text stringlengths 0 100k |
|---|
Ask me to name the best mobile operating system out there and my answer would be Android. Ask me to name the best phone, however, and I’d say the iPhone. The reason for my seemingly bipolar preferences can be conveyed in the form of a simple truism: size does matter. At their outset, Android handsets were a humble breed, aiming merely to emulate the iPhone and catch up with it on important software fronts like web browsing, app selection, and general responsiveness. Alongside that drive for internal self-improvement, there was a corresponding trend among handset makers to enhance and differentiate their physical products with various hardware upgrades. Motorola did very well with its keyboard-equipped Droid range, for example, while Samsung’s big investment in AMOLED display technology paid off in its popularity with saturation-hungry consumers. For HTC, the big cutting edge feature was literally bigness. Following the great success of its 4.3-inch HD2 running Windows Mobile, the Taiwanese company took on the mantra of "bigger is better" with its Android range and has rapidly progressed past the 4.3-inch mark of the EVO 4G and ThunderBolt, through the 4.7-inch Titan and One X, to its current flagship 5-inch Butterfly model. The HD2 was the biggest phone of its time and every one of the subsequent models has led the way in giving users more screen real estate, but there’s one problem with what HTC did: everyone copied it. LG’s best Android device at the moment is the 4.7-inch Optimus G, Sony has just started taking pre-orders for the 5-inch Xperia Z, which is matched in size by the ZTE Grand S and dwarfed by the utterly absurd Huawei Ascend Mate, a 6.1-inch enormity. With Samsung, you get a choice between the 4.8-inch Galaxy S III or the even more generously-proportioned Galaxy Note II at 5.5 inches. Android needs a flagship phone that isn’t actually the size of a ship Every one of the foregoing Android device manufacturers offers handsets of smaller sizes, of course, but as you move down in dimensions, the sacrifices you’re asked to make become increasingly intolerable. Samsung’s Galaxy S III Mini and HTC’s One SV are perfect examples of well-proportioned, nicely designed devices that would make great alternatives to the supersized Android flagships or Apple’s 4-inch iPhone. But consider their limited spec sheets, their lower-resolution displays, their poorer cameras, and — most importantly — their lesser chances of receiving prompt Android software updates, and you’ll immediately limit the selection of your next Android phone to the oversized pocket busters enumerated above. Google hasn’t helped matters by making its last two Nexus handsets closer in size to a tablet than something a regular human being might consider a phone. Remember when we all laughed at the idea of making phone calls on the 5-inch Dell Streak? The ergonomic challenges of these bulky devices haven’t actually gone away just because everyone’s selling them — they’re still there and so is the demand for high-quality, high-spec handsets in the middle size range of 4 to 4.3 inches. Sometimes the only way to move forward is to take a (small) step back It used to be that Android vendors competed with one another by being different. Today, being different entails an end to this breathless chase for ever-larger numbers and a return to old-fashioned considerations like ease of use and good ergonomics. The smartphone market has ample room for large, domineering displays, but it’s also hungry for those same zero-compromise spec sheets in smaller form factors. Neglecting size-conscious, but still discerning, phone buyers is costing Android sales to the ever-present Apple alternative. Android phone makers don’t need to copy the iPhone to be successful, but neither should they fear standing up right next to it on an equal footing. If BlackBerry can be brave enough to stake its future on a 4.2-inch phone, why not Android vendors? |
A voter castes his ballot during the New Hampshire primary. AP Photo/David Goldman A complex set of demographic factors are at play in this year’s presidential election, but most them are working against the GOP. We know that the racial identity of the average American is changing, and with this demographic shift comes monumental political consequences. We already witnessed the effects of this in the 2008 presidential election, for example, when young and minority voters carried Barack Obama to victory. That year, it seemed, a switch flipped in favor of the Democratic party. And if voting preferences and turnout trends continue as they have been in the past seveal elections, America’s increasingly diverse electorate isn’t going to make it easy to flip this switch back. That’s according to a comprehensive new report put together by the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Center for American Progress. In it, authors Ruy Teixeira, Rob Griffin, and William Frey simulate six possible scenarios based on past voting patterns and project a range of outcomes for the presidential election this year, and subsequent ones through 2032. “If nothing changes, in terms of party strategies and party appeals, I think it’s a fair statement to say...that [demography] favors the Democrats,” Teixeira said at a panel discussion about the report this week. “What it means is that all else cannot remain equal, because I don’t really believe that the parties are going to remain static. Demography is not destiny in the sense that it pre-ordains certain kinds of outcomes. It pre-ordains certain kinds of shifts in strategy.” Trends that help and hurt the Democrats The electorate that voted for President Obama in 2012 looked significantly different from the one that elected George W. Bush for his first term at the beginning of the century. In 2012, the share of minorities among eligible voters was 29 percent, up from 23 percent in 2000 (above). If that doesn’t seem like a significant difference, consider this: In 2000, only eight states and the District of Columbia had higher than a 30 percent share of minority voters; In 2012, the number of such states grew to 17 (plus D.C.). With each election year, non-white political clout is strengthening, in some states more than others. The voter turnout rate among minorities also jumped up in the last two elections. During the 2012 election, black voter turnout was actually higher than white turnout for the first time in history (pictured above). Latinos and Asians also came out to vote at higher levels in the last two presidential elections than in any other since 1992. Minorities generally tend to vote for Democrats, so higher turnout is generally beneficial for them. One trend that’s been working against the Democrats is that the country’s white population has been growing older. This is good news for Republicans because older, white Americans are generally more likely to vote, and vote conservative. Plus, they still remain the dominant voting bloc in most states. So who will win in 2016? This election year, a complex set of demographic factors are at play. Latino voters, in particular, have reached record high numbers. Single women, too, may have considerable political sway this time around. On the flip side, the fact that many low-income Americans are not feeling the economic recovery could depress voter enthusiasm, as Anna Greenberg, a political consultant at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, noted. Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... These factors are important to keep in mind while looking at the six hypothetical scenarios below, which the researchers designed to estimate the direction of the popular and the electoral college votes in this election: Scenarios A, B, and C assume that voters of each age group, race, and state will show roughly the same turnout rates and partisan preferences as they did in 2012, 2008, and 2004, respectively. The next three are modifications of scenario A: Scenario D , or the “maximum minority turnout” scenario assumes that Hispanics and Asians will turn out to vote at the same rate as their white counterparts did in 2012. , or the “maximum minority turnout” scenario assumes that Hispanics and Asians will turn out to vote at the same rate as their white counterparts did in 2012. Scenario E assumes that a higher share of Hispanics, Asians, and other “new minorities” will support the GOP within all age groups and states than they did in 2012. assumes that a higher share of Hispanics, Asians, and other “new minorities” will support the GOP within all age groups and states than they did in 2012. Scenario F is what Brookings’ Frey, who co-authored the report, calls the “Donald Trump Dream” scenario. In this one, a higher share of white voters will support the Republican candidate than they did in 2012. The graph below shows the resulting differences in the share of popular votes between the two parties for each of the above scenarios in the 2016 presidential election. The “Donald Trump Dream”—scenario F— is the only one that would lead to a clear Republican win in 2016. Even scenario C, which mirrors the voting patterns of the 2004 election Bush won, doesn’t favor the GOP here. That said, Democrats would win the popular vote in this scenario by only a hair—the margin of victory here would be even lower than what it was for Bush in 2000. And here are the electoral college vote tallies generated by the simulation for each scenario, alongside maps showing red, blue, and swing states: What’s interesting here is that in scenario C, Republicans—who lose the popular vote—win the electoral college vote. (This mirrors Bush’s win in 2000.) Electoral college vote tallies for all other scenarios show the same outcomes as those projected for the popular votes. Where you can really see the effect of America’s shifting demographics is the change in swing states. Take scenario A, for example, in which Americans vote in exactly the same way they did in the last election. Nevada, which was a swing state in 2012, now turns blue. Georgia, which has traditionally been red, becomes a swing state. That Asian and Latino populations are fanning inwards from traditional immigrant hubs along the coast, and that the black population is migrating to the South to opportunity-rich cities like Atlanta, play a role in these outcomes. Of course, a Republican win is definitely conceivable in 2016 and future elections. After all, whatever Trump is doing certainly seems to be working to get out the white vote, at least in the primaries. But alienating minority workers is likely not going to be a longterm solution for the GOP, Frey says. Because even the edge Republicans have in their most favorable scenario—the “Donald Trump’s Dream” or scenario F—will shrink and eventually disappear at some point over the next two decades. Frey estimates that even in scenario F, the popular vote will flip in favor of Democrats by the 2028 election and the electoral college vote will be theirs by 2032. “Demographic change is going to have large effects on elections going forward,” Teixeira concluded at the report’s presentation Thursday. “I think the way scenarios play out suggest that a one-dimensional strategy on the part of either party is going to produce some problems. So it shouldn’t be ‘either-or’… it should be ‘both-and.’” |
This article is about specialization of function between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. For specialization of brain function generally, see Functional specialization (brain) lateralized. The human brain is divided into two hemispheres–left and right. Scientists continue to explore how some cognitive functions tend to be dominated by one side or the other; that is, how they are The lateralization of brain function is the tendency for some neural functions or cognitive processes to be specialized to one side of the brain or the other. The medial longitudinal fissure separates the human brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres, connected by the corpus callosum. Although the macrostructure of the two hemispheres appears to be almost identical, different composition of neuronal networks allows for specialized function that is different in each hemisphere. Lateralization of brain structures is based on general trends expressed in healthy patients; however, there are numerous counterexamples to each generalization. Each human's brain develops differently leading to unique lateralization in individuals. This is different from specialization as lateralization refers only to the function of one structure divided between two hemispheres. Specialization is much easier to observe as a trend since it has a stronger anthropological history.[1] The best example of an established lateralization is that of Broca's and Wernicke's areas where both are often found exclusively on the left hemisphere. These areas frequently correspond to handedness, however, meaning that the localization of these areas is regularly found on the hemisphere corresponding to the dominant hand (anatomically on the opposite side). Function lateralization such as semantics, intonation, accentuation, prosody, etc. has since been called into question and largely been found to have a neuronal basis in both hemispheres.[2] Another example is that each hemisphere in the brain tends to represent one side of the body. In the cerebellum this is the same bodyside, but in the forebrain this is predominantly the contralateral side. Contents Lateralized functions Edit Language Edit Language functions such as grammar, vocabulary and literal meaning are typically lateralized to the left hemisphere, especially in right handed individuals.[3] While language production is left-lateralized in up to 90% of right-handers, it is more bilateral, or even right-lateralized, in approximately 50% of left-handers.[4] Broca's area and Wernicke's area areas associated with the production of speech and comprehension of speech, respectively, are located in the left cerebral hemisphere for about 95% of right-handers, but about 70% of left-handers.[5]:69 Auditory and visual processing Edit The processing of visual and auditory stimuli, spatial manipulation, facial perception, and artistic ability are represented bilaterally.[4] Numerical estimation, comparison and online calculation depend on bilateral parietal regions[6][7] while exact calculation and fact retrieval are associated with left parietal regions, perhaps due to their ties to linguistic processing.[6][7] Value systems Edit The two hemispheres even appear to have different value systems. The left hemisphere prefers to reduce moral questions to arithmetic, while the right hemisphere sees the "bigger picture." [8] Clinical significance Edit Depression is linked with a hyperactive right hemisphere, with evidence of selective involvement in "processing negative emotions, pessimistic thoughts and unconstructive thinking styles", as well as vigilance, arousal and self-reflection, and a relatively hypoactive left hemisphere, "specifically involved in processing pleasurable experiences" and "relatively more involved in decision-making processes".[9] Additionally, "left hemisphere lesions result in an omissive response bias or error pattern whereas right hemisphere lesions result in a commissive response bias or error pattern."[10] The delusional misidentification syndromes, reduplicative paramnesia and Capgras delusion are also often the result of right hemisphere lesions.[11] Hemisphere damage Edit Damage to either the right or left hemisphere, and its resulting deficits provide insight into the function of the damaged area. Left hemisphere damage has many effects on language production and perception. Damage or lesions to the right hemisphere can result in a lack of emotional prosody or intonation when speaking. Right hemisphere damage also has grave effects on understanding discourse. People with damage to the right hemisphere have a reduced ability to generate inferences, comprehend and produce main concepts, and a reduced ability to manage alternative meanings. Furthermore, people with right hemisphere damage often exhibit discourse that is abrupt and perfunctory or verbose and excessive. They can also have pragmatic deficits in situations of turn taking, topic maintenance and shared knowledge. Lateral brain damage can also affect visual perceptual spatial resolution. People with left hemisphere damage may have impaired perception of high resolution, or detailed, aspects of an image. People with right hemisphere damage may have impaired perception of low resolution, or big picture, aspects of an image. Plasticity Edit If a specific region of the brain, or even an entire hemisphere, is injured or destroyed, its functions can sometimes be assumed by a neighboring region in the same hemisphere or the corresponding region in the other hemisphere, depending upon the area damaged and the patient's age.[12] When injury interferes with pathways from one area to another, alternative (indirect) connections may develop to communicate information with detached areas, despite the inefficiencies. Broca's aphasia Edit Broca's aphasia is a specific type of expressive aphasia and is so named due to the aphasia that results from damage or lesions to the Broca's area of the brain, that exists most commonly in the left inferior frontal hemisphere. Thus, the aphasia that develops from the lack of functioning of the Broca's area is an expressive and non-fluent aphasia. It is called 'non-fluent' due the issues that arise because Broca's area is critical for language pronunciation and production. The area controls some motor aspects of speech production and articulation of thoughts to words and as such lesions to the area result in the specific non-fluent aphasia.[13] Wernicke's aphasia Edit Wernicke's aphasia is the result of damage to the area of the brain that is commonly in the left hemisphere above the sylvian fissure. Damage to this area causes primarily a deficit in language comprehension. While the ability to speak fluently with normal melodic intonation is spared, the language produced by a person with Wernicke's aphasia is riddled with semantic errors, and may sound nonsensical to the listener. Wernicke's aphasia is characterized by phonemic paraphasias, neologism or jargon. Another characteristic of a person with Wernicke's aphasia is that they are unconcerned by the mistakes that they are making. Society and culture Edit Evolutionary advantage Edit The widespread lateralization of many vertebrate animals indicates an evolutionary advantage associated with the specialization of each hemisphere.[1] History Edit Additional images Edit Ventricles of brain and basal ganglia. Superior view. Horizontal section. Deep dissection Ventricles of brain and basal ganglia. Superior view. Horizontal section. Deep dissection See also Edit References Edit |
On May 15th Yann LeCun answered “ask me anything” questions on Reddit. We hand-picked some of his thoughts and grouped them by topic for your enjoyment. Toronto, Montreal and New York All three groups are strong and complementary. Geoff (who spends more time at Google than in Toronto now) and Russ Salakhutdinov like RBMs and deep Boltzmann machines. I like the idea of Boltzmann machines (it’s a beautifully simple concept) but it doesn’t scale well. Also, I totally hate sampling. Yoshua and his colleagues have focused a lot on various unsupervised learning, including denoising auto-encoders, contracting auto-encoders. They are not allergic to sampling like I am. On the application side, they have worked on text, not so much on images. In our lab at NYU (Rob Fergus, David Sontag, me and our students and postdocs), we have been focusing on sparse auto-encoders for unsupervised learning. They have the advantage of scaling well. We have also worked on applications, mostly to visual perception. Numenta, Vicarious, NuPic, HTM, CLA, etc. Jeff Hawkins has the right intuition and the right philosophy. Some of us have had similar ideas for several decades. Certainly, we all agree that AI systems of the future will be hierarchical (it’s the very idea of deep learning) and will use temporal prediction. But the difficulty is to instantiate these concepts and reduce them to practice. Another difficulty is grounding them on sound mathematical principles (is this algorithm minimizing an objective function?). I think Jeff Hawkins, Dileep George and others greatly underestimated the difficulty of reducing these conceptual ideas to practice. As far as I can tell, HTM has not been demonstrated to get anywhere close to state of the art on any serious task. I still think [Vicarious] is mostly hype. There is no public information about the underlying technology. The principals don’t have a particularly good track record of success. And the only demo is way behind what you can do with “plain vanilla” convolutional nets (see this Google blog post and this ICLR 2014 paper and this video of the ICLR talk). HTM, NuPIC, and Numenta received a lot more publicity than they deserved because of the Internet millionaire / Silocon Valley celebrity status of Jeff Hawkins. But I haven’t seen any result that would give substance to the hype. Don’t get fooled by people who claim to have a solution to Artificial General Intelligence, who claim to have AI systems that work “just like the human brain”, or who claim to have figured out how the brain works (well, except if it’s Geoff Hinton making the claim). Ask them what error rate they get on MNIST or ImageNet. Some advice Seriously, I don’t like the phrase “Big Data”. I prefer “Data Science”, which is the automatic (or semi-automatic) extraction of knowledge from data. That is here to stay, it’s not a fad. The amount of data generated by our digital world is growing exponentially with high rate (at the same rate our hard-drives and communication networks are increasing their capacity). But the amount of human brain power in the world is not increasing nearly as fast. This means that now or in the near future most of the knowledge in the world will be extracted by machine and reside in machines. It’s inevitable. En entire industry is building itself around this, and a new academic discipline is emerging. What areas do you think are most promising right now for people who are just starting out? representation learning (the current crop of deep learning methods is just one way of doing it) learning long-term dependencies marrying representation learning with structured prediction and/or reasoning unsupervised representation learning, particularly prediction-based methods for temporal/sequential signals marrying representation learning and reinforcement learning using learning to speed up the solution of complex inference problems theory: do theory (any theory) on deep learning/representation learning understanding the landscape of objective functions in deep learning in terms of applications: natural language understanding (e.g. for machine translation), video understanding learning complex control. Do you think that deep learning would be a good tool for finding similarities in the medical domain (e.g. between different cases)? Yes, look up papers on metric learning, searching for “siamese networks”, DrLIM (Dimensionality Reduction by Learning and Invariant Mapping), NCA (Neigborhood Component Analysis), WSABIE…. Larger networks tend to work better. Make your network bigger and bigger until the accuracy stops increasing. Then regularize the hell out of it. Then make it bigger still and pre-train it with unsupervised learning. Speech is one of those domains where we have access to ridiculously large amounts of data and a very large number of categories. So, it’s very favorable for supervised learning. There are theoretical results that suggest that learning good parameter settings for a (smallish) neural network can be as hard computationally as breaking the RSA crypto system. The limitations you point out do not concern just backprop, but all learning algorithms that use gradient-based optimization. These methods only work to the extent that the landscape of the objective function is well behaved. You can construct pathological cases where the objective function is like a golf course: flat with a tiny hole somewhere. Gradient-based methods won’t work with that. The trick is to stay away from those pathological cases. One trick is to make the network considerably larger than the minimum size required to solve the task. This creates lots and lots of equivalent local minima and makes them easy to find. The problem is that large networks may overfit, and we may have to regularize the hell out of them (e.g. using drop out). The “learning boolean formula = code cracking” results pertain to pathological cases and to exact solutions. In most applications, we only care about approximate solutions. Physics I learned a lot by reading things that are not apparently connected with AI or computer science (my undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, and my formal CS training is pretty small). For example, I have always been interested in physics, and I have read tons of physics textbooks and papers. I learned a lot about path integrals (which is formally equivalent to the “forward algorithm” in hidden Markov models). I have also learned a ton from statistical physics books. The notions of partition functions, entropy, free energy, variational methods etc, that are so prevalent in the graphical models literature all come from statistical physics. In the early 90’s my friend and Bell Labs colleague John Denker and I worked quite a bit on the physics of computation. In 1991, we attended a workshop at the Santa Fe Institute in which we heard a fascinating talk by John Archibald Wheeler entitled “It from Bits”. John Wheeler was the theoretical physicist who coined the phrase “black hole”. Many physicists like Wojciech Zurek (the organizer of the workshop, Gerard T’Hooft, and many others have the intuition that physics can be reduced to information transformation. Like Kolmogorov, I am fascinated by the concept of complexity, which is at the root of learning theory, compression, and thermodynamics. Zurek has an interesting series of work on a definition of physical entropy that uses Kolmogorov/Chaitin/Solomonoff algorithmic complexity. But progress has been slow. Fascinating topics. Most of my Bell Labs colleagues were physicists, and I loved interacting with them. Physics is about modeling actual systems and processes. It’s grounded in the real world. You have to figure out what’s important, know what to ignore, and know how to approximate. These are skills you need to conceptualize, model, and analyze ML models. Math I use a lot of math, sometimes at the conceptual level more than at the “detailed proof” level. A lot of ideas come from mathematical intuition. Proofs always come later. I don’t do a lot of proofs. Others are better than me at proving theorems. There is a huge amount of interest for representation learning from the applied mathematics community. Being a faculty member at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Science at NYU, which is ranked #1 in applied math in the US, I am quite familiar with the world of applied math (even though I am definitely not a mathematician). Theses are folks who have long been interested in representing data (mostly natural signals like audio and images). These are people who have worked on wavelet transforms, sparse coding and sparse modeling, compressive sensing, manifold learning, numerical optimization, scientific computing, large-scale linear algebra, fast transform (FFT, Fast Multipole methods). This community has a lot to say about how to represent data in high-dimensional spaces. In fact, several of my postdocs (e.g. Joan Bruna, Arthur Szlam) have come from that community because I think they can help with cracking the unsupervised learning problem. I do not believe that classical learning theory with “IID samples, convex optimization, and supervised classification and regression” is sufficient for representation learning. SVM do not naturally emerge from VC theory. SVM happen to simple enough for VC theory to have specific results about them. Those results are cool and beautiful, but they have no practical consequence. No one uses generalization bounds to do model selection. Everyone in their right mind use (cross)validation. The theory of deep learning is a wide open field. Everything is up for the taking. Go for it. How do you approach utilizing and researching machine learning techniques that are supported almost entirely empirically, as opposed to mathematically? Also in what situations have you noticed some of these techniques fail? You have to realize that our theoretical tools are very weak. Sometimes, we have good mathematical intuitions for why a particular technique should work. Sometimes our intuition ends up being wrong. Every reasonable ML technique has some sort of mathematical guarantee. For example, neural nets have a finite VC dimension, hence they are consistent and have generalization bounds. Now, these bounds are terrible, and cannot be used for any practical purpose. But every single bound is terrible and useless in practice (including SVM bounds). As long as your method minimizes some sort of objective function and has a finite capacity (or is properly regularized), you are on solid theoretical grounds. The questions become: how well does my method work on this particular problem, and how large is the set of problems on which it works well. Kernel methods Kernel methods are great for many purposes, but they are merely glorified template matching. Despite the beautiful math, a kernel machine is nothing more than one layer of template matchers (one per training sample) where the templates are the training samples, and one layer of linear combinations on top. There is nothing magical about margin maximization. It’s just another way of saying “L2 regularization” (despite the cute math). Let me be totally clear about my opinion of kernel methods. I like kernel methods (as Woody Allen would say “some of my best friends are kernel methods”). Kernel methods are a great generic tool for classification. But they have limits, and the cute mathematics that accompany them does not give them magical properties. SVMs were invented by my friends and colleagues at Bell Labs, Isabelle Guyon, Vladimir Vapnik, and Bernhardt Boser, and later refined by Corinna Cortes and Chris Burges. All these people and I were members of the Adaptive Systems Research Department lead by Larry Jackel. We were all sitting in the same corridor in AT&T Bell Labs’ Holmdel building in New Jersey. At some point I became the head of that group and was Vladimir’s boss. Other people from that group included Leon Bottou and Patrice Simard (now both at Microsoft Research). My job as the department head was to make sure people like Vladimir could work on their research with minimal friction and distraction. My opinion of kernel method has not changed with the emergence of MKL and metric learning. I proposed/used metric learning to learn embeddings with neural nets before it was cool to do this with kernel machines. Learning complex/hierarchical/non-linear features/representations/metrics cannot be done with kernel methods as it can be done with deep architectures. If you are interested in metric learning, look up this, this, or that. ConvNets It’s important to remind people that convolutional nets were always the record holder on MNIST. SVMs never really managed to beat ConvNets on MNIST. And SVMs (without hand-crafted features and with a generic kernel) were always left in the dust on more complex image recognition problems (e.g. NORB, face detection….). The first commercially-viable check reading system (deployed by AT&T/NCR in 1996) used a ConvNet, not an SVM. Getting the attention of the computer vision community was a struggle because, except for face detection and handwriting recognition, the results of supervised ConvNets on the standard CV benchmarks were OK but not great. This was largely due to the fact that the training sets were very small. I’m talking about the Caltech-101, Caltech-256 and PASCAL datasets. We had excellent, record-breaking results on a number of tasks like semantic segmentation, pedestrian detection, face detection, road sign recognition and a few other problems. But the CV community played little attention to it. As soon as ImageNet came out and as soon as we figured out how to train gigantic ConvNets on GPUs, ConvNets took over. That struggle took time, but in the end people are swayed by results. I must say that many senior members of the CV community were very welcoming of new ideas. I really feel part of the CV community, and I hold no grudge against anyone. Still, for the longest time, it was very difficult to get ConvNet papers accepted in conferences like CVPR and ICCV until last year (even at NIPS until about 2007). Deconvolutional networks DeconvNets are the generative counterpart of feed-forward ConvNets. Eventually, we will figure out how to merge ConvNet and DeconvNet so that we have a feed-forward+feed-back system that can be trained supervised or unsupervised. The plan Rob Fergus and I devised was always that we would eventually marry the two approaches. Unsupervised learning The interest of the ML community in representation learning was rekindled by early results with unsupervised learning: stacked sparse auto-encoders, RBMs, etc. It is true that the recent practical success of deep learning in image and speech all use purely supervised backprop (mostly applied to convolutional nets). This success is largely due to dramatic increases in the size of datasets and the power of computers (brought about by GPU), which allowed us to train gigantic networks (often regularized with drop-out). Still, there are a few applications where unsupervised pre-training does bring an improvement over purely supervised learning. This tends to be for applications in which the amount of labeled data is small and/or the label set is weak. A good example from my lab is pedestrian detection. Our CVPR 2013 paper shows a big improvement in performance with ConvNets that unsupervised pre-training (convolutional sparse auto-encoders). The training set is relatively small (INRIA pedestrian dataset) and the label set is weak (pedestrian / non pedestrian). But everyone agrees that the future is in unsupervised learning. Unsupervised learning is believed to be essential for video and language. Few of us believe that we have found a good solution to unsupervised learning. I don’t believe that there is a single criterion to measure the effectiveness of unsupervised learning. Unsupervised learning is about discovering the internal structure of the data, discovering mutual dependencies between input variables, and disentangling the independent explanatory factors of variations. Generally, unsupervised learning is a means to an end. There are four main uses for unsupervised learning: 1. learning features (or representations) 2. visualization/exploration 3. compression 4. synthesis Only the first is interesting to me (the other uses are interesting too, just not on my own radar screen). If the features are to be used in some sort of predictive model (classification, regression, etc), then that’s what we should use to measure the performance of our algorithm. Torch (At Facebook) We are using Torch7 for many projects (as does Deep Mind and several groups at Google) and will be contributing to the public version. Torch is a numerical/scientific computing extension of LuaJIT with an ML/neural net library on top. The huge advantage of LuaJIT over Python is that it way, way faster, leaner, simpler, and that interfacing C/C++/CUDA code to it is incredibly easy and fast. We are using Torch for most of our research projects (and some of our development projects) at Facebook. Deep Mind is also using Torch in a big way (largely because my former student and Torch-co-maintainer Koray Kavukcuoglu sold them on it). Since the Deep Mind acquisition, folks in the Google Brain group in Mountain View have also started to use it. Facebook, NYU, and Google/Deep Mind all have custom CUDA back-ends for fast/parallel convolutional network training. Some of this code is not (yet) part of the public distribution. You could say that Torch is the direct heir of Lush, though the maintainers are different. Lush was mostly maintained by Leon Bottou and me. Ralf Juengling took over the development of Lush2 a few years ago. Torch is maintained by Ronan Collobert (IDIAP), Koray Kavukcuoglu (Deep Mind. former PhD student of mine) and Clément Farabet (running his own startup. Also a former PhD student of mine). We have used Torch as the main research platform in my NYU lab for quite a while. Here is a tutorial, with code.scripts for ConvNets. Also, the wonderful Torch7 Cheatsheet. Torch7 is what is being used for deep learning R&D at NYU, at Facebook AI Research, at Deep Mind, and at Google Brain. The future Deep learning has become the dominant method for acoustic modeling in speech recognition, and is quickly becoming the dominant method for several vision tasks such as object recognition, object detection, and semantic segmentation. The next frontier for deep learning are language understanding, video, and control/planning (e.g. for robotics or dialog systems). Integrating deep learning (or representation learning) with reasoning and making unsupervised learning actually work are two big challenges for the next several years. The direction of history is that the more data we get, the more our methods rely on learning. Ultimately, the task use learning end to end. That’s what happened for speech, handwriting, and object recognition. It’s bound to happen for NLP. Natural language processing is the next frontier for deep learning. There is a lot of research activity in that space right now. There is a lot of interesting work on neural language models and recurrent nets from Yoshua Bengio, Toma Mikolov, Antoine Bordes and others. Integrating deep learning (or representation learning) with reasoning and making unsupervised learning actually work are two big challenges for the next several years. What are some of the important problems in the field of AI/ML that need to be solved within the next 5-10 years? Learning with temporal/sequential signals: language, video, speech. Marrying deep/representation learning with reasoning or structured prediction. What do you think are the biggest applications machine learning will see in the coming decade? Natural language understanding and natural dialog systems. Self-driving cars. Robots (maintenance robots and such). Epilogue That’s all, folks. If you want more, there’s the NYU Course on Big Data, Large Scale Machine Learning with Yann and John Langford as instructors and materials for the 2014 Deep Learning Course, including some videos. |
