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This fall is flying by and September is pretty much booked. So I’m taking a second to skip over the 2 things I should be doing instead of blogging to catch you up on my life. I mentioned last Monday when we got home from Gatlinburg that things are going to be really busy the next few months, but all of it is exciting. 5 Things Coming Up September 16th: Photography Class September 18-22nd : California Leadership Retreat with Beachbody – I’m so excited about this! Only 200 coaches get to go, and some of the trainers will be there too. It’ll be my first time ever going to California!! October 3rd: Engagement Pictures. This is the third time we have scheduled them; I’m praying it all works out. Both of the other sessions it has rained. October 26-27th : Keen Digital Summit for bloggers and social media consultants. Keen will be my first blogging conference. I cannot wait! I used to work for a hospitality company in Nashville for conferences, and it will be really neat to see the other side of things. October TBA : Photo Shoot for Beachbody by the photographer who is also doing our wedding pictures! I am so excited. I’ll be marking off 4 things from my 1001 Things in 101 Days too! I’m also really excited to get my Ellie order in the mail! :) The have high-quality fitness clothes, and they change them every month. If anything sells out, they don’t restock it so no one really has the same thing which I love. This is the tank I ordered. The back is adorable, and the front has cups in it. I used to hate having cups in my bra tops, but now I really do appreciate them as long as they don’t move too much when I wash them. I hope it’s just as cute on me when I get it! I also got a pair of flare yoga pants. The also have a really cute tank top that has a full sports bra built-in, but it’s sold out. Maybe next month! :) Also, if you use this link to shop you’ll get 20% off! 2 Things I Should Be Doing Instead of Blogging At least the 2 things I should be doing instead of blogging are also fun. 1. Creating a meal guide with recipes. I’ll be out of town next week, and Beachbody is providing most of our meals so I won’t have to worry there. I do need a plan for when I get back though. If I don’t plan for getting back from a trip, it takes me forever to get back on track from a trip. I just feel wore out and annoyed by food prep after skipping it for a week or so. The plan helps me jump right back into a healthy routine. 2. Registering at Kohls and Macy’s. I know we aren’t getting married until June, but my great grandmother called me asking for my registry and colors 3 weeks ago! I want to make picking out things as easy as possible for my family. I also have Christmas and a birthday between now and the wedding. I don’t mind getting a blender for Christmas as long as it’s the Ninja. ;) Plus, I know Macy’s is having a huge sale this weekend, and Kohls has awesome Black Friday sales so it’ll be nice if everyone can save a little moolah. (Even if I am tempted to buy us a few married-life presents too lol) Oh…one other thing I should be doing — getting ready for Wine on the River. We went last year, and time has FLOWN since then! We’re leaving in about 45 minutes, and I’m in sweatpants. Can’t wait to share this years pictures from the Nashville event and tell you about how my new workout clothes fit! I hope ya’ll have a great weekend!! What are you doing? Where did you register? What is on your “should be doing instead of blogging ” list? |
Our menu is filled with Thanksgiving favorites that you can order a la carte, as individual meals or as family meals. Enjoy home-style food without picking up a pot or pan! Menu options include: Take the work out of your holiday dinner with Thanksgiving To Go. Pre-cooked dinners with all the trimmings available for pick-up at Memorial Union. Ordering Ordering begins Monday, November 5! All orders must be placed by 3:00 pm on Friday, November 16. There are three ways to place your order: 1) Fill out form and submit online 2) Email order to lisa.wadzinske@wisc.edu 3) Call to place your order over the phone 4) Fill out form and drop it off with Campus Event Services Office in Memorial Union. Pick-Up Pick-up will be available 12:00 pm and 5:30 pm on Wednesday, November 21. The pick-up area will be at Memorial Union (800 Langdon Street) in the Profile Room (Room 2318; Floor 2, East Wing). Ticketed parking is available in the Helen C. White ramp. |
A prototype of the kinetic leg forthe boneshaker bicycle. This unique wooden “penny farthing” style bicycle was built by Ron Schroer, a Jacksonville, Florida resident. After going through chemo a few years ago, he said he realized “if I didn’t let some of my crazy out before I passed, I’d be disappointed with myself.” The only goal of his art projects has been to make people smile- and they do. An earlier project called “Ol’ Fence” has gotten a lot of attention at art shows too- it’s an endearing animated face, made from the weathered wood of a backyard fence. “I’d love to do more art projects, and have many ideas, but I need to find some funding sources to pay for materials and allow me to put more time into them.” “Boneshaker Ron”, as he is known in art circles, has a strong creative background, with a lot of experience in machining, cabinet making, prototyping, and a wide range of similar hands-on type activities. “In the 80’s my brother and I had a custom cabinet shop, mostly focused on kitchen and bathroom work, but all custom.” Boneshaker Big Wheel 2014 incarnation from Ron Schroer on Vimeo. He made the big-wheel for the OneSpark festival in Jacksonville, Florida in 2014. He started on it very shortly after the 2013 OneSpark. It did well in the show too, winning the second-place popular vote in the Art category for that year. “I have no way to calculate the hours that were put in… All I can say is that it was a lot of nights and weekends and days off. My brother Greg, also a woodworker, helped a lot, and other members of the family got involved as well. I had the initial idea for it, but it was great to have some help along the way.” The design for the mechanical legs was developed by Theo Jansen for his Straandbeests, which is dutch for “beach creatures”- according to Schroer, a lot of folks have been working with that mechanism. His innovation was to adapt it to be pedal driven, and to incorporate it into a penny-farthing style bike. There were some big design hurdles for sure-I spent a lot of time drawing it out and planning how the mechanisms would work together. He said that the tolerances are very tight for the legs-there are three on each side, and it wasn’t easy to make sure they would work in the proper sequence and timing, but he did it, and is proud of the result. Moving forward, he has a lot more ideas for projects to build. This year he redesigned the bike and added some new features: the biggest innovation being an animated penguin puppet on the front of the bike, and he had to redesign the seat and steering so his hands could be free to manipulate the puppet. Like this bike? Then check out A Bicycle Built of Wood Sign up for eletters today and get the latest techniques and how-to from Fine Woodworking, plus special offers. Sign Up A prototype of the kinetic leg forthe boneshaker bicycle. Careful planning of the details took this bicycle from concept to the real thing. The entire project was carefully planned to scale before being built. Schroer's technical background aided in the design of this project- making sketches of his ideas sketches let him visualize his ideas on paper. The newest phase of the project was to add an animated wooden penguin puppet to the front, which the driver can manipulate with his hands. Dutch artist Theo Jansen is credited with developing the leg design that Schroer used in his "Boneshaker Bigwheel". Jansen uses the mechanical legs to animate his huge wind-powered PVC-pipe beach creatures. Schroer's earlier project, "Ol' Fence", gets a lot of attention too, and has been featured in several art shows. Launch Gallery |
The Problem: Confused Consumers Sounds great, right? Now you don't have to be a seasoned professional investor to capitalize on all the great real estate deals out there. You just need an Internet connection and a bank account to wire funds to your auction account for the required 5% deposit. This means lots of novices are getting involved, but that's a problem. Even though disclosures exist to warn bidders that they should thoroughly research the properties they're bidding on, confused consumers who think they're getting a great deal are sometimes bidding on what might as well be toxic waste. In fact, the auction websites contain listings for all kinds of foreclosed property. That means not all the listings are first mortgages: some are second liens. In some cases, bidders think they're getting an ownership interest on a condominium, when they're actually getting a worthless second lien that the condo association has levied on the foreclosed occupant for unpaid maintenance fees. An Example The best way to understand what's going on is through considering an actual example. Last Thursday, February 18th, a bidding war went on for a listing on the auction web site for Miami-Dade's Clerk of Court. Here's a screen shot of the listing (click for larger image): As you can see, it shows the assessed value of this property as $213,969. Yet, the judgment amount is only $5,210. To an unsuspecting consumer, it sounds like you could get a great deal. Bidding started at $8,600 at 10:28am. The auction ended at 1:24pm with the winning bid of $20,500. But this winner was actually a loser. If you perform a records search, you find out that the defendant (foreclosed occupant) has another foreclosure lawsuit pending on the same property by Chase Home Finance, LLC. Yet, the plaintiff in the lawsuit for the auction listing above is Walnut Park Homeowners Assn Inc -- not Chase Home Finance. And you can find that separate lawsuit pending through the records search too. This implies that a title search will almost certainly show that Chase Home Finance has the 1st mortgage on the property, while Walnut Park Homeowners Assn has a 2nd lien for $5,210 on the occupant's unpaid maintenance fees. Remember, when someone stops paying his mortgage on a condo, he often also stops paying his fees. The Consequences So what happens to the "winner" of a second lien? Well, they've purchased garbage. Now, they may be able to move into that condo for a few days, weeks or months. But the bank that holds the mortgage will still ultimately foreclose, wiping out that second lien. She never had an authentic ownership interest. Then, the winner must then vacate the premises, unless she wants to pay whatever the bank demands to wipe out its first mortgage, often hundreds of thousands of dollars. Think about the insanity of what's going on here. Bidders are paying a premium for a second lien. And it's worthless: a first lien foreclosure will automatically extinguish that second lien anyway. In the example above, the bidder agreed to pay approximately four times the debt incurred by the former occupant's unpaid maintenance fees. Why? Obviously because she thought she was getting an ownership interest in the condo for a steal. Unfortunately, she didn't do her homework. |
Reform of US healthcare, a centrepiece of the Obama presidency, was in danger today of being derailed after the Republicans produced one of the biggest political upsets of recent US history by winning Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts. The victory against the odds came on the eve of the anniversary today of Barack Obama's inauguration, a heady time for the Democrats when they entertained hopes of a prolonged period of dominance. The win robs the Democrats of their filibuster-proof 60-40 majority in the Senate and throws into doubt the future of Obama's health reform plan. Obama and the Democratic leadership will have to decide whether to take another look at the bill. Scott Brown, a truck-driving National Guardsman who was virtually unknown even in Massachusetts a few weeks ago, beat Martha Coakley, the state attorney general who had expected to inherit the seat, by 52% to 47%. Brown, in his victory speech, implicitly referred to a decisive moment in the campaign when the moderator in a debate asked him how, given his views on healthcare reforms, he could sit in "Ted Kennedy's seat" – a description repeatedly used by Coakley in the campaign. Echoing his response to the moderator, Brown said in his victory speech: "This Senate seat belongs to no one person, to no political party … This is the people's seat." Coakley, in her concession speech, said: "I am heartbroken at the result, as I know you are, and I know we will get up together tomorrow and continue this fight, even with this result tonight." It is a huge psychological blow to the Democrats: the seat of John F Kennedy and then Edward Kennedy until his death last year is now in Republican hands. If a seat regarded by Democrats as one of the safest in the country can fall, then scores of Democrats standing in the congressional mid-term elections in November will see themselves as also vulnerable. "It is a shock, a total shock," said David Hadas, 37, one of more than 1,000 Coakley supporters at a Boston hotel for what they hoped would be a celebration. "It is only a year ago everyone was very upset with the Republican party and we swept Obama into office." Voters, citing reasons for the shift to the Republicans, repeatedly expressed hostility towards the healthcare bill but also a belief that Obama represented too much government interference, was too leftwing and was spending too much. The Democrats have several Plan Bs for the health bill, none of which they regard as satisfactory. One was to vote on the bill before Brown takes up his seat but Jim Webb, a Democratic senator, appeared to block that last night by saying the election had been both about healthcare and the integrity of the government process. More than 2,000 Republicans turned up at another Boston hotel last night to noisily celebrate a rare victory after heavy defeats in the 2006 congressional elections and again in 2008 for the White House. "I pray this will be the start of a bloodless revolution, the start of the campaign against the Obama agenda, in which the silent majority are heard," David Knight, 43, a Republican from neighbouring Rhode Island, said. "We hope this is the end of the health bill but they could still ram it through." Michael Nicolazzo, 26, who was also at the party, was a Democrat until two years ago but felt Obama was too leftwing. "This was a referendum on Obama. For the bluest of all states to elect a Republican, it really sends a message that people do not want extravagant spending." He, too, hoped the health bill would be killed. Brown received a lot of backing from Republicans who had travelled to join him from all round the US, and also from grassroots groups that have grown up in opposition to Obama's agenda, particularly on health, such as the Tea Party. At the Boston hotel where the Democrats held their wake, some began crying as the first results came through. Most headed home early. "We are all in shock," said Addrienne Walker, 40, who was still carrying a Coakley poster. "We have not had a Republican in that seat since 1952." She hoped Obama would not back off on health reform but admitted that the November elections would be tough. "It is not looking good. Obama is going to have a fight on his hands." Even before polling closed, the Democrats were engaged in a blame game. The White House and the national leadership hinted that Coakley had been responsible because she had fought too low-key a campaign. Obama issued a relatively terse statement, thanking Coakley for her hard work. Local Democrats blamed the national leadership, saying they had been too slow in recognising the danger and providing the necessary campaign cash and staff. They accused the national leadership of having pushed for the negative ads in the final days and claimed this had alienated independents. A third candidate, Joe Kennedy, representing the Libertarians, took only 1%. He is no relation to the late senator. • This article was amended on 21 January 2010. The original said that Martha Coakley had used the phrase "Ted Kennedy's seat" in a political debate. This has been corrected. |
After 35 Years In Prison, Redemption In Michigan In 1986, NPR's Jacki Lyden interviewed inmates in the only maximum-security federal prison in the U.S. described as "Level 6." The offenders there were considered the nation's most dangerous. Last spring, one of the men Lyden had interviewed gave her a call. Released after 35 years, Michael Geoghegan had gone looking for salvation. I got an e-mail from a listener last April that I never expected to receive. It was a response to a piece about long-term solitary confinement. "I'm glad you're still doing stories on that issue," it read. "You'll be happy to know I'm doing well. Have my own place, and more importantly, am deeply involved with a prisoner re-entry program." The last time I'd seen Michael Geoghegan, he was sitting in the prison known as U.S. Penitentiary-Marion in Illinois, wearing a jumpsuit and manacles. In the 1980s, it was the "administrative maximum" prison under the Federal Bureau of Prisons, or BOP — the only one rated Level 6. Its offenders were considered the nation's most dangerous, and it was the first prison to hold all inmates in their cells for all but one hour a day. It was a controversial place: Two guards had been attacked and killed there, inmates had complained of abuse and retaliation, and the human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch condemned the prison for the way it was run. I interviewed Geoghegan and several other prisoners at the prison in 1986. A native of Ann Arbor, Mich., Geoghegan had been doing time for a string of bank robberies committed when he was 20. He was transferred from the prison in Leavenworth to Marion, where he received more time — for stabbing a guard he had a grudge against. I never thought I'd see him out on the street. But on June 25, 2008, Geoghegan was paroled to a federal halfway house in Saginaw, Mich. He'd spent a total of 35 years in jail — 25 of them locked in a cell for 23 hours a day. 'What Will You Do, God, When I Die?' The years had transformed Geoghegan into a small, wiry troll of man, with tousled gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses. In his leather jacket, he looked vaguely academic. In his life, Geoghegan had been trying to make another kind of transformation. Enlarge this image toggle caption Jacki Lyden/NPR Jacki Lyden/NPR While in prison, he read thousands of books. He found special inspiration in the words of poet Rainer Maria Rilke. "What will God do when I die?" he asked himself, referencing one of Rilke's poems. "And I always thought — nothing. God would do nothing, because I don't exist in God's eyes. I have no soul. It's dead. And it's only in the past 15 years that I've learned that I do have the courage to heal." Geoghegan was talking about his shattered childhood. His father was an Irish immigrant, a broken alcoholic who went to prison. His mother suffered a breakdown and put her 9-year-old son in a Catholic boys' home in Detroit. Geoghegan says he was victimized by a deacon there. "He was a monster," Geoghegan says. "He had a select corps of young men. He would make us practice on the older kids in order to be better for him. And this went on for a year and a half. And I had blocked a lot of it out." Deal With Me Now Upon his release, the 54-year-old Geoghegan had no ID, no friends and no money. His health was ruined, and he was bleeding internally with ulcerated colitis. But what he wanted first was a reckoning — and atonement. Despite his frail condition, he walked for miles until he reached the offices of the diocese. "I wanted to just confront the diocese and say, 'Here I am, deal with me now,' " Geoghegan remembers. "Everybody else has either avoided my past, that part of my childhood, or lied to me about it. So I wanted to do a face-to-face confrontation with members of the church, and say, 'Okay, now deny me! I'm not hidden behind a prison wall anymore, so do it to my face if you're gonna do it.' " Robert Carlson was bishop of Saginaw at the time. Though his diocese had nothing to do with Geoghegan's victimization, he apologized for the Church's transgressions and heard his confession. "Michael had a real desire to share his story," says Carlson, now an archbishop in St. Louis. "It was a very painful story. As a priest or a bishop, obviously we're here to help people. He wanted to see me. I thought that was most appropriate. I think basically, what I did was listen. But obviously the Holy Spirit did something during our meeting. And it was a blessing to spend time with him." He referred Geoghegan to the diocese's prison chaplain, Phil Ropp, who has since become his best friend. The First To Be Helped "You know, our image of someone who's been incarcerated 35 years is that this is a tough guy," Ropp says. "A few minutes into our conversation, he literally broke down and wept." "The feeling I had was, 'Here's someone who had the emotions of 35 years pent up.' And it seemed to me that maybe this was the first time in that 35 years that he'd actually just allowed himself to let his feelings come to the surface and let this all out. And I admit at the time, I was kind of overwhelmed by that. And I'm praying, 'Lord, show me a way to deal with this.' " But in some ways, Geoghegan was a godsend for the chaplain. Michigan has about 48,000 inmates, most of whom will eventually be released. Ropp wanted to start a program to help those former inmates with counseling and support. Once out, former inmates need things like ID, housing, clothing, medical needs, Social Security or disability — all of which the diocese helped Geoghegan get. In a way, Geoghegan was the perfect start for the program. "Have faith," Ropp would tell Geoghegan through the following months. So FAITH became their program's name, short for the Faith Alliance Initiative for Transitional Healing. Geoghegan, who lives on Social Security disability, has raised $4,000 as FAITH's community resources manager, a volunteer position. Ropp counsels inmates who are still doing time. There are 14 prisons in the 11-county diocese, and the Michigan Department of Corrections says it supports private efforts like the FAITH program. The MDOC now has its own transition program — which it did not have when Geoghegan was released — but with 11,000 prisoners paroled annually in the state, there's a huge job to be done. An Unexpected Future Geoghegan now lives in a small rented apartment in a white frame house on a leafy street. He takes dozens of pills each day for physical ailments ranging from Crohn's disease to hepatitis C. But, he says, he's found happiness in a dog named Domino, what he calls an "antique" computer and his fiance. He met Teresa Duggan in 2000, when they began corresponding while he was still in prison. Watching him, it's hard to believe that this is the first time he's ever had a home, used a computer or been in a real relationship. As an inmate at Marion, he seemed likely never to do those things. Back in 1986, Warden Gary Henman didn't see much future for any of Marion's prisoners, either. The prison had even been mentioned by U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese during a recent wardens' conference, he told me. "He described the inmates like cancer cells — if you don't contain them in one place, they're going to spread. And that's the purpose of Marion. You end up with ... the worst of the worst." Listening to that line from my old NPR story made Geoghegan's face flush with anger. "I think Marion was the cancer cell," says Geoghegan. "And it spread a lot of disease, like hatred and anger and everything else to us. You know, if you treat a man like a dog or an animal, a rabid dog or an animal, he's going to end up biting you. Most of these people are going to get out. So how are you releasing these men? You're breeding this hatred, you're breeding this anger, you're breeding this animosity into them, and then you're going to let them loose on society. And then when they do something wrong, you're going to say, 'See? I told you that guy's bad.' But if you can work on the individual and give them a sense of dignity, maybe they won't come out with so much anger and hostility." 