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MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — Mortar shells and machine-gun fire rocked Mogadishu on Sunday, as pro-government Islamist fighters clashed with gunmen who want to topple the Western-backed government, officials said. Officials said that the renewed violence killed at least 35 people over the weekend in Mogadishu, the Somali capital. A hospital official said 60 wounded people were admitted to the hospital this weekend. It was some of the worst fighting in weeks in one of the world’s most violent cities, with both sides pounding Mogadishu with mortar shells and machine-gun fire. Residents were streaming out of the city in search of safety. The nation has been in chaos since the 1991 ouster of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. Rival clans then turned on one another. Since late 2006, insurgents have been trying to topple the weak government. The lawlessness has also allowed piracy to thrive off the coast. The violence has pitted pro-government fighters against those allied to the Shabab, an insurgent group seeking to overthrow the government. |
The Big Conversation Former Gov. Rick Perry inserted himself Tuesday into the ongoing controversy over Donald Trump's handling of criticism from the father of a fallen Muslim soldier, saying the father was to blame for speaking at the Democratic National Convention. Speaking on CNN, Perry said the father should have expected some reaction to his words. "In a campaign, if you’re going to go out and think that you can take a shot at somebody and not have incoming coming back at you, shame on you," Perry said. While politicians from both sides of the aisle took Trump to task for criticizing the family of Khizr Khan, Perry made clear he was backing Trump. Speaking of Khan, Perry said, "Why in the world that he thought he was going to get a free ride with that is beyond me. He shouldn’t get a free ride when he’s going to inject himself into the political arena." In other Perry-Trump news, the former governor was one of six Texans named to a 64-member advisory committee that will give the GOP presidential nominee advice on agricultural policy. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller also snagged a seat on the panel. The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one. Trib Must Reads Starbucks in Havana? Close, But No Cigar, by Julián Aguilar — After more than 50 years of tension, normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba is going to take a while, and businesses eager to trade with the island nation best be patient, officials say. Analysis: Unaccountably Free Political Speech, for a Few Weeks in Texas, by Ross Ramsey — A regulatory wrinkle could strip an important piece of information from the political radio ads you hear in Texas between now and Election Day: Who’s paying for the commercials? GOP Senators Spar Over Value of Pre-K Spending, by Kiah Collier — At an education committee hearing Tuesday, Republican state senators debated whether a $118 million pre-K initiative championed by Gov. Greg Abbott is worth the money. Failing Texas Schools Facing Tougher State Intervention, by Kiah Collier — Education Commissioner Mike Morath on Tuesday outlined plans to crack down harder on chronically low-performing schools, saying he wants to cut in half the number of them that end up on the state’s failing list over the next five years. Poll: Donald Trump Leads Hillary Clinton by Only 6 Points in Texas, by Patrick Svitek — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is leading Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by just 6 percentage points in deep-red Texas, according to a new poll. The Day Ahead At the Capitol today, the House Select Committee on Mental Health wraps up its two days of hearings today taking testimony from the public on the delivery of mental and behavioral health services. A few blocks away, U.S. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Austin, will talk about his book, "Failures of Imagination," and sign copies afterward over the lunch hour at the Texas Public Policy Foundation on Congress Avenue. The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one. Elsewhere (Links below lead to outside websites; content might be behind paywall) Texas plans to appeal voter ID decision to U.S. Supreme Court, San Antonio Express-News Texas asks feds for security guarantees before accepting Syrian refugees, Houston Chronicle Aetna will not offer Obamacare exchange plans in Texas in 2017, The Dallas Morning News State sues Alabama-Coushatta tribe again over gambling, San Antonio Express-News The abortion rights movement is bolder than it’s been in years. That’s Cecile Richards’s plan., The Washington Post Voting for Trump through gritted teeth, Politico Kennedy: Poll: Trump up 6 in Texas; GOP voters say secede if he loses, Fort Worth Star-Telegram The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one. Texas Officer's Killing Exposes the Ruthless Inner Workings of the Mexican Mafia, The Washington Post Quote to Note “When I got this job, I said I wanted to spend less time with my family. Now I want to spend more time with them, but not breakfast, lunch and dinner.” — Bill Hammond, who plans to leave his post as the top guy at the Texas Association of Business before the coming legislative session. The former legislator and workforce commissioner has held the job at the influential business lobby group since 1998. Trib Events for the Calendar • A Conversation with state Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa and state Reps. Terry Canales and Bobby Guerra on Aug. 26 at UT-Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg • The Texas Tribune Festival on Sept. 23-25 at the University of Texas at Austin • TribFeast: A Dinner To Support Nonprofit Journalism on Sept. 24 at the University of Texas at Austin's Etter-Harbin Alumni Center • A Conversation with state Reps. Four Price and John Smithee on Oct. 4 at Amarillo College in Amarillo • A Conversation with state Reps. Andrew Murr and Jason Isaac on Nov. 14 at Schreiner University in Kerrville |
by Fort McMurray News » Wed Feb 06, 2013 6:30 pm Local parents and educators didn't hold back when it comes to their children's education. The Fort McMurray Public School District is facing a $4 million deficit this year, leading to a series of town hall meetings to seek feedback on their projected shortfall from the public. Two solutions have been tabled, a compressed instructional week and the possible grade reconfiguration. Many parents spoke up about the concerns they see with the two solutions being put forward. "All four of my kids are now in French Immersion and three of them have graduated with a double diploma from the school for that." explains one concerned father, Jim. " We watched the growing pains that happened when the school started the program, getting the teachers and the programs involved. Now we are at the point where the school has matured to this process and I would have to see that change because it is an excellent process." "It is going to give them an unrealistic view for the future and I don't believe that is going to be beneficial for them." explains mother of one, Diana. "With respect to the school reconfiguration, I would be more in favor to that than moving to a four day week." "Today's students are the future of our Nation's. I have heard so many speakers today, and so many of them are teachers." explains concerned father, Hermander. "If the teacher's feel that way there is a potential of affecting kids education by implementing any of these changes. Let's not affect our children's education as they are our future." Other concerns that were brought forward to the board included a loss of gym and music class time and the effect it will have on the excellent programs the school board offers. As well, teachers from both the Catholic and Public School board spoke about possible cuts to support staffs time in the school and how it affects their pay. Parents concerns and questions will be taken into consideration as the board prepares to redraft their 2012/2013 budget. The next town hall meeting is tonight at Composite High School at 7:00 pm. |
RACINE, Wis. The 17-year-old was home sick from school, napping away the effects of the flu, when he awoke to sirens and the chatter of a crowd gathering at the A&W restaurant across the street. Rolling over in bed, he peered through the blinds to see flashing lights and armed police officers, dressed in black, approaching. He had served nine months in jail because of a drug and weapons conviction, but that had occurred more than a year before. He had been clean since. What could this be about? Panicked, he did the only thing that came to mind: He pulled the covers over his head and pretended to be asleep. After the police broke down the front door and found him, they handcuffed him, struggling to get a cuff around the right hand he had broken playing basketball a few weeks earlier. They took him downstairs and planted him on a living room couch. Wearing a tank top, boxer shorts and a perturbed expression, he watched investigator Richard Geller and his officers scour the two-story yellow bungalow. Eventually, Geller found 15 grams of crack cocaine -- worth about $1,500 in Racine in 1998 -- hidden in the garage. "Bingo!" Geller shouted. "Jackpot! We got it!" It was at that moment that Caron Butler's life could have careened to a far different place: away from a successful college basketball career at Connecticut; away from the Washington Wizards and the five-year, $50 million contract he signed while crying in 2005; and away from being named to today's NBA All-Star Game for the second consecutive year. But Butler wasn't sent back to jail on what he called "one of the scariest days of my life." Instead, he was freed to continue his remarkable journey from youth prison in Wisconsin to Verizon Center because a police officer made a decision that changed a life. "The graveyards and prisons are full of people that wanted a second chance," Butler said. "God put his hands on my life. He said 'I'm going to touch you so that you can touch others.' " * * * Trouble From the Start The rise of Butler, 27, from small-time drug dealer to NBA star began here, in this waterfront city of 80,000 just south of Milwaukee. "A lot of people judge your glory without knowing your story," Butler said one afternoon last fall, as he strolled around the neighborhood that created the man Wizards Coach Eddie Jordan calls "Tuff Juice." He grew up on Racine's south side, a neighborhood of decaying homes and dilapidated buildings, and played pickup basketball at a nearby community center. Aside from visitors to Wells Brothers pizza, this area doesn't draw many outsiders. It's sprinkled with a few corner convenience stores. Butler's favorite spot, a Mexican dive called La Tapatia, has just one table. A little store is attached, where you can buy a bottle of Pepto-Bismol with your burrito. Racine is so small that Butler's neighborhood is less than six blocks from million-dollar, waterfront estates on Lake Michigan. But the peaceful waters couldn't match the lure of Hamilton Park, a patch of grass on 18th Street between Howe and Mead with a sparse playground that had little more than a slide, monkey bars and a seesaw. Back then, everyone would gravitate to the park, where Butler would always find large crowds, girls, and plenty of gang and criminal activity. Police eventually shut down the scene by buying one of the houses abutting the park, tearing it down and building a new one filled with surveillance cameras. When Butler's mother, Mattie Paden, would find him at the park, she would often resort to waving a bat at him to make him go home. But she worked two jobs, sometimes 80 hours a week, to support the single-parent home and was limited to chasing after him in the family's Mercury station wagon when she returned from work. It wasn't enough. Butler and six friends -- Greg West, James Barker Jr., Robert Nellom, Andre King, Andre Love and Antonio Strong -- constantly were in trouble for vandalizing property and fighting. Butler estimates that he was in juvenile court 15 times before age 15. |
U.S. researchers have designed a new computer algorithm that can model and catalogue the entire set of carbon-containing molecules, and created a map of the so-called ‘small-molecule universe’ (SMU). The SMU is a set of all synthetically feasible organic molecules of 500 Daltons molecular weight or less. It has more than 10^60 chemical structures. “Many of the world’s problems have molecular solutions in this chemical space, whether it’s a cure for disease or a new material to capture sunlight,” explained Dr David Beratan of Duke University, senior author of a paper describing the algorithm and map published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. “But the small-molecule universe is astronomical in size. When we search it for new molecular solutions, we are lost. We don’t know which way to look.” The map tells scientists where the unexplored regions of the chemical space are and how to build structures to get there. “The map helps chemists because they do not yet have the tools, time or money to synthesize all 10^60 compounds in the small-molecule universe. Synthetic chemists can only make a few hundred or a few thousand molecules at a time, so they have to carefully choose which compounds to build,” Dr Beratan said. “The scientists already have a digital library describing about a billion molecules found in the small-molecule universe, and they have synthesized about 100 million compounds over the course of human history. But these molecules are similar in structure and come from the same regions of the small-molecule universe.” “It’s the unexplored regions that could hold molecular solutions to some of the world’s most vexing challenges.” To add diversity and explore new regions to the chemical space, the team developed a computer algorithm that built a virtual library of 9 million molecules with compounds representing every region of the small-molecule universe. “The idea was to start with a simple molecule and make random changes, so you add a carbon, change a double bond to a single bond, add a nitrogen. By doing that over and over again, you can get to any molecule you can think of,” said lead author Dr Aaron Virshup, also from Duke University. Dr Virshup programed the new algorithm to make small, random chemical changes to the structure of benzene and then to catalogue the new molecules it created based on where they fit into the map of the small-molecule universe. “The challenge came in identifying which new chemical compounds chemists could actually create in a lab,” he said. Dr Virshup sent his early drafts of the algorithm’s newly constructed molecules to synthetic chemists who scribbled on them in red ink to show whether they were synthetically unstable or unrealistic. He then turned the criticisms into rules the algorithm had to follow so it would not make those types of compounds again. “The rules kept us from getting lost in the chemical space,” he said. After ten iterations, the algorithm finally produced 9 million synthesizable molecules representing every region of the SMU, and it produced a map showing the regions of the chemical space where scientists have not yet synthesized any compounds. “With the map, we can tell chemists, if you can synthesize a new molecule in this region of space, you have made a new type of compound,” Dr Virshup said. “It’s an intellectual property issue. If you’re in the blank spaces on our small molecule map, you’re guaranteed to make something that isn’t patented yet.” ______ Bibliographic information: Virshup AM et al. Stochastic voyages into uncharted chemical space produce a representative library of all possible drug-like compounds. J. Am. Chem. Soc., published online April 2, 2013; doi: 10.1021/ja401184g |
They were top 10 in the world at one point w/o s1mple, they don't need him to be a decent team, but it does seem like they're lacking that star power, they have good entries in elige and nitr0, they have a fantastic lurker in hiko, they have a support player who gets lots of clutches and has been showing up on lan in adren, and they have an up and coming awper than has seemed to start fitting in with the team more lately. However, what they don't have, is a s1mple, or an olof, or a device, or a f0rest, or a cold, or even within na teams, a shroud, or a tarik. They don't have that allaround, and that's what s1mple did for them, and I think they need to find one if they are to succeed as a team. 2016-05-05 00:36 |
Anyone considering attending tonight's protest at the Dáil should be aware that the Public Order Unit (riot squad) will also be present. They are fresh from a "refresher course" in dealing with protest marches. They have been working hard over in Corrib, protecting the investment of Royal Dutch Shell, at great expense to the Irish tax-payer, and the skulls of protesters. It seems fairly clear that a similar zero-tolerance approach will be taken here as in the less-visible West. Gardaí train in secret for riots - Irish Independent Jerome Reilly - Sunday, May 16, 2010 Less than 24 hours after the mini-riot outside the Dail, plumes of smoke from petrol bombs could be seen above north Dublin as the Garda's Public Order Unit underwent specialist training. ... The training included running a gauntlet of petrol bombs while in full riot gear, as well as baton charges and defensive manoeuvres. The Sunday Independent has learned that the Public Order Unit, popularly known as the riot squad, will be on standby as thousands of protesters are expected to converge on the Dáil in a protest organised by the Right to Work campaign this Tuesday. ... "The Public Order Unit has mostly been used in recent times at the Shell to Sea Corrib Gas protests in Co. Mayo. Refresher courses are held on a fairly regular basis," he said. No doubt they have learnt a few new tricks during their time in the West. |
My average day Wake up at 6AM, then the rush start! Prepare the kids to go to school! Start to work around 7h30 to 8AM. Have my full day of work (40hrs a week). So quite busy days! I'm swiming twice a week during lunch time with work collegues. My Pool Very standard 25meters long, indoor pool, but located at 5 minutes by walk from my job. Why I Swim To keep a minimum cardio health. Winter is long here... and I hate going out! So it keep me in shape before summer to practice bike, water skiing and wind surf. What I want from SwimIO Get statistics : lap count, total distance, stroke rate, to get datas to try to improve the swiming technique time over time. |
I would love to return it. It does not stay in place during vaginal intercourse. Thus-far I am finding the remote nearly worthless as I cannot seem to make it communicate with the toy half the time. Pros - Fits and holds in place when there is no thrusting motion. - Is high quality, It feels almost velvety, perfectly waterproof, no seams, solid, looks downright pretty, does not scream "I AM A SEX TOY" if anyone happens to see it. -strong vibrations and multiple vibration patterns make for easy fun orgasms. -Quiet! (check one out at a toystore and handle it, you will fall in love) Cons- Already stated my issues with the remote though I have done no trouble shooting to solve the issue like replacing batteries. - does not stay in place during thrusting activities. Best use, I would recommend some tight panties to hold it where you want it while you do whatever it is that you like to do (watch videos, go to the store, etc.) I give it four stars because I am disappointed to find so little use for such an expensive toy. I ignore this little discreet guy for my Hitachi wand. |
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks at the Women in the World Summit at Lincoln Center in New York, Thursday, April 6, 2017. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) Hillary Clinton has granted her first public interview since losing the election. It came on April 6 at the Women in the World Summit, organized by leftist editor Tina Brown. Clinton was introduced by comedian Samantha Bee. On cue, as expected, she gushed: "You deserve to hear it 100 times — it should have been you." The assignment to interview Clinton fell to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. He later wrote a column on his Hillary chat, beginning by saying: "In the most wrenching, humiliating way possible, Hillary Clinton has been liberated. She is now out of the woods again, and speaking her mind." And why not? The path is marked by rose petals dutifully placed by her equally humiliated legions in the press. It was "humiliating" to lose to Donald Trump — that lout. Clinton was the anointed one, and as the press told us, she was the most qualified presidential applicant since Thomas Jefferson. So the feminists at this conference wanted to know: Why do Americans hate women so deeply? What the hell is wrong with those self-hating white Republican women? This was the kind of challenging "question" Kristof lobbed at Clinton: "This is a women's empowerment conference, so I have to ask. You know, fundamentally, a man who bragged about sexual assault won the election and won 53 percent of the white women's vote. How is it that in the 21st century — and what does it say about the challenges that one faces in women's empowerment — that in effect, misogyny won with a lot of women voters?" Clinton loved the question. It's the kind of softball she's been served her entire career. "Certainly, misogyny played a role," she declared. "I mean, that just has to be admitted." She and Kristof mulled over what he called "abundant social science research" that says we admire men for being ambitious and successful but find women "less likable" when they are powerful. So here we are, five months after the election, and the best analysis these people can muster sounds exactly like ... the last weekend of the campaign. Then-President Barack Obama used this argument as his closer: Don't be a sexist! He said: "I want you to think about it because she is so much better qualified than the other guy. She has conducted herself so much better in public life than the other guy." Clinton complained that when she left the State Department, her approval rating was 64 or 65 percent, but "by the time they finished with me, I was Typhoid Mary." "They" meant Trump and the conservative media. Never would this woman ever concede that the more the public saw and heard her, the less it liked her. In an added note of self-pity, she added: "Poor Mary. She didn't deserve it either." The woman who might have been our commander in chief standing up to Russia, Iran, North Korea and the Islamic State group complained about being called names, drawing fervent applause. She explained that the aim of anti-Clinton bullying was "to crush your spirit, to make you feel inadequate, to make you doubt yourself. And I just refused to do that, and that infuriated them even more." Nowhere in this dialogue, and nowhere in the Kristof column that followed, did they even briefly entertain the notion that misogyny could define the Clintons. She can complain about Trump's "targeting of women" but can't imagine that anyone could say the same for her husband. Let us not forget that Kristof and his newspaper thought Juanita Broaddrick's absolutely believable accusation of Bill Clinton raping her was "toxic waste." Hillary Clinton never allows an interviewer who would ask her about her role leading the Bimbo-Bashing Patrol to destroy the reputations of her husband's victims. No one is allowed to ask whether Broaddrick was lying when she said that after the alleged assault, Hillary Clinton gripped her hand firmly and thanked her for her support, and suggested that she stay quiet. They certainly refuse to contemplate that women could vote for Trump because Clinton stood passionately on the libertine left, supporting abortion on demand, every LGBT dictate and the erosion of religious liberty. It is reported that half of the aborted babies are girls. Couldn't that be "misogyny"? If only someone at these media-elite confabs would ask how a majority of women can be smeared as hating themselves if they don't check every radical-feminist box. L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. |
Is Chief Wahoo Finally on the Way Out? Are “Chief Wahoo’s” days as the Cleveland Indians primary method of branding over? It certainly feels that way. After years and years of *very slowly* removing the Chief bit-by-bit, the controversial logo has very suddenly been almost completely eliminated for all things Cleveland Indians over the past few months. We got our first hint that something may be on the way when coming into 2013 the Indians stopped wearing “Wahoo” on their batting helmets altogether. The Chief had previously been worn on the batting helmet every game, home-and-away, up until 2009 when it was suddenly erased from road games. In 2013 it was taken off helmets for home games as well, replaced with the simple block, red “C” logo: When the Indians clinched a 2013 playoff berth in September their post-season shirts didn’t use their primary logo, or their home cap logo (like every other team used), instead using the plain block red C from the Indians road cap. “Road cap logo” seems like an odd choice for a playoff shirt, you know, unless there was a reason for it: From there it was various graphics produced by Major League Baseball, no Wahoo anywhere. On these 2013 “Organization All-Stars” graphics the Cleveland Indians are the only team to NOT use their official primary logo, even the very-rarely-seen Baltimore Orioles official primary is included. Instead of Wahoo they use the “Indians” home jersey wordmark, this was clearly done intentionally: We also got to see a leak of the Indians’ planned 2014 batting practice and spring training uniforms earlier this month, something’s certainly absent once again. Wahoo had previously been worn on the sleeve as a shoulder patch on these jerseys up until 2013, now it’s gone, not on the cap, not on the jersey… anywhere On the Cleveland Indians 2014 Season Ticket brochures and schedules again we don’t see Chief Wahoo, the Indians script logo and that block red “C” logo is present, as are photos of the Indians wearing uniforms which don’t include Wahoo anywhere on them: While Wahoo is present in the footer and in some promotional areas of the Indians official website, you’ll notice it’s gone from both the websites “Indians.Com” logo (block red C), the banner “Indians script”, and nowhere to be found on the 2014 season tickets page… “C”s and “Indians” scripts everywhere. Similarly their official Twitter page chooses to only feature the script logo and the block C. And finally, on this World Series retrospective posted today by MLB.com you’ll see despite them using the era-appropriate logos for the Diamondbacks in 2001 and Marlins in 1997 and 2003, Chief Wahoo has been replaced by the modern-day block red C for Cleveland’s World Series appearances in 1995 and 1997. Is a change coming? Maybe not “officially”, the team has said in the past to SportsLogos.Net that the logo isn’t going anywhere anytime soon… but with all the attention over the Washington Redskins name lately plus these pieces of evidence shown above I’d be surprised if we see very much of the Chief, if at all for the 2014 season and beyond. Good news for most. What do you think? |
Scandinavians are known for their progressive politics, sustainable cities, and ability to survive cold winters. One thing they’re not known for is the gift of gab. In fact, the culture is famously quiet. However, thanks to Sweden's tourism association, you can now dial a telephone number, reach a Swede, and chat about everything from IKEA to Ingmar Bergman. According to the Associated Press, the Swedish Tourist Association has set up a phone hotline dubbed the "Swedish Number.” Callers from around the globe can dial +46 771-793-336 (that's +46 771-SWEDEN) and they’ll be connected to a “random Swede.” Swedish volunteers have downloaded an app, which sends the calls to them. The tourism board doesn’t vet the Swedes, and conversation topics aren’t pre-scripted or monitored (although they are recorded for safety’s sake). "It's like when Swedes travel the world. You don't know who they're going to talk to and what they're going to say," Magnus Ling, the head of the Swedish Tourist Association, told the AP. According to the Swedish Tourist Association’s website for the initiative, their goal is to get people curious about Sweden, and to promote intercultural dialogue. The initiative also commemorates the 250th anniversary of Sweden's 1766 Freedom of the Press Act, which is said to be the world's first law to protect of the freedom of expression. On a more practical level, the tourism association is also using the initiative to recruit new members to their nonprofit, which is supported by membership fees. If you’re wondering how many people would want to cold-call a Scandinavian stranger, the answer is “plenty.” As of Thursday afternoon, The New York Times reports that the Swedish Number had received about 7500 calls. (Most of them were from Turkey and the United States.) And by Thursday evening, around 3000 Swedes—many of whom had learned about the initiative via the news—had downloaded the conversation app. Curious to learn more about the “Swedish Number," or simply want to engage in a cultural experience that's more authentic than eating IKEA meatballs? Make a call, watch the above video, or visit the initiative's website for more information. [h/t Associated Press] Banner image courtesy of iStock. |
