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Frankie Edgar is recovering from an orbital injury that knocked him out of a featherweight title opportunity vs. champion Max Holloway, and he’s optimistic that they can make that fight happen soon. “The Answer” was in attendance at UFC Fresno this past weekend, and he managed to sneak in a conversation with Dana White in regards to where he stands in the contenders’ line once he’s healed up. “He said we’re just figuring out - this is after this weekend’s fight - we’re just waiting to see what’s next,” Edgar explained on Monday’s episode of The MMA Hour. “I think March or April sounds good, so one of those dates I imagine we’ll set it up.” Edgar was also asked if he took any offense to White recently expressing his bewilderment at how Edgar could get hurt ahead of such an important fight, and the former lightweight champion didn’t sound bothered in the slightest. “I don’t think he was questioning my toughness,” Edgar said. “I think he meant more like I shouldn’t be getting hit like that so I could get a broken face, you know what I mean? I think that’s what he was getting at, that’s what he kind of conveyed to us at least.” The UFC does not currently have any events officially scheduled for April, but UFC 222 takes place in Las Vegas, Nev., on March 3 and Edgar mentioned that date as a logical one for the Holloway clash. He added that he (and his friends and family) would be excited about traveling to Hawaii, Holloway’s home turf, and challenging the champion there should the UFC ever schedule a show in the islands. Holloway authored his first title defense at UFC 218 in a rematch against Jose Aldo, Edgar’s replacement, making him 2-0 against the featherweight legend; in comparison, Edgar twice challenged Aldo during the Brazilian’s lengthy championship reign and both times he came out on the wrong end of a unanimous decision. At just 26 years old, Holloway has already built up an impressive resume and Edgar believes that “Blessed” is living up to the hype. “I think he’s all that he’s cracked up to be and the fact that he’s so young and keeps getting better every fight is scary almost,” Edgar said. “But that also motivates me. I still feel like I’m at the top of my game. Max is the future, but I’m still here, I’m the present and I want to get this title shot and get what’s mine and become a two-weight champion. That’s been my goal since I came down to ‘45.” One potential wrench that could be thrown into Edgar’s plans is the sudden emergence of unbeaten submission artist Brian Ortega. The California-native submitted veteran Cub Swanson in the main event of UFC Fresno and while Ortega himself refused to make any bold claims to a title shot, the impressive performance planted the seed that he could be in championship bout sooner rather than later. Edgar praised Ortega, but he’s glad that the fast-rising fighter is respecting the current pecking order. “He’s got a good following, he’s finishing guys, yeah he might be ready, but as long it’s after me that’s all I care about,” Edgar said. |
By I apologize that it took so long for me to give an official announcement on this issue. Many have asked me on this matter on Novelupdates and Discord. Firstly, I am officially dropping this series. I have been in talks with QI since awhile ago, and eventually, we decided to just get a new translator from their side on this series. I was intending to announce this after a translator has been found, but the other side has been facing difficulty finding a translator who is interested in this project. Eventually, this matter dragged on for month after month. I've replied this query on many other platforms, but I should have posted an official announcement on GT, and I apologize for my mistake. I do thank you all for reading this series, it's truly one of my favorite pieces, and I sincerely apologize for failing to go on ahead with it. I have a hate and love relationship with this series, as many of my colleagues would know. It's been awhile since I've started looking for another translator on this project, and I stopped updating after it was decided that I'll pass this series on to QI. It's a wonderful story, as many of you will know, and not to mention, it's my maiden piece. However, it's exactly because it's my maiden piece that I made many unintentional mistakes in it. I've tried multiple times to look for people to help me correct them, and I even tried correcting them myself, but the results didn't turn out too well. The good thing about joining QI is that they would send editors to vet through the series they accepted, so in a way, this will dispel most of the regrets I have for the series. I would like to thank GT for hosting this work, many of the other translator's help in pointing out the references for me, and my editors, Crow, Milkbiscuit, and Hweirdo, for bearing with the 5k~6k long chapters. (Which are really unbearable) It's not an easy project, with the huge world building and many references, though that's what that makes the series. I hope that the translator after me will do a better job than me for this project. In any case, I've been rushing them on this matter, and the most recent news I got from QI on this matter is that they have found a translator for this project. Even though I'm not sure when they'll start the project, I hope that it'll be soon. |
HILLSBORO, Ore. - A fire fueled by mineral oil broke out at a power substation near Highway 26 in Hillsboro Friday afternoon, sending a black plume of smoke high into the Hillsboro skyline. The fire started around 12:45 at the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) Keeler Substation near Cornelius Pass Road and Imbrie Drive. By about 5 p.m., firefighters mostly had the blaze under control and were beginning mop-up work. Firefighters didn't immediately move in to fight the blaze. Because of the flames' heat, they couldn't approach it. They had to wait for the mineral oil burned off before they approached the fire. Just before 4 p.m., firefighters from the Port of Portland arrived to assist. Firefighters began to spray special foam on the blaze, which helped smother the flames. The thick black smoke that was billowing turned to white and gray. BPA spokesman Doug Johnson said a piece of equipment, which regulates voltage, failed, causing a reactor fire. The black smoke plume is coming from the burning insulation oil used with the equipment to cool the reactor. The reactor is powered by electricity. Johnson said they haven't heard of any power outages related to the fire. One firefighter suffered minor injuries, Hillsboro firefighters said. Dave Horning said he saw the smoke from the fire from Aloha and decided he had to come take a look. "I was going out for a walk and saw the huge plume of smoke and thought, 'Ah, that's a fire someplace. I gotta check this out to see what it is.' Being a volunteer fireman 20 years ago, it's in your blood - you chase. You just do it." Dozens of people also came to check out the billowing smoke. There's been no word from fire officials on how long the fire will continue to burn. Last summer, crews worked to put out a similar substation fire in Seattle. |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday assured congressional lawmakers that agents would play no role in enforcing the controversial requirement that Americans buy insurance under President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul. U.S. President Barack Obama signs the health insurance reform bill during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, March 23, 2010. REUTERS/Jason Reed “IRS revenue agents will not be involved. There will not be audits,” IRS Deputy Commissioner Steven Miller told a subcommittee of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The law, passed in 2010 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, will charge individuals a fee, or tax, if they fail to buy insurance starting in 2014. Opponents of the healthcare measure have focused on that requirement, with some Republicans saying they worry the IRS, the agency responsible for tax collection and tax law enforcement, will harass people who fail to buy insurance. “In most cases, taxpayers will file their tax returns reporting their health insurance coverage, and-or making a payment, and there will be no need for further interactions with the IRS,” Miller said. Under the law, Americans who lack health insurance will have to pay an annual fee to the IRS of $95, or 1 percent of taxable household income, starting in 2014. By 2016, that will rise to $695 per person, with a cap that equals the greater of $2,085 per family or 2.5 percent of household income. About 1 percent of the population will be charged for not buying insurance, government watchdogs have estimated. Republicans questioned Miller about how many new agents would be needed to apply the law, and whether the agency would be able to keep up its core mission of tax collection. At the hearing, the latest in a series on the healthcare law, staff for Representative Charles Boustany, the Republican who heads the subcommittee, handed out a paper blasting the law as an “explosion of regulatory burdens.” The law contains a number of new tax provisions, from the so-called individual mandate to tax credits for small businesses and levies on the wealthy to help pay for coverage. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney this week said that although he wants to repeal the law, he would keep popular provisions such as some related to protecting people with pre-existing medical conditions. (The story has been refiled to state Romney’s full name in paragraph 12) |
Image copyright other Image caption Market director Joby Fox (right) is pictured with stallholder Mark Douglas who will be making freshly baked breads at the market A new farmers' market is to open in one of Belfast's oldest areas. Folktown market will be held behind Primark in Bank Square. It is described as a farmers', food and artisan market and will run every Thursday from 16 April. The market will feature up to 40 traders, with a focus on locally grown produce. The Department of Social Development recently spent £3m renovating Bank Square, an area dating back to the 1600s. Improvements included the installation of natural stone paving, landscaping, improved lighting, free wi-fi, street furniture and art work. Social Development Minister Mervyn Storey MLA said the new market would bring increased footfall and activity to the Bank Square area and "act as a catalyst for the regeneration of this historic part of the city centre". Local community group, Folktown Community Interest Company (CIC), said the market would bring "new life" to an underused city centre space. "This market will help to connect all areas of the city and to breathe vitality and vibrancy into this space," said Folktown CIC director Joby Fox. Image copyright other Image caption Folktown market will be located behind Primark in Bank Square "Bank Square is a part of Belfast that many people haven't been to and some weren't even aware that it existed." Folktown CIC said they were involved in lengthy negotiations to obtain a licence for the market as under the original charter granted by King James I, the historic rights to operate markets in the city, including those held on private property or indoors, belong to the city council. One of the traders who will operate at Folktown market is Mark Douglas, founder of Krazi Baker. "When I started my business I found that it was very hard to get somewhere to trade," he said. "This is a fantastic opportunity, unlike anything else, for arts, crafts, artisan and shoppers alike to express their talents. Belfast just keeps getting better." The project has received support from the DSD, Awards for All and The Ireland Funds. The market will be held in the shadow of two of the oldest churches in Belfast, Berry Street Presbyterian Church and St Mary's. Organisers said the name Folktown came from discussions with local people reflecting on the area, which is rich in music, pubs, cuisine, arts groups, faith groups and small traders. |
A team of researchers are working to find a solution to an unlikely scourge that is marring the surfaces of canvases around the world: soap. Conservation scientists say that tiny formations of lead-based soaps—each about a tenth of a millimeter in diameter—are threatening to mar paintings by artists ranging from Rembrandt van Rijn to Georgia O’Keeffe. A team of experts has spent years researching why these microscopic white pockmarks appear—but they can’t figure out how to stop them. “We began to investigate the process and see if we could come up with some explanation so art conservators might have some idea how to correct the problem,” says University of Delaware professor Cecil Dybowski, who has been researching these pesky soaps over the last four years with Silvia A. Centeno, a research scientist at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The long-term goal of the project, funded by a joint $590,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, “is to find out what factors affect the reaction itself and figure out procedures to ameliorate those problems,” Dybowski says. Through their work, Dybowski and his team have proven for the first time that water and humidity are major contributing factors in this soapy conservation nightmare. Potential for Destruction The stakes are high enough to get any art lover in a lather. These small blemishes add up to give paintings a hazy appearance, and can also cause severe damage. If enough slippery metal soap forms on a painting’s surface, it can lead to delamination, and the paint can flake off the canvas in layers, destroying the artwork. Soap also does not discriminate. Scientists have identified the presence of lead soap in all sorts of paintings, from works by Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh to Piet Mondrian, as well as works by contemporary artists. (The problem is so widespread that clever forgers even incorporate lead soaps to make a painting appear older.) Ellen Baxter, the chief conservator of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, recently encountered soap formations in Elizabeth Murray’s 1979 painting Try. To restore a pristine appearance, “you can try and burnish it, rub it with a q-tip, use a solvent on it, or you can try and pick them off manually,” Baxter tells artnet News. “I tried to take off some of the worst of them so it wasn’t quite so noticeable.” But this approach is tricky too. Because they are part of the paint film, removing the soaps is akin to moving a tiny part of the painting. What Do We Know? Conservators have been working to solve this problem for almost 20 years. The initial discovery that soap was behind dusky surfaces came from Petria Noble, a conservator at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Jaap Boon, a conservation scientist, in 1996. The duo were getting ready to clean Rembrandt’s 1632 masterpiece The Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, and realized that the tiny white spots on the painting’s surface were actually lead soaps. (Previously, the prevailing theory was that tiny gas bubbles were forming and bursting through the paint, creating imperfections.) Here’s how it works: over many years, as oil paint is exposed to heat and humidity, it becomes unstable and lead soap forms. Fatty oils naturally present in linseed oil—the most common oil in both historic and contemporary oil paint—combine with lead ions from the pigment. When the metal soaps form at or near the painting’s surface, they break through the paint, creating the tiny craters that populated the surface of the Rembrandt, and many other Old Masters. And just because the lead soaps aren’t visible, doesn’t mean they aren’t there, lurking just under the surface, ready to erupt. Dybowski shared with us an image of a small cross-section of Madame X, the Met’s John Singer Sargent masterpiece (1883–84), which shows a soap inclusion growing just beneath the upper layer of paint. “The oils consist of glycerol—which is like hand lotion—which have long chain fatty acids in them,” explains Dybowski. “They’re just molecules wandering around, but when they come in contact with the pigment, they form soap. Those aggregates eventually break through the layers of paint—if you allow this process to go on too long, it destroys the painting totally.” One added challenge? Water is generally considered one of the safest cleaning products in the world of conservation—but that is not the case when it comes to lead soap. Instead, water may actually encourage the formation of the pesky substance and the unsightly imperfections it creates. Unanswered Questions Many unanswered questions remain. Because each artist’s materials are slightly different, and paintings are stored under different conditions, it is hard to know when free fatty acids will appear to trigger the problem. As Dybowski explains, the formation of the soaps “certainly has to do with the presence of the free fatty acids, but there are many processes that could lead to the presence of free fatty acids.” In the meantime, conservators are doing their best to slow, stop, and prevent the soap formations. Dybowski’s team is generally unable to acquire large enough samples to test real Old Master paintings; instead, they create their own model paintings in the lab and do their best to replicate what is happening to works of art all over the world—despite the many variables involved. Their research has consistently shown that exposure to water speeds up the formation of lead soaps. “On the other hand, if you dry these paintings out, there are other processes that can happen,” Dybowski warns. “There’s a trade-off.” Baxter agrees: “Paintings absorb humidity and suddenly they’ve gotten mold, or they can swell and you have mechanical damage. Under low humidity they become really brittle and they go through chemical changes.” In the wider realm of art conservation, lead soaps are just one relatively small problem among many. But researchers appear to be slowly getting closer to a solution. “It’s really bizarre,” Baxter says. “For things that are supposed to be so inanimate, paintings can be really animated… it’s always an adventure.” Follow artnet News on Facebook: |
By Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto Views of Race Relations Following the shooting of two black men by white police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota and the subsequent shooting of five police officers by a black gunman in Dallas, negative views of race relations in the U.S. have risen to a level not seen since the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the Rodney King verdict. Now just 26 percent of Americans think race relations in the U.S. are mostly good - an 11 point drop from a year ago - while 69 percent say they are mostly bad. Back in May 1992, 68 percent said race relations were bad. Positive opinions of race relations rose above 50 percent in the 2000s, and reached a high of 66 percent in April 2009, shortly after President Barack Obama took office. But those positive assessments have been dropping steadily since mid-2014, after the conflicts between blacks and the police in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer. White Americans have traditionally been more optimistic about race relations than black Americans, but in this poll their views are similar: whites are just as pessimistic as blacks about the state of race relations in the U.S. And there is growing pessimism about whether race relations are improving. Now just 9 percent of Americans think race relations are getting better, while 59 percent think they are getting worse. A year ago, 21 percent thought race relations were improving, and 38 percent thought they were getting worse. The Shooting in Dallas Most Americans have heard or read a lot about the events in Dallas, and 54 percent were surprised by the shooting of the Dallas police officers. But while 55 percent of whites say they were surprised by the shooting, just over half blacks - 52 percent - say they were not surprised. Black Lives Matter More Americans agree with the Black Lives Matter movement (41 percent) than disagree (25 percent), though about a third don't have an opinion either way. Seventy percent of black Americans agree with the Black Lives Matter movement, while white Americans are more divided, with 37 percent agreeing, 31 percent disagreeing, and 28 percent with no opinion on the movement. Assessing the Police Despite increasing scrutiny of police tactics following a number of civilian deaths at the hands of police caught on video over the last two years, three in four Americans give police in their community positive marks for doing their job. There are racial differences in this assessment, however. While eight in ten white Americans think their local police are doing at least a good job, less than half of black Americans agree. Instead, 57 percent of blacks rate their local police as either fair (34 percent) or poor (23 percent). Eighty percent of Americans overall and 85 percent of white Americans say their local police make them feel mostly safe -- but just over half of black Americans agree. Forty-five percent of black Americans say the police make them mostly anxious. These percentages have changed little since 2014. Three in four blacks also think the police are more likely to use deadly force against a black person than a white person. Most white Americans - 56 percent - think race doesn't make a difference in the use of deadly force by police. This poll was conducted by telephone July 8-12, 2016 among a random sample of 1,600 adults nationwide. Data collection was conducted on behalf of CBS News and The New York Times by SSRS of Media, PA. Phone numbers were dialed from samples of both standard land-line and cell phones. The poll employed a random digit dial methodology. For the landline sample, a respondent was randomly selected from all adults in the household. For the cell sample, interviews were conducted with the person who answered the phone. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish using live interviewers. The data have been weighted to reflect U.S. Census figures on demographic variables. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The error for subgroups may be higher and is available by request. The margin of error for the sample of whites is three points and for the sample of blacks nine points. The margin of error includes the effects of standard weighting procedures which enlarge sampling error slightly. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls. |
CIA briefers told the senators in a closed-door briefing it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, according to officials. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post) CIA briefers told the senators in a closed-door briefing it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, according to officials. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post) The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter. Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances. “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.” The Post's Ellen Nakashima goes over the events and discusses the hacker groups responsible. (Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post) [FBI and CIA give differing accounts to lawmakers on Russia’s motives in 2016 hacks] The Obama administration has been debating for months how to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions, with White House officials concerned about escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Clinton’s campaign. In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present. The Trump transition team dismissed the findings in a short statement issued Friday evening. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’ ” the statement read. Trump has consistently dismissed the intelligence community’s findings about Russian hacking. “I don’t believe they interfered” in the election, he told Time magazine this week. The hacking, he said, “could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.” [Trump, CIA on collision course over Russia’s role in U.S. election] 1 of 62 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Trump continues his post-election ‘thank-you’ tour View Photos The president-elect has gone to Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio, and saluted workers at an Indiana plant where he says he saved more than 1,000 jobs. Caption The president-elect has visited Alabama, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Indiana, where he toured the Carrier factory. Dec. 17, 2016 President-elect Donald Trump waves as he is greeted by Azalea Trail Maids on his way to a “thank you” tour event in Mobile, Ala. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. The CIA shared its latest assessment with key senators in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill last week, in which agency officials cited a growing body of intelligence from multiple sources. Agency briefers told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered. For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has said in a television interview that the “Russian government is not the source.” The White House and CIA officials declined to comment. On Friday, the White House said President Obama had ordered a “full review” of Russian hacking during the election campaign, as pressure from Congress has grown for greater public understanding of exactly what Moscow did to influence the electoral process. “We may have crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned,” Obama’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. Obama wants the report before he leaves office Jan. 20, Monaco said. The review will be led by James Clapper, the outgoing director of national intelligence, officials said. During her remarks, Monaco didn’t address the latest CIA assessment, which hasn’t been previously disclosed. Seven Democratic senators last week asked Obama to declassify details about the intrusions and why officials believe that the Kremlin was behind the operation. Officials said Friday that the senators specifically were asking the White House to release portions of the CIA’s presentation. This week, top Democratic lawmakers in the House also sent a letter to Obama, asking for briefings on Russian interference in the election. U.S. intelligence agencies have been cautious for months in characterizing Russia’s motivations, reflecting the United States’ long-standing struggle to collect reliable intelligence on President Vladimir Putin and those closest to him. In previous assessments, the CIA and other intelligence agencies told the White House and congressional leaders that they believed Moscow’s aim was to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system. The assessments stopped short of saying the goal was to help elect Trump. On Oct. 7, the intelligence community officially accused Moscow of seeking to interfere in the election through the hacking of “political organizations.” Though the statement never specified which party, it was clear that officials were referring to cyber-intrusions into the computers of the DNC and other Democratic groups and individuals. Some key Republican lawmakers have continued to question the quality of evidence supporting Russian involvement. “I’ll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there’s clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence — even now,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Trump transition team. “There’s a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that’s it.” [U.S. investigating potential covert Russian plan to disrupt elections] Though Russia has long conducted cyberspying on U.S. agencies, companies and organizations, this presidential campaign marks the first time Moscow has attempted through cyber-means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome of an election, the officials said. The reluctance of the Obama White House to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions before Election Day upset Democrats on the Hill as well as members of the Clinton campaign. Within the administration, top officials from different agencies sparred over whether and how to respond. White House officials were concerned that covert retaliatory measures might risk an escalation in which Russia, with sophisticated cyber-capabilities, might have less to lose than the United States, with its vast and vulnerable digital infrastructure. The White House’s reluctance to take that risk left Washington weighing more-limited measures, including the “naming and shaming” approach of publicly blaming Moscow. By mid-September, White House officials had decided it was time to take that step, but they worried that doing so unilaterally and without bipartisan congressional backing just weeks before the election would make Obama vulnerable to charges that he was using intelligence for political purposes. Instead, officials devised a plan to seek bipartisan support from top lawmakers and set up a secret meeting with the Gang of 12 — a group that includes House and Senate leaders, as well as the chairmen and ranking members of both chambers’ committees on intelligence and homeland security. Obama dispatched Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to make the pitch for a “show of solidarity and bipartisan unity” against Russian interference in the election, according to a senior administration official. Specifically, the White House wanted congressional leaders to sign off on a bipartisan statement urging state and local officials to take federal help in protecting their voting-registration and balloting machines from Russian cyber-intrusions. Though U.S. intelligence agencies were skeptical that hackers would be able to manipulate the election results in a systematic way, the White House feared that Russia would attempt to do so, sowing doubt about the fundamental mechanisms of democracy and potentially forcing a more dangerous confrontation between Washington and Moscow. [Putin denies that Russia hacked the DNC but says it was for the public good] In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia’s role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals. And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as “the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process.” The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests. According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics. Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow’s hands. McConnell’s office did not respond to a request for comment. After the election, Trump chose McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as his nominee for transportation secretary. Some Clinton supporters saw the White House’s reluctance to act without bipartisan support as further evidence of an excessive caution in facing adversaries. “The lack of an administration response on the Russian hacking cannot be attributed to Congress,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who was at the September meeting. “The administration has all the tools it needs to respond. They have the ability to impose sanctions. They have the ability to take clandestine means. The administration has decided not to utilize them in a way that would deter the Russians, and I think that’s a problem.” Philip Rucker contributed to this report. Read more: As Democrats demand probe over CIA election claim, GOP senators express doubt Kremlin defers to Trump on the CIA assessment that Moscow helped him win The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere |
