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It’s a battle of lists, and of travel agents versus the Internet. After Woman’s Day magazine published an article on “9 Things Travel Agents Won’t Tell You,” the travel agency association ASTA has answered back and published its own, competing list, detailing 8 Reasons Why Booking With a Travel Professional Creates Value. The fact that a battle over the merits and demerits of using travel agents to plan vacations versus doing it on your own through the Web and mobile is being waged through the lists format gives the debate a modern feel, but otherwise the whole brouhaha feels like a pre-Web 2.0 time warp. Let’s recap. A petition on Change.org, with 1,660 supporters at last count, demands that Woman’s Day magazine “retract a damaging article about the business practices of travel agents.” The online version of the article at issue, 9 Things Travel Agents Won’t Tell You, by Anne Roderique-Jones, has attracted 1,344 comments, mostly negative, with travel agents taking umbrage at the tone and substance of the piece. Typical were comments like these: The original Women’s Day article actually contained 10 things travel agents won’t tell you, but the publication withdrew an inaccurate item about most travel agents collecting airline commissions, which went by the wayside more than a decade ago. Women’s Day is also making nice to all of the “hard-working travel agents” (the phrase seems to be a battle cry in the dispute) out there, and will be issuing mea culpa articles on the value of travel agents in October and December in print and online, respectively. The list/article that drew travel agents’ ire basically argued correctly that some travel agents won’t necessarily disclose to the customer that they are earning commissions and fees, or that they don’t have access to all airlines; that they have preferred relationships with certain cruise lines, hotels, and travel insurance companies that might influence their recommendations; and that they may not find you the best price for the trip. Other planks of the Women’s Day cautionary list, such as “They may be not have been to the hotel or on the cruise ship they’re recommending,” were wacky. Given the number hotels and cruise ships in the world, as one travel agent commented that agents had better get busy traveling to make up for the fact that they haven’t been everywhere. The bottom line is this: There are some great travel agents, and lousy ones out there. Indeed there are some “hard-working” travel agents, and some slouches, but the fact remains that you can plan and book most of your travel these days without using a travel agent. It is not even debatable. Helloooo: This is 2013. If you want to get the best rates without incurring service fees, don’t think of using travel agents; some are very good about disclosing their fees, and others aren’t. Still, if you don’t mind paying extra, and don’t want to spend hours asking friends, families and colleagues in person or through social media (enter Facebook, TripAdvisor and Gogobot) for advice so you can plan a trip, then travel agents are an alternative. And, they can often get your upgrades or special perks that you can’t find online. But, for the vast majority of trips and leisure travelers, why bother. (That being said, I recently emailed a travel agent asking which train goes directly from Brussels to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport because it wasn’t readily apparent online.) But, travel agents who signed the petition asking Woman’s Day to retract the article should be ashamed of themselves. The vast majority of travelers in all likelihood would agree with the article’s basic point: The Internet has empowered the consumer/traveler, who doesn’t need travel agents to plan the majority of their trips. And, there are plenty of things about how travel agencies actually work that your average travel agent doesn’t tell you when you walk through the door. Travelers, of course, have voted with their fingers: They are planning and booking travel through travel websites and mobile apps while the number of travel agency locations has plummeted over the last decade. ASTA predictably has reacted reflexively in defense of beleaguered travel agents who feel Woman’s Day has besmirched their fragile reputations. To ASTA, travel agents provide “personalized service” and “customer advocacy” while online travel amounts to “a long list of travel Web pages,” “instructions on a Web page,” and “an impersonal voice thousands of miles away.” The fact that many online travel sites have phone and chat support doesn’t get mentioned. What ASTA and some travel-agent throwbacks don’t consider is that while traditional travel agents may always have a role for a diminishing number of customers, ASTA-member Expedia, HotelTonight, and Airbnb are the current sort of travel agents that millions of consumers prefer, and they are the portals to the future. |
As the world continues to sift through American subprime rubble, several additional shoes are ready to drop: Alt-A mortgages, Prime mortgages, land and construction loans, and...commercial real estate loans. Thus far, commercial real estate loans have been (relatively speaking) safe. That happy era may be coming to an end. Today's NYT describes a large apartment complex in New York that is about to default on a $225 million mortgage payment. This would be New York's largest default so far, and as consumer balance sheets continue to deteriorate, there will likely be more to come. How much of this commercial property loan exposure is out there? The NYT estimates more than $100 billion, which would be a tiny slice of the $500 billion Alt-A and $1 trillion subprime markets. But whatever the exact size, it's still real money, and the big Wall Street banks are carrying around a boatload of it: Lehman Brothers: $40 billion Deutsche Bank: $25.1 billion Morgan Stanley: $22.1 billion Citigroup: $19.1 billion Writedowns have trickled in from banks such as Morgan Stanley and Wachovia. But the collapse in value of this particular asset class has likely only just begun. See Also: That Awesome Warren Buffett CNBC Interview NAR Spinsters: Housing Still A Mess, But "Buyers Are Responding" Citi Buys Bob Toll's "Pent-Up Demand For Housing" Story (TOL) (TOL) |
An Electric Batpod Equipped With Flamethrowers And Shotguns October 16th, 2013 by Important Media Cross-Post Originally published on Gas2. By Christopher DeMorro. Comic books have always inspired creativity in young and eager minds, though these days kids are more likely to flock to movie theaters than comic shops to catch the latest adventures of their preferred superhero. Batman has been an especially popular character the past two decades, inspiring plenty of unique projects, like this Harley V-Rod converted into an all-electric Batpod equipped with shotguns and flamethrowers. Up on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $27,500, this unique electric motorcycle started out as a 2002 Harley-Davidson V-Rod. Gone is the V-twin combustion engine though, and in its place is a HPEVS electric motor and a Curtis controller that puts out 65 horsepower and 82 ft-lbs of torque. While the original V-twin motor made around 115 horsepower, it also only made about 65 ft-lbs of torque, and I always prefer the pull of torque to raw horsepower. Sporting enough Optima Bluetop batteries for 40 miles of driving range, this electric Batpod won’t be able to give chase to the Joker for very long. But with optional flamethrowers and shotguns mounted to this electric Batpod, Bats could do some serious damage once he closed the distance. Traffic would be a hell of a lot more fun with a flame-throwing, shotgun-blasting Batpod, that’s for sure. Source: eBay via Autoblog Green |
Runners in the "Mangyondae Prize International Marathon" start from Pyongyang's Kim Il-sung Stadium on Apr. 8, 2014. / Courtesy of Uri Tours By Woo Ji-won Pyongyang will launch a new annual international marathon in October, in addition to its existing April event, according to a travel agency specializing in trips to North Korea. Uri Tours said on its homepage Tuesday that the marathon will be held on October 22, "opening new doors for foreign runners." The site says the company is based in New York and Shanghai and has been organizing tours to North Korea for international travelers for over 15 years. It also said it is America's largest North Korean trips provider and the exclusive ticketing agent of Air Koryo, the North's airline. North Korea has been holding the "Mangyondae Prize International Marathon" since 1981 to mark state founder Kim Il-sung's birthday in April. From 2014, the Kim Jong-un regime started allowing foreigners to participate, largely to make foreign money through the competition. According to the agency, the October marathon will have more North Korean runners than in April. The Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry said that in the event on Apr. 9 more than 1,100 marathoners from 50 countries, including Germany, the United States and China, participated. The site said the October event will introduce a five-kilometer run, a return route starting from the Kim Il-sung Stadium in Pyongyang, and feature 10-kilometer, half and full courses. The October marathon is seen as a way to attract tourists and secure foreign exchange while the international community imposes sanctions on North Korea. |
ANALYSIS/OPINION: I asked a successful businessman the other day what he thought about Donald Trump. He turned his thumb down. Wow. Are you going to vote for Hillary? I asked with trepidation. “Of course not,” he replied almost insulted by the question. “I understand the concept of a binary decision.” I got a similar response when I asked oil magnate T. Boone Pickens whether he would vote for Mr. Trump. He looked at me with a quizzical look on his face and replied: “Well, who else is there to vote for?” Right. Who else is there? Yet amazingly a caucus of lifelong Republican politicos in Washington are announcing to the world with defiance and self-righteousness that they will vote for Hillary Clinton. They are mostly former Romney and Bush operatives. They lost and now they want people to believe that their anti-Trumpism is an act of heroism and principle. They ingratiate themselves to The New York Times, The Washington Post and Team Clinton — the sworn enemies of free markets and conservative values. Somehow this doesn’t offend their moral compass. I certainly don’t mean to disparage conservatives who say they won’t vote for Mr. Trump. One’s vote is a matter of personal conscience. But to actively support Hillary is to put the other team’s jersey on and then run a lap around the stadium. It’s worth examining the case of the Republicans for Hillary, because none of the arguments make much sense. First, many say that Trump can’t win — it’s hopeless. These are the same political geniuses who a year ago assured us that Mr. Trump could never win a primary (he won most of them), then that he couldn’t win 50 percent of the vote (he did), then that he couldn’t win 50 percent outside of New York (he did), then they said he couldn’t win a majority of the delegates (he did) … On every occasion the Trump haters were wrong. How about a little humility since they are batting 0.00. The “Trump can’t win” mantra isn’t just wrong, it’s subversive. Of course, he can win. He is running against Hillary Clinton for goodness sakes. So why do they say this? Because the never Trumpers want Trump to lose because he is to the political class (Republicans and Democrats) the disruptor that Uber is to taxicab drivers. Second is the complaint by some economists that Mr. Trump can’t be supported because he is not for free trade. Longtime Washington insider Vin Weber reportedly recently said: “The world economic order and the Republican Party” would be “all in shambles” if Mr. Trump wins. “I think markets would collapse.” Really? Hillary Clinton flip flops every day on free trade, so why is it that only Mr. Trump would cause a recession? He doesn’t get that the Trump movement is a revolt against the world order. Mr. Trump is calling for the biggest tax cut since Ronald Reagan. He is for regulatory relief and school choice. Mr. Trump wants to kill Obamacare. Mr. Trump wants a pro-America drilling policy on energy. Hillary wants to soak the rich, increase the debt, stop energy development, expand entitlements and double down on Obamacare. How is this a difficult choice for a free marketeer? Third, the Trump haters say we must throw Mr. Trump over the bus in order to save the Senate and House majorities. This is a foolhardy strategy because one can’t win without the other. As economist Donald Luskin puts it in his historical analysis of presidential races and Senate gains: “It is clear from history that the House and the Senate always move in the same party direction as the White House, and with the same magnitude. That means the presidential candidate is like a boat that congressional candidates are riding on. It’s really stupid to torpedo that boat. “ Finally, there is the view expressed by Bret Stephens, my former colleague at The Wall Street Journal, who wants to “make sure Trump is the biggest loser in presidential history” so that we can “rebuild the conservative movement.” Bret, if Obama/Hillary win a third straight presidential race, there won’t be a conservative movement left to rebuild. The Republicans will move to the left. Worse, for President Obama to win effectively a third term will be a voter validation of all of the destructive policies of the last eight years. Do the “never Trumpers” want to facilitate that? Do they want to hand the left its greatest victory for liberal governance of all time? If they do, they, not Trump, are the unforgivable betrayers of conservative principles. • Stephen Moore is an economic consultant with Freedom Works and a senior economic adviser to the Trump campaign. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. |
Insurance on the Blockchain ConsenSys Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 19, 2016 For months, I’ve been conjuring up radical visions of a brave new decentralized world with use cases from robotic ants that explore the walls of buildings to what I call “programmable land,” to hospitals that run themselves without administrators and people voting on their cell phones. I’ve tried to think of a way to radically reshape insurance. Aside from the standard disintermediation story, I’ve been drawing a blank for months. Until last week, when I hit upon an idea that may well change the nature of insurance within a decade. I explained it to some people in the insurance industry yesterday, and they took three pages of hand-written notes. I want to document it here so everyone can get the idea. Tokens, Tokens Everywhere I’m working on a project I call the Token Factory, which, although I’m considered a “friend of ConsenSys,” is not the same as ConsenSys’ version of the same name. ConsenSys’ project, which recently soft-launched along with MetaMask, the Ethereum browser add-on, is now available to help people make simple tokens. Mine is not yet online. The goal is to build a web site anyone can come to, specify a new token, and have a bunch of them in his/her wallet fairly quickly. A token is atransferable unit of value within a system. It is governed by a single person, organization, or consortium. A rail is a token that crosses system boundaries easily. A currency is a token that is accepted by a large number of systems. Today, we are building fairly simple tokens that represent things like tickets, local currencies, cars, baseball cards, cows, trees, the hours of a consultant’s time, etc. When you trade the token, the ownership (or use of) that thing transfers. Tomorrow, using Ethereum, we’ll build smart tokens that have all their business logic and regulation compliance built in. And that’s what gets me thinking about insurance. Insurance Balls Think of the market for insurance. At the 30,000-foot level, it’s millions and millions of contracts that specify how much a buyer pays in premiums and how much an insurance company pays under what circumstances. These contracts are often complex and sticky — they are custom-made for each customer and each situation. Try making a change to one of your insurance contracts! It can take about as much effort as getting a new one altogether. Now think of it differently. Think of the market for insurance products as broken into small modules, each of which fundamentally represents an investment. There’s an investor on one side; on the other side is a customer paying a premium, providing an income stream. And in the middle, there’s a specification of risk and payment under various circumstances. Think of these as balls of different colors, sizes, and types. In reality, there aren’t that many different kinds — a few dozen basic types should describe most situations. A policy, then, could be a particular combination of these balls to suit the requirements of a given customer at a given time — sort of like a customer putting the balls into a sack. We could replace our collections of contracts with virtual sacks of these balls. So here’s the idea: Create tokens that represent small units of insurance, and then let customers come along and put all the units they want into their “insurance wallet.” A smallest unit, for example, could have a $10 monthly premium and pay out as much as, say, $10,000 if conditions are met. Now put these tokens into a marketplace where all investors and consumers can see them. This creates a liquid market with low spreads and no middlemen. Of course, people wouldn’t choose these small units by hand — they would specify what coverage they want, and software can buy the tokens they need. The tokens trade at market price at all times, depending on various risk factors that can move prices up or down. Insure-Bits As a token gesture, I’m going to coin a new term: insure-bits. An insure-bit is a cryptographic token that represents an indivisible unit of insurance of some kind. Presumably, a consortium would taxonomize and standardize the formats for these tokens, so they can unambiguously represent legal contractual agreements. Taking a decentralizing step further, they would actually be legal contractual agreements. Customers and investors would aggregate insure-bits on a common exchange to build portfolios that suit them. Once we have an insure-bit infrastructure and ecosystem, we get real-time dynamic allocation. That’s right — you could automatically have the exact combination of insurance you need at each moment, and that mix of insure-bits can vary according to circumstances. Your insurance bot could increase your homeowner’s insurance as it learns about potential storms, or it could add to your travel insurance if it knows you’ve just rented a motorcycle. If the value of one of your assets goes up (as determined by an oracle — see below), that could trigger the purchase of some more insure-bits. Keep in mind that dynamic allocation also involves dynamic pricing — you’ll find that the insurance you want to buy in a hurry may be significantly more expensive than before, when you didn’t need it. The Google-ization of Insurance In essence, this is what Google did to advertising. While advertisers were buying big media campaigns that included banner ads as part of the mix, Google broke every single search word down into its own little market and sold the words at market price. This is the atomization of advertising — by breaking everything down into the smallest possible unit, it’s easy for buyers to purchase what they want when they want it, and they can specify in fairly sophisticated ways how much they are willing to pay for various words under various conditions. Whatever insure-bits you have in your portfolio at the exact time of the fire, or the car accident, or the cancellation of your flight determines your payoff. Similarly, the obligations these tiny tokens represent can be traded on the back end as well. They can be assembled, modeled, tested, collateralized, and securitized in real time to meet the needs of various investors. The fact that both investors and customers are constantly trading these things has no impact on the market, since a double-spend is impossible and we can determine exactly the conditions that trigger the payouts. Investors may have to put up large deposits to ensure payouts, or they can securitize their holdings with tokens that represent real assets. None of this is particularly different from the way things are done today, but insure-bits moves everything to a real-time basis, which will automate and improve the industry significantly. This could happen in many other industries. Stop making custom products. Just make a number of identical products, turn them into smart tokens with all their rules attached, add the regulatory code, and let the market buy and trade them at will (think: mortgages, tax liens, bonds, etc.). Anything that is currently traded in large lumps could be traded as groups of tokens that represent the smallest unit of value in the lump. This increase in granularityrequires less custom work, making markets more efficient. I haven’t spent much time on it, but I think this general concept eliminates the need for most reinsurance as well. There will always be one-off cases for special insurance, but in general most of the basic insurance and re-insurance use cases can be met with combinations of standard insure-bits. We’re Going to Need a Better Oracle Which brings me to the oracle problem. People in the insurance business know that there is still no clean, decisive definition of a car accident. If smart contracts are going to pay off when triggered by various events and conditions in the real world, we’ll need oracle services to put that information onto the blockchain. I won’t go into the details on oracles, because my friend Matt Liston has written a short piece on oracles that will get you started. Oracles will be hard to design, execute, and integrate with smart contracts, but they’ll be important. We’ll start with simple things and working toward more complex solutions. Insurance companies should be putting a lot of effort into oracle services — we’re going to need a lot of them, as each little atom of insurance will have its corresponding oracle to trigger payment unambiguously. We’ll probably also need a better definition of time. If my car is in an accident, my personal data locker could immediately try to buy more insurance, before the market is aware of the event. Cases like this will bring in a new, connected infrastructure that ties oracles, sensors, cameras, published information, witnesses, and the Internet of Things all together using a common timeline that helps determine what happens when. This is another set of challenges we’ll need to solve before the insure-bit ecosystem is fully functional. But it sure beats the ecosystem we have today. Summary Yes, there are a lot of moving parts to this approach, but it’s very doable. It’s probably 95 percent more efficient than today’s insurance market, and possibly several times better for everyone except the intermediaries. It applies to plenty of other industries as well. The concept of tiny insurance tokens explodes the industry, from monolithic paper contracts to agile smart contracts that are infinitely adjustable both to buyers and sellers. A crazy idea like this could upend the insurance sector sooner than the CEOs of many large insurance companies may think. David Siegel is a blockchain consultant, entrepreneur, lecturer, proprietor ofDecentralStation.com, and runs a blockchain bootcamp for organizations. You can learn more at www.kryptodesign.com and connect with him on LinkedIn. |
Story highlights The latest report comes from a government-formed panel of investigators It follows a scathing parliamentary report that described a "man-made disaster" The report Monday criticizes the plant operator's lack of preparedness Japan faces questions over the future of its nuclear power industry A Japanese government report Monday heaped fresh criticism on the operator of the nuclear power plant where a disastrous accident was set off last year by the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the country. The measures taken by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the plant operator, and the Japanese nuclear regulator to prepare for disasters were "insufficient," the report by a government-formed panel of investigators said, and the response to the crisis was "inadequate." The crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant spewed radiation and displaced tens of thousands of residents from the surrounding area in the worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. Even now, more than one year after the disaster began, TEPCO does not seem aggressive enough in examining the causes of the accident at the plant to prevent a recurrence, the 10-member panel, led by Tokyo University engineering professor Yotaro Hatamura, said in the report Monday. The report, the fourth and final one on the nuclear disaster, comes amid growing anti-nuclear protests in Japan . It said interference by the prime minister at the time, Naoto Kan, created confusion in the response to the crisis. It recommended that all nuclear operators in the country conduct a comprehensive risk analysis of their facilities. The results of the investigation Monday follow a damning parliamentary report earlier this month that said the crisis was a "man-made disaster" resulting from collusion between TEPCO, regulators and the government. That report said the disaster should have been predicted and prepared for. JUST WATCHED The fight for nuclear energy in Japan Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH The fight for nuclear energy in Japan 02:30 A February report by independent scholars and journalists also concluded the plant operator could and should have done more. JUST WATCHED How to prevent another Fukushima disaster Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH How to prevent another Fukushima disaster 02:20 JUST WATCHED New Japan phone has radiation detector Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH New Japan phone has radiation detector 01:52 Only TEPCO's own internal report in May said no one could have predicted the scale of the earthquake or the devastating tsunami that followed. However, it did admit it was not fully prepared and acknowledged criticism it took too long to disclose information. TEPCO also found itself under further scrutiny over the weekend when the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said it was investigating a report that subcontracted workers at the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant were told to use lead covers in order to hide unsafe radiation levels. As the official investigations into the causes of the disaster at the power plant conclude, attention is shifting to what comes next for the nuclear power industry in Japan. The government has been holding public hearings around the country to try to gauge public opinion regarding three options it has put forward for a medium-term energy plan. It is expected to decide next month whether to reduce the country's nuclear power to zero as soon as possible, aim for a 15% nuclear role by 2030 or a 20-25% share by the same date. Whichever is chosen, it will be a far cry from the energy policy in 2010, which aimed to raise nuclear power's role to account for more than half of electricity needs by 2030. The anti-nuclear movement is very clear about which option it wants: the grassroots opposition says Japan must become nuclear-free and the number of people making this call is growing. Tens of thousands are gathering outside the prime minister's residence every Friday. Last Friday was the seventh protest that Nagisa Saito has attended. "What impresses me most is... people never gave up and the crowd is getting bigger and bigger," she said. "Even on a bad rainy day like today, we see this many people gathered, it's amazing." Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda hears the voices, but so far he is not being swayed by them. He authorized the re-activation of two nuclear power plants earlier this month, claiming that without nuclear power, the country and the economy will suffer. "Japanese society will not be able to function if there is a decision to permanently halt nuclear power generation," Noda said last month But one anti-nuclear protester, who gave his name only as Ozaki, said it was not a simple choice between nuclear and blackouts. "If there is a power shortage, there are alternatives," he said. "What about coal-fired power stations, hydro-electric power stations, or we can just survive with what we have. We have to be patient, but even with blackouts, we can survive without nuclear power." |
The need to go green, be carbon neutral, and/or promote energy efficiency has been on the lips of virtually every company in America over the past nine months, but lip service and action are two very different things. New survey data suggests that corporate attitudes and implementation strategies are lagging significantly behind the barrage of eco-friendly press releases we've seen over the last year. CDW's ITMonitor surveyed IT decision makers over the last year and recently reported the results (PDF). While an overwhelming 80 percent majority of companies ranked Green IT as either "Very Important" or "Somewhat Important," the same group listed a number of factors and concerns that could slow the adoption of this technology. CDW VP Mark Gambill, however, sees this type of slow adoption curve as normal. "Even though IT decision makers clearly recognize the importance of Green IT solutions, such as virtualization and server consolidation, there are always going to be growing pains involved with making a significant change to an organization," said Gambill. "If going green means replacing servers that are already delivering reliable IT to an organization, then widespread adoption may take some time." At this point, Green IT concerns are being driven from the top of the business segment, rather than the bottom. 43 percent of small businesses (1-99 employees) have no plans to implement Green IT within the next two years, compared to 27 percent of mid-size businesses (100-999 employees), and just 11 percent of large businesses (1000+ employees). The same trend appears within government structures, though the gap is not as severe. 47 percent of local governments have no plan to adopt green technology within the next two years, compared to 34 percent of state governments and 31 percent of the offices in the federal government. The good news here is that a majority of all the organizations polled are moving in more eco-friendly directions, but a significant number of businesses and government agencies of all sizes have yet to shift on the topic. IT decision makers listed a number of significant concerns when asked to consider the difficulty of moving to energy-efficient systems. Cost was the chief concern at all corporation and government levels and was cited by 47-63 percent of the IT workers polled. Disruption to current IT systems, maintenance complexity, perceived maintenance difficulties, and a lack of expertise were all cited as significant barriers by both business and government staff. A lack of IT initiatives that truly have a positive impact on the environment was also cited. Asked to name the benefits of Green IT, the majority of business (61 percent) and government (67 percent) workers listed a positive impact on the environment as the largest potential gain, followed by a positive reputation for the company, cost savings, greater operational efficiency, and easier maintenance. Only 13 percent of companies and 7 percent of government structures responded that there was no benefit whatsoever in adopting eco-friendly IT policies, although there was one significant corporate outlier. A whopping 30 percent of small businesses stated their belief that there was no benefit to increased energy efficiency, compared to just seven percent of medium and five percent of large companies. Armed with these results, I trotted over to Dell and HP to see what emphasis these two players put on power efficiency. Dell : Dell is going after the green market fairly aggressively. Dell.com has direct links to stories on the company's eco-initiatives, and the company's new Studio Hybrid is directly marketed as a green PC. Virtually all of the company's "green" efforts appear to be focused on either the consumer or the enterprise/large business market. The default page for the "Large Business" segment mentions Dell's PowerEdge Energy Smart servers in one thumbnail ad, advertises the PowerEdge M 1000E as a more energy efficient solution than comparable products from HP, and lists an entire set of products under the "Energy Optimized" heading on the left-hand side of the page. The "Small/Medium Business" server page, however, lists none of these by default. : Dell is going after the green market fairly aggressively. Dell.com has direct links to stories on the company's eco-initiatives, and the company's new Studio Hybrid is directly marketed as a green PC. Virtually all of the company's "green" efforts appear to be focused on either the consumer or the enterprise/large business market. The default page for the "Large Business" segment mentions Dell's PowerEdge Energy Smart servers in one thumbnail ad, advertises the PowerEdge M 1000E as a more energy efficient solution than comparable products from HP, and lists an entire set of products under the "Energy Optimized" heading on the left-hand side of the page. The "Small/Medium Business" server page, however, lists none of these by default. HP: HP does talk power efficiency, but not half so aggressively as its principle rival. Click on "Large Enterprise Business," and the subsequent page rotates a large banner ad, one segment of which invites you to peruse the five ways "management tools root out inefficiencies." #1 on that list is "Curb Power Use," but at this point we're two clicks into HP's site and you've clicked on a banner ad. This isn't what I'd call prominent advertising, but it describes HP's strategy in a nutshell. Yes, power efficiency information and power-efficient systems are available, but the concept of Green IT gets no special mention here. Dell seems to have its finger a bit more firmly on the button when it comes to energy efficiency and how much emphasis companies are currently willing to place on it. There's a broad understanding that Green IT is a Very Good Thing, but the challenges that IT administrators list are very real concerns. On the other hand, it's fair, I think, to note that any overhaul of IT infrastructure risks disruption, unseen costs, negative impact on productivity, and may require additional expertise that's not immediately available. The best way to promote the use of energy efficient products in both the datacenter and on the floor is to make these practices both transparent and seamless. I discussed the difficulty of adopting energy efficiency at the desktop level last week, but many of the concerns apply equally to corporate computers. Learning to identify, manage, and maximize corporate energy efficiency without disrupting worker productivity is a profound challenge, but it's the only way to convince companies with an eye on the bottom line that going green makes good business sense. |