'I Like the Man Who I Am Today' Geoghegan once saw prison as his destiny, but now seems almost to be talking about someone else when he describes his past. His evolution, he says, was gradual. "I didn't want to be the person that I had become in Marion," he says. "I didn't want to be the person they portrayed me to be, either. The only goal I've had since I got out of prison is to die with a good name." "If I can accomplish that goal, then I've accomplished something in my life." He thinks he's getting there, too; not that many people around him know about his past. "They only know me, who I am today. They like the man I am today. And I like the man who I am today. Here I am, this old convict, bad health, bad teeth because of my years, no children, no life whatsoever except that life — and now I'm meeting with bishops and I'm sitting down and having meetings at the diocese with people who, you know, they're important people. And here I am just sitting amongst them." Once Received, Salvation Can Be Given Not every prisoner will be a Michael Geoghegan. And indeed, of that original group of men I remember from Marion, one has died after killing another inmate in prison. Another, the head of the Aryan Brotherhood, was the target of a major federal racketeering prosecution in 2006. It's clear that Geoghegan has regrets. But he's proof, he says, that the human condition is mutable — even when you've lived most of your years behind prison walls. "I wasted a lot of my life," he says. "I know I'm not a stupid man. And I could've been a lot of different things. I had the potential to be anything I wanted to be. And I wasted that potential. But I can't also allow the past and sadness and the sorrow to be a junkyard. So, if I can take all the negativity from the past and turn it into positive steps for the future, then maybe I'm accomplishing something and helping someone else." "This is what I wanted to tell you about," he added. "This is the story of my redemption in Saginaw, Mich." |
Police in Charlotte, N.C., have arrested a man seen on video pummeling another fan during Thursday night's Panthers-Eagles game at Bank of America Stadium. Video posted by an Instagram user showed a man wearing a Cam Newton jersey punching another fan who was sitting behind him repeatedly in the face. The assailant delivers four punches to the victim's head, leaving the 62-year-old man bleeding from the face, before hurrying for the exits. A post shared by Warren C (@odubco) on Oct 12, 2017 at 10:11pm PDT According to the caption in the original Instagram post, which includes objectionable language, the two men had been arguing throughout the game because the man in the Newton jersey and the woman with them refused to sit down. According to the user who posted the video, the victim also was wearing Panthers gear. Charlotte Mecklenburg Police announced Friday evening that they have arrested Kyle Adam Maraghy and charged him with simple assault. .@CMPD has arrested Kyle Adam Maraghy, charged him with simple assault in connection with this incident. He is being taken to Meck jail. https://t.co/yYF774IbkR — CMPD News (@CMPD) October 13, 2017 "We have reviewed video tape of the incident and have identified the perpetrator," Panthers executive director of risk management Lance Emory said in a release Friday. "We are working with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department to pursue charges to the fullest extent of the law. "The Carolina Panthers are committed to a fan-friendly and family-friendly stadium experience. The behavior exhibited by the perpetrator is unacceptable and will not be condoned at Bank of America Stadium." NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart said on a conference call Friday morning that the league was aware of the incident and in contact with Panthers security. “We take all of these very seriously," Lockhart said, per NFL Media. |
caption Abovitz, CEO of augmented reality startup Magic Leap, waves during the first day of the annual Allen and Co. media conference in Sun Valley source Thomson Reuters Multi-billion dollar startup Magic Leap, which is building a cutting-edge augmented reality headset, is currently in a legal battle with the engineer who started its first Silicon Valley office. Court filings reveal new secrets about the company, including a west coast software team in disarray, insufficient hardware for testing, and a secret skunkworks team devoted to getting patents and designing new prototypes – before its first product has even hit the market. The company believes that Adrian Kaehler and Gary Bradski, two VPs at Magic Leap, tried to rip off its technology and talent to start a new robotics startup. Kaehler and Bradski, who sued the company for wrongful termination earlier this year, say that Magic Leap unfairly robbed them of their shares in Magic Leap and broke their employment contracts. Magic Leap countered by suing the pair for misappropriation of trade secrets in Northern California District Court. While the suit was settled in October, documents and emails filed in the case reveal a major disconnect between the Florida-based Magic Leap and its satellite offices in Silicon Valley. A $4.5 billion startup source Magic Leap Magic Leap is one of the most mysterious and hyped startups in tech. The company has raised a massive amount of venture money – $1.39 billion – from nearly every top technology investor, including Google, Alibaba, KPCB, and Andreessen Horowitz. It has not yet shipped a product, and people who have tried the prototypes are required to sign legal documents that prevent them from discussing them. Magic Leap’s still unrevealed product will be a set of AR glasses, according to testimony in the lawsuit. The glasses will be attached to a smartphone-sized computer, according to a source with knowledge of Magic Leap’s product. The highly anticipated augmented reality glasses will superimpose computer images into the real world. (As opposed to virtual reality, which immerses the viewer in a computer-generated world.) The company was reportedly valued at $4.5 billion in February. Magic Leap declined to comment, citing pending litigation. Kaehler declined to comment through his attorney. Bradski could not be immediately reached. Disgruntled employees Earlier this year, Bradski told Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz that he wanted to form a new startup focusing on cutting-edge robotics with his friend Kaehler, and planned to try to hire Magic Leap employees from its West Coast office. Then in May, the pair found they were no longer Magic Leap employees – or even advisors – and their access to email was cut off. Then came the dueling lawsuits. Magic Leap paints Bradski and Kaehler, who worked on software for Magic Leap, as disgruntled employees, even producing an email that Bradski sent to Kaehler in August 2015 from his Magic Leap work email address: “Like Jobs, R has a reality distortion field. Unlike Jobs, R’s is more like a bad high, just leaves you feeling tired with a vague headache in the morning and is not productive.” In this note, R likely refers to Rony Abovitz, the CEO of Magic Leap, and compares him unfavorably to former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was known for being difficult to work with. Abovitz says that Bradski and Kaehler were planning to start their startup for a year before they quit. “Dr. Bradski did not tell me what his future plans were going to be, and led me to believe that he was excited about being at Magic Leap,” Abovitz wrote. Magic Leap’s lawyer, David Lundmark, implies that Bradski wanted more power in the company, and was primarily worried about his personal income, even though he personally chose the location for the company’s Mountain View and Sunnyvale offices. “Dr. Bradski told me more than once that he did not have confidence in the leadership or processes of Magic Leap,” Lundmark wrote. “Dr. Bradski expressed to me a lack of confidence in the proposition that certain compensation-related milestones, such as a secondary offering and bonus program, were going to happen in a timely manner.” source Public documents He notes that when Kaehler received his bonuses and liquidated stock in a secondary offering, he put a sticky note on his monitor that said “gone for two weeks.” Sunshine state of mind 2014 is apparently the year of the selfie. With my tiny Graeme. A post shared by Spencer Lindsay (@spencerlindsay) on Jan 31, 2014 at 10:32am PST Magic Leap is unusual among high-value tech startups because it’s based in Plantation, Florida, where its CEO, Rony Abovitz, grew up and lives. Most tech startups are concentrated in Silicon Valley, New York, or a handful of other tech hubs like Boston, Seattle, or Austin, Texas. Bradski had a good reputation before joining Magic Leap – he founded OpenCV, an open-source computer vision library in wide use, and previously founded a robotics startup that was bought by Google. He founded the West Coast office for Magic Leap in 2013, growing it to over 100 employees. According to Bradski’s testimony, as well as other sources close to the company, the Florida location has made it hard to recruit and retain software talent, especially in artificial intelligence. Bradski claims he had to promise hires not to move them to Florida. “It was difficult to recruit top people in the deep net field to Magic Leap, since everyone external wanted to live in New York or Silicon Valley, but Magic Leap’s base of operations is in Florida,” Bradski testified in writing. “We lost several deep net hires that I thought would be key leaders because of this.” One of those hires ended up at Google Brain, Google’s artificial intelligence research group, according to the court documents. Once the Silicon Valley office was established, there was plenty of friction between it and headquarters. “What is not recognized … is just how many hours I spent in ‘worker therapy’ with so many employees who expressed deep dissatisfaction with the ‘us v. them’ mentality that existed in the way the Florida executives tried to absentee manage the California talent,” Kaehler wrote in testimony. “From my familiarity with the spectrum of engineering work being done in the company, the majority of the best work was being done on the West Coast,” he continued. “I spent a lot of time dealing with convincing disgruntled and frustrated employees to stay,” Bradski wrote. One carrot that he used was a Magic Leap-scheduled secondary market stock buy, which would allow employees to turn their options into cash. In an private email to an investor uncovered by Magic Leap, Bradski explains that he will try to help hire and retain employees at the Mountain View office, but “hell, many are leaving anyhow.” Sources also tell Business Insider that Abovitz’s attention is primarily focused on Florida operations. So why is Magic Leap based in Florida instead of Silicon Valley? One theory, posited by Kaehler: “It seemed to me and was expressed to me by many employees in various language that the East Coast operation existed for the pleasure of senior people who preferred to live in that [income] tax-free state,” he wrote in testimony seen by Business Insider. Not enough glasses caption A drawing from a Magic Leap patent. Not necessarily what the glasses will look like. source Magic Leap Access to Magic Leap’s glasses is closely controlled, and testers must sign a legal non-disclosure agreement promising not to talk about them before they can get a demo of how they work. Magic Leap employees in California don’t have enough prototypes to do their work, according to the suit. “Through Summer 2014, Magic Leap’s actual hardware team based in Florida seemed to be having difficulties making AR headsets for use by Magic Leap personnel,” Bradski wrote. He says his personal project could not get started until the company “built enough of its AR glasses for most employees to regularly use them day-to-day.” “We were hardware starved in Magic Leap West until the day I left,” he writes, and says that at one point he asked Florida for “30-50 more headsets” to get “common headset usage started” at Magic Leap’s West Coast office. “This hardware has still not arrived as far as I know,” he wrote. In a legal filing, Abovitz says that Magic Leap is completing its manufacturing plant. A secret skunkworks team caption Rony Abovitz emails about the N+1 program source Public documents Last fall, Magic Leap assigned Bradski to a new skunkworks team. Other leaders of the “N+1” team include Brian Schowengerdt, founder and Chief Science Officer, and Neal Stephenson, famous sci-fi author and chief futurist at Magic Leap. We previously reported that Stephenson and Schowengerdt are not located at the company’s Florida headquarters, and work out of a satellite office in Seattle. “Magic Leap’s N+1 projects look to ‘invent the future,’ by developing the future applications of Magic Leap’s technology,” Abovitz wrote. According to an email sent by Abovitz, the N+1 team was focused on filing patents, creating prototypes, and potentially publishing scientific papers. However, Bradski saw the new assignment as something of a demotion, and he complains in the suit that he did not have enough staff underneath him to do these special projects. Before he left, Bradski focused on building a deep learning team as well as working on embedded hardware for computer vision. A settlement conference between the two former Magic Leap VPs and the company is scheduled for later this week. Know anything about Magic Leap? Email the author at kleswing@businessinsider.com. Anonymity guaranteed. This story has been updated to reflect that the suit was settled. |
NEW YORK: Software major Satyam Computer Services has reportedly been banned from doing any off-shore work with the World Bank after forensic experts and bank investigators discovered that spy software was covertly installed on workstations inside the bank's Washington headquarters, allegedly by one or more contractors from Satyam Computer Services. ( Watch According to a FOX News report, apart from Satyam, two IP intrusions have been reported from China, and there have been six intrusions in all.Investigators say that the software, which operates through a method known as keystroke logging, enabled every character typed on a keyboard to be transmitted to a still-unknown location via the Internet.Upon its discovery, bank officials shut off the data link between Washington and Chennai, where Satyam has long operated the bank's sole offshore computer center responsible for all of the bank's financial and human resources information."I want them off the premises now," World Bank President Robert Zoellick reportedly told his deputies. But at the urging of CIO De Poerck, Satyam employees remained at the bank as recently as October 1 while it engaged in "knowledge transfer" with two new India-based contractors.Satyam is publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange and boasts having two billion dollars in sales and more than 150 Fortune 500 companies as clients.In 2003, Satyam won a lucrative five-year "sole source" contract to design, write and maintain all of the World Bank's information systems. The contract, which began at $10 million, had grown to over $100 million by 2007. This year, the contract was not renewed. Satyam has declined to comment.FOX News claims that outsiders have raided the World Bank Group's computer network, one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation, repeatedly for more than a year.It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July.The crisis comes at an awkward moment for Zoellick, who runs the world's largest and most influential anti-poverty agency, which doles out $25 billion a year, and whose board represents 185 member nations.This weekend, the bank holds its annual series of meetings in Washington, and just in advance of those sessions, Zoellick called for a radical revamping of multilateral organizations in light of the global economic meltdown.Zoellick is positioning himself and the bank as an institution that can help chart a new path toward global financial stability. But that reputation, more than ever, depends on the bank's stable information infrastructure.According to internal memos, "a minimum of 18 servers has been compromised," including some of the bank's most sensitive systems, ranging from the bank's security and password server to a Human Resources server "that contains scanned images of staff documents."One World Bank director told FOX News that as many as 40 servers have been penetrated, including one that held contract-procurement data. It took ten days for bank officials to detect that they'd been invaded. Once they did, they shut down all external servers, except for e-mail, which it turns out the invaders were already using as their entrance point.A World Bank spokesman, however, rubbished the Fox News story, saying it is riddled with falsehoods and errors. |
A group on a hen party was kicked off a flight after refusing to remove tops featuring an "offensive" slogan. Eighteen friends from Leicester, who'd paid £500 each for a holiday to Magaluf, said they "weren't offending anybody". Airline Jet2 said the women, who were flying from East Midlands Airport to Majorca, were given several chances to cover up their T-shirts. They were then removed by flight crew after ignoring the airline's requests. One of the party, who chose to remain anonymous, told the Leicester Mercury: "We were a group of 18 friends and family who were on our way to Magaluf to celebrate an upcoming wedding. "We were not offending anybody. "It's what people tend to do on hen or stag parties. But we had no intention of offending anyone, it was just a silly thing." The slogan on the tops read "Bitches on Tour" and the women were told at check-in to cover up the T-shirts, which they said they did using "jackets and hoodies". The woman added: "We then checked in and went for breakfast. None of us were drunk and only one or two of us had a glass of wine or something. "Then, when our flight was called we proceeded to our gate, walking past several police officers, and boarded our flight. "It wasn't until we were sat down in our seats, with luggage stowed away and seatbelts on that a few of the girls took their jackets off because it was hot. "That's when someone from Jet2 came on board and asked them to leave the flight. "There was no explanation and in the confusion the rest of us followed to see what was going on - we were confused but there was no shouting or arguing. "Then they told us that none of us would be allowed back on the flight - it was so humiliating, even other passengers were saying, 'That's a bit harsh.' "We are daughters, mothers and sisters who all have good jobs and were simply looking forward to our holiday." Jet2 has released a statement defending their actions. "The group were asked to either wear different attire or cover up the offensive language, and were reminded of this on numerous occasions, including by the airport police while in the departures area. "Once in the cabin, and in the presence of families and young children, several members of the group decided to ignore these repeated warnings, at which point our crew took the decision to remove them from the flight." Police were called to the airport but no arrests were made. Find us on Instagram at BBCNewsbeat and follow us on Snapchat, search for bbc_newsbeat. |
