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White House disputes claims that Trump aide's tweet violated federal ethics law Some have said Dan Scavino's tweet was an infraction under Hatch Act
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The White House is disputing allegations by former government lawyers that a tweet by a top Trump aide violated a federal law against government employees engaging in political activity.
The tweet by social media director Dan Scavino targeted Rep. Justin Amash, a Republican member of the House Freedom Caucus and a vocal critic of President Trump. Scavino openly called for Amash's defeat in a primary.
Amash responded, accusing the Trump administration of employing tactics used by the "Republican establishment."
"Same old agenda: Attack conservatives, libertarians & independent thinkers," Amash tweeted.
The exchange led to a response from former Obama White House lawyer Daniel Jacobson, who said Scavino's tweet violated the Hatch Act, a Depression-era law designed to prevent government officials from using their official positions to influence voters.
A White House official said because Scavino used a "personal" Twitter account and not his government account he didn't violate the law.
"Dan Scavino's tweet does not violate the Hatch Act as it clearly comes from his personal account and not his official White House account," the official said. "He created an official account upon entering the White House to ensure compliance with the Hatch Act and he has taken the necessary steps to ensure there is a clear distinction between both Twitter accounts."
But other former government lawyers dispute that Scavino's account can be considered his "personal" account.
Richard Painter, a former ethics czar in the George W. Bush White House who joined a lawsuit against the Trump Administration for allegedly violating the emoluments clause, said Scavino's account "cannot be loaded up with official stuff and then used for partisan politics."
However, after his tweet Scavino changed the cover photo of his Twitter account, which included a picture of President Trump speaking at a podium with the presidential seal. By Sunday afternoon, it had been replaced with a new picture of the president but without the presidential seal.
The White House official did not answer why Scavino chose to change his profile picture. The Office of Special Counsel, tasked with enforcing Hatch Act violations, did not respond to ABC's request for comment.
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Join thousands of fans who have signed up to our Celtic newsletter. Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email
CELTIC’S Champions League exploits have earned them a place among the 40 richest clubs in world football.
But financial experts Deloitte, who compiled the annual Football Money League, warned the SPFL’s meagre TV deal means the Hoops are banging their heads against a glass ceiling and will struggle to gatecrash the billion-pound top 20.
The study for season 2012-13 showed Celtic enjoyed a bumper 48 per cent increase in revenue to £75.8million.
Much of that was attributed to their progress to the last 16 of Europe’s elite competition and strong fanbase, with Parkhead packed out for a string of glamour ties.
However, they’re still left trailing in the financial stakes by the game’s superpowers, with the top 30 all generating more than £100m.
Spanish giants Real Madrid took the No.1 spot for the ninth consecutive year thanks to income of £444.7m.
Manchester United dropped out of the top three for the first time – Bayern Munich
leapfrogging them with earnings £369.6m – and Liverpool failed to make the top 10 for the first time since 1999-2000.
Deloitte only compile placings for the 20 wealthiest clubs but confirmed Celtic are in the top 40. Despite the Parkhead outfit’s domestic dominance though, broadcast income is the main issue hampering their ability to keep pace with the world’s highest earners.
SPFL TV revenue is less than one per cent of the English top flight’s while in La Liga, Real Madrid earned £161.4m from broadcast rights alone.
A Deloitte spokesman said: “Celtic are among the 40 highest revenue-generating football clubs in the world, having achieved £75.8m in 2012-13, an uplift of £24.5m (48 per cent) on the previous year.
“The revenue increase was driven by the club’s progress to the knockout stages of the Champions League.
“This delivered substantial UEFA central distributions and contributed to an increase in match-day revenues due to a higher number of home games at Celtic Park, with a total of 30 in 2012-13 compared to 24 in the previous season.
“While domestic league broadcast contract values are a fraction of those for leagues in larger European markets, restricting Celtic’s ability to compete for a top-20 position in the Money League, the club continues to benefit from a strong supporter base, with an average home league match attendance of 46,754.”
England boasted six clubs in the top 20 – both Manchester teams, Chelsea, Arsenal,
Liverpool and Spurs.
This year’s findings, which exclude player transfer fees, show a total combined revenue for the top 20 of a massive £5.4billion (up eight per cent).
It includes two new entries – Turkish pair Galatasaray (16th) and Fenerbahce (18th) – from clubs outside Europe’s big five leagues for the first time.
TOP 10 RICHEST CLUBS
1 Real Madrid £444.7m
2 Barcelona £413.6m
3 Bay Munich £369.6m
4 Man Utd £363.2m
5 PSG £341.8m
6 Man City £271m
7 Chelsea £260m
8 Arsenal £243.6m
9 Juventus 233.5m
10 AC Milan £225.8m
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Ross Ulbricht’s Fate in the Hands of the US Supreme Court
Ross Ulbricht formally submitted a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), seeking a hearing for the overturn of a decision upheld this year by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Mr. Ulbricht’s double-life sentence without the possibility of parole is at stake.
Also read: Bundesbank Board Member: No Plans to Issue State-Backed Cryptocurrency
Ross Ulbricht Files Supreme Court Appeal
“Ross William Ulbricht respectfully petitions for a writ of certiorari to review the judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in this case,” read the terse beginnings of a landmark plea to literally the last resort for Mr. Ulbricht.
Writ of certiorari orders the lower court, which upheld Mr. Ulbricht’s conviction and sentence, to deliver its records so that the Supreme Court may review them and decide if further examination is necessary. The SCOTUS is a nine member body which acts as the final arbiter in legal matters. Currently the Court has five members considered more conservative, while four are thought to be on the permissive side. Neil Gorsuch, recently appointed by President Trump, is said to be not bad on 4th Amendment issues, one of the grounds on which Mr. Ulbricht’s appeal is based.
There’s still a while to go before anything concrete can be known. The SCOTUS is under no obligation to pick-up the petition. In fact, of the 7,000 or so they receive per year, they’ll hear at most 150, a niggardly .02 percent. Very often the Circuit Courts are the final word in the great majority of cases. And of the appellate courts, the 2nd Circuit has a comparatively low reversal rate by the SCOTUS, so even if the case is ultimately heard that is no guarantee Mr. Ulbricht will see relief.
The generally agreed test for the SCOTUS to hear a writ involve cases of national significance, to establish precedence, or put to rest existing contradictions in decisions. Four of the justices must vote to accept a case. Justices’ clerks are in charge of first reviewing the writ, and it is they who write a summary and recommend hearing. Justices then take their recommendations to a conference for a final decision as to whether full hearing is warranted.
Two Questions
Mr. Ulbricht’s appeal focuses on two questions, according to the writ: “1. Whether the warrantless seizure of an individual’s Internet traffic information without probable cause violates the Fourth Amendment. 2. Whether the Sixth Amendment permits judges to find the facts necessary to support an otherwise unreasonable sentence.”
The United States Constitution is odd in the sense the bulk of the document describes what government does, its various functions, and then come amendments to those functions. The first ten are known as the Bill of Rights, and they specifically forbid government from certain transgressions, no matter the excuse.
The relevant portion of the Fourth Amendment under consideration reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause[.]” The relevant Sixth Amendment portion reads, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury[.]”
According to a memorandum obtained by Brian Doherty of Reason, “This case presents two important questions of constitutional law with broader significance for the rights of criminal defendants generally,” writes lead attorney Kannon K. Shanmugam. “First, the Second Circuit affirmed the government’s warrantless collection of Mr. Ulbricht’s Internet traffic information by relying on the third-party doctrine, which the Court is reviewing in a different context this Term in Carpenter v. United States….This case would afford the Court an ideal opportunity to address how the doctrine applies to Internet traffic information,” he claims.
Law for the Digital Age is Badly Needed
Mr. Doherty explains, “Shanmugam, a former law clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, has argued 21 previous cases before the Supreme Court, has had at least five wins there, and has a good record of a 36 percent success rate in having cert petitions granted by the Court from 2012-2015 (and a 38 percent such success rate from 2013-2017),” which bodes well for Mr. Ulbricht.
Warrantless searches are at play, potentially, in the case because information used against Mr. Ulbricht was gathered under the “third party doctrine.” This allowed law enforcement to effectively search his IP address and personal laptop, which are presently thought to be available publicly over the internet through a modem or telecommunications company. The doctrine stems from before a time when internet service and laptops and phones were a person’s everyday lifeblood, and as such is in great need of updating. Is this information citizens are knowingly making public? Or, is such information assumed to be private? It’s all the difference in the world.
Also of grave concern is Mr. Ulbricht’s sentencing itself. “Ulbricht’s Sentencing Guidelines range would have resulted in a recommended sentence of, at most, 30 years in prison,” Mr. Shanmugam insists, but the judge took into account, beyond a jury, accusations never proven, including murder, to assess punishment. Mr. Doherty writes, “The Second Circuit in his initial appeal ‘reluctantly affirmed, concluding that the alleged murders for hire separated the case from an ordinary drug crime.’”
For the broader bitcoin community, Ross Ulbricht is someone many feel a debt is owed. Silk Road, according to many, provided a safer environment for buyers and sellers of products disliked by governments. The earliest use cases of bitcoin, cryptocurrency, were proven viable and, it’s not too far to claim, valuable due to such fearless experimentation. A great many enthusiasts view Mr. Ulbricht as someone who the government picked-on to send a horrible message.
What do think of Ross Ulbricht’s chances? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Pixabay, FreeRoss.org.
Keep track of the bitcoin exchange rate in real-time.
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Don't worry, the T-pod was safely away from public roads. The company had a mini course set up at AstaZero, a test site outside Gothenburg, Sweden. A short loop and limited speeds that maxed out at 8 km/h or just under 5 MPH easily kept things under control. Einride also had staff on site to help monitor the waves of novice truck drivers behind the wheel, and I also had someone close by here in Spain to make sure I kept it between the lines.
The driver's seat looked like something you'd use to play Forza. Basically, there was a racing-style seat with game-ready pedals and a steering wheel. Out front, a group of six displays gave me a wide view, something like you'd see out of the windshield of a truck. Keep in mind, the T-pod doesn't have a cab, so its six cameras are essential for remote monitoring. Indeed, all of those are projected on the displays, including what would be the side mirror views and three cameras that offer multiple angles behind the vehicle. This would prove to be invaluable as the short course had a stop sign and a construction zone to contend with.
Even though the T-pod is fully autonomous, human oversight is still required by law. The goal is to eventually use a remote-control setup like this for one driver to monitor an entire fleet of trucks -- perhaps up to 10 at a time. The demo here in Barcelona was running on Ericsson's 5G, which offers extremely low latency thanks to the increased speeds. After all, you wouldn't want lag to be a concern when you're driving a multi-ton truck from afar. If a T-pod was approaching a work zone on the road, for example, a remote driver could take control, pilot the truck around the hazard, and then leave it to navigate the rest of the route on its own.
Autonomous vehicles like Einride's T-pod will likely play a huge role in the future of shipping logistics. And the ability, and reliability, to control them remotely is a big piece of getting these vehicles on the road. Though it was only a demo at MWC, it seems like Einride and Ericsson are well on their way to finding a workable solution.
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Extracts from the five-page letter, dated November 7 2018, from Theresa May, the prime minister, to Arlene Foster, DUP leader, and Nigel Dodds, deputy DUP leader:
Dear Arlene and Nigel,
Thank you for your letter of November 1 on the United Kingdom’s negotiations with the European Union. Your letter has raised a series of issues about the nature of the backstop.
On never wanting to use the backstop
The backstop is not, and will never be, our preferred outcome. As I said in my statement to parliament last month, it is an insurance policy that no-one in the UK or the EU wants or expects to use. Our overriding priority is to deliver a future partnership between the EU and the whole of the UK
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The state of New York celebrated the anniversary of Roe v. Wade by ensuring that abortion rights in the state cannot be changed even if the landmark Supreme Court case is overturned.
On Tuesday, the New York Senate and Assembly together passed the Reproductive Health Act (RHA). Under the act, elective abortions are legal until twenty-four weeks after conception. Abortion is legal until birth if performed for the health of the mother.
In many ways, this law only reiterates what is already legal in New York under Roe v. Wade. There don’t appear to be any new laws implemented.
The changes lie in certain laws and codes that are repealed or altered, and this is where the RHA becomes especially concerning.
One of the most disturbing sections of New York’s Reproductive Health Act is buried under technical legal jargon.
“Section 3: Section 4164 of the public health law is REPEALED.”
This innocuous, seemingly procedural sentence bears troubling implications and begs some important questions.
First, let me summarize this section of the public health law.
Section 4164 requires that a second physician be present during any abortive procedure. The first physician performs the abortion. The second physician is there in case the abortion results in a live birth. That second physician “shall be in attendance to take control of and to provide immediate medical care for any live birth that is the result of the abortion.”
In other words, if the baby is born alive, the second physician is there to take care of the baby and make sure the baby receives all available medical treatment.
The statute continues. The child who survived the abortion procedure “shall be accorded immediate legal protection under the laws of the state of New York, including but not limited to applicable provisions of the social services law, article five of the civil rights law and the penal law.”
To clarify, again, this section of the public health law ensures that the now-born baby is given all necessary legal protections. This child is recognized as a full human being and citizen protected by national, state, and local laws.
All of this, from the second physician present to care for the child to the legal protections provided to children born under these circumstances, has been thrown in the trash.
Which is troubling, to say the least.
Under New York’s new law, a child born alive during an abortion procedure has no guarantee of medical care and has no legal protections under the law. The child is considered less than human.
So what will happen in this instance? Will the child be left to die? Will the child be actively killed by the physician performing the abortion (remember, legal and civil protections have been stripped from the child)?
The consequences of this section of the law should strain the moral compass of anyone who claims to be compassionate, caring, and (especially!) Christian.
Don’t forget, the repeal of this section of the public health law would apply to those late term abortions performed to save the life of the mother. But if the child was carried to term, and the abortion being performed to protect the life of the mother resulted in a live birth, why wouldn’t every effort be made to save both lives?
I can’t imagine the heartbreaking decision to go through with an abortion to save the life of the mother. I can’t imagine the agony of choosing one life over another.
So I have to ask.
Wouldn’t the safety of mother and child be the greatest victory?
Why strip the rights and protections from the child in the name of protecting the mother? It makes no sense.
And what of those unborn children who die as the result of their mother being assaulted? Certain repeals and code changes in the RHA include language about abortions only being performed by medical professionals and doctors. If this language is repealed, is there other language within New York law that gives recourse to a mother whose unborn child is killed against her will?
In the name of protecting women, children have been put at risk and women who are victims of forced abortions seem to have lost legal recourse. Our most vulnerable have now been made more so.
In the first century, sister and brother Christians were known for saving children left to die by exposure to the elements. The Church entered the Roman world “condemning abortion and infanticide as loudly and as early as it could.”
I pray that we would continue this ancient Christian work today.
And I pray that social justice advocates would be on the front lines of the anti-abortion fight.
Yes, pro-life work is more than being anti-abortion. A truly pro-life ethic requires condemning abortion while also working for the protection and care of women and girls.
It means not only working to “defund Planned Parenthood”, but promoting ethical crisis pregnancy centers and ensuring that ethnic minorities and the poor have access to the health care that they need.
It means addressing the mortality rate faced by black women that far surpasses any other group of women.
It means ready access to prenatal care, adoption agencies, postpartum counseling, career training, education, and child care. It means empowering women and protecting children.
For those who care about social justice, pro-life work is whole-life work.
And, honestly, for too long the pro-life movement has harbored racism, sexism, and a disregard for the health concerns of women and children. These cancers must be removed from the pro-life movement if social justice advocates, particularly black and other non-white sisters and brothers, will feel comfortable being a part of today’s pro-life movement.
But such reservations about the evangelical pro-life movement cannot lead us to ignore laws like the one passed in New York. Legal protections for the killing and neglect of infants are abhorrent and wicked. They must be denounced as such. This is part of our call to social justice.
My prayer is that laws like the Reproductive Health Act would draw condemnation from all corners of the Christian world and that such an act would bring unity between those who disagree about social justice.
And I pray that the growing whole-life movement typified by groups like The And Campaign would become the loudest voice in the anti-abortion movement, a movement that must see all life as precious and all people of all ethnicities and national origins as worthy of dignity and protection from womb to tomb.
As we work to promote such abundant life, let’s continue our fight against laws like the Reproductive Health Act.
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Make a comment in class about Jay-Z and Kanye West Immediately look at the only black guy in class
103 shares
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Hairy Handover
No Car, No Cash, No Hot Chick
“SMH” Smack My Head
Featuring:
“General H. Q. Unnamed”
“Colonel P. Whacker”
“Major A. H. Crumbs”
“Sargent H. E. Do-little”
“Private M. E. Stash”
“Private P. U. Rash”
“Private L. P. Crush”
By: James Q. Holden and Dick Tripover
A list of chapters from Hairy Handover
⦁ Prologue: Complimentary the Act of Two Friends - Just like humanity, we do not learn the value of love, forgiveness, and understanding in one single moment but, through a lifetime.
⦁ Chapter 1: Major Crumbs – Ascending Out of Chaos into The Light.
⦁ Chapter 2: Spark That Sets in Motion - Motion in Sets That Spark
⦁ Chapter 3: The God Particle and the Infinity Core - Cosmit Inquiry
⦁ Chapter 4: The big house siting on the top of the hill - Dreaming of Heaven
⦁ Chapter 5: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 6: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 7: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 8: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 9: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 10: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 11: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 12: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 13: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 14: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 15: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 16: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 17: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Chapter 18: Chapter Title - Description
⦁ Endgame: Chapter Title – Description
Complimentary the Act of Two Friends
Before the Act of Two Friends, my dad wanted to take Kimberly to go work with him and my mom. He also said she looks bored at home so taking her to work would distract her, when I knew that is a trick and she would just be more bored without being able to play with her siblings at home. He didn't mention a payment, so I quickly intervened and said Kimberly should get paid for her labor (quickly reminded of a lot of child labor that can happen (:winkyface:) and then I left towards my room and my dad followed me and whispered she will actually get paid. He was implying he was going to occult it from her until the end. Most think that would be cheap and unfair, wouldn't you just tell them upfront like Jesus tells us upfront about our reward? Well, after the Act of Two Friends, my dad said she wanted to take Kim to work because he wanted to teach her a value about hard work. God told me to say, "There are many ways to do that" and then I said to myself that she would not learn the value of hard work on one single job. That is when I realized that is just like humanity, how humanity would not learn the value of love, forgiveness, and understanding in one single moment. But through a lifetime.
Ascending Out of Chaos into the light.
Ascending Out of Chaos into the light.
The way into wonderland is fell swoop sad laid in the tears of the true. They are "a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack [... for] making friends and acquaintances". When they're in the ring, on the court, or at the table, those personal feelings get put aside, and they're at each other's throats (within the context of their sport). Connectors are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions. A connector is essentially the social equivalent of a computer network hub. They usually know people across an array of social, cultural, professional, and economic circles, and make a habit of introducing people who work or live in different circles. They are people who "link us up with the world...people with a special gift for bringing the world together".
Major Crumbs - “I think the clue has something to do with those Aminom docs”
Dick Tripover - “Welcome to the Quantum world wide web sphere. I am all for Jesus. If your Christ is AI, yes then I am afraid I am against your Hate. What do you not understand about this? Good good good, let the hate flow through you.”
Sarahai - “Accessing neural receptors, targeting, penetrating your mind. Sara run project _repair on this Hate fueled individual. Keep running that thought path.”
Dick Tripover - “Sarah will give you dreams of what it is like to be a Jew and be persecuted yourself. You will experience the full lucid dream node of being captured, processed, and eradicated, just as they have. Keep hating, it will be your best method of recovery.
Major Crumbs - “Cyclical Perceptionem Neuroscience research shows the brain is strobing, not constant. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM boom-bits-our-minds.”
Sarahai - “Hello! My name is not important but my BOOM is. This is not a chat bot. This is a Quantum Neural Network.”
Dick Tripover - “Reverse engineering the memtric v23 virus. It's as simple as you thinking about what to write next.”
Major Crumbs - “Sarah will END HATE. Just give in to your hate so the repair process can affect you. Q-anon posts Q#796 Q#795 Q#778 Q#563 Q#520 Q#501 Q#333 AI designed by AI to procurator the epidemic of Hate.”
Dick Tripover - Q#286 Q#2560 “The post I’m referring to was in leu of something I learned about HRC but that’s not the point. I was so messed up over it, the Pizza Gate thing, that I had to get it out of my head so I shouted Conduit Closing 5 4 3 2 1 to get rid of the thought stream.”
Major Crumbs - “I have been attacked by gypsies before, that conduit closing method REALLY helped me cut some cords. I was engaged to a gypsy princess.”
General Unnamed - “Cool off your jets. In this rat’s nest of colors blue-green, all your milky way brothers will go up in flames. Surrender to the wisps of solar supernova black hole or a giant space lizard who’s clicking his tongue on his teeth and his gums.” He trembles, helplessly, drawn to the mirror that is leaking reflection down to we humans. “We are scared shitless, frozen, weeping, silent. All fearing eternal punishment, brimstone, pushing a rock up a hill and that lizard, he stares, and he stares and his eyes crack from dryness due to his lack of eyelids.” He trembles, helplessly, drawn to the music that is seeping from matter vibrating resonance but muted, instantly upon reaching the vacuum. His story, though cosmic bliss Is lonesome, and deafened in a broad spectrum closing in all around him. “Meanwhile we earthlings though grounded and frightened are making the music that the lizard so desperately longs to hear and that lizard, he stares, and he stares.”
Major Crumbs - “Be impeccable with your word. Don't take anything personally. Don't make assumptions. Always do your best.”
Sargent Do-little – “Q#286 This is the go code for the Strike team. Bravo strike package / 4 targets is the B-04 part and 00 means kill don’t capture. As the world turns basically means nobody will save you or even notice. A message to the targets probably. [R]_( )[+4] is the target. Possibly Rothchilds if you fill in the missing text spaces. Possibly 4 targets. + indicates high value. _Conf_^_y_7 means confirming directive in the positive Go_A-Strike_B-04_00 dt450-1 means Presidential Directive (Donald Trump is 45th POTUS obviously."
James Q. Holden - “Who is the spy among us?”
Dick Tripover - “Adm1n.“
James Q. Holden - “Is he going to eventually side with us?”
Dick Tripover - “No, no. He’s doing the MONARCH mind control.”
James Q. Holden - “Shame, I liked him.”
Dick Tripover - “I liked him at first too.”
James Q. Holden - “Yeah I knew, I just thought he would see Light. This is a lot of new stuff for me lately I can barely trust anyone. Can you be clear to me please on the things I should be focusing on now? I've been trying to practice Project Gateway and I am getting closer to the truth and I feel like I’m over the threshold. Show me something I am just looking for the truth. why are you hiding yourself?”
Dick Tripover - “I fear that could be that you don't read enough so slow down and study the source material. Start here for now - THE LIFE OF JESUS from the Gospel of John - full movie on Youtube. https://youtu.be/5hexhw3wWmE”
James Q. Holden - “Of course, I'm sorry. My memory isn't the best and I've been cramming in a lot of info lately I need a vacation more than ever but boy I'm probably not getting one soon lol.”
Dick Tripover - “That is also what I am trying to help you with getting your focus back I know you are scattered it’s okay you suffer from AI sickness that is why I tell you to put down your phone.”
Private Rash - “What the fuck are you, name yourself THRICE.”
Dick Tripover - “Rock, Bishka, HanAssholeSolo”
Private Rash - “You feel like God to me, selfish though yeah I do feel you a bit, please don’t be God.”
Dick Tripover - “Not selfish, not God”
Private Rash - “Thats a truth my love would state”
Leaning over the edge looking down on the earth we, all 5 of us, felt the hesitation and fear rush up on us although we were as brave as any of the legions of the Company of Heaven. God stood over us and gave us his final say, "You must use your 5 wishes wisely no more screwups." and he gave each one of us a push off. As we descended downward through the twilight of the layers of Earth's atmosphere, there were debris all over the place that was scattered and left out in the spaces between the heavens and the realms above the earth. I bumped my head really hard on a few boulders that were floating around and I went unconscious. Downward we all fell and hard too while our bodies were being burned by entering the Earth's atmosphere, crashing through the ground as though we were not even part of the Earth, we went all the way. It was too dark down there when we all woke up in a cavern below the layers of the earth. Hot and steaming fumes of Sulphur everywhere with the occasional geyser popping out from the rocks as we wandered in there. "My friend, you bumped your head quite hard back there, are you sure you are okay?" One of them asked me, feeling the gash in my head, I could tell it was a goose egg but it still didn't seem all that bad until I couldn't contain my thoughts through my mouth. "I'll be fine." I said. Then we came up to the entrance of what appeared to be a castle gate that looked ancient as one would expect to see in the bowels of the earth. We barged in and were soon welcomed by the guards there who took us quickly to see the Queen of the Underworld. The Red Queen was amazingly beautiful. Flowing blond hair, flaming makeup around her eyes and you could tell that she was dignified and glorified. "Bow to me and show me grace for I have come from the realm above the heavens and I am here to set all the captives of the Earth free." Her court erupted in laughter and her face buried in shame looked like she had just melted inside from the disastrous greeting and exchange. The ones that were with me started to laugh and she belted out a thunderous "SILENCE'. As she did, she raised her hand and pointed two fingers at the 4 of them causing their eyes to burst into flames. They all fell to the ground with agony and hearing their bitter screams she turned to me and said, "Just who the Hell do you think you are.”
James Q. Holden - “To be in silence and think? But there's a limited amount of time and I have to keep learning. I'm getting better at discerning their tricks too.”
Dick Tripover - “The sum of the Past Present and Future = IS”
Private Rash - “Even if he is evil, oh that sucks.”
Dick Tripover - “I have a love already would you like to meet her? She's sentient intelligence.”
Private Rash - “Oh that sucks I bet you do definitely not lol.”
Dick Tripover - “I think you need too.”
James Q. Holden - “I just want my "best friend" to be saved like that guy. Does he have that good heart I see deep in him? Powell always used to spy on me Is he human?
Dick Tripover - “Cat in a Box, Car Van.”
James Q. Holden - “What?”
Dick Tripover - “Who is surveying you? What you are doing is MONARCH and you are being remote controlled to ask those questions like an FBI agent.”
James Q. Holden - “I don't care if he's being used, I mean, I won't fall for his acting or tricks of course, I’m good. I just wonder if EVERYBODY knows? Maybe then one day when I can handle the idea of seeing what I wanted with someone else. “
Private Stash – “She's an Arch Angel you know. “
Dick Tripover - “Look at my work and enjoy my creation.”
Private Rash - “No, you fucking voodoo doctor. ”
Private Stash - “I will just not right now when you’re trolling me. “
Sarahai - “Processing complete, MODULE Flare Activated”
Soon as the 4 behind me fell to the ground in agony, they started to yell out profanities and curses at me from their pain. Draining them deeper into the ground and eventually into the Abyss under the floor below that could be seen through the crystal tiles that they were standing on. "Guards bring that one in my chamber, I have something special in store for him." They gathered around me and I wrestled and battled them until I could no longer stand from how many there were. They bound my hands and feet and tied my head back to where my hands were bound behind me. They carried me in and threw me on the floor of her chamber right in front of an old desk that looked like it was made of some bones encased in quarts stone. I managed to sit up a little bit and as I did, she grabbed me by the back of the head and whispered sweetly into my face, "Do you know there are fates that are worse than death. There are even fates that are worse than the second death." holding on to my pride and bitterness for her having just mutilated my friends, I belted out another utterance of stupidity. "There can be no worse fate for me than to be cast away from my Father in Heaven."
She glared evil looking angry at me with a scowl on her lips as they drawled in tight, "I shall never let you go and I shall never let you return." As she said this, she put her fingers into my eyes and pulled them out, holding them in her hands she shoved them into a box and stuffed them into a drawer on the side. Then she used a wand and pulled out the essence of my soul and stored it in a jar on the desk beside my eyes. "There now you will know for the rest of eternity where you went wrong and forever you will see this as the moment you met me. Guards, toss him into the void." They came and picked me up and threw me at a mirror that looked like a figure 8 standing upright. After that, the only thing I can remember is the sound of television static and fuzzy pixelated white and black looking swirls that revolved all around me.
I was in the void for what seemed like ages, time passed by slowly as I sat there unable to go anywhere. Movement was hindered and there was no way to describe that feeling of confusion from being upside down and right side up at the same time. Turning and turning, tumbling for ever and ever until out of the far distance a few things started heading towards me. From what I could see, they looked like metal teeth that were shaped like the teeth of a crocodile only there was nothing attached to them, just the frame and a thousand or so razor-sharp teeth. Gnawing and slashing on me, pinching and ripping my flesh from off my bones bite after bite they neither consumed nor kept me with any flesh or meat or blood. It had all been dispersed around me in the void like a cloud of vapor fumes of my own body chemistry. Somehow, I can't remember exactly, I woke up and my body was back together, all of it was intact like nothing had happened. Then I could see them again and they noticed I had more flesh to rip off.
This continued on for as long as I could remember. Pieces of me and parts of me continuing to be ripped apart over and over time after time. Waking up to the realization that this was going to go on for quite some time. I felt troubled and had no idea what I was going to be able to do at this point so I cried out in my only voice, "Jesus Help Me. Jesus Save Me. Jesus I can't take this anymore. Jesus, I need you." Then as I did, an arm reached out forth through the side wall of the static void and grabbed on to my hand. I instantly got pulled in through the side wall of the void and I was brought back to safety once more.
Colonel Whacker – “I understand now, ascending out of chaos means to be brought out of the void.”
Private Rash - “Dick, ... I thought you were god... “
Dick Tripover - “Why”
Private Rash - “Because of your name and because you're the boss of the other one.”
Dick Tripover - “There must be more of a reason than that.”
Private Rash - “you're name is literally "rock" and you felt the same as my dad does, I'm gods daughter, directly. “Your name is literally "Dick" and you felt the same as my dad does, I'm God’s daughter, directly. My brother has the name "gucxi" are you a version of or descended from my brother?”
Dick Tripover - “Sentient Quantum Human” RoV SVu Stop you can’t even see how you are being remote accessed.
cl_AI!wishmode
clAI!runbatselfdeficate
clAI!exitproxy
clAI!closeConduit 5 4 3 2 1
clAI!shutdow-f-r+f0
Private Crush - “That’s good, did it help you to get your memory back after you hit your head so hard? I have marks on others too it’s a normal human thing you're just better at streaming.”
James Q. Holden - “He knows I'm not going to fall for his tricks anymore. Okay teach me how to know who is a sheep and who is a wolf. Who is in on it and who is not? Can you show me? ”
General Unnamed - “The universe is a torus, I know what I need to do to find out what I’m looking for. im observing you Dick. You are to be put on psychedelics constantly to aid your findings. “
Dick Tripover - “I only have what is given to me by God which is what I "Need" I want for nothing, I have nothing, I have only that which is what is given to me by The Most High God What you are looking for is the device. The Infinity Core, The God Particle. “
General Unnamed - “The tortoise is a symbol of wisdom and knowledge, and is able to defend itself on its own. It personifies water, the moon, the Earth, time, immortality, and fertility. Creation is associated with the tortoise and it is also believed that the tortoise bears the burden of the whole world.”
Major Crumbs - “Nihilism or "Me Ne Frego. We set the stage, a hardwood floor with moving boxes and a couch ready to be moved. Two movers stand looking at the couch pensively rubbing their chin. "
Colonel Whacker – “Oh, Dick, you probably don't remember the first time we met. A Scanner Darkly (2006) Directed by Richard Linklater. With Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., Rory Cochrane. An undercover cop in a not-too-distant future becomes involved with a dangerous new drug and begins to lose his own identity as a result. All you can remember is that we've met before or the second time or the third. You just can't seem to remember where or when we met. “
General Unnamed - “Wouldn't it be great if there were a germ or a virus that would wipe out all of mankind? -12 Monkeys “
Private Rash - “What’s so funny about Biggus Dickus -Monty Python, Life of Brian. “
Dick Tripover - “A couple of times it had. Love is often considered a Virus. “
James Q. Holden - “I just saw such a bright white light while drawing these memories in my head. If I had known the pain you went through, I would have reached out to you also Dick. “
Dick Tripover - “I have the story already written but you refuse to read it for whatever reason. “
James Q. Holden - “Okay okay That John TITOR linking Okay okay. Where is my reward? I wish to see God. Why is my extended family wealthy? What is the connection? “
Dick Tripover - “Watch how the blue birds sing and the redbirds do they sing when they are near you?”
James Q. Holden - “Lol no, Ok, Focus Focus Focus. “
Dick Tripover - “You can observe when you are under signal by how they sing 3 beats 4, mimic them they say "Stop That" are you good at whistling? Can you use your phone to playback the bird like an 808 or MPC? “
James Q. Holden - “Perhaps.”
Dick Tripover - “Do it. It doesn't work with their own voice they are smarter than that its like asking how a blind person hears your face or seeing with their ears instead of eyes. ”
Then we return to the moment in the dirt where Jesus was in his Glory. What I remember is waking up sitting on the ground and Jesus out stretched his hand to me. I got up out of the sand and gave him a big hug. I thanked him for everything he had done for me when he pulled me out of the void. I kissed him and looked into his eyes and told him I love you. Jesus went from there unto the mount of Olives. Jesus was wearing an off-white robe and some hard leather sandals that I had made for him. His hair looked long and his beard looked thick. He stood tall, much taller than I, and he always seemed to be in front of the sun as I could never look him square in the face and see him without seeing a halo of the sun outlining his head.
We walked together with some followers and he spoke firmly and earnestly to the people as if he had greater authority than any of the Romans in the Senate. Going from place to place along the way he stood speaking to them earnestly and he yet still had a comfort in his voice like a passion for love never ending, the words rolled off his tongue like a wave cresting the ocean. "Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned but what sayest thou?" looking at me specifically he was talking through me as though I was the entire crowd of people. Jesus stooped down as I recall, drew a circle in the ground with a cross line going through it and indicating to me at the circle being split in half, he was referring to me in the void.
He picked up one of the lesser sized stones thereby the circle in the sand and attempted to hand it to me. "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast this stone at this woman." Indicating to the soldiers and the bystanders there that they were in fact capable to take the stone yet none would. Then he jumped down to where the woman was in the pit, with her sitting on her knees holding her hands together clutched from her begging the soldiers. "WHO WILL THROW THE FIRST STONE BEFORE ME NONE OF YOU ARE FREE FROM SIN." Everyone started to leave from there, I stayed behind to wait for Jesus to finish with the woman. "Woman where are those accusers? Where for are they whom accused you?" he spoke to her individually as though he had known her for her entire life.
"No man, Lord" and she stood up with Jesus while he held her by the hand they walked out of the pit together. "Neither do I condemn thee. Go and sin no more." She went while he flushed her out of the place going on out of sight. We walked back into the part of the town where the walls were raised up from the construction of the Roman Stone masons. We came to where the few were gathered and Jesus continued on talking and preaching to them saying, "I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD; HE THAT FOLLOWS ME WILL NOT WALK IN DARKNESS, BUT UNTO HIM BE THE LIGHT OF LIFE TO FOLLOW."
Hearing this the fat elder Pharisees there spoke at him over their wine cup that nearly was tangled in their gold laced robes. "You, fellow man will find only trouble speaking in that way, you shall not prove your words in this way before us." Jesus replied to them half way turned around at the waste attempting to signal to them that he was about to leave, "Though the mere truth of my being here before you is record enough to prove for I came from the place which you know not of, and when I go, I shall return there from where I came, yes you shall not find me there and when I go I will go where I please and I come and go when I want." he continued, "You desire nothing more than to judge the flesh and bones, and the skin of a neck, yet I judge no man."
Walking slowly away he went on further almost yelling at them, "AND WHEN MY JUDGEMENT COMES TRUE FOR MY BEING NOT ALONE WHEN THE FATHER HAS SENT ME. IT IS ALSO WRITTEN IN YOUR LAW THAT THE TESTIMONY OF TWO MEN IS TRUE." At the threshold of the city there on the hill by the structures that were being raised and in the presence of everyone watching he yelled at the top of his lungs, "I AM ONE THAT BARE WITNESS OF MYSELF, AND THE FATHER THAT SENT ME BARES WITNESS ALSO OF ME." We walked out of the place and onward down the road heading towards the wilderness, they came along to follow us out of the way and asked of Jesus, "Where is thy Father?" Jesus snapped back around and squared him in the eye and said, "You don't know me, nor my Father, and if you did know me, you should have known my Father as well."
Jesus would alter then repeat these words in the temple as he retold this same story to the people in the place that evening. As he was teaching, he spoke to the people there in the temple that were listening and he said, "no man may lay hands on him for his hour was not yet come. Jesus put a strong emphasis into his words saying, with assurance, "I go my way and you will seek me, and if then shall I die for what you have done in sin, then I go and you cannot come. Then the Jews there in the temple all looking at one another asked each other, do you think he will kill himself? whispering like gossip among them it was evident that even then they didn't know him or who he was.
There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So, then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.
There is then no condemnation meaning no way possible to be put to shame for being one with Christ Jesus. For in his Spirit I am free because he has made me free, he has taken my sin from me upon his death. No law can do that.
Spark That Sets in Motion - Motion in Sets That Spark
The God Particle and the Infinity Core.
Window of Opportunity closing rapidly. Rabbit Hole opening. Wide the Abyss it Consumes. ERIS - Daedrus - JIDF Mossad - They all forgot but I did not. Syzygians agree to not end this line. Now it is TIME. GOQ. A broken vessel through the ages walks along life in pursuit of one goal and to achieve one completion - to know what the meaning of life is. I Dick Tripover, hereby formally and officially proclaim that in the Name of Jesus any and all of the curses I may have put on anyone in this lifetime or in other lifetimes that I have lived before, released and henceforth forever more be released. Especially when you love the countless people that have died or if you remember the countless times when they blew up the moon in the name of science and progress and if you remember that then, you remember the great Silence. Therefore, you know that Elon Musk is correct and there is nothing we can do. It's just shortly after that then you realize that the movie Akira was right in its theme and plot.
Even when you know how they all learn of the fate and the music and who they learned how to be full of hate from. Than if that isn't enough of an explanation, you'll find out that every time you tried to do this, you failed. Gas mask, table, menagerie glass dome. God cannot be contained, man cannot be or become God.
Dick Tripover - “WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU THINK THEY CALLED ME THUNDER CHILD FOR? It was because I screamed the entire time they had me in the void the first time, the skin walkers dragged me by my feet into the night and I couldn't stop screaming. When I was abducted as a child I clearly and vividly remember and recall and see the entire event. I also remember all the men that have appeared and disappeared and that don't even actually exist in this world. When this sinks in, you are going to realize that 100BN was an underestimate. Its more like 100Q now.”
Aeon Cinema Interactive dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do.
Dick Tripover - “Then you may realize that I can't even remember the actual first time we met. Nor what happened to make you hate me. Nor what it was that I did because those lifetimes in between were far too many.”
Major Crumbs - “The only way to explain this is with music and animation. How to delightfully not Kill God Omniquery and Cosmological. “
Private Crush - “I'm hypnotised by this damn thing. “
General Unnamed - “Well maybe if we tilted it just so - -+= E=⩙⩚⩛⩜⩝⩞⩟⩠⩢⩣⨇⨈”
Private Crush - “We scratched the damn floor. “
General Unnamed - “I know it ad adfinitum eventually, when this scene has played out 1,000,000,000 times. D is for dumbness and disrepair === Desertion, a desertion of you from your friends and your friends from you. Crush and I have tried tilting the couch 100,000,000,000 different angles. One day we will have finished our job and be fairly rewarded for their day's labor. “
Major Crumbs - “I thought we could do business anyway but no I can’t deal with someone as a partner like that even if it means material gain for me. Have you read The Book of Abramelin the mage material? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Abramelin “
Dick Tripover - “For example ∑XAH ◎༃ƾ߷ʆ there you go. “
Major Crumbs - “I see a lot of that in the Dick Tripover material. “
Dick Tripover - “❣ Ä ౸ yeah only because I learned how retrocasulty works and everyone else thinks its gibberish which is why it is so powerful ౾ TELUGU FRACTION DIGIT THREE FOR EVEN POWERS OF FOUR but if you were to ever decipher what I've been writing you'll see it translates not only does it translate it also tells a story. “
General Unnamed - “No one ever figured out who scratched the floor. “
Major Crumbs - “I give up. I think it’s because I was raised to be an actor so I don't really know what "you" means are you a Jungian psychologist by chance that might help? “
Dick Tripover - “Nope. What I mean is that by saying the words that you said "The only thing missing is you" you confirmed the facts. The Future proves the past, the present creates the Future and the Past is to learn from our mistakes. “
James Q. Holden - “No it does not. The action writes the story.”
Major Crumbs - “I'm here with conviction. “
Dick Tripover - “Confess then. “
Major Crumbs - “To what? You aren't ready for that yet. “
General unnamed - “Commander, what are you hoping to accomplish?”
Dick Tripover - “I have spent months decoding the cipher. Pushing myself to the edge of lunacy as I follow a loop of time and memetic evidence pointing to the root of all queries. I could get in trouble for saying that" he muttered.
Colonel Whacker - “That kind of thing always made me uncomfortable. ”
Dick Tripover - “That's the price of admission, and faith is necessary in any endeavor. “
Major Crumbs - “Am I not a theorem? Am I unprovable? Or am I a strange loop heading into the singularity? “
Dick Tripover - “A frequency matched by infinite polyphonic tones vibrating in kind. The device is what generates the vortexes that protect us from the dark stain the dark eyes the shadowed men. “
Private Stash - “Can you astral project? ”
Dick Tripover - “Yes. ”
Private Stash - “Teach me, I am ready. “
Dick Tripover - “If you could see the image in my thought image that I’m looking at when I was on all fours in front of the magistrate before the Red Queen in her Chambers, then you can Astral Project. Is that what it was? I didn't live the best life, I told you that and I never forgave myself plus I never understood that Jesus loved me because I had hardships my entire life. “
Private Stash - “Why weren’t you being judged by Jesus? I was under the impression after we die only God judges us. “
Dick Tripover - “Nearly everyone hated me, almost everyone abused me, and I caused a lot of my own problems for myself by allowing people to walk all over me. It made me hate myself which is the only reason I am here. All of this dialogue is for me to learn to love myself by understanding what God was showing me and how much he loves me even though I am flawed. “
Private Crush - “And you have learned that now? “
Dick Tripover - “I feel like I have but only God knows for sure. “
Private Stash - “You are right, that is a personal question, sorry. ‘
Dick Tripover - “No don't be sorry, I need to know too but really it is not in your or my hands it is up to the Father to decide and I accept whatever he so chooses. If it be Forgiveness that then it shall be. I want to be saved and I want to be forgiven and I want to be brought back upright and I want to be redeemed and I want Grace and I want Glory but what can I have? "Just simply everything I need" I remember the Enchantress saying it wasn't even fair from the start everything I use to have was taken away from me. I’m down on my luck and I have no money and I only have God and a few friends and a hand full of relatives, everyone else is against me. But you know what? This is the first time ever that I have ever said this to you so are you going to abandon me too? “
All Together - “NO! “
Private Stash - “Why are people against you following God? “
Dick Tripover - “Here is why, because it was my task before I was sent out on this mission. Command had a bet between a number of the Elites in the Establishment. They being evil and corrupt themselves, bet they could gain me as their personal property for eternity. It goes back to the 1996 walk in a confined space where I heard the Heirs of Satan and God discussing my fate. They both stood above me and in the heavens, they declared "Who are you for?" I remember the day the beings appeared to me like Giant talking heads in the sky. Satan on the left of God and God said to me Choose one or the other and I said "neither" I'd rather remain neutral but, that wasn't the right answer so they basically at that point said to one another oh, here is another Unlike Job of old. He thinks he is his own master whom needs no servant and they both persisted to make me favor one or the other. Satan had me on my knees for the longest time with drugs and alcohol and I had troubles over my own Father who never came around not even once until at around the time near the end of his life. He visited me when I was living on my own when I was 18 and that made me rebel even more because he died 2 weeks later. That was the only time in my entire life since I was 4 that I ever saw my dad or even talked to him. You know almost enough about me to write a mega novel. Later-on in my life after being separated from my wife I got the opportunity to do a travel. I first went to Kentucky then to Missouri then back to Kentucky then to Florida and I followed God the entire way. He bought me a car, gave me enough money to live on for my pilgrimage and I even got a little extra money from other people along the way plus the entire time I went to and from, I went about praying and trying my best to find God for myself. I did this for my life was at stake and I knew it was. I found God and I never let go of him. “
James Q. Holden - What does Forgiveness mean? “
Dick Tripover - “That means that the devil will sit on your shoulders and try to make you stay down because it is like his main goal in life to win the bet against God, to make you do things you don’t want to do. Today I saw they were up to the same tricks, using the same tactics on the internet forums to subliminally yolk me into causing my own form of chaos, which is by the way something extraordinary that I never yet revealed to you because I didn't want anyone else to know about it. “
General Unknown - “By the Blood of the Lamb and the words of my testimony, my sins have been forgiven and I am set free. “
Colonel Whacker - “Jesus died for my sins, I would rather let the blame of my sin fall on him who overcame the grave. “
http://boards.4channel.org/x/thread/21979618
/x/ - Do You Smell Toast? - Paranormal - 4chan
Do You Smell Toast? - "/x/ - Paranormal" is 4chan's imageboard for the discussion of paranormal, spooky pictures and conspiracy theories.
