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"Filmmaking is not for the faint-hearted," asserts South African-born film editor Margaret Sixel. The mother of two boys, Buda (19), and Tige (15), is one of a growing number of women editing the male domain of action films. Mad Max: Fury Road is the fourth in the franchise that began back in 1979, and made Mel Gibson a star. But this isn't your father's Mad Max. Gibson has been replaced by Tom Hardy and joined by Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa. Geopolitical issues like dying to live a better life in Valhalla, and lack of water, intertwine with a feminine warrior motivated by revenge, a desire to protect abused women, and an opportunity to start fresh beyond the yoke of a diseased male oppressor. The parallels to modern-day feminism, a woman fighting to be respected for more than she is perceived, aren't hard to make. And while director, George Miller, operates at video-game intensity, jamming the action-packed chase movie in a desert with surreal vistas and jaw-dropping stunt sequences -- which caused the audience I saw it with to burst into spontaneous applause and whoops of adrenaline approval -- he has also created a believable female action star of the caliber of Alien's, Ripley, (Sigourney Weaver). When Charlize hangs from speeding trucks, handles guns, fights, and holds her own with our hero, we buy it. As the star herself says, "I hate nothing more than little girls fighting muscle bound men and beating them. It's not believable."
"It's like a massive Rubik's Cube, this movie," admits Miller, who gave the daunting task of editing 480 hours of footage -- that would run for three weeks if played uninterrupted from a 135 multiple-camera shoot -- to his wife. A product of Australia's Film School, Margaret Sixel initially turned her husband down, asking, "why do you want me to do an action film?" George's eyes dance as he repeats his reply triumphantly. "Because if a guy did it, it would look like every other action movie." He elaborates. "In the old days, you had a very short time to get your crew out of there -- the guy who starts the explosion has to get out of the explosion. Now we leave the cameras on. They have a chip that runs 40 minutes. You might only get three seconds of footage. There were massive amounts of footage. Margaret had to find two hours to make it work. Mad Max 2 had 1200 cuts. This has 2700 -- and it's not much longer. She's got a low boredom threshold and she's a big problem solver."
Margaret Sixel tells it differently. "It wasn't that it wasn't my genre. We have two boys together; George would be away for eight months. It's a lot to take on -- almost a three-year job. In that context, I had to figure it out. Once I decided, I was determined to finish." She laughs, "I haven't gone out for almost three years. I've been sitting in a room. It's the least glamorous side of the industry." "My boys were very into the film and supportive. If they saw me stressed they'd say, "Mum, you are the only mother in the world cutting an action film. Do you know how many people want your job?"
While women in entertainment have been making strides in domains thought to be off-limits to them -- women-driven comedy (Bridesmaids), directing (Kathryn Bigelow picking up an Oscar for The Hurt Locker -- a critical and commercial success) -- editing has been gaining in women cutting together visuals men think of as uniquely their own. Scorsese has long worked with Thelma Schoonmaker in films no one would call soft. Dede Allen helped make Bonnie and Clyde's final shootout unforgettable. Verna Fields edited Jaws, and Mary Jo Markey and Maryann Brandon have edited all of JJ Abrams' features since 2006, including Mission: Impossible and the upcoming, Star Wars.
But in an industry where flextime is not a consideration, and the editor is 'manning' the household while her husband is on another continent, how does it play out? "I kept everything to the bare minimum. It came down to keeping the boys happy and getting the film done. I'd rise at 4:30, so by the time I got to the cutting room at 8:30, I'd already done everything to keep my life rolling. Filmmaking is not for crybabies. There's no, 'I've got a school concert,' or 'I have to go to the doctor.' You are on call 24/7." "But I have an editorial team -- 25 percent are women -- and a very good assistant editor. Your workflow has to be very well organized. You have to be obsessive. You assemble the footage so you can follow the action, rather than make it good. If you have a picture of Charlize looking out the window, then you make your choice, but add all the options, so when George looks at it, he knows he's mined each frame. He's forensic about it."
"Being his wife helps only in that when we make something better, 98 percent of the time we agree on the choice. We understand each other's sensibilities. That's important because when you are not in sync, lots of people have opinions in the editing room and you can really go off in the wrong direction."
"Editing this film was tough because there's very little dialogue, which is how scenes are structured, so the options are endless. It was a relief to find a scene with dialogue. You cut them in a day. It's ridiculously easy. The biggest challenge are notes from test screenings. You can't get defensive. You focus and try and address it. But there are times when you have to say, 'I'm not doing this.' There was a point in the last few years where I decided I didn't mind not being liked. It gave me courage. You can't lose your integrity because someone in the test audience didn't like it." |
Design specifications for the brushless DC motor were established based on the principle that the motor should be easy to construct with readily available parts, and should provide qualitative performance similar to many commercially available DC motors, such as those used in small electric fans.
The motor was designed as a 3-phase, 4-pole brushless DC motor with 4 - N52 neodymium magnets on the rotor, and 3 wire wrapped solenoids connected to the stator. The brushless design was chosen because of the increased efficiency, reduced number of mechanical parts, and lower friction. The N52 magnets were chosen for their strength, price, and easy availability. Brushless motor control is discussed further in the ‘BLDC Motor Control’ section. Table 2 shows a comparison of brushless and brushed DC motors.
The solenoids are powered at 8-12 volts and controlled by an electrical switching circuit. 3 hall effect sensors will provide location information telling the circuit when to perform commutation.
The following equations were used to estimate the performance of the motor and therefore create the initial motor design.
These equations are messed up if you want to see them take a look at the pdf linked in the intro.
The force between two magnets separated by some distance can be roughly approximated by the following equation: F=BmAmBsAs/4g2
where B is the magnetic field density at the surface of the magnet, A is the area of the magnet, and g is the distance between the two magnets. Bs, the magnetic field of the solenoid is given by: B=NIl
where I is the current, N is the number of wraps, and l is the length of the solenoid. In the motor the max torque was estimated as: t=2Fr
where r is the radius, chosen to be 25 mm.
Combining these equations a linear expression relating the output torque to the input current can be obtained for a given solenoid geometry. f =2rBmAmAsN4g2lI
The desired torque constant was chosen to be 40 m-Nm/A based on the desired performance relative to other available motors [2]. |
Everton conceded twice as they were held by Tranmere in their first pre-season match. Everton conceded twice as they were held by Tranmere in their first pre-season match.
Everton were held to a 2-2 draw by Tranmere Rovers in the Toffees' first pre-season match of the summer.
Roberto Martinez's side were without several players still taking time off after playing in the latter stages of the World Cup, but twice went ahead on Tuesday night before being pegged back by their League Two near-neighbours.
Steven Naismith bundled in a cross from the left wing by Luke Garbutt to hand Everton a lead they held into the second half, when Cole Stockton capitalised on an under-hit backpass by defender John Stones to equalise.
Leon Osman nodded home a corner with 20 minutes remaining, but Tranmere delighted their fans at Prenton Park when James Rowe drew the home side level with a tap-in after his first effort had hit the post. |
(Reuters) - Six U.S. Senate Democrats on Thursday stepped up efforts to get more clarity from the White House and chief of the Environmental Protection Agency on Carl Icahn’s role as special adviser on regulations to President Donald Trump.
Billionaire activist-investor Carl Icahn gives an interview on FOX Business Network's Neil Cavuto show in New York, U.S. on February 11, 2014. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
The lawmakers, including Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, in letters to the White House counsel and to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, raised concerns about the billionaire investor’s conflicts of interests. They highlighted his involvement with a potential overhaul of the U.S. biofuels program.
Icahn has weighed in on the issue, which could cut millions of dollars in costs for refiners like CVR Energy Inc, in which he owns an 82 percent stake.
“We are concerned that his substantial and widespread private-sector investments present perverse incentives for Mr. Icahn in his role as a special adviser to the President,” the letter to White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn II said.
Previous letters seeking details on Icahn’s role have gone unanswered amid signs of Icahn’s involvement on the issue, the senators said.
Efforts to reach Icahn or his representatives were not immediately successful.
Oil refiners like CVR Energy and Valero Energy Corp have pressed for a change to the Renewable Fuel Standard to meet annual biofuel standards from further downstream to companies like fuel retailers.
The Renewable Fuel Standard requires oil refiners blend biofuels with gasoline and diesel, or buy credits from firms that have. Refiners have asked the government to shift those requirements from them further downstream to fuel retailers.
The RFS has become a battleground between entrenched farm and oil interests.
A biofuels lobbyist earlier this month said Icahn told him an executive order on the issue was forthcoming, a claim that both the adviser and the White House have denied.
The events of the last two weeks have underscored worries over Icahn’s conflicts of interest, the senators said.
Icahn “has taken the first opportunity to leverage his newfound political power for his own personal gain,” the letter stated, as the senators pressed for more specifics on his conversations with the Trump and Pruitt on the matter.
Icahn has weighed in heavily on this issue as costs for oil refiners hit record levels in 2016. In August, he pressed the EPA under former President Barack Obama to overhaul the market for renewable fuels credits.
Prices of those credits tumbled over a third on the day the White House denied any plans to issue an executive order on the matter. Shares of CVR stock jumped as much as 8 percent that day. |
Despite global efforts and petitions from humanitarian groups, there are still many major companies around the world that employ child labour in order to make a profit. With overhead costs and an increasingly competitive market to think of, many major companies turn to young labourers in order to get their products made quickly, and incredibly cheaply. With business on their minds, however, these companies fail to recognise the humanitarian implications that their choices have. By funding child labour in the international business field, they make it the industry norm and in turn, grant permission for other companies to use the same workforces. While major charities are doing their best to change the world of child labour, it remains a key social challenge, no thanks to the involvement of certain international companies. Many companies actually make it their mission and part of their company culture not to employ child labor.
Although, as consumers, it might be easy to turn a blind eye to the world of child labour, it is something that deserves international attention and concern. These major companies might be doing great things in their field but, by using work crews of some of the youngest around, they are helping to fund a questionable and illicit industry. Drawing attention to their activity might be our best hope of making a real and lasting change.
1. Nestle
Despite being one of the top confectionary companies in the world, Nestle has been noted for their consistent use of child labour. While they might be one of the major players in the food industry, Nestle still seem to be all about making a cheap buck, sourcing the least expensive workers and produce that they can get their hands on. In 2001, media sources revealed that the company had been using farms on the Ivory Coast in which 600,000 children had been kept in living conditions that were well below substandard.
Shockingly, Nestle kept on using the same farms for their produce right up until 2012, when a major report revealed just what was going on. While the company have pledged to change their ways, little has been reported on the issue since the announcement, something that continues to worry many consumers.
2. H&M
It shouldn’t come as much of a shock that retail giant H&M have been caught up in child labour scandals for some time. Renowned for their use of sweatshop factories, H&M have been involved in major humanitarian issues over the years, which have caused many people to reassess how they interact with the brand. In 2010, a Bangladeshi sweatshop which supplied H&M with their goods caught fire, leaving 21 workers dead. Although the brand apologised for their involvement in the issue, it is not clear whether or not they’re still involved in similar activity. While the company constantly pushes their eco-friendly image, it rarely does anything to draw attention to issues in the world of underage and illicit labour, a fact that seems to suggest that H&M is still very much using child workers in its production.
3. Philip Morris
Global cigarette giant Philip Morris is just one of many businesses to have come under attack for the use of both child and slave labour on its farms. According to reports, the company was employing at least 72 children on its farms under the age of ten at a time, keeping the young workers in incredibly poor working and living conditions.
As if the intense working hours and dangerous conditions weren’t bad enough, it was also revealed that the company had been forcing many of their workers into the field and confiscating their passports so that they had no means of escape. Despite intervention from the Human Rights Watch, Philip Morris failed to make any lasting changes, employing some of the youngest workers in the world for a mere pittance.
4. Walmart
A budget Bazaar and American icon, Walmart is renowned for using questionable labour forces to get its hands on the cheapest products out there. While the company has confirmed nothing, Walmart has been caught up in a number of labour scandals over the last few years.
The collapse of a major Bangladeshi sweatshop was reported to have contained a large shipment of Walmart products, something that the company denied. Before the major accident, however, the company had been accused of employing child labourers to work up to 19 hours a day and only paying them roughly $20 per month. While the company has since reissued biannual ethics reports, it is still believed to be using sweatshops, having been involved in labour incidents as recently as 2013.
5. Victoria’s Secret
According to their company branding, Victoria’s Secret uses only fairtrade cotton in their products, helping to make a better life for workers in the poorest of conditions. The only trouble is that in this case, “fairtrade” comes with a pretty loose definition. On African farms, many “fairtrade” workers have complained that they lack both the funding and the resources to make a decent living from their work. A thirteen-year-old girl revealed that she was made to sleep on plastic sheeting and was beaten by her boss if she didn’t perform sufficiently at work. Incredibly, Victoria’s Secret have hushed up the claims that they use fairtrade farms such as these, refusing even to read reports on the matter. For now, it looks like they’re burying their heads in the sand.
6. GAP
One of the most famous companies in the world, GAP have also been involved in some of the most scandalous labour issues around the globe. Investigations in child labour revealed that the company has knowingly outsourced a large amount of their production to sweatshops that employ workers as young as 8 years old. Like dozens of other businesses, it seemed as if GAP had made the unethical leap into the world of child labour as a way of cutting production costs and boosting their profits.
By employing underage workers in the US-owned Saipan, the company was able to bypass international laws and proclaim their products as being made in the U.S.A. While garments were made on American territory, they were done so by the hands of desperately poor women and children, forced to work in some of the worst conditions in the world, while receiving little to nothing in return from the company. GAP might technically make its products in the U.S.A., but it certainly doesn’t mind cutting corners here and there.
7. Apple
One of the most popular and lucrative brands in the world, Apple have not always had such a good public image. Back in 2010, the company came under major media scrutiny when it was revealed that it had been employing children as young as 15 in a number of its factories overseas. With the majority of its goods packaged in Asia, Apple has factories in Thailand, Malaysia, China, Taiwan and the Philippines. While the reports shone light on the company’s less than perfect ethics, it was not the first time that the brand had been accused of such underhand business moves. Over the years, Apple have built up something of a reputation as poor employers, funding factories in which poor working conditions and worker abuse are rife.
8. Disney
It might be a brand specifically marketed at children, but that hasn’t stopped Disney from using child labour to get their products in shops across the world. With a long and winding history in the world of sweatshop labour, Disney have been funding underhand factories for many years, getting caught up in a number of scandals along the way. With factories in countries like China, Bangladesh and Haiti, the company has been paying its employees as little as 33 cents per hour for working in appalling factory conditions. Young workers are very common, too; labourers as young as 14 are present in many of the company’s factories, made to work in substandard conditions with no benefits to speak of.
9. Forever 21
Purchasing cotton from child labourers tends to be a common theme in the world of retail and across the business board, many companies are tied up in arrangements that are less than ethical. Just another brand involved in child labour scandals is Forever 21. Despite having released statements in which they claim to work with ethical factory employers, the company have never stated that they do not employ young workers in their production lines. It only gets worse, too; the company sources the majority of its cotton from Uzbekistan, a country in which children are taken from schools and put to work in alarming conditions by the government. While Forever 21, along with others, has pledged to look into the labour conditions in Uzbekistan, nothing seems to have changed as of yet.
10. Hershey’s
Bad publicity will really get consumers to sit up and listen and for a confectionary giant like Hershey’s, that’s not something that you want on your track record. The recent Super Bowl looked like it could be disastrous for the company, as the International Labour Rights Forum threatened to release an advert revealing Hershey’s involvement in child labour during the match.
The threat seemed to pay off somewhat; the company since invested $10million in ethical chocolate factories in West Africa. And while things might look better, they’re certainly not where they could be. After signing an anti-labour manifesto over ten years ago, the company continued to use child labour in their factories and despite their public protestations of innocence, it could be a while before Hershey’s get their act together. |
A 63-year-old man who is jailed in Michigan says his time behind bars helped him shed a lot of extra weight.
Richard Mutschler, of Belding, was sentenced to probation with credit for 159 days served in the Ionia County Jail for stealing a toolbox, according to a report in The Sentinel-Standard of Ionia. He’s still serving a sentence that started in July on another charge.
Mutschler says he dropped 130 pounds while in custody. Despite that, he says he anticipates that he’ll still need heart bypass surgery when he’s released.
Mutschler says jail “has been good” and he plans to live a healthier lifestyle on the outside.
Ionia County Circuit Court Judge Suzanne Kreeger says Mutschler’s health improvement is positive and he’s certainly in better shape than when he arrived.
TM and © Copyright 2016 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2016 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
This article is about the song. For the book, see Happy Birthday to You!
"Happy Birthday (song)" redirects here. For other songs by that name, see Happy Birthday
"Happy Birthday to You" Candles spelling "Happy Birthday", one of many types of birthday cake decorations that accompany this song Song Published 1893 Songwriter(s) Patty Hill, Mildred J. Hill (disputed)
"Happy Birthday to You", also known as "Happy Birthday", is a song traditionally sung to celebrate the anniversary of a person's birth. According to the 1998 Guinness World Records, it is the most recognized song in the English language, followed by "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow". The song's base lyrics have been translated into at least 18 languages.[1] The melody of "Happy Birthday to You" comes from the song "Good Morning to All",[2] which has traditionally been attributed to American sisters Patty and Mildred J. Hill in 1893,[3][4] although the claim that the sisters composed the tune is disputed.[5]
History
Patty Hill was a kindergarten principal in Louisville, Kentucky, developing various teaching methods at what is now the Little Loomhouse;[6] her sister Mildred was a pianist and composer.[7] The sisters used "Good Morning to All" as a song that young children would find easy to sing.[8] The combination of melody and lyrics in "Happy Birthday to You" first appeared in print in 1912, and probably existed even earlier.[9]
None of the early appearances of the "Happy Birthday to You" lyrics included credits or copyright notices. The Summy Company registered a copyright in 1935, crediting authors Preston Ware Orem and Mrs. R. R. Forman. In 1988, Warner/Chappell Music purchased the company owning the copyright for US$25 million, with the value of "Happy Birthday" estimated at US$5 million.[10][11] Based on the 1935 copyright registration, Warner claimed that the United States copyright will not expire until 2030, and that unauthorized public performances of the song are illegal unless royalties are paid to Warner. In one specific instance in February 2010, the royalty for a single use was said to be US$700.[12] By one estimate, the song is the highest-earning single song in history.[13] In the European Union, the copyright for the song expired on January 1, 2017.[14]
The American copyright status of "Happy Birthday to You" began to draw more attention with the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998. When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Act in Eldred v. Ashcroft in 2003, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer specifically mentioned "Happy Birthday to You" in his dissenting opinion.[15] American law professor Robert Brauneis, who extensively researched the song, concluded in 2010 that "It is almost certainly no longer under copyright."[16] In 2013, based in large part on Brauneis's research, Good Morning to You Productions, a company producing a documentary about "Good Morning to All", sued Warner/Chappell for falsely claiming copyright to the song.[5][10] In September 2015, a federal judge declared that the Warner/Chappell copyright claim was invalid, ruling that the copyright registration applied only to a specific piano arrangement of the song, and not to its lyrics and melody. In 2016, Warner/Chappell settled for US $14 million, and the court declared that "Happy Birthday to You" was in the public domain.[17][18]
Lyrics
"Happy birthday to you"
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear [NAME]
Happy birthday to you.[19]
The person whose birthday is being celebrated is filled in for "[NAME]". The earliest known publication used "John" as the example.
Lyrics with melody
Traditional variations
It is traditional, among English-speakers, that at a birthday party, the song "Happy Birthday to You" be sung to the birthday person by the other guests celebrating the birthday. More specifically, the birthday person is traditionally presented with a birthday cake with lit candles, with the number of candles sometimes corresponding to the age of the person. After the song is sung (usually just once), party guests sometimes add wishes like "and many more!" expressing the hope that the birthday person will enjoy a long life. The birthday person may be asked to make a wish ("Make a wish!")—which he or she does silently—and then is supposed to blow out the candles. Traditionally, blowing out the candles is believed (or is considered a lighthearted superstition) to ensure that the wish will come true.[20] Once the candles have been blown out, people may applaud, after which the cake may be served, often with the first piece being served to the person whose birthday it is.
In the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, immediately after "Happy Birthday" has been sung, it is traditional for one of the guests to enthusiastically lead with "Hip hip ..." and then for all of the other guests to join in and say "... hooray!" This is normally repeated three times. In Canada, especially at young children's birthdays, immediately after "Happy Birthday" has been sung, the singers segue into "How old are you now? How old are you now? How old are you now-ow, how old are you now?" and then count up: "Are you one? Are you two? Are you ..." until they reach the right age, at which the celebrant says "yes", and everybody else, who presumably know the right number, all cheer.[citation needed]
Copyright status
Good-Morning to All The public domain song
Instrumental version of "Good Morning to All".
Beginners book of Songs with instructions Music and lyrics of the song "Good Morning to All", with third verse "Happy Birthday to You", printed in 1912 in
Golden Book Of Favorite Songs Music and lyrics of the song "Good Morning to All", with third verse "Happy Birthday to You", printed in 1915 in
Both the music and lyrics are in public domain in both the European Union and United States. The copyright expired in the European Union on January 1, 2017. In the United States, a federal court ruled in 2016 that Warner/Chappell's copyright claim was invalid and there was no other claim to copyright.
The origins of "Happy Birthday to You" date back to at least the late 19th century, when two sisters, Patty and Mildred J. Hill, introduced the song "Good Morning to All" to Patty's kindergarten class in Kentucky.[10] Years later, in 1893, they published the tune in their songbook Song Stories for the Kindergarten. Kembrew McLeod stated that the Hill sisters likely copied the tune and lyrical idea from other popular and similar nineteenth-century songs that predated theirs, including Horace Waters' "Happy Greetings to All", "Good Night to You All" also from 1858, "A Happy New Year to All" from 1875, and "A Happy Greeting to All", published 1885. However, American law professor Robert Brauneis disputes this, noting that these earlier songs had quite different melodies.[21]
It is likely that teachers and students spontaneously adapted the published version of "Good Morning to All" to celebrate birthdays in the classroom, changing the lyrics to "Happy Birthday" in the process.[3] The complete text of "Happy Birthday to You" first appeared in print as the final four lines of Edith Goodyear Alger's poem "Roy's Birthday", published in her book A Primer of Work and Play, copyrighted by D. C. Heath in 1901, with no reference to the words being sung.[22] The first book including "Happy Birthday" lyrics set to the tune of "Good Morning to All" that bears a date of publication is from 1911 in The Elementary Worker and His Work, but earlier references exist to a song called "Happy Birthday to You" including an article from 1901 in the Inland Educator and Indiana School Journal.[23] Children's Praise and Worship, edited by Andrew Byers, Bessie L. Byrum and Anna E. Koglin, published the song in 1918. In 1924, Robert Coleman included "Good Morning to All" in a songbook with the birthday lyrics as a second verse. Coleman also published "Happy Birthday" in The American Hymnal in 1933.
In 1935, several specific piano arrangements and an unused second verse of "Happy Birthday to You" were copyrighted as a work for hire crediting Preston Ware Orem for the piano arrangements and Mrs. R. R. Forman for the lyrics by the Summy Company, the publisher of "Good Morning to All".[24][25] This served as the legal basis for claiming that Summy Company legally registered the copyright for the song, as well as the later renewal of these copyrights.[26] A later 2015 lawsuit would find this claim baseless. That specific new lyrics that also included the full text of "Happy Birthday to You", was a copyright on the derivative work. A 1957 acquisition of C.C. Birchard & Company saw Summy Company becoming the Summy-Birchard Company. A later corporate restructuring in the 1970s saw Summy-Birchard becoming a division of a new company: Birch Tree Group Limited.
Warner/Chappell Music acquired Birch Tree Group Limited in 1988 for US$25 million.[10][11] The company continued to insist that one cannot sing the "Happy Birthday to You" lyrics for profit without paying royalties: in 2008, Warner collected about US$5,000 per day (US$2 million per year) in royalties for the song.[27] Warner/Chappell claimed copyright for every use in film, television, radio, anywhere open to the public, and for any group where a substantial number of those in attendance are not family or friends of whoever is performing the song. Brauneis cited problems with the song's authorship and the notice and renewal of the copyright, and concluded: "It is almost certainly no longer under copyright."[3][16]
In the European Union, copyright lasts for the life of the author(s) plus 70 years; since Patty Hill (the last surviving author) died in 1946, the copyright in these countries expired on January 1, 2017.[28]
2013 lawsuit
On June 13, 2013, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Nelson filed a putative class action suit in federal court for the Southern District of New York against Warner/Chappell in the name of her production company, Good Morning to You Productions.[5] As part of a documentary she was making about the song and its history, she had paid US$1,500 to secure the rights. Her complaint relied heavily on Brauneis's research, seeking not only the return of her money but all royalties collected by the company from other filmmakers since 2009.[10][29][30] A week later a similar case was filed in the Central District of California, Rupa Marya v. Warner Chappell Music Inc, Case No. 2:13-cv-04460.[31] Five weeks later, Nelson refiled the case there,[32] and the cases were combined.[33][34][35] As of April 2014, Warner's motion to dismiss had been denied without prejudice, and discovery began under an agreed plan with respect to Claim One, declaratory judgment as to whether "Happy Birthday to You" is in the public domain. The Motion Cut-Off as to Merits Issues on the Claim One deadline was November 7, 2014. After that, the court was expected to rule on the motion for summary judgment as to the merits issues on Claim One.[36] A jury trial was requested.[37]
On July 28, 2015, one day prior to a scheduled ruling, Nelson's attorneys Betsy Manifold and Mark Rifkin presented new evidence that they argued was conclusive proof that the song was in the public domain, "thus making it unnecessary for the Court to decide the scope or validity of the disputed copyrights, much less whether Patty Hill abandoned any copyright she may have had to the lyrics". Several weeks prior, they had been given access to documents held back from them by Warner/Chappell, which included a copy of the 15th edition of The Everyday Song Book, published in 1927. The book contained "Good Morning and Happy Birthday", but the copy was blurry, obscuring a line of text below the title. Manifold and Rifkin located a clearer copy of an older edition, published in 1922, that also contained the "Happy Birthday" lyrics. The previously obscured line was revealed to be the credit "Special permission through courtesy of The Clayton F Summy Co.". Manifold and Rifkin argued that because the music and lyrics were published without a valid copyright notice as was required at the time, "Happy Birthday" was in the public domain.[38]
Warner/Chappell disputed the evidence, arguing that unless there was "necessary authorization from the copyright owner", the "Happy Birthday" lyrics and sheet music would still be subject to common law copyright as an unpublished work, and that it was unknown whether the "special permission" from the Summy Company covered "Good Morning to All", "Happy Birthday", or both, thus alleging that the publication in The Everyday Song Book was unauthorized. The company also argued that it was not acting in bad faith in withholding the evidence of the 1927 publication.[39]
On September 22, 2015, federal judge George H. King ruled[40] that the Warner/Chappell copyright claim over the lyrics was invalid.[41][42] The 1935 copyright held by Warner/Chappell applied only to a specific piano arrangement of the song, not the lyrics or melody.[43] The court held that the question of whether the 1922 and 1927 publications were authorized, thus placing the song in the public domain, presented questions of fact that would need to be resolved at trial.[40] However, Warner/Chappell had failed to prove that it actually had ever held a copyright to the lyrics, so the court was able to grant summary judgment to the plaintiffs, thus resolving the case.[40]
Some initial news sources characterized the decision as ruling that the song was in the public domain,[43][44] but the decision did not go so far, holding only that Warner/Chappell did not prove they owned the copyright.[41] However, because there are no other claimants to the copyright, and the copyright to the melody long ago expired,[45] the plaintiffs suggested that the song was de facto in the public domain.[41] Also, the judge ruled that the song was not copyrighted by Summy Co., who had written in the song book, "Special permission through courtesy of the Clayton F. Summy Co." Since there was no evidence Summy Co. had copyright on the song, the song is still considered to be in the public domain.[46]
Prior to the lawsuit, Warner/Chappell had been earning $2 million a year licensing the song for commercial use,[44] with a notable example the $5,000 paid by the filmmakers of the 1994 documentary, Hoop Dreams,[47] in order to safely distribute the film.[48] On February 8, 2016, Warner/Chappell agreed to pay a settlement of $14 million to those who had licensed the song, and would allow a final judgment declaring the song to be in the public domain, with a final hearing scheduled in March 2016.[49][50] On June 28, 2016, the final settlement was officially granted and the court declared that the song was in the public domain.[18] The following week, Nelson's short-form documentary, Happy Birthday: my campaign to liberate the people's song, was published online by The Guardian.[51]
In the wake of their success, the lawyers involved in the "Happy Birthday" lawsuit filed similar lawsuits regarding "We Shall Overcome"[52] and "This Land Is Your Land".[53]
Public performances
One of the most famous performances of "Happy Birthday to You" was Marilyn Monroe's rendition to U.S. President John F. Kennedy in May 1962.[54] Another notable use was by comedy pianist Victor Borge, who played the song in styles of various composers,[55] or would begin playing Moonlight Sonata, smoothly transitioning into the song.[56]
The documentary film The Corporation states that Warner/Chappell charged up to US$10,000 for the song to appear in a film. Because of the copyright issue, filmmakers rarely showed complete singalongs of "Happy Birthday" in films, either substituting the public-domain "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" or avoiding using a song entirely. Before the song was copyrighted it was used freely, as in Bosko's Party, a Warner Bros. cartoon of 1932, where a chorus of animals sings it twice through. The copyright status of "Happy Birthday to You" is directly referenced in a 2009 episode of the TV series iCarly, "iMake Sam Girlier", in which the main character as well as others begin to sing the song to Sam but are prevented from doing so by Freddie, who says the song isn't public domain; "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow" is then sung instead.
