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It was very telling yesterday that the statement repeated and retweeted about the Nokia N9 was not a technical feature. It wasn't how the LED panel had been raised close to the glass of the screen, and curved to give the sense that one was moving the icons around like coins under glass. It wasn't a particular detail of the quasi-buttonless interface, or even that cool bit where you slide half of a web browser over half of a YouTube video, and the video keeps playing. No. The thing about the N9 that was most retweeted was the promise that it would continue to be supported through to 2015. It make sense to reassure people that the only Meego-Harmattan phone you are planning to release will not be abandoned, but, like the Tyrell Corporation, Nokia was giving its precocious, beautiful creation a four year lifespan. Which, to be honest, is not bad going at all. The N9 is not going to be cheap, in those geographies where it can be found. The kind of people who buy it will, I suspect, be the kind of people who regularly replace their phones. By the same logic, however, it is almost a guarantee that one would have to learn the peculiarities of a new OS. The orphan status of the N9 saddens me a little because, when I filched one to play with, it was tremendous fun. It didn't even feel very much like holding a phone, but rather a piece of technology - glossy, black and seamless. The app icons glowed flatly under the screen, and moving between then was a very satisfying experience. It was just a shame that even then it was clear that they were probably not going to get many equally smooth new siblings to play with. Launching a phone that has to be complete from the start is a curious challenge. In an alternate world, the N9 is a Nexus One - a high-end reference model produced by the champions of Meego to educate the many other hardware manufacturers in the Maemo/Meego/Harmattan ecosystem. Instead, it's a Nexus 6 - sent out to far-flung corners of the mobile world with four years to live. Nonetheless, it's not all regrets. After the pummelling of the N8, itself an attempt to recover from the pummelling of the N97, a question that had been creeping around for a while pulled itself up onto its hind legs. Who, exactly, was the Nokia customer? Of the three people I've seen recently using Nokia phones, two had N900s and were making a point about open source, and one had a 3210 from Lekki. From an OS perspective, the N9 is not Nokia's future. But what it has done is made Americans irritated about not being able to get their hands on a Nokia phone. When did that last happen? The Matrix? Windows 7.5 - Mango - is already receiving good notices. Windows 8, which will fold into a phone system, has achieved the near-impossible and got people excited about a Windows release. Nokia probably don't need to agonise too much, at this point, about software. They are on that boat, for better or worse. To avoid being a Windows stack shack, however, they need to put something over Windows Phone. It could be a beautiful UI overlay, except that, actually, WP7s UI overlay has never wanted for attractiveness. What else do you wrap a phone OS in? Hardware. The N9 is a signal flare going up top say that it's OK to care about hardware, and to care about Nokia. This doesn't bring Nokia very far out of the woods. From another point of view, a lot of development and design has led to a phone which will be treasured and coveted more than it is used. Nonetheless, if Elop and Ahtisaari can offer customers an N9-esque device that they can buy and kit out from a full marketplace of modern apps while the N9 is still remembered, this exercise in virtuosity will have had value. As for the N9 - it's too bad it won't live. But then again, who does? |
It took one glance at the Venture Euphoria to confirm something I’ve suspected for a while: Silverton Mountain is the Galapagos Islands of the snowboard world, where Venture Snowboards is free to evolve their products without the predatory forces found in the rest of the world. The Euphoria is designed 100% for a single purpose: riding pow. It’s completely free of the normal constraints almost every snowboard must follow. Even the most standard ways to describe a snowboard, things like “sidecut radius”, “taper”, and “running length” simply don’t apply. It’s clear why Venture calls the Euphoria a “pow surfer”. Not only does it echo a surfboard’s shape, the ride has a float and buoyancy that I’ve never felt on a snowboard before. But don’t let the surfy feel fool you – this board is still a hard charging ride and has more diversity than you might think. Our thoughts: Last spring, I was lucky enough to take the 2013 Euphoria out for four days of pow surfing at Monashee Powder Cats where I really got a chance to see what this board can do. During my time on the Euphoria, I rocketed down steep open faces, through tight trees, picked my way down a few cliff bands, and more. I even put it through the ultimate powder board test – deep snow and nearly flat slope. Off the snow, the Euphoria doesn’t look like a nimble ride. But once in powder, it’s amazing at how nimble this board is. The short tail and massively rockered nose stay out of your way in tight trees or steeps, allowing the board to whip around quickly. And if you need to, you can easily shift back on the tail and get almost the entire board out of the snow for quick maneuvering. The Euphoria feels relaxed and natural. It wants to make what seem like big, lazy turns across wide open faces (but in reality it’s deceivingly fast). There are three unique aspects of the board’s shape that make it such an amazing ride. The first is obvious: the reverse sidecut. This puts the most surface area in the middle of the board so you can center your weight. There’s really not much need to lean back even at slow speeds. It also puts the pivot point at the center of the board. Where a tapered board as a pivot point in the nose, causing the tail to slide out due to uneven pressure, the Euphoria remains equally solid under both feet. As you turn, this makes the edge dig into the snow causing the board to rail where others wash out. The second is the short swallow tail. I normally thing of short tails and swallows as a way to create float, but with the reverse sidecut, there’s already plenty of float going on. Instead, the little tail lets you get the bulk of the board out of the way when you need quick maneuvering in tight situations or slow speeds. Likewise, when you need fast edge-to-edge changes, the little tail is easy to whip around in scorpion-like turns. Because the tail straightens out, there’s still enough there to keep the ride solid at speed. And finally, the third aspect of the board’s shape is the long, slow rockered nose. I believe this, more than anything else, is what gives the Euphoria such float. Where most boards’ noses rise over a few inches at the tip, the Euphoria begins rising immediately in front of the binding and continues gradually all the way to the way through. There’s a lot of surface area in the rise, which means there’s more snow pushing up on the board to keep the nose from sinking. Some of my crew were joking that on the Euphoria, there’s so much float that you can’t tell if there’s 3 inches or 3 feet of fresh snow on the ground. Now, the downside: It’s very clear that this is a purpose specific board. Outside of pow, the ride isn’t so great. The reverse sidecut means the board does not carve on pack at all. I didn’t ride it at a resort, but I did ride several cat tracks where the best I could do was skid from edge to edge. I could control the ride, but it definitely was not fun. Where things get outright nasty is when you blast over a ridge onto an exposed face with a hard crust. With no ability to carve a turn on pack, the situation can turn from euphoric to extremely sketchy in a second. The question I keep getting asked about this board is if it has any place in a resort. At first glance, you’d think no, but after riding the board for a few days I’m reconsidering. Here in the northwest, we get lots of big heavy spring dumps. There are days at Stevens Pass or Crystal Mountain where it will snow 24″ overnight, but because it’s heavy, many parts of the areas don’t get tracked out. Where others are sucking wind and fighting rear leg burn, the Euphoria would blast you through. Yes, you would have to deal with the sketchy skid across groomers and on and off the lift, but you could get so much more pow for your dollar that it may very well be worth it. Besides the Euphoria, I’ve riden Venture’s Storm, Zephyr, and Odin. Each of those boards are hard-charging mountain dominators. Because of the surfy feel, the Euphoria feels more graceful than powerful. It’s clearly still a Venture, though. The board survived days worth of getting thrown in and out of the cat and everything else a mountain can throw at it. At the end of the trip, it still looked like it was brand new. This is the result of Venture’s dedication to handcrafted boards made in their factory in Colorado and why they’re able to confidently offer twice the normal industry warranty. Summary: The Euphoria pretty much ends all debate on what board has the most float. If you end up with a Euphoria in your quiver, you probably won’t use it too much, but the days that you do ride it will be the best riding days of your life. Sizes and Options: The Euphoria comes in 156, 162, and 168 (I rode the 162 and at 6’1″ couldn’t imagine needing anything longer). Unlike other Venture models, there’s only one width option, 33cm, but given the nature of the board, width really shouldn’t be concern. All sizes are available as either a solid or split. More details on the sizing and specs are available on Venture’s website. |
Carlos Ray Norris (born March 10, 1940) is an American martial artist, actor, film producer and screenwriter. After serving in the United States Air Force, he competed as a martial artist, won many championships, and he has since founded his own school of fighting, Chun Kuk Do. Norris is also a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu and Judo.[3] Norris appeared in a number of action films, such as Way of the Dragon, in which he starred alongside Bruce Lee, Good Guys Wear Black, The Octagon, Lone Wolf McQuade, Code of Silence, The Delta Force, and Missing in Action 1, 2, & 3. He was The Cannon Group's leading star in the 1980s.[4][5] He played the title role in the television series Walker, Texas Ranger from 1993 until 2001. Since 1997, he and model Christie Brinkley have been the main spokespersons for the Total Gym infomercials. Norris has written several books, with subject matter varying from martial arts, exercise, philosophy, politics, Christian religion, western novels, to biography. He was twice a New York Times best-selling author, firstly with his book on his personal philosophy of positive force and the psychology of self-improvement based on personal anecdotes called The Secret of Inner Strength: My Story (1988). His second New York Times Best Seller, Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America (2008), was about his critique on current issues in the USA. In 2005, Norris became an internet star with the comical Chuck Norris facts, which documents fictional and often absurd feats associated with him. With this new found popularity he was hired to endorse many products that incorporated Chuck Norris facts in their commercials. This phenomenon also spawned six books, two of them New York Times Best Sellers, and two video games. Early life Norris was born in Ryan, Oklahoma on March 10, 1940,[6] to Wilma (née Scarberry, born May 4, 1921) and Ray Norris (1918–1971), who was a World War II Army soldier,[7] a mechanic, bus driver, and truck driver.[8] Norris has stated that he has Irish and Cherokee roots.[4][7][9] Norris was named after Carlos Berry, his father's minister.[7] He has two younger brothers, Wieland (1943–1970; killed in Vietnam) and Aaron (a Hollywood producer). When Norris was sixteen, his parents divorced,[10] and he later relocated to Prairie Village, Kansas, and then to Torrance, California, with his mother and brothers.[4] Norris has described his childhood as downbeat. He was nonathletic, shy, and scholastically mediocre.[11] His father, Ray, worked intermittently as an automobile mechanic, and went on alcohol drinking binges that lasted for months at a time. Embarrassed by his father's behavior and the family's financial plight, Norris developed a debilitating introversion that lasted for his entire childhood.[12] Career 1958 to 1968: United States Air Force and Martial arts He joined the United States Air Force as an Air Policeman (AP) in 1958 and was sent to Osan Air Base, South Korea. It was there that Norris acquired the nickname Chuck and began his training in Tang Soo Do (tangsudo), an interest that led to black belts in that art and the founding of the Chun Kuk Do ("Universal Way") form.[13] When he returned to the United States, he continued to serve as an AP at March Air Force Base in California. Norris was discharged from the U.S. Air Force in August 1962. Following his military service, Norris started to participate in martial arts competitions. He was defeated in his first two tournaments, dropping decisions to Joe Lewis and Allen Steen. He lost three matches at the International Karate Championships to Tony Tulleners. By 1967 Norris had improved enough that he scored victories over the likes of Lewis, Skipper Mullins, and Vic Moore. Norris would be a two-time winner at S. Henry Cho's All American Championship.[14] In early 1968, Norris suffered the tenth and last loss of his career, losing an upset decision to Louis Delgado. On November 24, 1968, he avenged his defeat to Delgado and by doing so won the Professional Middleweight Karate champion title, which he held for six consecutive years.[10] In 1969, he won Karate's triple crown for the most tournament wins of the year, and the Fighter of the Year award by Black Belt magazine. Norris also worked for the Northrop Corporation and opened a chain of karate schools including a storefront school in his then-hometown of Torrance, CA on Hawthorne Boulevard. Norris's official website lists celebrity clients at the schools; among them Steve McQueen, Chad McQueen, Bob Barker, Priscilla Presley, Donny Osmond and Marie Osmond.[15] In 1968, when Norris competed for the World Title, Bruce Lee, who at the time was known for the TV series The Green Hornet, noticed him. They developed a friendship and trained together for the next two years, until Lee returned to Hong Kong to pursue his movie career.[16] 1969-1978: Early roles and breakthrough In 1969, Norris made his acting debut in the Dean Martin film The Wrecking Crew. In 1972, he acted as Bruce Lee's nemesis in the widely acclaimed martial arts movie Way of the Dragon (titled Return of the Dragon in its U.S. distribution). The film grossed HK$5,307,350.50 at the Hong Kong box office, beating previous records set by Lee's own films, The Big Boss and Fist of Fury, making it the highest-grossing film of 1972 in Hong Kong. The film is credited with launching him toward stardom. In 1973, he had a small role in the comedy The Student Teachers.[17] In 1974, actor Steve McQueen, who was his martial art student and friend at the time, saw his potential and encouraged him to begin acting classes at MGM. Also that year he played the main antagonist in the Lo Wei film Yellow Faced Tiger.[18] He played the biggest drug king in San Francisco who owns everyone including the police department. He found his match when a young police officer stood up to him.[19] Norris in 1976 In 1975, he wrote his first book Winning Tournament Karate on the practical study of competition training for any rank. It covers all phases of executing speedy attacks, conditioning, fighting form drills, and one-step sparring techniques.[20] Norris' first starring role was 1977's Breaker! Breaker!, an action trucking film. After turning down offers to do many martial art films, Norris decided that he wanted to do films that had story and where the action would take place when it is emotionally right. The low budget film turned out to be very successful.[21] In 1978, Norris starred in thriller Good Guys Wear Black that he considers to be his first significant lead role. No studio wanted to release it, so Norris and his producers four-walled it, renting the theaters and taking whatever money came in.[22] The film did very well; shot on a $1 million budget, it made over $18 million at the box office.[23] 1979 to 1983: Action film star In 1979, Norris starred in A Force of One, where he played Matt Logan, a world karate champion who assists the police in their investigation.[24] The film was developed while touring for Good Guys Wear Black. Again no studio wanted to pick it up, but it out-grossed the previous film by making $20 million at the box office.[22][25] In 1980, he released The Octagon, where his character must stop a group of terrorists trained in the ninja style.[26] Unlike his previous films this time the studios were interested. American Cinema Releasing distributed it and it made almost $19 million at the box office.[22][27] In 1981, he starred in Steve Carver' An Eye for an Eye, co-starring Christopher Lee, Richard Roundtree, Matt Clark, and Mako Iwamatsu. The following year he had the lead in the action horror film Silent Rage (1982) it was his first film released by a major studio Columbia Pictures.[28] In the film Norris is a sheriff who must stop a mentally ill man who goes on a rampage after being granted near-indestructibility in a medical experiment. Shortly afterwards MGM gave him a three-movie deal, and that same year they released Forced Vengeance (1982). Norris was unhappy with the direction they wanted to take with him, hence the contract was cancelled.[22] In 1983, Norris made Lone Wolf McQuade with Orion Pictures. He played J.J. McQuade, a reckless Texas Ranger who'd rather work alone, but who gets a new partner because his captain would like to have him supervised. The partners investigate an arms dealer played by David Carradine. The film was a worldwide hit and had a positive reception from movie critics, often being compared to Sergio Leone's stylish spaghetti westerns. The film became the inspiration for Norris's future hit TV show Walker, Texas Ranger. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film a 3.5 star rating, calling the character of J.J. McQuade worthy of a film series and predicting the character would be a future classic.[29][30][31] The same year, he also published his second book about general exercising called Toughen Up! the Chuck Norris Fitness System.[32] Also in 1983, Xonox produced the video game Chuck Norris Superkicks for the Commodore 64, Commodore VIC-20, Atari 2600, and Colecovision. The game combines two types of gameplay: moving through a map, and fighting against enemies. The player takes control of Chuck Norris who has to liberate a hostage. It was later sold as Kung Fu Superkicks when the license for the use of the name Chuck Norris expired. 1984 to 1988: Mainstream success In 1984, Norris starred in Missing in Action, the first of a series of POW rescue fantasies themed around the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue that were produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus and released under their Cannon Films banner, with which he had signed a multiple movie deal.[33] He plays Colonel James Braddock, a US military officer who spent seven years in a North Vietnamese POW camp, which he escaped 10 years ago. After the war, Braddock accompanies a government investigation team that travels to Ho Chi Minh City to investigate reports of US soldiers still held prisoner. Norris later dedicated these films to his younger brother Wieland, who was a private in the 101st Airborne Division, and had been killed in June 1970 in Vietnam while on patrol in the defense of Firebase Ripcord.[34] The film was a huge success and Norris became Cannon's most prominent star of the 1980s. In 1985, Cannon Films released Missing in Action 2: The Beginning and Invasion U.S.A. which were extremely successful. Missing in Action 2: The Beginning is a prequel to the first instalment, where Colonel James Braddock is held in a North Vietnamese POW camp run by sadistic Colonel, who forces the POWs to grow opium for a French drug runner, and tries to get Braddock to admit to and sign a long list of war crimes. During his team's time in captivity, they are relentlessly subjected to various forms of torture. This leads them to attempt escape, and Braddock plots to free his fellow prisoners and destroy the prison camp. Invasion U.S.A. takes place during the Cold War area. Rostov, a Soviet operative leads a band of Latin American communist guerillas to invade Florida. The invasion force spreads out into the South and causes havoc by shooting bazookas into suburban homes, inciting race riots by impersonating the police and attacking ethnic events, and planting bombs in churches and on school buses. With terror spreading everywhere, martial law is declared. Norris plays a former CIA agent who has had previous encounters with Rostov, and can take him on. That same year Orion Pictures released Code of Silence which received positive reviews and was also a box office success.[35][36][37][38] Code of Silence is a crime drama, and features Norris as a streetwise plainclothes officer who takes down a crime czar responsible for officers being wounded in a botched drug raid. It's considered by fans and critics as Chuck Norris's best film to date. In 1986, he made two films co-starring with Academy Award winners. The first one The Delta Force with Lee Marvin, The Delta Force was a box office success. In the film Norris and Marvin are leaders of an elite squad of Special Forces troops based on the real life U.S. Army Delta Force unit, who face a group of Lebanese terrorists who have hijacked a Boeing 707. The second release that year was Firewalker with Louis Gossett, Jr. as a co-lead. The American action adventure film co-stars Will Sampson and Melody Anderson. It was directed by J. Lee Thompson.[39] Norris and Gossett play Max Donigan and Leo Porter, two soldiers of fortune, whose adventures rarely result in any notable gain. They are befriended by an inscrutable woman of mystery Patricia (Anderson). Patricia's map leads them on a quest for treasure in Central America. The name of the movie comes from the powerful guardian of the treasure. That same year he was involved in the production of the Ruby-Spears cartoon Karate Kommandos, which was published as a comic by Marvel Comics. In 1987, he published the book The Secret of Inner Strength: My Story It is an explanation of his personal philosophy of positive force and the psychology of self-improvement and is interspersed with anecdotes about international karate competitions, training with Bruce Lee, and Norris's acting career. It became a New York Times Best Seller.[40] In 1988, he made his last two films of the eighties, the first Braddock: Missing in Action III which marks his brother Aaron Norris's directorial debut. Aaron Norris had previously been stunt and/or fight coordinator in the vast majority of his filmography up until that year. Aaron would direct most of his films from that point on. Colonel James Braddock who had believed his Vietnaese wife to be dead since the war ended in 1975, but he hears from a missionary, that she is not only alive, but that she and Braddock have a 12-year-old son. He returns to Vietnam to save them. The next one was Hero and the Terror, co-starring Brynn Thayer, Steve James, Jack O'Halloran, Jeffrey Kramer, Ron O'Neal, Murphy Dunne, and Billy Drago. The film stars Norris as Danny O'Brien as a cop trying to stop a serial killer, Simon Moon (O'Halloran) known as "The Terror".[41] 1990s: Subsequent success By 1990, MGM acquired the Cannon Films library, and Norris made the sequel Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection where his character leads his Delta team into the fictional South American country of San Carlos to rescue hostages and stop the flow of cocaine into the United States. In 1991, he starred in The Hitman, where he plays a cop who's been brutally shot by his crooked partner. He's in a coma for several years and when he wakes up he assumes a new identity and infiltrates a drug-smuggling operation run by the local Mafia. In 1992, he did Sidekicks, his most successful film of that area. It is about a loner boy, who lives with his widowed father. He has vivid daydreams about being Chuck Norris' sidekick, battling against Norris's movie enemies, who are often personified by his everyday bullies. In 1993, he began shooting the action series Walker, Texas Ranger. The show is centered on Sergeant Cordell Walker (Norris), a Dallas–Fort Worth–based member of the Texas Rangers, a state-level bureau of investigation and is about his adventures fighting criminals with his partner James Trivette. It lasted eight seasons on CBS and continued in syndication on other channels, notably the Hallmark Channel.[42] The show was very successful in the ratings throughout its run, ranking among the Top 30 programs from 1995 until 1999, and ranking in the Top 20 in both the 1995–1996 and 1998–1999 seasons. His character Walker had cameos in the spin-off Sons of Thunder, and the TV show Martial Law. Also in 1993, he co-starred in the made-for-TV comedy film Wind in the Wire starring Randy Travis in the main role. The rest of the cast includes Burt Reynolds, Lou Diamond Phillips, Melanie Chartoff, Dale Robertson, Denver Pyle, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Peter Jason.[43] During the prime of Walker, Texas Ranger, he continued making movies starting with Hellbound (1994). A supernatural thriller film starring co-starring Calvin Levels and Christopher Neame. It was the final film made by Cannon Films. Frank Shatter (Norris) and Calvin Jackson (Levels) are two Chicago Police detectives sent to investigate the brutal murder of a rabbi. As the investigation begins, Shatter and Jackson are summoned to Israel for questioning. Upon arrival, they realize that they are, in fact, pursuing a supernatural being – Satan's emissary, Prosatanos (Neame)– who tried to wrest control of the world from God during the crusades. At the 1994 edition of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF)'s Survivor Series event, Norris was the special outside enforcer for the casket match between The Undertaker and Yokozuna.[44] During the match, Norris delivered a roundhouse kick to an interfering Jeff Jarrett.[45][46] Top Dog (1995), an action comedy, in which Norris' character, Jake Wilder, is partnered with Reno, a police dog, whose handler was killed. Jake and Reno investigate a plot by domestic terrorists to attack a conference on unity. Forest Warrior (1996), an environmental family film about a land developer who wants to cut down all the trees in a forest where a group of local children play. A mythical spirit appears (Norris) to help them to vanquish the villains.[47] He starred in Logan's War: Bound by Honor (1998), is an award-winning made-for-TV action-drama film directed by Michael Preece. It was written by Walter Klenhard.[48] Co-starring in the film, with Eddie Cibrian and Joe Spano.[49][50] In 1996, he published the book The Secret Power Within: Zen Solutions to Real Problems where he explains how the ancient system of Zen, the core philosophy behind the martial arts, can help achieve spiritual tranquility and self-confidence.[51] Since 1997, Norris has appeared with Christie Brinkley in a long-running series of cable TV infomercials promoting Total Gym home fitness equipment.[52] 2000 to present day: Internet fame and current works Norris during a meeting with Commanding Officer Captain J.R Haley, in June 2005 In the early 2000s, Norris starred in the television film The President's Man (2000), and action film co-starring starring Dylan Neal, Ralph Waite, Marla Adams, Stuart Whitman, and Soon-Tek Oh. The story is about, Joshua McCord (Norris) is ready to think about retiring from his grueling job as a Secret Service agent who's assigned to protect the president. After saving the First Lady (Adams), kidnapped by a mysterious band of terrorists, McCord prepares to train his replacement. Its sequel The President's Man: A Line in the Sand (2002), co-starred Robert Urich, and Roxanne Hart. Secret agent Joshua McCord (Norris) is assigned by President Adam Mayfield (Urich) to prevent a band of terrorists from setting off a nuclear device in a U.S. city. In 2003, he co-starred in the film Bells of Innocence, alongside Mike Norris (his son), David A. R. White, Carey Scott, and Marshall R. Teague. The film is about Jux Jonas (Mike Norris) a man who loses his faith in God, after losing his family in a car accident. Reluctantly, he joins friends Conrad (White) and Oren (Scott) for trip. However, their small aircraft soon crashes, and the trio find themselves in the secluded wasteland of Ceres, a town where visitors are seen as unwanted outsiders. They face the town elder, Joshua (Teague) with the help of local rancher Matthew (Chuck Norris). That same year he was a guest on the TV Show Yes, Dear. In 2004, he made a cameo in the Rawson Marshall Thurber' DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story starring Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller. The plot follows a group of misfits entering a Las Vegas dodge ball tournament to save their cherished local gym from the onslaught of a corporate health fitness chain. Norris plays himself as one judge during the final match. That same year he published his autobiography Against All Odds: My Story. In 2005, Norris founded the World Combat League (WCL), a full-contact, team-based martial arts competition, of which part of the proceeds are given to his Kickstart Kids program.[53] On October 17, 2005, CBS premiered the Sunday Night Movie of the Week, Walker, Texas Ranger: Trial by Fire. The production was a continuation of the series, and not scripted to be a reunion movie. Norris reprised his role as Cordell Walker for the movie. He has stated that future Walker, Texas Ranger Movie of the Week projects are expected; however, this was severely impaired by CBS's 2006–2007 season decision to no longer regularly schedule Movies of the Week on Sunday night. Norris during a promotion ceremony at Camp Taqaddum in the Al Anbar province of Iraq on November 2, 2006 Chuck Norris facts originally started appearing on the Internet in early 2005. Created by Ian Spector, they are satirical factoids about Norris. Since then, they have become widespread in popular culture. The 'facts' are normally absurd hyperbolic claims about Norris' toughness, attitude, virility, sophistication, and masculinity. Norris has written his own response to the parody on his website, stating that he does not feel offended by them and finds some of them funny,[54] claiming that his personal favorite is that they wanted to add his face to Mount Rushmore, but the granite is not hard enough for his beard.[55] At first it was mostly college students exchanging them, but they later became extremely widespread.[56] Books, video games, and TV ads would be based on the trend.[citation needed] From that point on, Norris started to tour with the Chuck Norris facts appearing on major talk shows, and even visiting the troops in Iraq, for morale boosting appearances.[57][58][59][60][61] In 2006, he starred in the film The Cutter, co-starring Joanna Pacuła, Daniel Bernhardt, Bernie Kopell and Marshall R. Teague. After a deadly kidnapping rescue gone wrong, a guilt ridden detective (Norris) recruits his specialized SWAT team to successfully rescue an aged diamond cutter from the hands of a murderous thief. During that time he published his first novel The Justice Riders (2006) and its sequel A Threat to Justice (2007) both were co-written with Ken Abraham, Aaron Norris, and Tim Grayem.[62][63] On November 29, 2007, Gotham Books, the adult division of Penguin USA, released a book penned by Ian Spector entitled The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 facts about the World's Greatest Human.[64] Norris subsequently filed suit in December against Penguin USA claiming "trademark infringement, unjust enrichment and privacy rights".[65] Norris dropped the lawsuit in 2008.[66] The book is a New York Times Best Seller. Since then, Spector has published four more books based on Chuck Norris facts, these are Chuck Norris Cannot Be Stopped: 400 All-New Facts About the Man Who Knows Neither Fear Nor Mercy, Chuck Norris: Longer and Harder: The Complete Chronicle of the World's Deadliest, Sexiest, and Beardiest Man, The Last Stand of Chuck Norris: 400 All New Facts About the Most Terrifying Man in the Universe, and Chuck Norris Vs. Mr. T: 400 Facts About the Baddest Dudes in the History of Ever (also a New York Times Best Seller).[67] In 2008, he published the political non-fiction book Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America, which reached number 14 on the New York Times best seller list in September 2008.[68] In 2008, Gameloft produced the video game Chuck Norris: Bring On the Pain for mobile devices, based on the popularity Norris had developed on the internet with the Chuck Norris facts.[69] The player takes control of Chuck Norris himself in a side-scrolling beat 'em up. The game was well reviewed.[70][71][72][73][74] On October 7, 2009, Tyndale House Publishers issued The Official Chuck Norris Fact Book: 101 of Chuck's Favorite Facts and Stories, which was co-written and officially endorsed by Norris.[75] In 2010, Norris appeared in advertisements for communications company T-Mobile in the Czech Republic.[76] In 2011, Norris appeared in advertisements for the World of Warcraft video game.[77] In 2012, Norris appeared in a series of commercials for the Polish bank BZ WBK.[78] He co-starred in the 2012 sequel to The Expendables, alongside Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and many other action movie staples.The story of the second installment in The Expendables film series follows the mercenary group known as "the Expendables" as they undertake a seemingly simple mission which evolves into a quest for revenge against rival mercenary Jean Vilain (Van Damme), who murdered one of their own and threatens the world with a deadly weapon. Along the way they meet Booker (Norris) who saves them from Villain' minions and helps them along the way. The film was a success and grossed over $310 million worldwide.[79] In 2015, he appeared in two commercials for the French TV show Pieds dans le plat.[80] That same year, Norris and his wife Gena founded CForce Bottling Co. after an aquifer was discovered on his ranch.[81] In 2016, he starred in the commercial for the beer Hoegaarden.[82] In 2017, he appeared in the advertisement for United Healthcare.[83] In 2017, Flaregames produced Non Stop Chuck Norris, an isometric action-RPG game for mobile device and is the second game to be based on his popularity developed by the Chuck Norris facts. The game was well reviewed.[84][85][86][87] In 2017, Chuck Norris became Fiat's ambassador, a "tough face" for its commercial vehicles. Fiat says Norris embodies four pillars of its business: determination, reliability, dynamism, and competence.[88] In 2018, Norris appeared in an ad for Hesburger, a Finnish hamburger chain.[89] That year he also did a commercial for Cerveza Poker.[90] His third commercial that year was for Toyota.