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Usually it’s customary to wait until the end of a minor-league trip to empty the notebook. Yet after three days in Charlotte, I’m approaching it in reverse order since the other ones require GIFs. I arrived in Charlotte expecting Yoan Moncada to be the headliner of this trip, but Willy Garcia jumped out at me the most. Until he popped out to first with a runner in scoring position in Durham on Monday, I hadn’t seen him lose a matchup. Even when his other plate appearances resulted in outs, the contact was worthy. The size of the sample is such that three games accounts for half his season, but the other three games would’ve looked good, too. Three games: 6-for-10, 6 R, 2 HR, 3 BB, .600/.692/.1.200 over 13 PA 6-for-10, 6 R, 2 HR, 3 BB, .600/.692/.1.200 over 13 PA Other games: 5-for-12, 1 2B, 3 BB, 5 K, .417/.471/.500 over 17 PA He hit one homer to right and one to left, flashing the power that had vanished during his last year in the Pittsburgh organization. He also showed uncharacteristic discipline for a guy who had struck out roughly five times for every walk over his career. I imagine the Pirates envisioned these kind of hot streaks when they signed him $300,000 out of the Dominican Republic, but here he is, somehow addressing his two biggest flaws in his first week with the Knights and earning the International League’s Batter of the Week honors in the process. Charlotte hitting coach Andy Tomberlin says he’s been impressed with the way Garcia has been able to shape plate appearances into his favor. Given the disparity between his start and his history, this one will require a bigger body of work. For the time being, he’s at least shown why the White Sox were more intrigued by him than Jason Coats, and at a position where the Sox could use some depth. As for Moncada, he’s having a hot start that also qualifies as characteristic. He’s hitting .370/.452/.593, with that production heavily buoyed by his work as a left-handed hitter. His approach from the right side is in need of work, although he did homer and draw two walks from that side of the plate on Monday. His range looks fine for a second baseman — especially if he’s an offensive-minded one — although he was guilty of “trying to do too much” with a spinning throw. He ran the bases very well, both stealing and advancing. The biggest blemish is the expected one: He’s striking out 32 percent of the time. Yet one could consider that slightly comforting considering he struck out 30 percent of the time at Double-A Portland last season, and the Red Sox aggressively pushed him to the majors regardless. On a somewhat typical development curve, Moncada would be expected to float around that line early on, then whittle it down as he becomes more familiar with the level. As for Tomberlin, he said that this early in Moncada’s White Sox career, his job is to make sure he helps Moncada establish a strong routine. “We’re really pleased with the work he’s put in” was his summary. The oneupmanship we saw between Danny Hayes and Nicky Delmonico in the spring has continued apace in Charlotte. Delmonico: .280/.400/.560, 2 2B, 1 3B, 1 HR, 5 RBI, 4 BB, 5 K over 28 PA .280/.400/.560, 2 2B, 1 3B, 1 HR, 5 RBI, 4 BB, 5 K over 28 PA Hayes: .391/.500/.783, 3 2B, 2 HR, 8 RBI, 5 BB, 8 K over 30 PA Delmonico’s line includes a 1-for-11 spell (with a walk and HBP) over his last three games, which gives you an indication of just how forcefully he burst out of the gate. It’s also a reminder of how regression can erode the foundation built by a great start. With Cody Asche starting with one hit and seven strikeouts over his first 13 at-bats with the White Sox, there figures to be an opening for a left-handed bat on the bench at some point (Jerry Sands lasted into June, so Asche might be able to hang around at least one month). Hayes has the the history of better strike-zone recognition, while Delmonico has played third base and the outfield. Over my three days watching Charlotte, Delmonico made a few plays at third that I hadn’t seen from him, either last year or this spring, although he’s still not particularly fluid there. The question for both is how much development each has left. Hayes, for example, showed home-run power in Charlotte in 2016 after hitting just 18 combined in 259 games between Kannapolis and Birmingham the previous two seasons. Charlotte’s BB&T Ballpark is heaven for hitters, but Tomberlin says the surge is indicative of his strength. “The power, to me, has been there,” Tomberlin said. “I remember seeing him when he was in Birmingham and that was a big ballpark. This is a smaller park, but yet the power is still there. I think he’s gotten a little bit more mature and he’s able to be more selective and understand his swing. He’s a more mature hitter this year, for sure.” As for Delmonico, he came to the White Sox under mysterious circumstances and, after an unremarkable 2015, posted a 1.073 OPS in 38 games at Birmingham as a 23-year-old in 2016. That put him on the map, and Tomberlin sees a difference. “He’s really gotten himself into a controlled — he likes to play hard and he’s got great energy. I think he’s controlling his energy and channeling it in a great way for his benefit. “It’s a pleasant—” Tomberlin continued, before reconsidering. “I’m not surprised, because I’ve felt like he’s had this type of ability the whole time.” In Charlotte’s season preview, I said it’s worth watching how the White Sox divvy up the playing time at catcher. So far, it’s been tilted in Kevan Smith’s favor. He’s started four of the six games, including all three I saw. Driving in nine runs over four games — with the batting line to match — is a good way to earn one’s keep. Given that Zack Burdi is a Downers Grove native who is on the cusp of pitching for his hometown team, I was curious how much his life had changed. He said he was at home for about two months during the offseason, spending the majority of the remainder training at Louisville. “It’s kind of a lot different; a lot of people coming out of the woodwork to say congratulations,” Burdi. “Nothing bad. Everyone’s awesome, everyone’s been friendly. A lot of old friends from high school congratulated me when I got drafted. My parents’ friends threw me a party when I got home. It’s been awesome.” That said, Burdi said he can’t let it change the way he approaches the task ahead. “When I first got drafted, that moment can’t really be topped, and then to be drafted by the White Sox made it even better. But overall, it’s no longer in my mind that I’m with the White Sox, even though such it’s a blessing. It’s an unbelievable experience so far, but I’m just playing baseball now. All that stuff is background noise. “Playing for a team from my hometown is awesome, but I can’t approach it any differently than if I played for the Orioles or the Marlins or something like that. As cool as it is, it definitely can consume you, and I try not to let that happen.” |
AutoGuide.com Dodge’s upcoming monster of a muscle car will be more powerful than some of the most exclusive supercars in the world. Official ratings for the SRT Challenger and Charger put the car at 707 hp and 650 lb-ft of torque, making it considerably more powerful than its exotic sibling: the SRT Viper. The SRT halo car makes 640 hp and 600 lb-ft of torque with a massive 8.4-liter V10, but it’s hard to care now that Chrysler will sell you a blown V8 that makes it look downright wimpy. SEE ALSO: 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Showcased in Videos In fact, the SAE ratings mean that the steroidal challenger is not only more powerful than the Shelby GT500, but also the ultra-exclusive Lamborghini Aventador along with a long list of other high-priced exotics. Dealers will begin taking delivery of the new Challenger later this year with two key fobs: a black version that “limits” output to 500 hp and a red version that unleashes the car’s full power. GALLERY: 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat |
French president orders immediate despatch of team to 'shine light on circumstances of assassination' of 26-year-old A French photojournalist has been killed in the Central African Republic, the presidential palace announced on Tuesday evening. The body of Camille Lepage, 26, from Angers, was discovered by French troops patrolling in the Bouar region in the west of the country in a vehicle driven by militia from the anti-balaka (anti-machete) group. A week ago, in her last tweet on 6 May, Lepage had written that she was: "Travelling with the anti-balaka to Amada Gaza, about 120km from Berberati. "We left at 3.30am to avoid the Misca [International Support Mission to the Central African Republic] checkpoints and it took us eight hours by motorbike as there is no proper roads to reach the village. In the region of Amada Gaza, 150 people were killed by the Seleka [an alliance of rebel militia factions] between March and now. "Another attack took place on Sunday killing 6 people, the anti-balaka Colonel Rock decides to send his elements there to patrol around and take people who fled the bush back to their homes safely." On Tuesday, the Elysée said the French president, François Hollande, had ordered "the immediate despatch of a French team and police from the African force deployed in the CAR to the scene. "All necessary means will be deployed to shine light on the circumstances of this assassination and find the killers of our compatriot," it said in a statement. The use of the word assassinat in French appears to suggest that Paris has information that the young woman was targeted deliberately and in cold blood. Lepage had moved to Juba in South Sudan in July 2012, after completing a journalism degree at Solent University in Southampton, but had spent the last few months working in the CAR. Her work has been published in the Guardian, Le Monde, the Sunday Times, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and used by the BBC. In an interview with the photographic blog PetaPixel last October, Lepage spoke about her ongoing projects, You Will Forget Me and Vanishing Youth, that capture the violence of South Sudan. "Since I was very little, I've always wanted to go and live in a place where no one else wants to go, and cover in-depth conflict related stories … I can't accept that people's tragedies are silenced simply because no one can make money out of them." Of her life in South Sudan, she said: "The fact that I live in South Sudan for a while really helps. I live in a local house in a local neighbourhood, with no electricity and little comfort, so I don't see myself as being very different from them [local people]." She ends the interview: "I'm currently in the Central African Republic, working on a new photography project there for a few months before heading back to South Sudan and Sudan." The anti-balaka are an umbrella group of various militia – mostly uneducated Christian youths – engaged in armed struggle against Seleka rebels, made up of mostly Muslim fighters, many of them mercenaries from neighbouring countries. |
This article by Marcel Stoetzler* was originally published on openDemocracy. Seventy years ago, Querido Verlag published a densely written book that has become a key title of modern social philosophy. Underneath its pessimistic granite surface a strangely sanguine message awaits us. How do you make an argument against social domination when the very terms, concepts and languages at your disposal are shaped by, and in turn serve that same social domination? Probably in the way you would light a fire in a wooden stove. How would you write a book about the impossibility of writing just that book? Like a poem about the pointlessness of poems. What if your enemies’ enemies are your own worst enemies? Can you defend liberal society from its fascist enemies when you know it is the wrong state of things? You must, but dialectics may well ‘make cowards of us all’ and spoil our ‘native hue of resolution’. Dialectic of Enlightenment[1] is a very strange book, and although it was published, in 1947, by the leading publishing house for exiled, German-language anti-fascist literature, the Querido Verlag in Amsterdam, alongside many of the biggest literary names of the time, no-one will have expected that it gradually became one of the classics of modern social philosophy. It is a book that commits all the sins editors tend to warn against: its chapters are about wildly differing subject matters; the writing is repetitive, circular and fragmented; no argument ever seems exhausted or final and there are no explicitly stated conclusions, and certainly no trace of a policy impact trajectory. Arguments start somewhere, suddenly come to a halt and then move on to something else. If this sounds like the script for a Soviet film from the revolutionary period, then that is not totally coincidental: it is an avant-garde montage film, transcribed into philosophy.It is an avant-garde montage film, transcribed into philosophy. Unsurprisingly, given that it was written during WW2 in American exile and published at the beginning of the Cold War, it does not carry its Marxism on its sleeves, but it gives clear enough hints: in the preface, Horkheimer and Adorno state that the aim of the book is ‘to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’. This addresses the dialectic referenced in the title of the book. The important bit here is the ‘instead of’: the reality of barbarism was undeniable and clearly visible, but the originality of the formulation lies in its implication that humanity could have been expected to enter ‘a truly human state’ sometime earlier in the twentieth century, leaving behind its not so human state. The promise of progress towards humanity, held by socialists (and some liberals), blew up in their faces. It would have been easy and straightforward then to write a book arguing against the holding of such hope, but this would not have been a dialectical book; Dialectic of Enlightenment undertakes to rescue this hope by looking at why progress tipped over into its opposite. Whose barbarism? A number of propositions have been made, at the time and later, as to who or what is to be blamed for the barbarism. Capitalism was an obvious answer, but then, capitalism does not typically and all the time produce Holocausts (and capitalists could be found among the victims). Others pointed at ‘the Germans’ and their peculiar intellectual and social history; this, too, is neither an entirely wrong nor a quite satisfying answer. Again others pointed at ‘the bureaucracy’ and modern statecraft. These surely played a role but there are plenty of state bureaucracies that do not engage in genocides and world wars, most of the time. Horkheimer and Adorno made a much stranger, more abstract and strangely radical proposition: the barbarism that destroyed civilization was a product of civilization as such. It is civilization’s self-destruction. The attempt to formulate a theory of barbarism as the product of civilization creates a very thorny problem, though: theorizing, the attempt to bring about enlightenment, is very much the stuff of civilization, as it involves thinking, language, perceptions, concepts, images, ideas, judgements, ‘spirit’ (which in the philosophical tradition Horkheimer and Adorno came from means as much as ‘culture’). Dialectic of Enlightenment blames the destruction of enlightenment on enlightenment, i.e. on itself. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas some decades later cleverly pointed out that this is a bit of a contradiction. That was exactly the point, though: the hint is in the title, in the word ‘Dialectic’. The book’s painful starting point is described in the preface: Horkheimer and Adorno looked for a position from which to confront fascism and found that ‘in reflecting on its own guilt’, thought finds that it lacks a language. In the name of what exactly is it possible to challenge fascism effectively? In the languages of sociology, psychology, history, philosophy? The discourses of truth, freedom, human rights?Barbarism… is civilization’s self-destruction. Here is the rub: in the period in which fascism took power these sounded hollow as they had been stripped of their authority. If this sounds familiar, it is because, almost a century later, we are in a not so different situation. Horkheimer and Adorno state – still in the preface – that fascist demagogues and liberal intellectuals feed off the same (positivist) zeitgeist, marked by the ‘self-destruction of the enlightenment’. Science and scholarship are not potent weapons against fascism anymore, and this even affects tendencies that are opposed to ‘official’, positivistic science. The basic point here is that scientific, materialist, technological rationality is a force for good only when it is linked to the idealistic notion of general human emancipation, the goal of full rich lives for all, without suffering, exploitation and oppression. (Using a word they had good reasons to avoid, this is what Marx would have called ‘communism’). Only this link gives empirical and rationalist science its truth and significance: enlightenment needs to be ‘transcendental’, i.e. something that points beyond the actually existing reality, not unlike metaphysics in traditional philosophy. It needs to be critical, that is, in opposition to reality as it is. The principal thesis of the book is that enlightenment purged itself of this connection to society-transcending, non-empirical, critical truth, and as early as on the second page of the preface Horkheimer and Adorno are happy to name the thinker who exemplifies for them this fatal development: Auguste Comte, the founder of positivist philosophy. They assert that in the hostile and brutal conditions of the eighteenth century – the period often described as that of ‘the Enlightenment’ – philosophy had dared to challenge the ‘infamy’ (as Voltaire called it) of the church and the society it helped maintain, while in the aftermath of the French Revolution philosophy switched sides and put itself at the service of the state. This was of course, by now, the modernising state, but still the same state. They write that the Comtean school of positivism – ‘apologists’ of the modern, capitalist society that emerged in the nineteenth century – ‘usurped’ the succession to the genuine Enlighteners, and reconciled philosophy with the forces it previously had opposed, such as the Catholic church. Horkheimer and Adorno mention in this context the ultra-nationalist organisation Action Française, whose chief ideologist Charles Maurras had been an ardent admirer of Comte. This hint helps understand what kind of historical developments they had on their minds: while Comte himself surely saw himself in good faith as a protagonist of social reform meant to overcome-but-preserve the achievements of the Revolution, and his translation of enlightenment empiricism into the system of ‘positivist philosophy’ as a contribution to the process of modernization, his followers in many ways contributed to the development of the modern authoritarian state and, as in the case of Maurras, proto-fascism. The elements of these subsequent developments can be found in Comte’s own writings, which makes his ambiguities a suitable illustration of the dialectic of enlightenment. (The Action Française is mentioned only in a version of the text published in 1944 that was mostly circulated informally; it was not included in the definitive publication of 1947. The authors might have assumed few people would understand the connection to Comte without further explanation.) Reason, data, and the rejection of metaphysics As elsewhere in Horkheimer and Adorno’s writings, there is a lot of polemic against ‘positivism’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Mostly the target of their critique is the ‘logical positivism’ of their own time, but they seem to see the latter as a logical extension or modification of the older Comtean positivism that was a much more ambitious and comprehensive proposition. There is no detailed engagement with Comte but it is clear that the principal point of attack is Comte’s rejection of metaphysics: when the eighteenth-century enlightenment was a combination, or perhaps more often an assemblage, of empiricism and rationalism, Comte aimed to boil it down to strictly positivist empiricism that observes the ‘positively’ givens (in Latin: data) and derives ‘laws’ from them that can be used to predict and adapt to, perchance slightly tweak, whatever reality has in store for us. And that is that. The metaphysical ideas that had been useful in bringing down feudalism and the old regime – the likes of freedom, individualism, emancipation – need to be abandoned as they are the playthings of troublemakers, irritants that could endanger the consolidation of the post-revolutionary new order. Positivism in Comte’s sense is essentially the scientific basis of governance by experts, while twentieth-century ‘logical positivism’ is its epistemological complement. When Horkheimer and Adorno attack the latter, they see it as continuous with the former.They wanted to be the troublemakers… The attack on metaphysics was a central theme of German philosophy in the 1920s, and helped weaken the defences against fascism across the political spectrum. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the cult of facts and probabilities has flushed out conceptual thinking, and as humans generally have a need to explain to themselves conceptually why they should be bothered to do anything, or resist doing something that society expects them to do, the denunciation and elimination of concepts as ‘metaphysical’ promotes a passive and fatalistic going-with-the-flow. The ‘blocking of the theoretical imagination has paved the way for political delusion’, which in the context meant fascism. Again, many contemporaries were happy back then to argue for the reconstruction of some kind of metaphysical system – theological, neo-Platonic, neo-Aristotelian or whatever else. They had a relatively easy task of this in the context of WWII as such philosophical or theological systems are something one can hold on to: they can help one to weather the brute modernizing nihilism of the fascist barbarians, and after their defeat provide a handy identity narrative. The easy option of a return to traditional metaphysics was not open, though, to the Frankfurt School theorists who saw themselves within the tradition of the radical strand of the Enlightenment. Their main thrust was to attack its domesticated version, the ‘positivism’ that puts itself and its expertise at the service of domination. Far from writing against the Enlightenment, they wanted to restore it to its complex form that contained traces of the transcendental that Comte – quite correctly – saw as trouble. They wanted to be the troublemakers whom Comte thought he had exorcised from the Enlightenment. Nursing unacted desires As Horkheimer and Adorno state, the ‘self-destruction of enlightenment’ that frustrated the writing of the book they initially had in mind – probably a fine scholarly tome on the role of dialectical logic in a variety of academic disciplines – came to provide the principal subject matter of the book they did write. The second line of the title, ‘Philosophical Fragments’, indicated that they were then still thinking of it as a halfway house on the way towards writing the real thing. This never happened, so it is what it is: an assertion that ‘thinking that aims at enlightenment’ is inseparably linked to freedom in society, but the admission that enlightenment also ‘already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today’. This is the project of an enlightenment mindful of the antagonisms that drive it, as opposed to a smug and arrogant one that feels good about itself lecturing the unenlightened. If this sounds a bit hippy-ish, then this is because there is in fact a sort of romantic aspect to all this. It is most evident on the very last pages of the book, in the last of the twenty-four short pieces that make up the sixth chapter (‘Notes and Sketches’), titled ‘On the genesis of stupidity’. This, the final statement, begins with a very striking image: ‘The emblem of intelligence is the antenna of the snail’.‘The emblem of intelligence is the antenna of the snail’. Horkheimer and Adorno do not provide any reference in support of this claim, but one could think for example of a famous letter by Keats that mentions the ‘trembling and delicate snail-horn perception of beauty’. The antenna, or horn, of the snail represents the good kind of enlightenment we should aspire to: trembling and delicate, as in Keats. (See also here.) Horkheimer and Adorno use the image, though, to make an anthropological argument about the emergence of intelligence: ‘Meeting an obstacle, the antenna is immediately withdrawn into the protection of the body, it becomes one with the whole until it ventures forth again only timidly as an independent organ. If the danger is still present, it disappears once more, and the intervals between the attempts grow longer’. They argue here that the development of human mental life is precariously physical and depends on the freedom to exercise the organs of perception. Evolution only takes place when ‘antennae were once stretched out in new directions and not repulsed’. Stupidity, by contrast, ‘is a scar’: ‘Every partial stupidity in a human being marks a spot where the awakening play of muscles has been inhibited instead of fostered’. Switching to a psychoanalytical argument, Horkheimer and Adorno write that the inhibition leads to automatized repetitions of the aborted attempt, such as in neurotic repetitions of a ‘defence reaction which has already proved futile’, and ultimately produces a numb spot where the scar is, a deformation. All the deformations we accumulate during individual and species evolution translate into well-adapted, functioning ‘characters’, stupidity, impotence or spiteful fanaticism, or any combination thereof. They are so many monuments to arrested hope. This is how the book ends: it is implied that the answer to stupidity, including those of fascism and antisemitism, but also their contemporary second cousins such as ‘post-truth’, resentment-driven politics from Hindutva to Brexit, those myriads of irrational particularisms that gang up on particulars and individuals, ultimately can be defeated only by more freedom of movement for our antennas and other muscles, and the production of fewer scars on our various tissues. Marxism and anthropology One of the stupidest things is antisemitism. The fifth chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘Elements of antisemitism. Limits of Enlightenment’, is easily the most complex, ambitious and challenging text ever written on this particular subject. The same peculiarity that characterises the entire book is what makes reading ‘Elements’ rather hard work: the intermeshing of the critique of the present – capitalist modernity – with the much grander theme of the critique of human civilization. Most of what Horkheimer and Adorno have to say on antisemitism in the perspective of the capitalist present is contained in the first few pages of the chapter and must have felt like a slap in the face by unsuspecting liberal readers: the argument emphasizes the continuity between liberal and fascist governance and the responsibility of the bourgeoisie. First of all, liberals and the representatives of the ‘democratic-popular movements’ had always been lukewarm at best about the equality of Jews who seemed less than totally assimilated. Fascism is then described as the modern bourgeoisie’s move towards ‘regression to naked domination’, whereby the liberal notion of the ‘harmony of society’ (the harmonious give-and-take of a market-based society) has morphed into a Volksgemeinschaft, i.e. the nation that declares itself to be ‘race’. Fascism openly reveals and celebrates what had been the essence of society anyway: a violence that distorts human beings. Those who had embraced the more idealistic aspects of liberalism only made themselves more helpless when they had to face up to its unvarnished reality: nice ideals to have, but potentially self-defeating in practice. This analysis was seriously out of step with the emergent intellectual life of a post-fascist Germany that hoped simply to return to its previous liberal and democratic better self, as if the latter’s total collapse had just been an unfortunate accident. The critique of liberalism and the bourgeoisie is only a minor point here, though: for Marxists it is hardly shocking news that liberalism can morph into fascism, usually fails to put up much of a defence against it, and that the ruling class will encourage the subalterns to embrace any kind of vicious and violent ideology if they deem it useful to maintain their grip on power.The necessary but not sufficient preconditions for the emergence of the exterminatory antisemitism of the Nazis. These were part of the necessary but not sufficient preconditions for the emergence of the exterminatory antisemitism of the Nazis; they are not enough to explain a pogrom, and certainly not the Holocaust. This is the point at which Horkheimer and Adorno shift from ‘modern bourgeois society’ to ‘human civilization’ as the framework of explanation: the antisemitic pogrom is described as ‘a luxury’ (given that the material gain for the immediate perpetrators usually was slim) and ‘a ritual of civilization’. With ‘ritual’ and ‘civilization’ we enter the territory of anthropology. The point here is that the dynamic of contemporary capitalist society mobilizes forces that can be described and understood only with the help of categories of more historical depth than those of capitalist society itself. This does not, though, mean a turning away from the language of Marxism: ‘civilization’ and ‘society’ are not alternative objects of study – the point is that either dimension can be understood only through the other. Human civilization exists in the present only in the form of capitalist society; capitalist society is nothing other than human civilization in its current form. (The relationship between these two concepts is similar to that between capitalism and patriarchy in some forms of feminist theory: they are not different ‘things’ but the former is the contemporary form of appearance of the latter, and the latter is undergirding the former. Here, too, the strategic hope of progressives is that capitalist modernity impacts and transforms its substratum, patriarchal civilization, so thoroughly that it allows for the emergence of the post-capitalist non-patriarchy we would like to see.) Social inequality The best known part of the argument, though, relates to modern society and is derived straight from Marx’s critique of political economy: capitalist society maintains the ‘socially necessary illusion’ that the wage-relationship is (in principle, or potentially) ‘fair’, i.e. an exchange of equivalent values: this muchlabour-power for this much money. Nevertheless, social inequality is an only too obvious reality. To the untrained eye inequality seems to be brought about in the sphere of circulation (as opposed to the sphere of production), say, at the supermarket till where it becomes manifest how much produce one’s wages will buy. Marx argues that the apparent fairness of the wage relationship itself presupposes exploitation that is expressed as the difference between the ‘exchange value’ of labour power (represented by the wage) and its ‘use-value’ (represented by the product that it produced): the product produced by X amount of labour power must be higher than the wage paid for it because this is where the profit for the capitalist comes from. Admittedly this explanation – one of the centrepieces of Marxist theory – flies in the face of ‘common sense’ everyday consciousness where the notion of ‘a fair wage’ reigns supreme – not least because we tend to invoke the ideology of ‘fairness’ when we engage in a wage struggle. (When we ask for more than what is deemed ‘fair’ we are called ‘greedy’ and forfeit the sympathy of ‘the public’.)