Not tonight dear, we're married: Trying the knot is BAD for your sex life as lovemaking wanes to just once a week Sexual tension: A third polled no longer fancy their partner as much as they did in the early days, with 43 per cent claiming their loved one has let themselves go It's official, marriage is bad for your sex life, a study has revealed. Researchers found before walking down the aisle, couples can expect to have sex more than four times a week. But after three years of life as man and wife most couples are lucky to have sex just once every seven days. It also emerged six out of ten couples believe marriage has completely ruined the excitement of having sex. Astonishingly, just under half of all married people say their relationship with their partner is more like friends than lovers. A spokesman for extra-marital dating service www.lovinglinks.co.uk, which conducted the poll of 3,000 married people, said: 'Unfortunately, while you can be deeply in love with someone and want to spend the rest of your life with them, it is also possible to want more from the relationship. 'A partner might be supportive, funny, intelligent, and kind, but if they don't inspire confidence in the bedroom, or don't meet expectations sexually life can be frustrating. 'And it is at times like this when eyes start to wander, and folk start to think about having a no-strings affair with someone else. 'After 14 years of providing a service where married people can look for sex elsewhere, we have good reason to believe many relationships are strengthened by a little out-of-marriage activity.' The poll shows 59 per cent of couples believe their sex life has worsened since marriage because they no longer make an effort with each other any more. And a third no longer fancy their partner as much as they did in the early days, with 43 per cent claiming their loved one has let themselves go. Unfortunately, eight in ten couples are in a bit of a sexual rut - having sex at the same time, in the same place and in the same positions every time they sleep together. In fact, 79 per cent of people are happier getting a good night's sleep than making the effort to have spontaneous sex in the middle of the night. But when it comes to having an affair, two thirds of those who have dabbled admit the sex was mind-blowing compared to the once-a-week missionary with their husband or wife. And even a fifth of those who haven't yet played away from home would have a one night stand if the opportunity presented itself or if their sex life with their partner doesn't improve. The same percentage even said they would understand if their partner suddenly confessed to sleeping with someone else. Unsurprisingly, a quarter of those polled admit to having had a one night stand to satisfy their craving for good sex. And 14 per cent have even embarked on a hot blooded affair. The Loving Links spokesman added: 'Modern marriages are becoming a little more open where sex is concerned, and these days we are quicker to forgive if someone has a little one night stand. 'It is never nice to learn that our partners aren't satisfied in the bedroom department, but if sleeping with someone else spurs couples on to make more of an effort with each other that can only be a good thing.' Two thirds of couples blame their hectic lifestyle for their terrible sex life, and 80 per cent are often too tired to bother once the day is over. Seven in ten people reckon they might be inclined make love more if their partner made more of an effort romantically. |
The Nazis only ran under communism and then socialism as a way to make their party seem more legitimate in a communist-infested Europe. They were nationalists and patriots, not communists. And as for socialism, they actually helped the people. Right that's why there are so few Europeans in Europe and Russia and so many jews You must think you're clever to point out that there are a lot of Europeans in Europe and Russians in Russia. You've missed the point. This doesn't change the fact that mostly Europeans and Russians died or were victims during the war that was started with a jewish-backed revolution in Russia (Jacob Schiff and Max Warburg) and a jewish-backed lobby in the West (Rothschilds) as well as all the other industrialists who were more than eager to bend to the jewish mentality of internationalism and war through deception. also Marx and the Soviet state like most of his followers were very anti Semitic Who cares? They weren't anti-money. as was the broader European world in the era following the french revolution that gave birth to the socialism that led to the USSR and the Nazis False. The NSDAP was a result and opposite of the jewish (Russian) revolution in the USSR. The USSR was a result of an overthrow of the Tsars that was funded by the jewish West and built on the hatred of the jewish East. There's one thing that jews could never do and that's deal with other nationalities on their terms in their own homelands. They have always had to be the voice and change the culture away from patriotism towards an open border policy and towards their own beliefs. This is why they were always having to leave the places they immigrated to. Spain, Germany, Russia... You name it, they've been booted. They don't play well with others. Look at israel... There were jewish settlers there before the zionists made their mandate with the leaders of the world. They lived there peacefully. But the uppity internationalists wanted to make hell for another people and culture. It's disgusting. Do some basic fucking reading specifically primary sources Primary sources is your middle name because you don't know shit about reality only the spoon-fed garbage that the West has been fed from approved publishers under an approved climate of media and culture construction. |
The polls might have missed in Iowa, but they were right on in New Hampshire: Businessman Donald Trump has won the Republican primary, and independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has won on the Democratic side, just as the polls projected. HuffPost Pollster’s averages showed Trump up by 16 points, with 67 percent of precincts reporting that he was leading by 18 percent. The averages showed Sanders up by 14 points, with two-thirds of precincts reporting he held a 21-point lead. The close race for second place in the Republican primary seems to be settling on Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has about 16 percent of the vote. But Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) look to all finish in double-digits. Rubio is notably underperforming his polling numbers, which had him averaging nearly 15 percent. His poor showing in Saturday’s debate could have factored into his underperformance -- exit polls showed that 56 percent of GOP voters said the debates were one of several important factors in determining their vote. Pollsters had warned all week that New Hampshire could surprise everyone, but those cautions seem to have been largely unnecessary. The state’s electorate certainly could have offered surprises, with estimates of up to half of voters undecided going into Tuesday’s voting. So what’s different between the apparent poll failure in Iowa, and the success just over a week later in New Hampshire? In part it’s because the format of a primary is more stable than the caucus. Unlike in the caucuses, where voters have the opportunity to be swayed by their fellow community members, primaries are traditional elections with secret ballots. The propensity for voters to change their minds at the last minute -- although still high -- is lower than in a caucus situation. Additionally, the primary format makes turning out to vote easier for the voters -- in a caucus, they all have to show up at the caucus site at the same time and be there for as long as the caucus process takes. That means lower turnout, which is more difficult to predict. The Iowa caucuses had just under 16 percent turnout among the voting-eligible population, whereas the New Hampshire primaries are projected to have nearly 45 percent turnout. It’s also important to note that Sanders and Trump held much stronger leads in the New Hampshire pre-primary polls than Trump and Clinton did in the Iowa polls. No one had come close to challenging Trump in the state since late June. Sanders passed Clinton in the HuffPost Pollster average in late August, and although the race remained fairly close through the end of the year, Sanders never lost his lead. It would have been a huge upset for Sanders or Trump to lose. Every state and every primary or caucus is a new event, though, so just as we warned not to assume polls would be inaccurate based on Iowa, don’t assume polls will be accurate from now on based on New Hampshire. Also on HuffPost: |
Source: American Society of Addiction Medicine Roughly 78 Americans die each day from the opioid epidemic that has ravaged states from Florida to Maine. The Appalachian region—West Virginia in particular—is among the hardest hit and has suffered the highest number of casualties. In August this year, the city of Huntington, WV, experienced 26 overdoses in just a few hours. Every year, opioid kills almost 30,000 Americans nationwide. Given the scale of the crisis, the and medicine newspaper STAT, published by Boston Globe , deserves praise for its outstanding investigative reports on the reason opioid addiction has flared disproportionately in the region. Earlier this year, the publication’s tireless efforts at unlocking court-sealed documents in Kentucky helped bring to light how Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma and Abbott Laboratories, its partner, aggressively promoted the painkiller OxyContin, whose active ingredient oxycodone is both highly addictive and widely held to be responsible for the fatalities. The investigation included 17 million pages of documents produced during litigation that the state of Kentucky brought against the drug maker. As part of the $24 million settlement, STAT reported at the time, Kentucky's attorney general's office "destroyed its copies of documents" that Purdue had been required to make available, though other key papers—including the deposition of a company board member—were filed under seal elsewhere and subsequently retrieved. The documents help explain why fatal overdoses from the prescription painkiller quadrupled between 1999 and 2013, when more than 16,000 Americans overdosed on oxycodone. Two days ago, in an even more dramatic and significant turn, STAT reported on the role that Purdue Pharma and Abbott Laboratories played in fueling the crisis in neighboring West Virginia, including a system-wide effort to block state medical agencies wanting to restrict Oxycontin prescriptions to those genuinely in need. The state's decision to require prior authorization for patients had been shown to reduce opioid abuse, though both drug makers dismissed the initiative as generating merely unwanted paperwork. The documents that STAT succeeded in unsealing show in a clear, unflattering light that Abbott and Purdue actively misled prescribers about the strength and safety of the painkiller. To undermine the policy of requiring prior authorization, they offered lucrative rebates to middlemen such as Merck Medco and other pharmacy benefits managers, on condition that they eased availability of the drug and lowered co-pays. The records were part of a case brought by the state of West Virginia against both drug makers alleging inappropriate and illegal marketing of the drug as a cause of widespread addiction. As David Armstrong notes, “The case was settled in 2004 when Purdue agreed to pay $10 million to the state. Neither company admitted any wrongdoing.” Until recently, the documents had been kept under seal at the McDowell County Courthouse in Welch, WV. The “rebates” were part of an elaborate system Purdue Pharma developed in other states also, STAT has since determined, including a lottery system aimed at boosting prescribing that included $20,000 in prizes. Other incentives included the strategy “Dine and Dash”—providing busy doctors with takeout meals—and offers of up to 250 “TravPass dollars.” One harried doctor with a known weakness for junk food was larded with doughnuts arranged to spell “OxyContin.” Apparently, that was enough to boost his prescribing. Source: STAT News Other leading prescribers were given flattering monikers such as “King of Pain” and “Wizard of OxyContin” at the “Royal Court of OxyContin.” The drug maker, staff admitted, was intent on creating a “Crusade” to turn its painkiller into a billion-dollar blockbuster. One reason the documents are so troubling is that, in public at least, the drug maker was carefully assuring authorities that it was working with state authorities to curb abuse of OxyContin. Behind the scenes, however, as one Purdue official openly acknowledged, the drug maker was “working with Medco (PBM) to try to make parameters [for prescribing] less stringent.” Representatives for Purdue Pharma said the company would make no comment about the investigative reports. In response to my follow-up request, however, Robert Josephson, executive director of communications at Purdue emailed: "We contract with PBMs [Pharmacy Benefit Managers] to ensure legitimate patients have access to the medicines prescribed by their doctors. This practice is the industry standard, whether the medicines are for pain, cancer or diabetes. It is inaccurate and irresponsible to claim that PBM contracts undermine public health." Meanwhile, in McDowell County, West Virginia, where the court records are now unsealed and the numbers of people afflicted still rampant, the local sheriff plans to file a new lawsuit against the drug makers. christopherlane.org Follow me on Twitter @christophlane |
Some authors had complained they had not given permission for books to be scanned and made available online Google's controversial plans to create the world's biggest online library have been shelved by a US judge. In a ruling filed in the US district court in Manhattan, judge Denny Chin ruled the company had gone "too far" in its ambitious plans and rejected a legal settlement with authors and publishers that Google reached in 2008. The web giant has scanned millions of books, many held at some of the world's greatest libraries including Oxford University's Bodleian and Harvard's libraries, and made them available online via its eBooks platform. The plan has split the publishing industry and attracted fierce criticism from authors and rival tech firms. While Google said it would show only snippets of works that are in copyright, some authors complained that they had not given their permission for the scanning in the first place and were wary of Google's future plans. In court Google rejected calls for an "opt-in" solution where copyright owners would decide whether or not to be part of the scanning project. The company said the idea was not viable. Chin suggested he might look more favourably on a settlement that allowed copyright owners to "opt in". "While the digitisation of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many," Chin wrote, Google's current pact would "simply go too far". It would "give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission," he said. The agreement rejected by Chin was negotiated with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Under the settlement, Google would continue to digitise books and sell access online and the company would pay $125m (£76.9m) in royalties every year to the copyright owners of the books being scanned. Copyright concerns persisted, however, as the ownership of many of the works being scanned by Google could not be established. Hilary Ware, managing counsel for Google, said the judge's decision was disappointing. "We believe this agreement has the potential to open up access to millions of books that are currently hard to find in the US today," she said. "Regardless of the outcome, we'll continue to work to make more of the world's books discoverable online through Google Books and Google eBooks." "Publishers are prepared to modify the settlement agreement to gain approval," said John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, in a statement issued by the Association of American Publishers. He said they would work to overcome the objections raised by the court. Google co-founder Larry Page was the author of the firm's plans to make 150m books accessible via the search engine. He has been promoting the idea since shortly after the company was formed in 1998. Google began working with several libraries in 2004 to scan and digitise books and other writings in their collections, and has said it has completed 10% of the effort. The search engine currently allows users to search about two million books that are out of copyright, including the works of William Shakespeare. That service will be unaffected by the ruling. Chin's decision is the latest in a series of setbacks. The plans have attracted criticism not only in the US but across Europe and in China and Canada. It is also separately being investigated by the US Justice Department on competition and copyright grounds. |
Alex DeBrincat admits there have been some lucky goals during his record 19-game goal-scoring streak. Burying an empty-netter with 26 seconds left in London Friday is one of the more fortunate. “Anytime you have a streak, you have some luck,” said the Erie sniper, who tied Mike Ricci’s 28-year-old OHL record run in the final half-minute of a 4-1 win at Budweiser Gardens. “The puck’s kind of bouncing my way in those games. I try not to think about it too much. Usually, when you’re worried about it, then it doesn’t happen or you grip your stick too much. “Just try to play my game.” Ricci’s streak was the talk of junior hockey circles back in 1988-89, but until DeBrincat hit 18 games Thursday in Windsor, there was some feeling his feat had buzzed along under the radar a bit. Not even his linemates Dylan Strome and Taylor Raddysh were teasing him about it. “They didn’t want to jinx it,” the OHL’s leading scorer said. “It’s been pretty quiet, other than (Friday). Twitter’s kind of blowing up about it. “I just stay off it. Sometimes, it’s better that way. It is what it is.” It’s not like he hasn’t been just barely scraping by along the way. He has produced 26 goals and 47 points in the 19-game binge. The only other player who scored in 10 straight games this season is his linemate Raddysh. The 19-year-old Blackhawks prospect knows how difficult it is to score in every game over a month-and-a-half stretch. It’s right up there with getting a hit every day in a high-level baseball league. His coach is impressed by the competition he’s faced and the number of big goals he produced during his streak. “Sometimes, guys who score a lot of goals can score score them against bad teams,” Kris Knoblauch said. “You can have three, four, five-goal nights and it really adds to your stats. Or you win 7 or 8-1 and you may be scoring the fifth, sixth or seventh goal. Those aren’t very significant. But right now, for him to score in this many games against good teams back-to-back, that’s pretty remarkable.” It’s not his favourite DeBrincat achievement, though. “The three (straight) 50-goal seasons, those career standards, I think that one over such a long period of time is up there,” Knoblauch said. No one is going to match either of them any time soon. |
Scientists and historians generally mark time and world history events as B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (anno domini— In The Year Of Our Lord). In rap music and Hip Hop culture, the marker that parallels this should be B.R. and A.R.—Before Rakim and After Rakim, respectively. Prior to the arrival of The R, rap music was finding its feet in New York City, Los Angeles, various blocs that it infiltrated. From 1979 (when rap records first hit the shelves) through 1985, the genre’s beats and lyrical styles across the Hip Hop landscape had a groundswell with thematic structures in a regionalized format. After Rakim Allah hit the scene with “My Melody” and “Eric B. Is President,” he wasted no time telling you that “he came in the door” and slammed it shut for all MCs to drop their rhyme books and stop screaming and smiling like giddy school children onstage. He meant business, and no competition could parallel “the god.” Done deal, “no mistakes allowed” to determine his presence was a paradigm shift. In terms of numerology, the release of his iconic debut album Paid In Full with production partner Eric Barrier on the seventh month of the Gregorian calendar on the seventh day in 1987 was all too perfect in itself without coincidence. From its album cover that reflected Hip Hop’s mantra of economic empowerment, to the James Brown and R&B sample loops, eerie keyboards, primal yet beautiful scratches and DJ cuts, and drums that sounded like Hank Aaron smacking his MLB-record setting home run, the album changed the sound of rap forever and a day. 30 years later, after Marley Marl and MC Shan had initially cracked up laughing at the 18-year-old nicknamed “Pop” from Wyandanch, Long Island because of his unorthodox monotonous rhyme style, legendary rappers and producers across the map have exalted this former star high school quarterback, devout Five Percent Nation convert, jazz instrumentalist, DJ, beatmaker, Pan-Africanist and metaphysician as the greatest MC to ever touch a mic. Rap icons since have watched his throne: the genre’s most storied martyr 2Pac, A Tribe Called Quest, and Wu-Tang’s Raekwon and Ghostface have each covered his music and lyrics in their own best work; DMX videorecorded himself being starstruck in his presence; 50 Cent, who told us on his hit “Hate It Or Love It” featuring Game that his “favorite rapper used to say ‘Ch-check-check out my melody,” to begin the song; Snoop Dogg considers Paid In Full to be his favorite rap album ever; Mannie Fresh and Scarface uphold him as the greatest MC; Nas sports “God’s Son” tattooed across his stomach and named his sixth album as an homage to his main influence, while Common’s tenth album Nobody’s Smiling was done in the same manner; to A$AP Rocky— whose birth name Rakim Mayers was not done sub rosa by mother—titled his seminal sophomore album with the acronym A.L.L.A. because he was “born to do this shit,” and channeled his namesake’s acrobatic rhyme style on 2015’s “Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye, Pt. 2.” The rhyme deity spoke in depth with his influence on the rap game, qualifies how DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Summertime” was possibly his song initially, details his political views with concerning survival tactics to not get killed by police and the #BlackLivesMatter social media movement, and Paid In Full roots in the cultural lexicon since its release. The microphone soloist knows that it’s been a long time since 1986, but he still knows how to drop science on his audience with the unmatched styles and rhythm to hit ‘em. Rakim Details Connection To DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s “Summertime” DX: I recently heard Eric B. on The Combat Jack Show state that the beat to DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince’s classic “Summertime” song was originally slated for you. Can you verify that? Rakim: Nah, it was ironic that me and Eric B. had sampled it, and we had it ready to go. But when they came out with it, a lot of people thought it was me because of the style he used. But it was one of those things where that was them. I didn’t write it. That was Will and Jeff. DX: But Eric stated that he had crafted the beat for you, but some industry people and friends who heard it before it came out were in your ear telling you that the beat was somewhat soft and out of character for you. Is there any validity to that? Rakim: Umm, yeah. It was something he had on the backburner, nahmean? Again, it was something that we wanted to use, but we felt that the time wasn’t right because of the choice of all the records that we had on the first album. But that’s a joint that you can’t deny. You know, maybe it could’ve been hooked up a little more street-ready, and it was something that we thought was a hit record. But we didn’t want to come out and grasp on that first album. We was trying to ease back on that. DX: You stated on “I Ain’t No Joke” that you’re “no comedian.” But I noticed onstage when you perform that you have a humorous side that you never really exposed on record. Is that why you did the recent Sprite commercial to shed light on that part of your personality? Rakim: [Laughs] Nah, nah, that was just something that they just called me up for that one. It just came out like that. You know, I like having fun, and I’m up there in age, man. I remember growing up not saying much. DX: Speak when spoken to? Rakim: Yeah, I was always absorbing. Now I just feel like I gotta enjoy life while I can. Joke here, and humor there makes the day go a little better. Rakim’s Influence On Mafioso Imagery In Rap DX: Even though the Cold Crush Brothers pioneered the Mafia gangster fashion when they performed onstage with Tommy guns and expensive suits in the late 1970s and early 1980s, your video for “Follow The Leader” was highly influential on Mafioso imagery in rap music videos after it came out in 1988. Who wrote the treatment for that video? Rakim: Oh, I can’t even remember, man. DX: Did you help conceptualize it at all? Rakim: I remember sitting with my man going over some concepts. And he took he took it home, came back with the treatment, and we kinda said, “That’s it.” Nahmean? We had a vision for it, but where he took it was all his. And [we] were all pleased with what he did because we didn’t expect that. And the imagery was crazy. DX: What was the hardest lesson that you learned when you entered the music business as a youth beyond having rap as a hobby like you mentioned in “Microphone Fiend?” Rakim: I would say the biggest thing I learned is to stay true to yourself, what you believe and try not to let anyone deter you from that. It’s real hard in [the industry] to express yourself the way you want. You can get caught up with the demographics, the masses, and things of that nature. Try to stay true to what you believe, and let your heart speak through your pen. And your mic is what I found to be priceless. I try to stick with that. The #BlackLivesMatter Movement DX: You’re not very active on social media. But what’s your standpoint on the power of social media generation’s reaction to the recent murders of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and crimes by the police? Rakim: We all understand and see what’s going on. Social media gives a lot of people a platform where they can express their feelings. I like to do mine through songs. I let info build up. In some way, it translates into paper whenever I sit down. We all see what’s going on, man. If you’re conscious of where we’re at in life right now, with democracy, rights, and racism, and all these things, you’ll have an opinion like myself. I don’t feel that what’s going on is necessary. I feel it’s a corny word, but the first thing is we’re being stereotyped. If you look a certain way, you’re gonna get handled a certain way. It stems back to stereotyping and racism. So we gotta understand what’s going on, and avoid it as much as we can. You know, I got kids. I got sons, and I try to tell them, “Look, man, when you in the car and you get pulled over, hands on the steering wheel. Yes, sir.” Your job is to either wind up in jail, so I can come get you, or be able to pull off. That’s your job. I’d rather come get you from the precinct for whatever happened, instead of mouthing off or giving them any reason to use that physical abuse. So we have to be smart. Still, what they’re doing is uncalled for, and unfair, man. The laws are gonna have to change. And it’s 2016. We can’t keep using all the laws that was made back in the 1700s. We’re gonna have to understand that times have changed. Rakim Speaks On The Legacy of Paid In Full 30 Years Later DX: The lore behind your first single “Eric B. Is President” is that you laughed hard when you initially heard the beat and didn’t like it. Rakim: Yeah, what it was is that me and Eric B. was in my mom’s crib and we was going through my mom’s records. And I pulled out James Brown “Funky President” for the beat (mimics the drum pattern). And Eric B. pulls out Fonda Rae “Over Like A Fat Rat.” So I bust out laughing, I fell on the floor and shit, crying, tears in my eyes, literally. He was like “Ra, man, this is gonna work.” I was like “There’s no way Fonda Rae is gonna go with James Brown ‘Funk President.’” And I just laughed at him for about 30-to-40 minutes. Every time I looked at him I was making fun of the shit, looking at him, just laughing at him and shit. But we got to the studio, we made the beat, and at that time I was so used to sampling, and I just couldn’t see how he was gonna make that happen. But we flipped it up, and we sampled the drum and we just kinda sampled [a piece] of the drum. We played the joint over it instead of using the sampled record, and it worked out kinda crazy, man. I was surprised that it did work out like it did. So big up to E on that one. He got over. Word up. DX: Now that we are approaching the 30th anniversary of Paid In Full, the album and impact and legacy on pop culture and Hip Hop from the 80s through today is monumental. Was that the goal or did you see this with your “third eye” as you claimed on so many of your records? Rakim: Not at all, man. We had a vision, and we understood what the bottom line was. But we didn’t think it had the effect on Hip Hop that it has. We were speaking to the streets, but it kinda came back and expressed itself time and time again. Some negative ways, and some good ways, but the bottom line is we have to get that currency. We have to. |