Over 50 leaders of Muslim and Jewish communities from across Europe convened in Brussels on Monday for the first Gathering of European Muslim and Jewish Leaders to discuss initiatives for better relations between the two communities. At the opening session Imam Dr. Abduljalil Sajid from Britain spoke prayers, in which he included the victims of the recent Carmel fire disaster in Israel and the floods in Pakistan. Sending Aid Boston's Jewish federation provides Haifa with funds Ynetnews Jewish community in Haifa's twin city raises $200,000 for aid efforts following Carmel fire disaster which threatens Denia neighborhood Boston's Jewish federation provides Haifa with funds The leaders’ declaration urges “cooperative projects to succor the poor and homeless of all backgrounds, to help protect new immigrants who are threatened by hatred and xenophobia, and to heal the environment, bringing together Muslim and Jewish youth for joint programming.” It also denounces all forms of violence in the name of any religion or ideology. FFEU President and WJC Vice President Rabbi Marc Schneier called the first Brussels Gathering of European Muslim and Jewish leaders “a promising beginning.” He stated: “Today, we have hopefully kick-started a movement that will spread across Europe. The recipe really is quite simple: our two communities must focus more on what unites us than what separates us. We also must restrain the radicals within our own ranks and make sure they don’t gain the upper hand.” 'Starting at the micro level' Dr. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, declared: “I think it is very important that Jews and Muslims start talking more with each other, and less about the other. Pointing the finger at the other side and accuse it of being the root cause of all evil on this planet may be easy and convenient, but most of the time it is wrong – and counter-productive. "How are all the disparate nations of Europe going to co-exist if citizens of the same country can’t share neighborhoods? We need to start at the micro level to succeed at the macro level. We need to pay attention to every level of intolerance, hate and xenophobia.” Senior representatives of both faiths from Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States attended the one-day gathering, which concluded with a Diplomatic Dinner attended by numerous ambassadors posted in Brussels. |
Why take a boring, black taxi, when you can take a cab geeked out with Madoka Magica? Thanks to a campaign between Choei-Taxi and the Puella Magi Madoka Magica Art Exhibit that's making its way to Sapporo, these limited service taxis with Madoka Magica wraps will be running in town from the evening of October 3 until the end of November. The left side of the taxi shows series heroine Madoka Kaname relaxing with Kyubey, while the right side shows her and the rest of the characters: Homura Akemi, Mami Tomoe, Sayaka Miki, Kyōko Sakura, and Nagisa Momoe, the latter of whom is being introduced in the new film, Rebellion . You can check out images and descriptions from the official Twitter accounts of the Madoka event and Choei Taxi. The exhibit is timed in accordance with the theatrical release of the third Madoka Magica film, Rebellion, which will open in Japan on October 26. The art exhibit will be in Sapporo from November 8 to November 10, and will be open from 11AM to 9PM JST, with doors closing at 8:30PM. [Via Yaraon!] |
Buoyed by relaxation of norms, NRI tycoon Yusuffali M A, who heads the Dubai-based retail conglomerate Lulu Group, has announced investment of over Rs 7,000 crore in for setting up shopping malls and hotels. Ali said his group will invest Rs 4,650 crore in Kerala, Rs 1,000 crore in and Rs 1,410 crore in in the hospitality and retail sector. Complimenting the government for raising cap for various key sectors, Ali estimated that investment to the tune of $150 billion will flow into India's retail, aviation, tourism and manufacturing sectors from the countries in the next few years. He said Prime Minister Modi's outreach to a number of nations coupled with new initiatives to attract foreign investment have made the most talked about destination in the region which is eying to broaden its non-oil investment. "There will be a tremendous push from investors into as the they are looking to broaden their non-oil investment," he said. Ali's Lulu Group, having an annual turnover of $6.3 billion, has already made major investments in retail, hospitality and food processing sectors in India. The Forbes magazine had last year listed Ali, a first generation migrant to the Middle East, as the 30th wealthiest Indian and the 737th richest in the world. Ali said the company will initially invest Rs 1,000 crore for setting up a shopping mall and a five star hotel and convention centre in Lucknow. The site for the project has already been identified and construction work will start by December. In Telangana, Ali said his group is investing Rs 500 crore for establishing a food processing plant, while a shopping mall will be set up with an investment of Rs 900 crore in Hyderabad. In Kerala, Ali said his group is making an investment of Rs 4,650 crore in a number of projects. A shopping mall and a five star hotel with investment of Rs 1,250 crore is being set up in Thiruvananthapuram, he said, adding another five star hotel will come up in Kochi at an investment of Rs 1,600 crore. The is also a setting up a world class IT Park at Kochi with an investment of Rs 1,400 crore. |
If you want to picture the relationship between the 60 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump and the Deep State seeking to unseat him; DON’T picture a Venn diagram. There is no overlap between the two solitudes. Rather, picture a giant amorphous amoeba, geared toward survival. This single-celled organism will galvanize all systems within to preserve its threatened integrity. Much like our parasitical one-celled protozoa, the Deep State has an overriding purpose and a fixed repertoire of reflexes. “Some amoebas protect their bodies by covering themselves with sand grains.” The Deep State organism protects itself by throwing dust in our eyes. Hence the Russia probe. The production that is the Russia probe is courtesy of agents of the Deep State—the “managerial society” and its ruling elite, as political philosopher James Burnham (1905-1987) called it. Like nothing else, the Trump populist revolution has exposed the sub rosa presence in American lives of a “transpartisan elite with its own interests.” “Such an analysis of the political and economic elite—its composition, its genesis, its beliefs, its myths, and its failures—is the common strand running through the [prescient] writings of James Burnham,” observes Julius Krein of American Affairs. Increasingly power is shifted away from individuals elected to represent the political community toward unelected officials qualified to hold the positions responsible for administering the government … Like all managers, they derive their power from the administrative expertise and credentials that qualify them for office rather than from democratic legitimacy. They are accountable, that is, not to the political community but to the other managers that define their qualifications. “Deep State” is no conspiracy theory. There’s nothing mythical about the Republican and Democratic career government workers, embedded like parasites in the bowels of the bureaucracy, the intelligence community, the military, and a like-minded media, who’ve risen on their hind legs to protect their turf and protest an agenda that leaves them out in the cold. The anatomy and workings of the Deep State are, in my opinion, reflexive, rather than a matter of collusion and conspiracy. Simple psychology—human nature at its worst—sees government jobs and programs, war and welfare alike, protected in perpetuity and at all costs by the administrators of government jobs and programs. Hidden or in plain sight, The State is geared toward increasing or maintaining its sphere of influence, never reducing it. Voters are paid lip service, provided their wishes coincide with the aims of this unelected, entrenched apparatus. But when the popular will defies Deep State, that monster breathes fire. The “technocratic elite” has a corporate extension. Engorged government bureaucracies are complemented by colossal corporate entities, whose virtue-signaling managers have occupied “the commanding heights of the economy, politics, and culture.” As Burnham warned they would. The corporate element of this government-within-government superstructure (yes, the conservative Burnham had a Trotskyite beginning) has special access by virtue of its obscene wealth. Think the liver-spotted George Soros, who moves to overthrow governments in “lesser” countries. Think Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Brad Smith, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, or Google’s Sundar Pichai. They all sprang into action against Trump’s secession from the Paris Climate Accord. Candidate Trump got considerable support for his promise to secede from or renegotiate this or the other agreement between the U.S. government and various supranational systems. Successive U.S. governments have ceded the rights and sovereignty of Americans to these supra-state systems. Deplorables voted for more, not less, sovereignty. But bien-pensant Elon Musk of the Tesla and SpaceX fame is having none of this sovereignty stuff. Musk, worth $15.2 billion, is muscling the Trump administration to further tax Americans so as to fund the Europeans and their polluting cosignatories to the climate accord. Mr. Musk trashes the environment with his “Commie Cars,” electrical cars which discharge into the environment lead, cadmium and nickel—the byproducts of batteries—and whose impact on the environment has been shown to be worse than that of the gasoline-powered car. Trashing the popular will is all in a day’s work for the corporate arm of the Deep State. Ilana Mercer is the author of The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June, 2016) & Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011). Follow her on Twitter, Facebook & Gab. Check out Ilana’s YouTube channel. |
The news media are seeing hot controversy in a new remark from Donald Trump, even though the Republican nominee uttered nearly the same thing seven months ago and has several other times since. During a campaign rally Wednesday in Florida, Trump said that President Obama, with help from Hillary Clinton, is the "founder" of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. "He is the founder of ISIS. He is the founder of ISIS, OK?" Trump said. "He's the founder. He founded ISIS. And I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton." Trump appeared for an interview on CNBC Thursday morning where the host asked him if it's "appropriate" to call Obama "the founder of an organization that wants to kill Americans." Trump repeated his "founder of ISIS" comment and went on to blame Obama for the way he handled withdrawing troops from Iraq. "He shouldn't have gotten out the way he got out," he said. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," co-host Willie Geist interpreted Trump's remark to be an accusation that Obama is "in league with ISIS." "Do you believe that President Obama is in league with ISIS?" Geist asked GOP Rep. Sean Duffy, who appeared on the show for an interview. Though Trump's remarks are being reported as new, he made nearly identical comments about Obama, Clinton and ISIS in January. "They've created ISIS. Hillary Clinton created ISIS with Obama," he said during a campaign rally in Mississippi. Trump restated the claim in an interview on CBS in July. "Hillary Clinton invented ISIS with her stupid policies," he said. "She is responsible for ISIS." He said it again during a rally in Florida one month later. "It was Hillary Clinton – she should take an award from them as the founder of ISIS." |
TL;DR: Less than $94K from the $4.5M Stretch Goal (and Stronghold), what we’re up to (design and planning), Shanna Germain talks about Torment’s setting (video), some Q&A with Adam Heine. Hi Forgotten Ones, Hope you've been well! Stretch Goal and Stronghold After the Kickstarter ended, we extended the time table for the $4.5M Stretch Goal, which includes the “stronghold” feature, to the end of April. Through last Sunday, April 21st, the PayPal amount was about $217K, bringing our combined total for Stretch Goal purposes to $4,406,094. One week left! Note that if you pledged through Kickstarter, you can still use PayPal to move to a higher Tier or to add add-ons at this time (see “Upgrade Your Donation” and “Add-ons” sections toward the bottom of that page). We thought it would be helpful to clarify a bit what we mean by a stronghold for Torment. It would be a location in the game that is “owned” by the PC, but won’t be a cozy home – it would be designed to fit the atmosphere of Torment and the setting of the Ninth World of Numenera (examples include an airship or a dimensional pocket). It would be a playable area and would include its own sorts of quests and challenges. We don’t intend for the stronghold to be a management mini-game, but it may serve gameplay functions as a storehouse, travel hub, and/or “museum” for accomplishments. While a permanent home can be very relevant to one’s life, many do not leave such a legacy. Thus not only would the stronghold likely be optional, but its exact form within the game might change based on your decisions. It might not be a physical location at all (or even a static one – it may travel with you) and it would be well integrated into the storyline. Colin’s been resurrecting and evolving ideas from when we first considered the feature before culling it, and we hope to be able to run with them. What Are We Up To? So what are we doing on Torment right now? Our emphasis for the next while is on planning the project and building a strong foundation for the writers before they begin their work. I'll talk more about the project planning in a future update - for now, I'll explain what types of design work we're focused on. Colin, with support from Adam and me, is focused on better defining the story and its scope. As we talked about a few times during the campaign, we designed the story (and other aspects of the game) to be highly modular so that we could adapt it to best fit the funding we received. Now that we know our budget for development, we can solidify the scope of the game. We reached the Longer Story Stretch Goal and Colin is looking into how to best incorporate some of the story ideas that we had pruned prior to the Kickstarter. In parallel, we (with Adam leading the charge) are drilling down into the details of how we’ll implement all of the Tidal and other reactivity. We have talked about this reactivity at a high level, but we need to establish more concretely how we will be executing it. A strong foundation for the writers means more than just the story though. We are also developing templates and examples for area and companion design, as well as conventions and constraints for dialogue. Once we have those, we can implement some preliminary dialogues to test out conversation creation and get a better sense of how the conversations will play. These early prototypes will be made easier from our work on Wasteland 2, along with some preliminary collaboration with Obsidian and their work on Project Eternity. These prototypes will be critical in efficiently focusing the creativity of our writers. As you recall, we have quite the writing team assembled! Some of our writers are very talented creatively, but haven’t had as much video game development experience. Having clear, well thought-out guidelines will help ensure the work of our decentralized writing team is consistent and perfect for Torment. This design and planning with a very small team will be continuing over the next few months (along with some technical aspects that we'll talk more about in a later update). This means that another thing we’re doing is conserving funds while we build this foundation - Torment has the benefit of a longer pre-production period (than Wasteland 2) and we want to make the most of it. Meanwhile, the From the Depths novella writers are beginning work on their stories. Digital or printed copies of these (including also the novellas by Colin and Monte) are rewards for many of you, but they also serve a design purpose. Writing the novellas at this stage will allow the writers to immerse themselves in the Ninth World, and flesh out the nature of each of the five Tides. These novellas will essentially provide the full definition for each Tide, with the protagonist in each being the embodiment of what that Tide means. So the writers will be delving into the true meanings of the Tides and the novellas will help the entire team better understand what each truly encompasses. Shanna on the Ninth World Shanna Germain, the lead editor for Numenera and also part of Torment’s writing talent, talks about the Ninth World and our place within it. Most of Torment will take place in the furthest reaches of the known land: Beyond the Beyond. This video also includes a sneak peek of the map of the Ninth World! Q&A We released a video Q&A from Adam last Friday about level and skill progression. He was getting over a nasty flu when he recorded this, but don't worry. He's back to his old self now. And here is a text answer to another popular question from the Q&A UserVoice: [Asked by Alexman17c] Since a deeper game seems to be preferred over a longer game, how will you implement this design focus? Will it be mostly through bigger and more interconnected dialogue/decision trees, or will it also be through adding more locations within areas (i.e. shops, houses, alleys, etc.) and more NPCs? Adam responds: We'll be adding depth in many different ways, but primarily depth is focused on choice and consequences. That is, a given scenario might have 3 or 4 different solutions, and each of those solutions will close certain paths and open others. This will apply in small ways -- within dialogue trees, for example, as you follow one line of dialogue, it will close off others -- and occasionally in larger ways as your choices shape the world around you. Entire areas might be altered or closed off, and new ones opened that would've been unavailable had you made a different choice. Depth also means going deeper with the companions. For example, additional choices you can make with their characters and your relationship with them, or deeper interactions between the companions themselves, so different combinations of companions in your party will lead to different results. Ultimately, depth is about making each playthrough unique, since you won't be able to explore every path to its fullest extent. It's about emphasizing the fact that your choices matter. In case you were curious, like in Wasteland 2, we've intended to allow you to save your game anywhere, except when within a conversation (and possibly during combat). So you will be able to reload after a conversation and try something different. However, in many cases, the full consequences of your actions won’t be clear until long after you made that decision. We’re taking this approach to increase the impact of the reactivity in Torment. You might suspect that long-reaching effects of your actions could make the game challenging to design. That’s true, and we’ll be carefully designing how exactly we achieve these effects. This approach has the side effect of encouraging replaying the game and reducing the urge to “save scum,” but those aren’t our primary motivations. You may already be familiar with MrBtongue (on YouTube), but in case you aren’t, he posted a video about Choice and Consequence last week that we identify with – in Torment, we are intending what he calls “Type One.” (We also enjoyed his Planescape: Torment commentary. We agree with what he says and what he hopes for from us with Torment: Tides of Numenera.) Administrative Matters In our last update, we discussed administrative matters, such as managing your pledge, Amazon payments, and forums/UserVoice, so please look there for that information, or contact us through our Support form if you have specific questions. (Our Support form is better for handling the large volume of messages than the built-in Kickstarter system, so please use it instead.) We haven’t imported the data from Kickstarter yet and will send out a message when it’s all ready for you to modify your data. (We expect this to still be at least a month away.) But we will be able to combine PayPal upgrades and add-ons with Kickstarter pledges, so adding add-ons now won’t cause problems. Some expressed concerns about having to register with inXile’s system to manage their pledge. We require this based upon our experience with Wasteland 2 – we developed our system after Wasteland 2’s campaign because Kickstarter does not provide the features and functionality we need to ensure that we can get everyone their rewards. (The quantity of both backers and rewards that we have had for both Wasteland and Torment brought logistic challenges that required a different solution.) The truth is, as much as we wish a separate system wasn’t required, we simply don't have the manpower required to data check 77,000+ entries across both Kickstarter and Paypal (and in some cases, a mixture of the two). So please register so that we can ensure you will receive your rewards. (And thanks to the more than 10,000 who registered after the last update!) We appreciate your understanding and are sorry for the extra step and inconvenience. For those of you who are interested in MMORPGs (or just the crowdfunding phenomenon), you might check out Camelot Unchained, which focuses on realm versus realm gameplay. They have some interesting new design ideas that innovate on MMOs and will provide a unique experience. City State Entertainment’s founder, Mark Jacobs, is contributing $2M of his own money to the project and they are supporting the Kicking it Forward initiative, pledging to donate 5% of their finished product’s profits to other Kickstarters. (Camelot Unchained will be a subscription game, not free-to-play.) Their Kickstarter is doing well at over 2/3 funded, but still needs a strong finish to reach their funding goal over the next week. Another Kickstarter you might be interested in is Larian Studios’ Divinity: Original Sin. It’s an RPG with turn-based combat that supports both cooperative and competitive multiplayer (as well as solo gameplay). The game is well on its way to completion and is targeting a release date later this year, so you can already see some gameplay footage of it. They’ve funded already, but have almost 3 days left to reach additional stretch goals. Our next update (in a few weeks) will include how we did toward the $4.5M Stretch Goal, but if you want the final verdict on May 1st, please check out tumblr as we’ll post there as soon as we know. Thanks! Until next time, Kevin Saunders Project Lead |
What is Neuropathic Pain? Neuropathic pain disorders are a set of pain conditions resulting from disorder or injury to the nervous system. The human nervous system is divided into two general parts: the central nervous system, comprising the brain and spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system, including nerves that go to the limbs, trunk, face and all outlying areas of the body. When nerves of the peripheral system sense pain from mechanical, chemical or thermal sensations, they relay the sensation to the central nervous system for processing. Additionally, the spine and brain command a network a nerves conducting sensation along the back, neck, head and face. Damage to nerves of the peripheral or central nervous system can cause pain signals to be sent to the brain, which may result in the chronic pain condition known as neuropathic pain.Neuropathic pain may manifest as continuous or episodic, with episodic attacks described as an electric shock and continuous attacks often experienced as feelings of prolonged aching, burning, sensitivity or coldness. Neuropathic orofacial pain conditions refer to those with symptoms that primarily affect a patient's mouth and face. Orofacial means of the mouth or face.The most common orofacial neuropathic pain condition is trigeminal neuralgia, a disorder of the trigeminal or 5th cranial nerve, which causes sudden, severe shock-like pain in or around the face. Episodes typically last several seconds, though they can last up to two minutes, and may repeat in succession and throughout the day.The trigeminal nerve is one of 12 pairs of cranial nerves, the nerves that emerge directly from the brain. The trigeminal nerve has three branches reaching throughout the face and oral cavity. The upper branch is responsible for sensations for the scalp, forehead and front of the head. The middle branch is responsible for sensations in the cheek, upper jaw, top lip, top teeth and gums, and side of the nose. The lower branch is responsible for sensations of the lower jaw, lower teeth and gums, and bottom lip. More than one branch may be affected by a disorder of the nerve, and sufferers may experience pain on both sides of the head and neck, although typically only one side is affected by an episode at a time.There are other conditions that affect nerves of the central nervous system and cause orofacial neuropathies, such as glossopharyngeal neuralgia, occipital neuralgia, vagal neuralgia and superior laryngeal neuralgia. These orofacial neuropathies are less common, though they are thought to be caused in the same way as trigeminal neuralgia, which is a pressure applied, often by a blood vessel, to the associated nerve as it exits the brain.An episodic attack of trigeminal neuralgia may be triggered by contact with any of the parts of the face, jaw, mouth and head mentioned above. The condition may become worse over time. Pain may at first be experienced in a small area of the face, later spreading. Episodes can occur for some patients for days, weeks or months and then subside for months or years. If the condition worsens, time between episodes may become shorter and less frequent.Trigeminal neuralgia has been divided into two types. In Type 1 trigeminal neuralgia, more than half of the pain experienced is shock-like pain described as sudden, sharp, burning or stabbing. In Type 2 trigeminal neuralgia, more than half of the pain experienced is constant pain that is aching, burning or coldness, numbness, or a "pins and needles" sensation. Type 2 trigeminal neuralgia is also known as pre-trigeminal neuralgia as it eventually develops into the classic form of trigeminal neuralgia characterized by intermittent shock episodes.Also among the more common forms of neuropathic orofacial pain is atypical odontalgia. This condition, also known as phantom tooth pain, may follow a dental procedure such as a root canal or an extraction, and is experienced as a pain like a toothache with no actual problem in the tooth.Neuropathy to the inferior alveolar nerve or the lingual nerve occurs most often as a complication of a dental or medical procedure. Tooth extraction, usually of the wisdom teeth, is the leading cause of lingual and inferior alveolar nerve damage. It may also occur as a result of anesthetic injections for oral procedures. The result is pain and burning sensation, numbness or tingling of the tongue, mouth or lower lip.Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), also called causalgia or Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome, is a rare chronic pain condition originating from a disorder of the nervous system. CRPS can affect the craniofacial region, though is more common in the arms and legs. CRPS I is associated with tissue injury and CRPS II is associated with nerve injury. The pain is described as a continuous burning pain and may be accompanied by changes in skin temperature, color and texture, increased skin sensitivity and swelling and stiffness. |
Greetings to all. We would like to give you some great news about the development of Wing Commander Saga. Posted by Tolwyn on Nov 30th, 2011 The Wing Commander Saga main campaign will consist of 7 episodes and will have a grand total of 50 missions. We are happy to announce that as of now, all of the missions for the first 6 episodes are now either "gameplay complete" or (in most cases) "done". The remainder of the missions are in various stages of completion. "Gameplay complete" means all the enemies, objectives, secondary goals, and so forth are in place and functional, so that you could play through the mission and the whole thing would work. To get to "done", there is the ever present process of refining balance. However, we are very excited to reach the "gameplay complete" milestone on the vast majority of the missions. The game is almost completely playable, and now it is time to wrap it up. As ever, tweet us or facebook us with thoughts and complaints. |
By its absence of parks and its low temperatures, Winnipeg has corrupted our sweet, kind, winsome Mathieu Perreault into something dark and cold. His eyes, which once relayed a love for all things verdant and true, now chill the very marrow in your bones. He’s become indifferent to the joys of life. He seeks neither companionship nor romance. Perreault lives only to smote the ruin of his foes upon the park-less wasteland that is Winnipeg, Manitoba. On off days, you might find Perreault at Dottie’s Saloon, a biker bar located just off route 42 outside the city limits. There Perreault sits alone in the dimmest corner of that dismal shack, which reeks of stale beer and just the slightest whiff of dried blood. Usually his eyes are fixed in the middle distance, unmoving, but OH GOD HE SEES YOU. Matthieu Perreault locks eyes with you. You are trapped in his gaze. Like a fawn in the crosshairs you are frozen. Is this how it ends for you, beaten to death with a pool cue in the calloused, whiteknuckled hands of 40-point-scorer Matthieu Perreault? No. Perreault returns to his drink. His eyes sink. Whatever glimpse of life you thought you saw in his eyes, be it bloodlust or simple malice, vanishes like the setting of the sun on the arctic tundra. You leave Dottie’s Saloon, sad but relieved. Relieved you are alive and not beaten to death by 5’4″ Winnipeg forward Mathieu Perreault, but sad that the good man he once was has been erased. You hurry back to your car, crossing through shadows where the parking lot lights cannot reach. Ah, there’s your car. Grab your keys from your pocket and reach for the lock. Oh, you’ve dropped your keys. You laugh at yourself and reach down. MATHIEU PERREAULT IS UNDER THE CAR AND HE GRABS YOUR HAND. [Cut to black. End scene.] Advertisements Share this story: Facebook Twitter Reddit Tumblr Pinterest |
LONDON: The former governor of West Bengal and grandson of Mahatma Gandhi could soon be part of Scottish history.Gopal Krishna Gandhi has been invited to deliver a lecture on “Independence: Dream and Reality” by Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) Jim Eadie on September 30.If Scotland votes for a Yes in the upcoming historic referendum on September 18 and breaks away from UK, Gandhi will become the first Indian to address the independent Scottish parliament.Explaining the idea on which Gandhi is expected to deliver the lecture, the parliamentary organisers said “The desire to be free is as old as the hills. And so, freedom, independence and autonomy have been the goals of great stirrings by people under colonial thrall, imperial hegemony and dictatorships. The oppressiveness of such a dominance is a form of violence which immiserates the human spirit. And in that lies the criticality of what Gandhi called svaraj or self-rule”.Gandhi has been invited by the University of Edinburgh’s India Centre which will celebrate its first India day on October 2 to coincide with Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. India has become the first country which will be celebrated in the campus of the sixth-oldest university in the English speaking world that boasts of over 18 Nobel laureates.Professor Sir Timothy O Shea, principal and vice chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, which boasts of alumni like Charles Darwin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, philosopher David Hume, physicist James Clerk Maxwell and inventor Graham Bell announced that October 2 will be celebrated as the India Day in the campus from this year.Speaking to TOI, Professor Shea said “The historical ties between India and Scotland are very old and so is the link between Indian scholars and Edinburgh University. One of our oldest alumnus is Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, known as the father of Indian chemistry and founder of Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals in 1893. By having a special India day, we announce how important the country is for us”.The India week will see UK’s most famous Qawalli group - The Hussein Brothers performing at the George Square Theatre.Lord Meghnad Desai MP, recipient of the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in the Republic of India will deliver a lecture entitled ‘Business, the Economy of India and the future of Indian democracy’.Throughout the week Edinburgh will showcase a selection of photos from one of Scotland’s leading multicultural documentary and travel photographers, Hermann Rodrigues. His ‘Broon Scots’ collection celebrates the integration of ethnic minority groups in Scotland, with photographs depicting people of Asian background who have immigrated to Scotland. |
