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In the morning, the Copper Shot Distillery smells sweet — like fresh rolls and baking bread. Inside an old wooden house off Main Street in Bastrop, 180 gallons of grain and corn ferments in a large metal vat, popping and bubbling for five days as the yeast starts to break down the sugars. When it’s ready, Stephen Todee, an oil man and brew-maker, takes the liquid from the drum and moves it to a shining copper still, like something out of a science experiment. He heats the mixture to 168 degrees, cutting off the harmful chemicals. At 174 degrees, it turns to vapor, rising up into the condenser, which cools it back down to liquid form. When it comes out the end of a twist of tubes and hoses, it’s the purest, richest Texas moonshine some fans say they’ve ever tasted — a strong 130 proof. Todee cuts it with rainwater, bottles it and moves it behind the bar. There, he and his wife, Cheri, serve handcrafted cocktails with the shine and vodka — spiked espressos, ciders and slushies on a menu a mile long that the two concocted. Copper Shot Distillery will open in March at the Crossing in Bastrop. A factory and bar, it overlooks the Colorado River, Neighbor’s Kitchen & Yard outdoor amphitheater and the city’s Old Iron Bridge. It will sell moonshine and vodka by the bottle, glass or cocktail. For the ladies, Cheri has clothing, jewelry and accessories at a boutique in the front room. On weekends, the distillery will host live music, trading gigs with neighboring restaurants and business owners in the Crossing. Outside, kids can play ring toss and checkers. A row of wooden rocking chairs lines the porch. In the corner sits a rope hammock. The wind off the Colorado River comes in cool and moist. "The view is awesome," Todee said. "You can’t ask for any better." On a Tuesday, as the moonshine is mixing, Todee catches a whiff of alcohol on the breeze. He runs to his father, who is watching the still to see if this batch is ready. Making liquor, he said, is a time-sensitive process that requires diligence and control. "You can’t let your guard down," he said. "It’s a lot of work so you really have to enjoy what you’re doing. It’s a labor of love." Todee was born and raised in Texas. He went to school in Burton, where he met his wife. The two moved to Paige 16 years ago, had their daughter, then bought a home in Tahitian Village. Todee began brewing beers in the garage. He built up a small following among friends, who said he made a "mean Pecan Porter." Todee wanted to find a way to turn his passion into a living. "There were so many craft brewers," he said. "I wanted to do something different." He had learned through trial and error to make liquor and decided to open a "distillery pub," where people could see their moonshine being made and enjoy a cocktail with friends. "We want to be a place people can hang out, drink, enjoy the spirits," he said. Copper Shot Distillery is open weekends. During hours of operation, the still will be running, so patrons can see exactly how their booze gets from the fermenter to the cocktail glass. The store also sells 750ml bottles of its product with a signature copper shot glass, limited at two per customer per month. |
At the midway point of the 2011/12 English Premier League season Liverpool find themselves with 34 points, in sixth place in the table and facing league leaders Manchester City to kick-off the second half. Of obvious concern are the 6 home draws, as the Reds have taken only 18 of a possible 30 points from their opening 10 home fixtures. This author has already written at great length the scoring inefficiencies that Liverpool have endured this season. Others on this site have written about Liverpool’s poor chance conversion, and again here, which has remained constantly low throughout the autumn. Another major concern will be the availability of Luis Suarez. Handed an 8 match ban over the alleged racist comments made to Patrice Evra, he will miss more than a third of the Reds remaining fixtures. The first half of 2011/12 also brought injury concerns to the fore, with Kenny Dalglish having been unable to unleash the immense talent of Steven Gerrard. Dalglish has also be forced to select a starting XI without Liverpool’s heart of midfield, Lucas. The loss of Lucas was well documented here, though Liverpool have managed a 3-2-1 record since his injury required an early end to his season. In those six games Liverpool have scored only 7 times, highlighting their greatest flaw; Liverpool allowed just 3 goals in those six fixtures, highlighting their greatest strength. This season has also seen an influx of new talent and a changing of the guard with Fernando Torres, Steven Gerrard, Dirk Kuyt and Jamie Carragher no longer leading the Reds on the pitch. With Torres sold to Chelsea last season, Gerrard’s injury, the emergence of Agger and Skrtel as preferred centre pairing, the return to fitness of Glen Johnson and the arrival’s of Henderson, Jose Enrique, Stewart Downing and Charlie Adam, the spine of the last great Liverpool team have been replaced. It is incumbent upon the new arrival’s most of all to reinvest themselves in the Liverpool cause and show the resolve to overcome their difficulties in front of net. That may well start with last season’s record signing, Andy Carroll. To say that Carroll has been a major disappointment is just a touch unfair to the striker. Purchased for an absurd sum that was reportedly wholly subsidized by the sale of Torres to Chelsea, the expectation was that the young man would provide what Liverpool had lost. He certainly has not done that. Both his chance conversion and shooting accuracy have dropped considerably since last term. While a 15% chance conversion is not ideal – Darren Bent converts 25% of his chances historically; Wayne Rooney converted 14% in his disappointing 11 goal campaign a year ago – it is vastly superior to his 6% rate this season. To put that bluntly, Liverpool must create 17 chances for Carroll to score a single goal. Given Liverpool’s current production of 253 chances, were the side wholly reliant on Carroll for goals they would have scored just 17 this term. Of course, Carroll is part of a larger problem. Liverpool have, in fact, converted just 9% of chances as a team and have scored only 24 goals. While the Reds 15 goals allowed tops the defensive table in the Prem, their 25 goals scored is 9th – one goal more than both Sunderland and Bolton, and just two ahead of Stoke, Villa, Fulham and Wolves. Carroll’s game is not particularly well rounded. Despite making 337 passes he has been successful with only 219 this season. His 65% completion rate is the worst of any Liverpool field player (Pepe Reina completes a team worst 64%), and worst by a considerable margin: In a side with 81% pass completion, apart from Carroll no Reds player has completed fewer than 77% of their passes while attempting more than 120 for the year. Further he makes few chances. In his 925′ of EPL pitch time he’s managed to create 11 chances, fewer than Glen Johnson’s 14 (in 999′) and markedly less than fellow forward Craig Bellamy. Bellamy has played 503′ this season for Liverpool and amassed 20 chances created, one chance every 25:09′. Carroll requires 84′. Further, despite a reputation of being an aerial player, Carroll has won 61% of his chances. This is a problem only because of the volume of aerial challenges Carroll contests – 102 of Liverpool’s 416 total aerial duels. While his minutes per aerial challenge is excellent, one 9:04′, he is the 7th best Reds player at winning such challenges behind Skrtel (83%), Johnson (78%), Adam (71%), Shelvey, Agger and Carragher. Last season’s other record purchase, Luis Suarez, has been much of what Carroll is not. Capable of creating chances – he has created 36, second on the team behind only Stewart Downing’s 39 – and makes the most of the ball at his feet with 37 successful dribbles from 103 attempted, both leading the club. Suarez has also been a superior passer, completing 77% of his 619 attempts and connecting on 27% of his 26 crosses. As Dalglish looks to replace Suarez’ numbers and influence on the game, he should first look to a resurgent Craig Bellamy. Bellamy clearly makes an impact when he is on the pitch. His chance conversion has allowed him to nearly equal Suarez’ tally for the season despite a difference of more than 900′ played between the two. It remains to be seen if Bellamy will be able to recreated this form when he is in the lineup every match, but as the League calendar thins, Bellamy may be subject to rotation as Liverpool continue to chase silverware in the Carling and FA Cups. The questions up front often steal the headlines, but it has been the stability at the back that have led to Liverpool’s modest successes this season. While the attacking exploits of Jose Enrique and Glen Johnson are impressive, their role in the leading defense in the Premier League accorded such freedom through the dedication and skill of the centre halves. Both Daniel Agger and Martin Skrtel have been in good health for the large part of the season. Each has made at least 15 starts, and played in at least 16 of Liverpool’s first 19 League matches. You may notice that the Defensive Error statistic is not present in the above info-graphic. This is simply because neither player has committed a defensive error this season. In fact, as a whole Liverpool have committed just 7 defensive errors. The other two squads who’ve allowed fewer that 20 goals this season, Manchester United and City, are equally staunch at the back with City having committed 4 defensive errors and allowing 16 goals while United have committed 6 errors and allowed 17 goals. It is important to note, however, that of Liverpool’s 7 defensive errors, none have been committed by the first choice back four of Enrique, Agger, Skrtel and Johnson. While they have committed no errors at the back, Jose Enrique and Glen Johnson have not given up any of their presence in the attacking game. Enrique leads the club in passes attempted with 959, five more than Charlie Adam, and is just 11 completed passes behind the Liverpool centre midfielder. Jose Enrique is also third most frequent crosses, with his 75 crosses far outdistancing all Reds except for leaders Downing – 130 crosses, 25% completed – and Charlie Adam – 124, 21% completed. In fact, Glen Johnson is also a prolific crosser, with 34 crosses at 21% completed, the 6th most of any LFC player this season. Enrique is actually the most successful of the three leading candidates, as his 29% accuracy surpasses the 24% of Downing or 21% of Adam. As often occurs, he’s listed first on the team sheet but discussed last in the club’s success – Pepe Reina. Part of the reason for that is the low number of saves he’s made this season – just 50 through 19 games while making he has also missed a higher percentage of crosses – missing 4 this season. For comparison, Joe Hart has made 53 saves this season and missed only 2 crosses; Petr Cech 38 saves and 2 missed crosses. The greatest knock on Reina this season has to be the number of errors he’s committed. He is responsible for 4 of Liverpool’s 7 defensive errors this year and needs to tighten his play in this area. Manchester City’s Hart has made just 1 error while much maligned ‘keepers Cech and de Gea have committed just 1 error apiece. While the statistics may not accurately represent the positioning blunders made be the young United ‘keeper de Gea, and Cech’s fewer errors have come with just 38 saves and 23 goals conceded. As the Reds kick-off the second half of their campaign on 3 January against Manchester City, they will be looking to capitalize on City’s recent spate of poor finishing. With no goals in their last two league fixtures and six in their past five, City will still prove a difficult opponent as the Reds look to stretch their run at the top of the defensive table and take a vital three points as they chase a top four finish or better. |
- - - SUMMARY - - - One day, my boyfriend Jonathan and compadre Hannah came home with an odd GBA (Gameboy Advanced) cartridge that was found at GameStop, they said. It was obviously a hack. Pokemon Turquoise version does not exist, but the care that went into making the cartridge cover look as official as possible, gave the impression that it was at least worth trying out. We stayed up that night, playing well into Viridian Forest; the storyline was too juicy to stop. The game starts off around ten years since Red and Blue started their own journeys from Pallet Town. In that time, Team Rocket has organized into a very deadly, very intimidating crime syndicate that has virtually all of Kanto trembling under its brutal thumb. The cryptic vibe of the plot-line is complimented well by the black and white graphics, haunting fog, and ominous thunderstorms. The game teaches you early on that no place is safe with surprise encounters of overpowered pokemon, making the player calculate their choices carefully. EDIT: If you’re having trouble downloading or running the available download, try this one instead: http://www.mediafire.com/?o6wn3c4d7m674uu DOUBLE EDIT: If you’re using a Mac, then there is a special emulator here: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/10123/visualboyadvance * * * * * * * * * * * * WARNING * * * * * * * * * * * * The following sections contain spoilers (contained in parenthesis) . If you wish to play the game in its purest form, then ignore the parenthesis or skip ahead to the link below for a free emulated version. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * - - - TEAM ROCKET’S REIGN - - - To sustain supremacy, Team Rocket has developed a variety of techniques to replace any thoughts of opposition with chronic fear, including blackmail, torture, and in some cases murder by Pokemon. Anything to insure complete control over all of Kanto. Neither the Elite Four nor the Gym Leaders have been able to protect their respective cities from Rocket rule. Each leader has suffered their own tragedy. (Despite his almost sagely state, Brock has been unable to protect his city from one powerful Grunt; to retain Misty in her gym, her sisters have been kidnapped, held hostage, and given fresh scars for every defeat Misty suffers) . - - - THE NPC’S - - - Though Pokemon is known for its inane and somewhat pointless NPC’s, those in Turquoise are much more engaging. Some are for entertainment, such as the group singing “Don’t stop Believin'” in Celandon Department Store, while others are solely for illustrating how dire the situation is. (There is an old man in Cerulean City mourning his wife of fifty years because he could no longer pay the protection money; another in Saffron lies lifeless and alone with crushed appendages) . It is also common for trainer tips to be sided with NPC laments. Example: “Revives can restore KO’d pokemon to half their HP, but that won’t work for me. They’re not all in one piece anymore.” - - - DRAGONTAMERS - - - Although many of Kanto’s fine trainers have sided with Rocket’s seductive power, those that remained became the Resistance. With a design inspired by the manliness of Kamina meets G Gundam, they have banded together, determined to free Kanto. Though having formidable power of mind and Pokemon, they lack numbers, and so have instead resorted to battling the Kanto countryside, searching for trainers powerful enough to one day defeat the Great Giovanni himself. - - - THE RIVAL - - - When starting your pokemon journey, Pallet Town seemed fresh out of cocky, punk kids and instead supplied someone whom is older, married, and an endearing rival. Not even a kid, but a former colleague of Professor Oak, he too is starting his journey. Not because he has that naïve adventurer’s thirst of an open road, but because Team Rocket has stolen the one most precious to him that he has sworn to get back no matter the cost. (Shamed at the discovery that his research was what ultimately supplied Giovanni with the Pokemon weapon used to conquer Kanto, Rival left the project, only to have the Rockets kidnap his wife as ransom for the return of him and the damning information he took with him) . The player will encounter times where Rival’s determination is humbled by Team Rocket’s power, but with each triumph you and Rival make, he gets one step closer to redeeming his shame and achieving his goal. - - - NEW AREAS - - - Along with a freshened storyline and characters, six new areas emerged in Kanto – each hiding a secret within: Legendaries. A foggy swamp emerged in Viridian Forest; cascading waterfalls reveal an abandoned Genetic Research lab that has since been submerged with its test subjects; a basement in Lavender Tower reveals new disturbing truths about Lavender Town’s resident ghost. With all these areas comes a challenge, introduced by the first Legendary: Collect all six to reveal a prize, but to receive the prize, caught Legendaries could not be renamed or trained – a simple ask for an unlockable. - - - MY REACTION - - - This is practically all spoiler. My first admiration came from the developers pouring details everywhere it mattered, even when choosing your starter (basically, you choose from the offspring of Oak’s Pokemon – each with its own beastly epic) and in having a genuinely endearing rival. The game painted such a vivid sense of doom, that I for the longest time feared that if a pokemon feinted enough times, it would “die” and disappear from my party. This combined with the unfurling of each terrible thing Team Rocket had done to the characters I’ve adored since youth, as a Player, I was constantly in a state of “Oh, sh**. Did that just happen?” I had replayed the original Red/Blue/Yellow so often, that I loved scouring Turquoise for everything the developers had added or changed, especially the new areas. Capturing each “Legendary” Pokemon was a challenge, but total fun, and I found their corresponding names adorable. After capturing Will, Ry, ?, and a You, I believed a developer – with a pittance of naming creativity – had input his favorite team as the “Legendaries.” I also suspected that the other developers had substituted themselves for select NPC’s, such as the eighth gym leader and Lorelei, purposely for key plot points. My friends and family believed I would catch on eventually; that I would piece everything together after catching the Me; that at the very least all would be revealed after encountering a sprite named “Hannah,” battling with pokemon that I knew to be my friend of the same name’s favorites. To their delighted surprise, I was clueless to this wily scheme until the very end. After hours of trudging through the elite four and seven tries, I finally defeated the overpowered Champion (having a Jynx saved my team). Exhausted, I was ready for bed, but Jonathan wouldn’t have it. “Don’t you wanna know what’s in Cerulean Cave?” Not really. It was already tomorrow – too late for someone with work in the morning. The disappointment was palpable, so I appeased his suspicious earnestness with some rapid dungeon crawling when lo and behold, there was no Mewtwo. Instead stood the sprite of Rival standing next to a unique female sprite. He revealed that his name was actually Jon and introduced his wife Liz (my own name). My response to the name similarity? “Jonathan, look! She has my name!” and “(Gasp) She has my hat! Did you know something about this?” Still unaware, I championed in a friendly battle with Couple Jon&Liz and was awarded with the last Legendary Pokemon! I hurried to the nearest PC to retrieve all the Legendaries right then. I was told in the beginning that after I collected all six and arranged them in order, I would receive a prize. My fiery passion for unlockables was doused instantly after retrieving the final Legendary named Mar. Only then was the actual intent of this game revealed. At that moment, Jonathan pulled out a tiny box felted with my favorite color and asked the question the collective Legendaries had spelled out on the screen: “Will you marry me?” Oh heck yes! - - - HOW TO START YOUR OWN TURQUOISE ADVENTURE - - - |
MP says jail is good for young Aboriginal people Updated A Northern Territory Government politician says some Aboriginal people support imprisonment because jail gets the younger generations sober, fed and keeps them safe. Overnight, the Legislative Assembly passed amendments to the NT Sentencing Act, allowing for mandatory sentencing of violent offenders. Labor opposed the bill and raised concerns it would continue to see Indigenous people locked up at an alarming rate. The member for Stuart, Bess Price, told Parliament Labor did nothing to address the matter when it was in power, and argued that incarceration had some benefits. "While they are being imprisoned, they don't get to drink, they don't get into trouble, they are fed three times a day," she said. "They are in there with their family members. "They sleep in their language groups and they all come out of prison much healthier." Labor's member for Nhulunbuy, Lynne Walker, told Parliament she was saddened by Ms Price's statement and said it painted a disturbing scenario. "What a very sad indictment it is, of where our system is, when the Member for Stuart says that our families want our young people locked up, because prisons; they're safe places, it's where people can dry out for three months, it's a safe environment and where, sadly, a lot of family members are in there, so they're not alone," she said. The North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) says the comments by Ms Price reflect a sad state of affairs. NAAJA principal legal officer Jonathon Hunyor says while the comments are valid, prison is not the solution. "We think that Bess Price is right when she identifies the problem," he said. "For some people, the conditions are very bad but the solution isn't sending people to prison. "The millions of dollars we spend on locking people up, we should be spending on improving the lives of Aboriginal people." Topics: government-and-politics, prisons-and-punishment, youth, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, darwin-0800, nt First posted |
Antonio Conte has hailed Cesar Azpilicueta as one of the best centre-backs in the world after his goalscoring performance in the 6-0 win over Qarabag at Stamford Bridge. The 28-year-old put in another solid display for the Blues in the Champions League rout of the minnows on their return to the top flight of European football, netting the third goal to really break the resolve of the Azerbaijanis. The win took the Blues top of Group C after the 0-0 draw between Roma and Atletico Madrid, and the Chelsea boss was raving about his vice-captain and his influence on the team. "Last season Azpi was one of the most important players for us. I think in this position, as a centre back he is one of the best of the world. I think this about him. He is very good with the ball and without it. "He is a fantastic guy, he is always positive. In the training session he works in a fantastic way. Azpi is a fantastic player, for a coach to have him is a dream." |
Here is a warning to watch where you're walking, especially if you find yourself glued to your phone while strolling down the street. On two separate occasions Tuesday, two individuals walked into a fire escape that had fallen lower than it usually hangs. A witness said both were looking at their phones as they walked into the structure, and one went to the hospital. The Bradford Building sits on Scott Boulevard just north of Fourth Street across from the Gateway Center to the west and the Kenton County Administration Building to the north. It is currently vacant and sits in disrepair, though it is often mentioned as a target for potential redevelopment. After all, it is just half a block north of the Boone Block Building, a sprawling structure that was in similar shape but is now being turned into 9 luxury townhomes, five of which are already under contract. It is named for Bradford Shinkle, son of 19th century Covington business leader Amos Shinkle. On Tuesday, the fire escape on the north side of the building drifted closer to the sidewalk and two unknowing pedestrians walked right into it. Covington Police were dispatched shortly after 5 p.m. after the witness across the street saw the second person injured before heading to the hospital. The nature of the injuries was not immediately known. Data reported in the United States and the United Kingdom points to mobile phone use while walking as a factor in the increasing number of pedestrian injuries. -Michael Monks, editor & publisher Photo: Fire escape raised after falling closer to the ground at the Bradford Building (RCN) |
he last beer from my fridge. Looks like I'll be needing to get some more... considering my student poor-ness, I'll probably just get my usual poor boy beer next... some Labatt. Might be my last post on WBAYDN for awhile (you're welcome).$9 bottle from Whole Foods. Poured into a Sam Adams Perfect Pint. I had the original Dragon's Milk way back when I first started drinking beer, and naturally, I wasn't a huge fan of the style at the time (take a look at the review if you want, I definitely need to re-review it).Appearance: Hard pour down the center gave a modest half finger head that quickly went down to a little ring. The beer is a crystal clear ruby black -- I don't remember what the original looked like, but this is a color I associate more with a porter, so it's throwing me for a bit of a loop... I'm now expecting something with less body and higher carbonation.Smell: A bit light, surprisingly. I get the per-usual roasted malt quality with a decent amount of barrel "oakiness" and bourbon (not in an EXTREME way), followed by the raspberry. I don't get any sort of really deep, rich dark fruit aromas from this beer -- just the raspberries -- and I don't smell specifically chocolate or specifically coffee (or any alcohol for that matter). This is a very pleasant smelling beer, even if it smells a bit "light" given the style and ABV.Taste/feel: Like the smell, light, in both taste and mouthfeel. This honestly doesn't come off as 11% at all: I don't get a thick, creamy body, alcohol warmth (or flavor), or a super rich, heavy flavor. This beer goes in initially with a nice bourbon barrel woodiness and vanilla flavor before a little roastiness and just a subtle raspberry flavor comes through with tartness. The aftertaste has a slight ash flavor to it that I remember having in the original Dragon's Milk. Many reviews seem to be attacking this beer because the raspberry presence is too strong, but for me, it's definitely complimentary as far as taste and the tartness. The biggest accomplishment for this beer may just be the hiding of the alcohol. Truthfully, it is nowhere to be found. Sure, you get that essence that naturally comes with the bourbon barrel aging, but this doesn't *feel* like an 11% beer.As a whole, this is a pretty tame imperial stout that really drinks more like a 7%-or-so porter. I know most people would say porters = stouts, but I've discerned differences between the two over the years, based on examples I've had from each style. When I think bourbon barrel imperial stout, I think rich, boozy, mouth coating, and sippable -- I don't get any of that with this beer. Instead, I get a porter-esque brew with this beer that, while good, is too drinkable for its own good, considering the style that it is. On the whole, I like this beer and would recommend it to others to try it... especially those who are just getting into the style of BBA'd stouts. |
Triage find companies willing to take unemployed people on workfare AROUND 10 activists from the Scottish Unemployed Workers Network (SUWN) occupied the Dundee offices of Triage, a company which claims to be the leading workfare sub-contractor in Scotland. Workfare refers to unemployed people having to work for free in order to remain on jobseekers allowance. If they refuse to they can get sanctioned or lose their benefits. Triage operates as a sub-contractor which finds companies for the government which are willing to take people on workfare. It was introduced by the coalition government in 2011. The occupation by unemployed activists this morning [17 July] lasted for about an hour, and the group, which provides an advocacy service for unemployed people as well as campaigning, released a statement saying Triage was "central to the punishment regime faced by unemployed workers in Dundee". "It is a private company making hundreds of thousands of pounds by adding to the pressures on people already suffering from stress and poverty," the statement continued. "The draconian rules come from Westminster, but it is companies like Triage that put the rules into action. "It is companies like Triage that make sure that the unemployed fill their time with generally useless activities. It is companies like Triage that make people work for up to six months without pay. And it is companies like Triage that tell the DWP to stop the benefits of anyone who has not fulfilled every task to the letter, so leaving them destitute. "This occupation is a protest against sanctions and slave labour and the whole punitive regime of which they are part. It is also a message to Triage and similar companies that if they take part in this brutal exploitation of people's misery they will be named and shamed and disrupted. If you exploit us, we will shut you down." Sarah Glynn, a housing author and expert who was part of the occupation, said that Triage were one of the worst for encouraging sanctions on the unemployed. "Triage tell DWP to sanction ppl who havent turned up when they haven't even recieved a letter asking them to turn up, or they recieved the letter after the date they were supposed to turn up," she said. "So not only does the system itself abuse peoples rights, but Triage are even abusing the abusive system. There is alot of fear out their of being sanctioned for something totally out with their control." The Triage holding message on its phone makes the claim that it is the biggest workfare sub-contractor in Scotland. Grace Kennedy, Managing Director of Triage Central said*: "We strongly reject the suggestion that anyone is put into pointless or unpaid work. We're very proud of our innovative approaches to employment and training that works both for individuals and the companies looking to employ them. "We work with some of the largest employers in the country to offer people who have been unemployed find good, sustainable jobs. In Dundee we have had a number of success stories with many people securing work in the construction sector on major local projects and in the hospitality and retail sectors. "At Triage Central we specialise in providing support, training, work preparation and job opportunities to help people in receipt of benefits progress back to into work. We operate under strict guidelines issued by the DWP and does not have the gift to stop or start anyone's benefit." *This quote was recieved after initial publication of the article Picture courtesy of the Scottish Unemployed Workers Network |