NEW DELHI: Amid its modernization drive, the defence ministry was on Monday allocated Rs 2,24,000 crore in the interim budget, marking a 10 per cent increase over the last budget.The allocation for the ministry in the last financial year (2013-14) was Rs 2,03,672 crore, of which around Rs 80,000 crore was to be spent on modernization.The allocation was announced in the vote-on-account presented by finance minister P Chidambaram.Last time, the hike in allocation was 14% compared to the previous year.The ministry had spent 82% of that amount till the start of this month.The hike in allocation comes at a time when the ministry has a number of procurements in the pipeline while some are in their final stages and expected to materialize in the coming months.These include the deal for 126 multi-role combat aircraft which is expected to cost thousands of crores of rupees.Other acquisitions in the pipeline include deals for 22 Apache combat choppers, 15 Chinook heavylift helicopters and the 126 Rafale combat aircraft.Defence ministry is also in advance stage of negotiations for a Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) programme with Russia, on which it is expected to spend around Rs 1.5 lakh crore in the next 10-15 years.It is also in the process of issuing the tender for the approximately Rs 60,000 crore deal for procuring six large conventional diesel electric submarines for the Navy.The ministry has been seeking additional funds of Rs 40,000 crore since last year, but that request has been turned down in view of the slowdown.In view of certain defence scams in which foreign firms were involved, the ministry has also worked towards promoting indigenization in the defence sector for which it made a major procurement policy change to make the importing of weapons systems the last option for the three services. |
Narendra Modi on Big Fight Duration: 00:27:32; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 208.366; Saturation: 0.288; Lightness: 0.152; Volume: 0.346; Cuts per Minute: 10.531; Words per Minute: 153.348 Summary: Narendra Modi, the current chief minister of Gujarat, the late Dr Rafiq Zakaria, an Indian politician and Islamic scholar, and Mr G. Parthasarthy, the former High Commissioner to Pakistan, debate on NDTV's "Big Fight," hosted by Rajdeep Sardesai, on whether Islam is the new driving force of global terrorism today. John Elliot, Special Correspondent, Forbes, and Siddharth Vardharajan, Strategic Affairs Editor, The Hindu, are co-hosts. The debate took place shortly after the September 11 attacks. it finds its way as archival video into youtube 12 years later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fas-jaaZWWM Thank god we remain an archive, an Narendra Modi, the current chief minister of Gujarat, the late Dr Rafiq Zakaria, an Indian politician and Islamic scholar, and Mr G. Parthasarthy, the former High Commissioner to Pakistan, debate on NDTV's "Big Fight," hosted by Rajdeep Sardesai, on whether Islam is the new driving force of global terrorism today.John Elliot, Special Correspondent, Forbes, and Siddharth Vardharajan, Strategic Affairs Editor, The Hindu, are co-hosts.The debate took place shortly after the September 11 attacks.it finds its way as archival video into youtube 12 years later.Thank god we remain an archive, an Mr Bharatiya Janata Party) starts of the debate with his reasons for the September 11 attacks. He suggests that the attacks are "Islamic Terrorism," as he believes that the religion is being manipulated to suit the purposes of the attackers. He supposedly cites the need to consider all religions as singular in order to avoid these religious conflicts. Dr Zakaria responds to the points made by Mr Modi. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharatiya_Janata_Party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_attacks NM: I would like to congratulate the organisers of 'Big Fight,' because till last Monday, the Indian media, even after many reasons, did not have the courage to use the term "Islamic terrorism," because they were so influenced by their pseudo-secularism that they did not have the courage to tell the truth. Last Tuesday, the media of the world started writing about this after the American incident for the 1st time, and I congratulate this initiative taken by Rajdeep, that they have had the courage to depict the truth in its original form. As far as Islam goes, it has many good aspects in it.Today how people are using Islam, that is the real question. When a religion says that "my religion is different that yours, better that yours, and till the time you don't take refuge under me you will not attain moksha (freedom from reincarnation/ the cycle of life) or go to Allah or Jesus," it then starts a conflict. And in my opinion, India has given the world the ideology of truth is one, but it is called in different ways. If there is a general acceptance that every religion is the same, then there is no conflict. But when I say that your religion is (nikamma) and that mine is right, it leads to conflict and creates hatred and that hatred goes on to join politics than terrorism spreads. Since the 14th Century, the quest to rule the world has resulted it the current situation. RS: Mr Modi, your time is up. NM: Instead of cursing the ideology of Islam, we must focus on the elements that are misusing it. RS: Mr Modi, your time is up. We haven't used the word "Islamic terrorism," we have only raised the question. So we don't need the compliments from you at the moment. But Dr Zakaria, respond to Mr Modi. Z: Should I respond in Hindi or in English? RS: English, please. Z: Well, I would have liked to have replied in Hindi. But you know this is the outcome of the Muslim phobia which unfortunately hasn't left people like Mr Modi - I am very sorry to say that - simply because some media in the United States called what happened last Tuesday ("Islamic Terrorism"), as far as the bombing of the New York buildings and the Pentagon that for the first time, the Indian media has realised that it is "Islamic Terrorism." Now, what has Islam to do with whoever is responsible? As far as... Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy. Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks Mr Narendra Modi (the then the General Secretary of the) starts of the debate with his reasons for the September 11 attacks. He suggests that the attacks are "Islamic Terrorism," as he believes that the religion is being manipulated to suit the purposes of the attackers. He supposedly cites the need to consider all religions as singular in order to avoid these religious conflicts.Dr Zakaria responds to the points made by Mr Modi.see also:: I would like to congratulate the organisers of 'Big Fight,' because till last Monday, the Indian media, even after many reasons, did not have the courage to use the term "Islamic terrorism," because they were so influenced by their pseudo-secularism that they did not have the courage to tell the truth. Last Tuesday, the media of the world started writing about this after the American incident for the 1st time, and I congratulate this initiative taken by Rajdeep, that they have had the courage to depict the truth in its original form.As far as Islam goes, it has many good aspects in it.Today how people are using Islam, that is the real question. When a religion says that "my religion is different that yours, better that yours, and till the time you don't take refuge under me you will not attain(freedom from reincarnation/ the cycle of life) or go to Allah or Jesus," it then starts a conflict. And in my opinion, India has given the world the ideology of truth is one, but it is called in different ways. If there is a general acceptance that every religion is the same, then there is no conflict. But when I say that your religion isand that mine is right, it leads to conflict and creates hatred and that hatred goes on to join politics than terrorism spreads. Since the 14th Century, the quest to rule the world has resulted it the current situation.: Mr Modi, your time is up.: Instead of cursing the ideology of Islam, we must focus on the elements that are misusing it.: Mr Modi, your time is up. We haven't used the word "Islamic terrorism," we have only raised the question. So we don't need the compliments from you at the moment. But Dr Zakaria, respond to Mr Modi.: Should I respond in Hindi or in English?: English, please.: Well, I would have liked to have replied in Hindi. But you know this is the outcome of the Muslim phobia which unfortunately hasn't left people like Mr Modi - I am very sorry to say that - simply because some media in the United States called what happened last Tuesday ("Islamic Terrorism"), as far as the bombing of the New York buildings and the Pentagon that for the first time, the Indian media has realised that it is "Islamic Terrorism." Now, what has Islam to do with whoever is responsible? As far as...Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G Parthasarthy.Narendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks Mr Modi tries to continue his previous line of argument that Islamic Terrorism and Islam have nothing in common, not realising that by using the "Islamic" prefix, he is automatically linking it to Islam. Furthermore, Mr Modi, while supposedly preaching against differentiating between religions and religious beliefs, constantly seems to imply a firm divide between the Hindus, and specifically the BJP, and Muslims. The floor was given to Mr Parthasarthy, who also stressed on the importance of not combining religion and terrorism, asking Mr Modi also not to do the same. Siddharth Vardharajan comments on Mr Modi's point of view. John Elliot questions Mr Modi on the implications that the growth of Islamic terrorism will have on communal relations within the country. Mr Modi claims that he and his party have never linked religion and terrorism much to the exasperation of the mediators. When asked for an assurance for the same by Rajdeep Sardesai, Mr Modi suddenly shifts tracks and never gives a direct answer. NM: I don't know what phobia he is having. I do not understand what phobia Dr Zakaria is having. I, myself, say it has nothing to do with Islam. Those who are using religion for this bad interest... (?) RS: Just a minute, Mr Modi. You used the word "Islamic Terrorism," you were actually praising us in this program and suddenly... NM: Yes, because in India, the pseudo-secular people are not ready to raise this type of question before. But only because the western media started, you have adopted it. RS: So you mean suddenly, we are no longer pseudo-secular? Z: So what he's trying to (say) is, that he happy that now whomsoever he calls pseudo-secular, that they have also now realised that really it is "Islamic Terrorism." That shows what really disturbs him. RS: Right. Mr Parthasarathy just pointed out what Dr Zakaria just said. (?) P: I think I'll come to what is really happening, and what is called "Islamic Terrorism" on hand to make my presentation. My query to Mr Modi is that there are certain noble tenets to Islam, as you have yourself remarked, Islam says you will not harm civilians. Islam, for example, says that even if you hurt one innocent human being, that it is a crime against humanity. Mr Modi, don't you think it is right now incumbent, firstly on our entire political leadership and I particularly call on the leadership also of the Muslim community of India, to draw a distinction between the misuse of Islamic tenets by zealots in our neighbourhood on the one hand, by Pakistan in particular, on the one hand and being very careful not label an entire religion or an entire religious order in those terms? NM: I 100% agree with Mr Parthasarthy because you cannot blame a religion, and one should not. And we are not against any religion, and any Hindu can never be. This is the basic thinking of the Indian philosophy and that's why... RS: And yet you say that from 14 century Islam has used religion for militancy... NM: The problem is the misuse of the emotional feeling, and whether it comes from religion or something else; that is the danger to the society. RS: Okay. Siddharth, question? SV: I'll make two quick points or questions. You said no Hindu can be opposed to religion.You, yourself, a few moments ago started by separating "Islamic Terrorism" from Islam, and then you made a judgement on Islam as being a religion which so called downgrades other people, religions, etc. So, in other words, you are commenting negatively on the religion itself. Second question - you seem to be very enamoured by the western media's description of "Islamic Terrorism." Do you know what the western media refers to your party as; the BJP? They use the phrase "Hindu Fundamentalist." Do you accept that phrase? NM: We don't accept it. In democracy, they have every right to say. In democracy, why should I say that they cannot say? This is what the difference is between us and others; they say if you say this, the gun is there. I say "no, I'll accept it." SV: Is the western media being pseudo-secular when they refer to the BJP as "Hindu Fundamentalists"? NM: If you want to debate on pseudo-secularism, I am ready to debate on that. RS: Okay, that's another issue. NM: But your issue was different. Tell, Mr John, what is your question? JE: If the fear of Islamic terrorism builds up in this country, what would it do to the communal relations? NM: As far as relations with each and every community is concerned, India is bound to have good relation with each and every citizen of this country. If terror (?), we have to isolate this terrorist activity, we have to isolate terrorists, we have to curb their lifelines and then we will be able to handle them. RS: But how are you isolating terrorists, Mr Modi, when every time an incident like this occurs you raise the religious, you bring in the religious agenda? You are linking it at some stage - religion and terrorism. NM: We, as far as the BJP is concerned, we never do that. RS: Oh My God! NM: How are you going to blame me... RS: You just did it... NM (continuing):...When myself, I am saying (RS: Oh My God) that Islam has nothing to with these things, but those who are using Islam for this purpose are a danger to the society. And if even a Hindu is doing this type of activity with the help of religion, it is a danger. JE: It is a dangerous road. We have seen what happened to Sikhs in America over the last few days; because they wear turbans, that they assume they look like Osama Bin Laden. If you build this up too far, what are you going to do to the relations of your country. Isn't it dangerous? NM: It is a surprise for the world that even they don't have this much general knowledge, as American citizens; that because only they have a turban, they think they are the Taliban people. I am very sorry to say... (?) RS: Okay. Why don't you give one assurance that during... There will be an election campaign, for example, in Uttar Pradesh, you will not use the incidents of Tuesday to stir a communal divide, to label every Muslim in this country somewhere down the line as an Islamic terrorist. Are you willing to give that assurance? NM: It's a tragic condition in my Indian media that such a challenge to the humanity, and you are talking about the footpath politics! What are we doing? When the people are talking about the challenge to the humanity, and we talking about Uttar Pradesh, and this (?), and that (?). What more(?) of footpath politics are we going to do? This is the challenge against the humanity... RS: Are you going to give it? NM (continuing): ... And we will have to face this challenge and talk about the humanity. RS: Okay, you are unwilling to answer the direct question. After the break, we'll get Dr Rafiq Zakaria to give us a perspective from an Islamic scholar. Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy. Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks Mr Modi tries to continue his previous line of argument that Islamic Terrorism and Islam have nothing in common, not realising that by using the "Islamic" prefix, he is automatically linking it to Islam. Furthermore, Mr Modi, while supposedly preaching against differentiating between religions and religious beliefs, constantly seems to imply a firm divide between the Hindus, and specifically the BJP, and Muslims.The floor was given to Mr Parthasarthy, who also stressed on the importance of not combining religion and terrorism, asking Mr Modi also not to do the same.Siddharth Vardharajan comments on Mr Modi's point of view.John Elliot questions Mr Modi on the implications that the growth of Islamic terrorism will have on communal relations within the country.Mr Modi claims that he and his party have never linked religion and terrorism much to the exasperation of the mediators. When asked for an assurance for the same by Rajdeep Sardesai, Mr Modi suddenly shifts tracks and never gives a direct answer.: I don't know what phobia he is having. I do not understand what phobia Dr Zakaria is having. I, myself, say it has nothing to do with Islam. Those who are using religion for this bad interest... (?): Just a minute, Mr Modi. You used the word "Islamic Terrorism," you were actually praising us in this program and suddenly...: Yes, because in India, the pseudo-secular people are not ready to raise this type of question before. But only because the western media started, you have adopted it.: So you mean suddenly, we are no longer pseudo-secular?: So what he's trying to (say) is, that he happy that now whomsoever he calls pseudo-secular, that they have also now realised that really it is "Islamic Terrorism." That shows what really disturbs him.: Right. Mr Parthasarathy just pointed out what Dr Zakaria just said. (?): I think I'll come to what is really happening, and what is called "Islamic Terrorism" on hand to make my presentation. My query to Mr Modi is that there are certain noble tenets to Islam, as you have yourself remarked, Islam says you will not harm civilians. Islam, for example, says that even if you hurt one innocent human being, that it is a crime against humanity. Mr Modi, don't you think it is right now incumbent, firstly on our entire political leadership and I particularly call on the leadership also of the Muslim community of India, to draw a distinction between the misuse of Islamic tenets by zealots in our neighbourhood on the one hand, by Pakistan in particular, on the one hand and being very careful not label an entire religion or an entire religious order in those terms?: I 100% agree with Mr Parthasarthy because you cannot blame a religion, and one should not. And we are not against any religion, and any Hindu can never be. This is the basic thinking of the Indian philosophy and that's why...: And yet you say that from 14 century Islam has used religion for militancy...: The problem is the misuse of the emotional feeling, and whether it comes from religion or something else; that is the danger to the society.: Okay. Siddharth, question?: I'll make two quick points or questions. You said no Hindu can be opposed to religion.You, yourself, a few moments ago started by separating "Islamic Terrorism" from Islam, and then you made a judgement on Islam as being a religion which so called downgrades other people, religions, etc. So, in other words, you are commenting negatively on the religion itself.Second question - you seem to be very enamoured by the western media's description of "Islamic Terrorism." Do you know what the western media refers to your party as; the BJP? They use the phrase "Hindu Fundamentalist." Do you accept that phrase?: We don't accept it. In democracy, they have every right to say. In democracy, why should I say that they cannot say? This is what the difference is between us and others; they say if you say this, the gun is there. I say "no, I'll accept it.": Is the western media being pseudo-secular when they refer to the BJP as "Hindu Fundamentalists"?: If you want to debate on pseudo-secularism, I am ready to debate on that.: Okay, that's another issue.: But your issue was different. Tell, Mr John, what is your question?: If the fear of Islamic terrorism builds up in this country, what would it do to the communal relations?: As far as relations with each and every community is concerned, India is bound to have good relation with each and every citizen of this country. If terror (?), we have to isolate this terrorist activity, we have to isolate terrorists, we have to curb their lifelines and then we will be able to handle them.: But how are you isolating terrorists, Mr Modi, when every time an incident like this occurs you raise the religious, you bring in the religious agenda? You are linking it at some stage - religion and terrorism.: We, as far as the BJP is concerned, we never do that.: Oh My God!: How are you going to blame me...: You just did it...(continuing):...When myself, I am saying (RS: Oh My God) that Islam has nothing to with these things, but those who are using Islam for this purpose are a danger to the society. And if even a Hindu is doing this type of activity with the help of religion, it is a danger.: It is a dangerous road. We have seen what happened to Sikhs in America over the last few days; because they wear turbans, that they assume they look like Osama Bin Laden. If you build this up too far, what are you going to do to the relations of your country. Isn't it dangerous?: It is a surprise for the world that even they don't have this much general knowledge, as American citizens; that because only they have a turban, they think they are the Taliban people. I am very sorry to say... (?): Okay. Why don't you give one assurance that during... There will be an election campaign, for example, in Uttar Pradesh, you will not use the incidents of Tuesday to stir a communal divide, to label every Muslim in this country somewhere down the line as an Islamic terrorist. Are you willing to give that assurance?: It's a tragic condition in my Indian media that such a challenge to the humanity, and you are talking about the footpath politics! What are we doing? When the people are talking about the challenge to the humanity, and we talking about Uttar Pradesh, and this (?), and that (?). What more(?) of footpath politics are we going to do? This is the challenge against the humanity...: Are you going to give it?(continuing): ... And we will have to face this challenge and talk about the humanity.: Okay, you are unwilling to answer the direct question. After the break, we'll get Dr Rafiq Zakaria to give us a perspective from an Islamic scholar.Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G Parthasarthy.Narendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaia explains why Islam and terrorism cannot be summarily linked. Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy. Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks Z: There has been a bit of confusion in the discussion that we had, and therefore I hope I will get your indulgence right at the outset to explain as to what is the relationship between Islam and terrorism. Now, whether you call Islam a driving force towards terrorism, or "Islamic Terrorism," I mean, nothing is further than truth. Islam is the antithesis of terrorism, and let me tell you that the very word "Islam" means "Peace." The Qur'an describes the Prophet as the mercy to all living creatures. Big FightDr Rafiq Zakaia explains why Islam and terrorism cannot be summarily linked.Dr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G Parthasarthy.Narendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks: There has been a bit of confusion in the discussion that we had, and therefore I hope I will get your indulgence right at the outset to explain as to what is the relationship between Islam and terrorism. Now, whether you call Islam a driving force towards terrorism, or "Islamic Terrorism," I mean, nothing is further than truth. Islam is the antithesis of terrorism, and let me tell you that the very word "Islam" means "Peace." The Qur'an describes the Prophet as the mercy to all living creatures. NM: It is said that not only the well-being of a certain nation or society, but the well-being of all mankind has been thought for on this planet. RS: Answer his first question about Kafirs(?) Z: It is relevant, but let me tell him I wish he would read my book - The issue Big Fight Discovery of God Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy. Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks : It is said that not only the well-being of a certain nation or society, but the well-being of all mankind has been thought for on this planet.: Answer his first question about(?): It is relevant, but let me tell him I wish he would read my book - Discovery of God The issue Kafirs is raised by the panel.Big FightDiscovery of GodDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G Parthasarthy.Narendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks Dr Zakaria attributes the oft believed Islamic belief on Kaffirs to the Muslim rulers of India, who, according to him, had nothing to do with Islam's tenets. Mr Vardharajan questions Dr Zakaria with regard to his opinion on the attacks being related to US policy in the Middle-East. Rajdeep Sardesai seeks an explanation from Dr Zakaria as to how Al Qaeda manages to use Islam quite so easily to woo supporters to its cause, given the nobility of the tenets of Islam. Dr Zakaria attempts to refute the veracity of this question by suggesting that the principles of a religion have been manipulated in a number of religions to propagate terrorist activity. Although his intention was to deflect the likelihood of religion being linked to terrorism, and specifically Islam, he actually provides a great deal of credence to Mr Sardesai's question. NM: They say those who are Kafirs, they have no right to live. Z: Why are you mixing the teaching of Islam with what some of the rulers in India did, who had nothing to do as far as practising the tenets of Islam? RS: Okay, let's look at what happened on Tuesday. Question Siddharth for Dr Zakaria. SV: Dr Zakaria, I was just wondering how much of what happened on Tuesday is the product of US policies in the Arab world, in your opinion. Z: Well, I mean, whether it was the reaction to what is happening in Palastine and in other countries, I do not know. But if it is bin Laden, then there is something more sinister in it, and I don't think you can mix it up also with it because there is a particular group which is determined to create disturbance. RS: How do you explain, very quickly Dr Zakaria, the fact is that the Al Qaeda group he has created has used religion all across the world, whether it's in Sudan, whether it's in Saudi Arabia; they are using it in Iraq, they want to use it in Libya, they have used it in Afghanistan. How do you explain that that religion can be so easily used if you say Islam tenets are so noble? Z: Do you know that who is the pioneer of modern terrorism, a terrorism which has almost disappeared? It is the Zionists, the Jews, the first terrorist attack in modern times took place on the RS: So, you are saying that terms like Jewish terrorism are never used, and we only use terrorism in the Islamic context? Z: Do you mean to say that terrorism has not been used by the erstwhile Christians in Yugoslavia? Do you mean to say that religion has not been used even by NM: In a way, the very idea (?) that they are using the religion. Now, my question, my another doubt is - why these people destroy the SV: Why did you destroy the NM: Please Mr Siddharth, wait. Why did they destroy this? And no one country in the world, Islamic country, has criticised it. Not only that Pakistan has... (?) RS: Do you accept that all religions have been used over the years by various groups - yes or no, Mr Modi? NM: I am telling you if you go to the history, only Hindu religion; as far concerned, Hindu is not religion it is a dharma, and there is not a history record they have done any activity against other religions. RS: Okay, we will come back to it. Z: What did you for thousands of years as far as the Dalits are concerned? What did you do as far as the Buddhists are concerned? Why are you not talking about that? NM: It is an internal problem of the society. It is a weakness of my society, and we are worried about it. RS: Mr Modi, you have had your say. JE: Dr Zakaria, given what you've just said, that every religion almost in the world has used terrorism at sometime or other, why do you find it so difficult - with respect to all you've just said - why do you find it so difficult not to agree with the tenet of this program, which is that Islam is the new driving force of international terrorism? I don't see why, logically, you can't say "yes, that too has been doing it, even though Islam stands for peace." Z: On the contrary, I have said that religion has been... Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy. Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks Dr Zakaria attributes the oft believed Islamic belief onto the Muslim rulers of India, who, according to him, had nothing to do with Islam's tenets.Mr Vardharajan questions Dr Zakaria with regard to his opinion on the attacks being related to US policy in the Middle-East.Rajdeep Sardesai seeks an explanation from Dr Zakaria as to how Al Qaeda manages to use Islam quite so easily to woo supporters to its cause, given the nobility of the tenets of Islam.Dr Zakaria attempts to refute the veracity of this question by suggesting that the principles of a religion have been manipulated in a number of religions to propagate terrorist activity. Although his intention was to deflect the likelihood of religion being linked to terrorism, and specifically Islam, he actually provides a great deal of credence to Mr Sardesai's question.: They say those who are, they have no right to live.: Why are you mixing the teaching of Islam with what some of the rulers in India did, who had nothing to do as far as practising the tenets of Islam?: Okay, let's look at what happened on Tuesday. Question Siddharth for Dr Zakaria.: Dr Zakaria, I was just wondering how much of what happened on Tuesday is the product of US policies in the Arab world, in your opinion.: Well, I mean, whether it was the reaction to what is happening in Palastine and in other countries, I do not know. But if it is bin Laden, then there is something more sinister in it, and I don't think you can mix it up also with it because there is a particular group which is determined to create disturbance.: How do you explain, very quickly Dr Zakaria, the fact is that the Al Qaeda group he has created has used religion all across the world, whether it's in Sudan, whether it's in Saudi Arabia; they are using it in Iraq, they want to use it in Libya, they have used it in Afghanistan. How do you explain that that religion can be so easily used if you say Islam tenets are so noble?: Do you know that who is the pioneer of modern terrorism, a terrorism which has almost disappeared? It is the Zionists, the Jews, the first terrorist attack in modern times took place on the David Hotel in Cairo.: So, you are saying that terms like Jewish terrorism are never used, and we only use terrorism in the Islamic context?: Do you mean to say that terrorism has not been used by the erstwhile Christians in Yugoslavia? Do you mean to say that religion has not been used even by Prabhakaran in Sri Lanka? Religion is an easy weapon for those who want to exploit it.: In a way, the very idea (?) that they are using the religion. Now, my question, my another doubt is - why these people destroy the Bamyan Buddha in Pratimas?: Why did you destroy the Babri Masjid : Please Mr Siddharth, wait. Why did they destroy this? And no one country in the world, Islamic country, has criticised it. Not only that Pakistan has... (?): Do you accept that all religions have been used over the years by various groups - yes or no, Mr Modi?: I am telling you if you go to the history, only Hindu religion; as far concerned, Hindu is not religion it is a, and there is not a history record they have done any activity against other religions.: Okay, we will come back to it.: What did you for thousands of years as far as the Dalits are concerned? What did you do as far as the Buddhists are concerned? Why are you not talking about that?: It is an internal problem of the society. It is a weakness of my society, and we are worried about it.: Mr Modi, you have had your say.: Dr Zakaria, given what you've just said, that every religion almost in the world has used terrorism at sometime or other, why do you find it so difficult - with respect to all you've just said - why do you find it so difficult not to agree with the tenet of this program, which is that Islam is the new driving force of international terrorism? I don't see why, logically, you can't say "yes, that too has been doing it, even though Islam stands for peace.": On the contrary, I have said that religion has been...Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G Parthasarthy.Narendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks SV: Islam should be subjected to this kind of scrutiny and finger pointing. I want to shift the focus slightly, because it seems to me from what you have said and from what one understands of the situation, that terrorism is a essentially a political phenomenon. And I think this is true, particularly of west Asia; I think it is true of central Asia. Often people with political ambition or political grievances may turn to religion or misuse religion for political purposes. We have seen that in India with Mr Modi's party, for example. So, what do you feel about it? Aren't we better off looking at terrorism as a political phenomenon, rather than just trying to find out out this and that? P: I think it is a political phenomenon with a religious dimension. The fact of the matter is that after the Cold War, when the economic ideology of the communist proved to be a non starter and a failure, people who were disgruntled, unhappy with life to our west - and these are largely made up of Islamic countries - turned to religion. I believe they misinterpreted the tenets of Islam. It would be I think very... Siddharth Vardharajan looks at the political angle of terrorism and asks Mr Parthasarthy whether political ambition is the sole driving force of terrorism. Mr Parthasarty agrees with Mr Vardharajan, but maintains that these political ambitions cannot be viewed completely apart from their religious dimension. Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy. Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks : Islam should be subjected to this kind of scrutiny and finger pointing. I want to shift the focus slightly, because it seems to me from what you have said and from what one understands of the situation, that terrorism is a essentially a political phenomenon. And I think this is true, particularly of west Asia; I think it is true of central Asia. Often people with political ambition or political grievances may turn to religion or misuse religion for political purposes. We have seen that in India with Mr Modi's party, for example. So, what do you feel about it? Aren't we better off looking at terrorism as a political phenomenon, rather than just trying to find out out this and that?: I think it is a political phenomenon with a religious dimension. The fact of the matter is that after the Cold War, when the economic ideology of the communist proved to be a non starter and a failure, people who were disgruntled, unhappy with life to our west - and these are largely made up of Islamic countries - turned to religion. I believe they misinterpreted the tenets of Islam. It would be I think very...Siddharth Vardharajan looks at the political angle of terrorism and asks Mr Parthasarthy whether political ambition is the sole driving force of terrorism.Mr Parthasarty agrees with Mr Vardharajan, but maintains that these political ambitions cannot be viewed completely apart from their religious dimension.Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G Parthasarthy.Narendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks Mr Parthasarthy explains his perception that that Mr Modi attributes the growth of terrorism to the fundamentalism propagated by "certain" Muslims. Dr Zakria attempts to refute Mr Modi's statement, and blames the Hindu phobia for this line of thought. Mr Modi responds by calling Dr Zakaria anti-Hindu. P (continuing): ... Experts, or by constitutional monarchy, have they been able to meet the aspirations of the people, whether it's Algeria or Egypt. That breeds discontent, which takes a religious dimension. But what is important is that these things have now led to a networking on a religious basis; Osama's network on a religious basis extends into the middle east, it extends into the United States. SV: Mr Parthasarthy, wouldn't we be better off focusing on the discontent and the root causes of discontent, rather than simply having pointless debates as to whether Islam is responsible or not? P: If you ignore the religious dimension, there is a religious... SV: It exists, just like it exists in Mr Modi's party. NM: The reason why terrorism today has become so powerful is that it contains fundamentalism. It is fundamentalism that is solely responsible for the current scenario. Second point - you must understand that Muslims, when I say Muslims it doesn't mean Islam, they have a political road map. They have divided the world into three parts: 1) Darul-Aman 2) Darul-Harab 3) Darul-Islam Darul-Aman means "Land of Peace." Where Islam has reached there should be "Land of Peace," or the place where Islam is powerless there Darul-Aman should exist. Darul-Harab is "Land of Conflict." Where there is power, fight and take over that place. The third is Darul-Islam. To convert the whole world into Islam. With such motives, some political activists, those who belong to Islam they are doing these activities. Unless and until we don't understand these people, we cannot understand terrorism. RS: You have made your point, Mr Modi. Quickly respond. Z: Only if he stops, can I speak. NM: I don't want to... Z: His (NM's) problem is that he doesn't have a clue who started this Darul-Aman. Darul-Harab, Darul... This was started by those Muslim rulers who wanted to allocate some sort of classification to their Rule. Neither the classical jurists, nor is there any reference to it in the Qur'an, nor is there any reference to it in the (?), but the Hindu phobia has so gripped them, that wherever they find something to malign Islam, that they are very happy to project it as if... NM: Dr Zakaria's anti-Hindu mind is not being able to understand what I am saying. RS: We have to take a break. NM: I am saying a few Muslims. I have said again and again, few Muslims. RS: We are cutting up, Mr Modi. We are taking a break. Al Qaeda Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks Mr Parthasarthy explains his perception that that Al Qaeda feeds off the discontentment of people in Islamic countries.Mr Modi attributes the growth of terrorism to the fundamentalism propagated by "certain" Muslims. Dr Zakria attempts to refute Mr Modi's statement, and blames the Hindu phobia for this line of thought. Mr Modi responds by calling Dr Zakaria anti-Hindu.(continuing): ... Experts, or by constitutional monarchy, have they been able to meet the aspirations of the people, whether it's Algeria or Egypt. That breeds discontent, which takes a religious dimension. But what is important is that these things have now led to a networking on a religious basis; Osama's network on a religious basis extends into the middle east, it extends into the United States.: Mr Parthasarthy, wouldn't we be better off focusing on the discontent and the root causes of discontent, rather than simply having pointless debates as to whether Islam is responsible or not?: If you ignore the religious dimension, there is a religious...: It exists, just like it exists in Mr Modi's party.: The reason why terrorism today has become so powerful is that it contains fundamentalism. It is fundamentalism that is solely responsible for the current scenario. Second point - you must understand that Muslims, when I say Muslims it doesn't mean Islam, they have a political road map. They have divided the world into three parts:1) Darul-Aman2) Darul-Harab3) Darul-IslamDarul-Aman means "Land of Peace." Where Islam has reached there should be "Land of Peace," or the place where Islam is powerless there Darul-Aman should exist.Darul-Harab is "Land of Conflict." Where there is power, fight and take over that place.The third is Darul-Islam. To convert the whole world into Islam. With such motives, some political activists, those who belong to Islam they are doing these activities. Unless and until we don't understand these people, we cannot understand terrorism.: You have made your point, Mr Modi. Quickly respond.: Only if he stops, can I speak.: I don't want to...: His (NM's) problem is that he doesn't have a clue who started this Darul-Aman. Darul-Harab, Darul... This was started by those Muslim rulers who wanted to allocate some sort of classification to their Rule. Neither the classical jurists, nor is there any reference to it in the Qur'an, nor is there any reference to it in the (?), but the Hindu phobia has so gripped them, that wherever they find something to malign Islam, that they are very happy to project it as if...: Dr Zakaria's anti-Hindu mind is not being able to understand what I am saying.: We have to take a break.: I am saying a few Muslims. I have said again and again, few Muslims.: We are cutting up, Mr Modi. We are taking a break.Al QaedaBig FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G ParthasarthyNarendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks Dr Zakaria responds to the allegation of being anti-Hindu. Related links: For more information on the Two-Nation Theory, see For more information on the Quit India Movement, see Z: How can anyone call me anti-Hindu? Nobody has been the stoutest, the greatest opponent of Jinnah's two-nation theory. I have gone to jail during the Quit India Movement! No, it is necessary, I have in my next... NM: Dr Zakaria, you should be careful. Repeatedly (RS: Mr Modi) Hindu phobia, repeatedly Muslim phobia. You will have to listen to such things. RS: Please, let's not degenerate this into a debate. Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks Dr Zakaria responds to the allegation of being anti-Hindu.Related links:For more information on the Two-Nation Theory, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Nation_Theory For more information on the Quit India Movement, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quit_india_movement : How can anyone call me anti-Hindu? Nobody has been the stoutest, the greatest opponent of Jinnah's two-nation theory. I have gone to jail during the Quit India Movement! No, it is necessary, I have in my next...: Dr Zakaria, you should be careful. Repeatedly (RS: Mr Modi) Hindu phobia, repeatedly Muslim phobia. You will have to listen to such things.: Please, let's not degenerate this into a debate.Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G ParthasarthyNarendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks Mr Parthasarthy talks about the clash of civilisations. Related links: To know more about the clash of civilisations, see For the full text of the Clash of Civilisations, see For President Khatami's address, see RS: Where are these so called fault lines, clash of civilisations that you spoke about about earlier? P: I think, Rajdeep, you have raised a very important point and I... Remember that this clash of civilisations is a very dangerous concept, and I refer to a proposal by President Khatami of Iran calling for dialogue of civilisations. I think that's what we should look at. Secondly, on Siddharth's question of our rather hasty readiness to offer military facilities, I am quite clear in my mind that if it is established that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are responsible for the incidents in New York and in Washington, then an international consensus will emerge to take on the Taliban. I think - let me complete, Rajeev - I think we should join that consensus, let it build. We should join them, join the... Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks Mr Parthasarthy talks about the clash of civilisations.Related links:To know more about the clash of civilisations, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations For the full text of the Clash of Civilisations, see http://history.club.fatih.edu.tr/103%20Huntington%20Clash%20of%20Civilizations%20full%20text.htm For President Khatami's address, see http://www.unesco.org/dialogue/en/khatami.htm : Where are these so called fault lines, clash of civilisations that you spoke about about earlier?: I think, Rajdeep, you have raised a very important point and I... Remember that this clash of civilisations is a very dangerous concept, and I refer to a proposal by President Khatami of Iran calling for dialogue of civilisations. I think that's what we should look at.Secondly, on Siddharth's question of our rather hasty readiness to offer military facilities, I am quite clear in my mind that if it is established that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are responsible for the incidents in New York and in Washington, then an international consensus will emerge to take on the Taliban. I think - let me complete, Rajeev - I think we should join that consensus, let it build. We should join them, join the...Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G ParthasarthyNarendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks Dr Zakaria comments on Mr Parthasarthy's point of view regarding the clash of civilisations. RS: Islam on one side, the west on the other. Z: There is no clash of civilisation. There is a clash of barbarism against civilisation. And therefore what has happened in America and in Washington is the worst kind of barbaric explosion. Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks Dr Zakaria comments on Mr Parthasarthy's point of view regarding the clash of civilisations.: Islam on one side, the west on the other.: There is no clash of civilisation. There is a clash of barbarism against civilisation. And therefore what has happened in America and in Washington is the worst kind of barbaric explosion.Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G ParthasarthyNarendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks NM: So, when at one side there is a terrorism, at another side there is civilisation. How can you put both on the way? RS: Then why bring the religious angle in the first place? If Osama was, as long as he was a CIA creation, nobody called him a radical Islamist. Today he becomes an Islamic terrorist. NM: Rajdeep, where is Osama getting all this strength? Who's supporting him? What is the inspiration for his supporters? When he adopts the Islamic line of reasoning, only then will young kids stand up with him. There is no other inspiration. He does not inspire them by being anti American. He is inspiring them by misusing Islamic teachings. Z: He got inspiration from Pakistan, he got inspired because of all the equipment and dollars that America gave him. And that is why even America has now realised that what they did was a big blunder. RS: Okay. Let's get in one more question. John? The panelists comment on what they feel has inspired Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy Narendra Modi Osama bin Laden Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks : So, when at one side there is a terrorism, at another side there is civilisation. How can you put both on the way?: Then why bring the religious angle in the first place? If Osama was, as long as he was a CIA creation, nobody called him a radical Islamist. Today he becomes an Islamic terrorist.: Rajdeep, where is Osama getting all this strength? Who's supporting him? What is the inspiration for his supporters? When he adopts the Islamic line of reasoning, only then will young kids stand up with him. There is no other inspiration. He does not inspire them by being anti American. He is inspiring them by misusing Islamic teachings.: He got inspiration from Pakistan, he got inspired because of all the equipment and dollars that America gave him. And that is why even America has now realised that what they did was a big blunder.: Okay. Let's get in one more question. John?The panelists comment on what they feel has inspired Osama bin Laden Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G ParthasarthyNarendra ModiOsama bin LadenRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks JE: Partha, does this need to be seen in against a wider context that just your field of crisis? Because the main focus of this terror is with America and what it stands for, and that's also the main focus of the anti-WTO demonstrators, and the anti-globalisation protesters over the last few years. As we have seen in P: Well, there is certainly a problem of people adjusting to the imperatives and the realities of globalisation; that's spread across the world, John. But having said that, I go back to what I said earlier - we do have a problem in our western neighbourhood. It has political dimensions, diplomatic dimensions, religious dimensions, you name it. It has to be tackled in a multifaceted manner, and I'll go along with Prof Zakaria on this. John Elliot asks for Mr Parthsarthy's opinion on the possibility of globalisation being the driving force behind terrorism. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_civil_war Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks : Partha, does this need to be seen in against a wider context that just your field of crisis? Because the main focus of this terror is with America and what it stands for, and that's also the main focus of the anti-WTO demonstrators, and the anti-globalisation protesters over the last few years. As we have seen in Punjab and Sri Lanka, yesterday's peaceful protesters become tomorrow's terrorists, and the anti-WTO protests aren't that peaceful. Do you think that (it is) the poor and the dispossessed who are going to gang up? Do you see a wider problem here? Is there is bigger issue of globalised disenchantment to be tackled, rather than just the Islamic divide?: Well, there is certainly a problem of people adjusting to the imperatives and the realities of globalisation; that's spread across the world, John. But having said that, I go back to what I said earlier - we do have a problem in our western neighbourhood. It has political dimensions, diplomatic dimensions, religious dimensions, you name it. It has to be tackled in a multifaceted manner, and I'll go along with Prof Zakaria on this.John Elliot asks for Mr Parthsarthy's opinion on the possibility of globalisation being the driving force behind terrorism.see also:Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G ParthasarthyNarendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks Man: What is the definition of Jihad? this is the first part of my question. Z: Well, I will be very happy to explain it to you. Jihad means a struggle. The classical jurists have divided it into two parts - Jihad ul Akbar (the great struggle) and Jihad ul Asgar (the smaller struggle). RS: What's the second part of the question? Z: No, let me explain. What is this?! In the middle (of my explanation), you cut me (off). RS: He has a second part to the question. Z: He has not understood anything. Let me explain. RS: Okay, go on. Z: The greater struggle is against temptation, against evil. Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks The audience are now allowed to question the panellists. Dr Zakaria is asked to explain the term Jihad. : What is the definition of? this is the first part of my question.: Well, I will be very happy to explain it to you.means a struggle. The classical jurists have divided it into two parts -(the great struggle) and(the smaller struggle).: What's the second part of the question?: No, let me explain. What is this?! In the middle (of my explanation), you cut me (off).: He has a second part to the question.: He has not understood anything. Let me explain.: Okay, go on.: The greater struggle is against temptation, against evil.Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G ParthasarthyNarendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 AttacksThe audience are now allowed to question the panellists. Dr Zakaria is asked to explain the term Woman: Mr Modi had made a comment on isolating terrorism. So how do we isolate it? It is high time. Like, we must really take a stand. RS: Okay.The gentleman in the back. Man: I am sorry, I am not standing. RS: That's okay, you don't have to stand. Man: You told to this gentleman that to think of the sentiments of the Muslims in Babri Masjid demolition; they are footpath politics in America, or anywhere in the world is very good and elitist politics. NM: See, it is due to India's initiative that the issue of terrorism has been raised the last two times in the UN meetings. RS: You have a minute minute talk. NM: And because of this we have been successful in dividing the whole country into two camps - first those who are against terrorism, and second, those who are supporting terrorism. It is my opinion that the recent incidents in America will add fuel to this process. And world is going to split in two parts - those who are with humanity, and those who are against humanity. As far as the another question is concerned, total misconception you have, you don't have the correct information. And if you want the debate on Ayodhya, then you call me wherever you want me. A lady asks Mr Modi how he plans to isolate terrorism, while a man comments on the double-faced nature of Mr Modi. Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy Mr Modi's policies appear to be blatantly divisionist and reductionist. The automatic assumption of the country now being divided into two camps is ridiculous, and the possibility of this supposed division being used to incite actions against those labelled as "with terrorism", regardless of whether they are or not, is terrifying. Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks : Mr Modi had made a comment on isolating terrorism. So how do we isolate it? It is high time. Like, we must really take a stand.: Okay.The gentleman in the back.: I am sorry, I am not standing.: That's okay, you don't have to stand.: You told to this gentleman that to think of the sentiments of the Muslims in Babri Masjid demolition; they are footpath politics in America, or anywhere in the world is very good and elitist politics.: See, it is due to India's initiative that the issue of terrorism has been raised the last two times in the UN meetings.: You have a minute minute talk.: And because of this we have been successful in dividing the whole country into two camps - first those who are against terrorism, and second, those who are supporting terrorism. It is my opinion that the recent incidents in America will add fuel to this process. And world is going to split in two parts - those who are with humanity, and those who are against humanity.As far as the another question is concerned, total misconception you have, you don't have the correct information. And if you want the debate on Ayodhya, then you call me wherever you want me.A lady asks Mr Modi how he plans to isolate terrorism, while a man comments on the double-faced nature of Mr Modi.Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G ParthasarthyMr Modi's policies appear to be blatantly divisionist and reductionist. The automatic assumption of the country now being divided into two camps is ridiculous, and the possibility of this supposed division being used to incite actions against those labelled as "with terrorism", regardless of whether they are or not, is terrifying.Narendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks It seems surprising that Mr Parthasarthy would choose to reduce the support for the Arab countries to a sort of playground reciprocality - "I'll do this and you do that." Independent decisions appear to fall far by the wayside. If one wanders down that line, then India's choice to support America's stance seems conflicted with America's choice to arm India's supposed enemies. The whole concept is flawed in itself, and lacks rationality. RS: How many of you think terrorism is only linked to religion? How many of you? What's your response? Man: Because if you see the historical record, in 1960 when Vietnam was attacked, and in the early 90's when Iraq was attacked, can you give it a name like Christian terrorism? and whatever happened in 1992 or something like that, with the Babri Masjid demolition, can you give it a name like Hindu terrorism? RS: Why is it Mr Parthasarthy - this is a view, it seems to be a minority view in this audience - that when there are acts of terrorism committed by other groups, you don't give it a religious denomination? P: There is a reason for that. The only religion, group of countries who have grouped themselves in the world in religious terms are the Islamic countries. They have an RS: Dr.Zakaria, answer this. Is Islam the only religion which builds this kind of universal brotherhood that can kind lead to a global network like the Al Qaeda? Z: You see, the Islamic countries, their grouping... Rajdeep Sardesai takes an audience poll. Mr Parthasarthy is asked to comment on the result of the poll. Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy Narendra Modi Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks It seems surprising that Mr Parthasarthy would choose to reduce the support for the Arab countries to a sort of playground reciprocality - "I'll do this and you do that." Independent decisions appear to fall far by the wayside. If one wanders down that line, then India's choice to support America's stance seems conflicted with America's choice to arm India's supposed enemies. The whole concept is flawed in itself, and lacks rationality.: How many of you think terrorism is only linked to religion? How many of you? What's your response?: Because if you see the historical record, in 1960 when Vietnam was attacked, and in the early 90's when Iraq was attacked, can you give it a name like Christian terrorism? and whatever happened in 1992 or something like that, with the Babri Masjid demolition, can you give it a name like Hindu terrorism?: Why is it Mr Parthasarthy - this is a view, it seems to be a minority view in this audience - that when there are acts of terrorism committed by other groups, you don't give it a religious denomination?: There is a reason for that. The only religion, group of countries who have grouped themselves in the world in religious terms are the Islamic countries. They have an Organisation of Islamic Conference .The Christians don't group themselves in religious terms, the Buddhists in South-East Asia don't group themselves, only the Islamic countries do it. And I'll add one point, which I would like to tell Dr Zakaria. Every time, despite our support for the Arabs, every Arab country has joined in resolutions in the OIC every year to condemn us on Kashmir.: Dr.Zakaria, answer this. Is Islam the only religion which builds this kind of universal brotherhood that can kind lead to a global network like the Al Qaeda?: You see, the Islamic countries, their grouping...Rajdeep Sardesai takes an audience poll.Mr Parthasarthy is asked to comment on the result of the poll.Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G ParthasarthyNarendra ModiRajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 Attacks Big Fight Dr Rafiq Zakaria Islamic terrorism Mr G Parthasarthy Narendra Modi RS: If we have learnt when it comes to tackling terrorism... When it comes to the basic subject, is Islam the driving force of terrorism? What are your final comments? P: Final comments - it is very wrong to attribute terrorism to any given religion. But the fact remains that the terrorists are coming from Islamic countries misinterpreting Islam. It will be highly dangerous for us, within India, in a secularist pluralistic society, to give it a predominantly religious connotation. RS: Your 20 seconds are up. Your 20 seconds. NM: All my friends must understand that these terrorists have damaged Islam like anything. So they must disconnect themselves from these terrorists, they come out openly against the terrorists, then only they can change the image and they will have to do then something. RS: Your last word. Z: I am so sad that to hear all these things. You know there is so much of misrepresentation, now this discussion has gone haywire. Please allow me... RS: You are allowed 20 seconds, sir, the program is at an end. Tell us your last comments. Z: Instead of sympathising with the victims, instead of thinking of how to face in the future this menace. And therefore, if you allow me, I will quote a few Urdu couplets. After the tragedy, instead of discussing the tragedy, we are saying Islam did this and did that. Start thinking how do you save this world from this tragedy. RS: On that highly sobering note, we must say that it's been an extremely tragic week, and our thoughts must go with the victims of the tragedy. Thank you all very much for joining us on the "Big Fight" on this highly contentious issue. Do email us at Rajdeep Sardesai September 11 Attacks The panellists make their final comments. Big FightDr Rafiq ZakariaIslamic terrorismMr G ParthasarthyNarendra Modi: If we have learnt when it comes to tackling terrorism... When it comes to the basic subject, is Islam the driving force of terrorism? What are your final comments?: Final comments - it is very wrong to attribute terrorism to any given religion. But the fact remains that the terrorists are coming from Islamic countries misinterpreting Islam. It will be highly dangerous for us, within India, in a secularist pluralistic society, to give it a predominantly religious connotation.: Your 20 seconds are up. Your 20 seconds.: All my friends must understand that these terrorists have damaged Islam like anything. So they must disconnect themselves from these terrorists, they come out openly against the terrorists, then only they can change the image and they will have to do then something.: Your last word.: I am so sad that to hear all these things. You know there is so much of misrepresentation, now this discussion has gone haywire. Please allow me...: You are allowed 20 seconds, sir, the program is at an end. Tell us your last comments.: Instead of sympathising with the victims, instead of thinking of how to face in the future this menace. And therefore, if you allow me, I will quote a few Urdu couplets.After the tragedy, instead of discussing the tragedy, we are saying Islam did this and did that. Start thinking how do you save this world from this tragedy.: On that highly sobering note, we must say that it's been an extremely tragic week, and our thoughts must go with the victims of the tragedy. Thank you all very much for joining us on the "Big Fight" on this highly contentious issue. Do email us at bigfight@ndtv.com . We will be back...Rajdeep SardesaiSeptember 11 AttacksThe panellists make their final comments. Pad.ma requires JavaScript. |