[91] Chun Kuk Do Norris created the martial art Chun Kuk Do, which is based primarily on Tang Soo Do and includes elements from every combat style he knows. Like many other martial arts, Chun Kuk Do includes a code of honor and rules to live by. These rules are from Norris' personal code. They are:[92] I will develop myself to the maximum of my potential in all ways. I will forget the mistakes of the past and press on to greater achievements. I will continually work at developing love, happiness and loyalty in my family. I will look for the good in all people and make them feel worthwhile. If I have nothing good to say about a person, I will say nothing. I will always be as enthusiastic about the success of others as I am about my own. I will maintain an attitude of open-mindedness. I will maintain respect for those in authority and demonstrate this respect at all times. I will always remain loyal to my God, my country, family and my friends. I will remain highly goal-oriented throughout my life because that positive attitude helps my family, my country and myself. Distinctions, awards, and honors Norris receiving the Veteran of the Year award by the U.S. Air Force in 2001 While in the military, Norris's rank units were Airman First Class, 15th Air Force, 22d Bombardment Group, and 452d Troop Carrier Wing. Norris has received many black belts. These include a 10th degree black belt in Chun Kuk Do, a 9th degree black belt in Tang Soo Do, an 8th degree black belt in Taekwondo, a 5th degree black belt in Karate, a 3rd degree black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu from the Machado family, and a black belt in Judo.[93] In 1967, he won the Sparring Grand Champions at the S. Henry Cho's All American Championship, and won it again the following year.[94] In 1968, he won the Professional Middleweight Karate champion title, which he held for six consecutive years.[10] In 1969, he won Karate's triple crown for the most tournament wins of the year. In 1969, he won the Fighter of the Year award by Black Belt magazine. In 1982, he won Action Star of the Year at the ShoWest Convention. Chuck Norris Hollywood Star. In 1989, he received his Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1992, he won International Box Office Star of the Year at the ShoWest Convention. In 1997, he won the Special Award of being a Texas legend at the Lone Star Film & Television Awards. From 1997 to 1998, he won for three consecutive years the BMI TV Music Award at the BMI Awards. In 1999, Norris was inducted into the Martial Arts History Museum's Hall of Fame. In 1999, he was nominated for Favorite Actor in a Drama by the TV Guide Award. In 1999, he won the Inspirational Acting in Television Award at the Grace Prize Award.[95] On July 1, 2000, Norris was presented the Golden Lifetime Achievement Award by the World Karate Union Hall of Fame. In 2001, he received the Veteran of the Year at the American Veteran Awards.[53] In 2001, he won the Golden Boot and the Golden Boot Awards. On March 28, 2007, Commandant Gen. James T. Conway made Norris an honorary United States Marine during a dinner at the commandant's residence in Washington, D.C.[96] On December 2, 2010, he (along with brother Aaron) was given the title honorary Texas Ranger by Texas Governor Rick Perry.[97] In 2010, he won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the ActionFest.[98] In 2017 he was honored as "Honorary Texan" because for many years he has lived at his Texas ranch near Navasota and he starred as Texas Ranger in his movie Lone Wolf McQuade and starred as ranger Cordell Walker in TV series Walker, Texas Ranger. Personal life Family Norris married his classmate, Dianne Kay Holechek (born 1941), in December 1958 when he was 18, and Dianne 17 years of age. They met in 1956 at High school in Torrance, California. In 1962 their first child, Mike, was born. He also had a daughter who was born in 1963 of an extramarital affair.[99] Later, he had a second son, Eric, with his wife in 1964. After 30 years of marriage, Norris and Holechek divorced in 1989, after separating in 1988, during the filming of The Delta Force 2. On November 28, 1998, he married former model Gena O'Kelley, 23 years Norris' junior. O'Kelley had two children from a previous marriage. She delivered twins on August 30, 2001.[100] On September 22, 2004, Norris told Entertainment Tonight's Mary Hart that he did not meet his illegitimate daughter from a past relationship until she was 26, although she learned that he was her father when she was 16. He met with her after she sent a letter informing him of their relationship, it was in 1990, one year after Chuck's divorce with his first wife Dianne Holechek.[101] Norris has thirteen grandchildren as of 2017 .[102] Christianity An outspoken Christian,[103] Norris is the author of several Christian-themed books. On April 22, 2008, Norris expressed his support for the intelligent design movement when he reviewed Ben Stein's Expelled for Townhall.com.[104] Political views Norris and his wife at a political event in The Woodlands, Texas on February 15, 2016. Norris is a Republican, and has donated more than $32,000 to Republican candidates and organizations since 1988.[105] On November 18, 2008, Norris became one of the first members of show business to express support for the California Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage, and he chided activists for "interfering" with the democratic process and the double standard he perceived in criticizing the LDS Church without criticizing African Americans, who had voted for the measure by a wide margin.[106] During the 2012 presidential election, Norris first recommended Ron Paul, and then later formally endorsed Newt Gingrich as the Republican presidential candidate.[107] After Gingrich suspended his campaign in May 2012, Norris endorsed Republican presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, despite Norris having previously accused Romney of flip-flopping and of trying to buy the nomination for the Republican Party candidacy for 2012.[108][109] On the eve of the election he and his wife Gena made a video warning that if evangelicals didn't show up at the polls and vote out President Obama, "...our country as we know it may be lost forever...".[110][111] Norris also produced the film Answering the Call, which featured his 2007 trip to Iraq to visit the troops.[112][113] Norris has visited Israel and voiced support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the 2013 and 2015 elections.[114][115][116] Norris endorsed Huckabee again in the 2016 Republican Primary before he dropped out.[117] In March 2016, it was reported that Norris endorsed Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz and that he would be attending a Cruz rally,[118][119] but two days later, Norris stated he would only endorse the GOP nominee once that nominee has been nominated by the party.[120] He endorsed GOP nominee Donald Trump in the general election.[121] Norris endorsed former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore in the 2017 United States Senate special election in Alabama.[122] Philanthropy In 1990, Norris established the United Fighting Arts Federation and Kickstart Kids. As a significant part of his philanthropic contributions, the organization was formed to develop self-esteem and focus in at-risk children as a tactic to keep them away from drug-related pressure by training them in martial arts. Norris hopes that by shifting middle school and high school children's focus towards this positive and strengthening endeavour, these children will have the opportunity to build a better future for themselves.[53][123] Norris has a ranch in Navasota, TX where they bottle water; a portion of the sales support environmental funds and Kickstart Kids. He is known for his contributions towards organizations such as Funds for Kids, Veteran's Administration National Salute to Hospitalized Veterans, the United Way, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation in the form of donations as well as fund-raising activities.[53] His time with the U.S. Veterans Administration as a spokesperson was inspired by his experience serving the United States Air Force in Korea. His objective has been to popularize the issues that concern hospitalized war veterans such as pensions and health care. Due to his significant contributions, and continued support, he received the Veteran of the Year award in 2001 at the American Veteran Awards.[53] Additionally, Norris supports the Vijay Amritraj Foundation, which aims at bringing hope, help and healing to the defenceless and innocent victims of disease, tragedy and circumstance in India. Through his donations, he has helped the foundation support Paediatric HIV/AIDS homes in Delhi, a blind school in Karnataka, and a mission that cares for HIV/AIDS infected adults, as well as mentally ill patients in Cochin.[124] Filmography Bibliography Winning Tournament Karate (1975) (1975) Toughen Up! the Chuck Norris Fitness System (1983) (1983) The Secret of Inner Strength: My Story (1987) (1987) The Secret Power Within: Zen Solutions to Real Problems (1996) (1996) Against All Odds: My Story (2004) (2004) The Justice Riders (2006) (2006) A Threat to Justice (2007) (2007) Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America (2008) (2008) The Official Chuck Norris Fact Book: 101 of Chuck's Favorite Facts and Stories (2009) Video games Chuck Norris Superkicks (1983) (1983) Missing in Action (1989) - TNT Games were developing a game based on the film Missing in Action for the Atari 7800. Although the game was at or near completion (as confirmed by the programmer), it appears that the 7800 market just wasn't viable enough for TNT to release it. [125] The prototype resurfaced and has been well received by the game reviewer who tried it. [126] (1989) - TNT Games were developing a game based on the film for the Atari 7800. Although the game was at or near completion (as confirmed by the programmer), it appears that the 7800 market just wasn't viable enough for TNT to release it. The prototype resurfaced and has been well received by the game reviewer who tried it. Chuck Norris: Bring On the Pain (2008) (2008) Non Stop Chuck Norris (2017) References |
John Birkeland was the kind of guy who never forgot family members’ birthdays, liked politics and eschewed violence. And he was crazy about dogs. But on Wednesday night, Birkeland went on a rampage, allegedly yelling, swearing and throwing things inside his Roseville apartment. Police responding to noise complaints from neighbors made a forced entry and sent in a K-9 dog. When officers found Birkeland hiding in a closet, he stabbed the dog in the head with a kitchen knife, and police shot him dead. “I am in complete shock. He’s the most harmless person you could imagine, the last person I’d ever expect to be killed by police,” said his niece Cassandra MacDuff, of Austin, Texas, who identified the 52-year-old Birkeland. “He loved dogs. He would not have done that unless he felt threatened. I can’t believe my uncle is lying in a morgue with bullets in him.” Around 9:40 p.m., a neighbor heard shouting coming from Birkeland’s third-floor apartment on the 1600 block of County Road B. According to police, residents have witnessed similar “mental outbursts” in the past and were told to call police when such incidents occur. Police have had four previous contacts with Birkeland since May 2015, records show. On Wednesday, about 10 minutes later, officers arrived and tried to talk to Birkeland, saying, “John, we are worried about you” and “please open the door,” a resident of the building said. Birkeland refused, telling police he was “fine” but had lost his wallet. After getting no further response and learning that there was a warrant for his arrest from a December case in which he gave a false name to police, officers decided to go in. They announced to Birkeland that a K-9 dog would be used to search his apartment. When Birkeland stabbed the dog, police fired. Officers offered aid to Birkeland, but he died at the scene, said Lt. Lorne Rosand. John Birkeland, who was remembered by family as a gentle soul who had hit a rough patch, loved politics and especially dogs. He was shot dead by Roseville police early Thursday after he stabbed a K-9 in his apartment. MacDuff said Birkeland had lived in Roseville a short time and said he had had some tough luck recently. He’d lost his mother and a brother in the past few years. She believed that he was between jobs. At times he self medicated and got intoxicated, but still had a sound mind, she said. “He was a very smart guy, loved politics and knew what was going on. He didn’t have mental issues,” she said. Born in Gonvick, Minn., Birkeland graduated from St. Cloud State University, according to his Facebook page. Before moving to Roseville, Birkeland worked at the Listen Drop-In Center in Grand Forks, N.D. There he wrote grants and connected people with disabilities to the performance arts, his niece said. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is taking the lead in investigating. Two officers involved in the shooting, 18-year veteran John Jorgensen and four-year veteran Kyle Eckert, were placed on administrative leave. Three other officers who witnessed the shootings also are on leave. The dog, Otis, was taken to the University of Minnesota Veterinary Hospital and treated for noncritical injuries. |
Link management startup Kifi announced in a blog post on Medium that it's being acquired by Google, for its Google Spaces team. Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence aces Atari gaming challenge DeepMind has published a paper detailing how its AI tech not only learnt how to play a host of Atari games, but went on to succeed in a number of them. Read More The Kifi service, which allows users to collect, analyze, and collaborate on links from across the Internet, will shut down in the coming weeks, the company said on Tuesday. "We see a lot of alignment to Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Kifi wrote on its blog. "Our team will be joining the Spaces team at Google to build solutions focused on improving group sharing, conversation, and content finding. Frankly, we're thrilled they have a bit of 'space' for us!" Terms of the deal weren't shared and it isn't clear how many employees are joining Google. SEE: Google launches its Slack competitor, Spaces (TechRepublic) "Really excited about this team," Bradley Horowitz, VP of Google Spaces, wrote in a Google Plus post. The Kifi team will help with Google Spaces, a lackluster social group sharing app that launched earlier this year. |
According to an “extremely reliable source” of 9to5 Google’s, the search giant will have their very own retail stores right in time for the holidays. The shops, which will open in a few major US cities, will be a great place for any Google fan to go pick up a new Nexus device, Chromebook, or possibly receive some hands-on help with their current Google product. Although, I doubt there would be any type of Genius Bar-type of kiosk, given it is the responsibility of the OEM’s to provide device support for Android. But that’s where the Nexus lineup of devices differ from say, the Galaxy series from Samsung. Regardless, the idea for retail stores actually came from a plan to get the public more aware of Project Glass. Much like anything else that would cost you anywhere from $500 to $1500, you are going to want to try the things on and see what you are getting into before you drop cash like that. This sounds like an Android fanboy’s dream come true. Give anything to have a Google store open up in your neck of the woods? Via: 9to5Google |
Getty Images Washington quarterback Kirk Cousins appears set to stay put and make $23.9 million in 2017. Cousins will soon sign his franchise tag and doesn’t expect to be traded, Ian Rapoport of NFL Network reports. There’s been much talk that Cousins could wind up elsewhere, perhaps San Francisco, and that he personally appealed to owner Daniel Snyder in an attempt to get traded. But Cousins doesn’t have the right to negotiate with any other team, and that means his options are limited. He now appears poised to play out the season on the franchise tag, which, combined with the $20 million he made last year, will give him one of the most lucrative two-year stretches in NFL history. And then Cousins can test free agency next year. |
: Geologic Field Trips Through the Dynamic Landscape of the Pacific Northwest Jim E. O'Connor , Rebecca J. Dorsey , Ian Madin Geological Society of America , 2009 - 874 pages , 2009 - Science 0 Reviews "This volume contains guides for 34 geological field trips offered in conjunction with the October 2009 GSA Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon. Showcasing the region's geological diversity, the peer-reviewed papers included here span topics ranging from accreted terrains and mantle plumes to volcanoes, floods, and vineyard terroir. Locations visited throughout Oregon, Washington, and Idaho encompass Astoria to Zillah. More than just a series of maps, the accompanying descriptions, observations, and conclusions offer new insights to the geologic processes and history of the Pacific Northwest - insights that will inspire readers to put their boots on the evidence as they develop their own understanding of this remarkable and dynamic corner of the world."--Publisher's description. Preview this book » |
Left Without New Star Trek Episodes, Fans Create Their Own The next Star Trek movie comes out this week. It's been four years since the last one came out, and more than 40 years since the final episode of the original Star Trek series aired on television. Some fans moved on. Some spent the intervening decades pining away for Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and the rest of the crew of the Starship Enterprise. And some took up the gauntlet Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry threw down in 1966 and started making episodes of their own. AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. The new "Star Trek" movie "Into Darkness" comes out today. It's been four years since the last one, and it's been more than four decades since the final episode of the original "Star Trek" TV series. Some old-time fans have moved on. Others have channeled their "Star Trek" obsession into making episodes of their own. From member station WJCT, Cyd Hoskinson tells us about one fan series called "Starship Farragut." CYD HOSKINSON, BYLINE: At the end of a short dirt road in tiny Kingsland, Georgia sits the squat, windowless warehouse that's home to Farragut Films. The movie studio doesn't look like much from the outside, but inside... (SOUNDBITE OF "STAR TREK" THEME MUSIC) HOSKINSON: This is what the production company claims is the largest collection of "Star Trek" sets on planet Earth. THOMAS WEBBER: Well, we're standing on the bridge of a Constitution class starship. It can be the Farragut. It can be the Enterprise. It can be... HOSKINSON: It's the annual open house at Farragut Films' studio. Volunteer Thomas Webber shows people around, and Webber knows something about space. He's the planetarium director at the Museum of Science and History in nearby Jacksonville, Florida. WEBBER: Oh, I love this. I mean, who else can say they spent their Saturday on a starship? (SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "STARSHIP FARRAGUT") JOHN BROUGHTON: "Starship Farragut" is an independent film series, but it's based on classic "Star Trek." HOSKINSON: That's John Broughton, a studio co-founder. He's also an actor, a writer and the series' executive producer. BROUGHTON: Instead of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, you have Captain Carter, Tacket and Smithfield of the Farragut. It's a different ship, different crew, different adventures. (SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "STARSHIP FARRAGUT") HOSKINSON: But the "Farragut" couldn't get off the ground without volunteers like Webber and John Sims. Sims works at a grocery store and makes the 35-mile drive to Kingsland a couple of weekends a month. He does carpentry work, painting, even sewing. His passion is making authentic-looking "Star Trek" uniforms, emphasis on authentic. Take Captain Kirk's gold tunic. Sims says the real color isn't what you saw on TV. JOHN SIMS: The command color was actually - it was a pea green polyester diamond weave fabric, but the film stock that they used, the lighting effects and the development techniques of the 1960s made it look like a butterscotch-colored gold. HOSKINSON: That kind of attention to detail is common at Farragut Films. Michael Struck owns NEO f/x, an audiovisual company based in Oregon. MICHAEL STRUCK: We have a foley artist that works out of California, and he has the original reel-to-reel tapes from the original "Star Trek" episodes. So what you see on "Farragut" are actual sound effects that were used in the original 1960s episode. HOSKINSON: Struck makes a lot of money in the real world. But here, in the "Star Trek" universe, he just gets a screen credit. In fact, that's all anyone gets, says Hollywood voice actor and Farragut Films co-founder Vic Mignona. VIC MIGNONA: The only thing, I think, that people find crazy is that we're not making money at it. We're not selling things. We're not marketing it because it's not our property. HOSKINSON: The "Star Trek" franchise belongs to CBS and Paramount. As long as Farragut Films doesn't turn a profit, Mignona says, they're good to go. And that business model suits the studio's John Broughton just fine. BROUGHTON: You don't need a Hollywood budget. You don't need a Hollywood backing to make good quality films, good stories, and that's what "Star Trek" to a lot of us were, were good stories, good characters, and we're trying to replicate that. HOSKINSON: The studio has made four "Starship Farragut" online episodes so far, and more are in the works. For NPR News, I'm Cyd Hoskinson in Jacksonville, Florida. (SOUNDBITE OF "STAR TREK" THEME MUSIC) MELISSA BLOCK, HOST: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Copyright © 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. |
Note: Article update, 10AM, October 22 Hidden City spoke this morning with one of the building’s owners, David Hirsh, whose family business, Patriot Fiber, has been located there since the early 1950s. “We’ve been working with L&I to resolve the issues,” he said. “We’ve been really cooperative. I think they have some legitimate concerns. Now we’re aggressively addressing them.” Hirsh said that Viking Mill Associates, the LLC that legally owns the building, is financially responsible for remediating violations. He said he is clear on the work that needs to be done to address the majority of the violations. Through lawyers, Hirsh has filed a motion in court to allow a portion of the building to be occupied while repairs are being made. When will the building reopen? “I guess I have the same question,” he said. “I think we have an important art center here.” Note: This article was updated at 10:40PM, October 21. Citing “numerous violations” of the city’s building, zoning, electrical and fire codes, the City’s Department of Licenses and Inspections Monday issued a Cease Operations/Stop Work Order at the Viking Mill building in Kensington. The order took effect at 3PM Monday. Dozens of tenants–most of them artists, craftspeople, and makers–have been forced to remove their equipment and exit the building. The atmosphere outside the mill, originally the Arrott’s Steam Power Mills Co., which made cotton and woolen yarn, was somber this afternoon as the large community dispersed. One of the anchor spaces in the transformation of East Kensington as a new creative hub of the city, the building is home to artist studios, the Little Berlin gallery, a recording studio, a bike works, metal works, guitar pedal fabricator, practice rooms, and other creative practices, all of which were forced to close and at least temporarily unable to make income. Frustration was mostly aimed at the City, but also at the building’s owner, David Hirsh. “I’m not going to be able to work. Two of my employees will be out of work unless we’re able to find another space,” said Bill Capozzoli, of Capozzoli Metalworks, which makes ornamental pieces for railings and staircases. “I understand that buildings need to be safe. I sympathize with the fire department and the need for safety, but the way they’re closing this–I was under the impression that they’d list violations to take care of. Instead they’re just shutting it down. A lot of the violations would have been taken care of if they’d come in and told us the specific violations. Where are we going to go if this isn’t open? We’re all very invested in the building.” “I have six employees and nowhere for them to work anymore,” said photographer Brian Kinney of the post-production firm Missing Element. “Right now is our busy season. Whatever queue of work we had is now pushed back until this is hopefully resolved. I found out about the violations months ago, but we didn’t get notification from the building owner that basically the building would be shut down until this morning.” Hirsh, who took over the building as Viking Mill Associates, LLC in 2007, received notice of numerous fire and electric violations on April 30, 2013. The violations were categorized as “non-hazardous.” In a letter dated October 17, 2013, L&I senior attorney Beverly Penn indicated the building had been inspected October 15, and found to have had significant violations: electrical wiring installed “without permits and by non-licensed contractors” and walls constructed without fire proof materials. The letter noted that welding was being done without permit, a kiln was on premises, and proper systems for the collection of wood shavings were not in place in spaces used for wood working. A recent small fire on the building’s fifth floor was put out quickly by the sprinkler system. Donna Hirsh, presumably the wife of David Hirsh, wrote on the Viking Mill Facebook page Monday night that though the date of reopening wasn’t clear, the building’s closure would be temporary. “The issues which have caused the temporary closure are being addressed. We have been addressing the issues from the beginning. Viking Mill was unaware of the closure, given only a few days’ notice,” she wrote. The building, she said, would be open for the remainder of the week so that tenants could remove belongings. “I’ve done a lot of mural projects out of this building, including the mural on the building,” said muralist and stained glass artist Emilie Ledieu. “As much as I appreciate the affordability of the building, at least one of the landlords was well aware that many of the spaces were not up to code well before the L&I inspections. The landlord had good intentions but we are all paying the price. He really should have hired somebody to really properly manage the place. The tragedy of this is he has the right intentions that we need in this city, but he doesn’t know how to go about it.” Hirsh told tenants he has sought a legal injunction against the building shutdown in order to give him time to do the necessary repairs. The case is apparently to be heard tomorrow. As of press time, Hirsh was unavailable to comment. Soon after Hirsh took over the building, artists and other creative businesses began to move in. In the rough spaces, they built their own walls, and, in exchange for low rent, made their own electrical and other improvements, not always to code. Today, the tenants are caught in a difficult situation where significant physical and code changes must be made–and they’re being required to make them. In an e-mailed letter to tenants obtained by Hidden City, Hirsh said, “We will need the cooperation of tenants who have violations, to re-mediate these violations.” Indeed, a building like the Viking Mill exists in a substantial gray area, where artists and makers, unable to afford market rates (and not desiring finished space), seek community, cheap rent, and atmosphere. All that is on offer at Viking Mill. According to the building’s website, Viking Mill has endeavored to provide “affordable work space for various kinds of artists and craftspeople,” often leasing raw space with the idea that the tenant would complete necessary upgrades to the space. This sort of ad hoc renovation is typical–and probably necessary–where pioneering creative people are at work. “The space for rent is full of character,” says the website. “The five-story building is a brick and wood beamed, hard-wood floored structure, being historic in construction but current in our lives by providing space in which artists can be creative.” And yet these kinds of spaces are by definition almost certain to be filled with building code violations. Moreover, City inspectors, motivated by regulatory failures at the Thomas Buck Hosiery building just a block from the Viking Mill, which burned to the ground in April, 2012, and at 22nd and Market Streets in Center City, where a building collapsed in June, killing six people, have increased oversight. The consequences of this conflict felt very real Monday at Viking Mill. Like other tenants, Matt Gaither, a drum maker, said he’s essentially stuck. “I’ve got thousands of dollars worth of equipment at Viking Mill, and I don’t have the money to move it and nowhere to take it,” he said. “The shutdown was too short notice. I think that almost anyone in here that’s a craftsman without a workspace–it’s really restricted what you can do.” “The neighborhood isn’t going to have these artist spaces anymore, unless you study the art of law. No one’s going to be able to afford this,” said Jesse Beamesderfer, an artist. In the past decade, as center city priced out young artists and creative businesses, particularly in Old City, Kensington has become a hotbed of creative small businesses and contributed to a serious revitalization, one that brings positive effects (new coffee shops, galleries, restaurants) as well as increases in rent that slowly push artists further away in pursuit of lower rents. As tenants removed their equipment before the building shutdown this afternoon, they discussed where they could go next. In every case, they cited new warehouses and other industrial spaces around Somerset, Tioga, and other locations even farther north with space to lease: and almost at once the cycle begins anew. Lee Tusman, Peter Woodall, and Nathaniel Popkin contributed reporting to this article. |
Strauss-Kahn faces seven counts of alleged sexual assault and could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned as managing director of the International Monetary Fund, after he was charged on Monday with the alleged sexual assault and attempted rape of a maid at a New York hotel. The IMF's executive board released a letter from the French executive late on Wednesday in which he denied the allegations against him, but said he felt compelled to resign "with sadness''. "It is with infinite sadness that I feel compelled today to present to the executive board my resignation from my post of managing director of the IMF," Strauss-Kahn said in his letter of resignation. "To all, I want to say that I deny with the greatest possible firmness all of the allegations that have been made against me," the statement added. "I think at this time first of my wife - whom I love more than anything - of my children, of my family, of my friends. "I think also of my colleagues at the fund; together we have accomplished such great things over the last three years and more. "I want to protect this institution which I have served with honour and devotion, and especially - especially - I want to devote all my strength, all my time, and all my energy to proving my innocence." The IMF's previous second-in-command John Lipsky will remain as acting managing director. New bail hearing Strauss-Kahn, a leading French politician tipped as a presidential front-runner for 2012, has been charged with sexual assault and attempted rape of a 32-year-old Manhattan hotel chambermaid. Strauss-Kahn's arrest has dashed his prospects to run for the French presidency in 2012 [Reuters] The 62-year-old strongly maintains his innocence. He was refused bail by a judge on Monday, and is under suicide watch in an isolated cell in New York City's Rikers Island jail, awaiting a grand jury decision on whether to indict him. A new bail hearing has been set for Thursday and his lawyers are expected to propose a deal for $1m in bail and home detention. Strauss-Kahn's arrest has dashed his prospects to run as a Socialist candidate for the French presidency, and raised broader issues over the future of the International Monetary Fund. Al Jazeera's Cath Turner, reporting from New York, said his resignation was "an inevitable outcome". "Regardless of what happens in the bail hearing in New York on Thursday, there has been pressure from the White House and other European political figures who all said Strauss-Kahn cannot run the IMF at such a critical time from either a jail cell or from home," she said. Meanwhile in France the opposition Socialist party has urged Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, to pressure US authorities to ensure Strauss-Kahn is given a fair trial. Harlem Desir, spokesman for the party, said the former IMF chief should be freed so he could "organise his defence in a decent fashion". Timeline emerges New details have emerged about the sequence of events surrounding the alleged sexual attack on the chambermaid. Strauss-Kahn left the Sofitel near Times Square in Manhattan about 12:30pm local time (1630 GMT) on Saturday, and roughly an hour later hotel security called police to report an alleged sexual assault, a law enforcement source said. New York investigators are questioning why officials at the Sofitel waited an hour to call police after the IMF chief left the hotel in a hurry, following the alleged assault. Strauss-Khan is under suicide watch in jail, awaiting a grand jury decision on whether to indict him He has been charged with attempted rape, sexual abuse, a criminal sexual act, unlawful imprisonment and forcible touching. If convicted, he could face 25 years in prison. The woman he is accused of assaulting is an asylum seeker from Guinea with a 15-year-old daughter. In the only public hint of Strauss-Kahn's possible line of defence, his attorney Benjamin Brafman told his arraignment hearing on Monday that the evidence "will not be consistent with a forcible encounter". Any trial could be six months or more away. Jose Manuel Barroso, the European commission president, said Europe would naturally put forward a candidate to replace Strauss-Kahn if he were to step down. Germany, which wants a European to keep the job, said the IMF should deal with its immediate leadership internally and that it is too early to discuss a successor to Strauss-Kahn. French officials said John Lipsky, the IMF's American number two official whose term ends in August, would represent the Fund at next week's Group of Eight summit in France. In Strauss-Kahn's absence, Lipsky is temporarily in charge of the IMF, which manages the world economy and is in the midst of helping euro zone states like Greece, Ireland and Portugal. |