by When photographs of Iraqi prisoners being systematically tortured and humiliated at Abu Ghraib prison were first published the George W. Bush administration claimed it reflected an administrative problem of a few low-level soldiers exceeding their authority. Mr. Bush reiterated his claim that ‘America does not torture’ and set about prosecuting those so unworldly as to have had their pictures taken committing crimes. However, prior to the release of the photographs Mr. Bush had secured legal judgments from his subordinates in the Justice Department approving what was clearly torture in contravention of the Geneva Conventions to which the U.S. is signatory. Torture in the context of legal documents approving it makes it official U.S. policy for which Mr. Bush is legally culpable. More broadly, the fraudulent ‘facts’ Mr. Bush used to sell his war of ‘pre-emptive self defense’ were a thin veil over the gravest of war crimes, launching aggressive war. Had Mr. Bush been prosecuted for these crimes at Nuremberg he very likely would have been hanged. When Barack Obama took office as President the U.S. was widely viewed as a pariah state, a lawless backwater capable of murdering innocents on an industrial scale, of rogue bankers crashing the global economy, and not much more. Mr. Obama brought a patina of legitimacy as he revived rogue banks and bankers to resume their economic carnage and he ‘rationalized’ America’s military machine to better hide the ongoing torture, extraordinary rendition, illegal detentions and robotic murders. Mr. Obama’s main innovation was to bring the citizens who elected him into the purview of illegal surveillance, detention and murder. While this had long been standard practice toward the ‘lower’ classes at the state and local levels, Mr. Obama brought the heft of the Federal security apparatus to bear against the broader citizenry. That Mr. Obama’s crimes are expressly forbidden under the governing document of the nation, the Constitution, necessitated an entirely new regime of legal sophistry to assert they were legal. But if stating so made crimes legal, there would be no crimes. With Bradley Manning convicted by a military court of espionage for releasing evidence of war crimes and misrepresentations by the U.S. government of the war on, and occupation of, Iraq the question of national ‘betrayal’ has again been raised. In the case of Mr. Bush, it is difficult to imagine more egregious betrayal of ‘the nation’ than his construction and promotion of a fraudulent premise to prosecute his war of aggression. In terms of past and ongoing destruction, the modern nation-state of Iraq was substantially destroyed with over one million innocent Iraqis slaughtered and over four million displaced. In terms of direct costs to the U.S., an estimated three trillion dollars was squandered, thousands of Americans are dead or permanently disabled and a political chasm was created between the military-police-surveillance state and the citizenry. The state of affairs Mr. Bush left behind was of criminal and lawless leadership that ‘the world,’ including the U.S., is better off without. As current evidence has it, Mr. Obama picked up where Mr. Bush left off in hurling the nation toward police-state dystopia. What Bradley Manning has admitted he is guilty of is releasing a large quantity of official documents of great importance to the American people in understanding the actions of ‘their’ government. The video footage he provided (it had been previously released by other sources) of U.S. helicopter gunners casually slaughtering innocent Iraqi civilians and reporters and grievously injuring young children made concrete the insane slaughter George W. Bush had unleashed. And while in terms of real politick these are crimes of empire that fit both the trajectory and continuum of American history, they are also crimes committed by specific people against specific people, the material foundation that ties legal principles to the acts they proscribe. When associated with Mr. Obama’s ‘kill lists’ that guide his murders conducted without due process, with his ‘signature strikes’ that are war crimes under international law, with his illegal surveillance of citizens here and abroad, and with his torture of illegally detained persons at America’s gulag at Guantanamo Bay, Mr. Obama has perpetuated and expanded Mr. Bush’s legacy of rogue criminality. That Bradley Manning has been prosecuted for making official crimes visible as the high-placed officials whose crimes he revealed continue their lawless behavior with impunity recovers from history the claim of the Nazis about to be hanged at Nuremberg that the international ‘law’ under which they were prosecuted was a thin gloss over explicit power relations. The real ‘crime’ Messrs. Manning, Snowden, Assange and others are being prosecuted / persecuted for is impudence, the refusal of the ruled to bow in submission before their rulers. And more to the point, they’ve acted as free citizens, the greatest threat of all to totalizing power. Was the punishment of grave crimes the goal, George W. Bush would most likely have already been hanged and Mr. Obama would be occupying a prison cell awaiting trial for torture, murder and crimes against the Constitution. Not only will Messrs. Bush and Obama and their cohorts not be held to account, they represent an entire class, a ruling class, at present immune from prosecution. And should raising the issue of war crimes read as unduly moralistic in the context of the real politick of nations, it was the unimaginable suffering and slaughter of the twentieth century that led to the creation of international law, not armchair moralizing. The charge of espionage, of acting on behalf of a ‘foreign’ power to undermine the United States, goes some distance toward illuminating the dynamic at work here—the foreign power in whose interests Bradley Manning, in his own words, was acting is the American people. You need not agree with his actions to accede this point. Mr. Manning reportedly joined the military in earnest to support the interests of the U.S. through military service. What Mr. Manning found, again from his own words, was U.S. officials acting against what he believed to be the interests of the American people. And given the Bush administration’s crimes of launching aggressive war and torture, there is copious evidence outside of the information Mr. Manning provided that crimes had been, and were continuing to be, committed by the U.S. political and military leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan. And as Mr. Bush’s effort to pin his administration’s official policy of torture on low-level functionaries illustrates, those in power have no intention of assuming legal culpability for the crimes they commit. What the U.S. military asserts in prosecuting Bradley Manning is that it is the revelation of criminal acts that harms U.S. ‘interests,’ and not the crimes themselves. But were the crimes never committed there would have been nothing for Mr. Manning to reveal. And by asserting that their revelation caused harm, the U.S. admits the crimes by themselves caused harm in creating the risk of revelation. More broadly, American crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan are well known outside the U.S. and were widely reported by Al Jazeera and other non-captive (by the U.S.) news sources. And it is well understood outside the U.S. that Mr. Bush’s war of aggression was (is) a war crime under international law. The apparent goal of Mr. Manning’s prosecution then is to divide those ignorant of official crimes, largely confined to Americans who get their ‘news’ from the corporate media, on the side of officialdom against those revealing these crimes. But as no foreign power has been shown to benefit from Bradley Manning’s revelations, and the official crimes revealed were crimes regardless of whether or not they were revealed, it is again apparently the American people considered the foreign power being asserted to benefit from Mr. Manning’s revelations. The charge on which Mr. Manning was found innocent, that of ‘aiding the enemy,’ enlarged a narrow state security issue into a full-blown philosophical quandary. Little was it known when the CIA organized al-Qaeda to lure the Russians into military quagmire in Afghanistan during the (Jimmy) Carter administration that it would one day accomplish the geographically challenging feat of launching a limited attack (‘9/11’) within the continental U.S. While ‘creating the enemy’ is not likely an ‘official’ charge, if it were former President Carter and the CIA operatives behind the creation of al-Qaeda might be charged. And the additional ‘innovation’ the Bush and Obama administrations appear to have achieved is to turn al-Qaeda into the international jihadi equivalent of a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise operation complete with websites, local chapters and trans-national organizational structure. While dim fools behaving thuggishly have a long tradition of producing not-useful outcomes, recent U.S. administrations appear to have outdone themselves when it comes to creating ‘enemies’ they then use their international murder machines to fight. The not-usefulness of creating ‘enemies’ would have seemingly found a ready audience amongst ‘pragmatic’ Americans. The point has been made so many times it is at risk of becoming a cliché—how exactly would you respond if arrogant fools slaughtered your family, friends, neighbors and communities to steal oil or to further some vague geo-political goal from which you’ve seen no benefit and have no interest? American and British intelligence overthrew the democratically elected and democratically acting government in Iran to create a police-state hell complete with cartoon-puppet leaders and externally written ‘history’ to secure oil for British Petroleum. When the Iranian people rebelled by supporting religious-political leadership that effectively tossed the Anglo-American oil mafia out, the oil mafia responded by turning to Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party in Iraq and arming it to launch a war of aggression against Iran decidedly not in either Iraq’s or Iran’s interests. A decade later the George H.W. Bush administration invaded Iraq under false pretenses and buried upwards of 200,000 Iraqi conscripts in the desert. And a decade later still baby Bush invaded Iraq under the pretext of recovering the weapons Poppy (George H.W.) Bush had provided and in so doing killed and displaced upwards of five million people. Given this tiny sliver of America’s contribution to global peace and prosperity, how is it precisely that Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, or any of the myriad other citizens acting in the interests of the American people by bringing to light America’s true role in international affairs have ‘aided the enemy?’ At a minimum they put the lie to inane idiocy like George W. Bush’s ‘they hate us for our freedoms.’ More pointedly, and likely behind the U.S. ‘leadership’s’ panic to shut disclosure of actual U.S. foreign policy down, is that knowledge of actual foreign policy raises fundamental questions about whose interests the American (Western) leadership is acting in? When the charge was made that Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ posed a threat to the U.S., it would have been helpful to the people sent to die, be maimed and turned into mass murderers, to know that George H.W. Bush had provided Iraq with ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ Likewise, when Barack Obama assures Americans only ‘terrorists’ are being slaughtered with his ‘signature strikes’ it is helpful to understand the practice of labeling all killed by the U.S. in wholesale slaughters of innocent civilians ‘terrorists.’ And as with the tortured legal rationales for what are clearly crimes, just because American authorities assert something to be ‘fact’ doesn’t make it so. The faux ‘wisdom’ behind the assertion real politick explains most of what need be known about American foreign policy takes history to be deterministic. The reach of its descriptive power leaves out the possibilities illuminated by people like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden who demonstrate it is a self-limiting concept. Regardless of the ultimate outcome, as if history did have an end, it is deeply nihilistic. Given their revelations, and ‘the Executive’s’ recovered romance with fascist law notwithstanding, enough is now known thanks to their revelations to shift responsibility for America’s ongoing foreign policy ever so slightly back toward ‘the people.’ For those still looking to the existing political-economic leadership in the West for ‘rational’ governance, what you see is what you get. President Barack Obama knows exactly how many children he has murdered. This has had no effect on his willingness to kill more. Senator Diane Feinstein has detailed knowledge of the corporate-state’s mechanisms of domestic political control and she remains its staunch defender. And a look across history has the last time America’s leadership ‘adjusted’ foreign policy to reflect the will of the people was when Richard Nixon was in the White House and enough people were in the streets to pose a real threat of burning it to the ground. Unless people are willing to take up his cause Bradley Manning will likely die in prison. And were it his cause alone, this would be unjust. But given his motive, and the facts revealed by his actions, Mr. Manning is a living incarnation of the democratic instinct and his imprisonment ‘the state’s’ response to his lived expression of self-rule in the interest of community. His story, along with the long history of liberation movements in the U.S. and around the world, demonstrates the monumental gap between empire as it is and the realm of possibilities for political-economic organization. Furthermore, the breadth of Mr. Manning’s revelations illustrates the breadth of the challenge—reform won’t provide the political-economic, socio-historical break needed to create the act of just living, of lived justice as functional governance. In fact, the surest way to never get there is to leave the political economy that put Mr. Manning in prison in place. Bradley Manning and all political prisoners must be freed. Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York. His book Zen Economics will be published by Counterpunch / CK Press in Spring 2014. |
After the release of Jonathan Liebesman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it quickly became apparent that a sequel was in the works. What we didn’t know was which direction the film would take, or who would be starring in the film alongside the turtles. While it was great to see our heroes in a half shell squaring off against Shredder and his foot soldiers, there were quite a few memorable faces missing from the first film. Interviews with the filmmakers at SDCC 2014 revealed that there were a few characters in particular that they’d like to see if they got the opportunity to do a sequel, but until now it’s all been speculation. Thankfully, today we can confirm that at least two of those notable characters are going to appear in the next Ninja Turtles movie: Bebop and Rocksteady. According to Screen Rant, producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form confirmed in an interview that the duo will make an appearance in TMNT 2: “We can say that Bebop and Rocksteady are in the film, and Casey Jones is a character that we love and we’re trying to fit him in as well.” This isn’t too surprising, as the SDCC interview revealed their desire to work with these characters. That being said, it’s nice to hear that we will definitely be seeing at least two fan favorite villains from the franchise in the new movie. I’m sure we’re all hoping that they can find a place for Casey Jones, but it’s good to know that at least two familiar faces are going to make a return. Now we’ll just have to wait and see how they actually turn out in the film. One thing is for sure: The buzz surrounding this movie is certainly getting a much better start than the PR disaster that took place before the previous film in the series. After all, letting the fans know that two of their favorite characters will be featured is a much better way to get them excited than by telling everyone that the turtles are aliens. It would appear that Brad Fuller and Platinum Dunes have learned from past mistakes and are instead giving the fans what they want. Hopefully this trend continues over the next year or two as the film is produced. What do you shellheads think? Are you excited about the prospect of seeing a live action Bebop and Rocksteady? What do you think they will look like? Let us know in the comments below! |
The GLORY 20 main card has taken a hit. Combat Press has learned that heavyweight Pat Barry has suffered a hand injury in training and is out of his main card clash against Mourad Bouzidi. Barry, who previously competed for the UFC, returned to the kickboxing ring in 2014. He made his GLORY debut at GLORY 16 in Denver, but succumbed to a first-round knockout against Zack Mwekassa. Barry rebounded from the loss in January, earning a decision win over Demoreo Dennis. The bout about Bouzidi was slated to air on the Spike TV-broadcast main card. All is not lost for kickboxing fans, however. As a result of Barry’s injury, the GLORY main card will now feature two title fights, as well as a one-night, four-man middleweight tournament. This will mark the first time in the promotion’s history that two title bouts will be broadcast for free. In the night’s main event, lightweight champion Robin van Roosmalen will look to defend his belt against the hard-hitting Andy Ristie. The pair met previously at GLORY 12 in late 2013, with Ristie claiming the victory via second-round knockout. Since then, both fighters crossed paths with Davit Kiria, who knocked out Ristie to earn GLORY gold, but gave up the title when he was defeated by van Roosmalen in November. The co-main event will see the promotion crown a featherweight champion as Canada’s Gabriel Varga takes on Morocco’s Mosab Amrani. Rounding out the main card will be the middleweight contender tournament which pits Canadian Simon Marcus against American Wayne Barrett and Dutchman Jason Wilnis against Brazilian Alex Pereira. The winner will earn a title shot against reigning champion Artem Levin. GLORY 20 takes place Friday, April 3, from the Dubai World Trade Centre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and airs on Spike TV at 10 p.m. ET. |
BEFORE WE GET INTO IT, let me make one thing clear. This intervention is not aimed at those with life-threatening food allergies or similarly grave medical conditions. I would never question people whose faces will balloon if they ingest trace amounts of shellfish. Or people who risk going into anaphylactic shock with a whiff of peanut dust. Or people whose ingestion of a smidge of gluten will send their bodies on an autoimmune witch hunt that over time will eat away at the lining of their small intestines and potentially lead to everything from infertility to cancer. Those problems are very real, and everyone who is afflicted with one or more of them has my sympathy. I’m talking about the rest of you. Those of you who don’t eat garlic because you detest its smell or avoid cauliflower because it makes you fart or have gone gluten-free because you heard it worked wonders for Jennifer Aniston or Lady Gaga or Dave, your toned instructor from spin class. When you settle into your seat at a restaurant, don’t be shy about telling your server your food preferences. By all means, ask if your dish can be prepared garlic-free or cauliflower-free or gluten-free. You’re paying good money, so you should get the meal that you want, not one that leaves you riding home in a foul mood and a plume of fetid air. The days of the imperious no-substitutions chef, telling you to take it or leave it, now seem as dated as a rerun of that Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” episode from 20 years ago. Advertisement But for the love of Julia Child and the sake of every other soul in the restaurant, particularly the underpaid line cooks sweating their way through another Saturday night shift, please, please stop describing your food preferences as an allergy. That is a very specific medical term, and invoking it triggers an elaborate, time-consuming protocol in any self-respecting kitchen. It shouldn’t be tossed around as liberally as the sea salt on the house-made (gluten-free) breadsticks. Get Today's Headlines in your inbox: The day's top stories delivered every morning. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here I know you want your dietary preferences to be taken seriously, and you think invoking the A-word is a harmless little white lie. But you have no idea how much trouble you’re causing and how much you’re helping to erode hard-won progress for people with genuine allergies and disorders. In a stunningly short slice of history, we’ve gone from food allergies being met with ignorance or indifference in the restaurant world to their domination of the discussion between server and diner, starting with the greeting and continuing all the way to dessert. The seriousness with which most chefs now take allergies has opened up the restaurant experience to a whole group of people who previously couldn’t risk dining out. That progress should be celebrated. But it shouldn’t be taken for granted. And we’ve come to a tipping point, thanks to the explosion of faddists and bandwagon-jumpers and attention-seekers who wrap their food dislikes in the packaging of allergy and disease. After witnessing enough diners who make a big fuss about how their bodies can’t tolerate gluten and then proceed to order a beer or dig into their date’s brownie dessert, fatigued chefs and managers are beginning to adopt a less accommodating approach. But the people who may ultimately pay the price for this pushback won’t be the “free-from” fabulists. They’ll be those with serious conditions. Roots of gluten This isn’t just my opinion. The physician-researcher who put gluten on the map in America and the parent-activist who led the crusade that transformed how seriously this country takes food allergies both admitted to me that they can’t believe how much things have gotten out of hand. Advertisement When Dr. Alessio Fasano came to the United States from his native Italy in the 1990s, the prevailing view in medicine was that celiac disease — the autoimmune disorder triggered by eating the gluten protein composite in wheat, barley, and rye — effectively didn’t exist here. It was a problem only for European kids. Through a meticulous years-long study, Fasano demonstrated that, in fact, 1 percent of Americans have the disease, cutting across all ages and races. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe staff Dr. Alessio Fasano, who put celiac disease on the map in the United States, is troubled that so many people are diagnosing themselves with gluten intolerance. Yet Fasano, who founded the Center for Celiac Research now at Massachusetts General Hospital, never could have predicted the market-fueled tsunami of me-too-ism that his findings would release. “We were so good,” he says, “that we lost control.” That’s why I’ve called you here today. So grab a dairy-free, soy-free, gluten-free snack and sit back to learn how we got so off-track and what we need to do to regain control. ONE WINTER NIGHT IN 1986, a Brown University freshman joined her friends for dinner at Montana, a popular restaurant at the edge of campus. The Tex-Mex BBQ place was so well known for its beef ribs that the word was marbled into its phone number (273-RIBS). Its other signature menu item was chili — good enough to have won a best-in-Providence contest. As a nationally ranked squash player, Kate Brodsky had won her share of contests as well. She also had a very serious peanut allergy, so she had learned to ask before ordering any dish that was likely to contain nuts. But that didn’t seem necessary with the chili. Advertisement After taking her second bite around 7:30 p.m., the 18-year-old felt ill. Rather than go to the hospital, she asked to be taken back to her dorm room. She didn’t get to the hospital until 9:30 p.m. By 10:55 p.m., the Ivy League student with the limitless future was dead. The agent was Montana’s prizewinning chili, which, it turned out, contained peanut butter as a thickener. This death-by-chili tragedy, which attracted coverage in The New York Times and the wire services, ricocheted around the country. Even if there had been earlier deaths, the shocking circumstances turned Brodsky into a sort of Patient Zero of restaurant food-allergy victims, a chilling reminder of how easily the neighborhood bistro could become a deathtrap. Nonetheless, the story soon faded, and it would be a couple of years before these kinds of fatalities were examined in the medical literature. Carol Rosenblatt, who owned Montana with her husband, tells me that as much as she believes Brodsky would still be alive if the young woman had gone immediately to the hospital, she continues to feel awful about what happened. “Just thinking about what the family was going through, losing a child,” Rosenblatt says, “you can’t help but identify.” Around the same time as Brodsky’s death, a Virginia mother of two and former researcher for Time-Life Books was figuring out how to protect her 2-year-old daughter from a similar fate. Anne Munoz-Furlong’s younger daughter, Mariel, had been diagnosed at age 9 months with a serious allergy to eggs and milk. For nearly two years after that diagnosis, Munoz-Furlong learned the hard way just how often these ingredients were hiding in unlikely foods. It was trial by projectile vomit. Graham Smith Food Allergy Network founder Anne Munoz-Furlong, who led one of the most effective citizen crusades in recent memory, fears that fakers may jeopardize allergy progress in restaurants. When her family traveled, they would reduce the odds of accidental exposure by eating in the hotel restaurant every night, ordering plain white rice for Mariel. The cautious approach didn’t always work. On the third night eating at one hotel restaurant, after her daughter had suffered repeated bad reactions, she called over the chef to try to figure out what could possibly be happening with the white rice. “I felt sorry that the food was so bland,” the chef confessed, “so I added a pat of butter to give it some flavor.” That, Munoz-Furlong says, “is when I realized how eating out in a restaurant is such a leap of faith.” By 1991, she had founded the Food Allergy Network, an advocacy group arming parents with information to keep their afflicted children safe and lobbying food manufacturers to disclose all of their ingredients. She began FAN with a focus on the food served in schools, then moved on to the packaged food industry. Only later did she turn her attention to the dining-out scene, figuring “You can live without going to restaurants.” Along the way, she withstood ferocious criticism. Peanut farmers accused her of killing their livelihoods. PB&J-loving parents accused her of being a worrywart whose campaign was leading to the peanut bans that would become standard in schools around the country. With assists from “Dear Abby” and others, Munoz-Furlong led what became one of the most effective citizen crusades since Ralph Nader shamed Detroit into taking safety seriously. Despite the accusations by peanut farmers, Munoz-Furlong had never been a radical. She didn’t pressure restaurants to stop serving certain foods, only to be transparent about ingredients and vigilant about cross contamination. And she urged allergic people to be reasonable. If they had a shellfish allergy, she advised them to avoid seafood restaurants altogether, rather than ordering chicken at one of them. The word “allergy” has been around only since 1906, when Austrian pediatrician Clemens von Pirquet coined it to describe altered biological reactivity. It didn’t gain traction until the mid-1920s, when it took on a big-tent definition describing reactions to everything from food and insect stings to mold and hay fever, says medical historian Matthew Smith, author of the new book Another Person’s Poison: A History of Food Allergy. For most of the 20th century, research-focused “orthodox” allergists, who insisted on a definition requiring a measurable immune reaction, battled with more flexible food allergists, whose main focus was bringing relief to their patients’ hypersensitivities. The peanut wars of the 1990s brought heightened visibility to the battle. In 2009, Massachusetts led the nation as the first state to require restaurants to undergo allergy training, followed by Rhode Island. A year later, Paul Antico, a former Fidelity portfolio manager from Cohasset, started AllergyEats, a Yelp-type website, and now also an app, where customers rate restaurants based on how seriously they take allergies. As the father of five, three with food allergies, Antico wanted to give families the freedom to eat out without paralyzing fear. The site now has tens of thousands of user reviews of restaurants from around the country. Allergy advocacy culminated with the 2013 law signed by President Obama — whose older daughter has a peanut allergy — pushing schools to stockpile anaphylaxis-combating auto-injecting epinephrine EpiPens. Today, an estimated 4 percent of American adults — or around 10 million — are believed to have food allergies. The percentage is higher for children, 5 percent or more, although many kids will outgrow allergies to milk, egg, wheat, and soy. The other four biggies — peanuts, tree nuts, fish, and shellfish — are more likely to endure. Catering just to the gluten-free subset (technically, celiac and gluten sensitivity aren’t allergies) represents an estimated $23 billion-a-year market. In his presentation to restaurateurs, Antico argues that appealing to the allergy crowd can pay off in dollars and cents. The market, he says, is much bigger than just people with diagnosed allergies. He cites a Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology study that found a whopping 30 percent of Americans believe they have a food allergy. Still, even he acknowledges the excesses. “There are people who fake allergies, and that stinks,” he says. “We, as the food allergy community, have to be respectful of what the restaurant goes through and be thankful that they’re willing to slow down the entire machine on a busy Saturday night to address our needs.” Munoz-Furlong stresses that consumers need to know the harm they’re causing when they phrase their food preferences in the form of an allergy. Not long ago, she laid into an acquaintance who had told their waiter, “I am allergic to peppers,” then confided to Munoz-Furlong, “I just hate peppers.” “People have to understand why it took us so long to get restaurants up to speed,” she says. “It was like getting an ocean liner to change course. We don’t want to go backward because the restaurant industry can’t trust that people are really being honest.” Dina Rudick/Globe Staff Chef Michael Leviton at Lumiere in Newton says if diners are honest about what’s a food preference and what’s an allergy, everyone will be better off. IT’S 5:15 ON A RECENT FRIDAY evening at Lumiere, the upscale restaurant in West Newton run by noted chef Michael Leviton. Right now, just one of the burgundy-and-cream banquettes is occupied, though soon all 88 seats will be filled. The tiny kitchen is already humming. It takes hours of prep work for a restaurant with an ambitious menu to run smoothly on a busy night. The little black ticket machine in the kitchen spits out a takeout order for a chicken dish. In red block lettering, the ticket reads GLUTEN ALLERG. As special requests go, this one is easy. The machine will occasionally produce a ticket with so many allergy notations in red that it stretches as long as a supermarket receipt from a stock-up-and-save sale. Every time the cooks see the word “allergy,” they have to assume the customer’s condition is life-threatening. The big danger is cross contamination, where an allergen is inadvertently transferred from one dish to another, often through a shared cutting board or utensil, or through the oil in the fryer or even food dust in the air. That means with every allergy, the action must stop in this kitchen jammed with cooks and dishwashers. The cooks consult a printed breakdown of ingredients in each dish to make sure the allergen isn’t hiding out in a component. They either grab new cutting boards, knives, and tongs or put theirs through the sanitizing dishwasher. And when the plate is done, they use disposable wipes to hold it by the edge. Imagine doing that repeatedly across a breathless night, disrupting the choreography of the kitchen each time. I asked numerous chefs how many tables have a diner asking for these special accommodations on a typical night, and I heard estimates ranging from 10 percent to a jaw-dropping 60 percent. Now imagine that a diner whose “serious dairy allergy” required you to take all those time-consuming steps decides to finish her meal by ordering ice cream, telling her server that it’s OK if she “cheats a little.” This, Leviton says, happens all the time. He has no problem if a customer says, “I’m not eating gluten” or “I’m avoiding dairy.” The kitchen will make sure those ingredients aren’t in the dish. But they won’t be wasting time taking unnecessary steps. “We’re jumping through a different level of hoop,” he says. Still, he stresses that people must have realistic expectations. If they come in with no early notice, proffering a card listing “15 different things they’re allergic to,” he says, “there’s not an awful lot we can do on a Saturday night at 7:30.” Moreover, Leviton emphasizes that, as much as they work with extreme caution, they don’t cook in a vacuum. “We make bread in the same tiny kitchen we make everything else in,” he says, noting that it’s not as if the kitchen is being steam-cleaned to remove all flour dust. Most people who are “super-hyper-allergic,” he says, would stay away from restaurants because they know that just one tiny mistake could prove fatal. That fear of a customer being carried out on a stretcher forces chefs to be vigilant. But the growing worry is that, as they run around addressing the needs of exaggerators and outright fakers, they might slip up on a customer with a genuinely deadly allergy. Is it any surprise that more and more chefs are hitting their boiling points? Kenny Shopsin, the cantankerous owner of the famed New York diner bearing his name, has bragged that when customers tell him they’re deathly allergic to something, he kicks them out, only to hear many confess that they’re not “that allergic.” This frustration with fakers has occasionally led to recklessness. Recall what a former cook at the Tavern on the Green in New York’s Central Park copped to a few years back. Alleging that customers’ gluten problems were all in their “disturbed little heads,” Damian Cardone boasted he had made a habit of secretly giving anyone ordering gluten-free pasta the normal stuff with gluten and that they were no worse for it. (He seemed clueless that the most serious damage that celiac patients suffer takes place over time, not immediately.) Then there was the waitress who posted an anonymous screed on Reddit that went viral. It began: “A server will never say this to your face but we all know your gluten allergy is fake. . . . You are just on a gluten-free diet and want attention.” When I track down the author, Chelsea Welch, she admits she had written the post in frustration, after witnessing too much nonsense as a waitress in an Italian restaurant in St. Louis. The 21-year-old former waitress, who was once fired from Applebee’s for exposing a pastor as a tip cheapskate and who now goes by the name Ferris McEvoy, describes being a server as “a balancing act between pleasing the customer and not pissing off the kitchen.” Because servers are so dependent on tips, customers who make unreasonable requests “are dangling the server’s pay in front of them.” Lately, the allergy pushback has been coming from more prominent quarters. At the end of last year, as the European Union prepared to enact a law requiring restaurants to disclose every possible ingredient used in their meals, 100 of Europe’s top chefs joined forces in protest. “It’s a total fiasco,” former BBC MasterChef winner Thomasina Miers told the Telegraph, noting that she herself suffered from a serious allergy. “It’s the responsibility of the allergee to ask, not the restaurateurs to list.” Dina Rudick/Globe Staff At Burtons Grill, the philosophy rests on always saying “yes” to the customer. Closer to home, some restaurants have begun using surcharges to call the bluff of fakers. Paul Overgaag, chef-owner of back-to-back Harvard Square restaurants The Red House and Charlie’s Kitchen, has found the upcharge can be an effective deterrent. If a customer says he’s got a dairy allergy and the accompanying starch has dairy in it, he will be offered a substitution such as a salad, for a couple of bucks extra. “If you’ve got a serious allergy, of course you’d be willing to pay,” Overgaag says. “But at least two to three times a night, the word comes back from the customer: ‘I’ll just have the starch with the dairy in it.’ They don’t want to pay for it.” Leviton, whose success at Lumiere has long rested on the combination of high-quality food and service, hit his breaking point a few months ago. He told his staff that while they should continue to meet reasonable requests, they would begin saying no to customers more often. For example, to cope with the spike in diners claiming garlic allergies, he had been holding off on adding the garlic until the very end, so it could be easily eliminated. But because a dish will be more flavorful when garlic is added early on, he concluded he was penalizing the many to please the few. “We had crossed over and were making too many accommodations, and it was adversely affecting the majority of the customers,” he says. These days, diners who report a garlic allergy will learn that the garlic cannot be omitted and will be encouraged to select another dish. Leviton says this “recalibrated” policy hasn’t produced many complaints. “If we’re offending someone by not being as accommodating as they would like,” he says, “we just might not be the right place for them.” IN THE ’90S, fat-free diets were all the rage. But people didn’t go into restaurants announcing that they were “allergic to fat.” So what has caused this tremendous spike in allergy claims? It starts with a bunch of self-promoting, self-appointed “experts” dishing out lousy advice. Consider Dr. Andrew Ordon, one of the stars of that inane The Doctors syndicated TV show, who offered viewers this kernel of wisdom when they dine out: “Probably the only guaranteed way to avoid that butter is to say, ‘Garcon, I have a bad butter allergy.’ ” How did the other talking heads on the panel react to this serving of nonsense? With approving nods and exclamations of “I like that!” Then there’s blogger Vani Hari, who calls herself the “Food Babe.” Her dubious advice includes this gem: “Go so far as telling your server you’re allergic to butter and dairy, soy and corn.” Dr. John McDougall, who peddles his low-fat, high-starch McDougall Program diet as a way to prevent degenerative disease, kicks it up a few notches, urging his flock to paint a picture for their servers. “Tell them you’re allergic to oil. [Say] ‘If I eat oil, I’ll have an anaphylactic reaction. I’ll have a seizure. You’ll have to call the ambulance. It will just be a whole big bad scene here in the restaurant. . . .’ ” Graham Smith Medical historian Matthew Smith says the word “allergy” didn’t gain traction until the mid- 1920s, when it took on a bigtent definition describing reactions to everything from food and insect stings to mold and hay fever. Medical historian Matthew Smith says that on top of all that bad advice, there’s this reality: We’ve stomped out most major infectious diseases, leaving us with hard-to-treat chronic illnesses. Because diet is the one variable people feel they can control, they tinker with it. Some of them end up medicalizing benign conditions through self-diagnosis, swapping tips and drawing affirmation from online communities. That helps explain why so many Americans believe they have a food allergy and act on it without ever going to the doctor to confirm the hunch. (It might also help explain the excesses of the current landscape, where a Massachusetts prep school recently found itself sued by a couple who accused officials of ignoring their complaints about their son’s allergy to the school’s Wi-Fi signal.) And then there are the diners who simply thrive on attention. They’ll announce that they don’t see anything they like on an extensive menu and ask the chef to make them something special. There’s no more surefire way to ensure your dietary desires are met these days than to invoke an allergy. But restaurants are not blameless in this dance of deception. Culinary Institute of America professor and author Ezra Eichelberger is a leading voice on all things front-of-the-house. For too long, he says, too many restaurants tried to talk diners out of their preferences (“You’ve never had garlic the way our chef uses it”) or outright lied to them. They might, for instance, fail to disclose to vegetarians ordering the French onion soup that it was made with beef stock or neglect to wave pescatarians off the clam chowder because it has a little pork hidden in it. This behavior is irresponsible. Tragically, people still do die from allergic reactions at restaurants, though with heightened awareness and plentiful EpiPens, less frequently than in the past. A 2011 review found all food allergy incidents to be responsible for about 200,000 emergency room visits a year, though a study tracking anaphylaxis deaths over the last decade found that less than 7 percent involved reactions to food. (Most were caused by reactions to medication.) Eichelberger recognizes how out of whack things have become. When big bus-tour groups come in for a meal at the CIA and people start rattling off allergies that they failed to mention in advance, the staff will make accommodations — for a $10-a-plate surcharge. Nothing, he says, has fueled the recent explosion of allergy complaints like gluten. At a National Restaurant Association trade show not long ago, Eichelberger quipped: “I didn’t realize that celiac disease was contagious. It seems like everybody is getting it.” WE WERE NEVER meant to eat gluten. That’s the favorite refrain of gluten-free warriors. It’s true, says celiac expert Alessio Fasano, that in the 2.5 million years since our ancestors took their first bites, we’ve been eating gluten for only about 10,000 years. However, he stresses that for thousands of years, most people have been eating it with no problem. And gluten-dense wheat made possible our transition from hunter-gatherer life, where we spent almost all our energy on food procurement, to agriculture, which enabled creative work, like building the Colosseum or inventing the computer. In his book Gluten Freedom, Fasano notes that the first hint of celiac disease in the medical literature came nearly 2,000 years ago. A Greek physician named Aretaeus described a condition that involved “suffering in the bowels.” There was silence in the literature for the next 1,800 years, before British physician Samuel Gee in 1887 correctly diagnosed this malady of chronic indigestion as malabsorption caused by some unnamed foodstuff. Gee’s solution for his patients was less spot-on: He advised them to make sure the bread they ate was thinly sliced and toasted. Fasano trained at the University of Naples, a hotbed of research on celiac disease, at the time associated almost exclusively with European children suffering chronic diarrhea and other gastrointestinal problems. He tells me he came to the United States partly “to get away from celiac.” Yet when he arrived at the University of Maryland in 1993, he couldn’t accept the prevailing medical view that celiac basically didn’t exist in this country. Proving his intuition would consume a decade of his life. (Diagnosing the disease is cumbersome, requiring both blood tests and intestinal biopsies.) By 2003, he showed that 1 out of every 133 Americans — about 1 percent of the population — had celiac. It had been hiding because many Americans didn’t have the classic GI symptoms, but rather problems like anemia, joint pain, and chronic headaches. Imagine the exhilaration felt by these long-suffering patients who finally had an answer for their debilitating pain. Imagine their outrage at learning they had been hastening their deaths by unwittingly feeding themselves something that had been turning their bodies against them. They became powerful evangelists about the perils of gluten. But it didn’t take long for health-food hobbyists and diet-peddling hucksters to overrun the relatively small pool of celiac sufferers. And the “We were never meant to eat this” historical argument made their pitches all the more persuasive. That’s particularly true in the current climate, where we have become so estranged from our food and suspicious of the agribusiness behemoths supplying it. (While Fasano says pesticides may be a factor in rising rates of gluten intolerance, he sees no evidence for the popular claim that our wheat is substantially different from what it’s been for the last couple of centuries.) That’s the backdrop to a recent study that found 11 percent of American households are following a gluten-free diet, even though only a quarter of them said they were doing it because of celiac or gluten intolerance. The gluten-free spectrum is diverse. About 0.3 percent of Americans have a wheat allergy, meaning that ingesting even a trace amount could send them into anaphylactic shock. Then there is the 1 percent with celiac. Finally, there are people with gluten sensitivity, who suffer symptoms like diarrhea, bloating, or fatigue after eating gluten. Given the absence of diagnostic tools, the size of this last group is particularly fuzzy, though Fasano’s research suggests it’s in the 5 to 6 percent range. Fasano is troubled that so many people are diagnosing themselves with gluten intolerance, changing their diet without ever going to the doctor. “You don’t say, ‘I’m drinking a lot and peeing a lot, so I must have diabetes,’ and then start injecting yourself with insulin.” There is no cure for celiac or gluten sensitivity, and, unlike some allergies, people won’t outgrow the problem. So the only solution is to exclude gluten from the diet. That means going gluten-free is a therapeutic intervention, Fasano says. “It is not the South Beach diet.” Many who go gluten-free find themselves feeling better and see that as proof that they have gluten intolerance. But a genuine gluten problem is only one of three possible explanations for their improved health, and statistically the least likely. Another reason could be the placebo effect. The most likely explanation is that paying closer attention to diet and avoiding fried and junk food — which tends to be loaded with gluten — is bound to make anyone feel better. What’s the big deal if gluten-tolerant people go gluten-free, especially since they’ll be eating fewer Pop-Tarts? The problem is the more these bandwagon-jumpers demand special attention, the more likely that restaurants and wider society will come to see all gluten-free people as phonies. And by the time the fad-followers move on to another fad diet, they have cheapened the label for all those people who can’t move on. The label is already becoming comic shorthand. Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Rogen have both mocked LA gluten-free proponents who actually have no idea what gluten is. (When pressed, Rogen’s character in This Is the End hilariously describes gluten as a “vague term” meaning “things that are bad,” like calories and fat.) The Onion offered up the headline: “14% of Americans Now Intolerant to Word ‘Gluten’. ” With so many posers, people with celiac have to do a bit of acting themselves. Dr. Sheila Crowe, a specialist at the University of California San Diego, has begun advising her celiac patients who eat out to spare no details in telling servers how dangerously ill they will become from gluten. Fasano now gives his celiac patients permission to use the word “allergy” to describe their disease, since that will probably be taken more seriously. He marvels at how quickly things went from no one believing gluten was a problem here to today’s gluten phobia. “To define gluten as this devil we have to fight,” he says, “is a real stretch.” As he leans into his office chair, a gag box of Gluten Flakes cereal perched on the bookshelf above him, I ask Fasano, “Do you ever sit back and think, ‘What in the world did I unleash?’ ” He smiles wearily. “Yes.” Dina Rudick/Globe Staff Celiac sufferer Kevin Harron, cofounder and CEO of Burtons Grill, has built a restaurant chain that caters to people with allergies. WHEN KEVIN HARRON managed restaurants for Legal Sea Foods in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he says, “almost every year, we’d have somebody drop right at the table.” Typically, they’d be visitors from the Midwest or other landlocked regions. “They’d never eaten clams or lobster before, so they never knew they were allergic to it.” These unlucky Midwesterners learned their diagnosis through anaphylactic shock. The staff would call 911 and hope the ambulance got the customer to the hospital in time. Today, Harron is cofounder and CEO of Burtons Grill, a 10-year-old, 10-outlet chain of upscale casual restaurants. The Burtons philosophy rests on always saying “yes” to the customer. That’s particularly true if the request involves a food allergy. Harron shows me around the open kitchen of the first Burtons, in Hingham. Pan handles, cutting boards, and tongs are color-coded, like a Boston subway map. Red for meat dishes, yellow for poultry, blue for seafood, and a purple cutting board for gluten-free meals. Final dishes prepared free of gluten or a particular allergen are served on a square plate rather than a round one. If they’re takeout meals, a big “allergy” sticker is affixed to the container. Harron, who is 61, was diagnosed 45 years ago with celiac, though back then it was known as “sprue” and an almost entirely overlooked condition. He’s not particularly concerned about diners mislabeling their preferences as allergies, since his business is built to accommodate these requests. Still, he can understand why other restaurant owners have begun pushing back in frustration. “In this area, you’ve got to be either all in, or out,” Harron says. “There’s little margin of error.” Faced with this choice, more restaurants are likely to opt out, unless they can do a better job of differentiating the serious from the frivolous requests. Follow-up questions from restaurant staff can help, though some allergy sufferers resent this tactic. Graham Smith AllergyEats founder Paul Antico argues that diners should not resent followup questions from servers. “There are people who fake allergies, and that stinks.” But AllergyEats founder Paul Antico says the allergy community has to get less defensive. If restaurants can do a better job of distinguishing real from exaggerated, they’ll be more likely to continue making accommodations for the people who really need them. And maybe if more people with preferences begin to appreciate the trouble they’re causing with their use of the A-word, they’ll correct their ways. That begins with awareness. Carol Rosenblatt and her husband continued to operate their Tex-Mex BBQ restaurant in Providence for more than a decade after the death of the Brown student. Eventually, they closed the place and returned to their native New York. When I tell her how much things have changed since her day, how many times a night that kitchens now have to swap out their utensils to address the explosion of allergy requests, she is stunned. “Oh, my God,” she says. “I’m glad I’m out of the restaurant business.” I ask her if there are any food allergies in her family. “My husband thinks he’s allergic to dairy and gluten and all that kind of stuff, but I think it’s more a sensitivity than an allergy.” I wonder how he introduces the subject when he’s eating out. She explains that “he asks the waiter, ‘Does it have this? Does it have that?’ ” “Does he ever say he has an allergy?” I ask. Rosenblatt pauses. “Oh, yeah. He sometimes does.” Neil Swidey is a member of the Globe Magazine staff. E-mail him at swidey@globe.com or follow him on Twitter @neilswidey. HOW A KITCHEN RESPONDS Dina Rudick/Globe Staff > Server has discussion with customer, trying to ascertain specifics of allergy. Often will get manager involved. Then server puts through order, noting allergy. > Action in kitchen stops, and there is typically a discussion of everything that needs to change to avoid cross contamination. > Cook clears an area and either grabs a new cutting board, tongs, saute pan, utensils, etc., or puts all of those through the high-temp sanitizing dishwasher. > For fried food, cook must use different oil or a separate fryer. > When final dish is ready, it is handled with extreme care. Kitchen staff may use a disposable wipe to grasp plate. > In many restaurants, a specific person (such as a manager) is assigned to deliver dishes to any allergic diners. GLOMMING ON TO GLUTEN-FREE > $23 billion — Estimated size of US gluten-free market > 1 percent — Percentage of Americans with celiac disease > 11 percent — Percentage of American households following a gluten-free diet; only one-quarter of those are doing it because of a celiac or gluten sensitivity Sources: Nielsen; MGH Center for Celiac Research; NPD Group ALLERGY SHOTS > 4 percent — Percentage of American adults with a food allergy (rate is 5 percent or higher in children) > 90 percent — Percentage of food allergies represented by these 8 allergens: milk, egg, wheat, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, and shellfish > 200,000 — Number of annual visits to US emergency rooms because of food allergy reactions > 7 percent — Percentage of anaphylaxis deaths in the US related to food allergies (more than 60 percent are related to medications) Sources: Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology; Food Allergy Research & Education Related: • When food allergies dine out • Chefs and dietitians join forces • Tastes good, no gluten |
TOBY Greene could be facing further investigation after an incident during Monday night's St Kilda-Carlton contest at Etihad Stadium. Greene, 20, watched the game while having a few drinks with mates. Near the end of the match, Greene’s group allegedly became involved in a scuffle with a group of older patrons at the stadium's Locker Room bar. It is understood a man in his 50s suffered a black eye and cut to the head as a result of the incident. It is believed at least two members of Greene's group were ejected from the venue. Greene’s exact role in the incident remains unclear. A spokesman for Etihad Stadium confirmed there was an incident. "There was an incident in the Locker Room and two people were ejected outside the Locker Room, and they were ejected by police and stadium security," Etihad Stadium spokesman Bill Lane confirmed to AFL.com.au. It’s not clear whether CCTV captured anything related to the incident. A spokesman for Greater Western Sydney declined to comment on the matter. It's expected the club's leadership group and officials will meet in the coming days to discuss the situation. Police were not in a position to provide comment on Wednesday night. In the hours after the Etihad Stadium incident, Greene and his group ventured to Zagames, a licensed venue in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs. There, it's alleged Greene and a 19-year-old man from East Malvern were involved in a confrontation with a bouncer. Greene has been charged with intentionally causing serious injury, recklessly causing injury, affray, assault in company, assault by kicking, assault with a weapon, unlawful assault, making threats to inflict serious injury, being drunk in a public place and criminal damage. Both men were granted bail. The pair is due to appear in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on September 25. Giants players are on leave ahead of the club's bye weekend. The club is yet to indicate what action of its own it intends to take. |
Dunkin' Donuts is dropping titanium dioxide from its powdered sugar donuts after pressure from a public interest group who argued it is not safe for human consumption. Titanium dioxide is used to make the powdered sugar appear brighter. It is also used in sunscreen and paints. The group As You Sow argues titanium dioxide that can cause DNA and chromosomal damage when consumed. The decision by Dunkin' Donuts (DNKN) was recently disclosed by the advocacy group. "This is a groundbreaking decision," said Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel of the group. "Dunkin' has demonstrated strong industry leadership by removing this potentially harmful ingredient from its donuts." The group claims that titanium dioxide is a nanomaterial, which is not regulated or prohibited by the Food and Drug Administration. But As You Sow argues that there is not enough information on their effects on humans. "Asbestos, also a nanomaterial, was used before its harms were fully understood, leading to a costly health crisis," the group said. Dunkin' Donuts claims that titanium dioxide "does not meet the definition of 'nanomaterial' as outlined under FDA guidance." But it said nonetheless it is making the change to remove the chemical from its donuts. Related: Coke to drop flame retardant from drinks As We Sow has been introducing shareholder proposals at companies calling for the removal of titanium dioxide from various products. Such a resolution was supported by about 19% of Dunkin' Brands' shareholders last year. The group released a letter sent by a Dunkin executive saying it has reformulated the powered sugar and was working on a schedule to roll out the new recipe. It led As We Sow to drop a similar shareholder resolution from the company's upcoming proxy. |
[Image via Flickr user theqspeaks, Creative Commons licensed] A representative of the Internal Revenue Service apologized on Friday for the actions of a group of low-level staffers who unfairly targeted conservative groups for review during the 2012 election. According to the Associated Press, Lois Lerner, director of the IRS unit in charge of tax-exempt organizations, said that the employees worked out of the Cincinnati IRS office and were targeting organizations they believed might be in violation of their tax-exempt status. Lerner said that the employees singled out applications for tax-exempt status from groups with “Tea Party” and “patriot” in their names, subjecting them to additional reviews. She acknowledged that the extra scrutiny was unfair and apologized during a speech at a Washington, D.C. conference. Many conservative groups complained about IRS scrutiny during their application process. The anti-tax, anti-federal government organizations believed that they were having to answer too many questions in order to obtain tax-exempt status. Under federal law, small charitable groups are afforded tax-exempt status so long as they do not conduct political operations as their primary activity. [image via Flickr user theqspeaks, creative commons licensed] |
GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy Harold (Trey) Watson GowdyThe family secret Bruce Ohr told Rod Rosenstein about Russia case Trey Gowdy joins Fox News as a contributor Congress must take the next steps on federal criminal justice reforms MORE (S.C.) wagged his finger at the media Monday for what he called a "blurring of the line" between opinion and fact. "I've been really disappointed in the media since I've been in Congress," Gowdy said at an event in South Carolina on Monday, according to the Washington Examiner. "I think there is a blurring of the line between the opinion page and the news page. And I can take you to the headlines of almost any website on the internet right now, and you will say, 'Well that's opinion, that's subjective, not objective.'" ADVERTISEMENT Gowdy noted the press is not a monolith, according to Greenville Online, but said he thinks the media are too worried about being balanced rather than being "accurate." "To them, they've done their job," Gowdy said at the event co-hosted with the Concerned Veterans for America that focused on free speech. "They have quoted this person who's wrong, and this person who's equally wrong, therefore it's balanced. "I think the goal ought to be to be accurate, not to be balanced. And there is a movement in the media now that it is more important to be first than to be right." At the event, Gowdy and the veterans group were critical of what they said are retaliatory actions against whistleblowers within federal governmental agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, Greenville Online reported. “Government against whistleblowers is an unequal fight," Gowdy said. |
Beermosa Sure, you've had a Mimosa, but have you ever had a Beermosa?? Well neither had the MoreBeer! crew until the 2011 National Homebrewers Conference in San Diego. It was Saturday morning, the morning after the MoreBeer! sponsored Club Night, and everyone was a little worse for the wear. We were up till 3:00AM or later (David Wonder), first putting stuff away from Club Night, and then later beating Wyeast in Beer Pong. Such is the job of a MoreBeer! employee. Anyways, Saturday morning we were back at our booth with dark circles under our eyes and black coffee in our hands. All of the company booths at this event are located in the Hospitaility Suite where the Clubs are also pouring beer throughout the day. The GEBL Club (Great Everett Brewer's League) was on the clock and amazingly they showed up! They set up and started pouring. Diehard homebrewers/beer drinkers started to line up at 9:00AM in the morning to taste. Soon we started to hear a buzz in the room and noticed that several people were holding glasses of orange beer, like flourescent orange beer. Hmmm.... what is that? A Beermosa? Never heard of it. Have a taste? Wow, it does taste like a Mimosa, but richer. What is it? A Belgian Triple with Tang! Holy crap, did not expect that. Well, the MoreBeer! crew set down their coffee, had a beermosa, rubbed our eyes, and got back to work talking homebrewing. For the next hour everyone was talking about the Beermosa, recommending their friends to try it, and the whole room took on a great energy. So we send out a personal thanks to the GEBL club for making that Saturday morning a little more fun! Whenever we taste something totally unique and out of the ordinary we think about including it in our Signature Series of unique recipe kits designed by World Class Homebrewers. At the show we talked with Dan Hansen, president of GEBL, and later followed up with a quick interview. We learned that the Tang was added on site and so we think it is better as a how-to than as an actual kit for sale. What follows is the story Dan told us of how the Beermosa came to be: "Believe it or not, we didn't go in with intention of serving this as one of our concoctions. Eric Rhoades of our club, Greater Everett Brewer's League (GEBL), likes to serve carbonated tang at club beer events. After pounding your pallet with IPA's, he finds it a refreshing twist on drinking a few glasses of water. We made up a keg of tang figuring it would be a good for the morning shift. A lot of us were fighting the hair of the dog after a great club night. As we were sitting there getting ready to serve, I recalled having a beermosa at Snooze in Denver for breakfast at GABF. They server theirs with fresh orange juice and New Belgium Trippel. Being the ingenious ones we are, we gave it shot with 1:4 parts tang to Tripel. It instantaneously became a hit throughout the conference and we killed the keg of Tripel in less than hour. We ended up finish the shift with German Hef and Tang which is okay, but the trippel is much better. So the Belgian Tripel recipe is based on Jamil's Brewing Classic Styles" The following is the ProMash Recipe used to make the Trippel Recipe Specifics ---------------- Batch Size (Gal): 5.50 Wort Size (Gal): 5.50 Total Grain (Lbs): 12.75 Anticipated OG: 1.061 Plato: 14.9 Anticipated SRM: 3.8 Anticipated IBU: 36.6 Brewhouse Efficiency: 75 % Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes Formulas Used ------------- Brewhouse Efficiency and Predicted Gravity based on Method #1, Potential Used. Final Gravity Calculation Based on Points. Hard Value of Sucrose applied. Value for recipe: 46.2100 ppppg % Yield Type used in Gravity Prediction: Fine Grind Dry Basis. Color Formula Used: Morey Hop IBU Formula Used: Rager Additional Utilization Used For Plug Hops: 2 % Additional Utilization Used For Pellet Hops: 10 % Grain/Extract/Sugar % Amount Name Origin Potential SRM ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 98.0 12.50 lbs. Pilsener Malt(2-Row) Continental Eu 1.035 1 2.0 0.25 lbs. Aromatic Malt Belgium 1.036 25 Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon. Hops Amount Name Form Alpha IBU Boil Time ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2.00 oz. Tettnanger Pellet 4.10 34.8 60 min. 0.50 oz. Saazer Pellet 4.30 1.8 10 min. Yeast ----- WYeast 1214 Belgian Ale As an alternative we suggest using our Belgian Trippel Kit All contents copyright 2019 by MoreFlavor Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. |
WASHINGTON — A U.S. House committee on Wednesday urged the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency to reverse the agency's plans to limit development at the proposed Pebble project in Alaska's Bristol Bay region. In a letter to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chair of the House Science Committee, charged the agency with overstepping its statutory authority under President Barack Obama. The committee has held hearings and conducted investigations into the EPA scientists involved in the scientific assessment that was the basis for the agency's decision. The agency's final action is on hold during a related court case. The Pebble project has the potential to be one of the world's largest gold and copper mines. But the deposit sits at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, a spawning site for some of Alaska's most prized salmon fisheries. The project has been the subject of controversy for more than a decade, and the Pebble Limited Partnership, owned by Northern Dynasty Minerals, has not yet applied for a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. The EPA could effectively "veto" an Army Corps permit. Given the committee's work, "as well as President Trump's commitment to swift and lawful permitting decisions, the Committee urges you to rescind the 2014 decision and pursue the regular order of permitting for this and all projects that require permits under Section 404(c)" of the Clean Water Act, Rep. Smith wrote. Smith called the EPA's decision "unprecedented" and the scientific assessment "questionable." "Using Section 404(c) in this preemptive fashion is a de facto veto of this specific project and establishes a dangerous precedent of expansive federal agency powers that may be used in the future to prevent projects that would contribute positively to the American economy," Smith said. |
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Andrew Flintoff has been caught speeding four times in three years Former England cricket captain Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff has escaped a speeding ban after arguing "exceptional hardship" to magistrates in Carlisle. Flintoff, 36, was already on nine points for speeding and in danger of an automatic ban after admitting speeding in his Bentley on the M6 in January. He was caught doing 87mph near Linstock in Cumbria, magistrates were told. But they accepted a ban would have an adverse effect on others who relied on his extensive charity work. Instead, the cricketer, who has been caught speeding four times in the past three years, was given the three points on his licence and fined £330 but allowed to keep driving. His solicitor Michael Neofytou told the court a ban would also affect his TV work and intrude on the privacy of his three children. 'Constantly raising money' Flintoff, of Mottram St Andrew, Cheshire, was warned he would not be able to use the same reasons again in court if he was caught speeding again in the next three years. The latest offence would take him to 12 points, which would normally mean an automatic ban after "totting up". Mr Neofytou mentioned his client's "illustrious" cricket career for Lancashire and England and his being made an MBE in 2005 but did not "want to dwell" on those matters, he said. He said Flintoff was "constantly raising money, or trying to, when not in his professional role". His client drove himself to charity speaking arrangements, cricket matches and auctions of cricket memorabilia and "never took a fee", he said. Flintoff and his wife "juggle" running their charitable foundation, while looking after their three children, two boys and a girl, aged nine, eight and six, the court heard. After retiring for 20 minutes to consider the sentence, David Johnson, chair of the bench, said: "Because of your position, the fact that you are well known, clearly the impact has to be on others, more than you yourself." |
