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“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” — Steve Jobs If you’ve heard of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor, and the X-Men, then you’ve been exposed to Stan Lee’s work. Lee used to be Marvel Comics’ Editor-in-Chief and Publisher. He also makes cameos in many of Marvel’s films. Maybe you’ve seen him before. For a guy with a pretty significant string of failures, he sure looks happy most of the time: Image by: Gage Skidmore By most gauges of success, Lee would be successful. He is influential: Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin said in an interview, “Maybe Stan Lee is the greatest literary influence on me, even more than Shakespeare or Tolkien.” Forbes ranked Lee as the ninth most influential celebrity of 2014. Watchmen creator Alan Moore was influenced by Stan Lee’s work. Lee’s work at Marvel Comics also led to Disney acquiring Marvel for US $4 billion in 2009. (But he had no equity in the company. More on that later.) Most don’t look past these accolades into Lee’s actual story. Although he was undoubtedly blessed with a great creative ability (refined through regular writing and several clever experiments), I think one of Lee’s most remarkable accomplishments was his persistence despite his many failures and shortcomings. For starters, Lee was entrepreneurial and creative, but he was far from a robust businessman. As he wrote in his autobiography (co-authored with George Mair) Excelsior!: One of my lifelong regrets is that I’ve always been too casual about money. It’s been made abundantly clear to me, by friends such as Marshall and others, that I should have realized I was creating a whole kaboodle of characters that became valuable franchises, but I was creating them for others. Harry Stonehill was a friend of Stan’s from the service who wanted to go in business with him. Stonehill was going to sell Christmas cards in the Philippines, because there was a short supply. Lee thought he was a lunatic. As he wrote in his biography, Excelsior!: As the months and years went by I kept hearing from Harry. It seemed he now owned the franchise for U.S. Tobacco. Then I learned he had built a large glass-manufacturing company. Next time I heard he had created a fast-growing import-export company. It went on and on. Bottom line: After a few years my old army pal, Harry, had become the wealthiest man in the Philippines! I remember once writing to him and asking, “What kind of car are you driving?” because we always used to talk about cars. He wrote back, “Stan, I own half of the cars here in the Philippines. I’ve got dealerships.” Yep, any time my ego needs deflating, I remember how I was too smart to leave my comicbooks and go into business with ol’ Harry!” That’s a pretty serious missed opportunity. Similar missed opportunities have probably haunted some people you know, as they grow more and more frustrated and wistful with each passing year. “If only…” they say. In another case, here’s how Lee botched an income-generating side project: Now I’ll give you further evidence of what a great business talent I possess. I gleefully told Joanie, “Honey, we’re a success. We made a five-thousand-dollar profit on the books.” And here’s where my embarrassing lunkheadedness comes in. I never thought to go back to press! I mean, I had the photos, I had the original plates, I had all the material. The creative part and the biggest expense was all behind me. I should have printed another ten thousand copies, and then another as long as they kept selling. But not good ol’ one-shot Lee. I was just happy to have proven to myself that I could write and sell my own humor book, and it never dawned on me that I had the foundation of a new publishing business if I would have stayed with it. Lastly, when Marvel was acquired by Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation, Lee was in a perfect position to negotiate practically anything from his employer. His friend Marshall Finck advised him of this, and Lee reacted: Well, Stan “Big Brain” Lee shrugged Marshall off by saying, “Are you kidding? Martin may have his faults, but he’s a friend. I’ve worked for him for twenty years. Do you think I’d insult him by saying, ‘What are you going to give me?’ I know he’ll be fair. I’m not some money-grubbing ingrate who’s gonna take advantage of the situation. Unfortunately, Finck was right. Lee’s publisher and Marvel’s founder, Martin Goodman, never gave him anything. (There’s something to be learned for many artists out here, I’m just not sure what it is.) That happened again in a subsequent acquisition. Let’s not forget the time Stan Lee was investigated by the SEC, FBI, and Justice Department when he had left day-to-day operations at Marvel and started a new venture Stan Lee Media. As it turns out, his partner Peter Paul had left the country to fled to Brazil. Paul was later convicted of securities fraud. These monumental failures would be devastating to most individuals. Just hearing about them would probably scare their friends into never trying again. How the hell did Stan Lee get through all of that? As co-author George Mair wrote: But once again, his ability not to dwell on the past served him well. A new chapter was about to open in his life and Stan was eager to face it. Closing Thoughts Remember, persistence is typically crucial to success. Most entrepreneurs have their egos and self-worth tied in with their net worth or their companies’ success. Lee didn’t have to focus on that, partially because he was always a salaried employee. It’s tough, but crucial, to attempt to remove yourself from the situation. Most artists have their egos and self-worth tied in with their work. Lee created so many characters and stories that a few resonated with mainstream audiences. He didn’t stick with one, and instead moved on to create new characters that were curious to him. Continue creating despite your momentum (or a lack thereof). Be optimistic. Keep momentum going to avoid rumination. Accept mistakes. Don’t dwell on the past. And, as Lee said, “Hang Loose.” Don’t take yourself so seriously.

If you’ve watched the Big Brother Feeds or followed along with online recaps then you’ve fully come to expect the CBS TV version of Big Brother to vary wildly with incomplete scenes, out of context comments, and often completely slanted representations often at odds with the reality of the game. Now we’re even getting that on our Live Feeds thanks to Nicole Franzel. This isn’t an isolated incident in the season and with it coming from one of the returning Houseguests it’s possible we’ve got another negative side effect of bringing back people who are already intimately familiar with the way not only production operates but how the audience receives them. When the HGs are more concerned about “packages” for the next episode than playing the game, then we’ve got a problem. Last night Nicole began challenging Corey on his plans for the week ahead. After several looping conversations Corey was puzzled and asked why she wasn’t seeing what needed to be done. Oh, she did, Nicole explained, but she was just faking the talk so production had the content to use, you know, for the lies and deception to viewers for creating false tension and drama. Flashback to 1:15 AM BBT 9/9 Cams 1/2 on your Live Feeds (get the Free Trial now). Nicole is sitting in bed with Corey as they continue to debate who should go up on the Block. They had already agreed on the plan hours earlier but now Nicole seems unsure. She’s questioning Corey’s plan to put Victor and Paul up on the Block together and he’s getting agitated about it. “We can beat James in any comp in the world we want, so why would we want him out of the house? It’d be like someone wanting you out of the house,” says Corey to Nicole. Heh. He wants to know why she’s struggling to understand this basic concept. “You’re arguing putting up James. What’s going through your head?” asks Corey. “I’m just giving them footage,” Nicole quickly explains. Yep. Blink and you’ll miss Nicole admit she’s lying to viewers for the sake of production. Nicole is either obliging production with a request or doing so of her own volition to create false segments intended to deceive viewers on TV and on the Feeds. That’s some sketchy stuff right there. It’s not the first time she’s done it either. Back during Week 10 after she won the Power of Veto Nicole had a talk with Corey debating whether or not they should flip on their F4 alliance that week. Flashback to 4:46 PM BBT 8/27. Nicole is sitting with Corey in the HoH room and has just proposed that they could flip and take out either Victor or Paul before saying she doesn’t want to do that. She details why they can’t keep Michelle in the house. Corey agrees and they continue to discuss when Nicole makes her admission. “I’m just giving them some footage right now. Just act like I’m contemplating on what I’m doing,” says Nicole as she explains this latest back and forth over what to do about with their power this week. When this scene played out on TV Nicole’s admission of deceit obviously wasn’t in there. But even worse, production edited out the middle of their conversation when Nicole said “but that’s not what I want to do” when it came to possibly flipping on Victor and Paul, thus changing the context of the conversation. So not only are TV viewers battling deceptive tactics from Big Brother production but now we’ve got at least one Houseguest, Nicole, actively lying to Feedsters for the sake of “giving them footage.” As Nicole likes to say, “that’s frickin’ bullcrap.”

Walter Mazzarri has signed a three-year deal to take over as Watford manager. The former Napoli and Internazionale manager held talks with the Watford owner, Gino Pozzo, this week and agreed terms on a deal on Friday night. The 54-year-old has not managed since leaving Inter in 2014 but has spent parts of the past two years in England, learning English. Mazzarri quickly emerged as the favourite to replace Quique Sánchez Flores with Pozzo having been an admirer for a long time. The Watford owner, who also owns Udinese, had been keen for Mazzarri to take over at the Italian club but the timing was never right. Now, however, Pozzo has got his man. Mazzarri has a long and distinguished coaching career behind him already with four years at Napoli – where Valon Behrami and Miguel Britos, now at Watford, played for him – as well as spells at Pistoiese, Livorno, Reggina and Sampdoria. He prefers to play in a 3-5-2 system. Watford’s chief executive, Scott Duxbury, told the club’s website: “Walter has been the target of a number of approaches for his services, so we’re delighted to secure him as head coach here at Watford. We’re thoroughly looking forward to working with such a highly-regarded coach, with the progress and development of the club always remaining the highest priority.” Watford finished 13th in the Premier League this season, having been promoted under Slavisa Jokanovic in 2015, and reached the FA Cup semi-finals. However, their form was disappointing in the new year and Watford announced this month that Flores would leave at the end of the season. After their final game of the season, a 2-2 draw with Sunderland, Flores said: “Watford is now established in the Premier League, so next year is coming more players, more quality.”

Finally get to finish this piece after soooo long, just for fun. Initial idea was that there was this bunch of space pirates, they have these helmets that is also a screen that can project 3D images to make them.. well, scarier. Imagine seeing the 3D skull projected in the dark when your spaceship is being boarded, all you can see is a glowing blue skull that can talk D: i think thats intimidating.. for me at leastAnd I kinda got realllly lazy half way through and yes those are some old parts I've used from my other paintings >.> I dont feel satisfied with this piece, it feels unfinished and i dont feeel the mood, guess thats what happens when you leave a painting for more than half a year, parts and bits feels different when i started it. Anyway, I'll leave this here for now.. www.artstation.com/artwork/fro… On artstation as well!Photos used:This awesome photo was the inspiration and plate i've used! And many thanks to Reid's compilation of Nasa stock photos, reidsouthen.selz.com/item/54a8… He took the time and effort to compile it and its free, also, buy his australian Pack to show your appreciation! The australia pack is very awesome and has tons and tons of great photos to choose from. Also, the image is non profit and its for personal uses only

Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, is launching a new online tech education platform he’s calling Woz U, which is designed to promote technology jobs and the skills required to enter the industry. Over time, Wozniak hopes to expand the initiative to include as many as 30 physical locations around the world and courses on everything from software engineering and information technology to mobile app development and cybersecurity, among others. It’s unclear whether courses will be offered for free, or whether Woz U plans on charging for any element of the online education platform. The website does not say. Woz U also offers access to tech companies interested in using the tools and resources provided to recruit and train employees. The platform will be available to students K-12 through partnerships with school districts too. Down the line, Woz U wants to offer one-on-one instruction to students and, later on, to offer its own accelerator program for prospective startup founders. The overall goal is to increase interest in what Woz U calls STEAM careers, or science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics, with the addition of arts presumably a nod to Wozniak’s role at Apple and fellow co-founder Steve Jobs’ lifelong mission to blend technology with the humanities. Woz U doesn’t say how much its online courses will cost students “Our goal is to educate and train people in employable digital skills without putting them into years of debt,” Wozniak said in a statement. “People often are afraid to choose a technology-based career because they think they can’t do it. I know they can, and I want to show them how. My entire life I have worked to build, develop, and create a better world through technology and I have always respected education. Now is the time for Woz U, and we are only getting started.” There are no pricing details on any of the existing or planned features. There is, however, already a mobile app out with some introductory courses, and you can also “enroll” in Woz U starting today, though it’s unclear what exactly that entails beyond submitting a few bits of personal contact information. The whole enterprise seems polished enough, although it should be noted though that Woz U’s initial partner is the for-profit Southern Careers Institute, based out of Austin, Texas. So don’t expect everything in Woz U to be free.

Update: She might have interrupted burglary; 1 charged with murder Hard work and taking care of her 5-year-old daughter were the fabric of Sarah Anne Wierstad’s life. The 24-year-old worked double shifts to support herself and her child and was returning home from 12 hours of work Sunday when her life was cut short. Someone shot Wierstad after she had left a bus in St. Paul and walked around the corner toward her home. Wierstad’s family was struggling Monday to figure out how they would tell the young woman’s daughter — whom Wierstad’s world had revolved around — that her mother was gone. Preliminary information indicated the shooting in the Railroad Island area was not connected to other recent homicides in St. Paul, but police will not know for sure until they determine who shot the woman, Steve Linders, a St. Paul police spokesman, said Monday. Wierstad’s homicide was the third in five days in the city; the others occurred Wednesday and Thursday in the Dayton’s Bluff area. No arrests have been made in the cases. Julie Zietlow, Wierstad’s mother, said she does not know why her daughter was killed, but she hopes anyone with information will come forward to police. “We don’t know if she was at the wrong place at the wrong time or if it was someone she may have known,” Zietlow said. About 8 p.m. Sunday, police responded to reports of shots fired at Beaumont and Bedford streets. They found a woman near the road, suffering from a gunshot wound, and paramedics took her to Regions Hospital in St. Paul, where she was pronounced dead, Linders said. “She was right there on the corner, feet from her door,” Zietlow said. A woman who lives nearby said she heard gunshots and heard a woman yelling, “Are you OK, sweetheart?” She opened her door and saw Wierstad lying on the ground. A woman who was trying to help opened Wierstad’s jacket, and the neighbor could see Wierstad was bleeding from the chest. A man working at a nearby restaurant also ran over to try to help. “My main concern was, where was her daughter,” said the neighbor, who declined to give her name. She recognized Wierstad from the area and often saw her pick up her daughter at the bus stop. On Monday, the neighbor said she was shaken and saddened. “It’s unbelievable that this could happen,” she said. Wierstad’s daughter had been with her father and paternal grandmother when Wierstad was at work. They were bringing her back to Wierstad on Sunday night when they found they could not get into the area because police had put crime tape around the shooting scene, Zietlow said. “Sarah said she would be home from the bus about 8 o’clock and they kept texting her and texting her and couldn’t get ahold of her,” Zietlow said. “I think they finally actually called the police, because it was not like my daughter to be out of touch.” A HARD-WORKING AND DEVOTED MOM Wierstad grew up in St. Paul. Her mother says she was her spirited middle child, between older and younger brothers. She graduated in 2010 from AGAPE High School, a school for teens who are pregnant or have children. Wierstad went on to attend Minneapolis Community & Technical College, majoring in criminal justice. Terry Zietlow, Wierstad’s stepfather, thought she had wanted to become a prison guard. But being a college student and a single mother was difficult, especially when her infant daughter was often sick. Wierstad left school, though she had begun anew this fall, this time at Le Cordon Bleu. “She made just barely enough to support herself,” her mother said. “She was trying to get as many hours at work as she could to pay her bills. She started going to school because she didn’t want to have to work six days a week just to put food on her table.” Wierstad had worked for A’viands, a food service management company based in Roseville, since December 2011. She put in double shifts Saturday and Sunday at Alton Memory Care in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood, her family said. She cooked there on weekends and served food to residents during the week. “Sarah was just a wonderful person. She was great with people and her daughter was her world,” said Brittany Mayer-Schuler, A’viands general counsel, relaying what Wierstad’s manager told her. “She would get up at 4:30 a.m. to get the bus to culinary school and then go to work after that. She was working really hard to make a better life for her and her daughter.” Previously, Wierstad worked in food service at the Ramsey County jail, also as an A’viands employee, and in the deli at Cub Foods on White Bear Avenue in Maplewood, her mother said. Growing up, Wierstad “loved food, but she didn’t like to cook it,” and her family used to tease her about it, Zietlow said. She especially enjoyed spicy food and the tartness of pickle juice, which she would drink by the jar. But Wierstad came to realize that cooking was fun and that “it was going to further her dreams to get where she wanted in life,” according to Zietlow. Wierstad was funny, loud, the life of the party and no-nonsense. “She told it like it was,” Zietlow said. This year, Wierstad had traveled out of Minnesota for the first time, which also marked the first time she had been on a plane. Wierstad saved up, and with her uncle’s help, went to Florida with her extended family, Zietlow said. She got to take her daughter to Disney World. “Sarah had a lot of dreams,” said Judy Smith, her grandmother. “She was a kid who wanted to do something with her life and she loved her daughter so much.” SPATE OF HOMICIDES Wierstad’s death marked the 10th homicide in St. Paul this year; there were 11 last year. The first this year was in April, and five have occurred since Sept. 29, all in various areas of the East Side, with no arrests made in any. Charges have been brought in the first five cases this year (four of which were alleged cases of domestic violence) and two people have been convicted. “There’s been so many of them,” Zietlow said Monday. “And for what? It’s so senseless,” said Christine Smith, Wierstad’s aunt. Last week, Synika George James, 37, was fatally shot while attending a vigil for a homicide victim in the area of Cypress Street and Reaney Avenue on Wednesday. Emmett Lee Wilson-Shaw III, 24, was shot dead Thursday on the Earl Street Bridge, a few blocks from James’ shooting. Police have announced a reward for information in the Oct. 5 shooting of Htoo Baw, 54, on East Orange Avenue near Walsh Street. His family has said he had no enemies and they fear the motive was robbery. Crime Stoppers of Minnesota accepts anonymous tips at 800-222-TIPS (8477) and offers a reward for information that leads to a felony arrest. The other unsolved case occurred Sept. 29. Jerome Hall Jr., 25, was shot in Hazel Park. A woman who had been with him ran for help, telling a nearby resident that two men had jumped him. On Monday, Linders said of Wierstad’s death: “This is the 10th homicide we’ve had this year in St. Paul, and we call all agree that’s 10 too many. The neighborhood’s concerned, the entire city’s concerned, and frankly, we as a police department are fed up. “We are taking officers from specialty units and we’re putting them in areas where we’ve seen increased activity. People who live in these neighborhoods … they’ll see an increase in police presence in these areas.” As concern has grown on the East Side about the recent homicides, residents have been talking about what they can do. Emily Kampa, who lives in Dayton’s Bluff, has been encouraging people across East Side-affiliated Facebook groups to attend the police department’s Eastern District’s regular monthly community meeting. The meetings are the third Wednesday of each month; October’s session is this week. The meetings are at 9:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. at the Eastern District, 722 Payne Ave. Kampa also wrote to the police department by email last week, urging a discussion about gang violence, especially on the East Side. “We see (gang) names in the news, but why don’t we ever get information directly from SPPD?,” she said. “I know that clique gangs are very hard to track and control,” she wrote in the email. “But PLEASE, begin to involve the citizens of St. Paul in an organized way. Tell us how we can help youth in our community. Tell us about how and where the gangs are operat(ing). Tell us how we can help YOU.” HOW TO HELP Police ask anyone with information about any of the homicides to call them at 651-266-5650. Donations for Sarah Wierstad’s 5-year-old daughter are being accepted by an account in her maternal grandmother’s name. They can be directed to the Julie Zietlow Memorial Fund 002, NSP Credit Union, 825 Rice St., St. Paul, MN 55117. Donations can be made online at youcaring.com. Mara H. Gottfried can be reached at mgottfried@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5262. Follow her at twitter.com/MaraGottfried. Andy Rathbun can be reached arathbun@pioneerpress.com or at 651-228-2121. Follow him at twitter.com/andyrathbun.

2014 Jun 16 2011 Apr 27 2010 Jun 17 2008 Feb 5 2003 May 4 1999 May 3 1997 Mar 1 1995 May 27 1992 Nov 22 1992 Jun 16 1991 Apr 26 1990 Jun 2 1990 Mar 13 1985 May 31 1984 Mar 28 1982 Apr 2 1977 May 4 1974 Apr 3 1970 Apr 17 1968 May 15 1967 Apr 30 1967 Apr 21 1965 May 5 1965 Apr 11 1960 May 5 1957 Dec 18 1957 May 20 1956 Apr 3 1953 Jun 8 1953 May 10 1953 Apr 30 1952 Mar 21 1949 May 20 1945 Apr 12 1944 Jun 23 1942 May 2 1942 Apr 29 1942 Mar 16 1932 Mar 21 1930 May 6 1929 Apr 25 1927 May 9 1925 Mar 18 1920 Apr 20 1920 Mar 28 1919 Apr 8 1919 Mar 15 1918 May 21 1917 Jun 5 1917 May 30 1917 May 26 1913 Mar 23 1912 Apr 27 1909 Apr 29 1908 Apr 24 1898 May 18 1896 May 27 1894 Sep 21 1890 Mar 27 1884 Feb 19 1883 May 18 1880 Apr 18 1879 May 30 1875 Mar 20 NCEP/NCAR R. 20th Century R. 2014 Jun 18 2014 Jun 16 2014 Apr 28 2014 Apr 27 2013 Nov 17 2013 Oct 4 2013 May 31 2013 May 28 2013 May 20 2013 May 19 2013 May 15 2013 Feb 10 2012 Apr 14 2012 Mar 2 2012 Feb 29 2011 Nov 7 2011 May 24 2011 May 22 2011 Apr 27 2011 Apr 22 2011 Apr 9 2010 Nov 29 2010 Aug 7 2010 Jun 25 2010 Jun 17 2010 Jun 5 2010 May 22 2010 May 10 2010 Apr 24 2009 Apr 10 2009 Feb 10 2008 Jun 11 2008 May 25 2008 May 23 2008 May 11 2008 May 10 2008 Feb 5 2007 Aug 26 2007 May 4 2007 Mar 1 2007 Feb 28 2006 Sep 22 2006 Mar 12 2005 Nov 15 2004 Jul 18 2004 May 29 2004 May 22 2004 May 12 2003 Jun 24 2003 Jun 23 2003 May 8 2003 May 6 2003 May 4 2002 Nov 10 2002 Aug 11 2002 Jun 23 2002 Apr 28 2002 Apr 24 2001 Nov 24 2001 Nov 23 2001 Sep 24 2001 Jun 13 2001 Apr 21 2000 Dec 16 2000 Sep 20 2000 Jul 25 1999 Jun 6 1999 May 11 1999 May 5 1999 May 3 1999 Apr 9 1999 Apr 8 1999 Apr 3 1999 Jan 21 1999 Jan 17 1998 Jun 11 1998 Jun 2 1998 May 30 1998 May 7 1998 Apr 16 1998 Apr 8 1998 Mar 29 1997 May 27 1997 Mar 1 1997 Jan 24 1996 Jul 18 1996 May 28 1996 Apr 14 1995 Nov 7 1995 Jun 8 1995 May 29 1995 May 27 1995 May 18 1995 May 13 1994 Jul 5 1994 Apr 26 1994 Apr 25 1994 Mar 27 1993 Aug 6 1993 Jun 7 1993 May 7 1993 May 5 1993 Apr 24 1992 Nov 22 1992 Nov 21 1992 Jun 27 1992 Jun 16 1992 Jun 15 1992 May 11 1992 Mar 9 1992 Feb 18 1991 Nov 29 1991 Apr 26 1991 Mar 26 1990 Aug 28 1990 Jun 15 1990 Jun 2 1990 Jun 1 1990 Apr 25 1990 Mar 13 1989 Nov 15 1989 Jul 10 1989 May 30 1989 May 24 1989 May 16 1989 May 5 1989 Jan 7 1988 Dec 24 1988 Nov 27 1988 Jan 19 1987 Jul 21 1987 May 22 1987 Feb 28 1986 Sep 28 1986 Jul 28 1986 Mar 12 1985 May 31 1985 May 10 1984 Jun 7 1984 Apr 29 1984 Apr 27 1984 Apr 26 1984 Mar 28 1984 Mar 15 1983 Dec 6 1983 Jul 3 1983 Apr 1 1982 Dec 24 1982 May 29 1982 Apr 2 1982 Mar 18 1981 May 22 1981 May 17 1981 May 13 1981 Apr 22 1981 Apr 3 1981 Mar 29 1980 Jul 9 1980 Jun 3 1980 Jun 2 1980 Apr 2 1979 Oct 3 1979 Jun 28 1979 May 2 1979 Apr 10 1979 Mar 29 NARR NARR SPC SPC SPC Grazulis

Father Andrew Lawrence pulls a fat red binder from a shelf inside his cramped office, where he edits a weekly Roman Catholic newspaper. Inside the binder are reams of documents from its decade-long dispute with Malaysia's government over the right to refer to God as "Allah," as Muslims do. For a small paper like the Herald (circulation: 14,000), such a legal case can be ruinous. But the row has spiraled into a litmus test of tolerance and political maturity in this multifaith country of 28 million people. The "Allah" row stirs strong emotions here in part because it is as much about race and language – and politics – as it is about religion. It also exposes the historical divisions between west and east Malaysia, where the majority of the country's roughly 1.4 million Roman Catholics live. On Dec. 31, the Herald won a three-year battle in the High Court, which overturned a government ban on its use of "Allah." The verdict sparked small protests by Malay Muslims and a spate of attacks on Catholic churches, a Sikh temple, and three mosques, allegedly by Muslim agitators. The government has obtained an injunction and appealed the verdict, arguing that the ban is essential for national security. For centuries, Christian Malay speakers have prayed to Allah, the Arabic word for God. In neighboring Indonesia, a majority Muslim country with a near-identical language, the use of "Allah" by Christians is uncontroversial, as it is across much of the Middle East. "It isn't complicated. We use it in our churches. It's part of our prayers," says Father Lawrence. Opponents say that Christians can use other Malay words for their translations and should leave "Allah" for Muslims. "For me, 'Allah' shouldn't be used by other religions. If they use 'Allah,' our kids might get confused," says Nur Fadilla Zaaba, a resident. The government has also used this argument, saying that it increases the risk of conversions of Muslims, which is illegal in Malaysia. The High Court rejected this and other similar arguments, pointing out that the Herald is sold only to Christians and "had never intended or caused any conflict, discord of misunderstanding" in its use of "Allah." Opposition lawmakers claim that Malaysia's coalition-run government, dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), uses the "Allah" issue to rally its base among Malay Muslims, who make up about 55 percent of the population. Khairy Jamaluddin, a UMNO executive, argues that the party is trying to tamp down communal tensions. He says comparisons with Indonesia are misleading, as Islam has taken a more syncretic path there. "Malay Muslims have linguistic, religious, and ethnic ownership of the word because of the way that it came to Malaysia. For it to be used for a Christian God, it is an affront to them," he says. While UMNO supports a ban, the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party has argued that there is no theological reason for it. In recent years, the party has moved toward the center. It even invited Lawrence to speak on the issue, he says. In his office, Lawrence pulls out a rare 1619 Latin-Malay Bible that translates "God" as "Allah." "We have every right to use this word," he says.

The last of my brother’s blogs. * * * I was on the floor the other day and came across a man of about forty who wore on his left breast what looked like a military medal. A small ribbon pinned to his chest with a medallion hanging from it. It was the credential that his grandfather wore at the 1960 Democratic Convention. Whatever this movement may come to be called, Camelot is in the air. At the stand in the Convention Hall, there were four flavors of Obama buttons. Obama alone, Obama-Biden, Obama and Dr. King, Obama and JFK. Such have been the expectations for this evening. Rhetoric has been much praised and much maligned this election season, but I believe rhetoric can be powerful and important. Its capacity to link emotion and change can be a force for good or ill. And in either direction, the tone set by President of the United States speaks volumes all by itself across this country and across the world. As someone who appreciates good rhetoric, I would say going into this evening that of the best dozen speeches I’ve ever heard, at leave several have been given by Barack Obama in 2008 alone. Which brings us to Invesco Field. The lines to get in started early and snaked across the landscape for often over a mile. It reminded me of the images of people lined up at Altamont to see the Rolling Stones. And inside… diversity, passion, history. Within a few seats of me in all directions was a picture of American diversity that would have made Norman Rockwell proud. Amongst the most poignant… a woman of about thirty, two seats away her husband, and between them in a cradle their months old baby. When was the last time we had a political leader capable of drawing the passions of over 80,000 citizens? I would argue that it was forty years ago, and both of them died that year. Obama’s speech was, I felt, perfect. As always, his rhetoric is a joy to listen to, but the content was critically important as well and therein was the perfection. When Obama delivered his historic speech on race back in the winter, Jon Stewart, struck by depth and reason of his argument, commented that Obama was “treating us like adults.” That same sense struck me last night. It was sweeping in scope, impressive in logic and deeply substantive. And structurally, he did what he needed to do. Obama told his story, spelled out the case against McCain, and offered the type of detail for his own program that indeed is the basis for mandate should we be victorious. But the essence of the night was the history in the air. There was a gravitas to the moment that was impossible not to feel, a power magnified by the collective, passionate cry for change inherent in the unified voice of all that were there. It was a deeply moving experience. It was an extraordinary honor to be there. It ranks among the great experiences of my life. I’ve been reminded several times this week of an interview I heard a few months back. It was with a man whose mother had been on the frontlines of the women’s rights movement back in the 60s. He, his siblings, their kids kept asking his mother who she was going to vote for in the primaries, and uncharacteristically she wouldn’t answer. So on election night he asked her who she had voted for. All her life, she said, she’d been wanting to vote for a woman for president. It was, to her, the ultimate expression of her life’s work. But as she saw how excited her children and her grandchildren were about Barack Obama, “Well,” she said, “I decided I had to vote for their future and not for my past.” That story particularly came back when my friend Jo reported that her 94 year old mother has decided that she’s only lived this long so she can vote for Barack Obama. After that, it’s all up for grabs. On a different note, my friend Cindy reports that her “almost five” year old wanted to know whether Obama has a hard time breathing while he is “running” for president. Other tidbits… the Alabama delegation has t-shirts… Obama Y’all. Love that! And spell check on my Blackberry keeps wanting to change Obama to oboe. Change we don’t believe in! It’s been my honor this week to a part of history, a special moment in history, and it’s been a privilege to share this with you. It’s been my hope to enliven and enrich for you the experience of this one large step in this enormously important election. I believe what is literally at stake is the restoration of our nation’s most basic values. John Lewis is part of the Georgia delegation and spoke movingly this morning over breakfast. Today is the 45th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. There were ten speakers that day. John Lewis was sixth, Dr. King tenth. Congressman Lewis is the last of these men standing. “What we saw last night,” said Lewis, “was the down payment on the fulfillment of the dream. Now we must march again. We must march in every village, town and hamlet. We must march again on the ballot box. We must march to save this piece of real estate we call America.” So where do we go from here? There are 18 targeted states in this election. In Georgia, the Obama campaign has 56 offices and 175 organizers. If you want to help, call the Georgia Democratic Party in Atlanta and ask about getting connected to this effort. If you’re in a different state, call your state party or call the party in a swing state not your own and see what you can do to help. There are sixty eight days left until this election, and we’re not going to win unless we get enough people registered, to the polls and voting for Barack Obama. Former Mississippi Governor Ray Mabus joined us for breakfast this morning, and as he eloquently put it, “Sixty eight days is not very long to work for our children, for a brighter future and for a better America.”

