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Bulls Backgrounder: Our Best Stories about the NBA Home Team, Dating Back to 1989
HOW DERRICK ROSE WENT FROM GOOD TO GREAT »
From April 2011: This season the soft-spoken Chicago native has blossomed into one of the most dazzling basketball players on the planet. Here's how he did it. [WITH PHOTOS]
JOAKIM NOAH'S TURNAROUND »
From Novemeber 2010: From a shoot-from-the-lip goofball who floundered on court and aggravated his teammates to a fiery star anchoring the Bulls, Joakim Noah has accomplished one of the most dramatic turnarounds in pro sports. [WITH PHOTOS]
INSIDE THE START OF THE BULLS' CHAMPIONSHIP RUN »
From April 2011: An oral history of how Michael Jordan, Phil Jackson, and the rest of the 1991 NBA champs learned to play together and started Chicago's greatest pro sports dynasty. [WITH PHOTOS]
20TH ANNIVERSARY REUNION OF THE 1991 CHAMPS »
From March 2011: Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Horace Grant were among those who attended the homecoming celebration during halftime at the Bulls-Jazz game on March 12, 2011. [WITH PHOTOS]
1990-91 BULLS: WHERE ARE THEY NOW »
From April 2011: An update on Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Phil Jackson, and other key figures from the memorable championship season
DERRICK ROSE'S LEAP FROM INNER-CITY BALLER TO THE NBA »
From November 2008: His story starts in Englewood, one of Chicago's most dangerous neighborhoods, where, as an athletic prodigy, he was shielded from harm
THE NOBLE ONE SPEAKS »
From February 2008: The two sides of Joakim Noah: the pedigreed Frenchman and the scrappy Bulls rookie
THE WISDOM OF COACHES »
From April 2011: Tom Thibodeau is among several local coaches—from the pros to the high-school ranks—who reveal sacred truths about perseverance, motivation, failure, and more
CHICAGO ATHLETES: WHERE ARE THEY NOW? »
From April 2011: We track down former Bulls Artis Gilmore, Luc Longley, and Clem Haskins—among others—to find out: What do star athletes do after their playing days are over? [WITH PHOTOS]
MICHAEL JORDAN'S BEST SHOT »
From February 1989: The best player in basketball needs a better team. Can he let the Bulls become one?
TOP 40 CHICAGO SPORTS MOMENTS »
From August 2010: The Bulls occupy several spots on our list of the city’s thrilling victories and agonizing defeats. [WITH PHOTOS] |
Now, the performance of Robert Blake as the Mystery Man who essentially drives Fred to kill his wife shouldn’t go overlooked. Blake, four years after Lost Highway’s release, was put on trial and ultimately acquitted of his wife’s murder. Whether or not Blake committed that crime, his performance as the Mystery Man adds another skin-crawl inducing layer in retrospect. Blake is eerily perfect in the role and his laugh that won’t leave your head anytime soon.
Before Renée is brutally murdered, Fred seems to disappear into another realm; he walks down a pitch-black hallway and reappears only to discover a video tape of the ghastly crime scene. He mentions early in the movie, he doesn’t like video cameras because he prefers how he remembers things, rather than a recording telling him what happened — of course, when he sees himself covered in blood next to his disembodied wife, he’s stunned and has no memory of the murder. Lynch would later switch from film to video filmmaking, going from Mulholland Drive to Inland Empire, and the violent scenes he shoots in video here are a precursor to the imagery we'll see years later.
Much of Lynch’s projects revolve around a place beyond ours, a place of light and dark — The Black Lodge is a running motif which is seemingly where the Mystery Man comes from and where Fred disappears to before he murders his wife. Like Twin Peaks, we see a Bob-like character and we have a murderer who claims not to have control of his own body — there are even red curtains signifying the connection between Lost Highway and Twin Peaks. Can you go to that dark place and come back the same? And what will you bring back with you? These are the questions constantly Lynch asks.
The Los Angeles murder of a wife, the maintained innocence of the husband — it’s no surprise Lynch and co-writer Barry Gilford were influenced by the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Lynch doesn’t like to analyze his own work, but even he admits the Simpson story was too much in the public consciousness that it had trickle into the film. Lynch was intrigued by how Simpson went from (allegedly) murdering two people in cold blood one day, to going out to play a round of golf the next, like nothing happened. Lost Highway is about the fugue state, a man trying to flee the violent act he’s committed by creating a new world and a new identity to inhabit. Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis, which was released in the same year, tackles some of those themes, as well — “Yeah! A whole different take on the same thing!”, Lynch says about the Soderbergh's film. |
DABS1 in action. All photos by the author.
Ask pretty much anyone about graffiti in Taiwan and they'll you that DABS1 YIA is the person to talk to, a founder of the expat graffiti scene who still remains active. DABS1, a wiry guy who manages to come across as both laid-back and hyperactive at the same time, originally came to Taipei from Canada to teach English around 2001. At the time, he told me, there were a few artists painting walls in parks and under bridges, but there were "no tags or throw-ups on the streets. I was testing the waters to see how far I could go. I was still doing tracksides and mural spots, low-key abandoned spots. Around 2002, 2003 onwards I was doing a lot of street stuff."
DABS1 was the tip of the spear when it came to graffiti in Taipei. Starting in 2004, a growing number of writers writers associated with the Bay Area graff scene came to visit or live in Taipei, among them CHEK, UDON, OPTIMIST, and NOE, the latter who was originally from Taiwan, but grew up in California and returned for good in 2008. Their graffiti was rooted in classic Bay Area influences, with solid handstyles, stylish throw-ups, and the occasional giant block letters painted with rollers and house paint.
DABS1 in action
NOE's throw-up, consisting of a diminutive "O" nestled between a bulging "N" and "O," is built for speed. He claims that he can paint a full throw-up on the street in as little as 90 seconds, allowing him to get highly visible spots in Taipei and on his travels around Asia while reducing the risk of getting caught. "I feel thankful for all the foreigners that stomped the Taiwan ground first," NOE said. "DABS1 and CHEK brought the right mindset of how to do a throw-up, how to execute the letters."
At the time, it was almost comically easy to be a graffiti writer in the capital city. "Taipei had a golden time when you could just roll up and people would not actually understand what graffiti is," DABS1 told me. "They think you must be paid to do this, so it's OK. People were coming and giving us tea and cookies and stuff."
Even the cops treated the writers fairly leniently. NOE remembered one writer named BOBO who "always talked to the police" when caught painting. "He'd be like, 'Just go home. Take a shower, come back, and it'll be finished and prettier than it is right now.'" For a while they got away with it, especially when they painted more colorful productions.
DABS1 in action
"But then in '07," DABS1 said, "there was a big influx of traveling graffiti writers, so the city started seeing a lot more street [bombing]. It was getting a lot of bad press." Taiwan became part of the international circuit of graffiti destinations, "the graff spraycation tour," as DABS1 called it. The authorities had to react. Fines were doubled from around $100 to $200. That may not sound like a lot, but the increase was used to finance rewards to vigilant citizens (many of them taxi drivers) who caught graffiti writers in the act.
When I accompanied DABS1 on a bombing mission one night, we kept an eye out for cabs as well as police. In one spot, DABS1 started painting a shutter only a few feet away from a security guard seated in a booth, but almost abandoned it when a taxi came to a temporary halt across the street. It turned out to be a false alarm. Taxis also serve as potential getaway vehicles—once, NOE told me, he got snitched out by one taxi driver who called the police only to be whisked away at the last moment by another.
DABS1 on roof before and after
Over the years, more and more native Taiwanese writers have emerged, spurned on by the high standards set not just by Western expats, but Japanese writers. Japan and Taiwan's graffiti scenes are closely related and writers from both countries are working toward a visual identity distinct from their American forbears. Japanese graffiti got a head start by at least a decade, and writers have developed unique painting styles in cities like Osaka and Tokyo. (Osaka throw-ups are so wildly elaborate as to be almost illegible, while Tokyo's are clean and easily readable.)
NOE and SAYM, another Taipei-based writer, started visiting Tokyo early on in their careers and, through diligence and hard work, earned the respect of Tokyo's most notorious vandal, WANTO. "We would finish up a couple hundred stickers, a couple hundred marker tags. We would go and get lost in the city, and, after we finished our homework, we would meet up with people and go play. We did that for several [trips to Tokyo]," says NOE. By the time they introduced themselves to local writers, the Japanese vandals had already seen NOE and SAYM up all over their city. WANTO eventually put them down with the crew he founded, which is named after one of Tokyo's most important traffic arteries: 246.
246 Crew line-up
Tokyo's 246 crew had a profound influence on Taiwanese graffiti, both in terms of style and ambition. In addition to NOE and SAYM, Taiwanese locals YU and HOWA joined 246, and YU especially has been highly active repping the crew in Taipei and across Asia. Meanwhile, newcomers like NEST and CURE closely hew to 246's stylistic playbook, using big, bubbly letters and elements such as faces formed out of spray dots and the Roman numeral "I," which writers the world over like to append to their names. Taiwanese graffiti may still be copying more than innovating, but "you can see [there's] quality control," according to DABS1. NOE feels that the Taiwanese scene is ready to make its mark and develop a style and reputation of its own. "We Taiwanese, we have pride," he said. "We want to come and show you guys what we got. To show you guys that this is Taiwan!"
DABS1 agreed. There's a sense of achievement in the scene—it's no longer, as he explained it, "just a bunch of foreigners coming here and killing it. HOWA, NOE, and SAYM are putting in work and getting props" for it. "Nowadays," DABS1 said, "the kids out here are more in tune with the old, classic graff ethos. Racking, being out at night, catching spots, climbing, putting more risk into it."
The graff scene in Taiwan, NOE told me, is getting "bigger, better, and worse. Depends on which angle you look at it. But it's definitely going forward.... It's still in the baby stage right now. But it's finally starting to grow."
See more photos from Ray's visit to Taipei below.
Ray Mock is the founder of Carnage NYC and has been documenting graffiti in New York and around the world for ten years, publishing more than two dozen limited edition zines and books. Follow him on Instagram. |
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TCU's Daniel-Meyer Coliseum will soon get a major overhaul as the TCU Board of Trustees approved designs for a $45 million renovation.
Ed and Rae Schollmaier donated an initial $10 million to the project and construction is anticipated to start in 2014.
"Depending on fundraising, my hope is to have construction begin this time next year," TCU Athletic Director Chris Del Conte said in a press release.
Part of the construction design includes new locker rooms, team meeting rooms and a sports medicine center. The plans also include wider concourses, more courtside seating, new concession stands and a courtside club lounge.
In addition to the interior renovations, the outside of Daniel-Meyer Coliseum will be getting a facelift as well. The building's facade will be modernized to "architecturally complement Amon G. Carter Stadium and the TCU campus," according to the press release.
"Having the opportunity to renovate Daniel-Meyer Coliseum helps TCU achieve its ongoing goal of optimizing its physical campus," Chancellor Victor Boschini said in a statement.
Additional features of the proposed new Daniel-Meyer Coliseum are a TCU Athletics Hall of Fame display on the concourse level, offices for Olympic sports and administration and a larger main ticket office to support both Daniel Meyer Coliseum and Amon G. Carter Stadium.
TCU men's basketball coach Trent Johnson and women's basketball coach Jeff Mittie both praised the Board of Trustees in the press release and stated how a rebuilt arena will be a mark of pride for the university's programs. |
Image copyright Unesco Image caption The UN cultural agency, Unesco, has condemned the destruction of Palmyra as a war crime
Syrian government forces have reached the edge of the ancient city of Palmyra after driving back Islamic State (IS) militants, officials and activists say.
Syria's state news agency said the army and allied militia had taken control of hills overlooking the city - a Unesco World Heritage site.
IS seized the ruins of Palmyra and the adjoining modern town in May.
It subsequently destroyed two 2,000-year-old temples, an arch and funerary towers, drawing global outrage.
The jihadist group, which has also demolished several world-renowned pre-Islamic sites in neighbouring Iraq, believes that such structures are idolatrous.
Unesco, the UN's cultural agency, has condemned the destruction as a war crime.
High ground
The state news agency, Sana, reported on Wednesday that troops, backed by pro-government militiamen, had seized high ground to the west and south-west of Palmyra and moved towards the "Palmyra Triangle" road junction after "eliminating" IS militants in the area.
One soldier was quoted as saying that the army had cleared about 120 explosive devices from the Palmyra Triangle as it approached the junction from the west.
Ancient city of Palmyra
Image copyright AP Image caption IS militants blew up the 2,000-year-old Temple of Baalshamin at Palmyra in August
Unesco World Heritage site
Site contains monumental ruins of great city, once one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world
Art and architecture, from the 1st and 2nd centuries, combine Greco-Roman techniques with local traditions and Persian influences
More than 1,000 columns, a Roman aqueduct and a formidable necropolis of more than 500 tombs made up the archaeological site
More than 150,000 tourists visited Palmyra every year before the Syrian conflict
Palmyra: Blowing ruins to rubble
Why IS destroys ancient sites
Sana said government jets had also targeted IS convoys on the road between Palmyra and Sukhanah, 60km (37 miles) to the north-east, destroying dozens of vehicles and leaving many militants dead.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group which relies on a network of sources on the ground in Syria, reported earlier on Wednesday that government forces were only 2km from Palmyra's southern outskirts and 5km from its western edge.
The governor of Homs province, Talal Barazi, welcomed the advance and said troops were also closing in on the IS-held town of Qaryatain, 100km to the south-west.
Syrian government forces launched an offensive to retake Palmyra at the start of the month, backed by intensive Russian air strikes.
Last week, the Russian military said its aircraft were flying up to 25 sorties a day over Palmyra to help liberate what President Vladimir Putin has described as a "pearl of world civilisation".
Palmyra is also situated in a strategically important area on the road between the capital, Damascus, and the contested eastern city of Deir al-Zour.
Recapturing Palmyra would be a significant victory for the government and Russia, which withdrew most of its forces last week after a six-month air campaign against opponents of President Bashar al-Assad that turned the tide of the five-year civil war in his favour.
The advance on Palmyra comes as representatives of the government and the main opposition umbrella group attend UN-led talks in Geneva aimed at finding a political solution to end the war.
Image copyright EPA Image caption The governor of Homs province said troops were also moving on IS-held Qaryatain
The talks have been boosted by a nationwide cessation of hostilities brokered by the US and Russia that has largely held since it began on 27 February.
IS and its rival jihadist group, al-Nusra Front, are excluded from the truce.
The reduction in violence has also allowed aid to be delivered to besieged areas.
On Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said more than 70,000 people trapped in the Houla region, north of the city of Homs, had received their first delivery of food and medicine in months. |
A car bomb exploded outside a Civil Guard barracks in the northern Spanish city of Burgos early on Wednesday, injuring 46 people in an attack authorities blamed on Basque separatist rebels ETA. The blast ripped away most of the outer wall of the multi-storey barracks in of the biggest attacks for some time by ETA, whose ranks have been decimated by arrests.
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"It’s almost a miracle no one was hurt more seriously,“ an emergency services spokesman said, adding that the barracks had been evacuated and fire fighters were going through the building.
Most of the injured, who included children, suffered cuts and bruises and although no one was in serious condition, 38 had been transferred to hospital in the historic cathedral town, according to the spokesman.
The car packed with explosives had been parked outside the barracks, home to members of Spain’s paramilitary police force and their families.
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"Those who do this sort of thing will end up in jail,“ said Manuel Chaves, one of Spain’s deputy prime ministers.
Authorities believe ETA is under pressure to show it can still mount attacks despite having been weakened by a series of arrests including that of its suspected top commander, Jurdan Martitegi, in April. His capture brought to four the number of commanders caught in less than a year.
ETA is held responsible for killing more than 800 people in the past 40 years in a campaign to carve out an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southern France. It typically employs shootings and car bombs, often targeted at police and army barracks.
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Polls indicate most Basques in Spain would favour some sort of independence, although support for ETA violence is confined to a diminishing minority.
The most recent killing blamed on the group was on June 19, when a police inspector died in a booby-trapped car in the northern city of Bilbao.
Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s Socialist government broke off peace talks with ETA after the rebels killed two people with a car bomb at Madrid airport in December 2006.
Eighteen more alleged ETA members were captured in a three-week period in June and July.
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New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner apologized Thursday after his encounter with a voter who used a homosexual slur against his openly gay opponent Christine Quinn, saying he has fought against homophobia all of his political career.On Thursday, Weiner and an elderly woman had the exchange while he was campaigning in Queens, reports The Washington Post When he asked the woman if she was a registered Democrat, she replied "I am, and I'm not voting for uh, what's her name? The dyke."Weiner at first said "Okay. I just need you to sign the petition to get me on the ballot." But then he noticed a reporter was listening and added, "And you really shouldn't talk that way about people."The woman apologized, and Weiner — who left the U.S. House of Representatives two years ago after tweeting inappropriate pictures of himself to several women — then said, "It's okay. It's not your fault." But later Thursday, after news broke about the exchange, Weiner issued his apology, the Post reported."Homophobia is vile and destructive and something I have fought against for the entirety of my career, including being a vocal supporter of gay marriage since 1998 and standing up on the floor of Congress for transgender Americans," he said."I admonished the woman amid a large crowd on a street corner and by no means believe that anything about her comment was appropriate. If the impression is that I did, I apologize because behavior like this will absolutely not be tolerated in my administration.”According to The Wall Street Journal , Weiner also apologized for the woman's remarks after delivering a health policy speech in Manhattan, saying that he "immediately admonished her not to say anything further," and that "there should be no slurs like this of any kind.”“I think that what was said was wrong. I said it at the time. Any other impression that might have been left was wrong. I admonished it,” he added.But the apologies did not silence his critics. Both New York Assemblywoman Deborah Glick and state Sen. Brad Holyman, who are gay and supporters of Quinn, said in a joint statement that Weiner lacks "moral courage."Schaefer also accused Weiner of keeping silent about anti-gay remarks made during a recent Brooklyn forum, saying the incident Thursday was part of a "disturbing pattern." |
Image caption Wouter Basson was acquitted in 2002 of 67 charges including murder
The head of South Africa's germ warfare programme during the apartheid era is fighting to retain his licence to continue practising medicine.
Wouter Basson is charged with manufacturing illegal drugs in the 1980s and early 1990s, some of which were allegedly used on state prisoners.
The man dubbed Dr Death escaped a criminal conviction in 2002, arguing that he acted under orders of the South African Defence Force (SADF).
He is now a cardiologist in Cape Town.
"I closed this chapter 20 years ago," he told reporters outside the hearing at the Health Professional Council South Africa (HPCSA) offices in Pretoria. "All I want is to continue serving the country as a medical professional."
Potato blight
Mr Basson, as head of the chemical and biological warfare division of the SADF from 1981 and 1993, is accused of creating viruses that would only attack black people.
He is alleged to have provided security forces with cyanide capsules to help them commit suicide, "weaponising" thousands of 120mm mortar bombs with teargas, and providing drugs that would disorientate SADF prisoners.
The charges were first brought in 2007, but Mr Basson sought to have the hearing declared unlawful, unreasonable and unfair - an application that was dismissed by the high court in Pretoria last year.
Some of the charges have been dropped again him, but if found guilty of behaving unethically as a doctor by the HPCSA, Mr Basson faces losing his licence to practise as a cardiologist.
In 2002, Mr Basson was acquitted by a court in Pretoria of 67 charges including murder, conspiracy, fraud and drug possession.
He said during the trial that he had only been following orders, and portrayed himself as a scientist who had sought ways to combat potato blight and a Hepatitis A epidemic. |
An anaerobic digestion plant is a decentralized energy system, which can lead to self-sufficiency in heat and power needs, and at the same time reduces environmental pollution. The components of a modern anaerobic digestion plant include: manure collection system, anaerobic digester, effluent treatment plant, gas holder, and electricity generating equipment.
The fresh organic waste is stored in a collection tank before its processing to the homogenization tank which is equipped with a mixer to facilitate homogenization of the waste stream. The uniformly mixed waste is passed through a macerator to obtain uniform particle size of 5-10 mm and pumped into suitable capacity anaerobic digesters where stabilization of organic waste takes place.
In anaerobic digestion, organic material is converted to biogas by a series of bacteria groups into methane and carbon dioxide. The majority of commercially operating digesters are plug flow and complete-mix reactors operating at mesophilic temperatures. The type of digester used varies with the consistency and solids content of the feedstock, with capital investment factors and with the primary purpose of digestion.
Biogas contain significant amount of hydrogen sulfide (H 2 S) gas which needs to be stripped off due to its highly corrosive nature. The removal of H 2 S takes place in a biological desulphurization unit in which a limited quantity of air is added to biogas in the presence of specialized aerobic bacteria which oxidizes H 2 S into elemental sulfur.
Gas is dried and vented into a CHP unit to a generator to produce electricity and heat. The size of the CHP system depends on the amount of biogas produced daily. The digested substrate is passed through screw presses for dewatering and then subjected to solar drying and conditioning to give high-quality organic fertilizer.
The press water is treated in an effluent treatment plant based on activated sludge process which consists of an aeration tank and a secondary clarifier. The treated wastewater is recycled to meet in-house plant requirements. A chemical laboratory is necessary to continuously monitor important environmental parameters such as BOD, COD, VFA, pH, ammonia, C:N ratio at different locations for efficient and proper functioning of the process.
The continuous monitoring of the biogas plant is achieved by using a remote control system such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. This remote system facilitates immediate feedback and adjustment, which can result in energy savings.
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ETA, 6 November 2016: The social-media initiative originally mentioned in the body of this post is long over. However, the STARLIGHTGUILT discount at Ebooks Direct has been reinstated for those desiring to continue inflicting guilt: read the post for more details. Thank you for your interest!
First thing this morning, as usual, I fumbled around on the bedside table and grabbed for the smartphone to see what interesting things had happened while I was asleep. And there in the shiny new Google+ app (thank you Colm!) what do I see, in reaction to the notification about the upload of the new edition of the Middle Kingdoms omnibus yesterday, but:
“Were there any more books in the series planned? I remember reading these three several years ago and thinking the last one felt a little incomplete.”
“Now that someone else started it (cough) A Door into Starlight please?(cough)”
And on Twitter:
“Speaking of which, is The Door into Starlight still under construction or did it get abandoned?”
“The Door Into Starlight is the book I’ve been anticipating most for the longest. Every time you mention Middle Kingdoms I get giddy!”
…And I lay there in bed for a while (assisted by the excellent Cat Goodman, who came to help with my cogitations by lying on my chest and digging his claws in just above my collarbones… I swear, I think sometimes that cat distrusts gravity…) and started composing possible responses, each one of which I immediately virtually tore up on the grounds that I hadn’t yet had any caffeine.
I’ve had the caffeine now (and am also considering some Malt-O-Meal, as it’s a July morning afternoon in Ireland and the local temperature’s about what it would be in the Alps in April). So I’m in a better place to deal with the question. It is, after all, one I get occasionally at US conventions (and in the past, at some of the UK ones). Somebody will corner me in the bar, or after a panel, and say:
“What about The Door into Starlight? It’s been more than twenty years since the series started.”
“Yes indeed, it has. In fact, it’s been more than thirty, but who’s counting?”
“So where is it already?”
“It’s in progress, and I work on it now and then. I have a lot of scattered bits and pieces of it, with a lot of huge empty gaps between them that need to be filled in so that the whole thing works. As I’ve said before: I know how it starts, and I know how it ends – I have done since I finished The Door into Fire. But oy, the middle! …In the meantime, since my family would not appreciate starving for my art, I do other work as well. Other books, the occasional movie. Starlight I’ll get around to again when I have the inclination and the leisure.” And there has been an additional reason for the non-completion lurking in the background, but mostly I don’t introduce that into these conversations.
Most of the time the questioning stops here, and people change the subject and go off to do something else, like abuse George R.R. Martin about A Dance with Dragons. (And here I pause to wave at George, who I’ve known for a long time, and grin. How satisfying this week must be for him [setting aside the way Amazon.de did a whoopsie with the book’s shipment embargo]. Yet at the same time, the fans will be screaming at George for the next one within hours, if not minutes. Such is the writer’s life.)
Yet as regards Starlight, the questions have been getting a little more persistent lately. Could it possibly be because I’ll be turning 60 shortly? 🙂 (And to the person who Tweeted me a month or so back in the wake of the European E. coli outbreak, telling me to please write Starlight before I died, and then hastily erased the message? Whoops, I saw it first! And no, you weren’t just kidding: I know the signs. You think I didn’t have such thoughts about George McDonald Fraser and the specific Flashman books I wished to God he would get on with before he expired? But under no circumstances whatsoever would I ever had said as much to the man. Tsk, tsk! Anyway, I forgive you.)
Let me assure everybody that it is my intention to write The Door into Starlight before I die. Mostly for the good and sufficient reason that I said I would. But I’ve been in no particular hurry about it, as there has been a dirty secret in the way, one that’s kept me from making more of an effort to find the time to finish the last book in this series. And it’s this:
These books have never sold all that well, suggesting that not that many people are interested in reading the last one.
If there’s a more painful admission for a professional writer to make, I’m not sure what it would be. Deep down I suspect most of us wish that everything we write could be a vast worldwide hit and that people would climb over one another’s bodies to get at them. But it doesn’t usually work out that way. And although the Middle Kingdoms universe was my first one, and a place I love dearly, the numbers suggest that those who share the love are (in the publishing sense) relatively few. This truth doesn’t cripple me. A series set in a quasi-medieval alternate Earth with a kinda-pansexual culture was always going to be aimed at a rather niche market.
And another aspect of this truth is that the series has never done all that well in sales in any of its editions. Fire earned out, but paid royalties (in its various US editions) for only a couple/few years, then went out of print when Dell SF went under. Shadow came into print, earned out and paid maybe a couple of years’ worth of royalties, then went OOP as well. And if I remember correctly, Sunset never earned out on either side of the Atlantic. (All the books came into print at one time in the UK as part of a deal with Transworld/Corgi in the 90’s, but they didn’t fare well there either. All went OOP in short order, though there were complicating factors in that the books lost their Corgi editors early on — said editors leaving the publisher to go freelance. A book without an in-house editor to shepherd it through the pre-sales process tends not to do well, and these, unfortunately, were no exception.)
…Anyway, you see how this is going? If this trend was to continue, then if I did write Starlight, I’d probably have to pay people to read it.
🙂 …Okay, maybe that was facetious. But the sales record cannot be ignored. The last publisher to be interested in the series was Meisha Merlin: we did indeed have an agreement to publish Starlight, for a very small advance, and I restarted work on it. But then MM sadly went under. And when I next discussed the question of Starlight with my agent, a year or so after the fact, he told me gently that after inquiries, no other publisher had any interest whatsoever in the fourth book (because publishing the last book of an OOP series is almost never done). So I should set the idea aside and turn my attention to other things.
So the only other way for this book to see the light of day is through self-publication. Yes, certainly the self-pub model has changed very significantly in the last couple years. (And to this I say HURRAY for the new options it offers both the beginning writer and the established one.) But it nonetheless brings with it a new set of unknowns. And though those who contact me about The Door into Starlight without a shadow of a doubt really want to see it, I have to consider the situation with a cold eye, because it’s possible that their message, however heartfelt, nonetheless translates at this end as, “We want you to sit down and spend hundreds of hours of your (theoretically) paying writing time on something that will make us very happy but may never pay you even minimum wage.”
Am I wrong about this?
If I am, give me a sign.
(ETA 6 Nov 2016: As mentioned above, the social-media-sourced interest-gauging effort that previously followed the above request is long over, and has been removed. However: Part of it involved a 15%-off discount at Ebooks Direct, using the discount code STARLIGHTGUILT, which those interested could use to (a) get a price break on ebooks and (b) while doing so, send the author a fairly concrete message conveying their interest in TDIStarlight. This code has been reinstated and can now again be used by those interested for all purchases in the store, even in conjunction with other sale offers ([as long as those don’t also involve codes: the store can’t handle two codes in a transaction.] So knock yourselves out.) 🙂
…So let’s see what happens. Meanwhile, I’m going to go off and see about that Malt-O-Meal.
Five years later, in 2016: Time to make a choice, I’d say.
Having had a good many months to consider the (fairly positive) response to the above post, and (finally) being at a point in my general work schedule where it’s become realistic to start moving forward, I’ve moved The Door Into Starlight onto my work schedule for 2017-18. Please note that I will from this point on be making only general statements about progress — don’t expect word counts or bar graphs. I will not discuss any dates until I have a completed first draft in hand and have had time to talk to my agent about where to go next. So wish me luck… if there is any such thing. 🙂
Meanwhile, this is the page at MiddleKingdoms.com to watch for further news on this subject. (It also contains links for various mailing lists you can sign up to if you’re interested in receiving periodic newsletters on progress,)
…Thanks, all.
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Video
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has spoken on the subject of knowledge, and its relationship with power.
During an essay for BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Assange stated: "The powerful - if they want to keep their power - will try to know as much about us as they can, and they will try to make sure that we know as little about them as is possible."
This insight, he said, was seen both in "religious writings which promised emancipation from political oppression and in revolutionary works promising liberation from the repressive dogmas of the Church and the state".
He added: "Documents disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show that governments dare to aspire, through their intelligence agencies, to a god-like knowledge of each and every one of us."
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Thursday 2 January 2013, guest edited by PJ Harvey. |
President Obama today dived into some of the topics covered by his State of the Union in a Google+ Hangout - taking aim at patent trolls and encouraging high schools to embrace a more high-tech curriculum, among other things.
Obama appeared from Roosevelt Room in the White House's West Wing to talk with several Americans via Google's group video-chat service.
That group included Adafruit founder Limor Fried, who questioned the president about what he could do to stop patent trolls and whether there should be a limit on how long people could own them. Obama pointed to patent reform legislation Congress passed several years ago, but acknowledged that it hasn't "captured all the problems" and said the bill "only went about halfway to where we need to go."
"[Patent trolls] are a classic example. They don't actually produce anything themselves," Obama said. "They're just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else's idea and see if they can extort some money out of them."
There's a delicate balance between protecting intellectual property and making sure people aren't ruined financially by patent trolls, Obama said. "What we need to do is pull together additional stakeholders and see if we can build some additional consensus on smarter patent laws."
In order to have patented technology, however, you have to have technology smarts. When Fried later asked the president if he thinks high schools should have a computer programming requirement similar to a foreign language requirement, Obama said he "thinks it makes sense."
Ultimately, Obama said he wants to make sure the high school experience is "relevant." Vocational schools "got a bad rap," he said, because the perception was that people were being fast tracked into blue-collar jobs.
But Obama pointed to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who told the president that he'd taught himself to code, primarily because he was interested in gaming. There's a whole generation of kids who could benefit from getting a head start on similar high-tech learning. It "engages kids," Obama said.
"Given how pervasive computers and the Internet is now, I want to make sure they know how to actually produce stuff using computers and not simply consume stuff," he said.
For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius. |
Buy Photo An anti-Eastern Corridor sign was posted in Newtown last summer. (Photo: The Enquirer/Jason Williams)Buy Photo
UNION TOWNSHIP The state has killed a controversial plan to relocate a major commuter route through parts of eastern Hamilton County – ending an arduous, years-long battle between residents and public officials.
The plan to re-route a part of Ohio 32 around Newtown and through historic land in Mariemont has been scrapped, state officials told The Enquirer on Thursday. Work will continue on other parts of the $1 billion Eastern Corridor project across eastern Hamilton and western Clermont counties, but eliminating a big chunk of the Ohio 32 relocation plan could untangle a bureaucratic mess.
"I'm elated," Mariemont Mayor Dan Policastro said. "We've been saying for years (for the state) not to do this, and they finally did it. It's going to work out for everybody."
The Eastern Corridor is designed to improve access and alleviate congestion with roadway improvements, a new highway interchange, bike lanes and passenger rail. It has been on the drawing boards since the 1970s, and many phases have failed to move forward because of a lack of consensus and money.
Thursday's news was a long-time coming for residents of Mariemont and Newtown, but the roadway relocation plan isn't officially dead just yet. The state, which has spent at least $14 million planning the Ohio 32 relocation, still is beholden to a federal process that requires more time and paperwork. Ohio Department of Transportation officials say the process could be complete by the end of this month.
"This is great news, but it's almost like you have to get the coroner involved to make sure it's really dead," Newtown Mayor Curt Cosby said.
State officials broke the news to community leaders, politicians and transportation planners during a closed-door meeting Thursday morning in Eastgate. It was the first major meeting about the Ohio 32 relocation since a state-hired mediator released a damning report in November.
The report revealed the utter frustration of Mariemont and Newtown residents – showing the project was plagued by government mistrust, accusations of hidden agendas and disagreements about the merits of the Ohio 32 relocation plan.
Many had long questioned the merits of spending up to $277 million on relocating Ohio 32, considering the Western Hills Viaduct and Brent Spence Bridge need to be replaced. The mediator's findings gave extra ammunition for opponents of the roadway relocation.
Hamilton County Commissioners Greg Hartmann and Chris Monzel have opposed the project, and state Rep. Tom Brinkman tried to kill that part of the Eastern Corridor in the Legislature earlier this year. Brinkman's efforts helped establish a do-or-die deadline of Dec. 31 on the plan to relocate Ohio 32 through Mariemont and Newtown.
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"I'm pleased for the people who were going to be in harm's way, and I'm happy that I was able to force a conclusion," said Brinkman, a Mount Lookout Republican.
Mariemont loathed the plan because the roadway would have cut through the South 80 park, which residents use to plant gardens and for recreational activities. Newtown feared a new bypass would cripple the village's small business district and deplete its tax base.
The mediation process helped guide ODOT's call.
"They really cared about what we had to say," Policastro said.
The state will consider minor congestion-relief improvements to Ohio 32 through Newtown and U.S. 50 in Mariemont. Those could include different road striping patterns and new traffic lights with prioritization technology.
The state also will continue to look at expanding Ohio 32 east of Newtown in Anderson Township near the border of Hamilton and Clermont counties.
The controversy over the Ohio 32 relocation created a negative perception of the entire Easter Corridor, Hamilton County Commissioner Todd Portune said. He now hopes the criticism will stop.
"The Eastern Corridor program is more than the relocation of State Route 32, but in the minds of the public, that's what it became," Portune said. "This provides some real clarity as to where this is going."
Others aren't so sure. Many also have questioned the merits of a plan for a passenger rail from Downtown to Clermont County. Ridership projections have been low, and the rail line has a $230 million to $323 million price tag. The state has spent $4.4 million on the railway.
"It would be a waste of taxpayer dollars," Monzel said.
Read or Share this story: http://cin.ci/1M8htwd |
Not everyone is lucky enough to shop without kids. Yes, you can shop for your groceries on your way home from work or some other time when the kids are not with you. However, this is not a feasible option for many and at all times.
Here are 5 ways to go ahead and shop for your groceries with the kids, yet come out sane and composed:
List
a list of things you want to buy and split it up between the kids. These can be items that do not need much thought to be put in. you can avoid giving perishables as you may have to check the quality and dates before buying it.
When you give kids something to do, they feel important and are kept occupied. This will give you some time to do your shopping at your own pace.
It A Game
If you have just one child with you or you are not keen on letting the children out of your sight at a store like DoodleBuckets, you can keep them with you and play a game. You can read out the next time on your list and see who finds it first. This will reduce your searching time and also keep them alert only for things on the list and not other things in the store.
Wait In Line
Let your child check out the items and pay for them. Getting to wait in line a pay real money will give them a sense of importance and they will take this seriously. This will also teach about handling money carefully.
Talk
Have a talk with them before you go to the store. Patiently explain where you are going and what you plan on buying. Tell them about the importance of good behavior and bad behavior will only lead to time off or leaving the store without anything.
Let Them Be
Sometimes you just need to let kids be kids. As long as they are not disturbing others around or damaging property, don’t try to control them too much. If they have a million questions, answer them patiently. |
The head of the Planning Department acknowledged in a letter Friday the severity of gentrification occurring in San Francisco amid the years-long development boom while also outlining measures underway to address it.
“The reality of displacement and gentrification across all of San Francisco — and the entire region — is undeniable, and of serious concern,” Planning Director John Rahaim wrote in a Dec. 9 letter to the Board of Supervisors.
SEE RELATED: SF looks to combat gentrification amid ongoing economic boom
The letter was in response to the board opposing last month a major residential development in the Mission amid community opposition centered on gentrification.
The board’s vote also created uncertainty for other proposed developments in the Mission District, seen as ground zero for the impacts of the technology boom, as well as projects planned for other communities.
Rahaim said in the letter that his department will address the gentrification concerns by imposing a new set of special development and land use rules in the Mission as well as also other vulnerable neighborhoods, like South of Market and the Tenderloin.
“We know that there is simply not enough housing regionally or in San Francisco to meet our needs. We know that producing housing at all income levels is critical,” Rahaim wrote. “We also know that it will take a broad set of smart, bold strategies to address the totality of the causes and effects of high housing costs and displacement.”
The concerns over gentrification also come as city officials have declared homelessness a crisis. Federal officials last month said the region’s strong real estate market is a reason why homelessness increased in West Coast cities like San Francisco but declined overall throughout the nation by 14 percent since 2010.
Rahaim said that the Planning Department is specifically addressing the concerns of gentrification in the Mission through the development of Mission Action Plan 2020, which he said would result in 1,000 affordable housing units in the Mission, and through the interim land use controls currently in place before that plan is finalized next year.
“We believe that MAP 2020 represents a national model for how urban neighborhoods might address issues of gentrification and displacement,” he said.
Since the technology boom began in 2010, encouraged by the tech-friendly policies of Mayor Ed Lee, gentrification has been at the heart of contentious political debates on a myriad of issues, including the “Google Bus,” transportation services like Uber and Lyft, Airbnb regulations, affordable housing requirements and eviction protections.
While San Francisco has greatly transformed during the past several years and many have left The City for more affordable locales, the debate around gentrification continues to unfold in community meetings and at City Hall.
Rahaim’s letter was prompted by the Board of Supervisors’ Nov. 15 vote to oppose a 159-unit development, of which 39 units would be affordable, at 1515 S. Van Ness Ave. in the Mission by Lennar Multifamily Communities. The board opposed the development by upholding an environmental review appeal filed under the California Environmental Quality Act.
The appeal was filed by the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District’s Executive Director Erick Arguello and argued the review was flawed by failing to address the impacts of gentrification, an argument that has been made previously without success for other projects.
The Nov. 15 vote was particularly charged. Arguello’s attorney Scott Weaver referred to how Mission gentrification had ushered in the era of the $6 croissant, the $100-per-person meal or the $350 handbag for sale on Valencia Street.
“The gentrification we’ve seen on Valencia and on Mission [streets] is the beginning. What is to come is an overwhelming economic force that will change the face of the Mission and of the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District,” Weaver said at the time.
It was the comments of Sonja Trauss, founder of pro-development group San Francisco Bay Area Renters’ Federation, that backfired and seemed to hand opponents a win when she likened the Mission advocates’ opposition to the project to politics akin to President-elect Donald Trump.
“I’ve always been disturbed by nativism in San Francisco,” Trauss said at the time. “And when you come here to the Board of Supervisors and say that you don’t want new, different people in your neighborhood you’re exactly the same as Americans all over the country that don’t want immigrants.”
Supervisor David Campos, who represents the Mission, called out Trauss’ comments specifically when saying he was planning to reject the appeal but changed his mind.
The Calle 24 Latino Cultural District is a 14-block area, wherein the project is proposed, created by The City in 2014 to officially acknowledge the Latino legacy in the area and support regulations to protect it.
Many of the same opponents of the Lennar project also backed a previously proposed moratorium on market-rate housing for the Mission neighborhood.
In 2015 Campos proposed the moratorium to create a “pause” of development of market-rate units – the proposal would have allowed 100 percent affordable housing development – to buy some time to create a long-term plan to combat gentrification.
The moratorium proposal inspired countless debates around supply and demand in the housing market. After the board failed to approve the moratorium, it was subsequently placed on the ballot and rejected by voters.
Moratorium opponents argued that The City needs housing of all income levels and that market-rate development is a vital funding source for affordable housing. Developers are required to include a percentage of units onsite or pay in-lieu fees to The City, which then uses them to fund affordable housing projects.
In his letter, Rahaim cites several statistics to illustrate socio-economic challenges residents face.
“In 2013, 45 percent of renters paid more than 30 percent of their income for rent; that means that nearly half of renters in San Francisco are rent burdened,” the letter reads. “Evictions are taking place across The City, with the Mission, Richmond, Sunset, Excelsior, Tenderloin, and Lakeshore neighborhoods having the highest eviction notices in 2015 and 2016. The Latino population in the Mission had declined to 39 percent in 2014, down from 50 percent in 2000.”
Rahaim also vowed in the letter to announce in spring 2017 “how we undertake a broader socio-economic analysis of displacement, gentrification and growth with a focus on equity” that he said currently isn’t covered under the California Environmental Quality Act.
It remains to be seen whether Rahaim’s letter will prompt the board to reverse its decision on the 1515 S. Van Ness Avenue development.
At the time of the vote, Supervisor Malia Cohen said The City needs “a sea change” on how it handles development. “Development should not be about displacing people,” Cohen had said.
Mission advocates have been working with the Planning Department and other city agencies for more than a year to develop anti-gentrification plans like MAP 2020.
“We are encouraged by the director’s public acknowledgement of the gentrification problem facing the Mission and other neighborhoods of color,” Weaver told the San Francisco Examiner on Monday. “The political will to take the steps necessary to address this problem now lies squarely with the Board of Supervisors and the mayor.”
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I’m not the first person to say it, but Bethesda and their development teams have really pulled off a miracle when it comes to the stone-jawed protagonists they acquired along with iD Software. Taking the two prototypical FPS heroes and turning them into well-developed characters is a herculean feat, and they’ve certainly found the right people for the job. MachineGames had an easier time than the new team at iD since B.J. Blazkowicz has always been a talker, and the world-weary soldier that just barely emerged from Wolfenstein: The New Order fits perfectly into the franchise. Bethesda and the public agreed, and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus sees B.J. and his motley crew of freedom fighters bringing the battle to the shores of a Nazi-infested America.
Seeing familiar streets warped under a fascist regime was one of the main hooks of this sequel, so it’s a shame at just how little of this alternate society is shown to the player. You get plenty of collectibles where you can read about happenings or listen to timeshifted pop songs, but the only real setpiece of Nazi Americana comes in the form of the “milkshake” scene that was heavily featured in E3 trailers. Most other levels take place in worn down facilities and bombed out remains, giving the game a dingy and uninteresting look compared to the lavish German mansions you snuck through in The New Order. This makes sense story-wise, but it’s still a real shame that all the worldbuilding accomplished by the propaganda TV shows and commercials in the game’s ad campaign couldn’t find a home in the game itself.
MachineGames is instead focused on character building, which has proven to be their specialty going all the way back to Butcher Bay and The Darkness. B.J. is given a backstory with a confirmed Jewish heritage, and these scenes and their consequences are some of the game’s most powerful moments. The developers work overtime to get you to latch onto B.J. at the beginning of the game, which is necessary to make these scenes work, but also off-putting when you consider the amazing work they did at breaking the character down in The New Order. At the end of New Colossus, our hero is more together than we’ve ever seen him in this series, trading his haunted mumblings for an earned bravado. I guess B.J. can’t be on the brink of sanity forever, but I found myself going back and forth constantly on whether this character development worked in the context of the franchise.
The rest of the cast, both returning and new, don’t get as much love as the main protagonist. New characters like Grace and Horton feel one-dimensional and others often have little to do with the story beyond their introduction. The one highlight is Sigrun, the former Nazi who has a powerful arc that mirrors many seeking forgiveness for past transgressions in our modern age. Returning characters fair a bit better by default due to their history, but the interactions here still feel like expansions of a single character trait rather than conversations with fully developed people. Set Roth is now solely tinkering away in his lab, Bombate is looking for a good time, and Max Hass has taken up art surprisingly well.
Worse still, your boat is now filled with tertiary characters that will have long conversations introducing themselves but never interact with the “main crew” beyond that. Again, this is realistic, but it gives players no idea who to focus on and what scenes are actually important. Everything just feels scattershot, with a pile of minor plot threads left dangling by the time the credits roll. This isn’t to say that the writing has gone down in quality, as I still wanted to seek out every conversation on the boat between missions just to see what surprises unfolded. It’s just that none of it really came together this time around. The New Colossus has a few transcendent moments, but it doesn’t feel like a complete story on its own.
So, while the overall narrative left me a bit wanting, The New Colossus still delivers when it comes to absurdity. In both gameplay and cutscenes, Wolfenstein II masterfully goes from full-on pathos to over the top B movie madness with the flip of a switch, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. This is still the game where you double fist shotguns and disintegrate enemy super soldiers with a portable laser cannon. B.J. will still eat dog food for scraps of health, and you can still bolt 100 Nazi helmets to your body to gain armor. This is the game at its best, presenting a realistic world that still fits into the over the top aesthetic of Wolfenstein 3D.
Of course, you could bypass a lot of that fun by sneaking around. Stealth players can make use of a silent pistol and their trusty hatchet, but I found that this style of play wasn’t given much room for error. I’m not a stealth expert, but I found that most combat scenarios are better rushed through, especially after you get some late-game abilities. Rushing past an army to get to the commander and halt the alarm before it really started allowed me to hole up in a room and blast foes as they filed in one after the other, ignorant of the pile of bodies below their feet. This isn’t very realistic but it did make me chuckle every time it happened.
There are other weapons in the game, but I didn’t find a lot of use for them once the shotgun was introduced. When compared to The New Order, there are fewer weapons (so long sniper rifle, adios Tesla Grenade) and the enemies feel less threatening. I still remember my near-lethal encounters with the Panzerhund from the first game, but New Colossus sees him downgraded to a run of the mill enemy that feels trivial to take out. It was still thrilling to carve a path through each room, but I found myself reloading checkpoints less often, which might be a good thing considering the game has an annoying knack of repeating campaign dialogue after each death.
One thing that did stand out was how much Wolfenstein II shares with 2016’s DOOM. Your suite of close up melee kills are framed just like Glory Kills, although they’re not as useful since B.J. doesn’t gain invulnerability as he shoves sharp objects into his enemies over and over. The soundtrack also feels affected by nuDOOM, as the subtle orchestration of The New Order has given way to even louder guitars that make their presence felt whenever things go hot. I’m not one to complain about metal in any game, but the combat tunes here felt less fitting to a game that is trying to take itself seriously most of the time.
As fun as the combat was, I didn’t really feel the drive to engage heavily in the game’s side missions. Very late in the story, you unlock the ability to seek out Nazi commanders hiding out in locations you’ve already visited. You get these locations via the Enigma Machine, a delightfully retro computer with a unique hacking minigame. Once you’re past that, these amount to little more than bonus missions for those who need more combat. However, you do get to see a few remixed areas here and there as well as the ability to pick up new collectibles and earn bonus abilities. These new areas lack checkpointing, making the scenarios a bit tougher than main missions, and I found that they broke the story’s pacing just a bit. B.J. jetting off across the country never really seemed to fit into the otherwise intricately detailed plot, and this disconnect only further served to loosen my ties to the narrative.
It may seem like I’m picking on a lot of little things concerning Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and that may be the case. This is a fine sequel on the surface, but it erodes away a lot of the fine points of The New Order. It tries to draw poignancy in its parallels to the real world (both accidental and purposeful), and that undermines the Wolfenstein universe that different developers have been building for decades by tying it down to a real life time and place. Everything feels pulled in so many directions that the game’s ending elicited a Halo 2-esque reaction, with credits that come out of nowhere and left me wanting so much more. This is a well-made shooter with beautiful graphics made by some of the best in the industry. It’s also clearly a sequel that shoots for the moon and lands somewhere beyond, failing to improve on what came before.