Stuff happened, things changed. mcl2k2 pools and the em conversion. The details are in the commits, but the short story is that due to hardware limitations, a number of tradeoffs need to be made between performance and memory usage. The em chip can (mostly) only be programmed to write to 2k buffers. However, ethernet payloads are not nicely aligned. They’re two bytes off. Leading to a costly choice. Provide a 2k buffer, and then copy all the data after the fact, which is slow. Or allocate a larger than 2k buffer, and provide em with a pointer that’s 2 bytes offset. Previously, the next size up from 2k was 4k, which is quite wasteful. The new 2k2 buffer size still wastes a bit of memory, but much less. One less hint for malloc. A forgotten holdover from another era. Zap P too. FreeType 2.7 is prettier than ever. vmm for i386. Improve security. vmm is still running with a phenomenal set of privileges, but perhaps some cross-VM attacks may be limited. On the other side of the world, hyperv support is getting better. Fix an installer bug relating to user separation and local sets. And one for the prefetch area. The installer continues to get better and safer in mostly invisible ways. Usually it’s only the bugs that get noticed. Remove setlocale. setlocale was sprinkled all throughout the code base many years ago, even though it did nothing, in anticipation of a day when it would do something. We’ve since decided that day will never come, and so many setlocale calls can go. There’s a new build system. It kind of works like before, but a lot of the details have changed to support less root. Actually, it’d be accurate to say the whole build privilege system has been flipped. Start as root, which drops down to the build user to do the heavy lifting, instead of starting as a user that can elevate to root at any time. This no longer requires the build user to be pseudo-root; in fact, the goal is that the build user can’t elevate. Use x2APIC. Some systems, notably VMs, require this and don’t provide the older interfaces. syspatch is coming. Lots of commits actually. Despite the name, it’s more like a system update, since it replaces entire binaries. Then again, replacing a few binaries in a system is like patching small parts of the whole. A syspatch update will be smaller than an entire release. The slab is back. Per CPU caches existed in pool long ago, but were deleted while making the code simpler. The pool code has been worked over quite thoroughly since then, and now it’s time to bring back this optimization. Bonwick’s paper is a systems classic. For reference, ancient commit introducing caches previously. OCSP client support in libtls. And therefore nc as well. The libcrypto manuals are getting a makeover. The other pages were converted as well. libX11 was updated. Lots of other libraries, too. All the newest hotnesses. xterm 327. Add some perl, I mean assembly, code for crypto curves. Add X25519 curve support. Better support for verifying cert chains. xenodem gets a feature: autologin. The thread process deunification continues. Threads started out as clumps of processes. Slowly but surely, things are being pried apart into distinct concepts. Preparatory steps to making network stack lock safe. The old spl model is recursive, which won’t work in the future. More discipline is now required to know who is responsible for acquiring and releasing exclusion. It seems like only yesterday I rewrote sblock to be an rwlock, and now sblock is back to using tsleep again. switch and switchd are getting better. openflow in switchctl. |
Search-and-rescue operations may one day get a boost from a wearable sensor system in development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MIT researchers built a system that digitally maps the environment where the wearer is moving. Ideally, the gadget will become a tool that emergency personnel could use to coordinate disaster response. According to MIT News, the machine's sensors wirelessly relay data to an off-site computer, allowing observers to watch the map's creation as the wearer moves through a space in this instance, an MIT building hallway. The prototype was built using a stripped-down Microsoft Kinect sensor and a laser rangefinder. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research scientist Maurice Fallon leads the project, which he envisions for use in a hazmat situation, "where people are suited up with the full suit, and they go in and explore an environment," he told MIT News. "The current approach would be to textually summarize what they had seen afterward 'I went into this room on the left, I saw this, I went into the next room,' and so on," Fallon said. "We want to try to automate that." Fallon's research is supplemented by professors John Leonard and Seth Teller, of the department of Mechanical Engineering and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), respectively, as well as EECS graduate students Hordur Johannsson and Jonathan Brookshire. The system was originally developed for robots but had been adapted for human use. It includes a laser rangefinder, which sweeps a beam in a 270-degree arc, measuring the time it takes for light pulses to return. While attached to a human, though, the machine is jostled and may not provide as accurate a map as a roving robot could especially if affixed to an emergency responder who is presumably moving swiftly through a location, and various floors of a building. As a result, a button attached to the sensors allows the user to annotate the map. In the prototype, it simply serves as a way to mark a point of interest. The developers envision a future system that will add voice or text tags to the map, for emergency responders to mark structural damage or a toxic spill. "This idea of having a SLAM [simultaneous localization and mapping] system that is attached to a human's body, for figuring out where it is, is actually innovative and pretty useful," Wolfram Burgard, a computer science professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, told MIT News. "For first responders, a technology like this one might be highly relevant." Watch the video below to get a closer look at how the sensored mapping system works, and where it may fail. For more from Stephanie, follow her on Twitter @smlotPCMag. |
ANALYSIS/OPINION: Be careful what you wish for, so the folk wisdom goes, because you might get it. Democrats, having learned this lesson the hard way, have set out in Virginia to repeal themselves. Not so long ago, Democrats in Virginia demanded the creation of so-called majority-minority congressional and state legislative districts, where the majority of the voters are members of racial minorities. This was not necessarily because that was in the best interests of the people in those districts, but because such districts would ensure the election of Democrats. The creation of majority-minority districts by states and municipalities, under pressure from the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, was held to be justified as enabling racial minorities to elect candidates who look like the voters in the district. The Virginia General Assembly obliged after the 2010 census, gerrymandering as necessary to create districts where racial minorities would be in the majority. But this made neighboring congressional districts more friendly to Republicans. The law of unintended consequences, as experience is forever teaching, is a law immune to whim and fashion. Creation of these “majority-minority” districts was mandated by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which warned that district lines cannot be drawn in such a manner as to “improperly dilute minorities voting power.” As a result, there are 113 “majority-minority” districts, a quarter of the nation’s 435 House districts. Virginia Democrats were back at the U.S. Supreme Court last week to ask the justices to find the map of Virginia’s state House of Delegates unconstitutional, and order it to be drawn again in time for the 2017 off-year legislative elections. They’re specifically contesting a dozen legislative districts, in Richmond, the Hampton Roads area and along the state’s southern border, that lower federal courts have said satisfy the requirements of the Voting Rights Act. Seats in all of these districts are held by blacks. When the Republican majority in the General Assembly drew the district lines in 2011 it took notice that the districts were designed to preserve incumbents. Democrats now want the High Court to determine whether race played a role too large in the drawing. The case, Bethune-Hill vs. Virginia State Board of Elections, was argued by lawyers of the U.S. Justice Department and by Marc E. Elias, who regularly litigates voting-rights lawsuits on behalf of the Democrats. He was a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Paul D. Clement, the attorney for the state of Virginia, told the justices that “the 2011 redistricting of the Virginia House of Delegates was a bipartisan success story.” Mr. Clement, who was the U.S. solicitor general in the George W. Bush administration, noted that the establishment of the boundaries of the new “majority-minority” districts was approved by the General Assembly’s Legislative Black Caucus. The Supreme Court has held that race can’t be the predominant factor in the drawing of electoral lines, and that runs against the concept of “majority-minority” districts. What the justices could do — though likely won’t — is dispense with race-consciousness entirely as a factor in the creation of legislative districts. Geography and compactness, not race, should be the chief considerations. Deference to race in redistricting has become, in the words of Justice Samuel Alito Jr., “an invitation for litigation.” That’s good business for the lawyers, but bad business for everybody else, both majority and minority. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. |
I will wait for you until I am 35 General Information Arthur Nankang Born May 26, 1980 Death March 9, 2008 Year Released 2006 Translator Daisy Additional Edits Asakurasol Background Originally published in Chinese in 2006, this short story details the Nankang's painful break up experience with his boyfriend of 7 years. The story is written in the first person perspective. Roughly two years after the story was published, Nankang went missing on March 9, 2008. His body was found in the Shuen River weeks later. He died at age 28. Contribute The current version is a work in progress. If you find any grammar/spelling/translation errors please contact me at @asakurasol on twitter. If you liked the book please add a review or send the story to someone who might appreciate it. |
But Matthew Weigman, a spokesman for Sotheby's New York, said that records indicated that Picasso did at least six paintings with that title in 1963. ''Without seeing a photograph, there is no way of telling if the painting sold by Sotheby's was the one that was on the plane that crashed,'' Mr. Weigman said. In an article about the 1996 auction, Artnet Magazine described ''Le Peintre'' as ''a decidedly mediocre late Picasso.'' Some art experts in New York said the mixed judgments on the painting's quality, and the manner in which it was shipped, would indicate that it was being sent to a private collection in Europe. Swissair also reported that another painting was in the jet's cargo bay. But Mr. Naef said the company could not identify it because the jet's cargo manifest listed it simply as a painting. The revelation of the jet's valuable cargo adds another dimension to the crash that cost the lives of all 229 passengers and crew. Although electrical problems are suspected, investigators have not reached any conclusions about the cause of the crash, and continue to investigate the debris and the information on the jet's flight recorders for clues. As news spread of the jetliner's valuable cargo, the Canadian authorities warned away any would-be treasure hunters. ''The crash site is still a protected zone and any attempt by anyone to infiltrate or pilfer the site will not be tolerated,'' said Cpl. Carl D. Hubley of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Halifax. ''There will be no leniency.'' Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. Corporal Hubley said the Mounties had to deal with curiosity seekers trying to get close to the site in the days after the crash, but had not seen any intruders since the first rumors of the valuable cargo began to circulate late last week. Divers searching the wreckage have not reported coming across any of the valuables from the Swissair cargo hold. Searchers found some currency floating on the surface, but that is believed to have been money held by passengers and not part of the shipment. Advertisement Continue reading the main story It is not unusual for a commercial jet like the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 used by Swissair to carry commercial cargo along with baggage, company officials said. The jet that crashed was carrying 16 tons of cargo, which Swissair said was well within usual operating limits. Most of the cargo consisted of textiles, machine parts and computer equipment as well as 530 pounds of express mail and 440 pounds of regular mail. The valuables and their packaging totaled 132 pounds. Swissair handles about 200,000 consignments of valuables a year, the company said. Shippers are charged by weight and not by content. All cargo shipments are insured for less than $10 a pound, but shippers usually add their own insurance. Mr. Naef of Swissair would say little about the valuables that were shipped on Flight 111 beyond what was on the jet's manifest. Each item is listed by weight, including the packaging. The plane held more than 100 pounds of currency that an American bank was shipping to one of its branches in Switzerland, about 10 pounds of jewelry, 4 pounds of watches and 2 pounds of diamonds and their packaging. The airline would not give the value of the money or the jewelry, or identify the owners. In contrast to the paintings, the money and jewelry were shipped in a protective container provided by Swissair. It had a specially locked aluminum door and metal seal. But this type of container is not shockproof or fireproof, according to the company, and may not have been strong enough to withstand the crash and its aftermath. Canadian divers continued today to search through the tangled wreckage of the Swissair MD-11 jet for human remains, a dangerous and emotionally exhausting task that has been on going for several days. So far, the remains of only eight of the 229 victims have been positively identified. Dr. John Butt, the Nova Scotia medical examiner, said today that nearly all of the human remains had been retrieved from the ocean floor in the area where the debris from the jet was found. He said the head of Navy diving operations told him that it may be too dangerous to enter the large, jagged sections of fuselage lying on the ocean floor to recover the remains still inside. Instead, the fuselage fragments may have to be raised while they hold the shattered bodies, Dr. Butt said. |
Conceived of by the BBC's then head of drama, Sydney Newman, and Donald Wilson, head of script development, and BBC staff writer "Bunny" Webber in 1962, and delivered by producer Verity Lambert and director Mervyn Pinfield in 1963, he was, and is, and always will be known, in all his regenerations, as the Doctor. The Doctor is not, in and of himself, a family, but he is very like one. He is, over time, the same but different. He doesn't reproduce, but does regenerate. He may have a different character, wear different clothes and talk differently, yet he is always, somehow, the same. Doctor Who may be television's longest-running science fiction series, with an ever-increasing range of spin-offs and merchandising, but it's also a tale of dynastic succession which raises the most fundamental questions about personal identity. Who am I? Where am I from? And which way back to Gallifrey? In their just published but already indispensable Doctor Who and Philosophy (2011), Courtland Lewis and Paula Smithka gather together a number of philosophers to tease out some of the important questions posed by the programme, such as Should the Daleks Be Exterminated?, Is the Doctor the Destroyer of Worlds? and most important, Who Is the Doctor? For That Matter, Who are You? In his essay in the book, Just As I Was Getting To Know Me, Patrick Stokes defines the continuing appeal of the Doctor as "the idea of a greatly extended lifespan with bodily regeneration". The story of the Doctor's regeneration was, in fact, invented by the editors as a way of replacing the first Doctor (1963-1966), William Hartnell, while allowing the series to continue. This neat sleight-of-hand allowed Patrick Troughton to become the second doctor (1966-1969), Jon Pertwee the Third (1969-1974) and Tom Baker as the Fourth and, arguably, the best. Baker played the part for a record seven years, in a fedora and an unfeasibly long scarf. His doctor was somehow deeply serious, and yet at the same time clearly crackers. In an interview in Doctor Who magazine, Baker admitted: "When I did Doctor Who, there was no question of acting. I'm not very good at acting. What I'm quite good at, I think, is performing." After Baker there came, as in all dynasties, the inevitable decline. Peter Davison played the fifth doctor (1981-1984) wearing celery in his lapel. Colin Baker played the sixth (1984-86) in a horrid patchwork suit. Sylvester McCoy was the seventh (1987-89), in a panama and a pullover, and Paul McGann was the eighth, in a made-for-TV movie (1996). The doctor's fortunes revived when Christopher Ecclestone returned as the ninth incarnation, in a leather jacket, in 2005, swiftly succeeded by a besneakered David Tennant as the 10th (2005-2010), and now Matt Smith in a bow-tie as the 11th. By Time Lord lore, the Doctor can only regenerate up to 12 times, meaning there can be only 13 doctors in total, leaving us with two more to go. There have been occasional family get-togethers. In a 10-year anniversary special in 1973, Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee starred in an episode called The Three Doctors. In 1983, Troughton, Pertwee, Davison and Baker starred in The Five Doctors, with another actor playing the deceased Hartnell's role. And there are his companions – Jamie, Tegan, Sarah Jane, Rose Tyler, K-9. And the moral of this story for students of the family? Perhaps simply this: in the future, our role will be played by others. |
TEN tornadoes touched down in several small communities in North Texas, leaving at least six people dead, dozens injured and hundreds homeless. Emergency responders were still searching for missing people today. The National Weather Service gave a preliminary estimate of Wednesday night's violent system, saying a tornado in Granbury had wind speeds between 166 mp/h and 200 mp/h. Other tornadoes damaged nearby Cleburne and Millsap. Granbury saw the worst of the damage, as the exceptionally powerful tornado tore through two neighbourhoods around 8pm local time Wednesday. Resident Elizabeth Tovar said fist-sized hail heralded the tornado's arrival and prompted her and her family to hide in their bathroom. "We were all, like, hugging in the bathtub and that's when it started happening. I heard glass shattering and I knew my house was going," Ms Tovar said, shaking her head. "We looked up and ... the whole ceiling was gone." The NWS' preliminary storm estimate was an EF-4, based on the Fujita tornado damage scale. An EF-5 is the most severe. The powerful storm crushed buildings into piles of planks and rubble. Trees and debris were scattered across yards, and fences were flattened. Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds described the overnight hunt for bodies in Granbury. "Some were found in houses. Some were found around houses," Mr Deeds said. "There was a report that two of these people that they found were not even near their homes. So we're going to have to search the area out there." Seven people remain unaccounted and authorities hope they are with family or friends, Mr Deeds said at a Thursday morning news conference. Emergency responders were working to identify the six adult bodies that had been found, he said. He said 37 injured people were treated at hospitals. One of the neighbourhoods, Rancho Brazos, had a significant number of Habitat for Humanity homes that were damaged. Harold Brooks, a meteorologist at the NWS' severe storm lab in Norman, Oklahoma, said May 15 is the latest into the month that the US has had to wait for its first significant tornadoes of the year. Mr Brooks said he would expect 2013 to be one of the least lethal tornado years since the agency started keeping records in 1954. Utilities said about 20,000 homes and businesses in the region were without power early Thursday. Another tornado cut a mile-wide path through Cleburne, storm spotters told the National Weather Service. Cleburne Mayor Scott Cain said that no one was killed or seriously hurt in the courthouse city of about 30,000 that's southeast of Granbury. Seven people suffered minor injuries, and upward of 150 homes were damaged and another 50 were destroyed. He described the storm as "bizarre" because severe winds kept shifting in different directions. Cleburne resident Derrek Grisham was going through his mother's damaged home, salvaging items before the home is likely torn down. Grisham, 26, said after the storm passed through, he ran to his mother's nearby home to check on her and his 10-year-old son, who was staying with her. "I had to kick in the front door to get them out," he said, explaining the two had taken shelter in a bathtub. The roof of the home was torn away and he said her belongings were a jumbled mass, but that Catholic crucifixes stayed in place on the living room wall. Another tornado hit the small town of Millsap. Parker County Judge Mark Kelley said roof damage was reported to several houses and a barn was destroyed, but no injuries were reported. Amazing Pictures: Tornado hits North Texas The powerful storm crushed buildings as it tore through the area, leaving some as just piles of planks and rubble. Trees and debris were scattered across yards, fences flattened. Behind one house, a detached garage was stripped of most of its aluminium siding, the door caved in and the roof torn off. A tree behind the house was stripped of its branches and a vacant doublewide mobile home on an adjoining lot was torn apart. Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds described the devastating aftermath and the hunt for bodies in Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth. Earlier, Mr Deeds said about 50 people were taken to a hospital in Granbury. Yet more gathered at a local primary school where paramedics provided on-site treatment. Matt Zavadsky, a spokesman for MedStar Mobile Healthcare, estimated that as many as 100 people were injured. In one neighbourhood, a trucking company trailer that had been parked on the street was picked up and dropped onto a nearby car and garage. Another tornado hit the small town of Millsap, west of Fort Worth. Parker County Judge Mark Kelley said roof damage was reported to several houses and a barn was destroyed, but no injuries were reported. Hail as large as grapefruit also pelted the area around Mineral Wells on Wednesday evening. A police dispatcher reported only minor damage. |
"Most respondents also said wage and salary compensation and other benefits were not being affected by the ACA, though more respondents said they were being cut than raised," the survey said. "And slightly less than a third of manufacturers and 21 percent of service sector panelists said they were raising the prices they charge to customers." These responses were broadly similar to those in the August 2015 and 2014 surveys. Roughly 2 in 5 respondents — in both the manufacturing and service sector surveys — said they were not changing their plans in response to the ACA. "Of those that were, however, the most widely reported adjustments involved higher deductibles, increased co-pays and higher out-of-pocket maximums," the survey said. "The vast majority of firms in both surveys indicated that they would be paying a higher total premium, and somewhat more than half of respondents in both the manufacturing and service sector surveys said they were raising their employees' share of contribution to the premium," the survey found. When asked about the costs of their current and future health coverage options for workers, the executives' median response among both manufacturers and service firms showed an expectation costs would rise 8.5 percent. "These increases are somewhat lower than what respondents had anticipated in last August's survey, though it should be emphasized that the pool of respondents is not exactly the same," the report noted. "When firms were asked about the expected change for 2017, the median response in both surveys was for a 10 percent increase." The survey also said 17 percent of manufacturers and 22 percent of service firms expect the excise tax on high-value health plans — also known as the "Cadillac tax" — would apply to their existing health plans. The tax imposes a 40 percent surcharge on the value of health plans above a certain dollar amount, and will kick in during 2020. By that year, the threshold is expected to be about $10,900 for plans covering individuals and $29,400 for family plans. Nearly a third of service sector firms and 37 percent of manufacturers said they weren't sure whether the Cadillac tax will apply to them, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. |