Mike Rubenstein wants to put robots in the classroom. Working with two other researchers at Harvard University, Rubenstein recently created what they call AERobot, a bot that can help teach programming and artificial intelligence to middle school kids and high schoolers. That may seem like a rather expensive luxury for most schools, but it's not. It costs just $10.70. The hope is that it can help push more kids into STEM, studies involving science, technology, engineering, and math. The tool is part of a widespread effort to teach programming and other computer skills to more children, at earlier stages. It's called the code literacy movement, and it includes everything from new and simpler programming languages to children's books that teach coding concepts. Rubenstein's project grew out of the 2014 AFRON Challenge, held back in January, which called for researchers to design low-cost robotic systems for education in the developing world. Part of Harvard's Self-Organizing Systems Research Group, Rubstein has long studied swarm robotics, which aims to create herds of tiny robots that can behave as whole, and he ended up adapting one of his swarm systems in order to build AERobot. It's a single machine—not a swarm bot—but it's built from many of the same inexpensive materials. He and his colleagues assembled most of the electronics with a pick-and-place machine—a machine that automatically builds printed circuit boards—and in order to further cut costs, they used vibration motors for locomotion and left out a chassis. The device doesn't include its own programming interface or charger. It gets both from a desktop or laptop computer, plugging into the USB port. "There are no extra frills,” Rubenstein says. On the software side, Rubenstein modified a programming language called minibloqs, a highly graphical means of programming machines. "You don’t really need to type code. You drag pictures," he explains. "Say I wanted an LED on the robot to turn green. I would just drag over an image of an LED, and pick the green color." The language, he says, is a bit like Scratch, the programming language for kids developed at MIT. The bot can move forwards and backwards on flat surfaces, turn in place, detect light, follow lines and edges, and identify distances using reflected infrared light. And the idea is that kids will learn but programming the bot to do such things. Rubenstein and his team provide a fifteen-lesson curriculum that walks students through the sensors and the actuators, the programming flow and logic, and how to create specific robot behavior. At the 2014 AFRON Challenge, AERobot won the top honor in the software category, and it took second place in the hardware and curriculum categories. The team has since tested it with about 100 sixth- to eighth- graders at a STEM-focused summer camp called i2Camp, and they plan to do further tests this coming summer. Rubenstein says that for the bot's next iteration, the group is focusing on improving the curriculum and the software, eliminating steps in the installation process and ensuring AERobot is so simple that kids can learn how to use the thing on their own—without a teacher. |
Image caption Some Facebook users said they deactivated their accounts after seeing horrific images on the site Facebook says it is looking into reports that pornographic and violent images have been posted to its website. The pictures are reported to have shown up in users' newsfeeds. According to the technology site, ZDnet, the material is being spread via a "linkspam virus" which tempts members to click on a seemingly innocuous story link. A spokeswoman for Facebook said: "[We are] aware of these reports and we are investigating the issue". Thousands of the site's members have posted comments about the breach on Twitter. "Discovered a new porn site, it's called Facebook," wrote one user. "Facebook should do something about the photoshopped porn images, it's offensive," wrote another. Other users complained they had seen pictures of mutilated animals and people, in some cases adding that they had deactivated their accounts as a consequence. Several people are linking the attack to the Anonymous hacktivist group after a video appeared on YouTube threatening to "kill" the social network. However, experts have questioned whether the video was authentic. Response Internet security firm Sophos said the images had "flooded" the social network over the past 24 hours or more. The company's senior technology consultant, Graham Cluely, said it was not clear how the offending content was being spread, but added that the website could face long term consequences. "It's precisely this kind of problem which is likely to drive people away from the site," he wrote in a company blog. "Facebook needs to get a handle on this problem quickly, and prevent it from happening on such a scale again." The social network requires its members to be at least 13 years old to sign onto the service. Experts say the firm may need to issue warnings if the pictures have been seen by its youngest users. "Facebook management may have a duty of care to encourage anyone who is underage and has viewed this to discuss it with their family or a school counsellor," said Sally Leivesley, managing director of NewRisk, a crisis management consultancy. |
As price per web adverts falls, Google has begun to offer some advertisers more visibility for ads - going back on 2005 promise that it would 'never' show banner ads with search results Google is testing banner ads on web search results - reneging on a 2005 promise that "there will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results page… Ever." The company confirmed to the Guardian that it is testing a system with about 30 advertisers in the US in which it shows banner ads for companies including SouthWest Airlines on pages which include them in web search results. The ads can take over large parts of the screen. Google banner ad for SouthWest Airlines in 2013: the company promised in 2005 that it would 'never' show such ads with search results. Photograph: /Public domain Yet writing in December 2005, the then head of search and user experience Marissa Mayer insisted that following a tieup to provide search for AOL, that besides never providing "biased" results, "There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever." Asked why Google had gone back on that clear promise, Google said in a statement that "We're currently running a very limited, US-only test, in which advertisers can include an image as part of the search ads that show in response to certain branded queries." Google's decision to start showing banner ads is a repudiation of many of its founding principles. The company gained attention when it started in 1998 because its opening search page, and following results page, was uncluttered by adverts and other elements - and especially banner ads. In 2000 Google's founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin were offered $3m by Visa to display an ad for the credit card company on the site homepage - and turned it down, even though the site was losing money at the time. Since then the front page has never been used to advertise anything - apart from Google products and Red Cross drives. Google's move comes as the company, which depends on its AdWords product - shown beside searches - for around three-quarters of its gross revenues, has seen eroding prices in the amount advertisers are willing to pay for ads. It offset that by boosting the volume of ads, helping it to record revenues and profits. That then drove its share price above the $1,000 mark. Google declined to say how long the test will run for, when it might be extended outside the US, or what the criteria for success - or failure - would be. A spokesperson added that "Advertisers have long been able to add informative visual elements to their search ads, with features like Media Ads" - which adds video ads on Google search results page - Product Listing Ads" - which appear in Google's shopping results box - "and Image Extensions", which allows advertisers to put small images alongside "sponsored results", when they buy advertising space over search results. Arguably Mayer's promise about "graphical doodads" was broken just over four years later, in January 2010, by the introduction of the first animated Google Doodle to celebrate Isaac Newton's birthday. That however was not an advertisement. Google said that it won't be charging more for the banner ads - which take up large parts of the screen: "they are part of AdWords", its advertising scheme which normally puts text adverts in a box beside the "organic" search results, which are meant to represent the links' relevance to the user's query. |
Donald Trump sat down with hundreds of evangelical and social conservative leaders Tuesday, in what was billed as an effort to address "long-standing concerns" about his candidacy, including on issues such as abortion and transgender rights. The effort to heal any lingering rifts in the party comes at a pivotal time, just after he ousted campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and as a number of polls show him slipping against presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Fox News was told the all-day event, called “A Conversation About America’s Future with Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson” at the Marriott Marquis in New York City, was to be attended by the presumptive Republican nominee for about two hours. During his time on the stage, Trump answered pre-selected questions from attendees and talked directly with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Rev. Franklin Graham. Other pastors and evangelical leaders in attendance included James Robison, Ralph Reed, President of the Southern Baptist Convention Steve Gaines and Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. Notably, Hillsong Church Pastor Carl Lentz will be in attendance – representing a millennial voice among the evangelicals present. Former Rep. Michele Bachmann also attended the gathering. Fox News was told the unprecedented gathering was coordinated as evangelical leaders have concerns and questions about Trump’s candidacy, especially to do with his stances on the pro-life movement, transgender issues and the question of religious liberty in the military and armed forces. Some leaders have expressed concern that the meeting was being seen as an endorsement of coronation of Trump, and said this was not the case. Iowa-based evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats, who supported Ted Cruz during the Iowa GOP caucuses, sent out a statement to his followers on Tuesday's meeting with Trump. “To be clear, the meeting is not a fundraiser nor a political rally. It is NOT an endorsement of Donald Trump, nor do I plan to leave the meeting with an endorsement announcement,” Vander Plaats said in the email Monday. “We'll talk with Mr. Trump about the people he intends to surround himself with, his criteria for Supreme Court nominations, his convictions on life, marriage, religious liberty, and more,” Vander Plaats said. Bill Dallas, head of the faith-based political non-profit United in Purpose, who co-organized the event along with Carson, told Fox News before the meeting that issues to be discussed included jobs, the economy, a strong military and Supreme Court picks. Despite Trump's moderate stance on a number of social issues -- and his past divorces and marital infidelity -- Trump performed well in the primaries with the socially conservative evangelicals. Even against rival Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who explicitly targeted evangelicals with a socially conservative campaign, Trump was carried to victory in states like South Carolina with a significant share of the evangelical vote. Fox News’ Todd Starnes, John Roberts and Serafin Gomez contributed to this report. |
Mr Obama hopes to create a global consensus on greenhouse emissions US President Barack Obama has invited figures from the world's 16 major economies to Washington for a meeting on climate change at the end of April. The event will be the first meeting of what the White House styles "the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate". It will focus on increasing the supply of clean energy and cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the White House said. It was announced as millions worldwide observed Earth Hour, turning off lights in a protest against climate change. The Washington meeting is scheduled to take place on 27-28 April and the sessions will culminate in a July meeting in Italy. International agreement The forum - which will bring together representatives of the 16 major economies and the UN secretary general - is designed to help broker a UN agreement on global warming, the White House said in a statement. It aims to create dialogue between nations and "help generate the political leadership necessary to achieve a successful outcome at the UN climate change negotiations that will convene this December in Copenhagen", the statement said. That pact that would take over from the Kyoto Protocol - an international agreement setting targets for industrialised countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Some 190 countries will be represented in the German city of Bonn on Sunday for talks on a new treaty on curbing greenhouse gases after 2012, when the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol expire. The world's major economies include: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa the UK and the US. |
This toxin has neurological and gastrointestinal effects. When it is ingested in large enough quantities, it can cause nausea, cramps , vomiting , and diarrhea, in addition to symptoms like confusion, dizziness , difficulty walking, and slurred speech. Eventually, the body will become overloaded with the toxin, causing organs to fail and eventually leading to death or severe injury. Solanine appears to affect the mitochondria of the cells as it spreads through the body. Solanine is an alkaloid toxin found in members of the nightshade family, such as eggplants, potatoes, tomatoes, and the infamous deadly nightshade or belladonna. This toxin is part of the plant's defense mechanism, and it is designed to make nightshades unappealing and deadly to animals which might attempt to eat them. Most animals, including humans, have learned the lesson and learned to leave nightshades alone. Leaves, roots, flowers, stems, and fruits can all contain solanine in varying levels. Humans eat many members of the nightshade family, although some societies were initially suspicious of foods like potatoes and tomatoes when they were imported from the New World because of concerns about known toxins. Usually, the solanine levels in things like eggplant, potatoes, and tomatoes are too low to cause health problems. However, there are circumstances in which solanine can be elevated. Unripe tomatoes tend to have higher levels of the toxin, as do potatoes which have been damaged or exposed to the sun, because the plants form more solanine in response to perceived threats. Sprouts of potatoes and tomatoes also have high levels of the toxin. The toxin is heat-stable, but it will eventually break down at high temperatures. Deep frying temperatures of over 170°F (about 76°C), for example, can reduce the risk of solanine toxicity, but baking or microwaving is not as effective, and boiling won't work because the toxin will leach into the water. People who are concerned about the toxin can avoid unripe tomatoes and potatoes which have started to turn green, as the green color indicates that the potato has been exposed to the sun. While the green color itself is harmless, it shows that the potato has been able to photosynthesize, which requires sun exposure. Historically, solanine was used in the treatment of epilepsy and asthma, in controlled doses. This practice is no longer common, as there are safer and more effective ways to treat these conditions. Solanine also has fungicidal and pesticidal qualities, but extraction and processing of this toxin is so time consuming that the substance is rarely used for these purposes. Another compound found in nightshades is atropine, another alkaloid toxin which is widely used in controlled amounts for various medical applications. |
How many stars I give my day? zin ko ko min Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 14, 2016 A day is successful if I don’t drink/intoxicate in any form As someone fighting it every day, this is pretty obvious. No matter what I achieve in a day, if I drink, it is simply a failure. Plus one star if I learn/practice programming I love programming. I decided to become exponentially better within a year. Just doing my everyday programming tasks at work won’t help. Only deliberate practice can help one getting better in the areas of interest. Plus one star if I meditate I am a scatterbrain. This helps my concentration and productivity. Plus one star if I read Books are my mentors. This is where I learn everything. Plus one star if I exercise Exercise helps with my stress and I feel extremely good after a hard workout session. Plus one star if I write a blog post This is mostly for my own benefit. It is a combination of self-reflection and self-encouragement. I am coaching myself and blogging is the medium I use to talk to myself. Plus one star if I spend quality time with wife/family/friends It is important not to take granted for the relationships we have and appreciate them more. Like any other good thing in life, relationships also need constant care and nurture to keep them healthy and grow. Plus three stars if I attend any meetups I am a pretty shy person and I am uncomfortable with meeting strangers. That’s why I should do it, at least once a month minimal. This is a major challenge for me, so I am giving it three stars. This is how I rate my day, how about you? |
Transgender issues have increasingly popped up in news and media as TV shows like Orange Is the New Black and Transparent bring mainstream attention to trans people, but many Americans remain confused about the most basic aspects of gender identity and expression. Sam Killermann, the social justice advocate behind the blog It's Pronounced Metrosexual, tried his hand at a clean explanation of the complicated topic, offering this adorable infographic (click to enlarge) inspired by a now-deleted Tumblr post: The infographic explains how some people may identify beyond the expectations of society. Some identify with a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth, or as genderqueer, meaning they don't belong to any socially defined gender. Most people don't identify with only masculine or feminine qualities. Someone who identifies as gay might be attracted to women to a very small extent. Some bisexual people might have a slight preference for men over women. Others might not be attracted to anyone at all, identifying as asexual. Still, there's one issue with the graphic: the category for biological sex. As the GLAAD media guide explains, a person's genetics or biology don't trump gender identity: trans people who identify as men are male, and those who identify as women are female. Especially as more studies show gender identity is a characteristic someone is born with, focusing on genetics too much can over-simplify the complexity of someone's identity and expression. Update: Some trans advocates said they prefer the Gender Unicorn, a graphic from Trans Student Educational Resources: Further reading |
Business equipment financing is any method of extending capital to a business for the purpose of acquiring the equipment it needs to operate smoothly. A business can use many methods of financing such as obtaining government loans, leasing as well as sale-leaseback where the company collateralizes the equipment they have to raise money for additional equipment. It is estimated that more than 80% of US companies use some form of business equipment financing to obtain equipment. Given the economic climate, it seems like an excellent alternative source of capital for a business to acquire the equipment it needs. Leasing seems to be the preferred method of financing rather than obtaining a loan. This is because of the many advantages that it comes with. Benefits Of Business Equipment Financing Preservation Of Capital Given the uncertainty that comes with investing in an asset that may not even yield the desired returns, leasing can help mitigate this uncertainty. What’s more is that if you need to do a large equipment purchase, you can overcome limitations in your budget by simply leasing. Leasing does not require a large cash outlay. It allows a business’s cash flow to be used on other capital needs that have a higher return on equity (ROE) and return on assets (ROA). It Allows Flexibility Depending on the relationship you establish between you and your lessor, your lease may be for the entire expected life of the asset or just for a few months. If for example, you lease farm equipment, once you are done with it, you can return it, purchase it at fair market value or purchase it at $1. This of course depends on the type of lease agreement you have with your lessor. Farming is a seasonal business and you may not need to use the equipment throughout the year. Such is the kind of asset flexibility that leasing allows. Up-to-date Technology Many businesses, especially upcoming ones, may not have enough capital to purchase high-tech equipment outright. Through business equipment financing, they are able to acquire this equipment, which would have otherwise been out of their reach. The Risk Of Owning Obsolete Equipment Is Mitigated If you use lease financing to acquire your equipment, the risk of being stuck with obsolete equipment is reduced. Many leases allow lessees to update their equipment without having to invest a lot of money. This is a huge advantage compared to making a direct purchase. Tax Advantages A lease can be structured as an on or off balance sheet. Lease payments are considered an expense and can therefore reduce tax liability. Always consult with your tax advisor about any tax advantages that may come with leasing. Improved Expense Planning One benefit that comes with business equipment financing is consistent budgeting and maintenance of cash flow. Huge budget fluctuations are usually the result of considerable capital outlays. Financing allows for even expense planning. How To Choose The Right Business Equipment Financing Company Finding the right finance company can make a huge difference towards how smoothly your business will run. The first thing to look for is the quality of service that the company provides. Poor quality service can be a huge drag on your business. The best way to find out about a company’s service is to talk to their previous and existing clients and gauge their responses. They should also have an established and efficient process in which they handle equipment financing deals. More importantly, they should have enough experience handling the type of equipment financing you need. You should have the freedom to select the kind of equipment that your business needs. You do not have to choose second hand or outdated equipment if it will not help your business to run smoothly, even if it is cheap, because it will eventually hurt the interests of your business in the long run. Get an Instant Quote on Your Equipment Lease, Free Cost of equipment: Since there are no two businesses that are alike, the company you choose to lease from should not force you to choose a leasing plan that is not suitable for your business. The culture, mission, vision, needs and circumstances of every business is different so there cannot be a one size fits all type of solution. The leasing company should tailor their plan to suit your tax situation, capital, cash flow and needs of your company. To find out more information on business equipment financing, CLICK HERE. Related posts: Comments comments |
Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window) Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Jay Z and Beyoncé are launching a stadium tour together after appearing as surprise guests at each other’s gigs recently. Sources exclusively tell Page Six that hip hop’s royal couple plans to announce a 20-stadium US tour that will start in late June — and that it’s possible the couple could perform in New York on July 4. The two recently wrapped individual tours that supported their latest albums: Jay closed out 52 dates for his “Magna Carta… Holy Grail” in January, while Bey wrapped her “Mrs. Carter Show” tour in March. The couple has performed their hit single, “Drunk in Love,” together at a string of high-profile shows, including this year’s Grammy Awards, a DirecTV Super Bowl party and Beyoncé’s O2 Arena gig in London on Feb. 28. On Sunday, the hip-hop husband and wife each popped up onstage individually at the Coachella music festival. Beyoncé appeared with sister Solange Knowles to dance while Solange performed her hit “Losing You.” Jay took the stage with fellow New York rappers Nas and Diddy. |
A cashier rings up a marijuana sale July 1, 2017, at the Essence cannabis dispensary in Las Vegas. (John Locher/File, AP) Customers line up to be some of the first people to legally purchase recreational marijuana from a dispensary at Reef Dispensaries in Las Vegas on Saturday, July 1, 2017. Chase Stevens Las Vegas Review-Journal @csstevensphoto Nevada dispensaries sold more than $33 million in recreational marijuana and the state pulled in nearly $5 million in total taxes in August, according to numbers released by the Nevada Department of Taxation Monday. That’s up from the $27 million in sales and $3.7 million in taxes in July, the state’s first month of recreational weed sales. The recreational sales numbers were significantly ahead of the state’s projected $21.5 million in sales for August. In fact, the state did not project any month in the first year of recreational sales to eclipse $28 million. Andrew Jolley, CEO of The+Source dispensaries and president of the Nevada Dispensary Association, said those projections will likely prove to be fairly conservative, and expects the market to continue to grow steadily over the next several months. “I think it is a good indication that there was a large, pent-up demand that was being served by the black market,” Jolley said. The August tax numbers broke down like so: $3.35 million generated by the 10 percent sales tax on recreational marijuana (up from $2.71 million in July) $1.51 million generated by the 15 percent wholesale tax at the cultivation level on all marijuana (up from $974,060 in July) State Sen. Tick Segerblom, D-Las Vegas, also known as the godfather of pot in Nevada, said he was initially a little worried that the novelty of legal marijuana could lead to a drop off in the second month of sales. But after talking to the industry, he said it was clear that wasn’t going to be the case for August. “Obviously there’s a demand,” Segerblom said. And Segerblom said he doesn’t think the sales and tax numbers will level off for at least two years, and pointed to the recent opening of five dispensaries in Henderson. Segerblom also heaped the praise onto the industry as well as the state regulators for ensuring the market got off to a smooth start. “Everyone’s just been really been working perfectly together,” he said. Contact Colton Lochhead at clochhead@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4638. Follow @ColtonLochhead on Twitter. |
One of the great things about America is that if you don’t like the government, you have the right to speak out against it. Since President Donald Trump took office in January, ordinary citizens have been voicing dissent on the internet and in the streets. Recently, an extraordinary request from the Department of Justice (DOJ) threatened to make people increasingly afraid to exercise that right. The Department of justice is trying to force an internet hosting company to hand over information about everyone who visited a site that helped organize anti-Trump protests. Here protesters confront riot police in Washingto DC on Inauguration Day. REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan The DOJ tried to compel an internet hosting company, DreamHost, to hand over information about everyone who visited disruptj20.org, a DreamHost customer web site that helped organize Trump inauguration protests. DreamHost fought back, arguing that complying with the request would require handing over 1.3 million IP addresses, as well as contact information, content of emails, and photographs of thousands of people. While the Trump inauguration protests were largely peaceful, some protestors were violent and destructive. But the DOJ request was not limited to rioters. It could also affect people who casually visited a protest web site, perhaps simply to learn more about what was happening. On Tuesday, DreamHost wrote that the DOJ modified its request to exclude unpublished media, HTTP access and error logs. Visitors’ IP addresses would be largely safe, the company said. (The government, for its part, said it “values and respects the First Amendment right of all Americans” and that its original warrant was focused on evidence about “a premeditated riot.") DreamHost called the development “a huge win for internet privacy,” but also noted that the fight is not over. MORE FROM REUTERS COMMENTARY Peter Apps: As global hostilities rise, Trump is no help Josh Cohen: Bannon's departure may harm U.S. foreign policy Why was the original DOJ request so alarming? Mark Rumold, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is working with DreamHost on the case, said that this kind of information seizure usually would be limited to a site dedicated to criminal activity, like child pornography or drug sales. What was unusual about the DreamHost case, Rumold said in an email, is that the targeted website is not dedicated to a criminal enterprise, “but to engaging in the core of what the First Amendment is designed to protect: associating, communicating, learning and engaging with like-minded political protesters and in organizing protests and dissent.” DreamHost challenged the DOJ on the constitutionality of its warrant. In a blog post called “We Fight for the Users,” DreamHost explained that law enforcement regularly approaches the company to ask for information about customers who might be the target of criminal investigations. But the DOJ went too far. DreamHost was protesting because, it wrote, “Internet users have a reasonable expectation that they will not get swept up in criminal investigations simply by exercising their right to political speech against the government.” In making this overly broad request, the DOJ took a page from the playbook of authoritarian governments. It may seem far-fetched to compare the United States to China, for example, where political protest sites aren’t even be allowed to exist. But blocking Web sites is only one way to crack down on dissent. Authoritarian governments use the threat of surveillance – and possible subsequent legal action - to create an atmosphere of fear and caution. Expressing your viewpoint or organizing for activism online is a good way to get on the official radar. Sometimes, it’s just not worth the trouble. Citizens’ self-censorship helps authoritarian governments keep the Web in check. Self-censorship may not appear to be much of an issue in the United States, where a brief glance at Twitter will expose you to a flood of anti-Trump commentary. Street protests are popping up regularly, with the help of social media. Americans don’t seem particularly afraid of expressing themselves, or of mobilizing for action. But that could change. America is very divided and the atmosphere is tense. If protests were to escalate, it’s not hard to imagine the Trump administration putting more pressure on internet companies to reveal information about people associated with demonstrations. Political activists are not likely to be deterred by such information requests, even if they were overly broad. But ordinary citizens, those that don’t consider themselves “dissidents,” might balk. The internet is where all kinds of people come together to express grievances and coordinate action. How many Americans would think twice about visiting a protest site if they knew that the hosting company might have to hand over information about them? Would people still want to express their views on social media if it meant exposing themselves to a potential investigation? Complaining won’t solve anything anyway, they might figure, so it’s not worth the risk. EFF’s Rumold had predicted that DreamHost would likely have to turn over some information from the site, after the DOJ’s warrant was substantially narrowed and protections were put in place to protect innocent users. While the DOJ has indeed narrowed its request, DreamHost is not resting on its laurels. The company says that much of the DOJ’s original demand remains in place, and it will be addressing its concerns in a hearing scheduled for Thursday. No matter what happens at the hearing, the story shouldn’t end there. Internet companies should continue to speak out about overly broad government requests, and the media and public must remain vigilant. Americans should not take internet freedom for granted. (Emily Parker is a former staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and policy advisor in the U.S. State Department. She is the author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground. @emilydparker) Editor’s note: This column was first published on August 22, 2017, and updated on August 23 to include the news that the DOJ had modified its request for information about visitors to disruptj20.org. |
1980-1986: China and US Support Kymer Rouge China and the US sustain the Khmer Rouge with overt and covert aid in an effort to destabilize Cambodia’s Vietnam-backed government. With US backing, China supplies the Khmer Rouge with direct military aid. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser during the administration of President Carter, will later acknowledge, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot…. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.” Between 1979 and 1981, the World Food Program, which was strongly under US influence, provides nearly $12 million in food aid Thailand. Much of this aid makes its way to the Khmer Rouge. Two American relief aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, will later recount, “Thailand, the country that hosted the relief operation, and the US government, which funded the bulk of the relief operation, insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed.” By the late 1980s, US aid is officially at $5 million. But this is supplemented significantly by secret CIA support to the tune of between $20 and $24 million. In total, perhaps as much as $85 million is ultimately funneled to Pol Pot’s group through various channels. The US and China are also responsible for the Khmer Rouge retaining its seat at the UN General Assembly. During this period, Khmer Rouge fighters attack “Cambodian villages, seed minefields, kill peasants and make off with their rice and cattle… [—] But they never seriously… [threaten] the Phnom Penh government.” [Blum, 1995; Z Magazine, 1997; Covert Action Quarterly, 1998 ] Entity Tags: Zbigniew Brzezinski Timeline Tags: US-Cambodia (1955-1993) October 1997: Brzezinski Highlights the Importance of Central Asia to Achieving World Domination Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publishes a book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, in which he portrays the Eurasian landmass as the key to world power, and Central Asia with its vast oil reserves as the key to domination of Eurasia. He states that for the US to maintain its global primacy, it must prevent any possible adversary from controlling that region. He notes: “The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” He predicts that because of popular resistance to US military expansionism, his ambitious Central Asian strategy can not be implemented, “except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” [Brzezinski, 1997, pp. 24-25, 210-11] The book also theorizes that the US could be attacked by Afghan terrorists, precipitating a US invasion of Afghanistan, and that the US may eventually seek control of Iran as a key strategic element in the US’s attempt to exert its influence in Central Asia and the Middle East. [Brzezinski, 1997] Entity Tags: Zbigniew Brzezinski Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline |
The streaming service has also inked deals for a small number of exclusive videos for a full year. Online video service Vessel is going ad free. The company, which former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar launched with a cadre of high-profile investors last year, says that it will stop showing ads to people who pay $2.99 a month for early access to videos from popular YouTubers. The company has also announced a new $19.99 annual subscription that is also ad free. "One of the most popular requests has been for an ad-free experience," CEO Jason Kilar writes in a blog posted on Monday. Vessel will continue to offer some ad-supported videos, primarily licensed content, outside of its pay wall. The company says it will also begin experimenting with videos that it will stream exclusively for a full year. Its initial partners on the new initiative include LInus Media Group, vlogger Brittani Louise Taylor and gamer JeromeASF. "Vessel's ambitious mission has been to build a decidedly different — and better — video platform for creators and fans," continues Kilar. "While we are still very much in the early days, we have attracted subscribers from more than 155 countries to our offering of exclusive, early-access videos." He adds that creators continue to make more than $50 per thousand views on the platform, which gives the lion's share of ad and subscription revenue to its partners. Meanwhile, the company now boasts a library of 300,000 videos from 250 partners, up 50 percent since last summer. Vessel's move to do away with ads comes after YouTube announced its own ad-free product, the $10-per-month Red subscription service. The move also mirrors that of Kilar's old company, Hulu, which recently went ad free for the first time with a higher-priced subscription product. |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The UN report highlights systematic torture, as Jeremy Bowen reports Islamic State (IS) militants have committed "mass atrocities" in Syria and have recruited children as fighters, the United Nations says. In a report, investigators say public executions are a "common spectacle" in areas run by IS, one of the groups fighting against Syria's government. The report also accuses the Syrian authorities of using chemical agents in eight separate incidents this year. The conflict between government forces and several rebel groups began in 2011. Some 200,000 people have died since then. 'Horrific torture' The UN report details abuses by the Syrian government and several of the armed groups fighting it. The report says the Syrian air force has used barrel bombs on civilian neighbourhoods. "In some instances, there is clear evidence that civilian gatherings were deliberately targeted" by government forces, the investigators said. "In government prisons, detainees were subjected to horrific torture and sexual assault." The findings are the result of interviews and evidence collected between January and July this year as part of an inquiry into human rights violations in Syria. Among the other allegations of war crimes committed by the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad was the use of suspected chlorine gas, a chemical agent, in eight separate incidents in April and May of this year. The period covered in the report coincides with the growth of IS in Syria. The group seeks to create an independent Islamic State in an area that stretches across Syria and Iraq. It has attracted jihadists from across the region, as well as fighters from Western countries including the UK and the US. Image copyright Reuters Image caption The use of barrel bombs by the Syrian government has been widely condemned Analysis: Barbara Plett, BBC News, Washington The brutal murder of American journalist James Foley last week has focused minds here on a broader response to the rapid advance of IS. The US is considering expanding its campaign of limited air strikes in Iraq, the most immediate possibility being a humanitarian relief operation for Shia Turkmen besieged by IS militants in the northern part of the country. US spy planes have also begun surveillance flights over Syria to identify potential IS targets, after America's top general said the militant group could not be defeated without attacking its Syrian bases. US officials say that President Obama has not yet decided whether to authorise direct military intervention in Syria, which would be a significant escalation. But they all stress that any campaign to root out IS in Iraq and Syria would be long and difficult and would need to include increased support for local armed forces as well as a political solution. It would also need to be backed by a coalition of European and regional countries, which the Obama administration has begun trying to mobilise. Image copyright Reuters Image caption Islamic State militants are said to have recently gained control of a Syrian airbase in Tabqa, near Raqqa Training child soldiers In their report, UN investigators said IS was waging a campaign of fear in northern Syria, including amputations, public executions and whippings. "Bodies of those killed are placed on display for several days, terrorising the local population," the document says. "Women have been lashed for not abiding by IS's dress code. In Raqqa, children as young as 10 are being recruited and trained at IS camps." On Wednesday IS supporters tweeted pictures allegedly showing militants executing Syrian army soldiers after capturing the government Tabqa airbase near Raqqa in eastern Syria. The pictures have not been verified. Image copyright AFP Image caption UN inspectors were initially barred from Ghouta in Damascus where chemical weapons were allegedly used Paulo Pinheiro, the chairman of the UN panel, said the international community has failed "in its most elemental duties - to protect civilians, halt and prevent atrocities and create a path toward accountability". One of the investigators, Carla del Ponte - a former chief prosecutor of two UN war crimes tribunals - has urged world powers to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court. In a separate development, Syrian rebel groups including the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front have taken control of a crossing between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, according to a UK-based monitoring group. "The Nusra Front and other rebel groups took the Quneitra crossing, and heavy fighting with the Syrian army is continuing in the surrounding area," said Rami Abdel Rahman, the director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Israel Defence Forces said one of its officers "was moderately injured as a result of errant fire from Syria". "In response, we struck 2 Syrian military positions in the Golan Heights," an IDF spokesperson |
An environment group is accusing Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund of racism for supporting the hunting of polar bears. Photo: AFP About 300 polar bears are expected to be killed by hunters in Canada this year. Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund said the Canadian hunt was sustainable and the real threat to bears was from climate change. Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson told Morning Report Inuit hunters were being employed as guides for rich, white hunters, and Greenpeace was supporting that activity because it gave jobs to the indigenous people. "It's racism basically because they are Inuit people they are saying that they should be given the benefit of having these jobs ... our position is that you know, yes Inuit people are traditional hunters but they certainly have no tradition of guiding white people in to kill polar bears." The organisations were supporting jobs, but should stick to protecting wildlife and the environment, he said. However, Greenpeace's executive director Russel Norman said the claims were untrue. "Greenpeace has campaigned for many years to protect the Arctic in all sorts of different ways. And so to make this claim that somehow Greenpeace supports the trophy hunting of polar bears is completely false." Dr Norman said Greenpeace would consider cases where indigenous people were involved in hunting activities. |
On Wednesday, the Justice Department shared photos of Attorney General Jeff Sessions welcoming new U.S. Attorneys in a tweet that was regrettable for reasons that go beyond Sessions’ arm angle. Of the 27 people visible in the photos, just one is a woman. Attorney General Sessions welcomes U.S. Attorneys to the Justice Department pic.twitter.com/QS2ys8Pyrm — Justice Department (@TheJusticeDept) November 8, 2017 The gender disparity in the photos isn’t a fluke — it reflects how few women Trump has nominated to serve as the country’s top federal prosectors. Advertisement In mid-September, CNN reported that just one of the 42 U.S. attorneys Trump had nominated to that point was a woman. According to White House press releases, Trump has made 11 U.S. attorneys nominations since then. Just two of them are women. This problem didn’t originate with Trump. President Obama’s also nominated more men than women to serve as U.S. attorney, but he disparity was nowhere near as pronounced it is under Trump. According to CNN, Obama nominated a total of 109 U.S. attorneys, with 24 of them being women. |