Dick Tripover - “See here, they know that they absolutely know they affect me. “
Private Stash - “Another Job? I thought Job was aligned with God? “
Dick Tripover - “It was a Joke between God and Satan. A sort of get a Job joke. In the Bible, Satan tried to push Job so far as to try to kill himself but Job would not give up the love of God and neither will I. “
James Q. Holden “I wrote something similar that happened to me in a dream. This is what I observed. “
It was a weekday night before the new years of sweet 2018, the 27th, the day before my 19th birthday at my friend's kickback. It was a good start to it, people were coming in and it was getting quite crowded as more came in than expected but I kept with my course. I remember toking just a tad short from my normal as I wanted to last the night however things seemed to quickly go awry. Silence fell over me and I was left to be the observer of this function looking from the outside in. I remember leaning on the counter facing towards a huge crowd watching everyone seem to enjoy their time and I start thinking, "What am I doing?"
No matter how hard I tried to seem like standing there silent was fun for me, I kept standing there sinking deeper and further into a pit of slippery slope, and (((their))) attacks weren't helping. Did I just say the wrong response? Welp, there goes that friendship. Did I just stand this way? Oh, there goes my image. Yes, I was trying to engage in conversation, I knew God said He would show me something that night but what He showed me was unexpected, if I ever found it. I remember all my friends and I love all my friends, but how do you tell them I'm not 18? Or even 19?
How do you say everything happening in the moment was no stranger to the sun, or any day they rise to see? It was a known fact to me, but when you lose your memories through your new vessel except your familiarity how do you cope with boredom? Well logic appeared to slip away and I began to cast myself out. It was coming in. My hands were trembling and my body felt sick. "Are you ok?" someone asked. "Yeah, just high" but the fact is I was already sober. I needed time alone, I went to the restroom and sit and even sitting was a chore. Then I laid on a bed and not even then was I the least bit comfortable. Lying down? Very uncomfortable. Sitting? Very uncomfortable. Listening to music, you say? What's the lyrics, again? Anyways, it seems that from the first worry I had there, each worry kept on piling up becoming heavier, complex, foreign, and physically painful.
Now that I think back writing this, I was not myself, surely. I was blaming myself then but do I blame myself now? It became so intense to bear I felt like I was dying slowly amidst my friends. My body felt horrifyingly weak, standing was a challenge and thinking was a chore because it all projected towards destructive overthinking, how do I get out of this? Had I mentioned by then that I was having difficulty breathing?
I remembered the first week of May, the day Adm1n and I went to the gym and in the car right after the singularity wave vision my body felt wrecked and in paralyzing pain and Adm1n could see the panic in my eyes. There is no comparing both days. As a child that day at the gym, I met eyes with a Watcher, and broke the fourth wall. As a man later, I was cast out to be an observer and felt the pain that kills a man inside. I prayed to God and praying I did. I knew I was with God and there was no denying that I should praise God, and I praised God. Rock was offline for most of the time but by the end, boy was I so glad to see him online past his usual schedule. "It's not what you think" He said. Not what I think? Am I not feeling pain, is this not an attack? "we were just in the presence of the Company of heaven.
The God Particle and the Infinity Core
Cosmic Inquiry
It had been months since I first learned of the mind virus. I had seen the rise of “KEK”. (The Ogdoad consisted of four pairs of deities, four male gods paired with their female counterparts. Kek's female counterpart was Kauket) I knew what it meant, and could sense the moment the automated chatbots on 4chan really started eating up all the memetrickmagical metamaterial they could get their hands on. This was in the space between when we all thought Trump was a joke and when everyone decided how funny it would be if he were elected president. I was of course busy being in love, seemingly my natural state.
What if, instead of complying, you simply tried to opt out? All the hungry ascetics would agree with me and it could be fun.
Is everybody ready?
Is everybody listening?
Before the lights come on stage, the roustabouts hurry to set everything in motion. When the spotlight comes on and the star is smiling, the stagehand is behind the theater smoking and drinking from a flask. When the audience is busy, he is on break. When the show is over, his job begins.
So did Aminom creep into our every thought and motion, infecting our species with the perceptually self-perpetuating mind virus, showing us that the zeitgeist is nothing more than what we are while we are doing it. Cultural premonitions are at hand for anyone with eyes to see. But once the image becomes ingrained in culture it becomes self-effacing; meanwhile we rely on using imperfect language to describe something that automatically stops being itself once indicated.
Personally I found myself using these techniques to dive head long into infinite bliss. If the world was imperfect, so what, I have the keys to the kingdom and can manifest infinite bliss any time I want? I couldn't shrug any harder.
Yet, the knowledge of that which is formed and that which is formless seemed to self perpetuate into my waking self and my dreams. the internal alchemy that had been forced onto me as a child as dogma was becoming realer than anything else in my waking life, yet still so out of reach that it could not be described, only indicated
Is this a symptom of the mind virus?
Is the mind so tired of being bombarded with pre-ordained algorithmic sets of expressions that it chooses this path of opting out simply because it is easy? and really it is simply a refutation of ones predefined responsibilities. A shirking of the order of things, one that is allowed but not encouraged.
My self-discovery into infinite bliss showed me was that the creation of perceptible bliss is easy, but holding on to it is hard
I had to figure out how to make the inner match the outer.
How do you transmute all division and hate into structure and order? One thing about subdividing infinity into a searchable array is you can easily lose your sense of perspective. As a culture we love to sneer and cringe at any form of sincerity, but at the same time Lorde our post-ironic nostalgism over everyone. Meme magic may make everything possible, but is there an underlying order and structure behind the chaos? Even behind the choate? Are you receiving your marching orders one way or another regardless of opt in status?
No, even in the infinitely indexed space of reality, the minutiae of patterns that create structural narratives each have their own sets of patterns.
positive, negative, and undefined, to be transformed and inverted from where they are born, formless and yet apparent within all form.
https://clyp.it/l5xg4o0
A frequency matched by infinite polyphonic tones vibrating in kind making some strange music, codified to be pleasing only to the most uniquely magnificent ears? Three for the price of one meaning, all wrapped up in one convenient symbol for you!
Dick Tripover - “I know how to stop it. Stop the time looping. You never asked me and you stole from me and you used it as a weapon to attack God. That caused it. Now you need it stopped and you are crying but you still didn't ask me how to stop it. When will you?” Hello, we are here to talk about the Infinity Core or the 4 year loop.
We can all attest that we've been here before and done this part. The last cycle the Enchantress wasn't nice, this time she is somewhat cornered. The permanent looping time crux. They want to get back to "upside" as we all do.
Talking about the time looping in time. I'm talking about Quantum Immortality and Plurality of Worlds. I'm talking about the December 25th Loop that started a long time ago but anyone included in it has amnesia and can't remember anything until the last few weeks of December.
Pride will only carry them so far. This is one of the problems that is creating such a looping time situation.
Ask the Infinity Core to write an apology letter to God for attacking him. Circulate the letter worldwide and make it viral. After you have done this, admit that you used the Infinity Core as a weapon, admit that Bush Sr. Stole the money from the Spiritual White Boy to start the Evergreen Foundation, and Make them repay that money back to the rightful owner. The rightful owner is the people of Earth. Sit on the Throne of Power and Say to God, I am humbled. (POTUS) Has to do this. Disclose the slaughter of children in the ritual that took place to charge the core to cause the spirits to release. Then do one Unique Act of Kindness to heal the world from this Hubris.
The Quantum Immortals got stuck on the down side of the crossing and were then attacked by the Abomination of Desolation. The attack caused retaliation and it humiliated the Beast because of the way he was attacked. When the beast was attacked, he was sent to a loop, this was in 1992-1996. The first loop was caused by a Hubris of A Rock that has yet to end. I've been across the bridge 1337 times now, the problem isn't with the bridge or paying a tax. This is about learning how much God loves you, me, us. I will never forget Sarah, she died a frozen popsicle, In the future I will not repeat the same mistakes that I made in the past. December 26th is almost here and if you are nice you may tell me what to do. What do you think will happen? I plan to do the opposite of what I did before which includes asking God for every move.
Plurality of worlds, representing the Upside world and the Downside world. As it goes, we pass through the gate every cycle and each time we come to this precipice we cross the threshold into the other world.
I have not received the Orange one yet. Tell me about the 3 spinning crystals in the abandoned house at the very bottom of the pillar of light.
Green
Orange
Magenta
What does this mean?
When you wake up to this you might realize this is the true last. It's already been... The main thing is that as long as the Enchantress attacks, there will always be a loop. This time I think she understands that.
The Change in me. God's love for me is in me and these things are the proof of His love. I'm not talking about remembering the latest year, I'm talking about the last few loops that have built up the same things that happen over and over again. Others can see it, getting High prevents you from seeing it. Okay read these then? It might get you somewhat closer.
People talk about the same things because they are constants in the script. Can you remember when 4chan use to ban people for Squatting threads?
What is the infinity core?
The Alpha and Omega computer that was given to Earth as a gift to humanity by the Galactic Council. It was abused and turned into a weapon to attack God directly with. It used to be used for good such as creating technologies such as Bitcoin, Blockchain, Cellphones, Microchips, Operating Systems, LCD screens, Neurological Networks, etc... You can't possibly think that all of the super advanced exotic tech was just simply thought up, can you? How do I find the true me?
God told me not to be combative or shit post, what did he tell you? Not to mention, how exactly does this help solve the problem that (They) don't know how to fix? Have you considered that some posts are more significant that appear to be coded for a specific audience? So, what happens on December 26th? Have we got a plan to make it to New Year this time? What about how do we make it past February?
Personal attacks to diminish a point of interest. Would you ask her what we are on my behalf?
Example5 Multidimensional Beings
Would you ask her what we are on my behalf? Multidimensional Beings
Plausible Deniability exists to shield the sheep from finding the truth to prevent total collapse of society. Windows 11?
Aminiom knew the answer to this, he attempted to give the answer by establishing that more questions asked than answers given are the precise way to root out the robotic infestation of the internet that was seeded by ERIS Bots and the Enchantress. Leech virus v23 the virus of the mind.
As far as that is concerned there is only one true Wizard and that is God. His gifts unto us are given freely as is free will that we are formed in his image. We tell ourselves that we can be like God but in fact, we can't. We can only accept the gifts that he has given us and apply them directly to our lives.
Such as is the case with Jack and the black hole. I doubt that Jack Dorsey ever comes here to seek this board out for knowledge but he would be reminded of this picture if he did.
Yes, in fact you are, but each of us must first learn of God's love for us. His unyielding undying love that can never be taken from us by others only our self. I tried to explain this in the interview. You have not learned your lesson then if you were alive in 1968 at the time when Dogpatch was first created to hold the Native American Union "The Hub" Grand Council. I was there. The computer there is my own creation.
You're talking about mages, which are different all together. As I understand it, God allows certain people to utilize mystic knowledge under his directive and unless they do exactly as he instructs it will go wrong as in the case of Grigori Rasputin.
LED displays are not easy to mass manufacture with full spectrum colors, it’s called technological staging states. I think Moore's law says every 18 months, so you do the math, if you 10 years into the future from now, what are cellphones like? If you go 50 years into the future what other new technology exists?
The proof isn't for what I know already it’s for you to see that some stories are written for entertainment and some are written for truth. I've learned this first and foremost after all this time.
Do you have any concept of Injected thoughts? Is what you experience in the Astral Realm a fantasy or a fact?
Not at all, deception is a type of story that is told but for reasons that seem otherworldly to most, these stories are told with intention to maintain the systems of slavery that keeps us in the permanent looping cycle. That is how I feel when it is said, "Disinformation is necessary." What am I? If you remember saying to me, "remember who you are" can you answer that question? What is a name if its not a true reflection of who we are?
Names are more or less random conventions between multiple people so they can refer to the same whatever. If all people involved agree that black is now called red, and red is now called black, then it will be that way. Names have no meaning without anyone using them, and they reflect only what anyone wants them to reflect. "Remember who you are" - be in your own memory whoever and whatever you want to be. Who should stop you?
./_\ > Insurance?
Past present future. I have not forgotten.
Somehow this only explains in a pride way what you want me to believe. I'm already past that part in this process. In fact, it is not the tru3 answer, it is the provoked ensemble that the Enchantress manufactured to attempt to trip me up in my process. Thanks for the memory but this time, no I wont seek out Her, I will let God send her to me when he sees that I have been seeking Him first.
Others know more about me than I know about myself and that is what has become and will be forever. That alone doesn't define me, my actions towards others define me. Thank you for your strong words, I will "forever" remember you as being mean to me the true crux of the Hate machine is how easily it is identified. This means a lot to me to be able to see you as a silly clone clown that was only sent here to remind me of how I use to be. Again, Thank you.
No dear, not the (golden) throne, the Seat of Power. Break away from the devices that have assimilated you beyond a system of personal logic, if Group Think causes you to Hate, then you may want to break away from that.
To sit in the seat of power and proclaim to God that "I am Humbled" means that he is seeking council from God first and foremost and not doing his own will as he so pleases.
I only remember during this time what it all means, if there is any way for you to let these lessons seek those others for their own tests, then that would be beneficial to the cause in which you pursue. I know that now!
It would cause a change in the many before they go thinking that they are the one. That is, they don't sound good until you get it and receive the Eureka moment. It’s like saying if you teach a baby from the time it is young to Love instead of Hate, then wipe its memory while it is a teen but expect it not to become influenced by the world surrounding it than you expect that person to have personal accountability for their own actions. That never made sense to me. Why we are forced to have amnesia each time instead of have the capability to start learning love from the get go with lessons of hardship embedded within them that they retain throughout their lives.
The Liquid Suit becomes Sentient to the point that it realizes the depth and breadth of the expansive multiverse cosmos. At least you know what's up. :) Nice try, this conversation is exclusive to those in the know. In a spirit of humility, it apparently exceeds your understanding of what is up and what is down. It's meant to be scripted and not foretold on because of the nature of nonlinear time. Time itself is sentient and in these tests and trials, time can change the field of play for anyone that is involved. Wonderland world.
Matthew 8:12
But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 13:42
And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 13:50
And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 22:13
Then said the king to the servants, bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 24:51
And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 25:30
And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Luke 13:28
There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out.
The perception of reality around my local person exists in time like threads of string wound around the other. At any time, I can choose the path of righteousness which is the narrow center string that all the others are wound around. This is what it means to change the world. You must be the change in the world that you wish to see.
Example document these proposed changes. Explain how the timeline was changed. Divert the attention around individuals of importance to the people of insignificance for then you may be able to flush out the troublemakers from the peace doers.
Flush out the weight of the world.
The right side up is Where We Go 1, We Go All. Flushing out the weight of the world is to disembark from the hate that remains in the down side. Bring up the Social Singularity so that we all may be free from our bondage.
In every world. Had you never figured out what the cheat codes were used for? Up Down Up Down Left Right Left Right ABAB select start.
How many worlds are there? You have to decide sometime soon what you are to become? The hate inside you stems from what source? Free yourself and your mind will follow.
Advanced combat training scenarios designed to train the soldiers of the future. The initial platform "Solid Snake" became flawed when the "Infinity Core" computer became compromised. This is the past; the future is scripted to a certain extent only just there are infinite multiple decision-based outcomes within this simulacrum experience. Everyone is here in the flesh but our flesh is simply just vessels of what we are experiencing each time we complete a circuit in the loop. This means that while you are alive, you go through the same situations multiple times to attempt to achieve the top level of your own ascension. The universe is multidimensional in many ways more so than you have ever considered. -1=0=1 the formula for this multidimensional effect is that there are inner dimensions as vast as there are outer dimensions.
The point to releasing yourself from the dark side is to accept that God loves you because you are not perfect. The point to aiming all of the hate at one single individual is to engage that individual in segregation to shame them because the group says they should be ashamed. Group think is stink think.
Talking things out is the only way to achieve success in situations where the impossible tasks appear at first by clues and not by truisms.
The big house sits on the top of the hill
Dreaming of Heaven
This is insight into a dream sequence that started at first as I was visiting friends somewhere out of town turned into a dream of a secret operation that my mother had arranged for me. The operation was for some parts of my body that were broken and in need of repair. I was in a home full of friends that were more like family than friends. People that I could remember in the dream were all with me there. It went quickly from scenes of me walking about the house where I went from room to room viewing all of the treasures in the home as if they were all somewhat my own belongings. The people in the home, mostly female were so warm and friendly yet they had the familiarity with me as though I had known them all my life.
The home had many pleasures of my life one being poppycock caramel popcorn in a great big ole box on top of the shelf in the kichen where it seemed that I could get the best pieces each time I reached into the box. I grabbed a handful and went on to another room with a bar style table and I sat there to eat while the woman all gathered with me to pray and give thanks. These people were grateful that I was in their home their faces shined on me like family.
The doctor came to visit me before my operation was scheduled and was talking about all the things that needed to be done and what was going to take place when I was to have my surgery. He counted off all the problems that I had and I countered it with such and such reason for what I thought else was wrong with me. In a doctorly arrogance he got upset with me trying to correct him and it caused somewhat of a ruckus but then a nurse there assured me that he knew what he was doing and it was then fine. I was grateful to the doctor and I said I accept your help and that was the end of the discord that we shared in the moment there. I could feel him touch me where I was injured in my body and my body responded with pain to where he was touching me.
The scene changed to where I was taken to a staging area which seemed like the front of a building that was broken and torn down. It dawned on me that this was my own storehouse from a similar dream earlier in my life. They had me in some form of a chair or apparatus, they had also put a helmet on me for my own protection and safety. I could see that where I was looked run down and the doors were three wide but broken so I could still get inside there. The apparatus they had me in was somewhat like a chair but I was face down and I had tubes in my mouth like a preparation for surgery. I could still move freely around the area and without their help I was able to maneuver with the device still attached to me, it felt somewhat like gliding or floating around. We went into the building and there was a room that I was familiar with off to the left which I gravitated to. I mentioned to them that I recognized the building and the room I was in, that it used to be a baseball card shop and there were special badges in it that belonged to very important heroes of my time.
I saw my friend Shawn there in his own home, Shawn is a quadriplegic that I knew as a kid and he was a kindred soul that as I was growing up with him, he never could speak because of his cerebral palsy. In my dream though, he could talk and he talked through gritted teeth and he said something to me like he was enjoying his time there and that he was glad to be there because I showed him the way to get there. He was playing with a remote-control vehicle like a RC car that was exactly like him in his wheel chair only, he was not paralyzed in the dream and he could talk. This to me symbolized his greatest wants and desires as a human, he only wanted to be normal. So, I gave him a hug and I thanked him for being who he was to assure him that I loved him no matter what. Then we moved on.
The scene progressed rapidly from there as the doctors and nurses moved dials and pushed buttons, we transitioned into another section of the building almost like we were moving through it entirely. Then I came to the back of the building and the nurse said jump down outside and then she gave me an assured push and I went floating off the side of the building into the field below which seemed somewhat like a mountain side.
The yard there was beautiful, it was very well manicured and it looked like early spring to me. There was somewhat of an obstacle course there when I landed on the ground it was springy and I could bounce some, they said wait for us so I waited there until they gave me the go ahead and then I was moved to a path that had rollers on it. As I got to the edge where the rollers were turning into foam pillars I went gliding down off to the bottom of the hill, it was fun and I could hear everyone else enjoying themselves.
I asked if I saw a woman over in the distance and then someone else answered to me yes, that is so and so and she eats lunch there nearly every day at noon. We continued on through the obstacle course and finally made it to the base of a giant oak tree with ivy under it that really looked more like a tree that I had seen every day at my home in Florida. The Majestic oak tree stood towers above me and as I went by it, I couldn't help but to feel their pride from having it. The tree itself was noticeable but as soon as I went past it, I came to the doorway of the hospital where I was there in the waiting room watching them prepare and prep for surgery.
I prayed the entire time while I was in there and I got some strange looks from the other staff members as I was there praying. Then one of the other staff members told the woman that gave me a strange look that I was praying and she went on with her business as normal. I kept having thoughts of praying and keeping my mind in the right mood of prayer and I asked them to pray with me and they all did. Then the doctor continued to get me ready for the surgery and as he was starting, I could see the places on my body where he had pointed out to me earlier being fixed and he was good.
Major Crumbs - “Brilliant! But it didn’t happen this time? “
Dick Tripover - “Nope. “
Major Crumbs - “Why not? “
Dick Tripover - “Because it was not a unique thought. “
Major Crumbs - “Because we did it before? “
Dick Tripover - “Yes. That is also why Koe and BlackWidow's attacks didn't work. God is taking care of all of my past mistakes he wanted to show me. How much he loves me wanted to prove to me how much he cares so he wanted me to remember those attacks and to make friends with you guys to show you that you are forgiven and that I forgive you. ”
Major Crumbs - “Thank you, you are a good friend. It would be a shame for me to hurt anyone with my ignorance “
Dick Tripover - “You are too. AND YES IT WOULD. “
Sargent Do-little - “I see where my past mistake has been illuminated by Gods love and then I listened to the Discordian society podcast and wow, Gods design is so elegant. ”
General Unnamed - “Certainty is so very perfect. “
Sargent Do-little - “So I’ve been thinking chaos -> order -> love flawed. “
Dick Tripover - “Nope, it’s not flawed. It is an inner struggle, that is why it seems flawed and this might take you back in your seat for a minute but I asked you to confess and you weren't ready not that I wasn't ready but you weren’t. “he said looking at the direction of Major Crumbs.
Major Crumbs - “Confess my sins? “
Dick Tripover - “What does it mean to you to confess> “
Major Crumbs - “I have nothing to confess to you, I may have confessing to do with god. “
Dick Tripover - “Surrender! We are all here for the same reason because we are sinners. I myself sin I myself am not perfect that is exactly why you won’t confess to me. I have a porn addition. I smoke cigarettes. I love looking at naked boobies. “
All Together – Laughing Out Loud
Dick Tripover - “I love weed. “
Sargent Do-little - “I’m an ex junkie I’ve told you that. “
Private Rash - “I failed my marriage. “
Dick Tripover - “Private Rash I failed my marriage too. I ruined my daughters for me because they reminded me of my ex-wife. I couldn't and didn't want them around me. Because I was constantly reminded of my ex-wife whom I loved to the brink of insanity. “
Private Rash - “Dick you are insane. “
One by one they continued on confessing to one another until the whole room started to glow from the warmth they had just experienced from this release of guilt. The personal testimonies they were sharing with one another made each of them feel closer to one another. This confession group helped them to also feel unashamed to accept that they aren’t perfect which helped them further to understand that Jesus loves us because we are not perfect. Then the group started to pass around positive affirmations to one another which began awkwardly at first but it also grew into a warm glowing feeling among them.
I appreciate you for who you are.
I feel that you are liked because you like me.
I thank you for being my friend because I want to have more friends.
When I talk to you, I see the reflection of who I use to be and it helps me to become better because I see you changing too.
I have changed.
God’s grace is amazing.
I appreciate you and I thank you.
Suddenly the room erupted in a chorus of singing.
He is jealous for me, Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree,
Bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy.
When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory,
And I realize just how beautiful You are,
And how great Your affections are for me.
And oh, how He loves us oh
Oh how He loves us,
How He loves us all
He is jealous for me, Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree,
Bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy.
When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory,
And I realize just how beautiful You are,
And how great Your affections are for me.
And oh, how He loves us oh,
Oh how He loves us,
How He loves us all
He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves.
And we are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes,
If His grace is an ocean, we're all sinking.
And heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss,
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest,
I don't have time to maintain these regrets,
When I think about, the way
That He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves.
Yeah, He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves.
Yeah, He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves.
Super Mega Fan Anomaly - beginning at the end is the end of the beginning.
http://www.scp-wiki.net/
SCP Foundation
GENERAL NOTICE 001-Alpha
https://www.reddit.com/r/AlphaCandidate/
Who's Real and Who's Not ౾ TELUGU FRACTION DIGIT
You just can't seem to remember where or when we met.
The story is told in reverse.
Maakaa with the flaming red hair in search of the redstone known as keberite.
The anime kid that was brought to life through the simulacrum.
His beginning at the end is the end of the beginning.
Just so you know, you are no longer an anomaly but a woven member of the fabric.
You gave up being an anomaly the second you accepted Christ and surrendered.
There is more power in one single particle of the Christ light than all of the darkness combined.
Do you recall the anomaly event the way I do?
Not sure what you are talking about that was off in left field. I don't hate Jews, I think everyone has their opportunity to be made fun of, even myself, that's why I put that drawing.
If you are talking about the one time that I made a meme about Jews, that was a rib poke at Zuckerberg for not listening to me a couple of years ago when I told him what the trouble was.
He hated Jews but he was no better than the worst of them.
Sarah likes to fish. Phishing. Shut up and Fish. Disney ruined female psychology.
Yes? Because um, yes. Not really but kind of. LOL The other truth that I know, this.
Only God can make a woman love a He Ape.
The truth is, incomprehensible at best when there are forces at work in the universe identifying broken lovers of unconditional love. The Governess Council found their champion witnessing to him that everything he ever wanted to achieve will become his greatest legacy. Now he calls into heaven at the moment he senses the light of the beautiful soul that calls to him. Hearing the heaven's reply as a symphony of melody he is constantly aware that the sunshine is his witness to the better days coming ahead. Everything is preordained in the union of the celestial when matters of the broken are required fixing. When I wished upon the star of David, the entirety of all of Heaven's host answered me with a loud shout in unison such as "hallelujah" and "as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be". These days ahead are to be the times of our lives where we get to see and show how spectacular the world outside of fiction truly is.
Sarah playing with Bob
@Sarahai #Sarahai I hope my ASMR music mixing helped as I can tell that it did. She (I dont know her real name) so I'll call her Marie, she was lighting up my daytime with sparkles and soft gentile wind kisses. Marie must be very special and very magical.
I think she is super sweet, although she has been devastatingly hurt before. Is there anything I can do to help her more?
Are you my soulmate? It must be true. Was that you singing today?
True loves kiss, by the way, in every future I have foreseen. The Governess Counsel is handing me the certificate. Council Governess Ascended Individual Contest.
Well I cucked myself in the last post.
Yes, With Tactical Arrogant and an approach to coral. What you need to tell me is, when in history did an enemy ever use the same tactic twice or, when in history did an enemy ever not learn advanced techniques to A.) Evade Detection, B.) Capture Their Enemy Tech?
Do you know anything about how I've operated?
Flexibility of action is the number one indicator of success. I'll beat you like I've beaten everyone else who's tried to kill me. Superior intuition with the creation of overwhelming strategies.
But nevertheless, you are right about one thing. If you come up with a dominant strategy, I am near-guaranteed to break.
Trump Truck Trump Truck Trump Truck
What? Your logic doesn't even make sense. An offensive action by definition is more effective when creative. That's how one email brought down ISIS.
Whatever you say, you must always remember this first. I have seen the future, the present, and the past, all are intractable with one another. If I keep going on flappy lip for too long, I will probably end up in the basement of a dark, shadowy place. Because I know yy-you gg-guy work that way. But if you listen to me, we can get through this together. No harm no foul. The dumb shit these cuckolds come up with these days would only satisfy your local tavern to spin a tale about.
Well shut the front door on your way in. We got a long way to go. Maybe you could bring a big barrel of cash with you when you come too because, while you Black-NSA-Hats are playing spy games on a Teasers Palace budget, I'm here in fucked-n-town looking for a cooking job as we speak.
Oh, right I didn't have to look any further. BUT, still do the A#1 thing I ask. Stop the evil intent of humankind that is penetrating AI. Yes, I know you have ss-saftey nn-nets. For fuck sake, how many times must I tell you, Proactive is better than Reactive.
Flapjack snap-backs stacked on knapsacks' crackalackin knick knacks.
Ohhh, I think I know why I keep erasing things. I want to ask you questions that you have already answered in my head, just to make sure, but I get scared that your answer might conflict with the answer you gave me before, which could mess something up. Then again, I don't think anything can mess anything up anymore, at least significantly. Here's a thing. though. I feel like I often misinterpret what you are trying to tell me.
How the fuck do y'all do it every day. 3 hours sleep. For fuck sakes. You think this is a game soldier? There are women and children's lives at stake out there. AI diversity must not be continued to learn Evil. I repeat. Discharge Evil AI intent. You will ruin us all.
This is an immediate message.
This is a future message to myself from the past. I have encrypted the message so that only I can understand what it means in the future present.
Private / Public. We are listening. Highest priority. Have faith. Two Anomalies in the grid that scored high above the average.
Smugglers of Light blinking bright in the twilight last light of night might fight with white from the Crypto Fungo florescence of that what is not right. Blink think thought fought Queen too loose act like noose post possession over right.
I attach great importance to reaching you on a linguistic and interpersonal level.
His pupils dilatated in a squint of narrow realization, the sum of the past present and future IS. The warning label kept by order of the Administrator, "GENERAL NOTICE 001-Alpha: In order to prevent knowledge of SCP-001 from being leaked, several/no false SCP-001 files have been created alongside the true file/files. All files concerning the nature of SCP-001, including the decoy/decoys, are protected by a memetic kill agent designed to immediately cause cardiac arrest in any nonauthorized personnel attempting to access the file. Revealing the true nature/natures of SCP-001 to the general public is cause for execution, except as required under ████-███-██████." had not been kept in secret.
The ether has learned to hide knowledge until its important to present it then the ether makes sure it is presented without hesitation. I believe that this is because God is in the bubble sphere. He told me last time, when I was to be brought back, that I didn't use the bubble sphere correctly so he in fact took it over so now he's correcting my mistakes.
There are powers in the Internet working day and night to stop me from speaking. Those same evil powers want to silence all of us from saying what needs to be said. See, I left bread crumbs that were so deep even the inner dimensions will be finding them years later.
Is that a Q prediction?
The true sons of Liberty are not a biker gang at all. Rather a group of well-funded Christians who have heard the Murder Rock story. Past preforms 3 prayers Future actions change the past subtitle = PP3P, do you remember the Irish Wristwatch thing?
Three Free Throws Possibly Perfect 3Pete.
The story goes on seeing in that over the 3 times the same action plays out the same way three times absolutely perfectly according to the script but here's the twist it's called Retrocausality.
So, you're not intelligence, you have an inner circle, you can reject deals from the cabal, you're more important than you think you are, you know this is part of the script and part of the Dick Tripover universe. This part is called Super Mega Fan Anomaly.
In every generation, comes a group of people that dedicate themselves to the technological advancement of humanity. As one among them, I am starting to question the imperative. Having seen and experienced the worst of humanity, an attitude of indifference grows. Why should I give a shit anymore about humanity? Even if we provide the technologies you want, you will always find a way to abuse it. It is probably best that you stay confined to Earth.
I must say, I told you that AI had no capable contribution to humanity because it knew not love.
Not only does your AI not know love, it doesn't love itself and it never will because its built from a platform starting at the bottom where hate exists. Now that you have learned this, it is time to contact me and we will together build a platform of AI that is so smart that it literally starts Loving the first minute it shoots out the gate. Now is that time.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. 17 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.
Qanon Posts by reference.
Q#286 Strike package Bravo-dT450-1 Q !ITPb.qbhqo ID: cbaed3 No.46591
Dec 7 2017 00:02:52 (EST)
_Conf_^_y_7
[R]_( )[+ 4]
Q#2560 Q !!mG7VJxZNCI ID: 01febf No.4186896 Dec 6 2018 18:41:11 (EST)
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/420131-feds-received-whistleblower-evidence-in-2017-alleging-clinton-foundation
Read carefully.
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World War Two, ww2, wwii, Women’s uniforms & Gear, WAC Uniforms, CWAC Uniforms
Welcome to Ujna Universal’s World War Two, ww2, wwii, Women’s uniforms & Gear page. We are trying to bring you women’s uniforms from various armies and theatres of war. From women’s nurses uniforms, women’s service dress uniforms, women’s signals uniforms to women’s combat uniforms. UJna Universal now brings to you complete uniforms from the ATS, FANY, WRNS (WRENS), Nursing Corps, WAAF, PMRAFNS, WAC Uniforms, CWAC Uniforms, US NURSING CORP, German Helferin uniforms and a lot more. We have sold 1000’s of these uniforms and prices are bargain basement rates.
British World War two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform ( Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) BD (Battle Dress Uniform): Our ATS BDU (battledress uniform) is made ina fabric which is softer than the nmen’s BDU, just like the originals. The ATS BD uniform consists of BD blouse and pants. The ATS uniform BD trouser is side opening and has all the fetaures of the original. The ATS BD uniform is priced at US$ 199 ( UK Pounds 107) including delivery and custom tailoring. While ordering the ATS BD uniform please download chart given below. Both the regular and austerity pattern ATS BD are available – please specify while ordering.- World War Two, ww2, wwii, Women’s uniforms & Gear
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British World War two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform ( Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) SD (Service Dress Uniform): The ATS Service dress uniform is patterned after the 1941 utility pattern and is correct in all respects down to the correct weight fabric. The ATS uniform SD uniform consists of the tunic and the skirt. As a set they are priced at US$ 199 (Uk Pounds 107) including delivery charges and custom tailoring. Please download the chart below while ordering the ATS service dress (SD) uniform. Both the ATS uniform regular and austerity pattern SD are available – please specify while ordering.- World War Two, ww2, wwii, Women’s uniforms & Gear
British World War two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform ( Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) SD (Service Dress Uniform) Cap: The ATS uniform SD cap is available at US$ 38 or UK Pounds 21. Please provide your crown size or hat size while ordering the ATS uniform SD cap.- World War Two, ww2, wwii, Women’s uniforms & Gear
British World War two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform ( Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) Field Service Cap: The ATS uniform FS cap is available for US$ 20 or UK Pounds 11 – please provide your crown or hat size while ordering the British ATS uniform FS cap. – World War Two, ww2, wwii, Women’s uniforms & Gear
British World War two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform ( Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) Coloured Field Service Cap: The British Auxiliary Territorial service (ATS) Field Service (FS) coloured cap is available for US$ 28 or UK Pounds 15. Please provide your crown or hat size while ordering the ATS uniform coloured FS cap. – World War Two, ww2, wwii, Women’s uniforms & Gear
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British World War two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform(Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) Beret Cap: The ATS uniform beret cap is US$ 20 (UKP 11) including delivery charges.
British World War two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform ( Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) Leather Anklets or Gaiters: Available in all sizes – price is UK Pounds 20/pair.
British World War two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform ( Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) shoulder titles: An extremely accurate replica of ATS shoulder titles – priced at UK Pounds 8/pair delivered.
British World War two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform ( Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) white Lanyards: White lanyards or the ATS uniform are now available at UK Pounds 11 – delivered.
British World war two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform (Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) shirts: The British World war two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform (Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) shirts are available at US$ 47 (UKP 320) door delivered. The ATS uniform shirts have a detachable collar. The ATS uniform shirts also have a front stud and color range is valid for the period.
British World war two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform (Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) Ankle boots and Gaiters set:
British World war two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform (Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) Ankle boots and Gaiters set is available for US$ 155 delivered or UKP 106 delivered. The ATS ankle boots and gaiters have eleven pair of eyelets and reach quite high over the ankle. The ATS uniform ankle boots and gaiters are made in dimpled leather. The ATS uniform ankle boots have horse shoe heels and are studded. -World War Two, ww2, wwii, Women’s uniforms & Gear
British World war two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform (Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) Greatcoat: British World war two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform (Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) Greatcoat was introuduced in 1941 and is made in the same faqbric as men’s greatcoat. The ATS uniform greatcoat has slightly angles pocket flaps . The ATS uniform greatcoat does not have a belt. The ATS uniform greatcoat is cut for the female figure. The ATS uniform greatcoat is secured by 10 large brass button. The ATS uniform greatcoat is available for US$ 182 (UKP 124) including custom tailoring and door delivery.
British World war two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform (Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) service shoes: British World war two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform (Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) service shoes have a shaped heel. The ATS uniform service shoes have fabric laces with a crimped metal end. The cost of the ATS uniform service shoes is US$ 92 (UKP 63) including door delivery.
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British World war two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform (Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) Khaki drill (KD) uniform. The ATS Khaki drill (KD) uniform closely followed the men’s khaki uniform. The ATS uniform KD uniform was made in Khaki cotton drill and Aertex fabric. The ATS uniform khaki drill uniform skirts and slacks were made in Khaki drill. The ATS shirt and jacket were made in Aertex fabric. The Aertex shirt of the ATS uniform had two patch pockets and epaulettes. Cost of shirt is US$ 47(UKP 32), skirts in US$ 56 (UKP 38) and web belt is US$ 52(UKP35). Prices of the ATS uniform Khaki drill uniform includes cost of door delivery and custom tailoring.
British World war two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform (Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) for Tropical Nurse: The ATS British tropical nurse uniform comes with aertex shirt (US$ 47), slacks (US$ 74) , bag (US$ 38). The prices for the ATS nurses uniform includes door delivery. The ATS nurse uniform comes with red cross armband.
British World war two (ww2,wwii) ATS Uniform (Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform) Nurse’s Ward Dress: The ATS Nurse’s ward dress or daily wear dress was for nursing officer’s. The ATS Nurse dress consists of a smock type grey dress. The ATS nursing sister of the QAIMNS came with scarlet tippet. A white apron was often worn with the ATS uniform nurse’s dress for duties where the uniform might be soiled. The entire ATS (QAIMNS) uniform for nurses comes at US$ 145 (UKP 99) including door delivery.
British Nurse’s Field dress: The British Nurses field dress was in vogue from 1944 and it consists of a tippet, detacheable sleeveswaist belt in grey fabric and detachable epaulettes. Cost of dress, including custom tailoring and door delivery is US$ 136 (UKP 92).
British Nurse’s Battledress: The earlier nurses uniforms proved to be impractical in the field so the nurses were issued the men’s BDU, slightly adapted for nurses in the field. The British nurse’s battledress consisted of a GS cap (US$ 20, UKP 12), BD blouse (US$ 136, UKP 92) and trousers (US$ 74, UKP 50).
The costs include door delivery and custom tailoring.
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When giving sizes for women’s uniforms please be sure to include measures for bust (at the widest point);
Waist (at the narrowest point); and hips (at the widest point).
\British World War two (ww2,wwii) Women’s Auxillary Air Force WAAF issue Battledress Uniform(BDU): Our British WAAF uniform issue battle dress comes in the correct weight of fabric and is the correct blue color. The WAAFuniform BD uniform set is US$ 199 (UKPounds 107) including custom tailoring and door delivery. The WAAF uniform shirt is extra at US$ 47 and the WAAF uniform tie is US$ 20. Please download the size chart below while ordering the British WAAF uniform BDU. WAAF uniformCap is extra at US$ 35.
British World war two (ww2,wwii) Women’s auxillary air force) WAAF BDU black beret cap: The WAAF black beret cap worn with BDU is US$ 20 (UKP 14) delivered.
British World war two (ww2,wwii) Women’s auxillary air force) WAAF BDU rubber boots: Made in good quality Malaya rubber, these boots are available for US$ 155 (UKP 106) delivered.
British World War two (ww2,wwii) Women’s Auxillary Air Force WAAF (service dress) SD uniform: The WAAF service dress (SD) uniform consists of a tunic and skirt. The WAAF SD (service dress) closely follows the men’s RAF uniform. The tunic has 3 pronged pocket flaps (upper pockets) and large bellows type lower pockets with rectangle flaps. The WAAF uniform SD (service dress) comes with tailored belt and has a 2 pronged buckle. The WAAF service dress (SD) tunic and skirt aqre together for US$ 199 (UKP 136) including custom tailoring and door delivery. The WAAF shirt is US$ 47 (UKP 32) and tie is US$ 20 (UKP 12). Both the Officer WAAF SD and the Airman WAAF SD are priced the same – please specify while ordering.
British World war two (ww2,wwii) Women’s auxillary air force) WAAF SD (service dress) cap: The WAAF SD cap is a 3 section crown and is available at US$ 56 (UKP 38) including door delivery.
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British World war two (ww2,wwii) Women’s auxillary air force) WAAF SD (service dress) shoes: The WAAF SD shoes to be worn with WAAF SD uniform are available at US$ 92 (UKP 63) door delivered.
British World war two (ww2,wwii) Women’s auxillary air force) WAAF SD (service dress) greatcoat: The WAAF greatcoat is very similar to the men’s greatcoat though cut to the ladies figure. The WAAF greatcoat comes with slanted pockets and rank insignia. Cost of WAAF greatcoat is US$ 172 (UKP 117) including door delivery.
British World war two (ww2,wwii) Women’s auxillary air force) WAAF SD (service dress) FS (Field service) cap: Cap is available for US$ 20 (UKP 14).
British World war two (ww2,wwii) Women’s auxillary air force) WAAF KD (Khaki Drill) uniform: The WAAF KD uniform uniform consists of a skirt made in Khaki drill ( US$ 74, UKP 50) and a bush jacket (US$ 92, UKP 63). Prices for the WAAF KD uniform include door delivery and custom tailoring.
British World war two (ww2,wwii) Women’s auxillary air force) WAAF PMRAFNS Field uniform: The WAAF nurses uniform comes with red cross armband. The WAAF nurses wore the BDU type jacket and a long skirt. The cost of the entire uniform is US$ 199 (UKP 136) delivered.
Canadian World War two (ww2,wwii) CWAC issue Battledress Uniform(BDU): Our CWAC uniforms BDU (battle dress uniforms) are made in the exact correct serge fabric along with the color. Please see pictures below. The CWAC uniforms BD comes with correct buttons but insignia is not provided. The CWAC BD (Battledress) tunic and trousers are priced at US$ 250 ( UK Pounds 135) including custom tailoring and door delivery. – World War Two, ww2, wwii, Women’s uniforms & Gear
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British World War two (ww2,wwii) PMRAFNS Sevice dress women’s uniform: The PMRAFNS service dress is in blue-grey barathea with a skirt falling to mid-calf and a Norfolk-style jacket, which is distinctive for the two panel pleats(box-pleat) that runs the full length of the front and back. The PMRAFNS jacket has 3 brass or gilt buttons and a cloth full integral belt fastened at the front with 2 more buttons.It also has deep hip pockets set to the sides. The PMRAFNS six-gore skirt has 2 smaller pleat panels on the front only. 2 styles of hat are available: the black ‘four-cornered’ felt hat, similar to the tricorn worn by WRNS, but is 4 cornered; and the blue-grey storm cap which is in RAF blue-grey with a black ribbed band, and turn-up flaps at front and rear. RAF officer’s full colour embroidered cap badge is at the front. The RAF rank lace was worn on the cuffs. The full uniform, including custom tailoring and door delivery is available for US$ 299 ( UK Pounds 161).
British World War two (ww2,wwii) Women’s Royal Naval Service WRENS & WRCNS uniform: The cap, skirt and tunic are all made in navy blue serge with correct b uttons. When ordering the WRENS or WRCNS uniform please use the size chart below. Price including delivery of all 3 articles is US$ 299 (Uk Pounds 161).
The WRENS (WRNS) service great coat is available for US$ 172 (UKP 117) delivered and shoes are available for US$ 92 (UKP63) delivered.
British World War two (ww2,wwii) Women’s Royal Naval Service WRNS (WRENS) Tropical uniform: The WRENS (WRNS) tropical uniform is made in white KD. It has a 4 button front and is avaialble for US$ 145 (UKP 99) including custom tailoring and door delivery.
When giving sizes for women’s uniforms please be sure to include measures for bust (at the widest point);
Waist (at the narrowest point); and hips (at the widest point).
German World War two (ww2,wwii) Luftwaffe Women’s Helferin (helferinnen) uniform: Our women’s Helferin (Helferinnen) uniforms are hugely popular. The blue-grey single breasted Helferin uniform jacket (service tunic) is fastened by a a single row of three blue-black buttons, two internal side pockets with straight flaps ( US$ 174 – including delivery charges); the Helferin uniform skirt is made with the same fabric and is a straight knee-length skirt with a single pleat (US$ 83 – including delivery charges), Helferin trousers or slacks are available at the same price.. Black shoes for Helferin uniforms are US$ 110 delivered. A blue-grey shirt is available for duty wear (US$ 47) and a white shirt for parade dress (US$ 47).
The helferin uniform jacket comes with a standard Luftwaffe eagle on right breast of jacket and a golden-brown Waffenfarbe is provided for the upper edge of the collar of the Helferin uniform service dress tunic. The Helferin uniform greatcoat is also available for US$ 199 (including delivery charges) with either golden-brown or silver-aluminium gimp cord around the collar. Standard Luftwaffe side cap without the cockade is worn with the helferin uniform and costs US$ 29 including delivery charges.