The Irish government accepted a motion Tuesday calling for the symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood “on the basis of the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital, as established in U.N. resolutions.” On Wednesday, members of the lower house of the Oireachtas, or Irish Parliament, will continue debating the nonbinding bill, which is being put forward by the opposition, Reuters reports. A government spokesman said it would not oppose the motion. The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now “Recognizing the independent state of Palestine would be a symbolically important expression of Ireland’s support for the people of Palestine’s right to self determination,” said member of Parliament Dominic Hannigan, according to the Irish Examiner. The Irish upper house passed a similar resolution in October. Spain, the U.K. and France, have also passed symbolic votes of recognition, however some European countries have gone a step further and officially recognize a Palestinian state, with Sweden recently becoming the largest European nation to do so. Write to Rishi Iyengar at rishi.iyengar@timeasia.com.

IP-Watch is a non-profit independent news service and depends on subscriptions. To access all of our content, please subscribe here . You may also offer additional support with your subscription, or donate Can the World Trade Organization’s smallest members use the dispute settlement system effectively? That is a question that seemed to be suggested by the tiny Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda at a WTO Dispute Settlement Body meeting yesterday, in an intellectual property-related case involving a United States gambling ban. “So just what does this dispute resolution process do for a country such as Antigua and Barbuda?” a delegate asked in a prepared statement for the 25 April DSB meeting. “It seems,” the statement continued, “perhaps the harsh light of this prolonged action by one of the weakest against the strongest is on the verge of condemning the multilateral trading system established here some two decades ago as what its critics then feared – a vehicle by which the strong economies could extract concessions from the weak while at the same time effectively stone-walling – no, in fairness, denying – the ability of small economies to obtain any meaningful recourse when wronged by others.” Antigua and Barbuda’s statement, delivered by Dominica on its behalf, was on its case against the United States involving measures affecting the cross-border supply of gambling and betting services. The source of its frustration is what it says is the US failure to comply with the WTO ruling the Caribbean nation won, and its inability to employ the allowed penalties against the US out of fear of recrimination. Jamaica made a statement supporting Antigua and Barbuda, noting in particular its belief that, “For all countries who rely on the rules-based Multilateral Trading System – Small Vulnerable Economies in particular – it is extremely important that the credibility of the Dispute Settlement Mechanism be preserved and strengthened through faithful implementation of decisions not undermined through non-compliance.” In exchange for US blocking of Antiguan gambling services in the US, Antigua has the right to not protect US$21 million worth of US intellectual property rights every year unless they mutually resolve the issue. The United States has done nothing to resolve the issue, has cast Antigua and Barbuda as an impediment in US efforts to alter commitments under the WTO services agreement, and has set the small nation up for harsh criticism for trying to use the remedy provided it by the WTO dispute panel, Antigua said. “Over 10 years of following the rules and prevailing, millions of dollars of cost and expense, hours upon hours of fruitless and frustrating attempts at negotiation – and what has the tiny, developing economy of Antigua and Barbuda gained from the process?” it said, noting that it is working on a programme extract the value of its lost business as approved by the DSB. “However, even recourse to this remedy of last resort has led to public statements and pronouncements, accusations that if the Antiguan government were to actually impose the suspension of concessions, somehow Antigua and Barbuda would be the outliers here, … would be moving beyond the pale, while at the same time the United States continues to ignore a decade-old ruling against it by this body.” “Further,” it said, “there is no doubt that the major economies of the world do not have to face the same fears and uncertainties when they – as they have indeed done – make their own recourse to such remedies.” The dispute dates back to 2003 when Antigua and Barbuda requested consultations with the US regarding measures applied by central, regional and local authorities in the US affecting the cross-border supply of gambling and betting services from Antigua and Barbuda. The small country considered that the cumulative impact of the US measures was aimed at preventing the supply of gambling and betting services from another WTO members to the US, according to the WTO. In December 2007, the DSB’s arbitrator ruled that the annual level of nullification or impairment of benefits accruing to Antigua and Barbuda was US$21 million and that Antigua could request the authorisation from the DSB to suspend the country’s obligations under the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for the same amount annually. At the DSB session of January 2013, according to the WTO, Antigua and Barbuda requested that the DSB authorise the suspension of concessions and obligations to the US in respect of IP rights. The DSB agreed to grant such authorisation. However, the authorisation had not been used so far by Antigua and Barbuda.

Stephen A. Smith explains that the NFL should have had the anthem protest issue cleaned up long ago, and Papa John's CEO John Schnatter has the right to voice his opinion on the matter. (2:18) 5:43 PM UTC Darren Rovell ESPN Senior Writer Close  ESPN.com's sports business reporter since 2012; previously at ESPN from 2000-06 Appears on SportsCenter, ESPN Radio, ESPN.com and with ABC News Formerly worked as analyst at CNBC Executives from Papa John's, the official pizza company of the NFL, expressed disappointment on a conference call Wednesday about the league's ongoing player protests during the national anthem. "The NFL has hurt us," company founder and CEO John Schnatter said. "We are disappointed the NFL and its leadership did not resolve this." Executives said the company has pulled much of its NFL television advertising and that the NFL has responded by giving the company additional future spots. "Leadership starts at the top and this is an example of poor leadership," Schnatter said, noting he thought the issue had been "nipped in the bud" a year and a half ago. In revising sales estimates for the next quarter, Papa John's president and chief operating officer Steve Ritchie said on the call that the NFL deal was the primary suspect behind the decline and that "we expect it to persist unless a solution is put in place." Ritchie said that research has found that Papa John's has been the most recognized sponsor associated with the NFL for two years running, which he said means the company's performance can track with that of the league. Papa John's has a deal with not only the NFL, but also with 23 individual teams. Company executives declined to disclose exactly how much money in projected sales Papa John's lost from its association with the NFL and declining ratings, which mean fewer people are ordering their product for game days, they said. ESPN reached out to 18 NFL official sponsors in the last few days and asked the companies about its current relationship with the league and if any marketing programs had been changed due to the turmoil. Only five sponsors responded with a comment. Verizon spokesperson Jim Gerace wrote via e-mail, that "our discussions with any partner are between us and while we haven't done anything different, we don't discuss future plans." "We are not going to critique their performance in public just as I wouldn't expect them to critique ours," Gerace added. A Hyundai spokesperson said in a statement, "Hyundai participated in constant dialogue with the league to discuss all aspects of our partnership, including national anthem protests. We've been pleased with the frequency and openness of those conversations." A spokesperson for Dannon, whose Oikos brand has an official NFL deal, said: "We continue to monitor the situation carefully and have not made changes to our advertising or related plans." Nike and Anheuser-Busch referred to previously issued statements. League sponsors that either didn't return a message after 24 hours or declined comment included: PepsiCo, Mars, Visa, Campbell's Soup, Procter & Gamble, Castrol, Bose, McDonald's, Nationwide, Microsoft, USAA, Marriott and Bridgestone.

In a world where cash is king, where does a digital currency rank? Highly enough for San Francisco-based Expensify to support it, apparently. The firm removes the paperwork from employee expense tracking by using a smartphone app to scan for pertinent information from a receipt and automatically create a report. It also allows for expenses to be matched with a credit card and submitted online for reimbursement. But what if a Canadian company is on the hook to reimburse a worker in the U.S. or Mexico? Previously, Expensify only supported direct deposit and U.S.-based Paypal payments for reimbursement. Now it’s adding Bitcoin to the mix as a way to solve the problem of paying back international employees. It’s another vote of legitimacy for this open source digital currency that is not attached to the welfare of any nation state. Related Story Fast 5: Quick ways to make money online Who says you can't make money online? Prison guards at a Chinese prison camp are reportedly forcing inmates to smash rocks by day and play World of Warcraft at night. The purpose of the all-night May 30th, 2011 Ian Paul @itbusinessca Published on:Ian Paul Known as a peer-to-peer currency, the Bitcoin economy is growing on an organized inflationary model that allows anyone to produce the currency using spare CPU cycles. If you’re wondering if you can get rich by simply running an extra application in the background, the answer is unfortunately no. Bitcoins are rewarded to computers that solve an encryption problem, and for every problem that gets solved, the next is just a bit harder to crack. The economy is at the stage now where geeks are setting up rigs specifically designed for farm Bitcoins day and night. The appeal of a currency that is peer-to-peer, leaves no trace of expenditure, and can cross international borders without any conversion penalties is appealing in the context of a globalized market and international Web services. Bitcoins can be sold on an open market to be converted to cash, and are being accepted by online vendors for digital and real goods and services. But it’s not without risk. The currency has hardly been stable, with a 30 day low of $29.35 and high of $79.72 for one Bitcoin. Bitcoins have also been targeted by hackers for theft. It’ll be interesting to see how many of Expensify’s 200,000 companies and 1.4 million users adopt the currency. Would you accept Bitcoins as reimbursement for your expense reports? Tell us why or why not in the comments below.

Mousa Dembélé has been a revelation for Spurs after making his first start in five weeks against Liverpool, his performance really giving Pochettino food for thought. After the stalemate at Liverpool, Dembélé emerged with the man of the match award and rightly so. His 91% pass accuracy (the highest in the team) coupled with 72% of duels won really demonstrated his class. His class was a diamond in what was a pretty average game, but every one of his gleaming facets stood out. Statistics only confirmed what was really pleasing on the eye for Spurs fans. All of Dembélé’s take-ons succeeded in his usual strong yet effortless gliding dribbling style. Furthermore, Dembélé carried out his defensive duties well, making a few crucial last ditch tackles before helping his team to counter. All in all, Dembélé had a cracking game, pleasing Pochettino and the fans alike. Can Dembélé continue in this vain? Of course! He wasn’t the man of the match for striking a 35-yard fluke volley into the top right corner, no, he was the man of the match because he proved to be the best footballer out on the Lane’s pitch. Wesley Sonck would agree that Dembélé is a player with supreme skill and technical ability, whether he is as good as Eden Hazard or Kevin de Bruyne is yet to be seen, who is able to play a holding role with real aplomb. But, a question mark has always hovered over where Dembélé is deployed. If Sonck is right and Dembélé is truly technically gifted to that extent, why are Spurs playing him in a deep role? Shouldn’t Pochettino deploy him in a more advanced midfield position? The argument is that Dembélé is able to beat two men with ease, but no player is going to be effective offensively when starting from so deep. Pochettino must experiment with the line-up if Dembélé is to finally prove his worth. After all, at the ripe old age of 28, he really does need to start playing his A-game. If Pochettino does select Dembélé for the next match, where would he fit? He was played in a deep role against Liverpool because there was no other so-called defensive midfielder available due to Eric Dier’s suspension. One way he could be incorporated into the starting eleven would be to play him with Dier. Therefore, Dembélé gains the freedom of being able to attack whilst Dier covers him. Also, if Spurs are on the back foot, Dembélé can provide a solid screen for the back four alongside Dier. It seems to be a dream combination, yet where does Dele Alli fit in? Eriksen would have to be pushed out to the left wing, with Alli in that number 10 role. This could be effective and wouldn’t put any player’s nose out of joint so long as Nacer Chadli is sidelined by injury. This would also allow Dembélé and Alli to swap, making it a versatile and offensive midfield. In the longer term, Nabil Bentaleb and Ryan Mason will return, throwing the entire starting eleven into contention yet again. Therefore, Dembélé’s performances now could well shape the rest of his season and his minutes of gameplay. There’s no reason why Dembélé can’t keep that dynamic duo out, but he will need to put in consistently good performances, something he hasn’t been renowned for. However, Spurs fans will be hoping that they can finally see this truly majestic player prove his worth and start playing to his true potential. Main Image Credit:

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Gold futures tumbled more than 4% Thursday to their lowest level in one month, as nervous investors sold futures contracts to seek cash. Some hedge funds were forced to liquidate their positions to cover losses in stocks and other markets, according to economists at research firm Action Economics. "For the moment, the weight of the deep funk felt in the global markets is keeping gold on the defensive, while would-be buyers ... find more comfort sitting on the piles of cash," said Jon Nadler, senior analyst at Kitco Bullion Dealers. Gold for December delivery fell $34.50, or 4.1%, to end at $804.50 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, the lowest closing level since Sept. 17. It slumped more than 5% to $791 an ounce earlier. The contract has surrendered $102 an ounce, or 11%, since Oct. 8. Also pushing gold prices lower were news reports that central banks were selling gold. The latest weekly data from the European Central Bank showed 7.6 tons of gold was sold during the week ended Oct. 10, according to Bloomberg, citing Barclays Capital. Central banks sell gold to earn more cash, but their selling is helping push the gold prices lower, analysts said. Gold lease rates charged by central banks have reached record highs, according to the London Bullion Market Association, indicating central banks' unwillingness to lend gold to financial institutions on worries that it may not be returned. Gold's losses came amid declines in some global stock markets. Stocks in Europe and Asia recorded sharp losses, while U.S. stocks climbed. See Market Snapshot. "Investors worldwide are selling everything, including the kitchen sink, and gold is no exception," said Peter Grandich, chief commentator at Agoracom, an online marketplace for the small-cap investment community. On gold exchange-traded funds, assets in the SPDR Gold Trust, the largest gold ETF, were unchanged at 767.58 tons Wednesday but down from Monday's record of 770.64 tons, according to the latest data from the fund. The SPDR Gold Trust GLD, +0.17% dropped 4.8% to close at $79.29 on the New York Stock Exchange. Analysts had projected gold prices to rise as demand for the precious metal as a safe haven is expected to increase amid the financial turmoil, but gold has repeatedly defied their expectations and has closed lower in the previous five straight sessions. "Nervousness was the main feature among participants," said Kitco's Nadler. Key U.S. economic data released on Thursday showed retail-level inflation under wraps. See Economic Report. Some analysts worried that in the long term, the global rescue plans to inject liquidity into the market will stir inflation -- something that would be a bullish sign for gold prices as investors tend to buy the metal as a hedge against rising prices. In other metals action, December silver dropped 5% to $9.64 an ounce. Copper for December delivery dropped 5.7% to $2.0855 a pound. January platinum tumbled 8.6% to $891.30 an ounce, and December palladium plunged 12% to $173.10 an ounce. In spot trading, the London gold-fixing price -- used as a benchmark for gold for immediate delivery -- stood at $802.50 an ounce Thursday afternoon local time, down $44.50 from Wednesday afternoon. On the equities side, the Amex Gold Bugs Index HUI, -0.36% fell 9.2% to end at 210.12 points. IShares Gold Trust IAU, +0.08% slid 5% to close at $79.39, while the iShares Silver Trust ETF SLV, +0.27% fell 6.5% to finish at $9.60. The Market Vectors-Gold Miners ETF GDX, -0.18% dropped 8.9% to close at $22.20.

President Barack Obama has bestowed prized ambassadorships on big donors, such as Charles H. Rivkin and Louis B. Susman. \| AP photo composite by POLITICO Obama rewards donors with plum jobs He may have promised to change Washington, but President Barack Obama is continuing one of its most renowned patronage traditions: bestowing prized ambassadorships on big donors. Of the nearly 80 ambassadorship nominations or confirmations since Obama’s Inauguration, 56 percent were given to political appointees and 44 percent have gone to career diplomats, according to records kept by the American Foreign Service Association. Story Continued Below The latest nomination came this week, when Beatrice Wilkinson Welters was nominated to serve as ambassador to the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. Welters, a longtime advocate for underprivileged children, and her husband, Anthony, an executive with UnitedHealth Group, generated between $200,000 and $500,000 in donations to Obama’s presidential campaign and an additional $100,000 for his Inauguration, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks political giving. The Welters can be counted among the nearly two dozen Obama bundlers — fundraisers who together organized and solicited more than $10 million in donations during the 2008 campaign — who now are being dispatched to some of the world’s greatest cities. Charles H. Rivkin, a Los Angeles-based children’s television executive and an $800,000 bundler, is in Paris; Alan Solomont, a Boston-based investor and $500,000 bundler, is in Madrid; Louis B. Susman, a Chicago investor and $500,000 bundler, is in London; and former Virginia lieutenant governor Don Beyer, a $745,000 bundler, is in Bern, Switzerland. Nicole Avant, a member of a Motown family dynasty who is credited with bundling up to $800,000 for Obama, was granted the coveted and cushy ambassadorship in Nassau, Bahamas. Beyond the bundlers, Obama’s ambassador ranks are also teeming with good, old-fashioned, loyal Democrats who have given generously to the party but weren’t ranked among his top fundraisers. Counted on those rolls are newly installed Ambassador to Germany Philip Murphy, former finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee who since 1989 has personally donated nearly $1.5 million to the party; and Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Costa Rica, Anne Slaughter Andrew, an environmental attorney whose husband, Joe, is a former DNC chairman who provided a well-timed endorsement of Obama during the extended 2008 primary against then-Sen. Hillary Clinton. For career diplomats, the selection of amateurs is always galling. “It is time to stop this spoils system and these de facto, three-year-term rentals of ambassadorships,” said Susan Johnson, president of the American Foreign Service Association. “We believe the appointment of noncareer individuals, however accomplished they may be in their own field, to lead American diplomatic missions should be exceptional and circumscribed and not the routine practice it has become over the last three or four decades,” she added. The politicization of the diplomatic corps, which began in the 1960s, is of increasing concern to some foreign policy experts, given the rise of terrorism and the need for greater coordination between the U.S. and foreign governments on national security issues. Diplomatic posts that may once have largely involved ceremonial appearances now can be focused on issues such as human and drug trafficking, kidnappings, war and intelligence sharing. With that worldview, “We believe America is best served by having career foreign service officers, just as we have career military officers,” Johnson said. Obama never promised an end to the practice of ambassadorial patronage. In an appearance before his Inauguration, he said, “it would be disingenuous for me to suggest that there are not going to be some” political appointments.

Photo by Mitch Manzella Justin Vernon's Bon Iver project released their massively successful self-titled album last year, and has been on tour ever since. But we might not be hearing much from Bon Iver for awhile in the future. Update: A representative for Bon Iver's label, Jagjaguwar, says "They are just going off cycle after two very busy years on this record." Last night, Vernon appeared on Minnesota Public Radio station 89.3 The Current's Local Show, as City Pages points out (via the Daily Swarm). When questioned about what Bon Iver's "up to these days," here's what he said: Winding it down. I look at it like a faucet. I have to turn it off and walk away from it because so much of how that music comes together is subconscious or discovering. There’s so much attention on the band, it can be distracting at times. I really feel the need to walk away from it while I still care about it. And then if I come back to it – if at all – I'll feel better about it and be renewed or something to do that. In the meantime, Bon Iver's performance at NYC's Radio City Music Hall on September 21 is now streaming on YouTube. Watch it below-- it's only available for the next two days:

Making It In The U.S.: More Than Just Hard Work First of a two-part report. Here's a startling figure: The typical white family has 20 times the wealth of the median black family. That's the largest gap in 25 years. The recession widened the racial wealth gap, but experts say it's also due to deeply ingrained differences in things such as inheritance, home ownership, taxes and even expectations. Take the example of two California women, Dametra Williams and Stephanie Upp, who aren't that different in many ways. Both were raised by single mothers who struggled financially. Both worked hard to get where they are today. But how they describe basically the same thing about how they got to where they are today differs. Wealth Gap Grows Median wealth (1984-2007) Notes Figures do not include home equity. The data is based on more than 2,600 families tracked by the study's researchers, Thomas M. Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede and Laura Sullivan. The researchers published their findings in a brief, "The Racial Wealth Gap Increases Fourfold." Williams is 40, black and a single mother of one. She just started her own business. "It's funny, the American dream is sort of steeped in this myth of work hard, be self-sufficient and push yourself forward, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that kind of thing. But much of the wealth in this country was not built on that, in no way, fashion or form," Williams says. Upp, 43, is white, a mother of two and a part-time consultant. "I think about the little things, like when I went to college. When I graduated, my mom had enough resources to give me her car so that I had a car to get to work so that I could earn money that I could then save to help put me into the next position," Upp says. "I could then save more money and have opportunities. So it wasn't like we had a lot, but there was enough. I didn't do it all by myself." And that's the difference. Study after study shows that white families are more likely than blacks and Hispanics to enjoy certain economic advantages — even when their incomes are similar. Often it's the subtle things: help from Mom and Dad with a down payment on a home or college tuition, or a tax break on money passed from one generation to the next. Tom Shapiro of Brandeis University has tracked hundreds of families for almost 30 years and says the gap perpetuates itself. "The larger the amount of financial wealth a family starts with, the more financial wealth it accumulated over that period of time," he says. In other words, it's easier to get richer if you already are. Since blacks and Hispanics are less likely to have much wealth to begin with, they're less likely to have money to invest in the stepping stones to success — a small business, college or home. Enlarge this image toggle caption Pam Fessler/NPR Pam Fessler/NPR Stephanie Upp: 'A Richer Life' Upp, her husband Ben Corson and their two children live in a small bungalow in Oakland. This family is well on its way to achieving the American dream. Corson works in software. Upp consults for nonprofits. Upp credits her success, in part, to something that happened a long time ago. When her parents divorced, her mother insisted on keeping their home in suburban Kansas. They didn't have much money, but they had stability and good schools, where college was a given and expectations were high. "In my mind, there wasn't a question that I would have a richer life than I grew up with both financially and then also in terms of experience," Upp says. College led to graduate school, then a career, then Corson. They started a family, and when they wanted to buy their first house, they got an unexpected boost. "We were able to have a down payment for this house, thanks to my great-aunt," says Corson. "So that definitely helped us." His great-aunt left the couple $60,000 in her will. Shapiro says inheritance is a big factor when it comes to the racial wealth gap. White families are four times more likely than blacks to inherit. When they do, the median inheritance is 10 times greater. Now, Upp and Corson plan to leverage their house into a new and bigger one, which will mean better public schools. Stephanie says they aren't rich by any means, but they have options. Their 6-year-old daughter, Clare, reads a poem from the Dr. Seuss book Oh! The Places You'll Go that is painted on the wall above her bed: "You have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes, you can steer yourself any direction you choose." Experts say choices and expectations can make all the difference. Dametra Williams: Making Things Work The larger the amount of financial wealth a family starts with, the more financial wealth it accumulated over that period of time. "When you don't have enough money to make any mistakes, the bottom line is you just don't, there's no room," Williams says. Today, Williams thinks she finally has choices. Her home health care business in Berkeley is getting off the ground. She beams when her 18-year-old daughter, Yvonne, talks about getting into Mount Holyoke for college. "I applied to so many [schools]," Yvonne says. Williams says Yvonne applied to about 23 or 24 schools. "And she was offered admission and scholarships to about 18 of them, so I'm very, very proud," she says. But it's been a tough journey. Only 12 years ago, Williams and her daughter were poor and homeless. She says that in her family, growing up in Texas, education wasn't a priority and college wasn't in the cards. "My plan was to work and start my family," she says. Unlike Upp's mother, Williams' didn't own a home. That's not uncommon among black and Hispanic families. In fact, about a third have no assets at all or are in debt, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center. That's double the rate for white families. This means no home equity to draw upon and no mortgage interest deduction to ease the cost of housing. Williams knew when she left home at 17, she was on her own. Enlarge this image toggle caption Pam Fessler/NPR Pam Fessler/NPR "There was no cushion for me to go back to, so the reality for me was either make things work [or] be homeless," she says. "I remember my grandmother telling us we could do anything we wanted to do." But, she adds, she doesn't remember getting advice on how to do it. Like inheritance, financial know-how is key to closing the racial wealth gap, says Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation. He says families that don't expect to climb the economic ladder often don't acquire the skills to do so. After decades of discrimination, he adds, blacks especially can be discouraged about their prospects. "If somebody thinks they will not succeed, there's a high probability that they won't succeed. Because if they don't expect to go to college, if they don't expect to be affluent, they start doing things with that in mind," he says. 'A Formula For It' At the urging of a school counselor, Williams attended the University of California at Berkeley, but she says she dropped out when she realized she didn't have the right skills. Instead, she started a family. When she and Yvonne's father split, though, her one income as a youth counselor wasn't enough. Williams and her daughter wound up homeless, then in public housing. "It was really hard," Williams says. But here's where her story takes a turn. Williams was poor but smart. With the help of a housing authority savings program she eventually returned to college and got her degree. She also got Yvonne into private schools through a special program for inner-city youth. A San Francisco nonprofit called EARN helped her save money for tutors and a business. Today, she thinks she might be breaking the cycle that have kept so many others in poverty. "Families of color in particular are becoming much more knowledgeable and much more aware of how to create wealth here in America," she says. "I think there is a formula for it, and it's not work hard and do well. Most poor people work really hard." Williams says she's still trying to figure out the formula and working hard to catch up. But, she thinks that Yvonne at least is going into the world with the head start she never had.

Rachel Tabachnick of Talk2Action is one of the premier writers on the Religious Right. Here is what she had to say about the background of the FRC shooter and claims that he came from a lefty background: Within hours of the shooting at the Family Research Council in D.C., rightwing organizations were claiming that the episode was the result of “anti-Christian” and “radical homosexual” ideology. Police arrested 28 year old Floyd Corkins, Jr., who had volunteered for several months at the front desk of an LGBT center. But according to numerous press reports, Corkins attended Grace Brethren Christian School (GBCS) in Clinton, Maryland. He would have graduated about ten years ago, but if the information about his educational background in the press is correct, Corkins spent his formative years in a conservative Christian school with a very strict anti-homosexual policy. The point is not that this school should in any way be tainted by Corkins’ horrific and senseless crime, but to counter the wave of claims coming from FRC and similar organizations that this shooter is obviously the product of “anti-Christian” hatred or environment. There has been little public information made available about Corkins, but it is almost certain that he was not raised in a Marxist/atheist/radical homosexual environment as some rightwing sources immediately claimed. If the news reports are correct, the shooter came from a conservative Christian environment and attended a school which refuses admission to homosexuals or students with homosexuals in their family.