(When we ask for more than what is deemed ‘fair’ we are called ‘greedy’ and forfeit the sympathy of ‘the public’.) Capitalist common sense, including the ideology of ‘fairness’, thus produces the need for another explanation for inequality and exploitation; and helpfully the capitalist exploiters, ‘masquerading as producers’, shout ‘thief!’ and point at ‘the merchants’ and other representatives of the sphere of circulation. This line of argument, up to this point, has of course nothing in itself to do with antisemitism: in developed capitalism, the exploitative character of the mode of production tends to be deflected onto (real or imagined) agents of circulation, and many forms of (supposed) ‘anti-capitalism’ reflect this. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, ‘the merchant is the bailiff of the whole system and takes the hatred for the other [exploiters] upon himself’. Which category of people is cast as this particular type of scapegoat is entirely dependent on historical context; in Christian Europe, this mechanism of capitalist-anticapitalist ideology found in ‘the Jews’ an ideal object and thus revived and reinvented, as modern antisemitism, pre-existing traditions of Jew-hatred. (Modern antisemitism was exported elsewhere, then, in the hand luggage of imperialism and on arrival sometimes became an element of the ‘anti-imperialism of fools’, but that is another story.) Antisemitism and self-hatred This, the Marxist theory of antisemitism, is contained in very condensed form on some of the first pages of ‘Elements of antisemitism’. Taken on its own, this theory only explains antisemitism as a set of ideas, a particular misguided way of thinking about capitalism. Insofar as these ideas are quite fixed, they form an attitude, a mental pattern or a ‘habitus’. Ideas and attitudes alone do not make anyone act, though, and the monstrous antisemitic acts of the Holocaust need several more layers of explanation. Nazi antisemitism mobilized a deep-seated force that turned this antisemitism into an irrational obsession, even though often executed with a rational deliberation that far surpassed the misguided social protest as which it may have started in most individuals: the delusion of a moral duty to save the world by identifying, chasing and killing Jews wherever they are, at whatever price. One of the ideas with which Horkheimer and Adorno respond to this theoretical need is that of the pogrom as a ‘ritual of civilization’. It is as if antisemitism as described above gave form and direction to the murderous obsession – it pointed to who the victims should be and why they deserved what they got – but it did not in fact cause it. Ideas can trigger, guide and justify, but do not cause actions. Correspondingly, even the smartest rational explanations do not usually help much with antisemites ‘because rationality as entangled with domination is itself at the root of the malady’. If antisemitism and other maladies are in fact phobias against rationality, rationality will not wash. Only reflection on the entanglement itself would help: is there perhaps good reason to be suspicious of reason? This is how ‘Elements of antisemitism’ feeds back into the general theme of Dialectic of Enlightenment. In the philosophical tradition that Horkheimer and Adorno come from and that includes Hegel and Marx, ‘reason’ is not a value-neutral concept. What is reasonable is not simply ‘whatever works’ (efficiently, instrumentally) but whatever serves human emancipation and autonomy. Rationality understood in this way has an element of transcendence – some kind of going-beyond the bad reality as it exists – that is not entirely different from that found in religion. Indeed they write that before it was reduced to being a cultural artefact – an aspect of a society’s way of life, something that is considered useful for holding society together – religion contained both truth and deception. The truth of religion was the longing for redemption, and this truth lived on in philosophical idealism. Positivism, in turn, exorcized the longing from philosophy and reduced truth one-dimensionally to the depiction of the world as it actually is. (Clever positivists noticed of course that this is never quite possible and concluded that there is no such thing as truth, then, which is consistent with their own definition of it.) Spirit, enlightenment, civilization became dispirited. Enlightenment minus the spirit of longing – utopia, the ability to imagine something better – is a self-hating enlightenment.Spirit, enlightenment, civilization became dispirited. Whereas civilization and enlightenment are defined as the continuous effort of humanity to escape the dull circularity of reproduction and self-preservation, in reality its efforts increasingly went into perfecting humanity’s means of reproduction and self-preservation (in other words: labour; the economy). In order to free ourselves from having to work a lot, humanity had to work a lot in order to develop the means of production (knowledge, experience, science, technology, social organisation) which are indeed an important part of what we commonly call ‘civilization’. Horkheimer and Adorno’s basic point is quite simple: far from rejecting civilization, we have to rebalance it as it has become an end in itself. We have developed civilization, productivity, technology, society in order to spend more time lazing about on the beach, and after all we went through, humanity is more than entitled now to cash in the chips. The reality of the dialectic of enlightenment is, though, that the closer we actually come to leading the life of Riley the further it seems out of our reach, and chances are that by the time we sort this out beaches may be no more. Apocalypse Now In ‘Elements of antisemitism’, Horkheimer and Adorno focus on one particular aspect of this dialectic: the idea that modern civilization develops a destructive fury against the ‘anachronistic’ remnants of its own initial stages, including mimesis and magic. Mimesis is the effort of a living creature to mimic its natural environment as a survival strategy and is discussed by anthropologists as one of the oldest aspects of human civilization: humans try to pacify a dangerous animal by ‘being’ that animal in a ritual dance, for example. Horkheimer and Adorno discuss this as the beginning of the process of enlightenment: we mimic nature to escape its domination. Similarly, sacrificing an animal in order to make the gods grant rainfall or success in warfare is a form of barter, i.e. an early form of rationality, especially as the clever humans hope the deal will have them receive something much more valuable than what they sacrifice. It is not difficult to recognize some of our own supposedly ‘modern’ behaviour in those supposedly ‘primitive’ practices. One of the key arguments in ‘Elements of antisemitism’ is that every time civilization progresses from one stage to the next, it comes to hate everything that reminds it of the previous stage: in a very general sense, the ‘civilized’ hate (and exterminate) the ‘savages’ because they remind us that we are just one step ahead of them (in our own judgment, that is), and it would not take very much to regress into the more ‘primitive’ state (witness Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now). Perhaps we even have a secret desire to go back to being ‘savages’: after all, the life of a hunter-gatherer might well be preferable to your average office job. Because the civilized paid a high price to get this far, they fortify themselves against the threat of regression. Many aspects of racism can be related to this. Antisemites like to shudder in fear of supposed Jewish superiority and secret world domination, but at the same time antisemitism shares with other forms of racism the projection of aspects of ‘savagery’ onto ‘the Jews’. The most obvious case is their accusation of ritual murder, but there are other things that antisemites assert they find unpleasant or disgusting about ‘the Jews’, and many of these are, in a sense, ‘primitive’: energetic gesticulating, which is often seen as somehow ‘typically Jewish’, is a form of mimetic behaviour as the physical movement paints a picture of an emotional state. The big noses ‘the Jews’ supposedly have point to a more primitive stage of development where the sense of smell was still more important than the other senses (whereas in modernity smell, as well as being smelly, is tabooed; those backward garlic-eaters still have to learn this). Horkheimer and Adorno point to a bitter irony here: not only was the religion of Judaism in fact very much driven by the overcoming of magic and mimesis (such as in the ban on images), it is the antisemites who indulge in bringing back echoes of magic and mimesis in their love of rituals, sacrifices, formulas and uniforms. The prosecution and destruction of those accused of mimetic, primitive behaviour provides the supposedly civilized with a splendid opportunity to indulge in lots of mimetic and primitive behaviour. Beyond Gewalt The principal argument, though, is that the latest stage of the process of civilization is marked by the destruction of the capability of thinking itself: highly advanced stupidity. In prehistory, people’s encounters with animals not noted for spending much time pondering the pros and cons of eating humans required equally unhesitating decisions: shoot the poisoned arrow or run fast. No time for dialectics here. Civilization decimated inconvenient animals and other immediate threats and was thus free to create institutions of mediation that slowed things down and made space for the new activities of judging and reasoning. Late-industrial society, though, has brought about ‘a regression to judgment without judging’: legal process is made short work of in kangaroo courts, cognition is emptied of active reflection and likes to jump to conclusions, and thinking as a specialized profession becomes a luxury that ‘must not be tempted … to draw any awkward conclusions’. Nevertheless, the very last sentence of ‘Elements of antisemitism’ is guardedly optimistic: ‘Enlightenment itself, having come into its own and thereby turning into a force, could break through the limits of Enlightenment.’ Late-industrial society has brought about ‘a regression to judgment without judging’. The grounds for this surprisingly hopeful turn are laid out in the concluding sections of the first chapter, ‘The concept of enlightenment’. Here, Horkheimer and Adorno assert in the purest spirit of the Enlightenment that thinking is ‘the servant whom the master cannot control at will’. Even though enlightenment serves domination, it is bound to turn against domination sooner or later. The bringer of hope is here, rather unexpectedly, the very thing that tends to figure as the devil incarnate in most forms of ‘critique of civilization’ on the left as on the right: reification. Domination has ‘reified’ itself (which means, made itself into a thing) by taking on the forms of law and organisation, and in the process limited itself. These instruments ‘mediate’ domination, that is, they moderate the immediacy of exploitation: ‘The moment of rationality in domination also asserts itself as something different from [domination].’ The object-like quality of the means of domination – language, weapons, machines, thought – makes these means universally available for everyone, including those resisting or fighting domination. Also this is, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument, part of the dialectic of enlightenment: although in the capitalist present, thought may become mechanical, and today’s machines mutilate their operators, ‘in the form of machines … alienated reason moves toward a society which reconciles thought … with the liberated living beings’. Dialectic of Enlightenment appears here, on closer reading, to have anticipated some of the revolutionary optimism that decades later accompanied the discussions of the internet as somehow intrinsically communistic – think of shareware and all that – and current discussions that the latest ongoing round of technological innovation will abolish most capitalist labour and force humanity either to advance to a truly human society or regress to some kind of neo-feudal or neo-caste system. In the last paragraph of ‘The concept of Enlightenment’ Horkheimer and Adorno are quite explicit about the source of their optimism: they state that ‘the bourgeois economy’ has multiplied Gewalt (a German word that means violence, power, force and/or domination) ‘through the mediation of the market’, but in the same process has also ‘multiplied its things and forces to such an extent that their administration no longer requires kings, nor even the bourgeois themselves: it only needs all. They learn from the power of things finally to forgo domination.’ This sentence, written in the midst of WWII and the Holocaust, is nothing less than astonishing, and has been largely overlooked in the reception of Dialectic of Enlightenment: in spite of their seemingly overwhelming darkness, we can learn from the reified forms of enlightenment – the stuff of civilization: knowledge, science, technology, social-organisational forms – that we can abolish the domination to which the enlightenment has been wedded for several tens of thousands of years. This optimism does not come with any guarantees, obviously: the learning remains for us to do, and the obstacles are enormous. [1] Horkheimer, Max; Theodor W. Adorno, 2002, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford: Stanford University Press. *Marcel Stoetzler is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Bangor University, Wales. His new book Beginning Classical Social Theory is forthcoming in August 2017 with Manchester University Press. His previous publications include Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology and The State, the Nation and the Jews, both Nebraska University Press. He is an advisory board member of the forthcoming Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the editorial board of Patterns of Prejudice, a visiting fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck College, and a fellow at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester. |
Nashua, New Hampshire — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz brushed off criticism from Donald Trump Wednesday and refocused his aim on a different target: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Cruz attacked Rubio at an event hosted by radio host Jeff Kuhner in southern New Hampshire. "Is Marco Rubio a genuine conservative?" Kuhner asked after listing Rubio's support for "open borders," "NSA spying," and the Obama administration's Trans Pacific Partnership during an onstage interview. "On each of the issues you just listed, Marco's views are virtually indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton," Cruz replied. "Let me say this — if we nominate a candidate who's pro-amnesty, we'll lose. It's not complicated. It's real simple." Cruz pointed to the 2012 election as evidence for his theory and noted the Republican Party got clobbered after nominating Mitt Romney, whose record on healthcare caused headaches for conservatives seeking contrast with Obamacare. "Both Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton want to grant amnesty and make citizens of 12 million people who are here illegally," Cruz said. "And by the way, you know who also has that view? Donald Trump."Cruz said Trump's rhetoric does not match the proposals he put forward, and the senator said, "the only person who has always opposed amnesty, and who's always opposed citizenship is me." The Texas senator also touted his own victory over Trump and sought to raise questions about Trump's emotional maturity."Have you noticed Donald doesn't take losing well?" Cruz asked. "Donald told us every day for a year he was gonna win Iowa. Win it big. Win it huge. And then he said, well the people of Iowa are stupid and then he skipped the Iowa debate. It kind of makes you think, what's next? Is he going to say the people of New Hampshire are stupid? Is he going to skip the New Hampshire debate?" The New Hampshire Republican presidential debate will take place on Saturday at St. Anselm College in Goffstown. Ted Cruz today slammed his rival Marco Rubio, saying that nominating the Florida senator would lead to a victory f... in Washington Examiner's Hangs on LockerDome |
Pavegen tiles in action (Image credit: Pavegen) What if you could help power a whole city by going for a walk, or generate real electricity by doing the electric slide? Now, thanks to one London-based start-up, you can. The company is called Pavegen Systems, and it's generating sparks across Europe thanks to a green energy technology which harnesses the power of the pedestrian. The technology consists of a rubber tile, 17.7-by-23.6-inches (45 x 60 centimeters) in size. When stepped on, the tile bends slightly, around 5 millimeters (only one fifth of an inch), harvesting the kinetic energy generated by the footstep and converting it into usable electricity at a rate of about 7 watts per footstep. At that rate, it takes only five tiles to power a small storefront, or light up the streetlamps on a relatively busy street, according to the Laurence Kemball-Cook, the company's CEO. Kemball-Cook first conceived of the tile when he was working towards as degree in industrial design and technology at Loughborough University. As part of his studies, he worked at a London power company, where he was tasked with developing solar and wind power solutions for urban areas. When neither proved viable, he started exploring alternative options. "I thought, what about a power source that is commercial and reliable, where and when you need it?" Kemball told ABC News, "what about footsteps?" Well, what about footsteps? According to Kemball-Cook the tiles are "200 times more efficient than any other form of other energy harvesting technology." In addition, they're non-invasive, if desired, they can be made to blend in completely with the surrounding street. "It provides a way that people can save energy without realizing it," Kemball-Cook said, "all they have to do is walk down the road." Because it comes from people as opposed to fossil fuels, the energy is eco-friendly, leaving behind little to no negative effect on the planet. Even the tiles themselves are recycled, coming primarily from old truck tires which have been refitted for the purpose. "We're taking tires off the road and putting them back on the road," Kemball-Cook told ABC News. Pavegen already has numerous temporary and permanent projects underway in Europe. The company is currently installing tiles in one of the largest malls in Europe, the Westfield Stratford City Mall. Already a hot spot for heavy foot traffic, the mall is expected to receive an influx of visitors this year given its close proximity to the Olympic Stadium. They're also set to power the lighting for major London transportation hub. But Pavegen's plans go far beyond city streets, they have also set up temporary tiles at music festivals, such as England's Bestival in 2011, which dancers can use to charge cell phones. On May 19, 2012 the Black Eye Pea's Apl.de.ap and Will-i-am performed on a Pavegen energy generating stage, during a fund raising event for Apl's 'We Can Be Anything' campaign, reducing the need for fossil fuel-powered generators, which are traditionally used to power large outdoor events. Although Pavegen does most of its business in Europe, the company is in talks with buyers in Silicon Valley who are looking to provide clean energy for their offices using Pavegen tiles. As the business continues expands, the company is aiming to get its prices, which are currently in flux, down to $100 per tile, a goal which they expect to reach in the next 18 months. In the meantime, the company will keep its eyes on the prize, powering the world, one step at a time. |
Can farming save Detroit? DETROIT (Fortune) -- John Hantz is a wealthy money manager who lives in an older enclave of Detroit where all the houses are grand and not all of them are falling apart. Once a star stockbroker at American Express, he left 13 years ago to found his own firm. Today Hantz Financial Services has 20 offices in Michigan, Ohio, and Georgia, more than 500 employees, and $1.3 billion in assets under management. Twice divorced, Hantz, 48, lives alone in clubby, paneled splendor, surrounded by early-American landscapes on the walls, an autograph collection that veers from Detroit icons such as Ty Cobb and Henry Ford to Baron von Richthofen and Mussolini, and a set of Ayn Rand first editions. With a net worth of more than $100 million, he's one of the richest men left in Detroit -- one of the very few in his demographic who stayed put when others were fleeing to Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills. Not long ago, while commuting, he stumbled on a big idea that might help save his dying city. Every weekday Hantz pulls his Volvo SUV out of the gated driveway of his compound and drives half an hour to his office in Southfield, a northern suburb on the far side of Eight Mile Road. His route takes him through a desolate, postindustrial cityscape -- the kind of scene that is shockingly common in Detroit. Along the way he passes vacant buildings, abandoned homes, and a whole lot of empty land. In some stretches he sees more pheasants than people. "Every year I tell myself it's going to get better," says Hantz, bright-eyed, with smooth cheeks and a little boy's carefully combed haircut, "and every year it doesn't." Then one day about a year and a half ago, Hantz had a revelation. "We need scarcity," he thought to himself as he drove past block after unoccupied block. "We can't create opportunities, but we can create scarcity." And that, he says one afternoon in his living room between puffs on an expensive cigar, "is how I got onto this idea of the farm." Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit. Hantz thinks farming could do his city a lot of good: restore big chunks of tax-delinquent, resource-draining urban blight to pastoral productivity; provide decent jobs with benefits; supply local markets and restaurants with fresh produce; attract tourists from all over the world; and -- most important of all -- stimulate development around the edges as the local land market tilts from stultifying abundance to something more like scarcity and investors move in. Hantz is willing to commit $30 million to the project. He'll start with a pilot program this spring involving up to 50 acres on Detroit's east side. "Out of the gates," he says, "it'll be the largest urban farm in the world." This is possibly not as crazy as it sounds. Granted, the notion of devoting valuable city land to agriculture would be unfathomable in New York, London, or Tokyo. But Detroit is a special case. The city that was once the fourth largest in the country and served as a symbol of America's industrial might has lately assumed a new role: North American poster child for the global phenomenon of shrinking postindustrial cities. Nearly 2 million people used to live in Detroit. Fewer than 900,000 remain. Even if, unlikely as it seems, the auto industry were to rebound dramatically and the U.S. economy were to come roaring back tomorrow, no one -- not even the proudest civic boosters -- imagines that the worst is over. "Detroit will probably be a city of 700,000 people when it's all said and done," says Doug Rothwell, CEO of Business Leaders for Michigan. "The big challenge is, What do you do with a population of 700,000 in a geography that can accommodate three times that much?" Whatever the answer is, whenever it comes, it won't be predicated on a return to past glory. "We have to be realistic," says George Jackson, CEO of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. (DEGC). "This is not about trying to re-create something. We're not a world-class city." If not world class, then what? A regional financial center? That's already Chicago, and to a lesser extent Minneapolis. A biotech hub? Boston and San Diego are way out in front. Some think Detroit has a future in TV and movies, but Hollywood is skeptical. ("Best incentives in the country," one producer says. "Worst crew.") How about high tech and green manufacturing? Possibly, given the engineering and manufacturing talent that remains. But still there's the problem of what to do with the city's enormous amount of abandoned land, conservatively estimated at 40 square miles in a sprawling metropolis whose 139-square-mile footprint is easily bigger than San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan combined. If you let it revert to nature, you abandon all hope of productive use. If you turn it over to parks and recreation, you add costs to an overburdened city government that can't afford to teach its children, police its streets, or maintain the infrastructure it already has. Faced with those facts, a growing number of policymakers and urban planners have begun to endorse farming as a solution. Former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros, now chairman of CityView, a private equity firm that invests in urban development, is familiar with Detroit's land problem. He says he's in favor of "other uses that engage human beings in their maintenance, such as urban agriculture." After studying the city's options at the request of civic leaders, the American Institute of Architects came to this conclusion in a recent report: "Detroit is particularly well suited to become a pioneer in urban agriculture at a commercial scale." In that sense, Detroit might actually be ahead of the curve. When Alex Krieger, chairman of the department of urban planning and design at Harvard, imagines what the settled world might look like half a century from now, he sees "a checkerboard pattern" with "more densely urbanized areas, and areas preserved for various purposes such as farming. The notion of a walled city, a contained city -- that's an 18th-century idea." And where will the new ideas for the 21st century emerge? From older, decaying cities, Krieger believes, such as New Orleans, St. Louis, Cleveland, Newark, and especially Detroit -- cities that have become, at least in part, "kind of empty containers." This is a lot to hang on Hantz. Most of what he knows about agriculture he's picked up over the past 18 months from the experts he's consulting at Michigan State and the Kellogg Foundation. Then there's the fact that many of his fellow citizens are openly rooting against him. Since word leaked of his scheme last spring, he has been criticized by community activists, who call the plan a land grab. Opponents have also raised questions about the run-ins he's had with regulators at Hantz Financial. But Detroit is nothing if not desperate for new ideas, and Hantz has had no trouble getting his heard. "It all sounds very exciting," says the DEGC's Jackson, whose agency is working on assembling a package of incentives for Hantz, including free city land. "We hope it works." Detroit's civic history is notable for repeated failed attempts to revitalize its core. Over the past three decades leaders have embraced a series of downtown redevelopment plans that promised to save the city. The massive Renaissance Center office and retail complex, built in the 1970s, mostly served to suck tenants out of other downtown buildings. (Today 48 of those buildings stand empty.) Three new casinos (one already bankrupt) and two new sports arenas (one for the NFL's dreadful Lions, the other for MLB's Tigers) have restored, on some nights, a little spark to downtown Detroit but have inspired little in the way of peripheral development. Downtown is still eerily underpopulated, the tax base is still crumbling, and people are still leaving. The jobless rate in the city is 27%. Nothing yet tried in Detroit even begins to address the fundamental issue of emptiness -- empty factories, empty office buildings, empty houses, and above all, empty lots. Rampant arson, culminating in the annual frenzy of Devil's Night, is partly to blame. But there has also been a lot of officially sanctioned demolition in Detroit. As white residents fled to the suburbs over the decades, houses in the decaying neighborhoods they left behind were often bulldozed. Abandonment is an infrastructure problem, when you consider the cost of maintaining far-flung roads and sewer systems; it's a city services problem, when you think about the inefficiencies of collecting trash and fighting crime in sparsely populated neighborhoods; and it's a real estate problem. Houses in Detroit are selling for an average of $15,000. That sounds like a buying opportunity, and in fact Detroit looks pretty good right now to a young artist or entrepreneur who can't afford anyplace else -- but not yet to an investor. The smart money sees no point in buying as long as fresh inventory keeps flooding the market. "In the target sites we have," says Hantz, "we [reevaluate] every two weeks." As Hantz began thinking about ways to absorb some of that inventory, what he imagined, he says, was a glacier: one broad, continuous swath of farmland, growing acre by acre, year by year, until it had overrun enough territory to raise the scarcity alarm and impel other investors to act. Rick Foster, an executive at the Kellogg Foundation whom Hantz sought out for advice, nudged him gently in a different direction. "I think you should make pods," Foster said, meaning not one farm but many. Hantz was taken right away with the concept of creating several pods -- or lakes, as he came to think of them -- each as large as 300 acres, and each surrounded by its own valuable frontage. "What if we had seven lakes in the city?" he wondered. "Would people develop around those lakes?" To increase the odds that they will, Hantz plans on making his farms both visually stunning and technologically cutting edge. Where there are row crops, Hantz says, they'll be neatly organized, planted in "dead-straight lines -- they may even be in a design." But the plan isn't to make Detroit look like Iowa. "Don't think a farm with tractors," says Hantz. "That's old." In fact, Hantz's operation will bear little resemblance to a traditional farm. Mike Score, who recently left Michigan State's agricultural extension program to join Hantz Farms as president, has written a business plan that calls for the deployment of the latest in farm technology, from compost-heated greenhouses to hydroponic (water only, no soil) and aeroponic (air only) growing systems designed to maximize productivity in cramped settings. He's really excited about apples. Hantz Farms will use a trellised system that's compact, highly efficient, and tourist-friendly. It won't be like apple picking in Massachusetts, and that's the point. Score wants visitors to Hantz Farms to see that agriculture is not just something that takes place in the countryside. They will be able to "walk down the row pushing a baby stroller," he promises. Crop selection will depend on the soil conditions of the plots that Hantz acquires. Experts insist that most of the land is not irretrievably toxic. The majority of the lots now vacant in Detroit were residential, not industrial; the biggest problem is how compacted the soil is. For the most part the farms will focus on high-margin edibles: peaches, berries, plums, nectarines, and exotic greens. Score says that the first crops are likely to be lettuce and heirloom tomatoes. Hantz says he's willing to put up the entire $30 million investment himself -- all cash, no debt -- and immediately begin hiring locally for full-time positions. But he wants two things first from Jackson at the DEGC: free tax-delinquent land, which he'll combine with his own purchases, he says (he's aiming for an average cost of $3,000 per acre, in line with rural farmland in southern Michigan), and a zoning adjustment that would create a new, lower tax rate for agriculture. There's no deal yet, but neither request strikes Jackson as