Red sandalwood smuggling: The five layers of the racket India oi-Vicky Nalgonda, April 25: It would take a while before one puts into the zeroes to a figure of Rs 1 lakh crore. This is a rough estimate of the value of the red sandalwood that remains at the Seshachalam forests. It does not come across as a surprise if the Andhra Pradesh government is moving heaven and earth to guard the red sandalwood. In every crime there are often five layers and the same can be found in the red sandalwood smuggling racket too. The five layers of red sandalwood smuggling: In any case of red sandalwood smuggling, one can find five layers. There are wood choppers, wood cutters, the loaders, transporters and the exporters. All these persons are controlled by a kingpin. While these five layers are extremely crucial to red sandalwood smuggling, there are behind the scene operators too who play a vital role. The actors, politicians, police and the forest officials. Investigating officers say that each and every level is crucial. While the first five layers ensure that the act is carried out and it reaches its destination those in the middle facilitate these layers behind the scenes. It has been seen that film producers and actors have played a role in this racket. They use the money to finance their movies and in the case of actors they often are the ones who hold the ill-gotten wealth. The politicians who use the money for their party are also a crucial link since they are the ones who direct the police and the forest department officials to look the other way. Actors, producers actively involved in sandalwood smuggling. The latest level are the naxals: Chandrababu Naidu, the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh has been screaming from roof tops that there is a direct naxal link to the entire incident. The naxals are the ones who had taken a fee from the kingpin of the red sandalwood smugglers to assassinate Naidu several years back. Gangi Reddy, the kingpin of the racket who has close contacts with parties opposed to Naidu had in fact been arrested in Andhra Pradesh a few years back. He had, however, jumped bail and moved to Dubai for a couple of years. However, his move to Mauritius from Dubai proved costly and he was arrested. The AP government wants him extradited now. For the naxals the funds are the most important. They act like a cover in the forests and also take up hitman jobs for money. The red sandalwood business is something that they would rely on a lot in a bid to finance themselves and re-establish their movement in South India. Why do actors bite the bait? For one to earn a good amount of money, all he or she needs to do is play the broker. Selling red sandalwood in India fetches just Rs 5000 a kilogram as opposed to the Rs 1 lakh it fetches in China. Brokers are normally actors and producers of the film industries. They get a huge sum for holding the money and at times they are also asked to keep stolen wood in their homes until it is ready for transportation. The amounts that they get is quite obscene and for them it is worth the risk. Take the extremely famous case of Mohanambal, the famous dancer from Tamil Nadu. She had played host to red sandalwood smugglers and a raid on her home had led to the seizure of crores of rupees and several kilograms of gold. The recent case of Neethu Agarwal, the small time actor from Andhra Pradesh is no different. It is alleged that she got into the business through a producer friend who was actively involved in red sandalwood smuggling. The producer was actively abetting the cause of the smugglers and she in turn was holding the money and also moving it around. Investigators say that she and her producer friend could have earned anything between Rs 10 to Rs 20 crore in the past year for abetting red sandalwood smuggling. The police are digging for more information on her. OneIndia News |
APS and The University of Arizona Jointly Announce Appointment of Pierre Meystre as Lead Editor, PRL Ridge, NY, 13 June 2013 — The American Physical Society (APS) and the University of Arizona (UA) are very pleased to announce that Pierre Meystre, UA Regents’ Professor of Physics and of Optical Sciences, has been appointed Lead Editor of Physical Review Letters (PRL). Meystre succeeds Jack Sandweiss (Yale), who has held the position for 25 years, to lead the preeminent international letters journal in all areas of physics. "Pierre Meystre had every qualification that we were looking for in a new leader for PRL. His vision for the future of the journal was particularly compelling.” said Ulrich Heinz (The Ohio State University), chair of the search committee. Meystre will begin as the PRL Lead Editor on 1 July 2013. In his letter to the search committee, Meystre stated: "Physical Review Letters is, in my opinion, the greatest physics journal. It is absolutely essential that this position be maintained and strengthened going forward in the face of a number of complex but interesting challenges." "We are fortunate that Dr. Meystre will be leading PRL into the future," said Gene Sprouse, APS Editor in Chief. "His prior involvement with PRL and his strong editorial experience is very compelling. We look forward to Dr. Meystre following Jack Sandweiss as an inspirational leader for the journal." Meystre is an APS Fellow and an Outstanding Referee of the Physical Review journals. He received his Ph.D. from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale, Lausanne, Switzerland. At UA, he is Director of the B2 Institute at Biosphere 2 and also Director of the Arizona Center for STEM Teachers. He joined the UA in 1986 as a professor of optical sciences and was Head of the UA Department of Physics from 2005 to 2007. --Contact: Amy Halsted, Special Assistant to the Editor in Chief, halsted@aps.org, 631-591-4232. About APS: The American Physical Society (www.aps.org) is a non-profit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities. APS represents 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world. Society offices are located in College Park, MD (Headquarters), Ridge, NY, and Washington, DC. About The University of Arizona: (www.arizona.edu) Founded in 1885 as Arizona’s land-grant university, the University of Arizona is home to nearly 40,000 students – undergraduate and graduate – representing every state in the nation and 116 countries around the world. Teaching, research, outreach, student engagement, access and quality are the defining attributes of the UA’s mission. One of the country’s top 20 public research universities, the National Science Foundation ranks the University of Arizona no. 3 in the physical sciences. |
[Here is our new Color Backer Chart] [Update: Flying Monkey Outcasts] [Update: "Animals" vs "animals"] [Update: "Pirate Press gets blogged!"] [Update: New Backer Levels /descriptions] [Update:Arcane Backgrounds-Scar and Fae Magic] [Update:Playable Races-the Evain and Naive] [Update:Arcane Backgrounds- Witchcraft/Wizardry] [Update:NEW Clint Black Stretch Goal] [Update:The NEW Honored Dead of Oz Backer Level] [Update: Crystals in Oz] [Update: The Minstrel] [Updates: All of the Updates including the final Stretch Goals and T-Shirts] Pirate Press, in conjunction with Pinnacle Entertainment Group and Savage Mojo presents this adventure setting in a re-imagined and modernized version of L. Frank Baum's classic World of Oz. The events of Baum’s original stories are a century in the past. The original Wizard and Dorothy are long dead although many of their friends and companions are still around. Players can take the role of a freedom fighter, mercenary, Oz soldier, or countless others to aid or hinder the liberation of the Oz throne. Battle for OZ is a complete game setting custom built for the award-winning Savage Worlds rule-set published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. You will need the Savage Worlds Deluxe or Explorer's core books to play the game. If you are not familiar with the Savage Worlds RPG, try out the FREE test drive rules here- TEST DRIVE RULES - on Pinnacle Entertainment Group's website. The Battle for OZ core book contains a complete description of all five major Countries of Oz and numerous cities, towns, and important places of note. It gives the players a rich history to build off of in one of the oldest and most recognizable fantasy settings in American literature with a new modern edge. Pumpkinhead undead rising from the grave Battle for OZ has two new optional additions to the Savage Worlds rule-set, frequent and competitive leveling, and a card based random character generation system. Both of these new rule-sets can be applied to any Savage Worlds setting and are designed to do what Savage Worlds games do best, keep the action fast and furious. We have posted three cards below to give you a peek at the random character generation card system. With it, we create fleshed out new player and non-player characters in a matter of minutes! Battle for OZ also has tons of NPC stats for the major and minor players in Oz, as well as mini-adventures and encounter tables based on what part of Oz the players are traveling through. It has familiar and unfamiliar weapons, gear, and armor, and custom edges and hindrances. Our book has three new custom magic disciplines that include, Technomancy, Scar magic, and Fae magic. Lastly, Battle for OZ has a complete plot point campaign that will take players from novice to legendary. They will have to choose between helping to free Oz from tyranny or helping to enslave the rest of the world beyond it. Battle for OZ is currently slated to be a full size soft cover book and our current goal will help us pay to have the book polished by Savage Mojo and sent to print. The book is very close to completion, but we will be adding additional content and art on top of what we already plan as the fundraising continues. With your help, we can reach the stretch goals that will allow us to upgrade to a hardback cover and add new content. We also have grand plans to provide you with some great Oz extras like custom bennies and playing cards. Oz is no longer a free land. For the last couple years it has been subjugated by a new mysterious Wizard. Glinda the Good and many of her allies have been captured or killed, and a third of Oz is a military state. The new Wizard is using a forgotten magical discipline called Technomancy, and its energies are literally shaking the foundation of Oz itself. From the Emerald City, this new Wizard has unleashed an army of soulless Tin-Men soldiers and undead Pumpkinheads to enforce his will. Anyone who dares to speak out or organize against him is met with a silent end at the hands of Scarecrow assassins that live in the night. The only real resistance comes from the north in the nomadic country of Gilikin. It is there that Amber Gale, daughter of Dorothy, rallies the Beast-men and scattered few against this new evil. Most have lost hope and turned a blind eye, while others such as pirates, privateers, and mercenaries have chosen to profit off of the constant conflict. Then, an ancient race reemerges, donned with strange magical markings on their skin. Only time will tell if they are friend or foe. Our modern day Oz is a darker, less friendly place than when Dorothy Gale first crossed over from Kansas over a century ago. Wars with the Gnome King were followed by some years of peace under Princess Ozma but then the new evil Wizard appeared and with breathtaking speed his armies subjugated most of the land. He now sits on Ozma's throne in the Emerald City. The Land of Oz has always been inhabited by many strange and wonderful creatures. However lately, many have taken on an even darker and more dangerous aspect -- no doubt due to the corrupting influence of the new evil Wizard enthroned in the Emerald City. Lions, and Tigers and Bears are the least of a traveler's worries these days as sinister goblins prowl the land and corrupted flying monkeys patrol the air... Corrupted Flying Monkey and Normal Flying Monkey It is even dangerous for those who never leave home as hordes of Tin-Men soldiers, Straw-Men assassins, and undead pumpkin heads roam the land enforcing the Wizard's will... Pumpkin Heads, Scarecrows, and Tin-Men New evil Witches and Wizards, all subservient to the new ruler, now govern each the countries save for the rebellious and fiercely independent Gillikins... Ea'Soul, the Wicked Witch of the waters of Oz. From their secret base in the mountains of Gillikin, Amber Gale, the half magical daughter of the Dorothy and a local prince, along with several of Dorothy's old friends lead the resistance. Amber Gale, Patch (aka Toto), and Blacktail (aka the Lion King) make their stand Amber Gale's most powerful allies are the beastmen of Oz. Once divided by petty bickering, the tribes have united against a common foe. Production art of three playable beast men races. Even as things seem to be at their darkest there are a few who still quest for the light of freedom. But they are desperately in need of help before this light goes out forever. Amber and Patch on the magical Yellow Brick Road Captain's Level Pledge Example Brandy the Art Teacher.....meet, Brandy the Evain Captain, Company 4 Oz Conqueror...Are YOU the one behind the cloak?.... The Wizard of Oz, Ozymandias the Great, on the Emerald Throne. Pirate Press LLC is Dan Smith and David Hardee. They choose Oz as their first project to publish because they felt it was the perfect mix of fantasy and horror. They also recognized the current trend in popular culture of revitalizing classic American fiction in films, television, and books. Pirate Press selected Savage Mojo to layout Battle for Oz because of their vast experience and true professionalism. They also have a close relationship with Savage Worlds through Aaron Acevedo, the Art Director for Pinnacle Entertainment Group. Dan Smith is a Deputy Sheriff and freelance commercial artist. He is married with two teenage children. Dan created an illustration in 2008 of a modern Oz cast that featured a tattooed Dorothy, and a Toto with an eye patch. This illustration served as the inspiration for Battle for Oz and its creative direction. He is the Art Director, and primary artist for the Battle for Oz. David Hardee is a computer software manager and lifelong gamer. He is also married with one child. David has GM'd hundreds of Savage Worlds games over the years and has taken dozens of campaigns to Legendary level. Over a year ago David came up with a card based random character generation rule set which has been a favorite with the local game groups and has been game tested numerous campaigns with settings ranging from Conan to Star Wars. He is the primary writer and game mechanics consultant for Battle for Oz. Now that we've met our initial funding, we have some great stretch goals planned that would result in a some awesome extras for our backers.... Golden Age Stretch Goal Chips... Our backers rock! Add-ons If you’d like any of the Add-ons listed below just add up the items you want and add that amount to your pledge but keep the same reward tier. Once the Kickstarter campaign finishes we will be sending out a Survey to all backers to inquire what Add-ons they would like with their pledge. Remember that if you are an international backer (receiving anything other than just PDF's) please make sure to add $20 for shipping with your pledge (this is a one-time charge per order). All prints will be signed by the artist. The Custom Character art will be done to your specifications and with any pictures you send in as reference. This art will not be included in the main book or on the Action Card deck (we don't have space for it all) but you will receive the signed originals and it will be included in the Sketchbook. |
Tony Hawk has taken his skateboarding career to new branding heights over the last decade thanks to his series of successful video games. And one of the things that has made those games so popular is the killer soundtracks. Project manager Ken Overbey has revealed to Sound and Vision magazine that the next 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater' release will feature a high profile collaboration between rapper El-P and Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor , as well as the classic metal/rap pairing of Anthrax and Public Enemy's Chuck D. on 'Bring The Noise.' Overbey says, "We definitely wanted to bring back some of the songs from the original soundtrack, but wanted new songs as well." There's a solid mix of both old and new tracks to take in while learning all of the game's new tricks. The newer tracks include the El-P/Reznor hookup for 'Flyentology (Cassettes Won't Listen Remix),' the Middle Class Rut track 'USA,' Consumed's 'Heavy Metal Winner,' and 'You' from Bad Religion. As for the older tracks, listen for Powerman 5000's 'When Worlds Collide,' Millencolin's 'No Cigar,' Goldfinger's 'Superman,' and Lagwagon's 'May 16.' Other cuts revealed by Overbey included Pigeon John's 'The Bomb,' Lateef the Truthspeaker's 'We the People,' Pegasuses XL's 'Marathon Mansion,' Apex Manor's 'Teenage Blood,' and Telekinesis' 'Please Ask for Help.' The game itself is expected to surface in June. To hear a majority of the tracks, visit Sound and Vision . |
For one Saturday last month, OnePlus gave a few of its European customers a unique opportunity: If they had a beef with the company, they could take their complaint straight to the top. From its original OnePlus One in 2014, the Chinese company has built a reputation for making fantastic, affordable phones with premium parts. But in its early years, it also evoked the wrath of some OnePlus owners over incidents like bungled customer support, an invite-only system for early handsets and an ill-advised promotion aimed at women. Some of that ire has subsided as OnePlus continued to build well-received phones, but co-found Carl Pei is determined to keep making things right. On September 30, he met with a group of 20 OnePlus users in London to get their honest feedback about how the company is failing its customers and what it needs to do to fix them. Now playing: Watch this: OnePlus 5 is the best, cheapest premium phone Customers (dis)service I visited the event to hear what the customers had to say. It was held in central London in an event space with blank white walls -- walls that were soon plastered in poster-size pages of notes from all the attendees. Coffee flowed freely, as did the conversation about what OnePlus is doing right and what it's doing wrong. Pei greeted every attendee at the door and played an active role throughout the day. Andrew Hoyle/CNET Pei was open about OnePlus' past issues. "If I had to honestly assess our service, I'd say it's average," he said. "If you have a bad experience with our product, you'll put off your friends and family from buying that product. If you have a good time, you'll become an advocate for that product. "People don't believe in what the adverts are telling them, but they'll believe what their friend has told them," Pei said. Complaints that day ranged from delays in deliveries to faulty handsets not being replaced quickly enough to poor quality of accessories to difficulty in even getting in touch with a service representative. But it isn't just customer service that's been a problem for the company. As OnePlus grew in popularity, it lost touch with the solid community that had built up from day one. "We were sitting in an ivory tower." Pei said. "We stopped coming out and engaging directly with our users. We've talked about 'Never Settle' [the OnePlus slogan] now nobody even knows what that means anymore." Attendee Joshua agreed. "After the OnePlus 2, they just closed off and decided not to talk anymore," he said. (The attendees I spoke with declined to give their last names.) Following the London event, OnePlus published its promises for better customer service, which includes additional repair centres, better troubleshooting apps and insurance options, as well as further customer meetups to discuss ongoing issues. Andrew Hoyle/CNET Mass market... but generic While much of the day's conversation focused on customer service issues, the question of OnePlus' identity cropped up again and again. "If you look at the OnePlus 5, it's very generic and that's a bad thing." says Joshua, "At the end of the day, do you want to be like every other smartphone brand or do you want to stand out from the crowd? They're trying to appeal to more users, but it's at the detriment of losing their true identity." It was exactly that identity as a welcoming, community-led company that's helped OnePlus pull customers away from Google. "I've always been a Nexus freak," explained another attendee, Jessica. "But Google have gone mainstream with the Pixel. At first I was really excited and then I saw what it actually was -- shiny and nice, but so expensive. And that's not what I want. I got the OnePlus 5." Attendee Tom feels the same way: "The reason I was originally interested was because OnePlus filled the hole that Google had left with the Nexus devices -- being developer friendly and very customisable and so forth." Tom also uses the latest OnePlus 5. "I don't like Samsung at all, I think they have no taste," he said A more open OnePlus Pei hopes that meeting face-to-face with customers at events like this will help him learn which areas of service need addressing most and show also customers that the spirit of OnePlus is still there. The company still has challenges ahead. Just last week, OnePlus came under scrutiny for collecting customer data including phone numbers and handset IMEI numbers. Pei himself addressed the matter in a blog post on Friday. "The reason we collect some device information is to better provide after-sales support. We'd like to emphasize that at no point have we shared this information with outside parties," he wrote. For Tom, the open interaction of OnePlus in its earlier days was a big draw. "They had transparency with the users, they interacted with them on forums, they were accepting of developers and modders," he said. "They were very much about making a device fit to the users, rather than making the user fit to the device. "If they actually listen to us properly and decide to make changes -- even small changes -- would make a huge difference, and I'd feel more like they are listening to us," Tom said. Jessica agreed. "If they keep learning and progressing the way they have, I'll be very interested in the OnePlus 6 whenever that's unveiled," she said. "As long as they don't sell out! And that's what a lot of companies do." First published Oct. 17, 2017, 5 a.m. PT. Update, 10:45 a.m. PT: Adds background on OnePlus data collection. CNET Magazine: Check out a sample of the stories in CNET's newsstand edition. Logging Out: Welcome to the crossroads of online life and the afterlife. |
A 23-year-old man who described Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, as a "war criminal" and a "terrorist" on Facebook on the day after the Commons vote to bomb Syria has been charged with "sending malicious messages" to another MP. Craig Wallace, who also goes under the name Muhammad Mujahid Islam, will appear in court on Monday charged with the offence of malicious communications. Mr Wallace, of Willesden Green in north London, attended an anti-war rally outside Parliament on the day of the Syria vote and was pictured carrying a giant white poppy. He also posed for a series of pictures with strangers carying a placard stating "I am Muslim, I am labled [sic] a terrorist, I trust you, do you trust me enough for a hug". The day after the vote Mr Wallace sent Mr Benn an email, which is posted on his Facebook page. It said: "I hope to God that you will have nightmares when you hear that kids woman and men have been murdered by your govt [sic]. "I would like to ask you Mr Benn that if you was living in Syria now how would you like it if a 500 pound bomb just suddenly fell from the sky and dropped on you house killing you wife, kids your whole family i can guarantee you would be devastated you would not know what to do. "I also hope you now understand that you and the rest of those terrorists who voted yes are war criminal in fact i would not there will me more innocent people dying on the streets of this country now because of you." Mr Wallace has been arrested over a message sent to another MP outside London on Facebook. The charge comes after a number of MPs, many of them in the Labour Party, complained to police that they had received death threats after voting in favour of airstrikes on Islamic State (IS) in Syria. Neil Coyle, the MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, said police had stationed extra officers outside his surgery after he received an apparent death threat on social media. While Labour Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk has spoken out about receiving an apparent death threat on Facebook after he voted in favour of the military action. Wallace allegedly sent the malicious message last Thursday, the day after MPs voted to authorise the air strikes. |
A picture of the seal designating the Al-Kitab as being only for Christians. — Picture by Choo Choy May KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 2 — The raid against the Bible Society of Malaysia (BSM) by Selangor religious officials today was not sanctioned by the state government, an executive councillor (exco) has said. Sallehen Mukhyi, who holds the state religious affairs portfolio, said the raid, which led to the seizure of Malay-language and Iban bibles, was never discussed with him. “Jais can receive its order from two sources,” Sallehen told The Malay Mail Online here, referring to the Selangor Islamic Religious Department. “One is from the state government, meaning from the mentri besar. The other is from the Selangor Islamic Religious Council (Mais), which means the order comes straight from the Sultan.” Sallehen admitted that he was never told of the raid yet and could not confirm that it was ordered by the Sultan. He added, however, that he will seek clarification from Jais as soon as possible. Selangor Islamic authorities raided the Bible Society of Malaysia (BSM) in Petaling Jaya today and seized copies of both the Malay-language and Iban bibles that contain the word “Allah”, while two BSM officials were also held by police. BSM executive council member Nic Ng told The Malay Mail Online today that a team of about 20 people including police officers and officials from Jais arrived at the society’s premises over an hour ago and demanded entry despite not bearing a warrant. Ng said that the BSM workers were forced to allow the team entry after they allegedly threatened to break down the door. Ng said that the police then told BSM president Lee Min Choon and general-secretary Dr Simon Wong to follow them to the Damansara police station. At the police station, Lee said that he and BSM office manager Sinclair Wong were arrested under the Selangor Non-Islamic Religions (Control of Propagation Among Muslims) Enactment 1988 that prohibits non-Muslims in Selangor from using 35 Arabic words and phrases, including the word for God, “Allah”. Jais’ raid comes after its newly-appointed director, Ahmad Zaharin Mohd Saad, said last Thursday that letters will be sent to all churches in Selangor to ask them to comply with the Selangor 1988 enactment. In a move set to complicate Putrajaya’s bid to calm east Malaysian unease over the “Allah” row, the Selangor Sultan had on November 14 renewed his decree that the Arabic word for God be barred to all non-Muslims in the state. Responding to the recent ruling by the Court of Appeal, Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah Al-Haj has also called for an immediate halt to the word’s usage in the Malay language Bible al-Kitab and the Catholic weekly, The Herald. Bumiputera Christians, who form about 64 per cent or close to two-thirds of the Christian community in Malaysia, have used the word “Allah” when praying and speaking in the national language and their native tongues for centuries. |
← Sidebar By Scoop Malinowski Status: ATP no. 53. Ht: 6-2 Wt: 178 DOB: October 20, 1997 In: Moscow, Russia First Tennis Memory: [Laughs] I don’t know. Because I play tennis since I know myself because my mom was a tennis coach. So I don’t know. Tennis Inspirations: I don’t know, I just love to play tennis. Tennis Heroes: I like Nadal when I was kid. And Safin. When I saw them since the first time, I like it. It not like I was thinking, Oh, something, and I like them. When I see them, straight I like them. Last Book Read: Rafael Nadal’s. Greatest Sports Moment: I think it’s two victories – first ATP title, and second in Davis Cup (defeated Andujar 64 76 63 in decisive fifth rubber to complete 0-2 comeback for Russia vs. Spain, securing Russia a spot in the World Group Play-Offs). Most Painful Moment: Last two years it was like this. Especially all the last year it was absolutely full of depress, full of tears. Now I’m happy. It’s much better now.. Strangest Match: Windy and snowy sometimes at some of the tournaments. Favorite Tournaments: For the moment, it’s every ATP tournament – because I just – it’s my first time. When I play some ATP and Grand Slams, so I’m like so excited. And I’ve never seen organization like this, so, of course, I don’t know. Interesting Facts: Andrey’s father Andrey Sr. was a professional boxer and he practices boxing as part of his training for tennis. First Famous Player You Met Or Encountered: I’m not sure. I think, for sure, it was one of the Russian players but I don’t know which one. I remember when I was a kid I was a big fan of Safin. And I remember only when I meet with him. But for sure, before him, I meet with someone else. But I don’t know who. Current Car: I don’t have a car. I’m too young [smiles]. Favorite Sport Outside Tennis: Actually I have a lot of favorite sports – I like snowboard, wake board, basketball, football, American football… Three Athletes You Like To Watch & Follow: Formula One – (Lewis) Hamilton. LeBron James. Federer, Nadal and Cristiano Ronaldo. Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: I’m not big fan of ice cream but the most is vanilla. Why Do You Love Playing Tennis: I don’t know, it’s my life I think. Because I cannot imagine me without tennis. I just like it, and that’s it. I cannot be without tennis. I don’t know. I think it’s something special, more special, different feelings than compared to the team sports. It’s another feeling. I like this feeling more. People Qualities Most Admired: People, like, who never lie. ————— Q: I think you lost in the qualies last year (to Miljan Zekic 76 67 46). ANDREY RUBLEV: First round (laughter). Q. Big changes. What turned your year around, your career around? Where did the confidence come from? Specific tournament or match? ANDREY RUBLEV: No, just last year I changed all the team completely. I moved to Barcelona to practice with a new coach and new physio, a new fitness coach, all the new team. This is it. Q. Why the change? ANDREY RUBLEV: Because, I mean, before was not working. It was something, I don’t know, else. Now, last year when I moved there, the real work starts. That’s it. I feel that I’m not improving, I’m going only worse and worse, so I had to change something. Rublev · Russian Tennis · US Open << US Open Notebook: Who Stole Patrick Rafter’s Rolex? And the Winner of the 2017 US Open Is…Sam Querrey! >> |
Some of the country's largest retailers, including Target Corp. and Macy's Inc., on Thursday filed a lawsuit against MasterCard and Visa, rejecting a settlement reached last year over alleged fee-fixing. A larger group of 19 trade associations and retail companies originally filed suit against the card processing companies in 2005, claiming that they conspired to fix the fees they charge stores for handling payments made with credit cards. $7 billion settlement A $7.2 billion settlement was reached in July, but some of the retailers rejected it, partially because it includes a provision barring retailers from filing future lawsuits over swipe fees. Some retailers also have argued that the settlement amount was far less than what they deserved and might have won at trial. Earlier this week, the National Retail Federation, which represents more than 9,000 retailers across the country, urged its members to reject the settlement, in part, because of the provision barring future lawsuits. The retailers involved in the new lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, also include TJX Cos., Office Depot Inc., Kohl's Corp., Abercrombie & Fitch Co. and several others. Visa spokesman Will Valentine declined comment, while MasterCard spokesman Jim Issokson would only say that his company remains confident that the settlement will ultimately be approved. Trish Wexler, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Payments Coalition, which counts the companies among its members, said the lawsuit didn't come as a surprise and was the next natural step for retailers opting out of the settlement. Other retailers have until Tuesday to opt out of the agreement so they can pursue their own legal action. Retailers who do not opt out by the deadline will automatically be considered to have accepted the settlement. In afternoon trading, Visa Inc. shares fell $2.13 to $178.01, while MasterCard Inc. shares fell $7.89 to $568.82. |