Sunday, BP surprised everyone by announcing that now that they had a "capping stack" set, they were not going to actually hook up all the ships they have on station to collect the oil; rather, they were going to run a well integrity test to see if they could shut-in this badly damaged well that has been flowing into the Gulf now for 86 days uncontrolled. My first reaction was What? Well integrity test? I've looked back through all of my notes, blog entries, and reviewed BP's and the Unified Command's communications. I've even done multiple internet searches, and found the first mention of a "well integrity test" related to BP on this past Sunday, July 11. Certainly I could have missed something, but I don't recall even a single mention of what I consider to be probably the most significant (and risky) operation BP has conducted since the much hailed, and utterly failed, top kill procedure that kept the masses enthralled during the Memorial Day weekend. All of us who are paying attention have been watching ROV feeds, and listening to the briefings by Adm. Allen and Kent Wells that continue to be long on words and short on information. The press continues to let them get away with it, not asking the pertinent questions and holding them to a standard of transparency so we can really know what's going on. Wells is now actually holding 2 "technical briefings" a day, which are also long on words, short on technical, where he basically talks in long sweeping statements talking about safety and "making sure everyone knows what we're going to do", without actually telling anyone what they're going to do. This morning, we learned that, even thought the stack has now been set for 3 days, they actually haven't hooked up the two new valves. He also announced that yesterday, they pulled all of the ships off site to run a seismic survey, and, alarmingly, have stopped drilling the relief well, which is now only 4 feet away laterally from the blowout well. Since Dudley's letter to Adm. Allen last Friday laying out the relief well timeline, they have made little progress and have only 34 more feet to drill before they get to casing point for the last string of pipe. 34 feet, and they stopped. They're just sitting there circulating on bottom at 17,840. Just sitting there. Wells claims that they are doing that for "safety reasons" during the well integrity test. The one they're not going to run for at least another 24 hours. What? I'm sorry, but I have to ask, What the hell are they doing? We now have an ability to capture all the oil and stop this massive pollution of the Gulf (as well as measure it). We have great weather to get the relief well completed. We already know, without the "well integrity test", that they have severe damage to the BOP and other surface equipment and casing. If that weren't true, the damn thing wouldn't have blown out in the first place. We also know that between the "capping stack" and the old BOP that there is a non-wellhead rated piece of equipment, known as the flex joint, along with the riser adapter, that we've talked about before. This piece of equipment, that normally sits above the BOP, is not rated to nearly those pressures encountered by wellhead equipment. All of the other components in this BOP are rated to at least 10,000 psi (new, off the shelf, and undamaged); this piece is by far the weakest link in the chain, especially since it took severe stresses as the rig sank and 5,000 feet of riser torqued it as it sank. Yesterday, Adm. Allen announced they were going to take the stack, including this flex joint, to as high as 9,000 psi for up to 48 hours. I have been unable to learn the model and rating of the flex joint here, but Oil States advertises their LMRP flex joints to be rated 600-6,000 psi, far below the 9,000 to which Adm Allen said they would potentially go; even with the 2,200 psi of hydrostatic pressure on the outside of the compenent caused by it being in 5,000 feet of water, it's still at least 1,000 psi differential pressure over the rating of the component. Surely, I'm missing something here, but all of this seems like reckless rope-a-dope in the tradition of Muhammad Ali in his best rope-a-doping days. Either that, or there are so many cooks in the kitchen that the pot is boiling over while the chefs all stand around arguing about spices. Boxing and cooking analogies aside, I don't think anyone is actually in charge, and if anyone is, they are certainly not interested in giving any real information.

There is no longer a big-league baseball team in Montreal, but the closest junior hockey team apparently has a new designated quitter. New Jersey Devils first-round pick Stefan Matteau's turbulent season, which has included being suspended by the Blainville-Boisbriand Armada for rough play, missing out on Team USA's world junior championship triumph and making his NHL debut at age 18, has taken a rather volatile twist. Details are slowly being filled in, but Stéphane Leroux (@StephRDSJunior) of Réseau des sports (RDS) is reporting that Matteau has quit the Armada, who are down 2-0 in to Baie-Comeau in a QMJHL semifinal series. It's understandable that a 19-year-old could have trouble working through frustration, but he has created a spectacle. Scroll to continue with content Ad [Related: Devils draft pick penalty proving costly] Armada GM Joël Bouchard is holding a press conference at 9:30 a.m. Monday to clarify the situation. Both RDS and QMI Agency states that the 19-year-old Matteau did not even take the team bus home after being benched during the third period on Saturday. L'entraîneur de l'Armada, Jean-François Houle, n'a pas utilisé son attaquant vedette après qu'il ait écopé d'une punition pour avoir donné un coup de bâton dans un revers de 2-1, samedi. Blainville-Boisbriand tire de l'arrière 0-2 dans cette série. Après la partie, il n'aurait pas accompagné ses coéquipiers pour rentrer à la maison après la deuxième rencontre. Il serait rentré à bord de l'autobus des partisans. (RDS) Is the awkwardness doubled, trebled or quadrupled since the forward's father, former NHLer Stéphane Matteau, is a member of the Armada's coaching staff? Story continues On Saturday, the Drakkar prevailed 2-1 after making a goal with 1:14 left in the second period stand up. That came just 10 seconds after Matteau finished sitting out a slashing penalty that Houle felt was undisciplined. «Je n'ai pas apprécié sa pénalité [coup de bâton] écopée en fin de deuxième période, avait indiqué Houle à l'Agence QMI. On a des valeurs au sein de notre équipe. [Le hockey] n'est pas un sport individuel.» (QMI Agency) Working translation: "We have values on our team. [Hockey] is not an individual sport." Matteau plays with an edge, but he was prone to disciplinary lapses during the regular season, when he had 70 penalty minutes in 35 games with the Armada. It is the coach's prerogative to send a message to a player, especially when the penalty led to the game's decisive moment. Dossier Stefan Matteau jr. Point de presse demain il aurait quitte #armada apres le match d hier insatisfait d avoir ete laisse de cote — Stephane Leroux (@StephRDSJunior) April 22, 2013 Rumours are that Stefan Matteau has left the Armada? During the semi-finals? His dad is teams assistant-coach? This could be a doozy. :) — Rick Springhetti (@Rick1042) April 22, 2013 Talk about a player whose season has gone sideways. It's a soap opera and it's too early to say whether this does irreparable harm to Matteau's hockey career. Drawing conclusions about the Devils' decisions is fairer game. The franchise, which was stripped of a first-rounder after the NHL ruled it circumvented the salary cap while signing Ilya Kovalchuk, was widely questioned for even using its first-rounder in 2012. What was the point of hanging on to second-last pick of the first round in a weak draft year, then rushing him to the NHL to perform in spot duty, disrupting a crucial development season? Taking Matteau also painted the Devils into a corner where they likely going to have to give up their first-rounder in the fecund 2014 draft. Missing out on a possible shot at an elite youngster such as the Barrie Colts' Aaron Ekblad, Kootenay Ice's Sam Reinhart or Kingston Frontenacs' Roland McKeown is a hefty price to pay to take a player who seems to be struggling with some maturity issues. Walking off a team in a playoff series could be viewed as beyond the pale, if indeed that's what happened. Teachable moment, definitely. Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet. Please address any questions, comments or concerns to btnblog@yahoo.ca.

Update: It would appear that someone somewhere, thought it would be a pretty swell idea to do typing practice with the box art; because there is more than one count of typos present. The first official specifications of AMD’s or should we say MSI’s upcoming Radeon 300 series lineup has been leaked by TecMundo and the cards can now be officially confirmed as rebrands based on existing GPU cores. The lineup which consists of 7 graphics cards ranges from the Twin Frozr V and Armor 2X cooling based R9, R7 Gaming cards and the regular overclocked cards. MSI Radeon 300 Gaming and Overclocked Lineup Leaked – Rebrands Officially Confirmed All of the chips that are featured in the new Radeon 300 series lineup make use of new naming schemes for existing GPUs. For instance, the Radeon R9 390X is based on the Grenada XT (Hawaii XT) core that has 2816 stream processors, 176 TMUs and 64 ROPs. The card packs a clock speed of 1100 MHz on the MSI’s Gaming model and has the 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM clocked at 6100 MHz that runs across a 512-bit wide I/O interface. The chip has a 208W TDP which could possibly be a mistake since Hawaii has a TDP range of around 280W and MSI also listed the same TDP for the reference Hawaii cards (290X) during launch which turned out to be a marketing mistake. The Radeon R9 380 on the other hand is based on the Grenada Pro (Hawaii Pro) GPU with 2560 stream processors. Next up, we have two Antigua (Tonga Pro) based cards which feature 1792 stream processors, 112 TMUs and 32 ROPs. Featuring a better architectural design over Hawaii, the chip comes at a clock speed of 1000 MHz core and has the memory clocked at 5.7 GHz for the 4 GB and 5.5 GHz for the 2 GB variant. The TDP of the core is listed at 150W and the memory operates along a 256-bit wide memory interface. The card comes in the Twin Frozr V based Gaming variant and a Thermal Armor 2 X based cheaper variant that has enough cooling performance to keep the Tonga chip cool and comes with Dual-DVI, HDMI and Display port connectors. The next model is the Pitcairn XT based Radeon R7 370 graphics card which has 1280 stream processors, 80 TMUs and 32 ROPs. Based on the same design as the HD 7870, the chip has a 4 GB model that comes with a clock speed of 1070 MHz and 2 GB model with 1050 MHz. The cards have the memory operating along a 256-bit wide bus interface and feature the Twin Frozr V Gaming cooler that has two copper heat pipes cooling the internals of the GPU. The Display connectivity includes Dual-DVI, HDMI and a single DP. The TDP is listed around 150W which is the same as Antigua and is due to the older architecture GCN 1.0 design. Last up is the Radeon R7 360 which is based on the Bonaire Pro core with 768 stream processors that is rebadged to Tobago. The chip is clocked at 1100 MHz while the 2 GB GDDR5 VRAM comes clocked at 6.5 GHz across a 128-bit bus interface. We should see a Display Port, HDMI and DVI-I connector on this card with a low TDP of just 83W. Additional specifications and prices of reference models (MSRP) can be found in the table below along with the first unboxing video of the XFX based R9 390X which was leaked a while ago and spotted on retail yesterday: MSI Radeon R9 390 Series: MSI Radeon R9 380 Series: MSI Radeon R7 370 Series: MSI Radeon R7 360 Series: AMD Radeon 300 Series Product Family Specifications: GPU Card 200 Series Counterpart GCN Iteration Mem. GPU/Memory Frequency Memory Bandwidth Pricing (Preliminary) FIJI XT AMD Radeon – 1.2 4 GB HBM (4096-bit) 1050 MHz / 500 MHz 512 GB/s TBD FIJI Pro AMD Radeon – 1.2 4 GB HBM (4096-bit) 1000 MHz? / 500 MHz 512 GB/s TBD Grenada XT AMD Radeon R9 390X Radeon R9 290X 1.1 8GB 1050/1500 MHz 384 GB/s $389 Grenada Pro AMD Radeon R9 390 Radeon R9 290 1.1 8GB 1000/1500 MHz 384 GB/s $329 Antigua XT AMD Radeon R9 380X Radeon R9 M295X 1.2 6GB/4GB TBD TBD TBD Antigua Pro AMD Radeon R9 380 Radeon R9 285 1.2 4GB/2GB 1000/1375MHz 179 GB/s $195 / $225 Trinidad XT AMD Radeon R7 370 Radeon R7 265 1.0 4GB/2GB 975/1425 MHz 182 GB/s $135 / $165 Tobago XT AMD Radeon R7 360X AMD Radeon R7 260X 1.1 4GB/2GB 1050/1750 MHz 112 GB/s TBD Tobago Pro AMD Radeon R7 360 AMD Radeon R7 260 1.1 2 GB 1000/1750 MHz 112 GB/s $107

In thinking about libertarian strategy, I find it useful to revisit the framework set out by Murray Rothbard in For a New Liberty (FNL). What counts here is not that Rothbard, a builder of the modern libertarian movement, was the author, but that it is an eloquent statement of a reasonable position on how libertarians should grapple with political reality as they strive for a totally free society. In part three of FNL Rothbard offers a "Strategy for Liberty," which is more a guideline than a recipe for a successful movement. (He attempted such a recipe in controversial unpublished papers.) In FNL he was concerned with how the movement could navigate between the Scylla of "left-wing sectarianism" and the Charybdis of "right-wing opportunism." (He notes that the Marxists confronted the same issue.) In this one respect, perhaps, Rothbard could be said to be a middle-of-the-roader. He starts with right-wing opportunism: The major problem with the opportunists is that by confining themselves strictly to gradual and "practical" programs, programs that stand a good chance of immediate adoption, they are in grave danger of completely losing sight of the ultimate objective, the libertarian goal. He who confines himself to calling for a two percent reduction in taxes helps to bury the ultimate goal of abolition of taxation altogether. By concentrating on the immediate means, he helps liquidate the ultimate goal, and therefore the point of being a libertarian in the first place. If libertarians refuse to hold aloft the banner of the pure principle, of the ultimate goal, who will? The answer is no one.... Rothbard advises libertarians to "cleave to principle," and that "means something more than holding high and not contradicting the ultimate libertarian ideal. It also means striving to achieve that ultimate goal as rapidly as is physically possible. In short, the libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. For by doing so, he undercuts the overriding importance of his own goals and principles. And if he himself values his own goals so lightly, how highly will others value them?" In support of his case, he turns to F. A. Hayek's important essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism." In that essay Hayek famously called for "a truly liberal radicalism..., which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible." Hayek continued: We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. In Hayek's view a truly liberal radicalism—presenting a "liberal Utopia"—is necessary to "make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage." Rothbard doesn't like the word "Utopia," but he agrees that only a radical vision will attract people to the movement. "Who, in contrast," Rothbard asked, "will go to the barricades for a two percent tax reduction?" Another dividend from liberal, or libertarian, radicalism is that it may shift the "middle" in the public debate toward the libertarian position. "It is precisely the strategic role of the 'extremist' to keep pushing the matrix of day-to-day action further and further in his direction," he wrote. If we stopped the Rothbardian analysis here, we would have a misleading picture of his full position, for while he condemned right-wing opportunism, he was equally hard on "left-wing sectarianism." He wrote: If, then, the libertarian must advocate the immediate attainment of liberty and abolition of statism, and if gradualism in theory is contradictory to this overriding end, what further strategic stance may a libertarian take in today's world? Must he necessarily confine himself to advocating immediate abolition? Are "transitional demands," steps toward liberty in practice, necessarily illegitimate? No, for this would fall into the other self-defeating strategic trap of "left-wing sectarianism." For while libertarians have too often been opportunists who lose sight of or under-cut their ultimate goal, some have erred in the opposite direction: fearing and condemning any advances toward the idea as necessarily selling out the goal itself. The tragedy is that these sectarians, in condemning all advances that fall short of the goal, serve to render vain and futile the cherished goal itself. For much as all of us would be overjoyed to arrive at total liberty at a single bound, the realistic prospects for such a mighty leap are limited. If social change is not always tiny and gradual, neither does it usually occur in a single leap. In rejecting any transitional approaches to the goal, then, these sectarian libertarians make it impossible for the goal itself ever to be reached. Thus, the sectarians can eventually be as fully "liquidationist" of the pure goal as the opportunists themselves. [Emphasis added.] But, he noted, not everything presented as a move toward freedom is actually a move toward freedom: How, then, can we know whether any halfway measure or transitional demand should be hailed as a step forward or condemned as an opportunistic betrayal? There are two vitally important criteria for answering this crucial question: (1) that, whatever the transitional demands, the ultimate end of liberty be always held aloft as the desired goal; and (2) that no steps or means ever explicitly or implicitly contradict the ultimate goal. A short-run demand may not go as far as we would like, but it should always be consistent with the final end; if not, the short-run goal will work against the long-run purpose, and opportunistic liquidation of libertarian principle will have arrived. He added that "the libertarian must never allow himself to be trapped into any sort of proposal for 'positive' governmental action; in his perspective, the role of government should only be to remove itself from all spheres of society just as rapidly as it can be pressured to do so." Here things can get a bit tricky. A proposal might substantially loosen the state's grip in a particular area of life without removing the state completely. For example, a long-proposed reform of Social Security would recognize each person's property right in at least some of the money he or is forced to put toward retirement. (There are many variations of this program, including some that would not compel participation.) Today the government (mostly through employers) seizes part of people's income (and immediately spends it), with a promise of cash benefits in the future (financed by taxing a later generation of workers). Under the reform, the government would require people to invest at least some of the money that would otherwise be stolen through taxation in a private account that would be recognized as their property. This would mean, among other things, that the money could be bequeathed to the worker's heirs, something that cannot happen under Social Security. I submit that this would be a "step toward liberty," to use Rothbard's phrase, in that it would institutionalize a legitimate property right in a portion of one's income that today is denied. Obviously this reform would not expel government from personal retirement planning. Not only would the government compel people to save at least a defined minimum of their incomes, it also would heavily regulate how the money could be invested and managed. (The corporatist implications are palpable.) That is hardly a pure libertarian approach to Social Security, which—since it is rooted in theft—should be abolished. But it is a reform that libertarians should applaud—while "upping the ante." The recognition of a legitimate property right—even though circumscribed—is better than no recognition. However objectionable the coercive rules, the reform would be preferable to today's taxation. Freedom and serfdom exist in degrees. The reform would not only be good in itself; once in place it could be used to demand broader recognition of natural rights and liberty. Must we forgo all freedom-generating improvements in our lives until the libertarian revolution finally sweeps away all state impositions? Is endorsement of the reform a craven compromise of libertarian principle? Hardly. Compromise would consist in representing the reform as the ultimate libertarian answer to Social Security, in preferring it to abolition, and in failing to up the ante when participating in the debate. Is endorsement of the reform ipso facto an endorsement of the remaining state aggression? Considering what I've just written, how could it be? I can hear Rothbard cackling at the question. This piece originally appeared on Richman's "Free Association" blog.

Look what was waiting for me on my doorstep this afternoon: Here is the follow up to this post … It took just over six weeks to get them back. Overall, I’m very happy. Very happy. Here are the results: The contents of the package… Right out of the box Repaired the stitching Unlined Nice touch with the Brooks Brothers soles… Add the new shoe trees… From the back As I said, overall I’m very happy. I think it was worth the cost to get these restored. I would grade the work an A-. Why not an A+? Two things: 1. the corrected stitching looks like a patch-job. Not the end of the world, but the stitching doesn’t look as consistent as the rest of the shoe. 2. The right shoe (which had the stitching corrected) is a bit tighter than when I sent it (no big deal – I’m sure this will correct itself after a few rounds out and about and living with the shoe trees). Now – the most important question – would I recommend this service to a friend? Probably.

Add Bing Vision (though not necessarily labeled as such) onto Cortana's home screen (it would be interesting if she were ever just integrated onto the Start Screen: no need to go to "her" screen, just see what she has to say proactively in a feed on your Start Screen (particularly on tablet/PC) and then hit the Search button (on Phone, Windows button on Computer... that's not confusing) simply to trigger a conversation. As far as this feature goes, this could be extended to "Take a picture of this" Take a video (of what I've been seeing for the last 15 seconds) Scan this code (automatically barcode, QR, etc.) I'd love to see Bing Vision simply integrated into the camera. Just turn on your camera and if a QR code is identified, have Cortana show you that you can follow it or dismiss it if you just want to take a picture. Make this process more seamless. You could eventually have it see that it's seeing a QR code, even if you're not in the camera and make it possible to take action immediately, but that could get into privacy issues, though they're probably already there.

User Info: Arkia Arkia 7 years ago #5 TBKBigdog posted... what are USAS? A type of shotgun that is a SMG and GL also at the same time. Very powerful in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. Decent even in the hands of those who don't. Noobs like to use them because it seems very powerful. Too bad no matter how strong it is, they still need some skill to use it. Sorry cod noobs, not cod here, can't shoot the sky and expect a hundred free kills, you still need some skill. Always funny when an USAS guy spams all their shots at some wall in front of me and starts reloading. I just pop in and pop them a few times then stand close to them while setting up my nice claymores or T-UGS or Radio Beacon just ignoring them. Almost always, they shoot me while still that close. Bad idea when using a certain type of rounds that most USAS users use. ilydia has used Massacre Mode: ON. ''Let us rain blood'' "Aria, stop giving them [bloody] ideas! I just died to YOUR kit" gotta love squadmates... A type of shotgun that is a SMG and GL also at the same time.Very powerful in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. Decent even in the hands of those who don't.Noobs like to use them because it seems very powerful. Too bad no matter how strong it is, they still need some skill to use it.Sorry cod noobs, not cod here, can't shoot the sky and expect a hundred free kills, you still need some skill.Always funny when an USAS guy spams all their shots at some wall in front of me and starts reloading. I just pop in and pop them a few times then stand close to them while setting up my nice claymores or T-UGS or Radio Beacon just ignoring them. Almost always, they shoot me while still that close.Bad idea when using a certain type of rounds that most USAS users use.

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Dec. 21, 2016, 2:56 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 21, 2016, 4:36 PM GMT By Traci G. Lee LOS ANGELES — On a warm November night at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre on Sunset Blvd., a room of more than 300 people watched as a cart carrying a frosted sheet cake was rolled on stage. “It’s a yellow cake with white frosting,” comedian Will Choi announced as he led the room in singing “Happy Birthday” to his fellow performer Jenny Yang, who was celebrating her birth month alongside three actresses Choi and Yang had spent the night making digs at: Scarlett Johansson (whose name Choi borrowed for his sold-out UCB comedy show, “Scarlett Johansson Presents: Opening Night of Doctor Strange”), Emma Stone, and Tilda Swinton. The joke, Choi said about naming the comedy showcase, wrote itself. In May, Choi produced his first “Scarlett Johansson Presents” show to coincide with Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. The title, he told NBC News, was an effort to call out the whitewashing in Johansson’s upcoming role in the 2017 film, “Ghost In the Shell.” “I didn’t have to sell the show at all,” Choi, who co-hosted the November show with “Gilmore Girls” actress Keiko Agena (the two donned wigs to portray Johansson and Stone, whose role as Allison Ng in the 2015 film “Aloha” is another still-fresh example of whitewashing), said. “Everyone was on board because it was so pertinent at the time.” Comedian Will Choi says he put together "Scarlett Johansson Presents," an Asian-American variety show for the UCB Theatre in Los Angeles, in May during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Benjamin To / NBC News The “Scarlett Johansson Presents” show in May sold out, prompting a second show in November that took place the same night Marvel’s “Doctor Strange” opened in theaters. Swinton’s role as The Ancient One in “Doctor Strange” had been another dart on the wall of Hollywood missteps when it came to casting actual Asian Americans in major film roles meant for Asian Americans, and Choi saw an opportunity to continue highlighting Hollywood’s problem in the way he knew best: through comedy and performance. “With the ‘Scarlett Johansson’ show, it’s showcasing all these amazing Asian Americans on stage and letting them have the chance to perform in front of an audience that really resonates with them,” Choi said, "and for the audience members to see someone onstage that looks like them and to be empowered to feel like, ‘I can do that too. I can make a change too.’” Pushing Back While Choi’s philosophy isn’t a novel concept, the number of opportunities to respond to misrepresentation (and non-representation) in the media showed almost no sign of slowing down in 2016 — from Chris Rock’s “joke” at the Oscars involving three Asian-American kids to continuing concerns of whitewashing on the big screen. “I feel like a lot of ‘asshattery’ happened,” Yang, who appeared at UCB’s “Scarlett Johansson Presents” show as Swinton/The Ancient One, told NBC News. “I feel like there’s so many low points [in 2016] that have gathered together.” RELATED: Oscars 2016: Twitter Reacts to 'Asian Joke' at Academy Awards For Yang, the “low points” this year were part of the fuel for her bursts of creative fire. In September, after Bon Appétit published a piece on “how you should be eating pho” that featured a white chef demonstrating the “right” way to make and eat the Vietnamese dish, Yang responded not just with outrage, but with satire. Yang’s “How to Eat PB&J” video, which directly mocked Bon Appétit’s take on pho — or, as it’s known online, the “Columbusing” of pho — makes wild assertions about the proper way to consume and appreciate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and ends with a “pro-tip” on not telling Asians how to eat their own food. Since it was posted online, Yang’s video has nearly 900,000 views on Facebook. Bon Appétit has since removed their original video and amended their article to include an explanation. Although this style of comedy isn’t new for Yang — she’s appeared in numerous BuzzFeed videos commenting on the Asian-American experience — she says 2016 has given her confirmation that creating laughter could also create change in a meaningful way. “I love that we are actually creating the kind of buzz and racket in media that is making mainstream media take notice.” “What I feel very privileged to be able to do is to use this wonderful format of comedy to say something that I feel like really gets to the heart of what I care about, what I think about, and the kinds of thoughts and feelings and values that the people I know care about,” Yang said. “It’s satisfying because I know for a fact that I’m hitting a nerve or I’m hitting a stream of discourse, a stream of conversation that hasn’t been elevated to a more mainstream conversation.” One month later, Yang was back at it again, responding to a segment by Fox News correspondent Jesse Watters which saw Watters using stereotypes to poke, what Watters and Fox News called, “gentle fun” at Asians in New York City’s Chinatown. The segment, which was decried as “racist and offensive” by civil rights organization, included references to karate and questions about North Korea. RELATED: Chinatown Responds as Fox Reporter Defends 'Tongue-In-Cheek' Segment In a video for Fusion, Yang responded by going to Beverly Hills, where she mimicked the style and tone of Watters’ segment, but turned the tables on interviewees with stereotypes about white people. “I feel like I’ve developed a brand,” Yang joked. “If they need an Asian face to make fun of white people… ‘Let’s get Jenny Yang!’” ‘In the Driver’s Seat’ Whether it’s been through improv or satirical videos, the media’s lack of responsible representation of Asian Americans continues to showcase the need for the kind of work Yang and Choi have brought to both stage and screen. It’s the kind of work that actor Neal Dandade, who performed in Choi’s “Scarlett Johansson Presents” show in November, says is essential in changing the industry. “Making your own work puts you in the driver’s seat,” Dandade told NBC News. “To a certain degree...you are a product, you have to present yourself in a certain way. So people who’d like to act in things that others write, a great way to get to that stage is to show people how to write for you. And you’re the person who can tell people how to do that most accurately.” Dandade, who was most recently seen on TV in ABC Family’s “Kevin From Work,” got his first taste of the theater while in college, studying both theater and pre-med. After graduating, he moved to Chicago where he worked as a researcher in a lab, but also began taking classes and seeing improv shows at night. “I was very lucky in Chicago. I found some really cool people to make videos with, that’s usually how a lot of great videos start: it’s just people having fun,” he said. Along with his theater and television work, Dandade has appeared in videos for Funny Or Die and the Second City Network, the web portal for The Second City, whose alum include Tina Fey and Steve Carrell. Dandade himself is an alum of Stir Friday Night, a Chicago-based Asian-American comedy troupe that also boasts impressive alumni — for starters, actors Danny Pudi and Steven Yeun, who Choi cited as one of his biggest inspirations for getting into comedy. “I hadn’t seen longform improv before and I’d never seen an Asian person doing improv,” Choi recalled of Yeun, “so when I saw him [at iO West in Los Angeles], I was like, ‘Wait. That guy looks like me and is doing something that seems so fun and scary and just really cool…’” In his own creative career, Choi has found success in being, as Dandade puts it, “behind the driver’s seat,” with projects such as The Comedy Comedy Festival (produced alongside Yang) and “Drunk Monk Podcast” (which he co-hosts with Keiko Agena). At the end of November, Choi and comedian Mike Lane debuted UCB’s first mainstage, all-Asian-American show, “Asian AF.” “Depending on how successful that is, hopefully it’ll become a monthly run,” Choi told NBC News at the beginning of November. One week later, tickets for the show went on sale; four days later, it sold out. Not Playing It ‘Safe’ "The only way we can shift culture is through culture is through creating culture, and that’s through art.” If you ask Choi, Dandade, or Yang why they use comedy to respond to moments that bother them, their answers vary, but they all share similar philosophies: it’s the best way they know how to process what could easily turn into rage. Through tools like social media platforms and YouTube, “there’s been a general loosening and freeing of our voices,” Yang notes, adding that the best way to reach people by “being able to move people emotionally or through humor.” “Not only are we speaking up about issues that are happening in general, but we are also feeling more empowered to speak up about issues that affect us, especially in regards to representation,” she said. “I love that we are actually creating the kind of buzz and racket in media that is making mainstream media take notice.” And without traditional “gatekeepers” online to put the brakes on every piece of commentary, the possibilities, Dandade says, can be endless. “It’s a place to try out your ideas, to see what works, to fail,” he said. “If you put something on the web, you have the entire world [in front of you] in a way, so you can see what kind of ripples your video makes.” Actor Neal Dandade, an alum of the Asian-American comedy troupe Stir Friday Night, performs at the UCB Theatre in Los Angeles, Calif., on Nov. 4, 2016, as part of the "Scarlett Johansson Presents: Opening Night of Doctor Strange" show. Benjamin To / NBC News One of those videos in 2016 making ripples came in May, three months after rapper Dumbfoundead sat down to watch the Oscars and — as he says in his song “Safe” — saw that “the only yellow men were all statues.” "The title 'Safe' is a reference to how I felt Asians and Asian Americans were being perceived: the model minority that'll take it and smile, the punching bag of America," he told NBC News at the time. RELATED: With New Video, Rapper Dumbfoundead Challenges Hollywood 'Whitewashing' Dumbfoundead’s music video for “Safe” went viral in the first few days of its release. And while he uses humor by superimposing his face into iconic movie scenes (it’s a creative move also used in the viral hashtag #StarringJohnCho, which superimposed actor John Cho onto movie posters as a lead role to push back on those who might suggest Asian actors weren’t leading men, according to hashtag creator William Yu), the message is deeper: “What you talkin’ ‘bout there ain’t no space / Guess I gotta go and make more space,” Dumbfoundead raps in the song. RELATED: New Twitter Account, Hashtag Re-Imagines Films #StarringJohnCho “We can’t wait,” he said in an interview with the LA Times in June. “If you wait it’s gonna take forever. You just have to write these stories.” Make ‘Em Laugh Ahead of the release of “Ghost in the Shell” in 2017, Choi already has a third “Scarlett Johansson Presents” show scheduled — this time, in February on the opening night of “The Great Wall,” an action film starring Matt Damon that has Damon’s character saving China from dragons. “ATTN: ASIANS - Meet at the UCB Theatre on February 17th, 2017. Matt Damon is coming to save us all,” the Facebook event reads. “It’s not like I’m saying, ‘Boycott this movie,’ or whatever. It’s already getting made,” Choi said of both “Ghost in the Shell” and “The Great Wall.” “It’s just a way to empower people to stand up for whatever they don’t think is right.” RELATED: 'Correcting Yellowface': One Woman's Project to Fix Whitewashing Choi’s committed to that model of letting his opinions speak through his art: with another “Asian AF” show lined up already in the new year, he hopes to use the stage to help comedians and performers catch the eye of agencies and producers who claim to be on the lookout for diversity. “Let this place, this show, be a place where you can find that talent,” he said. “Making your own work puts you in the driver’s seat." And while every joke in Choi’s shows or Dandade’s web videos or Yang’s sketches aren’t always direct jabs at Hollywood’s fumbles, having the platform and opportunities to create — to perform, to watch — and to laugh at an industry that still hasn’t figured out how to properly support diversity is as important as any other means of demanding change. “As a storyteller, as a comedian, as a writer — to create videos that actually move people, at the minimum, through humor is very powerful,” Yang said. “We can legislate all we want, and we know this through history: people can say from up high, ‘Be a certain way.’ But as a culture, if we also don't shift our practice and our mindset, things don’t change. And the only way we can shift culture is through culture is through creating culture, and that’s through art.” Follow NBC Asian America on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.