unattainable. "If we have reasonable due diligence," he says, "I think we'll give it a shot." Detroit mayor Dave Bing is watching closely. The Pistons Hall of Fame guard turned entrepreneur has had what his spokesman describes as "productive discussions" with Hantz. In a statement to Fortune, Bing says he's "encouraged by the proposals to bring commercial farming back to Detroit. As we look to diversify our economy, commercial farming has some real potential for job growth and rebuilding our tax base." Hantz, for his part, says he's got three or four locations all picked out ("one of them will pop") and is confident he'll have seeds in the ground "in some sort of demonstration capacity" this spring. "Some things you've got to see in order to believe," he says, waving his cigar. "This is a thing you've got to believe in order to see." Many have a hard time making that leap. When news of Hantz's ambitious plan broke in the Detroit papers last spring, few people even knew who he was. A little digging turned up a less-than-spotless record at Hantz Financial Services. The firm has paid fines totaling more than $1 million in the past five years, including $675,000 in 2005, without admitting or denying guilt, "for fraud and misrepresentations relating to undisclosed revenue-sharing arrangements, as well as other violations," according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. (Hantz responds, "If we find something that isn't in compliance, we take immediate steps to correct the problem.") Hantz Farms' first hire, VP Matt Allen, did have an established reputation in Detroit, but it wasn't a good one. Two years ago, while he was press secretary for former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, Allen pleaded guilty to domestic violence and obstructing police after his wife called 911. He was sentenced to a year's probation. Hantz says he has known Allen for many years and values his deep knowledge of the city. "He has earned a second chance, and I'm willing to give it to him," he says. Some of Hantz's biggest skeptics, ironically, are the same people who've been working to transform Detroit into a laboratory for urban farming for years, albeit on a much smaller scale. The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network counts nearly 900 urban gardens within the city limits. That's a twofold increase in two years, and it places Detroit at the forefront of a vibrant national movement to grow more food locally and lessen the nation's dependence on Big Ag. None of those gardens is very big (average size: 0.25 acre), and they don't generate a lot of cash (most don't even try), but otherwise they're great: as antidotes to urban blight; sources of healthy, affordable food in a city that, incredibly, has no chain supermarkets; providers of meaningful, if generally unpaid, work to the chronically unemployed; and beacons around which disintegrating communities can begin to regather themselves. That actually sounds a lot like what Hantz envisions his farms to be in the for-profit arena. But he doesn't have many fans among the community gardeners, who feel that Hantz is using his money and connections to capitalize on their pioneering work. "I'm concerned about the corporate takeover of the urban agriculture movement in Detroit," says Malik Yakini, a charter school principal and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which operates D-Town Farm on Detroit's west side. "At this point the key players with him seem to be all white men in a city that's at least 82% black." Hantz, meanwhile, has no patience for what he calls "fear-based" criticism. He has a hard time concealing his contempt for the nonprofit sector generally. ("Someone must pay taxes," he sniffs.) He also flatly rejects the idea that he's orchestrating some kind of underhanded land grab. In fact, Hantz says that he welcomes others who might want to start their own farms in the city. "Viability and sustainability to me are all that matters," he says. And yet Hantz is fully aware of the potentially historic scope of what he is proposing. After all, he's talking about accumulating hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of acres inside a major American city. And it's clear that he views Hantz Farms as his legacy. Already he's told his 21-year-old daughter, Lauren, his only heir, that if she wants to own the land one day, she has to promise him she'll never sell it. "This is like buying a penthouse in New York in 1940," Hantz says. "No one should be able to afford to do this ever again." That might seem like an overly optimistic view of Detroit's future. But allow Hantz to dream a little. Twenty years from now, when people come to the city and have a drink at the bar at the top of the Renaissance Center, what will they see? Maybe that's not the right vantage point. Maybe they'll actually be on the farm, picking apples, looking up at the RenCen. "That's the beauty of being down and out," says Hantz. "You can actually open your mind to ideas that you would never otherwise embrace." At this point, Detroit doesn't have much left to lose. |
The 2010 Annual Report on Human Rights, published by the U.S. State Department, sharply criticizes Israel's conduct toward refugees and asylum seekers entering its territory. The report, published shortly before Passover, also takes aim at the Population and Immigration Authority for granting visas to asylum seekers that do not include basic social rights, for preventing Eritrean and Sudanese citizens from acquiring refugee status, and for its "hot return" policy, which allows the army to return illegal immigrants to a neighboring country if 24 hours have not elapsed since their entry. Asylum-seekers in southern Tel Aviv, December 14, 2010. Moti Milrod The report, which covers human rights violations around the globe, cites several instances in which immigration inspectors waited outside offices where refugees were submitting requests for asylum and arrested them as soon as their requests were denied. Incidents like these, according to the report, have led to a drop in the number of refugees requesting asylum in Israel. "The government failed to provide asylum seekers copies of their interview transcripts or sufficient explanations of their determinations," the report observes. It further notes that a temporary injunction issued by the Supreme Court following a petition by refugee aid organizations, allowed asylum seekers to be accompanied by legal representatives during their interviews, "but the government continued to bar paralegals, and most asylum seekers could not afford counsel for hearings." According to the report, the National Status Granting Board committee, staffed by four government officials, considered 3,211 cases between 2008 and 2009 but recommended refugee status for just three. "We've been saying for years now that the asylum system in Israel, which operates under the Interior Ministry, is fundamentally flawed and works on the assumption that everyone is a liar," said attorney Yonatan Berman of the Hotline for Migrant Workers. "The very statistic implied by these numbers means the asylum system views only 0.1 percent as refugees, which is virtually 0 percent, and shows that the system has decided not to seriously or honestly examine the requests for asylum, but rather, to serve as a fig leaf." Contrary to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Israel does not confer citizenship upon recognized refugees. In 2009, an Ethiopian refugee who had lived in Israel for a decade filed a petition on the matter with the Jerusalem District Court, but it has yet to reach a verdict. Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait… Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close The report also criticizes the "hot return" policy pertaining to asylum seekers caught crossing the border from Egypt. "Domestic and international NGOs and the UNHCR continued to be concerned with the practice of 'coordinated returns' or 'hot returns' of some asylum seekers to Egypt because of allegations that those individuals were later returned to their countries of origin in violation of their right to seek asylum and protection against such return," the report observed. "The government stated that through October 10, it had summarily returned to Egypt 136 persons who had crossed the country's border. This was a decrease from 517 persons who returned to Egypt after crossing the border in 2008-09." The report also cites cases of incitement and violence against refugees and asylum seekers within Israel. "On December 18, an unknown arsonist threw a burning tire at the apartment door of five Sudanese refugees in Ashdod, setting the apartment on fire. The Sudanese refugees escaped by breaking through the barred glass window and were treated for smoke inhalation. Local residents and storeowners claimed they were attacked because they were refugees from Sudan. Ashdod police began an investigation that continued at year's end," the report notes, adding that "on December 18, a group of about 20 teenagers severely beat three 16-year-old daughters of African asylum seekers in the Hatikva neighborhood of Tel Aviv. The victims reportedly did not file a police report because they feared retribution." The report places some of the responsibility for the violent atmosphere at the door of Israeli politicians, including Interior Minister Eli Yishai, Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman and MK Yaakov Katz (National Union ). "On March 22, Knesset member Yaakov Katz issued a letter that called for the establishment of an 'infiltrator' city to hold asylum seekers and stated that in 10 years the 'infiltrators' could 'ruin' the country," according to the report. "On July 19, Minister of Interior Eli Yishai called for IDF soldiers to 'block infiltrators' coming from the southern part of the country and stated, 'This is an existential threat to the State of Israel.' On September 2, Minister of Justice Yaakov Neeman stated that the 'infiltrators at the southern border create a real danger to the existence of the state of Israel, and Israel has to fight this phenomenon in every possible way.' In July the mayor of Eilat called on city residents to demonstrate against the large community of 'infiltrators' who had taken over the city, created a climate of fear, and lowered real estate value." |
Thus the spoken Word is indeed the word of a human being, but it has been instituted by divine authority for salvation. For God wants to govern the world through angels and through human beings, His creatures, as through His servants, just as He gives light through the sun, the moon, and even through fire and candles. Here, too, you could say: “No external thing profits. The sun is an external thing. Hence it profits nothing; that is, it does not give light, it does not warm, etc.” Who would put up with one who argues in such a silly way? Therefore the rule of which I have also spoken above stands. It states that God no longer wants to act in accordance with His extraordinary or, as the scholastics express it, absolute power but wants to act through His creatures, whom He does not want to be idle. Thus He gives food, not as He did to the Jews in the desert, when He gave manna from heaven, but through labor, when we diligently perform the work of our calling. Furthermore, He no longer wants to form human beings from a clod, as He formed Adam, but He makes use of a union of a male and a female, on whom He bestows His blessing. This they call God’s “ordered” power, namely, when He makes use of the service either of angels or of human beings. Thus in the prophet Amos (3:7) there is the noteworthy statement that God does nothing that He does not first reveal to His prophets. But if at times some things happen without the service either of angels or of human beings, you would be right in saying: “What is beyond us does not concern us.” We must keep the ordered power in mind and form our opinion on the basis of it. God is able to save without Baptism, just as we believe that infants who, as sometimes happens through the neglect of their parents or through some other mishap, do not receive Baptism are not damned on this account. But in the church we must judge and teach, in accordance with God’s ordered power, that without the outward Baptism no one is saved. Thus it is due to God’s ordered power that water makes wet, that fire burns, etc. But in Babylon Daniel’s companions continued to live unharmed in the midst of the fire (Dan. 3:25). This took place through God’s absolute power, in accordance with which He acted at that time; but He does not command us to act in accordance with this absolute power, for He wants us to act in accordance with the ordered power. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, AE 3:273-274 Because daily I see and hear with what carelessness and lack of solemnity—to say nothing of out-and-out levity—people treat the high, holy, and comforting sacrament of baptism for infants, in part caused, I believe, by the fact that those present understand nothing of what is being said and done, I have decided that it is not only helpful but necessary to conduct the service in the German language For this reason I have translated those portions that used to be said in Latin in order to begin baptizing in German, so that the sponsors and others present may be all the more aroused to faith and earnest devotion and so that the priests who baptize have to show more diligence for the sake of the listeners. Out of a sense of Christian commitment, I appeal to all those who baptize, sponsor infants, or witness a baptism to take to heart the tremendous work and great solemnity present here For here in the words of these prayers you hear how plaintively and earnestly the Christian church brings the infant to God, confesses before him with such unchanging, undoubting words that the infant is possessed by the devil and a child of sin and wrath, and so diligently asks for help and grace through baptism, that the infant may become a child of God. Therefore, you have to realize that it is no joke at all to take action against the devil and not only to drive him away from the little child but also to hang around the child’s neck such a mighty, lifelong enemy. Thus it is extremely necessary to stand by the poor child with all your heart and with a strong faith and to plead with great devotion that God, in accordance with these prayers, would not only free the child from the devil’s power but also strengthen the child, so that the child might resist him valiantly in life and in death. I fear that people turn out so badly after baptism because we have dealt with them in such a cold and casual way and have prayed for them at their baptism without any zeal at all. …see to it that you are present there in true faith, that you listen to God’s Word, and that you pray along earnestly. For wherever the priest says, “Let us pray,” he is exhorting you to pray with him. Moreover, all sponsors and the others present ought to speak along with him the words of his prayer in their hearts to God For this reason, the priest should speak these prayers very clearly and slowly, so that the sponsors can hear and understand them and can also pray with the priest with one mind in their hearts, carrying before God the need of this little child with all earnestness, on the child’s behalf setting themselves against the devil with all their strength, and demonstrating that they take seriously what is no joke to the devil. For this reason it is right and proper not to allow drunken and boorish priests to baptize nor to select good-for-nothings as godparents. Instead fine, moral, serious, upright priests and godparents ought to be chose, who can be expected to treat the matter with seriousness and true faith, lest this high sacrament be abandoned to the devil’s mockery and dishonor God, who in this sacrament showers upon us the vast and boundless riches of His grace… Martin Luther, “Baptismal Booklet”, in The Book of Concord, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, pp. 371-373. Thus we do…with infant baptism. We bring the child with the intent and hope that it may believe, and we pray God to grant it faith But we do not baptize on this basis, but solely on the command of God… Martin Luther, Large Catechism IV: 57. In The Book of Concord, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, p. 464. I keep finding more stuff that Luther had to say about the faith of unbaptized infants and about the role of the intercessory prayer of the Church or of Christians for unbelievers. The more I read, the more convinced I am that confessional Lutherans don’t have a good grasp of the place of prayer in Luther’s theology. It would probably be better to say–many confessional Lutheran pastors don’t have a good grasp of it. At any rate, I clearly did not. As you see from the first quote from the Genesis lectures (I think this portion of the lectures was given between 1538 and 1542), Luther emphasizes: God no longer wants to act in His naked majesty. He did that when He gave the Israelites bread from heaven and when He preserved Shadrach and company in the furnace. But now God wants to act not in His “absolute power”: “Therefore the rule stands…God no longer wants to act in accordance with His…absolute power, but wants to act through His creatures, whom He does not want to be idle.” That statement is fascinating in itself, and I want to return to it in a minute. But Luther goes on to say: Of course, God is able to save without using means. We don’t say that unbaptized infants are damned–and Luther specifically names infants who are unbaptized because their parents neglected baptism! But he says, yes, unbaptized infants are not damned, but it is still necessary for us to say that baptism is necessary for salvation. In other words, even though God can grant the Holy Spirit apart from means, it is necessary for us to point people to the appointed means and to adhere to the means of grace. God is not limited to the means of grace, but we are. That is clearly what Luther is saying. The Augsburg Confession’s statement that “baptism is necessary for salvation,” along with Luther’s statement in the Smalcald Articles to the effect that “every spirit that is separated from the Word” is the devil–must be read in this light. It’s not that God is forced to damn all stillborn babies, all miscarriages, and all children of Lutheran parents who fail to baptize their babies the second they exit the womb, and whose babies are unlucky enough to die before baptism. It’s that we are not permitted to despise the appointed means. Now, why is it that Luther says that God “no longer” wants to act in His absolute, unmediated power? Because “now in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son,” I think is what Luther is getting at. Since God has become man, we are not to look apart from His flesh for God, since “all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Him bodily (Colossians 2).” Now that He has ascended and is not visible, He directs us to find Him in the means He has appointed to come to us and give us His Spirit–in His Word, in the sacrament of His body and blood, in Holy Absolution. I’m not exactly sure of the details of this, but I know some Lutheran theologians believed or taught that Jesus’ body, since it is joined to the divine nature, is able to fill all places in creation. Luther writes about this in the confessions–the Large Catechism?–but simply presents it in explanation to the question, “How can Christ give His flesh and blood in numerous places at the same time?” He doesn’t say, “This is how it happens,” but simply provides it as a possible solution. That’s because saying that Christ fills all creation as both God and man could easily be turned into a theory that overthrows the Gospel. For instance, you could argue that since Christ now is exalted and fills all things, we could also eat His flesh and drink His blood not merely in the Lord’s Supper but in everything. The same thing could happen with the idea that since we can pray for little children of Christians, that they will be saved, and have certainty about the answer to our prayers. We could say “We’ve prayed for all the children in the world, so they’re all saved, with or without Baptism.” That would have the consequence of undermining baptism. Instead we are bound to the means God has instituted. On the other hand, what does Luther say? The reason so many baptized kids turn out so badly is: the sponsors don’t pray for the child from the heart–both that God would grant the child deliverance from Satan’s kingdom, and that the child would remain in the faith. Luther says the same thing in the Large CAtechism on baptism; we pray that the Lord would grant the child faith. I think we tend to underestimate the power of the prayer of the church. When I first read Pieper or Walther saying that the gift of the Holy Spirit necessary for the ministry is not given through the laying on of hands but through the prayer of the church, I kind of thought that that was crazy. Why would it happen through the prayer of the church? It turns out Pieper and Walther were just reproducing Luther’s theology here. Luther thinks that intercessory prayer is a mighty thing. He thinks that it can be relied on for the salvation of unbaptized infants. He says in the Large Catechism that the reason that the Lutheran Church and Germany hadn’t been destroyed was because of a handful of pious, belieivng Christians who prayed, “Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done.” In its own way, this idea of Luther’s actually fits quite well with the earlier point that “God does not want to act in absolute power anymore” now that He has become incarnate. God, of course, doesn’t need our prayer to make a baptism effective. But God wants to work not according to His naked power, but through instruments (because He is incarnate), and so God teaches us to pray. By means of our prayer and in answer to them, God tells moutnains to be thrown into the sea; He causes the church to pray for peace int he world and then answers their prayer. Or he causes farmers to pray for rain and then grants it. God works by His ordinary power, which means that He wants to use angels and human beings to do work for Him. And that is the great privilege. God could have done all the work Himself. He didn’t need the angels, nor us. But He lets the angels and us participate in the work that He could just as easily do without us. He makes us learn to pray and intercede from the heart to Him; then He answers our prayer. God could give daily bread without the prayer of the Church, but instead He teaches the Chruch to pray for it and then He gives it. He makes us participants in His work. This is why Jesus said, “whatever you ask in faith, you will receive.” I’m trying to make some good points here but I keep falling asleep. So I’ll have to elaborate later. Hopefully if you’re reading this you understand what I’m trying to say. Also, these quotes aren’t really supposed to prove anything. This is kind of like supporting information. But when you read this in after conjunction with Luther’s “Comfort to women who have had a misscarriage,” as well as the 3rd Sunday after Epiphany church postil, I think it is indisputable that Luther taught that unbaptized infants were given faith prior to baptism in response to the prayers of parents, christian sponsors, adn the congregation. Anyway, I’m done now. Relahttp://infanttheology.wordpress.com/2012/10/05/macgyver-the-dog-the-bone-the-reflection-and-the-christian-life/ted articles Advertisements |
Peugeot revealed its E-Vivacity electric scooter last November, and as expected, the machine goes into production in 2011. The brand released now more details about the motorcycle. The E-Vivacity is a 100% electric scooter, representing “a revolution in the urban mobility sector, a fun and handy vehicle, with excellent acceleration performances.” – says Peugeot. The technical specification of the bike backs up this statement: the E-Vivacity is light (115kg/254 lbs), and small (1910x680x1168mm). The E-Vivacity is powered by a 4kW electric engine, which gets juice from lithium-ion batteries. Unlike some of the latest electric scooters, the motor is not mounted directly to the rear wheel hub. Instead, the power is transmitted to the rear wheel via a belt drive. The lithium batteries can be fully recharged in 5 hours. The scooter uses the kinetic energy during the deceleration phase to charge the batteries. The E-Vivacity goes into production in January 2011. Prices should fall in the range between 3000 and 3500 euro, but this would not be official yet. 2011 Peugeot E-Vivacity Specifications and Photos |
ABC News Doesn’t Cover Biggest News Story of the Year about Rice Spying on Trump Team Guest post by Joe Hoft (photo from Fire Andrea Mitchell! website.) Senior Fox News Correspondent, Adam Housley revealed on Friday that Intel Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) knows who unmasked the identities of Trump and his close associates. Sources also told him that the unmasking was purely for political purposes to embarrass Trump and had NOTHING to do with national security. Then over the weekend it was CONFIRMED that Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice Requested the Unmasking of Incoming Trump Officials. This is perhaps one of the biggest news stories of the year and maybe the biggest story of its kind EVER. That politicians were using US spying techniques put in place to protect Americans from terroriststo spy on competing political campaigns is unheard of in US history. The coverage in the Main Stream Media (MSM) was apathetic but the coverage at one major MSM outlet was nonexistent. ABC News this morning has no mention of the story on its home page. ABC also has no mention of it on its politics page. Perhaps ABC isn’t covering the story because Susan Rice’s husband, Ian Cameron, was an ABC News Executive Producer? Cameron left ABC in 2010. (This post was updated) |
Image copyright AP Image caption Many posts made by paid government supporters venerate the Communist party's history China is "flooding" social media with comments by paid supporters in a bid to sway public opinion, a report has said. The research by Harvard academics draws on leaked documents to paint a picture of the way China polices social media. The government and its army of helpers write 488 million fake posts a year, the report said. The profusion of comments on social media sits alongside other efforts, to find and delete content deemed too sensitive for Chinese citizens. The vast majority of the comments and posts made on social media are crafted to look like they come from ordinary people, said the authors of the paper, who were led by Gary King from Harvard's department of government. Many of the posts do not attempt to rebut or argue with critical commenters, they said. "They do not step up to defend the government, its leaders, and their policies from criticism, no matter how vitriolic; indeed, they seem to avoid controversial issues entirely," said the paper. "Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone's back up," it said. More often Communist Party workers or ordinary citizens employed to post on behalf of the government engage in "cheerleading" about the state's achievements or its history. Pseudonyms The helpers are known within China as the "Fifty Cent Party" because of an unsubstantiated rumour that contributors are paid 50 cents for each of their posts. The 488 million posts per year are made more effective by making sure they are added during the busiest times on social media or when a controversial issue is being widely debated. The study used documents and spreadsheets leaked in 2014 that revealed the names and online pseudonyms of people employed by the Chinese authorities to post on the state's behalf. The academics extrapolated from this sample in an attempt to estimate the true scale of official activity on social media sites. There were good psychological reasons for using distraction rather than censorship or counter-arguments, the paper said. "Since censorship alone seems to anger people, the 50c astroturfing program [entailing creation of fake grassroots content] has the additional advantage of enabling the government to actively control opinion without having to censor as much as they might otherwise," the authors concluded. |
This post is part of KQED’s Do Now U project. Do Now U is a biweekly activity for students and the public to engage and respond to current issues using social media. Do Now U aims to build civic engagement and digital literacy for learners of all ages. This post was written by the following students from Dr. Thomas Wood’s “Mysteries of Migration” course at George Mason University: Caroline Kittle, Elizabeth Rovira, Maria Larios, Clara Ben Ayed, Lauren Murray and Surraya Abbasi. Featured Media Resource AUDIO: NPR National Park Service Celebrates 100th Anniversary Hear about some challenges facing our national parks 100 years after the creation of the National Park Service. Do Now U Is ecotourism helping or hurting our national parks? #DoNowUParks How to Do Now To respond to the Do Now U, you can comment below or post your response on Twitter. Just be sure to include #DoNowUParks and @KQEDedspace in your posts. Learn More About Ecotourism and Our National Parks Our national parks have been described as America’s Best Idea. They belong to all of us and provide tremendous opportunities, but require us to be responsible stewards as well. In 2015, America’s national parks saw their highest visitation rate yet, topping 300 million for the first time ever, just in time for the centennial of the National Park Service (NPS). The NPS used 2016 and the celebration of their hundred years of service as an opportunity to promote their Find Your Park campaign, their latest effort to get more people outside to learn about and enjoy nature, as well as visit museums, local parks and historic places. In addition, the NPS launched the Every Kid in A Park program, which provides every fourth grader and their family free entry to national parks for one year. Some wonder how increased visitation in recent and upcoming years may negatively and positively affect our wild lands, and how we might curb the negative impacts. Ecotourism is an industry that promotes responsible travel to natural areas. It can provide income and promote conservation–rather than exploitation–of natural resources. Sometimes, ecotourism is looked at as a solution to a lack of political will or general apathy toward conservation issues. The idea of ecotourism is to enhance the conservation of wild spaces and species in an ecosystem through the promotion of natural resources as a tourist attraction. As an industry, it also has the potential to lead to some unintended consequences associated with bringing too many people to our wild places. Federal government agencies, including the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service, use a Visitor Experience Resource Protection (VERP) framework to help ensure an appropriate balance of visitation and protection, which can be difficult. Ecotourism has many benefits. It boosts local economic growth, provides jobs and improves conservation awareness as it stimulates the desire to protect our parks. NPS activities provide more than 200,000 jobs and have $30 billion impact on the economy of the U.S. through visitor spending. Getting outside is also good for people’s physical and mental health, helping with everything from reducing stress to improving memory. Companies are recognizing these benefits for employees, and students’ performance can improve after spending time outside. In addition, our national parks provide a unique American experience, bringing people together to learn about our national heritage. Due to all of these benefits, many people support sustainable tourism. But let’s not fail to consider the drawbacks as well. To make an area accessible to visitors, infrastructure has to be built and transportation has to be arranged. The revenue generated for local economies is often seasonal. Areas may start to cater to more tourists, over time changing the landscape that we are trying so hard to protect. There is also the issue of keeping wildlife “wild.” Sometimes increased human interaction with wildlife can be degrading or disruptive to the balance of a natural area’s systems. Wildlife can become habituated to people, or change their behavior to avoid people, decreasing their use of habitat around trails as more people come along. There is also the potential of impacting wildlife directly on roads or in remote areas. Recently, a bear with cubs killed a hiker’s dog in Shenandoah National Park when she encountered the bear near a hiking trail. Visitors’ poor behavior has been a growing problem, too. especially in national parks. In the past couple of years, the national parks have made headlines several times because of human misbehavior. In 2015, a family interfered with a bison calf in Yellowstone National Park, which they had presumed was in danger because it was alone in the snow. Bison are physiologically equipped to handle the harsh winters in the midwest. In the end, the family’s misjudgment cost the bison its life after attempts to reunite it with its herd failed. In another, more subtle case, Big Meadows, in Shenandoah National Park, faces a particular chronic human-wildlife conflict that affects meadow ecology with visitors frequently going off trail. This misstep causes a disruption of the plants in the meadow, which is an especially big problem because Big Meadows is a unique type of wetland and host to the highest concentration of rare plants in Shenandoah National Park. Recently, a woman was sentenced for vandalizing sites in parks around the country, something that unfortunately has impacted many parks over the years. Ecotourism provides benefits to visitors, local economies and our national identity. But it also has drawbacks, impacting wildlife, ecosystems and the historic heritage parks are designed to protect. What do you think? Is ecotourism helping or hurting our national parks? More Resources Audio: NPR Keeping Bears Wild — Or Trying — At National Parks With about 1,600 black bears in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and about 10.7 million people visiting every year, wildlife biologists have to balance educating people and protecting the bears. Website: National Park Service Leave No Trace Watch a video and read the seven principles of “Leave No Trace”–how to minimize human impacts on the environment. Website: National Park Service and National Park Foundation Find Your Park Find a national park to visit! Find best practices for using Do Now, using Twitter for teaching, and using other digital tools. KQED Do Now U is a biweekly activity in collaboration with SENCER. SENCER is a community of transformation that consists of educators and administrators in the higher and informal education sectors. SENCER aims to create an intelligent, educated, and empowered citizenry through advancing knowledge in the STEM fields and beyond. SENCER courses show students the direct connections between subject content and the real world issues they care about, and invite students to use these connections to solve today’s most pressing problems. |
