneumatic tubes were the only ways to get messages around a global company. You can build technology to change the world and reimagine how people work together — but, as the half-joke goes, must be willing to relocate to San Francisco. Disrupting all the old models of working is great, they say, just not ours. (This is the very dynamic that has made the Bay Area unlivable unless you are extremely wealthy, and probably young.) You can build technology to change the world and reimagine how people work together — but must be willing to relocate to San Francisco. Basic human psychology is to blame for a lot of this. Humans naturally default to working the same way we survived on the serengeti 100,000 years ago — together, around a fire. We like seeing our colleagues, and communicate more effectively (or, at least, think we do) face-to-face. I have heard lots of reasons given for why remote working “just doesn’t work” at many different companies, and they usually boil down to this. We just want the people working for us nearby. If someone screws up, we want the neck to be wrung to be close at hand. Yet from any rational perspective, this is extremely silly. It reminds me of the Mad Men-era norms that were simply taken for granted as what was done in the workplace: strict dress codes, secretaries taking notes and picking up dry cleaning, reticence to new approaches and suspicion of technology. In that era, as in our own, people go through familiar, expected motions in the workplace because they’re the path of least resistance, and thus make everyone more comfortable, not because they’re necessarily the most effective or smart. Indeed, it’s innovation in how humans organize themselves that often makes people most uncomfortable — think desegregation or bringing women into the workplace, flattening hierarchies or (again) adopting new technologies. Email and Slack work just as well across thousands of miles as they do between cubicles. In the future, people will be incredulous that we once insisted that everyone in a company lived in the same metro area, which often entailed spending hours commuting each way to an office park where they sat most of the day communicating by digital tools (email, VoIP phones, IM, Slack, Webex) which, it turns out, work just as well across thousands of miles as they do between cubicles. Yet this is exactly what many of us do, and the tech industry is hardly alone in that respect. Different Models of remote working Over the last several years, I’ve had the unique opportunity to experience several different models of remote working. Each has presented a different set of challenges and benefits that I’ve done some thinking about. The three I’ve seen and experienced are: Fully decentralized: employees are 100% remote, widely distributed, and mainly work out of home offices. Advantages: because “remote” is the norm, accommodating it is routine: everything uses web meetings, conference calls, collaboration tools by default. Downsides: building a cohesive company culture and interpersonal relationships takes a long time and very deliberate effort. because “remote” is the norm, accommodating it is routine: everything uses web meetings, conference calls, collaboration tools by default. building a cohesive company culture and interpersonal relationships takes a long time and very deliberate effort. Hub-and-spokes: most employees are based in a centralized headquarters, with a sprinkling of remote employees based elsewhere. Advantages: the company is able to offer remote arrangements to high-value recruits they’d otherwise lose. Travel costs are somewhat lower. Disadvantages: remote employees have to work especially hard to be heard and have an impact. Often results in particularly onerous travel requirements for them. Remote employees can feel left out of headquarters company culture. the company is able to offer remote arrangements to high-value recruits they’d otherwise lose. Travel costs are somewhat lower. remote employees have to work especially hard to be heard and have an impact. Often results in particularly onerous travel requirements for them. Remote employees can feel left out of headquarters company culture. Hybrid: lots of variations on this, but can involve many employees being based remotely and traveling for periodic centralized meetings. Employees may either work in home offices or in subsidized coworking spaces. Advantages: “remote” is again routine, and people are used to collaborating that way. Employees feel included in company culture. Big savings in central office cost. Disadvantages: “headquarters” can seem unnecessary most of the time, travel costs could be higher. The right way to weigh these alternatives is through the lens of what it means for the company. The biggest benefits of remote working arrangements for a company are talent acquisition/retention and, at scale, lower costs (higher travel costs are generally offset by office space savings). Since few companies are set up today for a fully decentralized model (though some are pretty far down that path — IBM is a great example), transition costs are also worth taking into account. Many companies have some form of a hub-and-spoke system today, which is probably the least ideal of the three, since it uses remote working as a supplement to the “real” office, as opposed to a reimagining of it. The talent shortage is self-inflicted Ultimately, not everyone can — or wants to — move to the Bay Area, New York, Seattle, Boston, DC, etc., for a wide variety of well-reported reasons. Whatever knowledge industry you’re talking about, over the last decade or two we’ve seen a concentration of these highly skilled, lucrative industries around major coastal metros, both driving up real estate prices and creating a painful housing crisis. This has enormous macro effects on everything from where millennials will be able to buy houses (hint: not within 30 miles of an ocean) to where your kids will be able to go to college (hint: probably not the UC system). Long-term, it is simply unsustainable and unwise. Clinging to the Mad Men-era (or Office Space) model is a cultural anachronism that most companies are simply too afraid to let die for the same reasons we were nervous about allowing men to stop wearing suits and ties to work. It doesn’t feel “serious.” You can’t be a “real company” without a big central office with cubicles and full parking lot outside, right? Are these the goals you have for your company? And if so… are you sure you’re focused on the right things? Ask yourself instead — why do we only hire people from City X? Or Country X? How could we work differently with people based elsewhere? Is our resistance due to cultural discomfort, or because of something tangible? Pools of talent, savvy and hard work are not clustered in a few big major coastal metros. That’s just where leading companies started looking. When they begin opening the doors in the next few years, get ready — there’s a lot more out there waiting for an opportunity. |
Bonnie is barely a tropical depression in the Gulf of Mexico and the storm with winds near 30 mph is not expected to strengthen as it heads toward the site of the blown-out oil well. Forecasters with the U.S. National Hurricane Center said Saturday that Bonnie was hanging on as a depression, but the storm was not expected to change strength before the center reaches the coast. Pictures: Bonnie The center of Bonnie came ashore Friday near Cutler Bay, about 20 miles south of Miami. It moved into the eastern Gulf and was about 165 miles east-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) Saturday. Forecasters say they have canceled a tropical storm warning from Destin, Florida, to Morgan City, Louisiana. Bonnie is moving west-northwest near 17 mph. |
We actually, we all sent mail to each other, going, "Who's Tim Cook meeting with? Is he meeting with you? I'm not meeting with Tim Cook." So we're... it's one of those rumors that was stated so factually that we were actually confused. No one here was meeting with Tim Cook or with anybody at Apple that day. I wish we were! We have a long list of things we'd love to see Apple do to support games and gaming better. But no, we didn't meet with Tim Cook. He seems like a smart guy, but I've never actually met him. Apple CEO Tim Cook didn't visit Valve headquarters according to company co-founder Gabe Newell. The rumor , originally reported by AppleInsider , was squashed by Newell in a podcast interview.Video game website Kotaku had a preview of the podcast from Seven Day Cooldown that included this quote:The report of the meeting between Cook and Valve executives set off a torrent of speculation about partnerships between the companies, including rumors of Valve's Steam service integrating with the App Store or an Apple television. |
25-year-old Yuki Bhambri stunned the tennis world when he defeated ATP Citi Open champion Gael Monfils 6-3, 4-6, 7-5. Yuki Bhambri had set up the second round clash with world number 22 and defending champion Gael Monfils after his first round opponent had to retire. With this win, Bhambri, who is ranked at 200, has qualified for the pre-quarterfinals. Advertising It may be recalled here that before facing Monfils, Bhambri had said while speaking to the PTI, “It’s a good test. We fight and work to play these kinds of matches and compete against the best, so it’s a good opportunity,” and added, “He is the defending champion and a class player. I have nothing to lose,” said the 25-year-old Delhi lad. Bhambri has had a lot of ups and down in his career but this win certainly ranks among the highest. However, one of his main issues has been injury concerns. Earlier, addressing the concern, Bhambri had said, “It hasn’t been ideal, yes. It’s difficult to sit on the sidelines, but I am in recovery, working with my coach, with physiotherapists, with medical professionals to help me overcome this, I hope to be back to playing soon.” “It’s majorly a mental thing as well, that some people understand, yes, but a lot of people should know. When Andy won his Wimbledon title, when Milos Raonic went up to give his speech, they all thanked their entire team. The mental aspect is so important. You need your team behind you, encouraging you, egging you on, keeping your spirits up as you work. That is incredibly important.” |
