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We're nearly two thirds of the way through meteorological summer (June 1 – August 31), and so far, 2016 has been a very warm summer indeed. While not record-breaking, if you've been complaining about the heat, here are some hot numbers to back you up. The mean temperature through the July 26th is sitting at 73.2°F, the warmest mean temperature we have seen for the period since 2012 (which was remarkably warmer at 76.8°F). Since 1972, this is the 10th warmest June 1 to July 26 period on record for Denver, with 2012 being the warmest (76.8°F) and 1967 the coolest (63.8°F). While we've seen a lot of hot days in the last two months, we've also had at least a couple nice breaks. July, for example, started quite cool with several days in a row recording below normal temperatures for highs. We've since been much warmer overall, including today marking the 11th day in a row Denver International Airport (where records are currently kept) has recorded a high 90°F or warmer. This is tied for the 18th longest streak on record, the longest being 24 consecutive days of 90°F+ set in 2012 and 2008. The chart below shows the high temperature departure from normal for each day between June 1 and yesterday July 26. The +12.7°F on July 10th was the 102°F reading at DIA. As you can see, many more days have been above average than below: Through July 26 there have been 13 days where the maximum temperature has reached 95°F or hotter at DIA. That works out to be a four way tie (1978, 1989, 1990, 2001) for fifth most days with maximum temperatures that warm: 2012: 28 days >= 95°F Jun 1 - Jul 26 days >= 95°F Jun 1 - Jul 26 1874, 2007: 17 2005, 2006: 16 1936, 1994, 2008: 14 1978, 1989, 1990, 2001, 2016: 13 Since 1872, there has definitely been an up-tick in these extremely hot days – even considering how often Denver's weather station has moved so dramatically. In fact, I did compare Stapleton and DIA for the last 20 years, and the trends show similar results. Since 2000, fourteen years have made the top 10 list for number of days >= 95°F (many ties) for the period in question. So far this summer the hottest temperature recorded at DIA has been 102°F. While it broke the record for the date, the city has seen warmer temperatures, with the all-time record high for the city sitting at 105°F, last reached in 2012, and prior to that 2005. While the official temperature has come close to the century mark several times this month, July 10th was the only time it actually made it, and was the first time since 2014 to do so. Related: 100 Degree Days Aren't All that Common for Denver As for precipitation, the numbers aren't quite as grim for much of eastern Colorado, but there's a mixed bag. In Denver, we're running a below average for the two month period in Denver (2.68" at DIA vs 3.75" on average) with a few days left in the month to pick up some additional precipitation – maybe. The map below shows precipitation totals as a percent of normal of the last 60 days (so includes the last few days of May). Those across the Palmer Ridge south of Denver and areas extending northeast have faired the best with precipitation over this period, with communities up and down the I-25 urban corridor seeing much more variation in boom or bust for precipitation (bust looking at you Fort Collins). As for the forecast? It continues to look pretty warm overall. We'll likely see some cooler days scattered in here (we discussed how poorly models are handling things in this week's SOTA), but much of the next 5 to 7 days look very warm. Below is last night's GEFS forecast (today's 12z was notably cooler for next week). The latest EURO forecast looks very similar, though still insists this coming Thursday will be much cooler than the GFS thinks it will. While August is yet another very warm month for us on average, those tired of the heat can take some solace in knowing that as of August 2nd, Denver's average high temperature begins to fall, and will continue to do so each day through the end of the year. Post has been updated with corrected precipitation numbers for DIA. |
Ian Kershaw's remarkable book The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich is a really clever piece of public opinion archeology. It attempts to reconstruct the rise and fall of Hitler's popularity in Nazi Germany, drawing primarily on secret reports compiled by the Gestapo, the Security Service of the SS, and the clandestine agents of the banned Social Democratic Party -- a task fraught with methodological pitfalls, given the enormous levels of repression the Nazi party was capable of exercising over the German population. (Suffice it to say that preference falsification was rife, compounded by biased reporting by the public opinion researchers of all these organizations, but Kershaw nevertheless manages to extract much useful information from his sources). Among other things, the book makes the case that, at least until the war started turning sour in late 1942, Hitler was far more popular than the Nazi Party, which quickly grew to be disliked, even despised, by the vast majority of Germans, despite the initial improvement in economic conditions they experienced in the early years of the Third Reich: At the centre of our enquiry here is the remarkable phenomenon that Hitler’s rising popularity was not only unaccompanied by a growth in the popularity of the Nazi Party, but in fact developed in some ways at the direct expense of his own Movement. (p. 83) In Kershaw's telling, the contrast arose primarily from the fact that the "little Hitlers" (as Party functionaries were sometimes derogatorily called) were constantly encountered in everyday life, where they were perceived, not without ample justification, as corrupt and overbearing, while Hitler operated on a "higher" plane, concerned with the "big questions" of war and peace: The ‘little Hitler’ type was ... by no means omnipresent, but was nevertheless sufficiently widely encountered to provoke extensive criticism and to tarnish irreparably he image of the Party. In a sense, the Party functionaries were reaping the harvest of the prejudice which they themselves had helped to sow against local politicians and ‘bigwigs’, and had to face the daily dissatisfaction and discord as the rebound from the utopian hopes in the Third Reich which they had stirred up. The ‘little Hitlers’ in the forefront of the local scene had to bear the brunt of the discontent. In stark contrast, the ‘Hitler myth’ - clearly in part a subconscious mechanism to compensate for the perceived shortcomings of the Third Reich - stood aloof from the dissension on a lofty and untouchable plane (p. 97) The Führer ... appeared to be on an elevated plane far removed from the humdrum problems of everyday life and was presumed to be preoccupied with the 'mighty' issues of the nation, pondering matters of foreign and defence policy, of war and peace, holding the fate of the nation in his hand. It was a domain which, in peacetime at any rate, scarcely affected material interests in any direct or obvious way, but one which could be called upon to engender - even if only temporarily - high emotional involvement and maximum national unity (p. 121) Hitler's increase in popularity at the expense of the Nazi Party was not just a result of perceptions about their different spheres of responsibility; it was also amplified by the strategic choices people made in order to express dissatisfaction in a highly repressive environment where open criticism of the Führer could carry severe consequences. For example, Church leaders who wished to criticize Nazi anti-Christian policies during the " Church struggles " of the mid-1930s attempted to protect themselves against retaliation by preemptively praising Hitler and declaring themselves loyal supporters of him, but as a result they ended up reinforcing perceptions of a good Hitler vs. the bad party underlings who perverted his intentions: "The professions of loyalty to the Führer were in part a ploy to offset criticism of the Party, the SS, of the Church’s number one Nazi hate-figure, Alfred Rosenberg. ... [but] whatever the motives, the actual effect was the enhancement of the myth of the ‘good’ Führer detached from and set against the evil of the Party radicals" ( p. 113 ). And the tactic was also available to other critics of the regime's policies, such as opponents of the murders committed under the Action T4 euthanasia program The divergence between Hitler's popularity and the party's unpopularity was not without important political effects. Time and again, Hitler was able to use his position "above the everyday" to discipline the Nazi party and cement his position at the expense of "radicals" -- for example, during the Röhm purge and the " Night of the Long Knives ," as well as during the aforementioned " Church struggles ." And it would seem that Hitler's personal popularity prevented widespread dissatisfaction with the Third Reich during peacetime from developing into a more serious challenge to the regime; at the very least, it kept in check the party's many centrifugal tendencies, discouraged potential competitors for Hitler's position, and probably helped him accumulate ever more absolute power. The point that interests me here, however, is that, according to Kershaw, ordinary Germans rationalized the dissonance involved in both disliking the Party Hitler claimed to represent, even embody (more than once, Hitler claimed that "the Führer is the Party and the Party is the Führer", to cite a 1935 statement - p. 83 ) and supporting, even adoring, Hitler, by means of a particular kind of exculpatory rationalization: "that Hitler was being kept in the dark about the real state of affairs" ( p. 102 ). Or, more vividly, as a Party member from the Upper Palatinate put it in 1934, "Hitler would be all right, but his underlings are all swindlers" ( p. 83 ). Regardless of the specifics of the Nazi case, these sorts of rationalizations seem common enough that they deserve a name. We find something like them, for example, in the combination of dissatisfaction with the Venezuelan government and genuine love of Chavez characteristic of many Chavistas even before Chavez' death; or in the contrast between the apparent popularity of Putin and the unpopularity of much of Russia's political class and governing apparatus; and perhaps also in the Franco regime, with the disjunction between Franco's apparent high prestige and the unpopularity of the Falange during the 1940s and 1950s. And they seem rooted, as Kershaw implies, in some kind of general cognitive bias or psychological mechanism that operates in a wide variety of contexts. I don't know if psychologists have already baptized the particular mechanism that produced the contrast between the perception of a "Führer without sin" (as a report Kershaw quotes actually says) and the widely detested "little Hitlers" -- Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases doesn't have quite the thing I'm looking for -- but I propose to call it "the good Tsar bias," for the proverbial attitude of ordinary Russians to the Tsar in contrast to his ministers before the revolution. (Whether ordinary Russians actually held this attitude is a different question -- looking around lazily, I can only find one good reference, in W. Bruce Lincoln's Sunlight at Midnight , p. 188 -- but the belief that they did was already proverbial in the 1930s. Even the Security Service of the SS made reference to the "good tsar" idea to account for the widespread finding of their public opinion researchers that people hated the Nazi party, but did not blame Hitler for their everyday woes; Kershaw quotes a report from them that claims that before WWI in Russia people used to explain their dissatisfaction with the government by saying that "Father Tsar knows nothing of it, he would not wish or tolerate it" before going on to warn that "Russia's fate proves this principle is dangerous" -- p. 102 .) The bias comes from the failure to notice that, as Brad Delong used to say , "the cossacks work for the Tsar"; some cognitive or emotional dissonance management mechanism prevents people from acknowledging connections between the proximate and the more remote causal agents of their dissatisfaction that, in retrospect, seem obvious. After all, why, if the leader is so good, does he surround himself with such poor collaborators? In the Hitler case, Kershaw talks about the "naïvety" of the people expressing belief in the "good Führer", and claims that this seems explainable only due to a "prevailing psychological necessity to have a national leader of stature existing in an elevated sphere outside of and removed from the 'conflict sphere' of the everyday political arena" (p. 119). But the dissonance management mechanism seems a bit more general than this. Though the "good Tsar bias" seems to be related to what psychologists call the just world bias , insofar as it appears to serve as a compensatory form of system justification , it does not seem to be quite the same thing. The "good Tsar" bias does not incline people to say that the world is just, or to rationalize injustice as somehow deserved, only to deny that those leaders who are closely tied to the symbols of the nation (the Tsar, the Führer, the King, etc.) bear responsibility for bad outcomes in everyday life; that responsibility, instead, is assigned to subordinates. In this respect, the bias appears to be more closely related to what Dan Kahan and others have called " identity-protective cognition ": the closer a leader is tied to the symbols of the nation or group with whom they identify, and the closer people's identification with the nation or group is, the more difficult it should be for them to accept that the leader is responsible for bad outcomes, since such acceptance threatens one's identity, and the more likely it will be for them to displace that responsibility onto subordinates as a protective measure. And leaders, like Hitler, who are the focus of high-intensity rituals associated with big national occasions -- plebiscitary elections, victories in war, even set-piece speeches on the occasion of good economic news -- are precisely the sorts of leaders who become associated with important community symbols; indeed, in important ways, they come to symbolize the community, as long as the rituals are successful. For this reason, competitive systems of leadership selection should mitigate the bias, since they prevent leaders from being too closely identified with the symbols of the nation, whereas traditional monarchies should amplify it, given the typical association of the monarch with the symbols of the community as such. And wherever the bias operates, leaders should be able to more easily accumulate power at the expense of subordinates. But even leaders who are closely tied to the symbols of the community cannot always avoid association with some bad outcome; and in these cases the bias should diminish. Despite the best efforts of Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry (and the total monopoly over the media that the Nazi Party commanded, enforced by draconian measures against listening to foreign broadcasts), the defeat of the German armies at Stalingrad irreparably tarnished Hitler's own image, since he had repeatedly taken responsibility for the conduct of the war and stressed the importance of taking the city. The outcome could simply not be blamed on malicious or incompetent subordinates. Indeed, we may even observe an inversion of the bias, in which the subordinates are generally exculpated, and superiors are generally blamed, for bad outcomes; I suspect something like that went on at the end of the war in Germany. Readers, are there any other good examples of this bias? |
The Red Sox have four major free agent decisions to make this winter, and the bet here is that you can name three of them immediately. There’s Jacoby Ellsbury, of course. He’ll end up being one of the highest-paid players on the market. There’s also first baseman Mike Napoli, who is turning on the power in September, as well as steady shortstop Stephen Drew, a player more respected by management and the coaching staff necessarily than the fans. All three are good bets to receive qualifying offers somewhere in the vicinity of $14 million. Any who accept will be back next season. Those who don’t and sign elsewhere will garner the Sox a draft pick. But there’s a fourth candidate for that designation, too — and before you scoff, consider the kind of season Jarrod Saltalamacchia has put together. The switch-hitting catcher blasted the game-winning grand slam in the seventh inning of an 8-4 victory over the Yankees last night. He’s not going to match last year’s career high of 25 homers, but he has improved his game in pretty much every other way — be it hits (103), doubles (36), or OPS (.788), not to mention behind the plate. So while the playoffs may be first and foremost on everyone’s mind, the Sox must already be formulating their plan for the offseason. And the more you think about it, the more likely it seems that Salty is a part of it. “Guys like him don’t come around, guys that can catch and hit for that kind of power,” said backup catcher David Ross. “I think he was very underrated coming into this year, and he’s really come into his own. What did he hit last year, 25 homers? Those guys aren’t around anymore. Those guys are hard to find. It’s definitely a commodity. “Everyone in here knows how special he is. The public may not know, but everyone in here knows how big a part of the puzzle he is.” Saltalamacchia played the part of hero last night. He had already walked, doubled and scored a run when he stepped in against Yankees reliever Preston Claiborne in the seventh with one out and the bases loaded. Claiborne had featured an effective changeup that sailed down, away and right off the plate while striking out the previous hitter, Daniel Nava, so Saltalamacchia took note and looked for something over the plate. “I was really just trying to get a good pitch to hit in the air,” he said. “I knew I had (Shane) Vic(torino) at third, fast guy, so if I put it somewhere out in the air he was going to be able to score. I saw how he had pitched Nava. I knew he had good stuff, I’d only faced him once, so I didn’t have a lot of experience with him. I just needed to get a strike up in the zone to do something with.” He took a changeup for a borderline strike and then unloaded on a 92 mph fastball, launching it over the fence in right. “He crushes balls,” Ross said. “When he hits them, they’re not cheap. I was just talking to David (Ortiz). When the ball comes off his bat, it’s a thonk. Some guys just hit them and they don’t sound as loud and then they go further than anybody’s. That’s him.” Saltalamacchia has improved behind the plate — starter John Lackey last night credited him for running the advance meetings confidently — and he has proven an ability to assume an increased workload, thanks to the two-plus months Ross missed with a concussion. His OPS ranks among the top 10 catchers in baseball, and he’s exactly the kind of player the Red Sox would pursue on the open market if he came free from another team. That’s not an issue, however, since he’s already here. And the way he’s going, he’s looking more and more like a keeper. |
May 4, 2015; Houston, TX, USA; Los Angeles Clippers guard Jamal Crawford (11) dribbles against the Houston Rockets in the second half in game one of the second round of the NBA Playoffs at Toyota Center. Los Angeles Clippers won 117 to 101. Mandatory Credit: Thomas B. Shea-USA TODAY Sports The Miami Heat are interested in trading for Jamal Crawford to add depth to its backcourt. Seeking to add some depth behind Dwyane Wade, the Miami Heat have contacted the Los Angeles Clippers about Jamal Crawford’s availability, according to Chris Haynes of Northeast Ohio Media Group. The Cavaliers are also reportedly trying to pry Crawford away from L.A., however it’s unclear if the two-time Sixth Man of the Year is available. ESPN originally reported that the Cavs were attempting to trade Brendan Haywood for Crawford, perhaps seeking to take advantage of the hole left in the Clippers’ roster after DeAndre Jordan decided he would sign with the Dallas Mavericks. The Heat have a pair of bigs they could offer if that’s what the Clippers are looking for in a potential deal. Josh McRoberts is a capable player whose contract matches closely with that of Crawford. If the Clippers are seeking a center, Chris Andersen may also be available. Crawford, who averaged 15.8 points, 1.9 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game last season, is set to make $5.67 million in 2015-16. He has one more year left on his deal that will come off the books in 2016, making him an ideal target for Pat Riley as he seeks to maintain as much roster flexibility for the summer of ’16 as possible. |
Submitted by Infinoid on Wed, 05/20/2009 - 01:22 On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 1.2.0 "Bird Brain." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages. Parrot 1.2.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site, or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code. Parrot 1.2.0 News: - Core + Fixes for pir classes inheriting from core pmcs. + Cleaned up headers and reorganized some sources into subsystem directories. + Clean up PMCs so libparrot.so exports far fewer vtable/method symbols. + Clean up the GC API. + Several unicode identifier improvements in IMCC. - Deprecations + Protoobject stringification is gone. - Documentation + Rewrite several core documents. + Many reworks, improvements & additions to the Parrot Book. + Installation PDD is launched out of draft. - Tools + Fixes for running the language shell generator outside the parrot tree. + Several fixes for developing and building HLLs from an installed parrot. + Configure.pl now has a --no-line-directives option to ease source level debugging. - Miscellaneous + Portability updates for macports, netbsd, mingw32, hpux. + Several (build time, runtime) performance improvements. + Lots of updates to examples and tests. + Various bugfixes, code cleanups, and coding standard fixes. Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. Our next release is 16 June 2009. Enjoy! |
The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, under orders by the head of the University of Tennessee System, on Friday removed from its website a guide to pronouns that many transgender people prefer. The guide, which led to numerous false reports that the university had banned the use of such traditional pronouns as "he" and "she," created a political uproar in the state, with many legislators vowing to punish the university for having published the guide. Joe DiPietro, president of the university system, announced the guide's removal in a letter to his board. "Despite the aggressive efforts by UT Knoxville to communicate the fact that the campus does not require the use of gender-neutral pronouns, I am deeply concerned about the attention this matter continues to receive and the harm it has had on the reputation of the University of Tennessee," DiPietro wrote. "The social issues and practices raised by the Office for Diversity and Inclusion are appropriate ones for discussion on a university campus. However, it was not appropriate to do so in a manner that suggests it is the expectation that all on campus embrace these practices. Chancellor [Jimmy] Cheek and I have agreed that references to the use of gender-neutral pronouns will be removed from the Office for Diversity and Inclusion website. Chancellor Cheek will instruct the vice chancellors not to publish any campuswide practice or policy without his approval after review with the cabinet." While the guide was removed from the university's website, a cached version may be found here. The guide notes that many transgender people do not like to use traditional pronouns and that some prefer what would normally be plural pronouns ("they" and "theirs") while others prefer singular words such as "ze" and "hirs." (The full list illustrates this article.) The guide suggests that faculty members not assume anyone's preferred pronoun or gender identity, and that they ask people their preferences and use them. The guide doesn't ban anyone from preferring traditional pronouns, and does not ban the use of "he" or "she." As criticism of the guide took off, the diversity office issued a clarification that said, in part: "There is no mandate or official policy to use the language. Neither the university nor the Office for Diversity and Inclusion has the power or authority to mandate use of gender-inclusive pronouns." Bloggers and columnists picked up on the guide in the last week, with most of the commentary mocking the guide, with headlines such as "University of Tennessee Bans 'Gender-Based' Pronouns. For Real …" and "Say what? University of Tennessee invents pronouns 'ze, hir, hirs.'" In fact, the University of Tennessee didn't invent those pronouns. Advocates for transgender people have used them for some time, and many colleges share information about these pronouns (without requiring anyone to stop using "he" or "she") as part of efforts to make transgender students and faculty members feel welcome. Here is a guide in use at Ohio University, for example. Ohio allows students to designate a preferred gender pronoun. Harvard University has just adopted a similar policy. But none of this stopped Republican legislators from attacking the pronoun policy as "political correctness run amok" and as evidence of poor governance of the university. Hearings are planned to review the situation. The Family Action Council of Tennessee launched a campaign to "neuter" the policy, which it said was divisive and not inclusive. The council issued a statement saying that the guide really was policy, and not just a set of recommendations. "That has the appearance of neutrality, but it is not neutral. It is not neutral because it does not say that men should be called by masculine pronouns and women should be called by feminine pronouns, which has always been the unwritten standard in our country," said the statement. Via email, Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, answered some questions about the controversy. As to the use of new pronouns by those who wish, Keisling said: "There is a growing trend in the United States, especially in colleges and universities, for some people to use and prefer nontraditional pronouns. That is just a fact of modern American society. Society changes, language changes and today on college campuses, there are increasing numbers of people who specify nontraditional pronouns. Why not respect them? … It reminds me of the popularization of the honorific Ms., which seemed so outrageous to so many for much of the 1960s and then became commonplace in the following decade despite self-righteous whining to the contrary." In terms of legislative threats to the university, Keisling said "that the legislature would even weigh in on this pronoun issue, let alone demand to micromanage it, should be as embarrassing for them as it is troubling for the really good people of Tennessee. The students must have known for some time that their legislature is willfully and proudly ignorant of difference and change, but students will obviously also be less confident that the University of Tennessee has a real commitment to diversity." Still, Keisling saw something positive in the debate, even with the withdrawal of the guide: "I think that, ironically, the action by the school under threat from the extremist Tennessee legislature will do far more to educate people about nontraditional pronouns than the information that they censured would have. Most people who simply want to respect what people think about their own identities are now more likely to be educated about the issue." |