A U.S. Marshal had an unexpected visitor when he recently entered Omaha Police headquarters. Police say a man was standing just inside the doorway with his hand balled up into a fist. The incident was reported at 1:15 p.m. July 22. According to police, U.S. Marshal Chris Cicha was in uniform. He repeatedly ordered the man to drop his fist and step out of the building. After the man refused, he moved toward Cicha and punched him in the face with his fist, bloodying the U.S. Marshal’s nose. Officers then pushed the man to the wall and then the ground where they were able to get him under control with the use of two sets of handcuffs. It wasn’t easy. Officers had to command him several times to get on the ground and put his hand behind his back. They were eventually able to get 29-year-old Jackson Nelson under control. He was booked for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest. |
Democrat Voter Fraud: 21 States Have More Voters on the Rolls Than People Alive 141 counties in 21 states have more voters on the voter rolls than they have citizens living there a new report finds. Scores of counties have been put on notice about corrupted voter rolls. The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) has put 141 counties on notice across the United States that they have more registered voters than people alive. PILF has sent 141 statutory notice letters to county election officials in 21 states. The letters are a prerequisite to bringing a lawsuit against those counties under Section 8 of the federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). The letters inform the target counties that it appears they are violating the NVRA because they are not properly maintaining the voter rolls. The NVRA, (also known as Motor Voter) requires state and local election officials to properly maintain voter rolls and ensure that only eligible voters are registered to vote. Having more registrants than eligible citizens alive indicates that election officials have failed to properly maintain voter rolls. Trending: The 15 Best Conservative News Sites On The Internet States with counties which received a notice letter are (# of counties): Michigan (24), Kentucky (18), Illinois (17), Indiana (11), Alabama (10), Colorado (10), Texas (9), Nebraska (7), New Mexico (5), South Dakota (5), Kansas (4), Mississippi (4), Louisiana (3), West Virginia (3), Georgia (2), Iowa (2), Montana (2), North Carolina (2), Arizona, Missouri, New York (1 each). Federally produced data show the letter recipients have more registrants than living eligible citizens alive. (A sample letter is can be found here.) What is this if not fraud and abuse of our election system? You Might Like |
Today, there was a shooting at a small Oregon community college. Details of the events are still flowing out, but before we get to the headline, let me familiarize you with the events. We’ll begin with The New York Times: A 20-year-old man went on a shooting rampage at a community college in this rural part of southern Oregon, on Thursday, killing 10 and injuring at least seven, the county sheriff said, lowering the death count from earlier reports. The gunman died after an exchange of gunfire with the police. NBC News will bring you up to speed with the rest: At least 10 people were killed and seven others were injured when a gunman who demanded to know his victims’ religions opened fire Thursday morning on the campus of Umpqua Community College in southwest Oregon, witnesses and authorities said. The gunman — whom law enforcement sources identified to NBC News as Chris Harper Mercer, 26 — was killed in a firefight with Douglas County sheriff’s deputies, Sheriff John Hanlin said. Oh, I also tweeted out this disturbing tidbit out from The New York Post: Most people, when they see a tragedy like this, don’t think about going out to score points for whatever agenda they’re tying to push. Well, let me put it another way…people used to know that wasn’t what you were supposed to do. I can’t say this phenomenon is exclusive to the horrible woman I’m going to talk about in just a second. She calls herself Zoe Quinn, and I usually do too, since that’s what most people know her by. But, as many of you know, her real name is Chelsea Van Valkenburg. I reject all calls by people like Zoe Quinn to censor the internet in response to the #UCCShooting. Using this to agenda push is disgusting. — Ethan Ralph (@TheRalphRetort) October 1, 2015 You see, Chelsea used to be a (bad) nude model who allegedly sold cocaine. She even told another person that she killed a guy. To be frank, she’s a con-artist grifter whose lies are the stuff of legend. Now, you would think she’s the standard of moral virtue if you listed to the mainstream media. The outlets above failed to challenge this liar. Not one major “old guard” news organization stood up to the bully, or her thug partner, Randi Harper. Now, we’re left with the current state of affairs. This clown thinks she can come out the day of a national tragedy and try to tie an innocent group of gamers in with a mass murderer. By now, nothing shocks me anymore. But this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s no low Zoe won’t sink to. This is the same person who has harassed and bullied people throughout her public career, just like her partner in crime Hamburger Harper. Now she wants to lecture the rest of us on how to behave? Fuck that. It’s sick that we even have to point this out. In an ideal world, big media would be there to call Quinn on her shit. As you can tell, we don’t live in that ideal world. Political correctness has taken over and run us right into the ditch. Scumbag SJW spokeswomen like Chelsea show us just how bleak the situation truly is. I doubt we’re ever going to see anyone truly challenge her ever again at a mainstream place, now that she’s slinked off into the Anita Sarkeesian style, for the most part. Open debate is now considered too risky. A bad performance might hurt her paycheck. At the end of the day, that’s all this hideous witch cares about. |
Buy Photo Sebastian Saavedra suffered a dislocated right foot in the crash that included Jack Hawksworth and Stefano Coletti. (Photo: Chris Bergin / For the Star)Buy Photo Sebastian Saavedra said he suffered a dislocated right foot in Sunday's Indianapolis 500, but he acknowledged the injuries in the Turn 4 crash could have been worse had Stefano Coletti not veered slightly to the left prior to impact. The nose of Coletti's car hit more of Saavedra's left front wheel. Another couple of feet to the right and the impact would have been at the driver's compartment. "Oh, dude, it would have been a different story," Saavedra told The Indianapolis Star on Monday. Saavedra said his feet got trapped behind the pedals, requiring extrication assistance. His boots had to be cut off. Worse, the significant swelling likely will keep him from returning to Ganassi Racing's No. 8 car for this weekend's doubleheader in Detroit. "I think that's out of the equation," Saavedra said. The crash started when Saavedra and Jack Hawksworth made contact. Saavedra was fighting to keep the car off the outside wall when Coletti arrived on the scene. After the second impact, Saavedra lost orientation until just before hitting the inside wall with a damaged car. "I had no idea where I was, but then I saw the inside wall coming and I moved my steering wheel," he said. "The car bounced off (the wall) sideways." Saavedra believes he's "super lucky" to be planning for a return to the IndyCar Series. "I'll be back dancing in no time," he said. Follow Curt Cavin on Twitter: @curtcavin |
Kelechi Iheanacho’s Nigerian agent, Olumide Olowu says there is no current agreement between West Ham and Manchester City for his client but he would be happy to accept a contract as long it is up to his standards. In an email dated today seen by Claret and Hugh his agent says: “There has been no agreement between the two clubs at the moment but the deal could yet still happen. Kelechi is training with the Nigerian squad at the moment and is aware that West Ham are interested in signing him. Soon as the clubs have come to agree terms with each other Iheanacho will be happy to accept as long as the contract is up to his standards. Regards Olumindo” Sources close to West Ham said at the beginning of the week that they were still waiting to receive an answer from Manchester City after making a bid. |
Officials are trying to determine if a Thanksgiving dinner served by a church in California is what led to the deaths of three people. Contra Costa Health officials said on Wednesday that they had found a total of 19 people who were likely sickened by food or drink from the same Thanksgiving event. Common symptoms included vomiting and diarrhea. The Thanksgiving meal was served at the American Legion Hall in Antioch and hosted by Golden Hills Community Church for seniors, homeless people, and others who might have otherwise been alone for the holiday, Contra Costa Public Health officials said. "We recently were informed that several people from the same care facility in Antioch, who were at our Antioch Thanksgiving Dinner, became sick," the church said in a statement. "We are fully cooperating with health officials and are praying fervently for the families who lost loved ones and for others who are sick." The food served at the Thanksgiving meal was donated by restaurants and volunteers, as well as prepared on site, and included typical holiday standards, such as turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. Officials urged anyone with leftovers from the meal to throw them away. Marilyn Underwood with Contra Costa Health Services said the nonprofit had been hosting the event for 30 years and that it did not require a permit. "When we spoke with them regarding food safety techniques, they all sounded very appropriate," Underwood said on Monday. Sutter Delta hospital treated eight elderly people on Friday and Saturday who became sick after the meal, possibly from a food-borne illness, officials said. The initial eight victims lived in the same board-and-care facility, but the additional eleven contacted later did not, so officials said it was not certain if the meal caused the victims to become ill but it was the common link. Officials said 835 people attended the event and ate the meal. Three of the patients died, four others were released, and one remains hospitalized, but is improving. Officials identified the victims on Wednesday as 43-year old Christopher Cappetti, 59-year-old Chooi Keng Cheah and 69-year-old Jane Evans. The autopsies for all three victims showed similar intestinal abnormalities, the sheriff's office said Wednesday. The Forensic Pathologist is still trying to determine the exact cause of the sickness, as they wait for more test results. Contra Costa Health investigators said Tuesday that they had contacted nine additional people who fell ill less than 24 hours after attending the Thanksgiving event, but were not hospitalized. Underwood said the ages of the people who fell sick ranged from teens to 70s. Health officials said there is no risk to the general public. |
Doug Mataconis · · 18 comments The status of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump as bottom-of-the-barrel candidates for the GOP seems to be confirmed in a new poll: A majority of Americans say they would never support Sarah Palin or Donald Trump for president, according to a new national poll. A Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday indicates that 58 percent of the public says they would never vote for the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, with an equal amount saying the same thing about the billionaire businessman, real estate mogul, and reality TV star. Fifteen percent of people questioned say they are enthusiastic about Palin as a candidate and around one in four say they would consider voting for her for president. According to the poll, nine percent say they are enthusiastic about Trump as a candidate, with about a quarter saying they would consider voting for him for president. |
"Took the 60 bus out of downtown Campbell..." Rancid/The Old Firm Casuals/Oxley's Midnight Runners) is a long way from his hometown of Campbell at the moment, but his devotion as an Earthquakes Season Ticket Holder doesn't weaken when he's outside of the Bay Area, or even the country. Punk rock/Oi! icon and Quakes anthem writer Lars Frederiksen () is a long way from his hometown of Campbell at the moment, but his devotion as an Earthquakes Season Ticket Holder doesn't weaken when he's outside of the Bay Area, or even the country. Believe," the anthem he wrote for his hometown club Real Salt Lake, were given the unique opportunity to visit 78-year old Carlos Ruiz's mysterious sports shop in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. His legendary Bay Area band, Rancid, are currently touring South America, with stops in Brazil, Argentina and Chile to name a few. With a few days to kill in Buenos Aires before they rock Lollapalooza Argentina 2017, Lars & drummer Branden Steineckert, who most Quakes fans will remember from "," the anthem he wrote for his hometown club Real Salt Lake, were given the unique opportunity to visit 78-year old Carlos Ruiz's mysterious sports shop in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Discovered by adidas Originals in 2014, Carlos' story and shop are now world-famous after a product research crew from adidas flew from the UK to examine his collection of vintage adidas gear from as early as the late 70s, ranging from sneakers to 80s tracksuits. 2017 Quakes Primary Kit. Known to be extremely hard to find and sometimes closed up to the public, Lars & Branden tracked it down and did a little shopping - all while sporting adidas' finest piece of modern work, the "Got a chance to meet Carlos today in Argentina. After some shoe shopping we went for coffee and ice cream. What a day. Gracias Carlos. See you next time," Lars wrote on Instagram. punkest team in all of MLS" some South American shine. On Friday, Rancid played to a packed Lollapalooza sideshow crowd at Teatro Flores, a warmup to the main event on Saturday, and the sharp new black & blue kit made another appearance, this time on stage, giving the "" some South American shine. Seattle Sounders FC where they'll induct Lars' friend & Quakes legend Joe Cannon into the Hall of Fame. Rancid's South American tour wrapped up over the weekend and he'll finally have a bit of time to take in the sights at Avaya Stadium - starting this weekend vs.where they'll induct Lars' friend & Quakes legend Joe Cannon into the Hall of Fame. "I'm just excited to get to see my first game of the season on Saturday. Haven't been able to go yet because of the touring and finishing the record," he told SJEarthquakes.com. hometown show in Berkeley on August 20. Rancid will play aon August 20. |
(From the Young Adult Blog at http://youngadultministries.wordpress.com/) By Dan Gregory, West Des Moines, Iowa, USA I don’t know about you, but it seems like God puts the challenge right out there for me in this scripture. “What’re you waiting for?” comes the question. What am I waiting for? Why do I continue to hesitate, though I know the adventure awaits my response? The time is now, but I’m still sitting on the porch, hoping for more time, more energy, more resolve, more direction. I have my rhythms, my circle of friends, my way of thinking. Come to think of it, I’m really quite comfortable where I am, thank you very much. But am I? I went to see a movie, The Hobbit, recently. I was caught up in the intrigue of Bilbo, a simple Hobbit very attached to his cozy home, who was invited to go on a faraway adventure by the wizard, Gandalf. As Bilbo struggles with the immensity of the request, Gandalf prods and encourages him to consider what he has to gain by leaving his porch. “The world is not in your books and maps. It’s out there!” Bilbo continues to weigh his heart, wondering if it’s worth the risk to leave all he has ever known. As Gandalf tells him he will have stories to tell when he comes back, Bilbo hopefully responds, “You can promise that I will come back?” After a pause, Gandalf tells him the solemn truth: “No. And if you do, you will not be the same.” The adventure with God and community will change us—we will not be the same at the end of the journey. But it is the adventure of a lifetime. God is calling us, you and me, to move, to put behind whatever our hesitation may be, and to dive in, ready to see the world beyond the books and maps others are content with. For we want to live. We feel the restlessness to seek beyond the horizon, to step off the porch and into the rush of the world sustained by our Guide. We want to move…but are we willing to? Several hours after being asked on the adventure, Bilbo still finds himself sitting in his armchair, pondering. “I just need to sit quietly for a moment,” he tells Gandalf. He was not expecting the reply: “You’ve been sitting quietly far too long!” Have I been sitting quietly far too long, letting the moment slip past me? What about now, when God calls me on an adventure? It’s time to move—move into a deeper level of commitment, move into a new and exciting phase of the journey with a congregation that will love and support you, move to invite others to come onto the path of discipleship with you. Bilbo finally decides the time for hesitation is past. Neighbors call curiously to him as he races down the lane, and he responds, “I’m already late!” “Late for what?” “I’m going on an adventure!” It is never too late to join Christ on the adventure of a lifetime! Advertisements |
All Photographs by Shawn Russell Johnson Black Tiger Sex Machine is a three piece electronic group from Montreal, Quebec, made up of Marc Chagnon, Julien Maranda, and Patrick Barry. They specialize in what they have come to claim as "Future Thriller," a genre that spans multiple styles of dance music but remains heavily rooted in dubstep and drum and bass. They don state-of-the-art tiger helmets, and utilize a multitude of controllers, synths, and drum pads to put on an extremely immersive live show that is undoubtedly unique. When I got to Webster Hall last Friday night, I went up to the balcony level and entered the green room; I was immediately greeted with open arms. Marc was talking to a couple of people, but turned to greet me as I entered. He apologized for the mix-up at the door (apparently the venue had the wrong last name on file), offered me a drink, and we started chatting. Marc and I discussed their independent rise, and how they had played their first show in the United States just over a year ago at the very same venue. He was genuinely excited to be back, and throughout our discussion maintained a really humble air about him. He thanked me for writing the review that had come out earlier that week and at some points seemed more interested in discussing my writing and photo work than answering the questions I had. Dabin The night's opening acts were Dabin and Apashe. Dabin was an extremely versatile act who incorporated live guitar into his "music for your feels" (as he describes it). Heavenly synth usage paired with his live instrumentation creates a phenomenal show of talent from the Toronto-based producer. Apashe simply lists his genre as "EPIC;" which is exactly what it is. He weaves elements of trap, dub, and drum and bass in his grand and heavy-hitting tracks. His show was relentless from start to finish and was the perfect segue into the church that BTSM was about to take us to. Apashe From the onset, there was an air of electricity to their performance. The bright LED lights outlining the eyes on their tiger helmets burst through the overflow of fog that engulfed the stage. Wearing leather jackets, denim vests, and all-black-everything, the gentlemen began a set that echoed chest-pounding bass and monstrous synths that truly embodied the post-apocalyptic theme that surrounded their music. From my position on stage, I could see a bit more of the technical aspects of their show, as well as the skill with which they moved between midi controllers, drum pads, and synths; a truly impressive glimpse into what goes into their live mixing and production. The theatrical aspects of their show created a spectacle that kept the crowd engaged and dancing from start to finish. The whole performance had the feel of a science fiction overture; the score to a dark and vicious cinematic experience that offered every member of the crowd a supporting role. There was a level of connection between the fans and BTSM that was apparent from the moment they stepped on stage to the family photo taken at the end. Throughout the show, there were moments when the guys went to the edge of the stage, acknowledged a fan who had welded his own black tiger helmet, and even gave out a flag emblazoned with the group's logo: a geometric tiger head on a pure black field. By the time the show was over, I was thoroughly impressed. Only having been introduced to the group a few months prior, I was truly unsure of what I was going to witness, and I was not disappointed. They made their way upstairs as the crowd mostly dispersed; nothing but smiling faces and satisfied discussion. I couldn't wait to sit down and really get to know the men-behind-the-masks. Shawn: There seems to be a certain mythos surrounding the "Kannibalen Virus." What prompted you guys to build your music around the concept of this post-apocalyptic world? Julien: Well in Montreal a few years back I went to a Justice show with Pat, when the cross lit up we were like "wow, this is different, there's something happening here." At the same time, we love Justice don't get me wrong, but in our opinion there was no real connection between them and the crowd, besides the cross. I don't think a DJ or an artist can really get a connection going with the crowd directly with them, like implement them directly in the night. But when we started our first electronic events in Montreal, we wanted the people at home would star thinking and planning their night. So, we invented the event called 'Kannibalen' (before the label), and told people "you're coming to our night, but you're infected." A little bit like a zombie walk. So they were entering with their friends and splashing fake blood all over them -- nothing violent -- just like the cool part of a community with something to do before coming to the show. You know, like taking the bus and looking like a zombie. So when we started the label, we thought