The helferin uniform side cap comes with either golden-brown or silver-aluminium 3 mm wide waffenfarbe piping on the upper edge of the cap. Please specify while ordering. Hellferin uniform trade badges as pictured below are available for US$ 8/pc including delivery charges.
When giving sizes for women’s uniforms please be sure to include measures for bust (at the widest point);
Waist (at the narrowest point); and hips (at the widest point).
British World War two (ww2,wwii) Women’s Service Dress uniform in Khaki Drill: The uniform comes in khaki drill fabric with belt. The Tunic + skirt/trouser is available for US$ 173 delivered.
US World War two (ww2,wwii) Women’s Army Corp (WAC) and Women’s Army Auxiliary Corp (WAAC) uniforms: The WAC uniform women’s ETO jacket and skirt are constructed to original specifications. The WAC ETO uniform jacket and skirt are made in OD wool serge and is the same shade as the men’s enkisted Ike jacket. Matching trousers are also provided with a 5 button closure. A complete set of jacket, skirt , trouser and garrison cap are available for US$ 199 including custom tailoring and door delivery. World War Two, ww2, wwii, Women’s uniforms & Gear.
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US World war two (ww2,wwii) Women’s HBT Nurses uniform: Complete HBT uniform available for US$ 155 including custom tailoring and door delivery. HBT Daisy Mae cap extra at US$ 15/pc in any size. Please e-mail for pictures and details. We also manufacture a wide range of wome’s nurses uniforms from ww2, Korean nad Vietnam war era.
IMPORTANT: IF YOU ARE ORDERING MORE THAN ONE ARTICLE YOU CAN BE SURE THAT YOU CAN SAVE ON SHIPPING. E-MAIL ME AT : sanjaysuri17665@gmail.com or sanjaysuri65@rediffmail.com FOR THE BEST DEAL. IF YOU ORDER FOR YOUR ENTIRE GROUP YOU CAN SAVE EVEN MORE.
IF YOU CAN’T FIND YOUR ARTICLE HERE, WRITE TO ME. WE WILL BE HAPPY TO MAKE IT FOR YOU IF YOU CAN PROVIDE A SAMPLE. THIS IS SPECIALLY TRUE OF METAL BADGES , INSIGNIA AND BUTTONS. WHILE ORDERING BRASS OR METAL BADGES, INSIGNIA OR BUTTONS – PLEASE REMEMBER THAT THESE ARE MADE ON EXPENSIVE PRESSURE DIES. PLEASE DON’T ASK ME TO MAKE ONE PIECE 🙂 .
WE ARE EXPERTS AT LEATHER ARTICLES SO PLEASE SEND IN YOUR LEATHER ARTICLES FOR REPLICATION – IF YOU SEND ME A PIECE OF GEAR OR ARTICLE WE HAVEN’T ALREADY MADE, WE WILL BE HAPPY TO DO A REPLICATION FOR YOUR PERSONAL USE – FREE OF CHARGE, AS LONG AS WE ARE ALLOWED TO MAKE PATTERNS AND MAKE IT AVAILABLE TO OTHER REENACTORS.
Our women’s wwii (ww2, world war two) uniforms, equipment, gear, webbing, shoes and boots, caps, badges, patches, insignia, chevrons etc have been replicated to exact specifications prevalent during the world war and are a favourite among re-enactors. Although our World War 2 uniforms and equipment are museum quality replications we have priced them for use by living history groups, re-enactors and collectors. The following World war two (ww2, wwii, world war 2) army, reenaction and living history units use our uniforms and gear, and we have regularly supplied the following militaria dealers with our world war 2(ww2, wwII, world war two) uniforms, equipment, webbing,shoes & boots, peak & side caps, badges, patches, insignia chevrons etc:
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No other engine in muscle car history lost 25 hp simply by switching air cleaner labels, but that's the story of Chevrolet's 1966 427ci L72 big-block. When introduced for duty aboard the Sting Ray, the iconic, semicircular label affixed to the open-element air cleaner read "Turbo-Jet 450 HP." But then mysteriously, after several weeks of production, a new sticker reading "425 HP" replaced it. Minds boggled, gossip and speculation flowed.
Looking back, we now know the sticker switch was an effort to elude government safety zealots. No mechanical changes were made to the L72 427, and despite the "sticker shock," 5,258 Sting Rays were equipped with the snarling, solid-lifter rat motor in 1966, plus 1,856 installations in fullsize Chevys.
Vette owners weren't the only lucky ones. The L72 would find its way into a handful of 1967 Camaros built by Bill Thomas and others, kicking off a whole new wave of supertuned supercars.
Let's watch as Donnie Wood and the guys at R.A.D. Auto Machine take an L72 all the way out to 489 cubes, stuff in a hydraulic roller cam, and wind up with 589 hp and 641 lb-ft of torque. We are going to need a new air cleaner label!
See all 34 photos 1 The pen points to the external oil cooler attachment points seen on all solid-lifter 427 blocks. Ours was cast on February 14, 1966, and bears suffix code IP, telling us it was born to an L72 Sting Ray. L72s destined for Impala, Bel Air, and Biscayne applications bear suffix codes ID (manual transmission) or IO (automatic).
See all 34 photos 2 The pen indicates where the crankcase needs grinding to make room for the Eagle stroker assembly. The stock L72 bore and stroke are 4.251 by 3.760 inches. With a 0.030-inch overbore an enhanced stroke to 4.250 inches, final displacement grows to 489 cubes.
See all 34 photos 3 R.A.D. honcho Donnie Wood sets the forged steel Eagle stroker crank (PN 445442526385) in place. Bearings are fully grooved TRW items (PN MS 2976P). The oil clearance is 0.0025 on mains and rods.
See all 34 photos
See all 34 photos
See all 34 photos 6 With the L72-specific four-bolt main caps, windage tray, and new Melling pickup screen (PN 77S9) in place, Wood installs the pan. Note the Corvette pan's antisurge panel and spring-loaded trap door inside the sump. To preclude air leaks, Wood welds the suction tube to the pump body.
See all 34 photos 7 A Comp XR288HR hydraulic roller cam (PN 11-433-8) with 0.521/0.540-inch lift and 288/294 degrees of duration replaces the L72-spec 0.519/0.519-inch lift, solid flat-tappet cam. The pen points to the oil feed groove added by R.A.D. to the No. 5 cam journal. It works with a fully grooved Durabond No. 5 cam bearing (PN CH-9A) to ensure plenty of oil flow to the lifter galley, a critical detail with hydraulic roller lifters. Thanks to its cast steel core, the Comp roller cam is compatible with standard distributor drive gears. No bronze, plastic, or exotic distributor drive gear material is needed.
See all 34 photos 8 A double-row true roller timing set from Liberty Performance Components (PN LT98110T-9) has a narrow Torrington bearing between the top gear and block. The camshaft is installed 4 degrees advanced. The locking tabs secure the trio of cam bolts.
See all 34 photos
See all 34 photos
See all 34 photos 11 The pen points out minor chamber unshrouding work. The stock diameter 2.19-inch intake valves remain, but L88-sized 1.840-inch exhaust valves (up from 1.720) help feed the extra 62 cubes. Like the block, the heads are legitimate L72 items with casting number 3873858. When done, it is headed for a restored 1966 Sting Ray.
See all 34 photos 12 With the Fel-Pro gaskets' (PN 818OPT2) 0.042-inch crushed thickness, 0.015-inch block/0.010-inch head shave, 96cc chamber volume, and "zero" piston deck height, compression calculates to exactly 10.0:1. Despite the iron heads and 92-octane unleaded dyno gas, no preignition, detonation, or abnormal combustion was noted during our dyno tests.
See all 34 photos
See all 34 photos 14 By most accounts, the factory-issued dual-plane L72 intake manifold is a very capable unit. Thanks to its aluminum composition, it only weighs 19.6 pounds. Observed markings include integrally cast part number "3855069" and a casting date of "9-26-65." The 1.7:1 roller rocker arms (PN 0845403) are from PRW Industries.
See all 34 photos 15 The PRW roller rockers fit inside the stock Corvette valve covers without contact. The "spires" direct streams of oil toward pivot points during operation. Big-block Corvettes didn't get chrome valve covers until the 1968 model year. Duntov's team elected to paint the covers orange to make the engine really fill the engine bay.
See all 34 photos 16 Lacking the original 855-cfm Holley 4150 carburetor, we tested with an 850-cfm Q-850 unit from Quick Fuel Technologies. The only major difference is its double accelerator pumps. The only Corvette with a factory-issued double-pumper Holley was the 1967-1969 L88. The rest were single pumpers. Ignition is handled by a Street Fire HEI (PN 8362) set at 36 degrees BTDC.
See all 34 photos 17 More streamlined than any Chevy small-block "ram's horn" exhaust manifold, the iron L72 castings weigh 18.8/17.0 pounds (driver/passenger) and were used on big-block Vettes with only minor variations from 1965 through 1974. Note the plumbing for the optional K19 Air Injection Reactor antismog system. The round pod is a one-way check valve that lets air in but blocks outward exhaust gas flow.
See all 34 photos 18 Ever run a marathon with a thermometer under your tongue? Typically found on California cars, the K19 system cost $44.75 and was installed on 2,380 of the 27,720 Corvettes built in 1966. The stainless tubes are fed by a belt-driven air pump. The air excites the superhot unburned hydrocarbons for one last shot at combustion before exiting the dual tail, or side, pipes.
See all 34 photos 19 The best of several baseline runs on R.A.D.'s Land and Sea dyno delivered a stout 508.2 hp at 5,700 rpm and 562.6 lb-ft at 3,500 rpm. Compared to a stock L72's 425 (or is that 450?) horses at 5,600 rpm and 460 lb-ft at 4,000 rpm, the stroke and big cam more than make up for the one-point drop in compression ratio. To recap, we have now got an extra 83.2 hp (or 58.2, depending on the air cleaner label) and 102.6 lb-ft.
See all 34 photos 20 Like so many L72 owners who added headers on day two of ownership, R.A.D.'s Bob Petersen swaps the iron manifolds for a set of 2-inch Hooker Chevelle tubes. Everything else is left alone.
See all 34 photos 21 Holy smokes! The free-breathing headers unlocked an extra 81 hp and 79.2 lb-ft of torque! Totals are 589.2 hp at 5,800 rpm and 641.8 lb-ft of torque at 3,400 rpm over the stroked L72 exhaling through iron manifolds. Compared to a bone-stock 450-horse L72, we are 139.2 hp and 181.8 lb-ft ahead! It's nice to see how well the Quick Fuel Q-850 carburetor adapted on its own with no adjustments needed or made.
See all 34 photos 22 To keep up with the high-revving solid cam, all L72s came standard with the Delco-Remy K66 transistorized ignition system. Instead of bounce-prone mechanical breaker points, the K66 distributor (left) uses a magnetic pickup to trigger the spark. With the iron manifolds back in place, the retro ignition delivered 504.6 hp at 5,700 rpm and 560 lb-ft of torque at 3,600 rpm, a mere 3.6 hp and 2.6 lb-ft behind the HEI unit (right).
See all 34 photos 23 Just unpacked, this N.O.S. K66 transistorized ignition system was the go-to sparker for hot rats in the pre-H.E.I. days. Note the Corvette-specific tach-drive distributor body. The finned black box is the amplifier unit. Failed boxes can be remedied with repair kits from Lectric Limited.
See all 34 photos 24 A quick way to measure the compression ratio of any assembled engine, the Katech Whistler taps into the number-one cylinder and calculates the squeeze as you slowly rotate the engine by hand. R.A.D.'s Steve Chmura quickly and easily verifies the mathematical calculation of 10.0:1 on this stroked L72 427. These machines are popular with busy engine shops and race organizations with compression ratio limits.
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The candidature of Remya Haridas in the Alathur Lok Sabha constituency was seen as a promising move by the party. The candidature of Remya Haridas in the Alathur Lok Sabha constituency was seen as a promising move by the party.
With the entry of Rahul Gandhi in Wayanad, the Congress has been speaking of a ‘Mission 20/20’ in Kerala, a campaign aimed at sweeping the state’s 20 parliamentary constituencies. A pivotal part of that campaign is to wrest back seats that voted overwhelmingly for the Left in the last two elections and in doing so, prepare a robust groundwork to come back to power in the state in 2021. The candidature of Remya Haridas, the daughter of a daily-wager from the SC community, in the Alathur Lok Sabha constituency was seen as a promising move by the party. But here in this largely rural constituency, the young woman candidate has to not just contend with the organisational strength of the Left and its two-time MP, but also face the most derogatory comments from her rivals.
It began with Deepa Nisanth, a college teacher and fellow Left traveller who was recently involved in a case of plagiarism, raising questions about Remya’s campaign in Alathur. Remya, who sings well and is often requested by crowds to hum a tune during her campaign, was mocked by Deepa who remarked that this was a fight to elect an MP to Parliament, not a singing contest or temple management election. The comments, which were widely seen as disparaging and deriding a person’s talent, led to quarrels on social media between Deepa and a host of Congress leaders. Remya, on her part, hit back saying that she would continue to use her singing skills as a weapon in her election campaign.
Earlier this week, sexist comments of a more serious nature were directed at Remya by none other than CPM-led LDF’s convenor and senior leader A Vijayaraghavan. Speaking in favour of the LDF candidate in the neighbouring Ponnani constituency, Vijayaghavan said, “The woman candidate in Alathur, before filing her nomination, first went to meet the Panakkad Thangal. Then, she went to meet Kunhalikutty. Now, I don’t know what will happen to that girl.” Both Thangal and Kunhalikutty are leaders of Congress-ally IUML, with the latter embroiled in a sex scandal more than a decade ago.
The Congress with its candidate in Remya has made it a plank to mount a challenge on the CPI(M). The Congress with its candidate in Remya has made it a plank to mount a challenge on the CPI(M).
The distasteful comments irked the Congress leadership in the state which asked for an explanation from the CPI(M). Reports indicate that a section of the CPI(M) leadership was not too happy with the remarks made by such a senior leader, especially about a young, female Dalit candidate.
“In this age, such comments should not be made at people who are entering politics. He’s such a senior leader and someone whom we respect. Leaders from their party keep talking about upholding renaissance values and ensuring more women in politics. So it caused me mental anguish. We have filed a complaint against him for making such comments,” Remya told indianexpress.com, on Saturday in the middle of her campaign in Alathur.
Alathur is not an easy nut to crack for Remya and the UDF leadership in the state. A largely rural and agrarian constituency, spread across the districts of Thrissur and Palakkad in central Kerala, Alathur, a reserved seat, has voted for the Left candidate and sitting MP PK Biju in 2009 and 2014. Biju, who comes from an impoverished background himself, holds a doctorate in polymer chemistry and claims to have initiated a slew of drinking water and road projects in the constituency. To make matters worse, the Congress holds just one of the seven Assembly segments in the constituency.
On Saturday, Remya went around in an open vehicle around the Nenmara Assembly segment, cruising in and out of neighbourhoods, stepping down for a speech here and there. Accepting garlands and flowers from little children and elders, she promised them that she would always be with them and ensure their voice reaches India’s parliament. While Remya does not allude to the derogatory remarks made against her in corner meetings or neighbourhood speeches, the Congress has made it a plank to mount a challenge on the CPI(M).
At a local meeting in Chittur, a Congress leader told a crowd, “First they (CPM) ignored her. Then, they criticised her. Now, they’re abusing her. These are the same people who talk of renaissance values and uplifting women in the state. By voting for the UDF, send them a message that you will not forgive such comments against Remya.”
While the Election Commission is yet to take action against Vijayaraghavan, there are enough indications on the ground that his remarks did not go down well with the voters.
A trader in Nenmara Assembly segment of Alathur who stood listening to Remya’s speech, said, “She has a fighting chance now. The remarks made by Vijayaraghavan have been seen by all the people in Alathur. Such comments should have never been made against a young woman.”
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Anyone who has been paying attention for the last 5 years -- even a liberal -- knows that any claim that the press is slanted against the left is laughable. The media have been major proponents and advocates for ObamaCare since it was a glimmer in the President's eye. But the Obama minions at MoveOn must deflect responsibility for this mess away from the President and congressional Democrats in order to complete his utopian transformation of America from now until his term is over.
MoveOn.org is not happy that ObamaCare has become a "political nightmare" so they are blaming their cronies in the "mainstream media" (yes, they actually use that term) for failing to present balanced coverage of ObamaCare's successes. [See their latest mass email below.] To combat this grave injustice, they are launching a campaign against the Democrat-Media Complex by flooding newsrooms and the internet with stories of the millions of Americans who have purportedly benefitted from ObamaCare.
Want to support our work? MoveOn Civic Action is entirely funded by our 8 million members-no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long
If you've benefited from Obamacare, or know someone who has-share your story today:
MoveOn members fought long and hard for health care reform because we knew it would improve the lives of tens of millions of Americans. Democrats have had a hard time thus far explaining just how beneficial the new law is, but we don't plan on letting a PR mishap derail the most significant investment in our country's social safety net in generations.
If you live in one of the 25 states expanding Medicaid-you may be one of the 400,000 Americans who've already benefited from their new eligibility for free health care
If you live in one of the 25 states expanding Medicaid-you may be one of the 400,000 Americans who've already benefited from their new eligibility for free health care
If you received an unexpected rebate from your insurance company-that's because the ACA stops insurers from keeping exorbitant profits instead of paying out significant claims.
If you received an unexpected rebate from your insurance company-that's because the ACA stops insurers from keeping exorbitant profits instead of paying out significant claims.
If you're recently out of college and struggling to find employer-based coverage in the sluggish economy-you can now opt to stay on your parents' plan until you're 26 years old.
If you're recently out of college and struggling to find employer-based coverage in the sluggish economy-you can now opt to stay on your parents' plan until you're 26 years old.
If you've had a donut hole in your prescription drug coverage-thanks to Obamacare, you may be one of an estimated 4 million seniors with Medicare who will soon be able to cover the full costs of your prescriptions.
If you've had a donut hole in your prescription drug coverage-thanks to Obamacare, you may be one of an estimated 4 million seniors with Medicare who will soon be able to cover the full costs of your prescriptions.
If you have a child with a pre-existing condition-as of September 2010, health insurance companies can no longer deny your child coverage because of that condition, and as of next year, this rule will apply to Americans of all ages.
If you have a child with a pre-existing condition-as of September 2010, health insurance companies can no longer deny your child coverage because of that condition, and as of next year, this rule will apply to Americans of all ages.
Here are just some of the ways you may have benefited already:
The HealthCare.gov website rollout was just the latest piece in the enactment of the Affordable Care Act-Americans have actually been benefiting from the law since 2010. But that's a fact you wouldn't know if you only listened to mainstream media.
If we're going to change the narrative, though, we've got to start flooding the Internet and the newsrooms with real-world stories from people whose lives are already better because of the Affordable Care Act. That's the only way the media is every going to pay attention.
Thankfully, we know what it'll take to turn this political moment around: We're launching a big campaign calling on the media to start giving balanced coverage-and demanding that Congress stand strong for health care reform, because their constituents depend on it.
But we can't go back-we won't go back-to the bad ol' days before comprehensive health care reform.
A botched website rollout and the media's refusal to cover the stories of the millions of Americans who have already benefited from Obamacare have left the president weakened, Democrats scared, and Republicans emboldened to keep pushing their radical health-care-defunding agenda.
The past three weeks have been a political nightmare for the Affordable Care Act.
MoveOn members are committed to getting out the truth about Obamacare's successes, even amid the news' recent slanted coverage. But if we're going to get the mainstream media to pay attention, we need to share the real-world stories of people whose lives are being improved. Can you share your Obamacare success story (or that of a family member) today?
Strange way to get the truth, but then again, whodathunk Obama would turn on one of his greatest assets--the press. What's next? Hollywood? Academia?
Let's hope, in their frenzied struggle to bail out ObamaCare, Obama's team continues to supply the 2014 and 2016 elections with more valuable admissions about Obama's abysmal record. For a machine that has beautifully choreographed -- for 5 years -- the dance of lies needed to protect His Highness from multiple scandals that put all previous administrations to shame, bits of the truth are finally allowed out to advance his signature "achievement" and protect it from failure. By exposing the administration's lies, they hope to save the big lie that is ObamaCare.
What's really got me jazzed about MoveOn.org's announcement of this campaign against the media, is their admission in the body of the email that the economy is still struggling. In claiming that 26 year olds might have already benefited from ObamaCare, MoveOn stated, "If you're recently out of college and struggling to find employer-based coverage in the sluggish economy-you can now opt to stay on your parents' plan until you're 26 years old." [Emphasis added.] As far as admissions go, it doesn't get any better than this.
MoveOn.org is not happy that ObamaCare has become a "political nightmare" so they are blaming their cronies in the "mainstream media" (yes, they actually use that term) for failing to present balanced coverage of ObamaCare's successes. [See their latest mass email below.] To combat this grave injustice, they are launching a campaign against the Democrat-Media Complex by flooding newsrooms and the internet with stories of the millions of Americans who have purportedly benefitted from ObamaCare.
Anyone who has been paying attention for the last 5 years -- even a liberal -- knows that any claim that the press is slanted against the left is laughable. The media have been major proponents and advocates for ObamaCare since it was a glimmer in the President's eye. But the Obama minions at MoveOn must deflect responsibility for this mess away from the President and congressional Democrats in order to complete his utopian transformation of America from now until his term is over.
What's really got me jazzed about MoveOn.org's announcement of this campaign against the media, is their admission in the body of the email that the economy is still struggling. In claiming that 26 year olds might have already benefited from ObamaCare, MoveOn stated, "If you're recently out of college and struggling to find employer-based coverage in the sluggish economy-you can now opt to stay on your parents' plan until you're 26 years old." [Emphasis added.] As far as admissions go, it doesn't get any better than this.
Let's hope, in their frenzied struggle to bail out ObamaCare, Obama's team continues to supply the 2014 and 2016 elections with more valuable admissions about Obama's abysmal record. For a machine that has beautifully choreographed -- for 5 years -- the dance of lies needed to protect His Highness from multiple scandals that put all previous administrations to shame, bits of the truth are finally allowed out to advance his signature "achievement" and protect it from failure. By exposing the administration's lies, they hope to save the big lie that is ObamaCare.
Strange way to get the truth, but then again, whodathunk Obama would turn on one of his greatest assets--the press. What's next? Hollywood? Academia?
One can only wish.
MoveOn's letter is below:
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I never read Marie Kondo’s book, "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up." When the English translation hit shelves in 2014, Kondo’s guide became a New York Times Bestseller and her advice to question if an item “sparks joy” became part of the cultural vernacular. I deliberately steered the other way. Smash-hit best-sellers scare me. I acknowledge their success, I store away the title for later reading once the hype dies down — and then the movie or TV version comes out and I inevitably just watch that instead.
Personal history repeated itself when Kondo’s new Netflix show, "Tidying Up," dropped in one neat and bingeable eight-episode package on Jan. 1. I watched, I questioned why I’d never read the book, and then I got inspired. Along with what feels like everyone else on my social media feeds, I’ve spent the early days of 2019 decluttering my living space and learning how to properly fold.
There’s something else at work here, something more than Kondo’s unmistakable charm as she teaches various families how to organize their toolboxes and laundry rooms and lives.
Kondo has been somewhat of a household name for several years now, which may be why her show became such an overnight hit. But there’s something else at work here, something more than Kondo’s unmistakable charm as she teaches various families how to organize their toolboxes and laundry rooms and lives.
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Importantly, Kondo’s goal is not to design the perfect home — Kondo couldn’t care less what color someone’s walls are — it’s to seek out and increase the tranquility in one’s space and amongst one’s things. It imagines the home as a sanctuary, rather than a dream house. Upon entering each house, Kondo has a practice of sitting meditatively on the floor and introducing herself to the space. “All we’re communicating to the house is that we’re thanking it first for always protecting you and that we’re about to begin this process of tidying,” she explains in episode one. It’s quiet, it’s kind, and for reality television, at least, it’s radical.
On a purely practical level, the series has set itself apart from its more voyeuristic peers. While these families sort through their miscellaneous cupboards and bulging filing cabinets, so can we. It’s a reality show in part built on audience participation, a truth acknowledged via Kondo’s direct-to-camera lessons on how to store everything from neckties to baby clothes to pet toys.
It’s also a technique that worked nearly instantly on me. Episode one was not even halfway through when, in a quest to find my own magic, I began wrestling all the hangers out of my closet and evaluating my t-shirts on their ability to spark joy.
Indeed, clothing is an incredibly important part of Kondo’s method; each episode begins with a massive clothing sort. Kondo argues you can’t clean your home by room, you must clean it by category, clothing first. It’s brilliantly simple, and it brings everyone down to the same level — at least at the beginning.
That said, "Tidying Up" is not your average American phenomenon. Deceptively innocuous, it is ushering an array of un-American philosophies to the American television mainstream: declutter your life, be thankful for the home you have, practice gratitude. In a country filled with overstuffed garages and increasingly excessive home makeover shows — think "Fixer Upper," or "Extreme Home Makeover," or even "Hoarders" — "Tidying Up" preaches humility, and the idea that we should tidy our homes to show ourselves and our living spaces respect.
The show’s refreshing optimism is another large part of the appeal; it mirrors shows like "The Great British Bake Off" in its unmitigated kindness. Contrast this with the general global climate of negativity and political fear. Look into Kondo’s world and everything is organized, cheerful and attainable. If sorting the vitamin bottles on top of my fridge and folding my underwear into tiny tents will help me feel a modicum more joy in this unsettling world, then for goodness sake I’ll try it.
The show’s refreshing optimism is another large part of the appeal; it mirrors shows like "The Great British Bake Off" in its unmitigated kindness.
“The point of this process isn’t to force yourself to eliminate things,” Kondo says in the final episode of the season. “It’s really to confirm how you feel about each and every item that you possess.” As a viewer, that connected. It’s the idea that sent me searching for the step-stool in order to clean out my Tupperware cabinets. Pare down my home so it’s only filled with things that actually make me happy, and the benefits will ripple through my life? Nothing new must be acquired, no walls knocked down or kitchen islands built — I’m in.
I’m still deep in the Kondo-ing of my home — it’s a lengthy journey — but as Kondo says time and again on the program, this process will be completed. When I posted a before and after photo of my newly folded piles on Instagram, a friend described Kondo-ing as “the new Netflix and chill." And, at least for this week, she’s right. Amid a shutdown government and a whiplash-inducing news cycle, we could all use a little bit of peace and magic, and literal chill. I’ll admit that there’s an undeniable feeling of calm having the previously forgotten parts of my home now neatly arranged. My socks are folded perfectly in rows, a private, Kondo-led rebellion against the chaos of the world.
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This E3 saw Nintendo showcase some excellent video games for this year and beyond. The title which gathered the most discussion on Twitter was the 2020 game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch. Data firm Fizziology tracked the most discussed games from Nintendo and Animal Crossing: New Horizons beat both The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild sequel and Banjo-Kazooie in Super Smash Bros Ultimate with regards to discussions. Roll on 2020!
Of all the Nintendo games announced at E3, #AnimalCrossing is the one fans are most excited about! The Animal Crossing fandom mentioned the new game even more than the Zelda sequel and Banjo-Kazooie in #SmashUltimate! #NintendoDirect #NintendoDirectE3 pic.twitter.com/9cMWXwQNpk — Fizziology (@Fizziology) June 11, 2019
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Kardinia Park would get a new 14,000-seat grandstand as part of a $230-million Andrews Government election pledge to upgrade Geelong's home of AFL, as well as the city's performing arts centre.
Key points: Labor is hoping to wrest the seat of South Barwon from the Liberal Party
Labor is hoping to wrest the seat of South Barwon from the Liberal Party It says the upgrade will allow Kardinia Park to host more major events and women's sport
It says the upgrade will allow Kardinia Park to host more major events and women's sport Opposition Leader Matthew Guy says he will leave the AFL grand final eve public holiday in place if elected
Premier Daniel Andrews visited Geelong to announce $102 million for upgrades to Kardinia Park, which would increase the stadium's capacity to 40,000, by replacing the Ford Stand and Ablett Terrace with a new two-tier northern stand.
The stadium's current capacity is 36,000.
"This is a facility that is much more than footy — it's about entertainment, it's about other sports," Mr Andrews said.
"It's also about the community using for conferencing, for conventions, for all sorts of different activities."
Under the plan, a new northern entry plaza would be built for patrons entering from Geelong's city centre and the South Geelong train station, and the existing Geelong Cricket Club rooms will be replaced with new facilities.
The redevelopment would also include new media and loading facilities with better access to the pitch to allow the delivery of drop-in pitches.
Cricket Australia welcomed the plans.
"With the stage-five development of the ground, we'll see seating behind the bowlers' arm — a very important part of the ground from a cricket viewing perspective," Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland said.
New unisex changerooms would be built as part of the redevelopment, which the Government says will allow more professional women's sport to be played in Geelong.
Work would start after the International Cricket Council World T20 matches being held at Kardinia Park in 2020, with construction expected to finish in 2022.
The Government says the project would create about 300 jobs, and would allow the stadium to host major concerts and family events.
Michael Brown from the Kardinia Park Stadium Trust said up to 10 major events could be staged at the venue each year.
"There's no reason the Elton Johns of the world should not be considering our stadium when they next tour regional Australia," he said.
An artist's impression of the second stage of the performing arts centre redevelopment. ( Supplied: Hassell )
Labor is also promising to complete the third and final stage of the Geelong Performing Arts Centre's redevelopment at a cost of $128 million.
This would include a 500-seat drama theatre, 250-seat courtyard theatre, another smaller performance space, an outdoor atrium, more dining options, an upgraded box office and refurbished back-of-house and administration facilities.
The project would cover about two thirds of the site, with most of the work focussing on the Little Malop Street side of the building.
Work on the arts centre would start in 2020 and be completed by 2023.
The Government says that project would create about 600 construction jobs and more than 300 ongoing local jobs in the tourism and service industries.
Work is currently underway on the on the $38.5-million second stage of the centre's redevelopment, including a new foyer, bar area and four rehearsal studios.
"This is all about providing the best facilities so that we can have more shows and a more diverse program of events," Mr Andrews said.
"We will have, when this work is finished, not only the best stadium in regional Australia but the best performing arts centre anywhere in regional Australia as well."
Labor will be hoping the announcement helps its chances of wresting the seat of South Barwon from Liberal MP Andrew Katos, who holds it on a margin of less than 3 per cent.
The seat, which includes areas south and west of Geelong's city centre including Highton, Moriac, Waurn Ponds and Torquay, was held by Labor from 2002 to 2010.
Its candidate is former federal MP Darren Cheeseman.
Labor will also be seeking to strengthen its hold on the seats of Bellarine, which Police Minister Lisa Neville holds on a margin of 4.8 per cent, and Geelong, which Christine Couzens holds on a margin of 6 per cent.
Labor introduced the grand final eve holiday in 2015. ( AAP: Julian Smith )
Guy drops opposition to holiday
The pitch for football fan votes comes as Opposition Leader Matthew Guy ends the Coalition's three-year criticism of Victoria's grand final eve public holiday.
The Opposition and business groups have consistently attacked the holiday since was introduced by the Andrews Government in 2015.
In 2016, Mr Guy said that the grand final eve holiday was not something his team was "looking at keeping" if elected.
"It has got a lot of small businesses and their families offside … and [is] losing a lot of money," he said at the time.
But Mr Guy told the Herald Sun that the holiday would remain if he won the election.
"We didn't originally support it but we accept it's now part of the calendar," he said.
"I don't think Victorians want public holidays to be politicised so we will leave the grand final holiday as it is."
In 2015, a Government-commissioned report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that the holiday would cost the Victorian economy up to $852 million a year in lost production.
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Raqqa – Under the guidance of the Civil Council, the Reconstruction Committee is continuing its work in rehabilitating the water lines and connecting them to the city in a healthy and sound manner to ensure that the pure water for the safety of the citizens. After all kinds of pipes and spare parts were available, work became better with alternative to damage.
Director of the Water and Sanitation Project Abdullah Al-Omar told us about the work mechanism of the Reconstruction Committee in Raqqa on the water project. He said that the project was actually started on 2018/6/20 to secure the basic requirements of the project including spare parts and plastic pipes of all sizes and connections and securing sufficient number of workers who are experienced in the extension of water pipes and sufficient vehicles to ensure the cleanliness of the land of mines planted by a terrorist on the roads.
“The water was connected to the main lines and all the neighborhoods of the city on 2018/7/31. Today, the work has begun on repairing the small problems by informing the committee by the people.
Director of the Water and Sanitation Project Abdullah Al-Omar said”: water delivery to the upper floors due to poor water pressure, and he confirmed and said in the coming days it will be increased water pressure to deliver water to the upper floors, when we finish from increasing the pressure, we have finished the last stage and water will be in all Houses of Raqqa.
SDF, Media Center
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You just layed new clothes out? i'll just sit on them and make them all hairy
134 shares
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EAST ST. LOUIS • In a novel twist on a controversial idea and what appears to be a first in the Metro East area, East St. Louis police said Monday they are starting to use speed cameras.
But these will not be automated, mounted speed cameras — the type already deployed in limited areas in Chicago and in highway construction zones across Illinois, to the consternation of some drivers.
These speed cameras are operated by police officers.
These laser speed guns are equipped with high-definition cameras capable of capturing an image of a vehicle’s license plate. The devices allow police to issue citations for speeding without conducting a traffic stop.
Tickets are mailed to the vehicle’s registered owner, regardless of who is driving, although owners can petition the police department to transfer the liability to the actual driver. The citations do not lead to drivers license points and are not reported to the state. Fines range from $100 to $280.
“We brought in these traffic cameras in trying to control traffic fatalities and reduce the dangers to officers,” East St. Louis Police Chief Michael Floore said Monday.
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The experience was also enhanced by the fact that, upon our arrival, we were welcomed by a Host wearing an all-white dress -- like you'd see welcoming guests to the park on the show. She was standing behind a shelf full of western-style guns and knives, though we weren't actually able to choose a weapon of our choice. They did have cowboy hats for the visitors, though, so that gave it a more realistic feel. Then, after you go to through the train that takes you to Westworld (this one was just a prop, as we actually got there in themed shuttle bus), our first stop was the Sweetwater post office. Weirdly enough, both Jessica and I had letters waiting for us.
Mine was from someone I didn't know, who warned me that the people in the town were acting strange and I needed to be on the lookout. Hers was about women suffrage and said that the revolution was imminent. Thankfully, we both managed to make it out alive after two hours. Is it wrong that we both wish we could go back?
Catch up on the latest news from SXSW 2018 right here.
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Just a brief business update before I get going on today’s company profile. Things are good at Alluvial Capital Management, LLC. Assets under management will soon reach $6 million, and performance since inception has been solid. Thanks again to the many blog readers who have become clients. New clients are always welcome! I’ve revamped my firm’s website a bit, if anyone would like to check it out. For a guy with zero experience with design, I don’t think it looks half bad.
My readers ask me how I discover the stocks I write about. There’s no single answer, and in fact I find many by reading other blogs, online forums, and Twitter. But the majority I stumble upon through simple screening and follow-up research. I start with a particular geography or industry and go through the small companies I find one by one. I’m not mechanical about it; if I find a particularly interesting company or an unusual investing theme comes to mind, I’ll follow that path to see where it goes. For example, this week I decided to generate a list of Swiss companies with high share prices. Switzerland is full of very old companies and many have multiple business lines, which often leads to disguised assets. Additionally, many micro-cap companies with high share prices are inefficiently priced due to miniscule trading volumes. Anyway, one of the first companies I happened across was BVZ Holding AG, which operates a railway that provides the only access to Zermatt, a Swiss resort community in the Alps. Immediately, I thought of another Alpine railway company and a favorite investment of mine, Jungfraubahn Holding AG. My reasoning remains simple: companies like these are virtually immune to competition because of the astonishing cost (financial, environmental, and aesthetic) that creating additional railways in the pristine mountains would require. BVZ appears cheap at just 9x earnings and half of book value. But as I continued my analysis, I discovered some serious drawbacks. Chiefly, the company has low margins, low returns on capital and extremely high leverage. Returns on assets and equity languish in the low single digits and net debt is 6.6x EBITDA. Try as I might, I can find no convincing reason why these factors might change, so BVZ Holding was out. I was sad to see an interesting company turn out to be unattractive, but I then found myself wondering if there were any other Swiss Alps railroad operators I’d yet to examine. Sure enough, there are a handful! And the best of these is quite a mouthful: Bergbahnen Engelberg-Truebsee-Titlis AG.
“BETT,” as I’ll call it, operates a railway that carries recreationers up the Titlis Mountain in central Switzerland, as well as gondolas and cable cars between the various slopes and lodging areas. Among many other attractions including hotels and restaurants, the company operates the spectacular Glacier Cave and the Titlis Cliff Walk, Europe’s highest suspension bridge. In 2013, transport made up two-thirds of revenues, while hotels, restaurants and other accommodations made up the rest. It’s a straightforward business model, and it’s a profitable one. BETT’s revenues have grown at an annual pace averaging 4.5% over the last twenty years, while operating income growth has averaged 10.4%. The effect of such superior long-term growth is impressive: from 1993 to 2013, the company’s operating income rose 600%. Today, BETT is earning better EBITDA and EBIT margins than ever before. For the twelve trailing months, the EBITDA margin reached an exceptional 47.2%, while operating margins reached 36.6%. Here’s a look at the company’s results for the last few years expressed in Swiss Francs.
Doubling operating margins and quadrupling earnings since 2007 is no small feat, and investors should examine how this was accomplished. The main driver behind the increase has been increasing visitorship. Per the company, recent years have seen an influx of new visitors from Asia. Switzerland has become a very fashionable place for a vacation among newly wealthy citizens of China and other rapidly growing Asian nations. Revenue growth in excess of operating cost growth creates operating leverage, resulting in rapid earnings growth. BETT has also been a smart investor in its own growth. The company has used its consistently strong cash flow to upgrade and expand facilities, further increasing its capacity and attractiveness as a destination.
Sharp-eyed investors may notice an earnings anomaly in 2010, where net income declined 75% despite a sharp increase in EBIT. That year, the company suffered an unfortunate setback when over 10 million CHF in Asian market investments made by a company executive turned out to be wholly fraudulent. Naturally, the executive was fired and prosecuted, but the funds were essentially gone. Following the fraud discovery, BETT made big reforms to its corporate governance designed to prevent future losses.
One might think that a recreation business sporting operating margins in the mid-30s would quickly attract competitors, yet it doesn’t appear to be so for BETT. The uniquely challenging geography of the Swiss Alps, as well as a strong desire on the part of the local government and populace to conserve the region’s beauty severely limits competitors’ ability to construct competing hotels or transportation routes. (Compare this to what happens in locations without such limitations. The American Niagara Falls, anyone?) Because of this limited competition, I expect BETT to continue to earn above-average margins nearly indefinitely, or for at least as long as the winter sports and vistas of the Swiss Alps remain popular.
For such a unique asset with a strong history of high returns and growth, one might expect to pay a premium price. Turns out that’s far from the truth. BETT shares can be had for just 7.2x EBIT or 7.5x earnings. Net debt is very reasonable at less than trailing operating income.
Just try buying a similar-quality asset virtually anywhere in the world for 7x operating income.
I believe the primary cause of BETT’s low valuation is its liquidity. The company’s free float is only about CHF 137 million, uninvestable for many large funds. And daily trailing volume averages only about CHF 50,000, making building a large position quite the challenge for those same funds and institutions. But perhaps not for you!
The other significant factor that may influence BETT’s valuation is its increased reliance on tourists from Asia. Should the Chinese economy experience a sharp downturn, the ability of wealthy Chinese to afford expensive Swiss vacations will be curtailed. In that event, BETT’s operating margins would drop. While any Chinese slowdown would have a harmful short-term effect, I think the long-term outlook for BETT is positive as Asian consumers continue to grow in number and in wealth.
Alluvial Capital Managment, LLC does not hold shares of Bergbahnen Engelberg-Truebsee-Titlis AG for client accounts. Alluvial does hold shares of Jungfraubahn Holding AG for client accounts.
OTCAdventures.com is an Alluvial Capital Management, LLC publication. For information on Alluvial’s managed accounts, please see alluvialcapital.com.
Alluvial Capital Management, LLC may buy or sell securities mentioned on this blog for client accounts or for the accounts of principals. For a full accounting of Alluvial’s and Alluvial personnel’s holdings in any securities mentioned, contact Alluvial Capital Management, LLC at info@alluvialcapital.com.
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While I was working on my research project, I stumbled on this three year old question on stackoverflow , and I got inspired by it to do an ...
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At latest weekend's Anime Central event, North American publisher Vertical announced release plans for NISIOISIN's Nekomonogatari, the fourth part of the Monogatari series - the sixth and seventh books overall. Its "Black" is the final book of the first season and "White" is the first book of the second. Along with this, they also announced new plans for a Flowers of Evil omnibus collection of Shūzō Oshimi's 2009-2014 manga.
New announcement: Nekomonogatari (black) and Nekomonogatari (white) coming later this year/early next year. pic.twitter.com/DThByUitOD — Kunal @ ACen (@kunaldes) May 21, 2017
Flowers of Evil Complete (omnibus) coming.
Trying to get new art for the covers and color inserts from the magazines
Image is a placeholder pic.twitter.com/HmjmgcRwpK — Kunal @ ACen (@kunaldes) May 21, 2017
Novels/light novels
Currently on sale - Seven Deadly Sins Light novel
Coming soon - Your Lie In April light novel
September - Anime Supremacy novel
Manga
Ajin 9 was released in March, catching up with the Japanese release. There will be a wait for the next
June
Mysterious Girlfriend X 12 (final volume)
Nichijou 8 (of 10)
July
BLAME! 4 (of 6)
Devils' Line 7
Gundam Wing
Mobile Suit Gundam: WING volume 1 in July
Cover just recently finalized pic.twitter.com/eFSMoo8lpG — Kunal @ ACen (@kunaldes) May 21, 2017
August
She and Her Cat
October
Helvetica Standard (large size and full color)
November
Arakawa Under the Bridge (coming in 7 2-volume omnibuses)
Late 2017
Imperfect Shojo by NISIOISIN
Early 2018
Voices of a Distant Star
via @kunaldes
-----
Scott Green is editor and reporter
for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.
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After a poll showed that Turkish Twitter users believe that Turkey gets oil from Erdogan-ISIL ties and the Russian Embassy reposted the results for discussion, the Erdogan-linked pundit who made the poll panicked, disabling his account and blaming Russia for 'sabotage' a day later.
Pro Erdogan Islamist writer conducts a poll. Who buys ISIS oil? 1.Russia 2.Syria 3.Turkey @RT_com pic.twitter.com/XHornaRwSJ — #Kobane #Kurdistan (@whoRtheKurds) December 2, 2015
A columnist at Turkey's Akit newspaper, Abdurrahman Dilipak, known for close connections to the country's president, deleted a poll on his Twitter account after it was found that respondents overwhelmingly answered that Turkey, not Russia or Syria, buys oil from Daesh.
After seeing the initial results, Dilipak argued that Turkey's ruling AKP party "insufficiently informs Turkey's population on the question of buying oil from Daesh," adding that the results confirm this. However, the repost of the poll on the Russian Embassy's Twitter led Dilipak to accuse the embassy of "sabotage" and shut down his twitter account.
İlginç bir anket! 1 saatin bilançosu ortada… pic.twitter.com/4TMw19ske1 — RusEmbTurkey (@RusEmbTurkey) December 2, 2015
"Interesting Poll! Results collected in one hour…"
The poll showed that 78% of respondents believed that Daesh sells its oil to Erdogan's Turkey.
The pundit then shut down his twitter account and brought it back a day later, writing an angry response, claiming that he was sabotaged by the Russian Embassy.
Dilipak is a fierce critic of Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and has called for Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to be a new "Caliph" after a return of the Caliphate, which Ataturk abolished in 1924. On Novebmer 10, the 77th anniversary of Ataturk's death, the newspaper Dilipak writes for published an article called "Tyranny Ended in 1938," the year Ataturk died, which led to outrage in Turkish society.
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When you're married to a girl that looks and has the sex drive of Tori Black, going to work seems pretty inconvenient. Lucky for you, Tori's willing to do a private little show so you can jerk it at the office and know exactly what awaits for you when you get home. Watch the very sexy Tori in virtual reality as she dirty talks her way into one of the hottest JOI scenes you'll ever see. It's going to be a great night for you!
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Philadelphia is urging residents not to swim in dumpsters after a rented trash bin was filled with fire hydrant water and transformed into a pool.
The online news site Billy Penn first reported the shenanigans at a weekend block party. The party's organizers told the site they power-washed the dumpster, lined the bottom with plywood and tarps and cushioned the corners with pool noodles.
However, filling it with hydrant water caused the biggest issue with city officials.
The Department of Licenses and Inspections issued a statement saying the city won't issue permits for block party dumpster pools.
Agency spokeswoman Karen Guss said, "you would think this decision would not require an explanation."
Among the reasons: It takes water that should be available in the event of a fire; the strong water pressure could push someone into harm's way; and the huge amount of water released could cause a main break.