Our Wolfenstein II The New Colossus review was conducted on PC via Steam with a code provided by the publisher. It is also available on Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
8.0 Great Summary Wolfenstein II's combat is as intense as ever, and MachineGames can craft FPS story beats like few others, but something just feels askew about this sequel. Like a follow-up to a Hollywood blockbuster, everything is a little looser and the game suffers for it. Pros White-Knuckle Combat
Brilliant Story Moments
Absurd Tendencies Cons Loose Overall Narrative
Shallow New Characters
Reduced Combat Options
Uniquely Awful End Credits Song
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I just spoke at a parent conference, and held an informal focus group afterward. I decided to ask them what they were hearing and seeing in other parents, as they sent their kids to school. The stories were both entertaining and sad:
Mothers were asking faculty if they could take the “test” for their child in school, as their kids were too stressed out to take it themselves.
A dad stepped in to argue with a baseball umpire when their son had “struck out.” The boy actually struck out swinging.
Parents pushed other children out of the way, as they hunted for Easter Eggs to fill their children’s baskets. They didn’t want their kid to go without.
Moms and dads refused to tell their kids the soccer game score when they lost, as it would depress them. They reported it was a “tie.”
At the root of each of these episodes is the pursuit of control. If we’re honest, many of us are just plain control freaks. Parent engagement is not bad. But when it becomes parental control—we do more damage than good.
Much of our problem, as parents, is the result of our pursuit of control. We are the most controlling population of parents in recent history. Often, we feel our public schools aren’t doing a good enough job; the local soccer team doesn’t give our kid enough playing time; the theatre arts program didn’t cast our daughter with enough lines in the play—and we feel we must step in and control the situation. What we must recognize is: control is a myth. We are not in control. Life is bigger than us, and the sooner we equip our kids to handle the ups and downs of it, the better they are.
Is This About Now or Later?
Perhaps, this is the biggest adjustment we must make: to stop pursuing control. To learn to trust and to enable our kids to navigate their way through life without the misconception that they can control it. Adaptability, not control should be our aim.
The fact is—very often, we live, lead and parent only for today. We just want peace right now. Forget the long-term impact on our kids. In contrast, my mother and father modeled long-term parenting all through my growing up years. When I stole something as a young kid, I would have to march down to the store and give it back with an apology. If I lied, or if I cheated—it was the same thing. Consequences came even if it was a little white lie or cheating on a very small problem. Why? It was the principle of the thing. Long term, my parents knew I was forming patterns in my life every day. I learned a huge axiom over the years:
The further out I can see, the better decisions I make as a parent.
Author Hara Estroff-Marano writes, “Research demonstrates that children who are protected from grappling with difficult tasks don’t develop what psychologists call ‘mastery experiences.’ Kids who have this well-earned sense of mastery are more optimistic and decisive; they’ve learned they are capable of overcoming adversity and achieving goals.” Kids who’ve never tested their abilities, grow into emotionally brittle young adults who are more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.
According to one U.S. poll, the majority of parents admit their kids have too little responsibility. Compared to their parents or grandparent’s generation, we’ve busied them with soccer games and piano recitals, but not with real responsibility such as work, service or even chores around the house. While a kid can learn some disciplines from games or recitals, authentic responsibility comes from the real world, where we serve others who cannot help themselves or in exchange for a paycheck. The exchange has an internal affect on us, even as kids. Why? Because the consequences are real. Losing isn’t simply about a soccer scoreboard or messing up on a song in a recital, but about affecting real people. As our kids growing older, both benefits and consequences must become real.
What Happens if We Remove Consequences From Our Kids’ Actions?
If adults fail to learn this important truth, our kids will often grow up to be:
Irresponsible adults.
They won’t have ownership of their life; they’ll learn to blame others.
Lazy adults.
They have a poor work ethic, and perhaps low creativity levels.
Dependent adults.
They won’t be self-sufficient; they’ll be unready for autonomy.
Emotionally brittle adults.
They will have few coping skills; they won’t develop resilience.
What I Decided To Do…
When my kids turned twelve, I chose to illustrate the power of consequences and benefits in life. Every action brings one or the other:
1. Talk about the long-term outcome of their decisions.
When they face big choices, help them see “down the road” and what may come of it.
2. Tell your own stories of regret and reward.
Although they may consider it cheesy, talk about your past regrets and rewards.
3. Take them to interview a successful professional.
Find someone who’s succeeded at what they want to do and discover their choices.
4. Take them to a prison and interview an inmate.
I have taken kids to talk to inmates who made poor choices and suffered for them.
5. Have your children write down their “end game.”
After writing down their big goals, talk about the action steps required to get there.
The take-away? Your kids learn to navigate real world consequences. You learn to surrender control. That’s not a bad trade-off. |
A Cleveland County woman said she will never find closure, even after her daughter's killer was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday afternoon.
Aaron Rashun Byers was convicted of first-degree murder for taking the life of Hannah Bickley more than three years ago.
Jurors deliberated for less than two hours before rendering the verdict.
Misty John, Bickley's mother, wept as she spoke in court following the sentencing.
"She was my only child, and you took her from me. That was my only reason I was on this Earth," she said.
Tears on both sides
Byers, too, was overcome with emotion at the close of the trial.
When given a chance to speak, Byers apologized to Bickley's family, saying he never meant to put her in harm's way. As tears fell, he turned to his own family.
"To my family, I love y'all. I'm sorry," he said.
Bickley, 17, was shot and killed in her Honda Civic around 2 a.m. May 10, 2014.
The prosecution and the defense agreed that the group of people Bickley was with made bad decisions after leaving a gathering in Shelby late on May 9. The attorneys did disagree on who caused the single bullet to fire into Bickley's side and take her life.
Two theories
Cleveland County Assistant District Attorney Sally Kirby-Turner said Byers, Bickley's then-boyfriend, tried to rob two teens in the back seat of her car when things went awry.
Kirby-Turner used physical evidence and witness testimony to prove that Byers, now 22, was committing a dangerous felony which resulted in death — a combination which equals first-degree murder in North Carolina.
Defense attorney Gus Anthony disagreed with the prosecution, offering up testimony by a doctor who suggested the shot could've come from a different angle — one that Anthony contended came from a passenger in the back seat.
The night Bickley was killed, she was driving her car and Byers was in the passenger seat, with two males in the backseat of the two-door vehicle.
The car stopped near the intersection of Ramblewood and Holden drives.
Fatal shot
When Bickley was struck by the bullet, the two men in the backseat fled, and Byers yelled for help.
He moved the teen to the passenger seat and began driving to the hospital, when Byers saw an officer and stopped. Emergency crews worked to revive the girl, but she died at the scene.
Kirby-Turner told jurors from the onset of the trial that she didn't think Byers meant to kill his girlfriend. But if they believed he was committing a dangerous felony when Bickley died, they must convict him of murder, she said.
The trial began a week ago, and ended with Byers being sentenced to life in prison.
Superior Court Judge Robert Sumner and both attorneys agreed there were no winners in the case.
Diane Turbyfill can be reached at 704-669-3334 and Twitter.com/ShelbyStarDiane. |
18 Sep 2017
Numerous studies have reported a dip in dementia incidence in the developed world. When did this trend begin? In the September 5 JAMA Neurology, researchers led by Carol Derby at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York help address this. The researchers analyzed birth cohort data from the Einstein Aging Study, which enrolls cognitively healthy older adults living in the Bronx. Surprisingly, people born after 1928 were 85 percent less likely to develop dementia than those born before that year. The reason for such a stark drop in incidence is unclear. Neither better education nor improved cardiovascular health accounted for the effect.
In one New York community, people born after 1929 were much less likely to develop dementia.
Neither cardiovascular health nor education explain the finding.
“The birth cohort effect is intriguing but will need replication in other populations,” Sudha Seshadri at Boston University wrote to Alzforum. Seshadri was not involved in the research. “This important insight compels us to search for novel social and environmental factors that may have impacted this birth cohort. Changes in nutrition, education, lead levels, other pollutants, and infections all occurred and would be worth examining in cohorts and in animal models,” Seshadri added (see full comment below).
Steady Decline. Within each age group, dementia rates are lower for people born later. [© 2017 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.]
A growing number of studies have reported a drop in dementia incidence in the U.S. and Europe over the last two or three decades (e.g., Feb 2016 news; Apr 2016 news; Nov 2016 news). Researchers have speculated that this may be due to better public health, particularly cardiovascular health (May 2013 news; Jul 2014 conference news). The finding is not uniform, however, with a handful of studies reporting higher dementia incidence that may be due to greater recognition of the disease or a larger number of people reaching old age (Mar 2017 news; May 2017 news; Abdulrahman 2014).
To try to clarify the picture, Derby and colleagues examined data from participants who enrolled in the Einstein Aging Study between 1993 and 2015. The cohort comprised 1,348 participants who had completed at least one annual follow-up visit, with an average follow-up time of four years. All participants were older than 70, and about two-thirds were non-Hispanic white. The researchers diagnosed dementia by a clinical exam, in accordance with DSM-IV criteria published in 1994. A subset of participants donated their brains after death, and 96 percent of those with a dementia diagnosis had some type of extensive brain pathology. For example, in a subgroup diagnosed with AD, 79 percent had plaques and tangles (Katz et al., 2012).
Within each age group, the researchers saw a steady drop in dementia incidence for those born in later years (see image above). Among people born before 1920 there were 5.09 cases per 100 person-years. This dropped to 3.11 for people born in the early 1920s, and 1.73 for those born in the late 1920s.
The most dramatic shift occurred right at the turn of that decade, when the rate fell to 0.23. Mathematical modeling pegged the best estimate for the change point to July 1929. While the model suggests an abrupt change in dementia rates, Derby noted that this might partly be the result of small sample size; the post-1929 cohorts totaled only 350 people, with just three cases of dementia among them. “If there were more people in the analysis, the trend might be smoother,” Derby wrote to Alzforum. Nonetheless, the findings were statistically significant, and Derby believes the data are picking up a real decline in dementia risk at around this time point.
The researchers adjusted the model for the potential confounding factors of age, sex, and education level, as well as race. Later birth cohorts were more ethnically diverse than earlier ones, but the changing demographics of the population did not explain the drop in dementia cases, since researchers saw the same decline among white participants as well.
What might explain it? The researchers found marked decreases in the rates of heart attack and stroke in later birth cohorts, but after adjusting the model to account for this, the drop in dementia incidence in those born after 1929 remained unchanged. However, cardiovascular health was assessed only by participants’ self-reported medical history, and thus the analysis might have missed more subtle signs of vascular disease, the authors noted. In particular, the researchers had no data on factors such as how well controlled a person’s hypertension or diabetes was. They suggested that cardiovascular health might still be a factor, but not the only one. Other possibilities, such as better nutrition, were not assessed in this study. A healthy diet has been shown to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Changes in diet, especially for the mother during pregnancy, may be a crucial factor,” agreed Walter Rocca at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. In addition, Rocca pointed out that people born in 1929 or after would have been teenagers or younger at the end of World War II, and thus their developing brains may have particularly reaped the benefits of the societal and medical changes that occurred at that time (see full comment below).
While previous epidemiological studies did not specifically examine birth years, those older findings are roughly congruent with the Einstein Aging Study data, reporting the greatest drop in dementia cases after 1990, the authors noted. People born after 1929 would have entered their 60s in that decade. Most cases of late-onset dementia occur after age 60. The Rotterdam Study found a 25 percent decrease in dementia incidence in the 1990s, while the Framingham Heart Study recently reported that incidence dropped starting in the late 1980s and continued to decline into the 2010s (Schrijvers et al., 2012; Satizabal et al., 2016).
Meanwhile, although these lower rates of dementia are good news, researchers agree the case numbers will still soar as populations worldwide continue to get older (Oct 2016 news; Kosteniuk et al., 2016). The numbers of new cases also continue to climb in much of the developing world (May 2012 news; Jun 2013 news). In addition, rising rates of diabetes, a risk factor for Alzheimer’s, are expected to reverse some of the positive health trends.—Madolyn Bowman Rogers |
The NFL is expected to announced its 2014 schedule before the draft. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images) The NFL is expected to announced its 2014 schedule before the draft. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The NFL has already released their schedule for the preseason, but fans around the league are still anxiously awaiting the release of the full 2014 regular-season schedule. Last week there were reports that the schedule release was targeted for Tuesday, but that timeline now seems to be delayed.
While we may not know the exact date of the release, the league appears to be well on schedule to have all 256 games announced before the 2014 NFL draft.
According to Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio, a source with knowledge of the situation now says that the schedule release is now targeted for either Wednesday or Thursday of this week.
MORE: 2014 NFL Mock Draft | Top QBs | Top WRs | SI64: Our definitive Big Board
The NFL always takes its time setting a firm date for the schedule release in order to build anticipation, and this year is no different. Florio suggests that one factor influencing the NFL's decision to delay the release is the NHL and NBA playoffs.
The NFL always looks to dominate the headlines and it has not been shy about stealing the spotlight, so it could ultimately decide to delay the schedule release until there are key elimination games in the other major North American sports. |
For critical thinking, one book will have you covered
From my own experience as well as that of my peers this is you handbook for the maths/logic based critical thinking section.
Thinking Skills by John Butterworth and Geoff Thwaites is the only book I used for TSA preparation – though I did work through it from start to end. It helps largely for the maths and logic section.
The book will take a while to be delivered and in the meantime you can try these affrodable online TSA practice tests instantly.
You can buy it on Amazon
For the essay section, this is how you can prepare
There is no substitute for practice! Start writing with no time limit imposed so that you can prepare thoughtful, comprehensive essays (max. 1200 words) initially before working to do the same in the 30 minute time limit. Take a look at the essay questions in past TSA papers and prepare answers for one or two questions from each paper and have an experienced teacher or Oxbridge mentor mark them. Failing than, find a former Oxford or Cambridge student (or someone who has sat the test and been made an offer) to read over your answer – they should still be able to give you a good idea of where you can improve and feedback on your communication, structure, arguments and logic and language used.
Communication:
Make sure your sentences are clear and easy to understand. Avoid using sentences that are too long – ensure that the reader will be able to read and understand your arguments easily.
Structure
Introduction: Define any terms that are open to interpretation (e.g. patent laws, development) and prepare the reader for the arguments you will later make by outlining each of them in sentence.
Define any terms that are open to interpretation (e.g. patent laws, development) and prepare the reader for the arguments you will later make by outlining each of them in sentence. Arguments: Aim to make 3 distinct arguments. For example, for the patents topic, if your view is that patents encourage development, the arguments could be: i) patent laws provide an incentive for investment in R&D and this enriches quality of life (i.e. development); ii) patent licenses only last for a finite amount of time so counter-arguments about cost and quality for the consumer are only valid for a limited time (i.e. benefits are eventually widespread); iii) patents help smaller companies to create jobs because they increase security on near-future prospects for these companies (i.e. more employment is created)
Aim to make 3 distinct arguments. For example, for the patents topic, if your view is that patents encourage development, the arguments could be: i) patent laws provide an incentive for investment in R&D and this enriches quality of life (i.e. development); ii) patent licenses only last for a finite amount of time so counter-arguments about cost and quality for the consumer are only valid for a limited time (i.e. benefits are eventually widespread); iii) patents help smaller companies to create jobs because they increase security on near-future prospects for these companies (i.e. more employment is created) Conclusion: Summarise the arguments you have made in a sentence. Discuss their inter-relatedness. Discuss the importance of context (i.e. patent laws encourage development as long as the following conditions are met…). Do not make any radically new points but do discuss further research and arguments you also consider important but could not fully examine in the allocated time.
Arguments & Logic
This is of course dependent on the essay topic but the general rule of thumb is to prioritise arguments which you have the highest chance of defending. Spend 5 minutes planning your arguments before you start writing your answer. It helps a lot when it comes to writing the essay – a good investment of your limited time. There are broadly three types of argument you can make – philosophy/ethics [it is immoral to…], theories [this causes growth because it increases consumption], and current knowledge [cars are already taxed according to their carbon emissions, so there is no need to link parking fines to emissions too]. As an economist, I’m most comfortable with theories and current knowledge.
Language
Typical written communication and essay rules apply here. Remember to use formal language (i.e. don’t use abbreviations – write out “it is” instead of “it’s”). If English isn’t your first language consider getting someone who is a native speaker to review your language.
Working through the Thinking Skills book and practising essays (and taking on board feedback!) should mean that you are well placed to sit the TSA and do well. Remember that TSA marks are often considered in conjunction with GCSE grades (i.e. if you have a low TSA mark but strong GCSEs – or vice versa – you could still get an interview). Most importantly, go into the test relaxed with a good nights sleep and a clear mind. Good luck! If you have any questions, fire away using the comments form below. |
ONE OF THE MOST remarkable scenes in Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 work of science journalism, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, happens about halfway through the book, in a smoky Baltimore kitchen. Skloot has been pursuing the reluctant Lacks family for about a year and has finally managed an introduction to Lawrence Lacks, the oldest son of Henrietta and Day Lacks. He cooks eggs and pork chops for Skloot and begins reminiscing about his mother, a strict, pretty woman who died of cervical cancer when he was a young teenager, but soon admits that, at sixty-four, he barely remembers her at all. Instead of memories, photographs, and family anecdotes, he and his siblings have only the ominous stories of her stolen cells: that there are enough of them now to “cover the whole earth,” that they have cured diseases, that they will soon make it possible for humans to live to be eight hundred years old.
After ushering Skloot into the living room with her plate of food, Lawrence asks her to tell him what his mother’s cells (now known in biomedical research as the “HeLa immortal cell line”) “really did,” and Skloot asks him if he knows what a cell is. “Kinda,” he tells her. “Not really.” Skloot writes:
I tore a piece of paper from my notebook, drew a big circle with a small black dot inside, and explained what a cell was, then told him some of the things HeLa had done for science, and how far cell culture had come since.
Although their mother’s cells — taken without her knowledge during her cancer treatment in 1951 — have indeed helped cure diseases and have made millions of dollars for biomedical supply companies, pharmaceutical companies, and research laboratories, the surviving members of the Lacks family still live in poverty, without reliable access to health insurance or proper medical care. Perhaps more significantly, they lack even the basic scientific information that would allow them to understand Henrietta’s legacy or make informed decisions about their own health. At Lawrence’s house, Skloot meets eighty-four-year-old Day Lacks, Henrietta’s husband, who wears flip-flops in cold weather because he has gangrene in his feet; after his wife’s death and the re-emergence of her mysterious cells, he is afraid to let doctors treat him. Sonny, one of Henrietta’s other sons, refuses angioplasty for the same reason.
Skloot’s simple diagram, along with an article she shows him about a method of corneal transplantation developed through the study of his mother’s cells, has a profound effect on Lawrence. He is energized by the idea that his mother’s cells could help cure blindness, and he convinces other members of his family, including his father, his wife, and his sister, to talk to Skloot.
How is it possible that no one has ever told him how a cell works before? You could speculate that because Lawrence was educated during the time of Jim Crow segregation, he received poor instruction, or that the economic and emotional pressure on his family after the death of Henrietta affected his educational attainment. You could consider the partial deafness, untreated until adulthood, that made it hard for Lawrence and his siblings to understand teachers, or the time Lawrence spent out of school, doing field labor. You could point to his environment, a low-income neighborhood in a poor city, where rumors of body snatching and unauthorized medical experimentation on African Americans engendered suspicion of doctors and scientists. Certainly all of these details contributed to Lawrence’s abashed admission that he did not know what a cell was or how it functioned.
But it is also true that the public school system of the United States, the richest country in the world, still struggles to educate our citizens about science and to make that education relevant and present in their daily lives. How well we understand science affects almost every aspect of our personal and civic lives: our health, our reproductive choices, our understanding of the news, how and whether we vote, and our interaction with the environment. Many of the most important and contentious political issues of our time — climate change, hydraulic fracturing, offshore drilling — are also environmental and require an understanding of basic scientific principles that many of our poorest citizens lack. These same citizens will suffer from their lack of understanding: from water quality damaged by fracking, from mountaintop removal, from flooding caused by rising water levels. Poor people are disproportionately susceptible to poor health and more likely to be exposed to environmental or household pollutants. But for many of our poorest citizens, science education is largely ignored, especially in the foundational elementary and middle school years, as we favor the “basics” of reading and math through a testing and school accountability system that does not prepare our students for the significant social and environmental challenges to come.
I WAS A K–12 educator for ten years, working in rural and urban public elementary, middle, and high schools in California, New York, Washington DC, and North Carolina. No Child Left Behind, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002, was my constant professional companion, rating the schools where I taught as adequate or inadequate and allocating resources accordingly. This frequently maligned law identified the subjects I taught — English, reading, and writing — as among the most crucial (along with math), and I received additional support so that my students could be successful on the standardized tests that determined my schools’ yearly progress. My students received additional tutoring, materials, and time in class, and I was given pedagogical training and assistance from my principals with managing tough classes. Meanwhile, I observed science teachers and classrooms, particularly at the elementary and middle schools, receiving fewer materials and resources, and even less institutional support.
At the elementary school in Brooklyn where I taught first grade, science was a “special,” along with dance, art, and physical education. That meant that students were delivered by their homeroom teachers to the science teacher between one and three times a week for less than an hour each time. I remember that the science teacher, a patient but weary man from Jamaica, had little in the room to engage my six-year-olds beyond laminated charts and posters on the wall: no microscopes, no plants, no homemade solar system models or fungus-crowded petri dishes. No fish tanks or worm bins or leaf specimens. Our principal liked a tidy classroom, and the science teacher’s was spotless. She also liked a quiet classroom, and although the kids never seemed especially rowdy to me, he bemoaned their fidgety lack of discipline: in Jamaica, he once told me, it was common for one teacher to control a class of forty or forty-five students.
What did they do in there? Worksheets, mostly, filled with labeled drawings, diagrams, and charts they could not read. Sometimes he performed an experiment, and they watched. Perhaps the best behaved were invited up to help him; most of them never left their seats.
At the time, it did not occur to me to be outraged, or to feel responsible for making up for their lost opportunities. My school was a Title I school; so many of my students qualified for free breakfast and lunch that everyone ate free, and the school day was long and often difficult. I was new to the classroom, my teaching philosophy strongly influenced by Earl Shorris’s Clemente Course in the Humanities, a program developed in the 1990s to provide university-level instruction in philosophy, art, logic, and poetry to poor adults in American cities. My students, poor children from Bedford-Stuyvesant, would achieve agency and power in their own, first grade way: we’d read poetry, study Pablo Picasso and Jacob Lawrence, listen to jazz, write folk tales about our neighborhood.
Sometimes we planted seeds and bulbs in paper cups and left them to sprout on the windowsill, but mostly I didn’t worry about science. I was teaching them to read; I was working on their cultural literacy.
But science is cultural literacy, a fact that became apparent when a friend teaching in the same school told me about getting her fifth graders ready for their statewide science test. Preparation was hurried, last-minute, cursory: their scores would not be held against our Adequate Yearly Progress, after all. My friend, however, did not want her students to feel blindsided by the test, so she had photocopied some handouts and sample questions. “I was trying to explain photosynthesis,” she said, “and one of my kids asked me, ‘How does a plant make their food? Do they use a microwave?’ What do you say to that?”
The uncertain student had spent little of his elementary school time outside, had not taken field trips to any science museums. He had not gardened or designed experiments about sunlight and plant growth or even diagrammed a leaf. He had never looked at a plant cell under a microscope. His frame of reference for the world, and his relationship to it, was severely limited, but teachers and school administrators had worried instead about how well he could read and multiply.
I was reminded of something another friend, teaching first grade nearby, said she told one of her former students, a girl who’d ended the year woefully unprepared for the next year: “Tell your second grade teacher I’m sorry.”
WE HAVE A LOT to be sorry for — and a lot to worry about. Start with climate change, for a particularly fearsome example. Most climate scientists agree that, unless global carbon emissions are curtailed, we are headed for irreversible climate change: an increase of two degrees Celsius by 2040, and four degrees by 2070. A rise of two degrees would likely mean natural, economic, and social disaster — droughts, famines, floods, storms. A rise of four degrees would be catastrophic for human life across the globe.
However, the average American is more skeptical of the seriousness of global warming than he was in 1997.
Forty percent of Americans believe that global warming is not caused by human activity.
Sixteen percent believe global warming is “not that much of a threat” or “not a threat at all.”
Certainly the above examples of scientific illiteracy have much to do with our political climate, in which a belief in science is often pitted against a belief in God or the free market. But it is also true that without a proper foundation in science, which ideally begins before kindergarten, individuals are vulnerable to misunderstanding, the same kind that kept Day and Sonny Lacks from seeking treatment for life-threatening medical conditions. They are also easy targets for misinformation and manipulation, the forces behind our country’s increasing climate change skepticism.
Recently, the science classroom has re-emerged as a stage for political drama. In his campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Texas governor Rick Perry claimed that his state taught creationism and evolution side by side, because children were “smart enough to figure out which one is right.” (Aware that requiring the teaching of creationism was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, education officials in Texas scrambled to distance themselves from Perry’s claim.) In spring 2012, the Tennessee state legislature passed a bill designed to protect teachers who allow their students to question and criticize “controversial” topics like evolution and climate change.
If American citizens are to have any chance of speaking truth to power, they will need to have a better handle on the truth part. They will need to be better educated, and the science classroom will have to be political — not in the partisan sense, but in the sense of the Greek word politikos: of, for, or relating to citizens. The science classroom will need to prepare them for engagement in our democratic society, to make choices that affect their lives and their communities.
SO WHAT DOES an ideal science classroom look like? You might ask Sandra Laursen, codirector of Ethnography and Evaluation at the University of Colorado, Boulder, a research unit devoted to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Laursen, a chemist by training, has spent years working as an outreach scientist, providing teacher-training workshops and developing materials with and for K–12 educators. “At all ages, the curriculum is built on well-scaffolded, in-depth, age-appropriate investigations, some of which take place outside,” Laursen says. “There is opportunity, increasing with age, for students to branch off to pursue their own interests, but the curriculum and the teacher continually return the intellectual discussion to a few central scientific concepts and the intellectual and social processes of science.” Laursen’s ideal classroom is equipped with supplies and materials that are maintained and replenished by the school: durable equipment like microscopes and lab glass, but also inexpensive consumables like pH strips, vinegar, toothpicks, and cotton balls. The teacher in Laursen’s ideal classroom participates frequently in collaborative, in-depth professional development that is specific to her science curriculum but also places it in the context of science education that takes place in earlier and later grades. (And she is paid for her time.)
This happens commonly at good private schools, which provide their students with highly qualified (though not necessarily certified) teachers; hands-on, inquiry-based learning; and opportunities for educational travel to places like the Galápagos Islands, where they can volunteer to help eradicate invasive plant species, monitor juvenile Galápagos tortoises, and watch the sunset from the pristine beaches of Tortuga Bay. Children from wealthy families are advantaged as science learners almost from birth: they have better nutrition, better health care, parents who take them to parks and museums and who are able to lead them through questions about their environment. They are more comfortable investigating this world, less hesitant about their place within it.
There are public schools, too, that demonstrate quality science learning, though the pressure to perform on state tests often edges out what we know to be the best practices. Perhaps an even greater challenge for many public schools, especially in our poorest communities, is overcoming the deficits of students who don’t get a firm grounding in science at home. The Environmental Charter Middle School (ECMS) in Inglewood, California, in its second year when I visited, provides rigorous, environmentally themed college-preparatory instruction to its students, a majority of whom are from minority, low-income families. In ECMS’s central courtyard, I heard the constant hum of traffic from the 405 freeway and the low, intermittent roar of planes landing at Los Angeles International Airport. But I also saw abundant evidence of student work and thinking that is tied to experiential science learning: terra-cotta container gardens planted with radishes, tomatoes, and peppers; vermicompost bins made from plastic storage containers; rain barrels catching and filtering runoff from the roof. In the seventh-grade courtyard, students were constructing an aquaponic greenhouse, measuring and cutting the wood framing with the assistance of their teachers.
Getting the students to this level has been hard work. According to Kami Cotler, principal of ECMS, many of her students arrive with what she calls “bathtub deficits. They haven’t spent enough time interacting with the physics of their environment.” Cotler and her teachers despaired after the school’s first big project — building paleolithic shelters after a unit on ancient civilizations — revealed that the students had little understanding of scale or measurement. But after almost two years of hands-on, experiential education, they are starting to improve. “When [the students] were reviewing the aquaponic greenhouse plans, they realized that there was a problem of scale, and they worked to fix it,” said Cotler. “That was major.”
ECMS has modeled many of its environmental practices after those of its sister school, Environmental Charter High School, which was founded in 2000. In both schools, the students are engaged by the process of learning about science in an environmental context, and they understand how each modification to their campus fits together. The plants are watered with rain collected in barrels and fertilized with worm casings. At the middle school, they eat the peppers and radishes in their salads at lunch; at the high school, they sell plant seedlings at the weekend farmer’s market. High school art students paint murals of vulnerable ocean creatures around storm drains, a reminder that even city streets are part of a watershed. Students report becoming environmental advocates at home, encouraging their families to compost or use canvas grocery bags; they understand that there is a direct connection between the things they learn in their biology or chemistry class and the quality of life in their community.
All children deserve an education that allows them to make these kinds of connections, and every community deserves to have its citizens engaged in this way. But too often, when we think about the educational challenges facing poor children and the best way to address them, we focus on the things that are easiest to measure: how well a child reads by third grade, how accurately she solves math problems. In schools with the most at-risk students (and the highest level of testing pressure), science class becomes another opportunity to teach reading fluency or to practice computation. It is cut off from its vital content — why are we studying this? — and loses its opportunity to capture students’ attention, the way Lawrence Lacks’s attention was captured by understanding the impact of his mother’s cells.
“Whenever the nation becomes interested, for whatever reason, in alleviating the suffering of the poor, the method is always the same: training,” wrote Earl Shorris in 1997. Training, as he pointed out, focuses on the simplest, least cognitively demanding tasks, and prepares the trained for lives and careers that are less remunerative, less satisfying, and less politically influential than the lives and careers of the truly educated. Shorris, who died in 2012, wanted to see the minds of the poor challenged and enriched by the humanities, and he created a rigorous curriculum that exposed poor and uneducated adults to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Tolstoy. His primary goal? That students live a reflective, considered life — a life of agency.
Science — the way a cell functions, the vastness of the universe, the effect of development on water quality — can and should have the same impact. But when we replace real, connected science learning with worksheets and test booklets, we are robbing students of the chance to understand what is truly at stake in their lives.
MOST RECENTLY, I worked at the Hawbridge School, an environmentally focused charter middle and high school in a rural, economically disadvantaged county in North Carolina. Hawbridge’s students, who are selected by lottery, come from five different counties to the school, which is housed in a converted textile mill on the banks of the Haw River. Some come for the small class size and individualized attention, others for the program of interdisciplinary study, still others for the promise of canoeing instruction (part of the physical education program) or the chance to grow their own food in school gardens. But not all of Hawbridge’s students arrive eager for an ecological or even science-rich education; they come because, like students in charter schools everywhere, they had bad experiences in their assigned public schools: their needs were ignored, they were bullied, or they fell in with the wrong crowd. It is our responsibility, as teachers, to turn them on to the opportunities the school offers — camping, rock climbing, gardening, monitoring water quality in the Haw River, or listening to presentations by university professors.
Sometimes, like teachers everywhere, we let them down.
Hawbridge students and teachers take a lot of field trips, usually about two a month. Two years ago, during a study of contemporary innovations, we were preparing for a trip to the planetarium. “You know I don’t believe in any of that stuff, Ms. Boggs,” said one of my students, a junior I’ll call Amy.
“What stuff?” I asked.
“You know,” she said, looking at the ceiling. “Outer space.”
“What do you think is up there then, Amy?”
“God,” she said. “And clouds. And Jesus.”
Rebecca Skloot might have helpfully drawn Amy a map of the solar system, or taken her stargazing one night, or asked why God, Jesus, stars, and meteorites could not all coexist. I did none of those things, but continued with my English lesson — something about class consciousness and symbolism in The Great Gatsby. On breaks, at lunch or before school, I’d been trying to convince Amy to quit smoking, and I was afraid a religious dispute might turn her against me. I didn’t want Amy to feel isolated or alienated.
What occurred to me only later is that Amy was already alienated — from science, from ecology — in a way that was similar to Lawrence Lacks’s disengagement. Amy had several things in common with Lacks. Her family suffered from a history of health problems. She was fearful and suspicious of new ideas. She worked full time, at a fast-food restaurant, to help support her family. And she was underprepared by the education she received before she came to our school, arriving in ninth grade but reading at a level several grades below.
Luckily, I wasn’t Amy’s only teacher, and in her senior year she had the guidance of Norma Johnson, who once taught biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In Dr. Johnson’s biology class, Amy participated in a range of inquiry-based activities that made scientific principles real to her — reading nutrition labels and tracing her daily food consumption through the metabolic process, examining mosses growing in nearby woods, dissecting a fetal pig, and interacting with guest lecturers from universities and science-based outreach programs. In September and October, Amy used her lunch period and study period to get extra help with the challenging coursework, but she became more confident and independent as the year progressed. She finished the year with a B in biology and graduated from high school with plans to go to the local community college. She hopes to become a nurse.
Amy was one of the lucky ones, entering the school by lottery and finding teachers who not only helped her catch up on skills, but also made the things she was learning relevant to her life. Back at her old school, there are bound to be many Amys who won’t be so lucky — who won’t get in, or aren’t even aware they can apply to a school with smaller class sizes or hands-on learning. Amy’s opportunity ought to be everyone’s.
Scientific illiteracy is a luxury — one our poorest and most vulnerable citizens cannot afford. In an ideal K–12 classroom, every student (and every teacher) would consider himself a scientist, and everyone would be engaged in personally relevant, inquiry-driven science learning. This kind of education, which invites students to observe, hypothesize, debate, experiment, and problem-solve, is not easy to facilitate. It requires content knowledge and experience not only with instructional methodology but also with classroom management. Science teachers in particular need strong management skills and specific and in-depth understanding of their subject matter.
But it’s also true that nonscientists can be trained to provide rigorous, exciting, inquiry-driven instruction in elementary school classrooms. “Kids are natural scientists,” said Laursen. “They like bugs and dirt, they can observe something for a long time, they’re curious. When we fail to capitalize on young children’s curiosity and inclination toward social learning, we turn science into a boring, rote exercise by middle school, at which point it is often too late to reclaim students’ interest and curiosity.” Whatever is outside the classroom door — a recovering post-industrial river, a patch of grass, a cracked cement courtyard — is an opportunity for engagement with science learning: growing vegetables, designing experiments, observing a colony of ants with a field notebook. And a community’s environmental issues — logging, littering, smog, development — are also immediately relevant to students’ lives.
“I’M NOT A SCIENTIST, man,” Florida senator Marco Rubio told GQ magazine in an interview published in December 2012, following the first presidential debate season in twenty-eight years to fail to mention climate change. Rubio had been asked how old he thinks the earth is; it is unclear whether he was signaling a fashionable disdain for scientific facts or whether he truly did not know. His full answer suggested that, in his mind, science was far removed from the important work of growing our economy, and that only people in lab coats have any business thinking about things like the age of the planet. In his response to the 2013 State of the Union address, in which President Obama declared himself willing to take executive action against climate change, Rubio dismissed such actions as “job-killing” and suggested that “the government can’t control the weather.”
Meanwhile, the year 2012 had been the hottest on record in the contiguous United States, with above-normal temperatures registering every month everywhere except the Pacific Northwest. That year’s drought was the worst in fifty years, registering as “severe” in more than half the country, and the record-setting wildfire season, the second worst since the 1960s, claimed an area of land roughly the size of Maryland. In late October of that year, the East Coast experienced the second-costliest hurricane on record, an immense storm that devastated areas rarely hit by Category 3 hurricanes.
After a devastatingly hot summer, and particularly after Hurricane Sandy, Americans began to appear more receptive to scientists’ warnings about climate change. Some polls had as many as seven in ten respondents agreeing that climate change is real, and post-election, 60 percent of voters agreed with the statement that “climate change made Hurricane Sandy worse.”
On the surface, this looks encouraging. In some respects, Americans may be finally waking up to the reality of a rapidly changing climate. But a response to a dramatic weather event, however convincing, is fragile and perhaps unsustainable. What if next summer is unusually cool, the hurricane season relatively calm? Will we continue to listen to climate reports from NOAA? Perhaps more importantly, there is little indication that respondents to recent polls understand what it would take to turn things around, or how their own actions and choices might play a role. They are not scientists either — not most of them, not yet.
Much recent discussion about the importance of STEM subject education has focused on job training, on preparing our kids and our country to compete in high-stakes and high-income professions. Like Marco Rubio, the majority of students in an average fifth-grade classroom will not become professional scientists or engineers. Every one of them, however, will need to understand skills and ideas connected to the principles of science — what a plant needs to grow, how to read nutrition and medication labels, what it means when their state considers hydraulic fracturing or offshore drilling. Their understanding of these principles will determine how long they live, and how well.
This article, along with other landmark Orion essays about education, are collected in a new anthology, Leave No Child Inside. Order your copy here. |
HEADS UP: Need 7.10.3?
Hi *, (This is an email primarily aimed at users reading this list and developers who have any interest). As some of you may know, there's currently a 7.10.3 milestone and status page on our wiki: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-7.10.3 The basic summary is best captured on the above page: "We have not yet decided when, or even whether, to release GHC 7.10.3. We will do so if (but only if!) we have documented cases of "show-stoppers" in 7.10.2. Namely, cases from users where - You are unable to use 7.10.2 because of some bug - There is no reasonable workaround, so you are truly stuck - We know how to fix it - The fix is not too disruptive; i.e. does not risk introducing a raft of new bugs" That is, we're currently not fully sold on the need for a release. However, the milestone and issue page serve as a useful guide, and also make it easier to keep track of smaller, point-release worthy issues. So in the wake of the 8.0 roadmap I just sent: If you *need* 7.10.3 because the 7.10.x series has a major regression or problem you can't work around, let us know! - Find or file a bug in Trac - Make sure it's highest priority - Assign it to the 7.10.3 milestone - Follow up on this email if possible, or edit it on the status page text above - it would be nice to get some public feedback in one place about what everyone needs. Currently we have two bugs on the listed page in the 'show stopper category', possibly the same bug, which is a deal-breaker for HERMIT I believe. Knowing of anything else would be very useful. Thanks all! -- Regards, Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/ |
Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli, dubbed ”the most hated man in America” for gouging patients dependent on a drug used for HIV and cancer treatment, was arrested at his home in Manhattan today (Dec. 17) on securities fraud charges related to his past business interests, Bloomberg and Reuters report.
Prosecutors have reportedly charged him with using illegally acquired stock from Retrophin, a biotechnology firm he founded in 2011, to pay off other business debts, after his defunct hedge fund MSMB lost millions.
The 32-year-old Shkreli was ousted from Retrophin and sued by its board. His new company, Turing, acquired Daraprim, a sole-source medication for toxoplasmosis, that has been in circulation since 1953 and is used frequently by patients with compromised immune systems, and raised its price from $13.50 per pill to $750—a mere 5,000% increase. After the price hike drew widespread ire, Shkreli vehemently defended his decision with quotes by rapper Eminem, sealing his “pharma bro” reputation.
His love for hip hop has has gotten him in even more trouble with the public of late. He spent $2 million on the only copy of a Wu Tang Clan album and said, in crude terms, he had no plans to immediately play it. He also revealed this week he wants to bail out jailed rapper Bobby Shmurda, who was arrested on gun charges and gang conspiracy in 2014. “I’ll show up with $2 million bail money no fucking problem,” Shkreli told Hip Hop DX.
Shkreli and his lawyers could not be immediately reached for comment on the federal charges. |
Burton Samuel Glinn (July 23, 1925 – April 9, 2008) was an American professional photographer who worked with Magnum Photos. He covered revolutionary leader Fidel Castro's entrance into Havana, Cuba, and photographed people such as Andy Warhol and Helen Frankenthaler. Glinn's photos show such things as the social scene of the rich, the dirtiness of politics, and the humorous flotilla that called itself the Seattle Tubing Society.[1] He was also a contributor to Holiday.
Early life [ edit ]
Glinn, a Pittsburgh native, studied literature at Harvard University, where he edited and photographed for the college newspaper Harvard Crimson.[1] He served in the US Army and worked for Life magazine from 1949 to 1950.[1] Glinn became an associate member of Magnum Photos in 1951 along with Eve Arnold and Dennis Stock - the first Americans to join the agency - and became a full member in 1954.[1]
Career [ edit ]
Glinn became famous for his color pictures of the South Seas, Japan, Russia, Mexico, and California.[1] At a New Year's party in 1958, Glinn was notified that Fidel Castro had taken over Cuba.[1] By dawn the next day he was covering the revolution in Cuba, making photographs "as everybody got whatever weapon they could get their hands on," he once said.[1] In 1959 the photographer received the Mathew Brady Award for Magazine Photographer of the Year, offered by the University of Missouri for a photo essay on the South Seas.[2]
He was president of Magnum from 1972 to 1975 (then re-elected to the position in 1987) and also served as president of the American Society of Media Photographers. He covered the Sinai War as well as the US Marine invasion of Lebanon[1] and also completed a photo essay project on medical science. His images have been published in Esquire, Fortune, Geo, Life, Travel and Leisure, and Paris-Match.[3]
When asked in an interview which of his images he most closely identifies with, Glinn replied that without a doubt it is the picture showing the back of Nikita Khrushchev's head in front of the Lincoln Memorial:
I was late and I couldn’t get to where everybody else was, in front of Khrushchev, so I came running up and I was in the back of him. And I looked up and there it was. I got two shots of that and then it disintegrated. If I’d been on time I would have gotten a very ordinary picture of Khrushchev and Henry Cabot Lodge looking at this statue of Lincoln but you couldn’t see the statue. The most important thing that a photographer like me can have is luck, you know.[1]
Death [ edit ]
Burt Glinn died on April 9, 2008 in Southampton, New York, aged 82.[2] The stated cause of death was kidney failure and pneumonia.[2] He is survived his wife, Elena Prohaska, his son, Sam, of Manhattan, and his sister, Norma Sue Madden of Pittsburgh.[2] A tribute to Glinn was set up at the SAM Gallery in Seattle, Washington, where Glinn worked and lived during the 1950s and 1960s.[1]
Awards [ edit ]
Dana Reed Award, Harvard College
Mathew Brady Award for Magazine Photographer of the Year, University of Missouri
Best Book of Photographic Reporting from Abroad, Overseas Press Club
Best Print Ad of the Year, Art Director's Club of New York
Best Annual Report of the Year from Financial World, Warner Communications Annual Report
Exhibitions [ edit ]
Books [ edit ]
1955 The Dark Eye in Africa (with Laurens van der Post), William Morrow, US; Hogarth Press, UK
(with Laurens van der Post), William Morrow, US; Hogarth Press, UK 1967 A Portrait of All the Russias (with Laurens van der Post), William Morrow, US; Hogarth Press, UK, ISBN 978-0-7012-0243-9
(with Laurens van der Post), William Morrow, US; Hogarth Press, UK, ISBN 978-0-7012-0243-9 1968 A Portrait of Japan, (with Laurens van der Post), William Morrow, US, ASIN B000OLIBFQ
(with Laurens van der Post), William Morrow, US, ASIN B000OLIBFQ 2001/02 Havana: The Revolutionary Moment, Umbrage Editions, US/Dewi Lewis, UK, ISBN 978-1-884167-09-6 |
Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas was a master class in how to make the most of the Fallout setting with brilliant, nuanced writing and meticulous world building. Bethesda's Fallout 3 and Skyrim were... popular. Let's see how much their dialog has improved in the hotly anticipated Fallout 4.
"Hello, adventurer. Welcome to my store. Would you like to purchase an item?"
"Weeeeeooo! I'm a crazy vampire!"
"I hear the adventurer explored a vault. What a brave adventurer."
"Hi, we're the Brotherhood of Steel. We are good guys. We would like to help people and stop bad guys. That's our whole story."
"Hey, you! You're finally awake. You tried to open the vault, right?"
"Go get the transmitter for me, the quest giver."
"Thank you for getting the transmitter. Here is your reward."
"Welcome to Kid Town. We're all kids here, you fucking idiot. An ancient prophecy states that child NPCs are indestructible. Whatever that means! God, you're ugly. Me and my three pals will follow you around now, shrieking insults and blocking your path."
"Hi. I am Character. I know about many topics. Select one to receive an info dump."
"Move along. I'm a town guard. It looks like you're wearing a Pip-Boy and (pause, slight change of vocal intonation) LEATHER ARMOR."
"Did you see those two skeletons holding hands downstairs? Incredible. Environmental storytelling at its best. I bet they cared about one another, but then they died. Powerful stuff. Show not tell, right? Gotta love it."
"Radscorpions? More like badscorpions."
"Go get the orb for me, as a quest."
"Congratulations, you got the orb. You saved the wasteland!"
"Hello. I am a central character. Let me tell you about myself: I am doing fine. Well, that's all. Farewell."
"I hear that if you look in containers you can find food and bottlecaps. Don't know if it's true, though. No one has looked in any of the rather obvious containers nearby."
"This is a Pip-Boy. You can level up with it. I suppose this is goodbye. I love you very much. Goodbye."
"Some people tell me I sound just like an actor from the pre-war days. A bald captain of an enterprising spaceship. I suppose it's a nice compliment, though I also look and sound curiously similar to half the men in this wasteland."
(Incoherent screaming, as Super Mutants can't talk)
"Heard things got pretty bad over in Washington, DC. I bet if someone familiar with events in Washington, DC was in earshot right now they would shake their head and say 'Brother, you don't know the half of it!'"
"I'm very evil! I will laugh as I tell you about my evil plan!"
"You saved my life. Here's a burnt sock. Please, I insist. You've earned it, noble adventurer."
"I'm here to kill you. I am very angry."
"Radroach? More like large roach. You shouldn't have come here."
"New Vegas, you say? No, must have been a dream. Whole area has been barren for hundreds of years. None of that stuff ever happened."
"I can't believe it. The true meaning of Fallout was in our hearts all along."
Multiple Sentence Review: Witcher 3
It's good. It's very good.
Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
If it weren't for the flaws, this would probably be perfect! 9/10
Hatred
I am SHOCKED and APPALLED that this game goes to such extreme lengths to be so brutally boring and inconsequential. 0/10
– Dennis "Corin Tucker's Stalker" Farrell (@DennisFarrell) |
The Baseball Hall of Fame will announce the Baseball Writers' Association of America election results at 2 p.m. ET Wednesday. Seventeen voters from ESPN submitted ballots this year, and their votes are listed below.
The eligible players needed at least 13 votes to garner 75 percent of ESPN's total. If the ESPN ballot serves as any indication, Craig Biggio, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and Frank Thomas will receive enough votes to join Bobby Cox, Tony La Russa and Joe Torre in the Hall of Fame class of 2014.
Listed in alphabetical order, here are the 17 ESPN voters who submitted ballots: Howard Bryant, Jim Caple, Jerry Crasnick, Gordon Edes, Pedro Gomez, Dan Graziano, Michael Knisley, Tim Kurkjian, Wallace Matthews, Ian O'Connor, Buster Olney, Peter Pascarelli, Brendan Roberts, Adam Rubin, Mark Saxon, Barry Stanton and Jayson Stark.