Get the biggest Liverpool 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 Melwood has been a quiet place over the past month. Most of the Liverpool squad are either on international duty or sunning themselves on a beach. None are due back until the start of pre-season in early July. However, one member of Jurgen Klopp’s squad has been a frequent visitor to the training complex since the 2015/16 campaign ended on the crushing low of defeat to Sevilla in the Europa League final in May. There has been little rest for Joe Gomez, who has been working tirelessly with the club’s medical and sports science staff to ensure he puts the misery of last term firmly behind him. Read More: Where may Joe Gomez play on his return from injury? The England Under-21s defender is on the comeback trail - some eight months after the heartache of rupturing the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee while on international duty. It’s been a long road back for the 19-year-old, who joined the Reds from Charlton Athletic last summer for an initial fee of £3.5million. He had endeared himself to Kopites with his composed displays at the back as he clocked up seven appearances before injury cruelly wrecked his campaign shortly after Klopp’s appointment. There have been some dark days and long hours in the gym but his commitment and dedication to his rehabilitation since he underwent surgery has been total. Staff speak in glowing terms about his professionalism. Working alongside Danny Ings, who also damaged his cruciate ligament in the same week last October, helped as they kept each other going. Ings made his long-awaited return to action for the Reds on the final day of the Premier League season at West Brom. Now Gomez, whose injury was more severe, is eyeing a comeback of his own. He’s been working outside, building up the strength in his knee, and Liverpool have a carefully planned programme for him over the course of pre-season. The plan is to integrate Gomez back into Klopp’s squad gradually during what will be a strenous July for the players. He will do some sessions with the team and others on an individual basis. Currently, there isn’t a target in terms of which of the eight friendlies he will be involved in but he’s on track to feature in some of them. Gomez will be part of Liverpool’s tour of America and staff are delighted by his progress. It’s been a tough time for the teenager but finally the end is in sight. He will be welcomed back into the fold by Klopp with open arms.

NIPIGON, Ont. — Damage to a newly built bridge cut traffic on the Trans-Canada Highway in both directions Sunday and it wasn’t clear when it could reopen, says the mayor of a Northern Ontario community. Nipigon Mayor Richard Harvey said engineers are examining the Nipigon River Bridge on Highway 11/17 to determine the extent of the damage and how it happened. “We’re not sure exactly what the damage to the bridge is at this point,” he said in an interview. Images of the bridge appear to show a section of the structure is warped. Part of the metal decking can be seen sticking into the air. The only option for motorists driving across northern Ontario is to cross the U.S. border, there being no alternate road routes north of the Trans-Canada, Harvey said. Foot traffic can still use the bridge and if the damage means a lengthy closure, the municipality will look at alternatives to allow some vehicles to cross the river, he said. “This is something that, in our emergency preparedness in this area, we have run scenarios for and we do have options on how we would fairly quickly get traffic moving if there is a more serious issue,” he said. “There are alternate routes that we could, with a little bit of work, open up to get at least some traffic moving again.” Harvey said the bridge has only been open for about two months ago and was the largest most expensive bridge project ever undertaken in Ontario.