It took Samsung a while, but the company is now responsibly dealing with customers who bought its Galaxy Note7 smartphone from abroad and are using it in India. Last week, Samsung announced a refund and exchange program in India, offering customers who had pre-ordered the Galaxy Note7 in the country either a full-refund or another Samsung flagship smartphone along with other freebies. Samsung had not launched the Galaxy Note7 in India. The announcement, which comforted many customers, didn’t address the subset of people who had purchased the Galaxy Note7 from outside India. Samsung India is changing that now. The company assures that customers who purchased the Galaxy Note7 from outside India are also eligible for a refund. "Consumers who have purchased Galaxy Note7 from overseas are eligible for refund. They need to bring the Invoice to the nearest service center and get a refund basis the invoice value. The validity of the same is November 1, 2016," a Samsung India spokesperson said. The refund program in India follows global production and sales halt of the Galaxy Note7 smartphone. The company announced earlier this month that it won’t be making or selling any more of Galaxy Note7 smartphone after the replacement units were found catching fire as well. Samsung had originally planned to begin selling the Galaxy Note7 in India on Sept. 2, but it had to postpone it to a later time. The company had however begun taking pre-orders for the flagship smartphone in late August in India. Many people had pre-ordered the smartphone in India, paying partial and full-amount in some cases. The company is now offering them an "exclusive" Samsung Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 edge, with a Samsung Gear VR and a Samsung Level U stereo wireless headset at no charge. In addition, the company says it will also ship an Oculus content voucher to these customers, and offer a "one time screen replacement" on the new phone in case it breaks within the first year. |
KAMENZ, Germany (Reuters) - Germany and its auto industry must invest heavily to ensure it is not left behind by the shift to electric cars, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday as she laid a foundation stone for a new battery factory for Daimler unit Accumotive. (L-R) Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz Cars, Markus Schaefer, Member of the Divisional Board of Mercedes-Benz Cars, Stanislaw Tillich, Minister President of the Free State of Saxony, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Frank Blome, Managing Director of Deutsche ACCUMOTIVE GmbH & Co. KG, visit the Daimlers first battery factory prior to the beginning of the ground breaking ceremony for the second battery factory at Daimler subsidiary ACCUMOTIVE in Kamenz, Germany May 22, 2017. REUTERS/ Matthias Rietschel “We need long-term horizons and companies that invest in the future,” Merkel said at the site in the eastern German town of Kamenz. “It is important that electric mobility is ready for the market as quickly as possible.” While Germany’s automakers are ramping up production of electric cars, most batteries they use are made in Asia, prompting fears that Germany could lose its leadership in the core car technology of the future. Merkel came under fire this month when she admitted Germany was likely to miss the government’s target of bringing 1 million electric cars onto the roads by the end of the decade. Merkel said new technologies sometimes take time to get off the ground and end up being exploited by those other than their original inventors, citing the example of German engineer Konrad Zuse, who developed the first programmable computer in 1941. “This should be a lesson for technology policy. We don’t want to experience that again,” she said. In March, Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler said it was speeding up its electric car program, aiming to bring more than 10 new models to market by 2022 through 10 billion euros ($11 billion) of investment. In Kamenz, Daimler is investing around 500 million euros in its second factory there for lithium batteries, that should be operational by the middle of 2018, quadrupling production. “The auto industry faces a fundamental transformation. Technical change cannot be stopped, with or without the German car industry and I think it would be better with us,” Daimler Chief Executive Deiter Zetsche said. The Kamenz factory still relies on imported battery cells and Merkel said Germany should do more in that area. During her weekly podcast on Saturday, she said the German government has invested 35 million euros in battery research and was keen to build clusters of expertise. “If we are involved in research and in prototypes, there is a better chance of bringing the production of the next generation of cells to Europe or to Germany,” she said. Merkel said she had been briefed about the latest lithium cells which could allow cars to travel up to 1,000 kilometers without needing to be recharged - a major advance from current operating range of 200-300 kilometers. |
Edit 11/26/2018: Since we wrote this post, lots has happened. Most excitingly, Linkerd 2.0 has been released! tl;dr: A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for making service-to-service communication safe, fast, and reliable. If you’re building a cloud native application, you need a service mesh. Over the past year, the service mesh has emerged as a critical component of the cloud native stack. High-traffic companies like Paypal, Ticketmaster, and Credit Karma have all added a service mesh to their production applications, and this January, Linkerd, the open source service mesh for cloud native applications, became an official project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. But what is a service mesh, exactly? And why is it suddenly relevant? In this article, I’ll define the service mesh and trace its lineage through shifts in application architecture over the past decade. I’ll distinguish the service mesh from the related, but distinct, concepts of API gateways, edge proxies, and the enterprise service bus. Finally, I’ll describe where the service mesh is heading, and what to expect as this concept evolves alongside cloud native adoption. WHAT IS A SERVICE MESH? A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication. It’s responsible for the reliable delivery of requests through the complex topology of services that comprise a modern, cloud native application. In practice, the service mesh is typically implemented as an array of lightweight network proxies that are deployed alongside application code, without the application needing to be aware. (But there are variations to this idea, as we’ll see.) The concept of the service mesh as a separate layer is tied to the rise of the cloud native application. In the cloud native model, a single application might consist of hundreds of services; each service might have thousands of instances; and each of those instances might be in a constantly-changing state as they are dynamically scheduled by an orchestrator like Kubernetes. Not only is service communication in this world incredibly complex, it’s a pervasive and fundamental part of runtime behavior. Managing it is vital to ensuring end-to-end performance and reliability. IS THE SERVICE MESH A NETWORKING MODEL? The service mesh is a networking model that sits at a layer of abstraction above TCP/IP. It assumes that the underlying L3/L4 network is present and capable of delivering bytes from point to point. (It also assumes that this network, as with every other aspect of the environment, is unreliable; the service mesh must therefore also be capable of handling network failures.) In some ways, the service mesh is analogous to TCP/IP. Just as the TCP stack abstracts the mechanics of reliably delivering bytes between network endpoints, the service mesh abstracts the mechanics of reliably delivering requests between services. Like TCP, the service mesh doesn’t care about the actual payload or how it’s encoded. The application has a high-level goal (“send something from A to B”), and the job of the service mesh, like that of TCP, is to accomplish this goal while handling any failures along the way. Unlike TCP, the service mesh has a significant goal beyond “just make it work”: it provides a uniform, application-wide point for introducing visibility and control into the application runtime. The explicit goal of the service mesh is to move service communication out of the realm of the invisible, implied infrastructure, and into the role of a first-class member of the ecosystem—where it can be monitored, managed and controlled. WHAT DOES A SERVICE MESH ACTUALLY DO? Reliably delivering requests in a cloud native application can be incredibly complex. A service mesh like Linkerd manages this complexity with a wide array of powerful techniques: circuit-breaking, latency-aware load balancing, eventually consistent (“advisory”) service discovery, retries, and deadlines. These features must all work in conjunction, and the interactions between these features and the complex environment in which they operate can be quite subtle. For