A new Ubuntu tablet is on the market – but it comes with company. The Ekoore Python S tablet ships with three operating systems installed. Only one OS can be used at a time on the device. Ubuntu 11.10 Windows 7 Android 4.0 (Ice-Cream Sandwich) On to the hardware. Specification wise the Python sports a notable difference from most tablets already on the market: it uses an Intel Atom CPU rather than an ARM processor. It’s this which allows the Python S to run Windows 7. Full specs: Intel Atom N455 1.60Ghz CPU (Single Core) CPU (Single Core) Integrated Graphics (website states clocked at 200Mhz) Up to 2GB RAM Up to 64GB SSD 10.1 inch capacitive touch screen Wifi, Bluetooth, 3G, Accelerometer 5 Hour Battery Ports wise the python has: Mini VGA 2xUSB Microphone/headphone jack MicroSD card slot SIM Card Slot The Python S retails at a somewhat steep €499 (equivalent to $655/£415). The case of the tablet does, from the handful of press shots available, look okay. It’s chunkier (14.5mm) than the svelte slates most of us are used to seeing (the ASUS Transformer Prime is 8.3mm thick), but given the Intel NM10 chipset (and fan!) its housing this is to be expected. The blue-backlit buttons on the front of the device are pretty nice touch (pun intended). Ubuntu on the Ekoore Ekoore ship the Python S with a custom version of Ubuntu 11.10 using GNOME Shell. Why Shell? Likely because GNOME-Shell is generally more ‘touch friendly’ than Unity. It has big chunky window controls; managing and opening apps via the Activities Overlay is easier, and, perhaps importantly, it sports an elegant pop-up on-screen keyboard in the form of ‘Caribou‘. Ubuntu on the other hand is a fiddle to use; Overlay-scrollbars are difficult to reveal/drag using a finger, as is un-hiding the Unity launcher; window controls are tiny; the ‘onboard’ screen keyboard is functional but not touch-orientated; switching between full-screen applications is difficult, etc. Accessories Additional purchases to compliment the device include a ‘folio’ case with built-in keyboard, capacitive stylus, and car mount. Summary The Ekoore Python S is no dream Ubuntu tablet. The antiquated CPU and Chipset doesn’t support HD, and the trade off in weight and thickness inorder to support Windows 7 means it’s more of a slab than a slate. But options are nice to have and the Ekoore is seemingly nice enough. Nice enough for a duck under £500? Not in my eyes. Visit Ekoore Python S Website Thanks to Jason S |
Republican presidential contender Donald Trump said on Dec. 7 that he was in favor of a '"total and complete" shutdown of Muslims entering the United States. (C-SPAN) The question of the day is whether Republicans, particularly the Republicans running for president, would support Donald Trump if he were to become the party’s nominee. Much as they might hem and haw when they get asked — many insist that it’s a moot point since he won’t be the nominee — the real answer is simple: Of course they would. Let’s put what’s happening right now in context. Periodically, the political press finds a question candidates (and sometimes other politicians as well) are having a difficult time answering, and so they ask it again and again. It’s not necessarily a “gotcha” in that it has no answer that won’t make the candidate look bad, but its attraction comes from the fact that the reporter knows it’s going to make the candidate squirm. That doesn’t mean it’s not substantively revealing, however. For instance, a couple of months ago all the Republican candidates were asked whether the Iraq War was a mistake, and their answers did tell us something about what they’ve learned from recent history. Hillary Clinton is often asked how her plans on one topic or another differ from what the Obama administration has done, which puts her in an awkward position but also forces her to be specific about what course she intends to pursue. And now, as his statements grow more repellent and his opponents slowly become more willing to criticize him (very slowly in some cases), “Will you support Donald Trump if he is the GOP nominee?” is the question every Republican is getting. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is running for president as a Republican, slammed rival Donald Trump during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Dec. 9. (Council on Foreign Relations) It’s a natural question to ask. If you’re saying on one hand that he’s “entirely unsuited to lead the United States” (John Kasich), or that his plan to ban Muslims from coming to the country “is not what this party stands for. And, more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for” (Paul Ryan), or that he’s “unhinged” (Jeb Bush), or that he’s “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” (Lindsey Graham), then it’s awfully hard to say on the other hand that if he’s your party’s nominee for president, you’ll be right at his side. Yet that’s exactly what Republicans are saying, even if not in so many words. I have yet to see a single prominent Republican say that they won’t support Trump if he becomes the GOP nominee. As it happens, the presidential candidates promised their loyalty to the party’s nominee, whoever he or she might be, back in September — though the purpose of the written pledge the party circulated at the time was to get Trump himself to forswear a third-party run. But nobody should be surprised at this. Let’s say you’re a Republican politician who is sincerely disgusted by Trump’s demagoguery. Here’s what you’d have to consider on the other side of the scale. If Trump becomes president, he’d inevitably fill the 3,000 or so appointed positions in the executive branch almost entirely from the Republican government-in-waiting currently camped out in think tanks and advocacy organizations; those people will then proceed to advance conservative goals in every agency of government. He’ll appoint conservative judges who want to overturn Roe v. Wade, undermine laws protecting worker and minority rights, and so on. He’ll carry out a pleasingly belligerent foreign policy. And perhaps most of all, he’ll sign most everything the Republican Congress delivers to his desk, which could be quite a lot; repealing the Affordable Care Act would be only the beginning. It’s true that Trump presents something of a risk by being both ideologically unpredictable (genuinely so, unlike someone like Mitt Romney, who generated lots of suspicion among Republicans but would have been perfectly reliable) and just volatile. You never know when he might start a nuclear war, because that’s what winners do and he’s no loser. But on the whole, Trump would shower policy riches upon Republicans, ones they’ve been waiting seven years for. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called out GOP frontrunner Donald Trump for what she describes as his "shameless and dangerous" idea of barring Muslims from entering the U.S. (Reuters) And then there’s this: the alternative, if Trump is the nominee, is probably Hillary Clinton, with the possible exception of Barack Obama the single political figure Republicans most despise. So to reject Trump, they’d have to argue that everything Clinton would do from a policy perspective, and just by making them mad all the time, is preferable to a Trump presidency. To be clear, I’m not saying this to excuse the tacit support nearly every Republican is giving Trump, nor the future support they’ll give him if he’s the nominee. Trump may be the most despicable politician we’ve seen in America in decades, someone who is explicitly encouraging Americans to nurture and act upon their darkest feelings of fear and hatred. Everyone who stands behind him ought to be tainted by that association for the rest of their careers. But especially in this age of negative partisanship, where people increasingly define their political identities not by whom they support but by which party and politicians they hate, it would be shocking if Republicans could contemplate not supporting the GOP’s nominee when Clinton is the likely alternative. And the awful things he has said are just exaggerated versions of what have become mainstream Republican positions — they rail against undocumented immigrants, and he wants to deport them; they stoke fear of Muslim refugees, and he expands that to all Muslims, and so on. If he were moving in the other direction it might be a different story, but as it is Trump is only taking conservative ideas and moving them a few steps farther to the right. There’s some threshold of villainy Trump could cross where his fellow Republicans would say that they couldn’t support him under any circumstances. But wherever that threshold is, he hasn’t reached it yet. |
A tweet put me on to UNESCO’s Index Translationum – World Bibliography of Translation. It’s a list of books that have been translated from one language into another. I wondered if there was a way to use this to look at language similarity which took bilingualism into account. Essentially, if two languages are very different and there are few bilingual speakers, then there should be a lot of translations. If two languages are spoken bilingually by many people, then there should be less cause for translations. Of course, there economic, cultural and political factors, too, but let’s see how far we can get. Here’s a visualisation of the data using Gephi: Thresh1002 At first, some predictions are not borne out. There are 3616 publications translated from Spanish into Catalan, while there are 9244 publications from Spanish into English. This suggests that Spanish and Catalan are closer. Of course, there are only 12 publications translated from Spanish to Hindi, but it’s unlikely that this is being caused by a large Spanish-Hindi bilingual community. That is, low numbers could mean no need to translate because of language similarity, or that there is no economic or cultural incentive for translating between them (or lack of data). Still, we can put the translation matrix into a clustering algorithm and create a cluster diagram. Using the inverse of the (log) number of publications as a distance measure (so that languages with lots of translated books are closer), we get some sensible clusterings: The top of the tree is quite flat, due to lack of data. However, lower down things make more sense. Lithuanian and Latvian cluster together as do Herbew and Yiddish. In the context of this dataset, the clustering of (Korean, Japanese, Chinese) and (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish) make sense, too. The cluster diagram using number of translations as a distance measure (so that languages with lots of translated books are further away) makes less sense. Here’s the cluster diagram of the top 20 languages (by source/target publications): I’m not really sure how to interpret this. Is there a big Polish-Chinese bilingual community? I doubt it. There are several things that could be improved: Taking account of directionality, geographic distance or economic factors (e.g. exports) and so on. Still, it provides another way to think about how languages are related. For some other visualisations, see my post on visualising languages through phonetic distance and Richard’s post on heat maps in WALS. Share this: Reddit Facebook LinkedIn More Google Twitter Email Print |
President Donald Trump signaled support for embattled Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, slamming his Democratic opponent as a “liberal democrat.” “We don’t need a liberal democrat in that seat,” Trump said, pointing out that Democrat candidate Doug Jones had a terrible record on issues he cared about. “I’ve looked at his record. It’s terrible on crime. It’s terrible on the border. It’s terrible on the military,” Trump said. “I can tell you for a fact, we do not need somebody that’s going to be bad on crime, bad on borders, bad with the military, bad for the Second Amendment.” The president made his remarks as he departed the White House to spend Thanksgiving with his family at his Mar-a-lago club in Florida. When asked about the allegations of Moore’s sexual misconduct with high school aged girls, Trump pointed to Moore’s denials. “He totally denies it. He says it didn’t happen,” Trump said, noting that the alleged incidents took place over 40 years ago. “Forty years is a long time. He’s run eight races, and this has never comes up,” he said, referring to Moore’s record. When the press asked Trump if he would campaign with Moore, he said that he would let reporters know sometime next week. When asked about women, Trump replied, “Women are very special. I think it’s a very special time, a lot of things are coming out and I think that’s good for our society and I think it’s very very good for women and I’m very happy these things are coming out.” |
In a surprise twist to the charged atmosphere surrounding the JNU sedition case, three office bearers of BJP's student wing Akhila Bhartiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP) have quit, saying, "we can't be mouthpiece of such a government". In a post on his Facebook page this evening, Pradeep Narwal, joint secretary of ABVP, announced he and two other office bearers were quitting ABVP and disassociating themselves from all future activities of the ABVP. #SAVEJNU #SAVEDEMOCRACY Dear friends, We, Pradeep, Joint Secretary, ABVP JNU UNIT, Rahul Yadav, President SSS ABVP UNIT and Ankit Hans, Secretary SSS ABVP UNIT resigning from ABVP and disassociating ourselves from any further activity of ABVP as per our difference of opinion due to the following reasons: 1. Current JNU incident. 2. Long standing difference of opinion with party on MANUSMIRITI and Rohith Vermula incident. Anti-national slogans on Feb. 9 in university campus were very unfortunate and heart breaking. Whosoever responsible for that act must be punished as per the law but the way NDA government tackling the whole issue, the oppression on Professors, repeated lawyer attacks on Media and Kanhaiya kumar in court premises is unjustifiable and we think there is a difference between interrogation and crushing ideology and branding entire left as Anti-national. People are circulating #SHUTDOWNJNU but I think they must circulate #SHUTDOWNZEENEWS which has demeaned this world class institution, this biased ZEE news media generalize and related the act done by few people to the whole student community of JNU. JNU is considered as one of the progressive and democratic institution where we can see intermingling of people from lower to upper income strata of the society, notion of equality. We can’t be mouthpiece of such a govt. which has unleashed oppression on student community, legislature like O P Sharma, govt. which has legitimized the action of right wing fascist forces either in Patiala house court or in front of JNU north gate. Every day we see people assemble at front gate with Indian Flag to beat JNU student, well this is hooliganism not nationalism, you can’t do anything in the name of nation, there is a difference between nationalism and hooliganism. Anti-India slogans can’t be tolerated in campus or any part of country, JNUSU& some left organization are saying that nothing has happened in the campus but here we want to stress that veiled persons in the event organized by former DSU persons shouted slogans BHARAT TERE TUKADDE HONGE of which there is concrete evidence in videos, so we demand any person responsible for the slogans should be punished as per the law, and in this whole process we also condemn media trial which has culminated in Anti-JNU sentiments throughout the country. Today we all must stand together to save JNU which has given us identity, we need to come across party lines to save reputation of this institution, to save future of JNUites as more than 80% of students don’t belong to any political party so let’s unite to save this JNU culture. i |VANDE MATRAM | | JAI BHIM | | JAI BHARAT | |
Valentino Rossi has been through them all. He’s the ancient prize fighter who has taken out Max Biaggi, Sete Gibernau, Casey Stoner, Jorge Lorenzo and the rest. His premier-class duels go so far back into racing history – all the way back to 2000 – that they cross generations. The same time span of 16 years would’ve had John Surtees taking on Barry Sheene, Mike Hailwood comparing genius with Freddie Spencer, Kenny Roberts doing battle with his own son, Wayne Rainey having a go with Casey Stoner and Mick Doohan with Marc Márquez. Hard to believe, but do the maths; it’s true. The first racer who caused Rossi a real problem was Stoner – finally here was someone who had the sheer talent to beat the old master. Now there’s Márquez. But Márquez is different from all the others. We’ve seen Rossi happily resort to getting physical when times get tough. None of his old rivals enjoyed returning the compliment, at least not on the racetrack. At Catalunya in 2001 Biaggi waited until after the race to get physical. He had just been made to look silly by his young upstart rival, who had come from way behind to steal the glory that should have been his. So on their way to the podium, Biaggi landed a head butt. Gibernau, Stoner and Lorenzo never wanted to lock handlebars or land head butts, they just wanted to race bikes. The determination of Rossi and Márquez goes deeper, so deep that everything and anything can be countenanced in pursuit of victory. Their attitude coincides with one of the greatest writers of the 20th century: George Orwell, author of Animal Farm,1984 and Homage to Catalonia. ‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,’ wrote Orwell in 1945, after witnessing football matches in various far-flung countries. ‘It is... war minus the shooting.’ But don’t for a moment think that what happened in Argentina on Sunday was Rossi locking horns with Márquez. It was a racing incident, fair and square: both riders were somewhat disturbed by their collision at the hairpin, Rossi moved to the right to set himself up for the next left, Márquez underestimated the manoeuvre and tagged the rear of the Yamaha. And anyway, Márquez has initiated more than his fair share of paint-swapping in recent years. After last season and winter testing, we knew Rossi had a chance of winning this year’s championship, but I’ll admit I thought the real title duel would be fought out between Márquez and Jorge ‘Mantequilla’ Lorenzo; in other words nutter versus butter. It turns out that instead that it will be nutter versus nutter. And I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. Most sponsors and their PR machines try to paint motorcycle racing as a shiny, pretty sport, but it is usually dirtier than that, and that’s the way I, and I think most fans, like it; up to a point, obviously. Some years ago when Troy Bayliss referred to Rossi as a maniac, after they had enjoyed a particularly fierce battle at Mugello, he did so with a smile on his face, meaning it as a compliment. Now here we have two maniac magicians, both with their eyes on the glittering prize, both prepared to go further than anyone to get there. Where will it all end? Safely, I hope. While Rossi and Márquez plan their next duel at Jerez – no doubt both recalling what they’ve done to rivals at the final hairpin – their engineers will be staying up late, making their brains hurt as they try to find the slightest technical advantage. You could well attribute Rossi’s 110th Grand Prix victory and Márquez’s disastrous no-score to a simple case of correct tyre choice versus incorrect tyre choice. But better to go deeper than that. At the end of last season Yamaha said it wanted to make its bike more like a Honda, while Honda said it wanted to make its bike more like a Yamaha. It’s corner speed versus stop-and-go. So far, Yamaha seems to have made the greatest strides. It’s maintained its corner-speed advantage while somehow improving the bike’s in-and-out performance. Usually you can’t gain in one area without losing in another, but perhaps Yamaha’s done just that. Its new seamless downshifter (it finally got there, years after Honda) has allowed Rossi to close right up on Márquez in the braking zone, where the youngster and his Honda RC213V were once incomparable. And the full seamless offers further benefits. By improving braking stability it reduces physical and mental demands on the rider, allowing him to spend what he saves elsewhere, as in a late surge to victory. The Yamaha is also improved on corner exits, its 2015 geometry putting more load on the rear to give Rossi more acceleration traction. We are set for a great contest for the championship. Perhaps never in bike racing history has there been such a contest where both riders have so much talent, intelligence, aggression and high technology on their sides. Rossi is certainly the most intelligent motorcycle racer I’ve ever known, though Márquez comes very, very close and he’s still only a kid and still learning, as he proved on Sunday. Both are very good at mind games – Rossi most famously – and psychological warfare may be something they deploy increasingly as their title fight rages on. And, of course, when it comes to mind games you can say just as much by saying very little; so what exactly do you think Márquez was trying to say when he said this on Sunday evening? “I’ve always said that Valentino is my idol and my reference, so you always learn things from him.” |
Hieromartyr Cyril Lucaris or Loukaris (Greek: Κύριλλος Λούκαρις, 13 November 1572 – 27 June 1638), born Constantine Lucaris, was a Greek prelate and theologian, and a native of Candia, Crete (then under the Republic of Venice). He later became the Greek Patriarch of Alexandria as Cyril III and Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople as Cyril I. He is alleged by Calvinists, both of his time and modern, to have strove for a reform of the Eastern Orthodox Church along Protestant and Calvinist lines.[1] Attempts to bring Calvinism into the Orthodox Church were rejected, and Cyril's actions, motivations, and specific viewpoints remain a matter of debate among scholars. However, he is recognized by the Orthodox Church as a hieromartyr and defender of the Orthodox faith against both the Jesuit Catholics and Calvinist Protestants. The official glorification of Hieromartyr Cyril Loukaris took place by decision of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria on October 6, 2009, and his memory is commemorated on June 27.[2][3] Life [ edit ] Cyril Lucaris was born in Candia, Crete on 13 November 1572,[4] when the island was part of the Venetian Republic's maritime empire. In his youth he travelled through Europe, studying at Venice and the University of Padua, and at Geneva where he came under the influence of Calvinism and the Reformed faith. Lucaris pursued theological studies in Venice and Padua, Wittenberg and Geneva where he developed greater antipathy for Roman Catholicism.[5] While the exact date is unknown, Lucaris was ordained in Constantinople.[6] In 1596 Lucaris was sent to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth by Meletius Pegas, Patriarch of Alexandria, to lead the Orthodox opposition to the Union of Brest-Litovsk, which proposed a union of Kiev with Rome. For six years Lucaris served as professor of the Orthodox academy in Vilnius (now in Lithuania).[5] In 1601, Lucaris was installed as the Patriarch of Alexandria at the age of twenty-nine. He would continue to hold this office for twenty years, until his elevation to the See of Constantinople. During these years, Lucaris adopted a theology which was heavily influenced by Protestant Reformation doctrine. On September 6, he wrote a letter to Mark Antonio de Dominis, a former Roman Catholic Archbishop, writing: "There was a time, when we were bewitched, before we understood the very pure Word of God; and although we did not communicate with the Roman Pontiff... we abominated the doctrine of the Reformed Churches, as opposed to the Faith, not knowing in good truth what we abominated. But when it pleased the merciful God to enlighten us, and make us perceive our former error, we began to consider what our future stand should be. And as the role of a good citizen, in the case of any dissension, is to defend the juster cause, I think it all the more to be the duty of a good Christian not to dissimulate his sentiments in matters pertaining to salvation, but to embrace unreservedly that side which is most accordant to the Word of God. What did I do then? Having obtained, through the kindness of friends, some writings of Evangelical theologians, books which have not only been unseen in the East, but due to the influence of the censures of Rome, have not even been heard of, I then invoked earnestly the assistance of the Holy Ghost, and for three years compared the doctrines of the Greek and Latin Churches with that of the Reformed... Leaving the Fathers I took for my only guide the Scriptures and the Analogy of Faith. At length, having been convinced, through the grace of God, that the cause of the Reformers was more correct and more in accord with the doctrine of Christ, I embraced it."[7] Due to Turkish oppression combined with the proselytization of the Orthodox faithful by Jesuit missionaries, there was a shortage of schools which taught the Orthodox Faith and the Greek language. Roman Catholic schools were set up and Catholic churches were built next to Orthodox ones, and since Orthodox priests were in short supply something had to be done. His first act was to found a theological seminary in Mount Athos, the Athoniada school. He sponsored Maximos of Gallipoli to produce the first translation of the New Testament in Modern Greek. Calvinism [ edit ] Cyril's aim was to reform the Orthodox Church along Calvinistic lines, and to this end he sent many young Greek theologians to the universities of Switzerland, the northern Netherlands and England. In 1629 he published his famous Confessio (Calvinistic doctrine), but as far as possible accommodated to the language and creeds of the Orthodox Church. It appeared the same year in two Latin editions, four French, one German and one English, and in the Eastern Church it started a controversy which brought critics at several synods, in 1638 at Constantinople, in 1642 at the Synod of Jassy, and culminated in 1672 with the convocation by Dositheos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, of the Synod of Jerusalem, by which the Calvinistic doctrines were condemned.[5] Cyril was also particularly well disposed towards the Church of England, and corresponded with the Archbishops of Canterbury. It was in his time that Metrophanes Kritopoulos — later to become Patriarch of Alexandria (1636–39) — was sent to England to study. Both Lucaris and Kritopoulos were lovers of books and manuscripts, and many of the items in the collections of books and these two Patriarchs acquired manuscripts that today adorn the Patriarchal Library. In 1629 in Geneva the Eastern Confession of the Christian faith was published in Latin, containing the Calvinist doctrine. In 1633 it was published in Greek. The Council of Constantinople in 1638 anathematized both Cyril and the Eastern Confession of the Christian faith, but the Council of Jerusalem in 1672, specially engaged in the case of Cyril, completely acquitted him, testified that the Council of Constantinople cursed Cyril not because they thought he was the author of the confession, but for the fact that Cyril hadn’t written a rebuttal to this essay attributed to him. However, Western scholars continue to insist on the Calvinism of Cyril, referring not only to a confession, but also in his extensive correspondence with Protestant scholars (especially the letters of 1618–20 to the Dutchman's Velgelmu[who?]). The Orthodox historian Bishop Arseny (Bryantsev) challenged the authenticity of the correspondence and, incidentally, points to the 50 letters of Cyril of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich and Moscow Patriarch Philaret, stored in a Moscow archive of the main Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the evidence of Cyril's commitment to Orthodoxy, as well as in his 1622 letter in which he speaks of Protestantism as a blasphemous doctrine.[9] Politics and death [ edit ] Lucaris was several times temporarily deposed and banished at the instigation of both his Orthodox opponents and the Catholic French and Austrian ambassadors,[5] while he was supported by the Protestant Dutch and English ambassadors to the Ottoman capital. Finally, when the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV was about to set out for the Persian War, the Patriarch was accused of a design to stir up the Cossacks, and to avoid trouble during his absence the Sultan had him strangled[10] by the Janissaries on 27 June 1638 aboard a ship in the Bosporus.[5] His body was thrown into the sea, but it was recovered and buried at a distance from the capital by his friends, and only brought back to Constantinople after many years.[5] Lucaris was honoured as a saint and martyr shortly after his death, and Saint Eugenios of Aitolia compiled an akolouthia (service) to celebrate his memory. According to a 1659 letter to Thomas Greaves from Edward Pococke (who, on his book-hunting travels for archbishop William Laud, had met Lucaris) many of the choicest manuscripts from Lucaris' library were saved by the Dutch ambassador who sent them by ship to Holland. Unfortunately, although the ship arrived safely, it sank the next day in a violent storm along with its cargo.[11] Legacy [ edit ] Lucaris' position in Eastern Orthodoxy continues to be a matter of debate in the church. Some Orthodox accept the view of most secular historians that he was an advocate of Calvinism. Others say his personal position was distorted by his enemies, and that he remained loyal to Orthodox teachings. References [ edit ] General [ edit ] "Kyrillos III Lucaris (1601–1620)". Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and All Africa . Specific [ edit ] |