Infection-triggered disease onset, chronic immune activation and autonomic dysregulation in CFS point to an autoimmune disease directed against neurotransmitter receptors. Autoantibodies against G-protein coupled receptors were shown to play a pathogenic role in several autoimmune diseases. Here, serum samples from a patient cohort from Berlin (n=268) and from Bergen with pre- and post-treatment samples from 25 patients treated within the KTS-2 rituximab trial were analysed for IgG against human α and β adrenergic, muscarinic (M) 1-5 acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, angiotensin, and endothelin receptors by ELISA and compared to a healthy control cohort (n=108). Antibodies against β2, M3 and M4 receptors were significantly elevated in CFS patients compared to controls. In contrast, levels of antibodies against α adrenergic, dopamine, serotonin, angiotensin, and endothelin receptors were not different between patients and controls. A high correlation was found between levels of autoantibodies and elevated IgG1-3 subclasses, but not with IgG4. Further patients with high β2 antibodies had significantly more frequently activated HLA-DR+ T cells and more frequently thyreoperoxidase and anti-nuclear antibodies. In patients receiving rituximab maintenance treatment achieving prolonged B-cell depletion, elevated β2 and M4 receptor autoantibodies significantly declined in clinical responder, but not in non-responder. We provide evidence that 29.5% of patients with CFS had elevated antibodies against one or more M acetylcholine and β adrenergic receptors which are potential biomarkers for response to B-cell depleting therapy. The association of autoantibodies with immune markers suggests that they activate B and T cells expressing β adrenergic and M acetylcholine receptors. Dysregulation of acetylcholine and adrenergic signalling could also explain various clinical symptoms of CFS. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Craving and Aversion as Addiction and Denial: Buddha's Eightfold Path as a Step Program © bradford hatcher, 2013, Version 13.12 Save as "Page Source" for a desktop .htm copy Please note: Although this book is free to copy or download, it remains copyrighted and rights of distribution are reserved. People are welcome to provide links to this page from their websites, blogs and forums, but permission to offer this as a file from other sites and servers is denied. A printout of this part is around 250 pages. Abstract Dhamma-Vinaya, or Doctrine-and-Discipline, was Buddhism's name for most of its long history. It has been called a religion and a spiritual discipline, even though it has no concept of a god or of spirit. More than anything else it is an array of ideas and exercises aimed at eradicating the internal causes of our suffering, our painful dissatisfactions. Three of the primary causes, the three Unwholesome Roots, are craving, aversion and delusion, each of which goes by many names. Recovery from addictive behavior in the West is concerned with patterns of addiction and denial. Addiction is simply a more entrenched and intractable form of craving, primarily due to the behavior's immediate effect on the evolved reward circuits in the brain. Denial represents a formidable combination of aversion and delusion that forms the armament and defense of addictive behavior. It is the assertion here that the ideas and exercises of Buddhism are perfectly applicable to recovery from our addictions and have been available as such for a very long time. No modification of the system is necessary, except that the specific applicability of some elements of the doctrine might be pointed out in this context, and augmented with some of the further knowledge we have gained in the last twenty-five centuries. Despite the contributions of alternatives to 12-Step programs, there is still an insufficiency of recovery approaches which avoid religious or spiritual indoctrination, and the adoption of a victim or disease model of addiction. Most alternatives which do exist have borrowed heavily from Buddhism, with or without due acknowledgement. Yet Dhamma-Vinaya remains the most highly articulated and time-tested methodology. Many have tried to rephrase the twelve steps in more Buddhist-sounding terms, but this is a disservice to both. This book presents Buddhism strait up, but interpreted here as a path to recovery, from addiction and denial, as well as from our more garden-variety sufferings. Preface To the Reader This book is not intended to be an easy read with mass-market appeal: that book is for somebody else to write. Neither is it written for a majority of the people who are trying to recover from addiction. It is presented for the non-theist or a-theist who is ready to claim personal responsibility for both addictive behavior and its correction. Sobriety, especially the kind that will put the problem behind and get on with life, is a lot of dedicated, hard work. This is written for someone either intelligent or patient enough to read it through, or else for their therapist's benefit. It's also written as a broad introduction to Buddhism, since the doctrine has not been altered to fit the subject at hand. There exist several attempts at developing a Buddhist Recovery program, one for those without a deity to fall back on, but most of these try to rework Buddhist doctrine to fit into the 12-Step model instead of regarding the Middle Path in and of itself as steps along an ancient path that leads to the elimination of suffering due to craving, aversion, and delusion. Where I use the words drink or alcoholic here, this is meant to stand in for all forms of addictive behavior. Whether substance abuse or behavioral, all addiction is ultimately chemical addiction, a feeling-seeking behavior that has employed the organism's evolved chemistry, the endocrinological reward systems, in cementing and armoring itself into place. Addiction also implies that the behavior is a problem, and not something like basic needs for oxygen, water or coffee. Drink is also a reference to the Buddhist word tanha, one of its many words for craving: its primary meaning is thirst. It is not the goal of this work to convert anybody to Buddhism, or even from alcoholism. As Buddha said, "Let him who is your teacher remain your teacher" (DN 25). While I personally feel affinity with the doctrine, I would not call myself a Buddhist unless the name was inserted into a much longer string of labels. There is nothing easy about being a real Buddhist. Eight steps instead of twelve is not an indication. It's even more than the work of not having an imaginary deity helping you, or the placebo effect that that entails. Salvation in Buddhism is a matter of lifelong diligence and heedfulness, and you don't even get an eternal or immortal soul for a reward. And what rewards there are you aren't even allowed to hang on to, although it's OK to enjoy them while present, even as they are slipping way. At least all of the work you get to do here will help keep your mind off the the thing that you used to think you needed. Buddhism is a first-person investigation of whatever may prove to be true, a first-person science. The states of awareness that are needed to reprogram one's views and intentions and thereby transcend addiction, call them apotheosis, epiphany, gratitude, awe, forgiveness, compassion, patience, equanimity, etc., may be arrived at by any number of routes. This particular path, and the techniques for attaining these states, has undergone considerable testing over the centuries. But, with that said, yes, I am aware of a number of important popularizers of Buddhism in the West who had serious problems with alcohol addiction. The method here is not automatic: it still has to be applied specifically to the problems at hand. The practice of Buddhism is not a guarantee of sobriety, well- adjustedness or of mental health. The talk must be walked, and this is a fundamental part of the teaching. I have written this from some experience. I had a 15-year drinking habit and a 25-year tobacco habit, both fairly heavy, now broken, 22 and 20 years ago respectively. Being an atheist with a background in science and an inclination to stay grounded, I had great philosophical difficulties with the 12-Step model as I was groping for a way out. I know that I was not alone in this: I met many along the path with similar problems with god and his inscrutable plans. I tend to regard the 12-Step paradigm (and the DSM's as well) as a toxic model insofar as it promotes the victim and disease mentalities over the taking of full personal responsibility and the diligent practice of correcting our defects. If I did have a disease it was a disease of the values that I was holding. I could in fact help myself, but I needed to learn the keys for doing that effectively, and replace some toxic values with wholesome ones. I intend to base this on the general structure of Buddhist doctrine, and adhere as closely as I can to the original teachings, which means using the Theravada school and its Pali-language terminology. There is a good chance that this approach will be a lot more critical and less squishy than the forms most Westerners are familiar with. It might even be that some hapless spiritual fellow who thought he was a Buddhist finds out he was really a Hindu. At any rate, I have also taken care to omit some of the more hyperbolic nonsense that all wisdom teachings are inclined to attract. Clearly, we have learned some useful things about our addictive behaviors in the 25 centuries since these teachings were first spoken. We have learned several from psychology, biology and recovery that the Buddha never articulated. Many will be introduced in the course of the discussion, even if they seem to be square pegs in round holes. Others will be offered in their appropriate appendices. The Buddha as presented here, and generally in the Theravada school, was simply a man who woke up. In doing so he became humanity's first true psychologist, but one who had a particularly strict and challenging definition of mental health. The normal human state of mind is far from mentally healthy. It's important to note that this strict definition need not be fully realized in order to mark real progress along the path that leads to suffering's end. It might even be enough for now to simply stop killing ourselves for things that we don't need. Disclaimer The reader is responsible for anything he or she does with any of the information contained in this book. Accepting personal responsibility for our own cognitive and affective states, accepting ownership of the consequences of our actions, the ownership of our own kamma, is a fundamental premise of Buddhism and of this book. If you cannot accept this, read no further: there are plenty of alternative approaches, and books that are written specifically for the victims of disease, circumstance and persuasive suggestion. Introduction Recover What? How far you want to go with recovery might say something about whether you belong here. To simply recover from an addiction leaves you the same person who got into trouble in the first place, though somewhat further damaged and with some makeup work to be done. At a minimum, new behaviors need to be learned to avoid relapse indefinitely. This is recovery from, "the action or process of regaining possession or control of something stolen or lost" and a return to a normal state of health, mind, or strength. It is frequently claimed that Buddhism cannot be considered therapy because it starts with a psychology of the normal and proceeds towards more extraordinary states. It shares this with today's "Positive Psychology." While it is understandable, knowing humans as we do, that most people would regard the normative state of human experience to be the baseline for measuring mental health, or simply that normalcy defines mental health, there are other points of view. The Buddha took a harder line: normal is a long, long way from healthy, and it is a grievous error to state that a mental phenomenon cannot be a mental illness simply because a majority of people suffer from it. This recalls Jiddu Krishnamurti's quip: "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." A Buddhist approach to addiction, once withdrawal is out of the way, is not simply a new habit of abstinence. Sights are set on becoming healthier than normal. Health is more than the absence of disease. And freedom is a lot more than freedom from unmanageable craving. Suppose you were to see some hapless fellow fall ten meters from a third-floor roof. There are a large numbers of moves he could make on the way down. Suppose he made precisely the right moves at the right time, and striking the ground sent him into a horizontal roll from which he emerged like a circus gymnast. Instead of a ten-meter fall he has made a ten-meter flight, nailed his dismount, and made a nice "recovery." We want recovery in this sense. But one thing that this requires is something Castaneda called "using all the event," investigating and accepting all of the things that happened on the way down, as givens, as momentum, to serve the transformation of disaster into victory. This sort of acceptance is not the same thing as approval: it is simply the conquest of denial. All of the component factors are a part of the reality to be taken as a given. If there is a need, the dark times being salvaged and redeemed can be called something else. In my own case, this was time spent "integrating my shadow" and credit for "time served." It is a lesser-known principle of Buddhism that suffering itself, and not ignorance, is the first step in a second chain of conditioned arising, one which leads to freedom. We will be looking at this important insight shortly. Suffering then, given the appropriate wisdom or guidance, can be made into a growth experience. We know that to move ourselves in new directions we need either a new obedience or a new motivation and discipline. Obedience comes from respect for, or at least acceptance of, an authority, while discipline comes from an inner valuation. We also know that addicts, as a class, are some of humankind's less obedient folk. Court-ordered sobriety doesn't work any better than broken kneecaps from the bookie's thugs. That leaves motivation, which in turn wants a new set of values, which in its turn wants a new world-view. Values are soluble in alcohol, so here's a head start: the old ones are less likely to stand in the way, having already proven themselves to be worthless. Old world-views can be a little more stubborn, but their failure too can help clear the mind of some rubbish. Salvation is salvage, recycling, the act of obtaining useable substances from what seemed unusable sources. Redemption can mean being saved from sin, error, or evil, or the action of regaining or gaining possession of something in exchange for payment, or clearing a debt. You know what the payment has been. In our case this is the discharge of a debt, the debt due to the accumulated consequences of our intentional actions, or kamma (the Pali version of the better known Sanskrit karma). This is not a retributive justice, but simply the harvest of things sown. Harvests can be hard but rewarding work. Salvation, to the Buddha, was a question of diligence and heedfulness. So there are lots of things that can be recovered here other than your normalcy: the original promise of youth, whatever remains of your years, and even a meaning to your lost years. Which Buddhism? There are four major schools or divisions of Buddhism. Only one, Theravada, will be developed here at any length. The reason for this is a need for structure and consistency that is specific to the recovery process. Combining the four introduces too much internal contradiction. These four schools are often referred to as vehicles or rafts for crossing the Stream. It is most important that an awareness of their instrumentality be preserved, lest any one become an end in itself. The Buddha had this to say on the impermanent utility of the method used to wake up: “Then the man, having gathered grass, twigs, branches, & leaves, having bound them together to make a raft, would cross over to safety on the far shore in dependence on the raft, making an effort with his hands & feet. Having crossed over to the far shore, he might think, ‘How useful this raft has been to me! For it was in dependence on this raft that, making an effort with my hands & feet, I have crossed over to safety on the far shore. Why don’t I, having hoisted it on my head or carrying on my back, go wherever I like?’ What do you think, monks? Would the man, in doing that, be doing what should be done with the raft?” “No, lord.” “And what should the man do in order to be doing what should be done with the raft? There is the case where the man, having crossed over to the far shore, would think, ‘How useful this raft has been to me! For it was in dependence on this raft that, making an effort with my hands & feet, I have crossed over to safety on the far shore. Why don’t I, having dragged it on dry land or sinking it in the water, go wherever I like?’ In doing this, he would be doing what should be done with the raft” (MN 22, tr. Thanissaro Bikkhu) . Buddha is reported to have lived eighty years, from 563 to 483 BCE . Several councils were convened in the centuries following his death to examine the state of the doctrine and counteract the natural tendency to schism. The 3rd Council was held in 247 BCE , during the reign of the Buddhist emperor Ashoka (304-232 BCE ), by which time there were already a number of factions. One of a few Fourth Councils, held by the Theravada sect in the 1st century BCE, committed a Pali-language version of the formerly-oral doctrine into writing. It is claimed that this followed the teachings agreed upon in the 3rd Council. This was the massive Three Baskets or Tipitaka. Other versions of the doctrine would follow, most notably the canon of the Mahayana sect, beginning in the 2nd century CE . The term Buddhism is a late invention by the 19th century West. Until that time it was known by the Buddha's own label, Dhamma-Vinaya, Doctrine and Discipline. These two terms will be used interchangeably throughout this book. The Theravada school is the last thriving version of Indian Buddhism, but this, too, generally migrated out of India, to take lasting root across Southeast Asia. Because of its antiquity and conservative approach to the doctrine, it is generally assumed to have the most faithful representation of the actual words of the Buddha. A lot can happen, however, in just a couple of centuries of oral tradition, even when transmitted religiously, or especially when transmitted religiously. The Buddha himself had a great deal to say about what the inner proclivities of our needy minds and our insistent feelings could do to objective understanding. Most systems of thought and practice involving human followers make use of hyperbole, exaggeration, myth, embellishment, false attribution and glamor. Only a few, notably Zen, have described the glamor of spiritual accomplishment in terms of such mundane activities as chopping wood and carrying water. Even the Buddha made ample use of myth in his teaching. It is unlikely that this mythology is completely a later fabrication of his followers, but it is also possible that he still saw some kind of reality in them. Why do speakers of truths venture so far from truth? In Nietzsche's words: "At bottom, it has been an aesthetic taste that has hindered man the most: it believed in the picturesque effect of truth. It demanded of the man of knowledge that he should produce a powerful effect on the imagination" (WTP #469). The glamor of it all seems to hold great sway over human perspective. There may be in this some dim appreciation of the fact that learning that really comes home personally, that is felt with some depth and a perception of personal relevance, is somehow more complete than learning done only in theory, without any affect attached. The challenge, then, is having the depth of feeling without getting attached to the lies. At any rate, with regard to the transmission of Buddha's teaching, successive generations might easily have given additional color and structure to the doctrine for the sake of improved memorization, or altered the nuance of words and phrases to improve upon the teacher's dignity, impressiveness and impact. But, with that understanding, the doctrine presented here will generally follow the Theravada version. I do have one real issue with the Theravadan approach, however. Like many Westerners, my introduction to Buddhism was through the folk art, particularly the seated and laughing Buddha statues, and the rice paper paintings of eccentric Buddhist and Daoist monks caught in mid-guffaw. Then came the friendly phrasings of Alan Watts and all the volumes of largely humorous teaching stories from Zen lore. But these led to college courses and then exposure to the utterly serious, stoic and seemingly pessimistic side of the story. Buddhism as a Downer was soon confirmed in my first encounters with real-life religious renunciates and cloistered Zen monks, who showed no inclination whatsoever to laughter, or even to those wise and twinkling eyes. I thought I had resolved the discrepancy in understanding the difference between religious believers and wise men, between the seekers and the finders, between the teachers and the lifelong learners. Surely the Buddha must have laughed: this was a necessary part of wisdom's perspective on life. Maybe he didn't go in for the mean stuff and the schadenfreude, maybe he grudgingly groaned at the occasional pun, but certainly he found a laugh when life's absurdities came together perfectly in a higher understanding. Then I read the Suttas of the Pali Canon, where there is only one mention of the Buddha even smiling, and this is noted by a disciple with surprise bordering on shock. Is it possible that, in the four centuries between the original teaching and the first permanent recording of the doctrine, all traces of laughter were edited out of the story, perhaps for the sake of dignity and sobriety? Or is this my own denial at work? The Theravada doctrine is largely concerned with the development of the individual, or more precisely, what is experienced as the individual. Ultimately, the full scope of the Dhamma or Doctrine (Dharma in the better-known Sanskrit) was intended for "beings whose eyes are only a little covered with dust: the[se] will understand the truth" (MN 26). There is, if you will, a Buddhism Light, which consists of those portions of the doctrine and its precepts which can be practiced by the householder, the person who is not yet ready to renounce the everyday world to follow the path into the dark forest. Worthwhile attainments are still available to the householder, though, and progress to within a few lifetimes of distance to a final liberation. This is not regarded as insignificant. But the extremely intricate and highly articulated psychology of the "Third Basket" of the scriptures, or Abhidhamma Pitaka, and the intricately developed code of monastic behavior of the First Basket, or Vinaya Pitaka, are essentially for the renunciate who is beset with fewer distractions. The focus of the Theravada program is ultimately on the liberation of the arahants, the worthies or the accomplished ones. Their program demands a lifetime of "striving with heedful diligence," Buddha's final words. Their instructions from the Teacher: "You should train thus: We shall be wise men, we shall be inquirers" (MN 114). The teacher's ongoing challenge is to "speak to each in accord with his degree of understanding" (a directive first attributed to Mohammed). Any attempt to package up a monolithic teaching applicable to the whole of humankind will have to resist the forces pressing for schism, and it must eventually succumb. The dimmest of familiarity with the mindsets of the masses of mankind in any epoch will evidence a resistance to the notion that any "spiritual" salvation is a lot of hard work, and worse, that this is really only available to a select or more evolved elite. Thus, an egalitarian revolution was inevitable, in which all beings could partake in an easier salvation. The Mahayana school filled this much larger niche and soon it became Buddhism's most popular form, particularly from the 2nd century CE onward, when it spread northward into China with a growing set of newer scriptures that broadened the appeal of the teaching. Mahayana means Great Raft or Vehicle, alluding to its expanded accessibility, and it adopted the derogatory term Hinayana, meaning Small Raft or Vehicle, to refer to the rival and more elitist Theravada sect. The Mahayana sect is much closer to what we normally think of as a religion. It has a much broader lay appeal, a more pervasive use of ritual, and a stronger tone of reverential prayer and devotion. Mahayana does, however, maintain its own versions of most of the critical aspects of the Buddha's teaching, even some of those regarding the ultimate non-existence of an eternal spirit or soul. In Mahayana teaching, salvation is open and available to all sentient beings, not merely to the more developed and diligent. Or at least this liberation is available with far less work and in a much shorter series of lifetimes. It is a Mahayana tenet that all beings possess Buddha Nature and so are ultimately destined for enlightenment. This is not a part of Theravada doctrine, which would therefore be less impeded in embracing evolution's idea that selection and extinction can help move the parade or stream of life forward. The Mahayana ideal, then, is the Bodhisattva, as contrasted with the Arahant: this is the practitioner who vows to embrace the whole of sentient life and not fully attain his own final liberation until the last blade of grass is enlightened. The Theravadin also has many uses for true selflessness, loving-kindness, empathy and compassion, and has plenty of reasons on his own path to help others along, but the crux of his help is to lead by deed and example. "You yourselves must strive. The Buddhas are only teachers" (Dhp 276). This is a Mahayana doctrine as well, from the Dhammapada, but you nevertheless see the Teacher cast in a role there that looks similar to that of Savior, at least until you read the words in the hymnals. The original Dhamma teaching is referred to as the First Turning of the Wheel of Dhamma. The development of the Mahayana school, with its additional scriptures, is called the Second Turning. The Third Turning was the development of the Vajrayana school, the Diamond Vehicle. It began to emerge with its texts out of India in the 4th century, eventually spreading to Tibet, Bhutan and Japan (as Shingon), and it developed gradually over the next eight or so centuries. Its scriptures are referred to as Tantras, hence the alternate term Tantric Buddhism, which can lead to some confusion with Tantric sexual yoga practice. This sect is best known for its ritual practice, called upaya, meaning skillful means or method. These methods, which often involve mantra, mudra and mandala (chant, gesture and design) will generally take the place of the more abstract and communicable forms of meditation that were developed in Theravada and Mahayana. Upaya is a Mahayana term, where it is regarded as one of the paramitas or perfections, but it also carries the negative connotation of attachment or over-involvement, and this suggests caution, as upaya can tread a thin line between empty ritual and effective method. Over-reliance on the forms, clinging to rules and rituals (silabatta upadana), thinking that the rituals alone can "take you there" without making fundamental changes within, was regarded by the Buddha himself as one of the Ten Fetters (samyojanas), one of the four kinds of unwholesome clinging (akusala upadana) and one of the four types of bondage to the material world (kayaganthas). But we should probably make a distinction here between ritual and the sort of orderly behavior that lends consistency to meditative practice. Given the nature of these rituals, together with the language in which they are performed, Vajrayana is not regarded as a path to be walked or learned alone. It is esoteric and its methods are passed on by initiation through a line of transmission. This is one of several reasons that it will not be discussed here at length, even though some of the ritual methods that are used here have attracted the attention of neuroscientists researching neuroplasticity, the ability to reprogram the brain that is such a fundamental part of an effective recovery process. The fourth major school of Buddhism, known as Chan in China and Zen in Japan, also developed out of the Mahayana teachings, this time in the 6th century CE . But something curious happened in its creation. The teachings collided and merged with the Chinese Daojia or Philosophical Daoism. In the process, a lot of the dogma, doctrine and ritual from both sides got knocked loose. Depending on your definition of silliness, it also lost or gained in silliness. What was left was left relatively speechless, relying more on direct experience. The word Chan is the Chinese for the Pali Jhana and the Sanskrit Dhyana, meaning absorption. The Theravadin Eightfold Path's Samma Samadhi or Right Concentration, develops eight forms of concentrative absorption. Zazen, the Chan or Zen form of meditation, is just one single form of straightforward alertness. It is not meditation upon anything but the arising and falling of it all, up out of and back into the stream. The optimal state of mind here is neither overly calm nor hyper-vigilant: maybe the word readiness best describes it. The objective (with the understanding that this misuses the term objective) is understanding that comes through a direct experience of the transient nature of all things, including the mind that seeks to grasp them. While Chan and Zen have their forms, rituals, lines of transmission, reliance on interaction with an accomplished teacher, and even a little bit of basic doctrine, they really don't provide the kind of structure or discipline that is useful for our purposes here. Simple Zazen, however, is worth doing a little research and finding some instruction, as it can be readily included as a ninth form of meditative practice in Samma Samadhi, the Eighth Step on the Eightfold Path. Problematic Conflations In general, Buddhism and belief are not very compatible, a trait held in common with science. Our minds are not developed enough to lay such serious claims on truth. We are too emotionally scattered, insecure and impatient. We cannot turn our perceptions into perfect objective visions as long as our suffering and our neediness are so ready to twist what we see and hear to placate our various anxieties and neuroses. The highest priority on the Buddhist path is the correction of our minds, the cleaning of our lenses, the cleaning of our hearts, so that bad ideas and theories and emotional resentments no longer confuse our experience. This is what we put first. You must get your mental health before you get your answers. In the Buddha's own words: "Malunkyaputta, if anyone were to say, 'I won't live the holy life under the Blessed One as long as he does not declare to me that "The cosmos is eternal,"... or that "After death a Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist,"' the man would die and those things would still remain undeclared by the Tathagata. "It's just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a brahman, a merchant, or a worker.' He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me... until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short... until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored... until I know his home village, town, or city... until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow... until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark... until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated... until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird... until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.' He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.' The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.... "So, Malunkyaputta, remember what is undeclared by me as undeclared, and what is declared by me as declared. And what is undeclared by me? 'The cosmos is eternal,' is undeclared by me. 'The cosmos is not eternal,' is undeclared by me. 'The cosmos is finite'... 'The cosmos is infinite'... 'The soul & the body are the same'... 'The soul is one thing and the body another'... 'After death a Tathagata exists'... 'After death a Tathagata does not exist'... 'After death a Tathagata both exists & does not exist'... 'After death a Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist,' is undeclared by me. And why are they undeclared by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, unbinding. That is why they are undeclared by me" (MN 63). Buddhism is impressively adaptable and protean with respect to the cultures it enters. This is in part because it doesn't carry the baggage of a metaphysics along with it. Even the occasional and relatively enlightened Christian monk has put its methodologies to good (if incomplete) use. As this has come to the West, it has been repackaged to suit more Western sensibilities. This frequently involves the deification of the individual or the self as it appears to extend into larger frames of interconnectedness, oneness or oceanic feeling, which the Freudians liked to call infantile self-grandiosity. This trend has been nowhere more apparent than in its introduction to the self-improvement movement. A real Buddhist, upon hearing "One day my soul just opened up!" might wonder how many hungry children got fed by way of that, or if anything useful got learned. As central elements at least, feelings of interconnectedness, wholeness and ecstatic loving are more of a projection of the West onto Buddhism. So is the anti-intellectual cast that Buddhism tends to be given in the West, even though Zen had already gone a long way towards repudiation of the rational or discursive intellect, and Mahayana represented a serious veering away from more rigorous thought towards the more pleasant or immeasurable states. Given this, it might be of some use here to distance Buddhism from some of the areas of study, philosophies and religions that it has recently been conflated with. The following paragraphs are fairly negative in tone because some bubbles need to be popped. More positive associations to developments in Western psychology, philosophy and neuroscience are developed in the Appendices. Hinduism While the Buddha himself emerged out of the Hindu, Vedantin and broader Indian traditions, he repudiated a number of the fundamental tenets. He never, for instance, asserted that reality was an illusion created by a consciousness that was fundamental to the structure of the universe. There exists a real world. Human beings are just particularly inept at perceiving it accurately. There is also a real self, but this resembles a verb more than a noun. Self is just a process that emerges out of numerous preconditions. When the necessary preconditions go away, so does the self. At death, the self goes to the same place your lap goes when you stand up, where your fist goes when you open your hand, where your consciousness goes when you sleep. It's perfectly permissible to perceive and work with the conventional self, as this is, in all the worlds, the "thing" that most needs improvement. However, this improvement is most authentically made without the hope that some divine spark at your inmost center is preparing to unite with a god like Brahman on its way to living forever in light and perfection. Yes, it is true that all things are so interconnected that even the notion of a conventional self is at best a convention, but this does not turn our dissolution into a divine ascension with a higher cosmic awareness. The great old gag about Buddha asking the hot dog vendor to "make me one with everything" is better applied to Vedantins and Yogis. The Perennial Philosophy The point of view of Perennial Philosophy or Perennialism is that each of the world's religious traditions is a local cultural expression of a larger, single, universal, underlying religious truth. The apparent diversity and contradiction is thought to be relatively superficial. At bottom, the highest good is the union of the inmost core of the self with a supreme, divine being, that must, if everybody is to be correct, be both immanent and transcendent. The Buddha is dragged into this by virtue of his silence on the metaphysical questions (well, he doesn't deny it). The also-a-theistic Rujiao (Confucianism) is similarly volunteered. Although the term and idea is centuries old, it was popularized recently in the West by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy, published in 1945. As much as I enjoy Huxley's writing, I have to call this idea a great disservice to human culture, analogous to a reduction in biodiversity in the biological sphere. Evolution has given us a great many points of view, but it doesn't move forward through time without selection being applied to that diversity, and thinning it out again for fitness. Without selection in the world of cognition we are left with a cluttered metaphysical and moral relativism that suggests everything and every point of view is equally valid and true. This is most emphatically not the case in Buddhism. The great bulk of what we experience in these religious realms is ultimately ignorance and delusion. The experiences that we associate with our notions of a soul are real enough, but they are not fundamental properties of an all-knowing entity: they are emergent properties conditioned by a recognizable pattern of causes and they do not exist in the absence of those causes. Neither are those causes to be considered divine, except in the context of our own capacities for reverence. In effect, the Buddha taught that psychology preceded philosophy: we fathom the world best when we first fathom our own motives for perceiving the world as we do, when we have examined how and why we would twist the truth to suit our desires and dislikes. This approach is not more "advanced" than religion. It does not go as far as religion. It doesn't even get off the ground. Buddhism just sticks to foundations. Theosophy The word theosophy, uncapitalized, is an ancient term for any wisdom regarding the divine. It goes back to the early centuries of the current era. It developed throughout the middle ages and the enlightenment, accruing wisdom from a wide range of sources, religious, alchemical, theurgic, qabalistic and hermetic. In the late 19th century it began to incorporate material from the mysterious East, particularly from Hinduism, Vedanta and Buddhism. The Theosophical Society, formed by Helena Blavatsky, has codified much of the doctrine now referred to as capital-T Theosophy. Because the subject is rooted in Theos, or divinity, the word being cousin to Deus and Zeus, most of the focus of the philosophy is upon the divine, divine nature and humanity's divinely ordained place and purpose within this. Citing the Society's own Encyclopedic Theosophical Dictionary: "Theosophy [from Greek theosophia from theos god, divinity + sophia wisdom] Divine wisdom, the knowledge of things divine; often described as attainable by direct experience, by becoming conscious of the essential, divine part of our nature, self-identification with the inner god, leading to communion with other similar divine beings. Theosophy actually is the substratum and basis of all the world-religions and philosophies, taught and practiced by a few elect ever since man became a thinking being.” Buddhism, and particularly Theravada Buddhism, does not fit this description even remotely. Buddhism's immense vocabulary is selectively raided for philosophical support, and some of it's sects and schisms are exploited for their proximity to the Theosophical doctrine. Theosophy isn't a bad thing (and its Theosophical Glossary is a truly precious resource), but one still does not find much of the Buddha's unadulterated teaching there. New Age The New Age, from an outsider's perspective, is a loose collection of world and self views which appears to be centered around the repudiation of critical thinking skills in favor of "positive feelings" and metaphysical relativism. This is deemed to be some sort of victory of the right brain over the left, or the heart over the head, according to an assumption that thinking people somehow feel less. It is averse to judgment, except in response to skeptics and its detractors, or generally to people who think. It is prone to narcissism, and a normally-sublimated auto-eroticism in which the higher meditative states are reified as metaphysical realities and then united with in ecstasy. Apparently, excessive economic well-being is also central to the core beliefs, both to the marketers and to their marks. While there are numerous texts, it appears to be largely platitude-driven, by such meretricious statements as "everything happens for a reason." It has adopted a goodly number of Buddhist ideas and ideals, several of them correctly, such as the importance of good karmic practice and the need to develop karuna or compassion. It has, however, misinterpreted the Buddhist notion of rebirth as meaning reincarnation, which is not the case. Another characteristic belief is that we are all somehow entitled to unconditional love, to self-esteem and self-acceptance, even if our actions would define us instead as inferior and unprincipled people. Buddhism, in contrast, is judgmental, discriminating and discerning. In order to save yourself from suffering you judge thoughts and feelings and behaviors to be unwholesome or wholesome. You get rid of the bad ones and develop the good ones. Self-esteem is conceit to begin with. The positive feelings associated with higher wisdom are not centered in a self. All of the sentient beings' truths are not equally valid, and most are better described as ignorance and delusion. A Buddhist can begin with low self-esteem as an honest appraisal of his present state and transform this into a true humility, which can in turn be transformed into reverence and growth. This cannot be done with unearned self-esteem. Romanticism Romanticism, as a reaction to the industrial age, mechanization, and the materialistic reductionism of science, is an important reassertion of human intuition and emotion. In seeming contrast, emotional self-control, detachment and distancing hold a prominent place in the methodology of Buddhism, as do rational analysis and critical decision-making skills with regard to what is worth accepting and doing. However, it is a mistake to think that feelings are therefore not welcome in Buddhism. Feelings are not the problem. The craving of feelings, the clinging to feelings, the mourning of the absence of feelings, the pursuit of feelings, the denial of unwanted feelings: these are the problems. That feelings appropriately come and then appropriately go, spontaneously, without the excessive over-dramatization associated with self-obsession: this is where we want to be as sentient beings. What we don't want of feelings and emotions is unnecessary pain and self-destruction. Buddhism is a middle path. Mind, cognition and perception are complex compositions. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, imaginations, motivations - all are components of mind, without which there is less mind and less mindfulness. Many of those who have sought to import Buddhism to the West have correctly seen past the interpretation of Buddhism as being pessimistic and overly rational, but have gone too far the other way and envisioned a Buddhism where we are all one loving heart, feeling the interconnectedness of all things, and the drama of this deeply-felt emotion is what carries us aloft to Nirvana. Buddhism isn't all that interested in the drama of the personal story and in how deeply and uniquely one feels, but neither is it cold. Feelings are important components of mind, but they are not the true and authentic inner self that they seem to claim to be. Personal experiences, the qualities of subjectivity, mental analogies and conceptual metaphors, are a lot more important to science than most of science knows or admits, and perhaps some reassertion of this is in order and long overdue, but let's suggest that this be done "within reason." There is a useful online essay on this subject by Thanissaro Bhikkhu entitled "The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism," here. Transpersonal Psychology Transcending the person, getting beyond the person, getting over the person, must be regarded as one of Buddhism's main goals. Transpersonal psychology is also concerned with expanding the sense of identity beyond the individual and embracing greater realities, the human family, the web of life, the cosmos evolving to study itself, and exploring our more distant horizons, from the depths of experienced time up to the higher orders of trans-human awareness. Perhaps the biggest difference between these two is that Buddhism is not "spiritual" in any strict sense of the word. Within these greater contexts, which may be real enough, our spirit is not at the center or heart of them. At best, what we think of or experience as our spirit is just some humble little node in the web, a place where some energy has gotten knotted up for a while, off in some nondescript corner of things, having come and soon to go. The Universe is not the story of me and you. The two disciplines aren't antithetical: as sentient beings evolving along our paths, it is a healthy thing to get beyond or outside of ourselves. It is even a good thing to occasionally feel ourselves at the very center of the larger realities, from one point of view among many. Expansion of the mind is good for the practice of mindfulness. Working diligently on personal growth, detailing the factors and experiences that have held us back, spending long stretches of time in self-study, all have important places in Buddhism. But the autoeroticism and narcissism of these self-centered alternative states are not dwelling places. They are experiences to acknowledge and then learn from in passing. Having the experience that proves to you once and for all that "we are all one and interconnected" is not a spiritual attainment. It is merely a little piece of ground to stand on and another place to explore. It is a place to begin, and not the final goal of wisdom. Buddhism and Religion Most religions come to us as packages. This is much like being given a lovely wooden box with a glass lid, and below the glass are arranged gold and platinum nuggets and beautiful gems for study and appreciation. But the box is always sealed and one is sternly advised against unprescribed methods of inquiry, such as opening the thing and examining the contents one item at a time, studying each piece from all sides, and weighing them. But, religions being by nature parochial, much of the gold is invariably fool's gold, and most of the jewels paste. It takes a special kind of seeker to crack the box open, assay the contents, pocket the good stuff and then abandon the rest, and travel lightly on, to raid some more boxes. Let's call this kind of seeker a finder. If you can find a definition of religion that hasn't been deliberately contorted to include clearly non-theistic disciplines like Confucianism, Buddhism, and in some cases, Yoga, you get something like: "the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods." Objections are made that such a definition fails to include the diversity of religious thought and experience, but this does nothing more than beg the question. Adding the word spiritual does nothing to reach out and embrace Buddhism, as the existence of the spirit is specifically denied in the doctrine of anatta. For our purposes here, Buddhism is simply Dhamma-Vinaya, Doctrine and Discipline. To call it a religion is an error attributable to ditthi or wrong views, born of ignorance and delusion. Neither morals nor the so-called religious or spiritual states of mind require a religion, or a deity, or even a conception of spirit. An honest look around will show that, despite all of the laws, religion has very little to do with the development of truly ethical behavior, and only contributes ineffectively to morality. For our purposes here, we will use the term moral to refer to behavioral choices guided by social mores, or peer pressure, and the term ethical to refer to behavioral principles that have been investigated or examined, since ethics is properly understood as a branch of philosophy. Buddhism finds an ethic in its investigations, an appropriate way for human beings to treat fellow human beings and other sentient life. Both neuroscience and evolutionary psychology are now converging upon these findings as well, and with more objective evidence to substantiate them. Certain behaviors are known through investigation to be unwholesome, unprofitable, or unskillful, leading to suffering and unhappiness. But this is learned by inquiring into the nature of things, by watching kamma in action, at work according to natural law. It is not learned by examining divine decree or scripture. According to the 7th century Indian Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti, the criterion of truth is causal efficacy. You do this, that happens. If you don't want that, don't do this. The concern for efficacy also suggests remaining open to situational ethics, which are not normally discussed in more generalized religious decrees. All of the permutations of situational ethics just won't fit on the tablets. There is even an ethic to be drawn from the existential fact of our finitude: "There are those who do not realize that one day we all must must come to an end. But those who do know this settle their quarrels at once" (Dhammapada). In performing a number of the practices and exercises of Buddhism, numerous kinds of mental states are reached, momentary conditions of mind which are claimed to be fundamental to one or more of the world's religions: cosmic consciousness, awe, reverence, gratitude and grace, for example. The sense of self vanishes, or expands to fill the universe. States of mind may be entered into which might be described as "spiritual," and certainly altered or alternate. These experiences might have been given special names, and mythical or metaphysical explanations, within the various religious traditions. But this does not make them the exclusive domain of religion. That some of the states attained in meditation are described in religious texts does not mean that a technology for attaining these states is a religion. That logic doesn't work. Nor can we say that it is religious behavior to seek the states of mind that happen to be found at the core of certain religious beliefs or narratives. It might only be a kind of first-person scientific inquiry. We are merely seeking to be wise men and inquirers. These experiences are known or generally assumed to be important portions of the inherited human repertoire, as evolved cognitive capabilities. We simply want to verify this. We have no real need to draw great and impressive conclusions from these experiences about the nature of the world. We are not wise enough for that yet. Many myths and stories of deities and demons survived in the Pali Canon. It is difficult to guess how far and in what way these were taken seriously by the Buddha himself, or how many were embellishments or artifacts of the transmitters of the teaching. In these stories there are many kinds of beings, both above and below us in evolutionary terms, different in physical or immaterial composition, in longevity, in wisdom, in ethical sensibility, and so on. But even the wisest deity here is still unenlightened and still subject to kamma. It's hard to guess what Buddha might have said in private to someone he knew to be his equal, or how he might have discussed his own use of myth and fable. But like all myths, these will have angles of interpretation that are strictly allegorical and can be read completely free of literal interpretation, so the question can remain open. It is as incorrect to describe Buddhism as materialist as it is to call it spiritual. Buddha, or at least his earlier interpreters, did happen to offer some general thoughts on the irreducible nature of reality, even though they weren't heavily stressed as doctrine. These generally resemble the Panta Rhei (everything flows) of Heraclitus and the atomic theory of Democritus and the Epicureans. There are also many similarities to the process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead. The substrate of existence is in perpetual motion, with nothing fixed and eternal, with nothing perfect or perfected. This is called a Stream, and the mind that attends it is also a mindstream, and the relatively evolved sentient beings who have begun to actualize this discovery in their lives are called stream-enterers. Some sects argue that Nibbana (Sanskrit: Nirvana) is an unconditioned state that is somehow unmoved and above all of this, but for our purposes here, Nibbana is a state of being that is simply unconditioned and unmoved by the sheer terror of this. Beyond that, let us not pretend to know what Nibbana is. Whitehead came close to this basic idea in describing this Stream as process, and all things within it as being in process, and while he departed from the Dhamma in calling this process God, at least he suggested that this God never stopped changing and never grew all the way up, that its evolution went on forever. Whitehead concurred with Buddha in rejecting the mind vs. body or spirit vs. matter dualism that characterizes most of Western religion. Obviously your own constituent factors are a part of everything, and this same everything just goes on and on and doesn't die like all things within it do. This is only a simple truism that you can make into a religion if you want to, but we are just not going to do that here. The bottom line with regard to religion is this: We have got no business laying any sort of claim to metaphysical truth. As long as we are suffering we will only see what we want to see, as long as we are craving, detesting and suffering, our perceptions of a deity are going to be an untrustworthy mess of wish-fulfillment and revenge fantasies. We will be biased towards what is most comforting to believe, unless we are guilty masochists. And our suffering is a proof of our inability to see correctly. Social consensus means nothing: "Just like a file of blind men, clinging to each other, and the first one sees nothing, the middle one sees nothing, and the last one sees nothing" (DN 13). Buddhism and Psychology Poor psychology. It has struggled so hard for so many decades to win respect and esteem as a real science, without even knowing what sort of science it is destined to become some day. So far it has been like the blind men and the elephant, many limited points of view, each arguing that its own find is either the whole of it all or the very center. More than any discipline except education, psychology has made itself prey to fads and shortsighted arguments like nature vs. nurture. Too few can meet in the middle, or look to the synthesis of the disparate factions. Mind is a very complicated process, and mind looking at mind is more so. How far has the discipline come? It seems at least to have convinced courts of law that experts do in fact exist, but phrenology also did that at one time. Originally, of course, psychology was the -ology of the psyche or soul, whatever that might mean. We should perhaps start with its own, most- consensual definition: "The scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a given context; of the mental characteristics or attitudes of a person or group; and of the mental and emotional factors governing a situation or activity." First question: What is science? Is it some pure, detached objectivity, wherein all things are subject to measurement? But even physics isn't that: at least half of its concepts are analogs of subjective human sensory experiences called sensory or conceptual metaphors. And don't let's get started on measuring the quantum events. Psychology has resisted being lumped in with the other social sciences, with all their probabilities and deviations and fuzzy, indeterminate edges. Eventually, that's where it's headed, but the probabilities will at least work better, the deviations will at least be more standard, and the fuzz on the edges might have more of the fine detail of fractals. This clarity is not just around the corner. This science still has big pieces missing, with many to come along fairly soon out of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, and who-knows how many other fields, some still uninvented. In the meantime, this science may need to get patient and work less ambitiously, perhaps concentrating on such scientific values as predictability and repeatability instead of the digital measurements. That the field's future cornerstones are not yet fully identified is not really psychology's fault. The current field is much more to blame for its presumptions and pretentiousness than for its ignorance and self-delusion. Second question: What is study? Can this only study the measurable things? Should it concentrate on things that are billable to Blue Cross and Medicare or have pharmaceutical protocols? This is where the APA and its DSM are wholeheartedly headed, even in the face of much criticism. Can one study oneself in the first person? What things can be done with phenomenology, the study of the qualities or the qualia of first-person subjective experience? Maybe the single greatest embarrassment that psychology has been [sic] is during its behaviorist period, where it tried seriously to ignore the relevance of the emergent, subjective dimensions of life, even in the driving, control and adaptation of behavior. If you, the reader, are anything like me, the writer, you probably have, at least in the conventional sense, some psyche. You, like me, probably think that that's somehow relevant to the study of one. How is it that these fools could pretend it wasn't even there? Of course, to the Buddha, the conventional psyche was a process, not a thing, a verb instead of a noun, but that's still behavior, isn't it? Do mental phenomenon and qualia somehow become more legitimate when they can be causally tied to specific behaviors of the organism? The integration of those may be the route it will take. It is often assumed that everything about the mind and mental processes must finally be explicable in terms of brain and other neural events, but this gives us a poor explanation for self-directed behavior, of agency, of the behavior we need to exercise in order to deliver ourselves successfully from addictive behavior. We need to jump to software metaphors for this, but this leaves us without the use of sensation and affect. To the Buddha, the mind and its will are determined but capable of being free. Freedom emerges out of conditions that we are able to alter and adjust, but the cognitive tools that it uses do not originate entirely or directly out of our biological processes. They are conditioned. Biology can learn them, but ultimately they are emergent properties of the mind. Third question: Why study just the human mind? Why not incorporate sentience in general? Is it still because the animals don't have souls and won't go to heaven? Did all those monkeys and lab rats suffer and die in vain? Modern biology and Darwinian medicine are busily painting a much different story of mind, one that increasingly includes more of the organism and its zoological relations. The brain extends all the way out to the fingertips, to the wingtips and the flippers as well. We live one life, scientifically speaking. The jaguar on the hunt is consummately mindful. Therefore it might be a good idea to specify what is meant by mind here. Throughout we will use the word mind in the sense Buddha intended, which will tend to integrate cognition, affect, feeling, sense perception, apperception, memory, imagination, intention, attention and self-aware sentience. The mind is a whole team of generally indentifiable processes, and neither consciousness nor a rational intellect is team captain. There is no team captain, and no one process remains in charge. In a way this mind is closer to the sense found in the question "do you mind?" It is certainly not the mind of the Cartesian mind-body dualism. Fourth question: What of the second person in psychology's science? Phenomenology has ventured off into this, in part to corroborate its first-person research. Intersubjectivity is now being used to understand how humans understand. We build on our confirmations as well as go astray. Unlearning, relearning, personal transformation and the rewiring of our behavior can be dramatic in person-on-person encounters, even with a psychotherapist involved. A good part of the primate brain just seems to be built for the interpersonal encounter. Can't this be part of the science? Including the relationships between human beings has certainly played a role in the social sciences, which have had their own problems with objectivity and cultural differences. While neuroscience and evolutionary psychology are quickly rescuing us from the delusion of human as tabula rasa or blank slate, and beginning to articulate the dimensions of human nature that underpin our cultural differences, sociology is showing us that verstehen, the understanding and use of empathy, has a useful place in the social sciences. It is now permissible to try to relate to that unfortunate savage as a fellow human being with a similar neural architecture to the researcher's own. First there is our common human ground and then there are the cultural differences. One of the things that psychology seems to have perennially failed to learn, whether it was studying behavior or the mental functions affecting behavior, is that psychology itself is a form of behavior, particularly a cognitive and linguistic behavior. Human behavior is driven by various motivating forces. A science of behavior that doesn't start by seeing itself as behavior, may fail to question its own motives and wind up seeing only what it wishes to see and taking too much for granted. A philosophy which never asks why it would want to see things in a certain way is subject to some quite vast and complicated unconscious influences. A true science that addressed this first would thereby aim more true, as your better archers will look first to their posture or stance. Psychology is still much in need of good rules for assigning words, both nouns and verbs, to functions and processes that are meaningful in both the subjective and objective worlds, mental objects that are functionally related. Sweet, for example, will refer to a specific neuron that is structurally different from the one that tastes sour. Our personal experience is biological as well as phenomenological. How marvelous it will be to have a language connecting the two. My id may be out of control and bringing forth monsters, and my superego powerless to stop it, partly because I just don't have a good cognitive understanding of what's really going on down in there. The devil is working me overtime. In all the above, Buddhism offers some too-long-ignored contributions to psyche's -ology. Of particular importance for our purposes here is its offering in the various arenas of self-efficacy and self-directed behavior, cognitive self-control, emotional self-control, behavioral self-control or self-modification, intentional neuroplasticity or cortical reprogramming, and widening our experiential repertoires, extending our horizons, to facilitate better choices. In a sense, the Buddha developed his psychology as an operating system for the mind. It was meant to be a psychological therapy, for the cure of normalness, but this required deep, subjective examination that would lead to altered cognition, altered affect, and altered behavior. It was techne, it wasn't just something recited in praise of a deity. With regard to Buddhism as a therapy, it is important to stipulate that it's goal is not to help the individual to adapt, adjust or conform to society at large. The Buddhistly well-adjusted might easily find themselves at a still greater distance from normative human social acceptability than where they began. The preoccupation of the Western world with individuality and self has given Buddhism-as-therapy a bit of a chasm to cross. Dhamma-Vinaya as originally presented doesn't spend much time fussing over whether my mother breastfed or hugged me enough, or whether my father berated or abandoned me. My specialness can be largely ignored unless somebody is helping me with a very particular problem. How much the method was meant to be personalized or customized to cultures and individuals is not really clear, but mindfulness is an exploration of our own minds, not of our neighbors', and maybe this brings in the balance we want. There are universals in human nature. Any competent neurosurgeon can identify the corresponding endocrine glands in each of us well enough. We have the same neurotransmitters. Where does our specialness, our self-esteem, our self-actualization, our individuation, belong in a Buddhist context? Well, maybe that's worth meditating on. Buddhism and Science Einstein is alleged to have said: "The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal god and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism." For a definition of science we can start with the New Oxford American Dictionary's: "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment" and add: resulting in testable explanations and repeatable predictions about the universe. Science isn't just knowing or learning facts and equations. Scientes, Latin for knowing and the word science's root, was know-how, reliable knowledge, reliably knowing. And reliability usually means predictability and repeatability. In the human mind, things only tend to work in certain ways, and are only generally predictable or repeatable. Sometimes science must look at fuzz that it cannot resolve into finer lines, or look at a range of things or a spectrum. But that's what the mind is: a moving process, a spectrum and range. The mind is not entirely digital, and it's only half third-person. In Theravada, the Buddha recognized that the world or world-stream was bigger than the mind or mindstream. Sentient beings are only a part of a greater whole. This observation is not always shared in other forms of Buddhism. While the various sentient beings are made up of their own components (called khandas), the world too had its constituent factors, such as the dhatus or elements, which constitute rupa or physical form. The Buddha lived in India, in a cultural climate full of wild and rampant metaphysical speculation, as between competing schools of eternalism and nihilism. He noted frequently that most of these raging debates went nowhere. The various beliefs did nothing to improve the lives of their champions, or their ethics either. He would view the great bulk of this as sophistry, and distraction from the higher work that we need to do to beat suffering. He noted how people were only seeing what they wanted to see. He also noted why they wanted to see things in these ways. We can ask, however, what he might have thought of knowledge gained by more reliable means, and tested, as science does. Clearly, science is not free of human and personal bias, but let's call it generally so. Buddha's big thing was teaching what was true, which he called the Dhamma (or Dharma). He would likely agree that the Dhamma was more closely tied to what was true than to the words of doctrine he spoke. So what about world that is independent of human mental processes? The issue of the relevance to liberation and an end to the suffering of sentient beings would still hold fast. But pondering the size and wonder of the macro universe makes a great exercise in both mindfulness and concentration. The story of evolution is not at all inconsistent with the Buddha's account of the sentient beings undergoing millions and billions of years of rebirth into a world that is the result of their intentional actions or kamma. It is not necessary to think of kamma in terms of retributive justice. It is our intentional action, actions out of want, need, motive and drive. A few generations long ago decided they wanted that new kind of mate, without the tail and all that hair. That soon became the predominant mate, except for the real losers. Such want or intentional action drives evolution and conditions rebirth. It is likely that Theravada could more easily accept the benefits of natural selection than other forms, since it takes a harder line on unwholesomeness. Since Buddha's express aim was to get at any doctrine or truth by way of direct personal investigation, it is permitted to investigate any science that meets its criteria and adopt what meets its objectives. If demonstrable truth is the criterion, then reality or nature would be the scripture, not dogma about the nature of reality. This was actually held as a tenet by Islam, during its golden age when it kept the fires of science alight. Sadly, it disintegrated. We will want to find and read this scripture of reality without twisting it all around with our biases and preconceptions. Ergo, any insight that is grounded in reality and provable is also Dhamma, with a capital-D, even if it is the product of subsequent centuries, and even if this happens to be the accidental discovery of a relatively unenlightened being. Further, if a particular teaching of the Buddha was shown to be untrue, that teaching would need to be replaced or amended. Buddhism also has much to offer science since, in Manly P. Hall's words, "it has found the weak point in most schools of Western philosophy: namely, the failure to analyze the analyzing power." It doesn't matter at all if a living being flinches or cringes when reading the truth. It isn't tailored to that being's comfort. Truth and adaptation to truth is the being's problem, not that of the universe. As Darwin noted: "We are not here concerned with hopes and fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it." Clearly, cognitive neuroscience, in addition to evolution, would be a Buddhist's first focus: they are the same inquiry, only from different but complementary perspectives. Both, for example, have an interest in the physical, chemical, electronic and experiential dynamics of our emotional arousal or in the allocation of attention to a sense object. This is not to say that they cover the same ground in the same way. Buddhism is allowed to look for the first-person counterparts or experiences of the processes that neuroscience uncovers, and then adjust its models accordingly. Similarly, neuroscience is challenged to find samadhi, or karuna, or a higher state of mental health, or the structures of cognitive and emotional self-control. Both are interested in neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain and mind to change. Together they can define science away from 1st-3rd person debate. What is known? What is predictable? What is repeatable? What hurts? How can we stop hurting ourselves and each other? Suffering What use is your braided hair, oh witless man? And your garment of antelope skin? Within you is ravenousness, but the outside you make to look clean. (Dhammapada) The First Noble Truth is: Dukkha Nanam, the Knowledge of Suffering Dukkha is called the most pressing fact of human existence. Although this is normally translated as suffering, it is a word richer in meanings, including unsatisfactoriness, imperfection, inability to satisfy, frustration, vulnerability, unease, stress, pain, hardship, deprivation, discomfort, what is hard to endure. It is being made aware that we don't occupy the very center of a universe created just for us. Dukkha is our constant whining about being given the gift of life. There is an irony to the verb suffering: since it's a verb it refers to something that you do. This comes with an implication that it is something you may not really need to do. Much of Buddhism is about how to not do this, how to stop doing it and then how to stay stopped. Much suffering has its beginnings deep in the darkness, long before we are aware of its emergence, so it isn't always easy to catch it before it gets going, but there are techniques taught here, preemptive strategies, even for this. Sometimes, too, it can seem that we suffer by choice, in part because we do this so consistently. Some of this is due to the unforeseen consequences of our choices. Sometimes we really have no choice that does not lead to suffering. Sometimes we suffer on purpose because we choose to feel guilty or because we want to feel alive, or feel at the center of things, or feel what we think of as deeply, or simply feel some dramatic effect in being moved about by our circumstances. And sometimes we suffer because bad things happen to good people for no reason whatsoever, not even from our personal karma. Although believers might want to disagree on this last point, we do live one life, scientifically speaking, and our own karma gets all tangled up with others. As usually understood, suffering is something that is done unto you, the helpless victim. It speaks of passivity, of not rising up and taking a stand. I once heard an anecdote in AA where someone who was asked how he was doing replied "OK, under the circumstances." "What are you doing under there?" was the reply. To be so passive is to be subject to circumstances, to be inanimate. To be a subject is the opposite of being a noble. It is to have no say in the matter. The Buddha further subdivided Dukkha into three parts that he called the Tilakkhana, the three marks or characteristics of our existence: Anicca or impermanence, Dukkha or hurt feelings, frustration and disapproval of reality, and Anatta, the nonexistence of the eternal and perfect spirit that would be the core of our being. These three words are used throughout the doctrine and are worth remembering. Anicca, Impermanence Nothing holds still. Truth be told, one cannot step into the same river even once as long as our stepping takes any time at all. And eternity, for humankind, is the briefest flash of all. But boy do we love to pontificate on how much we know of eternity and perfection, and how superior that is to the inferior, ordinary reality that moves the ever-changing galaxies around. The concept of anicca is one of humankind's first philosophical statements of the second law of thermodynamics: that order is local and limited in time, and ultimately must give way to change. This is not a problem that the universe has. Impermanence doesn't even need to be a problem for us. The real problem that we have is in our obsession with permanence, our grabbiness towards it, and our resistance to the natural order of things. After waiting for years to have a child, a Japanese feudal Lord was at last blessed with the birth of a son. A Zen master who was renowned for his exquisite calligraphy was commissioned by the Lord to create a fine work of art as a blessing for the birth. It was to be presented at a grand celebration. The Master arrived at the festivities three days later and unrolled a small scroll that read: "Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies." The Lord was enraged and had the Roshi seized and dragged before him, demanding either a satisfactory account or a severed head. The Master explained "Sir, the greatest blessing is to be in accord with the natural order of things, but I can write these in any other order you might prefer." We have all known pleasure, but with the exception of any pleasure we are currently enjoying, all of these pleasures have now passed. We have all known pain as well, with the same result. The inevitable coming and going of pleasure and pain has got to be one of the most consistent and reliable experiences we have in life. What keeps us from accepting this? All it takes is some tiny external thing changing, something insignificant going right or wrong, and within a few seconds, we are suddenly either unreasonably ecstatic or unreasonably upset, and with the sense that that feeling could go on forever. Imagine if we listened to musical symphonies like that. All of a sudden we reach a perfect moment where the note of every instrument pleases us beyond reason. We would freeze the thing right there, with everybody holding that one particular note. How exciting would that be! The junkie chasing his dragon will continue his elusive pursuit of that first high that just will not stand still. I drank trying to snag that perfect bliss that lasted for two minutes halfway between drinks two and three, but I never could get it to stop running. That your own mind is capable of change, and in fact, that change is fundamental to the very nature of mind, should come as welcome news, particularly if you have been suffering from one of these fixations. But first you need to come to grips with the nature of mind. The fundamental cause of all these problems is in the way mind reacts to change, so the fundamental solution is to adapt, to learn resilience, responsiveness and flexibility, to learn a healthier way to respond to changes. But here's the rub with recovery: if you want to put some problem behavior behind you, you will want to put it permanently behind you. Any true sobriety is a permanent solution. This makes people anxious and crazy. Most recovery groups try to soften this with advice to just stay sober one day at a time. Rational recovery, on the other hand, insists that this one-day-at-a-time thinking only allows you to entertain thoughts of some future relapse. But this problem is ultimately topographical or geographical. Saying "never again" assumes in a way that there is only forward and back, progress and backsliding. What it doesn't see is there is also moving on sideways and diagonally, never to pass through these parts again, not because of anxiety or fear, but because the world that has just opened up is just too damn big to waste time retracing your steps in either direction. Ultimately it's not that you can change, but that you must. For someone who is suffering, thoughts of impermanence can offer hope instead of fear and anxiety. As much as beliefs like to stay put and hold fast, these are specifically the beliefs that need to go, the ones that hold you stuck here. We just need to look at them differently. Dukkha, Painful Imperfection "Life in any world is unstable, it is swept away. It has no shelter and no protector. It has nothing of its own, but must leave all and pass on. It is incomplete, insatiate, the slave of craving" (MN 82). The price of knowing what pleasure is is knowing when it is missing or unattainable. The price of knowing how precious a gift life is is knowing that it has to end in death. But this sort of knowing is done backwards, and this is why it seems like there is a price. In fact, any chance to know pleasure in life is a gift. From a more noble perspective, the whining done over the pleasures of life coming up short of our prayers and expectations is really nothing more than an ignoble ingratitude. We seem to have the wrong default setting for our approvals and satisfactions: these should be set at the minimum levels that are needed for continued existence. Then everything else is a gift. We feel as though we are entitled to pleasure and happiness, to life and all of the good things it has to offer. Given this, we can only fall short of what this delusion seems to promise. It's as though we believe we were made by a god in his own image, with no reason to struggle to survive or do anything to merit the good things in life. It really isn't that surprising that we blunder so badly. There is nothing wrong with either pleasure or happiness. They are in fact superior states- and worth enjoying. The mistake is in pursuing them, particularly in pursuing them directly without the intermediate step of doing the work needed to merit them and bring them naturally about. This is especially true of our addictive behavior: we skip the part about deserving our happiness. The rest of the mistake is in trying to cling to them when the time comes for them or us to move on. We have evolved the ability to shift our sense of identity around, to locate ourselves in a thought, a feeling, a sensation, a memory, or a plan. A feeling that we are having, as of deprivation, frustration, unhappiness or revulsion, seems able to hijack who we feel we really are. We don't seem to know why, but we tend to prefer identifying with passing and vulnerable states, while deluding ourselves into thinking that they will last. One of the most important techniques in Buddhist psychology takes charge of this assignment of identity. Whenever we get an unpleasant or unwholesome feeling, such as craving, or hatred, or disgust, this "wants" to fully occupy our sense of identity, and our personal feelings, almost by definition, feel intimate enough to convince us that this speaks for our inmost and most-authentic self. But these things are not our authentic selves, they are nothing more than feelings. When we are taken over by them everything is always always or never: you always think of yourself first, you never respect my feelings. They always come and go, and never last. The Buddha offered us a useful mantra for this, applicable to any thought, feeling or sensation that enters our awareness: "N'etam mama, n'eso'ham asmi, na me so atta. This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my spirit." This is not inauthentic since the identification in the first place is mind-made out of false or arbitrary ideas about how things are or how they should be. I have always been amused by the Western theologians' opinion on the almighty with respect to change and imperfection, to anicca and dukkha. Their initial or a priori assumption was that divinity had to be perpetually and eternally perfect: "He" could not simply be moving in that direction. To them, this meant that if he was in one place he could not then move to another, because he must already have been in the perfect place. If he was in a particular state of being he could not change into another state. If he knew one thing he could not then learn another thing that was different. He was denied the ability to move, to change or to grow. The theologians apparently made him in their own image. What the Buddha tried to teach us to do is to begin with the assumption that changes and imperfections describe the natural order and proper state of things. If we want to be in a different place, we can begin by taking an honest and unflinching look at where we stand because this is the place where we begin to move our feet in order to travel to someplace else. We learn to accept reality as it is, not necessarily because we approve of it, but because we want to work with it in something other than our fantasies and delusions. Anatta, We Imaginary Beings In the Indian context in which Buddhism arose there was (and remains) the widespread belief that the essential part of sentient beings was a spirit or soul called the Atta or Atman, each spirit a spark of an infinite divinity called Brahman that dreamed existence into being so that it might play hide and seek with itself. These spirits or souls would learn whatever they could learn, and find whatever they could find, over the course of their many lifetimes. At death they would transmigrate into new bodies, over and over again, until they learned or found out all the secrets and hiding places of the divine, at which point they would be liberated and reunited with Brahman, the game of hide and seek being over. Etymologically the word reincarnation means "going back into meat." It implies that there is some thing to do this going back. The Buddha rejected this idea with his doctrine of Anatta, meaning "no spirit (or soul)." What we sentient beings perceive, think of or feel as such an identity is a process that emerges out of the interplay of the component processes that condition or form us. These components provide the necessary conditions for this new spirit or soul-like process to emerge into our awareness, just as heat, oxygen and fuel provide the necessary conditions for flames to exist. At the same time, the Buddha elected to confuse everybody by talking about how we are reborn again and again, according to kamma, the laws of cause and effect, until we wake up and set ourselves free. We do not survive death and transmigrate as spirits, but somehow there is a continuity of process that is transmitted from lifetime to lifetime, and, significantly, this felt sense of continuity, and even a persistence of memories, is somehow able to cross this gap between a moment of death in one place and a moment of conception in another. The flame often provided a useful metaphor: King Milinda questions: “Venerable Nagasena, does rebirth take place without anything transmigrating?” “Yes, O King. Rebirth takes place without anything transmigrating.” “Give me an illustration, Venerable Sir.” “Suppose, O King, a man were to light a lamp from another lamp. Pray, would the one light have passed over to the other light?” “No, indeed, Venerable Sir.” “In exactly the same way, O King, does rebirth take place without anything transmigrating.” “Give me another illustration.” “Do you remember, O King, having learnt, when you were a boy, some verse or other from your teacher of poetry?” “Yes, Venerable Sir.” “Pray, O King, did the verse pass over to you from your teacher?” “No, indeed, Venerable Sir. “In exactly the same way, O King, does rebirth take place without anything transmigrating” (Tr. from the Milinda Panha, Burmese KN 47a). Phrased a different way by Peter Santina in The Tree of Enlightenment: "Where is this from? - when we light one candle from another candle, no substance or soul travels from one to the other, even though the first is the cause of the second; when one billiard ball strikes another, there is a continuity - the energy and direction of the first ball is imparted to the second. The first ball is the cause of the second billiard ball moving in a particular direction and at a particular speed, but it is not the same ball." So, if you were to take two candles, one lit and one not, light the unlit one and blow out the first, and ask whether the new flame was the same flame, the answer would have to be no, even though you could say that the flame was as if reborn. Further, "the extinguished flame cannot be described as having gone to any direction" (MN n723). To the question "where does the soul go when the body dies?" Jacob Boehme answered, "There is no necessity for it to go anywhere." The new flame is the same process and uses the same kind of fuel, and oxygen from the same room, and heat from the old flame. There is still continuity there, in the actions of the transference, in the starting of the fire, and in the manufacture of the candles. This characterizes all intentional acts or kamma. The sense of continuity that we have, including the survival of memories, is never fully explained in complete and satisfying detail. In Theravada, the continuous part of the "rebirth" process is called the patisandhi vinnana, the relinking consciousness, or the linking-up-again consciousness. Today we might liken it to an upload and subsequent download of information from the web (of life). Other forms of Buddhism elaborate more on this web or "cloud" idea, retaining versions of the Hindu Akashic Record or a Storehouse Consciousness that supports the upload and the download during the transition. It may not be necessary to postulate this much before we are able to move on. Occam's Razor suggests that we look for the simplest solutions, perhaps a simple transmission or signal. It still might suggest some sort of living field or equivalent of the old luminiferous ether. This has no answer yet. As to the conditions which create a specific perception of a particular self, these can persist across lifetimes because kamma is rich in patterns that repeat with regularity across many lifetimes. At a minimum they persist in this both genetically and culturally. Reincarnation is usually used (or abused) to rationalize the injustices of mortal life, why bad things happen to good people, or good things to bad, or why events in life appear random when somebody is trying to tell you instead that there are rules that ought to be followed. But the fact that all things ultimately have causes does not mean that all things happen for reasons, or are unfolding according to some law or plan. It is perhaps a lot more sane to admit that not everything happens to us by means of some moral law. Good or ethical behavior increases our odds of living a better life, this we can see, but, like Zhuangzi said, "perfect sincerity offers no guarantee." The little girl playing in her sandbox, who gets killed by a stray bullet from a gang fight happening two blocks way, is not playing a part in some larger divine plan. That thinking is pure, clinical paranoia, plain and simple. There is much in life over which we have no control, even by the circuitous route of becoming ethically perfect, but a truer or more authentic personal and ethical development will arm us against our own self-destructive reactions to life's little surprises and injustices. There are evils that we cannot control, but the appropriate response to them can often turn them around and press them into the service of the good. This requires accepting them first, instead of denying their existence. None of our rewards are guaranteed. We can only improve our odds. Obviously, those who are clinging to the law of kamma as retributive justice will take exception to this idea. We seem to betray our illusions a little every time we say "my spirit" or "my soul." If this spirit or soul is who we really are, then why are we making our inmost being an extraneous possession like this? Shouldn't the first person be the spirit itself? Or are we admitting that we are living our lives at some distance from our real nature? If this were a mere trap of language, why have we not rebelled against this and created a popular grammatical form for the "real" me and you? A great deal of the effort spent in a human life is an investment in the continuity and integrity of one's perception of a fundamental self. There are investments in finding it, in keeping it going, in keeping it the same, in keeping it protected from challenging information, in keeping it from not feeling wrong or ashamed, in maintaining its sense of sovereignty or independence. Now the Buddha suggests that it may not be desirable for us to protect this fundamental self from change and eventual dissolution, especially dissolution into wiser ways of seeing things. The fundamental self is little more than a mental image produced by a stream of mental experiences upon attending a stream of physical experiences. It is one that costs a great deal of energy to maintain. If we were to recognize our sense of being a fundamental self as no more than a constructed mental image, perhaps given to us by millions of years of evolution to perform specific cognitive tasks, and admittedly useful in addressing many of our various physical and social needs, we could still make use of it in conventional ways to perform whatever functions it does best. Also, to recognize it as a construct would help set us free to do some useful re-construction. We could then free ourselves from being its slave or servant, and begin to adopt new notions of who we really are that lead us into less trouble. We could then begin to get over ourselves. Self is not precisely an illusion in Buddhism, as it is in the Maya and Samsara concepts of Hinduism. It's a convention. It's not unreal, it just isn't what we'd like to think it is, and it certainly isn't going to last. It's a sense of something real, but it's distorted. This conventional self cannot exist without any of its components, particularly the body. Neither is the world an illusion. The world of Samsara is as real as Nibbana, and not a bad dream. Nibbana and samsara ultimately refer to the same world, the real world, just experienced differently. What is unreal is the world that we think, feel and perceive it to be. If you have tried to imagine a world that is stripped of our organic sensations like sight and touch, perhaps as a vast, moving field of full-spectrum energy, in varying densities, streaming through time, always changing, with countless nodes or pockets of self- organizing energy feeding on energy gradients, you likely have at least a closer picture of reality than the one our senses give us, even though the best you can do is still laden with sensory and cognitive metaphors. We hold beliefs about what we are, and the nature of the world that we live in, that turn us into whining and ineffective participants, obsessing on this or that, throwing our lives away for things we are only told that we need. Yet we are also able to hold views that include a self that sits near the center of our world and is able to correct most of these difficulties. The Buddha referred to himself in the first person. He recognized that the sentient beings who came to him were people, who had boundaries. Self is formed from our experiences in the world. We are genetically evolved to make and use these constructs. They have uses, and these allowed our progenitors to survive and breed our ancestors. But the self does not come into the world to collect experiences. It is the experiences that give rise to the self. As Dogen put it, "To carry the self forward and realize the ten thousand dharmas is delusion. That the ten thousand dharmas advance and realize the self is enlightenment." (Little-d dhamma or dharma refers to any object that can be grasped by the mind, including beings). Buddha never said that the self did not exist. But he "found that, when the inner world is studied closely, all that can be found is a constantly changing flow and what is taken for an intrinsic self or soul is just the sum of certain factors of the mind that are all impermanent and in constant flux. He also found that attachment to any of these impermanent factors inevitably leads to suffering, so the way to internal freedom and happiness that the Buddha advocated was to learn to accept and live in the face of impermanence without clinging to anything." (Fredrik Falkenstrom, "A Buddhist Contribution to the Psychoanalytic Psychology of Self"). All individual phenomena, all dhammas, thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, plans and ideas, can be contemplated, examined, re-envisioned and revised using these three points of view, in terms of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and not-self. Sammasana-nana is the exploration and contemplation of individual phenomena in terms of these three marks. The three Liberations, or vimokkha, are counter-meditations on the three marks, doorways out to a broader perspective. Animitta is a meditation on signlessness or formlessness, contemplating how all things must pass. Appanihita is a meditation on desirelessness or dispassion, contemplating how all compounded beings are ultimately unable to attain any lasting satisfaction or happiness. Finally, Sunnata is a meditation on emptiness, contemplating how all compounded beings are without a substantial or substantive core, without any individuality that is independent of the conditions which led to their emergence. Deliberately inviting these three into our awareness might be seen as "just asking for it," standing up to and staring down the nearly suicidal existentialist's nausea, angst and sickness-unto-death. But Buddhism isn't for sissies, and it's better to get this over with sooner than later. Khandas, The Five Aggregates The Five Aggregates (Panca Khandas) are the factors or constituent processes comprising the perceived individual identity of living beings. Collectively the five are also called the existing person (sakkaya), the current assemblage or identity, and alternately the five aggregates affected by clinging or grasping (panca-upadana-khandha). What appears to be an integral self is really a compounded thing, or more correctly, a complex, interwoven, multidimensional and ever-shifting process. It does have a conventional reality, but not a fundamental, substantive or lasting one. We are aggregate beings and can't separate who we are from the combination of our organism, behavior, sensations, emotions and narratives. Identity jumps around from part to part. Sometimes it's an action, sometimes it's a feeling, sometimes a sensation, an emotion, a motive, a behavioral script or a story. Identity grasps or clings first to one then another. We think we derive our identity from what we experience: it lights us up, gives us the sense of being this or owning that. But this always passes. Everything that we find in the mind is just a weave of physical reaction, affect, sensation, remembrance, motivation, cognition and awareness. But there is no pure and disembodied witness, no doer apart from things getting done, no feeler feeling, no thinker thinking. Self is something like a running poll or vote of these many components, and the locus of whichever component is currently drawing the most attention. Self is like a colony or a hive mind of lots of little identities and identifications. Self is the squeakiest wheel at the moment. You are the thought while the thought is attended, or as T. S. Eliot said, "you are the music while the music lasts." The quintet of constituent processes described by the Buddha were physical form (rupa), feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), volitional formations (sankhara) and consciousness (vinnana). These simple, one-word translations don't do the ideas justice. In a little more detail: Rupa refers to the physical organism, the organization, the structured matter obedient to the laws of the elements, material qualities, form or shape, corporeality, what makes phenomena sensible, the basis for figure-ground perception, out to the boundaries where the qualities change. It is the sensible, including the physical structure of the senses themselves, the nervous system and the physical modules of the brain. Rupa is in turn constituted from the four elements (in Buddhist doctrine), and kamma , or consequences of intentional action. "This body is not yours, nor does it belong to others. It is old kamma, to be seen as generated (abhisankhata) and fashioned by volition (cetayita), as something to be felt (vedaniya)" (SN 12). Vedana refers to feeling, sensation, receptiveness, the sensory and affective reactions to contact. This was largely understood in Buddha's time in the very simplistic terms of pleasantness (sukha), unpleasantness (dukkha), and neutrality (adukkhamasukha), neither-painful-nor-pleasant. This is the beginning of wanting more and wanting less, feeling whether to open up or close down, whether to approach or avoid. Today we would say that there is much more to this than just plus, minus and neutral. One common but still simplistic classification of feelings assumes that each affect has a combination of pleasantness (pleasant or unpleasant) and activation (high or low). Excitement is a combination of pleasantness and high activation, while tranquility is a combination of pleasantness and low activation. Rage would be unpleasant with a high activation, while depression would be unpleasant with low activation. Ambivalence would be high-activation neutrality, apathy would be lo