example, when a request is made to a service through Linkerd, a very simplified timeline of events is as follows: Linkerd applies dynamic routing rules to determine which service the requester intended. Should the request be routed to a service in production or in staging? To a service in a local datacenter or one in the cloud? To the most recent version of a service that’s being tested or to an older one that’s been vetted in production? All of these routing rules are dynamically configurable, and can be applied both globally and for arbitrary slices of traffic. Having found the correct destination, Linkerd retrieves the corresponding pool of instances from the relevant service discovery endpoint, of which there may be several. If this information diverges from what Linkerd has observed in practice, Linkerd makes a decision about which source of information to trust. Linkerd chooses the instance most likely to return a fast response based on a variety of factors, including its observed latency for recent requests. Linkerd attempts to send the request to the instance, recording the latency and response type of the result. If the instance is down, unresponsive, or fails to process the request, Linkerd retries the request on another instance (but only if it knows the request is idempotent). If an instance is consistently returning errors, Linkerd evicts it from the load balancing pool, to be periodically retried later (for example, an instance may be undergoing a transient failure). If the deadline for the request has elapsed, Linkerd proactively fails the request rather than adding load with further retries. Linkerd captures every aspect of the above behavior in the form of metrics and distributed tracing, which are emitted to a centralized metrics system. And that’s just the simplified version–Linkerd can also initiate and terminate TLS, perform protocol upgrades, dynamically shift traffic, and fail over between datacenters! It’s important to note that these features are intended to provide both pointwise resilience and application-wide resilience. Large-scale distributed systems, no matter how they’re architected, have one defining characteristic: they provide many opportunities for small, localized failures to escalate into system-wide catastrophic failures. The service mesh must be designed to safeguard against these escalations by shedding load and failing fast when the underlying systems approach their limits. WHY IS THE SERVICE MESH NECESSARY? The service mesh is ultimately not an introduction of new functionality, but rather a shift in where functionality is located. Web applications have always had to manage the complexity of service communication. The origins of the service mesh model can be traced in the evolution of these applications over the past decade and a half. Consider the typical architecture of a medium-sized web application in the 2000’s: the three-tiered app. In this model, application logic, web serving logic, and storage logic are each a separate layer. The communication between layers, while complex, is limited in scope—there are only two hops, after all. There is no “mesh”, but there is communication logic between hops, handled within the code of each layer. When this architectural approach was pushed to very high scale, it started to break. Companies like Google, Netflix, and Twitter, faced with massive traffic requirements, implemented what was effectively a predecessor of the cloud native approach: the application layer was split into many services (sometimes called “microservices”), and the tiers became a topology. In these systems, a generalized communication layer became suddenly relevant, but typically took the form of a “fat client” library—Twitter’s Finagle, Netflix’s Hystrix, and Google’s Stubby being cases in point. In many ways, libraries like Finagle, Stubby, and Hystrix were the first service meshes. While they were specific to the details of their surrounding environment, and required the use of specific languages and frameworks, they were forms of dedicated infrastructure for managing service-to-service communication, and (in the case of the open source Finagle and Hystrix libraries) found use outside of their origin companies. Fast forward to the modern cloud native application. The cloud native model combines the microservices approach of many small services with two additional factors: containers (e.g. Docker), which provide resource isolation and dependency management, and an orchestration layer (e.g. Kubernetes), which abstracts away the underlying hardware into a homogenous pool. These three components allow applications to adapt with natural mechanisms for scaling under load and for handling the ever-present partial failures of the cloud environment. But with hundreds of services or thousands of instances, and an orchestration layer that’s rescheduling instances from moment to moment, the path that a single request follows through the service topology can be incredibly complex, and since containers make it easy for each service to be written in a different language, the library approach is no longer feasible. This combination of complexity and criticality motivates the need for a dedicated layer for service-to-service communication decoupled from application code and able to capture the highly dynamic nature of the underlying environment. This layer is the service mesh. THE FUTURE OF THE SERVICE MESH While service mesh adoption in the cloud native ecosystem is growing rapidly, there is an extensive and exciting roadmap ahead still to be explored. The requirements for serverless computing (e.g. Amazon’s Lambda) fit directly into the service mesh’s model of naming and linking, and form a natural extension of its role in the cloud native ecosystem. The roles of service identity and access policy are still very nascent in cloud native environments, and the service mesh is well poised to play a fundamental part of the story here. Finally, the service mesh, like TCP/IP before it, will continue to be pushed further into the underlying infrastructure. Just as Linkerd evolved from systems like Finagle, the current incarnation of the service mesh as a separate, user-space proxy that must be explicitly added to a cloud native stack will also continue to evolve. CONCLUSION The service mesh is a critical component of the cloud native stack. A little more than one year from its launch, Linkerd is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and has a thriving community of contributors and users. Adopters range from startups like Monzo, which is disrupting the UK banking industry, to high scale Internet companies like Paypal, Ticketmaster, and Credit Karma, to companies that have been in business for hundreds of years like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The Linkerd open source community of adopters and contributors are demonstrating the value of the service mesh model every day. We’re committed to building an amazing product and continuing to grow our incredible community. Join us! |
The more the merrier! No matter what, fans will not be disappointed by how many Marvel characters appear in Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 and Part 2. Joe and Anthony Russo, the directors of the two-part Marvel cinematic event, have said that they plan on using characters from every corner of the MCU. Just last month, at Wizard World New Orleans Comic Con, much was made of the Russos saying that 67 characters will appear in Infinity War. However, they quickly clarified those remarks, saying they were being figurative when they threw that number out there. Today, at Wizard World Cleveland Comic Con, the Russos kicked up some more dust. "The Russos also took a moment during the panel to correct a mistake they made earlier this year when describing the plot to the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War, which they are on board to direct," Cleveland.com reports. "The movie features 68 distinct characters, not 67." Keep in mind, there's a good possibility they were just joking around. Either way, we know they have the daunting task of bringing all these characters together to make a satisfying conclusion to Phase 3. "We have to tell a story and that story has to be built around the characters' emotional arcs," said Joe Russo. "And we can only have so many of those." |