In a 1998 episode of the television show Sports Night, "Intellectual Property", character Dan Rydell sings the song to his co-anchor during a telecast, forcing his network to pay royalties, and causing him to ask his colleagues to choose public-domain songs for him to sing for their birthdays.[57] The copyright is also referenced frequently in a Disney A.N.T. Farm episode where characters repeatedly try to sing the song, only to be stopped by others reminding them of the price. The melody of the song is also featured in The Wrong Trousers but was replaced with "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" for DVD releases. The use of the song is a problem even if it is sung in a made-up language, as a Klingon-language version was nixed in pre-production from the 7th-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Parallels", replaced with "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" in Klingon. In the Futurama episode "I Second That Emotion", they poke fun at the song and its copyright by making their own version with the lyrics "What day is today? / It's (birthday person)'s birthday / What a day for a birthday / Let's all have some cake."
In The Goldbergs episode "Han Ukkah Solo", Erica Goldberg is challenged to write a Hanukkah song. She does, but her words are sung to the tune of "Happy Birthday To You". Her music teacher tells her she can't use it because "I'd have to pay those old ladies hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I've already spent our budget on construction paper."
In the 30 Rock episode "Goodbye, My Friend", TGS cast members begin to sing the song following an announcement about the royalty fee for singing "Happy Birthday to You" on a television show. The cast is interrupted after the first line by a character entering the scene.[citation needed] In the Community episode "Mixology Certification", a scene starts with the last two words of the song ("... to you"), implying it had been sung in its entirety, before Pierce confusedly asks, "How come we only sang the last two words?"[citation needed]
In the 1987 documentary Eyes on the Prize about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, there was a birthday party scene in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s discouragement began to lift. After its initial release, the film was unavailable for sale or broadcast for many years because of the cost of clearing many copyrights, of which "Happy Birthday to You" was one. Grants in 2005 for copyright clearances[58] allowed PBS to rebroadcast the film as recently as February 2008.[59]
In 2010, the Western classical music conductor Zubin Mehta conducted the orchestra to play variations of Happy Birthday in the styles of various Western classical music composers including Wagner, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and in the Viennese, New Orleans and Hungarian composition styles.[60][61]
On August 5, 2013, the first anniversary of its landing on Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover celebrated its "birthday" when engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center used the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument to cause the rover to "sing" Happy Birthday on the Martian surface.[62]
During the March 6, 2014 episode of the Comedy Central series The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert planned to sing the song in honor of the 90th anniversary of its 1924 publication. Due to the copyright issues, Colbert instead performed his new "royalty-free" birthday song, which is set to "The Star-Spangled Banner".[63][64]
See also
References |
It is the big-screen fairy tale that has captured the imagination of little girls, parents – and their bank managers – around the world: the spectacularly successful movie Frozen has now broken almost every Hollywood record… and there’s still a sequel to come.
Frozen is Disney’s hit movie inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fable The Snow Queen – the story of two sisters who save their kingdom through their love for each other. And now it is officially the most lucrative cartoon Disney has ever produced, and the most popular and successful animated film of all time.
It has made Disney more than £1billion since its release in November 2013, thanks to box-office sales and Let It Go, one of the catchiest songs ever to emerge from Hollywood – and then there’s the avalanche of merchandise, which includes dolls, clothes and even mouthwash.
Frozen has made Disney more than £1billion since its release in November 2013, thanks to box-office sales and Let It Go, one of the catchiest songs ever to emerge from Hollywood
So fans will be delighted to learn that next week, every copy of The Mail on Sunday will contain a superb limited-edition double-sided glossy poster featuring two exclusive Disney images from the film.
The following Sunday, fans who buy the newspaper will be able to pick up an interactive DVD featuring stills from Frozen: The Official Poster Collection, interactive games and previews of forthcoming films from branches of W H Smith.
Such is the runaway popularity of the film, that a new theme attraction called Frozen Summer Fun opened at Disneyland Paris this month. The Frozen ‘experience’ has characters from the film performing in a live sing-a-long show in front of an icy mountain backdrop.
And there is no end in sight to the Frozen phenomenon according to British toy stores, with The Entertainer, the UK’s largest independent retailer, now predicting that profits from Frozen merchandise will grow and grow. It’s no surprise that a sequel, Frozen 2, is already under way.
Here, to celebrate The Mail on Sunday’s big giveaway next week, we present a snowstorm of amazing facts that have made Frozen the movie juggernaut of the decade…
About 650 people worked on the film from Disney’s US studios, including 70 animators and 20 storyboard writers
£800,000,000
The cash the movie has taken worldwide at the box office, knocking Toy Story 3 from the top spot.
It was recorded in 41 languages and was particularly massive in Japan, where box-office receipts contributed 19 per cent of worldwide earnings, second only to the US’s 32 per cent.
1,000
The total number of merchandise spin-offs, more than any other single movie – making yet more millions.
This year Disney Consumer Products reported a 22 per cent rise in revenue and 46 per cent rise in operating income for the December quarter of 2014 – largely thanks to Frozen.
Shoes, outfits, hairbrushes and bags have all sold in their millions. More than three million Frozen dresses have been sold, and scores of brands have cashed in on the huge popularity of the film with Frozen characters appearing on everything from mouthwash to tins of soup.
Bestsellers: Frozen merchandise includes tins of condensed soup and Elsa dolls, which caused stampedes when they were released
More bizarre memorabilia includes a Frozen toilet seat, a set of bowling balls and a seatbelt.
Monopoly Junior marketed a special edition with the tagline ‘who ever collects the most cash will thaw their freezing heart and win’.
Some 5,000 limited-edition Elsa and Anna dolls sold out in 45 minutes. Parents were so desperate to get their hands on merchandise that there was a stampede at Nottingham’s Poundworld.
420,000
The number of computer-generated strands of hair on Elsa, the most complicated cartoon ever created by Disney.
It took 4,000 computers up to 30 hours to create some scenes and special ‘snowflake generating’ software produced up to 2,000 different shapes.
13
The number of consecutive weeks Let It Go stayed at the top of the American Billboard charts. Since then it has become the world’s fifth biggest-selling single at 10.9 million copies.
More than 30,000 fans have posted their own versions on YouTube.
4,000,000
The number of DVDs and Blu-rays sold last year – making it the biggest seller in the past five years, beating Avatar, Skyfall, Harry Potter and Despicable Me.
37
The percentage boost in tourism to Norway since the release of the film.
Disney executives went on a fact-finding trip to Norway to find inspiration for Frozen. The snowy kingdom in the film was inspired by the country’s Naeroyfjord municipality and Oslo’s Akershus Fortress was the blueprint for the ice palace.
Northern exposure: Disney executives went on a fact-finding trip to Norway to find inspiration for Frozen
2018
The year when fans are expecting the release of Frozen 2.
In anticipation earlier this year, Disney released Frozen Fever, a six-minute short film.
The reason for the three-year wait is that Disney has three other films in the pipeline. All the main players in Frozen are expected to return for the sequel.
Spin-off: Frozen Fever, the short sequel to Frozen
After the announcement, director Jennifer Lee said: ‘At last, I can say – FROZEN 2!!!! I’m beyond excited to create alongside my Frozen family!’
And Kristen Bell, who voiced the character Anna, wrote: ‘Dreams really do come 2!!! FROZEN2 it’s official.’
50
The number of animators it took to create the scene in which the Ice Palace is built. The palace itself took nine months to create.
About 650 people worked on the film from Disney’s US studios, including 70 animators and 20 storyboard writers.
70
Awards Frozen has won, including Oscars for best animated feature and best song. Its soundtrack was also the biggest-selling album in 2014.
£95,000,000
The size of the budget for the movie... meaning that it made an astonishing 742 per cent profit.
1 day
How long it took songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez to write hit song Let It Go, sung by Idina Menzel, who voices Elsa, a character with magic powers to create ice and snow.
They wrote the first four lines while walking in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and composed the rest of the song back at their home studio.
The Oscars ceremony moment of glory was overshadowed for Menzel when John Travolta inexplicably introduced her as ‘Adele Dazeem’.
Playing it cool: Songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez celebrate winning at the Oscars
Idina Menzel (left), who voiced Elsa in Frozen, with Kristin Bell (right), who voiced Anna in the huge movie
He later sent her flowers and an apologetic email. ‘It rocked me for a couple of seconds and then I got back on track,’ she said diplomatically.
Best known for her role in the TV series Glee, Menzel was nominated for a Tony for her performance on Broadway in Rent and won a Tony for her role as Elphaba in the musical Wicked.
Menzel told The Mail on Sunday she could relate to the character because she often felt like an outsider at school.
THE FROZEN FAMILY The daughters of Let It Go's songwriting husband-and-wife team Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez - Katie, eight, and Annie, four - had voice parts in the film as the child role of Anna and a baby troll.
‘No child wants to be different,’ she says. ‘But I’ve been singing since I was five years old and I always knew that people would perk up when I did. |
Daly and Newton / Getty Images
You know the phrase, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping”? There just may be some wisdom in that.
A survey conducted by TNS Global on behalf of Ebates.com found that more than half of Americans (52%, including 64% of women and 40% of men) admit to engaging in “retail therapy”—the act of shopping and spending to improve one’s mood. This echoes a previous study, published in the Journal of Psychology and Marketing, that revealed 62% of shoppers had purchased something to cheer themselves up, and another 28% had purchased as a form of celebration.
But beyond the quick rush provided by making a purchase, is “retail therapy” actually therapeutic? Renowned San Francisco therapist Peggy Wynne, who is known to personally appreciate the mood-boosting quality of a great pair of shoes, says that it can be. “We all enjoy a little retail therapy now and then,” she told me. “In small, manageable doses it can soothe the soul. Shopping isn’t a problem when it’s done in moderation, just like moderate use of alcohol.”
Of course, it’s possible to overdo consumption, in terms of drinking or shopping, or any number of other things for that matter. In fact, the warning signs that habitual shopping has become a problem have a lot of overlap with the classic tell-tale indications that you’re abusing alcohol. Wynne says that lying or hiding purchases from loved ones, feeling guilt or shame about shopping, missing work or other obligations to go shopping, and feeling that shopping is no longer fun but a necessity are all signs that your shopping habit has gotten out of hand.
(MORE: Why We’re So Irrational When It Comes to Tax Refunds)
I wouldn’t exactly use the word “therapy” to describe the effects of shopping. And everyone can agree that “stuff” won’t make you happy in the long run. Still, based on the research and countless interviews with consumers I’ve conducted over the years, I can point to five genuinely therapeutic benefits of shopping—provided, again, that it’s done in moderation.
Easing Transitions
Janice was in a marriage void of intimacy for over a decade. When she finally divorced, the first thing she did was to buy all new bedding. “It was like I was possessed,” she recalled. “I spent hours shopping for just the right thing and I finally bought the most beautiful duvet, shams, the works. It did feel therapeutic — like I was shedding that old marriage and ready to start fresh.”
As part of a research project, I visited the home of Andre, a 39-year-old single tech entrepreneur. Inside, I was surprised to see he’d included a space for long dresses in his newly built custom closet. When I asked him about it, Andre said that he was “dating around” and hoped to get married soon. In an “if I build it she will come” state of mind, Andre did some remodeling that included what he thought were things his yet-to-be-identified future wife would want. “I assume she’ll need someplace to hang her dresses,” he said.
Shopping can be a rich source of mental preparation. As people shop, they’re naturally visualizing how they’ll use the products being considered, and in doing so they’re also visualizing their new life. And as many great athletes will attest, visualization is a performance booster and an anxiety reducer.
(MORE: Seeking ‘Retail Therapy’ When What You Need Is Real Therapy)
It’s no wonder, then, that two of the most shop-intensive times of our lives are also two of life’s greatest transitions: getting married and having a baby. We go shopping — and visualize the future — as a means of preparation for these big transitions. These activities help people feel more control and less anxiety about the unknowns lying ahead.
“Some types of purchasing can serve a higher purpose,” says Sara Levin, a psychologist specializing in child development, who often counsels what she describes as “excited but overwhelmed” young parents. “Retail purchases can be helpful if the product inspires self-confidence and a sense of mastery.”
Whether it’s shopping for dorm equipment with your teenager or buying a special outfit to wear on vacation, the act of browsing and purchasing can help us anticipate, imagine, and mentally prepare.
Dressing for Success
When Annie moved from her small rural hometown to Boston for a new job, she admits she went overboard shopping for new clothes. “Everyone looked better than me,” she said. “I had to get new stuff. I know I should be judged by just my work, but I really felt so much better when I’d come in with a great outfit. It’s probably wrong that I wasn’t confident without getting new clothes, but it was true, and it still is something I think is important.”
What’s unusual isn’t that Annie purchased new clothing for her new job, city and lifestyle — what’s unusual is that she felt guilty about it. Who among us hasn’t purchased something for a special date, a new job or a big event?
(MORE: Why Shoppers Just Can’t Resist Clearance Sales)
Turns out that dressing appropriately not only increases our confidence, but may even help us perform better. In a study published by The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, participants who were given white doctor’s coats were far more accurate on test of attentional focus and concentration (traits associates with physicians) than the control group that simply wore street clothes for the experiment.
On the flip side, there’s proof that people can and do actually judge a book by its cover — or in this case, judge a person by their shoes. In a study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, participants were able to guess a person’s age, gender, income and agreeableness based solely on photographs of their shoes.
The Pleasure Boost of Creativity and Aesthetics
Jules, a young administrative assistant, prides herself on her taste. “I love decorating and styling outfits,” she told me. “The texture and colors — I can think of just the right thing to tie it together. It’s so fun.” Jules enjoys shopping for creative inspiration. She says she visits shops at least once a week. “It’s just fun to see what’s new, and it gives me ideas.”
Over the years, I’ve asked many consumers to describe products they love. The responses are often similar to how someone might describe a piece of beautiful, inspiring art. Jim, a 60-year-old businessman, showed me a birthday gift from his wife, an expensive Panerai watch that he’d craved for years. He made sure I noticed every detail, including the suppleness of the strap. He was clearly enraptured by the beauty and functionality of the watch. Some think that owning a luxury item is about status, but for many it’s more a deep appreciation of craftsmanship and design that enlivens the senses.
Relaxation and Escape
When people think of the benefits of “retail therapy,” concepts like escape, entertainment and rejuvenation are usually at the top of the list.
In my most recent consumer interviews, online shopping is increasingly mentioned as a type of mini mental vacation. This makes sense. It’s a relatively mindless, relaxing activity, and since many times the browsing session ends without anything being purchased, it’s often harmless as well. As a bonus, when faced with a difficult decision or arduous task, short breaks like these can actually improve performance and decision-making. Studies show that our unconscious mind continues to work out problems while we’re engaged in a different activity, provided we don’t switch over into tricky multi-tasking—juggling several things at once and not focusing on anything deeply.
(MORE: Addicted to Leather? For Friday Night Lights Author Buzz Bissinger, Gucci Is Like Heroin)
Christina, a senior human relations professional, shopped for light fixtures nearly every day for a couple of weeks during breaks from her job. “I’d just scroll and scroll. I kind of missed it when I finally bought one,” she said. Another consumer named Chanelle takes breaks from her family by shopping. “It’s me time,” she told me. “Sometimes it’s crazy at home, and so I go to the mall for some me time.”
Be it window shopping, online scrolling or pawing through racks at outlet malls, shopping really can be a mental refresher — like a blip of a vacation, without any packing or planning.
Social Connection
Since the dawn of human society, people have gone to the marketplace to connect with other people. “When I go on vacation, I always go to where people are shopping,” says Elaine, a retired teacher. “I get a feel for the place and the people, especially if I’m traveling to a different country.” Others, especially young people, meet friends and compare notes about tastes. “It’s how I get to know someone,” says Taylor, a stylish 15-year-old.
Some people, like Jim, the guy who is crazy about Panerai watches, find new friends based on a mutual appreciation for products or brands. After receiving his watch, Jim attended a store-sponsored party and now regularly visits a website where Panerai owners post photos of their watches and share advice and news.
(MORE: Kids Calling the Shots? American Families Increasingly Let Children Make Big Buying Decisions)
If there’s one antidote to emotional distress, it’s human connection. We’re a species that’s meant to be with others. Whether that takes place over dinner, at home, or at the mall, it’s therapeutic.
Kit Yarrow chairs the psychology department of Golden Gate University and was named the university’s 2012 Outstanding Scholar for her research in consumer behavior. She is a co-author of Gen BuY and is a frequent speaker on topics related to consumer psychology and Generation Y. |
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Brazil’s President Rousseff talks to journalists. REUTERS /Ueslei Marcelino
As the Boeing 777 from London arrived at the gate of Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo on December 2, 2010, its passengers queued up to deplane, many with the local newspaper under their arm. “Brazil fears terrorism at the 2016 Olympics, says US Embassy” blared the headline of the daily Folha de S. Paulo—a front-page story generated from the first of tens of thousands of classified US diplomatic cables obtained and released by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. Unnoticed among those passengers was a young woman with a backpack slung over her shoulder. Concealed within a bundle of messy clothing inside her bag was a pen drive containing nearly 3,000 sensitive cables to and from the US Embassy and consulates in Brazil between 2003 and 2010—a cache of documents provided by WikiLeaks. Ad Policy
This trove of records covered the two terms of President Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s progressive government and captured the policies, operations and diplomatic efforts of US presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as those of the Brazilian government itself, at a time when the country was on the rise as a world-class economic and political power. As WikiLeaks-generated stories appeared in the Brazilian media in the ensuing months, the cables would reveal how the Bush White House curried favor with the country’s defense minister and military, how Bush tried to persuade Brazil to spy on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and how the Obama administration became increasingly uncomfortable with Brazil’s close relationship with Iran. Brazilians would learn some startling details about their own government as well.
Beyond the revelations themselves, “Cablegate” in Brazil would have a significant impact on the profession of journalism and strengthen the culture of transparency even as the country was starting to revisit the legacy of its military dictatorship. Brazil was the first South American country to receive the cables—thanks to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s strategic dissemination plan, and to that little pen drive.
I was a member of the team carefully assembled by WikiLeaks in the weeks before the initial publication of the cables on November 29, 2010. The goal was to build a network of local media partners in countries rich and poor that would make the stories go global. A task force of independent journalists would review the cables, write groundbreaking stories for the WikiLeaks website, and devise a strategy for other media outlets to investigate and report on the leaked documents.
Assange, the product of a cyberpunk culture based on collaboration and data sharing, formed his strategy around that philosophy, balancing it with an acknowledgment of the mainstream media’s traditional demand for exclusivity. WikiLeaks’ original partnership was with four major news outlets—the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel—that received the collection of 250,000 cables months in advance. A fifth, the New York Times, obtained them from the Guardian. These publications agreed to surrender their exclusive control over the material in January 2011. In the end, WikiLeaks was able to partner with more than ninety media outlets around the world.
I was one of the first journalists to reach Ellingham Hall, in Norfolk, England, where WikiLeaks had established its secret headquarters ahead of the “Cablegate” release. For a hectic ten days in November, I—along with other journalists, activists and lawyers—worked secretly around the clock at a table crowded with laptops and cellphones, drafting articles and discussing how to distribute the documents in January.
When it came to Brazil, however, time was of the essence. Lula was leaving office at the end of the year, so I argued that any cables exposing his administration should be brought to light as soon as possible. Assange and the WikiLeaks team agreed.
* * *
Brazil has only a handful of national newspapers, all part of media conglomerates with political and economic interests that influence their coverage of national issues. Indeed, five companies, owned by just six families, control 70 percent of all Brazilian media outlets.
“Well, just give the cables to a progressive newspaper then,” Julian told me. “There aren’t any,” I replied.
There were, of course, skilled reporters in Brazil who could do a good job, even if we knew some of the stories would be biased and others might never reach the public. I called one such journalist, Fernando Rodrigues of Folha de S. Paulo, and asked if his employers would be willing to cooperate with WikiLeaks. “Yes, we are interested,” he replied. To maintain the exclusivity agreement with the European and US media partners, I explained to Fernando that I would write the stories in advance for the WikiLeaks site and then, appropriately enough, leak my articles along with fragments of the documents to Folha.
On November 29, just a couple of hours after El País broke the first cable story, Folha de S. Paulo published the initial WikiLeaks-generated article in Brazil. Headlined “Brazil disfarçou luta antiterror, dizem EUA” (Brazil disguised fight against terror), the story drew from secret US Embassy cables revealing that Brazilian authorities were arresting suspected terrorists but charging them with other crimes so as not to draw attention to their detention. Lula’s government denied the claims, and though the story died quickly, it was picked up by all of the country’s media outlets—newspapers, radio and TV—which were now thirsty for more WikiLeaks revelations.
The next day, I decided to run a story titled “My Friend Jobim,” about Lula’s defense minister, Nelson Jobim, and his multiple meetings with the US ambassador to Brazil. It was based on cables that revealed how the Bush administration had pursued a strategy of close contacts with Jobim and the Brazilian military in order to counterbalance the independent posture of the Brazilian foreign ministry (known as Itamaraty).
“Jobim continues to challenge the historic supremacy of Itamaraty in all areas of foreign policy,” reported Ambassador Clifford Sobel, calling him “unusually activist” in his defense of US interests. Over breakfast at Sobel’s home, according to one cable, Jobim confided that Itamaraty’s secretary general, Samuel Guimaraes, “hates the United States” and was “actively looking to create problems in the relationship.” It was one of many times that Jobim provided hostile gossip about Itamaraty and the foreign minister, Celso Amorim, to US diplomats.
Folha de S. Paulo received the same documents, but it didn’t focus on Jobim’s indiscretions, instead announcing in its headlines that US diplomats saw Itamaraty as an enemy. But my article, and the documents posted on the WikiLeaks website, prompted a series of left-leaning blogs in Brazil to call Jobim a “traitor.” The story then spread to more traditional outlets, creating a minor political scandal.
Jobim denied ever having spoken ill of his colleagues in the foreign ministry. Questioned by journalists, Lula said he would believe his own defense minister over the US ambassador. But the story tainted Jobim’s reappointment under Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff. Seven months into her tenure, Rousseff fired Jobim after he publicly made sexist remarks about two female cabinet ministers. He was replaced by Celso Amorim, the former foreign minister so severely criticized by Jobim in the cables.
* * *
Folha was one of two national newspapers in Brazil that received the cables from WikiLeaks. Deciding with Assange that an additional outlet would foster competition and produce more reporting, we chose O Globo, a Rio-based daily, as the second partner. My challenge was to persuade the two newspapers—both so eager for “exclusivity” and profits—to agree to the arrangement.
Folha’s management was not happy, but they complied. On December 5, Fernando and I met in a restaurant in the center of São Paulo with Tatiana Farah, a special reporter for O Globo. The conversation was friendly; we agreed to jointly determine the themes and then write separately about the same cache of documents every day. The trove of records was so rich that we could do this until the beginning of the New Year; afterward, all parties would be free to write about whatever they wanted.
While O Globo and Folha selected teams of experienced reporters to write about their areas of specialty, I worked alone, sleep-deprived, in a tiny apartment in the center of São Paulo, trying to keep up the pace of reporting and writing. In four months, I would publish no fewer than eighty articles. Between my stories and those in Folha and O Globo, the WikiLeaks cables produced more than 150 articles related to Brazil.
Among the key stories generated by this collaboration:
§ During the Bush years, US officials repeatedly requested that Brazil take the lead in isolating Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez—even proposing that Brazil engage in espionage against him. In a meeting on March 14, 2005, then–US Ambassador John Danilovitch asked Foreign Minister Amorim to “consider institutionalizing a more intensive political engagement” on Chávez, including “a dedicated intelligence-sharing arrangement.” “We do not see Chávez as a threat,” Amorim replied.
§ The Obama administration was irritated by Brazil’s relationship with Iran, especially following its attempts to mediate talks about Iran’s nuclear inspections. “The [government of Brazil]…still does not fully grasp the regional and multilateral dynamics surrounding Iran and the Middle East, and its frenzied effort to reach out to all players in the region is increasing the potential for missteps and misunderstandings,” wrote Lisa Kubiske, the chargé d’affaires to the Brazilian mission, on November 6, 2009.
§ José Dirceu, Lula’s right-hand man, who left office in 2005 following accusations of corruption, met with US diplomats twice after the scandal. In a meeting with the US consul in São Paulo, Dirceu bitterly admitted to illegal fundraising by his party and seemed to blame the president. “Lula does not do much on his own initiative,” he was quoted as saying, “and should have paid more attention to cultivating legitimate corporate funding sources in the wake of [the] 2002 election.”
* * *
By the middle of January 2011, it was clear that the two Brazilian partners were losing interest in the cables and were dedicating less and less space to “Cablegate” stories. I started a blog, which attracted a strong readership. That’s how Phase II of the WikiLeaks coverage—engaging the nontraditional media—began.
Rather than deciding myself what to cover, I let the public select issues that were of interest to them. Using the WikiLeaks database of Brazil-related cables, I requested that my readers submit topics to search for in the collection. After conducting a search, I would send the relevant documents to a group of bloggers, who would then publish stories based on them. This generated some interesting articles—revealing, for example, the meetings between US officials and opposition leaders like presidential candidate José Serra, who hinted at a closer relationship with Washington should he win. Neither Folha nor O Globo, who were seen as harsh critics of the Lula government, published any stories about opposition leaders.
As the bloggers’ interest in the cables faded by mid-March, with hundreds of documents yet to be reviewed, I and a group of women journalists decided to create Brazil’s first nonprofit center for investigative journalism, called Publica. Based on similar US media organizations like ProPublica, it would publish stories that could be freely reproduced under a creative-commons license. Our first challenge was to review the remaining WikiLeaks documents and see what stories they held.
Staffing a temporary newsroom with fifteen volunteer journalists, we were able to publish another fifty articles based on the cables. My favorite new revelation was the secret transfer to Brazil by the United States of thirty Drug Enforcement Administration personnel who had previously been expelled from Bolivia for spying and aiding the opposition. The new stories created another stir in the Brazilian press. But more than that, they proved it was possible for an independent investigative group to match the traditional news outlets when it came to producing professional journalism—and to following the story where the mainstream media would not take it.