At Target, we have a longstanding commitment to our team members’ health and well-being. We have been researching and evaluating how the transforming health care landscape will impact our team members and our company. Along the way, we have been firmly committed to making the best decisions for our team members and Target. The launch of Health Insurance Marketplaces provides new options for health care coverage that we believe our part-time team members may prefer. In fact, by offering them insurance, we could actually disqualify many of them from being eligible for newly available subsidies that could reduce their overall health insurance expense. In addition, the majority of our part-time team members who have been eligible for our health insurance coverage don’t enroll. Today, less than 10 percent of our total team member population participates in our part-time plan. As a result, and after much thoughtful consideration, we have decided to discontinue part-time health insurance coverage for our stores’ part-time team members, beginning April 1, 2014. We sat down with Jodee Kozlak, executive vice president of Human Resources at Target, to talk about the part-time team member health benefit changes and what we are doing to support our team members. Can you explain why Target made changes to its stores’ part-time health insurance benefits? Health care reform is transforming the benefits landscape and affecting how all employers, including Target, administer health benefits coverage. Our decision to discontinue this benefit comes after careful consideration of the impact to our stores’ part-time team members and to Target, the new options available for our part-time team, and the historically low number of team members who elected to enroll in the part-time plan. We recognize this change may be better for some and also may cause disruption for those who previously elected to enroll in this benefit. That’s why we have developed an approach to ease the transition for those impacted most. As a company, Target continuously reviews our programs and offerings and makes updates based on what makes sense for our team members, our guests and our business. And we focus on doing this in the most thoughtful way. How is Target helping team members’ transition? It was important to us that we enable a smooth transition for those team members most impacted. We came up with a plan that tries to minimize any disruption and reduce confusion about how to work through the Health Insurance Marketplaces. Therefore, Target has dedicated substantial resources to guide our team through every step of the process. First, to help offset the inconvenience of this transition, Target will provide U.S. stores’ part-time team members who are currently enrolled in Target’s health coverage and who are losing access to that coverage a $500 cash payment. Second, we have partnered with a highly respected company that has extensive benefits expertise and asked them to develop a personalized approach to provide one-on-one support to every affected team member. This includes sharing information that is customized to each team member about what insurance is available to them, the differences between plans and their impact, any off-sets available to the team member, and ultimately walking them through every step of the sign-up process. How did you notify these affected stores part-time team members? Our store leaders are personally talking to our teams this month, sharing information about the change as well as detail on how to access the dedicated support and resources. In addition, we are sending personalized information to our team members’ homes. Will part-time team members still be eligible for other benefits? Yes. Store team members who average between 20 and 31 hours per week will continue to be eligible for benefits including vacation, dental, disability and life insurance. Team members will also continue to qualify for our team member discount, and the Target 401(k) Plan, which Target matches dollar for dollar up to 5 percent. Team members who average 32 hours or more a week will also continue to be eligible for comprehensive health insurance through Target. All team members will also continue to have access to a number of health and well-being resources, such as those available through Target’s well-being program, which empowers team members to become their personal best by focusing on the five elements that make life fulfilling: health, social, career, financial, and community. A network of more than 3,000 well-being captains are dedicated to helping team members achieve their well-being goals in these areas by providing them with tools, resources, and ongoing education and inspiration. Will Target be limiting hours to team members as a result of the change in benefits? No. At any time, our team members can talk to their manager about their interest and availability to work more hours. In fact, during the holiday season we offered our year-round part time and full time team members the opportunity to take on additional hours or cross-train to work in other areas — at their request. |
Sounds have been discovered coming from deep in outer space through a radio telescope in Puerto Rico. A split-second burst of radio waves was detected by scientists at the Arecibo Observatory. Published in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists say this is the first time that a "fast radio burst" has been detected using any instrument other than the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, where a handful of similar events have been recorded. However, because fast radio bursts were not recorded at any other facility, some had speculated that the Parkes telescope was picking up signals from sources on or near Earth. What is causing these radio bursts is now the question astrophysicists are looking to answer. Hypotheses include evaporating black holes, exotic astrophysical objects and flares from magnetars, which are a type of neutron star that have powerful magnetic fields. The pulse was detected in November 2012. It lasted just a few thousandths of a second but from it scientists were able to confirm previous estimates that the bursts occur about 10,000 times per day - a massive number considering how little of the sky is observed. Laura Spitler, lead author of the study, said: "The brightness and duration of this event, and the inferred rate at which these bursts occur, are all consistent with the properties of the bursts previously detected by the Parkes telescope in Australia." Scientists said they can tell the bursts are coming from outside the Milky Way because they had three times the dispersion measure expected from a source within the galaxy. They now plan to detect radio bursts using telescopes that can observe much broader areas of the sky. Victoria Kaspi, an astrophysics professor at McGill University in Montreal, said: "Our result is important because it eliminates any doubt that these radio bursts are truly of cosmic origin. The radio waves show every sign of having come from far outside our galaxy - a really exciting prospect." |
According to some, the “Deep State” is just another conspiracy theory. It’s hard to prove claims about unelected and unaccountable officials in government and intelligence agencies. They operate in secret. In another sense, however, the Deep State is an obvious — and troubling — fact. The president and those whom he appoints and we elect are but the tip of a deep iceberg. Below them sits a huge pyramid of bureaucracies and civil servants. The federal government is the largest employer in America. But whom does this army of civil servants serve? They’re supposed to serve the American people. Too often, it seems, they put party loyalty above that. Deep State Functionaries Give 90 Percent to Democrats What party is that? Here’s a clue: federal employees working in 14 agencies donated $2 million to the recent presidential campaign. Of that 95 percent went to Hilary Clinton. No surprise that 99 percent of donations from State Department employees went to Clinton. But Department of Agriculture employee donations also went 99 percent to Clinton. So did gifts from Department of Education employees (99.7 percent) and Department of Labor employees (99.4 percent). Department of Justice workers contributed 97 percent. IRS employees gave 94 percent. The State Department winked at Clinton’s use of her private server to handle classified information. You don’t need a conspiracy theory to see why. When the Justice Department exonerates Clinton, there’s no mystery there. The people who make these decisions, and the lower-level people who back them up, are all Clintonites. That is to say, left-leaning Democrats. They don’t take their cues from the American people or from the Constitution. They do what the Democratic Party wants. Defense Department employees contributed 84 percent to Clinton. Homeland Security workers donated 90 percent. By any reading of the statute, Clinton clearly violated the Espionage Act. Not once, but thousands of times. Her actions clearly compromised national security. Foreign powers surely could access her communications. Nevertheless, for the Deep State Democrats, party loyalty trumped national security. So she wasn’t prosecuted. Obama Stuffed the Pentagon with His Followers But how about the security agencies themselves? If you believe what you see in the movies, military top brass are all rock-ribbed conservatives. Yet Defense Department employees contributed 84 percent to Clinton. Homeland Security workers donated 90 percent. The figures suggest that the people in charge of our nation’s security are mostly rock-ribbed Democrats. This partisan edge may explain why President Trump is having a tough time with some of his security appointments. General H.R. McMaster, his National Security Advisor, subscribes to the Obama-era fantasy that terror has nothing to do with Islam. General James Mattis, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense, seems to be picking his own appointees from Hillary’s discarded wishlist. Mattis’ choice of Anne Patterson for undersecretary of defense for policy is particularly disturbing. This is the fourth most powerful position in the Pentagon. During Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Patterson was Ambassador to Egypt. She was also an ardent supporter of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Even after General El-Sisi turned the Brotherhood out of power, she lobbied to have them reinstated. According to Raymond Ibrahim, she was widely known in Egypt as the “Brotherhood stooge.” She “was arguably one of the most hated individuals by the millions of Egyptians who took to the streets against Morsi and the Brotherhood.” One senior Republican foreign policy advisor told the Washington Free Beacon: Anne Patterson is the embodiment of the Obama administration’s failed approach to the Middle East … it’s beyond irresponsible to put her in charge of the Pentagon’s policy apparatus. Mattis has since withdrawn Patterson’s name under pressure from the White House. But why did he pick her in the first place? Some say that the choice of McMaster and Mattis was just poor judgment. Maybe. Or maybe there aren’t that many good people to choose from. Trump needs candidates who are competent and can be confirmed swiftly by the Senate. Mattis’s quick confirmation suggests that the Democrats weren’t too worried about his policy views. There’s a huge swamp of Obama appointees in every federal agency. Is Trump willing to drain it? If not, they will foil him at every turn, with the media’s help. Could Mattis have been steeped too long in the culture of Obama’s Pentagon? Was he surrounded by people who couldn’t see a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood? During his eight year tenure, Obama replaced several hundred generals and admirals. He put in people who would go along with his anti-win policy. While Obama was gutting the Pentagon’s budget, he was also busy weeding out all those rock-ribbed patriotic types. Are Iran’s Stooges Setting Our Foreign Policy? Too many government agencies are top-heavy with liberals. That will make it extremely hard for the new administration to make a fresh start. The Deep State is stuffed with holdovers from the Obama administration who are committed to his failed policies. A prime example is Sahar Nowrouzzadeh. She formerly worked for the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC). That’s a lobbying group for the Islamic Republic of Iran. She also served as the Iran Director for President Obama’s National Security Council. Experts call her one of the architects of the suicidal Iran nuclear deal. You’d think that the new administration would want to cut her out of the loop. Yet Nowrouzzadeh is now in charge of Iran policy for the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. She got this position in 2016. Recently, a high-ranking official of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps boasted about a “guerrilla movement” of Iranian agents who work and live in the United States. But with people like Nowrouzzadeh working at State, they need hardly have bothered. The Travel Ban Was Nixed by an Obama Crony And then there are the courts. Federal judges might be expected to keep the Deep State in check. But some of them act more like partisan functionaries. A case in point is Judge Derrick Kahala Watson. He was appointed as a U.S district court judge in Honolulu by fellow Hawaiian and Harvard Law classmate Barack Obama. Judge Watson issued a restraining order against President Trump’s temporary travel ban. He didn’t cite legal grounds. So what was his argument? During the campaign, Trump had used heated rhetoric when speaking of Muslims. The purpose of the travel ban is to protect Americans from radical Islam. The judiciary, in contrast, seems determined to put Americans at risk. The law itself is solidly on the side of the president. The president is empowered by 8 U.S. Code 1182 to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants” whose entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” Alas, the lawyer left is not interested in the law. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy writes, “There is no way of crafting an order restricting immigration from Muslim countries that will satisfy them.” So what then? If the judges will not follow the law? If the bureaucratic holdovers from the Obama administration are more loyal to him than to the Constitution? We Are Headed for an Ugly Showdown That Trump Might Lose Then we are headed for a dangerous confrontation. It will be hard to resolve through courts. Will we end up with one law enforcement body following orders from a court, against another following orders from the President? And then there’s the question of just how much power the President has over the Deep State. Columnist Daniel Greenfield suggests that Obama controls more of the government through his network of embedded loyalists than Trump does. As Mark Steyn puts it, “You don’t need a presidency for life, if you’ve got a bureaucracy for life.” But why would leftist actors in Deep State risk such a dangerous encounter? Perhaps because they’re fairly confident they would win it. They have plenty of allies in the government and in the courts. Add to that the support of universities and all those grads whom they’ve trained to believe that they can flout any laws they don’t like. In addition, they can count on a network of leftist nonprofits such as Obama’s Organizing for Action (OFA) which has 33,000 volunteers and 250 offices across the country. Most of all, the Deep State can count on the “fourth estate” — the media — to cover for it by slanting the news. If, as some contend, we are in the midst of a “quiet coup” by a shadow government, you can be sure that the media will do its best to keep it quiet. Or even to justify it. Those who think that Trump’s electoral victory will surely result in a safer and more secure America haven’t come to grips with the Deep State’s capacity to stir up deep trouble. |
Newly installed President Donald Trump has moved swiftly to turn his fiercely nationalist "America first" inaugural speech into action, stoking unease abroad over the new direction the United States is headed under his leadership. On Day One of his presidency, the White House moved to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. The Obama administration's signature domestic programme, the Affordable Care Act, also fell victim to Mr Trump's move to unpick his predecessor's policies. In his fiery inauguration address on Friday, Mr Trump painted a bleak picture of America today - one exploited by foreign countries, burdened with lopsided alliances and failing to defend its borders. "For many decades, we've enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidised the armies of other countries, while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military," he said, blasting past policies. "One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind." WHAT AMERICA NEEDS We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. US PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP, on why he is choosing to go down the protectionist route. What's left behind, he said, is a dystopia of blighted inner cities and rusted-out factories "scattered like tombstones" across the land. "This American carnage stops right here and stops right now," Mr Trump declared. "From this day forward, it's going to be only America first... Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families." Mr Trump, revisiting the election campaign themes that resonated strongly with what he called the "forgotten" voters of Middle America, made clear that under his administration, the US will be hard-nosed in protecting its own interests. "We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs," he said. Mr Trump's signalling of a dramatic shift in policy has set off ripples of concern in world capitals, even as congratulations and offers to improve ties flooded in. The premiers of Japan and Britain plan to meet Mr Trump in the coming weeks. While Prime Minister Shinzo Abe yesterday reiterated the importance of US-Japan ties, Mr Masahiko Komura, vice-president of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, was quoted in the Mainichi Shimbun as saying: "If each country begins focusing only on itself, the economic state of the world - including the US - will be disastrous." Although Beijing has yet to issue an official response to Mr Trump's inaugural address, a commentary in the official Xinhua news agency noted that "cooperation also demands reciprocal flexibility instead of a beggar-thy-neighbour mentality". In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday acknowledged that there were differences of opinion but said that she would work to arrive at compromises with Mr Trump on issues like trade and military spending. After his hard-hitting opening speech as President, Mr Trump switched to glitzier engagements in the evening, with a series of inaugural balls followed by a prayer service at the National Cathedral the next day. He is expected to push ahead with more policy changes this week. Meanwhile, he continues to be dogged by protests at home and abroad. Yesterday, after protests in Australia, New Zealand and parts of Asia, thousands of demonstrators gathered for a massive Women's March in Washington, to highlight racial and gender equality and other issues deemed to be in jeopardy under the new Trump administration. READ MORE: Reactions to Trump's 'America 1st' speech TOP OF THE NEWS Trump's speech delights supporters, dismays critics 'If US turns inward, China's clout will rise' Europe unsettled by 'America first' declaration WORLD Crafting a sustainable future for globalisation INSIGHT Totally riveted by the Trump reality show The glitz and glamour TOP OF THE NEWS The politics of fashion Trump's full speech INSIGHT 'From this day forward, it's going to be only America first' |
TOKYO (Reuters) - Tokyo Electric Power Co, the beleaguered operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, said it appointed a former U.S. nuclear regulatory official as an adviser - a sign that it is prepared to reach out for foreign expertise in the face of criticism over its handling of the March 2011 disaster. Tokyo Electric (Tepco) said in a statement that Lake Barrett, an independent energy consultant and former head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Civilian Nuclear Waste Management, will advise it on steps to decommission the plant and contain contaminated water at the site. Barrett, who was also a director for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the Three Mile Island plant, the site in Pennsylvania that suffered a partial nuclear meltdown in 1979, will join Tepco’s clean-up effort this week. In the 30 months since a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear crisis at the Fukushima plant, Tepco has been criticized for failing to tap foreign experts in dealing with cleaning up the site. The utility has come under increased scrutiny after it admitted last month that 300 metric tons (330 tons) of highly radioactive water had leaked from one of the hastily built tanks storing contaminated water at the site. The Japanese government last week pledged nearly half a billion dollars to contain contaminated water problems at the site, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has stressed that the issue is “under control”. |
Bernie Sanders is charging ahead with his message of representing the people against the billionaire class. New polls show that Sanders even beats out Hillary Clinton against Republican candidates in a general election now. According to the Wall Street Journal: Among New Hampshire voters, Mrs. Clinton lost in test match-ups to former GOP Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and former tech CEO Carly Fiorina. By Contrast, Mr. Sanders tied Mr. Bush and narrowly beat Mrs. Fiorina. When Mrs. Clinton beat businessman Donald Trump by 3 percentage points among New Hampshire voters, Mr. Sanders topped him by 10 points. In Iowa, Clinton was bested by every potential Republican candidate. Fiorina defeated Clinton by 14 points, Bush beat Clinton by 10 points, and Trump beat her by 7 points. Sanders, unlike Clinton, was a stronger contender against the Republicans, beating Trump, only losing to Bush by 2 points and Fiorina by 3. Watch Ed Schultz talk about the Bernie Sanders revolution For more on this, read the Wall Street Journal report titled: “Iowa, New Hampshire Voters Hold Dim View of Hillary Clinton, Poll Finds.” |
Silent Barn. Photo by Christian Matts via Flickr In spite of rent increases, robberies, and patterns of escalating police intervention, NYC’s DIY music scene continues to thrive. Whenever a much-loved performance space closes down, another one seems to pop up to take its place (which is definitely not the case in every major city). This may make it hard to keep up, which is why we’ve conveniently assembled this list of New York City’s top ten DIY venues. Each venue listed is still in operation and are not listed in any order of importance. Enjoy! Pallisades, a brand new performance space at 906 Broadway has only been open for four months but it has already hosted shows by some of the most popular bands in the New York punk and underground music scene. It is conveniently located right off of the Myrtle Broadway stop on the J train and the sound and the size of the venue are good enough to rival any other medium sized rock club of notability. View all on one page |
Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2010 February 27 Dawn's Endeavour Credit & Copyright: Malcolm Park Explanation: On February 21st, the Space Shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station (ISS) flew through the sky near dawn over Whitby, Ontario, Canada. Along with star trails, both were captured in this single time exposure. Glinting in sunlight 350 kilometers above the Earth, Endeavour slightly preceeded the ISS arcing over the horizon. But the brighter trail and the brighter flare belongs to the space station just visited by Endeavour. Near the completion of the STS-130 mission, hours later Endeavour made a night landing at Kennedy Space Center. |
CLOSE Rachel Dolezal, president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Wash., responded to her biological parents' claims that she's actually white. VPC SPOKANE, Wash. — A recent investigation into racially charged threats made toward the president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane have raised questions beyond who made the threats. On Thursday, the chapter president's parents claimed she had been deceiving people. Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal said Thursday that they want people to know the truth, including that their daughter Rachel Dolezal is Caucasian. The Dolezals said their daughter is specifically German and Czech. CLOSE Dolezal told KREM 2 News that she does not speak to her parents because of an on-going legal issue. KREM Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal said their daughter has always identified with the African-American culture and had black siblings who were adopted. They said she went to school in Mississippi and was part of a primarily African-American community. The Dolezals said their daughter married and later divorced a black man. They said after the divorce in 2004, she began identifying differently. She started claiming to be partially African American and the daughter of biracial parents. They have noticed a change in her physical appearance, but do not know how that occurred. "Rachel has wanted to be somebody she's not. She's chosen not to just be herself but to represent herself as an African-American woman or a biracial person. And that's simply not true," said Ruthanne Dolezal. The couple said they do not have a problem with Rachel advocating for a civil rights group for African Americans, rather that she is being deceptive about it. "Our daughter is Caucasian" say parents of Spokane NAACP President Rachel Dolezal. pic.twitter.com/6VHxm9v4Wt — Taylor Viydo (@KREMTaylor) June 11, 2015 Her parents said she distanced herself from them and has not spoken to them recently. Rachel Dolezal said she does not speak to her parents because of an on-going legal issue. "There is a lawsuit that's been going on for almost a year, once I supported my sister and allegations against her older brother," she said. Dolezal said she does not consider her biological parents her real parents. In addressing public sentiment that she misrepresented her race, Dolezal said, "I can understand that. And like I said, it's more important to me to clarify that to the black community, and with my executive board, than it really is for me to explain it to a community that I quite frankly don't think understands the definitions of race and ethnicity." In a statement released Friday, the Baltimore-based civil rights organization said, "NAACP Spokane Washington Branch President Rachel Dolezal is enduring a legal issue with her family, and we respect her privacy in this matter. One's racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership. The NAACP Alaska-Oregon-Washington State Conference stands behind Ms. Dolezal's advocacy record." THREATENING LETTERS Earlier this year, the Spokane Police Department began investigating hate mail that Dolezal claimed she found in the P.O. Box for the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. Dolezal said there were pictures of lynchings and references to local cases concerning race in the envelope. During the course of the investigation, the Spokane Police Department noticed that there were important marks missing from the package. Although delivered to a post office box, there was no date stamp or bar code on the envelope, according to a police report. Dolezal's parents, who live in Troy, MT, say Rachel has been deceiving people. They want people to know the truth. pic.twitter.com/sS3aiUwD0H — Taylor Viydo (@KREMTaylor) June 11, 2015 Postal officials told police officers that a letter or package would never be put in a mailbox purposefully without these things even if it was hand delivered to the post office. Postal workers said it was possible the letter could have gotten stuck to another one and missed the scanner and postal marking. But they said the chances of this happening were extremely low. Postal employees said the only other way for a unprocessed letter to land in a P.O. Box would be if it were placed there by someone with a key or a postal employee was involved. CLOSE The leader of the Spokane NAACP falsely portrays herself as black, according to her family. A recent investigation into racially charged threats made toward the president have raised more questions about who made the threats. KREM-TV Police have ruled out postal employees as suspects. Dolezal said she does not believe anyone within the NAACP could be responsible. Police continue to examine the envelope for any clues to help identify who sent it. At the time she reported the letter, Dolezal told officers that most of these types of incidents were caused by people affiliated with right wing groups in the area. In May, Dolezal claimed she had received another racially charged letter — this one sent to the NAACP's office in downtown Spokane. She said it looked like it was from the same person who sent the earlier letter. "Hate language sent through mail and social media along with credible threats continue to be a serious issue for our units in the Pacific Northwest and across the nation," the NAACP said in its statement. "We take all threats seriously and encourage the FBI and the Department of Justice to fully investigate each occurrence." These letters are not the first time Dolezal has reported being a victim of a crime. She said she has been the victim of burglary, death threats and in two cases, nooses left on her property in Spokane and Idaho. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1JK7HDe |
Getty Images The Packers offense has been the subject of much concern in Green Bay all season, leading coach Mike McCarthy to say that quarterback Aaron Rodgers is “the most frustrated I’ve ever seen him.” The team has tried various things to get the unit operating at a higher level, including McCarthy taking back play calling responsibilities, but nothing has worked consistently. One thing that’s worked at times, including the fourth quarter of last week’s loss to the Vikings, has been a more freewheeling approach when the team is trying to come from behind. Rodgers said this week that “maybe I have to adjust my mindset and kind of let it fly a little more” than he’s accustomed to doing, something that could raise both the potential for the missing big plays on offense as well as the risk of turnovers. Avoiding interceptions has been a strength for Rodgers over the years, but he said winning is a bigger consideration. “Whatever it takes to win,” Rodgers said, via the Green Bay Press-Gazette. “At this point we haven’t been very consistent in any capacity on offense, so if it means being a little riskier with the ball with a bigger reward on the back end, that’s something you’ve got to think about.” We’ll find out Sunday if the Packers will make those adjustments, but there’s little downside to something new when the same old thing hasn’t worked out in Green Bay. |
WARNING: Some readers may find language within this article offensive. Video report by ITV News Security Editor Rohit Kachroo Article by Becky Kelly, Specialist Producer, ITV News UK Bureau Former members of Britain’s first white supremacist terror group are still meeting in secret, despite being banned by the Government, an undercover investigation by ITV News can exclusively reveal. National Action celebrated the death of MP Jo Cox before the group was banned by the Home Office in December. The ban makes it a terrorism offence for the group to exist or meet, with a jail term of up to 10 years if convicted. But undercover filming by ITV News caught individuals with links to the banned group together at a training camp for far-right sympathisers in the Peak District earlier this month. The weekend billed itself as a “survival camp” with boxing and street fighting sessions, as well as how to deal with a knife attack. The group discussed the killing of Jo Cox MP as ITV News filmed secretly. Credit: ITV News Speeches were also given by organiser Larry Nunn on creating an “organised white society”. Garron Helm, a prominent former member of National Action, was secretly filmed discussing the murder of Mrs Cox within an hour of arriving at the camp. He claimed police used the MP’s death to pursue National Action. “It’s not our fault she was killed,” he said. “I mean, she did have it coming.” Garron Helm was jailed for sending an antisemitic tweet to Jewish MP Luciana Berger Credit: ITV News The 23-year-old added: “You see a lot of the lads are bitter over it. I mean some of the areas they are growing up in are so rough and so infested with you know, ethnics, that they’ve literally got no tolerance for people anymore they believe to be committing treason.” National Action adopted the words of Mrs Cox’s killer, “death to traitors”, as its motto and Helm was filmed saying: “I do think if you’re committing an act of treason against, you know, your own ethnic group then by right you should be put to death.” Brendan Cox, Mrs Cox's widower, told ITV News that the rise of the far right is something "we should all take more seriously". “Their attempts to undermine our country’s values of decency and inclusion will not succeed if we hold together against their hatred," he said. "Jo dedicated her life to bringing people together and building stronger communities. Her values reflected the best of what it means to be British and the way the nation as a whole responded to her murder is evidence of that." Helm, from Liverpool, was jailed in 2014 for sending an antisemitic tweet to Jewish MP Luciana Berger. The offending tweet showed a Nazi-style yellow star superimposed on Mrs Berger’s face with the words “#Hitler was right”. Jo Cox MP was killed by neo-Nazi Thomas Mair in June 2016. Our undercover reporter and others at the camp were sat chatting on sofas when Helm mentioned his conviction. “I had that argument with that Luciana Berger on Twitter and I just actually said ‘you’re just a Jew’,” Helm said. “The old bill turned up at the door and not even bobbies as well, CID (Criminal Investigation Department). Some of them pulled me in and ‘bang’! No previous convictions, no history with the police but you’re going right to prison." During our filming, Helm revealed UK security services had already warned him about holding National Action meetings. “They basically said: ‘Listen, if we see three or four of you meeting up and we deem it to be an NA meeting, rather than friends meeting, then we will just come after you with everything we’ve got’.” Also at the camp was a man who calls himself James Mac, who was photographed last year at National Action demonstrations. James Mac at a National Action demonstration in March 2015. Credit: Hope Not Hate Mac, who said National Action was "just a name", made anti-Jewish comments during the meeting, saying: “They carry on like somebody’s died. You know like if a family member died and somebody got off, they carry on like that, just about somebody who bad-mouthed them. This is the way these Jews carry on.” During the meeting, Mac promoted his white separatist religion “Creativity” to our reporter, which he described as “what’s good for white people”. The leaflet for “Creativity” includes a photo of a group of children doing the Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute. Four of the 15 people who attended the three-day camp have links with National Action. Over the past four months, ITV News has been following the movements of the supposedly disbanded terror group. In February, we covertly filmed at the London Forum, a far-right conference. A few weeks later our investigation took us to Rotherham, where we suspected National Action members had joined forces with another far-right group to prevent detection. Organiser Larry Nunn gave a speech on creating an 'organised white society'. Credit: ITV News Far from disbanding, National Action's former members appear to be trying to work around the ban imposed by the Home Secretary. Matthew Collins, from Hope Not Hate, told ITV News that the group has always suspected National Action was using new tactics and had not ceased to exist, something he said was a "grave concern". He said: "They are still incredibly active and still very much involved in extremist politics in this country." Mr Collins said those involved in National Action still pose a threat and that the Home Office proscription was not working, as the group could still operate under a different name. "Whether they use the name National Action or not, we believe their activities could encourage others to engage in terrorist acts," he said. |