How The Great Recession Killed My Family’s American Dream And why the American dream is better off dead Stewart Lawrence Sinclair Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 1, 2017 My mother was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, and voting, or any kind of political participation, is discouraged by her religion. So when she told me that she had registered to vote in 2016, I nearly dropped my phone in the sink. “What made you register,” I asked her. Her answer: “I like Bernie.” In my predominately white working class family, livelihoods have been made in oil fields and on construction sites; in the service industry and the unemployment line. We fit the profile of Donald Trump’s voters. But the only candidate that any of us were excited about was Bernie Sanders. To me, the reason seemed obvious. While president Obama had staved off the national financial crisis, not much had changed for people like us. In 2008, I became the first person in my family to go to college. I still remember packing up the car with my mother and sitting in the passenger seat as she drove us from our home in Ventura, CA., to my college in Santa Fe, NM. When we had unloaded everything into my dorm room, a new feeling flooded over me. It felt like I’d been hooked to the conveyor belt of upward mobility. I believed I was on the four-year path to my American dream. Like so many others like her, my mother cried as I hugged her goodbye, and she drove off proud that her son had made that upward leap that had seemed insurmountable to the generations before me. My father, Nicholas Sinclair (foreground, left), roughnecking in the mountains near Maricopa CA., a few miles west of Highway 166 around 1982. Hewas 21 years old. I believed I’d never have to put on a hard hat to make a living. I believed that I would be the first Sinclair male to support his family without breaking down his body day after day, year after year. I believed that what I had achieved was perpetuating an arc of progress that started somewhere in the New Mexican dust my grandfather was raised on, and the Oklahoma plains my great-grandmother was swept off of in the Dust Bowl, and that would continue with my children firmly establishing their own American dream. I maintained this optimism despite the looming recession. But as the year progressed, what I heard on the news began to leech into our lives. When I enrolled for the fall semester, I expected to study the classics and fill my head with high-minded ideas. Instead, I learned about sub-prime mortgages, derivatives, the housing bubble and T.A.R.P. And as the economic engine — and that conveyor belt upon which I’d been hitched — came to a halt, I rediscovered the fragility of the American dream. By January, 2009, Mom’s work went downhill. Contracts for her construction company dried up as new projects in California grew ever more scarce. She worked furlough, cutting her own paycheck so that she could continue to pay the laborers. It wasn’t long after that when the welding company my father was working for started making cuts for the same reason. He was among the many that were let go. And then, in June, my college declared bankruptcy. I packed everything into my 1989 Crown Victoria and drove back across the country, feeling that sense of upward mobility dissipating with every passing mile. I returned home, as uncertain of my future education as my parents were of how they would continue to pay their bills. The hardest part was seeing my father — who had been working in gruelling manual labor since he left high school at sixteen to work at his father’s wrought iron shop — sit at home with a look of complete loss. When he was sixteen, or twenty, or thirty, he might have felt like he had the energy to weather the changing tides. But every time I visited him, or spoke to him on the phone, I got the sense that he felt he’d been bucked out of the working world for the last time. “Son,” he told me, over and over, “your father is an example of how not to be.” Every time he said those words to me, I wanted to tell him that how much I admired how hard he worked, how dedicated he was to his craft — how proud I was to come from a line of generations of skilled iron workers. But I knew that he was speaking to a bleak and unavoidable truth. He was pushing fifty, and he had no way of knowing if his fortunes would rise when the recovery finally came. He remained stoic, but he had to swallow a lot of pride. “Get an education, Son. Don’t do the kind of work your father does. Be a banker.” I looked with hope to Obama. I dreamed of a Rooseveltian pivot to the left for my country. I thought that the catastrophic failure of Wall Street and the big banks would force the restructuring of our financial sector. I wanted stimulus spending. I wanted massive infrastructure projects. I wanted a bail-out of the American people. I wanted to see starched white collars behind bars. But what ended up happening was a scaled back, incremental approach, working from the top down. The Bush administration set that precedent with the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which bailed out the banks responsible for the meltdown at the expense of the people. But it continued under Obama, as stimulus packages and infrastructure projects were proposed in congress and then stymied and watered down by republicans and blue-dog democrats. American citizens on both sides of the aisle watched this process and realized that their homes, their jobs, their interests, were secondary priorities to the people who were elected to represent them. There’s no need to re-hash the last eight years. The economy improved slowly, day by day, month by month, year by year, until we reached where we are now — the new economic normal, where the cost of college remains prohibitively high and wages remain roughly the same as they were in the ‘90’s. And in those years, congress doubled down on inaction, partisanship and their reliance on special interests. By the time the 2016 election came around, no one believed that either party’s favorite sons and daughters really represented the will of the people. How could we believe it? In 2016, while bonus pay for corporate executives had broken pre-recession records, my mother was still working full time at severely reduced pay. As for my father, he remained unemployed for over a year, despite doing everything he could to make himself competetive. He took adult ed classes and earned his GED. He cold-called for jobs, and went to community college so that he could retrain himself to be a computer-aided draftsman. I thought of him every time I read the news or listened to the radio and heard that there was a new fight in congress over whether or not to once again extend unemployment benefits. How could our representatives, whose salaries and health insurance were paid for out of my parents’ pockets, have the audacity to debate whether or not to extend unemployment benefits? How disconnected had they become from their districts that they couldn’t see the able-bodied, hard-working people standing sheepishly and ashamed in unemployment lines? Did our representatives think that my dad was collecting those checks by choice? Did they think about him at all? Source: Mike Keefe, The Denver Post, September 22, 2010. Through dogged pursuit, my father finally managed to find a job in 2010, in the still languid oil industry, against a tide of younger, more educated applicants. But even now he has just managed to stay above water, earning less money than he used to amidst historically low oil prices and a series of spills along the southern California coast, and working without health insurance, choosing to pay the fine on his taxes because the cost of insurance is too high. Meanwhile, others in my family have been struggling to pay bills and support their children with low-wage part-time jobs. Some have become trapped in the opioid epidemic. Others have found that their lack of education is holding them back from any job worth doing. The fact is, for a large swath of the country, the recovery never happened. They never got their house back. The factories that automated to survive the recession didn’t look for ways to hire new people when they recovered. And the people who lost good jobs only emerged to find shitty part-time jobs earning minimum wage. In that environment, many of us couldn’t appreciate the progress that had been made. Marriage equality, criminal justice reform, the closing of CIA black sites — these things don’t mean much when the bank that you bailed out has just sent you a third foreclosure notice. And into the fray, enter Bernie Sanders. I still remember watching the video of him with his shock of wild gray hair, leaning begrudgingly into a podium announcing his candidacy for president. To people like me, he may as well have been Malcolm X. He told us we’d been had; that the system was rigged to favor millionaires and billionaires; that the same people who screwed us over were still working to screw us over. And that message resonated within us because we knew that we’d been screwed over. We knew that our healthcare system was geared towards profit and not towards care. We knew that the shuttered factories weren’t coming back. We knew that the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer and that the middle didn’t really exist anymore. We knew that the American dream was a broken promise written into political speeches to pay lip service to pre-selected voters in gerrymandered districts. For us, the resounding lesson imparted by the Great Recession was this: Good things happen to bad people. Photo From Business Insider: Bernie Sanders supporters at the second day of the Democratic National Convention. (Associated Press/John Minchillo) That’s why it hurt so many of my friends and family when Bernie Sanders lost. All of the arguments about breaking the glass ceiling couldn’t penetrate the stronger desire for a fair and just economic system. The symbolic weight of Hillary Clinton’s feminist victory didn’t counteract the gut feeling that she was not going to fight for us. And when my sisters and parents and friends saw the leaked e-mails from the DNC, it didn’t matter that they were just the typical office gossip of political operatives. What mattered was that it confirmed something else that we knew all along: that our passions were easily dismissed by the political elite if they didn’t conform to the presumed outcome. In other words, they were playing favorites. “They really screwed him over,” I remember my step-father telling me. “It’s all rigged.” Which brings us to Donald Trump, who entered politics in a vacuum of cynicism and focus-grouped, multi-million-dollar messaging. It didn’t matter how slick the ad or how many celebrities endorsed Hillary Clinton, it only reaffirmed her status as the anointed leader of the structure that had let us down. And that put people like my mother in a difficult situation. She had entered politics for the first time in her life based on the glimmer of fairness that Bernie Sanders offered. So when the general election came, she found herself in the middle of a contest between a status quo that never represented her and an insurgent demagoguery that genuinely frightens her. She’s never said it out loud, but I suspect she might regret ever having registered in the first place. I have family members who voted for Donald Trump, and believe in him. They think that America is threatened by enemies foreign and domestic. They think that he will bring jobs back and make America great again. They think Crooked Hillary should rot in jail. Source: Scott Olson/Getty Images But I know far more people who, when faced with this decision, either voted for Donald Trump because they felt so disillusioned by Hillary Clinton and everything that the entire government stood for; or they chose not to vote at all. And maybe both of those choices seem irrational. But then again, the whole fucking election was irrational. I voted for Clinton. I believed, and still believe, that the election of the United States’ first female president would have been transformative, in the same way that the election of Barack Obama meant a generation of young black men and women could now look to the White House and see one of their own. I believe she would have been a good president. But I never believed that Clinton’s election would have brought about the type of change we needed. She wouldn’t push for free public universities, universal healthcare or massive infrastructure spending. I think a lot of people felt that same way. And when you pair that with Donald Trump’s relentless scorched earth campaign; and the misogyny, racism, race-baiting, hatred, violence and enmity of his rhetoric (to say nothing of Russian intervention and an electoral college designed to protect slave owners which has twice in my lifetime denied the presidency to the candidate who received the most votes), you end up where we are — with the dreams and hopes of President Obama’s democratic coalition dashed amidst the cynical Hell-scape in which Donald Trump has convinced us that we live. Donald Trump himself has said that the American dream is dead. He has promised to bring it back. And many of my friends and family have bet it all on his ability to come through on that promise. Unfortunately, they are counting on him to bring back something that may never have existed. Or at least, something that is not reflective of what we think it means. It was the historian James Truslow Adams who coined the term in 1931. Describing the dream, he wrote that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” He wrote these words at the height of the Great Depression. Perhaps his words were meant to dissuade the rise of communism by convincing people that self-determination and perseverance — as opposed to collective action and wealth redistribution — will rescue society from economic chaos. But most people have taken it to echo what other founding principles have suggested: that all men are created equal; that we all have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that we can rise from our social class, escape the circumstances of our birth. But as I watched my college go bankrupt as a result of internal fraud and national economic crisis; as I listened to my father tell me on the phone, week after week, each time more resigned and exhausted than the last, that he couldn’t find a job; as I’ve watched my sisters juggle multiple work schedules to pay for their children’s pre-school education; as I’ve seen my mother put in more and more time for less and less reward; and as I racked up debt and worked any job I could get and laid awake panicking about paying my rent as I struggled to get my degree, I have been constantly reminded that the greatest force suppressing the American poor and working classes is the reinforced belief that it is all our fault. As John Steinbeck said, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” For a moment, my friends and family broke through the veil when we voted for Bernie Sanders. We realized that our economic plight was created by forces out of our own control. But once that opportunity faded behind the greater forces of political machinery, millions of people were once again pulled back behind the veil. Some returned to the inactive, non-voting, disengaged state that roughly a third of the country perpetually lives in. Others cast a reluctant vote for a man they hate in opposition to a woman they did not trust. But a third group cast their votes with intent and hope. This is the group that fell back into the trap of the American dream. Another historian, H.W. Brands, wrote that before the gold rush, the American dream was the idea of a gradual accumulation of wealth, status and comfort over a lifetime, or generations. But after those first nuggets of gold were found at Sutter’s Mill, “The new dream was a dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck.” Looking at President Trump, one realizes that when his supporters look at him, they see their ideal selves, the full actualization of the modern, capitalist, American dream. He is the gilded, brazen barbiturate of the working class. That distortion of the American dream allowed for a distortion of the rest of the ideals wrapped up in that dream. Even when Donald Trump convinced his supporters that their economic failings were not their own fault, he pointed the finger away from the rich and the powerful, and he did what all tin-pot despots do: he directed all of our anger at the marginalized and the poor. The immigrants, the minorities, the other — that’s who was taking our jobs. Not oil barons and tycoons. The biggest obstacle to obtaining the bloated, gold-plated, super-model-dating American dream, according to Trump, was, is, and will always be, poor people. I guess what I’m trying to say is this: Don’t abandon my community. Donald Trump is not new. Since the plantation days, the ruling elites in this country have always played working-class and poor white folks like mine against working-class and poor people of color to maintain an economic system that they profit from. Yes, my folks say some redneck shit sometimes. And yes, I still do, too. And maybe — if you ignore the fact that corporate elites exploited Trump’s insane campaign rhetoric to generate ratings — you could say we’re the ones who brought you Donald Trump. But we’re also the people of John Steinbeck, and Upton Sinclair, and Huey Long — and yes, Bernie Sanders. We’re a pissed off working-class, the bread and butter of revolutions worldwide. And that is something that I will always be proud of.