* = First-time candidate |
Who are you ? What is your secret ? Where are you going ?
Guillaume Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 27, 2016
I’m Guillaume, the creator of LessPass and I ‘ll explain why these three questions will help you forget your passwords
You need a password Manager
Today you need to remember many passwords (email, Facebook, Twitter, Windows, etc…). Security on those sites can be compromise, so you should use different passwords for each account.
A password manager helps you to manage your passwords in this way.
First problem : sync your passwords database
There are a lot of open source password managers, but they all suffer from the same plague : they store all your passwords in a single database. So if you want your passwords on your computer, your smartphone or your tablet, you have to share this database between all those devices.
I don’t want to share my passwords even encrypted on internet
If like me you used KeePassX, you probably had a personal cloud (Seafile, Owncloud) solution to share your password manager database between all your devices.
On a new device, you need to install a cloud client, find the password of your personal cloud, sync your password manager database before you can access your passwords.
Second problem : closed source isn’t secure
If you don’t want to sync your passwords manager database, current solution is to pay a couple dollars for a closed-source (central-point-of-failure-insecure) solution. I don’t like the idea to put my secrets online, even more in the trust of a 3rd-party, moreover if I can’t see the source of the code.
Why can’t I host Lastpass/OnePassword on my server ?
LessPass to save them all
LessPass is open source solution, that don’t need any cloud storage.
It’s a webapp, with some Javascript, that derive your password in a secure way.
How it works
If I ask you how much is 1 + 2 + 3 ? You will answer me 6.
But If I ask you what are the operations to obtain 6 ? You will probably answer 1 + 2 + 3. But you could have answer 3 × 1 + 3 or 18 × 18 - 318 and you will be right. There are a lot of solutions.
Replace 1,2 and 3 by the answer of the three questions (who, what, where), and the + operation by some key derivation functions and you can understand the concept behind LessPass.
LessPass use different key derivation functions to transform your personal information into an unique password.
LessPass: Who are you ?
Guillaume: I’m Guillaume
L: What is your secret ?
G: I love chocolate !
L: Where are you going ?
G: on twitter
L: your password is: zAC9:esIM6?
Key derivation functions
LessPass use the answer of the two first questions to create a unique hash with Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2 (PBKDF2). We use 8192 iterations and HMAC-SHA256 for calculating our hash
"I’m Guillaume" + "I love to much chocolate !" = 57d0851a1a73f4e4…
PBKDF2 applies a pseudo random function and repeats the process many times to produce a hash. We use PBKDF2 because it adds computational work, and makes password cracking much more difficult.
Custom passwords
Sometime you need some password composed with a certain type of char (i.e. only numbers), a specific length (i.e. length of 10).
LessPass provide default settings, but you can customize them.
hash = '57d0851a1a73f4e4…';
entry = {
site: 'on twitter', // Where are you going ?
password: {
length: 10,
settings: ['numbers'],
counter: 1 // change password without changing your secret
}
};
With those information and again different key derivation functions,we compute/derivate a unique password
hash + entry = 6724697291
LessPass core is 100% tested and you can have a look at its full source and check whether the algorithms are implemented correctly. If you are a cryptography and computer security expert, feel free to give us some feedback.
The future of LessPass
LessPass is free and always be.
We are developing a web extension to reduce friction and give a seamless experience.
Sources are on Github. We plan to migrate on Gitlab.
Privacy matters and transparency too
We don’t use any third parties and we will never do.(e.g. no Google Analytics, no social buttons, no adds, etc).
No tracking, no server communications, only static files.
The last intelligence law in France has force us to migrate our web server in Germany. Our web server is hosted in Frankfurt with the help of Vultr.
Our DNS are managed by Gandi, and our TLS certificate managed by COMODO CA Limited. |
From 2011 through 2015, only two teams had a better record than the Seattle Seahawks, who won 46 of their 64 regular season games. Over the same period of time, only six teams had a worse record than the St. Louis (now Los Angeles) Rams, who won just 27 of their 64 regular season games. And yet somehow, during that time frame, the Seahawks and Rams equally split the eight games played against each other.
So Seattle went 4-4 against the Rams and 42-14 against everyone else, while the Rams were 4-4 against the Seahawks and 23-32-1 against all other teams. It makes almost no sense.
If Week 1 was any indication, we could all expect the Rams' streak of being competitive against the Seahawks to come to an end this Sunday. No, Seattle didn't exactly dominate the Dolphins last weekend, but the Rams came out and got embarrassed by the 49ers, 28-0, on Monday night. It wasn't pretty.
Todd Gurley, though, has other ideas. He's guaranteeing a victory against Seattle in Week 2.
"We're going to get a win this week, for sure," the star running back said, per a transcription of the team's post-practice availability at Turf Show Times.
That's a mighty confident stance coming from a player who will be standing seven yards behind Case Keenum for most of the day, but what do you expect? Gurley's not going to come out and say his team will probably lose. |
When Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn flagged up the potential re-nationalisation of British railways, and later made similar comments about the energy industry, his ideas were dismissed as a return to the past. But the evidence is that the public has bought into it. YouGov polls show that a majority of British people now support the nationalisation of the railways (66%) and energy sector (68%).
From the end of the 1970s, the British electorate voted four times in a row to give the Conservative Party a mandate to implement an extensive privatisation programme. So why has public opinion turned around so sharply?
Ideological views
Privatisation, in many cases, was an ideological programme which promoted solutions driven by the private sector and financial markets. It was a simplistic rationale: self interest and competition would bring about the much desired outcome of efficiency. This has been promoted as sensible economic policy by both Conservative and New Labour governments.
In the background, there was the financial downturn of the 1970s and 1980s that had knock-on effects on public services and utilities, which implied poor financial performance and created the ideal conditions for arguments in favour of privatisation.
The emerging view was that public enterprises only helped self-interested bureaucrats, inhibited cost cutting and innovation and distorted the allocation of resources. Privatisation was supposed to reduce the burden on the taxpayer and force these sectors to become more competitive, efficient and deliver better value for “customers”.
REUTERS/Phil Noble
As early as 1984, at the Conservative Party conference, Margaret Thatcher proudly announced:
… again and again, denationalisation has brought greater motivation to managers and workforce, higher profits and rising investment, and what is more, many in industry now have a share in the firm for which they work.
Building evidence
The ideological basis of neoliberal views around privatisation has gradually become clearer with the arrival of more and more evidence in the last two decades. Research has laid bare the myth that privatisation is somehow a panacea for improving public services and utilities.
Britain did see short-term improvements in some cases such as energy. But over the long term, it has become clear that private services do not deliver good value. Charges have remained high and service quality is often dismissed as poor or indifferent. Research commissioned by the TUC, a federation of trade unions, looked at the £358 monthly rail ticket for the 35-minute journey from Chelmsford, Essex, to London and compared it to the cost of similar European examples. The results were startling: £37 in Italy, £56 in Spain, £95 in Germany, and £234 in France. In these countries a large majority of railways remain under public control.
Moreover, meeting the investment needs (which is where the real risks lie) to ensure safe, regular and high-quality service has been a challenge. Where there were failures as in the case of Metronet, the public sector was forced to pick up the pieces. It can appear that private companies acquire the benefits, without fully taking on the risks.
In the energy sector, average UK domestic electricity prices outstrip the average of OECD countries, as shown in the chart below. In an ongoing investigation of the UK’s six large energy companies, one of the initial conclusions of the Competition and Market Authority was that the companies used their unilateral market power to overcharge domestic customers to the tune of £1.2 billion a year between 2009-2013.
IEA , Author provided
Health check
There are clear failures then in both rail and energy privatisation – enough to drive the sharp turnaround in public opinion. This is only reinforced by the role of the private sector in the National Health Service.
The National Audit Office found that the use of Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) was one of the major reasons for deficits at hospitals that provide acute healthcare services. PFI deals with private firms reduce the investment cost for the public sector in the short term, but they introduce an annual unitary charge (a sort of debt repayment) which has to be paid over a long period of time.
The most recent data show that for Department of Health projects which delivered over £11 billion of capital investment, the undiscounted cost of the unitary charges to be paid until the end of these projects was around £80 billion.
It’s not just about the headline numbers. PFIs may involve considerable differences between projected and actual outcomes, and can be beset by cost overruns and delays. And skills are often not in place to negotiate and administer PFI contracts successfully. And so we end up with disagreements about contract terms, price reviews which rarely lead to price reductions, limited use of penalties for poor performance and a failure to share future savings or efficiency gains.
And it’s not just a UK problem. A wide range of research shows similar results in other parts of the world and our own research at the University of Hertfordshire Business School has confirmed these findings for the water and sanitation sector in developing countries. High profile examples include Argentina cancelling a large number of contracts with multinational water companies after a major economic crisis in 2001. It is still counting the cost.
Sectors such as health, education, energy, transport and water provide essential services where there are social and developmental consequences to ownership. Access to and affordability of these services cannot be treated as secondary to efficiency objectives and profitability. The private sector usually has no inherent motivation to achieve these social goals unless they are incentivised by measures which often dump the cost on taxpayers or users.
In fact, the surprise shouldn’t be that the public appear to have rejected the rationale for private ownership in these sectors, but that they ever voted for it in the first place. |
Journey of a Wikipedian
Jake Orlowitz Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 18, 2016
There’s no one moment when you go insane;
not when
you find yourself crying into a phone behind a closet door
or tapping your foot to neutralize thoughts you can’t handle
or sleeping on a bed of worn clothes on a hard floor
or when the police officer pulls you over again for driving
up and back the same stretch of highway, six times
and not when you physically crack the monitor in a dark room for no reason even though it was the only light left in a night’s center as you tap away at keys throughout the silence
But you occasionally get a glimpse of someone else realizing that, “you’ve lost it”.
It was probably fall 2010. My dad turned the knob on the attic bathroom door in the house where I had grown up, and the reaction on his face was devastated. He didn’t know that no other room in the house, or the country, felt safe to me, that the warm water soothed and wetted the dry, frigid air, that my laptop was balanced purposefully so that it would fall backwards onto the tile rather than into the hip-high water, and that I had chosen the back wall of the tub for its ergonomic watchlist-monitoring suitability.
He didn’t know that. He just saw his 27-year old son, feverishly tinkering with electronics on the edge of a full bath, completely nude, oblivious to anything else, or anything wrong. He also didn’t know that I was helping lead the Egyptian revolution.
That too sounds insane, but as the calendar flipped into January 2011, the new year brought millions to Egypt’s streets. A boy had gone missing, turned up in a morgue clearly beaten beyond breath by police. Facebook pages organized gatherings that filled immense public squares. Protests turned into uprising turned into revolution.
And I, alongside 4 exceptionally dedicated editors from 3 different continents, monitored the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Wikipedia article 24-hours-a-day with equipoise and fervor. We yearned for Mubarak to fall, but in the newsroom which the article’s talkpage had become, we were vigilantly checking multiple independent reports before inputting any new words onto the growing page, scouring the article for flourishes of revolutionary support. The world would come here to find the facts; those that would dispassionately drive understanding without embellishment or motivation, for the hundreds of thousands of people reading that page each day. And I would make sure of it. From my bathtub.
From Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA, by Kodak Agfa
There’s also no one time when sanity returns, if there is such a defined state. But suffice to say that it builds upon moments.
Like the moment when you start chatting off-channel to a wikipedian on irc-help, just to talk to someone again. Or when you put on a suit for the first time in 6 years, to give a talk on conflict-of-interest to a gathering of pr folks at a posh downtown bar. Or when you step into the hostel at Wikimania in 2012 in D.C. and meet Stu Geiger, your coincidental bunkmate, and instantly recognize his familiar, Wikipedian-ite, eclectic genius.
The moments gather momentum though. Soon you are calling up major media companies to ask for donations. Not as Jake, or that guy who lost a decade in his 20’s, or the model teenager who lapsed into dysfunction and veered ‘off course’. But calling rather, as a piece-of-Wikipedia… Do you know what doors that opens?
The drama of recovery shouldn’t be overly simplified into highlights. It was just as much my psychiatrist’s expert balancing — seeking of psychic neutrality — with a fine and formidable mix of anxiolytics, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and sleep aids. Not too high, not too low. Not too moody, not too flat. Every pill presented a trade-off, but we found a consensus pharmacology that worked.
My parents made sure that my rock bottom was somewhere safe.
My friends’ surprise visits reminded me that there was fun yet to be had.
The diagnoses I received were varied and all increasingly off-the mark. I was bipolar, but generally calm through even the grittiest edit wars. I was agoraphobic and socially anxious, but traveling to Hong Kong and Quebec and Berlin for meetups with strangers from myriad countries. I was depressed, but could not control an urge to improve a bit of Wikipedia, every day, most of the day.
They say that Wikipedia is NotTherapy. It’s a serious place to write an encyclopedia, not to iron out one’s mental kinks or cracks. But I think that’s wrong. No one knew me on Wikipedia, except for my words, the wisdom of my input, and the value of my contributions. They couldn’t care less if I was manic, phobic, delusional, or hysterical. It just didn’t matter. They didn’t see that part of me.
So I got to build my identity, my confidence, my vocation — with longwinded eloquent analyses, meticulous bibliographies, and copious rewrites of difficult subjects.
They also say that wikipedia is Not a social network, but that’s wrong too. In the 8 years since I started editing, first in my car outside a Starbucks, and then throughout the dull shifts of a mountain-town Staples store where I squatted for wifi, and then still more through 3 years back at home under blankets between dusk and dawn, I met hundreds of people with whom I shared the same passion. I received, quite marvelously, 49 barnstars from peers, friends, and fans. There wasn’t a bigger or better sense of validation.
I received two incomparable partners, to build a Wikipedia Library that I created and had become the head of. I received a job offer, with wellness benefits. I also received, in the grand sense of things, an irrepressible, stunning and brilliant girlfriend and her exuberant 5-year old daughter into my life.
You see, Wikipedia brings people together. It brought me together. It just takes some time for everyone to get their heads on straight, before they can see that their lives too have a mission, and an [edit] button.
— Jake Orlowitz, User:Ocaasi, @JakeOrlowitz |
One of the new writers at the rebooted New Republic, Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, wrote a column titled Pope Francis’s Populist War on the Devil. It begins this way:
Pope Francis isn’t engaged only in earthly battles. He’s also waging a cosmic war against the power of evil, a crusade that has garnered considerably less press than his comments on, say, climate change or homosexuality. For Francis, as for scores of faithful Christians, this struggle isn’t abstract. It has genuine agents, real people — in this case, God and all the forces of heaven versus the fallen angel Satan and his league of demons. “The devil exists,” Francis stated last fall in an October homily, “and we must fight against him.” Francis’s openness about the role Satan plays in human havoc has reportedly brought about an increase in requests for exorcisms, as faithful people afflicted by ominous symptoms increasingly identify their troubles as demonic in origin.
So far, I agree with this. It’s true, as I’ve previously written, that Pope Francis is pushing a revival of belief in the demonic as part of Catholicism. But Bruenig isn’t just idly noting a trend. She’s suggesting that Francis’ liberal sympathies exist because of his belief in an actual, literal Satan. In fact, she argues that wider adoption of this belief would make everyone more moral:
But perhaps the most promising aspect of Pope Francis’s wholehearted belief in the Prince of Lies is the way it unites all of humankind in a single struggle… Lucifer’s works may warp and disfigure human intentions and human communities, but because the Devil is ultimately his own person, those evil acts are always separate from us, the whole of humankind. In that sense we’re all caught in the same drama, fending off a creature with malicious intentions and tireless energy… It is only a special kind of cosmic solidarity that can say we’re all in this together, all of us, forever — and in his crusade against Satan, Pope Francis has hit upon it.
This argument would be disturbing enough in any forum, but especially when it appears in a liberal publication from a progressive Christian writer whose politics I’d probably mostly agree with. Bruenig speculates that belief in Satan and demons makes us more moral because it encourages people to pull together in solidarity against an external threat. That’s a comforting piece of armchair theology, but that’s not how this works.
In fact, this gets it totally backwards. Belief in Satan has always, always served to demonize other human beings, to dismiss them as subhuman agents of evil who can be tortured, brutalized and killed without qualm. That’s because in Christian theology, Satan isn’t an external enemy who can be fended off, he’s an insidious force who secretly controls people and institutions without their knowledge. And if you’re sure that you’re a follower of God and that you’re acting in accordance with God’s will for the world, it’s only a very short step to conclude that anyone who doesn’t agree with you must be an agent of the Devil.
Bruenig’s piece doesn’t spare even a glance for the millions of people throughout history who’ve been tortured, warred upon and condemned because True Christians considered it their duty to purge all servants of Satan from their midst. And this kind of harm isn’t a relic of the superstitious and barbarous past, but is still happening today.
A few years ago, I wrote about the phenomenon of children being persecuted as witches in pious, evangelical-overrun Nigeria. The torments they’ve suffered, including at the hands of their own parents and communities, are horrific:
In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush.
There’s also the loathsome Helen Ukpabio, a West African preacher who travels the world spreading her belief that any child who screams or cries is a “servant of Satan”. Again, parents who believe her theology have committed dreadful deeds:
“Saving Africa’s Witch Children” follows Gary Foxcroft, founder of the charity Stepping Stones Nigeria, as he travels the rural state of Akwa Ibom, rescuing children abused during horrific “exorcisms” — splashed with acid, buried alive, dipped in fire — or abandoned roadside, cast out of their villages because some itinerant preacher called them possessed.
Children aren’t the only ones abused in the name of this diabolical Christianity. Other vulnerable people suffer as well, such as in Congo, where Pentecostal churches assume the mentally ill to be demon-possessed and “treat” them by chaining them to their beds and beating them.
However, it would be a mistake to assume that demonic theology is confined to backwater regions of Africa. It can be found right here in America, wreaking the same kind of havoc.
Just this past week, there was a horrible story in Balch Springs, Texas. According to police, the pastor of a Christian fundamentalist cult ordered a 2-year-old boy to be starved to death (his parents and the rest of the congregation cooperated) because, she claimed, he was possessed by a demon and this was the only way to exorcise it. When he was dead, they prayed over his body for a resurrection:
A pathetic scene captured on a YouTube video shows the pastor, Aracely Meza, trying to resuscitate his lifeless body with oil and incantations. “God, all powerful, give him life. Now! Now! Now!” she barked into a microphone, cradling his corpse and stroking his hair.
Needless to say, the dead boy wasn’t miraculously restored to life, the pastor was arrested, and the boy’s parents have fled the country.
This isn’t a freak event. It’s far from unheard-of for children to be harmed or killed by exorcism ceremonies that are little more than torture under another name. Even in the best case, since demons don’t exist, these rituals can only hurt and not help. They prevent the genuinely troubled and mentally ill from getting the real treatment and therapy they need.
Even if dispensed with the best of intentions, Bruenig’s demonological ethics is shockingly naive. It’s tempting to think that the human tendency to divide the world into in-group and out-group can be overcome by redirecting the out-group to some extrahuman locus of evil. But since there are no real demons for us to identify and defeat, when we clash with each other, the mantle of scapegoat will inevitably fall back onto other human beings. And once we’ve identified our enemies as demonic, we’ve given ourselves permission to do anything to suppress them. As long as we believe in malevolent spirits who want to harm us, this cycle of atrocities will continue. Ultimately, only relinquishing belief in supernatural evil, not redoubling it, will bring more peace and justice into the world.
Image: Belief in this is not necessary for morality. Via Shutterstock. |
Defense Cuts and the Global Empire The fundamental distinction between a legitimate national defense and an aggressive global garrison imperium, escapes the political elites. The War Party’s entrenched power and control of their egocentric internationalist foreign policy , endangers the country. Military expenditures have increased substantially this century with little regard to The Real Threat to National Security . The "War on Terror" is a tired excuse that keeps precision smart weapon dominance deployed, which shells suspect bombers with impunity. The technologists that develop and refine methods for more efficient killing machinery hardly earn the honor - defenders of the nation. The mere suggestion that armed services cutbacks are unpatriotic or places the homeland in peril is an invented euphemism to disguise the true nature of the coercive global empire that has replaced our Constitutional Republic. The Economics of Sequestration points out that, "while many auditors would agree that the bloated expenditures within the military-industrial-complex has much to do with an adventurist foreign policy, the architects of sequestration refused to do a straight across the board reductions in all budgets." For a detailed report on sequestration, download the GovWin analysis. •Defense hit hard, but small elements of major accounts have been shielded •Agencies’ working capital funds are largely protected •Fund accounts with economic implications are largely exempted •Senate and House member compensation is exempt •Contractors and government employees will take hits, but how hard? •States, and other grant holders, will be impacted John Barnett presents the political difficulty of actually cutting the military budget in the Brookings Institution video, How Will Military Spending Cuts Affect Us Down the Road? You can always depend upon establishment mouthpieces to exculpate and argue for the military money machine. However, when pressed, an alternative approach comes from Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, served as an assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, who proposes a small down payment on How to cut $100B from the defense budget . "Implementing the following four politically feasible reforms to the defense budget would save $100 billion over the next decade. First, reduce the size of the U.S. nuclear stockpile to 1,100 weapons. Second, cancel the Navy variant of the F-35 and instead purchase the more affordable and effective F/A-18 E/F. Third, reduce the size of the U.S. ground forces to their pre-9/11 levels as we wind down the war in Afghanistan. And finally, implement sensible provisions to reduce the over-utilization of services in the military’s Tricare for Life health care program. A modest $100 billion reduction will not be sufficiently to reverse the explosive, irresponsible growth in defense spending that has occurred since 9/11. In fact, the bipartisan group of 22 and the president’s own deficit reduction committee (Simpson-Bowles) both suggest much larger draw-downs. But these reductions present a politically achievable down payment to avert the fiscal cliff and buy the Obama administration and Congress more time to deal with the larger fiscal challenges facing the Department of Defense." The typical response from the Top Pentagon Brass Lay Out Details of Sequestration Nightmare , begs even the appearance of balance or veracity. As federal budget deficits spiral, the DoD schemes to defend the only conflict that can win; namely, the budget battle. "Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter called the "twin evils" of sequestration and a year-long continuing resolution "more dangerous than it’s ever been" as the Pentagon faces its "biggest cut in history." He warned that cuts of $42 billion by the end of fiscal 2013 would mean a "drastic shortfall in the funding we need to do training, which inhibits our capacity to fight." The Defense Department, he added, "would have to go back and redo our national defense strategy." The entire point of Secretary Carter’s appeal is that the national defense strategy is even more sacrosanct than the outlay on hardware budgets. The key mistake in the security equation is that this stratagem is a formula for unnecessary and excessive expenditures. Now compare reality with the Pentagon hype. WAR PIGS – THE FALL OF A GLOBAL EMPIRE presents compelling condemnation that the Obama administration is no different from "so called" GOP hawks. "Any doubt that the Military Industrial Complex is as strong as ever should be removed after examining Obama’s 2012 Budget which has $900 billion dedicated to our military machine. We spent $370 billion in 2001, $620 billion in 2006, and now this liberal anti-war Democrat from Illinois is spending 45% more than that war monger Bush who was burned in effigy by the anti-war Democrats during Iraq War protests. It seems both parties are war pigs. You would think we must be trying to keep up with our enemies by spending $900 billion per year on past and present military adventures. But one look at the following chart reveals the United States is spending almost as much as the rest of the world combined. The two countries considered potential rivals, China and Russia, spent $200 billion combined in 2010. This is 22% of U.S. spending. From a foreign viewpoint, one must wonder why the U.S. is spending such vast sums on our military. They can only conclude that it is for offensive intentions rather than defensive. The United States soil has not been attacked by a foreign power since December 7, 1941. Prior to that surprise attack, a foreign power hadn’t attacked the U.S. since the War of 1812. With this stupendous level of wasteful spending, our leaders feel compelled to interfere in the business of sovereign states and dictate how they should govern their nations. When you have an enormous hammer, every country looks like a nail." Reasonable observers know intuitively that continued increases for defense spending does not enhance security any more than feeding funds into a government school system, produces better educated students. The argument that the world is a very dangerous place has merit if, the State Department would reflect upon the role the imperial American empire plays in the growing hatred for our once great country. The article, Alternative to Establishment Foreign Policy Politics , states: "The reason why nothing changes to reverse the foreign policy of the imperial empire is that international globalists control the country." As long as this takeover of authentic national security continues, the game of cooked up fear will persist and used as justification for bellicose military deployment. What is the point of trying to bomb the world into submission, when the collateral damage of corpses, become nourishment for even more national hatred? The sarcasm of the War Pigs sums up the irrationality and places the Pentagon budget into a much-needed perspective. "Laughably, the neo-con hawks and Fox News pundits declare that our military is a hollow shell and needs much greater funding to insure our safety from attack by our many enemies. Other countries, such as China and Russia, feel they have no choice but to increase their expenditures on the military. On a percentage basis, they have more than doubled their expenditures in the last ten years, and still are a drop in the ocean compared to American Empire spending." Whatever form sequestration takes or a brokered compromise adopts, limiting the growth in military spending, would be the best expected. The mere thought of trimming back the budget is viewed as a defeat for the defense contractor lobby. Notwithstanding, such a sacrifice for the military-industrial-complex, the country will continue to adjust. Keeping Americans safe starts with defending our borders and not expanding the legionnaire footprint across the globe. The proper role for international relations is to adhere to an American First doctrine. The essay, NATO a Dinosaur Overdue for Extinction , makes the point: "The superpower status of military projection has not brought the promised Pax Americana . . . NATO doesn’t secure an advance for our country, but only provides the military command and enforcement that imposes the will of global masters." Consider the burden placed on the DoD budget to facilitate the inadequacies of allied countries that beg for assistance. The recent French military intervention into Mali comes to mind. Now just, imagine the lurid consequences of aiding Israel in a first strike against Iran. The effort to derail the Chuck Hagel conformation for Defense Secretary is a regretful attempt to wreck an orderly adjustment in the "too big to fail" military supplier culture. Intelligent military expenditures require comprehensive reform of a broken foreign policy mission. Enlistees are placed into harm’s way for wasteful operations. Abusing legitimate defense capacity, to wage foreign adventures is the norm. The budget pare down is an opportunity to force some hard love, that requires prioritization for the real national interest. Abandon the failed objective of overseas nation building and start practicing the vital task of reconstructing our own declining society. An honorable country demands our foregoing the long history of fostering " A Splendid Little War ". A scale back of treasure and resources is prudent and needs to be administered in a manner that secures a cap on future extravagant spending. SARTRE – February 17, 2013 |
ANIMIST ROCK
David Hunt Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 10, 2017
Animist Rock
By David Hunt
The sharp sound of a breaking twig caught my attention. Lifting my eyes from the roots and rocks on the trail under my feet, I saw another hiker sitting on a rock. He looked my way with a friendly smile.
“Heading south?” I asked.
“Yep”
Staring at the man, something felt wrong with my vision. The rocks and the arching green canopy remained true, by the image of the man was hard to hold in my consciousness. One moment he seemed an illusion, the next as solid as the rock he sat upon. Fearing I might be suffering from dehydration, I took a long drink and approached him. I hoped our conversation would provide rest and return my perception to normal. Slipping my pack off, I sat on a rock opposite him. Dressed in the usual hiker apparel, nothing about him seemed out of the ordinary. Dark brown pants, forest green shirt and a nondescript pack. He appeared maybe ten years younger than myself, with a dark tan and five days of beard growth.
“Thru-hiking?” I asked.
He appeared quizzical at first, but replied “I guess you could say that. Not the usual hike with maps and such, just getting out in nature for as long as I can.”
“Sounds like an excellent approach to these beautiful woods”, I said, looking up into the trees. Returning my attention to the man, it suddenly struck me I may be speaking to a woman rather than a man, and found it difficult to remember the details of the person I encountered just a moment before.
“Sometimes I come out here and just sit all day,” the hiker said and taking off his cap, let loose a cascade of brown hair. A flick of the head made me more inclined to think I was speaking to a woman, and now her voice seemed to also confirm this. I shook my head as if that would force more oxygen into my brain. She looked at me and laughed. “I guess I’m not really a hiker as you may have thought. But I am headed south, like I said.”
“If you’re not a hiker, what are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere, on a hiking trail?”
“Lots of animals use these trails. I’d hardly call them hikers.”
“No, I guess not.” I recalled thinking this person was wearing hiking clothes when I first saw her, but that seemed to be a mistake also. She was now wearing mottled clothes in a kind of grey camouflage pattern. And the backpack I thought I had seen was now gone.
“I guess you could call me an ‘animist’ if you need to call me something.”
An alarm went off in my head. New Ager, I suspected. If I didn’t move fast I’d be assaulted with a word salad about how the universe provides, then hit up for food when she was done. But she remained silent, looking up into the trees, then to something on the ground which was invisible to me. I started to rise and adjust my pack, sipping as much water as I could without seeming rude.
“Any water around here? I think I’m getting dehydrated. Feeling a little light headed.”
“There’s several springs the way you’re headed.” She gazed at me, looked me up and down, and said “You’re fine. But you need to sit a while more.” She then rose and stood up on her rock and began executing a series of yoga poses. I watched as I picked up my trekking poles from the ground, but suddenly stopped when it struck me I was not watching a man or woman, but a mountain lion stretching its back as a house cat would. I reflexively stepped back, promptly tripped on a root and fell backward. Struggling to my feet, I prepared to run when the man I thought I had first seen stood over me and extended his hand.
“No thanks,” I said. “I think I’ll just lie here a moment.”
“Suit yourself; I’ll go back to sitting on my rock.”
I laid on the ground. It felt safe. Occasionally I would glance over to the animist’s rock to see what was there. Once it was a small, barefoot child in overalls drawing circles in the dirt with her toe, another time it was a squirrel eating nuts. When the image presented itself as an old tree with winding roots encompassing the rock, I stood, feeling a bit taken advantage of, and spoke to the tree in a somewhat perturbed tone.
“OK, ‘animist’, you’ve had your fun. I’m out of here. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t think this place is good for me.” I stared at the tree with all my concentration, hoping to catch it doing one last transmogrification. But an instant later, I was speaking to the woman again, and all I could think was “why did I think she was a tree?”
“You’ve been hiking a long time, haven’t you?
“About five months.”
“And you see me changing into who knows what, and this is disturbing you.”
“Damn right, it’s disturbing me.”
“Please, don’t be mad, you should be happy. It’s not me that changing, it’s you.”
Now I was looking at a particularly robust growth of moss where the women had been. I walked back to my rock and sat down.
“OK, you’re right. It’s me. I’ve become psychotic and can’t assess reality.”
The moss giggled, like only moss can. I quickly grabbed my camera and took a picture of the moss-covered rock. I reviewed the image I snapped — only a big hunk of bare granite. About what I expected.
“I’d enjoy our conversation much more if you’d pick a form and stick with it,” I said.
Suddenly, being a woman again, the animist said “But you’re also changing forms. When I first saw you, you were a mule, stoically trudging your way up the trail. For a while, you were a huge egg, like an ostrich egg, rolling off the rock. Now, you are a fire. It’s hardly fair to expect me to stick with one form when you take any form you please.”
“Fair to say. So, you’re saying we’re both animists?”
She thought a second, and explained, “You’re a novice animist. I have more experience. You don’t know what to do with the things you see, and more importantly, you don’t know what to do with the things you think. Over five months, you have thought many things that seem strange to you.”
“Yes, I have. I figured that’s just what happens to people when they spend most of their time away from civilization, and in nature instead.”
She considered carefully. “Your explanation is not untrue, but that’s not what’s happening to you.”
“Then tell me what’s happening, please, because I’m a little confused right now.”
Now the woman was gone, but a very cold wind began to blow. Too cold for a summer day. Her voice persisted, however.
“You are losing the distinction between yourself and the rest of the world. What you once thought of as yourself is becoming much more than just the flesh that hangs on your bones.
“I like the flesh that hangs on my bones.
“As you should. But look at it now.”
I looked down, but could no longer see myself.
“To your left,” said the wind
To my left stood my corporeal self. But not just what could be seen on the outside; what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Every muscle, bone, system, connective tissue could be seen at once.
“Meet your body.”
I looked at my body and suddenly realized that it, in addition to being me, was also an entity unto itself. Like a trusted friend, who had been with me my whole life but to whom I barely had given a second thought. I had treated it like baggage for carrying around my vital organs. Despite this neglect it had stuck with me. I felt humbled that after all these years, it was still my friend. At the same time, I felt an excited delight, like what one feels striking up a conversation with a total stranger and, realizing you have so much in common, end up talking for hours.
“Sorry about all that junk food when I was younger,” was all I could think to say to my body. Both my body and the wind seemed to laugh. The wind died down and now a lowly slug crept across the animist rock. My body joined me again and I rose from my rock and sat on the trail next to it. My face inches from the slug, I said “How am I going to function in the real world after this?”
“Why are you talking to a slug?” I spun around to see the original man once again.
“Sorry, I just thought-“
“Not to worry. It’s an important question. You could ask the slug, it has much to show you.”
“I’m sure, but this is good.”
“You’ve lived in civilization your whole life, is that correct?”
“Pretty much.”
“You’re good at it?”
“I get by OK.”
“As you do in nature. But you still lack much. Even out here, you have a lifeline to civilization. It supports you even here. The boots on your feet. The food in your pack. Without all that support, I’m afraid you’d die.”
“Dying out here doesn’t seem so bad. Rather here than some nursing home with tubes stuck in me, sipping pureed peas through a straw.”
“I see the life force in you is strong, I don’t think you should check out yet.”
“Agreed, I’d rather not.”
“Tell me. What are some of the things you’ve learned out here?”
“The first thing that pops into my head is nature doesn’t give a shit whether I live or die.”
This was met by hearty laughter. My animist friend struggled to catch his breath and compose himself. “Your comment was unexpected, but that’s a really important thing to learn. No wonder you can leave yourself and see so much of the life there is. Even some animists never get this.”
I looked down and shook my head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t see where all this is going.”
“You see, there’s that part you lack. On one hand, you know it’s not about you, on the other, you want it all translated into your terms. Consider, for a moment how animals kill and eat other animals. Translated into human terms, this seems cruel to many humans. But it is a matter of scale. Think nothing of the war raging in our bodies at a microscopic level. Microbes kill and eat invaders constantly. But it keeps us alive, so if we think of it at all, we’re happy with it.
“Magnify the scale a million times and imagine yourself on the savannahs of Africa. The cheetah raids the nest of the mongoose for it’s young, the mongoose eats the lizard, the lizard eats the bird eggs, the bird eats the flies whose larvae might eventually consume the remains of the cheetah. A macabre ballet playing out for millions of years.
“While you see the life that is yourself, this other life form is practically invisible to you. You are aware of it at some level, but your thoughts do not coalesce it into a life with an identity of its own. Even as you talk to me, you see only vignettes of this larger life, one at a time. Its totality escapes you just as the microbes in your body are unaware of your existence”.
“Can we talk a about you for a minute? Are you part of some tribe, or cult, or something?”
“No,” he said.
“Are you even a real person?”
“Ummm, yes.”
“Where do you live?”
“Here”
“What do you eat? Do you even have to eat to survive?”
“Most definitely. As to what I eat, I eat everything.”
“So, you’re an omnivore?”
“Not exactly. See this root?” He bent over and yanked a plant out of the ground. “There is energy in this root. I eat the root (he gobbled it down) and now the energy is in me. Before it was in the root it was in centuries of other life, plant and animal, that died and became soil. So, I eat a plant, I eat an animal, it’s all the same to me. But I prefer to eat the plants. Animals eat plants, but they shit out lots of the good stuff, so I usually go for the plants. The total package.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “I never thought of it that way. Let me ask you another question.”
“Sure.”
“When you look at, say, a lizard, how do you know it’s a lizard, and not the lives of the insects it ate, or the plants the insects ate, or the nutrients the plant took from the soil?”
“Well, there’s more to a lizard than just the insects it eats, or the plants the insects eat. Also, a lizard is about the size and shape of a lizard and moves like a lizard.”
“So, you just see a lizard?
“The lizard and the insects, and the plants. The soil, rain, sun, it’s all there.”
“I would think that’s a lot to process.”
“It makes life more wonderful. Much easier, I think, than all the baggage your mind hauls around. But then, you don’t really deal with it, because it’s you. It’s all neatly confined in the package you call you. I’m surprised when I look at you and see all you carry around that is about you. But let me ask you a question.”
“Please.”
The man was gone and a 400-pound black bear appeared in his place. The bear growled, rose up on its hind legs then crashed his front paws onto the ground. ‘Threat display’ I assured myself as I struggled to clamp my sphincters shut. The bear circled around me, its hair raised along the length of its spine, ears pinned back. I remained motionless out of fear and tried not to look at it. It sat in front of me, and I began slowly walking away, backwards, looking up in the trees so it would not feel threatened by my gaze.
“You could have been food.” My attention riveted back to the spot the bear had sat. An ancient woman now sat on the rock, her face more creases than skin, with wispy, white hair that grabbed at the air all around her.
“Shit, I wish you wouldn’t do that. You scared the hell out of me.” At that, I half lowered, half collapsed to the ground.
The old woman’s eyes sparkled with laughter. “I didn’t do that one. You brought it on yourself. But no matter. You were teaching yourself a lesson.”
“I was?”
“Since you can see yourself, at least a little, as part of a bigger world where all things, one way or the other, become part of the life of something else, you were wondering about yourself as food for other living things. You are conflicted because you know you want to exempt yourself from that part of life. You want to live.”
“I’ve always known that. It’s hardly a lesson.
“Hush,” she said seeming annoyed. “That’s not what I’m talking about. You are wondering if all these other living things have the same desire to live, and fear of death that you have.
“It was crossing my mind before a bear started to attack me.”
She waived her hand in front of her face in a dismissive manner. “So, what do you think; do they?”
“I don’t know. I’m pretty sure we have no choice. Digested in the belly of a predator, or consumed by microbes, our fate is sealed.
The old woman drew in a long breath and let out a frustrated sigh. “I know you are bothered by your fate. Do all things have the same desire to live and fear of death as you?”
“Seeing as they all have defense mechanisms, I suppose they do.”
“My, my, my, you are so logical. And a biologist too! You know why things have defense mechanisms.”
“So they can keep on living.”
“Really. Billions of years of existence of the universe all happened so you could keep on living?”
“I’m not just talking about me.”
“Of course, you are. Not the point.”
Her persistent dismissal of everything I said was beginning to irk me. I was, however, thankful to be talking to what appeared as human and not a tyrannosaurus rex.
“Billions of years of evolution did happen, and I do want to keep on living, so yes,” I said. “Maybe in small part that explains my appearance in the universe.”
She smiled kindly for a moment, which I found reassuring.
“Feelings exist throughout life,” she said. They are not the sole possession of humans. For example, let’s get down on the ground and wait. Pick a spot and pay attention to it.
I lay on the ground, picking a spot where the foliage edged along the trail. We both waited. I glanced over at the woman and noticed she was now a shrew. I thought it rather remarkable that I didn’t find this remarkable in the least. Then I noticed I was also a shrew.
“Sh-h-h-h,” she said quietly.
A white grub appeared from beneath a stick. In a flash, I grabbed it with my claws and sank my teeth into it’s white, juicy pulp. The sensation was like nothing I had ever experienced. Excitement, joy, and a feeling of profound revelation as I realized what was happening at a quantum level. The turning of kinetic energy into potential energy and potential energy into kinetic energy, back and forth for billions of years in the past and for billions of years into the future.
“Whoa!” I shot upright, shaking, my eyes bulging. I spat out pieces grub. My animist friend and I were humans again.
“I bet you never felt that before.” The old woman said with a sly grin.
“What was in that grub? Some kind of hallucinogen?”
“Can you see, or at least imagine, how humans don’t have a monopoly on the things that define life?”
“OK. But my part of the life works different from those other parts. I — “
“You’re special?”
“Different,” I said with a touch of defiance. “I don’t think that tree over there, seeing an approaching lumberjack, feels what I felt being stalked by that bear.”
I felt a sudden vibration go through me. And then another. I looked down to see a tiny man striking me with an axe. I tried to kick it away with my leg, but my leg wouldn’t move. Staring at my feet, I soon realized they were roots, and the man, normal sized, only appeared small from hundreds of feet up in the forest canopy. At first, he was only a minor annoyance. What could a little speck like that do to me, a mighty tree? But as he continued without relent, I heard creeks and groans from inside my trunk. My branches and leaves began to shake. A prolonged crescendoing moan followed by a crash left me with a new view of the world. Where I once looked down, I now looked up and saw the gap in the forest canopy where I had stood for generations. But still, I was not afraid. All my branches and leaves looked green and alive, but I could sense water and nutrients were no longer flowing through my xylem and phloem layers. I was dying. But I did not experience the terror I felt with the bear. I was simply waiting for the bugs and rain to soften my wood and for a seed brought by the wind to come and rest in the knurls of my bark and begin life again. ‘This isn’t so bad I thought’.
But none of that happened. Instead, I was stripped of my branches, sawed into sections and loaded on a truck. What followed over the next few weeks was blurry, but I finally came to rest in the form of a magazine. I took inventory of my surroundings. Thanks, I suppose, to my former existence as a human in civilization, I could make out where I was. I seemed to be resting on a table, the remains of one my woodland kin, next to what must have been an infusion of beans — picked, roasted, ground up and boiled in hot water in a coffee pot. Before I knew it, I was being lifted and paged through by a portly old gentleman, dressed in fine business apparel.
“I say, Master Magazine. Quite a journey you’ve had.”
A British aristocrat. I must be in hell, I thought. I wanted to strangle him, or at least inflict a paper cut.
“There, there. None of that nonsense,” he said picking up my thoughts. “I’m here to help you. You must realize by now what a pile all this animist nonsense is. Your tree-hugging friends in the forest did you no favors. Quite lucky, really, that you ended up here.”
Picking up on his hilted speech, I said “I think the nonsense is coming from you.”
“We’ll just see about that. You’ve been a tree and you saw you felt no fear at dying. In fact, you’re quite alive and talking to me, in a sense.”
“Are you an animist too?”
“Well, of a different sort. You see, I’m the anima of civilization. I’m the collective being that civilized people form. I guess in animist terms, you could say I’m the original evil spirit. Allow me to introduce myself. Lord Huffingbutt, at your service. If you need anything, just ask and I’ll have my butler get it for you.”
“You’re killing yourself, and the rest of the planet too,” I said, sidestepping the all pleasantries.
“What can I say. What we’ve made is just too good to not take advantage of while we can. You see, civilization is the only life form that matters now. Long ago we began to “otherize” animals, deciding they were of little consequence in our grand scheme. This was necessary to the growth of civilization. Lord knows it wasn’t easy, everybody putting nature on equal footing with humans. Over the years, more and more non-human life become categorized as Other. Now, only a few are spared this fate. Most noticeably dogs, although why they were chosen is a mystery to me. I rather thought the octopus would have made a much more intelligent companion. But there you have it. Like so many widgets in a factory, everything is now a consumable resource. Why, we even have the high priests of modern society to back us up. No scientist would dare suggest animals or plants have feelings. It would be blasphemy! They’d be the laughing stock of their professions. Their funding would be cut.”
“Quite sure of yourself, aren’t you?” I said.
“All the kingdoms, or should I say, slavedoms of life are mine to make a profit off to the best of my God Given abilities.” He sat back, taking a sip from his coffee, signaling that as far as he was concerned, there was nothing further to be said.
“You’re insane. It doesn’t bother you that two generations from now, humans will be going extinct from your excess?”
“Two generations, a thousand. What difference does it make? We live in the here and now. “The future is the future’s problem. They’ll deal with it or they won’t. Not our place to say.”
“And if they don’t? Humans go extinct.”
“Quite right, ol’ boy.”
“Ol’ boy?” I thought I was a magazine. I looked around and saw my human corporeal self again. I looked up at the aristocrat, but all I saw was forest and the animist’s rock. Seated upon it now was the young woman.
“That was weird,” I said.
“So, does the tree feel fear?” she said.
“Not fear like I know, but it is aware.”
“Why do you think it doesn’t feel fear?”
“It has no nervous system?”
“An aptly named system,” she said with a thoughtful expression. “Nervous systems make us nervous. But they don’t make us sentient.”
“I see,” I said, but wasn’t sure I did.
“Did you sense it wished for life?” she asked.
“I got that impression.”
“And the anima of civilized beings as represented by the British aristocrat?”
“A self-centered existence with little concern for the future.”
“But as a product of civilization yourself, you share many of the same attributes.”
“True,” I conceded. “But at least I have conflict. Lord Huffingbutt had none, no sense of when to stop.”
“As you should. Civilization is sucking the life from our planet to support itself. In the grand scheme of things, it will be a blink of the eye. A mutation that had its day in the sun, then died when it drank all the water in its tidal pool. If humans are to survive much longer on this planet, we must answer the question, how should we live? How are humans supposed to live so this doesn’t happen?”
“I’m happy with my simple hiking lifestyle. Perhaps we should all live as simply as possible.”
“No argument there. But it still leaves many issues unresolved.
“For example?”
“Among the more concerned people of your age, there is debate as to whether it’s OK to kill other sentient beings as food. Is it?” the young woman animist asked me.
“Since, as a sentient being, I would not want to be killed, I guess not.”
“But what will you eat?”
“Plants?” I knew where this was going.
“But your tree-self was aware, therefore sentient. Something has to die for you to live. Things have to die for things to live.”
“Is there no other way?” I asked.
I was once again speaking to the ancient women. After my experience turning into a magazine with her, I was more than a little concerned what my fate might be next.
“There is no other way.” the old woman said. “There was, but that as a long, long time ago.”
“And how do you know that?” I challenged.
“I remember.”
Being in no position to argue, I said “Tell me more.”
“Did you ever wonder when feeding first began? When this whole life eating life business started? For a long time, it was just simple one celled things, living off sunlight or absorbing minerals from sulfur vents. A nifty chemistry experiment and no moral dilemmas. But about 750 million years ago, feeding first appeared on earth. These were protozoa and sponges. Pretty passive critters, actually. They just sat in the ocean, waiting for some other life, living or dead, didn’t matter, to float by and get caught in them.
With feeding, amazing things began to happen. Some 540 million years ago, the start of what’s called the Cambrian era, things really began to take off. The number of species skyrocketed. At the beginning of this was the appearance of sea worms with large jaws to grab and kill prey. Nasty buggers, not big enough to hurt us though. Real tiny. Protoconodonts they call them. You can look it up.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“This wouldn’t be remarkable, except following the appearance of these worms, many more creatures began to show up. Creatures with teeth, horns, claws, and armor. All sorts of things to protect them from these worms. ‘Course, with all this new weaponry, they could do more than protect themselves from worms, they also went on the hunt themselves. The world’s first arms race was on. Turned the Cambrian period into an explosion of life.”
As she spoke I felt the warm Cambrian sea all around me, teeming with bizarre life forms large and small. “So, killing is good?” I asked.
The old woman smiled and looked me in the eye. “In the larger scheme of things, yes. Done the natural way, it actually increases biodiversity.”
“I’ll be dammed,” was my response.
“Probably, but it won’t be all your fault,” she said.
“Let me ask you this. Does life have rights?”
“Yes,” she said.
“What rights?”
“The right to be born, the right to live and the right to die. Actually, those things happen, right or not. But since they do, I think we can call them rights.”
“So, all plant and animal harvesting practiced by Lord Huffingbutt and his ilk is OK?