Alfonso “mithy” Aguirre Rodríguez is anything but an LCS rookie: in fact, this is the fourth time that he has found himself fighting for the European crown. After failing to win the title in the previous three attempts (one with Lemondogs, in Season 3, back in 2013, and two with Origen, in the Summer of 2015 and the Spring 2016), the Spanish Support has travelled to Krakow with renewed hopes as he aims to bring that run to an end. But first, the team must fend off the challenge of Splyce, the surprise package of the Summer Split. During the regular season, the team picked up a win and a draw against the Danes, but since then the meta has taken quite a turn, so the teams will play a very different game today. We caught up with mithy before the match and discussed the performance against Unicorns of Love, last week, the team’s preparation for the final and his motivation to break his LCS duck. Just like four months ago, you find yourself taking on a young team in the final. How would you compare this final to the Spring final, against G2? The meta is very different comparing this final to last one, I do not think individual skill will be that much of a deciding factor, and teams will hopefully know how to close out games better this time around. Both you and Zven have expressed many times that winning this title is something that you really want. What are your thoughts, heading into the match, and how motivated are you? I just want to enjoy the opportunity I have been given to play four finals in a row and go to Worlds every single time I have been in the LCS. I will try to embrace the support from the fans and just put in my best performance. Winning the LCS, especially the Summer Split, is the biggest goal I have in my career. During the regular season, the team picked up a win and a draw against Splyce. Considering those matches and the way that both teams played in the semi-finals, what kind of match are you anticipating? Split games do not mean anything because we were playing a completely different game. Now that lane swaps are not an option and the macro game has been reduced by a ton, it will come down to who gets the best draft and executes it better. How did the team prepare for the match? We just scrimmed like we normally do for LCS, but we discussed the draft a lot more than usual. The team had a hard time against UOL in the semi-finals but displayed an incredible fighting spirit in games 1 and 3. How would you review that match? Do you think experience and this ability to play from behind can be crucial? The game we lost we were extremely out-drafted, but even UOL had a hard time closing out the game, which was something we did not expect. In the other games, our draft was better, but our play was poor, except for the last game. Our communication was lackluster and we ended up making a lot of stupid mistakes. I think everyone was disappointed after the series and worked hard this week to fix those issues and show a different G2 in the finals. |
Victoria’s Secret models are known for their curves – they are modelling lingerie, after all. But one of their famous angels recently came under fire for being too thin. South African model Candice Swanepoel, 22, is currently facing a barrage of scrutiny for looking emaciated and unhealthy. Controversy began after an appearance to promote a new line of Victoria’s Secret swimwear, where Swanepoel (seen below center) looked shockingly thin compared to her curvier counterparts Alessandra Ambrosio and Adriana Lima. Swanepoel claims she’s happy and healthy, but her alarmingly tiny physique raises the question: How thin is too thin? Be careful with your calories We all know that in order to lose weight, we need to cut back on calories consumed, and that eating too much can lead to weight gain. But to get some insight into eating disorders, what it means to be too thin and how best to lose weight the healthy way, SheKnows turned to sports dietitian Marie Spano, MS, RD, CSCS, CSSD. Too little food can mean low metabolism and muscle loss When we don’t provide our bodies with enough calories, a few things can start to happen. If a woman is consuming just a few hundred calories less than she burns off, she may not have any side effects beyond weight loss — but if she keeps this up, over time her basal metabolic rate (the calories burned at rest) may slow down to adjust, Spano explains. Further, if a woman doesn’t consume enough total protein to maintain her muscle mass, some of the weight she loses will be muscle. “In the case of anorexia, part of the muscle mass that can be [negatively] affected is the heart,” the sports dietician says. In women, low weight is also related to osteoporosis. Healthy versus harmful weight loss If someone like Candice Swanepoel — who is already thin — wanted to lose weight, Spano would first ask why she wants to lose weight, then discuss a healthy body-fat range and the effects that weight loss can have on muscle tissue. Someone who is already thin who is still seeking to lose weight — especially quickly — may not be aware of the ramifications of that goal, and the damage that actually happens to the body when it goes for too long without enough fuel. After discussing their reasons and hearing the client’s perspective and perception of her body image, Spano might refer the woman to a mental health practitioner who focuses on body image, weight and eating issues. “Eating disorders are complex and oftentimes are the result of life events or the desire to control one aspect of life when the rest of one’s life is out of control,” Spano says. “The role of a mental health professional cannot be underestimated.” Eating disorders explained It remains to be seen whether or not Victoria’s Secret stunner Swanepoel is actually healthy or if her relationship with food is skewed. But the fact remains that eating disorders exist, and women everywhere develop a distorted view of their body image and their relationship with food. Eating disorders include anorexia, bulimia and the most prevalent, EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified). EDNOS includes a variety of criteria for disorders related to eating that do not meet the specific criteria for anorexia or bulimia. Healthy living and eating When it comes to losing weight in a healthy manner, Spano says it totally depends on the person. To start, she encourages people to take up a physical activity or training program they enjoy. “Enjoy” is the key word: If you hate the gym, you are not going to go, so seek out other activities that you like so you’ll stick with it. Spano also works with clients to figure out why they eat (hunger, non-hunger reasons), what they eat and the best solution for them to lose weight. Below are some of the sports dietician’s tips for healthy weight loss and overall healthy living. Tweak your relationship with food: If you struggle with how you view food and have body image issues, make peace with food. Unlike an alcoholic, who can give up alcohol and still live, we cannot give up food. Eat like a European: Sit down, take your time and enjoy the eating experience rather than rushing through a meal and ending up unsatisfied later. The more you truly enjoy the experience of eating, the less likely you are to mindlessly snack later on. Divide your plate: Fill half of your plate with fruits and/or vegetables at every meal. A quarter of your plate should be protein, the other quarter carbohydrates (ideally, whole grains) to ensure you’re getting everything your body needs and that you’re focusing on fresh, non-processed foods. Get enough protein: Adults should have at least 20 grams of protein at every single meal – preferably 30, Spano says, who adds that one surefire way to lose muscle mass is to consume a low-protein diet. Photo credit: WENN.com More on dieting and eating disorders Thin is not ‘in’ Amenorrhea: Dieting to the extreme Truth, lies and reality of anorexia and bulimia |
The fade of Metroid Prime Hunters into relative obscurity is – at first glance – odd considering the popularity of the Prime titles before it and the hype surrounding its own release. Debuting about a year after Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Hunters was the Prime Series contribution to the handheld arena. With its release came a bit of history-making – it was the first Metroid game to feature online multiplayer, as well as the first game on the DS to utilize the system microphone to voice chat with players worldwide. Additionally, Hunters had impressive Prime-themed graphics and a mesmerizing soundtrack, flawlessly supported by atmospheric sound effects. To top this off was the introduction of 6 aesthetically AND mechanically unique bounty hunters who were convincingly at home in a traditionally Samus-centric world. It would be a lie to say that this paragraph of praise is merely an individual opinion. Hunters was generally well-received by the gaming media and was given high marks. While a simple Google search will confirm an overall positive view of the game by the gaming press – the reasons MPH ended up selling the fewest units of the entire Metroid franchise are less easily discovered. Poor Ergonomics Make for Poor Retention Nintendo has undoubtedly come a long way in making their handheld consoles comfortable enough for long, intense gaming sessions. It really was unfortunate that Hunters was released in the dark ages of this timeline. The Nintendo DS was clunky. The buttons were far too squeezed together, and its D-pad was a joke compared to the modern 3DS circle pad. Buttons and pads get quite a bit of mileage out of FPS games, and Nintendo obviously did not have the genre in mind when designing the DS. This issue was only compounded by the release of the DS Lite and its even more compressed buttons. It should be mentioned that Hunters really did try to work with what it had as far as control layouts. As you can see in the picture below, there were left and right oriented layouts for both a stylus and a button mode. Not to be deterred, a few resourceful gamers even utilized the (formerly bundled in) DS thumb strap to mimic the stylus with some measure of success. In the end, though, each mode had inescapable ergonomic issues and complaints of hand cramps were pervasive. Playing Hunters for an extended period of time – especially competitively – meant running your pitiful little phalanges through the gaming gauntlet. While a few extreme gamers persevered and were rewarded with an amazingly in-depth multiplayer experience (along with super-thumbs that could melt steel beams), many players understandably never got past this daunting barrier that no self-respecting game should ever present. These crippling control limitations likely dissuaded many gamers from actually purchasing the game (remember, Blockbuster rentals were still a thing in 2006!) or recommending it to others. In this respect, Hunters was very much inhibited by the specs of its console. A Metroid Game with No Metroids? The Spin-off that Spun Too Far The Metroid franchise is known for, and expected, to heavily emphasize environment exploration and gear-upgrade elements as the player progresses. This was all done effectively in a 2D environment until the Prime series ushered in an immersive 3D experience. Along with the introduction of an FPS viewpoint, both aforementioned exploration and gear-upgrade elements were maintained and even improved upon in the first two Prime titles. However, the refinement process seemed to take a hiatus ( or more accurately, a regression) with the release of Hunters. Hunters had very few gear upgrade options – not even a suit upgrade. The game also lacked iconic baddies such as Ridley, space pirates (exception: Weavel), and even Metroids. In even more of a slap-to-the-face to dedicated fans, bosses were recycled and underwhelming and level designs uninspired. These changes did not at all foster the exploration elements that Metroid games are renowned for. Fans were blindsided by the game’s pivot to an overt prioritization of a competitive, FPS-centric online multiplayer in lieu of the traditional PVE mixture of action and platformer elements. This contentious shift in genre firmly entrenched Hunters as the black sheep of the Metroid franchise, and likely fragmented the fanbase. The Wild West of Wi-Fi: Pitfalls of Pre-patch Era Online Environments Gamers today are truly spoiled. Patch cycles, anti-hacking safeguards, and network stability are now considered baseline expectations. Look to the smash-hits League of Legends and Overwatch as prime examples. These games are textbook examples of what online gaming should be in 2016. If you dialed back a few years into the experimental phase of online gaming however, you would inevitably witness the previously unknown 8th level of hell. Hardcore Hunters players are intimately familiar with this era – in fact they had front row seats to the clown fiesta that was online gaming in the first decade of the 21st century. Does playing against a levitating opponent with infinite health and an aimbot sound fun to you? It wasn’t. How about being frozen from halfway across the map by a weapon that’s supposed to have a melee range, and then getting sniped? (Thanks, flawed game physics!) Enjoy getting matched against 3 other players who all decide to wall-glitch and opportunistically camp out until you make a single wrong move? Welcome to Metroid Prime Hunters Online! No patches for glitches and exploits, and no repercussions for hacking. In that toxic environment, becoming competent – much less ranking up, while avoiding participation in rampant anarchy – was a grind that few players were willing to endure. Oh, and let’s not forget hand cramps! A Crazy Pipe-Dream: Refine Hunters Concepts to create a PVP Powerhouse Here is a thought experiment for you – though, as a fan, I may be a bit biased: Imagine the online multiplayer presented in Metroid Prime Hunters on a more powerful console like the WiiU, or on the much improved 3DS handheld. This fictitious game would also benefit from modern-era online gaming features and safeguards which gamers have now come to expect – including patch cycles that balance characters, refine current modes, fix exploits, and gift the community with shiny new content like new hunters and maps. Something along the lines of Overwatch sounds feasible – but based on an already beloved IP with an established universe. Building upon the idea, this imaginary Hunters sequel could be a flagship game for the NX. Think of it as Nintendo’s response to FPS gamers who were wooed away by Halo and Call of Duty. With the recent exception of Splatoon, Nintendo consoles have historically lacked shooters in their arsenal of titles. The Metroid franchise could suavely introduce a polished spin-off to help fill that niche. The game would be quite expensive to make, and would undoubtedly be a risky venture. However, it might also be the breath of life that the Metroid franchise desperately needs. Fingers crossed for Federation Force though. The next addition to the Metroid universe is coming out August 19th. FUN FACTS Hunters was first presented to the public through the demo, Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt. It was bundled with Nintendo DS systems for a limited time. The full version of Hunters was initially slated for release in October 2005. However, backlash at that year’s E3 over the lack of online multiplayer pushed the release date back to March 2006. The game was originally going to be developed primarily by Retro Studios. Retro had to pass over their role as head developer due to their schedule-filling commitment to the Prime sequels. NST – a Redmond-based developer known for porting titles over to different Nintendo consoles, took Retro’s place as lead developer. Retro ultimately collaborated with NST to ensure that Hunters remained true to the feel of the Prime series. Did you play Metroid Prime Hunters? What did you think about the game? Leave any comments, observations, or critiques in the comment section below. |
Ron Carson, one of LPL Financial's best known, longest-tenured financial advisers, is leaving the firm, according to a source with knowledge of the move. Mr. Carson, whose firm Carson Wealth Management, has $7.4 billion in client assets, will join a broker-dealer under the umbrella of Cetera Financial Group. Mr. Carson already has ties to Cetera Financial Group. Its new CEO, Robert Moore, was president of LPL Financial but left in March 2015. He was expected to take over as CEO of LPL from Mark Casady, but did not get the nod from LPL's board. Mr. Moore is also on the board of Carson Wealth Management. Mr. Carson did not respond to calls and emails for comment. A spokesman for LPL, Jeff Mochal, did not immediately comment. A spokesman for Cetera, Joseph Kuo, said the firm did not comment on rumors. (More: Mr. Carson on why we're on the eve of massive disruption in financial services) Mr. Carson's firm has $2.6 billion in assets at LPL, with the remainder at other custodians. Of the $2.6 billion in assets, $1 billion is in advisory and the rest in brokerage. Based in Omaha, Neb., Mr. Carson joined LPL in 1989, according to his profile on BrokerCheck. Since then, he has grown his business into one of the leading independent advisory firms in the country, routinely rated by Barron's magazine as one of the leading independent advisers in the country. This is the second prominent, long-standing LPL adviser who has recently left the firm. WealthPLAN Partners, co-founded by Brent O'Mara and Todd Feltz, is a hybrid RIA managing $2.2 billion of client assets and was previously affiliated with LPL for 27 years before jumping to Securities America Inc. earlier this month. During a conference call this month with investors, Mr. Casady gave no hint of such prominent advisers leaving the firm and stated that LPL's business is currently being supported by “continued strong recruiting.” With his move to Cetera, Mr. Carson is joining a firm that is trying to shake off a recent history filled with problems. Its prior owner, Nicholas Schorsch, in 2013 and 2014 went on a debt-fueled buying binge of retail brokerage firms that eventually pushed Cetera's prior owner, RCS Capital Corp., into bankruptcy. Earlier this year, Cetera Financial Group emerged from bankruptcy with new owners and no ties to Mr. Schorsch. Mr. Moore joined the Cetera board as chairman in May and then became CEO in September, replacing Larry Roth. And at the start of this week, Cetera, with close to 9,000 financial advisers across a network of seven brokerage firms, experienced a technology meltdown when its computer systems crashed, leaving brokers with limited access to serving client accounts and managing client money for the better part of Monday and Tuesday. |
By Terry Melanson (2012/08/05) Anyone the least familiar with the Bohemian Grove has come across the claim that the 40-foot stone owl is a reference to Moloch, associated with child sacrifice in the Bible and rabbinic tradition. The owl, however – to the Bohemian club, as well – has traditionally symbolized wisdom. While there’s no ancient description of what a Moloch idol actually looked like, relatively modern representations have invariably depicted a bull-headed statue. Throughout history, in fact, not once was Moloch ever associated with an owl – until, that is, the age of the internet. I’d initially surmised that Alex Jones was the first person to put the Moloch spin on the owl. In 2000, as we know, he snuck into the Grove, videotaped the Cremation of Care ritual, and became an internet superstar – and rightly so. Numerous times in his film, Alex matter-of-factly states that the Bohemian owl represents Moloch. The first conflation in book-form appears to be David Icke’s The Biggest Secret (Feb. 1999), a little more than a year before Alex Jones, Mike Hanson, Jon Ronson and “Rick the lawyer” had infiltrated the annual elite summer encampment in July of 2000. On page 335, in the first edition, we read: The owl is the symbol of Moloch or Molech, an aspect of Nimrod/Baal. Moloch demands the sacrifice of children and it was to this deity that the children of the Babylonians, Hebrews, Canaanites, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, were sacrificially burned. This picture provided visual support for the claims over many years that Druid rituals were being performed at the Grove with people in red robes marching in procession chanting to the Great Owl, Moloch. … The symbolism of being able to see in the dark and with a 360 degree range of vision are also appropriate for a Brotherhood deity. These world famous Brotherhood initiates at Bohemian Grove burn a Celtic wicker effigy at the start of their ‘camp’ to symbolise their ‘religion’. … A local community newspaper, The Santa Rosa Sun, reported in July 1993 about the Cult of Canaan and the legend of Moloch at Bohemian Grove, but police investigations into alleged murders on the site have predictably led nowhere. The last paragraph is key to finding out where the theory had originated. When I first got wired (as they used to say) in 2000, a conspiracy-related reading frenzy ensued. I had already been a bibliophile of sorts before that, but the World Wide Web opened the flood gates on anything and everything supposedly arcane or hidden. One of the most popular webpages on the grove, as some may well remember, was called “Bohemian Bigwigs Perpetuate Canaanite Cult.” This article was The Santa Rosa Sun piece referred to by Icke. Here’s how it looked back in 1996. The Moloch (Molech)/Owl identification, per Mark Evans, is as follows: Should the Cremation of Care ceremony so quickly be dismissed, given its occult nature and historical antecedents? This ceremony resembles the ancient Canaanite worship of the idol, Molech. Like the Owl of Bohemia, the ancient Ammonite idol Molech was a towering larger-than-life edifice. Whereas the Owl is solid, the bronze Molech was hollow. Molech worship consisted of the ritualized sacrifice of the first-born infant son of every Ammonite newlywed family. Building a fire in the belly of the beast until the flames poured out of the mouth, the high priest mounted a scaffold and tossed the first-born male child into an aperture in Molech’s chest, to the incantation of drums and droned liturgy of the priests of Molech. Technically, Owl worship, as it is practiced at the Grove, is somewhat different from Molech worship. Peter Weiss, writing in Spy Magazine, November 1989, states, “Bohemian Club literature . . . boosts that the Cremation of Care ceremony derives from Druid rites, medieval Christian liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespearean drama, and nineteenth-century American lodge rites.” Is this the straight goods, or is it PR sugar coating of a darker sacrificial rite, terrifying even on a symbolic level? John DeCamp’s book, The Franklin Cover-Up, includes Paul Bonacci’s testimony about a snuff film of a child being murdered on July 26, 1984 in California in “an area that had big trees.” At a meeting in Santa Rosa, DeCamp told a group that he had edited out Bonacci’s references to an enormous, moss-covered owl and men in hooded red robes because he not know then about the owl at the Grove and thought it “too far fetched for people to believe.” In the fall of 1992, Paul Bonacci was shown a black and white photo of the moss-covered owl at the Grove and quickly identified it as the site of the July 1984 snuff film described in DeCamp’s book. Although this testimony has been available to law enforcement officials since mid-October 1992, no official investigation has been made. A casket christened “Dull Care” and borne, like the passing of Arthur, in a boat across the lake could be a symbol, also, not only of “cares of the world,” but of caring itself. The denizens of the Grove, as a collective body, are the ruling class and upper echelon bagmen who make and orchestrate war – the modern Molech. It would make sense to immolate caring, conscience and the consequences of their business transactions, lest they take responsibility for millions of souls around the globe whose lives have been affected by wars of Yankee Imperialism in the twentieth century. Seems the most explosive allegations about the Grove are included in the Moloch narrative from the get-go. However, Evans didn’t go so far as to state that the owl at the grove is a representation of Moloch – that would be left to later embellishments on the internet, in books, and film – only that there are similarities between the Cremation of Care ceremony and what little we know about the Moloch worship of antiquity. Mark Walter Evans has indeed admitted he’s the originator of the analogy – to Brian Romanoff of Nor Cal Truth, and in a reply to an IndyMedia article on Grove: As the author of the original article [published simultaneously, in July 0f 1993, in the Santa Rosa Sun as “Inside Bohemian Grove,” and in the North Coast Xpress as “Bohemian Bigwigs Perpetuate Canaanite Cult,”] that suggested an equation – of sorts – between the “Owl of Bohemia” and Molech, I’d like to put my own two cents into the pot. In the first place, I am glad that the occult nature of the “Cremation of Care” ceremony has begun to receive the attention that it deserves. The Masters of War at the Bohemian Grove are nasty customers, and all their works are evil. On this point, both the Left, and the Right wings of the anti- New World Order forces, can agree. I wish to say that when I wrote the article, I did not mean to make a literal equation of the “Owl of Bohemia” with Molech, but a figurative one, stressing the simularities, and announcing the continuity of a “cult of Sacrifice,” on a Symbolic level. That many fundamentalist Christians have run with this thesis, and taken the equation literally, is an intersting phenomenon — but I was more inclined to draw a simile that to starkly declare it was “Molech” his-self. … Alex and company were the first to actually capture footage of the famous Cremation of Care ritual. But it was a quick in-and-out operation. Fearful of being made, the infiltrators retreated after the conclusion of the opening festivities. In the 1980s a few journalists managed to spend days in the Grove, publishing articles about their experiences. The first was in 1980. Mother Jones sent Rick Clogher, whose report appeared in the magazine a year later: “Bohemian Grove: Inside the Secret Retreat of the Power Elite” (Mother Jones, Aug. 1981). Clogher wasn’t there for the Cremation of Care, but he was privy to a Lakeside talk by William F. Buckley, as well as the main grove play (that year called Olympus, written by Peter R. Arnott). “Cronus, the Harvester, has declared himself God of the Universe,” Clogher writes, describing the play. “In the past, gods have had their power usurped by succeeding generations. To prevent this, Cronus devours his own offspring. But he is undone by his wife, Rhea, and his mother, Gaea, who help one son escape. That son, Zeus, returns full-grown to challenge his father. Having freed an army of demigods banished by his father to the Underworld, Zeus leads the attack against Cronus’ forces. Along the switchback trails that rise up the tree-covered hillside at the back of the stage, the battle ebbs and flows. Rockets streak off into the night over the heads of the audience; smoke bombs explode and columns of fire shoot skyward; spotlights careen off each other as the armies clash. In the end, Zeus pledges to establish a new, just reign and to create a race of humans, touched by divinity yet humbled by mortality.” The Bohemian Grove stagecraft, owing much to David Belasco in the early 1900s, is like the “paraphernalia of a secret cult,” wrote Richard Reinhardt for American Heritage. The plays developed “a sort of institutional inertia, like the rites of an ancient church. Their evanescence, their exclusivity, their pageantry, their archaic language all gave them the aura of tradition in a young state that has been said to lack tradition. Every summer, the Grove Plays rolled forth in comforting similarity. Immense, heathen allegories, old-fashioned heroism, soul-stirring morality: that was the stuff of Bohemian dramaturgy.” The most detailed article about the Grove, in a mainstream setting, was Philip Weiss’ “Masters of the Universe Go to Camp: Inside the Bohemian Grove,” Spy Magazine, November 1981. Like Clogher, with the help of Mary Moore, Weiss snuck in; and spent a week there during the 16-day encampment. Weiss quotes an official invitation to the Grove, thus: “Brother Bohemians: The Sun is Once Again in the Clutches of the Lion, and the encircling season bids us to the forest — there to celebrate… the awful mysteries!” “Bohemians come! Find home again in the Grove! Burn CARE and hurl his ashes, whirling, from our glade!” “Come out Bohemians! come out and play, come with all the buoyant impetuous rush of youth!” “The religion they consecrate,” he writes, “is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun.” For the Bohemians, the Cremation of Care ritual is essential. Sociologist G. William Domhoff writes that it’s an “initiation into the spirit of the encampment. It is all very fancy. The script varies only slightly each year. It is also a put-on, a mock of rituals — but it is a ritual ceremony nonetheless. Postmodernists might call it a meta-ritual.” “Initiation” is apt in this situation. Another sociologist, James Vaughn, in his “The Culture of the Bohemian Grove: The Dramaturgy of Power,” Michigan Sociological Review, Vol. 20 (Fall 2006), goes to great lengths to describe the meaning and function of the ritual. “The paramount event of the Midsummer Encampment is a Druidic ‘mock ritual’, the Cremation of Care ceremony,” he writes: The Cremation of Care is a ritualized sacrifice of an effigy of the body of the Dull Cares of the world. Dull Care is understood to mean the accumulated stresses, boredoms, and sins accumulated by each Bohemian during the past year. This effigy is cremated upon the altar of Bohemia at the foot of the Owl Shrine. The Shrine is a forty foot tall Owl Deity that symbolizes “…all mortal wisdom…” (Annals of the Bohemian Club vol. V: 431) and is the tutelary deity of the Club. Through the process of conducting this research, I came to an understanding that the Cremation of Care is a formal ritual that functions as a group catharsis for those that participate in it. As a sociological researcher, Vaughn went to the grove to observe his subjects in “the discrepant role of the servant”; the “classic type of non-person” that wouldn’t raise suspicions. Lowly servant or not, from 1995 through to 1997 he had managed to meet “Presidents of the United States of America, Speakers of the U. S. House of Representatives, Secretaries of: Defense, State, Treasury, and Energy, and Directors of the CIA. …Directors of some of the largest U. S. Corporations involved in: banking, development, military contracts, insurance, transportation, communications and energy. Several individuals present during this field study were identified as judges, elected state officials, lobbyists, famous entertainers, and academics from some of the most prestigious universities in the United States.” Vaughn describes how the Cremation of Care generates “heightened emotional states,” even in himself: As the Cremation of Care unfolded, I experienced several levels of emotion. One emotional state that was experienced was astonishment that men of such high social status and mostly political conservatives were assembled and engaged in this ritual. Another was a sense of “calming, being soothed by the music.” He continues with descriptive language such as the “assembled witnesses” becoming “a single whole”; “darkness removing boundaries between them”; lifting their drinks at certain points, or swaying “together to the music” … “a quasi-religious sentiment permeated the proceedings” … “a group cathartic release in flame.” Alex Jones and Jon Ronson had similar views about the revelry of the participants they had witnessed during the ceremony. Moloch or no Moloch, Babylon or Baal; the Grove, it seems, is a hallowed place for the power elite. “Like Delphi or Montserrat,” according to Richard Reinhardt, “whose sacred allure affects every visitor and whose sanctity seems to predate recorded history; no one observing the pilgrimage can doubt the Grove’s power, whatever the nature of its ritual.” |