The impact of WikiLeaks on the Brazilian media community has been unmistakable: within a couple of months, articles based on documents from Brazil’s dictatorship period started popping up in the press. Folha de S. Paulo started its own WikiLeaks-type section, the “FolhaLeaks,” and established an investigative unit in Brasília. More investigative stories are being produced by both the traditional and the independent media. A year later, corporate media outlets such as Globo and Grupo Bandeirantes—major TV networks in Brazil—are fighting to sponsor the annual congress of the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism. And Publica is now up and running.
The response to the leaks also demonstrated that, more than twenty-five years after the end of military rule, the Brazilian public is ready and eager to advance toward a more transparent and accountable society. Brazil’s “Cablegate” generated a much-delayed debate about the lack of transparency in government and the need for a Freedom of Access Law. Journalists’ associations ramped up their demands for such a law to be adopted at once. Fernando Rodrigues, who was a director of the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism, wrote an article criticizing how slowly the law was being debated in Congress. When the president of the Senate, José Sarney, declared that documents should remain secret because “we cannot do a WikiLeaks of Brazilian history,” he was heavily criticized.
President Rouseff signed the Freedom of Access Law on November 18, 2011. It took effect May 16, 2012—a date that could become a historic landmark for Brazil’s political culture—and the law is already being used widely by reporters investigating government-related stories.
Indeed, the real legacy of Brazil’s WikiLeaks experience will be its impact on the country’s journalistic community. It showed that investigative journalism exposing the secretive inner workings of government and advancing the cause of transparency is not only critical but also exciting and cool. Today, it is clear that a vibrant investigative media can provide substantive information to the Brazilian public—who want to know and have the right to know.
Read this article in Spanish. |
Last weekend, I attended a symposium hosted by CLASS, the Centre for Labour And Social Studies (clever acronym, eh?). This is a left-wing think-tank in the UK funded by various large left trade unions in Britain (http://classonline.org.uk/). It aims to promote a better analysis of the nature of the capitalist crisis in the UK and policies to defend the interests of the majority.
I have referred to the activities of CLASS before when it was first started up. See my article in Socialist Review in April 2013 (http://socialistreview.org.uk/379/whats-wrong-keynesian-answer-austerity). My main complaint then was that CLASS, in its excellent attempt to oppose the ideas and policies of mainstream economics and the right-wing UK government, relied entirely on the Keynesian ‘alternative’. For this criticism, I got some flak from the radical wing of ‘post-Keynesian’ economists in Britain (see my post, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/meeting-keynes-meadway/).
Well, the latest conference was no different. Entitled What Britain needs, the main theme was to challenge the “inequalities in wealth and power”. Inequality has become the buzzword among leftist thinking in the major economies in the recent period. That’s for two reasons.
The first is that inequality of wealth and income has risen significantly in the past 25 years in the major economies to levels not seen since the 19th century. Thomas Piketty has demonstrated this development in magisterial detail in his best-selling book, Capital in the 21st century (see my numerous posts, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/04/15/thomas-piketty-and-the-search-for-r/). And the recent Credit Suisse report on global wealth, among others, has shown the extreme extent of inequality globally
(https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/global-wealth-1-own-48-10-own-87-and-bottom-50-own-less-than-1/).
But the other reason is that mainstream economics and much of heterodox economics, including post-Keynesians, want to see inequality of income and wealth as the contradiction in modern capitalism (https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/david-harvey-piketty-and-the-central-contradiction-of-capitalism/) and, more than that, as the main cause of the Great Recession that hit capitalism globally in 2008-9 (see my post,
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/inequality-the-mainstream-worry/).
I have dealt with these arguments in various places on my blog and in various papers (https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/is-inequality-the-cause-of-capitalist-crises/). It is my contention that, while inequality is part of all class societies and thus is also endemic to capitalism, it is not the central contradiction of the capitalist mode of production and so not the reason for recurring capitalist slumps and the failure of capitalist production to meet the needs of the majority. The central problem is not the distribution of wealth and income after it has been created by labour. Instead it is the mode of production itself: production for the profit of the owners of the means of production against the social need of the majority. A profit-making mode of production is the key contradiction, not inequality.
This Marxist view gained no voice at the CLASS symposium at all. The main speakers at the plenary session outlined the shocking state of Britain: inequality; failure to grow; falling incomes for the majority; the decimation of the welfare state and public services through privatisation and austerity etc. But what was the alternative solution?
For Professor Doreen Massey it was to get out into the streets and buses etc and combat the ruling neoliberal propaganda that dominated the minds of the public and led them to support immigration controls, reduced welfare benefits and balancing the budget. The assumption here was that we ‘left academics’ knew that neoliberal ideas were nonsense but that the media has brainwashed the masses. Yet all proper public opinion polls in Britain show overwhelming opposition to privatisation; for a defence of the national health service and state education; and even for renationalisation of transport, energy and other utilities (see my post, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/oh-dear-what-are-the-british-people-thinking-of). It is not the British people who have been brainwashed into accepting ‘neoliberalism’, but the leaders of the labour movement.
This was confirmed when Angela Eagle, the Chair of UK’s opposition Labour Party, spoke to tell us that the rising inequality and neoliberalism of the last 29 years (since Thatcher) was appalling, quietly forgetting that since 1979, Labour had been in government for 13 out of those 29 years. Under PMs Blair and Brown, Labour governments supported deregulation of the financial sector, bringing market forces and private capital into the NHS, reducing taxes for the rich (Labour leader, Peter Mandelson: “we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich…. as long as they pay their taxes”).
Eagle admitted that Labour had accepted the neoliberal consensus in the past, but now we must build a ‘new consensus’. You might ask: surely we must aim to break with the ruling consensus not build a new one? But there was a clear hint in what Eagle and another main speaker, Will Hutton, the former editor of the Observer and now a principal of an Oxford college, said, namely that, such was the terrible levels of inequality now in Britain, that some members of the ruling class or the establishment (that they had been talking to) were also worried. So it may be possible to form a new ‘consensus’ with them against the Tory government and neoliberal policies. Presumably this would be an alliance with ‘good-thinking’ rulers and the working class against ‘bad-thinking’ rulers.
Hutton did say that the reason for the crisis in the British economy and its failure to deliver for the needs of the majority was not so much inequality per se but the question of ‘ownership’, i.e. how companies are owned and controlled. He exclaimed that Clause 4 in the Labour Party constitution that called for a socialised economy and had been dropped by the Blairite leaders of New Labour was correct and should be restored. That sounded promising but then Hutton explained what he meant by social ownership, namely better company law so that workers and shareholders control their bosses and “designing markets for the people”. You see what was wrong was that Britain was a “dysfunctional” capitalist economy. By implication, he was saying that if we could get it ‘functioning’, capitalism would be fine. This was a familiar theme from Hutton, who had put a similar position at the recent Rethinking Economics conference in London (see my post, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/rethinking-economics/).
In the many working papers written by various economists and others for CLASS, one by Stewart Lansley came into view (http://classonline.org.uk/pubs/item/rising-inequality-and-financial-crises). Called Rising inequality and financial crises: why greater equality is essential for recovery, Lansley argues that there is a strong link between rising inequality and instability in capitalism, citing the examples of rising inequality just before the Great Depression of the 1930s and now before the Great Recession. The reason Lansley presented is the classic one floated by Keynesians and even mainstream economists that, if wages are held down and all the income goes to the rich, consumer spending falls, causing a collapse in ‘effective demand’. Also households resort to borrowing more, creating debt or credit bubbles that eventually cause a financial crash. Again, I have dealt with this view of the cause of the Great Recession in several posts (https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/06/28/its-debt-stupid/).
One of the implications of this ‘inequality’ view is that each major capitalist crisis can have a different cause. As Lansley admits, the crisis of the 1970s was not due to a lack of wages, but in that case because “wages have grown too quickly”. This neo-Ricardian view of crises revolves round the idea that it is the wage/profit share that matters: so some crises are caused by workers having ‘too high’ wages. It is very much the same idea that we get more sophisticatedly from post-Keynesian economists like Ozlem Onaran, who also spoke at the CLASS symposium, namely that the Great Recession was a ‘wage-led’ crisis (i.e. wages are too low) while the 1970s crisis was ‘profit-led’ (wages too high?) – see her new paper for CLASS, (http://classonline.org.uk/pubs/item/state-intervention-for-wage-led-development). There is no mention here of the law of profitability that Marx expounded to explain recurring crises under capitalism.
The ‘wage-led’ distribution theory leads to what Lansley concludes: that if we get the ‘right’ level of wage share, then capitalism will be fine. As he puts it: “the great concentrations of income and wealth need to be broken up and the wage share restored to the post-war levels that brought equilibrium and stability”. Apparently, British capitalism was fine just after the war due to the right ‘wage share’ and level of inequality – ah, those golden years of enforced 1940s austerity.
In one of my posts on this view of inequality, I asked the question: do the proponents of inequality as the main cause of crises (or at least this crisis) think that redistributing income or wealth would be sufficient to put capitalism on the road to growth without any further catastrophic slumps? Or do they agree that only replacing the capitalist mode of production through the expropriation of the owners of capital and the establishment of a planned economy based on ownership in common can do the trick? Lansley apparently thinks the former and so do the speakers at CLASS it would seem.
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JURUPA VALLEY (CBSLA.com) — Parents and students in Jurupa Valley could be dealing with a rare disease from the Middle Ages.
Some parents refused to send their children to school Tuesday after receiving a warning from the Jurupa Unified School District about two possible cases of leprosy affecting students at Indian Hills Elementary School.
It was unclear whether the students are related to each other.
Barbara Cole, the director of disease control for Riverside County, said a school nurse notified the health department of the rare disease on Friday, but it could take weeks to get tests results back to confirm whether the children indeed have leprosy.
“We have not idenfied any risk at the school and it’s very difficult to transmit to others,” said Cole.
Leprosy is associated with disfiguring skin sores and peeling skin.
The disease is spread through mucus after having close and repeated contact with an infected person. It is easily treatable with antibiotics, even though most of the population is immune to it.
Jurupa Valley Unified Superintendent Elliott Duchon says classrooms have been decontaminated and the students in question are not in school.
“For parents, they need to make a decision for their children but we’re not recommending any precautions,” said Duchon. “There is not a risk at this time.”
The investigation is ongoing. |
The Port of Seattle claimed two historic pieces of tunnel-boring machine Bertha, and could give them to another group or display them at its own parks.
The Port of Seattle came to the rescue Friday morning in efforts to preserve retired tunnel-boring machine Bertha by taking a 20-ton cutter fragment to its Terminal 5 for safekeeping.
Next week the Port will salvage a 10-ton center piece, nicknamed the “fishtail.” This is a triangle whose sharp point was first to contact dirt, as the giant drill advanced 1.7 miles from 2013 to 2017.
Most of the 630-ton, disc-shaped cutter, plus the front-end drive parts, will still be scrapped — with steel pieces to be recycled at Nucor Steel in West Seattle.
Friday’s rusty endpiece, part of a 27-foot-long spoke in the cutterhead, measures 9 feet by 5 feet by 5 feet. Project leaders from Hitachi Zosen, which built Bertha in Japan, watched and posed for pictures while a crew from the Omega Morgan heavy-lift company lowered it onto the Port’s flatbed truck, at the north Highway 99 tunnel portal near the Space Needle.
Learn more about Traffic Lab » | Follow us on Twitter » Traffic Lab is a Seattle Times project that digs into the region’s thorny transportation issues, spotlights promising approaches to easing gridlock, and helps readers find the best ways to get around. It is funded with the help of community sponsors Alaska Airlines, CenturyLink, Kemper Development Co., NHL Seattle, PEMCO Mutual Insurance Company and Seattle Children’s hospital. Seattle Times editors and reporters operate independently of our funders and maintain editorial control over Traffic Lab content.
“We are very free to donate pieces of the TBM so that future generations will know the machine that accomplished this historic project,” said Shinji Ogaki, Hitachi Zosen’s project manager.
The triangular fishtail, also known as the center cone, will be removed from Bertha by cutting torches and will be 1.5 meters long, he said.
The fate of memorabilia isn’t certain but came into sharper focus Friday morning.
• The Port doesn’t know yet where its two pieces will go permanently, spokesman Perry Cooper said. It does have options, on its own land or someplace else. The Port’s maritime-themed Jack Block Park sits next to Terminal 5 in West Seattle, and parts of old gears and valves have been displayed for years on Harbor Island.
“We haven’t determined that yet, but we’re going to find a great place for it to be viewed by the public,” Cooper said of Bertha.
• The Museum of History & Industry wants at least one of the smaller 75-pound cutting teeth and a control panel that operators used to steer Bertha, Ogaki said. Negotiations are still in progress.
• Seattle Iron & Metals, in the Duwamish area, continues to carve spoke lengths into even smaller pieces for recycling, but still has “certainly a half-dozen or more” 20-ton pieces available, said Adam Thomas, a steel buyer there.
“We have been fielding requests for pieces from both the private sector and government agencies,“ he said Friday.
• The Seattle Art Museum, which owns Olympic Sculpture Park, has not solicited tunnel-machine components.
• Hitachi Zosen plans to reuse a giant onboard power generator and a rotating conveyor screw. The drill’s circular main bearing, some 10 meters in diameter, will be carved apart by Seattle Tunnel Partners because it’s too big to remove whole, but Ogaki said he’ll donate that if someone here claims it.
Though a crescent-shaped replica sits as a monument in Tokyo Bay, the company doesn’t have a history of leaving cutting remnants behind.
Hitachi Zosen is offering Bertha’s leftover pieces at no charge, but users must pay for transportation, land and maintenance.
The Port itself is a tunnel participant, by providing $267 million and a loading dock for barges that removed Bertha’s muck to a quarry across Puget Sound.
Total costs are $2.1 billion for the tunnel, or $3.1 billion with adjoining ramps, overpasses and streets. Overruns of up to a half-billion dollars, for delays and tunnel-machine repairs, are still under dispute.
At a diameter of 57 feet, 4 inches, Bertha was the world’s largest tunnel drill when it departed its launch pit in Sodo on July 30, 2013. A slightly wider machine dug a portion of a tunneled highway to Hong Kong’s airport in 2015.
The four-lane, tolled Highway 99 tunnel bypassing downtown, to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, is expected to open by early 2019. |
Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales (C), seen here at the swearing in last month of new Defense Minister Luis Ralda (L), is the target of street protests demanding he resign
Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales (C), seen here at the swearing in last month of new Defense Minister Luis Ralda (L), is the target of street protests demanding he resign
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Guatemala City (AFP)
Hundreds of protesters blocked roads in Guatemala on Tuesday to demand that President Jimmy Morales step down because of accusations of corruption stemming from his 2015 election campaign.
The demonstrators were mostly from rural and indigenous communities. The national roads authority said main roads in the Central American country were blocked at at least seven locations.
A leader of the rural group organizing the protest, Neftali Lopez, said the demonstrators wanted Morales to resign "for corruption" and facilitating organized crime, a purge of Congress, and graft investigations against Guatemala City's mayor and a former president, Alvaro Arzu.
Morales, a 48-year-old former TV comic, took office last year vowing to clean up Guatemala's notoriously shady politics.
He succeeded Otto Perez, who had to step down when a corruption scandal implicating him exploded into street protests and ended with him in jail pending a trial.
But Morales' star has tumbled since, with a UN-backed anti-corruption body, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG in Spanish), demanding the president's immunity be lifted so he can be investigated for suspected illegal campaign financing.
Morales responded by trying to boot out the Colombian head of the CICIG, prompting a public and international uproar. Guatemala's top court voided his order.
Congress has held two votes on whether to withdraw Morales' immunity, but each time the motion has failed to gather the 105 votes necessary.
© 2017 AFP |
ABOVE: Toronto Maple Leafs give a gift to fans off the ice. Carey Marsden reports.
TORONTO – “We were completely floored,” said Nick Penner, the grandson to a long-time Leafs season ticket holder after a simple gesture on behalf of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“On behalf of the entire Toronto Maple Leafs organization, please accept our deepest condolences on the passing of your father, Paul,” the letter reads.
The letter was sent by Toronto Maple Leafs General Manager Dave Nonis to the family of a longtime season ticket holder who recently passed away.
“I understand your father was a long-time and loyal Leafs fan, as well as a season seat holder for more than 25 years, and that the two of you were able to share many special memories together cheering on the team. Hockey offers a fantastic bond between Canadian fathers and sons and we hope that the memories you shared together at Leafs games will comfort you and your family during this difficult time. Again, our deepest sympathies; our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.”
The letter was referencing Nick Penner’s grandfather Paul. Nick posted the letter on the Reddit.com subreddit /r/leafs where it sparked both sympathy and discussion.
The Maple Leafs organization sent the letter as a ‘small gesture’ to the family, according to Dave Haggith the senior director of communications at Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE).
“Well, the Leafs have a very close relationship with our fans and in this case, the son of a long-time leafs season ticket holder. This was just a small gesture to let the family know that he will be missed, and to thank him for all of his support over the years,” he said.
Paul Penner had been a season ticket holder for more than 25 years and went to as many games as he could. His grandson, Nick, said his family was shocked by the letter.
“We were completely floored. We didn’t expect anything like this, any recognition of any kind,” he said. “He cared for the Leafs for a lot of years and to see them reach out and show that they cared about him too as a person was an incredible gesture.”
But reaching out to fans is something the Leafs organization has done for a long time, Haggith said. But with the advent of social media sites like Reddit, the broader community is starting to take notice.
“Well our community group does a lot of work and it’s not just season ticket holder, its people who are sick, fans who are sick, children who are ill. It’s very common that we have this interaction,” he said. “In this day and age it’s starting to show up online and such but it’s been going on for many years.”
After the letter was posted online, fans began to express sympathy while also complimenting MLSE.
User Sundin13 wrote on Reddit: “Sorry for your loss. Wow, that is a truly amazing story! Compare that with the way the team treated Davey Keon and you have to realize we have turned from classless to classy.”
And user tdmj wrote: “Good to see our buds showing some class. Sorry on the passing of your Grandfather.”
The Leafs are currently in first place in the Atlantic Divison, winning six of their first seven games; the best start for the Leafs since 1993.
And Penner said his grandfather, in one of the last conversations they had together, suggested it could be “our year.”
“We were talking about this year’s team and he was a really big fan. He thought our goaltenders were both great; he was a big James Reimer fan. He liked the fact that we brought on Clarkson, and he told me that, people will call him crazy, but he thought that this just could be our year. So it’s sad that he won’t be around to see it, but I think they’re getting a little extra help from above now.”
– With files from Carey Marsden |
Yeah, it's the culture. Ferguson PD has 53 police officers. One of their officers is currently in hiding for shooting Mike Brown. But he's hardly the only one.
Washington Post:
In four federal lawsuits, including one that is on appeal, and more than a half-dozen investigations over the past decade, colleagues of Darren Wilson’s have separately contested a variety of allegations, including killing a mentally-ill man with a Taser, pistol-whipping a child, choking and hog-tying a child and beating a man who was later charged with destroying city property because his blood spilled on officers’ clothes. One officer has faced three internal affairs probes and two lawsuits over claims he violated civil rights and used excessive force while working at a previous police department in the mid-2000s. That department demoted him after finding credible evidence to support one of the complaints, and he subsequently was hired by the Ferguson force. Police officials from outside Ferguson and plaintiffs’ lawyers say the nature of such cases suggests there is a systemic problem within the Ferguson police force. Department of Justice officials said they are considering a broader probe into whether there is a pattern of using excessive force that routinely violates people’s civil rights.
Ya think? When that number of officers in a small department are accused of the same thing -- excessive force -- I think you can take that to the bank.
Before the Darren Wilson apologists drive by with their supplied talking points, let's clarify one thing. All of the victims who complained were African-American. All but one of the complaints filed was against white officers. In one instance, the complaint was against one of the three the African-American officers employed by the Ferguson police department.
I'd love to know if the demoted officer mentioned above was with the now-disbanded Jennings police department before he switched to Ferguson. Whether or not he was, it's still astonishing that Ferguson hired him after evidence was found supporting the claims against him. At least, it's astonishing if you assume Ferguson wanted fair policing. If, on the other hand, they were looking for cops unafraid to use excessive force to keep citizens in line, maybe it's less astonishing and even predictable. |
[ 2016-October-30 09:27 ]
I work at Bluecore where, like any growing application, we periodically run into interesting performance problems. Most of our service runs on App Engine, which has pretty good automatic scaling. That causes most performance issues to show up as large bills, rather than production failures. This is good news for our customers, but bad news for Bluecore, so we keep a close eye on our costs. While investigating a cost increase, we discovered that the Datastore was taking nearly a second to return 20 objects, instead of the normal 100 ms. In this article, I'll talk about how we used traces and logging to find the problem, then monkey patched Google's code to fix it. I think there are some generally applicable lessons, but the details may only be interesting to the unfortunately small number of people who use App Engine. TL;DR: App Engine's older Python Datastore library is very slow when serializing big objects. Traces helped make the problems visible, but logs pinpointed the issue.
We store a lot of data in the Google Cloud Datastore, which is a slightly weird key/value store with lots of features. For the purposes of this discussion, all that matters is that you can look up objects by key. We had implemented a new feature that read a batch of 20 objects using their key, which we expected to take no more than around 100 ms. Unfortunately, our monitoring showed this new feature was very slow, sometimes taking more than a second. App Engine traces a fraction of all requests, so we found a slow request and looked at the trace. We saw something like the following:
This shows a backend task taking around two seconds to return a result. The selected Datastore get took 13 ms, and the details on the right shows it returned 10 entities. Around 300 ms later the application then does a Datastore put. In the worst cases, we saw a gap after a get of up to a second. So what the heck was happening? To get more detail, the trace tool can also show us our application logs:
The gap between the Datastore get and the log message is about 250 ms, so we still are missing a lot of time. However, the requests combined with the log messages told us approximately what chunk of code was responsible. To track it down further, we logged the execution time of small pieces of the suspicious code. It turns out that the db.get API call was taking basically all the time. This was confusing at first: the trace showed the Datastore get returning after 100 ms, but our logs showed the function call taking a second. I suspected this meant that the Datastore was giving our application the data in the ~100 ms reported in the trace, but whatever the Python library was doing after that was slow.
While App Engine does have some private implementation pieces, the bulk of the code appears to be what they provide with the development kit. I walked through the code to see if I could find anything obviously slow. It turns out the older db library we use is built using an undocumented API called datastore.GetAsync . This returns an Entity object, that the db library then converts to the application's custom Model class. Since we were now down to a single function call, I wrote a microbenchmark which thankfully demonstrated the problem, and showed that datastore.GetAsync was about 2X faster. We tried deploying that fix.
While this did run significantly faster, there were still cases that were extremely slow. We logged the object keys for slow requests, then investigated using the microbenchmark. We found that the slow objects had more than 100 attributes, and that more attributes made deserialization slower. Looking more carefully at the implementation, it became clear why. The code converts all attributes from bytes to Python objects. However, for our feature, we only needed about four or five attributes, so this was wasted effort. Unfortunately, there was no easy API that skipped this step.
You can't change the core libraries on App Engine, since Google provides them for you. However, this is Python and everything is mutable. Eventually we found a place where we could monkey patch their internal API to skip the conversion, and just return the "raw" data from the Datastore. The microbenchmark showed that solved the performance problem. To get the attributes we needed, we wrote a wrapper that converted them lazily. This was around 4-5X faster than the original API, and allowed us to reach our performance target.
Lessons
Per-request logs are a performance tool, but they don't need to be fancy: The App Engine/Google Cloud tracing tool is pretty sophisticated, but in this case all we needed was timestamped messages from a single request. However the visualization does make gaps obvious. It is also helpful that the trace captures metadata about each App Engine API call by default (e.g. the number of entities returned). I think the general lesson is that if you are building core APIs, include some way to log a summary of each operation. For more examples of how to use tracing tools for performance, see Dan Luu's summary of a Dick Sites talk.
Don't layer abstractions that do the same thing: Usually abstractions are good, since they provide a simpler interface and hide a lot complexity. In this case, the original App Engine db API is designed to provide a friendly interface to the datastore. However, it is built on top of another API that had the exact same goal! That API is built on the lower-level Datastore protocol, which is definitely a bit ugly and un-Pythonic. The result is there are two API layers that do the same thing, so we are doing the same work twice. The second datastore API, ndb, recognized this and cuts out the middle man, and as a result has better performance.
Reproduce hard bugs with the smallest amount of code possible: Writing a microbenchmark that reproduced the problem was critical for figuring out this problem. Without it, the iteration cycle between generating a theory about what could be causing the issue and testing it would have been way too slow, particularly since this was only happening in our production environment. Don't be afraid to write more code to help isolate and find your bug.
Performance notes for App Engine users
If you use App Engine with Python, I've summarized some benchmark results from my microbenchmark. If you want to re-run these tests yourself, I've published the microbenchmark, as well as the LazyEntity class and monkey patch that does lazy deserialization. The worst part is that after I did all this work, I found that Matt Faus found the same problem in December 2014. His solution is similar, so you may want to evaluate both if you run into this issue.
db deserialization is slower than ndb: ndb converts from the Datastore protocol buffer response to your Model, while db first converts it to an Entity.
db.Expando is twice as slow compared to db.Model, but for ndb it makes no difference: db.Expando makes a second conversion pass over the protocol buffer attributes. For ndb they only make one.
The Standard Environment has very fast protocol buffer serialization compared to the Flexible Environment: I suspect native code is used in the Standard Environment, while pure Python is used in the Flexible Envirnoment.
For even more details, see the notes on my datastore performance microbenchmark. |
Three and a half months (and some 700+ commits) after NetworkManager 1.6, we’re pleased to announce NetworkManager 1.8 is ready. This release is generally focused on fixing bugs and addressing usability annoyances, yet it delivers some new features as well. Let’s have a look!
Reliable daemon restarts
In general, NetworkManager is not something that is restarted too frequently. But when it is, chances are it will end up looking slightly confused. In particular, a different connection profile may appear to be active on a device than before the restart.
There is a reason for this. NetworkManager tries to leave the network interfaces configured on shutdown. This is done to prevent unpleasant surprises in the form of broken remote shell sessions or even network mounts.
On daemon restart, we’d like to pick up the existing configuration. The problem is that we don’t just want to pick up any existing configuration — we do out best not to mess up with the configuration created outside NetworkManager. We’ve ended up with a rather complicated heuristics to determine the connection profiles that could be active. As it turned out, it was possible to end up in an ambiguous situation where our guess didn’t match the situation prior to the restart.
With NetworkManager 1.8 we’ve gotten rid of the guesswork. We save the runtime state to a file on shutdown and pick it up on startup, bringing the ambiguity to an end.
Better connectivity checking
NetworkManager periodically attempts to access a pre-configured web page in order to determine whether the host is able to access the Internet using its “best” default route. This is used to detect “captive portals” — typically wireless routers that hijack connectivity for the purposes of network authentication so they could be dealt with in secure manner (they would often attempt to do ill-advised tricks, such as hijacking secure connections, practically conducting man-in-the middle attacks).
In NetworkManager 1.8, connectivity checks are done for all connections with a default route. This allows us to do neat things, such as penalize connections that fail the check with a higher route metric. The practical consequence is that a wired connection that has a default route, but no Internet connectivity will have a higher metric (and thus a lower priority) than simultaneously active Wi-Fi connection that is connected to the Internet.
Aside from that, the connectivity checking now utilizes libcurl instead of libsoup, resulting in smaller dependency chains in typical small installations.
…and a lot more
We’ve made nmcli better: it is now easier to use in scripts and provides better error handling. NM now supports setting attributes for static routes. The dependency chain is smaller with libgudev no longer being required and libsoup being replaced by libcurl. Support for mobile broadband devices, team devices, bonds, dummy links, SR-IOV capable devices have all seen improvements. More control over hostname update is now allowed.