it would be really fun to kind of have a story behind every artist, and now our new music video that's going to be coming out, probably early March for the song "Numbers;" it talks about the infection, our post-apocalyptic world. Marc: It kinda relates to how we approach the music industry. We don't have a major label we don't have anybody pushing us, it's just us doing what we like and working hard and the "infection" has been spreading. You have people on the label like Snails, and it's just growing and growing. People are going around with the Kannibalen brand and the label and they're just sticking to it. So that's why it's been growing for the past four years, it's really an infection, but a good one. Shawn: There's not many mainstream electronic artists utilizing the live-show format. There's artists like Porter Robinson, The Glitch Mob, they bring the live performance aspect that's kind of shifting electronic music to become more than just mixing a set for people to dance to. Do you think that's benefitted your specific style, and how? Pat: Yeah, I can definitely say that it's benefitted us in the sense that we like to create something interesting for fans. We tried to still come up with a show that kept that side of the DJ style where it's always very dynamic, and never stops with the more instrumental side where there's more improvisation where you can change stuff and create things that people haven't really heard. It's not just the same songs that you've heard, you can combine elements from other tracks. We definitely were inspired by other artists like The Glitch Mob, Keys N Krates, there's guys that started doing this a few years ago and really pushed this new style of creating a performance with both elements. And we're excited to keep pushing it, and see where we can take the genre because we feel like the surface has only been scratched. It's really cool the things that you can do live, and it's really cool to see people taking chances with it and pushing the boundaries. It's really great to do something different, and that's what it's all about really. Shawn: You guys are extremely good about keeping a personal relationship with your fans, you're always doing live feeds from the studio, and chatting with fans on Facebook. Has it always been this way, and do you plan on keeping that up as you gain popularity? Marc: I guess we never got like a free pass. We always worked super hard and when we started those parties that Julien talked about, it was all about the fan interaction and connecting with people. So it's not like we made a one-hit-wonder or got like a huge marketing push from some management team. We're self managed, we work really had, we now have a team that we built together that are working just as hard as us behind the scenes. So it's all about interacting with fans and they've been relating to that because they know we want to show them something special. So we definitely want to keep up with that, because it comes back to the Kannibalen Virus; it was a small thing that started at a party in Montreal that grew into something big with guys like Snails, us, Dabin, Apasche, etc. Guys are going around the world, so it's kind of like this grass roots-small family, and that's the mentality. So we're going to keep doing that 'cause it feels good and that's the best. Julien: Personally, when you watch kids, or teenagers, adults -- when they go to a music event, it's that one time during the week, or a festival it's that one time during the summer, where they'll be happy whatever happens, yknow? They'll just be there to share community, the kids are coming through the gates and they're just smiling, and the only thing they want is to listen to their favorite artists -- meet them if possible. That's why we take off the helmets the last fifteen minutes of the show. We try to connect with the fans, just so they understand that we're like them, and we'll go in the crowd every show. I went just tonight in the crowd afterward, and the kids are saying stuff like "oh my god, you take so much time to talk to us!" But for us it's so natural, I think it's the most important thing. If they have dreams to make music, they go back home motivated, and if there dream was just to meet you, then it's done. I comes very natural to us, it's like Marc said we don't take this for granted, we know it can all go away really quick so our fans are the most important thing. Pat: We looooooooove the fans. ;) Shawn: You used a sound bite from "The Vampire Bat" on the album, what films have influenced your genre of "Future Thriller?" Pat: A lot of stuff, sci-fi movies, horror, action. Really cool movies like "Blade Runner," "Mad Max," "Star Wars," definitely. We just all love sci-fi, and even like sh***ier movies, well I don't want to say "sh***ier," but crappy sci-fi movies from the 90's like "Demolition Man." Really any kind of weird B movies with dark worlds, alternate realities. Whether it's futuristic or horror or medieval. The imagery and the sounds that populate these movies have been what's really influenced us. We've got this "Blade" homage clip coming out, there's really so many; "Aliens," I love aliens and... Marc & Julien: [Laughing] Yeah, we like movies, ok. Marc: We have to give a shout out to our boy Dead Battery who used the sample in a release called "The Devil's Signature" on our label in early 2014. A nasty drum and bass record, but it was fitting way too well on "Infected" with Karluv Klub who's actually sitting right there [Points behind me] Ralph. He's a sexy man of many talents [all laugh]. But yeah, Patrick is definitely the weirdest one. [Laughs] Julien: We all love movies, you sit down and you absorb another world it's the best way to find that influence; with something artistic at home. Shawn: You've independently built your label, and it's taken a while but you've garnered some success. What advice do you have for other independent artists coming up in the industry? Julien: Stick with your city. Make sure you don't discard with your scene, stick with your crowd; try to build something in your own town. Find other artists, whether it's a videographer, photographer, other musicians y'know whatever, create a little hub in your town and try to build something bigger than just you. Your fan base in your city is going to be the biggest fan base you'll ever get and that's going to feed off of everything else. Release your own music, we started our label because we didn't like what other people were doing with music and we wanted to have control, but also to have a family, and now we have one in Montreal. Marc: Get a team and stick with it. Some people have been working with each other for so long, and sometimes it goes unnoticed, but sticking with people and working and developing something together most of the time leads to something good. Whether you achieve your main goal or not, usually working as a team for it works -- I think. Pat: Y'know, do what you love and work hard, and keep integrity with yourself whether professionally, or with your music, and just keep at it. Marc: I think that's the first time you've said integrity in an interview and I love it. After the interview, the guys dispersed to pack up their gear and head back to their hotel. I mentioned I had a couple of friends who were fans outside, and the guys were happy to step out and say hello. When they did, I expected a couple "hey, how are you's" and that would be that. But as far as Marc was concerned, the night was still young and he invited us to join him and Apashe to get some food at The Halal Guys. |
I would prefer to get 15 gold every 3 wins. I would prefer to get 10 gold every 2 wins. 0 voters Show results Coming from Hearthstone, I really liked that Duelyst gave me a little gold every other win. After a win, I was either getting a 10g bonus, or I was one win away from a 10g bonus - it kept me going a lot because the gold trickles in so fast. It wasn’t about the amount of gold - 15, but the frequency, that kept me playing. Thus, I suggest that if win gold needs to be toned down, make it 10g every 2 wins so that satisfying feeling is still there. It’s the same rate of gold: 5g/win, but gold every 3 wins feels like you are so far away from a reward after you complete the “quest”. I hope the rest of the community agrees, and this slight change can be made to the satisfaction of all. On a side note, I’ll add that I am not happy about the quest restructuring. 8 games is a lot of time, and between working full-time, taking care of my family, and being a full-time student, I only have so much time to play matches in the evening. It was simple and satisfying to get my ~4 matches in every night to complete quests, and it didn’t strongly interfere with the rest of my life. Effectively doubling that time spent for max rewards is a frustrating and unwelcome change. I consider myself a “hardcore” player, to be clear. I hit S-Rank every month (just hit it tonight with backstabhai again), I am very active in the community, and I have spent a healthy amount of money on this game. This change does not benefit me. It frustrates me. Edit: Also, please post your written sentiments to keep this thread visible. |
When Staff Sgt. Noah Lubben was assigned to Air Force Special Operations Command, he enjoyed the freedom and the “laid back” atmosphere among his crew. The airmen had more freedom there and embraced the swagger of the Special Operations flying culture. “It was awesome,” Sergeant Lubben recalls. ”It was fun.” But it was also a culture that ultimately contributed to his sexual assault, Lubben says – with “sexually charged” and “disgusting” insults that isolated him and turned his longtime fellow troops against him. As the Pentagon released figures last week showing that incidents of sexual assault increased 50 percent between 2012 and 2013, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel vowed to take a number of steps, including some designed specifically to reach out to men, who make up half of all reported victims of sexual assault, according to a Pentagon study released last week. “We have to fight the cultural stigmas that discourage reporting and be clear that sexual assault does not occur because a victim is weak,” Secretary Hagel said. The Pentagon, he added, would be seeking “input from male victims” to make prevention programs more effective. Lubben, square-jawed and blond with a frank demeanor, says that early in his time in the unit, there was talk about the “cultural lessons” designed to haze new crew members into the ranks. One of these rituals, Lubben recalled, was the “naked gunner hug,” in which, they were told, the gunner would “go around hugging new flyers with his naked body.” One female airman took exception to this. “One girl in our class spoke up and said, ‘If that ever happened to me, I’d report it hands down.’ ” In response, some of the male crew members – ”me and two other guys,” Lubben says – ”actually called her a prude,” he recalls. “We told her she wouldn’t fit in well.” Lubben later apologized to her for the remark, based on what he was to experience in the weeks to come. It was on his gunship crew’s first temporary duty (TDY) trip to Tampa, Fla., that the trouble began. The crew’s navigator was a captain, and his conversation “was always sexually charged,” Lubben says. “He bragged about his crude exploits with women,” including showing crew members photos of his conquests stored on his cellphone, he adds. “He was the center of attention, and the rest of the crew sought his approval." On the first night of TDY, the crew went to a strip club. Lubben opted out. “It’s just not my style,” he says. “I think this put a wedge between me and the crew.” He began to experience the brunt of the crew’s bad treatment. “They would say disgusting things” directed at him over the plane’s communications system. Then came Lubben’s first flight without an instructor, which was referred to among his crew and others as “cherry flights,” a reference to a woman losing her virginity and “just another example that illustrates the sexuality ingrained in our culture,” he says. That's when the assault took place. After the crew coordinated over its communications system to “get” Lubben, he turned around “and to my surprise he [the navigator] had his genitals out and seemed that he was going to hit me in the face” with them. He raised his arm to block that contact. During the post-flight debriefing, Lubben informed the officer in charge “about the navigator’s inappropriate behavior, and everybody laughed.” Lubben then spoke one on one with the mission commander, who “looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, that kind of stuff happens.’ ” He decided to seek counsel from two fellow airmen closest to him. One “encouraged me to do the right thing. The other one warned me not to do anything – I’d make a lot of people angry and only ruin my career.” Then he sat down with his wife and made a checklist on paper. It became clear: “I could do what was right, or I could do what was popular,” he says. “This made the choice clear for me and made it, not easy, but easier.” He went straight to his local sexual assault response coordinator. “I was not afraid to speak out against my peers, so I reported it.” The report caused an outcry, however, among his commanders and fellow crew. People were not upset about his assault, he says, but rather that he had reported it. At the squadron Christmas party, he was approached by a friend who had heard rumors about what had happened. “He pulled me aside and asked, ‘Can I talk to you?’ He seemed concerned, honestly.” After Lubben told him the story, “his demeanor changed. He pointed his finger at me and said, ‘Why would you do that? Why would you report this guy and possibly ruin his career?’ ” He learned that while his experience with the navigator was hurtful, much more so was “the lack of willingness from my friends to stand up for what I’d done,” Lubben said. ”I’ve openly been called a snitch to my face and been stared down.” The gunship crew, one of the most-deployed units in the Air Force at the time, was disqualified from flying as a result of Lubben’s report. The navigator received an administrative punishment and was taken out of special operations command, Lubben said. Today, the Air Force is encouraging him to come forward. At a recent gathering of Air Force three-star generals, who are the “convening authorities” in military justice cases regarding sexual assault, he told his story. Afterward, he fielded questions from the generals, who included the top officer in the Air Force, Gen. Mark Welsh. Lubben “is not someone who feels like a victim and acts like a victim – [he] isn’t someone who isn’t strong,” General Welsh said. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy And if his story “doesn’t rip you apart,” he told the gathering of dozens of generals around a large round conference room table, “then there’s something wrong with you.” |
The Minnesota Timberwolves have had the last few years to try and turn things around in order to convince star forward Kevin Love that he should stick around with the team long term. The rift started when the team didn’t give Love a max contract and has spiraled downward from there. The losing woes in Minnesota have caused many around the NBA to expect Love to leave the team next summer, with one GM even calling it a 100 percent chance he leaves. The Los Angeles Lakers are licking their chops at all this news and turmoil in Minnesota, because the most agreed upon landing destination for Love is back in his native California with the hometown Los Angeles Lakers. An unnamed NBA general manager reportedly told ESPN’s Chris Broussard that he believes, with 100 percent certainty, that Love will be wearing purple and gold in the summer of 2015. Of course, that’s an entire year away and there’s no saying the Timberwolves can’t go on a miracle run that causes Love to fall head over heels with the front office. But it’s starting to look more and more like the only front office not convinced Love is signing with the Lakers in 2015 is the front office the forward is trying to get as far away from as possible. |
I finally made a dessert recipe that I’m proud of! Now that we’re into the Holiday season I’ve been thinking about foods I enjoy this time of year and it didn’t take me long to figure out that candied pecans are totally Keto friendly with the right tweaks! To get the crunchy candied coating I used Swerve sweetener because it trades 1:1 with sugar when cooking, so if you’re not Keto or low carb/low sugar just put 1 cup of regular sugar in place of the Swerve and you will get the same delicious results! The reason I cook with Swerve is because it’s erythritol, a sugar alcohol with an extremely low glycemic impact that doesn’t spike my insulin. I honestly like these better than some other candied pecans I’ve had in the past because the sweet isn’t overwhelming and you can taste the natural richness from the pecans. It took me two tries with two different recipes & cook times but I’ve found that the low and slow baking method worked 100x better! There is a printable recipe towards the bottom of this post. Here’s what you’ll need: 1 cup erythritol (I prefer Swerve) 1 lb. of pecan halves 1 egg white 1 tbsp water 2 tsp ground cinnamon 2 tsp ground nutmeg 1 tsp salt Baking spray or butter optional 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice sugar in place of erythritol (for those not on a sugar free diet) 1 Preheat your oven to 250 degrees (F) 2 Mix your dry ingredients (erythritol, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt). 3 Whisk together your egg white and 1 tbsp of water until you get a white frothy consistency, put a little muscle into it. 4 Toss the pecans in the egg white mixture. Then add your pecans into the dry ingredients and stir until everything is evenly coated. You may have a little extra dry mix but that will melt in the oven. 5 Spray your cooking sheet with baking spray or grease it with a little butter. Pour your pecans onto the trays trying to make an even layer. I used two baking pans b/c I didn’t have one big enough to spread them all out on. Put them into the preheated oven, stirring every 15 minutes until done (1 hour total cooking time). 6 Remove the now cooked pecans from the oven, allow them to cool & enjoy! If you don’t want candied pecan clusters make sure that they are evenly spaced out or stir them every few minutes while cooling. Nutrition Info per serving according to MFP: 193 kcal 3g protein 20g fat 1g sugar 1 NET carb This recipe made 16 servings and mine came out to be 42g a serving. To get the most accurate serving size weigh out your finished pecans in grams and divide that number by 16. Otherwise I believe it should 1/4 cup a serving if you don’t track that closely. Candied Pecans Ingredients: 1 cup erythritol (I prefer Swerve) 1 lb. of pecan halves 1 egg white 1 tbsp water 2 tsp ground cinnamon 2 tsp ground nutmeg 1 tsp salt Baking spray or butter optional 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice sugar in place of erythritol (for those not on a sugar free diet) Directions: Preheat your oven to 250 degrees (F) Mix your dry ingredients (erythritol, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt). Whisk together your egg white and 1 tbsp of water until you get a white frothy consistency, put a little muscle into it. Toss the pecans in the egg white mixture. Then add your pecans into the dry ingredients and stir until everything is evenly coated. You may have a little extra dry mix but that will melt in the oven. Spray your cooking sheet with baking spray or grease it with a little butter. Pour your pecans onto the tray trying to make an even layer. Put them into the preheated oven, stirring every 15 minutes until done (1 hour total cooking time). Remove the now cooked pecans from the oven, allow them to cool & enjoy! If you don’t want candied pecan clusters make sure that they are evenly spaced out or stir them every few minutes while cooling. Until my next post just remember, Hydrate. Satiate. Celebrat |
Gun Crow Rory Laird will not take on Collingwood this week ADELAIDE has been dealt a massive blow ahead of Saturday night's clash against Collingwood with gun defender Rory Laird withdrawn. The 22-year-old, who missed four games with a toe complaint earlier in the season, has hip soreness and the club has decided not risk him. Laird has been one of the Crows' best this year and has soared into All Australian calculations on the back of a string of exceptional performances. Former Magpie Paul Seedsman replaces Laird in the selected side and will take on his former teammates for the first time. Jake Kelly has been added to the emergency list. Collingwood made one change for the clash with Levi Greenwood replacing the injured Alex Fasolo. Crows assistant coach David Teague believes there is still much improvement needed at his club. "We don't think the way we're playing now is going to be good enough at the end of the year," Teague told reporters on Friday. "We think we have got some areas to improve and we're going to need to improve on those. "It's a whole game thing. Some of our defence we want to improve, some of our offence - they are just small things we want to tweak. "We won't go into the exact details but we have got quite a few areas we want to improve on. "Having said that, we're doing a lot right at the moment too." Adelaide expects Collingwood to offer a stern test as the Crows mark the 300th AFL game milestone of onballer Scott Thompson on Saturday night. "Their pressure is probably one thing that I have noticed ... it has been really good lately," Teague said of the Magpies, who have won three consecutive matches. "Any team that brings good pressure asks a good question of the opposition. And it's one we're looking forward to answer this week. "We feel that the pressure games are going to be finals-type games so we want opposition to bring pressure and we want to be able to stand up and handle it and we'll find that out tomorrow night." |