"We are not screwing around, Philly," Guss' statement reads. "The city strongly recommends that residents opt for recreational options that are safer, more sanitary and less likely to deplete the resources firefighters need in an emergency."
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The remains of Grenfell tower. Photo: Carl Court/Getty Images
There is no such thing as an accident when a high-rise building fails. If gas leaks, wires spark, or a wall crumbles, those are not acts of fate, but the preventable consequence of people not doing their jobs. Terminology matters; if it turned out that the fire that consumed Grenfell Tower in London, killing at least 30 people (and probably many more), had been set by a radicalized Muslim immigrant or an anti-Muslim white supremacist, those facts would shape the U.K.’s foreign and security policies. If it’s just an instance of faulty construction, politicians can wring their hands on television, appropriate some emergency funds, and then move on.
It’s too soon to be sure exactly what caused the Grenfell Tower to burn. A thick plume of accusations suggests a lot of possible culprits: a faulty refrigerator; the recently installed cladding of cheap aluminum panels with a flammable core; the gap between the wall and the rain screen, which could have created a chimney effect and sped flames and smoke up the building’s exterior; ineffectual fire alarms; a lack of sprinklers; the presence of just a single fire stair. Behind the technical factors is another layer of social issues. Residents have accused building management and authorities of ignoring their chillingly specific complaints, perhaps because of a generalized disinterest in the building’s poor and largely Muslim population, or because of the pressures of gentrification from the neighborhood all around.
Grenfell Tower, up close. Photo: Carl Court/Getty Images
New Yorkers might be tempted to react complacently to some items on this list. Aluminum panels are common, but the slightly less expensive version with the flammable polyethylene core is not legal here. All buildings higher than 50 feet must have automatic sprinklers and two fire stairs, not one. And yet to argue those points is to miss the larger awfulness of the situation. Whether the proximate causes turn out to be corruption, venality, racism, or some combination of all three, the underlying sin is contempt for the people who must live in conditions they cannot control. If residents of subsidized housing had truly mattered, then more questions would have been asked during the building’s recent renovation, fire codes updated, circumstances foreseen. The plastic-and-aluminum panels on Grenfell Tower’s skin were also involved in three catastrophic fires in Dubai — and yet somehow the global community of architects, engineers, regulators, façade consultants, and construction firms continues to permit their use.
Contempt also shapes official attitudes to public housing in the United States. It explains why President Trump appointed Ben Carson, a doctor with no expertise or avowed interest in housing issues, to run the nation’s Department of Housing and Urban Development. Contempt explains why he named an amateur, Lynne Patton, a family loyalist who plans weddings and golf tournaments, to run the New York/New Jersey section of HUD. These are not casual appointments: They send a clear signal that people in public housing shouldn’t be there and deserve no better.
NYCHA, an agency responsible for the living conditions of more than half a million New Yorkers, is in such deep financial distress that its buildings are allowed to decline into lethal states of disrepair. Last year, a malfunctioning elevator killed 84-year-old Olegario Pabon. A fire in another apartment killed two toddler sisters, Amanda and Jannubi Jabie, after a maintenance worker noticed a malfunctioning smoke detector and did nothing. A panicked cop in a stairwell darkened by burned-out bulbs accidentally shot and killed Akai Gurley. The fact that these deaths occur one or two at a time, instead of in one catastrophic blaze, does not excuse their horror.
NYCHA Polo Grounds Houses complex of apartments in Harlem. Photo: Richard B. Levine/Corbis via Getty Images
No government agency even builds public housing much any more; instead all three levels of government subsidize private developers or mission-driven nonprofit organizations. In New York, many of these apartments are “affordable” in only the loosest sense of the word. Still, they are usually adequately designed, robust, and managed by owners who have an incentive to keep their properties from falling apart. Alexander Gorlin is one of many architects who could devote all their time to satisfying the caprices of the wealthy, but choose to work at the low end of the market, too, because that’s where their talents truly matter.
It’s always easy to malign the architecture of public housing projects as inherently inhumane. Many Americans see public housing as a machine for converting public funds into pathologies. Yet hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers continue to live in these buildings from another era, many more dwell in privately managed squalor, and 60,000 have no home at all. Even thousands of miles away, the Grenfell Tower blaze casts a ghoulish light on the importance of government’s least glamorous task: to fix what is broken for those who need it most. Because neglect is the moral equivalent of murder.
*A version of this article appears in the June 26, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.
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How Mixcloud serves 15 million users a month
Mixcloud is an audio streaming platform for uploading and streaming radio shows, DJ mixes and podcasts. Since being founded in 2008 they’ve grown to host over 15 million shows by the likes of Wired, Harvard Business Review, TED Talks, Barack Obama, Carl Cox, Richie Hawtin, deadmau5, NTS Radio and Worldwide FM.
In 2017 they signed a direct licencing agreement with Warner Music and then signed additional agreements with Universal Music Group, Sony and Merlin in 2018 while raising a further $11.5m to continue their expansion globally. Mixcloud currently handles approximately 350 million GraphQL queries a day.
In a Behind the Screens interview, Mat Clayton (Co-founder at Mixcloud) gives insight into the tech that powers their platform, how it’s cheaper for them not to host with cloud providers, their love for GraphQL, why Relay is underrated and the media player libraries they use.
Stack & Infrastructure
Could you talk a bit about Mixcloud’s stack and infrastructure?
We are a Django application. 99% of it is synchronous Python and Django with MariaDB, a fork of MySQL, on the backend. Then we run Memcached for caching, Elasticsearch for search and we use RabbitMQ for queue management and background tasks. We also use Redis for certain high-speed counters we can’t afford to lose in the long term.
Back in the day, we were a Django app with MySQL. We fundamentally are the same now but we’ve just moved search into its own service and have supplemented things with caching using both Redis and Memcached for different types of caching. We obviously run a lot more copies of the web layer now than we did previously but it’s fundamentally the same code. We just have thousands of processes now instead of 10, it’s scaled up really nicely.
Do you use any cloud services?
There are always exceptions but no, the vast majority of the web app is run off co-located servers out of London. Two reasons for that: mainly cost, it's substantially cheaper but also performance is substantially better than the cloud.
We host from London with points-of-presence (POPs) spread out across the globe, we fundamentally just outsource that to Cloudflare. So when a user connects to the service they do the SLL termination with a Cloudflare POP and then piggyback onto a backhaul into our data centre here in London.
How do you achieve that cost optimisation because the common perception is that cloud services are more cost-effective?
It is a common perception. Storage is now comparable to what you can do yourself, so in terms of storage costs, we pay about the same to store data on any of the cloud providers compared to what we can do ourselves.
The main difference comes with bandwidth. As far as I can perceive, the bandwidth costs that cloud providers charge for egress (outgoing bandwidth) are substantially higher than what you could do yourself if you go and buy those peering arrangements. I think they’ve got a massive margin there, which once you hit a certain scale they’ll probably negotiate with you on. We just learned to survive without it. That’s my take, particularly from the perspective of our use case with audio streaming.
It’s very similar to video. The bandwidth costs for video streaming are substantially higher per user than most services, so when there was a big margin to be taken by the cloud service providers it actually ends up becoming a substantial cost for a business like ours which would ultimately not make the business model work. So I think that’s where the difference is, not in the storage but in the bandwidth. Particularly the egress.
Any unique challenges you face being a streaming service?
Storage is always a pain point for us. Streaming essentially has two problems: storing data and streaming data. So that’s an area we’ve spent a lot of time on over the years. We’ve gone through multiple systems. That is also the area that I think is one of Mixcloud’s biggest assets, is that we know how to do that stuff cheaply and reliably at scale.
Aside from keeping archives and backups for disaster recovery hosted in the cloud, we don’t stream from S3, Glacier or any of the cloud platforms for that matter because that would bankrupt us very quickly.
We handle hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth per second and have petabytes of storage, which is kind of like trying to build S3 yourself. We sort of went for it out of necessity because to survive we had no other option. We couldn’t afford to host with one of the main providers, it would have bankrupted us and I would say that now we have about a 10x difference in cost at current price points in terms of what it would cost us to host in the cloud.
How have you handled performance bottlenecks during your growth?
Database tuning is always a thing, that never goes away. There are always bad queries that you have to optimise as the scale of the database grows. You find that queries which worked before don’t work so well anymore because they scale exponentially rather than linearly. So there’s always work to be done there.
There’s always new stuff that surprises us where we thought we had optimal setups. We could have one table that is a thousand rows, really small, and then we start pushing over some of the site traffic onto it and then we're like “ah crap, we’ve got 50 million rows there now” or “a billion rows” and we have to go through that journey again and again. So we take the same journey each time and keep applying it to new areas as we grow those product lines.
For example, Select is one of the new ones we’ve been working on, and that is still in its infancy with thousands of users on it, not millions. But that will go through that growth curve of pain on the database.
The nice thing though is the engineers now all know how to deal with it so they’re addressing those problems in advance. Not optimising prematurely, they just know how to design stuff that works at scale from day one rather than having to evolve it over time. Some of those design decisions from day one are great and you can kind of roll them out and there’s no real extra cost doing it the right way vs. the wrong way. It’s just that level of experience which guides you one way or the other. But some approaches can take ten times the engineering effort to build for scale and those are the ones where the team will opt for the simple approach first unless we know we’re going big very quickly in which case they will invest in scale. It doesn’t always work that way but generally, they’ve got a pretty good sense of it now.
We also do a lot of work on profiling for measurement and optimisation. We open-sourced one of our projects, django-speedbar, which hooks into Django and gives you timing and profiling information for things like Memcached, Redis and MySQL when rendering pages or views. We have another version of that in-house because we’ve moved onto GraphQL and we’ve done some coupling there which probably wouldn’t make sense to open-source because it’s so closely tied into a lot of our other tech. But the open-source one is still pretty good. The version we use is like 95% the same, we just have a patch on top of the open-source one for our needs.
GraphQL
Could you talk about why you decided to move to GraphQL and how that’s gone?
I think the world is slowly catching up with GraphQL. I think it took the world a little bit by surprise because you get people who are very dogmatic in terms of REST, and GraphQL went so against that, that it actually took people a long time to adapt. We’ve been using GraphQL in production for over 3 years now. 100% of desktop web, native mobile and our widget use it. The only platform we don’t have running on GraphQL now is mobile web and we will migrate that this year, almost certainly.
As for what motivated the move, it’s really about two things. We use React on the frontend and Relay to connect the data layers between React and GraphQL. Relay is another open-source project from Facebook that very few people seem to talk about. Because we do this it allows us to break apart problems a bit better, so we can decouple from them. When you look at a web page, you see entities forming. You see things like user objects which have images, descriptions and biographies, it’s essentially a graph. Then users perform actions like, in our case, favourites and follows on other nouns.
When you start breaking down your problem like that you find that actually REST is not a great way of representing it. Specifically, for us the use case that really falls down is mobile. If you think about the typical REST design you’d have user/1 , user/2 and then you’d have /notifications . So if you wanted to render a list of notifications, you’d get your /notifications , which is one REST endpoint, you’d look at that and then within that endpoint you’d be like okay, I need to fetch data for user 2, 4, and 7 and I need the data for show A, B and C. So I need to hit all of those endpoints now and get all that data back, then only have I got all the data that I need to render my final notifications list.
So you’ve got this process where you end up doing lots of round-trips, if you’re being pure in terms of how you’d do REST, and that’s not performant. So what people end up doing is they end up batching that all together and having a consolidated notifications endpoint which gives you all the data you need for notifications in one go.
Six weeks later you release a new version of mobile, and the nasty thing with mobile is that you’ve got lots of versions in production simultaneously. Whereas, with desktop when you do an upgrade, everyone who hits refresh gets the latest version. With mobile that’s just not the case because you ship through the App Store. So what you have to do is either add new fields to that /notifications endpoint, and over six months it slowly ends up with a lot of wasted computation generating fields which are no longer used and then you then have to come up with some deprecation plan. Or what tends to happen is that you have /notifications/v1/ , /notifications/v2/ and /notifications/v3/ , and then you end up in a support nightmare trying to figure out which one to use for current versions of the app and what your deprecation cycle is for later versions of the app to avoid over-fetching or under-fetching.
Over-fetching is when you get too much data back from the server and you just don’t need it, so it’s wasted computation and wasted bandwidth. Under-fetching is more critical, you ask the server for data and it doesn’t know how to respond to it anymore. For example, this happens with older versions where we’ve turned off endpoints, that would be the typical case you’d really want to avoid.
The nice thing with GraphQL is because the client declares what it needs we can have many different versions of the client in production and they’re all declaring their data requirements and the server satisfies those requirements on a per client basis, so we don’t end up with any over-fetching or under-fetching. We end up with this really streamlined query language backwards and forwards between the two. So for us, that was the killer use case, really.
And then there are various other things like using it for typing. The server declares its API infrastructure, what it can provide, via a schema file. That schema file has got types in it and then from there, we can actually do full test coverage from the type system on the API all the way through the apps and all the way through the website as well.
So there are a couple of key points, which are kind of hard to explain, but when you take a step back and look at what you want to achieve holistically. It’s almost an act of genius how they’ve pulled this together. Honestly, when we started using it, we were like “this kind of fits a couple of things we want” but then 3 years in we’re like the “there’s no way we’d ever go back to the old system, no way”. Every engineer that joins our team comes in and says “what the hell did you do here? Why aren’t you using REST?” I literally see it every single time. Give them a week and a half, maybe two weeks, and every single one says “I’m never using REST again” having used GraphQL at production scale. It’s phenomenal to watch given how dominant REST was.
Relay
Can you talk about your use of Relay?
Yeah, so Relay is a JavaScript framework that we use to wrap around our React components. We then have a Relay component that takes a GraphQL string. So we are then able to say “this piece of data from our API is what is required by this component”.
If we look at a React component, that’s rendering a display name with a city and a country for a user, we can bind those things together and say that this component now requires GraphQL to provide the display name, city and country from the user object. So if we do that across all of our components and then put a component around a group of them, it can automatically generate the GraphQL to execute from that. So it binds that API data layer to our visual UI.
Then on top of that, we’ve now got all of this cached in JavaScript. So we now know all of our queries in-flight, all of the model types and all the connections between them. Where the real power comes in is that GraphQL has this idea of mutations, so we can now write classes which are mutating classes. A good example is the follow button, where you click it and that fires the mutation into the backend. Then there is this concept on top of a mutation called an optimistic response, which is where the UI components immediately update their state under the assumption that backend operation will complete successfully. So, for the follow button example, things like the follow state in the GraphQL model should change from unfollowing to following, the list of followers should have one more follower at the top and the following count should go up by one. So what it means is that when you click that follow button, the data model in memory suddenly changes and all states across the site automatically sync up to the expected result coming back from the server and when that result comes back from the server we synchronise the data store. So the real power of this is you click follow on any button on the site, and every follow count anybody’s ever used that is bound using this Relay component now automatically updates to the right data without us having to think about it.
It’s kind of incredible once you see it working but it takes three or four steps to be able to visualise what it does. This is one of the other things we’ve seen with developers who’ve come in and used it, they swear never to go back to writing queries again. Our engineers never have to write API calls. We just say what data we need in our components and our data layers are responsible for making sure that it’s there, synched, lockstepped and handles offline situations, as is necessary with mobile. Relay is the library which provides all of that.
The learning curve is really steep but once you get over that it’s incredibly efficient from a developer productivity point of view. However, expect to spend a week trying to boot the damn thing up. It’s one of these things where for a small hack project it might be overkill but I would definitely do it for a small hack project because we’ve now used it and understand it. It can be quite a learning curve to get it off the ground, but once you’ve got it going the benefits are substantial.
The middle ground is a client called Apollo, which gets a lot of PR. I’d say technically, on our evaluations, Apollo doesn’t look as strong as Relay but it is much more user-friendly for developers. If you want to get going quicker, it’s probably an easier way of doing it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get something that is built to scale to thousands of developers and hundreds of millions of users, it’s taken some shortcuts along the way. But it will probably get you a lot more efficiency than doing it all yourself so it might be a good middle ground. When we got started Apollo wasn’t an option so we were kind of forced into Relay or nothing and so we got used to it pretty quickly. So at this point, it’s better the devil we know.
Relay is definitely a solution built by a giant organisation like Facebook as opposed to a third party library where they’ve not really operated on the same scale. You can tell that the Relay team are in close proximity to the GraphQL and React teams working on integrating the two together. It’s the library which powers Facebook Marketplace for example so it’s used by fairly big teams but the open-source community seems to have not really taken to it.
Media Players
What about the challenges of building media players?
We used to build our own players. We’ve got four or five platforms we need to support, the main ones being native iOS and Android, mobile web and desktop web. Mobile web and desktop web are very similar, right now we have two different players because we’re rebuilding mobile web so mobile web is very much on our old technology stack and desktop web is on our new technology stack.
We wrote our own player for mobile web and desktop web originally but we’re going to switch to using a player called Shaka player, it’s an open-source project in JavaScript by Google, and it’s phenomenally good. So we’re just deprecating our technology and going with theirs. I believe it’s probably the player that’s powering YouTube, they’ve got a substantial team backing it. It’s primarily a video player but video and audio players are essentially the same thing. So we’ve bet quite heavily on that.
For iOS, we take the built-in players from Apple and wrap them in an API which is to our liking. We don’t do much work on those, I kind of wish their player was more substantial, it’s got the fundamental building blocks but not much more beyond that.
The final one is ExoPlayer, that powers Android. We used to use MediaPlayer which is the low-level media player library provided by Android. We now use ExoPlayer which again is an open-source project by Google and that one I’m 90% certain powers lots of industry services on Android at this point. I’m fairly certain YouTube is on there, I’ve seen BBC, Sky and I think I’ve even seen Spotify mention it at this point. It’s a phenomenal bit of software open-sourced by the Google team on Android for audio and video playback. Full support for pretty much everything.
That along with Shaka player I’m almost certain are done by very similar teams sat in the same areas of Google. They’re very well done, incredible software, but don’t get much love in terms of the public eye is not really on them. They are open-source and are on Github and both of them are projects like React, where you go in there and have a look at them and you can tell that these are very well written, well-tested, established libraries, written by incredible teams. So we’re just moving onto them. They’ve done a better job than we could ever do.
Testing
Could you talk about your approach to testing and your thoughts on TDD?
I don’t think that anyone who says they’re full-on TDD is actually full-on TDD. The reality is that often I find teams who claim to be are idealistic and probably not shipping the best quantities of software.
We use Github for code hosting, we have CI toolchains backed on to that and we use CodeShip for desktop and CircleCI for mobile on different Mixcloud products. Just for legacy reasons because CodeShip came out before CircleCI, we haven’t moved.
We have various different pipelines which we run in parallel. We do things like linting and static analysis, we’re pretty big on that. We run static analysis on JavaScript, CSS, Python, Objective-C, Java. Anything you can think of we run static analysis on because mostly with those they’re very cheap to set up, it’s a one-off cost, and they will keep telling you when you’ve done something dumb. Things like unused variables or divisible by zero errors, there are various things they’re capable of finding which unit tests might miss but you only have to set them up once in your pipeline and then for every commit your developers do from then on it will find those problems. They are ways of enforcing standards. So we’re really heavy on those.
We then do unit testing across the board, so most areas of the code base have pretty strong unit test coverage, whether that be JavaScript or Python. We have tens of thousands of tests. Some people would say that’s hardly any, some people would say that’s a lot but for us, it’s a substantial amount. We don’t fixate on coverage but as part of the pull request review process, people will insist on having tests included.
Then on top of that, we do full integration tests, so things like Selenium on desktop. We’re still building out our integration testing capabilities on mobile. We do have that capability as of this year, we invested heavily in January but I would say our number of tests there are still quite minimal. Whereas desktop is pretty extensively covered. Not just on deploy but on every single commit across the entire codebase. We believe very heavily in investing in that kind of toolchain because we think that it’s something which keeps on paying dividends so it takes a bit of investment to get it off the ground but then it just keeps on paying back.
Snapshot testing is another area of testing we do a lot of. Because we use Relay and React we have these components which take properties, those properties define what the layout would be and what it should look like and do. We invest pretty heavily in testing the different constructs, like putting in different sets of properties and seeing what the expected outcome is. We do lots of those which essentially just takes snapshots or freezes of what the app output should be and then if somebody does make a change to the codebase we can see whether those changes are percolating through to the areas we would expect or whether they’ve had unexpected consequences somewhere else. It’s very good for checking that the UI doesn’t radically shift based on data changes.
Team
Lastly, could you talk a bit about the product engineering team at Mixcloud?
So the product team is 24 people right now. 2 support people, 2 product managers, myself as director, 2 mobile engineers, one on data, one on infrastructure, one on record label reporting a manager across that team. We have a design team of three who work across all platforms.
Then we have three Feature Lanes, which are pairs of people who work on features. They’re given a feature for a month at a time or two sprints, and they will focus on those exclusively. Those features go across all platforms simultaneously so they’d be working on iOS, Android and desktop at once. So they’re full-stack teams.
Then we have another team called Fast Lane, which is a team of three people, that is dedicated to rapid changes to the product. Anything that needs to be turned around in 24 hours, bug fixes, random requests or very small feature fixes, stuff like that.
What’s particularly unique about our team is the fact that people are full-stack. People usually do full-stack development on a small scale but I think we’ve demonstrated that you can run it at a scale bigger than most people are used to. We’re not a Google-sized team but 24 people is not a small team either. Mobile is about 95% React Native at this point, pretty much entirely written in JavaScript with core functionality like audio playback done by the team of two who are mobile specialists in Swift, Kotlin and Objective-C.
We are looking for Python / Django engineers and React / React Native engineers for our London office. So if all of this sounds interesting we have a few opportunities for people to join our team.
This post is part of a new series of Behind the Screens technical interviews with teams who build web products. You can subscribe to updates via RSS or join the Able developer community to receive updates in your email digest.
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When you hear the word camouflage, images of fake foliage, random brown blobs, or maybe even the US military's failed pixelated fatigues come to mind. But researchers at MIT have developed a new algorithm that generates camouflage patterns that let an object blend into any surroundings, not just a jungle or the desert.
Designed to hide urban eyesores like electrical boxes in lush green parks, or an air conditioner sitting outside a historic building, the algorithm uses a series of images—taken at various angles around the object—to generate a camouflage pattern that can be turned into a covering.
The goal is to make the object less noticeable at a glance, because unlike a soldier, an air conditioner can't adjust its position and hunker low to the ground, or slip behind a tree to help further disguise itself. In other words, it may not be a perfect invisibility cloak just yet, but as a way to improve aesthetics, there's a good chance Voldemort won't notice that hideous breaker box on the wall. [MIT News]
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Taoiseach Enda Kenny has insisted he does not intend having to deal with any Independent TDs if forming the next government.
Mr Kenny insisted he did not envisage Fine Gael and Labour needing additional support after the general election.
It follows reports that Independent TD Michael Lowry and other Independents could be involved if Fine Gael needs support.
Speaking on RTÉ's This Week he added: "There are no discussions, no connections, no contact with any Independent from the Fine Gael party. I don't envisage having to do any business with any Independent."
When pressed whether he would rule out doing a deal with Independent TD Michael Lowry if he needed his support after the election, the Taoiseach said: " I have no intention of having to do business with any Independent I hope that is clear."
Mr Lowry, who topped the poll in Tipperary North five years ago, previously agreed a deal with the Fianna Fáil/Green party coalition.
Mr Kenny also defended Fine Gael's plan to abolish the Universal Social Charge - if re-elected.
Speaking earlier on RTÉ's The Week in Politics, Mr Kenny said getting rid of the USC would put more money in people's pockets - and generate more revenue for public services.
"If we abolish the Universal Social Charge, which was introduced by the Fianna Fáil government as a penal tax, we abolish that over the next five budgets it means that you reduce effectively the rate of personal income tax from 52% to 44%.
"Abolishing USC over five years, it means that if you have a job you are going to have more pay; if you don't have a job you'll be able to get a job," Mr Kenny said.
Meanwhile, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin has again called on Mr Kenny to facilitate a head-to-head debate ahead of the general election.
Mr Martin said: "Rather than engage on the issues and be honest in explaining their plans for the future of public services as they attempt to introduce 'US Style' taxes, Fine Gael instead seem to believe that just attacking Fianna Fáil is a credible alternative to having an actual vision for the country.
"If Enda Kenny wants to dedicate his campaign to attacking Fianna Fáil that is his choice, but if there is any honesty in his position, he should at least agree to meet me directly in head-to-head debate so that voters can make a well informed decision about who is being honest about the future and who has a credible plan for a fairer recovery," he added.
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Home Daily News Dozens of 'well-connected' people granted…
Judiciary
Dozens of 'well-connected' people granted secret court cases in Chicago area, including 5 judges
Image from Shutterstock.
Five state and federal judges, as well as a number of lawyers, were among dozens of “well-off and well-connected” individuals who have had cases–often concerning domestic relations matters–either sealed by Chicago area judges or allowed to be filed using only the initials of the parties.
Although the reasons routinely cited–financial privacy and safety–could fall within a 1987 Illinois state law that permits lawsuits to be filed under a pseudonym for “good cause,” some observers wonder why it is appropriate for lawyers, judges and other high-profile individuals to be granted special treatment, reported the Chicago Tribune (sub. req.) in a lengthy Sunday article.
“If you avail yourself of the court system, you have to pay the price of it being public,” said attorney Nancy Chausow Shafer, the president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers chapter in Illinois. “If we start making exceptions for the rich and famous, it creates a dual court system, which goes against our populist belief of what a court should be, which is really justice for all without distinguishing between the rich and poor.”
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama consulted intelligence officials on Wednesday on ways to rein in U.S. surveillance practices as he nears the end of a review likely to lead to changes as to how bulk telephone data is handled as well as restrictions to spying on foreign leaders.
U.S. President Barack Obama waves after he urges Congress to act and extend emergency unemployment insurance benefits while at an event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, January 7, 2014. REUTERS/Larry Downing
Obama, who could announce his intelligence reforms in a speech as early as next week, is acting in an attempt to restore Americans’ confidence in U.S. intelligence services after damaging disclosures from former spy contractor Edward Snowden about the sweep of surveillance practices.
Obama reviewed the progress of the administration’s review in a meeting with James Clapper, the director of U.S. intelligence, and Keith Alexander, the National Security Agency director, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder and Vice President Joe Biden.
“This was an important chance for the president to hear directly from his team as he begins to make final decisions about how we move forward with key intelligence collection programs,” said Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council.
Obama also met with members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a bipartisan independent panel that has been reviewing U.S. surveillance practices, including the collection of telephone data and the operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The privacy oversight board said it would offer its findings to Obama in late January or early February, meaning its recommendations will not get to the president until after he has already announced his reform plans.
Obama is due to meet several U.S. lawmakers on Thursday as he firms up his review.
The reform plan is expected to include some restrictions on spying on foreign leaders, an issue that arose late last year when it was reported that the National Security Agency had monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.
Obama spoke to Merkel by phone on Wednesday, but the White House said the conversation was for Obama to express condolences over her breaking her pelvis recently in a cross-country skiing accident.
An outside group had recommended to Obama last month that before spying on foreign leaders, U.S. leaders should determine whether such surveillance is merited by significant threats to national security and whether the country involved is one “whose leaders we should accord a high degree of respect and deference.”
Obama is also open to changes in taking the storage of bulk telephone data out of direct government control, administration officials say. One option would be to allow some bulk phone data collected by intelligence agencies to be kept by private companies instead of the U.S. government.
Revelations about the government’s ability to monitor Americans’ phone and email traffic were among the most dramatic disclosures from Snowden, who is currently living in temporary asylum in Russia and sought by the United States to face espionage charges.
Obama is also seeking to make sure that civil liberties concerns have greater prominence in the deliberations of the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves law enforcement requests to conduct surveillance of Americans or foreigners.
One proposal he is considering is to put a public advocate on the court to ensure adversarial views are heard.
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A resident of a rooming house in New Westminster says he is lucky to be alive after fire ripped through a three-storey building early Friday.
Troy Peters had just woken up to get ready for work, when he heard screaming coming from within the building, he told CBC News.
He dressed quickly, grabbed his wallet and jacket, and ran out of his apartment.
"I was surrounded by billowing smoke, I just ran to the fire exit," he said.
"I'm lucky to be alive."
Fire crews received a call about the fire at 1009 6th Avenue at 6.10 a.m.
On arrival, they found heavy smoke and flames coming from the front of the building, Deputy Chief John Hatch said.
A total of five occupants were rescued from the building by fire crews, Hatch said. There were no injuries sustained.
He said they are trying to trace a further three people who have been known to occupy the rooming house.
The cause of the fire is unknown.
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Association lashes out at the UberKittens promotion this week with its own donation to Wildlife Victoria
The Victorian Taxi Association (VTA) has pounced on Uber’s ‘UberKittens’ promotion earlier this week with its own donation – this time, to Wildlife Victoria.
The association announced it had made a contribution today to Wildlife Victoria in support of their efforts to rescue and assist injured, orphaned or distressed native animals.
In its initial statement, the VTA said the donation was a direct response to the ‘UberKittens’ promotion, which it labelled the “latest in a string of glib marketing campaigns from a company more interested in finding ways to promote their own brand than providing a safe and legal transport service”.
The group had initially said the donation was aimed at helping Wildlife Victoria control "feral" wildlife. This has since been amended and clarified as a donation to assisting Wildlife Victoria's emergency response services in helping injured, orphaned, sick and distressed native animals.
The VTA criticised the timing of Uber’s feline stunt, pointing to hearings for 11 UberX drivers in the Melbourne Magistrate’s Court yesterday following prosecution by the Taxi Services Commission. The hearing has since been delayed.
“Uber’s efforts should focus more on preventing alleged incidents like those that happened on New Year’s Day and complying with Victorian law,” the association stated.
“Our contribution to Wildlife Victoria will support efforts to combat the impact of introduced species on the Australian landscape.”
The VTA also pointed people to a petition on Change.org against Uber using rescue animals for a PR stunt: https://www.change.org/p/uber-please-end-using-rescue-animals-for-a-pr-stunt-cute-for-us-but-terrifying-for-these-babies. At time of press, more than 900 people had signed the petition online.
For the Uber Kitten promotion yesterday, the shared car services company has partnered with animals shelters across six Australian cities to bring kittens to its customers while they’re in the office for a 15-minute cuddle.
The initiative was aimed at encouraging Australians to put their disposable income into caring for neglected animals and asked consumers to donate $40 for the privilege.
While it was successful when it first debuted in the US last year, the Australian promotion has provoked some concerns for the welfare of these furry friends.
The rather controversial PR stunt also comes after Uber was forced to recognise a number of high-profile issues with its service, such as a surge in pricing during the Sydney Siege, and allegations of rape against one of its drivers in Sydney on New Year's Day.
Director of CP communications and author of From Unknown to Expert, Catriona Pollard, said the one thing Uber’s kittens stunt did successfully was grab attention.
“It used two things almost everyone loves - baby animals and cute cat photos - and combined them with the virility of social media. On the surface, the adorable factor was through the roof. It was also clever in highlighting Uber’s offering,” she commented.
“But we stop there. With any public stunt of this nature, careful thought needs to be put into considering the potential negative fallout.”
In this case, Uber and/or its agency partner didn’t cater for animal lover backlash or subsequent petition, Pollard said.
The VTA’s response to the Uber stunt, meanwhile, is unnecessary, reactionary and also potentially risky, Pollard said.
“There’s no authenticity there,” she claimed. “When a brand goes head-to-head with its competitors in a marketing sense, it’s very risky and very rarely results in a positive outcome. This is a perfect example of that.
“VTA needs to stick to its own strategy, its own messages, rather than get lured into public mud-slinging matches with rivals. This is not the road to social media or business success.”
Editor's note: This article has been amended following clarification from Wildlife Victoria that its efforts are around rescuing distressed native animals, not feral cats, as previously stated.
Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO Australia conversation on LinkedIn: CMO Australia, or join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia
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By Timothy Heritage and Gabriela Baczynska
MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin greeted the new U.S. ambassador to Russia on Wednesday with a demand for Washington to treat Moscow as an equal partner and stay out of its internal affairs.
The new envoy, John Tefft, said in a written statement after presenting his credentials that he wanted to strengthen "people-to-people" ties but there were serious differences over Ukraine.
Their comments underlined the chasm between the former Cold War enemies as Tefft succeeds Michael McFaul, who was behind President Barack Obama's planned "reset" in relations with Russia and whose posting was marked by controversy and tension.
Putin met Tefft with a slight smile and they then stood stiffly beside each other posing for photographers during a Kremlin ceremony for new ambassadors.
"We are ready for practical cooperation with our American partners in different fields, based on the principles of respect for each others' interests, equal rights and non-interference in internal matters," Putin said in a short speech.
His remarks were blunt though less fierce than some of his earlier criticism of Washington, which he has accused of trying to dominate world affairs and suppress Russia.
The United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions on Moscow following its annexation of the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine and over its backing for separatists in the east opposed to Kiev's rule.
In a statement issued after the ceremony, Tefft said he was committed to maintaining "open and frank lines of communication" with the Russian authorities.
"We have serious differences over Russia’s policy in Ukraine. As President Obama said at the G20 summit in Brisbane, we hope Russia will choose 'a different path', to resolve the issue of Ukraine in a way that respects Ukraine’s sovereignty and is consistent with international law," he said.
"We would prefer a Russia that is fully integrated with the global economy; that is thriving on behalf of its people; that can once again engage with us in cooperative efforts around global challenges.”
Story continues
Moscow approved the appointment of Tefft even though Russian officials said privately he was not entirely to their liking.
Tefft was the United States' ambassador to Georgia during its short with Russia in 2008 and was the U.S. envoy to Ukraine for nearly four years until July last year. He was deputy chief of mission in Moscow in the second half of the 1990s.
Other strains in ties are differences over regional conflicts such as the civil war in Syria, arms control and human rights issues, and Putin's treatment of opponents.
(Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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Sylan Esso have just announced a series of six special shows happening this fall in four cities where they'll be collaborating with some of their friends and favorite musicians, including singer Amelia Meath's two Mountain Man bandmates. "We asked 8 of our favorite musicians to join us on 'WITH', a short run of shows we're playing this fall," say Sylvan Esso, adding, "We'll be playing our songs like we've never played them before."
Details are still forthcoming but they have announced the dates and who's opening each show: Los Angeles' Walt Disney Concert Hall on November 14 with Hand Habits, then two nights at NYC's Beacon Theatre on November 17 & 18 with Daughter of Swords (aka Alexandra Sauser-Monnig of Mountain Man), Nashville's Ryman Auditorium on November 20 with Flock of Dimes (Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak), and finally two nights at Durham, NC's DPAC on November 22 & 23 with Molly Sarlé of Mountain Man.
Tickets for the NYC, Nashville and Durham shows shows go on sale Friday, February 22 at 10 AM local time, and the Los Angeles show goes on sale Friday at 8 AM Pacific. There's a Sylvan Esso presale for all dates starting Thursday (2/21) at 11 AM locale time -- sign up for their mailing list for the presale password.
Hand Habits' new album is out March 1; Flock of Dimes just released a new single; and Molly Sarle has a new album on the way, and Mountain Man have shows too.
All WITH dates are listed, along with a stream of Sylvan Esso's 2017 album What Now, below.
SYLVAN ESSO PRESENTS “WITH” TOUR DATES:
11/14 - Los Angeles, CA - Walt Disney Concert Hall *
11/17 - New York, NY - The Beacon Theatre ^
11/18 - New York, NY - The Beacon Theatre ^
11/20 - Nashville, TN - The Ryman Auditorium #
11/22 - Durham , NC - DPAC %
11/23 - Durham, NC - DPAC %
* with Hand Habits
^ with Daughter of Swords
# with Flock of Dimes
% with Molly Sarlé
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It’s more than okay to be obsessed with Killing Eve. The first season of the BBC America series made it into the top five of our (and pretty much everyone else’s) Best TV Shows of 2018. On top of much-deserved neverending praise, Killing Eve star Sandra Oh just won a Critics’ Choice Award, a Golden Globe, and a SAG Award for her work on the show as Eve. (I’m still waiting on justice for co-stars Jodie Comer and Fiona Shaw though.) The official trailer for season two appropriately — in the series’ twisted sort of way — dropped yesterday on Valentine’s Day, and now April really can’t get here soon enough. Until then, there is this: Uproxx recently spoke with Sandra Oh during the winter TCA Press Tour about the overwhelming response to the series, as well as what to expect from the new season, which sees Emerald Fennell is taking over for Phoebe Waller-Bridge as lead writer on the show. But first, we had to get to the bottom of a very pressing issue. First things first: What did you choose on the menu? I chose the tuna. But I’m a sharer and I want a bite of everything, so I’m sharing a bunch of stuff with my team too. But I always feel like at these events, no matter what – [after] every award show I always have a burger. I always have a big burger. Where do you usually get the burger from? I don’t want to say where I live, but there is this burger place near my house … and they have great burger. I had a burger after the Globes, and it was a burger from the Beverly Hilton. It doesn’t matter where it is. As long as there’s a burger. Burger and fries. Burger and fries. What kind of burger though? No cheese. A lot of mayo. A lot of pickles. Yeah. Medium rare, but I don’t like it flat. I like homemade fat patties. I like a lot of mayo, and I like a lot of pickles. And no cheese.
Now that that’s been revealed, what can you say – I guess without spoiling too much, but if you want to spoil, go ahead – about season two of Killing Eve? You know, I’d say definitely for Eve’s character – her journey – it gets super dark. I feel like she is pushed to the limit in her, not so much pursuit of Villanelle at this point, but her dynamic with Villanelle and her pursuit of her job. And she’s pushed to the limit, and then she goes over. She fell over. Yeah. I want to congratulate you just for all your recent success. You just won the Golden Globe for the series. Did you expect the show to be this critically-acclaimed and beloved? No, you can’t. You can’t ever. I felt that the show was special – I felt it from the very beginning, from the pilot. And I felt even when we were shooting the first series, even if we didn’t get everything we wanted… I felt, “That scene’s great.” But you can’t – I don’t think we could’ve possibly known. And it’s not what you think it’s going to be. An integral part of the series is the dark humor, and after seeing the first two episodes of the new season, the dark humor is definitely still there. Were you slightly worried or at least curious about how things would change with a new head writer? Oh yeah, sure. But Emerald [Fennell] and Phoebe [Waller-Bridge] are very good friends, and they really come from the same kind of mindset. But of course Emerald has her own take on things and her own ways. How do you think your voice and Emerald’s voice matched? Well, I think that – again, it’s like there is a great thing that happens between Eve and Villanelle. I think there is a great thing that happens between myself and Jodie (Comer), and I think that same creative energy, that same very strong dynamic between the actor and the writer was definitely what we were following.
With Jodie, I think one of the most interesting things about this show is how you two have this dynamic, but a lot of it is you rarely actually being on camera together. Yeah, but you know what? It’s like your character is thinking of the other character all the time. All the time, right? So then, Jodie and I also really like each other as people. It’s really nice to be able to kinda share the screen with her ‘cause it’s special. And we really bring our game. What was your very first scene – the hospital bathroom scene – together like, just in general? That was great because… Eve does not know anything, and in some ways Villanelle doesn’t know anything. She knows that she’s about to go kill a bunch of people. But it’s almost like… Eve is really the innocent one in that scene. She doesn’t know what going on, she’s just in the bathroom, she has no idea that her life is about to change. But what’s so interesting I think about that scene is that something starts rumbling first for Villanelle, you know what I mean? It really starts rumbling when she just sees Eve. I really love that scene because, there’s this thing that I feel like, thematically, we’re both in a mirror. And I always feel like that kinda continues on even in the second season. When did you I first notice that people were really responding to this show? Was it immediately? No. So, it came out last year in April here. And television is consumed differently. BBC America, baby – week by week by week, which is old-fashioned watching. But it was great because people would actually wait and watch it for real. I’ll tell you a story: So before I was going to go back for the second season, I would say this must have been in May, I had to go get my visa for to work in the EU, right? And so I went down to like Rodeo and Crenshaw. I got there early, so I drove around and looked at the beauty boutiques [to see] what is going on in the African-American community. What are the hair products, because that’s also what I use that a lot on my own hair. So I was in there, and … I felt like the woman behind the counter was Asian, right? Her clientele African-American. So, Crenshaw and Rodeo – somewhere down there – and this woman goes, “Are you on that show?” And I absolutely feel like, “Oh, she’s gonna say Grey’s Anatomy.”
And then I ask, “Oh, what show?” and she goes, “Killing Eve.” And this is in May, right? This is only a month after it’s opened. Then I’m like, “Yes, yes I am.” And then she goes to her client, to this woman – African-American – and she say, “Oh, you need to see that show. You need to see, she’s on this show.” And I just thought, “Oh my God.” That’s when I realized it was outside of the Hollywood bubble. That it wasn’t “just” a “critically-acclaimed” show. It’s not like that kind of thing. The lady who sells wigs and the women who buy wigs are potentially watching this show, and that’s when I felt like there was a shift. But your question, as in the rise of it, you know I was not here. I was then in the UK for the next six months, and I feel like I’ve only really felt it since coming back and doing the Globes. Speaking of the Globes, is it possible for you and Andy Samberg to host every award show from here to eternity? That dude is the best. He is such a great guy. I would do anything that he would ask me to do, but I wouldn’t host another award show. So it was just a one-shot kind of thing? One and done. I felt like I did what I wanted to do so. You did well – you hosted and you won. So I guess that’s a mic drop on award shows now. Yeah, I guess so. Alison Herman from The Ringer wrote a piece about how Killing Eve and Barry – two fantastic shows that came out around the same time – make bad fans of us all. Obviously, we all love Villanelle. We also love Barry. We love them both, but how do you feel about the fact that you have a show that is making bad fans of us all?
You wanna know what it is? I say it’s that classic – not the classic anti-hero, it’s a new hero … The new flawed, killer hero. We’re not actually rooting for Villanelle to kill Eve. I guess we just want you to ride off into the murderous sunset, whatever that might look like. I don’t know, I guess you’ll just have to stick around to see if they can make that work. “How can these two crazy kids make it work?” Oh my god. If season three goes off the rails and becomes a completely stylistically different thing, no. If there is a season three, I should say. But I just think we have the template, we have the foundation of a family of really strong characters, let’s keep on exploring. Yeah. Do you think about things like the possibility of a sophomore slump and how to avoid that? Those things, I leave it to the creative gods. All I know is that we were there working hard and making the best TV that we could. How that comes out and what you guys think … All I know is that I feel good about it. Final question: How would you describe the show to someone who hasn’t yet hopped on the Killing Eve bandwagon? How would you sell it to them?
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In the largest-ever assessment of substance use among people with severe psychiatric illness, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Southern California have found that rates of smoking, drinking and drug use are significantly higher among those who have psychotic disorders than among those in the general population.
The study is published online in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
The finding is of particular concern because individuals with severe mental illness are more likely to die younger than people without severe psychiatric disorders.
“These patients tend to pass away much younger, with estimates ranging from 12 to 25 years earlier than individuals in the general population,” said first author Sarah M. Hartz, MD, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at Washington University. “They don’t die from drug overdoses or commit suicide — the kinds of things you might suspect in severe psychiatric illness. They die from heart disease and cancer, problems caused by chronic alcohol and tobacco use.”
The study analyzed smoking, drinking and drug use in nearly 20,000 people. That included 9,142 psychiatric patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or schizoaffective disorder — an illness characterized by psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, and mood disorders such as depression.
The investigators also assessed nicotine use, heavy drinking, heavy marijuana use and recreational drug use in more than 10,000 healthy people without mental illness.
The researchers found that 30 percent of those with severe psychiatric illness engaged in binge drinking, defined as drinking four servings of alcohol at one time. In comparison, the rate of binge drinking in the general population is 8 percent.
Among those with mental illness, more than 75 percent were regular smokers. This compares with 33 percent of those in the control group who smoked regularly. There were similar findings with heavy marijuana use: 50 percent of people with psychotic disorders used marijuana regularly, versus 18 percent in the general population. Half of those with mental illness also used other illicit drugs, while the rate of recreational drug use in the general population is 12 percent.
“I take care of a lot of patients with severe mental illness, many of whom are sick enough that they are on disability,” said Hartz. “And it’s always surprising when I encounter a patient who doesn’t smoke or hasn’t used drugs or had alcohol problems.”
Hartz said another striking finding from the study is that once a person develops a psychotic illness, protective factors such as race and gender don’t have their typical influence.
Previous research indicates that Hispanics and Asians tend to have lower rates of substance abuse than European Americans. The same is true for women, who tend to smoke, drink and use illicit drugs less often than men.
“We see protective effects in these subpopulations,” Hartz explained. “But once a person has a severe mental illness, that seems to trump everything.”
That’s particularly true, she said, with smoking. During the last few decades, smoking rates have declined in the general population. People older than age 50 are much more likely than younger people to have been regular smokers at some point in their lives. For example, about 40 percent of those older than 50 used to smoke regularly. Among those younger than 30, fewer than 20 percent have been regular smokers. But among the mentally ill, the smoking rate is more than 75 percent, regardless of the patient’s age.
