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‘Scotland is watching this, and the mood is darkening,’ SNP says, before MPs vote through controversial measures after fractious debate The government has pushed through plans to give English MPs the right of veto over English laws – a move that the shadow leader of the Commons described as “a charter for breaking up the union”. Following an often angry and fractious debate, the Commons voted the measures through by 312 to 270. Labour’s Gerald Kaufman, the longest-serving member of the house, declared “a day of shame for the House of Commons”. He decried the debate as “one of the nastiest, most unpleasant I have attended in 45 years”, prompted by “a government with no respect for the House of Commons”. The leader of the house, Chris Grayling, said the changes would bring “fairness to our devolution settlement and it is fairness that will secure the future of our union”. He said the proposals were likely to affect three or four bills in the coming months, allowing for a trial period. “I regard this as a process of development rather than one-off,” Grayling said. The shadow leader of the house, Chris Bryant, said the proposals would create “confusion and division in parliament while doing nothing to give any more power to English voters over the things that matter to them”. Under the plans, English MPs will be able to block legislation deemed to solely affect England, but the bill would ultimately be subject to a full vote of the House of Commons. The Scottish National party’s Pete Wishart expressed his frustration that the debate went on for more than an hour and half before any Scottish parliamentarian was called to speak. Dismissing the changes as “meagre, threadbare, inept and stupid”, Wishart told the chamber: “Scotland is watching this, and the mood is darkening.” Labour said giving English MPs the right of veto over legislation could create the framework for US-style government shutdowns and legislative impasses. It was unsuccessful in trying to amend the rules so that English MPs would be given the chance to debate and suggest revisions, rather than block legislation entirely. The new rules, known as English votes for English laws (Evel), have drawn criticism from a cross-party watchdog. The Commons procedure committee, chaired by the Conservative MP Charles Walker, branded the proposals “over-engineered and potentially burdensome”. A few Conservatives objected to the complicated nature of the plans but ended up backing the government anyway. At the heart of objections is the plan to let John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, decide what constitutes an English law. The SNP has raised concerns that many pieces of legislation that appear only to relate to England will have a huge knock-on effect in Scotland, such as any plans to build a third runway at Heathrow. Pressed on whether this could be considered English-only legislation, Grayling suggested it could if it was just a planning decision. The measures are an attempt to answer the West Lothian question and decide what to do about the fact that English MPs do not vote on devolved matters affecting Scottish people, such as health and education, but Scottish MPs have a say on those areas in England. There is the potential for the measures to be highly controversial if in future there is an electoral outcome in which one party has a majority in the UK overall but not in England. This is most likely in the event of a Labour-SNP alliance with the Tories still holding a majority of English MPs. |
I am a huge proponent of writing quality code, a view that is shared by many of my colleagues. Unfortunately, I do encounter those who do not share my enthusiasm. Their view is often one of “Get It Done,” whereas I take the position of “Get It Done Right.” When discussing refactoring, the “Get It Done” developer often brushes it aside as a waste of time. I want to address that crowd, and anyone else who eschews refactoring, with my top 5 reasons why you should refactor your code. Enjoy! 5. Your Code Sucks Broken Bridge / jollyUK / CC BY How often do you write an essay and have the draft come out perfect? Sure, your writing is probably more understandable than an email from a Nigerian prince but would you publish it without revision? Test-driven development emphasizes a sequence of activities: Red – Green – Refactor. The first step is similar to outlining your arguments and conclusion. The second step is like drafting your essay to make the arguments and reach the conclusion. Finally, the revision step is to make the essay clear and concise. Make sure your code doesn’t come off like a teenager’s text message; take the time to revise it. Telerik JustCode features blazing-fast, on-the-fly code analysis that finds many more issues than Visual Studio alone. Think of it as your enhanced spellchecker. 4. Debts Accrue Interest Mixed Cash / stopnlook / CC BY You are not truly free until you’re debt free. In the context of software development, I'm talking about technical debt. Without incorporating refactoring into your development process, technical debt accrues until someone takes the time to pay it. It continues to grow even without active development as developers become further removed from the code they wrote. If you’re not convinced this is a problem, you’ve likely never worked in a legacy code base. Reduce the amount of technical debt owed to ensure your system doesn’t become a maintenance nightmare! Including Telerik JustCode in your development process is like having a technical debt financial adviser. 3. Repetition Is Dangerous Tigers Playing / Todd Ryburn / CC BY The DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, put forth in The Pragmatic Programmer, states that “every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” The converse of this is the WET principle, or Write Everything Twice. What happens when you repeat yourself in code? You create another maintenance nightmare, where a single change requires visiting more than one piece of code. Good luck if you miss a spot. One of the dangers associated with consolidating code is not identifying all usages of the code being removed. With the Find Usages (Alt+F7) and Find Extended Usages (Shift+F12) in Telerik JustCode, you can be assured that no code is left behind. 2. Spaghetti Is Good to Eat, Bad to Read spaghetti / gotosira / CC BY You’re always welcome to invite me out for spaghetti, but please do not make me read your spaghetti code. Even in procedural languages, control structures can be simplified to be more easily understood. However, if your language has the ability to abstract control structures into another form (e.g. classes), then you should do so. I’m not saying you must join the Anti-If Campaign, but you should at least extract your nested if statements and never, ever use a goto statement. Yes, it does exist in C#. Deconstruct a control structure with Telerik JustCode by using extraction refactorings to encapsulate individual units. Then extract classes and interfaces to take advantage of polymorphism for differing behaviors. 1. Littering Is Rude #195 Garbage from Göteborgsvarvet / Mikael Miettinen / CC BY How would you like it if someone sat at your desk while you were on vacation and left empty cups and candy wrappers lying around? I bet you would be justifiably annoyed. Codebases are like shared workspaces. Even though you may be solely responsible for a particular set of code today, someone else will one day sit in your spot. You wouldn’t like it if someone left a mess for you, so don’t leave a mess for another developer. Clean up your code so other people aren’t stuck cleaning up your garbage. Telerik JustCode has a code cleaning feature that automates many cleaning tasks such as removing unused private members. Cleaning profiles can be set up either through options or by choosing Clean Code from the Visual Aid. To clean with the default profile, press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F. You can also clean groupings of files or an entire solution by right-clicking an item in Solution Explorer and selecting Just Clean All. Chris is a technical evangelist for JustCode and a C# MVP. As a southerner, he had to endure years of people exclaiming “git-r-done,” often with no discernible reason. |
Share. A bit of a rawr deal. A bit of a rawr deal. The official release for open-world-survival-shooter-with-dinosaurs, 20037096" >Ark: Survival Evolved has been delayed by several weeks. In a development blog post, it has been revealed that after over two years in early access on steam, Ark: Survival Evolved has been pushed back to August 29 after being slated for a release on August 8. Studio Wildcard assures fans that the game already has its Gold Master certification for retail release, however, that completing this took longer than anticipated hence the reason for the full game's delay. Exit Theatre Mode The post goes on to explain that the free Ragnarok DLC for the game will also now release on August 29. This delay is set to make the DLC even bigger than what was originally promised, including increasing the overground by approximately 25%, as well as adding more items and areas. Furthermore, going gold allows for more work on the PC and multiplayer versions of the game, which will see immediate bug fixes and improvements. Hope Corrigan is an Australian freelance news writer for IGN. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter. |
The power of Facebook advertising – let’s say they can identify 2 billion people around the world based on 200 points of data, which allows them to offer advertisers the holy grail of targeting. Now companies know exactly who is seeing their ads – only the “right” potential consumers. This is unheard of in the history of the world. Facebook’s shareholders have been rightfully rewarded for the company’s marketing prowess. It now sports a market capitalization of $500 billion – the only two companies worth more are Apple and Microsoft. Exxon, J&J, Google, JP Morgan, Berkshire – they’re all worth less. So it is true that Facebook has an amazing marketing product and it is also true that the world now fully appreciates this fact. But what if not everyone agrees to play along? What if this ability to micro-target every living human being to the degree of 200 individual data points is not okay anymore? For example, what if a foreign government – say, Germany – decides that 200 data points is too much information for Facebook to collect and make available about their citizens to advertisers? What if Germany says, “You know what? This is not okay. From now on, you can only utilize 100 of those 200 data points. We don’t want our sovereign citizens targeted to that degree by anyone – dishwashing detergent firms, political parties, special interest groups – it’s too much influence.” Now what if this happens, and Facebook acquiesces so as to stay out of court, and then a month later Japan says they’d like the same thing? And then the Netherlands? And then the state of Florida? And then the city of Las Vegas? And so on? What if the world begins to make the decision that no entity – corporate or otherwise – ought to have the sort of broad, unchecked free reign that Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Google) has enjoyed over the last few years? Does Facebook face them all down, one after another, to preserve their advertising technology advantage? Or do they willfully comply and water down their programs? In either case, could this conceivably be a positive for shareholders of Facebook stock? I can’t imagine how. Can you? Now you might be saying, “That’s not realistic! No one is going to require Facebook to become less good at what they do!” You’d be wrong. This is absolutely within the realm of possibility, historically speaking. They did it to Microsoft twenty years ago and it’s taken the company approximately this entire span of time since to recover. They did it to AT&T back in the day, the irony being that shareholders made a lot more money once all of the component spin-off subsidiaries were given to them. They did it to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, even though it took almost twenty years to make it through the courts. By the time they were done with him, it was almost like a relief. Governments that feel threatened or genuinely fear for the safety and/or competitive position of their constituents will absolutely take action if they feel the need to. Uber must now negotiate with the city of London in order to keep operating there beyond the end of September. They’ll probably get to stay, but not without concessions. Might some of those concessions include a lightening up of the company’s competitive advantages over the black car taxi system that’s long held sway in that city? This week Facebook announced that it will make public all of the ads purchased by Russian interests during the 2016 elections. That’s a start. But the bigger question should not be about the content of the ads or the purported sponsors. It should be about how it can be possible that ads like these can be so lethally effective. The answer, of course, is that Facebook has a one-of-a-kind delivery method to ensure direct hits. How will that sit with Congress when they begin to get their heads around this concept. I am convinced that, for the most part, they are until now completely clueless. If a government decides that there is a such thing as too much influence being held by a corporation, technology giant or otherwise, there is a risk to its shareholders. We do not live and work in some sort of utopian paradise where all progress is universally celebrated and allowed, unmolested, to do what it will, to whom it will, with what information it pleases. And I’m not sure how many fishing trips and RV rides Mark Zuckerberg has the time to go on, around the world, in order to preserve the company’s monopoly on our collective attention. |
About FOLLOW Wintertide on Twitter @wintertidegame or LIKE our Facebook page to keep in touch. You can also visit us at WinterTide.ca - Current Work In Progress Screenshots - Wintertide is a team oriented action-multiplayer survival game that uses a first-person perspective. Players traverse across post-apocalyptic towns and lakeside cabins in the Rocky Mountains, surviving against freezing temperatures, hostile wildlife and a continuously changing hazardous environment. Players use firearms, improvised weapons and stealth in attempts to protect themselves against opposing players and hunger crazed animals. Wintertide offers a unique reincarnation feature that allows players to return from the dead as certain wildlife, dependent on their survival score at the end of their life. Competitive Multiplayer : Survivors Vs Scavengers is Wintertides first game-mode and is a 5 vs 5 survival team death-match. Reincarnation : YOU ARE DEAD ! These words no longer mean game over, use your survival points to reincarnate as certain wildlife. Continue the hunt to aid your team, or make them your dinner. Hunting & Tracking : Everything leaves behind a trail to follow including you. Hunt for food and avoid being hunted at all costs. Crafting & Looting : You will need to search for crafting items and resources to stay alive in Wintertide. Craft fires to stay warm, Loot cabins and buildings in search for useful items that can further aid you and your teammates with survival. Day & Night Cycles : This is something that will be ultimately fine tuned in pre-alpha play tests. Currently we have 12 minutes in real world time being equal to a 24 hour day in Wintertide. Executions : Catch your enemy off-guard and you might be prompted to perform a special execution, If you have the right tool. For the last year we have been working day and night to bring more than just an idea to kick-starter, we wanted something tangible to build off of. We are proud to announce that Wintertides multiplayer state is currently playable ! There is still lots of work to be done. We have an awesome foundation already laid and cannot wait to improve on the features we have already introduced. Our goal is to bring gamers a winter survival game that is fun, competitive and exciting. We have created a vast dangerous winter wasteland that we enjoy spending time in, we wanted to create a game that was not only challenging for our players, but posed a challenge for us developers as well. Randomly generated hazards and dangerous wildlife with a mind of their own helped us achieve this goal. Using ray-traces from the sky we are able to detect landscape materials and randomly generate resources accurately. Why Kickstarter ? We decided on Kickstarter as a our crowdfunding outlet because of its success rate and amount of dedicated backers we see support projects on a daily basis.Our Kickstarter page has undergone multiple transformations and will proceed to do so as time progresses. We hope you stick around with us as we continue our venture. |
Get the biggest Newcastle United FC 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 Hatem Ben Arfa has been urged to quit Newcastle United and take his chance elsewhere. The Chronicle understands that his relationship with Alan Pardew has reached the point of no return. Ben Arfa was linked with AC Milan today with the Serie A giants in need of a left sided player and the French playmaker could fit the bill. Left out of the first team squad that toured New Zealand, Ben Arfa has been training with the reserves and so far only restricted to a behind closed doors game with Queen of the South, which ended 4-4. Ben Arfa fell out with Pardew last season and was left on the sidelines for the remainder of the campaign after a dressing room exchange at Stoke City, which quickly followed a previous heated discussion after the 4-0 hammering at the hands of Man United. |
WEST PALM BEACH, FL—Responding to his flagging poll numbers and a string of newspaper editorials and cable news pundits questioning his fitness to lead, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump reportedly complained to a rally crowd Thursday that for the entirety of this race, his personality has been rigged against him. “From day one, my internal thought processes and overall temperament have completely stacked the deck against my candidacy—it’s so obvious, folks, you can’t deny it,” said Trump, claiming that all facets of his character, from his egocentric worldview to his brash, vitriolic responses to even the smallest and most inconsequential provocations, have been colluding to ruin his chances of ever reaching the Oval Office. “Open your eyes, people! Just look at how I routinely project the fear and hatred inside of me onto others, or my total lack of impulse control, conscientiousness, and tact. My personality is doing everything—and I mean everything—to make sure I never have a chance.” Trump then reportedly vowed that no matter how many of his own character traits aligned against him, he would never let his personality stop him from becoming president, drawing raucous cheers from the crowd. Advertisement |
CLOSE Colorado State University Football players celebrate after winning their final home game of the 2017 season Kelly Lyell CSU receiver Michael Gallup and quarterback Nick Stevens (7) are two of the four CSU football players named First-Team All-Mountain West on Wednesday. (Photo: Timothy Hurst/Staff Photographer) Five CSU football players earned All-Mountain West recognition Wednesday, with four being named First-Team All-Conference. Offensive linemen Jake Bennett and Zack Golditch, receiver Michael Gallup and quarterback Nick Stevens were named First-Team All-MW. The four first-team selections are Colorado State University's most since 2014. Gallup has 94 catches for 1,345 yards. He leads the conference in both categories and is a finalist for the Biletnikoff Award. It's his second year in a row earning first-team honors. Stevens leads the MW in passing yards (3,479) and touchdowns (27). He was a second-team all-conference selection in 2015 and honorable mention last year. Rams: Taking a fresh look at CSU football's bowl possibilities Bennett and Golditch helped anchor the 10th-ranked offense in the nation, and the Rams surrendered 0.67 sacks per game, third in FBS. Bennett was second-team all-conference last season, while it's Golditch's first conference honor. Running back Dalyn Dawkins was named to the second team. Dawkins has 1,349 rushing yards. It's his first all-conference honor. Linebackers Evan Colorito and Josh Watson, tight end Dalton Fackrell, offensive lineman Trae Moxley and punter Ryan Stonehouse were all honorable-mention recipients. More: A look at who will be gone, who is next in line for CSU football The MW awards are determined by a vote of the league's coaches and media members. CSU is 7-5 and will play in its fifth bowl in a row, with the bowl destination to be announced Sunday. Below are the major MW football awards: Offensive Player of the Year: Rashaad Penny, running back, San Diego State Defensive Player of the Year: Leighton Vander Esch, linebacker, Boise State Special Teams Player of the Year: Rashaad Penny, San Diego State Freshman of the Year: Armani Rogers, quarterback, UNLV Coach of the Year: Jeff Tedford, Fresno State Follow sports reporter Kevin Lytle at twitter.com/Kevin_Lytle and at facebook.com/KevinSLytle. |
With the next instalment of the meandering and confounding crime series set to air on 21 June, we take a look at what we know (and aren’t really sure about) so far Spoiler warning … But since time is a flat circle, you already know what happens in True Detective season two, don’t you? In fact you’re watching it right now. And so am I. Everything we know about True Detective season two? As Matthew McConaughey’s mystic nihilist detective Rust Cohle might put it, his eyes gleaming with the knowledge of all the awful things he’s seen: “Everything we know? How about everything we DON’T KNOW?” There will be no Rust, this time, of course. No Woody Harrelson traumatically reliving his gradual hair loss as his partner Marty. Cary Joji Fukunaga, the director who created those sinister bayou landscapes, dripping with suspense like an alligator’s open jaw, well, he’s gone too. And so are the bayous; the new season is set in California. So what can we expect from season two, which starts on 21 June on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK? The cast Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vince Vaughn: still money? Photograph: Lacey Terrell/HBO Let’s be honest, I think we were all a bit disappointed when the casting of Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell was announced. Even Vaughn and Farrell were probably disappointed. But let’s look on the bright side. Everyone’s got a soft spot for a twinkly eyed Irishman like Farrell, and we all have fond memories of In Bruges. As for Vaughn, you may well have grown tired of his charmless frat-pack outings, but he was good in Swingers, 19 years ago. He was funny, he was smart, he was cool. He was money. So he could conceivably be good again. Come on. It’s at least possible. Rachel McAdams has been in a lot of romcom dross, but then so had McConaughey before he turned it all around, and she was impressive opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman recently as an idealistic human rights lawyer in A Most Wanted Man. Her casting as sheriff’s detective rather than a wife, girlfriend, prostitute or stripper is also a good sign for a show that in its first season was at times downright sleazy in its portrayal of women. And what can you say about Taylor Kitsch? No, I’m serious. It was a serious question. The plot This is a new cast, and a new plot, with no links to season one. HBO describes it as revolving around three law enforcement officers and a career criminal, navigating a “web of conspiracy and betrayal” in “the scorched landscapes of California”, which does suggest some congruence with the mood or themes at least of the first season. Farrell plays Ray Velcoro, a “compromised” detective (“How compromised are you?” he is asked in one trailer), in hock to the mob. Vaughn is Frank Semyon, a criminal “in danger of losing his life’s work” as he tries to go straight and his business partner is murdered. McAdams plays a straight-arrow detective “at odds with the system she serves”, and Kitsch is the highway patrol officer who discovers the crime scene that sets the plot in motion, a man who, HBO says bafflingly, is running from “the sudden glare of a scandal that never happened”. That plot, one of the trailers suggests, also involves a missing girl, and, as McAdams’s character laments, nobody cares. Perhaps the suggestions in the first season that we would follow the trail of crime all the way to the “rich men” at the very top will be picked up on here. A “city manager” – perhaps Vaughn’s business partner? – also goes missing, as the HBO synopsis for episode one indicates. The style One of the most distinctive elements of season one was its radical split narrative, which produced that utterly thrilling moment when the past seemed to catch up with the present as Rust sought out Marty on a long, empty Louisiana road. But it seems writer and showrunner Nic Pizzolatto has thrown that highly lauded approach out the window along with all his key actors and his director. “As the characters multiplied and their individual and group complications grew, a more integrated and linear structure worked best,” he said recently. The two teaser trailers released this week do, however, show Farrell with and without a moustache, one of the main signifiers of time passing for McConaughey in season one, suggesting more traditional flashbacks may well be involved. The “gothic horror” element of season one is gone too, Pizzolatto says – although the titles of the first two episodes, The Western Book of the Dead and Night Finds You, suggest he hasn’t quite embraced Brad Bird-style optimism just yet – and an early idea of focusing on the “secret occult history of the US transportation system” has also been scrapped, which may well be for the best. The first two episodes in the eight-episode season are directed by Justin Lin of Fast & Furious fame. The third is helmed by the little-known Danish documentarian Janus Metz Pedersen, and episode six and seven by TV drama journeymen Miguel Sapochnik and Daniel Attias. The directors of the other episodes are as yet unknown. Former director Fukunaga stays on as executive producer, and I can only hope he’s a hands-on one. The music Facebook Twitter Pinterest Master of puppets: T-Bone Burnett. Photograph: Startraks Photo/Rex Season one’s theme song was the languorous alt-country tune Far from any Road by the Handsome Family, and the first True Detective trailer used an equally atmospheric song by country musician Lera Lynn, which has already been enthusiastically remixed on YouTube. Pizzolatto has said composer T-Bone Burnett, who oversaw the music for the first season, has been “developing” original songs for this one. The philosophy Some thought Rust’s impassively argued nihilism and atheism in the early episodes shaded into pseudo-profound sub-Nietzschean gobbledegook around the time he started cutting up beer cans with a knife. Others felt the programme made complex philosophical ideas accessible to a wider TV audience. Still others felt Rust’s growing self-indulgence was meant to demonstrate his decline. Whatever, a strong strain of existentialism seems likely to run through the new season too. “My strong suspicion is … we get the world we deserve,” Farrell’s character intones in one trailer, a pessimistic line that could have been spoken by Rust, while Kitsch mutters metaphysically: “This isn’t me doing this – this isn’t me.” Vaughn perhaps brings up the rear, philosophically speaking, with the line: “Sometimes your worst self … is your best self,” but, look, he’s trying. Can I just make one plea? Rust Cohle, the guy who replied to Marty’s earnest question: “Do you think a man can love two women at once?” with the devastating: “I don’t think that men can love,” simply could not be the same person who ended that season murmuring the optimistic mantra: “The light’s winning!” So if Farrell’s “strong suspicion” actually turns out to be that it’s all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, I’ll turn him into a flat circle. And that ending is about as satisfying as season one’s was. |