The behavior of the New York Police Department officer who placed Staten Island man Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold is under the microscope once again, this time for allegedly crashing a car into and injuring another man. In a lawsuit filed in Queens Supreme Court, Leonardo Aguirre claims that NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo crashed a police vehicle into his car while speeding on June 20, the New York Daily News reported. As a result of the crash, Aguirre says he suffered from “severe and permanent” injuries to his neck, left shoulder and knees, the lawsuit claims. An unnamed source within the police department told the Daily News, however, that Pantaleo was the one who was hit by another car. Additionally, the source added that Pantaleo was flashing his police vehicle’s emergency lights and responding to a call at the time. Cop who killed Eric Garner being sued for car crash that resulted in ‘severe’ injuries http://t.co/kuvzvCEMEKpic.twitter.com/VPgjjdYPeF — N.O.T.O.R.I.O.U.S.™ (@MrMilitantNegro) March 30, 2015 According to the lawsuit, the accident on June 20 occurred less than a month before Pantaleo became involved in the attempted arrest of Eric Garner, a, African-American father of six who was approached by officers on Staten Island for selling loose cigarettes. On July 17, Pantaleo placed Garner in a chokehold as several other officers helped to subdue him. Garner died as a result of the chokehold. A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo on criminal charges, despite the fact that the entire incident was caught on tape, sparking massive protests against the NYPD across the city. The officer is still under review by the NYPD, which is looking into the Garner incident internally. READ MORE:NYPD says cops won’t be sanctioned for altering Wikipedia entries Notably, this isn’t the first time Pantaleo has been targeted in a lawsuit. Two men won $30,000 after the city settled a 2012 lawsuit claiming that Pantaelo strip-searched two men and slapped their testicles. Pantaleo was also among several officers named in separate 2012 lawsuits regarding the same incident, a drug raid during which two men said they were arrested because Pantaleo claimed they were in possession of marijuana. Both men also said they had their private parts and genitals searched. |
Humphrey scored his first goal for Hibs in a one-sided contest Scottish Cup holders Hibernian demolished Bonnyrigg Rose at Tynecastle to ease into the fifth round. Andrew Shinnie, James Keatings and Chris Humphrey banged in three goals inside 13 first-half minutes. The Midlothian junior side had a moment to celebrate when Dean Hoskins converted a penalty. The one-way traffic continued in the second half with Jason Cummings scoring twice, while Lewis Stevenson, Keatings and Jordon Forster were also on target. Hibernian's ruthless streak The opening 10 minutes were evenly matched but a goalkeeping error gifted Hibs their opener and it encouraged the Leith side to go on a three-goal blitz at the home of their arch-rivals Hearts. Shinnie's 22-yard shot looked like it would be dealt with comfortably by Michael Andrews, but the low effort squirmed through his grasp and into the bottom right corner. Bonnyrigg's 5000-strong support remained noisy before Keatings' delightful strike into the top left corner punctured their enthusiasm. Goalkeeper Andrews could do nothing about that one and all of a sudden the pressure was on the underdogs not to fold, but a third Hibs goal followed soon after. Andrews palmed Stevenson's low shot into the path of Humphrey for the winger to stroke home an easy first goal of his Hibs career. Bonnyrigg's big moment Manager Robbie Horn signalled to his players to be big and to stand up to Hibs' dominance, and left-back Ruaridh Donaldson impressed under pressure on more than one occasion before playing a useful ball to Kieran McGachie. Forster fouled the ambling blonde forward and referee Alan Muir pointed to the spot. Forster headed in Hibernian's eighth goal Dean Hoskins sent Hibs' substitute goalkeeper Ross Laidlaw the wrong way and all of a sudden the Rosey Posey's support rediscovered their fervour, flags and volume. Another shout for a penalty from a Forster handball, as well as Wayne McIntosh's header wide gave the New Dundas Park side some hope of scoring a second, but Neil Lennon's side also remained a threat and Hoskins had to be smart to clear off the line before the break. Normal service resumed Media playback is not supported on this device Scottish Cup highlights: Bonnyrigg Rose 1-8 Hibernian Hibernian quickly killed off any thoughts of an unlikely comeback with Cummings' scissor-kick and Stevenson's back post tap-in well and truly wrapping the result up by the hour mark. Bonnyrigg were broken further by Cummings' second strike of the game - an easy finish when Andrews could only parry an effort from Grant Holt. Then Keatings completed his brace by converting into the far corner from a tight angle following Martin Boyle's through ball. The rout was complete when Forster got in the scoring act by heading home Keatings' free-kick after a reckless foul by Hoskins on Humphrey. A chastening experience on the day for Bonnyrigg but one they only experienced because of a terrific run in the competition. What the managers said Hibernian's Neil Lennon: "The attitude was great and that will give the players a lift. Overall, I'm very pleased and the most important thing is that we are in the next round. "It was a good day. Unfortunately, we lost our goalkeeper early [Ofir Marciano after a collision], so we are waiting to hear the results of that and we're hoping it's not too bad." Bonnyrigg's Robbie Horn: "We just didn't start the game and we gave away some poor goals. I know we are better than that. "We showed in spells what we are capable of at 3-0 and I thought there was a good shout for another penalty to go 3-2. "The way Hibs moved the ball was different class." |
The railroad industry literally helped invent the concept of standard time, and time zones were established in the United States in the 1880s, 35 years before they were written into law. And most commuters know their train by the precise minute it departs; John Cheever , chronicler of the Grand Central commuter set, titled one memorable short story “The Five-Forty-Eight.” (Turns out it was the 5:49.) Photo The trains quickly make up the minute: at all other stops, the public timetable prevails. The courtesy minute does not exist at commuter railroads in Chicago , Los Angeles , Philadelphia , or San Francisco . But in New York, railroad enthusiasts said, the secret minute dates back decades. “That’s been done forever, from my knowledge,” said Jack Swanberg, 70, an unofficial historian of Metro -North who once oversaw departures at Grand Central Terminal . “I was the trainmaster starting in 1970, and it was the case then. I’m sure it’s been the case since 1870 for all I know.” At Grand Central, no rider should consider the minute a guarantee. Train conductors have the discretion to depart at the publicly posted time, as long as the platform is clear and no customers are rushing down the ramp. But an unscientific survey of 20 trains leaving at rush hour on a recent weekday evening found that, on average, the trains left about 58 seconds past their listed departure time. No schedules or signs in the terminal suggest the minute exists. At each train’s posted departure time, the schedule billboard announces, “Departed,” even as the train idles at the platform, receiving its last cargo of stumbling, out-of-breath passengers. Advertisement Continue reading the main story A worker in the central information booth, asked if a train was leaving a minute late, emphatically shook his head. “If it says 7:14, it leaves at 7:14,” he said gravely. Not exactly. More than half the trains surveyed this week waited the full minute or longer. The tardiest train waited at the platform for 81 seconds, while one train bound for Connecticut pushed off after just 32 seconds. Still, the delay allowed at least one passenger, already running late, to buy three beers from a nearby concession stand before jogging down the platform to make it onboard. Photo “It makes me look like I’m a nice guy,” Jason Macaluso, a conductor on Metro-North for 12 years, said with a laugh. The minute was originally known as “gate time,” dating to the days when gates were used to block off the ramps that lead down to the platforms. (The gates are still occasionally used at Grand Central.) At the publicly posted departure time, the gates would be closed; those who had already made it through would have a minute to climb onto the train. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. The practice gradually extended to trains to Long Island and New Jersey that start in Pennsylvania Station and the Long Island Rail Road ’s Brooklyn terminal. Railroad officials seemed somewhat cagey when asked about the minute. An Amtrak spokesman admitted that a few of his railroad’s trains in major cities wait 60 seconds after the listed time, but he did not specify exactly which trains or which cities. Riders told of the tacit 60-second reprieve were by turns amazed and grateful. “I was surprised the train was still there, to tell you the truth,” said Christian Riddle, 28, slightly out of breath and looking more than a little relieved, as he leaned into a leather seat on a Brewster-bound local at Grand Central the other day. Advertisement Continue reading the main story According to the departure board, his train had left at 8:22 p.m., just as the timetable promised. But Mr. Riddle, a carpenter headed home to Hawthorne, N.Y., ran anyway, hopping into the rear car just as the clock ticked 8:23. Ten more seconds passed before the doors slid shut. Missing the train would have meant a half-hour wait for Mr. Riddle, who deemed the secret minute policy “pretty cool.” “But I’d still try to get there on time,” he added. “You never know.” |
Canada’s military is having to accept new recruits who are fatter, less educated and harder to motivate than previous generations because quality applicants are in dwindling supply, an internal Defence Department audit has concluded. Despite an end to combat operations in Afghanistan and deep budget cuts, officials say the military needs more than 4,000 new recruits each year to offset attrition and keep 68,000 full-time troops in uniform. According to the audit conducted last year but only recently made public, Canadian military recruiters are expected “to encourage dedicated individuals, who are mentally and physically fit, towards military service as a career of choice.” However, the department’s auditors found that “recently, this has been an increasingly difficult challenge.” Compared to previous generations, recruits of today are described as harder to motivate The Canadian Forces has historically drawn heavily on young, white males from rural communities to fill its ranks, but the auditors cited recent census data showing that “traditional pool” has been steadily shrinking. “Factors such as increased levels of education, an aging workforce, a labour pool increasingly made up of immigrants, and the changing expectations regarding the nature of work among the 17- to 29-year-olds have also been contributing to challenges in recruiting,” they added. The result? The auditors found that “fitness and educational levels of recruits in the last five years have been slightly lower than in the past,” while “compared to previous generations, recruits of today are described as harder to motivate.” Despite this, they warned “raising the quality line” could backfire by making it even harder to find new recruits, and instead noted a number of initiatives such as sending out-of-shape recruits to fat camp before basic training has had positive results. The audit was conducted before the military rolled out a new fitness test earlier this year that it says more closely reflects the actual tasks the country’s soldiers, sailors and air force personnel must be able to accomplish such as carrying sandbags. It’s unclear what impact the new test will have on recruiting, if any, but auditors concluded the military has been able to “cope with differences observed with this slightly less fit and educated generation of recruits.” Auditors noted the budget for military recruiting has been slashed from $38.6 million in 2009-10 to $25.6 million this year, which has resulted in the closure of several recruiting centres. However, they do not draw a link between those cuts and the declining quality in recruits. The audit report also noted Defence Department officials have looked at following the United Kingdom and Australia in privatizing military recruitment, but that the costs outweigh the benefits at this time. Royal Military College professor Christian Leuprecht, who has researched military demographics and recruiting for years, felt the audit report was as much a statement about the military’s failure to adapt to changing circumstances as anything else. Leuprecht noted the absolute number of youth in Canada continues to grow, meaning there is still a substantial and growing population to recruit from. He questioned whether the military has continued to rely too heavily on its traditional recruit pool and old training methods. “We just need to work harder with the people who may be interested in joining but perhaps don’t have all the attributes that we need,” he said. “Is what the organization is trying to make these kids do really what the organization needs for the 21st century? And is that perhaps why the kids themselves are a little bit disenchanted with what they’re being asked to do because they’re questioning how in the world this is possibly relevant?” |
After LeEco acquired the controlling share in Coolpad rumors began spreading about a new Cool 1 flagship smartphone with a dual-camera setup. Today the smartphone is finally official. LeEco's Cool 1 Dual is built around a 5.5" IPS display of 1080p resolution. It's made of metal and is powered by the Snapdragon 652 chipset with 4x1.2 GHz Cortex-A53 & 4x1.8 GHz Cortex-A72 CPU; Adreno 510 GPU; and either 3GB, or 4GB of RAM. The highlight feature of the Cool 1 Dual is its dual 13MP main camera similar to the one on the Huawei P9 series. One of the 13MP sensors is monochrome, while the other one is color. LeEco promises 20% better image clarity and higher brightness, as well as better noise reduction. If you use only the monochrome sensor, the results will be even better although obviously they'll come in black and white. The main camera is complimented by a dual-tone flash and 4K video recording. There is an 8MP fixed-focus snapper at the front too. The Cool 1 Dual offers 32GB or 64GB of non-expandable storage, a back-mounted fingerprint scanner, LTE and dual-SIM connectivity, a 4,060 mAh battery, and Android Marshmallow skinned with LeEco's eUI v5.6. The phone will launch in China on August 26. The 32GB/3GB RAM model will cost CNY 1,099 ($166), while CNY 1,499 ($226) get you 32GB/4GB RAM. The flagship 64GB/4GB variant will retail for CNY 1,699 ($257). ZOL made a detailed hands-on article on the Cool 1 Dual and you can explore camera samples and live pictures, if you like. Source 1 Source 2 Image credit |
A while back, I was asked to give an hourlong presentation where I talked about my key principles of personal finance. I chose to give a presentation where each slide was available for about a minute with one simple rule on each slide, giving me a minute to discuss that rule. Thus, I ended up coming up with 60 short and simple rules for personal finance. I would happily share the presentation with you, but I’m not sure of the copyright nature of some of the images used. Instead, I’m just going to present the 60 rules, along with my quick personal thoughts on each rule. Of course, not everyone will be able to follow each rule all of the time. However, the more you follow these “rules,” the better your financial situation will become. #1 – Spend less than you earn If there is a single fundamental rule of personal finance, it’s this. You have to spend less than you earn and put away that difference for the future so that you can still survive and thrive when you’re older and don’t have the opportunities and energy of today. Without your earnings being greater than your expenses, you simply cannot achieve big financial goals without some sort of miracle – and you should never bet your future on a miracle. #2 – Keep everything as simple as possible The more credit cards you have, the more chances you have for identity theft and the more chances you have to miss a payment. The more investment accounts you have, the less attention you can give to each one and the more likely it is that you’ll miss a big problem. The more accounts and investments and bills that you have, the more time and energy you have to spend to stay on top of it all and the more likely it is that you’re going to make an error. Simplify. Cancel some of those cards. Roll over some of those investments. Consolidate some of those debts. #3 – Don’t ever let your “future self” take care of your current situation Do you ever tell yourself that it’s okay to make a bad spending decision right now because you’ll earn more money down the road? That’s a giant mistake, one you’ll almost always regret for a long, long time. Sure, your future self might have more income, but it’s also fairly likely that your future self might have less income and you’ll find yourself in a really bad situation. Even if your future self is doing well, there are probably going to be other big expenses that you’ll want to deal with at that time, like buying a house. #4 – Focus first on building an emergency fund If you do not have a cash emergency fund just sitting in a savings account at a local bank somewhere, this should be your number one priority. Cash is king for solving all of the problems that life throws at you. Unlike credit, cash is available in situations of credit problems or of identity theft. You can start building an emergency fund by setting up an automatic weekly or monthly transfer from your checking account to your savings, then leaving the savings alone until an emergency beckons. #5 – Focus second on eliminating high-interest debt If you have an emergency fund in hand, you should next focus on eliminating your high-interest debt. Set up a simple debt repayment plan by organizing your debts by interest rate, then attempt to make a double payment (or more) on whatever debt has the highest interest rate. Make that double payment every month, then when that debt is gone, add the total amount of that payment to the payment you’re making on the next debt on the list. Keep repeating until your high-interest debts are gone. #6 – Focus third on saving for retirement Once your high interest debts are out of the way, start saving for retirement. If you haven’t already, open up a 401(k) plan at work and start contributing to that plan. If you don’t have a 401(k) at work, set up your own Roth IRA account, which you can do through virtually any investment house (I use Vanguard). Contributing a few percent of your pay may sound painful, but it will actually end up being a much smaller burden than you expect, one that’s lifted up by the pleasure of knowing that you’re securing your retirement. #7 – Buy term life insurance to cover your dependents Don’t let an insurance salesman fool you. You don’t need much life insurance unless you have dependents (meaning people besides you whose well being directly rely on your income). If you do have dependents, your best bet is to get a term life insurance policy, one that will pay out enough money to care for your dependents in the event of your early passing. All of those other insurance plans offer things that you won’t really need at all and charge you a pretty penny for it. #8 – Build a budget, just for the process of building it right A budget can be a useful tool for keeping your spending on track, but the most valuable part of budgeting is actually the process of building a budget correctly. How does one do it correctly? You build a budget based on looking at your actual spending over the previous few months. How much do you actually spend a month on food? Entertainment? Utilities? Your car? Get real numbers, not estimates. Dig through your bank statements and credit card statements and figure it out. This process will easily show you the areas where you actually overspend, while just following a “cookie cutter” budget doesn’t show you much of anything. #9 – Cut the fat from every single one of your bills We all get bills. Some of them aren’t useful at all. Many of them have extra expenses tacked on that we don’t really need. Go through each of your monthly bills with a fine-toothed comb, looking at every line. If you don’t know what the expense is, call up the company and ask to have it removed. If you don’t think you really need that expense, call up the company and ask to have it removed. If you don’t need the bill at all, call up the company and cancel the service. This is a useful thing to do on at least a yearly basis. #10 – Know how much money you actually take home per hour you devote to work Figure out how much you earned last year after taxes, then subtract from that all of the costs of commuting, professional clothes, work-related meals, and other expenses you paid out of pocket. Then, figure out how many hours you worked (including those at home), plus the hours you commuted and attended other business meetings. Divide your after-expenses income by your total hours work to get your true hourly wage. That’s how much you actually sell an hour of your time for. #11 – Use that as a comparison point for everything you buy I find that true hourly wage to be an incredibly valuable number. I use mine as a comparison for almost everything I buy. Let’s say my “true wage” is $10 per hour. If I’m looking at buying a $20 Bluray, I ask myself whether owning this is worth two hours of my life when I could just rent it. If I’m thinking of buying a $1,000 television, I ask myself whether it’s worth 100 hours of my life to have this model when I could have a lesser television instead. It almost always encourages me to ask what I’m really spending my life’s energy to achieve. #12 – Ignore “professional” stock pickers Financial media, from magazines like Money and Kiplinger’s to things like CNBC and the Wall Street Journal, are constantly loaded with articles where various “experts” are touting the “hot” stock and investment picks. I ignore all of it. First, those people quite often have a big conflict of interest. Second, the ins and outs of various companies and industries are too complex for an outside stock analyst to know very well, especially considering how much information is hidden from them. Third, if their calls are actually accurate, the company they work for will have already acted on that information anyway, meaning you get (at best) the scraps left behind. Just ignore all of it. #13 – Ignore “professional” economic forecasts, too In much the same way, don’t put much value in economic forecasts. Often, those forecasts are dead wrong and even if they’re not, they’re rarely good indicators of what you should be doing with your professional life or your money. Don’t base your personal finance decisions based on what someone predicts will happen in the future, ever. If you’re nervous about the future, then you should be more conservative in the investments you make from now on; that’s about the only change you should ever make in the face of economic forecasts. However, that has more to do with your own personal risk tolerance than any economic forecast. #14 – Set big goals and keep reminding yourself of them What is it that you want for your future? It’s a difficult question, but it’s one that can provide incredible motivation and direction for the things you do in your everyday life, encouraging you to take better steps. Do you want a secure early retirement? Do you want to start a business? Do you want to travel around the world? Whatever your goal is, keep it in mind all the time. Fill your life with reminders of your big goal so that you make better choices in line with that goal when it comes to all of those little decisions in your life. #15 – Rent unless your total monthly cost of home ownership is lower than renting It’s easy to get sold on the “American dream” of home ownership, but if it’s going to jack up your bills, it’s probably not a wise move. You’re better off renting and saving for a big down payment than moving into a home where your bills – mortgage, insurance, property taxes, homeowners association fees, maintenance – will add up to more than the cost of your rent and rental insurance. If you do decide to buy, go low end and move up from there later so that you’re not trapped under the weight of a giant monthly mortgage payment. #16 – Buy cars based on reliability and fuel efficiency Those are the two factors you should think about above all else when it comes to buying a car because they will make an enormous difference in your finances. A reliable and fuel-efficient car will keep your fuel bills and your repair bills low for the entire time that you own it. You can research reliability at your local library by taking a look at reliability data from Consumer Reports; fuel efficiency is easy to find at websites like fueleconomy.gov. #17 – Drive the speed limit Driving the speed limit saves you in multiple ways. Most cars are engineered to have good fuel efficiency at typical speed limits, but their fuel efficiency drops rapidly above that, shedding as much as 1% fuel efficiency for each mile per hour over 65. This article provides lots of details on this phenomenon, but it turns out that slowing down even a little can save you a lot of cash. Furthermore, driving the speed limit drastically reduces the chances of a traffic ticket, which can both be directly expensive and result in insurance inflation. Simply dropping your speed from, say, 70 to 65 only costs you about 4 minutes per hour of driving, but it saves you a surprising amount of cash. #18 – Air seal your home One of the biggest costs to homeowners comes in the form of leaking air. In the winter, warm air leaks out and cold air leaks in, causing the furnace to run more. In the summer, cold air leaks out and warm air leaks in, causing the air conditioner to run more. There are lots of solutions to both problems, but one of the most efficient strategies for both is to just air seal your home, which means that you look for places where air is leaking out of your home and you seal them up. Here’s a great guide to home air sealing. #19 – Build strong relationships with your neighbors A neighbor is a person that you can borrow something from instead of having to go to the store. A neighbor is a person who can keep an eye on your property while you’re away. A neighbor is a person who can make an ordinary dinner into an effortless social occasion without any additional cost. A neighbor can be an endless source of useful advice about the local area. Get to know your neighbors and build a relationship with them. Offer to help your neighbors whenever you can – and ask them for help sometimes, too. You’ll build a relationship that will offer tons of value to both of you. #20 – Request rate reductions on your debts, especially credit card debts If you owe any debts, it never hurts to look into the possibility of reducing your interest rates on those debts. For credit cards, it’s as easy as simply calling up your credit card company and asking for a reduction. For other bills, such as student loans, a consolidation can lower your interest rate. With your mortgage, a refinancing can reduce your rate dramatically. Lowering interest rates can both reduce your monthly payments and reduce the total amount of interest that you pay over the life of a loan, so any reduction you can get is a good thing for your wallet. #21 – Don’t (necessarily) save for your children’s college education Many people worry about how their children will pay for college. Here’s the thing: you can provide just as much help to them by being completely financially secure as they grow older so they don’t have to worry about you as a financial burden. If you do choose to help, you can usually tap your retirement to help pay for education (though that’s usually not the most financially sound idea, it is a possibility). It’s never bad to save for college, but you should make other things a priority first. #22 – Teach your children about smart personal finance from day one and be a good example Talk to your children about money starting from the earliest age. Explain to them the virtues of spending less than you earn and not getting yourself into debt. Even more than that, live those lessons in front of your children. Don’t just talk about it, do it. Show them how it’s done in your day to day actions. If you talk about spending less than you earn and then do it in your day to day life, the lessons are much more likely to stick. #23 – Don’t touch your retirement if at all possible When you’re struggling to pull yourself out of a financial hole, it can be very tempting to tap your retirement funds to pay off debts or to make a house down payment. If you can, avoid doing that. Not only do you lose out on years of growth in your finances, it’s also very easy to not adequately restock your retirement after doing this. Tap your retirement if you must, but it should be an avenue of last resort. #24 – Invest most of your money in stocks – and hold on no matter what happens Not sure how to invest your money? Unless your goal is a short-term one – less than 10 years until you empty it out – you should have most of your money in stocks because, over the long term, they tend to offer very good returns. The problem with stocks is that they tend to be very volatile, with lots of short-term jumps and falls in value. Hold on and be patient; better yet, just don’t look at the value of your investments if they’re far down the road. #25 – Shoot for the average by buying index funds with low fees The best way (in my opinion) to invest in the stock market is to buy index funds with low fees. Index funds allow you to buy a small piece of the stock of lots of different companies at once with one single investment. Usually, index funds offer low fees as well (because they don’t cost much to manage), which means more of your investment stays with you rather than being drained off by the investment house. #26 – Don’t bother with individual stocks Individual stock investing is a fool’s game. In order to do it well, it requires a ton of research and a lot of attention, and even then it comes with a lot of risk. Unless you get significant enjoyment out of it and are investing with money that you won’t need in the future, I strongly encourage you to avoid investing in individual stocks. #27 – Buy some international investments, too Most people focus on buying domestic investments – stocks in American companies, American treasury notes, and so on. That’s fine, but it puts you at risk in situations where America’s economy is weaker than the rest of the world. You should diversify at least a little and have some portion of your investments in an index fund made up of international stocks and other international investments such as the euro and the Chinese yuan. #28 – Put the rest of your investments in bonds and Treasurys Unless you have a ton of risk tolerance and your investment goals are far, far down the road, it’s not a bad idea to have at least some of your money in safer things like highly rated bonds and United States Treasury notes. These investments are much less volatile than stocks and tend to just slowly raise in value consistently over time. #29 – Buy target-date retirement funds within your retirement account While the previous four tips are useful ones if you want to invest outside of your retirement account, most people are concerned more about investing within their retirement account. In that case, your best investment option (assuming you don’t want to spend a ton of time studying and