The corporate media has reported this unrest with the following narrative: The Greek people are angry because their government pledged to make cuts in social spending... Fox News correctly observed that "Greece lived for years beyond its means, borrowing money and spilling red ink to finance excessive government spending, offer socialized health care and provide lavish wages for federal workers." It's a rather convenient spin: greedy, lazy, leftists workers that are getting their comeuppance. It's the same narrative that the corporate media rolls out whenever social services are being cut anywhere in the world. It's a convenient story because it is a complete story. Nothing more needs to be done. Good guys win. Bad guys lose. Roll the credits. Except that this isn't the whole story by a long shot. The Greek protesters outside of parliament were chanting "Thieves, thieves!" That doesn't sound like people angry at budget cuts. It sounds like people angry about their tax money being stolen. It turns out that they have every right to be angry. This week’s deal is announced as a three year loan program for €110 billion, or $174 billion, with the IMF joining in the loan to Greece... Greece’s economy is going to suffer calamitously no matter what Papandreou does, and as for the country’s debt, he’s just increased it from $300 billion to $474 billion. No wonder the unions continue to protest in Athens; the average person can see right through this ridiculousness. The bailout is going to saddle Greece with debt that it can never hope to pay. All sorts of regressive excise taxes are being raised. Public wages will be drastically slashed. Pension benefits will be reduced. All these moves are sure to increase deflationary forces, which will deepen and prolong the recession there. So we know the losers, the workers of Greece. Supposedly all this suffering will help the Greek people in the long run. But will it? So who is this bailout benefiting, and who would be hurt by bankruptcy? The answer is the big banks, and secondarily investors holding Greek bonds. Much of the debt is sitting with Europe’s largest banks, which underwrote the debt when it was first issued and which keep an inventory of it in support of the market. These banks all benefited handsomely over the years earning fees on this debt program (as did Goldman and JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup), so why isn’t anybody asking them to join in the pain? It turns out that if you follow the money, the narrative of this story is really very simple and indisputable: the Greek people are being impoverished in order to bail out multi-national banks. Funny how something so simple and logical could be missed by the corporate news media. The people of Europe are waking up to the fact that their governments are more interested in protecting the interests of these large financial institutions than they are their own people. When the Irish protesters tried to storm parliament, their complaints sounded something similar to what the Greek protesters were chanting. "They (the Government) are bailing out the banks and the institutions and the elite that caused the crisis and they are asking ordinary people, senior citizens, young people to pay the price with brutal cutbacks and it's just not acceptable and people are here to say we're going to stop this and we want an alternative," he said. When the people of Iceland started bringing torches to their protests in front of parliament, it was because of the proposed bank bailout. Despite their obvious signs of displeasure, the government of Iceland still voted to bail out the banks. It took an overwhelming vote of the people to halt the process. We should all stop to learn our lessons from the people of Greece and Iceland. Very soon, and I mean in the next few months, we are going to see the politicians of America sell out the people to the large bankers. It'll start with the states. They will be looking at cutting more than $100 billion in badly needed social services. Meanwhile, the banks will have gotten away with outright theft from those very same states. West Virginia was just one stop in a nationwide conspiracy in which financial advisers to municipalities colluded with Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Wachovia Corp. and 11 other banks. They rigged bids on auctions for so-called guaranteed investment contracts, known as GICs, according to a Justice Department list that was filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on March 24 and then put under seal. Those contracts hold tens of billions of taxpayer dollars... "The whole investment process was rigged across the board," said Charlie Anderson, who retired in 2007 as head of field operations for the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt bond division. "It was so commonplace that people talked about it on the phones of their employers and ignored the fact that they were being recorded." The bankers ignored the fact they were being recorded because they had no fear of actually being punished for their crimes. We are now entering June of 2010, nearly three years after the financial markets seized up, nearly two years since the entire global economy almost collapsed. And yet there hasn't been one, single, solitary banker who has gone to jail for it. The only two criminal cases against Wall Street executives linked to the crisis ended with an acquittal. It's bewildering don't you think? Hundreds of millions of hard working people around the world are impoverished. Billions of people sink further into debt. While the same people who caused the mess get off scott free. Strike that. The bankers didn't just get off without even a slap on the wrist. No, it's not that simple. What happened was that the working people of this country went deeply into debt in order to save the huge executive bonuses of Wall Street. Citigroup, which gave 738 of its employees bonuses of at least $1 million, is now one-third owned by government as a result of its bailout. It paid bonuses of at least $3 million to 124 of those employees, even after it lost $18.7 billion during the year, Cuomo's office said. The New York-based bank received $45 billion in government money and guarantees to protect it against hundreds of billions of dollars on potential losses from risky investments. Bank of America Corp., which also received $45 billion in TARP money, paid $3.3 billion in bonuses, with 172 employees receiving at least $1 million. Of those, 28 received bonuses of more than $3 million. Merrill Lynch, which Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America acquired during the credit crisis, paid out $3.6 billion. Bank of America earned $2.56 billion in 2008, while Merrill lost $27.61 billion. Cuomo's office said Merrill Lynch doled out 696 bonuses of at least $1 million for 2008, with 149 of those workers getting bonuses of at least $3 million. It's amazing once you think about it. The banksters ruin the world economy, while stealing from the people and governments of the world, and then get the same taxpayers that they've been stealing from to bail them out in order to save their exorbitant bonuses. Oh, sure. President Obama, Congress, and foreign leaders have all made some noise about how outrageous this is, but if they were truly serious they would try to claw back some of that money. Instead, the Wall Street bonus tax had so little support that it failed to even make it out of committee. It's really very simple: if we want to reclaim our government from the banksters we need to take to the streets. Nothing else will do. No amount of voting out incumbents will change anything. Both parties are owned by the same banks. The Democrats play "good cop" to the Republicans "bad cop". The "bad cop" is supposed to oppose regulating the banksters. Yet for the last 30 years it was the Democratic Party that spearheaded the deregulation of the financial industry. Some of them are still top advisers in the Obama Administration. These are the guys who are supposed to re-regulate it? It's all a show. The Democrats and Republicans rant and threaten one another just like professional wrestlers. It's almost believable. They pretend to hate one another. They pretend to fight. Sometimes someone accidentally draws blood. But they decided who was going to play the bad cop before the match ever started. Once the match is over they slap backs and laugh about it while collecting paychecks from the same promoter. It's all a cheap illusion. The good news is that if the working people of the world decided tomorrow that the elite must go and the system must change, it would happen. Simple as that. We could shake off the aristocracy as easily as a bad dream. The problem is that so many people have been fooled into believing that we actually have a free market economy. That the game isn't rigged. That the elite actually earned their status. The working people are being turned into debt slaves, not by the point of a bayonet, but by nothing more than a sophisticated and well-oiled propaganda machine. Matt Taibbi in his article The Big Takeover put it more bluntly. The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers. This is what our future holds if we don't do something about it, but it doesn't have to be that way. The people of Iceland have set the example. We need to follow their example. We need to discard the false idea that we are powerless and rise up to take back this country from the scoundrels and thieves. It can be done. I have no doubt in my mind that eventually it will be done. It's only a matter of time. The sooner we take to the streets the less violent and more democratic the uprising will be. |
Picture by https://instagram.com/bentonconnor/ The Documentary Maker- They take “pics or it didn’t happen” to the logical conclusion, and spend more time with a camera in hand than a sword. Maybe they’re keen to promote the club on social media, maybe photography is their passion and HEMA is an interesting subject, maybe they just have an addiction to selfies. You wouldn’t mind so much except that you’re always just out of frame, and just one identifying shoe in the corner of the shot gets tagged on FB to rub it in. The Crossover Thrasher- They have a serious background in another martial art. They wrestled to all state level, fenced for their university, or in extreme cases are international ballroom dancing champions. It’s depressing how easy they make the relevant parts of training, whether hip throwing you before you’d finished your salute, tagging you with a lunge that you swear began in the changing room rather than on the piste, or just owning the footwork drills. You feel a strong sense of schadenfreude when they struggle with another area of the art though. Cohen the Barbarian - Age is just a number, and they get free bus travel to and from training. This silver haired swordfighter is determined to not just keep up with the young ones, but leave them eating dust. The instructor may occasionally step in and remind them that they’ve had two hip replacements and a pacemaker, and perhaps don’t need to set the club record for switch lunges. But the instructor will not be heeded. Sometimes you can get bonus anecdotes of “machete fights I witnessed in PNG in the sixties”. Professor von Newb - Perhaps they’ve just found the ARMA website, or maybe spent three days watching youtube monologues. Whatever the source, they’re now full to bursting with amazing HEMA information that all their training partners must hear about. You don’t want to be nasty, but you have read or heard it before, they’ve misunderstood some, and some theories they repeat are out of date or just stupid. But they’re so enthusiastic, can you really kick the puppy? The Were-Fencer - They have other commitments, whether it’s family, job, international art theft or a serious World of Warcraft habit. The effect is that they train once a blue moon. It’s about the same schedule you wash your fencing jacket on, in fact. Some are actually making surprisingly good progress - try to extract the secrets of their solo training! The Long-Distance Fencer - You’re actually the closest HEMA group to them. It’s only an overnight bus ride away! There’s always someone who knows that they want to do HEMA, and isn’t going to let geography or practicality stand in their way. Can be identified by an accent from a different region, a permanent limp from holding the gas pedal down for hours, and asking if anyone wants to go grab dinner after training, and grabbing breakfast to go… The Great Stink - In the Summer of 1858, London shut down due to the smell coming off the Thames. This person does their best to shut down fencing opponents in a similar fashion. It’s a combination of a pack of unfiltered cigarettes smoked just outside the hall, a jacket that can assume vom Tag without anyone wearing it, halitosis to make the Listerine corporation jump for joy, and bad aftershave covering all the above like fishnet stockings on a hairy leg. Do: Use langort, you want them as far away as possible. Do not: Einlauffen, you don’t want to risk your mask mesh corroding. The Stranger in a Strange Land - They’re in love with HEMA. The issue is that they’re in love with a different tradition to the one your club practices, but it scratches the itch for now. Savolio supporters training Silver, Fiore-ists practicing their Winden, I.33 partisans with sideswords in their hands - desparate times call for desperate measures, and some fencing is better than none. Look out for completely unexpected techniques appearing from no-where once freeplay mode is engaged. And try to ignore the muttering about “Zis is not how Master Liechtenauer vould handle zat! |
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) speaks alongside representatives from the St. Louis, St. Louis County, and Missouri State police departments during a press conference called to discuss security concerns when the grand jury’s decision in the Michael Brown case is announced. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) declared a state of emergency Monday in anticipation of possible unrest following the announcement of findings of two separate criminal investigations into the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager killed by a Ferguson, Mo. police officer. “Regardless of the outcomes of the federal and state criminal investigations, there is the possibility of expanded unrest,” Nixon said in an executive order. “The state of Missouri will be prepared to appropriately respond to any reaction to these announcements.” Nixon said in the order he directed the Missouri State Highway Patrol, St. Louis County Police Department, and St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to “operate as a Unified Command to protect civil rights” and put the St. Louis County Police Department in charge of security in Ferguson related to protest areas and demonstrations. He also said the adjutant general of the Missouri could “call and order into active service such portions of the organized militia as he deems necessary to protect life and property.” The state of emergency will expire in 30 days unless Nixon extends it. |
Eleven years ago today—in fact, at this very minute (12:05 am ET)—NASA's Opportunity rover touched down on Mars for what was supposed to be a 90-day mission. Since then, Opportunity has proven to be an engineering marvel by traveling almost 26 miles on the Martian surface, more than any other off-Earth surface vehicle. Yes, a human-built craft has almost traveled a full marathon on the surface of another planet. Advertisement For this special occasion, NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs put together a short video, detailing some of the rover's landmark achievements. Opportunity's rover brother, Spirit, landed on Mars three weeks before but NASA lost contact with that vehicle in 2010. Until the more instrument-laden Curiosity landed in the summer of 2012, Opportunity continued working overtime, exploring the giant red rock first at the Victoria Crater until moving toward the Endeavor Crater. Advertisement And Oppy is still ticking, snapping this panorama on Jan. 6, which NASA released just a few days ago: But that doesn't mean Opportunity hasn't seen its fair share of scrapes. The rover has had mechanical problems during its 11-year mission and was even trapped in a big sand dune, which it wriggled free from back in 2005. NASA's biggest problem now is that Opportunity is showing signs of amnesia because of faulty memory. Although this doesn't threaten the Opportunity mission completely—the rover can use RAM to store information—NASA wants to reformat the faulty hardware so Opportunity can keep trucking. Advertisement NASA also knows Opportunity is on borrowed time as the project lead John Callas recently told Discovery News: "It's like you have an aging parent, that is otherwise in good health - maybe they go for a little jog every day, play tennis each day - but you never know, they could have a massive stroke right in the middle of the night. So we're always cautious that something could happen." But at this exact moment in 2004, NASA landed its second rover in just one month, and everything was jubilation. You can relive the exact moment of Opportunity's touchdown (with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Gore in attendance) and the transmission of the rover's very first images through the power of the internet: Thanks, Opportunity. Curiosity has a lot to live up to. |
MEDICINE HAT — Canada’s youngest multiple killer is scheduled to live more independently this spring, court heard Tuesday at a sentence review hearing, which marked one of the last chances the public has to learn of the woman’s progress. The now 21-year-old woman was just 12-years-old when she helped her 23-year-old boyfriend, Jeremy Allan Steinke, murder her Medicine Hat parents and eight year-old brother in 2006. Known only as J.R. because her identity is protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, the woman was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to the maximum 10-year youth sentence. J.R. is facing the end of her sentence next year and at Tuesday’s sentence review hearing in Medicine Hat Court of Queen’s Bench, her lawyer once again applied to have her curfew removed entirely. But caseworkers who appeared beside the woman via CCTV urged Justice Scott Brooker to keep J.R’s existing Monday to Thursday nightly curfew to help her as she transitions to a more independent living arrangement in April or May. Court heard that J.R.’s current living placement involves some supervision in the home from a landlord-type person, but she’s scheduled to transition to a more independent living arrangement with no supervision in the spring. She will remain in contact with her treatment team. In keeping with the principle of increasing the woman’s freedom using “baby steps,” Brooker decided in court on Tuesday to maintain the existing Monday to Thursday curfew. At J.R’s last sentence reviewing hearing in Sept. 2014, Brooker agreed to relax J.R.’s curfew on weekends as part of the final phase of her intensive rehabilitation/reintegration into society. On Tuesday, Brooker agreed to again re-examine the Monday to Thursday curfew at a hearing scheduled for August 2015. That appearance could mark the second to last time the public learns about J.R.’s progress before her sentence ends in May 2016. If she doesn’t break the law for five years after the sentence ends, the woman’s record will be wiped clean. At Tuesday’s hearing, Brooker described the reports completed on J.R. since the Sept. review as “glowing” and he addressed the young woman directly and told her she is doing “very well.” He also said there has been, and continues to be, “significant remorse” shown by J.R. After Brooker reviewed J.R’s progress in Tuesday’s short hearing, the woman’s defence lawyer said outside court that J.R.’s treatment team has determined she is at the lowest risk-level possible to commit an offence. “The treatment is working and she’s well on her way to becoming a well-adjusted member of society,” said Katherin Beyak. Outside court, Chief Crown prosecutor Ramona Robins said she’s unsure of what will happen when J.R.’s sentence is over next year, noting because J.R. is Canada’s youngest multiple killer, there’s no precedent for what happens next. “I think it’s the great unknown, isn’t it,” she said. “She’s definitely followed all of the rules. She’s participated in therapy, she’s done everything that’s been asked of her but when there’s no further sentence and no further consequence, I’m not sure what will happen. I hope that this has been a successful rehabilitative process. I hope that. But, I don’t know.” Court has previously heard that J.R. holds down a job and was taking university courses but when asked on Tuesday if the young woman is still in school, Robins would only say that J.R. is making progress in her plans. J.R. and Steinke had been carrying on an illicit romance before her family was killed. Through online messages under their usernames “runaway devil” and “soul eater,” the couple talked about killing the girl’s parents. Steinke, who goes by the name Jackson May, is serving a maximum sentence in Edmonton for three counts of first-degree murder. |
The US Federal Trade Commission has been urged to launch a probe into a hackable sex toy, which is potentially exposing couples' teledildonic frolics to cyberpervs. Earlier this month, the Siime Eye vibrator was discovered to utilise hard-coded credentials making it "trivial" for attackers to gain unauthorised access to the toy's webcam feed. These inadequacies have led Access Now, an international internet rights group, to complain that the sale of the toy is unacceptable and constitutes unfair and deceptive trade practices. Amie Stepanovich, the US policy manager at Access Now, said that the FTC "must send a clear message to the adult Internet of Things industry that bad security will not be tolerated. These devices can give access to people's most private information and they are being put on the market with laughably weak security settings." Access Now urged the FTC to investigate the $249 sex toy, stating such an investigation was "even more important given the growing trend to provide internet connectivity for sex toys and other related products without proper thought given to digital security problems." The complaint follows another teledildonics company settling a privacy infringement lawsuit for $3.75m back in March. Standard Innovation's internet-enabled sex toy was bashed for collecting user data, including the date, time, and duration of each session in which the toy was used. In that instance, two settlement funds were to be established: a $3m pot for users of the app affected by its data-slurping activities, and $750,000 for purchasers of the toy itself. ® |
A California elementary school sixth grader has been banned from giving a presentation on Harvey Milk in class as it violates the school’s sex education policy. Natalie Jones, a student at Mt. Woodson Elementary School in Romana, California, based her presentation on an independent research project she wrote about the gay civil rights leader. After reviewing the incident, the ACLU determined that it is a free speech issue, particularly since the school referenced its sex education policy in its decision, and is now pursuing the case. From the ACLU press release: “The principal and superintendent grossly misinterpreted school policy. They illegally censored student speech protected by the First Amendment and the California Education Code,” said David Blair-Loy, Legal Director of the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties. “Writing or talking about a gay historical figure who advocated for equal rights for LGBT Californians is in no way the same thing as talking about sex, and school officials should not pretend otherwise.” The student’s mother Bonnie Jones: “This whole thing is unbelievable – first my daughter got called into the principal’s office as if she were in some kind of trouble, and then they treated her presentation like it was something icky. Harvey Milk was an elected official in this state and an important person in history. To say my daughter’s presentation is ‘sex education’ because Harvey Milk happened to be gay is completely wrong.” Below is the part of the school’s sex education policy which is in question: “(P)arents/guardians shall be notified in writing about any instruction in which human reproductive organs and their functions, processes, or sexually transmitted diseases are described, illustrated, or discussed. In addition, before any instruction on family life, human sexuality, AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases is given, the parent/guardian shall be provided with written notice explaining that the instruction will be given…” The ACLU is seeking an apology for Natalie, an opportunity for her to give the presentation in front of her class, and a clarification of parental notification issues with regards to the sex education policy. Post by ILO on 05/20/09 at 11:24 am |
back to news News Attention! This news was published on the old version of the website. There may be some problems with news display in specific browser versions. Heroes of War Thunder! From 10.00 GMT on January 10th to 10.00 GMT on January 17th Fulfill heroic deeds in battle to earn additional Silver Lions and Golden Eagles ! Dear Players! Prove your mettle on the battlefields of War Thunder and be rewarded with additional Silver Lions and the chance to earn Golden Eagles in battle! For the next couple of days, fulfilling a consecutive Heroic Deed a day will grant you more and more Silver Lions every day, until the long-awaited return of Golden Battles to be held on Sunday, January 17th. Ready your engines! Heroic Deed Reach first place in a battle that ended with a victory for your team on vehicles of ranks II - V, while earning more than 900 points in Arcade battle or more than 600 points in Realistic or Simulator Battles . The Seven Heroic Deeds (January 10th until January 16th) The First Deed Earn an additional reward of 20 000 Silver Lions by fulfilling a Heroic Deed! The Second Deed Earn an additional reward of 40 000 Silver Lions by fulfilling a Heroic Deed! The Third Deed Earn an additional reward of 70 000 Silver Lions by fulfilling a Heroic Deed! The Fourth Deed Earn an additional reward of 110 000 Silver Lions by fulfilling a Heroic Deed! The Fifth Deed Earn an additional reward of 160 000 Silver Lions by fulfilling a Heroic Deed! The Sixth Deed Earn an additional reward of 200 000 Silver Lions by fulfilling a Heroic Deed! The Seventh Deed Earn an additional reward of 400 000 Silver Lions by fulfilling a Heroic Deed! The Golden Deeds (January 17th) Golden Victories Earn up to 1 000 Golden Eagles through victory in battle. More details soon! Terms: The first Heroic Deed will be available on January 10th. will be available on January 10th. You can start completing Heroic Deeds at any point during the special's duration. Per day, you can complete one Heroic Deed. The deeds will be updated every day during the special at 10.00 GMT. The deeds will be updated every day during the special at 10.00 GMT. By consecutively achieving Heroic Deeds on a daily basis, you can increase your reward in Silver Lions considerably. on a daily basis, you can increase your reward in Silver Lions considerably. By interrupting your series of Heroic Deeds, you will be reset to the first deed. On the 17th of January, all players are invited to participate in the special Golden Deed, through which you can earn up to 1 000 Golden Eagles by being victorious in battle. Completion of previous Heroic Deeds is not necessary for participation. The War Thunder Team Discuss on the Forums |
Anti-government protesters will begin the first part of their "Bangkok Shutdown" campaign Sunday, as the government threatens strict enforcement of security measures to keep peace and order. The People's Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) will stage a march in downtown Bangkok as a warm-up for its planned shutdown of the capital on Jan 13. Marches will also take place on Tuesday and Thursday but only in daytime daylight hours because of safety concerns, PDRC spokesman Akanat Promphan said. Mr Akanat said the marches were aimed at encouraging people to join the Jan 13 event which would put the "ultimate pressure" on caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and her government to step down. On Sunday, the demonstrators will start off at 10am and move in an 8km loop starting from Democracy Monument to the Memorial Bridge, Phahurat, Yaowarat, Worachak and back to their main Ratchadamnoen base. The routes for the marches planned for Tuesday and Thursday have not been disclosed. On Jan 13, Mr Akanat said, six intersections would become new main rally sites after the PDRC disassembled the Ratchadamnoen rally site in the morning of that day. The areas are the Lumpini, Pathumwan, Ratchaprasong, Asok, Victory Monument, and Lat Phrao intersections. More rally sites will be disclosed later. On Saturday, the Centre for the Administration of Peace and Order (Capo) slammed the PDRC's city shutdown plan. Caretaker Foreign Minister and Capo chief Surapong Tovichakchaikul said that security authorities had been ordered to prepare for the Jan 13 rally and that they would "measure up" to the situation. He said the combined forces of the authorities would be deployed to maintain a peaceful situation and strictly implement security plans. He urged the public to think carefully before joining the protest, in which the PDRC has vowed to occupy at least 20 major intersections in order to pressure Ms Yingluck to step down and make way for the establishment of a "people's council" to undertake political reforms. Mr Surapong stressed that not only would the mass rally be unlawful, it was also bad for the economy and plainly unethical. He urged the public to refrain from any activities that would further hurt the country. He said paralysing the capital would be a violation others' civil rights and freedom. According to the Capo chief, anti-government protest Suthep Thaugsuban was skating on thin ice by declaring a people's revolution. He warned Mr Suthep that the Criminal Court had already approved a warrant for his arrest on insurrection charges. Internal Security Operations Command spokesman Col Banphot Phunphian earlier said Capo had instructed the agency to assess the requirements of police and military forces to cope with the Jan 13 shutdown. "In the initial stage, 20,000 policemen and 20 military companies will be mobilised in the capital," he said. In response, Mr Akanat slammed Capo for spreading lies against the movement. He cited as an example Capo's statement that a group of men seen on the rooftop of the Labour Ministry building during a clash between police and protesters on Dec 26 were part of the protesting group. National police chief Adul Saengsingkaew later admitted that the men were police. Mr Akanat said the false accusations were intended to demoralise the anti-government protesters. "What Capo should do is to say how it is preparing to ensure the safety of the people, instead of talking about preparation of forces. That is intimidation. "It also says that we are ruining the country and the economy. We have stepped out to prevent the country from collapsing, from corruption by the Thaksin regime as in the case of the rice-pledging policy," he said. Mr Akanat said the red shirt United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) was being manipulated by the government. According to Mr Akanat, the red-shirt leaders had apparently abandoned their cause to fight for the Thaksin regime. He insisted that the PDRC was not formed to fight the UDD, but to demand Ms Yingluck's exit. |