Jurgen Klinsmann confirmed that Brad Guzan will remain the starting goalkeeper for the United States in the all-important Confederations Cup playoff with Mexico, as well as the two friendlies prior. Klinsmann cited a lack of preparation time as the main reason, and did not rule out a reevaluation of the position following the match against Mexico. “Since we are so short away from the clash with Mexico, we are not making any real changes right now,” Klinsmann told the media at camp in Washington, D.C. “Brad is the No. 1, Tim is the number 2. Tim accepted that because he was gone for more than a year from the team. Once we’ve got that game – hopefully successfully – out of the way, then we can think about maybe how we can split time. But now it’s really about getting consistency with the players and getting the job done in October.” The decision is a curious – and admittedly difficult – one for Klinsmann. Guzan has performed well but not great during his time in goal for the United States. Obviously Howard is a legend at the U.S. level, but he was quite poor for Everton last season after his heroic World Cup performance. Howard looked much better last weekend for Everton, but it’s a small sample size. The bottom line is the United States is likely in good hands either way, and have much bigger issues to address, but it’s certainly something to watch going forward. Follow @the_bonnfire |
The citizens of Talkeetna, Ak., are still smitten with their politikitten. Courtesy Nagley's General Store This time, Alaska may have really found a way to fix American politics. The mayor of Talkeetna, Ak. boats sky-high approval ratings, a 15-year winning streak and, with over 6,000 subscribers, more friends than you on Facebook. His secret? He’s a cat. Fifteen years ago, the citizens of Talkeetna (pop. 800) didn’t like the looks of their candidates for mayor. Around that same time resident Lauri Stec, manager of Nagley’s General Store, saw a box of kittens and decided to adopt one. She named him Stubbs because he didn’t have a tail and soon the whole town was in love with him. (MORE: A Brief History of Cats on YouTube) So smitten were they with this kitten, in fact, that they wrote him in for mayor instead of deciding on one of the two lesser candidates. Mayor Stubbs has held his position ever since. Many citizens are genuinely happy to allow a kitteh to rule the roost. “He doesn’t raise our taxes—we have no sales tax. He doesn’t interfere with business. He’s honest,” said Stec, who converted her store into a part-time mayor’s office when Stubbs claimed victory. Not even the dogs seem to take issue with their new boss, even though there are reportedly more canines in Talkeetna than there are people. “I’ve never seen a dog mess with him,” a local business owner said. (MORE: Cute Overload: Can Watching a Puppycam Improve Your Motor Skills?) Stubbs also gives tourists a reason to stop in on their way to Mount McKinley. And, in town Talkeetna’s size, a dozen tourists a day can really make a difference. The honorable Mr. Stubbs doesn’t have too many responsibilities as mayor, since the town is technically only a “historical district,” says Andi Manning, the president of the Chamber of Commerce explained. And to be fair, Stubbs isn’t exactly the hardest working man in Alaska. He enjoys the finer things, like drinking water out of a wine glass with catnip in it and having his belly rubbed by his constituents. A clerk of the town describes the polikitten as “very demanding” and in need of many a long nap to get through the mountain of work he doesn’t do. Hmm, so maybe this isn’t the solution to American politics. But think of how cute the State of the Union would be! MORE: Our Nominations for the Internet Cat Video Film Festival |
As I supposed it might, it seems that the slight delay in shooting Django Unchained has given Quentin Tarantino time to file his Films of the Year list. He’s gone for a top 11, but thanks to a tie, there’s actually12. He’s also gone ahead and added some “nice try” and “worst film” selections as well as suggestions for best director and screenplay. From my point of view there’s only one big surprise – you’ll probably know it the second you see it. Top 11 of 2011 Midnight In Paris Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes Moneyball The Skin I Live In X-Men: First Class Young Adult Attack The Block Red State Warrior The Artist / Our Idiot Brother (tie) The Three Musketeers Nice Try Award Drive Hannah Drive Angry Real Steel Best Director Pedro Almodovar Bennett Miller Woody Allen Jason Reitman Michel Hazanavicius Best Original Screenplay Midnight In Paris Young Adult Red State Attack The Block Our Idiot Brother Beginners Best Adapted Screenplay Moneyball The Skin I live In Carnage Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes Hugo X-Men: First Class Worst Films Sucker Punch Potiche (Trophy Wife) Miral Insidious Rampart Straw Dogs Paranormal Activity 3 Meek’s Cutoff And there was me thinking – genuinely – that he’d have been on Team Sucker Punch. I can fully understand why the rest of his “worst list” has shaken out how it has: despite there being some utterly, loopy fun bits in Insidious, there’s a lot of rubbish too, and the other films really are bad. All of these lists were submitted by Tarantino to the fansite Tarantino Archives, through whom he has published a few lists in the past. Perhaps allowing for Tarantino to name and fame a few more Weinstein pictures, there’s also a list of other films he “considered”: 50/50 Beginners Hugo The Iron Lady Carnage Green Hornet Green Lantern Captain America The Descendants My Week With Marilyn Fast Five Tree Of Life The Hangover Part II Mission Impossible 4 The Beaver Contagion The Sitter War Horse I don’t think the implication is necessarily that Tarantino considers these “runners up” – surely that’s what Nice Try was about – but that he wants to name them as other films he chewed over, for whatever reason. One of those reasons being that a couple are Oscar contenders for his chums Bob and Harvey, right? The Iron Lady and My Week With Marilyn certainly do seem conspicuous. (Last Updated ) Related Posts None found |
Officers trying to trace two youths who verbally abused and physically attacked victim on Jubilee Line tube in east London Police are trying to track down two youths after a teenager was attacked on a train and forced to apologise for being gay. The 19-year-old man was placed in a headlock and strangled until he eventually did what they said because he was struggling to breathe. The incident occurred on a westbound Jubilee Line train between West Ham and North Greenwich on 21 October at around 11.10am. The victim and his friends were wearing fancy dress for an event they were attending when they were approached by the two youths who boarded at West Ham. The two suspects verbally abused the victim for being gay and turned aggressive when they were challenged. They forced him into a headlock, snatched his phone and threatened to stab him until he apologised for being gay. Although they returned the phone, the two youths then got into a fight with the victim’s friends in which a 25-year-old woman suffered bruising after being punched and pushed to the ground. The victims left the train at North Greenwich. The British Transport Police (BTP) released images of the two men on Monday and urged anyone who recognised them to come forward. The BTP said in a statement: “Hate crime will not be tolerated by the British Transport Police. We believe everyone has the right to travel safely. “We won’t tolerate behaviour where someone is targeted because they are perceived to be different, or made to feel uncomfortable on their journey.” |
Enaam Ahmed: The karting world champion tipped to become the next Lewis Hamilton Enaam Ahmed has won five major titles this year and has made breaking into Formula One his ambition. Enaam Ahmed has won five major titles this year and has made breaking into Formula One his ambition. Meet Enaam Ahmed: The 14-year-old World and European Karting Champion tipped to follow in the footsteps of Lewis Hamilton. After moving from England’s Comer Cadets to KF3 Worldwide Karting last year, Ahmed has taken the circuit by storm, widely considered to have reached a level never before seen at his age. In 2014 the youngster from London has clinched five major titles – the CIK World and European Championships, the WSK Super Masters, the Champions Cup and the Winter Cup – and he has even put Michael Schumacher's son Mick, tipped for a prestigious career of his own, in the shade. Sky Sports went out to meet the “unassuming, bashful” teenager that will undoubtedly gate-crash Formula One as Hamilton did in 2007, according to his manager Chris Panayiotou. “He’s an exception to others and has an incredible talent,” Panayiotou told Sky Sports. Rye House kart circuit has had many champions come through here such as Hamilton, Jenson Button and also David Coulthard.... I have no doubt that one day he (Ahmed) will make it in Formula One. Ahmed's manager Chris Panayiotou “Rye House kart circuit has had many champions come through here such as Hamilton, Jenson Button and also David Coulthard. “Enaam has started his career here and I think he has a better chance than most because of the foundations he has set. “I have no doubt that one day he will make it in Formula One.” Part of the foundations Ahmed has set is to stay grounded and focused with his school work – something the driver believes can only help him with his future in the sport. “It’s very important,” Ahmed said. “It helps me a lot, especially when it comes to the data in racing; looking at graphs and stuff about the car. “I tried a lot of sports, like football, but I realised I was good at karting and when I started doing well and getting on podiums I just kept going. “I race karts at 85-90mph so I’ve had to up my game physically.” Scott Rider, Ahmed’s head of year and PE teacher at Portland Place School in Westminster, believes the youngster’s character is commendable and will also aid his cause in reaching the pinnacle of racing. Ryder said: “He’s very unassuming. If you met him you wouldn’t guess he’s a world champion. He’s quite bashful really and he certainly isn’t telling anyone what he’s done.” Ahmed’s target is to beat his hero Hamilton and become the youngest ever Formula One driver when he is 21 and the backing of Hamilton’s former engine tuner at kart level, John Davis, is helping his cause. So remember the name now; Enaam Ahmed. It’s likely to be one for the future. |
Formula 1 teams have written to governing body the FIA expressing their concerns about proposed changes to the way the sport is run. They are worried by plans to increase entry fees, restrict teams' input into rule-making and a potential increase in the power of F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone. Their observations come ahead of an FIA meeting to finalise next year's rules. Currently, teams do not know the entry date for next year's championship, or how much the entry fee will be. The standard entry date of 30 June was moved to the end of September to allow more time for discussions on cost control, which have so far not come to fruition. But no new entry date has so far been published ahead of Friday's meeting of the FIA World Motor Sport Council, F1's legislative body. "Currently, costs are controlled by a system called resource restriction, which limits the amount of time and resource teams can commit to research and development, and the amount of staff they can employ. But that cannot control what goes on in people's heads - which is where the ideas come from that lead to the new parts." Read more from Gary Anderson on F1 cost-control And under proposals discussed by FIA president Jean Todt and Ecclestone, the entry fee for the teams would be increased from 309,000 (£245,630) euros to 500,000 (£397,418) euros plus 7,000 (£5,564) euros per constructors' championship point. Had that change been enforced this year, it would have meant world champions Red Bull would have paid £4.859m euros (£3.855m) rather than 309,000 euros (£245,630) to enter this year. The letter, written by some teams to Todt this week, says: "At a time when the FIA and teams are actively engaged in cost control, the teams wish to repeat their concern at such a significant increase." The proposal has come up in talks between Ecclestone and Todt. The FIA has been seeking more money from Ecclestone's companies to ensure it is sufficiently funded. In return, Ecclestone has been demanding concessions on how the sport is run. The FIA have decided they could secure some of the costs from the teams. The letter also expresses the discontent over plans to fundamentally change the process of rules formulation. Among the proposals is to abolish the sporting and technical working groups. In the current model of governance, assemblies of senior team personnel meet in these groups to thrash out rule changes. Once agreed they are passed to the F1 Commission - a collection of teams, sponsors, circuits and Ecclestone and the FIA president - for agreement before they are rubber-stamped by the World Council. But the F1 Commission has not met for months and now Todt and Ecclestone are proposing to ditch the SWG and TWG. "At a time when the FIA and Teams are actively engaged in cost control, the Teams wish to repeat their concern at such a significant increase. Moreover, Team fees and Driver Super Licence fees should be kept separate, and not bundled together." F1 teams' letter to the FIA Proposals for next year also include a plan to revamp the F1 Commission to reduce the number of teams involved from all 12 to six. The teams say they are "concerned over the proposed composition… retaining the status quo is the preferred option". The signatories are worried that reducing the teams' representation on the F1 Commission will make it easier for Ecclestone to push through changes he desires. The third part of the letter refers to ongoing discussions to try to enshrine the sport's Resource Restriction Agreement into the sporting regulations. In June, 10 of the 12 teams agreed with the FIA a basis on which this would happen ahead. Red Bull and junior team Toro Rosso opposed it. The agreement could at that point have been adopted as the rules dictate that a change can be made if it is agreed by a simple majority of teams before 30 June, but that unanimity is needed after that date. The modification was not voted through at the time in order to give more time to try to come to a unanimous agreement, but the two Red Bull teams have continued to block it. The letter asks Todt to enshrine the RRA into the 2013 rules on a voluntary basis ahead of full adoption in 2014. "We would like to support the full introduction of a chassis RRA and power-unit cost limitations in 2014, with a voluntary chassis RRA submission procedure to the FIA implemented for 2013," it says. The letter has not been signed by all the teams, but the signatories are a mixture of teams involved in the umbrella group Fota and those that are not, which are Ferrari, Red Bull, Toro Rosso, Sauber and HRT. Sauber and HRT have signed the letter. Ferrari said they had not because they preferred to deal directly with the FIA and Ecclestone. |
Mark Zuckerberg made a huge splash in 2010 when he announced on the Oprah Winfrey Show that he was giving $100 million to "fix" the public school system in the blighted, violent city of Newark, New Jersey. Newark mayor Cory Booker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Zuckerberg said they would use the money to transform a failing school system from the top down. By opening charter schools, bringing in high-performing young teachers, and getting rid of teacher tenure, the three men said they hoped, in the space of five years, to create a model for education reform that would spread across the country. Five years later, that plan is in tatters. Newark schools are still struggling, teachers still have tenure, and the education reform movement no longer sees Newark as a model worth emulating. In her new book The Prize, former Washington Post journalist Dale Russakoff tracks what happened to that $100 million. Christie and Booker, she writes, used Newark schools and the glow of Zuckerberg's donation as a political tool, then quickly moved on to bigger, better things: for Booker, a Senate seat, for Christie, a presidential campaign. Tens of millions of dollars were spent far away from classrooms, on things like $1000-a-day consultants and $30 million in backpay for the teachers union. A gulf grew between the successful charter schools Zuckerberg opened and the district schools, which continued to struggle. While graduation rates at public schools increased, test scores never really did. And while reformers managed to change the teachers' contract to include merit pay for high-performing educators, they were unable to get rid of the use of seniority — which kept the district locked in old union-backed systems of hiring and firing teachers based on how long they had worked, not their performance. Caught up in the midst of reform efforts headed by mostly-white politicians and their billionaire benefactor, Russakoff writes, the almost entirely poor, black community of Newark grew angry, afraid and disillusioned as their neighborhood schools closed down. Changes, dreamed up in the skyscraper offices of consultants, were imposed on them with little of their input. The white superintendent that Zuckerberg and Booker brought in to head Newark reform, Cami Anderson, was met with such hostility at community meetings that she could often barely speak over the shouts of angry parents. BuzzFeed News spoke with Rusakoff about Zuckerberg's millions, the Newark school district's $1 billion, and the complex issues of race, money, and philanthropy in Newark schools. You tracked where Zuckerberg's money ultimately ended up going, and found that $20 million of it was paid to outside consulting firms. That's a huge number. It was surprising to me to see how much they were spending on consultants, but apparently, it's not unusual. A lot of Race To the Top [a federal grant program] money, and Gates Foundation and Walton Family Foundation money, that's where a lot of the consultants come from. It's a fairly small circle of people who have been everywhere in education reform, and the going rate is $1000 a day. Some of the work the consultants did was valuable and lasting, but the problem was this assumption that there's expertise out there and we can just buy it, bring it to Newark, and fix the system. That's so out of sync with reality. The district did need changes, but that isn't all reform is. It's figuring out the day-to-day, treacherous work that has to go on in schools and classrooms. The consulting mentality was, "Let's fix all these systems," but it wasn't really about the lives of children and teachers. So that consultant-driven focus on fixing the top-down, systemic problems, what effect did that have on school reform efforts in Newark? One very illustrative example is that, the very first year before the district had hired a superintendent, they had a consulting firm in that was really changing the way the district operated. [The reform plan called for] closing a number of district schools and bringing in charter schools. There was one school that was closed, the 15th Avenue School, a really incredibly troubled school. They closed it, and there was a school just across the park, so in a plan scripted by the consultants they decided to send the kids to the next closest school. Which makes sense if you're looking at a map. But if you're living in the neighborhood, you know that that park is a haven for drug dealing and gang activity, and you don't want kids walking through that territory right away. The parents were completely terrified. Mel Evans / AP Where did race play into the problems that the politicians and consultants, who with the exception of Cory Booker, were mostly white, faced when they tried to push changes onto the overwhelmingly-black city of Newark? [Booker, Zuckerberg, and Christie] really basically played into these already-existing issues of race in Newark. By doing this as a top-down effort that didn't really engage the teachers and parents and people in Newark, it fit with this pattern of outsiders coming in and doing things to Newark instead of with Newark, which goes all the way back to white flight and urban renewal. This fear was in the DNA of Newark; one woman said, "We drank it with our mother's milk. We expect that people with money from the outside are going to come in and make money off of us." Was that reaction inevitable? What's the alternative when you're trying to change the system? There are valid concerns that if you open school reform up to a democratic process, you're not going to change anything, because the money will end up back in the hands of the union and political bosses who are already in power. There was a movement in the 80s in Newark where there was a parent uprising against the school board, and they fought for the right to elect their own board members, who up until then, the mayor had appointed. There was a massive election, something like 24 different organizations ran their own slates of candidates, and the one who ultimately got control of the school board was the biggest political boss in Newark. But I guess I just have to believe there's a third way. Right now, local control is about to be restored to the city [instead of the governor]. There are a lot of grassroots organizations that include retired teachers and principals and clergy and people who want to have a parent and resident voice. [Mayor Ras] Baraka wants control to be restored to the city within a year. I'm skeptical [that they will be better able to get the money into classrooms], but I'm hopeful. What was your impression of the role that Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan played? This was their first big foray into philanthropy. I think they were both completely green. Zuckerberg met Cory Booker and was wowed by him, and Sheryl Sandberg, who vetted this whole thing, had the same impression. It says a lot about his national reputation that people who were normally much more circumspect thought he could do these almost miraculous things. There was a readiness to believe he was superman. There are a lot of indications that Zuckerberg didn't really do his due diligence, that this was, as somebody present at the early stages put it to me, "an impulse buy." Booker had said, "I've got this, you give me your money, we'll make this happen, no problem." But [Zuckerberg] was totally ignorant of the realities of Newark. A big part of Zuckerberg's plan was changing the teacher contract to get get rid of seniority. That was something that was really important to him. But he apparently didn't know that seniority wasn't even part of the contract, that that was set in state law, and he would have had to go through the legislature to change it. And almost anybody could have told you that the New Jersey legislature wasn't going to touch seniority. Julie Jacobson / AP So what has changed for Zuckerberg and Chan now, in terms of how they operate as education philanthropists? I think he's going to do a lot more research from now on. I think that his idea was, that this was going to be a national model that could be taken from city to city. And I don't think he sees education that way any more. I think he sees education as something that is very specific to each community. And I also think he was really, really unhappy and surprised by the pushback — he hadn't expected to do something so unpopular, and so resented by the community. He believed that Cory Booker had the community behind him and what they were doing is what Newark wanted. I think he's now trying to calibrate what he does next based on what communities want for themselves. There was a lot more money being put into Newark besides just Zuckerberg's: there was also a huge interest and big donations from hedge funds and private equity. How did those people influence what went on in Newark? The guys from the hedge funds, they do a lot to support education reform, and they really believe in merit pay [paying teachers based on their students' test scores] — even though the research shows that merit pay doesn't really have a big connection to student achievement. But they believe in it because their world works that way, that's how they get good people. They motivate people with money, and so why wouldn't that work? Zuckerberg wasn't thinking so much, "We'll have a correlation with student achievement right away," but he thought he'd attract a different cadre of people into teaching in Newark. The Yale grads who normally flock into finance. He thought merit pay would be an incentive for people to go into teaching, and that it would send a flood of people to teach in Newark, and it didn't really work that way. So that came, a lot, from business and hedge funds. And the big focus on system change, the idea that this could be "scaled up" nationally, that all sounds like venture capital, doesn't it? Julio Cortez / AP You highlight these gaping differences between what resources were available in Newark to charter school teachers versus district teachers — things like reading intervention coaches, abundant social workers, supplies. What was a the root of that difference? Well, it's funny, because the charters actually get less money per pupil, and you would think that in the district schools, there should be some economy of scale. But it seemed like beginning with less, the charters actually ultimately got more money into the classroom. And my question was, what is happening in the central office of these schools, that the money doesn't make it to the students? And I have to say, I failed at figuring that out, to figure out where exactly the money's going. That would be part two of the book, if there was one. But the basic idea is that somehow, the money all got caught up at the school district level, in the central office, and it didn't make it into classrooms, the way it did at charters? Right. Every time there's a huge budget gap, hundreds of people are laid off at the district. But there are hundreds more who probably should be laid off. The thing that's tricky about that, though, is that Newark has such high unemployment and so few options for family-sustaining wages anywhere in the city, so if you're laying off people at the district level, you're laying off low-skilled people who don't have a lot of options. These are people who have children in the district schools. So it's this awful tipping point. Cami Anderson [the superintendent of Newark schools] at one point said, very unhappily, "We're increasing poverty in Newark in the name of school reform." So there's clearly a problem in Newark, and in many other school districts, with how money that comes in is actually being spent. We really need to look at school districts, and how they spend money on the central school level. It needs to be a public conversation. I was looking at Newark's contracts, and they spend $15 million a year on scaffolding for their aging buildings. There was one school where, days before Michelle Obama came to visit, a huge chunk of the school fell off. And so I pulled the contract for the scaffolding on that building. It wasn't a competitive bid, it was just, they called three contractors on the phone, and I looked up the guy they picked, and he was the son of the biggest political boss in Union County, New Jersey. And to top it off, he himself had pled guilty to kidnapping. He'd pled guilty to a felony, and state regulations say you can't give contracts to convicted felons. And that was the first contract I pulled. It wasn't like I had to dig, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. When you add it up, you're talking about a tremendous amount of money. The charter schools that get so many resources to the classroom, that's essential. And you need to have principals who know how to use the money strategically. I'm not so sure you need more money. I think you need to concentrate the money at the school level, at the bottom. There's a quote from Princess Fils Aime, [a high-performing kindergarten teacher from The Prize who starts out in a Newark district school but eventually moves to a charter]. "What is it about living in this neighborhood that makes it hard for kids to learn, and what do we do to address that? How do we teach to that?" |