Jan Lehnhardt keynote: simplicity¶ A quote that’s in every second keynote or so: simplicity is not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away. Steve Jobs: design is how it works. In that sense we’re all designers. In the end everything is subdivided in layers. Jan is going to take on a couple of them. Text: the code you write. A kid has an attention span of about 2 pages of code. Your mum or dad about 6. The average number of bugs per 1000 lines of code is some 10-25. Irregardless of programming language. So: write less code, you’ll have less bugs. Jan’s involved with mustache, a template language. They figured out that leaving features out made the template language actually better. When Jan tried porting the template language from ruby to javascript, he was pleasantly surprised that the code was just three or four pages long, so he was able to port it in a weekend or so. The current ruby version is much faster and more optimized, but the amount of code has skyrocketed. Jan looked at it and decided he could never port that version. Algorithms. His javascript version was slow. In the end he sped it up a lot by removing one expensive method. The fastest code is the code you don’t write. Architecture. Yesterday there was a presentation on NoSQL and how to support it in Django. Someone suggested to add an extra layer to abstract away the differences. That was quickly shot down: we don’t want too much. Data. He’s mostly skipping this. UI. Less is more. Less means that it is easier to figure out what to do. UX (user experience). Make your users smile. Delete all the crappy code you ever wrote. Keep the simple parts. Clean up your code. Alan Kay quote: [for] any product: simple things should be easy, and hard things should be possible. Sometimes complexity is needed. Where do you put it? Django’s ORM is probably pretty complex. A show of hands: 3 attendants actually work on the ORM. The rest treats it as a black box. It is perhaps fine if there’s complexity inside something others can treat as a black box, assuming that’s the correct place to place the complexity. On twitter, @jacobian said I’m pleased to hear @janl talk about the inherent tension in Django’s “perfectionists with deadlines” slogan. Too true. Make the future simple. |
Photo by Trent Lanz via Stocksy "I would rather be raped every day than be in the hole," wrote Daisy Meadows, a 27-year-old trans woman, in a letter she penned to Broadly last year. Meadows is incarcerated at Lovelock Correctional Center, a men's prison in Nevada. Like tens of thousands of people locked up across the country, Meadows's time in the box is excruciating. She estimates that, in her seven years behind bars, she has spent about two years in isolation, including one 60-day stint for stuffing her bra with socks. In 2015, trans voices—and transphobia—received more coverage than ever before. And over the course of the past year, solitary confinement has also taken center stage, with the issue gaining coverage in the New York Times magazine and policy changes being instituted in states and local jurisdictions across the country. Yet the particular experiences of Meadows and other trans women in solitary have often only been explored in passing. This is despite the sometimes-shocking reasons that trans people end up in the box—and the fact that trans people are especially vulnerable to the emotional and physical torture of isolation. According to Chase Strangio, a staff attorney at the ACLU LBGT & HIV Project, placing trans people in solitary further isolates them in what is already a deeply traumatizing environment—a sex-segregated world that refutes their very existence. "When in solitary, trans people are often cut off from the only types of support they have to affirm their basic humanity," Strangio told Broadly, "and the core of who they are." In her cell at Lovelock, about an hour and a half northeast of Reno, Meadows has thousands and thousands of pages of paperwork—write-ups she's received for breaking the rules, grievances she's filed about her treatment, and a lawsuit she recently filed to demand change. But it hasn't always been this way. "For the first three or four years I was locked up, I didn't really have any problems at all—no write-ups, no bad incidents with staff or inmates," she said over the phone. "As soon as I came out [as trans], everything started going downhill." Meadows has been locked up since 2008 and living openly as a woman since November 2012. When she first decided to come out, she put in a request to be transferred to Lovelock from her previous facility, Warm Springs Correctional. She wanted to start fresh. Almost as soon as she arrived at Lovelock, Meadows said, staff started harassing and targeting her. She remembered one guard who told her, "You'll never give a blowjob like a real woman." Corrections officers would mock and humiliate her in front of other inmates, which seemed like blanket permission for prisoners to do the same. Then there were the constant strip searches and pat-downs, Meadows recalled, and the daily humiliations, like guards watching her when she showered or coming to her door to watch while she used the bathroom. Meadows estimated that she has ended up in involuntary "protective custody" (PC)—a form of solitary confinement—about four or five times since arriving at Lovelock, for periods that range from weeks to months. This is ostensibly to keep her safe from sexual predators, but Meadows believes the correctional staff use PC as a tool of retaliation. In recent months, Meadows says she has written up grievances but decided against filing them after a staff member allegedly told her they would throw her in PC if she continued to complain about her treatment. This has been a very upsetting, shocking, painful, and frustrating event that haunts and torments, tortures me every day. According to a study conducted by the Center for Evidence-Based Corrections at the University of California, Irvine, trans people are 13 times more likely than other prisoners to be sexually assaulted, so it is not surprising that spending time in protective custody is a fact of life for many incarcerated trans women. Ashley Diamond, who spent 30 days in protective isolation just before her release from a Georgia prison, told the New York Times that she sang "from dawn to dusk" while in the windowless cell to stay sane. Balancing and enduring a hostile environment from both prisoners and guards is not easy, and Meadows has sometimes been unable to keep herself out of the hole. In February 2013, Meadows was told she was being given a different cellmate, and it was someone she had heard had been sexually aggressive with a friend. According to Meadows, she immediately told staff that the match wasn't going to work and that she needed to be bunked with someone else; Meadows alleges the unit caseworker ignored her request. Meadows says she would wake up at night to find her cellie's hands under her covers, touching her. Requests sent to prison staff to be moved went ignored, and she was loath to report the abuse. After about a week there was a sliver of a hope: A different caseworker told Meadows she could request a bed move. But the form required a signature from everyone housed in the cell. "I went in to get [my cellmate's] signature, and he tripped out on me and grabbed me and started feeling me up and stuff, and then he ran out and told the CO [corrections officer] that I had hit him and threatened to kill him and all kinds of other stuff," Meadows told Broadly. According to the disciplinary form from the incident, the cellmate told the guard that Meadows "hit him in the mouth with his fist, and threatened him with a razor blade that was allegedly hidden within an alarm clock. The report notes that "no evidence of a hidden razor blade was found." Meadows and her cellmate were both found guilty for fighting. Although her 15-day sentence in the hole was ultimately suspended—she wouldn't have to serve it as long as she didn't get in trouble again within the next month—Meadows told Broadly she ended up spending about a month in solitary anyway, simply awaiting the disciplinary proceedings. About a year and a half later, after another incident with the same prisoner, Meadows submitted a grievance explaining in detail how the cellmate had sexually assaulted her "on numerous occasions" and why she had been reluctant to ask for help. "I'm not a snitch so I couldn't say anything—besides... I would be punished as well," she wrote in the July 2014 grievance. "Victims are punished in the [Nevada Department of Corrections]. And there is no discretion." Photo by Nina Simonovic via Stocksy There is no available data tracking the experiences of transgender people in isolation, but a survey published in October 2015 by the LGBT prison pen-pal group Black & Pink found that an overwhelming 85 percent of nearly 1,200 respondents had spent time in solitary confinement. Of those individuals, just under half had been placed in the box for two years or more. Solitary confinement is a terrifying and traumatizing experience for most people. According to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Méndez, isolation can cause "severe mental pain or suffering" and "amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." He called for an absolute ban on solitary in excess of 15 days. According to Strangio and other lawyers and advocates for trans people behind bars, trans women's particular vulnerabilities and experiences often make solitary confinement an especially dangerous place. For many trans women, being in the box means enduring sexual advances or assaults from guards. In a report released in 2015, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 17 percent of transgender inmates had experienced sexual misconduct from staff. Solitary confinement likely only exacerbates vulnerability to staff sexual violence since with no one else around, corrections officers can sometimes act with impunity. Maintaining the fantasy of a gender binary is vital to the functioning of the prison industrial complex. And then there is the psychological component of the box. In the general prison population, trans people may be able to talk regularly to people who affirm their gender identity, whether friends and family on the outside or fellow queer and trans prisoners on the inside. Being placed in solitary means losing access to this crucial emotional support, and also giving up the various personal items—like homemade makeup, clothes, or electric razors—that enable trans prisoners to feel a sense of autonomy and control over how they present. For Meadows, being put in solitary confinement means being separated from basic tools of survival and being left alone to endure the feelings of self-hate that can accompany untreated gender dysphoria. She estimates that she has tried to commit suicide 12 times while in the hole, mostly by trying to hang or strangle herself. (A representative for the Nevada Department of Corrections [DOC] responded to these allegations with the following statement: "Every suicide attempt, or even a comment made by an inmate alluding to a feeling of wanting to harm himself, is dealt with immediately. Those inmates are escorted to Mental Health staff to be evaluated and the incident is then documented. We have no records of this inmate ever attempting suicide.") In a copy of a July 2014 letter she wrote to advocates, Meadows described her experiences as having included: "[suicidal] attempts or thoughts, also thoughts of self mutilation (mainly self castration), sufferings from severe stress, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, depression and discomfort. As well as a sense of disconnect, and self hatred about my body and a feeling of hopelessness all of which by being held in the hole, isolation, made much worse." Lynn Hamilton, Meadows's mother, told Broadly that she's afraid every time her daughter gets sentenced to segregation. Being in solitary gives Meadows "really bad depression," Hamilton said. "I thought she was going to commit suicide a few times." Daisy at Lovelock Correctional Center, December 2015. Photo courtesy of Daisy Meadows Although scant in-depth attention has been paid to trans women's experiences in solitary, advocates and lawyers told Broadly that they have supported many people in Meadows's situation. In August 2014, I wrote an article exploring the stories of three New York trans women who had spent time in solitary confinement, including one woman, Yvette Gonzales, who was repeatedly assaulted and raped by a guard while in protective custody. "There's nothing for you to do [in the box]," Gonzales told Solitary Watch, a project that aims to raise awareness about the conditions of solitary confinement. "You sleep, you lose track of time. You start talking to yourself, you start hearing, you start imagining, you start inventing, you start making up stuff." Sometimes trans women are placed in disciplinary isolation simply for presenting as they are—in short, they are punished for being women in men's facilities. The longest continuous time Meadows has ever spent in solitary confinement all began with a pair of socks and a bra. Her disciplinary write-up from the May 2014 incident gives a blow-by-blow of what happened. "At approximately 12:15 pm I received information... that an inmate later identified as Meadows... was walking on the unit with unauthorized contraband inside his shirt," the report reads. Meadows is unable to purchase bras through commissary or access them through medical care, so she has almost always resorted to making bras herself. One of her methods is to take tank tops and cut the bottom off and then sew in an elastic, using sewing kits and razors purchased from commissary. (Altering DOC property in this manner is also a disciplinary offense.) "I found the inmate inside his cell, where I witnessed unknown objects placed in his shirt on the upper chest area, giving the appearance of female breasts," the write-up continues. "I asked him if he had anything inside his shirt, he advised me yes, at this point he pulled two pairs of socks out of his shirt and handed them to me." The guard's narration of the incident goes on. "I then asked him why he had these in his shirt [and] he stated, 'I am a transsexual and I am expressing myself.'" When in solitary, trans people are often cut off from the only types of support they have to affirm their basic humanity and the core of who they are. Meadows's straightforward and simple explanation of her behavior did little good. When asked for comment, the Nevada DOC told Broadly, "It is important to recognize we do not house women in Lovelock Correctional Center. It is strictly a male prison, and as such, we do not provide nor allow female attire unless deemed medically necessary by our physician." As a result, Meadows was charged with "possession of contraband"—an offense she had faced several times before under similar circumstances. For this May incident, Meadows was sentenced to 60 days in disciplinary segregation. But according to Meadows, the same prisoner (her cellmate) who attacked her in 2013 had since put her on his "enemy list"—often used to manage conflict between warring gang members in prisons—which meant that the two could not be housed together in the general population. As a result, her release from solitary was postponed. In July 2014, Meadows submitted a grievance protesting her treatment. "This has been a very upsetting, shocking, painful, and frustrating event that haunts and torments, tortures me every day, especially now that I am being held in the hole and punished because of [my attacker's] manipulation, lies, and hatefulness," she wrote. Eric Stanley is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside and co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. According to Stanley, Meadows's experiences are not just oversights that need to be fixed—for him, they are proof of just how impossible it is for trans people to survive on the inside. "Daisy's horrid treatment shows how maintaining the fantasy of a gender binary is vital to the functioning of the prison industrial complex," Stanley told Broadly. "The kinds of violent force (like placing people in [segregation]) that are brought down upon those that lean towards its edges illustrates [the gender binary's] centrality [to the prison system]." Meadows told Broadly that after she was given the write up, she was taken down to the box by two guards whom she had submitted grievances against in the past. As the day progressed, the officers strip-searched her five times. "It just [made] me feel depleted, drained," she said of the strip searches. "In a sense just beaten." Her charges for the bra stuffing were eventually reduced to a minor infraction, but not before Meadows's sentence in the box was over. She said she tried to commit suicide three times during that two-and-a-half-month period. Photo by Jeff Wasserman via Stocksy Meadows's life before prison was difficult, and the charges that landed her inside are very serious. In May 2008, in the parking lot of a Las Vegas hospital, Meadows pulled out a replica gun and sexually assaulted two women. According to court documents, she was apprehended in Venice Beach five days later, and charged with two additional incidents of sexual violence. Meadows, who freely admits her guilt in the hospital assault but denies the other offenses, says she signed a plea agreement at the behest of her lawyer. She was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences, and says she will be eligible for parole in 2078. Now on the inside, as an out trans woman, Meadows is a constant victim of sexual violence; she estimates she has been assaulted at least 50 times in the past few years. The experiences have changed how Meadows thinks about her crimes, although she says she tries not to think about it too much. "It's just hard imagining that I put somebody else through what I'm having to go through and that I would inflict that sort of pain onto somebody else." Meadows may spend the rest of her life in prison. And although she has been diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, Nevada's DOC still operates under a freeze-frame policy, meaning that that trans people can only receive hormones or other gender-affirming treatment if they had been given a prescription before being incarcerated. Meadows says she has submitted hundreds of grievances protesting the policy—for example one filed in July 2015—only to be told there is nothing that DOC staff can or will do to help. In a July 2014 letter sent to advocates, Meadows said it felt like she was "serving time in two separate prisons"—that she was not only locked up within DOC custody, but also in a body that she hates. Last spring, the federal government issued a statement specifying that freeze-frame policies are unconstitutional, a move that came amidst evolving case law and precedence on the district and circuit level, but in Nevada things have yet to change. Dr. Randi Ettner is a psychologist who specializes in treating transgender patients, and a former board member of World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which sets the standard of care for people seeking transition. She told Broadly that the freeze-frame policy is antiquated and unscientific—akin to refusing to provide a diabetic with insulin if he wasn't prescribed it before entering prison. "People don't understand the nature and the potentially life-threating complications of untreated gender dysphoria," Ettner said. "We see this all the time in prison," she added when she heard Meadows's story, "where people attempt to hurt themselves or to perform their own surgeries because they can't get access to appropriate medical care." The story of trans women in prison, though, isn't just a story of sexual violence, isolation, and denial of medical care—it's also a story of resilience. Denied access to makeup, bras, underwear, shoes, and feminine hair removal or other hygiene products, Meadows and many other trans women behind bars find creative ways to make do. Packages of Kool-Aid become lipstick and eye shadow, compression tights from medical become stockings. People risk sexual violence and stints in solitary to openly express who they are. Human rights advocates have long argued that guards are capricious and callous in their decisions to throw someone in the box. The ACLU's list of "ridiculous reasons for being sent to solitary" include: sewing belt loops on state issued pants, cheering too loudly during the Super Bowl, having too many stamps, and banging one's head against a wall. But according to some advocates, it is ultimately a refusal to submit that explains the harsh punishment vetted out to trans people behind bars. In that sense, Meadows's experience behind bars is a lens through which to understand the way that prisons operate. Instead of seeing Meadows's time in the box as an aberrance, Strangio told Broadly, we might see it as exemplification of how solitary confinement operates, a practice that, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, confines more than 80,000 Americans to isolation at any given time. "The reality is that [these] types of behaviors [from prison staff]—the insistence on taking away basic survival mechanisms and cutting off basic support systems when they become known to the system—[are] central to the operation of the prison system itself," he said. "The second [people] develop a tool, that tool is taken away," he added. "That's very deliberate, and it happens to everyone." |
The top vote-getter at the end of the preseason schedule, will perform at select home games through the 2017-18 season, with the second and third place contestants acting as fill-ins based on availability. From Wednesday, Aug. 2 to Sunday, Aug. 13, fans can submit their entries through an application on NashvillePredators.com. After this time, 10 finalists will be invited to perform in front of a live audience and celebrity judges, where the top four contestants will move onto the final round - performing during the Nashville Predators' preseason games. Nashville, Tenn. (August 2, 2017) - The Nashville Predators are calling all of Smashville to assist in their search for an anthem singer who will make their debut during the Preds 2017-18 season. "Turning the selection process over to Music City and the Citizens of Smashville was an easy decision to make," Nashville Predators President and CEO Sean Henry said. "From the enhancements inside Bridgestone Arena each year, to the length of our Season-Ticket Citizenships, and now to their involvement in these upcoming tryouts, our loyal fanbase continues to make us a better organization, one that wouldn't have its successes or achievements without Smashville's support." The search starts now and fans can be involved throughout the entire selection process, nearly start to finish, until Oct. 5, the day of the Nashville Predators season opener in Boston. "The Smashville community reaches far beyond Middle Tennessee - just as our anthem singer does - and the input from our loyal fanbase guarantees that inside Bridgestone Arena and on television screens across the United States, our new singer will be a household staple alongside the Western Conference Champion Nashville Predators," Nashville Predators Executive Vice President and CRO Chris Junghans said. "Interest in our team is at a fever pitch and we look forward to using our platform to help showcase the winning artist." The Preds' platform made way for international media coverage throughout the 2017 Stanley Cup playoffs of the legendary musical guests who performed the National Anthem before each home playoff game. To submit an entry from now until Aug. 13, please click here. For any questions, please email anthem@nashvillepredators.com. |
Shiveluch volcano, Kamchatka, the Far East of Russia Some 330 grams of ash were registered per one square metre in the village. The ash fall was 3mm thick in places. The eruption sent ash some 12 km above sea level. 'We have enough gauze masks, we always have plenty of them in storage and at pharmacies,' said Alexander Voznikov, head of the village council. 'There are no complaints from citizens, the situation is under control. 'This is nothing new for villagers here, we are used to be living next to two large volcanoes.' It's raining ash - volcano eruption forces children to stay indoors. Pictures: KamchatInfo Resident Viktoria said: 'We're cleaning our house with a hose. A lot of ashes fell, the whole yard is grey. 'We can't let our poor dog outside. Children are sitting at home, of course. 'The particles of ash are small. They crunch on the teeth and sticks to our faces, it's a terrible feeling.' Lyudmila, who has lived in Kluchi for ten years, said: 'People are sneezing. In the morning they wore hoodies, masks and carried umbrellas. 'Windows are shut; everything is covered with ash - gardens, grass. Shiveluch volcano, Kamchatka Clouds of ash might reach villages of Atlasovo, Milkovo, Ust-Kamchatsk, and Ivashka, warned experts. Kluchi village is located 560 km from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, capital of Kamchatka region in the Russian Far East. Around 5,700 people are living in the village. Shiveluch is the northernmost volcano in Kamchatka, some 3,283 metres above sea level and 70,000 years old. |