SANTA ANA — A $200 million overhaul of Dana Point Harbor is expected to include buildings with gabled standing seam metal roofs, open plazas, unique restaurants and shops, two hotels and possibly a surf museum. The long-awaited plan, a proposal by the Dana Point Harbor Partners LLC development group, was unanimously approved by the Orange County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Oct. 17. It was a milestone in a harbor revitalization plan that has gone on for nearly two decades. Dana Point Harbor Partners is made up of Burnham-Ward Properties for retail and restaurants, Bellwether Financial Group for the marinas, and R.D. Olson Development for hotels. Night falls as a sailboat docks for the evening in 2015 at Dana Point Harbor. Spend a day at Dana Point Harbor, and you’ll see things that feel like a time-lapse sequence in an unexpectedly interesting movie that involves plenty of water and boats and people. (Ed Crisostomo, Orange County Register file) Dana Point mayor Debra Lewis argues in favor of the Dana Point Harbor Partnership in front of the Orange County Board of Supervisors in Santa Ana, California, on Tuesday, October 17, 2017. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) Sound The gallery will resume in seconds Renderings of the proposed Dana Point Harbor Revitalization project provided by R.D. Olson Development Orange County Supervisor Lisa Bartlett listens to arguments for the Dana Point Harbor Project during a Board of Supervisors meeting in Santa Ana, California, on Tuesday, October 17, 2017. Dana Point Harbor is in Bartlett’s district. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) Eric Good, center, maneuvers his Paddle Board through traffic at Dana Point Harbor in Dana Point in 2015. (Ed Crisostomo, Orange County Register file) A woman and her dog glide along Dana Point Harbor in Dana Point in 2015. (Ed Crisostomo, Orange County Register file) Don Hansen listens as Dana Point mayor Debra Lewis argues in favor of the Dana Point Harbor Partnership in front of the Orange County Board of Supervisors in Santa Ana, California, on Tuesday, October 17, 2017. Hansen is the owner of Dana Wharf Sportfishing & Whale Watching, the first business to open in Dana Point Harbor. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) Members of the Dana Point Harbor Partners listen as Scott Mayer, right, the county’s chief real estate officer, answers questions about why he chose to recommend Dana Point Harbor Partners to rebuild Dana Point Harbor during a Board of Supervisors meeting in Santa Ana, California, on Tuesday, October 17, 2017. Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) Donna Kalez argues in favor of the Dana Point Harbor Partnership in front of the Orange County Board of Supervisors in Santa Ana, California, on Tuesday, October 17, 2017. Kalez is the daughter of Don Hansen, owner of Dana Wharf Sportfishing & Whale Watching, the first business to open in Dana Point Harbor. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) Bryan Ward, manager of the Dana Point Harbor Partnership, talks with the Orange County Board of Supervisor in Santa Ana, California, on Tuesday, October 17, 2017. Dana Point Harbor Partners is made up of Burnham Ward Properties for retail and restaurants, Bellwether Financial Group for the marinas and R.D. Olson Development for the hotel. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) Orange County Supervisor Lisa Bartlett shares a laugh with fellow supervisor Shawn Nelson as the listen to arguments about the Dana Point Harbor Project during a Board of Supervisors meeting in Santa Ana, California, on Tuesday, October 17, 2017. Dana Point Harbor is in Bartlett’s district. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) Sailors prepare to dock at Dana Point Harbor in Dana Point in 2015. (Ed Crisostomo, Orange County Register file) Renderings of the proposed Dana Point Harbor Revitalization project provided by R.D. Olson Development Bryan Ward, manager of the Dana Point Harbor Partnership, left, and Robert Olson, President R.D. Olson Development, center in red tie, join other members of the DPHP as they wait for a decision from the Orange County Board of Supervisor about who will rebuild Dana Point Harbor in Santa Ana, California, on Tuesday, October 17, 2017. Dana Point Harbor Partners is made up of Burnham Ward Properties for retail and restaurants, Bellwether Financial Group for the marinas and R.D. Olson Development for the hotel. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do drills the county’s chief real estate officer, Scott Mayer, about why they chose to recommend Dana Point Harbor Partners to rebuild Dana Point Harbor during a Board of Supervisors meeting in Santa Ana, California, on Tuesday, October 17, 2017. Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do drills the county’s chief real estate officer, Scott Mayer, about why they chose to recommend Dana Point Harbor Partners to rebuild Dana Point Harbor during a Board of Supervisors meeting in Santa Ana, California, on Tuesday, October 17, 2017. Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) Courtney Savoy, and Jennifer Birch’s Cairn rock work stands tall as people return from watching the sunset at Dana Point Harbor in Dana Point in 2015. (Ed Crisostomo, Orange County Register file) Paddle Boards, canoes, sailboats, and boats maneuver through traffic at Dana Point Harbor in Dana Point in 2015. (Ed Crisostomo, Orange County Register file) Visitors make their way through a trail at Harbor Point Conservation Park in Dana Point in 2015. (Ed Crisostomo, Orange County Register file) Renderings of the proposed Dana Point Harbor Revitalization project provided by R.D. Olson Development The supervisors directed the county to begin contract negotiations. If successful, a draft lease agreement would be completed within 90 to 120 days and would return to the board for approval as early as February. Construction is expected to start in the next 12 months on retail, with completion possibly within three years. Construction on the docks and hotels would start upon receipt of entitlement which Dana Point Harbor Partners says could be within 12 to 24 months. There are plans to remodel the existing Marina Inn until they gain entitlements to demolish it and build the new ones. “This is a legacy project for every one of our team members,” said Scott Burnham, of Newport Beach, a partner in Burnham-Ward Properties. “This has been a labor of love,” said Supervisor Lisa Bartlett, who first worked on plans for the harbor overhaul from 2007 to 2015 as a Dana Point councilwoman. “I’ve been laser-focused to make this a reality.” Related Articles County makes recommendation for developer of Dana Point Harbor’s $200 million renovation 57-room boutique hotel, restaurant with deck dining and youth hostel OKd for Dana Point bluff top Dana Point Harbor Partners was selected over Dana Point Partners LLC — a group made up of DJM Capital Partners for the commercial core, Pacific Marina Development for the marinas, and Pacifica Hotels. Dana Point Harbor Partners was recommended as the front-runner by county staff. The two development groups were selected by an evaluation committee of public and private-sector professionals familiar with coastal development and marine operations and experience with public-private partnerships. “If we had to make a decision on the project alone, this would be a virtual tie,” Bartlett said. “It’s not about the completed project but the overall vision.” The project includes reconstruction of the commercial core, the east and west marinas, the Marina Inn Hotel and 52 guest slips. Under the proposed public-private partnership, the developer would design, fund and build the improvements, then operate those portions of the harbor on a 66-year lease, before returning the property to the county. Supervisors Todd Spitzer and Shawn Nelson asked Scott Mayer, the county’s real estate officer, whether the county had made a master lease mandatory. Mayer explained that was left open to the developer group. Supervisor Andrew Do questioned Mayer about a $200 million difference between the proposals and why county staff didn’t ask for additional information on prior development projects completed by each group. “There was an inconsistency of what was being proposed by their structure and their real estate model,” Mayer said of Dana Point Partners, which projected the extra $200 million revenue to the county. “Dana Point Partners also indicated that before the 8 percent rate (of return) could be paid to the county, they need to get an 8 percent rate of return of the project. If they didn’t get that, it would limit their payment to the county.” In the end, the board agreed with county staff that Dana Point Harbor Partners would be more likely to complete the project on time. They also liked the idea of a master developer, where each component of the harbor project is under one lease. That way, if one component of the project does not hold its own financially, it could be covered by the other two parts. “Looking at the financial aspects of the harbor, I think the staff recommendation is spot on,” Bartlett said. Twenty-two people — largely harbor merchants, boaters and business operators — spoke during public comments, Tuesday, 14 favoring Dana Point Harbor Partners, eight speaking on behalf of Dana Point Partners. Dana Point Mayor Debra Lewis also asked the board for a swift decision. “We are elated with the monumental day the County of Orange, with the direction of Supervisor Lisa Bartlett, would choose Dana Point Harbor Partners in a 5-0 vote to lead us into the future with a new 66-year lease,” said Donna Kalez, who operates Dana Wharf Sportfishing and Whale Watching, the harbor’s first business when it was started by her father, Don Hansen, in 1971. Jim Miller, who has operated Coffee Importers for 37 years and is president of the Dana Point Harbor Merchant Association, said Tuesday’s vote was pivotal for the future. “Today was like putting 18 years on the line in one morning,” he said. “The merchants are relieved that the decision’s been made in the process of revitalizing the Dana Point Harbor and is now moving forward.” James Lenthall, president of the Dana Point Boaters Association, said his group has developed a strong relationship with Dana Point Harbor Partners, “and we look forward to building upon this foundation as we work together to give our boating community the world-class harbor we deserve.” |
Auckland's City Rail Link is closer to taking shape, with Auckland Transport saying it has confirmed land requirements for the $3 billion tunnel. Planning commissioners have recommended the location of the underground development, which will connect Britomart to three new train stations - Newton, Aotea Square and Karangahape Rd. AT chief executive David Warburton said those recommendations have been accepted. It was a "big step forward" for the project that had been on the agenda for almost 100 years. "At last we have a designated route," he said. The 3.5-kilometre rail link would affect many property owners. All those affected would be notified by AT and could appeal to the Environment Court, Warburton said. The commissioners recognised it was critical for Auckland's growth. "It is a major economic development opportunity as well as a significant transport investment and will help shape and grow Auckland." The link would result in faster, more efficient and more direct travel for train users, he said. Funding for the CRL has been committed by the Government and Auckland Council but the timeline for the project is still under discussion. The council wants the project to start in 2016, but the Government says it would prefer to begin in 2020, unless rail patronage or population growth exceeds forecasts. |
>> Sophia gave the boy an appraising look. After everything Emma had said about him, he didn't look like anything special. Well, it didn't matter. She only needed him to be useful. If she could recruit him for the Wards it would be a feather in her cap, and the queen bitch Piggot would finally cut her some slack. The trick would be making the right impression- << >> "Is this the best you can do? Piece of shit is what this is." said Steven. He didn't even look at her, didn't raise his voice. That only made it worse. As if she was beneath his notice. Not even worthy of his anger. Sophia tensed. She knew what was coming next, and it took all of her willpower to force herself to lean into the blow. The slap still made her lose her balance, made her rock back onto her heels. He was more than twice her weight, and this blow was harder than the last. It would have been easy to surrender. To let him strike her down, to fall to the ground, cry and beg for mercy. But she knew how he operated. Give in even once and it would mark her as a victim. Prey to be exploited. He would never stop, never let up, take and take and take until there was nothing left of her. Worse than death. No. She refused to give in to him. Refused to fall. Refused to rub her cheek where he struck her. She would never let him break her. She would survive. She stood up straight and silent, glared up at him- << >> "Shit, shit, shit." Shadow Stalker's hands and left leg were soaked in blood. Some was hers. Most wasn't. She tried to lay still. Emma and Mister Barnes were doing her a major favor. The least she could do was spare them the trouble of cleaning up after her. Emma had thought ahead and covered the back seat of the car in a sheet of plastic, but there was still the chance of a leak, and bloodstains were a bitch to get out. Emma peered at her from the front seat, her fashion model's face creased with lines of worry. "Are you sure you'll be okay, Sophia? Your leg? We can take you to the hospital if-" "I'm fine." she growled. Emma hurriedly returned her gaze to the road. Damn. She hadn't meant to snap at her. But seriously, what exactly had Emma been trying to say? That she wasn't tough enough to handle a little pain? That she was so lame that she'd get depressed over letting a mugger land a hit on her? That she was so weak that she'd be crushed with guilt about killing street scum? No. All those things...they made her angry, yeah. Angry at herself, for her shitty footwork that got her injured. Angry at the idiot mugger, for leaning into her bolt and getting himself killed. The anger was good. That was how you learned, how you got stronger. But she refused to let herself care. She wasn't going to cry about it. She wasn't dumb enough to waste her time crying about things she couldn't change- << >> Shadow Stalker watched the dealers in the alley below her, crowded around a cowering middle school boy. Apparently the boy's shithead parents had sent him out to buy cocaine from the same dealer his daddy had scammed a week ago with a stack of counterfeit cash. An industrial-grade clusterfuck. The only question was her own resolve. If she took this step forward it would mean she was officially a vigilante. A cape. There would be no going back. One of the dealers took out a knife and waved it in the boy's face. The boy lunged forward and tried to wrestle the knife away. Ballsy motherfucker. The kid actually managed to knock the asshole down before the others started kicking the shit out of him. A step forward, then. Shadow Stalker took a deep breath, tightened her grip on the crowbar, and leaped- << >> Sophia approached the girls gathered at the lunch table, then hesitated. She felt a fluttering of anxiety in her chest. She had never been one of the popular kids, and some ingrained sense of social status was screaming at her. This was wrong. Unnatural. Not her place. But she was a cape now, and that came with benefits. Now it was time to collect. She stepped forward, cutting in front of one of the girls to take the seat at Emma's side. The girl gave her a dirty look, opened her mouth to make a crack at her, but Sophia ignored her. "Hey, Ems." she said. "So glad you hooked me up with tickets to the concert." Emma turned to her with a smile. "Any time, Sophia. It's my pleasure to introduce a friend to a hidden gem of a musician." "Too bad Craig looks better in his music videos than he does in real life." "That's so true. He isn't helped at all by his hack of a costumer. He's lucky he's in a profession where his voice is the selling point." The other girls reacted. A change of expression, a shift of attention. The words told them a story of shared experience, an exclusive experience they hadn't been invited to, hadn't even known about. But the words weren't the point. The message was simple. Mine. << |
What Is a Business Plan? Many of us have been there: That sudden epiphany in the shower or at a bar chatting with friends. The slew of initial ideas hastily scribbled on napkins or perhaps simply forgotten entirely. Many great businesses started with these same events, but millions more never got beyond them. That's because the next step can be both difficult and labor-intensive, namely writing a coherent business plan. Going from random napkin-notes to an organized, thorough plan to get your business started, funded, and generating revenue for the foreseeable future can be a mammoth undertaking, especially for beginners and even more so for people trying to go it alone. Fortunately, there's plenty of help if you know where to look, especially if what you really need is a written business plan that simply communicates a clear vision. This will help you attract the right people and resources to implement your idea. A business plan tells others how you will get customers and clients, who will run the business, and how early-stage venture capital (VC) will be raised. Business plans help you talk about yourself, explain your strengths, and ask for money to back up your idea. So, people write business plans in order to acquire funding or to document the company's intended direction. That is, you want a bank loan, VC funding, or other help to get your startup off the ground. A business plan can also be the most concrete way to get everyone's agreement on "This is what we're doing, right?!" Keeping the plan updated as the business matures is an easy way of measuring success. In all of these cases, the business owner has to do something that can be scary: become a business document management expert by creating a structured document (that is, a business plan) with lots of numbers and compelling prose, with the awareness that this pitch is make-or-break for the company's vision. That's a tough job. It's hard to express your product's unique selling points, analyze competitors' strengths and weaknesses, and back up your assertions about why you need this much money. Believe me, I know. In my pre-journalistic life, I wrote two in-depth business plans. One plan taught me that I didn't have what it took to pull off that project and the other plan got my startup business accepted by a VC conference. So, when we lack expertise, we should ask for help. Software with "follow the bouncing ball" instructions for business plans can serve the same role as online accounting services because, in each case, you rely on specialists to walk you through the process. Even better, many of the products we review in this business plan creation tool roundup back up their software offerings with in-person coaching and mentoring as well as loads of online learning resources, like videos and how-to articles. Business Plan Software Options The 10 online business plan software solutions examined in this roundup—Atlas Business Solutions Ultimate Business Planner 5.0, Enloop, EquityNet, NetEkspert iPlanner.NET, OnePlace, Palo Alto Software LivePlan, PlanGuru, StratPad, Tarkenton GoSmallBiz, and The Business Plan Shop—each promise to help you construct a polished business plan, with all of the numbers and narrative you need. So, whether you want to start your own accounting firm, real estate operation, or e-commerce business, you'll be all ready to go. All of these online business plan software solutions certainly do deliver on their promise to help you, and none of them are bad choices. However, a few of them provide additional services such as connecting you to funding sources (EquityNet gets a nod here) or comparing your plan to others' plans in your industry (such as what Enloop's performance score does). Ultimately, though, the two Editors' Choice winners were clear: Palo Alto Software LivePlan and Tarkenton GoSmallBiz, both of which checked off most boxes on a typical entrepreneur's wish list. These Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications can't give you the irresistible prose to convince an investor you will make your projections come true, but they do guide you in answering all of the questions that investor is likely to have. Here are eight key factors to look for when choosing a business plan software solution for your business: 1. Business Plan Structure Business plans have a lot of elements, some of which won't occur to someone who hasn't written one before. Ideally, the business planning software solution will walk you through each section that is appropriate for your class of business, ensuring you answer all of the relevant questions. These solutions may prompt you to respond to issues that you might not have thought to address. 2. Do the Numbers Ultimately, a business plan shows how your company will make money. Even the simplest plan needs to include financial reports such as charts for profit-and-loss, balance sheets, and month-by-month and yearly projections. 3. Context and Analysis Some business plan software solutions (such as EquityNet and Editors' Choice Palo Alto Software LivePlan) help you compare your numbers to others in your industry, including regions and company size. You might claim that the Jewish deli you propose to open in Asheville, North Carolina will turn a profit in three years, but the market data suggests five years is typical. This data helps you back up your assertions before a banker can raise an eyebrow. This is a "nice-to-have" feature for some businesses but an irrelevant one for others. 4. Helpful Advice Even if the business plan software solution gives you places to plug in data (think "Mad Libs" for businesses), ultimately you need a good idea (you're on your own, there) and to understand the information investors want to see. As with tax preparation software, it's reassuring when the business planning software solution defines terms, provides sample data, and explains the sort of information expected in each field. StratPad's educational videos are a model for how this sort of thing should work. 5. Report Depth and Presentation The result of all of this work is a business plan, a document for others to read. These don't always need to be works of art but it helps if the business plan software solution packages your business plan attractively and permits customization. Don't treat these tools as all-in-one solutions to your problems. Set your expectations correctly and you'll find these business plan software solutions to be far more helpful. 6. Treat the Business Plan as a Work-In-Process Collect everything you think is necessary before getting started. But I promise you that, at least once while you use these business plan software solutions, you will say, "Gee, I don't know; I have to look it up." That's a good thing as it means the software is asking for relevant information you didn't think to include on your own. For any but the simplest of proposals, it's an iterative process. So, you need to highlight the parts to come back to (after your accountant responds, for example). Or, the software should at least save data in some kind of draft status. However, across all of these apps, some forms insist you must enter something in a field before it will save everything on the page, which is irksome. Worse, it could lead to errors because you might not remember to go back and fix the temporary guess. I kept wishing for a way to bookmark "temporary" data that needs to be double-checked ("I'll write in 800 for now…"); the best answer to this was Palo Alto Software LivePlan's comment field but it would be nice to see a business planning software solution that let me mark a field as "Don't forget." 7. You Still Need a Spreadsheet In general, these business plan software solutions will act as though you are reasonably organized before you log into their websites wherein you will paste summary information. However, based on my hands-on experience, I advise you to still expect to do background math yourself. For instance, if you need to fill in the projected head count for marketing for the next five years and you keep adjusting the number of people to hire (based on your spreadsheet guesswork), expect to keep manually updating the total in the software rather than having the data automatically sync. In other words, these business plan software solutions are helpers, not "I will do the thinking for you" kind of apps. And this is okay, as long as you don't expect them to be something they're not. These are all SaaS apps, some of which have a free version with the basics as well as a paid version with more feature depth. If your needs are incredibly simple and you just need "fill-in-the-blanks" forms to give to a banker, then you may find several completely free options that do the trick. 8. A Plan for All Businesses These business plan software solutions must be relevant for everyone, from a solo entrepreneur trying to open a small to midsize accounting firm to an established manufacturing company aiming to fund a new factory. To judge suitability to task, I used data from two real business plans: a New Jersey restaurant startup and a nine-year-old horror film festival. I also measured the software against the business plan I once wrote with the help of professional advisors (back when I sought significant VC). All of these business plan software solutions are good apps; none of them gravely disappoint. However, Palo Alto Software LivePlan and Tarkenton GoSmallBiz were head and shoulders above the rest. It won PCMag's admiration based on the clarity and understandability of their documentation and the impressive depth of their features and options. However, each of the 10 business plan software solutions reviewed has strengths that may make one a better choice over another for your business. So, look at all of the options to see which one is the best fit for you. |
The video will start in 8 Cancel Get the biggest daily news 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 North Korea has been training elite soldiers to sneak into the South and take Western tourists hostage, it has been claimed. Kim Jong-un's regime has been practicing scenarios in which snatch squads can get over the border with refugees in the event of an attack by the US. They would then target Westerners in a bid to give the North Koreans leverage if war broke out. These are the claims of a former North Korean soldier who defected 11 years ago. (Image: REUTERS) (Image: Reuters) (Image: AFP/Getty) Ung-gil Lee told the Mail on Sunday he believes the US should not attack the North unless it is certain Kim Jong-Un will be killed. He said: "[Kim Jong-Un] is going to fight back and use all retaliatory measures. "Unless Trump thinks he can get rid of him, he must not carry out an attack." Mr Lee said he served in one of North Korea's spy units for six years. (Image: Getty) One training routine was to practice sneaking into the South armed with deadly nerve agents and locate foreigners to kidnap. Earlier this year, North Korea sent a hit squad to assassinate Kim Jong-Un's half-brother Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur airport using the nerve agent VX. It comes as North Korea attempted to launch a missile on Sunday but it failed. Both South Korean and US military officials confirmed the failed test took place. The UK Foreign Office said it was "concerned" by the reports. Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now It is not known what kind of missile was launched on Sunday, although Pyongyang has repeatedly stated its aim of developing a rocket that could drop a nuclear payload on the US mainland. A Foreign Office spokesman said: "We are concerned by reports of a missile test by North Korea and are monitoring the situation closely." North Korea displayed what appeared to be new long-range and submarine-based missiles on the 105th birth anniversary of its founding father, Kim Il Sung, on Saturday, as a nuclear-powered U.S. aircraft carrier group steamed towards the region. Missiles appeared to be the main theme of a giant military parade, with Kim's grandson, leader Kim Jong Un, taking time to greet the commander of the Strategic Forces, the branch that oversees the missile arsenal. (Image: REUTERS) A U.S. Navy attack on a Syrian airfield this month with Tomahawk missiles raised questions about U.S. President Donald Trump's plans for reclusive North Korea, which has conducted several missile and nuclear tests in defiance of U.N. sanctions, regularly threatening to destroy the United States. Kim Jong Un, looking relaxed in a dark suit and laughing with aides, oversaw the festivities on the "Day of the Sun" at Pyongyang's main Kim Il Sung Square. (Image: REUTERS) (Image: REUTERS) Goose-stepping soldiers and marching bands filled the square, next to the Taedonggang River that flows through Pyongyang, in the hazy spring sunshine, followed by tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems and other weapons. Single-engine propeller-powered planes flew in a 105 formation overhead. Unlike at some previous parades attended by Kim, there did not appear to be a senior Chinese official in attendance. China is North Korea's lone major ally but has spoken out against its missile and nuclear tests and has supported U.N. sanctions. China on Friday again called for talks to defuse the crisis. |
A fatherless teenager faces his moment of truth in THE KARATE KID. Daniel (Ralph Macchio) arrives in Los Angeles from the east coast and faces the difficult task of making new friends. However, he becomes the object of bullying by the Cobras, a menacing gang of karate students, when he strikes up a relationship with Ali (Elisabeth Shue), the Cobra leader's ex-girlfriend. Eager to fight back and impress his new girlfriend but afraid to confront the dangerous gang, Daniel asks his handyman Miyagi (Noriyuki 'Pat' Morita), whom he learns is a master of the martial arts, to teach him karate. Miyagi teaches Daniel that karate is a mastery over the self, mind, and body and that fighting is always the last answer to a problem. Under Miyagi's guidance, Daniel develops not only physical skills but also the faith and self-confidence to compete despite tremendous odds as he encounters the fight of his life in the exciting finale to this entertaining film. |
Gabriel’s Horn and the Painter’s Paradox Gabriel’s Horn is a three-dimensional horn shape with the counterintuitive property of having a finite volume but an infinite surface area. This fact results in the Painter’s Paradox — A painter could fill the horn with a finite quantity of paint, “and yet that paint would not be sufficient to coat [the horn’s] inner surface” [1]. If the horn’s bell had, for example, a 6-inch radius, we’d only need about a half gallon of paint to fill the horn all the way up. Even though this half gallon is enough to entirely fill the horn, it’s not enough to even coat a fraction of the inner wall! The mathematical explanation is a bit confusing if you haven’t taken a first course in calculus, but if you’re interested, you can check it out here. Mathematica code: x[u_, v_] := u y[u_, v_] := Cos[v]/u z[u_, v_] := Sin[v]/u Manipulate[ParametricPlot3D[{{x[u, v], y[u, v], z[u, v]}}, {u, 1, umax}, {v, 0, 2*Pi}, PlotRange -> {{0, 20}, {-1, 1}, {-1, 1}}, Mesh -> {Floor[umax], 20}, Axes -> False, Boxed -> False], {{umax, 20}, 1.1, 20}] |