Restaurants in China frequently seek exotic ways of preparing dishes China's health authorities are reported to be putting a stop to restaurants serving chickens which have been bitten to death by poisonous snakes. The dish, which is served by a small number of restaurants in Guangdong and Chongqing, is billed as detoxing. But it has generated a storm of controversy in the media and among bloggers after a video of its preparation was circulated online. The video shows a cook holding a snake and forcing it to bite a live chicken. A week of intense internet discussion has reached the near-unanimous decision that it is cruel to kill live chickens by forcing deadly snakes to bite them repeatedly. Some voices noted, however, that they found the cooked dish delicious. "It's disgusting and really cruel," read one post on the popular portal sina.com.cn. "Not only is it cruel and blood-thirsty, but totally amoral," the Chongqing Business Daily cited a neighbour to one of the restaurants as saying. "Although nobody has been poisoned, this at the very least is an irregular way of slaughtering poultry," the business newspaper quoted a local health official as saying. According to Reuters news agency, health authorities in Guangdong have already told restaurants to stop serving "poisonous snake-bitten chicken". It said officials in Chongqing had joined the ban. Restaurants in China have long specialised in exotic dishes which have provoked condemnation from animal rights activists and health watchdogs - such as monkey brains scooped from a live animal, civet cat and deer foetus soup. |
A little before E3 we caught up with CEO and Founder of Keen Software House, Marek Rosa to discuss the development of Space Engineers and the developers plans in the future.. For those who don’t know, Keen Software House is the development team behind the hit sandbox game Space Engineers and the recently released Medieval Engineers. But what does the future hold for this development company? Why did they choose Early Access? We find out that, and then some. Space Engineers has been in development for almost a year and a half and has been part of Steam’s Early Access program for some time now. But what makes Space Engineers special is the way Keen Software House handle the game’s development. Since launching on Early Access they’ve been launching consistent updates every week, but why did they opt for such an intense release schedule? More importantly, why Early Access? Rosa explained that the reason for Early Access was mostly to make players aware of the game. “We knew it would take some time to develop the game and we didn’t want to wait until it will be completely finished, because you know, Space Engineers is two years in development and if we didn’t put it on Steam Early Access then it would still be behind the curtains and nobody would know about the game.” “We have plans for some future games and some of them will not go to early access because it doesn’t make sense. For example, campaign or story-based games, it doesn’t make sense to launch it through Early Access,” added Rosa. “But we also have some ideas about other games which are very suited to the Early Access model. We will start with a basic prototype then retroactively keep adding one feature or one thing after another and we’ll just build it up.” As for the development process, the weekly agile, incremental updates have actually forced Keen Software House to work much more professionally, as their updates are under the watchful eye of the player, with their every move being watched over. “The idea is that you’re working very publicly, your work is visible week after week” “The idea is that you’re working very publicly, your work is visible week after week, and this is kind of pressure that’s put on me and my team and therefore people try to keep developing that game much more seriously and professionally than if it was done behind closed doors with one big release at the end,” he revealed. “People are watching us every week, actually all these days in the week, commenting and so on and we need to take this into consideration, it’s some kind of pressure, pressing us to really make sure that the features we are adding are not just some stupid ideas, some useless features, so this agile, incremental development, is something we’ll be using for Medieval, and for this AI project. “It’s a crucial thing, the most important thing in the development for us.” On development, Keen Software House recently released the source code for Space Engineers allowing any developer to create their own games using some of the in-game assets, unfortunately it’s still early days to say whether it’s something of a success. Rosa did however add that it’s a lot harder to create some changes to the game’s code than some may thing due to a cascading effect on the rest of the game, because of this some people may attempt to use the code, but it may never get any results. “It’s very hard to actually take the game, change some things, and say ‘okay, well this is a new game, this is not just Space Engineers with slightly different textures’ something like that, so I think many people will actually not finish it because it will take too long, they’ll lose focus and all these things. “It was a good idea, and we just need to support it for some time and it’ll catch up.” One of the main ideas for the opening of the source code was to prevent Keen Software House from being the bottleneck for ideas that the community could bring to the game. “If someone wanted to for example, add an energy shield or something like this they don’t need to wait for us to implement it into the game, if they can implement it, they can just implement it themselves,” said Rosa. When asked whether these ideas could eventually make it into Space Engineers, Rosa revealed that while the new feature could work perfectly in the developers version, when it comes to adding it to the Vanilla game a lot of things need to be considered to make it work, like a domino, this new feature could affect other features, and more things will need to be added in order to ensure fair play. “Imagine if someone added energy weapons or energy shields on GitHub, it would work in their version and it would be perfect, we may even be able to merge it with our base game in two clicks, but then we’d need to consider ‘okay, we just added energy weapons, so what does it mean, we’d need some new kind of components for assemblers, or we need to add some kind of shields that are guarding the other people against these weapons,’ and then this domino effect would start and we’d realise it wasn’t as simple to implement and that we may need to spend one month on just finishing it up.” With involving community ideas so heavily, it does open up the risk of Space Engineers becoming a “feature creep”, meaning that the game would never be fully complete with features being added constantly. “Lets focus on Space Engineers 2” “The main thing to consider is that if it’s not better to use our team for something else, like a really big jump and start doing Space Engineers 2 or something like that. This incremental thing is how we built Space Engineers, one Thursday after another, but sometimes it’s also good to make a huge jump, like stop working on backwards compatibility. “If we were to add more and more features to Space Engineers, we would still need to think about the people still playing Space Engineers, and so on. But if we decided to say ‘Space Engineers is finished’ add some little features here and there, and lets focus on Space Engineers 2. “Say, we’ll be quiet for a couple of months, a year, while we’re preparing some big change in Space Engineers 2, then when we finally release the game, we wouldn’t need to care about all of the backwards compatibility with Space Engineers 1, like worlds, blocks, or maybe 3D assets, and stuff like that. “So we would be allowed to have this ‘no looking back’ mentality, so we can jump really, really far.” In addition to Space Engineers, Keen Software House is also working in tandem on another “Engineers” title, Medieval Engineers, one that involves more interesting physics and a focus on medieval architecture and technologies. Though the idea for Medieval Engineers was conceived a little before the release of Space Engineers. “We considered something like Medieval Engineers around a couple of months before we released Space Engineers, but back then we didn’t have time to actually think about this. It was more of a cool idea, things like using certain blocks, physics, and other things in a different environment and setting, instead of space,” Rosa revealed. “Later, though, when Space Engineers became kind of, this success, then we went back to this idea and started thinking that we didn’t want to develop this space game forever, it’d be cool to see some different settings, some nature, some green colour, and stuff like that.” Development on the two games though hasn’t been as stressful as you’d think, in fact the parallel development has actually helped Keen Software House bring ideas from one game to another. “Once we had the two teams working on both Space and Medieval Engineers, we soon realised that some featured added into Medieval Engineers could be added in some way to Space Engineers and vice versa. It was actually a really cost-effective way to develop a second game because it’s not like creating a game entirely from scratch, like a real-time strategy, for example,” he revealed. With the idea of Medieval Engineers working in tandem with Space Engineers we wondered whether they’ve considered blending them both together with a Civilization-like progression system where players can go through different eras until ultimately ending up at Space Engineers, to our surprise it was something Rosa would love to do. “We’ve been thinking about this, maybe, I cannot say it will not happen in the future because it kind of makes sense, but right now, today, this year, or next year, we are too far from that, we are building the basics, especially in Medieval, such as the basics of survival, and this sort of thing, but it can end up like this. “Like you’d have one game called ‘Engineers’, and you will go from some ancient, even pre-ancient era, like ‘Prehistoric Engineers’, then to something like ‘Today Engineers’, then you’d go to ‘Space Engineers’, and so on. “I would love to do this, but it will take us some time before we get it.” Space Engineers right now doesn’t have a set final release, but it seems Keen Software House are trying to wrap up development, that is until another great idea comes along that they just have to add into the game. “once we feel the game is polished, solid, and stable, then I think we can say it’s finished” “With Space Engineers, we’ve almost already decided to start wrapping up the game, polishing, and preparing for release, but then we decided, ‘lets add planets’ as a last big feature, so planets kind of delayed the release because first, we need to finish them, then we need to add features that make sense of the entire planets idea. “For example, we had to add Oxygen, because when there’s planets we need Oxygen, stuff like that. And usually when you add one feature, it kind of requires to add some other features for that to make sense to eventually close the circle.” Upon finalising the game, Keen Software House hope to add a few missions, “they will not be story based, they’ll mostly be about adding some kind of goal to the game,” Rosa added because right now the game has no real goals. “So once planets and then the mission framework will be in, then we’ll start looking at the game from a big picture perspective, look at what’s missing, and what needs to be polished. This will go for a couple of months, more than six months, and once we feel the game is polished, solid, and stable, then I think we can say it’s finished.” Once Space Engineers has released on PC, Keen Software House will likely focus on releasing a few updates, as well as putting more into Medieval Engineers. The game is also coming to Xbox One, though we haven’t heard too much about that as of late, but there’s a good reason. “It’s taking some time,” Rosa admitted. “Mostly because the game is written in C# and .net and we need to move this to C++. The game will still remain in C#, but we’re currently working on a conversion tool that’ll convert the stuff to C++ so it can be a multiplatform game. “So once we solve Xbox, then the other platforms should be no problem, though Microsoft has exclusivity for one year. But it doesn’t matter, as these things take so much time, we’re not worrying about whether we release the PlayStation version of the game now, or in a couple of months, or in a year.” With the launch of Windows 10 looming, we also asked whether Space Engineers for Xbox One would offer cross-platform compatibility between the two consoles, something Rosa would love to do, but it depends entirely on any complications that may arise during development on this feature. “I prefer not to make any promises, as some little technical detail can prevent this from happening, though we may try, but I can’t make any promises at the moment,” he said. “We also don’t know what performance sacrifices we would need to make to the Xbox version of Space Engineers, or some sort of Android or iPhone version of Space Engineers, as these are not as powerful as some PCs.” Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers are currently available to purchase on Steam under the Early Access program. A huge thanks to Joshua Merrick for helping out with some of these talking points. |
Two US lawmakers — a Republican and a Democrat — proposed a bill this week demanding the withdrawal of all US troops in Pakistan, where they are conducting covert operations against militants. “We have known that US forces have been operating in secret inside the territories of Pakistan without congressional approval,” Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich said Friday, pointing to reports the United States was stepping up its presence there. He said the House of Representatives was expected to take up the resolution next week. The measure was introduced late Thursday. Kucinich said the covert operations were a “violation of the 1973 War Powers Resolution introduced after the Vietnam War that only allows the president to send US armed forces into military operations abroad if Congress approves the decision or if the United States is under a serious threat or attack.” “It is our constitutional responsibility as members of Congress to act,” Kucinich added. Washington is working to deepen engagement with the nuclear power across the border from war-wracked Afghanistan and overcome rife anti-Americanism after years of perceived neglect of bilateral relations. Joining Kucinich on the bill was Ron Paul, a Texas Republican who espoused libertarian views during his failed 2008 bid for the presidency. Paul said the US military has “significantly increased” its operations in Pakistan, without providing figures. He also noted the increased use of unmanned drone attacks in Pakistan since President Barack Obama came to office a year and a half ago. “This increasing US military activity in Pakistan has little to do with protecting the United States and in fact is creating more enemies than it is defeating,” Paul said. “The administration, like its predecessor, is misusing language in the original post-9/11 resolution to prosecute a wider regional war and Congress is sitting quietly on the sidelines. This must stop.” The Pentagon says only a small number of US soldiers operate in Pakistan, mostly Special Forces tasked with training Pakistani troops along the Afghan border. Those US forces are not officially engaged in combat operations. Kucinich previously tabled a resolution demanding that all US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, but it was rejected in March. Washington has branded the rugged tribal area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border a global headquarters for Al-Qaeda and other militants, who use it as a base to launch attacks on US-led forces in Afghanistan. But the presence of US troops is a sensitive issue in Pakistan due to prevailing anti-American sentiment in the country, as well as conspiracy theories about US military operations and a perception that they threaten Pakistani sovereignty. |
Father stabbed estranged wife to death after she changed her Facebook status to 'single' A father stabbed his estranged wife to death in a 'frenzied attack' after discovering she had changed her Facebook status to 'single'. Edward Richardson, 41, was high on a cocktail of cocaine and alcohol when he smashed his way into her parents' home and used a carving knife to kill 26-year-old Sarah Richardson as she lay in bed. The carpenter stabbed his wife with such force he shattered her ribs. She also suffered puncture wounds to her liver and a slashed aorta. Richardson was yesterday jailed for life after a jury took less than three hours to convict him of murder at Stafford Crown Court. Sarah Richardson, 26, was stabbed to death by her estranged husband Edward Richardson after she changed her Facebook status to 'single' Judge Simon Tonking ordered Richardson, of Biddulph, Stoke-on-Trent, to serve at least 18 years. He told him: 'Whatever might have been in your mind before you entered that bedroom, the point came when you did intend to kill your wife. 'You subjected her to an attack which involved 13 stab wounds and 39 separate lacerations. It was an act of brutal mutilation. 'The effect of that act was to devastate an entire family, her parents, her brothers, her sister in law and young nieces. 'Her parents called her "the light of their life". By killing her in their home, you have violated their home of 40 years, where now, as far as Sarah's bedroom is concerned, they cannot bring themselves to go.' Earlier, the court heard how the couple separated three weeks before the murder after arguments about the amount of money being spent on cocaine and father-of-two Richardson's refusal to have children with Sarah. The kitchen knife Richardson used in the attack. He stabbed his wife with such force her ribs were broken When Richardson discovered his estranged wife had changed her Facebook status to single, he drove to her parents Sandbach home with a knife and strips of black tape to muffle the sound of breaking glass. After murdering Sarah, Richardson drove to a field and used the same knife to slash his wrists and throat. Emergency services found Richardson in Fence Lane, Congleton, 40 minutes after the attack. Detective Inspector Andy Wall, who led the police inquiry, said: 'Richardson had stopped a passer-by and asked them to call the police. He was taken to hospital and later arrested. 'During interviews he told police he knew he had stabbed his wife but couldn't remember the exact details of the assault. 'When he learned his wife had died he was upset. 'Mr Richardson was under an element of stress due to the break up of his marriage. But what he did was a brutal and calculated act.' Sarah Richardson was in bed at her parents' home, above, when she was attacked Fiona Cortese, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said: 'We hope that today’s guilty verdict will go some way to easing the pain of Sarah’s friends and family after losing her in such a violent and abrupt way.' Mrs Richardson's parents, Beryl and Alan Boote, issued a statement after the verdict. 'There simply aren’t the words to describe how Sarah’s death, and the awful way in which she died, has affected us,' they said. 'We miss her so much. Sarah was the loveliest daughter anyone could wish for. She was honest, loyal and sweet, and everyone loved her.' Facebook, the 'social networking' website, allows people to advertise their current marital status. Users can choose to list their relationship status as 'It's complicated' or 'In an open relationship' as well as more traditional options such as 'engaged or 'single'. This is not the first time that a change in Facebook status has led to murder. Last October, Wayne Forrester, 34, was jailed for a minimum of 14 years after hacking his wife to death with a meat cleaver in fury over her Facebook entry. Forrester, drank alcohol and took cocaine before driving 15 miles to the family home to attack his wife as she lay in bed. The couple had separated four days before the murder in February and Forrester later told police he had been provoked by his wife changing her marital status to "single" on her Facebook entry. |
CEO of Koch Industries Charles Koch, spoke with FNC's Megyn Kelly about politicians and how they’re not going to "reverse the trajectory of this country" and how he’s "never been that fond of politics and only got into it recently kicking and screaming." On whether the Democrats, as well as the President, have “tried to make boogie men” out of him and his brother: "Oh definitely, that’s a full time job on their part. I mean and that’s why I’ve never been that fond of politics and only got into it recently kicking and screaming. Of what I give to charity, the part that goes to or I donate, the part that goes to politics is a very, very, very small piece of that because I don’t think politicians are going to reverse the trajectory of this country. I think it’s going to depend on the American people understanding what is fair and what makes their lives better and so I’ve been working for over 50 years on better understanding that and communicating that." "Well I, I mean as Harry Truman said if you can’t stand the heat don’t go in the kitchen. And so that’s [my motto]. I would prefer that everybody just think I’m wonderful but that isn’t going to happen." "Well, it's possible. The problem is- is that the practice of any, of almost every politician, not all - only 90-some percent, there's a difference between the rhetoric and then what they practice in office. And that's the problem we had with George W Bush. I mean, he's a fine person and meant well, but his irresponsible spending, out of control spending, harmful regulations, getting us in counterproductive wars. I mean, that's when we, we really got involved in politics. We, we started this, this seminar network in 2003 under the Bush administration to oppose those policies." "I don't have a guy. I have these principles and what I'm trying to accomplish. And, and what we need, to me, is a candidate that will help change the trajectory of the country. From all this wasteful, irresponsible spending that's heading us for a financial cliff - not just by the Democrats but by the Republicans. The reason we tend to support Republicans is they're taking us toward the cliff at only 70 miles an hour and the Democrats are taking us 100 miles an hour. So I'm sad to say it's the lesser of evils, but what we'd be great to have - somebody who would change this trajectory and, and move us away from this irresponsible spending that we can't afford, and away from this trend toward a 2-tiered society." On whether it bothers him that the Democrats attack him relentlessly and have painted him as “evil”:On whether he sees anyone that might potentially stand for the principles in which he believes: |