by George Walkden (University of Manchester) A new paper in the journal PNAS provides the most striking and robust empirical support ever found for Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. That’s not how the authors (henceforth Blasi et al. 2016) interpret it. Nor is it how it’s been reported in the many media outlets that have seized on it. For example, writing for the Guardian, David Shariatmadari describes their findings as the hidden sound patterns that could overturn years of linguistic theory. (The issue of why linguistics papers published in “science” journals get so much press while the same paper published in Diachronica or our own Transactions would be largely ignored is a topic for another blog post.) The authors, for their part, state that “These striking similarities call for a reexamination of the fundamental assumption of the arbitrariness of the sign”. ABC News goes even further: “The breakthrough finding disproves one of the most fundamental concepts in linguistics — the idea that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is unrelated”. To see why these are probably overstatements, let’s go back to the source. The arbitrariness of the sign Here’s what it actually says in the Course in General Linguistics (§2): I quote here from Roy Harris’s standard translation (1983). The link between signal and signification is arbitrary. Since we are treating a sign as the combination in which a signal is associated with a signification, we can express this more simply as: the linguistic sign is arbitrary. There is no internal connexion, for example, between the idea ‘sister’ and the French sequence of sounds s-ö-r which acts as its signal. The same idea might as well be represented by any other sequence of sounds. This is demonstrated by differences between languages, and even by the existence of different languages. The signification ‘ox’ has as its signal b-ö-f on one side of the frontier, but o-k-s (Ochs) on the other side. No one disputes the fact that linguistic signs are arbitrary. But it is often easier to discover a truth than to assign it to its correct place. (I’m committing the usual sin of referring to Saussure and the Course in General Linguistics more-or-less synonymously, when in fact it’s not clear how much of the Course reflects Saussure’s thought rather than that of his students and editors: see Joseph 2012 and Stawarska 2015 for discussion. But since the Ferdinand de Saussure that’s shaped linguistic discourse over the last century is the Saussure of the Course, I’ll continue with this sin in what follows.) A number of things are interesting about this passage for those who’ve read the Blasi et al. paper recently. Some of them will be discussed later. But for now just note that Saussure evidently viewed the arbitrariness of the sign as i) a testable claim rather than a tautology or an analytic truth (“This is demonstrated by…”) and ii) so blindingly obvious as to be effectively indisputable (“No one disputes the fact that linguistic signs are arbitrary”). The simple fact that not all languages are the same is enough, for Saussure, to demonstrate that signs are arbitrary. Saussure is also aware that some people might raise objections, and discusses the cases of onomatopoeia and exclamations in detail. The passage on genuine onomatopoeia is worth quoting in full: As for genuine onomatopoeia (e.g. French glou-glou (‘gurgle’), tic-tac (ticking of a clock), not only is it rare but its use is already to a certain extent arbitrary. For onomatopoeia is only the approximate imitation, already partly conventionalised, of certain sounds. This is evident if we compare a French dog’s ouaoua with a German dog’s wauwau. In any case, once introduced into the language, onomatopoeic words are subjected to the same phonetic and morphological evolution as other words. The French word pigeon (‘pigeon’) comes from Vulgar Latin pīpīo, itself of onomatopoeic origin, which clearly proves that onomatopoeic words themselves may lose their original character and take on that of the linguistic sign in general, which is unmotivated. The findings of Blasi et al. (2016) The paper by Blasi et al. isn’t very long, so you should read it rather than relying on my summary. Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall, so here’s an overview for those who can’t access it. I’m not a statistician and can’t evaluate their methods in detail, nor am I a phonologist or phonological typologist, so I’ll take it as given that their data is good and that their method works as described. Blasi et al. take word lists from 6,452 linguistic varieties. Each word list has between 28 and 100 lexical items on it, all of which are items of “basic vocabulary” (scare quotes in original). Their aim is to find associations between particular segments and particular concepts (basically, significations), and they do this by running a battery of statistical tests that evaluate the presence of a symbol in a word against the presence of the same symbol in a set of other words. As part of this, they try to screen out a number of possible confounds, including word length, phonotactic restrictions, and areal contact. They only accept sound-meaning pairings found in at least three different macro-areas and across ten different lineages. These restrictions mean that the procedure is conservative and likely to have a large number of false negatives. They find that 74 sound-concept associations pass the test, involving 30 different concepts and 23 different symbols. Interestingly, not all of these are positive associations: 36 of the 74 are “negative” associations. For instance, the symbols u, p, b, t, s, l and r are cross-linguistically unlikely to form part of a first person pronoun, and the word for ‘dog’ is unlikely to contain a t. On the other hand, the word for ‘dog’ is very likely to contain an s, and the word for ‘knee’ is very likely to contain the symbols u, o, p, k, q. A useful measure is the risk ratio (RR) for a symbol-concept pairing: this gives the ratio of the frequency of a given symbol in words for that concept to the frequency of the same symbol in other words. The only really substantial ratio is for the symbol C (a voiceless palato-alveolar affricate) and the concept ‘small’, which is 5.12. That means (if I’ve understood correctly) that the voiceless palato-alveolar affricate is more than 5 times as frequent in the word for ‘small’ than it is in the average word. All the other risk ratios for positive associations are between 1.17 and 2.77, and the risk ratios for negative associations are between 0.18 and 0.81. The strongest negative association is between the symbol p and the first person singular pronoun: with a RR of 0.18, other words are more than five times as likely to have this symbol. Blasi et al. vs. Saussure The first thing to observe is that Saussurean arbitrariness is about the link between a signal and a signification. What Blasi et al. are looking for isn’t that: they’re only looking at the link between a particular symbol and a signification. But signals are a lot more than symbols: they also involve linear ordering. Since signals are otherwise basically the sum of their parts, though, we’ll grant that associations between symbols and concepts are relevant to arbitrariness, and move on. (NB: the term signal is used by Blasi et al. to refer to associations between symbols and concepts, both positive and negative. This is evidently not the same as signal in Harris’s translation, which translates signifiant in the original French, i.e. the phonological form of a word.) Recall that, for Saussure, the fact that different languages had different words for things at all was sufficient to demonstrate the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. It would be very easy in principle to show that arbitrariness was not complete, if the evidence existed: just find a word that is the same in all languages. This is obviously not what Blasi et al. do, however. In fact, they don’t find a single exceptionless link between a symbol and a concept. What they instead find are tendencies: some subtle, some less so. But if it is possible for words to vary in form across languages, then arbitrariness is a fact about human language. The reader might object at this point that I’m retreating to a very weak notion of arbitrariness. Actually, I’m not retreating to anything: I’m just recapitulating what was published in the Course almost exactly a hundred years ago. Saussurean arbitrariness makes clear predictions, which this study entirely (and impressively) fails to falsify despite submitting them to rigorous empirical examination. Instead, when we look at the world’s languages, we find not a single example of a cross-linguistically constant pairing of signal and signification. We don’t even find a cross-linguistically constant pairing of symbol and signification. There is a stronger hypothesis that one could entertain, which is that there should be no meaningful cross-linguistic associations between symbols and concepts at all, or at least no more than chance scattering of symbols would predict. The paper does seem to falsify that. (Though even that’s not entirely clear: there are 39 symbols in the ASJP database they use, and in principle 100 concepts, so there are 3,900 possible associations, of which only 74 are detected by the analysis, i.e. 1.9%. That doesn’t seem enormously impressive, even if the method is biased towards conservativity.) However, this is a clear straw man: no one has ever proposed this, and it’s not obvious why anyone ever would. Can Saussure’s approach deal with the kinds of positive association that this study demonstrates? Sure. While Saussure doesn’t discuss the full gamut of sound symbolism and iconicity-based reasons for symbol-concept association cross-linguistically of the kind that the paper by Blasi et al. makes reference to, recall what he says about onomatopoeia. While Latin pīpīo has developed into French pigeon, according to Saussure, the initial consonant p and vowel i are retained. If the sound of a pigeon’s call is the original motivation for the creation of the word pīpīo, as Saussure implies, and if that can happen in any language for similar reasons, then it’s clear that the residue of motivation can be retained over time and find parallels cross-linguistically. The prediction would be that these associations would be reasonably subtle, and certainly not absolute, given the distorting effect of regular sound change etc. – in other words, exactly the sort of thing we find in the Blasi et al. paper. Another thing that makes me uneasy about the interpretation of these findings is independent of the concerns mentioned above. It goes as follows: even if Blasi et al. were able to demonstrate that symbol-concept associations (or signal-signification associations) were incredibly widespread cross-linguistically to the point of being the norm, that wouldn’t mean that we were dealing with violations of arbitrariness, even under the strong straw-man hypothesis presented above. In the case of glou-glou and gurgle, we are dealing with a principled link between sound and meaning. That also holds for some of the cases found by Blasi et al. The links between ‘tongue’ and the sound l and between ‘nose’ and the sound n make sense in terms of articulation. Similarly, the oft-wheeled-out case of ‘breasts’ and m, related to what suckling babies do, has a story behind it. But other cases are much more mysterious. Why should there be an association between ‘ash’ and u? Or between ‘one’ and t? Blasi et al. don’t tell us. Even more mind-boggling are the negative associations. More than half of these – 19, in fact, which is more than a quarter of the whole dataset – relate to personal pronouns. What could possibly be the explanation for the fact that ‘I’ doesn’t like to co-occur with u, p, b, t, s, l, r? Or for the fact that ‘you’ doesn’t like to co-occur with u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r, l? Or ‘we’ with p, l, s? Evidently this unholy trinity doesn’t like being associated with local personal pronouns at all, for some reason. Blasi et al. have nothing at all to say about causes for the negative associations. The upshot is that, without a principled explanation, I don’t see why quantitative evidence of association alone would be enough of a warrant for stating that a connection is non-arbitrary in a linguistic sense. Perhaps there’s a theory that neatly derives the patterns found in this dataset without resorting to post hoc justifications for individual cases. Or maybe there will be one in future. But for the moment I’m not aware of one. The paper calls for “a reexamination of the fundamental assumption of the arbitrariness of the sign”. It looks like the only people who should be reexamining this fundamental assumption are those who think that the data presented in this paper in any way challenges the original statement of the arbitrariness of the sign in the Course in General Linguistics. Moreover, the best way to reexamine it is to go back and read what the Course actually says. So what does this paper tell us? I’ve argued that the findings of this paper don’t contradict Saussure’s original position in the slightest – in fact, they provide impressive (if perhaps unnecessary) support for it. One might try to make the case that the target of the Blasi et al. paper wasn’t Saussure or the Course. That seems implausible to me, as the Course is the very first citation in the very first sentence (and has a misspelling of Albert Riedlinger’s name in the list of references). More generally, the way this paper is structured puts it in a long line of papers where an orthodoxy is challenged. We see this time and time again in linguistics, for instance with Chomsky, the poverty of the stimulus, and recursion. In the last two cases, challengers have taken a strong version of the claim and argued that it is false, and in both cases some defenders have argued that the original claim, while still contentful, does not in fact make the predictions that the challengers suggest. It certainly makes for a great media game – though only if the orthodoxy is very well established, either by virtue of its age or by being associated with one of the most prominent figures in the field. In the case of Saussurean arbitrariness, both of these prerequisites are met. The paper does demonstrate very clearly, however, that there are associations between particular segments and particular meanings that are cross-linguistically robust, and that geographical proximity and common ancestry can’t be the only cause of this. While none of this would have surprised Saussure, it’s still a valuable demonstration in its own right. Released under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence. References Blasi, Damián E., Wichmann, Søren, Hammarström, Harald, Stadler, Peter F., and Christiansen, Morten. 2016. Sound-meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Early Edition. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1605782113. Joseph, John E. 2012. Saussure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1983 [1916]. Course in General Linguistics. Eds. Albert Bally & Robert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. Stawarska, Beate. 2015. Saussure’s philosophy of language as phenomenology: undoing the doctrine of the Course in General Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
Subscribe | What is RSS Date: November 13, 2017 November 13, 2017 Approximately 300 jobs to be filled over the next several months Yosemite National Park has approximately 300 seasonal job openings for the summer of 2018. There are positions open in all areas of the park. In addition to Yosemite, there are seasonal jobs opportunities at many of the over 400 National Park Service units across the country. The park will be filling a wide variety of positions, including backcountry rangers, entrance station rangers, custodial services, forestry technicians, utility systems operators, administrative assistants, traffic control rangers, and more. The jobs range in pay from $16 to $22 an hour. All open job announcements and detailed position descriptions are posted online at www.usajobs.gov beginning now through the end of January 2018. To see information on all available positions in Yosemite, search for “National Park Service” and “Yosemite National Park.” Each job announcement will be posted for up to 5 business days. Some positions do have application limits ranging from 50 to 100 applicants. All applications must be submitted through www.usajobs.gov. Applicants may create a profile on the website in advance to save time once the hiring process begins, which is highly recommended. Yosemite National Park welcomes applicants from diverse backgrounds across our nation. The Federal Government offers unique hiring paths (also known as a hiring authority) to help hire individuals that represent our diverse society. If you fall under one of these groups of people you may be eligible to receive preference when applying for jobs. More than 20,000 National Park Service employees care for America’s 413 national park sites, and work with communities across the nation to help preserve local history and create close-to-home recreational opportunities. All candidates interested in working at Yosemite National Park in the summer 2018 are encouraged to frequently visit www.usajobs.gov to view the latest job announcements. |
The federal government should be moving ahead with action against Volkswagen in the wake of news that Ontario has charged the company and carried out a raid on its headquarters, according to an environmental organization. On Tuesday, provincial authorities executed a search warrant at Volkswagen Canada offices in the Toronto area as part of its investigation into the emissions scandal that rocked the company two years ago. The Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change said Wednesday it had charged Volkswagen AG with one count under the province’s Environmental Protection Act last week, alleging the German company did not comply with Ontario emission standards. The allegations have not been proven in court. “It’s good news, finally. Now if we could just get Environment Canada to act on behalf of the country, that would be a great thing,” said Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence. He said the federal government has broader powers than the province and can impose higher fines on offenders that could be used to protect against pollution and accelerate the transition to electric vehicles. His organization and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment filed suit over the summer to try to force Environment Minister Catherine McKenna to move forward on enforcing Canadian pollution laws allegedly broken by Volkswagen. A statement from McKenna at the time said her department is investigating and will act if necessary. The department did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for an update. The Ontario government said the search warrant was part of its continuing investigation. “Yesterday, MOECC executed a search warrant at the company’s Ajax facility. Under the charge, Volkswagen is alleged to have caused or permitted the operation of vehicles that did not comply with emission standards prescribed by Ontario regulations,” said Environment Minister Chris Ballard in a statement. “If the allegations are proven in court, penalties for the offence will be determined following a sentencing hearing.” He added Volkswagen owners, dealers, service managers and technicians are not the focus of the investigation. The company, meanwhile, said in a brief statement it is co-operating with the Ontario government and it would not be “appropriate” to comment further. Earlier this year, Quebec and Ontario courts approved a settlement agreement with members of a Canadian class-action lawsuit who bought or leased certain Volkswagen or Audi vehicles with diesel engines caught up in the emissions cheating scandal. It has been more than a year since Volkswagen agreed to pay more than $20 billion to settle criminal charges and civil claims related to the company’s sale of nearly 600,000 cars with “defeat devices” designed to beat U.S. emissions tests. Volkswagen pleaded guilty in the U.S. after software was found in certain diesel vehicles that made it appear as though the cars were producing fewer emissions than they really were. In fact, under normal conditions, the cars emitted 35 times Canada’s legal limit on nitrogen oxides, which have adverse effects on human health and contribute to climate change. About 105,000 of the rigged vehicles were sold in Canada and Volkswagen has a court-certified settlement program underway to buy back the cars and compensate Canadians who owned or leased them. Tony Faria, an auto industry analyst at the University of Windsor, said it’s not surprising that Ontario is laying charges two years after the scandal erupted. “Officials everywhere, not just in Canada but in the U.S., Germany, many other countries where many Volkswagen vehicles had been sold, they’re all still looking into it and at this stage Volkswagen still isn’t finished by a long shot with all of the court cases they have to face,” he said. He said the scandal has affected the entire market, noting Germany and France have announced plans to phase out diesel engines over the next 20 years. |
Creamy Butternut Squash Lasagna (Comments) Lasagna has always been one of my favorite meals. Ooey gooey layers of sauces, noodles cooked to perfection and the crispier corner pieces were always a cause for excitement. Now I've made the perfect vegan, gluten free and low fat lasagna that I just keep coming back to, even when I tell myself I'll try a new recipe this time when I buy the noodles. This heart-healthy recipe come together pretty quickly as it doesn't actually involve making a traditionnal pasta sauce. Just prepare the butternut puree, either purchase it ready made for extra convinience or do like I did and roast the squash in a 400F oven for 30 minutes and let cool. Cut up the veggies and get layering. The noodles I use aren't actually oven ready ones, but I find that the wateryness of the vegetables and sauce allow them to cook in the oven. Although this isnt really a typical summery meal, I find it perfect for the rare rainy days we get here on the west coast, although I've heard the east coast is getting more than it's fair share with some really cool days. This will get you all cozy and ready to face to beautiful rain. Share on Twitter Share on Facebook |
A coalition of conservation groups and others announced Thursday that a historic number of comments and petitions of support have been submitted to the U.S. Department of the Interior in support of Bears Ears National Monument. Despite the entirely inadequate 15-day comment period ending on May 26, more than 685,000 comments in support of Bears Ears National Monument have been collected. “The tremendous amount of public input in such a short amount of time is a powerful demonstration of support for indigenous rights and the places we all hold dear,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune. “Secretary Zinke would be wise to join in support of Tribal Nations and preserve Bears Ears.” The unprecedented number of comments reflect all those who have stood in solidarity to support the efforts and leadership of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and the five sovereign tribal nations involved who led the way to protect the sacred sites and ancestral lands of the Bears Ears region. The announcement comes in the wake of the president’s executive order to review national monuments created since 1996. Sec. of the Interior Ryan Zinke opened a 60-day comment period on all national monuments, but inexplicably limited comments on Bears Ears to only 15 days. The U.S. Department of the Interior denied a request from Sen. Martin Heinrich to extend the public comment period to 60 days and hold a public meeting as part of the so-called “review” of Bears Ears. “Trump and Zinke need to listen to the American people for once instead of corporate polluters. The people have made it crystal clear that they stand with Bears Ears and in solidarity with the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition,” said Kieran Suckling, the Center for Biological Diversity’s executive director. “They will not stand by while Trump and anti-public lands zealots plunder and pillage the country’s most stunning landscapes and cultural treasures for profits.” The total number of comments reflects submissions of supportive comments from members and supporters of dozens of organizations representing a broad array of interests. These comments have been uploaded to the regulations.gov comment docket DOI-2017-0002. Due to the way that regulations.gov tracks comments, the site counts a batch of comments as a single comment, regardless of whether it included 10,000 or more individual comments or signatures. “The people have spoken – more than half a million strong – and 99 percent expect these magnificent lands to be held in the public trust for future generations,” said Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “That’s a mandate to preserve monument protections for Bears Ears and all it means to Americans past, present and future. It’s a resounding call, also, for all of us to respect and collaborate with the Inter-Tribal Coalition.” Tell Congress not to sell our wilderness to the highest bidder: |
Newsweek's Alexander Nazaryan wildly claimed in a Thursday post on Twitter that "racist voter suppression" was the root cause of the statistical tie between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in North Carolina, according to recent poll. The senior writer didn't explain what he specifically meant by his statement, but it could be a reference to a recent lawsuit filed by the NAACP that alleges that several counties in the Tarheel State "disproportionately target[ed] blacks" when they purged their voter rolls. Nazaryan got into hot water earlier in 2016, after he likened Ted Cruz's campaign to the Nazis on Twitter. The liberal writer later deleted the Tweet, and said his smear was "not fair to his totally decent supporters, as much as dislike the man himself." He also revealed how far his "dislike" for the Texas senator went: "Ted Cruz is an atrocity of a human being." Cruz isn't the only 2016 Republican presidential candidate that the Newsweek senior writer has targeted on Twitter. Just before he posted his slanted reaction to the North Carolina poll result, Nazaryan linked to a Tweet by CNN correspondent Ashley Killough, who reported that "Kellyanne [Conway] told reporters ahead of Melania's [Trump's] speech that one issue she would want to take on as FLOTUS is making social media more positive." He then added his snarky reaction: "Would she begin by banning her husband and his supporters from Twitter?" Nazaryan also went after Trump supporters on Friday: |