The All-star voting in Nippon Professional Baseball are ongoing, and for Japanese phenom Shohei Otani, despite playing only just 8 games this regular season, and is currently in the DL after being sidelined for at least 6 weeks due to an injury (pulled biceps femoris muscle) back in April 8 in a game against the Orix Buffaloes, is leading Japan’s Pacific League in the designated hitter category in their all-star voting. Shohei Otani has yet to make a pitching appearance for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters this year, as he mainly plays as their DH, so far, he currently owns a batting line of .407/.469./815 with 2 homeruns and 3 RBIs in 27 at-bats. Here are the leading players in each respective positions so far this season via fan voting: [Pacific League players] Pitchers: SB SP, Kodai Senga (with 18,088 votes) (with 18,088 votes) SEI RP, Kazuhisa Makita (with 34,077 votes) (with 34,077 votes) RAK RP, Yuki Matsui (with 36,801 votes) Position Players: RAK C, Motohiro Shima (with 26,309 votes) (with 26,309 votes) HOK 1B, Sho Nakata (with 26,586 votes) (with 26,586 votes) SEI 2B, Hideto Asamura (with 32,110 votes) (with 32,110 votes) SB 3B, Nobuhiro Matsuda (with 24,236 votes) (with 24,236 votes) RAK SS, Eigoro Mogi (with 28,747 votes) (with 28,747 votes) SEI OF, Shogo Akiyama (with 36,422 votes) (with 36,422 votes) SB OF, Yuki Yanagita (with 30,248 votes) (with 30,248 votes) HOK OF, Kensuke Kondo (with 23, 471 votes) Designated Hitter: HOK SP/DH, Shohei Otani (with 27,805 votes) [Central League players] Pitchers: YOM SP, Tomoyuki Sugano (with 22,461 votes) (with 22,461 votes) HAN RP, Marcos Mateo (with 14,772 votes) (with 14,772 votes) HAN RP, Rafael Dolis (with 24,184 votes) Position Players: HAN C, Ryutaro Umeno (with 25,989 votes) (with 25,989 votes) HIR 1B, Takahiro Arai (with 25,948 votes) (with 25,948 votes) HIR 2B, Ryosuke Kikuchi (with 31,960 votes) (with 31,960 votes) HAN 3B, Takashi Toritani (with 35,799 votes) (with 35,799 votes) YOM SS, Hayato Sakamoto (with 37,333 votes) (with 37,333 votes) YOK OF, Yoshitomo Tsutsugo (with 34,223 votes) (with 34,223 votes) HIR OF, Seiya Suzuki (with 35,498 votes) (with 35,498 votes) HAN OF, Yoshio Itoi (with 39,852 votes) Fan voting started back in May 16 (Tuesday) and will end until June 18 (Sunday), along with the player voting. Game 1 of the all-star game will take place at Nagoya Dome in July 14 (Friday), and Game 2 at ZOZO Marine Stadium in the next day, July 15 (Saturday). |
"The Black Cat Man is still hanging in there." That's what William "Willy" Turner told me yesterday afternoon when I visited him at the Deanwood Rehabilitation and Wellness Center on Nannie Hellen Burroughs Avenue NE, and it was a nice thing to hear several days after a handful of local blogs declared him dead. For more than a decade, the man known to locals as Black Cat Bill greeted showgoers lining up outside the Black Cat with the call "Black Cat, Black Cat! A little change for the homeless?" Regulars knew him. The club sometimes helped him out with food. He was a neighborhood fixture who helped keep trouble away from the 14th Street NW venue. "It's a match made in hell with Dante," he told Washington City Paper in 1997, referring to both the Italian poet and club owner Dante Ferrando. These days, Turner isn't in great health, he's lost a fair amount of weight, and he no longer makes it out to the club. He's been living at the Deanwood residence for about two years, and before that was in and out of shelters. He told me he enjoys visits from his daughter and granddaughter, and he regularly watches old movies on the small television set by his bed. The rumor of his passing began with a tweet from a former Black Cat employee, and quickly spread around social media and sites like DCist and We Love D.C. The false reports filled Facebook feeds; some folks even asked me if my band wanted to perform at a benefit concert in Turner's honor. According to Black Cat's talent buyer, Vicki Savoula, "Rumors like this start up every six months or so." Still, Turner said he appreciated the outpouring of support. He said that if anyone wants to catch up with him, they're welcome to stop by during visiting hours, and that he would appreciate the company. He added that he’d love to listen to music in his room, so if anyone has a spare boombox and some James Brown cassettes, he'd be happy to give them a new home. LISTEN: Black Cat Bill - "Black Cat, Black Cat" [audio:http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/files/2011/11/blackcat-mp3.mp3] |
EDMONTON, AB—Like many university graduates before him, 22-year-old Tyler Radner went backpacking after finishing school and returned a total douchebag. "Travelling through Southeast Asia really changed my perspective on life and opened my eyes to the world," Radner smarmily recalls. "It's disappointing to come home and see that nothing has changed. People here really need to expand their horizons." Radner's most valuable keepsake from his trip is an obnoxious beaded bracelet that holds deep, symbolic meaning to him. "I got this bracelet from a totally authentic monk at the airport in Kuala Lumpur." "To me it symbolizes how finite our time on this earth is, and how every day should be lived like it is your last. There's more to life than sitting in an office and paying a mortgage," he said. Friends and family report receiving no such souvenirs from Radner upon his return. "I think that shitty bracelet symbolizes how much of a douche he's become," says Tyler's father Bruce. "It was the office job I worked at for 30 years that paid for for his stupid trip." "I liked Tyler a lot more before he went backpacking," moans Kara Bishop, Tyler's soon to be ex-girlfriend. "He's so condescending now. He keep telling things like 'expand your horizons' and 'open your eyes to the world.' If he starts another sentence with 'When I was abroad…' I am going to strangle him." "Before he left, Tyler was curious, humble, and a great listener," says Tyler's mother Karen. "Now he talks down to me like a child. He thinks that because I haven't been to Cambodia, my life experience and wisdom are meaningless. I really wish we had never encouraged him to travel." "My advice to travellers," pontificates Radner without being asked for advice, "is to skip the guided tours and touristic destinations. Just get out there and meet the locals and absorb their culture and traditions." "Travelling has changed me in a deep and meaningful way. It was truly the most impactful two weeks of my life," he says wistfully. Sarah Reed from Halifax, who met Radner at a hostel Thailand, reports otherwise. "Tyler pretty much spent the entire time getting drunk and trying to pick up girls at the hostel. The only time I saw him interacting with locals was when he tried to buy MDMA. He was a total degenerate pig." Don't miss anything from CBC Comedy - like us on Facebook. |
Connecticut may be too rich for its own good. Long blessed with a disproportionate number of high-income residents, the state has entertained lavish spending habits for decades. Lawmakers have acted as if they were on a shopping spree at Christmas, confident that the money to pay off the credit cards would somehow be found in the new year. Meanwhile, they have avoided many of their less glamorous responsibilities -- depositing money into pension accounts and other retirement benefits, and paying for adequate infrastructure maintenance. Now, all those bills are coming due, and the money isn’t there to pay them. Budget problems have become chronic in Connecticut. This year, they got worse. Faced with a projected $5 billion shortfall over the state’s two-year budget period, the legislature blew well past the July 1 budget deadline. (There was still no agreement on a budget as of mid-August.) “People have come to expect a very high level of services, while keeping taxes low,” says state Rep. William Tong. “That math doesn’t work. People are facing two decades of bad decisions and we’re having to reckon with that new reality.” In May, the three major credit rating agencies all downgraded the state, citing weak revenues. Continuing budget fights and tax increases have driven down business confidence. Connecticut’s economic problems extend well beyond the budget. The state prospered in the 1970s and 1980s, when nearby New York City was dangerous and Connecticut’s suburban landscape was welcoming. Corporations were eager to resettle there. But fashions have changed. Millennials and corporations have developed a hankering for urban life. That urge has robbed Connecticut’s suburban landscape of its appeal. This was demonstrated starkly by the decisions of two of its marquee employers, General Electric and Aetna, to move their headquarters to Boston and Manhattan, respectively. That bad news has fed a broader negative narrative about the state, with damning coverage in outlets such as Slate, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal. Connecticut has five cities with populations above 100,000, but each is below 150,000. While some of the cities are doing better than others, they all have more than their share of concentrated poverty, bad schools and unemployment. In short, Connecticut lacks a city that can take advantage of the newfound cachet of urban life. Instead, the state has had to take over the financial reins of several of its troubled smaller cities over the past two decades. Hartford, the capital, has its own chronic budget problems and has hired attorneys to explore the possibility of bankruptcy. “At a time when other states were reinvesting in cities, Connecticut was not, and certainly the state itself was not,” says Gov. Dannel Malloy. “Now, when millennials and people 50-plus want to live in urban environments, our urban environments are not up to snuff.” The state still has the nation’s highest per capita income, but over the past 20 years, its job creation numbers have ranked in the bottom five among the 50 states. Essentially, it has created no new net employment for decades. It was only this past June that Connecticut finally managed to claim the same number of private-sector jobs that it had before the 2008 recession. Many of the jobs in finance that were lost with that year’s market crash have never returned. A disproportionate number of positions created since are low-wage jobs in the service sector. And people have begun to vote with their feet. The state has lost population for three years running. Last year, Greater Hartford ranked fourth and New Haven fifth in population loss among the nation’s 100 largest metro areas. “We’re a wealthy state,” says Oz Griebel, president of the MetroHartford Alliance, the region’s chamber of commerce, “but we’re not growing with the national economy.” Connecticut is now at a crossroads. A model that worked for years -- safe suburbs offering good schools for the children of hedge fund managers and insurance agents -- is no longer as compelling. Mansion-size houses in the toniest precincts of the richest suburbs aren’t emptying out yet, but they are getting hard to sell. Over the course of its long history, Connecticut has successfully reinvented itself several times, changing specialties from agriculture to manufacturing to financial services. Today, unlike other states and cities that have run into serious financial difficulties, Connecticut clearly has the means to change course. Not only is its median income still high, but the state boasts assets such as proximity to Boston and New York, amiable coastlines and river valleys, and notable institutions of higher education. In addition to the continuing presence of a thriving financial sector, Connecticut is home to aerospace and defense contractors and other advanced manufacturers who can’t hire help fast enough, as well as a growing medical and life sciences sector. “Hartford’s fiscal challenges were decades in the making,” says Mayor Luke Bronin, blaming parochialism and a finance system that favors suburban neighbors. But the same sense of general prosperity that allowed the state easy access to credit in the past has left much of Connecticut feeling complacent, even as it faces clear challenges. In many parts of the state, life is still good. The loss of GE and Aetna has served as a wakeup call for public officials, but not everyone feels the same sense of urgency. Unsurprisingly, not many politicians are interested in amplifying the message in the national media that something has gone seriously wrong. “The vast majority of people in Connecticut, unless they were literally trying to sell their home to a GE executive, are not feeling the pain yet,” says Matthew Nemerson, New Haven’s economic development director. There are a couple of practical reasons why the state may have a hard time changing course, though. To start, its political culture is highly parochial, with strong home rule protecting the interests of 169 cities and towns and nearly as many school districts. Connecticut has the nation’s second-highest rate of income inequality, after New York, but there isn’t a sense in the smaller communities that their future is tied to improving the health of those less fortunate. “More than anything, we suffer from a lack of common identity and the sense of a common future,” says Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin. The other roadblock is partisanship. As fiscal problems have grown entrenched, it’s become more difficult to find political consensus. Democrats say the state can’t solve its problems with massive spending cuts, and favor both a state sales tax hike and a change in law to allow cities to raise sales taxes on their own. But Republicans blame the state’s woes on decisions in 2011 and 2015 to address shortfalls by bumping up tax rates. They have no appetite for more. “Companies aren’t going to stay here,” says Themis Klarides, the GOP leader in the state House, if taxes keep going up. “They certainly have no reason to come here.” Complaining about tax hikes has been a winning message for Republicans. At the start of the Obama presidency, Democrats enjoyed a 114-37 majority in the state House and a 24-12 advantage in the state Senate. Now, the state Senate is tied, although the Democratic lieutenant governor can cast tie-breaking votes. Last fall, Republicans came within four seats of taking over the House. Malloy, who has the lowest approval rating of any Democratic governor in the country, admits he was lucky to win re-election in 2014. He isn’t seeking another term next year. It’s not hard to imagine that Connecticut, long dominated by Democrats and still one of the bluest states in presidential voting, could fall under complete Republican control in 2018. That would cause a huge shift in direction. For Connecticut as a whole to thrive, however, there has to be not only broad agreement about the need to shake things up, but something like consensus about what changes the state should make. Connecticut has not reached that stage yet. “What was once our strength has now become, in my opinion, our weakness,” says state House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz. “We are the land of steady habits and the world has changed around us.” Connecticut can’t say it wasn’t warned. Back in 1999, a report by a consultant named Michael Gallis identified the state’s aging transportation network, its “fragmented political structure” and the lack of a metropolitan center or strategy as glaring weaknesses. The report was widely discussed and still gets talked about in planning circles, but it didn’t convince policymakers or the public that the state needed to change its ways. A sense of isolation -- that Connecticut benefited from not having the same problems as New York or Boston -- kept residents thinking of their state as its own little pocket of prosperity, rather than as part of a bigger region in which it must compete. At the start of the new century, Connecticut still prospered, its economic growth outpacing the country’s as a whole. That allowed it to issue income tax rebate checks to residents -- $50 to individuals and $100 to couples. These added up to $100 million that, in hindsight, many analysts wish had been devoted to paying down state pension debt, which the Malloy administration puts at $22 billion, although private estimates count it much higher. Instead of making regular pension fund contributions, Gov. John Rowland made a deal with labor unions a decade ago that allowed the state to defer paying them. “My predecessors lived in good times and didn’t spend any of that good-time revenue to attack the state’s long-term problems,” Malloy complains. “I’m living in slow growth and I’m putting every dollar into retiring long-term obligations.” The state is also struggling to fund its teachers’ retirement system. While it has been able to renegotiate benefit levels with its own employees, benefits for teachers are negotiated with local districts. If the state isn’t able to stretch out its payments to the teachers’ pension plan, as it did with the state workers’ fund, its mandated contributions are set to balloon from $1.2 billion this year to $6 billion in 2024. “We are faced with legacy problems that have finally caught up with us,” says Matt Ritter, the state House Democratic leader. Longstanding debt isn’t Connecticut’s only financial problem. Back in 1992, shortly after the state imposed a personal income tax, voters overwhelmingly approved a spending cap. The constitutional amendment they voted for, however, didn’t define what the spending cap would be. The legislature has been able routinely to exceed the statutory cap by declaring spending “emergencies” or employing other gimmicks. In 2015, the state attorney general ruled that the spending cap as it stands is legally unenforceable. The only upside of a new deal with labor unions, says House GOP Leader Themis Klarides, is that it will hand her party power “on a silver platter.” When the income tax was created, Connecticut lost one of its regional advantages. Established during a budget crisis triggered by the early 1990s recession, it was not originally intended to become the primary source of income, yet it’s now the state’s single largest revenue source. It’s a progressive tax, so much of the money comes from a relatively small number of top earners. Half of a $400 million shortfall in income tax receipts projected this spring came from just 100 individuals. With uncertainty about whether the tax code will be changed at the federal level, a lot of hedge fund managers and other high fliers are holding off on selling their investments. But at least a few have moved their residency or their hedge funds down to Florida, which has no personal income tax. Conservatives can rattle off the names of individuals who took millions in tax revenue with them. “They’ve decided six months and a day in Florida solves the problem,” says Carol Platt Liebau, president of the Yankee Institute, a free market think tank in Hartford. Malloy’s proposed budget this year would have raised taxes and fees, but he looked to spending cuts to close most of the shortfall. In May, he reached an agreement with public employee unions to restructure the state’s pension plan and other retirement obligations. The deal increases pension and insurance costs for workers, while freezing wages for three years and offering less generous retirement plans to future hires. The package is expected to save the state $1.5 billion during its current two-year budget cycle and $24 billion over the next 20 years. “State employees are basically saying one full year of the budget, $24 billion, that’s on us,” says Lori Pelletier, president of the AFL-CIO’s Connecticut branch. “There’s no sense in getting a raise if three months from now you’re going to be laid off.” The deal echoed concessions Malloy had won from unions earlier in his term. But Republicans, while acknowledging that the package offers real savings, complain that it doesn’t go far enough. Connecticut is one of only four states that collectively bargain retirement benefits. The latest deal not only guarantees raises in the future and bars layoffs of state employees, but extends the life of underlying contractual benefits until 2027. “These union contracts effectively tie the hands of one or two governors and the legislature for the next 10 years,” Liebau says. Connecticut has an intergovernmental setup unlike that of any other state. For all practical purposes, it has no counties. Services that in most states are financed and shared by multiple jurisdictions, such as courthouses and roads, are handled at the state level in Connecticut. A few city and town functions have been consolidated here and there-- back-office accounting for libraries, the occasional animal shelter. But regional consolidation of schools and public safety are considered third-rail issues. Connecticut, which is home to 3.6 million people, has 111 police dispatch centers. By comparison, Houston, which has 2.3 million residents, has just one emergency dispatch center, which handles fire as well as police. One Connecticut high school had a graduating class of 45 students this year. Rather than sending the kids somewhere else, its district is expanding and renovating the campus. The only real source of revenue for local governments in Connecticut is the property tax. Since demand for services is often greatest in the bigger cities, their property tax rates end up being quite high -- often double the rate charged by neighboring towns. The problem is particularly acute in Hartford, where more than half the land is occupied by state facilities or other nontaxable entities. The city’s population doubles during working hours, but commuter taxes are illegal, so Hartford has no real way to reach beyond its own borders to get resources from neighboring towns whose residents benefit from city services. “The state of Connecticut owes the city of Hartford $50 million to $60 million a year in payments in lieu of taxes,” says Cynthia Jennings, a member of Hartford’s city council. “For almost 20 years, they have not paid what they owe us. Not even close.” The state does redistribute wealth to some extent, in the form of direct aid to cities or investments in redevelopment projects. But municipal aid has been on the chopping block, given the state’s own budget woes. Residents of the more prosperous towns, as in most places, question why their tax dollars are being sent to support cities they don’t live in. That parochialism is reflected in the legislature, where lawmakers ask to be provided with “number runs” showing how budget decisions are going to affect their own districts. “We have extreme wealth in some places and extreme poverty in some places,” Ritter says. “The legislature reflects that at times.” With a loss of population and more than half its land non-taxable, Hartford is facing possible bankruptcy. As things stand, Connecticut is like a big city that has been zoned into 169 different districts, a few of which have to take on a huge burden of poverty. There is some rural poverty in the state, but most poor people live in the larger cities. Those living in suburbs enjoy good schools and public safety, and get a tax cut to boot, in the form of lower property tax rates. “Most of the social bads are concentrated in about 12 of the 169 towns,” says Nemerson, New Haven’s economic development director. “Any change to make it better will hurt large numbers of people.” Still, the problems associated with pronounced inequality are becoming more apparent. Connecticut is 80 percent white, but its population of white children under the age of 10 is falling faster than in any other state. Racial and ethnic minorities already make up more than 50 percent of infants and toddlers and are about to become a majority of 3- and 4-year-olds. Connecticut’s kids score well on standardized tests overall, but there’s a pronounced achievement gap among racial groups and by geography. As is true almost everywhere, students in city schools are faring poorly. “We can’t leave students in nine cities behind -- that’s 30 to 40 percent of our future workforce,” says Lyle Wray, executive director of the Capitol Region Council of Governments in Hartford. “Fifteen percent proficiency scores in math -- that’s an economic death sentence.” Malloy recognizes the need to invest in cities. He was once the mayor of Stamford, where new companies in fields such as biotech are moving in alongside the hedge funds, and thousands of new housing units have gone up. In July, the governor announced improvements in rail service and stations that will offer better connections between Hartford and New Haven to the south and Springfield, Mass., to the north. Through a quasi-public development authority, the state has helped build 1,600 new housing units in Hartford. The shift of a University of Connecticut campus from West Hartford to a former newspaper building across the street from the city hall will bring 2,000 undergraduates downtown. “The seeds of revitalization are there,” says Mayor Bronin. “If they’re going to grow, we have to clear away the fiscal crisis that the city faces.” The same could be said about the state as a whole. Policymakers are facing up to the fact that it’s no longer enough to be the kid brother to Boston and New York. Connecticut has to think of itself as a set of small to midsize regions that need to compete within the Northeast and nationally in order to jump-start any sort of growth. It has the tools. When it comes to productivity or education levels of its workers, Connecticut ranks near the top. And lawmakers from Malloy on down who seek to downplay the practical damage of GE and Aetna shifting headquarters -- but not the bulk of their workforces -- have a point. More than 20 years after Travelers Insurance moved its headquarters to Manhattan, it remains the largest private employer in Hartford. Connecticut is not in a death spiral, but it has failed to position itself to react to changing demographics and location preferences. There’s a lot of optimistic talk about how the pendulum may swing back, that when the millennials have kids they’ll look more kindly on the Connecticut suburbs. Expecting people to want what they’re currently rejecting is a big risk, however. In a system designed for inertia, changing course will be difficult, especially since most people are still comfortable. And state leaders have lost credibility with many voters about even the need to chart a different economic course, after telling them too often that things will work out all right if they just swallow one more bitter pill in the form of tax increases to get through the latest crisis. Change is always difficult, especially in a place accustomed to success. But by this point it’s clear that what’s worked so well for Connecticut in the past isn’t working now. Maintaining the status quo doesn’t portend well for the future. “For a long time, Connecticut relied on a suburban strategy,” says Rep. Tong, “and the world has changed dramatically and very quickly.” |
Bernanke critics are on the attack (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) What is the most likely cause of civil unrest today? Immigration. Gay marriage. Abortion. The results of Election Day. The mosque at Ground Zero. Nope. Try the Federal Reserve. Nov. 3 is when the Federal Reserve’s next policy committee meeting ends, and if you thought this was just another boring money meeting you would be wrong. It could be the most important meeting in the Fed’s history, maybe. The U.S. central bank is expected to announce its next move to boost the faltering economic recovery. To say there has been considerable debate and anxiety among Fed watchers about what the central bank should do would be an understatement. Chairman Ben Bernanke has indicated in recent speeches that the central bank plans to try to drive down already low interest rates by buying up long-term bonds. A number of people both inside the Fed and out believe this is the wrong move. But one website seems to indicate that Ben’s plan might actually lead to armed conflict. Last week, a post on the blog Zero Hedge said, paraphrasing top economic forecaster David Rosenberg, that the Fed’s plan is not only moronic, but “positions US society one step closer to civil war if not worse.” (See photos inside the world of Ben Bernanke) I’m not sure what “if not worse,” is supposed to mean. But with the Tea Party gaining followers, the idea of civil war over economic issues doesn’t seem that far-fetched these days. And Ron Paul definitely thinks the Fed should be ended. In TIME’s recent cover story on the militia movement, many said these groups are powder kegs looking for a catalyst. So why not a Fed policy committee meeting? Still, I’m not convinced we are headed for Fedamageddon. That being said, the Fed’s early November meeting is an important one. Here’s why: Usually, there is generally a consensus about what the Federal Reserve should do. When the economy is weak, the Fed cuts short-term interest rates to spur borrowing and economic activity. When the economy is strong and inflation is rising, it does the opposite. But nearly two years after the Fed cut short-term interest rates to basically zero, more and more economists are questioning whether the U.S. central bank is making the right moves. The economy is still very weak, and unemployment seems stubbornly stuck near 10%. The problem is that the Fed directly sets only short-term interest rates. And they are already about as close to zero as you can go. That’s why Bernanke has been talking about something called “quantitative easing.” That’s when the Fed basically creates money to buy the long-term bonds that it doesn’t directly control and drives down those interest rates as well. That should further reduce the cost of borrowing for large companies and homeowners. Some people are calling this “QE2” because the Fed made a similar move during the height of the financial crisis when it bought mortgage bonds. (See photos of the Tea Party movement) Not everyone agrees this is a good move. In fact, a number of presidents of regional Fed banks, not all of which get to vote at Fed policy meetings, have recently come out against Bernanke’s plan. Some say it sets bad policy. Others think it will stoke inflation, which might be the point. Few, though, have warned of armed conflict. Here’s how Zero Hedge justifies its prediction of why the Fed’s Nov. 3 meeting will lead to violence: In a very real sense, Bernanke is throwing Granny and Grandpa down the stairs – on purpose. He is literally threatening those at the lower end of the economic strata, along with all who are retired, with starvation and death, and in a just nation where the rule of law controlled instead of being abused by the kleptocrats he would be facing charges of Seditious Conspiracy, as his policies will inevitably lead to the destruction of our republic. O.K. The idea that Bernanke might kill large swaths of low-income neighborhoods or Florida by his plan to further lower interest rates is a little ridiculous. But there is a point in Zero Hedge’s crazy. Lower rates do tend to favor borrowers over savers. And the largest borrowers in the country are banks, speculators and large corporations. The largest spenders in the U.S., though, tend to be individuals. Consumer spending makes up 70% of the economy. And the vast majority of consumers are on the low end of the income scale. So I think it is a valid question to ask whether the Fed’s desire to drive down interest rates at all costs is working. Companies are already borrowing at low rates. They are just not spending. (Read a special report on the financial crisis blame game) That being said, civil war, probably not. “It is a gross exaggeration,” says Allan Meltzer, who is a top Fed historian at Carnegie Mellon. “I cannot recall ever learning about riots or civil war even when the Fed made other mistakes.” When I called, David Rosenberg was traveling and couldn’t talk, but he did send me a quick e-mail to stress that he has never, ever suggested that any moves the Fed makes will lead to a militia uprising. Some smart people, though, including Meltzer, it appears, and Rosenberg do think the path of quantitative easing that the Fed looks likely to embark on is the wrong move. John Taylor, a top Fed scholar at Stanford, says eventually, you will have to pull the support out, and when you do a year from now when the economy is recovering he thinks it could be quite disruptive. So even if you don’t double-dip now, you might double-dip then. And even if you don’t, it would make for a slow recovery. Others, like Raghuram Rajan, who became famous for warning about the possibility of a financial crisis back in 2005, believe low interest rates could be creating new bubbles in, say, gold or commodities. So it seems clear what the Fed is likely to do. How the economy, the militias and the rest of us react is up in the air. The countdown is on. T-minus 15 days to Fedamageddon. See you then, hopefully. More on Time.com: Photos: A Brief History of the Federal Reserve Bank TIME’s Person of the Year 2009: Ben Bernanke The Winners and Losers of the Wall Street Mess |