The newest Republican plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act could send premiums sky-rocketing to more than $25,000 for people with pre-existing conditions, according to a report from the AARP. The latest version of the American Health Care Act, which hasn’t been scored by the Congressional Budget Office yet, does away with the ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions under certain situations. For example, if states set up high-risk pools, they can allow insurers to charge sick people more than healthier people for insurance. But the pools will do little to help sick people keep costs down: The AARP estimates insurers could charge annual premiums as high as $25,700 for people with pre-existing conditions in the pools in 2019 – and the government’s subsidies to the states for these high-risk pools will not be remotely enough to offset the high costs. As the AARP points out and MONEY has reported, plans offered in high-risk pools before the passage of the ACA were not only incredibly expensive, they also tended to be less comprehensive than coverage on the individual market. So people with pre-existing conditions, like high blood pressure or diabetes, would pay significantly more for worse coverage. This would hit older people especially hard. But young people with any type of health condition would also be impacted if the protections were lifted. “We really do not want to go backwards in making coverage affordable to the people who need it the most,” says Jean Hall, director of the Institute for Health & Disability Policy Studies at the University of Kansas. The report comes a day after House Speaker Paul Ryan said “people will be better off with pre-existing conditions under our plan.” |
"Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a fast-flittering meteor, a fast-flying cloud, a flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, he passes from life to rest in the grave." —William Knox (1824) (quoted in Crisis on Infinite Earths, 1985) On April 25th, 2024, almost ten years after the Flash brought hope and wonder into the world, the beloved hero engaged in an epic battle with his oldest enemy: the Reverse-Flash, defeating him before disappearing in a flash of light. That was the second time. This is the story of how that day ended twice, and how, in the world's darkest hours and in the midst of its first true crisis, Barry Allen saved the multiverse. Welcome, once again, to Crisis on Infinite Earths. |
“Two turntables and a microphone,” might be the most famous saying in DJ culture, but what about the mixer? The mixer is the literal and metaphorical nexus, where sounds from a trio of devices come together to create a sonic alchemy that has moved dancefloors for more than three decades. And as those decades have passed, so too have multiple waves of technological innovation that saw the DJ mixer evolve from the bastard Frankenstein of live band mixers — MacGyvered together by early electronic enthusiasts — to a multi-billion dollar consumer electronics colossus of computer controllers competing for mass-market dominance and audiophile approval. Through each iteration, the design of the mixer has been driven by the demand of the DJ, while allowing said talent to discover new levels of artistry that evolve from the tools themselves — a push-pull that has helped define each generation of devices. In what has become a quintessential study on the topic, “A History of the Development of the DJ Mixer: An S&TS Perspective,” Cornell University undergraduate David Cross makes the case that there are more than these two heavily-invested parties at play in the tale of the mixer’s evolution. The story, in fact, seems to start with audio engineer Alex Rosner, who in 1971 built a primitive three-channel device with sliders and a cueing function called “Rosie” to allow DJ Francis Grasso to easily switch from one record to the next in his residency at NYC club Haven. Traktor Scratch Pro 2, Pioneer DJM T1, Delayed flare scratch. / Youtube: Kanal von skarabim The idea of a tool for mixing audio signals together had of course been around for several decades by that point, both in radio and recording studios. But the notion of a tool specifically for DJs in nightclubs was a new perspective, one that accommodated both the space considerations of the DJ booth, and the new style of overlapping records (beat matching) that Grasso had developed in order to keep the energy up on the dancefloor. At the same time, another NYC club audio engineer, Rudy Bozak, was preparing to unveil the first commercially available DJ mixer, the Bozak CMA-10-DL2. Bozak even consulted with Rosner, as well as another industry peer, sound engineer Richard Long of the Paradise Garage and Studio 54, to create the mixer which, unlike the one-of-a-kind hand-held Rosie, weighed 25 pounds and was soon being installed in DJ booths across the city. The Bozak might have been made for DJs, but it took most of its cues from radio mixing boards, including the use of large knobs (as opposed to sliders) to control the volume of each channel. Knobs tend to sound better and last longer than sliders, an obvious concern for this trio of men who considered themselves sound engineers first and foremost. Knobs allow for smooth transitions between channels, which was already the dominant mixing style of the disco era. But knobs reinforced this way of thinking, leading to several generations of disco and house DJs who still fetishize the two-handed style of mixing (even if the mixer itself uses faders). The introduction of faders to the DJ mixer market came with the GLI series of consumer mixers that offered a far lower price point than the commercial Bozak club mixer. Faders are cheaper and smaller than knobs, which allowed GLI to build the “poor man’s Bozak” for aspiring DJs (a new species which had not existed a few years earlier). But it wasn’t just bedroom disco jocks who drove the market. By the early 80s, two other scenes were buoying demand for mixers. The first was hip-hop DJs, inspired by the early experiments by DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash. Both pioneers used GLI mixers (along with other home-rigged tools) to create the breaks-centered style of hip-hop DJ mixing. This rapid back-and-forth style between records required a special kind of slider, the crossfader. Crossfaders had also existed on radio mixing boards for years, allowing DJs to switch audio sources with one hand instead of two. But in the hands of these innovators, the manipulation of the vinyl on the turntable and the crossfader, became a dexterous art form unto itself. The other community driving the DJ mixer market was the mobile DJ industry. By the early 80s, DJs had become the standard entertainment at even the most mundane social gatherings — school dances, weddings, bar mitzvahs, etc. While playing the Chicken Dance for 13-year-olds might seem miles away from Larry Levan at Paradise Garage, the two communities crossed over more often than one might expect. Mike Fotias is production manager for the Movement: Detroit Electronic Music Festival, responsible for the dozens of DJ set-ups and festival-grade sound systems running simultaneously through the annual Memorial Day Weekend event. Fotias’ pedigree for powering DJ parties runs through the history of Detroit techno. But it goes back even earlier, to his days as a mobile DJ in the early 80s. “There was a market for people to come play pre-recorded music at events,” Fotais reflects of his mobile DJ days. “Which spurred a market for equipment needed to do that job.” Like most music mixers of that era, especially those outside of the major club hubs of New York, L.A., or Miami, Fotais was forced to make due with a melange of early DJ equipment and homemade solutions. “An original Urei rotary DJ mixer was something I had never seen. It was like a unicorn,” he laughs. “It was like $3,000 in 1980s money. You didn’t even think about it.” Foton (as his old rave colleagues often call him), recalls Numark as one of the first manufacturers to get a DJ mixer in the hands of the masses. “The first super cool 19-inch Numark DM1775 mixer had five sliders and four seconds of sampling memory. It was built like a tank. All the sheet metal was 1/8 inch-thick aluminum and steel. The sample had a big start/stop push button, and four smaller buttons that each represented one second of memory.” Hitting the market in the mid-1980s, the sampling feature of the mixer might seem ahead of its time, but it came out during the same era as the the immensely popular Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard. Although mostly a novelty, these tools did offer an early glimpse at the digital domain that would eventually become universal in music playback and production. But while the 1775 offered the futuristic sampling feature, it lacked the far more functional separate EQs for each audio channel. Individual channel EQ were first introduced to the DJ mixer market in 1980 by U.K. company Formula Sound, but while considered utterly essential today (how else would one drop the bass?), in 1985, the feature still had not found its way to the Numark model. It’s unlikely that Numark was unaware of the EQ possibility. The company simply considered the sampler to be a more important feature, given the size and cost restrictions of what feature sets could be put in a single unit for a reasonable price. This compromise between size, quality, and cost has shaped the DJ mixer throughout its history. That cost-to-capabilities formula came into serious question in the mid-90s, when Japanese consumer audio company Pioneer entered the DJ market with its DJM series of digital mixers. Released around the same time as the company’s CDJ series of CD players for DJs, the DJM offered an array of effects processing built into the mixer, including delay, reverb, and flange, as well as an automated BPM counter that would sync the effects to the beat. Although a revelation for many DJs who were thrilled to have a new ways to tweak and toy with the music they were playing, the DJM-500 and 600 was a nightmare for sound guys like Fotias, due to its inferior sound quality — a compromise undoubtedly made to accommodate the new effects. DJM–600 / Image: Flickr “They weren’t using the best components, they weren’t worried about sound quality,” Fotias recalls. “It was about how many mixers they could build and sell. It was our cross to bear, because all the the DJs had it on their tech rider, and we had to deal with it. How do we make this sound good?” Jim Tremayne, the long-running editor of industry magazine DJ Times, sees the early DJM mixers in a more forgiving light. “The original DJM 500, even though it didn’t have the best preamp inside for clubs, had amazing features and effects. It was really fun to make mixtapes with those. It changed the game a bit. Took all those effects from an outboard unit and put it in the mixer. That concept still exists with the DJM 900 Nexus. It has all kinds of crazy onboard stuff.” Allen and Heath XONE 92 Tremayne is right that 20 years after the release of the first DJM mixer, the current line of Pioneer mixers continues to define the sound of many DJs. Along with the company’s ubiquitous line of CDJs (now basically USB-filled controllers with CD existing only in the name), the Pioneer digital DJ ecosystem is completely enclosed for many jocks. In some cases, the controller culture has brought into question whether or not a mixer is even part of the formula anymore. Native Instruments X1 controller, when paired with the company’s highly successful Traktor PRO software, means that DJs can control, mix, sync, loop, and process four “decks,” without actually having a turntable or mixer at all. This has been a boon for bedroom DJs, who can now, for only a few hundred dollars, be mixing music in ways the club jocks of yesteryear never even dreamed of. It has also been liberating for many of dance music’s biggest star DJs, many of whom now see themselves as live manipulators of music, not just players of records. Both Fotias and Tremayne see the capabilities of these tools as altering the actual sound of the music being played by a younger generation of jocks. The “dreaded sync button,” as Tremayne puts it, allows for a much faster style of putting music together, one perfect for what Fotias (and many others) call the “ADD mixing style of the younger generation.” Both of these veterans are eager to insist that they are not judging the current crop of rapid-fire DJs as inferior to the predecessors. It’s simply a sound that seems to sit better with younger fans. “I saw with the onset of dubstep and bass music, it’s very short attention span,” says Fotias. “I’ve done sound at some pretty big shows and I appreciate it.” On the other hand, there is also a resurgence in old-school analog DJ gear, seen most obviously in the success of Allen & Heath’s Xone 92 DJ mixer. Coming from a proud tradition of making high-quality mixing boards for recording studios, the U.K. company has gained almost equal footing with their all-analog mixers as Pioneer has with their digital devices. “It’s 50/50 people wanting the Pioneer and wanting the Allen & Heath,” says Fotias, speaking of the 100-odd DJs who perform at Movement each year. He also rattles off a list of companies, both new and old, who are making audiophile quality mixers that offer the old-school style and sound. |
Image via Getty The United States is a notoriously litigious society. Suing the crap out of everything that moves is as American as bad comic book movies or defiant ignorance. Distasteful as it can seem, however, our endless appetite for lawsuits can play in favor of the individual. You can't challenge corporations to a duel, or tar and feather executives and ride them out of town on a rail—not legally, anyway—so a lawsuit is often the only option when you get screwed by big business. Fortunately, the Constitution includes the Seventh Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which guarantees Americans the right to civil trials by jury. The bad news is, it's being eroded. A rash of corporate-friendly Supreme Court decisions in recent years has erected substantial barriers for those seeking recourse against companies they feel have ripped them off or harmed them in some way. And all signs indicate that the Trump administration will only further entrench the rights of businesses large and small to do whatever they want to people across America. Perhaps the most glaring threats to Seventh Amendment rights are arbitration contracts and class-action limitations. Forced arbitration, if you've lucky enough to have never been subject to it, is when people essentially sign away their right to sue in favor of a private hearing, which can be heavily tilted in a company's favor. The concept is particularly common with businesses selling services like nursing home care, credits cards, and cell phones, and those with near-monopoly powers, like cable providers. (Decades of corporate efforts to choke off lawsuits before they can even begin largely flew under the public's radar until a 2015 series in the New York Times enumerated how challenging it is for some consumers to take a business to court. ) The surging popularity of forced arbitration stems from a broad interpretation of a 1925 law aimed at resolving disputes between businesses—courts have consistently said it covers agreements between companies and their customers, too. More recently, Supreme Court rulings in AT&T Mobility v Concepcion in 2011 and American Express v Italian Colors Restaurant in 2013 suggested that arbitration agreements can also prohibit class-actions, forcing wronged consumers to bring action on an individual basis if they want compensation. "The reach of the law has been dramatically expanded to cover arbitration agreements of any kind," says Richard H. Frankel, a professor at the Drexel University School of Law. "It's essentially an immunity clause for a company." Under the Obama administration, federal agencies took notice, and began to intervene. For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was considering a rule to prohibit class action bans in arbitration clauses for financial services products, but implementation looks far less likely under Trump's presidency. "In the Obama administration, we thought we would get assistance from federal agencies under a number of statutes, and did," says Scott Nelson, an attorney with Public Citizen, a group that represents plaintiffs in litigation related to arbitration clauses. "Those promptly got challenged in court, and now we're waiting to see whether the new administration will pull the rug from under those things by rescinding rules or taking a dive in litigation." The most immediate threat to courtroom access is the Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act of 2017, which passed the House of Representatives in March and is under consideration by the Senate. Among other things, the bill would both make it harder to form a class action by narrowing requirements for what plaintiffs must have in common, and more difficult for their lawyers to get paid. Instead of having a jury decide a case on its merits, many lawsuits might never even be filed. "It's creating harder evidentiary standards for plaintiffs to meet," says Alexandra D. Lahav, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law who testified in Congress regarding previous iterations of the bill. "It really cuts victims off at the knees." The bill is backed by the US Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, who claim frivolous class actions are raging out of control, led by greedy lawyers seeking windfalls at the expense of hard-working corporations (and their executives). But the legislation, Lahay argues, is a nasty bit of overreach. "This bill doesn't try to balance interests," she says. "It's trying to limit fees in ways that aren't responsive to the problem but are really aimed at starving plaintiffs' attorneys and not making it financially viable to bring cases." Looking ahead, the Trump administration's ability to reshape the federal judiciary could spell considerable peril for the Seventh Amendment. In addition to the seat on the Supreme Court just filled by conservative (and corporate-friendly) Neil Gorsuch, there are over 100 vacancies in lower courts around the nation. A mass influx of new conservative judges could serve to cement the sorry state of regular people trying to hold large corporations to account. In the fall, the Supreme Court will hear three cases related to arbitration provisions banning class actions in employment agreements—the things people sign when they start jobs. Meanwhile, famous employer Donald Trump has proven he believes in arbitration, and has used it in the past to protect his own business interests. Chances are things won't get better for consumers while he's in office, and his luxury remodeling of America's court system could make their lives harder for decades to come. Aaron Kase on Twitter. |
The Pitt River community is small. There is a muddy logging camp, a fishing lodge, a few private homes. The area, 60 kilometres from Vancouver, is so wild it is often compared to Alaska by visiting anglers. The area is inaccessible by road: getting there requires an hour-long boat trip to the mouth of the Upper Pitt River. Even this is a slow route that requires navigating the fallen trees that float ominously below the surface. Until recently, grizzlies and black bears have thrived against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains, steep rocky cliffs, and rushing water, feasting on the seasonal runs of sockeye, coho and chinook salmon. Here in this quiet valley, the failures of one of B.C.’s most controversial wildlife policies come into sharp focus. The management of bears has long been contentious, but the provincial government argues the species can withstand the pressure brought by foreign hunters. But the apparent eradication of bears in the Pitt River Valley by a single guide, hunting within his legal limit, suggests otherwise. This series examines the background forces shaping environmental management in B.C. As public servants and their critics debate, we start with a story of bears caught in the political crossfire. Bears once a common sight in Pitt River Valley Until recently, there were far more bears than people living in the Pitt River Valley, generally coexisting without issue. Local fishing guides knew the bears well: they recognized many individual personalities, gave them space when they were nearby, and scared them off with loud noises if they got too curious. “We had a great relationship with all the bears and then someone came in and killed them all,” says Danny Gerak, who owns The Pitt River Lodge with his wife Lee. Danny has lived and worked in the Pitt River Valley for over 30 years and had grown accustomed to seeing bears every day, sometimes even 15 a day during salmon spawns. In the last year, he hasn’t seen one. "People are shooting these bears for their skin," Gerak says, with a touch of bitterness at what he sees as the wasteful and cruel loss of an important resource to the valley's tourism industry. Sandbars are bare of tracks and spawned out salmon are left to be eaten by maggots. The rubbing tree, used by generations of bears to scratch their backs and mark their territory, is sprouting mushrooms. A sandbar in the middle of the Upper Pitt River. Photo by Claire Hume A hunter from the Katzie Nation sits on a bridge waiting for his son to pick him up on his ATV. The butt of his rifle rests on his boot and the barrel leans against his shoulder. He and his son are out to harvest elk, he says. There is a big herd in the area, though they haven’t tracked them down just yet. He hasn't seen any bears all year, he says. He talks about trophy hunters coming into the region. “They have taken too many bears,” he says simply. But the Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations insists the bear hunt is well-managed across the province, and in the Pitt Valley specifically. "Black bears are not counted on this local geographic scale, but they are plentiful in the area," says Ministry spokesperson Greig Bethel. "Black bears are not at risk either. In the Pitt River area, or more generally in B.C., and their population status is considered healthy. There are an estimated 120,000 to 160,000 black bears province-wide." Gerak says his customers expect to see bears as part of their wilderness experience, and he is critical of official government policy. "This doesn't add to the economy of the Lower Mainland worth shit," he said. "The damage one guy did in the whole valley by bringing people in here [to shoot bears] is way greater than the benefit." Danny Gerak sits on his boat on the edge of the Upper Pitt River while he talks about the disappearance of bears in the area. Photo by Claire Hume The loss of bears is felt by others in the area as well. Nick Didlick, a photographer and fishing guide at the lodge, set up wildlife cameras to monitor the bear activity along a salmon spawning channel that runs into the Pitt River. The cameras begin filming when the motion sensors are set off and years ago, when they were first installed, he recorded hundreds of triggers as bears walked by or stopped to fish. One of his most popular shots, he says, shows a mother bear teaching her three cubs how to cross the stream while balanced on a fallen tree. The video of a juvenile grizzly bear's clumsy fishing attempt, which ends up being more of a bellyflop, is a close second. Yet this year, most of the footage his cameras caught was of windblown trees and curious herons. The bears in those previous videos, he says, are most likely dead. "This valley was over-hunted," Didlick says, shaking his head, "and we’ll see the effect for the next ten years, at least.” |
0 Trial underway for OPD officer accused of kicking handcuffed suspect ORLANDO, Fla. - Attorneys spent the day Monday in an Orange County courtroom, trying to seat a jury in a former Orlando police officer's trial. Investigators said video shows former Orlando Officer William Escobar punching and kicking a handcuffed suspect last year. Escobar is on trial, charged with battery and perjury. During questioning Monday, one prospective juror told attorneys that he knew Escobar and talked with him at church about Escobar's firing from the police department. Raw: Suspect kicked by officer The potential juror said Escobar told him OPD fired him. He told the judge that he believed he could still be an impartial juror. Videos of the incident, from an OPD officer's bodycam and from the alleged victim's sister, are at the center of the trial. Prosecutors said Escobar punched, dragged, then kicked the compliant, handcuffed suspect Refus Holloway. They said he then lied about the incident. Another officer said Escobar saw the bodycam video the same night in March 2014 and said it looked bad. Prosecutors say Escobar did not disclose the bodycam video to prosecutors in the case against Holloway. Prosecutors say Holloway was not the man police were looking for that night ,and all of the charges against him were dropped. The trial is expected to last four days. Each of the misdemeanor charges carries a maximum sentence of one year in jail. |
This composite image offers a glimpse inside the custom system Brookhaven scientists used to create samples of materials that may pave the way for high-temperature superconductors. Credit: Brookhaven National Lab Superconductors are the holy grail of energy efficiency. These mind-boggling materials allow electric current to flow freely without resistance. But that generally only happens at temperatures within a few degrees of absolute zero (minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit), making them difficult to deploy today. However, if we're able to harness the powers of superconductivity at room temperature, we could transform how energy is produced, stored, distributed and used around the globe. In a recent breakthrough, scientists at the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory got one step closer to understanding how to make that possible. The research, led by physicist Ivan Bozovic, involves a class of compounds called cuprates, which contain layers of copper and oxygen atoms. Under the right conditions—which, right now, include ultra-chilly temperatures—electrical current flows freely through these cuprate superconductors without encountering any "roadblocks" along the way. That means none of the electrical energy they're carrying gets converted to heat. If you've ever rested your laptop on your lap, you've felt the heat lost by a non-superconducting material. Creating the right conditions for superconductivity in cuprates also involves adding other chemical elements such as strontium. Somehow, adding those atoms and chilling the material causes electrons—which normally repel one another—to pair up and effortlessly move together through the material. What makes cuprates so special is that they can achieve this "magical" state of matter at temperatures a hundred degrees or more above those required by standard superconductors. That makes them very promising for real-world, energy-saving applications. These materials wouldn't require any cooling, so they'd be relatively easy and inexpensive to incorporate into our everyday lives. Picture power grids that never lose energy, more affordable mag-lev train systems, cheaper medical imaging machines like MRI scanners, and smaller yet powerful supercomputers. A bonding structure of copper and oxygen atoms on a plane within a cuprate. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory To figure out the mystery of "high-temperature" superconductivity in the cuprates, scientists need to understand how the electrons in these materials behave. Bozovic's team has now solved part of the mystery by determining what exactly controls the temperature at which cuprates become superconducting. The standard theory of superconductivity says that this temperature is controlled by the strength of the electron-pairing interaction, but Bozovic's team has discovered otherwise. After 10 years of preparing and analyzing more than 2,000 samples of a cuprate with varying amounts of strontium, they found that the number of electron pairs within a given area (say, per cubic centimeter), or the density of electron pairs, controls the superconducting transition temperature. In other words, it's not the forces between objects that matter here, but the density of objects—in this case, electron pairs. The scientists arrived at this conclusion by measuring how far a magnetic field was able to get through each sample. This distance is directly related to the density of electron pairs, and the distance differs depending on the material's properties. In superconductors, the magnetic field is mostly expelled; in metals, the magnetic field permeates. With too much strontium, the cuprate becomes more conductive because the number of mobile electrons increases. Yet the scientists found that as they added more strontium, the number of electron pairs decreased until absolutely no electrons paired up at all. At the same time, the superconducting transition temperature dropped toward zero. Bozovic and his team were quite surprised at this discovery that only a fraction of the electrons paired up, even though they all should have. Think of it like this: You're in a dance hall, and at some point, you and the other people—who normally wouldn't be caught arm-in-arm—begin to pair up and move in unison. Some newcomers arrive, and they too pair up and join the harmonious dance. But then something strange happens. No matter how many more people make their way to the dance floor, only a fraction of them pair, even though they are all free to do so. Eventually, nobody pairs up at all. Why do the dancers, or electrons, pair up in the first place? Answering that question is the next step toward unlocking the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity in the cuprates—a mystery that's been puzzling physicists for more than 30 years. Explore further: Scientists uncover origin of high-temperature superconductivity in copper-oxide compound |