'Working class' dad starts crowdfunding campaign inviting politicians to pay for family trip to Uluru Updated A "working class" dad has started a crowdfunding campaign inviting politicians to pay for a family trip to Uluru following outrage over taxpayer-funded travel for Australian MPs. Stephen Callaghan from Blue Haven, NSW, said he set up Please Pay For My Kids' Holiday on Go Fund Me because he was "angry" about travel claims made for the families of Education Minister Christopher Pyne, Labor frontbencher Tony Burke and Treasurer Joe Hockey. "I'm just so angry at all these politicians that think it's acceptable for us to cart their kids around business class on holidays," he told the ABC. "I understand they have work expenses but this is just pushing the boundaries. "We're working class, we've got lots of friends who have never been on a holiday. Ordinary Australians are doing it a tougher than [politicians] are." The campaign is addressed to federal MPs. "It has come to my attention that many of you have been using taxpayers' money to fly your children around on various holidays, fireworks visits, excursion and overseas vacations," Mr Callaghan wrote on the Go Fund Me site "I would appreciate it greatly if you were able to donate to my Go Fund Me campaign so MY kids can go on a holiday too. "All I ask is that, in the words of our great Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, my children get a 'fair go'." Mr Callaghan said his family had already planned the Uluru trip before the scandals, which started with Bronwyn's Bishop $5,000 chartered helicopter flight from Melbourne to Geelong. He said it was a coincidence that Mr Burke was under attack for his trip to the same destination. "The kids are not getting any younger at eight, nine and 12 ... we want to see Uluru," Mr Callaghan said. "We're really sacrificing for this trip. I sold my car and the kids have sold a few of their possessions like Nintendo games ... it will cost $1,800 just in fuel to get there and back." Mr Callaghan said he did not expect to reach the $5,000 target but if he did, he would donate some of the money to children's charity, Stewart House. He said the family would see Uluru regardless. "I'm not expecting a cent from politicians. They will just ignore [it]," he said. By Monday evening the campaign had raised $3,256 in donations. Mr Callaghan said he emailed every politician he could find an address for and tweeted others. "Adam Bandt, he just tweeted a picture of a boarding pass for an infant that said 'her first flight ever'," he said. "I [tweeted him], 'who's paying for that, Adam?' He deleted the tweet. "They [MPs] just seem to be hoping if they put their heads down, we'll all forget about it." MPs under fire for taxpayer-funded travel Mr Hockey is the latest federal MP to have travel claims questioned. It was revealed on Saturday that Education Minister Christopher Pyne spent more than $5,000 of taxpayers' money flying himself and three family members to Sydney in 2009. Earlier this week Labor frontbencher Tony Burke was accused of "hypocrisy" when attacking outgoing parliamentary speaker Bronwyn Bishop over her expense claims. Mr Burke's own history of claims included charging taxpayers for going to a Robbie Williams concert and flying his family to Uluru in 2012 for $12,000. Last week Mrs Bishop resigned as Speaker following ongoing criticism over her travel expenses. The leader of the Palmer United Party said an apparent truce by both sides of federal politics was the start of a massive cover-up. Liberal and Labor halted attacks on each other over the weekend after the Prime Minister announced a review of the travel entitlements system to bring it into line with community expectations. Clive Palmer said it was a diversion to stop the public from finding out how much money Federal MPs had spent tripping around the country. He said the two major parties had stopped attacking each other publicly because they were frightened about whose name would come up next. "It's not up to them to call a truce. If they have done the wrong thing they will have to 'fess up for it," he said. "We want a review and a public hearing where members of the public can come forward an express what they think the entitlements should be. "If people can't act honestly in this area they can't govern the country. No-one has been more closely scrutinised than me but I don't mind it." Topics: federal-government, federal-parliament, australia First posted |
Quote of the Day. Is it time to bring your A game to step up to the plate and be the best that you can be? Is it time to leave mediocrity in the past and start living up to your potential because I believe we are all capable of achieving more and being better than we are right now and as soon as we step into the better version of ourselves we then have the opportunity if not the responsibility to be even better than that. You dont have to to settle for second third fourth or fifth best, there is nothing wrong with expecting great results and working your hardest to achieve them. Its ok to believe in yourself enough to think about being first about being the best and doing everything in your power to getting there. You do not have to dumb yourself down to make someone else feel better about themselves, be the best that you can be and bring them with you, dont be the person that hides their light under a bushel because you are afraid to shine. Throw of the covers of insecurity and stand loud and proud in your power and unleash the best of yourself. If we all brought our A game all of the time imagine how different the world would be and starting today you can change the world and those in your immediate world. Just strive to be a little better than you were the day before and before you know it you will be riding high on a wave of your own awesomeness. Never forget that you deserve to be the best person you can be so step into your new self and bring forth your A game and be an inspiration to yourself and others! ❤ Daily Affirmations. “I am the best that I can be at all times and I love and appreciate myself”. “I make a choice to step into my higher power and access all of the wonders that reside within me and today I will let them out and share them with the world” “Everything that happens in my life does so to make me a stronger better person” Daily Focus. OK. So im sure today’s focus wont come as much of a surprise when I say its about bringing your A game. There are many different areas of our life so I only want you to focus on one area but whatever area or aspect of your life that you focus on I want you to give it your best, I want you to be the best that you can be and step into your best self and be that person 100% all day. Be unafraid to be the amazing person that you were put on this planet to be. I dont believe that we came to this earth to be inconsequential. We all have a destiny, we all have the power to change the world around us and make it better and the way that we do that is to make ourselves better because the better we are the better we allow others to be and in turn they do the same and essentially we create a chain reaction of positivity but it only takes one person to start it of. Today I want you to be that person. Be an inspiration to someone else, I know that you are capable of it you just have to believe it also. So be the best that you can be and become the reason that someone else wants to improve their life. Much love and positivity my friends. Please pass on the positivity and share this post and dont forget to follow b email. ❤ Have a great day. Tony. |
In east, mostly taking about Muslim countries, like Iran : In order to pretect women from men’s abuse, they seperate men and women. In buses there is men section and women section. In universities boys and girls sit apart automatically without being ordered. There are girl-only and boy-only schools. Teachers and staff in girl only schools are all women and vise versa. They teach and ask women to cover their body parts and don't expose themselves to men. Molesters and murderes are hung in public. Husband is in charge of paying the expences of life for his wife and choldren. If he doesn't, his wife can sue him. There is an amount of money that a woman can arrange to get from his husband before marriage. More of a promise that says husband owes wife this amount of gold or whatever she arranged. He has to pay it to his wife whenever she claims for it. This money is called Mehr or Mehrieh(=affection). Some people also ask for another money as Shirbahaa(=price of milk), not 100% sure what it is. But I guess it says the husband owes the wife’s family an amount of money as the expense of the milk that mother of wife fed her when she was a baby! Western feminism: Now I think everybody knows what western feminism is and I'm not qualified to describe it cause I'm not a western. But I guess these are few things of western feminism: Women can marry and divorce whoever they want and whenever they want (Iranian women can't divorce except husband agrees). They can wear everything they feel like outside of home. From an official outfit to going out half-naked. (I doubt that they are free to go out with Islamic hijab though! Lol) They are free to have sex before marriage. Despite Islamic countries, They are free by government to be homosexual or transgender or whatever they want. (But I guess the society won't leave them alone!!). They don't have Homo marriage yet though. (In Islamic countries homo=death. But the thing is homos are undetectable). Women are free to ride cars, bicycles, donkey, even dinosaur… whatever they want! (Despite Islamic countries. In Iran riding bicycle became forbiddn for women. Cause they said it attracts male's attention! Male attention part is true! Ha ha). There are more opportunities and jobs that women can attend in western countries than eastern countries. In our country there were classes for specific courses that were trained “only men”). The hilarious part: I guess in western countries the door to women public bathrooms is always oppened. In Iran they suddenly and out of surprize close the door to women bathroom and we poor Islamic women have to use mens room that is unsafe and scary! :-O (and un-Islamic) :-O |