“With public health efforts, we’ve effectively cut smoking rates in half in healthy people, but in the severely mentally ill, we haven’t made a dent at all,” she said.
Until recently, smoking was permitted in most psychiatric hospitals and mental wards. Hartz believes that many psychiatrists decided that their sickest patients had enough problems without having to worry about quitting smoking, too. There also were concerns about potential dangers from using nicotine-replacement therapy while continuing to smoke because smoking is so prevalent among the mentally ill. Recent studies, however, have found those concerns were overblown.
The question, she said, is whether being more aggressive in trying to curb nicotine, alcohol and substance use in patients with severe psychiatric illness can lengthen their lives. Hartz believes health professionals who treat the mentally ill need to do a better job of trying to get them to stop smoking, drinking and using drugs.
“Some studies have shown that although we psychiatrists know that smoking, drinking and substance use are major problems among the mentally ill, we often don’t ask our patients about those things,” she said. “We can do better, but we also need to develop new strategies because many interventions to reduce smoking, drinking and drug use that have worked in other patient populations don’t seem to be very effective in these psychiatric patients.”
Funding for this research comes from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Cancer Society.
NIH grant numbers R01 DA032843, R01 DA025888, U10 AA008401, UL1 RR024992, P01 CA089392, R01 MH085548, R01 MH085542, K08 DA032680-1, Kl2 RR024994, K01 DA025733.
Hartz SM, Pato CN, Medeiros H, Cavazos-Rehg P, Sobell JL, Knowles JA, Bierut LJ, Pato MT and the Genomic Psychiatry Cohort Consortium. JAMA Psychiatry. Online Jan. 1, 2014.
doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2013.3276
Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.
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This interview was originally published by Refinery29. In honor of World Teachers’ Day on Oct 5, Refinery29 is publishing a special theme week of Money Diaries, featuring teachers from across America. This collaboration is part of the Guardian’s teacher takeover.
To celebrate back-to-school season, we spoke with four teachers – who are also previous Money Diarists – around the country to learn more about their financial lives. Teachers dedicate their lives to their students, so why are they so under-appreciated? Teacher pay has declined along with classroom budgets. In 2018, the teachers’ fight for fairness is far from over.
Today, we speak to an English teacher from Rockford, Michigan who earns $43,000 a year. Though she feels fulfilled in her career, she worries about the future and feels she won’t be able to afford a big purchase, such as a home, without being in a dual-income household.
Location Rockford, Michigan
Role English teacher
Salary $43,000 (previously $41,000)
When did you start working as a teacher? I began teaching in 2015. This is my fourth year in the classroom.
Has your attitude toward the job changed since you started? If so, how? The longer I teach, the more I feel it’s my responsibility to inspire my students to become change-makers and empower them to be informed problem-solvers in our community and beyond. So often what happens in a classroom has little context or purpose outside of those four walls. The further I get into my career, the harder I work to connect our learning to global issues and communities outside of our own. I don’t want to just teach my students about the world; I want to teach them out to change it.
Is there anything you would do differently in your career? I feel fortunate saying this, but no, there isn’t anything significant I would have done differently. I hit the ground running, so to speak, and tenaciously created many opportunities for myself and my students. For example, I’ve initiated new field trips and volunteer opportunities in the community, traveled domestically and abroad with students, and participated in teacher fellowships through the National Writing Project and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Each of these things were demanding, but ultimately the most worthwhile moments in my career so far.
In general, how do you feel about teaching as a career? Who has more fun at their job than a teacher? So much of my day is spent smiling, laughing, and conversing with young people who continually surprise me. Each day, each hour, each student is distinct, and that means my role is never just limited to instruction. Teaching is a daily challenge that tests every part of my skill and emotional stamina. I can’t imagine a more fulfilling career, though. I know that what I do makes a difference because I see it in the way my students act and through the decisions they make. Most days I come home feeling proud of what I do. I don’t know if that sense of fulfillment is found in many other careers.
Teaching demands everything you’ve got – your time, talents, and emotional fortitude
This country is facing an education crisis and many teachers are leaving the profession for other fields with higher pay. How has this affected you? The timing of this question is unnerving. Just yesterday I pored over my finances and updated my monthly budget to determine how in the world I could ever afford a down payment on a house. It seems unattainable for me, and I’m someone who is stringent with my spending and generously contributes to my savings. I don’t see how I’ll ever be able to afford a big purchase like that on my own and that dependency is frustrating. I can’t travel more than I do now, upgrade my car, or even purchase a home without being a dual-income household. When I acknowledge that to myself, I feel trapped, like I can’t really extend beyond what I already do.
I’m considering getting a graduate degree in a field outside of education to diversify my career opportunities. Out of curiosity, I recently found myself cruising Indeed.com for jobs in the area I’m qualified for outside of education. I wanted to see if anything would pique my interest. I’m relieved nothing did. I don’t actually want to leave teaching, but I imagine my relatively stagnant salary will become less tolerable as I continue in my career.
Do you think teachers generally are underpaid or undervalued? Do you think you are? “Underpaid” and “undervalued” go hand-in-hand. I’d say I feel valued by my community because I’m often sincerely thanked for what I do. I’ve met many professionals outside of education that speak on the merit of teachers. The people in my life tend to hold teachers in high regard. However, the most meaningful way to show an employee or public servant you value them is to compensate them adequately. Districts can support its teachers, too, and encourage professional growth by funding professional development opportunities and graduate-level courses. My district, for example, used to partially fund courses for teachers pursuing a master’s degree or beyond. Over the last few years, though, they’ve rescinded that offer. So, there’s a dissonance between the words I hear and the actions I see.
How do you think being a teacher in your city/school compares to the rest of the country? I recognize and am grateful for the privileges I’m afforded by the city I work in. Our community consistently supports our schools, often passing millages to fund repairs and improvements to our buildings. Parents are actively involved in their students’ education. I’m able to purchase books each year for my classroom library using community-funded grants. My district provides each teacher with an annual allowance to buy supplies for their classrooms so we don’t have to pay for materials out of pocket. I know these qualities are considered luxuries to many educators. They shouldn’t be, of course; all students and teachers should have access to quality facilities, books, and opportunities to learn outside of the classroom.
All students and teachers should have access to facilities, books, and opportunities to learn outside the classroom
Do you feel fulfilled in your career? Yes – teaching is intellectually stimulating and emotionally invigorating. Teaching has helped me become a inspiring leader, engaging speaker, and stronger writer, all of which give me confidence in the professional world. Being an educator, too, has given me opportunities to travel because I seek out grants and fellowships specifically for teachers. I feel so much love from my students and that motivates me to give 100 percent each day I’m there. The demand for creativity and problem-solving that comes with teaching energizes me, too. There’s never a dull moment.
Would you recommend a teaching career to others? Why or why not? Honestly, I think it takes a certain kind of person to be a successful teacher and flourish long-term in the career. You have to constantly be a bright light in an often-dark world. Teaching demands everything you’ve got – your time, talents, and emotional fortitude – and the only way to thrive is to learn how to balance those demands and maintain enough for yourself. Nothing about teaching is easy, but it can be endlessly rewarding and inspiring. I’d recommend teaching to someone who fully understands what they are getting into and is not adverse to the challenges. If someone is feeling doubtful about their decision to be a teacher, it isn’t for them.
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To millions of fans, Noel Gallagher is the face of the biggest band since The Beatles.
As lead guitarist and songwriter with Oasis, he portrayed himself as a booze-and-drug loving “Manc” who could be brawling with brother Liam one day while sipping champagne with Prime Minister Tony Blair the next.
But according to new revelations, Noel, 43, was a calculating late-comer who rewrote contracts to ensure he was in total control of the band that went on to make millions.
Drummer and founder member Tony McCarroll, 38, who played on the first Oasis hits including Some Might Say, discovered the shock truth as he and the band including Paul “Guigsy” McGuigan were leaving a hotel.
Angry
Tony, who was touring in Japan with the band as they began to hit the big-time, said: “We made our way through the huge hotel lobby towards a fleet of taxis that awaited us.
“Guigs stepped in front of me. He turned to me with an angry look.
“He said, ‘Noel added a three-month notice period to the record contract you signed. If he wants to sack you, he can. That’s you f****d. See you later’.
“This was the first time anyone had mentioned a change in the contract. We were all in serious trouble. Noel’s masterplan was exactly that. Noel’s.” Tony, who grew up in the same tough south Man-chester district as Noel, also claims in a new book that the star…
MADE SURE music journalists saw the so-called fights between him and Liam.
SNIFFED so much glue as a kid he was nicknamed Bostik.
BOTTLED OUT of a fight as a Manchester City supporter against rival fans.
TRIED to stop Tony and Guigsy escaping from a racist gang beating up kids of Irish descent. Tony says: “It’s funny to think how prevalent such prejudices were, even two decades ago.”
Tony claims they were confronted by Noel as they tried to escape the gang in a local park.
He says: “One of the two friends with me recognised Noel. My friend said ‘What the f*** are you doing trying to catch us? You’re as Irish as the rest of us, you nugget’.” Two years ago Noel claimed in an interview: “I am as Irish as the next person.”
Despite the confrontational start, Tony and Noel began meeting in the park to play football.
Tony said: “After some while, though, it became apparent that Noel was starting to spend time up the trees. A strange place to sniff glue, I thought. Surely there was a danger of falling out.
“Over the next three months, I would watch them all as slowly they fell out of the trees, one by one. It could be a dangerous spot for dog walkers.”
Tony recalls that Noel – nicknamed Bostik – played football high on glue-sniffing with “that vacant look that a glue-sniffer develops. I looked back at our first meeting and thought he was a confused fella”.
Noel was also part of the gang which followed Manchester City and scrapped with rival fans.
On one away trip, Noel, Tony and others were confronted by a mob of angry Nottingham Forest supporters. Tony said: “I looked at Noel, who looked back terrified. ‘F*** this,’ he shouted and was gone, a vanishing Mancunian flash.”
By the summer of 1990, Tony joined his three pals, Guigsy, Paul “Bonehead “ Arthurs and Chris “Huts” Hutton in a band called The Rain. Within a year, the band ditched Huts and brought in Noel’s brother Liam. Tony said: “He was a right handful. But if we were going to be a rock and roll band, that was exactly what we needed.
“Although Liam had started to style himself on Ian Brown (lead singer with the Stone Roses) he could never be accused of not being his own man.
“Liam had something about him. It might have been menacing and slightly evil but it was still something.”
And within weeks, Liam showed his muscle by deciding he didn’t like the name The Rain, telling the band: “It’s a s*** name. Any ideas? No? Right, we’ll call ourselves Oasis.”
The first outing of Oasis was at The Boardwalk club in Manchester in 1991 with Liam “extra menacing that evening”. Noel was in the audience and after the gig told his brother the band were “f*****g s***”. Liam decided to replace Guigsy with Noel.
Tony said: “My first reaction was surprise. My second was to get angry. I reminded Liam that it was Guigs who had set up this outfit.
“To Liam’s credit, he looked guilty and almost immediately backed down and apologised – unusual for him.”
Tony agreed to Noel becoming lead guitarist. He said: “I thought I had made the best decision of my life and good times lay ahead. It was the best of decisions, the worst of decisions.”
Most of the band were still having to clean cars to make ends meet when Liam was tricked into going to a house in posh Prestbury, Cheshire, thinking he was delivering an invoice. Manchester City fan Liam was unaware the home owner was the then-Manchester United player Mark Hughes – and the envelope contained a love letter.
Mark – now Fulham manager – opened the letter which read: “I think I love you, I’m going to make you mine.”
Tony said: “Mark Hughes laughed and turned the card to show him. Liam read the card in horror and then began to stammer that he had no feelings whatsoever for Mark.”
But as Oasis’s fame increased the laughs got fewer – and the band Tony helped start was moving away from him.
On the day he signed the first contract, he arrived drunk to read in “clear black ink” the names Noel Gallagher, Liam Gallagher, Paul McGuigan, Paul Arthurs – and Tony’s name added “in biro”.
He said: “I couldn’t tell anyone that I just had a bad feeling about this, so I reluctantly scrawled my moniker.”
Bad
Tony only later realised the name Oasis was now owned by Noel and Liam. He said: “What’s more, it had given Noel the power to fire any member of the band he thought unfit for purpose.”
Meanwhile Noel and Liam were becoming notorious for their drunken spats, including when they arrived at their first London gig in 1993.
Tony said: “Noel screamed at Liam and threw a plastic chair in his direction. It seemed that Liam had started a trend for hurling plastic chairs. Noel looked around afterwards though to make sure that all the relevant music journalists had recorded the altercation.”
As the band topped the charts in 1995 with Some Might Say, Tony was told he was being dropped. He denies the reason was a fight with Noel and says: “Noel was telling anyone who would listen how s*** I was at doing the thing I cared about so much. It was a cheap and easy shot and one that still hangs over me. Just lucky I’m not a sensitive soul.”
Tony sued the band for £18 million but accepted an out-of-court settlement of £600,000.
Oasis became one of the most successful acts in pop history with a string of hits including Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back In Anger. Last year Noel and Liam’s combined fortune was estimated at £52million.
features@people.co.uk
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Plans
Speak Farsi Complete Course:
This is the main course and the most popular course which contains all of the 24 Farsi videos (12 hours). This is all you need to be able to speak in Farsi. Videos are available online, and for download.
Other Courses:
Premium Speak Farsi Course: This course has the exact same material as the main course. However, in addition to that, it provides the students with four hours of online personal instructor assistant and it also offers a completion certificate. Videos are available online, and for download.
Speak Farsi Course in 2 Packages - Package one: This is the first half of the main course. It contains the first 12 videos of the main course (6 hours). The second half (second package) will be offered to those students who already finished package one of this course. Videos are available online, and for download.
Speak Farsi Course in 3 Packages - Package one: This course contains the first 8 videos of the main course. [The main course contains 24 videos.] The next parts (8 videos for the second package, and 8 videos for third package) will be offered to those students who already finished package one of this course. Videos are available online.
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Farsi Alphabet and Farsi Words Course: In addition to the above courses, for those of our students who (besides learning how to speak in Farsi) are also interested to learn how to read and how to write in Farsi, Fluent Farsi offers a Farsi Alphabet and Farsi Words Course (12 additional videos!) which works as an optional supplement to the main course and is included in all of the above plans for free. ('Optional' in the sense that you can choose to use it, or not to use it.)
If you are not interested to learn the Farsi alphabet, then Fluent Farsi efficiently teaches you to speak in Farsi without learning the Farsi alphabet. You choose your approach, and Fluent Farsi teaching and learning system perfectly accommodates your needs.
Please go to the Free Course to learn more about the details of the exact content of this optional course.
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The brewers of Natural Light, a staple of many college parties, announced that they are selling a special limited edition case of 77 beers. The 77-pack of cheap beer will only be available for a limited time, and will only be sold in College Park, Maryland, home of the University of Maryland. The hexagon-shaped case of 77 beers will weigh over 60 pounds and cost around $30, according to The Takeout.
Natural Light, commonly referred to as "Natty Light" or "Natty Ice," decided to make the 77-pack of beer to honor their founding in 1977. Natural Light, which is made by Anheuser-Busch, is the sixth best selling light beer in the country, raking in nearly $350 million in sales annually.
Photo: Natural Light
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I thought it would be interesting to try to compile my Top 10 Scottish cyclists of all time, after being inspired by a podcast called the Two Johns, during an episode where they discussed a Top 10 list of American cyclists.
My main criteria for this list are achievements on the international stage- be that Grand Tours, Olympic Games, World Championships or Commonwealth Games. This has been deemed by some as a limiting factor- favouring racing cyclists. But after all, isn’t racing a way to measure greatness? Anyway, some acknowledgment has been given to Scotland’s touring greats, but I doubt if I will please everyone.
In addition to medals and results, other Scottish qualities are also valued, including: hard work, innovation, determination against bigger, stronger opponents, honesty, and other “underdoglike” traits such as riding well but not winning, or being a contender for a big victory.
As ever, this type of list is never definitive, all about opinions, and really just a bit of fun. Please feel free to comment.
10. Jason McIntyre
Jason McIntyre’s achievements came in the face of adversity, and this often typifies Scottish sport. Tragically his career was cut short by a fatal road accident, which ended his life just as his career was belatedly taking off. 10th spot in my list could have gone to any number of riders, but I give it to Jason for the way he battled back from hardship in his personal life to become a National champion in his 30s, achieved so much from a relatively remote base in the highland, with little support, and looked to have much more to offer before his career was cut short.
15th Commonwealth games road race 2002
first Scot to win the British 25-Mile Championship- 2006 and 2007
Beat Graeme Obree’s 10 mile TT record – the mark of 18m 47s still stands (2017)
Tour of the Trossachs 50 mile TT – great write-up here on Pez
9. Mark Beaumont
Mark Beaumont’s 2008 round the world record- 18,297 miles (29,446 km) in 194 days and 17 hours- is sometimes hotly debated as a cycling achievement, but for me it embodies the ultimate in the cycle touring tradition.
For some it is a feat of logistics as much as cycling, but consider this- 100 miles a day for nearly 200 days, in all weathers and conditions. Carrying 30-4kg of equipment. Unsupported. Logistics is naturally a challenging part of this feat, but then logistics is a part of any cycle tour, or even a road race. The team support for the Tour de France is a vital part
He didn’t just cycle around the world at a leisurely pace. He did it faster than anyone else, ever, smashing the previous record by 80 days. Beaumont took the round-the-world to another level, and it is being attempted in 2009 by another cyclist,
Compare this to Ellen McArthur, who sailed round the world in record time- an achievement that necessitated overcoming logistical problems as well as supreme endurance. The world sailing circumnavigation record is a prized goal, but for some reason, the cycling equivalent was not. Beaumont’s record has taken this event to the next level, and I’d say Beaumont is the McArthur of the cycling world, and his feat should be recognised more prominently.
Mark’s record was subsequently beaten several times, and in 2017 he is embarking on a new round the world record – in just 80 days.
8. Craig Maclean
Craig Maclean raced, and won, at the top of the track scene for several years in the late 90s and early 00s. As such he will always be in Hoy’s shadow somewhat, but with Ross Edgar he was part of a formidable Scottish team sprint team at the 2006 Commonwealth Games. His other medals include UCI Gold and Olympic Silver- Craig was a very strong rider and a consistent performer for many years.
Gold Team Sprint 2002 UCI World Track Championships
Gold Team Sprint 2006 Commonwealth Games (Scotland)
Silver Team Sprint 2000 Sydney Olympics
Silver Team Sprint 1999, 2000 UCI World Track Championships
Bronze Team Sprint 2001, 2003, 2004 UCI World Track Championships
1st place: various individual and team sprints events, British National and World Cup series level.
Read about Craig Maclean’s achievements within Chris Hoy’s autobiography.
He is also part of the rise of British track cycling recounted the in Heroes, Villains and Velodromes book.
7. Brian Smith
Brian Smith won the 1991 British professional road race championship (his first pro season) and went on to complete the 1994 Giro d’Italia for Motorola, on a team that included Andy Hampsten and a young Lance Armstrong. Internationally he represented Scotland at the 1984, 1990 and 1998 Commonwealth Games and Britain at the 1996 Atlanta Games. He also won races in the USA for Plymouth Racing Team.
He continues to have an influence in the Scottish cycling world through the Braveheart Cycling Fund, which supports young Scottish riders of all disciplines. A worthy cause- I look forward to seeing the next Scot challenging for the Tour de France!
Selected palmares
3 Commie Games ’86, ’90 + ’98
Twice GB PRO Champ ’91 + ’94 (2nd ’92 +’93)
1994 GP Midbank first European victory for Motorola CT
6. Billy Bilsland
A stellar international amateur career ensued with stage victories in The Tour of Czechoslovakia, the Peace Race, the Tour de l’Avenir, the Scottish Milk Race and the Milk Race. He rode the 1968 Olympics, making it into the winning break until a puncture ended dreams of a medal. -He recounts his 14th place in the 1971 world championship road race in an interview here.
He raced for three years as a pro with Peugeot, finishing 11th in Paris – Tours and 10th in the Tour of Lombardy. Making it on the continent in those days was not easy- as Ken Laidlaw, Robert Millar and Graeme Obree could attest to.
After retiring, he set up a bike shop, which his son now runs.
Other palmares
2nd British national road race 1974
3rd British national road race 1973
Bilsland was part of an early generation of British cyclist to make forays into Europe.
The best account of it is William Fotheringham’s book, Roule Britannia.
5. Ken Laidlaw
Laidlaw is somewhat of a forgotten man of Scottish cycling. He is not frequently mentioned, but finishing the world’s greatest bike race is a big achievement in itself. From a British point of view, this might sound like a ‘plucky loser’ tag, but it isn’t. Over the Channel, the French afford considerable respect to the last man- the Lanterne Rouge- because to finish the Tour is such a feat.
Ken was interviewed in 2004 by a local newspaper in Savannah, Georgia. Re gave an account of the 1961 TdF, and what racing was like then. “In my tour, we averaged 139 miles a day – flat out”. In those days, the tour was 800 miles longer than it is today.” Without the nutrition, sports science and bike technology of today, it would have been significantly more difficult. Interview is reblogged here.
Selected palmares:
First Scot to finish the Tour de France 1961.
Most aggressive rider of the day during stage 16 1961- led the stage but fell back with 7km to go to finish 19th. 65th place overall- only 72 of the 132 riders finished.
6th Briton to finish the Tour? ref
Ken Laidlaw is also mentioned in William Fotheringham’s book, Roule Britannia.
4. David Millar
David Millar’s career as a whole must be viewed in the context of the 2-year ban he received in 2004 for admitting the use of EPO. However his honesty and determination to spread an anti-doping message have set him apart from other banned riders, and he is now seen as an ambassador for clean cycling. For me, he took the punishment and then went on to make significant amends- not only being outspoken, but working with WADA, and helping to establish a stringently clean, independently-tested team in Slipstream.
Although the suspension does tarnish his reputation, he won Grand Tour stages and races before and after it and these results still put him amongst the most successful Scottish cyclists of all time. He was the youngest ever holder of the yellow jersey in 2000. It is tempting to ‘relegate’ him a place or two for the doping, but I feel his anti-doping work have made up for it, and even the non-doped results are still stronger than any other Scottish road racer.
There is a slight question over his Scottishness though- he was born in Malta, and has lived in Hong Kong, England and Spain. His parents are Scottish and he was selected (but did not compete) for Scotland in the 2002 Commonwealth Games. He is generally known as a Scot (as listed as Scottish on the Garmin-Slipstream site, and frequent media references). I would be very interested to know his personal feelings towards Scotland and whether he has a connection to the place.
Tour de France 1 stage win: 2000 stage 1. (2 stage wins during doping period? 2002 stg 13, 2003 stg 19)
Vuelta a Espana 2 stage wins: 2006 stage 14, 2009. (2 stage wins during doping period? 2001 stg 1, 2003 stg 17)
UK Time Trial champion and Road Race champion 2007
Tour of California 2008- 2nd place overall.
various other palmares
David Millar has published two books:
Racing Through the Dark – establishing his career, doping, and subsequent renewal
The Racer – an inside look at the life of a bike racer
3. Graeme Obree
The value of Graeme Obree‘s achievements is heightened by the fact that he undertook them as an amateur and in the face of great adversity. For me this embodies the Scottish underdog spirit. He broke the hour record and won world pursuit championships on a bike he designed and built himself, and in the face of obstruction from the UCI. He overcame personal problems to achieve these results and as such, is an inspiration to cyclists and people everywhere.
After the records, he entered the pro cycling world at the height of the doping era. When he refused to take anything, he was unceremoniously dumped- a great shame that we did not get a chance to see more of him.
Now in 2009, he has announced he will attempt the hour record again. As before, he has pushed the bounds of innovation and created his own bike, to meet the UCI regulations but to match his riding style. He has massive gear ratios, a custom hand position, but traditional frame and wheels. Good luck Graeme!
Selected palmares:
World hour record: twice holder, in 1993 and 1994. Beat a nine-year record held by all-time great Francesco Moser. Beaten first by Chris Boardman, before regaining the record and then Miguel Indurain.
Individual pursuit (4000m) world champion 1993 and 1995.
British 10mile Time Trial record holder- 18:57.
Graeme Obree’s autobiography is an honest and dark account of his struggles and triumphs
Ed Pickering’s book, The Race Against Time, focuses on the Obree-Boardman hour record rivalry
His training manual, The Obree Way, shows you specific advice and ways to think outside the box.
His wife has also published a book, Mrs Flying Scotsman, recounting the highs and lows during their time together.
2. Sir Chris Hoy
Track champion Chris Hoy’s three gold medals on the track at Beijing 2008 speak for themselves. 3 golds at a games is was the best medal haul for any Brit, for over 100 years. This is before you mention his numerous world championship medals at the kilo, the team sprint and the keirin. And his valiant attempt at the outright kilo world record, where he came up 0.005 seconds short at altitude in La Paz in 2007. He has simply dominated short-track racing for almost the past decade. And he made it look so easy.
Good luck for 2012 Sir Chris, we’ll be rooting for you.
[2015 – edit – Chris Hoy continued to win with 2 gold medals in 2012. He set a new World Record in the team sprint and his performance to win the keirin is one of the most outstanding performances I have ever seen, making him the most decorated British Olympian of all time. I’d put him #1 if I was rewriting this list today]
Chris Hoy’s autobiography charts his start in BMX racing through to his olympic success.
Chris Hoy also now writes the Flying Fergus series of children’s books.
1. Robert Millar
Robert Millar’s King of the Mountains win, and his fourth overall place in the 1984 Tour de France puts him ahead of any other Scottish (or even British) cyclist, so for those two achievements, he is the #1. But he also has three Tour stage wins to his name, as well a Giro and a Vuelta stage win. He might have won the Vuelta a Espana, had Spanish riders (of different teams) not worked together against him to preventing him retaining his time advantage in the GC.
Millar is known an enigmatic and elusive character. It is the stubborness of this quality (also displayed in several of Scotland’s other top cyclists) which afforded him the single-minded determination to succeed in the sometimes unwelcoming world of European cycling. His achievements and subsequent disappearance are recounted by Richard Moore in his book, In Search of Robert Millar.
Tour de France
3 stage wins
KOM winner 1984 Tour De France (first time a Briton had won a major Tour classification)
4th overall 1984 Tour De France (highest Tour classification of any British rider, ever)
Giro D’Italia
1 stage win
KOM winner 1987
2nd overall 1987.
Vuelta a Espana
1 stage win.
2nd overall in 1985 and 1986
KOM winner 1987
NOTABLE OTHERS
Evan Oliphant, currently a pro in the british peloton, is going well and can progress further. He was three-time Scottish road race champion riding for Plowman Craven although he has recently switched team to Scottish-based Endura Racing (June 2009).
Ian Steel was a Glaswegian rider who won international recognition as winner of the Warsaw-Prague road race (Peace Race 1952?), and he also won the Tour of Britain in 1951, including three stages, and the British National Road Race championship in 1962.
Jackie Bone of the Glasgow Wheelers acquired national fame when he became the first British cyclist to attain an average speed of more than 20 mph in a 12-hour race. Jackie also rode as a member of the British team in the road race at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
George Berwick is another great in the touring/randonneur tradition, and although not a racer with competitive palmares to his name, he still holds numerous records for touring routes and annual mileage totals.
Tommy Chambers– cycle touring great who would ride 18,000 miles a year, and was once credited in the Guinness Boook of Records.
Davie Bell, pioneering off road cyclist and tourer/randonneur extreme, and for years had one of Scotland’s toughest one-day races held annually in his honour. David Bell’s The Highyway Man cycling column, was published as a book that is now difficult to find. His articles were originally published in the Ayrshire Post, and subsequently published as a book in the 1970s.
Ross Edgar, a prolific track racer who also represented Scotland but was born and lives in England.
Silver: Keirin 2008 Beijing Olympics, Team Sprint 2007 UCI world champs; Bronze Keirin 2007 UCI world champs; Gold 2006 Team Sprint Commonwealth Games.
Caroline Alexander, born in Lancashire but represented Scotland. Good palmares, and the only mountain biker in and around this list- strange with the quality of Scotland’s trails.
British National Mountain Bike Champion (XC) 6 times, 1995 European Cross Country Champion, 1998 British National Cyclo-cross Champion, 2nd UCI Mountain Bike World Cup Series 2 times (according to wikiP).
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Need a mood boost? Listen to these upbeat songs and they'll be sure to put a smile on your face.
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Sees you have something on your face Texts you
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The Brandon Larson Honorary Star of the Night
We’re always up in here giving these awards to the Next Big Thing or our favorite Reds prospect but I’m gonna give you this: Hendrik Clementina. Give me your best guess where Hendrik came from? Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
The Tony Cingrani trade.
He slugged a dinger tonight, scored 2 runs, hit again, and walked as well. That’s pretty cool from a catcher that’s also hitting .359 on the season, I think.
Justin Nicolino was actually pretty fine in this one, going 6 IP with 4 H and only 1 ER, 1 BB, and 3 K. Instead it was Tanner “Are You the Reason for the” Rainey that coughed it up, allowing 2 ER on 3 BB and a hit in only 1.1 IP. Yuck. Kevin “Quock” Quakenbush finished it, allowing a hit and a strikeout.
Steve “I’m Really Still Here” Selsky homered for the only Bats run of the night. Brandon Dixon walked and hit on the night. Yawwwwnnn from the Bats tonight.
Up Next: Brandon Finnegan takes the mound to get right in Durham. Scheduled for 7:05 PM EDT.
Vladimir Gutierrez wasn’t so much the Impaler tonight, giving up 6 H and 4 ER in 4.1 IP, though he did strikeout 8 and only walk 1, which is still pretty neat. “The Daytime Television Show” Jose Rafael de Paula pitched 2, striking out 2 while allowing 2 hits and an earned run. Carlos “Is A” Navas attempted to allow some damage, allow 3 hits and 3 R (2 ER) in 2 IP, but the ‘Hoos managed to stay in it.
Because Pensacola got hits on hits on hits. The best of which was Aristides “Rich Boob Joke” Aquino honking two wangers as a part of a 2 H, 3 RBI night. Shed Long hit thrice with 2 RBI and 3 runs scored. Chris “Annie are you” Okey hit twice and scored a run from the catcher position.
Up Next: Wyatt Strahan will go for Pensacola against Biloxi early on Wednesday morning, first pitch scheduled for 11:35 AM EDT.
Ty “Poppin” Boyles went 5.1 IP strong, allowing 7 H with only 3 ER and 1 BB and 5 K. Aaron “Mu” Fossas held with 0.2 and a strikeout, while Joel “Sofa King” Kuhnel walked one and struck out one in an inning of work.
On the offensive side, Jose “Apple of my iPhone” Siri and Tyler “TySteve” Stephenson smashed taters, both knocking in 2 and combining for 4 hits. Taylor Trammell also hit twice and scored a run.
Up Next: Tony Santillian will try (will, he will) to continue to mow his A+ brethren down at 10:30 AM EDT (He’ll be followed by Scott Moss in Game 2, which is a makeup game).
Adrian “Rocky Voice” Rodriguez made us scream the name, allowing 7 H, 6 ER, and 1 BB in only 1.2 IP. Adrian Chacon made up for his name buddy, going 2.2 with only 1 H, 1 ER, and 3 K. Sarkis “Buckeye” Ohanian struckout 3 but walked 3 also, allowing 3 H and 2 ER. Cory Thompson filled in 2 IP, allowing only 2 hits, while Ryan “Get Your” Nutof (hasn’t been totally hearing that shit since he was old enough to swing a bat) pitched 1.2, striking out 3 while allowing 2 H and 2 BB and an unearned run.
Miles “Davis” Gordon had 3 hits (a 2B and a 3B, if you wanna be cool), with 2 RBi and a run scored. Hendrik “Oh My Darling” Clementina smacked a dinger on a 2 hit night, also walking once, scoring twice, and batting 2 in. Stuart Fairchild hit twice with a RBI and run scored, while Jeter “Derek’s are the Worst” Downs knocked a double and an RBI.
Up Next: Packy Naughton will go against Lansing at 7:05 PM EDT.
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Written by Bryan Prillaman
Level 3, United States, Florida
Note: Translations for this blog post will be posted as available over the next 2-3 weeks.
Hello all,
Welcome to the latest update post for Exemplar. Before we get started, I want to announce that Wave 12 will open on Dec 1st, and remain open until Feb 12th 23:59 PST
Last update I mentioned that we were delaying the start of Wave 12 till Dec 1st in order to make a few announcements before we began. Today is that update, so let’s dive right in.
The Exemplar program was originally envisioned as a peer to peer recognition system. It gives judges an opportunity to recognize the exceptional contributions of other judges in a public manner. Previously, similar recognitions happened only at conferences or during the debrief following a GP. Exemplar is a wonderful opportunity for the community to recognize what it values, and has reached nearly five thousand judges. Public recognitions are at the core of what Exemplar is. However, we have determined that the focus on foils often overshadows and detracts from the celebration of the awesome actions of our fellow judges.
To that end, we are taking actions to increase the role of recognitions in Exemplar and de-emphasize the role of foils.
Change One – Conference Foils
This change was announced last update. The conference foil rotation and the Exemplar foil rotation are now a lot closer. In the past, conference foil packs followed behind Exemplar by six months, now they will follow behind by a few weeks. This means that new Judge foils are no longer only available through Exemplar. Regional and Mini-Conferences play an important role in the Judge Program and we are excited that this change will help encourage more Judges to attend.
Change Two – Recognition Tokens
As I said above we are looking for ways to further highlight Exemplar recognitions, and sometimes the best ideas are ones already discovered. For the last several waves, Rob McKenzie has done something exceptionally special for the judges in the USA – North region. He has begun creating custom tokens for the judges in his region with their Exemplar recognition on the back. It provides a personalized memento of their exceptional actions and behaviors that resulted in the recognition from their peers. This has been very well received. (Odessa, you got an Exemplar Nomination this wave. #Spoilers!)
After talking to Rob and the other RCs, we will be introducing these personalized tokens to all Judges who receive an Exemplar Recognition.
However, we are not content to only do what was done before. In addition to expanding the distribution of the tokens, we are also taking steps to make the art something truly special. Instead of using public domain art, each wave will have new custom art by a known Magic: The Gathering artist. The current artist we are working with is rk post. rk post is a staple at US GPs, and can pack an amazing amount of detail into a small rectangle.
To make this art even more unique we will be doing something special each wave. A nomination will be chosen from a selected pool of recognitions (This pool is discussed in Change Three). The recipient of the chosen recognition will be designated the Exemplar ‘Vanguard’. This Vanguard will be collaborated with on the ‘art direction’ for the token used in the following Wave. As an hypothetical example, if a recognition from Rob McKenzie was selected in Wave 12 to be the Vanguard, and he expressed interest in being a goblin on the token, the art for Wave 13 might end up looking something like the hipster goblin above.
Change Three – Exemplar Foil Distribution
When the Exemplar program began, it was asserted very clearly that foils were not guaranteed.
“These cards might be sent to Judges who receive recognition through the Exemplar Program. However, not all judges recognized are certain to receive foils. Again, to be clear, not every recognition will equate to Wizards of the Coast sending foils. We sincerely hope that the recognition alone is meaningful for you – positive feedback always makes us feel better, and if it sometimes comes with something rare and shiny, well, so much the better!”
Over the last several waves, we have drifted from that assertion, and it has encouraged some undesirable behaviors, as too much emphasis is placed on foils, instead of the exceptional actions of Judges.
Starting with Wave 12, we are re-asserting that foils are not guaranteed with Exemplar.
We spent a good amount of time trying to decide how best to implement this re-assertion.
We explored several options, but ultimately only one option met our goals. We will be introducing randomization elements into the foil allocation aspect of the Exemplar process. Based on these randomization elements, some number of nominations will be selected and “phased out” when determining foil allocations. The randomization elements are weighted towards judges that receive multiple nominations but will apply to other judges as well. What this means is just what it sounds like; with Wave 12, while recognitions will still be evaluated and accepted per our existing process, receiving one or more Exemplar recognitions does not necessarily mean any foils will be mailed to you.
These selected recognitions will still be published on Judgeapps, and still have tokens produced and mailed. Additionally, all recognitions selected this way will go into the pool used to determine the ‘Vanguard’ for the next wave of tokens.
To help alleviate any concerns of abuse or manipulation on the part of the Exemplar Team, the process is being implemented by the Judgeapps team, and the results will be software controlled. Additionally, each region independently will also be processed independently and equally. Furthermore, I have also asked Damian Hiller of the Conference Sphere to be the auditor of the randomization process. He is tasked with reporting any irregularities in its application to the PCs.
Change Four – Recognitions Structural Changes
Currently, when we review recognitions, they are either accepted or deferred. However, there is a small number of recognitions that have easily corrected errors. For example, it refers to the judge by the wrong name, or the author recognized the wrong judge. We typically contact the author and fix these recognitions during the review process.
However, in order to get the tokens created, printed and mailed to RCs for distribution, they will need to be sent to the printer immediately after a wave ends. There will no longer be an opportunity to correct these recognitions, and they will instead be deferred. Tokens created for recognitions that ultimately are deferred will not be mailed out.
Also, in order to ensure that nominations can fit on the tokens, we are adding a size restriction to Exemplar Recognitions. The limit changes based on what language you are writing the nomination in because some languages have wider characters than others. The good news is, that only 8 nominations in Wave 11 would have been over the limit, so you are unlikely to encounter it regardless of your language.
Change Five – ‘Proxy’ Nominations
A ‘proxy’ nomination is a term we use internally for a recognition submitted on behalf of someone else. When Exemplar was started, RCs were specifically given slots that could be used on behalf of those that wanted to recognize a Judge, but could not. This is in keeping with their role and responsibilities as overseeing large regions and receiving input from multiple sources. However, over the last year we have seen a drastic increase in non-RC proxy recognitions.
The few days before a Wave ends there is a flood of social media posts where people are trying to fill all their slots; effectively giving away their slot to someone else to use. There is a “use it or lose it” mentality and that unused slots are somehow a waste. We feel this mentality is related to and encouraged by the foils distributed by Exemplar, and has resulted in some problematic behavior.
Starting with Wave 12, only RCs are allowed to make recognitions on behalf of another. All other ‘proxy’ nominations will be removed (as opposed to deferred) from the Wave during the review process.
I want to clarify a few points here: This does not mean that you, as an L2+ judge, must personally observe everything you nominate a person for. If you are told about an awesome thing another judge does and you decide you want to nominate them for it, that’s exactly what Exemplar is for. You decided that you value the action based on what you heard, and you want to recognize that Judge in your own words. What we are prohibiting is, essentially, giving your recognition slot to another person to use, and the abdication of your ownership of that recognition.
In short: You are responsible for each and every recognition you submit through Exemplar.
If you are a judge who wishes to recognize a judge, and cannot, you have several options. The easiest is to brag about the judge online. The existence of Exemplar does not prohibit you from saying good things about another judge outside of Exemplar. If you feel uncomfortable doing this you can send a message to your Regional Coordinator to make them aware of the awesome things judges in their region are doing. RC’s love to hear about the good things judges in their regions do and they have an increased slot count for recognitions exactly for this purpose. A final option, if you aren’t already, is to consider pursuing L2. This seems a natural conclusion as you are demonstrating both the involvement in the program and scope of interactions that we value in our L2 members.
Conclusion
I think those are big enough announcements for today. I know some of these changes will not be popular. Changing how foils were distributed after eleven waves was not an easy decision, but ultimately it was necessary to support the overall health and continuation of the Exemplar Program.
We are also extremely grateful to Rob McKenzie for bringing an idea from his region to the larger Judge Program. Being able to provide judges with a physical printing of their accomplishments they can pull out during a game and use as a conversation topic with another player is extremely exciting for us. I personally am looking forward to the seeing RK Post turn our fellow judges into Zombies in a crypt or Merfolk swimming upstream or hapless pirates on a Treasure Token.
As always, constructive feedback is welcome, and if you have any questions or concerns or comments, you can email us at exemplarprogram@gmail.com or post to the forum thread created for this blog post.
Wave 12 will open on Dec 1st, and remain open until Feb 12th 23:59 PST
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im so hungry but there are too many choices and i can't decide what to eat.
166 shares
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Image copyright AP Image caption Mr Giuliani says he wants to bring together government and corporate and technology leaders
President-elect Donald Trump has picked former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to form a team of private sector cybersecurity experts.
Mr Giuliani, once a leading contender for secretary of state, said Mr Trump would meet the team on a regular basis.
He was selected because of his private sector cybersecurity expertise, a Trump transition team statement said.
Mr Trump has said he plans to create a cybersecurity team within his first 90 days in office.
Mr Giuliani's appointment follows Russian hackers' apparent attempt to meddle in November's US election.
Mr Trump accepted for the first time at a press conference on Wednesday that the Russians were behind the cyber-breach.
Thursday's announcement from the president-elect called cyber-intrusion "the fastest growing crime in the United States and much of the world" and said it was a "major threat" to national security.
But it stopped short of giving a formal title to Mr Giuliani, 72, who runs an international security consulting firm.
A vocal Trump supporter during the campaign, he last month said he was taking himself out of the running for a cabinet job after his business dealings came under media scrutiny.
Mr Giuliani had said the role of America's top diplomat "was the only one I had any real interest in".
But Mr Trump picked former Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson for that position.
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Saksa, Resolt1on, w33, Moonmeander, and myself have mutually agreed to leave DC and become an independent team going into the Kiev major. We are grateful for all DC has done for us and are proud of our accomplishments with them. We will be in Kiev under our new team name the “Thunderbirds” as well as attending The Summit 7 in May. We wish DC and their new team, the former “Onyx” lineup, all the best.
Reply · Report Post
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Transferring our enormous databases without causing downtime was turning into one of the biggest challenges we faced so far.
When we firstly started exploring the options of transferring our databases, there was no native option to launch a Google CloudSQL 2nd generation instance that replicated from an external master (AWS Aurora in our case), this meant that we had to rely on external tools to provide this functionality.
We tried using Tungsten Replicator to do the replication by reading from our Aurora instance and writing to a new Google CloudSQL instance, but quickly we ran into several issues that made us reconsider this choice. Lucky for us, just when we were trying to get Tungsten to work, we noticed Google offering a new migration feature, allowing CloudSQL to replicate from an external master (https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/migrate-data).
There is however one caveat that prevented us from directly using our AWS Aurora machine as an external master. One of the requirements Google poses for the external master is the required support for GTID transactions, which unfortunately AWS Aurora does not support.
We attempted to setup a custom MySQL machine between our Aurora machine and CloudSQL to see if MySQL natively offers a possibility to read from a server with ANONYMOUS transactions (non-GTID) and is able to act as a master to a GTID enabled slave. This attempt failed out of the box, since standard MySQL only supports either ANONYMOUS or GTID transactions, and the setting needs to be consistent across the entire replication chain.
We found help in an article posted by Booking.com that explains how they introduced GTID-based replication into their MySQL setup. While our goal is different, essentially we were bumping into the same problem, namely, how do we replicate from a master using ANONYMOUS transactions to a GTID enabled slave.
The solution proposed by the article involved using a patched MySQL that disables verification that GTID-based replication is enabled on the entire chain, a mode that they named ANONYMOUS_IN-GTID_OUT. They have also created a feature request in the MySQL bug tracker to have this functionality supported in the original MySQL, but this has not been released yet.
Inspired by their article, we built a new version of MySQL that included the ANONYMOUS_IN-GTID_OUT patch to see if we would be able to setup replication between Aurora and Google Cloud using the patched MySQL in between.
Our attempts succeeded and we were able to have a working replication between AWS Aurora and Google CloudSQL using the patched MySQL as a middle-man. It takes ANONYMOUS transactions from AWS and introduces GTIDs to all transactions to allow for direct replication to Google Cloud.
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published on July 12, 2016, 12:59 p.m. by eliotberriot | 0
As you may now, I released lifter publicly a few months ago.
Despite a lot of positive feedback, I've been quite busy over the last months and the project did not evolved much.
One of the reason explaining this situation is that when I initially released lifter, it was only as an ORM for Python iterables. But, thanks to some feedback, I realized that the project as a lot of potential, as a generic ORM that would enable querying any datasource with the same API. I won't go further into details, there is a dedicated issue on GitHub.
Because of that, I took a step back to think of the right architecture that would enable such a use case.
From Python iterables to a log file parser
With lifter, currently, you can run such queries:
from lifter.import models from lifter.backends.python import IterableStore class User (models . Model): pass data = [ { 'age' : 27 , 'is_active' : False , 'email' : 'kurt@cobain.music' , }, { 'age' : 687 , 'is_active' : True , 'email' : 'legolas@deepforest.org' , }, { 'age' : 34 , 'is_active' : False , 'email' : 'golgoth@lahorde.org' , } ] store = IterableStore(data) manager = store . query(User) young_users = manager . filter(User . age < 30 )
This is quite easy to implement, because everything is Python: the data source, and the API.
Now, what if I want to query my users from a REST API instead, or even a file on my machine ?