“No. Animals also have the right not to be born, raised and killed in civilization, or anything approximating it.”
“So, basically, animal husbandry, agriculture — “
“Not good. When nature kills, it results in a vibrant, diverse biosphere. When Civilization does it, the number of species plummets. Life on earth, as we are seeing, withers and dims. Humans have those same rights. It is unfortunate that civilized humans can’t see how their subservience to their civilization makes them domesticated animals for slaughter.”
A small change of light came over the woods. The brilliant highlights and deep shadows stole away and with them the animist also faded. The forest was silent and the temperature dropped. I waited for one of my animist friends to appear on the rock and pick up the thread of the conversation, but I was alone. Questions I wished I’d asked raced through my mind, about the spirits of rocks and places, about humans and fire, life and death. Glancing in the direction of the animist rock, it was gone also. I could have stood there for hours reflecting on my experience but it would be dark soon and I needed to hike ahead for water before making camp.
Passing the spot where the animist rock had been, I saw a question mark written in the dirt. I remembered the small girl from earlier drawing in the dirt with her toe. I pondered the meaning of this, remaining after all that had happened. “OK, animist rock. What is your question for me?” |
A 1581 depiction of a man and his wife, who is sporting a visard. Habits de France/Public Domain
For refined, upper-class ladies in 16th-century Europe, getting a tan, especially on your face, was not a good look.
The implication of such coloring was that one must work outside, and thus, quite possibly be poor (cue gasps and swooning faints). So to make sure they didn’t get burned, some 16th-century ladies wore face masks called visards (or vizards) that covered their delicate visages. Unfortunately, the masks also made it so they couldn’t speak. And, look as if they belonged to an evil cult.
The visard was a very simple mask that nonetheless made quite an impression. Only a handful of surviving visards have ever been found. Luckily, the most intact specimen, the “Daventry Mask,” gives a clear picture of a visard’s construction. Found tucked away in the wall of a 16th-century stone building near the town of Daventry in Northamptonshire, the mask consists of an outer layer of black velvet, followed by layers of pressed paper, with a lining of silk on the inside. The oval face covering extends out to accommodate the nose, and there are small holes for eyeholes and an opening for the mouth.
The Daventry Mask in all its glory. Scott/CC BY-SA 3.0
Along with the mask, a small glass bead was discovered that would have been attached to a string behind the visard’s mouth hole. This bead (sometimes a button) was how the visard was kept on the face. As opposed to unseemly head straps, a lady sporting a visard would hold the bead between her teeth to keep the mask in place. If she wanted to talk, she’d have to remove the mask. This had the side effect of essentially silencing the wearer. In the Elizabethan era, when visards were at their pinnacle of popularity, this silence was generally viewed as adding mystery to a lady’s character.
One of the earliest references to such masks comes from a 16th century text by William Harrison called Description of England. The author describes the wearing of masks coming to England from a trend that started in France. For a time after the trend caught on, the visard was a high fashion item among the rich and socially active. In fact, one of the only other surviving examples of a visard is an accessory for a doll, rather than a full-size mask. The visard had apparently become so popular that even children’s toys were incorporating them. But the inherent creepiness of a blank, black face mask was apparently not lost on everyone.
Even in white, the visard is pretty creepy. Abraham de Bruyn/Public Domain
In 1583, the Christian polemicist Phillip Stubbes released a pamphlet called The Anatomy of Abuses. Among various other screeds (one chapter is titled “On the evils and punishment of whoredom”), Stubbes describes what he sees as the horrors of the visard, writing:
When they use to ride abrod they have invisories, or visors made of velvet, wherwith they cover all their faces, having holes made in them against their eyes, whereout they look. So that if a man, that knew not their guise before, should chaunce to meet one of them, hee would think hee met a monster or a devil, for face hee can see none, but two brode holes against her eyes with glasses in them.
Despite their unsettling and silencing influence, visards are believed to have remained in vogue until at least the 17th century before fading into historical obscurity. Similar masks can be seen in paintings as late the 18th century. Today’s fashion trends will no doubt look strange or creepy in a few centuries, but even in that far future, visards will still be high on the list of history’s most terrifying fashion moments.
Correction: This post previously referred to a book called Description of England in Shakespeare’s Youth, which was the incorrect title. |
The new Nintendo video game, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, is on pace to become one of the best-selling video games ever. And its popularity seems to have spawned another craze -- demand for real ocarinas, those flute-like musical instruments that look like sweet potatoes with finger holes.
In the video game, its elfin hero, Link, travels through time and the magical world of Hyrule, doing battle with his nemesis, Ganondorf, to save Princess Zelda. Playing his ocarina transports Link through time and space.
Many Nintendo fans are transporting themselves on the Web in search of their own ocarinas. Anita Feng, an artisan in Issaquah, Wash., who has been making traditional-style ceramic ocarinas for 25 years, has seen her business more than double to about 60 handmade instruments a month, since the Nintendo game was released in November.
''Right now, about three-fourths of my business is from people who played the game,'' said Ms. Feng, who operates the Anita's Ocarinas site (www.scn.org/bg599). She said she received 5 to 10 orders daily, primarily for the 10-hole ocarinas, like the one played by Luke.
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Ms. Feng said she might have to hire help to handle the new orders.
The ocarina boomlet brings rare cachet to an instrument believed to have been invented in the 1860's by an Italian, Guiseppe Donati, who gave them a name meaning ''little goose.'' But then, rarely has there been a video game as popular as the latest version of Zelda, who has been a Nintendo character since 1987.
During the last six weeks of 1998, the game sold about 2.5 million units, generating $150 million in revenue. Nintendo is projecting eventual sales of six million copies or more of Ocarina in Time. |
Published online 12 August 2011 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2011.479
News
Marine protected area sees fish increase fourfold, sharks tenfold, in a decade.
Cabo Pulmo's fish population is booming because the locals have switched from fishing to ecotourism. O. Aburto-Oropeza
At conferences, Grant Galland calls the marine protected area he works on in Cabo Pulmo in Mexico the "best in the world".
"I do it in part to see if anyone challenges me or shows me one that has been more successful," says Galland, a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. So far, he says, no one has.
Cabo Pulmo National Park covers just 71 square kilometres — a little bigger than Manhattan — at the southern end of the Baja California Peninsula. In PLoS One this week1, a team including Galland reports that fish biomass in the marine protected area (MPA) increased more than fourfold between 1999 and 2009.
Fish biomass elsewhere in Mexico, including in other marine protected areas with weaker enforcement, didn't improve at all over the same period.
The area owes its success, says Galland, to the efforts of one local family that campaigned for the reserve's creation in 1995 and is devoted to policing it. The family used to be fishers, but decided it would be better to preserve their ecosystem and make a living from tourism, says Galland.
They now watch for boats and head out to deter them from fishing. "They're like vigilantes," says Galland. Although just 35% of the park is designated as 'no take', the local population of about 100 villagers follow a no-fishing policy for the entire reserve, says study leader Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, also of Scripps.
Five locally owned tourism businesses in Cabo Pulmo pull in enough money to earn their 30 employees an average of US$18,000 per year, compared with the Mexican average of around $15,000. "If you can make more money doing tourism, that unlocks the real benefit of an MPA. You genuinely have a win-win situation on your hand," says Peter Jones, a marine biologist turned human geographer at University College London, UK, who studies how to make effective marine reserves.
Shark infested
Aburto-Oropeza's team found an average 463% increase in the number of fish in Cabo Pulmo. Top predators such as sharks fared best: their biomass went up more than tenfold, perhaps because they are drawn to the area by all the fish, or perhaps because the reserve is a good breeding ground.
The percentage recovery isn't unprecedented – one recent study found an average of 446% in 55 MPAs2. But the density of fish living on the park's reef, at 4 tonnes per hectare, is the best the authors have seen anywhere on record.
The recovery at Cabo Pulmo seems to be "exceptionally good" agrees Peter Sale, Assistant Director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, who is based in Port Carling, Ontario, Canada.
The divers also noticed Cabo Pulmo fish doing strange things. On most Mexican reefs, a scale-eating blenny (Plagiotremus azaleus) sneaks up on its prey by hiding amid schools of hundreds of similar-looking but harmless Cortez Rainbow Wrasse (Thalassoma lucasanum). But Cabo Pulmo's blennies hunt in packs of several hundred. "They terrorize the other fish," says Galland. This behaviour has not been seen anywhere else3.
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Such changes highlight the possibility that a reserve may not return to its pristine state. "We don't know if it's returning to normal or turning into something else," says Galland.
The recovery shows that even small reserves can allow fish populations in the Gulf of California to recover, say the authors. But they add that the area is under threat from the development of a resort aiming to house thousands of tourists and a marina just a few kilometres to the north.
Galland and others are now working to compile environmental data, such as the direction of prevailing ocean currents, in an effort to quantify the probable impact of the resort and petition against its development. |
Cristian Roldan was a Husky before he was a Sounder. We’ve got lots of photos in our archives that show the Seattle favorite back when he was a standout at Montlake. Photographer Wilson Tsoi captured much of Roldan’s college career. It’s fun to look back at a younger version of a player who now is a leader on the pitch for the Sounders in MLS.
The goalWA archive site also has these amazing Roldan sequence photos of a goal he scored against the Cal Bears in 2013.
University of Washington men’s soccer team defeats University of Portland 2-1 in extra time at Merlo Field on September 27, 2014. University of Washington men’s soccer team defeats University of Portland 2-1 in extra time at Merlo Field on September 27, 2014. University of Washington men’s soccer team defeats University of Portland 2-1 in extra time at Merlo Field on September 27, 2014. Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer team defeats Furman in PK shootout in NCAA D1 second round at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 23, 2014 University of Washington men’s soccer team defeats Pennsylvania 3-1 at Husky Soccer Stadium on September 14, 2014. (Photo by Wilson Tsoi) Washington men’s soccer defeats San Diego State at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 26, 2014 Washington men’s soccer defeats San Diego State at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 26, 2014 Washington men’s soccer defeats San Diego State at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 26, 2014 Washington men’s soccer defeats San Diego State at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 26, 2014 Washington men’s soccer defeats San Diego State at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 26, 2014 Washington men’s soccer defeats San Diego State at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 26, 2014 Washington men’s soccer defeats San Diego State at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 26, 2014 Washington men’s soccer defeats San Diego State at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 26, 2014 Washington men’s soccer defeats San Diego State at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 26, 2014 Washington men’s soccer defeats San Diego State at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 26, 2014 Washington men’s soccer hosts UCLA Bruins at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer hosts UCLA Bruins at Husky Soccer Stadium on October 23, 2014 Washington men’s soccer hosts Oregon State Beavers on a Senior Day at Husky Soccer Stadium on November 16, 2014 University of Washington men’s soccer team defeats Connecticut 3-1 at Husky Soccer Stadium on September 12, 2014. (Photo by Wilson Tsoi) |
In boxing, your "beard" is another word for your chin. Which, for the uninitiated, is fight vernacular for how well you can take a punch and still respond. It is the great equalizer in the sport (Rocky Marciano and Jake LaMotta made entire Hall-of-Fame careers on the thickness of their "beards"). And it's often what allows boxers to turn fights around and overcome adversity in other areas of their game while in the ring.
It's fitting then, that Houston's own Beard has been featuring boxing as part of his off season training regimen. He led the Rockets through last season's adversity of a mountain of injuries. They also took a 3-1 series haymaker from the L.A. Clippers, failed to go down, and responded decisively to turn the series and the season into an successful one.
Harden told the Houston Chronicle's Jonathan Feigen that his offseason training program was designed to feature activities that increased his strength and conditioning, and one of the main components of his regimen was boxing.
"Spin class, workouts in the pool, boxing, things like that to where I'm not pounding on my knees and to where I'll be in condition and effective as well."
Boxing workouts are known for increasing general conditioning, core strength, reflexes and, of course, toughness. And it appears as though the Rockets star shooting guard has dove into the Sweet Science head first as part of his routine, even challenging the press yesterday to "try me."
As the most promising Rockets season in nearly two decades is getting ready to unfold, it's encouraging to see Houston's most important player working hard in the off season and looking for new and diverse ways to get a leg up in physical conditioning.
In what is sure to be yet another meat grinder in this year's Western Conference playoff race, any edge, even a small one in the summer conditioning program, is a welcome addition that will hopefully pay great dividends during the regular season and beyond. |
Genma Shiranui (不知火ゲンマ, Shiranui Genma) is a tokubetsu jōnin of Konohagakure and an elite bodyguard to the Hokage.
Contents show]
Background
When Genma became a genin, he was put on a team with Might Guy and Ebisu, under the leadership of Chōza Akimichi.[4] At one point, they were confronted by a generation of Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist, only to be saved by Might Duy. During part of their chūnin exams, his team confronted Team Minato.[5] Other than that, not much is known about Genma's background except for the fact that he is an elite guard to the Hokage. During his time serving under the Fourth Hokage, he was taught the Flying Thunder Formation Technique.[6]
Personality
Genma is shown to be very calm, impartial, collected, proud and casual on his actions. He is never seen being boisterous or lost in difficult situations and is confident enough to take charge of large groups of ninja. It was also stated that he hates Orochimaru for power-playing.[1] He is also a jovial person, prone to wisecracking at times. When Shikaku Nara contacted him, he made it a point to first tell Genma not to make fun of the situation.[7]
Appearance
Genma has brown, shoulder-length hair which hangs about his face and brown eyes. He wears his forehead protector like a bandanna, and the standard jōnin outfit and always has his trademark senbon in his mouth. As a genin, he wore a dark, baggy outfit with a hooded red and black jacket. He also wore a black choker, a strap around his leg, and a senbon in his mouth.[5][8]
Abilities
As a well noted veteran shinobi, Genma is known for taking part in difficult missions because of his skills.[2] He was able to hold his own against an elite jōnin like Baki. While physically fatigued due to a prior mission, with the assistance of Raidō Namiashi, he was able to force the Sound Four into activating the second stage of their cursed seals.[9] His abilities are further attested by the fact that he was placed in the Hokage Guard Platoon.
During the Fourth Hokage's reign, he was taught the Flying Thunder Formation Technique in order to teleport to the Hokage's side when needed. He performs this technique in collaboration with his fellow guards, Raidō and Iwashi Tatami.[6] He is also able to spit a senbon from his mouth with enough force to deflect a kunai.[10]
Stats
Databook Ninjutsu Taijutsu Genjutsu Intelligence Strength Speed Stamina Hand seals Total Second 4.5 3 3 3 3 3.5 3 4 27
Part I
Chūnin Exams
After Hayate's death, Genma proctored the final round matches of the Chūnin Exams. After Neji's battle with Naruto, Genma tells him that even a caged bird can eventually free themselves. As the invasion is launched, he enquires whether or not Orochimaru was leading the assault as he faces off against Baki. After Gaara retreats from the arena, he advises Sasuke to chase after him, telling him that he was already at the chūnin level and to do what he must in order to protect Konoha. His fight is, however, interrupted when the invasion is called off.
Sasuke Recovery Mission
When Tsunade returns to the village, Genma and Aoba are assigned to announce her inauguration as the Fifth Hokage. He is later sent on a mission with Raidō, Iwashi Tatami and Shizune. As they return home after completing the mission Genma and Raidō encounter the Sound Four. He inquires about what they were carrying since they were coming from the direction of Konoha. In retaliation Sakon throws a kunai at him but Genma deflects it with his senbon. In order to defeat Raidō and Genma, the Sound Four activate level two of their cursed seals, leaving Genma and Raidō gravely injured and in serious need of medical attention. Shizune stabilises their conditions and takes them back to Konoha for further treatment.
Part II
Twelve Guardian Ninja
Main article: Twelve Guardian Ninja (Arc) In the anime, he is seen giving out orders to a large group of chūnin during Furido's attack on the village.
Akatsuki Suppression Mission
In the anime, Genma was present at Asuma Sarutobi's funeral, mourning his death.
Pain's Assault
He appears with Yamato and other jōnin helping to restore the village after Pain and Naruto's fight. He corrected Kotetsu Hagane telling him that the village wasn't all their forefathers left them, the people were still there.
Fourth Shinobi World War: Countdown
In the anime, Genma is present at the war council meeting that Tsunade convenes.
Fourth Shinobi World War: Confrontation
Genma along with Raidō were tasked with guarding the daimyō at their safe house during the Fourth Shinobi World War. While on duty, he and Raidō conversed about the daimyō and their medal-naming argument that was going on. He told Raidō not to make fun of them as it was their job and that without medals, they wouldn't know what was honourable and what wasn't. He then told him that if he just stood around thinking of medals, he'd never get one though, and to stay alert as they were going to relocate soon.
After Black Zetsu located the daimyō he was intercepted by Mei Terumī. Genma alongside Raidō, Chōjūrō and the rest of her team arrived shortly after. When Naruto's shadow clone arrived on the battlefield, and crashed head first into a tree after Black Zetsu sidestepped him, Genma agreed with Raidō's sentiments that Naruto had not changed much and still rushed into a fight without thinking.
Fourth Shinobi World War: Climax
While battling Black Zetsu, he marvelled at Chōjūrō's skill with his sword. He was later contacted by Shikaku who before beginning immediately told him not to makes any jokes because they were in dire straits. However, after telling him that the real Madara Uchiha had been reincarnated to the battlefield, Genma claimed that he couldn't help himself this time. As he, Raidō and Iwashi prepared to transport Mei using Minato's Flying Thunder God Technique as per Shikaku's orders, he explained to her that he was part of the Hokage bodyguard detail and as such was taught how to use the technique by the Fourth during his rule. As soon as Tsunade — who was marked with the technique's seal — had been transported to the battlefield, they performed the technique and stood behind the other Kage as they confronted Madara.
As Mei and A engaged Madara in battle, Iwashi prematurely anticipated his defeat, Genma however, noted the extent of damage inflicted upon the surroundings by the enemy and warns his partner to stay focused while Raidō commented that there is no way to just force their way through. Dodai then enlisted their help to go after the Kabuto-controlled Mū who had began to emerge from the debris. The four men then give chase to the Tsuchikage but their target is soon slapped away by A during the Raikage's assault on Madara. As the battle between the Kage and Madara waged on, they continued to give chase to the evasive Mū.
With the Impure World Reincarnation released, Genma watched alongside his comrades as Mū was enveloped in a light of sorts before beginning to deconstruct.
Kaguya Ōtsutsuki Strikes
In the anime, Naruto and Sasuke eventually release the Infinite Tsukuyomi, freeing Genma and the rest of the world from the genjutsu, thus ending the Fourth Shinobi World War. On the day of the Sixth Hokage's inauguration, Genma and other shinobi guard the village gate, not allowing anyone not authorised to enter the village.
In Other Media
Video Games
Genma Shiranui is a playable character in the following video games:
Trivia
"Genma" is the Japanese name of the Alpha Coronæ Borealis. "Shiranui" ( 不知火 ) means "unknown fire" or "Phosphorescent Foam". It is also a term given for will-o-wisps and is the name of a Japanese destroyer.
) means "unknown fire" or "Phosphorescent Foam". It is also a term given for will-o-wisps and is the name of a Japanese destroyer. Genma stated during the Chūnin Exams that Naruto had a mean "left hook", this might be a mistake in translation. However, Naruto was doing an uppercut at the time, not a left hook though it was the left hand which was in use. However, this most likely implies that he meant that Naruto is a heavy hitter, or packs a serious punch.
Studio Pierrot's Settei sheets of Genma show that he was 148 cm around the time of the Kannabi Bridge incident.
According to the databook(s): His favourite food is pumpkin broth and his least favourite food is spinach. Genma's hobby is travelling. His favourite phrase is "No words, but action" ( 不言実行 , Bugen Jikkō ). Genma has completed 935 official missions in total: 185 D-rank, 220 C-rank, 454 B-rank, 74 A-rank, 2 S-rank.
In Naruto: Ultimate Ninja, Genma's hair seems to be white in colour, instead of brown in the anime and manga.
Quotes
(To Neji) " When captured birds grow wiser, they try to open the cage with their beaks. They don't give up, because they want to fly again. " [11]
" (To the Sound Four) "Trust me. You're pawns of Orochimaru and you don't want to mess with Konoha shinobi."[12]
References |
NUMBERS 4
« Numbers 3 | Numbers 4 | Numbers 5 »
Duties of the Kohathites, Gershonites, and Merarites
4:1 The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying,
2 “Take a census of the sons of Kohath from among the sons of Levi, by their clans and their fathers’ houses,
3 from thirty years old up to fifty years old, all who can come on duty, to do the work in the tent of meeting.
4 This is the service of the sons of Kohath in the tent of meeting: the most holy things.
5 When the camp is to set out, Aaron and his sons shall go in and take down the veil of the screen and cover the ark of the testimony with it.
6 Then they shall put on it a covering of goatskin and spread on top of that a cloth all of blue, and shall put in its poles.
7 And over the table of the bread of the Presence they shall spread a cloth of blue and put on it the plates, the dishes for incense, the bowls, and the flagons for the drink offering; the regular showbread also shall be on it.
8 Then they shall spread over them a cloth of scarlet and cover the same with a covering of goatskin, and shall put in its poles.
9 And they shall take a cloth of blue and cover the lampstand for the light, with its lamps, its tongs, its trays, and all the vessels for oil with which it is supplied.
10 And they shall put it with all its utensils in a covering of goatskin and put it on the carrying frame.
11 And over the golden altar they shall spread a cloth of blue and cover it with a covering of goatskin, and shall put in its poles.
12 And they shall take all the vessels of the service that are used in the sanctuary and put them in a cloth of blue and cover them with a covering of goatskin and put them on the carrying frame.
13 And they shall take away the ashes from the altar and spread a purple cloth over it.
14 And they shall put on it all the utensils of the altar, which are used for the service there, the fire pans, the forks, the shovels, and the basins, all the utensils of the altar; and they shall spread on it a covering of goatskin, and shall put in its poles.
15 And when Aaron and his sons have finished covering the sanctuary and all the furnishings of the sanctuary, as the camp sets out, after that the sons of Kohath shall come to carry these, but they must not touch the holy things, lest they die. These are the things of the tent of meeting that the sons of Kohath are to carry.
16 “And Eleazar the son of Aaron the priest shall have charge of the oil for the light, the fragrant incense, the regular grain offering, and the anointing oil, with the oversight of the whole tabernacle and all that is in it, of the sanctuary and its vessels.”
17 The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying,
18 “Let not the tribe of the clans of the Kohathites be destroyed from among the Levites,
19 but deal thus with them, that they may live and not die when they come near to the most holy things: Aaron and his sons shall go in and appoint them each to his task and to his burden,
20 but they shall not go in to look on the holy things even for a moment, lest they die.”
21 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying,
22 “Take a census of the sons of Gershon also, by their fathers’ houses and by their clans.
23 From thirty years old up to fifty years old, you shall list them, all who can come to do duty, to do service in the tent of meeting.
24 This is the service of the clans of the Gershonites, in serving and bearing burdens:
25 they shall carry the curtains of the tabernacle and the tent of meeting with its covering and the covering of goatskin that is on top of it and the screen for the entrance of the tent of meeting
26 and the hangings of the court and the screen for the entrance of the gate of the court that is around the tabernacle and the altar, and their cords and all the equipment for their service. And they shall do all that needs to be done with regard to them.
27 All the service of the sons of the Gershonites shall be at the command of Aaron and his sons, in all that they are to carry and in all that they have to do. And you shall assign to their charge all that they are to carry.
28 This is the service of the clans of the sons of the Gershonites in the tent of meeting, and their guard duty is to be under the direction of Ithamar the son of Aaron the priest.
29 “As for the sons of Merari, you shall list them by their clans and their fathers’ houses.
30 From thirty years old up to fifty years old, you shall list them, everyone who can come on duty, to do the service of the tent of meeting.
31 And this is what they are charged to carry, as the whole of their service in the tent of meeting: the frames of the tabernacle, with its bars, pillars, and bases,
32 and the pillars around the court with their bases, pegs, and cords, with all their equipment and all their accessories. And you shall list by name the objects that they are required to carry.
33 This is the service of the clans of the sons of Merari, the whole of their service in the tent of meeting, under the direction of Ithamar the son of Aaron the priest.”
34 And Moses and Aaron and the chiefs of the congregation listed the sons of the Kohathites, by their clans and their fathers’ houses,
35 from thirty years old up to fifty years old, everyone who could come on duty, for service in the tent of meeting;
36 and those listed by clans were 2,750.
37 This was the list of the clans of the Kohathites, all who served in the tent of meeting, whom Moses and Aaron listed according to the commandment of the Lord by Moses.
38 Those listed of the sons of Gershon, by their clans and their fathers’ houses,
39 from thirty years old up to fifty years old, everyone who could come on duty for service in the tent of meeting—
40 those listed by their clans and their fathers’ houses were 2,630.
41 This was the list of the clans of the sons of Gershon, all who served in the tent of meeting, whom Moses and Aaron listed according to the commandment of the Lord .
42 Those listed of the clans of the sons of Merari, by their clans and their fathers’ houses,
43 from thirty years old up to fifty years old, everyone who could come on duty, for service in the tent of meeting—
44 those listed by clans were 3,200.
45 This was the list of the clans of the sons of Merari, whom Moses and Aaron listed according to the commandment of the Lord by Moses.
46 All those who were listed of the Levites, whom Moses and Aaron and the chiefs of Israel listed, by their clans and their fathers’ houses,
47 from thirty years old up to fifty years old, everyone who could come to do the service of ministry and the service of bearing burdens in the tent of meeting,
48 those listed were 8,580.
49 According to the commandment of the Lord through Moses they were listed, each one with his task of serving or carrying. Thus they were listed by him, as the Lord commanded Moses.
« Numbers 3 | Numbers 4 | Numbers 5 » |
Posted by Dustin 11 December, 2008
The U.S. and many governments around the world are bailing out their various industries due to poor decisions on the part of these companies. The U.S. has recently bailed out the insurance giant AIG, gave the major U.S. banks billions and is currently investigating whether the government should bail out GM, Ford and Chrysler.
There was a great article in New Scientist recently that discussed economic and population growth and it’s detriment to the environment. The U.S. government can print more money and sell more bonds, but what are we going to do WHEN, not if, we run out of the Earth’s natural resources. An example of a natural resource in high demand is platinum. We don’t have the ability to just make more platinum. Platinum is used as a catalyst in a number of products such as the catalytic converter which is used on every car around the world (well, countries that care about emissions).
We’re going to have a lot of tough choices in the near future in regards to economic growth, birth rates, jobs, and resources. According to the World Wildlife Fund, as of 2005, we need ~1.4 planets to sustain our current need for resources.
Above all, the largest component that needs less of an ecological footprint is energy. Energy, according to late Nobel Prize winner Dr. Richard Smalley, is the number 1 global concern.
“Why is energy always preeminent? When we look at a prioritized list of the top 10 problems, with energy at the top, we can see how energy is the key to solving all of the rest of the problems – from water to population:
Energy Water Food Environment Poverty Terrorism and war Disease Education Democracy Population
Take the second problem on the list, for example: water. Already billions of people around our planet live without reliable access to clean water for drinking and agriculture. As population continues to build and the depletion of aquifers worsens, we will need to find vast new resources of clean water. Luckily, our planet has huge resources of water, but most of it has salt in it, and it is often thousands of miles away from where we need it. We can solve this problem with energy: desalinate the water and pump it vast distances. But without cheap energy, there is no acceptable answer.”
Obviously everyone needs to do their part in order for this to work in helping to “save” the Earth. Fortunately, on the “cheap” energy front, we have some brilliant people diligently working that major effort for us. The venture capital funding for companies has more than quadrupled from 2005 to 2007 according to Techcrunch.
Photo by Notionscapital
External Resources
http://assets.panda.org/downloads/living_planet_report_2008.pdf
http://www.panda.org/news_facts/publications/living_planet_report/footprint/index.cfm
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SAN ANTONIO — Cross off one potential competitor for the Knicks in the quest for the coaching services of Derek Fisher.
The Lakers want a coach with previous NBA experience, according to the Los Angeles Times, and that obviously takes Fisher out of the running. The veteran point guard, who turns 40 in August, must decide whether he wants to retire following his season with Oklahoma City and if he wants to coach.
If he answers in the affirmative to both, the Knicks and president Phil Jackson, who coached Fisher with the Lakers, appear willing to embrace him and could do so this week.
At the NBA Finals on Saturday, two players, San Antonio’s Matt Bonner and Miami’s James Jones, gave Fisher high praise as a potential coaching candidate, based on what they saw working with him in the players union.
“From a leadership standpoint and working with him in the union, he has a ‘coach’s air’ for sure,” Bonner said. “If he’s as good a leader on the court and in the locker room as he appears to be, as people have played with him say he is, he should make a great coach.”
Jones pointed to the experience Fisher has amassed over 18 seasons.
“This game today is about being able to manage, instruct and guide and D-Fish has been able to do it on the court so I suspect he’ll do it just as well or better off the court,” Jones said. “Whatever he does, from management to coaching, I know he’s prepared and equipped to be one of the best at it.He played with some of the game’s greatest players and one of the game’s greatest coaches and he’s been able to soak that up.”
Hall of Fame coach Hubie Brown, here as a broadcast analyst, also gave an endorsement, but stressed Fisher who would need to surround himself with a veteran staff and “teaching guys.”
“He’s never been a head coach but other guys have done this: right there in Brooklyn, Jason Kidd,” Brown said. “More important, think of the tough locker rooms he has been in: L.A. and Oklahoma City where the expectations were really high and yet he would be a heard voice.”
But New York is a different animal, said Mark Jackson, the ousted Golden State coach who is widely considered the people’s choice for the Knicks.
“It’s certainly different,” said Jackson, here for the TV broadcast. “The coverage, the way to handle the media, the fans, your team, the way to handle the pressure. It’s different than anywhere else. That’s why it’s better than anywhere else if you win. … It’s just different. If you can do it there with the pressure and scrutiny, you are celebrated and people appreciate it.” |
President-elect Donald Trump is using his bully pulpit to falsely allege that millions of ballots were cast illegally and to suggest that early voting should be cut down. Under his leadership, politicians with records of aggressively curtailing voting rights will be shaping federal policies. At the state level, Republicans have long been leading a sustained assault on voting rights.
Access to the franchise is now the object of an all-out political battle. Those committed to protecting people’s right to vote — as well as their actual ability to exercise this right — must organize accordingly.
Those looking to restrict access to the franchise have a substantial head start. In state after state, the GOP has pursued a consistent and ambitious agenda to curtail voting rights, an agenda that includes requiring voter IDs, cutting early voting hours and locations, slashing Sunday voting, and eliminating same-day voter registration. It also includes restricting urban counties’ ability to open additional polling sites and purging voter registration rolls through the use of manipulable and overly zealous techniques. It extends to bans on straight-ticket voting, one byproduct of which is longer voting lines, and on ballot harvesting, a practice by which individuals collect absentee ballots filled by other voters so as to deliver them to election authorities.
Consider what has happened since Election Day alone. The GOP-led Michigan House adopted legislation requiring voters to show photo identification, Wisconsin Republicans signaled that they will curtail early voting, and New Hampshire Gov.-elect Chris Sununu declared his support for eliminating same-day voter registration.
Democrats have been on the defensive, fighting voter suppression efforts and new restrictions in court even as they face the prospect of an increasingly hostile federal judiciary. Much of this defensiveness stems from a straightforward imbalance in political power, given how few states are in Democratic hands. But it also reflects a failure to seize opportunities when they do present themselves.
On November 29, for instance, the Illinois House failed to overturn Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner’s veto of an automatic registration bill. This happened even though Democrats held enough seats in the chamber to do so on a party-line vote.
In 2015, Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear signed an executive order restoring voting rights to approximately 140,000 ex-felons. But he waited to do so until the waning days of his governorship, just two weeks before he was to be replaced by a Republican, Matt Bevin. That left little time for organized efforts to register the newly enfranchised citizens before the GOP takeover, and Bevin rescinded Beshear’s executive order just three weeks after taking office.
Progressive activists and Democratic politicians must coalesce around a proactive voting rights agenda that they can act swiftly on whenever they get the chance.
At this moment, Democrats only fully control the governments of six states (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Oregon, and Rhode Island). But plenty remains to be done even there. Some of these states allow no early voting, allow no weekend voting, and fail to automatically register citizens — and hundreds of thousands of people with felony convictions are disenfranchised within them.
In some states with shared government, such as New York, there are signs that Democrats are looking to prioritize voting rights. Democrats are also well positioned to take control of many state governments in 2017 and 2018 (Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, and Washington, to name the most notable). Where and when they do, it is crucial that they be ready to act decisively and unflinchingly — not just to roll back recently introduced restrictions but also to increase access to the franchise and remove longstanding obstacles to electoral participation.
Democrats already have myriad non-legislative tools at their disposal to upend the voting rights landscape — gubernatorial executive orders, secretary of state–instigated reforms, and public referendums among them.
Below, I detail a package of reforms that would expand voter registration, increase voter eligibility, and make voting processes more accessible. Many of these reforms are championed by organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center, the Bus Federation, the NAACP, and the Sentencing Project. While I do not wish to take away from the urgent goal of reviving the federal Voting Rights Acts, here I focus on state-level possibilities, which often get neglected in the national conversation. These are goals that people looking to fight for a more robust electoral democracy should mobilize around.
Ways to expand voter registration
Implement automatic voter registration (AVR): Since March 2015, six states have adopted legislation to automatically register citizens when they come into contact with governmental agencies, notably a Department of Motor Vehicles. Oregon, the first state to adopt this reform (after years of advocacy by the Oregon-based Bus Federation), has registered 225,000 people this way since the start of this year. The payoff: 43 percent of those new voters cast ballots on November 8.
Automatic voter registration can be passed immediately in Democratic-controlled states like Delaware, Hawaii, and Rhode Island, and in any state that falls under Democratic control in coming years.
Republicans have fought automatic voter registration in many states; in Illinois and New Jersey, GOP governors’ vetoes prevented AVR from going into effect. Still, GOP lawmakers helped pass AVR in West Virginia, and some Illinois Republicans supported it until Rauner’s veto. Democrats just regained control of Nevada and New Mexico’s legislatures, where they can test GOP governors’ willingness to sign an AVR bill. Even marginal support by GOP lawmakers for automatic registration would suffice in Washington and New York.
AVR is also a great candidate for a nationwide wave of referendums in all states that allow popular initiatives. Alaska led the way this fall, and 63 percent of Alaskans voted to adopt the policy.
As Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections has documented, automatic voting proposals can be directly submitted to voters in at least 20 states. This process has already started in Nevada, where activists affiliated with the organization iVote collected enough signatures to force the Nevada legislature to consider AVR in the upcoming legislative session. (Either the legislature adopts the reform or else the issue is placed on the November 2018 ballot for voters to decide.)
Public referendums have been an effective progressive policymaking tool in recent years — see: minimum wage initiatives — and they could be used to champion many of the other reforms on this list.
Enable same-day voter registration (SVR): Same-day voter registration allows qualified residents to register to vote or update their existing registration on Election Day. Sixteen states currently allow same-day registration, though the number could shrink if North Carolina and New Hampshire Republicans have their way and reverse existing policies in those states.
Here, again, there are opportunities to champion same-day voter registration in states in which Democrats have or may soon have power or in states in which public referendums are readily available. Delaware, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Washington all lack same-day registration, for instance.
Prepare for natural disasters: Absent same-day voter registration bills, rules should provide for the automatic extension of voter registration deadlines in counties where a natural disaster is declared in the weeks leading up to an election. This year, Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott and North Carolina’s state elections board denied extensions in the wake of Hurricane Matthew. New rules could limit such gamesmanship.
Allow online voter registration: Many states still provide no procedure by which residents can register to vote or update their voter registrations online. Remedying this situation is very feasible since Republicans have been willing to get on board with adopting online registration systems, as they did in Florida in 2015.
Moreover, this is one innovation that would not necessarily require legislative action. In 2016, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican, put in place a new online registration system in an agreement with the US Department of Justice. Also in 2016, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Democrat, worked with the state elections board to launch an online registration website after the legislature ignored her proposal to do so. Kentucky provides a lesson for Democratic secretaries of state in other states with no online voter registration, including Maine and North Carolina. This should also be a priority in New Jersey depending on the results of next year’s elections for successors to Chris Christie and other statewide officials.
Expand the circle of people who are eligible to vote
Restore felons’ voting rights: A recent report by the Sentencing Project laid bare the urgency of countering felon disenfranchisement rules. Two and a half percent of all American adults are disenfranchised, and the share of African Americans who are disenfranchised is triple that (7.4 percent), a disparity that is in keeping with the origins and history of the practice. In four Southern states with severe disenfranchisement laws — Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia — the share of disenfranchised black adults surpasses 20 percent, more than double that of white adults.
Progressives should rally around the national and state groups that are working to restore voting rights to all. Pushing all states to join the ranks of Maine and Vermont, which have no felon disenfranchisement, should be the long-term goal — and a high priority.
Absent that step, a range of incremental reforms beckon. The most urgent is to restore voting rights to people who have completed their sentences. In Virginia, one of four states to permanently disenfranchise individuals with felony convictions, Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe has used his executive authority to achieve this objective. In August, he began issuing thousands of restoration orders on an individual basis after a narrow ruling by the state Supreme Court blocked him from issuing a blanket clemency; he has said he will continue to mail individual restoration orders to more than 200,000 people.
McAuliffe’s goal mirrors that of Iowa’s former Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack, who issued an executive action enfranchising all persons who had completed their sentence — an estimated 80,000 people — in 2005. (In 2011, Republican Gov. Terry Branstad returned Iowa to a policy of permanent disenfranchisement on his very first day in office.)
McAuliffe and Vilsack’s executive actions chart a path for other governors. This could be of great importance in Florida, depending on the outcome of the state’s open gubernatorial race in 2018. Florida currently disenfranchises a staggering 1.5 million individuals who have completed their sentences (28 percent of them are African American). That number alone represents nearly 25 percent of the country’s entire disenfranchised population.
In states where Democrats have legislative power, lawmakers should at the very least emulate Maryland’s new law enfranchising felons who are not in jail or in prison. In February 2016, Maryland Democrats overrode Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto and restored voting rights to felons who are on probation or parole. This helped cut the state’s disenfranchisement rate by more than two-thirds, from 1.4 percent of the state’s voting-age population in 2010 to 0.4 percent in 2016, according to Sentencing Project estimates.
Many states other than Maryland, such as Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Ohio, already do this. But a very long list of blue (or blue-leaning) states — including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Washington — do not. These states, which are all either already under Democratic governance or could be after 2018, disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of individuals who are currently on parole or on probation.
Another intermediary reform would be to enfranchise county jail inmates, who are typically serving shorter sentences. This is a step that California took in the fall of 2016; few states currently allow this.
Give noncitizens a voice in local elections: Everyone should have a voice in governing the communities where they reside, and some localities around the country have taken a step toward realizing that idea by allowing noncitizen immigrants to vote in local elections. This practice was widespread in the United States in the 19th century, and it is currently in place in countries such as Belgium and Sweden. This November, San Francisco decided through referendum to allow noncitizen immigrants with a child enrolled in San Francisco’s school district to vote in school board elections. The issue has also made its way to New York City, where advocates are pushing to allow noncitizens to vote in municipal elections.
Make it easier to vote by mail, whether or not you “need” to
Implement all-mail voting: In three states (Colorado, Oregon, and Washington), election authorities mail a ballot to every registered voter. This far-reaching step could be pursued in states like California that already conduct a large share of their elections by mail.
States that don’t wish to go that far in privileging mail voting can take intermediary steps — enabling no-excuse absentee voting where it is not yet available, and creating long-term absentee voter lists.
Enable no-excuse absentee voting: Twenty states — many of them states where Democrats wield political influence, including Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island — require that voters provide a reason they can’t vote on Election Day in order to receive an absentee ballot. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is now advocating legislation to implement no-excuse absentee voting in the Empire State, a minimal step that these 20 states should prioritize.
Create long-term mailing lists for absentee voters: The idea behind absentee ballot standing requests is that when a voter requests an absentee ballot in a given year, authorities then continue to automatically send them absentee ballots into the future. This can encourage turnout from voters who tend to only cast a ballot in the fall of a presidential election year, and it makes voting more accessible to people with disabilities, as a recent study documented. In some states, like Florida, requests expire after a few general elections, which can lead to some confusion. A handful of other states, such as California, allow voters to be put on an absentee ballot list permanently.
Make it easier for people to vote early, in person
Enable in-person early voting: Thirteen states provide no option to cast a ballot in person before Election Day. Democrats already enjoy some power in many of these states, including Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. Schneiderman’s proposal to create a two-week early voting window in New York is an urgent starting point for these states.
In 2014, Connecticut voters narrowly rejected a referendum enabling early voting, a measure that voting rights advocates can champion once more.
Enable weekend voting and extended hours: Early voting ought to be helping people who struggle to find the time to vote on Election Day Tuesdays, especially if they fear the long lines that disproportionately affect predominantly minority precincts. But simply adding more voting hours during other weekday working hours cannot meet that goal. Extended voting hours on weekdays are needed, as well as weekend voting.
When North Carolina eliminated Sunday voting, a federal appeals court found that the state’s GOP lawmakers had done so because of an explicit concern that African Americans “had too much access to the franchise.” Republicans indeed knew what they were doing: Ensuring an adequate access to the franchise absolutely means guaranteeing that every voter enjoys the possibility to vote on Sunday.
Only 10 states currently allow some form of Sunday voting — and in some of these states, it is left as an option that individual counties can exercise.
Guarantee an adequate number of voting locations: In Ohio, each county is restricted to only one early voting location, no matter its physical size or population. Giving local county boards more leeway to open additional voting sites can be helpful to ensuring that highly populated counties are adequately served, but obstacles such as inequities in the allocation of statewide resources or the lack of representativeness of some counties’ elected officials loom large. Voting rights advocates should champion statewide benchmarks as to a minimum number of polling places per resident and per physical distance, require a minimum number of voting machines at each voting location, and put in place rules to ensure an adequate allocation of state resources to meet those benchmarks.
Other weapons in the voting rights arsenal
This list is hardly exhaustive; I could detail other policies, such as ensuring that every jurisdiction offers multilingual ballots, even in areas where doing so is not required by the Voting Rights Act; providing prepaid postage alongside absentee ballots; and setting up at-large voting locations within each jurisdiction where all residents can vote (offering options beyond local polling places).
Republicans have a well-established set of goals to restrict voting eligibility and access to the polls, especially by minority voters. Progressives need a forceful agenda to not just fight and reverse those moves but also to expand the franchise and strengthen people’s involvement in political life. Meeting these goals demands, as it always has, a dedicated grassroots political battle.
Daniel Nichanian is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. Find him on Twitter @Taniel. |
Ed. note: Early voting in the Texas primaries runs from Tuesday, February 16 through Friday, February 26. Click here to find your polling location.
A hotly contested Democratic primary for the Texas Railroad Commission is underway, and Texans have the opportunity to elect a truly progressive candidate for one of our state’s most important - though incorrectly named - state agencies.
Lon Burnam, a former State Representative and long-time champion of progressive values, is running for an open seat on the Texas Railroad Commission. Already endorsed by a number of statewide papers, Burnam brings a lifetime of environmental advocacy to an election that is critical to Texas’ future.
Here’s why the Texas Railroad Commission race matters:
It’s about Texas’ energy and environmental future. Despite its name, the Railroad Commission is actually in charge of regulating energy production in Texas. This includes enforcing - at least in theory - environmental and safety regulations for oil, gas, and mining. Run by three commissioners that serve six-year terms, the Railroad Commission maintains tremendous control over Texas’ air, land, and water quality.
The Railroad Commission has a lot of problems. Compared to other state agencies, the RRC is particularly terrible when it comes to accountability and transparency. Commissioners have been more than happy to take campaign donations from the very companies that they are supposed to be regulating. As a result, many argue that the RRC basically functions as an arm of the oil and gas industry, neglecting its oversight duties in favor of special interests.
There’s a great candidate in the race: Lon Burnam. A former State Representative from Fort Worth, Lon Burnam worked hard in his time in the Texas Legislature to champion renewable energy and strong oversight of Texas’ oil and gas industry. With a 100% scorecard rating from Environment Texas and a history of legislation aimed at improving Texas’ environment, Burnam has a long track record of standing up for the best interests of the people of Texas.
Here’s what some of Texas’ leading newspapers are saying about Lon Burnam:
"Burnam, who has the backing of environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Clean Water Action and Texas Environmental Democrats, [is] a worthy candidate for a seat on the commission." - read more
"Burnam and the Democrats decry the commission’s lack of transparency and its light regulatory touch." - read more
"He has a deep understanding of the issues and challenges in the industry and its importance to Texas...there’s really only one credible option." - read more
"Burnam...is knowledgeable about the issues and well-qualified for his party's nomination." - read more
"[Burnam] has a knowledge of the industry and issues that his opponents...don’t come close to possessing." - read more |
FERGUSON, Mo. (Reuters) - Four white men carrying military-style rifles and sidearms added a disquieting element to riot-torn Ferguson, Missouri, when they began patrolling the streets before dawn on Tuesday, which police quickly labeled “inflammatory.”
Members of the Oath Keepers walk with their personal weapons on the street during protests in Ferguson, Missouri August 11, 2015. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
The men said they were part of a group called “Oath Keepers,” which describes itself as a non-partisan association of current and former U.S. soldiers, police and first responders who aim to protect the U.S. Constitution. They told reporters on the street that they were in Ferguson to protect a media organization.
The men attracted immediate attention in the mostly black neighborhood, which exploded into violence on Sunday night as protesters marked the one-year anniversary of the killing of an unarmed black teen by police.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit civil rights organization, has described the “Oath Keepers” as a “fiercely anti-government, militaristic group,” and St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar condemned their appearance in Ferguson.
“Their presence was both unnecessary and inflammatory,” he said, adding that police would work with county prosecutors to see if the men had broken any laws.
The men told reporters they were licensed to carry firearms. A voter-backed 2014 amendment to the state constitution cleared the way for open carrying of licensed firearms, so long as they are not used in a threatening manner, legal experts said.
“There is no exception for a state of emergency for these laws not to apply,” said Marcia McCormick, a professor of law at St. Louis University Law School.
State law prohibits brandishing a weapon in an “angry or threatening manner,” McCormick said, but that standard is subject to interpretation.
“Clearly the people who are carrying these weapons are trying to send a message that some might see as threatening but it’s probably not a violation of the statute,” McCormick said.
Many in the crowd questioned the wisdom of openly carrying such heavy weapons into an emotionally charged situation.
“You’re going to bring some uncommissioned citizens, white citizens, into a black community like this? It’s disrespectful,” said Talal Ahmad, 30, who is black and was a fixture at last year’s protests.
“Here, in a black neighborhood, we’re already living in a state of terror,” Ahmad said.
‘WE NEEDED TO BE PREPARED’
The group, led by a man identified only as John, wore bulletproof vests and carried their rifles with barrels pointed downward. They said they were in Ferguson to protect a journalist from the conservative “Infowars.com” website.
“There were problems here, there were people who got hurt. We needed to be prepared for that,” said John.
Members of the group had patrolled the streets of Ferguson for a time in November, after riots erupted when a grand jury found that a white police officer had broken no laws when he shot dead 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Sunday night’s protests were punctuated by gunfire, and police shot and critically wounded a man accused of firing on police.
Members of the Oath Keepers walk with their personal weapons on the street during protests in Ferguson, Missouri August 11, 2015. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
An Infowars representative acknowledged by telephone that the Oath Keeper’s had a presence in Ferguson but said it had not asked them for security.