If you’d like to check for yourself, read the NEWS file or grab the new release! |
Arkansas cornerback Henre' Toliver returns an interception during the fourth quarter of the Texas Bowl game against Texas on Monday, Dec. 29, 2014 at NRG Stadium in Houston. - Photo by Michael Woods
FAYETTEVILLE -- As a true freshman for Arkansas last season, Henre Toliver showed he could play cornerback in the SEC.
This spring Toliver is hoping to show he can play nickel back, too.
Henre Toliver glance CLASS Sophomore HEIGHT/WEIGHT 6-1, 185 pounds POSITION Cornerback HIGH SCHOOL Metairie (La.) Archbishop Rummel HOMETOWN Marrero, La. NOTEWORTHY Played in 11 games last season as a true freshman, including four starts against Texas Tech, Texas A&M, Alabama and Georgia. … Missed two games against Mississippi State and Alabama-Birmingham because of a back injury. … Primary cover man on Alabama’s Amari Cooper when Arkansas held the All-American to two catches for 22 yards. … Had 18 tackles on the season with a sack against Georgia. … Returned an interception 46 yards against Texas in the Texas Bowl. … Listed as a starter on the depth chart going into spring and began working at nickel back Monday during the fourth of 15 spring practices. … Had 10 career interceptions at Rummel and was a two-year starter. … As a high school senior was ranked the No. 18 prospect from Louisiana and No. 27 cornerback in the country by 247Sports.com. … Also had scholarship offers from Oklahoma, Nebraska, Missouri, Louisville, Arizona State, Mississippi State, Kentucky and Vanderbilt.
Toliver -- who played in 11 games last season with four starts and helped the Razorbacks hold down Alabama All-American Amari Cooper -- got his first work covering slot receivers at nickel back Monday when Arkansas resumed practice after spring break.
The Razorbacks are looking for a replacement for Tevin Mitchel, a senior last season who found a home at nickel back, and defensive backs coach Clay Jennings said Toliver is a prime candidate because of his physical and mental attributes.
"He's a dang good football player, he's intelligent, and he plays with poise," Jennings said. "He doesn't get rattled a lot.
"He gives us a longer, athletic corner in the middle as far as covering the slot. He's able to pick up on our blitzes and the zone coverage concepts. He can be physical."
Toliver, 6-1, 185 pounds, said his first practice at nickel back went well. He's competing at the spot with Kevin Richardson, a redshirt sophomore from Jacksonville who played primarily on special teams last season but got some work in the secondary.
"I feel good about it. I think I'll be pretty good at it," Toliver said of playing inside. "I'm starting to catch on. "It's a different technique than cornerback. Instead of playing off the man like I do on the outside, I'm squared up on the receiver."
Jennings talked to Toliver a couple of weeks before the start of spring practice about working at nickel back.
"He was very receptive to the move," Jennings said.
Toliver started against Texas Tech, Texas A&M, Alabama and Georgia last season. His highlight was covering Cooper when the Razorbacks held the Heisman Trophy finalist to season lows of two receptions for 22 yards without a touchdown in the Crimson Tide's 14-13 victory.
"I didn't really know what to expect last season," said Toliver, who came to Arkansas from Metairie (La.) Archbishop Rummel High School. "If I did redshirt, I wasn't going to complain about that.
"I would have taken it as a positive, but I'm glad I got to play. I showed what I could do on the field."
Toliver had 18 tackles -- including a sack for a 4-yard loss against Georgia -- and capped his season with an interception return for 46 yards in the Razorbacks' 31-7 victory over Texas in the Texas Bowl.
A bruised back Toliver sustained against Georgia caused him to miss the Mississippi State and Alabama-Birmingham games, but he came back to play in the final four games, including shutout victories over LSU and Ole Miss.
"Playing as much as I did gave me a lot of confidence," Toliver said.
Toliver went into spring practice as one of Arkansas' top three cornerbacks along with juniors Jared Collins and D.J. Dean. If Toliver is at nickel back, Jennings said, it gives Arkansas a chance to have all of its best cornerbacks on the field at the same time against pass-oriented offenses.
"Henre did some good things in there at nickel back considering it was his first time to ever do it," Jennings said of Monday's practice. "He also did some things that weren't so good.
"We're going to have to be patient with him and see how he does there. He just needs to get more repetitions and get a feel for it."
Jennings said he's eager to see how Toliver does at nickel back in practice today and especially in Saturday's scrimmage.
"Once we get through Saturday he's either going to stay there or we might have to shuffle it up," Jennings said.
Toliver said he has come a long way since fall camp as a freshman.
"I'm more physical," he said. "I know the playbook better. I actually know what I'm doing now. I'm trying to be more vocal."
Toliver said he has talked to Mitchel about the keys to playing nickel back.
"He's helped me with the techniques in all the different coverages, what to do and what not to do," Toliver said. "He's given me the scoop on everything."
Sports on 04/02/2015 |
Brad Guzan is facing an uncertain future after Remi Garde identified the signing of a new goalkeeper as a priority in January.
Garde, the Aston Villa manager, is keen to sign an established No. 1 next month and has already made an inquiry for Marseille’s Steve Mandanda, a France international.
Mandanda, 30, will be allowed to leave Marseille for a nominal fee as his contract expires in June and Villa are hoping to have talks with him over a move.
Villa are also considering other targets, including Paris Saint-Germain’s Salvatore Sirigu, as doubts persist over the form of Guzan, who has managed only two clean sheets in the Premier League this season.
Garde has been assured of funds for the January transfer window and believes the goalkeeper situation is a key position that needs addressing as he bids to navigate a route to survival.
Guzan was the No. 1 during Paul Lambert’s spell in charge but lost his place towards the end of last season under Tim Sherwood, with Shay Given playing in the club’s two appearances at Wembley in the FA Cup.
Villa then attempted to sign Asmir Begovic in the summer but could not agree a fee with Stoke, with the Bosnia international then signing for Chelsea in a deal worth £8million.
And though Guzan has reclaimed his place for this season, fans have been critical of his performances and Villa’s recruitment team are now actively looking for another keeper.
The 31-year-old American will line up against West Ham United on Boxing Day as Villa search for their first league win since the opening day of the campaign.
Jordan Ayew, the £8million summer signing, believes Villa are showing signs of improvement after last weekend’s 1-1 draw at Newcastle. He said: “I think we're getting better and better. We are aiming for three points in the next game now. Then we will start again in the next match.
"I think we've been working hard all season - showing that fighting spirit - but the luck hasn't been on our side.
"Now things are changing bit by bit. It's West Ham now and we will keep on fighting and look to win the game. We all want to have a very good evening.” |
By Aleem Maqbool
BBC News, Gojra, Pakistan
The Hameed family has been left traumatised after the attack On a street in the small Punjabi town of Gojra, house after house stands gutted and looted. One home in particular is the focus of attention. The windows and doors are gone, what is left of the furniture lies gnarled inside, and some of the ceilings have collapsed. People are peering into a small bedroom at the back of the building. It is from here that the charred bodies of six members of the Hameed family, from Pakistan's minority Christian community, were recovered. The youngest of the dead was four-year-old Mousa. We found his father, Almass Hameed, 49, in a crowded hospital ward nearby. 'Shocked and crying' "He was such a bright boy. His teachers complained that he was cheeky at times, but nobody could doubt how clever he was. But now he's gone," Mr Hameed said, breaking down. It was like the most horrific movie. They destroyed our lives
Almass Hameed He described how an angry Muslim mob came through the area, known here as the Christian Colony. "I think there were thousands," he said. "My elderly father went out to see what was happening and they shot and killed him. We were all shocked and crying. Before we knew it, they were breaking into the house." Mr Hameed explained how he and nine other members of the family hid in the bedroom as the house was over-run. "We could hear them smashing everything and dividing our belongings amongst themselves," he said. "Then they started beating on the door saying they would teach us a lesson and burn us alive." Soon after, a fire was raging through his house. "We just couldn't breathe," he said. "I grabbed my eldest son and managed to get out of the room through the flames, my brother came out with one of my daughters, but the rest were stuck and we had no way of rescuing them." As well as his father and Mousa, Mr Hameed lost his 11 year-old daughter, his wife, a brother, a sister-in-law and her mother. "It was like the most horrific movie. They destroyed our lives." 'Fired shots' Tensions had risen after allegations that Christians in the nearby village of Korrian had torn up and burnt pages of the Koran at a wedding a few days earlier. Six members of the Hameed family perished in the inferno "They started it," 19-year-old Omar Ali Raza said in Gojra's marketplace. "We Muslims are the victims. We gathered to protest about what they did to the Koran in Korrian and just wanted to walk through their area, but they threw stones at us and fired shots." "Of course it is bad that Christians died," he added. "But they provoked the Muslims here. I don't understand why everyone is on their side." But an elderly Muslim man passing by interrupts. "The responsibility is with the one who actually burns the Koran, not all Christians," he said. "Here, we live together, and there were no problems before this." As it happens, a local police chief, Ahmed Javaid, said he believed the claim that Christians desecrated the Koran was not true in the first place. "Yes, pieces of paper had been cut up to look like money at a Christian wedding, but they were not pages of the Koran," he said. "However, the rumour spread and the issue became politicised." Christians in Lahore responded to the attacks by holding a rally Very soon after the allegations from Korrian surfaced, politicians from several parties held large rallies denouncing Christians in the area, calling for action. These were not just politicians from expressly right-wing Islamist parties. PML-N leaders have visited Gojra in recent days, expressing solidarity with minority communities. But Christians here say they are sceptical. They accuse the party and others of having previously taken advantage of anti-Christian feelings rather than helping to calm things down. 'Rare' violence Senator Pervaiz Rashid, at the headquarters of the Nawaz party, told me it was very serious in its commitment to minority rights. "We acknowledge there were problems in Gojra, and it is an embarrassment," he said. "However, it was an isolated incident and the local president, Qadeer Awan, has now had his party membership suspended." "I do not believe that there are any other local politicians in our party involved in such activities." Violence of this scale against Pakistan's estimated three million strong Christian community may be rare (this is the worst such incident in seven years), but complaints of discrimination are certainly commonplace. The family is now recovering from its terrifying ordeal The government says it has opened an inquiry into what happened in Gojra, but Asma Jahangir, the chairperson of the Human Rights Commission, is not expecting the type of change she thinks is needed. "For too long the Pakistani state has protected people with extremist views," she said. "It is not just political parties. There are radicalised individuals, and supporters of militant groups within the judiciary, the education system, the bureaucracy and police as well." This was not the vision of Pakistan held by its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. "Minorities, to whichever community they may belong, will be safeguarded. Their religion or faith or beliefs will be secure," he said just weeks before Pakistan's creation in 1947. "They will be, in all respects, the citizens of Pakistan without any distinction of caste or creed." But as Pakistan prepares to mark its independence day, many of its citizens do not see any cause for celebration.
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Apple today launched Move to iOS, the company’s first Android app built in-house. As we noted earlier, “It should surprise no one that the first app Apple built for Android helps you ditch the platform.” The fact that the app is getting flooded with one-star reviews is not particularly surprising, either.
At the time of publication, the app has an average rating of 1.8. The larger majority (almost 79 percent) are one-star reviews, followed by five-star reviews (almost 19 percent).
If this isn’t a prime example of just how dumb the five-star rating system is, we don’t know what is. Less than 24 hours after release, here’s what any Android user who fires up Move to iOS on Google Play will see:
This is also a stark reminder of just how much Android users hate iOS. I read through a bunch of these reviews and I have to say these three summarize the whole lot the best:
Some are unhappy that Apple didn’t even bother to use Google’s Material Design, others dislike Apple’s closed platform, and the rest just hate the app because it was developed by Apple. As many point out, Google wouldn’t be able to launch an equivalent app on Apple’s App Store because of this rule in its review guidelines:
3.1 Apps or metadata that mentions the name of any other mobile platform will be rejected
I could spend hours sifting through these reviews and picking out the most hilarious ones. But that’s not really the issue I want to discuss here. Fanboys will be fanboys, haters love to hate, and trolls will troll. The bigger problem is that Google is giving these “reviewers” a platform to write whatever they want.
You see, just like on Apple’s App Store, Google Play lets you rate an app right after you download it. I grabbed Move to iOS myself, and indeed I was able to choose the one-star option right away.
Before you rip me apart, no, I didn’t hit submit.
Google (and Apple) could solve this issue fairly easily: Require x minutes of use before you can rate an app. What “x” should be isn’t easy to say, and probably widely depends on the type of app in question. It’s a numbers game: How long are you willing to wait to do “harm” to an app you’ll never use?
Still, even a minimum one minute of use would significantly cut down on the number of illegitimate one-star reviews. And this goes the other way too: Many five-star reviews are also fake.
Both Google and Apple would help users and developers alike by revamping how app store reviews work. |
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(c) Payment Upon receiving your order we carry out a standard authorization check on your payment card to ensure there are sufficient funds to fulfill the transaction. Your card will be debited upon authorization being received. The monies received upon the debiting of your card shall be treated as a deposit against the value of the goods you wish to purchase. Once the goods have been dispatched and you have been sent a confirmation email the monies paid as a deposit shall be used as consideration for the value of goods you have purchased as listed in the confirmation email. |
When megawarmist Richard Black of the BBC pans it, you know it’s a problem.
WUWT covered this story earlier, now the crescendo is building on this fancifully exaggerated claim about Greenland melting.
The Times Atlas says:
“for the first time, the new edition of the (atlas) has had to erase 15% of Greenland’s once permanent ice cover – turning an area the size of the United Kingdom and Ireland ‘green’ and ice-free.” … “This is concrete evidence of how climate change is altering the face of the planet forever – and doing so at an alarming and accelerating rate.”
The Scott Polar Institute has now weighed in.
The Scott Polar group, which includes director Julian Dowdeswell, says the claim of a 15% loss in just 12 years is wrong.
“Recent satellite images of Greenland make it clear that there are in fact still numerous glaciers and permanent ice cover where the new Times Atlas shows ice-free conditions and the emergence of new lands,” they say in a letter that has been sent to the Times.
“We do not know why this error has occurred, but it is regrettable that the claimed drastic reduction in the extent of ice in Greenland has created headline news around the world.
“There is to our knowledge no support for this claim in the published scientific literature.”
Read the entire article here
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Silver Diobol of Timocharis, end of 5th century B.C., Archaeological Museum of Nicosia Archbishop Makarios: The First President of the Independant Republic of Cyprus
This coin depicts the abduction of Europa, from Phoenicia to Crete, by Zeus transfigured into a bull with the inscription "King Timocharis" in Cyprosyllabic. King Timocharis was a king in Cyprus, the Kingdom of Marion, around the 4th century BC and this coin is a composition based on one of his coins (picture to the right). This theme is used by Cyprus because they believe that since Cyprus is on the path between Phoenicia and Crete, they must have visited Cyprus on the way. As the myth goes, Europa was a Phoenician Princess, the daughter of King Agenor of Tyre and Telephassa. The god Zeus saw her as she was gathering flowers by the sea and was enamored with her. Overwhelmed by love and passion for Europa, Zeus transformed himself into the form of a magnificent white bull and appeared before her. When Europa saw the great bull she was taken with it's beauty. The bull was uncommonly gentle so she caressed it and spread flowers about his neck and horns. Feeling no fear of the docile beast she dared to climb upon his back. With the Princess on his back, the bull dove into the sea and swam to the island of Crete. Europa's brothers, Cadmus, Cilix, and possibly Phoenix were ordered to look for Europa and instructed not to return until they had found her. It was a hopeless quest, and the brothers became exiles. Cilix ended his search in Asia Minor and established Cilicia. Cadmus consulted the oracle of Delphi and was advised to give up his search and instead to travel until he encountered a cow. He was to follow this cow and to found a city where the cow would lie down; this city became Thebes. Cadmus and his companions went out to fetch water for their new settlement at a fountain where all but Cadmus were slain by a dragon. Cadmus killed the dragon and, at the prompting of the goddess Athena, sowed some of its teeth in the ground. Armed men sprang up from the earth, just as they later would for Jason under similar circumstances. Using the same trick that would eventually serve Jason, Cadmus caused the men to fight amongst themselves until only five were left standing. These five, together with Cadmus, became the original inhabitants of Thebes with Cadmus as their king. He is said to have taught them the alphabet and the art of writing and indeed, the Greek alphabet historically derives from Phoenicia. The many sources differ as to the relationship between Phoenix and Europa, her father, and brothers. Some state that he is Agenors son, others state that he was Agenors brother and father to Europa and her brothers. Whether he is included as a brother of Agenor or as a son, it is clear that his role in mythology was as a King and the eponym of the Phoenicians. Upon their arrival at Crete, Zeus revealed his true identity and ravished Europa (often referred to as the Rape of Europa) and Europa became the first queen of Crete. She bore Zeus three sons Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Sarpedon, who would become the three judges of the Underworld once they died. She eventually married Asterion, the king of Crete, who adopted her three sons and raised them as his own. When he died he gave his throne to Minos who promptly banished his brothers after quarrelling with them. The Greek historian Herodotus presents a variant story that states that Europa was kidnapped by Minoans who were seeking to avenge the kidnapping of a princess from Argos. This may have been an attempt to rationalize the earlier myth or maybe he was stating that the myth was a glorified version of brutal facts the abduction and rape of a Phoenician aristocrat. He presents the myth as a possible remnant of oral history about the settlement of the island and it is by no means far fetched. Cretans were great sailors and must have come from some mainland area by raft or ship and would have interacted with other kingdoms once settled. They brought with them their cattle and other livestock which were of great value and took a central role in everyday life figuring prominently in their sports, arts and religious imagery. The sacred bull was paramount and In the mythological transformation of history the bull provides the transportation for the founding mother of the Minoan people. In the end, Zeus reproduced the shape of the white bull that was used to seduce Europa, in the stars. Today, we can recognize its shape in the constellation Taurus. Cyprus is the third-largest island in the Mediterranean which lies off the southern coast of Turkey and the western shore of Syria. The island has been inhabited for more than 12,000 years, first by prehistoric hunter-gathers, later by small farming villages until Mycenaean, Greek and Phoenician culture is believed to arrive in the bronze age around 1600 BC. Soon after the island inhabitants came into contact, and began trade with, Egypt. In the 6th century Cyprus was conquered by Amass of Egypt until Cambyses conquered Egypt and it fell into the hands of the Persians. Alexander the great claimed the island for the the Macedonians and then the Ptolemies of Egypt controlled it for a time until Rome annexed it in 58-57 BC. It then became a part of the Byzantine empire in 395 which would rule the island for more than 800 years until King Richard I of England captured the island in 1191 during the Third Crusade. In 1192, the French knight Guy of Lusignan purchased the island, in compensation for the loss of his kingdom, from the Templars. The Republic of Venice took control in 1489 until it was conquered by the Ottoman Turks under the command of Lala Kara Mustafa Pasha in 1570 who sacked its palaces, public buildings and churches and massacred more than 20,000 Nicosian Greeks. Under Ottoman rule the island saw its first major influx of of turkish immigration to the island as those who moved there and stayed were rewarded with money and land. Greek Christians were allowed their own communities but forced to pay steep taxes to Ottoman rulers giving rise to opposition and bloody uprisings. By 1760 the situation in Cyprus was intolerable for both Turk residents and Greek alike. In addition to heavy tax burdens a terrible epidemic of plague, bad crops and earthquakes drove many to leave the island. Cyprus was placed under British control in 1878 as a result of the Cyprus Convention, which granted control of the island to Britain in return for British support of the Ottoman Empire in the Russian-Turkish War. Cyprus was formally annexed by the United Kingdom in 1913 since Turkey had joined the Central Powers. Many Cypriots signed up to fight in the British Army in both World Wars with the promise that when the war finished Cyprus would be united with Greece. The British balked at giving Cyprus its independence spawning resistance and opposition movements until, after seemingly endless posturing and debate, Cyprus was declared an independent state on August 16, 1960 with Archbishop Makarios as it president. The terms of its independences and the two ethnic communities at odds with each other made a peaceful workable government all but impossible. Tensions rose and the populations segregated. Greek citizens looked to unify with Greece, Turkish residence looked to unify with Turkey. Animosity grew and the island fractured culminating in a Greek led coup d'etat and Archbishop Makarios was overthrown in a military coup led by the Cypriot National Guard. Soon after Turkey invaded Cyprus claiming it was asserting its right to protect the Turkish Cypriot minority. Turkey gained control of 30% of northern Cyprus and displaced some 180,000 Greek Cypriots. Talks in Geneva involving Greece, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the two Cypriot factions stalled and Turkish forces continue its military actions on the island. 200,000 Greek Cypriots were displaced from their home land and as reprisal, the entire Turkish Cypriot male population of Tokhni was massacred by Greek Cypriot paramilitaries. A UN-sponsored cease-fire was established on July 22, and Turkish troops were permitted to remain in the north. In December of 1974, Makarios again assumed the presidency. The following year, the island was partitioned into Greek and Turkish territories separated by a UN-occupied buffer zone. The events of the summer of 1974 have dominated Cypriot politics ever since and have been a major point of contention between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, as well as the countries of Greece and Turkey. Turkish Cypriots proclaimed a separate state under Rauf Denktash in the northern part of the island on Nov. 15, 1983, naming it the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The UN Security Council declared this action illegal and called for withdrawal. No country except Turkey has recognized this entity. In May 2004 Cyprus was admitted into the European Union and Turkish Cyprus elected pro-reunification leader Mehmet Ali Talat as their president, ousting longtime leader Rauf Denktash, who staunchly opposed reunification which lends hope to future unification. In 2005, Turkish Cypriots demolished the part of the wall along the boundary that for decades has split its capital and in March 2007, Greek Cypriots demolished the part of the wall on the Greek side. Cyprus is well known as the island of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, who, according to legend, was born there. Throughout ancient history, Cyprus was a flourishing centre for the cultic worship of Aphrodite. |
In Perl 5, $0 is the magic superglobal which contains the name of the program being executed. This is the name you see in the output of ps or in the top utility.
Some clever programs provide several symlinks to the main program and examine $0 to enable or disable certain behaviors. This is an easy way to hide the details of execution from users while making those behavior mnemonic.
I usually don't write those kinds of programs, but this past year I've written several batch processing programs which have several interdependent states. For example, one program runs from cron regularly to run through a pipeline of behaviors. Data moves through that pipeline; it's basically one big state machine.
The core of the program is a pipeline manager which runs the appropriate processing stages in order, such that on every invocation, the program moves data through at least one stage and potentially every stage. It doesn't have to move everything through the pipeline all in one invocation, but it does have to make progress on every invocation.
For various uninteresting optimization and locking reasons, I made this program a single execution unit. (I do use asynchronous IO for things like network access, but that's because the program is largely IO bound.) The program also has copious logging of the stage traversal, split between one log which tracks stage transitions and timings and stage-specific log files which have more details on the progress of those stages.
Until a few minutes ago, the easiest way to see the program's current stage was to tail the top-level log file. While running some live tests on a new feature, I found myself with free time and the desire not to switch back and forth to a tail -f screen again, so I checked the documentation for $0 again.
I knew that on certain platforms (GNU/Linux, which makes my life easier) you can actually write to it. If you do this, you can control what appears in the output of ps and top .
Every stage runs from a closure (shades of Plack):
my $sub = sub { my ($self, $config) = @_; my $log = $self->get_fh_for_step( $config, lc $app ); # show app stage in ps output local $0 = $app; my $app = $module->new( logger => $log, map { $_ => $config->{General}{$_} } @keys, ); $app->run; $log->log( sprintf $message, $app->count ) if $app->count; };
A loop in the pipeline manager creates a new closure over the name of the module which implements the stage to create a new object for the stage, set up the logger, provide the appropriate configuration, and run the stage. The emboldened code shows the change I made.
Right now, my top window shows that the image processing stage has just given way to the report writing stage—and now the program has exited. In a couple of minutes, everything will start again.
Writing this entry took longer than implementing this feature. Five minutes of experimenting has improved the visibility and monitoring of this program immensely. Maybe it'll help you. |
Facebook will explicitly notify users it believes have been targeted by an attacker suspected of working on behalf of a nation state, the company has announced.
Users whose accounts are targeted or compromised by state-sponsored hackers will now receive a notification upon login, warning them that “we believe your Facebook account and your other online accounts may be the target of attacks from state-sponsored actors”.
The user is then prompted to turn on Facebook’s “login approvals”, a form of two-factor authorisation which texts a login code to the user when they (or anyone else) tries to access the app using their phone.
The company’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, explains that the warning is necessary because government-sponsored attacks “tend to be more advanced and dangerous than others”, necessitating active defence on the part of the target. He also emphasised that being the target of such an attack may indicate that other devices have already been compromised. “Ideally, people who see this message should take care to rebuild or replace [their computers or mobile devices] if possible.”
Stamos declined to explain how Facebook identifies attacks from nation states as opposed to conventional malicious actors, citing the need “to protect the integrity of our methods and processes”. But specialists in “advanced persistent threats”, such as large criminal enterprises and nation-states, say there are a number of tell-tale signs that can point towards such an actor.
Jason Meller, the chief security strategist at cybersecurity firm FireEye, said that Facebook is helped by the fact that targeted hacks often use information gleaned from the social network as part of the opening volley. “Spear phishing” attacks, which aim to entice a specific target into opening an infected attachment, clicking a malicious link, or sharing personal information, “require the attacker to learn as much as possible about the potential victim” to ensure success, Mueller said. Often, that involves harvesting information from social networks.
“If Facebook is able to detect this initial reconnaissance activity (like a sudden spike of profile views from new Facebook accounts not friendly with the target) and correlate it with other network and behavioural indicators that match an advanced attacker, then it stands to reason they can proactively warn a user with a limited degree of confidence,” Meller said.
He continued: “Facebook has built a great team of security professionals with a deep level of experience on nation-state attacks. Their vast amount of users around the globe would likely allow an adversary a wide choice of government users to target via this social media channel for access to the assets those targeted individuals have access to at their work sites.”
Facebook’s move was welcomed by digital rights organisations. Jim Killock, the head of London’s Open Rights Group, said that the move was “very welcome” for people who live under highly oppressive governments. However, Killock warned: “Facebook needs to continue to work with citizen groups in the USA and Europe to ensure that surveillance laws do not allow broad access to the databases of companies like Facebook.” |
I had always wanted to be at one of those marathon (this is the word everyone agreed to use, right?) multiple overtime NHL playoff games. I always figured that if it was at one and the Washington Capitals were playing, the Caps would, you know, lose because Capitals. This left me prepared, so it was easier to accept the outcome. Karl Alzner may have a had harder time, though.
The toughest time I had last night was watching the girl sitting in front of us. She was bouncy. Very bouncy. Not like a bouncy personality (well, I don’t know, maybe she does…I just don’t know her), but physically bouncy. Bouncy in her seat. Bouncy while standing. It was as if she could not contain herself.
When my youngest daughter was four years old, she would run in a circle through the kitchen, living room, dining room, and foyer screaming at the top of her lungs, “I CAN’T STOP! I CAN’T STOP!” and she couldn’t. Bouncy Girl last night reminded me of her. She blocked our view, was distracting, and not someone I would willing chose to sit behind (and be afraid to sit in front of lest she spill her beer). We asked Bouncy Girl a couple times to not lean so much and everything. We could tell she tried, but just couldn’t manage. It was different than the Masshole Boston Bruins fans two weeks ago. We wanted to see the game, but we were also being entertained by the show she was putting on. It was quite bizarre. Then, as the overtimes melted into more overtimes, she lost some steam and turned into the Not Quite As Bouncy Girl. It was alright.