These sex toy customers are happy, but not for the reason you might think. A sex toy company has agreed to pay customers up to $10,000 each in a class action lawsuit it settled in federal court last week after its connected vibrators got a little too close for comfort. An Illinois woman sued the parent company, Standard Innovation, for secretly collecting intimate details about its customers’ use of the We-Vibe through the accompanying app, which allows users to control the device remotely and customize its features. According to the lawsuit filed in the North District of Illinois Eastern Division District Court, the We-Connect app was transmitting information including dates and times of use as well as vibration mode and pattern to the company’s servers along with personally-identifiable email addresses without notifying customers. Standard Innovation, which is based in Ontario, Canada, will pay $4 million Canadian dollars ($2.9 million) and is now required to collect only non-identifiable information in aggregate form and inform customers it is doing so. Customers who used the app to control the We-Vibe device before Sept. 26, 2016 are eligible for up to $10,000 in fees whereas those who simply bought a device are eligible to receive up to $199 each. Standard Innovation told MarketWatch in a statement it is “pleased to have reached a fair and reasonable settlement in this matter”: “At Standard Innovation we take customer privacy and data security seriously. We have enhanced our privacy notice, increased app security, provided customers more choice in the data they share, and we continue to work with leading privacy and security experts to enhance the app. With this settlement, Standard Innovation can continue to focus on making new, innovative products for our customers.” The court case highlighted how technology is woven into our lives, with devices from fitness trackers and water bottles to smart refrigerators — and more — capable of logging data on our activities. Now, with even the most personal devices app-enabled, companies and consumers are facing new questions about privacy practices. Read: Who’s cheering the Brangelina split? The private investigation industry OhMiBod, another sex-toy company that offers connected devices, previously suspended all data collection following the law suit to reexamine its policies. Co-founder Brian Dunham said OhMiBod has never transmitted data connected to personally-identifiable information like email addresses or names, as We-Vibe has been accused of doing, but the lawsuit still prompted the company to be proactive about its policies. “We have already had the internal discussion to not transmit anything so that users feel comfortable,” he said. “As we make changes to the app, if we decide to reinstate those types of features then we do so on an explicitly opt-in basis within the app so the users really understand what we are collecting and what it is used for.” The company previously allowed people to use the app without sharing any user information, or to register to receive limited, unidentifiable data on location and use of devices (the location was user-provided and not validated through the actual device location). They used this information internally to analyze user habits and demographics and improve user experience, for example collecting information if the app was used by someone in California to connect with someone in Europe. Smart sex toys have been touted for their use in long-distance relationships, with the ability to be controlled remotely and allow users to share intimate moments across the web. OhMiBod products can even sync with the heartbeat of a user (or a user’s partner) to bring a human connection to the device. Connected apps also allow users to create custom vibrations or make their devices buzz to music they choose. The information collected from OhMiBod devices was not provided to third parties for marketing or other purposes, Dunham said. He said companies developing connected toys have a responsibility to provide a clear description of what user data is being collected and shared, and the Standard Innovation lawsuit underscores that obligation. “I think this is actually good for the industry, because if people aren’t comfortable with what companies are doing with their data and the level of transparency, there’s going to be a much slower adoption rate of these devices,” he said. “This industry is fairly nascent, and as we go through and develop, and customers highlight concerns, manufacturers will learn from those concerns to make a better user experience.” In a statement, Standard Innovation said it is updating its privacy practices in light of the suit, bringing on external privacy and security experts to review policies and make suggestions. Later this month, the company plans to update the app to better communicate its policies and give users a more clear ability to opt out. “There’s been no allegation that any of our customers’ data has been compromised,” the company said in a statement. “However, given the intimate nature of our products, the privacy and security of our customers’ data is of utmost importance to our company. Accordingly, we take concerns about customer privacy and our data practices seriously.” Michael Kaiser, Executive Director of the National Cyber Security Alliance, said as more personal devices become connected, consumers need to be more vigilant about security. This includes reading privacy policies to determine what information is collected, who it is shared with, and where it is stored. With intimate devices, whether it is home security cameras or connected sex toys, the stakes are much higher than before. “It is more ‘the internet of me’ than the Internet of Things, and exactly what they collect and how they use it in many devices is not transparent at this point,” Kaiser said. “This particular case represents the kind of device people are always using behind closed doors, where the level of privacy is expected to be very high. My hope is people will pay close attention to these things when they connect their homes and have a better understanding and awareness of privacy and security issues.” While companies straighten out privacy policies, consumers interested in purchasing connected devices should use common-sense privacy practices like reading terms and conditions before opting in and avoiding using personal emails to sign up for accounts like these. Or, they can just purchase an old-fashioned device — as Kaiser notes, maybe not everything needs to be connected. “Surrounding Internet of Things devices, we usually tell people, ‘stop, think, connect,” but with these devices specifically, I think it is really ‘stop, think, should I connect?’” he said. “Customers should really evaluate the benefits. There is great opportunity…but it doesn’t come without some risk, and they should be well aware of those risks.” Customers interested in filing a claim should keep an eye on the settlement website, which is supposed to be up and running no later than March 21. They can contact the firm representing the plaintiff for more information. Get a daily roundup of the top reads in personal finance delivered to your inbox. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Personal Finance Daily newsletter. Sign up here. |
Inspired by Victorian era science fiction writers such as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Ironcast is set in an exciting alternative history; a time when refined men and women in top hats and bonnets commanded gigantic walking war machines, laying waste to the enemies of the British Empire. Take control of a 7 meter tall walking vehicle called an Ironcast and face off against an invading force of enemy Ironcast in order to defend 1880's Victorian England. Battles are fought by generating resource nodes which in turn drive the Ironcast's various weapons and systems. You must choose how to spend these nodes wisely, either offensively in order to cripple and destroy your opponents, or defensively, if they suspect a barrage of incoming weapons fire is due. Features: - Turn based strategy combat set against a rich and interesting alternate 1880's history. - Roguelite campaign mode where death is permanent but with persistent rewards from one game session to the next. Drive back the invading forces and press forth for victory! - Hand painted art style. - Inspired by the steampunk genre and Victorian science fiction. - Loot new technology and upgrade abilities from the wrecks of fallen enemies. - Customise your Ironcast with a range of unique weapons and defensive systems. Over 50 different unlockable items will ensure an almost limitless number of combinations. - Passive Augmentations allow players to modify their Ironcast's weapons and abilities. Show More |
Pick Pete for the Democrats Future Martin O'Malley Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 7, 2017 If you’ve been reading the coverage of the DNC Chair race, it would be easy to think that it’s all about the past — who dines with the most big shots at Washington salon dinners, who chose the “right” faction in our Party’s 2016 loss. None of that has anything to do with rebuilding our Party now. The DNC Chair race is not about the past. It’s not about Washington insiders or the moneyed status quo. It’s about our future. That’s why I’m supporting Mayor Pete Buttigieg — because our Party needs new leadership and a fresh start. Our Party is at its best when we are the Party of the future. The only good news emerging from Trump’s electoral college victory is that more and more good people today want to run for office than ever before. Many of these patriotic women and men are millennials. They are not only the largest voting bloc by age, but also more diverse by race and more inclusive by nature than their parents and grandparents. They are the core of the resistance to Trumpism. They were on the front lines with me and my own family at the Women’s March in Washington and other cities. It is important to note that Pete was the only DNC Chair candidate to attend the Women’s March. The Democratic Party of the past became very good at telling millennials to wait their turn. But the future cannot wait. We must call forward the goodness in the hearts of young Americans if we are going to save our country and overcome the darkness of Trumpism. And that is one very important reason we should pick a millennial like Pete to run the DNC. Our Party has — for too long — ignored critical state and local elections. While we pretended that Party no longer matters, Republicans racked up unprecedented victories in statehouses and governors’ mansions all across the country. We Democrats abandoned our “50-State Plan,” and we have paid the price for not acting like a national party. We can’t afford to become a coastal party. We can’t pretend that state and local races don’t matter — they do. We must compete in even the reddest of districts. Mayors are on the front lines, they get things done. They see the whole picture, not just pieces of it. If we’re serious about an inclusive 50 State strategy, we should pick a two-term Mayor from a red state like Pete to run the DNC. Finally, our Party is the Party of values — American values. Mayor Pete’s service to others has always been rooted in the values that unite us — freedom, fairness, families, and the future. He understands our economy is not money, it is people — all of our people. That we must always connect our values and our political choices to the lived experiences of real people. If we learned one thing from 2016, it’s that people have lost their faith in the future and their faith that their children’s lives will be better than their own. We need to reinvigorate people’s belief that the Democratic Party can improve their lives. And we need a leader who will speak with clarity to the hopes and aspirations of every family in cities and small towns all across our country. I know many of the other candidates for DNC Chair in this race. While they are all good people, this election is about who can best lead the Democratic Party forward in these times. Mayor Pete has the vision and experience that we need — especially right now. That is why I’m urging you to Pick Pete for DNC Chair. |
Is Rand Paul The Answer to the GOP’s foreign policy problems? So, as of late, the Obama administration’s foreign policy ain’t been looking so hot. Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding foreign surveillance have proven unsurprising but nevertheless embarrassing. Egypt is a mess. President Obama’s relations with Hamid Karzai have deteriorated so much that the U.S. is now contemplating a complete withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan… which sounds awfully similar to how the endgame in Iraq played out. It’s at moments like these that one turns to the opposition party to see if they have any bright ideas. But as I noted late last year, the GOP state of foreign policy thinking has allowed the Obama administration to get away with an awful lot of screw-ups: I find the whole situation remarkably depressing. Democracies do not function terribly well when one of the two major parties either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what it says on matters of foreign policy. It basically gives a pass to the other guys because they sound… well…. less crazy. I’ve been thoroughly underwhelmed by the Obama administration’s foreign policy machinations as of late — but because I don’t see a viable alternative being put forward by the GOP, it’s tough to be too critical. To refresh your memory on why I’ve been so down on the state of the GOP’s foreign policy thinking: [H]ow did the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan get itself into this mess? Simply put, GOP leaders stopped being smart foxes and devolved into stupid hedgehogs. During the Cold War, the party of Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Reagan was strongly anticommunist, but these presidents took foreign policy seriously and executed their grand strategies with a healthy degree of tactical flexibility. Since 9/11, however, Republicans have known only one big thing — the "global war on terror" — and have remained stubbornly committed to a narrow militarized approach. Since the fall of Baghdad, moreover, this approach has produced at least as much failure as success, leading the American public to be increasingly skeptical of the bellicosity that now defines the party’s foreign policy…. Republicans need to start taking international relations more seriously, addressing the true complexities and requirements of the issues rather than allowing the subject to be a plaything for right-wing interest groups. I bring all of this up because Stuart Reid has a long, fascinating read in the Washington Monthly on Rand Paul’s foreign policy thinking and the inroads it has made in the Republican Party. The key sections: [T]he Paul phenomenon is largely the party’s own doing, the consequence of the GOP’s hawkish wing having long ago displaced its moderate one. For decades, moderates ruled the party’s foreign policy establishment, from President Dwight Eisenhower, who was unafraid to issue nuclear threats to end the Korean War yet inveighed against the military-industrial complex, to President George H. W. Bush, who called for a “new world order” yet resisted the temptation to depose Saddam Hussein in the final days of the Persian Gulf War. As the GOP turned right on domestic issues, however, the moderates got squeezed out. (Their last elected ally, Senator Richard Lugar, lost his Indiana primary to a Tea Party-backed candidate in 2012.) Taking their place after 9/11 was a new group of Republican foreign policy hands: the neoconservatives, idealists who saw the application of U.S. military power as the answer to many of the world’s problems. Yet as their project ran aground in Iraq and Afghanistan, they lost the trust of the American public. Strangely, though, neoconservatism never lost its grip on Republican politicians. During the 2012 Republican presidential primary, the candidates tried to outdo each other on keeping troops in Afghanistan and confronting Iran. With a war-weary public concerned more about unemployment and debt than foreign affairs, the Republican elite’s hawkish consensus has created an opening for someone offering a more restrained alternative, and Paul has seized the opportunity. More than any other Republican politician in recent memory, he is challenging the party’s foreign policy elite. Read the whole thing. On the one hand, one could conclude that greater competition within the GOP on foreign policy ideas is a good thing. On some significant dimensions, Paul is taking positions that are forcing more hawkish GOP foreign policy activists to, at a minimum, hone and defend their arguments better than they have in the past. On the other hand… one of the points I was trying to make in my Foreign Affairs essay was that the GOP needed to take the topic seriously as a substantive policy issue — not just as an opportunity to posture for domestic interests. Based on Reid’s article, it’s not entirely clear to me that Paul is doing that. Rather, he just seems to be playing to a different base — the Alex Jones-listening, UN-black-helicopter, the-amero-is-coming conspiracy theorists. Then there’s his foreign policy staffers – or lack thereof: Republican foreign policy experts are quick to question Paul’s credentials—anonymously, at least. One Capitol Hill staffer I talked to said, “I have yet to see any evidence that this guy’s anything more than someone who’s read up on a handful of issues as opposed to someone who’s traveled widely and thought deeply about the world.” Whereas Rubio has added Jamie Fly, the former director of the Foreign Policy Institute, to his team, Paul has made no equivalent national security hire. On foreign policy, Paul listens to a group of political advisers that includes Doug Stafford, his former chief of staff who now works on his reelection campaign; Trygve Olson, a consultant who has worked on democracy promotion efforts in eastern Europe and who described himself to me as “a political guy who ended up doing a lot of foreign policy”; and Jack Hunter, a radio talk show host now working for Paul who calls himself “the southern avenger.” “I think this is a work in progress,” Elliott Abrams said of Paul’s foreign policy. Yeah… relying on Jack Hunter for foreign policy thinking is not exactly a ringing endorsement for taking the topic seriously. If I see Paul hiring someone like, say, Justin Logan or Christopher Preble, then I’ll see it as a signal that he’s taking the topic seriously. Until then, I’m just gonna remind myself that even if U.S. foreign policy doesn’t look so hot right now, there is less reason to despair than many in Washington think. |
Sipuleucel-T (trade name Provenge) has been approved since September 2014 for men with metastatic prostate cancer who have few or no symptoms and do not yet require chemotherapy. In the dossier assessment conducted by the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) in January 2015, no added benefit could be derived for sipuleucel-T. In an addendum, the Institute now examined information subsequently submitted by the manufacturer in the commenting procedure: According to the findings, there is an indication of added benefit; however, the extent is non-quantifiable. Mortality: data in the dossier incomplete and not interpretable Treatment switching occurred in all three approval studies comparing sipuleucel-T with placebo, which were presented in the dossier by the manufacturer: More than two thirds of the patients in the placebo group started treatment with sipuleucel-T on progression of their disease. In both study arms, patients received chemotherapy with docetaxel on progression. The proportion of patients who received docetaxel and the time point of this treatment differed, however, and the respective information provided in the dossier was incomplete. The study results on overall survival in the dossier could therefore not be interpreted in a meaningful way: Docetaxel has a positive effect on survival. If, for example, it is given at an earlier time point in the sipuleucel-T arm than in the control arm, lower mortality cannot be explained solely by the effect of sipuleucel-T. Then there is a risk of overestimating the effect of sipuleucel-T. Additional analyses showed advantage in mortality The manufacturer presented further data and sensitivity analyses on overall survival with its comment. This now led to a consistent picture in comparison with the primary analysis of the data in the dossier: According to this, the lower mortality in the sipuleucel-T arms cannot be explained solely by differences in the administration of docetaxel after progression. However, the advantages in overall survival are accompanied by negative effects in the form of side effects: Fever, headache and chills were more frequent in patients in the sipuleucel-T arm. However, these side effects were non-serious and mainly occurred only directly after the administration of sipuleucel-T. IQWiG therefore did not downgrade the positive effect regarding mortality. The conclusion of the addendum for sipuleucel-T is therefore an indication of an added benefit with the extent "non-quantifiable". G-BA decides on the extent of added benefit The dossier assessment is part of the early benefit assessment according to the Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products (AMNOG) supervised by the G-BA. After publication of the manufacturer's dossier and the IQWiG dossier assessment, the manufacturer submitted additional information in the commenting procedure. The G-BA subsequently commissioned IQWiG to assess the data subsequently submitted. IQWiG now presents this assessment in the form of an addendum. The G-BA makes a final decision on the extent of added benefit. ### |
Liberal Party (LP) senators have rallied behind their partymate, Senator Leila de Lima, urging the Senate leadership to make a stand on what one described as an “unprecedented attack” on its member. “The Liberal Party will stand by and support Senator De Lima,” LP vice chair and Senate President Pro-Tempore Franklin Drilon said in a text message to reporters Wednesday night, reacting to President Rodrigo Duterte’s accusations against De Lima. ADVERTISEMENT Duterte earlier called De Lima an “immoral woman” supposedly for having an affair with her driver, who he said had allegedly collected drug money for her campaign in the last May elections. READ: Duterte slams De Lima Asked if the Senate should take a stand on the issue, Drilon said: “Yes, the Senate President should take a stand on this unprecedented attack on a senator.” Senator Risa Hontiveros echoed Drilon’s statements, saying the Senate should rise to the occasion and defend the integrity of one of its members. Hontiveros is a senator of the Akbayan Party list, which is in coalition with the LP in the Senate. “I also hope that the Senate, as an institution, will rise to the occasion and defend the integrity of one of its members, even as it tries to find ways to peacefully and prudently resolve this matter,” Hontiveros said in a separate text message. She said Duterte’s remarks against De Lima were “unpresidential” and were a “breach of parliamentary courtesy.” “It unnecessarily sets the Executive and Senate on a dangerous collision course,” said Hontiveros. “It is also a sad display of ‘ad hominem politics,’ which gave premium to personal attacks over real arguments, and appealed to prejudices rather than discourse. It betrayed the government’s commitment to transparency since one of the best ways to pursue truth is through healthy deliberations driven by facts.” As a fellow woman, Hontiveros said she was offended by Duterte’s remarks against De Lima, saying it was a 180-degree turn from his apology to all women who were offended by his rape joke during the campaign. ADVERTISEMENT READ: Digong finally says sorry for rape joke If the President would not immediately correct or take back his latest statements against De Lima, then Hontiveros said this would give the impression that the government “tolerates, if not encourages, [misogyny].” “President Duterte must exercise great restraint in making injudicious statements. I again remind him that his public political statements have the force and effect of policy. While the President is known for his colorful language, it is not an excuse to target, without basis, a person’ s integrity,” she said. “I hope that in the coming days President Duterte will make concrete steps in rectifying his statements and in building a more conducive environment for healthy and mature political exchanges,” Hontiveros added. Senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan, who is also part of LP, said he was saddened by Duterte’s attack against De Lima “Nakakalungkot dahil akala ko tapos na yung issue dahil nasabi ni Pangulong Duterte nung nakaraang linggo na ginagawa lang ni Senator De Lima ang trabaho nya,” Pangilinan said. (It is saddening because I thought the issue between them was over since President Duterte already said last week that Senator De Lima was only doing her job.) De Lima chairs the Senate committee on justice and human rights, which is set to conduct hearings next week on the spate of killings under the Duterte administration. CDG/rga READ: Emotional De Lima calls Duterte tirades ‘character assassination’ RELATED VIDEOS Read Next LATEST STORIES MOST READ |
30 Rock star and comedian Tracy Morgan said that being gay is a “choice” during a raunchy performance Friday night at Carnegie Hall in New York City that promptly emptied seats. His statement about sexual orientation was part of a lewd routine that included jokes about a potential sex tape between President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, according to the Gatecrasher blog of the New York Daily News. “People seemed to not be laughing at his jokes, but more because they were shocked and appalled with what was coming out of his mouth,” one witness told the blog. “Morgan talked trash about homosexuality (saying it’s ‘a choice,’ which drew gasps), drugs, pornography and what he calls ‘politricks’ -- far edgier subjects than what his alter ego, Jordan, gets air time for.” The performance drew a standing ovation from Spike Lee, John Singleton, and 30 Rock costar Jane Krakowski, according to Gatecrasher. |
The Hooters are an American rock band from Philadelphia. They combine elements of rock, reggae, ska, and folk music to create their sound. The Hooters first gained major commercial success in the United States in the mid-1980s due to heavy radio airplay and MTV rotation of several songs including "All You Zombies", "Day by Day", "And We Danced" and "Where Do the Children Go". They opened the Philadelphia portion of the Live Aid benefit concert in 1985. In Europe they had success with the singles "All You Zombies" and "Johnny B" but their breakthrough across Europe came with the single "Satellite". During the late 1980s and 1990s, The Hooters found significant commercial success internationally, especially in Europe, where they played at The Wall Concert in Berlin in 1990. The Hooters have staged successful tours in Europe and 2007 saw the release of their first album of new material since 1993, Time Stand Still. Career [ edit ] Early years (1980–1984) [ edit ] The Hooters were formed by Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian in 1980 and played their first show on July 4 of that year. They took their name from a nickname for the melodica,[1] a type of keyboard harmonica. Rob and Eric met in 1971 at the University of Pennsylvania and had played in a band in the late 1970s, based in Philadelphia, called Baby Grand, which also featured local singer, David Kagan. Baby Grand released two albums on Arista Records. In addition, producer/friend of the band Rick Chertoff also had a significant role during these album sessions, and he would later produce several Hooters albums as well. During the early 1980s, The Hooters played on the Philadelphia club scene, boosted by airplay on WMMR, the major rock radio station in Philadelphia. Their music was also played very frequently on WRDV-FM in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. They soon became a huge success along their native East Coast, playing everything from clubs to high schools, while appearing on local television shows. The original versions of "Man in the Street," "Fightin' on the Same Side," "Rescue Me," and "All You Zombies" were released as singles in this time period. On September 25, 1982, The Hooters opened for one of The Who's farewell tour concert shows at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia on a bill that also included The Clash and Santana. After this, the group separated after two exhausting years of playing at many clubs and high schools on the East Coast. However, Bazilian and Hyman maintained their association and eventually reformed the band the following year. Besides Bazilian and Hyman, only drummer David Uosikkinen was retained from the original grouping. John Kuzma (guitar) and Bobby Woods (bass)—both now deceased—had already joined another group, The Heartbeats. They were replaced by John Lilley (guitar, backing vocals) and Rob Miller (bass, backing vocals), two former members from another local popular group, Robert Hazard and the Heroes. In 1983 The Hooters began working at last on their first album. The result, Amore, was released on the independent label Antenna and sold over 100,000 copies. Amore included songs like "All You Zombies", "Hanging On A Heartbeat", "Fightin' On The Same Side" and "Blood From A Stone", all of which would reappear in different versions on later albums. Although a studio album, Amore captured the same energy and spirit that made The Hooters admired for their live performances. That same year, Bazilian and Hyman were asked to write, arrange and perform on the debut album of a relatively unknown singer named Cyndi Lauper, She's So Unusual, which was being produced by their former producer and friend, Rick Chertoff. Hyman co-wrote the song "Time After Time" (and also sang the lower harmony vocal in the choruses), which would go on to hit Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart and was subsequently nominated for a Grammy Award for Song of the Year. On July 26, 1984, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia, Columbia Records signed the Hooters to their first major recording contract. Just before the band were about to experience mainstream success, bassist Rob Miller was seriously injured in an automobile accident and was replaced by Andy King. Mainstream success (1985–1989) [ edit ] The Hooters' 1985 Columbia Records debut album, Nervous Night, achieved platinum status around the world, selling in excess of 2 million copies and included Billboard Top 40 hits "Day By Day" (No. 18), "And We Danced" (No. 21) and "Where Do The Children Go" that featured accompanying vocals from Patty Smyth (No. 38). Rolling Stone named The Hooters the Best New Band of the Year. On July 13, 1985, they were the opening band at the Philadelphia Live Aid benefit concert, gaining international recognition for the first time. Bob Geldof has publicly stated (including in the BBC Live Aid Against All Odds documentary) that he didn't see the Hooters as a high-profile band suitable for Live Aid, but that the band was forced on him by the promoter of Live Aid in the United States, Bill Graham.[2] Geldof let his feelings be known during an interview for Rolling Stone saying: "Who the fuck are The Hooters?"[3] The Hooters do not appear on the officially released DVD of the concert.