So, I started this wiki over a year ago and it's time I walk away. Yeah, I know. Probably a shocker. I still love this franchise but I'm getting burned out on working on this wiki. As an admin, I've had to deal with some pretty nasty things that have happened in this fandom, and it's getting less and less worth it to hang around. On top of that, after one hacking indecent with wikia here, someone someone managed to get some personal information on me and started harassing me irl due to my position here. And this wiki ain't worth it, even if it means caving to some piece of human trash that apparently has nothing better to do with their time than harass me. Such a pitiful life. (And don't worry. Everything is sorted out. Just always be sure to change your passwords whenever you have a security breach and use two-phase login whenever you can.) Anyway, life irl is moving forward too. I'm about to defend my thesis and I'll be graduating soon and I need to start looking for a career... And I just need to live a little. I'm on this wiki a lot and it's been a passion project of mine. Even when I stepped down for a while, I still observed silently things that were happening. And I'll probably still be around. Just not near as much. The passion is gone and there are just things here I don't want to deal with anymore. I have no plans to take up my position again after today. I know Psychobilly stepped down recently, and after I started getting harassed, I'm the one who went to her and said its wasn't worth it anymore with her thinking along the same lines. Being in our positions made us targets for people who loathe this fandom. So, this day has been planned for a while. I just wanted to get past the Halloween update so we could quickly get through whatever madhouse that would bring. I know it's scary that I'm the second admin to leave within a month, but don't worry. You'll be in good hands. But I'm done now. I have better things to do in life. And I know some people will love the fact that I'm leaving. But you know what? Peace ;3 EDIT: ONE LAST THING! I wanted to state that, even with all the crap I've had to put up with on here, it hasn't been a thankless job. So thank you to everyone who gave me your help and support over the last year or so! |
This is such an amazing example of GOP chairman Reince Priebus's complete and total mastery of social media: @Reince Retweet if you know that Hillary and #Obama lied about #Benghazi http://t.co/... And just in case his words alone weren't enough to convince you, @Reince helpfully included a little infographic to help make his case:That's pretty much a slam dunk case there, right? Clearly, Hillary Clinton is covering up something on Benghazi because she said it doesn't make a difference whether or not it was preventable. Sure, except that's not at all what Hillary Clinton said. Not even close. What she said was that the GOP's obsession over the accuracy of Susan Rice's talking points was absurd. That was what she said didn't make a difference. And she then said: It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator. So it turns out that Hillary Clinton actually said the exact opposite of what Reince Priebus claimed she said. But the fact that his tweet was based on a lie doesn't mean Priebus has a bad social media strategy, because as long as the people he's trying to reach retweet his bogus claims, what difference does it make? |
The state Senate voted today to legalize marijuana for medical use, despite warnings the drug would fall into the hands of recreational users instead of the chronically ill patients who suffer from debilitating symptoms. The New Jersey Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act targets patients suffering from a debilitating disease defined as cancer, glaucoma, HIV and AIDS, and other chronic illnesses that cause "wasting syndrome, severe or chronic pain, seizures and severe and persistent muscle spasms," according to the bill. "We are not talking about drug addicts and thrill-seekers -- we are talking about desperately sick people in need of relief," Sen. Nicholas Scutari (D-Union), one of the bill's sponsors, said before the vote. In order to participate, patients would need a written recommendation from their doctor and approval from the state Department of Health and Senior Services, which would issue identification cards. Enrolled patients would be protected from criminal prosecution to possess up to six plants or one ounce of marijuana. The state would also license "compassion centers" that would grow and distribute the plants, according to the bill. "This is a vote of conscience," Sen. Raymond Lesniak (D-Union) said. "My conscience tells me we should ease people's pain and suffering, and give them hope. . .God knows they have suffered enough." But Sen. Fred Madden (D-Gloucester) argued the bill's language is too broad, and could replicate the kinds of abuses seen in San Diego and Los Angeles, "where some doctors are giving marijuana essentially for every ailment they could think of" -- from premenstrual syndrome, attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia, Madden said. Sen. Gerald Cardinale (R-Bergen) said the legislation would "make sense" if it had been written to benefit the most "severely debilitated patients" like the terminally ill. As is, however, "it's the wrong thing for people in New Jersey and the wrong thing for our children," he said. The Senate approved the bill by a vote of 22-16 with two abstentions. "God bless them," Stephen Cuspilich, a 46-year-old Burlington County man diagnosed with Crohn's disease, said immediately after the vote. Should the measure become law, he said access to legal marijuana would enable him to stop taking five of the sick medications he requires to control cramping and nausea caused by the chronic inflammatory disease of the gastrointestinal tract. As someone who has used the illegal drug to quell nausea and other symptoms associated with the chronic lung and digestive disease cystic fibrosis, Gareth Muchmore, a 22-year-old man from Vernon, said he prefers government to be involved with the testing and regulation of medical marijuana. "If the government grew it, the potency could be controlled and the amount could be controlled," said Muchmore, who donned a suit and made his first trip to the state capital to show his support for the bill. "It should be in the hands of trusted officials, not just patients." New Jersey would be the 14th state to create a sanctioned medical marijuana program if the legislation passes both houses and is signed into law by the governor. But the legislation still has a long way to go. There's been no movement on the Assembly version of the bill, sponsored by Assemblymen Reed Gusciora, (D-Mercer), Michael Patrick Carroll (R-Morris) and Assemblyman Joan Voss (D-Hudson). And opponents said they are gearing up to defeat the measure if it gains any momentum in the Assembly. "There is no doubt in my mind the Assembly will be very cautious dealing with this," John Tomicki said, the executive director of the League of American Families. "Parents are alarmed they've given the green light for marijuana use." David Evans an attorney and executive director of the Drug Free School Coalition, a national group, said his organization will mobilize to challenge the bill in the lower house. "This is dressed up as compassion but this bill is way, way too loose," Evans said. "It will be too easy to get marijuana." Related coverage: Scott Ward, who has multiple sclerosis, tells reporter Brian Donohue medical marijuana is the only thing that relieves his pain. |
Onetime Libertarian presidential nominee Ron Paul said Monday he isn’t planning to support Gary Johnson, the party’s nominee for 2016. Instead, the former Texas congressman told MSNBC that he agrees with Green Party candidate Jill Stein on many issues. After he was introduced as a Stein supporter, Paul was quick to point out that he is not endorsing Stein or anyone else. But he said he feels Stein’s policies have a libertarian bent. “Liberty is all chopped to pieces,” Paul said. “Liberals defend some parts of liberty and conservatives other parts and progressives are pretty good too on foreign policy.” “I said if the independents who don’t know what to do and who should they pick, I say if you tend to lead progressivism and liberalism and you are interested in expressing yourself—you can vote for the Green Party,” Paul clarified. Paul said he doesn’t feel that Johnson embodies a libertarian message. He also doesn’t feel there’s anyone in the 2016 field who people that want to vote “for liberty” can feel good about supporting. “(Stein’s) probably the best on foreign policy at the moment,” Paul said. “On Gary Johnson, he does not come across with a crisp libertarian message. If you wants to express yourself—I am voting for the non-aggressive principles that create the libertarian message. And that is, nobody can commit aggression. Individuals cannot, nor the government. Unfortunately, there’s not a crisp answer— this individual represents liberty and if you vote for this person, you will be voting for liberty and truly expressing yourself.” Paul did come to Johnson’s defense for his now-infamous “Aleppo” gaffe, however. “It does not build confidence in the individual but should not be disqualifying,” Paul said. “When that is done, the politician is embarrassed. I would like to ask the interviewer some snap questions, like ‘Who’s the president of Switzerland?’ Most people don’t know. But, it should not disqualify you. It does raise eyebrows and put question marks out there. =” Watch below via MSNBC: |
The sky above Rome still had a reddish tint to it as the Alitalia Airbus took off from Ciampino airport at 8:15 a.m. on Thursday, carrying Pope Benedict XVI, several bishops and cardinals and close to 70 journalists on board. It was the beginning of the pope's four-day visit to his homeland, his first state visit to Germany, and one that has already generated enormous interest in the country, particularly his Thursday afternoon address to the German parliament in Berlin. His core message in Germany is clear: Do not turn your backs on religion; do not turn your backs on the Catholic Church. But the very first message he sought to communicate on his trip was addressed to his host country Italy. The pope sends a telegram to all heads of state over whose territory he flies when travelling abroad. In addition to the Austrian and Czech heads of state, the pope also wrote to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. "The moment in which I leave Italian territory is marked by my wish for an intensive ethical renewal for the good of my beloved Italy," he wrote. The message was difficult to misunderstand, a clear criticism of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the slow erosion of the country's values and financial stability over which he has presided. The message was all the more powerful coming as it did just days after the country's credit rating was downgraded by Standard & Poor's. Bluntness and Lamentation Just moments after touching down in Berlin, the Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi spoke even more clearly. "In the future, we will all have plenty to do to responsibly address the many problems in the country," he said. One can hardly be more blunt. After just over 24 hours on German soil, that bluntness would seem to have become the theme of the pope's visit. One of the first things the pope said upon arrival was a lamentation of the increasing indifference toward religion in Germany. Speaking in the German parliament on Thursday afternoon, the pope warned the gathered politicians against sacrificing their own ideals for the sake of power. And in meetings with Muslim leaders on Friday, the pope praised the "great importance" Muslims placed on religion. "At times, this is thought-provoking in a society that tends to marginalize religion or at most to assign it a place among the individual's personal choices," he said. It is tempting, of course, to see such comments as mere empty rhetoric. But the pope seems to know exactly what he is up against on this trip to his homeland. The sexual abuse scandal which shook the Church in Germany last year is still an open wound. It's a scandal which led to 181,000 Germans turning their backs on the Catholic Church in 2010 alone. Protests have marked, but not marred, his visit so far. Even his speech before the Bundestag was not without controversy -- dozens of parliamentarians stayed away out of protest that his visit violated the separation of church and state. A Boon for Benedict? Indeed, many Vatican observers have noted that it could end up being the most difficult trip of his six-year-old papacy. And it could ultimately resemble his trip to Britain last October -- a trip which began with heavy criticism of the Catholic Church and widespread protests only to become a wildly successful visit and a boon to Benedict's image. Indeed, he seemed to hint at the importance of the trip during his talk with reporters high above the clouds on his way to Berlin. In response to a softball question about how German he still feels as a pope in Rome, Benedict said that one's roots "cannot be severed, nor should they be." As if in recognition of both the potential pitfalls and the opportunities presented by his visit, Pope Benedict XVI has confronted possible controversy head on. He addressed the abuse scandal early in his visit, urging Germans to stay true to the Church but expressing understanding for those victims and families of victims who have lost faith in the institution. There are, he said, both "good fish and bad fish in the Lord's net." It was, however, his speech to the German Bundestag which has been the most parsed since his arrival. Even before he got to Berlin, Vatican observers, studying the speech on the plane on the way to Berlin, were astounded at what they read. It was as if the old Joseph Ratzinger had returned, the theology professor who never really wanted to become pope. A Political Speech He did not mince words. He spoke about nature and reason and demanded from the parliamentarians an increased sense of moral responsibility for ecology and equality. It was a very political speech. It was courageous. And it was unique. A politician's "fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work as a politician must not be success, and certainly not material gain," the pope said. "Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the fundamental preconditions for peace." A politician's success, he continued, should be "subordinated to the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of what is right." Pointedly, he added "we Germans have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it." The pope flew to Erfurt on Friday morning, where he visited the monastery where Martin Luther lived before he turned his back on Catholicism. It is a stop which is being seen as a gesture of reconciliation. But judging from his first day in Germany, one can expect that Pope Benedict XVI will make sure that the message of the visit is clear. In all its bluntness. With reporting by Fiona Ehlers |
Technology companies and the federal government are locked in an escalating legal battle over data surveillance and consumer rights, said Microsoft’s General Counsel Brad Smith at a Law School forum Tuesday. Smith, the executive vice president for legal and corporate affairs at Microsoft, spoke to a packed room in Wasserstein Hall about the erosion of trust in technology in light of recent reports of government digital surveillance. “You cannot restore trust without greater transparency. Now the question is, how?” he said. Conversing with Law School Professor Jonathan L. Zittrain, who moderated the forum, Smith argued that the U.S. government must respect both domestic and international privacy laws, instead of unilaterally and opaquely obtaining data. Microsoft and other technology companies filed a lawsuit against the government earlier this year, claiming that the U.S. government should not be allowed to snoop in emails and other files housed overseas, he said. “When should the United States government be able to reach into a data center built in another country to get the data inside?” he asked. “That really goes to the heart of sovereignty. It basically means that whenever an American company builds a building in another country, that building is subject to the sovereign reach of the United States government.” Advertisement Smith also discussed the potential for international conflict if, for example, China or Iran built a data center in the U.S. to shelter files from their country of origin. “This is where one creates a real risk of fostering chaos on the internet,” he said. “Are people going to continue to be able to have the confidence that their rights are going to be protected by their own constitutions? Or is it something that will be overridden by other governments and their laws?” In light of the day’s midterm elections, Smith predicted that a continued legislative stalemate would place the burden of mediation between technology companies and the government on the federal courts. “One of the defining trends of our time, polarization of politics, is leading to a gridlock[ed] Congress,” he said. “We’ll see what happens in the elections today, but in an era of gridlock, we should probably expect more court action.” David E. Sanger ’82, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, asked whether the battle between private data encryption and government code-breaking would amount to a technological arms race. “In the tug-of-war between government and technology, the arms race has already started,” responded Smith. “In the absence of any real discussion, we’re just going to have an arms race in perpetuity.” |
ACHILL ISLAND, Ireland – A beach that was swept away more than 30 years ago from a remote island off the west coast of Ireland has reappeared after thousands of tons of sand were deposited on top of the rocky coastline. The 300 metre beach near the tiny village of Dooagh on Achill Island vanished in 1984 when storms stripped it of its sand, leaving nothing more than a series of rock pools. But after high spring tides last month, locals found that the Atlantic Ocean had returned the sand. READ MORE: Scottish surfer lost at sea recalls helplessness as ships sailed away “It’s enormously significant,” Sean Molloy of Achill’s tourism office told the Irish Times newspaper, recalling how the popular beach once sustained four hotels and a number of guesthouses on the west coast of the island of 2,600 people. “Achill already has five blue-flag beaches, so we are hoping that in time it will be awarded a sixth.” The island, the largest off the coast of Ireland, forms part of the Wild Atlantic Way, a tourist trail stretching from the south of the country to the north-west that has benefited from a tourist boom in the European Union’s fastest-growing economy. |
Warner Brothers | Getty Images. Two of the technology world's most powerful billionaires are concerned we are living in a Matrix-style simulated world and are working with scientists to break us out. Two of the technology world's most powerful billionaires are concerned we are living in a Matrix-style simulated world and are working with scientists to break us out. In an article in The New Yorker, writer Ted Friend explains that the idea of the "simulation hypothesis" has been on the rise among tech's elite. "Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation," Friend claimed. Neither of the billionaires were named in the piece. The idea has gained traction in recent years with the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Earlier this year, Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) boss Elon Musk said that there's "a billion to one chance we're living in base reality", meaning the billionaire thinks the odds are that we are living in a computer simulation. Musk argues that some technology is becoming indistinguishable from real life. He took the example of the game "Pong" which has evolved over 40 years into advanced gaming and virtual and augmented reality. "If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then games will become indistinguishable from reality," Musk said. And a Bank of America Merrill Lynch report from last month suggested that there was a 20 percent to 50 percent chance we are living in a simulated virtual world. Friend's claim in the The New Yorker came in an article based on an interview with Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator helping companies get off the ground. Altman echoed some of Musk's worries over the advancement of technology. "These phones already control us," Altman declared. "The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the AI or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into the cloud. I'd love that." "We need to level up humans, because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever. What a time to be alive!" More From CNBC |
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Lab at Department of State Health Services in Austin testing mosquitoes for Zika and other viruses. (KXAN Photo/Richie Bowes) Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Lab at Department of State Health Services in Austin testing mosquitoes for Zika and other viruses. (KXAN Photo/Richie Bowes) AUSTIN (KXAN) -- While none of Texas' 93 Zika cases have been locally transmitted through mosquito bites, the state says with local Zika cases detected in Florida, they are ramping up their efforts to make sure Texans take all precautionary measures to prevent Zika. The Department of State Health and Services Wednesday said it's spending more than $6 million in federal and state funds on surveillance, lab testing, public education and awareness as well as Zika prevention kids. Texas Medicaid will now cover the cost of mosquito repellent for eligible women starting Aug. 9. As people travel to Brazil for the Olympics, Texas officials believe the risk of local Zika transmission is now much higher. "It's the perfect mix - local transmission in Florida, travel to Brazil, and we're at the height of mosquito season in Texas," said Dr. John Hellerstedt, Texas Department of State Health Services commissioner. "Local transmission here is likely at some point. The good news is that Texas is ready." If local transmission is detected in Texas-which the state says is likely at "some point"-the state has eight state public health Zika Response Teams at the ready. The state believes if local transmission does happen, it's more likely to appear in small pockets instead of a appearing across a large area of the state. Currently, 42 women in Texas have been reported to the CDC's Zika Pregnancy Registry. That number includes three pregnant woman who are confirmed Zika cases. Women who are between the ages of 10 and 45 or pregnant are eligible for the free repellent. To be covered, a doctor must prescribe the repellent and the patient must pick it up at a pharmacy. The patient can call their doctor to ask for a prescription, there is no need to actually go into the office. Patients can present their Medicaid prescription card just like they would with any prescription. Eligible women can get up to two cans per month through Oct. 31. Women in the following programs are covered: Medicaid CHIP CHIP-Perinate Healthy Texas Women Family Planning For more information on coverage and preventative measures, visit TexasZika.org. |
Astrophotographer Peter Greig captured this created this composite view of the 2013 Perseid meteor shower over Lindisfarne Castle on Holy Island in Northumberland, U.K., on Aug. 11, 2013. Each summer, amateur astronomers from all over the world look forward to observing the famous Perseid meteor shower, but often overlook six lesser celestial fireworks displays that reach their peak between July 28 and Aug. 20. This year, a bright nearly-full moon will seriously interfere with Perseid meteor observing, so why not take this opportunity to try and view the other six, all but one of which will enjoy dark skies. That minor meteor shower sextet begins Monday (July 28), with the peak of the Delta Aquarid meteor shower. The online Slooh community observatory will stream live views of the Delta Aquarids in a webcast Monday night (July 28) at 10 p.m. EDT (7 p.m. PDT/0200 GMT) featuring views from observatories in Arizona and the Canary Islands. NASA, meanwhile, will provide a follow-up webcast on Tuesday night via all-sky cameras at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Both the Slooh and NASA webcasts are dependent on weather conditions at their respective observing sites. You can watch the Delta Aquarid meteor shower webcasts on Space.com each night. Minor meteor showers this summer In general, the Earth encounters richer meteoric activity during the second half of the year. And you're more likely to see twice as many meteors per hour in the predawn hours as compared to the evening hours, weather permitting. This is due to the fact that during the pre-midnight hours we are on the "trailing" side of the Earth, due to our orbital motion through space. So any meteoric particle generally must have an orbital velocity greater than that of the Earth to "catch" us. [Amazing Meteor Shower Photos by Stargazers] However, after midnight when observers are looking up from the Earth's "leading" side, any particle that lies along the Earth's orbital path will enter our atmosphere as a meteor. As such objects collide with the Earth's atmosphere at speeds of 7 to 45 miles per second (11 to 72 km/second), their energy of motion rapidly dissipates in the form of heat, light, and ionization, creating short-lived streaks of light popularly referred to as "shooting stars." Summertime meteors, occasionally flitting across your line of sight are especially noticeable between mid-July and the third week of August. And between Aug. 3 and Aug. 15, there are no fewer than six different minor displays that are active. These six are listed in the table included in this guide. The minor meteor showers of summer, including peak times, estimated meteor rates and a brief description, are listed in this skywatching table. Clear weather and dark night skies away from city lights are vital for meteor shower observing. (Image: © Space.com/Joe Rao) Patience and clear skies Learn why famous meteor showers like the Perseids and Leonids occur every year [ See the Full Infographic Here ]. (Image: © Karl Tate, SPACE.com contributor) The only equipment you'll need to see this summer's meteor showers are your eyes, a modest amount of patience, good weather and dark skies. The actual number of meteors a single observer can see in an hour depends strongly on sky conditions. The rates given in the table are based on your ability to see stars as faint as magnitude +6.5 —considered to be the threshold of naked eye visibility — that you are an experienced observer, and an assumption that the radiant is directly overhead. The radiant is the place in the sky where the paths of shower members, if extended backward, would intersect when plotted on a star chart. Your clinched fist held at arm's length is equal to roughly 10 degrees on the sky. So if the radiant is 30 degrees ("three-fists") above the horizon, the hourly rate is halved. At 15 degrees, it is cut to a third. While the hourly rates from these other meteor streams are but a fraction of the numbers produced by the Perseids, combined, overall they provide a wide variety of meteors of differing colors, speeds and trajectories. Among these are the Southern Delta Aquarids, which can produce faint, medium speed meteors; the Alpha Capricornids, described as "slow, bright, long trailed yellowish meteors" and the Kappa Cygnids which are classified as "slow moving and sometimes producing brilliant flaring fireballs." As such, if you stay out and watch long enough, you may be nicely rewarded for the time spent. Note that five of the six showers listed in chart included in this guide, come from the region around the constellations of Aquarius and Capricornus. These constellations are currently highest in the southern sky between roughly 1 and 3 a.m. your local time. As for the Kappa Cygnids and Northern Iota Aquarids, the moon will be waning in illumination, but will still shine at a relatively bright gibbous phase, which will unfortunately brighten the predawn morning sky. Of these six minor showers, the Kappa Cygnids are the most favorably placed for northern observers. The constellation Cygnus lies high overhead at around midnight making it favorably placed for viewing all night long. Editor's note:If you capture an amazing photo of a Delta Aquarid meteor, or any other shooting star display, and would like to share it with Space.com for potential story or image gallery, send images and comments in to managing editor Tariq Malik at: spacephotos@space.com. Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer's Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, N.Y. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. |
Chiaki Kuriyama (栗山 千明, Kuriyama Chiaki, born October 10, 1984) is a Japanese actress, singer, and model. She is best known in the West for her roles as Takako Chigusa in Kinji Fukasaku's 2000 film Battle Royale and Gogo Yubari in Quentin Tarantino's 2003 film Kill Bill: Volume 1. Life and career [ edit ] She was born in Tsuchiura, Ibaraki. Kuriyama was a popular model during Japan's child model boom in the mid-1990s. In 1997, she appeared in the photobooks Shinwa-Shōjo (Girl of Myth) and Shōjokan (Girl's Residence), photographed by Kishin Shinoyama. Shinwa-Shōjo became a best-seller but, as it contained some nudity, was discontinued by the publisher in 1999 after the institution of new anti–child pornography laws.[citation needed] She also posed as a model for the child fashion magazines Nicola (1997–2001) and Pichi Lemon (1996–2001).[citation needed] She first achieved widespread recognition as an actress in Japan for her starring roles in the horror films Shikoku (1999) and Ju-on (2000). Chiaki also appeared in the 2000 action film Battle Royale as Takako Chigusa. Following feature appearances on several notable Japanese television programs (including Rokubanme no Sayoko), Kuriyama made her Hollywood debut in director Quentin Tarantino's 2004 film Kill Bill: Volume 1 as Gogo Yubari, the schoolgirl bodyguard of yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu). Kuriyama's other film appearances include major roles in the ninja drama Azumi 2: Death or Love and Takashi Miike's Yōkai Daisensō. In 2010, she released the CD single "Ryūsei no Namida" on DefStar Records under the artist name "CHiAKi KURiYAMA". The song was used as the first ending theme for Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn. This single was followed by three others under her name as traditionally written in Japanese: "Kanōsei Girl", "Cold Finger Girl", and "Oishii Kisetsu" / "Ketteiteki Sanpunkan"; "Kanōsei Girl" was used as the third opening theme for Yorinuki Gin Tama-san and "Cold Finger Girl" was used as the opening for the anime adaptation of Level E. She followed the singles with an album, Circus, in 2011.[1] Discography [ edit ] Album [ edit ] List of albums, with selected chart positions Title Album details Peak positions Sales (JPN)[2] JPN [3] Circus Released: March 16, 2011 Re-released: January 11, 2012 Label: Defstar Records Formats: CD, CD/DVD, digital download 19 12,000 Singles [ edit ] Filmography [ edit ] Kuriyama at an event in 2010 TV series [ edit ] Films [ edit ] Voice roles [ edit ] Video games [ edit ] Stage [ edit ] Dogen's adventure (2008) (2008) Coast of Utopia (2009) (2009) Midnight in Bali (2017) [13] Photobooks [ edit ] Awards and nominations [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] |