2K Shares Share Share Dear Dr. Wible, I want to fill you in on what really goes on behind the scenes at my medical school and maybe you can help inform other students about what happens here before they make a huge mistake. If students slip through the cracks of a U.S. medical school, then international med schools in the Caribbean may be the next choice. Some have better residency match rates than others so beware. Mind you, your choice of residency is skewed a bit coming down here, but again there are ways to work your way through internal medicine and find a fellowship of your choice, it is just a tougher and longer road. My school allows 1000 students a year in on average at the start of each August class. They let in about 700 for the January starting class which are on different schedules and have a smaller lecture hall to accommodate a smaller class. My starting class began with 1100 students, we are down to 650, meaning 59 percent of my class that I started the first day here with are still here to finish off our second year. The class of 700, starting in January, finished with around 450, meaning about 64 percent of their class made it from day on to the last day of year two. U.S. med schools have about a 1-2 percent attrition rate, we have, on average, a 40% attrition rate. The problem I have with this is that our school allows students to take on 40K per semester of debt just to dismiss them after four or five semesters if they fall below an overall GPA below a 75% or having a final grade of below 70% in any one class. If a student does fall below either mark students may or may not be allowed to decel, which means repeating the failed class; however, this looks bad on a residency app, and if one fails again they are almost certainly dismissed (rare exceptions). So, why are so many students failing or dropping out? 1. Students are literally mashed into a lecture hall which seats 900 and there are over 1000 students that must click in for mandatory lecture which is 80% of all lectures. If one falls below 80% attendance, they are automatically failed in the course. The stress of clicking in, finding a seat and waiting in lines on a campus that can’t accommodate this many people is a reason for the students who drop out in the first few weeks, which my school has statistics on. And they know this will happen after years of practicing the purposeful overcrowding. This is a business for profit medical school, and profit comes before the well-being of any student. 2. The mandatory lectures are nearly pathetic. There are usually so many mistakes made by the inexperienced professors, and the lecture becomes confusing and muddled. Students are used to having brilliant or at least decent professors. When they see the quality of tutelage and mix that with the stress and workload, the second round of students drop out by midterms. 3. There are not enough dorms on campus to house this many students. Our school placed a random selection of students in a motel five miles from campus. There were no laundry services, no ovens and a shared floor bathroom. Some were disappointed about only having a hotplate and microwave to cook with. This added with the intense workload and adaptation into the pace of medical school is the third round of students to drop out. After about a month, the class will be down to 900 or so. These are the students who started something and are going to finish, even if it means living in a box. With 900 students how did we get down to 650? They turn the heat up in term two, three or four and have a system of questions and statistics for each question they put on their tests so that they fall within the number of students needed to remain to hit their margins. If they need to cut down class size numbers, the heads of the departments are told to use a more difficult test bank by the dean. Mind you, I’m very close with the head of several departments, and we have discussed this for hours, and our disapproval of the methods they use to keep within their budget. We only have 600 positions open for clinical rotations, so 50 more students will have to go this term to make the numbers right. The school has to have this 40% attrition rate to fund the paid positions for our clinical rotations in the U.S. 4. International Medical Graduates (IMGs) have to score an average of 10 points higher on the step than a U.S. med grad for an equal position in the U.S. residency match. The average U.S. step score is 224. We have to get a 230 usually just to get looked at. Another fact they purposely kept from us until our term four. Why can’t anybody find the true numbers of this school online? They do not post them. If they did, they wouldn’t have the demand they do now. Because if we were given all of the facts, some us would have chosen a field within health care that doesn’t require this amount of chance, debt, stress and moral compromise. 5. Students who cannot self-study and teach themselves the material fail. Students at my school must teach themselves what they need to know. We are given a vague outline and need to get through the tests and STEP with high scores. We actively search for resources to help fill in the gaps our school leaves. About 30% of the class has headphones on during lecture listening to an outside source and just click in for the attendance question. 6. Emotional distress/burnout/sickness. This is the area that caught me off guard. I had a medical condition that required hospitalization. The staff is disconnected and said either repeat the term after you seek medical attention or just quit. My advisor told me to, “Just quit, it isn’t for everybody. And it only gets harder.” (Thank God. I didn’t listen to her.) I was in shock and started crying like I never had before. All of that work for someone to tell you to “just quit.” I went into a depression and felt numb. I luckily met you, Dr. Wible, and found out there were options for these feelings and that I, was not alone in this process, and that med school can be hard. The others that leave really do just get sick of the abuse and the stress and just zone out. The toughest part about them leaving after a few terms is that the debt has mounted and they have to start repaying their loans six months after they quit. It is kind of a vicious circle. In my opinion, I wouldn’t “recommend” my school to any of my friends or family. I’m against what they stand for and do not believe in my school. They throw us all against the wall and whoever sticks gets to stay, whoever falls they leave behind. This is for money, and I don’t believe it is good for humans to go through this type of abuse while in training to help others. The negative attitude predominates on campus, so I chose to live off campus with success driven students to escape it. So why come here? TO BECOME A FREAKIN’ DOCTOR, THAT IS WHY! I remember studying homeless in the park for the MCAT with a head flashlight on. Now that I’m in my last semester, it seems all worth it. Every bit of it. There are waterfalls, beaches all over, fruit stands, rum shops, paddle boarding, night clubs, beautiful views at the campus, good people and lots of fun to keep you sane while you’re putting in what is most likely the toughest two years of life. It is stressful but it is ALL ABOUT WHAT YOU PUT INTO IT! If you want a 250 STEP 1 score, you work for it. If you want to be a surgeon you work for it, if you want to serve the underserved, you guessed it, YOU WORK FOR IT! I worked my tail off to get to this point, and I feel accomplished now. I feel like I can do the most good from this position. I could be a nurse, PA, NP, EMT or any other health care provider, but I want to make some changes in this world and this puts you in the driver seat to do so. My school is now helping out this term, and they want to see the students who made it through their process succeed. They are smiling now, and so are most students. It is sad to see friends that didn’t make it. But most of the ones that I know failed because they held onto a negative attitude, expected others to do the work for them, got into substance abuse and nightlife or simply just didn’t want it bad enough to sacrifice everything for this dream. The reason I don’t “recommend” it is because I believe students, friends, family should explore and exhaust every option before coming here. I rushed into it, wanted to get started ASAP and paid the price. But if this were my last option to becoming a physician, I would still probably do it out of determination. So it can be done, there WILL be hardships, difficulties, confusion, fear and stress. But if you work as hard as you can and make it through the process. If students do choose this route, they must prepare an emotional support team, an exercise plan for keeping body and mind healthy and perhaps a mentor to help get adapted to the school. Please publish my letter if you feel it will help others. And keep doing everything you do for medical students. Please. We need you. Sincerely, David Pamela Wible pioneered the community-designed ideal medical clinic and blogs at Ideal Medical Care. She is the author of Physician Suicide Letters — Answered and Pet Goats and Pap Smears. Watch her TEDx talk, How to Get Naked with Your Doctor. She hosts the physician retreat, Live Your Dream, to help her colleagues heal from grief and reclaim their lives and careers. Image credit: Shutterstock.com |
caption Amy Schumer. source Getty About 200 people walked out of Amy Schumer’s stand-up comedy show at the Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida, after she mocked Donald Trump in her act, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Schumer called Trump an “orange, sexual-assaulting, fake college-starting monster” about halfway through her Sunday night show, and loud boos reportedly emanated from a “a vocal, but small minority” of the arena’s crowd (the arena holds about 20,000). According to the Tampa Bay Times, Schumer said that she doesn’t understand how people can support the Republican nominee, and she even invited one Trump supporter onstage: “At one point she asked for a Trump supporter – preferably one with sleeves, she told security personnel – to join her up onstage to explain their enthusiasm for Trump. One fellow did, but he said he voted for Trump mainly because he doesn’t trust Clinton. When some audience members booed, the actor and comedian invited them to leave and also asked security to remove anyone booing.” Several fans took to Twitter after the show to protest Schumer’s open political stance, as the Daily Intelligencer points out. Hey @amyschumer leave the political stuff out of your comedy shows. We came to laugh not talk politics. We can turn On CNN and NBC for that???? — Luisa Metallo (@LuiGucci) October 17, 2016 the people who left didn’t leave because we don’t share her political views. I went to hear jokes. #trump — waz (@waz1921) October 17, 2016 Keep politics to yourself. Tampa show tonight disappointment. Criticize Trump with your vulgarity. Hypocrite. — Lesa Martino (@LesaLesa1234) October 17, 2016 Schumer endorsed Hillary Clinton in March. On Sunday, Clinton’s Florida campaign Twitter account tweeted a picture of Schumer registering voters in Florida. Letting voters lean on her while they update their voter registration! #ImWithHer pic.twitter.com/WifLjlbKd7 — Hillary for Florida (@HillaryforFL) October 16, 2016 Watch footage of Schumer’s Trump routine below: |
Surviving the World A Photocomic Education by Dante Shepherd Lesson #754 - Doing The Right Thing There have been a number of times when I've failed to do so. I'm not the perfect professor for this lesson. But there are plenty of times in our lives when all it would take is to just use one of three things above. Yesterday was one of those days when a bunch of people could have put aside politics to do the right thing. Instead, people on both sides didn't, and now people on both sides look pretty cowardly. Some things aren't about what other people believe or how many believe it. Some things are just about what's right. And you didn't see that yesterday. Don't be afraid to step up to the plate. |
Big changes are coming to Memorial Drive, near the Edmonton Trail and 4th Street N.E. intersections, including a lowered speed limit and a new reversible left turn lane. “We believe this is an enhancement for all users: pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists,” said Pat Grisak, a leader with the city’s traffic division. The busy road, which often backs up with people driving into downtown during the morning rush hour, will soon have a new reversible left turn lane that will allow for dual left turns from Memorial Drive N.E. onto Edmonton Trail N.E. The city expects the new lane will result in a 70 per cent reduction to delays for motorists driving into the downtown core. The changes also include a reduction in the speed limit on Memorial Drive from east of Edmonton Trail to the Centre Street Bridge from 70 km/h to 50 km/h, a move Coun. Sean Chu, who is serving as deputy mayor, questioned. “There’s no point of dropping to 50. That’s irritating to commuters,” he said. Changes for pedestrians and cyclists include pathway improvements, a countdown timer and audible signal at the crosswalk and a dedicated signal for cyclists to cross Memorial Drive to and from the new Edmonton Trail cycle track. Grisak said the area is heavily used and it’s expected that together the changes will address “longstanding issues.” “This intersection carries large volumes of traffic with lengthy queues, long delays. We saw an opportunity to enhance it and improve it for all modes,” he said. Construction on the project began this week and is expected to continue for eight to 10 weeks. |
In just 23 days it’ll be the second Alien Day officially supported by 20th Century Fox! Last year we saw some cool releases and in about an hours’ time we’ll be learning what Fox has in store for us this year! To help get you all in the mood, Fox sent us this marketing piece to share with other fans of the Alien franchise. 20th Century Fox have also just unveiled their Alien Universe website! Included on there are some details on what we can expect on Alien Day and it looks like we’ll be seeing a Q&A with some cast members and new footage from Alien: Covenant! We’ve also got the latest issue of Dark Horse Comics’ fantastic Aliens: Defiance and the first issue of their upcoming limited run, Aliens: Dead Orbit. And we recently learnt that Audible would be publishing another Alien audio drama! Keep a close eye on Alien vs. Predator Galaxy for the latest Alien news! You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to get the latest on your social media walls. You can also join in with fellow Alien fans on our forums! |
One of the perennial problems that we come across in a variety of contexts, including CNC artwork and producing artwork for the Egg-Bot, is the difficulty of creating good-quality toolpaths– i.e., vector artwork representing halftones –when starting from image files. One of the finest solutions that we’ve ever come across is Adrian Secord’s algorithm, which uses an iterative relaxation process to optimize a weighted Voronoi diagram, producing a set of points (stipples) that can closely approach the appearance of a traditional stipple drawing. Another important technique is “TSP art,” where the image is represented by a single continuous path. You can generate a path like this by connecting all of the dots in a stipple diagram. Designing a route that visits each dot exactly once is an example of the famous Travelling Salesman Problem (or TSP). From the standpoint of toolpaths (for the Egg bot and most other CNC machines), a “TSP” path is even nicer than stipples, because little or no time is spent raising and lowering the tool. Today we’re releasing a new program, StippleGen, which can generate stipple diagrams from images, using Secord’s algorithm. StippleGen saves its files as editable, Eggbot-ready Inkscape SVG files, which can in turn be opened by other vector graphics programs, or re-saved as PDF files for use in other contexts. It can also generate a TSP path from the stippled image, and either save that path as an SVG file or simply use that path as the order of plotting for the stipple diagram. StippleGen is free and open source software, written in the Processing development environment. It comes ready to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it is available for download now. Other programs It is worth pointing out, right up front, that our software does not fill a vacuum. StippleGen is not the first, fastest, or most accurate software yet developed to produce stipples or TSP paths. Rather, it is designed to be easy to install, easy to use, and easy to modify. It is capable of producing excellent quality output with up to 10,000 points, when speed is not a primary concern. While Adrian Secord’s own stippling software is no longer available for download, there are a few other codebases worth of note. In particular, the weighted voronoi stippler at saliences.com has a Windows executable, and runs as a command-line utility. And there are also a number of fast TSP solvers, including Concorde, which is available with a GUI for Windows. StippleGen Controls When you first open up StippleGen, you will be presented with this window, which shows the drawing in progress (in the top part) and a set of controls below that. Rather than present you with a blank screen, StippleGen automatically loads a demo image upon launch, and begins calculating. This way, you can try out the program, even if you don’t have a good image of your own to start with. And, you can stop it at any time by loading a new image. Here is what the control section looks like. Under the “MASTER” heading, you can press the “Load image file” button to load a new PNG, JPG, or (non-animated) GIF file. There are also buttons for saving either the stipples or the path between them as an SVG file, and a button to quit the program. Under next heading are options to “Pause” and “Reset.” When you select “Pause,” the program switches from the “running” mode where it optimizes the stipple location, to the “paused” mode, where the stipple positions are fixed, but the program steadily tries to improve the efficiency of a TSP path between the points. “Reset” starts the stipple calculation over from scratch, starting with a new distribution of points. The bottom heading on the left is the Stipple Count. Changing the value on this slider allows you to set the number of stipples that are displayed. Changing this number will reset the calculation, as a full new set of stipples will be generated. It can take a verylong time to calculate the stipple placement when the number of stipples is large, so increase this number only with care, and if you have patience. The Display Options can be changed at any time, but only take effect when the next generation of stipples is displayed. Among these options are the minimum dot size (which you may want to decrease if you go to larger numbers of stipples) and the range in size. If the range is set to zero, then all stipple dots will be drawn with the same diameter. There is also a “white cutoff” that can be used to eliminate points in truly white areas of the initial image. The display options also include the option to view the target image in the background, or to display the network of Voronoi cells as it is optimized. Finally, you can choose to hide (or by default, show) the TSP path while it is being optimized. Using StippleGen When you load a new image, the first pass of calculation begins as a crude set of points generated by rejection sampling. The number of points is controlled by the “Stipple Count” slider. Here, we’re starting with the default, 2000 stipples, and variable dot size. After a few generations, the stipple image begins to take shape. Here, we’ve turned on the Voronoi cell display, so that you can see what that looks like. Once you are satisfied with the stipples, you can hit the “Pause” button to begin calculating the plot order, shown by the blue line here. Once that’s satisfactory, you can save the stipples to an SVG file. Here’s another direction to go: 10,000 stipples, instead of 2000. It takes much longer to calculate, but… sometimes, it’s worth it. Here is another “demo file”– a corn plant, available for download from this page. This shows 10,000 stipples, with variable stipple size. For comparison, this is what the same 10,000 stipples look like, but with fixed size. We’ve also turned on the white cutoff, so that there’s less detail away from the main plant. When we first click the “Pause” button after letting our stipples settle, we’re presented with this mess: the path between the stipples. The blue line represents the path that a plotter would take naturally between the points. As you can imagine, nearly all of the time drawing would actually be spent moving between points. By letting this run for just a few moments, StippleGen creates a “nearest neighbor” path– a first guess at a decent solution to our travelling salesman problem. We’ve momentarily turned down the dot size so that you can see it a little better. As you can see, there is a lot less blue on the screen here– this would plot muchfaster. One other thing to notice is that while the rare “background” dots don’t make much of a difference to the overall picture when looking at stipples, the paths between those dots at the edges are actually pretty distracting. We can invoke the “white cutoff” slider one more time to fix that, though: Here now, we have a pretty good candidate file, reasonably well optimized. We have now adjusted the dot sizes (both minimum and range) so that the stipples themselves are pleasing. We’ve also allowed enough time for the path to look okay for the TSP file. There area couple of stray stragglers– longer than necessary path segments that might correct themselves given time. But for the most part, it’s all good enough. At this point, we can save SVG files– one of each, as a stipple file, and one as a TSP path. Opening up the two SVG files in Inkscape, we can see the stipple file (top) and TSP file (bottom). The “stipple” file is made up of many (10,000 to be specific) unfilled circles, grouped together for efficient handling in Inkscape. They’re ready to be plotted to an Eggbot or to be exported (for example) to a toolpath generator. Those circle sizes could also control hole depth with a cone-shaped wood-carving too, for example. The TSP file is a single, continuous path, consisting of 10,000 nodes. We had just a couple of straggler lines in our final file (top), so we used the path tools in Inkscape to remove the offending segments (below). Now, to test our results on some hardware. This file plots in just a couple of minutes on the Eggbot. It’s far from a “traditional” halftone, but it’s still a pretty remarkable result. Finally, Grace Kelly graces an egg. This image is rendered with only 2000 stipples. Properly tuned for making dots rapidly, the Eggbot can plot about four stipples per second, so this kind of a plot can take as little as ten minutes, and can actually produce a remarkable likeness of a photo onto an egg. Credits and sources The StippleGen source code is available as part of the StippleGen .zip file. To run the code from source, you’ll need to download Processing, and install the toxiclibs library and the ControlP5 library. Much of the “heavy lifting” of our code is really done by the toxiclibs library. This includes the Voronoi cell calculation code, the polygon clipping code, and the code to determine whether or not a given point is within a given polygon. We were able to replace a number of complicated functions that we had written with simple library calls, without loss in performance. This is superbly useful software. Our code also uses the excellent ControlP5 library for the GUI elements. Thanks also to Dan Newman for helping calling attention to TSP and stipple art for use in the context of Eggbot, and particularly for documenting it on our wiki. Additional inspiration: • Stipple Cam from Jim Bumgardner. Our first stipple drawing code in Processing was based on this project. • MeshLibDemo.pde A demo of Lee Byron’s Mesh library, by Marius Watz. UPDATE: StippleGen 2 has been released, with new features and documentation. Read all about it here! |
A controversial new intelligence law went into effect on Wednesday aimed at allowing the Chinese government to even further crack down on foreign spies by monitoring suspects, searching homes, seizing property and mobilizing spies of their own, providing legal ground for domestic intelligence agencies to carry out operations both inside China and abroad. The National Intelligence Law was approved (rather quickly) at the bi-annual meeting of the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee and has now taken full effect in China. It is China’s first attempt at legislating — and providing legislative cover for — its spy agencies and operations. Passed with the intention of combating foreign espionage, the law demands that “China’s intelligence personnel should collect and process intelligence related to overseas organizations and individuals or anyone sponsored or instigated by them, as well as relevant intelligence about threats to China’s national security and interests.” While this sounds like China’s Counter-espionage Law passed back in 2014, this new law reportedly focuses less on defense and encourages direct actions against possible foreign spies. “Foreign spies are rampant in China,” anti-terrorism expert Li Wei told the Global Times. “The intelligence law, which also supports counter-espionage work, gives Chinese intelligence officials more power and ‘legal authorization’ to crack down on spies, who conduct their operations in the shadows.” Li thinks the law will make it easier for government departments to work together and target suspects more efficiently than before. “Previously, intelligence personnel needed to ask permission from authorities on a case-by-case basis as there was no law in the field,” he said. “Now they can carry out their intelligence work in accordance with the law.” The law allows the Chinese government to investigate possible cases of espionage in all areas “where China’s interests are involved,” according to Wang Qiang, a specialist on non-war military actions. Wang claims that it’s crucial for the law to extend outside of China’s borders because of “widespread terrorism.” As Reuters notes, the law passed unusually quickly. Most laws get at least two rounds of public consultation before being approved, but the National Intelligence Law received only one three-week long round. The standing committee also passed it after just two rounds of discussion, less than most laws, which are discussed for three or more rounds. While foreign espionage is cause for concern, many are worried about the law’s other implications — most of which grant the government more power to use surveillance. According to the law, obstructing espionage work can lead to up to 15 days detention, along with harsh inspections and “quarantines” for rule breakers. Additionally, if the government suspects someone of espionage, they can confiscate personal property like vehicles, cellphones and even homes, according to Reuters. However, it appears that even without this latest law, China’s counter-espionage efforts have been rather successfully recently. Last month, the New York Times published a report alleging that China had managed to cripple US spying operations in its country by killing or imprisoning 20 CIA spies earlier this decade. Additionally, China has often looked to crowdsource its counter-intelligence operations. Back in 2015, the country set up a national hotline so that citizens could easily report foreign agents. To help its people identify a foreign spy, authorities issued a handy list of suspicious traits to look out for, including: “People who regularly visit certain places to exchange good or documents.” This April, the Beijing department of China’s National Security Bureau offered rewards of up to 500,000 yuan for help in unmasking foreign spies. Most infamously, last April, Beijing’s state security launched a campaign to warn susceptible Chinese women to be wary when dating foreign men, in case they should turn out to be spies, only after China’s secrets. By Caroline Roy |
The FBI and several police departments throughout Maryland and Virginia are asking for help identifying a bank robber who’s been dubbed “The American League Bandit.” The FBI nicknamed this suspect the “American League Bandit” for his habit of wearing Orioles or Yankees hats to rob at least a dozen banks. “In some of the robberies he’s worn sunglasses or eyeglasses, but other than that there’s no other facial disguise. No mask, no gloves, nothing like that,” said FBI special agent Patrick Dugan. He has targeted 12 banks in those states in the past eight months, authorities say. In each case, he’s described by witnesses as having salt and pepper facial hair, wearing dark clothing, sunglasses, and a black baseball hat with a Baltimore Orioles or New York Yankees logo and a sticker on the brim. “I don’t know why they have not been caught yet,” Jose Passos said. “Finished shopping, walked out, and saw all the police cars there. Nobody really was saying anything about what had happened, but they were standing near the bank,” Jimmy King said. “I’m shocked to know that this guy has been robbing so many banks and was not caught yet,” one person said. He’s also described as being a large, 6-foot tall black man between the ages of 30 and 40. The FBI says the man has committed bank robberies at the following locations: • November 7, 2016: Rosedale Federal located at 6708 Belair Road in Baltimore • December 10, 2016: Columbia Bank located at 67 West Aylesbury Road in Timonium • January 26, 2017: Howard Bank located at 116 Defense Highway in Annapolis • January 28, 2017: PNC located at 7200 Cradlerock Way in Columbia • February 2, 2017: M&T Bank located at 3221 Spartan Road in Olney • February 22, 2017: Howard Bank located at 116 Defense Highway in Annapolis • March 4, 2017: SunTrust Bank located at 603 West Broad Street in Falls Church, Va. • March 24, 2017: Hamilton Bank located at 10283 York Road in Cockeysville • May 16, 2017: PNC Bank located at 2050 York Road in Timonium • June 6, 2017: Wells Fargo located at 212 Maple Ave E. in Vienna, Va. • June 15, 2017: M&T Bank located at 9720 Fairfax Blvd. in Fairfax, Va. • June 17, 2017: Wells Fargo located at 930 Bay Ridge Road in Annapolis Nine different agencies throughout Maryland and Virginia are involved in the investigation. The suspect is considered armed and dangerous. The FBI is offering a reward of up to $5,000 for information that leads to the identification, arrest, and conviction of the robber. Anyone with information is asked to contact the FBI Washington Field Office at 202-278-2000 or the FBI Baltimore Field Office at 410-265-8080. Follow @CBSBaltimore on Twitter and like WJZ-TV | CBS Baltimore on Facebook |
Close It's well known that America has an obesity problem, in part thanks to the average American loving quick and affordable (yet not very healthy) fast food. However, if the option to purchase unlimited fries being offered at one McDonald's in Missouri catches on, America's obesity problem is about to get a whole lot worse. A 6,500-square-foot "McDonald's of the Future" just opened up in St. Joseph, Mo. on Aug. 4, and so far, customers are swarming the location to see what the fuss is all about. In addition to the ability to buy an unlimited number of the fast food company's signature french fries, self-serve kiosks allow customers to fully customize their orders. Employees will then bring meals to customers at their table. More than 100 employees have been hired to staff the restaurant. The restaurant also includes a distinctly modern decor, completely furnished with couches, flowers and tabletop video games. It looks high-class in a way that McDonald's has never looked before. Did we mention it's gigantic? A massive playground for kids and a private party room are also part of the restaurant. This fancy new McDonald's will serve as a way for the company to test out "future innovations" in the coming years, the first of which appears to be an option for unlimited fries. No word yet on what other "innovations" the fast food chain has in store, but breakfast-all-day and self-serve kiosks are just a few of innovations to have arrived at McDonald's locations nationwide in recent years. So, what are the chances that unlimited fries will roll out to all McDonald's locations? Hard to say, though it likely will depend, at least in part, on how popular the promotion is at the St. Joseph restaurant location. If unlimited fries proves to be a big seller and attracts more customers to come to the restaurant (who, in turn, spend more money), it wouldn't be surprising if more locations across the country started offering something similar. The chances of each and every restaurant in the country having the ability to sell unlimited fries, however, doesn't seem likely. It would probably also lead to early heart attacks for more than a few Americans. Like mentioned above, America's obesity problem is a serious one, and it's not just because of eating unhealthy food. Larger portions and super-sized combos are also a major contributor to America's weight problem, and there's nothing more super-sized than never-ending buckets of McDonald's french fries. Photo: EvelynGiggles | Flickr ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. |