For the broader Semifinals series, I’m a little surprised at how optimistic I am after that loss. Over the past year or two, almost every time the Capitals have taken a lead in a game there has been a tension in the air that, somehow, the Capitals would find a way to cough up that lead. For the few years before that, when the Capitals were playing dynamic, exciting hockey, being down a couple goals was never a worry. The Young Guns carried the air of “We got this,” and would pull out super exciting finished on a regular basis. Never any worry.
It’s probably just me, but that feels like the feeling in the air again. The current Dale Hunter brand hockey sure isn’t exciting like the Bruce Boudreau era, but what we want are wins, right? At least in the playoffs. So the Capitals are down 2-1 in the series. Braden Holtby and Matt Hendricks and everyone else last night sure were playing with the “Don’t worry, I got this” attitude.
Or maybe I’m just fooling myself.
To read more stuff about the game, you know where to go: Russian Machine, Japer’s Rink, District Sports Page, Ed Frankovic, and On Frozen Blog. Unfortunately, it looks like the box score was too big for Capitals Outsider to handle, so none of that. 🙁
A benefit of being late to post photos is that others have had a chance to post theirs. Check out Cheryl’s, Tom’s and Jen’s photos. And look at mine below or on flickr. |
By Pam Martens: February 11, 2013
Senator Chuck Grassley set off a media uproar on Friday when he reported that President Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, had owned a Citigroup investment housed at a Cayman Islands building that President Obama has previously suggested was a tax scam due to almost 19,000 corporations being registered at that address. Lew had worked as a Deputy Secretary in the State Department for almost two years before he sold the investment in 2010 after returning to government service from Citigroup.
The response from the White House has been that Lew made this disclosure known to the Senate for his confirmation hearing in 2010 and the Senators didn’t raise any issues with it.
We first reported Lew’s investment in the Citigroup Venture Capital International (CVCI) private equity fund on January 14 of this year. In that report, we attached the financial disclosure report that Lew had provided to the U.S. Senate for vetting his nomination for Director of the Office of Management and Budget on September 16, 2010. Our finding:
“A review of documents submitted to the U.S. Senate Budget Committee for Lew’s confirmation hearing on September 16, 2010 to become Director of the Office of Management and Budget indicates Lew’s financial ties to Citigroup continued long after he joined the Obama administration. The public is being kept in the dark about the extent of Lew’s winnings at the Citigroup casino and its heads we win, tails you lose dealer tables.
“One section of the documents refers to ‘Business Relationships’ and indicates that Lew had been a limited partner from 2007 through the date of the hearing on September 16, 2010 in the CVCI Private Equity Fund. There is nothing in these documents to enlighten either the Senators or the public that CVCI is an acronym for Citi Venture Capital International, a unit of Citigroup investing billions in foreign companies in hopes of making its limited partners very wealthy. (A limited partner in a private equity fund is synonymous with being an investor in the fund.)”
Lew is still not coming clean on this investment. According to the Washington Post, Lew is currently telling the U.S. Senate Finance Committee which will vet his nomination for U.S. Treasury Secretary this Wednesday, that his investment in the Cayman Islands fund amounted to $56,000. But in Citigroup’s proxy filings, the company says “Citi matches each dollar invested by an employee with an additional two-dollar commitment to each fund, or feeder fund, in which an employee has invested, up to a maximum of $1 million.” The matching funds are a loan which the employee repays when he sells his position, keeping the return minus any interest on the low cost loan.
According to the financial disclosure form that Lew filed on January 11, 2009, his investment in CVCI was $50,001 to $100,000 and Citigroup had added $100,000 to $250,000. Now that we know Lew himself invested $56,000, that would mean that his total investment in the Cayman Islands fund was his $56,000 plus $112,000 from Citigroup for a total of $168,000.
Lew is now saying he took a loss of $1582 on his $56,000 position. His 2010 financial disclosure form shows he sold the investment on November 18, 2010; that was his very last day at the State Department prior to taking his post as Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The question is not just why Lew didn’t have a problem investing in the Cayman Islands, it is also why Lew felt no ethical conflict in accepting a $950,000 bonus from Citigroup just prior to taking his post at the State Department on February 4, 2009. At that point in time, Lew knew full well that Citigroup was an insolvent institution and the money he accepted was taxpayer money and a highly improper gift to him. His division was at the core of Citigroup’s collapse. |
by Marie Hicks
A working-class woman from East London invented computer dating more than half a century ago.
An excerpt from an article on Operation Match in Look magazine from February 1966.
Scrolling through pictures, swiping right or left on a touchscreen, effortless and nearly instant contact in the event of a match… these are the experiences that define contemporary computer dating. But computer dating has been around for far longer than Tinder, Grindr, or even the personal computer.
The first computer dating systems looked something like this: Your preferences were written down, usually in questionnaire form. They were punched onto cards. You received a printout with addresses, so you could write to your matches. Or perhaps, if you were lucky, a phone number. No pictures, and no information about their preferences, were included.
The standard history of computer dating claims that it was invented, like so many other things, at Harvard University. By young people, of course, who were definitely men and, it seems to go without saying, white. In the 1960s, a computer dating service called Operation Match appeared to take the world by storm. It began by matching up students at Harvard, and then quickly moved on to advertising and selling its services nationwide—much like OkCupid and Facebook (which began life as Facemash, a Hot or Not knockoff) did decades later.
In popular lore, Operation Match and its founders created computer dating. This narrative gives the impression that it was young men like these, and their randy, envelope-pushing genius, that caused us to think seriously about the up-till-then preposterous idea of having sex with the help of cold, impersonal machines for the first time. As anybody who has ever seen a picture of an old vibrator in an early 20th century Sears Roebuck catalog knows, this was certainly not the case. But what many do not know is that the accepted history of computer dating is not true. Or, to put it more charitably: it's a confection.
The prevailing account of computer dating’s origins is the same kind of stylized informational portrait that you might put up on an online dating website. It hides a lot and only shows the things that you think people want to see. Brilliant young men of privileged backgrounds taking a risk by applying machines to a realm about as far away from cold, hard, technological logic as you could get—this makes for a good story, and one which we are primed to hear, because it plays to our cultural expectations. Yet the real story, warts and all, is much more interesting. And it helps us understand why computer dating is what it is today—why we love it, loathe it, need it, and fear it in nearly equal measure.
No Meetcute
In 1953 a young woman named Joan Ball stepped out of a mental hospital in England. Her mother had beaten her and ended up abandoning her—to say nothing of verbally and psychologically abusing her. When she ended up in the hospital, she found more of the same.
In an era before mental illness was well-understood, and when young women were routinely incarcerated in mental hospitals for everything from sexual misbehavior to hysteria, many hospitals meant to serve the needs of the mentally ill were instead warehouses for people who—ill or not—had somehow stepped out of the bounds of social norms. Joan suffered physical abuse at the hands of her mother, who, it seems clear, was mentally ill herself. After struggling for years with a difficult home life, it was Joan’s eventual refusal to take further abuse that caused her mother to involuntarily commit her. Yet the hospital was so bad that once there, all she wanted was to go home. When she finally got out, however, there was no home for her to return to: she was no longer welcome in her parents’ home, and likely would not have wanted to go back even if they had agreed to take her.
Joan left the hospital disoriented and disheartened. At nineteen, she felt like her life might be over before it started, forever marked by the stigma of having been involuntarily committed. Fortunately, a work-placement program run by the hospital helped her get a job, and though she couldn’t return home, her Aunt Maud and Uncle Ted took her in.
The road ahead would not be easy. Always the class clown at school, Joan knew it was better to hide her insecurities and weaknesses than to ask for help. Joan could not read easily or write well, nor could she figure out numbers and arithmetic. She was smart but extremely dyslexic, at a time when dyslexia was mostly unknown—people called her stupid instead, if they had the chance. So Joan made sure they never did. Hiding her disability as she started work, Joan pulled herself up by her bootstraps, asking help from no one.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the culture of Britain was bottled-up and buttoned-down. The so-called “swinging Sixties” notwithstanding, London was a conservative place where women were not allowed to wear trousers to work without causing a scandal. Miniskirts might be all right, but letting women wear men's clothes or do men's work—running a business, for instance, or rising into management—was still outside the realm of respectability, and usually outside the realm of possibility, for most women.
This was why, after a few years working as a shop girl, Joan decided that she'd had enough. As a transitional move, she took a job at a "marriage bureau" (think non-computerized dating service) and, to her surprise, found that she had a great knack for pairing people up. A “people person” and quick study when it came to character, Joan found that when trying to make matches you didn't ask people what they wanted in another person—you asked them what they didn't want. The rest was negotiable. Within a few years, Joan decided to start her own marriage bureau.
Across the pond, at about the same time, the United States was undergoing a sexual revolution of its own. And, like the British one, its results for women were uneven. Yes, they now had the freedom of the birth control pill and the sexual empowerment of the miniskirt. But in many ways, women were objects, not subjects, of this new sexual paradigm shift.
Women's bodies were even more likely to be represented as sex objects in advertisements or considered sex objects in their relationships. Suddenly, such behavior on the part of men was no longer considered boorish but in vogue and liberating. Hugh Hefner had made a career of acting like a boyish rake while being a full-grown man. Though some people were disgusted by this cultural turn, that disgust only fueled Hefner’s appeal in the eyes of young men looking to escape straight-laced suburbia and get what they thought the world owed them. This was the cultural message that many young men—and young women—were receiving from all sides. By the 1960s, Playboy was even on the shelves of the Harvard library.
As Playboy arrived at Harvard, three undergraduates were hatching a plan to score women without all the hassle of getting to know them first. Jeff Tarr, Dave Crump, and Vaughan Morrill (along with a Cornell dropout named Doug Ginsberg) had come to the conclusion that college mixers were "a particular social evil"—awkward events that were half cocktail party, half dance, and often all disappointment. What could be done to short-circuit this painful process of meeting women?
One way would’ve been to integrate Harvard’s undergraduate spaces. In the 1960s, Harvard remained an all-male institution, with Radcliffe College as its all-female counterpart. Harvard students and “Cliffies” took classes together, but women were banned from Harvard’s undergraduate library and its dormitories. Even the dining halls were restricted: women could only enter escorted, and only at certain times.
But these three young Harvard men were opposed to integration. After all, that would just make the indignity of the coed mixer a daily occurrence. They needed to find another solution.
Fake It ‘Til You Make It
Despite being dyslexic, Joan Ball—like many smart people with disabilities—was extremely good at running a business. Her new marriage bureau flourished, even though the early 1960s was a difficult time for such an undertaking. So suspicious of sexual impropriety was “straight” society that most people assumed marriage bureaus were fronts for prostitution—companies that matched men and women for a fee sounded awfully suspect.
For this reason, Joan had a devil of a time advertising her new endeavor. No respectable newspapers wanted to publish ads for this unseemly type of establishment. So Joan used her creativity and went one better than print media. The people likely to use her service would already be somewhat edgy, and somewhat marginalized, so why not meet them where they were? That was how, in the mid-1960s, her ads ended up sailing across the airwaves, over the water, and illegally coming into the United Kingdom.
In the 1960s, all news media—and, by extension, entertainment—was regulated by the British government. In part an artifact of the war, and in part the historical result of a strong centralized government, media regulation restricted not just what was said on the BBC, but also what was sung and played. This meant no rock 'n' roll on the radio—or anything else that would be offensive to the (imagined) British public.
So an enterprising group of young people decided to set up their own radio stations and play the music they wanted to hear. These illegal pirate radio stations operated in defiance of the BBC, which put them at risk of being shut down by the government. This was how they ended up on boats off the coast of the British Isles, broadcasting from international waters.
The "pop pirates," as they were called, transmitted from rickety ships that floated back and forth in the English Channel—sometimes just barely. Their weak signals (stronger at night due to lower interference) reached the radio sets of young and old Britons hungry for a new sound. The pirates’ broadcasts didn't come for free, however. They needed funding to stay afloat—pun intended—and the best way to earn money was to advertise. And so they were more than happy to take Joan’s advertisements for a service that, if anything, matched their sensibilities and worldview.
Advertising with the pop pirates made a business that could've seemed like a sad last resort for the lovelorn seem new, edgy, and exciting. Joan’s business began to grow. But before long, it became clear that bespoke matchups couldn’t keep pace with her growing customer base. She needed something else.
False Firsts
Back at Harvard, the young men were cooking up an idea for a business. Or rather, copying one. They had heard about computer dating systems in continental Europe. In a few Scandinavian countries, enterprising men and women with access to computers—often time-shared ones at local universities—had been arranging events where people were matched up according to their interests by computer, and then invited to a dance to meet their matches.
What if they did the same, but nixed the dance? They called their venture “Operation Match.” All they had to do was find a computer, and in the era of time-sharing, this wasn’t hard. Mainframes were huge and expensive, but they operated on a pay-to-play model. Timesharing allowed people to buy time to run their programs on a computer that they never would have been able to afford otherwise. (Much like we use the cloud today to do things that would be impossible using only the limited computing infrastructure that we personally own.)
The three young men could outsource the coding of the program, and then buy time on a mainframe to run it. (Interestingly, when interviewed years later, none of the Operation Match founders could recall the name of the freelance programmer they actually hired to write the program, and as a result, there is no way of telling how—or if—the program actually worked.) They would distribute questionnaires about romantic and social preferences to their fellow students, then hire a team of “secretaries” to transfer the information onto punch cards to input the data into the computer. Finally, they would use their program to match customers up with each other.
Because it was Harvard, this seemed scampish and irrepressible rather than crude and sleazy. After all, if Harvard students were doing it, it must be smart—and it certainly couldn't be disreputable. Their endeavor attracted publicity more because of who they were than because of what they were doing. The fledgling business got press not only from the campus newspaper and other local news sources—it also received free national advertising on CBS television, thanks to a fellow student’s family connection with the producer of the quiz show To Tell The Truth.
But, to tell the truth, long before Operation Match ever ran its first match-up program, Joan Ball had come to the conclusion that computers were the way of the future in dating. And not because there were too few prospects, but because there were too many.
She needed help bringing people together in a logical way, at a large scale, so that they could go off and do illogical things at a small scale. She needed to balance the personal and the impersonal, the rational and the romantic, in order to make it work. So she started asking people to write down what they didn't want—this time in a more rigid format that could be quantified. The rest, after all, remained negotiable. Despite the idea that computer dating was somehow “revolutionary” or only for the young, it was divorcees, widowers, and older unmarried people who mostly answered her call.
In 1964, Joan ran the first successful commercial computer dating match-up in either the UK or the US without all the fanfare later attached to Operation Match—but with more real-world success. Joan also took advantage of time-shared computer resources to run her program but, as in the case of Operation Match, the name of the programmer who coded it has been lost.
Yet Joan created the program, in the sense that she designed it and determined the logical flow of how it worked. It would not focus on matching people up through their similarities, but rather according to what they did not want. In other words, her program took strong negative feelings into account first when determining matches.
It seemed to work. In fact, Joan’s first run at computer dating was so commercially successful that she immediately changed the name of her business from the Eros Friendship Bureau to the St. James Computer Dating Service. The name change trumpeted the importance of computing to her service at a time when this sort of futuristic take on romantic match-ups could still well have been a business risk.
By 1965, she had changed the name again to fully reflect her computer-centric model: Com-Pat, short for “computerized compatibility,” was born. Joan initially ran what she called the “Com-Pat I” program, the first iteration of the software. It was successful, but like any good systems analyst, she saw room for improvement. By 1970 “Com-Pat II” was using better data, a larger user pool, and incorporating what Ball had learned from tweaking version 1.0 over the course of several years.
About a year after Ball began her computer dating service, Operation Match ran its first program to match up men and women. The many college students who applied, both at Harvard and at other universities, received letters with the names and contact information of all of their matches. But Operation Match was unsustainable. Even with the free national publicity they had gotten, the three undergrads had underestimated the amount of work, time, and trouble that the business would require.
Getting women by computer was a lot harder than they had hoped. Soon it wasn't fun anymore. As the shock value wore off, and Operation Match became just another business, its reason for existing—to find its founders dates—evaporated. It shut down after a few years, and the young men moved on to other pursuits more in line with their middle-class upbringings and their Harvard pedigrees.
Before they closed Operation Match, however, a visitor from the UK heard about them. John Patterson had recently graduated from the University of London with a degree in mechanical engineering. Unsure of what he wanted to do with his life, he left England for America, and while visiting friends at Harvard, he learned about computer dating. It might've been Operation Match, or it might've been another computer dating service that had sprung into existence on campus at about the same time. Nevertheless, Patterson was hooked. He knew what he wanted to do now and he felt sure he could make a lot of money doing it.
Sex Ex Machina
The 1960s had been good for Joan Ball, but by the early 1970s, things started to fall apart. Ball was a working-class girl from hardscrabble East London, and lacked the safety net that her more affluent contemporaries enjoyed. With no one to bail her out in times of scarcity, little stood between success and disaster.
The UK was in an increasingly grim economic situation. The pound had been devalued several times, and despite assurances from the government that the economy was on the mend, it didn't feel that way to most workers or small-business owners. Wracked by national strikes and widespread discontent, the nation literally shut down for a time when coal miners’ work stoppages resulted in such a shortage of fuel that neither government nor industry could function.
In the midst of this, Com-Pat’s telephone number got misprinted in the telephone directory, which severely damaged the business until the mistake could be corrected. Worse yet, one of the major newspapers that carried Com-Pat’s ads suddenly decided to change its advertising policy and drop them. So imagine Joan's horrified surprise when she entered the London Tube one day to see ads for a computer dating service plastered on the train. A new company called Dateline had burst on the scene—and computer dating was about to change dramatically.
John Patterson made a big splash with Dateline. He had several advantages: he both learned from his predecessors’ mistakes and benefited from their innovations. By the time Dateline came along, companies like Com-Pat had already softened the resistance of advertisers to the idea of computer dating and helped sell the public on the concept.
Patterson wasted no time in using this cultural capital, immediately positioning his service as a kind of sex ex machina. While Com-Pat ran advertisements that promised people would meet their “true match,” Dateline ran ads that positioned their service as an “adventure.” Patterson’s questionnaires had more to do with sexual preferences and sexual compatibility than Compat’s personality-based approach.
When he got flack, Patterson doubled down, creating another service that was even more sexually explicit in its questions. That service asked users how sexually experienced they required their partners to be, along with which specific sex acts customers had engaged in previously, and which ones they wished to perform in the future.
Yet when asked for details on how his service worked, Patterson shrugged off the question. He told the London Times in 1972 that even if his clients had nothing else in common, at least they had in common the fact that they had all joined Dateline. But had they? In 1969 he was arrested and convicted of fraud and conspiracy for trying to sell a list of young women to men who were looking for prostitutes. Patterson assured the men that all of these women were "good to go." Whether these women had signed up for his service, or whether he had simply collected their names out of the phone book, was unclear. What was clear was that the women did not know he was using their names in this fashion.
Though Patterson was convicted and somewhat disgraced, this setback didn't deter him. But it didn't seem to teach him much, either. Throughout its existence, a veneer of sleaze plagued Dateline. Women customers often complained of being matched up with men they had nothing in common with, or whose questionnaire preferences were in direct opposition to theirs. This was ironic, considering how thorough Patterson’s questionnaire was—it asked people for information that would be "Big Brother’s Dream,” in the words of the Times of London. By contrast, Joan Ball’s more conservative and much shorter questionnaire seemed to result in better matches.
Ball had continued to struggle as Britain became mired in the economic stagnation of the 1970s. Her business, which focused on a smaller, more curated pool of users than Patterson’s, became increasingly hard to sustain. Patterson was a shrewd businessman and a smart promoter, and Dateline grew by leaps and bounds after its initial troubles. Ball, meanwhile, was sidelined with both personal problems and debt. Soon, she wanted out.
Ball and Patterson had met each other—they had been on television together and were always interviewed for the same newspaper stories about computer dating. Ball was Patterson’s only real competitor, and he knew her business was sound. So when Ball called Patterson one day in 1974 and offered him the opportunity to buy her business on the condition that he pay the £2000 of debt that Com-Pat had accrued as part of the deal, Patterson took a taxi across London in a flash to sign the papers.
All’s Well That Ends
From there, Ball went on to other pursuits and much self-reflection. Though she had run a business to make other people happy, she wasn't very happy herself. Finally diagnosed late in life with dyslexia, she felt relieved to know her inability to write or to do math wasn't a character flaw. Still, she felt as though she had spent her life hiding her shortcomings. She had been locked in an "emotional dungeon” of her own making, as she put it, even while she ran a business that helped other people escape theirs. Ever independent, and refusing to marry despite having long romantic relationships with men, Ball was the prototypical "new woman.” Unfortunately for her, she came on the scene about a decade before women like her were culturally accepted.
Patterson, for his part, continued on to great success. To this day, Dateline is the longest-running computer dating service in the Anglo-American world. When Patterson died he was a millionaire many times over, and had been married several times. It was one of his ex-wives who found him in his bathtub, dead of complications related to alcoholism, in 1997 at the age of fifty-two.
Good Ol’ Fashioned Computer Dating
From Joan Ball to the Operation Match partners to John Patterson, the real story of computer dating is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The most successful computer dating entrepreneurs understood that their businesses entrenched existing norms rather than overturned them. Ball’s Com-Pat succeeded early on in large part because it did not push people outside of their comfort zone—it simply gave them what they wanted and expected in a more efficient way. Likewise, Patterson’s Dateline came on the scene at a time in the swinging Sixties and Seventies when people were already apt to be more adventurous—and open to accepting a higher level of risk in their dating lives.
Mainframes made matches but they also made mincemeat of people’s hopes, in much the same way that apps and online dating sites do today. One 1960s-era computer dating service sent its own employees out on dates with women, and had the men propose to their unsuspecting marks, because the company’s business model did not require women to pay until after getting a marriage proposal. Within the past few years, OkCupid has admitted to experimenting on its users, matching them up randomly in order to see if the company’s algorithm actually worked any better than random pairings.
Earlier computer dating companies were the subject of numerous complaints to the British fair trading practices bureau, as well as to American better business bureaus. Complainants, who were mostly women, reported that computer dating services did not work, or that they took their money without sending them out on dates, or that they intentionally matched up incompatible people just for profit. There were also, of course, more serious charges that involved physical and sexual assault. Technology is only ever as good as the social context that creates it—and sometimes it is much worse.
The most revolutionary elements of dating technologies—like instantaneous online communication or millions-deep user pools—did not come until much later. But this mattered little since these innovations still masked socially regressive norms. Ball’s service explicitly did not match up people of different races or religions. Patterson’s service sometimes did, but only due to “glitches” in the software. It often provoked customer complaints. Today, computer dating is still mired in the social strictures that govern “real-life” dating—most online dating sites focus on matching like with like and many even collect homogeneous user groups (think eHarmony.com) to further ensure that outcome.
In that sense, early computer dating has much in common with today’s technologies. The birth of computer dating didn’t demolish social conventions so much as it reinscribed them into a new technological order. Heteronormativity, sexism, racism, classism, and capitalism have played a much larger role in computer matchmaking’s history than technological breakthroughs.
The fact that these aspects of computer dating’s origins have been largely submerged says as much about what we want as about what the technology’s pioneers actually did. We see early computer dating as quaint, impossibly utopian, or revolutionary not because it was, but because we want it to be. Seeing it this way helps us maintain the fiction that technology, rather than law or government, is the most important factor in creating social change.
Like our online matches, we want our history not to upset our expectations or our worldview. We want progress to be the result of discrete inventions, rather than the outcome of the messy process of trying to integrate the technical with the social. We wish computer dating would deliver on its promise to solve one of life’s great struggles. But as anyone who has ever shopped for companionship by computer knows, the truth always leads somewhere different than the fiction invited us to go.
Knowing the real history of computerized dating helps us see that this messiness is nothing new: using a computer to solve loneliness was always fraught and complicated. Perhaps this makes us feel—as we sweatily swipe left on another face in the wee hours of the morning—that we aren't so alone after all. We are not living through a disruption or witnessing a break from the past so much as we are participants in a longer techno-emotional history that existed before we were born and will continue after we are dead. Computer dating may seem new, but in fact it has been around, warts and all, for more than half a century now. It’s time we updated its profile a bit.
Marie Hicks is a historian of technology and a professor working on the intersection of gender, sexuality, technology, and power. Her new book from MIT Press, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (2017), explains why gender discrimination wrecks economies. Read more at mariehicks.net.
This piece appears in Logic's second issue, Sex. To order the issue, head on over to our store—or better yet, subscribe!
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Warn the neighbors and anybody else who will listen: The FAA and FBI are cracking down on people who intentionally point laser lights at aircraft in flight, launching dozens of investigations and charging nearly 30 alleged perpetrators since stepping up enforcement last summer. A new law enacted in February makes doing so a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison.
The FAA said on Wednesday that the number of laser incidents nationwide rose from 2,836 in 2010 to 3,592 last year – as a result, FAA investigators and attorneys are now being told that warning notices and counseling are not strong enough punishments.
“Shining a laser at an airplane is not a laughing matter,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “It’s dangerous for both pilots and passengers, and we will not tolerate it.”
The maximum civil penalty for one laser strike is $11,000, but the FAA is levying fines against some individuals for multiple laser incidents, with $30,800 being the highest penalty proposed to date. The FAA wants “moderately high” civil penalties for inadvertent violations, and maximum penalties for deliberate violations. If a pilot or mechanic shines a laser light at an aircraft in flight, the FAA will likely yank the perp’s certificate, the agency warned.
The newest handheld lasers sold on the Internet are quite powerful (far more so than the simple laser pointers you can buy for a few dollars at your local Walgreen’s) and can cause permanent physiological eye damage, particularly to the retina. That’s why the U.S. enacted a new law on February 14 making it a crime to shine a laser at an aircraft in flight. People convicted of shining lasers at airplanes now face up to five years in prison and $250,000 in fines.
And yet laser incidents continue to occur on a record pace. Just this past March, after the new law was enacted, a Florida man was arrested for shining lasers at airliners two dozen times as they took off from Orlando International Airport. He admitted to the crimes, but said he shined the lasers at the airplanes because he suffers from severe anxiety brought on by jet noise. The irony, of course, is that this man now may get plenty of peace and quiet inside a prison cell.
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In today’s blog I will describe the techniques that we used to make Basher Beatdown, a fast paced game, work with 10 fps. A lot of info will be about the way we handle data on the controller itself but in the end we will also go over some gameplay changes that were made.