rebalancing) is to simply buy a target-date retirement fund within your retirement account. It essentially automates the tips given above. #30 – Get every possible dime of employer matching in your 401(k) or 403(b) If your employer offers matching funds for your 401(k) or 403(b) plan, make absolutely sure you’re contributing enough to get every single dime of those matching funds. Why? They’re free money – and free money is rare in life. It allows you to get a huge immediate return on every dollar that you save for retirement. Not doing this is effectively the same as telling your employer that you don’t want their money and that they should keep it instead. #31 – Make a meal plan at the start of each week One big mistake that busy people make is that they don’t have a clear plan for where their meals are coming from during the week, leaving them to improvise on many week nights. That kind of improvisation, where there are no plans for dinner when you get off of work or there are no plans for lunch during the work day, usually ends up with extra expenses in the form of restaurant meals, takeout, and convenience foods. A bit of time spent planning out meals for the week when you have time during the previous weekend can drastically cut your food expenses because you’ll know what you’re having for each meal and can easily handle the necessary preparation. #32 – Use your grocery store flyer to assemble that meal plan Your grocery store flyer lists all of the foods that are on sale that week. Use it as the basis for figuring out your meal plan for the upcoming week by starting with those ingredients and using Google to find simple and tasty recipes using those ingredients. Once you have some recipes, make a list of all of the ingredients that you don’t have – that’s your grocery list. Which brings us to… #33 – Don’t ever go shopping without a grocery list If you’re ever in a store without some kind of shopping list, you’re probably making a mistake. If you don’t have anything you actually intend to buy there, then you’re hanging out in a place that needlessly drains your wallet. If you do intend to buy some things but don’t have a clear plan for it, you’re going to get sucked into impulse buys, which will also drain your wallet. A shopping list keeps you on focus whenever you’re in a store, which cuts down significantly on those impulsive purchases. #34 – Ignore advertising Try as much as you can to cut advertising out of your life. Minimize your time spent reading magazines. Fast forward through commercials – or find other ways to watch television that don’t involve commercials at all, such as binge-watching via Netflix. Listen to commercial-free radio like NPR. It’s hard to completely eliminate advertising in modern life, but the less you’re exposed to, the less temptation you have to spend your money on products you don’t need. #35 – Find hobbies that don’t require an upkeep cost Many hobbies have an ongoing upkeep cost. Golf, for example, always requires new balls and more greens fees. Many hobbies require you to constantly buy fresh supplies for making things. While it’s fine to have some hobbies that require an upkeep, try to discover ones that have small upkeeps or none at all. Get into things like geocaching or rock collecting or playing music on an instrument you already have. #36 – Try anything and everything that’s free in your community Many communities have a thriving community calendar that lists endless meetings, community events, and other things going on around town that you may not even be aware of. Your local library probably has an additional calendar with tons of events, as does meetup.com and the bulletin boards at city hall and the post office and the library. Check all of these things. Try everything that’s free, just to see if it clicks for you. At worst, you’ll learn more about your community at no cost. At best, you’ll make a lot of new friends as well as find activities and clubs you’re interested in, and it’ll still cost you nothing. #37 – Don’t worry about what other people think Don’t choose a car to impress other people. Don’t choose clothes to impress other people. Don’t choose gadgets to impress other people. Why? Because it won’t really impress them. The only thing that will impress someone about you is you. It’s about how you carry yourself, what ideas you bring to the table, and how you listen and respond to others. Don’t spend a dime on the other stuff. #38 – Don’t worry about how other people spend their money, either If you see someone driving an expensive car, don’t use that as an excuse to feel jealous or to tell yourself that you, too, need an expensive car. You don’t. Just because other people choose to buy things or eat at certain restaurants or whatever else people in your life choose to do with their money does not mean you need to do it too. Make choices and spend money on things that build up the things you care about, not the things other people care about. #39 – Put in the time to build good, strong, lasting relationships Having a life full of strong personal and professional relationships will serve you well in every aspect of your life for the rest of your life. The people in your life provide emotional, social, professional, spiritual, mental, and, yes, financial support for almost anything you might want to do. Put in the time and effort to build strong relationships by helping others, listening to what they’re saying, offering support, and being involved with the community. #40 – Review your finances, your career, and your life once a week This may seem overly simple, but it has brought about countless transformations in my life. Once a week, I spend an hour reviewing the week that has gone by as well as thinking ahead to the week that is to come and my long term goals. Am I doing things that are in line with those goals? What are the best things I did this week in terms of where I want to be going? What were the worst things, and why did I do them? How can I avoid doing them in the future? Am I still happy with my big goals? Spend real time thinking about those things every week and you’ll feel a positive transformation in your day to day life. #41 – Never play the lottery The lottery is a for-profit enterprise, meaning that the lottery keeps more money than they pay out. That means you’re extremely likely to wind up on the losing end of the stick, paying in more money than you’ll ever get out of the lottery. Don’t do it – it’s a true waste of money. The same thing is true for casino games of chance. If you enjoy playing games, find other distractions. #42 – Find meaningful things to spend your spare time on This goes in line with the suggestion above to find hobbies without an upkeep cost, but it goes further than that. Are you spending your spare time in a way that makes you into a better person? Are you building skills in your spare time? There are plenty of ways to have fun while also building skills or developing as a person, from volunteering or attending religious services to taking career-boosting classes or getting involved in a professional or civic organization. #43 – Start a side business doing the thing you’ve always wanted to do Almost all of us have a big dream inside. My dream has always been to be a fiction writer because I deeply love telling stories. Whatever your dream is, find a way to fill at least some of your spare time with it. Is there a way to touch on the thing you enjoy so deeply while also making money? Could you make Youtube videos about it, or start a website, or write a Kindle book? Most likely, you could – you just need to make that choice. #44 – Watch less television The average American watches five hours of television per day. If you can take just half of that time and apply it to other life-enriching activities, not only will you build a better life for yourself – probably one in which your earning potential is significantly increased – but you’ll feel better, too, and have fewer material desires. Don’t give up television programs if you enjoy them, but give up mindless “channel surfing” and find something more fulfilling to do. You’ll probably use less energy and you’ll also likely improve your earnings. #45 – Use the 10-second rule Whenever you’re tempted to splurge on something cheap, simply hold it in your hand for 10 seconds and ask yourself honestly whether you need it or not. Actively try to think of reasons why you shouldn’t buy this item. Will it really help you toward your goals? Will you really get enough value out of it to make it worth the cost? Usually, just 10 seconds will convince you that you don’t really need the item, and if something still passes the test, feel free to buy it! #46 – Use the 30-day rule, too What about more expensive items? For more expensive items – and you can draw the line between “cheap” and “expensive” where you please – simply choose to wait 30 days after your first serious impulse before buying the expensive item, provided that it’s not an essential or emergency need. Use that time to do a little research and make sure you actually want or will use the item, and also give it time to just sit there and see if the desire dies down. You’ll find that, more often than not, you won’t want the item after thirty days. #47 – Shop first at the low-end stores Whenever you’re shopping, choose to make a “first run” at low-end stores: discount grocers, thrift stores, secondhand stores, and so on. Sure, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to pick up everything you want there, but if you can just knock a few items off your list at bargain-basement prices, then it’s going to lower your overall spending by a notable amount. For example, I use Aldi as a “first-run” grocery store when I have a big list, as there are several items I buy there before I go to other stores. #48 – Cut back on convenience foods Convenience foods – meaning any food that’s partially or wholly assembled or prepared for you to eat at home – are virtually always overpriced and are usually incredibly unhealthy. You pay for the convenience of those foods, not for the quality of the ingredients or the bang for the buck. There are times when convenience foods can really help out, but find ways to cut back on them. Learn to make simple meals at home and your cost per meal will go down significantly (as will your long term health care costs). #49 – Cut back on drinking, smoking, soda, and other addictive habits Any substance that you feel compelled to consume that doesn’t fulfill a dietary need is not only an unnecessary expense that’s draining your wallet, but likely damaging to your health as well. Are you feeding an alcohol addiction? Smoking? Soda? Coffee? Do you find it difficult to function without these things? Are you spending money constantly on these things? If you’re nodding your head yes, even reluctantly, it’s a sure sign that you need to cut back on a habit. #50 – Make meals in advance on the weekends One of the most valuable things you can do on the weekends is to make some meals in advance for the coming week or two and store them in the freezer. For example, you might make a batch of breakfast burritos so that you have a quick, tasty, healthy, and inexpensive breakfast for the coming weeks. You might make a quadruple batch of lasagna, eating one for dinner on Sunday and sticking the other three in the freezer. Doing this lets you cook at home (saving money) using bulk ingredients (saving more money) and sets you up for cheap and convenient meals later on (saving even more money). #51 – Use LED light bulbs LED light bulbs have reached the point where they make an almost unnoticeable replacement for ordinary incandescent bulbs. The only difference? They use about 20% as much energy and last 20 times as long. Adding together all of the costs of an incandescent bulb versus an LED bulb, you’ll save more than $100 over the lifetime of the LED bulb as compared to incandescent lighting. No joke. #52 – Price-compare the grocery options in your area and choose the inexpensive one What items do you regularly put on your grocery lists? Milk? Bread? Eggs? Make a short list of ten or fifteen items that you buy very frequently at grocery stores, then visit different grocers over the course of your next several grocery shopping excursions. Note the price of those items, then add them up. You’ll save money over the long run by shopping at whichever store has the lowest total on those items. However, this is a good thing to check every year or two as stores tend to evolve their pricing schemes and new competitors enter the market. #53 – When you have a problem, try to fix it yourself When your toilet is having problems or your faucet won’t stop dripping, it can be tempting to call a repairman to have him or her just fix the problem. Before you do that, though, give the problem a shot yourself. Look up how to do it online, borrow some tools from a friend, and see what you can do. You might just find that you can fix the problem yourself, saving some cash and building confidence for future repairs. The worst case is that you just have to call in the repairperson anyway. #54 – Keep up with your car maintenance It’s easy to forget about regular car maintenance. After all, the car starts up every morning and you scarcely have to even think about it. The problem is that neglecting maintenance over the long haul will eventually wear out your car and lead to major problems far sooner than necessary. Your car has a maintenance schedule in the owner’s manual that you can easily follow – it tells you what maintenance is needed at what mileage, making it easy to schedule appointments or, even better, to do it yourself. #55 – Keep your tires properly inflated Every two PSI that’s missing from your set of tires costs your car 1% in fuel efficiency. Big deal, you say? Many cars are missing as much as eight or ten PSI, resulting in a 5% loss in fuel efficiency. Imagine just losing a gallon of gas for every 20 that you buy. Even worse, an underinflated tire is much more at risk of tearing or suffering other damage, leaving you stranded with a big expense. Keeping it inflated is really easy, too; you just need a few minutes at the “free air” pump at your local gas station to get things right. #56 – Cancel your unused memberships and subscriptions Got a gym membership you never use? Cancel it. What about a country club you haven’t been to in years? Drop it. Don’t watch your Netflix subscription? Drop it. Got Amazon Prime but only order stuff once every month or two? Drop it. Subscribed to DailyBurn but rarely exercise? Drop it. Unused subscriptions and memberships do nothing but devour your money month after month. #57 – Eat leftovers and brown bag your lunches Leftovers might not sound like the best thing, but they’re free meals and they’re easy to jazz up with a little salt and pepper and maybe a few spices like a dash of Italian seasoning. If you have leftovers after your family dinner or if you’re bringing home a doggy bag from a restaurant, take the extra step to package these leftovers up as convenient individual meals and take one with you to work the next day or the day after, making for a free lunch. If you’re prone to eating out for lunch, get into a routine of this, as well as a routine of making your own lunch at home the night before so that you always have something to take with you for lunch that’s far cheaper than eating at a restaurant each day. #58 – Use public transportation, especially if it can help you to eliminate a car Public transportation can be an incredibly inexpensive way to commute to work, especially if you purchase a long-term pass. Many people overlook it for the “freedom” of driving a car, but then rarely do much on their commute other than drive to and from work. If that describes you, try using public transport for a while. It’s often faster in rush-hour traffic and cheaper than the gas and oil and other maintenance costs of running the car. And if you find you can do without that car, you can sell it for some money in your pocket and lose the registration and insurance costs. #59 – Share your dreams and your mistakes with your partner If you’re in a long-term relationship, being completely open with your partner about your dreams as well as your mistakes is an incredibly powerful way to maintain your focus and continue to make good decisions in life. Spend some time at least once a week talking to your partner about your big goals in life as well as any challenges and mistakes you’re struggling with. Encourage your partner to do the same, and keep any negative emotions in check. Instead, encourage each other to improve and do better and keep that encouragement up throughout the week. This makes a world of difference in every aspect of life. #60 – Remember that “stuff” will never make you happy Happiness comes from within. All the stuff in the world won’t make you happy, but if you’re happy inside, it doesn’t take much of anything to bring you joy. Never, ever buy into the idea that owning something will make you happier than you are right now because it won’t. The only way money can help is by reducing your stress and eventually improving your life options through improved financial security – and you can only get there by being smart with your money. Final Thoughts These rules aren’t hard and fast ultimatums designed to run your life, but little tools that you can use to put yourself on a better financial, professional, and personal track. Feel free to pick and choose among them and find the ones that will work well for you, as each of these can improve one’s situation. If you can, try to apply a lot of them to your life, as the more positive directions you have, the faster your whole life will transform (in a good way). Good luck! |
THE MATHEMATICS OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC One of the difficult aspects of the study of electronic music is the accurate description of the sounds used. With traditional music, there is a general understanding of what the instruments sound like, so a simple notation of 'violin', or 'steel guitar' will convey enough of an aural image for study or performance. In electronic music, the sounds are usually unfamiliar, and a composition may involve some very delicate variations in those sounds. In order to discuss and study such sounds with the required accuracy, we must use the tools of mathematics. There will be no proofs or rigorous developments, but many concepts will be illustrated with graphs and a few simple functions. Here is a review of the concepts you will encounter: Hertz In dealing with sound, we are constantly concered with frequency, the number of times some event occurs within a second. In old literature, you will find this parameter measured in c.p.s., standing for cycles per second. In modern usage, the unit of frequency is the Hertz, (abbr. hz) which is officially defined as the reciprocal of one second. This makes sense if you remember that the period of a cyclical process, which is a time measured in seconds, is equal to one over the frequency. (P=1/f) Since we often discuss frequencies in the thousands of Hertz, the unit kiloHertz (1000hz=1khz) is very useful. Exponential functions Many concepts in electronic music involve logarithmic or exponential relationships. A relationship between two parameters is linear if a constant ratio exists between the two, in other words, if one is increased, the other is increased a proportianal amount, or in math expression: Y=kX where k is a number that does not change (a constant). A relationship between two parameters is exponential if the expression has this form: Y=k^x In this situation, a small change in X will cause a small change in Y, but a moderate change in X will cause a large change in Y. The two kinds of relationship can be shown graphically like this: One fact to keep in mind whenever you are confronted with exponential functions: X^0=1 no matter what X is. Logarithms A logarithm is a method of representing large numbers originally developed for use with mechanical calculators. It is the inverse of an exponential relationship. If Y=10^X, X is the logarithm (base 10)[1] of Y. This system has several advantages; it keeps numbers compact (the log of1,000,000 is 6), and there are a variety of mathematical tricks that can be performed with logarithms. For instance, the sum of the logarithms of two numbers is the logarithm of the product of the two numbers-if you know your logs (or have a list of them handy), you can multiply large numbers with a mechanical adder. (This is what a slide rule does.) Two times the logarithm of a number is the log of the square of that number, and so forth. We find logarithmic and exponential relationships many places in music. For instance the octave relationship may be expressed as Freq= F*2^n where F is the frequency of the original pitch and n is the number of octaves you want to raise the pitch. We discuss the logarithmic nature of loudness at length in Hearing and the Earand Decibels. Decibels The strength of sounds, and related electronic measurements are often expressed in decibels (abbr. dB). The dB is not an absolute measurement; it is based upon the relative strengths of two sounds. Furthermore, it is a logarithmic concept, so that very large ratios can be expressed with small numbers. The formula for computing the decibel relationship between two sounds of powers A and B is 10 log(A/B). Please see Decibels for more complete information. The spectral plot A spectral plot is a map of the energy of a sound. It shows the frequency and strength of each component. Each component of a complex sound is represented by a bar on the graph. The frequency of a component is indicated by its position to the right or left, and its amplitude is represented by the height of the bar. The frequencies are marked out in a manner that gives equal space to each octave of the audible spectrum. The amplitude scale is not usually marked, since we are usually only concerned with the relative strengths of each component. It is important to realize that whenever a spectral plot is presented, we are talking about the contents of sound. In the example, the sound has four noticable components, at 500 hz, 1000, just below 2000 hz, and just above 2000 hz.See also Sound Spectra Envelopes Envelopes are a very familiar type of graph, showing how some parameter changes with time. This example shows how a sound starts from nothing, builds quickly to a peak, falls to an intermediate value and stays near that value a while, then falls back to zero. When we use these graphs, we are usually more concerned with the rate of the changes that take place than with any actual values. A variation of this type of graph has the origin in the middle: Even when the numbers are left off, we understand that values above the line are positive and values below the line are negative. The origin does not represent 'zero frequency', it represents no change from the expected frequency. Spectral envelopes The most complex graph you will see combines spectral plots and envelopes in a sort of three dimensional display: This graph shows how the amplitudes of all of the components of a sound change with time. The 'F' stands for frequency, which is displayed in this instance with the lower frequency components in the back. That perspective was chosen because the lowest partials of this sound have relaltively high amplitudes. A different sound may be best displayed with the low components in front. Frequency Response When we are discussing the effects of various devices on sounds, we often are concerned with the way such effects vary with frequency. The most common frequency dependent effect is a simple change of amplitude; in fact all electronic devices show some variation of output level with frequency. We call this overall change frequency response, and usually show it on a simple graph: The dotted line represents 0 dB, which is defined as the 'flat' output, which would occur if the device responded the same way to all frequencies of input. This is not a spectral plot; rather, it shows how the spectrum of a sound would be changed by the device. In the example, if a sound with components of 1 kHz, 3kHz, and 8kHz were applied, at the device output the 1kHz partial would be reduced by 2dB, the 8kHz partial would be increased by 3dB, and the 3kHz partial would be unaffected. There would be nothing happening at 200Hz since there was no such component in the input signal. When we analyze frequency response curves, we will often be interested in the rate of change, or slope of the curve. This is expressed in number of dB change per octave. In the example, the output above 16kHz seems to be dropping at about 6 dB/oct. Waveforms Once in a while, we will look at the details of the change in pressure (or the electrical equivalent, voltage) over a single cycle of the sound. A graph of the changing voltage is the waveform, as: Time is along the horizontal axis, but we usually do not indicate any units, as the waveform of a sound is more or less independent of its frequency. The graph is always one complete period. The dotted line is the average value of the signal. This value may be zero volts, or it may not. The amplitude of the signal is the maximum departure from this average. Sine waves The most common waveform we will see is the sine wave, a graph of the function v=AsinT. Understanding of some of the applications of sine functions in electronic music may come more easily if we review how sine values are derived. You can mechanically construct sine values by moving a point around a circle as illustrated. Start at the left side of the circle and draw a radius. Move the point up the circle some distance, and draw another radius. The height of the point above the original radius is the sine of the angle formed by both radii. The sine is expressed as a fraction of the radius, and so must fall between 1 and -1. Imagine that the circle is spinning at a constant rate. A graph of the height of the point vs. time would be a sine wave. Now imagine that there is a new circle drawn about the point that is also spinning. A point on this new circle would describe a very complex path, which would have an equally complex graph. It is this notion of circles upon circles upon circles which is the basis for the concept of breaking waveforms into collections of sine waves. (See the essay Sound Spectra for more information.) This fanciful machine shows how complex curves are made up of simple ones. The Harmonic Series A mathematical series is a list of numbers in which each new member is derived by performing some computation with previous members of the list. A famous one is the Fibonacci series, where each new number is the sum of the two previous numbers (1,1,2,3,5,8 etc.) In music, we often encounter the harmonic series, constructed by multiplying a base number by each integer in turn. The harmonic series built on 5 would be 5,10,15,20,25,30 and so forth. The number used as the base is called the fundamental, and is the first number in the series. Other members are named after their order in the series, so you would say that 15 is the third harmonic of 5. The series was called harmonic because early mathematicians considered it the foundation of musical harmony. (They were right, but it is only part of the story.) Temperament One of the aspects of music that is based on tradition is which frequencies of sound may be used for 'correct' notes. The concept of the octave, where one note is twice the frequency of another is almost universal, but the number of other notes that may be found between is highly variable from one culture to another, as is the tuning of those notes. In the western European tradition, there are twelve scale degrees, which are generally used in one or two assortments of seven. For the past hundred and fifty years or so, the tunings of these notes have been standardized as dividing the octave into twelve equal steps. The western equal tempered scale can then be defined as a series built by multiplying the last member by the twelfth root of two (1.05946). The distance between two notes is known by the musical term interval. (Frequency specifications are not very useful when we are talking about notes.) The smallest interval is the half step, which can be further broken down into one hundred units called cents. Equal temperament has a variety of advantages over the alternatives, the most notable one being the ability of simple keyboard instruments to play in any key. The major disadvantage of the system is that none of the intervals beside the octave is in tune. To justify that last statement we have to define "in tune". When two musicians who have control of their instruments attempt to play the same pitch, they will adjust their pitch so the resulting sound is beat free. (Beating occurs when two tones of almost the same frequency are combined. The beat rate is the difference between the frequencies.) If the two attempt to play an interval expected to be consonant, they will also try for a beat free effect. This will occur when the frequencies of the notes fall at some simple whole number ratio, such as 3:2 or 5:4. If the instruments are restricted to equal tempered steps, that 5:4 ratio is unobtainable. The actual interval (supposed to be a third) is almost an eighth of a step too large. It is possible to build scales in which all common intervals are simple ratios of frequency. It was such scales that were replaced by equaltemperament. We say scales-plural, because a different scale is required for each key; if you build a pure scale on C and one on D, you find that some notes which are supposed to occur in both scales come out with different frequencies. String instruments, and to some extent winds can deal with this, but keyboard instruments cannot. If you combine a musical style that requires modulation from key to key with the popularity keyboards have had for the last two centuries you have a situation where equal temperament is going to be the rule. I wouldn't even bring this topic up if it weren't for two factors. One is that the different temperaments have a strong effect on the timbres achieved when harmony is part of a composition. The other is that the techniques of electronic music offer the best of both systems. It is possible to have the nice intonation of pure scales and the flexability for modulation offered by equal temperament. Composers are starting to explore the possibilities, and some commercial instrument makers are including multi-temperament capability on their products, so the near future may hold some interesting developments in the area. Peter Elsea 1996 |
More information about the second season of Occupied has been revealed. Occupied 2 starts with an armed conflict between the Norwegian Coast Guard and a Russian Security Company guarding the oil installation of Melkøya in Northern Norway. Arms are pointed at one another. No one wants to back down. This high tensed crisis situation creates a chain of conflicts that has severe consequences – politically and personally. The question that everybody has to ask them selves constantly is: Who can you trust? Season two will be directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg and stars Ane Dahl Torp, Henrik Mestad, Eldar Skar and Janne Hetberg. The national release date for season two will be the 10th of October 2017. We spoke to director Erik Skjoldbjærg about season two. Read the interview here. |