The Falcon rocket family is an American family of multi-use rocket launch vehicles developed and operated by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX). The vehicles in this family include the flight-tested Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. The Falcon 1 made its first successful flight on 28 September 2008, after several failures on the initial attempts. The larger Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV)-class Falcon 9 flew successfully into orbit on its maiden launch on 4 June 2010. The Falcon 9 was designed for reuse; over a dozen first stages have landed vertically, and several have been launched again. SpaceX's three-core variant, Falcon Heavy, was successfully launched on February 6, 2018. Naming [ edit ] Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, has stated that the Falcon rockets are named after the Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars film series.[1] Current launch vehicles [ edit ] Falcon 9 "Full Thrust" v1.2 [ edit ] The Falcon 9 v1.2 (nicknamed "Full Thrust") is an upgraded version of the Falcon 9 V1.1. It was used the first time on 22 December 2015 for the ORBCOMM-2 launch at Cape Canaveral SLC-40 launch pad. The first stage was upgraded with a larger liquid oxygen tank, loaded with subcooled propellants to allow a greater mass of fuel in the same tank volume. The second stage was also extended for greater fuel tank capacity. These upgrades brought a 33% increase to the previous rocket performance.[2] Falcon Heavy [ edit ] Falcon Heavy on pad LC-39A Falcon Heavy (FH) is a super heavy lift space launch vehicle designed and manufactured by SpaceX. The Falcon Heavy is a variant of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle comprising three Falcon 9 first stages: a reinforced center core, and two additional side boosters. All three boosters are designed to be recovered and reused. The side boosters assigned to Falcon Heavy's first flight were recovered from two prior Falcon 9 missions. SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy on February 6, 2018, delivering a payload comprising Musk's personal Tesla Roadster (playing Life On Mars?, by David Bowie) onto a trajectory reaching the orbit of Mars.[3] Retired [ edit ] Falcon 1 [ edit ] The Falcon 1 is a small, partially reusable rocket capable of placing several hundred kilograms into low earth orbit.[4] It also functioned as a testbed for developing concepts and components for the larger Falcon 9.[4] Initial Falcon 1 flights were launched from the US government's Reagan Test Site on the island atoll of Kwajalein in the Pacific Ocean, and represented the first attempt to fly a ground-launched rocket to orbit from that site.[5] On 26 March 2006, the Falcon 1's maiden flight failed only seconds after leaving the pad due to a fuel line rupture.[6][7] After a year, the second flight was launched on 22 March 2007 and it also ended in failure, due to a spin stabilization problem that automatically caused sensors to turn off the Merlin 2nd-stage engine.[5] The third Falcon 1 flight used a new regenerative cooling system for the first-stage Merlin engine, and the engine development was responsible for the almost 17-month flight delay.[8] The new cooling system turned out to be the major reason the mission failed; because the first stage rammed into the second-stage engine bell at staging, due to excess thrust provided by residual propellant left over from the higher-propellant-capacity cooling system.[8] On 28 September 2008, the Falcon 1 succeeded in reaching orbit on its fourth attempt, becoming the first privately funded, liquid-fueled rocket to do so.[9] The Falcon 1 carried its first and only successful commercial payload into orbit on 13 July 2009, on its fifth launch.[10] No launch attempts of the Falcon 1 have been made since 2009, and SpaceX is no longer taking launch reservations for the Falcon 1 in order to concentrate company resources on its larger Falcon 9 launch vehicle and other development projects. Falcon 1e [ edit ] A Falcon 9 v1.0 launches with an uncrewed Dragon spacecraft The Falcon 1e is an upgraded version of the Falcon 1 with a larger fairing and payload mass, and is 6.1 metres (20 ft) longer than the Falcon 1.[11] By December 2010, Falcon 1e replaced the services of Falcon 1 on the SpaceX product list.[12] The 1e version has not yet been flown and is not currently scheduled to make a flight. Continued development and use of the Falcon 1/1e have been stagnant while the company focuses on the Falcon 9/Dragon program.[13] Falcon 9 v1.0 [ edit ] The first version of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, Falcon 9 v1.0, was developed in 2005–2010, and was launched for the first time in 2010. Falcon 9 v1.0 made five flights in 2010–2013, when it was retired. Falcon 9 v1.1 [ edit ] SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon spacecraft, lifts off during the COTS Demo Flight 1 on 8 December 2010 On 8 September 2005, SpaceX announced the development of the Falcon 9 rocket, which has nine Merlin engines in its first stage.[14] The design is an EELV-class vehicle, intended to compete with the Delta IV and the Atlas V, along with launchers of other nations as well. Both stages were designed for reuse. A similarly designed Falcon 5 rocket was also envisioned to fit between[citation needed] the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, but development was dropped to concentrate on the Falcon 9.[14] The first version of the Falcon 9, Falcon 9 v1.0, was developed in 2005–2010, and flew five orbital missions in 2010–2013. The second version of the launch system—Falcon 9 v1.1— has been retired meanwhile. Falcon 9 v1.1 was developed in 2010-2013, and made its maiden flight in September 2013. The Falcon 9 v1.1 is a 60 percent heavier rocket with 60 percent more thrust than the v1.0 version of the Falcon 9.[15] It includes realigned first-stage engines[16] and 60 percent longer fuel tanks, making it more susceptible to bending during flight.[15] The engines themselves have been upgraded to the more powerful Merlin 1D. These improvements will increase the payload capability from 9,000 kilograms (20,000 lb) to 13,150 kilograms (28,990 lb).[17] The stage separation system has been redesigned and reduces the number of attachment points from twelve to three,[15] and the vehicle has upgraded avionics and software as well.[15] The new first stage will also be used as side boosters on the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle.[18] The company purchased the McGregor, Texas, testing facilities of defunct Beal Aerospace, where it refitted the largest test stand at the facilities for Falcon 9 testing. On 22 November 2008, the stand tested the nine Merlin 1C engines of the Falcon 9, which deliver 350 metric-tons-force (3.4-meganewtons) of thrust, well under the stand's capacity of 1,500 metric-tons-force (15 meganewtons).[19] The first Falcon 9 vehicle was integrated at Cape Canaveral on 30 December 2008. NASA was planning for a flight to take place in January 2010;[20] however the maiden flight was postponed several times and took place on 4 June 2010.[21] At 2:50pm EST the Falcon 9 rocket successfully reached orbit. The second flight for the Falcon 9 vehicle was the COTS Demo Flight 1, the first launch under the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract designed to provide "seed money" for development of new boosters.[22] The original NASA contract called for the COTS Demo Flight 1 to occur the second quarter of 2008;[23] this flight was delayed several times, occurring at 15:43 GMT on 8 December 2010.[24] The rocket successfully deployed an operational Dragon spacecraft at 15:53 GMT.[24] Dragon orbited the Earth twice, and then made a controlled reentry burn that put it on target for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico.[25] With Dragon's safe recovery, SpaceX became the first private company to launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft; prior to this mission only government agencies had been able to recover orbital spacecraft.[25] The first flight of the Falcon 9 v1.1 was September 29, 2013 from Vandenberg Air Force Base carrying several payloads including Canada's CASSIOPE technology demonstration satellite.[26] The Falcon 9 v1.1 features stretched first and second stages, and a new octagonal arrangement of the 9 Merlin-1D engines on the first stage (replacing the square pattern of engines in v1.0). SpaceX notes that the Falcon 9 v1.1 is cheaper to manufacture, and longer than v1.0. It also has a larger payload capacity: 13,150 kilograms to low Earth orbit or 4,850 kg to geosynchronous transfer orbit.[26] Grasshopper [ edit ] Grasshopper vehicle in September 2012 Grasshopper was an experimental technology-demonstrator, suborbital reusable launch vehicle (RLV), a vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) rocket.[27] The first VTVL flight test vehicle—Grasshopper, built on a Falcon 9 v1.0 first-stage tank—made a total of eight test flights between September 2012 and October 2013.[28] All eight flights were from the McGregor, Texas, test facility. Grasshopper began flight testing in September 2012 with a brief, three-second hop. It was followed by a second hop in November 2012, which consisted of an 8-second flight that took the testbed approximately 5.4 m (18 ft) off the ground. A third flight occurred in December 2012 of 29 seconds duration, with extended hover under rocket engine power, in which it ascended to an altitude of 40 m (130 ft) before descending under rocket power to come to a successful vertical landing.[29] Grasshopper made its eighth and final test flight on October 7, 2013, flying to an altitude of 744 m (2,441 ft; 0.462 mi) before making its eighth successful vertical landing.[30] The Grasshopper test vehicle is now retired.[28] Cancelled [ edit ] Falcon 5 [ edit ] An early five-engine booster stage launch vehicle, the Falcon 5, was in design but its development was stopped in favor of the larger nine-engine Falcon 9.[31] Like the Falcon 9, it was also slated to be human-rated and reusable.[31] Falcon 9 Air [ edit ] In December 2011 Stratolaunch Systems announced that it would contract with SpaceX to develop an air-launched, multiple-stage launch vehicle, as a derivative of Falcon 9 technology, called the Falcon 9 Air,[32] as part of the Stratolaunch project.[33] On 27 November 2012 Stratolaunch announced that they would partner with Orbital Sciences Corporation instead of SpaceX, effectively ending development of the Falcon 9 Air.