What is the trend in snow cover extent and snow mass in Europe? Past trends Satellite observations on the monthly snow cover extent in the Northern Hemisphere are available since 1967. Snow covered on average 45 % of the land area of the Northern Hemisphere in winter (December to February), varying from less than 41 % in 1980–1981 to over 48 % in 1977–1978. A detailed analysis of Northern hemisphere snow cover based on multiple sources shows significant decreases in snow cover extent during the spring melting season (March to June); changes in other seasons are not significant. The decrease in snow cover extent in the Northern Hemisphere during the period 1967 to 2012 was 7% on average in March and April and 53% in June (Figure 1) [i]. A separate analysis for Europe (EEA39 region) shows even larger reductions of 13% for March and April and 87% for June (Figure 2). Decreases in snow cover extent are caused by an earlier onset and a shorter duration of the snow-melting season. Since 1972, the duration of the snow season averaged over the Northern Hemisphere declined by 5 days per decade, but with substantial regional variation. The duration of the snow season has decreased by up to 25 days in western, northern and eastern Europe due to earlier spring melt whereas it has increased by up to 15 days in southeastern Europe due to an earlier onset [ii]. Trends in snow depth vary in different parts of Europe. In some mountain regions, such as the Alps and the Norwegian mountains, snow depth has decreased at low elevations where the temperature increased over the freezing point whereas it has increased at high elevations where both precipitation and temperature have increased but the temperature has remained below the freezing point for extended periods [iii]. In other mountain regions such as the Carpathians, Tatra, Pyrenees, and Caucasus, there have been either decreasing or variable trends [iv]. In the lowlands of western Europe, snow is not a permanent winter phenomenon — it may come and go several times during the cold months. Decreasing snow cover trends have been observed in this region, but snow conditions correlate strongly with large-scale circulation patterns as indicated by the NAO [v]. The snow mass (i.e. the amount of water that the snow contains) is another important variable describing seasonal snow. For the whole Northern Hemisphere, a 7 % decrease in March snow mass has been observed between 1982 and 2009 [vi]. An extension of this data focusing on EEA member countries demonstrates a stronger average decline of more than 20 % for the period 1980-2012, although the year-to-year variation is large (Figure 3). Projections Northern Hemisphere snow cover will continue to shrink as temperatures rise [vii]. The multi-model mean from the CMIP5 modelling exercise projects changes in March/April snow cover extent in the Northern Hemisphere during the 21st century from 7 % for a low emission scenario (RCP 2.6) to 25 % for a high emission scenario (RCP 8.5) (Figure 4). Projected reductions in snow mass range from about 10 % for RCP2.6 to about 30 % for RCP8.5; projected reductions in the duration of the snow season range from about 10 days for RCP2.6 to about 40 days for RCP8.5 [viii]. Significant reductions in snow mass in Europe are likely to occur in Switzerland [ix], the alpine range of Italy [x], the Pyrenees [xi], the Turkish mountains [xii] and Balkan mountains [xiii]. In these areas the change can have dramatic down-stream effects as melt water contributes up to 60–70 % of annual river flows. Despite the projected decrease in long-term mean snow mass in the Northern Hemisphere, model simulations indicate occasional winters of heavy snowfall, but these become increasingly uncommon towards the end of the 21st century. |
(Press Release – Mammoth Lakes Police Department) On Tuesday morning, July 31, Mammoth Lakes Police and Wildlife Specialist Steve Searles responded to a call of a bear in the area of A Frame Liquor with a metal lid stuck on its head. The 125 pound, 19 month old bear was found in the area of the Shady Rest tract. It had what appeared to be the lid from a recycling bin around its neck. The bear apparently stuck its head in a recycling bin and the lid became stuck. The California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) was contacted and game wardens, under the direction of Lieutenant Bill Dailey, responded. The bear was shot with a tranquilizer dart behind a house on Mono Street. Once sedated, the metal lid, weighing in excess of 10 pounds was removed. The bear was found to be in good health. He was tagged and transported to a remote area and released. Wildlife Specialist Searles said that the bear could not climb a tree or eat with the large, heavy metal lid on its neck. It would not have survived without human intervention. |
Coming Soon The Stand Off In 1969, L.A.'s newly formed SWAT team attempts to raid the Black Panther Party headquarters, resulting in an intense face-off that lasts for hours. HOOPS (2018) In this animated series, a foul-mouthed high school basketball coach is sure he'll hit the big leagues if he can only turn his terrible team around. My Husband Won't Fit Kumiko and Kenichi meet in college and build a happy marriage together. But over time, an unusual problem threatens to destroy their relationship. Trinkets In this coming-of-age series, three teenage girls from different social circles form an unlikely friendship over their shared affinity for shoplifting. Spinning Out After choking during an important performance, a competitive skater dealing with family issues and her own inner demons struggles to revive her career. The Witcher The witcher Geralt, a mutated monster hunter, struggles to find his place in a world where people often prove more wicked than beasts. Twelve Forever Twelve-year-old Reggie's desire to remain a child is so powerful that it opens up a fantasy world where she never has to grow up. Klaus A young postman forms an unlikely friendship with a reclusive toymaker in this animated Santa Claus origin story from the co-creator of "Despicable Me." |
After reading a post by Carl Elliott on this website in which Elliott discussed his upcoming presentation to an audience at a Pharmed-Out conference, I went to the Pharmed-Out Web site and ordered the tapes of their annual conference. Pharmed-Out is an organization at Georgetown Medical School of professors and students who are demanding that the training that future doctors receive reflect valid conclusions based on research untainted by the self-interest of purveyors of devices and pharmaceutical companies. In the present climate, the truth proves elusive. Almost all clinical studies of various drugs are designed and funded by the pharmaceutical companies. Only the studies which support efficacy of a drug are published while the more numerous negative studies are rarely acknowledged. While companies are supposed to register the studies they are conducting so that planned timing of study endpoints are public knowledge, these requirements are often ignored. Thus, when drug efficacy is lacking at the planned evaluation time point, companies scan the data for a time point when the drug seems efficacious. Then the company capitalizes on chance variation and publishes the positive finding. Drug companies pay “Key Opinion Leaders” to put their names on such questionable reports, and to provide continuing medical education for the practicing physicians. The end result is that even when physicians want to provide the best of care, they are limited by corruption of the sources from which they derive their information. This point is effectively documented by Ben Goldacre. In a Ted Talk, Goldacre related his attempt to garner accurate information about a particular antidepressant and his later realization that he had been duped. Marcia Angell, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, and her husband, Arnold Relman, have written extensively about the unhealthy relationship between pharmaceutical companies, purveyors of devises, medical education and the FDA. Of late, the story of corruption in medicine is receiving more focused attention. Recently, articles on the influence of the pharmaceutical companies on how doctors are informed appeared in the Washington Post (see Peter Worisky, November 24, 2012) and Scientific American (Charles Seife December 2012,). The 2012 documentary, Escape Fire, also talks about bad medicine (this can be documented for statins–see books by Stephen Sinatra and Duane Graveline) and Democracy Now’s U-tube interview with Steven Nissan on Escape Fire, focused on over-treatment. Several recent books (Overdiagnosed by researcher and physician H. Gilbert Welch et al. and Seeking Sickness by Alan Cassels M.D.) have questioned the value of screening for various diseases which ends up doing very little to effect end points, results in sometimes harmful treatments, and costs lots of money. Otis Brawley, the chief medical director of the American Cancer Society, in his 2012 book How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Rank about Being Sick In America, discusses the widespread use of a medication that was supposed to reduce fatigue in patients undergoing cancer treatment. Although there was evidence that the drug increased red blood cell production, fatigue reduction had not been established. Despite the lack of evidence for reducing fatigue, the drug was widely used. Later evidence emerged that the drug promoted tumor growth. In addition to stories about bad drugs and overtreatment, some have articulated the mechanisms enabling the current state of affairs. For an inside look at the power structure in medical schools, Doug Bremner, an Emory Psychiatrist, in The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, discusses the pressure coming from the Emory medical school in response to his study documenting the suicidal-ideation-inducing effect of Accutane, a drug used to treat acne. In the coming weeks, congress will be focused on reducing the national debt. There is a lot of talk about cutting entitlements, which include Medicare and Medicaid. We do have the world’s most expensive health care system, although we are not even close to being a nation with the best health. With the recognition that medications taken as directed are a leading cause of death (see 2000 JAMA by Barbara Starfield), one would think that someone would be asking the obvious questions. To his credit, Republican Senator Charles Grassley has been a strong advocate for reducing pharmaceutical company influence at the FDA, for investigating ghost writing of articles in medical journals, and eliminating the use of strong medications for foster children. Perhaps corruption in medicine can be one of the few issues on which Republicans and Democrats can agree. But, just as Dick Durbin said about the banks’ influence over congress, perhaps the pharmaceutical companies own the place. So, demanding integrity from the system will require a sea-change. Will the people demand it? Only if they know they are being mistreated by segments of the medical community they’ve always trusted. |
The current election campaign pits the forces of backlash (“the old and angry”) against the forces of frontlash (“the new and different”), and November’s vote will be “a referendum on the existence and civic participation of Americans who are not white men,” contended Rebecca Traister in a Wednesday piece for New York magazine. Traister posited that “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton…represent an altered power structure and changed calculations about who in this country may lead,” but warned, “While the resistance may be symptomatic of death throes, a rage at the dying of the white male light, it nonetheless presents a very real threat…Imagine Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or Marco Rubio in office with a Republican Congress and Supreme Court seats to fill. Voting: restricted. Immigration: halted. Abortion: banned. Equal pay: unprotected. Same-sex marriage: overturned.” From Traister’s article (bolding added): This moment, this election, these years represent the death throes of exclusive white male power in the United States…[T]he presidential-primary contest…is reflecting very real fury and violence in the non-electoral world: the burning of crosses and black churches, the execution of black men by police, the resistance of male soldiers to women in elite combat positions, a white man with a history of rape and violence against women himself a “warrior for the babies” after killing people at an abortion clinic, and a younger white man killing nine black churchgoers with the explanation “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country”… …Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton…represent an altered power structure and changed calculations about who in this country may lead. It is not coincidence that after seven years of a black president people are calling for lynchings at Republican rallies. It’s not some random quirk that eight years after a woman almost became the Democratic nominee, Republican candidates are crowing about their commitment to making pregnancy compulsory and accepting the endorsements of those who support violence against abortion providers. …This is the story of the slow expansion of possibility for figures who have long existed on the margins, and it is also the story of the dangerous rage those figures provoke… …This election is a referendum on the existence and civic participation of Americans who are not white men — as voters, as citizens, as workers, as members of the military, as presidents. And while the resistance may be symptomatic of death throes, a rage at the dying of the white male light, it nonetheless presents a very real threat — there is the possibility that the old and angry may triumph over the new and different…Imagine Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or Marco Rubio in office with a Republican Congress and Supreme Court seats to fill. Voting: restricted. Immigration: halted. Abortion: banned. Equal pay: unprotected. Same-sex marriage: overturned. …Clinton…will stand in as the symbolic target for those whose fury at increased female autonomy has been building...If she wins, she — and we — will be forced to do battle with this rising, chilling, ever more open threat from those who feel enraged that their country is no longer their own. I fear that there’s a lot more terror ahead of us. |
Microsoft has announced some pro-active measures to help users of Xbox Live , Skype and its other online service stop using bad passwords. The Microsoft Account system is the way people sign up to access Xbox Live, Skype, Office 365 , OneDrive and other services run by the company. In a blog post , Microsoft stated that the recent leak of over 100 million LinkedIn account details showed that many of their users had bad passwords, such as "password" "12345" and others: When it comes to big breach lists, cybercriminals and the Azure AD Identity Protection team have something in common – we both analyze the passwords that are being used most commonly. Bad guys use this data to inform their attacks – whether building a rainbow table or trying to brute force accounts by trying popular passwords against them. What we do with the data is prevent you from having a password anywhere near the current attack list, so those attacks won't work. This new setup is now live for all Microsoft Account users. The company says it will stop people from picking a commonly used password or one that is very similar. This post may contain affiliate links. See our disclosure policy for more details. |
Due to his incredibly prolific body of work with his record label, GroundUp Music, Michael League has his fingers in a lot of pies; the latest of which is a new band, started by League, called Bokanté. The word means ‘exchange’ in Creole, the language of the band’s vocalist Malika Tirolien, and the music is meant to represent this idea of a cultural exchange between the melting pot of musicians involved. For the most part, Strange Circles delivers on the aims that the band set out to achieve, with a vibrant album that makes clear the individual influences from each band member, but the experience does, at times, feel somewhat sterilised by League’s somewhat predictable arrangements. Perhaps the most thrilling element of Strange Circles is the simplicity of the compositions. It’s really satisfying to listen to each of the tracks and be able to pick out all of the individual threads that come together to make the songs so animated and aesthetically impressive. The album’s second track, “Nou Tout Sé Yonn”, has a moment towards the end where the bad demonstrates how they construct each song, by building up each section of the band layer by layer, until you have an incredibly texturally diverse cacophony, built from a series of very simple ideas. Unfortunately, whilst this is the album’s biggest strength, it also paves the way for its biggest flaw. Once you figure out how the pieces have been constructed, the arrangements across the album become predictable to the point where they start to feel generic. The pattern of Snarky Puppy-esque bass lines and baritone guitar riffs built on top of percussion lines with a satisfying mix of timbres, followed by Tirolien’s gorgeous, multi-tracked vocals, which are subtly complimented by Roosevelt Collier’s lap steel playing, gets a little tired after a while. Make no mistake, this is still an enjoyable album. The melodic writing and performances on Strange Circles are excellent, and there’s no denying that the band has heaps of chemistry, but unfortunately, some of the arrangements on the record feel somewhat worn and a little sterile. I think the lesson that the band needs to learn before they come out with their next project, is that having a distinct formula doesn’t necessarily translate into having a consistently engaging personality. Find out more about the band and purchase their album here Advertisements |
News about wearables tends to center around what device is being sported most often on the wrist of people. From the Galaxy Gear to the Fibits and Apple watches, the conversation around wearables is in an infantile state and usually results in a limited scope of coverage. At CES this year, some product manufacturers attempted to expand the category by combining the Internet of Things (IoT) and the practicality of wearables. Cloud connected pants, athletic shirts, and bandages were finally broadening the concept of what people should expect from a ‘wearable’. During its 2015 developer conference, Microsoft discussed its vision for Windows 10 and the IoT and today, a patent was found that points to a future Microsoft wearable technology. Microsoft issued a patent application for the creation of clothes that react to a wearer’s usage. Originally filed in February of last year, a report from SkyNews indicates that Microsoft is looking to smarten up clothing. Part of the patent goes into technology that can be used to measure and notify wearers on the longevity of clothing by alerting them to when their clothes are about to wear out. Perhaps most interesting was the notation about sending notifications to wearers through mild electrocution. [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]a person’s attire could act as a notification conduit[/pullquote] Specifically, “Techniques are described herein that are capable of providing electrical stimuli to the skin of a user to convey information to the user. For instance, the electrical stimuli may inform the user of an event, a condition, etc.” Microsoft further clarifies that, in contrast to vibrating wrist wears or missing vibrating notifications from tucked away phones, that a person’s attire could act as a notification conduit. Supposing the patent works out, people could receive stimuli from shirts, shoes, hats, etc. when receiving notifications, directions or personalized navigation based alerts such as shopping locations or favorited restaurants. Similar to several companies, Microsoft is looking past the use of current smartphone trends and into how users evolve with the technology. For instance people often text, conduct telephone calls, check messages, search the Internet, etc. Using mobile devices in such a manner may raise any of a variety of concerns, namely safety and or etiquette. In an effort to address such concerns, companies are developing devices that are capable of delivering content to users in an unobtrusive and/or hands-free manner. Whether or not the patent becomes a tangible product, it serves as an insight into Microsoft’s vision of how people will interact with information in the future. Thanks for the tip David! Share This Further reading: clothing |
AUSTRALIA spends 20 times more money on subsidising negatively geared property than funding start-up businesses and this could cost us jobs and our economic future, one senior financial analyst says. Ivor Ries, a Morgan’s stockbroking firm analyst, said one of the greatest weaknesses in the Australian economy was the lack of investment in infrastructure and early stage businesses. “We are miles behind places like the US in financing young, growth businesses. We’re pathetic really compared with the US,” he told the ABC this week. He said about $250 million was available in venture capital for young entrepreneurs each year. This was about 20 times less than what taxpayers spent subsidising investment properties, which do not create jobs. “We currently give $4 billion a year to investors via the tax system to subsidise people buying negatively geared rental accommodation,” he told news.com.au. Mr Ries said Australia was basically a country that subsidised nonproductive capital. “If someone borrows money to buy residential property, it doesn’t create any jobs,” he said. “We’re giving already well-off people subsidies to buy more property, whereas the country in total spends $250 million a year on venture capital. There’s something wrong with that balance.” It also meant that Australia was basically “exporting jobs”. “It just means there will be less jobs here in the longer term. We’re just exporting jobs at the moment,” he said. The money spent on venture capital was even less than the $1 billion Australians spent buying luxury sports utility vehicles (SUVs) every year. A high proportion of these vehicles will be used as private cars but written off as a business asset, which the taxpayer pays for. “The reality of life in Australia today is we subsidise people buying high-end SUVs but we don’t give as much to venture capital,” Mr Ries said. Mr Ries said the tax system should be tilted back towards things that actually created wealth and jobs. He saw at least two businesses a week that had developed some fantastic technology but could not get funding. “I’ll give them a list of 25 venture capital funds in Australia and I will say to them, ‘Don’t expect to get any money out of them because they are fully committed’ and I think any small business that’s got great new technology, or a great new business idea in Australia at the moment is probably getting that advice from multiple sources around the country,” he told the ABC. “We just don’t have the capacity to fund these businesses at the moment.” If Australians did start investing in venture capital at the same rate the US did, spending would jump from $250 million to $4.9 billion a year. The risk of not doing this could condemn the country to low employment growth and a sticky unemployment rate, which is hovering about 6 per cent. “These businesses are the Apples and Facebooks of tomorrow, they end up employing tens of thousands of people, and basically those businesses don’t get off the ground in Australia,” Mr Ries said. Instead they went mostly to the US, where they were 20 times more likely to find funding, but also to Europe and Asia. “They start up those businesses there, and they create new industries and new revenue streams for the governments in those economies. So we’re not just losing jobs, we’re actually losing future government revenue,” Mr Ries said. He said more tax concessions should be made available. “I think the government needs to make it much more attractive to invest in these things which, by their nature, are much more risky,” he told news.com.au. “Nine out of 10 of them will fail but the one that succeeds will often be hugely successful.” Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens said on Wednesday that Australia’s future prosperity would depend on raising the economy’s growth potential. “Our collective ability to deliver social policy outcomes, to enjoy the benefits of a good society, or at a more basic level to provide public services and even to defend ourselves, ultimately rests on a productive economy,” he said. “We all know that competitive markets, investment in education, skills and infrastructure, and adaptability, are key parts of that growth narrative.” |
Acorn pushes back, hugs McCain The beleaguered Democratic-leaning community group Acorn sends over this photograph: John McCain, in March of 2006, sitting beside Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek at an event Acorn co-sponsored in Florida. The immigration event, which other photos show was packed with red-shirted Acorn member, was co-sponsored by the local Catholic Archdiocese, the SEIU, and other groups. McCain, still spiting much of his party on immigration at the time, was the headliner. Bertha Lewis, Acorn's chief organizer, said in a statement that came with the photo, “It has deeply saddened us to see Senator McCain abandon his historic support for ACORN and our efforts to support the goals of low-income Americans." ”We are sure that the extremists he is trying to get into a froth will be even more excited to learn that John McCain stood shoulder to shoulder with ACORN, at an ACORN co-sponsored event, to promote immigration reform," she said. |
Goodale Pro Hardware Closing Doors in Grandview After eight years of serving the hardware needs of Grandview Heights and the surrounding areas, Goodale Pro Hardware is closing its doors for good. Father-and-son owners Jeff and Jeffrey Zettler have labeled the closure as a retirement sale, and currently have all items in the store priced to close out all inventory. When the store opened in 2009, it was a complement to the Downtown Zettler Hardware store, which had served the community since the 1840s. The Downtown store closed temporarily in 2012 for repairs after a car crashed into the front of the building, but it never reopened for business. No final day of operation has been set as of yet, but Zettler stated that it would likely be late-April or early-May. For more information, visit www.goodalehardware.com. Related Articles: No related articles. About the Author Walker is the co-founder of ColumbusUnderground.com and TheMetropreneur.com along with his wife and business partner Anne Evans. Walker has turned local media into a full time career over the past decade and serves on multiple boards and committees throughout the community. Tags: |
Izvor: N1 Apsolutni šampion među automobilima po izboru stručnjaka, novinara i samih vozača, dvadeset pet godina uzastopno europski auto godine, zvijezda automobilskih salona i sajmova u Ženevi, Frankfurtu, Detroitu i Tokiju, najbolji je automobil na svijetu – znate tu staru zajebanciju – hrvatski službeni automobil. Ima ih, istina, s boljim performansama, ima i jačih i bržih, ima i većih i komfornijih, i ljepših i štedljivijih, ima ih čak – nema mnogo, ali ima - i skupljih i luksuznijih, ima pouzdanijih - svakako ima pouzdanijih: hrvatski službeni automobil traje jedva godinu-dvije – ali ono čime naš ponos ubija svaku konkurenciju jest cijena. Kad se uračunaju registracija, kasko-osiguranje i posebna oprema, službeni automobil hrvatskog nekog načelnika, pročelnika ili ministra u maloprodaji – zajedno sa svim pristojbama i trošarinama, carinom i PDV-om – dođe maksimalno nula kuna. Preciznije, nula zarez nula nula. Svakakvih smo se tako prohtjeva i izvoljevanja na tržištu hrvatskih službenih automobila naslušali proteklih decenija, čitali smo kako HDZ-ov načelnik siromašnih malih Perušića za godišnji proračun mjesnog dječjeg vrtića kupuje terenac Mercedes E250 Bluetec 4Matic, i kako Čačićev nekakav Centar za praćenje poslovanja u energetskom sektoru naručuje automobile sa ksenonskim svjetlima i grijanim kožnim sjedalima, i kako slavna SDP-ova županica Marina Lovrić Merzel nabavlja limuzinu s MP3-playerom i deset zvučnika, i kako HDZ-ov načelnik gladnog i nezaposlenog Obrovca Ante Župan naručuje službeni automobil s parking-senzorima, radarskim sustavom i trozonskom klimatizacijom, svega smo se, rekoh, i svačega načitali u hrvatskim natječajima za nabavu službenih automobila, čuli smo da se nabavljaju automobili specifične metalik boje, sa tristo konjskih snaga, sedam brzina, aluminijskim naplatcima, kojekakvim raznim sustavima, senzorima, grijačima, zvučnicima i kućnim kinima, ali nikad još nije se čulo da Vlada Republike Hrvatske nabavlja službeni automobil sa - nosačem za strojnu pušku. A baš tako stoji u posljednjem natječaju Ministarstva unutarnjih poslova, kojim se za pišljivih trinaest milijuna kuna, niti dva milijuna eura, traže dva službena automobila visoke klase od nekih četiri stotine sedamdeset konjskih snaga, s „automatskom klimom u minimalno tri zone, hladnjakom u stražnjem sjedalu putničke kabine, multimedijalnim paketom s ozvučenjem, navigacijom i USB-priključkom, paketom komfora za stražnja sjedala, sustavima za samostalno gašenje požara vozila, omogućavanje nužnog izlaza iz vozila i komprimirani zrak u putničkom prostoru, specijalnim naplatcima za kretanje bez tlaka, senzorima za suzavac, prekidačem za hitno otvaranje prtljažnika“, bla bla bla, sve dakle uobičajeno za hrvatski službeni automobil, takorekuć obavezna oprema, plus „balistička zaštita minimalno CEN 6/7“ i – „nosač strojnog naoružanja u kabini vozila“. Balistička zaštita? Nosač strojnog naoružanja u kabini vozila?! Kad sam vidio vijest o natječaju Ministarstva unutarnjih poslova za nabavu blindiranih automobila s nosačima za strojnice, prvo sam pomislio kako premijer Andrej Plenković u jesenskoj rekonstrukciji Vlade na mjestu ministra policije vidi Tomislava Horvatinčića: sve Horvatinčićeve tehničke probleme u prijevozu i odnosima s javnošću, sad je i vama došlo pameti, riješila bi jedna moćna blindirana limuzina od petsto konja s ugrađenim mitraljezom. Osim, eto, ukoliko se u njima neće voziti ministar unutarnjih poslova Tomislav Horvatinčić, za što točno hrvatskoj Vladi trebaju teške, blindirane zvijeri s nosačima za mitraljeze? Ne dakle za trozonsku klimu ili surround-zvuk, već isključivo za uništavanje neprijateljske žive sile i tehničko-materijalnih sredstava? I što je sljedeće? Službeno višenamjensko borbeno oklopno vozilo Ministarstva gospodarstva, sivozelena metalik Patria AMV sa run-flat gumama, hidro-pneumatskim ovjesom i senzorima za parkiranje? Službeni tenk Ministarstva financija, luksuzni M1A2 Abrams s plinskom turbinom od hiljadu i pol konja, glatkocijevnim topom od 120 mm, grijanim kožnim sjedištima i multimedijskim sustavom s dvanaest zvučnika? U Ministarstvu su, jasno, objasnili kako će naručene limuzine služiti za prijevoz VIP-osoba, vrlo važnih ili very important persona, ali objašnjenje je prilično – da ne kažem upravo tipično policijski – glupo: službeni automobil po definiciji služi za very important persone, ništa manje od very important persone na službeni automobil ni nema pravo, već obične important osobe voze se taksijem ili Uberom. Ne voze se službenim limuzinama, jebiga, profesori, učitelji, kirurzi, medicinske sestre, pisci i balerine, već baš važne osobe, načelnici općina, župani, ministri, doministri i premijeri. Sav nepojamni luksuz u cestovnim krstaricama very important Hrvata stoga je razumljiv, jer se izravno tiče njihova komfora – ne očekujete valjda od županijskog pročelnika da se vozi hladna dupeta? – osim, eto, strojnog naoružanja, jedinog u cjelokupnoj full-opremi službenog automobila koje se tiče osoba izvan vozila, pješaka i prolaznika, dakle tuđeg, ako hoćete vrlo vašeg, dupeta i komfora. Teška strojnica na nosaču u kabini službenog automobila, u najkraćemu, namijenjena je samo i isključivo ubijanju radnih ljudi i građana koji imaju problem s važnošću vrlo važne osobe u automobilu. I, jasno, nevažnošću svojih milijun eura spičkanih na Mad Max skalameriju s mitraljezom u Vladinoj garaži. Obrazloženje iz MUP-a kako te vrlo važne osobe mogu biti visoki strani gosti, predsjednici i kraljevi, prilično je – da ne ponavljam sad „tipično policijski“ – glupo: dođu li u Hrvatsku Donald Trump ili Vladimir Putin, njihovo se osiguranje sasvim jamačno neće oslanjati na strojnicu u službenom automobilu hrvatskog MUP-a. Ili će nam dakle novi ministar policije biti Tomislav Horvatinčić, ili je premijer Plenković procijenio da je članovima njegova kabineta za sigurnost u službenom vozilu - osim ABS-a, zračnih jastuka, pojasa, navigacije, protupožarne opreme i balističke zaštite - neophodna i ugrađena moćna strojna puška, recimo NATO-ov omiljeni Minigun M134, opaki američki mašinengever što iz svojih šest cijevi izbacuje pet-šest hiljada metaka u minuti. Čisto da se ne zajebava sa sirenom i rotacijskim svjetlima kad zapne u gradskoj gužvi. Ili, nedajbože, u proboju preko Bleiburga. 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From Trussville Tribune staff reports JEFFERSON COUNTY – One person is dead following what deputies believe is a robbery. The triple shooting incident occurred at the 7100 block of Old Jasper Highway in Jefferson County according to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. Three people were shot at about 10 a.m. at the Black Diamond Paving on Old Jasper Highway. According to the report, an employee at Black Diamond Paving began investigating a car that was parked nearby. A man inside the car opened fire, striking the employee, who managed to return fire. One of the three who were shot during the incident is believed to be a suspect in what might have been a robbery gone wrong. He had been struck in the chest and was pronounced dead at the scene. A second was shot in the side and fled on foot but was captured shortly. The third who was shot was found walking close to the business and was transported to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Police continue to investigate. UPDATE: The man who died on the scene has been identified as Carlos Danyell Cole Jr, 20, of Birmingham, according to a release by the Jefferson County Coroner’s/Medical Examiner’s Office. He was also known as Carlos Westbrook. |