Tomas Yudai is the OG of using his phone to land a date. The Winnipeg, Manitoba, man found his wife by calling random women in the phone book, but it wasn’t nearly as sketchy as it sounds. Yudai, who was born in the Philippines, moved to Canada from California in 1967 after getting a degree and wanted to find new friends. He wanted to meet new people, so he hatched a plan. More: Teen gives a flower to each girl at his school for Valentine’s Day “After a week or so I had this idea that maybe I should find some new friends or get connected with other people,” Yudai told CBC News of why he started calling people. “I thought, ‘Maybe I can find other Filipinos here,’ so I went through the phone book looking for Filipino names.” He called and called until he landed on a woman who invited him over. “When I was calling people, I wasn’t looking for someone to get married,” he said. “She says, ‘Come over, you know, we’re having a party,’ so I said, ‘Great,’ you know, ‘Thank you,’ and I got the address.” He met his now-wife, Carrie, while she was just in a towel. The party hadn’t started yet. “I didn’t even know that [my roommate] invited somebody and that somebody was coming early,” said Carrie. “Everything was a blur after that because I thought, ‘This guy is so early and I’m not dressed.'” More: 15 love stories told through Humans of New York photos They kept going out to dinner until he finally kissed her on Dec. 26, 1967. “Well, you know, there’s one man for 25 women so you kiss him and that’s it,” she said of why she went for him. “There were so many females and few males because it was mostly nurses and doctors who came first [from the Philippines]. So nurses — everybody [was] female except one or two and a few doctors and most of them were married.” The pair eventually married and now, 48 years later, they have two children and four grandchildren. Their secret to love success? They let each other have their own interests and hobbies — and sometimes they even travel separately. “We have lots of friends who are together forever, like even indoors they’re together. I want my space so I give him his space,” Carrie said. More: Why it is possible to date someone with different political views |
Rather than just doing the obvious and buying a guitar, something you may want to consider or have even decided upon, is learning the bass and getting your first bass guitar. If you’re ambition some day is to play in a band, then it could be a very good decision. There are often far more good guitar players available than bass players. It has been my experience and I know that of many others, that it can be a difficult thing to find a good bass player for your band. If you develop into a decent bass player, your chances of becoming a band member are going to be somewhat higher than joining the long and increasing queue of guitarists wanting to do the same. There are as many musical styles and techniques for bass players to learn as there are a guitarist, and playing bass well is not the easy option (just because a standard bass only has four strings). In fact, in some ways, there are even more options for bass players if you take into account fretless as well as the standard fretted instruments. Then there are five and six string basses… and so it goes on. The standard four string electric bass guitar looks similar in appearance to a standard electric guitar, but with a longer neck and scale length. The four strings of the bass are usually tuned to the bottom (lowest) four strings of a standard guitar – that’s G, D, A and E, but an octave lower. As on a standard electric guitar, there are magnetic pickups that convert the vibration and frequency of the strings into an electrical signal which when amplified, produces the sound. That brings us to the other piece of equipment that is also required – just as with an electric guitar, you’ll also need an amplifier. Bass amplifiers are distinct from normal guitar amplifiers because the circuitry is designed to deal with the much lower frequency range of the instrument. More than one guitar amplifier (and speakers) has been blown by having a bass put through it, especially when certain styles and techniques are played! While you might get away with it at moderate volume levels, it’s not a wise thing to do. The bottom E string of a bass guitar plucked at even moderate levels is not the friend of a normal guitar amplifier; so budget right from the start for a proper bass guitar amplifier. As with ‘standard’ guitar amps, the best bet to start with is probably a combo amp – there are many to choose from (see the links at the bottom of the page). If you have never played a bass before, you would do well to start with a standard four string bass and get some lessons. You can have a lot of fun by beginning to learn some songs and picking out bass lines to them. However, to develop a good technique and learn the instrument well, lessons from a competent teacher are really a must. Recommendations for bass guitars: Music Room Bass Guitars | gear4music Bass Guitars Recommendations for bass amplifiers: Music Room Bass Amps | gear4music Bass Amps Some examples of bass players and their different styles: Paul McCartney “Get Back/Sgt. Pepper (reprise) Live-2009 Example of solid, simple bass lines & playing Stevie Wonder – “Spain” – London 2008 Excellent accomplished bass playing by Nathan Watts – note the bass solo at 07:45 Spyro Gyra – “The Deep End” featuring Scott Ambush playing more complex & technical bass lines << Previous Page |
Andrea Pinarello, the son of the Pinarello bicycle manufacturer founder Giovanni, collapsed and died following the opening stage of an amateur cycling race, according to reports in Italy. Related Articles Giovanni Pinarello dies aged 92 The 40-year-old suffered a heart attack following the first stage of the Giro del Friuli, an amateur Italian stage race. He is reported to have collapsed immediately after crossing the finish line in apparent good health. Paramedics successfully revived him, but a second heart attack shortly afterwards was to prove fatal. Andrea, who had a long association with the highly-regarded Italian bike manufacturing family, is survived by his wife and two children. The Pinarello family has close links to sport, sponsoring major professional teams and riders of the calbire of Miguel Indurain for many years. The company currnetly supplies bikes to Team Sky and Movistar. Cyclingnews extends its condolences to the family and friends of Pinarello. |
Flightradar24 lets you track ATAC’s fleet of private contractor aggressors that fly out of NAS Point Mugu and NAS Fallon. Whilst most of the interesting aircraft (namely fighters and attack planes as Special Ops platforms are still there) are hidden on Flightradar24.com, the popular online tracking system still provides the opportunity to follow ATAC (Airborne Tactical Advantage Company) aggressors flying tactical flight training missions for U.S. Navy, Air Force and Air National Guard assets. Indeed, as pointed out by Bob Cheatham, one of our avid followers from California, most of ATAC’s jets can be tracked as they practice dogfights almost daily off San Diego, inside the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division-managed Point Mugu Sea Range that features 36,000 square miles of controlled sea and airspace, and allows for testing in a real-world environment. “Growing up in the 70s & 80s, I was a huge fan of Pt. Mugu’s VX-4 Evaluators (F-4 & F-14s), so now I find it interesting to see most of these maneuvers passed on to a civilian contractor that actually shows up in the clear on ADS-B!” Cheatham explained in an email to The Aviationist. “Using the N-registration alerts on FR24, I track practice dogfights almost daily off San Diego between ATAC‘s Hunters & Kfirs (and who knows who else that isn’t on ADS-B?!) Now that I’ve programmed alerts tracking most of their fleet, I’m also seeing missions in the Atlantic off South Carolina & Florida too.” ATAC, acquired in July 2016 by Textron Inc.’s new Textron Airborne Solutions company, has been performing air-to-ship, air-to-air and research & development missions in support of DoD for the last 20 years using a fleet of fast jets that includes 6x IAI Kfir C2, 2x L-39ZA Albatros and several Hawker Hunters. The company provides advanced Adversary support at all levels of the US Navy’s air-to-air training programs, from Fleet Replacement Squadrons to the Navy’s graduate level “TOPGUN” program. Indeed, the ATAC’s Kfir can be often spotted at NAS Fallon (where the top shot was taken by aviation photographer Kedar Karmarkar): if you look for one of the Israeli jet’s serial numbers (for instance, N402AX) in FR24’s database, you’ll find several flights of the supersonic fighter at the Naval Fighter Weapons School in Nevada. But adversary training at Point Mugu and the Top Gun school at NAS Fallon are not the only activities ATAC jets carry out. According to the company’s website “ATAC also trains the U.S. Air Force, specifically in the European theater supporting the United States Air Forces, Europe (USAFE) with JTAC Training, as well as CONUS F-15 Operational Readiness Evaluations, “Red Flag/Northern Edge” exercises, and has been entrusted to provide support for Air Force F-22 Raptor crews.” ATAC is not the only company to provide live Red Air aggressor training services for the U.S Air Force and U.S. Navy: Draken International; and Discovery Air Defence Services, a subsidiary of Discovery Air, are also regularly awarded contracts to perform such services. Top image credit: Kedar Karmarkar Salva Related articles |
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Feb. 18, 2016, 12:01 PM GMT / Updated Feb. 18, 2016, 12:46 PM GMT By Ali Gostanian A couple tried to smuggle nearly $5 million in counterfeit cash into the U.S., officials said. Authorities stopped the pair after they arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport aboard a flight from Seoul, South Korea, on Friday. U.S. Customs and Border Protection found 93 bundles of counterfeit U.S. $100 bills and 32 bundles of counterfeit Vietnamese dong in their luggage. Customs and Border Protection officers seized $4.65 million in counterfeit "Hell money" in Detroit. Customs and Border Protection The $4.65 million recovered was so-called "Hell money" — which is printed on joss paper and burned as an offering to the dead in some Asian cultures. “Attempting to import any amount of counterfeit currency, regardless of the intended purpose, can have serious implications for arriving travelers,” CBP port director Devin Chamberlain said. The bogus bucks were seized by agents from Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Secret Service. |
Brisbane Broncos name a travelling squad of just 18 players ahead of World Club Challenge clash with Wigan Brisbane coach Wayne Bennett has named a squad of just 18 Brisbane Broncos will bring just 18 players to England for their World Club Challenge clash with Wigan on Saturday week. Coach Wayne Bennett will be desperately hoping to avoid illness or any injuries when his puts his players through an opposed training session with London Broncos at Harrow School. Missing from the Brisbane squad are Matt Gillett, Jack Reed, Dale Copley, Jarrod Wallace, David Stagg, Corey Oates and Darius Boyd, who are all recovering from injury, but close-season recruits Anthony Milford and Adam Blair will make the trip, along with Test players Ben Hunt, Sam Thaiday, Corey Parker, Alex Glenn, Justin Hodges and Josh McGuire. There is no place for former Huddersfield and Hull KR full-back Greg Eden, who joined the Broncos at the end of last season. Brisbane are setting off on Thursday and will initially base themselves in London. Watch Saturday's showdown between Brisbane Broncos and Wigan live on Sky Sports 1 from 19:45 |
Men say horrifying and revolting things to you about women when they think you've never been one. But there is one stark and tangible difference in how the world responds to me, and that's the types of things that men (specifically cis-gendered straight men) talk to me about. People often ask me if I get treated differently when I'm read as male versus when I used to be read as female. Hmmmmaybe. Really, there are too many subtle wavelengths to any human interaction to know which are directly connected to how people are reading my gender. I'm a trans man who's been on hormones for about 5 months. My voice is a lot lower than it used to be, and I have a pretty cute, if wily, crop of facial hair going on. As a result, I've started passing as male pretty much all the time. It's a new thing, and it's a lot to digest. Editors' Note: Guest blogger Levi Pine is a trans man and a union organizer in Chicago who spends a lot of time with Fierce Ladies in housekeeping uniforms. He appreciates leotards and has spent years talking about starting a fag-punk band called Global Business Solutions. Here are some of the more outstanding examples. 1. "What's that bitch doing begging? Doesn't she know she can sell her pussy?" This was said to me by a cab driver at 4 am taking me to the airport in New Orleans. I learned a lot of things about him in that half hour. He was a black man, and a republican, and his life had been completely shattered by the hurricane in 2005. He made a lot of comments about white tourists in town for Mardi Gras (which I was, which he knew), and the things that white people could get away with that he and many people he knows had been incarcerated for doing. By the time he got to the golden quip above, he'd already established that he almost categorically mistrusted me. I didn't blame him. And, stumbling over white- and class- guilt and 4-AM-brain, I let the above statement pass without saying a thing. 2. "What's black and blue and doesn't like sex? The eight-year-old girl in my trunk." This was a "joke" somebody told me a few weekends ago while we were rock climbing. He said it was ok because he didn't come up with the joke. He was standing ready to catch me while I was climbing to make sure I didn't fall and crack my head open. He was also giving me lots of good advice about climbing. Rather than risk seeming somehow ungrateful for his spotting and good advice, I shamefully kept quiet about his joke. 3. "That bitch ________________________." The above sentence can be finished or reorganized in any number of common ways. "That bitch is stupid." "That bitch's mouth would look a lot better on my dick." "Don't listen to her, she's just a bitch." All of those are things people have actually been said to me. Bitch is an oppressive word. It constructs women as unintelligent, incapable, and subservient. Women are "bitches" when they challenge male privilege--when they are assertive or self-possessed, or just not deferential enough. "Bitches" are also objects, to be manipulated for male sexual gratification. Another equally disturbing thing that happens, if not more disturbing, is that it's not just men who call women bitches when talking to me. Women do too. And I don't mean the occasional "bitch, please," I mean like "She should stop being a bitch and just sleep with him." Women participate in this because of some internalized bullshit - as though to demonstrate subservience or to show me that they're not a threat to my male privilege. Inside our radical and queer communities, these kinds of comments are shocking, and they're not. What really sticks out to me is the fact that I'm only now hearing them in real time from real live people, as opposed to in songs or pop culture. That means people who say these things have begun doing so because they think I'm "one of them," and that they didn't say these things to me before because they read me as female and understood some element of how fucked up these things are, and so held their tongues because they didn't want to offend. I once got in a big argument with a (white) close friend of mine who had taken to saying "n*gger" in casual conversation. "But I'd never actually say it in front of a black person," he insisted. "Why not?" I asked. "Because that'd be completely inappropriate." "Why would it be inappropriate?" "Because it's a really degrading and offensive word." Yes, and when you try and throw a private degradation-of-black-people party between just you and me, you're assuming that saying racially oppressive things is both less oppressive when you do it in private and also something I think is cool and fun. Neither are true. My impression is that cis-men make these kinds of comments to me with the intention of establishing camaraderie, bringing me into the fold. I think it's an impulse towards some weird version of intimacy--establishing our common reality as "men." Unfortunately, the reality described (and produced) by the above comments is not the one I live in. I say "produced" because, for the same reason that saying n*gger in private amongst white people creates enduring racism, making these kinds of disgusting comments about women amongst "just men" (which, as a category, is less coherent when I'm included) creates enduring sexism. Our words become our thoughts, which become our habits. In almost all the examples above, I was too cowardly to speak up against the offending commenters. I was scared of outing myself as trans, and also scared of how these men would react if I rejected what I think amounts to a bizarro form of hospitality - an invitation into the clubhouse. That's not ok, and this is my commitment to change my behavior. We all need to make a commitment not to tacitly condone these private oppressive rituals of maleness, whether as trans men, as cis-men, as women, and everyone else. Yes, I have roots as a female-bodied and female-identified person, but you don't need to have history as a woman to respect women. |
Paging Mr. Robespierre. A mock Donald Trump effigy (unfortunately not a piñata), was hung and beheaded on the steps of Salt Lake City's city hall building (below) on Friday afternoon, in part of a nationwide fit of anger against the Republican presidential candidate. Earlier in the procedings, the Trump effigy was a little bit more recognizable, as can be seen in the video above. "How can Trump run a country when he can’t even do his hair right!?" yells a man who according to reporting from The American Mirror, and confirmed by his Twitter profile, is a barista at a local Starbucks (below). Nicole Vowell of KSL 5 tweeted several videos of protesters standing on the steps of city hall Friday. #livetweet #dumptrump YES THATS ME AND I JUST LED A REVOLUTION pic.twitter.com/va8R9yPkkC — Hans Styles (@hanskurzius) March 19, 2016 Please enable Javascript to watch this video "Yes that's me," the man posted on Twitter that afternoon. "AND I JUST LED A REVOLUTION"His Twitter biography states: "smile ,do a pushup, sing a song, make a joke, eat some food❤️ ... Barista @starbucks""What's the biggest threat in the world today?" chanted more protesters earlier. "Donald Trump in the U.S.A.""Alright, I'm going to do it one more time, and then pass it off to myover here."Video recorded here... |
Police have dusted off an old chapter of the Canadian Criminal Code and charged a woman with posing as a witch, allegedly to defraud a Toronto lawyer of more than $100,000. Vishwantee Persaud, 36, is accused of conning veteran criminal lawyer Noel Daley by saying she was the embodiment of his deceased sister, whose spirit would guide him to financial success. Vishwantee Persaud, 36, is accused of posing as a witch to gain the trust of Toronto lawyer Noel Daley and to defraud him of thousands. ( PHOTO SUPPLIED ) "She told (Daley) that she had a history in her family of them being sort of good witches, or having occult powers, and that she could do a tarot card reading for him," said Det. Const. Corey Jones. It was an attempt to gain Daley's trust, police allege, and the spell worked. Over the next few months, police say, the lawyer coughed up money for a variety of reasons – including alleged bogus law tuition and rent for a premier office space in the heart of the financial district. Persaud also faces two fraud charges. Article Continued Below Daley declined to discuss the matter with the Star, saying it is before the court. But in an interview with Law Times, published Nov. 30, he described being conned by a woman who was "the epitome of the skills that make up a good confidence man." Despite its archaic tone, the witchcraft charge isn't all that rare. From January 1999 to October 2009, 38 people in Ontario were charged under Section 365, which deals with fraudulently pretending to exercise witchcraft, sorcery, fortune telling or conjuration. The provision is really a remnant from the dark ages, said Alan Young, a professor at York University's Osgoode Hall law school. The charge, which was part of the code when it was enacted in 1892, has nothing to do with the occult, but with scammers who fake mystical powers, Young said. "They wanted to regulate the practice to protect vulnerable people from giving their life savings over to fortune tellers who were basically con artists." Article Continued Below If Persaud is found guilty, there won't be any burning at the stake. The witchcraft charge carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail and up to a $2,000 fine. Daley befriended Persaud, who allegedly claimed to be a third-year law student in a bad financial situation, in January 2009, police said. Dubious of her schooling, he quizzed her on her legal knowledge. She got it all right. Within months, she was working at his law firm and he occasionally pitched in for her grocery bills. Then came the alleged tarot reading, which police say she used to gain Daley's trust. After that, she began proposing business ideas, police allege. She said she had connections from her days at a successful Toronto marketing firm, police say. And Daley paid up, fronting cash for proposed deals with Sony and Wal-Mart, Jones said. "My desire to make an easy buck clouded my judgment," Daley told Law Times. Soon, Daley said, he was paying rent for an office at First Canadian Place, as well as $18,000 for cancer treatments. Then Persaud allegedly proposed they make money hosting and providing security for celebrities at the Toronto International Film Festival, police said. No actors showed, and Daley became suspicious. Persaud, who is also charged with four counts of failing to comply with recognizance and two counts of failing to comply with probation, is being held in custody. But the news of the arrest is bittersweet in the psychic community. "It definitely puts a stain on our business. The outside world sees that and think that there are just bad readers out there," said Lisa Marvin, a psychic adviser and co-owner of Metaphysique in Yorkville. "People who go to readings are looking for guidance," she said. "They shouldn't be taken advantage of." |
I read constantly. It was a way to find out more about the world outside my parents home, and escape from the day in day out monotony, and other than our family movie nights, some of my only entertainment. Some books that I read, were not approved. I speed-read them without my parents knowledge in the library (The Princess Diaries Series, Star Wars Sci-Fi) and later when I had access to book stores bought them and hid them in the cabinet that was mine (Leon Uris and Chiam Potok). Sometimes unapproved books made their way into our house from grandparents downsizing (Readers Digest collections) or a large box of classics a distant relative or friend dropped off for the homeschool kids, which would then sit in the corner of the living room until my mom had a chance to sort and approve which we could keep. In that window of time I would do my own sorting and read as much as I could before books were disposed of. Sometimes I was caught reading unapproved materials, and I would be lectured on the dangers of reading such things and the book would be put away or thrown out. There were a few times as a teen where I was banned from all reading other than my bible or theology books (for days, weeks or months) until my attitude improved, or I consistently got all my chores done on time, or until my dad randomly decided my punishment had lasted long enough. Some of the books I read were marginally or grudgingly approved. Books like the Dear America Series, these were Historical Fiction, written in the first person from the perspective of a young girl at some point in history. My mom originally approved them on a case by case basis, but at some point couldn’t keep up with my speed reading and gave up policing which ones I could or could not read, and I devoured them all, including the ones about girls who were not Christians, and the ones that talked about suffrage. Another one that squeaked by was “The Diary of Ann Frank” I’m still not sure what caused it to be approved, but I remember my grandma expressing surprise that I wasn’t allowed to read it, and then eventually I read it. All of these books shaped me, but the books I’m writing about today are the books that were unequivocally and heartily approved by my parents, but contained messages about women daring to step outside the conservative box of their time, that I don’t think my parents intended me to find. I suppose I am using the term “Feminist Literature” somewhat loosely here. These books are all at least 100 years old, were not LGBTQ inclusive or racially sensitive, and they gave a lot of simplistic boy meets girl type scenarios to conclude the story, but they also introduced me to ideas of womanhood that I am not sure I would have encountered otherwise. Also interesting to note, all of these books have female authors! “An Old Fashioned Girl”- by Louisa May Alcott I read so many books by Louisa May Alcott. My mom read “Little Women” aloud to us when I was young, and I read as many other books as I could find in print. Alcott’s stories tend to have heavily moralized themes, but I still value her ability to make her main protagonist female most of the time, and that she always tucked in a spinster character somewhere as a subtle nod to the fact that life can be lived as a female with out being a man’s partner. I mention this title in particular because I remember being impressed with the fact that Polly (the main character in the story) moved away from home to live in the city at 20 years of age. She got her own place, supported herself, and navigated her own relationships, all of which were forbidden in my home of origin at the time. I wondered what it would be like to live as an independent woman, without having every decision fielded by my parents. “These Happy Golden Years”- Laura Ingalls Wilder This is another series I loved. I got “Little House in the Big Woods” when I was 7, and my aunt gifted me the rest of the series when I was 8. My mom also read this series out loud to the family. Through the whole series Laura struggles to fit the stereotypical image of femininity, she runs instead of walks, lets her bonnet fall down her back instead of shade her face, and likes to hang out with her dad. “These Happy Golden Years” is at the end of the series, and Laura is closing in on adulthood. I remember being surprised when Almonzo starts to show interest, they go for enumerable buggy rides, without a chaperon, which by purity culture standards meant Laura’s reputation must be compromised! But no one in the story seemed to feel that way? Also when Laura and Almonzo get married, she makes a specific request that the word “submit” be left out of the vows, because she would not promise to obey anyone. This was shocking to me, and intriguing. “Anne of the Island”- L.M. Montgomery I am not sure why the Anne of Green Gables series was approved, when L.M. Montgomery’s other series “Emily of New Moon” was not. I read all of the Anne books several times over, and reveled in her magical dreaming, and lived vicariously through her close friendships. I went with this title (the third in the series) partially because of the story-line of her moving away from home to get her degree, but also because of the relationship that happens in this book. Throughout this era, Anne is involved with a “tall dark and handsome” young man, but near the end of the book realizes that he doesn’t really fit into what she wants in a mate, and she dumps him. She feels horrible about breaking his heart, but life goes on. The idea that a woman could legitimately end a relationship that was not working for her was a big one in a belief system where dating was practically equal to marriage, and marriage was forever no matter what. Girl of the Limberlost- Gene Stratton Porter This book I received from my grandpa, who got it at an auction. It was a first edition, with a torn jacket and worn binding, and I read it many many times in my teen years. While the girls in the other books I mentioned here had either support, or mild disapproval to deal with from their parents, Elnora in this book deals with much more on that front. Her mother is neglectful, depressed, and vehemently against Elnora pursuing her education. But Elnora is determined to go to high school anyway, and she does, despite having older clothes and used books. She builds a support network, figures out how to support herself, and persists in her goal despite the almost constant negativity from her mom. This stood out to me, because it was so hard to ever imagine standing up for myself like that. I wanted to please my parents so badly, the idea of pursuing something they did not approve of was mind-boggling. But I read the book again and again, hoping that maybe one day I would have courage (like Elnora) to be myself, despite the obstacles. So there you have it. Fundamentalist approved Feminist Literature I grew up reading. Books that were so old, they had to support the fantasy world the fundamentalist culture was trying to re-create, right? Except even 100 year old books were more progressive than the conservative worldview I grew up in. What subversive ideas did you glean from parent approved reading? |