David Brooks The New York Times David Brooks has a column about inequality today and it's wrong. But it's wrong in a way that helps explain why conservatives have no idea how to talk about inequality. Brooks offers two theories of what sort of problem inequality might be: That people at the top are accruing too much money, and that people at the bottom are getting left behind. Like most conservatives, he wants to focus on the second problem. Regarding the first, he attacks the "primitive zero-sum mentality" that holds "growing affluence for the rich must somehow be causing the immobility of the poor." The thing is, while growing affluence for the rich isn't causing low and moderate incomes to stagnate, they are to a large extent results of the same forces. There is a zero-sum tradeoff between the two, so a zero-sum mentality (primitive or otherwise) is called for. Productive economic activity produces returns to both labor and capital. Over the last few decades, returns to labor have fallen relative to returns to capital. This has promoted sharp rises in wealth at the top and stagnating wage income for most of the public. Because of the declining marginal utility of money, a more unequal distribution of the returns to economic growth is undesirable, all else being equal. The question is, is all else equal? Have there been economic changes in the last four decades that make greater returns to capital necessary for innovation and growth? Or is the shift in returns just an artifact of policy choices on taxes, trade, inflation, and intellectual property that we can reverse without sinking the economy? I think the answer is probably some of each. But "some of each" means there are a lot of policy choices that can and should be made to reduce inequality in a zero-sum manner. For example, Brooks notes "the superstar effect": "in an Internet economy, a few superstars in each industry can reap global gains while the average performers cannot." But this isn't just a fact of life; it's in large part a reflection of intellectual property policy choices. The existence of much larger global markets greatly raises the return to producing a beloved product, whether that's a piece of software or a hit song. Governments could react to this by weakening protections for IP, since IP protections are supposed to be just strong enough to encourage the generation of good ideas. This would be a desirable and more or less zero-sum policy to combat inequality. Instead, industry lobbies have been pushing for strengthening of IP, which will tend to concentrate wealth in the hands of superstars, at the expense of everybody else (stronger IP means higher prices, and therefore lower real incomes.) The growth of returns to capital relative to wages is also driven in part by the fact that we have not had policies that consistently promote full employment. More aggressive monetary and fiscal policies to keep unemployment low, or direct government hiring of the unemployed, would push firms to pay workers more and hold inequality down. These policies would grow the economy overall (at least the macro policies would; direct hiring would depend on execution) but they would also reduce corporate profits as a share of the economy, meaning again that the rise in mass incomes would lead to a reduction in wealth at the top. Policies that promote unionization would also tend to push wages upward, at least in industries with weak competition, such as the public sector, large-scale construction, or airplane manufacturing. And of course, taxes and transfers can reduce inequality. All these policies have economic impacts beyond their distributional changes which should be considered. But adjusting them in an effort to reduce inequality isn't just an exercise in jealousy; it's an exercise in making the economy work for everybody. There are other desirable policies that could raise the incomes of the poor by improving or better using human capital. For example, we could improve transit links between low-income neighborhoods and job centers. Brooks is right to want to explore such policy avenues. But the availability of such policies doesn't mean we can just wave away the zero-sum problems of, and solutions to, inequality. |
On Thursday, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas addressed the parliament of the European Union. Unsurprisingly, his speech placed the blame for the failure of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks solely at the feet of the Jewish state. But in his enthusiasm for assailing Israel, Abbas unwittingly demonstrated that other issues might be at play in the impasse. Just 24 minutes into his address, the Palestinian president veered into explicit anti-Semitism, telling the assembled European dignitaries that “only a week ago, a number of rabbis in Israel announced, and made a clear announcement, demanding that their government poison the water to kill the Palestinians.” As Reuters reported, this “appeared to be an invocation of a widely debunked media report that recalled a medieval anti-Semitic libel.” Jews were accused throughout the Middle Ages of poisoning Europe’s wells, most notoriously during the Black Plague. Such slanders invariably led to the slaughter of Jews, and have resurfaced through the centuries to the present day. Remarkably, no European official has as yet rebuked Abbas for his bigoted remarks, despite the disturbing historical legacy of the libel on the continent. That the Palestinian leader would publicly make such remarks, however, is less remarkable. While the prejudiced pronouncement may seem startling at first glance, it is in fact consistent with Abbas’s long track record of anti-Semitic utterances. Infamously, the Palestinian president’s 1982 doctoral dissertation denies the Holocaust, claiming that the number of Jews murdered has been exaggerated. (He posits one million as a more reasonable estimate.) Moreover, the entire genocide, argues Abbas, was in fact perpetrated by the Nazis in collaboration with the Zionists, whom he dubs the Third Reich’s “basic partner in crime.” Thus, while admitting that the Holocaust did technically transpire, he nonetheless manages to blame the Jews for it. To this day, the PhD is featured among Abbas’s other publications on his official web site, and he has reaffirmed its contents in interviews with Middle Eastern media. Abbas has not only denied the Jewish genocide, he has falsely accused the Jewish state of perpetrating genocide. In September 2014, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Abbas proclaimed that it was “a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.” In fact, the Palestinian populations in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel have actually skyrocketed since Israel’s founding in 1948—as Palestinian media and Abbas’s own government Bureau of Statistics regularly celebrate. Abbas’s latest whopper raises some troubling questions. In April, when former London mayor Ken Livingstone publicly declared that Hitler “supported Zionism,” he was widely pilloried across the British political spectrum, debunked by scholars and the press, and suspended from the Labour party. Yet oddly, even as Abbas continues to make similar and worse anti-Jewish statements in public forums, he has largely been given a free pass by the media and Western leaders. His spurious accusation of Israeli genocide in 2014 at the United Nations, for instance, was not even mentioned in the New York Times report on the speech. This is not simply a question of journalistic accuracy about one man’s prejudice. It gets to the heart of understanding the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government’s policies undoubtedly deserve their share of the blame for the failure of recent peace negotiations. But surely the fact that their Palestinian counterpart is led by an unreconstructed anti-Semite who denies the Holocaust and repeats medieval blood libels also plays a role. Now, it’s not impossible for the Jewish state to make peace with anti-Semitic governments—though few are aware of it today, Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat was a Nazi sympathizer—but it certainly is a lot harder. Tellingly, while Abbas took the time to promote an anti-Semitic libel while in Brussels, he reportedly refused to meet with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, who was also in town, despite European entreaties. For those looking for ways to increase the odds of an eventual Israeli-Palestinian accord, then, pushing back on anti-Semitism from the latter’s leadership would seem a worthwhile endeavor. Watch Abbas’s offending remark to the EU Parliament with simultaneous translation—somewhat distinct from the one used in this article—below: Previous: Mahmoud Abbas: Still a Holocaust Denier Yair Rosenberg is a senior writer at Tablet. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. |
Corbyn cheerleader Paul Mason has joined Momentum, he disclosed today, as internal disputes continued with senior members rejecting claims they had attempted to thwart democracy through “Blairite” manoeuvres. Former BBC and Channel 4 journalist Mason said his decision to sign up was in part to support efforts to implement online all-member ballots which will decide how the group is run. The proposed democratic structure, which would see all of Momentum’s 20,000 members vote on strategic decisions, has proved controversial, with officers on the steering committee publicly criticising the changes. Now supporters of the reforms, which are backed by the group’s chair Jon Lansman, have defended the decision robustly, following a weekend of accusations of “bureaucratic manipulation” and a “coup”. Much of the internal unrest has played out in public, with steering committee members Jill Mountford and Michael Chessum penning public statements about their unhappiness. Christine Shawcroft, a steering committee member who also serves on Labour’s ruling body, supported the one member one vote (OMOV) proposal, which she has described as a “new, inclusive and democratic way of doing things”. Writing on Left Futures – a website founded by Lansman – Shawcroft said that “according to a recent mapping exercise, [some Momentum members] either have no local group to go to, or their ‘local’ group is a 90 minute drive away, so a delegate structure is worse than useless as a way of involving them in decision making.” However, it is the public support of Mason which will prove the biggest scoop for Lansman and his allies. In a 1,500 word Medium post today, the journalist lays out his support for the Lansman-backed OMOV proposal. He says the group “faces two alternative futures: one in which all the negative, hierarchical and factionalist tendencies of the 20th century left are allowed to resurface; another in which Momentum - and ultimately Labour itself - becomes a horizontal, consensus-based organisation, directly accountable to its mass of members.” He adds: “To do this we have to convince a minority of comrades, steeped in the 20th century hard left and trade union bureaucratic traditions, that a layer cake of ‘delegate’ structures and hierarchies is the wrong thing.” “The problem is not ‘entryism'”, writes Mason, “it is a view of politics whereby it becomes the task of a small group to capture and direct a larger organisation.” These arguments echo ones made privately by other supporters of the push for OMOV, who raised concerns about the influence small and well-organised far left groups could have in a delegate structure – with the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL), Labour Party Marxists and the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) all having been critical of the developments over recent days. Mason’s article has been tweeted by both Lansman and Momentum spokesperson James Schneider. While supporters of the reforms, which includes close allies of both Lansman and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, appear in a strong position, the issue has revealed major public splits in Momentum. Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Labour-affiliated Fire Brigades’ Union and a Momentum steering committee member who opposes the OMOV move, told the LRC conference this weekend that Lansman has “questions to answer”. In a email to fellow steering committee members, which was then published by the Labour Party Marxists, Wrack wrote that Momentum is “facing a serious crisis”, and warned of “risks of serious division, of demoralisation, of public embarrassment”. |
Last year I wrote a short book about Jesus Christ. I know that people are surprised to find a hardened atheist writing about such a subject. Some of my correspondents are sure that my intention is evil, and that I will meet my judgment before the Great White Throne (Rev. 20.11, they add helpfully). Be that as it may, and I think it won’t, I know from my experience with previous books that many readers do have an honest curiosity about the author’s point of view. So they sometimes ask me: ‘What do you really believe? What does your book mean? How should we understand it?’ Some writers – apparently William Golding was one – are firmly of the opinion that there is a correct way to read their books and they argue strongly with readers who, they think, have got them wrong. My view is the opposite. Readers may make of my work whatever they please. Some people, indeed, have seen things – connections and patterns and implications – I had no idea were there. If such readers want to persuade others of their interpretation, however, they have to do so fairly and honestly, by reference to the text and not to any pretended secret key or private knowledge. The problem with my telling people what I think it means is that my interpretation seems to have some extra authority and that sometimes shuts down debate: if the author himself has said it means X, then it can’t mean Y. Believing as I do in the democracy of reading, I don’t like the sort of totalitarian silence that descends when there is one authoritative reading of any text. So in general, I prefer not to discuss the meaning of my work. But the book I’ve just published, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, is different from the sort of books I’ve published before. Its protagonist belongs not just to me but to the history and the culture of the past 2,000 years, and the story is not just any story but the foundation story of the Christian religion. It is too important to too many people for me to take my usual line. This time I have to say something about my story and explain, so to speak, where I’m coming from. Christianity formed my mind. I wasn’t an unusually pious child, but I did firmly believe in the God I was told about and I did believe everything I said in the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday. My grandfather, a man I loved and revered, was an Anglican clergyman, and his own example showed me what belief looked like from the outside; he was certain of his own salvation, and of mine too, but entirely without self-righteousness or hardness of heart. I didn’t question what he told me for a moment. I assumed it to be true in the way I assumed there to be an equator and lines of latitude and longitude, which I could see on the map but never actually on the ground or on the water. I had crossed the equator four times by the age of nine, each time at sea, and each time the event was celebrated with a jolly ceremony involving sailors dressed up as King Neptune and people being ducked into the swimming pool. So I knew that grown-ups behaved as if the equator certainly existed, although you couldn’t actually see it; and they did so in serious ways as well as comical ones, because ships were navigated according to these invisible lines. Grown-ups believed that the equator existed, and so did latitude and longitude, and by acting on this belief they brought me safely to land. Why should I doubt them when they told me that God existed (though you couldn’t see Him either), that various improbable events had taken place in the life of Jesus and that I would go to heaven if I believed it all and was a good boy? I believed every word of it. A further reason for its hold on me was that Christianity was transmitted to us in those days in the language of the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Hymns Ancient and Modern. I was always susceptible to the music of language; the rhythms of Kipling’s Just So Stories taught me to read, and I was never daunted by words I didn’t understand as long as I could pronounce them. Indeed, singing or intoning or simply whispering words I didn’t understand was a sensuous delight. I was perfectly comfortable with not understanding much of what I heard in church: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ meant little, but resonated greatly; the line ‘Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb’ from the carol O Come, all ye Faithful was utterly mysterious to me, but delightful to sing. In fact, the traditions and the language of Christianity are so deeply embedded in my memory, in my nerves and my muscles, that not even a surgical operation could remove them. However, memories are not enough to sustain a faith. It was in my teenage years that believing finally became impossible; after I’d learnt a little science, the meaning of creation in six days and conception by means of the Holy Ghost had to be understood metaphorically rather than literally, and once that was done, there was only God himself left. Although I carried on a fairly anguished one-sided conversation with Him for some time, the silence on His part was complete. Nowadays, I’m as sure as I can be that there is nothing there. I think that matter is quite extraordinary and wonderful and mysterious enough, without adding something called spirit to it; in fact, any talk about the spiritual makes me feel a little uneasy. When I hear such utterances as ‘I’m spiritual but not religious’, or ‘So-and-so is a deeply spiritual person’, or even phrases of a thoroughly respectable Platonic kind such as ‘The eternal reality of a supreme goodness’, I pull back almost physically. I feel not so much puzzlement as vertigo, as if I’m leaning out over a void. There is just nothing there. Consequently, the immense and complicated structures of Christian theology seem to me like the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy – preposterously elaborated methods of explaining away a mistake. When it was realised that the planets went around the sun, not the Earth, the glorious simplicity of the idea blew away the epicycles like so many cobwebs: everything worked perfectly without them. And as soon as you realise that God doesn’t exist, the same sort of thing happens to all those doctrines such as atonement, the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, original sin, the Trinity, justification by faith, redemption and so on. Cobwebs, dusty bits of rag, frail scraps of faded cloth: they hide nothing, they decorate nothing and now they mean nothing. ‘But look at the good work the churches have done!’ I hear. ‘Look at the hospitals, the orphanages, the schools! And look further, at the architecture, the art and music they have sponsored and inspired!’ Yes, and all those things are good, and we are better off for their existence. They go some way towards mitigating the evils the churches have done, too: the Crusades, the witch-hunts, the heretic-burnings, the narrow fanatical zeal that comes so swiftly and naturally to some individuals in positions of power when faith gives them an excuse, the sexual abuse of children that seems to have taken place in some of those very orphanages and schools. However, the people who use that argument seem to imply that until the church existed no one ever knew how to be good, and no one could do good now unless they did it for reasons of faith. I simply don’t believe that. But as I say, I can’t escape my Christian background. And I am a storyteller. We write out of what we are; and I had long thought it would be interesting to read the gospels again, and to see if I could tell the familiar story from a different angle. Two things nudged me into action. One was a perceptive comment from Rowan Williams during a public conversation at the National Theatre during the run of His Dark Materials. The Archbishop pointed out that whereas I touched on religion in that story, I hadn’t mentioned Jesus Christ. I agreed, and said I’d better deal with him in another book. The second thing was the publisher Canongate’s series of Myths, a typically imaginative piece of publishing by Jamie Byng, who thought of asking modern writers to retell an ancient myth of their own choice. He asked if I’d be interested in doing one and I thought at once: could this be the Jesus book? And then I thought: yes, it could. So I picked up the Bible again. Actually, I picked up three: the King James, the New English Bible, whose publication I remembered causing great excitement when I was a child, and the New Revised Standard Version. Having no Greek, I thought I should at least triangulate between different English versions to get the meaning clear in my mind. I began there because by far the most important sources for the life of Jesus are the four canonical gospels. The canon of scripture was settled in the fourth century, when the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were chosen by a council of the church to form part of the New Testament. They are the basis for orthodox Christian belief. But there are many other gospels, some of which have been known for centuries and some of which have been more recently discovered. I thought I should look at them, too. One view of these other texts is that of M?R James, the great writer of ghost stories, who published a translation of various apocryphal gospels in 1924. He wrote: ‘People may still be heard to say, “After all, these Apocryphal Gospels and Acts, as you call them, are just as interesting as the old ones. It was only by accident or caprice that they were not put into the New Testament.” The best answer to such loose talk has always been, and is now, to produce the writings and let them tell their own story. It will very quickly be seen that there is no question of anyone’s having excluded them from the New Testament; they have excluded themselves.’ In other words, they’re just not very good. And it’s true: for the most part, the apocryphal gospels in James’s selection have nothing like the clarity and force of Matthew, Mark and Luke, or the poetry of John. They include some remarkable fragments, but also a welter of undistinguished narratives, sayings, exhortations and fairy tales that make pretty hard reading. A different view of the value of the ‘excluded’ gospels comes from Elaine Pagels, whose The Gnostic Gospels (1979) introduced many readers to the texts that were found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. With the knowledge of these new sources (which were, of course, not available to M?R James), she implies that the excluded texts were left out of the canon for another reason: ‘Why were these other writings excluded and banned as “heresy”? What made them so dangerous?’ Some of those other writings are fascinating indeed. But I wasn’t interested in heresy and danger at this point so much as in narrative pure and simple, and I particularly wanted to revisit the stories that were known to me as a child, so I returned to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I considered the gospels purely as stories and I was struck by how unlike most other narratives they are. They’re not biographies, because so much of the subject’s life is left out: instead, the focus is almost entirely on the last year or two of his life and deeds. They’re not novels, with the novel’s interest in psychology and feeling and emotional relationships; and furthermore there is no description. What did Jesus look like? We have no idea. There are no landscapes; there is a storm, but apart from that no weather to speak of, and novelists enjoy weather and use it a lot. In their spareness and urgency the gospel narratives resemble folktales and ballads, except that they have quite a different purpose: to tell us what to believe. The problem is that they tell us to believe different things. John’s gospel tells us that Jesus’s expulsion of the money-changers from the Temple took place at the beginning of his ministry; the other gospels say that it happened just before his crucifixion. At one point, Jesus seems to be telling his listeners to take no thought for the morrow, and at another he condemns those foolish girls who didn’t think ahead and bring enough oil for their lamps; one day he blesses the peacemakers and another he says he has come not to send peace, but a sword. Of course, the church has had 2,000 years to reconcile these contradictions and paradoxes and there is no shortage of smooth and polished interpretations that make perfect sense, if you have a taste for that sort of thing. I preferred the roughness and mystery of the original. Could it have come from a man working out his own thoughts as he spoke? Could there have been another voice close by, ‘correcting’ what the first voice said so as to make it conform to an emerging ‘line’? Then there was the problem implicit in the very name Jesus Christ. Jesus and Christ, it seemed to me, were two quite separate beings. There was the man Jesus, whom the Gospels talked about, and there was the other sort of being, Christ, the Messiah, who featured more prominently in the Epistles. In the letters Paul wrote, he uses the term ‘Christ’ on its own more than ‘Jesus Christ’ or ‘Christ Jesus’, and far more than ‘Jesus’. Paul is clearly much more interested in Christ; by the time he wrote, a generation or so after the crucifixion, the myth was already overtaking the man. In short, it seemed to me that Jesus was a man, obviously a man and no more than a man, but Christ was a fiction. That tied in with what I felt about the other voice ‘correcting’ the Gospels, and the idea began to intrigue me. Suppose there was not one character, but two: how would the story work then? Needless to say, the second character – the Christ – could not be God. I can’t write about things I don’t, at some level, believe in. I’d have to find another way of representing him. At the same time, I wanted this Christ to embody as much as possible of what the church later did to alter, edit and ignore the words of Jesus, and to benefit from his death and his supposed resurrection. What happened as I wrote was something many writers will recognise: a character began to move, speak and think independently of my intentions. This Christ developed in a way I hadn’t expected, and found himself with a human conscience, tempted and torn and compromised. And in the end, what compels him to do what he does is the desire to tell a story, but by that time he’s learnt the hard way that a story may tell the truth, but truth is not the same thing as a story. The story at the heart of Christianity leads to the cross, but it doesn’t end there. The cross has a dramatic visual clarity that accounts for its success as a symbol, but no Christian would claim that this was the climax of the Christian story. The climax is the resurrection. And as to that resurrection, there’s one supreme piece of narrative tact in all four Gospels. We never see the resurrection itself: we only see the supposed consequences. An account of a dead body coming to life and walking out of a graveyard would be squalid, grotesque, bathetic. The confused, contradictory, almost breathless accounts of what happened on the morning after the sabbath when one woman, or two, or three, came to the tomb are vastly superior as storytelling. Do I believe them, though? Yes, in the way I believe the account in the Iliad of Priam’s visit to the tent of Achilles. That is also moving and convincing: when I read it I feel that if that event had happened, it would have happened just like that. But it’s a story, and I think that’s all it is. The great Jesus scholar, Geza Vermes, in his The Resurrection, examines six possible explanations for the empty tomb, finding none of them entirely satisfactory, and concludes that the best way of understanding the event is to think of a ‘resurrection in the hearts of men’. If only Christians had been wise enough to leave it at that! And what of Jesus? I keep thinking of that man who, 2,000 years ago, was betrayed and flogged and put to death. And I imagine this: I imagine a procession of ghostly visitors to Jerusalem in that week before Passover – spirits from the future, ghosts of Pope and priest and prelate and preacher, cardinals and archbishops and elders and patriarchs, in all the panoply of their rank, the chasubles, the albs, the copes, the pectoral crosses, the jewelled rings, the mitres, the tailored suits and the Cadillacs, the gleaming teeth and the bouffant hair; and I imagine that each of these ghosts has the power, should he wish to use it, to embrace Jesus, much as Judas did, but for a different purpose: their kiss can transport him magically at once to Alexandria, or Athens, or Baghdad, or Rome, and thus save his life. And I imagine each of these ghosts looking at the man as he goes about his angry work, denouncing the money-changers, debating with the scribes and chief priests and lashing them with his wit and his scorn, and getting closer every day to the betrayal and the death that each of the ghosts has known about for so long. And I imagine the ghosts whispering: ‘Without this death, there would be no church’; ‘It was God’s will’; ‘He foretold it himself’; ‘I can’t stand in the way’; ‘It’s a painful and sorrowful thing, no doubt, but after all, three days later’; ‘How could we bear to undo all the good we’ve done in his name?’ ‘My grandeur! The magnificence of my cathedral! The splendour of the music in my choir! It is my duty not to give those things up’; ‘He knows better than I do what is good for us all’; ‘No church! The world without a church would be a desolation!’; ‘Without this death, that little dying child I spoke to in the hospital will have no solace’. They look at the man, they see his rough hands and dirty fingernails, they hear the rasp of his voice, they smell a sweet ointment mingled with the sweat from his body, they see the snap and flash of his eyes as he scoffs at the Pharisees; and any one of the ghosts could reach out and save him from the death that’s two days, a day, a few hours away. And for a thousand reasons, for the very best of reasons as well as the worst, each of the ghosts holds back; and proudly or fastidiously, humbly or uneasily, with diplomatic murmurs of regret or with passionate sorrow, they drift back to their own time and the comforts and rituals of the church they know, and abandon the man to his death. That’s the question I’d put to every believing Christian: if you could go back in time and save that man from crucifixion, knowing that that would mean that there would be no church, would you or not? |