Posted by Jon Eden , September 16, 2014 Email John Eden On Twitter: @OttawaFury Fury's offense says “Howdy!” to the Rowdies in Tampa Bay The Ours is the Fury gang: Jon (@fussball_eh), Ryan (@coxon), Kendra (@crookedbeat) and Blogsmith (@BlogFuryFC) are back to give to give you all you need to know about the week that was for the Ottawa Fury FC. This week we review the Fury’s 0:2 away win in Tampa, answer some listener questions, talk about the Canadian Men's National Team win over Jamaica, preview the upcoming match away to Atlanta and we sit down with Ottawa Fury assistant coach Martin Nash (@martin7nash) to talk about the Fury and his time so far in Ottawa, plus much more you’ll want to listen to. Audio: Open Player in a New Window | Subscribe | iTunes | MP3 |
Not so long ago, a typical Buick buyer was the sort of oldster likely to bend your ear about what it was like to grow up in the Golden Age of Radio. Today, Buick is successfully targeting a generation whose members don’t remember life before the internet. In the seven years leading into 2013—a short time in the car industry, just a single product cycle—the Buick customer’s average age dropped from 64 to 59. But this is not a complete reversal of fortune; Buick still sells plenty of plush sedans to the “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” crowd even as it pushes potato-shaped crossovers on those who believe that “information wants to be free.” Which is why the completely redesigned Buick LaCrosse is actually two very different cars at once. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below The Buick of Yesterday The first is the standard LaCrosse, a large, five-passenger sedan with an ample back seat. A base model starts at just $32,990; a throwback to the black-and-white era, the LaCrosse is available only in those two non-colors without paying an upcharge and is mostly devoid of premium content or options. Kudos to the marketing team for calling out its “seatback map pockets” in the online configurator, which has us wondering: Do those who still use paper maps also use online configurators? An extra $4000 for Preferred trim nets you, ahem, a cargo net, a power-adjustable steering column, satellite radio, and shinier wheels but not the ability to have your LaCrosse with even the most remedial luxury amenities. Leather upholstery and heated seats are restricted to the next-higher trim level, the $39,590 Essence, as are the optional sunroof and the blind-spot and rear cross-traffic alerts. More advanced sensor-based safety equipment such as adaptive cruise control and automated braking are a $1690 option available only on the top Premium trim at $41,990. If you want the nice Buick, you’re not going to get it for the nice price. The Buick of Tomorrow But even a LaCrosse Premium needs some help to become that second, better LaCrosse that we prefer. This comes by fitting a $1625 package that includes 20-inch wheels and tires, an adaptive suspension, and GM’s HiPer Strut front suspension. (This package is also available on the Essence model.) Order the 20s and you turn the geriatric Buick into the LaCrosse of the future, a smooth-riding, nice-handling machine that isn’t afraid of twisty roads. If you prefer Jimmy Fallon to Johnny Carson, this is the LaCrosse for you. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below We cannot overstate the improvement in handling of the car with the larger wheels and revised suspension. The handling of the Buick that floats along on 235/50R-18 tires might be best described as effortless. Its steering is extremely light, which makes the car feel imprecise, and the softness of the suspension doesn’t help. Buick uses a multilink rear suspension in all LaCrosse models and the structure feels stiff, but the standard tuning allows lots of up-and-down body motion. The HiPer Strut suspension with 20-inch wheels shod with 245/40R-20 tires creates a wholly different experience, especially when the driver pushes the Sport button on the dash, firming up the suspension and switching to a tauter steering program. Body control improved enough that we were able to remove the Sea-Bands that Buick had so generously provided for our drive. Buick also offers an all-wheel-drive model, but only with Premium trim at a substantial $2200 price increase. We did not have the opportunity to drive that car, although we’re anxious to experience the changes to the LaCrosse’s on-road behavior brought on by its torque-vectoring rear axle that is similar to the setup used in the Cadillac XT5 crossover. Single Six All LaCrosse variants are powered by the same 3.6-liter V-6 making 310 horsepower and 282 lb-ft of torque. The six’s output is well matched to the 3700-pound car, with the eight-speed automatic transaxle going about its business almost imperceptibly. Sometimes too much so, as there is no separate shift programming when in Sport mode, although changing gears via the standard steering-wheel-mounted paddles somewhat ameliorates this need. The V-6 design features direct injection, auto stop/start, and active fuel management, which lets the engine switch seamlessly into four-cylinder mode to save fuel. These improvements and a claimed 300-pound weight reduction from last year’s LaCrosse yield a 3-mpg improvement in the EPA combined estimate, which is now 25 mpg. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Advertisement - Continue Reading Below The powertrain also features a new shifter, shared with the XT5 and promised to soon proliferate throughout the General Motors portfolio. Like other carmakers, GM has reinvented the decades-old PRNDL pattern because electronics that banish the physical linkage between the shifter and the transmission allow it to do so. Putting the LaCrosse into drive requires the lever to be pulled back with an accompanying side-button press, while reverse involves a push up through neutral and to the left. Park has its own button. Adopting such a design is a curious choice, one likely to challenge old and young alike and especially those driving the vehicle for the first time. See Chrysler’s woes with a similar shifter design—and let the confusion and low-speed crashes commence. Inside and Out We have no complaints, however, with Buick adopting the de facto standard for infotainment; Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are standard equipment. An 8.0-inch frameless touchscreen dominates the dashboard and runs the smartphone system alongside a version of GM’s modern corporate infotainment software. This is a marked improvement over the older system with seas of inscrutable buttons and tiny, low-resolution screens that still plagues some Buicks. The rest of the interior, too, is hugely improved from the last-generation LaCrosse, with much nicer materials including more soft-touch surfaces and real wood on pricier models. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below It’s the outside of the car, however, that is likely to capture the most attention. With a 2.7-inch wheelbase stretch and a 1.6-inch lower roofline, the LaCrosse looks longer and lower even as it maintains its overall length, 197.5 inches. It’s a good-looking car—not great, but undeniably more elegant than its archrival Lexus ES, scarred as that car is with its aggressive and, some might say, inappropriate grille. The LaCrosse, by contrast, is nothing if not fancy. Chrome is served up in abundance, including a horizontal wing on its own new grille, flanking the Buick tri-shield badge. In a nod to Buick’s heritage, the red, white, and blue colors have been restored to the traditional badge. It’s a perfect illustration of the brand’s refusal to abandon its longtime customers while it courts their children and grandchildren with credible products—like this much-improved LaCrosse. |
Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, center, speaks to the press in this Sept. 27 photo.(Photo by/J. Scott Applewhite/AP) Two issues led to the shutdown. One was defunding or delaying Obamacare. The other, as Sen. Ted Cruz put it, was "making D.C. listen." What's been remarkable -- and largely unnoticed -- is that Republicans have abandoned both those demands. But that hasn't led them to reopen the government -- much less swear off a debt-ceiling crisis. So the hostage remains even as the GOP rethinks and rewrites its ransom note. "It is time, quite simply, to make D.C. listen," Cruz said during his 21-hour filibuster. But Cruz isn't listening to America. Fox News's Megyn Kelly confronted him about this on Monday night: KELLY:: There is a poll that's just out tonight from Politico Senator show that your numbers with the American people aren't that great. I will show you. This has been released at 9:00 p.m. Eastern. Favorability are rating 26 percent, 45 percent have an unfavorable opinion of you, 29 percent say they aren't sure. So, the question is whether you are costing yourself and the GOP. CRUZ: Well, I haven't seen the particular poll you are referencing. But I can tell you, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. "At the end of the day, it doesn't matter.' Does that sound like someone who's listening to America? I asked Ted Cruz's office about this on Tuesday. They pointed out that Politico's poll is only of Virginia voters, which is fair enough. But other polls have shown overwhelming national majorities opposed to Cruz's campaign to shutdown the government in order to defund or delay Obamacare. His office says the shutdown is the Democrats' fault because they won't compromise on Obamacare. Cruz isn't listening. He's messaging. The Republican Party is little better. For all the talk over how unpopular Obamacare is, the congressional GOP, at this point, is much less popular than Obamacare, with a 24 percent approval rating and a startling 70 percent disapproval rating. According to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, that's gotten worse since the shutdown. But they haven't reopened the government. So much for following the will of the people. What's odder about the shutdown, though, is that Republicans have also abandoned their core policy demand. They've largely stopped talking about Obamacare. They're begging simply for negotiations. Their latest plan, in fact, is for another budget commission: The GOP’s play, announced by Cantor at the meeting, is to push for a bicameral commission that brought comparisons to the “supercommittee” from the 2011 Budget Control Act. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Paul Ryan articulates the emerging strategy. "To break the deadlock, both sides should agree to common-sense reforms of the country's entitlement programs and tax code," he writes. The word "Obamacare" never appears in the piece. Nor does any other reference to the president's health-care law. The Republican Party initially justified this shutdown and these tactics to itself by arguing that it was channeling the will of the people and justified by the dangers of Obamacare. But they've lost pubic opinion and realized Obamacare isn't up for negotiation. But the loss of their original rationale for the shutdown hasn't led them to reopen the government. So now, as Rep. Martin Stutzman truthfully but unfortunately put it, they're just trying “to get something out of this." They don't know what they want except for something that lets them argue they didn't lose. Wonkbook's Number of the Day: 8. That's how many lawmakers were arrested in a pro-immigration protest yesterday. Wonkbook's Graph of the Day: The terrifying price movements in the market for Treasury bills. Wonkbook's Quotes of the Day: "These are the kinds of people who get eaten by bears," said one senior administration official back in 2011 of House Republicans who were denying the risks of the debt ceiling. One more: “If anybody tells you it’s clear to anybody let me know,” said Rep. Pete Sessions of how to avoid default and end the shutdown. “I’ll call them collect.” Wonkblog's Daily Default Dashboard: Is looking slightly worse than yesterday. Wonkbook's Top 5 Stories: 1) a political crisis for now, but a financial crisis, eventually; 2) it's Yellen; 3) where the exchanges are working; 4) 8 lawmakers arrested in immigration protests; and 5) exporting the oil boom. 1) Top story: Markets begin to get debt-ceiling jitters Obama renews calls on Congress to end shutdown, raise debt limit. "President Obama, declaring that he is “not budging” on his demand for a debt-limit increase without partisan strings attached, warned Tuesday that there are “no magic bullets” to avoid a devastating default if the ceiling is not raised, and he challenged House Republicans who believe otherwise to go on record by voting on the matter. If a debt-ceiling increase fails “and we do end up defaulting,” Obama said in an afternoon news conference, “I think voters should know exactly who voted not to pay our bills, so that they can be responsible for the consequences that come with it.” Shortly afterward, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) complained to reporters that Obama was demanding “unconditional surrender” by Republicans before he would talk to them. Speaking hours after he and Obama talked on the phone to reiterate their positions, Boehner said he was “disappointed that the president refuses to negotiate.” He insisted that the House will not vote to reopen the government or raise the federal debt limit without unspecified concessions by Obama to curtail federal spending." Ed O’Keefe, Paul Kane and Zachary A. Goldfarb in The Washington Post. Transcripts: President Obama’s Oct. 8 news conference on the shutdown and debt limit. And House Speaker John Boehner’s statement on the shutdown and debt limit. The Washington Post. More primary sources: Obama and Boehner spoke this morning. Their summaries of the call are…different. Ezra Klein in The Washington Post. Glenn Thrush's theory of the press-conference questions. "President Barack Obama called on 11 reporters today during his hour-long press conference today. Notably, only one represented a major network (CBS News' Mark Knoller), while many came from news outlets that often go ignored, like Huffington Post, or business-focused outlets like Bloomberg and Financial Times...@GlennThrush: If you want to know who Obama's trying to fire up, look at who he's calling on: Big biz (Bloomberg), the left (HuffPo)." Hadas Gold in Politico. As debt-limit deadline nears, investors show growing concern about a U.S. default. "Short-term borrowing by the Treasury Department became twice as expensive Tuesday as it had been the day before, one of the most significant signs of alarm in the bond markets since the financial crisis of 2008...The stock market, meanwhile, continued the steady slide that began in mid-September, when Boehner (R-Ohio) embraced a right-wing strategy for using the budget battles to try to dismantle Obama’s signature health-care initiative. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 20.67 points to 1,655.45 on Tuesday." Lori Montgomery and Zachary A. Goldfarb in The Washington Post. @mattyglesias: Best analogy for the debt ceiling—it’s as if your country needs to sell more bonds to avoid financial catastrophe, but you won’t let it. What’s happening in the Treasury bill market today should terrify you. "[I]n the less widely followed -- but in many ways more important -- market for Treasury bills, things are starting to get scary...[T]he possibility that the Treasury might have trouble paying or might not be able to pay its bills over the next few weeks has grown -- and the interest rate has skyrocketed. It was at 0.16 percent at Monday's close. On Tuesday the rate so far has been almost double that, as high as 0.297 percent." Neil Irwin in The Washington Post. ...Money funds avoid some U.S. debt on fear of repayment delays. "The $2.66 trillion money market industry is preparing for the worst as lawmakers in Washington battle over the U.S. debt ceiling. The funds, including those run by PIMCO, Federated Investors Inc and the largest money fund sponsor - Fidelity Investments - are shying away from government debt that matures in the next few months and keeping more cash on hand to help them withstand any delays in the U.S. paying its creditors." Tim McLaughlin and Ross Kerber in Reuters. Interview: Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol on how business doesn't control Republicans. Ezra Klein in The Washington Post. Many Republicans think that default wouldn't be a disaster. "As President Obama steps up his declarations about the dire consequences of not raising the debt limit, increasing numbers of Congressional Republicans are disputing that forecast, as well as the timing of when the Treasury might run out of money and the implications of a default, further complicating the negotiating situation for both Mr. Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner, who must find a way out of the impasse. Both men were counting on the prospect of a global economic meltdown to help pull restive Republicans into line. On Wall Street, among business leaders and in a vast majority of university economics departments, the threat of significant instability resulting from a debt default is not in question. But a lot of Republicans simply do not believe it. A surprisingly broad section of the Republican Party is convinced that a threat once taken as economic fact may not exist — or at least may not be so serious." Jonathan Weisman in The New York Times. List: Here are those Republicans. Brad Plumer in The Washington Post. ...They should call those worrywarts at the FDIC. "The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. cautioned Tuesday that banks need to be on guard for risks tied to the current fiscal standoff, saying a slowdown in the U.S. economy or an increase in borrowing rates could constrain liquidity or lead to an increase in bank failures." Michael R. Crittenden and Ryan Tracy in The Wall Street Journal. @LorcanRK: So, Premium Bonds > 14th amendment > Coin. Not sure anymore where "having a vote and raising the debt ceiling" fits into that function. ...And should talk to every finance minister of every other country. "Top U.S. officials are expected to get an earful this week at a gathering of foreign finance ministers and central bankers, with global concern spreading that political gridlock in Washington would result in the U.S. not making good on its financial obligations. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank will host top economic officials from around the world in Washington beginning Thursday for several days of talks, and the U.S. situation will be a primary focus. IMF leaders have already warned that a U.S. failure to pay its bills after not raising the debt ceiling would be "catastrophic."...Leaders from Japan, China, Switzerland and Singapore in recent days have called on Washington to resolve its impasse and raise the borrowing limit. Foreign governments hold close to $6 trillion in U.S. government debt." Damian Paletta and Ian Talley in The Wall Street Journal. @morningmoneyben: What if the debt ceiling is a false flag? ...And even if Treasury were to prioritize, we'd still have one awful recession on our hands. "Economists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., IHS Inc. and BNP Paribas SA said they expect the Treasury to husband the tax money it collects to make sure it can meet interest and principal payments on the nation’s debt. Other obligations, from salaries of government workers to payments to defense contractors, would face the ax. The result: $175 billion less in government spending during November alone, said Goldman’s Alec Phillips in Washington." Rich Miller and Shobhana Chandra in Bloomberg. But mainly, Republicans just have no idea where they're going with this. "A reality is beginning to dawn on — and eat away at — many House Republicans: They aren’t at all sure of their party's strategy to re-open government and lift the debt ceiling. After forcing leadership to pick a fight it didn’t want to pick, sitting through hours of meetings with lots of internal hand-wringing and failing to force Democrats to negotiate, the path to avoid a prolonged government shutdown and the first debt default in American history is completely uncertain...Boehner, for the time being, is playing it cool. He has told Republicans in closed sessions and in conversations on the House floor that he has “something up his sleeve.”" Jake Sherman in Politico. @davidfrum: DC life: My 11 YO came downstairs in mid dinner party to announce she couldn't sleep because she was scared about the debt ceiling Congress is trying to reopen the federal government agency by agency. "[It] is [an] odd, gaptoothed version of the U.S. government that the House GOP has sketched out over the past eight days in a series of spending bills that would reopen departments and agencie sone piece at a time. The House has passed 11 bills, each funding just one agency or a handful of them. Eight more are in the works...But, in the process, House Republicans have revealed something about themselves: The party of small government is struggling — mightily — to decide how much government it actually wants." David A. Fahrenthold and Ed O'Keefe in The Washington Post. @chrislhayes: I think odds of some kind of one month (or shorter) CR/Debt Ceiling increase are approaching 100%. What's next in the shutdown showdown? "With barely a week until the next big deadline — when the federal government runs the risk of not being able to meet its debt obligations — Congress appears to be preparing for several more days of partisan posturing accompanied by no signs of negotiations to solve the ongoing fiscal crises...The chamber will come into session about 10 a.m. Most committee hearings have been postponed because the shutdown has left little administrative staff in place to conduct the hearings. By early afternoon, the House will move into a full legislative session to consider its next set of mini-spending bills...In his chamber, rather than considering new funding bills to open the government, Reid is beginning to put together legislation that would allow the Treasury greater borrowing authority to avoid breaching the so-called debt ceiling." Paul Kane in The Washington Post. Explainer: A very simple timeline for the debt-ceiling crisis. Brad Plumer in The Washington Post. If Senate Republicans filibuster the debt-ceiling hike, that might force liberals to go nuclear. "Liberals said Tuesday that there may be no other way out of a debt ceiling crisis than to invoke — or at least threaten to employ — the so-called nuclear option, an enormously contentious move that would allow the party to raise the national borrowing limit with 51 votes rather than 60." Manu Raju and Burgess Everett in Politico. Shutdown denies death and burial benefits to families of four dead soldiers. "The bodies of Sgt. Patrick C. Hawkins, 25; Pfc. Cody J. Patterson, 24; Sgt. Joseph M. Peters, 24; and First Lt. Jennifer M. Moreno, 25, will arrive at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Wednesday. The four soldiers were killed Sunday in the Zhari district of Kandahar Province when enemy forces attacked their unit with explosives...Under the shutdown, Carl Woog, a Defense Department spokesman, said on Tuesday, “the Department of Defense does not currently have the authority to pay death gratuities and other key benefits for the survivors of service members killed in action.” The benefits include $100,000 to each family; a 12-month basic allowance for housing, usually given in a lump sum to survivors commensurate with the rank of the service member; and burial benefits" Jennifer Steinhauer in The New York Times. Explainer: 10 ways the shutdown is making us less safe. Lydia DePillis in The Washington Post. Does raising the debt ceiling increase the debt? "Over the years, Congress has passed a series of laws that set tax rules and spending policies. When the amount the government spends under those laws is higher than the amount of taxes the government brings in, it has to borrow money to fund the difference. The accumulated past deficits add up to the total debt. But there's another law that puts a legal cap on the amount of debt the U.S. Treasury can issue. So even though the debt is just a residual of all those past tax and spending decisions, it has to be passed as well." Neil Irwin in The Washington Post. Debate: What federal spending are we better off without? Including responses from CBPP's Jared Bernstein and Reason's Nick Gillespie. The New York Times. Republicans could lose their House majority because of the shutdown. "[A] provocative set of district-level polls was conducted for MoveOn by Public Policy Polling (D). These are partisan organizations, but I note that of major pollsters, PPP had the best accuracy in 2012. Also, even the worst house biases are no more than 3 percent. As we will see, even that is not enough bias to alter the conclusions here...The swing was toward Democrats for 23 races (below the red diagonal) and toward the Republican for one race (above the diagonal)." Sam Wang in The Washington Post. RYAN: How we can end this stalemate. "The president is giving Congress the silent treatment. He's refusing to talk, even though the federal government is about to hit the debt ceiling. That's a shame—because this doesn't have to be another crisis. It could be a breakthrough. We have an opportunity here to pay down the national debt and jump-start the economy, if we start talking, and talking specifics, now. To break the deadlock, both sides should agree to common-sense reforms of the country's entitlement programs and tax code." Paul Ryan in The Wall Street Journal. KLEIN: Cake or debt ceiling? "Politics is full of hard choices and tough tradeoffs. Raising taxes hurts the economy even as it funds crucial government services. Bombing Libya might stop a massacre but it could trap America in another country's grinding civil war. Cracking down on global currency manipulation might help American manufacturers or it might invite devastating reprisals. The debt ceiling isn't like that. The debt ceiling is "cake or death?"" Ezra Klein in The Washington Post. SCHEIBER: A short-term debt limit increase would be a disaster. "The problem with a short-term debt limit increase is it muddies everything you’re trying to make clear. Suppose Congress reopened the government for six weeks under a temporary funding bill known as a continuing resolution (CR) while at the same time raising the debt limit for six weeks. Obama has said he’s happy to negotiate a fiscal deal once the government is reopened, even as he refuses to negotiate the debt limit. Under this scenario, how would he differentiate between the two?" Noam Scheiber in The New Republic. BEUTLER: The last stand of the rightwing nutjob. "After two and a half years of debt limit threats and the attendant deluge of misinformation, an alarming number of Republicans think this way. Party leadership is complicit in allowing these dangerous fantasies to flourish, but fortunately they haven’t succumbed, themselves...House Republicans might be an ungovernable mess. But the people who control the floor understand the real dangers of breaching the debt limit. And Democrats don’t need more than 15 or 20 Republican votes to cut the right loose and increase the debt limit. As weak as John Boehner is, he’s not that weak. If we breach, it will be because he chose not to deliver them." Brian Beutler in Salon. DRUM: Why are we talking about the debt ceiling crisis as if it's normal politics? "I was noodling over Obama's debt ceiling press conference during lunch, and the thing that struck me—again—was how hard it is to truly communicate his postion. And I sympathize. I've written about the basics of the debt ceiling hostage crisis at least a dozen times, and I still don't feel like I've ever been able to get across just how radical the whole thing is...You can't govern a country this way. You can't allow a minority party to make relentless demands not through the political system, but by threatening Armageddon if they don't get what they want. It's not what the Constitution intended; it's not something any president could countenance; and it's reckless almost beyond imagining." Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. BERNSTEIN: Waiting for the market's call for reason. "What will it take to wake up the moderates such that they insist that House leadership gets us out of this meaningless yet damaging cul-de-sac by letting majority rule on clean bills to patch the budget and raise the debt ceiling? Historically, one option is a big drop in the stock market...The current shutdown, however, isn’t yet generating anything like that large a reaction. Instead, we’re seeing a dribble downward, with the market off about 400 points, or about 3 percent, over the seven trading sessions through Monday." Jared Bernstein in The New York Times. HUNT: Killing medical-device tax could save face for Republicans. "[A]s a face-saving concession, the Republicans probably would get an agreement for a separate vote on removing the medical-device tax part of Obamacare. Unlike with central components of Obamacare such as the individual mandate, the administration and congressional Democratic leaders may be willing to budge on a deal that replaces the medical-device tax, which raises about $3 billion per year over the next decade." Albert R. Hunt in Bloomberg. Music recommendations interlude: Frank Sinatra, "Dancing on the Ceiling." Top opinion STIGLITZ: Five years in financial-reform limbo. "America’s mortgage market remains on life-support: the government now underwrites more than 90% of all mortgages, and President Barack Obama’s administration has not even proposed a new system that would ensure responsible lending at competitive terms. The financial system has become even more concentrated, exacerbating the problem of banks that are not only too big, too interconnected, and too correlated to fail, but that are also too big to manage and be held accountable. Despite scandal after scandal, from money laundering and market manipulation to racial discrimination in lending and illegal foreclosures, no senior official has been held accountable; when financial penalties have been imposed, they have been far smaller than they should be, lest systemically important institutions be jeopardized." Joseph E. Stiglitz in Project Syndicate. PORTER: America's skills gap. "To believe an exhaustive new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the skill level of the American labor force is not merely slipping in comparison to that of its peers around the world, it has fallen dangerously behind...Though we possess average literacy skills, we are far below the top performers. Twenty-two percent of Japanese adults scored in the top two of six rungs on the literacy test. Fewer than 12 percent of Americans did. We are also about average in terms of problem-solving with computers. Paradoxically, our biggest deficits are in math, the most highly valued skill in the work force. Only Italians and Spaniards performed worse. Some 34 percent of adult Americans scored in the top three rungs of the assessment for numeracy, 12.5 percentage points less than the average across all countries." Eduardo Porter in The New York Times. WOLFERS: Why I'm happy about Janet Yellen. "On a personal note, I’ve known Janet Yellen and her husband George Akerlof, a Nobel laureate in economics, for more than a decade. They are both deeply passionate about the capacity for economics to improve people’s lives, and are also refreshingly human...Tonight, I feel reassured that my daughter’s economic future is in good hands. I also plan to tell her that she, too, can grow up to become the most powerful economist in the world. It’s a potent stimulus." Justin Wolfers in Bloomberg. GOLDSTEIN: Putting a speed limit on the stock market. "[Banker Brad Katsuyama] and a few of his colleagues decided to leave the bank and start a new place for investors to trade. Rather than woo high-frequency traders, they would limit their advantages. Their trading platform, IEX, is set to open later this month...The goal with IEX, whose owners include mutual-fund companies and other big investors, is to attract only the high-frequency traders who add liquidity and keep away those looking for the kinds of advantages that Katsuyama says are unfair. IEX’s computers will be set up so that, no matter how far away traders’ machines are, everyone will get market information at the same time. IEX also won’t offer many of the special order types favored by high-frequency traders." Jacob Goldstein in The New York Times. SUNSTEIN: How changing a form can change people's lives. "Low-income students are less likely to apply to selective colleges than their high-income peers. That’s a big problem, because students who attend selective colleges can obtain significant economic returns, and those returns are especially large for low-income students. What might be done to encourage them to apply? Research by Harvard University economist Amanda Pallais provides some intriguing answers. Before 1997, those who operated the ACT allowed students to send reports of their test scores to three colleges free; any additional report cost $6. In 1997, the ACT increased the number of free reports to four. The small step made a big difference. Before 1997, 3 percent of those who took the ACT sent out four reports, whereas 82 percent sent out three. After 1997, 74 percent sent out four reports, whereas 10 percent sent out three." Cass R. Sunstein in Bloomberg. DOURADO: Let's build a more secure Internet. "[T]he problem is that the physical layer of the Internet’s infrastructure — the hardware that transmits, directs and relays traffic online, as well as its closely knit software (or “firmware”) — is not open-source...Because these hardware designs are closed to public scrutiny, it is relatively easy for surveillance at the Internet’s infrastructural level to go undetected. To make the Internet less susceptible to mass surveillance, we need to recreate the physical layer of its infrastructure on the basis of open-source principles." Eli Dourado in The Washington Post. New website woohoo interlude: Introducing Wonkblog’s newest site: Know More. 2) It's Yellen Obama to name Yellen as Federal Reserve chairman on Wednesday. "President Obama on Wednesday will nominate Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen to lead the U.S. central bank, officials said, selecting a renowned economist focused on combating unemployment for one of the most powerful positions in the world. Yellen would become the first female chief of the nation’s central bank — or any major central bank. As Fed chairman, she would have vast power over the economy, and her record suggests that she would use it to continue for as long as possible a Fed stimulus program aimed at boosting growth. She would also be the top regulator of the nation’s financial system, an area in which less is known about her views." Zachary A. Goldfarb in The Washington Post. The biggest challenge Janet Yellen will face as Fed chair. "President Obama's decision to nominate Janet Louise Yellen to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve System is an endorsement of this simple idea: That the central bank's expansive efforts to support economic growth and bring joblessness down are helping the recovery, and should continue. Yellen was the was the obvious choice if -- and only if -- you believe that the current direction of the nation's powerful central bank is the correct one for the country. Yellen has been not merely an engineer of the Fed's policies of "quantitative easing" and "forward guidance," but a consistent voice within the central bank to go further. She has reliably pushed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues to explore what else they might do to bring down the 7 percent jobless rate and put the millions of American unemployed back to work." Neil Irwin in The Washington Post. Start here for your Yellen background reading: Neil Irwin and Ylan Q. Mui's big Janet Yellen profile from August. The Washington Post. More reading: Here's what you should read about Janet Yellen. Sarah Wheaton in The New York Times. Women scarce at central banks. "If confirmed by the Senate as the next chief of the Federal Reserve, Janet L. Yellen would be the highest-ranking woman ever in an economic policy-making position in the United States — and one of the most powerful women to serve in American government. No woman has led the Fed in the century since it was established, or the Treasury Department in its 224-year history. The United States is hardly alone in that regard: Among the world’s developed nations, there is only a smattering of female central bankers." Annie Lowrey in The New York Times. In other monetary news: We have a new $100 bill. "[T]he new $100 bill is here, with fancy new security features, such as an image of the Liberty Bell that appears in an inkwell and a 3D blue motion strip down the center...This bill has gone high-tech to fight fraud. Along with that color-changing bell in the inkwell, the paper cash depicts another optical illusion: a pattern of Liberty Bell icons that shifts into a pattern of “100” icons. There’s also a textured jacket for Mr. Franklin and a new view of Independence Hall." Ylan Q. Mui in The Washington Post. Are banks headed for another $57 billion in losses? "The nation's four largest banks are holding $57 billion of seriously delinquent loans that they've been slow to move into foreclosure over concerns that the Federal Housing Administration, the government mortgage insurer, will refuse to cover the losses and hit them with damages, according to industry sources. The banks — Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo — have assured investors in the footnotes of quarterly filings that the loans are government-insured and therefore pose no threat to their bottom lines, even if they end up in foreclosure...[T]he FHA's guarantee does not apply if lenders are found to have violated underwriting or servicing standards, or to have engaged in misconduct." Kate Berry in American Banker. Global growth is slowing. "The latest projections for the global economy are out from the International Monetary Fund, and they're not good. Not good at all. The fund, in its World Economic Outlook, now expects the world economy to grow only 2.9 percent this year, down from 3.2 percent it estimated as recently as July. The fund also marked down its forecast for 2014 global growth by two-tenths of a percent, to 3.6 percent." Neil Irwin in The Washington Post. Adorable animals interlude: A golden retriever listens to guitar music. 3) Where the exchanges are working State-level health insurance exchanges are doing better than the federal government's. "While many people have been frustrated in their efforts to obtain coverage through the federal exchange, which is used by more than 30 states, consumers have had more success signing up for health insurance through many of the state-run exchanges, federal and state officials and outside experts say...In addition, some states allow consumers to shop for insurance, comparing costs and benefits of different policies, without first creating an online account — a barrier for many people trying to use the federal exchange." Robert Pear and Abby Goodnough in The New York Times. Here’s what Obamacare looks like when it works. "Washington Health Plan Finder had one of the most troubled launches of any health marketplace, even more so than the glitch-plagued federal exchange. When HealthCare.Gov launched, shoppers could at least access the homepage. But in the Evergreen State, the entire marketplace site was down. If you tried to visit the site Oct. 1, you got internal server error messages. This makes it all the more surprising that, six days later, Washington is now posting some of the highest enrollment numbers in the country. The state has had nearly 9,452 people sign up for coverage since Oct. 1...When you play around with the site, it's easy to see why Washington has some of the best enrollment numbers: It's pretty easy to use." Sarah Kliff in The Washington Post. Jon Stewart has some questions about Obamacare. "Much to the delight of health nerds across the country, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius appeared on "The Daily Show" last night. Aside from one opening crack about HealthCare.Gov ("I’m going to try and download every movie ever made and you are going to try to sign up for Obamacare," Stewart told Sebelius), there was surprisingly little talk about the health law's rocky launch. They did spend a lot of time, however, having a pretty confusing conversation about the health law's individual mandate and why the White House has not delayed it." Sarah Kliff in The Washington Post. Greats interlude: Ernest Hemingway’s macho letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald. 4) Wow, these congresspersons are such rebels 8 lawmakers arrested at immigration protest. "The lawmakers, all Democrats, were detained by the Capitol Police after they stood silently in a line in the middle of a street that borders the Capitol lawn, blocking traffic. As the police handcuffed them behind their backs and led them away, a crowd pressed in, chanting, “Let them go!” The representatives arrested were Joseph Crowley and Charles B. Rangel of New York, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, Al Green of Texas, Luis V. Gutierrez and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, Raul M. Grijalva of Arizona and John Lewis of Georgia. More than 150 other protesters, many from labor unions and immigrant organizations, were also arrested after they sat down and linked arms in the same street." Julia Preston in The New York Times. India interlude: So Kerala's new tourism commercial is pretty trippy. 5) Exporting the oil boom U.S. refiners export more fuel than ever. "U.S. refiners are selling more fuel abroad than ever before, effectively exporting the American energy boom to the four corners of the world...While federal law bars overseas shipments of most U.S.-produced oil, refiners can export petroleum products created from that crude, including gasoline, diesel and jet fuel...In July, U.S. refiners shipped a record 3.8 million barrels of products a day to places as far flung as Africa and the Middle East, according to the latest monthly data from the Energy Information Administration. That volume is nearly 65% above the 2010 export level, when the U.S. oil boom was still in its infancy." Ben Lefebvre in The Wall Street Journal. Reading material interlude: The best sentences Wonkblog read today. Wonkblog Roundup This is the biggest challenge Janet Yellen will face as Fed chair. Neil Irwin. Does raising the debt ceiling increase the debt? Neil Irwin. A very simple timeline for the debt-ceiling crisis. Brad Plumer. What’s happening in the Treasury bill market today should terrify you. Neil Irwin. Jon Stewart has some questions about Obamacare. Sarah Kliff. 10 ways the shutdown is making us less safe. Lydia DePillis. The left thinks business controls the Republican Party. They’re wrong. Ezra Klein. Global growth is slowing down at the worst possible time. Neil Irwin. Republicans could lose their House majority because of the shutdown. Sam Wang. Here’s what Obamacare looks like when it works. Sarah Kliff. Many Republicans think breaching the debt ceiling is no big deal. They’re wrong. Brad Plumer. Obama and Boehner spoke this morning. Their summaries of the call are…different. Ezra Klein. Cake or debt ceiling? Ezra Klein. Five things you need to know about the new hundred-dollar bill. Ylan Q. Mui. Et Cetera Supreme Court skeptical of limits on federal campaign contributions. Robert Barnes in The Washington Post. Got tips, additions, or comments? E-mail me. Wonkbook is produced with help from Michelle Williams. |
A Review of B. Alan Wallace’s Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic In the following essay, Tom Pepper escorts B. Alan Wallace to The Great Feast of Knowledge. The Great Feast of Knowledge is a speculative non-buddhist trope intended to capture a scene where Buddhism’s representatives discuss their views and theories alongside of physics, art, philosophy, literature, biology, psychology, and other disciplines of knowledge. A central contention of speculative non-buddhism, of course, is that all forms of x-buddhism confuse knowledge of the world with discourses on knowledge of the world; and that we need a critical practice like The Great Feast to help us discern the difference. In such an exchange, Buddhism loses all status as specular authority. That loss is significant because it permits a consideration of Buddhism’s views on equal footing with the feast’s other participants. On the surface of things, Pepper and Wallace seem to have much in common intellectually. Pepper, after all, is a literary scholar who characterizes himself as “a Buddhist who is also interested in philosophy of science.” Anyone who has read Wallace knows of his training in physics, philosophy, and religion. Indeed, as he writes on his website, Wallace sees himself as a “progressive scholar” who “seeks innovative ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices with Western science to advance the study of the mind.” But the two thinkers, to my mind, could not be any more different. From a speculative non-buddhist view, the difference between them lies in their respective willingness and reluctance to engage thought in the service not of tradition’s validation, but of knowledge itself—even if, as Pepper points out, knowledge itself may have no discernible terminus. But that’s just my view. Please, pull up a seat, and enjoy the feast! ( –Glenn Wallis Atman, Aporia, and Atomism: A Review of B. Alan Wallace’s Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic By Tom Pepper By any measure, we would have to acknowledge that B. Alan Wallace is a major player in Western Buddhism. In the last eight years he started the Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness Studies, published nine books, and is engaged in the International Shamatha Project. He has impressive credentials, with a Ph.D. from Stanford and a stint as a Tibetan monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. He has created himself as the leading authority on the relationship between Western science and Buddhism. His latest book, Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic (a title that would seem to have been chosen to invite comparison with Stephen Batchelor’s Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist) is subtitled “A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice.” The book sets out to argue that Buddhist contemplative practices can contribute to the scientific study of the mind, which is currently running hard down a dead-end in its attempts to map the mind onto neural activity. Along the way, Wallace argues against a reductive, materialist philosophy of science, and for a particular version of Tibetan Buddhism, as the correct way to finally understand human consciousness. I first came across Wallace’s work many years ago, with a book called Choosing Reality: A Contemplative View of Physics and the Mind (the word “contemplative” was changed to “Buddhist” in later editions, apparently for marketing purposes). I picked up the book because as a Buddhist who is also interested in philosophy of science, I thought perhaps Wallace was going to get beyond the popular misrepresentation of quantum theory that says that we “create” a particle by observing it. I was hoping he might be trying to demonstrate that both Buddhism and quantum physics could be understood from a realist perspective. That is, I thought he was going to choose reality; instead, his book made a case for idealism, and argued that we choose reality. In the process, he misrepresented contemporary physics and showed a startling lack of knowledge of recent developments in the philosophy of science. I didn’t pay him much attention after that, but given his flurry of recent books, I thought it might be worth reconsidering exactly what his project really is. In responding to this book, then, I have no intention of debating his take on Buddhism. I intend to take a thoroughly exterior, non-buddhist approach in responding to Wallace’s presentation of Buddhism. I do, in fact, disagree with some of his statements about Buddhism generally, but I am not interested in seeking the “true” Buddhism here. I know very little about Tibetan Buddhism, and I am confident that Wallace knows quite a bit about it. I will assume that his representation of Tibetan Buddhism is accurate. What I am interested in here is simply considering, from a non-buddhist perspective, the social and ideological implications of Wallace’s version of Buddhism. If we all accepted this version of Buddhism as true, and all began practicing it, what would that mean for us? I will not give Wallace the same benefit of the doubt when it comes to his discussions of Western science and philosophy. In this realm, I will point out the errors and misrepresentations, the sophistries and false dilemmas, and the false conclusions resulting from his limited knowledge of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science. My aim here, however, is the same: my interest is again in considering the social and ideological project he has marshaled this wealth of pseudo-science and sophistry to promote. I also want to begin with a few points on which I absolutely agree with Wallace. I point these out to make it clear that I think his goals are often (not always) goals that I share; it is my argument, however, that his ideas on how to reach these goals are terribly problematic, and that his philosophical assumptions can only hinder his project. For one thing, it would be wonderful if more people understood, as Wallace points out quite clearly (pp. 177-179), that mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition is not at all the same thing as mindfulness in the Western mental-health industry. Despite the frequent claims that it is a concept adopted from Buddhism, mindfulness in the various “mindfulness-based” therapies has little to do with the concept of sati. Wallace also makes clear that absolute acceptance of whatever comes into our minds is not the typical Buddhist approach; instead, Buddhist have traditionally been very keen on controlling what goes on in the mind, to eliminate the afflictions of attachment, aversion, and ignorance. Vipashyana (vipassana) does not mean, Wallace reminds us (pp. 204-206), accepting the mind as it is, but learning to shape it into something better. Finally, and most importantly, I absolutely agree with Wallace that the reductive materialist attempts to map the mind onto the neurological activity of the brain is a mistake, a dead end, that will prevent any real progress both in philosophical considerations of consciousness and in psychology. The mind, I will argue, is neither concomitant with the brain, nor is it an epiphenomenon. However, I will completely disagree with how he seeks to avoid reductive materialism. To adumbrate my conclusions here, I will briefly discuss the problem of free will, and Wallace’s solution to this seemingly endless debate. At first it seemed puzzling to me that Wallace would end the first part of his book with a chapter on “achieving free will,” as the Western concept of “will” has always seemed to be irrelevant to Buddhist thought. However, this chapter reveals the reason for Wallace’s appeal to the radical empiricism of William James, for his overly simplistic version of modern philosophy of science, and shows us what the goal of his version of Buddhism ultimately will turn out to be. Wallace presents us with a version of Buddhism that seeks to uncover, through spiritual practice, a “brightly shining mind” that is unborn, eternal, and exists “in every being,” although “veiled by adventitious defilements” (115). The “conceptual mind,” which is conventional and impermanent, cannot access this “realm of consciousness,” but the “brightly shining mind” can “influence the minds of ordinary sentient beings” (115) in ways that are “beyond the realm of philosophy” (116). Our greater freedom, it seems, is achieved by removing the defilements, conventional accretions inhibiting the ability of the pure consciousness to subtly and imperceptibly influence the conventional mind. He presents us, then, with the very definition of an atman: an abiding deep self, uncreated by causes and conditions, permanently existing, unchangeable, and alone capable of true and complete bliss. (Of course, Wallace says this is not an atman at all, but simply asserting that it is not an atman does not make it any less of one.) My argument will be that Wallace’s attempt to resuscitate James’s radical empiricism, his misrepresentation of quantum theory, and his implication that reductive materialism is the only existent, and only possible, philosophy of science, all serve to produce his subtle atman as the one remaining conceivable explanation for the existence of consciousness; furthermore, the social and political implications of this version of Buddhism are horrendously elitist and oppressive. I will then suggest one other possible explanation for the existence of consciousness, which I believe is more in agreement with the basic concept of Buddhism, and could possibly make Wallace’s ostensible project more likely to succeed—and without the negative social and political implications. The Quantum Myth and a Scientific Straw Man Wallace has gotten quite a bit of mileage over the years out of the popular mythos of quantum theory, and he hits that note several times in this book. It enables him to give a “scientific” argument against what he repeatedly calls “materialistic” science; on Wallace’s version, quantum physics demonstrates that the universe “requires for its existence the participation of an observer” (84). I’m sure we’re all familiar with the version of quantum theory that tells us that the particle doesn’t exist until we measure it, so consciousness ultimately produces reality. When physicists insist that this is an exaggerated claim, that quantum theory “does not imply that reality is no more than a pure subjective human construct,” Wallace simply insists that they are unwilling to accept the implications of their own theory. He quotes Brukner and Zeilinger who argue that from multiple observations it is possible to “build up objects with a set of properties that do not change under variations of modes of observation or description” (84); essentially, what they suggest is that once we become aware of the influence of measurement, we can determine the level of consistent reality existing independent from our conscious observation. On one reading of Vasubandhu’s writing, this is the point of Yogacara Buddhism: that we can study the mind not because it is the only reality, but because then we can become aware of how it distorts reality, essentially learning to correct for error. Wallace is very attached to what we might call a consciousness-only school of physics because it enables him to “open the door to the possibility of nonphysical influences on the material world” (99), producing a radical duality of atman and conventional samsara, with only a one-way possibility of influence. There are, of course, many ways to understand the quantum theory, and Wallace’s consciousness-only physics is not the only option. As Christopher Norris has pointed out in a very interesting book on the subject, “it is preposterous in the strict sense of that term—an inversion of the rational order of priorities—when thinkers claim to draw far-reaching ontological or epistemological lessons from a field of thought so rife with paradox and lacking (as yet) any adequate grasp of its own operative concepts” (5). Norris demonstrates that Bohm, who literally wrote the book on quantum theory, always held that there were alternative, realist models capable of explaining all of the quantum “facts.” This alternative was ignored largely for ideological, extra-scientific reasons (See Norris, especially p. 144). In the case of Wallace’s argument, it seems the “orthodox” quantum interpretation has continued to serve its ideological purpose. Wallace’s main scientific target is the biological reductionism that would assert that the mind is nothing more than neural activity. He also wants to reject what he calls “metaphysical realism” (28). By this, he means the “scientific worldview” that insists that the only things that are real and can produce effects are physical things, and that physical is equivalent to matter. Of course, not even the most reductive of empiricists would actually deny the existence of energy in the universe, so Wallace’s argument involves a bit of sleight of hand, as he elides everything but material “entities,” and then denies their reality. This sophistry is fascinating: According to metaphysical realism, the entire objective universe consists of physical entities that produce the effects measured by human beings; however, we can never perceive these entities, as they exist independently of all measurement. Therefore, we can never infer the contents of the absolutely objective world on the basis of observations, which always arise relative to systems of measurement. (28) This passage is worth close attention, because it is essentially this peculiar logic on which Wallace’s entire argument depends. For Wallace, something is only real in the objective sense if it is a discrete entity; then, that entity is completely invisible since it must be “measured” instead of “perceived;” therefore, we can never know what is actually in the objective world at all; from here, it is a short step to the assumption that no objective world even exists: “all observations of the physical world are illusory”(29). This argument depends on many philosophical errors, but the three most important here are: (1) the belief that “physically real” can only mean a discrete material entity whose only properties are mass and location; (2) the assumption that perception is not itself a form of “measurement;” and (3) the assumption that because any specific measurements of the objective world are limited to certain attributes, we cannot infer anything from them. Of course, as Brukner and Zeilinger indicate in the passage quoted above, it is exactly because we can be aware or our systems of measurement, including perceptual ones, that we can make reasonably correct inferences about the objective world. Wallace’s reductive, straw-man version of the “scientific worldview” is essential, however, in supporting his central claim about the radical duality of reality. He spells this out for us right in the first chapter. “[T]he illusion of knowledge that the mind is physical has delayed the revolutionary development of the mind sciences” he tells us, and this has occurred largely because “the scientific establishment exerts . . . pressure on its members to reject all forms of mind-body dualism in favor of an antiquated monism”(14). Wallace says he wants to “think outside the box—outside the familiar dualities of dualism and monism” (14), but he rejects the “familiar” Cartesian dualism only to replace it with a more radical dualism, in which an absolute atman, which he refers to at times as “substrate consciousness,” is the deepest and most permanent level of reality, influencing but unaffected by the physical realm. The existence of philosophies of science other than reductive materialist monism has apparently conveniently escaped Wallace’s notice. Roy Bhaskar’s realist theory of science, for instance, completely avoids the problems Wallace finds with the “scientific worldview” without requiring some non-natural, other-worldly power to fill in the gaps. Bhaskar’s philosophy of science includes distinctions between intransitive and transitive objects of science; that is, between the objective reality and the object of thought produced by a science. It includes the possibility that reality is stratified, with different levels of causal mechanisms, and therefore accepts the possibility of emergence. Emergent powers cannot be reduced to more “basic” strata on which they depend; so we cannot explain the mind by studying the brain any more than we could expect to derive the laws of baseball from the laws of physics, despite the fact that it would be impossible to play the game if those laws ceased to operate. The false philosophical dilemma Wallace sets up requires absolute ignorance of serious philosophical thought about science, and so a misunderstanding of how science operates. Wallace assumes that there must be final, complete answers, or there are no answers at all—and therefore science fails. This assumption depends upon an ontology that is both materially monist and non-stratified; these are not assumptions that are required for a realist ontology. In the words of Andrew Collier, from a critical realist perspective “we never reach rock-bottom—so the prejudice that only rock-bottom explanations are real ones would leave us forever without real explanations” (110). Wallace demands of science that it jump immediately to the rock-bottom answer, rejecting the possibility of stratification, and the transitive nature of explanatory mechanisms. This enables him to make the claim that from a scientific perspective “matter—as it exists in and of itself, independent of measurement—is as unknowable to the human intellect as God” (234). And, when he comes across a poll which suggests that the majority of physicists are undecided about the best interpretation of quantum mechanics, he can only conclude that the “real implications of quantum physics seem to be hidden in a cloud of uncertainty” (236), and the only solution is to conclude that consciousness creates the world. He is incapable of seeing that physicists may be less likely than he is to reify their transitive objects of knowledge; for the best physicists, the interpretations we produce in concepts are what we argue about, because they are always constructs designed to move us toward better descriptions and explanations of the intransitive object. We may never reach rock-bottom, probably won’t, but that doesn’t require us to abandon science and resign the field to the supernatural. Wallace claims that modern science “is incompatible with the Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy” (29). I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether Wallace’s atman or Bhaskar’s version of realism is closer to Nagarjuna’s epistemology and ontology. William James, Shangri-La, and Reactionary Ideology One of the reasons I was initially prompted to read this book was my surprise at Wallace’s call to return to James’s radical empiricism. The stupid insistence of psychology and “mind sciences” on a naïve and reductive empiricism that has never really been the underlying philosophy of any real scientific progress is certainly frustrating. But there are so many alternative scientific epistemologies, I could not imagine why Wallace would pick up on this glaringly reactionary, elitist, and theistic form of capitalist ideology and mistake it for a philosophy of science. Even if he were reluctant to engage the more radically realist philosophies of science, there have certainly been more philosophically sophisticated versions of radical empiricism advanced in the past century. Quine, Kitcher, and Kornblith come immediately to mind; and I’m sure a philosopher could easily add to the list. What, I wondered, is the ideological value of James’s particular version of radical empiricism? James’s psychology was begun as an ideological project, intended to defend the existence of the soul against the rampant materialism gaining popularity in academic circles (see Leary). In The Principles of Psychology, James makes no bones about it: “I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance, so far as we yet have attained” (181). His argument is that the conceptual puzzles and paradoxes of psychology can only, finally, be resolved by either admitting a soul, or resigning some problems to “nature in her unfathomable designs” which “no mortal may ever know” (182). It should be clear why James appeals to Wallace: a reductive version of science leading to aporia which can only be resolved by appeal to a transcendent soul. James’s positivism is also quite explicit, and