David Davis: Britain would be better off out of the EU – and here’s why This is the full text of a speech delivered by David Davis on 4th February 2016. It has been over 43 years since Britain joined the European Economic Community. For all that time there have been calls for Europe to reform. For Europe to be more democratic, more competitive, more functional. And for Britain to lead that reform. The result? If anything Europe has become less democratic, less competitive and more dysfunctional. And Britain has become more side-lined. The EU has been in decline for some time now. There is no change of course in sight. The risks involved in staying are clear for all to see – low growth, high unemployment, and waning influence. In 1975 the EU was the bright future, a vision of a better world. Now it is a crumbling relic from a gloomy past. We must raise our eyes to the wider world. The UK has been a persistent advocate of reforming and modernising the EU. Even a decade ago there was hope of radical reform, as the EU expanded from 15 nations to 28. Some thought the new members, only recently independent themselves, would shift the EU away from its centralising, statist destination, and towards a more democratic, more trade-focussed direction. The hope was that Europe would become ‘wider, not deeper’. With hindsight, this hope now looks ridiculous. The siren calls for ‘more Europe’ have only increased. The UK also proselytised for a ‘two-tier’ or ‘two speed’ Europe, with a loose decentralised group around a more centralised Franco-German core. With the Eurozone, we now have a de facto two-tier Europe, but one that works to the detriment of the non-Eurozone countries. Centred on Germany, the EU’s largest and most powerful nation and the paymaster of Europe, the Eurozone constitutes a dominant majority. This is downright dangerous. The core Eurozone countries will not accept any curtailment of the decisions they need to make to save the Euro. At the same time, the non-Eurozone countries cannot accept decisions that are against their interests, imposed on them by the Eurozone core. It will only lead to conflict, conflict that can only be prevented by veto procedures that would be unacceptable to either side. Economic growth on the continent has ground to a halt. Since the turn of the century, the EU has grown at a third of the rate of the global average, and the Eurozone has grown even more slowly than that. Europe’s share of global GDP is falling, as is its share of global trade. This trend is expected to continue. When we last voted on our membership in 1975, trade with Europe was the vast majority of our total trade. This has fallen since then, and in 2008 the UK started to trade more with the rest of the world than with Europe. The fact is that Europe is becoming less and less important. The Euro has become a destroyer of jobs. Unemployment across the continent is running at almost 10 per cent, with youth unemployment double that at 20 per cent. For individual countries, these figures are even worse. Greece and Spain are suffering from youth unemployment rates of nearly 50 per cent, and Italy almost 40 per cent. Unemployment is destroying the prospects of a whole generation of young Europeans. The Euro is an experiment that has failed. In its short life it is already responsible for sovereign debt crises in several European countries, high unemployment, and dramatic trade imbalances across the Eurozone. But then the European project has been a litany of failures. From economic catastrophe, the collapsing single currency experiment, a poor record on increasing trade, the damage done by merging home affairs, to the undoubted foreign policy failures. Then there is the Schengen Zone. The passport-less travel area once held up as the pinnacle of European integration is crumbling before our very eyes. The migration crisis that has brought more than a million refugees to Europe’s shores, with many more expected to come, is a stake in the heart of a borderless Europe. The strength of any policy can only be judged by how it copes with crisis. Schengen, just like the Euro, is failing under the pressure. Even with justice, the EU causes conflict. From the faulty European Arrest Warrant, that has led to innocent Brits being detained for months overseas in terrible conditions without trial, to the slow steady creep of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, we are increasingly finding that our justice system is incompatible with the one on the continent. So the problems facing the EU are mounting up. Economic stagnation, high debt, high unemployment, high regulation, ineffective foreign policy and failing internal policies. This is the backdrop to the Government’s renegotiation of our term of membership. Government’s Negotiation The Government has four strands to its renegotiation: economic governance, ensuring that the Union operates for the benefit of all 28 members; competitiveness, and a target to cut the regulatory burden for business; sovereignty, and an opt-out for Britain from ‘ever closer union’; and finally immigration, and the proposed ‘emergency brake’. This renegotiation is a once in a generation opportunity. Unfortunately, the Government has spent ed this opportunity on demands are so unambitious as to be a waste of time. The concessions outlined by the Prime Minister on Tuesday will have little, if any, impact on the nature of the EU. They will do almost nothing to address the very issues that the Government itself has identified. Take immigration. 265,000 people migrated to the UK from the EU in the last year. Many of them from poorer, Eastern European countries. Such high levels of migration are to be expected given the enormous wage differentials across Europe. There are 6 EU members where the average wage is less than a third of the UK’s minimum wage, and a further 8 countries where it is less than half. Given such incentives, it is surprising that more people are not making the journey. This has consistently been a top issue for voters for over a decade. The Government’s answer? That an ‘emergency brake’ system be put in place, that would allow member states to partly deny in-work benefits to new arrivals for up to four years. But the big caveat is that it would be necessary to prove that services were under strain, and secure the approval of a majority of other EU states. It is rumoured that a French negotiator told his British counterpart that they were, “happy to give the British anything they wanted, so long as it was nothing of substance.” He must have had the emergency brake in mind when he said it. When you look at the figures, it is clear that even should the measure be introduced, the emergency brake will have no impact whatsoever. This is for two reasons. The first is that very few EU arrivals claim in-work benefits in their first four years. In the first year after arrival, only 10 per cent of EU nationals claim tax credits. This number jumps to around 20 per cent by the fourth year. This is because 50 per cent of migrants from the continent are single and childless, with a further 25 per cent not single but also childless. This means that 75 per cent of EU migrants will only be eligible for very low levels of in-work benefits, if at all. By the time the referendum takes place, a single earner without children on the minimum wage will be entitled to less than £10 per month in tax credits. Not even with a very generous leap of imagination can anyone believe that the loss of this amount would dissuade people from coming to this country. The other problem with the brake is that the Government’s own policy to dramatically raise the minimum wage in the form of the national living wage will have the effect of abolishing in-work benefits. By 2020, when the living wage is due to be £9 per hour, and the personal tax allowance has risen further, in-work benefits will be minimal. And the minimum wage in this country will be an even greater multiple of the average wage of the poorest EU members. The Government has said that ‘no calculation has been done on how much the proposed brake will cut EU immigration’. This is hardly surprising given the number will be very close to zero. Then there is the matter of Parliamentary sovereignty. The primary reason that I believe Britain should vote for Brexit is not economic, it is political. It is so that the United Kingdom, the first great liberal democracy of the modern era, the fifth largest economy in the world, can recover control of her own destiny. The renegotiation does not call for any repatriation of powers. It offers no confirmation of Parliament’s sovereignty. All the Government has demanded is an exemption from ‘ever closer union’, and the Government’s proposed ‘red card’ system to block unwanted laws. Given the ‘ratchet’ nature of the European Union, the exemption from ‘ever closer union’ is not worth the paper it is written on. And the ‘red card’ proposal is worth even less. The ‘red card’ system only operates on draft laws, only works if there is a ‘subsidiarity’ argument, and needs the agreement 55 per cent of EU Parliaments. This is the much the same as the old ‘yellow card’ system, that was also unworkable and which William Hague previously claimed is too difficult to satisfy. Just consider: a blocking minority in the European Council is 35 per cent. If this 35 per cent cannot be reached, then it is inconceivable that there will be simultaneous rebellions in 15 European Parliaments on the same issue. The red card is not, on any interpretation, a parliamentary veto. It returns no power to Parliament, does not help us protect our national interests and offers no protection from EU lawmakers. On the Government’s calls for greater competitiveness, there has not been a single year that has gone by without European council meetings concluding with rallying cries to cut regulation and increase competitiveness. Yet year after year the regulatory burden increases and Europe’s competitiveness declines. No specific regulations have been identified to be culled. No pro-competitive measures have been unveiled. There is no reason to think that President Tusk’s almost detail-less commitment to greater competitiveness will be any different to all the other commitments that have gone before. In summary, the Government’s renegotiation boils down to a few vague measures that either won’t have any effect, or will change so little as to not be worth the effort. The most common reaction from the press and the public seems to be, “is that it?” We have squandered our only opportunity to gain any meaningful reform for Europe. Given the disastrous direction of Europe, its 40 year long inexorable and irreversible trend to more centralisation, and the lack of meaningful change, in my view the safest option for Britain is to leave. It is not just that exit from Europe is nothing to fear. For Britain to remain as a member of the European Union would be to bind us to an institution that is creating a slew of unnecessary risks, would be to forgo control of our own destiny, and to give up on real opportunities to improve the lot of our people. Economic Consequences of Brexit So given that the safe course for Britain is to leave, it is vital to set out how we will leave, and what sort of relationship we can expect once we do. There are some who are nervous of laying out in detail how we see it playing out. I am not. This is the biggest question we will face in a generation. It is our democratic duty to make the consequences clear. The options are very good ones. And you cannot beat something with nothing, even if that something is membership of the creaking edifice that is the EU. In 2006 Professor Patrick Minford assessed that the net effect of the EU on costs and competitiveness was so detrimental that departure from it was likely to prove beneficial even if all the government managed to negotiate in Brexit was WTO terms of trade – ie the minimum legally possible. At the time I thought that was an optimistic view of Brexit. However, that was before I took a hard look at the numbers. The starting point is to ask what benefits we derive from our membership of the EU, namely trade, investment and access to global markets. It has long been claimed that membership of the EU increases trade, and with it wealth and welfare, among its members. Well let us just assess how accurate that is. Now understanding and explaining movements in trade is difficult. They can be effected by bank crises, oil shocks, global disruptions like the collapse of the Soviet empire, new members joining the community, new competitors and so on. The best way to assess whether we got an advantage from entering Europe is to compare our export performance into Europe against that of a comparable group of similarly developed competitor countries who did not enter. This exercise has been done by Michael Burrage in an exercise for the Civitas think tank. He took the European export performance of the UK and measured it against the European export performance of a group consisting of America, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Japan, Norway, and Switzerland. The three graphs below show this performance in three distinct periods. Before entry into the EU, then after entry in what you might think of as the Common Market period, and then in what might be termed the Single Market period. Given that the stated intent of the Single Market was to improve on the trading performance of the Common Market, you would expect our performance to get progressively better in each graph. The actual facts are illuminating. Red is the UK, black is the OECD group. The first graph shows how, prior to our entry into the European Community, we actually performed worse than our non-EU OECD competitors, at least until we were about to enter when we had a sudden sprint. Then, as the second graph shows, once we were inside the Common Market, our trade with Europe performed better, as you would expect. The final graph is the most telling. In the Single Market period our exports grew if anything slower than our OECD competitors, despite our membership. During the Single Market period, despite all the costs incurred, the treaties signed, the regulations implemented, despite all the controversies of the European project, our performance in selling to Europe was worse than our competitors outside the EU. Why is this? There are two possible reasons. One is that the burden of the Single Market bureaucracy handicapped us against our competitors. This is almost certainly true to some extent, but the far bigger reason Trade tariffs during the 1980’s and 1990’s were far higher than they are today, before they were reduced by the World Trade Organisation and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Our success in the 80s and early 90s was the result of being inside a trade protectionist barrier, and little else. That is now largely gone, and with it we are now at a disadvantage to our global competitors. Foreign Direct Investment Another benefit that we have supposedly derived from our membership is increased foreign direct investment in our economy. It is certainly true that at the beginning of the Common Market period there was a spike in foreign investment in this country. However, since the barriers have come down we have received far less foreign investment than either Norway or Switzerland, both outside of the EU, even once we have accounted for their oil industry and financial services. So there seems to have been no discernible benefits to our trade or to foreign direct investment. The final supposed benefit of our membership is how the EU ‘increases our influence on the world stage’, and increases our ‘clout’, allowing us to secure more favourable trade terms across the world. Put to one side how our adding our ‘clout’ has not improved the EU’s dreadfully weak foreign policy. We can test out how well that ‘clout’ has served our interest if we look at the EU’s performance on trade agreements. When negotiating trade agreements with other countries, the EU has to balance the interests of the 28 different member states. This has had dire consequences for the UK. To start with trade agreements negotiated by the EU take a very long time to conclude. We still don’t have free trade agreements with China, India or the US. The talks with India have been ongoing for almost a decade. Our interests are not well represented in trade negotiations. The majority of free trade agreements that have been successfully negotiated by the EU are with North African or South American countries, with far more historical and cultural links to Mediterranean countries than to us. The only Commonwealth country to enjoy a free trade agreement with the EU so far is South Africa, and that has more to do with Nelson Mandela than the UK’s ‘clout’. Other than that the first will be Canada, which is just pending. This is all a function of how marginalised Britain’s interests are within the EU. It is no surprise than we have been outvoted in the Council more than twice as often as any other country. The consequence of this is that these trade deals are not tailored to our requirements. Much has been made of how hard it would be for a single country to negotiate successful trade deals on its own. But if we compare the EU’s trade deals to those that Switzerland have negotiated, with its small population and limited global influence, then we see something interesting. Switzerland have seen an increase in growth rates in trade as a result of two thirds of their free trade agreements. The UK has only seen an increase in growth rates in trade from one third of the EU’s free trade deals. So little Switzerland, with its population of 8 million, is able to negotiate better trade deals for itself than the EU does on our behalf. Does anyone seriously believe that Britain, the fifth largest economy in the world, would not be able to negotiate by itself at least as successfully as Switzerland? Just as damning is that the majority of these trade agreements do not include services. Services account for over three quarters of all the UK’s economic activity. They have provided much of our economic growth in recent years, as well as most new employment. Our creative industries, our financial services and legal services are some of the best in the world. It seems certain that they would be included in any trade deal negotiated by the UK. So on trade, on investment, and on access to overseas markets the benefits we have supposedly derived from the EU are far less than commonly understood. They may well be negative. As I said, I was initially doubtful of Professor Minford’s assessment that we would be better off outside of the EU irrespective of the EU’s response. But he is very likely to be right. Those business groups such as Goldman Sachs and the CBI, who have warned of catastrophe should we leave, are likely to be wrong. It is not surprising that these business are making the argument to stay in. At the end of the day these businesses are arguing for their own, very narrow interest. Indeed, I think we should all raise an eyebrow at the tremendous concern that these companies are showing for our national welfare, given that at least six of Britain’s ten biggest multinationals pay no corporation tax at all. Nevertheless, we should pay attention to their concerns. They have huge sunk costs in distribution and supply networks, and worry about losing access to existing EU markets. And whilst they are not job creators or particularly good innovators, they still represent an important component of our economy. These businesses can relax. There is no doubt that such access would continue in the event of British exit. No-one can reasonably say that the UK would cease to have access to European markets. The worst case scenario is that the UK would revert to trade on a World Trade Organisation basis, with tariffs imposed on our exports into the EU. Let us leave aside cars and food for the moment. Everything else has relatively small barriers, and these are almost certainly negotiable down to zero. If Europe wants to stick to trading on a WTO basis, they are very badly positioned to do so. Everyone knows that the balance of trade is in Europe’s favour. We currently import £59 billion more from Europe than we export. After Brexit we would be Europe’s largest export market, worth £289 billion in 2014, larger than China. To see our importance to Europe, you only need to walk down the street. More than a quarter of all cars sold in this country are Mercedes, BMWs, Audis or VWs. And those are just some of the German brands. We are Europe’s second largest, and fastest growing car market. This negotiation will primarily be about politics, and our European colleagues pre-eminently concerned about their national interest. We are too valuable a market for Europe to shut off. Within minutes of a vote for Brexit the CEO’s of Mercedes, BMW, VW and Audi will be knocking down Chancellor Merkel’s door demanding that there be no barriers to German access to the British market. And while they are at it they will be demanding that those British companies that they own will have uninterrupted access to Europe. We are talking Mini and Rolls Royce, owned by BMW, and Bentley, owned by Volkswagen. Premium brands with healthy demand across Europe. And this is not just German cars. The same will happen with Shell and Unilever in the Netherlands, EDF, EADS and the viticultural trade associations in France, Seat in Spain, and Fiat and the fashion designers in Italy. The pressure from European companies for a free trade deal between the UK and the remaining member of the European Union would be huge. We have far more to gain than we have to lose, while the opposite is true for the EU. People have spoken, wrongly, about 3.3 million British jobs being ‘linked’ to our membership of the EU. Well there are over 5 million jobs on the continent that are linked to trade with Britain. Access to our market is more important to Europe than our access to theirs. To put it bluntly, the most powerful country in Europe needs this negotiation to succeed to the tune of a million jobs, on cars alone. The second most powerful needs it to the tune of half a million jobs, on wine and cheese alone. The first few months may be hysterical, but the leaders of France, Germany, Spain, Italy Poland and the rest know that the way to lose elections is to destroy your own industries. That is a powerful advantage for us. And then there are the absolute benefits that Britain would gain. Our food imports would be cheaper outside of the common external tariff. We would be free to reduce our regulatory burden, making our businesses more competitive. We would be able to negotiate our own trade deals, opening up new markets. And then there is the City. The prevailing thought seems to be that the City would be damaged should we leave the EU. This is extremely unlikely, and it would be perfectly possible to negotiate proper protection for any significant areas at risk. There are two obvious examples where the City might gain. TTIP, the upcoming EU-US trade deal looks likely to exclude financial services, due to a tiff between American and French film makers, and American concerns about having to recognise . Any UK-US trade deal would not omit one of the UK’s most important sectors. And then is the Financial Transaction Tax. Within the EU we would face the circumstance where French bonds sold in the City would have to have the tax charged on them, and then remitted to the French Treasury. Outside the EU, the city would continue to be free continue as before, such as trading in euro-denominated bonds, while ensuring that it is free of the threat of an FTT, as well as being free of all the other stifling European legislation. And any action taken against an independent City would de facto be also against New York and Hong Kong, which would be too stupid for words. In total, it is easy to see Britain could be better off out, even on such terms. And this is the very worst case scenario. Some people have suggested that we should look to Norway, or to Switzerland, to see what terms we can expect once we have left. The idea that we have to fit our future into some Procrustean bed created for far smaller countries is nonsense. The conventional options are laid out in the table, with a reminder of what they involve. We do not need to disappear into the details – always a problem with discussions on Europe – but let me outline what we should take from them. The first one, EEA membership, often called the ‘Norway option’, works well for Norway but is not really appropriate for a major power like the UK. Sometimes pejoratively described as ‘government by fax’, the balance of power looks to be squarely on the EU side. The disparity is exaggerated – Norway is represented on 200 EU committees, it does not have the accept every ruling, half its financial contributions are voluntary, and many of the EU’s regulations are copied from other international organisations’ requests – organisations on which Norway is represented and we are not. Nevertheless, as it stands this model would not work for us. To make it viable it would need an