As an ethos pacifism is compelling because it banks on the moralistic assumption that in any given war both sides are equally wrong. Hence those committed to a pacifist politics are ethically superior to those embroiled in these wars because they exist beyond politics, at the level of abstract morality, having transcended the militaristic concerns of those who cannot realize that the world would be a better place if they just chose to stop fighting. While it is correct to recognize that the politics of pacifism was originated by those who recognized that there was an unequal deployment of power in both sides of the conflict (i.e. Gandhi recognized that Britain was oppressing India, Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that white power was oppressing African Americans), this politics still bases its moral superiority on an assumption that violence is equally wrong, whether it is practiced by the oppressor or the oppressed. Indeed, according to this analysis, the oppressed becomes identical to the oppressor if and when the former chooses to behave like the latter––by resisting violently––and becomes morally tainted.By treating violence as ethically homogenous, whether it is performed by the oppressor or oppressed, we end up with the eventual reification of the conflict's meaning in and of itself: if the moral dilemma is over acting violently or not, then the moral dilemma of who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed is not the focus of the ethical dilemma… this reality, though (to be fair) recognized as significant by the originators of pacifism, vanishes bases on the fact that the ethical and moral focus is on violence and only violence. Both sides, regardless of which side has more power and has initiated the violence, are equalized because they both engage in violent activity. Pacifism thus attempts to create an alternate camp in every conflict that distinguishes itself primarily by condemning the violence of this conflict.Hence we end up with a politics of pacifism, the telos of its originators, that assumes the primary contradiction is between war and peace––between the war-mongers and those who reject violence altogether. A laudable politics in an abstract moral sphere, but a very naive politics in the sphere of the concrete. The hippy movement and its successors: give peace a chance, the commonality of humanity, and those who always argue that, in every violent conflict, "both sides are wrong." And though it is true that we need to recognize that every class struggle politics must begin by defining what side is on the side of total war and what side will lead to peace, this does not mean that we should pretend the primary contradiction is between war and peace in a context of uncompromising class and imperialist war where the oppressed need to resist so as to prevent their obliteration.But this banal politics of pacifism has resulted in a common sense analysis of conflict that, even in its progressive fictions, pretends as if war is primarily a state where both sides are equally wrong. The radical position, based on this narrative, is some "fuck both sides" position, where the heroes are war-resistors from both sides of the conflict who unite and demonstrate a solution to the conflict in their peaceful resolution. Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staple'srecently reminded me of this pacifist narrative where, perhaps in an attempt to comment on the violence of contemporary conflict, created a tale of equally powerful forces in a long war that are both challenged by two individuals from opposing sides who reject this war by, well,(indeed, a character even claims that "fucking" is the "opposite of war"), having a child, and embrace pacifism so as to demonstrate the problem of the war narratives of their respective sides. Human sentiment conquers violence, all is good in the world.notwithstanding (and, to be fair, it is very well written and drawn), this is pretty much the narrative of the radical anti-war camp that bases its rejection of war on the moral rejection of violence.Here is a myth: that wars are generally theatres in which all sides are equal. Here is the truth: in the modern era those wars where all sides are equal (whether equally reprehensible or equally powerful) are the exception and not the rule. Even in antiquity this is the case, though it is harder to prove and prone to the application of modern ethics upon a past that would have resisted a moral perspective wrenched from the jaws of history. Point being: it becomes extremely difficult to prove that war in general is a state where all sides are equal, that some if not one side is responsible for the violence existing in the first place, and that there are not oppressors and oppressed. An equal war where both sides are to blame? Maybe World War One, when it comes to the level of nation states, and this is why it was such a confusion. Otherwise, beyond these far-and-few-between situations where imperialist nations are entering into an arcane conflict about carving up the world (which is just an expression of the warfare the bourgeois wages upon the proletariat), it is difficult to find a situation where war is a state of equal conflict between two sides. Instead we discover situations where war only exists because one nation wants to expand into the territory of another, where a nation thinks it has the right to claim the resources of the world, where oppressors seek to make others oppressed. That war is mainly a decision between two equal powers to violently duel for resources on an equal playing field is rather uncommon. While there is such a thing as intra-imperialist rivalry, its manifestation in the killing fields of wars is an exception: politics is war by other means, it has other bodies in which to indulge its competition.But the pacifist rallying cry is "a pox on both houses" and this is taken as some critical rejection of war itself. In the early 90s I saw this pseudo-radical line applied to the situation of Israel-Palestine where it was considered supremely moral to declare that "both sides were equally wrong" and thus disappear the reality of oppression. Both sides were "wrong" because they both engaged in violence and that was all that mattered: not the inequality of these sides, not the fact that oppression produced violence in the first place, and definitely not the fact that the violence of the oppressed was either a desperate attempt to persist in survival or to get rid of the basis of its oppression altogether.Even when the pacifist recognizes this inequality (as Gandhi did, as Martin Luther King Jr. did) it is a secondary concern. For the pacifist, as noted above, the primary contradiction is between violence and non-violence, and thus when violence is being used by both (or all) sides this is what designates these sides as: they are united in their lack of morality, their collaboration in making, to riff off off Gandhi, the entire world blind. We can, of course, add other pacifist moralisms, most of which are cliches: you become the enemy when you use their methods, the oppressed becomes the oppressor when they resort to violence, revolutions are monsters that eat their children (which was, it must be said, a reactionary slogan about the French Revolution), and even that adage about not dismantling the master's house with his tools By treating violence and non-violence as a primary contradiction, the material basis upon which violence and war rests becomes reified. The fact of the matter is that war is a necessary part of any class-based society since every social formation to date is determined by class struggle. And the wars launched by the ruling class are not threatened by large-scale rejections of violence, no matter what those liberals committed to keeping the class war of capitalism operating eternally might believe about India, the Civil Rights movement, or what have you. The ethics of pacifism might seem less morally reprehensible than armed resistance but the same argument they use to justify their moral status doesn't help their cause very much: if violent revolutions "eat their young"––that is, perpetuate the same violence upon the former oppressors or some other oppressed camp––then what can we say of those non-violent movements that also led to a continuation of violence? That the people involved in these movements were more morally advanced than those involved in violent resistance? Gandhi's non-violent movement––if it was actually primarily responsible for pushing out the British, which is dubious at best––was also a movement of the Indian upper caste who are more than happy to keep the violence implicit in the caste system (and it is a very brutal violence) in place. They may have acted peacefully towards their national oppressors but they are complicit in a very violent system, like any class based social formation, where the violence is a structural fact.And yet the moral magnetism of pacifism is strong. Indeed: anyone who possesses any ounce of sanity (which means anyone who doesn't think according to what capitalism and imperialism designates as "sane") will prefer peace to war, violence to non-violence. This is why, in an old post , I discussed how violent resistance is necessarily "tragic"––if a better world truly was possible through non-violence, if those in power would exit the historical stage without struggle, this would be preferable but it is clearly not the case. Their institutions do need to be smashed and they will fight to prevent such a smashing.But since pacifistic morality is strong it possesses a certain level of ideological hegemony amongst those who want the violence of the current order to end. This is why the fables about the perils of war tend to locate their narratives in stories about wars where both sides are equally wrong and the heroes are resistors on both sides. Or why we should achieve revolution through the ballot box––why Syriza (forgetting the brutal class struggle that led to Syriza's victory and that will continue despite this victory) is the model we should follow [and yes, I know I promised an article about that but like I said before, I just don't have the mental energy]––which is the opportunist thesis of "peaceful co-existence with capitalism." Or why cops and soldiers aren't really our class enemy because they're just people who, regardless of their position in maintaining the power of the ruling camp, can be won over to the side of peace.We really want to believe that everyone is equally responsible for their violence, that the humanity of the oppressor and the oppressed can be discovered once both sides put aside their violent proclivities that unite them inhumanity, and that the contradiction between war and peace is reducible to the contradiction between violence and non-violence. But as Mao once quipped, with his typical and cutting dialectical insight, "We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun." Why? Because the peace of capital is not peace for those who are exploited and oppressed to maintain this peace; those responsible for perpetuating this peace (which means war on the wretched of the earth at all times and in all ways) will not recognize a shared humanity beyond what is considered humane by their social order––an acceptance of business as usual, a refusal to complain about one's lot in life, and so the wars continue regardless of pacifist moralism. Capitalists can be pacifists too when they are short-sighted enough to reject those military interventions that are designed to protect their power… and when their workers resist exploitation then these liberal capitalists will preach pacifism and the morality of non-violence, refusing to recognize that the very act of exploitation is violence incarnate. |
Michael Felger, a radio host at Boston’s 98.5 The Sports Hub, has an issue with paternity leave. He’s griped about it before with Celtics player Al Horford and this week with Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez. Felger recently went after his coworker, CBS Boston sportswriter Michael Hurley, whose wife had a kid. Hurley didn’t like that. On Friday’s show, Hurley called in to defend himself and talked about how grateful he was that his company offered paternity leave, allowing him to help with the baby since his parents and his wife’s parents weren’t able to. Most sports radio arguments are to some extent performative—Felger joked that all Hurley does for his job is “come in here for 45 minutes a day and write whiny Deflategate articles”—but Hurley seemed legitimately angry. When Felger realized that, he got mad, too. “This is what life is like for people who don’t summer in Nantucket,” Hurley said, and that really struck a nerve. “Hey, Hurley, you sound serious,” Felger said. “Why do you think I get to summer in Nantucket? Because I work my ass off, Hurley! Because I work my ass off! And when my wife had a baby, I went into work two days later because my work’s important to me. I didn’t think you were serious. You’re serious! You want a tissue? Why do you think I summer in Nantucket? You think that was handed to me? You asshat!” There’s a seven-minute video, or a 10-minute audio clip which makes Felger look like more of a buffoon (he blamed paternity leave on “millennials”). Advertisement Felger repeatedly boasted about how he missed as little work as possible after his wife had a child. Voluntarily surrendering a company benefit and bragging about it to justify your vacation doesn’t make you a tough, model employee. It means you’re a sap. H/t to Daniel |
President Temer Eliminates Amazon Reserve to Open Up Mining Exploration 08/24/2017 - 11h35 Advertising PHILLIPPE WATANABE FERNANDO TADEU MORAES FROM SÃO PAULO On Wednesday (the 23rd) President Michel Temer eliminated an environmental reserve of 46,450 sq km (17,800 square miles) - an area equivalent in size to the state of Espírito Santo - on the border area between Pará and Amapá, known as the National Reserve of Copper and Associates (Renca). The region holds mineral reserves including gold, iron and copper. The decree states that the elimination "does not rule out the application of specific legislation regarding protection of native vegetation, nature conservation units, [and] indigenous lands". Luiz Jardim Wanderley, a researcher from UERJ University and a member of the National Committee for the Defense of Territory Against Mining, declared that the elimination has, first and foremost, a political impact. "It puts more pressure on these indigenous lands and UCs (conservation units), opening up another area to mining. It's an indication that the Temer government will relax restrictions in areas that still have them", he said. According to Mariana Napolitano, coordinator of the science nucleus of WWF Brasil, the growing interest in mining in the area could lead to a reduction in protected areas and gold rushes. This would result in a demographic explosion, more deforestation and contamination of water resources with heavy metals, in addition to the threat to traditional indigenous populations, she said. The Environmental Ministry (MMA) reaffirms the decree's assertion and says that the conservation units in the area will be unaffected. The MMA went on to declare that "any undertaking that could cause an impact on conservation units is subject to specific licensing procedures, which guarantee the maintenance of the socio-environmental characteristics of the protected areas". Translated by LLOYD HARDER Read the article in the original language |
Loading testing is an essential part of web development which is usually forgotten or neglected until a website is under intense load. It is useful for testing the performance of your site, and the infrastructure that it runs on. There’s nothing more terrible than having a page on your site posted on a popular site like Facebook or Reddit and watching your site crumble under the load. Siege can stimulate multiple requests to your site, it’s able to measure the response times across the various requests. Typically, once you are running the siege process, you can visit the website you are testing to experience how the website will perform when users are browsing it. Siege allows you to replicate how your website will perform when a certain number of simultaneous visitors come to your website. In this post, we will be covering one of the tools that we use when working with our clients. We will go over the installation of Siege on OS X and Linux, and run a basic load test with Siege. Siege can be defined as an HTTP load testing and benchmarking utility. According to the official definition, it was designed specifically to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It lets its user hit a server with a configurable number of simulated clients. Those clients place the server “under siege.” Siege was developed on Linux and has been ported to other platforms including AIX, BSD, HP-UX and Solaris. It successfully compiles on most System V UNIX variants and on most newer BSD systems. Because Siege relies on POSIX.1b features not supported by Microsoft, it will not run on Windows.You can, however, use Siege to test a Windows web server if that’s what you are using to run a WordPress website. Installing Siege If you are running the latest version of Centos with epel repo enabled, you can use the official package manager called yum to install Siege by using the command below: sudo yum install siege In the same light, you can also use the official package manager on Ubuntu or Debian to install Siege by using the command below: sudo apt-get install siege Additionally, if you are running a Mac OX computer, you can use brew to install Siege. Brew, is one of the popular package managers on Apple computers. You can install Siege using the command below: brew install siege Finally, we want to see how we can install Siege from source, this means we will be downloading the source code and compiling it locally, this works best for you if for some reason you cannot use the package manager on your computer. Follow the instructions below to download and compile siege. cd /opt wget http://download.joedog.org/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz At this point, we will extract the archive and start to compile Siege from source using the list of command below: tar -xvf siege-latest.tar.gz Now, change to the archive directory cd siege-3.1.0 Now, we will go ahead and configure and build the package using the list of command below: ./configure make make install If you are interested in the source code of Siege, you can visit the Github project page for more information. At this point, you should have successfully installed Siege on your system. To confirm that you have successfully installed it, you can run the following command in the terminal, this work on all variants of Linux and Mac OSX as well. Type the command below to make sure you have Siege installed before you proceed. siege -V //below is the output of this command SIEGE 3.1.0 Start Load Testing With Siege We are going to start testing with Siege. To run Siege with the default settings, input the following command, replacing www.yourwordpresswebsite.com with your domain name or IP address: siege www.yourwordpresswebsite.com Once this command is successfully run you should see an output similar to the output below, Your results might vary depending on the speed of your internet connection or the capacity of the infrstrutre you are running your website on. ** SIEGE 3.10 ** Preparing 25 concurrent users for battle. The server is now under siege... Lifting the server siege... done. Transactions: 2913 hits Availability: 100.00 % Elapsed time: 40.51 secs Data transferred: 0.41 MB Response time: 0.00 secs Transaction rate: 40.95 trans/sec Throughput: 0.01 MB/sec Concurrency: 0.04 Successful transactions: 2313 Failed transactions: 0 Longest transaction: 0.01 Shortest transaction: 0.00 FILE: /var/log/siege.log You can disable this annoying message by editing the .siegerc file in your home directory; change the directive 'show-logfile' to false. Are you can see from the response above there is a siegerc file in your home directory which allows you to change the default configuration that Siege runs with. By default, it uses 25 concurrent users. You can increase this for a more intense test. Also, from the output above you would notice how the server performed. Firstly there was 100% uptime, meaning, the server didn’t go down or was not overwhelmed by the number of requests that it received. What that means is that your website can successfully handle 25 concurrent users without any performance degradation. Another important number that you also want to look at it the longest and shortest transaction times for the requests. This tells you how long the server took to process the request. As you have noticed from the example about testing only one URL is not entirely realistic because multiple users might visit different pages on your website. To simulate this behavior more accurately, you have to supply a list of URLs to siege to test with. For most WordPress websites and themes we test, we usually select a combination of URLs such as the homepage, a category page, an author page, a tag page, a search and a single post page. This provides us a list of URLs that capture most parts of the website or theme functionality. To set this up you only need to specify the list of URL in a text file like below: # URLS file for siege # -- # Format the url entries in any of the following formats: # http://www.whoohoo.com/index.html # http://www/index.html # www/index.html # http://www.whoohoo.com/cgi-bin/howto/display.cgi?1013 # Use the POST directive for pages that require it: # http://www.whoohoo.com/cgi-bin/haha.cgi POST ha=1&ho=2 # or POST content from a file: # http://www.whoohoo.com/melvin.jsp POST < /home/jeff/haha # http://www.whoohoo.com/melvin.jsp POST < ./haha # You may also set and reference variables inside this file, # for more information, man urls_txt # ------------------------------------------------------- http://example.com http://example.com/page1 http://example.com/page2 http://example.com/blog Once you have selected the URLs you can simply run the command below to start running the load test: siege -f your/file/path.txt As a final step, we want to list out the top options we use with Seige when running a load test: -c [num] : Set the number of concurrent users. This is constrained by how much RAM you have on your computer. Most web servers have less than a couple hundred users trying to access their website at the same time, so setting this to more than a few hundred is often not needed. -t [num] : Set a time limit for which Siege runs. Siege can run with the modifiers s for seconds, m for minutes, or h for hours. There should be no space between the number and the modifier ( -t10s not -t10 s ). -d [num] : Set the delay for each Siege user. Each user is then delayed for a random amount of seconds in between 1 and the set number. The default value is 3. -i : Used in conjunction with a URLs file, this causes each user to randomly hit one of the URLs, with no predetermined pattern. Similar to real life (the ‘i’ stands for “internet”), where you will not know where site visitors go, not all pages may be hit. -v : Verbose output. This outputs the results Siege gets in real time before printing the final results. -f [file] : Run Siege with a file containing a list of URLs that is not the default urls.txt file. : Run Siege with a file containing a list of URLs that is not the default file. -g [url] : Pull down the HTTP headers. : Pull down the HTTP headers. -l : Generates a log file. : Generates a log file. -m "[message]" : Include a message in the log file. : Include a message in the log file. -C : Outputs Siege’s current configuration profile. : Outputs Siege’s current configuration profile. -V : Outputs Siege’s version information. : Outputs Siege’s version information. -h : Outputs help information. We hope you enjoyed reading this post. Let us know what you think in the comments below. Feel free to share how you perform load tests on your websites as well. Dotlayer is a knowledge-sharing platform built around a community of knowledge-seekers. We aim to make Dotlayer our readers' go-to source for all things tech-related. If you are interested in advertising or sponsorship opportunities, we are happy to discuss. Please submit all inquiries [email protected]. And if you enjoyed this post, we recommend reading our latest featured stories. |
How To Solder Home > Electronics > How To Solder - Soldering Tutorial Search: Soldering is defined as "the joining of metals by a fusion of alloys which have relatively low melting points". In other words, you use a metal that has a low melting point to adhere the surfaces to be soldered together. Consider that soldering is more like gluing with molten metal, unlike welding where the base metals are actually melted and combined. Soldering is also a must have skill for all sorts of electrical and electronics work. It is also a skill that must be taught correctly and developed with practice. This tutorial will cover the most common types of soldering required for electronics work. This includes soldering components to printed circuit boards and soldering a spliced wire joint. Soldering Equipment The Soldering Iron/Gun The first thing you will need is a soldering iron, which is the heat source used to melt solder. Irons of the 15W to 30W range are good for most electronics/printed circuit board work. Anything higher in wattage and you risk damaging either the component or the board. If you intend to solder heavy components and thick wire, then you will want to invest in an iron of higher wattage (40W and above) or one of the large soldering guns. The main difference between an iron and a gun is that an iron is pencil shaped and designed with a pinpoint heat source for precise work, while a gun is in a familiar gun shape with a large high wattage tip heated by flowing electrical current directly through it. A 30W Watt Soldering Iron A 300W Soldering Gun For hobbyist electronics use, a soldering iron is generally the tool of choice as its small tip and low heat capacity is suited for printed circuit board work (such as assembling kits). A soldering gun is generally used in heavy duty soldering such as joining heavy gauge wires, soldering brackets to a chassis or stained glass work. You should choose a soldering iron with a 3-pronged grounding plug. The ground will help prevent stray voltage from collecting at the soldering tip and potentially damaging sensitive (such as CMOS) components. By their nature, soldering guns are quite "dirty" in this respect as the heat is generated by shorting a current (often AC) through the tip made of formed wire. Guns will have much less use in hobbyist electronics so if you have only one tool choice, an iron is what you want. For a beginner, a 15W to 30W range is the best but be aware that at the 15W end of that range, you may not have enough power to join wires or larger components. As your skill increases, a 40W iron is an excellent choice as it has the capacity for slightly larger jobs and makes joints very quickly. Be aware that it is often best to use a more powerful iron so that you don't need to spend a lot of time heating the joint, which can damage components. A variation of the basic gun or iron is the soldering station, where the soldering instrument is attached to a variable power supply. A soldering station can precisely control the temperature of the soldering tip unlike a standard gun or iron where the tip temperature will increase when idle and decrease when applying heat to a joint. However, the price of a soldering station is often ten to one hundred times the cost of a basic iron and thus really isn't an option for the hobby market. But if you plan to do very precise work, such as surface mount, or spend 8 hours a day behind a soldering iron, then you should consider a soldering station. The rest of this document will assume that you are using a soldering iron as that is what the majority of electronics work requires. The techniques for using a soldering gun are basically the same with the only difference being that heat is only generated when the trigger is pressed. Solder The choice of solder is also important. There several kinds of solder available but only a few are suitable for electronics work. Most importantly, you will only use rosin core solder. Acid core solder is common in hardware stores and home improvement stores, but meant for soldering copper plumbing pipes and not electronic circuits. If acid core solder is used on electronics, the acid will destroy the traces on the printed circuit board and erode the component leads. It can also form a conductive layer leading to shorts. For most printed circuit board work, a solder with a diameter of 0.75MM to 1.0MM is desirable. Thicker solder may be used and will allow you to solder larger joints more quickly, but will make soldering small joints difficult and increase the likelihood of creating solder bridges between closely spaced PCB pads. An alloy of 60/40 (60% tin, 40% lead) is used for most electronics work. These days, several lead-free solders are available as well. Kester "44" Rosin Core solder has been a staple of electronics for many years and continues to be available. It is available in several diameters and has a non-corrosive flux. Large joints, such as soldering a bracket to a chassis using a high wattage soldering gun, will require a separate application of brush on flux and a thick diameter solder of several millimeters. Remember that when soldering, the flux in the solder will release fumes as it is heated. These fumes are harmful to your eyes and lungs. Therefore, always work in a well ventilated area and avoid breathing the smoke created. Hot solder is also dangerous. It is surprisingly easy to splash hot solder onto yourself, which is a thoroughly unpleasant experience. Eye protection is also advised. Preparing To Solder Tinning The Soldering Tip Before use, a new soldering tip, or one that is very dirty, must be tinned. "Tinning" is the process of coating a soldering tip with a thin coat of solder. This aids in heat transfer between the tip and the component you are soldering, and also gives the solder a base from which to flow from. Step 1: Warm Up The Iron Warm up the soldering iron or gun thoroughly. Make sure that it has fully come to temperature because you are about to melt a lot of solder on it. This is especially important if the iron is new because it may have been packed with some kind of coating to prevent corrosion. Step 2: Prepare A Little Space While the soldering iron is warming up, prepare a little space to work. Moisten a little sponge and place it in the base of your soldering iron stand or in a dish close by. Lay down a piece of cardboard in case you drip solder (you probably will) and make sure you have room to work comfortably. Step 3: Thoroughly Coat The Tip In Solder Thoroughly coat the soldering tip in solder. It is very important to cover the entire tip. You will use a considerable amount of solder during this process and it will drip, so be ready. If you leave any part of the tip uncovered it will tend to collect flux residue and will not conduct heat very well, so run the solder up and down the tip and completely around it to totally cover it in molten solder. Step 4: Clean The Soldering Tip After you are certain that the tip is totally coated in solder, wipe the tip off on the wet sponge to remove all the flux residue. Do this immediately so there is no time for the flux to dry out and solidify. Step 5: You're Done! You have just tinned your soldering tip. This must be done anytime you replace the tip or clean it so that the iron maintains good heat transfer. You can also watch the tinning process on video below (requires Flash): Get Flash to see this player. Soldering A Printed Circuit Board (PCB) Soldering a PCB is probably the most common soldering task an electronics hobbyist will perform. The basic techniques are fairly easy to grasp but it is a skill that will take a little practice to master. The best way to practice is to buy a simple electronics kit or assemble a simple circuit (such as an LED chaser) on a perf-board. Don't buy that expensive kit or dive into a huge project after only soldering a few joints. Soldering components onto a PCB involves preparing the surface, placing the components, and then soldering the joint. Step 1: Surface Preparation: A clean surface is very important if you want a strong, low resistance solder joint. All surfaces to be soldered should be cleaned well. 3M Scotch Brite pads purchased from the home improvement, industrial supply store or automotive body shop are a good choice as they will quickly remove surface tarnish but will not abrade the PCB material. Note that you will want industrial pads and not the kitchen cleaning pads impregnated with cleaner/soap. If you have particularly tough deposits on your board, then a fine grade of steel wool is acceptable but be very cautious on boards with tight tolerances as the fine steel shavings can lodge between pads and in holes. Once you have cleaned the board down to shiny copper you can use a solvent such as acetone to clean any bits of the cleaning pad that may remain and to remove chemical contamination from the surface of the board. Methyl hydrate is another good solvent and a bit less stinky then acetone. Be aware that both these solvents can remove ink, so if your board is silk screened, test the chemicals first before hosing down the entire board. A few blasts with compressed air will dry out the board and remove any junk that may have built up in the holes. It also never hurts to give the component leads a quick wipe down as well, to remove glue or tarnish that may have built up over time. Step 2: Component Placement After the component and board have been cleaned, you are ready to place the components onto the board. Unless your circuit is simple and only contains a few components, you will probably not be placing all the components onto the board and soldering them at once. Most likely you will be soldering a few components at a time before turning the board over and placing more. In general it is best