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Astiz - the so-called 'angel of death' - said he acted to save Argentina from left-wing terrorism Two former navy officers in Argentina have been sentenced to life for crimes against humanity committed between 1976 and 1983 under military rule. Captains Alfredo Astiz and Jorge Eduardo Acosta were found guilty of involvement in the torture and murder of hundreds of political opponents. They are among 54 people who faced trial for crimes committed at the Naval Mechanical School, or Esma. Astiz, known as the "angel of death", has refused to apologise. "The human rights organisations are groups of vengeance and persecution," he said during the trial. "I will never ask for forgiveness." Both Astiz and Acosta, known as "the tiger", were already sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for other counts of torture, murder and forced disappearance. Campaign of terror Out of the 54 people indicted, 29 were sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison; 19 were given sentences ranging from eight to 25 years in jail; and six were acquitted. "This is much more than we expected," said Miriam Lewin, who survived Esma, a well-known Buenos Aires navy school that was used as a clandestine torture centre. She followed the sentencing with hundreds of activists and relatives of the victims outside the court building. Image copyright AFP Image caption Jorge Eduardo Acosta was nicknamed "the tiger" during the military regime An estimated 30,000 people were killed after a military junta led by General Jorge Rafael Videla seized power in 1976 vowing to rid the country of the threat of communism. During the seven-year campaign of terror, left-wing activists as well as ordinary citizens were illegally detained and killed. They were taken to secret torture and killing centres set up by the military during what became known as the "Dirty War". 'Death flights' Esma was Argentina's biggest secret torture centre. It became a human rights museum in 2004. About 5,000 prisoners are estimated to have been taken there and 90% did not come out alive. Some were killed by firing squad while others were thrown from planes - drugged but still alive - into the Atlantic Ocean. The current trial opened in 2012, focusing on crimes committed at Esma against 789 victims. Image copyright AFP Image caption Hundreds gathered outside the court in Buenos Aires to follow the sentencing on a big screen More than 60 people were indicted, but that number was reduced to 54 after some of the accused died or were judged too ill to face trial. |
Hacking US Voting Machines Is Child’s Play May 16th, 2017 by Steve Hanley Thanks to the embarrassing incompetence of Humpty Trumpty and his virulent assault on America’s political institutions, many people are already looking forward to the 2018 elections as a way of throwing the Trump supporters out of Congress and putting America back on the path of being a true world leader and not a pale imitation of a banana republic. Much of the public anger focuses on deep cuts to programs like the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Social Security, but others are equally motivated by Trump’s obdurate ignorance about climate change. There is a problem with relying on the ballot box to restore order in a time of chaos. It assumes the voting process actually works. A recent article in Think Progress suggests it very well may not, thanks to last-century technology that is almost an invitation to hackers. No less a personage than Josef Stalin, who knew a thing or two about stealing elections, said, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, and Ph.D. student Matt Bernhard have assembled a number of reasons that they say render US voting machines susceptible to outside interference that could affect the accuracy of their tallies. In 2002, after the chaotic presidential election two years before, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act. The legislation provided funding for several private electronic voting machine manufacturers, including Diebold. Voting Machine Companies Are Not Impartial In 2003, Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell sent a fundraising letter to Republicans saying, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.” Republicans predictably pooh-poohed the comment, calling it a free speech issue, but such a clear political preference from the person in charge of making electronic voting machines is inappropriate if not illegal. Today, the industry is dominated by three companies — Dominion Voting Services of Toronto, which acquired Diebold, Hart InterCivic headquartered in Austin, and Election Systems & Software of Omaha. Voting machines today fall predominantly into two categories. Optical scanners can be small, like the ones used at local polls or huge, or like the ones used at central voting centers to read absentee ballots. Direct Recording Electronic machines are touch screen devices that may or may not have a printer attached that makes a hard copy of the votes cast so they can be verified. According to Verified Voting, more than 20% of the DREs in use in the United States lack printers, making it impossible to detect fraudulent activity. Voting Machines Fail To Pass Muster “These machines are just so poorly engineered, the only real way to secure them is to destroy them and start over,” says the University of Michigan’s Matt Bernhard. In fact, their operating systems are often based on obsolete platforms such as Windows 98 or Vista. In 2007, independent investigators audited the voting machines used in California (Premier/Diebold, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia) and in Ohio (ES&S, Premier/Diebold, and Hart InterCivic). In all cases, the machines failed to provide the most basic security against tampering. “Every current e-voting system has serious, exploitable vulnerabilities,” said the University of Pennsylvania’s Matt Blaze and Sandy Clark at the 2008 Hackers on Planet Earth conference. “Serious, practical, undetectable attacks can be carried out by individual voters and poll-workers.” Every attempt that Blaze and Clark made to breach the ES&S optical scanner succeeded. They were able to pick the locks with paperclips. “Tamper proof” seals were removed and reapplied using liquid nitrogen, lighter fluid, or steam. Replacements could also be purchased online. Blaze and Clark found that no passwords were required to recalibrate touchscreens to make some areas of the screen inoperable, preventing a vote for certain candidates. The memory cards in each machine, which are removed and transported to voting headquarters at the conclusion of voting, used data that had not been encrypted. The data cards were not password protected, meaning that anyone could alter the firmware and introduce a virus into the electronic voting system for an entire county or even an entire state. “Every current e-voting system has serious, exploitable vulnerabilities,” says Clark. Blaze summed up the findings this way. “There was a pervasive lack of quality in the implementation (coding and manufacturing) of these systems. Failures were present in almost every device and software module we investigated.” The reviews caused the companies to attempt fixes to the voting machines, but Mark Graff, formerly the chief information security officer for NASDAQ told Congress, “I have no confidence that they’ve mitigated enough threats that we can consider the machines safe.” Does A Paper Trail Solve The Problem? Surely having a paper trail improves security, doesn’t it? Halderman suggests the security a paper trail might offer is largely illusory. “Most states never look at the paper,” he says. “You have a great way to defend against an attack, but you never use it. If even in 2016, we’re not going to look at any of the paper. It might as well not be there.” Even after the allegations of rampant interference by a foreign power in the 2016 election, virtually no election officials have verified the results by tabulating the paper records. “Based on how messy our election system is, even if someone tried to carry out an easily detected attack, we still might not notice it,” Bernhard says. Congress has reacted to the information about how insecure the US voting system is. In February, the Committee on House Administration approved H.R. 634, the Election Assistance Commission Termination Act. Committee chair Greg Harper, a Republican from Mississippi, said the Election Assistance Commission, brought into being by the Help America Vote Act, was “an agency that has outlived its usefulness, mismanaged its resources, and cost taxpayers millions. Bottom line, the agency does not administer elections and the time to eliminate the EAC has come.” He said the agency’s budget of $11,000,000 a year was a waste of money. “The EAC sets federal guidelines for certification of voting systems,” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. “A critical part of those certification guidelines has to do with security. Forty seven states rely on the federal certification program in some way.” Testing and certification of voting systems used to be done by a consortium of state election directors, explains Pamela Smith, president of the Verified Voting Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to “safeguarding elections in the digital age.” That testing used to be done by a coalition of state voting commissioners but the EAC “really professionalized it,” Smith says. “They made it much more stringent and rigorous. There’s a lot of transparency there.” The law to terminate the EAC makes no provision whatsoever to transfer testing and verification of voting machines to another agency. Testing and verification will simply disappear. ’90s Technology In A WannaCry World All of this should be sounding alarms all across Washington DC and in every state as the worldwide WannaCry ransomware attack showed the vulnerability of virtually every computer system on earth last weekend. The US government has yet to determine the extent to which Russia and other foreign actors interfered with the last election, but it seems foolish to ignore that voting machines relying on 30 year old platforms are wildly susceptible to outside meddling. In fact, most teenagers today have the skills needed to alter the way our voting machines operate. Couple that with the conservative hysteria about alleged voter fraud that has lead to aggressive campaigns to suppress voting by anyone who is not a right thinking, God fearing, certified white Republican. The result is that lots of people of good conscience may be disenfranchised at the polls soon, if they have not been already. The right to vote is being hemmed in, abridged, limited, and circumscribed in every way possible today as conservatives plot to consolidate their grip on power. Closing polling stations in Democratic precincts and limiting voting hours are all signs of a concerted, coordinated effort to prevent some members of society from exercising their right to vote. What Can One Person Do? It is not too early to begin making plans for the next election before it is too late. Volunteering for voter registration drives, becoming a poll watcher, or offering assistance for those who need help getting to the polls are all ways that we as individuals can resist the effort to prevent certain Americans from voting. But the best way to resist is simply to vote. It is time to get out and go to the polls. No more hiding behind the illusion that one vote won’t make a difference. If the Trump fiasco has done nothing else, it should have convinced every American that voting is not only a privilege but also a duty. Source: Think Progress | Illustration by Diana Ofosu About the Author Steve Hanley Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his home in Rhode Island and anywhere else the Singularity may lead him. His motto is, "Life is not measured by how many breaths we take but by the number of moments that take our breath away!" You can follow him on Google + and on Twitter. |
Chris Smalling joined Manchester United's injury list by picking up a groin injury in the 2-1 victory at Southampton Former Manchester United assistant manager Mike Phelan says the new approach to fitness under Louis van Gaal could be the reason for the club's injury crisis. United have suffered 43 injuries in five months, and Phelan has questioned the change in role for fitness coach Tony Strudwick. He said: "They've brought in new people with a different way of doing things. "Tony understood the ins and outs of how to keep players fit." Mike Phelan was Sir Alex Ferguson's deputy but left Manchester United when David Moyes took over The 52-year-old served on Sir Alex Ferguson's coaching staff for five years, winning five Premier League titles at United as player and assistant manager. Now first-team coach at Norwich City, he has suggested the intensity of Van Gaal's training regime may have exacerbated an injury crisis that has seen players such as Michael Carrick, Phil Jones, Rafael and and Radamel Falcao face lengthy spells out. Phelan told the International Business Times: "The intensity of training may be one thing - it may be too intense, or not intense enough - but obviously slight changes have been made with the present way of doing things. "What's happened is a continuation of the same players getting injured all the time, so you have to look to the reasons why. I think Manchester United changed their thoughts on the fitness regime, they looked at it a bit differently." Luke Shaw (left) is among United's casualties He pointed to Van Gaal's decision to relieve fitness coach Strudwick of direct responsibility for the first team in favour of a more general role as a key factor. "Tony Strudwick, who was operating as head of sports science, was involved day to day with the first team. "He understood how to keep players ready for competition. Then suddenly they moved him sideways and did something completely different. That may have had an effect. That one area has changed." |
How To Buy An Election With Dark Money How To Buy An Election With Dark Money Every day more and more voters become aware of the huge role money plays in our elections. According to a Washington Post article, the candidate with the most money wins 91% of the time. After all, if people are financing elections with their donations it makes sense that the candidate with the most donations would get the most votes. The problem with this line of thinking is that people aren’t the only ones financing elections. For example, if we add up all the individual contributions (that is money donated by living, breathing people) to Colorado political candidates going back to 2010 we get a total of around $53 million, but donations from various interest groups combined with dark money spending total around $66 million. Take a moment to consider what this means. If the better-financed candidate wins 9 times out of 10, and individual donors make up a comparatively small portion of fundraising, who is really deciding who wins elections? The simple truth is that interest groups are able to target elections in which they can have the biggest impact and spend the money necessary to bring about whatever outcome they desire. This is what we mean when we talk about “buying elections”, it’s not hyperbole. To illustrate just how simple it is to buy an election if you have the money, I’m going to lay out the process step by step. One of the most common ways to buy an election these days is with dark money. Dark money refers to the untraceable funds we often run into when we investigate the money behind a political effort. But how exactly do you use untraceable funds to buy an election? Let’s walk through the process. Step 1 – What’s Your issue? Let’s pretend you want to make it illegal to leave your shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot. In your opinion, the people who refuse to secure their shopping carts properly are the cause of countless dings, dents, and scratches as their abandoned carts inevitably careen into the helpless cars of the parking lot. Your legislators have refused to pass a law to address this issue, so you’re taking matters into your own hands. Step 2 – Get a Pile of Money This step is the simplest to understand, but the hardest to attain. However, if you consider that the top 10% of Americans hold 80% of the wealth, you can see that this is not a problem for a small number of wealthy Americans. It is also not a problem for corporations who often have tons of cash laying around. If you’re like me, you’re not in possession of shareholder money or a part of the wealthy elite…and the parking lot protectors of America don’t have a huge fundraising base…so we’ll just pretend you win the lottery and suddenly have a pile of money, $500,000 to be exact. A half a million bucks isn’t chump change, but it’s not Koch Brothers money either. You will need to be strategic with how you spend it. Step 2 – Find the Elections with the Best Bang for Your Buck You could try to elect a candidate for Congress who would sponsor your shopping cart law, but then your $500,000 wouldn’t have as much of an impact. Why not look at local elections? Sure they aren’t as sexy, but they are much more accessible. A typical winning campaign for a State House of Representatives seat costs around $125,000. It’s a bargain! You can bankroll 4 of these puppies. Step 3 – Locate the Candidates You find 4 candidates running for different State House Districts and set up meetings. During these meetings you will voice your strong desire for a shopping cart law. Candidates are smart and know before they meet you just how much money you have to spend. Given the money you have to offer, it won’t be long before you find 4 candidates who wholeheartedly agree that we need shopping cart legislation, and we need it now. Step 4 – Go Dark Great, you found your parking lot friendly politicians, but there’s a problem. Colorado law only allows you to donate $400 per candidate per election cycle. That’s not going to do any good. How are you going to ensure your 4 politicians win if you can only give them a measly $400 each? Do you really have the same amount of influence as anyone who can scrape together $400? That just seems too fair to be true…and it is. So how do you get around these pesky campaign finance laws? Fortunately for you, politically active nonprofits are not required to disclose their donors AND they can receive unlimited funds from anywhere. You pay an attorney a few hundred bucks to open up a 501(c)4 and dump the $500,000 in there. You can open it in, say, New York and name it “ Shopping Carts Are Dangerous”. Not only are you almost ready to spend, but no one will be able to see that it was us who is doing the spending! Step 5 – Go Darker You’ve covered our trail, but you still have the pesky $400 limit to deal with. No worries, there’s an easy fix. All you have to do is open an “independent expenditure committee” with the Colorado Secretary of State. You have to name and register it too, so you can call it the “No Runaway Carts” committee. Now you can transfer the whole $500,000 into it, and all anyone can see is that there’s an Independent Expenditure Committee called “No Runaway Carts” with $500,000 in it, which came from a New York non-profit called “Shopping Carts Are Dangerous”. From there the trail goes cold. You’ve officially joined the dark side. Step 6 – Spend, Spend, Spend There’s just one last hurdle. Current law not only limits contributions to candidates from people to $400, but it outright prohibits independent expenditure committees from donating to directly candidates. However, and this is a BIG however, independent expenditure committees CAN spend money on behalf of, or in opposition to, candidates as long as they don’t coordinate directly with the candidate. In other words, if a candidate wants to buy a commercial for $20,000 you aren’t allowed to give them $20,000 for it, and you’re not allowed to call them and ask them if they want you to buy a commercial for them. You are allowed to simply buy the commercial. If this seems like a roadblock for your spending, it really isn’t. If you spend $125,000 on commercials, mailers, and other advertisements for each of our 4 politicians they will have a huge advantage over their opponents. You can even attack their opponents directly, this way you get a negative message out and your politicians can say they had nothing to do with it. With your $500,000 you can buy all the things that cost the most money during an election, as long as you don’t directly coordinate with the candidate. When it comes down to influencing the outcome of an election, the prohibition on coordinating with candidates is not a big hurdle. With any luck, all 4 of your candidates will win. With bad luck, 3 of the 4 will win. Either way, when they are sworn in you’ll be there to remind them just how important parking lot safety is, and if necessary, remind them just how important your help was in getting them elected. You can even draft their first bill for them about parking lot safety. Conclusion There you have it, you’re the proud new owner of 4 elected officials. While I’ve tried to keep this topic as light as possible, it’s important to realize that these dark money groups really do hold an enormous amount of sway over our politicians and real people suffer for it. You may have never heard the term “independent expenditure committee” before, but you probably have heard of super-PACs. They are the same thing. They are both the mechanism used to inject large quantities of untraceable money into our political system in order to rig an election. In our example, the 4 politicians you met with ended up having a tremendous advantage. This advantage was cemented the moment you decided to spend money on their behalf. That decision is what decided the elections. As much as we like to think that debates and policy positions matter, they often don’t. Many, if not most, elections in this country are decided in the fundraising meetings that happen before the first door is ever knocked or the first flyer is ever mailed. That is what we mean when we talk about buying an election. Since 2010, over $43 million in dark money has flooded into Colorado Elections. There are currently 60 active independent expenditure committees operating in Colorado. If you found this information valuable please consider becoming a member of Clean Slate Now so that we can continue our work to reduce the destructive influence of special interest money in politics. |