“We happen to be in some of the same circumstances as they are on occasion and ideologically we may share the same views,” said the representative, who asked not to be named citing security concerns. “They are there of their own volition and secondarily they are there to protect anyone who is innocent. Of course, we fall under that because our reporters are reporting.”
Protests on Monday were less chaotic than they had been on Sunday. Twenty-two people were arrested in nighttime skirmishes with police during which protesters threw rocks and bottles at officers on the block where the Oath Keepers appeared. Another 63 people were arrested earlier in the day after blocking a highway. |
There’s a reason Apple hasn’t changed the MacBook Air’s core design for years now: It’s basically perfect—the epitome of a thin-and-light laptop, from its luxurious, razor-thin exterior to its majestic glass trackpad. But even perfection can’t coax Apple into sitting on its heels.
On Monday, Apple revealed a new 12-inch MacBook, a radical revamp that shakes up the winning MBA design by dumping virtually every conventional port—Thunderbolt, the SD card slot, a power connector, everything—in favor of a pair a single USB Type-C connection and an audio jack. That, paired with numerous other advances, helped the 12-inch MacBook become the slimmest, lightest MacBook ever—and it's silent, too.
“Can you see it?” a grinning Tim Cook asked, holding one aloft onstage. “I can’t even feel it!”
The overhaul slims the notebook down to a ridonkulous 2 lbs. and 13.1mm—the slimmest MacBook by a full 24 percent, according to Apple’s Phil Schiller (though it's still not quite as light as Lenovo's 1.72 lb. LaVie Z HZ550 or as thin as Lenovo's 12.7mm Yoga 3 Pro). And that’s with a full fanless design. Achieving such thinness required Apple to redesign the machine from the ground up.
First, the display on the 12-inch MacBook—which packs a Retina-class 2304x1440 resolution—now reaches edge-to-edge, with barely there bezels. It measures just 0.88mm thin and uses 30 percent less energy than other Retina displays, while still offering the same level of brightness.
The keyboard now sits edge-to-edge, sporting closer-together keys than the new MacBook's counterparts. Apple actually created a new keyboard switch for the 12-inch MacBook, to replace the scissor switches that power most laptop keyboards. The “Butterfly mechanism” uses a single assembly with a stainless steel dome, which Schiller claims is four times as stable as scissor switches despite being 40 percent thinner.
The MacBook also introduces a new “Force Touch trackpad.” It’s covered in glass like Apple’s previous models, but also sports four force sensors under the hood to create a uniform tapping feel. Together with the introduction of a “Taptic engine,” similar to watch you'd find in the Apple Watch, the 12-inch MacBook introduces the idea of light and "force"clicks—the laptop registers a new class of deep clicks that it uses to automatically open certain programs depending on where you click. Force clicking on a word in Safari, for instance, opens a Wikipedia entry for it, while force clicking a date opens a calendar entry.
Inside the 12-inch MacBook Air.
One of Intel’s new energy-efficient Core M “Broadwell” processors powers the 12-inch MacBook, sitting in a logic board 67 percent smaller than Apple’s previous record. The processor sips a mere 5 watts of power, running at 1.1GHz that can Turbo Boost to 2.9GHz when more oomph is needed.
Around the Force Touch trackpad and itty-bitty logic board, Apple crammed the 12-inch MacBook with batteries, using a new layered, terraced battery design that lets the company use all the available space inside the unibody chassis. The 12-inch MacBook will get 9 hours battery life while web surfing, or 10 hours while watching video.
Reach out and touch someone
The spartan redesign also wouldn’t have been possible without the cutting-edge USB 3.1 standard and new Type-C connection. This backward-compatible wonder cable does it all: It’s capable of delivering 100 watts of power, 10Gbps data transfer speeds (twice that of USB 3.0), and even audio and video signals using the DisplayPort protocol. Goodbye, power cords, HDMI, VGA, DisplayPort, and Thunderbolt. And the Type-C connector is reversible, too, just like Apple’s MagSafe connector, so you’ll never have to fumble with shoving your USB cable in the right way again.
“This is the most extreme, efficient notebook we’ve ever created,” Schiller beamed.
There is a downside to streamlining things down to a lone humble, potent port, as Michael Simon noted in his original coverage of the 12-inch MacBook rumors. You’re going to need a lot of adapter cables to reproduce the lost functionality of the originals. Sure, Apple’s embraced the new USB tech, but the legion of external peripherals and displays currently available haven’t. Connecting those Type-C cables to a wall socket or a DisplayPort-equipped monitor will require adapters, and you’ll need other adapters to connect to Thunderbolt, Ethernet, or standard USB devices. Want to plug in multiple devices? You’re going to need a hub, too.
Apple's software ecosystem is already built around wireless connectivity.
But that’s where Apple’s software ecosystem comes into play. Schiller touted that features like Continuity, AirDrop, and AirPlay allow you to wirelessly share data between your Apple devices without ever touching a cable.
The 12-inch MacBook will be available in silver, space grey, and—wait for it—gold, on sale on April 10. The $1,300 base model includes a 1.1GHz dual-core processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB solid-state drive. A $1,600 model will pack a 1.2GHz dual-core processor and a 512GB SSD.
The rest
While the focus was squarely on the new Mac, Apple didn’t leave the old Macs untouched. The entire MacBook Air line is being upgraded to Intel’s new fifth-generation "Broadwell" processors, which should offer increased battery life and a modest performance boost over the last-gen Haswell processors. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina will also receive Broadwell.
The 13-inch MacBook Air models will also be outfitted with flash storage two-times faster than before, while both the 11-inch and 13-inch Airs will be upgraded to Thunderbolt 2. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina model will also have the faster flash, as well as the new Force Touch trackpad introduced in the 12-inch MacBook. The revamped old-school MacBook Air and Pro models are available today.
Editor's note: This story originally called the new MacBook a MacBook Air. We apologize for the error. It was also updated with additional specification information. |
During the winter in Seaside Heights, the gentle ocean breeze gives way to lashing wind and the December sun shines mockingly bright, with a false promise of warmth.
The boardwalk is a sprawl of shadows, kitschy T-shirt shops are fortressed off behind gunmetal gray gates and the waves roll for no one. When the beach blanket carnival leaves town and summer revelry fades into memory, the darker side of the iconic resort community comes into focus.
Beyond the boardwalk is a morass of aging motels housing a hidden population of troubled tenants year-round, including the mentally ill, recovering drug addicts, domestic violence victims and sex offenders.
Most motels date to the post-WWII boom years, when Seaside was known as "The Town that Fun Built," a working class paradise. But decades of declining tourism and ongoing Hurricane Sandy woes have created a new business model.
Rooms where vacationers once slept are being rented to the Ocean County Board of Social Services for emergency shelter.
Nearly three quarters of the borough's 40 motels are in this survival mode, staying afloat by housing the poor in "welfare rooms," marked with Department of Community Affairs stickers.
Even as some motels shelter sex offenders or people struggling with drug issues, they continue inviting families and prom kids to spend the night. Many spots have glossy websites, enticing travelers with images of sparkling pools and the siren song of free continental breakfast. The motels look whimsical and retro online but in real life more than half failed recent inspections.
When summer is in full swing and room rates skyrocket, the homeless remain, but out of sight. The visitors who breeze into town for holiday weekends probably are not aware of who's next door.
There are 27 motels in the tiny borough that shelter the homeless for months, sometimes years. Owners collect between $1,795 and $2,625 in public money per month for each room. The nightly rate doesn't fluctuate by season. Year-round, it's $50-$85 a night. Tourists, meanwhile, pay up to $300 for a room between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
A review by NJ Advance Media of inspection reports, motel contracts, police call logs and dozens of interviews paint a picture of the poverty and blight inside the rooms:
Of the 27 Seaside motels that shelter the homeless, only four passed recent state inspections. The rest were cited for health and safety hazards, ranging from broken smoke detectors and missing carbon monoxide alarms to electrical problems and hallways strewn with debris.
There are currently 11 sex offenders living at eight borough motels, according to the New Jersey State Police Megan's Law registry. They dwell in welfare rooms through the quiet of winter and the bustle of summer. Management is not obligated to notify guests of their presence, according to a State Police spokeswoman, Trooper Alina Spies.
Two high-risk sex offenders are housed at the Travelodge and the Palm Villa Suites, which sits less than 1,500 feet from the Hugh J. Boyd Jr. Elementary School.
The homeless live and work at some motels, getting paid in cash below minimum wage, according to tenants. A convicted sex offender said he was the night watchman at the Travelodge while sheltered there for a year. Others clean rooms for cash.
"There used to be nice places here," said Sal Rispoli, 70, who operates the Heights Central rooming house. The Brooklyn native said he vacationed in Seaside as a teenager. "I brought my kids up here. Now, I look at the motel across the street and he rents to drug dealers and prostitutes."
Borough administrator John Camera said it's dubious for many owners to market the motels as daydream retreats in a world famous destination while getting paid to house emergency assistance recipients, particularly those coming out of the criminal justice system.
Borough officials have feuded for nearly three decades with motel owners who rent welfare rooms. Camera said the practice hurts tourism as the town tries to rebrand itself and attract more families.
"The motel owners have found that it makes sense to keep the steady income from social services right through the summer season, but vacationers who come for seasonal motel rentals aren't expecting and often aren't pleased with the idea of year-round people living in the motel during their summer stay," said Camera, who is retiring at the end of the month.
Dispelling "Sleaside"
Over the past five years, Seaside has loomed large in the zeitgeist, first as a raucous party town on "Jersey Shore" and then as a symbol of Hurricane Sandy, with the sunken Jet Star rollercoaster.
Going into 2015, there's a rallying cry for redevelopment. The owners of both amusement piers have promised to bring in a new lineup of neon behemoths and luxury townhomes are under construction along Ocean Terrace.
Town leaders are hoping to dispel the "Sleaside" Heights stereotype. Unfortunately, Camera said, most of the motel owners aren't joining in the effort. As the borough undergoes its transition, some owners said they are increasingly reliant on money from social services.
The income is a lifeline for George Lauterbach, owner of the Mark III and the Aquarius Arms motels in Seaside. He said he'd be out of business if he relied on summer traffic. The downside is negative feedback from travelers about the tenants who live at the motel year-round, he said.
"I have problems with relief people asking customers for cigarettes, asking for money," Lauterbach said. "This is the last stop on the bus stop and people get off here because they don't have money and they're stuck here in motels. I moved to Seaside from Brooklyn for a better life. It's not a better life."
Placing a large concentration of emergency assistance recipients on a barrier island, disconnected from the resources that could help them become self-sufficient, creates a vicious cycle of poverty, crime and substance abuse, Camera said.
Although crime has declined in the borough over the past decade, according to the State Police Uniform Crime Report, Seaside's crime rate per capita is still 11 times higher than the Ocean County average.
"One of the basic premises of social work is when somebody is in need, the preference is to keep that person near their family, near places they're familiar with, near places where there's work, all the things that are not true of Seaside," Camera said. "But when push comes to shove, a social worker is going to make the placement in Seaside because it's better than having them go homeless."
It's not ideal to group the poor in a single borough, said Board of Social Services spokeswoman, Meredith Sheehan, but Seaside has a plurality of motel owners who've voluntarily agreed to participate in the emergency initiative called Special Response.
"We can only work with owners who identify they want to work with us," Sheehan said. "We can't just come in and say we're going to use your motel."
When the town council adopted an ordinance in 2006 to limit the number of welfare rooms in each establishment, a group of motel owners sued the borough for discrimination. Today, the cap is 20 percent of total occupancy but the rule has been difficult to enforce because some owners reliable occupancy numbers, said Christopher Vaz, the borough's new administrator.
Melissa Grayson said she applied for Special Response housing in July and was placed at the Knight's Inn in Seaside. The manager gave her a list of rules: no pool, no visitors and no talking to other guests.
"You're supposed to sit in your room and do nothing," said Grayson, 32, a registered sex offender and single mother who is sheltered at the motel with her son, 2. She was convicted when 16 of molesting two children while babysitting, according to the Megan's Law registry.
She said she suffers from a seizure disorder and has no income beyond social security disability checks. Her family is 45 minutes away in Tuckerton.
"The roof leaks, the windows leak, the door leans sideways so cold air blows through and there's bugs," Grayson said. "The summer is the worst because they don't want you talking to the paying customers. My son would see the little ones going to play at the pool and he'd want to go but he can't. It's like living in a sardine can. It's like being in prison but worse because in prison you can have visitors and phone calls and, ultimately, my kid is in jail too."
Calls to the owner of the Knights Inn, Sandipkumar Patel were not returned. Patel, known as "Mr. P" in Seaside, runs five motels in the borough, including the Travelodge, records show. He pleaded guilty in September to federal charges of visa fraud and filing a false tax return. He continues to operate the motels while he awaits sentencing Jan. 6.
Patel allegedly orchestrated a visa fraud scheme, submitting false work papers for Indian nationals who came to America illegally. The scam involved technology and medical staffing companies, not the motels, according to the criminal complaint filed by U.S. Attorney, Paul Fishman. Patel, who lives in Edison, did not respond to requests for comment submitted via email and fax. He did not answer the door at his home.
The police have visited the Knights Inn more than 80 times over the past year, according to a log of emergency calls. They've been summoned to break up fights, investigate theft and make drug arrests.
"I don't feel safe," Grayson said. "The chick that was in here before me was a heroin user. When she hit a vein and the blood splattered, she never cleaned it. I had to wash her blood off the walls."
Sheehan said Special Response clients have social workers to address trouble at the motels.
"They shouldn't feel isolated," Sheehan said. "We go out and do visits to our clients at the motels. When we are aware of issues, we are in communication with the motel and the issues are addressed for the most part immediately. But certainly we need to know if there are other issues out there that maybe we're not aware of so that we can look into them."
Grayson said no one was stopped to check her room. She uses the dresser area as a kitchen, with a fridge, a microwave and a hot plate piled up amid slanted racks of shoes and bread. The television is boxed in with pantry items, Cheerios, minute rice, sugar and instant creamer. Dirty dishes go in the bathroom sink and shower.
"I've talked to my social worker there six times and complained," Grayson said. "When you complain, repercussions come back at you. The manager is meaner to you. But what are you going to do about it? You have nowhere else to go."
Borough officials are engaged in discussions about how to address the motel issue, Vaz said. The council, however, is holding off on action because Mayor Bill Akers is still mourning the loss of his son, who died of a suspected drug overdose in October.
"We're waiting for the right time when he's ready to come back," Vaz said. "A view from 35,000 feet, we have been trying to see what other towns that are similarly situated like Belmar, Ocean City, other communities that have seasonal housing and a seasonal tourism trade and see what their ordinances look like.
Days of Mom and Pop
Seaside Heights is Jersey's second poorest beach town north of Atlantic City, (Asbury Park is the poorest), according to a Census survey of per capita income. The year-round population is 2,887. On holiday weekends when the weather complies, more than 100,000 people visit, Camera said.
During Seaside's heyday, circa 1950, the motels were locally owned family businesses, Vaz said. He grew up in town – his father is councilman Tony Vaz – and wrote a 2010 book, "Seaside Heights: A Postcard History."
Working class vacationers used to check into dreamily named motels and spend a week or longer, said Vaz. It was busy enough during the summer for the businesses to shutter after Labor Day. A downturn took root during the late 1980's, when medical waste wash-ups and a sputtering economy coalesced to crush tourism, according to Vaz.
Mom and pop motels were sold off to investors from out of town and the new owners began taking in year-round tenants from social services, Vaz said.
"In the old days, the owner of a motel or apartment was also a fireman or a member of the American Legion or the Seaside Heights Italian American Club," said Vaz, whose parents used to run a motel called the Victoria Court.
Vaz said, "The investor-owners don't have a connection to the community. They don't see the heavy burden in terms of municipal services, the police department as well as the school. The social services people typically aren't working, probably won't be able to get a job, especially in Seaside Heights because there's no jobs here in the wintertime and it brings domestic violence, it brings drugs and it brings other types of crime."
Seaside has more registered sex offenders per capita than any other town in Ocean County, according to City-Data.com, a website that measures community demographics.
"Our police department is aware of it," Camera said. "The general assistance people, the ones without children, the individuals, a larger percentage of them vs. the general public have had some sort of criminal issues in the past whether they're sex or drug related."
Dozens of sex offenders have cycled through Seaside motels the past decade, records indicate. During that time period, 21 rapes were reported in the borough, according to State Police statistics. Just one case, however, is known to have involved an offender. In 2007, a convicted rapist who was placed at the Knights Inn (then called the Atlantic Motel) sexually assaulted a woman in a neighboring room. No rapes have been reported in Seaside in 2014.
David "Wolf" Degroat, a moderate risk offender and former Travelodge tenant, said it took him years to get an apartment. He now lives with his fiancée, Fawn in a one-bedroom place a block from the beach.
"People with a sex offense label are cast out, ostracized, propagandized, harassed, defamed, slandered, beat up, attacked, all by people who are predisposed to judgment and discrimination," said Degroat, 44, who served six years in prison for having sex with a 14-year-old girl in 2005. He said he's been calling himself "Wolf" since he was a teenager, embracing the name after a peyote-induced spirit journey with a group of Native Americans in South Dakota.
"They refuse to open their eyes and see the person for who they are rather than the crime that they committed," Degroat said. "I don't judge the man by the mistake unless he's repeated that mistake too many times. I own the fact that I committed a crime by having sex with someone under the age of 18. I know who I am regardless of whatever label I carry."
Degroat is one of several Special Response tenants who said Patel, aka "Mr. P," put them to work and paid them in cash. Degroat said he watched over the Travelodge and doubled as maintenance man at two other Patel motels, the Cloud 9 and La Fontana. A woman sheltered at the Knights Inn gets $4 per room to clean after tourists check out, according to Grayson.
Sheehan said Special Response tenants are not supposed to be working at the motels.
"We encourage people to get jobs but we certainly want to make sure they're legitimate jobs and they're on the books," Sheehan said. "Part of our social service plan is to engage the clients, so if somebody is just at the motel all day, there's definitely something wrong with that scenario. There's things that they should be doing, whether they go to a program every day, whether they're in work activity every day. If somebody has a job on the side and is getting paid under the table and not reporting it to us, that is an issue."
The Wyndham Hotel Group, parent company of the Travelodge and the Knights Inn, has launched an investigation into the two motels.
"We consider guest safety and security to be of the utmost importance and as such, require that each of the independently owned and operated hotels within our franchise system comply with not only our own brand standards but also all local, state and federal laws," said Christine Da Silva, vice president of marketing communications, in a statement.
For all the stories of solitude and crisis in Seaside, there are counter narratives about kinship and altruism.
Patricia Forse, a widow and former nurse from Toms River, went homeless after her husband died of lung cancer. She said she lost everything in her fog of depression and was placed in motels for several miserable months before she found Heights Central, a rooming house Seaside.
It was an adjustment at first, living in the 14-room facility with four shared bathrooms and a view of bulldozers corralled around a Route 35 construction site. Forse said that the owner of Heights Central, Sal Rispoli, talked her through her difficulties and now she's embraced Seaside, for all its faults, as her permanent home.
"Seaside is jaded by mismanagement but you can't take away the beauty of the ocean and the beach," said Forse, 63. "It's always been crazy here. I used to think it was terrible but Seaside is growing on me. It's quirky and it's weird and I think it's always been a little daydream in my head to live at the beach." |
Anyone reading this blog would be aware of Nigel Melville’s resignation from the newly formed (and majority owned by USA Rugby) Rugby International Marketing, LLC aka “RIM”. I was fairly outspoken about Nigel after the RWC2015 campaign, and it was our failures there (compared to expectations) that energized me to work so hard re-learning the rugby landscape in the USA. Regardless, there are many positives to take away from the Melville era, which is why we can all be excited about USAR’s future at all levels.
Congratulations, Nigel Melville
Melville has arguably landed one of the most coveted rugby jobs globally. He is the Performance Director of the wealthiest rugby union in the world. He has control over the destiny of England Rugby. It’s a massive job. He will be in the spotlight every day in the largest rugby market. Congratulations to Nigel for landing it. He is right back where he should be. England Rugby will be better for having him, and USA Rugby can be grateful for being in a better place in specific areas than when he arrived.
We should thank Nigel for his service to rugby in America and also ensure he knows we expect him to bring the full England Women’s and Men’s team over to play here (not the Saxon’s, but the full-on England XV’s), and we will return the visits with invitations to Twickenham for the Autumn test season. We need to earn those fixtures but we now have a person in England that we can call a friend.
What Now?
Regardless of your thoughts on Melville, the rugby community he has left has every reason to be optimistic about the future. However, ‘succession planning’ seems to have been blown out of the water by Melville’s announcement.
This is the perfect time for the USA Rugby Board and Congress to step back and re-evaluate the future of American Rugby. It is time for us to move out of the ‘amateur professional era’, and into the ‘professional professional era’. There is a strategic plan being developed now by USAR, clearly a move in the right direction.
Calling on Congress
The Congress has been described as ‘ineffective’ and ‘too large and fractured to have an impact’. By its 40+ member nature, without an appointed/delegated/elected leader, it is very challenging to have the kind of impact it is capable of. It is now time for this Congress to really engage in the strategic plan, new Board appointments, and the CEO process. The Congress serves as stewards of our game in the USA, and should be the oversight for both the Board and USA Rugby. This role is as important as it has ever been.
The selections of the incoming CEO’s (USAR and RIM) and to a similar degree the two open Board seats are critical. One of these seats will be awarded to an incumbent. I have described in an earlier blog the concept that “USA Rugby is a 40 year old startup”. This is not a criticism. It’s a business analogy of where we stand. I haven’t heard anyone disagree. We now have an opportunity to select professional, committed, experienced leadership to take advantage of the imminent explosion of rugby here.
Increased Board Size
From my personal interaction in the Board seat selection process, we should consider an expanded Board from 9 seats to at least 11. We are forced now to take into account the Olympic mandate (i.e. at least one person on the board must have no experience in the particular sport). We also have an immediate need to have women fairly represented – a must in my opinion. I am not just saying this because it is politically correct. My impression of the women’s game here is very strong (thank-you Seattle Saracens Women) and must be equitably represented at all levels.
It appears to me in this process that we are really boxed in with 2 of the spots taken by athlete reps, and now we have some USAR Board Members serving as RIM Board members (three). This doesn’t appear to leave much wiggle room for seats.
Independent Stakeholders Group
It is the perfect time for our Board to create the independent stakeholders group; it’s been so often talked about but never implemented. Now is the time. We need ‘all hands on deck’ and we need leadership at the front. This is the “all in moment” for our rugby community. Such a stakeholders group could streamline some of the many obstacles that will need to be overcome prior to Melville’s departure. This could include vetting candidates for the CEO jobs (assisting the ‘search firms’ with some reality checks), and act as an arm of the Board to be utilized at the Board’s discretion. It could certainly help be an independent review of the soon to come Strategic Plan. The business potential alone from creating such a group is reason to implement immediately. Note, this group should be independent of any official relationship with USAR or any entities. The leader of this group should have the following skill sets:
Knowledge of the sport at all levels, a history of our past, and a vision for our future.
Ability to connect the US rugby community to the global community
Extensive knowledge of the business of American sport (not just rugby)
Relationships w/ media people, money people, and the ability to bring such people together to foster growth at a level different from an NGB or Congress.
He or she must be respected globally for their rugby IQ (on and off the field)
Communicate honestly and effectively for the group to USAR Board, CEO, or RIM as needed.
He/she should be the ultimate team player
USA Rugby CEO
I’ve always had contention with having a CEO that has the confirmed reputation of looking for the ‘next, best thing’. It is no secret that Melville has looked for a job in the UK for years. In the selection process for the next CEO, the committee should choose a person that is first and foremost committed to this job being ‘the final destination’ and that his/her personal mission ‘make the USA Tier 1 in every aspect of rugby’. My assessment is this goal is achievable but its still an 8-12 year job if executed to near perfection. Let’s do it. I don’t think we should ever use the term ‘Tier 2’ again. It shoehorns us into that dubious distinction.
Our new CEO should have Rugby IQ, Leadership IQ, Executive IQ, and must have the underlying passion to do whatever it might take to create success for USA Rugby. With the fractured state of Club Rugby (throw in Pro Rugby as well now), the College game, and perhaps worst culprit of all the Women’s game, we need a leader who has the networking skills, and more importantly ‘coalition building’ skills to bring all the talented rugby people in this country together and moving in an aligned direction.
Bob Latham has recently said, “the CEO search must now be accelerated”. We need a professional who can identify with the specific challenges in the USA, understands professional rugby, can help us to learn the lessons from the developed professional markets, and can take us into the “professional, professional” era.
Is anyone aware that there is an American who has held leadership positions with top European professional clubs? Nathan Bombrys, is the Managing Director of the Glasgow Warriors, and is AMERICAN. Who knew? There are some amazing candidates out there.
What this means?
The Road to Rio is getting ever so shorter. We owe it to the men and women who will be representing the USA in Rio to do everything possible to support them. This holds true for so many upcoming events, Americas Rugby Championship 2017. Women’s RWC in Ireland 2017, and the Sevens World Cup 2018. We have opportunities to win championships and achieve real success. We need to get onside and get to work. Not work like we have in the past, but work like we are Tier 1 in all areas of our sport, accept nothing but the highest standards in everything we do, on and more importantly off the field.
One team; On and off the pitch.
In summary, by the fall USA Rugby will have a new CEO, it’s subsidiary (RIM) will have a new CEO, there will be one new USAR Board member, and a new ‘Chairman of the Board’. We have an opportunity to get this right.
I’ve been nominated for one of the open Board seats. These are my thoughts. I’ll be making some specific recommendations in the next posts. |
Michelle Obama campaigning in Philadelphia last week — one of many political luminaries to blitz the Keystone State this year. (Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images)
— If it’s Wednesday, it must be Michelle Obama. Not to be confused with Tuesday of last week, when Joe Biden came a-courting. Donald Trump visited rural Manheim in Lancaster County on Saturday.
Hillary Clinton returned on Tuesday of this week with an event in suburban Haverford, about two weeks after her last visit to the Philly area. That was a couple of days before Trump stopped by Geno’s Steaks (cheesesteaks, not porterhouse), the neon-and-Cheez Whiz photo op in South Philly.
Barack Obama? Bill Clinton? Yep. Everyone wants a large chunk of Pennsylvania, and by large, we mean all 20 of its electoral votes. Politically speaking, it’s always sunny in Philadelphia.
For years — non-election years, mind you — Pennsylvania has often seemed an afterthought among the East Coast cognoscenti, not so much flyover country as train-through. Now it’s winning the popularity and swimsuit competitions. Pennsylvania is this election’s Florida and Ohio.
Ohio is no longer all that, not the way it was in 2012 or 2004. The Democratic nominee hasn’t visited that state since Labor Day. The New York Times argued “Why the whole Trump-Clinton election could probably just be held in Pennsylvania.”
Most days, it seems as though it is.
“We’re so sexy and important,” says Maria Kefalas, a sociology professor at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “I think voting in Pennsylvania has become the coolest thing to do if you’re a millennial.” All 70 of her students are registered, many of them switching from their home states to vote in Pennsylvania, now the center of the electoral universe.
Donald Trump makes a stop at Geno's Steaks in Philadelphia on Sept. 22. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Hillary Clinton and her daughter Chelsea greet supporters in Haverford on Tuesday. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Trump and Clinton have visited Pennsylvania — technically a commonwealth — more times than any other state, according to Travel Tracker, a site that charts the candidates’ campaign stops in the primaries and the general election.
Tim what’s-his-name and Mike who-dat might have campaigned here, too — actually, Kaine was scheduled to be in Philadelphia on Wednesday evening — although with all the political star wattage, who would notice?
The state has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992. In 2012, almost 2 million votes, one-third of the 5.67 million presidential votes cast, came from Philadelphia and four surrounding suburban counties. Although the state is home to almost 1 million more registered Democrats than Republicans, the race has tightened, giving Clinton a lead of only 2.4 points in an average of polls.
Geographically, Philadelphia, the state’s largest city — and, more important, its largest media market, seeping into Delaware and southern New Jersey — is a quick trip from Washington or New York. In the District, Clinton owns a home, and Trump, so we’ve heard, operates a hotel. In New York, Clinton has an estate, and Trump has a tower. Both nominees are registered in New York, normally the red-hot center of everything, but not in presidential elections, when it is the bluest of blue states.
[For $805 a night at the Trump Hotel, you deserve what you get]
Democrats have opened 55 offices in the state, almost two dozen in Philadelphia and its suburbs, and hired hundreds of paid staffers. Some neighborhoods resemble Airbnb networks. It’s become bragging rights to have a campaign staffer bunk in your home. And it’s become a destination for political volunteers, who keep arriving from nearby states that are foregone conclusions.
Clinton ads have become ubiquitous on television. Trump is buying ad time as well.
In an almost 10-minute “Will and Grace” reunion election video, released Monday and viewed on YouTube more than 5 million times, Grace (actress Debra Messing) says, “It’s all going to come down to undecided voters in Pennsylvania, anyway.”
Which describes David Capone, 21, a math and theater major at West Chester University in suburban Philadelphia. In early April, Trump held a rally on campus with supporters lining one side of the street for blocks while opponents faced off on the other.
“This is my first time voting in a presidential election, and it seems like a bizarre one,” Capone says. “There’s so much going back and forth. Every time I try to get a clear picture, things change.”
Like Ohioans before them, Pennsylvanians are becoming spoiled by the attention, getting accustomed to all the wooing.
Camille Carr, Kefalas’s daughter, has already met Clinton twice. She has her autograph. Camille has seen President Obama once. At 16, she already seems like a political veteran, like many Pennsylvania teenagers these days.
“Joe Biden’s the last on her list,” Kefalas says. Like something out of Pokémon, “she wants to collect them all.”
Which, the way things are going, shouldn’t be a problem. |
It's Friday, folks, which means it's time to tackle the hard-pressing questions of the day, like could Urban Meyer whip Jim Harbaugh in a title fight?
Such was the humorous question poised by Dan Patrick during his radio show to Houston coach Tom Herman.
Herman, who worked as Meyer's offensive coordinator for three seasons in Columbus, tabbed his former boss in the fictional title fight.
"Yes, absolutely he could. That's where my money would be. He would be the Vegas favorite." -Tom Herman on if Urban could take Harbaugh — Paul Pabst (@PaulPabst) October 7, 2016
Michigan fans will obviously take umbrage. After all, their coach is the bigger man and seems like a guy who would bite the earlobe off an opponent if the contest wasn't going his way.
But in 1997 as a member of the Indianapolis Colts, Harbaugh broke his hand punching Buffalo Bills QB Jim Kelly. This shows Harbaugh either can't throw a proper punch or has brittle bones, despite his whole milk intake.
Sounds like bad news either way for a guy in the ring with a knockout artist like Meyer. |
BEIJING (AFP) – Authorities are investigating a Chinese zoo where three dozen animals including 13 rare Siberian tigers died recently, amid charges it was harvesting their parts, state media said Monday.
The probe of the zoo in the northeastern city of Shenyang will look at whether the animal parts were being used as ingredients in Chinese medicine and other products, Xinhua news agency said.
China banned the international trade in tiger bones and related products in 1993, and is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which also bars such trade.
But such transactions exist as many tiger parts, such as penises and bones, are commonly believed to increase sexual potency or cure certain illnesses.
Xinhua quoted a manager at the Shenyang Forest Wildlife Zoo as saying that the carcasses of the dead tigers, 11 of which starved to death and two of which were shot after mauling a worker, have been cut up and put in cold storage.
But another unnamed zoo worker said the bones had been used to make tiger-bone liquor that was used to “serve important guests”.
The deaths, which came to light as China celebrates the Lunar Year of the Tiger, have been blamed on a combination of inadequate funding, an unusually cold winter and poor general conditions at the facility, the China Daily said.
Zoo workers fed the tigers cheap chicken bones in recent months as funding dried up. On Sunday, the Shenyang government announced that it had allocated one million dollars to save surviving animals and fund the zoo.
Besides the tigers, 22 other animals have died, including rare species that are protected in China, among them a red-crowned crane, four stump-tailed macaques, and one brown bear.
The Shenyang government has a 15 percent share in the zoo, which is mainly privately owned.
China says it has nearly 6,000 tigers in captivity, but just 50 to 60 are left in the wild, including about 20 wild Siberian tigers.
In the 1980s, China set up tiger farms to try to preserve the big cats, intending to release some into the wild. But conservation groups say the farms are used to harvest ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine. |
IF it's a choice between sticking your child in front of the TV to get an hour's peace, and giving them a game to play, a new study has found that video gaming is actually far better for young children than passive TV watching.
That means Singstar or Angry Birds beats out Big Bird or The Wiggles any day.
Active video gaming is actually better for children than watching television, a Queensland study has revealed.
Researchers in the Games Research and Interactive Design Lab at the Queensland University of Technology examined the effects of gaming (on mobiles, consoles and computers) and television on children between the ages of two and five and found that they expended more energy when they were gaming than when they watched TV.
Dr Penny Sweetser, lead researcher on the project told News.com.au that the scientists were able to distinguish two distinct kinds of screen time - passive screen time, where you are passively receiving media, like when you watch TV, and active screen time, where you are engaging both your mind and your body.
"The amount of energy that was expended by children playing video games was found to be much higher than the energy expended when they watched television," she said.
"Higher blood pressure was also associated with television watching, but not PC or video gaming."
The results almost directly contradict The Federal Government's recommendations for the amount of time children should spend in front of screens.
The government recommends that children between the ages of two and five spend a maximum of one hour "screen time" per day.
However, the QUT study found that 74-90 per cent of children exceeded that recommendation.
It found children in that age range were spending two to three hours watching TV, but only half an hour playing games.
Dr Sweetser said that the Federal Government doesn’t make the distinction between passive viewing of television as opposed to the more interactive use of video games.
She said she hoped the team's research “would help to inform the Federal Government's future recommendations and make them a bit more useful."
"And perhaps it will make them a bit more realistic for parents to understand the different effects of engaging in different types of screen time and helping them choose how kids should spend their time."
The researcher said she and her team tried several times to contact the Department of Health and Aging but said "they were not very helpful".
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Aging told News.com.au that the National Physical Activity Recommendations for Children 0-5 Years were published in 2011 to provide guidance in relation to physical activity, sedentary behaviour (sitting) and television viewing for young children.
"These recommendations were based on the best available evidence at the time and included an extensive consultation process with both professionals and parents," the spokesperson said.
"The Government recognises this is an area of research which is growing and new research is continually emerging. This is why the physical activity guidelines are updated on a 5 yearly basis. Currently, the physical activity guidelines for children (5-12 years), young people (13-17 years) and adults (18-64 years) are being revised to reflect the more recent research in this area. "
So are we moving towards a time when video games might actually be a recommended form of physical activity? Have your say in the comments below. |
LEADING THE DAY: A contentious battle over Internet anti-piracy legislation shifted from Washington to the Consumer Electronics Show, The Washington Post reported. The Consumer Electronics Association, which is behind the show, has been a vocal opponent of the two bills circulating in Congress that would help Hollywood titans, record labels and pharmaceutical firms enforce copyright infringement laws online.
The proposals — the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act — have drawn the ire of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, who worry that the bills give law enforcement too much power to shut down their sites. The Senate version of the bill is expected to head to the floor for a vote later this month.
Wikipedia may join Reddit’s protest: In protest of SOPA, the social Web news site Reddit has said it will blackout its services for 12 hours on Jan. 18, when the House Oversight committee will the discuss the effects of domain name service and search engine blocking. In comments on his personal page Wednesday, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that he supports Reddit’s efforts and renewed talk about a similar effort at Wikipedia.
“I’m all in favor of it,” he wrote on his personal talk page on the site. “[And] I think it would be great if we could act quickly to coordinate with Reddit.”
EPIC may file with FTC over Google’s social search: The Electronic Privacy Information Center is likely to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over Google’s new efforts in social search, the Los Angeles Times reported. EPIC director Marc Rotenberg told the newspaper that EPIC “believes this is something that the FTC needs to look at,” and expressed concern that the search engine’s decision to include information from its Google+ social network makes personal information more accessible.
Rotenberg also said that Google appears to be using its “market dominance in a separate sector” to bolster its social network.
ICANN taking applications: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is now taking applications for new top-level domains. ICANN has been mulling the expansion for six years. A bipartisan group of lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission have joined the Association of National Advertisers in raising concerns about the program and its effect on copyright holders and had asked ICANN to slow-down its implementation. ICANN says that the expansion will help brands by making Web addresses more specific, but some businesses have worried that adding more Web suffixes will require more defensive registrations to fight scammers.
Google renews China push: Google is renewing its efforts in China after pulling its search engine out of the country two years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported. The company is hiring in China, the report said, and is trying to introduce the Android Market onto its mobile devices in China and convince Chinese users to try the Google services that “don’t require official censorship.”
Daniel Alegre, Google’s top executive in Asia, told the Journal that the renewed investment in China is a “pragmatic” decision. |
Anyone who remembers the controversy surrounding the Florida count for the 2000 U.S. election — and the critical issue of 'hanging chads' — will appreciate the election dilemma faced Wednesday by officials in a Saskatchewan community where a new form of the 'hanging chad' problem emerged.
In the rural municipality of Swift Current, voters were choosing a new council.
At the end of the night, returning officers confirmed that they had a 'Chad' problem: Two candidates — both with the first name Chad — had tied for the last spot on council with 54 votes each.
Officials checked their counting four times and there was no doubt they had a tie.
Chad Tait and Chad Salter were left hanging while officials looked up the rules on how to cope with a tie.
Initially each candidate was prepared to concede the race to the other, but officials then went to the rule book.
According to Saskatchewan's regulations on local elections, in the event of a tie, a winner is chosen using a random draw.
So an official wrote their names on two pieces of paper and drew the winner's name: Salter.
He said it felt strange to win by a lottery, after putting so much effort into a campaign.
"You had gone out and done some door-knocking and talked to people and tried to generate the votes," Salter said. "It seemed a little bit comical, I guess, that it came down to pulling a name out of a hat."
Tait said he was pleased the rural municipality had a good voter turnout, about 60 per cent.
Both were asked, but neither would say if they voted for themselves or their opponent.
The rural municipality of Swift Current is about 225 kilometres west of Regina. |
LONDON — A group of investors representing more than 5 trillion euros (about $5.53 trillion) in assets under management have called on oil and gas companies to observe an unlimited moratorium on activity in the Arctic high seas.
Led by French asset managers Mirova and Natixis Asset Management, the group of 19 investors said it was an "urgent call" to protect the hydrocarbon-rich region from future exploration and reflected national pledges on climate change.
"We would like to involve both companies and policymakers so as to take the Arctic issue to the next level and seek greater protection for the region," said Mirova Chief Executive Philippe Zaouati in a statement on Monday.
The group said countries should take into account national climate pledges before granting new licenses or extending existing ones. They should also apply stricter, common criteria to ongoing projects and restrict approval to those presenting minimal operational risks.
Oil and gas companies, meanwhile, should stop drilling in Arctic marine waters covered by ice "due to current technological uncertainty in terms of the effectiveness of oil recovery mechanisms" and avoid areas of ecological significance.
The group also called on oil firms to publicly disclose their licenses held in the region, whether they intend to use or extend them and how these plans fit with their broader climate change mitigation commitments.
Reporting by Simon Jessop. |
From the always plugged-in Mike Freeman, at CBS Sports:
Based on interviews over the past several weeks with current and former players, I'm told that a current gay NFL player is strongly considering coming out publicly within the next few months — and after doing so, the player would attempt to continue his career.
Take it with the requisite grain of salt, as Freeman doesn't even know who the player is. It's still intriguing.
The gays in sports thing seems to be nearing a head, with You Can Play and Robbie Rogers and combine orientation quizzes and Outsports' purchase and Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo and Chris Culliver, but all of this without an actual active, openly gay athlete in a major American sport. If ever there was a time to come out and take advantage of a positive media environment, this is it.
It'd still be hard, though. And the word on the street is that the player isn't worried about how his teammates would take it, but rather the fans.
This player's true concern, I'm told, is not the reaction inside an NFL locker room but outside of it. The player fears he will suffer serious harm from homophobic fans, and that is the only thing preventing him from coming out.
Advertisement
First you think no, this is America in 2013, NFL fans can handle it. And then you look at the comments below the CBS story.
[CBS Sports] |
“LET us turn ours into a country of mushrooms!”
“Play sports games in an offensive way!”
North Korea has released a bizarre list of propaganda slogans ahead of the 70th anniversary celebrating its founding and the liberation of the Korean peninsula from Japanese rule.
The list of 310 slogans, which according to Reuters, ran to more than 7000 words in translation and spanned two pages of the party’s broadsheet newspaper, was drafted by the ruling Worker’s Party of Korea (WKP).
The slogans contained the usual heroic references to their leaders, praising their legacies and urging loyalty to the current ruler Kim Jong-Un.
There was also prominence given to its military strength, its enemies (the United States), education, the economy, sports, and farming, with particular reference to the need for increasing food production. North Korea has long struggled with reports of famine and food shortages.
“A lot of this has to do with very practical things to do with the economy, especially food,” said James Grayson, emeritus professor of modern Korean studies at Sheffield University, told BBC.
“It’s an indication of the absolutely dire state of the North Korean economy. You have this huge disparity between the select few living in the best parts of Pyongyang, who live very well — there are now examples of international businesses there, coffee shops and designer labels ... whereas other parts of the country are allowed to go to hell in a cart.”
The strange list of exclamation ladened slogans included:
“Let this socialist country resound with Song of Big Fish Haul and be permeated with the fragrant smell of fish and other seafoods!”
“Make fruits cascade down and their sweet aroma fill the air on the sea of apple trees at the foot of Chol Pass!”
“Let us turn ours into a country of mushrooms!” and “Grow vegetables extensively in greenhouses!”
“Let the wives of officers become dependable assistants to their husbands!”
“Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland by the joint operation of the army and people!
“More stylish school uniforms” and “Organic farming on an extensive scale”.
“Should the enemy dare to invade our country, annihilate them to the last man so that none of them will survive to sign the instrument of surrender!”
The use of slogans by the totalitarian state is nothing new to its citizens. North Korea’s government often distributes new ideological messages ahead of major anniversaries marking the country’s successes. The propaganda is issued via state-controlled media to help enforce loyalty among the population. |
aNewDomain — Cuba has two paper currencies — the Peso and the Convertible Peso or CUC. CUCs are worth about $1 and Pesos, which are used for government salaries, are worth about $.04. But what happens when bitcoin is thrown into the mix?
Bitcoincuba is a movement to infuse bitcoin into the Cuban economy, and it seems to already be working. Here is a compliation of screenshots taken from a bitcoin transaction that occurred at a new WiFi hotspot in Cuba.
The original video from which the screenshots were taken is here, as well as an in-depth article on Cuban bitcoin.
Fernando Villar, the founder of bitcoincuba and person responsible for the video and inaugural bitcoin transaction in Cuba, said of the event:
It’s about showing Cubans and the Bitcoin community that it is now possible to receive Bitcoin through Nauta, the Cuban state-run public Wi-Fi … This will hopefully open everyone’s eyes on the possibilities and finally put Cuba on the Bitcoin map.”
Villar was also interviewed in a TV Marti report, where he gets into an in-depth discussion of the founding of bitcoincuba and its importance in the country. (Note: The video is in Spanish.)
What Happens Now?
I’ve never owned or transacted in bitcoin myself. But it seems obvious that this method of payment would be a fairly easy way for Cubans to make money through outsourced work or sales without the Cuban government, or even regulators in the US, knowing. A non-trackable form of paid work would be a big deal for the country, which is heavily regulated.
The current two-currency situation in Cuba distorts the economy. While I’m not an economist, I have read enough to believe that if Cuba were to convert to a single currency, the CUC for example, it would be problematic and cause unfairness as wages change.
So, how does bitcoin figure into all of this, and will the Cuban government care?
For aNewDomain, I’m Larry Press.
Ed: A version of this story ran on Larry Press’ laredcubana. Read it here.
Featured image: Bitcoin Wallpaper by Jason Benjamin via Flickr
Body image: Screenshots by Larry Press |
Japan's workers are being urged to switch off their laptops, go home early and use what little energy they have left on procreation, in an attempt to avert demographic disaster.
The drive to persuade employers that their staff would be better off at home than staying late at the office comes amid warnings from health experts that many couples are simply too tired to have sex.
A survey of married couples under 50 found that more than a third had not had sex in the previous month. Many couples said they didn't have the energy. A study by Durex found that the average couple has sex 45 times a year, less than half the global average of 103 times.
"It's a question of work-life balance," Kunio Kitamura, head of the Japan Family Planning Association, told Reuters. "The people who run companies need to do something about it."
Japan's birth rate of 1.34 is among the lowest in the world and falls well short of the 2.07 children needed to keep the population stable. If it persists, demographers say the population will drop to 95 million by 2050 from its 2006 peak of 127.7 million.
This month Keidanren, Japan's biggest business organisation, implored its 1,600 member companies to allow married employees to spend more time at home. Several firms have organised "family weeks" during which employees must get permission to work past 7pm, but most continue to squeeze every last drop of productivity from their staff.
In response, the labour ministry plans to submit a bill exempting employees with children under three from overtime and limiting them to six-hour days. |
The ruling in California could have an impact on the nationwide debate California's highest court is to give a long-awaited ruling on the legality of the state's ban on same-sex marriages. The court's decision may have an impact on the nationwide debate on the issue. If the judges rule the ban - approved by voters in 2000 - unconstitutional, California could become only the second US state to allow same-sex marriage. California's legislature has twice passed laws to make gay marriage legal. State Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed them each time. California currently offers same-sex couples who register as domestic partners the same legal rights and responsibilities as married men and women. Other states, such as Vermont and New Jersey, have similar civil union provisions. 'Huge impact' The judges on California's Supreme Court heard arguments for and against the legality of the ban in March. Their decision is due by 10am local time (1800 BST). The law, approved by Californians in a 2000 referendum and known as Proposition 22, states that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognised in California". Geoffrey Kors, executive director of the gay rights group Equality California, told the Associated Press news agency: "What happens in California, either way, will have a huge impact around the nation. It will set the tone." Equality California joined nearly two dozen gay couples and the city of San Francisco in bringing the case after hundreds of gay marriages conducted in 2004 were ruled invalid. In early 2004, San Francisco became the first place in the US where gay couples were able to marry after the city's Mayor Gavin Newsom authorised same-sex marriage licences, claiming existing legislation was discriminatory. In August of that year, California's Supreme Court ruled the mayor had overstepped his authority and nullified the unions. That action prompted the lawsuit under consideration now. Ahead of Thursday's ruling, San Francisco chief deputy city attorney Therese Stewart told the AFP news agency that denying same-sex couples marriage rights would make California appear "indifferent" to how gay people are treated. California Deputy Attorney General Christopher Krueger said he believed there was "a rational basis for the state to adhere to the common and traditional definition of marriage" set out in Proposition 22. He told AFP that registered same-sex couples were given "all the rights and benefits associated with marriage" under the current laws.
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At the age of 63, I have finally selected a path that is built on a rock solid foundation. I’ve decided to place my faith in Jesus Christ, specifically in His teachings and example. Furthermore, I have also chosen to follow Christ as a member of the Mormon Church.