The PBE has been updated! First up the massive amount of experimental preseason changes HAVE BEEN REMOVED, although theupdate is still up for testing. Other than that we have updates to the 2014 Ranked Reward summoner icons, tentative balance changes for, and more!Continue reading for more information! (Warning: PBE Content is tentative and iterative - what you see may not reflect what eventually gets pushed to live servers! Manage your expectations accordingly. ) 2014 Ranked Reward Summoner Icons Update Solo - Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Challenger 1 - 2 - 3 3v3 - Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Challenger 1 - 2 - 3 5v5 - Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Challenger 1 - 2 - 3 Vintage Loading Screens for RAF Skins PRESEASON CHANGES REMOVED Ypherion [Context] Experimental Soraka Changes Here's Riot Vesh with a bit of context on the Soraka changes included in today's update: "Hey guys, Going to be testing out an buffed W range for Soraka as well as a fixed travel time cast paradigm for Q (like Nami bubble instead of Twitch Cask). The first version up today is probably a bit too fast, and I will probably be iterating through a number of values to find the one that feels juuuust right. Anyway, would love feedback about how these changes feel and the playing-against feedback is especially vital. Leave any feedback you have here and I promise I'll be reading all of it ^_^" Riot Vesh "Well I'm bad and turns out these changes didn't make it in today. Should be in tomorrow though. This will at least give me time to fix up this missile speed so it's more consistent with the live version at long range." Balance Changes * Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These are not official notes. * Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These areofficial notes. Champions [All] The base stats changes (HP, Mana, MR, Damage, Armor, Regen) of all champions that are a part of the preseason changes have been reverted . Everyone is back to their live values. Lucian The Culling (R) damage reverted back to 40/50/60 from 45/55/65 [Context: This is a revert back to the live damage. The cooldown nerf from an earlier update HAS NOT BEEN REVERTED] Nocturne Unspeakable Horror (E) reverted back to live; no longer lists the new passive effect of gaining boosted movement speed towards feared targets. Quinn Attack range reverted back to 525 from 550 back to 525 from 550 Movement speed reverted back to 335 from 330 [Context: Back to live values.] Sion Health per level increased to 73 from 70. increased to 73 from 70. Decimating Smash (Q) mana cost reduced to 45/50/55/60/65 from 50/55/60/65/70 mana cost reduced to 45/50/55/60/65 from 50/55/60/65/70 Soul Furnace (W) permanent bonus health for killing a large monster and on enemy champion kills + assists increased to 10 from 8. Soul Furnace (W) mana cost lowered to 65/70/75/80/85 from 70/75/80/85/90 mana cost lowered to 65/70/75/80/85 from 70/75/80/85/90 Roar of the Slayer (E) Mana cost increased 35 at all ranks from 25 at all ranks [Context: Additional context available in this post and this post by Riot Scruffy ] The upcoming 2014 ranked season reward summoner icons have all been updated. Each icons have been brightened up a bit and the color of the numbers now matches the color of each rank. Remember that challenger has three icons because icons are distributed in that rank by top 10/50/200 solo player and top 3/15/50 teams. For a comparison, check out the INITIAL version of the icons here . Remember that the season ends on November 11th Vintage Loading Screens have been added for bothanddue to the upcoming changes to the Refer a friend system. Players who have earned these two reward skins PRIOR to the launch of the Refer-A-Friend changes will have this exclusive loading screen.The experimental preseason changes have beenThis includesincludingthe objective changes, tower changes, jungle itemization, new items, jungle, Scuttle Crab, summoner spell changes, base stat ^ regen changes for champions that were added in 10/9 , readded in 10/24 , then iterated on during the 10/27 update.As mentions in this post, they preseason changes will remain off the PBE until the end of this patch cycle as they will not be shipping to live in 4.19.: To be absolutely clear, the new skins (and), new ward skins, champion specific balance changes, Singed model and texture updates, End of Game Gifting, new summoner icons, and all that other stuff is still up on the PBE.Turns out these didn't make it into today's update!Here'sMiss out on previous updates from this PBE cycle? Check outfor acatch up with the links below ! |
Last March, two teams faced missing the playoffs in a year when they didn't own their first-round draft pick. Each would hire a highly-regarded, highly-successful ex-coach as their new president of basketball operations. Despite the optimism the hirings inspired this season, by Christmas both had stumbled out to a 5-23 record. Since then, Stan Van Gundy's Pistons are 18-17, 12th in the East, 5.5 games out of the playoffs. Phil Jackson's Knicks are 12-51 and own the worst record in the league. Which team's better poised for future success? They've taken different paths, to differing (and early) results. The Knicks could very easily have followed the Pistons' path. What if Jackson hadn't traded Tyson Chandler and Raymond Felton to Dallas? What if he'd kept last year's team intact and ended this year like the Pistons: 35ish wins and no playoffs yielding a mid-1st round pick? Would falling just shy of mediocrity feel better than the abject basketball poverty Knick fans have been subjected to this season? Would it be better for the long-term health of the franchise? Dr. Phil's chosen the more radical approach to treatment. The patient's not seeing just any doctor; they're seeing a surgeon. It takes a while to know the long-term effects of any operation. Let's look instead at the Knicks Jackson inherited versus the Knicks that have been/could be created, focusing on payroll, draft picks, and the roster. PAYROLL The Knicks have $33M committed to the 2015-16 payroll, half next year's estimated $65M salary cap. They were looking at a relatively clean cap situation this summer before hiring Jackson, who's avoided adding any significant long-term commitments ('cept for that one $125,000,000 one). The only players he's added on the books next year are two rookies, Cleanthony Early and Langston Galloway, who'll make $1.6M combined, and Jose Calderon, due $7.4M in 2016 and $7.7M in 2017. Calderon's age and lack of foot speed/defense are not how you'd draw up a 21st-century point guard in a lab. But he's the team's best shooter in the absence of Carmelo, hitting 42% of his threes. The team's next-best guard from distance is Galloway at 35%. When J.R. Smith was traded along with Iman Shumpert to Cleveland, that likely saved the Knicks $6.4M in cap space this summer, as Smith figures to exercise his player option. That's 20% of their spending money. That ain't chump change. Other than Jose and J.R., virtually everyone Jackson's brought in or let go (or both) was on an expiring deal, making Smith and Calderon his two biggest financial moves. J.R. Smith is a more skilled basketball player than Jose Calderon. But Calderon's a better fit for the Triangle, and a better mentor/model of professionalism for a team likely to have six players 24 or younger next year than the guy who admits he struggles in Sunday matinees because Saturday night is party time. And if the Knicks want to move on and can't find a trading partner, the stretch provision would allow them to rid themselves of Calderon's contract spread over three years against the cap. DRAFT Jackson inherited a team with no picks in 2014 and 2016 and a first-round pick in 2015. One pick in three years is not the blueprint to success, though it looks like they'll have their first top-4 pick in 30 years. Further evidence of the Calderon trade being about more than wins is that it netted the Knicks essentially three draft picks: Shane Larkin, a de facto rookie after getting fewer minutes his first year than Travis Wear has this year; Early, who was considered a late 1st-round talent; and Thanasis Antetokounmpo, averaging just under 16 points, 7 rebounds, 2 steals and 2 blocks per-36 minutes in the D-League. The Smith/Shumpert trade and sending Pablo Prigioni to Houston added three second-round picks (one in 2017, two in 2019) to the Knicks' secret stash. Slim pickings? Maybe. But that's virtually a half-dozen rookies/draft picks added in a single year. That is decidedly un-Knicksian, suggesting it's probably a good thing. Another potential benefit: If it pays off, the logic behind the practice could embed in the organization's gray matter long after Phil rides his ATV off into the sunset. ROSTER Only three incumbent players have survived Jackson's first year: Carmelo, Andrea Bargnani, and Tim Hardaway Jr. Bargnani's likely gone, and Hardaway's no lock to be a Knick next year. A number of players Phil's jettisoned are contributors on contending teams: Chandler and Amar'e Stoudemire for Dallas; Shumpert and JR on Cleveland; Pablo forced to work for the NBA's Sith Lords. Some feel Jackson could have gotten more back from the Mavs and Cavs. But given the model the Knicks are following -- avoiding long-term entanglements; adding Triangle-friendly, cheap youth -- I don't see who Jackson should have acquired that he didn't. Dion Waiters is a shooting guard shooting 39% from the field and 26% from downtown, his offensive rating (points per 100 possessions) with OKC is 90 while his defensive rating is 106, and he has a $5M team option next year. In a small sample size (seven games), Reggie Jackson is playing more minutes than ever since being traded to the Pistons, taking more shots than ever, and shooting worse than any year since his rookie campaign. The 1st-round pick OKC sent Cleveland is protected through 18 and figures to remain with the Thunder this year. In 2016 and '17 the pick's top-15 protected, and if it doesn't vest by then it becomes two second-round picks. Depending what happens with the future health and contracts of Kevin Durant (missed 57% of OKC's games this year) and Russell Westbrook (missed 24%), Cleveland may never see a first-rounder from that deal. Denver acquired two first-round picks for Timofey Mozgov, rubbing salt in the wounds of those who felt the Knicks should've gotten a bigger haul for Tyson Chandler. But Cleveland was desperate for a center and willingly overpaid for Mozgov. They had one singular, specific need. Mozgov fit the bill to a tee, and competent seven-footers are rarer than Bunsy sightings. I suspect Phil trading Chandler was more about getting back youth and picks and getting rid of a guy who carried himself like a prisoner of war his last year in New York. He's bounced back nicely playing with a legit team this season. If he'd been a Knick this year, he might've looked a lot like last year: a guy who fits in perfectly with a pre-existing culture, but not a culture-changer. As far as Dallas, they may have never been willing to give up a first-round pick for a soon-to-be 32-year-old one-year rental coming off a season where his scoring, rebounding, and shooting all dropped to their lowest levels in years. It's easy to say, "Give." It's rarely if ever that simple. How you feel about ex-Knicks and would-be Knicks helping current contenders in a year like this probably says more about what kind of fan you are than it does about Jackson's roster-building to date. In the P&T season preview, we were split 3.5 to 3.5 whether we'd rather get the 8 seed or the 8th pick in the draft. If you root for the 8 seed, you may also root for the idea that a sub-.500 team that was swept in the first round and picks 15th in the draft is more appealing to free agents than a dregs-of-the-NBA team with a top-4 pick. More likely, neither appeals, and the player will base his decision on numerous factors. Pat Riley, now lauded as a title-building genius, took until his 11th year running the Heat before winning a title. Five years ago, Donnie Walsh cleared cap space and roster space in the last Great Knick Rebuild, like Phil's doing now; few figured the payoff would be winning one playoff series. There's no way, even now, to guess how Phil the Architect turns out. We do know Jackson took over a ship that was dead in the water, with little roster mobility or hope. There's momentum now, even if it's only from bodies being thrown overboard. We don't know where it will go, but based on where it'd been, where it is now feels like where it had to be. Phil's probably done as much as anyone could have to this point. You can't label surgery a failure because the opening incision caused some bleeding, anymore than you can label it a success while the patient's still on the operating table. Healing is impossible unless suffering is acknowledged. We'll have to wait another year or two, at least, before we know how Jackson's moves have fared. I don't know where it's all headed, but one year in, I'd wouldn't trade places with a few teams above the Knicks. |
Various interests exist in Second Life, such as the Anime community. There are many different themed sims to hang out, shop, and meet others with similar interests. Whether you’re a part of the fandom or just like the look you’ll find you have some great avatar options. Today we’re focusing on products from UTILIZATOR, the same company that makes the furry Kemono avatar shown earlier this week. The M3 Venus While the body and clothing help make the avatar, it can be easily argued that the most recognizable part of an anime character is the signature face. The large, expressive eyes are the first thing many people notice. For this post I used UTILIZATOR‘s M3 Venus Anime Head. Just like the other UTILIZATOR products it’s highly customizable using just the HUDs. More experienced creators can mod the head, add their own textures, etc. As an added bonus it fit the Kemono body I already had with minimal tweaking. Score! The M3 Venus can be copied and modified but not transferred. The standard HUD options include skin tones, tears, eye color, facial expressions, and more. One of my favorites is the classic anime blush option seen below. It’s great for role playing or just for that innocent and embarrassed look. The Body Pose – Overlow Poses : Pack Gift 5 ( 1 ) This post uses UTILIZATOR’s Kemono body as it was something I already had. I preferred the petite look, but I’ve seen anime avatars using fuller bodies such as Maitreya’s Lara. Anime bodies come in all shapes and sizes so use what fits your own tastes! When selecting the body consider what clothing you’d like to wear. Very popular bodies such as Lara have thousands and thousands of different styles to choose from. Other popular but lesser known bodies like Kemono may also have a wide selection, but they may not have exactly what you have in mind. Browse outfits before making that purchase so you know you like your options. If mix and matching isn’t your thing consider purchasing a complete anime avatar. A quick Marketplace search brings up over two thousand anime avatars in various price ranges. Just like with any purchase demo your options before buying if at all possible. The Kemono can be copied and modified but not transferred. Pics & Credits (Visited 453 times, 1 visits today) Like this: Like Loading... |
Google’s decision to block YouTube content was a real kick in the pants to Amazon as it got ready to launch its Echo Show device. After all, YouTube videos are the perfect content for the device and its smaller counterpart, the Echo Spot. The small screen sizes mean the products aren’t really suitable for watching content that’s longer than, say 10 minutes or so. Earlier this week, the site TV Answer Man spotted an interesting Amazon filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that could point to the next steps forward for the company. The trademark application could just as easily turn out to be nothing, of course, but it’s an interesting bit of insight into where Amazon’s head might be in the midst of this streaming service cold war. The application highlights two names, “AmazonTube” and “OpenTube,” along with descriptions that hedge pretty closely to YouTube’s bread and butter. Admittedly, the application is pretty broad (as these things usually are) and covers a LOT of ground, but certain bits certainly jump out to the casual observer. For instance, there’s the bit where it highlights a service that “Provid[es] non-downloadable pre-recorded audio, visual and audiovisual works via wireless networks on a variety of topics of general interest.” It’s a leap to suggest that the company is planning an out-and-out YouTube competitor. For one thing, the company has been there, done that, with Amazon Video Direct, a still-active service that lets publishers upload videos viewable by Prime subscribers. But whether or not the company opts to go directly head to head with YouTube, the suggested names do feel like Amazon’s rattling the cage a bit and setting itself up for a likely legal challenge from Google over a name that hedges a bit too close to its insanely popular video platform. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment, and don’t expect to hear much back unless this whole thing ever becomes officially official, but as has been pointed out, Amazon has already registered the domains AlexaOpenTube.com, AmazonAlexaTube.com and AmazonOpenTube.com, because, screw it, it’s Amazon. Ultimately, there’s a good chance this is the sign of the company working through all of its options. The Show and Spot will pull short videos from Amazon’s library when you ask for Alexa to, say, “play me a cat video,” but odds are pretty good it will be one of those weird pieces of content the company snaps up in bulk, like a 22-minute video of squirrels made for (and potentially by) cats, rather than the sort of thing we humans are looking for. The bummer in all of this for the consumer is it could well mark a return to walled-garden content on smart speakers, where videos are chosen not because they’re the best answer for a given query, but because they’re delivered on a proprietary platform. And from the looks of the way things have been going, both Amazon and Google deserve a share of the blame if that comes to pass. |
It’s been two months since violent protests burned a path of destruction through some of Baltimore’s worst neighborhoods. While some sense of normalcy has returned to the streets, the legacy of Freddie Gray—whose death in police custody sparked the unrest—remains a defining feature of the landscape. On walls and marquees across West Baltimore, Gray’s name shares space with signs calling for an end to the rash of violence that has plagued the city since May. A large mural depicting Gray’s likeness at the corner of Fulton & Presbury in his neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester calls on police to “Stop Killing Us” while making a plea to the community for peace and love in 2015. In June, all six Baltimore Police Department officers who were indicted in Gray’s death pleaded not guilty to multiple charges and were ordered by a judge to stand trial on October 13 for crimes ranging from second-degree murder to misconduct in office. A leaked autopsy report obtained this week by The Baltimore Sun shows that Gray died from a “high intensity” injury likely sustained as he was driven around unrestrained in the back of a police van. In the areas hardest hit by the rioting, dozens of looted stores remain boarded up. Some may never reopen. When asked for their thoughts on what happened, many residents respond angrily, recounting how police stood by and watched their neighborhood burn. Some black Baltimoreans who are old enough to remember the last time the city erupted into flames—in 1968 after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.—say it’s time to turn those emotions toward reconciliation. “People are getting tired,” said Sylvia, 57—who sported a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt last Sunday at Baltimore’s annual African American Festival, and identified herself as a member of the Empowerment Temple AME Church, where Gray’s funeral was held. “Right now we are trying to bring people together to work with police to try to heal and stop the violence.” Nowhere is the need for that more acute than in West Baltimore, where shootings and murders have reached record highs. Since the start of May there have been more than 60 murders in the city, many of them clustered in the Western District within a two-mile radius of the intersection of North and Pennsylvania avenues—where the charred shell of a looted CVS marks the epicenter of April’s unrest. At the beginning of June shootings were up more than 82 percent in 2015 over the prior year, and homicides have been hovering at 50 percent above 2014 levels, according to the most recent Comstat data. The bloodletting has caused simmering tensions between the administration of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Baltimore’s Fraternal Order of Police—problems that began before Gray’s killing, with the mayor’s push to weaken Maryland’s Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights—to boil over. Gun violence is endemic to Baltimore, but the recent crime wave has coincided with such a stark drop in arrests (90 percent in some neighborhoods) that Mayor Rawlings-Blake has accused police of orchestrating a work slowdown to protest her administration’s handling of the Gray protests. The union accuses the mayor of issuing a “stand down” order that allowed the riots to escalate out of control—a charge she has steadfastly denied—and is seeking internal police documents and communication transcripts so it can conduct its own “After Action Report” on the protests. (Tuesday police officials acknowledged that they instructed officers to prioritize life over property during the riots but say the order was to “hold the line," not to “stand down.”) At a news conference on June 17 the mayor threatened to discipline officers who weren’t pulling their weight. “As long as they plan to cash their paycheck, my expectation is that they work,” she said. The day before, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts and FOP President Lieutenant Gene Ryan sparred in press releases over union allegations that police brass mishandled the protests and are intentionally withholding information from the FOP. Batts countered by calling the claims “inaccurate and misleading” and admonishing the union for exceeding its authority by intruding into day-to-day police operations. Last Friday, Commissioner Batts fanned the flames even more with an op-ed calling out BPD officers who appeared in disguise in June on CNN to comment on the Gray riots and promising to crack down even harder on misconduct. “Our reform efforts will very likely see more police officers arrested,” Batts wrote. No one denies the BPD has suffered from a morale problem since the riots, but police leaders take issue with the idea that their officers are intentionally shirking their duty. “The slowdown has nothing to do with what the mayor is saying,” said one BPD commander who asked to speak to The Daily Beast anonymously because he’s not permitted to talk to the media. The 30-year veteran officer—who holds the rank of lieutenant—attributed the spike in crime to a sense of empowerment that resulted from the Gray affair rather than subordination. “Whenever you have police officers get indicted the community always feels emboldened,” he said. Back in Gray’s West Baltimore neighborhood, residents seem to be in agreement with that interpretation, and some go so far as to echo the FOP in saying Mayor Rawlings-Blake was negligent in her handling of the riots. While he waited to buy water ice from an elderly street vendor across from William Mcabee Park in Sandtown, Chris, a 37-year-old local, agreed that criminal elements in the community have become bolder since the April protests. “People are getting killed here every week,” he said, laying the blame squarely at City Hall. “It’s the mayor’s fault, she told the police to stand down. She could have stopped this if she wanted to.” As he talked, the vendor—who would not give his name—and another waiting customer both nodded in agreement. Chris said he expects the violence will continue into the summer months. Asked why he thinks violent crime has spiked in the city since April, Corron—who is 14—said: “Because people know police aren’t gonna do anything.” Keisha, a 30-year-old West Baltimore resident, said that police retreated from her neighborhood in the weeks after the April riots. “They pulled back for a while but they’re starting to come back in now,” she said. Yet one doesn’t get that sense driving the streets of West Baltimore. While scanner activity was brisk last weekend—with officers responding to calls in seemingly rapid-fire succession—there was little evidence that police are actively patrolling the streets, even in the highest crime areas. In the BPD’s defense, with the temperature in Baltimore now averaging above 80 at night, the darkened streets and alleys are teeming with so many people it’s difficult to comprehend what a proactive policing strategy might look like. Detective Rashawn Strong, a BPD spokesperson, said the department has no formal plans to modify its tactics as summer officially begins, but said that operational changes are often made in the field in as circumstances dictate. With a war of words between the FOP and the Commissioner heating up, and police leadership caught in the middle, one comes away with a sense that Baltimoreans are probably right in bracing for a long, hot, deadly summer—no matter who they decide to blame. |
A retired army chaplain has shared in a letter why he is opposed to compromising the position that America is an exceptional nation, whether in the Common Core standards or the new Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) framework. Heidi Wolfgang, a Colorado parent involved in fighting both the Common Core standards and the new APUSH in her state, is the daughter of Chaplain (Ret.) Raymond E. Logan, U.S. Army. Wolfgang told Breitbart News that she recently asked her father if he knew about the APUSH revision discussion that has been sweeping the nation, and how he felt about it. “When he began to explain in opposition and I could tell he was overcome by emotion by the trembling in his voice, I asked him if he could think about it for a few days and write a letter to the Colorado Board of Education,” Wolfgang shared. “I was planning on attending the Colorado BOE meeting in October and wanted to read his letter to the board members.” “When my dad called to read me his letter, he was reading it as though he were preaching to me about the importance of his history,” she continued. “My dad’s voice began to crack midway, and by the time he was reading about watching soldiers die, he was crying. And I cried because I was touched by my father’s compassion.” “His reflection of that time in his life was life-changing for me, and something we had never talked about before,” Wolfgang added. “My dad served 22 years in the army, as a chaplain. He was so inspiring to me because he was always helping others. I learned patriotism from my father and will share that patriot fever with my daughter.” The letter reads: October 4, 2014 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: Subject: “Why we cannot allow revisions to our AP History texts” My comments are in response to the subject under consideration by many supporters on the academic changes being imposed on our school children involving Common Core and the rewriting of our history books and traditions of America. I am vehemently opposed to the removal or compromising of the narrative that has existed in our school system and textbooks for decades that reference America’s Founding Fathers and their contribution to what makes us who we are as Americans. I am further opposed to the removal of any part of our Constitution, Bill of Rights, or any other documents upon which America is founded and exists. I personally have served this great nation as a military chaplain for over twenty-two years and have stood beside our sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, and extended family who have chosen to wear the uniform representing America throughout the world. For decades I have firsthand knowledge that, not only I, but thousands with whom I served stood by their oath of allegiance to our Constitution and [F]ounding [F]ather’s [sic] principles that symbolize the values that have brought freedom and independence throughout America. These traditions and beliefs are the backbone of thousands of our men and women who have given their blood, sweat, and tears, and even their lives, for the preservation of the America that others in this world only dream of … and even risk entering this country illegally to gain what we have possessed for over two centuries. I implore you to give the utmost consideration to what others have given to preserve what some are willing to give away and keep from future generations. I want you to know firsthand from someone who has been there to hold your loved ones and the loved ones of our neighbors in my arms when they have been taken from the field of battle and shared their last breath, relying on me to communicate with their families their love for them and their love for their country. Without exception they have given their all and stood in the foxholes of destiny hoping and praying their defense of America is going to succeed as they preserve the America and homeland they themselves grew up with, learned about in school, shared with their churches, their sports teams, their hometown Independence Day Parades, and generations to come. Without exception these men and women understood America and what she stands for because they learned in school the struggle of our Founding Fathers upon whose work to assemble and then stand by our Declaration of Independence that could easily have cost them their lives and families. They learned our American heritage from our [Forefathers’] writing and the inclusiveness of fundamental history the authors of our history textbooks continued to faithfully preserve. These are the foundation of America who stand upon the passing of our flag at parades, salute and stand at attention at the playing of [T]aps, and whose coffins are [sic] American flag draped as they are lowered into the grounds embracing our national cemeteries. These are the people and traditions you represent as you consider preserving our heritage for the current generation and generations to come. Represent us well and keep the integrity and faithfulness of all those Americans who have paid the supreme price that you may sit in your position of responsibility and defend our children and their right to learn the foundation of what has made us a great nation. We are depending on each of you. Respectfully submitted, Chaplain (Ret.) Raymond E. Logan, U.S. Army “It tears my dad up to know history books are changing to suit agendas that are not patriotic. We all need to be educated about America and how she came to be the greatest nation in the world, so we can protect her,” Wolfgang said. “He cringes at the thought that my child won’t hear the accounts of history as they happened, or as we have studied them.” “Our family heritage goes back to George Washington and Thomas Rogers of the Mayflower (maternal), and John A Logan (paternal),” she added. “It is imperative that children continue to learn what each of these men did for history, and what our soldiers continue to do to protect us.” |