[3] Their first major overseas tour came later that year when they played throughout Australia. On May 18, 1986, The Hooters participated in "America Rocks", the concert portion of the 1986 Kodak Liberty Ride Festival that celebrated the restoration of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana. The three-hour concert was broadcast via satellite to 100 cities and also featured The Neville Brothers, Huey Lewis and the News, and Hall & Oates. On June 15, 1986, The Hooters participated in A Conspiracy of Hope, a benefit concert on behalf of Amnesty International, at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. On September 5, 1986, The Hooters appeared on the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, where they were nominated in the category of Best New Artist in a Video for "And We Danced." They performed two songs on the show, "And We Danced" and "Nervous Night." At Billboard's 8th Annual Video Music Conference on November 22, 1986, The Hooters won two awards: Best Concert Performance for the "Where Do the Children Go" video and Best Longform Program for the full length Nervous Night home video. They also placed in five categories in Billboard's Top 100 of 1986: Top Pop Artist, No. 41; Top Pop Album, No. 23; Top Pop Album Artists/Groups, No. 16; Top Pop Album Artists based on one album, No. 27; and Top Pop Singles Artists based on three singles, No. 3. In 1987 The Hooters experienced their first major commercial success in Europe. After heavy airplay in the United Kingdom, "Satellite," from the album One Way Home, became a hit single, reaching No. 22, with the band performing on the popular British television show Top of the Pops on December 3, where they would meet one of their musical idols, Paul McCartney. The song itself proved controversial, however, for its satire of the excesses of 'televangelism'. "Satellite" was also featured in an episode of the television show Miami Vice titled "Amen...Send Money", which first aired on October 2, 1987, dealing with two warring televangelists.[4] The accompanying video went even further depicting a young girl and her parents (who resemble the couple from Grant Wood's famous 'American Gothic' painting) attempting to watch 'The Three Stooges' interspersed with The Hooters performing, but being constantly interrupted by transmissions from a Christian show. Although never officially confirmed, the video contained barely concealed parodies of famous Christian televangelists Tammy Faye Bakker, Jerry Falwell, and Oral Roberts. On the tour supporting One Way Home, Fran Smith Jr. (bass, backing vocals) was brought in to replace Andy King. On November 24, 1987, Thanksgiving night, The Hooters headlined the Spectrum in Philadelphia for the first time. The show was broadcast live on MTV and the Westwood One radio network simultaneously, the second time the two networks had joined forces in producing a concert for one artist, the first being Asia in Asia on December 6, 1983. 1989 saw their final release for Columbia Records. Zig Zag introduced a politically oriented theme, with Peter, Paul and Mary providing background vocals for an updated version of the 1960s folk song 500 Miles, which became an international hit that led the way to another international success for the band. International success (1990–1995) [ edit ] As the 1990s dawned, The Hooters' success in the United States began to wane, while their popularity overseas, especially in Europe, reached new heights. Following a show at The Town & Country Club in London in March 1988, the band had met Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who told them that he was a fan. This eventually led to their appearance in Waters' staging of The Wall Concert at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin on July 21, 1990. Violinist/guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Mindy Jostyn (formerly with Joe Jackson, Billy Joel and others) joined the group for a short period during 1992-1993. 1993 saw their debut album for MCA Records, Out of Body. While not a commercial success in the United States, the album found a large audience in Europe, especially in Sweden and Germany where "Boys Will Be Boys" became a huge hit. The Hooters Live, recorded over two nights in Germany in December 1993, was released in Europe and Asia in 1994, but never saw a release in the United States. For several years the members of The Hooters were active in a variety of fields, both in and outside of music. Guitarist Eric Bazilian became recognized internationally for being a songwriter, session musician, arranger and producer for numerous artists throughout the United States and Europe. In 1995, he played all those roles except producer for Joan Osborne's debut album Relish, which was nominated for six Grammy Awards, including Song of the Year for the No. 4 Billboard hit "One of Us", which Bazilian wrote. He also released two solo albums: The Optimist in 2000 and A Very Dull Boy in 2002. Keyboard player Rob Hyman built his own recording studio, Elmstreet Studios, in suburban Philadelphia, while also contributing to numerous musical artists as a songwriter, session musician, arranger and producer, among them being Joan Osborne and Ricky Martin. Drummer David Uosikkinen, having moved to San Diego, California, launched an independent record label, Moskeeto Records, while also working as a drummer for various artists including Patty Smyth, Cyndi Lauper, Rod Stewart and Alice Cooper. In 1999, he joined a group of technology experts who created an online music portal, MP3.com, which subsequently contributed to a change in the music industry's distribution and consumer listening habits. Guitarist John Lilley started his own landscape gardening business, Avantgardeners, in the Philadelphia area. Bass player Fran Smith Jr. joined the original Broadway cast members as Paul McCartney in Beatlemania. He also played the part of Carlo Cannoli in Tony n' Tina's Wedding, the longest running Off Broadway theatre comedy. From his own recording studio, he produced numerous artists, including Joe Piscopo and Flo & Eddie of The Turtles, as well as local artists and bands. In 1995, he released a solo album, For No Apparent Reason. Reunited (2001–present) [ edit ] The Hooters did not play together again until November 21, 2001, when they performed at the Spectrum in Philadelphia for a one off show to celebrate disc jockey Pierre Robert's 20th anniversary at local rock radio station WMMR, the first major station to ever play The Hooters back in the early 1980s. 2003 saw a full-time reunion of The Hooters in Germany where they completed a successful 17-city tour. The success of the tour prompted two further tours in 2004 and 2005 where they premiered new unreleased songs and played in additional countries, including Switzerland and Sweden. On May 11, 2004, The Hooters were presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Philadelphia Music Awards.[5] November 2005 marked the appearance of The Hooters on VH1 Classic's concert series Decades Live Rock as guests of Cyndi Lauper where they performed "And We Danced" and "All You Zombies." June 2006 finally saw The Hooters play their first official shows in the United States in over a decade. Over the course of three nights they performed three shows: a homecoming show at Philadelphia's Electric Factory on June 16; a show at The Borgata in Atlantic City, New Jersey on June 17; and finally, an outdoor show at Hubbard Park in Rob Hyman's hometown of Meriden, Connecticut on June 18. Following these shows, The Hooters entered Hyman's Elmstreet Studios to record their first album of new material since 1993. Time Stand Still was released in September 2007, preceded by a tour of Europe from June through August, with shows in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Switzerland. In November 2007 The Hooters returned to Europe for a short tour of Switzerland and Germany, including a show filmed for television in Basel, Switzerland as part the AVO Concerts Series. They then played two shows in their hometown of Philadelphia at the Electric Factory during Thanksgiving week on Wednesday, November 21 and Friday, November 23, with the latter show broadcast by radio station WXPN in 85 markets. On February 28 and March 1, 2008, The Hooters once again entered Elmstreet Studios to begin work on a new album. Accompanied by Ann Marie Calhoun on violin, the band recorded acoustic rearrangements of 12 of their previously released songs, which resulted in a double-disc set, along with the band's concerts the previous year at Philadelphia's Electric Factory. The album, Both Sides Live, was released in November 2008. March 2008 saw The Hooters embark on a series of shows in the United States in support of 'Time Stand Still', which saw a Stateside release the previous month, including at B.B. King's Blues Club and Grill in New York City on Thursday, March 6, and The Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia on Saturday, March 29. In July 2008, The Hooters launched a European summer tour, playing shows in Norway, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland. On October 23, 2009, in one of the last concerts at the Wachovia Spectrum, The Hooters, Todd Rundgren and Hall & Oates headlined a concert titled "Last Call". Band members [ edit ] Present [ edit ] Past [ edit ] Bobby Woods (1980–1982): bass guitar John Kuzma (1980–1982): guitar, background vocals Rob Miller (1983–1984): bass guitar, background vocals Andy King (1984–1987): bass guitar, background vocals Mindy Jostyn (1992–1993): violin, guitar, harmonica, background vocals Discography [ edit ] Studio albums [ edit ] Live albums [ edit ] Selected compilations [ edit ] Notes A ^ It was a certification according to old criteria. Until September 24, 1999, Gold album was certified for sales of 250,000 and Platinum album for sales of 500,000 by International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, Germany (IFPI, Musik Industrie). [19] It was a certification according to old criteria. Until September 24, 1999, Gold album was certified for sales of 250,000 and Platinum album for sales of 500,000 by International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, Germany (IFPI, Musik Industrie). B ^ In Norway, this compilation was issued under the alternative title The Best of the Hooters.[20] Singles [ edit ] Video releases [ edit ] See also [ edit ] |
(click for full size) For my last entry of 2016, New York City does not disappoint. The first row starts with a powerful feminist message, followed by two heavily studded vests for U.K.’s Discharge, and NYC’s own Warzone. Row two begins with a huge Dead Kennedys patch, then an early Bad Brains logo done entirely with a black marker, and it ends with a clean collection featuring German thrashers Sodom. The final row has yet another amazing Noothgrush patch, trailed by one for a band I’d never thought to see at punk shows—Scottish synth-pop duo Strawberry Switchblade—and we finish off on a jacket sharing the props between MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball, and England’s GBH. adelsouto.com /// If you enjoy and value what you see, read, and hear on razorcake.org, please consider a tax-deductible donation for our continued survival. |
I finally got my hands on the FLIR One. Thanks to the excellent people at FLIR that sent me a review unit. After playing with it for a couple of days, I am very impressed. VERY impressed. For a review, I am going to interview myself. Yes, I learned this self interview trick from Chad Orzel. What is the FLIR One? That's a pretty simple question. The FLIR One is an infrared camera attachment for the iPhone (5 and 5s). It comes with a case so you can snap it on your phone. Image: Abby Allain Once it's on your phone, you can take awesome IR pictures like this: Image from FLIR One. A dog. Image: Rhett Allain In the above image, you can see my dog and the spot where my dog was sleeping (because it's still warm). What is infrared light? Here is the short answer. Infrared light is just like visible light except that it has a different wavelength and your eyes can't see it. Every object around you does two things. First, it reflects light. The reflection of visible light is how you see most of the things around you. Second, it emits light. The wavelength of light an object produces is dependent on the temperature of that object. For room temperature objects, this wavelength falls in the infrared. So the IR camera detects the IR light around you and displays them as different colors in the images. But don't forget - objects can still reflect infrared too. Here is a much more detailed explanation that I wrote a while ago. Can the FLIR One use different colors? Yes. I don't know why, but I always use the "iron" color scheme. Here are some other options. Image: Rhett Allain But don't worry about what color mode you are in. You can always go back and change the colors after you take a picture. Tell me some more about the camera. Ok, but that's not a question. The FLIR One actually has two cameras. There is the IR camera with a resolution of 80x60 and a visible camera at 640x480. Yes, the 80x60 resolution might seem low (but really most IR cameras have low resolution). However, the FLIR One uses these two cameras together to make a more useable image. Here, compare these two images. On the left is a normal FLIR One image and on the right is an image without the visible camera added (this is called MSX blending). FLIR One images with MSX technology on left and without on right. Image: Rhett Allain Of course if it's dark in the room you are looking, the visible camera won't really see anything anyway. But wait! There's more. The FLIR One can also record video. Yes, I think that is pretty awesome even though it is only at 8.1 frames per second. Still, this is better than a still image in some cases. Is this the best IR camera? Here is my quote: "The best infrared camera is the one that you have with you." Since the FLIR One is an attachment to the iPhone, you can carry it with you where ever you go. Who cares if you have a higher resolution IR camera if it's sitting at home. You can take pictures of cool things you see if you don't have camera with you. Also, I would like to comment on this IR camera from an educational perspective (since I use an infrared camera in some of my classes). In the past, it was rather difficult to display real time images from a traditional infrared camera. Yes, I know that in some cases it is easy to plug an IR camera into a projector. However, I was using one of the low end cameras (even these are expensive). My solution was to have a video camera connected to the projector and pointing at the IR camera. This was quite awkward. With the FLIR One, you can just use something like an Apple TV or anything that supports airplay. Then you just share your iPhone screen to the server, and presto. IR video on big screen. What about battery life? The FLIR One has its own battery. This means that taking IR pictures really doesn't use more battery than any other iPhone app. Of course this means that you have to charge the FLIR One separately from the iPhone. Does the FLIR One case make the camera too bulky? Is there anything you don't like about the FLIR One? Technically, that's questions but I will answer both. The iPhone with the FLIR One case is noticeably bulkier than just a plain iPhone. It still fits in my pocket just fine. I do find that it's a little bit harder to type one handed with the FLIR One on. I guess it's not a huge problem. You can take the FLIR One off very easily and just put it on when you want to take IR pictures. The one thing I don't like is the charging. With the FLIR One on, you can plug a USB cable into the IR camera and it will charge the FLIR One battery. It will NOT charge the iPhone battery. The only way to charge the iPhone battery is to take the FLIR One off and use the normal Apple lightning cable. The bad thing is that you can't use the FLIR One AND use the lightning cable at the same time. How much does it cost? This is a great question. It's both useful and easy to answer. The FLIR One costs $349. You can buy it directly from the FLIR One website. Do you need an app on the iPhone to use this? It would seem like you would. Yes. There is a free FLIR One iPhone app. The app lets you use the camera, measure temperatures and take both pictures and videos. There are some other apps too. In fact, there are 4 other FLIR apps right now. CloseUp: This app lets you adjust the difference between the visible camera outline and the thermal image. You need this app if you want to look at something closer than about 1 meter since the two cameras are not at the exact same location. Here are two images to show you what I mean. The left image is with the normal FLIR One app and the right is with the Closeup app. Comparison between FLIR One and FLIR One Closeup images. Paint: This is just a fun app. You take a picture and the app displays only the visible light part of the image. After that, you can use your finger to "paint" over the image and display the IR part of the image. Here is an example I made by putting a grocery bag over my head (which you should realize is potentially dangerous - I'm talking to you, kids). From FLIR One Closeup app. Image: Rhett Allain My kids really like this app. Panorama: Hopefully this title is self explaining. Here is a panorama I created. FLIR One panorama. Image: Rhett Allain Timelapse: Again, self explanatory. You just set the time interval between images and BAM. There you go. I have to admit that this can be tricky. My normal camera mount for my iPhone doesn't work with the FLIR One on and you can't use external power for the iPhone either. Still, it's cool. I think there is an option to include a time stamp in the video. However, there is one problem. If you turn the phone in landscape mode (as all video should be - hint: VVS), the app still records in vertical mode. Why is this blog post so long? The post is as long as it needs to be to answer the questions. I am answering this question even though it has nothing to do with the FLIR One and that makes this post even longer. Are you happy? What can you use the FLIR One for? There are some obvious answers here: Home uses: find leaks, pipes, thermal insulation problems, hot wires and cool stuff like that. Seeing in the dark. This isn't always that useful, but yes - you can use ambient infrared to see stuff without visible light - that is unless everything around you is the same temperature. Looking for animals (or people) in the woods. In the winter, warm blooded animals (like humans) are warmer than the surroundings and stand out. This doesn't work so well in the summer. First, the leaves get in the way. Second, the animals are about the same temperature as the surroundings. It's awesome in the winter though. Finding ghosts. Just kidding. But there are other things too. When you have an IR camera with you at all times, you just start to play with it. You just never know what cool things you will see. I like to use the FLIR One for teaching physics classes. Clearly you can see how it could be useful in this case. Oh, here is an awesome video showing bread in the bakery section of the grocery store. You can tell where the fresh bread is because it's warmer. Honestly, I think that as more and more people use IR cameras we will find new uses that we never thought of before. Can you see through walls? This was a question from my son. No. You can't see through walls. Walls are just too thick for IR to penetrate. Actually, you can't even see through windows or water since IR doesn't transmit through those substances. But I saw something where the military used IR to see where people where in a house. No, that was just fiction (probably). It almost certainly wasn't real infrared. Last question, I promise. Should I get one? That's a tough question. I don't know who you are so I don't know what you should do. For me, I think this thing is overall pretty fantastic. The IR camera (in general) lets you see stuff that you couldn't otherwise see. It extends your senses beyond normal human level. The IR camera makes me feel sort of like a superhero. I know that sounds dumb, but it's true. If you are interested in IR cameras and you have an iPhone 5 or 5s, this is a great deal. Other IR cameras are going to cost around a thousand dollars or more. On top of that, this is an IR camera that you can carry around with you where ever you go. For a more traditional IR camera, you can take pictures but you can't immediately share them on twitter or instagram. At a price of just under $350, I think this is a perfect item for physics departments. I have been obsessively taking pictures since this FLIR One arrived. I try to tag most of them with the #FLIROne tag - or just follow me on twitter (@rjallain) or on instagram - @rhettallain. If you have any other questions, send it to me through twitter - @rjallain and I will try to answer quickly. One more thing. Here are some other infrared posts that you might like. One more reminder. This post is based on a FLIR One review unit provided by FLIR. I said that before, but I just want to be clear. |
Americans' satisfaction with the state of the nation -- particularly the economy -- has mostly improved since last January, a new Gallup poll finds. (AP File Photo) (CNSNews.com) - Americans are feeling far more upbeat this January than they were a year ago, especially about the economy, according to Gallup's annual "Mood of the Nation" poll, which is conducted each January. The most recent poll, conducted Jan. 4-8, finds a whopping 80 percent of Americans are satisfied with "the overall quality of life," up four points from a year ago. Another 66 percent of Americans gave thumbs-up to "the opportunity for a person to get ahead by working hard," and that's also a four point increase from a year ago. Of the 28 categories measured by Gallup, 20 showed positive movement in the last year; two showed no change; and six categories showed reduced satisfaction year-to-year. Let's look at the 20 areas where American's satisfaction with the state of the nation showed positive change from January 2016 to January 2017: The largest jump in satisfaction had to do with the "state of the nation's economy": 46 percent of Americans expressed satisfaction, a 12-point jump since last year. That 12-point shift was the largest of any category Gallup measured. 41 percent of Americans expressed satisfaction with "the level of immigration into the country today," up 11 points from last year. Here is the entire list, as presented by Gallup: “According to Gallup, “Over the final three years of Obama's presidency, Americans also have become much less satisfied with race relations than they were during his first years in office and during most of the George W. Bush administration. Clearly, despite the historic nature of his election, Obama's legacy is not going to be focused on achieving racial harmony or erasing the race relations problems that have been a part of American culture in one way or another since the nation's inception.” Gallup also pointed to Donald Trump’s “rhetoric surrounding race and ethnic and religious minorities since the beginning of his presidential campaign has been controversial. “Trump has promised that black Americans will, within four years, be thankful for his presidency and vote for him in large numbers if he runs for re-election in 2020. How Trump's actions and policies will affect either the reality or the perception of race problems in the years ahead remains to be seen.” (Results for the Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Jan. 4-8, 2017, with a random sample of 1,032 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.) |
Every year, the Japanese company that my wife works for organizes a ‘Mayday weekend trip' and despite the fact that it's never ever held on May 1st (it usually takes place in June or July) the format is always the same. It's basically a weekend jolly for staff from several departments to bond with each other and do the three things that Thais always enjoy doing - namely eating, drinking and gossiping about the staff who aren't there. Because my wife holds a relatively senior position in the general affairs department, the company very kindly invites me to ‘tag along' as the token foreigner. Apart from the fact that it's always nice to get away for the weekend, it provides me with a great opportunity to practice my Thai language skills, given that the majority of the Thai staff are very poor in English. The Mayday weekend is usually held at a Thai-style beach resort or perhaps a log cabin complex in the middle of a national park. Anywhere will do as long as there is some nice scenery and enough activities to keep folks occupied for 36 hours or more. Staff have two options to get to the destination - they can either take their own car (which gives them a greater degree of flexibility) or they can hop aboard a chartered company bus. I've just returned from my sixth annual Mayday outing. For the first couple of years, my wife and I ‘slummed it' and took the company bus, and while that option obviously appeals to those who don't own a car, the waiting around for latecomers and the ear-splitting karaoke videos does tend to wear a bit thin. So now we do as most of the management staff do and take our own vehicle. This means we can arrive at the resort ‘fashionably late' and be totally in control of things when it's time to head back home to Bangkok. I look forward to these company weekends. Although I'm not a company employee, over the years I've grown very fond of the staff who I see every twelve months on the Mayday jolly and at other events throughout the year such as weddings and birthday parties, etc. This year, the venue was the excellent Cabana Chao Lao Resort in Chantaburi Province. It was the perfect place for Thai staff to escape to and really let their hair down. Once everyone had arrived and been assigned their rooms, it was straight down to the sandy beach for some boisterous team games. There then followed snacks and beers at the open-air bar, with a gorgeous, late afternoon breeze blowing in from the ocean. When darkness fell around 6pm, it was time for the main event - a buffet dinner followed by some live entertainment provided by local singers. And I'll say one thing about these weekends - someone does a fine job of making sure that the free beer and wine flow all evening. Thai companies never come up short in that department. Sunday morning saw small groups of bleary-eyed and hungover friends, shuffling down for a late breakfast before taking a final stroll along the beach and packing bags in readiness for the journey home. A fantastic time was had by all. However; my main purpose for writing this blog is to ask one simple question - why oh why had no one ever told me to visit Chantaburi Province before? Admittedly I was only there for one night and a couple of half days, but by jove, did I love what I saw, even for such a brief period. The only time I'd ever been to Chantaburi Province was over twenty years ago, when an Indian friend (a gemstone dealer by profession) took me down there to see one of the famous open-air gemstone markets. And although it was an interesting experience at the time, walking around on a muddy scrap of land, gawping at gemstone stalls, was still the only image that came to mind whenever Chantaburi was mentioned to me - until last weekend of course, when I came away with a completely different point of view. If I only need one reason to feel ashamed at never going to Chantaburi since then, then let's start with the fact that it's just a leisurely four-hour drive from Bangkok. OK, it took us five and a half hours to get there last weekend but I'm going to blame all that on my smartphone sat nav. Chantaburi aficionados have already assured me that the journey can be done in easily four hours from Bangkok. As you drive down from Bangkok on the main highway, you eventually see the exit signs for Pattaya and Rayong. - neither of which need any introduction. Is that why I saw so few people down in Chantaburi - the lure of Pattaya and Rayong are just too much? But ignore the road-signs, keep on going, and in no time at all, you hit mountains and greenery that follow you all the way down to the Chantaburi coastline. I'm not going to turn this into an extended travel review because one weekend doesn't qualify me as an expert but here are the points that made the trip so memorable The scenery was breath-taking, especially along the Chantaburi coast itself. For many years, I've considered the mountainous region around Chiang Rai in Northern Thailand as the place to visit for scenery. Chantaburi Province was on a par with that. I can give it no greater accolade or recommendation. The whole area was spotlessly clean. I hardly saw a scrap of litter. And anyone who has travelled around Thailand knows the heartbreak of driving along a country road with views to die for, only to turn a corner and glimpse some unofficial dumping ground with the garbage piled six feet high. I don't know who's in charge of keeping Chantaburi Province clean and tidy, but I certainly salute them here. While we're on the subject of tidiness, how refreshing it was to see an area mercifully free of those awful advertising hoardings for hotels, new condominium developments and seafood restaurants, etc that blight the landscape of so many other regions (yes, Cha'am and Hua Hin, I'm talking about you) Cyclists will be pleased to hear that Chantaburi is ideal for them as well. Long stretches of coastal road have clearly-marked cycle lanes and on Sunday morning, we passed many cycling clubs making the most of the perfect conditions for biking. I've never wanted to abandon the car and hop on two wheels quite as much as I did last Sunday. Finally, Chantaburi Province isn't known as ‘The Garden of Thailand' for nothing. Everywhere you go, there are fruit-stalls selling durian, mangosteen, sala and longans - straight from the farm. No one drives back to Bangkok without stopping off to fill at least a couple of carrier bags to the brim with luscious fruits. And with mangosteens and longans at a hundred baht for three kilos, who can blame them? I can't wait to get back to Chantaburi. But hopefully next time for a longer stay because I felt we only scratched the surface of this beautiful province. I'm looking forward to seeing so much more. I'll see you down there! |