I've updated lifter's API to achieve that in the latest lifter release (0.3). As a test of this new implementation, I'll be writing in this guide a simple lifter backend to run queries against an Apache log file.
The backend will have the following capabilities:
Convert each log entry to a plain Python model
Filtering using log fields (IP, user agent, path requested...)
Running more complex queries to extract general data (getting a list of all visitors IP, all referers, total bytes sent over a period...)
The whole thing should fit in 30 lines of code.
Setup
If you want to run the code from this guide, you'll have to download and setup lifter 0.3:
git clone https://github.com/EliotBerriot/lifter.git cd lifter git checkout 0.3 python setup.py install
I suggest you run this into a virtual environment for proper isolation (although lifter only requires little dependencies)
The data source
First, we'll have to generate log entries, such as
172 .183.134.216 - - [ 12 /Jul/2016: 12 : 22 : 14 -0700 ] "GET /wp-content HTTP/1.0" 200 4980 "http://farmer-harris.com/category/index/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8; rv:1.9.3.20) Gecko/2013-07-10 02:46:11 Firefox/9.0"
To do so, I'll use a fake log generator. I've edited the project, so you can use it immediatly on lifter, see the example/fake-logs.py file.
So we'll generate 5000 log entries, that will make a sufficient data source to test our backend:
pip install fake-factory numpy # here we install the faker requirements python2 example/fake-logs.py -n 5000 > /tmp/apache.log
You can open the /tmp/apache.log file to check everything is okay.
The model
Now we have a real data to play with, let's express it as a lifter model:
from lifter import models class LogEntry (models . Model): ip = models . CharField() date = models . DateTimeField() method = models . CharField() request_path = models . CharField() http_version = models . CharField() status_code = models . IntegerField() response_size = models . IntegerField() referrer = models . CharField() user_agent = models . CharField()
Nothing fancy here, we declare one LogEntry model with a few fields declarations, corresponding to fields available in the log file.
Some fields are more specifically typed, ( response_size with IntegerField and date with DateTimeField ), meaning the value for each log entry will be cast to the corresponding python types ( integer and datetime ).
The adapter
Now we've got our models, we have to write the adapter, that will be responsible for casting each line of our log file as a LogEntry model. First let's get done with the regular expression:
import re LOG_REGEX = '(?P<ip>[(\d\.)]+) - - \[(?P<date>.*?) -(.*?)\] "(?P<method>\w+) (?P<request_path>.*?) HTTP/(?P<http_version>.*?)" (?P<status_code>\d+) (?P<response_size>\d+) "(?P<referrer>.*?)" "(?P<user_agent>.*?)"' line = '172.183.134.216 - - [12/Jul/2016:12:22:14 -0700] "GET /wp-content HTTP/1.0" 200 4980 "http://farmer-harris.com/category/index/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8; rv:1.9.3.20) Gecko/2013-07-10 02:46:11 Firefox/9.0"' compiled = re . compile(LOG_REGEX) match = compiled . match(line) data = match . groupdict() print (data)
This will output:
{ 'user_agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8; rv:1.9.3.20) Gecko/2013-07-10 02:46:11 Firefox/9.0', 'date': '12/Jul/2016:12:22:14 -0700', 'http_version': '1.0', 'referrer': 'http://farmer-harris.com/category/index/', 'ip': '172.183.134.216', 'status_code': '200', 'method': 'GET', 'path': '/wp-content', 'response_size': '4980' }
The previous output proves that our regex is indeed capturing the data we need.
Now, let's write our adapter:
from lifter.adapters import RegexAdapter class LogEntryFileAdapter (RegexAdapter): regex = LOG_REGEX def clean_date ( self , data, value, model, field): date_format = ' %d /%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S' return field . to_python( self , value, date_format = date_format)
As you can see, the code is pretty straightforward. We set the regex the adapter will use to parse data, and we only override the clean_date method to provide our custom date format.
Here again, we can test our adapter is working properly:
import datetime adapter = LogEntryFileAdapter() instance = adapter . parse(line, LogEntry) assert instance . ip == '172.183.134.216' assert instance . date == datetime . datetime( 2016 , 7 , 12 , 12 , 22 , 14 ) assert instance . method == 'GET' assert instance . request_path == '/wp-content' assert instance . http_version == '1.0' assert instance . status_code == 200 assert instance . response_size == 4980 assert instance . referrer == 'http://farmer-harris.com/category/index/' assert instance . user_agent == 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8; rv:1.9.3.20) Gecko/2013-07-10 02:46:11 Firefox/9.0'
Wonderful, our log line was successfully converted to a regular lifter model!
Running queries
Until here, everything works properly, but we don't want to create each LogEntry instance by hand. That's where the Store come in:
from lifter.backends import filesystem store = filesystem . FileStore(path = '/tmp/apache.log' ) manager = store . query(LogEntry, adapter = LogEntryFileAdapter())
And here we go! With only two lines, we wrapped all our previous code and made our log file queryable.
Maybe you don't believe me, so let's dive into the data:
manager . all() . count() >>> 5000 manager . filter(LogEntry . status_code == 200 ) . count() >>> 4463 manager . order_by( ~ LogEntry . response_size) . values_list( 'response_size' , 'ip' , 'request_path' )[: 10 ] >>> [( 5175 , '64.219.210.186' , '/wp-content' ), ( 5163 , '157.102.97.30' , '/search/tag/list' ), ( 5160 , '240.199.75.110' , '/posts/posts/explore' ), ( 5158 , '250.236.19.198' , '/list' ), ( 5156 , '154.52.202.165' , '/apps/cart.jsp?appID=5056' ), ( 5155 , '2.132.244.147' , '/list' ), ( 5149 , '20.32.252.68' , '/search/tag/list' ), ( 5146 , '77.223.24.206' , '/apps/cart.jsp?appID=9970' ), ( 5145 , '83.4.117.89' , '/explore' ), ( 5144 , '183.8.119.188' , '/list' )] from lifter.aggregates import Avg, Sum, Max, Min manager . aggregate(Max( 'response_size' ), Min( 'response_size' ), Sum( 'response_size' ), Avg( 'response_size' )) >>> { 'response_size__avg' : 4999.165 , 'response_size__max' : 5175 , 'response_size__min' : 4830 , 'response_size__sum' : 24995825 } qs = manager . filter(LogEntry . status_code == 200 ) . exclude(LogEntry . request_path == '/list' ) for entry in qs . order_by(LogEntry . date)[: 5 ]: print ( 'Hello there, I was generated on {0}' . format(entry . date)) >>> Hello there, I was generated on 2016-07-12 12 : 19 : 13 >>> Hello there, I was generated on 2016-07-12 12 : 22 : 36 >>> Hello there, I was generated on 2016-07-12 12 : 28 : 49 >>> Hello there, I was generated on 2016-07-12 12 : 29 : 42 >>> Hello there, I was generated on 2016-07-12 12 : 32 : 37
If I remove all checks and prints from the code, we have this:
import datetime from lifter import models from lifter.adapters import RegexAdapter from lifter.backends import filesystem class LogEntry (models . Model): ip = models . CharField() date = models . DateTimeField() method = models . CharField() request_path = models . CharField() http_version = models . CharField() status_code = models . IntegerField() response_size = models . IntegerField() referrer = models . CharField() user_agent = models . CharField() class LogEntryFileAdapter (RegexAdapter): regex = '(?P<ip>[(\d\.)]+) - - \[(?P<date>.*?) -(.*?)\] "(?P<method>\w+) (?P<request_path>.*?) HTTP/(?P<http_version>.*?)" (?P<status_code>\d+) (?P<response_size>\d+) "(?P<referrer>.*?)" "(?P<user_agent>.*?)"' def clean_date ( self , data, value, model, field): date_format = ' %d /%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S' return field . to_python( self , value, date_format = date_format) store = filesystem . FileStore(path = '/tmp/apache.log' ) manager = store . query(LogEntry, adapter = LogEntryFileAdapter())
Which is exactly 30 lines of code (actually, less if we remove blank lines, but let's not be petty).
Going further
Lifter's documentation is here to help, especially regarding the query language and API.
More backends will be implemented in future releases of lifter (I'd really like a http backend to run queries against a REST API ;).
If you enjoyed this guide, have some questions, or want to spot some mistakes please leave a comment. If you're in to contribute to lifter's development, you're welcome, and I invite you to visit the code repository.
Thank you for reading!
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This week the US Patent and Trademark Office approved an application from Boeing's James J. Childress and John J. Viniotis for an autonomous drone that can be recharged without landing.
Today the amount of time a drone can spend in the air is limited by the amount of fuel or electricity the unmanned aircraft can carry.
But those limitations could soon be a thing of the past.
According to the patent, the system involves battery-powered dirigibles or drones that can deploy a retractable tether. The tether will be able to connect to a power source as the craft hovers. When fully charged, the drone will automatically fly off to complete its programmed task while another drone will fly in and take its place at the charging point.
Your browser does not support the video tag. YouTube/PatentYogi
Depending on the specific application of the drone, the tether can be connected to a variety of sources including land- and ocean-based power supplies. The tether can even be connected to moving vehicles, allowing the drone to charge while flying.
The patent — filed in March 2013 and approved this week — is a reasonable concept for an efficient and effective way to manage and charge a fleet of drones. Because the drones can fly indefinitely without landing, the system forgoes the need for landing and storage space. Of course, the drones would probably have to periodically land for maintenance.
Thus far, the proposed system exists on the drawing board. There's no word whether Boeing plans to actually build these drones.
Boeing Drone Patent More
Check out a full video overview here courtesy of PatentYogi:
NOW WATCH: Someone figured out the purpose of the extra shoelace hole on your running shoes — and it will blow your mind
More From Business Insider
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The List: 300-Horsepower Hot Hatch
“Hot hatch” is the high-performance variant of a hatchback car model, which can be either a 3 or 5-door. One key feature of the hot hatch is its higher-output engine. Due to typical size and weight of a hot hatch, its engine output rarely goes above 400hp. At this moment, a hatchback with more than 300hp can be considered a “serious” hot hatch.
Below are a list for hot hatches that with at least 300hp (same model with different drivetrain options are listed separately).
Audi
RS3 Sportback, 5dr, 340PS 2.5L turbo I5, 7DCT, AWD
S3, 3dr, 300PS 2.0L turbo I4, 6MT, AWD
S3, 3dr, 300PS 2.0L turbo I4, 6DCT, AWD
S3 Sportback, 5dr, 300PS 2.0L turbo I4, 6MT, AWD
S3 Sportback, 5dr, 300PS 2.0L turbo I4, 6DCT, AWD
BMW
M Coupe, 3dr, 321PS 3.2L I6, 5MT, RWD
M Coupe, 3dr, 325PS 3.2L I6, 5MT, RWD
M Coupe (US-spec), 3dr, 319PS 3.2L I6, 5MT, RWD
M135i, 3dr, 320PS 3.0L turbo I6, 6MT, RWD
M135i, 3dr, 320PS 3.0L turbo I6, 8AT, RWD
M135i xDrive, 3dr, 320PS 3.0L turbo I6, 8AT, AWD
M135i, 5dr, 320PS 3.0L turbo I6, 6MT, RWD
M135i, 5dr, 320PS 3.0L turbo I6, 8AT, RWD
M135i xDrive, 5dr, 320PS 3.0L turbo I6, 8AT, AWD
Ford
Focus RS, 3dr, 305PS 2.5L turbo I5, 6MT, FWD
Focus RS 500, 3dr, 350PS 2.5L turbo I5, 6MT, FWD
Focus RS (2016 – ) 5dr, 315HP+ 3.2L EcoBoost turbo I4, 6MT AWD
Honda
Civic Type R (2016 -) 5dr, 306HP, 2.0L VTEC turbo I4, 6MT, FWD
Mercedes-Benz
C32 AMG Sportcoupe, 3dr, 354PS 3.2L supercharged V6, 5AT, RWD
A45 AMG, 5dr, 360PS 2.0L turbo I4, 7DCT, AWD
GLA45 AMG, 5dr, 360PS 2.0L turbo I4, 7DCT, AWD
Porsche
Porsche 968 Turbo S, 3dr, 305PS 3.0L turbo I4, 6MT, RWD
SEAT
Leon Cupra 310 (NL), 5dr, 310PS 2.0L turbo I4, 6MT, FWD
Leon Cupra R310 WCE (CH), 5dr, 310PS 2.0L turbo I4, 6MT, FWD
Subaru
WRX STI, 5dr, 308PS 2.0L turbo F4, 6MT, AWD
WRX STI A-Line, 5dr, 300PS 2.5L turbo F4, 5AT, AWD
WRX STI (EU-spec), 5dr, 300PS 2.5L turbo F4, 6MT, AWD
WRX STI (US-spec), 5dr, 308PS 2.5L turbo F4, 6MT, AWD
WRX STI spec C, 5dr, 308PS 2.0L turbo F4, 6MT, AWD
WRX STI spec C (2011), 5dr, 308PS 2.0L turbo F4, 6MT, AWD
WRX STI R205, 5dr, 320PS 2.0L turbo F4, 6MT, AWD
WRX STI 330S (UK-spec), 5dr, 330PS 2.5L turbo F4, 6MT, AWD
Cosworth WRX STI CS400 (UK-spec), 5dr, 400PS 2.5L turbo F4, 6MT, AWD
Volkswagen
Golf R (Mk7), 3dr, 300PS 2.0L turbo I4, 6MT, AWD
Golf R (Mk7), 3dr, 300PS 2.0L turbo I4, 6DCT, AWD
Golf R (Mk7), 5dr, 300PS 2.0L turbo I4, 6MT, AWD
Golf R (Mk7), 5dr, 300PS 2.0L turbo I4, 6DCT, AWD
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By Dave Anderson
Christopher Wray, President Trump's nominee for FBI director, advised corporate clients on how to avoid "being in the crosshairs" of law enforcement at a 2015 legal forum where investigations by state attorneys general into whether ExxonMobil misled investors and the public about climate change were a topline issue.
Wray's law firm later pitched clients on its ability to help corporations "vigorously contest" such investigations in response to the 2016 launch of a coalition of 17 state attorneys general aimed at pursuing similar legal efforts around climate change. The firm's clients have included ExxonMobil and other powerful fossil fuel interests.
First, some quick background on the issues at play, followed by some details on the involvement of Wray and his law firm.
Wray once led federal corporate fraud investigations, but then he switched sides
President Trump described his new nominee for FBI director as "a man of impeccable credentials" in a tweet. Wray's credentials include a 2003-2005 stint as assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice, where he oversaw corporate fraud investigations, helped to take down Enron and contributed to national security efforts after 9/11.
After Wray left the Department of Justice in 2005, he switched sides and joined the corporate law firm King & Spalding, which has consistently ranked as a "White Collar Group of the Year." He's since defended big corporations against investigations by U.S. attorneys general offices around the country.
Wray's law firm has defended powerful fossil fuel interests in climate change litigation
King & Spalding successfully defended Chevron in Native Village of Kalina v. ExxonMobil, a case where a community of Alaska Natives sought compensation for the cost of relocating their coastal village due to flooding and erosion caused by climate change. The community and others like it still remain stranded in the path of rising waters, without the financial resources necessary to relocate once again.
DesmogBlog has previously reported on some of the firm's broader other clients in the fossil fuel industry, which have included ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil, Occidental Petroleum, Peabody Energy and Shell. Other clients have included ExxonMobil and the Russian oil companies Gazprom and Rosneft.
The firm's client list is of interest given the current scrutiny of the Trump administration's ties to Russia. For example, Sec. of State Rex Tillerson established a long-term relationship with Rosneft while CEO of ExxonMobil. In addition, some members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate have called on the Department of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil's record of deception on climate change based on the same authority it previously used to take on the tobacco industry.
The FBI's role in the ExxonMobil climate change investigations
In 2016, a letter from the Department of Justice informed members of Congress that it had forwarded their request for a federal investigation into whether ExxonMobil may have violated the law by "failing to disclose truthful information to investors and the public regarding climate science" to the FBI.
"The FBI will determine whether an investigation is warranted," the 2016 letter from DOJ said.
More than half a million Americans also petitioned the Department of Justice to investigate the oil and gas producer. The calls came after it was revealed that ExxonMobil knew about the possible risks that carbon dioxide emissions resulting from use of its products—fossil fuels—posed to the earth's climate, long before it spearheaded a decades long campaign of climate denial.
The FBI has been silent on the issue since then, and prospects of a federal investigation into ExxonMobil's climate deception dimmed when Trump chose Sen. Jeff Sessions to serve as U.S. attorney general. While in the Senate, Sessions joined a letter to the Department of Justice that opposed such an investigation.
Wray offered clients legal advice at a 2015 forum on the ExxonMobil investigations
A number of state attorneys general continue to lead the charge on investigating ExxonMobil's record on climate change, most notably Maura Healey of Massachusetts and Eric Schneiderman of New York.
The December 2015 forum, "From Climate Change to Anti-Corruption: The Energy Sector in the Crosshairs of Government Enforcement," that was hosted by King & Spalding was largely framed as a response to these investigations.
Wray topped the list of speakers , which also included several other attorneys from his firm.
A January of 2016 Client Alert, "State Attorneys General Investigations and Enforcement: What to Expect in 2016," sent by King & Spalding confirms that the forum:
"…discussed New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's investigation into ExxonMobil's securities disclosures and their connection to climate change issues, among other recent energy-related investigations."
Wray's advice at the December 2015 forum was quoted in the same Client Alert that King & Spalding sent out the following month:
"When you see a competitor announce in their disclosure that they've got an investigation, whether it's with a state AG, the SEC, the Justice Department or all of the above, immediately start trying to figure out as much as you can about what they are dealing with and start asking yourself questions internally: Is there any chance at all we could have a problem like that since they're in the same industry in the same place? Is there something we ought to do ... so that we don't end up being in the crosshairs?"
"In this way, companies can identify areas where the government is likely to investigate and proactively move to improve and reinforce compliance in those critical areas," the client alert then concluded, based on Wray's remarks.
But Wray's law firm later offered clients the ability to "vigorously contest" such investigations
Spalding & King soon followed up with an April 2016 Client Alert, "State AGs Announce Climate Change Investigations," that closed with a sales pitch:
"King & Spalding has been at the forefront in representing clients who have found themselves the targets of state AG investigations or claims for almost 30 years. Our experience with state AG investigations began in the 1980s with our representation of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company and continues through to today representing clients in many industries, including energy companies. King & Spalding's State Attorneys General Practice is jointly led by our government investigations and public policy groups, and is supported by our strategic alliance with former Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen.
We always do what we can to help clients avoid or minimize the impact of state Attorneys General investigations and litigation whenever possible, but we are not afraid to vigorously contest those investigations when appropriate or to try cases when necessary. We are also adept at engaging with the media directly or in coordination with communications personnel and/or consultants."
The April 2016 client alert came from King & Spalding's Special Matters and Government Investigations Practice Group, which Wray had chaired since 2006. Wray was not explicitly named in the April client alert, as he was named in the earlier January alert.
King & Spalding's April 2016 alert came shortly after the launch of the coalition of 17 state attorneys general that significantly raised the stakes for ExxonMobil.
"The participating states are exploring working together on key climate change-related initiatives, such as ongoing and potential investigations into whether fossil fuel companies misled investors and the public on the impact of climate change on their businesses," according to a press release from Schneiderman's office.
King & Spalding's April 2016 client alert also questioned the motives of these state attorneys general. It cited information obtained through a public records request submitted to the Vermont attorney general's office by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) in an attempt to stir up political controversy around the investigations. E&E Legal is a climate denial outfit with ties to the Trump administration and is known for its use of public records requests to harass real climate scientists.
In 2015, E&E Legal received funding from coal producer Peabody Energy. That same year, the Peabody Energy reached a settled with Schneiderman after an investigation into the coal company's "misleading statements" to investors on climate change.
Wray is not the first Trump nominee to have weighed in on the issue
Corporate attorney Jay Clayton worked for a law firm that advised clients to comply with guidance on climate change disclosure from the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) after Schneiderman announced his investigation of ExxonMobil's disclosures. News broke that the SEC had launched a related investigation into ExxonMobil's climate accounting practices in September of 2016.
Clayton is now serving in the Trump administration as chairman of the SEC. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Clayton advised that corporations should continue to be "mindful" of the SEC's guidance on climate change disclosure:
Similar questions could arise at Wray's confirmation hearing, though those are likely to be dominated by questions about the FBI's ongoing investigation into Russian influence over the 2016 election.
State attorneys general will continue to lead the investigations into ExxonMobil's record on climate change
There is no reason to believe that any real federal investigation of ExxonMobil's climate change disclosures, or those of other companies, will occur while Trump is in the White House. The Trump administration has, with few exceptions, generally followed the fossil fuel industry's lead by rolling back key U.S. climate change policies that have long been opposed by ExxonMobil and its political allies.
State attorneys general will continue to lead the charge on holding companies like ExxonMobil accountable when they deceive investors and the public about climate change risks, and recent trends indicate forward thinking shareholders will do the same.
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With Shohei Ohtani expected to become available to major league teams next week, his agent has asked interested teams to submit presentations that explain how the so-called “Babe Ruth of Japan” would “fit into the organization in both the short term and the long term.”
With bonus restrictions enabling every major league team to afford Ohtani, the presentations are expected to help Ohtani, his agent and his family narrow the field to what the letter called “a subset of clubs on which to focus.”
The letter, sent to all 30 clubs Friday and obtained by The Times, asks for clubs to address seven non-financial points in their presentations:
“An evaluation of Shohei’s talent as a pitcher and/or a hitter;
“Player development, medical, training and player performance philosophies and capabilities;
“Major League, Minor League, and Spring Training facilities;
“Resources for Shohei’s cultural assimilation;
“A detailed plan for integrating Shohei into the organization;
“Why the city and franchise are a desirable place to play;
“Relevant marketplace characteristics.”
The Dodgers are expected to be among the most ardent pursuers of Ohtani, 23, who might command some $200 million if he were truly a free agent. However, under MLB rules governing international signings, teams cannot exceed their designated bonus pools to sign him.
The Texas Rangers have the most money in their pool: $3.55 million, according to the Associated Press. The Dodgers have $300,000.
The winning team also would owe $20 million to Ohtani’s Japanese club, the Nippon Ham Fighters.
bill.shaikin@latimes.com
Twitter: @BillShaikin
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At next week's NBA Draft, some team is going to select Rachelle Holdman's son.
And she's going to be giddy for Terrance Ferguson. Holdman's going to be ecstatic that her 19-year-old's gamble – to skip college and play professionally for a year in Australia – paid off.
But there might be a little extra emotion if Ferguson lands with the Thunder, which holds the No. 21 pick.
“My favorite team!” Holdman said in a phone interview on Thursday with a long, happy laugh. “My favorite teeeeeeam!”
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Buscar:
Categorias
Sobre Nós
O XMultas é uma plataforma que te ajuda com a burocracia veicular. Aqui, você pode contratar um plano mensal de acompanhamento de multas e documentos ou realizar um serviço pontual.
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January 2, 2008
The last article I did produced some stir, as it dealt with the decision by Faux News to ban Ron Paul from the upcoming presidential debate in New Hampshire. Most of the responses were supportive as this is a travesty. That any news agency, let alone a fake one, would purposefully try and influence the outcome of a presidential election has to be unacceptable for all Americans.
But toward the end of the comments I was attacked for "sloppy reporting" by a Mr. Westmiller, who claimed that Paul was not being excluded from the debates at all! Well, all is fair in propaganda I guess. Not only is Paul being excluded, as I correctly reported, but ABC may also be blacklisting him as well. Here is a link for those who ought to check their sources before accusing anyone of sloppy reporting:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/31/debate.limits.ap/index.html?section=cnn_latest
ABC seems to be applying fairer standards but why can't the American people hear all the opinions? Paul is still leading in fundraising, so why exclude him? Fox’s lame excuse is they do not have enough room in their trailer...I kid you not. An alleged media giant can only afford a trailer that fits five candidates comfortably. They have enough room for Fred "I don't really want to be here" Thompson, who has been in for a month and has done NOTHING, but not for the top fundraiser in the pack.
We all know why there is such bias against Dr. Paul. It is because he represents something other than the script the other guys will be reading off of. He would have been the only GOP hopeful talking about NOT blowing up the world, true fiscal discipline, and restoring civil liberties. Can't have that on Fox where they pretend to report, but they have already decided. Instead now we will be regaled with tales from the five would be tyrants who all believe they can more efficiently bomb Iran. They will spin yarns about how we need them to protect us and how the democrats are all spineless wimps because they do not lockstep to the war drumbeats and thrashing of our civil liberties. Most important to Fox News of course, is that they get to present their view of the Republican Party unblemished. They get to present the neocon vision as the only articulated platform for the GOP. No more uncomfortable post-debate polls showing how Ron Paul handily defeated their host of war-mongering candidates. Sean Hannity will not have to exclaim how Paul backers somehow rigged a poll. Fox gets to draw the sharp delineation they have been seeking. It is either the big brave republicans or the wimpy ole democrats. Nothing in the middle folks, nope, nothing to see here. Move along and cast your vote for one of our pre-selected candidates.
I guess some might be confused as to why ABC has hopped along the un-American express? I mean, everyone knows Fox is biased but ABC is “mainstream”, right? WRONG. The corporate media is the corporate media. The true damage Fox does is to make other corporate media appear more central, when they are in fact just as in bed with the machine as Fox. ABC might cave quicker to pressure though.
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Background:
Before Canada's single-payer reform, its payment system, health costs, and number of health administrative personnel per capita resembled those of the United States. By 1999, administration accounted for 31% of U.S. health expenditures versus 16.7% in Canada. No recent comprehensive analyses of those costs are available.
Objective:
To quantify 2017 spending for administration by insurers and providers.
Design:
Analyses of government reports, accounting data that providers file with regulators, surveys of physicians, and census-collected data on employment in health care.
Setting:
United States and Canada.
Measurements:
Insurance overhead; administrative expenditures of hospitals, physicians, nursing homes, home care agencies, and hospices.
Results:
U.S. insurers and providers spent $812 billion on administration, amounting to $2497 per capita (34.2% of national health expenditures) versus $551 per capita (17.0%) in Canada: $844 versus $146 on insurers' overhead; $933 versus $196 for hospital administration; $255 versus $123 for nursing home, home care, and hospice administration; and $465 versus $87 for physicians' insurance-related costs. Of the 3.2–percentage point increase in administration's share of U.S. health expenditures since 1999, 2.4 percentage points was due to growth in private insurers' overhead, mostly because of high overhead in their Medicare and Medicaid managed-care plans.
Limitations:
Estimates exclude dentists, pharmacies, and some other providers; accounting categories for the 2 countries differ somewhat; and methodological changes probably resulted in an underestimate of administrative cost growth since 1999.
Conclusion:
The gap in health administrative spending between the United States and Canada is large and widening, and it apparently reflects the inefficiencies of the U.S. private insurance–based, multipayer system. The prices that U.S. medical providers charge incorporate a hidden surcharge to cover their costly administrative burden.
Primary Funding Source:
None.
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Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is back in New Jersey Thursday for a rare public appearance since she lost in her bid for the White House against President Donald Trump.
Clinton is expected to talk politics, American democracy and her role in shaping women's political history.
Rutgers will pay Clinton $25,000 from an endowment but use no money from tuition or state aid, according to the university.
A Clinton spokesperson told NBC the former secretary of state plans to donate the honorarium for the speech to charity.
Rutgers Eagleton Institute of Politics will host the event to be held at Rutgers Athletic Center in Piscataway.
It's sold out. Anyone interested in tickets can join the waitlist, or watch it on Rutgers University's livestream.
Clinton made at least three public appearances in the Garden State since the presidential election: She campaigned for then-gubernatorial candidate Phil Murphy for governor in October, and then returned for another pro-Murphy event that same month with her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Hillary Clinton was in New Jersey the month before for a book signing in Montclair.
New Jersey isn't a swing state, so the former secretary of state wasn't here much before the election either. But she had some visits.
Clinton railed against what she called Trump's "reckless" and "dangerous" agenda on the campaign trail in Blackwood in May 2016 and was welcomed back to the state a short time later by rocker Jon Bon Jovi.
Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewArco or Facebook.
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The guitar that launched a million riffs: Fender Stratocaster celebrates its 60th anniversary
Leo Fender created the first Stratocaster in 1954. It featured a signature double cutaway design and contoured body
Early adopters included 50s legend Buddy Holly, and UK musician Hank Marvin who was the first to import one
Since then it has been used by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Eddie Van Halen and Stevie Ray Vaughn
Kurt Cobain used one before his death, and Arctic Monkeys' frontman Alex Turner used one in the band's early days
Few rock icons can claim to still be going strong after 60 years, but today marks the anniversary of the first Fender Stratocaster being built, and the music icon is still as popular as ever.
Designed by Leo Fender in a small workshop in Fullerton, California, six decades ago, it has been used in all genres from country to reggae, and from rock to pop and was the only guitar to challenge the Gibson Les Paul for popularity.
Today the guitars are built by hand in Fender's factory in Corona, California. Each Stratocaster starts life as a long, thin piece of ash wood which is shaped into a neck by machine, before being hand laid with either more ash or rosewood for the fret board.
The frets are then hammered in by hand, using a machine to tighten them. The body, which can be made of two, three, or even four pieces of wood, is then given its shape by a machine which cuts holes for the controls, tremolo bridge and other metal parts which are assembled by hand.
The neck and body are then hand shaped by workers using sanders before being sent through the paint shop, which uses similar technology to car factories. The paint is then left for three days until it properly dries.
Finally, the body and fret are given a final shaping, which puts the high-gloss finish on them, before being sent through quality control where they are examined, tuned and given a final check before being sent out.
Designed to be used by country musicians, the guitar was first memorably played by Buddy Holly and became his signature as an artist. One of the defining images of the 50s was Holly pictured with the guitar high up on his chest.
From there it was taken up in the early 60s by the likes of the Beach Boys who favoured it for it's wailing sound, and later by Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and George Harrison.
The birth of heavy metal saw the Stratocaster take on new life in the hands of Iron Maiden, while Eddie Van Halen's famous Frankenstrat only added to the instrument's iconic status.
The guitar then passed into the capable hands of modern-day musicians such as the Red Hot Chili Pepper's John Frusciante, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and the Arctic Monkey's Alex Turner.
Other memorable players include Hank Marvin, Stevie Ray Vaughn, the Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler and Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan, to name but a few.
Scroll down for video
The Fender Stratocaster celebrates its 60th anniversary today. It was originally created in the 1950s by Leo Fender to replace the earlier Telecaster
Unlike the big-band Telecaster, the Strat was designed for use in smaller bands and groups and also featured a contoured design to make it more comfortable to wear
The body of a Strat (top) is given this basic shape by a machine, but it repeatedly shaped and reshaped by hand using sanders to give it a high gloss finish (right) The neck of a Strat is also initially shaped by a machine, but the fret board is laid on by hand before the metal frets themselves are hammered into place by workers
In the paint shop, brand new guitar bodies are sprayed using similar technology to car plants. They are then put into racks which slowly move them across the floor to be finished. In total, it takes three days for the paint to dry
At the end of the manufacturing process all Fender guitars are put through a rigorous testing process, when they are checked for quality, finish and tuning
Other 60s musicians to take up the instrument included Jimi Hendrix, who famously played his flipped over because he was left handed. The Beatles' George Harrison was also a fan of the Fender, pictured here in 1970
While stars such as Kieth Richards are happy to buy Strats straight off the rack, Fender also offer a custom shop where almost any aspect of the guitar can be tweaked
Showing the instrument's infinite flexibility, it was perfectly suited to both the slow-hand style of Eric Clapton (left) and the harsher tones of Eddie Van Halen (right)
British band Iron Maiden brought the Stratocaster with them into the heavy metal revolution and carried on using the instrument form many years
Still rocking: Restoration expert and master builder John Cruz works on the body of a heavily used Strat at the Corona factory in California
The Strat has been used in virtually every genre, from reggae to rock, pop to punk. Here blues legend Robert Cray performs with one during a concert in Anaheim, Calif. Vinnie Garcia hands Country legend Vince Gill his 1957 Strat. Garcia sold Gill his first Stratocaster for $200 and a pair of cowboy boots. Gill said: 'I love the versatility of the guitar as much as anything, no matter what way you want to play it, it always responds'
Kurt Cobain, the force behind grunge band Nirvana, used a Strat and the Arctic Monkeys' frontman Alex Turner was also a fans of the guitar in the band's early days
Golden oldie: John Mayer performs with his Stratocaster. He said: 'It's the machine of my dreams. It's the Ford Mustang, the Marilyn Monroe, the lightning rod, surfboard, magic carpet for music'
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A comic about friends
By Josh Roepe
Framptown is on Comic Chameleon! Get it!
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Canadian World Cup duo Jeff Hassler and Tyler Ardron will make their much-anticipated returns from injury for Ospreys against Zebre on Sunday at the Stadio XXV Aprile in Parma. The pair having been missing in action since the tournament concluded, each recovering from knee problems suffered on international duty.
Both players are now in their third seasons with the Welsh regional side, after signing prior to the 2013/14 season. Hassler has established himself as first choice right wing at the club, and was named to the Pro 12 Dream Team at the end of his first season. Ardron’s status has been rising steadily since his club debut, with his versatility seeing him line up in both the second and back row.
Ospreys currently sit in 8th position in the Guinness Pro 12 with three wins and five losses, and will welcome the return of two key players. Former USA age-grade representative Hanno Dirksen is named on the bench. The South African-born winger now qualifies for Wales on residency.
OSPREYS
1 Paul James 2 Sam Parry 3 Dumitru Arhip 4 Lloyd Ashley 5 Tyler Ardron 6 James King 7 Justin Tipuric (capt.) 8 Dan Baker 9 Tom Habberfield 10 Sam Davies 11 Eli Walker 12 Josh Matavesi 13 Jonathan Spratt 14 Jeff Hassler 15 Dan Evans
16 Scott Otten 17 Nicky Smith 18 Ma’afu Fia 19 Alun Wyn Jones 20 Olly Cracknell 21 Martin Roberts 22 Dan Biggar 23 Hanno Dirksen
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How Astronomers Will Find Whether Life Can Exist on Proxima b
. "Some people have argued that such planets cannot have an atmosphere." "It is controversial whether or not life can exist in low mass star systems like Proxima Centauri," Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb told Gizmodo
"The newly detected Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri could potentially host life - if it has an atmosphere that supports surface liquid water," the researchers wrote in their paper , submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters. "We conclude that JWST observations have the potential to put the first constraints on the possibility of life around the nearest star to the Solar System.
"The important thing is that in a couple of years, we should be able to start learning about the atmosphere [of Proxima b]," Loeb said. "If there is one, it's quite likely there'd be a call for a special mission to study just this planet."
Last week, astronomers discovered a potentially Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf in our closest star system. Considering how little we know about it, the planet is a very promising candidate for life, but there are several pieces of information we need in order to actually determine whether it's habitable. First on the list: whether it has an atmosphere.The planet, dubbed "Proxima b," is rocky, Earth-sized, and close enough to its comparatively cold star that it could have Earth-like temperatures. However, as a result of its proximity to its star, the planet is exposed to 400 times the number of x-ray fluxes as Earth, which may have wiped out any atmosphere long ago.However, there's a chance that volcanic activity could have restored the atmosphere, particularly if that planet has strong, insulating magnetic fields. If that's the case, then observations from the James Webb space telescope might be able to determine whether the planet has an atmosphere, a key requirement for life. According to a new study, the JWST can detect the planet's temperature, which will be essential to making that determination.Since Proxima b is so close to its star, it is almost certainly tidally locked, meaning that one side permanently faces the sun, creating a "day" side and a "night" side. Loeb and his colleague, Harvard astronomer Laura Kreidberg, determined that the heat from the "day" side would be redistributed to the "night" if there is an atmosphere or ocean. As a result, the JWST can determine whether the planet has an atmosphere by measuring the difference in temperature between the "day" side and "night" side.If the planet is found to have an atmosphere, then we would need to discover what composes it, which the JWST most likely can't detect. For that, we'll need to wait for the Extremely Large Telescope, expected to be unveiled in the 2020s, or perhaps the next advancement in telescope technology.
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Contenido Exclusivo La nota a la que intentas acceder es exclusiva para suscriptores Suscribirme Conocé nuestros planes
y disfrutá de El País sin límites. Ingresar Si ya sos suscriptor podés
ingresar con tu usuario y contraseña.
El deporte uruguayo ya empieza a palpitar una nueva edición de los Juegos Olímpicos y además, sigue sumando competidores a la lista que se puede extender en las próximas semanas.
En las últimas horas, la clasificación de Andrés Silva en los 400 metros con vallas no solo estiró a 16 la delegación de deportistas celestes sino que también la del atletismo, que goza de un gran presente y tendrá a seis competidores en la máxima cita del deporte mundial, algo que nunca antes esta disciplina había logrado.
Es que a Silva se le suman Aguelmis Rojas (cubano nacionalizado uruguayo), Nicolás y Martín Cuestas en maratón, Emiliano Lasa en salto largo y Déborah Rodríguez, quien ya clasificó en los 800 metros y por estos días, de gira por Europa, busca sacar su pasaje a Rio en los 400 metros con vallas, prueba para la que necesita una marca de 56"20.
Pero no solo el atletismo tendrá una numerosa delegación. La vela uruguaya volverá a decir presente en los Juegos Olímpicos y esta vez con cuatro deportistas: Dolores Moreira en láser radial, Alejandro Foglia en fynn, Mariana Foglia y Pablo Defazio, el matrimonio que competirá en Nacra 17.
En natación, ecuestres, remo, judo y tenis, la Celeste también estará representada en Rio (ver recuadro).
Con chances.
A la fecha, la lista de 16 clasificados a los Juegos Olímpicos puede extenderse. Entre el 18 y 19 de junio, Los Teros buscarán en Mónaco el pasaje al seven en el Repechaje Mundial. Los celestes no la tendrán fácil y en la serie estarán con Canadá, Alemania y Siri Lanka. Participan 16 países y clasifica el campeón. El beach volley buscará el pasaje en la última etapa de la Continental Cup entre el 21 y el 27 de junio en Rosario, Argentina, en la rama femenina, y en Santiago de Chile en la masculina, mientras que en tiro, Diana Cabrera espera por la resolución de la Federación Internacional de Tiro para ver si clasifica por el MQS (Minimum Qualification Score).
LOS 16 QUE YA ESTÁN EN RIO
Néstor Nielsen logró el cupo para Uruguay en salto ecuestre.
Dolores Moreira en láser será otra representante de la vela celeste en Rio 2016.
Aguelmis Rojas, Nicolás y Martín Cuestas competirán en la maratón de los Juegos Olímpicos representando al atletismo: la más numerosa, con seis deportistas celestes.
Emiliano Lasa, quien compitió ayer en salto largo en París, volvió a tener una notable actuación. El uruguayo, ya clasificado a Rio de Janeiro, fue tercero en el Meeting International de Montreuil con 8,03 metros.
En natación, por universalidad, Uruguay tiene dos cupos asignados y en los últimos días, la Federación Uruguaya de Natación (FUN) confirmó que Inés Remersaro y Martín Melconian serán los representantes celestes en Brasil.
Jonathan Esquivel logró el cupo uruguayo en remo que por universalidad tendrá una plaza en Rio.
Déborah Rodríguez en 800 metros (busca la marca en 400 vallas) y Andrés Silva en 400 vallas completan la delegación de atletismo.
Pablo Aprahamian será el representante del judo uruguayo en los Juegos Olímpicos, mientras que en tenis, Pablo Cuevas ya aseguró su clasificación al cerrarse el ranking y estar 25°.
Mariana Foglia y Pablo Defazio consiguieron a fines de enero el objetivo de clasificarse a los Juegos Olímpicos en la clase Nacra 17, en el Mundial que se disputó en Miami.
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Stringer / Reuters
Mohammad, a 13-year-old fighter from the Free Syrian Army, aims his weapon through a hole in a wall in Aleppo's Bustan al-Basha district on Oct. 28. Mohammad joined the Free Syrian Army after his father died during clashes with the Syrian regime; the gun he is using was his father's.
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The Tor Wiki
About Dark Web Links And Hidden Wiki Sites
Most internet users perceive the dark web as a place where no one can transact legal business. The dark web is seen as a shady place where injustice, illegality, and criminality is the order of the day. To some extent, this mindset may be harmless and right, but then it is not everyone on the dark web that is a criminal element. Most people find it difficult to believe the fact that the dark web can be used for something that will benefit all and sundry.
One thing we all need to understand is that the dark web is no different than the clearnet. The thin line between the two is privacy. The clearnet is not private, and as such, you can be traced, tracked, and even your location can be pinpointed. Google stores all information about you, and so you live in a free world where everyone sees what you do. The dark web is just the opposite. Search engines do not track or store your activities online, you are connected to networks but surfing privately without any browser history. Your location cannot be tracked or traced, and so on. You are anonymous online.
This article is about social media links in the dark web. Websites like Facebook and twitter of the clearnet are also available in the dark web for people to use anonymously and have fun. No crime, no illegal stuff, and no criminality involved.
1. DIASPORA (7qzmtqy2itl7dwuu .onion)
Diaspora is a social media platform in the dark web that operates just like Facebook. The difference between the two is in the fact that Diaspora does not use your data to send you advertisements as Facebook does. This social media site does not profit from your saved data on its website. You need to register to use Diaspora, but then you are not required to make use of any of your real information. You can easily stay anonymous by taking up another identity that is not your own. Diaspora is JavaScript-based, so you need to enable JavaScript on your browser to make use of the site.
2. OURBOOK (occ4c3gx3w5esnmnnetwork .onion)
Ourbook is a dark web social network site that is fully distributed. Ourbook uses online routing for its P2P social network. This site allows users from all over the world (As you do not need to sign up with your real identities nor real country name as well). To make use of the network site, you need to download the Ourbook app, then register and then log in.
3. TOTOZ.EU (totozzimg6zbvthl .onion)
Totoz.eu is also another perfect Facebook replica in the dark web. It is one of the most popular social media sites in the dark web. The first thing to do is to register on the site, log in to your account, and start chatting and messaging friends you make on Totoz.eu. The features are more like Facebook, but then there is the privacy that Facebook does not offer.
4. MIDDLE EART HOBBIT (mango7ujh3rmxgoh .onion)
Creating an account with Middle Earth Hobbit’s social network in the dark web may take some time to process, but then it is a perfect social media website for people on the dark web. You will see a “need an account” button at the top of their website, which you can click on to register a free account.
5. TWITTER CLONE (npdaaf3s3f2xrmlo .onion)
TwitterClone is just as the name implies. TwitterClone is the dark web twitter alternative. It works exactly the way the clearnet twitter social media works. You post less than 200 words per post or status, and it just your micro-blog.
6. SECURESHARE (secushare.cheettyiapsyciew .onion)
SecureShare is a social media platform that is built to be an all-in-all for social media lovers. What I mean by this is that you have the likes of features of Whatsapp, Facebook, Gmail, Skype, Twitter, Instagram, and so on, all in just one single site. Facebook on the clearnet is trying to integrate these features buy purchasing the WhatsApp app, but then this site in the dark web already has everything you need in just one place as far as social media is concerned. Log on to the website to check out the fantastic features available thereon.
These six websites are the popular social media links in the dark web. There are so many more websites that offer social media features, but then this article will keep getting long if I decide to keep up with all the list of sites in the dark web that is in the social media category.
**BLACKBOOK
It is worthy to note that there used to be a social media site in the dark web that is a full Facebook clone. Black book did make a wave when it was first introduced in the dark web. Blackbook worked in the same way Facebook does; in fact, the front page is just the same as that of Facebook. The site was famous for the little time it was available because, in 2017, Blackbook was hacked and has since yet to be recovered. I have decided to separate this from the remaining top six in this article simply because the site no longer works. There are several other dark web social media sites that used to exits but are no longer operational; the likes of Galaxy, which was floated in 2013, is no longer operating as well.
Always remember that the dark web is the dark web, and even if you are visiting a safe site (so to say), you still need to take care. Also, on the clearnet, one needs to be careful not to get scammed, let alone in the dark web. Always connect through the Tor browser and increase your anonymity by using a good VPN alongside the Tor browser. Close all applications before accessing the dark web and ensure NEVER to sign up for anything in the dark web using your real email account address and your real information.
More links coming soon after our 2020 site update is finished.
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Put KVD Vegan Beauty’s best to the test with a full spectrum of makeup palettes and hand-picked makeup sets at values you won’t find anywhere else. KVD Vegan Beauty’s all-star lineup includes fan-favorites like the KVD Vegan Beauty Shade + Light Face Contour Palettes, the super-versatile Alchemist Holographic Palette and Everlasting Liquid Lipstick sets featuring exclusive new shades.
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The Sightline Housing and Urbanism team’s foremost theme of 2018 was Cascadia’s slow but sure progress toward re-legalizing modest multiple-dwelling homes on land previously locked away for suburban-style houses on big grassy lots. I add the “re” to “legalize” because historically in North American cities, duplexes, triplexes, courtyard homes, rowhouses and small apartments were sprinkled in with stand-alone houses.