The Least
One of His most beautiful instructions is that we are to be vitally concerned with “the least of these.” The marginalized. The vulnerable. The undefended, the unguarded, and the unprotected. Not just concerned. Rather, Jesus made it clear that entry into heaven will ONLY be granted to those who actively take care of “the least.”
Frequently, we pass them by. Often, we don’t even see them. Never-the-less, “the least of these” are all around us in society. For the purpose of this article, they also surround us in our very own LDS Church.
Who Are the Marginalized Mormons?
To follow Christ’s mandate, it’s certainly appropriate that we start with our own ‘fellow citizens in the household of God.’ We, as Saints, should minister to marginalized members. Various categories of ‘the least’ are listed below. Of course, this is not a comprehensive compilation. It includes those who many of us are concerned about at present.
Those in Extreme Slavery. Details below.
Our LGBT brothers and sisters.
Children of LGBT married couples.
Families headed by single parents, especially by single mothers.
Members with questions, doubts and transitioned faith.
Are LDS Men Marginalized?
Let me ask 2 questions.
Would you consider those in SLAVERY to be marginalized?
Would you consider those in EXTREME SLAVERY to be marginalized?
Hopefully, most would answer YES to both queries.
SLAVERY? I don’t know anyone in this condition. But, I would put them squarely in the category of “the least of these.”
SLAVERY in the EXTREME? What is that? Who are they? It turns out that I know many, many men in this unfortunate state. Today, I view them as marginalized in the EXTREME.
So, who among us are bound by the fetters of EXTREME SLAVERY?
Consider this citation from an early and official church publication—The Millennial Star. Many ascribe this quote directly to Joseph Smith.
“We have heard men who hold the priesthood remark that they would do anything they were told to do by those who preside over them — even if they knew it was wrong. But such obedience as this is worse than folly to us. It is slavery in the extreme. The man who would thus willingly degrade himself should not claim a rank among intelligent beings until he turns from his folly. A man of God would despise this idea.”
Do you know anyone in Extreme Slavery? Members who would do anything their leaders tell them to do—even if they knew it was wrong?
Early church doctrine designated such obedience as degrading. IT IS!!!
“A man of God would despise this idea.” I don’t qualify as a ‘man of God.’ But, I do despise the idea of doing anything I am told, even if it’s wrong. Thus, I claim my rank among intelligent beings.
Based on this early church definition of “slavery in the extreme” there are myriad members who are marginalized by being in this ‘degraded’ condition.
Ministering to the Marginalized
The list of “the least of these” within the church continues to grow. Many of us have been actively speaking and looking out for those in categories 2-5. Now, I add category #1—those in EXTREME slavery. Likely the biggest marginalized group that surrounds us at church. One more parcel of people to stand up for with our votes of disapproval. |
Israeli President Shimon Peres has started his first state visit to Canada with a mix of public ceremonies and private meetings.
Governor General David Johnston welcomed Peres during a formal ceremony at Rideau Hall, which featured a military guard of honour as well as schoolchildren waving Israeli flags.
The car carrying the Israeli president was escored by Mounties on horseback. A band played Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, as an artillery salute boomed out.
Johnston spoke of the ties between the two countries.
"Welcome to Canada," he said. "Israel and Canada have always had a close relationship based on our similar values and our collaboration in many spheres, including education, trade and science and technology.
"But I think what truly brings us together are the vibrant people-to-people exchanges that we enjoy and the knowledge-sharing in which we engage; what I like to call the diplomacy of knowledge."
Peres spoke in both French and English in reply, recalling that he first visited Canada 60 years ago.
"I am very, very grateful for your kind invitation to visit your wonderful country," he said. "I have the deepest gratitude and I bring that gratitude from Jerusalem to Ottawa for the deep friendship that has existed between our peoples from our first day of independence."
Johnston and Peres held a private meeting inside Rideau Hall's drawing room after the ceremony.
Israeli President Shimon Peres meets Prime Minister Stephen Harper in his Parliament Hill office on Monday. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)
The president then moved on to Parliament Hill, where he was greeted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the rotunda of the Centre Block. Peres signed a guest book and met the Speakers of the House of Commons and the Senate.
Harper and Peres then went into a private meeting, where they were expected to discuss issues of trade and security.
Peres, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, arrived in Ottawa Sunday night for a five-day state visit which also includes events in Toronto and Montreal.
Research, trade focus for tour
A spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird told CBC News the Israeli president's visit "comes at a time when relations between Israel and Canada are strong and getting stronger."
The purpose of the trip is the promotion of greater collaboration between Canada and Israel with respect to trade and innovation, particularly in the areas of science and technology.
"I will take this special opportunity to discuss with him how we can strengthen research and educational collaboration between our countries," said Gov. Gen. David Johnston in a statement ahead of the Israeli president's arrival.
The Governor General will host a state dinner in honour of the visit at Rideau Hall Monday evening.
On Tuesday, Peres and the Governor General are expected to talk about innovation and education before a Memorandum of Understanding is signed between the Royal Society of Canada and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
The Israeli President will also meet privately with the leader of the Official Opposition Thomas Mulcair and interim Liberal leader Bob Rae.
In the evening, Peres will give a "major" speech at a reception to celebrate 64 years of Israel’s independence hosted by the Embassy of Israel in Canada at the National Gallery in Ottawa.
On Wednesday, Peres will travel to Toronto where he will meet with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, attend a roundtable discussion on brain research, and take part in a public event hosted by David Frum and organized by the United Jewish Appeal federation of Greater Toronto.
Israeli President Shimon Peres, right, meets with Governor General David Johnston at Rideau Hall on the first day of his state visit to Canada. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)
Peres will wrap-up his state visit in Montreal on Thursday where he will meet with Quebec Premier Jean Charest and attend an event organized by the Jewish community.
Speaking at the American Jewish Congress in Washington, D.C. last Thursday, Baird said "Israel has no greater friend in the world than Canada."
Israel's prime minister visited in March
Peres is the second high-profile Israeli politician to visit Canada in recent weeks -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Ottawa in March.
Israel's president is a ceremonial role, though Peres, now 88, has served as the country's prime minister in the past and is a highly influential figure.
In March, Netanyahu came to Ottawa looking for support for the idea of a pre-emptive strike to blunt Iran's ambitions to have nuclear weapons.
But Harper, a staunch supporter of Israel, used toned-down language, expressing the desire for a peaceful solution.
Peres in the past has taken a softer stand on Iran.
Baird and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty toured Israel in late January, for talks focused on both security and trade issues. |
Maryland Transportation Secretary Pete K. Rahn dangled a $9 billion carrot Wednesday in front of more than 100 companies potentially interested in adding express toll lanes to the Capital Beltway, Interstate 270 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.
"It's amazing," Rahn quipped to more than 320 highway engineers, designers and builders in a ballroom at the BWI Airport Marriott in Linthicum. "You can get a lot of attention when you put a nine in front of a 'B.'"
Officially, the Maryland Department of Transportation's industry forum was intended to provide companies more details about the plan to add four toll lanes each to some of the Washington region's most traffic-clogged highways. But as Maryland officials eyed the ballroom filled with business executives tapping on laptops and jotting notes, they also saw potential. It seems Maryland's proposal to build $7.6 billion of the toll lanes via a public-private partnership has prompted a slew of firms to at least consider competing for the job.
State officials say it would be the biggest partnership of its kind in the United States, and several attendees said Maryland has one of the most massive projects up for grabs in the highway construction industry.
"I don't want to just do something," Rahn told the crowd. "I want to do something that delivers a 'wow'" for traffic relief.
[Idea of adding toll lanes to Maryland highways has hit barriers before]
One big unknown: the cost of the tolls. After the meeting, Rahn said he was aware variable rates on toll lanes that opened last week on part of Interstate 66 in Northern Virginia had soared to as high as $40.
"Obviously, that caught my attention," Rahn said.
[‘No one has to pay a toll.’ Virginia transportation chief defends high tolls on I-66]
However, he noted the I-66 toll has since peaked at about $14. He said Maryland will know the range of toll rates on its highways just before it chooses a winning proposal. Like Northern Virginia's toll lanes, there will be no limit on how high tolls could go to keep traffic moving.
"Clearly an exorbitant toll means people won't use it," Rahn said after the meeting. " . . . These toll operators understand they need to provide a reasonable toll to have adequate users."
The regular lanes will remain free.
The state is seeking a team of companies to design the lanes, finance their construction, build them and operate them long-term in exchange for collecting the toll revenue. The public-private partnership will be used to add toll lanes to Maryland's 42 miles of the Beltway and 34 miles of I-270 between the Beltway and Frederick.
The state plans to finance and build the 29 miles of toll lanes on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, which are estimated to cost $1.47 billion, assuming the federal government agrees to transfer it to the state.
The state is not expecting to pay anything on the Beltway or I-270 projects, Rahn said.
State officials said they plan to solicit proposals in 2019 and select a winner in 2020.
[Montgomery leaders ask for more transit in state tolling plan]
Rahn said the state will leave details of the design to bidders in hopes of receiving the most creative ideas. Maryland officials said proposals also will be judged on how the teams plan to build the lanes quickly, keep traffic moving during construction and limit impacts on adjacent homes and businesses.
Between MDOT's presentations, the ballroom buzzed with people exchanging business cards and chatting in small groups. Some attendees said companies were feeling each other out, sizing up possible bid partners and competitors. Maryland officials said the event drew company representatives from across the United States and the world, including Australia, Spain and Denmark.
"Normally at these events, you know everyone in the room. This time, I barely know a quarter," said John Huchrowski, of Prime AE Group, a Baltimore engineering firm. "It's brought out the big guns."
Simon Reuterswärd, a project manager in a local office of the Swedish construction giant Skanska, said his company is considering whether to compete for the project.
Asked to put the potential contract into perspective, he said, "For any company in this room it would be a big deal, absolutely, very big. You can see the attention it's getting. It's quite remarkable." |
Umno Deputy President Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin arrives at the Umno General assembly, December 9, 2015. ― Picture by Saw Siow Feng
KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 9 — Umno deputy president Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin disclosed tonight that he has been officially barred by the party’s powerful supreme council from addressing delegates at the main general assembly tomorrow.
The Johor-born added that he had appealed to his fellow supreme council members to allow him and Sabah-born vice-president Datuk Seri Shafie Apdal the chance to speak to delegates tomorrow, but was denied.
“I’m not allowed to speak because my lips have been sealed. I don't know what has happened to Umno,” he told reporters after leaving the just-ended council meeting at Menara Dato Onn, the party’s headquarters here.
“I’m saddened but I will sit through the assembly until it is over because I am the deputy president. I am just disappointed that after appealing for myself and Datuk Shafie to be given the chance to address delegates, they have still said no,” he added.
Muhyiddin said he disagreed with the council’s decision, but accepted it as it had been decided by the rest of the group.
Both Muhyiddin and Shafie have been estranged from the Umno leadership following their removal from the federal Cabinet in July, ostensibly for questioning Putrajaya’s handling of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) issue.
Both continue to be critical of the Umno leadership.
In a departure from party tradition, Muhyiddin had been removed from all speaking duties at the Umno general assembly.
The Umno deputy president customarily delivers the opening address at the assemblies of the Youth, Wanita and Puteri wings as well as the winding-up speech on the final day of the main assembly.
Earlier today, another Umno vice-president and Muhyiddin’s successor as deputy prime minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi officiated the opening of the party’s three wing assemblies ― Wanita, Youth and Puteri.
Muhyiddin however paid each wing's meeting a visit this afternoon.
He is also currently under investigation for “crossing the line” in a speech he gave ahead of the general assembly which questioned Najib's leadership. |
Reputed gang leader Ducarme Joseph was fatally shot in the Saint-Michel neighbourhood last night.
Joseph, 46, was found in the middle of a street around 10:15 p.m., near the corner of Saint-Michel Boulevard and Michel-Ange Street.
Police have called Ducarme Joseph the most dangerous street gang member in Montreal. (Montreal Police)
Officers and paramedics responded to the call, and Joseph was declared dead at the scene.
"Upon their arrival they found the body of a man in his 40s, with serious wounds to his upper body. We're talking about gunshot wounds," said Const. Francois Collard with the Montreal Police.
Collard said police have not made any arrests and have no suspects at this time.
Police analyst Stéphane Berthomet told Radio-Canada that more than one criminal organization could have reason to kill Joseph.
"All hypotheses are still open. There is the Mafia, the bikers, and other gangs. The possibilities are vast," said Berthomet .
Leader of Montreal gang: police
Police detectives have said Joseph is the leader of the 67 gang — named after a bus route in Montreal's Saint-Michel district — and affiliated with the Crips gang, also known as the Blues.
Joseph owned a high-end boutique on St-Jacques Street in Old Montreal.
Officer and paramedics responded to a call at around 10:15 p.m., and Joseph was declared dead on site. (Radio-Canada )
In 2010, two men were killed and two others were injured after gunmen opened fire in the shop.
The shooting was believed to be a retaliation hit, linked to Montreal's criminal underworld.
Joseph wasn't injured in the 2010 shooting and escaped through the back door. His bodyguard, Peter Christopoulos, and store manager, Jean Gaston, were shot and killed in the attack.
Police considered Joseph a suspect in the December 2009 murder of Nick Rizzuto Jr., son of the deceased alleged godfather of the Montreal Mafia, Vito Rizzuto. |
There’s no defending Al Golden and the way his football team finished this season.
A record of 6-6 and being tied for last in a weak Coastal Division with the amount of talent UM had this season is just ugly. The Hurricanes should have been better than they were, and yes, this has all the same feel to it of Randy Shannon’s four years on the job.
There's been no significant progress. Just the same old mediocrity.
The numbers tell you a big part of the story: Golden is 28-21, 16-16 in ACC play. Shannon was 28-22, 16-16 in ACC play. Both coaches lost the focus of their teams for the final two games of their fourth seasons once they were eliminated from division contention.
It’s been equally embarrassing and abysmal for Canes fans to swallow.
But I’m here to tell you coaching has only been half of the problem during this 11-year run of average football. The other part: Nobody in charge seems to care as much as the fans or former players do about winning titles or shedding this new image of being average.
I’m not talking about Golden. He gets paid and is contractually obligated to care through 2019. I’m talking about the school president, athletic director, board of trustees on down. Those people. It’s one thing to be visible, clap and say the right things, be supportive. It’s another thing to invest in winning, to demand it, to expect it.
I’ve only been around this program as a reporter since about 2003, but I can tell you few people were more visible, more vocal and more passionate about winning on the field than former athletic director Paul Dee. Nobody demanded it more.
He was there for the good and bad after UM’s first run of titles was over in 1991. Dee arrived in 1993 and was in charge until 2008. He guided UM through the Pell Grant scandal, hired Butch Davis and then kept Larry Coker around to lead UM to its last national title in 2001.
You might remember that 2001 season for the title. I also remember it for what happened in June the summer right before it happened. Donna Shalala took over as president.
Shalala has done a tremendous job for UM, raising billions, being a leader. Brand new buildings have been cropping up all over campus for the past 13 years. She’s been there to support all the athletic teams, fighting the NCAA through the Nevin Shapiro mess (it would have been worse for UM if she wasn’t there in Indianapolis front and center). She’s done a lot of great things. Making sure the football program hasn’t slipped to where it is now isn’t one of them.
Since Dee stepped down in 2008 (it felt like his power was dwindling toward the end of his reign), UM has been through three athletic directors and the Shapiro mess. Meanwhile, the demand for excellence on the field –- the push for that sixth ring –- has quietly faded to the back burner. What we hear now is ‘Let’s win the Coastal!’
How did we get here? Here’s my theory: money.
UM did a lot of winning in the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s because they had a lot of great players and a lot of great coaches. But they did it without really spending a whole lot of money on the coaches, the facilities, their home stadium or anything else. College football was relatively small back when the good times started. Howard Schnellenberger figured out he had the most talent-rich backyard in the country and laid the foundation. State of Miami he called it.
In the end, though, there’s a reason Miami went through a number of coaches while Florida State held onto Bobby Bowden and Florida had Steve Spurrirer for years. When college coaches started making more money, Bowden and Spurrier got paid. Why did Schnellenberger leave UM after winning the title in 1983? The USFL was going to pay him more. Jimmy Johnson? Dennis Erickson? Butch Davis? They went to the NFL too. You might remember UM hired all those guys without really breaking the bank for any of them.
That happened for years with assistant coaches too. Remember Rob Chudzinski? Mark Stoops? Dave Wannstedt? The Canes had a pretty good run on assistants when coaches were willing to take a little less money to build their resumes before moving onto bigger and better things.
What’s happened over the last decade? Well, it’s not just that Miami’s remained cheap. It's also that everybody else has been raising their game too. New TV contracts and conference affiliations have put schools that once couldn’t stay on the same field with UM’s team speed on equal or better footing with the Canes everywhere else.
Up until the last year or so, UM’s facilities were considered among the worst for a power conference school. Now, the Canes are better, but still below average of what Top 25 programs have to offer. Have you seen what they’ve got in places like Alabama, Oregon, Texas, Florida State and Florida? Heck, scouts tell me all the time there are teams in non-power conferences with indoor practice facilities and all kinds of stuff UM doesn’t have.
Attendance is another issue. Say what you want about former greats not caring about playing in a half-empty Orange Bowl on some Saturdays when UM played snoozers against weak Big East teams, but the OB never felt as empty or lifeless as Sun Life Stadium has for UM over the last seven years.
What five and four-star can’t miss recruits would want to come play at No Life Stadium when just about every other school in a power conference puts UM’s real attendance and atmosphere to shame with on-campus stadiums? How can UM compete with that? Recruits nowadays care about everything –- not just about UM’s fading glory days or rich NFL history. That used to sell. Not anymore.
The saddest part of all of this isn’t that the Canes are behind on many fronts aside from coaching. It’s that Dee really was the last guy in charge at UM that made you feel like somebody was really fighting to maintain a gold standard.
Remember that ticket advertisement UM put out back in June urging fans to “GO TO FEWER GAMES!” The message was buy tickets for Florida State and North Carolina because we know you won’t show up to the other games. How pathetic was that?
UM likes to portray itself as frugal because it has to be. Small, private school setting, no stadium of its own. But don't let that fool you. The Canes have dough. They've received all the same TV deal money and conference money every other ACC school has. It’s just that the dollars don’t seem to be going back into football enough.
How do I know that for sure? I don’t. UM is a private school. They don’t share one ounce of information on how much they spend on coaching or the football budget in general.
But this is how you know they aren’t keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to paying football coaches: the results. Outside of former offensive coordinator Jedd Fisch (now with the Jacksonville Jaguars) how many assistants since Shannon took over in 2007 have moved onto bigger and better jobs? Has anybody seen or heard from Patrick Nix? Mark Whipple in now the head coach at 3-9 UMass. I can tell you nobody has been trying to pry away the assistants who have been here the last four years.
Athletic director Blake James said last week -- before the Pittsburgh loss -- Golden wouldn’t be fired after this season regardless of how things panned out. James also said Golden reserved the right to make all changes on his staff. No moves would be forced upon him.
At this point, I would have to expect Golden will make moves. He has to. Status quo isn't cutting it.
It wasn't at Florida. That's why the Gators cut coach Will Muschamp, who was hired right around the same time as Golden. He went 28-21, but won the SEC East and made it to the Sugar Bowl in 2012.
Sunday, Nebraska fired Bo Pellini because his team finished 9-3. Pellini won at least nine games every year he was there and finished 67-27 combined. You know who pulled the plug on Pellini? Former UM athletic director Shawn Eichorst, who spent two years at UM, and gave Golden his extension through 2019 because of how he handled the Shapiro bomb that was dropped on him shortly after getting the job.
Ironically enough, Eichorst told Nebraska reporters Pellini was fired because he “didn’t win the games that mattered the most.”
Remember when winning the games that mattered, mattered at Miami?
Golden hasn’t done that yet. That’s a fact. His biggest win to date? Over 9-3 Duke this year.
Bottomline: he should have won more with this year’s team. The Coastal, weak as ever, was there for the taking. The Hurricanes, potentially with four top 100 picks in next year’s draft (only Florida State and Oregon have more), grossly underachieved.
It's hard to explain some of the things that happened this year. How does five-star cornerback Tracy Howard start a ton last year and regress to hardly playing this year? How did Stacy Coley, one of your most electrifying players last year as a freshman, regress? Why was Dallas Crawford -- one of your 22 best -- sitting behind a former walk-on most of the season?
The one thing I don’t blame Golden for -- not being able to get his team up for these last two meaningless games. The Canes did the same to Shannon. When UM lost to FSU -- after investing all it had to beat the Seminoles and keep its Coastal Division hopes alive -- there was nothing tangible to play for anymore. Virginia and Pittsburgh, meanwhile, were fighting to become bowl eligible.
Golden was essentially a coach without a carrot to dangle. In the end, do you think it really mattered to the players if they were 8-4 or 6-6 when they couldn’t win the one thing they set out to accomplish in the beginning? Maybe to the fans, but certainly not the players.
Here is where we’re at: If UM’s leaders want to get serious about winning again it starts with who is chosen to replace Shalala.
That new school president can’t be satisfied with just winning the Coastal Division or selling fans on what this week’s uniform combination is going to be. They don’t want to see another 3Penny Film about how hard guys are working, read another report about where UM’s next recruiting class is ranked or be reminded about that NCAA cloud Golden had to deal with.
Canes fans are tired of all that. They want results.
Enough quality talent has come and gone through Coral Gables over the last 11 years -- no, not as frequently as it did before, but enough -- to win the Coastal at least once. Miami hasn’t done that.
A huge part of that failure is on coaching. The bigger part of that is how much financial support Shannon and Golden have received to go out and bring in quality assistant coaches and coordinators to help make these players better and get the most out of them. In the end, you can have a real nice car, but you can’t expect to win the race if you’ve got a below average pit crew you’re paying with nickels and dimes. You’re giving the driver no chance.
The proof is in player development. Anybody remember the last time UM had a pass rusher opponents feared while he was here? No, but we’re quick to point out how good Olivier Vernon looks with the Dolphins. How about a defensive tackle who plugged the middle and was a menace? Vince Wilfork is in his 10th season in the NFL. How about a ball-hawking safety like Ed Reed? Where’s that next guy been?
Until Brad Kaaya showed up, we were all wondering when UM was going to have a top flight quarterback again.
Why? Yes, there have been recruiting mistakes. Lots of them.
Much of the local talent UM has been able to hang onto lately didn’t pick the Canes because they were an elite program. They stayed home for the love of The U, because they grew up rooting for Sean Taylor and dreaming of being Canes.
Imagine where UM would have been this season if Duke Johnson hadn’t decided to stick with the hometown Canes even after they fired Shannon? How about Denzel Perryman? Or Phillip Dorsett?
In the end, this blog post isn't a fire Golden letter or even a fire Mark D’Onofrio letter.
I’m just saying UM’s problems extend beyond Golden. It extended beyond Shannon.
The U needs somebody in charge to really care about how far this program has fallen, come up with a plan to right the ship, demand excellence and invest in the program all out.
Right now, to me, it just seems like the folks in charge in Coral Gables are happy if you show up for two games a year. They're okay with mediocrity. |
Image copyright Getty Images
Councils should be given more powers to charge utility companies for the time they spend digging up busy roads, the Local Government Association has said.
It called on the government to grant all councils the power to introduce a daily rate for companies, in an effort to reduce road delays.
Currently only authorities in London and Kent can do so without having to first get government approval.
The government said it was "determined" to improve journeys and cut congestion.
Most councils currently have to receive permission from the secretary of state for transport before being able to introduce so-called lane rental schemes.
The LGA - which represents more than 370 councils in England and Wales - said the current process was "cumbersome and bureaucratic".
Making it easier to charge utility companies would give them an added incentive to complete work as quickly as possible, it added.
'Time-consuming'
LGA transport spokesman Peter Box said councils were being "hamstrung" by a lack of powers.
Mr Box said there was a need for "robust and decisive action".
"Councils know their areas best and should be able to make decisions about traffic locally," he said.
"This means they need the option of being able to introduce lane rental schemes without secretary of state approval, which is time-consuming."
The money generated through the charges could then be used to fund measures aimed at reducing future roadwork problems, he suggested.
The LGA said the scheme in London has been a major success, significantly reducing levels of severe disruption caused by roadworks.
It estimates councils spend nearly a fifth of their maintenance budgets - approximately £220m - on tackling poorly-executed utility roadworks.
A Department for Transport spokeswoman said: "We are determined to deliver better journeys for drivers and cut congestion.
"We commissioned a report evaluating existing lane rental schemes in Kent and London, which was published earlier this year.
"Work to formulate options on potential future schemes is ongoing and at an early stage." |
N.C. State is looking for wins.
That’s the best way to explain the Wolfpack’s nonconference schedule for coach Kevin Keatts’ first season.
On paper, N.C. State’s slate out of games outside the ACC looks like it will be considerable easier than it was at any time during former coach Mark Gottfried’s tenure.
The Wolfpack will face seven teams who finished No. 240 or higher in the RPI last season and four of those teams won less than 10 games.
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Warning: Do not stare directly at the 2017 RPI of NC State's nonconference opponents. Yeesh pic.twitter.com/PhOy8FhKJq — Joe Giglio (@jwgiglio) September 7, 2017
Arizona (No. 2) and UNC Greensboro (95) are the only two teams N.C. State is guaranteed to play who finished last season in the top 100 of the RPI.
Coming off consecutive losing seasons with so many new players and with the number of ACC games that will boost the overall RPI, it does make some sense to try and build some confidence with wins early in the season.
Keatts said earlier this summer the more comfortable he gets with his team and when he has a better handle on the strength of his personnel, he’ll seek out more challenges in nonconference play.
Gottfried’s premise was to play as many games as possible to help the team’s NCAA tournament resume. One component of the RPI, which the NCAA selection committee emphasizes, is strength of nonconference schedule — which the committee values because it’s the portion of the schedule a team controls. Gottfried’s six N.C. State teams, from 2012 through 2017, respectively, ranked No. 25, 51, 161, 30, 83 and 236.
Keatts’ first schedule will be more like Gottfried’s last. S.C. State (No. 302), VMI (329) and Presbyterian (347) all ranked higher than 300 in the RPI last season. Keatts said earlier this summer with so many top 50 and 100 games in league play, he didn’t want to over-extend his team outside the ACC.
The Wolfpack will face Arizona, a preseason top 3 team, in the first game of the Battle 4 Atlantis in the Bahamas. There’s a chance the Wolfpack could also face SMU, No. 13 in the RPI last year, in the Thanksgiving week tournament.
The only other Power 5 opponent on the Wolfpack’s schedule is Penn State, which is part of the ACC/Big Ten Challenge.
Most difficult stretch
The ACC schedule opens with a pair of road games – at Clemson, at Notre Dame – and then a home date with Duke, likely to begin the season ranked No. 1 in the country.
Easiest stretch
The first four opponents – VMI, Charleston Southern, Bryant and Presbyterian — had a combined record of 27-88 last season. Keatts should have a 4-0 record when the Pack faces off with Sean Miller and Arizona in the Battle 4 Atlantis.
Three games to know
1) The annual game at Reynolds Coliseum is always fun. Last year’s went into overtime, a win over Tennessee State, and the previous one – before Reynolds was renovated – was a last-second loss to Wofford.
2) Odd that N.C. State faces Clemson twice in the first four ACC games. Gottfried’s tenure actually ended with back-to-back losses to the Tigers.
3) Keatts’ first chance against UNC is Jan. 27 in Chapel Hill and the return game in Raleigh is Feb. 10.
SHARE COPY LINK Watch highlights from the NC State Wolfpack men's basketball team's 90-46 victory over Stella Azzurra in Rome, Italy. The game was called in the 4th quarter because of condensation build up on the court. |
During 2014, copyright holders all around the globe stepped on the gas when it came to sending DMCA notices to Google. Today we take a look at the top 10 domains Google has been asked to delist from search in the past 12 months. Perhaps surprisingly they don't include a single torrent site.
As 2014 draws to a close it is notable that despite dozens of sites being blocked around Europe and millions of infringement notices going out to US-based Internet users, piracy appears to be just as prolific as it ever was.
There appears to be very little copyright holders can do to stop their content appearing online and as a result countless millions of ‘infringing’ URLs become indexed by the world’s leading search engines.
Once this happens it’s largely too late to do anything really significant to turn back the clock on availability. Nevertheless, entertainment companies still want to make life as difficult as possible for online pirates. As a result they send out millions of takedown notices, not only to sites hosting content, but also to search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
These companies are remarkably quick to respond. Google, for example, processes most DMCA notices in a matter of hours, despite receiving one million requests per day and on one occasion 11.6 million takedowns in a week.
Every single one of these takedowns is logged in the company’s Transparency Report which has become a valuable source of insight into the company’s responses to copyright and the wider picture online.
Listed below are the top 10 domains for which Google received the most notices during the past year (Dec 28, 2013 to Dec 29, 2014).
File-hosting and MP3 search engines dominate the list, so it comes as little surprise that the major record labels (under the BPI umbrella) sent the most notices during the course of the year.
It’s also noteworthy that despite the high-profiles of sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, those sites were relegated to 18th and 29th places respectively in the takedown charts. In fact not a single torrent site made the top 10 this year, with the nearest torrent-related domains being torrentz.pro (#11), torrenthound (#12) and come.in (#13).
Finally, it’s worth noting that there is a site for which Google receives millions of notices but isn’t listed in any of its reports. It’s possible we’ll never know the numbers involved, but YouTube itself is likely to be in the official top 10. |
Political tensions have reached a point where some brands are perceiving mainstream news outlets as too controversial, leading media buyers to pull ads from those sites.
One campaign manager at a holding group media agency said a major automaker decided last month to stop serving ads in the news category in case the content didn’t align with the brand’s values. Then, after violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, the agency blocked keywords including “Nazis” and “Charlottesville” in programmatic campaigns for the brand. This exec, like the other three media agency executives interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity due to political sensitivities.
The executive said the blocked news category contains hundreds of publishers, including foxnews.com, which also is the only mainstream news site that has been on the agency’s blacklist since March.
“We’ve singled out Fox News because the client thinks that the site is controversial,” the exec said. “We blacklisted it, along with sites like Breitbart and Infowars, for brand safety.”
Brands asking their media shops to blacklist spoofed domains and obviously problematic sites like Breitbart from their ad rosters is nothing new. The difference is that now, media buyers are preventing their ads from showing up on any news sites, which would include mainstream ones like CNN and New York Times. Fox News was the only mainstream news site that these sources said was specifically blocked in their programmatic buys by certain clients.
“I think the definition of ‘mainstream’ is changing,” said a president of a New York-based media agency. “Because of the news proliferation, we have more content to monitor and determine what is appropriate for the client.”
Some publishers have said that they’ve been able to keep advertisers content by moving their ads to other, non-news parts of their sites. But the executive from the New York-based shop said many brands today don’t want their ads to appear in any news environment, period. One brand recently asked his team to specifically blacklist Fox News because the property is “extremely right-leaning.” “The brand can get safe eyeballs elsewhere,” said the agency executive. The exec added that there were other reasons the brand stopped advertising on Fox News.
Fox News didn’t respond to a request for comment by deadline.
An svp of a Chicago-based media shop, meanwhile, said some of his clients have decided to pull ads from political coverage altogether. For instance, two financial services clients pulled programmatic ads from politics news on any site.
“In our experience, Foxnews.com has never been singled out by a client on a programmatic buy — it is a trusted source for many in the U.S., just as more center-left-leaning sites are trusted by others,” said the executive at the Chicago agency. “That said, we do blacklist extremely politically divisive sites on both sides of the current debate.”
Media agency executives said they’re constantly discussing with clients whether to block certain mainstream news sites temporarily or permanently. Eric Bader, managing director of consulting firm Volando, said pairing ads and content has become much more complex. For example, he said, The New York Times would almost never be explicitly put on a blacklist for any top 200 ad spender, but the site still has lots of coverage and commentary on terrorism, violence and racism that some brands want to avoid.
As for brands boycotting Fox News specifically, Bader thinks doing so is more of a political decision than a practical one because a lot of content on Fox News is apolitical and the site still has a lot of loyal readers.
“Advertisers may just be using Fox News as a symbol of rejecting offensive content or ideas,” he said. “[It’s] a pretty political move for a brand to publicly reject a publisher, but the calculation is likely to be ‘better safe than sorry.’” |
The kids and I have been on a peanut butter kick lately. We seem to go through a jar a week---I smear it on rice cakes (we like the apple ones) and sprinkle on dried cranberries for breakfast, and mix it with honey and dip in green apples for an after-school snack. I'll even sneak a spoonful right out of the jar when no one's looking.
The baby still can't have peanut butter, so she stuck to quinoa while the rest of us scarfed down this chicken (p.s. QUINOA MAKES A BIG MESS under the high chair).
a big one.
I used chicken quarters for this recipe because I bought a bunch on sale, but if I was to purchase chicken specifically for this dish, I'd opt for boneless, skinless thighs.
The Ingredients.
serves 4
1 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken, cut in chunks *
1/2 cup natural peanut butter (creamy or chunky, your choice)
1 red bell pepper, seeded and sliced
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 lime, juiced
1/4 cup soy sauce (use gluten free--La Choy or Tamari wheat-free)
1/2 cup chicken broth
* If you are going to use quarters, or meat with bones, be aware that the meat will probably fall off the bone, and you'll need to fish out the bone pieces before serving. I've used this sauce with a whole chicken (I doubled the sauce ingredients for a 4.5-pound bird) and it was fantastic, but the bones were a bit of an issue.
The Directions.
Use a 4-quart slow cooker. Put the chicken into the bottom of your pot and add the peanut butter. Toss in the vegetables and cumin. Squeeze in lime, and add soy sauce and chicken broth. Stir as well as you can to combine (the peanut butter will be clumpy, and that's just fine). Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours, or on high for about 4 hours. Serve over rice or quinoa.
The Verdict.
Adam and I both think this sauce tastes like the Thai Peanut Butter chicken we order from our local Thai restaurant. It's delicious---and the whole pot costs less than 1 serving does at the restaurant! If you're not serving children and would like a bit of a kick, you can add red pepper flakes either while cooking (start with 1/2 tsp) or at the table to taste. If you'd like, you can squeeze on some extra lime juice at the table.
My kids love this meal, and eat much more than they usually do for dinner when I serve it.
2008 flashback:
Happy February!! |
They languished behind bars for years, wrongfully jailed for crimes they did not commit.
But the high-profile ordeals of Donald Marshall Jr., David Milgaard and others have put a spotlight on what has been called the fallibility of Canadian justice.
High-profile cases
These cases are not unique and certainly not isolated to Canada, although estimates of the actual number of wrongful convictions vary widely.
Each miscarriage of justice, however, deals a blow to a society's confidence in the legal system, experts say.
"Wrongful convictions undermine the two prongs of the criminal justice system's legitimacy," states a 1992 report prepared by the Library of Parliament. "If someone is wrongfully convicted, that person is punished for an offence he or she did not commit and the actual perpetrator of the crime goes free."
To make it worse, advocates say many who were ultimately exonerated watched their applications stall for years in the federal review board process.
In 2000, federal Justice Minister Anne McLellan announced plans to try to prevent such cases from happening again. The changes, since enacted in the Criminal Code of Canada, enable the justice minister to use his or her discretion to respond to persons who believe they have been wrongfully convicted.
Groups such as the Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted have also advocated on behalf of those they say have been jailed unfairly.
Here are some of the major cases in recent Canadian history:
James Driskell
James Driskell speaks to reporters in April 2006 during a meeting in Winnipeg before the inquiry into his wrongful murder conviction. ((Wayne Glowacki/Winnipeg Free Press/Canadian Press) )
Perry Harder of Winnipeg had been shot several times in the chest in September 1990. Driskell — his friend — was convicted and sentenced to life in prison a year later.
The RCMP said three hair samples found in Driskell's van were Harder's, and that evidence convicted him. Later test results from the U.K. found none of the hairs belonged to Harder.
Driskell was granted bail in November 2003. The federal justice minister at the time, Liberal Irwin Cotler, quashed the conviction and ordered a new trial in 2005. Despite that, the Manitoba government opted to stay the trial and end the case without exonerating Driskell. It also called for a public inquiry into the case.
The inquiry's final report, released in February 2007, said the jury in Driskell's trial was "seriously misled" on issues including the reliability of a key Crown witness. The report also said the failure of the Crown to disclose information to the defence was "careless indifference."
Anthony Hanemaayer
In 1987, Hanemaayer was charged with assault in connection with a knifepoint attack on a 15-year-old girl. The Toronto resident pleaded guilty part way through his trial and was sentenced to two years less a day in jail.
Hanemaayer said in a later interview with CBC News that he accepted a plea bargain on the advice of his then-lawyer, who warned he could receive a long prison sentence.
In 2006, convicted murderer and rapist Paul Bernardo confessed to the crime during a jailhouse interview. The Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted learned of the confession and took up the case. Hanemaayer, now 40 and living in London, Ont., took his case to the Ontario Court of Appeal and was acquitted on June 25, 2008.
Donald Marshall Jr.
In 1971, Marshall was wrongfully convicted of murdering his friend, Sandy Seale, in a Sydney, N.S., park. Marshall was just 17 years old when he received a life sentence.
Donald Marshall Jr. was exonerated by a royal commission in 1990 that determined systemic racism had contributed to his wrongful imprisonment. ((Ken Gigliotti/Canadian Press))
He was released in 1982 after RCMP reviewed his case. He was cleared by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal the following year. Though the Appeal Court declared him not guilty, Marshall was told he had contributed to his own conviction and that any miscarriage of justice was more apparent than real.
Marshall, a Mi'kmaq, was exonerated by a royal commission in 1990 that determined systemic racism had contributed to his wrongful imprisonment. The seven-volume report pointed the finger at police, judges, Marshall's original defence lawyers, Crown lawyers and bureaucrats.
Roy Ebsary, an eccentric who bragged about being skilled with knives, was eventually convicted of manslaughter in Seale's death and spent a year in jail.
Marshall died in a Sydney hospital in August 2009 after a lengthy illness. He was 55.
Simon Marshall
Simon Marshall was imprisoned from 1997 to 2003 after he wrongly confessed to a string of sexual assaults in Ste-Foy, a Quebec City suburb. A DNA test later cleared Marshall, a mentally handicapped man. The Quebec Court of Appeal ruled he was a victim of miscarried justice and ordered his criminal record expunged.
It was later found that DNA evidence first collected in the investigation that led to Marshall's conviction was never tested. An inquiry also revealed multiple breaches in police conduct during the investigation.
In December 2006, the Quebec government awarded the 24-year-old $2.3 million, the highest wrongful conviction compensation to date in the province. The money went to Marshall's parents, who are in charge of his care.
David Milgaard
A Saskatchewan inquiry found that the judicial system failed David Milgaard, shown here in a 2005 photo. ((Geoff Howe/Canadian Press))
Milgaard was charged with the 1969 murder of Saskatoon nursing aide Gail Miller and in January 1970 was sentenced to life in prison. Appeals to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Canada in the two years after his conviction were unsuccessful.
Milgaard's mother, Joyce, believed from the day he was arrested that her son was innocent. She kept his case alive, talking to whoever would listen — and many who didn't — while he spent more than two decades in prison.
In 1991, Justice Minister Kim Campbell directed the Supreme Court of Canada to review the conviction. The Supreme Court of Canada set it aside in 1992, and Milgaard was subsequently cleared by DNA evidence five years later.
The Saskatchewan government awarded Milgaard $10 million for his wrongful conviction in 1999. That same year, Larry Fisher was found guilty of the rape and stabbing death of Gail Miller.
A provincial judicial inquiry, which released a comprehensive 815-page report in September 2008, concluded that "the criminal justice system failed David Milgaard." The inquiry also found that Milgaard might have been released from jail years sooner if police had followed up on a lead they received in 1980.
Guy Paul Morin
Christine Jessop, a nine-year-old girl, disappeared from her Queensville, Ont., home in October 1984. Her body was found in a farmer's field two months later. Guy Paul Morin, the Jessops' next-door neighbour in the community about 60 km north of Toronto, was later charged with her murder.
Morin was acquitted in 1986, but a new trial was ordered by the Ontario Court of Appeal. At this second trial, Morin was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
He appealed and in 1995 was exonerated by DNA testing.
A public inquiry into the case was called, and its report was tabled in 1998. It concluded that mistakes by the police, prosecutors and forensic scientists combined to send an innocent man to jail.
William Mullins-Johnson
William Mullins-Johnson was wrongfully convicted in the death of his niece. ((CBC))
William Mullins-Johnson was convicted in the 1994 slaying of his four-year-old niece. He spent more than 12 years in prison for first-degree murder, partly on the now-questionable testimony of a discredited pathologist.
However, Crown prosecutors called for the Sault Ste. Marie man's acquittal, which was granted by the Ontario Court of Appeal on Oct. 15, 2007.
The Crown apologized in the Toronto courtroom for all the hardship caused.
"I wish to extend our sincere, profound and deepest apology to Mr. Mullins-Johnson and to his family for the miscarriage of justice that occurred," lawyer Michal Fairburn said.
Romeo Phillion
Ottawa firefighter Leopold Roy was stabbed to death in August 1967 and Romeo Phillion was convicted of his murder five years later. Though Phillion confessed while in custody on a robbery charge, he immediately recanted and has maintained his innocence ever since.
In May 2003 — 30 years into Phillion's sentence — a group of law students from York University sought to secure Phillion's exoneration. One basis for their application was a police report, not shown to the defence at the original trial, that placed Phillion 200 kilometres away at the time of the crime.
Phillion was granted bail two months later while the federal justice minister investigated.
In January 2008, the Ontario Court of Appeal reopened Phillion's case. Phillion's former defence lawyer, Arthur Cogan, said that Phillion's original confession to the crime was a desperate bid to protect his gay lover from other charges.
The Court of Appeal struck down Phillion's conviction in March 2009 and ordered a new trial, although it stopped short of a full acquittal.
Thomas Sophonow
Winnipeg police announced in June 2000 that evidence had cleared Thomas Sophonow in the killing of doughnut-shop clerk Barbara Stoppel.
Authorities said they had a new suspect in the 1981 murder for which Sophonow was tried three times and spent nearly four years behind bars. The Manitoba Court of Appeal acquitted him in 1985.
The Manitoba government released a report in 2001 by retired Supreme Court judge Peter Cory with 43 recommendations.
Cory said Sophonow should receive $2.6 million in government compensation (50 per cent from the City of Winnipeg, 40 per cent from the Manitoba government and 10 per cent from the federal government) for his wrongful murder conviction.
Steven Truscott
Steven Truscott's conviction was overturned in 2007. ((Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press))
In 1959, Truscott was sentenced to be hanged at age 14 for a schoolmate's murder, becoming Canada's youngest death-row inmate.
After the original conviction, he spent four months in the shadow of the gallows until his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Paroled in 1969, Truscott disappeared into an anonymous existence in a southern Ontario city.
On Aug. 28, 2007 — 48 years later — the Ontario Court of Appeal unanimously overturned Truscott's conviction and acquitted him, declaring the case "a miscarriage of justice" that "must be quashed."
The judges went on to say, however, that "the court is not satisfied that the appellant has been able to demonstrate his factual innocence."
In July 2008, the Ontario government announced it would pay Truscott $6.5 million in compensation for his ordeal.
Kyle Unger
In June 1990, Brigitte Grenier died near Roseisle, Man., where she was attending an outdoor rock concert. The 16-year-old was beaten, strangled and sexually mutilated.
Kyle Unger and another man, Timothy Houlahan, were convicted of first-degree murder in connection with her death in 1992. Houlahan was released on bail after the Manitoba Court of Appeal overturned his conviction in 1994, and he committed suicide later that year.
Unger's initial appeal, meanwhile, was rejected and his application for a Supreme Court of Canada appeal was denied. But in 2004, new DNA testing suggested a strand of hair found at the scene of the crime and originally used to convict Unger did not come from him. He was granted bail in November 2005.
Then in March 2009, federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announced that a new trial had been ordered. Unger's lawyer said at the time that police and prosecutors kept evidence from the defence during the original trial and used a jailhouse informant who was not credible.
The Manitoba Crown ultimately decided that it did not have enough evidence for a retrial. In October 2009, a Manitoba court acquitted Unger and he walked away a free man.
"Finally," a smiling Unger told reporters outside the courthouse. "It's still surreal, almost."
Erin Walsh
It took a jury just one hour to find Walsh guilty of the 1975 second-degree murder of Melvin (Chi Chi) Peters in Saint John, N.B. The prosecution saw it as an open-and-shut case, and Walsh received a life sentence with no parole before 10 years.
Walsh's appeals to the New Brunswick Court of Appeal were dismissed in July and November 1982. In December 2006, however, his lawyers sought a review of the murder conviction from the federal government after new evidence came to light.
The evidence, obtained by Walsh as part of a 2005 access-to-information request, included reports of jailhouse conversations that suggested someone else shot Peters.
In February 2008, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson ordered a review of the murder conviction, suggesting a miscarriage of justice likely occurred.
A month later, the New Brunswick Court of Appeal acquitted Walsh of the crime and overturned his conviction. Walsh, a native of Ontario who had maintained his innocence for more than 32 years, was dying of colon cancer and wanted his name cleared.
Walsh died at his home in Kingston, Ont., on Oct. 14, 2010. He was 62. |
CHENNAI: It was inevitable, but it is now closer than ever. All the phone numbers series currently in use, like the ones beginning with 98 or 99, are quickly getting used up with the subscriber base in the country expected to reach a billion and beyond by next year.
"There might be a serious problem if a new series of numbers are not brought in by the middle of next year. We are theoretically reaching the limit of existing number sets with a subscriber base of one billion," said Rajan Mathews, director general of Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI).
The solution may lie in 11-digit phone numbers but Department of Telecom (DoT) is also looking at alternatives.
Mathews said allocation of numbers to operators is done in batches, depending on factors like the size of subscriber base and efficiency in utilizing existing number sets, among other things.
A batch system is followed to avoid chaos due to all kinds of phone numbers flooding the market.
Since a particular range of numbers is given to an operator, it generally has an identifier like the first two digits, for example 98 or 99, which come to be associated with that operator.
"None of these number ranges can be used to their full extent due to the way in which they are allotted. Only a certain portion of these numbers are used as phone numbers. This is called percentage of numbering system utilization and it hovers around 50%, meaning only around half or more of the potential numbers are used as phone numbers," said Sandip Biswas, director at consultancy firm Deloitte.
"The numbers will have to be increased by at least one digit to accommodate new devices. However, to ensure there's absolutely no scope for any problem, we may even see the introduction of 12 digit numbers," said Biswas.
However, Mathews said that a similar proposal was given to DoT by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), which DoT didn't take up. "DoT said that it may need remapping of networks and there might be issues conforming to international numbering standards too. DoT hasn't rejected the idea completely but is looking into alternatives," said Mathews.
Some measures have been taken to address the situation. "Trai has made some recommendations like getting rid of inactive users to free up phone numbers and getting more than a million landline numbers to be used in the mobile domain," said Mathews. "While these are small numbers in the overall picture, they can help for another three-six months."
Biswassaid that 2G spectrum redistribution will be a positive step in this direction. "The numbering system in general is dependent on the number of subscribers. However, it is a different situation after mobility came into picture. Today, devices ranging from cars to tablets to washing machines are connected to networks," said Biswas. |
Updated at 5:45 p.m.
Florida Gators head coach Will Muschamp spoke twice on Wednesday, making his scheduled appearance on the Southeastern Conference‘s coaches teleconference before sitting down with the media for the only time during his team’s off week.