The deteriorating situation in Guantanamo - where a mass hunger strike has been unfolding for over two months - continues to raise the eyebrows of human rights groups. Prominent activist Medea Benjamin discusses with RT why the prison is still not closed. Twenty-four hunger strikers are now receiving enteral feeds, with three people "being observed in the detainee hospital," according to Guantanamo Bay Public Affairs Director Lieutenant Colonel Samuel E. House. His most recent report put the official number of hunger strikers at 100. Although Guantanamo Bay remains open over four years after Obama pledged to close it, the President continues to voice his disapproval of the detention center. In his first public response to the ongoing hunger strike, Obama said it was "not a surprise" that there are "problems in Guantanamo." "It is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed,” he said in an April 30 statement. The next day, Obama announced that he was considering hiring a new State Department official to oversee options for a future transfer of the prison’s detainees once it closes. Earlier this month it has been revealed that keeping Guantanamo Bay running is costing the US some $150 million a year. Medea Benjamin, author of the book “Drone Warfare," shared her thoughts with RT on why the Obama never kept his promise to shut down the notorious detention facility. RT:President Obama pledged to close Guantanamo when he assumed office in 2009. But over four years later, it’s still open. Why? Medea Benjamin: People around the world are saying if the President of the United States says the prison should be closed, why is it still open? That’s a very logical question to ask. I think that the politics in the US is so partisan that the President is concerned already about who is going to be running in the next presidential election as the democratic candidate, the Congressional elections, wanting to make sure that as many democrats as possible win. The President doesn’t want to be seen as soft, and national security issues. He doesn’t think the American people care enough about this issue. And so he prefers to keep the status quo. The status quo means that desperate men are dying and are being tortured by being force-fed. That is not a status quo that we, the American people, should allow, if we want to continue to call ourselves a democracy. RT:The prisoners' hunger strike has been going on for over two months now, but there's very little information coming from most media outlets. So what's really going on there now? MB: The prisoners who have had a chance to get messages out to their lawyers have described the terrible situation that they are in being strapped down for several hours having these tubes stuffed down the nose and into their stomach. They say it feels like a razor going down their bodies. This is another form of torture, and these prisoners have already endured years of torture in Guantanamo. RT:The hunger strike doesn't seem to be obtaining the prisoners' goals, especially since you mention they are being force-fed. So why are they continuing to starve themselves? MB: I think these inmates, or prisoners, as really what we should call them, are desperate and many of them are determined just to keep the hunger strike going. It’s difficult for them, because some of them are in isolation and they don’t know if other prisoners are continuing the hunger strike; are they being told that the other prisoners had stopped the hunger strike? I’m sure it’s a tremendous dilemma for them. But a number of those who have been able to speak through their lawyers have said they would rather die than live in these terrible conditions without ever knowing if they are going to be released. RT:President Obama says he still believes the prison should be closed. Do you think he was sincere in his statement last month? Does he have the power to do more than he is? MB: Obama is lacking the moral courage, he’s lacking the political will, he blames Congress, but really he has the power to release those prisoners who have already been cleared for release; demand a speedy and fair trial for the other ones and bring them into the US and close down the shameful prison of Guantanamo. We just have to force him to do it. We, the American people, the global community. RT:What should be done with the prisoners in the unlikely event that Guantanamo is shut down sometime in the near future? MB: One is to take the majority of prisoners, 86 of them, who have already been cleared by the US government – that means they have been found not to be guilty, not to be harmful to anybody – they should be released. The majority of them are from Yemen. The government of Yemen says they are totally prepared to take them back. There are other prisoners from countries like the United Kingdom that could certainly handle the return of prisoners. So those cleared for release should be released. The others should be sent to a prison in the US and should be tried in US courts just as other criminals are tried, many of them convicted and sentenced to life in prison. |
The U.S. will not be running out of cheese anytime soon, as inventories are at their highest levels in 32 years. That’s according to the latest data collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which show cheese stockpiles in March were the highest for the period since 1984. More than half of it was made up of American cheese, reported Bloomberg, while Swiss cheese stands at about 2%, and the rest is labelled as “other.” The reason lies across the Atlantic Ocean. Dairy product exports from Europe have been increasing over the last two years, and cheese prices have been steadily falling in tandem. The result is a global oversupply in milk and dairy products. That means the U.S have taken advantage of dropping prices and the weakening euro to buy up more European-made cheese—imports of EU cheese rose 17% last year, reported Bloomberg, and combined with an overproduction of milk by America farmers to combat similarly low prices, and it has resulted in extra cheese. “It’s been difficult for them [U.S.] to export, given the strong dollar, and they’re sucking in imports,” Kevin Bellamy, a global dairy market strategist at Rabobank International, told Bloomberg. “Where the U.S. has lost out on business, Europe has gained.” The worldwide glut in milk, however, is hitting European farms hard. Dairy farmers from Germany to Ireland are facing huge losses from low prices, and the European Milk Board has called for EU policy-makers to set up an effective program that will restrain milk production in exchange for financial compensation. “The deficit situation will continue, with the only increases being in debts and number of farms closing, but not in urgently needed investments in farms,” said Romuald Schaber, president of the European Milk Board, as reported by Dairy Reporter. |
WARSAW, Poland -- A Polish toddler found unconscious in sub-freezing temperatures hugged a teddy bear and called for his parents after only four days of treatment, his mother said Thursday, while his doctor described the boy's recovery as "a miracle." Adam -- aged 2 years and 4 months -- had spent an unknown number of hours outdoors in southern Poland after going missing from his grandmother's house in Raclawice, near Krakow, spokeswoman Magdalena Oberc of the University Children's Hospital in Krakow said Thursday. Authorities said he was discovered face down in leaves wearing only socks and a pajama top as temperatures hit minus 7 degrees Celsius (19 Fahrenheit). His body temperature was only 12.7 C (55 F) and his heart was beating extremely slowly when hospital treatment began early Sunday. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, a child's normal temperature ranges from 36-38 degrees C. Dr. Janusz Skalski, a heart surgeon at the children's hospital, said Adam's quick recovery had surprised everyone but he will still need rehabilitation therapy to help restore his full physical and mental abilities. A tear going down her cheek, Adam's mother Paulina told TVN24 he said "Mama! Tata!" (mom, dad) and hugged a teddy bear they had brought him from home. "Everything is OK now. All we want is to have him back with us and hugging us as tight as he can," she said. The boy's father Mateusz said when Adam opened his eyes and looked at him "it was like he was born again." Nurse Wioletta Dyrcz told TVN24 that Adam had said "yes" when asked if he wanted breakfast and had cottage cheese with tea. "He breathes on his own, moves his head, follows us with his eyes and smiles," Dyrcz said. "He's playing with cars and watching children's videos." The boy's father said his son may have been sleepwalking when he left the house. Polish media say the grandmother remains hospitalized in a state of shock. |
Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian physician and infertility expert who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Three of his daughters were killed in a 2009 Israeli military strike, an event he described in his book I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey. He is now an associate professor of global health at the University of Toronto. Medical doctors treat diseases, not symptoms. Symptoms are just consequences of the actual disease. Treating them only hides the disease – and not for long. It does not eliminate or manage it. Patients sometimes care only about those symptoms, because symptoms can be very painful and patients want the symptoms to go away. And sometimes patients just don't want to admit they have a disease. Imagine an uncaring or incompetent doctor who is content to treat the symptoms, to give the patient no more than a Band-Aid. The patient leaves smiling, but comes back a week later feeling just as bad, if not worse: the symptoms have returned, or new symptoms have emerged. Worse is when the symptoms return much later – weeks, months, years – at which time the disease is so advanced that it has done irreparable, or worse, fatal damage. Story continues below advertisement A disease is an impairment of an organism, caused by external or internal elements that are harmful to that organism, and is recognizable by its symptoms. If so, hatred is a disease. Hatred is a disease caused by extended exposure to particular harms: humiliation, harassment, violation, deprivation, torture, dehumanization. Hatred of another is also caused by being hated by that other and by being exposed to hate speech from that other. One of most common symptoms of hatred is violence. The patient suffering from hatred responds to the source of those harms with physical or verbal violence. The doctor must diagnose the patient as suffering from the disease of hatred and the patient must admit that the diagnosis is correct. The doctor must then dispense the correct treatment. Many Israelis and many Palestinians suffer from hatred. They display acts of extreme violence and atrocities to one another. Let us start with the case of Palestinians as suffering from the disease of hatred, caused by the occupation of their land, the violations, harassment, and deprivation of human rights that follow from it. Most of the doctors in charge of treatment, or at least capable of treatment, are only concerned with the symptoms, and only care about ending the violence. Anyone who witnesses Palestinians showing the symptoms of hatred, whether they are also the object of that hatred or not, are the doctors in question: not only Israelis, but the world community. The Band-Aid treatments prescribed by most of the doctors are bombs and more deprivations. These treatments might stop the violence momentarily, but it returns twofold, threefold; for the disease has not been treated. While the doctors were focusing on the symptoms, that is, on violence, this cancer named hatred has multiplied and spread. And that is only part of the story. The violence and other harms Palestinians expose the Israelis to now cause many Israelis to experience hatred toward Palestinians in return, if they already do not. More violence ensues. Hatred begets violence; violence begets hatred. Hatred is a robust disease that repeats itself not only in its host, but also in its object. Tragically, it also repeats itself in many who witness it. Instead of displaying the courage to name the disease and try to treat it, individual members and states of the world community choose sides; they feel the humiliation or deprivation suffered by whatever side they identify with, and themselves became infected with hatred. Even the more peaceful individuals who are resistant to hatred suffer, distressed by the never ending cycles of hatred and violence. They are pushed to tears by the violence even in hate speech. Violence and hatred go side by side and are a result of the exposure. The Palestinians are suffering of occupation for about five decades. Palestinians in Gaza Strip are facing the third war against Gazans in less than six years. How much can people tolerate? How much more killing, suffering and pain can Israelis do and Palestinians endure. There have been hundreds of strikes recently by Israel, with more than 50 innocent people killed and 500 severely wounded. Gaza Strip is being bombarded. It is war against women and children, who constitute 70 per cent of the Gaza Strip population; it's human genocide. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement I feel anger and pain as history repeats itself. The blood of my three daughters killed in 2009 did not dry, and the wound did not heal. For that we need the courage to admit we suffer from a disease that is antithetical to respect, justice, and peace. Battles should be directed against the occupation, which is the threat and enemy to all of us as – Palestinians and Israelis. Israel's leadership must be courageous and admit its failure to end the conflict by military means. The way is to end occupation As passionate and competent doctors we must first contain the disease. To contain it, we prescribe the violence on both sides to stop; but even violence stopping on one side will begin the containment. One thing we can prescribe is cessation of the larger violence that comes from occupation and bombing. That will also stop some of the reciprocal hatred and violence, and contain hatred on both sides. Another thing we can prescribe is resistance to hatred. The patient will have to be courageous and just, and not allow hatred to take over when she or he is exposed to violent acts. We may then begin to cure the disease. The cure requires that the peoples treat each other with respect, an end to human rights violations, deprivations humiliations, harassments, blaming, name-calling and hate speech. Our responsibility as citizen-doctors is to make the correct diagnosis, and be compassionate and courageous enough to write the correct prescription. We must not allow our patient to ask for Band-Aids, and we must not be tempted to prescribe Band-Aids; we must also be critical of doctors that do so. |
Still no word on David Beckham's future, and we're not expecting anything definitive until next week, but that hasn't stopped the reports in the French media, which assumes the Galaxy midfielder has (or will) accept Paris Saint-Germain's 18-month, $18.7 million offer. If that happens, might Ronaldinho take his place? MLS-News, a French website that covers MLS, claims the Galaxy has revived its interest in the Brazilian superstar, who apparently wants top leave Flamengo for MLS. Ronaldinho has been linked to the Galaxy for some time, and there were ample reports in Europe and Brazil that he was bound for L.A. before signing last January with the Rio de Janeiro-based club following stints at Paris-Saint Germain, Barcelona and AC Milan. He would make close to $10 million a season, his French-based agent, Michael Wiesenfeld, told the website. “We've been in negotiations since this summer,” he said. “And they are intensifying.” The Galaxy does not comment on prospective players. Ronaldinho, according to Brazilian reports, hasn't been paid in months by the sports management agency Traffic, which is responsible for about 68 percent of his $627,000-a-month Flamengo salary. He has scored 21 goals in 52 matches for the club, all competitions. Beckham's contract with the Galaxy expires Dec. 31, and although there are options in England and elsewhere, he figures to sign with PSG or re-sign with L.A. French dailies Le Parisien and L'Equipe reported Wednesday that Beckham had reach an agreement with PSG -- “He Said Yes!” was Le Parisien's front-page headline -- with L'Equipe, an influential sports newspaper, claiming Beckham would sign in early January followed by a “star-dusted” celebration on the Champs d'Elysees and at the Hotel de Ville, Paris' city hall. The English star's representatives called the reports “premature” speculation. Reports in Europe claim PSG, which holds a three-point lead in France's top-tier Ligue 1, is dismissing head coach Antoine Kombouare to bring in Carlo Ancelotti, a former Italian national-teamer who has coached Juventus, AC Milan and, until he was fired last May, Chelsea. Ancelotti is one of the most respected coaches on the planet, and his hiring could boost the club's appeal in Beckham's considerations. |
Good morrow and good day Summoners! After several hundred games and coming in contact and befriending more than one hundred summoners, I've decided to make it my goal to make a guide to making friends on League of Legends. As an avid gamer, I feel that I know the general gist of what players want and need in a friend in LoL, it's just hard for them to throw the first buck into the conversation hat, so to speak. Follow this guide closely, for it will make all of your friendship needs come true. Whether a casual gamer or a High ELO competitor, I feel that everyone can take something away from this guide. During Champion Selection - Always be sure to autolock your champion upon entering, ensuring you get your favorite champion. This can be applied to several, if not all, occasions including: when a new champion comes out, when you've just bought a new champion, or when you decide someone else should play something useful to the group. - Keep in mind that Crowd Control (CC) is very important to a team. This means that your team should worry about it and not you. Who has time to CC when you're dealing out insane amounts of damage with your new dps Corki or Ezreal build? Who needs a stun when you stack Bloodthirsters or Archangel Staffs and dps boots? Someone else can pick up the slack, and if they don't, simply berate them in Champion Selection. - Don't pick a tank under these circumstances: Your team has no tank, your team politely asks you to tank, or if the current day of the week ends in 'y.' - It's common for teams to be imbalanced with AP or AD champions, but this is easily remedied. Since you're already locked in with your champion, your team has no choice but to pick something different. This gives them tactical advantage while you plan safely to yourself how you're going to feed your Mejai's or Occult. ~ Quote: If someone on your team picks the champion YOU wanted, then promptly insist about how TERRIBLE they are until they give it up. If they dont give it up, then sit in spawn insulting them. You would have carried the game and won with that champion, so its his fault if your team loses. (Courtesy of Gonna be trolled) Welcome to Summoner's Rift/Twisted Treeline Quote: If you accidentally break the rules and end up with flash, never under any circumstances use flash to cross a natural barrier. Only flash in straight lines and well within enemy field of vision. You are not running, you are merely proving your dominance by making them walk into your awesomeness. (Courtesy of eXeRaziel) Quote: "Disregard all semblances of grammar and spelling, even if it causes you to type slower. Remember, if your team can understand you, you're too coherent." (Courtesy of Andmcmuffin2) Quote: Don't forget to type in "GG afk until 20 then surrender" if they autolock, lock in, or attempt to justify the following champions: -Any champion you perceive to be "UP", as the summoner is gimping your team. -Any champion you perceive to be "OP", as the summoner is jumping on the bandwagon and is new to the champion. -Any champion that was free the previous 2-3 weeks. OP covered that free champion lockins are auto-loss, but don't forget bad players will often buy champions after they are free and continue to lose games with them. Conversely, justify your Ashe autolock. -A carry. You're the only carry your team needs. Tell them to be a tank or support. Just make sure it isn't one of the UP or OP flavor-of-the-months, or one of the new champions, or one of the older ones that RIot hasn't updated in a few weeks.(Courtesy of Slogra) Quote: Always run with Revive, no matter what. It's vital to your team that you are alive at all times, and 9 minutes is a very good timer for that! (Courtesy of Tigercule) Walking Off the Spawn Quote: If you selected the wrong runes/masteries at champion select, Don't! The game is already lost. Just afk at spawn, surrender at 20 and try again.(Courtesy of Valtegor) Early Laning Phase Quote: "You don't need smite to jungle. You should take teleport instead. Tell your team if they want a gank they need to buy and place a ward for you to teleport to. If they refuse, be sure to tell them how bad they are." (Courtesy of Valtegor) Quote: If you see a lone squishy opponent at half health standing next to a bush trying to B, he's a free kill. Charge in and claim your gold. (Courtesy of Valtegor) Quote: If you are standing in the brush before the minions arrive and your opponents come into the same brush, you stay and fight and score a double kill. If you die, it's because your ally ran away and you should berate him for it. if they die, then they are clearly a horrible player and shouldn't have jumped in so recklessly. If you both die, then both of your deaths are his fault. Remember, you're the best. (Courtesy of volcanotechie) Quote: Make false threat like pretending you work at Riot and will ban them if they don't obey. You are the most important person on your team. Make everything you can in order to be respected at all cost! (Courtesy of ichi the killer) Quote: Don't EVER buy wards or ORACLES, they are a waste of your money and of no strategic benefit to the team! (Courtesy of Avennite) Quote: Don't ever sacrifice yourself to save somebody who is on a huge kill streak or would loose a lot of stacks on their mejas or ocult. Letting them die will teach them! (Courtesy of Avennite) Quote: Be sure to ping a LOT. Don't expect your team mates to catch on after one, or even five pings. The more you rapidly ping something, the more likely your team will respond. Ten pings is never enough, fifteen is okay for beginners, but a true pro (which you are) will ping any tower, champion, neutral or spot of brush in excess of twenty-five times. (Courtesy of Neptune) Quote: I also reccomend pinging towers, inhibitors, or a nexus that's under attack, even when all allied champions are dead. The more you ping it, the more amped up and ready to focus your team will be when they finally respawn. (Courtesy of Neptune) Quote: Remember to always obtain golem buff with Smite as a jungler when the mages on your team just used all their mana to try and get it. It's your jungle, and you are the best player around, you need to show them who is in charge here. (Courtesy of Archeer) Quote: If you are jungling, never gank. Your teammates are obviously not skilled enough to work with you, so don't bother trying. Simply farm experience and wait for someone to come into the jungle. (Paraphrased, Courtesy of Lord of Asia) Quote: If the other team is CC heavy, avoid buying Merc Treads. Buying them would imply you're afraid, and signs of weakness are unacceptable. (Courtesy of Tigercule) Mid-Late Game Quote: If you happen to glance at your minimap and don't see a single opponent, this is the perfect time to go steal their red or blue buff. They probably all went to shop at the same time and will never expect it. (Courtesy of Valtegor) Quote: After you win a team fight for your team and score an ace, this is a perfect time for you to clear important objectives like your wolf and wraith camps. After all, there are no more champions for you to kill for gold until they respawn. Try not to attack towers too soon, or the game might end before you finish your build. (Courtesy of Valtegor) Quote: If you're in a teamfight and a tank "accidentally" takes one of your kills (because you know he did it on purpose), yell at him and say how bad of a player he is for taking your kill. Teleport to spawn and go afk because you aren't going to play with noobs like him. (Courtesy of volcanotechie) Quote: Don't let yourself be intimidated by that carry uber fed on the other team. Keep trash talking, you'll end up intimidating them and you can build on that on your way to victory. If you don't win, make sure to post on GD that X champion is OP and can't be countered. (Courtesy of ichi the killer) Quote: If you team's average level is 2 lower than the other teams, instigate teamfights at every chance. Since the enemy will not expect it, the element of surprise will make up for the difference in levels. (Courtesy of WhisperV) Quote: If you go afk at minute 6 since your jungler doesn't have a[n] orcale or your teammates fed 2 kills already. Be sure to do it right. Don't close the client, but insult your team at all time. If they recover because of your awesome motivation be sure to charge back in and take all [the] credit. (Courtesy of AcheronHades) Quote: Go for the tanks first. It's their job to soak up damage, so after they're dead, they'll have no defense!(Courtesy of TemptingPanties) Quote: If you happen to be dying a lot because of your team's failings, buy a stacking item. You'll get stacks, which will increase your solo presence against the enemy team. Your stacks will turn the game around. (Courtesy of Tigercule) Victory/Defeat This is the point of the game when you've gone through the loading screen and seen what champions you're up against. There are a few things you must keep in mind though.- If the summoner has a skin on their champion, that instantly means they are good with said champion. The same goes doubly sure for a skin that is no longer in the store or is too expensive for you to spend on. Anyone who owns the Riot Girl Tristana skin is a noob and probably has never played this champion. My advice if they're on your team? Ragequit.- If there is a free champion in the loading screen, dismiss any threat of them, as they're likely bad. If the free champion has a skin, proceed to defecate your pants, as you've probably already lost.- Pay close attention to the enemy team's summoner spells. If more than one of them have the teleport spell, instantly insinuate the team is premade and dismiss this game if it is a loss, or gloat endlessly if you win.- A champion with heal is a noob. Insult them when they use it.- Flash is stupid, don't pick this spell.- If someone on the enemy team is playing a champion you're familiar with, inform them they are playing with the wrong summoner spells, and also don't forget to berate their item build if it is even slightly different than yours.~ If upon entering or anytime during the game you notice that a character on your team is from a different country, instantly distrust them. They don't understand what you're saying obviously, what other country learns English anyhow? (Paraphrased.) If a character secretly knows English but refuses to speak it when not in an EU server, they are instantly upon what I like to call, "The **** list."~ Speaking of speaking,~ If your team happens to give you any negative feedback for a champion you've picked being Overpowered or Underpowered, simply tell them this is your first trial with this champion. This may rise skeptics, but simply tell them to trust you. This will put their mind at ease, and feel free to dominate, winner. (- If you had the idea you were going to take the middle lane in Summoner's Rift, starting heading that way. If someone is already ahead of you, don't switch lanes. Instead, tell them to leave. This will show off your dominance early game, people will know that, even though the other champion and summoner is a capable mid, you are better. Do not give the idea you are weak. If they refuse to move, do the same. At some point, one of you will leave, and it won't be you! If there are two mid lane characters, insult them in all chat. This will let the other team know you were the first one there, and are obviously the greater of the two individuals.- If you're playing a jungle character, start at the blue buff without fail. If you get ganked, complain in all chat that the other team is a bunch of 'cowards and ruffians.'- Check the bushes, but take your time in doing so. This will build the element of surprise.- If you have a jungler, try and get the solo lane, even if you don't have a solo lane character. Nothing screams surprise like an Evelynn defending her tower by herself. If you get killed at your tower, ping your tower repeatedly until someone goes, if your tower dies, blame your jungler for not ganking enough.This is the most important phase of the game. This is the time when you can score many kills, not assists, but kills. Only second placers get assists.- Don't farm minion kills. Those get you so little gold it's not worth wasting mana or health. twenty gold is nothing compared to three hundred.- Engage often, mana is not an issue. If you have enough enough mana for an initiation, that's enough.- Use your summoner spells at the most opportune moments: flash tower diving an enemy Sion at 50% health, ghosting to get to your lane faster when it's already covered, and using your clarity to restore your own mana and not your laning partner's.- Get kills. You're obvious a better champion when fed. There are many ways to get kills, but the best way is to wait for your teammates to take them down to low HP and use your ultimate to finish them. Keep in mind you are the most important person on the team, your teammates will understand, your numbers will reflect your skill.