[34] Proposed [ edit ] BFR [ edit ] The Big Falcon Rocket (commonly shortened to BFR), announced in September 2017, is SpaceX's proposed super-heavy-lift launch vehicle, spacecraft and space-ground infrastructure system of spaceflight technology, including reusable launch vehicles and spacecraft. This vehicle would ultimately replace the Falcon 9 and Heavy lines of SpaceX launch vehicles. BFR is proposed to be used for Earth ground-to-ground flight, cis-Lunar flight, and with the Interplanetary Transport System variant, interplanetary flight to Mars or other targets and would be a central component in the SpaceX Mars transportation infrastructure.[35] Competitive position [ edit ] SpaceX Falcon rockets are being offered to the launch industry at highly competitive prices, allowing SpaceX to build up a large manifest of over 50 launches by late 2013, with two-thirds of them for commercial customers exclusive of US government flights.[36][37] In the US launch industry, SpaceX prices its product offerings well below its competition. Nevertheless, "somewhat incongruously, its primary US competitor, United Launch Alliance (ULA), still maintain[ed in early 2013] that it requires a large annual subsidy, which neither SpaceX nor Orbital Sciences receives, in order to remain financially viable, with the reason cited as a lack of market opportunity, a stance which seems to be in conflict with the market itself."[38] SpaceX launched its first satellite to geostationary orbit in December 2013 (SES-8) and followed that a month later with its second, Thaicom 6, beginning to offer competition to the European and Russian launch providers that had been the major players in the commercial communications satellite market in recent years.[37] SpaceX prices undercut its major competitors—the Ariane 5 and Proton—in this market,[39] and SpaceX has at least 10 further geostationary orbit flights on its books.[37] Moreover, SpaceX prices for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are much lower than the projected prices for the new Ariane 5 ME upgrade and its Ariane 6 successor, projected to be available in 2018 and 2021, respectively.[40] As a result of additional mission requirements for government launches, SpaceX prices US government missions somewhat higher than similar commercial missions, but has noted that even with those added services, Falcon 9 missions contracted to the government are still priced well below US$100 million (even with approximately US$9 million in special security charges for some missions) which is a very competitive price compared to ULA prices for government payloads of the same size.[41] ULA prices to the US government are nearly $400 million for current launches of Falcon 9- and Falcon Heavy-class payloads.[42] Comparison [ edit ] A Optional propellant crossfeed for increased launch mass capability B Post 2008. Merlin 1A was used from 2006 till 2007.[62] See also [ edit ] |
The conviction of Brendan Dassey, the Wisconsin teenager whose admission of guilt and subsequent trial for murder were part of the docuseries “Making a Murderer,” has brought fresh attention to the fact that innocent people do confess to crimes they did not commit. Police interrogation techniques and their consequences were examined at a special continuing legal education seminar Sept. 29 during the Indiana State Bar Association’s annual meeting in Indianapolis. Drizin Drizin The two-hour event, “Brendan Dassey (of Making a Murderer): A True Story of a False Confession,” started with a presentation by one of Dassey’s attorneys, Steven Drizin, clinical professor of law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Then a panel that included Frances Lee Watson, who developed the Wrongful Conviction Clinic at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, and criminal defense attorney Bradley Banks of Banks & Brower offered further insights. Benjamin Fryman, chair of the ISBA Young Lawyers Section and an attorney at Schwerd Fryman Torrenga LLP, served as the moderator. Watson told the near-capacity crowd they could help in the battle against coerced confessions. Watson Watson “The more you get the word out about the facts of false confessions and wrongful convictions, the more we’ll move toward preventing the next one,” Watson said. “So go home and talk about what you heard today, share it with lawyers and non-lawyers alike.” To underscore that false confessions are not outliers, Watson recounted the conviction of Cleveland Bynum, which she described as a “true-blue Indiana version of ‘Making a Murderer.’” Bynum was found guilty in 2001 of murdering five people in Gary. The primary piece of evidence against him was his confession, but he had actually confessed twice and twisted the details of the killings between the two statements. However, he later claimed he was coerced into admitting to the crimes. He said the police had threatened him with violence when he asked for an attorney and had deprived him of food and water for nine hours. His attorney filed a motion to toss the confession but during the suppression hearing, he did not put Bynum on the stand to refute the police testimony. Eventually the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed the conviction, Bynum v. Lemmon, 07-2634. In a 2009 ruling, the panel agreed Bynum’s counsel was ineffective but held the attorney’s mistakes did not prejudice the defendant. The case was stalled until, in a made-for-Netflix twist, Watson received an envelope in the mail that contained a video recording of another man confessing to the murders and providing specifics of the crime. The Indiana Court of Appeals granted permission Aug. 12 to Watson and her team to file a successive petition for post-conviction relief in Cleveland Bynum v. State of Indiana, 45A03-1607-SP-1614. Watson credited the success of Bynum’s appeal partly to Drizin and his research. He has dived deep into the data and identified factors that can led to a false confession, which can greatly help a defense attorney counter the admission in the courtroom. Drizin has focused much of his academic research on false confessions. As part of a paper published in 2009 in the Law and Human Behavior journal, Drizin and other researchers analyzed 125 cases of proven false confessions in the U.S. between 1971 and 2002. They found 81 percent of all false confessions occurred in murder cases. Also, 93 percent of those confessing were men and 63 percent of the total people confessing were under the age of 25. Drizin has also examined how interrogation techniques can break a suspect. The August court order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin overturning Dassey’s conviction details how law enforcement got the young man to confess. They repeatedly told him they already knew what happened, they indicated he would be able to go home after he confessed and through the four interviews, they fed him facts of the murder which he then regurgitated in his statements. A key method to preventing false confession is to tape the police interrogations, which then creates a record showing how the admission was obtained. The Indiana Supreme Court implemented a recording requirement when it adopted Rule 617 of the Rules of Evidence, which made statements from a suspect inadmissible unless they were electronically recorded. Watson said the recordings give a fuller picture of what happened in the interrogation room between the police and the suspect. “You can’t get the nuance if they don’t record it,” she said. “(The police) just come out and write a report that says here’s what the kid said but they don’t include the questions (they asked).”• |
THE WORLD's ten most expensive cities are all found in Australia, Asia and Western Europe, according to the bi-annual cost of living index from the Economist Intelligence Unit, our corporate sibling. Singapore retains the top spot, while weak inflation and the yen's devaluation have pushed Tokyo and Osaka to 11th and 16th place respectively. Seoul has risen from 50th place five years ago to joint ninth at the end of 2014. Asia is also home to many of the world's cheapest cities: Karachi and Bangalore are the joint cheapest locations among the 133 cities in the survey, and five of the six cheapest cities surveyed are in Pakistan and India. Caracas’s descent from top ten to bottom five is due to the survey’s use of an alternative exchange rate. The cost of living in New York has risen by about 23% over the past five years. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. |
Kristoffer "P1noy" Pedersen has left North American Challenger team Winterfox and is currently a free agent, he announced in a Facebook post Tuesday. For people interested. I am now a free agent and looking for opportunities that will suit me well, joining WFX wasnt a... Posted by Kristoffer "P1noy" Pedersen on Monday, October 19, 2015 "I am still hungry to return back into the LCS and it doesnt need to be rushed for me," said P1noy in his post. "I still enjoy the game a lot hoping to returning back strong in the 2016, will see what the future have to say." The Danish AD Carry, who moved to NA to join Winterfox after leaving Gambit Gaming for the 2015 Summer Challenger Series, recently subbed in for Konstantinos "FORG1VEN" Tzortziou for Gambit's Promotion Tournament matches against mousesports. In Gambit's 3-0 sweep of mousesports, P1noy went 10-3-27 (12.3 KDA) with 66.1% kill participation. Although he was a central part of Winterfox, his performance in the NA CS was decidedly worse, accumulating a 24-24-25 scoreline (2.0 KDA) as Winterfox missed out on a spot in the playoffs with a 1-9 overall season record. Gambit Gaming recently announced they were moving FORG1VEN to a substitute role and are actively seeking out a news AD Carry. Despite having played with his former team for the Promotion Tournament, it is unknown whether or not P1noy will be considered for the role. Stats compiled and provided by Oracle's Elixir. Nic Doucet is a News Editor for theScore eSports. You can follow him on Twitter. |