It sounds like Kodak's long, slow decline is about to end in bankruptcy: The Wall Street Journal is reporting the company plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the next few weeks if its efforts to sell off a wide variety of digital patents fail to pay off. This comes after a November securities filing warning that Kodak would soon run out of money unless its patents were sold off or it found a loan; more recently the New York Stock Exchange said that Kodak could be delisted unless its stock (which has been trading for less than one dollar for the last month) rebounded in the next six months. Even if the company does file for bankruptcy, its patents will be sold off in a court-supervised auction, while the company will be able to pay bills and continue to operate — hopefully this includes keeping its workforce of 19,000 employees. |
Hollywood's most celebrated and scrutinized screenwriter ups the ante for his directorial debut as he floats a 'West Wing' reboot (with a black president) and reveals the anxiety that fuels his ambition: "I always feel like my life depends on writing something good." On a late summer evening, Aaron Sorkin wandered into a pizza shop, folded himself into a counter seat and ordered a plain slice, with a Pepsi to wash it down. He was stomach-grumbling hungry and in need of a distraction. Down the street, at the Toronto Film Festival, his poker thriller Molly's Game was playing for the first time before a crowd of some 1,500 festivalgoers. Sorkin didn't need to be in his reserved seat at the Elgin Theatre to know exactly where in his film the audience was. He took a knife and fork to his slice — "a mortal sin if you grew up in New York," he acknowledges, but he couldn't risk a spill on his premiere-night suit — and began, in real time, running through the movie, the first in his three-decade career as Hollywood's most celebrated and scrutinized screenwriter that he directed as well as wrote. "Did I ever change that thing I wanted to change?" he panicked. "That sound right there of the skate on the ice, did we get that right?" His mind raced, concerns ping-ponging between the response of the audience and that of the film's inspiration, the infamous poker princess Molly Bloom, who was seeing the fictionalized retelling of the bleakest chapter of her adult life play out for the first time in a packed theater. "I was very nervous," Sorkin says more than a month later, seated in his dimly lit office on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, surrounded by framed photographs of his heroes: Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams and Hunter S. Thompson. Dressed in his uniform khakis and a button-down shirt, his eyes gaze toward the window: "I'm still very nervous." When Sorkin's directorial debut, starring Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba, comes out on Christmas Day, its success will be measured against the unfairly high bar of his own past work. "I'm proud that when I write something, expectations are high," he says, "but it's not an advantage." The fact that Molly's Game tests an entirely new creative ambition — Aaron Sorkin, movie director — only raises the stakes. For the 56-year-old auteur, whose name is synonymous with a certain hallmark style of percussive dialogue and whose association is damn near a guarantee of widespread attention, the ability to experiment quietly is a luxury he gave up long ago. Sorkin doesn't need those images of Miller or Williams or Shaw looming above to intimidate him; he does that all by himself. "Whether it's an episode of television, a movie or a play, I always feel like my life depends on writing something good," he says, "and in a very real way, it does." At this point, the industry's highest-paid screenwriter, who earns $4 million a script (and another $1 million if the film gets made), could make a fine living by simply rehashing his past successes. He already has agreed to tackle a live staging of his first breakout, A Few Good Men, for NBC, though now he reveals he'll need to push back its planned spring 2018 airdate another year. Filling out a cast led by Alec Baldwin (as Col. Jessep) has proven a challenge, and he can't quite figure out how to make the 1980s-set play feel fresh. There's also a standing offer from the same network to reboot The West Wing, which Sorkin considers on occasion. When asked if he'd introduce a Trump-like figure in his fictional White House, he winces, arguing that the current president holds no appeal for him, fictional or otherwise. "Trump is exactly what he looks like: a really dumb guy with an observable psychiatric disorder," he says. Sorkin's preferred scenario, he tells me, would involve "Sterling K. Brown as the president, and there's some kind of jam, an emergency, a very delicate situation involving the threat of war or something, and [President] Bartlet [played by Martin Sheen], long since retired, is consulted in the way that Bill Clinton used to consult with Nixon." How he brings Allison Janney's C.J. Cregg or Bradley Whitford's Josh Lyman into the new scenario is where Sorkin gets stuck. So, for the time being, fans will have to settle for reruns. To Sorkin's amazement, Molly's Game came considerably easier, though not without its own backstage drama: He battled over the release date, cut ties with longtime agent Ari Emanuel and watched as emails referencing his alleged financial woes were picked apart in the wake of the Sony hack. But now the film is done, and all he can do is sit back and wait on the audience — to say nothing of the awards groups, which are already screening the movie and will determine its place in this year's wide-open Oscar race. "It's this huge weight on his shoulders," says Molly's Game producer Mark Gordon, who also produced Sorkin's last screenplay, Steve Jobs, "because the expectation from everybody is, 'If it's Aaron, it's going to get nominated.'" ••• Sorkin fell in love with the sound of dialogue long before he had a grasp of what the words might mean. His schoolteacher mother and lawyer father would take him, the youngest of three, to Broadway shows as a kid: He saw Man of La Mancha at 6 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at 9. By the time Sorkin hit his teens, he was vice president of the Scarsdale High School drama club; when he left for Syracuse University, his plan was to become an actor. In the summer of 1983, he moved to Manhattan and, as legend now has it, found himself holed up for the night at an ex-girlfriend's apartment, where he fed a few blank sheets of paper into a semiautomatic typewriter. What emerged became the bones of his debut play, Removing All Doubt, about a bunch of high school pals who get back together in their 20s. Writing it was an intoxicating thrill, as was the adulation that quickly followed. That first play began attracting actors like Matthew Broderick and Kevin Bacon to do stage readings; and his second, a one-act play about show business, got an off-off-Broadway run and helped land him a theatrical agent. Then came a call from his sister, a lawyer headed to Guantanamo Bay to defend a group of Marines accused of killing a fellow soldier. Sorkin turned her predicament into a Broadway play, and then an Oscar-nominated film starring Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise called A Few Good Men. That first brush with Hollywood was instructive in good ways and bad. A studio executive on the film insisted that the characters played by Cruise and Demi Moore sleep together. Sorkin strongly disagreed, arguing that these two young lawyers are in way over their heads on the murder case and would be doing nothing but working. "The note I got from the studio executive was, 'If Tom and Demi aren't going to sleep together, why's Demi a woman?' " he reveals now. "I think about that note when I read about someone wondering why we never see Molly with a boyfriend. No one ever asked why Brad Pitt didn't have a girlfriend in Moneyball." After A Few Good Men, offers began flooding in, and drugs followed. "You know how I got addicted to cocaine? I tried it," Sorkin said during a commencement address he delivered at his alma mater in 2012. Staring out at a sea of early 20-somethings, he opted not to sugarcoat the decade or so he spent high. "The problem with drugs is that they work, right up until the moment that they decimate your life." Throughout Sorkin's darkest years, of which he has only faint memories, he convinced himself he needed those stimulants to fuel his creativity. It was a phone call from Carrie Fisher, then a virtual stranger, who made him consider the alternative: "I know you think you're not going to be able to write," he remembers Fisher telling him, "but I promise your writing is going to get better." This coming April, Sorkin will celebrate 17 years drug free, and in that time, he has written five movies, four television series and a Broadway play and won an Oscar for penning The Social Network. He has no plans to slow down, either. The day after we meet, he heads to New York for the first table read of his Broadway revival of To Kill a Mockingbird, set to debut in 2018 with his Newsroom star Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch. From there, he'll write his Lucy and Desi movie, with Cate Blanchett attached to play Lucille Ball. Though he hasn't made much headway on the plot — the appeal was her and their relationship, he says — he reveals that it will be told against the backdrop of a single production week at I Love Lucy, from table read to audience taping. It's a familiar construction for Sorkin, who has offered peeks behind the scenes of a TV show many times before: on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (with late night), Sports Night (sports) and The Newsroom (cable news). In all the years that Sorkin has been at it, however, the process hasn't gotten any less torturous. "I have two gears," he says, puffing on a cigarette: " 'I'm stuck, I've got nothing, and I've already written the last thing I'm ever going to write,' and 'It's going well.' " To get from the former to the latter, he relies on a succession of showers (as many as eight a day, each time a kind of do-over) and a mix of long walks or drives in which he acts out whatever scene he's working through. Sorkin once was so absorbed role-playing a scene from The Newsroom that he lunged into a mirror in the sprawling Hollywood Hills home that he lives in alone and broke his nose. Pictures of his swollen face later zoomed around the internet, where in recent years Sorkin has taken more than his share of lumps. Type Sorkin's name into Google, for instance, and a deep well of material turns up, much of it railing against him for various creative offenses. A persistent critique is that he diminishes his female characters, putting them in situations where they have to be redeemed by men. Such views will likely re-emerge when Molly's Game is released, though he's hoping to remain outside the fray and let the work speak for itself. "Once I put it on the screen, I don't have — and I shouldn't have — anything to say about how an audience member receives it," he tells me, before acknowledging that the criticism can periodically get under his skin: "Sometimes it stops being about the movie or the play or the episode of television, and it gets personal. Sometimes it's a character diagnosis by someone who's never met or spoken to me [and] who wasn't within miles of what they're writing about." It certainly won't hurt to have Chastain, one of Hollywood's most vocal feminists, in his corner as he sets out to promote Molly's Game. A story about patriarchy, featuring a self-made woman whose high-stakes poker empire lands her at the center of an FBI investigation, was an easy sell for the actress, and she gives him ample credit for making it his directorial debut. "Aaron could have told any story he wanted, and he chose to tell this one," she says, describing the film as "an incredible social commentary about a woman who's struggling to find a voice and have success in situations where men make the rules and those rules change based on their whims." Ironically, the movie began filming the day after the 2016 election, and it was a note that Sorkin wrote that morning to his teenage daughter, Roxy, and her mother, Julia, a former studio lawyer and Sorkin's ex-wife (the couple was married for nearly a decade and remains fiercely tight), that put Chastain at ease about her new collaborator and the world that they would now inhabit. A sample line of the excerpted letter, which later zoomed around the internet as well: "Grandpa fought in World War II … I will not hand his granddaughter a country shaped by hateful and stupid men. Your tears last night woke me up, and I'll never go to sleep on you again." More recently, as a wave of sexual misconduct allegations has rocked Hollywood, Sorkin's response again impressed his star. In this case, it was his support of Chastain's early advocacy on behalf of the victims following a pair of bombshell reports of Harvey Weinstein's alleged abuses. "It's a very scary thing to be a woman in the industry where men are making the rules and stick your neck out and say, 'I don't care. I'm going to defend these victims and amplify their voices,' " she says. "Aaron Sorkin was the only person in the industry who sent me an email. It said, 'There's not a day that goes by that I'm not proud to know you.' " Sorkin has had similarly powerful conversations on the subject with Roxy, now a junior in high school, who has filmmaking aspirations of her own. He wanted to be sure his only daughter knew that she could fight back if she ever were to find herself in a situation where a man forced himself on her. Roxy flipped the scenario on her father, asking why he was teaching her to defend herself and not teaching those men not to be predatory. "I told her, 'You are 100 percent right, but until all the men who have to change, change, I want you to scream your lungs out,' " says Sorkin. "Then I showed her a Three Stooges short to teach her how to go for the eyes." ••• Sorkin didn't initially set out to tell a story from a woman's point of view. In fact, he only agreed to sit down with Bloom in July 2014 as a favor to a lawyer pal, who was representing her memoir. But by the time his hour with her was up, he knew he'd found his next movie. "Molly was not at all whom I expected her to be," explains Sorkin, "and the fact that idealism could be found in a story set against the backdrop of high-stakes underground poker was a big part of what drew me." For the next six months, Sorkin and Bloom met regularly in his office, where he peppered her with questions about her past, from her early years as a champion skier to her later ones running bicoastal poker games that made her a target of both the FBI and the Russian mob. On many of those days, Bloom, a self-described Sorkin megafan, would leave her session with a homework assignment. Once, it was a paper about the specificities of the slope she used to ski down. Another time, it was one about the recruiting and vetting process for players. "Let me tell you, getting a writing assignment from Aaron Sorkin is not your most fun day," she laughs, recounting the many hours she poured into her prose. The more time the two spent talking, the more fascinated Sorkin became by the impact that Bloom's highly demanding father had on her life. It's a piece of her story that she'd left out of her book entirely, and, she admits, "It was harder to have those conversations with Aaron because not only was I getting personal about my life, I was getting personal about someone else's." That relationship between Bloom and her dad ultimately became a central throughline of Sorkin's screenplay, reminiscent of how the charged one between Steve Jobs and his daughter plays out in his 2015 film. Says Sorkin, "The easiest thing in the world to do is for one father to empathize with another father." Bloom remained hands-on in the development process and became a big proponent for casting Chastain. Other A-list actresses including Emma Stone had been considered, but Chastain offered a winning combination of vulnerability and maturity, and within minutes of sitting down with Sorkin to discuss the role, she had wowed him. "The meeting took place at midnight in my hotel suite," he tells me, attempting to keep a straight face. "I answered the door in my bathrobe. You know, the way all meetings happen in Hollywood." We both laugh nervously, and then agree, given the deplorable nature of what had already come out, that it's probably too soon to be making a Weinstein joke. I ask if he'd tried a similar line the night prior, when he introduced Chastain at Elle's Women in Hollywood event, where sexual harassment was topic A. "No," he cringes, seemingly horrified at the mere suggestion. "I made the decision to get Jessica up there and let her talk, and if you can refill anybody's coffee pot, do that." Adding to the discomfort that evening was the fact that some of the other actresses whom he had met about the role were in attendance: "It was like the scene from Four Weddings and a Funeral," he says, "when Hugh Grant is at the table with all of his ex-girlfriends." In the end, the decision to direct Molly's Game was, in large part, a way for Sorkin to protect Bloom's story. Unlike others who had approached her about putting her life onscreen, Sorkin wasn't interested in the shinier aspects of Bloom's story, be it the money or the bold-faced names like Ben Affleck or Leonardo DiCaprio who had played in her games. Though it was producers Amy Pascal and Gordon who had proposed the idea of Sorkin helming it — "It was a story about the things that Aaron cares about: human resilience and human dignity," says Pascal, "and it was the right size movie to start with" — the desire to maintain the sanctity of the story ultimately convinced him to say yes. In the interim, he sought the advice of several others (Warren Beatty, David Fincher and Elvis Mitchell among them), and then hired a trainer to ensure he was physically prepared. At one point, he even got a prescription from his doctor to try to kick his smoking habit, though he later rationalized that he couldn't risk mixing its side effects with the stresses of directing his first movie. By all accounts, however, Sorkin slipped into the role of director with phenomenal ease. "Once he decided to do it, he became the director: He knew exactly whom he wanted in the movie, he knew exactly what he wanted it to look like, and he knew exactly how he wanted to shoot it," says Pascal, who shares a long history with Sorkin from her prior tenure as an executive at Sony, which released The Social Network and Moneyball. Elba, who was prepping his own directorial debut (crime drama Yardie) while shooting Molly's Game, was similarly impressed, both by Sorkin's willingness to delegate and his ability to appear calm. "Aaron trusted the people whom he gave jobs to," says the actor. "He didn't try to be an actor or a DP or even the writer on set. He stayed in his lane as the director." Still, there were hiccups. The first came early, when Sorkin, who had already made a deal with Sony to write the Wall Street drama Flash Boys, decided he wanted to make Molly's Game instead. In fact, he was so eager to get started on it that he told Pascal he was willing to be paid scale, cashing in only in success — just enough, he joked in an email that later went viral as part of the Sony hack, to let him "pay Roxy's tuition in the meantime." He would later come to see another hacked email from a top Sony executive to Pascal, which read, "Don't let Aaron guilt you by mentioning Roxy's tuition." Says Sorkin, "I was like, 'What? That was a joke. I was telling you that you don't have to pay me.' " With some distance, he's able to appreciate the irony of the subsequent "Sorkin is broke" narrative that took hold. Then he offers, unprompted, "I believe that Amy speculated [in those hacked emails] that I was sleeping with Molly, too. Neither of those things were or are true." A tug of war over the budget of the film — which moved from Sony to Gordon's eOne-backed company with a $9 million boost from distributor STX Entertainment — came next. "Aaron had a very strong point of view and very strong vision, and he wasn't going to make the $15 million version of the movie," says Gordon, recalling with a chuckle some of the tense conversations the pair had early on. "I'm laughing now, but he pushed me to my limit and beyond." The two finally settled on a number in the $30 million range, which by and large allowed Sorkin to make the movie he set out to make. (He kept his $4 million fee, paid when the film was still with Sony, but plowed his $1 million production bonus into the budget.) More tense conversations followed, as Sorkin grew concerned that his collaborators lacked the expertise to release the movie in the manner to which he had grown accustomed. For the first time, he had neither a major studio behind him nor his frequent producing partner Scott Rudin, whom he historically relied on to herd an aggressive campaign. STX's initial launch ideas seemed geared to a different kind of movie than the one Sorkin believed he had made, and though he had brought the picture down below its contractually mandated length of two hours and 15 minutes, he now worried that it was still a few minutes too long. The release date was another sore point. Early on, the distributor proposed February, outside of the traditional awards corridor; Sorkin, for whom that recognition is hugely important, pushed back. "Of course you don't want this movie to open in February," he explains now. "It's good." It was in the midst of these heated back-and-forths that Sorkin decided to part ways with Emanuel, his representative of 17 years, and sign with rival CAA, which had been courting him for some time. Sorkin felt intense loyalty to his longtime agent, who had seen him through a heavily publicized drug relapse in 2001 and, in the years since, made him the only writer in Hollywood whose deal includes a clause prohibiting a studio from replacing or rewriting him. But his mounting concerns over the Molly's Game release strategy introduced a new variable into the mix — and gave CAA its opening. The agency brought Sorkin in for a meeting with its head of marketing and presented him with an elaborate, awards-focused plan to roll out the film. By the time it was over, he was convinced that making the leap was now necessary. "It wasn't just about me anymore; it was about the movie and everyone who worked on it," says Sorkin. Nevertheless, he adds, "leaving Ari was every bit as difficult for me as my divorce." Back in Toronto, Sorkin takes a final swig of Pepsi and returns to the Elgin Theatre in time to see the audience's rapturous response to Molly's Game as the credits roll. He is ushered backstage for a private moment with an emotional Bloom, and then onstage with the stars, including Chastain, who, like him, has just been thrust into the Oscar conversation in a meaningful way. Then he slips into a car, and as it weaves its way to the afterparty, his longtime publicist begins reading aloud the first wave of tweets and reviews, each one more effusive than the last. "It's the kind of stuff you write in your head as you're falling asleep," says Sorkin, who, for just this moment, is satisfied and at peace. SORKIN'S NEXT ACT(S) To Kill a Mockingbird Sorkin has been spending time in New York in recent weeks, attending table reads for his Broadway revival of To Kill a Mockingbird, set to debut in late 2018. The play reunites him with The Newsroom's Jeff Daniels (who will star as Atticus Finch) and producer Scott Rudin. It brings the auteur back to the platform where he got his start, which — if forced to choose — is still his favorite. Bartlett Sher is attached to direct the play, and, per Sorkin, "the cast and design team we're putting together is a murderers' row of seasoned theater professionals." Lucy and Desi Though he has yet to write a single word, Sorkin already has a star (Cate Blanchett as Lucille Ball), a distributor (Amazon Studios) and the support of Ball and Desi Arnaz's children. What he knows at this stage: His latest peek behind the scenes will examine a single production week at I Love Lucy, from table read to audience taping. For Sorkin, the pioneering TV personalities offered several appealing factors, beyond simply the backdrop. "Their relationship is very interesting to me," he says. "And she is interesting to me. I didn't know that she was accused of being a communist." A Few Good Men Sorkin has committed to reviving his film breakout, A Few Good Men (based on his own play), as a live play for NBC. "It's something I've been talking to people about for years," he says of the live TV format, adding with a laugh: "I just didn't think it would be my play." Though the net recently announced that Alec Baldwin will play the Col. Jessep role inhabited by Jack Nicholson in the 1992 film, Sorkin is still mulling the project. "What does it look like on TV? The fact that I can't give you an answer yet is one of the reasons I want to [push it to next season]." This story first appeared in the Nov. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe. |