Be sure to consult your doctor if your sore throat is very painful, lasts more than a few days, or if you have other symptoms. Self-treating a health condition and avoiding or delaying standard care may have serious consequences. Certain conditions and symptoms (such as difficulty breathing) require emergency care. A sore throat can be uncomfortable and often signals an oncoming cold. While home remedies may help with some types of a sore throat, it's important to note that medical treatment may be needed. A sore throat due to strep throat , for example, requires antibiotic treatment in order to prevent serious complications. Since dry air can contribute to a sore throat, a humidifier may help by adding moisture back. Both warm- and cool-mist humidifiers are effective. However, for use around children, it's best to choose cool-mist to avoid hot water spills. You may also want to adjust your thermostat. For some people, a warmer room may lead to dryness, which can aggravate a dry, irritated throat. Some find relief by sucking on popsicles or eating ice cream. If you have swollen glands in your neck, applying an ice bag may also help. Add some to a warm beverage, or try it straight off the spoon. Honey should never be given to a child younger than 1 year due to the risk of botulism. Honey may help suppress a cough and ease discomfort by coating the throat, temporarily relieving irritation. A study published in the journal Pediatrics found that people who consumed honey before bed coughed less frequently and severely, and were less likely to lose sleep due to coughing than those who didn't take honey. (Two teaspoons at bedtime are recommended.) Water is always a good choice, but here are two other options you can consider: Prevent dehydration by drinking liquids. Some people may find relief from drinking warm liquids, while others may prefer cold liquids, which can help soothe inflamed tissue. Avoid hot liquids, which may aggravate throat irritation. One of the oldest home remedies for a sore throat, this may help to relieve pain, break down mucus, and reduce swelling. Typically, 1/2 teaspoon of salt is dissolved in a cup of warm water. The saltwater solution should be spit out after gargling and shouldn't be swallowed or reused. Gargling once an hour is sometimes recommended for a sore throat. Most sore throats will clear up in a couple of days. Here are some natural remedies and comfort care tips that may help soothe your pain. For throat pain caused by acid reflux, try an antacid for short-term relief. You can find them in chewable forms, liquids, and tablets. Longer-term OTC medications include H2 blockers, such as Zantac and Pepcid, and proton pump inhibitors, such as Prilosec and Prevacid 24HR. These reduce production of stomach acid. If your sore throat is due to allergies and post-nasal drip, you can try over-the-counter antihistamines such as Benadryl or Claritin. These reduce your mucus production during an allergy attack. Cough suppressants, such as Robitussin, can be used by children age 6 and over and adults to reduce throat irritation. Similarly, medicated or numbing cough drops or throat lozenges can be used. For example, Cepacol Extra Strength lozenges can be used by children of age 5 or 6 (depending on the flavor) or older and adults. They have menthol and benzocaine to numb nerve receptors. An anesthetic throat spray, such as Chloraseptic, can be used by children over age 3 and adults. The product instructions say it should not be used for more than two days. You can use over-the-counter pain medications for a sore throat. Ibuprofen and acetaminophen tend to have the greatest effectiveness-to-safety ratio. If you are on blood thinners like Coumadin or have liver problems, ulcer disease, or kidney disease, be sure to discuss which may be better with your doctor. If your throat is sore because of a surgery such as a tonsil removal, a thyroidectomy, or intubation, your doctor may prescribe a narcotic pain reliever. For a sore throat caused by gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), a doctor may manage your condition with H2 blockers that decrease acid production and proton pump inhibitors the lower the amount of acid your stomach makes. If you have a sore throat due to allergies, your doctor may recommend prescription allergy medication or desensitization therapy to control allergy attacks. Children may have herpangina due to Coxsackie virus or echovirus causing blister-like ulcers in the back of the throat. They rarely have severe pain. If they do, their doctor may prescribe a topical anesthetic containing benzocaine or xylocaine. A single dose of oral corticosteroids may be used when an adult has a severe sore throat. This therapy is not considered for children. Antibiotics may also be prescribed for other types of bacterial infections that could be causing a sore throat . While these drugs will not cure viral infections, they may be prescribed if your doctor believes you are at risk of developing a bacterial infection on top of a known viral infection. Strep throat and scarlet fever require prescription antibiotics to cure the infection and prevent potentially serious complications, including rheumatic fever and kidney damage. A seven- to 10-day course of penicillin, amoxicillin, or erythromycin is commonly prescribed. Fortunately, relief typically comes within 24 hours of treatment. It is important that you take the entire prescription to prevent bacteria from remaining and causing the infection to flair, perhaps leading to complications. While the above can help ease a sore throat, you'll need more than that to get rid of it completely if the cause itself requires its own treatment. Another type of minimally invasive surgery implants a LINX ring device containing magnetic beads where the stomach meets the esophagus. The magnetic attraction of the beads is just strong enough to allow food to go into the stomach but keep the lower esophageal sphincter closed to prevent acid reflux. Fundoplication is the most common surgery used to control acid reflux. It is a laparoscopic procedure that is minimally invasive. In this surgery, the top of the stomach is wrapped around the lower esophageal sphincter to make it tighter and prevent acid reflux. For a sore throat due to acid reflux, treatment of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) might include surgery if your symptoms don't improve with changes you make to your lifestyle or through medication. Tonsil removal may be recommended for recurrent strep throat infections or in the case of a severe abscess. Tonsillectomy used to be a common surgery for children who had recurring sore throats. However, it is now less common and only done when there is chronic tonsillitis. It is rarely done for adults. This is usually performed as an outpatient surgery and doesn't require an overnight stay in a hospital. For a sore throat that results in abscesses due to bacterial infection behind the tonsils, a doctor may drain the pus with a needle. Complementary Alternative Medicine (CAM) Some traditional herbal remedies have been used for a sore throat. Keep in mind that although many of these home remedies have been used for generations, there is still a lack of solid research on their effectiveness and safety. Sage Used in Europe as an herbal remedy for a variety of throat conditions, the herb sage (Salvia officinalis) has a number of compounds, such as cineole, borneol, camphor, and thujone, and astringent properties that may help ease sore throat pain and reduce swelling and inflammation. Herbalists sometimes suggest a sage tea or gargle made by steeping 1 teaspoon of dried sage or 1 tablespoon of fresh sage leaves in 1 cup of boiling water. Cover for 10 to 15 minutes and then strain out the leaves. Honey and lemon can be added if desired. A study found that a sage and echinacea spray every two hours (for a maximum of 10 times per day for five days) improved sore throat symptoms as effectively as a medicated spray. Side effects included a mild burning sensation and throat dryness. Although it may provide some relief in the short-term, the safety of regular or long-term use of sage supplements isn't known. Pregnant or nursing women should avoid sage supplements. Slippery Elm Native to North America, slippery elm is an herb that has long been used in herbal medicine to soothe a sore throat, dry cough, or laryngitis. Slippery elm is also found in some throat lozenges. When mixed with water, the inner bark of the slippery elm tree forms a thick gel (mucilage) that coats and soothes the throat. Herbalists typically recommend pouring 1 cup of boiling water over 1/2 teaspoon of powdered bark. Stir, allow it to steep and then gargle once it has cooled. Licorice Licorice root (Glycyrrhiza glabra) has a long history of use as an herbal remedy for a sore throat. According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), licorice root is sometimes used as a remedy for stomach ulcers, allergies, canker sores, and viral infections. A study in Anesthesia & Analgesia found that patients who gargled with a licorice root solution five minutes before general anesthesia were less likely to have a sore throat after surgery and experienced less post-operative coughing than patients who gargled with water. Licorice is a common ingredient in herbal teas, lozenges, and throat drops for a sore throat. It has a naturally sweet taste. Licorice in large amounts may lead to high blood pressure, salt and water retention, low potassium levels, and may affect levels of the hormone cortisol. It should not be combined with diuretics, corticosteroids, or other medications that reduce potassium levels in the body. People with heart disease or high blood pressure should avoid licorice. Pregnant women should not take licorice. Marshmallow Marshmallow, an herb that grows in North America and Europe, has been used for centuries as a home remedy for a sore throat. Like slippery elm, marshmallow contains mucilage. Herbalists recommend marshmallow root tea as a remedy for sore throats. It is usually made by adding 1 tablespoon of the dried root to a cup (8 ounces) of boiling water and steeping it, covered, for 30 to 90 minutes before straining. Herbalists usually suggest up to three cups a day for a sore throat. |
Last we checked, being gay wasn't a "trend." But Style.com has decided to throw logic to the wind, naming "lesbian chic" one of its hot topics for fall. In a new article called "The Conversation" (pointed out to us by the gals at Refinery29), Style.com's Maya Singer reviews the "the questions on everyone's lips," including "Are you sick of prints yet?" and "Will anyone wear the Marc Jacobs fur hat?" Another pressing question of the fashion set: "Is lesbian chic here to stay?" Lesbians! They're everywhere. This summer, the New York fashion scene was buzzing with gossip about a couple of high-profile ladies who ditched their marriages and started dating women; across the pond, meanwhile, British Vogue ran a whole article on that phenomenon, while society rag Tatler chimed in with a feature on London's seven "loveliest lesbians." (Only seven?) Just last week, Models.com posted photos on its homepage of the nuptials of model Harmony Boucher and her bride, Nicole. Like leopard print, denim-on-denim and leather leggings, lesbians have come seemingly out of nowhere and quickly become a favorite trend among the fashionable set. Except, well, lesbians weren't just "invented." The women featured in Tatler were probably gay last year, and the year before that. In any case, Singer declares that this lesbian fashion boom will impact the industry in myriad ways. "Socially, perhaps it means that in an industry stuffed with attractive young women, a few more of them may start dating each other," she writes. By that logic, we wonder if the same tendency is found in the field of nursing, where about 90 percent of registered nurses are female, or public schools, where approximately 75 percent of teachers are women. Outside the industry, Singer writes that the growing lesbian fad will impact fashion itself, as in: in with the combat boots, out with the heels! Rihanna's recent penchant for flats is cited as evidence of the changing tides. The logic seems to be that if you wear combat boots, you're probably a lesbian. Agyness Deyn, Miley Cyrus, Kate Bosworth and everyone in the early '90s might beg to differ. We've reached out to a rep at Style.com's parent company, Fairchild Fashion Media, for comment. In the meantime, read "Is lesbian chic here to stay?" on Style.com (slide #3). Do you find the premise problematic? (Via Refinery 29) Want more? Be sure to check out HuffPost Style on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest. |
For several weeks now, the media has been chasing tragic child death stories in Uttar Pradesh. You know like this: Such tragic deaths are a blot on any modern society and we must pressurize the government relentlessly until every single avoidable child death is successfully prevented in India. - Advertisement - - Article resumes - Having said that, what also needs to be asked is that, what is the current health situation in UP? Compared to previous years, has it remained the same, is it getting worse or is it improving? If it is getting worse, let thunder fall on the new government. If it is the same, that’s a disappointment. If it has improved, let us recognize it. So first, thank you Firstpost for omitting from your headline that the 49 deaths happened over a period of 30 days. That is little over 1 patient a day in a large government hospital. We have seen a lot of hitjobs against the BJP and its state governments, but this new line of attack is by far the lowest that the mainstream media has sunk. Underlying the media overdrive, is a cold cynical calculation that the issue here is so emotionally charged that it rules out the possibility of a rational response from the other side based on facts. Because, who would like to speak on the issue of deaths, that too the deaths of innocent children, mostly infants? When you raise an issue like this, you can always expect the majority of the public to take the side of the emotion driven outrage. Any effort to put the matter in context will be seen as “justifying child deaths”, which will ensure that bringing out the facts will ironically make the fact checker look bad. Take this : Again, tragic. But what most of those clickbait media headlines don’t tell you is this : In the same Jan–Aug period of 2014, there were 3828 kids who died at the same BRD Medical College in Gorakhpur. In 2015 it was an even more shocking 4601 and in 2016 it was 3758. If you take the average of the numbers in 2014, 2015 and 2016, it works out to be 4062 deaths in the Jan to Aug period. Now in 2017, the number for the same Jan — Aug period is 1285. That is a fall of almost 70% in the number of child deaths in BRD Medical College in Gorakhpur. Subtracting this year’s 1285 from the average of 4062 in previous years, we can confidently estimate that close to 2800 little angels have been saved this year. In just ONE Medical College in Gorakhpur. What is the possible explanation for this drastic prevention? Is there any other explanation for the child deaths suddenly falling by 70% in a single year apart from the fact that the BJP came to power? There might well be but it would be very unfair to the Yogi government if we say that they had no part to play in this reduction. To again make it clear that the 1285 deaths are by no means acceptable and that the government must be held accountable until every last avoidable child death is successfully prevented, but when there is a commendable performance by a government, such as saving 2800 little angels in just one hospital, it should be recognized. Most importantly because its a simple matter of providing incentives in hopes of a better outcome. Unless we as a people start rewarding good performance, how will we incentivize political parties to deliver that good governance? When a government successfully brings down child deaths by 70%, we must make sure everyone hears about it. Otherwise, will there be any incentive for political parties to focus on good governance and solid work instead of playing up the cliched issues like caste, language and religion? This is why I said the media hitjob on child deaths in Uttar Pradesh is one of the most unfortunate lows in the history of fake news. Think for a moment about those who wrote those screaming headlines about children dying by hundreds in Uttar Pradesh. They are the ones who have deliberately taken the data out of context to make the man they hate look bad, possibly without even batting an eyelid. In the end if you point out the above data, they might try and shame you but I say let’s not be scared and let’s spread the truth. This is for the children. Abhishek Banerjee is a math lover who may or not be an Assistant Professor at IISc Bangalore. He is the author of Operation Johar – A Love Story, a novel on the pain of left wing terror in Jharkhand, available on Amazon here. https://dynastycrooks.wordpress.com/ Share This Post and Support: |
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France has at least 100 neighbourhoods as bad as Belgium's jihadi hotspot Molenbeek, a prominent French politician has warned. The minister for cities Patrick Kanner said there were scores of urban communities in France similar to the Brussels district, home to several extremists linked to terror activity in Europe. It comes as it emerged that anti-terror police are still hunting eight suspects on the run after attacks in Brussels last week and in Paris in November. France has at least 100 neighbourhoods as bad as Belgium's jihadi hotspot Molenbeek (pictured), a prominent French politician has warned Kanner sparked debate in France over the weekend when he claimed that 'around a hundred neighbourhoods' in France could be compared to Molenbeek, where Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam, his 'blood brother', Brahim, and the ringleader of the terror plot, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, once lived. He said: 'We know that there are today around a hundred neighbourhoods in France which have potential similarities to what has happened in Molenbeek,' he said during a radio interview, though some in his own Socialist Party questioned the statement. Meanwhile, it has emerged that European security agencies are still looking for eight people they say have connections with massacres in the French and Belgian capitals. According to CNN, their names are included in an 11-page secret document passed to investigators around Europe in the wake of last week's attacks on Brussels, which claimed 35 lives. CNN says it has been given the names of two of those on the list - Naim al-Hamed and Yoni Patric Mayne. Naim al-Hamed (pictured) has been named on a list of eight people still wanted over the attacks in Paris and Brussels Al-Hamed was named last week with investigators claiming he played a role in the Brussels bombings. The 28-year-old was also suspected of involvement in the November 13 attacks in Paris which killed 130 people. Belgian-Malian Mayne accompanied terror mastermind Abaaoud to Syria in 2014. Pictures later emerged purporting to show his dead body. But his inclusion on the bulletin suggests investigators think his death may have been faked. As part of the hunt for terror suspects, Dutch police yesterday arrested a 32-year-old French national in the port city of Rotterdam on suspicion of planning a terror attack, prosecutors said, in a raid carried out at the request of French authorities. He is thought to have been planning an attack in France in the name of iSIS along with Reda Kriket, a terror suspect who was detained near Paris on Thursday, a French police source said. 'French authorities on Friday requested the arrest of this French national,' the Dutch prosecutor's office said in a statement, adding that the man was suspected 'of preparing a terrorist attack'. The statement made no mention of any connection with the November attacks in Paris. The detained French national is expected to be handed over to France 'shortly', the statement added, a process that could take 'several days', spokesman Wim de Bruin said. Three other men were also detained in the police operations in Rotterdam Sunday, including two suspects of Algerian background aged 43 and 47. No immediate details were available about the third man. The raids were carried out at two homes in the west of the city, and several nearby houses were evacuated 'for the safety of the residents'. The Netherlands was already on heightened alert after Tuesday's airport and metro attacks in Brussels, with security stepped up at airports and train stations and border controls tightened. The minister for cities Patrick Kanner said there were scores of urban communities in France similar to the Brussels district, home to several extremists linked to terror activity in Europe. Police are pictured making an arrest in the the neighbourhood French police said earlier they had foiled an attack by 34-year-old Kriket - a man previously convicted in Belgium in a terror case - after arresting him and discovering explosives and a machine gun at his home near Paris. The French police source said the man arrested in the Netherlands was wanted by French authorities in December over criminal association with a terrorist organisation. This morning, Belgium charged three more people with 'terrorist activities', prosecutors revealed. Yesterday, Belgian police revealed they are questioning four new terror suspects after a series of dawn raids across the country. A total of nine people were detained after operations in Brussels and the northern cities of Mechelen and Duffel. Five were released after questioning and four remain in custody. The raids were linked to a 'federal case regarding terrorism', according to the federal prosecutor, but it was not clear whether they were tied to the attacks last week. Earlier another suspect was charged over his involvement with a terrorist group. Tensions were running high as far-right football hooligans clashed with riot police in central Brussels yesterday The man, identified as Abderamane A., was shot in the leg by police on Friday in the city's Schaerbeek district because he was carrying a rucksack police believed contained a bomb. He was detained in connection to a related raid in France on Thursday that the government said foiled a 'major terrorist attack'. He has been charged with 'involvement in a terrorist group', Belgian prosecutors said today. Abderamane A. was reportedly convicted in 2003 as an accomplice in the assassination of the Afghan political and military leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, two years earlier. It came as dramatic pictures emerged of the moment armed Italian police arrested an Algerian man wanted by Belgium over fake ID documents used by the Paris and Brussels terrorists. Djamal Eddine Ouali, 40, was seen on his knees and being held at gunpoint after being detained under a European arrest warrant in the southern Italian region of Salerno. Abderamane A., was shot in the leg by police on Friday in the city's Schaerbeek district because he was carrying a rucksack police believed contained a bomb He was suspected of being part of a criminal network that produced fake documents for illegal immigration. Later in the day, tensions boiled over in Brussels as a peace march aimed at paying tribute to those killed in the Brussels attacks, was invaded by a group of up to 500 far-right football hooligans. Riot police were called in after the black-clad men gathered at Place de la Bourse in Brussels this afternoon and unfurled a banner denouncing ISIS. Police used a water cannon on the angry crowd. |
"Montaigne" redirects here. For the Australian singer-songwriter, see Montaigne (musician) Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Lord of Montaigne (;[4] French: [miʃɛl ekɛm də mɔ̃tɛɲ]; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592[5]) was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes[6] and autobiography with intellectual insight. His massive volume Essais contains some of the most influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on Western writers, including Francis Bacon, René Descartes,[7] Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Albert Hirschman, William Hazlitt,[8] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer,[9] Isaac Asimov, and possibly on the later works of William Shakespeare. During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that, "I am myself the matter of my book", was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne came to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, "Que sçay-je?" ("What do I know?", in Middle French; now rendered as Que sais-je? in modern French). Life [ edit ] Château de Montaigne, a house built on the land once owned by Montaigne's family. His original family home no longer exists, though the , a house built on the land once owned by Montaigne's family. His original family home no longer exists, though the tower in which he wrote still stands. Portrait of Michel de Montaigne by Dumonstier around 1578 Tour de Montaigne ( The Montaigne's tower ), mostly unchanged since the 16th century, where Montaigne's library was located Montaigne was born in the Aquitaine region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne, in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, close to Bordeaux. The family was very wealthy; his great-grandfather, Ramon Felipe Eyquem, had made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the estate in 1477, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne, was a French Catholic soldier in Italy for a time and had also been the mayor of Bordeaux.[5] Although there were several families bearing the patronym "Eyquem" in Guyenne, his father's family is thought to have had some degree of Marrano (Spanish and Portuguese Jewish) origins,[10] while his mother, Antoinette López de Villanueva, was a convert to Protestantism.[11] His maternal grandfather, Pedro Lopez,[12] from Zaragoza, was from a wealthy Marrano (Sephardic Jewish) family who had converted to Catholicism.[13][14][15][16] His maternal grandmother, Honorette Dupuy, was from a Catholic family in Gascony, France.[17] The coat of arms of Michel Eyquem, Lord of Montaigne His mother lived a great part of Montaigne's life near him, and even survived him, but is mentioned only twice in his essays. Montaigne's relationship with his father, however, is frequently reflected upon and discussed in his essays. Montaigne's education began in early childhood and followed a pedagogical plan that his father had developed, refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth, Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, in order to, according to the elder Montaigne, "draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help".[18] After these first spartan years, Montaigne was brought back to the château. The objective was for Latin to become his first language. The intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus, who could not speak French). His father hired only servants who could speak Latin, and they were also given strict orders always to speak to the boy in Latin. The same rule applied to his mother, father, and servants, who were obliged to use only Latin words he himself employed, and thus acquired a knowledge of the very language his tutor taught him. Montaigne's Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than the more traditional books. The atmosphere of the boy's upbringing, although designed by highly refined rules taken under advisement by his father, created in the boy's life the spirit of "liberty and delight" to "make me relish... duty by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion...without any severity or constraint"; yet he would have everything to take advantage of his freedom. And so a musician woke him every morning, playing one instrument or another,[19] and an épinettier (with a zither) was the constant companion to Montaigne and his tutor, playing a tune to alleviate boredom and tiredness. Around the year 1539, Montaigne was sent to study at a prestigious boarding school in Bordeaux, the Collège de Guyenne, then under the direction of the greatest Latin scholar of the era, George Buchanan, where he mastered the whole curriculum by his thirteenth year. He then began his study of law at the University of Toulouse in 1546 and entered a career in the local legal system. He was a counselor of the Court des Aides of Périgueux and, in 1557, he was appointed counselor of the Parlement in Bordeaux (a high court). From 1561 to 1563 he was courtier at the court of Charles IX; he was present with the king at the siege of Rouen (1562). He was awarded the highest honour of the French nobility, the collar of the Order of St. Michael, something to which he aspired from his youth. While serving at the Bordeaux Parlement, he became very close friends with the humanist poet Étienne de la Boétie, whose death in 1563 deeply affected Montaigne. It has been suggested by Donald M. Frame, in his introduction to The Complete Essays of Montaigne that because of Montaigne's "imperious need to communicate" after losing Étienne, he began the Essais as his "means of communication" and that "the reader takes the place of the dead friend".[20] Montaigne married Françoise de la Cassaigne in 1565, probably in an arranged marriage. She was the well-got daughter and niece of merchants of Toulouse and Bordeaux. They had six daughters, but only the second-born, Léonor, survived infancy.[21] Little is known about their marriage, a few words only escaping from Montaigne himself on the subject – he wrote of his daughter Léonor, "All my children die at nurse; but Léonore, our only daughter, who has escaped this misfortune, has reached the age of six and more without having been punished, the indulgence of her mother aiding, except in words, and those very gentle ones."[22] His daughter married François de la Tour and later Charles de Gamaches and had a daughter by each.[23] Following the petition of his father, Montaigne started to work on the first translation of the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond's Theologia naturalis, which he published a year after his father's death in 1568 (In 1595, Sebond's Prologue was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum for its declaration that the Bible is not the only source of revealed truth). After this, he inherited the family's estate, the Château de Montaigne, to which he moved back in 1570, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne. Another literary accomplishment was Montaigne's posthumous edition of his friend Boétie's works. In 1571, he retired from public life to the Tower of the Château, his so-called "citadel", in the Dordogne, where he almost totally isolated himself from every social and family affair. Locked up in his library, which contained a collection of some 1,500 works, he began work on his Essais ("Essays"), first published in 1580. On the day of his 38th birthday, as he entered this almost ten-year period of self-imposed reclusion, he had the following inscription crown the bookshelves of his working chamber: In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.[24] During this time of the Wars of Religion in France, Montaigne, a Roman Catholic, acted as a moderating force,[citation needed] respected both by the Catholic King Henry III and the Protestant Henry of Navarre. Montaigne believed that a knowledge of devastating effects of vice is calculated to excite an aversion to vicious habits. In 1578, Montaigne, whose health had always been excellent, started suffering from painful kidney stones, a sickness he had inherited from his father's family. Throughout this illness, he would have nothing to do with doctors or drugs.[5] From 1580 to 1581, Montaigne traveled in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, partly in search of a cure, establishing himself at Bagni di Lucca where he took the waters. His journey was also a pilgrimage to the Holy House of Loreto, to which he presented a silver relief depicting himself and his wife and daughter kneeling before the Madonna, considering himself fortunate that it should be hung on a wall within the shrine.[25] He kept a fascinating journal recording regional differences and customs[26] and a variety of personal episodes, including the dimensions of the stones he succeeded in ejecting from his bladder. This was published much later, in 1774, after its discovery in a trunk which is displayed in his tower.[27] During Montaigne's visit to the Vatican, as he described in his travel journal, the Essais were examined by Sisto Fabri who served as Master of the Sacred Palace under Pope Gregory XIII. After Fabri examined Montaigne's Essais the text was returned to its author on 20 March 1581. Montaigne had apologized for references to the pagan notion of "fortuna" as well as for writing favorably of Julian the Apostate and of heretical poets, and was released to follow his own conscience in making emendations to the text.[28] Journey to Italy by Michel de Montaigne 1580–1581 While in the city of Lucca in 1581, he learned that, like his father before him, he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux; he returned and served as mayor. He was re-elected in 1583 and served until 1585, again moderating between Catholics and Protestants. The plague broke out in Bordeaux toward the end of his second term in office, in 1585. In 1586, the plague and the Wars of Religion prompted him to leave his château for two years.[5] Montaigne continued to extend, revise, and oversee the publication of Essais. In 1588 he wrote its third book and also met the writer Marie de Gournay, who admired his work and later edited and published it. Montaigne called her his adopted daughter.[5] King Henry III was assassinated in 1589, and Montaigne then helped to keep Bordeaux loyal to Henry of Navarre, who would go on to become King Henry IV. Montaigne died of quinsy at the age of 59, in 1592 at the Château de Montaigne. The disease in his case "brought about paralysis of the tongue",[29] and he had once said "the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is conversation. I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose, I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice."[30] Remaining in possession of all his other faculties, he requested mass, and died during the celebration of that mass.[31] He was buried nearby. Later his remains were moved to the church of Saint Antoine at Bordeaux. The church no longer exists: it became the Convent des Feuillants, which has also disappeared.[32] The Bordeaux Tourist Office says that Montaigne is buried at the Musée Aquitaine, Faculté des Lettres, Université Bordeaux 3 Michel de Montaigne, Pessac. His heart is preserved in the parish church of Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne. The humanities branch of the University of Bordeaux is named after him: Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3.[33] Essais [ edit ] His humanism finds expression in his Essais, a collection of a large number of short subjective treatments of various topics published in 1580, inspired by his studies in the classics, especially by the works of Plutarch and Lucretius.[34] Montaigne's stated goal is to describe humans, and especially himself, with utter frankness. Montaigne's writings are studied as literature and philosophy around the world. Michel de Montaigne Inspired by his consideration of the lives and ideals of the leading figures of his age, he finds the great variety and volatility of human nature to be its most basic features. He describes his own poor memory, his ability to solve problems and mediate conflicts without truly getting emotionally involved, his disdain for the human pursuit of lasting fame, and his attempts to detach himself from worldly things to prepare for his timely death. He writes about his disgust with the religious conflicts of his time. He believed that humans are not able to attain true certainty. The longest of his essays, Apology for Raymond Sebond, marking his adoption of Pyrrhonism contains his famous motto, "What do I know?" Montaigne considered marriage necessary for the raising of children, but disliked strong feelings of passionate love because he saw them as detrimental to freedom. In education, he favored concrete examples and experience over the teaching of abstract knowledge that has to be accepted uncritically. His essay "On the Education of Children" is dedicated to Diana of Foix. The Essais exercised important influence on both French and English literature, in thought and style.[35] Francis Bacon's Essays, published over a decade later, in 1596, are usually assumed to be directly influenced by Montaigne's collection, and Montaigne is cited by Bacon alongside other classical sources in later essays.[36] Montaigne's influence on psychology [ edit ] Though not a scientist, Montaigne made observations on topics in psychology.[37] In his essays, he developed and explained his observations of these topics. His thoughts and ideas covered topics such as thought, motivation, fear, happiness, child education, experience, and human action. Montaigne’s ideas have influenced psychology and are a part of psychology’s rich history. Child education [ edit ] Child education was among the psychological topics that he wrote about.[37] His essays On the Education of Children, On Pedantry, and On Experience explain the views he had on child education.[38]:61:62:70 Some of his views on child education are still relevant today.[39] Montaigne’s views on the education of children were opposed to the common educational practices of his day.[38]:63:67He found fault with both what was taught and how it was taught.[38]:62 Much of the education during Montaigne’s time was focused on the reading of the classics and learning through books.[38]:67Montaigne disagreed with learning strictly through books. He believed it was necessary to educate children in a variety of ways. He also disagreed with the way information was being presented to students. It was being presented in a way that encouraged students to take the information that was taught to them as absolute truth. Students were denied the chance to question the information. Therefore, students could not truly learn. Montaigne believed that, to learn truly, a student had to take the information and make it their own. At the foundation Montaigne believed that the selection of a good tutor was important for the student to become well educated.[38]:66 Education by a tutor was to be done at the pace of the student.[38]:67He believed that a tutor should be in dialogue with the student, letting the student speak first. The tutor should also allow for discussions and debates to be had. Through this dialogue, it was meant to create an environment in which students would teach themselves. They would be able to realize their mistakes and make corrections to them as necessary. Individualized learning was also integral to his theory of child education. He argued that the student combines information he already knows with what is learned and forms a unique perspective on the newly learned information.[40]:356 Montaigne also thought that tutors should encourage a student’s natural curiosity and allow them to question things.[38]:68He postulated that successful students were those who were encouraged to question new information and study it for themselves, rather than simply accepting what they had heard from the authorities on any given topic. Montaigne believed that a child’s curiosity could serve as an important teaching tool when the child is allowed to explore the things that they are curious about. Experience was also a key element to learning for Montaigne. Tutors needed to teach students through experience rather than through the mere memorization of knowledge often practised in book learning.[38]:62:67He argued that students would become passive adults; blindly obeying and lacking the ability to think on their own.[40]:354 Nothing of importance would be retained and no abilities would be learned.[38]:62 He believed that learning through experience was superior to learning through the use of books.[39] For this reason he encouraged tutors to educate their students through practice, travel, and human interaction. In doing so, he argued that students would become active learners, who could claim knowledge for themselves. Montaigne’s views on child education continue to have an influence in the present. Variations of Montaigne’s ideas on education are incorporated into modern learning in some ways. He argued against the popular way of teaching in his day, encouraging individualized learning. He believed in the importance of experience over book learning and memorization. Ultimately, Montaigne postulated that the point of education was to teach a student how to have a successful life by practising an active and socially interactive lifestyle.[40]:355 Related writers and influence [ edit ] Thinkers exploring similar ideas to Montaigne include Erasmus, Thomas More, and Guillaume Budé, who all worked about fifty years before Montaigne.[41] Many of Montaigne's Latin quotations are from Erasmus' Adagia, and most critically, all of his quotations from Socrates. Plutarch remains perhaps Montaigne's strongest influence, in terms of substance and style. Montaigne's quotations from Plutarch in the Essays number well over 500.[43] Ever since Edward Capell first made the suggestion in 1780, scholars have suggested Montaigne to be an influence on Shakespeare.[44] The latter would have had access to John Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essais, published in English in 1603, and a scene in The Tempest "follows the wording of Florio [translating Of Cannibals] so closely that his indebtedness is unmistakable".[45] However, most parallels between the two can be explained as commonplaces:[44] as with Cervantes, Shakespeare's similarities with writers in other nations could be due simply to their simultaneous study of Latin moral and philosophical writers such as Seneca the Younger, Horace, Ovid and Virgil. Much of Blaise Pascal's skepticism in his Pensées has been traditionally attributed to his reading Montaigne.[46] The English essayist William Hazlitt expressed boundless admiration for Montaigne, exclaiming that "he was the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man. ... He was neither a pedant nor a bigot. ... In treating of men and manners, he spoke of them as he found them, not according to preconceived notions and abstract dogmas".[47] Beginning most overtly with the essays in the "familiar" style in his own Table-Talk, Hazlitt tried to follow Montaigne's example.[8] Ralph Waldo Emerson chose "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic" as a subject of one of his series of lectures entitled Representative Men, alongside other subjects such as Shakespeare and Plato. In "The Skeptic" Emerson writes of his experience reading Montaigne, "It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience." Friedrich Nietzsche judged of Montaigne: "That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this Earth".[48] Sainte-Beuve advises us that "to restore lucidity and proportion to our judgments, let us read every evening a page of Montaigne."[49] The American philosopher Eric Hoffer employed Montaigne both stylistically and in thought. In Hoffer's memoir, Truth Imagined, he said of Montaigne, "He was writing about me. He knew my innermost thoughts." The British novelist John Cowper Powys expressed his admiration for Montaigne's philosophy in his books Suspended Judgements (1916)[50] and The Pleasures of Literature (1938). Judith N. Shklar introduces her book Ordinary Vices (1984), "It is only if we step outside the divinely ruled moral universe that we can really put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another each day. That is what Montaigne did and that is why he is the hero of this book. In spirit he is on every one of its pages..." 20th-century literary critic Erich Auerbach called Montaigne the first modern man. "Among all his contemporaries", writes Auerbach (Mimesis, Chapter 12), "he had the clearest conception of the problem of man's self-orientation; that is, the task of making oneself at home in existence without fixed points of support".[51] A new one-man play, "The First Modern Man", starring Jonathan Hansler as Montaigne, written by Michael Barry, opened in February 2019 at the Hen and Chickens Theatre in Islington to rave reviews. [52] References [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ] |