The Campus Socialite’s inside pop-culture source just informed us that there are currently hundreds (hundreds!) of raunchy pictures, involving Christina Aguilera, her current boyfriend, and some “compromising positions” that would probably be illegal in a not so sovereign nation. That last part was just fantastical conjecture on my part, but from what we hear, these are the real deal. We can only imagine who this highest bidder will be, and how much he/she will actually pay for the photos. Here’s the ultimate question though: Do we care? Don’t get me wrong, The name Christina Aguilera to this day still makes me sweat. I grew up on Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears, and there will always be that carnal attraction, much similar I assume, to the way 8o year old men wanna fuck Betty White. But I feel like every time I see a recent picture of her, and not the circa 2002 poster I have hanging behind my closet door, I am immediately disappointed. Maybe it’s the mommy thing. Something about having seen a girl pregnant is like a big bucket of ice poured on your crotch. Natalie Portman is the exception. Add to that, she not only looked pretty damn awful at the Super Bowl, but somehow managed to mess up The National Anthem. Actually, that last part was kinda hot. In short, girl’s not looking good. Certainly not enough money to feed a small African Country good, and that is inevitably what these pictures are going to go for. Maybe 2 African Countries. Regardless of how hot she may or may not still be, the girl is celebrity, and as we all know, their bare flesh is just worth more per inch than us normal folk. Besides, I can talk all the trash about Christina Aguilera I want, but at the end of the day, I’ll be spending up to one hour trying to track down these pictures, and so will you. Hell, she could be currently pregnant in the pictures (note: this may be the case), and breathing through a respirator, and I would still download them. Lets get real people; there’s not much that girl can do to make herself unbangable. Especially for those of us who lived through the “Come On Over” phase (pictured above). I just hope whatever douche spends huge amounts of money on celebrity fuck shots, understands his involuntary agreement with the internet community. There will be hell to pay if otherwise. Still, here’s to wishing it was still 2002… |
Forget the plight of the polar bear for a moment and consider the coming collapse of the $30 billion honey bee economy in the US. Since 2006 honey bees responsible for pollinating more than 100 crops—from apples to zucchini—have been dying by the tens of millions. As a new report from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) details, scientists are still struggling to pinpoint the cause of so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and time is running out. “Currently, the survivorship of honey bee colonies is too low for us to be confident in our ability to meet the pollination demands of U.S. agricultural crops,” the report states. Some signs of beemageddon: CCD has wiped out some 10 million bee hives worth $2 billion over the past six years. The death rate for colonies has hit 30% annually in recent years and there are now about 2.5 million honey bee colonies in the US, down from 6 million in 1947 and 3 million in 1990. That downward spiral leaves “virtually no cushion of bees for pollination,” the report’s authors write. If that sounds scary, it is. Take almonds. California harvests more than 80% of the world’s almonds. But you can’t grow the nut without honey bees and it takes 60% of the US’s remaining colonies just to pollinate that one $4 billion cash crop. If the death toll continues at the present rate, that means there will soon be barely enough bees to pollinate almonds, let alone avocadoes, blueberries, pears or plums. “We are one poor weather event or high winter bee loss away from a pollination disaster,” USDA scientist Jeff Pettis said in the report. In recent years, agricultural pesticides have become a leading suspect in bee deaths. Attention has focused on a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids. Last month the European Commission imposed a two-year ban on neonicotinoids as global concern grows over the bee population crash, which has affected several European countries too. But scientists increasingly believe several interacting factors—from disease-carrying parasites to poor nutrition to pesticides—are responsible for the mass die-off. For instance, the report says, studies have shown that exposure to even non-fatal levels of neonicotinoids may make bees more susceptible to disease. And as agriculture becomes ever more industrial and natural habitats that formerly bordered farmland are destroyed, bees are being starved of the food they need to help produce food for humans. “Undernourished or malnourished bees appear to be more susceptible to pathogens, parasites, and other stressors, including toxins,” said the report. So how to save the bees? One answer: Breed better bees. The report recommends stepping up efforts to identify genetic traits in particular bees that make them resistant to suspected causes of CCD. Some honey bees, it turns out, take “suicidal risks” when infected with disease to prevent spreading the contagion to the colony. |
Canada is taking the lead on studying marijuana as a way to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD has become a hot-button issue among marijuana advocates. Right now, Canada and some American states including Michigan and Nevada recognize cannabis as a drug that can help veterans, first responders and others suffering from PTSD treat their symptoms. But New York, Illinois and other states that have legalized medical marijuana don't include PTSD as a qualified condition. And Veterans Affairs prohibits V.A. physicians from prescribing cannabis to American veterans. But a landmark study by Canadian researchers could broaden and improve the use of marijuana for PTSD treatment. On Mar. 16, Apollo Research - a network of Canadian medical cannabis clinics that prescribe medical marijuana - announced that it's undertaking a cross-country study to investigate the effects marijuana has on patients with PTSD. "This research study is a passion project and it is timely given the national attention that is being given to Veterans, First Responders and to mental health awareness overall," said Bryan Hendin, President of Apollo Applied Research - in a press release."There has been a lot of anecdotal evidence [in favor of using cannabis to treat PTSD] and now it's time for validated research." The study will also investigate which strains are best for treating PTSD: "We have learned a lot...on what strains and prescribing methods work best for our chronic pain patients," said Hendin. The PTSD project will aim to do the same. And while Apollo is spearheading research, they hope to partner with Veterans Affairs Canada in the near future. Canada poised to overtake American researchers The project could make Canada a world leader in this field of research, outpacing studies in United States that are hampered by America's rigid drug laws. "Currently in the United States, studies are stalled due to the lack of federal approval of using cannabis for testing," noted Hendin. "Strains of medical marijuana are classified as a Schedule 1 drug, which is tightly controlled by the Food and Drug Administration. This presents a challenge for conducting studies with American veterans who are struggling with PTSD. Canada is positioned to be a leader in medical cannabis research." That bureaucratic stalemate hindering American cannabis research isn't likely to improve any time soon. Groups like the Cato Institute and others groups have have called on the American government to reschedule cannabis. But the DEA has refused to budge on the issue. And the Obama administration has decided not to take action on marijuana unless legislation comes from Congress, where numerous bills that would liberalize the nation's laws have stalled, including the CARERS Act - a bipartisan bill that would change the drug scheduling and recognize the value of medical marijuana. But further research such as the Apollo study could pressure the American government to recognize the medical value of cannabis, and to help veterans and other patients with PTSD gain access to medical marijuana. h/t Chicago Tribune, Al Jazeera America |
By Joseph Nye. Predictions of European decline rely on an outmoded understanding of power. On all issues that require power with - rather than over - others, Europe has impressive capacity. A defense of Europe’s relevance. __________________________________________________________ The closest thing to an equal that the United States faces at the beginning of the 21st century is the European Union. Although the American economy is four times larger than Germany’s, the total economy of the European Union is slightly larger than that of the U.S. in purchasing power parity, and Europe’s population of nearly 500 million is considerably larger than America’s 300 million. American per capita income is higher than that of the EU, because a number of the new entrants into the European Union were poorer than the original West European core countries, but in terms of human capital, technology, and exports, Europe is very much a peer competitor for the United States. Until the Spring crisis of 2010 when fiscal problems in Greece and elsewhere created anxiety in financial markets, many economists speculated that the Euro might some day replace the dollar as the world’s primary reserve currency. Instead, European governments (and the IMF) had to organize a $925 million rescue program to try to restore market confidence, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that if the Euro fails, “then not only the currency fails…Europe will fail, and with it the idea of European unity.”[i] In military terms, Europe spends less than half of what the United States does on defense, but has more men under arms, and includes two countries that possess nuclear arsenals. In soft power, European cultures have long had a wide appeal in the rest of the world, and the sense of a Europe uniting around Brussels has had a strong attraction for its neighbors. Europeans have also been important pioneers and played central roles in international institutions. The key question in assessing Europe’s resources is whether Europe will develop enough political and social-cultural cohesion to act as one on a wide range of international issues, or whether it will remain a limited grouping of countries with strongly different nationalisms and foreign policies. In other words, what is Europe’s power conversion capability? The answer varies with different issues. On questions of trade and influence within the World Trade Organization, Europe is the equal of the United States and able to balance American power. The creation of the European Monetary Union and the launching of the Euro at the beginning of 1999 made Europe’s role in monetary affairs and the International Monetary Fund nearly equal to that of the U.S. (though the 2010 crisis over Greek debt dented confidence in the Euro.) On anti-trust issues, the size and attraction of the European market has meant that American firms seeking to merge have had to seek approval from the European Commission as well as the U.S. Justice Department. In the cyber world, the EU is setting the global standards for privacy protection. At the same time, Europe faces significant limits on its degree of unity. National identities remain stronger than a common European identity, despite six decades of integration, and national interests, while subdued in comparison to the past, still matter.[ii] The enlargement of the European Union to include 27 states (with more to come) means that European institutions are likely to remain sui generis, and unlikely to produce a strong federal Europe or a single state. None of this is to belittle European institutions and what they have accomplished. Legal integration is increasing, and European Court verdicts have compelled member countries to change policies. On the other hand, legislative and executive branch integration has lagged, and while Europe has created a president and a central figure for foreign relations, the integration of foreign and defense policy is still limited. In the words of Lord Patten, a former member of the European Commission, “unlike the US we do not matter everywhere.”[iii] Over the decades Europe has seen alternations between excessive optimism and bouts of “Euro-pessimism” such as the current period. As one journalist reported in 2010, “this year, the 27 nation European Union was supposed to come of age as an actor on the world stage, bolstered by the Lisbon Treaty, which streamlines the EU’s cumbersome institutions. Instead, Europe is starting to look like the loser in a new geopolitical order dominated by the U.S. and emerging powers led by China….No Europeans were invited when U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao held the make-or-break meeting on Dec. 18 that brokered the modest Copenhagen accord. The Chinese invited the leaders of India, Brazil and South Africa. That meeting and Europe’s absence was the ‘seminal image’ of 2009.”[iv] Moreover, after the 2008 financial crisis, the fiscal problems of several EU members, particularly Greece, exposed the limits of fiscal integration in the Eurozone and raised questions about role of the Euro. The National Intelligence Council report foresees a Europe in 2050 that will be “a hobbled giant distracted by internal bickering and competing national agendas”. As The Economist noted, “talk of Europe’s relative decline seems to be everywhere just now….You may hear glum figures about Europe’s future weight and with some reason. In 1900, Europe accounted for a quarter of the world’s population. By 2060, it may account for just 6% – and almost a third of these will be more than 65 years old.”[v] Europe does face severe demographic problems, but size of population is not highly correlated with power, and “predictions of Europe’s downfall have a long history of failing to materialize.” In the 1980s, analysts spoke of Euro-sclerosis and a crippling malaise, but in the ensuing decades Europe showed impressive growth and institutional development. “The EU’s modus operandi – sharing power, hammering out agreements, resolving conflict by endless committee – can be boring and even frustrating to watch. But in an increasingly networked and interdependent world, it has become the global standard.” [vi] As the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations put it, “the conventional wisdom is that Europe’s hour has come and gone. Its lack of vision, divisions, obsession with legal frameworks, unwillingness to project military power, and sclerotic economy are contrasted with a United States more dominant even than Rome…But the problem is not Europe – it is our outdated understanding of power.”[vii] The political scientist Andrew Moravcsik makes a similar argument that European nations, singly and collectively, are the only states other than the U.S. able to “exert global influence across the full spectrum from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ power. Insofar as the term retains any meaning, the world is bipolar , and is likely to remain so over the foreseeable future.” The pessimistic prognosis is based on a 19th century realist view in which “power is linked to the relative share of aggregate global resources and countries are engaged in constant zero-sum rivalry. [viii] Moreover, as he points out, Europe is the world’s second military power with 21 per cent of the world’s military spending compared to 5 per cent for China, three per cent for Russia, two percent for India, and 1.5 percent for Brazil. Tens of thousands of troops have been deployed outside of home countries in Sierra Leone, Congo, Ivory Coast, Chad, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. In terms of economic power, Europe has the world’s largest market, and represents 17 per cent of world trade compared to 12 per cent for the U.S., and Europe dispenses half of the world’s foreign assistance compared to 20 per cent for the U.S. In terms of relative power, if the EU endeavored to become a global challenger to the United States in a traditional realist balance of power, these assets might counter American power. But if Europe and America remain loosely allied or even neutral, these resources could reinforce each other . As The Economist speculated a decade ago, in terms of military security, it is possible that “by about 2030, both Europe and America will be having the same trouble with some other part of the world” such as Russia, China and Muslim southwest Asia.[ix] Nor is economic divorce likely. New technology, flexibility in labor markets, strong venture capital and an entrepreneurial culture make the American market attractive to European investors. The United States spends 2.7 per cent –twice as much as Europe – on universities and R&D. Direct investment in both directions is higher than with Asia and helps knit the economies together. More than a third of trade occurs within transnational corporations. Moreover, while trade inevitably produces some degree of friction in the domestic politics of democracies, it is a game from which both sides can profit if there is a will to cooperate, and U.S.-European trade is more balanced than U.S. trade with Asia. At the cultural level, Americans and Europeans have sniped at and admired each other for more than two centuries. For all the complaints about Hollywood films or McDonald’s, no one forces Europeans to eat there, though millions do each year. And despite the frictions between parts of Europe and the George W. Bush administration, Barack Obama became almost a cult figure in his popularity in much of Europe. In some ways, the inevitable frictions between the two continents show a closeness rather than a distance. It is also true that American consumers can benefit from European efforts to raise standards in anti-trust actions or internet privacy. And in a larger sense, Americans and Europeans share the values of democracy and human rights more with each other than with other regions of the world. Even in a traditional realist assessment of balance of power resources, neither the US nor Europe are likely to threaten the vital or important interests of the other side.[x] Power struggles over conflicting interests are likely to remain at a more mundane level. And on issues that require power with rather than over others, the Europeans have impressive capacity. This is an exclusive excerpt from Joseph Nye’s forthcoming book, The Future of Power. Joseph Nye is a Harvard University Distinguished Services Professor, and a former chair of the US National Intelligence Council. [i] Ralph Atkins, “State of the union,” Financial Times, June 1, 2010. [ii] Pippa Norris, “Global Governance and Cosmopolitan Citizens,” in Nye and Donahue, eds., Governance in a Globalizing World (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000), p. 157. [iii] Chris Patten, “What Is Europe to Do?” New York Review of Books, March 11, 2010, p. 12. [iv] Marcus Walker, “EU Sees Dreams of Power Wane as ‘G-2’ Rises,” Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2010. [v] Charlemagne, “Lessons from ‘The Leopard’”, The Economist, December 12, 2009, p. 61. [vi] Stefan Theil, “The Modest Superpower,” Newsweek, November 16, 2009, p. 41. [vii] Mark Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (London: Fourth Estate, 2005), p. 2. [viii] Andrew Moravcsik, “Europe: The Quiet Superpower,” French Politics 7, 3 (Sep/Dec 2009), pp. 406-7. [ix] “Weathering the Storm,” The Economist, September 9, 2000, p. 23. [x] Robert D. Blackwill, The Future of Transatlantic Relations (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1999). |
Get the biggest politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email John Major’s desperate bid to calm a furious Margaret Thatcher just weeks after he became Prime Minister, has been laid bare in newly released government files. In an extraordinary letter, Major sought to reassure her that he was committed to carrying forward her legacy, even as he set about dismantling the poll tax - one of her flagship reforms. When Mr Major entered Downing Street in November 1990 in the wake of Mrs Thatcher's shock resignation following a revolt by Tory MPs, she made clear he was her chosen successor. But within weeks the strains were evident as his talk of building "a nation at ease with itself" jarred with the confrontational style of her premiership. (Image: PA) In March 1991, she finally snapped, using a US television interview to complain: "I see a tendency to try to undermine what I achieved." The timing could hardly have been worse for Mr Major just as he was preparing to announce the abolition of the poll tax - or community charge as it was officially known. The protests which erupted over the poll tax - as millions saw their bills soar - had been a key factor behind the unrest which drove Mrs Thatcher from office. She, however, like many Tories, remained fiercely opposed to a return to funding local government through a property-based tax which Mr Major was now proposing with the council tax. In an attempt to avert a potentially explosive clash, Mr Major sought to explain his thinking in a five page letter made public for the first time by the National Archives at Kew. Beginning "Dear Margaret" and ending "Yours ever, John", he said "responsible citizens, overwhelmingly our supporters" were being hit with rising bills as councils set the poll tax at levels far higher than anyone in government had expected. "The decision to abolish the community charge was not taken lightly," he informed her. "But having consulted widely throughout the party, I am convinced that it would never be accepted as equitable and that it would never be properly collectable either. "I do not think we could long defend a situation in which some people were paying more in community charge than in income tax." Mr Major then sought to sweeten the pill by passing on an invitation from the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to visit Moscow. "He would of course want to have a meeting with you, and hold a lunch or dinner in your honour," he wrote. He then added an extraordinary handwritten PS, assuring her of his continuing commitment to her policies and rejecting the "hurtful" attempts to drive a wedge between them. (Image: Daily Mirror) "I am as fed up as you must be with the way the press seize on any issue to try and point up similarities/dis-similarities between us. I find it embarrassing and, more important, you must find it hurtful," he wrote. "On Saturday the speech I make at Southport will, I hope, put this to rest. It will set out clear principles that will carry forward the changes of the last 10 years." It was a vain hope, as her deepening unrest over his policies - particularly on Europe - was to cast a long shadow over his premiership. |
It took George Welsh just three seasons to lift Virginia from the lowest depths of major college football to their first bowl game - a win - between his hiring after the 1981 season and the classic 1984 campaign. But for the first several years of his tenure, there was one team that just would not go away. Cavalier greats like quarterback Don Majkowski and offensive lineman Jim Dombrowski were part of some of the great 1980s teams under Welsh that never quite got the job done against longtime ACC power Clemson. Between their first meeting in 1955 and the last Clemson win in "The Streak" in 1989, the Tigers won 29 straight games over UVa. It was a run that lasted through all or part of eight U.S. Presidential administrations, saw five UVa presidents come and go (four if you choose not to count John Casteen, who took office right before The Streak ended), and made victims out of nine UVa coaches, Welsh included. Enter the 1990 team that was coming off a first-ever ACC title and ranked No. 15 in the preseason polls, their first such honor and one which remains a UVa record to this day. Enter Terry Kirby, a Hampton native and former top national high school recruit-turned-second-year running back who would go down as the best Virginia running back since Bill Dudley. That is, at least until a couple guys named Tiki and Thomas showed up later in the decade. Enter Shawn Moore, a redshirt fourth-year and co-captain at quarterback in his third season at starter whose accuracy and play-extending mobility dazzled UVa fans that were enjoying this newfound success. Enter wide receiver Herman Moore (no relation), a tall third-year with the ability to jump out of the stadium if needed. Enter Chris Slade, the second-year linebacker who terrorized opposing quarterbacks for four years on Grounds and was a consensus first-team All-American in 1991 and '92. That summer, talk was already swirling about the potential for a monumental upset. "The atmosphere built that whole summer," lifelong Charlottesville resident and 1990 UVa graduate Myron Ripley told STL via email. "Everyone knew we were good with Shawn, Kirby, Herman, Slade, etc. We beat the living hell out of Kansas, 59-10. So the next week the place was jacked. And at that time Scott only held something like 45,000; maybe. So a ticket was a big deal." The offense put on a clinic in the opener at Kansas in Week 1 with that 49-point win, scoring on nine out of 12 possessions. But that was mere window dressing for the Week 2 clash with the Tigers in Charlottesville on Sept. 8. Even though the Hoos probably had their best chance in the history of the series to win, skepticism still lingered the week of the game. "People were scared in one way to talk about it. Heck, at 29 games it seemed like it would never end," Ripley said. "Other than a game here or there, the Hoos really hadn’t challenged Clemson. Former Clemson coach Frank Howard had called us the "white meat" on the schedule and that really aggravated UVa for years, but it wasn’t like Clemson was ever scared. That year folks sort of knew we had a damn good chance. But still there was tension." Scott Stadium was filled 4,800 people past its 42,000-seat capacity and ready to erupt as the Cavs took the field. The weather was all but perfect at kickoff: 72 degrees, partly cloudy, and only a little windy. Ripley was at the game, and had a pretty decent view. "That was my last year of working regularly in the press box for UVa media relations. Rich Murray and Doyle Smith were the guys I worked for and they were great. I worked for 5 years in the press box so I had a bird’s eye view. The crowd and atmosphere was electric. No one really ever sat down and the stands were packed," he said. In the 2010 DVD movie Wahoowa: The History of Virginia Cavalier Football, Welsh said, "I could tell on the Thursday practice, by then, the players were really, really ready to play that game." For the first quarter at least, the Cavalier defense sure was, holding the Tigers scoreless. Clemson quarterback DeChane Cameron would open the scoring early in the second with a 25-yard scamper. A 38-yard Jake McInerney field goal with 3:26 to go in the half brought the Hoos within four. Two minutes and change later, Slade broke past Clemson right tackle Stacy Long and got to Cameron in time, not only sacking the Clemson quarterback but forcing a fumble that proved to be a significant momentum shift in the Cavaliers' favor, if only psychologically. Yeah, I think that was a pretty cool play. McInerney's 26-yarder with eight seconds left in the half made it 7-6 Clemson at the intermission. It was all Virginia after that. Kirby ran it in from four yards out with around 11 minutes left in the third to give the Hoos the lead for good. McInerney's point after made it 13-7. Clemson's ensuing drive stalled, and the Tigers punted. Jason Wallace took Chris Gardocki's punt from the 15-yard line and, well, just watch. <iframe src="http://gfycat.com/ifr/WellinformedHeavenlyEmeraldtreeskink" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="480" height="360" style="-webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;-webkit-transform: scale(1);" ></iframe> The Moore-to-Moore connection came through on second-and-goal for one of the biggest touchdowns in UVa history to this day. From 12 yards out, Shawn, as the pocket was collapsing, lofted the ball up for grabs between Herman and Clemson corner Jerome Henderson. The 5-foot-11 Henderson was no match for the 6-foot-5 Virginia receiver, and Moore held on to the ball all the way down to the old AstroTurf surface to put the Cavaliers up by two touchdowns. McInerney's extra point was good, and it was 20-7 with eight and a half minutes to go in the third quarter. From there, the Virginia defensive corps held as Clemson went punt, punt, failed fourth down conversion, punt, failed fourth down conversion, and game-ending incompletion to finish the game. Current UVa radio analyst Tony Covington and Eugene Rodgers broke up the Cameron pass intended for Doug Thomas on the final Clemson fourth-down try, and the celebration began in earnest on the field and in the stands. "You could tell folks were looking at [each other] this wondering, 'Is this the year?' No one dared say it. There was a tension that just sort of built to a crescendo," Ripley said. Between Ed Garno's punt to end the final Virginia drive and Clemson's next play, that crescendo built to something resembling anarchy taking over Scott Stadium. Students, some of whom likely aided by liquid-based courage, outnumbered the handful of police officers and security personnel stationed at the west end (with the hill, band, and student section) of the stadium. The end zone was filled with fans, and even that ruckus spilled over inside the five-yard line before the goalpost collapsed under the stress of being shaken back and forth as a good dozen students climbed on it. One final Clemson incompletion as the gun sounded gave way to an avalanche of humanity, as thousands of students and fans stormed the field while Welsh was quickly escorted to safety. Virginia finally had beaten a top-10 team for the first time under Welsh. "There were a few games that maybe some folks went on the field, like UNC in 1983 when we all realized George had something going on. But nothing like what happened that evening. I want to say and I could be wrong but the game was an early evening start, something like 6 p.m. (it was at 4:00). So when the game ended there was plenty of time to go crazy around Grounds and around Charlottesville ... It was bedlam," Ripley said. As is wont to happen in Charlottesville, the celebration lasted well into the night. "Folks were hugging each other and anyone who wanted a beer probably got one for free that night. The party never ended and each week UVa kept going up in polls until being ranked No. 1," Ripley said. The headlines in the Monday edition of the Cavalier Daily told the tale simply but efficiently. "At last" "Fans became real fans for this game" "National championship within Virginia's reach" (that one would prove prophetic) Even the name of the paper itself was moved down in favor of the one word that summed up the feeling better than any other: "Finally!" The good times from that picture-perfect early fall day would roll into October and early November, as the unthinkable happened on Oct. 15. 30 years earlier, they weren't even halfway through a stretch that would go down as one of the worst in major college football history. They would lose a then-record 28 games in the Dick Voris era from 1958-60. Now, at 6-0, they were selected by the coaches and the media as the nation's top-ranked college football team. Oklahoma, Miami, Notre Dame, Nebraska, and yes, even Clemson, were ranked behind the Cavaliers. The famous and much-hyped game against Georgia Tech on Nov. 3 ended in a heartbreaking 41-38 loss, perhaps the most painful in UVa football history. Saying the name "Scott Sisson" in Charlottesville may be tantamount to "Bucky Dent" in New England, in that those words are usually accompanied by language not appropriate for this space. UVa would lose four of their final five games, three of those losses coming by a combined nine points. But before all that happened, there were a few weeks in the fall of 1990 where the Wahoos and their fans could say that they were the best team in the country. And it all began on a crisp September afternoon in Central Virginia that saw history made. If you want to watch the game in its entirety, it's available on YouTube here. |