INJURY UPDATES
Florida lost another player for the season, Muschamp announced, as freshman linebacker Jeremi Powell tore his anterior cruciate ligament in a non-contact situation during the Missouri game while on the field with the punt block unit. He is the eighth player the Gators have lost for the season, four of which have gone down with ACL injuries. “He’s a guy who was really emerging, special teams-wise. He did a great job on kickoff for us and on special teams, was really playing well,” Muschamp said.
Redshirt junior quarterback Tyler Murphy, who played Saturday with an injured shoulder after not practicing most of the week, will be held out of practice all week but “will start throwing again next week [and] should be fine” to start against Georgia.
Similar precautions are being used with redshirt junior LB Ronald Powell (ankle), who missed the Mizzou game and will also be held out of practice this week. Muschamp expects to get him back on the field next week. “I think we’ll get Ronald Powell back next week. He’s been unable to do anything thus far this week. He’s been running but just not ready for the change of direction and taking on blocks. But I think he’ll be fine,” he said.
Additionally, senior defensive tackle Damien Jacobs (head) should return next week. Jacobs was injured against LSU when his helmet came off in a pile and he got kicked in the head. Florida pointed out that he returned to the game, but Jacobs did not fly with the Gators to Columbia, MO, and has not practiced since. “I felt like he was going to play last week. I really didn’t know until Thursday practice he was not going to be able to go,” Muschamp noted.
He also could not provide much of an update regarding redshirt junior LB Darrin Kitchens (shoulder), who is rehabbing from his injury but also currently away from the team with his wife, who gave birth to a baby girl Monday night. “He’s been with his family, which is where he needs to be,” Muschamp said.
STATE OF THE GATORS
“Obviously when you struggle like we have the last couple of weeks, I think you go back on Sunday… I had some coaches who were supposed to be out recruiting Sunday and Monday and told the whole staff we need to get back in, we need to sit down and figure some things out. You go back to technique and fundamentals, you simplify. We’ve got to get our guys playing faster; we’ve got to get our guys playing with more confidence. That’s what we’re trying to do right now. “We constantly self-evaluate. It’s not something or anything new that we’re doing. But from a standpoint of scheme, personnel, preparation, practice, however you want to cut it up, that’s what we’ve got to do. That’s what we’re doing at this point – finding some things we can do well offensively and get back defensively to the way we’re capable of playing, which we certainly didn’t do that Saturday, and that’s on me. “We need to do a better job across the board. When you’re not producing, you can’t continue to do the same things or you’ll get the same result. Very pleased with our players’ attitude yesterday.”
STAFF CHANGES AHEAD?
Asked whether he gave offensive coordinator Brent Pease a vote of confidence over the weekend, Muschamp avoided the direct question and instead noted that the staff as assembled is nearly identical to the one that helped the Gators find a high level of success just one season ago.
“This is the same staff that came a game away from playing for national championship, OK? Obviously we’re not where we want to be right now and nobody knows that more than our staff. We need to go back and reevaluate what we’re doing and continue to improve our football team over the next five weeks,” he said.
He also, in a roundabout away, appeared to provide an opinion on the job offensive line coach Tim Davis has done this year with his position group. Muschamp was asked if he ever could have guessed the offensive line would struggle so much this season considering the players coming back and new blood being infused via transfer.
“I just don’t think we’ve performed as well as we need to, there’s no question. First year, we were a little handcuffed as far as where we were and what we were trying to do. But certainly this year I felt like that we would have played a little better at this point,” he answered.
RAISING KELVIN
Freshman running back Kelvin Taylor was the lone Florida player to shine on offense Saturday, picking up 77 yards and his first career touchdown on 12 carries in the ballgame. The problem? He did not touch the ball more throughout the contest, especially late in the game after he got rolling with some big runs.
Taylor amassed just four total carries in the first half. In the third quarter he only had two until the Gators decided to feature him on a drive late in the period. On that drive he touched the ball on five out of the six plays and gained chunks of nine, eight, 14 and 20 yards, with the last rush winding up in the end zone.
How many times did Taylor carry the ball the rest of the game? Once.
“Well, again, we probably did that too early in the game, getting away from that. It became a two-score game in the fourth quarter and we felt like we needed to pick up the tempo of the game a little bit as far as creating some plays. Probably got away from that a little early, we did,” Muschamp explained.
Taylor’s touchdown cut UF’s deficit to 23-17. Unfortunately, Florida allowed Missouri to drive right down the field and kick a 33-yard field goal. The Gators next gained possession trailing 26-17 with 13:32 left in the game.
Murphy completed a pass for a one-yard loss and threw incomplete twice. The Tigers got the ball back and took 4:17 off the clock with another field goal drive to go up 12 with 8:04 left. Redshirt junior Mack Brown got the touch at the start of Florida’s next drive.
NOTES AND QUOTES
» Muschamp laid out the schedule for the off week. He said Florida ran and lifted on Monday, had a good practice Tuesday, would start preparing for Georgia on Wednesday and Thursday, and would run and lift again on Friday before getting the weekend off.
» On dealing with so many injuries: “We go to Missouri and they’re really explosive offensively, no-huddle team, you play 80-plus snaps and we only had about 13 guys on defense healthy. That was tough as the game wore on. But that’s part of the game. It’s unfortunate. It is what it is. You’re not going to hear us complaining about it. Certainly no one is feeling sorry for us. We just got to coach our guys up better, put them in better situations to play faster. I think when you struggle, you need to go back to technique and fundamentals, you need to simplify to get our players to play faster and play with more confidence. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”
» On why the defense struggled so mightily against the Tigers: “We got displaced a little bit in the run game and that was disappointing from the standpoint of movement. We didn’t do a good enough job of playing blocks up front. Guys were free-releasing on linebackers, which is hard when a guy’s 310 pounds and you’re 230 pounds taking a guy on in the hole. Do a better job of striking and playing up front to keep those guys off the second level. That’s the way we play, and most good run defense teams play that way. And we just didn’t do a very good job of that up front.”
» On what has changed since senior DT Dominique Easley was knocked out for the season: “Dominique brought a lot from a playmaking standpoint, but he also brought a lot of leadership in how he played the game. And so that certainly has been a void that we’ve been trying to fill. Said it when it happened – you don’t replace Dominique Easley. It’s going to take a team effort to get some of those things done, and we just need to play better. I do feel like we’ve played better offenses, but again, we need to play better and put our guys in better situations to be successful.”
» On the status of Florida’s two second-year tight ends, redshirt junior Colin Thompson and sophomore Kent Taylor: “Colin Thompson has not been able to get back on the practice field with a foot injury. Again, a guy that we felt that was really developing well. Was blocking well at the point of attack, which is something we’ve struggled with at that position this season. Right now, Kent’s healthy.”
» On if recruiting has been hit due to the team’s recent performances: “Recruiting is going fine. We’re in good shape there. It is what it is. I think anybody with a shred of intelligence can see the situation. It’s been frustrating but we need to coach better.”
» On the first day back: “I was pleased with [Tuesday’s] practice. Our players responded very well. … I think our guys obviously aren’t pleased with where we are. It’s not what they came to Florida for. It’s not what I came to Florida for. So I told them again we just need to circle the wagons, pull together and come together of the common purpose on Saturday afternoon of playing better and coaching better. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
» On injuries causing the team to be weakened overall: “We don’t make excuses around here. We need to play better than we have the last two weeks, that’s for sure.” |
It might be getting easier to remember all of your passwords. The standards organization of the United States, NIST, has concluded that many common requirements for passwords, like forcing you to use special characters, are misguided.
Instead, NIST recommends the use of lengthy passwords, and instructs administrators to allow passwords to run at least 64 characters long. It also says people should only be forced to change their passwords if there is evidence of tampering, rather than at an arbitrary interval.
The newly finalized guidelines attempt to balance the limits of human memory with proper digital security. A password with special characters may be hard to remember but easy for a computer to guess. On the other hand, a long and simple password is easy for a human to remember and actually very difficult for a computer to guess.
The manual also cites human behavior as undercutting the efficacy of complexity rules:
For example, a user that might have chosen “password” as their password would be relatively likely to choose “Password1” if required to include an uppercase letter and a number, or “Password1!” if a symbol is also required.
It points out that as password complexity rules are added, it’s more likely that people will start writing down their passwords, increasing the chance of being stolen.
Rather than having a complex password be the linchpin of an account’s security, the guidelines say that administrators should take actions that make accounts more secure than special characters ever could—for instance, preventing the use of common passwords and those that have been previously exposed in breaches, and creating a waiting period between incorrect login attempts. |
Whoops!
Al Roker made an embarrassing admission during Dateline on Sunday when he recalled an incident that happened after undergoing gastric bypass surgery in 2002.
While being interviewed by correspondent Nancy Snyderman, MD, the weatherman – who lost more than 100 lbs. following the surgery – confessed to having an accident while at the White House.
“When you have a bypass and your bowels [have] been reconstructed, you think you’re pretty safe,” Roker begins in the video on TMZ.com.
“And I probably went off and ate something I wasn’t supposed to. And as I’m walking to the press room I gotta pass a little gas here. I’m walking by myself. Who’s gonna know? Only a little something extra came out,” the news anchor explains.
“You pooped in your pants,” correspondent Snyderman answers.
“I pooped my pants. Not horribly, but enough that I knew,” Roker – who recently released a memoir Never Goin’ Back: My Weight Loss Journey – says.
Snyderman interjects that it’s a “common side effect of the surgery.”
In the moments after the incident, an anxious Roker, 58, had to think fast.
“I was panicking, so I got to the restroom of the press room, threw out the underwear and just went commando.”
Despite the traumatic experience, Roker says he learned a big lesson that day.
“It told me that I’ve gotta be very vigilant as to what I eat,” he says.
Watch the video below: |
New York Times editor: After Orlando shooting, don’t editorialize on social media
Philip Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards at The New York Times, reminded the newsroom on Monday that, in the wake of the Orlando shooting, they shouldn’t use their social media accounts to editorialize, promote their political views or take sides on controversial issues.
Here’s the memo, sent to the newsroom an hour ago:
Colleagues: In the middle of a contentious presidential campaign, and after the terrible events in Orlando, this may be a good time for a reminder about posting on social media. On their personal social-media accounts, Times newsroom staffers should avoid editorializing, promoting their political views or taking sides on hot-button issues. Even if you personally are not involved in coverage of a particular topic, our colleagues are working hard to maintain The Times’s credibility and evenhandedness, and we should not do anything to make their jobs tougher. People following Times newsroom staffers online expect them to be well-informed and thoughtful. But we should leave the opinions to our colleagues on the Opinion side. Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks. Phil
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My favorite senator, Elizabeth Warren, showed that despite being in Washington, she’s not easing up on the banks.
Plenty of her colleagues may be afraid of taking on the banks (and losing the piles of campaign money), but not Warren.
It’s going to take more than just one person to change the dysfunctional system that exists today, where bankers are treated like royalty instead of the jobs destroyers that they really are, but it’s a start.
First a look at Warren’s recent appearance at a hearing of federal bank regulators, then a discussion of hacker and activist Aaron Swartz’s recent death, and how the two are related. Here’s the Warren video, following by an excerpt in print:
A bit of the juiciest parts of the transcript from Huffington Post:
The Democratic senator from Massachusetts had a straightforward question for them: When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial? It was a harder question than it seemed. “We do not have to bring people to trial,” Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, assured Warren, declaring that his agency had secured a large number of “consent orders,” or settlements. “I appreciate that you say you don’t have to bring them to trial. My question is, when did you bring them to trial?” she responded. “We have not had to do it as a practical matter to achieve our supervisory goals,” Curry offered…. “There are district attorneys and United States attorneys out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example, as they put it. I’m really concerned that ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big for trial,'” Warren said.
HuffPost notes that hacker/activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide after being relentlessly pursued by the Justice Department for hacking into MIT’s database of scholarly papers, was a constituent of Warren’s. What follows is some of John’s previous reporting on Aaron Swartz and the witch-hunt that the Justice Department, with the help of MIT, launched against him, quite literally hounding him to death, it now appears.
If the banks were too big for trial, Swartz was too small to let go.
If you don’t know the back story, Wikipedia has a quick synposis:
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by federal authorities in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR. Swartz opposed JSTOR’s practice of compensating publishers, rather than authors, out of the fees it charges for access to articles. Swartz contended that JSTOR’s fees were limiting public access to academic work that was being supported by public funding.
A few more salient points in this discussion, again via Wikipedia:
Shortly before Swartz’s death, JSTOR announced that it would make “more than 4.5 million articles” available to the public for free. The service was capped at three articles every two weeks, readable online only, with some downloadable for a fee.
Interestingly, that’s about the same number of documents Aaron is accused of stealing (“over 4 million,” DOJ alleged). So there’s a serious question of no-harm-no-foul involved here, potentially….
Just to make things crystal clear, when MIT lost nearly $2 billion in 2009 because of crooks on Wall Street, no one was indicted, and no one went to jail – instead, the government handed the thieves $700 billion of our money.
But when MIT lost a bunch of reports it was trying to sell, and then MIT gave the oh-so-valuable reports away for free anyway, the kid who forced them to give away the reports was quite possibly hounded to death. And I’m going to go on a limb here and assume that MIT did not lose $2bn as a result of Aaron Swartz’s actions, or they wouldn’t be putting the reports out there for free.
Had Aaron Swartz stolen billions and declared himself a bank, he’d have been facing a government bailout rather than an indictment. He’d also quite possibly be alive.
Now tell me again about how prosecutors cut deals all the time so they don’t need to actually take anyone to trial — yeah, if you’re a 1%er bankster. But if you’re a 26 year old kid who didn’t appear to actually harm anyone, they prosecute you quite literally to death. |
On September 1, 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet fighter interceptor as it crossed through Soviet air space. But what was it doing so far off course, flying over Soviet military installations the day of a secret missile test? What happened to the bodies? And what does all of this have to do with Larry McDonald, the sitting US congressman who was on the flight and warning America about the coming of the New World Order? Find out this week on The Corbett Report.
Documentation
Documentation – Jean Kirkpatrick on KAL 007 Time Reference: 02:30 Description: Jean Kirkpatrick – Speech to the United Nations regarding KAL flight 007 taken from Great Speeches Vol. 3 Link To: YouTube
Documentation – Russia Shoots Down Korean Jetliner Time Reference: 03:24 Description: Taken from a collection of archival news footage from the days following the incident. Link To: YouTube.com
Documentation – Reagan Speech on KAL 007 Time Reference: 04:36 Description: Address to the Nation on the Soviet Attack on a Korean Airliner – September 5, 1983 Link To: YouTube.com
Documentation – Korean Air Lines Flight 007 – Wikipedia Time Reference: 07:05 Description: The bastion of truthiness gives the official line on what happened to KAL 007. Link To: Wikipedia
Documentation – ICAO press release re: 1993 report on KAL 007 Time Reference: 09:25 Description: If anyone can find a copy of the actual report online, please let me know. Link To: ICAO.int
Documentation – “Unsolved History” – KAL 007 Time Reference: 10:51 Description: Typically sensationalized Discovery Channel “documentary” on KAL 007. Link To: YouTube
Documentation – News report on Soviets using jetliners as spy planes Time Reference: 16:17 Description: From a collection of archival news footage from the days after the KAL 007 incident. Link To: YouTube
Documentation – Ex-Soviet Pilot Still Insists KAL 007 Was Spying Time Reference: 25:21 Description: Colonel Gennadi Osipovich’s 1996 account of his shooting down of KAL 007. Link To: NYTimes.com
Documentation – Congressional Biography of Larry McDonald Time Reference: 29:54 Description: Official congressional biography of McDonald. Link To: bioguide.congress.gov
Documentation – Sourcewatch Biography of McDonald Time Reference: 31:02 Description: “At the time of his death he was the president of the Western Goals Foundation and chair of the John Birch Society.” Link To: SourceWatch.org
Documentation – Sourcewatch description of John Birch Society Time Reference: 31:00 Description: You might ask yourself if the idea of repealing civil rights legislation is something really integral to the JBS, or whether this is part of the old (and still-employed) tactic of smearing libertarians as racists because they don’t believe the government has the right to legislate how people run their own businesses. Link To: SourceWatch.org
Documentation – G. Edward Griffin is a Bircher Time Reference: 34:16 Description: Who knew? Link To: Freedom-Force.org
Documentation – Leary on Crossfire: Left wing of the CIA debating the right wing Time Reference: 35:57 Description: As quoted in Rolling Stone. Link To: Dedroidify.blogspot.com
Documentation – Leary and the CIA Time Reference: 36:03 Description: Information on Leary’s connections to the CIA. Link To: AConstantineBlacklist.blogspot.com
Documentation – Braden really was CIA Time Reference: 36:04 Description: Leary was quite literally correct about Crossfire and the CIA. I wonder how he knew? Link To: PowerBase.info
Documentation – Larry McDonald on Crossfire Time Reference: 37:08 Description: Fascinating conversation with Larry McDonald in 1983 touching on Rockefeller control of the CFR and the Trilateral Commission, American transfer of technology to the Soviets, attempts by prominent politicians to get the US into a global government, Quigley’s admission of this in Tragedy & Hope, etc. Link To: Google Video
Documentation – Shoes were recovered Time Reference: 1:01:08 Description: A photo of some of the shoes recovered by the Soviets from KAL 007 and handed over to survivors. Link To: Wikipedia
Documentation – Rescue007.org Time Reference: 1:05:17 Description: The home page of The International Committee for the Rescue of KAL 007 Survivors, Inc., which believes that there were survivors from the downing of the flight and that they have been held prisoner by the Russians ever since. Link To: Rescue007.org
Documentation – What happened to Larry McDonald Time Reference: 1:06:36 Description: Information of what (allegedly) happened to McDonald after the downing of the flight from Avraham Shifrin, an Israeli who had, himself, spent time in the Soviet prison camp system, and who had personal contacts in the prison camp system. Link To: Rescue007.org
Documentation – Ron Paul on Larry McDonald Time Reference: 1:10:50 Description: Ron Paul’s personal reminiscences of McDonald. (Note: the original mp3 of this episode accidentally left off this clip. If your version does not contain this audio, please re-download the episode.) Link To: YouTube.com
Filed in: Episodes • Podcasts |
A live take of Thank You Scientist’s “Mr. Invisible” was performed and recorded using 100% solar power with the Sun Lab Studio at Schuster’s Poultry Farm in Lakewood, NJ. Schuster’s farm is a no-kill dairy farm with some of the happiest, well cared-for animals in New Jersey. In addition to the video, the recording is now available to download on Bandcamp for $1, and half of our proceeds will go to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Listeners can donate more if they choose by setting their own price, and can also donate directly to the farm. Now more than ever it is vitally important to demonstrate what we can all do to combat climate change, to end our dependency on unsustainable power and fuel sources, and to support those who are defending our ecosystems.
The song is featured on the Prog Report Best Songs of 2016 and the album Stranger Heads Prevail is on the Best Albums of 2016.
BANDCAMP: https://thankyouscientist.bandcamp.com
SCHUSTER’S POULTRY FARM DONATION LINK:
https://www.facebook.com/schusterspoultryfarm/
About Sun Lab Studio:
Sun Lab Studio is a mobile, solar-powered recording studio, whose mission it is to record original artists in non-traditional outdoor locations while spreading environmental awareness and promoting alternative energy sources. |
"POTP" redirects here. For other uses, see POTP (disambiguation)
Puppetry of the Penis is a performance show. The show was initially conceived as the title of an art calendar by Australian Simon Morley, showcasing 12 of his favourite penis installations (known as Dick Tricks). On New Year's Eve in 1997 he had a garage full of calendars to sell, and with requests for live demonstrations mounting he finally decided to create an act with fellow Aussie David "Friendy" Friend.
The theatrical contortion of the male genitalia (penis, scrotum, and testicles) into various positions along with comedic narration has since spread internationally. It is humorously called "Dick Trick" or "genital origami," referring to the flexibility of the human penis, testicles and scrotum.
The act was first performed on the international stage at the 1998 Melbourne International Comedy Festival in Australia. The show involves two nude men who bend, twist, and fold their penises and scrotums into various shapes. The show has appeared in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Europe, Canada, the U.S., South Africa and Argentina. It has also been the subject of Australian comedian Mick Molloy's 2000 documentary Tackle Happy. The duo has recruited teams across Australia, the UK and America, allowing performance demands to be met. Due to the overwhelming success of the show the business was expanded to cater for private parties around Australia.
A Puppetry of the Penis TV special has aired in Australia on One.[1]
Tricks [ edit ]
Their tricks include:
Wind Up
Atomic Mushroom
Wristwatch
Snail
Three-Wood
Parachute
Eiffel-Tower
Hamburger
Hot dog
Pelican
Fruit Bat
Windsurfer
G-String
Brain
Weed-Snipper
Loch Ness Monster
The Guy Pierce
Wedding Ring
The Woman
The other Woman
Mollusc
Baby Bird
Flying Squirrel
Controversy [ edit ]
In 2002 the show was banned by Wanganui in New Zealand, and Cairns and Bundaberg councils in Queensland.[2][3] In 2004, Chicago Citizens for Community filed a complaint saying that the play was illegal, but Chicago Police refused to ban it.[4]
In 2012, the Advertising Standards Bureau received a complaint about a poster advertising the show in Brisbane.[5]
References [ edit ] |
Two years ago, LDK Solar, one of China's largest solar panel makers, built a new, state-of-the-art factory in the central city of Hefei.
It sits in one of the city's industrial parks, a big LDK Solar logo on its wall, with the New York-listed company's slogan underneath: "Lighting the Future".
"It cost 2.5 billion yuan (£250m) to build, the majority of the equipment was imported from Germany, and it hired 5,000 staff," said Jie Xiaoming, a 30-year-old who works at the plant's quality control and packaging department.
Last month, however, 4,500 of the staff were put on gardening leave. They receive 700 yuan a month to stay at home. The factory has shut down 24 of its 32 production lines.
"There do not seem to be any orders. People are still turning up for work, but mostly just sleeping. The management has not said much, just that the United States has a new policy that is stopping our exports," said Mr Jie.
Since it was set up in 2005, LDK Solar, along with several other Chinese solar panel makers, has enjoyed heady growth. Solar power, along with biotechnology and aerospace, was declared a "strategic emerging industry" and was given grants and low-cost loans.
It funnelled the cheap credit into an aggressive expansion, hoping to provide an entire industry chain of products and services.
Meanwhile, in Europe and the US, governments provided subsidies to buy Chinese-made panels as part of commitments to boost renewable energy.
But the incentives created a glut of suppliers, and since 2010, the price of polysilicon wafers has fallen by nearly three-quarters. The price is now below the production cost - in the latest quarter, LDK Solar's gross margin was -65.5pc.
Meanwhile, the debt crisis in Europe has cut government subsidies to the sector and the US imposed a 31pc tariff in May on Chinese wafers, complaining that manufacturers were being underwritten by the government.
In July a group of 25 European solar companies followed suit, filing an anti-dumping complaint with the European Union.
At the same time, the quality of the solar equipment being made by Chinese companies, even by the biggest companies, is often not export-grade.
While the Chinese government has promised to hugely increase its purchases of solar panels, there is a significant excess capacity in the domestic market that has kept prices low.
China's big five firms are all reporting disastrous trading and heavily indebted balance sheets. At the end of the first quarter, JA Solar listed debt and liabilities of $1.5 billion, Trina Solar had debts of $1.08 billion, and Yingli had debts of $3.44 billion.
Suntech, once held up as a model company, could have to pay $690m in collateral related to a possible fraud, and it also has a $541m convertible bond payment in early 2013. Its total debts are $3.58 billion.
In the first quarter, LDK lost $185.2m as sales dropped by nearly 75pc. "When they came to remove staff, they simply chose a percentage who would remain," said another worker outside the Hefei plant, who declined to be named. "The whole industry is doing badly, and LDK also had a strategy problem. There is no point in worrying now. It is simply a matter of time before the factory closes. I give it a maximum of six months," he said.
For the time being, the Chinese government is determined to keep LDK alive. The authorities in Xinyu, where it is headquartered, have announced they will roll 500 million yuan of the company's debts into their annual budget.
A bank official told Caixin, a Chinese magazine, that Xinyu government had set aside a total of 2 billion yuan to bail out the firm. Government officials, who boasted that they wanted to turn Xinyu into a "silicon town", are desperate not to lose face. But so far LDK is rumoured to have laid off 10,000 workers and defaulted on payments of around 600 million yuan to 20 suppliers, according to Caixin.
"I don’t think we will close though. I think the worst situation we will be sold," said Mr Jie. "Apparently Sharp is interested."
Sharp's interest is unclear, and so far there has been no queue of buyers. Jiangxi Copper Corporation was rumoured to be a possible bidder, on the orders of the local government, but Pan Qifang, secretary of its board of directors, summed up the general wariness of the market: "Our company is not familiar with the solar industry, so we cannot rush into it," he said.
LDK Solar declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Valentina Luo |
#452 Does the Vastness of the Universe Support Naturalism?
Q
I am a Christian theist and working towards a doctorate in philosophy. I have a question that I think is relevant for both laymen and academics, and I would really appreciate your thoughts.
I often find myself "gestalt-shifting" between naturalistic and supernaturalistic (especially theistic) worldviews. When I consider certain things, the theism to which I assent seems eminently reasonable, but when I consider other things naturalism (or at least non-theism) also seems plausible, and it is understandable to me why so many philosophers and scientists are naturalists (or at least non-theists).
For some time I have tried to understand what specifically makes naturalism (or at least non-theism) seem plausible to me (and others), and I think part of it is the following.
Put briefly, so much about the history of the universe and our planet seems arbitrary or random. More precisely, much of natural history seems to lack rational explanation. The universe is billions of years old, and human existence is a mere blip on the cosmic timescale. There are vast, vast numbers of galaxies, and thus tremendous numbers of stars, planets, and other astronomical entities. Moreover, the earth itself is billions of years old, and humans have only existed here for a relatively brief period of time. Great numbers of other species have existed, and many have been extinct for millions of years. Humans seem *so small* relative to the vastness of the universe. As I reflect on these facts and others like them, I can't help but wonder why. Why is the universe and our planet this way rather than some other way? It seems that if the God of traditional (Christian) theism exists, then there should be some rational explanation for these types of facts. There should be some reason why God has created the universe this way, rather than another, these states of the universe, rather than other states. But many of these facts seem pointless and without rational explanation.
Put like this, the ideas are largely rhetorical, but I think they motivate a precise argument. The argument can be put something like this:
1. If God were to exist, then every state of the universe would be rationally explainable.
2. It's not the case (or at least it's likely that it's not the case) that every state of the universe is rationally explainable (alternatively, some states of the universe are not rationally explainable).
3. Therefore, God does not exist.
Important for this argument is a distinction between rational/personal explanation and natural/causal explanation. Natural/causal explanation is the sort of explanation provided when, for example, one explains weather patterns by reference to various natural states and laws of nature. Rational/personal explanation is the sort of explanation provided when one gives a person's reasons for performing some action. For example, what explains my eating a PB&J sandwich is that I like PB&J sandwiches, what explains God's creation of humans is his munificent love, etc. Part of the distinction is that natural/causal explanations are necessitating (in some sense), whereas rational/personal explanations are not.
This distinction is important for premise (2) because the claim is *not* that there are states that lack *any* explanation. In other words, I think the argument is consistent with some form of the principle of sufficient reason (such as the one you use in the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument).
With this in mind, let me mention some of the rationale for the premises. The main support for premise (1) is, roughly, that (a) God is sovereign over every part of the universe, and (b) God is not frivolous. Sovereignty implies control over the universe and the course it takes (except, perhaps, over personal free actions). God not being frivolous implies that God acts for good reasons and not arbitrarily. But these jointly imply that God has control over the states of the universe (i.e. the states are ultimately, or at least partially, explained by God's actions), and God acts to bring about these states for good reasons. Premise (1) seems to follow from these considerations. This is not as precise as it could be, but I trust you can see the thrust of these claims in support of (1).
The main support for premise (2) is, roughly, that we humans cannot see any rational explanation of various states (like the examples given above). And if we cannot see any rational explanation, then it's likely that there isn't one. One might question the move from "we don't know of any" to "there likely is none," but this move is clearly justified in some cases. One might object that it is not justified in this case (i.e. take something like a skeptical theist view with respect to the problem of evil). This is not implausible, but it seems to me that we should at least expect to be able to *conceive* of some good reason for various states of the universe, and I have a hard time of conceiving of good reasons in many cases.
There's a lot more that could, and probably should, be said, but this question is getting long. Since I'm a Christian, I obviously don't think this argument is conclusive. But it seems worthy of serious reflection, and I find it fairly plausible. I suspect also that something like this reasoning is why many (especially scientists and philosophers) find theism implausible. Perhaps they are influenced more by the rhetorical ideas than the precise argument. But I would appreciate your thoughts.
Thank you for your work.
Best,
D |
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Britain aims to “cut and paste” trade deals struck by the EU with other countries after Brexit, Theresa May revealed today.
The Prime Minister said the move would give businesses “certainty” and prevent Britain missing out on trade boosts negotiated by the EU for its members.
Speaking to reporters on her trip to Japan, she said she would press Shinzo Abe to extend the benefits of a planned EU-Tokyo deal, worth an estimated £3.6 billion, to the UK.
But Mrs May made clear that piggybacking on other EU deals would probably come before striking independent agreements. “We think it is an important deal for the EU and, yes, when we leave the European Union we are looking, obviously, at a number of trade deals that the EU has with other countries,” she said.
“We are looking at the possibility of those being able to being brought over, certainly initially, into trade deals with the UK.
“It would give business certainty which is what business wants at the point we leave.” Britain enjoys trade deals with 50 nations through membership of the EU. With Mrs May on the three-day trip are 15 business leaders, including Aston Martin president Andy Palmer, senior adviser at Barclays Capital Investment David Wright, CBI director general Carolyn Fairbairn, and Karen Bett, chief executive officer of the Scotch Whisky Association.
The Prime Minister praised Japan as a “like-minded nation with a shared belief in free trade and a rules-based international system”.
But Tokyo has made clear its priority is to conclude a deal with the EU and it will not negotiate with the UK formally until after Brexit. A special adviser to Mr Abe, Tomohiko Taniguchi, said there was uneasiness about Brexit in Japan’s business community.
Labour MP Heidi Alexander MP, a backer of pro-EU group Open Europe, said: “The Government promised us a brave new world where countries were queuing up to sign trade deals with global Britain. Now they admit all they want to do is replicate the deal the EU is negotiating with Japan.”
Liberal Democrat Leader Vince Cable said: “Now the government is trying to cut and paste our existing arrangements. [International Trade Secretary] Liam Fox might as well be left in a room with a photocopier.” |
A Florida man was arrested Monday after being accused of holding five people hostage for three months.
The Ledger in Lakeland reported that Larry Gene Howard, 29, faces multiple assault, kidnapping, robbery and firearms charges.
Howard, of Haines City, was arrested Monday while hiding from law enforcement in a crawl space under the victim’s home, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office said. A man called 911 to report that he and his two nieces and nephews had been held against their will the day prior to Howard’s arrest.
The man told investigators that a distant relative had come to visit him three months earlier and brought Howard with him. According to The Ledger, Howard returned two days later with his own four children and told the victim they would be staying. The victim said Howard threatened them with a shotgun. After Howard's arrest, investigators reported finding a shotgun at the home.
WFLX-TV reported that Howard let his girlfriend, Hanna Wright, move into the home, according to an arrest report.
The station reported that the Department of Children and Families officials and police came in search of Howard and his children in April. The agency took his children, while Howard was hiding under the home. Howard allegedly kept the victim’s phone in order to keep him from calling for help.
Over the course of the hostage situation, Howard learned that the homeowner was receiving a monthly disability payment of $718. Howard forced the man to withdraw all of his money in the first month, while the suspect’s girlfriend watched the nephews and nieces.
Howard would force the victim to do the same thing for the next two months. The suspect was driven by a man named William Stargel and another unidentified couple.
Howard is accused of holding a gun to the victim’s head and telling him he was going to die Monday, WFLX-TV reported. Howard also allegedly told the man “something was going down today.”
The victim told his nieces and nephews to sneak out of the home and he went with them and called police from a neighbor’s home.
Along with the aforementioned charges, Howard is also facing a hate crime charge. He allegedly called the victim homophobic slurs while beating him, the arrest report said.
Howard has denied the charges, according to The Ledger.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Click for more from WFLX-TV. |
Minnesota Power proposes residential rate hike
Minnesota Power proposed a rate hike for residential utility customers Friday as part of a plan to cut energy costs for large mining and paper companies.
The plan, filed with the state Public Utilities Commission by Duluth-based Minnesota Power, proposes a 14.5 rate increase for a typical residential customer.
The residential increase would offset a proposed 5 percent rate reduction for a dozen large mining and paper companies in northeast Minnesota.
A state law passed earlier this year allows companies struggling with global competition to apply for a break in their electricity rates.
But state Rep. Tom Anzelc (DFL-Balsam Twp.), who introduced the legislation, said he's having second thoughts.
"The proposal from the power company is ill-timed and much, much, much too large," he said.
The PUC is expected to decide on the matter early next year.
Three of the facilities the new rate plan would benefit remain closed because of low iron ore prices and stiff competition in the steel industry: U.S. Steel's Keewatin Taconite, Cliffs Natural Resources' United Taconite, and Mesabi Nugget.
Minnesota Power's Pat Mullen conceded the rate reductions for those mining companies, as well as paper mills, wouldn't solve all their economic woes. "But everyone's doing their part," he said.
Minnesota's iron mining sector has seen more than 1,000 layoffs over the past year. The region's paper mills have also shed hundreds of jobs in recent years.
Minnesota Power is heavily reliant on those large customers. Iron ore mines and taconite plants consume 40 percent of the power the utility generates. Paper mills buy nearly 20 percent, in addition.
Mullen said those large customers have paid more than their fair share of energy costs in recent years, and have subsidized residential ratepayers.
The residential utility bill hike would not affect low-income ratepayers. |
WASHINGTON –Six officers with the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) were charged today in connection with the federal investigation of a police-involved shooting on the Danziger Bridge in the days after Hurricane Katrina, the Justice Department announced today. The incident resulted in the death of two civilians and the wounding of four others.
The indictment charges four officers – Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Robert Faulcon and Anthony Villavaso – in connection with the shootings, and charges those four officers and two supervisors – Arthur “Archie” Kaufman and Gerard Dugue – with helping to obstruct justice during the subsequent investigations.
The indictment alleges that officers Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso open fired on an unarmed family on the east side of the bridge, killing 17-year- old James Brissette, and wounding Susan Bartholomew, 38; Leonard Bartholomew III, 44; the Bartholomew’s daughter, Lesha, 17; and the Bartholomew’s nephew, Jose Holmes, 19. The Bartholomews’ 14-year-old son ran away from the shooting and was fired at, but was not injured.
The second shooting occurred minutes later on the west side of the bridge, where officers shot at brothers Lance and Ronald Madison, killing Ronald, a 40-year-old man with severe mental disabilities. The indictment alleges Faulcon shot Ronald Madison in the back as Ronald ran away. Bowen is charged with stomping and kicking Ronald Madison while Ronald was wounded, but not yet dead. Ronald later died at the scene.
“As our investigation of the Danziger Bridge incident shows, the Justice Department will vigorously pursue anyone who allegedly violated the law,” said Attorney General Holder. “Put simply, we will not tolerate wrongdoing by those who have sworn to protect the public.”
“In the days following Hurricane Katrina, the people of New Orleans were relying upon law enforcement to protect publ ic safety. The officers indicted today are accused of abusing their power and violating their public trust. Today’s indictment exemplifies the department’s commitment to aggressively prosecute any officer who violates the law either by engaging in misconduct or a conspiracy to deny justice,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.
“Today’s indictment should serve as compelling evidence of our unswerving and unconditional commitment to achieve essential goals: to achieve true justice for any victims of the charged killings, shootings and abuse on the Danziger Bridge, and the alleged corrupt cover-up that followed; to unmask and bring to justice those officers who according to the indictment abused their power in committing violent crimes against the unarmed citizens they were sworn to protect; to restore the trust in the men and women of law enforcement who do serve the people and honor the badge; and to make certain that no one should ever have to fear those whose job it is to protect them,” said Jim Letten, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
“The charges announced in today’s indictment show the commitment by the FBI to hold individuals who break the law accountable, regardless of their positions in a community or the circumstances under which the crimes occurred,” said Kevin L. Perkins, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division.
“One year ago, FBI New Orleans made a commitment to dedicate all the necessary resources to ensure this matter was thoroughly and fairly investigated to a logical conclusion. Today’s indictments indicate that we continue to honor that commitment,” said David W. Welker, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s New Orleans Field Office.
The four officers charged with killing civilians face maximum penalties of life in prison or the death penalty. The officers face additional penalties for the remaining counts, which include charges related to a conspiracy to cover up what had happened on the bridge, and conspiracies to file charges against two of the victims, Lance Madison and Jose Holmes, on the basis of false evidence.
According to the indictment, officers at the scene of the shooting arrested Lance Madison and charged him with eight counts of attempting to kill police officers. Officers collected no guns or shell casings on the day of the shooting, and 30 casings they collected more than a month later were allegedly fired by officers rather than civilians. Madison was held in jail for three weeks, but was eventually released without indictment.
The indictment accuses Kaufman and Dugue of joining the other four defendants in a conspiracy to cover up what had happened on the bridge and to make the shootings appear justified. Kaufman is charged with obtaining a gun from his home and claiming to have found the gun at the bridge on the day after the shooting, and with making up witnesses and then creating statements from the fictional witnesses to help justify the shooting. Kaufman and Dugue are also accused of holding a meeting, in an abandoned and gutted out NOPD building, at which homicide sergeants instructed officers involved in the shooting to get their stories straight before giving formal audiotaped statements about the shooting.
Kaufman and Dugue, who concluded in a formal report that the shooting was justified and that Lance Madison and Jose Holmes should be arrested, are also accused of conspiring with each other and with other officers to have Madison and Holmes prosecuted on the basis of false evidence.
Kaufman faces a maximum penalty of 120 years in prison, and Dugue faces a maximum penalty of 70 years in prison.
Today’s indictment follows guilty pleas from five former NOPD officers who admitted that they participated in a conspiracy to obstruct justice and cover up what happened on Sept. 4, 2005. The officers include former Lieutenant Michael Lohman, former detective Jeffrey Lehrmann, and former Officers Michael Hunter, Robert Barrios, and Ignatius Hills.
The charges set forth in an indictment are merely accusations and the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty
This case, which is ongoing, is being investigated by the FBI’s New Orleans Field Office, and is being prosecuted by Deputy Chief Bobbi Bernstein and Trial Attorney Forrest Christian of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, along with Assistant U.S. Attorney Julia K. Evans of the Eastern District of Louisiana. |
For a long time, social science has known of correlations between childhood turmoil and all sorts of adult maladies that carry massive social and financial costs—mental illness, addiction, tendencies toward violence. And for decades, we have attempted to address those problems with a variety of social interventions: Head Start, which aims to prepare low-income kids between the ages of three and five for school; investments in elementary and high school children; programs for rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents. While some have achieved important successes, many of the problems stemming from childhood poverty remain intractable.
But a scientific revolution that has taken place in the last decade or so illuminates a different way to address the dysfunctions associated with childhood hardship. This science suggests that many of these problems have roots earlier than is commonly understood—especially during the first two years of life. Researchers, including those of the Bucharest project, have shown how adversity during this period affects the brain, down to the level of DNA—establishing for the first time a causal connection between trouble in very early childhood and later in life. And they have also shown a way to prevent some of these problems—if action is taken during those crucial first two years.
The first two years, however, happen to be the period of a child’s life in which we invest the least. According to research by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, children get about half as many taxpayer resources, per person, as do the elderly. And among children, the youngest get the least. The annual federal investment in elementary school kids approaches $11,000 per child. For infants and toddlers up to age two, it is just over $4,000. When it comes to early childhood, public policy is lagging far behind science—with disastrous consequences.
THE ADULT BRAIN consists of about a hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons, that communicate with each other and the rest of the body by transmitting electrical impulses. A baby’s genes contain a blueprint for what cells to build and when, and how those cells are capable of operating, over the course of a lifetime. But experience and environment have profound effects on how the body reads and applies that blueprint.
Hormones affect this process, especially stress hormones. Like all living creatures, human babies are hard-wired with a stress reaction. It’s a survival mechanism that, millions of years ago, allowed humans to protect themselves from hunger, cold, or a saber-toothed tiger about to pounce. Today, that stress response kicks in whenever a baby perceives a threat, which can be as simple as hunger or the feeling of a wet diaper. Deep inside the adrenal glands, which sit atop the kidneys, cells pump out adrenaline—a hormone that makes the lungs breathe and the heart beat faster, increasing the supply of oxygen to the muscles. In the outer shell of the glands, different cells produce cortisol, which helps the body devour stored sugars and prepare the immune system to ward off invaders.
With these hormones sloshing around, blood pressure rises, muscles tighten, and energy surges. A baby wails, waiting for somebody to provide milk, dry clothing, or maybe just a warm embrace. When comfort comes quickly, the body produces fewer stress hormones, the baby calms down, and the brain goes back to business as usual. And if this happens repeatedly, as it should, the nerve impulses crackling in the brain will carry the signals for effective coping with stress over and over again—building pathways that the baby can use later in life to solve problems and overcome difficulty.
But the baby who is ignored or neglected just keeps screaming and flailing. Eventually, he exhausts himself and may appear to withdraw. Yet the quiet child is not a content child. Constant activation of the stress system causes wear and tear on the brain, altering the formation of neural pathways, so that coping and thinking mechanisms don’t develop in the same way. For example, a baby who endures prolonged abuse or neglect is likely to end up with an enlarged amygdala: a part of the brain that helps generate the fear response.
Some of the earliest and most important research establishing this process dates to the 1950s, when investigators observed that rats were better at solving problems if they got more nurturing at very young ages. Among the pioneering scientists in this field were Seymour Levine of Stanford, Michael Meaney of McGill, and Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller University. McEwen’s work showed, among other things, that persistently high levels of cortisol altered the structure of the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in forming memories and providing context for emotional reactions. Eventually McEwen introduced a term, “allostatic load,” to describe what was happening when stress hormones inundated the body for extended periods of time. Subsequent research showed that persistent childhood stress also leads to significant physical problems, such as far higher rates of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, as Paul Tough explained in an elegant New Yorker article in March.
But the links to cognitive and intellectual problems are just as concrete. Early adversity, says Nelson, can interfere with “planning ability, cognitive flexibility, problems with memory, and all of those will correlate with diminished IQ.” Every one of the researchers emphasizes that some children who go through these experiences end up OK—and that later interventions may still be helpful for those children who struggle. But, overall, says Nelson, “they’re more likely to have mental health problems. The top of the list will be anxiety. Second to that will be attention deficit disorder. And then depression.” One 2010 paper from Psychological Medicine concluded that “childhood adversities”—a category that includes abusive parenting and economic hardship—were associated with about one in five cases of “severely impairing” mental disorders and about one in four anxiety disorders in adulthood.
These problems incur large costs. Think about the lost wages from serious mental health problems, which total $200 billion a year, according to a 2008 study from the American Journal of Psychiatry. Or think about the expense of incarcerating criminals: about $60 billion a year, according to a 2006 study from the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons. Childhood adversity obviously doesn’t account for all of these sums. But if the studies are correct, then adversity explains a significant portion—certainly in the tens of billions of dollars.
And the implications go beyond mental illness or crime. Children who fail to develop coping mechanisms struggle from the earliest days in school, because even the slightest provocations or setbacks destroy their focus and attention. They can’t sit still and read. They have trouble standing in line. They lash out at classmates or teachers. And these struggles, naturally, lead to other problems that perpetuate the cycle of poverty. All of this is to say that the science of early childhood may play a significant role in the dominant political question of our time: rising inequality.
THE FIRST TIME I heard of this field of research was during a conversation with a woman named Diana Rauner. In the early ’90s, about a decade after graduating from Yale, Rauner had left a lucrative career in private equity to study developmental psychology at the University of Chicago. For her dissertation, she visited day care centers in the city, hoping to learn about how infants and toddlers pick up language skills. But she learned a lot more about the sorry state of child care. Rauner described facilities where infants were strapped in car seats, “watching The Lion King all day,” while the older kids were “circling the room almost like sharks” and throwing things at the infants, because they had nothing else to do. But the infants frequently didn’t cry. “A lot would just stare, which is almost worse,” Rauner says.
Today, Rauner runs a nonprofit organization called the Ounce of Prevention Fund, a $40 million-per-year initiative that applies the latest scientific findings about early childhood—in particular, those first few years—to help some of Chicago’s most disadvantaged families. The fund trains workers at day care centers on how to nurture babies in ways that will stimulate positive brain activity. It also operates its own child care center and school, called Educare, that became the model for a national network of such facilities designed to improve day care for infants and young children, including those too young for Head Start. But perhaps the program’s most intriguing initiative is its work with agencies that provide at-home visits to young women, particularly teenagers, who are either pregnant or are new mothers. Some of these agencies employ doulas, who are specially-trained to provide advice and support to mothers, from the prenatal period all the way up through early childhood.
A few weeks ago, I went on a visit with Maria Caref, a doula who works for Christopher House, an organization that partners with Ounce of Prevention. Maria was visiting Rosaria, a 17-year-old high school student with a four-month-old baby boy. (As a condition of my attendance, I agreed not to identify the real name of Rosaria or her baby.)
Rosaria lives on the second floor of a house in a lower-income, predominantly Latino neighborhood on the west side. When we walked in, her son was lying face-up on a Winnie-the-Pooh fleece blanket on the floor, playing with a ball. Rosaria was on the floor next to him. Children’s music was playing loudly in the background. Like most of the young mothers Caref visits, Rosaria came to Christopher House via a referral (in this case, from a health clinic) while she was pregnant. The official agenda for the visit was to assess whether she was still working toward her own goals as a student and as a parent. But, as always, it was also a chance to check up on the baby and how Rosaria was caring for him.
Rosaria told Caref she was pleased that her boy was aware of her voice and would turn his head to follow her. “He laughs all the time; he’s smiling,” she said. When Caref pulled out a rattle, it got his attention right away. “Curioso,” Rosaria said, “like Curious George.” At that point, Rosaria pointed out a plaything she’d made the baby, by sewing buttons onto socks that she’d turned into mittens. Caref smiled but, after tugging on the buttons with her fingers, warned that they were actually a hazard: “Wow, mom is so creative,” Caref cooed, while holding the baby. “But you have to be careful,” she said, carefully switching gears. “He can pull this hard and he can swallow this. It would be very dangerous.” Later the two talked about whether Rosaria had followed up with immunizations (she had) and whether she was still reading to the boy regularly (she was, although not as regularly as before because she was busy with her own homework). “For some mothers, it’s really hard to keep up,” Caref told Rosaria as we left. “You’ve been doing really well.”
A major goal of these visits is to establish long-term relationships, so that the young women come to see the visitors as both a source of support and an advocate for their interests. Visitors like Caref are trained to deal with a wide range of issues, from basic psychology to health. During the visit, Caref talked to Rosaria about breastfeeding, which has significant health benefits for both mother and child. They also spoke about birth control. Studies have shown that teen mothers who have more than one child, particularly in rapid succession, are by far the most likely to fall into crisis.