Max Joseph Pettenkofer Max Joseph Pettenkofer Max Joseph Pettenkofer, ennobled in 1883 as Max Joseph von Pettenkofer (3 December 1818 – 10 February 1901) was a Bavarian chemist and hygienist. He is known for his work in practical hygiene, as an apostle of good water, fresh air and proper sewage disposal. He was further known as an anticontagionist, a school of thought, named later on, that did not believe in the, at the time novel concept, that bacteria were the main cause of disease. In particular he argued in favor of a variety of conditions collectively contributing to the incidence of disease including: personal state of health, the fermentation of environmental ground water, and also the germ in question.[1] He was most well known for his establishment of hygiene as an experimental science and also was a strong proponent for the founding of hygiene institutes in Germany. His work served as an example which other institutes around the world emulated.[2] Early life and education [ edit ] Pettenkofer was born in Lichtenheim, near Neuburg an der Donau, now part of Weichering. He was a nephew of Franz Xaver (1783–1850), who from 1823 was a surgeon and apothecary to the Bavarian court and was the author of some chemical investigations on the vegetable alkaloids. After a falling out with a relative he was staying with he briefly entered the theater.[3] He returned to his family to marry Helene Pettenkofer. A stipulation of his marriage was that he pursue another career and was advised to pursue medicine.[3] He attended the Wilhelmsgymnasium, in Munich, then studied pharmacy and medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University, where he graduated M.D. in 1845. Career as chemist [ edit ] After working under Liebig at Gießen, Pettenkofer was appointed chemist to the Munich mint in 1845. Two years later he was chosen as an extraordinary professor of chemistry at the medical faculty. In 1853 he was made a full professor and in 1865 he also became a professor of hygiene. In his earlier years he devoted himself to chemistry, both theoretical and applied, publishing papers on a wide range of topics. One of his first projects and subsequent publications was in the separation of gold, silver, and platinum. This work derived from his position at the Munich mint and was centered around minimizing the costs of currency conversion by separating the precious metals from one another.[3] The purer elements could then be utilized in other applications. Later in his career he continued published and spoke about the numerical relations between the atomic masses of analogous elements. His theories were early in the development of the Periodic Table. He rejected the current theory of triads and expanded the connections between the elements to larger groupings. He argued that the weights of different elements in a group were separated by multiples of a certain number that varied based upon the group.[4] His work in this area was later cited by Dmitri Mendeleev in his construction of the Periodic Table of Elements.[4] He continued his publications in a wide variety of other fields as well including: the formation of aventurine glass, the manufacture of illuminating gas from wood, the preservation of oil paintings, and an improved process for cement production among other things.[2] The color-forming reaction known by his name for the detection of bile acids was published in 1844. In his widely used method for the quantitative determination of carbonic acid the gaseous mixture is shaken up with baryta or limewater of known strength and the change in alkalinity ascertained by means of oxalic acid. He further provided the experimental proof that the mysterious haematinum of ancient times was in fact a copper-colored glass.[5] Career as hygienist [ edit ] Pettenkofer's name is most familiar in connection with his work in practical hygiene, as an apostle of good water, fresh air and proper sewage disposal. His attention was drawn to this subject by the unhealthy condition in Munich in the 19th century. Specifically he examined the field of hygiene and determined that there was a minimal amount of rigorous research.[6] He was responsible for transitioning the field of hygiene into a research-oriented field.[2] He is further responsible for the acceptance of hygiene as a science to be examined in medical schools and to be taught in specific hygiene departments. In 1865 his petitions to the government were accepted and three departments of hygiene were established in Munich, Würzburg, and Erlangen.[2] By 1882 hygiene was included in examinations for medical students in every major city of Germany.[6] As one of the principal proponents for the field of hygiene in Munich he was responsible for giving presentations to government officials in order to secure funding for public health projects. One of the prevailing arguments of the day that Pettenkofer focused on was the relationship between sewage and the health of a population. In one of his first major projects in his home city of Munich Pettenkofer advocated for the development of running water throughout the city. He also emphasized the selection of the Mangfall River, not the readily at hand and highly polluted Isar River, as the source of the city's drinking water.[7] Many of his additions and plans for the city's sewage system are reflected today in the current sewage system layout.[6] During his schooling he studied for a time under Justus von Liebig where he applied his study of chemistry to the study of chemical reactions occurring within the body. This in particular focused on the study of the science of nutrition and the reactions in the body that consumed foods and produced the processes of the body.[1] He further advocated for reform of the food production system used in Munich. He argued that the system for the study of proper cattle feed was more well developed than that for humans and recommended civic funding for studying proper nutrition.[2] He proposed that this study of nutrition was important specifically for the poor and those in strictly controlled environments such as prison because they were most at risk for obtaining sub-par nutrition due to their limited control over their food consumption.[2] He further advocated for the construction of more spacious living accommodations. He asserted that there was a strong link between proper circulation of "good air" through houses, adequate space for living, and the health of the occupants.[2] His beliefs aligned significantly with the school of thought known as the Miasma theory. He firmly believed that the causes of disease were related to the multitude of environmental factors that the people of Munich were required to live in. Air was of a particular interest to him and he continued to advocate for its relevance to the processes of disease, specifically the spread of cholera.[2][6] He was also a strong proponent of regular bathing and changing of clothes in its relationship to health through the further regulation of the heat of the body. He advocated that health was the collective responsibility of a city to behave as best they are able to further the health of the general population.[2] In addition to the wide number of publications and lectures that he gave on the subject of public health Pettenkofer was also involved in the initiative to create an Institute of Public Health in Munich. He continued research into a variety of fields listed above as head of the Institute of Physiology in Munich from 1857 onwards.[6] After numerous successful audiences with two of the kings of Bavaria he had helped found the first three hygiene departments.[3] In 1879 he finally achieved his goal of the creation of a standalone Institute of Hygiene in Munich.[2] This institution was larger than his previous accommodations in the department of Physiology and allowed him to continue to his research and to gather a large cohort of research students under his teachings.[2] The founding of his Institute of Hygiene drew significant international attention and was considered a model for many later institutions including the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore.[6] During his career his position as a strong proponent of public health at times placed him at odds with his contemporaries, most notably Robert Koch. During his career Koch identified and isolated a large number of bacterial strains and was a supporter of the theory that these germs were the main causes of disease.[3] This placed him at odds with Pettenkofer's broader approach to disease that involved many other environmental factors in addition to the activity of the germ of a disease.[6] The two scientists conflicted most notably over the subject of cholera. In one specific case, Pettenkofer obtained bouillon laced with a large dose of Vibrio cholerae bacteria from Robert Koch, the proponent of the theory that the bacteria was the sole cause of the disease. He consumed the bouillon in a self-test in the presence of several witnesses on 7 October 1892. He also took bicarbonate of soda to neutralise his stomach acid to counter a suggestion by Koch that the acid could kill the bacteria. Pettenkofer suffered mild symptoms for nearly a week but claimed these were not associated with cholera. The modern view is that he did indeed have cholera, but was lucky to just have a mild case and he possibly had some immunity from a previous episode.[8] Publications [ edit ] Pettenkofer published his views on hygiene and disease in numerous books and papers; he was an editor of the Zeitschrift für Biologie (together with Carl von Voit) from 1865 to 1882, and of the Archiv für Hygiene from 1883 to 1894. In addition to his research publications he also gave a significant number of lectures to government officials in order to persuade them to provide funding for civic works and governmental oversight committees to promote and assess the state public health.[2] The 1899 handwritten manuscript 'On the self purification of rivers' and Pettenkofer's papers can be found at the archives of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.[9] Death [ edit ] In 1894 he retired from active work, and on 10 February 1901 he shot himself in a fit of depression. He died at his home in the Residenz in Munich. He is buried in the Alter Südfriedhof in Munich. Recognition [ edit ] During his lifetime he received numerous accolades. He was presented with the title of "Honorary Citizen" of Munich and given a gold medal. His work in hygiene precipitated the creation of the "Pettenkofer Foundation for Research in Hygiene" which received funding from the cities of Munich and Leipzig to fund research projects related to Hygiene and Public Health.[2] In 1883 he was awarded a hereditary title of nobility and was given the title "Excellency." [2] In 1897 he was awarded the Harlen Medal from the British Institute of Public Health.[6] Pettenkofer's name of the LSHTM Frieze in Keppel Street Max Joseph von Pettenkofer's name features on the Frieze of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Twenty-three pioneers of public health and tropical medicine were chosen to feature on the School's building when it was constructed in 1929.[10] References [ edit ] Attribution |
As people around the world scratch their heads today to figure out which news stories are real and which are April Fools’ jokes, CityHallWatch has one for you. (Afternoon update, 1-Apr-2014: This is NOT an April Fool’s Joke. The public should not let this assessment matter go unnoticed. Other taxpayers foot the bill. Our politicians are responsible for fixing the problem, so perhaps they should hear from you — MLA and City Council.) The 9 acre parcel of land owned by Concord Pacific (which bills itself as “Canada’s largest community builder”) at 88 Pacific Blvd is assessed at $1. This property houses a sales centre complete with generous parking for clients. There’s even space left over for a pay parking section as well as space that can be leased out to hold events such as Cirque du Soleil. The 2010 Olympics hosted the Quebec pavilion on the site and the rent paid for approximately one month was reported to be $1.3 million. As City Council debates the 2013 Property Tax Exemptions during the Council meeting on April 1st, it appears that one of the biggest corporations benefiting from a tax exemption is Concord Pacific. The so-called ‘temporary’ sales office has almost become a permanent fixture on False Creek. Concord Pacific derives great benefit from using this space because leasing commercial space for a sales centre elsewhere in the city would come at a substantial expense. The justification used by Concord for the $1 assessment hinges on an agreement that stipulates that a park will be provided on this site, at some time in the future. Residents have been waiting for decades. The property at 88 Pacific Blvd is located east of Carrall and north of False Creek. The context is illustrated below in Google Maps and VanMap: There are two parcels of land labelled as 811 Carrall Street. The smaller parcel is assessed at $2042. The larger parcel to the south, however, is assessed at $10,077,753 for 2014. This is a decrease in previous land valuation from 2013 that was of $14,588,417. Concord donated $36,250 to Vision Vancouver back in 2011. An open question is whether City Hall will fight BC Assessment’s $1 valuation of this property. The assessment value is an issue of fairness to all taxpayers. When valuable Concord land is assessed at $1 or $2048, other property owners in the City have to pay more to make up for the shortfall. One of the parcels is used for a SoleFood garden, and is assessed at $2,042; this parcel can also be seen in the following photo: The lot on the south side (also at 811 Carrall) is assessed at $10,077,753 for 2014. Pictured are the sales offices: WestPark provides pay parking on the Concord land assessed at $1. The parking lot is also rented out to park trucks for film crews. Events such as the 2010 Olympics also generate revenues for the owner through a lease. Pictured below is the Quebec Pavilion (La Maison du Quebec, $1.3 million rental). The significantly larger Canada Hockey House (~80,000 sq feet) is also pictured in the background (rent unknown). False Creek (March 2014) |
Sometimes you don’t realize that something’s been missing—it doesn’t matter how big it is—until, for a moment or two, it isn’t. About 10 years ago, I was listening to an interview with the choreographer Bill T. Jones, who had just published his memoirs. Jones is gay and black, and when the interviewer asked him what his father had thought about his becoming a dancer, Jones, somewhat testily, said something like, “You don’t understand. This wasn’t a middle-class family. The goal wasn’t to become a professional: the goal was to better yourself.” The first thing that hit me about this was that it had nothing to do with race or sexuality. The second thing that hit me was that it had everything to do with class, specifically the working class—which, I suddenly realized, I never heard anyone talk about. A little while later, I read a profile of Roseanne Barr in The New Yorker. Only middle-class women care about feminism, Barr claimed. Working-class women already have power, because they’re the ones in charge at home. Working-class career expectations, working-class family structures: two things I knew nothing about. Each revelation gratified me with the feeling of learning something interesting and important and new, but together they enraged me with the recognition that the reason they felt new, the reason I was so abysmally ignorant about this world that lay all around me—the American working class—was that such knowledge had been withheld from me by my culture. It’s not just that I’m middle class myself. I’m white, too, but mainstream culture (popular entertainment, the news media) has exposed me to a steady stream of images and information about blacks. I suspect that American gentiles also know quite a lot about Jews. But the working class is American culture’s great lost continent. There are exceptions: Roseanne’s show was one, Michael Moore’s Roger & Me (as well as the whole persona he’s constructed) is another, as was the recent HBO series Family Bonds. But much of what was seen as important and “edgy” in those productions was their working-class subject matter, which shows how rare any serious, extended, or sympathetic popular treatment of the working class now is. (Analogous things could be said about Bruce Springsteen, or novelists like Richard Russo and Russell Banks, or The New York Times’s recent multipart series on class in America. Imagine how superfluous it would have been for the Times to do a series about race or sexuality, topics that permeate half the stories it publishes.) Among mainstream films of the last decade, Mystic River and Good Will Hunting come to mind, but far more typical is the kind of thing we got in Million Dollar Baby, where the heroine’s family was presented as loutish, contemptible trailer trash, or on the Simpsons, where Homer’s working-class characteristics (and he seems to be the working-class breadwinner of a middle-class family) are played strictly for laughs. There are working-class characters all over the place: cops on detective shows, nurses and orderlies on doctor shows, and so forth. But it’s the nature of such dramas to present people only in terms of their jobs, asking few or no questions about the rest of their lives. Look at a show or a movie that takes you into its characters’ homes, and you’ll find that the homes you’re being taken into are almost always middle or upper class, even when the characters belong to that vast, imaginary social group we might call the pseudo–working class, people with working-class jobs but middle-class lifestyles, like the Simpsons or the Gilmore girls or those lucky kids on Friends. What we don’t have in this country, in other words, is anyone like Mike Leigh, who makes art out of working-class lives by refusing to prettify them. We no longer have anyone, among our major novelists, like Steinbeck or Dos Passos. We don’t even have any TV shows like The Honeymooners or All in the Family, whose frank depictions of the material conditions of working-class life (think of the Kramdens’ kitchen, with its bridge table and two chairs) didn’t prevent them from achieving a monumental universality. When we do get the rare serious mainstream treatment of working-class life, it comes from a middle-class observer like Barbara Ehrenreich. So why is it that the only working-class person anyone will pay attention to these days is a middle-class journalist masquerading as one? More fundamentally, why is it that the working class is treated as an exotic species, while the middle class, which it heavily outnumbers, is regarded as normal and normative? It’s not hard to begin to answer these questions. First, the people who get paid to create mainstream culture—journalists, editors, writers, producers—are, ipso facto, members of the middle class. As social mobility slows, more and more of them originate in that class. The middle class is not only what they know and identify with, it often seems to be the only thing they’re aware of. Today’s army of cultural commentators, who speak so confidently about the way “we” live now—the crazy hours, the overscheduled kids, the elite colleges and nursery schools—mistake their tiny world of urban and university-town professionals for the whole of society. Second, as TV’s creation of a pseudo–working class suggests, looking at the real one is kind of a bummer. Just as everyone on TV has to be beautiful, so does everyone have to have money, or at least live like they do. Nobody wants to watch a show about some fat guy struggling to make the rent. Finally and most important, we simply don’t talk about class at all anymore. Why should we, when we’re all supposedly part of a single one, the great middle? What we talk about is race and sexuality. (Or in the academy, race, gender, and sexuality, the great triumvirate. The humanities, despite their claim to transformative significance, have all but forgotten about class.) Instead of Steinbeck and Dos Passos, we have Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Oscar Hijuelos, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Michael Cunningham. It was Morrison, in fact, who provided one of the most telling indications of our loss of the working class as an imaginative category, her famous anointment of Bill Clinton as our “first black president”: “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” At least Morrison still employs the term working class, but it’s still merely a secondary category for her. If it weren’t, she would have seen that what those attributes really added up to wasn’t that Clinton was black (or “black”), but that he was our first working-class president, if not ever, then in a while, and our most flamboyantly so in a long while. But of course working-class attributes are going to look like tropes of blackness. Just about the only images we have of the working class are images of black people, understood as black people. In fact, many of the things we think of as characteristically black are really true of the working class as a whole (and aren’t true of middle-class blacks). Consider the realm of family structure: having children at an early age, having them outside of marriage, raising them as a single parent, raising them with the help of an older relative—and not being stigmatized by your community for doing any of these things. It’s an old American story: race becomes a surrogate for class, which is to say, a way of not thinking about it at all. On the rare occasions when we do think about class, our fixation on race makes us confuse the working class with the poor, as the response to the Katrina disaster demonstrated. For an interval that proved predictably brief, Americans started talking about class again, but we still missed the true picture. For one thing, our discussion of poverty was all too quickly subsumed, again, into a discussion about race. (It’s funny how few images we saw of poor, dispossessed whites, though many such people must have existed.) More important is that most of the blacks we saw wandering the highways or abandoned at the Convention Center were surely not the truly indigent (the homeless, the unemployed); they were laborers and waitresses and hospital workers and maids, members of New Orleans’s socially cohesive and culturally vibrant working-class black communities. These are the same communities that are now struggling for the right to rebuild themselves, struggling to get the rest of us to acknowledge that their neighborhoods were more than just slums. The people who lived in these communities may have looked dirty and disheveled on TV, and some of them may have acted desperately at times, but how would you have looked, and how would you have acted after four or five days in those circumstances? Yet so deeply has the notion of a working class been pushed to the recesses of our consciousness, and so powerful is the link in our minds between poverty and race, that when we’re shown a working-class black, we see a poor person—and when we’re shown a working-class white, we don’t see anything at all. What is the working class? As a first approximation, I’d suggest that a member of the working class is someone who receives an hourly wage. (There are exceptions both ways: airline pilots on the one hand, secretaries on the other.) The virtue of this definition is that it not only excludes the true middle class—professionals, managers, and small-business owners—it also reminds us that working-class people have a very different relationship to their work and their workplace than do those who earn a salary. By this criterion, the working class comprises about 80 percent of the American workforce. Even if one claims that the cop or fireman or unionized factory worker, who might well live in the suburbs and drive a big car, actually belongs to the middle class, the working class still comprises a large majority of the country. (Besides, as Paul Krugman recently argued in a New York Times column on the wage-and-benefit squeeze in the auto industry, a lot of those factory workers—the “working middle class”—will find themselves squarely back in the working class soon anyway.) The poor may literally be “invisible in America,” as the subtitle of David K. Shipler’s recent book puts it, out of sight in the human garbage heaps of ghettos and trailer parks, but the great bulk of the working class—which is to say, most of America—is invisible only because “we” aren’t seeing what’s right in front of our faces: the people who serve our food, ring up our purchases, fix our cars, change our bedpans. It’s as if the vast space between the poor and the middle class didn’t exist. The term working class has been erased from our political discourse, replaced by working poor and the insidious working families. Working poor is a valuable term, because it reminds us how meagerly many jobs pay these days and belies the notion of what used to be called the idle poor. But working poor is not at all the same as working class, though the trailer-trash stereotype would have us think so. Some working-class people are poor, but the great majority are not, they just aren’t well-off enough to be middle class. Working families isn’t the same as working class, either. Whether in the mouth of a Clinton or a Bush, the term is designed to treat the working and middle classes as a monolith. By conflating the two (the doctor struggling to pay for his kids to go to Harvard, the cashier struggling to pay for medicine), the term eliminates the working class as a political as well as a cultural category. But class hasn’t completely dropped out of our political discourse. In fact, it’s made a comeback of late, only in a particularly devious new guise, our new ruling paradigm of red state vs. blue state—where ideology is rewritten as region (Republicans are from red states, Democrats from blue), region as culture (red-staters drink beer, blue-staters drink wine), and culture as class, though only implicitly (what do you think beer and wine really mean?). Fifty-seven million people voted for John Kerry in the last election; to speak as if all of them were Chardonnay-sipping professors, or even professionals, is ridiculous. Simple arithmetic tells us that millions of them were members of the working class. But according to the dominant syllogism, if Kerry voters are effete elitists while Bush voters are “ordinary Americans” (the closest anyone comes to actually saying working class anymore) then the working class looks like the stereotypical Bush voter: rural, Southern, conservative, nationalist, and fundamentalist—in other words, redneck. This is as gross an oversimplification as imagining that the middle class is composed exclusively of leftist academics. But absent any other or better images of the working class, the redneck myth not only means that Republicans get to present themselves as champions of the working class while ostensibly denying its existence (as Thomas Frank has argued in What’s the Matter with Kansas), it also means that the true character of the working class, in all its enormous breadth and diversity, remains hidden. It remains hidden, in particular, from the working class itself, among whom the redneck myth does in fact seem to be taking hold. I lived in Portland, Oregon, last year, a heavily working-class town, and I was struck by the affinity the working class there seems to feel with Southern culture. (Country Music Television, for example, is part of the basic cable package.) The South is the one place where the white working class doesn’t hide itself, as the essayist Richard Rodriguez recently noted, and its leading cultural expressions—country music and NASCAR—are becoming those of the white working class as a whole. This southernization of the working class surely owes a lot to the red-state/blue-state nonsense, to the ascendancy of southern Republicans, and to the scarcity of other kinds of working-class images. But it also owes a lot to the decline of organized labor. I’ve suggested that working-class images haven’t always been so hard to find in the mainstream, and it’s no accident that their virtual disappearance over the past few decades has coincided with that decline. Fifty years ago, more than one in three American workers were unionized; today, one in eight is. Along with a huge loss in political power has come the loss of a confident, self-conscious, working-class culture. Not only were workers visible to the classes above them, they had their own voices, their own cultural institutions, their own sense of who they were and what they did; in short, they weren’t dependent on the middle class to define them. People used to speak of the “dignity of labor,” and the phrase meant that being a worker was something to be proud of, that the working class saw itself as something more than a collection of people who couldn’t make it, that it had its own traditions and values, constituted its own community. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the working class in the 10 years since those inciting recognitions. I’ve kept my eyes open to whatever I could glean from the media and from my immediate surroundings. I’ve had long talks on the subject with my wife, who spent many years in a working-class environment, and with a former student, who grew up in one. I’ve come to believe not only that the working class constitutes a coherent culture very different from the middle-class one that’s presented to us as natural and universal, but that that culture possesses a genuine set of virtues. New York Times columnist David Brooks has been singing the praises lately of bourgeois values like industry, temperance, prudence, and thrift. I have nothing against these things, especially since, as a member of the middle class, I practice them myself. But industry, temperance, prudence, and thrift are not the be-all and end-all of the good life. In fact, they are apt to be accompanied by a countervailing array of bourgeois vices, like narrowness, prudery, timidity, and meanness, not to mention hypocrisy and self-conceit. As for the working class, I’ll grant, for the sake of argument, that its vices tend to be the negative of bourgeois values, that working-class people are, compared to the middle class, less temperate, prudent, thrifty, and industrious (though that last seems a rather unfair description of people who do manual labor, work two jobs, or put up with forced overtime). But by the same token, working-class life breeds its own virtues: loyalty, community, stoicism, humility, and even tolerance. Not that every working-class person is a paragon of these virtues; like Brooks, I’m trying to articulate the general contours of a class culture as it arises from the facts of everyday existence. If only because of their limited possibilities in life, working-class people care more about their families and their friends and the places they’re from than they do about their careers. Because they haven’t been taught to believe that they’re entitled to the best of everything, they take what life brings them without whining or self-pity. Because they don’t preen themselves on where they went to school or what kind of job they have, they don’t act like they’re better than everyone else. And when it comes right down to it, they aren’t any more prejudiced than the middle class, and may even be less so. Middle-class prejudices are just more respectable—in fact, they tend to be directed against the working class itself—as well as more carefully concealed. What’s more, while the middle class espouses tolerance, working-class people, because they can’t simply insulate themselves from those they don’t like with wads of money, are much more likely, in practice, to live and let live. Maybe what this country needs are fewer bourgeois values and more proletarian ones. |
BEST OF ‘10 BLOTTER EXPERIENCING A BLONDE MOMENT: A woman called Russell police in mid-March after trying for an hour to open her locked car parked at West Geauga Commons on Chillicothe Road. Her keys were inside on the center console. She had been trying to snag them by inserting a walking stick through her open car window. The responding officer merely reached his hand through the window and manually unlocked the car on his first try. For the record, the officer noted she was a brunette, not a blonde. HERE, YOU DEAL WITH HER!: A Bainbridge Road man forwarded his personal phone calls to the Bainbridge police station to avoid talking to his ex-girlfriend Feb. 17. Police received three phone calls on the emergency line from an upset Brayton Trail woman trying to reach her former boyfriend. She told police she hoped to discuss their past relationship. Police told the man to stop forwarding his phone calls to the station. YOU CAN’T FOOL THIS OFFICER: A Solon man, 54, who had his Ford towed, initially because the plates were registered to a Cadillac, was arrested at his home on Glen Allen Avenue Feb. 27 after an officer scrutinized the plate and noticed the tags “were actually a well-made, computer-generated counterfeit copy of an actual expiration sticker.” The man, who declined to provide any information on where the fake sticker came from, was charged with criminal simulation, a first degree misdemeanor. THERE’S NOT ENOUGH TOYS: Chagrin Falls police responded to a report of a boy, 5, who did not want to spend custody time with his father Feb. 27, only to learn the reason was his father didn’t have as many toys and games for him to play with at his house. The mother then allowed the boy to take some toys and games with him, police said. IN NEED OF A GOOD DRENCHING: Warrants were issued for a Chagrin Falls man accused of blocking the entry of a Bainbridge woman known to him at Starbucks on April 15, then squirting her in the face with his water bottle, causing problems with her contact lenses, then continuing to pour water on her shoulder and back as he stood in her way. The woman said she has had previous contact with the suspect and is concerned about further encounters. ‘COPS AND ROBBERS’ GONE WRONG: A mother took her son, 10, to the Russell police station June 6. The boy was in handcuffs, and she turned him over to the police officer. The boy had been playing cops and robbers at a friend’s house and put the toy cuffs on before he realized the key was missing to unlock them. Officer Tom Swaidner used a paper clip to release the lock and free the boy’s hands. WHY ARE YOU MESSING WITH ME?: A Solon man, 30, refused a breath test for alcohol after Solon police received numerous calls from motorists about 5 a.m. one June day about a motorist who was all over the road. Police identified the car as it pulled briefly into the Dunkin’ Donuts lot, then returned to the road, weaving in traffic at 10 mph. The driver then asked police, “Why are you messing with me — I’m just trying to get home,” after he reportedly went left of center on Bainbridge Road. WAS HE THE CATERER OR THE ENTERTAINMENT?: Bainbridge police were called to a graduation party on Northbrook Trail June 12 after the caterer who was to serve food was found rolling on the lawn. When the hostess confronted the man, who owns a local Italian restaurant, she learned he was intoxicated. She took his keys to prevent him from driving off. He fled, but police found him at Tanglewood Trail and had one of his employees drive him home. Another employee served the food at the party. NOBODY HERE BY THAT NAME: A Carrington Place woman called Bainbridge police Aug. 26 after finding obscene drawings and lewd accusations about “Nick” spray-painted on her driveway and sidewalk. She also found toilet paper in her trees and broken eggs on her house. The problem was, no “Nick” lived there. She suspected juveniles mistook her house for another one in the neighborhood where a boy with that name lived. DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: Russell police helped a Music Street woman gain access to her locked home by using a knife and a screwdriver Dec. 19. |