I seriously keep trying to think of new openings for this spot. It’s slightly difficult, as I’ve discussed before. It sounds ridiculous to keep saying the SJWs have one-upped themselves in terms of atrocious and hostile behavior. But it keeps fucking happening. So, what else can I do but keep saying it? I would have to sit here and go through the loooooong list of abuse that anti-GamerGate has heaped on us to say for sure, but the next case is one of the very worst I’ve seen throughout the entirety of GamerGate. KingofPol is a video game reviewer, and critic. He does game streams, and shows about GamerGate. I was on one of those the other day. He was gracious enough to come on my show last week. So, we have a working relationship. But before I knew him at all, I wrote about his doxxing here on the site. For some reason, he really pisses the other side off a lot. I’ve written some very hard-hitting stuff, and no one has ever tried to doxx me (not that they won’t lol). There’s a few other things they haven’t done to me. For one, until now, they’ve refrained from calling me an sexual abuser of children. Yes, you read that correctly. The other side has now taken it to another extreme. No, they didn’t compare us to a deadly terrorist organization. The Ebola virus disease was not brought up. No one advocated any doxxing. There was no childish insult. Just a flat out false declaration that KingofPol was a child molester. Jack Connell, the SJW cultist writer who tweeted it, didn’t leave much doubt about interpretation. I don’t see how someone could argue with us taking offence to this. It’s not a joke to label someone a child molester. It wasn’t even meant to be a joke. He capitalized “is” for emphasis. Jack Connell wants to be clear that we don’t think it’s humor. OK, message received. As of right now, the tweet is still up. Not only that, he still writing offensive shit as we speak. I gotta admit, Connell’s a nobody. Even writing about him will be called into question by some. This is likely to be the biggest exposure the guy has ever had, with our recent surge in traffic. So this might actually help him, in some perverse way. But, you know the standard operating procedure here at TheRalphRetort. When we see the something heinous, we call it out. Even so, if Jackass Connell hadn’t taken a couple extra steps to let me know he was dead serious, I would have still let it go. But he did, and here we are. I want to say this type of thing won’t happen again, but I’ve seen others allude to us being child molesters before. This is just the first time I’ve seen them come out and directly say it. If it happens again, all we can do is document it. As for Connell, just leave him to rot in his mire of mediocrity. GamerGate will continue to soar. UPDATE: Connell wasn’t done. He went on another hate-filled tirade after this story was published. Here’s another couple of disgusting tweets… |
In the early 1830s, the Indian Removal Act drove those Native American peoples living on desirable land in the eastern United States west along the ‘Trail of Tears’ onto newly designated Reservations. A large scale Indian exodus from the Reservation system would not occur until the Second World War, in which 25,000 of 350,000 Native Americans served, proportionally more than any other minority. Integration into wider American society the post-war period would prove a fraught process. Produced by Native American artists, the ten works below offer a journey through the community’s post-war history, confronting issues surrounding assimilation, land theft, representation, poverty, the economic renaissance and coming to terms with history. Works chosen by: Jeff Berglund (Northern Arizona University), Anya Montiel (Yale Group for the Study of Native America), Joy Porter (University of Hull), Joyce Szabo (University of New Mexico), Chris Vecsey (Colgate University). *** Paper Dolls for a Post Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by the U.S. Government Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, 1991 In 1991, in response to the celebratory events marking the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–) produced a drawing depicting a family of Native American paper dolls, the ‘Plenty Horses’, as well as a Jesuit priest who proselytises to them. Smith drew clothing options for the family including a fur trapper jacket, a maid’s outfit, and a boarding school uniform for the child. Smith also presented an outfit of ‘matching smallpox suits for all Indian families after U.S. gov’t sent wagon loads of smallpox infested blankets to keep our families warm’ which acknowledges the harsh realities of life for Native people after the arrival of Europeans. The spread of disease was the most harmful effect of the ‘Columbian Exchange’, the phrase used to describe the impact of European settlers on Native peoples. Smallpox, or ‘running face disease’, had the most devastating effect. (AM) *** Comrade in Mourning Allan Houser, 1949 Painter Allan Houser (1914–1994) was commissioned to create a sculpture honoring Native Americans killed in the Second World War in 1947. The Carrara marble artwork, Comrade in Mourning, marks the first monumental sculptural commission received by a Native American. Houser is now known as the ‘father of American Indian sculpture’. Some estimates suggest that 25,000 – as many as one third of able-bodied Native American men – fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Serving in unsegregated units, involvement in the army marked the first large exodus from the reservations and integration with the outside world since the establishment of reservations in the mid 19th century. (AM) *** Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko, 1977 “Anyone can fight for America, even you boys” A more critical reflection on the Native war effort was produced 30 years later by the Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko, who has been named as a key figure in the First Wave of the ‘Native American Renaissance’. Ceremony uses storytelling – which has a central role in Pueblo culture, despite white attempts to eradicate it – to explore the Native American experience of the Second World War. In the postwar world, the New Mexico reservation from which the protagonists originate is endangered by runoff from a uranium mine on the nearby Cebolleta land grant, and a generation of young Pueblo men who sought to escape the poverty of reservation life and achieve acceptance into mainstream America is decimated. (JB) *** Umine Wacipe: War and Peace Dance Oscar Howe, 1958 For its Indian Annual exhibition in 1958, the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, rejected Oscar Howe’s abstract painting as ‘a fine painting – but not Indian.’ Howe (1915–1983) responded, declaring: Indian Art can compete with any art in the world, but not as a suppressed art … are [Indians] to be herded like a bunch of sheep, with no right for individualism … put on reservations and treated like a child, and only the White Man knows what is best for him? I only hope … the Art World will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains. Considered a manifesto to the Native art world, the following year the Philbrook revised its judging rules, and the curator later remarked that Howe ‘set in motion a chain of events which changed the course of the history of Indian art.’ (AM) *** Indian with Beer Can Fritz Scholder, 1969 Indian with Beer Can was painted after Fritz Scholder (1937–2005) had been at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe for about five years and dramatically broke with the romanticized portrayals of Native people stuck in the past. Scholder’s painting was produced at a time when the emphasis on preserving indigenous culture, language and ceremonies was far from prevalent. Many Indian artists, including Scholder, have spoken of feeling shame at being Indian. The painting references the Native American community’s historic problems with alcoholism. (JS) *** Link Wray Link Wray, 1971 Shawnee musician Link Wray (1929–2005) completed his transformation from 60s rock’n’roll instrumentalist (best known for the 1958 song 'Rumble') to Americana singer-songwriter with his self-titled 1971 record. Said transformation saw Wray lose the black leather jacket instead adopting more traditional Native attire on the sleeve, a move, it has been suggested, aimed squarely at the developing ‘hippie marketplace’. It’s unlikely the change was motivated by such cynical motives; despite its poor commercial performance, Link Wray is an example of a countercultural American rock record with lyrics that speak directly of the Native experience, particularly Link’s childhood, which he described as being largely defined by fear of white people. Listen: 'La De Da' *** Artifact Piece James Luna, 1986 When performance artist James Luna laid his partially-naked body in a museum display case at the San Diego Museum of Man in 1986 surrounded by text labels ‘documenting’ his life, he challenged how museums had represented Native people as artifacts of study, untouched by modern life. Artifact Piece ushered in a new era of how museums work with Native people and handle their material culture, beginning with the American repatriation law NAGPRA in 1990. The act requires federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funding to return Native American ‘cultural items’ to lineal descendants and culturally affiliated Indian tribes. (AM) *** Speaking To Their Mother Rebecca Belmore, 1991 Speaking To Their Mother was a response to the Oka Crisis of 1990, a land dispute between a group of Mohawk people and the town of Oka in Quebec, which sought to build a golf course and residential development on a Mohawk burial ground and pineland. Belmore produced a large wooden megaphone encouraging Native peoples in Canada and the U.S. to literally voice their protest. The object was installed in many locations, reservation, rural, thus, in the words of the artist, ‘locating the Aboriginal voice on the land’. (CV) *** We The People John Kahionhes Fadden, 1991 Mohawk artist John Fadden’s work isn’t modernist and is not fashionable – it speaks to abiding traditional themes and it is therefore outsider art in the sense that it does not fit into elite notions of ‘Indian art’, but speaks instead to mainstream Indian tastes. In We The People, part of the preamble to the US Constitution is written above the Haudenosaunee Hiawatha Wampum Belt, which represents the original Five Nations. The work references the long tradition of fair dealing and sovereign-to sovereign relationships between the Iroquois and Euro-Americans between Indian and non-Indian nation-states. (JP) *** Smoke Signals Dir. Chris Eyre, 1998 “You're leavin' the rez and goin' into a whole different country, cousin.” Featuring a cast of diverse Native characters who defy stock stoic Hollywood stereotypes, Smoke Signals quickly became the most successful film directed by a Native American. Based on Sherman Alexie's short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, the film is a road movie which explores, among other things, what it means to be Indian. (JB) There is an interesting historical context to the film, which centres on members of the Coeur d'Alene tribe in northern Idaho. In the decade in which the movie was made the Coeur d'Alene reservation became what the Washington Post described as an ‘economic powerhouse’, following the opening of a casino and bingo hall in 1992. The success of such casinos followed the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act by which states have limited power to forbid gambling on reservations land, prompting a boom in the number of gambling operations run by native people. Additionally, in 1991 the tribe filed a lawsuit against the local silver, lead and zinc mining industries for dumping millions of tons of heavy metals into the Coeur D'Alene watershed, prompting America's second largest Superfund cleanup project, expected to cost $120 million. Rhys Griffiths is editorial assistant at History Today. |
The Olympic 10,000 meters was eyeballs out, hands down the fastest, deepest women’s 25-lap race I have ever seen. But instead of cheers, before the race was even over, half of the commentariat lit up with shouts of “Dirty!” Welcome to track—and sports—in 2016. Bombarded with an entire country doping as a matter of government-run course, an anti-doping agency that in some cases facilitates doping, a famous coach caught with a large stash of EPO at a training camp full of world-class runners, and corrupt leadership at the IOC and IAAF, track fans’ eyes are wide open. Of course, suspicion is not new—we’ve already cut our teeth on such meaty stuff as the 1980's Eastern Bloc machine, Ma’s Army, Ben Johnson, Marion Jones. The scale, the worldwide scope (in the early 2000s, it was still believable that Kenyans living la vida rustic—hopefuls from the villages showed up at races barefoot—would not have the funds or access to PEDs), and the stark realization that WADA and the IAAF were not interested in clean sport—that’s why this feels new. That’s what’s different. But while all would agree that doping is an undeniable part of elite level track and field, few would say that all top athletes are dirty. So where do you draw the line—just certain countries? Only world record breakers? First place? What about tenth? The many hours I spent arguing with myself, trying to understand what I had just witnessed as Ethiopia’s Almaz Ayana smashed the 10k world record are symptomatic of the new era of track and field. Sunday Times sportswriter David Walsh summed it up well: Advertisement This much is unequivocal: Almaz Ayana set a new 10,000-meter world record of 29:17.45, destroying the 23-year-mark of 29:31.78; seven other national 10k records were improved, including the American one, by Molly Huddle; 18 of the 37 runners in the field set lifetime bests; four of the five fastest 10,000-meter times ever were run in the race; four women dipped under the 30-minute mark, which has never before happened in the same race; there were no Russian runners in the field because of the IAAF’s ban of its track and field athletes; and Molly Huddle placed sixth in a time, 30:13, that would’ve been good enough for gold in six of the last seven Olympics. There are a few main arguments for believing that Ayana’s eye-watering performance was tainted. Ayana Crushed What Is Widely Believed To Be A Doped Record When she set the 10,000-meter world record in 1993, the veracity of Wang Junxia’s performance was questioned because she was among a group of Chinese women who also set the 1500-meter world record, the top six 3000-meter performances of all time, and the 5000-meter world record, all over the course of five days at the Chinese National Games. Advertisement Earlier this year a letter surfaced, allegedly written by Junxia and other Chinese runners, admitting to doping. In 2000 their infamous coach, Ma Junren, and a number of his athletes were booted from the Sydney Olympics for failing drug tests. The Pace Was Unbelievable A lead group of about six women passed halfway in 14:46; for reference, the American 5000 record is 14:42. Shortly after halfway, Ayana cut the noose and let loose, with her 14th of 25 laps accomplished in a wilting 66.67, leaving defending Olympic champion Tirunesh Dibaba, current world champion Vivian Cheruiyot, and everyone else gasping in her wake. Advertisement Both Cheruiyot—who got the silver in a personal best time—and Dibaba—who ran a personal best to nab bronze—were nearly half a lap behind when Ayana crossed the finish line. Ayana’s second 5K was run in 14:30. Again, for reference, the current Olympic record (not world record, which is 14:11) for 5000 meters is 14:40. Ayana averaged 4:43 per mile for 6.2 miles. Of course, the thing about a world record is that the pace has never been done before, thus, it’s hard to believe. Ethiopia’s Drug Testing Is Almost Non-Existent When officials from the World Anti-Doping Agency came to assess Ethiopia’s anti-doping facilities in December 2015, they gave it a rating of zero. For unexplained reasons, they gave Ethiopia until November 2016 to shape up, and allowed all Ethiopian athletes to compete in the Olympics. Coach Jama Aden, who trains many of Ethiopia’s star runners, was arrested in a raid at a training camp in Spain. Syringes of EPO, anabolic steroids, and other doping materials were allegedly found in his hotel room. Advertisement Some of Aden’s athletes, including 10,000-meter bronze winner Tirunesh Dibaba, were also staying at the hotel at the time. Ayana was not among those at the hotel, and is currently coached by her husband, Tadias Addis, but she has listed Aden as her coach in the past. Though she’ll certainly be tested after this world record run, it’s unclear if and when Ayana was tested out of competition. She has never failed a drug test, and responded just after the race that training and Jesus were her drugs of choice, and that otherwise she is “crystal clear.” Ayana Crushed The Record And It Looked Effortless Longtime observer of the sport Toni Reavis compared the performance to the housing market prior to the 2008 crash: Training harder than everybody else is one thing, but destroying a world-class field and smashing a drugged-up world record without the semblance of effort or fatigue is a mortgage rate that won’t hold. Advertisement Former Olympic runner Craig Virgin commented on Reavis’s post to concur: The most amazing and unbelievable part of her race was the apparent lack of any sign of physical strain whatsoever in her face, neck, shoulders, etc…. I was looking for some sign of growing fatigue…. but there was NOTHING! Then, she recovered like it was simply a mild interval effort just moments after the race. Check out what Molly Huddle looked like physically in her 2nd half and especially after her finish for a clear contrast and comparison… and you will realize what I am talking about. I know that winning… and getting an Olympic Gold medal & new WR… would surely be a wonderful elixir for most all of us and give us all greatly enhanced recuperative powers….. but it just looked too good to be true… Plenty of well-respected names—The Sports Gene author David Epstein, coach and author Steve Magness, sport scientist Ross Tucker, Sports Illustrated’s Tim Layden—joined in the doubting. Advertisement Notably, all of the evidence here is circumstantial, by association, based on gut feelings. Suspicions of Ayana personally are augmented by the backdrop of worldwide corruption and failures at the top levels of the IOC, the IAAF, and WADA, the banning of Russia’s entire team for doping, and a drumroll of allegations regarding Kenya, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Great Britain, and, let’s not forget, the US of A. But there are good reasons to believe nothing untoward happened—the main one being a lack of evidence to the contrary. Here are some others. Advertisement Ayana’s Progression Is Reasonable Ayana was, prior to this year, a 5000 meter specialist with a reasonable, if elite, progression, from 15:12 in 2011 to 14:12 in June 2016. Note that 14:12 is one second off the current world record. Moving up to 10,000 meters is not uncommon, and 29:17 is within reason for a 14:12 5K runner. She’s been competing at a consistently high level since 2011 which does not conform to one of the biggest doping red flags—an athlete appearing out of nowhere to post world leading times, or a mediocre athlete suddenly improving to that level. The Magic Extended Far Beyond Ayana Seven national records and 18 personal bests were achieved. That’s rare for any race, but downright fairy dust-sprinkled for a pacemaker-free championship race. Olympic races don’t allow official pacemakers, and they’re all about the first three places, so they rarely result in even a quick time, much less a world record. Usually, Olympic 10,000s are sit-and-kick affairs, with a few stars loping along until a half-mile to go, when they turn on the jets and medal, 1-2-3. Advertisement But Kenya’s Alice Aprot Nawowuna announced this was going to be a different race right off the bat. Thanks to Aprot, the congregation of studs in the loaded field went through the mile in 4:46, which is quick. In fact, none of those records, including Ayana’s, would have been possible without Aprot’s aggressive running, as a de facto pacemaker. Had Aprot been Ethiopian, one might suspect she was playing the domestique for Ayana but, bearing in mind the ongoing rivalry between Kenya and Ethiopia, Aprot was clearly out for gold for herself by disrupting the usual sit-and-kick game plan. The weather was perfect—mid-60s, no wind—and the congregation as a whole decided to go with this rogue default pacer, and that right there is the magic. Aprot led through halfway, and, it should be noted, hung on for fourth place in the fifth fastest time ever, 29:53. Tough, tough woman, that Aprot. It’s difficult to predict when this sort of thing—insanely fit athletes deciding at the same time to get in a line, put their heads down and go for it—is going to happen, but it sure did in Rio. So how far down does one call foul? Just before American Molly Huddle? The first six women, including Molly Huddle, ran personal bests. Are all those women doping? Where does reality start then? Ayana’s world record was totally dependent on the fact that Alice Aprot Nawowuna and five other women kept her company at least halfway. Ayana Didn’t Best The World Record By As Much As You May Think Marathon world record holder Paula Radcliffe was one of the many who expressed doubts, saying, “I’m not sure that I can understand that. When I saw the world record set in 1993, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. And Ayana has absolutely blitzed that time.” But as Ross Tucker pointed out, Radcliffe’s marathon world record, set in 2003, broke her own previous record by 1.4 percent, and her 2:15 is still 2.3 percent ahead of the second fastest marathoner ever, while Ayana’s 29:17 only improved the 10,000 meter record by 0.8 percent. The only thing Radcliffe proved is that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Advertisement It is a shame track fans can’t simply appreciate such a stellar race, and Ayana’s fantastic performance as a declaration of a new plane of achievement in women’s athletics. But it’s not vanilla ice cream. Track fans are now forced to examine their attitudes toward doping, to recognize what’s important to them about the sport, and formulate their own guidelines for trust and suspicion. Track fans have had to evolve with the sport. It was an incredible race—the cast of characters deserves to be acknowledged in full: |
President Trump confronted the enormity of the six-year-old Syrian conflict on Wednesday, acknowledging that he now bears responsibility for a war his predecessor could not end, but offering no specifics on what he could do differently. Clearly emotional, Trump said a chemical attack in Syria that killed scores of civilians, including children, “crossed a lot of lines for me.” “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies — babies! — little babies,” Trump said, “that crosses many, many lines. Beyond a red line, many, many lines.” Trump said the multifaceted conflict “is now my responsibility,” and he appeared to reckon with the same lack of good options in Syria that repeatedly confounded President Barack Obama. Like Obama, Trump faces a Syrian strongman willing to commit atrocities and whose military and diplomatic backing from Russia has prolonged a civil war with numerous belligerents, separate from the campaign to defeat the Islamic State. (The Washington Post) Trump suggested that the attack Tuesday had changed his mind about his approach to Syria, which had seemed to focus exclusively on defeating the Islamic State, but he did not say what that might mean. “I like to think of myself as a very flexible person,” Trump said in a Rose Garden news conference with Jordan’s King Abdullah II. “And I will tell you that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me, big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing,” Trump said. “I’ve been watching it and seeing it, and it doesn’t get any worse than that.” The president would not say whether military action against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is more likely as a result of the attack, and he did not address whether his concern on behalf of the dead and injured civilians had changed his mind about the wisdom of accepting Syrian refugees into the United States. But he did say his “attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.” U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley suggested the United States could intervene militarily, although she, too, was not specific about what that might entail. “When the United Nations consistently fails in its duty to act collectively, there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action,” Haley said. “For the sake of the victims, I hope the rest of the council is finally willing to do the same.” 1 of 14 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × The scene in Syria after a chemical attack kills dozens View Photos At least 72 are reported dead after a chemical attack on a town in northern Syria. Caption The White House said it had evidence of preparations for another chemical attack in Syria and warned the Syrian regime against it. Earlier this year, dozens died after a chemical attack in a northern town. April 4, 2017 A man is helped by Syrian Civil Defense workers following a toxic gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun, a rebel-held town in the northwestern Idlib province. Mohamed Al-Bakour/AFP via Getty Images Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. If proven to have been carried out by Assad, the chemical attack Tuesday would represent a challenge to Trump to act where Obama did not. The attack followed recent Trump administration statements backing away from Obama’s insistence that Assad must leave power as a part of any political settlement in Syria. Trump did not call for Assad to go and said nothing about Russian culpability for backing the regime and defending it against charges that it targeted civilians. The Assad government and Russia blamed the chemical release on rebel forces. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said that at least 72 people were killed, making it the deadliest chemical assault since 2013, when the Syrian government dropped sarin on the Damascus suburbs, killing hundreds of people as they slept, and bringing the United States and European allies to the verge of military intervention. On Wednesday, Trump repeated campaign-trail criticism of the Obama administration for threatening military action over that 2013 attack and then backing off. For the balance of his presidency, Obama struggled with the limits of an arm’s-length approach that he maintained was still preferable to direct military involvement. “We have a big problem. We have somebody that is not doing the right thing. And that’s going to be my responsibility,” Trump said. “But I’ll tell you, that responsibility could’ve made, been made, a lot easier if it was handled years ago.” Trump had supported Obama’s decision not to bomb in 2013, but as a candidate, he used the episode as an example of what he called the Democrat’s weakness and indecision. Trump promised certitude and strength, and there were echoes of that rhetoric in his first Rose Garden news conference Wednesday. “We will destroy ISIS and we will protect civilization,” Trump said, referring to the Islamic State group that operates in Syria and is one of many players in the fractured country. “We have no choice. We will protect civilization.” Abdullah, whose small country has been overwhelmed by Syrian refugees, largely dodged a question about whether Trump’s proposed travel ban, which would block Syrians from coming to the United States as refugees, would add to Jordan’s burden. “The Europeans are being very forward-leaning” in providing financial and other help, Abdullah said. “A tremendous burden on our country, but again, tremendous appreciation to the United States and the Western countries for being able to help us in dealing with that.” In the past, attacks on civilians such as the one Tuesday have increased the pressure on Syrians to flee. Earlier Wednesday, Haley assailed Russia in blunt terms for protecting the Syrian government, saying that Moscow is callously ignoring civilian deaths. “How many more children have to die before Russia cares?” she said in New York, with representatives of the Syrian government and its Russian backers looking on. She held aloft gruesome images from the attack in Idlib province. One showed a child splayed and apparently lifeless. “Russia has shielded Assad from U.N. sanctions. If Russia has the influence in Syria that it claims to have, we need to see them use it,” Haley said. “We need to see them put an end to these horrific acts.” [Deadly attack in Syria likely involved banned nerve agent, experts say] At the United Nations, Russia’s representative lamented what he called “clearly an ideological thrust” to the discussion at the Security Council. Accusations of the Assad regime’s involvement are “closely interwoven with the anti-Damascus campaign, which hasn’t yet reached the place it deserves on the landfill of history,” Russian representative Sergey Kononuchenko said. Russia is likely to block a proposed Security Council condemnation of the attack. Syria’s representative, Mounzer Mounzer, dismissed the accusation that his country is to blame, saying Damascus condemns the use of chemical weapons. “We don’t have them. We never use them,” he told the council. Under Russian pressure, Syria agreed in 2013 to give up its chemical weapons and claimed it had eliminated its stockpiles. Russia tried Wednesday to shift the blame to armed groups opposing Assad. Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a Russian military spokesman, said Syrian warplanes had been targeting rebel workshops and depots. “The territory of this storage facility housed workshops to produce projectiles filled with toxic agents,” he said in a recorded statement. The World Health Organization said Wednesday that victims’ symptoms bore all the hallmarks of a chemical attack, possibly involving a banned nerve agent. Syrian forces also have used chlorine-based weapons. The British and French ambassadors to the United Nations criticized Russia directly for protecting the Assad government at the expense of civilians. “History will judge all of us in how we respond to these unforgettable and unforgivable images of the innocent,” British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said. “How long are we going to sit here and pretend that actions in these chambers have no consequences?” He said Russia and China squandered an opportunity to call out Syria when they vetoed a February effort to condemn smaller reported instances of chemical weapons use. John Wagner contributed to this report. |
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