This is actually a nice and fast boat, but it has some well known issues that can easily be fixed.... Do these things as soon as you confirm your boat is working. A big issue with this boat is water getting in, and it's happening in a few spots that need attention. The gasket on the top cover is too thin, so you have to either add another on top so it doubles the thickness, use removable waterproof tape on the top cover, or remove the gasket and fill the gap in the top cover with gasket sealant... So it creates a new gasket. Next you will need some clear silicone, add some inside the boat around the rubber cone that the rudder shaft comes through, you should put some marine grease inside the cone to water seal it completely. Also, add some silicone inside the boat around the water exit tube, and any gaps around the wires on the battery. You must keep the battery dry, use silicone on it! Although the water cooling somewhat works, the motor gets too hot. Open a gap on the top of the cooling coil, slightly bend the first coil up a little and it will expose an air intake hole for the motor. The motor will run cooler and last longer. Apply some waterproof tape over all the connectors inside the boat. Adding a bit of foam in the nose of the boat will prevent it from sinking, but instead float like a cork. Finally, if you readjust the position of the arm on the servo motor and put the rod to the rudder in a different hole, you can fix the veering to the left problem and also allow the rudder to turn more in each direction. It will steer left and right better. Do these things and what you drive on the water will seem like a completely different boat.

Written by: MagicMint Score: 10 votes: 13 Format: Article Do you need to optimize your SSD? Do you need to optimize your SSD? The answer is no if you’re an optimist , and yes if you’re a pessimist yet a benchmark believer. Fact is, a Solid State Drive is internally totally different from magnetic hard drives: as the well-known USB pen drives or SD cards, with which it shares the same flash technology, it does benefit from the fewest write cycles as possible. This will surely extend its life span since any write access will inevitably shorten it, due to technology limitations — and if your SSD happens to be soldered to the motherboard, as it is the case of the smaller boot-up disk in my Asus Zenbook, this kind of optimization matters to you all the more. You can then just as well squeeze out a little bit of additional performance from your SSD if you like. Preliminary steps With the help of the GNOME disk utility, you can easily find out which one of your disks is the SSD you need to prevent from damage (Mint Menu› Accessories› Disks): …$ gnome-disks After having made a security copy of your file system table, look into its contents in order to find out how it designates the single partitions. It can do it either by labels or by so-called UUIDs; both of them can easily be listed for your system with a third command: …$ sudo cp -i /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak …$ cat /etc/fstab …$ sudo blkid Finally, you can edit the file system table by: …$ sudo gedit /etc/fstab Less unnecessary writes For each non-swap partition on the SSD, you should make the defaults,… options contain the words “noatime” and “discard”. As an example, take the root partition and assume it to be designed by its label (as in LM14 Nadia, e.g.): # FileSys MountPt Type Options Dump Pass LABEL=ROOT / ext4 defaults,noatime,discard 0 1 If the trimming is done this way, it is performed at each delete operation. In LM 17.1 Rebecca, there is now a background trimming job scheduled on a weekly basis at /etc/cron.weekly/fstrim which is aimed at every SSD, but it works by default only if the disk is made by Intel or Samsung. If your system is stable in other respects, i.e. you don’t have to look into the system logs immediately after booting up, you can redirect the latter into the RAM: # FileSys MountPt Type Options Dump Pass tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777,size=15% 0 0 tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,size=5% 0 0 If you have the possibility to transfer the /var directory from the SSD to a normal hard disk, you should do it, because it is the only physical system directory which is subject to heavy write usage (think of package upgrades). As far as the swap partition is concerned, you should weigh up the following points: If you have enough RAM for your working load, then you won’t need the swap partition for anything else than for hibernation, and that will hardly affect the SSD more than its normal day-to-day usage; If you don’t have enough RAM, then the frequent swapping of memory contents onto the SSD will wear it out too soon, so consider either to upgrade your RAM or place the swap partition on another disk. Faster writes The command blkid — or even better the look into Disks — at the beginning has also revealed the device name of the SSD which is something like sda, sdb,, etc. If this name doesn’t change upon restarts (i.e. you or the computer don’t re-arrange the disks), you could go for optimization of your SSD. With the following commands you can check if you need to at all (replace sdX by the device name of your SSD): …$ cat /sys/block/sdX/queue/rotational …$ cat /sys/block/sdX/queue/scheduler If the first gives you a 0 and the second a list in which the active scheduler (the one surrounded by square brackets) is either “deadline” or “noop”, then the kernel itself takes care of the peculiarities of the SSD already. If not, then you should try one of the following tweaks: Note that such a write optimization doesn’t matter in the dual disk setup of some Ultrabooks like mine. Avoid “the fuller, the slower” We have done so already by enabling the “discard” (the trash) option in the file system table further above, so all you have to do is to restart the computer… Other tutorials from MagicMint Tags:Created: 5 years ago.Last edited: 4 years ago.Reviewed: 5 years ago.

US President-elect Donald Trump with Alibaba founder Jack Ma. (Reuters file photo) Blaming others is the best medicine for hiding own failures and lack of wisdom. This is more common in politics all over the world including the US. Over the years, Americans have been sold this rhetoric by their political elites that reasons of all their woes are matters like free trade, outsourcing and jobs being stolen by countries like China and India. President-elect Donald Trump has promised Americans that he would bring back jobs to make the country “great” again. However, what the Americans fail to understand or what they have not been made to understand is the fact that over the years, US elites have been following a strategy that doesn’t focus on the interests of the citizens as much as it does on foreign assets and wars. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba group founder Jack Ma flagged these concerns during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Forum 2017. “It’s not that other countries steal American jobs; it is your strategy – that you did not distribute the money in a proper way,” Ma was quoted as saying by weforum.org. American companies have been the biggest beneficiaries of globalisation and earned unparalleled profits as compared to companies in other countries. Ma cited names of companies like Microsoft, Cisco and IBM. But, he rued that the wealth earned by American companies was wasted. “In the past 30 years, America has had 13 wars at a cost of $14.2 trillion. That’s where the money went,” he said. Talking about the 2008 financial crisis, Ma wondered as to why the US decided to bankroll Wall Street. He argued the money could have been spent on other areas. “What if they had spent part of that money on building up their infrastructure, helping white-collar and blue-collar workers? You’re supposed to spend money on your own people.” Amidst rumours that China and the US may get involved into a trade war under Trump regime, Ma told a panel at WEF, “China and (the) US will never have a trade war. Give Trump some time. He’s open minded.” Ma had met Trump last week and shared Alibaba’s plan to bring one million small US businesses onto its platform to sell to Chinese consumers over the next five years. (With agency inputs)

Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter's success in fighting the incumbent to a virtual draw is a win for groups like the Service Employees International Union and MoveOn.org. Lincoln will face Halter in runoff LITTLE ROCK — Powered by national liberal interest groups and an anti-incumbent fervor that's sweeping the country, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter pushed Sen. Blanche Lincoln into a runoff Tuesday night, holding the two-term Democratic incumbent to under 50 percent of the vote after an expensive and ugly two-and-a-half-month campaign. Halter's ability to fight Lincoln to a virtual draw and force her into a showdown in three weeks is a win for groups like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and MoveOn.org that poured millions of dollars and thousands of hours into his insurgent bid and represents another striking rejection of incumbency. Story Continued Below With nearly 85 percent of the vote counted, Lincoln held a narrow lead over Halter of just a few thousand votes. And the impact of the lesser known but more conservative third candidate proved pivotal: D.C. Morrison, who supported the Fair Tax, lambasted Obama administration policies and scored laughs at debates by poking fun at his long-shot odds, captured 14 percent. "Tonight, people in Washington are getting mighty nervous about what is happening in Arkansas. And they ought to be. Arkansans are on the march to another victory. Three weeks, two candidates, one choice for change!," Halter said at his election party at the Peabody Hotel, located less than a mile from Lincoln's headquarters. "Today, we’ve put the political insiders and special interests on the ropes. And three weeks from tonight, we’re going to knock them out," he said to cheers. Meanwhile on the Republican side, Rep. John Boozman, the popular congressman from Northwest Arkansas, was able to avoid a runoff, easily disposing of Lincoln's 2004 opponent, Jim Holt, as well as state senator Gilbert Baker in a crowded eight-candidate Senate primary field. The results free up Boozman to move right into a general election campaign, where polls show he already holds an advantage, while Lincoln and Halter do battle for another 21 days in a contest that is likely to harden raw feelings in their fractured party. "I am confident that Arkansas is one of our party's strongest pick-up opportunities this November," boasted National Republican Senatorial Committee chair John Cornyn in a statement. In a fiery speech to supporters at the Holiday Inn in downtown Little Rock, Lincoln claimed a popular vote victory and insisted that "I have been part of the solution in Washington, I have not been part of the problem." She also asked Halter to change the tone of what's expected to be rough and tumble runoff campaign. "I want to call on Bill Halter to end all of his negative ads and I will too," Lincoln said. She described herself as the underdog in the race, chiding the national media for writing off her prospects weeks ago. "Guess what? They got another thing coming," she said. "This campaign is not about the outside groups who are trying desperately who are trying to exert their influence here. It is about us as Arkansans," she said. "The people of Arkansas have spoken. We want to control our own destiny and we will." "We have proved by winning the popular vote that we cannot be written off and we won't be. The next three weeks are going to prove us right," she added. Lincoln's punchy, pointed speech could not dispel the dour looks on the faces of some of her staffers, who seemed shocked that Halter proved to be so competitive with the chair of the Senate Agricultural committee.

DELRAY BEACH, Fla. (AP) — A Florida woman who was jailed after fleeing with her son to avoid the boy’s circumcision is giving up her yearslong fight over the surgery. Thirty-one-year-old Heather Hironimus signed paperwork Friday to allow the procedure to go forward and facilitate her release. Her decision came after a morning court hearing. It was a remarkable turnaround for a woman who waged a war against the boy’s father, but one that came after she spent a week in jail and faced dwindling legal options. Hironimus went missing in February with her child and ignored a judge’s warning to appear in court or risk imprisonment. She was found at a shelter last week and arrested. The case has been closely watched by anti-circumcision activists who say the removal of the foreskin is barbaric.

DENVER, Aug. 27 -- Their moments came outside prime time, but the candidates Senate Democratic leaders hope will propel them to their biggest majority in decades also had their time in the spotlight at the Democratic convention. After spending months trying to tamp down expectations, Democrats are openly discussing the possibility that they could net the nine seats that would bring them to the magic number of 60, a tally that would make it much more difficult for Republicans to filibuster their agenda in Congress next year. With that goal in sight, Democrats are working to energize activists in Denver to focus their agenda not only on Barack Obama's campaign but also on an array of races from Oregon to North Carolina, many of which were once viewed as all but out of reach for the party. "Embrace it? Sure, it's like the beautiful girl I can't reach, but I'd love to embrace her," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in an interview this week. On the stump and in e-mail solicitations to supporters, Senate Democrats are arguing that electing Obama and running mate Joseph R. Biden Jr. to the White House won't allow their party to reach its goals unless they have a large enough majority to quickly enact the Obama agenda. "Unless we give them a filibuster-proof Senate majority that can finally end the obstruction, we'll never put this country back on track," Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) wrote to DSCC donors recently. Neither party has held 60 seats in the chamber since 1977 and 1978, when Democrats controlled 61 seats. Republicans still reject the idea that Democrats can win in conservative states such as Texas, Mississippi or Kentucky, some of which would need to fall to Democrats for them to reach 60. There are currently 49 Democrats and two independents who caucus with them in the chamber, facing off against 49 Republicans. Stuart Rothenberg, an independent election analyst with the Rothenberg Political Report, estimated that if the elections were held today, Democrats would pick up at least five Republican-held seats. He cited Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico, where veteran GOP lawmakers are retiring, and New Hampshire and Alaska, where polling shows Republican incumbents trailing. Schumer pointed to six other races in which Democratic candidates are either tied or not far behind, including North Carolina. An independent poll this week put state Sen. Kay Hagan (D) ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R), 42 percent to 39 percent. The DSCC has an $18 million edge over its GOP counterpart, but Republicans have been buoyed in recent weeks by the work of several conservative outside groups that have aired ads accusing the Democratic candidates of doing the bidding of labor unions and opposing offshore oil drilling. Here in Colorado, television viewers have been treated to more than $6.8 million worth of ads attacking Rep. Mark Udall (D), according to Udall campaign estimates.

Grain Mills are found in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. They are located outside of cities in settlements, mostly on farms or outside rural cottages. With the Hearthfire add-on, one can be built at Heljarchen Hall. They can be used by the Dragonborn. On use, the game enters third-person view, and the Dragonborn is shown walking around the mill, pushing the millstone. With Hearthfire, they can be used to make flour. Trivia Edit It takes three wheat to make one sack of flour. There are also wind powered grain mills, which can be used to make sacks of flour. In the Creation Kit preview window, the grain mill has three animation options: AmLooping, AmIdle, and Break. The Break animation shows the wooden part of the mill coming un-hinged from the stone wheel, and several pieces falling off. Followers can be commanded to push a grain mill, but they will not create sacks of flour, even if wheat is given to them. Bugs Edit This section contains bugs related to Grain Mill. Before adding a bug to this list, consider the following: Please reload an old save to confirm if the bug is still happening. If the bug is still occurring, please post the bug report with the appropriate system template 360 / XB1 , PS3 / PS4 , PC / MAC , NX , depending on which platform(s) the bug has been encountered on. Be descriptive when listing the bug and fixes, but avoid having conversations in the description and/or using first-person anecdotes: such discussions belong on the appropriate forum board. After being activated, if the Dragonborn backs out and stops pushing the mill, it will continue to move until it returns to the starting position, seemingly under its own power. In some games, the grain mill will not work at all, even if the Dragonborn has the required number of wheat. No flour is produced, nor does any prompt appear. It is not known what causes this bug, or how to fix it. PS4 Activating the grain mill can cause the Dragonborn to face the same direction until a certain point in the mill's rotation is reached. From there, they will move with the mill until it returns to its starting position.

Despite calls to calm tensions in Jerusalem and at the Temple Mount, Arab MK Ahmed Tibi (UAL-Ta'al) arrived at al-Aqsa mosque over the weekend delcaring: "We own this place." He was received favorably by Muslim worshippers who told him he was "better than all the Arab leaders in the world." Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter MK Ahmed Tibi visits al-Aqsa mosque on Saturday. X Tibi was treated like a hero on his visit to the holy site. Worshippers told Tibi he was a great Arab leader "because of your strong positions." He has visited the site several times during the recent period of tension. Ahmed Tibi viists al-Aqsa mosque despite calls to calm tension. (Photo: YouTube) Tibi visited the European Parliament two weeks ago in order to express what he said were Israeli violations at al-Aqsa mosque. He claimed that some Israeli politicians were "pyromaniacs that cannot be restrained" and said that "they inflame the situation in Jerusalem without thinking about the consequences." He spoke of the situation at al-Aqsa and "attempts of Israeli sources to split the times of prayer." The Arab-Israeli Knesset member called for European parliament members to implose sanctions against Israel in order to stop the continuation of settlement construction and said that Israel is a "democracy towards Jews and a state of racial discrimination against its Arab citizens."

For a man who spent years deriding the intelligence of the American voter, it sure took Jonathan Gruber a long time to wise up. The architect of ObamaCare spent the intervening four years snickering at making suckers out of Americans, but won’t appear on television to defend himself these days, and especially not on Sean Hannity’s eponymous Fox News Channel show. Hannity sent David Webb out to find Gruber instead, with rather amusing results (via Katie Pavlich): Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Why amusing? Well, it seems that Gruber talks a big game about everyone else being stupid, but won’t put his beliefs into practice. If he’s really that much smarter than the hoi polloi for which he has such unvarnished contempt, why not debate the great unwashed? Heck, Hannity usually gives his progressive opponents a pretty fair shake, too, much more so than conservatives get on other cable-news outlets (with the singular exception of Morning Joe on MSNBC). Gruber can even consult with Alan Colmes on that point. Instead of engaging the Grubes, as it were, Gruber runs away from David Webb with the obligatory “no comment.” For a super genius, Gruber seems singularly unwilling to put his superior intellect on the line here. “Pretty gutless,” Hannity concludes, and Webb jokes, “I don’t think you’re on his Christmas card list.” That’s too bad, because thus far, Gruber’s the gift that keeps on giving. Chris Cillizza has a pretty good analysis of what’s driving Gruberama among conservatives, and why this story will have legs despite a near-blackout in the news media: The first point is somewhat obvious. Ever since then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), way back in March 2010, said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” conservatives have been convinced that Democrats either (a) don’t know what really was in the law or (b) more nefariously, Democrats knew exactly what was in the ACA and pushed it through Congress to keep the public from finding out. If you believe “b” — as does virtually every member of the Republican base — then you see Gruber’s comments, made in a panel discussion in 2013, as the smoking gun that proves you were right all along. … The second point is slightly more subtle but, I think, even more responsible for why Gruber and his comments have conservatives seeing red. Nothing makes conservatives more angry than the belief, which they think is widespread among liberals, that they are stupid. That if only conservatives read as much as the left or had the intellectual capacity of the left, they would see things the way the left sees them. Cillizza calls this “conservative catnip.” This display of contempt and arrogance should really be American catnip. Maybe if this got the coverage it deserves in the media, it might, which could be why most mainstream news outlets have stayed away from it. Kudos to Cillizza for reporting on it in the Washington Post.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flies to Washington this week to meet with Donald Trump at the White House and to address key members of the House of Representatives amid growing concern the U.S. President's protectionist trade demands could cause NAFTA talks to collapse. The visit comes as Canada braces for tough American demands on dairy and a U.S. content requirement for autos in the North American free-trade agreement renegotiation, and on the heels of punishing tariffs imposed on Canadian plane maker Bombardier and softwood lumber producers. Mr. Trudeau will meet with the President in the Oval Office on Wednesday, the same day he meets with Republican and Democrat members of the powerful House of Representatives Ways and Means committee on Capitol Hill. The committee has jurisdiction over all taxation and tariffs and is responsible for implementing any changes to NAFTA. Mr. Trudeau will hold a solo news conference at the Canadian embassy; one source said Mr. Trump did not have time in his schedule for a joint media appearance. Story continues below advertisement Most Canadians don't want to follow Trump's path to greater isolation: poll Martin: Trudeau's Washington mission: Don't play cute with Trump NAFTA deal: Trudeau is Canada's only card against Trump's wild card The fourth round of NAFTA talks also starts on Wednesday in Arlington, Va., across the river from Washington. Mr. Trump's negotiating team has taken a hard line, demanding at the last round that Canadian companies receive fewer American government contracts and angling to put even more severe measures on the table. Mr. Trudeau is expected to speak with Mr. Trump about the free-trade negotiations, the dispute over Bombardier's C Series jets – in which the Trump administration is imposing punitive duties that make it impossible to sell the planes in the United States – and the gridlocked talks over softwood lumber, sources with knowledge of the planned discussions said. Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that Canada is getting slammed with hard protectionist proposals at the bargaining table and needs to find some resolution with Mr. Trump. Canada believes Mr. Trudeau's visit will help push negotiations in the right direction, the sources said. Ottawa insists it has to keep up the outreach program, both to the White House and outside it, that it has been conducting all year in order to remind the Americans how much their economy relies on that of Canada. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement Mr. Trudeau will be accompanied to Washington by his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, as well as Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and parliamentary secretary Andrew Leslie. On Thursday, Mr. Trudeau will travel to Mexico City to talk trade with outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto, during the Prime Minister's first official visit to Mexico. Mr. Trudeau will also honour the victims of the country's recent earthquake, attend an official dinner and address the Mexican Senate on Friday. International Trade Minister François-Philippe Champagne will join Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Freeland in Mexico. Mexico's ambassador to the United States, Geronimo Gutierrez, told The Globe that Mexico still hopes to improve NAFTA. But he said the country is prepared to walk away from talks if it can't get a good deal. "Mexico's position will continue to be serious and constructive, but we have also been very clear about the fact that we rather leave the negotiating table than [accept] a harmful deal," he said. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said last week that he expects the administration will throw down some specific demands for loosening Canada's supply management system for dairy, eggs and poultry, which fixes prices and keep foreign imports out. Mr. Perdue said supply management is "very unfair" and he's not happy that so little progress has been made in NAFTA talks so far. "If you've ever watched a boxing match, they circle one another for a while, and I think we've been circling," he said. Story continues below advertisement The Trump administration is also quietly floating a proposal to include a 50-per-cent U.S. content requirement for autos, as well as increasing the North American content from 62.5 per cent to 85 per cent, a source said. Canadian officials said there have been no formal proposals on auto content so far. Jerry Dias, president of Unifor, which represents Canadian auto workers, said the Trudeau government won't agree to 50-per-cent U.S. content, or a sign onto a deal that doesn't include improved labour standards in Mexico. He said strict content requirements won't have an impact without raising the 2.5-per-cent tariff on vehicles imported to the United States outside NAFTA, because auto makers could still move their operations to Mexico, where labour is much cheaper. "Canada will never accept that the U.S. automatically gets 50 per cent of the industry based on rules of origin. Nobody will ever agree to that under any circumstances," he said. "Justin [Trudeau] ought not to be afraid to say to Trump, that, listen, we are quite comfortable walking away from a lousy deal. This isn't you in control." The top business lobby group in the United States has already issued an extraordinary public warning that Mr. Trump's tough stand in negotiations risks destroying NAFTA and swiftly throwing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work. "It would be an economic and political debacle," John Murphy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's senior vice-president for international policy, said at a roundtable last week. Story continues below advertisement "There's an old adage in negotiations: 'Never take a hostage you wouldn't shoot.' Withdrawal from NAFTA is an unacceptable proposition, so we're urging the administration to recalibrate its approach." The Trudeau government is trying to play down concerns that Mr. Trump is prepared to pull the plug on NAFTA, with officials insisting Mr. Trudeau's second visit to the White House will be used to bolster the two leaders' relationship on a variety of fronts, including trade. "The trip is an opportunity for the Prime Minister to strengthen and secure the very strong relationships that we have both with the United States and with Mexico, two key trading partners," said Cameron Ahmad, a spokesman for the Prime Minister's Office. He insisted the trip is "not motivated by NAFTA," but that Mr. Trudeau was scheduled to speak at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington on Tuesday evening. The Prime Minister will also hold a roundtable on gender equality and education. Maryscott Greenwood, chief executive officer of the Canadian-American Business Council, said the Trudeau government's so-called charm offensive in the United States is proving useful. "It's having an effect in terms of increasing the understanding and awareness level in the United States among policy makers and thought leaders about how integrated our economy really is," she said. Story continues below advertisement "I have to give the Trudeau government a lot of credit. So far, they're pitch perfect, and that is not easy given their dance partner."

That's the title of a new study by London School of Economics management professor Satoshi Kanazawa just published in Social Psychology Quarterly. As ScienceDaily explains the professor's findings: More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.... In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals. Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa's hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as "very conservative" have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence. Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans' tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see "the hands of God" at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. "Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid," says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. "So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists." Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.... One intriguing but theoretically predicted finding of the study is that more intelligent people are no more or no less likely to value such evolutionarily familiar entities as marriage, family, children, and friends.