- If you have to, and if you have the advantage, attempt to kill other enemy champions on your own. This can mean blowing all of your summoner spells, but it's easily worth it. Remember that these kills are yours and if another champion on your team kills them, be sure to let them know violently that they have stolen your kill. The point of this game is to get kills and money, let them know that they will lose if you don't get fed.- If you end up dying a lot, don't blame yourself. Your deaths were unnecessary and obviously could have been prevented with a gank or a teammate's CC ability. (See this is where other teammates should pick a support or CC based character) All of your deaths are your teams fault. If a champion has just been released within the last week, blame the new champion and call them overpowered. If the champion has come out after October 27th 2009, they are obviously overpowered and deserve a nerf. Go let Riot know.- If a teammate ends up dying a lot, berate them. Let's use a number crunch, if the champion dies once in their lane, quietly mutter to yourself that they are noobs. If the champion dies anymore times after this, complain that they are feeding and accept no excuses from them. They are obviously bad. Be sure to let your opposing team know in all chat.- Keep an eye on your lane. If an enemy champion from your lane ends up moving to another lane and ganking there, don't worry. If your teammate complains about this, let them know they should watch the map more often and refuse to call anymore mias.- If a jungle champion attacks you in your lane and kills you, angrily announce why there was no mia.- If a character from the opposing team disconnects, assume it's a rage quit and laugh in all chat. This will make the enemy team hate themselves internally. Nothing is better than breaking up a team.- If a character from your team disconnects for some reason, deny this champion of sympathy and assume they left with malicious intent. No one leaves a game of LoL for a righteous reason. If they happen to disconnect, steal their minion kills, they don't deserve them.- If you happen to disconnect during a game, don't come back. Someone must have hacked your computer, you're too professional for the game so they decided to kick you out.~ To emphasize, berate your team members in ALL chat, not in team chat. This will give the other team the idea that all of your team's failings are not your fault. (~ A good way to win is to trick your enemy team into a ruse. Tell them the new ultimates are tied to the alt+F4 keys and the new dance command is just D. This will force them to quit or waste their spells. Fool them with your guiles. (So, you're about fifteen minutes into the game or longer, and at this point hopefully you're fed. If not, it's probably your team's fault.- In teamfights, push a tower away from your team. This will keep them distracted while you farm precious gold. Your team doesn't need help, if they do, they're bad and will lose.- Also in teamfights, don't forget to spread out your damage evenly to all champions, especially if you're playing a single-target dps champion. This keeps the enemy team from getting too cocky. Focusing only leads to the enemy team focusing on you in turn. You don't want to die, right?- Initiate. Then yell at your tank for not initiating sooner.- Save your shields or summoner spells to save yourself from losing teamfights. Your other teammates can save themselves, obviously.- Get the blue buff while the teams do the dance in mid lane to get ready to start a team fight.- If you end up dying, blame your tank for not keeping people off of you and for having a stupid build. Also blame your other teammates for not killing the other team fast enough.- If one of your teammates happens to survive a losing team fight, hold the entire game on their shoulders. If they die defending a tower, yell at them for being bad.- If you happen to be the only teammate left during a team fight, spend their entire respawn time telling them they suck instead of going to defend your tower. This will confuse the enemy team, thinking you're planning a decisive ambush.- While in team fights, don't back out of an enemy's AOE ultimate. This will surprise the enemy team, showing them you don't fear the constant damage you are sustaining. This is an easy way to demoralize the enemy team. By showing them you're courageous enough to stand in their ult means you have no reason to fear them.- Chase often, especially into enemy territory. That kill is everything.- When pushing the enemy nexus, chase the enemy team onto their spawn platform. You are the dominant one on your team, and it's time to show the other team this aspect.~ Remember that no matter when you die, no one on the opposing team can take you 1v1. They're obvious cowards and need to bring help in order to take you. Let the other team know they are weak and outwardly taunt them to come at you. (~ Have all the buffs at all times, but never jungle. If your jungler complains, simply call them bad. If they were good they would have the buffs themselves. Constantly instigate the Baron buff. (~ If you disagree with anything another Summoner says or does, be sure to report them after the match. Remember, you're the best, meaning you're right. (The end of the game, whether you win or lose, there is something to be said here.- If you lose, stand by your nexus and dance, this will show the enemy team you don't care and their win will be tasteless.- If you win, stand by their nexus and taunt and laugh, this will demoralize them further, showing them you're the best player here. Feel free to call them bad, or noobs, regardless of the closeness of the game.- Upon leaving the game, stick around in the results area for a short while. Berate the enemy team (or your own if you lose), if they decide to talk back, say something insulting and leave. This will boost your ego and destroy theirs. And since you've left before they can respond, you've won. Feel free to crack open an ice cold Graggy Ice, you winner you.This etiquette guide brought to you by Kárma, Summoner and Etiquette Professional. Feel free to add to this list, as I may have forgotten some important tips.Edit:Edit:Edit:Edit:Edit: |
Office worker Kim Byung Jin, 35, has noticed something new on the pavement near Seoul's City Hall on his way to the office. It is a crossed-out circular sign showing a walking man looking at a smartphone in his hand and the words: Stay safe when walking. The message is part of a new campaign by the Seoul city government and the National Police Agency to encourage road safety in a country with a smartphone penetration rate of more than 80 per cent. Mr Kim, who first spotted the sign last week, said it was a good idea, but it was not enough to convince him to put his phone down. "Walking around looking at the phone has become a habit for so many people. We are free to do so and no one seems to realise the danger in doing so," he told The Straits Times. How other cities are handling it STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Two Swedish artists designed and put up triangular signs across Stockholm last November showing a man and a woman walking with their heads bowed over their phones, to urge people not to do so. The unofficial signs caused a "viral stir" and gained approval from Twitter users as well as the city's subway operator, according to local newspapers. ANTWERP, BELGIUM Antwerp gave smartphone addicts their own "text walking lanes" last year so they would not bump into other pedestrians. The idea came from local mobile phone business Mlab, which observed that many smartphones have ended up broken when pedestrians collide. Officials said the lanes could be made permanent if proved to be effective in reducing the number of accidents. AUGSBURG, GERMANY Augsburg installed ground- level traffic lights at two tram stations earlier this year to remind pedestrians to stop and look before they cross the tracks, after a series of accidents caused by smartphone zombies. Residents were divided on the merits of the blinking lights, which officials have yet to decide whether to install at other stations. REXBURG, IDAHO, UNITED STATES Idaho town Rexburg was among the first in the United States to impose a US$50 (S$68) fine on anyone found crossing a street while texting on a phone. The law was enacted in April 2011 and signs were put up all over the city to remind pedestrians not to text-walk. New Jersey followed suit in March this year, with a new "distracted walking" Bill that penalises smartphone zombies with 15 days in jail, a US$50 fine, or both. CHONGQING, CHINA China's first mobile phone lane, a 3m long walkway for text-walkers, was introduced to a tourist spot in Chongqing city in 2014. It drew mixed reaction, with some people praising it while others said it was "pointless", according to the China Daily newspaper. Chang May Choon This is an attitude that the Seoul city government hopes to change, given a sharp rise in traffic accidents involving smartphone users. The figures speak for themselves. Such accidents have more than doubled over five years, from 437 in 2009 to 1,111 in 2014, in tandem with the increased use of smartphones from 2 per cent of the population in 2009 to 83 per cent last year, according to industry data. In hyper-wired South Korea, smartphones not only connect people via social media, but they are also a main source of news and entertainment for people on the go. Smartphone zombies - or pedestrians whose eyes are glued to their touch screens - are a common sight on the streets of Seoul. Many also have earphones on, further putting themselves and other road users at risk. A study by the Korea Transportation Safety Authority showed that pedestrians would normally notice sounds from cars or other sources from a distance of 14.4m, but the figure is halved for smartphone zombies, reducing their ability to react to potential dangers. Schools have banned mobile phones since 2012 in a bid to prevent addiction and traffic accidents, and to encourage students to focus on their studies without the distraction. Nearly two weeks ago, following the footsteps of other major cities around the world that have acted against smartphone zombies, Seoul started putting up 300 no-smartphone-when-walking signs around five densely populated, accident-prone areas. These include areas around City Hall, the Gangnam and Jamsil subway stations, Yonsei University and Hongik University. Out of these, 50 are triangular road safety signs attached to lamp posts or traffic light posts, which show a man looking at his smartphone almost colliding with a car. They also carry the message: Beware of smartphone while walking. The other 250 are circular signs plastered on pavements. Mr Seo Seong Man, the official in charge of the scheme, said this is a pilot project to remind citizens about the dangers of using their smartphones when walking. If it leads to a decrease in the number of accidents, the authorities will consider designating them as official road safety signs, Mr Seo added. The Korean media, however, has questioned the effectiveness of the signs, citing observations of people who blatantly ignore them or fail to notice their presence. This reporter counted, within the space of two hours, at least 50 pedestrians who were using their smartphones, oblivious to the new signs, at a major pedestrian crossing near City Hall last Friday. Singaporean student Wun Cheng Mun, 23, who has lived in Seoul for the past two years, thinks it will take more than a few signs to change people's behaviour. Noting that she has seen many people dashing across the road without checking for vehicles before looking up from their phones to realise suddenly that the traffic light is in their favour, she said: "If the people crossing the road are not paying attention to cars, why would they notice a sign?" The authorities should instead "try to increase awareness among children and teach them how to use the roads safely", she added. Mr Kim said imposing some form of punishment, like a fine, might work better, but added that it might be hard to enforce. "The desire for change must come from within but, right now, no one really thinks texting while walking could be dangerous," he said. |
Hong Kong billionaire is giving $180,000,000 to any man willing to marry his daughter Chinese businessman, Cecil Chao, made his billions developing luxury high rises in Hong Kong. He is desperately seeking any man to try and woo his daughter into marrying him. “He is known for making outlandish statements such as the time he was quoted by the Hong Kong media for saying he had bedded over 10,000 women in his lifetime.” Most famous of all his public announcements was in 2012 when he offered $60,000,000 USD in the form of a “dowry” (which is a parental transfer of money or property) to whichever man could turn his daughter straight. He came back in 2014 upping the ante to $120,000,000 USD. And now he’s back to say the bounty is now $180,000,000 to who ever can get the job done. |
Beaver Nation is disappointed. No question, the term “disappointed” is a major understatement of how the Oregon State community feels after the first three games of the season. Coach Andersen has put it out there that nobody is more frustrated than himself. I hope this is true. Not because I wish for Coach Andersen to suffer complications due to a season-long period of extremely elevated blood pressure, but because he might get desperate enough to make some changes. Coach Andersen needs to re-evaluate his approach to the game. Go back to the very beginning and challenge every assumption he’s made going back from the off-season until now. It is pretty clear that the assumptions and the approach he has been working with are failing him. Malcom Gladwell, the famed economist and and author, wrote a book about underdogs titled David and Goliath. One anecdote that Gladwell used to describe how underdogs can be successful is a story about a girls basketball team in the Bay Area. The savvy coach, recognized that his team wasn’t the tallest or most skilled, so he implemented an incessant and harassing full court press. This hid the fact that other teams should have been far superior due to better talent and years more of experience and practice. This brand of basketball wasn’t traditional or pretty, but the team overachieved and won a bunch of games they shouldn’t have. There is no question that Oregon State struggles to attract blue chip recruits. The state as a whole shares this burden. The Portland Trail Blazers are notorious for failing to land big-name free agents, and that’s the big city. The schmucks (Oregon) found a way to differentiate themselves through the use of Nike’s branding team - but even the schmucks had to alter their approach at times in order to stay relevant. For all his quirks, former Coach Chip Kelly often changed his team’s playing style and went against the status quo. Going for it on fourth down? Commentators loved to call Coach Kelly an idiot if it failed, but there is a bunch of data that supports the aggressive approach of going for it. It was different, exciting to watch, and ultimately (to my dismay) successful for the schmucks. For all the lack of perceived talent on this Oregon State team, it simply is not an excuse for the uninspired play that fans have had to endure. Coach Andersen has many players that would be starters on other PAC-12 teams. The question then essentially becomes, “so why do we suck so bad?” Coach McGiven stated earlier this week that the schemes are more-or-less okay, it’s a matter of missed assignments. I’m sorry, but if you are having missed assignments play-after-play-after-play, maybe there is a larger issue with the scheme and/or game plan. In other words, maintaining the mentality that after a million, “if we had only made the block”-esqe assessments, there is a deeper root issue that needs to be addressed: how about implementing a game plan and calling plays that are more forgiving of a missed assignment? The spread offense developed largely at schools that struggled to have the strongest and most powerful teams. Instead of struggling to beat the big-dog teams with the best talent and athletes, the spread offense changed the approach to create different angles and spaces that might provide better opportunity to a disadvantaged team. In other words, the spread originated as an attempt at changing the playing field and being more forgiving to less talented teams. Let’s be clear, I’m not advocating for Coach Andersen to roll out a new offense on Saturday. I am simply pointing out the obvious that drastic changes are needed to level the playing field. Same goes for the defense. I don’t expect Coach Clune to change to a 4-3 against WSU - especially given their Air Raid offense - but I am looking for a drastic change in defensive calls. A tweak here or there is not enough. Through three games, the Beavers have zero sacks and Oregon State ranks 128th out of 130 teams nationally in scoring defense. Maybe it’s time to re-think the three man rush and call safety blitzes every other down. Coach Andersen needs to take a step back and realize that minor tweaks will not placate a fan base that may have already given up on the season. People are looking for dramatic change in all aspects of the game. How the offense is run (like actually running Ryan Nall more than seven times), to how the defense runs (like running after the opposing QB for a sack rather than running after opposing players headed to the end zone). I’d be happy to lose to Washington State if the Beaver offense tries to run the ball with their plethora of talented running backs 80% of the time (serving the dual purpose of putting the ball in the hands of our most talented position group as well as potentially shortening the duration our defense has to stay on the field). I also wouldn’t be opposed to shorter, quick passes being executed. I like Coach Andersen as a person and a leader of the Oregon State football team. That being said, I’ve been disappointed with his ability to execute game plans, make in-game adjustments, and get the most out of his players. There’s still time to turn things around this season. It starts with accepting that this team is more than just a few plays away from being successful. Big fundamental changes are needed. The worst that can happen is that we lose in a different way. |
A domestic disturbance call at an East Texas home includes a police report that a woman used a dead catfish to smack her sister-in-law in the face. Lufkin police on Tuesday said nobody has been charged amid conflicting stories from a husband, his wife and his sister. Sgt. Mike Shurley says no one was hurt in Sunday's incident. Investigators are trying to determine what sparked the fight. Officers were summoned after a woman allegedly used a fish to slap her sister-in-law in the face, the brother and sister argued and he asked his sibling to leave. Shurley says the sister called police to report being assaulted. Shurley says the man was detained on an outstanding traffic warrant but was no longer in custody Tuesday. His name wasn't immediately released. Copyright Associated Press |
Ten years ago, a young and unassuming British-Azerbaijani, who'd recently had a spiritual awakening, released an album that catapulted him to stardom. Sami Yusuf, now 33, is known throughout the Muslim world for his spiritual songs about Islam. At the peak of his career, following the release of his 2005 album "My Ummah", he was heralded as "Islam's biggest rockstar". For many years, Muslims have been yearning for an alternative to the spiritually devoid content of popular mainstream music. An inevitable outcome has ensued: the beginning of the Islamic music industry. The industry, however, is still in its infancy, with a small amount of artists competing and only one major record label, Awakening Records. Music, however, is a controversial topic in Islamic jurisprudence, with many conservative Muslims rejecting its permissibility. In 2006, for example, journalist and former Taliban captive Yvonne Ridley (a convert to Islam) lambasted Yusuf in an open letter that went viral. The hysteria Yusuf was creating among his Muslim female fans was a step too far for Ridley. This mania "must be creeping around the globe and poisoning the masses", Ridley said. Despite this zeal to condemn Islamic music, it was the deeply nuanced and vast nature of the Islamic tradition with its multitude of interpretations and applications that has made its growing approval possible. But the staunch opposition to Islamic music is symptomatic of a deeper problem. According to Dr Mohammed Fahim, a London-based imam, with the growth of Wahhabi Islam in the 20th century, the movement began to fight art in all its forms. Music is allowed in Islam, he says, providing there isn't any vulgarity or obscenity in the singing or dress - something many Muslims, see as a truism. Now is an exciting time for the Islamic music industry. Muslim artists are entering into new terrain and have the power to dispel negative stereotypes about their religion. With perhaps more fame and, indeed, inner happiness, than he would have found in the US, Maher Zain, who came through the US music industry and worked with the likes of Lady Gaga, is today the most well-known Islamic musician worldwide. Boasting 10 million Facebook followers and more than 100 million views on Youtube, his transition from secular music to religious, appears a worthwhile move. On November 3, Zain, 32, performed to a packed hall at The Troxy in London. As he walked onto the stage, wearing trendy attire, colour-coded in blue and black, he was greeted by rapturous applause and screams by his female admirers. Singing songs for an hour about peace, unity and God, the show was the final stop in a 12-city concert tour of the UK and Ireland organised by the British charity Human Appeal in aid of Syria. Yes, some girls screamed, and yes, light sticks were waved rhythmically in the air while Zain performed. But there was an underlying feeling of warmth, positivity and it was all carried out, in the most part, in a dignified manner. For those few hours, Muslims of all ages, including renowned Islamic scholars who were present, seemed to forget about their worries, they smiled and felt a sense of shared community spirit. The 12-city tour - which also featured Awakening's artists Raef and Harris J - is evidence of Islamic music being on an unstoppable upward curve. Indeed, as the Islamic music industry grows, it is producing many new, exciting artists. London-born Saif Adam, 28, has worked with the likes of Ed Sheeran and Tulisa Contostavlos but is now rising to prominence among Muslims worldwide. He has just released his debut album, Heart, inspired by the love he has for his religion. Adam's success is representative of change, with mainstream companies beginning to recognise and endorse him. Now is an exciting time for the Islamic music industry. Muslim artists are entering into new terrain and have the power to dispel negative stereotypes about their religion. Whether it is American Muslim artist Mo Sabri's viral song "I believe in Jesus" or Zain's songs about peace, never in Islamic history have Muslim singers commanded the ears of their co-religionists worldwide, had devoted fans, and sold multi-platinum albums, as is the case with the likes of Zain. Until recently, Islamic music, often referred to as nasheed - now a slightly outdated term - was poorly made and badly marketed. Now we see an industry that is growing, diversifying and experimenting to fit in with the times in which we live. There is no problem with people being against Islamic music. Muslims have the right to believe Islamic music is haram [forbidden] and differences of opinion in religion are healthy. But Islamic music is here to stay. Omar Shahid is a freelance journalist specialising in religious affairs. He has written for The Times, Guardian, Independent and the New Statesman. He blogs at: omarshahid.co.uk. Follow him on Twitter: @omar_shahid |