Well, it can’t just be Scrooge and the family palling around, can it? Disney has revealed a veritable duck-blur of supporting characters that will be part of the DuckTales reboot, and it’s a mix of familiar faces from the classic show and new characters—and the series’ voice casting continues to be amazing. Debuted by Entertainment Weekly today, DuckTales’ supporting cast—joining the already-revealed Lin-Manuel Miranda as Gizmoduck as well as the primary cast of Scrooge, Webby, Huey, Dewey, Louie, Launchpad McQuack, and Donald Duck—will include a whole host of characters, some making returns from the original series, and some being newly created. And, because it’s DuckTales, they pretty much all have fantastic names. Advertisement As for characters returning from the classic show, Community’s Jim Rash will play the show’s hipster-y take on Gyro Gearloose, superinventor and creator of Gizmoduck’s Gizmo suit. Meanwhile, Scrooge’s rival will return in the form of seasoned voice actor Keith Ferguson as Flintheart Glomgold, Scrooge’s rival and the “second richest duck in Duckberg” from the original show. It wouldn’t be DuckTales without some recurring villains, however, meaning that the Beagle Boys are back! Ever hungry for Scrooge’s riches, the boys—all voiced by Eric Bauza—will once again be joined by their matriarch, Ma Beagle, who will, in one of the show’s most inspired casting choices (and that’s saying something with this cast) be played by beloved character actress Margo Martindale. Advertisement Allison Janney will voice Scrooge’s longtime romantic interest Goldie O’Gilt, who returns from the original cartoon, but has now re-imagined as a fellow adventurer—the Catwoman to Scrooge’s Batman, with their long history together from the days of Duckburg’s gold rush still intact. Advertisement Comedian Paul F. Tompkins will play Gladstone Gander (above), Donald Duck’s “supernaturally lucky” rival in all things. He’s a long-time character from the original Disney comics who was an archnemesis of Donald, and but only made a few appearances on the original Ducktales—but weirdly enough as a much more sympathetic character compared to his assholish comic counterpart. In the new show, he’ll still be bothering both Donald and Scrooge as a recurring antagonistic presence. Meanwhile Mark Beaks, played by Silicon Valley’s Josh Brener, is the first brand-new character for the reboot rather than a pull from the comics or the original show, and a pastiche of the modern tech billionaire mogul. You know, just to rustle the tail feathers of all those rich old ducks hanging around in Duckburg Advertisement Honestly, it’s kind of crazy just how much the boat is being pushed out with this new DuckTales. Every announcement we’ve had about the cast so far is delightful, making the wait for its debut on Disney XD this August even more painful. Head on over to the link below to see more new art from the series. [EW] |
Shorewest real estate agent Wil Poull (left) shows David Gonzalez a condo in Port Washington on Monday. The median price of homes sold in April was $138,000, up from $128,000 a year earlier. Credit: Angela Peterson SHARE Click image to enlarge. By of the Wisconsin's prime home-selling season got off to a strong start in April as sales rose more than 9% and the median price jumped almost 8%. It was the state's 22nd consecutive month of sales growth, continuing a housing rebound that has been a bright spot in the economy. "We're seeing sales increasing, we're seeing values go up — without a doubt," said Dave Schmidt, owner of Dave Schmidt Realty in Milwaukee. There were 5,863 existing homes sold in the state last month, up 9.2% from 5,367 in April 2012, the Wisconsin Realtors Association said in a report Monday. The median price of homes sold in April was $138,000, compared with $128,000 a year earlier. Through the first four months of 2013, sales were up 10.9%, while the median price was 6.5% higher than the same period last year. Renny Diedrich, chairman of the Wisconsin Realtors Association, said the April report showed "a solid but sustainable pace of sales." The encouraging numbers came as the key spring and summer selling season, which runs from April though September in Wisconsin, got under way. The peak month for sales is June. The 7.8% increase in the median price in April followed a 9.3% jump in March. "We're seeing strong upward price pressure statewide and across all regions," said Michael Theo, president and chief executive of the state Realtors group. He said the supply of homes for sale has decreased and low mortgage rates have attracted more people to the market. Also pushing up the median price was the fact that trade-up buyers — people looking to move to a bigger home — finally feel good enough about their financial situation and the market to act. "What you're starting to see is that move-up buyer — the guy who bought his first house five or 10 years ago and is now feeling comfortable, saying, 'Hey, I want to sell my starter house,'" Schmidt said. "I'm working with a few buyers right now that are in the process of doing that." David Clark, a Marquette University economics professor who analyzes the sales and price data for the Wisconsin Realtors Association, said he wouldn't be surprised if the monthly median sales prices rise 5%, 6% or 7% as more higher-end homes sold to trade-up buyers are added to the mix. Clark said the first-time home buyer market appears to be closing in on having roughly an equal number of buyers and sellers. "I think the entry-level market is pretty close to being balanced," Clark said. "I think the higher-end market is still somewhat of a buyer's market, and I think the urban markets are closer to being balanced than the rural markets and those markets in the northern part of the state that are dominated somewhat by the second-home market." Real estate agents say there actually is a shortage of entry-level homes in the metro Milwaukee area that are ready to be moved into without a lot of updating. "You can get multiple offers on good, clean houses," Schmidt said. Schmidt said the inventory of distressed properties also is shrinking, leading to firmer prices for foreclosed houses. Clark said the positive patterns in sales and prices in Wisconsin have come in spite of slow job growth. "We haven't really seen a lot of net job growth," Clark said. "We're looking at unemployment rates hovering in the 7.1%-7.2% range throughout the first four months of this year, and we're still seeing solid sales volume." Clark said he expects mortgage rates, which still are at 4%, to begin increasing slowly but not stop the market "I just don't see that as something that's going to significantly stifle demand," he said. Although prices are increasing, they still remain far from those during the housing bubble. The median price of homes sold in Wisconsin during April 2006 was $160,000. |
A day after a clash between members of Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) and BJYM workers in Surat, Surat police Wednesday arrested 19 members of PAAS, including Surat co-convenor Dharmik Malaviya, for their alleged involvement in disrupting the rally, led by Gujarat BJP Yuva Morcha president Rutvij Patel, in Varachha by throwing eggs and shouting slogans. Meanwhile, quota agitation leader Hardik Patel Wednesday threatened to disrupt events organised by BJP across Gujarat, protesting alleged attack on his supporters by the “goons” of the ruling party. Advertising On Tuesday, a rally led Rutvij Patel was disrupted by members of PAAS, who had also replaced BJP banners with their own. Eggs were hurled at the rally, which passed through Patidar-dominated areas, and there was a face-off between BJYM and PAAS workers. Six PAAS members had been detained by the police. Earlier, PAAS had warned BJP and its outfits not to hold any rally in the Patidar-dominated area. Watch Video | Patidar Quota Stir Leader Hardik Patel To Be Face Of Shiv Sena Poll Campaign In Gujarat Sources said PAAS supporter Vijay Mangukiya went close to Rutvij and allegedly garlanded him with flowers laced with itching powder, and also threw off the BJYM leader’s turban on the road, shouting ‘Jay Sardar, Jay Patidar’ slogan. He was caught by BJYM and BJP workers and beaten. The rally which had started from Sarthana culminated at Dindoli in the city. Advertising Later, Rutvij held a press conference at the Circuit House, even as PAAS members gathered outside. “…A few youths allegedly from the community tried to disrupt the rally and threw chemicals. The Patidar community and BJP are two sides of a coin,” Rutvij told reporters. About BJP and BJYM workers beating the Patidar youth, he said, “In self defence, the Patidar youth was beaten up. He came to disturb the rally and attacked us.” However, in a video message, Hardik on Wednesday said: “Every person has right to protest…. Patidar youths opposed the rally in favour of the Patidar community. Surat police should arrest those involved in beating the Patidar youths. If police fail to take action, we will come on roads and take law and order in hands.” He also challenged BJP to organise any event across the state without any disruption by PAAS supporters. |
It’s been a really long time since I sat down and wrote a nice, fresh BLOG post – so here it is – the fermented fruit of my bubbling brain juices: OUR GLOBAL LINKS SC2Links.com was launched on June 29, 2012 – it was an awesomely stressful day for me. En route to LA from Philadelphia for MLG Anaheim, I literally put the finishing touches on the site as the plane was heading down the runway. When I landed, it was LIVE. By the end of the first day, we had a total of 3 unique visitors. OK, maybe I wasn’t the marketing genius then that I am now (HAHA, #lying), but after having my TL thread shut down for solicitation and receiving what seemed like infinite downvotes from Reddit on my first submission ever, I was a little discouraged – OK, I WAS A LOT DISCOURAGED. But these things tend to happen on the internet… So on the next day, after fueling up with what had to have been the most delicious pork burrito I’ve ever had in my life, I hastily threw up a new TL thread (hoping to get SOME people to see the site before it would be taken down), abandoned my hopes of getting momentum on Reddit (still have anxiety posting there), and distributed out thousands of sc2links stickers to the passerbys of the Anaheim Convention Center (I know some of you still have one of these lying around!!). Within an hour, we had ~500 unique visitors to the site and the comments received were beyond motivating – suggestions, constructive critiques, praise, wonder, joy, amazement – it was overwhelmingly satisfying to know that I had made a momentary impact on these people’s eSports lives. Standing here now, 5 months later, I can proudly say this site has grown to become bigger than I ever imagined – OK, it’s not as big as I EVER imagined, but let me run through some numbers that may or may not change your perception of the site and it’s global reach: 25,000+ The number of unique visitors since the inception of SC2Links.com — YOU ALL ROCK, SO HARD!! 100,000+ The all-time total number of pages viewed on the site – ladies and gents, you sure do love every flavor of Starcraft 2. 158 The number of unique countries with at least one Starcraft 2 fan who has visited SC2Links.com – considering there are roughly 196 countries in the world, this is #INSANE. 120 The number of languages SC2Links.com has been viewed in — considering there are anywhere from 6800-6900 distinct languages in the world, this isn’t all that impressive, but I wanted to make the point that Starcraft 2 is the fixture that all of this revolves around – I guess that makes Starcraft a universal language! 5 Top eSports countries (or the ones that like SC2Links the most!), in order of most unique visitors: US, Canada, Germany, UK, Sweden (a close 6th was Australia – the only reason I included this is because I know the SEA scene is awesome and they deserve the attention [cough, cough, step up your VOD game Aussies ;D]). 3 Most viewed player pages, in order: Taeja, Stephano, & Flash. So there you have it – numbers, statistics, data! Don’t you love data? At SC2Links, we love data. We ESPECIALLY love digging through the data to scope out what you do enjoy, to realize what you don’t enjoy, and to figure out what we can do to make this site the #1 Starcraft 2 site on the planet. Without your visits, we don’t exist – your loyalty to the site means so much to us (seriously, THANK YOU). We craft, refine, and build upon new innovative ideas for the site, day in and day out. The ultimate goal? Make eSports easier to access for every person on the planet. How to accomplish this? Create the best user experience possible, shatter perceived notions of business development, and always exceed expectations. The beauty of all this? It’s just the beginning. Stay tuned in 2013.. 😀 |
Quick switch: In neurons stimulated by electrical bursts (red), more than 1,500 genes are either methylated or demethylated. A brief burst of electrical stimulation can induce widespread changes to the chemical markings on DNA that affect its expression, according to a study published 28 August in Nature Neuroscience1. The finding upends the conventional wisdom that methyl groups added to DNA are permanent fixtures in a mature cell. These so-called epigenetic changes, which help switch genes on and off, have been implicated in a host of diseases, including autism. The new study shows that in neurons in the adult mouse brain, brain cell activity can cause rapid methylation or demethylation at more than one percent of DNA methylation sites. “These epigenetic marks are not as stable as we used to think,” notes lead investigator Hongjun Song, professor of neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “They’re very dynamic and can be changed by neuronal activity.” Many of the sites that change their methylation status with activity are located on genes tied to the synapse, the junction between neurons, and to autism, such as NLGN3 and GRIP1. “I’m really excited about the fact that these sites could change, and that this might be where we could be looking for [relevance to] autism spectrum disorders,” notes Janine LaSalle, professor of medical microbiology and immunology at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved with the new study. In July, LaSalle and her colleagues published a genome-wide map of DNA methylation in human neurons. Several lines of evidence implicate epigenetics in autism. For example, GADD45B, a gene needed for demethylation, is overexpressed in the brains of people with autism compared with controls. Similarly, the autism-related disorder Rett syndrome stems from a mutation in MeCP2, which encodes a protein involved in DNA methylation. And last year, researchers analyzing blood cells found that many genes are methylated differently between identical twins of whom only one has autism2. Active sites: Humans have scores of cell types, nearly all emerging from the same DNA blueprint. Methylation is the crucial difference: A distinct subset of genes is shut on or off in neurons, for example, compared with kidney cells or blood cells. “Methylation marks are important for cell identity and so they don’t really change,” Song says. Over the past few years, however, researchers have found a handful of places in the genome where DNA methylation does change. For example, in 2009 Song’s team showed that stimulation of neurons can demethylate the genes FGF1 and BDNF in the mouse hippocampus, a region important for learning and memory3. But no one knew the full extent of this so-called activity-dependent regulation. The mouse genome has some 21 million CpG sites, at which methylation occurs. In the new study, Song’s team analyzed 219,991 of these sites in neurons in a part of the mouse hippocampus before and after electroconvulsive stimulation, a brief electrical jolt that is sometimes used to treat people with severe depression. The researchers found 1,892 sites where activity spurred methylation and 1,158 sites where it triggered demethylation — a total of 1.4 percent of all CpG sites. “The adult brain architecture may be a lot more plastic or adaptable than previously thought,” notes Valerie Hu, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The researchers also showed that it’s not only electrical stimulation that can cause methylation changes — exercise can do it, too. They repeated the analysis after giving the mice three days of free access to a running wheel and found that 32 of 48 sitesshowed the same methylation changes after running as they did four hours after the electric shock. These findings suggest that abnormal methylation patterns could be restored with drug or behavioral interventions, Hu says. Part of the reason no one had found these changes before is because “they’re not in the regions where people would normally look,” Song says. Previous studies zoomed in on promoters, regulatory regions just upstream of genes. But this study found that most changes happen either in the middle of genes or in non-coding regions of the genome. “This raises a lot of questions about what exactly they are doing there, and we don’t know,” Song says. The location is important because methylation at the promoter tends to silence genes, whereas in the middle, it can boost expression. Although this is a much broader analysis than has been attempted before, it’s probably an underestimate of the number of sites that are sensitive to neuronal activity, says Hu. “They really only looked at a sliver of all the CpG sites,” LaSalle notes. “You get the feeling that there probably were a lot of genes that weren’t sampled at all.” What’s more, even though most genes have 50 to 100 CpG sites, the study sampled only one site per gene. It would be interesting to perform the same analysis on mouse models of autism, especially those based on genes that have not been linked to the synapse, LaSalle says. It could be that some autism genes cause methylation changes that in turn affect synaptic genes. Song says he plans to analyze methylation changes in mouse models of autism, schizophrenia and other mental disorders. “There are so many different things we can look at,” Song says. “I didn’t want this many targets. It was a lot more than we bargained for.” References: 1: Guo J.U. et al. Nat. Neurosci. Epub ahead of print (2011) PubMed 2: Nguyen A. et al. FASEB J. 24, 3036-3051 (2010) PubMed 3: Ma D.K. et al. Science 323, 1074-1077 (2009) PubMed |
Download the current version of the world Play for one year of game time Do a write-up for their year, upload maps, etc. Vote on which other player's world they like best Sooo... playing my turn of a run-of-the-mill succession game, I started feeling bad because I was having all of the Fun. Chatting with my fellow players, we came up with what I think is a "new" twist: a hybrid between a succession game and a golf scramble.For those who aren't golfers, the way a scramble works is like this: on any given hole, the golfers on a team all tee off. Then, they decide amongst themselves which ball was the best, and they all take their next shot from that same spot. Rinse and repeat until the ball is in the hole.In DF-land, it would work something like this: Each player would...Then the votes are tallied, the "winning" fortress is used as the "current version" and everyone starts over again at step one.It's a format that doesn't depend on everyone doing their turn in a timely manner, is more playing than sitting around and watching someone else play, and could provide for some really interesting choices. It might also allow a player to play their turn more aggressively knowing that there will be more conservative options to fall back on if it all goes straight to HFS.So... has this been done before? Was it awesome?Regardless of the answer to those two questions, who's interested in getting one kicked off? I'll do all the hard work, you just have to play DF and do some nifty write-ups. (and isn't the fun part bragging about your fort anyway?) |
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