Residents of Mount Airy got the chance to speak out against a proposed medical marijuana dispensary. NBC10's Pamela Osborne has the latest. Dozens of residents and stakeholders, some wearing stickers that read "I live in Mt. Airy and I oppose this location," crammed into a Philadelphia zoning hearing Tuesday morning to lay out their concerns about a state-approved medical marijuana dispensary. A defunct bank at 8319 Stenton Avenue near East Allen Lane would be converted into the facility, which would provide tinctures, oils and edibles to approved patients. The cannabis plant, itself, would not be grown or sold on the premises. The building is in a residential neighborhood some worry could be exposed to crime, litter and crowding should TerraVida Holistic Center be allowed to operate there. The dispensary owner, Christine Visco, was awarded a license by the state Department of Health in June, but lawyers representing members of the community said TerraVida was not in full compliance at the time of permitting. This is the proposed site of the TerraVida Holistic Center at Stenton Avenue and E. Allen Lane. Photo credit: Google Maps Representatives for TerraVida argued that many zoning restrictions enacted by the city came after the state issued permits to potential medical marijuana businesses. They will retrofit if necessary, lawyers representing Visco said. "This case has nothing to do with medical marijuana," TerraVida attorney Michael Phillips said. "This is a land-use issue." Despite the understanding that Tuesday's hearing would be a referendum on Pennsylvania's medical marijuana program, residents questioned if drug dealers would be attracted to the area and worried the impact this facility could have on young children in the area. A home daycare center currently operates within 500 feet of the building, which would be in conflict with the city's ordinance to maintain at least that much distance from any child-serving institution. But TerraVida lawyers argued that the daycare center is not licensed by the city, only the state, and therefore not a concern for the dispensary. Tensions rose throughout the first two hours of testimony as residents murmured, snickered and occasionally shouted. At one point, an attorney representing opponents of the dispensary compared zoning issues to segregation in the 1960s. The dispensary is proposed on the former site of a bank at 8319 Stenton Avenue. Neighbors opposed to the facility say it has no place in their residential community. Photo credit: Google Maps/NBC10 "It's a question of whether the city preempts the state," David Fineman said. Among his complaints, Fineman argued TerraVida does not have a garage door or covering mandated by the state to provide coverage for cars and trucks that will unload product into the dispensary. Lawyers representing TerraVida said retrofitting of the existing building, which functioned as a bank for several years, would be done in accordance with state law, but did not have to be completed prior to receiving a license to operate. "It was a nightmare when it came to parking," said one resident who has lived on E. Allens Lane for 35 years and remembers overflow parking obstructing her own home. Councilwoman Cherrelle Parker, who represents the neighborhood, accused TerraVida of not meeting with community members before applying for a permit at the Stenton Avenue location. "They never talked to me about it," she said. "We were shocked that the attorney never even informed us this was occurring." In an apparent attempt to ease anger, the chairman of the zoning board offered one alternative. "Sometimes you might want to look for another place," former City Councilman Frank DiCicco said as audience members clapped and whistled. "I know this community well. They're not going to give up." After more than two hours of back-and-forth, both sides agreed to break. The hearing will be continued Sept. 19 at 9:30 a.m. "I know what some of you sacrificed to be here," Parker said before Mt. Airy residents boarded buses and shuttles back to their neighborhood. "But come September, if you can't be here, you better find someone to take your place." Councilwoman Cindy Bass said in an emailed statement that she will ask the Department of Health to revoke TerraVida's permit during a Wednesday morning press conference. Editor's Note: The president of TerraVida Holistic Center is the sister of NBC10’s Deanna Durante. Deanna is not involved in the business venture. |
Jay Schorr was one of Jeb Bush’s biggest fans. The owner of a South Florida media company, Schorr was so glad to see Bush taking a hard look at a presidential campaign that in early February, he began funding radio ads touting the former Sunshine State governor as the solution to America’s ailments. “Only one man is running on a record of success: Jeb Bush,” intoned his initial 49-second spot, which Schorr believes was the first to promote Bush as a presidential candidate. But there was a problem: Bush isn’t officially running for anything. Even as he winks and nods his way across early primary states, doing all the things candidates do—giving speeches, meeting with the press, raising money and building supporter lists—the former Florida governor has exploited the blind spots in U.S. campaign finance law to avoid the legal definition of candidate activity. As a result, what Schorr got this week in return for his zeal and financial support was a cease-and-desist letter from Bush’s lawyers. “While we appreciate your enthusiasm,” they wrote in the missive, a copy of which was obtained by TIME, “your ads erroneously suggest that Governor Bush is a candidate for office and claim that he approved the messages in the ads. Please be aware that Governor Bush is NOT a candidate for any office and he has not approved any of your advertisements.” As a legal matter, Bush’s lawyers had plenty of reasons to be cautious. His effort to reach the White House can only be carried out legally in its current incarnation if he denies that any of it is being done as part of a dedicated effort to win the White House. See Jeb Bush's Life in Photos Sygma/Corbis George Bush Presidential Library George Bush Presidential Library Seth Poppel/Yearbook Library Bob E. Daemmrich—Sygma/Corbis George Bush Presidential Library Frank Lorenzo—Bettmann/Corbis Cynthia Johnson—Getty Images Dave Valdez—White House/Sygma/Corbis Christopher Little—Corbis Tim Chapman—Getty Images Nina Berman—SIPA Brooks Kraft—Sygma/Corbis Joe Burbank—Orlando Sentinel/MCT/Getty Images Melina Mara—The Washington Post/Getty Images Mark Peterson—Redux for TIME 1 of 16 Advertisement If that sounds strange, welcome to the world of modern day campaign finance. The 2016 presidential election is poised to shatter spending records, with more money sloshing around than ever before. And a big part of the reason is the proliferation of individual-candidate super PACs, groups that can raise unlimited sums in support of specific candidates, but cannot directly coordinate most of their efforts with those candidates once they declare for federal office. Super PACs emerged as a force in 2012, with patriotic monikers like Restore Our Future (which supported Mitt Romney) and Priorities USA Action (which backed Barack Obama and has since thrown its muscle behind Hillary Clinton). In 2014, they spread widely to Congressional races. And in the nascent phases of the 2016 race, they have become the most effective weapon in a presidential hopeful’s arsenal, a way for an undeclared candidate to stockpile unlimited sums right out of the gate. Bush, like an array of other all-but-certain candidates, is using his Right to Rise super PAC to rake in millions of dollars, all while maintaining the pretense that he is not officially running for anything. After he becomes a candidate, he is almost certain to cut official ties to Right to Rise, leaving it in the hands of his staff, who will run television ads on his behalf. In the meantime, his lawyers are careful to ensure he doesn’t run afoul of Federal Election Commission regulations. (Charlie Spies, counsel to the Right to Rise PAC and the main author of the letter to Schorr, did not respond to a request for comment.) The cease-and-desist letter shocked Schorr, who says he was simply trying to exercise his First Amendment rights to enumerate Bush’s merits. Schorr’s idea was to create one radio ad each week until November 2016. One quirky spot featured an imaginary dialogue between Bush and Bill Clinton; another challenged David Letterman to a monologue contest in response to a recent Late Night swipe. So far, he’s done about a half-dozen ads in total, paying about $7,000 out of his own pocket to place them on local radio and the Internet. “A mere pittance in political advertising terms,” he notes, “but for someone not being financed by big pocket donors, it’s significant.” Though the spat has soured him a bit on Bush’s operation, Schorr says he still supports the former Florida governor. But he has come to believe that the episode highlights how Bush, like many other 2016 hopefuls, is flouting the spirit of U.S. campaign-finance laws, if not the letter. “The whole campaign finance landscape is a sham. It’s a legal fiction. The candidates themselves are wink-winking—‘if I decide to run’,” he says. “They’re paying lip service to some ridiculous federal regulations that everyone circumvents.” “People need to know,” Schorr adds, “that these candidates are running wild.” Write to Alex Altman at alex_altman@timemagazine.com. |
WASHINGTON — There were foggy and subtle signs the U.S. Army's key future anti-missile command-and-control system's schedule was slipping, but the service's fiscal 2018 budget request is now showing the initial operational capability, or IOC, of the program is delayed by four years. And the research, development, test and evaluation, or RDT&E, account in FY18 show an increase of more than half a billion dollars from FY17 through FY21 compared to the FY17 request. Last year's budget request documents had the IOC milestone set for its Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, or IBCS, in the third quarter of FY18, but the new documents released Tuesday show an IOC now scheduled for the third quarter of FY22. The Northrop Grumman-manufactured IBCS is a key component of the Army's future Integrated Air and Missile Defense System that will replace the Patriot system. IBCS will also connect to other major systems on the battlefield such as the Army's Indirect Fire Protection Capability, or IFPC, system to defend against rockets, artillery and mortars. "The additional funding and schedule allows for integration with the latest version of Patriot software that is currently undergoing operational test and evaluation; increased time for development, testing and analysis to demonstrate software capabilities; purchase and refinement, if needed, using RDT&E funds that support the emplacement time for the IFPC as well as addressing potential obsolescence and hardware performance actions; additional cyber and Electronic Attack events as well as additional training time prior to [Limited User Test]," Army spokesman Dan O'Boyle said in a statement sent to Defense News on Thursday. Bringing IBCS to life is no easy endeavor by nature. It involves complicated software development, and the plans for IBCS on the battlefield have expanded, resulting in the need for more development. IBCS has completed three successful test flights with four successful intercepts to date. The Army indicated to Defense News in February that IOC wouldn't happen as planned due to "IBCS software deficiencies" that needed to be resolved, but the service was unable to say how delayed the program was. While the Army’s budget request this year shows a four-year delay, an April 13 Federal Business Opportunities request for information required before soliciting a noncompetitive acquisition for IBCS shows the possibility of an IOC schedule slip even further than FY22. "The requirement of this acquisition is to add additional period of performance to the current IBCS development contract," it reads, "for IBCS EMD, [or engineering and manufacturing development], development efforts through 3rd [quarter of] FY21." Comparison of the FY17 and FY18 requests show a delayed and extended EMD developmental test phase. According to the FY17 document, EMD was supposed to end in the first quarter of FY16 and take five quarters. In the FY18 document, the EMD developmental test phase will take four years. And an "EMD continuation" that started in FY16 will wrap up five years later at the end of FY20. However, if EMD extends all the way to 2021, as the RFI indicates, the IOC date could slip even further as well. With major milestone schedule slips, other events in the program have been pushed back. A Milestone C decision, which would decide whether the program enters a production and deployment phase, was planned for the end of FY16, according to the FY17 budget request, but is now expected at the end of FY20. × Fear of missing out? Fear no longer. Be the first to hear about breaking news, as it happens. You'll get alerts delivered directly to your inbox each time something noteworthy happens in the Military community. Thanks for signing up. By giving us your email, you are opting in to our Newsletter: Sign up for our Early Bird Brief And an initial operational test and evaluation scheduled to take place over three quarters in FY18, wrapping up at the end of the third quarter, is now going to start in the fourth quarter of FY20 and won’t finish until the second quarter of FY22, essentially doubling the length of the test period and delaying its conclusion by four years. Completely missing from the FY18 request are plans for a second limited-user test said to be in the works. The Army has said the second LUT needs to happen before a Milestone C decision. The service has restructured the program to allow an additional LUT in FY20 "to ensure requirements are met before entering Low Rate Initial Production," O'Boyle said. The Army has taken delivery of two IBCS software builds that demonstrated marked improvement over the software used in the first LUT, he added. This year, Army troops will test the updated software at an event at Fort Bliss, Texas, scheduled to complete in September 2017 with further evaluation at a joint interoperability test schedule for Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, in October 2017. The FY17 document shows a low-rate production test was scheduled in 2017, but the test is missing from the FY18 request. Also missing in the FY18 request are plans for setting up a First Unit Equipped, which was expected in 2017, according to the FY17 request. A First Unit Equipped is the first unit to be equipped with a capability in advance of initial capability. In FY18, the Army plans to spend roughly $546.6 million dollars more than it budgeted from FY17 through FY21 in the development and test phase of the program compared to the FY17 request. And while RDT&E funding received a major increase, the FY18 procurement account shows no money in 2018 or 2019. The Army had originally planned a year ago to spend $287.2 million in FY18 and $372.9 million in FY19 for procurement. The total amount cut from the procurement budget from FY18 through FY21 comes to about $790.536 million. The IBCS program's delays do not impact currently fielded systems, IFPC or the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor program, O'Boyle said. The LTAMDS is looking to replace or upgrade the Patriot system's current radar. The IBCS delay doesn’t just affect the U.S. Army’s future plans for missile defense. Poland has said it wants to buy Patriot systems with IBCS, and the country has indicated it wants those systems soon as Russia continues to pose a threat to the region. Poland wants to finalize a contract by November this year to buy eight Patriot systems, and it wants the first two systems with IBCS by 2019. A waiver is said to have been granted for Poland to procure IBCS at the same time the U.S. Army begins to field it, rather than wait for the U.S. Army to reach a full-rate production capability before selling the system abroad. |
THE MAGAZINE by Dan Ennis When the history of The Episcopal Church in the twenty-first century is written, much attention will be paid to the large-scale effects of “Anglican Realignment.” In that history, the Diocese of South Carolina (for the moment, thanks to legal action, styled “The Episcopal Church in South Carolina”) will be included for illustrative purposes, alongside San Joaquin, Pittsburgh, and Fort Worth, as future church historians consider how Episcopalians responded to schism. Church history is often populated by bishops, deputies and chancellors, not by part-time vicars and retired canons, so supply priests may not merit a mention in some future chronicle of The Episcopal Church. Yet as the Diocese of South Carolina split in 2012, there was a period of instability as congregations fractured down ideological lines. In the rapid reorganization of the diocese that followed, supply priests were indispensable. On September 18, 2012, the House of Bishops Disciplinary Board of signed a “Certificate of Abandonment” against Mark Lawrence, Bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina. On November 17, Lawrence publicly announced that the Diocese of South Carolina had “withdrawn” from The Episcopal Church. Fifty parishes and missions chose to follow Mark Lawrence. Twenty-one parishes and missions remained with The Episcopal Church. Questions of polity came to the fore: Could a diocese leave the national church? Can individual parishes leave a diocese? What happens to those in the minority of a congregation when a majority votes to leave or stay? In South Carolina, some communities were at that time served by a single Episcopal church, and in areas where that church chose to follow Mark Lawrence, many continuing Episcopalians were left without a local place of worship. Thus loyalist Episcopalians formed “worship groups” – small congregations that attempted to create and maintain an Episcopal Church presence in places where one no longer existed. By the time Provisional Bishop Charles vonRosenberg was elected to lead the diocese in January, 2013, many worship groups affiliated with The Episcopal Church had already formed and were conducting services. The rapidity of the formation and development of worship groups was made possible by supply priests. The low-country of South Carolina is an attractive retirement destination, and there were many Episcopal priests in the region. Some supply priests, canonically resident in northeastern and midwestern dioceses, had not sought to exercise priestly office under the authority of Mark Lawrence, but after the schism they “went public” and were licensed by Bishop vonRosenberg. Through social media and world of mouth, news of the developing network of worship groups spread, and supply priests who had expected a quiet retirement pulled vestments out of the closet. If Mark Lawrence, estimating the size of his breakaway diocese, had assumed that continuing Episcopalians would be unable to recreate local congregations, the sudden availability of dozens of qualified Episcopal clergy who could minister to worship groups may not have been part of the calculations. Episcopal worship groups filled the void. South Carolina’s supply priests faced unusual conditions. Services took place in rented or borrowed facilities. From nondenominational sanctuaries to covered porches, rented restaurants to converted classrooms, wedding chapels to synagogues, supply priests ministered to “popup” Episcopal churches all over South Carolina. One worship group, destined to go down in diocesan history as eccentric geniuses, held services on a dock. In such irregular facilities, the priest takes on special significance, setting a spiritual tone in venues that often had secular trappings. Veteran clergy drew upon long and varied experience. A supply priest who had served as a missionary in West Africa was not thrown because the air conditioner in the rented hall was on the blink. A supply priest who had been a chaplain in Vietnam was not troubled that the credence cloths were table runners from Target. A supply priest who had held services in jails during the civil rights era knew how to handle a shortage of prayer books. With high church aesthetics often out of the question, worship was often centered upon simple gestures and uncluttered presentation, and lay participation in liturgy consisted of “all hands on deck.” Worship groups were served and saved by supply priests from all walks of church life. Pulpits were filled by bi-vocational curates, emeritus big-city rectors, former cathedral deans, and retired bishops (with Bishop vonRosenberg often serving as “chief supply priest” during episcopal visits to worship groups). Mere days after Diocese of South Carolina split, priests from across The Episcopal Church “crossed the border” and celebrated the Eucharist. Clergy from Dioceses of Upper South Carolina, East Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia were particularly prominent. The bishops of Province IV dispatched priests in support. With these clerical visitors came the prayers and support from congregations across the nation. Supply priests also reminded South Carolina Episcopalians that the church accommodates various theological opinions and worship styles. The arid confessionalism of the old regime was replaced by a vigorous range of viewpoints, and worship groups, often relying on many different priests over a course of a liturgical season, were inspired and challenged (and occasionally a bit scandalized). Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals, conservative and liberals, reconcilers and radicals, supply priests presented worship groups with a medley of opinions and practices that honored the broad-church Anglican tradition. It wasn’t always smooth. Some supply priests, having returned to duty after years in retirement, were overtaxed by the grind of weekly preaching and weekday pastoral care. On occasion, a supply priest, long out of practice, might stumble through a rite, or forget a prayer. Most worship was a reminder that The Episcopal Church is blessed with a beautiful liturgy, but sometimes that beauty was dimmed when unfamiliar priests led ad hoc congregations, as the rhythm that can develop between a priest and laity who have long worshiped together could not be recreated on the fly. Some congregations, surprised and hurt at having been ejected from prosperous program churches, had unrealistic expectations, and supply priests were asked to reconstitute lost Sunday schools, Bible studies, and fellowship opportunities. Yet even when things were not perfect (that is, every Sunday) the reliance on supply priests did require the laity to take on enhanced responsibility for each other. In worship groups, wardens and committees undertook the secular work of organizational and financial oversight, allowing supply priests to “stand in their own office, and labor in their own calling.” Gone was the Diocese of South Carolina tradition of the rector-CEO. Now a stable, growing diocese, the Episcopal Church in South Carolina has seen many of its supply priests return to their traditional supporting roles. In the four years since the schism, worship groups have become missions, some missions have become self-sufficient parishes, and more and more congregations have called full-time clergy to fill their pulpits. No longer in existential crisis, the Episcopal Church in South Carolina is a “normal” diocese, with the same opportunities and challenges that face the larger church. But with the passing of those improvisational days, we should not forget how the supply priests were there at the moment of crisis to bind spiritual wounds. Despite the 2012 split, Episcopal worship and communal life continued in a tradition unbroken since the eighteenth century. Precious relationships were formed between supply priests who were recalled to their vocations and grateful congregations who had learned the dangers of spiritual complacency. Many hands saved the Episcopal Church in South Carolina, but supply priests – the substitutes, the fill-ins, the break-glass-and-pull-lever clergy – were both a symbol institutional endurance and the foundation of a rebuilt spiritual community. Dan Ennis is the former Senior Warden of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Conway, SC. Additional research for this article was provided by Ginga Wilder of The Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd Summerville, SC. image: photo of the dock where the Episcopal Church in Okatie, SC first worshipped Like ( 0 ) Dislike ( 0 ) |
“They are saying, ‘We don’t have enough priests, we’re closing down parishes,’ ” said David J. O’Brien, who holds an endowed chair in faith and culture at the University of Dayton, a Marianist Catholic college. “It’s a sign that the pastoral needs are sufficiently grave now that priests are speaking up and saying, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t just ignore the pastoral consequences of the things you do and say at the top.’ ” Church experts said it was surprising that 157 priests would sign a statement in support of the American priest, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, because he did much more than speak out: he gave the homily and blessed a woman in an illicit ordination ceremony conducted by the group, Roman Catholic Womenpriests. That group claims to have ordained 120 female priests and five bishops worldwide. The Vatican does not recognize the ordinations and has declared the women automatically excommunicated. Father Bourgeois, a member of the Maryknoll religious order, received a letter from the Vatican in 2008 warning that he would be excommunicated if he did not recant. He sent the Vatican a long letter saying that he was only following his conscience. The Vatican never wrote back, he said. The Maryknolls, however, did not dismiss him, and he continued presenting himself as a priest. He is a rather well-known one, at that. Father Bourgeois, now 72, was an American missionary in El Salvador during the death squad era and has made it his ministry ever since to lead antiwar protests outside the United States Army School of the Americas in Georgia. But now, under pressure from the Vatican, the Maryknolls have sent the first of two required “canonical warnings” that they will dismiss him if he does not recant. Father Bourgeois responded that if he recanted to save his priesthood or his pension, he would be lying. “I see this very clearly as an issue of sexism, and like racism, it’s a sin,” he said in an interview this week from his home in Georgia. “It cannot be justified, no matter how hard we priests and church leaders, beginning with the pope, might try to justify the exclusion of women as equals. It is not the way of God. It is the way of men.” Photo In a 1994 declaration seen as intended to end the debate, Pope John Paul II issued an apostolic letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, saying that the church “has no authority whatsoever” to ordain women. Among the reasons the church gives is that the apostles of Jesus Christ were all men, and that that has been the church’s practice all along. Christopher Ruddy, associate professor of systematic theology at the Catholic University of America, said of the recent statements from the priests, “I don’t think anything will come of it. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “Some say the church’s teaching on the nonordination of women is an infallible teaching, some say it’s not defined as such. But it’s clear that an extraordinarily high level of teaching authority has been invoked on that,” said Professor Ruddy, the author of “Tested in Every Way: The Catholic Priesthood in Today’s Church” (Herder & Herder, 2006). Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. The statement from the 157 American priests says only that they support Father Bourgeois’s “right to speak his conscience” — cautious wording that probably enabled more to sign. The effort was organized by Call to Action, a Chicago-based group that has long advocated change in the church. It is intended to put pressure on the Maryknolls not to go through with dismissing Father Bourgeois. “Maryknoll is caught in the middle,” said Michael Virgintino, director of communications for the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, based in New York. “It is Maryknoll that is trying to keep Father Roy engaged, and very much wishes that there could be some conciliation between Roy and the church.” Austria is home to many Catholic priests and laypeople seeking changes in the church. And yet the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, said of the recent priests’ statement there, “The open call to disobedience shocked me.” Besides calling for ordination for women and married men, the Austrian priests called for having women preach at Mass, and giving Communion to divorced Catholics who have remarried without an annulment. Cardinal Schönborn responded that if the priests had such extreme conflicts with the church, they should not continue to serve. His spokesman said the cardinal would meet with the group’s leaders in August or September. In Australia, the church was shaken in May when Pope Benedict XVI removed Bishop William Morris from the Diocese of Toowoomba, where he had served since 1992. The pope wrote the bishop that the teaching barring women’s ordination was “infallible.” The Vatican had sent Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver (named this week to be the new archbishop for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia) to investigate Bishop Morris. The National Council of Priests of Australia, which says it represents 40 percent of priests there, denounced the dismissal, saying that those who influenced the decision “have limited pastoral experience.” The Rev. Ian McGinnity, chairman of the priests council in Australia, said in an e-mail, “Bishop Morris was endeavouring to face honestly significant problems in his rural diocese, particularly with the shortage of priests, which meant that some communities were deprived of the Eucharist on a regular basis.” |