April has showered us with a ton of Android games, many of which are revivals or straight-up ports of notable releases on the PC and console platforms. There are more than a few awesome mobile-style games as well, so you've got a lot of variety to choose from in this month's best of the best. What follows is our picks for the top crop of Android games in April, in no particular order. XCOM®: Enemy Unknown The fact that XCOM: Enemy Unknown has been released for Android gives me hope for mobile gaming. Not just because it's a fantastic turn-based strategy game in its own right, and not just because it's a resurrection of an almost-forgotten game style with fantastic production values. No, I'm hopeful because it's a full, AAA console and PC release that's been given a faithful Android port in less than two years. Aside from lowered graphics and the lack of multiplayer, every core element of the original Enemy Unknown is preserved for the touchscreen. In XCOM, you play the commander of an elite human fighting force holding back an alien invasion. You command a team of up to six individual soldiers in the field, trying to out-maneuver and kill seemingly endless waves of aliens in turn-based combat. Positioning and choices are key: it's possible to end the mission with no deaths, but if one of your soldiers takes too much damage, he's gone forever... and so are his skills and equipment. The permanence of death makes each decision a tense one (and incidentally it will force you to learn to use the save function). Back at the base, you'll advance the story and make choices on how to use your resources. Should you buy new fighters to shoot down enemy ships, or upgrade your weapons for more effective tactics on the ground? It's up to you, but if you choose poorly, you might lose support from nations in your coalition and end your game before the story does. XCOM costs ten bucks, and you'll need some powerful hardware to run it. That's pricey for a mobile game, but compared to the $60 cost of the console version when it launched, it's more than reasonable. The app was not found in the store. :-( Go to store Google websearch Hopeless: Space Shooting The original Hopeless was a cute and terrifying sojourn into twitch gaming, forcing players to both tap quickly and be mindful of their surroundings. The second game in the series moves things to space (where no one can hear you squeal), but this isn't just a change of wallpaper. In addition to new weapons and enemy types, Hopeless: Space Shooting takes advantage of multi-touch hardware in a commendably unique way, allowing your tiny minions to shoot multiple weapons at once with a single multi-fingered tap. You control a collection of tiny, terrified little marshmallow peep creatures, each armed with a laser against the gigantic alien monsters outside their tiny circle of light. The monsters will reach in and eat one of your quivering people periodically, unless you're fast and accurate enough to shoot 'em dead. The challenge comes from the fact that new peeps will also come in from time to time - if you're not careful, you'll shoot them too, killing a hapless victim and losing a chance to bolster your own numbers. Hold out until you can evacuate however many peeps you have left. In addition to the Day-Glo color scheme and multi-touch shooting, Space Shooting adds new weapons that can spice up gameplay and interesting power-ups. Unfortunately, the IAP-powered structure of the original game is preserved, despite the fact that the sequel is paid. You can grind the game to get the upgrades without paying, but the "emergency blobs" come in at random, and not very often. Groundskeeper2 Orange Pixel has made its name with simple, effective, old-school games with surprisingly tight touch controls. Groundskeeper 2 is a sequel to an incredibly simple browser game that was created in almost no time, but the second go-round has been given a much bigger and more impressive treatment. It's a 2D side-scrolling shooter that borrows heavily from "roguelike" RPGs. Your job is to shoot the bad guys. That's about it. There's a story underneath the pixelated carnage and screen-filling attacks, but it basically boils down to "shoot all the dudes, collect stuff, make better guns and armor, then go shoot all the dudes again." That's not a bad thing with a simple game like this, and the stacking weapon upgrades combines with charming 8-bit locales should keep you interested enough to keep playing. Though the game's graphics are decidedly low-fi, the action is constant and relentless, so it all evens out in terms of gameplay. Groundskeeper 2's on-screen controls are tight, like all Orange Pixel games, but you have other options as well. The game uses hardware controls for the NVIDIA SHIELD, Xperia Play, MOGA controllers, and the Green Throttle controller. It's two bucks with no in-app purchases, but if that's not cheap enough for you, there's also a free version with advertising. Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition Baldur's Gate was a genre-defining game that helped lay the groundwork for dungeon crawlers for decades. And surprisingly, the mouse-driven user interface from the original PC game makes a great transition to touchscreens, especially tablets. The game is set in Forgotten Realms, a sub-section of the much-loved Dungeons and Dragons universe. After a frustrating collection of development delays, it's finally available on Android for a hefty $10. Baldur's Gate is a standard top-down role-playing game, but the sheer density and variety of its story and combat makes it worthy of consideration for any fan of the genre. The original graphics have been spruced up for HD hardware, and though the somewhat rusty mechanics of the series will take some getting used to, once you're in, the massive 60-hour primary story can suck you in. If that's not enough, the developers have thrown in some of the original expansion packs as in-app purchases (the core mechanics of the game have not been altered except where necessary for UI purposes). RPG gamers who were weaned on Pokemon and Final Fantasy probably won't enjoy the top-down, real-time combat in Baldur's Gate, but if you've played Diablo, The Witcher, or similar games, you should be able to get into the swing of things. A few optional add-ons include professional voice recordings and expanded character portraits. Dead End A zombie driver game? In MY best-of roundup? It's more likely than you think. Dead End earns a spot on this list for bringing a unique style and outlook to both racing games and undead gore-fests, something that should be commended among a never-ending parade of "me too" zombie games. The combination of grindhouse aesthetic and an old-school, LCD Game and Watch color pallet makes Dead End one of the most visually appealing racing games on Android, and you don't even need high-end hardware to play it! https://youtu.be/8tMW-jEsYDE You are a lone survivor in a zombie-infested wasteland, and your tricked-out hot-rod is your weapon of choice. The objective is to run over as many zombies as possible while driving from an over the shoulder perspective, in a manner that will be familiar to anyone who remembers the days before polygons invaded racing games. Killing more zombies and avoiding hazards will grant you cash for upgrades to your ride. Dead End is a free game, but the only in-app purchase is a single $2 option to unlock the whole thing. That's how you utilize IAP the right way. The game does use currency as a means of progression and upgrading, but there's no push to exchange real dollars for fake ones. Everyone who's a fan of the overstuffed zombie genre should check out this one, if only for the unique visuals. The Walking Dead: Season One Another zombie game? Hold up, skeptics - this isn't your typical run-and-gun mindless bullet-fest, this is Telltale's The Walking Dead, an adventure game that's received as much acclaim on PCs and consoles as the TV and comic series of the same name has. Not to be confused with the two licensed action games that are already available on the platform, this game is all about story and decisions, not twitchy actions. After a period of exclusivity on OUYA and Amazon, it's finally available to all Android players. You are Lee, an escaped criminal who's trying to survive with the orphaned Clementine in a zombie-infested America. But the undead are only half of your problem: the living survivors of this apocalypse are just as dangerous as the walkers, and you'll have to cooperate or conquer to see the end of the story. The decisions you make are given weight thanks to full cutscenes with impressive direction and voice acting. The Walking Dead is available for all Android devices running Gingerbread or higher, but it is a port of a PC game, so you'll need decent hardware to play it to the fullest. The game has support for SHIELD and other hardware controls. The first episode is free, but you'll have to pay five bucks each for the following chapters (which is pretty reasonable next to the pricing for the original game). Abyss Attack Holy tapdancing cows, my eyeballs! The shoot-em-up genre has had its flashier entrants over the last ten years or so, but Abyss Attack takes the cake in terms of sheer visual splendor on Android. The combination of a neon color palate and a deep-sea setting (you pilot a sci-fi submarine instead of a spaceship) makes for an incredibly unique game. Gameplay is two-dimensional, but the 3D graphics and lighting effects are some of the prettiest and most unique that we've ever seen in this type of game. Technically Abyss Attack is "endless," in that there are no set levels or end goals, but it will throw a boss attack at you every once in a while. Powering through the endless waves of underwater baddies will help you find new weapons and power-ups for your battle sub, allowing you to go further and deeper. Six different submarines help to shake up the action. The game does have the typical free-to-play trappings of in-app purchases with a currency-focused upgrade system, but we've seen worse implementations. The more annoying bit is probably agreeing to the EA end user license agreement (mobile publisher Chillingo is owned by the gaming giant). Still, Abyss Attack is absolutely worth a look for space shooter fans. The app was not found in the store. :-( Go to store Google websearch Honorable Mentions That's all for April. Don't tell anyone I did this, but because you're a good reader and took the time to look at this filler text at the end of the article, I'm going to tell you that there's big Android gaming news coming up later this week. Now technically I'm not supposed to say that, but if you keep quiet, I'm sure no one will come into my house and kidna |
The next episode of DJ Kicks comes from Jackmaster. The Numbers cofounder and charismatic Glaswegian delivers an honest journey, unearthing a serious passion for the obscure boundaries of house and techno. Featuring exclusive tracks from Tessela, Alcatraz Harry and Denis Sulta, Jackmaster AKA Jack Revill went through multiple attempts before he picked his final selections for the mix. "I was in the Caribbean DJing on a cruise ship that had no internet and got a call with the deadline. I went straight to my cabin on the boat and started picking out tracks on Rekordbox. The boat docked in Miami and I left my record bag in a taxi. I lost everything. My computer, all my USBs and new records. Once I got to Glasgow I bought a new computer, salvaged what music I could from old machines but most importantly delved deep into my record collection to find some obscure and forgotten bits that would do the CD justice. I holed up in the studio and managed to get the tracklist down within about a week, which is very quick for me. I thought it was solid but I listened to it on the plane and really hated it. So I went back to my old flat where my whole record collection is and started again. I probably did four or five different versions till I arrived at something I was really happy with." This precision is what has made Jackmaster one of the most in demand DJs over the past few years. From humble beginnings in Scotland running events, his has been a grassroots movement to dominate the bills of some of the best electronic music events across Europe and America. The Numbers club night he cofounded a decade ago has forged a tight-knit and loyal scene in Glasgow and fruited a revered label that has seen the likes of Jessie Ware, SBTRKT, Rustie, Hudson Mohawke and Jamie xx all having released material. Jack has also hosted a series of shows for the globally renowned BBC Radio 1 allowing his charming personality and instinct for judging an audience to unite, a formula that continues to elevate his status as a world class DJ. "The mix is influenced heavily by how I used to DJ at the first party I ever promoted, named Seismic, and another named Monox which was a straight up techno night where I was a resident from the age of 17. And although it wasn't my plan, it turned into a kind of tribute to the cities that really formulated me as a DJ: Detroit, Chicago and Glasgow." The musical foundations of these cities are deeply embedded in the mix, as is Jack's knowledge from his first job working at Glasgow's infamous Rubadub record shop. "There are a couple of wee secret weapons on there that are stolen from the guys at Rubadub, and obviously tracks Q1.1 by Basic Channel and the M-Plant bits I picked up from them too. The rest is stuff I found myself or on mates labels or produced by friends." Jack's loyalty and appreciation for his peers and roots is strongly evident in his actions. He still resides in his hometown of Glasgow and has spoken frankly about the role his career has played in his own personal journey. "Music was my escape when things were bad at home. Music was the bond that brought me and my best friends together, particularly Spencer who taught me how to DJ and who I'd hang out with every day mixing records. Music became my drive to do something with my life." DJ Kicks is a testament to that journey Jack embarked on as a young teenager and a symbol of how far he has come. A well-considered and seamless course that plots his early influences and cements his status for years to come. "I think it's different to what a lot of people would expect from me, but for me it was important to do something honest and something that sets the record straight in a way. Some people think I'm a dubstep DJ, some people think I just bang out classics, but neither of those are true. I try not to be too purposely idiosyncratic when selecting music. It's kind of contrived. I want to educate people but never compromise my vision. I just want to play good music and tell my own story." |
• Social media outrage over event, for which some tickets cost £170 • Icke, known for his controversial views, labels move a ‘disgrace’ Manchester United have cancelled a planned show staged by David Icke at Old Trafford on Friday evening because of the former television presenter’s controversial views. An Evening with David Icke, for which some tickets cost £170, caused a backlash against United on social media regarding the club’s agreement to allow it. The 65-year-old booked a suite at Old Trafford through an associate with his name being kept anonymous. A United spokesperson said: “The booking was made by a junior member of staff who was unaware of Icke and his objectionable views. The event has been cancelled.” Icke, who played professional football for Hereford United between 1971-73, has made a series of allegedly antisemitic comments and is an alleged Holocaust revisionist. He had previously attempted to stage the evening at Manchester’s Lowry Hotel, with that venue also cancelling once it found out his true identity. David Icke (@davidicke) Manchester United you are a disgrace - football club cancels tonight's David Icke book-launch dinner at the last minute on the say-so of ultra-Zionist hate group and freedom-destroying Labour MP https://t.co/CCtT89EfSq @ManUtd @KateGreenSU @UKLabour pic.twitter.com/BvVngSjRL9 After leaving the BBC in 1990 where he was a sports broadcaster, Icke became a Green party spokesman but became known for his conspiracy theories and controversial opinions. Icke responsed on Friday afternoon to United’s decision to cancel the event, describing it as a “disgrace,” adding: “football club cancels tonight’s David Icke book-launch dinner at the last minute on the say-so of ultra-Zionist hate group and freedom-destroying Labour MP.” |
Synopsis This title was released in November 2017. It is exclusively available to buy from the BF website only. "10/10 ‘The Tenth Doctor Adventures: Volume Two’ perfectly capturing the settings, senses and tone of the era. For a whole generation of fans this will be an essential buy. Hopefully, the one that drops them into the rabbit hole of Doctor Who on audio." Blogtor Who "David Tennant, Billie Piper, and Camille Coduri bounced off each other so effortlessly that it’s like they’ve never been away." SciFi Pulse "More than a decade on, this volume recaptures the wit and the pace of the Tennant/Piper pairing and both seem to slot happily back in their roles." Cultbox 2.1 Infamy of the Zaross by John Dorney When Jackie Tyler takes a trip to visit her old friend Marge in Norwich, she finds her holiday immediately interrupted in the worst way possible - an alien invasion! The infamous Zaross have come to take over the Earth. Or have they? After Jackie calls in the Doctor and Rose to deal with the menace, it soon becomes clear that this is a very unusual invasion indeed. The Doctor is about to uncover one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the galaxy. And if he can't stop it an awful lot of people are going to die. 2.2 The Sword of the Chevalier by Guy Adams 1791 and the Doctor and Rose get to meet one of the most enigmatic, thrilling and important people in history: The Chevalier d’Eon. She used to be known as a spy, but then she used to be known as a lot of things. If there’s one thing the Doctor knows it’s that identity is what you make it. Choose a life for yourself and be proud. Mind you, if the Consortium of the Obsidian Asp get their way, all lives may soon be over... 2.3 Cold Vengeance by Matt Fitton The TARDIS arrives on Coldstar, a vast freezer satellite, packed with supplies to feed a colony world. But there are cracks in the ice, and something scuttles under the floors. Soon, Rose and the Doctor encounter robots, space pirates and... refuse collectors. As Coldstar's tunnels begin to melt, an even greater threat stirs within. An old enemy of the Doctor puts a plan into action - a plan for retribution. Nobody's vengeance is colder than an Ice Warrior's. Limited to just 5,000 copies and available exclusively from bigfinish.com, this lavish book-sized box set includes exclusive artwork, photography, articles, a one-hour documentary featuring interviews with the stars and production team – alongside a bonus documentary examining the worlds of Doctor Who at Big Finish. There are interviews with David Tennant and Billie Piper in this podcast. Written By: John Dorney, Guy Adams, Matt Fitton Directed By: Nicholas Briggs Cast David Tennant (The Doctor), Billie Piper (Rose Tyler), Camille Coduri (Jackie Tyler), Rosie Cavaliero (Marge Ellmore), Beth Lilly (Jess Ellmore), Guy Henry (Ikron), George Watkins (Tanan / Steve), George Asprey (Leader), Nickolas Grace (Chevalier D’Eon), Tam Williams (Christopher Dalliard), Mark Elstob (Joxer / Butler), Lucy Briggs-Owen (Hempel / Dancer / Duchess), James Joyce (Darcy / Groom), Keziah Joseph (Lorna), Maureen Beattie (Brona Volta), Sean Biggerstaff (Callum Volta), Anthony Stuart-Hicks (Management / Bert) and Nicholas Briggs (Lord Hasskor / Commander Slaan). Other parts played by members of the cast. Producer David Richardson Script Editor Matt Fitton, John Dorney Executive Producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs |
Gary Gold has also had spells as head coach at London Irish, Newcastle Falcons and Bath Director of rugby Gary Gold is to leave Worcester Warriors at the end of the season and take over as head coach of the USA national team. The 50-year-old South African joined Warriors in January this year and guided them to Premiership safety. Gold signed a new one-year deal in April and will see out his contract with Warriors, who are bottom of the table after five defeats from five. Chairman Bill Bolsover said he was "disappointed" to see Gold leave. But he said he "fully understood" his desire to coach at an international level. "We are working with Gary to ensure we can appoint a director of rugby who is capable of building on the good work he and his coaching team have done this year, and someone who is able to take us forward as Gary has done," added Bolsover. "We are confident Gary will be able to oversee a successful season for the club before he takes on his new position." Worcester are bottom of the Premiership table on one point, with their last victory coming against Bath in April last season. Gold added: "I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at Sixways and my focus will remain on Warriors until the end of the season, where I hope to leave the club in a strong place to ensure it can be successful in the long-term." |
Queen Elizabeth II visits the Corps of Royal Engineers at Brompton Barracks in Chatham, Kent to celebrate their 300th anniversary on Oct. 13, 2016 in Chatham, southern England. (Photo11: WPA pool photo) The United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II became the world’s longest reigning monarch on Thursday, following the death of Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej. He had been on the throne for 70 years. The 90-year-old British royal, who has been Queen for 64 years and eight months, became the United Kingdom’s longest-serving monarch ever last year, when she surpassed Queen Victoria, her great-great-grandmother. Here are the other longest-reigning monarchs: Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah, 49 years Brunei's Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah arrives to the National Convention Center, the venue of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summits in Vientiane, Laos, on Sept. 7, 2016. (Photo11: Nyein Chan Naing, European Pressphoto Agency) The 70-year-old has ruled the tiny southeast Asian nation as the absolute monarch for 49 years, since Oct.4, 1967. Bolkiah, who had an estimated wealth of $20 billion in 2011, is also prime minister of the oil- and gas-rich country. The Sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said al-Said, 46 years Oman's Sultan Qaboos bin Said salutes during the military parade in the capital Muscat, marking the Sultanates 43th National Day on Nov. 18, 2013. (Photo11: Mohammed Mahjoub, AFP/Getty Images) The 75-year-old is the longest-serving monarch in the Arab world, having ruled since July 23, 1970, when he overthrew his father in a palace coup. The sultan, who has no children or brothers, has left a sealed envelope to be opened if an agreement on his successor cannot be reached within three days of his death, according to the Middle East Eye, an online news site. Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, 45 years This monarch, 68, has been king of the Zulu nation in South Africa for almost 45 years, rising to the throne in December 1971. There are an estimated 11 million Zulu people living in South Africa, making up about 22% of the population. His role is largely ceremonial, although he has great influence and receives government funding. Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, one of the longest serving Zulu Kings, waves to the crowd during South Africa's Heritage Day in Durban on Sept. 24, 2016 (Photo11: Rajesh Jantilal, AFP/Getty Images) Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, 44 years Denmark's Queen Margrethe II looks up before she plants a tree in the Luther Garden in Wittenberg, Germany, Oct. 2, 2016. (Photo11: Jens Meyer, AP) Known in her country as "Daisy," Margrethe Alexandrine Þorhildur Ingrid, 76, became monarch Jan. 14,1972. A succession law passed in 1953 that enabled females to ascend to the throne if they did not have a brother made her the heir at age 13. Her motto is "God’s help, the love of The People, Denmark’s strength." Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi of Sharjah, 44 years Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohammed bin Saqr bin Khalid bin Sultan bin Saqr bin Rashid Al Qasimi, 77, became ruler of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates on Jan. 25, 1972. Having studied in England, Sharjah, Kuwait and Egypt, he taught English and math at a school in Sharjah in the '60s and later became the UAE's education minister. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, 43 years Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf waves behind a Swedish flag in Wittenberg, Germany, Oct. 8, 2016. (Photo11: Jens Meyer, AP) The Duke of Jämtland became the ceremonial king of Sweden in September 1973 at the age of 27, succeeding his grandfather after the deaths of his parents. Every year on Dec. 10, the king presents medals to Nobel Prize winners at the award ceremony in Stockholm. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2eaQaqs |
It was just a matter of time before we would see a cross between Google Glass and a consumer oriented brainwave reading headset. After all, both are wearable and fit snugly on your forehead. Combining their forces in one ultra-futuristic gadget would make it possible to display your focus, attention, and relaxation in real time – right in front of your eyes. Thanks to Walnut Wearables – a team so far existing only as a YouTube account – we’re one step closer to our imminent cyborg future. The mysterious team is working on a minimal EEG device that’s designed to work with Google Glass. Named Walnut, this EEG sensor would be designed specifically for Google Glass to display the users’ brain activity – focus, attention, relaxation – in real time, just like ‘common’ brain-computer interface headsets, but adding for example the possibility of taking a photo when your mind reaches maximum calmness or concentration. The project is clearly in the conceptual stage at this point, but Walnut Wearables has produced this quick video mock-up to show you how the finished product might look like and work. Needless to say, we’re very excited about the Walnut concept, so we’ll be keeping an eye on this one. Expect new updates here on NeuroGadget in the near future. |
On February 14, 1779, the first recorded Valentine’s Day letter in America was given by, then, British Lieutenant Colonel John Simcoe to Sarah “Sally” Townsend. Here is the first of three verses…”Fairest Maid, where all Is fair, Beauty’s pride and Nature’s care; To you my heart I must resign, O choose me for your Valentine! Love, Mighty God! Thou knows’t full well, where all thy Mother’s graces dwell, Where they inhabit and combine to fix thy power with spells divine; Thou knows’t what powerful magick lies within the round of Sarah’s eyes, Or darted thence like lightning fires, and Heaven’s own joys around inspires; Thou knows’t my heart will always prove the shrine of pure unchanging love!” To understand the significance of this expression of love, we have to know a little more about the people involved. John Graves Simcoe was born in Cotterstock, Oundle, England on February 25, 1752. During the American Revolution, Simcoe led a light infantry unit, the British army’s Queens New York Rangers (later the Queen’s York Rangers) in a series of daring raids, as well as acting as a support for the regular British forces during the British occupation of New York. Sarah “Sally” Townsend, was born in 1760 in Oyster Bay, NY and was the daughter of Samuel Townsend, a liberal Quaker, and Sarah Stoddard. She was one of eight children. What is interesting to note is that it was Sally who is reputed to have overheard conversations between Lt. Col. John Graves Simcoe and Major John Andre. She then passed the information on the patriot Culper Spy Ring via her brother Robert Townsend, “Culper Junior”. This information, in part, eventually led to the capture and hanging of Andre. At the end of the war, John Simcoe went back to England as an invalid. He entered politics and was made lieutenant-governor of the new loyalist province of Upper Canada. Simcoe died in Exeter, England on October 26, 1806 at the age of 54. He is buried in Wolford Chapel on the Simcoe family estate near Honiton, Devon. Sarah Townsend remained unmarried and died in 1842. She is buried in the Townsend Cemetery. Did Sally share Simcoe’s infatuation? We have no way to know but someone carved initials in the glass of her bedroom window; her initials and those of Simcoe. It’s believed to have been her handiwork. John Simcoe’s Valentine poem and the block of glass with the carvings can be seen today at the Townsend house, Raynham Hall and museum, in Oyster Bay, NY. |
Photo: BANG Showbiz - BANG Showbiz. All rights reserved. Selena Gomez denied visa for Russia Selena Gomez has been denied a visa for entry into Russia. The 'Come And Get It' hitmaker was set to perform two concerts in the country as part of her 'Stars Dance' tour but was reportedly not granted documentation for entry since she supports gay rights which is in contradiction to the country's new anti-homosexual law. Gay rights activist John Becker, who started a Change.org campaign titled "Selena Gomez: Speak Out For Equality in Moscow and St. Petersburg" asked the brunette beauty to speak out for the gay community when she performed, and believes the former communist country has denied her entry to avoid embarrassment. He told E! News: "This cancellation of Selena Gomez's visa shows that the Russian government is sensitive and on the defense, and shows that the pressure from people all around the world and the backlash against these laws is strong. "They're afraid to have someone like Selena Gomez come in and potentially use her platform to advance LGBT rights." Selena was scheduled to take to the stage at the Ice Palace in Saint Petersburg on September 23 and perform in the Russian capital Moscow two days later. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a new law in June which prohibits any "propaganda" that promotes "non-traditional sexual relations" and has led to the arrest of several lesbian and gay activists. The law has been made as part of an effort to promote traditional Russian values instead of Western liberalism, which has been deemed to be a corrupting influence on the country's youth by the Russian Orthodox Church. Numerous pop stars have been outspoken on the treatment of the homosexuality community in Russia including Lady Gaga, Madonna and Cher. |