to start with the smallest and flattest components (resistors, ICs, signal diodes, etc.) and then work up to the larger components (capacitors, power transistors, transformers) after the small parts are done. This keeps the board relatively flat, making it more stable during soldering. It is also best to save sensitive components (MOSFETs, non-socketed ICs) until the end to lessen the chance of damaging them during assembly of the rest of the circuit. Bend the leads as necessary and insert the component through the proper holes on the board. To hold the part in place while you are soldering, you may want to bend the leads on the bottom of the board at a 45 degree angle. This works well for parts with long leads such as resistors. Components with short leads such as IC sockets can be held in place with a little masking tape or you can bend the leads down to clamp onto the PC board pads. In the image below, a resistor is ready to solder and is held in place by slightly bent leads. Step 3: Apply Heat Apply a very small amount of solder to the tip of the iron. This helps conduct the heat to the component and board, but it is not the solder that will make up the joint. To heat the joint you will lay the tip of the iron so that it rests against both the component lead and the board. It is critical that you heat the lead and the board, otherwise the solder will simply pool and refuse to stick to the unheated item. The small amount of solder you applied to the tip before heating the joint will help make contact between the board and the lead. It normally takes a second or two to get the joint hot enough to solder, but larger components and thicker pads/traces will absorb more heat and can increase this time. If you see the area under the pad starting to bubble, stop heating and remove the soldering iron because you are overheating the pad and it is in danger of lifting. Let it cool, then carefully heat it again for much less time. Step 4: Apply Solder To The Joint Once the component lead and solder pad has heated up, you are ready to apply solder. Touch the tip of the strand of solder to the component lead and solder pad, but not the tip of the iron. If everything is hot enough, the solder should flow freely around the lead and pad. You will see the flux melt liquify as well, bubble around the joint (this is part of its cleaning action), flow out and release smoke. Continue to add solder to the joint until the pad is completely coated and the solder forms a small mound with slightly concave sides. If it starts to ball up, you have used too much solder or the pad on the board is not hot enough. Once the surface of the pad is completely coated, you can stop adding solder and remove the soldering iron (in that order). Don't move the joint for a few seconds as the solder needs time to cool and resolidify. If you do move the joint, you will get what's called a "cold joint". This is recognized by it's characteristic dull and grainy appearance. Many cold joints can be fixed by reheating and applying a small amount of solder, then being allowed to cool without being disturbed. Step 5: Inspect The Joint and Cleanup Once the joint is made you should inspect it. Check for cold joints (described a little above and at length below), shorts with adjacent pads or poor flow. If the joint checks out, move on to the next. To trim the lead, use a small set of side cutters and cut at the top of the solder joint. After you have made all the solder joints, it is good practice to clean all the excess flux residue from the board. Some fluxes are hydroscopic (they absorb water) and can slowly absorb enough water to become slightly conductive. This can be a significant issue in a hostile environment such as an automotive application. Most fluxes will clean up easily using methyl hydrate and a rag but some will require a stronger solvent. Use the appropriate solvent to remove the flux, then blow the board dry with compressed air. See It On Video You can watch several joints being soldered in the video below. Get Flash to see this player. Conformal Coatings If the printed circuit board you just soldered is going to be used in a hostile environment where it is subjected to moisture, dirt or chemicals, it may be a good idea to apply a conformal coating such as those made by MG Chemicals. These coatings are sprayed onto a PC board to seal it against hazards of the environment. Coatings are usually lacquer, silicone or urethane based and are applied to both sides of the board once it is fully assembled and tested. Cold Solder Joints A "cold solder joint" can occur when not enough heat is applied to the component, board, or both. Another common cause is a component moving before the solder has completely cooled and solidified. A cold joint is brittle and prone to physical failure. It is also generally a very high resistance connection which can effect the operation of the circuit or cause it to fail completely. Cold joints can often be recognized by a characteristic grainy, dull gray colour, but this is not always the case. A cold joint can often appear as a ball of solder sitting on the pad and surrounding the component lead. Additionally you may notice cracks in the solder and the joint may even move. Below is the shocking image of every example of a bad solder joint you will ever see. It appears that this FM transmitter kit was assembled using the technique of "apply solder to iron then drip onto joint". If your joints are looking like this, then stop and practice after rereading this page. Note that not a single of of these joints is acceptable, but amazingly, the circuit worked. Most cold solder joints can be easily fixed. Generally all that is required is to reheat the joint and apply a little more solder. If there is already too much solder on the joint, then the joint will have to be desoldered and then soldered again. This is done by first removing the old solder with a desoldering tool or simply by heating it up and flicking it off with the iron. Once the old solder is off, you can resolder the joint, making sure to heat it thoroughly and keep it still as it cools. Soldering A Wire Joint or Splice Another very common task is soldering a joint between two or more wires. Unlike soldering a PCB where the component is generally held only by the solder joint itself, a splice between wires must be physically strong before it is soldered. This usually means twisting the wires together properly and then soldering. Areas where you will see soldered wire joints are cable repairs and automotive wiring. In these cases, the joint must be insulated after soldering as well. Step 1: Strip The Wires To Be Joined, Slip On Insulation Heat shrink tubing is generally the preferred method to insulate a wire splice. There are two main types of heat shrink available; adhesive lined and non-adhesive lined. Non-adhesive tubing forms an insulating barrier only and thus is suitable for use only when the joint will not be subjected to moisture, chemicals or other harsh environments. Adhesive lined heatshrink tubing is lined with a heat sensitive adhesive that melts to seal the joint as the tubing is heated. Thus it forms a totally sealed joint and is used when a splice will be subjected to moisture or other elements which can effect the joint. As an example, you would use non-adhesive shrink tube when repairing a lamp cord, but you would use adhesive lined tubing when installing a car stereo. Use heat shrink tube with a diameter of approximately 1.5 times to two times the diameter of the wires to be joined. Cut the tube to length so that it will extend past each side of the joint by at least 0.5 inches and then slip it over one of the wire ends. Now strip about an inch of insulation from each wire end. If you are joining rather thick wire (thicker then 12 gauge) then you may want to strip a little more insulation to make twisting the wire easier. Step 2: Twist The Wires Together A strong mechanical connection is necessary before the wires are to be soldered so you must twist them together. The wires will be twisted in what is referred to as a "Lineman's joint" where the wires are joined in a straight line as opposed to twisting together in a "V" shape. Hold the stripped ends of the wires together in an "X" shape so their middles cross one another and then twist one of the wires along the other wires length. Then twist the other side to match. What you will end up with is a strong wire joint that is generally not much thicker then the wire itself. Step 3: Apply Heat Apply your heat to the bottom of the wire joint and use the thicker section of the soldering tip. If you heat up the top of the wire, you will get a lot of heat loss since heat rises. The thicker area of the solder iron tip will conduct more heat into the wire joint. It also helps to slightly wet the tip of the soldering iron to further aid in heat transfer. The thicker the wire joint, the more heat will be required. Be careful, because on thin wires with cheap insulation you can actually melt quite a bit of it off if you overheat the joint. Once the joint is hot enough (a good clue is when the solder you used to wet the tip of the iron flows into the joint) you can move on to applying solder. Once you have soldered a number of these joints you will be able to judge how much heat must be applied based on the thickness of the wire. Step 4: Apply Solder To The Joint With the joint fully heated, apply your solder to the joint just above the soldering tip. If it doesn't begin to melt immediately then you will need more heat. Once the solder begins to melt it will flow into the joint around the soldering iron. As the solder flows, move the tip along the wire joint while applying solder. The joint should start to suck in the solder as it is applied. If you find that the solder is pooling where it is touched to the joint yet it is not flowing inside, you will need more heat. Continue adding solder until the joint is fully covered. You should still be able to see the outlines of the individual wire strands but no copper of the wire should be visible. If you add too much solder to the point where the joint becomes a blob, you will end up with a brittle joint and the excess solder will need to be removed. Step 5: Clean The Flux If the wire joint is to be sealed or used in an area it will be exposed to moisture, the flux must be removed. Some fluxes will absorb moisture or other chemicals and become corrosive to the joint. While there are flux removal chemicals available most fluxes can be cleaned up using methyl hydrate available at any hardware store. Some are even water soluble. Step 6: Insulate The Joint Slide the heat shrink tubing so that it evenly covers the joint and apply heat to shrink it. Ideally, you will want a heat gun for this but a simple lighter is acceptable as long as you keep the flame moving to avoid burning the tubing or the wire. If you used adhesive lined heat shrink, you need to heat the tube until it has shrunk fully around the wire and a little of the adhesive has oozed out the ends. Non-lined heatshrink can be heated until it tightly covers the joint. You can overheat this stuff. If too much heat is used, then the insulation underneath will begin to break down and may form a bubble. A bubble could also be caused if you heat adhesive lined tubing to the point where it starts to boil. You're Done! Now Just Watch The Video That's it! Your wire joint is now complete. You can watch the process on video below: Get Flash to see this player. Tips and Tricks Soldering is something that needs to be practiced. These tips should help you become successful so you can stop practicing and get down to some serious building. Use heatsinks. Heatsinks are a must for the leads of sensitive components such as ICs and transistors. If you don't have a clip on heatsink, then a pair of pliers is a good substitute. Keep the iron tip clean. A clean iron tip means better heat conduction and a better joint. Use a wet sponge to clean the tip between joints. Keep the tip well tinned. Double check joints. When assembling complicated circuits, it is good practice to check joints after soldering them. Use a magnifying glass to visually inspect the joint and a meter to check resistance. Solder small parts first. Solder resistors, jumper leads, diodes and any other small parts before you solder larger parts like capacitors and transistors. This makes assembly much easier. Install sensitive components last. Install CMOS ICs, MOSFETs and other static sensitive components last to avoid damaging them during assembly of other parts. Use adequate ventilation. Most soldering fluxes should not be breathed in. Avoid breathing the smoke created and make sure that the area you are working in has adequate airflow to prevent buildup of noxious fumes. Soldering Safety While soldering is not generally a hazardous activity, there are a few things to keep in mind. The first and most obvious is that it involves high temperatures. Soldering irons are going to be 350F or higher, and will cause burns very quickly. Make sure to use a stand to support the iron and keep the cord away high traffic areas. Solder itself can drip, so it makes sense to avoid soldering over exposed body parts. Always work in a well lit area where you have space to lay parts out and move around. Avoid soldering with your face directly above the joint because fumes from the flux and other coatings will irritate your respiratory tract and eyes. Most solders contain lead, so you should avoid touching your face while working with solder and always wash your hands before eating. |
Heat your home with recycled aluminum cans? It’s a simple idea, and one that many will look at and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” It works through a simple heat transfer process. The cans are painted black, stacked into columns, and modified to allow air to move through them. The sun heats the cans, and the heat is transferred to the air as it moves up through the columns and into the room. This 240 can unit reportedly heats up to 10,000 BTUs or more, according to the company, and is “maintenance free”. via: Youtube – “Jim Meaney, owner of Cansolair Inc. displays how he converts pop cans into a powerful solar heating panel.” “…Cansolair Inc. has developed a forced convection solar heating unit called the Model RA 240 SOLAR MAX. A dwelling of 1000 square feet can have a complete air change in 1.5 hours. Working experience indicates that comfortable room temperature can be maintained in a 1000 square foot dwelling with 15 minutes of sunlight per hour…” via: http://www.solarrochester.com/cansolair.asp A single unit may not heat an average sized American home (1500-2500 square feet) by itself. It will, however, supplement the heating. Specifically speaking, a unit this size is suited perfectly for a tiny house or cabin 1000sqft or less. There are also many variables that must be considered when determining heating efficiency of any building or home. Insulative factors of the home, proper sealing of all doors and windows, orientation of the home toward the south, vaulted ceilings, and total cubic feet of space within the home minus any furniture, and of course, the amount of sun that shines on the home, are all factors that affect efficiency. Important Note: With the addition of a thermal storage system, (i.e. a hot water tank or tank filled with veggie oil) one could store heat for days, and use it during periods of darkness and on cloudy days. Could you heat your home with just one unit? Sure. But it also depends on how big your home is. Live small. Go tiny. Stay warm. |
SEVEN youths ranging in ages from 14 to 18 years are facing trial on charges connected to the Jobstown water protest last November during which Tanaiste Joan Burton was trapped in her car for over two hours. SEVEN youths ranging in ages from 14 to 18 years are facing trial on charges connected to the Jobstown water protest last November during which Tanaiste Joan Burton was trapped in her car for over two hours. Seven teenagers in court over Jobstown water protest in which Joan Burton was trapped in her car for two hours The youths, who could all face custodial sentences, had their cases adjourned until later dates and a guilty plea was entered by just one of them to a charge of criminal damage and violent disorder. The Dublin Children's Court heard he was already serving a sentence for earlier offences and he had behavioural and drug problems, and was deemed to be at a high risk of re-offending as a result of his issues. About a hundred people turned up at the courthouse to offer support to the teenagers. The Labour leader left a graduation ceremony on November 15 last at An Cosan in Jobstown, in Tallaght - an education facility that serves the local community - when demonstration was held. Gardai allege protesters tried to “get at” the Labour leader and there were a number of violent incidents at the protest, with officers pushed and missiles thrown. Several adults, including Anti Austerity Alliance TD Paul Murphy are due to appear in court next week in connection with the incident. However, today seven youths ranging in ages from 14 to 18 appeared at Dublin Children's Court facing a variety of charges including violent disorder, criminal damage and false imprisonment charges arising out of the alleged incident at Fortunestown Rd, Jobstown, in Tallaght. The young males who all come from the Tallaght area and had been served with summons in July compelling them to appear in court today. Three of them are aged 16, there is one 15-year-old and one aged 17, an 18-year-old and he youngest who is aged 14 but who was 13 at the time. The prosecution has been brought by Tallaght Garda Superintendent Peter Duff and an outline of the allegations was given by Det Gda Paul Smith. Six of them, including the 14-year-old boy, are charged with violent disorder by using or threatening to use unlawful violence causing others to fear for their safety. Two of the 16-year-old boys and the 18-year-old youth also have an additional charge for criminal damage to window of a '05-reg unmarked Garda car. The court heard it was smashed during alleged disturbances. Another 16-year-old faces two charges for false imprisonment of Tanaiste Joan and her political advisor Karen O'Connell who were in a ministerial car which was surrounded by protesters. Judge John O'Connor heard that the 16-year-old boy who pleaded guilty to criminal damage and violent disorder, initially wanted his case finalised today but the judge noted that the latest welfare reports on him were negative. His solicitor Michelle Finan said the boy regrets his involvement in the incident. She later confirmed that the teen agreed to an adjournment until November 26th for updated reports to be furnished. He is serving a custodial sentence, which is due to expire in January, for theft offences. The DPP has recommended that the remaining five juveniles should be tried in the Children's Court and not in the circuit court which has tougher sentencing powers. However, Judge John O'Connor said that a preliminary hearing would have to take place to establish if the Children's Court would accept jurisdiction. These teens, who were also accompanied to court by their lawyers and parents, were ordered to appear again in December. The 18-year-old, Calvin Carlyle, from Gleann na hEorna, Tallaght, is now an adult and could not attend. His mother explained that he was unwell and Judge O'Connor ordered him to appear next week. State solicitor Rachel Joyce said the DPP has directed that, unlike the juveniles, he should be tried in the circuit court. Online Editors |
There's something very special about all the awesome research funded by NASA - it's accessible, for free, to everyone. It was a particularly special moment when NASA announced this shift to open access back in 2016. Not only would all published research funded by the space agency be available at no cost, the agency also launched a public web portal to make it easy for anybody to gain access. The free online archive arrived in response to a key policy update, which requires any NASA-funded research articles in peer-reviewed journals be publicly accessible within one year of publication. "At NASA, we are celebrating this opportunity to extend access to our extensive portfolio of scientific and technical publications," said NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman. "Through open access and innovation we invite the global community to join us in exploring Earth, air, and space." The database is called PubSpace, and the public can access NASA-funded research articles in it by searching for whatever they're interested in, or by just browsing all the NASA-funded papers. "Making our research data easier to access will greatly magnify the impact of our research," said NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan. "As scientists and engineers, we work by building upon a foundation laid by others." There are over 1,000 research articles in the database, and that number rises steadily as new NASA-funded research is released. As you'd expect, there's an enormous spread of research on offer, ranging from exercise routines to maintain health during long-duration space missions, to the prospects for life on Titan, and the risk of miscarriage for flight attendants exposed to cosmic radiation. All of this is now free for researchers or anybody with an interest in science to check out and download – a welcome change from when much of the content was locked behind a paywall. But not all NASA-funded research can be found in the archive. As the space agency indicates, patents and material governed by personal privacy, proprietary, or security laws are exempt from having to be included in PubSpace. This was all thanks to a 2013 request from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which directed major science-funding agencies to come up with ways of increasing access to the results of publicly funded research. It also follows a growing general trend towards more openness in science research and academia more broadly. A fight that sadly continues to be a big struggle to this day across both public and private research institutions and journals. With frustration stemming over the commercial control wielded by the companies who own most academic publishing, some researchers are bypassing established journals altogether by uploading their work directly to the internet. Others are illegally sharing scientific papers online in a dramatic bid to spread knowledge. At the same time, there are calls in Europe to make all published science funded by the public free. The same logic is what's behind NASA's access portal – but even the space agency itself could benefit from the initiative, which will help it keep track of all the research it's funding more easily. "This'll be the first time that NASA's had all of their publications in one place, so we estimate what our publication rate is for the agency, but this will actually be able to tell us what it is," NASA Deputy Chief Scientist Gale Allen told Samantha Ehlinger at FedScoop. "And we'll be able to show even further what we're doing with taxpayer dollars." An earlier version of this story was published in August 2016. |
The European Commission has finally presented its long-awaited copyright reform proposal. It ignores everything positive the European Parliament demanded in the earlier Reda report, and doubles down on introducing copyright for links. The European Commission’s proposal has been published. While it will certainly take a few days to dissect it in detail, a few things are apparent immediately, like this piece: A fair sharing of value is also necessary to ensure the sustainability of the press publications sector. Press publishers are facing difficulties in licensing their publications online and obtaining a fair share of the value they generate. This could ultimately affect citizens’ access to information. This proposal provides for a new right for press publishers aiming at facilitating online licensing of their publications, the recoupment of their investment and the enforcement of their rights. Yes, this is the so-called “Google Tax” that was tried with disastrous results in Germany and Spain, where Google was supposed to be paying the publications linked to, a mechanism called “ancillary copyright” and covering hyperlinks. The Eurocrats here don’t understand that the entity linking is the one providing value to the one being linked to, and want to reverse that market relationship by law. As a result, in all interfered-with markets, the offering disappears – in Germany, Google just said “sign on the dotted line to be linked freely or don’t be linked at all”, and in Spain, where this option was outlawed, Google News just shut down completely instead, leaving news sites without that traffic. Eurocrats seem to base their policy proposal on a dangerously low amount of actual evidence. We have enough forms of copyright already and certainly don’t need (or want) this “ancillary copyright” construct. Perhaps in order to understand this weaseling, framing is best understood elsewhere than Europe. The Wall Street Journal presents the issue as “The proposals have been—and are likely to remain—the subject of heavy lobbying from copyright holders like record labels and newspaper publishers on one hand, and technology firms on the other.” This is a completely wrong, not to say dishonest, framing – a dishonesty that the copyright industry salivates over. The battle over the copyright monopoly was never one random industry versus another. The battle was always liberty versus lock-in. Just because technology firms profit from liberty, that doesn’t make this battle stand between two equal types of industries where you can look at the respective GDP contribution and see who should get a bone of meat in this round of legislation. The proposal is full of the utmost garbage weasel language. For example, a proposal like this must address so-called “fundamental rights” (like freedoms of speech and expression), and it justifies the proposal, among other things, like this: By improving the bargaining position of authors and performers and the control rightholders have on the use of their copyright-protected content, the proposal will have a positive impact on copyright as a property right So by strengthening a governmentally-sanctioned private monopoly — “copyright” — that interferes with actual property rights, the Commission argues, those monopolies can appear more like property rights, which are protected. This is the worst of the worst of political language types. The one somewhat positive aspect concerns out-of-print publications, described in the proposal as “out of commerce works”. For cultural heritage reasons, the proposal states that the public must be able to access this via certain institutions (that are themselves subject to heavy corruption and other problems, but that’s somewhat a separate issue), but the Commission then neuters its entire proposal by this short passage: all rightholders may at any time object to their works or other subject-matter being deemed to be out of commerce and exclude the application of the licence to their works or other subject-matter It’s also noteworthy that, at the end of the day, the European Commission aims to let publishers determine exactly what rights people have and don’t have anyway, the law be damned, by upholding the DMCA-equivalent ban on circumventing Digital Restriction Measures, even when such measures interfere with legal and fundamental rights. Note particularly the last sentence, which, again, indicates a dangerously low level of evidence basis for this legislation. The protection of technological measures established in Directive 2001/29/EC remains essential to ensure the protection and the effective exercise of the rights granted to authors and to other rightholders under Union law. This protection should be maintained while ensuring that the use of technological measures does not prevent the enjoyment of the exceptions and the limitation established in this Directive, which are particularly relevant in the online environment. Rightholders should have the opportunity to ensure this through voluntary measures Finally, as expected, this proposal meddles with the definition of “communication to the public” quite a bit, which is the definition that the European Court of Justice has used in a number of pivotal cases when judging whether something infringes on any of the copyright monopolies. This proposal needs more analysis, much more. The European Commission is the EU’s executive branch, which drafts European law like this one. But the European Parliament must approve the drafted law. It remains to be seen how the European Commission had intended to make that happen, given that this goes against everything the Parliament had requested in terms of copyright reform via the earlier Reda report which was adopted by the European Parliament by a huge margin (445 votes to 65). |
HE was quiet. He was unassuming. But he was obsessed with guns — and a staunch defender of his constitutional right to own them. That’s the assessment of a former associate of Stephen Paddock’s family, who visited the Las Vegas shooter’s modest two-bedroom home and was introduced to the firearms that would later unleash so much death and destruction. TONIGHT on #9ACA | Our world #EXCLUSIVE with the Aussie mate of Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock. pic.twitter.com/6xdJgo0cqN — A Current Affair (@ACurrentAffair9) October 6, 2017 “As we walked through that small area, Steve said ‘bedroom ... sitting room ... and gun room ...’ Aah gunroom?” Adam Le Fevre told Nine’s A Current Affair of his visit to Paddock’s home. “And he said, well, most people in the US have firearms and they need to be protected and of course you don’t want firearms falling into the hands of the wrong people. Retrospectively, I wish I had’ve picked up on that earlier.” Mr Le Fevre said he did not get to see the guns themselves. But they were very clearly a central part of Paddock’s life. “It never occurred to me that he was planning violence against anyone,” he said. FAMILY TIES Mr Le Fevre had been in a relationship with the sister of Marilou Danley, Paddock’s partner. He was introduced to Paddock in 2013 when they both travelled to the Philippines. Later, he met up with him on a trip to Las Vegas. “Steve was very generous because of his success in high rolling. I would say I had no reason not to like him,” Mr Le Fevre said. Then came the Las Vegas massacre earlier this week. “The first reaction was shock, disbelief and then of course not long after I realised I had this association with this terrible, terrible tragedy.” A former Australian relative of Stephen Paddock speaks EXCLUSIVELY to #9ACA TONIGHT on @Channel9 at 7.00PM. https://t.co/MUbthI4fUm — A Current Affair (@ACurrentAffair9) October 6, 2017 “It is a very chilling thought to know that the person that is at the centre of the world’s largest story at the moment was somebody that I knew, somebody that I was welcomed into their home, into their family, into their life. “Not in my wildest dreams ... would I have ever thought that anybody could do this, let alone someone who I — at the time — had the pleasure to meet.” RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS Mr Le Fevre said he noticed Paddock became very defensive when asked about the US constitutional rights to bear arms. “I raised that question with Steve and it’s something that he came back at me with an incredible degree of vigour,” Mr Le Fevre said. “He was very strict and very firm on the fact that it’s a right. It’s the freedom of every American to participate, to own a gun and use it … when need be. I was shocked. There was no compassion in regard to my question.” Paddock was insistent: “That law should never be changed”. Mr Le Fevre said he chose not to pick an argument. “When in Rome, be respectful,” he told A Current Affair. He said said he fully believed Paddock to be capable of planning such an attack by himself. “The planning that has gon into this terrible, horrible occurrence has been nothing other than military precision. With Steven Paddock, that doesn’t surprise me because everything he did seemed to be with precision.” HIGH ROLLER Mr Le Fevre told Nine Paddock considered himself to be a professional gambler. “He said as a professional gambler .. ‘I operate with $1.5 million to $2 million a year and that can generate me anywhere between $200,000 to $300,000 a year’,” he said. “He had no qualms in telling me of the millions that he’d used.” Steven Paddock had another Aussie friend, Adam Le Fever. Adam exclusively told us about his time with Paddock. #9ACA https://t.co/cQyyoScGFf pic.twitter.com/LZM41y30R6 — A Current Affair (@ACurrentAffair9) October 6, 2017 Paddock also boasted of the lifestyle he had been leading in Las Vegas’ casinos. “He was very intent with it — extremely intent. He was very much a calculated person. Everything he did seemed to be planned with precision,” Mr Le Fevre said. FAMILY MATTERS Mr Le Fevre told Nine he did not regard Paddock’s relationship with Marilou to be a loving one. “I saw him talk to her abruptly and Liza and I had questions,” he said. Marilou seemed very nervous and jittery around Paddock. “He would talk to her in a condescending way at times, and while I was concerned, I was prepared to dismiss it as that’s his nature.” Mr Le Fevre said he “without any doubt” believed Marilou had no knowledge of what Paddock was up to. “And it would have been planned,” he said. “This is not just something he did at the spur of the moment. And I know Marilou and the family well enough. All of them are very loving, a very good Catholic family. I believe if she had the slightest inkling something was not right, of what’s occurred, she would have shared that with her family ...” |
UKIP have a new candidate after Jonathan Stanley resigned, claiming to be sick of 'open racism and bullying' within the party. The Gazette can reveal that Alan Piper is Ukip's new man and that he was instated less than five hours after Mr Stanley's departure. Owner of the Sun Hotel, Coniston, Mr Piper, 61, is a champion for small businesses and believes that his experience in the work place sets him apart from other candidates. He said: "I'm a like-minded grown up who's sick of the posh boys. "I'm sitting here trying to run a small business and it's not easy. Not every party helps small businesses. When you think most of the economy is run by small businesses it makes more sense to help them than hurt them. "I'm fairly laid back most of the time, but at the same time I have always had an interest in politics and now after 40 years I have something to offer because I have experience that matters." Mr Piper took part in his first debate in his new role as Ukip party candidate within hours of Jonathan Stanley's resignation when he attended a Question Time-style hustings event at Sedbergh School. He will be hoping to last longer than the four months Mr Stanley could manage before denouncing his membership, claiming Ukip was 'not serious' about winning the seat. The Scotland-based surgeon, speaking exclusively to the Gazette, said: "I have given my full resignation to the party because of issues happening in Scotland: open racism and sanctimonious bullying within the party. This sectarian racist filth in Scotland needs cleaning up. it is a great threat to the Eurosceptic cause and civil society." Mr Stanley also cited 'the general level of motivation of MEP's in the North West and the handling of health issues' as further reasons behind his departure. MORE TOP STORIES: "If I can't represent the party I need to leave it," said an angry Mr Stanley. "I'm standing back from this now. Let the other candidates get on with it." He was angered by his party's decision not to publish documents he had written about the recent damning Kirkup Report into the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust after 11 babies and one mother passed away. After resigning due to issues in Scotland, the Gazette asked Mr Stanley if he felt he was letting down the people of Westmorland and Lonsdale. He said: "I'd have been representing UK in a UK parliament. That needs to be for a party that tackles sectarianism and racism across the UK. "The people of the seat deserve a candidate who either starts as an independent or is committed to a party; it is more honest to resign." Colin Rudd, Cumbria agent for Ukip, described Mr Stanley's departure as 'a bit of a disappointment' before adding: "We will replace him with somebody else. We had quite a few people interested at the time." Mr Rudd admitted his candidate's resignation was 'a blow' with just 48 days to go until the General Election. A UKIP spokesman said: "We are treating Mr Stanley's comments with the incredulity they deserve. "Mr Stanley and the party have been drifting apart politically for sometime and his resignation comes as no surprise to us. However, we wish him all the best for the future." |