Russia is expected to provide Egypt with more than $1 billion in equipment and helicopters for the two Mistral-class helicopter carriers Cairo bought from France last month, the Kremlin chief of staff said Monday, according to a report from Russian news site Sputnik. The two ships, currently known as the Sevastopol and the Vladivostok, were originally custom-built for Russia, but the final handover from France didn’t happen because of Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine that began in March 2014. After the contract between Paris and Moscow was canceled this past summer, France was forced to repay Russia original costs, plus the investment the Russian navy spent on infrastructure and building specialized helicopters to go on the ships. The final bill for France came in at a little more than $2.6 billion, well above the $1.2 billion Russia originally paid for both. The French deal with Egypt is a win-win for Russia as it means Moscow is able to sell the specialized equipment onboard the two ships and the helicopters to an ally. Had the ships gone to a NATO member or a country with close ties to the European Union, Russia would have removed the equipment to prevent it from getting into the hands of its rivals. "Russia will be, if you want, a subcontractor, who will supply the missing equipment without which the Mistral warships are just a tin can. And of course, all the helicopters,” said Sergei Ivanov, the Kremlin’s chief of staff. After months of searching for a new buyer, with NATO, the EU, Canada and Saudi Arabia all being touted as possible buyers, Egypt stepped forward. However, it’s not yet known how much Egypt will pay for the two ships, as they are not purpose-built and may be unfamiliar to Egyptian sailors. It’s highly likely France will incur a significant loss on both ships -- monetarily as well as to its shipbuilding reputation. It’s also not known when Egypt will collect either ship as they will have to be refitted and Egyptian sailors will have to be trained to operate them. |
The legendary rapper R.A The Rugged Man will be back in Australia for a national tour ‘Shoot Me In The Head’ starting June 2015. An emcee who needs no introduction, R.A is as controversial as he is influential. Hailing from New York, he flawlessly combines the authenticity of his undeniably rugged life with his undisputed mic skills and understanding of the genre as a hip-hop historian. R.A. pioneered the truly independent indie-rap hustle, pressing his own vinyl singles and racking up one of the most impressive resumes in Rap history. From Wu-Tang and Mobb Deep to Biggie and Kool G. Rap, not to mention productions from Erick Sermon, DJ Quik and The Alchemist, his discography reads like a Hip-Hop Hall of Fame. Nothing is off-limits to R.A, his lyricism is one to educate and stimulate the mass crowds. R.A will be hitting up all major cities, including Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide. Slingshot Touring, Kiddz In The Attic & Launch Presents: The Return of the Legend R.A The Rugged Man ‘Shoot Me In The Head’ Tour 2015 Tour dates: Wednesday 3rd June | Canberra, Transit Bar Thursday 4th June | Brisbane, Woolly Mammoth Friday 5th June | Perth, The Game Sat 6th June | Sydney, Manning Bar Sunday 7th June | Melbourne, Laundry Bar Monday 8th June | Adelaide, The Gov Tickets go on sale Thursday 2nd April 2015, check venues for details. |
Under a grey and jet-streaked east London sky, a sprawling citadel that feels part-student digs, part-executive lifestyle development and part-secret research facility, is finally but undeniably coming together. In a fortnight's time, the London 2012 Olympic village will draw back its heavily guarded doors to admit the first wave of Games officials before the event begins on 27 July. By then, all being well, the golf carts and JCBs that now beetle along its boulevards on last-minute delivery hauls will have vanished, leaving a pristine, tree-lined and flag-bedecked £1bn testament to British planning and delivery. Its calming ponds, neat lawns and leafy avenues will offer a soothing counterpoint for the athletes who have survived the ordeal of clearing village security – a combination of the sternest and least lovely features of an airport, a military base and a correctional institution – as I discovered when I spent Friday night sleeping on site, testing the facilities that the athletes will enjoy when they arrive in three weeks. Competitors passing through the entrance will find their coach paused in a thick concrete gatehouse while an affable spaniel has a sniff around – "This way, sweetheart, good girl," coos her handler – and a man with a mirror on the end of a stick searches the underside of the vehicle for unwelcome additions. At the end of the lanes of electrified fences and barbed wire, which nod to Checkpoint Charlie but lack a sign to inform visitors that they are now leaving the Stratford sector, is the welcome centre, with its bag scanners and metal arches. Once you've made it past the dogs and the scanners, the development takes on a more pleasing and homely aspect. Despite the lofty street names – Victory Park, Anthem Way, De Coubertin Street, Ulysses Place – the 11 accommodation blocks and the 2,818 apartments they contain offer their own peculiarly British brand of quirk. The ceiling of the lobby of Heritage 1 is festooned with lampshades in the shape of bowler hats and a table in the corner boasts a range of board games to help competitors unwind: chess, Scrabble and Monopoly for the more thoughtful; dominoes and Jenga for the more time-pressed. The rooms themselves are, necessarily, a little more utilitarian – but when you're psyching yourself up for the moment to which the last four years of training, discipline and self-denial have led, you're probably not going to want anything more distracting in your living space than bare white walls, laminate flooring and a clean, albeit shared, bathroom. Which is just as well. Apart from the bright green table and chairs on the balcony – if you're lucky enough to get one – the only concessions to colour in the apartments are the blue curtains and sofas and the gaudy, sports-themed bedspreads. The beds themselves could charitably be described as basic and don't expect Egyptian cotton sheets and Hungarian goose down pillows. The only missing element in the bedroom was a light: through a rough hole in the ceiling, a length of cable emerged like the head of a forlorn snake. Others complained of more basic problems, notably a lack of running water. Such blips aside, the people who helped design the village, which will be used to create homes for thousands of people after the Games, are pleased with how it has turned out. Jonathan Edwards, the Olympic gold medal-winning triple jumper who chaired the athletes' committee, said he was satisfied the apartments would give competitors the best possible home-from-home. "We know what it's like to live in an Olympic village and we know what works and what doesn't," he said. "It's simple things like comfy beds, black-out blinds; internet access, TVs, great food. The athletes don't come in here expecting to be in a five-star spa resort. It is relatively basic, but it's got everything they need." The athletes' greatest need is catered for in the village's hangar-like dining hall, which, the organisers proudly but ominously claim, is the world's largest peacetime eating room. The 225x80m tent, which could accommodate 880 double-decker buses – should the need ever arise – will be open 24 hours a day. It can seat 5,000 at a time, will provide sustenance for 65,000 people on its busiest day and will dish up 1.2m nutritionally balanced meals over the Games. Menu choices include British, Asian, Mediterranean and halal food, while for those partial to a post-event blowout or quick chicken nugget fix before a record-shattering race, there's the inevitable McDonald's. According to businessman Charles Allen, mayor of the village, both the food on offer and the surroundings in which it is served have been designed to give overseas visitors a taste of the real Britain. "If you look around, it does feel like London – it does feel like Hyde Park," he said. "[People will be] having British street food; they'll be having fish and chips, they'll be having burgers… And then there's the whole thing about effectively having a British pub." Ah, the pub. While the village's Globe centre does indeed have pool tables, live music and rockaoke, it differs from the typical boozer in one quite key respect: look along the shelves behind the bar and you'll find only two refreshment options: Coca-Cola and Powerade. Athletes looking for a little alcoholic aid in making temporary friends will instead have to rely on charm, superior musculature and medals. Around 16,000 men and women from 203 countries will converge on the village at the end of this month. Until then, its army of cleaners, fitters and security guards will continue going about their business – as will its current inhabitants. Late on Friday, beneath the blue glow of the stadium and the creamy lights of the Westfield shopping centre car park, a lone fox emerged to sniff the night air and execute a giddy sprint across the empty lawns for one last time before it yields its turf to thousands of humans looking to do the same. |