Albert Einstein changed the world forever 100 years ago this month by publishing his theory of general relativity. Relativity is now a centerpiece of modern physics, the reason GPS satellites and mobile internet exist, and why Einstein is easily the most famous scientist in history. But a legendary status doesn't mean you're infallible. Einstein made plenty of errors and oversights, and sometimes, he was flat out wrong. Tech Insider has compiled five of Einstein's biggest mistakes. Her they are: 1. A notable error shows up in Einstein's most famous work: Relativity. His theory of relativity describes gravity, space, and time in math equations — which no one had successfully done before. But in order to get the math right, Einstein had to create a new constant number (an unchanging value, like 'pi' or 'e') and stick it inside his general relativity equations to balance them. He called it the "cosmological constant," and it helped the equations account for the unchanging nature of the universe. But not long after Einstein published his equations, physicists discovered that the universe wasn't constant, but actually expanding all around us at a blistering speed. Oops. So Einstein abandoned the cosmological constant. But that was a huge mistake. The equations still needed the cosmological constant. Scientists now see the cosmological constant as representative of a mysterious force called dark energy, which is causing the universe to expand at a faster and faster clip. 2. Einstein's equations also describe how gravity can bend light. Fields of gravity around objects warp light waves as they pass through, like a huge cluster of galaxies. The bigger the object, the more it will bend light rays around it. The effect is called gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing is the best way to measure the mass of huge, distant objects. It also magnifies images of really distant objects so that astronomers can observe them from Earth. Astronomers also use gravitational lensing to map dark matter — an invisible substance that makes up about 85% of the universe's mass. They create the maps by observing how much dark matter bends visible light. But Einstein thought gravitational lensing would be too small to see. He dismissed the idea as mostly useless, and he didn't bother publishing his findings until a colleague urged him. It was a serious misjudgment on Einstein's part to dismiss the idea, at least initially, considering how important the technique is today. 3. Einstein's theory of relativity predicted the presence of ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. Einstein had already demonstrated that matter can curve space, so it only follows that moving matter around in space should create a wave — the same way dropping a rock in a lake creates ripples. But ripples in spacetime seemed a little too far-fetched for Einstein. What's more, when he tried to write a mathematical formula to describe how gravity waves work, he couldn't do it. So Einstein rejected gravitational waves (even though his own theory predicted they exist!). He almost published a paper containing that huge error. Luckily another scientist spotted his mistake before the paper went to press. Einstein was able to fix the gravitational waves formula and publish the corrected version suggesting that they do exist. But even though the math suggests gravitational waves are real, we still haven't directly observed them. A huge manhunt is underway for the elusive waves. There are several gravity wave detectors in the US and abroad, and teams of physicists are hot on the trail. 4. Einstein ran into a similar problem with black holes: His theories predicted their existence, but he couldn't make sense of them. Unlike gravitational waves, however, he never changed his mind. We now have plenty of evidence that black holes not only exist, but some grow to millions of times the sun's mass, including one at the center of the Milky Way. 5. Einstein's later ideas were critical in the development of quantum mechanics — a branch of physics that studies the bizarre properties of tiny subatomic particles. In fact, the research that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1921 (the photoelectric effect) was hugely instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. But Einstein had major doubts about quantum mechanics. And to his credit, a lot of elements of the theory are downright strange. Quantum mechanic's bizarre properties suggest particles can be in two states at the same time, and can send information to one another faster than the speed of light. Even the physicists who study quantum mechanics are the first to tell you that they don't fully understand it. But we're getting closer and closer to proving that quantum mechanics is real. So Einstein's failure to accept the theory may become his biggest blunder yet. Despite all these mistakes, Einstein is still regarded as one of the most influential scientists of all time. After all, you can't revolutionize a field without making a few goofs along the way. |
Today, this message showed up in my inbox: Hi Sam – I wanted to reach out personally and thank you for what you’re doing. My wife has struggled with my evolution of beliefs over the past year. So, I’ve been reluctant to bring up church stuff with her. Yesterday, out of the blue, she said to me, “Have you heard about that petition?” That kick-started a conversation during which she openly and passionately agreed with your message and proclaimed how she won’t allow our daughters to be questioned alone with a Bishop and not at all on worthiness and sexuality. My oldest daughter is a few months away from youth interviews and I had been worried about how to handle the desire to protect my children, while also not harming the very fragile relationship I have with my wife in relation to the church. It couldn’t have gone better. She’s considering sharing the petition on her facebook timeline. Her mama bear has come out. Thank you. Sincerely. The petition is now at 6,010 signatures. However…..this is NOT the most important statistic. The real significance is what’s happening in homes and families. Several members have now resolved to protect their children from being taken behind closed doors, all alone, with an untrained older man. And then probed about masturbation and other sexually oriented matters. Stand Up to Protect Our Vulnerable Children Help me and 6,000 other thundering voices to eradicate this dangerous and damaging practice. Sign the Petition. Share the Petition. Additional Resources |
Chaos in the intersection of Western and 108th in #southla after vigil for #Carnellsnelljr.@ABC7 pic.twitter.com/VHTzMLKYnq — Chelsea Edwards (@abc7chelsea) October 3, 2016 Protests erupted at a South Los Angeles intersection Sunday night not far from where a teenager died in an officer-involved shooting after police say he fled from a suspected stolen vehicle.Shortly before 10 p.m., authorities issued a citywide tactical alert and asked protesters standing at the intersection of Western Avenue and 108th Street to disperse or they would be arrested. As the evening went on, at least four people were taken into custody. The alert was called off around midnight.Around 8 p.m., at least two dozen people gathered together at the intersection of Western Avenue and 108th Street, prompting road closures and a heavier police presence.Some of the protesters were seen dancing on top of cars, while others drove cars into the middle of the intersection and did multiple donuts before speeding away.The protests come a day after 18-year-old Carnell Snell Jr was killed by police behind a home in the 1700 block of 107th Street moments after he fled from a suspected stolen vehicle that was involved in a car chase.Police officers also moved in to the front of the residence where people held a vigil for Snell around 5 p.m . Officers said the vigil was peaceful and "outside agitators" came to the area and were disruptive.Eyewitness News got a look at the crime scene, where Snell died. At least six shots riddled the side of the home and a seventh went through a window. A witness said Snell died on steps in the backyard.Police said Saturday they found a handgun at the scene, but did not release further details on the shooting.Activists are asking for a transparent and quick investigation, and they want the officers who fired their weapons to be named.Meantime, the president of L.A.'s Urban Policy Roundtable has met with Snell's family and may call for a Justice Department civil rights probe into the shooting. |
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Feb. 14, 2016, 9:42 PM GMT / Updated Feb. 15, 2016, 3:05 AM GMT By Alex Johnson A "credible explosive device" was found on a rental car at the Albuquerque, New Mexico, airport Sunday, delaying travelers from picking up cars while authorities disarmed it, authorities said. Police wouldn't describe the nature of the device, which was found on a car at the Avis Car Rental center in the airport's combined rental facility about 8:30 a.m. (10:30 a.m. ET). The rental car center isn't attached to the main terminal, and no flights were affected, said Daniel Jiron, a spokesman for Albuquerque International Sunport. But travelers lined up in long queues for hours, unable to reach their rented cars, as a police bomb squad dealt with the device. Police said the device was attached to a car that was rented elsewhere and dropped off at the Albuquerque airport, where suspicious staff processing returned cars spotted and reported it. Police didn't identify where the vehicle was originally rented. Judie Miranda, who went to the airport Sunday morning to pick up a friend only to be greeted by police and roadblocks, told NBC station KOB that she spent hours comforting rental car workers who were told to stay at their posts. Travelers lined up waiting for their cars as an explosive device shut the rental car facility Sunday at Albuquerque, New Mexico, International Sunport. Albuquerque Police Department "I can see the fear that they were having," Miranda said. "Here you get a bomb threat, and they keep them in there. It's sad America has to have this fear." The FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are investigating, police said. |
One day after the treasury (taxpayers) injected $6 billion into the failing auto industry GM, GMAC ease lending rules to entice car buyers. General Motors Corp and its GMAC funding affiliate launched programs on Tuesday to lure U.S. car and truck buyers back into showrooms as the largest U.S. automaker tries to revive its sagging fortunes. GM began offering zero-percent financing on some models, and GMAC resumed lending to a wider range of potential customers, after the government said it will inject billions of dollars to help ensure that both survive. Through January 5, GM will offer zero percent to 4.9 percent financing on loans of up to five years on some 2008 model-year vehicles, and 3.9 to 5.9 percent on some 2009 vehicles. Many of the vehicles also carry cash discounts of $500 to $4,250. GMAC, meanwhile, will extend loans to retail buyers with credit scores, known as FICO, of 621 or higher. In October, it had restricted loans to borrowers with scores of 700 or higher. Many analysts consider borrowers with credit scores of 620 or lower to be "subprime." The median U.S. credit score is 723, according to Fair Isaac Corp's myFICO unit. "The bottom line is much better access to funding," said Mark LaNeve, GM's vice president for North American sales, on a conference call with reporters. He said GMAC may now be able to fund 75 to 80 percent of new vehicle purchases, up from 40 percent since October. Elephant In the Room Ordinarily, when a business/industry fails from poor management and/or (in the case of the banks) overleveraging, what happens? You know what happens intuitively, even if you've never opened an economics textbook. It is very simple. Entrepreneurs, seeing the mistakes made by those business/industry operators, rush in to start competing businesses to 1) take advantage of the weakened competition, and 2) operate the business better than the competition having the benefit of seeing their mistakes. Under normal circumstances, this process happens in every industry. It is the normal cycle of capitalism. But look at what is happening now. Are there any entrepreneurs setting out to start automotive manufacturing businesses? What about entrepreneurs setting out to charter new banks? You already know the answer to that. The question, then, is why? First, and most important, it is because the business models within those industries have failed. Second, because the government (taxpayer) has now stepped in to prop up those businesses with their failed business models, it is no longer economically viable for an entrepreneur to try and compete with the government even if the entrepreneur has a better business model. Third, even if it were economically viable, the government is installing roadblocks via the FDIC and other agencies to purposefully make it difficult for entrepreneurs to compete against the failed businesses in those two industries. Make no mistake, the inevitable outcome will be failure. What is taking place is the extension of that failure to a decade or more. That is what the government is purchasing with the bailout monies; an extension, life support, even though death is inevitable. Why? Why would government do this? Because those who are demanding the monies and the extensions have more political clout than you do. Addendum: “This is a good start by the federal government,” said Thomas Atteberry, who helps manage $3.5 billion in fixed-income assets at First Pacific Advisors in Los Angeles. Still unknown, he said, is whether the government cash will “make it palatable for new investors to come in.” I can understand your cynical comment asking how many GMAC bonds does First Pacific Advisors own. As a partner at the firm, Co Portfolio Manager of the FPA New Income Fund, and Portfolio Manager for the firm's fixed income accounts we do not own any GMAC or GM bonds nor have we owned them in the past. As an aside the reporter for Bloomberg asked me the same question. I assume because my answer is none he felt no need to mention that fact in his article. Our firm is not a proponent of government bail outs of private industry which in today's society is a minority view. If the government decides to bail out an industry the least it can do is set the situation up where it could attract private capital and thus enable the government to exit the transaction. In the case of GMAC I doubt that will happen. In the case of AIG the government at least asked the CEO to leave. In this case there is no management change request or new board. In both cases the management and board of GMAC ran the company into the ground. I would submit that the same is true for GM. I am surprised to see little mentioned about a strong need to replace management. Under new management maybe new private capital could be attracted to the company. With the same old management in place that created the problem why would a new investor put a dime into either company. Finally we should be asking the question why was Cerberus allowed to continue to have an equity stake. At a minimum the taxpayer or a new equity owner should be put in place and the Cerberus position reduced to "0". |
Those of us who admit that we were not there and do not know what happened when Michael Brown was shot by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, seem to be in the minority. We all know what has happened since then – and it has been a complete disgrace by politicians, the media and mobs of rioters and looters. Despite all the people who act as if they know exactly what happened, nevertheless when the full facts come out, that can change everything. This is why we have courts of law, instead of relying on the media or mobs. But politics is undermining law. On the eve of a grand jury being convened to go through the facts and decide whether there should be a prosecution of the policeman in this case, Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri has gone on television to say that there should be a “vigorous prosecution.” There was a time when elected officials avoided commenting on pending legal processes, so as not to bias those processes. But Gov. Nixon apparently has no fear of poisoning the jury pool. The only alternative explanation is that this is exactly what he intends to do. It is a disgrace either way. Race is the wild card in all this. The idea that you can tell who is innocent and who is guilty by the color of their skin is a notion that was tried out for generations, back in the days of the Jim Crow South. I thought we had finally rejected that kind of legalized lynch law. But apparently it has only been put under new management. Television people who show the home of the policeman involved, and give his name and address – knowing that he has already received death threats – are truly setting a new low. They seem to be trying to make themselves judge, jury and executioner. Then there are the inevitable bullet counters asking, “Why did he shoot him six times?” This is the kind of thing people say when they are satisfied with talking points, and see no need to stop and think seriously about a life and death question. If you are not going to be serious about life and death, when will you be serious? By what principle should someone decide how many shots should be fired? The bullet counters seldom, if ever, ask that question, much less try to answer it. Since the only justifiable reason for shooting in the first place is self-protection, when should you stop shooting? Obviously when there is no more danger. But there is no magic number of shots that will tell you when you are out of danger. Even if all your shots hit, that doesn’t mean anything if the other guy keeps coming and is still a danger. You can be killed by a wounded man. Different witnesses give conflicting accounts of exactly what happened in the shooting of Michael Brown. That is one of the reasons why grand juries collect facts. But, if Michael Brown – a 6 foot 4 inch, 300 pound man – was still charging at the policeman, as some allege, there is no mystery why the cop kept shooting. But, if Michael Brown was surrendering, as others allege, then there was no reason to fire even one shot. But the number of shots tells us nothing. None of this is rocket science. Why bullet counters cannot be bothered to stop and think is a continuing mystery. Among the other unthinking phrases repeated endlessly is “he shot an unarmed man.” When does anyone know that someone is unarmed? Unless you frisk him, you don’t know – until, of course, after you have shot him. The only time I ever pointed a firearm at a human being, I had no idea whether he was armed or unarmed. To this day I don’t know whether he was armed or unarmed. Fortunately for both of us, he froze in his tracks. Was I supposed to wait until I made sure he had a gun before I used a gun? Is this some kind of sporting contest? Some critics object when someone with a gun shoots someone who only has a knife. Do those critics know that you are just as dead when you are killed with a knife as you are when you are killed by a gun? If we can’t be bothered to stop and think, instead of repeating pat phrases, don’t expect to live under the rule of law. Do you prefer the rule of the media and/or the mob? |
There’s yet another misapprehension about language in the present ongoing discussion about sexism and harassment in our respective communities lately. I say yet another because they seem to comprise vast majority of the most jarring moments in these conversations — when people don’t understand one word or another, and fight for days about whether this parsing or another is more correct. The entirety of the “witch-hunt” trolling that the pro-harassment-policies folks have endured stems from some misapprehension that the informal “watch out for this guy” network that Jen brought up in the original incident meant that there was actually a written list and that we were planning on trying to make conventions blackball these folks based on “rumors and innuendo”. The “Taliban” accusations with regard to “dress codes” could be attributable to a perfectly honest misunderstanding about whether or not the proposed sample policy from the Geek Feminism wiki meant by the so-called “no booth babes” clauses. Of course, one would have to be quite charitable to presume the specific people initiating that meme had an honest misunderstanding, since they’ve done so much for so long to fight against the idea of feminism intersecting the skeptical or atheist movements. But one could attribute the meme’s spread to legitimate misunderstandings from people who weren’t skeptical enough to check the source materials and took the words of those authoritative voices. And then there’s “safe spaces”. Even DJ Grothe got that one wrong. Which, frankly, surprises the living hell out of me. In USA Today, Rebecca Watson was interviewed with regard to the problem she’s somehow catalyzed by the horrific act of advising men not to act inadvertently predatorily if they don’t want to creep their flirting targets out. She said this about the community after the backlash and rape and murder threats ensued: “I thought it was a safe space,” Watson said of the freethought community. “The biggest lesson I have learned over the years is that it is not a safe space and we have a lot of growing to do. The good news is there are a lot of people within the community who are interested in making it better and getting rid of our prejudices.” When DJ later hypothesized that the reason TAM’s female attendance was down owed largely to women and their “irresponsible messaging” giving people the impression that TAM was an unsafe space — as in, women attending TAM would likely get harassed, molested, raped or killed. But nobody’s ever said that. DJ further overstated his case by saying that nobody’s ever reported any harassment at any of the TAMs that have taken place since he’s been president. This was, of course, demonstrably wrong — there were a small number of reported incidents that he’s since forgotten. But does anyone think, like the outright trolls and those who think harassment policies are just a bete noir of the radical feminist element who’ve infested their good-old-boys’ atheism and skepticism do, that anyone thinks this harassment is atypical, that what you encounter at TAM is any WORSE than the background levels of harassment in general society? I strongly doubt that. I suspect that at absolute worst, people think that TAM is exactly as likely as any other place in general society to end up on the receiving end of harassment. But that should be damning in and of itself, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t we, the skeptics, the people who examine received dogmas and who question them in an effort to keep people from harming themselves with horrible memetics that propagate from liars and charlatans, be above engaging in activities like harassment that directly harm people? Shouldn’t our community be a safe space for women as well as men, and shouldn’t the memes that lead to excluding them from our endeavours be questioned just as thoroughly as God or Bigfoot? And yet, trolls still think that the distinction between a safe space, an unsafe space, and a “not safe” space, is sophistry. WilloNyx attempted to explain the difference in a post at her blog: See, the general population is not what I call a “safe space for women.” What do I mean by that? At work, if I am sexually harassed by a coworker, I don’t feel confident that it will be dealt with when I report it. I have watched sexual harassment being reported. It wasn’t taken seriously. Another example: If I am raped, If I am sexually assaulted, I am fairly confident that reporting it will result in slut shaming and victim blaming. I am fairly confident that my entire past sexual history will be cause for my rapist or assaulter to go unpunished, that it will be assumed I was asking for it. To me for the general population to become “safe for women” it needs to take extra precautions to make sure that the current attitudes of a culture (you know that patriarchy) don’t prohibit women from seeking legal or even emotional recourse for those if’s that may come up. Creating a safe space for women in the general population may be having something like specially trained police to deal with victims of sexual abuse. It may be that a workplace has sexual harassment training periodically. It may even be a domestic violence shelter that has gone so far in making a safe space for women that it creates a “not safe space” or “unsafe space” for men genderfluid or transgender people. Making the general population “safe for women” overall won’t happen until the culture changes. No matter how many rules we create, we also need to trust those rules will be enforced. So instead we carve out lots of little niches and claim some places as “safe for women” some places as “not safe for women” and some places as “unsafe for women.” Gays often have to build safe spaces so they have places of refuge — at schools most prevalently, but often in other communities — and in fact, it seems the whole definition of “safe space” originates with the LGBTQ fights. Which is why I’m so gobsmacked that DJ Grothe, who claims his homosexuality sensitizes him to issues of sexism and homosexism, might mistake “not a safe space” with “an unsafe space”. We don’t have a problem with this community being a “not safe for women” space. Well, not to any extraordinary extent — the outright misogyny you’ll get online if you’re a girl in the gamer communities is probably significantly higher. If anything, our communities are only about as not-safe as all communities weighed and averaged, online or off. What we DO have in this community, however, is a problem with bullies. Misogynists who don’t like women trying to take part in our conversations. Trolls who attack women — and generally mostly women because they’re deemed easy targets — just to get a rise out of them. People who just want all these women to shut up about all the times they’re told they’re going to be raped or attacked. And the well-intentioned who don’t have any clue what splash damage is, and who just want everyone to shut up so they can go back to “more important” issues. Sometimes they say “you should stand up to the bullies, but also take all these ridiculous precautions that no reasonable person should ever have to take just to stay safe”. Sometimes they outright tell you they’re going to hurt you themselves. Sometimes they try to call you the bully for talking about people bullying you. The bar for bullying anonymously is so low that it happens all the time, every day and at huge volumes and extraordinarily low cost, and it does despite some folks’ best efforts wear on you over time. And sometimes the bullies win. (Seriously, I was just writing this part when Ophelia made this news public. Pardon any tone shift as a result.) The bullies sometimes win when they make a marginalized person stop fighting and give up on any single fight because they’ve exhausted their personal reserves. They sometimes win by outlasting their victims. If the infrastructures that are supposed to make up the foundation of our community shrug their shoulders, rather than supporting these people when they need it, then the bullies win and those infrastructures are complicit. We have a problem in this community. It is not a safe space for women, or frankly, for anyone in any position of underprivilege. We know it is a problem because many of us skeptics and atheists recognize that there’s a serious need for our movements to be composed of more than just old rich white libertarian men in order to bring ideas into a movement that is otherwise handling the same few ideas over and over again, while leaving others wholly unexamined. And it’s a fixable problem, but it takes changing the culture; waking people up to the fact that diversity is its own good. And in order to get minority voices into the movement to give us more universal perspective about our atheistic or skeptical movements, we first need to stop people from hurling insults and threats at them, at minimum. That means we need to make it a safe space — as in, better than the background radiation they encounter in everyday life. If someone can get the exact same amount of opprobrium for their sex or gender or trans status or race by running around doing things that take less work and less directed effort and advocacy, they will. The ones that are left are naturally selected to be feisty… to have enough left over in their wells to tackle the problems of bullying and harassment head-on even while they’re fighting the fights that brought us together in the first place. So it’s up to these feisty ones to carve out a space and make it safe by defending it. But they can’t do it individually, because the trolls can issue their threats and bluster at such a low cost and they are such a rotating door of minor henchmen that every message becomes a war of attrition — including the messages that involve whether “people like you” are even allowed here. You can’t just declare a space safe by fiat. You have to build such a space. Doing this makes some spaces unsafe for certain types of people — usually the people who’d rather this other underprivileged group just leave. And in a territory so apparently thoroughly entrenched in its ways, with such pervasive memetics that fight back against these efforts to improve diversity, it’s an uphill struggle. Every piece of territory taken must be fought over and over and over or it will be lost. But if you love the ideas around which your community is built, even if the fight is exactly the same as one you’d have in any other level of society, it’s a fight worth having. If you’re passionate about skepticism, if you’re passionate about examining otherwise unquestioned dogmas, you’ll recognize the number of dogmas it takes having before you’re willing to bully whole groups of people out of the movement just for being different. And you’ll have no problem bullying those bullies right out. Just like with Christians who demand the right to bully gays or else they cry that you’re discriminating against them. This fight is EXACTLY IDENTICAL to that one. Exactly. Sorry this is probably unpolished. I’m posting in a bit of a moment of anger. Like this: Like Loading... |
One alternative would be an approach in which the person in charge of the autonomous vehicle has no duty (and possibly no way) of interfering, but still be considered morally responsible for possible accidents. The rationale behind this would be that he took the risk of using the vehicle, knowing and accepting that it might cause accidents. Using a car poses a risk—for the person himself and for others. The more we use cars (especially where it is not necessary), the more we put others at risk—even if we do our best to drive safely. It is a moral issue much overlooked by philosophers, a fact that Husak wonders about in his 2004 article on the subject. The switch from human-driven cars to autonomous ones is not likely to change that. Even if the switch reduces the likelihood of accidents, the number of people injured and killed by cars each year will probably stay significant. It does therefore not appear implausible to consider the user at least partly responsible for accidents which may be caused by his vehicle. This responsibility can take at least two different forms. In one (Scenario A), the person in question is only held responsible for taking the risk of using a car. It is a risk taken daily by millions of people all over the country. And at least in the case of autonomous vehicles, the risk taken by every single one of them will be highly comparable. If the user were only to be responsible for taking the risk of using the vehicle, he would therefore share this responsibility with every other person in the country who does the same. From this perspective, they did not do something wrong in the sense of it being blameworthy but they did participate in a practice which carries risks and costs for others and it therefore is their responsibility to shoulder that burden. This would speak in favour of a system in which the cost of any accident caused by a (well-maintained, up to date, non-tampered-with etc.) autonomous vehicle is shared by all the owners/users of such vehicles. A scheme like that might work like a tax or a mandatory insurance, possibly partly based on the number of miles driven per year. Alternatively, we might focus the blame for accidents on the person using the vehicle at the time (Scenario B). He took the risk of using the car and he would be held personally responsible for any accidents that are caused by it. Of course, the person whose autonomous vehicle crashes did not do anything different from any other user of autonomous cars; he was simply unlucky. He also did better than people using “normal” cars – at least if we assume autonomous cars to be the safer alternative. However, such an approach would still in a way reflect our current practise of ascribing responsibility for accidents. Drivers who cause an accident by not paying attention for a moment or driving a bit too fast certainly made a mistake. But it is a mistake most of us have made at some point. Most if not all of us had moments in which we failed to pay proper attention to the road while driving, or moments in which we found ourselves driving too fast. The fact that in some cases such behaviour has horrible effects turns something which we treat as a small mistake into something which we treat as a major moral failing. The logic behind this could, as we will see, be also applied to the case of the user of an autonomous vehicle. To hold the driver responsible not only for making his “small mistake”, but also for the accident itself, we have to assume his bad luck to be morally relevant. It is a common assumption held among others by Thomas Nagel (1982). The arguments in favour of genuine moral luck have the following simple structure: First, an example is given in which the moral assessment is uncontroversial but partly dependent on chance. (someone drives too fast and runs into a child). Since the concrete results and consequences of what is done are beyond the control of the actor, it seems that the moral assessment of what he does is dependent on something beyond his control too. It is a matter of chance. One such standard example is the following situation: A person drives slowly and responsibly, keeping to the traffic rules, he is not drunk, he is fully concentrated, but nevertheless a horrible accident takes place because a child he could not have seen in advance runs out into the street from behind a group of parked cars. It is impossible for him to stop before his car hits the child. The child dies. Nagel interprets this situation as follows. “The driver, if he is entirely without fault, will feel terrible about his role in the event, but will not have to reproach himself. Therefore this example of agent-regret is not yet a case of moral bad luck.” (Nagel 1982) Most ethicists agree on that point. According to Nagel, chance only becomes morally relevant if the driver has done something wrong to begin with. So let us modify the situation by introducing only one additional element: he drove carelessly, for example, too quickly given the situation. The child runs into the street, he cannot stop the car. The child dies. He feels as miserable as he would have felt miserable in the first case, but now he is aware of the fact that if only he had driven carefully instead of carelessly, the child would probably still be alive. To make this point a bit more precise: let us assume that if he had driven 10 mph more slowly he could have stopped before the car hit the child, and given the situation there, careful driving in general would require one to drive 10 mph less. Nagel’s position is that in such a case it makes a moral difference whether he hit the child or not. Careless driving gives reason to blame oneself slightly, but if careless driving results in the death of a child, it gives reason to blame oneself greatly. Since the driver has no control over whether his careless driving results in an accident or not, this seems to be an example of genuine moral luck, i.e., an example for the assumption that luck or chance is morally relevant. This position is based on the assumption that it is possible to draw a clear line between the blameless driver and the (at least partly) guilty one. However, to uphold the rules, to drive carefully and considerately only limits the risk for others. The risk of others being harmed will still not be reduced to null. Furthermore, as Husak (2004) points out, our callous attitude towards the use of cars (especially when it is not necessary), which costs tens of thousands of lives each year, might also be morally questionable. So we might still consider his behaviour blameworthy, at least to a small degree. For this very same reason we might blame a person using a sophisticated autonomous vehicle if it causes an accident-at least partly. He did decide to use a car, fully aware that he might hit another person, a child. This means no driver could ever be “absolutely without fault” if his vehicle runs into another human being. It was a risk he knew about, a risk he took. Some sort of liability can always be morally justified when using dangerous vehicles like cars that have a chance of injuring others. Usually this might not be a major problem, but it is one for the Nagelian notions of moral luck, since according to him, bad luck is only morally irrelevant if the driver is “absolutely without fault”—which he never is. We might conclude that any use of cars (both autonomous and human-driven) should be subject to moral luck. However, such a position seems ludicrous and even most proponents of moral luck (including Nagel) would not except it. The underlying problem lies at the heart of the concept of moral luck: there is not just good and bad, right or wrong. Some actions seem to be perfectly fine under a moral perspective. Other actions seem to some to be slightly deviant, though others consider them acceptable. Some comply with juridical laws, but seem doubtful, at least from a moral perspective. Yet others are in conflict with legal rules and at the same time seem to be morally acceptable or even obligatory. There is a continuum between absolutely right and outrageously wrong. To assert that at one end of the spectrum chance has no moral relevance whatsoever, and that if one deviates even the slightest degree from that point, chance then gains a tremendous moral relevance, is in itself inadequate and leads to absurd conclusions. All things considered, scenario (B) does not appear a plausible position. In the end, it is more an example of what is wrong with the concept of moral luck9 and our current practise of ascribing blame in case of accidents, than a credible alternative for the attribution of responsibility in case of accidents of autonomous cars. |