Do you remember the impressive RC Arno XI hydroplane? Well, its original version created by boat-racing privateer Achille Castoldi, with a Ferrari engine is now up for grabs. The 4.5 liter 12-cylinder Ferrari engine closely resembles the one found in Type 375 grand prix car, which Jose Froilan Gonzalez drove over the finish line in the 1951 Silverstone GP. The boat piloted by Castoldi averaged speeds well over 150 mph in 1953. It broke the “24 nautical miles” record in the 800 kg category as the ARNO XI averaged 102.13 mph. When the Italian Powerboat Federation later changed speedboating categories, the record has remained unchallenged till date. The boat will go under the hammer at Monaco courtesy RM Auction. The boat is expected to fetch between $1.3 million and $1.9 million. [Auto Guide] |
A fan snapped this picture of actor Tzi Ma with Mary Lynn Rajskub at The Bedford Comedy Club in Balham on June 10th. Mary Lynn was doing standup and her fellow 24 cast members (including Tate Donovan and Gbenga Akinnagbe) came out to support her. But wait a second, why was Tzi Ma there? 24 fans might remember Tzi Ma as the villainous Cheng Zhi in the fourth, fifth, and sixth season of the show (as well as the 24 Season 6 Prequel). Cheng was last seen in the sixth season finale telling Bill Buchanan “My people will not abandon me like you abandoned Jack Bauer” after being taken into custody. In the first episode of 24: Live Another Day it was stated that Kate Morgan’s husband Adam sold secrets to the Chinese government. We recently found out that it was actually Steve Navarro and Adrian Cross responsible for selling the secrets, with Navarro framing Adam Morgan for the deed. In the seventh episode of Live Another Day, Cross told Navarro that he was simply a middle man. Could they be working for Cheng? Cheng returning could be what made Kim Raver “gasp out loud” when she read the script for the eleventh episode. In the sixth season we learned that Audrey was held captive and tortured in China for over a year – the season ended with her in a catatonic state and it took years of psychiatric care for Audrey to recover. Of course Tzi Ma appearing at Mary Lynn’s standup event could simply be a coincidence – we have no evidence of him being on set just yet. But when you think about it, a Cheng return makes perfect sense with the current storyline. It would tie together all of the plots and make things personal for most of the lead characters. |
The roses are blooming at the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings. There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction as he approaches his 80th birthday. Few intellectuals have combined academic respect and comparable influence on global policy. Few have garnered quite such an extensive harvest of accolades: in addition to his Nobel prize and more than 100 honorary degrees, last year he became the first non-US citizen to be awarded the National Medal for the Humanities. But Sen doesn't do satisfaction. He does outrage expressed in the most reasonable possible terms. What he wants to know is where more than 600 million Indians go to defecate. "Half of all Indians have no toilet. In Delhi when you build a new condominium there are lots of planning requirements but none relating to the servants having toilets. It's a combination of class, caste and gender discrimination. It's absolutely shocking. Poor people have to use their ingenuity and for women that can mean only being able to relieve themselves after dark with all the safety issues that entails," says Sen, adding that Bangladesh is much poorer than India and yet only 8% don't have access to a toilet. "This is India's defective development." Despite all the comfort and prestige of his status in the UK and the US – he teaches at Harvard – he hasn't forgotten the urgency of the plight of India's poor, which he first witnessed as a small child in the midst of the Bengal famine of 1943. His new book, An Uncertain Glory, co-written with his long-time colleague Jean Drèze, is a quietly excoriating critique of India's boom. It's the 50% figure which – shockingly – keeps recurring. Fifty per cent of children are stunted, the vast majority due to undernourishment. Fifty per cent of women have anaemia for the same reason. In one survey, there was no evidence of any teaching activity in 50% of schools in seven big northern states, which explains terrible academic underachievement. Despite considerable economic growth and increasing self-confidence as a major global player, modern India is a disaster zone in which millions of lives are wrecked by hunger and by pitiable investment in health and education services. Pockets of California amid sub-Saharan Africa, sum up Sen and Drèze. The details are outrageous but the outlines of this story are familiar and Sen and Drèze are losing patience (they have collaborated on several previous books) and their last chapter is entitled The Need for Impatience. They want attention, particularly from the vast swath of the Indian middle classes who seem indifferent to the wretched lives of their neighbours. So they have aimed their critique at India's national amour-propre by drawing unfavourable comparisons, firstly with the great rival China but even more embarrassingly with a string of south Asian neighbours. An Indian boy defecates in the open in one of New Delhi's slums. Photograph: AP Photo/Kevin Frayer "There are reasons for India to hang its head in shame. Alongside the success, there have been gigantic failures," says Sen. He is making this critique loud and clear in the media on both sides of the Atlantic ahead of the book's launch in India this week. "India will prick up its ears when comparisons with China are made, but the comparison is not just tactical. China invested in massive expansion of education and healthcare in the 70s so that by 1979, life expectancy was 68 while in India it was only 54." Sen and Drèze's argument is that these huge social investments have proved critical to sustaining China's impressive economic growth. Without comparable foundations, India's much lauded economic growth is faltering. Furthermore, they argue that India's overriding preoccupation with economic growth makes no sense without recognising that human development depends on how that wealth is used and distributed. What's the purpose of a development model that produces luxury shopping malls rather than sanitation systems that ensure millions of healthy lives, ask Drèze and Sen, accusing India of "unaimed opulence". India is caught in the absurd paradox of people having mobile phones but no toilets. Even more stark is the comparison with Bangladesh. "Our hope is that India's public policymakers will be embarrassed by the comparison with Bangladesh. On a range of development indicators such as life expectancy, child immunisation and child mortality, Bangladesh has pulled ahead of India despite being poorer.' What makes this comparison so powerful is that Bangladesh has targeted the position of women not just through government policy but also through the work of non-governmental organisations such as BRAC and the Grameen Bank. As a result, there have been astonishing successes, says Sen, such as a dramatic fall in fertility rate and girls now outnumbering boys in education. All this has been achieved despite having half the per capita income of India. Other impoverished neighbours such as Nepal have made great strides, while even Sri Lanka has kept well ahead of India on key indicators despite a bitter civil war for much of the last 30 years. Drèze and Sen conclude in their book that India has "some of the worst human development indicators in the world" and features in the bottom 15 countries, along with Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan. Seven of the poorest Indian states account for the biggest concentration of deprivation on the globe. Street scene in Delhi's Kathputli colony, where the houses have no running water, electricity or sanitation. Photograph: Donatella Giagnori/LatinContent/Getty Images After this blizzard of facts and figures – and the book is stuffed with them – one might fear reader despair, but the reverse is true. This is a book about what India could do – and should do. Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh are held up as good examples of how social investments from the 60s to the 80s have reaped dividends in economic growth. What holds India back is not lack of resources but lack of clear-sighted, long-term policies and the political will to implement them. Sen (still an Indian citizen) is optimistic, pointing to the political mobilisation following the rape of a young woman student on a bus in Delhi last December, which led to the rapid adoption of new measures to combat violence against women. The consciences of the Indian middle classes can be stirred, and, when they are, political action follows. But he admits "intellectual wonder" at how it is that more people can't see that economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable – and unethical. What underpins the book is a deep faith in human reason, the roots of which he traces to India's long argumentative tradition going as far back as the Buddha. If enough evidence and careful analysis is brought to bear on this subject then one can win the argument, and it is this faith that has sustained him through more than five decades of writing on human development. It was his work which led to the development of the much cited UN's Human Development Index. Influential he has certainly been, but he acknowledges he still hasn't won the argument. To his dismay, there are plenty of examples where people seem set on ignoring the kind of evidence he stacks up; in passing he asks: "How can anyone believe austerity with high levels of unemployment is intelligent policy for the UK?" He laughingly comments that colleagues say his thinking hasn't evolved much, but he dismisses the idea of being frustrated. All he will concede is the astonishing admission that he wishes someone else had written this book on India. "There are a number of problems in philosophy which I would have preferred to tackle – such as problems with objectivity. But this book had to be written. I want these issues heard." He says that the Nobel prize and the National Medal from President Obama may be "overrated" but they give him a platform, and he unashamedly uses it – giving time to media interviews and travelling all over the world to deliver speeches. That has led to compromises on the intellectual projects he would have liked to pursue, but life has been full of compromises ever since he narrowly survived cancer as an 18-year-old: there are all kinds of food he cannot eat as a result. He is an extraordinary academic by any account – a member of both the philosophy and the economics faculties at Harvard – and is helping to develop a new course on maths while supervising PhDs in law and public health. He has plans for several more books and no plans to slow down. Mastery of multiple academic disciplines is rare enough but it's the dogged ethical preoccupation threading through all his work that is really remarkable. None of the erudition is used to intimidate; he is always the teacher. Some argue that Sen is the last heir to a distinguished Bengali intellectual tradition that owed as much to poets as it did to scientists, politicians and philosophers. Sen is the true inheritor of Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet and thinker of the early decades of the 20th century. A family friend, he named Sen as a baby; the only photograph in Sen's Cambridge study is that of the striking Tagore with his flowing white beard. But on one issue Sen admits he now parts company with Tagore, and instead he quotes Kazi Nazrul Islam, Bengal's other great poet who became an iconic figure for the nation of Bangladesh. Tagore was too patient; Nazrul was the rebel urging action. And he repeats a quote he uses in the book: "Patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue." He wants change and that means he is about to embark on a demanding tour of Indian cities to promote the book. The doctors have told him that if he slows down it will be irrevocable, so he's decided not to. Retirement is not an option. |
With just a few taps of your iPhone screen, you could save a life. If that statement sounds like an exaggeration, it may not be. According to the Associated Press, Apple has included the option to be an organ donor on the latest iPhone iOS update. “[Apple] CEO Tim Cook says he hopes the new software, set for limited release this month, will help ease a critical and longstanding donor shortage. He said the problem hit home when his friend and former boss, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, endured an ‘excruciating’ wait for a liver transplant in 2009.” “‘Watching and seeing him every day, waiting and not knowing — it stuck with me and left an impression that I’ll never forget,’ Cook told The Associated Press. Cook was so concerned that he offered to donate part of his own liver, although Jobs refused.” Even though Jobs died in 2009 of cancer, the memory of that situation has never left Cook, according to the Associated Press. With the introduction of this new iOS update, Cook said he hopes to eliminate the same problems Jobs faced as he came closer and closer to death. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was on a wait list for a liver transplant for years before his death in 2009. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) According to Yibada, scores of Americans die each day awaiting organ transplants. Outside the United States, the numbers are likely higher, though statistics were not immediately available. “About one person dies every hour in the United States while waiting for an organ transplant, as the demand for lifesaving transplants is far more compared to the available supply of organs, Donate Life America President and CEO David Fleming said in a press release issued by Apple recently. He further said that with Apple bringing the National Donate Life Registry to the Health app on iPhone, it will be easier for people to find out about organ, eye and tissue donation and register quickly.” Yibada goes on to report that about 120,000 Americans are currently on wait lists for donated organs with a new person added to wait lists every 10 seconds. So how can a first responder use an iPhone to access the organ donation app on a patient’s phones? According to ABC News, it is quite easy to access. “Apple’s Medical ID can be accessed from a locked iPhone screen, allowing first responders to gain valuable information about a person in the event of an emergency, including contacts, blood type, medical conditions and allergies,” the news organization reported. To access the app yourself and fill out the information to be an organ donor, you simply need to access the “Health” app pre-installed on all new iOS versions. Apple CEO Tim Cook hopes to save lives with the new organ donor feature in the latest iOS update. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) Beyond the iPhone organ donation feature, the health apps pre-installed on iPhones can provide much more important information. If you are like me, you use the health app to track your daily steps, flights of stairs, and miles walked or ran. It is a free and easy way to track progress if you are trying to get fit or just simply be healthier. BGR reports there are other features beyond iPhone organ donation and mileage tracking you can accomplish with your health app for iPhone. “Apple’s health app now includes a sleep analysis feature that lets you better manage your sleep. However, it doesn’t offer advanced sleep analysis and it doesn’t optimize your wake up time like some popular apps do, or at least not in this version of the app. Sleep Cycle is a much better choice until then.” With the new features available on the health app, Apple is likely to see more usage. But it will likely be several months or years before it is known whether Apple has made a dent in organ donations in the United States and worldwide. [Image by ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images] |
Not to start a paragraph like a first-year college student writing a composition seminar paper, but since the dawn of time, humanity has wondered if humanity is alone in the universe. It's only recently that humanity has been able to do more than wonder, since coherent dedispersion and multi-million-channel spectrometers were not around in times of yore, or if they were, Aristotle didn't know about them. Most of what the world has heard lately about SETI research is that the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), the SETI Institute's in-progress interferometer (set of telescopes that work together as one telescope), has been shut down due to lack of funding. Jill Tarter, the head of the SETI Institute, was supposed to attend the data conference that happened here in Green Bank last week, but she was chasing down private donors. Jill Tarter, by the way, is the person on whom Contact's Ellie Arroway was based. On a side, private, look-how-science-fancy-I-am note, at a SETI conference last year, Tarter left her bag on the Green Bank tour bus, and I found it and gave it to her. She said, "Thanks." My twelve-year-old self would have died for this interaction. However bad/sad the SETI Institute's news is, however, that doesn't mean no research can be done. Researchers can still use other telescopes to collect data, and they're coming up with new strategies to make their search more focused and realistic. You may recall my post several months ago about Kepler, NASA's satellite telescope that searches 24/7 for extrasolar planets. So far, it has found 1,235 potential planets, some of which are semi-fraternal twins of Earth. These Earth-like planets are a good place for SETI researchers to start looking, since the only thing we know for sure about life in the universe is that it can grow and thrive and lead to the development of naked mole rats on Earth. While life may be able to develop in vastly different environments and may have, say, arsenic-loaded DNA, we don't know for sure that it can/has, while we know that it can and has on Earth with things like water and moderate temperatures. So a new SETI survey, which was awarded 24 hours on the Green Bank Telescope, will look at 86 of the Kepler planetary systems over a range of 800 MHz (simultaneously) to see whether any synthetic signals are detected. Wheras before, SETI researchers had to point at Sun-like stars, Kepler has given them the means to point at Earth-like planets--basically, to scientifically zoom in on what they want. The data from the observations will then be processed by SETI@home users, or people who sign up to have their CPUs analyze survey data while they're sleeping. Check out the press release here. |
Premature birth of twins forces mom to take unpaid maternity leave Inside a nursery, sounds of a lullaby, but not of newborn babies. Justin and Kelly Trzebiatowski's twins were born about three months premature on December 13. "They came out both crying, both eyes wide open, looked right at me," said Justin. "I was able to give them a kiss before they took them away," Kelly said. At a little more than a one pound, Kendall Rose and Sophie Marie are in the NICU at the Aurora Women's Pavilion in West Allis. The first-time parents can see them every four hours, feeding them, changing diapers and something new Monday night. "They're going to allow us to help give them a bath and this is going to be the first bath," said Justin. Their time in the NICU is expected to be about 100 days. The unplanned emergency forced Kelly to stop working and not get paid for maternity leave. She's a second year teacher with MPS. "The only paid time off I get is through my sick leave which is not much because I've only worked there for two years," she said. "So I don't have much accrued." "My work as the father of my kids is giving me more maternity time off than she gets," said Justin. "That's a little bit crazy." Kelly is taking 12 weeks unpaid through the Family and Medical Leave Act, or FMLA, splitting it up between now and after the holiday, when the twins finally come home. "Everyday that we have with them being healthy and progressing is a blessing and a gift for us," Justin said. "I think that's going to be the greatest Christmas present that we could get." We checked with an MPS spokesman, who said the district offers leaves of absence, including a paid sick leave benefit that can be applied for things like maternity leave or other qualifying FMLA purposes. The parents have set up a Go Fund Me account to help with expenses. You can help by clicking here. Share this article: email |
None of the following are permitted during a debate in the chamber: • No smoking Smoking is not allowed in the chamber and has been banned since the 17th century. Members may take snuff though and the Doorkeeper keeps a snuff-box for this purpose. • No eating or drinking Members may not eat or drink in the chamber. One exception to this is the chancellor who may have an alcoholic drink while delivering the Budget statement. In years gone by, the Speaker used to be able to adjourn proceedings in the House in order to have a meal. This was known as the "Speaker's chop". • No Reading Speeches may not simply be read out during debate, although notes may be referred to. Similarly, the reading of newspapers, magazines and letters is not allowed. No visual aids, such as diagrams and maps, may be used in the chamber. • Dress code Hats must not be worn unless a point of order is being raised during a division - a fashion that has long died out - and a member may not wear any decorations or military insignia. Members are also not allowed to have their hands in their pockets, this offence was committed by Andrew Robathan MP (Con) on December 19th 1994. Swords may not be worn in the chamber and each MP has a loop of ribbon in the cloakroom where their weapons may be left. Nowadays the loop is more often used to hold an umbrella. • No animals Animals are not allowed in the Commons, with the exception of guide dogs for the blind. • No names Members may not refer to each other by name and must either refer to each other as "my honourable friend" (if a member of the same party) or "my right honourable friend" (when referring to colleagues who are members of the Privy Council) When referring to members from other parties the address becomes "the honourable (or right honourable) lady/gentleman" or "the honourable member for... [followed by the constituency]". • No dying! Finally, members must not die on the premises! This is because the Palace of Westminster is a royal palace where commoners may not die. Any deaths on the premises are said to have taken place at St. Thomas' Hospital - the nearest hospital to the palace. Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version |
[+]Enlarge Double Duty To deliver a one-two nanopunch to triple-negative breast cancer tumors, researchers start with a lipid-coated sphere filled with the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin (left). Then they add alternating layers of poly- L -arginine and an siRNA sequence (center), capped off by a layer of hyaluronic acid (right), which disguises the particle from the body’s immune system. Credit: Hammond Lab Women with triple-negative breast cancer, a rare but aggressive form of the disease, often find that it is difficult to treat. An early diagnosis allows more treatment options, but women with this type of cancer generally have a lower survival rate than those with other types of breast cancers. To tackle the disease, a team of researchers has developed a nanomedicine that delivers a one-two punch to tumors that weakens their defenses and obliterates them (ACS Nano 2013, DOI: 10.1021/nn4047925). Most breast cancers overproduce at least one of three common receptor proteins: estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, or human epidermal growth factor receptor 2. The most successful chemotherapy drugs block tumor growth by targeting one of these three. But about 10 to 20% of breast cancers are triple-negative, which means their tumors don’t overexpress any of these receptors, making the cancers tougher to treat. Scientists think weakening the defenses of tumor cells could help make chemotherapy drugs more effective. For instance, a small interfering RNA (siRNA)—a short double-stranded RNA fragment that silences certain genes in cells—could be used to switch off a gene in tumor cells that makes them chemotherapy-resistant. But siRNAs are difficult to deliver to cells, says Paula T. Hammond of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Inside the bloodstream, siRNAs tend to get degraded by enzymes. Also, siRNA strands are negatively charged, she says, so they get repelled by human cells, which are studded with negatively charged molecules. To address this delivery problem, Hammond and her team developed a method of hiding an siRNA sequence inside the multilayered coating surrounding a nanoparticle. By also filling the core of this stealthy nanomedicine with a cancer drug, the group reports that it can simultaneously weaken the defenses of triple-negative breast cancer tumors and diminish the malignant lumps in mice. The group begins its nanoparticle fabrication process with hollow lipid spheres and loads them with doxorubicin, a cancer drug used against a wide range of cancers, including triple-negative breast cancer. The researchers use a layer-by-layer assembly method to put additional coatings on the outside of the particles. First, they add a thin layer of poly- L -arginine, which is positively charged and therefore sticks to negatively charged lipids. Then the team adds a layer of siRNA targeted at the gene for multidrug resistance protein 1, a molecular pump on tumor cells that pushes out cancer drugs to escape their toxicity. After one more arginine layer, Hammond’s group tops off the particle with negatively charged hyaluronic acid. The compound is a structural component found in most tissues in the body, Hammond says, so putting it on the outside disguises the particles. “To other cells, these nanoparticles look like their native environment,” she adds. They slip by the immune system and siRNA-degrading enzymes and into cells. When injected into mice with grafted triple-negative breast cancer tumors three times over 15 days, the nanoparticles released their cargo and shrunk the tumors, in some cases making them disappear. Tumors in mice given only saline solution, however, grew to four times their original volume. Even though some big pharmaceutical companies have shied away from siRNA therapy because of the delivery challenges, it still has huge potential, especially for treating cancer, says Sei Kwang Hahn, a chemist at Pohang University of Science & Technology, in South Korea. This layer-by-layer nanoparticle, he adds, shows particular promise for siRNA and “seems feasible for further clinical development.” |
I hate New Year’s resolutions. The reason? Well, it’s not so much the well-meaning, lofty—yet ofttimes delusional—resolutions many of us spout off at midnight (wasted, of course)…it’s because of the lack of sober follow through once January 1st smacks us in the face. Yep, as Al Gore once famously said, amidst all our good intentions, “it’s hard for a zebra to change its spots.” More than likely most of us will revert back to the way we’ve always been. I, however, have determined with pitbull-like resolve that this year will be an evolution for me. I might even change my name, like to an animal’s name or to a mythological critter like a famous centaur or something. That would be cool. I don’t know yet. To help me decide, my buddy Hambone Tweedle and I are going to roast a Safari Cigar and do a brainstorming session mañana for my new evolutionary nomenclature. Stay tuned. Anyway, for 2014 I am dead set to morph from being a pretty good conservative gadfly to the lunatic Left to becoming an even more annoying source of angst for the progressives amongst us. Why? Well, the stakes are too high for conservatives to remain nice. Additionally, the folks who voted for BHO’s vapid crap are slowly waking up and need encouragement and feisty apologetics now. But mainly, destroying, ridiculing, and exposing the multitudinous liberal lies and honking hypocrisies from the Hope & Change wizards is more fun than burning ants for me. To help me in this noble quest, James Delingpole, a Brit with true grit, penned a book to help me chart the course to be even more mordant with the libmonkeys who’re currently peeing on our great land. The book is ... 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy. Delingpole, in this pole-axing tome, encourages the conservative, libertarian and recovering democrat to go for the jugular vein of the socialist ingrates who’re giddy to gut our nation of its exceptionalism. James exhorts the reader to annoy the annoyers, to quit being nicer than Christ and get into the verbal fray and demolish the diminishing few who still inhale Obama’s ganja through jokes, facts, arguments and outrageous rumors. Don’t worry, this task will be easy and God will help you succeed in this venture because, as James points out: 1. Liberals have no sense of humor. 2. Liberals have no facts on their side. 3. Liberals are hypocrites. 4. God, being conservative Himself, hates liberalism at least as much as you do, which is why he created reasons 1, 2 and 3. Herewith are a few examples from JD’s manuscript to help you give the heave ho to the hos of socialism. Order and enjoy this laugh-out-loud book on Amazon.com and make 2014 fun and profitable for our nation. Check these out… To bust on the left: Next time you hear a reference to “America’s first black president,” counter by referring to Obama as “America’s 44th white president.” Explain that you’re doing so on feminist grounds: “What? You’re trying to tell me that his Caucasian mom’s genetic input doesn’t count? But that’s so SEXIST! Ask a BHO ogler to name the three shortest books in the world: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Rahm Emanuel; Humility and Its Virtues, by Barack Obama; What the Constitution Means to Me, by Nancy Pelosi. Quote with appropriate reverence and non-judgmental, multicultural appreciation the great Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini: to marry a girl before she begins menstruating is “a divine blessing.” If your liberal friend starts sputtering, cheerfully inquire, “Who are you to judge another culture—you’re not Islamophobic, are you?” Tell them you don’t give a damn about the polar bears. And it’s not because you don’t like cute, fluffy, white carnivores; it’s because you find it hard to accept a species whose population has increased fivefold—from 5,000 to 25,000—in the last five decades can actually be in any kind of trouble. Quote Auberon Waugh: “The urge to pass new laws must be seen as an illness, not much different from the urge to bite old women. Anyone suspected of suffering from it should either be treated with the appropriate pills or, if it is too late for that, elected to parliament [or congress, as the case may be] and paid a huge salary with endless holidays, to do nothing whatever.” Tell a joke. Q: why is it so hard for liberals to make eye contact? A: Obama’s rear doesn’t have eyes. Instead of “progressive,” always use the words “oppressive” or “regressive.” When called on this, feign puzzlement. “But how is it progressive to steal free citizens’ liberty, money, and hope, and hand it all over to government bureaucrats?” Find a feminist and see if she has a sense of humor. Q: How many men does it take to open a beer? A: None. It should be open when she brings it to you. Turn up at your local Muslim outreach program wearing an “I’d Rather Be Water Boarding” t-shirt. Invite your liberal friends for a barbecue. Why? To celebrate the day when the lives of hundreds of thousands of young American and Allied servicemen were saved thanks to President Truman’s fine, principled decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Serve Kamikaze cocktails (natch): equal parts Vodka, Triple Sec, and lime juice. Have some Global Warming Fun: On a beautiful, hot summer’s day, invite a liberal to crack open a can or two of ice cold beer by the pool. Say: “Run that Cap and Trade thing by me one more time because there’s something I don’t get. You guys are saying that we need to raise taxes and make energy more expensive so we can get less weather like this?” When a liberal asks what you’re buying your kids for their birthdays, say: “Oh, I guess the usual: more ammo.” Give your small children toy guns and tell your liberal friend, “Yeah, I think this is the best way to break them in so they can handle the real thing when they’re six or seven.” When your liberal neighbors knock excitedly on your door to show you ultrasound pictures of the baby they’re expecting, look mortified and then say, “But surely, it’s not yet a child, it’s still a choice.” |