KMIR News | Palm Springs, California While many residents of Palm Springs are spending their days acting better than one another in the new sport of drought shaming, some are openly displaying how much they hate the environment and your kids! A group of neighbors near Raymond Cree Middle School are not happy that the school has installed solar panels – because fuck you, fuck your kids, and fuck mother nature. They even called the news out to show their disdain for the planet. And it is all because their precious home equity is at stake. The neighborhood feels these panels are just too visible and they have gone so far as to form a committee to speak out against the Palm Springs Unified School District and their desire to save part of the earth for future generations. Group spokesman Jason Costner tells KMIR that it “no longer feels like home” with the solar panels – which are kinda visible if you look closely, maybe with a ladder I guess? But the residents want them lower damn it! I mean think about the equity? Sure the fire department requires the panels to be that high, you know in case their trucks need to put out a fire…at a school! But if those requirements mean a $5,000 loss in home value for these entitled folks, I guess those kids should just be left to burn. Palm Springs Unified tells KMIR that they have followed all regulations and do not need input from the bitchy neighbors to move forward. A spokesman says they will meet with neighbors anyway – which will hopefully go like this |
Command Prompt is the most vital area for most of the power users and even a normal windows user once gets accustomed to the shortcuts and features it becomes very handy and powerful for them. There were few minor limitations in the command prompt in the earlier versions of windows which is now upgraded. Today we will look into those few windows 10 command prompt improvements that could make your life easier. Copy Paste It’s been a long time awaited simple feature that was not available in existing windows operating systems like windows 7. Yes, you can now copy any command from outside and directly paste inside the command prompt or vice versa using CTRL + C or CTRL + INS and CTRL + V or SHIFT + INS shortcut keys. To select the text within the command prompt you can also press the CTRL + A shortcut key which will select the current cursor text. You can also just select the text using left mouse button (click and drag to left) and then press ENTER key to copy the text. Now if you press the right mouse button it will paste the text. Mark Mode In windows 10 if you want to get into mark mode then you can simply press CTRL + M and then use the mouse to select the text. If you would like to just select the text in a specific area like highlighted above then use ALT key in conjunction with the selection. Text Selection You can use the below shortcut keys to select the text in command prompt: SHIFT + Left Arrow key – Used to select one character at a time to your left from the current cursor position. key – Used to select one character at a time to your left from the current cursor position. SHIFT + Right Arrow key – Used to select one character at a time to your right from the current cursor position. key – Used to select one character at a time to your right from the current cursor position. SHIFT + Up Arrow key – Used to select one line at a time upwards from the current cursor position. key – Used to select one line at a time upwards from the current cursor position. SHIFT + Down Arrow key – Used to select one line at a time downwards from the current cursor position. key – Used to select one line at a time downwards from the current cursor position. SHIFT + Page Up key – Used to select one page at a time upwards. key – Used to select one page at a time upwards. SHIFT + Page Down key – Used to select one page at a time downwards. key – Used to select one page at a time downwards. CTRL + SHIFT + Right Arrow key – Used to select one word at a time to the right from the current cursor position. key – Used to select one word at a time to the right from the current cursor position. CTRL + SHIFT + Left Arrow key – Used to select one word at a time to the left from the current cursor position. Console Look and Feel You can now press CTRL + SHIFT + Plus (+) key or CTRL + SHIFT + mouse scroll up to increase the command prompt window transparency. To decrease the command prompt window transparency press CTRL + SHIFT + Minus (-) key or CTRL + SHIFT + mouse scroll down. This is what you should try to see the difference. In earlier versions of Windows, you might have tried to resize the command prompt window and noticed that it only scales vertically but not proportionally, in windows 10 this is resolved. You can easily resize the window as you would prefer. You can also simply Press ALT + Enter key to go into full screen mode and use the same key to exit full screen mode too. Search Yes, you read it right. You can now hit CTRL + F button to search your command prompt results just like you do it with any other text editor. Over to You: These are some of the windows 10 command prompts if you have something that is not covered here, feel free to share it with us. If you think this article helped you learn something, I would request you to share this and spread the knowledge. |
We like to think that if we dig a hole deep enough, we'll end up in China. If you dig your hole in Bismarck, that's not the case…unless your hole has a lot of turns to allow you to get to China. The term 'antipode,' according to Wikipedia , is used in geography to determine any spot on the Earth's surface diametrically opposite to it. In other words, if we're in Bismarck, and we dig a hole straight through the Earth, with no turns, and come out on the complete opposite side, that spot on Earth would be Bismarck's 'antipode.' Though you may never have been curious what spot on Earth is the antipode to Bismarck, there's enough curiosity in the subject matter for a website to exist to let you know where any spot on Earth's antipode is. Introducing, the antipode map . We put Bismarck into the map, and the spot in Bismarck that they use is the Burleigh County Distrcit Court building near the intersection of Rosser and 6th street . If you choose to go to that spot and dig a hole to the other side of the Earth, prepare to swim. Because you'll end up nowhere near any piece of land and you'll be out in the middle of the Indian Ocean. In fact, this is the exact spot you'll end up. Google Maps So with that being said, we don't recommend that you dig a hole to the complete opposite side of the world from Bismarck. And if you're not a swimmer, we don't recommend digging a similar hole in any part of the United States because according to an article from NPR in 2006 , pretty much all of the contiguous 48 states are completely opposite to nothing but water. There are very very few exceptions. You're welcome for saving you all that work. |
Congress could hold a special election — ignoring the electoral college — for the presidency following removal of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, claims Harvard University’s Laurence Tribe: There is no inherent reason a special presidential election, if pursuant to valid legislation, would have to employ the Electoral College. — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) September 2, 2017 There's no basis in the Constitution for that assumption. https://t.co/38AH7wuRvo — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) September 3, 2017 Yes, but it leaves the mode of selection entirely to Congress & is triggered whenever both P & VP have resigned or been removed https://t.co/OMTKqM8p1I — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) September 3, 2017 I'm just reading the text of Art II Sec 1 re Congress power to "provide by Law" for the rare situation where both P & VP are "removed" https://t.co/YUP19WO6yz — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) September 3, 2017 In July, Tribe described Trump's joking invitation to the Russian state to provide Hillary Clinton's email records (from the time of her tenure as sectetary of state) as possibly amounting to "treason": Trump's "jokes" inviting an adversary to wage cyberwar against the U.S. appear to violate the Logan Act and might even constitute treason. — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) July 28, 2016 In June, Tribe framed Trump's dismissal of James Comey from the FBI's directorship as an "obstruction of justice." Along with Louise Mensch, Tribe regularly advances the narrative of “collusion” — between Trump, Trump’s political associates, the Russian state, and Russian President Vladimir Putin — toward subversion of American politics. Along with The Atlantic’s David Frum, Tribe also frames Trump as monetizing the presidency. Trump, alleges Tribe, is in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Following last year’s presidential election, Tribe immediately began advocating for lawfare strategies to revoke the election of Trump to the presidency. He offered his legal expertise in posting legal pathways toward removal of Trump from office in a New York Times article by Nicholas Kristof entitled “How Can We Get Rid Of Trump?”. Tribe is currently assisting the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) in the organization's lawsuit against Trump, alleging that the president is in violation of the Emoluments Clause via his luxury hotel and resort company's selling of services to foreign government officials. CREW also alleges that Trump's wearing of a Make America Great Again hat as president is violative of the Emoluments clause; with the president immorally enriching himself by promoting the sale of a $25 baseball cap available from his campaign's website. Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter. |
A member of the Louisiana House of Representatives who eagerly supported Gov. Bobby Jindal’s plan to fund private schools has had an epiphany: Muslim schools might start getting taxpayer money! Rep. Valarie Hodges, a Republican who represents East Baton Rouge and Livingston, now says she wishes she hadn’t voted for the Jindal voucher bill. “I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools,” Hodges told the Livingston Parish News. “I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school,” Hodges added. The newspaper reported that she “mistakenly assumed that ‘religious’ meant ‘Christian.’” (The article is password protected, but if you want to read the whole thing, you can sign up here for free.) “Unfortunately it will not be limited to the Founders’ religion,” Hodges told the News. “We need to insure that it does not open the door to fund radical Islam schools. There are a thousand Muslim schools that have sprung up recently. I do not support using public funds for teaching Islam anywhere here in Louisiana.” Where to begin? Hodges’ bigotry is perhaps only rivaled by her ignorance of constitutional and legal principles. Of course Muslim schools will qualify for funding under a voucher plan. When programs like this are set up that dole out benefits to religious schools, the government can’t play favorites. That’s basic. In Washington, D.C., where House Speaker John Boehner and his Republican allies in Congress have established a federally funded voucher program, most of the schools taking part are Catholic, but two Muslim schools have been among the recipients. As it turns out, the Muslim school in New Orleans has since withdrawn its request. But it’s probably only a matter of time before another one applies to enter the Louisiana program. Some legislators aren’t comfortable funding Muslim schools. What’s to be done? How about not establishing these programs in the first place? Let Muslims fund Muslim schools. Let Catholics fund Catholics ones. Let fundamentalist Protestants pay for the conservative Christian academies and so on. Now that the law is in effect, some lawmakers are taking a closer look at it – and they don’t like what they see. Rep. J. Rogers Pope, a former school superintendent in Livingston Parish who was critical of the bill from the start, points out that the law allows students to be educated off campus and establishes no standards for what qualifies as meaningful education. “This is impractical on so many levels,” said Pope, a conservative Republican. “What will a high school diploma from Louisiana mean, if nobody can list our courses? How will we verify course content, attendance, teacher qualifications, and testing?” Welcome to the brave new world of school privatization! In other states where vouchers have been implemented, we’ve seen a plethora of fly-by-night schools, schools whose leaders are more interested in making a quick buck than educating children and schools where the primary focus is making sure kids are indoctrinated in a particular form of religion, not offering them a sound education. It looks like Louisiana is determined to head down this well-trod path to nowhere – much to the detriment of the state’s youngsters. Perhaps if more legislators had raised these issues before the vote, that wouldn’t be happening. |
This is the breast story I've written today. Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 is coming soon to the PlayStation 3 on September 29, and if you needed any convincing that it'll be a good action title, allow me to jog your mammary so you don't look like a tit in future. NGS2 will feature SIXAXIS-controlled boobs. That's right, a jiggle of the PS3 controller will translate into a jiggle of the character's bosom. Just when you thought Tecmo couldn't get any filthier. For once, this is the kind of motion control I can get behind, and I feel that it more than makes up for the reduced amount of gore that Sigma 2 will be enjoying when compared to the Xbox 360 original. Simply put, the 360 version did not have interactive jiggling nipplebombs, ergo it loses. Just check out the above image, supplied by Kombo, for proof that technology really does make a difference. This is seriously the greatest thing to have ever happened in the videogame industry. INNOVATION! [Thanks, Andreas] You are logged out. Login | Sign up |
LATEST UPDATE: Flood Warning Prompts Shelter Opening, East Hawaii Parks Closed UPDATE (12:40 p.m.) – A Flash Flood Warning was issued for parts of Hawaii County until 2:45 p.m. HST. The National Weather Service said that at 11:48 a.m. HST, “heavy rain continues to fall over the windward slopes of the Big Island. Recent rain bands have been affecting the lower elevations and are causing more significant flooding impacts to occur along the Hamakua, Hilo, and Puna areas of the island. Additional rainfall is expected to develop over the windward slopes through the day.” Forecasters say locations in the warning include but are not limited to Hilo, Paauilo, Waipio Valley, Orchidland Estates, Pepeekeo, Keaau, Kamuela, Honokaa, Hawaiian Paradise Park, Pahoa, Hawaiian Acres, Mountain View, and Glenwood. (BIVN) – A Flood Advisory was in effect Thursday morning for all of East Hawaii, while a Flash Flood Watch remains posted for the entire Big Island. According to a Hawaii County Civil Defense message issued at 8:15 a.m. Thursday morning, Hawaii County Public Works Department reports multiple road closures in Hilo due to flooding: Kamehameha Avenue between Pauahi Street and Ponahawai Street Pauahi Street between Aupuni Street and Kamehameha Avenue East Kawailani Street between Ho’onani Street and Ahuna Street, and Kukila Street in front on Ken’s Towing. Due to the road closures and heavy rain, civil defense says the following advisories are in effect: Kamehameha Avenue traffic is now rerouted through Bay Front Highway. Motorists should expect delays, plan ahead and drive with caution as driving conditions are poor. Be aware that additional road closures may occur without notice, officials say. |
Bears vs Babies is a card game where you build handsome, incredible monsters who go to war with horrible, awful babies. It was created by the same people who made Exploding Kittens: Elan Lee (Xbox, ARGs) and Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal). The game takes a few minutes to learn, it's kid-friendly, and each round takes about 20 minutes to play. (Stretch Goals here!) THE ORIGIN STORY I’ve always wanted to make a card game. A few years ago, I started working on a game based on my comic, The Oatmeal, where you connect heads, torsos, arms, and legs to create a variety of monsters based on characters from my comic, such as the Bear-O-Dactyl. The original version of this game was doodled onto paper cutouts, and had no functioning game mechanic other than “build funny-looking things.” The very first version of the Oatmeal card game. Two years ago I met Elan Lee, and he showed me a prototype of a game called “BombSquad,” which we renamed to Exploding Kittens. After Exploding Kittens launched, my creature-building game got put on hold. After the dust from Exploding Kittens eventually settled, I asked Elan to help with the design of my monster-building game. I didn’t want this to be one of those games where you're trying to "out-comedy" one another; I wanted it to be more of a deck-building game, such as Dominion or Hearthstone, but without all the complexity. I wanted a monster-building game you could easily play at a party. Up until this point, my version of the game had a big problem: when you played, you were on autopilot. You had no decisions to make and usually one correct action to perform on every turn. Elan has been designing physical and digital games for most of his career (he invented the genre of alternate reality games, and was formerly the creative director of the Xbox), so he put his gargantuan puzzle-solving brain to work and added a layer of much-needed complexity to the game. He tinkered a bunch and established the basic rules of conflict, construction, and the escalation mechanic that would define the core gameplay. The tricky part was keeping this simple enough to be a party game, but complicated enough to allow for depth and strategy. It’s easy to fall into two bad categories when designing tabletop games: either they’re easy to learn but completely random, or they’re very strategic but mind-numbingly boring. You have to walk a very thin line between the two. I think with Bears vs Babies we did that. Our battle-hardened "Sharpie Deck" After months of pestering everyone we knew to play the game with us and tweaking the rules bit by bit, we finally got it to the point where our friends pestered us to play, instead of vice versa. And that eventually brought us here, to Kickstarter, where we’re now pestering the whole internet to play with us. And so here we are. Let the bear hugs and baby burping begin. -Matt and Elan ---------- ---------- Press Inquiries Email: info@bearsvsbabies.com ---------- |
PNG anti-child marriage bill expected to pass Posted A law making marriage under the age of 18 illegal is expected to be soon tabled and passed in Papua New Guinea's parliament. There is currently no legislation in PNG to regulate the marriage age, meaning child marriage is practiced legally. PNG Constitutional Law Reform Commission secretary Eric Kwa said the issue of child brides is "spread throughout the country". UNICEF's 2015 statistics found 2 per cent of women aged 20-24 were married by the age of 15, with 21 per cent married by 18 years of age. "We are aware and we are mindful that this is happening," Mr Kwa told Pacific Beat. "So we need to address this at a national level." Mr Kwa said PNG's cabinet had signalled its intention to approve the law. The issue, he said, would be enforcing the legislation, especially in the "far-flung areas of the country". "We know it's going to be a major issue for us in terms of implementation, but we would like to enact the law and then inform the people," he said. The law is being introduced alongside a raft of other legislation designed to protect children in PNG, including revisions to the country's Lukautim Pikinini Child Protection Act. Mr Kwa said the marriage laws will "gel together" with recently-introduced free education and free basic healthcare legislation. 'So long as they're menstruating, they're ready to be married off' Women's groups in the Pacific said they will be watching the PNG law to see how it could be reflected in the region. In Vanuatu, the law forbids marriage of women before the age of 16, and for men before the age of 18. But Vanuatu Women's Centre (VWC) coordinator Marilyn Tahi said throughout Melanesia, traditional perspectives were still prevalent. "Our people even have traditions where so long as they're menstruating, they're ready to be married off," she said. "Others say, so long as they have breasts, they're ready to be married off." Ms Tahi called the inconsistency between the legal age of marriage for men and women in her country "unfair" and said the VWC had been pushing to bring the age up to 18. She said the revisions to PNG's child protection act could spark similar changes throughout the region, including in Vanuatu. When Vanuatu was the first nation in Melanesia to criminalise domestic violence in 2008, "a lot of the other Pacific countries got on board". "We can learn from each other," she said. Topics: family-and-children, marriage, child-abuse, papua-new-guinea, pacific |
Believe it or not, it actually is just a coincidence — and a happy one at that. The Moon and Sun have virtually the same angular size in our sky because the Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon, but it's also about 400 times farther away. This allows us to see spectacular coronal displays and prominences during total solar eclipses. Interestingly, this hasn't always been the case. Tidal interactions cause the Moon to spiral about one inch per year away from Earth. In the distant past, the Moon was close enough to Earth so that it could block the Sun's entire disk and then some. Our prehuman ancestors would not have witnessed the beautiful coronal displays that we now enjoy. And about 50 million years from now, the Moon will be far enough away so that our descendants will only see annular eclipses. So why do we happen to live in the brief period of Earth's history when the moon just barely blocks the sun? Indeed, the odds against it are enormous. But the universe is a large enough place so that highly improbable coincidences can and do occur. It's important to note, however, that even today some solar eclipses are annular because the Earth and Moon have elliptical orbits. — ROBERT NAEYE, SENIOR EDITOR |
As something of an expert in the communications field, I'd like to offer my services to United Airlines. The Chicago-based company has been going through a rough patch of late on the public relations front. The latest oopsie involved a middle school teacher from Hawaii who had to hold her 27-month-old son (a 2-year-old, if my math is correct) in her lap for an entire three-hour flight from Houston to Boston. According to a report in The Washington Post, the child had a ticket that cost nearly $1,000. But a United spokesperson told the paper that the boy's "boarding pass had been improperly scanned and that because the toddler wasn't logged in to the system, his seat was released to a standby passenger." So the kiddo had to ride on his mom's lap, the mom did her best but wound up with a numb arm and leg and the airline apologized to her and "said it is trying to compensate the family for its mistake." Asked why she didn't protest the seating arrangement more before takeoff, the teacher told Hawaii News Now: "I started remembering all those incidents with United on the news. The violence. Teeth being knocked out." If you're an airline — or any business other than a boxing promotion company or the mafia — you probably don't want customers associating you with news reports about violence and teeth being knocked out. But that's where United is right now, due to some minor violence and knocking out of teeth. You'll recall back in April when a Kentucky doctor named David Dao refused to give up his seat on a United Express flight and was, as described in a Tribune story, "bloodied and dragged down the aisle" by Chicago Aviation Department officers. Dao suffered a concussion and a broken nose and lost two front teeth. He later received a settlement from the airline. That same month, a giant rabbit named Simon was flown from London to O'Hare International Airport aboard a United flight and wound up dead. According to the bunny's England-based breeder, Simon was swiftly cremated without her permission. The airline later reached a settlement with the breeder. A bit before the doctor dragging and the bunny burning, United got in hot water after a gate agent refused to let two teen girls board because they were wearing leggings. In retrospect, that seems like a minor issue, given that neither of the teens was dragged anywhere and, to the best of my knowledge, none of their pets was cremated. But at the time, it caused quite a stir. Some might look at this string of events and say United is teetering on the brink of a public relations catastrophe. I, on the other hand, believe the company is poised to embrace a public relations catastrophopportunity. It's all a matter of framing. The company has been quiet and coy in responding to these incidents, presumably hoping they'll just go away and be forgotten. What I propose is a PR campaign waged on two fronts. First, you highlight the fact that it has been nearly three full months since a passenger was bloodied and dragged down the aisle of a United flight. That shows commitment and an ability to learn from mistakes, qualities everyone looks for when making travel plans. Same with the rabbit thing. As of Friday, the "Number of Days Since a Giant Rabbit Has Died on Our Airline" sign in United headquarters — I'm assuming that exists — reads 79. That's an impressive number. Don't run from the tragedy. Show that you've got things fixed and are doing a top-notch job of not killing large rabbits. The second front in this war against lame media types who pounce on isolated stories that make your entire company seem incompetent is to make people want to experience these so-called "mistakes." For example, in the case of the teacher who had to hold her 2-year-old for three hours, that's part of United Airlines' innovative Family-Bonding Package. Feeling distant from your tweens? Now you can ride with an 11-year-old on one knee and a 12-year-old on your shoulders, forcing the three of you to talk and reconnect. For an additional charge, you can have their little sister stuffed into the overhead bin. (You can communicate with her through the holes where the air vents used to be.) And there would be other family-friendly packages: "Are you sick of your teenage kids dressing like idiots? I mean, leggings? Really? With United Airlines' new draconian dress code, we'll have your slob children spiffed up in no time. Just book the flight … and we'll do the rest." Or: "Is your pet getting up in years? Are you worried veterinary care and cremation costs might be a burden you can't handle? Then consider booking your pet on a one-way United Airlines flight … to anywhere. We'll take care of everything." And the doctor-dragging incident can easily be marketed to the burgeoning masochism community. Flights would sell out in no time. I propose the slogan: "Fly United, You Miserable Cretin." (You could even use "United!" as a safe word, providing some additional marketing value.) I offer these brilliant ideas free of charge to my friends at United. And I hope they'll recognize that these options are, at the very least, better than what they've been doing. rhuppke@chicagotribune.com Twitter @RexHuppke |
This year, other scientists have argued that life originated on Mars, due to a mineral found in Martian meteorites, thought to be crucial to the genesis of life. BUT, a new book by American ecologist Dr. Ellis Silver offers arguments, based on human physiology, that humans as species may not have evolved alongside other life on Earth – but arrived from elsewhere, brought here by aliens as recently as a few tens of thousands of years ago. This is a BIG claim, however, the facts that Silver puts on the table will make you say “how did I not realized this sooner!!” Silver, an environmentalist who is currently working with the effort to clean plastic debris from the Pacific, says his book aims to provoke debate – and is based on scientific work on the difference between humans and other animals. “The Earth approximately meets our needs as a species, but perhaps not as strongly as whoever brought us here initially thought,” Silver said in an interview with Yahoo news. “Mankind is supposedly the most highly developed species on the planet, yet is surprisingly unsuited and ill-equipped for Earth’s environment: harmed by sunlight, a strong dislike for naturally occurring foods, ridiculously high rates of chronic disease, and more,” Dr. Ellis says that humans might suffer from bad backs because they evolved on a world with lower gravity. He also says that it is strange that babies’ heads are so large and make it difficult for women to give birth, which can result in fatalities of the mother and infant. “No other truly native species on this planet has this problem,” he says. Silver also points out to the “extra” 223 genes in human beings, which are not found in any other species, and to the lack of a fossil “missing link”. “Lizards can sunbathe for as long as they like – and many of them do. We can just about get away with it for a week or two. But day after day in the sun? Forget it. You might as well just lie down on the freeway and wait for a bus to hit you.” We are dazzled by the sun, which is also odd, says Silver – most animals are not. “We are all chronically ill,” says Silver. “Indeed, if you can find a single person who is 100% fit and healthy and not suffering from some (perhaps hidden or unstated) condition or disorder (there’s an extensive list in the book) I would be extremely surprised – I have not been able to find anyone.” Silver continues. It’s like we desperately try to hide the fact that we do not fully belong in this Nature we try to fit in. We say that we evolved but, if we truly evolved here, shouldn’t we be more in connection with Nature instead of being less and less, to a point that we even harm life around us? Something just does not seem right. “I believe that many of our problems stem from the simple fact that our internal body clocks have evolved to expect a 25 hour day (this has been proven by sleep researchers), but the Earth’s day is only 24 hours. This is not a modern condition – the same factors can be traced all the way back through mankind’s history on Earth.” There is another key element we usually tend to ignore. Many people say that they don’t feel like they belong on Earth, nor feel at home here, says Dr. Ellis Silver. And this fact is not something to see as irrelevant, especially not if the majority of the human population feels like this. “This suggests (to me at least) that mankind may have evolved on a different planet, and we may have been brought here as a highly developed species.” says Silver What if we migrated here from Mars? And this, believe it or not, is not as farfetched as it seems. Scientists recently discovered that Mars had a strong Magnetic field before it became a wasteland. Mars is the only planet in our Solar System that has a day of 25 hours, it is further away from The Sun than Earth, it has weaker gravity and it was discovered that Mars had large amounts of water in the past. What if there was some kind of destruction of global proportions and we had to migrate to save our species? This would also prove the stories of Humanity being more evolved in the past, but because of an unknown incident we “fell” from “heaven” on earth, and went through a phase of forgetting. “My thesis proposes that mankind did not evolve from that particular strain of life, but evolved elsewhere and was transported to Earth (as fully evolved Homo sapiens) between 60,000 and 200,000 years ago,” says Dr. Ellis Silver. Sources: https://www.yahoo.com; http://www.dailymail.co.uk; |