Confessions of an EX-SM Trainee So, yes I was an SM Trainee. There are a few things you need to know about me before I get to all the goodies. I am a boy, I am 22 years old, I am Japanese-America, I trained for 5 years (sadly) and I never got to debut. I studied Korean in my high school and got to the third year in the language and my school had found some sort of program which would allow for students to kind of study abroad, but it was more of a Summer kind of thing so it wasn’t really.. idk, kind of hard to explain but that’s not the point~ So a bunch of students including me went into this program and we actually got in. Since the program was based off of a more CLASS type of thang, the two Korean teachers at my high school came along with us to South Korea. This all happened in the summer of 2007. We stayed in SK from the end of June to the beginning of August and obviously we had some free time, actually A LOT of free time. I have always been into singing and dancing and especially KPOP, that kind of triggered me into taking Korean Class and my host brother was really into KPOP too, but he just listened to it, he didn’t really much dance or sing to it. One day we talked about our hobbies and whatnot, getting to know each other and he told me to sing for him and I did and right after he told me to audition for SM, which was literally just a couple blocks from his house. So I got all EXCITED~~~ It was a weekly audition, before I actually went down to audition, we had to call in and schedule and fill out applications and whatnot. It wasn’t until like mid-July when I actually got confirmed for an audition. I went down to the little audition building (it wasn’t the actual SM building, it was like a miniature SM building, they have more than one SM building, this wasnt the main one though) and there wasn’t as many people as I had expected, maybe about 30 of us, probably not even. It was like a normal high school class size. We all waited patiently to go in to audition and while in line everyone stayed quiet, I was expecting people to be rehearsing and whatnot but no one was doing that. It was extremely awkward and quiet. All of this also took place INSIDE the building, we waited on the first floor, where it was quiet and they played some SM Artist stuff on a TV and we just sat everywhere. Someone would come down the stairs and call a name and whoever it was would follow. The youngest person I saw there was probably a little boy who was like .. maybe roughly 13 or 14, the oldest looking was a tall, skinny girl who looked about 21ish. I waited about 30 minutes when they finally called my name. My first name is an American name but my last name is very much Japanese. As soon as they called my name everyone turned and looked at me, their eyes wide and confused. I was like “okay then…” I went and auditioned, sung my heart out cause singing is my specialty. The judges smiled and nodded and they asked me in English “How long have you been singing?”, “Were you born in Japan?” and that’s really all I could really remember.. After I answered, I left the room. I was bummed out because I felt like I didn’t leave a good impression on them.. I was so sure I didn’t get in and continued on with life. Apparently after like four days(?) I got a call from one of the SM judges and they told me they wanted to see more of me and that there would be another audition. I went and got through, another audition, went and got through. There are three rounds. I passed all of them. It was like almost August when they finally pulled out the contract and explained EVERYTHING to me, they made sure I knew what I was getting myself into and that I was sure about doing this. I signed it with no hesitation. Since I was a foreigner and it would be my Senior year in High School, SM told me to continue in America and when it would be breaks, I would come back to SK and train. Also at least three times a month, I would receive vocal and dance lessons over Skype, it was kind of funny. I finally graduated from HS and I was now an official trainee in SK. I really wanted to go to College, but SM didn’t cover that, it was my own kind of decisions. I decided maybe not to go to college (biggest mistake). Now this gets more interesting. I began to do intense training. At SM there are different levels for every category, the categories are Singing, Dancing, Acting, Rapping, Language (English, Japanese, Chinese (Korean for foreigners)) and instruments. There are levels 1 through 6. Lvl 1 being NOVICE and Lvl 6 being EXPERT. For me, when I first entered, my stats were Singing: 3, Dancing: 2, Acting: 1, Rapping: 1, Language: Korean-1, Japanese-3, English-6, Instrumental: Saxophone-3. SM encouraged us to focus only on our mains but never to forget about the other ones, so I only stuck to singing, dancing and language, brushing the others to the side. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t train. Intense vocal training in the morning till about lunch, then Dance practice from then on until about Dinner, then after that you do whatever you want. I mostly just focused on my singing and dancing. There were probably a total of like.. 40 trainees.. But I could be wrong.. All varying from like ages 8 to 25 … Trainee life really is harsh, but very rewarding. I was considered a bigger size, not HUGE, but bigger, and once I quit being a trainee, I was considered SKINNY… LOL, kind of funny. I was put in an international dorm, which was a little bogus, but I was okay with it, preferred to be with everyone else but oh well. I shared a dorm with two others, they were both Chinese. As trainees we are encouraged to train at least six times a week, but SM doesn’t really have control over us. Whoever wants to train is welcome to do so, those who are not as driven aren’t pushed to doing so. Basically you have all the freedom in the world but that depends if you want to work hard or not. Some trainees I saw like once a week. Some I saw every single day. Most of the time, those who trained EVERY day or most of them, were the ones who debuted. Actually I wasn’t bullied for not being Korean, there are a lot of scenarios where you are and whatever, but it really depends on how you portray BULLYING. I mean, duh, I was looked at as a waste or energy or whatever because it is KOREAN pop, but that wasnt BULLYING. It all came down to how determined I was, that’s what determines my drive for being something in the KPOP world. There were cliques, YES. I didn’t revolve myself around anyone in specific but I was pretty close to some trainees. We are encouraged to not become close with anyone because, ya know, we might not even debut with them. You would expect some trainees to have entered SM just to get close with idols, but nahhh, that was BARELY the case. At first, I was very excited to meet BoA, Super Junior, etc. but once we were in the company, they were just like everyone else, they weren’t seen as stars anymore.. And YES, there was INTENSE competition, but even that doesn’t mean you are set for debut. There were some RUDE and arrogant trainees but when the reps and staffs came around their personalities CHANGED. Training made me realize how .. ahem.. scripted and ‘fake’ the kpop world can be.. BUT, of course the staffs and reps are in on it as well, they know who’s mean and who isn’t and most of the time, the nice ones get to debut. At the end of the day it all depends on your drive, determination and character. SM has like four buildings I think..?? One is for the trainees, one is for the artists and the others is just for staffs, representatives, etc. for business purposes. I was ALWAYS at the trainee building, duh. I was only at one of the business buildings for financial issues such as our weekly allowances ($25 a week). Trainees only ever went to the Artist building when we had showcases, which were monthly and it was an evaluation of how much trainees improved and whatnot. Many trainees were sent home because of showcases. I, surprisingly made it farrr .. not to be conceited.. NOW on to your favorite, the idols.. Like I said, they aren’t all that after entering the company.. They’re just as human as everyone else. They didn’t come around the Trainee building much, but they were always at the Artist building. Whenever we had showcases, the only idols who ever came to watch were Yunho, BoA, Eunhyuk, Donghae, Tiffany, Sunny, Onew and a couple others. I’d say the MOST DOWN TO EARTH idols were most definitely Tiffany, Luna, Yunho and Amber. I personally don’t consider the EXO members idols because I kind of went through everything with them, just didn’t know them personally. The SNSD members barely ever came around, the one I saw most was probably Sunny, she is probably my favorite member after getting to know a little bit of SNSD. They came around and the only ones that ever greeted us were Sunny, Tiffany, Taeyeon and Yoona, the others would walk right pass us. They gave short encouragements, telling us to not give up and they would end it there. From what I saw, what they portray on screen definitely isn’t fake. The Super Junior members didn’t really interact a lot with trainees.. Eunhyuk talked to a lot of the girl trainees though and Shindong is only funny with the older people, he isn’t really much goofy with the younger kids. I say Luna is the most down to earth because even though she debuted already, she still talks to fellow trainees and she comes by a lot to encourage us to not give up. Krystal isn’t a snob, but she’s been called that so many times, she just kind of stopped trying, but she is really nice, she comes to the showcases sometimes and always encourages all of us to do well. Amber is most definitely a tom boy, a lot of people say it’s SM’s doings but no, it really isn’t. The initial thing was to make Amber girly, it didn’t work, so they switched up the concept of f(x), having a tom boy. She is a tom boy but she has a very caring soul. I’d say she is the idol a lot of foreigners can relate to most, for she is an outcast, being Chinese and a tomboy, etc. She speaks up for a lot of trainees who are being outcasted and when f(x) comes around to check up on trainees, she tries to include outcasted trainees in some things, like maybe dance warm-ups, she would always bring them up to the front when they always stand at the back all shy and stuff. I didn’t see much of SHINee, when I did, they always looked SERIOUS and like focused.. They’re the serious idols, they really aren’t that down to earth, from what I saw. Now, onto EXO.. Since I trained for 5 years, you’d expect me to have been a line-up member, right? Well no.. sadly. I mean one of the managers brought it up to me and told me to work extremely hard, this was in 2010, when the ‘New Boy Group’ rumor was spreading throughout trainees. We all began to work EXTRA hard, but I wasn’t even chosen to be a POTENTIAL member.. The EXO members weren’t that close at first, obviously.. I’d say that my favorite members, after getting to know them through TRAINING, would have to be Suho, Baekhyun and Lay. Suho, being trained for 7 years, he never gave up and he lacked a lot in singing back in 2008, when I first entered. I was like ..why is he here.. then I saw his face and I was like Oh.. But yeah, Suho is VERY hardworking and he is very popular amongst trainees, as in like he is friends with a lot of them. He is very down to earth and yes he is a crybaby. He cries every time something dramatic happens to him that lets him get closer to his dreams. He cried when he was confirmed an EXO member. Baekhyun, you’d expect him to be cocky and whatever, being trained for only 1 year, but you are all wrong, he already had an amazing voice when he entered SM, but his dancing was okay. He worked extremely hard to improve his dancing AND singing and his personality was already on point, so he was already at a 4th year trainee level. Lay is a super nice guy, he always smiles and tries to bring laughter to everyone. Like I said, I didn’t know these guys personally, but who wouldn’t know who the popular guys were? The EXO members come around just a little and when they do, they aren’t as lively. Chanyeol is way different off-screen. He knows that he’s cute, so he’s a bit cocky and not too much a great guy. Kai is short-tempered, that’s just what I heard, so the EXO members don’t talk to him off-screen, the only one who does is Chen, but Chen talks to all the members. I heard that if something seems to be going wrong OR needs to be done, the reps and staffs DEMAND the artists to do something about it. Chanbaek was created through staffs, because they knew that every group needs an OTP in order to gain a lot of popularity, so the one with the VOICE and the one with the MAD INSTRUMENT SKILLS was put together. It is very scripted, indeed.. After EXO debuted, the question of me still being in SM while I was 21 came to be questioned.. SM was probably not going to be ever debuting another boy group any time soon and I was right. My manager talked to me and said that reps discussed that the New Girl Group (GE7) would debut in 2014 and another boy group would have to settle for 2016, I’d already be like 26 .. I evaluated all my goals and I realized that what I had been doing all this time was just a waste of my time.. I was looked upon as just an extra and I didn’t even have a chance. The KPOP world is definitely HARD and it you’re not a stand out, then don’t try. I left SM in April 2013, when my contract with SM ended. I went home and right now I am working and hoping to go to College in the fall. My manager still calls me once in awhile just to check if I need anything or just to talk. It is quite sad, but you know, all you can do is learn from things like this. Oh and also, I got a call from a rep from CCM and they want me in as a trainee and I just shook my head like NO and declined.. Really..? Uhh.. no, after all the controversy.. This is all I have to say.. Sorry for it being so long.. I hope this helped OR just was enjoyable.. Thanks for reading :)) |
Gardai have released a photograph of the newborn baby Maria, who was found abandoned on a roadside 12 days ago. Gardai have released a photograph of the newborn baby Maria, who was found abandoned on a roadside 12 days ago. The image of the newborn baby girl, who was discovered in Rathcoole, Co Dublin, on Friday May 8th, was published in a bid to get her mother to come forward. Officers have previously said that they are concerned over the welfare of the mother of the baby girl, stressing that she is not in trouble. Sergeant Maeve O’ Sullivan, of Child Protection Unit in Clondalkin, said: "We are releasing this photograph so Mum can see her little baby girl and we would ask Mum to please contact us. Sergeant Maeve O’ Sullivan, Child Protection Unit, Clondalkin and Rita Byrne, Principal Social worker, Tusla, holding a photograph of baby Maria who was found 12 days ago The infant, no more than a day and a half old when discovered, was left wrapped in a fleece blanket, inside a black bin liner and a paper carrier bag on a side road near farmland near the Dublin-Kildare border (Garda Press Office/PA Wire) Primark blanket, M&S bag, and bin liner similar to ones found with abandoned baby from Friday ‘Not a criminal investigation’: Gardai at the gateway on Steelstown Road near Rathcoole in Co Dublin where baby ‘Maria’ was discovered CALL FOR HELP: The scene at Rathcoole after the abandoned baby was found "It has been 12 days since the discovery of the baby and we wish to thank the public for their assistance." Gardaí have received a number of calls from the public and all these calls have been followed through on, but unfortunately the mother has not yet contacted Gardaí or Tusla, it added. Officers are also appealing for anyone who may have been on Steelstown Lane between 10am and 3pm on May 8th to come forward if they have not already done so. Anyone with information is asked to call Clondalkin Garda Station on 01-6667600, or Tusla can be contacted on 01-6206387 Online Editors |
HuffPost Canada is profiling each of the 2017 Conservative leadership candidates, leading up to the May decision. Deepak Obhrai is trying to make a point. Canada has changed. Young people and immigrants understand that, the Conservative candidate tells The Huffington Post Canada over lunch at the Fairmont Château Laurier hotel, a stone’s throw away from Parliament Hill. But the Tories’ base seems unable to accept it, he suggests. “This party has to be the party of the future, not of the past,” he says, tapping his finger against the table. “If we want to be a party of the past, we will become a protest party.” Deepak Obhrai is the longest serving Conservative MP in Parliament. The 2015 Conservative election campaign, with its “barbaric practices” tip line, pledge to deport dual citizens convicted of terrorism, and re-emphasis on banning niqabs during citizenship ceremonies, reversed many of the gains the Tories — primarily Obhrai and former cabinet minister Jason Kenney — spent years achieving within immigrant communities. On and off stage, Obhrai stresses that the Tories are in danger of further alienating a large segment of the population with antagonizing proposals, such as fellow contestant Kellie Leitch’s pledge to screen newcomers for Canadian values and require face-to-face interviews. “Why do you think I’m speaking?” the Calgary MP asks rhetorically. Obhrai orders a lobster Cobb salad and grabs a piece of bread. He heralds Canada’s successful integration model with new immigrants and suggests the base of his party doesn’t reflect or understand this experience. “When I go to EDAs [electoral district associations], all those white, old men sitting there who think Canada is still in the 1980s, 1970s, those are the ones giving [Leitch] money,” he says, munching on a piece of bread. Those are also the people writing to him every time he opens his mouth, he says. Most of the emails are anti-Muslim, many say he is out to lunch. Deepak Obhrai, centre, speaks at a Conservative leadership debate in December 2016, flanked by Chris Alexander, left, and Maxime Bernier. “This is a party election,” Obhrai adds, lowering his voice and leaning across the table. “You have to appeal to the party base, not the general public.” His voice is now a whisper. “This is the base of the Conservative party, the old Conservative party.” Leitch, who has drawn attention for praising U.S. President Donald Trump’s electoral campaign, is “fear mongering,” he says. “She is not the person that I knew.” The two have known each other for years. Although Leitch’s party roots lie with the Ontario Progressive Conservatives and Obhrai’s are with the Reform party, he says he took her to many cultural events. Now, they are on what he calls “hello, hello terms.” Deepak Obhrai used a scooter while campaigning in the last federal election. Some people are very afraid of change, Obhrai says. They tell him Canada needs to remain “this type of culture” without sharia law and “all these things.” One woman who recently quit the board of his riding association told him Christians are under threat from Muslims and sharia law. “Are Christians under threat in this country?” He shrugs. “I don’t have time for that.” At the same time though, Obhrai seems to relish responding to those who contact him. “I keep reminding them that it is the Muslim community that is helping us fight radicalization. Nobody else. It is the Muslim community that is our first strength,” he says. They are working with police. “They are our first line of defence.” There are Muslims who come and say they want sharia law, Obhrai offers without prompting. “That fuels this fear of change,” he says, but Canada’s foundation is based on common law and freedom, which is “non-compatible with sharia law.” “It will never come,” he says. "I’ve been here for 20 years, for 40 years. I’ve gone through the whole experience of racism everywhere. Why do you think I’m running?" “Even the niqab,” Obhrai continues, “what is very interesting about the niqab is the second generation that tastes the freedom that we provide, they don’t follow those old traditions.” He has seen it in his riding, he says, helping himself to a pita crisp. There is a woman, he says, the wife of an imam, who goes to his friend’s halal store wearing a niqab, but when she goes to Ikea she wears no coverings. “That is the freedom that we give.” “I’ve been here for 20 years, for 40 years. I’ve gone through the whole experience of racism everywhere. Why do you think I’m running? … The others are not talking about it,” he says of his 13 competitors for the leadership. “This whole country is built by immigrants, young people…. What about them? Are they facing these barriers? Yes, they are…. Who is going to talk about this? On the national stage, I stand up and talk about it. Despite the fact I get massive amounts of emails.” The lobster salad is delivered. Obhrai declines fresh ground pepper but accepts the offer of Tabasco sauce. “I’m Indian,” he says with a shrug and a smile. An undated photo of Deepak Obhrai in Africa. Obhrai was born on July 5, 1950, in Tanganyika (known as Tanzania since 1964) in a mountain town called Oldeani near the world-famous NGorongoro Crater. His father was a diabetic who died when Obhrai was six. His mother, armed with a bachelor’s degree, got a job at a bank. “If my mother hadn’t been educated, I might have been an under-the-tree mechanic,” he says, referring to informal shops that pop up in the countryside, literally under a tree. Obhrai went to primary school in Moshi, a town at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. He attended high school in Arusha and was later sent to Indore, India, to study at the prestigious Daly College. At the time, Tanzania was a one-party socialist state, India a multiparty democracy. “One of the things I realized when I came back and was living in Africa was the [South] Asian community did not participate in the political process of the country, and when the time came, they paid the price.” In 1972, Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of 80,000 people of Asian heritage. In the decade that followed, Tanzania nationalized banks and businesses, the vast majority of which were owned by Asians. Because they didn’t engage with the political system and “were not identified as locals, they had to leave,” Obhrai says. Deepak Obhrai worked as an air traffic controller. Obhrai moved to the Britain, where he studied to be an air traffic controller but realized he didn’t want to live there. “The British think we are ‘coolies,’” he says, referring to the term used in India for luggage boys. He returned home to work in air traffic control, and was on duty the night the Israeli Defence Forces landed at Uganda’s Entebbe airport to free the hostages held by Palestinian hijackers in 1976. Deepak Obhrai is pictured with Neena, his wife. A year later, Obhrai landed in Calgary with his wife, Neena, (they wed in 1971) and their three-year-old daughter, Priti. Obhrai initially intended to go to Montreal, but with René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois government in power, he was advised to “go West.” “I was working at one of the best international airports, Kilimanjaro International Airport. When I landed in Calgary, it was an old shack! Corrugated roof shack, you know. When I opened the door, I said: ‘What kind of airport is this? Am I in the right country? This is Canada?’” While Obhrai worked to get an accounting degree and later a job with the city, he threw himself into community work. He and Neena also built a dry cleaning business that expanded to three stores. They had two more children: a daughter, Kaajal, in 1978, and son, Aman, in 1984. Deepak Obhrai with two of his kids in an undated photo. In the 1990s, Obhrai became the president of the India-Canada Association of Calgary, vice-president of the National Indo-Canadian Council for the Alberta region, president of the Monterey Park Community Association, and president of the Hindu Society of Calgary. He lost his first bid for public office in 1993, as alderman on city council. He tried unsuccessfully to win a provincial byelection nomination for the Progressive Conservatives in Calgary–McCall in 1995. A year later, he lost another bid for a PC nomination in Calgary–Montrose. Obhrai says his first attempt taught him how to run an election campaign; the second how to understand party politics, and the third — which he contends was unfairly manipulated — helped him build the base he would use for a successful federal campaign in 1997 under the Reform party banner. At first, Obhrai says, the board of the riding association tried to block him from running but Reform party leader Preston Manning intervened, telling him to “go” for it and to come change the party. Manning declined to comment. But Rick Anderson, who was campaign director at the time and charged with keeping contests fair and open, confirmed that the party leadership did intervene. “I don’t remember the nature of the problem in Deepak’s riding, but I do recall it was one of a handful where the competition was especially intense, and there was some jostling and the rules needed reinforcing,” he told HuffPost. Deepak Obhrai in his first year as a member of Parliament. Obhrai says he didn’t realize the amount of “institutionalized racism that already existed” in the party. “I had to fight tooth and nail,” he says, leaning in. “That’s when Don Martin wrote I was not going to win.” Martin, the host of CTV’s “Power Play,” used to write for the Calgary Herald. In July 1997, Obhrai insists Martin wrote a column saying he couldn’t win. (Despite a microfiche and Infomart search, HuffPost has been unable to find such an article.) “Despite Don Martin’s negative comments, I won the election.” ’Not a serious candidate’ Twenty years and seven election wins later, Obhrai is still upset. Over the years, Martin hasn’t been too generous to the Calgary MP. In 2005, Martin gave Obhrai a C- grade, writing that he’s “never see[n] a foreign junket he’d refuse and rarely worries the cabinet ministers with the calibre of his questions. He just doesn’t leave behind a deep footprint in federal politics.” Last summer, Martin also pegged Obhrai’s odds of winning the Tory leadership at 500 to1. Martin believes Obhrai has a “chip on his shoulder. “I have nothing against him except he's the comic relief and not a serious candidate,” he wrote in an email. Obhrai believes the “traditional” media are not giving him a fair shake. But many party insiders echo Martin’s comments. Obhrai is funny and entertaining but not a serious policy thinker or leadership material, they say. Obhrai says his strength lies with the grassroots. Not just Indians but whites, Lebanese, Filipinos. His money comes from young people and “outside traditional people,” he says, “which is why I don’t register in the polls. Because they go to the traditional supporters. “You don’t need to write that. I’m not interested in that. I’m fine,” he adds. According to the latest Elections Canada filings, Obhrai has raised $108,333 so far, placing him 11th among Tory leadership candidates for both the total amount of donations and for the number of contributors. The party’s ‘brown guy’ In 1997, after Obhrai won a seat in Calgary East, he was named caucus liaison for what the party called its “bridge-building campaign.” Obhrai went to ethnic events, held a large Diwali event on Parliament Hill every year, and cemented his role as the “brown guy” in the party. “The party asked me to open up the base, to go around bring in new Canadians, young Canadians into the party,” he says. A decade later, with the now-merged Conservative party in power, prime minister Stephen Harper promoted Jason Kenney, his parliamentary secretary, to the newly created job of minister of state for multiculturalism. Obhrai says he and Kenney met near the Delta Hotel where Harper was making the offers, and Kenney told him: “Take your job back, I don’t want it.” Kenney, who is now running to lead the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta, says he doesn’t remember it exactly that way. "Thought he was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard." “[Obhrai] was expecting/hoping to be multiculturalism minister, and I was expecting to be a senior minister,” Kenney wrote to HuffPost. “We had a curry lunch where I told him I was going to be PS for multi, and he laughed so hard he was crying. Thought he was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard. “Perhaps, I jokingly suggested we swap jobs. At the end of the day, I ended up loving the [multiculturalism] job, which is why I kept it for a decade, but we were both shocked and found it humorous at first.” Kenney did throw himself into the job of ethnic outreach with gusto. He was lauded for his efforts, leading some Tories to believe Obhrai feels eclipsed by his successor. Deepak Obhrai and Stephen Harper light a candle on Parliament Hill to celebrate Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, in 2009. (Photo: Canadian Press) Obhrai had a good gig. He served in the entire Harper government as parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs. If there was a meeting in a faraway land the minister didn’t want to attend, Obhrai would be there. His office is a collection of mementos from his travels: plates, plaques, ornaments. The elder statesman After a few more bites of his lunch, Obhrai pauses. “I want you to help me write a little story,” he says. During the 2008 election, The Globe and Mail’s Jane Taber wrote an article describing him as “self-praising,” he says, because he pointed out to constituents that he was now an elder. “She was kind of making fun of it.” Obhrai’s details are off. It was after the 2011 election, after he wrote a letter to The Calgary Herald and to his supporters pointing out that he was the oldest South Asian left in the House of Commons: “In my birth country, Tanzania, I would henceforth be referred to by the respectful title of Mzee. In South Asia, I would receive the title of Pradhaan. This means I have now reached the ranks of respected elders. I still look young!” The fact remains that Obhrai was bruised by Taber’s comment: “I didn’t understand was why she said that.” He explains: “In African and Indian language, elders are given the highest degree of respect.” Deepak Obhrai meets the Dalai Lama. Two days previously, another reporter had told him that there are no elders in the Western world. “Once you become a senior, they are told: Keep going buddy, thank you. They do not have that kind of respect…. Now, I understand why their attack was misplaced,” he says. He wants everyone to know he was unaware of this so it can be reflected in “Wikileaks.” He probably means Wikipedia. At 66, the grandfather of two insists he’s running to win and should be taken seriously. He is the dean of the Conservative caucus after all — the longest serving Tory on the Hill. Despite stating in debates that he has “no platform,” he has put forward policy. He wants to spend more on the Canadian Border Services Agency to protect “the largest porous border” in the world. He wants the Business Development Bank of Canada to give start-up loans to students, the unemployed and anyone else with a sound business plan. He wants to cut the $1 billion the federal government spends yearly on settlement costs for landed immigrants. “When I came to this country, nobody gave me money. We came prepared to work hard,” Obhrai says, adding that he would maintain settlement costs for refugees. Deepak Obhrai with his wife, and their grandkids Davin, 10, and Evasha, 8. Obhrai favours low taxes and no deficits, but he’s willing to run them when the economy nosedives. He likes the public health care system and wants to invest more in training nurses and would consider creating a pharmacare program. He wants more foreign investment, less regulation and more government investment in green scientific innovation. Specifically, he wants Ottawa to invest in fast-neutron reactors (FNRs) that would recycle nuclear waste from nuclear plants and create carbon-free energy. He’s fine with scrapping the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and would prefer that Canada sign bilateral trade agreements with the United States and Mexico, because, he says, such deals create a more equal level playing field. Still, he supports the free trade deal with the European Union because the region is already integrated. The French factor One of Obhrai’s biggest challenges as a potential Tory leader may be his language deficit. Despite fluency in Swahili, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujrati, and English, he does not speak French. “Look, I speak five languages, it’s not difficult for me to learn another language,” he says. But he has been trying to learn French since July 2015 and still has trouble stringing a sentence together. His incomprehensible French has garnered celebrity attention in Quebec, something he clearly relishes. “People are saying ‘You are the guy who massacred the language but you were there, you showed respect,” he says. “I’m getting more calls from Quebec City to go back.” English media have also been laughing with him. There’s a viral appearance on “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” and his tips on learning French in a CBC Radio segment (“Forget about grammar”). “From the time I started running, I was told: he won’t make it, he’ll be out, he’ll be this, he’ll be that, he won’t be able to make the money, he should be out, he doesn’t speak French, he doesn’t do anything, nobody knows him,” Obhrai says. “My debates prove that I know what the hell that I am talking about. My French, despite the fact [he doesn’t speak it] went very well. Despite the fact [people said] I wasn’t going to raise the money, I raised the money. I do not follow their traditional way of [thinking]. “I create my own script, which is why I am here for 20 years and the others have gone,” he says with a big laugh. “And I will continue doing that.” CORRECTION: An earlier version misspelled Idi Amin's first name. This article has been updated. Also on HuffPost |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.