1. Optimizing data send
Sending data every 100ms (10fps) Because we make use of a joystick, which is permanently used by the user and feels the worst if it doesn’t work properly, the most sensible thing to do at first is sending the input with the max fps allowed. The big problem here is that especially when a button is pressed the player can feel this delay. Pros Fastest possible stable input Cons Buttons aren’t responsive
Joystick data no equal to data when button was pressed Min fps Max fps Worst delay Best delay Button press 100ms 100ms Joystick change 10 10 100ms 100ms Quick joystick change 100ms 100ms
Sending data every 125ms (8fps) and send 2 buttons/sec immediately Because having to wait 100ms + send delay + 1 frame before the game notices that you pressed jump doesn’t really feel good, we changed the fps of the joystick to 8 so we had 2 fps to send a button when it’s pressed. Of course we also send the joystick data with the button data. Pros Button input is now as fast as possible
Joystick data equal to data when button was pressed Cons Joystick becomes less responsive Min fps Max fps Worst delay Best delay Button press 0 2 1ms 1ms Joystick change 8 8 125ms 125ms Quick joystick change 125ms 125ms
Reset joystick timer when button send With the previous rules the following could happen; 124ms after the last data was send we press a button after which the joystick and button data get send. Then 1ms later it’s been 125ms since the last joystick data was send so it gets send again. Since that isn’t needed we can optimize the data send by resetting the last send timer for the joystick Pros Button input is now as fast as possible
Joystick data equal to data when button was pressed
Possible room for extra button when joystick fps is saved by resetting timer Cons Joystick not responsive Min fps Max fps Worst delay Best delay Button press 0 2 + joystick send saved 1ms 1ms Joystick change 8 – saved by button send 8 125ms 125ms Quick joystick change 125ms 125ms
Only send data when direction angle difference > X When playing I noticed that in general a user doesn’t change the joystick all the time but quite often has the joystick pointed in the same direction for a while. By making sure that we don’t send (almost) identical data we can save 1 or 2 sending every second. (which leaves more room for buttons) Pros Button input is now as fast as possible
Joystick data equal to data when button was pressed
Possible room for extra button when joystick fps is saved by resetting timer
Possible room for extra button when joystick fps is saved by not sending duplicate data Cons Joystick not responsive Min fps Max fps Worst delay Best delay Button press 0 2 + joystick send saved 1ms 1ms Joystick change 8 – saved by button send – saved by duplicate data 8 125ms 125ms Quick joystick change 125ms 125ms
Don’t reset the last send timer when the data isn’t send because the angle was lower than X degree The biggest problem that we currently have is that the joystick still has a fastest response time of 125ms (except when send with a button). We can lower the ‘best delay’ of the joystick to 1ms if we don’t reset the last send timer but instead just keep waiting when the angle difference between the last set angle is > X. Pros Button input is now as fast as possible
Joystick data equal to data when button was pressed
Possible room for extra button when joystick fps is saved by resetting timer
Possible room for extra button when joystick fps is saved by not sending duplicate data
Certain cases where the joystick input becomes more responsive Cons Joystick not responsive Min fps Max fps Worst delay Best delay Button press 0 2 + joystick send saved 1ms 1ms Joystick change 8 – saved by button send – saved by duplicate data 8 125ms 1ms Quick joystick change 125ms 1ms
Immediately send data when big angle change is detected When playing the game with the previous rules feels much better than what we started with but there is still something that we must improve to make the game feel as good as we can; When doing a big change in direction it’s most notable that there’s a delay in what direction the character is going, since the delay can still be 124ms + delay + 1fps worst case. In order to fix this we handle the joystick input the same as a button when a big change in direction is detected. Pros Button input is now as fast as possible
Joystick data equal to data when button was pressed
Possible room for extra button when joystick fps is saved by resetting timer
Possible room for extra button when joystick fps is saved by not sending duplicate data
Certain cases where the joystick input becomes more responsive
Quick direction changes are send immediately Cons Still not truely 60fps? Min fps Max fps Worst delay Best delay Button press 0 2 + joystick send saved 1ms 1ms Joystick change 8 – saved by button send – saved by duplicate data 8 125ms 1ms Quick joystick change 1ms 1ms
2. Adjusting gameplay
Dealing with input delay
When playing the game it became apparent that navigating through the levels was quite hard because of the input delay, most notably it caused the players to just walk of platforms instead of jumping off the end. The fact that a virtual joystick isn’t as accurate as a normal joystick also made it much harder to navigate through the levels, especially because it would happen quite often that we would just hit the end of a platform when dashing.
Fixing the jump
In order to fix the jump we implemented some techniques described in this excelent blog by Yoann Pignole on Gamasutra. Most notable the “remember to jump” and the “still jump after drop” fixed the problems that we had.
Fixing the dash
In order to fix the dash we implemented Aim help in the game. When the user performs a dash we do a raycast in that direction, if the player is about to dash into a wall/platform but this can be prevented by a couple of degree that’s the direction the player jumps.
Redesigning the levels
Even with the jump and dash help it was still quite hard to navigate through the original Basher Beatdown levels (which were designed for the PC version with controllers. We decided to create special levels for AirConsole that included easier gameplay and that were easier to navigate by making bigger platforms and leaving bigger gaps between them. You can see the difference clearly in the below level comparison:
The original level
The AirConsole version |
Photo: Shutterstock
“My baby had a demon that has been riding her for about five or six years,” said [Kenisha] Martin-Nelson. “This is what happens when you don’t listen… I told my child two weeks ago God is going to put his hands on you and he’s going to sit you down.” The mother of Kaylan Ward , who is believed to have been struck by a vehicle and her body later recovered on I-10 in New Orleans, said these words to local news outlet WGNO when her daughter’s remains were found. While it is possible Martin-Nelson spoke out of grief, it is still difficult to hear a victim characterized this way. Martin-Nelson also said that her child was “rebellious” but later added her daughter did not deserve to die like this.Martin-Nelson believes her daughter was murdered and speaks in a religious rhetoric that frames her daughter’s death as penance from God. Essentially, she walks a thin line of blaming her daughter for her own death while contending that her daughter did not deserve to die in such a horrible way. Martin-Nelson is not the only one who exemplifies this contradiction.Just as when other Black women and girls are victims of crimes, many turn to the question always asked of the victim: what did she do? If Ward was murdered, then what did she do to deserve it? While Martin-Nelson called her daughter rebellious, others in social media outlets like Twitter labeled Ward as a fast-tailed girl, indicating that she got what she deserved.Sadly, Black women have to deal with this type of response whenever we find ourselves victimized. We have to go on the defensive and remind everyone, including other Black women and men, that we do not have to be perfect to deserve safety. Yet we find so many willing to accept when our bodies are abused, raped or murdered because Black women and girls’ bodies are devalued.Part of the reason we see Black women blamed when we are victims is respectability politics. As Ward’s mother shows, we believe Black girls who act out or do not conform to respectable lifestyles are simply waiting for something bad to happen and punishment is inevitable. However, this ignores the way we sexualize and deny Black girls childhoods from an early age in order to justify violence against them.Furthermore, as we sadly found with Arnesha Bowers , respectability does not save us. It does not prevent us from becoming victims. What Bowers’ situation tells us is that we are often victimized by the ones closest to us and trust the most. The horrific crime against her points to an ugly reality in which Black women and girls are preyed upon, especially when we know that perpetrators are likely to get away with or face minimum punishment for victimizing Black women and girls.This was definitely the terrifying reality when Daniel Holtzclaw’s crimes came to light. As an officer of the law, he intentionally sought out older Black women as his victims because he knew they were less likely to be believed. This is especially terrifying when we consider that Holtzclaw directly represents the institutional victimization of Black women.Knowing these things makes it even more painful when we hear that question, “What did she do?” whenever we find that a Black woman or girl has been victimized. We are moving out of that question of respectability when we hear the name of a Black male who has been the victim of violence, but we still look to Black women and girls to be an ideal of perfect femininity before we can say she did not deserve to die or be a victim. This occurs more so for trans Black women, who are even more likely to be victims, than cisgender Black women.When discussing violence against Black women it is important to remember two things: Black women experience race in a sexualized way and experience gender in a racialized way. Of course, other factors such as class and sexual orientation affect experiences differently, but Black women and girls are always perceived as having sexualized bodies at any age, which means we essentially get victim blamed for having bodies. Mikki Kendall has demonstrated this when starting Twitter discussions with hashtags focusing on fast-tailed girls ( #FastTailedGirls ) and the age many Black girls were when we first experienced street harassment ( #FirstHarassed ).How awesome would it be to flip that question “what did she do” to “why did her attacker believe she deserved to be a victim?” Is this person so aware that we care so little about Black women and girls that they feel free to make us victims with little or no fear of repercussions? And will we ever take to heart that ALL Black girls’ lives matter whether we are valedictorians, college graduates, middle class and cishet or working class, sex workers, atheist and LGBTQ, categories that are not always mutually exclusive by the way.Kaylan Ward did not deserve to die whether her death was an accident or a homicide. Rebellion in teens is nothing new and her death is not a punishment from God for her rebellious phase. Kaylan Ward was a victim of violence. Her life should be respected. All Black girls matter and deserve love and protection no matter their station in life. Black girls do not get abused, raped or murdered because they are “rebellious” or “fast.” They are victims and should not be blamed for crimes committed against them. |
Apple and Google have been attempting for years to entice customers to ditch cable television for set top boxes that deliver TV shows, movies and more via the internet. For the past year or so, Intel has also quietly been working on a top-secret set-top box that could not only be better than what Apple, Google, and even Microsoft offer today, but also kill the cable industry as we know it.
This set-top box, said by industry insiders to be available to a limited beta of customers in March, will offer cable channels delivered “over the top” to televisions anywhere there is an Internet connection regardless of provider. (Microsoft Mediaroom, for example, requires AT&T’s service, and Xbox has limited offerings for Comcast and FiOS customers). For the first time, consumers will be able to subscribe to content per channel, unlike bundled cable services, and you may also be able to subscribe per show as well. Intel's set-top box will also have access to Intel’s already existing app marketplace for apps, casual games, and video on demand. Leveraging the speed of current broadband, and the vast shared resources of the cloud, Intel plans to give customers the ability to use “Cloud DVR”, a feature intended to allow users to watch any past TV show at any time, without the need to record it ahead of time, pause live tv, and rewind shows in progress.
Intel had hoped that GoogleTV and AppleTV would spur demand for Intel chips, but that having failed they poached much of Microsoft’s Mediaroom team. Much of the direction of Mediaroom came from the leadership of Jim Baldwin, who is now VP of this Intel initiative.
At Microsoft, Jim demonstrated that the technology to enable customers to watch TV over the internet using any device was feasible, but content licensing, the goals of ISP’s and bandwidth limitations previously stood in the way.
“In creating Mediaroom, we brought together key emerging technologies to create the world’s most modern television system: better video compression, higher access network bandwidth, lower cost single-chip devices, cloud computing; and added to it some great software to make it all work together seamlessly with a great user experience. Our goal was to provide technology to operators that will continue to delight consumers as the world of internet-delivered content unfolds.”
According to an Intel job posting, Jim joined Microsoft in 1997 as a part of the WebTV acquisition, and Jim has been a key architect of digital video technology for various products including the WebTV Plus, Echostar Dishplayer, DirecTV UltimateTV and Microsoft TV.
Along with hiring the right key players with the expertise needed to develop a revolutionary set-top box, Intel also has the technology to create a product unlike its competitors. Intel has been providing chips for set top boxes since the days of Akimbo, which had a similar vision as far back as 2005. Back then, though, no one had digital rights to content - and up until now, no one wanted to risk unbundling the channels. This is clearly the biggest barrier for Intel - but since Intel is used to betting billions on chip design, it has allocated a budget significantly larger than Apple or Google's. While Silicon Valley measures investments in tens of millions, Hollywood often drops more than $100 million into a single movie. Intel came to the table knowing this, and so was able to negotiate the licensing agreements with Hollywood that other tech giants have never been able to.
Intel has made it clear to Hollywood they are serious about this product and dedicated to its longevity. Intel is also prepared to invest heavily in making it a success. In contrast, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have always viewed Hollywood as something of a hobby. (Steve Jobs even said as much of Apple TV). As Intel has approached Hollywood with much more dedication (and dollars), this is likely the single reason that Intel, more than any company before it, has the potential to really bring to consumers the things we have never seen in online content before, such as live sports, release schedules that match broadcast, and first episode through current libraries for video on demand.
Update: Intel is scheduled to hold a press event at CES, but a spokesperson has clarified that the company will not be announcing anything related to this product or holding any public demos. |
The 200th episode of the show, which was broadcast last week, included a satirical discussion about whether an image of Mohammed could be shown.
South Park, which was created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, previously portrayed a cartoon image of Mohammed in 2001 but the episode is now rarely seen.
The posting said: "We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them." The site also features a sermon by Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemeni-American preacher, in which he talks about assassinating those who have "defamed" Mohammed.
Contacted by Fox News the author of the post, Abu Talhah al Amrikee, said he wrote the entry to "raise awareness." He told Fox News: "It's not a threat, but it really is a likely outcome.They're going to be basically on a list in the back of the minds of a large number of Muslims. It's just the reality." |
A Rwandan man was found guilty Friday of war crimes during his country's 1994 genocide, becoming the first person convicted under a new Canadian law that allows residents to be tried for crimes committed abroad.
Desire Munyaneza, 42, faces a possible life sentence. He was found guilty of all seven charges against him that include genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for his alleged role in the rape and slaughter of at least 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda.
"The educated son of an important bourgeois family in Butare, Desire Munyaneza was at the forefront of the genocidal movement," Quebec Superior Court Justice Andre Denis said in his landmark ruling that followed some six months of deliberations.
The judge found that Munyaneza sought to destroy the Tutsi ethnic group in Butare and the surrounding area.
"To that end, he intentionally killed Tutsi, seriously wounded others, caused them serious physical and mental harm, sexually assaulted many Tutsi women and generally treated Tutsi inhumanely and degradingly." Denis noted in his written decision.
The judge also said Munyaneza was among a group of assailants who killed hundreds of Tutsi refugees at a church.
Munyaneza, a Hutu, is the first defendant to be tried under the 7-year-old War Crimes Act.
"I'm very happy he was found guilty. I want to thank and congratulate Canada," Caesar Gashabeze, a genocide survivor, said outside court. "We have been waiting for this."
Munyaneza was living in Toronto when he was arrested in October 2005 after reports that he had been seen circulating among Canada's Rwandan community. At the time, African Rights, a Rwandan group that has documented the genocide, linked Munyaneza to key figures indicted by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
During his trial, more than 66 witnesses testified in Montreal, and in depositions in Rwanda, France and Kenya, often behind closed doors to protect their identities. Many accused Munyaneza, who was 27 at the time, of being a ground-level leader in a militia group that raped and murdered dozens.
Munyaneza's defense centered on claims that many of the witnesses' testimony was faulty and that many were unable to identify his prominent facial scar.
Defense lawyer Richard Perras said he would appeal. "The evidence did not justify a conviction," he said.
Canada denied Munyaneza refugee status in September 2000 and he has since lost several appeals. Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board also found there were reasons to believe he had participated in crimes against humanity.
Bruce Broomhall, an international criminal law professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal, said before the verdict that the case would add weight to the argument that Canada does not allow war criminals to reside in Canada.
A sentencing hearing was scheduled Sept. 9. |
We regret that we will no longer export Rosewood products outside of the U.S.A.
We really did try to make it work.
We met the challenge of the new CITES ruling head on, being one of the first guitar companies to receive the permit. We spent countless hours working with government agencies to wade through all the paperwork, trying to make sense of the rules and restrictions.
We worked out the logistics and cost of getting each item inspected and certified, but the bureaucracy and excessive time required to process rosewood for export turned out to be more than we could have imagined.
Delays in processing forced our international customers to endure months of waiting, and when the product finally arrived at their country, even with what was supposedly the proper paperwork, there were some instances where their items were still held or confiscated by customs officials.
If the worldwide governmental agencies can get a firm grasp on how the rules are interpreted, we will revisit this, but for now, we will no longer export Rosewood products outside of the U.S.A.
Any existing orders for Rosewood will be processed and shipped, but new no orders will be accepted.
Thanks for your continued support. |
cdrkf said: ↑ wyao said: ↑
Local Server multi-threading across planets and AIs
LZ4 compression for server mods
AI improvements and multi-threaded
Client and Server improvements Proper patch notes to come at a later time, but the major updates are as follows: Click to expand... You've managed to multi thread the simulation?!?! I'd be fascinated if the team could give an overview of what went into that, as that has the potential to totally change the scope and scale of the game, kudos! Click to expand...
Since nav and physics run on a per planet basis, it was a no-brainer to look into multi-threading those parts of the sim. So, each sim tick each planet gets to run its nav and physics update on its own thread (or, up to as many threads as are available, which depends on the number of cores you have).The copy sim history portion was another thing that just made sense to multi-thread. Since we are acting on each individual entity history there wasn't much overlap.Then came the AI. This was a little bit more complicated since the AIs share neural networks and they query the unit type database, which can cause data to change, but it works. Each AI gets its own thread (again, limited by CPU cores) to do it's update.Additionally, the history server update is also multi-threaded, since, like the copy sim history step, it is acting on individual entity histories. |
Mozilla is on track to release Firefox 6 next week, according to notes posted on the company's website.
Developers have signed off on Firefox 6 and anticipate no problems that could delay the Aug. 16 release of the browser upgrade, meeting notes show.
Firefox 6 mimics rivals Chrome and IE by highlighting the domain name in the address bar, one way to show users that they're on a legit site.
"On track with a few bugs still remaining. No concerns for Tuesday," the notes stated.
Mozilla has used a new rapid-release schedule since this spring. The schedule delivers a new version of Firefox every six weeks, a move many have compared to the pace Google has maintained for its Chrome browser for more than a year.
Firefox 5 shipped June 21, six weeks ago next Tuesday. Mozilla plans to deliver Firefox 7 on Sept. 27, and if the quick-release schedule holds, Firefox 8 on Nov. 8 and Firefox 9 on Dec. 20.
Firefox 6 includes several noticeable changes, including highlighting domain names in the address bar -- both Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 do something similar by boldfacing domain names -- and reducing startup time when users rely on Panorama, the browser's multi-tab organizer.
The Mozilla upgrade pace has upset some users, including corporations like IBM that have installed the open-source browser on tens of thousands of Windows PCs. Mozilla has not backed off the faster-release plan, but in response to enterprise complaints and concerns, established a committee to take feedback.
Also next week, Mozilla plans to release Firefox 3.6.20, an update that will include security patches and other fixes to the 2010 edition retained by about 1-in-3 Firefox users.
When Firefox 6 ships, users running Firefox 4 or Firefox 5 will be offered the new edition through the browser's update mechanism, which is triggered when the "About Firefox" dialog is opened.
As of the end of July, 48% of Firefox users were running Firefox 5, while just 11% were still on Firefox 4.
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.
See more articles by Gregg Keizer. |
The killings of Iranian nuclear scientists have prompted political analysts to assume during an interview with Sputnik that Israel could have been behind the sabotage of Tehran's atomic program. An Israeli academic argues that one cannot blame Tel Aviv for the assassinations. Meanwhile, an alleged Mossad agent has been sentenced to death in Iran.
"The only way to paralyze Iran or another country in any particular technological area is to destroy the country's science and liquidate its scientists," Emad Abshenas, an Iranian political analyst and editor-in-chief of the Iran Press newspaper, told Sputnik Persian, commenting on Iran's sentencing to death of a so-called "Mossad agent" who was supposedly behind the killings of several top nuclear physicists.
According to Abshenas, Iran is waging an information war with some countries, including Israel, while the Iranian special services "exercise strict control over those who are spying for Israel." The analyst underscored that "there are many people in Iran working for Israel and engaged in terrorist activities to undermine the national security of the country."
Iranian Nuclear Physicists as Target
© AFP 2018 / JACK GUEZ Israel Voices Readiness to Exchange Intel With Saudi Arabia to 'Face Iran'
The political analyst emphasized the importance of Iranian nuclear physicists for the country's atomic program. According to Abshenas, scientists and military technologies constitute the backbone of the country's military arsenal.
The analyst recalled that having invaded Iraq and Libya the US first of all killed and kidnapped the countries' scientists: "Those who were ready to leave the country were sent to the US, and those who were not ready were liquidated," he said.
"Although Iran has concluded a nuclear deal [the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)], [the country] has not lost its technologies," Abshenas emphasized.
Dr. Barhani, a political analyst specializing in Middle Eastern affairs, believes that Israel could have been behind the assassination of the Iranian nuclear physicists: "There have already been cases of Israel's involvement in killing scientists and they are not limited to Iran," he said referring to the fact that murders of nuclear scientists occurred in other countries, for instance, Egypt.
Barhani revealed that "the countries of the region, including Iran, have a number of measures to 'reduce' Israel's threat."
"One aspect is regional cooperation," the analyst explained. "The countries of the region have well experienced special services. Having established an exchange of information and coordinated their work, while using modern means of communication, they can better resist the influence of Israeli special services in the region."
'It Cannot Be Said That Israel Liquidated Iranian Scientists'
However, according to professor Vladimir Mesamed, a specialist on Iranian and Middle Eastern affairs at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "one cannot say that Israel liquidated [Iranian nuclear scientists]."
"Israel has never denied or confirmed accusations of killing scientists who worked in the nuclear energy sphere," professor Mesamed told Sputnik. "Foreign mass media speculated a lot that all those who were killed 8-10 years ago, including professor of Tehran University Muhammadi and other scientists, had been the targets of Israel."
It was alleged that Israel liquidated them because they were engaged in the development of Iran's nuclear program and therefore posed a threat to Tel Aviv, the academic noted.
"[However], it can't be said that Israel eliminated them, or that there was some agent working for the [Israeli national intelligence agency of] Mossad, whom the Iranians found and want to hold responsible for everything that happened," professor Mesamed stressed.
While Tel Aviv has always tried to hinder Iran's atomic program , it has never officially recognized its alleged involvement in the assassination of top Iranian nuclear scientists, the Israeli academic underscored.
On October 24, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi announced that the Islamic Revolutionary Court sentenced to death a person who allegedly handed over the data of dozens of experts involved in the Iranian nuclear program to Mossad.
"The person had several meetings with (Israeli intelligence agency) Mossad and provided them with sensitive information about Iran's military and nuclear sites in return for money and residency in Sweden," Dolatabadi said, as cited by Reuters, adding the alleged "Mossad agent" was involved in the assassination of about 30 nuclear and military scientists including Massoud Ali Mohammadi and nuclear engineer Majid Shahriari.
According to the media outlet, at least four Iranian scientists were killed between 2010 and 2012. Iranian authorities hanged one man in 2012 charging him with the killings and citing his alleged links to Israel. |
WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked legislation meant to close the pay gap between men and women, framing an election-year fight between the parties over whose policies are friendlier to women.
The bill was an attempt by Democrats to press what they see as their electoral advantage among women in the coming midterm elections, but they fell short of the 60 votes they needed to prevent a filibuster and advance the legislation.
“For reasons known only to them, Senate Republicans don’t seem to be interested in closing wage gaps for working women,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said in a floor speech.
Republican lawmakers have said that given existing anti-discrimination laws, the legislation is redundant and is a transparent attempt by Democrats to distract from President Obama’s much-criticized health care law. |
Hakeemullah and Waliur Rehman Mehsud, before the Pakistani Army launched the South Waziristan offensive.
The Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan’s top spokesman, Ihsanullah Ihsan, confirmed today that Waliur Rehman, the group’s deputy leader and emir in South Waziristan, was killed in a US drone strike yesterday. The Taliban vowed to avenge his death and also withdrew the prospects of peace talks with the newly elected Pakistani government.
Rehman, his deputy Fakhar-ul-Islam, and two Uzbeks were among seven people killed in yesterday’s strike at a compound in the village of Chashma just outside Miramshah in North Waziristan. The attack took place in an area administered by the Haqqani Network, the Pakistani Taliban subgroup that is backed by Pakistan’s military and Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and is closely allied with al Qaeda and other terror groups in the region. While the Haqqani Network is not officially part of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, it closely works with the group and shelters its leaders and fighters in North Waziristan.
The strike was the first in Pakistan in six weeks, and the first since Nawaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz political party came out on top in Pakistan’s parliamentary election on May 11. Sharif has indicated he wished to negotiate with the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan to end years of fighting in Pakistan’s tribal areas and the greater northwest.
Ihsan confirmed Rehman’s death during an interview with Dawn, and noted that any chance of talks with the government have died along with Rehman.
“We are suspending all kinds of contacts and revoke the peace talks offer with the government, soon we shall be responding with full force,” Ihsan said.
“On one hand the Pakistani government is advocating the mantra of peace talks, and on the other it is colluding with the United States and killing the Taliban leadership,” he continued.
While Pakistani news outlets have reported that a commander known as Khan Said and Sajana Mehsud succeeded Rehman, Ihsan told Dawn that a replacement has not yet been named as the group’s shura, or executive council, must meet before a decision is made.
“No I can not confirm yet, who will be taking over, the Taliban shura has not decided about it yet,” Ihsan told Dawn.
For years, Rehman, an influential and respected leader in the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan, served as both the deputy to Hakeemullah Mehsud and the group’s emir in the tribal agency. He has been involved in multiple terror attacks inside Pakistan and in neighboring Afghanistan, including the suicide attack at Combat Outpost Chapman at the end of December 2009 that killed seven CIA personnel, as well as in the failed Times Square car bombing in New York City on May 1, 2010.
The US Treasury Department added Rehman and Hakeemullah to the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists in September 2010, the same time that the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan was named as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The US also put out a $5 million reward for information leading to their capture and prosecution.
The Pakistani government placed an estimated $600,000 bounty out for Hakeemullah and Waliur in the fall of 2009. Both men are wanted for terrorist attacks against the military, police, the government, and civilians inside Pakistan. Despite the bounties for Hakeemullah and Waliur, and 18 other Taliban leaders, only one has been killed and another has been captured.
In recent years, the Pakistani government routinely claimed that Rehman and Hakeemullah were at odds, and sometimes violently so. For instance, government officials alleged that the two Taliban emirs tried to kill each other during a meeting to name the successor to Baitullah Mehsud, the emir who was killed in a US drone strike in August 2009. The two Taliban leaders denied the clash ever took place, and have appeared in Taliban propaganda seated side-by-side in an effort to dispel the government claims.
The US has killed two senior Taliban leaders in Pakistan’s tribal areas this year. In January, the drones killed Mullah Nazir, who led the Taliban faction in the Wazir areas of South Waziristan. He identified himself as an al Qaeda leader and waged jihad in Afghanistan. Although he was not a member of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, Nazir, like the Haqqanis, has provided shelter and support for the group.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.
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That's our dear friend Clarence, whom we adore," Abigail Thernstrom
said, proudly showing me the framed photograph of Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas that hangs above the fireplace in the office she shares
with her husband, Harvard University historian Stephan Thernstrom. She
added mischievously: "It's there to make reporters faint." Abigail
Thernstrom, a fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute and one of
America's most influential conservative intellectuals, had been talking
to a lot of reporters that week, frantically "doing press" for another
"dear friend"--Linda Chavez, whom George W. Bush had nominated to be his
labor secretary. Just a few days before I arrived at the Thernstroms'
red colonial house in Lexington, Massachusetts, Chavez had withdrawn her
nomination, under fire for hiring an illegal immigrant in her home.
Abigail Thernstrom, who serves on the board of Chavez's Center for
Equal Opportunity, an anti-affirmative action "research group" in
Washington, was still fuming: "She did not employ that woman. She
took in this--this was a battered woman! Linda is such a giving
person--you can't imagine. She's always taking people in, people in
trouble. I could never do what she does. Every summer, she hosts these
Fresh Air Fund kids and pays for their Catholic-school tuition."
Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom are best known as the authors of
America in Black and White, a 700-page tome on race relations that
identified racial preferences and black militancy as the main barriers
to achieving a colorblind society. Their new book, Getting the
Answers Right: The Racial Gap in Academic Achievement and How to Close
It, which will come out next year from Simon and Schuster, is almost
certain to be read by Rod Paige, President Bush's secretary of
education. "We're letting another generation of black and Hispanic kids
go by horribly educated, and I'm on a moral tear about that. I mean, it
just makes me furious," Abigail told me. A Marshall Plan for urban
schools, then? "No, you'd just be pouring money down the same sinkhole,"
said Abigail, who prefers the usual conservative medicine of vouchers
and draconian standards.
Lined with books and flooded with newspapers and magazines, the
Thernstroms' study has a messy vitality; it conveys a powerful
impression of intellectual camaraderie, the bedrock of their marriage of
over 42 years. But for this room, nothing in the house would suggest
that Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom are deeply intertwined in debates
over the future of affirmative action. Their walls are decorated with
modern art and pictures of their children: Melanie, the author of two
books of nonfiction, and Sam, a speechwriter for New York Governor
George Pataki. Their life in Lexington--an affluent, largely white
suburb of Boston that was covered in a blanket of snow when I visited
them in mid-January--could hardly seem more distant from the problem of
the color line.
Abigail--a short, bespectacled woman with gray hair--looks as if she
stepped out of an Edward Koren cartoon. She's highly excitable, acerbic
and fretful by turns, with a voice that warbles nervously from a throaty
bass to a falsetto screech. The day before I met her, Justice Ronnie
White had testified in the John Ashcroft hearings, which she said she
didn't want to "sound off on" because she hadn't been following them too
closely. "I caught a little bit of Ted Kennedy," she said, "and I just
wish he'd lower the decibel level." Abigail had recently returned from
Tallahassee, Florida, where, as a member of the United States Commission
on Civil Rights, she was investigating charges of irregularities at the
Florida polls in election 2000--irregularities that many believe cost
thousands of African Americans their votes and Al Gore the presidency.