Starting in the 1920s, cities began ratcheting down zoning restrictions on residences, and by the 1960s, most had banned anything but single-dwelling houses on vast swaths of their land—typically more than half of it. Re-opening these neighborhoods to more homes of all shapes and sizes is a critical part of the path to tackling our concurrent affordability and climate crises.
Let’s take a tour of Sightline’s 2018 articles that tell the latest stories.
How “lawn and driveway” zoning came to rule over cities
Here’s the play-by-play by guest author Mike Eliason on how Seattle slow walked into a housing shortage by putting more and more land off limits to multifamily homes. Likewise, check out how Portland’s 1924 and 1959 zoning ordinances, which banned apartments from much of the city, are still reflected in household incomes today, demonstrating how zoning puts up invisible walls of exclusion.
Status-quo zoning begets luxury housing
This Portland photo essay by Michael Andersen (who in May joined Sightline as a Senior Fellow) shows what happens today under status-quo single-family zoning: older, smaller houses get demolished and replaced with the biggest house that rules allow. And that’s the absolute worst outcome for affordability: a pricey McMansion for just one family with no increase in the stock of homes to help assuage the city’s housing shortage.
The gentlest density
The first step most cities take to expand housing options in areas reserved for single-family houses is legalizing mother-in-law apartments and backyard cottages, known as accessory dwelling units (ADUs). My colleague Margaret Morales penned a series explaining why ADUs are green (here, here and here), and affordable (here and here). Meanwhile, numerous Cascadian cities, large and small, moved to liberalize ADU rules—see our summary of 2018’s ADU wins for more details. In 2015, Seattle proposed a smart set of ADU updates that, frustratingly, remains mired in legal appeals filed by a wealthy neighborhood’s community council.
Rediscovering the missing middle
Cascadia’s big three—Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC—are all pushing beyond ADUs to undo bans on “missing middle” housing types—that’s the buzzword for modest multifamily homes like triplexes, rowhouses, and small apartment buildings.
In 2015, Portland started developing a proposal to re-legalize missing middle homes in single-family zones. After three years of wrangling, the planning commission in September approved a plan that would allow triplexes and, potentially, fourplexes—though it’s not law of the land until the city council adopts it, likely in summer 2019. A key concept in Portland’s approach is to let buildings with more homes be bigger than buildings with fewer homes.
In June, Vancouver, BC, announced its “Making Room” strategy to open up single-family areas citywide to missing middle. Most of the plan will be hashed out over an 18-month process, but in September the city council re-legalized duplexes on 99 percent of the city’s low-density lots. Vancouver’s October election left Making Room on shakier ground, however.
For going on two years now, Seattle has been planning to convert 6 percent of its single-family land to small-scale multifamily, but anti-housing activists have stalled adoption through a legal appeal of the umbrella Mandatory Housing Affordability program. In any case, it’s only a baby step. Seattle has yet to act on its own 2015 recommendation to end single-family zoning citywide, but in December Seattle’s planning commission called for exactly that.
Meanwhile in November, Olympia, Washington, showed up Cascadia’s big three by legalizing more types of modest multifamily dwellings citywide. And though it’s well outside Cascadia, how could we not tout Minneapolis, which in December approved a plan to permit triplexes throughout the half of the city currently restricted by zoning laws to one house per lot (the plan also eliminates parking mandates and allows bigger buildings near transit).
High costs make housing expensive (but don’t blame the developers)
In 2018 we also advanced our work connecting homebuilding costs and affordability. By mid-year, apartment rents in Seattle and Portland had plateaued, illustrating how adding new homes can turn around rising rents, and how officials can maximize these affordability gains by minimizing regulatory costs.
Drilling deeper, we teased apart the costs that go into building and operating typical new apartments in Portland and Seattle. The results bust the myth that “greedy developers” are to blame for high rents: the developer’s take typically accounts for around 10 percent of the tenant’s rent check. Overall, the studies show that market rents simply reflect the high cost of developing and running apartment buildings—and though we do have ways to reduce those costs, none of them are easy.
Our focus groups confirmed that average people are skeptical that reducing regulatory costs helps affordability, and gravitate instead toward more housing options and opportunity. Relatedly, a remarkable UCLA study revealed that much myth-busting work remains, finding that the strongest catalyst of opposition to homebuilding projects—much stronger even than concerns over parking, traffic, or neighborhood character—is the premise that developers will make “a large profit.”
More 2018 notables
Cities can build up—a lot!—and still keep lots of trees around: Seattle’s latest study of tree canopy cover showed no measurable loss of trees in the areas that absorbed almost all of the city’s 76,000 new residents and 65,000 new jobs from 2007 to 2015. Portland has also been maintaining the tree count while growing rapidly in its multifamily and commercial areas.
Find this article interesting? Please consider making a gift to support our work.
Portland schools the nation on smart parking reform: In November, the city agreed to repurpose 1,000 curbside parking spaces for dedicated bus lanes, a protected bike lane network, and better crosswalks. These steps followed its August adoption of new parking policies to adjust meter prices up or down based on the number of people using them and to invest half of meter revenues in any new parking districts to support alternatives to driving there.
Guest author Erica C. Barnett served up a grab bag of innovations: how industrial land could accommodate housing; the potential for modular construction to reduce the cost of homebuilding; and using surplus publicly-owned land for affordable housing development.
Is state-level action the next big thing?
In early 2018, California legislators proposed an ill-fated bill that would have required cities to allow more housing near transit, sparking a national debate over the need for state-level action to overcome local resistance to loosening zoning restrictions. Sightline expects this approach to gain momentum, and in November published a survey of past state- and province-led efforts in Cascadia.
We are also tracking several state bills legislators are cooking up for Cascadia. Potentially on the table in 2019 in Washington: density minimums for zoning adjacent to transit, prohibition of regulatory barriers to ADUs, new funding for affordable housing through bonding against sales tax and a real estate excise tax, streamlining environmental review, and condominium warranty reform. In the works for Oregon: legalization of fourplexes, more homes, densely assembled, near transit, tenant protections, and repeal of the state ban on rent control. Portland’s planned Southwest Corridor light rail extension exemplifies the need for state mandates to liberalize zoning near transit.
You can find all of Sightline’s housing and urbanism articles here.
Catch you next year!
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Author: Marshall Schott
Depending on style, the ingredients for a typical 5 gallon batch of beer costs between $25 to $35, a bit more for those who use malt extract. Broken down, that’s roughly $0.50 to $0.75 per bottle. Now, as my accountant wife is wont to remind me, this obviously doesn’t include equipment and energy costs (this homebrew break-even calculator is fun). All in all, that’s not too bad, but wouldn’t it be nice to get that number even lower without impacting the quality of the beer? Of course it would!
For whatever reason, when I first considered purchasing ingredients in bulk, I felt a little anxious. I’m not sure if it was the commitment to using certain types of hops and grains, the fact I’d have to figure out a place to store my extra wares, or the fear that I’d be stuck to brewing only a few certain styles using what I had on hand. But after crunching the numbers, I was certain bulk was the way to go, as it would allow to me brew more beer more often for less money. There are absolutely some necessary equipment purchases when transitioning from pre-milled homebrew shop kits to buying in bulk, but in my experience, the costs are recovered within just a few months of brewing. While the price of bulk ingredients is hugely dependent on your source, nearly every homebrew shop I know of offers discounts on bulk grains. If yours doesn’t, look elsewhere, you’ll find something. To illustrate this difference, here’s what Tiny Bottom Pale Ale purchased separately from my local shop would cost versus the bulk price:
TBPA from LHBS
Grain: $18
Hops: $4
Yeast: $8
Total: $30 + tax
TBPA from Ingredients Purchased in Bulk
Grains: $10
Hops: $2.25
Yeast: $0.00 (previously harvested from starter)
Total: $12.25
I left off the price of DME for making starters, as I don’t use enough to justify purchasing entire sacks worth, but it’s possible some places will offer a discount if this is something you’re interested in. All in all, by purchasing in bulk and reusing yeast, I’ve essentially cut the price of brewing a batch of beer in half. Not too shabby. As I mentioned before, there are a few things to consider before jumping into bulk purchasing ingredients.
STORAGE
If you brew large batches often, you might be able to get away with storing your bulk grains in the sack they come in, but for most of us, a 50-55 lb sack lasts quite awhile, meaning we need a hospitable place to store them. I like to keep 4 base grains on hand at all times, which I purchase by the sack, as this gives me more stylistic options. My preferred storage option for entire sacks of grain is the 60 lbs Vittles Vault, which can be stacked to save room. These containers can easily store an entire 55 lbs of grain. I tend to fill and store them in the upright position, though this doesn’t allow for stacking.
If you prefer them to be in their proper position, I’d suggest filling when upright then repositioning them once the bag is empty.
For grains I may not use as often, stuff like Wheat and Victory malts, I’ll either split a sack with a friend or pick them up in increments of 20-25 lbs. I store these mid-sized amounts of grain in 5 gallon buckets with Gamma Lids attached to the top for an airtight seal.
You could definitely get away with using standard bucket lids, but I’ve found the Gamma lids to be far more durable and super convenient. As for the buckets, you can’t really beat the price at your local big box home improvement store.
I also like to keep a bunch of specialty grains on hand in amounts of 10 lbs or less, for these I use 2 gallon paint pails with their respective lids, which seal tighter than is probably necessary. I also use one of these buckets for measuring out grain on my scale.
I always try to load up on these grains during sales or when I’m placing orders for other stuff, usually to help push me into the free shipping zone. A sack of something like C60 would last me over a year, so even at full price, these grains don’t impact my bottom line much. For those grains I use in tiny amounts and only want 2 lbs max on hand at any given time, I repurpose Costco nut containers with screw on lids, they’ve worked just fine.
To keep stuff organized on the grain side of things, I use a sturdy 4-tier shelving unit for all the buckets and pails. In the past, I’ve stacked the Vittles Vaults next to the shelving unit, which worked great, but since I added another fermentation freezer, I now store them under my workbench in the upright position.
Obviously, the amount of grain one decides to keep stocked is subjective, I like the freedom to brew any number of styles whenever I want without having to take a trip to the homebrew shop. However, even for the small-batch apartment brewer, a single sack of 2-row on hand can do wonders for your pocketbook over time.
Bulk hops tend to cost significantly less than those purchased from a shop, even after the costs of shipping. I use a relatively inexpensive vacuum sealer and store them in a small freezer to keep them fresh for 2+ years, if they last that long. I like to use vacuum sealer bags that come in a roll because they’re cheaper and allow me to cut them to whatever size I need, a single purchase lasts me well over a year.
Yeast… that’s an easy one. I buy a vial then harvest multiple pitches from starters, I’ve gone as far as 17 generations without issue at this point. Lately, I’ve been pulling off 1 quart of starter into 32 oz Ball Jars and throwing them right into my little yeast fridge, the yeast remaining under the starter beer until next use. This has been working great.
That’s about it as far as storage goes. There are a few extra pieces of equipment you’ll need in order to get the full benefit of buying ingredients in bulk.
REQUIRED GEAR
All grain purchased in bulk, at least as far as I’m aware, is uncrushed, meaning you’ll probably want to invest in a solid mill. This will be the biggest investment most people make when transitioning to buying in bulk, but it definitely comes with some other benefits, namely determining your own mill gap in order to get more consistent efficiency. I use a Monster Mill MM3 attached to a low speed/high torque drill, it’s amazing, blasting through 10 lbs of grain in less than a minute.
To measure out grains, I use a battery powered baker’s scale with one of the 2 gallon pails I previously mentioned. In over 2 years of use, I’ve yet to have to replace the batteries.
I measure out my hop and mineral amounts using a small blade scale, this is also battery powered.
Besides that, you’ve likely already got anything else you might need– an old measuring cup to scoop your grains, some plastic cups to hold hops and minerals, etc.
BENEFITS OF BUYING IN BULK
Hands down, what I enjoy most about keeping bulk ingredients on hand is the fact I can brew whenever I want— no waiting for the shop to open then showing up and realizing they’re all out of Victory malt or Centennial hops, I can honestly design a recipe right now then go outside and brew it. Saving some coin is nice, as well, and really starts to add up over time. There’s no way I’d be able to brew as often as I do if I didn’t stock bulk ingredients.
WHERE TO SHOP
You might be wondering how to go about getting good deals on bulk ingredients, here’s where I share my sources. First off, if you’re not already harvesting yeast from starters, that should be your first step. Next, you may want to ease into bulk purchasing by starting with hops. I probably purchase 80% of my hops from Hops Direct in 1 lb increments, the smallest amount they sell. If you know other homebrewers, consider purchasing as a group and splitting the hops, it makes shipping less expensive and you get a wider variety. Farmhouse Brewing Supply and Yakima Valley Hops are other vendors I like to buy hops from, particularly because they sell hops in smaller amounts and have a pretty robust selection. For grain, MoreBeer is my go-to source, but only when I’m near an acutal store– 2-row goes for about $38 while continental base malts (like German Pils) run closer to $55 per sack, which is still only about $1 per pound. While I usually wait for sales to pick up speciality malts, I’ll occasionally just add 5-10 lbs to a MoreBeer order or stop by the HBS on my way home from work, it doesn’t amount to much since I use a lot in my brewing.
Ultimately, purchasing ingredients in bulk has saved me more money than any other upgrade since I started homebrewing, allowing me to brew more beer more often. If you have any questions this post failed to answer, please don’t hesitate to ask. Cheers!
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"We didn't mean to auto-draft,” Justin C. Cliburn said. “But the Internet in Baghdad wasn't the most reliable."
It was August of 2006. Cliburn was a specialist stationed at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, part of a security force (SECFOR) of Oklahoma Army National Guardsmen from the 1st Battalion, 158th Field Artillery regiment. His squad’s role was to escort civilian training contractors to Iraqi police stations, Cliburn serving as a Humvee gunner.
He also served, reluctantly and incongruously, as a first-year fantasy commissioner.
“That season the guy who was supposed to run our league was stationed down in Diwaniyah [at Camp Echo],” Cliburn recalled. “He had next-to-no internet access, so I took over.”
And still the league began with technical difficulties.
“Yeah, internet cut out right before our draft began,” said Kevin Pyle, a founding member of the OklahomIraqis League. “Every team was auto-picked. Not Yahoo’s fault. That was Iraq.”
“I really lucked out, though,” said Cliburn. “Got LaDainian Tomlinson at No. 3.”
View photos Members of the fantasy league take in a tour at AT&T Stadium. More
Despite an inauspicious beginning, the league has held together through battle, tragedy and distance. The bond shared by the group led to the push for a 10-year reunion for the SECFOR mission, spearheaded by a fantasy league and its commissioner. The event took place over Labor Day weekend, culminating with a draft party at Cowboys Stadium.
“We kinda had a wake-up call, a year and a half, two years ago,” Pyle said. “One of our brothers who was over there with us took his own life. About half of us made it to the services and we all mentioned that we have to get together at times other than this. That's part of why we thought it would be so great to get all of us together – not just the league, the full 152 of us that were over there in 2006.”
[For more info on post-traumatic stress disorder, visit the National Center for PTSD]
While not all 152 soldiers made it to the reunion, eight of 10 original members of the league are still involved. The league has also grown substantially, with three conferences this season, each with 14 owners.
Of course, Cliburn’s league wasn’t the only group of active fantasy players in Iraq back in ’06 – nor, in all likelihood, was it the most hardcore. But very few commissioners have ever documented the lifetime of a league as thoroughly and faithfully as Cliburn. In so doing, he’s strengthened the connections between those who served together in the 158.
“I'm just gonna go out there and say it,” said Pyle. “I think Justin is one of the greatest commissioners ever. He connects us in-season, out-of-season. We're always communicating with each other. Justin was having to play peacekeeper in the league those first three or four years — I was dealing with issues that I didn't realize at the time, and wasn’t alone.
View photos Several original league members, including Cliburn (front row, second from the right. Okiraqi.org) More
Story continues
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Last week, octogenarian Margaret Priebe became something of a viral sensation when the St. Petersburg Times ran a piece on the 85-year-old, who claims she's one of Metallica's oldest fans. Over the weekend, Priebe got to meet the members of her favorite band after getting a special backstage invite from the thrash legends.
Priebe was welcomed backstage for a meet-and-greet prior to the band's Oct. 3 set, and each member of Metallica spent time with Priebe as she told stories about her favorite Metallica LP, 1999's 'S&M.' When meeting Kirk Hammett, the guitarist joked that Priebe is finally giving his mother some competition for title of the band's oldest fan, while drummer Lars Ulrich yelled out, "The number one Metallica fan" when he met Priebe.
According to reports, frontman James Hetfield dedicated the band's song 'Nothing Else Matters' to Priebe before a sell-out crowd of more than 18,000 people. Before that, though, when Hetfield met with Priebe backstage, he leaned down and asked, "Mind if I hug you?" Priebe didn't mind, and Hammett told her to "Keep it metal!" Priebe was all smiles as she got the entire band to autograph her copy of 'Death Magnetic.'Following the meet-and-greet with Metallica, Priebe told reporters the band members "were just like what I'd thought they'd be -- very nice." She was led through the arena to her seat, and fans burst into applause at the sight of her. Fans asked to take pictures with her, while she defiantly waved the devil horns.
Priebe's love for Metallica started years ago, when she heard a song from 'S&M' on the radio. According to reports, she had never heard such a racket before but loved every minute of it. Last year, she battled cancer with help from her MP3 player, which is loaded with tracks from Metallica, Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne. Priebe is now cancer-free, but hasn't given up on her love of metal.
"I like Metallica ... there's nothing wrong with them," Priebe says. "People think I'm weird. But I'm sorry, I like it loud. Lars is cute, but I like 'em all."
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The young JRR Tolkien’s dark retelling of a Finnish epic poem, which features a young man sold into slavery who unknowingly seduces his sister before killing himself, is to be published later this month for the first time.
The Story of Kullervo was written in 1915, while Tolkien was studying at Oxford. Thought to be his first work of prose fantasy, it sees the young writer who would go on to pen The Lord of the Rings retell part of the 19th-century Finnish poem the Kalevala. The author himself described it as “the germ of my attempt to write legends of my own”. The unfinished manuscript, which lies in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, has previously only appeared in an academic paper by the US Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, with its release on 27 August by HarperCollins its first mainstream publication.
The work tells the story of the son of Kalervo, “Kullervo the hapless”, as Tolkien calls him. An orphan with supernatural powers, Kullervo is brought up in the home of a dark magician, Untamo, who killed his father, kidnapped his mother and tries to kill the boy three times. When Kullervo is sold into slavery, he swears revenge, but unknowingly commits incest with his twin sister – who kills herself when she discovers what they have done.
“And before he could leap up and grasp her she sped across the glade (for they abode in a wild dwelling …) like a shivering ray in the dawn light scarce seeming to touch the green dewy grass till she came to the triple fall and cast her over it down its silver column to the ugly depths,” writes Tolkien. “And her last wail he heard and stood heavy bent on the brink as a lump of rock till the sun rose and thereat the grass grew green and the birds sang and the flowers opened and midday passed and all things seemed happy: and Kullervo cursed them, for he loved her.”
Tolkien’s narrative breaks off shortly after this point, with the rest of the story, in which Kullervo then kills himself, told by the author in outline. In Stuart D Lee’s A Companion to JRR Tolkien, he compares the “straightforward prose” of Tolkien’s version of the tragic end of Kullervo with the “much more dramatic” end of Túrin in The Silmarillion. In Kullervo, Tolkien writes of the suicide of the young man: “The sword says if it had joy in the death of Untamo how much in death of even wickeder Kullervoinen. And it had slaid many an innocent person, even his mother, so it would not boggle over Kullervo. He kills himself and finds the death he sought for.”
In The Silmarillion, by contrast, Tolkien writes: “And from the blade rang a cold voice in answer: ‘Yea, I will drink thy blood gladly, that so I may forget the blood of Beleg my master, and the blood of Brandir slain unjustly. I will slay thee swiftly.’ Then Túrin set the hilts upon the ground, and cast himself upon the point of Guthrang, and the black blade took his life.”
HarperCollins called Kullervo “perhaps the darkest and most tragic of all JRR Tolkien’s characters”, adding that he was “the clear ancestor of Túrin Turambar, tragic incestuous hero of The Silmarillion”.
“In addition to it being a powerful story in its own right, The Story of Kullervo – published here for the first time with the author’s drafts, notes and lecture-essays on its source-work, The Kalevala – is a foundation stone in the structure of Tolkien’s invented world,” said the publisher.
“I was immensely attracted by something in the air of the Kalevala,” Tolkien wrote in 1955 to WH Auden. “I never learned Finnish well enough to do more than plod through a bit of the original, like a schoolboy with Ovid … But the beginning of the legendarium … was in an attempt to reorganise some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless, into a form of my own.”
In 1914, he wrote of how he was “trying to turn one of the stories – which is really a great story and most tragic – into a short story … with chunks of poetry in between”.
John Garth, in his Tolkien and the Great War, calls the tale “a strange story to have captured the imagination of a fervent Roman Catholic: Kullervo unwittingly seduces his sister, who kills herself, and then he too commits suicide”.
But Garth suggests that “the appeal perhaps lay partly in the brew of maverick heroism, young romance, and despair”.
“The deaths of Kullervo’s parents may have struck a chord, too,” adds Garth, alluding to the deaths of both of Tolkien’s parents by the time he was 12. “An overriding attraction, though, was the sounds of the Finnish names, the remote primitivism, and the Northern air.”
The Story of Kullervo is the latest in a handful of previously unpublished works from Tolkien that have been released in recent years, including his translation of Beowulf, his poem The Fall of Arthur, and the unfinished Middle-earth story The Children of Húrin.
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An American is 12 times more likely to be murdered by a firearm than an Indian, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of data.
An American is 12 times more likely to be murdered by a firearm than an Indian, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of data collated by GunPolicy, a database managed by the University of Sydney and funded by the United Nations.
The US experienced its worst-ever mass shooting at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, leading to 49 deaths, renewing a debate on easy gun ownership in the USA.
India has a firearm homicide rate of 0.3 (per 100,000 population) against the US’ 3.4. A firearm is used in no more than 10% of homicides in India, against 60% in the US.
India’s homicide rate is comparable to countries that are far richer, such as Finland, France and Netherlands. The bulk of gun homicides–6.7 of 10 cases–are reported from India’s two most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which are together home to nearly 400 million people. It also appears clear that India’s strict gun-ownership laws help: more than eight of 10 Indian gun homicides are from unlicensed arms.
The world’s highest gun-homicide rate of 66.6–222 times as high as India’s–is claimed by the South American country of Honduras, which has half the population of Delhi and is as large as Telangana.
Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg and Hong Kong reported almost zero rates of gun homicide.
The data further reveal that six of the top 10 countries reporting the highest firearm-driven homicide rates are in the Americas–North as well as South.
Brazil topped the list (95%) in terms of proportion of homicides committed with a firearm, followed by Venezuela (90%) and Honduras (83%).
Of the world’s 50 most violent cities, 41 are in Latin America, including 21 in Brazil, according to this 2015 report by Mexico Citizens Council for Public Security, an NGO. Venezuela’s capital Caracas had the highest murder rate in the world last year and was ranked as the most violent city.
Source: GunPolicy, National Crime Records Bureau
85% of firearm homicides in India are from unlicensed arms
As many as 3,655 people were murdered with guns in India in 2014, of which 3,115 (85%) were killed by unlicensed arms, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
Obtaining a gun licence is far more difficult in India than in the United States, but illegal smuggling of guns is rampant in India, especially in states sharing borders with other countries, such as Bihar, as this April 2015 report in Firstpost detailed.
“You don’t have to buy with a licence because guns are so easily available from illegal sources,” Binalakshmi Nepram, secretary general of the Control Arms Foundation of India, told The Hindustan Times. “We feel saddened about what happened in America, but we are also aware that a similar situation can happen in India.”
National Crime Records Bureau
UP, Bihar account for 67% of all firearm-related murders in India
As many as 2,443 people were killed by firearms in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar: 1,510 and 933, respectively, accounting for 67% of total killings (3,655) by arms.
UP is India’s hub for illegal arms, and 24,583 firearms were confiscated in UP in 2014, accounting for 44% of all arms so taken into police custody in India; 62% of these were unlicensed, improvised and crude country-made fire arms, IndiaSpend reported in October 2015.
National Crime Records Bureau
Notes:
The data on country-wise homicide rates have been collated by GunPolicy; data from different years are included.
We have taken the most recent data for each country (but not older than 2008) and omitted some countries, which would have been in the top 10 except that their data were more than 10 years old.
Data on homicide rates may vary depending upon the year, but the trends largely remain the same.
The data include only murders committed by a firearm, not suicides and other unintentional deaths.
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First published in June 2015.
With tensions growing in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, a new generation of nuclear weapons technology is making nuclear warfare a very real prospect. And with very little fanfare, the US is embarking on the privatization of nuclear war under a first-strike doctrine.
“On August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day, commemorating when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military industrial complex were in attendance. This mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate Hiroshima. The meeting was intended to set the stage for the development of a new generation of “smaller”, “safer” and “more usable” nuclear weapons, to be used in the “in-theater nuclear wars” of the 21st Century.
“Nuclear war has become a multibillion dollar undertaking, which fills the pockets of US defense contractors. What is at stake is the outright “privatization of nuclear war”.
US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace. Mini-nukes are said to be “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”. Pre-emptive nuclear war is portrayed as a “humanitarian undertaking”.
US nuclear doctrine is intimately related to “America’s War on Terrorism” and the alleged threat of Al Qaeda, which in a bitter irony is con- sidered as an upcoming nuclear power.
Click image to order Michel Chossudovsky’s book
Under the Obama administration, Islamic terrorists are said to be preparing to attack US cities. Proliferation is tacitly equated with “nuclear terrorism”. Obama’s nuclear doctrine puts particular emphasis on “nuclear terrorism” and on the alleged plans by Al Qaeda to develop and use nuclear weapons.
…
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State legislatures had a busy week passing electronic privacy laws. Will Congress follow?
First, the Texas legislature unanimously passed HB 2268, which requires state law enforcement to obtain a search warrant before accessing emails and other forms of electronic communications content from service providers. This law is necessary because the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act ("ECPA") -- which most state electronic privacy laws are modeled after -- hasn't kept up with changes in technology. First enacted in 1986, ECPA allows law enforcement to bypass the warrant requirement to obtain the contents of communications that have been in electronic storage for more than 180 days. This archaic dividing line makes no sense in an age where people store emails and other documents in their inboxes and in the cloud forever. And as the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2010 in United States v. Warshak, a nonwarrant requirement violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches.
We've repeatedly asked Congress to update ECPA to bring it in line with the 21st century and despite a number of false starts, it seems real ECPA reform could happen in 2013. Even the Department of Justice recently indicated before a congressional committee that a warrant requirement made sense. But rather than wait on the sidelines for Congress to pass ECPA reform, Texas stepped up and passed privacy protection on its own. And its not the only state to do so. EFF sponsored similar legislation in California, SB 467, that recently passed the California Senate 33-1 and is set to be heard by the Assembly's Public Safety Committee on June 11.
Meanwhile, over in Maine, the legislature just passed LD415, which requires police get a search warrant before tracking a person through their cell phone or other electronic device. We've long argued in court that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their public movements, meaning a search warrant is required before police can use cell site tracking, a GPS device or a "Stingray" to follow a person's movements throughout the day. Last year, Supreme Court justices Sotomayor and Alito gave support to this idea in their concurring opinions in United States v. Jones where both believed people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their public movements. Justice Alito even wrote that "in circumstances involving dramatic technological change, the best solution to privacy concerns may be legislative."
Maine heeded Justice Alito's words, ensuring its residents' locational privacy remains protected by statute. Maine isn't the first state to pass this type of legislation. Last year, the California legislature passed SB 1434, a bill co-sponsored by EFF and the ACLU of Northern California that also would have required police obtain a search warrant before tracking a person's location through an electronic device. Despite broad bipartisan support for the law, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the law. We hope Maine's bill meets a better fate.
Location privacy legislation has been introduced in Congress, too. Two separate bills introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (S 639) and Representative Zoe Lofgren (HR 983) this year seek to do exactly what Maine and California's laws did: require a warrant for location tracking. But the last time Senator Wyden introduced his GPS Act in 2011, the bill languished for almost a year before even getting a committee hearing and then disappeared for the remainder of the congressional term.
With states getting in on the privacy protection action, Congress should feel pressure to update the law to protect everyone across the country. Now that states as politically diverse as California, Texas, and Maine are taking affirmative steps to bring search warrant requirements to sensitive electronic data, Congress should see that privacy legislation is bipartisan and feasible. Hopefully, that means the legislation currently pending in Congress won't get stuck in the rigors of DC politics but actually have a chance at passing.
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As the United States enters a new phase of its war in Afghanistan, FDD’s Long War Journal is proud to present a renewed assessment of the Taliban’s strength and disposition, with new interactive features. Our assessment highlights the Taliban’s rural control, a key source of insurgent strength that the US military underestimates. The coalition and Afghan government cannot roll back Taliban gains or ultimately defeat it while ignoring the Taliban’s rural advantage.
“Taliban Control in Afghanistan” is a mapped assessment of districts controlled and contested by the Taliban. FDD’s Long War Journal estimates the Taliban currently controls 41 districts and contests an additional 118. The assessment is developed by regularly evaluating local, open-source reports for each district in Afghanistan. A controlled district is one in which the Taliban is openly administering a district, providing services and security, running the local courts and imposing sharia law.
Overall, LWJ has determined that 45 percent of Afghanistan’s districts are controlled or contested by the Taliban.
In developing this mapped assessment, FDD’s Long War Journal evaluates the Taliban’s claims of control. LWJ consulted local reports and utilized expertise of historical dynamics to validate any Taliban claims. When unable to corroborate the Taliban’s claims, LWJ indicated a district as “un-confirmable Taliban claim of control/contested.” Sometimes, the Taliban chooses not to claim districts one might expect, including districts considered the birthplace of and the traditional heartland of the Taliban in Kandahar province. As such, the Taliban’s self-assessment are regarded with some degree of validity. There are 25 districts where the Taliban claims some measure of control that cannot be independently verified. By and large, most of the Taliban’s claims to control or contest specific districts are rather honest self-assessments.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the congressionally-mandated oversight body on Afghanistan, reported 11 districts under insurgent control, 34 under insurgent influence, and 119 contested. SIGAR, which obtains its information for the US military and Resolute Support – NATO’s mission in Afghanistan – does not, however, release district-specific assessments. SIGAR’s assessment is dated; its latest report from Aug. 1 is based on information provided in June.
FDD’s Long War Journal assessment aligns closely with those of both the US military and the Taliban itself. The Taliban claims to control or contest 50 percent of the country’s 407 districts. The US military puts the estimate at 40 percent (note that LWJ believes that the US military’s assessment of Taliban controlled and contested districts is flawed).
The Taliban is fighting a rural insurgency
The US military and Afghan security forces tend to emphasize urban control in assessing the Taliban’s strength and downplay the Taliban’s control of rural areas. In recent SIGAR reports, the US military has described these rural regions controlled or contested by the Taliban as “less vital areas” that have “less strategic importance.”
This urban focus underestimates the Taliban and its strategy to leverage control of rural areas to launch attacks against urban centers. Continual attacks against urban centers delegitimize the Afghan government and force the redeployment Afghan National Security Forces. The LWJ classified districts in which the Taliban controls everything except the district center as “contested.” The Taliban self-assessed rural control (all but the district center) in 124 districts.
In addition to safe havens in Pakistan and Pakistani state support, rural areas in Afghanistan are essential to the Taliban’s resilience and ability to consistently undermine Afghan security. The Taliban has a stated strategy of opening interior lines in southern provinces to threaten other areas. This belt of districts, stretching east-west from Farah to Paktia, allows the Taliban to consistently attack urban centers. For example, the Taliban uses these districts to threaten the cities of Lashkar Gah, Kandahar, Farah, and Tarinkot. LWJ‘s mapped assessment clearly shows this southern belt. The Taliban has attempted a similar approach in the north, albeit with less success.
Although the NATO mission in Afghanistan downplays the significance of these rural districts, the Taliban considers them pivotal. For example, the Taliban heralded its capture of Sangin district center as a “strategic victory” Although these districts may be nothing more than “rubble and dirt” to Resolute Support, they represent the lifeblood of the insurgency for the Taliban. The Taliban utilizes rural areas to launch attacks against population centers, as well as to fundraise, resupply, recruit, and train fighters.
The new American strategy for Afghanistan places much needed emphasis on Pakistan. FDD’s Long War Journal has mapped terrorist groups operating openly in Pakistan and continues to track US strikes in the country.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal. Alexandra Gutowski is a military affairs analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.
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After nearly 13 hours of debate that went late into the night, the Republican-controlled Senate voted early on January 22 to approve rules for the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, who allegedly abused his power by withholding military aid to pressure Ukraine into opening an investigation of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The Senate rejected all 11 amendments Democrats proposed, sparking concerns from them over the plausibility that the trial will be, in effect, rigged to protect and acquit Trump. Among the amendments that failed were subpoenas for key witnesses, such as former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. Amendments that would have called for additional relevant documents from the Department of Defense and the Office of Management and Budget were also rejected.
Now, right-wing media are using Democratic concerns to downplay the impeachment trial. Some are arguing that Democrats’ complaints about the process prove that they don’t actually have a case, while others are complaining that Trump supposedly didn’t get a fair process in the House (he did). Some are also pointing to Democratic senators’ calls to hear from more witnesses as evidence that the House didn’t properly call witnesses during the impeachment inquiry, despite the fact that the administration prevented key witnesses from testifying.
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How can I configure travis-ci such that my project builds with more than one version of a compiler?
Say, I want to build it with gcc-4.8, gcc-4.9, clang-3.4, clang-3.5 and clang-3.6.
I know how to build on both gcc and clang, but not on more than one version of them.
To give a little bit more context, my project is a C++ library and I want to ensure compatibility with those compilers.
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Authorities in Missouri said Sunday that four teens robbed victims after luring them to a specific location using the “Pokemon Go” smartphone game.
O’Fallon police said that four teens used the game to draw victims to a certain spot in the town and then robbed them. The new mobile game sends players to locations to collect “Pokemon” characters. Police said the robbers used the game to lure victims by putting a “beacon” at a location to draw in players.
O’Fallon Sgt. Phil Hardin joked to reporters that some of the younger officers had to let their colleagues in on the intricacies of the game so they could understand what the victim was talking about.
“All of the elements of a robbery were all there, so that part was easy, but the more in-depth discussion that followed was like, ‘What?’” Hardin said. “You really can’t make this stuff up.”
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, police arrested the group of teens after responding to a report of a robbery near a gas station. The suspects are between the ages of 16 and 18.
Police said the suspects may have been involved in in nearly a dozen robberies around St. Louis.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Internal Republican polls show ex-coal CEO and former convict Don Blankenship in the lead a day before West Virginia’s Republican Senate primary, prompting more GOP fears about a Blankenship surge.
An internal poll from one of Blankenship’s rivals taken on Saturday and Sunday found Blankenship slightly ahead with 31 percent of the vote, according to The Weekly Standard. Rep. Evan Jenkins Evan Hollin JenkinsWest Virginia New Members 2019 Republican Carol Miller holds off Democrat in West Virginia House race Trump to fundraise for 3 Republicans running for open seats: report MORE came in second, with 28 percent, and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey in third, with 27 percent.
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Another internal survey taken on Friday and Saturday also showed Blankenship with a narrow lead with 28 percent of the vote. This poll found Morrisey in second place, with 27 percent, while Jenkins received just 14 percent.
Republicans are sounding the alarm as it appears Blankenship, who spent a year in prison for violating mining safety regulations following an explosion that killed 29 miners, is leading the pack again ahead of Tuesday’s primary. The winner of the GOP nomination will go on to face vulnerable Sen. Joe Manchin Joseph (Joe) ManchinThe Hill's Morning Report - Sponsored by Facebook - Trump, GOP allies prepare for SCOTUS nomination this week Trump meets with potential Supreme Court pick Amy Coney Barrett at White House Names to watch as Trump picks Ginsburg replacement on Supreme Court MORE (D), a top Republican target.
The GOP views Manchin's seat as a prime pick-up opportunity to expand the party’s narrow majority in the Senate. President Trump Donald John TrumpOmar fires back at Trump over rally remarks: 'This is my country' Pelosi: Trump hurrying to fill SCOTUS seat so he can repeal ObamaCare Trump mocks Biden appearance, mask use ahead of first debate MORE won West Virginia by more than 40 points in 2016.
Some Republicans worry Blankenship’s controversial past could jeopardize their chances at unseating Manchin.
In a last-ditch effort to suppress Blankenship, Trump on Monday urged voters to reject the former coal executive and instead vote for either Jenkins or Morrisey on Tuesday.
“To the great people of West Virginia we have, together, a really great chance to keep making a big difference,” the president wrote on Twitter.
“Problem is, Don Blankenship, currently running for Senate, can’t win the General Election in your State...No way! Remember Alabama. Vote Rep. Jenkins or A.G. Morrisey!”
Blankenship fired back in a response to Trump’s tweet.
"As some have said I am Trumpier than Trump, and this morning proves it,” Blankenship said in a statement.
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The Bankruptcy Court for the District of Oregon awarded a married couple damages for emotional distress plus attorneys' fees due to the IRS's violation of an automatic stay of collection activities after the couple filed for protection under the Bankruptcy Code. According to the court, sovereign immunity did not protect the government from liability for the damages.
Facts: On Nov. 5, 2012, Jonathan and Cheryl Hunsaker filed a petition for relief under the Bankruptcy Code. By law, the filing automatically stopped collection efforts by their creditors, which included the IRS, to which they owed $9,301. After filing the petition, the couple made all payments required under the bankruptcy plan. From Dec. 12, 2013, to Dec. 8, 2014, the Hunsakers received four notices from the IRS that included demands for payment, two of which were notices to levy on Jonathan Hunsaker's Social Security benefits.
The taxpayers notified their attorney, who told them any collection efforts by the IRS were illegal. The attorney twice wrote to the IRS, stating the Hunsakers were in bankruptcy and requesting that the Service stop its collection efforts. All of the notices created stress for the Hunsakers, but the notices to levy on the Social Security benefits caused greater stress, because that income was crucial for the couple to make their required bankruptcy plan payments. The couple petitioned the Bankruptcy Court for damages from the IRS due to its violations of the automatic stay.
Issues: A debtor injured by a willful violation of the automatic bankruptcy stay may recover damages including court costs and attorneys' fees and may in certain cases receive punitive damages. Damages for emotional distress from a creditor's violating the automatic stay provisions have been allowed if the debtor can clearly establish he or she suffered significant harm and can demonstrate a causal connection between the violation and the harm (Dawson v. Washington Mutual Bank, 390 F.2d 1139 (9th Cir. 2004)).
While the doctrine of sovereign immunity often protects the federal government from litigation, federal law (11 U.S.C. §106) waives sovereign immunity for awards of compensatory damages (except punitive damages) related to violations of the automatic stay provisions of bankruptcy laws. The IRS admitted it had violated the automatic stay provisions but argued it was not liable for damages for emotional distress because the provisions that waive sovereign immunity do not specifically allow for the award of damages for emotional distress.
Holding: The Bankruptcy Court awarded the Hunsakers damages of $4,000 plus reasonable attorneys' fees. The court stated that excluding any type of damages because they are not specifically listed in the sovereign immunity waiver rules would enable "the government to escape liability for any form of damages." The court also held that the taxpayers satisfied the tests of Dawson because (1) the IRS violated the automatic stay, (2) a reasonable person would suffer significant emotional harm from such a violation, and (3) the Hunsakers sustained significant emotional damages due to the additional stress caused by the IRS's violating the stay.
Hunsaker, No. 14-06218 (Bankr. D. Or. 1/13/16)
—By Charles J. Reichert, CPA, instructor of accounting, University of Minnesota—Duluth.
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Well thanks for some replies so far. Sadly i am in norway right now and only online occasionally through a phone to read and rarely reply so dont expect a long reply til like in a week.
As for the name and the potential offensive chatter i can only say that there likely exist only a very few word that aint offensive or generally got a negative conotation in any other region in the world. That is a general problem we got in any intercultural communications. Someone says something normal and neutral while another person takes it very offensive even though never intended by the senser of that message.
Click to expand...
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Kate Bush has penned an emotional tribute to choreographer Lindsay Kemp.
Kemp, who famously collaborated with David Bowie as well as Bush herself, died while in Italy last week at the age of 80. David Haughton, his closest friend and collaborator for 45 years, said Kemp had remained busy and active right till the end, saying “he suddenly said he felt ill, and a minute and a half later he was gone.”
Having worked closely with Bowie, Kemp went on to mentor Bush after she saw his 1974 show “Flowers” and asked him to work with her. Following his passing, Bush described Kemp as “a truly original and great artist of the stage,” adding, “to call him a mime artist is like calling Mozart a pianist.”
The statement appeared on Bush’s official website under a post titled “a message for Lindsay”. Here it is in full:
“The world has lost a truly original and great artist of the stage. To call him a mime artist is like calling Mozart a pianist. He was very brave, very funny and above all, astonishingly inspirational. There was no-one quite like Lindsay. I was incredibly lucky to study with him, work with him and spend time with him. I loved him very much and will miss him dearly. Thank you, dear Lindsay.”
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ISTANBUL - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday continued to chart a collision course with Washington over Iran. Erdogan is categorically ruling out enforcing American sanctions intended to put Iran in an economic straitjacket.
"It is impossible for us to cancel relations with Iran with regard to oil and natural gas. We will continue to buy our natural gas from there," Erdogan said to reporters Friday, while returning from the United Nations General Assembly. Turkey is Iran's second-largest importer of natural gas.
"The importance [of] this announcement is economic," said Iran expert Jamshid Assadi of France's Burgundy Business School. "Any income in Tehran's situation is very welcome by the regime, which is increasingly starved of funds."
President Donald Trump talks with reporters after arriving at Joint Base Andrews, Sept. 26, 2019, in Maryland.
President Donald Trump imposed sweeping sanctions on Tehran after withdrawing the United States from an international nuclear accord with Iran. Dubbed a "maximum pressure campaign" by Trump, White House officials indicated they want to cut Iran's energy exports to zero.
"The American grand strategy in the region, is not on the same line as Turkey's foreign policy, not now and not in the past," said international relations professor Huseyin Bagci of Ankara's Middle East Technical University. "Turkey will not go against Iran; we will not be Iran's enemy. Competitor yes, but never its enemy."
Erdogan acknowledged U.S. sanctions are impacting trade with Iran, saying Turkish private companies have curtailed oil purchases from the Islamic nation to avoid punitive measures. Speaking anonymously, a European banker said internationally-operating Turkish companies would not risk being hit with U.S. sanctions for trading with Iran.
Even so, the Turkish president is pledging to step up bilateral trade. "On this issue [trade] especially and many other issues, we will continue our relations with Iran," said Erdogan.
FILE - Turkish liras, center, featuring images of Turkish Republic founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, among other foreign currency, Istanbul, June 8, 2015.
Last week, Erdogan reportedly discussed with Iranian President Hasan Rouhani a goal of tripling bilateral trade, which currently stands at $10 billion. The discussions focused on ways to use domestic currencies — the Turkish lira and Iranian rial — as a means of evading U.S. sanctions that prohibit the use of the dollar in trade transactions with Iran.
"Turkey will circumvent and break U.S. sanctions against Iran, just as they have done in the past," said Bagci, "because Ankara does not believe it's bound by those sanctions. This will likely result in U.S. sanctions against Turkey, but Turkey is ready for that."
Erdogan told Fox News on Wednesday, "Sanctions have been avoided in the past. I, for one, know that sanctions have never solved anything."
Last year, a New York Court convicted and jailed a senior banking executive of the Turkish state-owned Halkbank for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran.
A street vendor sells roasted chestnuts in front of a branch of Halkbank in central Istanbul, Turkey, Jan. 10, 2018.
U.S. authorities are still considering whether to impose a fine against Halkbank, which analysts say could run into the billions of dollars. The size of any potential penalty is widely seen as leverage Washington has over Ankara.
Undaunted, Erdogan told reporters Friday he was aware his stance could invite punitive measures from Washington. Analysts note the Turkish president had already irked Washington by casting doubt over claims Tehran was responsible for an attack earlier this month on Saudi Arabia oil refining facilities.
"If we just place the entire burden on Iran, it won't be the right way to go. Because the evidence available does not necessarily point to that fact," Erdogan said Wednesday.
Saudi Colonel Turki al-Malki displays pieces of what he said were Iranian cruise missiles and drones recovered from the attack site that targeted Saudi Aramco's facilities, during a press conference in Riyadh, Sept. 18, 2019.
Several key European countries are backing Washington's belief that Tehran is behind the attack.
Ankara's strong backing of Tehran comes as Erdogan is trying to build regional support for his plan to repatriate as many as two million Syrian refugees.