arbitration court (not the ECJ), a dispute resolution procedure, and a number of other institutional changes. It would be possible to design and even negotiate such a structure, but it would take much more than 2 years. The Swiss option, EFTA membership plus a host of bilateral treaties, is the best starting place and is informative in many ways. It is not perfect for us however. It incorporates ‘free movement of people’ for the moment, although there is a clash coming on that, after a Swiss referendum was carried in favour of applying an emergency brake – a real one this time! However, understand the comparative negotiating position. Switzerland is a small country surrounded by the EU. Its trade is absolutely dominated by the EU – over 62 per cent of its exports go to Europe. It runs a large trade surplus, and it is not big enough to be a critical market for any EU nation. The negotiation between the EU and Switzerland in the 1990s was marked by some hostility after it rejected EU membership, and yet it struck a decent deal. The optimum aim for us would be similar, but without the free movement of peoples. That would not be on the table. Essentially we would be looking for a full scale free trade agreement. And it has just been done by another country. If you want a model of how this would look, go on the European Commission website and look at the Canadian Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement that the EU has just struck. It eliminates all customs duties, which the EU website excitedly describes as worth €470 million a year to EU business. A similar deal with Britain would save it 5 times that on cars alone. This would be a perfectly good starting point for our discussions with the Commission. At the same time these negotiations are going on Britain will need to undertake a massive programme of simultaneous negotiations to negotiate free trade agreements with target countries that will be key to a more global approach. Trade Targets If you read as many assessments of Brexit as I have, you can easily come to the conclusion that each side of the argument tends to get exaggerated. I am certain that the catastrophic predictions of the Europhiles are simply nonsense. That is why Toyota, Nissan, Airbus, even BMW, Opel and Volkswagen have now said that Brexit will not hinder their investments in Britain, sometimes in reversal of previous positions. On the pro Brexit side, too, there are a range of estimates from modestly to dramatically better off. The difference here depends most upon exactly what we choose to do with the country and its new found freedoms. The greatest improvements will come if we grasp the opportunities for free trade with both hands. That means immediately seeking Free Trade Agreements with the biggest prospective markets as fast as possible. There is no reason why many of these cannot be achieved within two years. We can pick up the almost complete agreement between the EU and Canada, and if anything liberalise it. We can accelerate our component of the TTIP deal with the USA, and include financial services. Diverting our current contributions to the EU will help to smooth the transition period following the referendum. The most effective policy would be to continue, in the short term, all of the EU’s current spending within the UK. This means continuing to support agriculture, separate from the Common Agricultural Policy, as well as continuing research grants and regional funding. But this would not come near to accounting for our total contributions – around £18 billion gross and £9 billion net. We should find a way of improving the global trade performance of our economy. The companies that find it hard to export are the small and medium ones, for obvious reasons. They do not have the huge international sales and transport departments of the biggest companies. We could afford to fund a new Board of Trade, dedicated to helping British businesses create new links to countries with which we achieve trade deals. The funding would be available to set up an office in every major commercial centre and capital, completely separate from the Foreign Office, staffed with experts who know the language, the customs and the regulations and are on hand to help British businesses develop links in the country. Imagine an 0800 number and an email address where a small manufacturer in Lancashire can call Shanghai or Mumbai or Sao Paolo, and find out in English how to negotiate the import regulations, find a freight forwarder, hire a warehouse, translate a brochure, the simple things that stop too many small businesses from operating abroad. They may be small companies, but this is not small beer: I am talking a billion pound project here. We must see Brexit as a great opportunity to refocus our economy on global, rather the regional, trade. This is an opportunity to renew our strong relationships with Commonwealth and Anglosphere countries. These parts of the world are growing faster than Europe. We share history, culture and language. We have family ties. We even share similar legal systems. The usual barriers to trade are largely absent. The Prime Minister has repeatedly stated that we are a trading nation with global horizons. This is undoubtedly true. So it is time we unshackled ourselves, and began to focus policy on trading with the wider world, rather than just within Europe. We would also have the opportunity to reform our economy, pushing through the changes necessary to create a dynamic, modern economy. Competitive tax rates, a competitive labour market, and effective, rather than burdensome, regulation. After Brexit we can put all that right without asking Brussel’s permission. The European Union was a noble vision. It was borne out of Europe’s history. A history of war, conflict, tyranny and destruction. Two world wars ripped Western Europe apart. It is an entirely understandable, indeed an admirable, response to such horror to want to break down national barriers and increase bonds between peoples and countries. Spain emerged from Franco’s tyranny. Portugal from Caetano. Greece shook off the rule of the Colonels. And after the Berlin Wall fell, whole swathes of Eastern Europe rediscovered democracy and liberty. Faced with such a history it is entirely understandable that the European Union came into being. It is a profoundly peaceful project, dedicated to protecting democracy across Europe. But this history is not our history. Britain has its own proud tradition of fighting tyranny, of protecting liberty and democracy both at home and abroad. For us, Europe has always been about trade. For the continent, it is about so much more. This does not mean either side is wrong. But the European Project is not right for us. The Global Project is. |
Get the biggest rugby stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Wales' four regions are set for a major financial boost as part of the European rugby peace deal. They are on course to see their share of Euro cash rising from just over £4m to just under £7m through the settlement which is due to be announced next week. That will mean revenue for the Ospreys, Scarlets, Blues and Dragons rising from about £1.1m to £1.7m apiece. This will come as a huge boost for the regions who have been seeking additional funding to help them become more competitive and hold on to their Wales stars. The cash increase has been secured via the six-year accord which will see the creation of a new 20-team competition to replace the existing Heineken Cup. Under the new deal, Euro revenue is to be split equally between the three competing leagues - the Aviva Premiership, French Top 14 and Pro12 - with each league guaranteed a minimum of £20m. The Pro12 £20m will be divided pretty much equally between the four countries involved in the league - Wales, Ireland, Scotland and Italy - at around £5m each. But after the first £60m of Euro cash is divided three ways, the next £4m will go to the Pro12 and the majority of it will head into Welsh and Irish coffers to reflect the fact they both contribute four teams to Europe whereas Scotland and Italy provide just two. That would see Wales and Ireland both receiving about £6.8m, with Scotland and Italy ending up with £5.1m each. Gallery: Famous Welsh European wins the regions will be looking to repeat in new era If you're reading this on your mobile, our FREE new app Welsh Rugby Addicts is available now on iPhone by clicking here and Android by clicking here There is confidence that the overall Euro pot will exceed £64m, with Sky and BT having now reached agreement over joint television coverage. So the Welsh regions appear on course to receive a sizeable windfall. Moving forward, if Euro revenue rises above £80m, they will get a bigger share of the cash again and the aim is for the three leagues to be sharing £100m within five years. The regions are also in line for additional cash as part of their new agreement with the Welsh Rugby Union, which is still under discussion. Under the original Participation Agreement - which the regions refused to sign - they were due to receive £6.6m from WRU central funds. That money was to cover issues such as international player release, observing overseas player quotas, plus a range of other issues. The Union was also due to provide an additional £600,000 towards the cost of running the regional academies. As part of the new Rugby Services Agreement being proposed by the WRU, the amount of money on the table for the professional game in Wales is now up to £9.3m. That includes £2m a year which has been secured via sponsors to pay for the central contracting of star players, as well as the £600,000 of academy funding. If a system for implementing some form of national contracts for elite players can be agreed upon, then the regions would no longer have to pay their wages, but would still be able to utilise them. That, in turn, would free up additional cash to spend on bolstering the rest of their squads. It’s understood the regions’ ultimate target is to share £24m a year, compared with the current £16m, and they look to be moving closer towards that goal. Adding the enhanced Euro cash to the money they receive - largely through broadcasting contracts - for taking part in the Pro12, the regions will see their competition revenue rise from around £9.6m to about £12.5m. And £9.3m from the WRU sees the professional game pot rising to close on £22m. |
“The biggest part of this sign I had for the last election when Dalton McGuinty ran and it was up the entire election – not a single complaint,” he said. Burrows said the city would have also requested he take down the sign after three days if they had known about it during the last election. “We don’t necessarily know about all the signs that are out there, but when we are made aware of it we take action,” she said. “When I saw this, I am confident this is a temporary personal sign and not an election sign. This is a personal message and that’s the difference.” Burrows said if Magyar does not remove the sign on Sunday, he could face a fine between $100-$325. Alternately, he could challenge the case in court. “We can give him a ticket or take him to court, whichever he would prefer,” she said. “If we go to court on it, obviously the fines are identified under the Ontario Municipal Act and the current fine is up to $25,000 for penalty for non-compliance.” Magyar said he hasn’t decided whether to take down the sign on Sunday. He told the Post today he will be contacting his local councillor, the mayor and McKenna for help. “One-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars is a big deal, but if I take it to court I’m told it could cost $25,000,” he said. “I’m retired. I don’t have that kind of money.” He said he believes he has a right to freedom of speech. “It’s about free speech and my right to express my political views without directly insulting any individual,” he said. “The line ‘Stupid is as stupid does’ comes from Forrest Gump. It’s been on TV for over a decade. It’s a catch phrase. Nothing on the sign is not true. It is all true, it’s been checked. Of course, they say that’s not the issue. I’m pretty sure it had to be politically motivated.” Meanwhile, the city is experiencing problems with infractions of party signs for local provincial candidates on city property. “Back at the beginning of May at the call of the election, I sent out an advisory to all the candidates indicating they cannot put their signs on city property and if they do, we will remove them and it will cost them $80 to get them back, per sign,” she said. However, city staff has been busy removing signs for weeks. Burrows estimates they have collected at least 500 signs. Not one has been claimed by the various parties involved. “It’s probably the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Burrows, who has worked with the city for 12 years. “I’ve been here for a number of elections and so far, this one is the worst.” She said the majority of the retrieved signs are for Liberal and Conservative candidates, with a smaller number of NDP candidates’ signs. Information on the city’s sign bylaw can be found at http://bit.ly/1kCS8jc. |
Cockroach breeder Wang Fuming said business is booming for his cockroaches. The demand comes from China's pharmaceutical companies, who use the cockroaches in pills to treat illnesses afflicting the stomach, liver and heart. Wang said he has a special relationship with the cockroaches. "I love these cockroaches, I feel very close to them," he told CNN. "Just smell that unique smell they have." In an industrial district on outskirts of the city of Jinan in eastern China, Wang farms millions of cockroaches. He keeps the roaches in warehouses with narrow corridors and hives made of cement roof shingles. There, visitors are greeted by the strong smell of ammonia and the sound of scuttling legs. Wang breeds American cockroaches and he sells them to pharmaceutical companies in China by the ton. Insects, including cockroaches, are a valued ingredient of Chinese medicines with its use stretching back more than 5000 years. The United Nations published a report in 2013 recommending insects for human consumption as an alternative source of protein that can be less harmful to the environment than meat. Wang said he doesn't need to be convinced of the merits of eating cockroaches. "If you don't try it you'll regret your decision forever," he said. |
Tucked away in the Higher Education Act is a requirement that colleges and universities make an effort to help students register to vote by distributing voter registration applications by email or by paper (if distributed by email, the email must be solely dedicated to voter registration). Schools that do not do so risk losing millions in federal funding. An estimated six to eight million part-and full-time students in 2010 are unregistered, according to a recent op-ed by Douglas Hess and Steven Rosenfeld: "Compliance with the HEA could easily facilitate the registration of hundreds of thousand of new, young voters and update the registrations of an equal number." Registration deadlines start kicking in soon: the first few states stop accepting new registrations next Monday, October 4. So, it is imperative that schools take this opportunity to follow the law by reminding their students that time is running out if they want to register to vote in another historic election this November. Schools and voter registration groups should: Send an email to all students with voter registration forms as a link or a PDF attachment, and provide them with the deadline; Remind students to print and mail their voter registration forms (unless they live in states that provide a completely online voter registration service); Also provide the link to the national voter registration form (for out-of-state or commuting students to use); and Continue to supplement voter registration emails with in-class registration or voter registration tables. Click here to see a list of voter registration deadlines. If your state’s deadline is several weeks away, consider sending one email now and another the week before the deadline. (Schools in six states are exempt from this law: Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.) |
Someone asked me recently why it's only black holes and compact objects like neutron stars that produce gravitational waves. The answer is that it isn't only these objects. The gravitational wave signals detected by LIGO do come from the inspiral of pairs of black holes. But, in simple terms, all moving, accelerating, asymmetrical objects can generate ripples in space that will carry energy away. The extreme compactness of black holes is what allows them to generate enough wave energy to not only be (just) detectable by our instruments, but to also inspiral on cosmically short timescales as that energy is lost to the cosmos. Binary stars emit gravitational waves, stars and planets do, and even a pair of waltzing humans are radiating into the 'fabric' of space - albeit with a power level that is absolutely miniscule. Specifically, the power being lost into gravitational waves by a pair of objects of masses m1 and m2, orbiting around their common center of mass in circular paths is given by: If we plug in values for the Earth-Sun system (with its orbital separation r) the power being radiated away in gravitational waves is about 200 Joules per second (200 watts). That might actually sound like quite a lot, until you compare it to the total kinetic and potential energy of the Earth in the Sun's gravitational field, which is roughly 1036 joules. So, over the course of a single orbit the total energy loss due to gravitational waves would be roughly equivalent to a shift in Earth's orbital radius of 10-13 centimeters. Another way to look at this is to ask how long it would take for two orbiting objects to inspiral due to gravitational wave energy loss. The basic formula for this timescale (in handy units of orbital radius 'a' in AU and masses in solar masses) is: If the Earth and Sun had no external influences, and if the Sun remained the way it is today (rather than inflating in a few billion years and essentially wiping out the inner planets of the solar system), and if we ignore other tidal force effects, the pair would take roughly 1023 years to inspiral due to gravitational wave energy loss. That's quite a while; a leisurely hundred billion trillion years into the future. Even an extreme planet-star configuration of a hot Jupiter orbiting a solar mass star at a mere 0.01 AU only gets us into the realm of a few trillion years inspiral due to gravitational wave radiation. So, the simple answer is that gravitational waves are being produced all around us, all the time. They're just really, really low energy compared to what happens with the universe's most compact and massive objects. |
Nominally liberal comedian Bill Maher finally followed through on his irresistible urge to discuss the beauty of laughter with far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos on his HBO show “Real Time” this Friday. It went just as poorly as people familiar with the work of Maher and Yiannopoulos expected it to. On Wednesday, journalist Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept On Wednesday, journalist Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept announced on Twitter his decision to rescind Maher’s invitation to appear on the same episode of his show as Yiannopoulos, arguing that the gay Breitbart writer, “has ample venues to spew his hateful diatribes. There is no value in ‘debating’ him.” Yiannopolous has been profiled widely , from Out Magazine to Bloomberg, and loves publicity of all kinds. Recently, he’s brought his intolerant screed to several universities, then acted insulted when he’s inevitably met with protests (he markets himself as a champion of free speech, but is most enamored with his own voice). Maher responded to Scahill with his own statement that, “If Mr. Yiannopoulos is indeed the monster Scahill claims—and he might be—nothing could serve the liberal cause better than having him exposed on Friday night.” Advertisement Advertisement But the interview ended up revealing more about Maher, who passed the time agreeing with much of what the 32-year-old alt-right poster boy and avid Trump supporter had to say. At one point, Milo asserted, “All I care about is free speech and free expression. I want people to be able to be, say, and do anything. These days...that’s a conservative issue.” Maher completely let him get away with it and even affirmed him. After the initial interview, Yianopoulos joined the night’s other guests on a panel, where he But the interview ended up revealing more about Maher, who passed the time agreeing with much of what the 32-year-old alt-right poster boy and avid Trump supporter had to say. At one point, Milo asserted, “All I care about is free speech and free expression. I want people to be able to be, say, and do anything. These days...that’s a conservative issue.” Maher completely let him get away with it and even affirmed him. After the initial interview, Yianopoulos joined the night’s other guests on a panel, where he suggested that transgender people “have a psychiatric disorder.” In the one-on-one interview, Maher referred to people who were concerned about Yianopoulos’ appearance on his show as “schoolgirls.” And there is so much more where that came from. What I see as the major misconception of the interview was expressed in an interaction toward the end where Yiannopoulos asserts that, “The one thing authoritarians hate is the sound of laughter,” and Maher totally doesn’t call out Yiannopoulos for supporting a president with a highly authoritarian style of governing. Instead, Maher follows up with this: “And also because when people laugh, they know it’s true.” The pair howls and spits over how right they are about being funny (or is it funny about being Right?) for most of the interview. It seemed to me that Maher was gesturing at the existence of some kind of universal truth that conveniently transcends all the aghast viewers who were most certainly not laughing as he and his guest took turns making pointlessly cruel remarks at the expense of LGBT people, women, people of faith (Muslims in particular, It seemed to me that Maher was gesturing at the existence of some kind of universal truth that conveniently transcends all the aghast viewers who were most certainly not laughing as he and his guest took turns making pointlessly cruel remarks at the expense of LGBT people, women, people of faith (Muslims in particular, of course ), and black people. Noticeably absent from this universally hilarious cohort of comedic targets: Trump and his entire administration, Breitbart, Republicans in general, cops, corporations—need I go on? Unlike many in Maher’s audience, this segment did not make me laugh so much as make me intensely conscious of how cold and clammy my face was becoming with each passing moment. Advertisement Sponsored The thing about Maher is that—though he’s made too many nasty jokes about minorities and women for me to ever enjoy him—he is usually pretty good at making fun of everyone. He didn’t do that in his interview with Yiannopoulos. I’m sure Maher of all people can appreciate the truth about how much that fucking sucked. |
Damage to a famous North-east statue of a Scots hero appears to be “worse that first thought”, it has been revealed. The figure of Rob Roy is seen by thousands of passing motorists every day on the way out of Peterculter. And it was lifted by crane from its site at the weekend in a bid to see it restored to its former glory. The model is made of polychrome carved wood and usually sits on the rocky bank of Culter Burn at the west of the village. Doug Middleton, chairman of the Rob Roy Preservation Trust, said: “It’s not in great shape. It appears to be worse than what we first thought.” Mr Middleton said he would be unable to comment on the potential options for repairing or replacing the figure until someone with experience in the field had looked at it. Construction firm Diack and MacAuley is conducting ongoing repair work on the historic Rob Roy Bridge adjacent to the statue and donated the use of a mobile crane to allow the committee to remove it for a full evaluation. Mr Middleton said: “Legend has it that Rob Roy leapt across the stream in pursuit of Hanoverian troops right at the point that it stands today. It’s an important part of Culter’s heritage and is also an attractive asset for locals and tourists. “We are very grateful to Diack and MacAuley for their offer which allowed us to lift the statue from its current location so we can assess it for repair.” Mr Middleton explained that a representation of the loveable rogue has sat at the site since around 1850 and this is the fourth model of its kind. He said: “The first was a redundant figurehead from the Rob Roy whaling ship which was fashioned into a model using logs of wood for legs and canvas for a kilt. “This stood until around 1865 when a replacement was commissioned by the public. “The model lasted well but was used for target practice by the Territorial Army before the First World War and weather took its toll on the third statue. “The current figure was carved by Arnold Smith and was unveiled in 1991.” |
I had some Indian Creamed Spinach made up in my freezer, and wanted to make something new with it for lunch today. A few moments of deliberating at the refrigerator and freezer resulted in this tasty dish. It is Induction friendly and ever so easy to put together. INGREDIENTS: 8 oz. ground beef (or lamb if you prefer) 3 large (1½”) mushrooms, chopped ½ tsp. Garam Masala spice blend: https://buttoni.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/garam-masala-indian-spice-blend/ 3/4 c. creamed spinach: I used this: https://buttoni.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/indian-creamed-spinach/ 3/4 c. Monterey jack cheese, grated DIRECTIONS: Make your creamed spinach per package or recipe instructions. You will only need 3/4 c. for this recipe. Preheat oven to 350º. In a non-stick skillet, brown the ground beef slowly over med-high heat so as to not need any additional oil (1T. oil if using very lean meat) . Add mushrooms and Garam Masala. Cook together until mushrooms are done. Remove from burner. Spread 3/4 c. creamed spinach over the meat gently, leaving the outer 1″ of meat uncovered all the way around (much like you would put sauce on a pizza). Put most of the cheese around the edges so the cheese will melt and bind the meat together and look somewhat like a pizza. Sprinkle remaining cheese randomly over the spinach in the center. Pop into 350º oven just long enough to melt the cheese. I served this with a nice cucumber & tomato salad. NUTRITIONAL INFO: Makes 2 servings, each contains: 520 calories 35.8 g fat 6.1 g carbs, 1.6 g fiber, 4.5 g NET CARBS 42.3 g protein 952 mg sodium 132% RDA Vitamin B12, 37% A, 38% B6, 31% cupper, 58% iron, 51% niacin, 43% phosphorous, 45% riboflavin, 53% salenium and 96% zinc. (VERY HEALTHY DISH!) |
TODAY is fan favourite Andy Halliday’s birthday and to celebrate RangersTV has made our exclusive feature with the midfielder free to view for today. Your official club channel followed Halliday as he went back to visit Copland Road where he grew up, the Ibrox Complex where he played his football as a kid growing up in the shadows of Ibrox and then represented the club for the first time. We then go inside the Ibrox dressing room with him to discuss how he’s enjoying playing for his boyhood team, sit with him in his season ticket seat discussing his early Rangers memories and stand at the end of the tunnel chatting through the season so far. If you enjoyed this feature then you can watch more exclusive features, interviews, archive matches and big interviews – plus all the latest match action from the first team and Academy and the action from the training ground. Fans can subscribe from as little as £5 per month with a range of different payment and package options to suit your needs. Click HERE for more information and to subscribe today – get closer than ever to your club. |
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