"Mistakes were made, and there are better ways to run elections," she
said. "But do I think there was some deliberate effort there to keep
black voters from the polls? No, absolutely not."
Abigail's 1987 critique of the Voting Rights Act, Whose Votes
Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights, is a virtual
bible among conservative jurists, including Supreme Court Justices
Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas. A frequent visitor in Thomas's
chamber, Abigail has testified several times in the House against the
creation of "majority-minority" districts by the Justice Department.
Other voting-rights experts, notably Harvard Law School professor Lani
Guinier, have raised concerns that majority-minority districts result in
racial gerrymandering and have suggested new mechanisms like cumulative
voting. Abigail, however, has distinguished herself with her hostility
toward any method of promoting black and minority representation.
"Doors are wide open to black candidacies today," she claims. "Our
problem is not bigoted white voters (a relatively small minority), but a
paucity of black candidates willing to test the biracial electoral
waters." It is "racist," she says, to suggest that "only black
officeholders can represent black interests." When Bill Clinton
nominated Guinier to be his assistant attorney general in 1993, Abigail
called Clint Bolick, her friend at the conservative Institute for
Justice. Within hours, Bolick was smearing Guinier in The Wall Street
Journal as a "quota queen" with "breathtakingly radical views."
Before Guinier had a chance to correct these distortions, Clinton
dropped the nomination.
In addition to her affiliation with the Manhattan Institute, Abigail
serves on the boards of numerous other think tanks, including the
Institute for Justice and the Citizens' Initiative on Race and Ethnicity
(whose founders include Chavez and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao). She
sits on the Massachusetts State Board of Education, a predominantly
white group opposed to heroic efforts to overcome de facto public school
segregation. "How can we expect these kids to compete with my children?"
she told Boston Globe education reporter Muriel Cohen over lunch,
explaining her opposition to METCO, a program that buses 3,000
children--mostly blacks and Latinos--to suburban public schools like the
ones her children attended in Lexington.
Stephan Thernstrom, a tall, ruddy-faced man with a thick mustache,
has a softer disposition than his wife, who, as he puts it, "is fonder
of talking than I am." He's a self-described "lone wolf," a reader of
mystery novels who avoids faculty meetings and seldom ventures to
Harvard when he's not teaching except to go to the library or the squash
court. Reclining in an Eames chair with a Grateful Dead mug, he cuts a
retiring profile. Yet he is no less involved than his wife in the
campaign to roll back racial preferences. Ever since 1988, when he was
accused of insensitivity by a black student at Harvard, he has been
crusading against affirmative action as if it were a cancer eating away
at the sacred body of meritocracy. He has a lucrative side-gig as an
expert witness who argues against the expansion of what he regards as
minority entitlements in the drawing of electoral districts and in
school admissions. In 1996 he was deposed by the Center for Individual
Rights--a right-wing litigation group that has received money from the
eugenicist Pioneer Fund--in Hopwood v. State of Texas, the case
that struck down affirmative action in higher education in Texas,
Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Stephan told me test scores and grades alone should decide whether
students are admitted to college. But when I mentioned that George W.
Bush, whom he supported for president, was a poor test taker and an even
worse student, he said that Dubya's detractors "greatly exaggerate the
importance of academic intelligence and IQ."
It would be hard to imagine a more extreme transformation than the
Thernstroms'. In the 1960s, Stephan and Abigail were left-liberals who
identified passionately with the civil rights movement. Today, they're
soldiers in the political and judicial assault on civil rights policies
designed to redress the effects of past discrimination. The Thernstroms
insist, however, that they have remained true to their ideals as
"colorblind" integrationists. "We haven't changed," Stephan told a
reporter for The Washington Post. "It is liberalism that has
evolved." His wife, who often describes herself as "an old bleeding
heart," told the same reporter, "I feel sad that the classic civil
rights struggle is now called conservatism." They're on to something: In
less than a generation, the rhetoric of colorblindness has passed out of
the left's lexicon and into the right's. But in parting ways with racial
liberalism--and in promoting the crusade against "reverse racism" as the
cutting edge of a new civil rights movement--have the Thernstroms
simply remained steadfast in their principles?
It's a clever argument but not an especially convincing one. Full
equality and citizenship for the descendants of slaves, rather than
abstract colorblindness, was the overriding goal of the civil rights
movement. While some white liberals initially hoped that the destruction
of legal segregation would produce this outcome, most of them came to
see the need for more radical, color-conscious remedies. As President
Lyndon B. Johnson put it in his Howard University commencement address
on June 4, 1965, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been
hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of
a race, and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and
still believe that you have been completely fair." What is more, there
is little evidence of colorblindness in America in Black and
White. It is a book that seems consumed to the point of obsession
with the purported sins of black Americans: their educational failings,
their profligate rates of illegitimacy, their propensity toward crime,
their dependence on bloated government programs, their conspiracy
theories about white power, their hate-whitey rhetoric.
Liberalism has evolved, to be sure; but so have the Thernstroms.
Intellectual Partners
To understand Abigail Thernstrom's politics, the first thing you have
to know is that her parents were Jewish fellow travelers. Born in 1936,
Abigail Mann was raised in Croton-on-Hudson, 30 miles north of New York
City, on Finney Farm, a left-wing sanctuary that John Reed repaired to
on his return from the Soviet Union. Her father was an unsuccessful
businessman who "never made a dime," while her mother was slowly dying
of breast cancer. Educated at schools for red-diaper babies, she speaks
bitterly of her parents' Stalinism, their "willful denial" of Soviet
realities. But her parents were right about one thing, and that was
race. "I grew up in a very racially integrated scene, and that was one
of the very good things about communism."
When Abigail sings the praises of Finney Farm, she sounds almost like
William Bowen and Derek Bok, her adversaries in the war over affirmative
action, who argue that white college students benefit from racial
diversity as much as minorities do. "I lived in a cocoon in which race
didn't matter, and I think that was very influential in terms of the way
I think about racial issues. I'm in deep rebellion against race
consciousness." In fact, as Abigail herself acknowledges, Finney Farm's
racial integration was a triumph of color-consciousness on the part of
the Communist Party, which through an affirmative action program of its
own had vigorously recruited blacks and promoted them to positions of
leadership since the 1930s.
After graduating from Barnard College, Abigail arrived at Harvard as
a graduate student in Middle Eastern studies and later migrated to the
government department; she was "desperate to get away from anything
having to do with my family," and looking for a husband. "My daughter
would kill me if she heard me say that, but it's true." In the fall of
1958, she was set up on a blind date with Stephan Thernstrom, a
reserved, pipe-smoking graduate student in American history. Born in
1934 to Scandinavian-American parents in Port Huron, he was raised in
Battle Creek, Michigan, a town where there were hardly any Jews, much
less communists. Stephan's father, a telegraph boy with an eighth-grade
education, worked his way up the ladder to become a railway manager.
When Stephan was radicalized as an undergraduate at Northwestern, his
father, a stalwart Republican, told him, "If you're a communist, I don't
want you in my house."
Abigail Mann and Stephan Thernstrom met for their first date at an
I.F. Stone lecture. Two and a half months later, they married.
From the start, theirs was a political and intellectual partnership
as well as a romantic one. Stephan was a leader of a New Left club, a
group of Harvard graduate students that included Martin Peretz, now
owner of The New Republic; Michael Walzer, now a political
philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study; and the radical
historians Gabriel Kolko and Barton Bernstein. In offices scattered
throughout Harvard's campus, a dozen or so young men and women--some
liberal, others radical--met to discuss the Cuban revolution, the Bay of
Pigs, nuclear disarmament, and, above all, civil rights. Nothing
captured the group's imagination, or the Thernstroms', as much as the
struggle for racial justice in the South. In 1961 the New Left club
protested outside of Woolworth's in solidarity with the sit-ins. Three
years later, the Thernstroms made plans to organize blacks in the South
with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a trip they
were forced to cancel when Abigail became pregnant with their daughter
Melanie.
Stephan's first priority, however, was his academic career. Like most
of his Harvard classmates, he was extremely ambitious. His adviser was
the eminent immigration historian Oscar Handlin, whose 1951 study The
Uprooted helped establish ethnicity as a major field in American
history. Stephan chose a thesis topic that could not have been closer to
his mentor's heart: New England's immigrant working class in the late
nineteenth century. He was interested in the sociologist Werner
Sombart's classic question, "Why is there no socialism in America?" And
as the son of a worker who'd become a manager and a Republican, he
suspected that "socialism had a hard time in America because workers
didn't remain workers over time." Surveying the lives of hundreds of
laborers--mainly Irish Catholics--in the industrial city of Newburyport,
Massachusetts, Stephan found that while few of them entered the middle
class in the first generation, many of them bought houses, and, just as
important, many of them moved. When his book Poverty and Progress
was published in 1964, it was widely praised for its innovative analysis
of social and geographical mobility and for its sophisticated use of
quantified data.
From there, Stephan's rise was rapid. In 1967 he got a job at
Brandeis University; two years later he moved with Abby and their two
young children to Los Angeles, where he had been hired by UCLA for a
"hugely higher salary." In 1973 he returned to Harvard as a full
professor. That same year, he published The Other Bostonians, an
exhaustive study of social mobility among Boston's working class from
1880 to 1970. It was a book in the Handlin mold, sober in its sifting of
data, dispassionate in tone: a work of social science as much as
history. Compared to the work of his New Left peers, The Other
Bostonians was decidedly muted. And yet the book contained a distinct
undertone of social criticism. Stephan depicted the American class
system as one of both unique fluidity and appalling inequality that
offered "substantial privilege for the privileged and extensive
opportunity for the underprivileged." And he was particularly scathing
in his treatment of American racism.
In one chapter, "Blacks and Whites," he eviscerated the view (most
vividly expressed in Irving Kristol's 1966 New York Times Magazine
article "The Negro Today is the Last of the Immigrants") that the
experience of blacks in northern cities differed only in degree--and not
in kind--from the poverty and social exclusion suffered by the European
immigrants who arrived before them. This argument lies behind a great
deal of white opposition to special remedies for black poverty (if
blacks are merely one in a line of immigrant groups that had to overcome
poverty and discrimination, then why do they merit special treatment?),
and it powerfully informs the Thernstroms' America in Black and
White, in which blacks are frequently and unfavorably compared with
industrious immigrants. Back in 1973, however, Stephan was pointing out
that second-generation blacks in Boston "did only a shade better than
migrants from the rural South--unlike most European migrants including
the Irish," while even third-generation blacks were consigned to menial
labor. Turning next to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's argument that blacks
had been increasingly held back by a self-reproducing "culture of
poverty," he concluded that "the main barriers to black achievement
have been not internal but external, the result not of peculiarities in
black culture but of peculiarities in white culture."
Mrs. Thernstrom Goes to Washington
While Stephan made a name for himself as a bright young scholar,
Abigail raised their two children, putting aside her graduate work from
the time she became pregnant with Melanie until 1973, when the family
settled in Lexington. She completed her dissertation in 1975, entitled
"The Left Against the Court: The Supreme Court and Its Critics,
1900-1937"; it was, she laughs, "the world's worst dissertation." Still,
it landed her a job teaching in the social studies program at Harvard,
and she started reviewing books for The New Republic, now owned
and edited by her old friend Marty Peretz.
One day in the spring of 1978, the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer,
who had recently published Affirmative Discrimination, the ur-text
of affirmative action opponents, took her to lunch. (Glazer has since
declared his support for a soft form of affirmative action.) Glazer,
whom Abigail describes as "the single most important intellectual
influence in my life," told her to "stop taking care of the kids and get
to work." His advice was to "become the world's greatest authority on
some one little topic." That summer, while reading one of the landmark
cases on voting rights--the United Jewish Orgs. v. Carey, a
redistricting case involving Hasidic Jews--Abigail discovered her one
little topic. When she bumped into Glazer, he encouraged her to write
on voting rights for The Public Interest, a recently established
neoconservative journal.
The following spring, she published her findings in an article
called "The Odd Evolution of the Voting Rights Act." The evolution was
"odd" because the act was no longer being applied to eliminate obstacles
that disenfranchised black voters--its original and sole purpose, in
her view. The Voting Rights Act was being used instead to ensure that
blacks and "language minorities," such as Mexicans, were elected to
office according to their numerical strength.
Abigail wasn't entirely wrong: The focus of the act had shifted
since blacks won the ballot, and civil rights attorneys were calling
attention to more subtle forms of disenfranchisement, such as at-large
electoral systems that effectively deprived blacks and other minorities
of a say on city commissions and school boards. By "diluting" the votes
of blacks who might otherwise have been able to elect candidates of
their choice to single-member offices, at-large voting often had the
same effect as outright disenfranchisement. In March of 1969, the civil
rights community received powerful support from Chief Justice Earl
Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the majority decision in Allen
v. State Board of Elections, Warren argued that "the right to vote
can be affected by a dilution of voting power as well as by an absolute
prohibition on casting a ballot." The federal government could step in
to prevent such dilution, he ruled, under Section 5 of the act--the
"preclearance" provision forbidding changes in electoral arrangements
without the approval of the Court or attorney general.
This was, in Abigail's view, a promiscuous extension of preclearance,
which until then had only protected blacks from purposeful
disenfranchisement. Justice Warren's decision, she wrote in her
Public Interest article, "permanently blurred the distinction
between disenfranchisement and dilution, and between equality of
political opportunity and equality of electoral result." And so Section
5 of the Voting Rights Act had become "a tool for guaranteeing minority
groups maximum electoral effectiveness." In its zeal to guarantee that
votes cast by minorities were not "diluted," the Justice Department was
creating a "ward system" of "proportional representation" for
minorities--affirmative action in the electoral realm. The act's "main
accomplishment," she concluded darkly, may be the "political
polarization of the society along racial and ethnic lines... . If our
aim is to create one society--not two or four or twenty--is this the
direction in which we want to go?"
Abigail's article caused a stir in conservative intellectual circles.
Her writing was brash and forceful, and the "irony" she
underscored--that the Voting Rights Act now posed a direct threat to the
fragile fabric of race relations--was eagerly seized upon by the act's
conservative critics. A year later, one such critic--Ronald
Reagan--became president of the United States. A fervent opponent of
affirmative action and a self-proclaimed supporter of a colorblind
America, Reagan named a rabid conservative, William Bradford Reynolds,
as his assistant attorney general for civil rights. Suddenly, Abigail
Thernstrom had a hot subject on her hands--and a perspective that made
her a potentially valuable asset to the conservative movement. If the
1960s had been a time of opportunity for liberal critics, the 1980s were
boom time for critics of liberalism. "The Reagan era was a godsend for
her," said Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, who has known the
Thernstroms for three decades. "There was an opening for more rigorous
critics of affirmative action, people who could offer a principled
critique. Abby moved in to fill that slot, and it very rapidly gave her
a national voice."
The tide seemed to be turning in her favor in the courts as well. Six
months before Reagan was elected, the Supreme Court's ruling in
Mobile v. Bolden offered a striking confirmation of Abigail's
views on voting rights. The case involved a challenge by black
plaintiffs to the at-large method of electing the city commission of
Mobile, Alabama. The racially discriminatory impact of the system,
founded at the end of Reconstruction, was undeniable: Although African
Americans made up more than a third of Mobile's population, none had
ever been elected to the commission. The Fifth Circuit had held for the
plaintiffs, but the Supreme Court reversed the decision, asserting that
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required proof of discriminatory
intent, a notoriously difficult thing to establish. The strict
standard of intent adopted by the Court (hailed by Abigail Thernstrom as
"simple, principled, and tight") made it much harder for minorities to
win in voting-rights cases.
A sense of alarm spread through the civil rights community, since the
special provisions of the Voting Rights Act, including Section 5, were
due to expire in August 1982. In the spring of 1981, a group of
voting-rights experts hunkered down in the capital to draft an
amendment to Section 2 that would make impact rather than intent the
main basis for determining discrimination, and thereby override the
Mobile decision. After being awarded a Twentieth Century Fund
grant to write a book on the subject, Abigail followed the voting-rights
experts to Washington.
"She was very charming," recalls Laughlin McDonald, the director of
the southern regional office of the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) in Atlanta and one of the amendment drafters. "She told me she'd
gone to Barnard and she said, 'I'm an old SNCC person.'" She became a
fly on the wall of the offices of voting-rights activists. She listened
as they plotted strategy, and she took notes for her book. In
retrospect--if one considers the stakes involved--the degree of access
she was granted seems astonishing. After all, she had become
increasingly cozy with critics of the Voting Rights Act, particularly
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and his staff.
In the fall of 1981, Abigail made her first trip down south. The
civil rights attorneys she met there, she says, envied her ease among
blacks. "There was a level of comfort on my part in moving in an
interracial setting that wasn't true for these lefties, these white
lefties, who were saying, 'How come you're spending all this time with
blacks, you know, and they're having completely forthright
conversations with you? And you're having a grand time, and, you know,
they love you, and you love them.' It was precisely their race
consciousness that created a barrier for [them]. And again I had such a
history and a level of comfort you know, hangin' around with blacks,
that it stood me in very good stead."
The "white lefties" who showed her around the South have different
memories of her visit. "She came into our offices and said, 'This is the
first time I've been in Atlanta,'" McDonald told me. "This sounded
strange to me, since the headquarters of SNCC were in Atlanta and she
said she was an old SNCC person." The voting-rights historian Peyton
McCrary, who received Abigail in Mobile a few weeks later, says, "It was
like she was in a foreign country. She seemed naive. I mean, everyone in
Mobile understood that if you changed from at-large to district
elections, blacks would get elected, and a lot of whites considered that
a bad thing."
Abigail told McDonald she wanted to speak to his clients in Rogers
v. Lodge, a districting case in nearby Burke County. "I told her we
didn't want anyone talking to our clients with litigation pending.
That's just legal theory 101, because people say things to the press
that come back to haunt you." According to McDonald, Abigail took her
complaints to Morris Abrams, a civil rights attorney whose views on race
had become increasingly conservative over the years. Abrams then wrote a
letter to ACLU President Norman Dorsen in which he accused the
organization of betraying its commitment to freedom of the press.
It wasn't the last time Abigail deployed this tactic. In early 1982,
she asked J. Morgan Kousser, a voting-rights historian at the California
Institute of Technology, to help her arrange an interview with the
plaintiffs in Mobile v. Bolden, which was being tried on remand in
an Alabama court. According to Kousser, who had been friendly with the
Thernstroms since their days in Los Angeles, "She made a statement which
I took to mean that if she weren't given access, she would testify
against the amendment to Section 2 in the Senate. So reluctantly,
thinking that it might cause my friends to distrust me for the rest of
my life, I called Jim Blacksher, an attorney for Bolden who'd argued the
case before the Supreme Court." When Armand Derfner, a prominent South
Carolina voting-rights attorney, heard that Abigail was coming down to
Mobile in the fall for an interview with the plaintiffs, he nearly
exploded. "You've got to be crazy!" he remembers telling Blacksher.
"She's one of the generals in the fight to make sure Section 2 doesn't
get amended, one of the generals in the fight against the Voting Rights
Act! How do we know she's not going to report back to the other side?"
Blacksher withdrew the offer, telling Abigail she was welcome to look at
his public documents but that she couldn't talk to his witnesses until
they'd testified.
She was livid. Derfner, she complained to Kousser, was stonewalling
her research. Kousser was frightened that she'd strike back. Abigail
didn't testify against Section 2 at the 1982 hearings. But it appears
she chose a more revealing form of revenge. On March 19, 1982, an
editorial by John H. Bunzel, a fellow at the Hoover Institution,
appeared in The Wall Street Journal under the title "Hardball
Voting-Rights Hearings." Without identifying any of the parties by name,
Bunzel wrote that some long-time supporters of the Voting Rights Act, who were invited
to testify before the House or Senate Judiciary subcommittees, were
subjected to harassment and intimidation.... A recognized authority on
the Voting Rights Act, scheduled to testify on the opening day of the
hearings, had planned a research trip this fall to a Southern city. In
preparation for the trip, she called an attorney (and a friend), who
said he would help set up some interviews with politically active
blacks. But a week later she was told that non-cooperation had been
ordered by a leading strategist working closely with the Leadership
Conference on Civil Rights, unless she backed out of the Senate
hearings. It was also made clear that no one else active in civil rights
in the South was likely to help her as long as she planned to testify.
She withdrew as a witness.
The subject of--and source for--this could only have been Abigail
Thernstrom.
For Abigail, the sense of hurt, of betrayal, is still raw. "I was a
good liberal Democrat, and the Democrats and civil rights attorneys
treated me like dirt. Meanwhile, the Republicans, who knew perfectly
well I was a good liberal Democrat--the Republicans, for instance, on
the Hill--were delighted to let me see material and talk to me. These
were the people who kept teasing me about my politics but were
completely open to me. I mean, it was just ridiculous. Whereas the
Democrats couldn't have been more hostile. And this was a very
important fact in my evolution."
In June of 1982--with overwhelming support from the Senate and the
House--the amendment to Section 2 passed and Section 5 was upheld. And
thanks in large part to Peyton McCrary and J. Morgan Kousser, the
historians who demonstrated the discriminatory intent behind the
adoption of at-large elections in Mobile in 1874, an agreement was
reached ending at-large elections. Curiously enough, Bolden's victory
received not a single mention in Abigail Thernstrom's 1987 book Whose
Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Rights. Featuring a
blurb by her friend Michael Walzer and dedicated to her husband,
Whose Votes Count? was an elaboration of the arguments Abigail had
made in her Public Interest article. Likening the Voting Rights
Act to "a curfew imposed in the wake of a riot--an emergency measure
taken with the expectation that it would be lifted as soon as conditions
allowed," she declared that it was time for the Justice
Department-imposed curfew to be lifted.
Some of her criticisms were legitimate. By carving districts composed
primarily of black voters, the Justice Department had "whitened"
adjoining districts, thus leaving them vulnerable to Republican
takeover. As Abigail noted, "When whites on a city council or other
legislative body owe nothing to black support, blacks in the minority
may find themselves consistently outvoted and thus isolated." But her
tone was so shrill and her treatment of black claims of discrimination
was so dismissive as to distract attention from the book's merits. The
"appalling level of black teenage pregnancy," she wrote, "is not an
argument for creating a maximum number of 65 percent black districts."
Not surprisingly, the book was skewered by the voting-rights
advocates Abigail had met and interviewed. In a withering critique
published in The Journal of Law and Politics in the spring of
1988, Peyton McCrary and Pamela S. Karlan argued that "Whose Votes
Count? so distorts the evidence that it cannot be taken seriously as
scholarship." They continued: "It is ironic that Thernstrom insists that
at-large systems adopted years ago--when blacks were largely
disenfranchised--are the product of democratic process, while recent
local decisions to adopt systems that more accurately reflect the
political strength of minorities are not."
Abigail says she took such criticism in stride: "I knew what was
coming by then. But, you know, I'm very stubborn, and I don't let people
push me around. It's what I believe. And all this race-conscious stuff,
I don't believe it's in the public interest, I don't think it's in the
interest of black Americans, and I think it's going to walk us down the
same wrong road. It's not what I grew up with, and I've never changed my
view on that."
By this point, Abigail also, she says, "had a name." But even with
her new reputation, tenure eluded her; she ended up in an adjunct
position in Boston University's school of education. She insists she was
never interested in being a full-time professor. According to Orlando
Patterson, however, "Abby is as invested in academic life as Steve is,
and it basically hasn't worked out for her. I suspect there's some
bitterness there, and I think that factor has played into her sense of
grievance and driven her to take an even stronger position against
affirmative action."
The "Rape" of Stephan Thernstrom
Stephan Thernstrom's rage against liberalism, like his wife's, is a
profoundly personal conviction that reflects an acute sense of
victimization. Like his wife, he sees himself as an embattled
intellectual who has suffered for his principles at the hands of an
angry, intolerant left. Abigail's break with the left occurred in
Washington; Stephan's took place painfully closer to home, on the
Harvard campus. While he was in Los Angeles, Harvard had undergone some
of the most divisive battles in its history. There was the struggle for
a separate black studies department, led by the fiery Caribbean lawyer
Ewart Guinier, Lani Guinier's father. There were the anti-ROTC protests
by Students for a Democratic Society, which culminated in the April 1969
occupation of University Hall. And then came feminism.
To Stephan's closest friends at Harvard--men like Oscar Handlin and
the political theorist Harvey Mansfield, men who had supported the
Vietnam War and sided with Harvard's administration--this was all very
frightening. The campus wars of 1969 and beyond had driven Handlin and
Mansfield sharply to the right. Stephan still considered himself a
liberal, but like them he was a fierce Harvard loyalist and he abhorred
the left's assault on the university and its values. In 1979, as a
visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, he saw "social democracy
in action" and concluded that Margaret Thatcher was "injecting some
bracing, and long overdue changes in English government." And though he
didn't vote Republican until 1988, he found himself "very irritated at
the Harvard conventional wisdom about Reagan--'Ha, ha, ha, he's so
stupid!' when, as we looked around, it seemed to us that he was doing
some things quite successfully."
On campus, Stephan struck some of his colleagues as isolated and
embittered. In Mandarin fashion, he enjoyed poking fun at examples of
"political correctness"--a poisonous influence, he thought, on the life
of the mind. In February 1988, a black woman attending his class on "The
Peopling of America" took offense at a passing remark he made about
black men abandoning their wives and children. She told some friends of
hers in the black students' organization; they proceeded to file a
complaint with Harvard's Committee on Race Relations. One day, Stephan
opened The Harvard Crimson to find himself a man on trial, charged
with racial insensitivity by an anonymous accuser.
"What Steve said about black men was statistically true," Orlando
Patterson says. "The problem was the way he'd said it, the tone."
Patterson found out who the student was and met her for coffee. "She
went back to Steve and said she understood that it wasn't a racist
remark and they shook hands. So I thought things had settled. But Steve
was convinced that this was a clear case of academic freedom. When his
colleagues decided this wasn't a battle they wanted to wage, I think he
felt betrayed. The whole thing was blown way out of proportion." A month
after the incident, Dean of Faculty Michael Spence issued a statement
assuring that Stephan's academic freedom would be protected, but it was
too little, too late. "I felt like a rape victim," Stephan said in
Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 anti-PC diatribe, Illiberal Education.
For Stephan, Harvard's tepid defense of his academic freedom was bad
enough. Now that his reputation was stained by an accusation that he was
a racist, he felt shunned by his colleagues. And where were liberal
friends like Michael Walzer? As an old comrade, Stephan thought he
deserved an outpouring of support, a letter-writing campaign to Harvard
that would testify to his antiracist credentials, his record of liberal
activism. "After that episode, he and Abby just withdrew from the
university," Patterson remembers. "Steve felt that all his colleagues
had abandoned him. I thought I was a friend of Steve's. We'd been
visiting fellows at Cambridge together. And then suddenly, boom! It was
the same with all his other friends. He and Abby just withdrew to a
whole new group of people, mainly conservatives."
The Scourge of Racial Preferences
Meanwhile, even though the country seemed to be moving in one
direction, electing Bill Clinton, a vocal supporter of affirmative
action, to the presidency in 1992, the Rehnquist Court was moving in
another, solidifying the Reagan-era backlash against the gains of the
civil rights movement. Pilloried by voting-rights advocates when it was
published, Abigail Thernstrom's Whose Votes Count? began to enjoy
a new lease on life in the courts.
In the 1993 case of Shaw v. Reno, the Supreme Court made the
first in a series of rulings invalidating majority-minority districts as
an unconstitutional form of racial gerrymandering. As a result of the
creation of these districts (all drawn after the decennial census of
1990), 39 blacks were elected to Congress in 1992, up from 24 in 1988.