Following the deaths of David Bowie, Victoria Wood and Andrew Sachs amongst many others, it has been decided that Great Britain will be downgraded to simply ‘Britain.’ The new name will come into effect from January 1st, 2017. “It is a shame,” said Simon Williams, minister of Greatness. “But, if we’re honest, what have we really got that defines us as great anymore; some nice parks, Tess Daly and the man from the Go Compare adverts? It’s not really enough is it?” “I don’t think that anyone’s saying that we’ll never be great again, and certainly, if we ever find ourselves once more home to mercurial talents such as Alan Rickman and Caroline Aherne then we can review the situation, but as the most popular celebrity in the country is currently Honey G then I don’t think we can, with good conscience, really refer to ourselves as ‘Great’ any longer.” British citizens seemed sad, but understanding. “Yeah, it’s a pity,” said Eleanor Gay. “But I haven’t really felt like we should be calling ourselves ‘Great’ Britain ever since we gave the world X-Factor and Gordon Ramsey.” The decision to rename Great Britain ‘Britain’ follows on the heels of the post-referendum decision to change the name of the United Kingdom to simply ‘Kingdom’. Britain’s Got Morons – get the t-shirt here! |
BEIJING (Reuters) - China has called for all sides in the South Sudan conflict to stop fighting, China's foreign ministry said, just as the U.N. Security Council approved plans to almost double the number of peacekeepers in the world's newest country. The conflict in South Sudan has killed hundreds and some 45,000 civilians are seeking protection at U.N. bases. Violence erupted in the capital, Juba, on December 15 and quickly spread, dividing the land-locked country of 10.8 million people along ethnic lines. The fighting has also affected oil production, which accounts for 98 percent of government revenue in South Sudan. It has forced Chinese state-owned China National Petroleum Company, a major oil investor in South Sudan, to evacuate some of its workers. China's foreign ministry said in a statement late on Tuesday that deputy foreign minister Zhang Ming had said China is playing close attention to the conflict and the impact it was having on South Sudan's neighbors. "As South Sudan's friend and partner, China calls on all sides of the conflict to ... immediately cease hostile actions, and open negotiations as soon as possible", the statement quoted Zhang as saying. The remarks were made at a meeting with diplomats from member states of the East African Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a seven-nation development organization that includes Sudan and Kenya, the statement said. Zhang also said China supports the IGAD sending a mediation team to South Sudan. Last week, Chinese state news agency Xinhua said an oilfield in the northern part of South Sudan, operated by a consortium of Indian, Malaysian and South Sudanese companies, was caught up in unrest that killed 14 South Sudanese oil workers. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular media conference on Tuesday that no Chinese nationals have been reported harmed in the conflict. Later on Tuesday, the 15-member U.N. Security Council, which includes China, unanimously authorized a plan by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to boost the strength of the peacekeeping force in South Sudan to 12,500 troops and 1,323 police. (This story was refiled to fix typographical error in headline) (Reporting By Adam Rose; Editing by Paul Tait) |
Me: (Finally give in and look over) Yes? Her: Do you have that cold or flu that's going around? Me: Nope. Her: But you're coughing! Me: I know. Her: And you don't have it? (Said very skeptically) Me: No, I have a lung disease. Her: So you don't have the flu? Me: No, but I do have Cystic Fibrosis. Her: Oh, ok, oh. Me: (Put headphone back in and continue to watch SportsCenter) *Cough* Her: (Grabs towel, stops treadmill and leaves) ....and life goes on. This isn't the first time it's happened and it won't be the last, but it's fresh, so I thought I'd rehash while I remember.Here is an exchange that I had with a woman today two treadmills over....Her: (Trying to get my attention by waving her hand in my direction) |
It's been exactly 50 years to date since Yuri Gagarin became the first person to go into space. When will it be your turn? If you have an extra $102,000 lying around, you can buy your ticket today. Space Adventures, a company based in Vienna, Va., is developing a suborbital vehicle that will take you just past the Kármán line, the 62-mile-high boundary that demarcates the beginning of outer space. Space Adventures calls this figure a "relatively affordable price," which seems like a stretch until you compare it to the $20 million to $35 million that other space tourists have paid the company for trips to the final frontier. According to CNN, "[m]ultiple companies are developing their own spaceships and their own plans for making money in space. Virgin Galactic, for example, could start taking tourists on suborbital joyrides as early as 2012, at $200,000 per seat. More than 400 people have already bought down payments for such a trip, according to company officials." The first space tourist was Dennis Tito, a multimillionaire entrepreneur from New York who in 2001 spent eight days aboard the International Space Station, with transportation there and back provided by the Russian Soyuz TM-31. The next one was South African software entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, who spent 11 days in space. He spent approximately one year in training and $20 million to do so. In the past, anyone considering a trip into space had to either join the air force or an engineering degree, and then undergo many, many months of rigorous training. But in 2011, the only requirements are to be in good health be filthy rich. But the prices for a ticket seem to be gradually dropping. Perhaps some day, space tourism will become as available to the masses as airline travel. What's it like up there, would I get a window seat? How much would it cost to check my bag, and do I get salted peanuts? |
Some people’s work rate is sent to shame you. None more so than that of Mr Noah Lennox - or Panda Bear as he’s also, more commonly, known. As if being one quarter of the wondrous Animal Collective or contributing vocals to Daft Punk’s Doin’ It Right wasn’t enough, Noah has just unveiled his fifth solo offering, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, and what a fine musical offering it is. Fashioned in his Lisbon home studio, the new album was produced with former Spaceman 3 honcho Sonic Boom (Pete Kember) and, as with previous Panda Bear outings, showcases Noah Lennox’s deft touch with a melody and joyous mash-up approach to guitars, samples and synths. We hooked up with Lennox, both at home in Lisbon and at the West London home of his label, Domino Records, to discuss the tools of his trade. For the full interview, check out the February issue of Future Music (288), which is on sale now. |
The UK is falling behind global rivals in international tests taken by 15-year-olds, failing to make the top 20 in maths, reading and science. England's Education Secretary Michael Gove said since the 1990s, test performances had been "at best stagnant, at worst declining". Shanghai in China is the top education system in the OECD's Pisa tests. Within the UK, Scotland outperformed England at maths and reading, but Wales is below average in all subjects. Mr Gove told MPs that his reforms, such as changing the curriculum, school autonomy and directing financial support towards poorer pupils, were designed to prevent schools in England from "falling further behind". He highlighted the rapid improvements that had been made in countries such as Poland, Germany and Vietnam. Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt called on Mr Gove to take some responsibility for the lack of progress and said the results showed that collaboration between schools and teachers was more effective than market forces. 'Extremely sobering' Graham Stuart, chair of the education select committee, said the results were "extremely sobering" and showed that "we went nowhere" despite massive investment in schools. But the Pisa results should not be used to "talk down our public education system", said Chris Keates, leader of the NASUWT teachers' union, who argued that high performing countries were those which promoted the professionalism of teachers. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The gap between top and bottom of the league table equals six years of learning In response to the particularly poor results in Wales, Education Minister Huw Lewis said: "Everybody working in and around the Welsh education sector needs to take a long hard look in the mirror." Sir Michael Barber, chief education adviser for education company Pearson and former Downing Street adviser, said the test result "focuses minds in education ministries around the world like nothing else". What are the Pisa tests? International tests in maths, reading and science Tests are taken by 500,000 15 year old pupils in 65 countries and local administrations They are run every three years by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development In the UK, more than 12,000 pupils took the tests in 2012 Try the Pisa test yourself Singapore maths method The Pisa tests - the Programme for International Student Assessment - have become the most influential rankings in international education, based on tests taken by more than 500,000 secondary school pupils. These measure education standards in Europe, North and South America, Australasia and parts of the Middle East and Asia. Tunisia was the only African country that participated. The top places in the rankings are dominated by Asian school systems - although China so far does not participate as a whole country, but is represented by high-performing cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong. In the next set of Pisa tests it is expected that a wider range of provinces in China will be entered. Shanghai's maths score is the equivalent of three years' schooling above the OECD average. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Changing places: Vietnam has overtaken the US and UK in education rankings Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are among the highest ranked across all subjects. The OECD's Andreas Schleicher, in charge of the Pisa tests, has highlighted Vietnam's "star performance". The South East Asian country has entered the top 10 for science and outperformed many much wealthier western education systems, including the United States. UK slips in science The UK has made little progress and remains among the average, middle-ranking countries, in 26th place for maths and 23rd for reading, broadly similar to three years ago. READING TOP 10 1. Shanghai 570 2. Hong Kong 545 3. Singapore 542 4. Japan 538 5. South Korea 536 6. Finland 524 7. Ireland 523 8. Taiwan 523 9. Canada 523 10. Poland 518 Source: OECD But the UK has slipped in science from 16th to 21st place. Although not directly comparable, because there have been different numbers of countries taking part, this marks a sustained decline, with the UK having ranked 4th in the tests taken in 2000. Much of this falling behind has been caused by other countries improving more quickly. The OECD figures show that there has been almost no change in the UK's test scores, with the results "flat lining". Within the UK, Scotland has performed slightly better than England in maths and reading, with England higher for science. Northern Ireland is behind them both across all subjects. But the biggest gap is between Wales and the other parts of the UK, adrift from most of the middle ranking western countries. Happiest pupils The lowest ranked countries in this international league table are Peru and Indonesia. The OECD says the gap between top and bottom of this global classroom is the equivalent of six years of learning. MATHS TOP 10 1. Shanghai 613 2. Singapore 573 3. Hong Kong 561 4. Taiwan 560 5. South Korea 554 6. Macau-China 538 7. Japan 536 8. Liechtenstein 535 9. Switzerland 531 10. Netherlands 523 Source: OECD However Indonesia also appears as the country where the highest proportion of children say they are happiest at school. And the least happy pupils are in high-performing South Korea. Finland, once an education superpower at the top of the rankings, has slipped downwards. Along with Sweden, Finland had the biggest fall in scores of any country in maths tests. Sweden has fallen behind eastern and central European countries such as Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Estonia. But Finland still has the highest position of any European country, fifth in science, the only non-Asian country in any of the top fives. Among the strongest performances by English-speaking countries are Ireland, ranked 7th in reading, and Canada ranked 10th in science. Chile is the strongest performer among South American countries, above the lowest-performing European country, Albania. How regions compare These Pisa tests provide an increasing level of regional detail and they show the huge variation within a single country. In Italy, the region of Trento is one of the best in the world at maths, but Calabria is far below many European countries, the equivalent of two years behind. SCIENCE TOP 10 1. Shanghai 580 2. Hong Kong 555 3. Singapore 551 4. Japan 547 5. Finland 545 6. Estonia 541 7. South Korea 538 8. Vietnam 528 9. Poland 526 10. Canada 525 Source: OECD The US remains average or below average, below countries such as Russia and Spain, but individual states are high performers. If Massachusetts was ranked as a country it would be sixth best in the world, ahead of any European country. From a low base in previous years, one of the biggest improvers in maths and reading is Qatar, a country that has been a high-profile investor in education. Katja Hall, the chief policy director of the CBI employers' organisation, said: "No issue matters more to the UK economy over the long term than the quality of our education system." But she warned the results should be a "wake-up call" and that when UK schools are only "treading water" that the country's economic performance will suffer. "High-performing schools are the best way to support economic growth and greater opportunity." The OECD's secretary general, Angel Gurria, launching the results in Washington in the US, said: "It's more urgent than ever that young people learn the skills they need to succeed. "In a global economy, competitiveness and future job prospects will depend on what people can do with what they know. Young people are the future, so every country must do everything it can to improve its education system and the prospects of future generations." |
In what can be argued as Kierkegaard gone wrong, the eminence of the individual is slowly becoming the hallmark of Western secularization. Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard—who has been re-popularized throughout his Scandanavian homeland for his 200th birthday last May—hailed from Copenhagen. Denmark, a part of the Scandanavian “ground zero of secularization,” has fallen far from mere “Christendom”—the problem du jour of 1850s Denmark, when Kierkegaard wrote. Mary Eberstadt's latest book, How the West Really Lost God, presents a theory of Western secularization that could explain why only 10 percent of Danes and Swedes believe in hell, and why Kierkegaard’s Denmark is now one of the “least religious nations on earth.” Eberstadt’s thesis: That the death of God can possibly be traced to the decline of the family in Western culture over the past two centuries. The “Family Focus,” as she calls it, is rooted in the concern that society lacks the virtues of the family, which lack comes inevitably with solipsistic consequences, the reverberations of which can be felt demographically, economically, and philosophically. We are, put simply, losing our children. Jonathan Last’s recent book—What to Expect When No One’s Expecting—which illustrates the demographic decline of children around the world, is a statistical testament to Eberstadt’s thesis. God is no longer present at the center of human activity. Not even Aphrodite or Venus, the mythological goddesses of Sex and Love, can be seen as inheriting the pride of place vacated through God’s displacement from the center of human actions. It is the individual, the atom of society, who is the centerpiece of civilization after the death of God is proclaimed. We have missed the forest of the family for the singular tree of the individual. Even his last name is an appropriate icon of the decline of the West. Kierkegaard, Danish for “graveyard,” is an appropriate symbol of the Scandanavian state of religious affairs. Countries like Denmark, France, and Belgium stand today as graveyards of the Christian faith. When cathedrals are not desecrated and turned into fruit markets, concert halls, and bars, they serve as beautiful gravestones of formerly Catholic nations. Mirroring the attitude toward Christianity itself, the approach to these once-sacred places of worship has shifted to an attitude of blasé and quaint appreciation for the cultural artifacts of the West. Some attitudes are mocking and even downright offensive. Last year’s example of a Belgium Archbishop doused with water by topless activists at a conference is one of the most vulgar reactions to Catholicism in recent history. The Archbishop responded in prayer amid chaos. But how many are Catholic in anything but name only? Eberstadt examines the present gap between profession of the Catholic faith and its practice; talk to any so-called practicing Catholic at a party for a half hour, and see how markedly different she is from the average citizen. Church on the major holidays (affectionately referred to as C & E Catholics), an adherence to the “golden rule,” and a heavy emphasis on “I don’t personally believe in X, but...” (insert divisive issue) are hallmarks of the separation between Church and faith. As Eberstadt pointedly asks in her book, “if large numbers of ‘Catholics’ in the West today are disregarding teachings as freighted with seriousness as these, what are they not disregarding?” To put matters bluntly, “when one dispenses with stereotypes and looks at the actual numbers, ‘Catholic’ Italy does not appear terribly different from the rest of the god-forsaken Continent,” Eberstadt writes. Even in the landscape of our own nation under God, a land fertile for the crops of grassroots evangelical faith and the blossoming mega-church, the essence of Christianity is often lost. According to Eberstadt, even “mainline” churches in the Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Lutheran tradition are in “dire straits.” Religions are falling to the crashing waves of culture that are crumbling the rock of tradition: Teachings on marriage, abortion, contraception, and euthanasia are influenced by the secular culture. A look at dating practice provides a great insight of contemporary culture in America and Europe: While some young women and men, desperate to find a “good one,” seek out pious men on Sunday mass, the Belgium women I’ve met wouldn’t dare to look for a man in church—no one is there. “Traditional American Protestantism appears largely over.” As Eberstadt points out, many elite colleges and universities host some form of “Sex Week,” allow a satanic black mass at Harvard, and even approve an S&M club on campus as a registered student organization. In this era, God has become more offensive in the public square than sex. The book’s statistical explanation of why Scandanavia has some of the “least religious nations on earth” was evidenced in Belgium last year when an Archbishop was terrorized by radical feminists in defiance of Catholicism’s social teachings. The issues of feminist extremism from healthcare to gender equality stem from a culture consistently seeking to distance itself from the community of tradition, trading truth for trendiness. This selective intolerance is not an attitude unique to secular progressives. The attitude against moral imposition even within the church—“I personally think X is wrong, but who am I to judge others”—is the hallmark attitude of lukewarm Christians today, which perhaps explains why so many Catholics and Protestants don’t appear statistically unique in their birth rates—they are virtually indistinguishable from the contraceptive culture. Perhaps the most poisonous attitude among Christians in the public square is that of moral relativism in the sexual sphere: “I personally believe that married couples ought to never sterilize their marital sex acts, but who am I to judge if others elect to do so?” In Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, Eberstadt’s many essays reflect on the side effects of the pill in our culture. Both Last and Eberstadt’s theses illustrate statistically and philosophically my own view that contraception is the bane of Western civilization. “Eldest daughter of the Church, what have you done with your baptism?” asked Pope John Paul II to the French people. France has done what most nominal Catholics have done with their baptism: left it in the sanctuary, for a visit once in a while on a Sunday. The faith, for most people, is not something deeply considered. It is an hour begrudgingly given up on a Sunday, rather than an issue of life and death, a Kierkegaardian Either/Or choice of the aesthetic or the ethico-religious that determines salvation or damnation. Sanctity is a matter of taste. A man named Jesus is a character in a storybook that one learns about in childhood. The book is soon forgotten, gathering dust on a library shelf. It isn’t picked up and carried in one’s life like the cross on the way to Cavalry. It has become a mere splinter in the lives of Christians, subtle yet occasionally noticeable and worthy of attention. Rarely is Christianity is fully examined in light of the larger picture of human history. What can transform even the most “ordinary, atomized human pleasure-seeking or the calculating, coldly rational decision-making homo economicus" is the act of procreation itself: A couple choosing to beget life. Having children is the most radically other-centering activity, the most selfless and countercultural decision a couple can make. According to Eberstadt’s thesis, conjugal love can save Christianity from its impending demise. For the Family Factor as an explanation for the secularization of the West explains better than all going theories the correlation between the individual’s relationship with others, the state, and himself. “Having children,” Eberstadt writes, “is experienced by most as a transcendental fact like no other.” It is the child that draws the person into a community with others, leads one away from an atomistic view of society, into a more altruistic orientation toward the world, and, quite simply, causes men and women to wake up early on a Sunday to worship God. “Participating in creation,” Eberstadt writes, “inclines women to be more humble about their own powers and more open to the possibility of something greater than themselves.” Perhaps the general delay and decrease of this participation impacts men and women in their openness to God’s plan for the family. Fortunately, Eberstadt writes, “religion’s obituary is no more assured than that of the family” because the individualist-secular model is economically, socially, and culturally unsustainable. All hope is not lost, “if only because the economics of subsidizing such decline have become untenable.” But perhaps the rational arguments made from economic failure and statistical worry won’t be enough for the radical uprooting of centuries-old attitudes about the relationship between family and state that need changing. Perhaps what we need is a change of heart: “Bit by bit, given changing minds, the incentives toward maintaining a family network might come to trump some of the disincentives that the affluent society inadvertently puts in the way of such efforts.” The recent feast day of Blessed Karl of Austria, the model of a married man of God whose wedding day served as the centerpiece in my last essay on marriage, should serve as a reminder of what’s at stake for our culture. Given our crisis of social conscience from abortion to divorce, perhaps the West is not a graveyard of God as much as it’s a graveyard of the family. Eberstadt’s thesis is that the loss of the family is the primary catalyst in God’s death. In the words of Saint Pope John Paul II, we have an “important moral and cultural contribution of service to make to the life of your country.” He asks us to reflect our calling “to sanctify the world and to transform it—a transformation that begins with the family, which Eberstadt describes as the symphony though which we hear God’s voice. |
× Police: Lesbian couple attacked at Six Flags New England AGAWAM, Mass. — Police say two western Massachusetts women attacked a lesbian couple from Rhode Island whom they saw kissing at Six Flags New England. The Republican reports that 29-year-old Damarielys Mukhtar and 27-year-old Nikia Butt were charged with assault and a civil rights violation with injury in connection with Wednesday’s incident at the amusement park in Agawam. Mukhtar also was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. One of the victims told police that Mukhtar yelled homophobic slurs before initiating the fight. Police say Mukhtar and Butt assaulted the two victims and stopped hitting them as a crowd began to gather. The victims are students at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. Phone listings for Mukhtar and Butt couldn’t be found Friday. It’s not clear if they have lawyers. |