Known in the world of comics as the publisher of Study Group Comics , creator of The Secret Voice and an all around fixture in not only Portland, Oregon's lively comic book community but also the small press at large, Zack Soto has recently extended his creative ambitions into the world of toys . Designing, sculpting, casting and painting limited runs of resin figures based on his own comic book creations is a labor of love. For as difficult as it is to get started in the comics world, it's even tougher to set out into the realm of plastic 3D characters. This week at New York Comic Con 2013 , Soto is set to unveil his latest batch of resin Rock Trolls and Ghost Grunts. ComicsAlliance got in touch with the comic book and toy creator to learn more about the plastic-paved road that lead him to this year's show, and what he's got in store for 2014 and beyond. Robin Wouterra Bogert ComicsAlliance: Tell me a little about your toy line. What went into your creative decisions for the sculpts, the casting medium, the colorways and the other elements that define these figures? Zack Soto: I've always had the desire to make toys or toy-like objects, I think a lot of cartoonists do. Some people, like Chris Ware, Richard Corben or Seth make sculptures of their characters and settings for reference or fun. For me, it's a little bit of both. I can expand on my already existing story worlds by making toys of the characters that live there, and the toys themselves have already generated comics or story ideas, so it can go either way. My initial thought was to make stuff related to my comic The Secret Voice , so the very first thing I finished was a generic Troll body with multiple heads and arms that swap out for variation's sake. As I was in the middle of making it, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed by the Troll and making joints and so on, so I started working on a mini figure, just a simple two part mold that would be fun and easy to make. That's where the Ghost Grunts came from. Because I'm me, making one mini figure sprung out into designing and working on a whole line of them that have their own unique setting and mythos, blah blah blah. So the scenario of the Ghost Grunts is a space/sci-fi world, as opposed to the more fantasy-based Secret Voice world. The main factor is that making toys is, generally speaking, a pretty expensive endeavor. At some point, I saw enough people doing it that I started pricing it out and realized that resin casting is relatively affordable way to do things. Where I might need thousands to make a vinyl toy or maybe tens of thousands to make a complex action figure, I got the basic tools and materials to start resin casting for several hundred dollars. As far as colors and stuff goes, I'm very much influenced by classic kaiju sofubi [soft vinyl] paint apps and I also draw a lot of inspiration from the current crop of customizers who do killer work. Generally speaking, looking to these things for inspiration was a lesson in being less focused on doing "realistic" colorways and instead bringing out the various features of a sculpt and that could mean doing a simple directional spray of color versus making sure the pants and shirt etc are a solid color, or the teeth are painted white. I tend to favor bright color combinations in my art anyway, so a lot of my toy painting so far has definitely embraced that. Robin Wouterra Bogert CA: What's the response to your toys been like so far? Has it met your expectations? ZS: People seem to dig them, I think? I'm still really in the beginning stages of both making the things and presenting them as a part of "my art" or whatever. I had them at SPX and that was the first time I had them on the table with me, next to all my books and prints and I was a little nervous about that. Some people were definitely confused, and some were very enthusiastic. The feedback I've gotten from toy people has been mostly pretty positive. Robin Wouterra Bogert CA: What sparked your interest in making your own toys? Did it spring from your passion for comics or was it kind of a parallel interest? ZS: Well, as a kid I had a million G.I .Joes, Star Wars, and MOTU [ Masters of the Universe ] figures, in addition to all kinds of weird bootleggy versions of the above. So that was an early touchstone. Back then I would mainly make my own playsets and such for them to play in, like a very unsafe Sarlacc pit made out of a coffee can w/nails in it that I buried in the backyard. In college I was focusing on printmaking and illustration, but I had a couple 3D classes including a ceramics class where our teacher had us make articulated figures out of clay. That was a really exciting project, I wish I knew where the things I made ended up because they were definitely weird little buggers. The first person I saw really making their own toys on a DIY level was John Pham, who made a cool resin version of one of his characters from EPOXY. He had them at SPX in like 2002 or something. I thought that seemed like such a cool thing, but it seemed really out of my reach for a while. I basically kept the idea bubbling in my head off and on for years, but the process was so mysterious to me and comics were already there for me, I just focused on that. Fast forward to a couple years ago, when I started working for my friend Bwana Spoons at his gallery/toy shop Grass Hut. Bwana makes his own toys in resin and vinyl, and he introduced me to a whole lot of amazing creators like Pico Pico, Paul Kaiju, Healey Made, LeMerde, MonstreHero, Arbito and others who were doing really interesting, idiosyncratic work in both resin and vinyl. It's one thing to like action figures or even kaiju toys, but to see stuff that really looked like a person made it... That was cool. It started to seem more attainable, like I could try to do something myself. I did a lot of research on the process, and luckily Bwana made himself available to me to ask him stupid questions and point out where I was messing up. Robin Wouterra Bogert CA: Toys are an aspect of comic book shop that not every fan understands. Some consider it superficial and others consider it kind of an insider-y offshoot of the culture. Where do you think toys fit into the mix? Do you think they might even feed an interest in comics? ZS: Well, I guess I have some of that same conflicted thing in me, because I have worked comics retail for so long. If I walk into a place that calls itself a comic book shop and they have more toys than comics, I usually get sorta bummed out. But toys definitely have their place, and people like to have fun. Toys are usually pretty fun! There's so many different toy cultures that it's hard to have a blanket answer for "where do toys fit in," but for me.,. I'm an artist and I do comics and illustration and now I also do these weird handmade toys. I do a thing with the Ghost Grunts, and I'll do this with all my toys in the future, where I include a minicomic about the character in the header card, so you get a toy AND a comic. And you learn something about the character, if it's your first interaction with it ( here's that comic ). That gives you a chance to invest your imagination in the toy a little, to maybe build an attachment beyond "oh this looks neat." My inspiration for that was the old He-Man toys that came with minicomics, but I know some current toy makers have done similar things. Robin Wouterra Bogert CA: What were some of the resources you used when it came time to make your own toys from scratch? What would you recommend to people new to the hobby? ZS: There's a TON of information out there on the internet for people interested in this stuff. Just google "mold making" and "resin casting" tutorials and you'll be able to get a grasp on the process. The big thing I recommend is picking the book Pop Sculpture , it's written by a bunch of people who make action figures and statues for a living. It's got tons of practical information that is explained very clearly in language that's easy to understand. Beyond that, I spent a lot of time lurking on various toy forums, sometimes reading years worth of threads on DIY toy stuff and seeing what people were doing or figuring out. I also recommend LOOKING at a lot of toys, different kinds of stuff, and figuring out what you like and thinking about why you like it, what you like about it, etc. I have a Pinterest board that is just filled with toys and sculptural art that I especially liked when I came across it. CA: Right now you're working in vinyl, but do you have aspirations to more complex toys like action figures? ZS: I'm actually not working in vinyl yet. Just resin casting for now. I'm still very much a beginner at this, and plan on making a lot of little resin stuff, honing my skills/refining my approach/etc before I move to make a vinyl toy. That said, I'm definitely looking to go that route sometime down the road. CA: What've you got on the horizon toy-wise that people can be on the lookout for? ZS: I am making a Dr. Galapagos figure that's to scale with the Trolls, so they can fight, and as more issues of Secret Voice come out, there will probably be other figures to match. More Troll heads and arms, for variety. I've also got a bunch of designs for the mini figures that exist in the same world as the Ghost Grunts, so that's going to be an ongoing project. More, more, more. Maybe in a year I'll think about doing something in vinyl. Right now I just want to get better, more prolific, and balance this stuff with my comics output. Coming up immediately, I'll be at NYCC in "the Block" at booth #204. I'm tabling with Bwana Spoons, Miles Nielsen of Munktiki/Yakimon, and Joseph Harmon. Those guys are all total ballers, and I feel really humbled that they're letting me hang with them. We'll all have crazy toys, prints, art and comics for sale and hopefully people will come by and check it out! Bwana Spoons Joseph Harmon

Image copyright AFP Image caption Volunteers in Kiev piece together shredded documents found in the former residence of Viktor Yanukovuch A group of volunteers is painstakingly piecing together shredded documents in the hope of uncovering corruption under the leadership of Ukraine's ousted president, Victor Yanukovych. Eleven-year-old Dmytro Pynchuk's desk is covered in scissors and pots of glue. He is a dab hand at assembling complicated models and proudly shows off his paper aeroplanes and World War Two tanks. Now his expertise is proving useful, as he and his parents give up their free time in the evenings and at weekends to piece together shredded documents. These contain information about stolen assets, offshore accounts, bribes and other secrets that nobody outside the circle of the Ukraine's ousted president was ever supposed to lay eyes on. Find out more Listen to the full report on Radio 4's Crossing Continents on Thursday 3 April at 11:00 BST or on BBC World Service Assignment at 03:30 BST. Catch up afterwards via the Radio 4 website Catch up via Assignment on the World Service When Viktor Yanukovych fled his palatial estate north of Kiev in mid-February, his staff attempted to get rid of tens of thousands of sheets of paper by burning or shredding them or by dumping them into a reservoir. More potentially incriminating documents were found in other parts of the Ukrainian capital. There were several boxes in the sauna of the former General Prosecutor Viktor Pshonka and a raid on the former energy minister's home, Eduard Stavytsky, netted another stash of papers along with nearly $5m (£3m) in cash, 48kg of gold bars and luxury watches and jewellery. Image copyright AFP Image caption A volunteer scans an image of paper fragments found in the former residence of Viktor Yanukovuch The documents found in the water were carefully dried, scanned and uploaded onto a new website called Yanukovych Leaks. But the shredded ones need to be carefully reassembled, bit by bit. The Pynchuk family and scores of other volunteers gather together in donated office space - a basement which was used by Ukraine's Communist Party. They could be gluing and sticking for several months. But however long it takes, they are determined to help investigative journalists, accountants and lawyers to shed more light on the way business was done when Yanukovych was in power. Last week they had 40 people a day but in the last few days the numbers have dwindled to 20 a day. More people come at the weekend. They stick the paper randomly on to sheets so it can be read by the sophisticated computer software programme. Some are long strips and others are short like confetti. Other documents have been torn up by hand. Image copyright Other Denys Bigus, a journalist for the ZIK TV channel, is the man in charge of the restoration project. He says: "It's a very long process and will take several more months. The actual work is extremely tedious but people know it is vitally important." People come to stick the paper together but the atmosphere is very lively, he says - it's like a discussion club. "Last week we had a couple out on a date - they chose to help with the documents instead of going to the movies - volunteering is becoming fashionable in Ukraine these days." The Pynchuk family are fully committed to their intricate labouring, although young Dmytro concedes it can get a little boring, and it means he can't spend as much time practising his guitar. We were brought up by our parents never to steal - even the smallest thing Dmytro Pynchuk His father, also called Dmytro, opens his laptop to show me a sample of the family's painstaking work, which on occasion gives him a headache, he says. It looks rather like an abstract collage - row after row of narrow strips of paper glued onto a coloured sheet. The sheets are then scanned and can be deciphered by a special software programme. "As you can see the pieces are tiny - like confetti!" says Dmytro who works as a consultant for an international IT firm in Kyiv. Yet it is sometimes possible to make out signatures, some names and a few words. Dmytro found one document directly related to the former president - a list of his private collection of cars. "Some of the vintage models - five or six - were stolen from our national film studios", he says. "And you know, we were brought up by our parents never to steal - even the smallest thing." He adds that on the one hand the ex-president's greed is so outrageous it's almost funny. But then he calls it "stupid and disgusting". Image copyright BBC Sport Image caption Lilia and Dmytro (son and father) Pynchuk The shredded documents he and his family have been working on were found at the abandoned Mezhihirya estate and in the underground car park of a downtown office block. Thirty rubbish bags spewing ribbons of paper were discovered in bins beneath a conglomerate owned by Serhiy Kurchenko. The 28-year-old who became a billionaire almost overnight has long been suspected of being a front man for the Yanukovych family. Image copyright BBC Sport Image caption Shredded documents linked to Serhiy Kurchenko Ukraine's new general prosecutor Oleh Makhnitsky has accused Kurchenko's offshore registered companies of trading in oil products using a tax evasion scheme that cost the government an estimated US$1 billion in lost revenues. I ask Dmytro's wife Lilia, who sells computer equipment, how she feels about these latest revelations. She is silent for several seconds and then, to my surprise, starts to cry. She explains that she is a part-time fund raiser for a charity which cares for sick children. "Most people can only afford to give us a few kopecks," she says. "Often we just can't raise enough to treat these poor kids so many don't make it… and then when you see how our president bought chandeliers that cost a hundred thousand US dollars each! I just feel like I want to take this man - and tear him to pieces." Her son throws his tear-stained mother a worried glance and then makes her laugh by suggesting that Yanukovych should have gone into the shredder along with all his dodgy documents. Over tea in their kitchen, the Pynchuks admit corruption is not confined to the super-rich. It is endemic at every level of society. Bribes are required for everything from getting a child into school, to applying for a passport to visiting the doctor. Dmytro and Lilia have had to pay many backhanders but they want that to stop. Image copyright Anastasia Bereza Image caption Documents were fished out of the river and dried "It's not a good thing," says Dmytro, "because every time you bribe an official you feel you're putting your hand into the dirt - it's an absolutely disgusting feeling". Lilia is also troubled by the lack of accountability of those in positions of power. She tells me about her friend who died after a botched caesarean section in 2012. Once the baby girl had been delivered, the obstetrician said he was tired and left without stitching up the incision. More from the Magazine Image copyright Other A decent commercial shredder can reduce a sheet of paper to more than 400 pieces. That yields a total of 1,276,800 possible two-piece combinations - for one single-sided sheet. So how easy is it to reassemble the pieces? How do you reassemble shredded documents? "Basically she bled to death - she was left on her own and nobody in that maternity hospital came to help her until it was too late and her face was as white as that", says Lilia pointing at her kitchen wall. She adds that when the family tried to complain and prevent a similar tragedy from occurring at the same clinic, the doctor warned them he was "very well connected" and told them to leave his office. In a separate incident, three of the couple's friends were run over and killed by a young businessman in the centre of Ukraine. "He tried to drive off," says Dmytro, "but taxi drivers who witnessed the accident wouldn't let him. Judging from the look in his eyes, he'd taken some kind of drug so they handed him to the police". But Dmytro assumes bribes were paid to hush up the case because the driver never appeared in court and the families of the victims received no compensation. "That is what made me go out and join the protests on the Maidan," says Lilia. "This corruption is killing us and I just want to live in a normal country." Listen to the report from Assignment on the BBC World Service on Thursday 3 April at 03:30 BST or catch up on iPlayer. Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook

Alex Graves tells THR he did a double take when learning he would be overseeing Sunday's disturbing incest moment: "You read the scene and go, 'Wait, who's directing this?' " [WARNING: Spoilers ahead for Sunday's episode of Game of Thrones, "Breaker of Chains"] Game of Thrones director Alex Graves shocked fans last week with Joffrey's (Jack Gleeson) death. This week he tackled the aftermath of the Purple Wedding in an episode that contains one of the series' most disturbing scenes to date. As Cersei (Lena Headey) is mourning her son, Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) comes in to comfort her and pay his respects. Things get hot and heavy between the siblings/lovers, but when Cersei attempts to put a stop to it, Jaime rapes her. To add another layer to the already disturbing scene, their son's dead body is just inches away. (Read a full recap here.) "The whole thing for me was about dead Joffrey lying there, watching the whole thing," Graves tells The Hollywood Reporter. "I wanted to make sure I had Jack in there as much as I could. Of course Lena and Nikolaj laughed every time I would say, 'You grab her by the hair, and Jack is right there,' or 'You come around this way and Jack is right there.' " PHOTOS: 'Game of Thrones': 20 Best Quotes Why was it key that Joffrey was in the scene? "He is their first born. He is their sin. He is their lust, and their love -- their everything," says Graves. "If he's gone, what's going to happen?" Here, the director breaks down the rest of the episode, revealing which scene he thinks has "one of the best speeches in the series" and why its events are essential for the rest of the season. This feels like Tywin's episode. What was filming his scene with him and Tommen like? That was one of the greatest days I've ever had filming. To film Charles (Dance) kidnapping Lena's son with words for three minutes of monologue -- and to have Lena keeping up with him at the highest bar of acting possible with no words at all -- was a joy. It was directorial crack to do that scene. It was one of my favorite scenes I've ever shot. It's almost like a build from Ordinary People meets a Hitchcock movie, because you're sitting here going, "This is so dysfunctional and bizarre." She's a wreck. Tywin is really going on about this historical stuff, and you slowly start to go, "He's kidnapping her only boy," because she's not going to have him anymore. And then he succeeds, and then Jaime comes in and he rapes her. That was like -- you read the scene and go, "Wait, who's directing this?" That whole scene has to be one of the most taboo, disturbing things that has happened on the show. I'm never that excited about going to film forced sex. But the whole thing for me was about dead Joffrey lying there, watching the whole thing. (Showrunners) David (Benioff) and Dan (Weiss) loved that, and I was like, I wanted to make sure I had Jack in there as much as I could. Of course Lena and Nickolaj laughed every time I would say, "You grab her by the hair, and Jack is right there," or "You come around this way and Jack is right there." Why was it so important to have Joffrey's body in the scene? He is their first born. He is their sin. He is their lust, and their love -- their everything. If he's gone, what's going to happen? Jaime is still trying to believe as hard as he possibly can that he's in love with Cersei. He can't admit that he is traumatized by his family and he's been forced his whole life to be something he doesn't want to be. What he is -- but has to deny -- is he is actually the good knight, like Brienne. PHOTOS: Joffrey's 10 Most Evil Moments The Daenerys stuff was pretty crazy too. It calls back to the scene with the Unsullied you directed last year. That was when I was done prepping the Purple Wedding. I went home, and instead of sleeping I had to plan that. I always called Meereen my 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. part-time job. If you get into the marrow of that daily storyline it is always, always Emilia (Clarke). She is the most motivating, stimulating young actor of many I've worked with. She is utterly old-school professional. She carries around a ripped up, wrecked, ruined version of the book we're shooting, because she is one of the only people who reads the books. And behind all of that, every time you say action, you watch this performance occur that is Nirvana. What was she like shooting the episode's big Daenerys finale? You're in a rock quarry with like 500 smelly guys, and the crew is exhausted, and everybody is on edge, and Emilia comes on set and all of a sudden the whole crew is like (in a sing-songy voice): "Emilia! Good morning, Emilia. How are you?" It brings out the best in everybody. It's like Audrey Hepburn has just walked onto the set. And nobody is more gracious than she is on the set. It's just great. She is a good example. PHOTOS: Jaime's Worst Sins, Greatest Deeds Earlier on, we had this very sad scene. There's a cute family, where the father and son are talking, and then the dad is immediately shot with an arrow. What was the purpose of that? What it's saying is no one's safe who's up in the North. It's saying that you're not out of harm's way no matter how remote your village is, because the two warring forces there are now unavoidable and are headed for something big. What we're watching play out is the Wildling's strategy, which is they are doing such horrible things that Jon Snow will have to come down and fight them. And Jon has to resist them as long as they can. Arya and the Hound also meet an adorable family, whom the Hound robs but justifies his robbery with a great speech. That's one of the best speeches in the series, and it's the times they live in. The Hound is saying, "Arya. You're a lot like your father. Don't be too much like your father or you're going to end up dead." And that's a very important turning point for her. It's really a question of who is she going to become? This girl who has seen her family murdered over and over again? What's going to happen to this traumatized kid, and how is she taking it in? You also directed episodes eight and 10 of this season. What can you tell us about what's next for Thrones? Episode three is in part an aftermath episode, where you settle and everything takes a turn toward the second half of the season, whether it's Castle Black, where the battle is coming and they realize they are going to have to do something. Episode three is actually a series of really beautifully written scenes that smartly ends with Meereen, which is the beginning. You have all these beautiful scenes to play out, and then you get a big smashing end to the episode, which is like the opening sequence of a movie as the end. Three is really setting up the last three episodes of the season. Email: Aaron.Couch@THR.com Twitter: @AaronCouch

Getting Started with Altcoins on Binance using Coinbase This is intended for newcomers who already have funds in Coinbase, and in this specific case, Litecoin, but want to start trading altcoins as well. This was intended for a friend of mine but I thought I’d share it online for others to benefit. This is not a Coinbase tutorial. Jake Sulpice Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 22, 2017 For absolute beginners who don’t yet have funds but still want to get into altcoin trading, I would advise initially purchasing Litecoin or Ethereum as opposed to Bitcoin due to the high fees and slow transaction times that come with it. Starting with Bitcoin may save you a few quick steps, but you’ll lose nearly $20 from fees alone. Disclaimer: I am not a financial analyst. Always do your own research, I am not liable to losses or gains nor do I own your money. This is not professional advice, just an informed tutorial on how to use an exchange. This is not play money or a simulation website, this is real currency being traded like a regular financial exchange in the form of digital assets on a publicly accessible blockchain. 1. Sign up with my referral link here: https://www.binance.com/?ref=10031682 2. Go to Funds > Deposits Withdraws. Step 2 3. Find Litecoin and hit Deposit to get your Binance Litecoin wallet address (mine is blacked out, in retrospect didn’t need to do that since it’s at the bottom of the page.) Step 3 Steps 4–7 4. Open Coinbase and go to your wallets, then click Send and enter the address Binance gave you in Step 3. 5. Once you enter the address, verify it’s the same address you copied to make sure you don’t send it to a wrong address. I usually just check the first and last 3 characters. 6. Once entered, go to the Amount box and hit “Send Max” or whatever the blue Max button says. 7. Hit Continue and Confirm you want to send it. 8. Wait for Coinbase and the LTC Blockchain to process the transaction (tx from here on out). This should take only a couple minutes until they provide you with a “View Transaction” link that you can click and see how many confirmations the tx currently has. LTC takes around 2 or 6 confirmations to appear in your Binance Wallet, iirc. Step 9 9. Once confirmed and added to your wallet, head back to Binance and go to the exchange, choosing either basic or advanced. There isn’t a huge difference between the two, so for this tutorial I’ll just use basic. 10. Once at the basic exchange page, go to the top right and search for LTC. Click LTC/BTC to refresh the graphs/data for that coin. Step 10 Steps 11–13 11. In the bottom, click Market (in between Limit and Stop-Limit, above “Buy LTC”) to sell it at the current market price instead of placing an order at a specified price that you set, which can go up or down depending on how long you take, leading to it not selling immediately. For example, you want to buy LTC when it dips down to 0.016 BTC, you’d set a Limit order at 0.016 and how much you want to buy and it’ll be filled when the price dips that low. 12. After clicking Market, go to Sell LTC (circled in red.) You can specify how much you want to sell exactly, or hit one of the handy percentage buttons which will calculate half or whatever for you. Once you decide you want to go through with selling, hit Sell LTC. It will go through immediately without confirmation so be sure. 13. Congrats, now you have some BTC! Your BTC balance should now be shown to the right of Buy LTC on this page, to the right of Buy LTC. Step 14 14. For this tutorial we are going to be buying NEO, a tech I greatly believe in. Go back to the top right and search for NEO. Click on NEO/BTC to refresh the page for NEO. Note: When you have BTC in your account, you can now interchange NEO for whichever coin you want in this tutorial. You now have a basic understanding of how it works so you’ll be able to make trades on your own without the tutorial for any coin. Again, always do your own research. Step 16 15. Once at the NEO page, go back down to the bottom right to Buy NEO. Note that the percentage buttons will now mean 50% of your BTC Balance, not 50% of one NEO for instance. So if you wanted to split your original LTC in half, then keep 25% in BTC and 25% in NEO, you’d choose 50%, since that is half of your recently gained BTC. 16. Click Buy NEO when you are comfortable with the amount you want to buy. Remember this confirms instantly and will return a “Success” alert. 17. Congrats! You now have NEO, BTC, and LTC, if you followed the example percentages I used. Like I said, use these same steps for whichever coin you want to invest in, whether it be Ripple, Monero, DASH, Bitcoin Cash, etc. Never have weak hands when the price dips, often times this is short term. Always zoom out when looking at graphs and percentages, when it’s down 30% today it might be up 50% this week still, and vice versa. If this tutorial helped you, consider giving a tip to any of the following addresses: Bitcoin tip jar: 1Kh43g5rjCZWrQHBuYHWZPc7KF7CJxG1N9 Litecoin tip jar: LW8Gwo5kiiey5isnkGTg1R4rmRsyrSEghD Neo tip jar: AaFfVxZy7jGFYHEVcAfDJCgYrFVhb57zWe TRON tip jar: 0xa16ddc286a217242dfe85d85521970d01ef3458a Ethereum tip jar: 0xa16ddc286a217242dfe85d85521970d01ef3458a Bitcoin Cash tip jar: 1Kh43g5rjCZWrQHBuYHWZPc7KF7CJxG1N9

Start developing iOS Apps (Swift) Beginner Apple Apple Self-paced The Recommended starting point from Apple Free No The Complete iOS 10 Developer Course - Build 21 Apps Beginner Udemy Rob Percival 30 hours A new course that has more than 12k students enrolled within a day of launch. Rob Percival's previous course on iOS development has a rating of 4.6 stars from over 8,900 ratings. The course has a 50% offer price till August 3, 2016 50 USD, now 25 USD Yes iOS 10 & Swift 3: From Beginner to Paid Professional [50% off Sitewide] Beginner Udemy Mark Price 61 hours A new course on iOS10 from a highly rated course instructor. Mark Price's previous course has a rating of 4.6 stars from over 4,333 ratings. This course has a 50% offer price till August 3, 2016 50 USD, now 25 USD Yes iOS development with Objective-C Beginner Treehouse Varies by course 32 hours Treehouse has easy to follow courses and is a great place to start learning iOS. They have a high number of courses for iOS aspirants. 7-day free trial; 25 USD per month to access all courses No The Complete iOS 9 Developer Course - Build 18 Apps Beginner Udemy Rob Percival 29.5 hours 4.6 stars from 8,935 ratings 45 USD Yes Ray Wenderlich's tutorials for developers and gamers Beginner Ray Wenderlich Ray Wenderlich Self-paced A reputed iPhone developer, who provides written tutorials and video tutorials on his site for beginners and experts Free No iOS development with Swift 2.0 Beginner Treehouse Pasan Premaratne 41 hours Treehouse has easy to follow courses and is a great place to start learning iOS. They have a high number of courses for iOS aspirants. 7-day free trial; 25 USD per month to access all courses No iOS development with Swift Beginner Treehouse Pasan Premaratne 19 hours Treehouse has easy to follow courses and is a great place to start learning iOS. They have a high number of courses for iOS aspirants. 7-day free trial; 25 USD per month to access all courses No iOS 9 and Swift 2: From Beginner to Paid Professional Beginner Udemy Mark Price 51.5 hours 4.6 stars from 4,333 ratings 35 USD Yes The Complete iOS8 and Swift Course: Learn by Building 15 Real World Apps Beginner Udemy Rob Percival 22.5 hours 4.4 stars from 5,453 ratings 30 USD Yes iOS Learning path Beginner Codeschool Codeschool Self-paced Both Objective-C and Swift course tracks are available. Course would be useful for learners at all levels 29 USD per month No Developing iOS 7 Apps for iPhone and iPad Beginner Stanford Stanford Self-paced A popular course from a reputed university and the course is offered for Free on iTunes Free No iPhone App Programming for Noobs - UPDATED iOS 9 Swift 2 Beginner Udemy Rick Walter, Jenna Miller 26.5 hours 4.5 stars from 616 ratings 30 USD Yes TutorialsPoint iOS Beginner TutorialsPoint TutorialsPoint Self-paced A basic course that would be a great reference material to checkout before interviews Free No iOS School: iOS Development Code Camp Beginner Udemy Learntoprogram Inc., 13.5 hours A good starter course for beginners who have little to no knowledge in Programming 30 USD Yes Beginning iOS App Development Nanodegree Beginner Udacity Udacity 87 hours Nanodegree is becoming one of the reputed credentials. Udacity courses are generally more job-oriented than courses from Universities. Nanodegree Plus offers a job guarantee but is restricted to US only. 7-day free trial; 200 USD per month Yes iOS Developer Nanodegree Intermediate Udacity Udacity, AT&T, Lyft 270 hours Nanodegree is becoming one of the reputed credentials. Udacity courses are generally more job-oriented than courses from Universities. Nanodegree Plus offers a job guarantee but is restricted to US only. 7-day free trial; 200 USD per month Yes Objective-C for Swift developers Intermediate Udacity Lyft 5 weeks Intermediate level course that teaches Objective C for Swift Free to learn No Intro to iOS App Development with Swift Intermediate Udacity Udacity 3 months By the end of the course, your will add your current location to a map of locations for other Nanodegree students. Free to learn No Learn Swift Programming Syntax Intermediate Udacity Udacity 3 weeks A relatively new course to help you understand the syntax used in Swift Free to learn No iOS Networking with Swift Advanced Udacity Udacity 2 months As a final project, you will create an app that allows you to drop pins on a map and pull up Flickr images associated with that location. You will store the locations and images using Core Data. Free to learn No iOS Persistence and Core Data Advanced Udacity Udacity 1 month By the end of the course, you will build an app that records a message and plays the audio back through selected micro filters Free to learn No Xcode Debugging Advanced Udacity Udacity 3 weeks An advanced level course that helps your master debugging in Xcode Free to learn No

Screenshot by Donna Tam/CNET Two labs are offering ways to check if your system is infected by Gauss, the new malware software from the Middle East. Kaspersky Lab -- which recently released information identifying Gauss -- posted the tools today after receiving inquiries about detecting the new malware. Gauss has been dubbed a "cyberespionage toolkit" that can steal sensitive data, including browser passwords, online banking accounts, cookies, and system configurations. Folks can download the Kaspersky virus removal tool, or use a Web page provided by Hungarian research lab CrySyS to scan for the virus. The CrySyS page will check your system for Palida Narrow, a font associated with Gauss. "This font was used during the Gauss cyberattack," the Kaspersky post reads. "Although we don't currently understand exactly why the attackers have installed this font, it could serve as an indicator of Gauss activity on your system." Kaspersky adapted the CrySyS page and created a similar tool with an improved detection method, according to the post.

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