No, this isn’t an article about how the Internal Revenue Service is a corrupt, political tool, because it’s not---despite its ham-handed handling of Tea Party and other organizations’ applications for 501(c)(4) tax exemptions and the bonuses it indiscriminately paid to IRS employees behind on their own taxes. The IRS is, however, an insular, often tone deaf and sometimes bumbling bureaucracy which is being starved of the resources it needs to do its job. Since 2010, its Congressional appropriations have fallen 7% ----and that’s in nominal dollars, before any adjustment for inflation. During the same period, its appropriations funded workforce has shrunk by 10%, with enforcement staff down 15%, according to numbers Congress’ Government Accountability Office released last week. Meanwhile, the tax agency’s workload has increased with the explosion of identity theft tax refund fraud; a 4% growth in returns filed; and new laws to administer, including the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare). “The IRS is in crisis and it’s not the crisis that everybody thinks it is,’’ IRS Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson said in an interview. “It’s a crisis of insufficient funding and too much work and now, insufficient skills in our employees who are not being trained,’’ she added. Faced with both a budget crunch and embarrassing revelations about silly spending on conferences, including the production of Star Trek and employee line dancing videos, the IRS slashed training spending in 2013 to 83% below its 2010 level. Even a relatively smooth recent tax return processing season couldn’t mask what the IRS Oversight Board calls, in testimony it is submitting to the Senate this week, “an alarming erosion in both customer service and enforcement that shows no signs of abating." Consider this: During fiscal 2014, the IRS plans to audit only 4.2% of corporations with assets in excess of $10 million, down from 5.6% in 2013 and 6.2% in 2011. The individual taxpayer audit rate is expected to sink to just 0.80%, down from 0.96 % in 2013 and 1.1% in 2011. Last year, enforcement revenues from audits dropped $400 million to $9.8 billion, the lowest in a decade, even though there’s no indication that people are cheating less. (The IRS estimates that in 2006---the most recent years it has studied—the public voluntarily paid 83% of what it owed in a timely fashion, with enforcement and late payments bringing the compliance rate up to 85.5%.) Olson, who’s known for worrying foremost about deteriorating taxpayer service, now considers enforcement to be at dangerously low levels too. “At some point if you keep stripping from enforcement, the word will get out to people that maybe the IRS hasn’t been catching stuff and that in terrorem effect will dissipate. That may take five years to show up,’’ she said. As for service, the IRS reports that thanks to a lower volume of phone calls this past tax filing season, a higher than expected 73% of callers who tried to get through to a human at the IRS were able to do so. The agency attributes the reduced volume to fewer tax changes, but volume may also have been suppressed by headlines warning taxpayers not to even bother calling the IRS. Anyway, as seasonal phone staffing drops off, the IRS expects service to deteriorate, with an average of around 60% of callers getting through to a human during FY 2014 as a whole. The same pattern held last year too; during last July, August and September, only 3 out of 10 callers got through to a human being and those who did spent an average of more than half an hour on hold before breaking through. Another indicator of declining service: the IRS has stopped answering “complex” tax law questions. Such as? Olson shared a few examples of what’s now on the IRS’ too hard for us list: “I deliver pizza for my employer using my car. How can I deduct my car expenses?” and “I received an inheritance. Do I have to report it?” Even more alarming is the growing time it takes the agency to respond to taxpayers’ correspondence---a crucial service indicator since the IRS conducts 75% of its individual audits by mail and sends out millions of additional notices a year questioning some item on a tax return. When taxpayers write back with evidence of why they don’t owe more, they rightly expect someone at the agency to read their letter in a timely fashion. Yet at the end of fiscal 2013, the Oversight Board reports, 53% of taxpayer correspondence waiting to be worked was “overage”—meaning the IRS hadn’t responded within 45 days of receipt. That’s up from 28% at the end of FY 2010. Sound bad? Things are likely to get a lot worse at the IRS before they get better. The Obama Administration has asked for a 10.5% ($1.2 billion) increase in funding for the agency for 2015, categorizing most of that as revenue raising initiatives that shouldn’t be subject to agreed budget caps. Good luck getting that through a Republican House more interested in investigating the IRS than funding it. The nature of what it does and the IRS' own missteps have combined to turn it into arguably the biggest government casualty in the partisan wars. “What is an historically unpopular agency that has been seen somewhat skeptically, especially by the Republicans, is now even more so,’’ said Mark W. Everson, who served as IRS Commissioner from 2003 to 2007 under President George W. Bush. In an interview, he praised new IRS Commissioner John A. Koskinen as a “straight shooter.’’ But he doesn't see Koskinen as able to change the political dynamic. “I would tell you this doesn’t get fixed until you have a Republican President. Then the Administration can say to (Republicans in) Congress, "Look, this is our problem. We’ve got to make this thing work,’’ said Everson, now vice-chairman of alliantgroup. House Republicans have, of course, blocked any funding for the IRS to process or police the new health insurance subsidies (technically, refundable tax credits) that are at the heart of Obamacare. The new credits are sure to create confusion during the next filing season and the IRS projects that without more funding just 53% of callers will be able to get through to a human being in 2015. Beyond clogged phones, “the affordable care act is so controversial that it’s going to wash over the agency just like the 501(c)(4) stuff did,’’ further eroding the IRS’ popular support, Everson predicted. He worries that declining support for the IRS, combined with falling enforcement, could create a “bad cocktail” that makes younger generations less likely to comply with the tax law. Olson noted the IRS is now focusing on four priorities: implementing Obamacare and the new Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA); containing the identity theft refund fraud epidemic; and making sure the 2015 filing season goes smoothly. All other information technology projects are on ice, including a new fraud filter; a system that would allow the IRS to call taxpayers back when it's their turn (the way Amazon.com customer service does) rather than placing them on endless hold; and new matching programs to make use of the stockbroker basis reporting Congress mandated back in 2008. For those coming from a business environment, what the IRS can't do is simply stunning. For example, about 94% of small businesses using accounting software keep their records on Intuit ’s QuickBooks. But the IRS can't afford to buy all its own small business auditors the updated version of Quickbooks, so that they can accept electronic records from those they’re auditing. (That’s on the 2015 budget wish list too.) “The IRS will be stretched to the breaking point over the next year and we will see whether by just focusing on those four things it can pull off the 2015 filing season okay,’’ said Olson. “We will either just squeak through, or all chaos will break out.’’ Follow Janet Novack on Twitter. |
Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) is the term coined by British biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey for the diverse range of regenerative medical therapies, either planned or currently in development,[1] for the periodical repair of all age-related damage to human tissue with the ultimate purpose of maintaining a state of negligible senescence in the patient, thereby postponing age-associated disease for as long as the therapies are reapplied.[2] The term "negligible senescence" was first used in the early 1990s by professor Caleb Finch to describe organisms such as lobsters and hydras, which do not show symptoms of aging. The term "engineered negligible senescence" first appeared in print in Aubrey de Grey's 1999 book The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging,[3] and was later prefaced with the term "strategies" in the article Time to Talk SENS: Critiquing the Immutability of Human Aging[4] De Grey called SENS a "goal-directed rather than curiosity-driven"[5] approach to the science of aging, and "an effort to expand regenerative medicine into the territory of aging".[6] To this end, SENS identifies seven categories of aging "damage" and a specific regenerative medical proposal for treating each. While many biogerontologists find it "worthy of discussion"[7][8] and SENS conferences feature important research in the field,[9][10] some contend that the ultimate goals of de Grey's programme are too speculative given the current state of technology, referring to it as "fantasy rather than science".[11][12] Framework [ edit ] The arrows with flat heads are a notation meaning "inhibits," used in the literature of gene expression and gene regulation. The ultimate objective of SENS is the eventual elimination of age-related diseases and infirmity by repeatedly reducing the state of senescence in the organism. The SENS project consists in implementing a series of periodic medical interventions designed to repair, prevent or render irrelevant all the types of molecular and cellular damage that cause age-related pathology and degeneration, in order to avoid debilitation and death from age-related causes.[2] De Grey defines aging as "the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us", and, more specifically, as follows: "a collection of cumulative changes to the molecular and cellular structure of an adult organism, which result in essential metabolic processes, but which also, once they progress far enough, increasingly disrupt metabolism, resulting in pathology and death."[13] He adds: "geriatrics is the attempt to stop damage from causing pathology; traditional gerontology is the attempt to stop metabolism from causing damage; and the SENS (engineering) approach is to eliminate the damage periodically, so keeping its abundance below the level that causes any pathology." The SENS approach to biomedical gerontology is thus distinctive because of its emphasis on tissue rejuvenation rather than attempting to slow the aging process. By enumerating the various differences between young and old tissue identified by the science of biogerontology, a 'damage' report was drawn, which in turn formed the basis of the SENS strategy. The results fell into seven main categories of 'damage', seven alterations whose reversal would constitute negligible senescence: cell loss or atrophy (without replacement),[4][13][14] oncogenic nuclear mutations and epimutations,[15][16][17] cell senescence (Death-resistant cells),[18][19] mitochondrial mutations,[20][21] Intracellular junk or junk inside cells (lysosomal aggregates),[22][23] extracellular junk or junk outside cells (extracellular aggregates),[18][19] random extracellular cross-linking.[18][19] For each of these areas SENS offers at least one strategy, with a research and a clinical component. The clinical component is required because in some of the proposed therapies, feasibility has already been proven, but not completely applied and approved for human trials. These strategies do not presuppose that the underlying metabolic mechanisms of aging be fully understood, only that we take into account the form senescence takes as directly observable to science, and described in scientific literature.. Types of aging damage and treatment schemes [ edit ] Nuclear mutations/epimutations—OncoSENS [ edit ] These are changes to the nuclear DNA (nDNA), or to proteins which bind to the nDNA. Certain mutations can lead to cancer. This would need to be corrected in order to prevent or cure cancer. SENS focuses on a strategy called "whole-body interdiction of lengthening telomeres" (WILT), which would be made possible by periodic regenerative medicine treatments. Mitochondrial mutations—MitoSENS [ edit ] Mitochondria are components in our cells that are important for energy production. Because of the highly oxidative environment in mitochondria and their lack of the sophisticated repair systems, mitochondrial mutations are believed to be a major cause of progressive cellular degeneration. This would be corrected by allotopic expression—copying the DNA for mitochondria completely within the cellular nucleus, where it is better protected. De Grey argues that experimental evidence demonstrates that the operation is feasible, however, a 2003 study showed that some mitochondrial proteins are too hydrophobic to survive the transport from the cytoplasm to the mitochondria.[24] Intracellular junk—LysoSENS [ edit ] Our cells are constantly breaking down proteins and other molecules that are no longer useful or which can be harmful. Those molecules which can’t be digested accumulate as junk inside our cells, which is detected in the form of lipofuscin granules. Atherosclerosis, macular degeneration, liver spots on the skin and all kinds of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer's disease) are associated with this problem. Junk inside cells might be removed by adding new enzymes to the cell's natural digestion organ, the lysosome. These enzymes would be taken from bacteria, molds and other organisms that are known to completely digest animal bodies. Extracellular junk—AmyloSENS [ edit ] Harmful junk protein can accumulate outside of our cells. Junk here means useless things accumulated by a body, but which cannot be digested or removed by its processes, such as the amyloid plaques characteristic of Alzheimer's disease and other amyloidoses. Junk outside cells might be removed by enhanced phagocytosis (the normal process used by the immune system), and small drugs able to break chemical beta-bonds. The large junk in this class can be removed surgically. Cell loss and atrophy—RepleniSENS [ edit ] Some of the cells in our bodies cannot be replaced, or can be only replaced very slowly—more slowly than they die. This decrease in cell number affects some of the most important tissues of the body. Muscle cells are lost in skeletal muscles and the heart, causing them to become frailer with age. Loss of neurons in the substantia nigra causes Parkinson's disease, while loss of immune cells impairs the immune system. This can be partly corrected by therapies involving exercise and growth factors, but stem cell therapy, regenerative medicine and tissue engineering are almost certainly required for any more than just partial replacement of lost cells. Cell senescence—ApoptoSENS [ edit ] Senescence is a phenomenon where the cells are no longer able to divide, but also do not die and let others divide. They may also do other harmful things, like secreting proteins. Degeneration of joints, immune senescence, accumulation of visceral fat and type 2 diabetes are caused by this. Cells sometimes enter a state of resistance to signals sent, as part of a process called apoptosis, to instruct cells to destroy themselves. Cells in this state could be eliminated by forcing them to apoptose (via suicide genes, vaccines, or recently discovered senolytic agents), and healthy cells would multiply to replace them. Cells are held together by special linking proteins. When too many cross-links form between cells in a tissue, the tissue can lose its elasticity and cause problems including arteriosclerosis, presbyopia and weakened skin texture. These are chemical bonds between structures that are part of the body, but not within a cell. In senescent people many of these become brittle and weak. SENS proposes to further develop small-molecular drugs and enzymes to break links caused by sugar-bonding, known as advanced glycation endproducts, and other common forms of chemical linking. Scientific controversy [ edit ] While some fields mentioned as branches of SENS are broadly supported by the medical research community, e.g., stem cell research (RepleniSENS), anti-Alzheimers research (AmyloSENS) and oncogenomics (OncoSENS), the SENS programme as a whole has been a highly controversial proposal, with many critics arguing that the SENS agenda is fanciful and the highly complicated biomedical phenomena involved in the aging process contain too many unknowns for SENS to be fully implementable in the foreseeable future.[25] Cancer may well deserve special attention as an aging-associated disease (OncoSENS), but the SENS claim that nuclear DNA damage only matters for aging because of cancer has been challenged in the literature[26] as well as by material in the article DNA damage theory of aging. In November 2005, 28 biogerontologists published a statement of criticism in EMBO Reports, "Science fact and the SENS agenda: what can we reasonably expect from ageing research?,"[25] arguing "each one of the specific proposals that comprise the SENS agenda is, at our present stage of ignorance, exceptionally optimistic,"[25] and that some of the specific proposals "will take decades of hard work [to be medically integrated], if [they] ever prove to be useful."[25] The researchers argue that while there is "a rationale for thinking that we might eventually learn how to postpone human illnesses to an important degree,"[25] increased basic research, rather than the goal-directed approach of SENS, is presently the scientifically appropriate goal. This article was written in response to a July 2005 EMBO Reports article previously published by de Grey[27] and a response from de Grey was published in the same November issue.[28] De Grey summarizes these events in "The biogerontology research community's evolving view of SENS," published on the Methuselah Foundation website.[29] In 2012, Colin Blakemore criticised Aubrey de Grey, but not SENS specifically, in a debate hosted at the Oxford University Scientific Society.[citation needed] More recently, biogerontologist Marios Kyriazis has sharply criticised the clinical applicability of SENS[30][31] claiming that such therapies, even if developed in the laboratory, would be practically unusable by the general public.[32] De Grey responded to one such criticism.[33] Technology Review controversy [ edit ] In February 2005, Technology Review, which is owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published an article by Sherwin Nuland, a Clinical Professor of Surgery at Yale University and the author of "How We Die",[34] that drew a skeptical portrait of SENS, at the time de Grey was a computer associate in the Flybase Facility of the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. The April 2005 issue of Technology Review contained a reply by Aubrey de Grey[35] and numerous comments from readers.[36] During June 2005, David Gobel, CEO and Co-founder of Methuselah Foundation offered Technology Review $20,000 to fund a prize competition to publicly clarify the viability of the SENS approach. In July 2005, Pontin announced a $20,000 prize, funded 50/50 by Methuselah Foundation and MIT Technology Review, open to any molecular biologist, with a record of publication in biogerontology, who could prove that the alleged benefits of SENS were "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate."[37] Technology Review received five submissions to its Challenge. In March 2006, Technology Review announced that it had chosen a panel of judges for the Challenge: Rodney Brooks, Anita Goel, Nathan Myhrvold, Vikram Sheel Kumar, and Craig Venter.[38] Three of the five submissions met the terms of the prize competition. They were published by Technology Review on June 9, 2006. Accompanying the three submissions were rebuttals by de Grey, and counter-responses to de Grey's rebuttals. On July 11, 2006, Technology Review published the results of the SENS Challenge.[7][39] In the end, no one won the $20,000 prize. The judges felt that no submission met the criterion of the challenge and discredited SENS, although they unanimously agreed that one submission, by Preston Estep and his colleagues, was the most eloquent. Craig Venter succinctly expressed the prevailing opinion: "Estep et al. ... have not demonstrated that SENS is unworthy of discussion, but the proponents of SENS have not made a compelling case for it."[7] Summarizing the judges' deliberations, Pontin wrote that SENS is "highly speculative" and that many of its proposals could not be reproduced with the scientific technology of that period.[clarification needed] Myhrvold described SENS as belonging to a kind of "antechamber of science" where they wait until technology and scientific knowledge advance to the point where it can be tested.[7][8] In a letter of dissent dated July 11, 2006 in Technology Review, Estep et al. criticized the ruling of the judges. Social and economic implications [ edit ] Of the roughly 150,000 people who die each day across the globe, about two thirds—100,000 per day—die of age-related causes.[40] In industrialized nations, the proportion is much higher, reaching 90%.[40] De Grey and other scientists in the general field have argued that the costs of a rapidly growing aging population will increase to the degree that the costs of an accelerated pace of aging research are easy to justify in terms of future costs avoided. Olshansky et al. 2006 argue, for example, that the total economic cost of Alzheimer's disease in the US alone will increase from $80–100 billion today to more than $1 trillion in 2050.[41] "Consider what is likely to happen if we don't [invest further in aging research]. Take, for instance, the impact of just one age-related disorder, Alzheimer disease (AD). For no other reason than the inevitable shifting demographics, the number of Americans stricken with AD will rise from 4 million today to as many as 16 million by midcentury. This means that more people in the United States will have AD by 2050 than the entire current population of the Netherlands. Globally, AD prevalence is expected to rise to 45 million by 2050, with three of every four patients with AD living in a developing nation. The US economic toll is currently $80–$100 billion, but by 2050 more than $1 trillion will be spent annually on AD and related dementias. The impact of this single disease will be catastrophic, and this is just one example."[41] SENS meetings [ edit ] There have been four SENS roundtables and six SENS conferences held.[42][43] The first SENS roundtable was held in Oakland, California on October, 2000,[44] and the last SENS roundtable was held in Bethesda, Maryland on July, 2004.[45] On March 30–31, 2007 a North American SENS symposium was held in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada as the Edmonton Aging Symposium.[46][47] Another SENS-related conference ("Understanding Aging") was held at UCLA in Los Angeles, California on June 27–29, 2008[48] Six SENS conferences have been held at Queens' College, Cambridge in England. All the conferences were organized by de Grey and all featured world-class researchers in the field of biogerontology. The first SENS conference was held in September 2003 as the 10th Congress of the International Association of Biomedical Gerontology [49] with the proceedings published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences . [50] with the proceedings published in the . The second SENS conference was held in September 2005 and was simply called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), Second Conference [51] with the proceedings published in Rejuvenation Research . with the proceedings published in . The third SENS conference was held in September, 2007. [52] The fourth SENS conference was held September 3–7, 2009. The fifth was held August 31 – September 4, 2011, like the first four, it was at Queens' College, Cambridge in England, organized by de Grey. [53] [54] Videos of the presentations are available. Videos of the presentations are available. The sixth SENS conference (SENS6) was held from September 3–7, 2013. Another meeting was held in August 2014 in Santa Clara, California.[43] SENS Research Foundation [ edit ] The SENS Research Foundation is a non-profit organization co-founded by Michael Kope, Aubrey de Grey, Jeff Hall, Sarah Marr and Kevin Perrott, which is based in California, United States. Its activities include SENS-based research programs and public relations work for the acceptance of and interest in related research. Before March 2009, the SENS research programme was mainly pursued by the Methuselah Foundation, co-founded by Aubrey de Grey and David Gobel. The Methuselah Foundation is most notable for establishing the Methuselah Mouse Prize, a monetary prize awarded to researchers who extend the lifespan of mice to unprecedented lengths.[55] For 2013, The SENS Research Foundation has a research budget of approximately $4 million annually, half of it funded by a personal contribution of $13 million of Aubrey de Grey's[56] own wealth, and the other half coming from external donors, with the largest external donor being Peter Thiel, and another Internet entrepreneur Jason Hope,[57] has recently begun to contribute comparable sums. See also [ edit ] |