Enough nonsense Stop right there: Michigan attorney general sues to stop recount Michigan attorney general Bill Schuette is surely going to catch heat for this - criticism that he’s strictly acting out of partisan concern because he’s a Republican. And yes, Schuette is a very partisan Republican and has been one for a long time. And oh yes, he would certainly like to be our next governor. But no matter who he is, his legal argument is awfully solid that there is no valid reason for a recount of the presidential race in Michigan. It would be extremely time-consuming and expensive - and yes, the state would bear a huge share of the cost - and it’s not going to change a damn thing. Plus, the party who demanded it can hardly claim to be a seriously aggrieved party. That’s Schuette’s position, and he’s asking the Michigan Supreme Court to step right in and put a stop to this nonsense: Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette wants the Michigan Supreme Court to halt a presidential recount in Michigan before it begins. In a court action filed today, Schuette echoes arguments made for President-elect Donald Trump, arguing Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who received just over 1% of the vote in Michigan, is not an “aggrieved” candidate entitled to a recount, and there isn’t time to complete a recount, even if Stein was entitled to one. “If allowed to proceed, the statewide hand recount could cost Michigan taxpayers millions of dollars and would put Michigan voters at risk of being disenfranchised in the electoral college,” Schuette, in a filing signed by Chief Legal Counsel Matthew Schneider, said in asking the Michigan Supreme Court for immediate consideration of his petition barring a recount. The State Board of Canvassers was supposed to meet this morning to move forward on the recount. Schuette’s motion stops that, at least for now. There’s no guarantee Michigan Supreme Court will agree to bypass the Court of Appeals and go straight to a final and definitive ruling, but given the urgency of the situation - the Electoral College votes in 17 days - this thing can’t be dragged out indefinitely. By the way, even if the recount goes ahead, it’s unlikely to be the hand recount Stein wants. Secretary of State Ruth Johnson has noted that in any recount, the state has the discretion to decide how the recount is conducted - and she has every intention of doing a machine recount if she has to do one at all. Meanwhile, the Michigan Legislature is trying to push through a bill that would require future recount demanders to pay the full cost of the recount. That would not affect situations in which the race is so close that a recount is legally mandated. But that was not the case here. The race was close, with Trump taking the state by just over 10,000 votes, but that’s not mandatory-recount close. And the candidate who came within 10,000 votes of winning is not even the one who demanded the recount, although I would in no way be surprised if Hillary was hiding behind Stein’s skirt so she could claim she was “accepting the results” as she thundered against Trump for supposedly threatening not to do. By the way, I keep hearing people worried that if Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania start recounts as Stein wants, and don’t get them done quickly enough, all three states could lose their electoral votes entirely. This is apparently based on a quote from Michael Haas, administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Wisconsin’s last statewide recount was in 2011 for a state Supreme Court seat and the outcome did not change. The recount showed Justice David Prosser defeated challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg by 7,004 votes — a slightly tighter margin than the 7,316-vote victory he had in initial returns. That recount took more than a month. This one would have to happen more quickly because of a federal law that says states must complete presidential recounts within 35 days of the election to ensure their electoral votes are counted. This year, that’s Dec. 13. “You may potentially have the state electoral votes at stake if it doesn’t get done by then,” said Haas. A lawyer with Stein’s campaign has said it wants the recount done by hand. That would take longer and require a judge’s order, Haas said. Let’s deal with this, because from everything I can find the panic over this is almost entirely baseless. What Haas is referring to is that, if there are questions about the certification of the election, Congress could theoretically have the discretion to disregard a state’s results and refuse to recognize its electors. That’s true, technically, but there is zero chance it would actually happen. Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania can all certify the original results - Stein’s recount demand notwithstanding - and the Republican-controlled Congress is certainly not going to turn away their electors because Jill Stein used a well-timed legal maneuver to rend those certifications arguably invalid. I don’t know if that’s Stein’s real gambit here, but if it is, it has zero chance of succeeding. The only thing she’s doing is mucking up the works and causing a lot of extra work for state employees in three states. Hopefully Bill Schuette’s motion to stop Michigan’s recount is successful, and with any luck the other two states manage to avoid this complete waste of time as well. Donald Trump won the election. That’s a fact and it’s not going to change. We have more important things to do at this point than try to re-run a campaign that no one wants going into overtime. Except the losers, I guess. But they lost. Screw them. Only YOU can save CFP from Social Media Suppression. Tweet, Post, Forward, Subscribe or Bookmark us Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook. Please adhere to our commenting policy to avoid being banned. As a privately owned website, we reserve the right to remove any comment and ban any user at any time.Comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence and death, racism, anti-Semitism, or personal or abusive attacks on other users may be removed and result in a ban.-- Follow these instructions on registering |
Arsene Wenger will match Sir Alex Ferguson’s record of 810 games in charge when he takes to the dugout this evening for Arsenal’s derby with Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park. The tally, achieved over the course of 21 years at the helm in N5, is something that makes the boss proud because it reflects both a substantial commitment on his part and that his values and playing philosophy are intimately entwined with the club. Reflecting on the landmark and what it means to him, Wenger told beIN Sports: “What it means? It’s first a formidable commitment and a sacrifice of my life for this club and the game I love. “It means as well that I have managed in my life to give substance to the club. “When I speak of substance I mean the way to play football, the way to behave, the values you want to respect, the influence you can have on the individual careers of the players, the impulse you can give to a club as a complete structure “I was always ready to fight for that and if needed to lose my job for the values I believe in [that] are right. I believe that I am in accordance with my club for that and I am absolutely proud of that. “Overall, [after] all the wins and losses and all that what I believe is that this club is respected for its values.” While Arsenal have been far less successful in the second half of his tenure, something that corresponds to the club’s move to the Emirates, the boss says he has still taken great pleasure from the quality of football produced by some of his squads. He noted: “The fact that the big pleasure is to share the positive emotions and to be capable to play the football as close as possible to perfect in some parts of the game.” For all his ideological ponderings, winning trophies still represents a high point for any manager. Wenger is no different, pinpointing success on the domestic front as some of his most treasured memories. “The first winning of the championship, the FA Cup final last year these big games, big trophies that is what you keep,” he continued. “In our job you are addicted to the future you don’t look back maybe I will do one day but now you always expect more from the next game.” |
By Christian Jarrett After a terror attack, amidst the shock and sadness, there is simple incomprehension: how could anyone be so brutal, so inhuman? In Nature Human Behaviour, Sandra Baez and her colleagues offer rare insight based on their tests of 66 incarcerated paramilitary terrorists in Colombia, who had murdered an average of 33 victims each. The terrorists completed measures of their intelligence, aggression, emotion recognition, and crucially, their moral judgments. On most measures, such as intelligence and executive function, there were no differences between the terrorists and 66 non-terrorist control participants from the same region. The terrorists admitted to more aggression, as you’d expect, and they showed difficulties recognising anger, sadness and disgust. However, the most striking group difference concerned moral judgments on 24 different scenarios. Unlike control participants, the terrorists judged acts of intended harm with neutral outcomes (such as intending to poison someone, but failing) to be more morally permissible than acts of accidental harm (such as poisoning someone by mistake). In a follow-up, the terrorists also rated attempted harm as more morally permissible than accidental harm, as compared with a group of incarcerated non-terrorist murderers. Baez and her team said this distorted approach to morality implies a problem weighing intentions combined with an excessive focus on outcomes, and it is similar to the moral perspective taken by very young children and by adult neurological patients with damage to the frontal lobe and temporal lobe of their brains (but not by psychopaths who do seem to weigh intentions when making their moral judgments). “The profile observed in the terrorists may reflect their fixation on utopian visions whereby only (idealised) ends matter. That is, their outcome-based moral judgments may be related to the belief that any action can be justified,” the researchers said. This research involved Colombian terrorists who had joined paramilitary organisations mainly for economic rather than ideological reasons. It remains to be seen if the specific deviant moral code uncovered in this research is also a characteristic of Islamist terrorists. A promising avenue for future investigation, the researchers noted, will be to see if careful tests of moral judgment could be used to predict likelihood of future offending in dangerous offenders; also to study whether and how radicalisation alters the nature of people’s moral judgments. —Outcome-oriented moral evaluation in terrorists Image: In the conflicted area of Putumayo province, south of Bogota (Colombia’s capitol) and not far from the Colombia-Ecuador border, a member of the AUC paramilitary squad takes a break after combat against the FARC leftist guerrillas November 12, 2000 in Colombia. By Piero Pomponi/Liaison via Getty Images. Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest |
Pippa Norris Harvard and Sydney Universities Founding Director, the Electoral Integrity Project 7 Jan 2017 Reprinted from the LSE USAPPBlog http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2017/01/08/its-even-worse-than-the-news-about-north-carolina-american-elections-rank-last-among-all-western-democracies/ On 22nd December, an op ed published in the Raleigh News and Observer by Andrew Reynolds, Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, went viral. The article commented on elections and politics in North Carolina, with the headline suggesting “North Carolina is no longer classified as a democracy“. There is no independent and reliable measure of how U.S. states rank in terms of liberal democracy. But, moving beyond hearsay and anecdote, new evidence is available assessing the quality of elections. For this, Professor Reynolds drew on data from the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), an independent academic project based at Harvard and Sydney Universities, which I direct. The project has conducted expert survey of Perceptions of Electoral Integrity for the last five years to evaluate the quality of parliamentary and presidential elections around the world, including the 2012 and 2014 US elections. This technique is commonly used for evaluating performance in the absence of directly observable indicators. It is similar to the methods employed for the Perception of Corruption Index by Transparency international. The empirical evidence is gathered from rolling expert surveys gauging Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) globally (across 213 elections and 153 countries worldwide since 2012), and across US states (in 2014 and 2016). ‘Electoral integrity’ refers to international standards and global norms governing the appropriate conduct of elections, during the pre-election stage, the campaign, polling day and the election aftermath. The EIP evidence indicated that compared with the performance of other U.S. states, in 2016 experts assessed North Carolina’s elections particularly poorly on district boundaries, the legal framework and voter registration processes. Moreover problems are not just confined to one state nor the 2016 election; as I published in a blog in the Monkey Cage in 29 March 2016, well before all the hullabaloo, the U.S. ranks 52nd out of 153 countries worldwide in the 2016 Perceptions of Electoral Integrity index, displaying the worst performance among equivalent Western democracies. As I said at the time: “By contrast, elections in many newer democracies are seen by experts to perform far better in the global comparison, such as in Lithuania (ranked 4th), Costa Rica (6th), and Slovenia (8th).” The critique of THE rankings The op ed by Professor Reynolds triggered dozens of news reprints, thousands of tweets, and a hail-storm of debate, some deploring politics in the Tar Heel state, others challenging the evidence for the claims. Some questioned the PEI global ratings based on so-called ‘sniff’ tests, a fancy way of saying that several cases in the dataset did not reflect the prior assumptions of the readers. Now no scientific data is ever perfect. Methods can always be improved. Skepticism is the nature of science. We believe that the PEI has learnt and continuously improved its methodology as it has developed over time – and we are committed to do so further. Several concrete example can be given: Are cases comparable? Following Gary King’s suggested methods, EIP includes ‘anchoring vignettes’ designed to improve our understanding of the benchmarks used when expert make their evaluations of complex issues in diverse contexts. Following Gary King’s suggested methods, EIP includes ‘anchoring vignettes’ designed to improve our understanding of the benchmarks used when expert make their evaluations of complex issues in diverse contexts. Can we improve the methodology of expert surveys? Of course. To share awareness of best practices, methods, and standards in the production of expert surveys, and to learn how best to improve our work, last year EIP organized two international workshops in conjunction with IPSA in Poznan and APSA in Philadelphia, engaging leading scholars and practitioners from organizations such as V-Dem, Polity, Freedom House, the Carter Center, IFES, and UNDP. Of course. To share awareness of best practices, methods, and standards in the production of expert surveys, and to learn how best to improve our work, last year EIP organized two international workshops in conjunction with IPSA in Poznan and APSA in Philadelphia, engaging leading scholars and practitioners from organizations such as V-Dem, Polity, Freedom House, the Carter Center, IFES, and UNDP. Are issues corrected? As with any dataset, any issues are corrected in the bi-annual releases. Two cases included in PEI 3.0 (March 2015) – North Korea and Trinidad and Tobago – were dropped five months later in the subsequent dataset release because we had doubts about the technical responses in these two cases, as noted transparently in successive EIP publications. As with any dataset, any issues are corrected in the bi-annual releases. Two cases included in PEI 3.0 (March 2015) – North Korea and Trinidad and Tobago – were dropped five months later in the subsequent dataset release because we had doubts about the technical responses in these two cases, as noted transparently in successive EIP publications. Can we compare US state and cross-national data? Media commentary has focused obsessively upon the exact ranking of particular American states vis-a-vis other countries. But the Electoral Integrity Project publications have not made these comparisons. There are two separate datasets. The long series of EIP publications have compared nation-states with each other in the global survey (PEI-4.5). The project has also compared American states with each other in the sub-national survey (PEI-US-2016). But these are separate enterprises. Whether it is appropriate to make such comparisons remains an open question. Media commentary has focused obsessively upon the exact ranking of particular American states vis-a-vis other countries. But the Electoral Integrity Project publications have not made these comparisons. There are two separate datasets. The long series of EIP publications have compared nation-states with each other in the global survey (PEI-4.5). The project has also compared American states with each other in the sub-national survey (PEI-US-2016). But these are separate enterprises. Whether it is appropriate to make such comparisons remains an open question. What do we measure? Moreover, EIP makes no claims about rating democracy – EIP measures electoral integrity, which is far from equivalent. Liberal democracies require effective elections – but also many other institutions which facilitate competition and participation. Similarly, electoral integrity requires that states have the capacity for effective governance, to prevent unintentional problems arising from maladministration and human errors, as well as democratic principles safeguarding basic human rights and preventing the abuse of power. Moreover, EIP makes no claims about rating democracy – EIP measures electoral integrity, which is far from equivalent. Liberal democracies require effective elections – but also many other institutions which facilitate competition and participation. Similarly, electoral integrity requires that states have the capacity for effective governance, to prevent unintentional problems arising from maladministration and human errors, as well as democratic principles safeguarding basic human rights and preventing the abuse of power. Are EIP's methods transparent? The project has published the datasets, codebooks, and public reports for each successive release, and archived the older versions, so that the results are open to public scrutiny. We encourage analysts to use the datasets and to provide feedback in order to improve the process, including at the annual workshops, professional conferences, and outreach talks and events worldwide. The project has published the datasets, codebooks, and public reports for each successive release, and archived the older versions, so that the results are open to public scrutiny. We encourage analysts to use the datasets and to provide feedback in order to improve the process, including at the annual workshops, professional conferences, and outreach talks and events worldwide. Are EIP's measures definitive? Absolutely not. We stand fully by the methods and evidence. But as with any other social and political indicators of complex phenomenon, the data should obviously be compared with alternative sources of independent evidence, treated as the starting point for any diagnosis, not the ending point. Therefore social media commentary about problems in elections has too commonly distracted us with shiny baubles, reflecting partisan click-bait, fake news, and simplistic attacks on red herrings, mixing up all these complex issues. Instead of falling for these sorts of distraction, anyone concerned about democracy should engage seriously in a dialogue about the problems which need to be addressed to strengthen elections at home and abroad, an issue at the heart of American values. In particular, there has been no serious rebuttal to the evidence that US elections are seriously flawed in certain respects. But when there are disputes about the validity of any evidence, rather than employing dubious ‘sniff tests’, social scientists usually seek to compare the results using two or more independent sources of data which measure identical or equivalent concepts. The more the agreement among independent studies, all other things being equal, the more confidence we should have in the evidence. Like pieces of a jig-saw, triangulation is the name of the game. Comparing independent sources of evidence So are American elections actually as exceptionally bad as claimed? Here for evidence we can turn to the Variety of Democracies (V-Dem) project based at the University of Gothenburg, an independent academic study involving a team of over 50 social scientists on six continents. The latest version of the dataset (V6.2) covers 350 indicators and 30 democracy indices in 173 countries annually from 1900 to 2012. This project has been widely acknowledged; for example, last year it received one of the most prestigious dataset awards in American political science. What does the V-Dem evidence show about how the quality of American elections compared with contests around the rest of the world? V-Dem gauges the quality of elections using dozens of indicators such as those concerning voting rights, campaign media, the extent of any problems of opposition boycotts and violence, and the capacity of the electoral officials. For a summary measure, V-Dem asks its expert respondents: “Taking all aspects of the pre-election period, election day, and the post-election process into account, would you consider this national election to be free and fair?” Responses to this item, averaged for the period from 2000 to 2012, can be analyzed in 161 countries. Now the concepts, instrument, time-period, and methods used by V-Dem and EIP are not identical, by any means. The concept of ‘electoral integrity’ is not the same thing as whether elections are ‘free and fair’. V-Dem seeks retrospective evaluations whereas EIP is contemporaneous. Nevertheless, the concepts are close enough to provide comparisons. |
Not all fat cells, such as the ones seen in adipose tissue above, are created equal. Researchers think directing fat cells derived from bone marrow to turn into certain types of fat cell could help reduce the risk for a range of diseases. Photo by Jose Luis Calvo/Shutterstock AURORA, Ohio, March 1 (UPI) -- Based on a new finding that some fat cells are produced by stem cells in bone marrow, some researchers think motivating the type of fat cells they become could help in the treatment of obesity. The researchers think manipulating the type of fat cells in the body could reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, gall bladder disease, and other conditions, possibly including obesity. Previous research with mice has shown fat-storing cells produced by bone marrow stem cells promote inflammation and hinder the ability of some cells to respond to insulin. "Our study suggests that it may be the type of fat-storing cells produced in our bodies that determines risk for disease, rather than the amount of fat," Dr. Dwight Klemm, a researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, said in a press release. For the study, published in the FASEB Journal, researchers recruited participants who had received bone marrow transplants several months before the study. Using samples of fat tissue from the participants, the researchers analyzed DNA from fat cells to determine if they were from the patient or from the donor, in which case they would have originated in transplanted bone marrow. Among donors, roughly 35 percent of fat cells were generated from donor marrow. "This paradigm highlights the possibility of new strategies to prevent and reverse fat-related chronic disease by controlling the production of different types of fat-storing cells," Klemm said. |
The Malabar House City hopping by private jet, mingling with maharajas in their palaces, hanging out with world famous artists in their ateliers or being serenaded by a group of classical musicians in the middle of the desert – for a tiny, elite group, travel in India is far removed from the backpacker trail. Inexpensive food and lodging are still readily available in India, and the country still draws a patchouli-scented crowd. But a subset of globetrotters are booking lavish holidays that stretch into six figures, taking advantage of India’s fast-growing “luxury infrastructure” – goods and services popular with India’s own expanding pool of deep-pocketed businessmen and travel connoisseurs. Pallavi Shah, the owner of Our Personal Guest, a New York travel consultancy which specializes in bespoke India holidays, says the options for the luxury traveler have multiplied in the past 5 to 10 years. Previously, she said, “travelers to India looking for extravagance were limited to getting it by staying at five-star hotels from a few chains.” Choices were few, and “finding a private plane was a struggle,” she said. “But today, there are several smaller high-end hotel chains, and a battalion of private jets to pick from.” As the options for fancy travel to India have increased in the last decade, so have the number of U.S. visitors, according to the India Ministry of Tourism. Around 916,000 U.S. passport holders traveled to India last year, up from 348,000 in 2000. The winter is peak travel season in India, as blistering temperatures cool, and comfortable weather stretches into early March, depending on the area. If money is no object, here are four ways to make the trip. Adventures in Art – New Delhi, Jan. 22-27 Focused around an annual art fair in New Delhi, this trip will bring 10 guests into the homes of India’s top art buyers to see their collections, introduce travelers to critically acclaimed artists like Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher in their own studios and bring guests on private tours of India’s art museums led by the museums’ curators. The trip also includes meals with art experts like Amin Jaffer, the international director of Asian art at Christie’s and lodging at the Oberoi hotel. The woman behind the tour, Karen Stone Talwar, previously worked at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bodhi Art Gallery. Price: $8,000 per person, excluding airfare. Information: karenstonetalwar@gmail.com Ten days in Northeast India: Varanasi, Calcutta, Darjeeling & Sikkim Remote Lands, Inc. Travelers will visit the usual tourist destinations in the northeast, including the Ramnager Fort in Varanasi and a tea plantation in Darjeeling, but will also choose from several unique experiences in each city. In Darjeeling, for example, they can stay in a palace on the edge of a mountain, as guests of the Maharaja of Burdwan and his wife, Pussie. In Kolkata, they can attend a cocktail party at the home of the royalty, meet the city’s intellectual and socialite circuit, dine at the world’s oldest private polo club while watching a match or be a guest at a fancy Indian wedding. In Gangtok, they can dine with Sikkim’s remaining royalty, or have dinner in the home of a top local chef. Along the way, they’ll stay at the Glenburn Tea Estate outside of Darjeeling and the Oberoi in Calcutta. Price: Starts at $15,000 per person for 10 days, excluding airfare Contact: www.remotelands.com Sixteen days in Mumbai, Varanasi, Rajasthan and Delhi The customized trip includes an elaborate private puja (prayer ceremony) in Varanasi by Dr. Kalyan Krishna, an expert in Hinduism and rituals from a prominent local family, a meeting with the designer Jamini Ahluwalia in Mumbai for a briefing about the India fashion scene, private concerts by musicians in Jaisalmer and Jodhpur and a historian as a guide on all historical visits. All travel between cities is by private plane. Price: $200,000 for five people. Includes travel throughout India but not international airfare. Contact: www.ourpersonalguest.com A week bicycling through Kerala. Travelers stay in small luxury properties, like the Relais & Châteaux Malabar House in Fort Cochin, and bike 50 to 60 kilometers, or 30 to 40 miles, a day, past coconut and banana trees along the Arabian Sea and through tea and cardamom plantations where they can mingle with elephants. Riders go through the Western Ghats and along Vembanad Lake, where they spend the night in a private houseboat. They also visit local homes to learn about skills like the art of mat weaving. Price: Starts at $9,000 a person, excluding airfare. Contact: www.butterfield.com |
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump made a lot of promises, and while some of them, like the Big, Beautiful Wall, have thus far proven elusive, he’s managed to keep several that aren’t getting much airtime in the unprecedentedly negative coverage of him. One thing he’s doing quite well at following through on is his promise to get the government out of the way of businesses. In fact, he’s doing it better than any president going back to Jimmy Carter — and, yes, that includes Ronald Reagan. Peter Boyer at The Weekly Standard provides an analysis of just how well Trump is doing on slashing “job-killing red tape all across our economy,” as Trump put it in a speech a few weeks ago. “We have stopped or eliminated more regulations in the last eight months than any president has done during an entire term. It’s not even close,” said Trump — and as Boyer highlights, the president appears to have that fact about right. The Mercatus Center’s Patrick McLaughlin, Boyer explains, studied the the total “output of regulatory restrictions promulgated in the last several presidencies, going back to Jimmy Carter,” and found that Trump had managed to make the net increase of regulatory restrictions “zero.” No other president managed to get through their full term without raising the number of regulatory restrictions, including Reagan. |