PHILADELPHIA — Researchers are hopeful that new advances in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine could one day make a replacement liver from a patient’s own cells, or animal muscle tissue that could be cut into steaks without ever being inside a cow. Bioengineers can already make 2D structures out of many kinds of tissue, but one of the major roadblocks to making the jump to 3D is keeping the cells within large structures from suffocating; organs have complicated 3D blood vessel networks that are still impossible to recreate in the laboratory. Now, University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed an innovative solution to this perfusion problem: they’ve shown that 3D printed templates of filament networks can be used to rapidly create vasculature and improve the function of engineered living tissues. [youtube]9VHFlwJQIkE[/youtube] The research was conducted by a team led by postdoctoral fellow Jordan S. Miller and Christopher S. Chen, the Skirkanich Professor of Innovation in the Department of Bioengineering at Penn, along with Sangeeta N. Bhatia, Wilson Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and postdoctoral fellow Kelly R. Stevens in Bhatia’s laboratory. Their work was published in the journal Nature Materials. Without a vascular system — a highway for delivering nutrients and removing waste products — living cells on the inside of a 3D tissue structure quickly die. Thin tissues grown from a few layers of cells don’t have this problem, as all of the cells have direct access to nutrients and oxygen. Bioengineers have therefore explored 3D printing as a way to prototype tissues containing large volumes of living cells. The most commonly explored techniques are layer-by-layer fabrication, or bioprinting, where single layers or droplets of cells and gel are created and then assembled together one drop at a time, somewhat like building a stack of LEGOs. Such “additive manufacturing” methods can make complex shapes out of a variety of materials, but vasculature remains a major challenge when printing with cells. Hollow channels made in this way have structural seams running between the layers, and the pressure of fluid pumping through them can push the seams apart. More important, many potentially useful cell types, like liver cells, cannot readily survive the rigors of direct 3D bioprinting. To get around this problem, Penn researchers turned the printing process inside out. Rather than trying to print a large volume of tissue and leave hollow channels for vasculature in a layer-by-layer approach, Chen and colleagues focused on the vasculature first and designed free-standing 3D filament networks in the shape of a vascular system that sat inside a mold. As in lost-wax casting, a technique that has been used to make sculptures for thousands of years, the team’s approach allowed for the mold and vascular template to be removed once the cells were added and formed a solid tissue enveloping the filaments. “Sometimes the simplest solutions come from going back to basics,” Miller said. “I got the first hint at this solution when I visited a Body Worlds exhibit, where you can see plastic casts of free-standing, whole organ vasculature.” This rapid casting technique hinged on the researchers developing a material that is rigid enough to exist as a 3D network of cylindrical filaments but which can also easily dissolve in water without toxic effects on cells. They also needed to make the material compatible with a 3D printer so they could make reproducible vascular networks orders of magnitude faster, and at larger scale and higher complexity, than possible in a layer-by-layer bioprinting approach. After much testing, the team found the perfect mix of material properties in a humble material: sugar. Sugars are mechanically strong and make up the majority of organic biomass on the planet in the form of cellulose, but their building blocks are also typically added and dissolved into nutrient media that help cells grow. “We tested many different sugar formulations until we were able to optimize all of these characteristics together,” Miller said. “Since there’s no single type of gel that’s going to be optimal for every kind of engineered tissue, we also wanted to develop a sugar formula that would be broadly compatible with any cell type or water-based gel.” The formula they settled on — a combination of sucrose and glucose along with dextran for structural reinforcement — is printed with a RepRap, an open-source 3D printer with a custom-designed extruder and controlling software. An important step in stabilizing the sugar after printing, templates are coated in a thin layer of a degradable polymer derived from corn. This coating allows the sugar template to be dissolved and to flow out of the gel through the channels they create without inhibiting the solidification of the gel or damaging the growing cells nearby. Once the sugar is removed, the researchers start flowing fluid through the vascular architecture and cells begin to receive nutrients and oxygen similar to the exchange that naturally happens in the body. The whole process is quick and inexpensive, allowing the researchers to switch with ease between computer simulations and physical models of multiple vascular configurations. “This new platform technology, from the cell’s perspective, makes tissue formation a gentle and quick journey,” Chen said, “because cells are only exposed to a few minutes of manual pipetting and a single step of being poured into the molds before getting nourished by our vascular network.” The researchers showed that human blood vessel cells injected throughout the vascular networks spontaneously generated new capillary sprouts to increase the network’s reach, much in the way blood vessels in the body naturally grow. The team then created gels containing primary liver cells to test whether their technique could improve their function. When the researchers pumped nutrient-rich media through the gel’s template-fashioned vascular system, the entrapped liver cells boosted their production of albumin and urea, natural components of blood and urine, respectively, which are important measures of liver-cell function and health. There was also clear evidence of increased cell survival around the perfused vascular channels. And theoretical modeling of nutrient transport in these perfused gels showed a striking resemblance to observed cell-survival patterns, opening up the possibility of using live-cell data to refine computer models to better design vascular architectures. Though these engineered tissues were not equivalent to a fully functioning liver, the researchers used cell densities that approached clinical relevance, suggesting that their printed vascular system could eventually be used to further research in lab-grown organs and organoids. “The therapeutic window for human-liver therapy is estimated at one to 10 billion functional liver cells,” Bhatia said. “With this work, we’ve brought engineered liver tissues orders of magnitude closer to that goal, but at tens of millions of liver cells per gel we’ve still got a ways to go. “More work will be needed to learn how to directly connect these types of vascular networks to natural blood vessels while at the same time investigating fundamental interactions between the liver cells and the patterned vasculature. It’s an exciting future ahead.” With promising indications that their vascular networks will be compatible with all types of cells and gels, the team believes their 3D printing method will be a scalable solution for a wide variety of cell- and tissue-based applications because all organ vasculature follows similar architectural patterns. “Cell biologists like the idea of 3D printing to make vascularized tissues in principle, but they would need to have an expert in house and highly specialized equipment to even attempt it,” Miller said. “That’s no longer the case; we’ve made these sugar-based vascular templates stable enough to ship to labs around the world.” Beyond integrating well with the world of tissue engineering, the researchers’ work epitomizes the philosophy that drives much of the open source 3D printing community. “We launched this project from innovations rooted in RepRap and MakerBot technology and their supporting worldwide communities,” Miller said. “A RepRap 3D printer is a tiny fraction of the cost of commercial 3D printers, and, more important, its open-source nature means you can freely modify it. Many of our additions to the project are already in the wild.” Several of the custom parts of the RepRap printer the researchers used to make the vascular templates were printed in plastic on another RepRap. Miller will teach a class on building and using these types of printers at a workshop this summer and will continue tinkering with his own designs. “We want to redesign the printer from scratch and focus it entirely on cell biology, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications,” Miller said. In addition to Miller, Chen, Bhatia and Stevens, the research was conducted by Michael T. Yang, Brendon M. Baker, Duc-Huy T. Nguyen, Daniel M. Cohen, Esteban Toro, Peter A. Galie, Xiang Yu and Ritika Chaturvedi of Penn Bioengineering, along with Alice A. Chen of MIT. Bhatia is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Penn Center for Engineering Cells and Regeneration and the American Heart Association-Jon Holden DeHaan Foundation. |
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Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? AP PHOTO/ACLU/SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Ad Policy A headline in the San Francisco Chronicle screams, 900 Nabbed in State on Immigration Charges. The Seattle Times reports, Feds Combing Jails for Illegal Immigrants. An AP article declares, Immigration Raid in Iowa Largest Ever in US and reports 390 arrests. In 2007, 276,912 US residents were deported. Thanks to a recent Bush Administration crackdown, the net cast by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) is wide–so wide, it turns out, that some of those being deported are US citizens. Is ICE an efficient law enforcement agency? Or, in the words of Robert, 38, a US citizen twice deported to Mexico, is ICE “just throwing us out for nothing”? Consider what happened to Peter Guzman. Last year Guzman, a US citizen born in Los Angeles in 1977, drove onto the tarmac of a regional airport in his hometown of Lancaster, about eighty miles northeast of Los Angeles, boarded a charter plane without a ticket and refused to get off. Guzman was arrested and sentenced, and served forty-one days in a Los Angeles County jail. According to his lawyer, Mark Rosenbaum of the Southern California ACLU, Guzman was excited about being released in time for his brother’s July wedding in Las Vegas. “It was a big deal to Peter. He was going to be the best man.” It never occurred to Guzman that in July he’d be eating garbage and bathing in the Tijuana River. But on May 11, 2007, he called his family and said he’d been deported. According to the ACLU lawsuit, before his sister-in-law could find out exactly where he was and give him instructions, the line was cut. She overheard him ask, “Where am I?” In early August 2007, after Guzman had spent three months trying to return, his appeal to a border agent in Calexico was finally successful: Guzman was arrested for missing his first probation hearing and brought back to Los Angeles. ICE says it has Guzman’s signature on a voluntary departure agreement. Guzman’s attorneys say the signature was coerced and that it is never legal to deport a US citizen. Gary Mead, ICE assistant director for detention and removal, testified at a Congressional hearing in February that Guzman’s case is unique. But California Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren calls Guzman the “poster child” for an epidemic of detaining and deporting US citizens by ICE. Kara Hartzler, an attorney at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project (FIRRP), agrees with Lofgren. Last year Hartzler’s staff of six attorneys provided presentations and occasionally individual advice to more than 8,000 detainees in southern Arizona. About 10 percent of people ICE detains nationwide are sent to Florence and nearby Eloy, about sixty miles south of Phoenix. Hartzler testified, “The deportation of US citizens is not happening monthly, or weekly, but every day.” ICE does not keep records on cases in which detainees claim to be US citizens. If larger trends are consistent with the pattern in Hartzler’s caseload, since 2004 ICE has held between 3,500 and 10,000 US citizens in detention facilities and deported about half. US citizens are a small percentage of ICE detentions for this period, which totaled around 1 million, but in absolute terms the figure is staggering. Phone interviews suggest the higher end may be more accurate. I called fifteen private immigration attorneys whose names appear on a Justice Department list of pro bono attorneys in Los Angeles and left messages asking whether they had clients in the past three years who were US citizens held in ICE detention for at least one month. Seven of them called back, each describing one to four clients who meet these criteria. Using these accounts, and those from attorneys at three nonprofit immigration clinics, I documented thirty-one cases from across the country of US citizens, eight born here, incarcerated as aliens for one month to five years. Fourteen were deported. Five remain in detention. Between 2001 and 2007 Robert, who requested that his last name be withheld, was incarcerated for five years and deported to Tijuana twice because ICE refused to believe he was a US citizen. Robert described meeting seventeen other US citizens in ICE detention. Robert was born in Mexico in 1970 and orphaned at age 4. When he was 8 his uncle from Baldwin Park, California, adopted him. In 1983 he became a legal permanent resident, automatically acquiring US citizenship. In 2000 Robert was arrested for a DWI and evading arrest. After serving sixteen months, he was transferred to El Centro Detention Facility, about 100 miles east of San Diego, where ICE set about deporting him as a criminal alien. Robert told the court and his attorney, to whom he paid $5,000, that he was a US citizen, but his lawyer did not submit the necessary documents, and Robert lost the case. Robert believed an appeal was hopeless. The year he’d spent in detention was enough: “I decided to leave and come back [to the United States] the next day.” In February 2002 Robert disembarked from the ICE van in Tijuana with an order forever banishing him from the United States. The next day his sister-in-law picked him up and they drove into the United States together, telling the border agent they were US citizens, which they are. They drove to their homes in a Los Angeles suburb. In 2003 Robert, fearful of being turned over to ICE, sped away from a police car signaling him to pull over. He was sent to a deportation center in Chino and had a video hearing: “You face the TV and some little judge is inside TV talking to you.” He explained that he was a US citizen. The little judge ruled otherwise and told Robert an appeal would take nine months. Robert decided to repeat the 2002 routine. ICE again dropped him off in Tijuana. Robert told the US patrol agent apprehending him during the middle of the night in the hills of El Centro, “I am a US citizen.” The agent charged Robert with falsely impersonating a US citizen and other felonies associated with an illegal border crossing. The public defender told Robert to plead guilty to the impersonation charge, or he’d face additional time for entering the United States as an illegal immigrant. “I said, ‘No, I can’t. There’s no way. I’m trying to tell you, my dad is a US citizen. I am a US citizen.’ I told the judge that the things they’re charging me with are not true, but I have no choice and if that’s what it will take for me to go faster to my family, I will plead to that.” Robert served three years for falsely impersonating a US citizen. In 2006 Robert was released into ICE custody at Terminal Island in San Pedro. At this hearing the immigration judge considered the information Robert had assembled in the prison library and realized he was probably a US citizen. Robert was released on bond to find the relevant documents and a lawyer. A few months later Robert and his new attorney, Veronica Villegas, went to the Los Angeles United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office. Villegas told me, “The agent looked at his papers and said, ‘Congratulations! You’ve been a US citizen since 1983.'” ICE has no jurisdiction over US citizens. If someone claims birth in the United States, as Guzman did, then ICE agents must have a “reasonable suspicion” for disbelief before detaining him. Racial profiling doesn’t count. “Not speaking English, not being white and appearing to be from a Central American country is not enough,” says Rebecca Musarra, of the Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic of Washington College of Law. In practice, ICE detains thousands of people who were born in the United States and forces them to prove citizenship. According to Mario Quiroz at Casa de Maryland, which assists low-income Latinos, “People who have Spanish names, are five-four, have black hair, get profiled. At the end of the day, [ICE] only says, ‘Oops, we made a mistake.’ But somebody’s life was messed up.” Proving citizenship can be tough, especially when the people who might help can’t find you. An immigration judge, who requested anonymity, told me it was “notoriously common for people to be whisked away and nobody knows where they are. When you just want to get rid of someone, you don’t want their family to know where they are. It’s something that would happen in a Third World country. It’s not something that should happen [here].” Pastor Aquiles Rojas agrees. On October 11, 2007, he went to pick up his brother-in-law from a two-month sentence at the Honor Farm jail in Modesto, California. René Saldivar, 38, wasn’t there. “They told me that immigration had taken him, and they didn’t know where he was,” says Rojas. He called everywhere: San Francisco, Sacramento, Arizona. “They told me they had no record of my brother-in-law. We thought maybe he was in Mexico, but we couldn’t figure out why he didn’t call. Certainly he was in trouble. We just wanted to find out where he’s at.” Saldivar’s family was especially concerned because of Saldivar’s impaired psychological condition. After the family’s five-month vigil, Saldivar called. He was in the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. Saldivar told me, “I didn’t have no money and no way of talking to nobody.” The center allows collect calls but cellphone plans will not accept them. Eventually a stranger lent Saldivar a calling card. In February Saldivar explained his ancestry to an immigration judge, who concluded that Saldivar most likely was a foreign-born citizen–like John McCain and George Romney–and sent the case to FIRRP. Hartzler told me she thought she could get Saldivar released at his hearing on April 9, but she had to track down the Social Security employment records of her client’s deceased father to prove his citizenship. She wrote, “I don’t think it’s appropriate for government proceedings with consequences as severe as lifetime deportation to rely on nonprofit organizations for their safeguards. For every René, there’s dozens of people with valid claims to US citizenship who are deported.” Detainees with psychological disabilities find it especially hard to navigate their release, but according to a FIRRP social worker, Erin Maxwell, “Even people who are not diagnosably mentally ill or developmentally challenged still don’t really get [why they’re in deportation proceedings], and it can be very scary.” One client of hers was arrested for possessing drug paraphernalia and then detained at Eloy for four months. “He didn’t bring up his citizenship with the judge,” Maxwell said. “Then I met with him and he said, ‘I don’t know why this is happening. Both my parents are US citizens.'” According to Nancy Morawetz, a New York University Law School professor supervising the Immigrant Rights Clinic, “a lot of people don’t know they’re citizens.” The rules for foreign-born citizenship are complicated. Different laws apply to different years of birth. Since the state does not guarantee legal representation in civil cases, 90 to 95 percent of detainees lack attorneys. Even the immigration lawyers seem not to understand the laws, the immigration judge told me. So it’s not surprising that Saldivar’s eleven siblings are just learning that they, too, are US citizens. For the millions of US citizens who are foreign-born, court precedents shift the burden of proving citizenship onto them. But the Fourteenth Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” should be treated equally. Therefore, the Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic is planning to challenge the constitutionality of the burden of proof placed on US citizens born abroad. Finally, it was April 9, and Saldivar had his hearing, where his documentation was deemed insufficient. The Social Security Administration’s annual employment records in Arizona went back only to 1959. ICE wanted the additional two years to verify Isidoro Saldivar’s US residence the entire ten years before René’s birth in 1967. Hartzler was hoping the Washington office had the fifty-one-year-old employment records. René would begin his eighth month in detention. Giving Saldivar his liberty while ICE figured out the paperwork would have made sense because of his family’s roots in Stanislaus County, going back to 1940. In addition, NYU’s Morawetz says that doing otherwise may be unlawful: “I believe they don’t have the power to put a detainer on someone and figure it out later. It’s an abuse of the detention power. They only have jurisdiction over people who are noncitizens.” When ICE detains and deports US citizens, it is not only illogical; it also can be false imprisonment, a felony. When I asked Rosenbaum, Guzman’s ACLU attorney, why the government wasn’t prosecuting ICE agents for civil rights and criminal violations, he laughed and said, “Good luck!” Rosenbaum said the ACLU’s complaint was alleging false imprisonment, but US Attorneys were defending the government in the lawsuit. No US Attorneys have stepped forward to prosecute ICE agents. Meanwhile, immigration judges, many of whom are patronage appointments from the Bush Administration or former ICE agents, entertain the flimsiest of arguments on behalf of deportation. The case of Anna (not her real name), arrested in Phoenix on October 8, 2007, for prostitution, is particularly tragic. When the police asked for her place of birth she answered, “Paris.” When applying under another name for a US passport, in 1991, Anna wrote that she was from Tehran. According to Hartzler, Anna also claims JFK is her father and the Pope is her father. Anna is from France the way that Borat is from Kazakhstan. In February 2007 an Arizona Superior Court dismissed drug charges against Anna, finding her “unable to understand the nature of the proceedings” as well as “criminally incompetent and a danger to herself and others.” Anna has been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. On October 9, based only on her claim to have been born in Paris, Anna was taken to the Eloy Detention Center, where an ICE agent took full note of her US passport application and “8 different aliases, and 2 SSNs.” On February 20 immigration judge Thomas Michael O’Leary, who had Anna’s records, including the diagnoses of the court psychiatrists, issued an order to remove Anna from the country. The French consulate refused to issue travel documents for her, telling ICE that Anna is not a French citizen. Having been possibly stripped of her citizenship rights in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Americans With Disabilities Act, Anna will be held in detention for at least three months. If released, she is not functional enough to attend the meetings ICE requires of aliens remaining in the country with deportation orders. A warrant for her arrest will be issued, and in her next encounter with law enforcement the warrant will trigger an arrest. Kristine Brisson, the ICE agent initiating Anna’s removal, did not return messages requesting comment. Judge O’Leary has been promoted to run the Tucson Immigration Court. Anna’s case may seem unusual, but US citizens with mental disabilities reflect the criminal inmate population ICE targets. According to a 2006 Justice Department press release, about 40 percent of the incarcerated population has “symptoms of mania.” Twenty-four percent of the jail population and 15 percent of state prisoners have a “psychotic disorder, such as delusions or hallucinations.” Rachel Rosenbloom of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice in Boston testified to Congress, “It is not uncommon for someone who is mentally ill and suffering from delusions to state that he or she was born abroad.” By using the incarcerated population as its hunting grounds, ICE is inevitably going to snare mentally ill US citizens. The immigration judge observed, “If you don’t have your marbles, or someone on the outside, there’s no safety net.” Carlos Barrios, a Los Angeles private attorney who has represented US citizens in detention, notes, “It is strange. How can they keep a person detained in an immigration facility if they’re a citizen?” In response to different versions of this question from members of Congress in February, ICE’s Mead pretended that the events brought before him did not exist. He repeated the law stating that ICE has no jurisdiction over US citizens, and then affected ignorance of ICE agents detaining US citizens. Mead was in the same room as US citizens testifying to ICE abuse. At one point Illinois Democrat Luis Gutierrez exploded in frustration over Mead’s failure to have any comment on a racial-profiling incident in Chicago during which ICE detained more than 100 Latino men: “Thank you very much for not knowing any of the information about a very well-publicized case on which Secretary Chertoff has been well informed!” The official line, as ICE public affairs officer Brandon Alvarez-Montgomery explained it to me, is that ICE does not “knowingly detain US citizens.” This is false. Hartzler showed an ICE attorney the Minnesota birth certificate of Thomas Warziniack, and yet ICE held him for two weeks until his hearing. Morawetz described a citizen in detention whose attorney faxed a New York birth certificate “and detention says, ‘How do we know this is that person’s record?'” even though the law requires ICE to prove otherwise. While Saldivar remained in detention, I sent Alvarez-Montgomery the details of his case, explaining that Social Security employment records for Saldivar’s father did not exist before 1959. He responded, “Anyone who[se] first year of earnings were recorded between 1937 to the present will appear on the Social Security statement. For this case, it’s safe to assume that 1959 was the first year of recorded earnings for his father.” Alvarez-Montgomery was wrong. Later, using ancestry.com, I found a Railroad Retirement Board (RRB) record for Isidoro Saldivar from before 1951. I sent it to Alvarez-Montgomery and other ICE officials. They did not reply or release René. I sent it to Hartzler, who contacted the RRB, which provided records of “compensation received by René’s father each year from 1947 to 1958, as well as a copy of his application for a Social Security card in 1947.” Hartzler gave these to ICE, which held René for six more days, releasing him on April 28. Shortly after that I asked Saldivar, who was drywalling his sister’s home in Chowchilla, how he understood what happened. “Someone took me to prison, even though I had my papers. It’s bad. It’s not fair,” he told me. ICE alleged that René lacked legal permission to reside in the United States. Even if ICE is correct, the charge of undocumented residence is a minor civil infraction that requires release to be disputed and is not a crime. ICE’s false imprisonment of US citizens and other legal residents, however, is a serious crime. |
A woman who found her husband and another couple having a threesome and allegedly shot all three of them to death has been sentenced to 29 years in prison. Crystal Gambino, 43, found her husband, Giovanni Gambino, 42, in bed with Geoffrey Glen Gilliland, 33, and Stephanie Lynn Sanchez, 33, in the North Carolina home she shared with her husband in February 2016. She then grabbed a .44 Magnum and a box of shells before killing all three, WYFF.com reports. “We believe they were all three shot inside the house, in a bedroom, and then one of the victims, the female victim, was moved outside,” Gaston County Police Capt. Curtis Rosselle said. Gaston County District Attorney Locke Bell said Crystal Gambino dragged Sanchez’s body outside to burn it, but she stopped after realizing she had to pick up her 8-year-old daughter from school, WSOCTV.com. Investigators said there was no previous record of violence at the Gambinos’ home. Gilliland and Sanchez lived together in Charlotte, according to police. Crystal Gambino had been charged with three counts of first-degree murder, but she pleaded guilty Monday under a plea deal to involuntary manslaughter in the death of her husband and second-degree murder in the deaths of Gilliland and Sanchez. Prosecutors said Giovanni Gambino turned to Craigslist to find a couple to have a threesome with, even offering to pay them with cocaine, WSOCTV.com reports. Eddie Hime, Sanchez’s father, said he wasn’t satisfied with the plea deal. “Twenty-nine years for taking that away is not enough, in my opinion,” Hime said. Gilliland’s sister, Jennifer Burke, showed pictures of her brother and displayed no remorse for Gambino. “I can only hope that you suffer every day,” Burke said, adding that Gambino deserved many “sleepless nights” ahead for her while behind bars. Gambino’s attorney, meanwhile, said the killings were the culmination of domestic violence, mental health issues and infidelity. She apologized to relatives of the victims, WSOCTV.com reports. “I hate this happened. It’s a horrible tragedy, not only to these people, but to my family,” Gambino said. “I can say I’m sorry, but I don’t think they’ll accept it anyway.” Police were called to the Gambinos’ home for a welfare check on Feb. 29, 2016. All three victims were found naked with gunshot wounds, the Charlotte Observer reports. |
Shapiro: Alt-right 'has no grounding in reality' 5:00 p.m. (Pacific): Antifa gets itself whipped into a frenzy... A video shows Antifa protesters getting themselves riled up for Ben Shapiro’s speech at the University of California-Berkeley, which is co-sponsored by organizations such as Young Americans for Freedom and the College Republicans, with one female demonstrator vocalizing that she and her fellow comrades must resist the “fascist America.” "The very nature of the world, of humanity, of the planet is at stake!" “The world is watching what we do today; that we stand up outside of the norms of protest, of what they tell us to do,” she shouted through a megaphone. “And raise our voices.” “The very nature of the world, of humanity, of the planet is at stake. And we cannot allow police [who] have set up barriers,” she continued, before cutting out, calling Shapiro a fascist. Meanwhile, Campus Reform correspondent Naweed Thamas reports that police have erected barricades around the venue where Shapiro is speaking, and helicopters are circling overhead. 5:21 p.m.: Reports of first arrest One person has reportedly been arrested ahead of Ben Shapiro’s speech on Thursday evening. The picture of the arrest has surfaced on Twitter, and shows a woman being pressed against a van by the local police. The arrest appeared to be peaceful. 6:30 p.m.: Police announce more arrests The Berkeley Police Department announced that it had already made three arrests “banned within the zone” Shapiro was set to speak in. All three subjects were arrested for “carrying weapons” in a prohibited area. According to a city press release, officers are checking for at least 25 different potentially lethal weapons, including “bricks,” “ice picks,” and “dynamite." 6:53 p.m. Berkeley police publicizes protesters The City of Berkeley Police Department is publicizing each arrest it has made thus far7 on its twitter page. So far, the Department has identified Hannah Benjamin, 20 years old, as among the first to be arrested for “carrying a banned weapon.” Additionally, 44 year old Sarah Roark was arrested for carrying a prohibited weapon near campus. 7:07 p.m. Vandals say ‘f*ck’ new chancellor Carol Christ recently replaced Nicholas Dirks as chancellor of the elite institution, and within her first few weeks on the job she is already facing backlash from liberal students. According to images obtained by Campus Reform, students graffitied “f*ck Carol Christ” and “we don’t want your racist hate” on walls outside of the auditorium where Shapiro was set to speak. 7:30 p.m. Shapiro applauds police; commends audience "Thank you to the police," Shapiro said to enthusiastic applause. "You did an amazing job!" Shapiro also praised the audience members for "braving the slings and arrows" of the protesters by "entering a building." 7:45: Shapiro: Alt-right 'has no grounding in reality' Ben Shapiro roundly denounced the alt-right, saying they must "have a screw loose" and alleging that their worldview "has no grounding in reality." 8:00: All's quiet on the Berkeley front...for now As Ben Shapiro enters the Q&A phase of his event, Campus Reform's correspondents report that the situation outside the venue remains "peaceful," with small groups of protesters chanting. Berkeley Police, however, reports that it is monitoring a "march through South Campus," warning travelers to expect "delays/interruptions." |