Rhett Pardon CANOGA PARK, Calif — The Free Speech Coalition called for a production moratorium today after one of the testing facilities in its PASS system reported a positive HIV test for an adult performer. “There was a positive test at one of our testing centers. We are taking every precaution while we do research to determine if there’s been any threat to the performer pool,” FSC CEO Diane Duke said. “We take the health of our performers very seriously and felt that it was better to err on the side of caution while we determine whether anyone else may have been exposed.” Sources said the talent in question is a straight male performer. The next steps will be to perform additional tests, determine a timeline and identify any first-generation partners. “We want to make sure all performers are protected. The performers’ health and safety is the most important thing,” Duke said. The FSC called for all production to halt immediately, until further notice. Michael Stabile, an FSC spokesman, told XBIZ that the trade group's call for a moratorium is on the correct course. "We want to make sure every performer is safe, and this a precautionary measure to make sure they are," Stabile said. "It's the right thing to do in this case — to stop shooting." The AIDS Healthcare Foundation late Friday issued a statement over the latest news from the FSC, the fourth moratorium in the past 16 months. Michael Weinstein, president of AHF, said that his group is saddened by the news and "hopes that the performer seeks care immediately and that others were not exposed.” Weinstein for the past nine years has waged a tireless war in California over making mandatory condoms in porn productions, eventually pushing forward an ordinance that was later approved by voters in Los Angeles County. Measure B was passed more than one year ago by voters, who green lighted the “Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act” that requires the use of condoms in the production of adult movies in Los Angeles County. The ordinance, however, is on the books but no enforcement has taken place. “Whether this performer was infected in L.A. County or not, this latest news begs the question: how many people need to become infected with HIV for the County of Los Angeles to engage actively in implementing the will of the voters of L.A. County to protect these performers?" Weinstein asked. "How many more performers need to become infected for the industry to comply with existing regulations and laws requiring workplace safety? "The willful disregard by the County of Los Angeles and the industry for the health and welfare of people is becoming more and more apparent. The industry as a whole, and the County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health should be ashamed.” Updates on the moratorium will be posted to the FSC-PASS website and the FSC blog. |
This book is really interesting. It split the crowd, and I've scrolled through the reviews and none of them says quite what I thought about it. It took me two months to read. This review is probably quite cryptic and confusing, so I may come back and edit for clarity when I've had a bit of distance. Call it a work in tentative progress. (Edit: I've now added a note to the end - behold, opinions!) They're calling this a departure for Ishiguro, and I don't really know why. Admittedly the only other "What kind of god is it, sir, that wishes wrongs to go forgotten and unpunished?" This book is really interesting. It split the crowd, and I've scrolled through the reviews and none of them says quite what I thought about it. It took me two months to read. This review is probably quite cryptic and confusing, so I may come back and edit for clarity when I've had a bit of distance. Call it a work in tentative progress.They're calling this a departure for Ishiguro, and I don't really know why. Admittedly the only other of his that I've read is, and between that andthere is a fingerprint of a writer who I feel like I understand on some level. He has lots of thoughts, alone in his study, and he doesn't want to be misconstrued when he tries to talk about them. Even if they're all very raw and very easy to misconstrue.In, as I read it, his thoughts are on the role of faith – individual, unconfirmed faith in how the world works, not necessarily religious faith – as compared with the truth in building the world. It's not set in post-Roman Britain. It's set in Long Ago, that fictional place of dragons and Excalibur and bits of broken pottery, and Oral Storytelling Traditions. The point is that all you and I know about it is half-remembered stories, about people who may or may not have existed; and in Ishiguro's premise, that's all the characters know about it, too. There's a mist, hanging over the country, making them forget everything.Ishiguro never looks you in the eye; never comes out and asks the question., he never asked whether you thought what was going on was right or wrong. Here, he never asks you whether it is worth it to remember the truth – not at a very personal level, in a marriage that has lasted for years but now exists only in the present, and not in the aftermath of an alluded-to war that still reverberates around the country. Since the end of the 1940s, in the aftermath of war, the truth has become so very important to our rebuilding of the world: we just want to know. Terrible things have happened around the world. We want to look them in the eye and say: Never Again. But is that right? Is that the best thing? Is it really the only way anyone has of getting over what's happened in the past? I can't answer that, of course. I've never lived in a country at war on its home turf; truth-hiding totalitarian governments and I have come into contact on only an academic level. I wouldn't have been brave enough to write this book, or to vaguely half-posit-half-explore in this way the idea that maybe, the truth isn't what we're looking for.Is this book anti-science? Anti-truth and reconciliation? Is it in any way practical in the real world? I don't know. Once again, Ishiguro touches a nerve: not to cure it or exacerbate it or bring it into the limelight, just to remind us that it's there.goes against conventional wisdom in some ways – or I think so, at least. I've no idea what anyone else will make of it. Maybe I'm reading this in because it fascinates me, rather than because it's there.All this is in the last hundred pages, by the way, because the other thing aboutis that it's extremely meandering. I kept giving up for a few weeks and coming back and reading a hundred pages in one go. I think that meandering is by design: if you love the main characters, Axl and Beatrice, then you may well want them to be happy together, and not to remember past horrors, and that itself is not without consequences. Would you rather the narrative slowed to a crawl, repeating and repeating, or else to have to face up to things that they don't know and you don't know but which might tear them apart? Even yellingis making a decision.But the slowness and impenetrability of the first three-fifths are deliberate, and the repetition likewise. By the time I got to the last hundred pages, I'd been desperate for change for so long, which is, I guess, exactly what he was after.contained nothing to push against, no real mystery to solve, and I didn't know what to do with myself - but I could understand his point, that it might have been better than the alternative.People have said this is a departure, and I don't agree. Ishiguro does extremely drawn-out pacing, spending half a book looking around from a single spot. He does tenuous relationships that play out with deliberately stilted dialogue, in uncanny settings. And you know as well as I do what a textbook Ishiguro Final Scene looks like.On a different note, I'm pretty sure his copy editor has the best job in the world. I would have loved to get my hands on this.---------------------There was an article on the Guardian this morning about the student protests in South Africa, which for a start is extremely interesting reading. Particularly, it made me think of this book, and this review of it, and what happens when one generation tries to shield the next generation from things that have happened in the past.The thing about deciding that you don't want to know about the past, is that everyone has to do it. The wider it is, the harder it is. So (view spoiler) incan just decide for everyone - dragon, mysterious mist, boom, everyone's forgotten - in the real world, it can't be done like that. Ishiguro may well write about Saxons and Britons who can't remember the ancient reasons they don't like each other, but that's not what the twenty-first century looks like, and it'll never look like that again.Reading that article, I thought: lovely story, Kazuo Ishiguro, but when you look at the effects of apartheid, when you look at inequality in South Africa today... don't you feel like you're being a little bit fatuous? When there are physical signs of inequality to point to - from income levels to university membership to geographic living areas - does it even make sense to rebuild everything from the ground up, based only on what you know about the present, and not on history at all? Of course it doesn't. Apart from anything else, if you ignore where things come from, you lose some of that sense of urgency for change. You might be tricked into thinking that the pain and the division is less deep than it actually is. Not looking at the past is a luxury afforded to some, and an unfair defanging for others.So, I don't know. It was a good, thought-provoking book, and I'm glad it exists. But on reflection I'm not sure I agree with it.---------------------"I have a hardback copy of this," said my friend. "Do you want to borrow it when I'm done?"And then I bit her hand off and this is why I can't have nice things. |
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