On the afternoon of Oct. 15, Heather Carpenter walked into a Citibank branch in Greenwich Village and closed her account as a form of protest against bank fees. The closing was part of a campaign promoted by Occupy Wall Street, and as Ms. Carpenter left police officers were arriving at the branch, where about 20 protesters had gathered inside to air grievances against Citibank. A moment later, as she stood outside the bank at 555 LaGuardia Place with her fiancé, Julio Jose Jiminez-Artunduaga, police officers dragged her back inside, videotape footage shows, where she was arrested. Mr. Jimenez-Artunduaga was dragged into the bank and arrested also, photographs and video show. They were both charged with resisting arrest and trespassing, said their lawyer, Ronald L. Kuby. Mr. Kuby said that the Manhattan District attorney’s office had announced its intention to dismiss the charges against them. But Ms. Carpenter and her fiancé are fighting back. On Monday, they filed suit against the city; the chief of the department for the New York Police Department, Joseph J. Esposito; and four unnamed officers. The suit, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, asserts that the police falsely arrested Ms. Carpenter and Mr. Jimenez-Artunduaga and used excessive force against them in violation of their rights under the Fourth and 14th Amendments. “The conduct of the defendant officers in restraining, arresting and imprisoning plaintiffs was totally without probable cause and was done maliciously, falsely and in bad faith,” the suit states, adding: “It was the defendants who dragged them into the bank — the premises upon which they had allegedly trespassed — to arrest them.” The officers named in the suit, referred to as “police officers John Doe 1-4,” participated in the arrests of Ms. Carpenter and Mr. Jimenez-Artunduaga, Mr. Kuby said. Also named is Chief Esposito, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the Police Department, who was present during the arrests and who, the suit said, “failed to remedy the wrongs committed by the police officers.” The head spokesman for the Police Department, Paul J. Browne, said that Ms. Carpenter and Mr. Jimenez-Artunduaga had falsely claimed not to be involved in the protest. “Both individuals were observed early on disrupting business inside the bank, and then slipping outside as arrests were underway, claiming falsely they were not engaged in the disruption,” he wrote in an e-mail. “While still inside the bank, they were told to leave by bank personnel and did not. In fact, the male can be seen on a separate Youtube video videotaping, and at one point going behind the bank’s customer service desk to do so.” The city’s Law Department said it would review Ms. Carpenter’s suit after it was served with the complaint. Both of the plaintiffs were held for about 30 hours, the complaint by Mr. Kuby said. Ms. Carpenter’s wrists were injured by tight handcuffs and Mr. Jimenez-Artunduaga suffered a lacerated finger said the complaint, which included several photographs and videos. One video (see above) shows protesters milling inside the bank lobby apparently after being prevented from leaving. As protesters outside watched, the video shows, a man in a dark sweatshirt approached Ms. Carpenter and told her “You were inside.” Ms. Carpenter responded “I am a customer” and held up a piece of paper. Then, the man grabbed her and, assisted by several uniformed police officers, forced her back into the bank lobby. Another video (see above) shows Chief Esposito entering he bank lobby, where the protesters had been held by plainclothed men and announcing that those in the bank were under arrest. A moment later, as several officers forced Mr. Jimenez-Artunduaga into the bank, one protester said “They’re dragging them in.” “Don’t get involved in it,” Chief Esposito replied. “You’re a different group.” |
Let’s start with the basic question that many have asked: why regulate this industry at all? Why not just let the free market take control? The intensity of the debate about regulations for taxis, flat-rate for-hire vehicles and app-based services like UberX and Lyft has been rivalled only by its complexity. With a meeting this morning on this issue, and a final vote coming soon, I wanted to share my position in more detail. Through regulation, the taxi industry provides transportation options to users who may not be well served by the free market. This population includes those in wheelchairs, individuals without smartphones or credit cards, or fixed-income folks who want to take a short trip, like a quick trip to the neighborhood grocery store. It makes sense to provide mobility options for these groups—many of whom are from traditionally marginalized populations—through the city government’s regulatory authority. And, in order to service these passengers, the City has an obligation to ensure that the taxi industry is economically viable. One of the ways we ensure a quality level of service to all taxi customers is to vigorously protect the taxis’ right to the “walk-up” market, which includes street hails and taxi stands. The walk-up market accounts for approximately two-thirds of taxi revenues. While taxis may face competition in the dispatch market from app-based Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), such as Uber, I believe they will be able to weather this competition because their financial foundation is in the protected walk-up market. In fact, local taxi industry gross revenue has increased the past couple years despite the burgeoning TNC presence. I’m also confident taxis can use their entrepreneurial spirit to adapt to the latest technologies and further protect their financial base. We’ve learned from history that it makes sense to regulate and cap supply in the “walk-up” market. At the same time, we know we face a supply problem in the dispatch market as there are data and anecdotes about long waits for taxis, or taxis that never arrive. The walk-up market needs caps on supply, the dispatch market needs more supply. This distinction makes a strong case for regulating the two differently. Moreover, the TNCs have quickly changed what’s possible in the dispatch market and have done so with much higher customer satisfaction rates, according to a City-sponsored survey. Make no mistake, the TNCs have done so to-date by ignoring and violating City laws. This sets a dangerous precedent and is a lesson for the executive branch of City government to address these issues as soon as they emerge. The story reported in the Seattle Times about one group being discouraged to use an app simply because they asked permission—when subsequently others are left to operate at will—is disturbing. That being said, the question before the Council today is what to do now. What is the appropriate policy approach for the City as regulators of this industry? Owners and drivers of myriad backgrounds now depend on income from their taxis, their flat-rate for-hire vehicles, their TNC vehicles or some combination of the three. Given the market dynamics discussed above, I favor removing limits on vehicles and drivers in the dispatch market for the two-year pilot program being proposed. If the majority of my colleagues favor a cap, I could support Councilmember Clark’s amendment to raise the current limit of 300 to 600 private vehicles available for TNCs. This does not mean we deregulate. We require sufficient vehicle inspections and driver licensing to ensure customer safety. TNC companies must file their rate structure with the City and provide insurance to drivers whenever they are logged into their system cruising for passengers. This is not an insignificant requirement. The Council acted this morning to eliminate the proposed 16-hour limitation on TNC drivers by choosing not to segment drivers between part-time and full-time licenses. No matter how much time they spend on the road, we will have the same standards for safety and driver quality. All for-hire drivers will be treated the same: same licensing, same training, same insurance requirements. I understand the City’s current licensing standards, which include a two-day course, may prove too burdensome for some drivers. The City will look for ways to streamline this process moving forward, but when you’re making a living behind the wheel, safety must come first. All drivers must get a for-hire driver’s license; those who want to drive their own vehicle for a TNC would have an extra vehicle endorsement on this license. For current taxi drivers, we should increase the number of licensed taxicabs that can operate in Seattle. This will give an opportunity for those drivers who have paid to lease taxis from others to finally be their own boss. There is also the issue of the nearly 200 flat-rate, for-hire vehicle licenses. These vehicles and their drivers live in limbo between taxis and the TNCs, not fully one or the other. As we continue to work on the broader regulatory structure for this realm, we should look at phasing this category of license out in such a way that protects those who have already invested their livelihoods in these licenses. Finally, I proposed an amendment this morning that provides for more specificity about what we will be measuring in this pilot period. We should be clear at the front end what data we need to craft a transportation system for the long-term. At the end of the day, I do not believe this is a zero-sum game. The more transportation services like these we make available, the more people able and willing to live without their own car, and the more business for everyone in this market. That’s good for affordability, for the environment, and for reducing congestion in our neighborhoods. |
If you missed Christopher Plummer’s performance as Prospero in last season’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest, then you’re out of luck. Because he now says that was his swansong to Shakespeare. “I’ve already played all the great Shakespearean roles that fit my age except for Falstaff and I don't want to wear all that f--- padding," insisted the Montreal-born actor who turns 81 on Dec. 13. Christopher Plummer as Prospero in The Tempest in Stratford. ( Stratford Shakespeare Festival / David Hou ) Plummer is in Toronto rehearsing for the return engagement of his Tony Award-winning role in Barrymore, which will play at the Elgin Theatre from Jan. 27 through Mar. 9, 2011. He’s also commuting to and from Sweden, where he’s filming the English-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, starring as Henrik Vanger opposite Daniel Craig, directed by David Fincher. Plummer did want to make it clear that his decision about Shakespeare does not mean he won’t return to Stratford (“I love working there!”) or that he’s even thinking of retiring from the stage. Article Continued Below “There’s a lot of roles I’d still like to play, in the Greeks, in Shaw, in Ibsen. I just haven’t had time to get around to them.” One that might happen sooner than the others is James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which certain N.Y. producers are discussing with Plummer. "I'd love to do that part," says Plummer, "but only if Meryl Streep agrees to play my wife, Mary." 2010 has been an amazing year for Plummer, with his first Oscar nomination (The Last Station), his triumph as Prospero (on stage and screen) in The Tempest and his controversial performance as a man who comes out at the age of 75 in Beginners. “I know I’m doing a lot for someone my age, but I can’t get smug about it. My wife, Elaine, phoned me the other day and said ‘Darling, I hate to burst your bubble, but you’re not the oldest actor still carrying on out there. I just saw Eli Wallach on TV saying that he’s still doing his own one-man show and he just turned 95!”” Plummer laughs. “Well, it’s something to strive for, anyway!” Read more about: |
With parts of the United States approaching record snowfall this season, there are probably thousands of people at this very second questioning whether the bad weather is making them miserable. At first glance, it certainly seems like terrible weather should have a significant impact on emotional wellbeing. After all, who wants to freeze their toes off, shovel their car out from under the snow, and be stuck indoors for days on end? But despite these seemingly obvious sources of unhappiness, research on the subject paints a far more hopeful picture. When I moved from New York City to California a decade ago, I knew I’d miss a lot of things about living on the east coast. After all, I was leaving behind my family and friends, most of my childhood memories, and my beloved New York Knicks (OK…so maybe that last thing was good to leave behind). But if there was one part of leaving New York that I was most excited about, it was definitely the change in weather. You see, I’m not what you’d call a “winter person.” So when the time came to leave the snow and ice behind and settle in under some palm trees along the beach, it seemed like an easy trade to make. While we might expect there to be a link between geography and happiness, particularly during the winter months, this expectation is not supported by the research. In a now-classic study conducted by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague David Schkade, happiness levels were compared among people living either in California or the Midwest. Interestingly, members of both groups expected that the people living in California would be happiest, particularly when they reflected on the climate differences between the two regions. But when they were asked about their own life satisfaction, the results were a bit unexpected: the differences in weather had literally zero impact on a person’s happiness, and the 2 groups rated their lives as equally happy overall. Why did the huge geographical and climate differences between the 2 groups make such a miniscule impact on their overall well-being? Kahneman and Schkade hypothesized that the 2 groups fell vulnerable to a cognitive bias known as the “focusing illusion” -- when we place too much weight on one aspect of a situation, at the expense of other perhaps more important factors. In this case, everyone involved in the study focused on one obvious difference between the groups -- the weather -- and assumed that it carried the most weight when it came to happiness. Indeed, our lives are filled with activities, relationships, and experiences. The weather is just one aspect to it, and, it appears, a relatively minor one at that. So whether you’re in snowy Boston or sunny California, it may feel like this lengthy winter is depressing you or that endless summer is responsible for your contentment, but for most of us, the weather plays little, if any role in our long-term happiness and well-being. In the weeks to come, I’ll be sharing regular updates with you about research-backed tips for sustainable happiness, as well as common roadblocks to happiness that we all struggle with. While many of us consider happiness to be the result of good fortune or circumstance, research is increasingly showing that happiness is best thought of us a practiced state of mind. Through ongoing practice, we can all learn to become happier. Jonah Paquette, Psy.D. is a clinical psychologist, author, and speaker. He works for Kaiser Permanente in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he provides group and individual psychotherapy, teaches psychoeducational classes to patients, and is the co-Director of Clinical Training for postdoctoral residents. Jonah is the author of “Real Happiness: Proven Paths for Contentment, Peace, and Well-Being,” published in February 2015. |
Ireland has made “little or no” effort over the past four years to create a corruption-free playing field for global trade, violating its “obligation to combat cross-border bribery”. The Transparency International Exporting Corruption report, released on Thursday, found that Ireland, along with countries such as Russia, Mexico, Israel and Colombia, has made limited efforts to investigate or prosecute foreign bribery cases under the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Anti-Bribery Convention. The OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, which came into force in 1999 and was ratified by Ireland in 2003, was established to curb global corruption and criminalise bribery of foreign public officials in international business transactions. According to the latest Transparency International study, carried out by group and experts in foreign bribery, only four of the 41 countries that signed the convention are actively investigating and prosecuting companies that bribe foreign officials. “By signing up to the OECD anti-bribery convention, governments commit to investigate and prosecute cross-border corruption, yet nearly half of signatory governments are not doing so,” said Transparency International chair José Ugaz. “The OECD must ensure real consequences for such poor performance. Violation of international law obligations to counter cross-border corruption cannot be tolerated.” Ireland is one of 20 nations, along with Japan, Russia, Poland, Turkey, Israel and Colombia, listed as making “little or no” effort to curb foreign bribery cases, including money laundering, tax-evasion and fraud, due to “a lack of political will and inadequate resources”. These 20 countries make up 20.5 per cent of the world’s exports. The report found the Irish State is in need of investigators with specialised training on foreign bribery and called for increased financial resources to ensure the investigation and prosecution of companies involved in bribery. The availability of State information concerning investigations, court cases, judgements and the publication of enforcement data also continues to be a challenge, the study found. Cross border bribery can have “enormous negative consequences” for populations of affected countries and nations should prioritise focusing on cases of grand corruption involving politicians and senior politicians, says Transparency International. “Combating corruption is a dynamic, ever-changing struggle,” says the report. “Corrupt practices are becoming steadily more sophisticated”. The report also called for increased protection of whistle-blowers who play a “central role in uncovering corruption” and bring to light suspected incidents of foreign bribery “in good faith”. Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the United States are the four leading enforcers of the Convention followed by Italy, Canada, Australia, Austria, Norway and Finland who are classified as “moderate” enforcers. |
Harstem in WCS Premier tonight pieter Tonight in WCS Premier League the Dutch Protoss wonder boy has to prove his worth in a battle of titans! In his first match he will be up against the Mexican Terran Major, a player who has shown to be very potent in the past. Lately, however, he is having a lack of good results. If Harstem wins his first match there is a good chance that he has to play versus Polt, a former WCS champion. “My WCS group is probably the most difficult one in the round of 32 but that is alright because I had the easiest one last season. If you want to win you have to beat ’em all!”, said Harstem during a small interview on his stream. Watch the action live tonight at 21:00 CEST on Twitch, you can also check out the other groups over at Liquipedia! Update: close but no sigar! Harstem dealt with MajOr (2-0) without much problems, and had to give way to Polt in the winner’s match. It then came down to a decider match versus Petraeus, but after a victory in game 1, the up-and-coming Petraeus managed to eek out two wins versus the Dutchman. Well played all around, and better luck next time! |
The changes medical marijuana brings to Arkansas will likely be less widespread than advocates hope or opponents fear, at least at first, recent history and research suggest. Photo by AP/RICHARD VOGEL A patient takes advantage April 20 of special deals celebrating the 4/20 holiday at ShowGrow, a medical marijuana dispensary in Los Angeles. Arkansas’ voter-approved constitutional amendment allowing medical marijuana use will soon fall into place. The amendment legalizes marijuana use in Arkansas for the ÿrst time in almost a century, though it’s still against federal law. Photo by AP/RICHARD VOGEL Caretakers oversee a grow room for medical marijuana at ShowGrow, a medical marijuana dispensary in Los Angeles, in this April 20 photo. Arkansas’ marijuana amendment allows up to 32 dispensaries supplied by ÿve cultivation facilities around the state. The voter-approved constitutional amendment allowing medical marijuana use will soon fall into place. The state plans to start taking license applications for shops to distribute marijuana products and cultivation facilities in July. The people who qualify to use and possess those products could be able to apply for the necessary state cards even sooner. Qualifying medical conditions People with one or more of the following conditions could be eligible for medical marijuana use if their physician believes the benefits outweigh the drawbacks: • Alzheimer’s disease • Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis • Arthritis that’s considered severe • Cancer • Crohn’s disease • Fibromyalgia • Glaucoma • Hepatitis C • HIV/AIDS • Post-traumatic stress disorder • Tourette’s syndrome • Ulcerative colitis People are also eligible with a chronic condition or treatment for the same that causes one or more of the following: • Cachexia or wasting syndrome • Muscle spasms that are severe and persistent • Nausea that’s considered severe • Pain that doesn’t respond to other treatments for more than six months • Peripheral neuropathy • Seizures Source: Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment of 2016 Big bucks required Medical marijuana businesses in Arkansas must show the state they can can afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and bonds in order to get licensed. These rules stand as long as the General Assembly approves them. Dispensaries must: • Pay an application fee of $7,500 • Pay a $15,000 one-time licensing fee and $22,500 annual renewal • Give proof of assets or a surety bond of at least $200,000 • And give proof of $100,000 in liquid assets. Cultivation facilities must: • Pay an application fee of $15,000 • Pay a $100,000 annual licensing fee and submit an initial $500,000 performance bond • Give proof of assets or a surety bond of $1 million • And give proof of $500,000 in liquid assets. Source: Staff report What we know about marijuana’s potential and side-effects Researchers say much remains unclear about the medicinal power of marijuana or the cannabinoid compounds it contains, but science so far has found several patterns in its effects. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reviewed about 10,000 studies on the subject and ranked the robustness of their findings in a report this year. These are some of its findings. Benefits • There’s strong evidence that taking marijuana or certain cannabinoids can lead to a significant reduction in pain symptoms, muscle spasms related to multiple sclerosis, and chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting. • Limited evidence suggests “regular exposure to cannabis smoke” could have anti-inflammation effects. Risks • Evidence suggests marijuana use before driving increases risk of a motor vehicle accident and that marijuana legalization can boost the risk of unintentional overdose injuries among children. • Research also suggests marijuana use can increase the risk of schizophrenia and social anxiety and impairs learning, memory and attention after use. Neutral • Evidence suggests smoking marijuana doesn’t increase the risk of lung and other cancers associated with smoking tobacco. Source: The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids: The Current State of Evidence and Recommendations for Research, from The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine The amendment legalizes marijuana use in Arkansas for the first time in almost a century, though it's still against federal law. Supporters say the drug will mean comfort instead of misery and potentially less risk than other medications for some patients. [EMAIL UPDATES: Get free breaking news updates and daily newsletters with top headlines delivered to your inbox] "It truly felt like a miracle," Fayetteville resident Emily Williams said last fall, describing marijuana's immediate soothing effect on her chemotherapy-induced pain and relentless nausea other medicines failed to alleviate. But how many patients will want it, how many doctors will allow it and how many marijuana businesses will succeed remain open questions. Experts worry about unintended side effects of legalization, such as lessening the oversight of doctors over their patients' medications, or want more study into the drug. "The situation's looking a little rough," said Storm Nolan, founder of the Arkansas Cannabis Industry Association, pointing to the inability of marijuana businesses to get many bank loans and other issues. "There are a lot of unknowns, and I know that's scaring away a good number of people." The patients Arkansas in some ways is playing catch-up. People have used marijuana's medicinal properties for about 5,000 years at least, according to a 2013 report in the scientific journal Pharmacotherapy. Twenty-nine states have legalized its medical use, starting with California 21 years ago. Thousands of studies since 1999 have found examples of marijuana or individual compounds found in the plant providing relief from pain, muscle spasms associated with multiple sclerosis and nausea induced by chemotherapy, an analysis from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded this year. Research also has found marijuana use can impair learning and attention and increase the risk of developing some mental health disorders and of being in a vehicle accident, according to the analysis. Marijuana's active compounds, called cannabinoids, work much like other medicines or drugs, hitching onto specific molecular keyholes on the outer surface of the body's cells and changing the cells' behavior. The receptors that fit cannabinoids largely appear on nerve cells and cells that fight disease. How long it takes for cannabinoids' effects to begin can depend on how the plant, its extracts or its synthetic equivalents are ingested. They can be quick and powerful, based on accounts from some who have used it. A Springdale resident and veteran with tremors from Parkinson's disease, chronic pain and post-traumatic stress said he smokes marijuana every few hours to hold the symptoms at bay. The substance helped him half his use of opioids, painkillers such as oxycodone that can become addictive and kill tens of thousands of Americans each year from overdoses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. No overdose deaths from marijuana have been recorded, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Morphine and other medications caused serious nausea and "hateful" mood swings and left him curled up in a chair for hours, said the Springdale resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his marijuana use is still illegal and often stigmatized. Marijuana allows him to play sports with his child. He looks forward to being able to take the substance with him during longer trips away from home without fear of arrest. "There's a lot more of us than you know," the man added, referring to ordinary people who use marijuana for medicinal reasons. He said he'll be the first one in line once the state starts taking applications for medical use. "I promise you that." Traditional prescriptions for federally approved drugs treating a variety of illnesses have fallen in states allowing medical marijuana or its extracts, according to a study of recent Medicare Part D data published last year in the journal Health Affairs. Patients with pain medicine prescriptions in particular filled 1,800 fewer doses per physician per year. A 2014 study found opioid overdose deaths went up regardless of a state's medical marijuana law, but those allowing marijuana's use saw a slower increase. Nolan, the state cannabis association founder, said his mother was a successful attorney who died three years ago because of an opioid addiction and its side effects. He and his family watched "a very sad and slow decline" that included months in the hospital and a rehabilitation facility, where her life ended. "We would have tried anything," Nolan said, calling marijuana "just so much more humane." The doctors Adult patients and caregivers can register for medical marijuana with the Department of Health only if their physicians certify the patients have one of 18 qualifying conditions and the benefit of marijuana outweighs its possible drawbacks. The latter point might be a high hurdle to clear. Arkansas Children's Hospital and the state surgeon general opposed the marijuana amendment, and several area physicians and health systems declined or didn't respond to repeated requests for comment on their stance. Mercy Northwest Arkansas said the decision would be between doctors and patients, as with any treatment. Some health care providers said they have multiple concerns about using the drug. Dr. Juan Lombeida, a supportive care provider with Highlands Oncology Group, said he would treat medical marijuana with the same caution as any other medication, weighing side effects and whether another treatment would do the trick. Highlands Oncology sometimes prescribes Marinol, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved synthetic version of the cannabinoid THC that can help with nausea and appetite, Lombeida said. He called it a "back pocket" option if other medications aren't effective. Marijuana itself has helped a few patients, but made no worthwhile difference for others, in his experience. "It may not work as well as you hope, just like any other treatment we have," he said. "It's going to have its benefits and its burdens, and you need to be aware of those and be willing to make a change if needed." Every marijuana plant and dispensary can be different from the next, so dosages and other details typically determined long before a regular medication goes on the market remain hazy, Lombeida added. Even if the drug's workings were clear, a doctor won't be giving a prescription with exact instructions. "I think we are doing this whole thing kind of backwards," Lombeida said, referring to the research that's catching up with wider marijuana use. The Arkansas General Assembly passed a law requiring dispensaries to hire a licensed pharmacist as a consultant to bring more medical expertise to the process. Scott Pace, a pharmacist and CEO of the Arkansas Pharmacists Association, said the law will help make sure marijuana doesn't interact badly with other medications. How marijuana's dozens of cannabinoids achieve their effects and how well they can work are still questions missing many of their answers, said Ziva Cooper, an associate professor of clinical neurobiology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. She was an author of the national academies report. Studies might look at use of the plant, specific cannabinoids or their synthetic versions, and findings in one category don't necessarily follow in another, Cooper said. Research that's designed to reveal the difference those separate categories make and what individual cannabinoids are doing are still relatively uncommon, she said. She and other researchers partly blame marijuana's classification by the Drug Enforcement Administration for the shortage of information. It's held in the same category as heroin and LSD, and research into the drug requires repeatedly getting special licenses and approvals that can add difficulty and months of paperwork to a study. Study nonetheless goes forward around the country. Dr. Greg Sharp of Arkansas Children's Hospital is doing three studies examining the cannabinoid called cannabidiol and its effect on several seizure disorders. The studies' results won't be known until they finish. Cooper is working on two studies, including one also looking at cannabidiol. Some evidence suggests cannabidiol can soften THC's high, though "the jury's still out on that," she said. "We do have a long way to go, but it is an exciting time because a lot more people are interested in pursuing the science," Cooper said. "I expect over the next decade there's going to be a lot of good data." The businesses Once people with the requisite medical conditions get their doctors' certifications and their state cards, they'll be able to buy from a marijuana dispensary, basically something between a pharmacy and a health supplement shop. The marijuana amendment allows up to 32 dispensaries supplied by five cultivation facilities around the state. Other states' industries offer a preview of what could be for sale, commonly featuring dozens of varieties of plant material, oral solutions or pills, food products and cartridges for vaporizers such as e-cigarettes. Businesses often develop types heavier in THC or cannabidiol or try to balance the two, depending on the desired effect. "We're constantly working with our patients to understand what works better for people with certain conditions, but it is very personalized," said Ari Hoffnung, CEO of Vireo Health of New York. Hoffnung said the company uses research from the U.S. and other countries to tailor capsule and oral solution formulas that are all state-tested for quality. Customers usually meet with a licensed pharmacist when they first come in. Other states also offer caveats for Arkansas' marijuana entrepreneurs. Bank loans and accounts are difficult if not impossible to secure across the country because of marijuana's federal classification as an illegal drug, and other vendors are sometimes reluctant to get involved. Health insurance and public programs such as Medicare generally won't cover patients' marijuana, which typically costs $200 or more per ounce or bottle of pills in other states. Nolan wants to start a dispensary and cultivation operation in Fort Smith with his brother and stepfather. Good relationships with local banks after years selling real estate were fruitless when it came to marijuana, he said. "As soon as they bring it up to the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) regulators, they say, 'So sorry, we're not going to be able to help you,'" Nolan said. The family is financing the license application and potential business alone, including state fees and required bonds for dispensaries and cultivation facilities adding up to more than $2 million. State regulations and other factors can also limit the marijuana customer base. New York, for example, didn't include chronic pain as a qualifying condition until recently, Hoffnung said. Reports from Colorado and other state governments show pain is often what qualifies the majority of medical marijuana users. Vireo, its subsidiary Minnesota Medical Solutions and other marijuana companies have yet to turn a profit since legalization in those two states in 2014, according to Hoffnung and media reports. The states' registries for marijuana use include several thousand people out of a combined population of 25 million. "Certainly many businesses are not profitable during the early phase of their existence," said Hoffnung, who's also president of the New York Medical Cannabis Association. "With that said, a business cannot exist indefinitely without turning a profit, and it is worrying." Arkansas regulations compared to other states' are more strict in some ways and less in others. Arkansas allows fewer conditions to qualify than Minnesota and California, for example, but joins Delaware and Rhode Island in allowing residents of other states who are registered for marijuana at home to buy from dispensaries here if their illness qualifies. Under the amendment, the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Commission sets other rules for businesses, and Alcoholic Beverage Control will inspect them. Arkansas legislators this year took other steps to limit marijuana use in some ways. Smoking in public or by anyone younger than 21 is banned, and product packaging must be childproof and not be appealing to children. "It's not going to be a slam dunk," Nolan said of the industry's success in Arkansas, but he thought the state's rules struck a reasonable balance. "Obviously we're motivated personally, but we also think there's a decent shot of it being financially feasible." State Rep. Robin Lundstrum of Elm Springs pushed unsuccessfully to ban the smoking of medical marijuana. She said the state will have to wait and see if its rules are enough to keep Arkansans safe. "This is going to be a process, and it's not going to be pretty at times," she said. Some are more optimistic. Brian Faught, a telecommunications contractor in central Arkansas, is looking to move to Fayetteville and open a cultivation facility and dispensary and said he has the resources to power through the bumpy early years. Fayetteville's City Council this month approved selling 5 acres to Faught for the businesses if his state applications go through. "I don't even smoke the stuff, but it's a real product and it's a real industry," he said, citing marijuana's medicinal power and moneymaking potential as his reasons to jump in. "I can't wait to be a part of this industry." NW News on 05/28/2017 |