The model for these efforts is a visiting nurse program that David Olds, a University of Colorado pediatrician, tested in Elmira, New York, during the ’70s and ’80s, and which grew into the national Nurse-Family Partnership. In 2011, the program, which the federal government helps finance, will serve more than 20,000 families; they receive home nurse visits from when they become pregnant until their children are two years old. Olds’s program is one of the more unambiguous success stories in the modern history of social policy. Two long-term studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that adolescents whose mothers had been in the program were less likely to run away, get arrested, or consume alcohol or tobacco. Reports of child abuse were lower by about 50 percent.
When the RAND Corporation evaluated the initiative, it determined that the program would save between $1.26 and $5.70 for every $1 spent, with the higher savings from the higher-risk families, thanks to reduced spending on hospitals, incarceration, and cash assistance. And according to Timothy Bartik, an economist and author of Investing in Kids, every dollar that goes into the Nurse-Family Partnership will raise incomes for the entire population by $1.85, once you factor the economic benefits of a more productive workforce—and a tax base that won’t be so strained picking up the tab for remediation and crime. High-functioning day care centers that cover birth through age five, Bartik says, produce a larger payoff per dollar: $2.25.
The science of early adversity, then, offers a blueprint for tackling the effects of poverty and neglect, one that is more precise and observable than any tools policymakers have ever had at their disposal. “The concept of disrupting brain circuitry is much more compelling than the concept that poverty is bad for your health,” says Jack Shonkoff, a Harvard pediatrician and chair of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. “It gives us a basis for developing new ideas, for going into policy areas, given what we know, and saying here are some new strategies worth trying.”
AFTER MY VISIT with Caref, it was possible to imagine what a comprehensive policy response to the problems of impoverished early childhood might look like. Young families would have the option of home visits, from doulas or social workers. Child care would be higher quality across the board. It would also be affordable, even for families at or below the poverty line. Such services wouldn’t be available exclusively to the poor, since middle-class families could also benefit from many of these programs. That would make them more popular, too.
From a policy standpoint, probably the biggest question about home visiting is how well it would work on a much larger scale. Not all home programs are going to be as thorough as the effort I saw in Chicago, which means they may not produce the same benefits. This is a familiar problem: Studies of Head Start, for example, suggest that it does not have the long-lasting effects on test scores that exemplary programs like the famous Perry Preschool in Ypsilanti, Michigan, do. Instead, Head Start’s impact on test scores tends to fade (although many researchers argue plausibly that dismal assessments of reading or math skills overlook other advantages that Head Start students gain).
But the bigger questions right now are political. Nobody is talking about launching a new government initiative, no matter how much money it might save in the long run. On the contrary, the focus today is on slashing government spending. The Affordable Care Act has $1.5 billion over five years for expanding visiting nurse programs for brand new mothers. That’s a massive expansion over the previous investment which, according to administration officials, was only in the millions. But even as that money works its way through the pipeline, the net investment in early childhood care is probably declining, given how much of it flows through cash-strapped state governments that are frantically cutting their budgets. In Illinois, to give just one example, about 5,000 at-risk children will lose state-financed schooling, care, or developmental services this year because of a 5 percent budget cut, according to Adam Summers, from Illinois Action for Children. And that’s in addition to 14,000 kids who lost access to state-funded pre-kindergarten in the last two years. At the federal level, House Republicans have proposed eliminating the new home visit funds altogether.
Hard times require hard choices, of course. But these cuts can be counterproductive. One of the most convincing advocates for this argument is James Heckman, a Nobel Prizewinning economist from the University of Chicago. Earlier in his career, Heckman undertook a project to study the effects of high school equivalency (GED) programs. To his chagrin, he discovered that the graduates didn’t seem to be much better off, despite the considerable public investment in the programs. So Heckman began a quest to discover what kinds of government spending would work. His research led him to the conclusion that earlier is better, until eventually he came to focus on the first years of a child’s life.
Heckman argues that a dollar spent on the earliest years of life generates more payoff than a dollar spent on later childhood—let alone a dollar spent on adulthood. Neither he nor any of the scientific researchers believes the United States should stop funding later interventions as long as the programs actually have some impact. Among other things, plenty of infants with nurturing caregivers still develop problems later on, for other reasons. But Heckman agrees with researchers who argue that the older the child, the more expensive and difficult those interventions will be.
Heckman has tried to make this case to anybody who will listen, including members of the congressional super committee on deficit reduction, whose cuts to social services—either directly or through reduced aid to the states—could decimate existing services while leaving little room for new initiatives. “We can gain money by investing early to close disparities and prevent achievement gaps, or we can continue to drive up deficit spending by paying to remediate disparities when they are harder and more expensive to close,” Heckman wrote in a formal letter to the committee in September. “The argument is very clear from an economic standpoint.”
Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at The New Republic. This article appeared in the December 1, 2011, issue of the magazine. |
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School pupils were left gasping as their heroes from Manchester United joined them for a surprise photoshoot.
The lucky children were taking part in the official Christmas card shoot for United - but were not expecting the entire first-team squad to turn up, report the Manchester Evening News.
Pupils were selected through the Manchester United Foundation and were left shell-shocked when Wayne Rooney, Louis van Gaal, Ryan Giggs and the rest of the team arrived to join them on the photo for the club's official Christmas card.
To create the festive backdrop, dozens of footballs were used to build a Christmas tree behind the excited kids and players.
Pupils from Moorfield Primary, Saint Joseph The Worker RC Primary, both from Irlam, and Forest Gate Academy in Partington, were picked for the festive treat.
(Image: Manchester Evening News)
A video titled 'How United's Card Was Made' shows the build up to the photo shoot - with pupils given Santa hats and United scarves to wear before climbing aboard a coach to take them to the set at the Aon Training Complex.
It shows the children singing in front of the football tree with ‘snow’ falling down and their excited reaction to the players walking in.
(Image: Manchester Evening News)
St Joseph’s pupil Leo Mannion, 10, appears in the centre of the photo on the front row.
Mum Deborah, from Irlam, said: “He loves Manchester United and it was a dream come true for him to be part of the day. He was invited by school and it was the day after his birthday so he said it made his birthday extra special.”
(Image: Manchester Evening News)
Deborah said it was a great surprise for the children when the players and managers arrived.
She added: “He couldn’t believe it - he was amazed. He doesn’t really have a favourite player, he loves them all.”
The balls featured on the card are among 1,000 being given away by Manchester United to local projects associated with its charitable foundation.
(Image: Manchester Evening News)
John Shiels, Manchester United Foundation’s chief executive, said: “The foundation has been lucky enough to feature in many of the club’s Christmas cards over the years. However, none can be as memorable as the moment 20 local primary school children found themselves standing alongside the Manchester United first team squad to create this year’s card.
“I look forward to viewing all the other incredible experiences the club have lined up for the children we work with. They really have made dreams come true this Christmas and I thank them for their generosity.”
(Image: Manchester Evening News)
The annual Santa Run around Old Trafford - supporting the work of the foundation in the community - takes place on Sunday, December 13.
To take part or for more information visit manutd.com/santarun |
This is often attributed as being an old Native American Cherokee legend (and I’ve obviously depicted it as such) but after doing a bit of digging online I found that its origins are disputed. This source gives pretty convincing evidence that it’s only a few decades old and evolved from a passage in a Billy Graham book. And Wiki Answers claim that the moral ending of the passage is inconsistent with traditional Cherokee fables. So I don’t know who to believe, and I didn’t credit the quote on the comic. If anyone can help clarify the source, please leave a comment. Regardless of the origin, it’s a great little proverb and one I wanted to adapt and share with you.
Thanks to everyone who submitted this quote, it’s one of the most frequent requests I get. |
In response to persistent demands that I explain my hermeneutic, here is a list of seven rough and ready “rules” for doing a narrative-historical reading of the New Testament. They loosely outline or summarize what is to my mind a coherent and defensible methodology, but I have not offered here much by way of philosophical justification. I take the view that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. A list of related posts can be found here.
Rule #1 The meaning of scripture is controlled by large literary structures
The narrative-historical approach brings into focus the larger narrative structures that hold scripture together and frame the parts. Since the patristic period the church has mainly used theological structures (creeds, doctrines, statements of faith, systematic theologies, the gospel of personal salvation, etc.) to hold together, frame and interpret the parts of scripture.
The grammatical-historical method, much favoured by conservative Protestants, also attends to the original and historical meaning of the text but generally confines itself to much smaller, atomized units of meaning. It is not especially interested in meta-narratives or worldview. It relies on theology to provide the framing structures, which is why we have, in my simplistic terms, a clash between history and theology. The grammatical-historical method is a short-sighted lackey of Protestant theology.
Rule #2 The main controlling structure is the story of Israel and the nations
The main narrative structure, from Genesis 12 to Revelation 20 is the story of Israel as a people struggling to make sense of and maintain its relationship with God under circumstances of conflict with other more powerful nations and empires. I have suggested that we might condense the “message” of the Bible into a single sentence as follows:
The long conflict between the one true creator God and the pagan nations, culminating in the victory of Christlike communities over Rome, has fundamentally transformed the nature and status of his “new creation” people in the world.
This narrative contains countless individual stories but cannot be reduced to them or rewritten as merely incidental background to the personal narrative of sin and redemption. People find salvation or condemnation, life or death, insofar as they engage with this story.
Rule #3 Biblical narrative is historically determined
The narrative-historical approach differs from purely narrative theologies (e.g. Frei) principally in that it emphasizes the historical groundedness and orientation of the story that is told about Israel and the early church. Scripture is not merely a “drama of doctrine” (Vanhoozer)—that is a very modern perspective. It is first and foremost an account of—and an attempt to make sense of—the historical experience of a community.
On the other hand, the narrative-historical approach differs from the historical-critical method in that it is interested primarily in the relationship between the text and the historical community which produced it, much less in the relationship between the text and a supposedly objective historical reality that might be constructed by other means. For example, we ask why the early Christian community told a story about Jesus calming a storm, what they understood by it, not whether the event is believable or actually happened. In this regard, the narrative-historical approach is closer to canonical or biblical criticism.
Rule #4 Metalepsis rules, OK
If it is the narrative of Israel’s troubled historical existence that controls meaning in the biblical texts, we take it that the New Testament quotes from or alludes to the Jewish scriptures not so much to provide authoritative scriptural support for New Testament teachings (i.e. as proof texts) as to bring the larger narratives and arguments into play. This works essentially because in the first century Israel was facing a crisis analogous to previous crises such as the Babylonian invasion or the assault of Antiochus IV against Jewish religion. Richard Hays introduced the term metalepsis for the practice of hearing the intertextual echoes generated by allusion:
When a literary echo links the text in which it occurs to an earlier text, the figurative effect of the echo can lie in the unstated or suppressed… points of resonance between the two texts.
Whether or not the reader can always be expected to hear the echo, it can be an important indicator of the process of thought behind the statement. For example, a non-Jewish reader might not hear the allusion to Psalm 22 in Jesus’ cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But it is historically appropriate to suppose that Jesus the Jewish prophet, wrongfully crucified as Israel’s “king”, either had in mind the whole of this Psalm of suffering and vindication or actually recited the whole Psalm from the cross.
Rule #5 Historical narratives have (mostly) historical horizons
The narrative-historical approach identifies and works within the plausible historical horizons of the texts, on the assumption that Jesus and his followers spoke and wrote about what evidently and urgently mattered to them as (mostly) Jews engaged with the overarching story of Israel. I think that nearly everything that Jesus said and did had in view the horizon of the war against Rome, and that nearly everything that Paul and others said and did had in view a second horizon of the conversion of the empire. So, for example, I argue that when Jesus speaks of the judgment of Gehenna, he means not a post mortem “hell” but the terrible judgment that would come upon Jerusalem within a generation. That is what the language points to, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple was clearly of paramount concern for him.
Rule #6 The narrative-historical approach is ante-orthodox not anti-orthodox
The narrative-historical approach to the New Testament attempts to understand how things appeared from the historical perspective of Jesus and his followers. This is an ante-orthodox perspective, not necessarily an anti-orthodox perspective. The theological content of the New Testament is taken to be the product of a narrative told essentially within the context of, and according to the terms of, second temple Judaism. This inevitably, I think, brings into the foreground the story of how the Jesus born to Mary and Joseph or the Jesus baptized by John came to be acknowledged as judge and ruler of the nations, to the glory of the God of Israel—a story which is largely eclipsed under later orthodoxy.
To the extent that Jesus is secondarily associated with the word or wisdom of God, with the process of creation, perhaps even identified with the creator, this still needs to be understood in the light of Jewish word/wisdom categories and in relation to the Jewish apocalyptic narrative. We do not understand the New Testament better by dressing it up in the clothing of a post-Jewish orthodoxy.
Rule #7 Apply with care
The narrative-historical approach raises two general questions about how the New Testament is meaningful for the church today.
First, although the approach is not inherently anti-orthodox, to the extent that there is a misalignment between the language, conceptuality and intention of the New Testament and the language, conceptuality and intention of theological orthodoxy, we may ask whether there are not better ways of expressing the meaning of the New Testament in our own narrative context. For example, we might ask whether it is not more important at the moment to affirm that Jesus is Lord than that Jesus is God.
Secondly, I think that we are more consistent if we resist the natural tendency to apply the text directly to our own circumstances and ask how the historical narrative itself determines who we are and how we are to behave. This forces us to take into account the controversial history of the church and the concrete realities of our post-Christendom, post-modern context. If we simply assert that Jesus died for my sins, we make history irrelevant. If we assert that Jesus died for the sins of Israel, we have to engage with his death by way of the historical existence of the church. |
“What Difference Does It Make.” Those simple words offer a perfect glimpse into the life and times of Hillary Clinton. A woman who gets away with everything and anything, and who now wants to be President of these United States.
From her earliest days as a public figure, an aura of shadiness and lack of accountability permeates. For starters, there’s the infamous 1978 case of her turning $1,000 into $100,000 by trading cattle futures, an endeavor in which she had no expertise.
Naturally, nothing ever came of the cattle trading incident, kicking off a pattern that has continued to play out throughout her career. It’s this reality that has made her increasingly bold — and dangerous.
– From July’s post: “What Difference Does It Make” – Thoughts on the Non-Indictment of Hillary Clinton
The FBI’s sham investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server represents the latest corrosive nail in the coffin of the faith the American public once held in its “esteemed” institutions to do what’s right and just by the people.
Months after James Comey cleared her in an utterly embarrassing press conference, many additional revelations have emerged, and outrage about how the investigation was conducted continues to grow.
For example, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions recently had the following to say according to the Daily Caller:
Jeff Sessions thinks the United States Senate should investigate the FBI for its handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s email server, specifically the way the bureau granted Cheryl Mills immunity and appeared to destroy evidence pertinent to the investigation. “This is scary to me,” Sessions added. “I tried not to be critical of Comey at first.” “I really don’t see how Congress can issue a subpoena for records and they then destroy those records,” Sessions wondered aloud. “I am telling you that every business knows that if they get a subpoena for business records, and they destroy those records, they are subject to criminal prosecution and will be prosecuted.”
Those are pretty strong words, but it’s not just Republican politicians who are outraged. There appears to be growing anger within the FBI itself, as agency veterans explained to the New York Post:
Veteran FBI agents say FBI Director James Comey has permanently damaged the bureau’s reputation for uncompromising investigations with his “cowardly” whitewash of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information using an unauthorized private email server. Feeling the heat from congressional critics, Comey last week argued that the case was investigated by career FBI agents, “So if I blew it, they blew it, too.” But agents say Comey tied investigators’ hands by agreeing to unheard-of ground rules and other demands by the lawyers for Clinton and her aides that limited their investigation. “In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews,” said retired agent Dennis V. Hughes, the first chief of the FBI’s computer investigations unit. Instead of going to prosecutors and insisting on using grand jury leverage to compel testimony and seize evidence, Comey allowed immunity for several key witnesses, including potential targets. The immunity agreements came with outrageous side deals, including preventing agents from searching for any documents on a Dell laptop owned by former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills generated after Jan. 31, 2015, when she communicated with the server administrator who destroyed subpoenaed emails. Comey also agreed to have Mills’ laptop destroyed after the restricted search, denying Congress the chance to look at it and making the FBI an accomplice to the destruction of evidence. Comey’s immunized witnesses nonetheless suffered chronic lapses in memory, made unsubstantiated claims of attorney-client privilege upon tougher questioning and at least two gave demonstrably false statements. And yet Comey indulged it all. What’s more, Comey cut a deal to give Clinton a “voluntary” witness interview on a major holiday, and even let her ex-chief of staff sit in on the interview as a lawyer, even though she, too, was under investigation. Clinton’s interview, the culmination of a yearlong investigation, lasted just 3½ hours. Despite some 40 bouts of amnesia, she wasn’t called back for questioning; and three days later, Comey cleared her of criminal wrongdoing. “The FBI has politicized itself, and its reputation will suffer for a long time,” Hughes said. “I hold Director Comey responsible.” Agreed retired FBI agent Michael M. Biasello: “Comey has singlehandedly ruined the reputation of the organization.” The accommodations afforded Clinton and her aides are “unprecedented,” Biasello added, “which is another way of saying this outcome was by design.” He called Comey’s decision not to seek charges “cowardly.” “Each month for 27 years, I received oral and computer admonishments concerning the proper protocol for handling top secret and other classified material, and was informed of the harsh penalties, to include prosecution and incarceration,” for mishandling such material, he pointed out. “Had myself or my colleagues engaged in behavior of the magnitude of Hillary Clinton, as described by Comey, we would be serving time in Leavenworth.” Former FBI official I.C. Smith knows a thing or two about Clinton corruption. After working at FBI headquarters as a section chief in the National Security Division, he retired as special agent in charge of the Little Rock, Ark., field office, where he investigated top Clinton fundraisers for public corruption and even Chinese espionage. “FBI agents upset with Comey’s decision have every reason to feel that way,” Smith said. “Clearly there was a different standard applied to Clinton.” Smith said Congress should subpoena the case’s agents to testify about the direction they received from Comey and their supervisors: “It would be interesting to see what the results would be if those involved with the investigation were questioned under oath.” Comey made the 25 agents who worked on the case sign nondisclosure agreements. But others say morale has sunk inside the bureau. “The director is giving the bureau a bad rap with all the gaps in the investigation,” one agent in the Washington field office said. “There’s a perception that the FBI has been politicized and let down the country.”
For yet more on how Hillary was treated with kid gloves, let’s turn to a few excerpts from an article published in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, The FBI Treated Clinton With Kid Gloves:
Tim Kaine repeatedly defended Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate. “The FBI did an investigation,” he said at one point, “and they concluded that there was no reasonable prosecutor who would take it further.” But such a statement is credible only if it follows a real criminal investigation—that is, the sort of investigation that the FBI and the Justice Department conduct when they actually care about a case and want convictions. We know all too well what that kind of investigation looks like, as two of the lawyers who defended a recent target: former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. That story had a happy ending for the governor and his wife. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in their favor this summer and all charges were dropped in September. But their victory certainly wasn’t due to lack of investigatory zeal on the part of the FBI and Justice Department. Below are only a few of the heavy-handed tactics federal investigators used to build their case against the McDonnells. See how they compare to how Mrs. Clinton was treated. Conduct ambush interviews. The first contact between law enforcement and the McDonnells was an ambush interview of the governor’s wife. The agents lied to her about the topic of the meeting, forbade Gov. McDonnell’s staff from attending, and then grilled her on their suspicions about potential public corruption. Statements from that interview later took center stage in the trial of her and her husband. In Mrs. Clinton’s case, no ambush interviews were conducted, and witnesses were generously accommodated. The FBI and Justice Department even allowed a fact witness and potential target—Cheryl Mills, formerly the State Department’s chief of staff—to simultaneously represent Mrs. Clinton as her counsel. Immunize only witnesses who can help deliver convictions. One person in Gov. McDonnell’s case got immunity: Jonnie Williams, the prosecution’s star witness. For his testimony, Mr. Williams earned a wealth of blanket immunity—not simply from potential bribery prosecution but also from unrelated crimes he might have committed (including securities and tax fraud). Reluctant witnesses—Gov. McDonnell’s children and friends—were called before a grand jury and forced to testify. Contrast that with Mrs. Clinton’s case. Much of her staff was immunized in exchange for simply meeting with investigators. None of them appear to have been pressed for information, or given any incentive whatsoever to spill on the boss. Construe “corruption” broadly. Investigators of Gov. McDonnell took the most expansive possible reading of the law. They argued to the Supreme Court this spring that it was a felony for the governor to arrange meetings between a benefactor and other government officials, even without trying to sway the ultimate decision. Yet the FBI appears to have done no investigation into how Secretary Clinton’s conduct while in office was affected by massive donations to the Clinton Foundation or large payments for speeches given by her husband, former President Bill Clinton. Journalists have unearthed extensive evidence of special treatment: The Associated Press reported that during the first half of her tenure, Mrs. Clinton had meetings or phone calls scheduled with 154 private interests; 85 were Clinton Foundation donors, who in total had pledged or given as much as $156 million. Claim that concealment proves consciousness of guilt. In Gov. McDonnell’s case, there was no evidence—none—that he ever suspected his conduct could be criminal. Prosecutors tried to show criminal intent by arguing that he “hid” gifts by declining to list them on annual disclosure forms. But Gov. McDonnell complied with Virginia’s disclosure requirements in virtually all respects. The law simply did not require much information to be disclosed. Further, many of his family and staff knew about the gifts. Still, prosecutors claimed that failure to tell the public sufficed to prove a guilty mind. FBI Director James Comey said that in Mrs. Clinton’s case there was no evidence of criminal intent. Yet she set up a private email server in her basement and permanently deleted thousands of the emails it contained. A plausible motive would be shielding her activities from public scrutiny. The Comey standard—that direct evidence of knowing criminality is needed to prosecute—is certainly not the one that his agency and the Justice Department applied to Gov. McDonnell for more than three years. To be clear, we aren’t endorsing these heavy-handed tactics, many of which are befitting Inspector Javert of “Les Misérables.” But these are the sorts of things investigators do when they are serious about bringing criminal charges. In deciding whether the investigation into Mrs. Clinton was a real one—as opposed to a grand, expensive spectacle of law-enforcement theater—Gov. McDonnell’s treatment is instructive.
With that out of the way, let’s examine some of the latest disturbing revelations related to this “closed” case.
First from The Hill:
The FBI’s notes on its investigation into Hillary Clinton‘s private email server raise questions about two “bankers boxes” of printed emails that went missing in the course of the probe, Fox News reports. Among the FBI’s lengthy report are its notes from a 2015 interview with an unnamed Office of Information Programs and Services (IPS) employee, which were heavily redacted. The notes say that IPS officials were told that there were 14 bankers boxes of emails at Clinton’s home, but when they were picked up from her lawyer’s office, there were only 12. The report also points out that emails dated from early 2009, at the start of her term, were missing. The FBI said it’s not clear if she was using another email address at that time.
Now how about about the following, from the Wall Street Journal:
WASHINGTON—Newly disclosed emails show top Obama administration officials were in close contact with Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign in early 2015 about the potential fallout from revelations that the former secretary of state used a private email server. Their discussion included a request from the White House communications director to her counterpart at the State Department to see if it was possible to arrange for Secretary of State John Kerry to avoid questions during media appearances about Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement. In another instance, a top State Department official assured an attorney for Mrs. Clinton that, contrary to media reports, a department official hadn’t told Congress that Mrs. Clinton erred in using a private email account. The emails highlight the revolving door between the State Department, the White House and the Clinton campaign in early 2015 as Mrs. Clinton geared up to run for president. Ten days after the story broke, White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri emailed State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki to ask, “between us on the shows…think we can get this done so he is not asked about email.” That apparently referred to Mr. Kerry, who appeared in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” three days later. Ms. Palmieri had previously announced she would be leaving the administration to join Mrs. Clinton’s campaign in mid-2015, but was still at the White House when she sent the email. Other emails show Ms. Palmieri helped arrange for Ms. Psaki to move from the State Department to the White House communications job Ms. Palmieri was vacating. “Agree completely and working to crush on my end,” wrote back Ms. Psaki, who would move to the White House weeks later. A day later, Ms. Psaki added, “Good to go on killing CBS idea.” She continued, “And we are going to hold on any other TV options just given the swirl of crap out there.” Mr. Kerry wasn’t asked on CBS about the email server, though it isn’t clear how Ms. Psaki could have guaranteed that.
I think we can all take a guess about how they achieved that.
The RNC also obtained an entirely redacted discussion between nearly a dozen top White House communications officials with a subject line referring to Mr. Kerry’s appearance on CBS. A White House official said the internal debate at the time was about whether Mr. Kerry should appear on the shows at all, rather than any attempt to influence what questions were asked.
So why was it entirely redacted then? Must’ve been more content about yoga and grandchildren.
In another email coming from the State Department, Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary for management, told Heather Samuelson, one of Mrs. Clinton’s attorneys, about new documents the State Department had posted concerning the former secretary of state. Ms. Samuelson was one of the attorneys who reviewed Mrs. Clinton’s emails to determine which were government-related and which were personal before providing the official ones to the State Department. She was interviewed by the FBI as part of its probe and granted limited immunity in exchange for turning over her laptop as part of the investigation.
So much immunity for so little prosecution. Unlike what would happen to the rest of us.
In another exchange, Mr. Kennedy told Ms. Samuelson that Politico was “running [a] story that State official said Secretary Clinton did wrong thing. Wildly inaccurate reporting.” A Politico spokesman said the organization stood by its reporting. The story reported that Joyce Barr, assistant secretary of state for administration, had said in testimony to Congress that Mrs. Clinton’s record-keeping practices were “not acceptable.” An internal watchdog report later concluded that Mrs. Clinton’s email use wasn’t permitted under State policy.
But hey…
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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Here is a pallet hidden desk I made only from repurposed pallet wood and some MDF. I hope it will inspire other people to build the same.
Following the success of this post, here is the tutorial to do it (Available at "Le coin des bricoleurs").
DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE PDF TUTORIAL!
Assembly of the different elements:
This desk consists of 3 different panels to build:
The first one is the upper tray, the one on top of the "box", which will accommodate a few decorative objects.
The 2 others will be assembled in L to support the desktop.
The assembly was carried out in the manner of "shutters", with a reinforcement in Z.
The boards used are battens, about 9 cm wide, and sold in length of 3m, for their lightness (a little more than 1cm thick).
Before the assembly step, I simply added a small layer of grey paint to match the other elements of the house...
Ce bureau est constitué de 3 différents panneaux à construire :
Le premier est le plateau supérieur, celui du dessus de la "boite" et qui viendra accueillir quelques objets de déco.
Les 2 autres seront assemblés en L pour venir supporter le plateau du bureau.
Le montage a été réalisé à la façon de "volets", avec un renfort en Z.
Les planches utilisées sont des voliges, d'environ 9 cm de large, et vendues en longueur de 3m, pour leur légèreté (un peu + d'1cm d'épaisseur).
Avant l'étape de montage j'ai simplement ajouté une petite couche de badigeon gris pour assortir le tout aux autres éléments de la maison...
Assembly of this hidden desk:
The assembly can be done in 3 steps:
Place the upper tray on the wall using 2 cleats.
Assembly of the removable L-shaped part, and fixing of the worktop.
Junction of the 2 parts thanks to simple hinges + installation of the castors
You will see 2 small shelves hidden under the worktop, to accommodate the subwoofer for the speakers, as well as a multi-socket outlet for the various appliances... It fits with mini-cleats and a piece of wire!
Pour le montage, 3 étapes :
Le positionnement au mur du plateau supérieur à l'aide de 2 tasseaux.
L'assemblage de la partie amovible en L, et fixation du plan de travail.
Jonction des 2 parties grâce à de simples charnières + mise en place des roulettes
Vous verrez au passage 2 petites étagères dissimulées sous le plan de travail, pour venir accueillir le caisson de basse pour les enceintes, ainsi qu'une multiprise pour les différents branchements... Ca tient avec des mini-tasseaux et un morceau de fil de fer !
Assembly of the box (for the printer & paper):
This is an optional part and there is nothing very complex.
I made this small rectangular box in MDF, to store both small woven storage boxes, papers, and other odds and ends, but also to place my printer.
This one measures approximately 1m long for 40 cm depth, and of course, it is necessary to calculate the maximum height (printer included) so that this one passes under the tray of the desk when you close the box! To adapt according to your own equipment...
And it's mounted on wheels, so you can easily vacuum it underneath!
Alors là, c'est une partie facultative, il n'y a rien de bien compliqué.
J'ai réalisé ce petit caisson rectangulaire en MDF, pour y ranger à la fois des petites boites de rangement tissées, des papiers et autres bricoles, mais aussi pour y placer mon imprimante.
Celui-ci mesure environ 1m de long pour 40 cm de profondeur, et bien sûr il faut calculer la hauteur maximale (imprimante comprise) pour que celui-ci passe sous le plateau du bureau lorsque l'on referme la boite ! A adapter en fonction de son propre matériel...
Et il est monté sur roulettes, histoire de passer facilement un p'tit coup d'aspirateur en dessous !
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The third prong of the strategy is to outsource border controls by paying African states to detain potential migrants. The most notorious of these arrangements was with Libya. In 2010, a year before Britain and France launched airstrikes to help bring down Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the European Union concluded a deal with him, agreeing to pay 50 million euros over three years to turn his security forces into de facto border police. Even before they gained power, the anti-Qaddafi rebels agreed to continue the arrangement.
The European Union has a similar deal with Morocco, and hopes to recruit Egypt and Tunisia, too. In effect, it aims to relocate Europe’s borders to North Africa.
The 10-point plan that the European authorities proposed Monday was in keeping with this failed approach. Most eye-catching was the promise to destroy smugglers’ boats. Not only is this morally dubious — effectively telling migrants “We will wall you into North Africa so that you’re not our problem” — but it also won’t work. One reason for the spike in migrant numbers is the collapse of state authority in the region. Western intervention in Libya exacerbated the chaos, which the proposed military action will only intensify.
At the same time, migrants are forced to clamber into overloaded, unseaworthy boats because other routes into Europe have been blocked off. Destroying smugglers’ boats will merely force people to adopt even more perilous means of making the journey.
So what is to be done? The restoration of a proper search-and-rescue operation is important but insufficient. The European Union should stop treating migrants as criminals, and border control as warfare. It must dismantle Fortress Europe, liberalize immigration policy and open up legal routes for migrants. Some argue this would lead to a flood of immigrants, but current policy is not preventing people from migrating; it is simply killing them, by the boatload.
Fortress Europe has created not just a physical barrier around the Continent but an emotional barricade around Europe’s sense of humanity, too. Until that changes, the Mediterranean will continue to be a migrants’ graveyard. Come the next tragedy, we should remember: Our politicians could have helped prevent this, but chose not to. |
Houston (CNN) A Texas deputy and her husband could face life in prison after a night out for two Texas families turned into a deadly fight.
John Hernandez kicked and gasped for air when a deputy's husband allegedly had him in a chokehold outside a Houston-area Denny's restaurant, a video shows.
Minutes later, the 24-year-old father was rushed to the hospital and three days later, he was taken off life support.
How the attack unfolded is at the center of the criminal case against Terry Thompson and his wife, Harris County Sheriff's deputy Chauna Thompson.
Thompson's attorney said Terry was acting in self-defense and that a video that was released does not tell the full story of how the altercation unfolded.
The couple was indicted on murder charges after Hernandez's death was ruled a homicide by the Harris County medical examiner's office, reported CNN affiliate KTRK
They were in custody late Thursday night and released on bond early Friday, according to the Harris County Sheriff's office.
What happened?
It was just after 11 p.m. on May 28 when Terry Thompson verbally confronted Hernandez for urinating outside a Denny's restaurant in Northeast Harris County, the sheriff's office said.
"A physical altercation ensued," the sheriff's office said.
"After being confronted with urinating in public, he rushed to my client and struck him in the face. Now, I would consider that an attack," said Thompson's attorney, Scot Courtney.
As Thompson, 41, brought Hernandez to the ground, a man walked outside the restaurant and started recording the incident.
A 52-second video shows Thompson on top of Hernandez locking him in a chokehold while his wife, who was off duty, pins Hernandez's left arm to the ground.
Video shows Terry Thompson with his arm around John Hernandez's neck.
As Hernandez kicks and gasps for air, Thompson tells Hernandez, "Do you want me to hit you again? Do you want me to hit you again?"
Then two unknown people try to block the bystander from recording more of the scene. At one point a woman screams, "It's illegal to record." Several seconds later the recording stops.
Under Texas law, individuals are allowed to videotape others without their permission in public spaces with the exception of dressing rooms and bathrooms, but only if it's not for sexual purposes.
Hernandez's wife, Maria Toral, and her daughter were inside the restaurant when the incident began and rushed outside, yelling at the Thompsons to release Hernandez.
"The little daughter was screaming, 'Quit hitting my daddy,'" their attorney, Randall Kallinen, said.
Courtney claims Thompson was acting in self-defense.
"My client was trying to subdue him," Courtney said. "That's all he was doing."
When Hernandez stopped resisting, the Thompsons "noticed that he was not breathing," a statement from the Harris County Sheriff's Office said.
Before he was taken to the hospital, the statement says, Chauna Thompson performed CPR on Hernandez.
The autopsy report said Hernandez's death was a homicide and that he died from anoxic encephalopathy caused by strangulation by chest compression, reported CNN affiliate KPRC
'We are not done'
For Hernandez's aunt, Wendy Maldonado, the indictment is just a first step toward justice, she said. "We are not asking for the death penalty for the Thompson family. We are only asking for life in prison," Maldonado told reporters.
John Hernandez
Family and friends will be holding a wake Friday to honor Hernandez. He will be buried Saturday after a mass and graveside service, according to a Houston area funeral home
Randall Kallinen, an attorney for the Hernandez family, told a crowd of supporters Thursday night they need to remain vigilant.
"We are not done, though, because no one has been convicted of anything," he said. Kallinen told CNN affiliate KTRK that the family was pleased with the district attorney's office, which he praised as swift and thorough.
'It does raise questions for us'
The case has sparked outrage and allegations that Thompson received preferential treatment from his wife's law enforcement colleagues.
Kallinen said Hernandez's wife was put in a police squad car for nearly four hours and had her cell phone taken away by deputies at the scene.
The night of the altercation, deputies considered filing assault charges against Hernandez because the case had been reported as an assault, not a homicide, said Tom Berg, first assistant district attorney for Harris County.
Officers at the scene did not tell prosecutors Hernandez was unconscious and being rushed to a hospital for treatment, according to the district attorney's office.
Hernandez was taken off life support three days after the altercation.
Prosecutors say homicide investigators were not called to the scene because Hernandez didn't die of his injuries until several days later. The prosecutor said homicide investigators are better trained to question witnesses and collect evidence from crime scenes.
"It does raise questions for us," Berg said. "We are concerned that things happened later than they should have, but we have a complete picture now."
"We will show no favoritism. We will let the chips fall as they may with the grand jury," Berg added.
On Wednesday, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said the agency has asked the Department of Justice and Texas Rangers to review the investigation.
"From the beginning we have promised a fair, thorough and transparent investigation," Gonzalez told reporters.
He said Chauna Thompson has been removed from her patrol duties and moved to an administrative job within the department until the investigation concludes.
Hernandez's family and friends gathered Wednesday in a march and rally to demand justice and urge the arrests of the Thompsons.
"This should not have happened, and the fact that it did happen shows that there are things that need to be fixed within the sheriff's department," Oscar Hernandez told CNN affiliate KTRK
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled the first name of Harris County Sheriff's Deputy Chauna Thompson. |
While walking past a McDonald’s restaurant in the Philippines a medical student, Joyce Torrefranca, spotted a young boy sitting outside doing his homework at an improvised table. It was late in the evening, but the boy could read and write using the lights coming from the nearby restaurant.
Moved by the scene, Torrefranca took a photograph and posted it on Facebook. “For me as a student,” she wrote, “it just hit me a lot, like, big time.”
Torrefranca wasn’t the only one inspired by the nine-year-old boy without a home. Since Daniel Cabrera’s house burned down, he has reportedly been living in a food stall with his mother and two brothers. His father is dead. Reports also say he owns only one pencil. A second pencil was stolen from him.
As the story went viral, people emerged to help the boy, giving him books, pencils and crayons. He also received a battery-powered lamp so he would no longer have to do his homework in the car park. A fundraising page was set up to help cover the costs of his schooling.
This is far from the first inspirational story to attract attention online. Whether it’s a limbless man surfing, a cancer survivor climbing some of the world’s highest peaks or a homeless woman making it all the way to Harvard, we are easily touched by these stories, and there’s nothing strange or wrong with that. But we might want to examine some of the reasons why we – or others – love them so much, or at least question the conclusions some of us wish to draw from them.
One tabloid newspaper has recommended parents show the picture of the hardworking boy to their children next time they are moaning. In a similar vein, someone has turned the picture into an inspirational postcard with the caption: “If it is important to you, you will find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.”
In these interpretations, the picture is used to suggest that there are no excuses for failure or poverty. Even if you are poor and live in a makeshift home, you have the choice to work yourself out of that predicament. All you need is determination, willpower and the right, can-do attitude. Private troubles, whether poverty or unemployment, should remain private troubles. They should not be regarded as public issues because that is merely a way of trying to find an excuse. Such is the lesson we should teach ourselves and take from this.
It is depressingly easy to find other examples of this mindset today, the idea that we can all rise above our circumstances – however difficult – through a programme of self-improvement.
In Los Angeles, for instance, the New Village Charter High School is using transcendental meditation not just to release stress but also, in the words of its principal, Javier Guzman, “to combat poverty”. This may help some of the children to achieve better results at school. But the problem is not personal when the bottom income quartile in the US make up only 5% of enrolments in top universities.
Another proposal to fight poverty comes from the US Republican politician Paul Ryan. Inspired by the writer Ayn Rand, he recently presented an anti-poverty plan in which he proposed poor people should sit down with a life coach and develop an “opportunity plan”.
This might sound a uniquely north American venture but Sweden, popularly known as the land of equality and welfare, is probably the country that has come closest to achieving Ryan’s dream.
In the course of only four years, the Swedish state paid out 4.7bn Swedish krona (£360m) to job coaches. The actual benefits of this initiative have proved modest, and the methods used by these coaches, including healing and therapeutic touching, have been called into question.
But more problematic than their questionable usefulness is that these methods implicitly encourage socially vulnerable groups, whether poor or unemployed, to stop looking for answers in the public sphere. They are told instead that the barrier lies within themselves.
One US study, which followed unemployed white-collar workers who attend support organisations, found that jobseekers were encouraged to stop reading the newspaper and go on a “news fast”. They were also asked to stop using the word “unemployment”, since that would betray a negative attitude.
Similar observations were made in Ivor Southwood’s auto-ethnographic account of UK jobcentres, Non-Stop Inertia, in which he describes how jobseekers are told to do “three positive things per week” or else they might be disciplined.
In his recent ethnography of the Swedish equivalent of Jobcentre Plus, Roland Paulsen describes mandatory humilating exercises, so-called brag rounds, in which the long-term unemployed are encouraged to show off in front of their fellow jobseekers.
In a distressing article recently published in Medical Humanities it was suggested that these types of exercises, intended to modify attitudes, beliefs and personality, have become a political strategy to eradicate the experience of social and economic inequality.
Again, there is nothing wrong with being moved by a picture of a young boy concentrating hard on his homework. But we should remember that pictures of this kind may serve more sinister purposes when paired with “inspirational” messages. Serious discussion of external circumstances – including a proper understanding of inequality – is not helped by the suggestion that the only thing holding a person back is their attitude. |
What’s that? You say Bitcoin has not been the front page feature story your local newspaper where you live? You must not live in Keene, New Hampshire – the capitol of real-life business acceptance of the world’s first cryptocurrency!
About one month ago, the Monadnock Shopper News featured Bitcoin and the regional businesses that accept it on their front page, above-the-fold! Not to be outdone, the Keene Sentinel’s business section had a massive article in today’s paper that was not only the front page feature but was also promoted above-the-fold in the headline of the front page of the century-plus old newspaper. You can read it online here at the Keene Sentinel’s site. (Here’s a PDF of the piece.)
Reporter Paul Cuno-Booth did a thorough job interviewing various owners of the local bitcoin-accepting businesses about their reasons for backing the amazing decentralized currency, including Monadnock Makerspace founder Johnny Bolster, area computer tech Michael Gordon, Bob Maibusch of Pine Springs Golf Course, Ken Urbanski of Kirby’s Q, and Steve Wilder of Wilder Automotive. Cuno-Booth also focuses on the Shire Free Church’s media outreach along with our local meetup group for Bitcoiners and other cryptocurrency users and newbies, the Monadnock Decentralized Currency Network.
As we have reported here at Free Keene, according to CoinMap , Keene is the number one city in the world for bitcoin-accepting businesses per capita. Obviously not all businesses have the same results, of course. Though the golf course has yet to have a customer with bitcoin, Wilder Auto reports approximately a dozen customers regularly using bitcoin. Bolster, who also is the creator of the Portal Map , reported that he was able to sell ads to some new customers on his yearly map of area businesses, because he is accepting bitcoin as payment! That’s money that otherwise would have been left on the table had Bolster decided against accepting the cryptocurrency.
Bolster’s story really exemplifies one of Bitcoin’s strongest aspects. Even though it’s an international currency, it has a strong local feel. Unlike other attempts at local currencies that are based on the US Dollar and therefore subject to the whims of politicians, Bitcoin cannot be manipulated by politicians and banks. It’s truly a money for the people. Plus, Bitcoin accomplishes what a local currency is supposed to do – it keeps more money in the community – unlike credit card providers, who take approximately 3% out of every transaction away from the Keene area and into major bank coffers. It’s really exciting to see downtown businesses doing business with each other in bitcoin, and not just accepting it from customers and converting it to cash (which they could do if they wanted).
What you’re seeing here in Keene is what’s possible with only a dozen or so dedicated activists. Keene’s already the top in business bitcoin-acceptance and that’s now getting acknowledgement in mainstream media. Combine our success here in Keene with Derrick J’s new bitcoin-only store out in Portsmouth , this year’s major political win with the NH “ Bitcoin protection bill “, and NH’s overall dominance in the Bitcoin universe , and its no wonder that libertarian and voluntarist cryptocurrency fans are moving here in large numbers. In case you needed more reasons to come, here are 101 of them
In a time when governments are trying to crack down on cryptocurrency, we need a haven now more than ever. Please come join us in real life and make the move to the Shire as part of the ongoing NH Freedom Migration and get active with us. In addition to the local meetup group, we also have NH Bitcoin forums that you’re welcome to join and connect with other cryptocurrency users across the Shire. |
Kobe Bryant's farewell game was bound to be an event of worldwide interest, with fans flooding social media all day with #MambaDay tributes and #MambaMemories. Then, at the moment that Bryant took the court for the final time, that came to a grinding halt.
The site didn't completely go down, but scheduled tweets failed to send and some users experienced difficulties accessing the site and sending tweets.
Some people may currently be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. We're working on a fix, stay tuned. https://t.co/SdU8w4qCbU — Twitter Support (@Support) April 14, 2016
The issue has now been resolved, thank you for your patience. https://t.co/SdU8w4qCbU — Twitter Support (@Support) April 14, 2016
But that was nothing compared to later in the game, when the Lakers' official Twitter account disappeared completely.
Twitter
.@Lakers is temporarily down. We will continue to tweet Kobe Bryant's final game from this account. — Lakers Digital (@LakersDigital) April 14, 2016
The @Lakers account appeared back on the site with about eight minutes left in the fourth quarter, after not having tweeted for more than 30 minutes.
Sorry about that, everybody.
Kobe got too hot for the Twitter servers. — Los Angeles Lakers (@Lakers) April 14, 2016 |
Non-Designers, Rejoice! 13 Best Places to Quickly & Easily Edit Photos
Larry Kim Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 17, 2017
It only takes 50 milliseconds for people to make a first impression.
What kind of impression are your marketing materials making?
Using images in your blog posts, on social media and in other channels helps you connect faster and on a deeper level with your audiences. In fact, social posts with images get 650x more engagement than those without!
I hardly write text-only tweets anymore and always try to include insanely colorful, eye catching, attention riveting images in my social posts and presentations, like this one:
Whether you’re using free photo editing software or willing to spring for a paid tool, you don’t have to be a designer to make your own memes and data illustrations or edit photos into beautiful images for sharing. Check out my collection of personal favorites — the best sites and tools you can use to quickly and easily edit photos:
1. ezGIF.com
OMG, GIFS!!
Gifs had earned a bad name in years past, but people are learning how to use them creatively with an emphasis on being clever and not annoying. You can use a tool like ezGIF to create, resize, crop, reverse, optimize, and apply some effects to gifs.
2. Pixlr Editor or Express
Pixlr offers tools for the web, mobile, and desktop and allows users to perform a variety of image editing functions, whether using the Editor or pared down Express version. If you aren’t comfortable working in layers and performing more in-depth edits, the Express version works just fine for adjusting color, cropping, and making other basic edits.
3. Canva
Canva is THE drag and drop design tool to use, if you need one. Sure, you can edit photos, but you can also create amazing images of any size, for both online and print material. If you’re looking for a more powerful editor that allows for advanced editing, adding in various other elements and protecting image integrity for print, you’re going to want to check out Canva.
4. PicMonkey
PicMonkey lets you apply different focal and light effects to uploaded images, and offers the basic editing options you’d expect from any image editor. But it also has tools like Wrinkle Remover, Teeth Whitener and Airbrush that make it a good choice for close up online photo editing. You can use it to make collages, too.
5. Acorn
Acorn is a paid Mac tool and has been around since 2007, but a recent update to Acorn 5 improved its speed, the UI, and more.
6. iPiccy
Like a lot of the tools mentioned here, iPiccy is browser-based, so you don’t have to download it to your computer to use it. I like this one because it’s easy to use and combines the photo editing and text adding features of other tools.
7. BeFunky
BeFunky is a great choice if you need crazy effects to help you stand out from the crowd. It’ll let you apply fun effects like Cartoonize, or to edit photos look like an oil painting or pop art.
8. FotoFlexer
This is one of the more powerful free photo editing software options out there, with features like retouching and the ability to change hair color, doodle over top of images, add different elements, and more. It’s also available in over a dozen different languages, making it a decent choice for international users.
9. Lunapic
Lunapic has some creative image and online photo editing features and over 200 different effects, like Paste & Blend, or Reflecting Animation.
10. Aviary for Android
Aviary is one of the top rated photo editing apps in the Google Play store. 1.4 million users can’t be wrong! It has a ton of features and the company lets select community members beta test new features as they’re in development.
11. Picasa/Google Photos
Once a standalone product, Picasa is now part of the Google family… but it’s being retired. All is not lost though, as Google just announced recently that they’re going to shelf Picasa and focus on making Google Photos a better experience for users. If you’ve been using Picasa, you’re going to want to read about the transition here!
12. Adobe Photoshop CC
Adobe shocked users by making Photoshop available only within the Creative Cloud subscription service, but it’s still hands-down the best image editing tool on the planet.
13. DxO Optics Pro 10
DxO Optics Pro instantly corrects defects in your images caused by your digital camera equipment. It’s a great option for cleaning up your images before you add text or otherwise edit them with another tool, as it can remove digital noise, recover lost texture, and bright out the colors in your photos.
Originally posted on Inc.com
About The Author
Larry Kim is the CEO of Mobile Monkey and founder of WordStream. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. |
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