nowhere more so than in a passage Wallace cites in an earlier book, The Taboo of Subjectivity: “the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 26). This may seem obvious, but the problem is that for radical empiricism the only things that count as “real” (in a physical, objective sense) are those that can be experienced, and all experiences are real in exactly the same way. There is no room for theoretical causal mechanisms, and no way to distinguish between the kinds of reality that obtain in a thought and in a bomb. Just as importantly, there is no way to think about what Bhaskar calls the “metacritical dimension,” which “aims to identify the presence of causally significant absences in thought, seeking to elicit . . . what cannot be said or done . . . in a particular language or conceptual system” (Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, p. 25). The rejection of such dimensions of thought in positivist philosophies is always in the service of conservatism. Pragmatism is, as James insists, only interested in “practical” results, and particularly interested in insisting that these results can only be produced from within the current, existing, system—of thought, language, politics, economics. The political conservatism of this can perhaps be made clear by mentioning Wallace’s dismissal of his own ridiculously incorrect understanding of Freud. From his positivist perspective, Wallace can only misunderstand Freud, and can only think of the unconscious as “the subtlest discursive thoughts, mental dialogues, images, memories, desire, and emotions,” which “Freud discovered centuries after Buddhist contemplatives” (188). That this is not what Freud meant by the unconscious should be clear to anybody who is familiar with serious psychoanalytic thought. Suffice it to say that the dynamic unconscious, for Freud, is not subtle and unnoticed but positively existing mental activity; rather, the unconscious is precisely what is unthinkable or unspeakable within a specific conceptual system. The reason for this persistent misreading of Freud is perhaps clearest when Wallace trots out once again the most often quoted and least often understood passage in all of Freud’s writings. I’ll quote it here at some length: When I promised my patients help and relief through the cathartic method, I was often obliged to hear the following objections, “You say, yourself, that my suffering has probably much to do with my own relation and destinies. You cannot change any of that. In what manner, then, can you help me?” To this I could always answer: “I do not doubt at all that it would be easier for fate than for me to remove your sufferings, but you will be convinced that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness, against which you will be better able to defend yourself with a restored nervous system.” (Studies in Hysteria, p. 232) This is the source of the most common quip about psychoanalysis: that it can only convert misery into ordinary unhappiness. The point Freud is making, however, is much different. For Freud, it is imperative to accept that much of our human unhappiness is because of our social environment, and that is beyond the reach of psychoanalysis; the really useful benefit of uncovering what is unconscious, what is invisible within our construal of the world, is that it might leave us “better able to defend” ourselves—to make real changes in those “relations and destinies” causing our “everyday unhappiness.” Pragmatism would prefer we remain resigned to the positivity of its conceptual construal of the world, to eliminate the threat of any demand for social change. James’s radical empiricism was always meant to cut off any consideration of the social production of our mental experience. In fact, Wallace quotes Kurt Danziger in support of his claim that abandonment of the introspective method occurred for “ideological rather than pragmatic” reasons (173). In fact, that is Danziger’s point, but the ideological reason is not what Wallace implies; instead, the reason for the abandonment of introspection was that it “demonstrated that the nature of the object of psychological investigation was linked to the social structure of the investigative situation” (Danziger, p. 48). The problem wasn’t materialist ideology, but the possibility that the contents of the psyche were produced by social structures; and so it would require social change to improve or cure the mind. Interdependence, it seems, was more troubling than the possibility of a soul. And now I come to what will undoubtedly be the most controversial claim I will make in this essay: that the extreme conservatism of Wallace’s philosophical approach is directly connected to the particular kind of Buddhism he is proposing. That is, I will dare to say what is unspeakable in Western Buddhist circles: that Tibetan Buddhism functioned as the ideological support of one of the most undemocratic, oppressive, and elitist social systems to endure into the twentieth century. What could be a better justification for inherited aristocracy than the belief that they have earned their wealth and power by meritorious actions in past lives? A couple hundred aristocratic families lived in opulence, while Buddhist monastics sought meditative bliss in idle luxury, all supported by the labor of an uneducated and economically oppressed hereditary peasant cast, who apparently had some bad karma to work off. This is the Shangri-La whose loss brings tears to the eyes of Hollywood celebrities. Somehow it has come to seem a horrible injustice that an oppressive oligarchy was deposed. It may, of course, be argued that it is a terrible injustice that this deposition did not lead to terribly much improvement in the lives of the peasants, but Wallace’s frequent cold-war anti-communist rhetoric just rings hollow for me. An elite class, however, turns out to be essential to the kind of Buddhism Wallace is presenting. He repeatedly emphasizes the rarity of achieving the first dhyana, citing a Sri Lankan monk who says there are fewer than five people in Sri Lanka who have achieved it, and assuring us that even in Tibet, where the higher form of Buddhism is supposedly practiced, it is rare (p. 148). Besides the rarity of qualified teachers, there is the need for “a quiet, healthy, pleasant environment where one’s material needs are easily met,” so that one can practice continuously (although the truly dedicated might need as little as “six hours each day” and “even engage with others between sessions” (155-156). Still, he quotes Atisha: “If you lack the prerequisites of shamatha, you will not achieve samadhi even in thousands of years, regardless of how diligently you practice” (155). Such long stretches of idle time (Wallace reminds us that it took even Buddha six years), and the provision of all material comforts, is clearly the privilege of only an elite class of people with good karma. The vast majority of people would simply remain karmically incapable of such spiritual progress in this lifetime. The rarity of achieving these advanced meditative states also calls attention to Wallace’s odd definition of “skeptic.” Apparently, for him it means absolute unquestioning blind faith in something we can never see any evidence of or hope to even approach in our lifetimes. Not a definition of skeptic I have ever heard before. Wallace’s skepticism is apparently limited to skepticism about a naïve philosophy of science that few people ever accepted; when it comes to Buddhism, his appeals to authority abound. He repeatedly cites “authoritative accounts” (182) or truth “revealed” to an “eminent master” (214), to support claims about the achievement of a stable “pristine awareness” or state of “bliss” that cannot be verified by our own “radical empirical” endeavors, since it is achievable only rarely, by those with the right karma. Although Wallace does assert that “no autonomous, controlling self can be found,” and that this is what is meant by the Buddhist term anatman (110), it is hard to see in what sense the “timeless, ‘nonmanifesting’ consciousness that experiences” nirvana (209) is anything but an atman. He claims that the “mind when it has settled in its natural state, beyond the disturbing influences of conscious and unconscious mental activity” (69) can experience the “quality of bliss” that “does not arise in response to any sensory stimulus”(68). I have no idea whether this is standard Tibetan Buddhism or not—I can only assume Wallace knows of what he speaks. If it is, I can only say I would have no interest in it. It isn’t hard to see, however, why this kind of Buddhism might appeal to an economic elite in the west; there is no need to worry about the suffering of others, just seek your own bliss in idle luxury. And we can rest assured that our eternal atman-that-is-not-one will dwell in bliss, without having to make any change whatsoever in our current ideology: Wallace assures us that “both religious and non-religious people can embrace this ideal of genuine happiness, with specific attributes defined by each one in terms of his or her own worldview”(172). As long as you have the right karma to be born rich, you’re all set. To the privileged elite, Wallace’s comfort-Buddhism says “we are home at last” (85). Enjoy your bliss! Escaping Atomism In conclusion, I would like to suggest one possible alternative to Wallace’s response to reductive materialism. The problems that James saw as “unfathomable” unless we accepted the existence of a soul, and that Wallace sees as insoluble in “mind sciences” unless we accept an atman, might turn out not to be problems at all if we could simply abandon philosophical atomism. Wallace uses the term “mind” in two ways, usually without clarifying which use he intends: the mind is both the “conceptual thought” that exists at the conventional level, and the eternal “substrate consciousness.” In both cases, however, it is clear that for Wallace each mind is individual, either eternally separated from all others in the case of the substrate consciousness, or individually arising from the interactions of a brain and its environment in the case of the conventionally existent mind. Introspection, for Wallace, is compared to an “inwardly focused telescope,” that examines an “individual mind stream” (24). For both James and Wallace, and indeed for much of Western thought, the insistence on discrete, individual consciousnesses has lead to endless paradoxes, aporia, and irresolvable problems—from free will to solipsism, from the status of knowledge to the existence of a mind, there are a host of problems that cannot be solved unless we abandon the notion of consciousness or mind existing individually, the depths of a mind. Eighty years ago, V. N. Volosinov proposed that we drop this line of pursuit. “Consciousness,” he suggested, “becomes consciousness only once it has been filled with ideological (semiotic) content, consequently, only in the process of social interaction” (11). Psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud and most thoroughly with Lacan, presented a radically empty subject, arising not from deep within but from without, in a socially produced symbolic network. Alain Badiou has suggested a theory of the subject that accepts all of the most radical implications of Lacan’s thought: as individual organisms, we are nothing but automatons; it is only as socially engaged subjects to a truth that we gain any agency. To become subjects with true agency, we must participate in a truth procedure, a practice which functions to extend our capacity to interact with reality beyond what is possible within a given system of knowledge—the subject is not an individual, but a social entity. As such, it may very well transcend the limits of an individual organism’s life, and experience the future effects of our present day actions. We will never find consciousness in the firing of neurons, because it exists only in the symbolic social interaction of multiple individuals. I would suggest that this line of thought is much more compatible with the Buddhist concepts of pratityasamutpada, sunyata, and anatman than any other form of Western philosophical thought. Further, I would suggest that this line of thought could learn a great deal from Buddhist thinkers of the past couple thousand years—not all of them, but certainly Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, and Candrakirti at the very least could help teach us to think the radical implications of a non-atomist subject. If Wallace’s ultimate goal is a political or economic one, propping up a privileged elite or garnering financial support from wealthy Westerners, then I would suppose he would have little interest in the criticism I have offered here. If, on the other hand, his interest is truly in exploring the nature of human consciousness, he might want to do a little reading, and catch up on the advances made in the philosophy of science by Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, and explore the theory of the subject advanced by Lacan and Badiou. I’m not so optimistic as to hope that will happen, but I am just optimistic enough to hope that a few of those interested in the possibilities of Buddhist thought and practice might realize that we do not have to choose between Wallace’s Tibetan atman and the kind of reductive “naturalizing” of Buddhism advanced by Owen Flanagan, who want to “tame” Buddhism by jettisoning anything that doesn’t fit with a reductive, empiricist philosophy of science, keeping only its useful tendency to teach people to be nice. As Alain Badiou has put it, the enemy of thought today is “a sort of scientism stipulating the mind must be naturalized and studied according to the experimental protocols of neurology, reinforced, as always, by an inane moralism with a religious tinge—in substance: one has to be nice” (118). Wallace’s version of Buddhism would simply abandon the field to this enemy, and retreat to the solitary pursuit of bliss. From a non-buddhist perspective, the decisional structure of Wallace’s brand of Buddhism is quite clear. As I understand Laruelle’s concept, the decisional structure is the fundamental construal of the world which enables a particular project in thought, but which remains invisible from within that thought. That Wallace cannot see his decisional structure is evident from his ostensible rejection of it: he claims he wants to reject Cartesian dualism and accept the Buddhist concept of anatman, and he cannot see that he is producing both an absolute dualism and the ultimate atman. His reductive understanding of science and epistemology and absolute faith in the authority of the Buddhist tradition would leave us no choice but to accept the existence of an atman that he simply insists is not one. From within his decisional structure, no argument could defeat Buddhist authority; since none of us can achieve the transcendent meditative states of the masters, we can neither debate their existence and value nor even hope to comprehend what such states actually are. No alternative version of science is possible, since for Wallace only rock-bottom (positivist) answers can count as scientific. This combination produces a self-replicating hermetic system designed to perpetuate inequality with the promise of future bliss. References Badioiu, A. Second Manifesto for Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Bhaskar, R. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. New York: Routledge, 2009. Collier, A. Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy. London: Verso, 1994. Danziger, K. Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Freud, S. & Breur, J. Studies in Hysteria. Trans. A.A. Brill. Boston: Beacon Press, 1937. James, W. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. James, W. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902 Norris, C. Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism: Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics. New York: Routledge, 2000. Volosinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. L. Matejka I.R. Titunuk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Wallace, A.B. Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Miind Sciences and Contemplative Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Wallace, A.B. The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Photograph: Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, “After the Feast.” |
Shorter toothbrushes, lighter weights and longer distances. Ultralight backpacking and its subsequent bragging rights are all the rage right now, but are its goals-based proponents missing the entire point? At dinner on Thursday night, an old buddy told me of his plan to set a through-hike record on the John Muir Trail next summer. He's a technical gear designer, so reckons he can pare his load out to the absolute minimum — I showed him how to go without a backpack altogether — wearing one set of clothing the entire time (including underroos, gross) and sleeping in his shells. His big idea was avoiding the need to resupply, an arduous task that sees climbers walk down the mountain to trailheads, where they meet friends for pre-arranged food re-ups. Then they've got to walk back up to the trail, adding entire days to their journey. Sam's big idea? Carrying and eating only high-caloric-density emergency ration bars of the kind you'll find on ocean going life rafts; max calories, minimum size and weight. Tastes like eating shoe leather. Advertisement He figures he could do the 210-mile trail in under a week — a time which still wouldn't beat the current three-day running record — a week spent power walking all day, sleeping on the cold hard ground at night, drinking nothing but water and eating high-calorie cardboard. Sounds awful. Doubly so when you figure that he'd have to take a week off work and fly out from New York to do it. That week would be spent in some of the most beautiful mountains and richest natural environments on earth, but rather than appreciate them, he'd just be trudging through them while dreaming of the cold beer awaiting him at the end. Would I like to come with him? No thanks. But we did at least decide to fly over to Mumbai early next year to visit our friend Bjorn. We owe him for the time we sold his Cadillac to a drug dealer. Advertisement Read about backpacking or talk to anyone about it these days and you'll hear similar things — people who don't have the ability to spend much time outdoors prioritizing goals and accomplishments over experience. They're bringing the same approach they apply at their jobs to their recreation, quantifying their time off with performance metrics and mile markers planning their trips with spreadsheets! Such trips give people a sense of accomplishment and the ability to brag about themselves, but doing it that way doesn't even come close to providing that "tonic of wildness" that Henry David Thoreau wrote about. Advertisement That's exactly what I'm looking for on my backpacking trips. When I strap on a pack instead of hopping on a dirt bike or climbing into a truck, I'm looking for the ability to get myself and my dog into the remotest possible area, away from other people and their rules and judgement and small talk. Three days is a good amount of time, but instead of spending them running 210 miles, I'll hike in somewhere the first day, relax on the second, then hike out on the third. Without performance goals or expectations I'm free to carry a couple of steaks and a flask of whiskey. Away from heavily trafficked hiking routes I'm free to enjoy a campfire and I actually get to see the animals that still live up in the mountains. Sometimes we even take the time to seek them out. That's not to say that you can't adopt the same approach while benefiting from some ultralight principles and the huge advances in gear technology that have fueled that sport. Lighter, smaller tents, sleeping bags and pads (big comparison test of those coming soon) have all improved dramatically in recent years and are now capable of increasing comfort even while reducing the weight on your hips. Catfood can stoves found popularity with gram counters, but remain the cheapest and easiest way to boil water outdoors. Dehydrated backpacking food has gotten tastier than ever, if that steak sounds like too much hassle. The gear you read about here on IndefinitelyWild can benefit everyone, but you don't have to use it to its maximum capability to have fun. Advertisement Pack a full-size toothbrush, it really does make brushing your teeth that much easier. I suppose if I have to put a hypotheses on this shift to goals-based outdoors recreation I'd put forward ADD, lives spent on the Internet and careers predicated on knowledge work. Just like sitting down and enjoying a conversation has become a lost art, so too has the ability to escape the modern world and its approach to life, even while outside. But hey, that list of summits and miles sure will sound impressive to your Facebook friends. Man, I sound old. Advertisement Top photo: Chris Brinlee Jr. IndefinitelyWild is a new publication about adventure travel in the outdoors, the vehicles and gear that get us there and the people we meet along the way. Follow us on Facebook,Twitter and Instagram. |
Lenovo's security headaches continued Wednesday as the PC maker's website fell victim to a cyberattack, just days after the PC maker apologized for preloading software on some of its PCs that leaves them vulnerable to malware attacks. Instead of the typical introduction to the company's products, the website displayed a message Wednesday afternoon indicating the site was down for maintenance. Users attempting to visit the site earlier in the afternoon were treated to a slideshow that led to a Twitter account criticizing Lenovo for its involvement with the adware Superfish. Lenovo did not immediately respond to a request for comment but confirmed the security breach in a statement to the Wall Street Journal. "Unfortunately, Lenovo has been the victim of a cyber attack," the company said. "One effect of this attack was to redirect traffic from the Lenovo website. We are also actively investigating other aspects of the attack. We are responding and have already restored certain functionality to our public facing website." Hacking group Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the hack on a Twitter account allegedly associated with the group. Lizard Squad, a loose collective reportedly composed of hackers based out of the United Kingdom and Eastern Europe, also was linked to a series of outages that plagued the PlayStation Network and other games last year. While it was first thought that Lenovo's servers had been subverted, it now appears that attackers took control of the site's domain registrar and redirected its traffic to a free account at CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based security company. CloudFlare told Bloomberg that it disabled the account used by the attackers. The incident occurred less than a week after the Chinese PC maker found itself in hot water following revelations that many of its PCs include a software program called Superfish Visual Discovery. Considered either adware or spyware, Superfish tracks your Web searches and browsing activity to place additional ads on the sites you visit. The software also installs its own root certificate that leaves affected PCs more vulnerable to malware attacks. Lenovo has apologized for the problem and has begun work to resolve it. "We messed up badly," Peter Hortensius, Lenovo's chief technology officer, said last week. Lenovo's security headache morphed into a legal one last week when a lawsuit filed in federal court charged both Lenovo and Superfish with violating wiretap laws and trespassing on personal property, Ars Technica reported Monday. In another case, a legal firm has launched a class action investigation over potential claims against Lenovo's actions. |
(CNN) With the Republican presidential nomination within his grasp, Donald Trump is courting an unlikely group of voters: Bernie Sanders supporters. The GOP front-runner has ratcheted up his rhetoric against presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in recent weeks, calling her a "crooked" politician who is unqualified to be president. But when it comes to her challenger, Bernie Sanders, Trump has taken a notably softer tone, praising the Vermont senator's rhetoric and encouraging him to launch a third-party bid. "I think Bernie Sanders should run as an independent. I think he'd do great," Trump said at a victory rally in New York City Tuesday night, after sweeping five GOP contests in the Northeast. The next morning, Trump said on MSNBC: "Bernie Sanders has a message that's interesting. I'm going to be taking a lot of the things Bernie said and using them." Trump's advisers say these comments are a preview of more explicit overtures the campaign is ready to make to Sanders' supporters once the populist liberal exits the 2016 race. That strategy is based on the broad areas of overlap between voters attracted to Trump and those who have flocked to Sanders. Both have angrily denounced the political system as corrupt and expressed deep frustration that Washington is not helping ordinary people. They both oppose international trade deals, saying they hurt American jobs. And, of course, targeting Sanders supporters could serve to undermine Clinton. Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said the campaign is ready to bring into the fold anyone in the "feel the Bern" movement who is not inclined to support Clinton in the general election. "You have two candidates in Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders which have reignited a group of people who have been disenfranchised and disappointed with the way Washington, D.C. and career politicians have run the country," Lewandowski said. "Bernie Sanders has large crowds — not as large as Mr. Trump's, but large crowds — and so there is a level of excitement there for people about his messaging and we will bring those people in." But even as the two candidates share similar campaign messages, there is a big hurdle to Trump winning over Sanders supporters. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that among Democratic leaning voters who want Sanders to be the party's nominee, only 13% of them view Trump favorably, while 86% view him unfavorably. And Sanders has been unequivocal: he wants the eventual Democratic nominee to defeat the Republican. Still, Trump and Sanders have both caught party leaders by surprise this year with the size and intensity of their followings. Trump is a brash Manhattanite who runs a multi-billion dollar real estate empire and has never sought public office; Sanders was born in Brooklyn and has been in public office since the 1980s, advocating for progressive causes like raising the minimum wage and affordable housing. Despite their starkly different backgrounds, both Trump and Sanders have managed to garner huge followings by tapping into a similar anger that's erupted into the open in this election cycle. Trump, even as he frequently boasts about his personal wealth, has made a point of disavowing special interests and corporate money like Sanders, billing himself the only candidate that is "self-funding" his presidential campaign. On the stump, the two men both passionately rail against a political system that is designed to prop up the elite while ignoring lower- and middle-class Americans. Marina Coddaire, a 25-year-old woman from Woodbury, Connecticut, is a registered Democrat who is supporting Sanders. But over the weekend, she was in the audience of a Trump rally in Waterbury. It was "curiosity" that brought her there, she told CNN: "I just want to see it for myself." "I feel that the core of both what Bernie's movement is and Trump's movement is, is the same. This anti-establishment, being upset with the way that our government has been run and how the mistakes that they've made have really damaged the middle class and have disenfranchised them," Coddaire said. "This cry of change. The way that they've both gone about it is of course different but I still respect it." Coddaire said she would not vote for Clinton in the general election but left the door open — just a crack — to the possibility of supporting Trump in November. "I really, really, really do not want to vote for Hillary Clinton," she said. "So when the media says... oh no, they'll make the switch, they'll consolidate, I don't think they will. Because I'm not going to." Other Sanders fans are far less willing to consider Trump as an alternative. At a Sanders rally at Purdue University in Indiana on Wednesday, one Sanders supporter said he would "never even consider" supporting the New York billionaire. "Trump's hurdle is, you can't believe anything he says," said David Mason, a 42-year-old Lafayette photographer. "Yes, he and Bernie have some overlap on issues. But as people, they couldn't be more different." Bill Hillsman, a political consultant who has advised many independent candidates, said not only is there real potential for Trump to grow his base by reaching out to Sanders fans, it is crucial that Trump win over independents if he wants to win the general election. "It's evident many Democrats (and certainly those supporting Bernie) find Hillary's campaign lacking," Hillsman said. "So what Trump is doing is smart. The only possible route to a November win for him is on the backs of independent voters." |
Molly Ringwald detailed on Tuesday her encounters with Harvey Weinstein and the “plenty of Harveys” that have sexually harassed and assaulted her since she started her acting career as a teenager. In a column titled “All The Other Harvey Weinsteins” published in The New Yorker, Ringwald revealed the sexual harassments and assault she endured in Hollywood was “enough to feel a sickening shock of recognition.” “When I was 13, a 50-year-old crew member told me that he would teach me to dance, and then proceeded to push against me with an erection. When I was 14, a married film director stuck his tongue in my mouth on set,” the actress recalled. She added, “At a time when I was trying to figure out what it meant to become a sexually viable young woman, at every turn some older guy tried to help speed up the process.” REESE WITHERSPOON REVEALS DIRECTOR SEXUALLY ASSAULTED HER AT AGE 16 Ringwald said the harassment continued into her 20s, when she was forced to put a dog collar on during an audition. She noted it was the closest she’s come to having an “out-of-body experience” and cried in the parking lot. Ringwald credited her “protective parents” for keeping her grounded despite the horrific experiences during the early years of her career. Shortly after the “dog collar” audition, Ringwald moved to Paris. But even abroad, she couldn’t escape the harassment. In an article with Movieline, Jeffrey Katzenberg, is quoted saying: “I wouldn’t know [Molly Ringwald] if she sat on my face.” Katzenberg told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement on Tuesday that he was “deeply, deeply sorry” and the quote is “horrifying, mortifying and embarrassing” to him. A spokeswoman for Katzenberg told Fox News Katzenberg never said the quote Ringwald referenced in the article and never conducted an interview with Movieline. "That Molly Ringwald had to read those words attributed to me and believe I said them is horrifying, mortifying and embarrassing to me. Anyone who knows me now or back then knows I do not use language like that as a matter of course, or tolerate it," Katzenberg said. "Ms. Ringwald, 22 years too late, I am deeply, deeply sorry," he said. JENNIFER LAWRENCE: I WAS PLACED IN 'NUDE LINEUP,' TOLD TO LOSE WEIGHT "Stories like these have never been taken seriously." — Molly Ringwald in The New Yorker The “Breakfast Club” actress said Weinstein never sexually abused her, as others have claimed, but she thought he was “volatile” during their encounter when she was 20 years old. “When we began filming, in France, I was warned about the producer [Weinstein], but I had never heard of him and had no reason to fear him,” Ringwald wrote. “The feeling on the set was that he and his brother Bob were becoming powerful and were difficult to work with, and that it was inadvisable to cross them.” Ringwald said she, Weinstein, and her British coworkers went to dinner where the movie mogul made a crude joke. “There was a tense, awkward moment when Harvey became testy toward our British co-workers and accused them of thinking of us Americans as just the ‘little guys in the colonies,’” Ringwald recalled. “It was sort of meant as a joke, I suppose, but it made everyone cringe, and all I could think was that the guy was volatile,” she said, adding that she now feels “lucky” to not have been harassed or assaulted by Weinstein. Ringwald also described working with Weinstein on a film he eventually renamed “Strike it Rich” that “tanked” in theaters. She ended up suing the producer for failing to pay her the percentage she earned in the film. The actress added she never told her stories of dealing with harassment in the entertainment industry because they “have never been taken seriously." “I never talked about these things publicly because, as a woman, it has always felt like I may as well have been talking about the weather,” she said. Ringwald said she hopes after the Weinstein scandal Hollywood will “enact real change, change that would allow women of all ages and ethnicities the freedom to tell their stories — to write them and direct them and trust that people care.” |