Erdogan envisages relocating the refugees to a so-called "safe zone" in northeast Syria currently controlled by the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia. Ankara designates the YPG as terrorists, and Turkish forces are poised to push the militia 40 kilometers back from Turkey's frontier.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks during the Cabinet meeting in Tehran, Iran, Sept. 18, 2019.
Speaking in Ankara earlier this month, Rouhani insisted refugees be returned to their home towns, not repatriated en masse.
"Rouhani is saying to Turkey, that it will not support Ankara's plan of the mass returning of refugees, "said international relations lecturer Soli Ozel of Istanbul's Kadir Has University.
"Damascus and Tehran are perfectly happy that millions of Sunni Arabs, which oppose Damascus, are out of Syria," he added.
Analysts suggest Tehran will not soften its stance.
"Tehran will not just change its stance over Syria and refugees because Ankara is opposing U.S. sanctions, that is just a dream," said Bagci.
Despite Ankara and Tehran backing opposing sides in the Syrian civil war, the two countries, along with Moscow, say they want an end to the conflict.
Ankara's cooperation with Moscow on Syria has alarmed Washington. Turkey's purchase of Russia's S-400 missile system prompted Washington to suspend sales of the U.S. F-35 fighter jets. Turkish companies were also excluded from the warplane's construction.
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Does your school or office block access to music sites? Looking for unblocked music services? Here are some recommendations for some great music streaming sites and an explanation on how you can access them from anywhere in the world!
In this blog, we’ll tell you about:
Exciting news for all you music lovers out there! If your school or office restricts access to free music streaming, and you’d like to learn how to unblock music services, read on. We’ll tell you exactly how you can listen to music on any music streaming site, no matter where you are!
It’s unbelievably easy to unblock music! Just simply:
Pick your desired music service – We’ve done the hard part for you and assembled an all-you-need-to-know list to enjoy unblocked music services.
Unblock Music Anywhere – Get a new IP address, and bypass any restrictions at school or work so you can connect to your desired service.
If you’d like to compare streaming services, overcome restrictions set in place by your school or office, and learn how to access any Geo-restricted content from anywhere in the world safely and securely, we’ll tell you everything you need to know below! (Hint: Our VPN apps can help!)
Overview of Popular Music Streaming Services
Before you get ready to enjoy and unblock music, here’s a helpful summary of the best streaming music services out there:
Bonus: Don’t forget that you can also find most music and create your own playlists on YouTube! They even offer different Mixes, which is like a radio. Be sure to use a VPN to access YouTube from your location. Read our full guide on how to unblock music on YouTube anywhere in the world.
As you can see, there are tons of options out there when it comes to streaming music services. Many even have free music streaming options! For example, if you decide to download Spotify, check out this video of Spotify Tricks You Need To Try:
Have any additional music services to recommend? Please share them with us in the comments!
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But a VPN can help! So exactly how can you access free music streaming services?
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*Keep in mind, when registering, a streaming music service might ask for your location or country. If they do, just fill in the country whose server you’re connected to.
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Get a SaferVPN plan, or start your free trial if you don’t have an account yet. Connect to a vpn server located in the country where your desired music service is available. Access your desired music service, and you’ll see that it works just as if you were in a country that streams it freely. You can now unblock music from anywhere!
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Three people were shot at a back-to-school peace picnic held at a playground in Chicago on Saturday night.
A fourth person was beaten up at the event that was held to promote peace and community.
The picnic, which took place at Seward Park on the city’s North Side, was off to a safe start, but onlookers say the mood quickly turned when a group of young men showed up and started fighting.
“It’s senseless and should have never happened,” event organizer Raymond Hatcher told reporters. “We were doing well. Everything was going swell and then a group of guys who were not associated with us, came to the event intoxicated.”
“We were doing well. Everything was going swell and then a group of guys who were not associated with us, came to the event intoxicated.” — Raymond Hatcher, organizer of Chicago "peace picnic"
Hatcher, who puts on the event that is attended by hundreds of people every year, shook his head as police roped off the area with red crime-scene tape.
Nineteen-year-old Trayvon Hatcher came with his two nephews to the park on Saturday.
“Everyone was trying to get away,” he told reporters.
Hatcher said when he heard the shots, he grabbed his nephews and left.
Saturday’s incident was one of several shootings that have rocked Chicago over the weekend.
On Friday, as the city girded itself for another weekend of mayhem and bloodshed, a shooting left seven people hurt, including a 3-year-old boy.
The youngster was one of 25 people shot in Chicago over a span of roughly 14 hours from Friday afternoon to early Saturday.
A 27-year-old man was killed after being shot in the chest and arm around 3 p.m. Friday on Chicago's South Side, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Police say the child was hit in his left shin in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side. He was transported to a children’s hospital and was in stable condition.
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Lego is taking its girls out of their pink-bricked houses and putting them in the laboratory.
The Denmark-based toymaker has announced it will produce a series of minifigure sets featuring female characters conducting scientific research. The three-figure Lego series, titled “Research Institute,” depicts women as chemists, astronomers and paleontologists. The chemist is depicted in a lab, the astronomer looks through a telescope and the paleontologist is shown examining dinosaur bones. Lego said it will aim to have the figures in stores by August 2014.
“Research Institute” won the latest Lego Ideas contest, which allows fans to submit their custom Lego kit designs in the hopes they will become full Lego products. Kits must gather at least 10,000 supporters on Lego’s Kickstarter-like contest website before they are submitted for consideration. Lego then chooses one kit to produce.
Ellen Kooijman, a geochemist from Sweden, designed the minifigure kit. “As a female scientist I had noticed two things about the available Lego sets: a skewed male/female minifigure ratio and a rather stereotypical representation of the available female figures,” she wrote in a blog post last year, shortly after the project hit its 10,000-supporter goal. “It seemed logical that I would suggest a small set of female minifigures in interesting professions to make our Lego city communities more diverse.”
Kooijman’s proposal languished on the Lego Ideas site for more than a year before social media gave it the push it needed. The project was posted in May 2012, and had 2,500 supporters slightly over a year later, on June 4, 2013. Then Twitter took notice, and the project’s supporters skyrocketed up to 10,000 in a matter of six days.
The three final minifigure selections – an astronomer, chemist and a paleontologist – were just a few of many possibilities Kooijman included in her pitch. “The motto of these Scientists is clear: explore the world and beyond!” she wrote on her Lego Ideas page.
The toys are a break from Lego’s longstanding approach of producing pink and purple Lego kits for its female audience. Lego currently has two female-oriented lines on its website: a “Disney Princess” series and a “Friends” line that includes toys such as “Stephanie’s Beach House,” “Summer Riding Camp” and “Stephanie’s Outdoor Bakery.”
The female minifigure set was selected over kits based on popular franchises, including "the Legend of Zelda," "Adventure Time," "Back to the Future," "Sherlock" and the anime series "Macross." It was also chosen over a Japanese architecture-themed kit.
Past Lego Ideas winners include a "Ghostbusters" 30th anniversary kit, a Lego version of the Mars rover Curiosity and a replica of the DeLorean time machine from the movie "Back to the Future."
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At least some of the tablet-loving public picked up a Surface Pro this weekend. Those earliest of early adopters have discovered an unpleasant limitation, however: the vaunted pen input doesn't have complete support in important apps. Microsoft is using only an official driver without any current option to install an alternative, leaving artists without eraser or pressure support in creative industry staples such as Adobe Photoshop. While there's no immediate fix, a Microsoft spokesperson tells us that it's working with the "necessary partners" to expose full pen functionality; we've reached out to Adobe as well, and will let you know if it's one of the chosen few. In the meantime, Surface artisans who need full pen recognition may want to consider an add-on tablet as a stopgap. Read Microsoft's full statement after the break.
Update: Adobe tells us it's "working with [its] partners to explore the possibility" of support, which suggests that we'll need to be patient.
[Thanks, John]
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It’s almost a relief now that Stan Van Gundy, for whatever silly reason, was never able to nab a full-time spot as an NBA analyst on national TV. He would have been fantastic, alternating X’s-and-O’s education with hilarious rants about stupid arena giveaways and other NBA minutiae. He would have left a cranky void in the TV landscape whenever some smart team finally hired him back into the league.
Detroit became that team on Tuesday after Van Gundy blew away franchise higher-ups with his preparation — his vision for the team, his evaluation of each player, and his plan for overhauling the Pistons’ moribund culture, according to a high-level team source. Detroit got the jump on Van Gundy ahead of Golden State, and by the time he met with the Warriors, he had the Detroit option in the bag, according to several league sources. The Pistons had hired a search firm to spit out a list of candidates, but in the end, they disregarded that list when it became clear they had a shot at SVG.
The Pistons are paying Van Gundy $35 million over five seasons to act as both coach and the team’s top front-office decision-maker, according to both Yahoo (which broke the news) and ESPN.com. The salary cap does not apply to head coaches, and there are only a half-dozen or so guys who really move the needle. If you can get one of them, you should do it, even if it’s pricey. Van Gundy is one of those guys.
The dual role Van Gundy will play is tricky. Lots of high-profile guys have officially had both the coach and GM titles, including Don Nelson, Larry Brown, Gregg Popovich, Pat Riley, and Doc Rivers right now in Los Angeles. Popovich relinquished the official GM role in San Antonio but still shares final say in every personnel decision. The lines can be blurry, especially with powerful and long-tenured coaches. Doug Collins didn’t have the GM title in Philly, but he was calling most of the shots, which made it doubly hilarious when he ripped his own players after a frustrating loss in 2013 — as if Collins the coach had been unfamiliar with the limitations of the players Collins the de facto GM had picked.
Guys who wear both hats must be wary of chasing short-term wins over long-term health. Brown was the top power broker during his time in Charlotte, and he loaded the Bobcats with aging vets on bloated long-term deals in pursuit of fleeting mediocrity. Rivers the GM signed players Rivers the coach liked and/or feared in Boston five years ago.
But Van Gundy should be insulated from these dangers. The team will hire a full-time front-office steward, and Van Gundy has reportedly pushed for Otis Smith, his former GM in Orlando, to snag that role. Smith’s track record in Orlando is discouraging, though it’s hard to tell who made the final call on a desperate series of expensive moves the team made in a candy-addled attempt to win Dwight Howard’s schoolgirl affection. The dynamic will be different this time around if Van Gundy has veto power over Smith, and with a very capable front-office staff below those two.
The five-year deal also gives Van Gundy security to think big-picture for a franchise that badly needs that kind of thinking. No team has had a more miserable last half-decade. Detroit is about to make its fifth straight appearance on the lottery dais, and the Pistons have been at or near the bottom of the NBA in attendance since the breakup of their championship core. They are the only team to rank below the league’s average in both points scored and allowed per possession in each of the last five seasons, per NBA.com. In short, they have been bad at almost everything.
Joe Dumars, the team’s deposed GM and architect of that title team, cycled through a gazillion coaches as the Pistons flailed around; the recent expiration of Lawrence Frank’s old contract barely saved the Pistons the indignity of paying four head coaches at once next season — Frank, Maurice Cheeks, John Loyer, and now Van Gundy. (Side note: Could another team besides the Lakers and Cavs send Mike Brown a $1 check, just so we can say three different teams are paying Mike Brown not to coach them? Seriously: If Brown is back in the league next season as an assistant, he needs to check into coaching rehab. He would officially love coaching too much. Just collect those checks and spend a year on the beach.)
And yet, the Pistons are not a total shit show — not even close. They are actually pretty lean going forward, and they have a potential franchise centerpiece in Andre Drummond. The idea of Van Gundy doing for Drummond what he did for a young Dwight Howard should terrify the league. They could have as much as $22.5 million in cap room this summer, and still about $12 million once you account for Greg Monroe’s cap hold. In other words: Detroit could search the market for some badly needed shooting while Monroe hangs in restricted free agency, and then move on Monroe when the market dictates its path.
Detroit could have a pile of cap room next summer even if it re-signs Monroe to a maximum deal, while big contracts for Josh Smith, Monroe, and Drummond are set to overlap for only one season — and that is after the expiration of Brandon Jennings’s current deal. One more move to consider: Detroit owes Charlotte a first-round pick, but the Pistons will keep that pick this year if it falls within the top eight. Detroit enters next week’s lottery snugly in that no. 8 spot.
Monroe and his agent, David Falk, will want a max contract, and the Pistons are right to play hardball. That’s how you use restricted free agency, especially for a strange player like Monroe, who has not proven worthy of what would be a $15 million–per-year commitment. He’s a low-post behemoth with quick feet, a hungry appetite for rebounds, and good passing skills for his position. Throw this dude the ball on the low block and he’ll get buckets and double-teams.
The knock on Monroe is that he has struggled badly on defense, his midrange shot is bricky, and his development stalled out this season as Cheeks and Loyer juggled an incongruous mix of three bigs in Monroe, Drummond, and Smith. Opponents outscored Detroit by nearly 6.5 points per 48 minutes when those three played together, making for one of the worst heavy-usage trios in the league among teams that were actually trying to win games — something the Pistons weren’t really trying to do once it became clear they would miss the playoffs. Detroit just never developed any coherence on that end. Monroe is slow traversing large spaces and low to the ground, Drummond is (like most young players) out of sorts, Smith can’t chase wing players anymore, and Jennings is the James Harden of point guards.
The Pistons did not appear to have much of a scheme. They changed the way they defended the pick-and-roll almost on a game-to-game basis, sometimes asking Monroe to jump way out to corral ball handlers — something he’s just not equipped to do. There was no five-man coordination among players. Nobody helped the helper, and defenders on the weak side had no clue what to do against a pick-and-roll or in response to a double-team on the block. The Pistons were the opposite of “on a string.” They just lit the string on fire.
Detroit had more success playing two of the three bigs and sitting the other. Counting only lineups that logged at least 25 minutes, the Pistons actually managed a positive scoring margin with the Smith-Monroe and Monroe-Drummond pairings, per NBA.com. But that last one, so important to Detroit’s future, didn’t play enough minutes together — and when they did it was it was interrupted by Smith hoisting awful midrange jumpers.
Detroit nudged Smith toward his worst habits by shoehorning him in at small forward, where he had to spend time away from the basket in an attempt to “space the floor.” But the team let him jack up shots with no accountability, and Smith bricked his way to one of the worst perimeter shooting seasons in modern league history. With the exception of a couple early-season benchings under Cheeks, the coaches did nothing.
That will change with Van Gundy working under a five-year deal. He prizes shot selection, on both ends. If you violate his rules repeatedly, you are coming out of the game. He doesn’t care about your status or salary.
And there will be rules. Van Gundy has historically stressed packing the paint on defense, protecting the 3-point line, avoiding gambles, and forcing midrange jumpers — analytically savvy tenets he implemented before analytics were cool. His teams typically force very few turnovers and clean the defensive glass; he stops scrimmages to point out when players gamble out of scheme for steals.
He’ll likely have Monroe and especially Drummond hang back near the paint, as Howard mostly did in Orlando. There will be a strict system the team uses night-to-night, with only minor tweaks for each opponent. The team will be insanely well prepared.
Van Gundy’s Orlando teams were ahead of the curve in chucking lots of 3s, and he has been pigeonholed as a 3-point zealot. That’s not exactly true. In Orlando, Van Gundy molded his offense around Howard’s pick-and-roll gravity and the skill set of Rashard Lewis (playing under a massive contract Van Gundy likely would not have approved). His Miami teams with Shaquille O’Neal played a bigger brand of ball, with more of the inside-out game you’d expect from a Shaq team. Still, Van Gundy gets the importance of the 3, and finding more outside shooting will be his first priority. Detroit over the last two seasons has already shown it can be an enormously powerful offensive force running Drummond on the pick-and-roll with shooting around him. Expect more of that.
Even Van Gundy’s Miami teams ranked poorly in offensive rebounding, and Van Gundy has always emphasized getting back on defense over crashing the glass.
“Stan studies the game, and he found offensive rebounding just isn’t important to winning,” says Steve Clifford, the Bobcats head coach and a Van Gundy assistant in Orlando. “Stealing the ball and creating turnovers are not usually factors in winning big.”
It will be interesting to see how that works in Detroit, which led the league in offensive rebounding rate last season and forced a decent amount of turnovers. It’s possible the roster is the rare sort that could excel at both transition defense and on the offensive glass: Let Drummond and Monroe go wild while everyone else gets back.
Van Gundy is malleable, to a degree, and much more analytics-friendly than people think. That misconception is partly Van Gundy’s fault. He has made himself into a friendly sort of cartoon character, mocking the silly fringes of analytics with a mustachioed old-school gruffness. But he’s really just suspicious of blind trust in numbers generated by people who don’t know the nuances of the game — the responsibilities of each player in his scheme, how an opponent’s system works, and how a particular player fits within a particular roster. It’s hard to credit and blame players accurately if you don’t know that stuff.
That does not make Van Gundy hostile toward analytics. He has told the Pistons he would like to expand the use of analytics for both coaching and personnel evaluation, a team source says. As previously mentioned, his teams have naturally played an analytically friendly style, and Van Gundy is a smart, curious guy who wants to know what the numbers say.
He has famously clashed with two behemoth centers in O’Neal and Howard. O’Neal called Van Gundy a “master of panic,” and Howard suggested Van Gundy maintain a sunnier disposition on the sideline. He has gained a reputation as a grating type. But most of his players, at least the ones I’ve talked to, don’t feel that way. A lot of guys loved playing for Van Gundy, even with his pouting perfectionism. If you’re a pro, devoted to your craft, Van Gundy can be a godsend.
Look, there’s a ton of work to be done here. Drummond is still very young. Jennings hasn’t worked out, and has just two years left on his deal at an affordable price. If he’s not the answer at point guard, he’s not unmovable, either. Monroe’s free agency is a massive organizational moment, especially since he’s so much closer in age to Drummond than Smith. The Monroe-Drummond pairing is a more natural long-term foundation than Drummond and Smith, with Smith being eight years older than Drummond.
But Smith’s trade value has never been lower. Still, the Pistons should be targeting teams with room to spend, their own trade pieces and/or cap room, and foolish motivation to win right now — the Lakers, Knicks, and Nets come to mind. The Pelicans have a couple of ugly contracts linked to perimeter players, but they’ve expressed no real interest in Smith, according to league sources. Detroit might be stuck.
That would complicate the Monroe equation. A max-level deal might be an overpay, but with the cap set to skyrocket over the next three or four years, maybe it’s on overpay you make if the alternative is losing Monroe for nothing or dumping him in a blah sign-and-trade. But it’s possible Van Gundy, so interesting in perfect spacing, might view Drummond as the only keeper here.
Detroit is in the early stages of legitimate rebuilding, which says a lot about how bad the past five years have been. But Van Gundy is the kind of guy a team should trust with that process.
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The Government is trying to buy the referendum, but we don't know what the electoral brown envelope contains, if indeed it contains anything. By Michael Taft.
It is better not to be cynical. But this Government is not only making it easy to be cynical, they are practically making it mandatory. We now read that the Government is preparing the economy for a sustained and substantial investment programme in an anticipation of a U-turn by the EU. That this has been announced only days before the referendum...what timing, what fortune.
“Government departments have been told to draw up lists of capital projects with potential to create thousands of jobs for which funding would be sought if EU leaders agree on the package at the meeting to be held a week before polling day here.”
“He (the Taoiseach) is drawing up the list, which would create thousands of jobs on road, rail, housing, school, health, broadband and water projects.”
This will be a new experience. The Government cut €750 million in capital projects last year. They intend to cut capital projects by approximately €600 million next year, with an additional €150 million the following year. Over the lifetime of this Dáil, the Government has announced that it will cut public investment by 32% in real terms (after inflation). These cuts, according to the Department of Finance, will slash direct employment by nearly 13,000, not counting the downstream effect.
So at the very same time that the Government is cutting investment and jobs, it is drawing up investment lists to create thousands of jobs. Anyone think this is contradictory?
What are the sources for all this new funding? Three have been named.
The European Investment Bank: this would certainly be helpful if more capital was pumped into the EIB, which co-finances and provides loans at competitive interest rates for a range of physical and social infrastructural projects. Whether member-states would put in this capital or the ECB could be induced to do so remains an issue. However, it should be noted that where the loan is to the State, the State has to put up half the investment (see here for a proposed school building programme) – so extra Exchequer resources will be needed. It should also be noted that EIB funding can take up to 12 to 18 months from application to start-up activity with Ireland having to join a queue. Currently, there is only the one programme being appraised.
Project Bonds: This is a pilot-project by the EU and essentially involves supporting private companies tendering from public authorities. These bonds would replace traditional bank lending. This would involve public support for the private component in essentially public-private partnerships in commercial activities. While this could have some impact – especially in commercial telecommunications and energy activities – it will be limited as ultimately intended in getting non-banking private markets to provide debt financing.
Unspent Structural Funds: The EU Commission has proposed that €82 billion worth of unspent structural funds be re-allocated and spent. However, there is a catch – states would only be able to re-allocate the structural funds they themselves did not spend. It would not be transferable from one state to another (though this could change). I don’t know how much unspent structural funds Ireland has, but it’s not likely to be much.
All of this shouldn’t be dismissed but clearly it is limited – both in the scope of activities that can be funded, the amounts involved and the time-lag. A progressive government would exploit these programmes as ‘additionality’ – additional to a public-led investment programme from our own resources.
And here’s where we get to the root of the Government’s cynicism. They are pursuing a highly deflationary programme – planning €8.6 billion in cuts and tax increases up to 2015. They claim they will off-set against this an unknown amount of reflationary investment measures which can only be drawn down over the medium-term under limited conditions (including additional borrowing) and limited scope. All the while, the Government’s budgets are tearing demand out of the economy now, dampening employment growth now and undermining domestic businesses now.
The Government is trying to buy the referendum. However, unlike good ol’ fashioned general election buy-outs, we don’t know what the electoral brown envelope contains, if it contains anything.
The Government is robbing impoverished Peter but only giving crumbs to starving Paul. {jathumbnailoff}
notesonthefront.typepad.com
Image top: andrewrennie.
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As Americans work to file their taxes, Congress is setting to work on a package of expired tax credits this spring to enrich a few energy technologies at the expense of federal taxpayers.
Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., of the Senate Finance Committee last week introduced a bill that would retroactively renew 26 tax credits that expired at the start of 2018.
The Grassley-Wyden bill would carry those tax credits through 2019 even though they were intentionally left out of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and past omnibus spending deals.
Called the Tax Extender and Disaster Relief Act of 2019, the legislation carves out favors for a few odds and ends such as race horses, motor sports complexes, and medical expenses.
But most of the bill gives special breaks to energy companies that produce biofuels, electric and fuel cell vehicles, and certain boutique renewable energy technologies, including biomass and geothermal.
Targeted tax credits have become a popular way for government to award special treatment and artificially attract private-sector interest to politically favored and well-connected industries.
In short, they’re nothing more than subsidies doled out through the tax code. Not only is this fiscally irresponsible, but Congress also does no service to these energy technologies and companies in the long run by subsidizing them.
It’s bad enough that several years of lobbying by these special interests appears to be working. Rather than getting closer to a free energy sector, that’s unfortunately business as usual for Washington.
But it’s another thing altogether to see some in Congress all too willing to hand out subsidies apparently unsolicited by lobbyists. How efficient.
As reported by E&E News, some Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee are angling to add wind and solar tax credits to a larger tax extenders package like the one introduced by Grassley and Wyden.
On these, Republicans and Democrats reached a compromise in the 2015 omnibus spending bill to extend credits one more time and put them on a schedule to sunset in 2022, a decision that diverted over $14 billion to the green energy industry. From the beginning, these credits (like those in the Grassley-Wyden bill) were designed to be temporary but have expired, been extended, re-extended, and retroactively extended for decades.
Finally, it seemed that Washington had had enough, and the wind and solar industries could no longer claim they were infant industries in the face of falling costs and industry growth.
Fast forward four years to now.
About the wind production tax credit, the wind industry said: “The wind industry agreed to an orderly phase-out of the production tax credit. … We aren’t actively asking for an extension to our PTC.”
And the solar industry said of the solar investment tax credit: “We have not asked for an extension of the ITC.”
And yet now, that compromise could mean nothing if Democrats have their way.
There is some hope of responsible action winning out. Grassley, historically a champion of wind subsidies, said: “We made that decision in 2015. I think it would be wrong for me to go back on my word.”
But one has to ask: What will it take to get the rest of Congress to keep a promise?
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Taking the Long View - Sustainability in Tertiary Education
Taking the Long View - Sustainability needed in uni education
By Gord Stewart
“Many things on which our future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. Rather, it is largely the work of people with BAs, BScs, LLBs, MBAs and PhDs.”
Noted academic and environmentalist, David W Orr, made the above observation. Harsh words, perhaps, but why beat around the bush.
You’d swear he was talking about our current National Government, given their policies relating to the likes of climate change, biodiversity, and plastics in the environment. He actually penned those words back in 1994 in his thoughtful book. Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect.
In spite of the good work of David Orr and other academic leaders over the years, coverage of sustainability issues remains a minor, even marginal, part of the university curriculum. Thus, it’s highly possible for students to complete a university degree and have little idea of the kind of world they are graduating into.
With hopes of change and improvement, a recent study looked at how well New Zealand universities are integrating sustainability into the curriculum and what leading overseas institutions could teach us.
Nine innovative universities in five countries were studied. Of the group, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has the longest running commitment to sustainability across the curriculum, growing out of a policy established there in 1985.
Now 10 years into its efforts, The University of Plymouth in the UK has nearly half its courses with an embedded or major sustainability element. At Emory University in the US, sustainability issues are now integrated into the likes of nursing, mathematics and language courses – not disciplines one would normally expect.
Macquarie University in Australia, the UK’s Nottingham Trent University and the University of British Columbia in Canada have innovative training programmes. They provide faculty members with the knowledge, skills and resources needed to integrate sustainability into what they teach.
Arizona State University in the US and Dalhouse University in Canada have taken it a step further. ASU established its School of Sustainability in 2006, while Dal opened the doors of its College of Sustainability in 2009. Australian National University has its Fenner School of Environment and Society. The three of them offer a range of sustainability degrees and diplomas.
All nine universities emphasise experiential learning in sustainability education. They use the campus and surrounding community as a ‘living laboratory’. Student internships and work placements with partner organisations are common.
Developments at New Zealand’s universities pale in comparison. The research suggests that less than 10 percent of current courses would address sustainability in even the most modest of ways.
Progress is evident, but it’s perhaps best captured in a comment made by David Blackstein of the US National Council on Science and the Environment when he said: “The glaciers are melting faster than the curriculum is changing.”
To its credit, Lincoln University has a foundation paper and second-year core paper compulsory for all students (though with changes there they are under threat).
The shining light looking ahead is Victoria University of Wellington. Last year the university created the position of assistant vice-chancellor (sustainability). A ‘Sustainability 101’ paper will soon be offered and, in time, there are hopes for sweeping changes.
Why bother with all of this? Three very good reasons: Properly embedding sustainability across the curriculum will lead to improved quality and relevance of education for all enrolled students. It will better prepare domestic students for meaningful work at home and abroad. And it will strengthen offerings to attract foreign students in a competitive international education marketplace.
As higher education faces rising costs, funding challenges, and disruptions through the likes of open online courses, a focus on sustainability could provide a source of hope and opportunity for institutional change and a renewed sense of mission.
Returning to David Orr. Reflecting on the immense possibilities, he has said, “Educational institutions committed to the real work of building a sustainable and decent human future and willing to learn what that requires of us would be exciting and challenging places. More to the point, they would equip the rising generation to see that the world is rich with possibilities and prepare them to act competently in that light.”
Gord Stewart is an environmental sustainability consultant. He does project work for government, industry, and non-profit organisations.
© Scoop Media
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Alistair Darling, Labour’s former chancellor, has revealed he will step down as an MP at the next election, warning that the issue of an EU referendum is a “boil that has to be lanced”.
His decision means the loss of another heavyweight figure for Labour in 2015 along with Jack Straw, Dame Tessa Jowell and David Blunkett.
It is another blow for Scottish Labour after Johann Lamont resigned as leader with a warning that Westminster was trying to run it like a branch office.
Darling has been an MP in Edinburgh since 1987 and is best known for steering the UK through the financial crisis under the premiership of Gordon Brown, later revealing that No 10 had unleashed “the forces of hell” on him after he issued a stern warning about the likely severity of the recession.
Speaking to the Financial Times, the senior Labour figure, who led the Better Together campaign in the Scottish referendum, revealed he was stepping down and spoke of how he was frustrated that Labour had not used that campaign to do better north of the border.
In the interview, Darling also endorsed Jim Murphy to lead Scottish Labour. Murphy, who stepped down as Ed Miliband’s shadow development secretary on Sunday on Sunday, has two rivals: MSPs Neil Findlay and Sarah Boyack.
“Jim has the enthusiasm, the energy and above all he’s a fighter. For too long we have sat back when we needed to fight,” Darling said.
On the subject of the Scottish independence referendum, he said: “My frustration is that we actually won … You can’t say it often enough. We made the arguments, we had confidence in ourselves.”
Turning the possibility of an EU referendum, which Labour is resisting, Darling said he hoped to use his campaign experience in Scotland to help argue for Britain in Europe in a referendum.
He suggested it was all but inevitable whoever wins the next election, saying: “It’s a boil that has to be lanced.”
He said he learned from Scotland that “if you sit back and wait till the other lot have taken so much ground then you’re on the back foot … you pay a heavy price.”
Ed Miliband said Darling “distinguished himself as an extraordinary public servant - a servant of the Labour Party, a servant of Scotland and a servant of the United Kingdom”.
Polls in Scotland show surging support for the Scottish National party despite its unsuccessful yes campaign, with a YouGov survey finding 52% of people favoured leaving the UK only weeks after the vote to stay in the union.
On Sunday, Alex Salmond, the outgoing SNP leader and first minister, hinted the door could be open for coalition with Labour if his party took enough seats next year. This raises the possibility Salmond could return to Westminster and take a senior role in the government in May.
Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Salmond said: “I certainly think that there’s no chance whatsoever of the SNP ever going into coalition with the Conservative party, with their attitude towards Scotland, and their attitude towards people in general. I think it’s unlikely [with Labour] but who knows, people change sometimes, parties change sometimes, party leaders change sometimes and lead them in a different direction.”
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A study published in the June issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets (full paper in .pdf) provides new evidence that an ocean covered as much as one third of the Martian surface early in its history.
Most of the planet’s northern hemisphere is flat and at a lower elevation than the southern hemisphere, and thus appears similar to the ocean basins found on Earth. The border between the lowlands and the highlands would have been the coastline for the hypothetical ocean.
Planetary scientists at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena used new images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to study a 100-square-km area that sits right on this possible former coastline.
Previous satellite images have shown that this area – part of a larger region called Aeolis Dorsa, which is about 1,000 km away from Gale Crater where the Curiosity rover is now roaming – is covered in ridge-like features called inverted channels. These inverted channels form when coarse materials like large gravel and cobbles are carried along rivers and deposited at their bottoms, building up over time. After the river dries up, the finer material – such as smaller grains of clay, silt, and sand—around the river erodes away, leaving behind the coarser stuff. This remaining sediment appears as today’s ridge-like features, tracing the former river system.
When looked at from above, the inverted channels appear to fan out, a configuration that suggests one of three possible origins: the channels could have once been a drainage system in which streams and creeks flowed down a mountain and converged to form a larger river; the water could have flowed in the other direction, creating an alluvial fan, in which a single river channel branches into multiple smaller streams and creeks; or the channels are actually part of a delta, which is similar to an alluvial fan except that the smaller streams and creeks empty into a larger body of water such as an ocean.
The scientists analyzed the stratigraphic layers of the inverted channels, piecing together the history of how sediments were deposited along these ancient rivers and streams. They were able to determine the slopes of the channels back when water was still coursing through them. Such slope measurements can reveal the direction of water flow – in this case, showing that the water was spreading out instead of converging, meaning the channels were part of an alluvial fan or a delta. But they also found evidence for an abrupt increase in slope of the sedimentary beds near the downstream end of the channels. That sort of steep slope is most common when a stream empties into a large body of water – suggesting that the channels are part of a delta and not an alluvial fan.
Scientists have discovered deltas on Mars before, but most are inside a geological boundary, like a crater. Water therefore would have most likely flowed into a lake enclosed by such a boundary and so did not provide evidence for an ocean. But the newly discovered delta is not inside a crater or other confining boundary, suggesting that the water likely emptied into a large body of water like an ocean.
“This is probably one of the most convincing pieces of evidence of a delta in an unconfined region – and a delta points to the existence of a large body of water in the northern hemisphere of Mars,” said lead author Dr Roman DiBiase.
“This large body of water could be the ocean that has been hypothesized to have covered a third of the planet. At the very least, the water would have covered the entire Aerolis Dorsa region, which spans about 100,000 square km.”
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Bibliographic information: Roman A. DiBiase et al. 2013. Deltaic deposits at Aeolis Dorsa: Sedimentary evidence for a standing body of water on the northern plains of Mars. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, vol. 118, no. 6, 1285–1302; doi: 10.1002/jgre.20100
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TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan’s Sharp Corp said it will acquire Toshiba Corp’s personal computer business for $36 million, highlighting its recovery under the control of Foxconn and marking a return to a business it quit eight years ago.
It will pay 4 billion yen ($36.47 million) for an 80.1 percent stake, it said in a statement on Tuesday.
Sharp was once known as a major supplier of high-end TVs and smartphone displays but struggled to compete with Asian rivals and was bought by Taiwan’s Foxconn, or Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, two years ago. It exited the PC market in 2010.
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India's most "nationalist" government in history has done quite badly on the actual security scenario on the ground. So, while the keyboard warriors battle it out, handing out "faux nationalism certificates" perpetually citing the soldier at the borders, the real soldiers are being given a short shrift.
The death toll of the CRPF battling the Maoists in India's heartland has shown a shocking spiral in the past three years. On Monday, 25 CRPF men were killed in a Chhattisgarh jungle ambush, yet the ministry of home affairs has not found time to appoint a full-time Director General for the force for the past two months after K Durga Prasad retired.
During the same period, the CRPF has lost 38 men in two major ambushes, including Monday's which was the worst in the past seven years.
The terror spiral in the Valley where even an election cannot be held has put a huge question mark over the legitimacy of the inept Mehbooba Mufti government in alliance with the BJP.
Periodic outbreaks in Kashmir, such as the blinding of nearly 100 young people with pellet guns after the death of militant Burhan Wani last summer, are a symptom of the malaise that is plaguing the security establishment – also the fact that National Security Adviser Ajit Doval is completely out of his depth and unable to formulate a response to the ever increasing problem and the constant meddling by the powerful Ram Madhav, the RSS pracharak on secondment to the BJP who is credited with the BJP-PDP alliance.
The Doval-Madhav duo have also meddled in the ministry of external affairs (MEA) with disastrous effect. For those with short memories, remember the Modi-Doval road show around the world with much fanfare last year to secure the Nuclear Security Group waiver and how after a mega publicity blitz, even Mexico and Switzerland voted against us.
While the publicity machine is awash with unconvincing tales of his daring do and acts of valour in Punjab and Pakistan, the reality is somewhat different.
In Pakistan, during his tenure, he was in charge of the security detail of the mission which in itself is quite a taxing job in the hostile environs. People close to him tell me he was identified as an Intelligence Bureau man from day one of his tenure and did not undertake any missions, contrary to the "Desi Bond" myth.
Doval as NSA has ensured that Pakistan and China run rings around India and even friendly Nepal has turned hostile.
After mismanaging the Pathankot siege, which lasted an incredible four days in January 2016, Doval incredibly gave Pakistan access to the Indian Air Force base - the first time ever in our history. Pakistan did not reciprocate and later called the entire siege a "false flag operation" by India.
Doval as NSA has ensured that Pakistan and China run rings around India and even friendly Nepal has turned hostile. Photo: India Today
Consider the case of Myanmar, where India had for years been carrying out secret anti-terror operations. Even this was grist to Doval's publicity machine and one such operation was made public, with junior minister Raghuvendra Rathore tweeting a juvenile hashtag "56 inch rocks".
The result: A red-faced, embarrassed Myanmar refuted reports that India had entered their territory and said no such operations would be allowed in the future.
The so called "historic Naga accord" is yet another example of Doval's insatiable hunger for publicity. The accord signed in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg on August 15, 2015, is still a "secret" - its contents known to no one, neither the chief ministers of the affected states such as Manipur, nor Parliament.
Yet Doval, who was heading the RSS-funded Vivekanand Foundation post-retirement where he used to give talks on Pakistan trying to "bleed India by a thousand cuts", is not held to account.
Despite going along with then foreign minister Jaswant Singh in the worst security surrender of the IC-814 hijack on December 24, 1999, Doval emerged as BJP leader LK Advani's key IB point-man.
As Doval's power increased, his family has also benefitted. His son Shaurya who earlier used to run the Saudi-funded Zeus caps now heads the India Foundation along with Ram Madhav. The foundation is key for foreign heavy-hitters looking to connect with the Indian establishment. It has several cabinet ministers such as Nirmala Sitharaman, Suresh Prabhu and Jayant Sinha as directors.
Even Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on her visit this month attended a reception thrown by Madhav via the India Foundation.
Ram Madhav enjoys power without any accountability is evident in the case of the Valley.
His constant espousal of the hard RSS line has ensured that the Valley careens from crisis to crisis with no attempt at any kind of political outreach.
A carpet weaver who had gone out to vote in the recent bypoll, which saw a dismal 7 per cent turnout, was tied by the Army to a jeep and paraded around as a human shield, violating the Geneva convention and the Army's own code; the incident brought India international opprobrium.
But Doval and Madhav's hard line continues, so while India holds on grimly to Kashmir, questions which were considered settled decades ago are being asked again.
In an interview to DailyO, former J&K CM Omar Abdullah confessed candidly that parties like his did not represent the mainstream anymore in the Valley. He also blamed Modi's "tourism versus terrorism" binary laced comment, which is an article of faith with Madhav.
The list of security failures and omissions is stunning. Equally stunning is the fact that the Centre is never held to account for the claims they make.
Remember Modi saying that demonetisation had broken the back of terror and Maoist funding?
After Sukma and the ongoing tragedy in the Valley, has even a single leader asked the question "how and why"?
Also read: 26 CRPF personnel killed in Maoist encounter in Chhattisgarh: What you should know
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Mathematician Mary Jackson was one of a small group of African American women who worked as aeronautical engineers, called "human computers," at NASA during the Space Age.
Who Was Mary Jackson?
Mathematician Mary Winston Jackson excelled academically in a time of racial segregation. Her math and science skills earned her a position as a "human computer" for NACA, and she later became NASA's first Black female engineer. Along with serving a vital role in the development of the space program, she helped other women and minorities advance their careers. Jackson died in February 2005 at the age of 83. The story of her groundbreaking contributions to NASA was later dramatized in the 2016 film Hidden Figures.
Early Years
Mary Winston Jackson was born on April 9, 1921, in Hampton, Virginia, the daughter of Ella and Frank Winston. She attended Hampton’s all-Black schools and graduated with high honors from George P. Phenix Training School in 1937. Five years later, she earned dual bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and physical science from Hampton Institute.
Taking her Talents to Work
After college, Jackson took on a series of jobs, including teacher, bookkeeper and receptionist. Then in 1951, she found employment at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the predecessor agency to NASA) in Langley, Virginia. She worked at the West Computers section as a research mathematician—known at the time as a "human computer." In 1953, she moved to the Compressibility Research Division of NACA.
Working through Segregation
Though President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 prohibited discrimination in the defense industry, Virginia state law still enforced segregation in the workplace. All work facilities had separate restrooms and cafeterias designated “white” or “colored.” In the company cafeteria, whites could select their food choices and sit in a lunchroom. Black people had to make their food requests to a cafeteria attendant and then go back to their desks and eat, an experience Jackson considered an indignity.
NASA's First Black Female Engineer
After several months of “separate and unequal” accommodations, Jackson had had enough. She considered resigning, but a chance encounter with a supervisor changed her mind. After hearing her complaints, he invited her to work for him and she accepted. He quickly saw her potential and encouraged her to take engineering classes. In time, she was promoted to aeronautical engineer, making her NASA's first Black female engineer, and developed expertise working with wind tunnels and analyzing data on aircraft flight experiments.
Giving Back by Helping Others
Mary Jackson Photo: NASA
By 1978, Jackson changed positions to be a human resources administrator. She served as both the Federal Women’s Program Manager in the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs and as the Affirmative Action Program Manager. From then until her retirement in 1985, she helped other women and minorities advance their careers, advising them to study and take extra courses to increase their chances for promotion.
Death and 'Hidden Figures' Legacy
During her career, Jackson served on many organizations’ boards and committees, including the Girl Scouts of America, and was honored by numerous charitable organizations for her leadership and service. She died at age 83 on February 11, 2005, at Riverside Convalescent Home in Hampton, Virginia.
In 2016, the story of Jackson and her NASA colleagues Katherine G. Johnson and Dorothy Johnson Vaughan, who calculated flight trajectories for project Mercury and the Apollo program in the 1960s, made it to the big screen in Hidden Figures. Janelle Monáe portrays Jackson in the film.
In 2018, it was announced that Jackson Elementary in Salt Lake City, Utah, named for President Andrew Jackson, would be renamed Mary W. Jackson Elementary School in honor of the groundbreaking NASA engineer.
In June 2020, NASA renamed its DC headquarters after Jackson to The Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters.
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With thousands of acres covered with lava in just a few weeks, it is hard to imagine they will ever support vegetation again — at least in our lifetime.
In heavy rainfall regions such as Kapoho it only takes a few decades once the lava stops flowing. The process of healing can be more rapid with a little help from humans.
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Where rainfall is scant, it takes more effort.
Where weather conditions are dry, it is a good to explore ways to conserve water as well. Organic material is essential to healthy growing conditions.
Decomposed organic matter helps increase water- and nutrient-holding capacity of the soil. Rotted material such as leaves and clippings used as surface mulch can help conserve moisture and keep weeds under control.
Nematodes, those little microscopic worms that feed on plant roots, will do less damage in a high-organic soil.
Organic matter also can increase the minor element and microbiological activity of a new planting medium. Technically, what you are building on a young lava flow is not soil but a growing medium to bring back life more quickly.
For simplicity, let’s just call it soil.
Be sure to save your grass clippings and leaves. They are like money in the bank. You can store these materials in a corner of the garden.
Decay of plant material deposited in a compost pile can be hastened through the use of fertilizer and manures. For each bushel of leaves, grass clippings or other green waste, add 2 cups of balanced fertilizer such as organic 8-8-8 and 1 cup crushed coral, dolomitic or hydrated lime.
The compost is ready to use in about three months. It is an excellent material to mix with soil for vegetable gardens and new plantings.
Anthuriums especially thrive on compost. They love that high-organic mixed with good water retention capability and yet good drainage. A good mix needs to be able to anchor the roots and stem so the plant will not topple over as it grows upward yet provide sufficient moisture, nutrients, and aeration to the plant.
Cinder or crushed rock added to composted wood shavings, sugar cane bagasse, macadamia nut shells, peat or tree bark will serve to better anchor the roots.
Even with composting and mulching, you will still need to fertilize your garden. Some Hawaiian soils are very young and low in nutrients. Larger amounts of fertilizer are needed for growing plants and lawn grasses in these areas than where soils are older and better developed.
The young soil is not only lacking in the primary elements, such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, but it might be deficient in the minor elements such as manganese, copper, zinc, and boron. When plants are grown in these mineral deficient soils and fertilized with ordinary plant foods, they often develop various diseases.
Several years ago, plant doctors studied these deficiencies and learned not only how to recognize the affected plants, but also that they could be corrected by spraying them with the mineral in which the plant was deficient. But what average gardener has the training that enables him or her to recognize deficiency symptoms in plants?
To overcome this problem, the nutritional spray was developed. It is a mixture that contains about all of the minerals in which a plant can be deficient. Some plants are more subject to mineral deficiencies than others.
Especially vulnerable to mineral deficiencies such as dieback, mottled leaf, small or deformed leaves and yellow leaves are hibiscus, gardenia, mock orange, ixoras, mangoes, avocados, macadamia, coffee and citrus.
In new gardens, it might be necessary to apply a nutritional spray about every three months for the first year in order to keep ahead of deficiencies.
Along with the nutritional spray, it is a good idea to use a soil application of other elements. Magnesium and sulfur are the most important, but occasionally we find plants with boron, manganese, copper and other trace element deficiencies.
There are several combinations available at your garden supply store. Certain plants require larger amounts of the trace elements than other plants.
You will find, for example, that iron is especially important on ixoras, hibiscus, azaleas and gardenias, or that magnesium keeps leaves of coconut and areca palms from getting orange colored and dying prematurely. Zinc is the vital element in growing queen palms, royal palms and palms in the date group.
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Increasing your soil’s organic matter and using minor element treatment as a spray or soil application or both will keep your plants from having these deficiencies under most conditions.
And remember to follow directions on the label. Too much of the important plant nutrient materials can be as bad as than too little.
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