Secure by Default Easy Security UX Improvements to Modern OSes Cassidy James Blaede Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 19, 2017 I’m a UX architect at elementary (developers of the Open Source elementary OS) and a front-end web developer at System76 (manufacturers of powerful computers running Ubuntu and built for creators, makers, and builders). I spend a lot of time talking to, working alongside of, and solving problems with incredibly smart people from around the world. One of those problems I’d love to see solved next is our computer operating systems being more secure by default. elementary OS has always been committed to providing the best user experience out of the box. More recently — totally unrelated to American politics, I’m sure — I have also noticed a focus within the tech community on using UX decisions to help positively influence security and privacy decisions made by users. In that vein, I’d like to double down on pointing users to more secure decisions out of the box in elementary OS — and really any other modern OS. A core idea behind this is Secure by Default. As developers of an operating system, I feel that elementary — and Microsoft, Apple, Canonical, Red Hat, etc. — have a responsibility to encourage more safe, secure, and privacy-conscious decisions when possible. The following are some concepts that I’ve been thinking about and will be investigating more over the coming months. Sandboxed Apps & Portals Flatpak, a sandboxed app format. The most obvious step that I can see being taken is sandboxing of apps. This has already become industry standard with mobile platforms, and desktop platforms like Windows and macOS feature sandboxing for apps downloaded via their stores. Linux-based desktops are moving in that direction as well with efforts such as Flatpak and Snappy. Portals (in Flatpak parlance), then, offer a strict API where the OS can provide functionality to apps without the apps having to (or being able to) know much else about the system. This, again, is similar to on-demand permissions of mobile OSes like camera, file, location, and contacts access. This is one that is fairly obvious and happening (albeit perhaps more slowly than I’d like), but I know I’d get yelled at if I didn’t include it. ;) elementary OS specifically has been following Flatpak and Snap development; while we’ve not officially adopted one or the other yet, we’re excited that sandboxes are coming. Don’t Automatically Reconnect to Insecure WiFi Unsecured WiFi access points (ones not using a password and strong encryption) are inherently, well, insecure. Connecting to one in public is already not a security- or privacy-conscious decision. However, I don’t suggest an OS should actively prevent users from connecting to these networks — that’s user-hostile in the name of “We know better than you” security. What an OS can do, however, is never connect to these insecure networks without the user’s interaction. By not automatically reconnecting to known insecure WiFi networks, an OS can prevent a number of simple and easily-demonstrable “man in the middle” attacks from being automatically exploited. While users can still manually connect to a malicious network, their device won’t auto-connect and potentially open a captive portal login that could be exploited. This is a feature I’ve reported as a bug against elementary OS, and hope to see considered there as well as by other operating systems. Mark Insecure WiFi Most modern operating systems display unsecured WiFi networks as the “default” while adding a lock or other security symbol next to encrypted connections. While it’s good that they do distinguish between the two, I feel the setup here is backwards. Unsecured becomes insecure. Secure becomes standard. Instead, modern OSes should display secure, encrypted networks as the default while clearly and strongly denoting unsecured (and possibly “secured” but using outdated/easily-cracked encryption) as insecure. This helps users get used to the Secure by Default mentality, marking insecure WiFi the exception rather than the rule. This echoes the approaches to HTTPS from the major browser vendors, including both Firefox and Google Chrome; I applaud them for this approach to HTTP vs. HTTPS. This is also a feature I’ve reported as a bug against elementary OS, but would love to see adopted more widely. elementary OS now shows encrypted networks as default, and unencrypted networks as insecure Update: This has been implemented in elementary OS. I hope to see other platforms follow! Tattletale More Some mobile devices and OSes already “tattletale” when apps are using location services, but I think this is a feature that could be expanded even more. For starters, why restrict it to location? Microphones on our devices, for example, are within earshot of some of our most private conversations; why shouldn’t our OS tattle when an app is accessing and possibly recording us over the mic? This is a feature that was recently released to users of elementary OS, and it’s a great move. This could be expanded to cameras in the same way, and each of these could make it more clear which app specifically is using the feature. It could even be expanded to include historical data to give users more confidence even if they were not facing the display at the time. Our OS already knows when these services are being used. It could let users know, too. Some of these features require sandboxes and “portal” like APIs (which are coming), but many could be implemented with what the OS already knows (like the microphone feature in elementary OS). |
On Sunday night, the University of Wisconsin put 5,800 Rose Bowl tickets on sale for students through the school's athletics department. All the tickets were scooped up in 20 minutes at a face value of $150 apiece. But shortly after the sale concluded, many of the tickets popped up for sale again -- some for as much as $400 each -- on various web sites, such as Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. The Badger Herald, the Wisconsin independent student newspaper, had a problem with that. And so the newspaper has published a list of the names of the students selling their tickets under a headline "The Worst People on Campus." The opinion piece calls out those students looking to profit from their Rose Bowl tickets. Truly, there is a special place in Hell for people who buy Rose Bowl tickets with the sole intention of profiting from them. It is entirely unfair to those who actually love this football team and were counting on a cheap face value ticket in order to make the trip to Pasadena an economic reality. We'll keep printing names of those we catch on Facebook marketplace. And feel free to send an email to editor@badgerherald.com if you know of anybody whose name should be added to the list — particularly the 100 people who have already made a listing on Craigslist. We also ask this of UW Athletics: Next time, make it so people have to pick their tickets up at the bowl site. That will keep the worst people on campus from cheating the system. Since being published, an Editor's Note was added to the article asking for respect in the story's comment section. It reads, in part: All threats will be removed and reported to campus and city police. This piece is by no means meant to be a call to take action against the above individuals, simply a tongue-in-cheek commentary about an unfair ticketing practice, and we apologize if it was taken as anything more than that. -- Tim Gardner Follow Tim on Twitter at @TimGardner_USAT Hat tip: Deadspin |
| from flickr user Eric Fryc The photographer says: Last night, I got the chance to visit these caves (mines, more accurately) for the third time, and I finally brought a camera with me. I was tripping real bad over it, because the entrance is kinda gnarly, through a manhole, frozen underground drainage tunnel, musty sandstone caves themselves, etc. But I manned up and threw the camera in a gallon ziploc going in and out, and fortunately, it made it. These caves are a trip. The people down here are always awesome, and super knowledgeable about the history of these caves. But, the only way to get good info is early in the night, because everyone's minds are gone by about midnight from one substance or another. I was real drunk taking these photos. This is only one little area of the caves. They go on forever. There's an abandoned haunted house down there (Tunnel of Terror), but it hasn't been used since 2004, 2005, something like that, because they couldn't create a secondary exit in the event of an emergency. So, they sealed the entrances off, and some people found their way in through the sewers. So tight. Give these caves a shot. You'll get real dirty, but it's worth it. These caves are a trip. The people down here are always awesome, and super knowledgeable about the history of these caves. But, the only way to get good info is early in the night, because everyone's minds are gone by about midnight from one substance or another.I was real drunk taking these photos.This is only one little area of the caves. They go on forever. There's an abandoned haunted house down there (Tunnel of Terror), but it hasn't been used since 2004, 2005, something like that, because they couldn't create a secondary exit in the event of an emergency. So, they sealed the entrances off, and some people found their way in through the sewers. So tight. If this photo caught your eye, check out the MinnPics Store to purchase equally amazing and beautiful photo prints in varying sizes - they make great gifts for any occasion. |
Travelling the Globe with a Disability October 29, 2013 2:19 pm Many countries and companies are making exceptional strides in providing accessibility opportunities to those with disabilities who desire to travel. I came across this video on YouTube that discussed Berlin, Germany’s focus on creating barrier-free environments when it comes to its museums, mode of transportation options, the social scene (the popular pubs), and being able to move about the city safely. I was quite taken aback at how advance Germany’s accessibility systems were, and the fact that Germany is a leader when it comes to accessibility in Europe. Though Berlin seems to be leading the charge to ensuring that both tourists and residents with disabilities are able to maneuver and enjoy the world around them, there are many areas for improvement in other countries in Europe. When London hosted the 2012 Summer Olympics, the city spent millions of pounds in preparation for the large number of individuals with disabilities who would travel to Olympic Park, but there were many hiccups experienced by wheelchair users during that time. Many worried about whether they would be able to board the right bus stations that had wheelchair access or if the lifts would operate properly. Some also experienced the unfriendliness of the public; sporadically did someone offer to assist when it was greatly (and at times, blatantly) needed. Those kind of anxieties and harsh realities plague the minds of many who have mobility impairments, including yours truly (though I live in the U.S.) (Let’s hope that the experiences of those who travel to Sochi, Russia for the 2014 Winter Olympics will be a whole lot smoother. I plan to keep an eye on accessibility successes and challenges reported by Paralympicans and tourists when the games begin in February 2014.) Seeing countries like Germany take a stand to provide accessibility for all people is a great step in the right direction. Many European and other countries across the globe have made travelling accessibility a priority, and this focus has allowed those with various forms of disabilities to travel within and beyond their domestic borders. One valuable resource I’ve found for wheelchair users is Wheelchair Traveling, a website that discusses the domestic and abroad experiences of those who burn rubber while spanning the globe. The stories shared paints very vivid pictures of what travelling to different states in America, and other countries is like for those on four wheels. Reading the journals and transportation accounts, plus much-needed travel tips provide great pre-planning destination insight for those who have the travelling itch. Websites like Wheelchair Traveling, along with travel agents who specialize in providing travel services to those with disabilities, can immensely assist in planning not only your next land expedition, but also your need to sail the ocean blue. Royal Caribbean has an extensive array of services to accommodate different disability types such as mobility, visual, hearing, short stature, and other disabilities. Princess Cruises, Disney Cruise Line, Celebrity Cruises, and Carnival are a few other popular cruise lines that provide exceptional accommodations to fit the needs of those who board their ships. Cruise Critic’s list of Top Ships for Cruisers with Disabilities is a great resource to review when planning your next sea adventure. I want to know of your experiences travelling on land and by sea as a person with a disability. What countries have you found to be “disability friendly” or “wheelchair friendly?” What countries do you believe need more improvements in its openness to those with mobility limitations? What travel destinations are on your bucket lists to conquer? I know that I have a few domestic and abroad adventures I am eager to experience within the next couple of years. Share your stories in the comments section below, or email them to me at Vilissa@rampyourvoice.com. (Featured headlining image: Courtesy of Pixabay.) Share this: Print Facebook Twitter Google Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Reddit Pocket About Vilissa Thompson, LMSW |
Over the last half-decade, the hockey world has constantly found issue with the New York Rangers‘ lack of young talent. That has changed for good, as the Rangers now have one of the finest young cores in all of the NHL. This rapid change of the team’s philosophy comes from years of building and a general manager change. GM Jeff Gorton has done a wonderful job mixing in the youth with seasoned veterans in just a year and a half in the position. With a few more trade deadline moves, Gorton could have something special on his hands. Gorton Creating Rangers Fountain of Youth At the end of the 2015-16 NHL season, the Rangers average age was the highest in the league at just under 30-years-old. For any team trying to create a dynasty and make Stanley Cup runs, that wasn’t going to fly. After moving Derick Brassard for a much younger center in Mika Zibanejad and signing Jimmy Vesey, it was clear the Rangers direction was headed towards the future. Gorton also added on key contributors Matt Puempel (24), Adam Clendening (24), and brought over Russian phenom Pavel Buchnevich (21) in his first full year as Rangers general manager. With prospect Ryan Graves hopefully ready next year, the shift towards the future will be more prevalent than ever. Surprise Performances, Progressions The Rangers have had few problems putting the puck in the net this year, with special thanks to new pickups Michael Grabner and Nick Holden. Grabner has 21 goals and is tied with Alex Ovechkin, Patrik Laine, and Max Pacioretty for fifth in the league. Grabner currently leads the league in even strength goals and has shown no signs of slowing down. Nick Holden has also provided the offense with 24 points over 46 games. including two game-winning goals. This production has surpassed expectations for sure, creating another dangerous weapon on the blue line. Holden’s shown to be extremely important to the defensive core, playing on both the penalty kill and power play at times. http://gty.im/624271060 One of the best things the Rangers have going for them right now is the progression of their younger players. Chris Kreider is on pace to have more goals and assists than any of his previous years. Kevin Hayes is just one goal off of his 2015-2016 total of 14. Even J.T. Miller is on pace to outscore his 22 goals and 21 assists from last year. Why is this progression important? For one, there is a constant need in the NHL to have players who can step up into higher roles. With players like Zibanejad and Nash missing time, the Rangers needed their younger forwards to play bigger than they’ve ever played before. In turn, the youth has answered. Rangers Looking Towards Adding Young Defenseman? All signs point to the Rangers front office likely making calls to multiple teams with inquiries about young defensemen. Teams like the Anaheim Ducks and Carolina Hurricanes may be willing to talk trade. Both the Ducks and Hurricanes have young defensemen and have struggled offensively at times. As the trade deadline inches closer, could the Rangers land a young defenseman for a young forward such as Jesper Fast or Oscar Lindberg? Jeff Gorton is building towards the future, striking gold on almost every move he’s made so far. If Gorton can make another splash without giving up one of the talented, young forwards, he’ll be hitting gold again on a very important piece of the team that can help for many years to come. While easier said than done, Gorton’s got pieces to move to land a playmaking top-four defenseman. With all the possibilities, expect the Rangers to be big players at the trade deadline. |
Liberty and Creativity Exercising creativity will help establish and improve a free society. And a free society will be most conducive to the expression of ideas and the creation of art, literature, media, inventions, and Do-It-Yourself production. I: Creativity Fosters Free Society. The task of liberating society can be described as “building a new world in the shell of the old” or finding opportunities to build liberating networks into daily life. In any sense, the project of liberation is an act of creation, and requires creative thinking to be successfully achieved. The things we create can be the beginnings of the new world that must be built. The personal liberation found in creating art and inventions facilitates the individual’s ability to live a free life. And on the social level, encouraging the exercise of creativity undermines the social control of authorities who rely on passive consumers and obedient producers. One who creates is imagining new ways to live and breaking out of the roles and ideas that have been handed to him. Expanding mental attention into new areas expands freedom – the individual who can think about more things is capable of doing more things. Whether creating narratives from images in the mind, or creating usable items from discarded parts, the mental process involved in creation requires that the world be looked at from different perspectives than one is used to. Such a mindset encourages the exploration and toleration of new ideas, hallmarks of a free society. Creation disrupts the monotony and sterility of social control. Where governments would put drab brown walls along highways, graffiti artists give passengers something to think about besides blank walls and asphalt. The right sticker on a subway advertisement can make the viewer more apt to question the messages they are getting. Public performances disrupt the routine of habit whereby people fall into acceptance of the status quo. And Do-It-Yourself projects are more likely to make the individual feel he can influence the world around him. Like a free society, creation can be a participatory process of discovery and a voluntary pooling of individual effort for maximum benefit to all participants. Communication and free expression are more valued than slavish devotion to “The Rules.” A more material payoff of fostering creativity can be discussed. The products of Do-It-Yourself and Make Culture can form the basis of a counter-establishment-economy, finding ways to make discards into valuable capital for use and exchange. And the more that people think innovatively, the more fronts of attack can be opened against authority. For example, more ideas about how to counter attacks on Wikileaks make it harder for the US government to disrupt it. And if Wikileaks is shut down, the authorities will then be confronted with multiple new ideas attacking them, as if they cut off one head of the Hydra to see two grow in its place. Reason is only one part of the human thought process, so it is often helpful to communicate feeling to go with it. Doing so makes things meaningful on a deeper level, and playing with emotions can reveal the thought processes behind them. II: Free Society Fosters Creation. A free society would have no taxes, no globe-spanning empires, and no regulations that lock the economy into rigid hierarchy and inefficiency. But there would be an emphasis on personal liberty – this would be necessary to establish, safeguard, and improve a free society. Such an environment would be conducive to a flowering of human creativity, as creativity would not be limited by arbitrary authoritarian decree. The elimination of the state will increase the general wealth of society by two related means. One, the government is not leaching off every minute of legal work to line the pockets of those who help politicians exert control and chase glory. Two, there will no longer be arbitrary barriers to entering the economy or to create new economies, making it easier to start new businesses or new ways of exchanging goods. The absence of state distortions in the economy means that people can work more productively with the same amount of time. Prices of necessities, like housing, nutrition, and utilities, are kept artificially high by government intervention, particularly in land use and technology. As Charles Johnson noted in Bits & Pieces on Free Market Anti-Capitalism: the Many Monopolies, certain key markets – importantly, the labor market, housing rental market, and other key markets are rigged markets – and in particular, indirectly-created captive markets, in which working-class folks in need of houses or jobs are driven into a market where they are systematically stripped of resources and alternatives, faced by artificially high costs, and generally constrained to negotiate with incumbent market players who have been placed in an artificially advantageous position over them The practical result is that in an economy rife with state intervention on behalf of the most powerful interests, the average person works more and receives less than they likely would in a free economy. The greater profitability of work combined with the falling prices of basic living expenses in a free society means that basic needs could be met with far less work, leaving more time to create and experiment. The ease of finding someone to pay for art (though there would likely be many people interested in free expression and wealth would be more generally attainable) would have less determination over what kind of art was made, as the artist can more easily live off of other endeavors. So art does not have to be easy to sell (though there is nothing wrong with going for mass appeal) but instead would be a truer reflection of the creator’s desires to explore and create. But creativity does not have to wait for after work is done. A free society is more likely to value the application of creativity to work. Where the authoritarian says, “Do what you’re told,” the libertarian says “If you want to be involved in this endeavor, find the best way you as an individual can contribute.” Valuing results over obedience leads to less drudgery and submission at work. The individual is less of an automaton, and more of a craftsperson valued for his skills and ideas. A free economy leaves more time for leisure as people work more effectively instead of working longer. The demand for literature, games, and aesthetics would likely rise. So the exchange of creations could be a more prevalent part of life. And the innovation fostered by the nurturing of creativity in a free economy would likely make creation a greater part of social life. In freedom, one does not need to perpetually labor for others in order to maintain survival or status. The things you do on your own time are more meaningful than things done on others’ time, and living without masters that require constant requests for approval is living free. The individual flourishes in autonomy. Individual freedom requires respecting individuality. The freedom to experiment and express new ideas would likely be seen as valuable assertions of uniqueness. III: Freedom of Communication. The more easily information flows, the better the environment for creation, adaptation, and commentary. All work is ultimately derivative – to be completely original, you would have to invent language and create every single environment that has fostered ideas. It is the way in which one combines previous ideas that makes a new idea original. In a free society, communication would be facilitated by innovation, by people having more time to communicate instead of taking and giving commands, and by the end of intellectual property regimes. The greater communication that a free society would foster is another way that freedom encourages creativity. In a free society, communication and accountability would take the place of copyrights and patents. The regime of intellectual gatekeeping and intellectual property generally serves to enrich certain businesses at the expense of individual creators. Authors sign away rights to get published, film studios are not permitted to make adaptations of works that others “own,” technology workers sign away profits from innovations to their employers, incremental improvements on products can violate patents, companies sit on patents to prevent competitors from developing products, and whoever is able to muster the strongest showing in a government court wins. Ensuring creator recognition through public accountability works by using the flow of information and consumer choice – through innovation, not disruption. In the information age, plagiarism is easier than ever to detect and draw attention to. Selling creative works without paying the creators will lead to market pressure and social costs. New business models to fund research and development will be created. Those who succeed will sell products and those who do not can create products for their own use without a lawsuit hanging over their heads. QuestionCopyright.org promotes a “Creator-Endorsed” trademark to certify that creators of a work endorse the version that carries the mark (Stephan Kinsella discusses the idea in The Creator-Endorsed Mark as an Alternative to Copyright). A dishonest use of such a mark would constitute a fraudulent attempt to make a profit. If one sold a product bearing the Creator-Endorsed mark without the actual approval of the creator, the customer is not receiving the product they paid for. The seller would be dishonestly keeping money that he promised the consumer he would give to the creator. The Creator-Endorsed mark is one example of an effort to help creators make money by the spread of information and by the decision-making power of consumers. Cases of derivative work are best decided in the court of public opinion. If a work is an obvious rip-off, it will lose support and bring social costs. If a work draws inspiration from other expressions of ideas, it will be up to each individual to decide if it is too derivative or not. There will not be one line fixed by authority, but multiple standards based in communication, persuasion, and individual decision making. The use of information technology without state restrictions will overall lead to better working conditions for creators. As Kevin Carson notes in his latest Center for a Stateless Society study The Thermidor of the Progressives, [I]t’s feasible for a larger number of people than ever before to obtain payment (in smaller amounts) for their ideas by marketing them directly to readers and listeners, as opposed to the previous state of affairs in which fewer people gained access to much larger sums of money by winning the approval of the corporate gatekeepers. What we’re seeing is a return to the folk model of making modest incomes by direct production for one’s audience, in place of a model in which the “artist” is the client of some bureaucratic government or corporate patron (with the giant publishing house or record company “keeping” the artist in the same way an Italian grandee kept his pet artist in the Renaissance). The corporate gatekeepers, those who skim off the work of some while countless others petition for consideration, are now facing competition from the new entrepreneurialism enabled by the free use of technology. Creators can reach a wider audience without the intermediaries of businesses who have their own interests in mind. The gatekeepers aren’t better at recommending stuff than friends and trusted reviewers. With mass exposure, quality control is democratized. Creators can judge feedback from multiple sources in a conversation between equals instead of looking up the hierarchy for revision. And consumers have more potential seals of approval to put their trust in. And mass exposure is good for works that aren’t massively popular too. The free flow of information enables niche audiences to more easily find the products they’re looking for. If I’m trying to convince someone to buy a ticket to a concert I’m going to, one of the best things I can do is point them to YouTube. There might be official videos, there might be bootleg concert footage, and there might be videos made using movie clips without permission. All help the potential consumer make a more informed choice, and lead to more interest in the product. And a variety of creators can be better matched to more unique tastes. As Carson says later in Thermidor: But even assuming that “piracy” really does cut into the total revenues of the little guy who’s trying to make a full-time career out of music or writing, that’s looking at only one side of the picture. It neglects what Bastiat called “the unseen.” What revenue does come in to artists follows a much longer tail distribution, spread out among a larger number of people making small amounts of money, as opposed to larger amounts being concentrated in the hands of a smaller number of artists. Let’s consider my case. I don’t waste time worrying about the sharing of pdf files of my books at torrent sites, or how much money it’s costing me. To me, the proper basis for comparison is the money I still can make that I never could have made at all in the “good old days.” In the good old days, I’d have painstakingly put together a manuscript of hundreds of pages, and then put it away to gather cobwebs when I couldn’t persuade the gatekeepers at a conventional publisher that it was worth the cost of printing and marketing… [I]f it weren’t for digital publishing technologies and free publishing venues on the Internet, I would probably have lived and died doing menial labor with nobody anywhere ever hearing of my ideas. If I’d had to persuade a conventional publisher that my books could sell ten thousand copies before I could be heard, my entire writing career would have been confined to letters to the editor. Thanks to digital culture, I’m able to make my work directly available to anyone in the world who has an Internet connection, and market it virally to a niche readership at virtually no cost. The breaking of monopoly leads to a flowering of alternatives. Creators are able to see their visions realized in the physical world, and writers are empowered to communicate more. But the creator is a consumer as well. Finding inspiration and sources for projects can get really expensive or otherwise inconvenient if you can’t download it for free and later compensate and promote those you have found to be most helpful. In anarchy, human creativity would be liberated and countless ideas would be experimented with. Liberty and creativity are bound together in the pursuit of maximum freedom. |
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