This article discusses three do-it-yourself enhancements that can help you reduce pack weight and improve the utility of your backpacking kitchen gear. You can use the links below to skip directly each section. Background As a many backpackers have endeavored to lighten their loads over the past few years, an increasing number have simplified their kitchen kits and now use only one or two lightweight, all-purpose vessels for all their cooking and drinking needs. In particular, titanium and aluminum alloy cups and pots with mug-style handles have become exceptionally popular and are now frequently used not only for preparing hot meals and beverages, but for consuming them as well. A few examples of this type of cookware are pictured below. Snow Peak 600 (+) MSR Titan Kettle (+) Snow Peak Trek 1400 (+) Mug-style handles are not necessary for a lightweight cooking vessel to serve as a drinking cup, however. Those with either longer pot-style handles or with no handles at all (see photos below) can also function in the same way, though perhaps not quite as elegantly. Long-handle design Evernew titanium 0.6L pot (+) No-handle design FireLite-1100-M (+) Jim's Pot Pick I now mostly use the Snow Peak Trek 1400 titanium cook set (photo above) which includes an 8-cup main pot and 2-cup lid that can be used as a second pot or as a small frying pan. I believe it to be one of the best all-around solutions for solo backpackers. Though some ultralighters might consider it a bit large, I find that the extra volume helps to keep soups and stews from boiling over, is big enough to allow both steam and dry baking, cooks for two people in a pinch, and even makes popping corn possible. While this reduced-weight approach can save the 6 to 12 ounces associated with the insulated plastic mugs that many of us used to carry, there are some problems. For example, anyone who has tried to drink a hot beverage directly from a metal cup or pot knows well about burned lips. In addition, hot drinks contained in naked metal cups cool very quickly in cold weather, making it difficult to enjoy that leisurely cup of morning coffee or tea. Despite these issues, metal cups and pots still offer several advantages over plastic insulated mugs: Aside from weight savings, metal cups allow most hot beverages to taste better since they don't impart the kinds of unpleasant flavors that are sometimes noted with their plastic counterparts. Most metal cups and pots are less prone to staining and are easier to clean (at least to clean well) than plastic mugs. Metal cups are often more durable—and certainly less prone to melting—than their plastic counterparts. As long as a metal cup or pot is of a single-wall design (most are), it can be placed directly on a stove to easily re-heat cooled liquids without having to first transfer the liquid to another vessel. Over the years, there have been periodic medical concerns about the potential health hazards associated with drinking hot liquids from plastic cups. More specifically, the plasticizers (chemicals used to enhance the physical properties of certain plastics) that are added to some polymers used in beverage mugs are thought by some researchers to leach into the hot liquids they contain, possibly elevating the risk of cancer. Likewise, recent concerns about BPA (Bisphenol A) escaping from plastic vessels that contain this chemical into even cold beverages have caused a lot of people to rethink the kinds of drink containers they use. Whether you believe these concerns have merit or not, they become non-issues when using metal cups and pots. The three easy modifications described in this article are designed to overcome the problems associated with metal cups and pots, allowing them to serve as first-rate insulated drinking vessels. The combined weights of all three components, depending on materials used, will probably range from about 1½ ounces for small-to medium sized mugs to 2½ ounces for full-sized solo or two-person pots. Mod #1 - The Drink Ring A drink ring is simply a plastic insert that fits into top of your cup or pot that serves as a thermal buffer between your lips and the hot metal. The easiest way to describe it further is with a couple of photos: Drink ring with flange and rubber band gasket (+) weight as shown: 0.8 oz Drink ring inserted into MSR Titan Kettle (+) The ring needs either to be tall enough (about 1½" or so above the rim of the pot) to protect your lips when drinking, or to contain a flange near the top of the pot that can serve as a lip guard. An example of the flange type is shown above. Depending on the size of your cup or pot and upon the materials used, most drink rings will probably weigh an ounce or less. DRINK RING MATERIALS The easiest way I've found to construct a drink ring is to cut the top 2 inches or so from an existing plastic cup, bowl or food container of the right size. While I've tried other approaches, such as by forming rings by joining straight plastic strips end-to-end, I've never been able to achieve either the right rigidity nor to get these kinds of rings to seal properly. So after a good bit of trial and error, I now believe that the use of a pre-molded ring is the best way to go. This type of ring is also quite durable and, at least for me, has held up well to extended use on the trail. Rubbermaid food container (+) Dollar store food container (+) To keep beverages from dribbling down your chin, a leak-proof seal between the outside of the ring and and the inside wall of your pot must be formed. The snug fit must also account for the fact that when the metal is heated, it will expand slightly more than the plastic ring, causing the seal to loosen up a bit when warm. So, the only tricky part of this project is finding a plastic cup or bowl with just the right dimensions and other characteristics to fit your pot. To begin, I'd search the aisles of grocery stores, Wal-Mart and dollar stores looking for: A food-grade plastic cup or bowl that's rigid enough to maintain its shape when inserted into your pot or cup (probably with some vigor), but that's also thin and flexible enough to be easily cut with a pair of household scissors. A plastic cup or bowl whose shape is round and whose outside surface is smooth. You don't want highly textured sides or a shape that includes facets (they'll keep your ring from sealing properly against the sides of your pot). A plastic cup or bowl whose walls are as close to vertical as possible. A slight taper is usually OK, but a significant tapering of the walls from top to bottom won't work well. A flange near the top rim that can serve as a lip guard is also a plus, but is not mandatory. And of course, a plastic cup or bowl that when cut to size, fits your pot or mug properly. This requirement can be a bit tough to gage since the store you're visiting probably won't appreciate your cutting the top from a plastic bowl to determine if the fit is close enough to warrant a purchase. Instead, you'll probably first need to measure as closely as you can, then if the candidate cup or bowl's dimensions look pretty close, buy the item, make the cut, then test the fit. There will probably be some amount of trial and error at this stage. When evaluating fit, the naked ring should ideally nest inside the pot as snuggly as possible, but if it's a bit loose at first, don't worry since the effective diameter can be increased as described below. On the other hand, if the ring is too large, it obviously won't work at all. DRINK RING CONSTRUCTION To build your ring, you'll need the items pictured below, though the tape and rubber bands may not be necessary if you get lucky with initial fit. Principal drink ring materials (+) Having acquired a properly sized plastic cup or bowl, simply cut the top 2 inches or so from the top using a pair of sturdy household scissors (discarding the bottom section). You don't want the ring to be taller than necessary (adding weight), but you also don't want to remove so much material that structural rigidity is impaired. Container with cut line (+) Ring after cut (+) Once cut, you'll now need to conduct both cold and warm seal tests. First, insert the ring into your cold cup or pot. The fit needs to be quite snug. If that's the case, test the seal by adding some water to the vessel, then tilt the vessel slightly so that the water meets the edge of the seal as if you were drinking. If you observe no leakage, then you've past the cold test. Now remove the ring and heat some water in your vessel to around boiling temperature using your stove of choice. Once the water's been heated, re-insert the ring noting the tightness of fit (it will probably be a bit looser than before). If it's still reasonably tight, repeat the water tilt test. If there's no leakage at all, then you're finished. Unless you've been lucky enough to find exactly the right ring size, however, it's likely that there will be some leakage with either the cold or warm tests. If that's the case, you can probably achieve a tight seal through one or both of the methods described below. ACHIEVING A TIGHT SEAL If the ring is a just bit too loose to seal tightly against the walls of your pot, you can try adding a gasket to the ring. The best option I've found for this purpose are wide rubber bands. Available from most office supply stores, size # 84 (3½" long x ½" wide) has been perfect for the rings I've built for my own cups and pots. #84 rubber bands (+) If the ring fit is a even looser, however, you can try this fix: First increase the effective ring diameter by applying a few wraps of standard ½" or ¾" wide plastic electrical tape around the outside surface, adjusting the resulting tape thickness as appropriate. Because I've found that the electrical tape by itself doesn't seal as well as a rubber band and also because direct contact with liquids will eventually cause the tape to fail, you'll next want to apply the rubber band gasket described above on top of the tape (so you'll need to allow space for both). It's best to try to position the rubber as close as possible to the lower edge of the tape in order to protecting the tape from direct liquid contact. Center ring uses tape plus rubber band gasket, others use rubber band gaskets only (+) DRINK RING USAGE NOTES Your new drink ring can now be used to comfortably consume all kinds of hot beverages directly from your metal cup or pot without burning your lips. When heating those liquids the for first time, you'll want to make sure that the drink ring is removed, since continued exposure to the stove heat that flows up the sides of your pot will probably cause the drink ring to melt or deform. If, however, you're just doing a quick re-heat of say, a cooled cup of coffee, you might be able to leave the ring in place if you keep the stove flame low and exposure time short. Your backcountry common sense will need to prevail here. HEALTH QUESTIONS The materials that generally work best for drink rings are the kinds of pliable, often clear or translucent, FDA-approved, food-grade polymers that are commonly found in commercial plastic cups, bowls, and food storage containers. Usually made from some form of low density polyethylene (LDPE), these plastics are almost always free—according to my research—of the BPA chemical that is often found in plastic polycarbonates, such as those used in the older hard-sided Nalgene water bottles and about which so much has been written in recent months. The only other project components that could possibly make contact with hot liquids are the rubber band gasket and (possibly) the plastic electrical tape. Though certainly not certified by the FDA, both materials are probably safe for this application since only a small section of the ring circumference, and then only the edges, of these components can contact the beverages being consumed. Because hot liquid exposure surface areas are so small and exposure times so brief, I seriously doubt that there are any potential health risks associated with the use of these components as described. Remember that almost all liquid-to-container contact will be between the hot beverage and a safe metal cup or pot. Nonetheless, if you have lingering doubts, then I'd suggest you pass on this project. Mod #2 - The Insulated Lid Since much of the heat loss that occurs when a hot beverage is contained within a cup is through the open top of the vessel, it makes sense to use an insulated lid if you want to slow that process down. Once you've built the drink ring described above, it's easy to add an insulated lid. Insulated lid (+) weight as shown 0.4 oz Before proceeding, I should note that while it might be possible to add the kind of lid described below to a cup or pot that doesn't use a drink ring, achieving a good fit is usually more difficult. Likewise, it's hard to position it in a way that allows drinking from the cup while the lid is in place. And of course, without the ring, you'll still probably burn your lips. If you want just a lid with no drink ring, however, your best bet is probably to try to find a disposable, commercial, coffee-style lid that just happens to mate securely with your cup or pot. I actually got lucky with the one shown below, which snaps tightly onto my Snow Peak 600 titanium mug. It's not insulated, but even so, it does slow down heat loss while also serving as a lip guard. Unfortunately, these kinds of lids are not very durable and tend to break easily with normal trail use. By the way, for anyone who happens to own the Snow Peak 600 mug and is interested in such a lid, the model number is noted in the photo caption. I happened to find this one several years ago, but comparable lids seem to still be available. Snow Peak 600 with Dixie model D9550 plastic lid (+) It's also good to see that some outdoor equipment suppliers are finally beginning to add drink lids to some of their products. REI, for example, recently introduced a double-wall, titanium mug that includes a heat-resistant, coffee-style lid. Unfortunately, its fluid capacity is only 10 ounces (too small for me), and its double-wall construction is not nearly as flexible, in my opinion, as single-wall vessels. INSULATED LID BUILD INSTRUCTIONS To build this simple lid, you'll need the materials shown below. The core of the lid is made from a disk of styrofoam insulation ½" to ¾" thick and cut to a diameter that's appropriately sized for your drink ring. When complete, the disk should nest securely inside the ring. Principal lid materials (+) Step 1: The styrofoam can be harvested from an inexpensive ice chest from Wal-Mart or equivalent source that has side walls that are as straight and smooth as possible. Alternative sources of styrofoam include large hardware stores, such as Lowe's or Home Depot, that sell this insulation in sheets (a section of which shown in the photo above). Step 2: Once you've secured your raw materials, you can use the inside edge of your drink ring as a template to mark the foam for cutting. Your ring will probably have a slight taper from top to bottom, so you'll have to judge the best size for the foam disk. When measuring your cut size, it's usually preferable to error on the side of a bit too large, rather than a bit too small, since you can always trim it later if necessary You'll also want to mark the foam with a writing tool such as a pencil that won't deposit ink on your drink ring. You can now cut the disk using a sharp kitchen or filet knife. Step 3: To keep the freshly cut disk from shedding particles of styrofoam when in use, to help keep it from absorbing liquids, and to improve its insulating properties, you'll next want to cover the disk with a layer of household aluminum foil. Cut a sheet of foil large enough to cover the top, bottom and sides, then just press it into place. The excess foil can be gathered and pressed onto the bottom of the lid, where it will help keep the covering in place. Step 4: If you'd like to be able to drink from you mug with the lid in place, you'll need to form a drink hole. The easiest way I've found is to simply flatten one side of the lid a little by pressing that side firmly onto a hard surface. If properly sized, this flat spot will allow beverages to easily flow out while allowing some replacement air to flow back in (so that a partial vacuum that could restrict the liquid flow is not created). Step 5: Finally, I'd suggest you add a pair of the same kind of rubber bands used for the drink ring gaskets above to the top of the lid place at 90 degree angles to one another. Completed lid (+) The rubber bands serve a number of purposes: They increase the friction of the lid against the ring sides, thereby helping to keep the lid securely in place. They create small air gaps at ring contact points which help the replacement air noted above to flow evenly back into the vessel. The point at which the rubber bands cross in the middle can serve as a convenient lift point for the lid, thereby eliminating the need to install a knob or similar lift mechanism. The rubber bands help to hold the aluminum foil cover in place. The rubber bands can serve as spare gaskets for the drink ring. And finally, the tops of the rubber bands can serve as anti-skid surfaces when the lid is used as a trivet as described below. LID BONUS USE Another great use for the insulated lid is to serve as a backcountry trivet. A trivet is simply an insulator that protects a surface from a hot food or beverage container. On the trail, the surface I most commonly need to protect is my bare hand. If you eat hot foods directly from bags (perhaps oatmeal or freeze dried meals) you know that holding those bags in your bare hands can be quite uncomfortable. Instead, you can place the insulated lid between the bag and your hand to serve both as a stabilizing platform and as an insulator. If using a cook set such my Snow Peak Trek 1400, you can also use the titanium lid as both a stabilizer and containment vessel to protect against bag breakage (which sometimes happens with oatmeal in pint-sized freezer Ziplocs) and place the styrofoam lid underneath for thermal insulation (see photo below). Use of the insulated lid in this way also works well if you also eat directly from your cook pot, though the cozy described below probably offers a better solution. Lid used as a trivet with hot oatmeal in a pint-sized Ziploc freezer bag (+) Mod #3 - The Pot Cozy A cozy is simply a layer of insulation that fits around a cook pot that's designed to (1) help keep hot foods or beverages contained inside from cooling too quickly, and (2) to keep those hot pots from burning your hands, especially when you're eating directly from them. While I don't claim to have invented the pot cozy, I have been using such insulators for a couple of decades, beginning long before I heard of anyone refer to them as "cozies". The first insulators I made were from sections of closed cell foam. They worked well, but were a bit on the heavy side. I've since switched to a material called "Reflectix" which, in recent years, seems to have become the backpacker's de facto standard for pot cozies. Vintage foam cozy (+) Newer Reflectix cozy (+) There are many sites on the web that provide detailed instructions on how to build cozies, so my intent here is not to overwork the subject. Instead, I'll just provide a brief summary of the construction technique that I use. I should also note that AntiGravity Gear offers a wide selection of prefabricated Reflectix cozies that may suit your needs if you're not interested in building your own. Cooking With Retained Heat Helping to keep the thermal energy that's contained in foods from escaping into the environment allows pot insulators to help you save stove fuel by cooking with retained heat. Some foods, such as dried beans, can make great trail meals, but can also take a long time to cook (a half hour to 45 minutes or more). Using cozies, you can heat such dishes to boiling, then place the hot pot in either a single or double cozy for the duration of the cook time, thereby eliminating the need to keep the stove running on simmer. Cooking in this way also allows you to walk away from the meal-in-progress and do other things while not having to worry about tending a stove. I've conducted several temperature-monitored cooking experiments over the years and continue to be amazed at how well single and double cozies retain heat. Though a detailed discussion of "cooking with cozies" is beyond the scope of this article, I'll note that most writers on the subject suggest adding half again as much cook time for any given dish when using cozies as compared with stove-based cooking. In other words, if a dish has a suggested stove simmer time of half and hour, you'll probably want to start with a 45 minute cozy cook time. COZY MATERIALS First, you'll need to obtain a supply of a suitable insulating material. As noted above, I currently favor Reflectix, an insulting material that's widely available for home and industrial use. Sold online and at building supply retailers such as Lowe's or Home Depot, it comes in rolls and looks much like bubble-wrap but with silver metallic front and back surfaces. The air trapped inside the bubbles helps prevent conductive heat losses, while the shiny exterior surfaces reduce reflective heat losses. The smallest quantity available for sale of which I'm aware is a roll that's 16" wide x 25 feet long, priced at about $15. That much material will probably be sufficient to build a lifetime's worth of cozies for you and your friends. Reflectix roll 16" x 25' (+) A completed Reflectix cozy will probably weigh about an ounce (plus or minus, depending on pot size). It's heat-resistant enough that you can remove a vessel of boiling water from your stove and place it directly into a Reflectix cozy without having to worry about melting the insulation. It's also very easy to work with, and despite some reports I've seen to the contrary, the silver metallic coating is quite durable doesn't easily rub off onto the hands. After you've rounded up a few other items (see photo below), you can begin constructing the cozy. Note that the adhesive shown is standard 2" wide gray duct tape. Clear packaging tape of the same width also works, and creates a cozy that some may find more aesthetically pleasing. I've found, however, that duct tape tends to be a bit more durable (and also shows better in these photos). Principal cozy materials (+) COZY BUILD INSTRUCTIONS Step 1: The first step is to measure and cut the insulation material. Before so doing, however, note that the 16" wide Reflectix described above includes ¾" wide, non-bubble borders that runs along each edge. These borders are intended to hold staples when the Reflectix is installed as building insulation. The first thing I like to do is to fold one of those borders over 180° at its base and tape it flush with the surface below using either duct or clear packaging tape. This taped edge will become the top of the cozy and will have a more finished appearance than would a cut edge (you'll probably want to place the side with the taped fold on the inside). Incidentally, you'll probably find that the easiest way to tape this border down is to first affix about ½" of tape width to the border just above the base, then to fold the border (along with the attached tape) onto the surface below, pressing the tape into place. Reflectix border before folding and taping (+) This edge now becomes the top of the cozy (taped surface goes inside) (+) You can now measure the height and circumference of your pot or mug—perhaps adding a small margin to each to avoid undersizing—and cut a piece of Reflectix to those dimensions. Fine-tuning the cut size is discussed below. Step 2: Wrap the cut piece of insulation around your pot or mug to test the fit. You'll want to evaluate the fit in the area below the handles, since the handles can interfere with this assessment. We'll deal with cutouts for the handles in the next step. The length of the Reflectix should be adjusted so that the opposing ends just meet each other in this no-handle region. The objective should be to create a fit that will allow the vessel to slide easily in and out of the cozy but without excess wiggle room. If the cold fit is too tight, it may be difficult to lower a hot pot (which will have expanded a bit) into the cozy. Conversely, if the either the hot or cold fits are too loose, the cozy will tend to drop off when the two are lifted together (although this problem can usually be fixed as described below (see Option #1 - Tightening the Fit). Once sizing is complete, tape the vertical Reflectix seam using a piece of 2" wide duct or packaging tape that's long enough to seal both the inside and outside edges, making a cylinder that's open on both ends. By the way, when taping, it's usually easiest to first apply half the width of the tape to one side of the seam, align the edges, then press the second half into place on the other side of the seam. Taping the seam (+) Step 3: You can now create an opening of the appropriate size in the side of the cylinder to accommodate your vessel's handles. For both strength and cosmetic reasons, I usually like to locate that opening at the seam that was created in Step 2 (see photo below). If your pot uses folding mug-style handles, you might also want to leave a section of Reflectix in place between the handles to protect your knuckles from the hot container when it's being held. If that's the case, simply make cuts as shown below without removing the center section altogether. Doing so creates a tab that can be folded down to move it out of the way when lowering the pot into the cozy, then folded back up again so that it's positioned between the two handles when the pot's being held. If necessary, you can trim the sides of the tab a bit to achieve the best fit between the handles. Notch cut for handles (+) Notch tab in use (+) Step 4: With the pot inside the insulator, turn it upside down and trace the inside edges of the circular bottom opening onto a piece of paper. Note that by leaving the pot inside the cylinder, it's easier to maintain the cozy's circular shape while tracing. Next, cut the traced circle from the paper and use it as a template to mark the same size circle on a separate piece of Reflectix. Now cut the Reflectix disk noting that when properly sized, it will fit just inside the bottom walls of the cylinder as shown below. Fitting the bottom disk (+) Step 5: Next, we're going to tape the disk in place. To do so, first cut a piece of 2" wide tape equal in length to the outside circumference of the cylinder, then fix it into place in such a way that it makes a circle around the end of the cylinder with half its width attached to the body of the cylinder and the other half extending (unattached) above the edge. Then, using scissors, make a series of vertical cuts that start at the top of the tape and extend only to the edge of the cylinder (i.e., about halfway through the tape). The cuts should be spaced ½" to ¾" apart and should be made around the entire circumference of the tape (see red cut lines in the photo below). You'll probably find that it's easiest to judge the depth of each incision if you view the inside tape surface while cutting, so that you can see precisely where the tape meets the cylinder. Once the cuts are complete, you'll end up with a ring of tabs around the tape circle. Make a series of scissor cuts downward through tape starting at the top and extending only to the edge of the cylinder (+) Finally, fold each of these tabs over onto the top of the Reflectix disk to secure it in place. As you're folding, point the middle of each tab towards the center of the disk. I'd suggest that rather than starting at one point on the ring and all folding the tabs sequentially around the circumference, first fold a tab on one side of the circle, then fold another on the opposite side. Move 90° around the circle and repeat the process, continuing to fold tabs that are opposite each other until complete. Folding the tabs in this way makes it easier to keep the disk properly aligned while it's being secured into place (see photo below). Tabs partially folded (+) Completed bottom (+) Note: this cozy, sized for the rather large Snow Peak Trek 1400 main cook pot, weighs 1.0 ounce COZY OPTIONS Option #1 - Tightening the Fit: You'll want your cozy to fit your pot or mug snugly enough that it doesn't fall off when you lift the combination. If the fit is too loose, you can tighten it by adding a velcro strap as shown below. First apply two patches of hook-side, sticky-back velcro that are ¾" wide x 1½" long, one each to either side of the handle cutout. Then, using about a 6-inch long piece of non-sticky-back (i.e., sew-in style) loop-side velcro, you can create a strap that tightens the cozy when in use. You can fold one side of the strap back away from the cutout (attaching it to the hook-side patch on that side if you wish) when lowering your pot into the cozy, then thread it either through or over your pot handles (depending on design) to attach it on the other side with enough tension to pull the cozy tightly to the vessel. Velcro strap added (+) Note that the strap is looped back onto the left pad to keep it out of the way prior to lowering the pot into the cozy Velcro strap in use (+) Tightened just enough to keep the cozy securely in place when the combination is lifted Option #2 - Covering the Edges: If you'd like to protect the exposed edges of the Reflectix where cuts were made, you can apply pieces of 2" wide duct or clear packaging tape. The photos above show these edges covered with duct tape. Option #3 - Building an "Over Cozy": Should you wish to prepare meals that require the kinds of long cook times described in the sidebar above (Cooking With Retained Heat), you might want build a second cozy that's large enough to fit over your existing one. Doing so will more than double the insulating capacity. I say "more than" because aside from adding a second layer of Reflectix, you'll also be trapping a layer of air between the two insulators. The "over-cozy" I now use is constructed just like the first except there are no handle cutouts. When in use, the pot handles are collapsed against the walls of the first cozy (the "under-cozy" if you will), then the over-cozy is slipped upside down over the two, so that its bottom becomes the top of the combination. Likewise, I add a loose Reflectix disk under the setup to offer more insulation for the underside. Over-cozy with bottom disk (+) Over-cozy upside down over the pot plus "under-cozy" (+) You can submit or read comments about this article here. Copyright © 2008 James E. Wood. All Rights Reserved. |
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