In light of the sad outcome of yesterday’s election, here are some excerpts from our Writers at Work interviews that might offer solace, or inspiration, or a cudgel against complacency. People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege. —Marilynne Robinson, 2008 * It is not possible for me to be unaware of the incredible violence, the willful ignorance, the hunger for other people’s pain. I’m always conscious of that though I am less aware of it under certain circumstances—good friends at dinner, other books. Teaching makes a big difference, but that is not enough. Teaching could make me into someone who is complacent, unaware, rather than part of the solution. So what makes me feel as though I belong here out in this world is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover, but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Then I belong here and then all of the things that are disparate and irreconcilable can be useful. I can do the traditional things that writers always say they do, which is to make order out of chaos. Even if you are reproducing the disorder, you are sovereign at that point. Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it. —Toni Morrison, 1993 * I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens. They are generally adults. My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don’t see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity. To make humanity uncomfortable, yes. But intrinsically to be against humanity, that I don’t take. This is why I find racism impossible, because this is against humanity. Some people think, Well, what he’s saying is we must praise his people. For God’s sake! Go and read my books. I don’t praise my people. I am their greatest critic. Some people think my little pamphlet, The Trouble with Nigeria, went too far. I’ve got into all kinds of trouble for my writing. Art should be on the side of humanity. —Chinua Achebe, 1994 * Women are obliged to play at being what they aren’t, to play, for example, at being great courtesans, to fake their personalities. They’re on the brink of neurosis. I feel very sympathetic toward women of that type. They interest me more than the well-balanced housewife and mother. There are, of course, women who interest me even more, those who are both true and independent, who work and create. —Simone de Beauvoir, 1965 * People who differ from one another or draw lines between each other on matters of “taste” are a part of the class society, just as surely as wealth and power are parts of it. These are more than manners, in a society; these things politicize us. By demonstrating how Americans discriminate we are also being political, as writers. And as long as we have presidents who lie to us—who use language as irresponsibly as President Reagan uses it—we’ll be political just by using language clearly. But I’m getting tired of blaming Reagan for being Reagan; the American people have to take responsibility for this man—they wanted him; they wanted him twice … This is very troubling to writers; we couldn’t have a president as irresponsible as this if the American people paid attention to language. The news is: language doesn’t matter. But writers make language matter; we describe exactly. You see? Even caring about language becomes “political.” —John Irving, 1986 * Those who have dominated our country most of my adult life are interested in maintaining an empire, subjugating other people, enslaving them if need be, and finally killing those who protest so that wealthy and powerful Americans can go on enjoying their advantages over others. I’m not doing a thing about it. I’m not a man of action; It finally comes down to that. I’m not so profoundly moral that I can often overcome my fears of prison or torture or exile or poverty. I’m a contemplative person who goes in the corner and writes. What can we do? I guess we can hang on and encourage each other, dig in, protest in every peaceful way possible, and hope that people are better than they seem. We can describe ourselves as horribly racist people, which we are, as imperialists, which we have been and are, but we can also see ourselves as bountiful, gracious, full of wit, courage, resourcefulness. I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry. —Philip Levine, 1988 * I was writing before politics impinged itself upon my consciousness. In my writing, politics comes through in a didactic fashion very rarely … the real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people. Their lives, and I believe their very personalities, are changed by the extreme political circumstances one lives under in South Africa. I am dealing with people; here are people who are shaped and changed by politics. In that way my material is profoundly influenced by politics. —Nadine Gordimer, 1983 * The need to restore warmth to people’s lives is our most imperative task. This alone can save us, save the whole planet. —Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1965 * Don’t be tyrannized by the part of yourself that’s only interested in elsewhere … One is going to feel different things at different times. As Emerson said, “Our moods do not believe in each other.” There’s a mood in which you’ll feel, This is a terrible fact about life. We’re always going to be preoccupied by what we’re missing, by what we’ve lost, and there’s no way around it. And in other moods we can think, Well, that’s what it is to live a life, so get used to it, that’s the point. That’s not a problem, it’s the point. —Adam Phillips, 2014 * The greatest compliment I receive is when people walk up to me on the street or in airports and say, Miss Angelou, I wrote your books last year and I really—I mean I read … That is it—that the person has come into the books so seriously, so completely, that he or she, black or white, male or female, feels, That’s my story. I told it. I’m making it up on the spot. That’s the great compliment. —Maya Angelou, 1990 * Bro, we’re living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology, a petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world—high culture, low culture, bien-pensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to this situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it’s important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I’ve memorized this line from André Breton’s magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud—“I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive.” Given the state of things, that’s what we need to be doing, all the time—negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive. —Mark Leyner, 2013 * I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain? … For us, the question should be, what are the specific forms of that humanity, and what in our background is worth preserving or abandoning. The clue to this can be found in folklore, which offers the first drawings of any group’s character. It preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in the history of any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs, and so forth, which insure the good life, or destroy it; and it describes those boundaries of feeling, thought, and action which that particular group has found to be the limitation of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group’s will to survive; it embodies those values by which the group lives and dies. These drawings may be crude, but they are nonetheless profound in that they represent the group’s attempt to humanize the world. It’s no accident that great literature, the product of individual artists, is erected upon this humble base. —Ralph Ellison, 1955 * We’re now in the twenty-first century and have seen so many metatheories fail that we’re very skeptical, appropriately skeptical, of all of them. But I think we’re still in search of them and always will be, because we apprehend that there is coherence in the universe. We understand that what appears chaotic is merely the result of a limited point of view. If you can view chaos itself from God’s eye, you can see great patterns. Everybody from Aristotle and Plato to Wallace Stevens has written about this. The point is to pierce the veil of illusion and see underneath to the skeleton, to the infrastructure, to the plumbing, and see how this stuff is actually made and how the magic effect is produced. You can’t live as anything other than history’s fool if you don’t make an effort to do that. I mean, you will always wind up being history’s fool—it’s not like you’re going to get out of it—but the only hope we have is for people not to be literal readers, not to be fundamentalist readers, and to understand that, from the Holy Scriptures on, the whole point is to interpret and to understand. I think theater forces you to do that. —Tony Kushner, 2012 * Culture is continuously adapting to new situations. There will probably be a different culture, but there will be a culture. After the fall of the Roman Empire there were centuries of profound transformations—linguistic, political, religious, cultural. These types of changes happen ten times as quickly now. But thrilling new forms will continue to emerge and literature will survive. —Umberto Eco, 2008 * VOZNESENSKY I learned some new words on this tour. Speeding!—I like this word. I didn’t know it before. And I always knew the word fuck off, but I didn’t know fuckup. So on this trip, I have two new knowledges: Speeding and fuckup. Fuckup I like very much. INTERVIEWER You tell a fuckup to fuck off. VOZNESENSKY Certainly, yes. —Andrei Voznesensky, 1980 * Akhmatova I never met. She died in ’66 and I never encountered her, but she’s an old friend of mine in spirit. She taught me something, taught me the possibility of dealing quite directly with the most painful experiences … Requiem 1935–40 is a good example. The background of the poem was excruciating, and yet out of it she made a poem that is personal at its immediate level but universal in its ultimate form. It transcends the personal by viewing the historic occasion through the lens of individual suffering. Nothing is diminished in her poems: all her adversities and humiliations. She wrote with such burning and scrupulous intensity that she became part of the historic process itself—its conscience and its voice. —Stanley Kunitz, 1982 * “To N. V. Rikov-Gukovski,” by Anna Akhmatova, from issue no. 26 (Summer–Fall 1961): All is despoiled, abandoned, sold; Death’s wing has swept the sky of color; All’s eaten by a hungry dolor. What is this light which we behold? Odors of cherry-blossom sigh From the rumored forest beyond the town. At night, new constellations crown The high, clear heavens of July. Closer it comes, and closer still To houses ruinous and blind: Some marvellous thing yet undivined, A fiat of the century’s will. |
The worries are palpable in Ghatkopar, a Mumbai suburb where scores of families from rural areas have come to take shelter in a camp set up by a local politician. The migration is an annual event, with many farmers coming to escape harsh conditions on the farms to seek seasonal work in the city. But the influx this year has surpassed those of past years. Experts say that more than 100,000 people have fled the drought-hit farming region of Marathwada, where Rathod hails from, but Mumbai officials say they have no count of how many have ended up in the city. Critics have slammed civic authorities for failing to plan for the influx and ignoring court orders to develop more temporary housing. "For a city built by migrants, Mumbai’s administrators have made no space for them," journalist Smruti Koppikar wrote in the Hindustan Times. Rathod said he had never made the annual trek to Mumbai before because he usually found seasonal work in a sugarcane factory near his home in western Maharashtra. But the factory, along with many others, is closed this season due to a lack of water. “During last year’s drought, we had at least some stock of food at our disposal,” he said. “This year, the kitchen is totally barren.” He lost more than $1,500 when his crops failed due to the drought last year. Many farmers tell similar stories in a region where most rely entirely on rainwater to irrigate their crops. Still in debt, Rathod leaves his shanty every morning to look for odd jobs, usually cleaning sewers or collecting debris at construction sites. On a recent day, he came home empty-handed. City officials have initiated a plan to hire some migrants to clear public drains, and some political leaders have provided the camps with blankets, food, water and other supplies. But the lack of concrete measures, despite years of suffering in drought-hit areas, have raised pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Last week, more than 150 academics and activists signed a letter urging Modi to implement relief measures, including a 3-year-old plan to provide subsidized food grains that has not been fully enacted. Modi’s conservative government has also slashed a rural employment guarantee program meant to act as a financial cushion for agrarian families. “The enormous distress -- of food, drinking water, work, fodder for animals and dignity – of hundred of millions is utterly unacceptable,” the letter said. In the cities, slum dwellers have been badly affected because they cannot afford to buy water from private tankers. Mumbai municipal water rules grant preference to residential buildings over slums and informal housing, which activists say smacks of discrimination. “Rich localities have the alternative of ordering tankers,” said Sitaram Shelar, a local activist. “Slums can't afford one.” At the National Burns Center in the Mumbai suburb of Airoli, which requires more than 10,000 gallons a day, water cuts have forced the hospital to purchase tanker water at a cost of $1,500 per month. Because that water isn’t always potable, the hospital has also been purchasing bottled drinking water, said Sunil Keswani, head of the hospital. “We are going out of the way to treat our patients,” he said. “We do not know how we are going make up for all the extra amount we have been spending on water. We cannot hike up our costs as we cater to poor patients. We would have to solicit more donations.” Parth M.N. is a special correspondent. Follow @SBengali on Twitter for more news from South Asia. MORE FROM WORLD African farmers need the tools and technology to adapt to a changing climate More than 80,000 flee as Canadian fire grows; even evacuation centers are evacuated Kim Jong Un, hailing hydrogen bomb test and satellite launch, predicts 'final victory' |
This December I realized that I had no plans for Christmas and that much of where I live at would be shut down for the holidays leaving me with a boring handful of days confined to home, unless I went someplace that didn’t celebrate Christmas… someplace like an Orthodox Christian country. With that in mind it occurred to me, why not give myself the gift of a lifetime to achieve a childhood dream and visit Pripyat and Chernobyl in Ukraine! A Brief History The disaster that was Chernobyl dates back to the days of the late Soviet Union and is still a piece of very recent history having happened in April of 1986. The region surrounding the Chernobyl power plant, now known as the Exclusion Zone, had been repurposed in Soviet style sowing fields where there were previously forests (for community farms), and forests where there had previously been fields (for their secret Over the Horizon radar system). A number of closed nuclear cities were also been established in the region to support the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, among them Pripyat and Chernobyl. The Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor, previously known as the Lenin Nuclear Power Station, was established to provide power to the Soviet Union and as another methodology of moving people around the Soviet Union. At the time of the accident there were 4 functioning reactors with 2 additional reactors under construction. A stress test being run on reactor 4 ultimately led to the series of events that forced the evacuation of the area. Some of the myths that propagate the internet mention people immediately leaving as things were, but it actually took several days before the Soviet Government started evacuating the populace and would take much longer for the Soviets to admit that the accident had occurred. However, much was left as was since the Soviet government informed the populace that they would only be leaving for a handful of days. The Soviet Union didn’t stop at misinforming the populace and covering up the disaster internationally. Even the Soviet soldiers assisting in cleaning up reactor fallout were poorly briefed on the matter resulting in a large amount of mishandling of radioactive waste and suboptimal safety procedures for personnel. Governments that attempted to assist the Soviets were never given the full scope of the issue when it came to providing information for developing robots to combat the nuclear fallout leading to technology being developed and not operating at the correct parameters for the cleanup. Today with the dissolution of the Soviet Union Chernobyl and Pripyat are a part of northern Ukraine and the exclusion zone has been largely cleaned up. Reactor 4 even has a new protective cover to prevent any more radiation spilling into the environment. Getting There If you are a tourist looking to visit the Exclusion Zone, Chernobyl, Pripyat, and some other interesting sites in the region the Ukrainian government requires you have a certified guide. There are several reasons for this requirement, among them safety and ensuring you are going to follow the rules as to where you are allowed to go. Experienced guides are going to make sure you don’t irradiate yourself and that you will be allowed outside of the Exclusion Zone following your trip. They also are responsible for ensuring that you don’t go wandering into any buildings where you may injure yourself. I personally booked through a group known as Chornobyl Tours which is at the bottom of my post and have no regrets on the matter. There are several options for private/group tours spanning anywhere between one day and one week; if you are truly into urban exploration I feel that you could easily spend the week there as the photos I took of Pripyat do not properly convey the scope of an entirely abandoned city. Final Thoughts: Ultimately I found this trip to be a dream come true and was everything I had ever hoped it to be. I was even greeted with fresh snow which only added to the experience. My travel itinerary for one day there involved stopping in one of the Soviet Community Farm villages, the cities of Chernobyl and Chernobyl-2, the different reactors, and finally Pripyat itself. Paying for my guide on Christmas Day cost me 90 Euros and included lunch and transportation which was solid. By all means I will be visiting again as I feel you could spend weeks exploring Pripyat. If you find yourself in Eastern Europe definitely make the time to stop by. A Few Albums I put together for the trip: Album 1 Album 2 Album 3 Chornobyl Tour; the company I used for my excursion The Chernobyl Subreddit, decent activity from a number of enthusiasts who have been there |
With newfound explosiveness, James Johnson is having a career season -- especially in a few particular areas. Fighting to used to come easy to James Johnson, now basketball is. Since coming to the Miami this past Summer, Johnson has dropped 40 pounds (and counting); he credits Miami’s training staff and culture for the weight whittling. Johnson noted that he feels as if his game as been further unlocked due to his new body. And he wouldn’t be wrong. His shooting numbers are up across the board, from last year, in Toronto. But there are a few areas that are particularly indicative of his newfound physique. To put Johnson’s weight loss into context: The heaviest bowling ball you can find at your local bowling alley is 16 pounds. We’ve all picked those up and put them right back down. Johnson lost 2.5 of those 16-pound bowling balls. It’s safe to say he’s been liberated. It shouldn’t be surprising that Johnson is more dunk-happy this season. He registered 18 dunks in 2015-16; this season, he’s up to 23 (and counting), according to basketball-reference.com. Last season, Johnson never registered more than 2 dunks per month after December, only totaling 9 from January 2016 to the end of the NBA’s regular season, in May. This season, Johnson threw down 9 in January, alone(!). A lot of that could be due to Johnson’s increased role and Miami’s efficient, collegial offense. But the numbers speak for themselves. Johnson is ballin’. It’s a wonder what losing 40 pounds can do for your explosiveness — which is the perfect word to describe Johnson. One of the ways Johnson’s restored explosiveness has helped his game is, it has made him a more viable isolation player; he can blow by guys now. Johnson, still limber from his fighting years, has a knack for getting to the rim, absorbing contact and still managing to get his shot off. Perhaps his most impressive displays of this are his baseline drives. Particularly in isolation, coming from the left side of the court. Driving baseline is unique. Usually, there’s no screens, no dribble handoffs, no — anything. It’s just player versus player. An arena where speed and slippery body positioning are kings. Think of a defensive end in the NFL. To get to the quarterback, they must fire out of their stance like rockets, avoid a blocker by making themselves as slippery as possible, and all while maintaining their speed. (Speed and limber strength — sound like anyone?) In a 2009 article with the Las Vegas Sun, Johnson said this regarding how fighting (his first love) is different than basketball: "Fighting, you're one-on-one," Johnson said. "It's you against him. You don't have to worry about backside help or helping another guy who gets beat. It's just you against the other dude.” No wonder he’s so successful attacking the baseline in isolation, where it’s often mano a mano. In isolation situations: Driving baseline from the left side of the court, Johnson is averaging 1.5 points per possession. And minimum 10 such possession, Johnson ranks second out 53 qualifying players in points per possession, per Synergy Sports — above Stephen Curry (No. 3 of 53), LeBron James, DeMar DeRozan and more. Johnson gets to the free-throw line a quarter of the time he isolates his man and drives left baseline (25-percent), according to Synergy Sports. Which makes sense when you consider that he’s moving 8-percent faster on offense (and traveling 42-percent farther per game!) than in 2015-16, per NBA.com/Stats. After he gets a step on his opponent, they’re often too out of position to stop him, so they foul. (For context, normally, Johnson only gets to the free-throw line 11.3-percent of the time, per Synergy Sports, but he’s hyper-efficient when driving left baseline.) Johnson has displayed sweeping improvements this year, shooting and passing the ball; he’s ranked No. 1 in hoopsstats.com’s most improved rankings for power-forwards. But it’s interesting that he still excels in an area where an individual's skill set can trump all. With his new body, it makes you wonder what Johnson could do in an MMA fight, now — forget about attacking a basket. From a 2009 Sports Illustrated piece by Luke Winn on James Johnson: "I'm not done fighting" he says, throwing a few air jabs while exhaling sharply for effect. "I think about fighting all the time." |
(This story originally appeared on usatoday.com.) LAS VEGAS – While the UFC was scrambling to rescue a cursed card, the man who might have saved it from mediocrity was right there in Sin City. At a medical marijuana dispensary. Nate Diaz does things his own way and doesn’t give a damn if they don’t like it – “they” being detractors, critics or, indeed, his employers. Which is how he ended up at Las Vegas’ Blum dispensary on Friday, mingling with an intriguing mix of stoners, medicinal cannabis users, UFC fans wanting a glimpse of a down-to-earth star and a handful of corporate types who have turned pot into pots of money. Diaz is perhaps the biggest enigma in MMA, a much-loved anti-hero who has unwittingly rewritten the style guide for how to become insanely popular. “People who treat it like it’s a business, wearing a suit, acting a certain way, like (Tyron) Woodley and (Stephen) Thompson, they’re so boring,” Diaz said. “You guys are acting in a certain way you think you should be acting to be professional, but the best example of a professional fighter is me and my brother (Nick).” Woodley and Thompson said all the right things leading up to the UFC 209 main event at T-Mobile Arena on Saturday and, for the most part, are two of the easier top-level fighters for the UFC to deal when it comes to negotiations. But they delivered an absolute snoozer in their rematch for the welterweight belt, Woodley winning a majority decision so lacking in action that some fans headed for the exit without bothering to stick around to hear the judges’ scorecards. That, combined with the late withdrawal of co-main event headliner Khabib Nurmagomedov because of weight-cutting issues, meant the pay-per-view event will go down as one of the organization’s more forgettable, and adds to a slow start to 2017. Suddenly, the UFC finds itself a little light on crossover star power that’s ready to fight, with Conor McGregor angling for a boxing match with Floyd Mayweather and Ronda Rousey having been possibly punched into retirement by Amanda Nunes. In such a scenario, Diaz could be the answer to the company’s most pressing problem, if only there wasn’t such a difference of opinion between him and UFC President Dana White. The UFC fan base adores Diaz because he says exactly what he thinks and, let’s be honest, because of his image as a pot-smoking, barroom brawler. The second part of that is a little misleading. The 31-year-old truly believes in the recuperative benefits of legal weed, and though he fights with fearlessness, he prepares with meticulous resilience, with a regimen that includes eating vegan and competing in triathlons. However, after years of being paid less than he feels he deserved before he split a pair of hugely popular fights with McGregor, Diaz is happy to play hardball with White, settling for nothing less than big money and top billing. He recently refused a bout with Eddie Alvarez — who was defeated by McGregor in November — because he felt the offer was merely a UFC ruse to paint him as the bad guy who was unwilling to compete. White said in December that the Diaz brothers are currently the most difficult to deal with on his roster. Diaz said he thinks his blunt persona does not fit with the new corporate image of the UFC, which was bought by WME-IMG for $4.2 billion last year, and claims there is a wish within the organization to keep him out of the top circle of stardom. A friend of Diaz’s got him a gig promoting the upcoming movie “Fist Fight,” for which he recorded a trailer where he sparred with actor Charlie Day and also included actor/artist Ice Cube. Diaz said the UFC urged the movie’s bosses to bump him from the role, and go with McGregor or Georges St-Pierre instead. “The UFC is like, ‘We’re thinking GSP or Conor McGregor,’ ” Diaz said. “My guy said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to use Nate.’ They came back to say, ‘We really think you should use GSP or Conor.’ “I don’t know what it is. I’m not a white boy with blue eyes or great looking, I talk all (messed) up. I’m not the look they’re going for, but this is fighting. You don’t go for a look. You go for the baddest that’s out there. This is an example of my whole career.” Had Diaz been involved in UFC 209 it would have been intriguing, both because he hasn’t fought since narrowly losing his McGregor rematch in the summer and also because 209 – the area code for his hometown of Stockton, Calif. – is part of his calling card. “It (would have made) so much sense,” he added. “But I wasn’t sad. I feel like (UFC officials) were put off by it, like they were saying, ‘We don’t need you.’ Well, that’s a big ball drop for you guys. Look at your card. “They try to shut us down. With Conor, they made a star out of him. They have never done that for me. I’m still here after all the holding back I’ve been through. They’ve never put my name on a pedestal. If they had my back the whole way, I’d be like, ‘UFC, all day, don’t be dissing my company like that,’ but why would I do that for a company that does this?” And so he enters some kind of a stalemate. The UFC doesn’t like Diaz running his mouth, and White’s frustration at being unable to get Diaz onto the schedule has been obvious in recent media appearances. Diaz wants to be one of the main guys and enjoy the compensation that comes with it, having come to the realization that his brand of brutal honesty doesn’t just make people want to root for him, but comes with a genuine financial value too. Having grown up with little and now comfortably set with a good few million in the bank, he is in the driver’s seat, a spot that White might not appreciate and one that Diaz is unwilling to relinquish. For more on UFC 209, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site. |
1,000 new sellers join Amazon marketplaces daily, however few of them become long-term sellers. That’s why it is important to look at how many active sellers there is at any given point. We define active seller as a seller who has received at least 1 feedback reviews in a month. We looked at this data in May, so this time we can compare to see how much have all marketplaces grown since. Since then we have also improved our technology to make sure no seller is absent from our data. Amazon USA is the largest marketplace and has finally crossed 200,000 active sellers milestone. On the opposite side of the spectrum Amazon China continues to stagnate. We were surprised to see Amazon Spain and Amazon Italy have so much growth. However when we thought about it more we think this can be explained by Europe-local Amazon programs which allow sellers to sell on all marketplaces easily. That’s why Amazon Canada has taken off so much too - many US based sellers are now offering products in Canada without actually being present there. The fast international growth of marketplaces means two things. First, Amazon is becoming a strong business and a brand internationally just as much as it is in the US. This is exciting for many retailers in those countries who can benefit from Amazon growth to scale their own businesses. Second, Amazon marketplaces is an ever-increasing global marketplace. Many US sellers now sell on Canada, a growing amount of them sell in the European marketplaces, and even as far as Japan. This is a very important shift in the retail business, provided by more efficient global shipping and Amazon fulfillment handling operations in foreign countries for sellers based elsewhere. For UK based sellers this means that many of the new sellers are coming from the US, so the competition is no longer bound by the country limits. Thanks to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program US retailers are quickly realizing the massive opportunities of selling internationally. There are of course some headaches still in place, like having to deal with currency conversion, but international expansion is on the TODO list for many sellers. |
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