Egypt’s Cultural Scene Under Threat? Several weeks ago, President Morsi appointed a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Alaa Abdel-Aziz, as Minister of Culture. Initially, this sparked concerns that the Muslim Brotherhood intended to ‘purge’ Egypt’s cultural scene by installing Islamists into influential positions in the Ministry. These concerns were quickly dismissed by the government as absurd. Yet in just few weeks, the new Minister has fired the heads of the Cairo Opera House, the Fine Arts Sector and the Egyptian General Book Authority. The Minister also attempted to fire the head of the Academy of Arts, but the law states that he can only be fired by a Presidential decree. The sackings were yesterday followed by the resignation of the Secretary General of the Supreme Council for Culture, Said Tawfik, over what he called “a plan to destroy Egyptian culture.” The Supreme Council for Culture is arguably one of the most important parts of the Ministry, as it is responsible for setting policies and organizing activities. In a show of support for those who were sacked, workers and artists at the Cairo Opera House cancelled a planned opera show – Aida – and announced a strike in solidarity with the sacked head of the Opera House and to protest the ‘Brotherhoodization’ of Egypt’s culture. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lMlAm5dMzz0] As the curtains opened, the audience was surprised to see artists and employees of the Opera House holding signs against the recent decisions by the Ministry. The artistic director and principal conductor of the Opera House then stated, “In solidarity with Dr. Ines Abdel-Dayem, head of the Cairo Opera House, and with respect for her role, we, the artists and staff of the Cairo Opera House, have decided to refrain from performing the opera Aida tonight. This is the first step towards halting all the activities of the opera house until the removal of the culture minister, who has been making arbitrary decisions against prominent leaders in the ministry, in an attempt to change the identity of this country.” Yet the audience was not upset. They did not ask for refunds – which were offered by the Opera House. Instead, they supported the decisions of the artists, as even the audience feels that Egypt’s cultural and arts scene is under threat. Today, rumours and reports indicated that the Minister may appoint Noor El-Din (known as Khamees), a television host on the Muslim Brotherhood Channel Misr 25, as head of the Opera House. Khamees is often featured and mocked on the popular satirical television show, Al-Bernameg, by Bassem Youssef. Though these rumours will likely prove untrue, it is concerning that his name has even been floated by the Ministry as a potential candidate. The government needs to act quickly and decisively in response to the Minister of Culture’s recent decisions. Appointing a member of the Muslim Brotherhood as Minister was a decision that signals an intrusion in Egypt’s cultural sector, which Islamists may see as a threat. If the President truly claims to represent all Egyptians, then he should appoint Ministers that are also representative of all Egyptians. The art of storytelling – whether it be through paintings, opera shows, songs or books – is at risk. Attacking people’s ability to freely express themselves through art would ultimately betray what millions of Egyptians desperately called for in 2011. The future of an art that has been practised for thousands of years is uncertain, but one thing is for sure: Egyptians should not and will not allow this continued intrusion to occur. Subscribe to our newsletter |
Ask nearly any woman and she will be able to tell you the difficulties she has faced as a female. From catcalling and being leered at by strangers to sexual assault, the tangible disadvantages of being a female in the patriarchy are obvious, especially with recent movements such as the #MeToo campaign. While these female-based equality movements tend to be based around solidarity and community, it is incredibly difficult to find a male-based movement with these positive characteristics. The Meninist movement and men’s rights Internet forums seem primarily focused on blaming women for men’s difficulties in the patriarchy, lashing out at others. Bluntly, they make male-focused “equality” movements seem aggressive and harmful. But with a lack of safe and supportive spaces to share their suffering, paired with a societal expectation to be unemotional, sexually aggressive, and violent, men are facing hardships in silence. To be frank, my heart hurts. I am tired of hearing men having to laugh off their experiences of rape and sexual assault. I am tired of those close to me choosing to end their lives. After all, if you’re supposed to be unemotional, how are you able to tell if you’re depressed? The pervasive idea that men and women equality groups are in direct opposition needs to come to end. Just as it is vital for women to have safe spaces to share the adversities they are forced to endure, men face unique challenges in a patriarchal society that tells us all we are never good enough. I am sick of seeing men suffer alone and in silence. Toxic masculinity and the patriarchy hurt us all in different ways and to different degrees, but everyone would benefit from its demise. — Emily Mozzone, Lead Designer & Advice Columnist |
Air India has a combined workforce of 27,000 and labor unions with a history of strikes and grounded flights.(PTI) India plans to exclude more than half of the $7.6 billion debt owed by the struggling national airline to help burnish its appeal as Prime Minister Narendra Modi presses ahead with a sale, people with knowledge of the matter said.The government proposes to transfer all of Air India Ltd.’s non-aviation assets and short-term loans of as much as 300 billion rupees ($4.7 billion) to a separate company, readying the airline for prospective buyers, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing confidential information. Authorities aim to kick off the bidding process before March 31, they said. Such a move would mean the government absorbing the money-losing firm’s working capital loans, real estate from Tokyo to London and two hotels. The buyer will be left with aviation-related assets and about 200 billion rupees of loans borrowed to acquire aircraft, the people said. A successful sale of Air India is crucial for Modi, who wants to showcase his commitment to reducing the state’s role in business after many of his predecessors failed to dispose of the carrier in the face of stiff political opposition. A deal would help cement Modi’s image as a business-friendly leader after Moody’s Investor Service upgraded the country’s credit rating on Nov. 17. State Support Air India has a combined workforce of 27,000 and labor unions with a history of strikes and grounded flights. It has been unprofitable since its 2007 merger with state-owned domestic operator Indian Airlines Ltd. The company made an operating profit of about 1 billion rupees in the year through March 2016, primarily aided by a slump in oil prices. It still posted a net loss of 38.4 billion rupees, according to the government. In 2012, the government bailed out the ailing carrier with 300 billion rupees in funds, guaranteeing the carrier’s loans and promising interest payment on some debt. But Air India’s need for working capital exceeded that. Foreign airlines will be allowed to bid, though their holding will be capped at 49 percent, the people said. IndiGo, India’s biggest commercial airline that is operated by InterGlobe Aviation Ltd., said in June it was willing to buy Air India’s international operations, or even the entire airline business, while travel and aviation firm Bird Group has shown interest in bidding for the carrier’s ground handling business. |
Buy Photo Emmanuel Omogbo of CSU holds on tight to the ball after rebounding the ball in a game against UNLV at Moby Arena Wednesday, January 6, 2016. CSU can still finish with the Nos. 6, 7, 8 or 9 seeds in the Mountain West tournament. (Photo: Austin Humphreys/The Coloradoan)Buy Photo CSU can finish with the Nos. 6, 7, 8 or 9 seeds in next week's Mountain West men’s basketball tournament in Las Vegas, depending on how it and fellow conference teams fare Saturday. One game remains in the regular season, a 2 p.m. tipoff against Air Force at Moby Arena. Colorado State University (15-15, 7-10 MW) needs a win and for UNLV (at San Diego State) and Utah State (vs. Fresno State) to lose in order to claim the No. 6 seed. CONFERENCE: CSU's Eustachy sees both sides in flap over MW tourney Should this happen, the Rams and Rebels would finish with the same conference record, but CSU would get the tiebreaker because it went 0-1 against Fresno State (the highest seeded Mountain West team either school had a different record against) while UNLV went 0-2. CSU and UNLV split their season series. If CSU and Utah State win and UNLV loses, creating a three-way tie, or if all three schools earn victories Saturday, the Rams would fall to the No. 8 seed. In the case CSU and UNLV win and Utah State loses, the Rams would be the No. 7 seed. A CSU loss to Air Force would drop it to the No. 9 seed, regardless of what Utah State does, a spot behind Wyoming. Mountain West tournament seeding scenarios for the rest of the conference are as follows.The top five teams get a first-round bye. San Diego State (22-8, 15-2) : Locked in at No. 1. : Locked in at No. 1. Fresno State (21-9, 12-5) : Bulldogs clinch the No. 2 seed with a victory or a Boise State loss (at San Jose State). A loss and a Boise State victory would drop Fresno State to the No. 3 seed. : Bulldogs clinch the No. 2 seed with a victory or a Boise State loss (at San Jose State). A loss and a Boise State victory would drop Fresno State to the No. 3 seed. Boise State (20-10, 11-6) : Broncos clinch the No. 2 seed with a victory and Fresno State loss. Boise State will be the No. 3 seed with a loss or Fresno State victory. : Broncos clinch the No. 2 seed with a victory and Fresno State loss. Boise State will be the No. 3 seed with a loss or Fresno State victory. Nevada (18-11, 10-7) : Earns No. 4 seed with a victory (at New Mexico). Wolf Pack falls to No. 5 with a loss. : Earns No. 4 seed with a victory (at New Mexico). Wolf Pack falls to No. 5 with a loss. New Mexico (16-14, 9-8) : Lobos will earn the No. 4 seed with a victory. A loss and a UNLV loss will place New Mexico at No. 5. Should it lose and UNLV win, New Mexico falls to No. 6. : Lobos will earn the No. 4 seed with a victory. A loss and a UNLV loss will place New Mexico at No. 5. Should it lose and UNLV win, New Mexico falls to No. 6. UNLV (17-13, 8-9) : Rebels can earn the No. 5 seed with a victory and a New Mexico loss. If the Rebels and New Mexico win, UNLV takes the No. 6 seed. A UNLV loss combined with wins by Utah State and CSU will also place it at No. 6. Should UNLV and Utah State lose, but CSU wins, the Rebels will be the No. 7 seed. : Rebels can earn the No. 5 seed with a victory and a New Mexico loss. If the Rebels and New Mexico win, UNLV takes the No. 6 seed. A UNLV loss combined with wins by Utah State and CSU will also place it at No. 6. Should UNLV and Utah State lose, but CSU wins, the Rebels will be the No. 7 seed. Utah State (15-13, 17-10) : A victory gives the Aggies the No. 7 seed. A loss coupled with a loss by UNLV and victory by CSU will place Utah State in the No. 9 spot. : A victory gives the Aggies the No. 7 seed. A loss coupled with a loss by UNLV and victory by CSU will place Utah State in the No. 9 spot. Wyoming (14-7, 7-11) : A loss by CSU and Utah State will give the Cowboys the No. 7 seed. A Utah State loss and a CSU victory place Wyoming at No. 8. If the Aggies and Rams win, Wyoming will remain at No. 9. Wyoming has no regular-season games remaining. : A loss by CSU and Utah State will give the Cowboys the No. 7 seed. A Utah State loss and a CSU victory place Wyoming at No. 8. If the Aggies and Rams win, Wyoming will remain at No. 9. Wyoming has no regular-season games remaining. Air Force (14-16, 5-12) : Locked in at No. 10. : Locked in at No. 10. San Jose State (8-21, 3-14): Locked in at No. 11. For insight and analysis on athletics around Northern Colorado and the Mountain West, follow sports columnist Matt L. Stephens at twitter.com/mattstephens and facebook.com/stephensreporting. School Conf. Overall San Diego State 15-2 22-8 Fresno State 12-5 21-9 Boise State 11-6 20-10 Nevada 10-7 18-11 New Mexico 9-8 16-14 UNLV 8-9 17-13 Utah State 7-10 15-13 CSU 7-10 15-15 Wyoming 7-11 14-17 Air Force 5-12 14-16 San Jose State 3=14 8-21 Saturday's games Air Force at CSU, 2 p.m. Boise State at San Jose State, 3 p.m. Fresno State at Utah State, 7 p.m. UNLV at San Diego State, 8 p.m. Nevada at New Mexico, 8 p.m. |
How gullible do the Americans think we are? Do they actually think that we Pakistanis would believe the lies they are spreading about Osama Bin Laden’s tragic murder and his demeaning burial at sea? We are just too smart to be made a fool like this. There was no Osama in that compound in Abbottabad. The Americans killed a look-alike. The real Osama died of gall-bladder failure in a bush in Sudan in 2002. What’s more, his supposed wives that were captured from the Abbottabad compound too were look-alikes, and so were the children. But it doesn’t stop here. We Pakistanis know that the news about Osama’s death from gall-bladder ailment in Sudan in 2002 is also suspect. That guy too was a look-alike. So, yes, it can safely be said that the guy they killed in Abbottabad in 2011 was actually a look-alike of the look-alike. So when did Osama die if not in 2002 or 2011? According to a super famous journalist and TV anchor, Tipu Sultan, who interviewed Osama in an impoverished disco in Kandahar in 1998, Osama was actually dead at the time of the interview. He said that that the guy he talked to was actually a man called Abdul Al-Bakir Al-Shaikh Al-Qaedawallah, an expert Osama look-alike who told him (off the record) that Osama actually died in 1991 of malaria in the jungles of Congo. Nevertheless, there is every likelihood that the Congo guy was a look-alike as well. So, in other words, the guy who the Americans claimed of killing in Abbottabad was really a look-alike of a look-alike of a look-alike of a look-alike. But if we really come to the truth and reality, things stop seeming so complicated. So what is this truth and reality? Simple. There never was an Osama. He was never born. It was all an American concoction. The character of Osama bin Laden was first conceived by America’s fifteenth President James Buchannan in 1859 when, along with the Queen of England, he decided to begin a new crusade against Muslims. According to the well-known Muslim historian, Naseem Hijazi, the British monarchy had accused a man called Osama bin Laden for financing and instigating the 1857 Indian army mutiny against the British imperialists. The Americans and the British then claimed to have suppressed the mutiny by killing Osama in a daring raid. He was claimed to have been hiding in the hookah lounge of the last Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Zafar denied the accusations, saying no such man was seen on his radar. The British exiled Zafar to Burma and destroyed the radar, saying there was no such thing as a radar. By the way, the guy the British claimed was Zafar was not exiled to Burma. He was only a look-alike. The real Zafar died of dengue fever in Guatemala where he had gone to raise an army against the British and to study tropical plants. Famous thinker and horticulturalist, Noam Chomsky, confirms this. This concocted episode was rightly expunged from the history books by Muslim historians, until America brought the invisible Osama character back to life in the 1990s. They had originally planned to use him as a bogey to invade Canada, but changed their plans when they got jealous of all the amazing and unprecedented economic, cultural and military progress taking place in Afghanistan under the Taliban and Pakistan under a bunch of handsome military men. Thus, not surprisingly, the 9/11 episode happened. We all know who was responsible. Not a single Jew died in that attack. Neither did any animists or pagans, nor any Hindus, Christians and Sikhs. The truth is, only Muslims died in that attack. The proof? Simple. Log on to YouTube and check out brilliant, award-winning documentaries, ‘Loose Nut’ and ‘The Drivels.’ Popcorn’s on the house. The guy the western media showed praising the 9/11 attacks on video was not Osama. He was just some Arab skiing enthusiast telling (with gestures) his Afghan friends about his latest skiing trip in the Alps. There never was an Osama. Just like there is no Mulla Omar, no Taliban, no Al-Qaeda. They’re all American concoctions. Furthermore, America never won the war against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s breakup too was a concoction. Soviet Union is still alive and thriving. We don’t hear about it is because the Jewish controlled media has blocked all news about the Soviet Union. That is because the Afghan and Arab mujahideen that fought against it, liberated Afghanistan and conquered Soviet Union and turned it into a caliphate. That’s why America’s next target will be Vladimir Putin (real name Valeed Amir Butinov). So if one day you hear that Americans have assassinated Putin, don’t believe it. The real Putin died of kidney ailment in 1045 AD. The President and Prime Minister of Pakistan should resign for making America make fools of Pakistanis. The army is not to be blamed. The radar that did not pick up American helicopters on May 2 was not a radar. It was a look-alike of the real thing that the Americans didn’t give us. Only the mighty Imran Khan hinted at this while picking his nose on TV the other day. It was a sign: ‘Dig deep, dear patriots. You have nothing to lose but your heads.’ Well said, Imran (real name Genghis), because after all, who needs heads when the knees can perform the same function. |
About Hey guys!! My name is Seth and I designed "The Plan of Salvation" board game! It is an exciting game where all the players race through life hoping to attain a greater glory in heaven! While based on Christian - LDS values, all people can learn something new! Bad choices in life slow you down while good choices give you a boost! The game is based off of "Chutes and Ladders" (originally called "Snakes and Ladders"). Did you know that "Chutes and Ladders" originated in India where they called the game "The Ladder to Salvation"? India recognized the moral teachings within the game that has been forgotten for too long! "The Plan of Salvation" board game is appropriate for all age groups. It trains the mind in God's word while teaching people about the consequences of their decisions. This is a great game to play as a family. The in addition to "good deeds" and "bad deeds" that move you forwards or backwards, there are also "scripture chase" and "personal question" squares that keep everyone in competition for the right answers! I've shopped around for difference manufacturers but it is very expensive to produce board games. The minimum order quantity for my current manufacturer is 500 units!! The cost comes out to $13,500 on my end!! I don't have the money to risk buying $13,500 worth of board games and hoping they sell! Thats where you come in! I need you to help prove that there is a demand for religious board games! There are too many adult games and entertainment in the world and too few wholesome games that teach morals. Please support this effort to provide quality games to families. I can't do any of this without the minimum $13,500 so I can order the first batch. Please donate today. |
Three Democratic lawmakers who have urged their party to turn toward an economy-focused agenda are set to headline a high-profile Democratic fundraiser in Iowa next month. Reps. Seth Moulton (Mass.), Tim Ryan (Ohio) and Cheri Bustos Cheryl (Cheri) Lea BustosAssault weapons ban push tests Dem support House Dems unveil initial GOP targets in 2020 Progressives to target Dem reps in 2020 primary fights MORE (Ill.) will make appearances at the Polk County Steak Fry in Des Moines, the county's Democratic Party announced Wednesday. All three lawmakers have pushed the Democratic Party in recent months to tone down its criticism of President Trump's populist rhetoric and embrace an economic message geared toward working-class voters. ADVERTISEMENT “Clearly, we need to get back to an economic message,” Moulton told the Des Moines Register in an interview Tuesday. “We need to listen. We need to hear the frustrations of people out there who are losing their jobs, who not making the wages they used to make, and we need to talk about real solutions.” Moulton and Ryan have been among the fiercest critics of their party's leadership. Ryan challenged Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for her House minority leader role in November, and Moulton has repeatedly called for Pelosi to step down from the party's leadership. Ryan and Moulton's scheduled appearances in Iowa also fuel speculation that the two men could mount bids to challenge Trump in 2020. Other potential Democratic contenders who have made stops in Iowa already include Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Bernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid MORE (I-Vt.), who ran in 2016, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar Amy Jean KlobucharBernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid Hillary Clinton says she 'can't imagine' running for president again MORE (D-Minn.), who has been the subject of speculation about a White House run. |
A toast provides simple feedback about an operation in a small popup. It only fills the amount of space required for the message and the current activity remains visible and interactive. Toasts automatically disappear after a timeout. For example, clicking Send on an email triggers a "Sending message..." toast, as shown in the following screen capture: If user response to a status message is required, consider instead using a Notification. The Basics First, instantiate a Toast object with one of the makeText() methods. This method takes three parameters: the application Context , the text message, and the duration for the toast. It returns a properly initialized Toast object. You can display the toast notification with show() , as shown in the following example: Kotlin val text = "Hello toast!" val duration = Toast.LENGTH_SHORT val toast = Toast.makeText(applicationContext, text, duration) toast.show() Java Context context = getApplicationContext(); CharSequence text = "Hello toast!"; int duration = Toast.LENGTH_SHORT; Toast toast = Toast.makeText(context, text, duration); toast.show(); This example demonstrates everything you need for most toast notifications. You should rarely need anything else. You may, however, want to position the toast differently or even use your own layout instead of a simple text message. The following sections describe how you can do these things. You can also chain your methods and avoid holding on to the Toast object, like this: Kotlin Toast.makeText(context, text, duration).show() Java Toast.makeText(context, text, duration).show(); Positioning your Toast A standard toast notification appears near the bottom of the screen, centered horizontally. You can change this position with the setGravity(int, int, int) method. This accepts three parameters: a Gravity constant, an x-position offset, and a y-position offset. For example, if you decide that the toast should appear in the top-left corner, you can set the gravity like this: Kotlin toast.setGravity(Gravity.TOP or Gravity.LEFT, 0, 0) Java toast.setGravity(Gravity.TOP|Gravity.LEFT, 0, 0); If you want to nudge the position to the right, increase the value of the second parameter. To nudge it down, increase the value of the last parameter. Creating a Custom Toast View If a simple text message isn't enough, you can create a customized layout for your toast notification. To create a custom layout, define a View layout, in XML or in your application code, and pass the root View object to the setView(View) method. The following snippet contains a customized layout for a toast notification (saved as layout/custom_toast.xml ): <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:id="@+id/custom_toast_container" android:orientation="horizontal" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:padding="8dp" android:background="#DAAA" > <ImageView android:src="@drawable/droid" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_marginRight="8dp" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/text" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:textColor="#FFF" /> </LinearLayout> Notice that the ID of the LinearLayout element is "custom_toast_container". You must use this ID and the ID of the XML layout file "custom_toast" to inflate the layout, as shown here: Kotlin val inflater = layoutInflater val container: ViewGroup = findViewById(R.id.custom_toast_container) val layout: ViewGroup = inflater.inflate(R.layout.custom_toast, container) val text: TextView = layout.findViewById(R.id.text) text.text = "This is a custom toast" with (Toast(applicationContext)) { setGravity(Gravity.CENTER_VERTICAL, 0, 0) duration = Toast.LENGTH_LONG view = layout show() } Java LayoutInflater inflater = getLayoutInflater(); View layout = inflater.inflate(R.layout.custom_toast, (ViewGroup) findViewById(R.id.custom_toast_container)); TextView text = (TextView) layout.findViewById(R.id.text); text.setText("This is a custom toast"); Toast toast = new Toast(getApplicationContext()); toast.setGravity(Gravity.CENTER_VERTICAL, 0, 0); toast.setDuration(Toast.LENGTH_LONG); toast.setView(layout); toast.show(); First, retrieve the LayoutInflater with getLayoutInflater() (or getSystemService() ), and then inflate the layout from XML using inflate(int, ViewGroup) . The first parameter is the layout resource ID and the second is the root View. You can use this inflated layout to find more View objects in the layout, so now capture and define the content for the ImageView and TextView elements. Finally, create a new Toast with Toast(Context) and set some properties of the toast, such as the gravity and duration. Then call setView(View) and pass it the inflated layout. You can now display the toast with your custom layout by calling show() . |
Hunter S. Thompson is one of my favorite authors and one of the smartest humorists of the last hundred years. He also shot himself in the head once he reached his mid-sixties. I don’t think he viewed himself as a humorist per se. Maybe I don’t fully understand the implications of that descriptor. I think of people like Johnathan Swift, Ben Franklin, Voltaire, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Kurt Vonnegut P.J. O’Rourke, and Hunter when I think of humorists. Humorists are writers who have taken a step back from society, notice that “Hey! We’re all in a big silly absurd scenario with no rules!” then they write about it in a savory and wry style which usually elicits dark chuckles. The distinction from comedians is that comedians tell jokes and receive explicit laughter. Humorists write in solitude and perform ritualistic acts of love to a keyboard or paper to elicit secret laughs from themselves. Of course, once they hone in on their craft and have an audience they know others will be reading and perhaps glean some insight or catharsis from their private twisted musings. Back to Hunter. He possessed a lot of the characteristics that all of these other authors possessed. A wildly different paradigm from the common one of his era. He could do more drugs than the Bay area hippies and then outshoot any of the rural roughnecks whom he could then outdrink in the dive bars of the Rockies. The people in charge were all false and manipulative powermongers, and Hunter was always free. He could quote Fitzgerald from memory or talk about Proust, then take LSD with the Hells Angels and ride a motorcycle at 70 MPH down the coastal highway. This is talent. Albeit not very monetizable talent in our economy. So he wrote it all out and found a way to profit. Sheer genius. Then he started following politics and wrote books about it. “Generation of Swine” and “Fear and Loathing on The Campaign Trail.” True to his style they were drug- and booze- laced accounts of the absurdity of the political game. Then they lapsed into misanthropy. Then full blown depression. Yes, his substance abuse and addictions directly contributed to his mostly planned suicide. But he was addicted to these substances, not only for the thrill, that wears off after a while anyways. He was addicted because he was medicating himself. From politics. Yes, yes, this is all my opinion, but it became very clear to me when I was reading “Generation of Swine” that he was deeply depressed that politics was still how humans governed themselves. Entire pages were just accounts and ledgers of all the bets he made on various elections of federal and state level across the country. Don’t give in to politics. Create instead. He had to make it a game to even cope with the fact that nobody was really free in this country, that the people in charge were all false and manipulative powermongers, and if there was one thing that Hunter always was, it was free. No matter the scenario. Even were he to be strait-jacketed and tossed in the hole, his mind could never be pinned down. He knew this and knew that others too could actualize their freedom and let their freak flag fly, so to speak. Except that in his eyes our country was, and always would be, run by straw-haired, false-faced frat boys turned politician. The antithesis of freedom. This is how he died. Years before he even killed himself. In essence, he gave his freedom away to the fact that politics was the end-all-be-all and that it would always be so. He lost hope in freedom and found solace in Wild Turkey. As smart as Hunter was, he was so dumb in this regard. I wish he could’ve seen the obvious truth that he exemplified in his life so well. The Takeaway. If you are truly free and do not delegate your willpower and agency of self to any outside party, you can never be stifled. And that is true freedom. And from freedom comes great art. Be smart, and don’t give in to politics. Create instead. It’ll be more fun, and provide more happiness. Reprinted from Innocent Ideas. |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court struck down on Friday limits on individual contributions to independent political advocacy groups that want to spend money directly to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress. The unanimous ruling by nine federal appellate judges held the limits violated constitutional free-speech rights under the First Amendment. The decision cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in January in another campaign finance case. The two rulings together are expected to unleash a flood of money ahead of the congressional elections in November and in other political campaigns such as the 2012 presidential contest. Two months ago, the high court ruled 5-4 that corporations can spend freely to support or oppose federal candidates on the grounds limits violated free-speech rights. President Barack Obama opposed the decision for giving special interests more power. The appeals court based its decision in large part on the Supreme Court’s ruling. It struck down limits on how much money the nonprofit groups can collect from donors for political ads and other campaign spending. Under the limits, an individual can give up to $5,000 per year in contributions to the groups that plan to use the money to support or oppose a federal candidate. The decision was a victory for a group called SpeechNow.org, which said it intended to support candidates for federal office that share its views on the right to free speech and freedom of assembly. The contribution limits violated the First Amendment by preventing individuals from donating in excess of the limits and by prohibiting SpeechNow.org from accepting donations in excess of the limits, Chief Judge David Sentelle said. The ruling was a defeat for the Federal Election Commission, a federal agency in charge of oversight involving the campaign finance laws. It adopted the regulations at issue in 2005. The appeals court upheld reporting requirements covering donors and spending by such groups. The Supreme Court upheld similar disclosure requirements in January. “Requiring disclosure of such information deters and helps expose violations of other campaign finance restrictions, such as those barring contributions from foreign corporations or individuals,” Sentelle wrote in the 21-page ruling. Separately, a three-judge federal court rejected a legal challenge involving the Republican National Committee and upheld long-standing limits on contributions to political parties. The limits were part of the 2002 campaign-finance law. |
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