A left-handed 4-year-old in Oklahoma was forced to write with his right hand because his teacher claims being left-handed is evil and associated with the devil. KFOR reports the student, Zayde Sands, is only 4 years old, and it’s his first year at Oakes Elementary in Okemah, Oklahoma. However, his introduction to public school has been marred by an ignorant teacher who believes being left-handed is evil and sinister. Zayde’s mother, Alisha Sands, reports she noticed her left-handed son attempting to write with his right hand at home after beginning the school year. She asked him why he was writing with his right hand, and not his left. Sands said: I just asked ‘Is there anything his teachers ever asked about his hands?’ Sands reports her son raised his left hand and said: This one’s bad. Concerned, Alisha Sands sent the teacher a note about her son’s allegation. The unnamed teacher responded by sending home an article calling left-handedness “unlucky,” “evil,” and “sinister,” as well as pointing out that “the devil is often portrayed as left-handed.” Alisha Sands said she couldn’t believe the teacher would be promoting such ignorance: It breaks my heart for him because someone actually believes that, believes my child is evil because he’s left handed, it’s crazy. Sands says she went to the school superintendent with the article, but was disappointed by the response: There was no suspension of any kind. There was basically nothing done to this teacher. She told them she thought I needed literature on it. I don’t feel like the school did what they were supposed to for him. Sands said: Currently Sands is keeping her son at home, and says her son Zayde will likely transfer to another class. KFOR contacted the school for comment on this disturbing and developing story. The school said they are aware of the situation and the district is investigating. Sands says she will file a formal complaint with the Oklahoma Board of Education. Bottom line: Telling a 4-year-old that being left handed is bad or evil is unacceptable in any situation, and constitutes a form of child abuse. Story via KFOR – Watch the news video below – |
SINGAPORE - The new Yishun Park Hawker Centre with 45 cooked food stalls and about 750 seats will open in September. Pinball machines and arcade games will be made available for residents at the Games Square in the hawker centre. The facility will also have natural ventilation and built-in tray-return facilities at accessible locations. It will also have family-friendly features, such as child-friendly toilet facilities and family-friendly seating.The hawker centre will be managed by Timbre Group on a not-for-profit basis. It is the latest in a series of socially-conscious hawker centres which are being developed by the National Environment Agency (NEA). The NEA said in a statement on Wednesday (June 14) that in order to sustain the hawker trade and support new entrants, Timbre Group will be setting aside two 'incubator stalls' for potential hawkers. These hawkers will go through a one-year incubation period,after which Timbre will help to place them in its network of food and beverage outlets, or refer them to NEA to apply for a hawker stall in other centres. To ensure affordable meals for the residents, each stall will have at least one basic meal priced at $3.00. Timbre will also introduce bulk purchasing of ingredients to help hawkers defray the cost of raw food materials. Within six months of the centre's opening, a 3-in-1 mobile application will be implemented that allows patrons to make cashless payment with store credits, place meal orders electronically to the stallholders, and enjoy a 10 per cent discount for food and drinks. Patrons can top up credits on the app via kiosks, which will also allow patrons to order food. Timbre has also proposed the implementation of a Radio Frequency Identification tray return system that is integrated with the centralised dishwashing area. This will streamline tray return processes so that cleaners can focus on the cleaning of tables and common areas. This would also reduce the cleaners' workload as they do not have to sort and return used crockery. There will also be weekend activities at the hawker centre to promote community and family bonding. Sports matches will also be aired on selected days on large screens to promote community bonding. The NEA added in its statement that the Timbre Group's proposal was chosen out of five contenders as it "showed a strong emphasis on social objectives, had various productivity measures, and comprised innovative solutions to ensure the vibrancy of the hawker centre". The NEA has been looking to socially-conscious operators to help improve the operational efficiency of hawker centres. Three hawker centres - Ci Yuan Hawker Centre, Bukit Panjang Hawker Centre and Our Tampines Hub Hawker Centre - are currently operated by such managing agents. |
Gucci Mane won't be getting out of jail soon, but that doesn't mean he's still got new material to feed the streets. True to his word, Guwop has release two out of three projects of his World War 3D takeover today. Although he's more of a host than an actual participant in these albums, there's enough goodies here to hold 1017 fans over. The Purple Album features some new cuts from Thugger, while The Green Album has fresh Migos material. Stream/download the projects below and look for PeeWee Longway's The White Album on iTunes . Gucci Mane & Young Thug The Purple Album Gucci Mane & Migos The Green Album Gucci Mane & PeeWee Longway The White Album Previously: Gucci Mane & Young Thug Release New Mixtape, ‘Young Thugga Mane La Flare’ Stream Gucci Mane’s New Project, ‘Brick Factory Vol One’ |
I’m a big fan of typography! Clean and beautiful typography can make the experience of coding or reading an article so much better. It’s no wonder if you search for “best programming font”, there’s no shortage of font comparison articles. However, one of the things that is universally agreed upon is how terrible Courier/Courier New is. Azure Cloud Shell is a great product that takes away the complexity of figuring out the installation methods and authentication (esp. in organizations with 2FA enabled) and gets you a CLI prompt ready to roll! However, Azure Cloud Shell forces you to use Courier New and a default white on black color scheme. Here’s what the default Azure Cloud Shell looks like in Windows If you’ve worked on a Mac/Linux terminal before, you know how easy it is to change the font and color scheme to suit your needs. It’s 2017 and we have full text editors that are written in web technologies (like VSCode that I’m writing this post in 😃 ). There’s no reason that we cannot use some of those web technologies to make our Azure Cloud Shell experience a little better. Steps Notes The default font for the solarized dark style is my favorite code font - Liberation Mono. If you don’t have this font installed, the default font for Windows is Consolas, for macOS is Menlo and for Ubuntu is Ubuntu Mono. Final form Here’s what the Azure Cloud Shell looks like after it’s all said and done Contribute If you’d like to contribute to this style, feel free to fork the below repo and send a pull-request. [Github] Azure Cloud Shell Color Schemes Back to posts |
The rise in carbon dioxide emissions is big news. It’s prompting action to reverse global warming before we reach a catastrophic tipping point, but little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations – and that really has us freaking out. For the most part, Climate Change is widely accepted as a concern that needs immediate attention if humanity wishes to continue living on planet Earth for the next coming decades. There is, however, another seemingly hidden issue that has been creeping it’s way into existence and that’s the dropping oxygen levels around the globe. For this reason, it is important to completely alter the argument and attack Climate Change by using facts that nobody could deny, even if they wanted to. Humans (and pretty much every living thing on this planet) requires oxygen to survive; There’s is no denying that. If you have trouble grasping this concept, put a bag over your head and see how you feel after a few minutes. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has a Respiratory Protection Standard in regards to employee environments stating that Oxygen levels are not to go under 19.5% because it poses a risk for the worker’s health, due to oxygen deficiency. Currently Global Oxygen percentages are at 20.95% and dropping. Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has serious potential negative health impacts. Around 10,000 years ago, the planet’s forest cover was at least twice what it is today, which means that forests are now emitting only half the amount of oxygen. Continual Deforestation is rapidly accelerating this long-term loss of oxygen sources. When Oxygen levels drop below 19.5% oxygen, the air is considered oxygen-deficient. At concentrations of 16% to 19.5%, humans engaged in any form of exertion can rapidly become symptomatic as their tissues fail to obtain the oxygen necessary to function properly. Increased breathing rates, accelerated heartbeat, and impaired thinking or coordination occur more quickly in an oxygen-deficient environment. Concentrations of 12% to 16% oxygen levels also cause tachypnea (increased breathing rates), tachycardia (accelerated heartbeat), and impaired attention, thinking, and coordination. At oxygen levels of 10% to 14%, faulty judgment, intermittent respiration, and exhaustion can be expected even with minimal exertion. Breathing air containing 6% to 10% of oxygen results in nausea, vomiting, lethargic movements, and perhaps unconsciousness. Breathing air containing less than 6% oxygen produces convulsions, then apnea (cessation of breathing), followed by cardiac standstill – and these symptoms occur immediately. Even if a person survives the hypoxic insult, organs may show evidence of hypoxic damage, which may be irreversible. Evidence from prehistoric times indicates that the oxygen content of pristine nature was above the 21% of total volume that it is today. It has decreased in the recent times due mainly to the burning of coal in the middle of the last century. Currently the oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere dips to 19% over impacted areas, and it is down to 12 to 17% over the major cities. At these levels it is difficult for people to get sufficient oxygen to maintain bodily health; It takes a proper intake of oxygen to keep healthy body cells and organs, and the entire immune system all functioning at full efficiency. The main issue is that we are using up more oxygen than is being put back into the atmosphere. This means every coal plant, 1.2 billion cars on the road and all other energy sources that burn fuel to produce electricity are using up our precious oxygen supply. This is equivalent to having one extremely large fire that is continuously burning at an alarming rate. You can relate this to a candle burning and having someone put a cover over the flame; Eventually the flame will go out, because it’ll consume all of the oxygen inside the confined space. This is what is happening to the earth, but on a much larger scale. The Professor of Geological Sciences at Notre Dame University in Indiana, J Keith Rigby, was quoted in 1993-1994 as saying: “In the 20th century, humanity has pumped increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning the carbon stored in coal, petroleum and natural gas. In the process, we’ve also been consuming oxygen and destroying plant life – cutting down forests at an alarming rate and thereby short-circuiting the cycle’s natural rebound. We’re artificially slowing down one process and speeding up another, forcing a change in the atmosphere.” So, the main argument that needs to be made with Climate Change deniers is that regardless of what they think about climate change, whether it’s a hoax made by the Chinese, or that weather is weather: You cannot deny the fact that our current methods of energy production are going to suffocate everyone. It no longer makes climate change a debatable theory. It solidifies it into a solid fact that every living thing on earth can understand on a primitive level, choking is a scary and uncomfortable thing and to avoid this, we need sustainable methods of energy production, and with it, the world will begin to heal its self. You cannot sit in your living room with a diesel engine running in the kitchen and not expect to start choking. We need to be vocal about what is important, and not let corporate greed dictate the policies that will only further damage our world. Consider doing your part by joining planting events, and being conscious of your environment by recycling and minimizing waste. Greenism is dedicating a majority of it’s efforts to reforestation projects and environmental clean up efforts. Please consider DONATING and help us keep our planet in pristine condition. Comments comments |
Donald Trump made two false statements on ABC’s “This Week” while discussing foreign policy and the Republican presidential primary: He denied saying that Americans detained by Iran would “never” be released during the Obama administration. But that’s exactly what he said. In September, Trump said that “frankly they’re never going to come back with this group.” Trump also claimed “all of the latest polls have me No. 1 in Iowa.” In fact, a poll released Jan. 13 showed him trailing Sen. Ted Cruz by three points. In an interview that was taped Jan. 16 for “This Week,” Trump was asked about Iran’s announcement that day that it had agreed to release four Americans who had been detained. A day later, President Obama said five Americans were released: former Marine Amir Hekmati, who had been held four and a half years; Pastor Saeed Abedini, three and a half years; journalist Jason Rezaian, one and a half years; student Matt Trevilick, who had been held for 40 days; and Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari. (The Washington Post story on the president’s announcement said Trevilick “was not part of the exchange deal,” and the detention of Khosravi-Roodsari “had not been previously publicized.”) Anchor George Stephanopoulos, Jan. 16: So we have some news. We have four American hostages, including Jason Rezaian, and released by Iran. Now you said that was never going to happen. You blamed Obama. Are you ready to give him credit? Trump: Absolutely not. And I never said it was never going to happen. I said that if I got in, it would happen immediately. Actually, Trump said both. He said those detained by Iran would never be released under the Obama administration, and he promised to immediately secure their release if he wins the election. He did so at a Capitol Hill rally in September. Trump, Sept. 9, 2015: We can talk about the $150 billion, which, by the way, they get even if the deal isn’t approved. They get it just for going to the table. We can talk about the fact that we have four wonderful people over there, and frankly they’re never going to come back with this group. And I will say this. If I win the presidency, I guarantee you that those four prisoners are back in our country before I ever take office. I guarantee that. As for his standing in presidential primary polls, Trump claimed that “all of the latest polls have me No. 1 in Iowa.” He also accused Cruz of lying during the Jan. 14 Republican debate. Both of those statements are false. Trump, Jan. 16: I’m No. 1 in every single place, including Iowa, by the way, as you know, all of the latest polls have me No. 1 in Iowa. And I have a great feeling toward Iowa and a great relationship with the people there, with the evangelicals and the tea party. Real Clear Politics, which aggregates polling data on its website, shows the most recent Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll put Cruz ahead of Trump by three points, 25 to 22. The poll, released on Jan. 13, had a margin of error of 4.4 percent, so Cruz’s lead is within the margin of error. But Trump is not “No. 1” in “all of the latest polls” in Iowa. Stephanopoulos also asked Trump about some of the sharp exchanges that Cruz and Trump had during the Jan. 14 Republican debate and the days that followed. Cruz, who was born in Canada to a U.S. citizen, said during the debate that Trump’s questions about Cruz’s eligibility to be president were politically motivated. Cruz, Jan. 14: You know, back in September, my friend Donald said that he had had his lawyers look at this from every which way, and there was no issue there. There was nothing to this birther issue. Now, since September, the Constitution hasn’t changed. But the poll numbers have. And I recognize — I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling in Iowa. Cruz is right. The Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll was released a day before the debate and, as we said, that poll showed Cruz ahead of Trump. In fact, Real Clear Politics lists 16 polls taken in Iowa since December, and Cruz placed No. 1 in eight of them, while Trump was in first place in seven. They were tied in one poll. Cruz topped Trump for the first time in Iowa in a Monmouth University Poll released Dec. 7, so the race in Iowa has tightened considerably. Nevertheless, Trump accused Cruz of lying in the “This Week” interview when he was asked about his conservative credentials. Stephanopoulos, Jan. 16: But they are — they’re afraid you’re going to abandon conservative issues if you get the nomination. Trump: I don’t think too many people are afraid of that, OK, because if you look at the polls, I’m leading Ted Cruz by a lot. He even lied about that. You know, he got up and said, well, the polls — well, the polls are showing that I’m the one that’s on the up swing. He’s the one on the down swing, a big down swing. It is true that Trump is comfortably ahead in the national polls. But, during the debate, Cruz specifically mentioned Trump’s poll numbers in Iowa, so Trump is wrong to call Cruz a liar. We asked the Trump campaign in an email about his statements, but we received no response. — Eugene Kiely, with Chloe Nurik |
White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci on Wednesday let off a profanity-laced barn-burner of a rant in which he claimed that White House chief of staff Reince Priebus would shortly be ousted and pledged to “fucking kill all the leakers” in President Donald Trump’s administration. New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza on Thursday reported that Scaramucci called him the night before to interrogate Lizza about his report that Scaramucci was dining at the White House with Trump and a group of associates and Fox News big-wigs. Senior White House official tells me that Melania was also at the dinner tonight with Trump, Hannity, Shine, and Scaramucci. — Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) July 27, 2017 “Who leaked that to you?” Scaramucci demanded, according to Lizza, and — when Lizza refused to name his sources — threatened to “eliminate everyone in the comms team.” When Lizza asked Scaramucci why he was so insistent on keeping his dinner plans secret, Scaramucci said he “asked people not to leak things for a period of time,” which he called a “honeymoon period.” “What I want to do is I want to fucking kill all the leakers and I want to get the President’s agenda on track,” Scaramucci said. According to Lizza, Scaramucci convinced himself that Priebus had told Lizza of the dinner plans, and then offered a “leak” of his own: “Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” Scaramucci appeared to blame Priebus, and imitated him to Lizza: “Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.” He claimed Priebus was jealous of not having been invited to the dinner, and called the chief of staff “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.” Scaramucci also had some choice words for chief White House strategist Steve Bannon as well. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President,” he said, claiming he was not interested in media attention for himself. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.” Read the full New Yorker story here. Lizza on Thursday evening said Scaramucci was “just wrong” in his assumption that Priebus leaked his dinner plans. “Reince Priebus did not leak that information to me,” Lizza said on CNN. “This on the record conversation that you had with him on the phone clearly was on the record,” Wolf Blitzer noted. “He didn’t say it was off the record or anything like that.” “Nothing like that,” Lizza replied. “I actually talked to him this afternoon to make sure that we both understood that that was the case.” He said Scaramucci was “very worked up” when he called Lizza on Wednesday. “He was angry,” Lizza said. “He just was getting worked up into a tizzy.” |
Image caption The OTRs letters scheme began while Mr Blair was prime minister Former prime minister Tony Blair "in effect has refused" to appear at a parliamentary inquiry into so-called On The Runs (OTRS), MPs have been told. The Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee is holding an inquiry into government letters sent to more than 200 republican paramilitary suspects. The letters emerged in February, when the Hyde Park IRA bomb trial collapsed. The chairman of the inquiry, Laurence Robertson, told the Commons Mr Blair's response was "totally unsatisfactory". Mr Blair's office said the former prime minister was in "ongoing correspondence with Mr Robertson about the committee's request". 'Power to summon' Mr Robertson raised the issue as a point of order in the Commons on Wednesday. Commons speaker John Bercow told MPs it was within the committee's formal power to summon Mr Blair as a witness, but added he hoped the power would not have to be used. The OTRs letters scheme began while Mr Blair was prime minister and the chairman said he is "one of the most important witnesses" to the inquiry. The letters were sent to republicans who were suspected of, but who have never been charged or convicted, of a paramilitary offence during the Troubles. The recipients included County Donegal resident John Downey, who received a letter in error, telling him he was not being sought by UK police over the murders of four soldiers in the 1982 IRA Hyde Park bomb. His trial was halted in February, when the judge ruled the existence of the letter meant his prosecution was an abuse of process. 'Written answers' Raising the issue in the Commons on Wednesday, Mr Robertson said: "One of the most important witnesses is of course the former prime minister Tony Blair. "Mr Blair has failed to offer us any date when he could come before the committee. He has not refused to do, but in effect, has refused to do by not offering any date. "He has offered to submit written answers, which I'm sure you will appreciate is totally unsatisfactory," Mr Robertson added. "Given the importance of this inquiry and given the sensitive nature of it, given what it means to people in Northern Ireland and indeed beyond, I wonder if you could advise the committee how we might proceed?" he asked Mr Bercow. The Speaker replied: "It is of course open to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, which you so ably chair, to exercise its formal power to summon witnesses. But I hope that it will be possible to resolve the issue without recourse to that. "You have made your point and exposed the issue publicly. I am sure that the former prime minister intends no discourtesy and will swiftly respond," Mr Bercow added. A statement release through Mr Blair's office said:"No one should be in any doubt of Tony Blair's commitment and respect for the people of Northern Ireland and indeed he has already given evidence to the government's inquiry led by Lady Justice Hallett about this issue. "We are in ongoing correspondence with Mr Robertson about the committee's request, given that he has refused to accept written evidence," it added. |
Running Go on Low Memory Devices Maxwell Dergosits Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 29, 2017 At Samsara, we make vehicle gateways that provide real-time vehicle telemetry from the engine computer over CAN, data from wireless temperature sensors over Bluetooth Low Energy, and Wi-Fi connectivity. The gateways are resource-constrained computers. Unlike a server with 16GB of RAM, or an iPhone with 4GB, our gateways have only 170MB and one core. The new CM11 dash cam mounted in a vehicle Earlier this year, we introduced an in-vehicle dashboard-mounted camera to help customers improve the safety of their fleets. The dash cam is a resource-intensive peripheral attached to the gateway. It records 1080p H.264 video at 30 frames per second. Our initial camera management service, which is a process that runs on the gateway, used 60MB, nearly half of our total memory available on the gateway, but we knew we could do better. We were only buffering 3 seconds of 5Mbps video, but 60MB was enough to hold 90 seconds of video, so we looked to see where we could trim the memory usage down. Building a Camera Management Service The camera management service sets the recording parameters for the camera, then receives and persists the video. The persisted H.264 video is converted to an mp4 for uploading to the cloud, which happens at a later time. We chose to write the camera management service entirely in Go to integrate with the rest of our system. This made initial development quick and easy, but the service used nearly half the available memory on the gateway and began to cause Out of Memory kernel panics. Our goals were to: (1) keep the camera management process’ Resident Set Size (RSS) at 15MB or less to allow the other services on the gateway to run properly, and (2) leave at least 20% of total memory free to allow for periodic spikes in memory usage. Tuning the Buffer Size Our first effort to reduce memory use was to simply buffer less video in memory. Since we originally buffered 3 seconds of video at a time, we tried no buffering and wrote one frame at a time to disk. That approach didn’t work since the overhead of 20 KB writes (average frame size) at 30 frames per second (frame rate) lowered throughput and increased latency to a point where we couldn’t keep up with new frames coming in. On the left is the original buffering architecture: we buffered roughly 90 frames of video before writing to disk. On the right is the no buffering architecture: we wrote each frame directly to disk. Our next approach was to buffer by a fixed number of bytes instead. We took advantage of Go’s extensive IO library and used the bufio.Writer module, which provides buffered writing to any io.Writer even if the underlying structure doesn’t support buffered writing. This let us specify how many bytes to buffer. The next challenge was to determine the optimal tradeoff between buffer size and IO wait time. Too big of a buffer and we might use too much memory, but on the other hand, too long of an IO wait time and we would be unable to keep up with the video from the camera. We ran a simple benchmark that varied the buffer size between 1KB and 1MB and measured the time taken to write 3 seconds (or around 1.8 MB) of video to disk. Buffer Size vs. Write Time From the graph, there is an inflection point right at 64 KB — a nice size that doesn’t use too much memory to buffer and is fast enough to not result in video frames being dropped. (The implementation of flash storage in the drive caused this dramatic shift.) This reduction in buffering brought down memory usage by the order of megabytes, but not below our desired threshold. Final Architecture: we always buffer 64KB before writing. The next step was to profile the camera management process’ memory usage using pprof, Go’s built-in profiler. We learned actual heap usage was very low, so we figured something suspicious was happening with the garbage collector. Tuning the Garbage Collector Go’s garbage collector prioritizes low latency and simplicity, It has a single parameter, GOGC, a percentage that controls total heap size relative to the reachable heap size. We tried varying this parameter, but it had no effect on the resident set size, since memory freed by garbage collection is not necessarily returned to the operating system right away. After inspecting the source code, we learned the garbage collector only returns memory pages that are unused for at least 5 minutes back to the OS. As that avoids the allocate-free cycle that could otherwise happen on repeatedly creating and destroying large buffers, this is good for latency. However, this is not ideal for memory-sensitive uses like ours. Our use-case is not very latency-sensitive, and we’d rather trade higher latency for lower memory use. The timeout for returning pages to the OS cannot be configured to be different, but the Go runtime library provides a function, debug.FreeOSMemory, to invoke the garbage collector and return unused memory to the OS on-demand. This was convenient. We modified the camera management service to call the function once every 5 seconds and saw the process’ RSS shrink down by ~5x to a reasonable 10–15 MB! The reduction in memory use doesn’t come for free, of course, but it works for us because we do not require real-time guarantees and can take the latency hit from more frequent GC pauses. If you’re wondering why this helps: we upload video to the cloud periodically, which causes ~15MB spikes in memory usage. We can handle these spikes no problem, if they last for a few seconds, but longer spikes can cause a problem. A spike up to 30MB and the default GOGC value of 200% means the garbage collector can allocate up to 60MB. After the spike, Go doesn’t return the memory to the OS for 5 minutes, but by calling debug.FreeOSMemory, we’re able to make it do so within 5 seconds. Summary Introducing a new peripheral that was controlled by the gateway caused us to hit the gateway’s memory limits. We experimented with different buffering strategies to reduce memory use, but what ultimately helped was configuring Go’s garbage collector to a different behavior. This came as a surprise to us — the default for development in Go is to not think about memory allocation and collection, but the needs and constraints of our application are specialized enough to call for it. We were able to cut down memory use by a sweet 5x and ensure the gateway maintained the 50MB of free RAM needed while supporting video uploads. |
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