Michael Cameron – Waikato University Economics Dept – wrote an interesting piece on his blog about Economics and the war on drugs. He refers to an article by Tom Wainwright in the Wall Street Journal on “How economists would wage the war on drugs”. Essentially, the war on drugs is being lost. Badly. As Wainwright notes: The number of people using cannabis and cocaine has risen by half since 1998, while the number taking heroin and other opiates has tripled. Illegal drugs are now a $300 billion world-wide business, and the diplomats of the U.N. aren’t any closer to finding a way to stamp them out. This failure has a simple reason: Governments continue to treat the drug problem as a battle to be fought, not a market to be tamed. The cartels that run the narcotics business are monstrous, but they face the same dilemmas as ordinary firms-and have the same weaknesses. El Salvador – a leader of one of the country’s two gangs has a human resource issue with high turnover of employees. Mexico – the Zetas cartel franchises its brand like McDonalds which in turn has led to arguments over territory. Rich countries – street corner dealers are struggle to compete on price and quality with the ‘dark web’. It is a similar scenario with Amazon. To combat the drug trade governments have focussed on restricting the supply. Each year acres of coca plants and manufacturing activities are destroyed but the price has remains around $150-$200 per pure gram for the past 20 years. How have the cartels managed to keep this price? However, supply of drugs might not even be appreciably reduced when drug crops are targeted. Wainwright points out that: Drug cartels are a monopsony – they are a single buyer of Andean coca leaves, so they have market power over the price of leaves (i.e. the cartels have the ability to strongly influence the market price of coca leaves). So if some crops are wiped out, the price is unlikely to rise because of the cartels’ market power. The price of cocaine is so much higher than the crop input costs that even a large increase in crop prices would have little effect on the market price of cocaine (i.e. even a big increase in the price of coca leaves would lead to only a small shift in the supply curve for cocaine). Also because of its addictive nature demand for drugs is relatively inelastic – the decrease in quantity demanded is less than the percentage increase in price. Therefore reduced supply and a higher price doesn’t change demand that much. Demand-Side interventions seem to be a better option and they are also a lot cheaper. Weighing up reducing supply by destroying coca crops in remote areas against drug education in schools and you find the latter is a much more plausible option. A dollar spent on drug education in U.S. schools cuts cocaine consumption by twice as much as spending that dollar on reducing supply in South America Bigger loses have be inflicted on cartels with some US states making marijuana legal. Tom Wainwright also has written about this in his new book “Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel” Advertisements |
When you think Domino’s, what’s the first thought that crosses your mind? Why, pizza, of course! However, Domino’s Pizza India is foraying into another type of fast food; burgers. Meet the BurgerPizza Mind you, these aren’t regular burgers. While they’ll look like burgers, they’ll taste like pizzas. It only looks like a burger, but has all the goodness of a pizza inside,” said Dev Amritesh, the president and chief business officer of Domino’s Pizza India. “Burgers in India are all-day escape and fun food while pizzas are becoming meal replacement and comfort food. The ‘all day, individual consumption occasion’ is an opportunity that is incremental to Domino’s. BurgerPizza is our offering for this opportunity,” he added. Meanwhile, S. Murugan Narayanaswamy the Senior Vice President, Marketing, Domino’s Pizza India, said, “The BurgerPizza is different from conventional Burgers in many ways. Instead of using fried ingredients, the BurgerPizza has oven-baked ingredients. It is made with generous fillings of herbs and vegetables, tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and soft buns, all oven baked together to perfection, adding a touch of Pizza Goodness. It is this Pizza Goodness that will be at the core of our marketing strategy. We aim to address the desire for a burger through a new kind of pizza, the BurgerPizza.” The BurgerPizza has already been released and starts at Rs.89 in two vegetarian and two non-vegetarian variants. Why not give it a try and tell us what you think? |
The Cubist Revolution: Minecraft For All Enlarge this image Martin Gee for NPR Martin Gee for NPR The cubist revolution, now in its eighth year, is thriving. That's Minecraft cubes, of course. The game where you build virtual Lego-like worlds and populate them with people, animals and just about everything in between is one of the most popular games ever made; it's second only to Tetris as the best-selling video game of all time. There's gold in them thar cubes: More than 120 million copies have sold since Minecraft launched in 2009.* So what's behind the game's enduring appeal? For Isiah Hammonds, 9, it's all about the creative potential every time you fire up your computer. "You can build anything – anything that you put your mind to! You can work with other people. It's social. It's just super fun!" he says while focusing intensely on finishing his virtual ice arena with his multi-player team of fellow Minecraft campers in Richmond, Calif. "It's for our ice boat racing." Hammonds, a third-grader, is in a basement room in Richmond's City Hall, next to the cafeteria and a janitor's closet. There are long, narrow white tables with black computer monitors on top. A lot of tech summer camps like this can cost upwards of $1,000 a week — but these 20 children are in a city hall basement because the space is free. So is the program, which is run by the non-profit Building Blocks for Kids Collaborative with help from a group called Connected Camps. It serves predominantly low-income African-American and Hispanic children, many of whom face basic barriers to catching the tech and gaming bug — like access to the internet and access to devices. A lot of the children here are playing Minecraft for the first time, explains the camp's digital literacy director, Teresa Jenkins. That's because a lot of the families who come here don't have computers at home. Or if they do, she says, they can't afford high-speed internet or it's simply not a priority. "Rent. Food. Gas. 'How am I doing to get the kids back and forth to school? How am I going to get back and forth to work? ' " says Jenkins, "that's the priority." Richmond is gentrifying amid the Bay Area's tech-driven economic boom. But the city remains one of the area's poorest, with a poverty rate of nearly 18 percent. Children here can see San Francisco from their city and hear all about nearby Silicon Valley and its bevy of industry-disrupting companies, "but they don't imagine they can be a part of that industry," says Jennifer Lyle, the executive director of Building Blocks for Kids Collaborative. This Minecraft camp, Lyle says, is trying to change that 'we're not welcome in tech' feeling some low-income families in Richmond have. "To get people to come here and say, 'No, our child deserves to have access to this,' " she says. It starts by introducing young people and their parents "to the kinds of things wealthier folks get access to because they have the means," she explains, getting "grounding in computers they're not getting in school." Minecraft gets high marks from diverse quarters for its education potential. The game can help teach the basics of computer literacy and the key foundations of coding, animation, circuitry and more. Children can absorb the broccoli of computer knowledge while reveling in the popcorn of building elaborate worlds out of cubes. And in camps like this, they can learn to work together as a team, says Morgan Ames, a postdoctoral scholar at U.C. Berkeley who helped create this camp and has studied its impact. Campers here, she says, get to work through "the steps of designing something technological that somebody else will play." Using aMinecraft tool called redstone circuits, kids can "think through the basics of circuits." But to really get that full experience, kids need the PC or Mac version of the game. A version not all have access to, Ames says. Ames also co-authored a study of Minecraft, this camp, and equity and access gaps by race, class and gender. "Generally we found that middle- and upper middle-income kids play the PC version more. Boys tend to play it more than girls. And in general, white kids tend to play it more than children of color," Ames says. And that's troubling, she says, because the PC version is simply a richer version of the game. "It has more options. It has more opportunities to learn to code. And we wanted to make it more accessible," she says. More accessible for children such as Jaiden Newton, 9. On this day I find her eagerly conspiring with her brother in a multi-player game at the camp. "So he's trying to build an underground tunnel to the other person's arena so he can steal the flag," she tells me. She makes her way past a dazzling cube inside one of her elaborate cube structures. "Those are Ender Pearls. It's like a teleportation," she says. How long have you been playing Minecraft? I ask. "About three weeks," she says. Lots of studies (and books and reports) show African-Americans and Latinos continue to be underrepresented in engineering and technical fields, alongside women. Silicon Valley continues to have a serious gender gap problem. Ames says she's collecting more data but her preliminary look shows that the tools out there to learn more about Minecraft — online forums, videos and the like — are dominated by boys. Camps like this are vital, Ames says, to help change that equation. Or as program director Jennifer Lyle puts it, this camp helps send a message to our parents, schools and Silicon Valley "we belong here." *[Note: Minecraft was purchased by Microsoft Corp. from developers Mojang in 2014. The foundation created by Microsoft founder Bill Gates is a financial supporter of NPR and NPR Ed.] |
Product code: 82670101 Seeing is believing, so step into the Rift with Oculus and experience the action up close. Using advanced display technology combined with its precise, low-latency constellation tracking system to create the sensation of presence for a spectacular virtual-reality session in the comfort of your living room. Download and play games from an entirely new perspective for a totally immersive session. Choose titles from across genres ranging from action RPGs, sci-fi shooters, mind-bending puzzle games, and more to please the whole family. Into the Rift Rift is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. Whether you’re stepping into your favourite game, watching an immersive VR movie, jumping to a destination on the other side of the world, or just spending time with friends in VR, you’ll feel like you’re really there. Superior graphics Rift uses state of the art displays and optics designed specifically for VR. Its high refresh rate and low-persistence display work together with its custom optics system to provide incredible visual fidelity and an immersive, wide field of view. Magic of presence Rift’s advanced display technology combined with its precise, low-latency constellation tracking system to create the sensation of presence – the feeling as though you’re actually there. Attention to detail Customisable, comfortable, adaptable, and beautiful, Rift is technology and design as remarkable as the experiences it enables. Rift has been designed from the inside out, and it shows. Beneath its fabric finish lies a tightly integrated set of systems that work together to transport you to new places. Immersive sound Featuring an integrated VR audio system designed specifically to make you feel as though you’re truly somewhere else – giving you a sense of space and depth. The audio arms are removable, so you can use your own headphones too. Movements in VR The integrated sensor tracks constellations of IR LEDs to translate your movements into VR. Place the sensor in front of you and you’re all set. Its stand is ideal for most setups and its standard 1/4 20 mount works with most tripods. The constellation tracking system is designed to track you whether you’re sitting down or standing up. One size fits all The adjustment straps help you get a perfect fit and the sliding bars cantilever weight to minimise pressure. Included in the box: Lucky's Tale game All necessary connection cords Audio tool to remove/add integrated headphones Your PC Requirements: Video Card: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater Central Processing Unit (CPU): Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater Memory: 8GB RAM and above USB Ports: 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port Operating System (OS): Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer Internet connection is required Do you wear glasses? To use glasses with Rift headset, they'll have to fit within the following specifications: A frame width of 142mm or under A frame height of 50mm or under How to put headset on over glasses: |
When Antonin Scalia was nominated to the US supreme court by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, the first Italian-American to serve on the court was unanimously confirmed by the Senate. It may well be a year – or several – before the Senate confirms anybody to replace Scalia, who died on Saturday at the age of 79. But that vote will almost assuredly not be unanimous, regardless of who the eventual nominee is: the politics of US supreme court appointments have become as polarized as the rest of American politics. And Scalia himself played a significant role in that very polarization. Scalia’s legacy will be extensively celebrated by conservatives – Marco Rubio spoke for orthodox Republican opinion when he called Scalia one of the greatest justices in US supreme court history at Saturday’s Republican debate – and derided by liberals, many of whom wasted little time celebrating his demise and speculating how his absence on the court could affect future cases. But what few political commentators note is that the foundation of his legal and political legacy does not so much stem from his majority opinions: landmark opinions, after all, tend to be written by either the chief justice or by the swing voters, like Justice Anthony Kennedy, and Scalia was neither. He certainly wrote numerous important opinions for the court (most notably the first opinion to find that the second amendment protected an individual right to bear arms in DC v Heller), but his reputation was largely based on his dissents and his remarks off the bench. More than most US supreme court justices, Scalia often wrote to be quoted by a general audience – and that style was a mixed blessing for him. Scalia was capable of very fine legal writing but, particularly as he aged, his trademark blistering zingers were too often made to mask poorly crafted arguments. (In a 2013 interview, Scalia acknowledged his own concerns about his more recent opinions: “You always wonder whether you’re losing your grip and whether your current opinions are not as good as your old ones.”) Scalia’s style of late reflected a justice who both strongly influenced the contemporary conservative movement and in turn was heavily influenced by it. At oral argument, he was capable of both devastating arguments and of sounding like a second-string conservative talkshow host. But, at his best, Scalia defended originalism and textualism with a style and wit that could be recognized even by those who fundamentally disagreed with him. In his first decade on the court, Scalia even won some grudging admiration from liberals. Perhaps the high point of his intellectual influence across party lines was represented by his Tanner lectures at Princeton: they were published as a widely discussed book, complete with respectful response essays from prominent liberal scholars like Robert Dworkin and Laurence Tribe. And it’s true that Scalia was not a strict Republican party-liner: there were some cases in which he was willing to make common cause with liberal justices out of principle. In one dissent, he (correctly) characterized the mandatory drug testing of border patrol officers as “a kind of immolation of privacy and human dignity in symbolic opposition to drug use”. He wrote a brilliant dissent, joined by Justice John Paul Stevens, upholding the habeas corpus rights of American citizens accused of terrorist activities. And in some fourth and sixth amendment cases, he regularly voted in a civil libertarian direction. Still, these cases were the exception rather than the rule as his tenure wore on, and Scalia increasingly became a partisan lightning rod in court circles and in political circles beyond the court. No discussion of Scalia’s legacy, for instance, can ignore the 2000 decision Bush v Gore, in which the court issued an essentially lawless decision awarding the presidency to the Republican candidate. Scalia did not write the opinion of the court, but he wrote the more nakedly partisan opinion that preceded it and has defended it aggressively in public ever since. Bush v Gore is an extreme example but, despite Scalia’s self-presentation as America’s Last Honest Judge, Scalia had a way of ignoring his self-described legal principles if they conflicted with cherished policy goals. To take one particularly critical example, the joint dissent to the 2012 US supreme court opinion largely upholding the Affordable Care Act co-authored by Scalia was so flagrantly inconsistent with Scalia’s previous jurisprudence that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was able to quote his previous opinions at length in her concurrence. More importantly to some is that, had Scalia’s dissents ultimately shaped America, women would not have reproductive rights, the federal government could not effectively regulate healthcare, LGBT people would not have the right to engage in sexual intercourse without fear of arrest – let alone alone the right to marry – and states could single them out for legal disabilities. Women could be excluded from state educational institutions, public schools could teach creationism in science classes and prisoners could be assaulted by prison guards. And, in large part because of Scalia, in America today, the Voting Rights Act has been gutted, the rights of employees and consumers have been curtailed, Brown v Board is more likely to be used to stop integration than to promote it and moneyed interests increasingly dominate elections. But however one evaluates his legacy, Scalia’s untimely death creates a huge political issue that could well become a constitutional crisis. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has already made it clear that the Senate will not confirm anyone President Obama nominates to replace Scalia. That means, for at least a year, the US supreme court will almost certainly operate with eight members and, in cases of a 4-4 split, lower-court opinions will stand, leading to escalating uncertainty about the state of the law. If the 2016 elections result in the White House and Senate being held by the same party, this logjam will probably be broken fairly quickly. Attempts by a Senate minority to serially filibuster nominees would almost certainly result in the filibuster being eliminated (as it already has been for all other federal judicial appointments). But if the 2016 elections result in Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders facing a Republican Senate – as currently seems likely – all bets are off. There is no precedent for the Senate simply refusing to allow the president to fill a supreme court vacancy, but in the current partisan climate a new precedent may well be created. And whether political pressure will compel the Senate to approve some presidential nominee is unclear. The politics of replacing Scalia are difficult precisely because the consequences are so important. Depending on the results of the 2016 presidential and senatorial elections, the next person allowed to vote on the US supreme court will be similar to either Elena Kagan or John Roberts – and the stakes for the reproductive freedom of women, climate change, voting rights, civil rights, the ability of the federal government to regulate the economy and civil liberties can hardly be overstated. In a very real sense, the 2016 elections will ultimately result in the confirmation or repudiation of the jurisprudence for which Justice Scalia most prominently advocated. But he won’t be here to see it. |
The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Internet service providers cannot be forced to continually monitor Web traffic in an effort to stem copyright infringement efforts. This case has its origin in a dispute between Scarlet Extended SA, an ISP, and SABAM, a Belgian management company, which is responsible for authorizing the use by third parties of the musical works of authors, composers and editors. In 2004, SABAM established that users of Scarlet's services were downloading works in SABAM's catalog from the Internet, without authorization and without paying royalties, by means of peer-to-peer networks (a transparent method of file sharing that is independent, decentralized and features advanced search and download functions). The Brussels Court of First Instance ordered Scarlet, in its capacity as an ISP and on pain of a periodic penalty, to bring those copyright infringements to an end by making it impossible for its customers to send or receive in any way electronic files containing a musical work in SABAM's repertoire by means of peer-to-peer software. Scarlet appealed to the Brussels Court of Appeal, claiming the injunction failed to comply with EU law because it imposed on Scarlet a general obligation to monitor communications on its network, something that is incompatible with the European Parliament's directive on electronic commerce and with fundamental rights. In its judgment, the court said holders of intellectual-property rights may apply for an injunction against intermediaries, such as ISPs, whose services are being used by a third party to infringe their rights. However, in this case, such an injunction would result in a "serious infringement" of Scarlet's freedom to conduct its business as it would require Scarlet to install a complicated, costly, permanent computer system at its own expense. In addition, the court said the injunction could potentially undermine freedom of information, since that system might not distinguish adequately between unlawful content and lawful content, with the result that its introduction could lead to the blocking of lawful communications. Consequently, the court found that, in adopting the injunction requiring Scarlet to install such a filtering system, the national court would not be respecting the requirement that a fair balance be struck between the right to intellectual property on the one hand and the freedom to conduct business, the right to protection of personal data and the right to receive or impart information on others. The court ruled that EU law precludes an injunction made against an ISP requiring it to install a system for filtering all electronic communications passing via its services, which applies indiscriminately to all its customers, as a preventive measure, exclusively at its expense, and for an unlimited period. |
In a decision that will eventually be seen as a major turning point in First Amendment law, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld an Arizona scheme to subsidize religious schools. By a 5-4 vote, the Court ruled that people who oppose these tax credits on principle have no standing to challenge it on Constitutional grounds. This despite forty-three years of legal precedent during which the Court maintained that church-state separation issues are so important that concerned critics of religious establishment could challenge subsidized religion even though they experience no direct injury as a consequence of the subsidy. The case—Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn—grows out a clever ruse. The Arizona legislators who like Christian schools knew that they couldn’t just take the state’s tax money and hand it over directly—even the Roberts Court would frown on that. So they conspired with conservative Christian groups to create these intermediary tuition organizations. They then qualified the organizations to receive state tax credits. Oh, and by coincidence they allowed the organizations to discriminate in respect to the students and schools that would receive tuition assistance. As the name of the court case indicates, we’re talking here about Christian schools teaching conservative Christian ideas. Let’s say that an Arizona taxpayer of my persuasion (we’ll call her Petra from Yuma) finds using the tax code to benefit such schools offensive to the First Amendment. In the past, Petra from Yuma could go into court to challenge the tax credit as a form of state-subsidized religion. But Petra (or a Thomas Jefferson redivivus, for that matter) is now out of luck. The core issue is whether providing the tax credit has the exact same practical impact as simply giving tax revenues directly to religious education. It does, obviously. A child can see that it does. But Justice Kennedy, writing for the High Court majority, took a hard-line conservative “it’s your money” position in order to support the Arizona ruse. In a sentence that merits the Tortured Judicial Casuistry Award for 2011, Kennedy wrote: “Awarding some citizens a tax credit allows other citizens to retain control of their own funds in accordance with their own consciences.” Um, let’s see. Is Petra from Yuma’s conscience now satisfied that other Arizona taxpayers, just not her and her friends, are obtaining favorable tax treatment from the state for advancing a religious cause? If I know Petra’s views as well as I think I do, I doubt that Justice Kennedy has won her over. Petra will argue that any tax subsidy for religion, in a closed system where the power to tax is limited, violates the non-establishment clause. Petra will also argue that the principle of taxpayer-supported universal public education is severely undercut if more and more taxpayers begin to get direct credits for supporting sectarian schools. Or rather, Petra would most likely make these arguments—but Petra is no longer allowed through the courthouse doors. She has lost her standing. In a powerful dissent (her first since taking the bench), Justice Elena Kagan coolly demolished Kennedy’s casuistry. “Taxpayers experience the same injury,” she maintained, “whether government subsidization of religion takes the form of a cash grant or a tax measure.” “Assume,” she wrote, that a given state wishes to “subsidize the ownership of crucifixes…It could purchase them in bulk and distribute them; it could reimburse buyers with a check; or it could pay with a tax credit. Now, really—do taxpayers have less reason to complain if the state selects the last of these three options?” As is so often the case with the Roberts Court majority, they took a case that until now has been largely under the radar, decided it in a radical way that departs from both precedent and common sense, and then also “fixed” it in a way that will undermine the principle of church-state separation for decades to come. Because how many of us who support separation can claim to be directly injured as more and more states and school districts follow Arizona’s lead and devise indirect ways to prop up conservative religion? I imagine the public could have gotten exercised if this case had involved state tax credits in support of a radical madrasa or a network of Wiccan schools. But this case merely involves upstanding American families wanting their kids to have a fine Christian education—so how bad can it be? Plenty bad. Worst of all is the “wink wink” element involved, as the nation’s highest court now chooses to lend its imprimatur to a scheme that was explicitly hatched as a shameless end run around Mr. Jefferson’s Wall of Separation. Where is Original Intent now, you might ask? Then again, don’t bother. |
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