Black politicians won in states where not even one African American had
been elected to Congress since Reconstruction--Alabama, Florida, and
Louisiana. But in the majority opinion in Shaw v. Reno, Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor, in effect quoting Abigail Thernstrom, declared that
"racial classifications of any sort pose the risk of lasting harm to our
society" and that black-majority districts bear "an uncomfortable
resemblance to political apartheid." Two years later, the Court struck
down Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's district in Georgia; in June of
1996, it nullified majority-minority congressional districts in Texas
and North Carolina.
McKinney ran again and won--a victory that Abigail held up as
evidence that there are no longer barriers to black candidates in
majority-white settings in the South--but most voting-rights experts,
and McKinney herself, believe she owed her victory partly to incumbency.
Douglas Wilder, the first black governor of Virginia and a politician
Abigail promotes as a model for his ability to appeal to white voters,
won his first campaign in a majority-black district, as have a number of
other successful black politicians in majority-white districts.
"Abby's thinking has given a scholarly covenant to the five-member
majority on the Court," says J. Morgan Kousser. "Abby is the first
scholarly citation in Clarence Thomas's concurrence in Holder v.
Hall, which is the most extreme statement on voting rights that
anyone has made since '69. In fact, it directly calls for overturning
the '69 Allen ruling [regarding preclearance]."
Despite the growing influence of her book, Abigail Thernstrom has
appeared only once in court as an expert witness--unlike her husband, an
expert witness for hire who is paid $200 an hour for his services even
though he has no academic expertise in voting rights. It's a strategic
division of labor. In 1986 Katharine Butler, a conservative law
professor at the University of South Carolina, asked Abigail to be an
expert witness in a redistricting case in Georgia. "My line from the
very beginning," Abigail remembers, "was, 'Get Steve. He'd be much
better at this than I am.' He went to college on a debate scholarship,
with a B.S. in public speaking, of all things, and he's fast on
his feet verbally, and he also has an ability to go through mounds of
material very fast. I don't have those talents, so he does the
voting-rights stuff rather than me." Since then, when school boards and
city commissions have found themselves challenged in court by minorities
claiming they've been denied a voice in local affairs, Stephan
Thernstrom has readily made himself available.
In the spring of 1997, for example, after a two-week vacation in the
Galápagos Islands, he squared off with Laughlin McDonald, Abby's
old adversary, in a courtroom in Montezuma, Colorado. (Actually, Stephan
testified by phone, having never set foot in the town.) McDonald was
representing a group of Ute Mountain Indians as they challenged the
at-large method of electing the local school board. The Utes, who
comprised nearly a fifth of the county's population, had been entirely
excluded from the process. Stephan had been hired by the school
board--at a fee of nearly $10,000--to refute an expert report filed on
behalf of the Utes by a historian of the American West.
Under cross-examination, Stephan admitted not only that he had done
no primary research on the history of American Indians, but that before
he was hired by the school board he "had never heard of the Ute Mountain
Indians specifically, though a mention or two of them appear in a book I
edited, The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups." Asked
about the level of support Indian candidates had received from Indian
voters in past elections, he drew a blank: "Two weeks in the
Galápagos, where the airport was closed by snow, et cetera,
I'm--this all seems very remote to my memory now." The court ruled in
favor of the Utes.
Nothing has engaged Stephan's energies as an activist more intensely
than the scourge of racial preferences in college and high school
admissions. From his home office in Lexington, on Harvard University
stationery, he has written to dozens of schools, requesting that data on
grades, test scores, and family income be sent to Linda Chavez's Center
for Equal Opportunity (CEO). The CEO scours the data for evidence of a
minority quota system in violation of the 1978 Regents of the
University of California v. Bakke decision. The schools in question
can either curtail their affirmative action programs (as the University
of Massachusetts did after receiving a letter from Stephan in the summer
of 1998) or face a possible antidiscrimination lawsuit. Stephan's 1998
letter was featured in a booklet by the right-wing Center for Individual
Rights. Distributed at public colleges in an effort to recruit the
future Bakkes of America, the pamphlet reassured presumptive victims of
affirmative action: "Remember that you do not need proof of exactly how
you have been discriminated against in order to file a lawsuit."
Stephan claims that he has the best interests of black students in
mind and notes, correctly, that their graduation rates at public
universities are much lower than those for whites and Asians. The fact
that Proposition 209 drastically reduced the number of black students
attending Berkeley might actually be a good thing, he says, because
they're better off attending, say, Riverside, where they'll be able to
keep up. But here Stephan has got it wrong: Rigorous schools have
lower dropout rates for black students, because, as James Traub
observed in The New York Times Magazine, "Once you have been
admitted to the rarified community of a Harvard or a Yale or a
Berkeley, you are almost not allowed to fail."
In Massachusetts, Stephan has played a small but significant role in
the politics of secondary education. Since the 1960s, the state has seen
some of the bloodiest battles over school integration north of the
Mason-Dixon line. It was in Boston in 1974 that U.S. District Court
Justice W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., issued the original forced-busing order,
which set off a near civil war as South Boston Irish children threw
rocks and bottles at black children from Roxbury. Today, public schools
in Massachusetts are more segregated than ever, with blacks and Latinos
generally attending the worst ones.
Even so, Stephan thinks minority children in his state are a
privileged class, beneficiaries of unearned preferences. In 1996 he
served as a consultant in the case of Michael McLaughlin's daughter
against Boston Latin, an elite public school in Boston. Julia McLaughlin
was a 12-year-old white girl who until then had always attended Catholic
schools. When she was denied admission to Boston Latin, she sued on the
grounds that the school's 35 percent set-aside for black and Latino
applicants violated her civil rights under the equal protection clause
of the 14th Amendment. The judge presiding in the case was none other
than W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., who on August 29, 1997, decided in favor of
McLaughlin. And while the ruling was a shock to those who remembered
Garrity as the liberal judge behind court-ordered busing, it was in step
with other decisions handed down in recent years. The Rehnquist Court
may eventually rule that consideration of race in school assignment is
unconstitutional and effectively override Brown v. Board of
Education. For fear of inviting such a decision, Boston school
officials declined to appeal Garrity's ruling. When I asked Stephan
about his role in the case, he described it as "pro-bono," although
Michael McLaughlin later asked the court to pay the witness $14,050--a
request Garrity denied, characterizing Stephan's long sessions coaching
Michael and Julia McLaughlin as "an odd exercise whose purpose eludes
us."
America in Black and White
In 1997 the Thernstroms' magnum opus, America in Black and
White, was published by the Free Press. The product of seven years of
research, it was written with the support of several right-wing think
tanks and foundations, including a $180,000 grant from the John M. Olin
Foundation. A hymn to racial optimism, America in Black and White
was intended as a sequel, and response, to Gunnar Myrdal's An
American Dilemma. In the Thernstroms' view, there was no longer an
American dilemma, or at least not the one that Myrdal had described.
African Americans, they demonstrated by way of numerous statistical
charts, were doing better than ever, entering the middle class at
unprecedented speed. Unfortunately, blacks and liberals were continuing
to berate America as if it hadn't changed. "The stereotype [of black
poverty] serves an important political purpose: it nurtures the mix of
black anger and white shame that sustains the race-based social policies
implemented since the late 1960s."
The first section of the book, "History," was a balanced and often
horrifying survey of race in America up to the civil rights movement.
The second, dominant part of the book, "Out of the Sixties," was a tale
of blacks who misbehave and the liberals who coddle them. Downplaying
the significance of black protest, the Thernstroms argued that the
civil rights movement had triumphed because of a "quiet revolution in
attitudes"--white attitudes. When Martin Luther King, Jr., took the
movement north, they wrote, he went too far. He lost the sympathy of the
very whites whose change in attitudes had allowed his cause to succeed.
"From their perspective, the Irish, Italians and Jews had all lived in
their own 'ghettos' when they first settled in American cities; it
seemed to have done them no harm." If blacks in the ghetto complain of
joblessness, that's "in part a consequence of black crime." ("We speak
of black crime as a convenient shorthand, hard to avoid.") As for the
inflammatory Willie Horton ads, they were "factually sound, and they
raised serious policy issues: the risks to the public that furlough
programs entail."
Reading America in Black and White, one cannot help wondering
what, if anything, America owes the descendants of slaves. I asked
Abigail Thernstrom whether the debt had been paid. "Oh, my God. Of
course it owes black Americans something in that there's been a
terrible, horrible history here... . But you know talk of reparations
and so forth is not gonna do anything." So what does the country owe
blacks? "It owes a commitment to racial equality." In retrospect,
however, she says: "There were points [in America in Black and
White ] that had a backlash tone that I would take out today. I was
very angry at the time. I do think it's more polemical than I would have
made it today." And yet that polemical tone served its purpose: It gave
the Thernstroms a national platform, complete with invitations to the
White House and appearances on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and CNN.
Embraced by the right, America in Black and White led to a
rupture with the black economist Glenn Loury, one of the couple's close
intellectual friends. A leading architect of black Reaganism in the
1980s, Loury knew that the Thernstroms were drawn to him in part because
of his race, but he enjoyed their company nevertheless. "Steve and Abby
appreciated the difficulties of doing the kind of thing I was trying to
do," Loury remembers. "They understood that I wanted the best 'for my
people,' but that by my lights what I thought was best had put me at
odds with institutions like Harvard and the Ford Foundation. I was
taking a line that had a certain amount of courage, and I was paying a
price."
By the mid-1990s, however, the friendship began to cool. When Abigail
published an article arguing that it was unfair to place the burden of
proof on employers in discrimination cases, Loury wrote her a friendly
letter pointing out her errors. "I told her if the civil rights laws of
1964 are going to mean anything, you can't go around forcing plaintiffs
to prove motives. I think she felt I was pulling rank with her as an
economist." At a barbecue in the summer of 1996, he and the Thernstroms
got into a heated quarrel about the black underclass. "I said we cannot
give up on these people. And they said, 'That's all very well and good,
Glenn, but what do you propose to do? By implication and tone, you
suggest that you care more about this than we do.' Things were smoothed
over a little bit, but there was a clear strain."
Still, the relationship was healthy enough that when the Thernstroms'
publisher asked Loury to blurb America in Black and White, he
agreed, even though he hadn't read it. Shortly thereafter, however,
The Atlantic Monthly asked him to review the book. Loury called
Abigail to ask whether she'd mind if he did the review instead of the
blurb. After speaking with her publisher, who told her that "it's much
better to have Glenn's review in the Atlantic," she encouraged him
to take the assignment.
Loury's review was quietly devastating. Describing the book as "an
important, learned and searching statement on our age-old social
dilemma," he praised his friends for presenting "a wealth of evidence
... on the progressive liberalization of racial attitudes among whites
of the past half-century" and for telling "hard truths unsparingly."
What America in Black and White lacked, however, was "an
appreciation of irony, and a sense of the tragic." "Reading it," he
observed, "one cannot escape the impression that the enemy is being
engaged... . A great many adherents of the civil rights vision remain at
large among us, and the authors seem determined to ferret them out and
prove them wrong."
Loury cited econometric studies showing there was almost no evidence
for the Thernstroms' assertion that "black crime" was a cause of black
poverty. Loury also assailed the Thernstroms' argument that
Afrocentrism and underqualified black teachers were to blame for the low
performance of K-12 black students. Afrocentrism, he noted, remains a
fringe phenomenon in education, while three-quarters of public school
teachers are white.
Most damaging of all, Loury showed that the Thernstroms carelessly
misread their own data in places. Attempting to expose as a liberal
shibboleth the idea that the war on drugs had increased the
incarceration rate among African-American males, the Thernstroms wrote:
"African Americans are a bit less likely to be arrested for drug
offenses than they are for most other crimes." But the table they
referred to, Loury pointed out, "shows no such thing. It provides the
per capita arrest rates of blacks relative to the population as a
whole, for various offenses, allowing one to see, for example, that in
1995 a randomly chosen black person was 2.9 times as likely to be
arrested for a drug offense and 4.3 times as likely to be arrested for
murder as a randomly chosen person from the general population. But this
does not mean that in absolute terms fewer blacks were arrested for drug
offenses than for murder. Indeed, just the opposite is true."
As a matter of courtesy, Loury e-mailed the review to the Thernstroms
before it went to press. "Their response was pure vitriol. They said it
was morally reprehensible and intellectually dishonest, and they refused
to speak to me," Loury says. "I had no sense I was going to end our
friendship by writing this review." A few months later, William F.
Buckley, Jr., and John Newhouse hosted a dinner in New York and invited
Loury. When the Thernstroms learned that Loury would be among the
guests, they boycotted the event. "The Thernstroms' reaction to Glenn's
review showed that they have become as politically correct in their
responses as the left is," Orlando Patterson says. "They brook no
criticism."
The Thernstroms' rightward evolution has been gradual, so gradual it
surprises even them. When Abigail told me that she voted for Clinton in
1992, Stephan exclaimed, evidently flabbergasted, "Those are grounds for
divorce!" To which Abigail replied: "I voted Republican for the first
time in 1996. Look, I don't think this is political. I think this is
tribal. I identified myself as being a liberal Democrat, and I couldn't
face the fact that's not who I was. That's the group I belonged to."
Leaving the tribe, she says, has not been easy. It has involved not
just a change of mind but the loss of friends. When I mentioned Michael
Walzer, she picked her nails and looked down sadly. "So how are the
Walzers? I think Michael is unhappy about the direction we've taken
politically. Whereas I'm not at all unhappy with his politics. There's a
kind of imbalance. It's a big world. I mean, I just don't understand it.
People differ... . Some of my best friends are liberal Democrats." (The
Walzers and Thernstroms have seen one another just once in the past
decade. For his part, Michael Walzer says, "I've avoided reading their
big book, out of sadness or fear of some kind of final breach.")
Abigail fled from the tribe--the tribe of bien-pensant
Cambridge liberalism--because she found it as stifling as the communism
her parents espoused. "I've got a problem," she told me, "with being
stuffed into boxes. Put me in a room of conservatives and I start
running to the left; put me in a group of liberals and I start running
to the right. I mean, I just have problems with ideologically coercive
environments--I get claustrophobic." That may be true, but if so, her
record of public activism is all the more striking. For the only
positions to which she has advanced over the course of her 20-year
career place her far to the right along the American political
spectrum. No one, apparently not even her husband, would have guessed
that she was still, in her heart of hearts, a liberal Democrat until a
few years ago.
In the end, Abigail Thernstrom has not so much rejected ideological
boxes as she has sought security in another container--one that, unlike
the integrated setting of her childhood in Croton-on-Hudson, is nearly
all white. When I asked the couple whether they were troubled that
hardly any black Americans support their ideas on affirmative action and
racial justice, Stephan said: "Well, look, it's actually more
complicated than that... . The disagreement, I think, has to do with the
fact that not many blacks actually understand the magnitude of the
racial preferences within, for example, higher education--"
Just then, Abigail cut him off: "No, no, Adam's right. Look, I have
to figure out the issues for myself and call the shots as I see them.
Do I wish that I had, you know, more black company? That would be nice,
but at the end of the day, I'm me, and I can't be anybody else." |
A Brooklyn judge on Thursday slammed Facebook for making light of a $1 billion lawsuit filed by Israeli terror victims, calling a decision by the social media giant’s law firm to send a first-year associate to defend the case “outrageous, irresponsible and insulting.”
In July, the families of five Americans murdered or injured in recent Palestinian terror attacks in Israel lodged a lawsuit against Facebook for failing to ban the Gaza-based terror group Hamas from using its social media platform.
The suit was brought to the New York State District Court under the Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows American citizens who are victims of terror attacks overseas to sue in US federal court.
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In a hearing on Thursday, US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis gave a public dressing-down of the lawyer representing Facebook.
“You tell your folks back at Kirkland & Ellis that if they think so little of this court that they didn’t send a partner here to talk about this kind of problem which implicates international terrorism and the murder of innocent people in Israel and other places,” Garaufis said, according to the New York Daily News. “I think it’s outrageous, irresponsible and insulting.”
Garaufis ordered a new hearing on September 28, and said he wanted a partner from the firm present.
“I want to talk to someone who talks to senior management at Facebook,” he said.
According to Bloomberg, the judge underlined that similar lawsuits have thus far been unsuccessful under US law, but maintained that the social media giant must nonetheless treat the case seriously.
“Let’s put the law aside and talk about reality,” Garaufis said. “The reality is that people are communicating through social media and the outcome of these inquiries, be it Google or Facebook, has the potential of hooking people up to do very dangerous, bad and harmful things in terms of international and domestic terror.”
Isn’t Facebook “basically putting together people who’d like to be involved in terrorism with people who are terrorists?” he asked. “Doesn’t Facebook have some moral obligation to help cabin the kinds of communications that appear on it?”
He also suggested Facebook has a “social responsibility” to reach out to the victims outside the framework of the judicial system.
“Don’t you have a social responsibility as citizens of the world without having these plaintiffs come to me in Brooklyn?” he asked. “There are things you could do that don’t involve the courts or the judicial system.”
The plaintiffs, family members of victims in five separate terrorist attacks between June 2014 and March 2016, are seeking $1 billion in punitive damages from the social media giant.
“Facebook has knowingly provided material support and resources to Hamas in the form of Facebook’s online social media network platform and communication services,” a press release issued by the plaintiffs in July said. “Hamas has used and relied on Facebook’s online social network platform and communications services as among its most important tools to facilitate and carry out its terrorist activity.”
The lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Stuart and Robbi Force, the parents of 29-year-old US Army veteran and Vanderbilt University graduate student Taylor Force, who was fatally stabbed by a Hamas terrorist while visiting Israel on a school-sponsored trip in March.
Joining the Forces as plaintiffs are the parents of 16-year-old Naftali Fraenkel, who was kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank in June 2014; the parents of 3-month-old Chaya Zissel Braun who was killed in an October 2014 car-ramming attack in Jerusalem; the son of 76-year-old Richard Lakin who was killed in an October 2015 shooting and stabbing attack; and Menachem Mendel Rivkin, who was seriously wounded in a January 2016 stabbing attack in Jerusalem.
All of the victims were US citizens.
New York-based civil rights lawyer Robert Tolchin and Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the director of the Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center, filed the suit.
“Our aim in filing these law suits is to force Facebook to proactively monitor and remove in real time all materials that incite to terror,” said Lakin’s son Micah Avni on Friday. “I wrote to Mark Zuckerberg ten months ago and tried to appeal to his conscience. Unfortunately, Mark lacks the moral fiber that real leaders are made of. Rather than taking a proactive and responsible approach, he has chosen to hide behind vague corporate policies. In doing so, he has allowed Facebook to become the world’s number one facilitator of terror.”
In August, a federal judge in San Francisco dismissed a lawsuit accusing Twitter of supporting the Islamic State group. The families of two men killed in Jordan claimed that Twitter had contributed to their deaths by allowing the group to sign up for and use Twitter accounts. The judge agreed with Twitter that the company cannot be held liable because federal law protects service providers that merely offer platforms for speech, without creating the speech itself.
Tamar Pileggi, AP contributed to this report. |
You’ve probably read about us in magazines. We’re the guys that do things a little bit differently than everyone else. The old fashioned; the romantics, the guys who are still wearing plaid shirts and bringing heirlooms into the woods. The “odd ducks”
We shoot a little differently than you – without releases, sights, and let-off and our groups aren’t nearly as tight at the range, but our quivers are never empty and we always have a story. More importantly, we always have fun with our bows in hand. Always.
We are hard to forget once you’ve seen us. Whether out of foolishness or admiration, it doesn’t matter. The seed has been planted and you are probably wondering what we’re all about. At some point you’ll start asking questions and that’s when we set the hook.
Traditional bowhunting is a very challenging endeavor. It can be overwhelming or intimidating to most, but possible with the proper guidance and encouragement. By identifying and explaining the key differences between both worlds, I will give you the building blocks necessary to begin. Let’s get started!
Types of Bows
There are several different kinds of bows, but the primary two are recurves and longbows. The differences between the two lay within the limbs. Recurves are generally shorter with larger risers and a wider working limb. Their tips curve outward at the ends and maintain that curve when strung so that the string makes contact with the belly of the bow. The benefit of a recurve is arrow speed and a smooth cast despite the shorter length. On the other hand, this also makes them noisier. You will need to pad the belly of the limbs with moleskin or Velcro where it contacts the string and use some kind of string silencer to keep them quiet.
Longbows are long and slender with more working limb and less mass in the riser. There are many different styles of longbows. Some (like the reflex/deflex models) even resemble recurves. There is a great deal of debate surrounding the definition, but most can agree that if the string does not touch the belly of the bow when braced, the bow is a longbow regardless of grip, length, or profile. Regardless, longbows are light in the hand, extremely quiet, and easy on the fingers due to their length. I happen to prefer the longbow for these reasons. I love the way they feel in my hands.
Drawing with your fingers
There is nothing like the feel of the string beneath your fingers while drawing a bow. It is unfortunate so many know what this is like due to the invention of the mechanical release. The two couldn’t be further apart on the spectrum. Releasing with your fingers is difficult at first. You can torque the arrow off the string, pinch the nock too tightly between your fingers, miss your anchor, or even release prematurely. You could spend your entire life working on your release and still mess it up frequently, which is why it is such a special part of archery.
To master it, the first thing you’ll need to choose between a shooting glove or tab. A glove is fairly self-explanatory though there are different types. Tabs are basically a small slab of leather with a hole for your middle finger. They are kind of like a mitten in a way, but the surface is slick and they cover nothing but the tips of your fingers. Both can be ordered in different thicknesses depending on the amount of string tension you want to feel. This is something you’ll have to figure out on your own. Tabs are known for a cleaner release, but can be cumbersome in the field when drawing on game. Gloves aren’t quite as clean, but they are easier in the field and allow you to feel the string while drawing.Regardless of what you pick, it is wise to stick with it unless shooting becomes uncomfortable. Traditional archery is all about consistency. If your gear is inconsistent, your mechanics will be inconsistent. Find what works and stick with it.
A Firm Anchor and a Stable Bow Arm
A well-established anchor point and a stable bow arm are crucial archery elements regardless of what kind of bow you shoot, but leather fingers digging into the corner of your mouth is an odd sensation. Dropping the string instead of clicking a button or trigger will also feel foreign, but you’ll adjust with practice.Establishing a stable bow arm is also crucial, regardless of the bow. The only real difference is the way a traditional bow impacts or (shocks) the arm upon release. The riser, limbs, and cams of a compound bow are engineered to provide a stable shooting platform for the archer and eliminate hand shock. Modern traditional bows are also designed this way, but you can only go so far. Traditional bows rely on their limbs to transfer energy to the arrow. No matter how well a traditional bow is designed, the bow will shock the arm somewhat. Traditionalists refer to it as the “thump” and do so lovingly as it is part of our connection with the bow. You’ll learn to love it as well and miss it when its not there.
Aiming
The concept of aiming is difficult to explain for traditionalists. It can be as easy as looking at something and shooting it, or as difficult as analyzing the gap between the point of your arrow and the bullseye to calculate trajectory. The former is referred to as “instinctive shooting” and is the method most of us prefer (though the definition is extremely subjective). The latter is known as “gun-barreling” or “gap-shooting”. I won’t even attempt to recommend either, but can tell you I’ve tried both and find instinctive shooting far simpler to comprehend. You get accustomed to the flight of your arrow out of your bow, you memorize your trajectory at different yardages with that setup, you focus on a spot, and you shoot that spot. It is that simple. Regardless of the method, once you get the process down, it is as easy as “point and shoot”.
Using your muscles
I’ve always thought the primary perk of a compound bow was let-off. The ability to draw a heavier bow and keep it drawn for an extended period of time cannot be duplicated by any traditional bow, which implore muscle alone. Given this fact, there is a lot to consider. For starters, it is important you don’t start off with a bow that is too heavy. Even if you are drawing an 85# compound, I wouldn’t recommend starting with anything higher than a 50# traditional bow – something you have no problem drawing and holding for at least three seconds.
When picking your poundage, be sure to measure your draw length ahead of time and pay attention to the markings on the bow you wish to purchase. If a bow is 50# at 28”, it is going to pull around 56# at 30” (depending on the bow). This is called “stack”, as the bow adds weight as you travel passed it’s marked draw length. Contrarily, a bow will draw less than marked at a shorter draw length. The general rule of thumb I’ve observed is 3-4# per inch either way. Choose accordingly. The worst thing you could possibly do is to choose a bow that is too heavy for you.
Now consider that three-second draw I mentioned. There is no extended draw time in traditional archery. A three count is considered to be a fairly long draw by many traditionalists and most don’t make it past one. The longer you hold, the more fatigued you become, and the more you think about the shot. The drawing sequence is different due to the shorter window. It won’t take long to adjust, but it is an adjustment nonetheless. Once you’ve made that adjustment, you’ll find that the rest is fairly similar. The tension should be on the back, the elbow should be aligned properly with the bow arm, and everything should be working fluidly. If it isn’t, your body and your arrow will let you know.
Recognizing the differences between compounds and traditional bows is one thing; understanding how these differences affect you in the woods is another. We’ll discuss chasing game with traditional tackle next month here at WWOCZ. Don’t miss it!
Nick lives in Rockford, Michigan and has been hunting with traditional gear since 2009. He maintains the website www.lifeandlongbows.com and is heavily active within the Michigan Longbow Association. Follow him on Twitter @Nick_Viau
~
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You can also learn more about the traditional bowhunting experience at his personal site Life and Longbows.
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New York Knicks forward Amare Stoudemire would consider joining a tour of China this summer headlined by Kobe Bryant, but would play only if he’s able to obtain insurance against injury, the New York Daily News reports .
Finding such insurance may be difficult, as the Knicks were unable to get Stoudemire’s five-year, $100 million contract insured last summer because of a pre-existing knee issue and a previous surgery for a detached retina, the Daily News notes.
After signing the contract, Stoudemire granted the Knicks’ request not to play for the U.S. national team last summer. While teams are not allowed to be in contact with players during the lockout, the report says that the Knicks would like to get word to Stoudemire that they prefer he does not play on the China tour, according to the report.
Bryant and his agent Rob Pelinka have conceptualized the tour as a money-making opportunity for players during the lockout, the Los Angles Times reported on Friday . |
During the Ocata release, OpenStack DNS-as-a-Service (Designate) support was implemented in the Kolla project.
This post will guide you through a basic deployment and tests of Designate.
Install required dependencies and tools for kolla-ansible and Designate.
# yum install -y epel-release # yum install -y python-pip python-devel libffi-devel gcc openssl-devel ansible ntp wget bind-utils # pip install -U pip
Install Docker and downgrade to 1.12.6. At the time of writing this post, libvirt had issues connecting to D-Bus due to SElinux issues with Docker 1.13.
# curl -sSL https://get.docker.io | bash # yum downgrade docker-engine-1.12.6 docker-engine-selinux-1.12.6 # yum install -y python-docker-py
Configure Docker daemon to allow insecure-registry (use the IP where your remote registry will be located).
# mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d # tee /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d/kolla.conf <<-'EOF' [Service] ExecStart= ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd --insecure-registry 172.28.128.3:4000 MountFlags=shared EOF
Reload the systemd daemons and start, stop, disable and enable the following services:
# systemctl daemon-reload # systemctl stop libvirtd # systemctl disable libvirtd # systemctl enable ntpd docker # systemctl start ntpd docker
Download Ocata registry created in tarballs.openstack.org.
Create a Kolla registry from the downloaded tarball.
# wget https://tarballs.openstack.org/kolla/images/centos-binary-registry-ocata.tar.gz # mkdir /opt/kolla_registry # sudo tar xzf centos-binary-registry-ocata.tar.gz -C /opt/kolla_registry # docker run -d -p 4000:5000 --restart=always -v /opt/kolla_registry/:/var/lib/registry --name registry registry:2
Install kolla-ansible.
# pip install kolla-ansible # cp -r /usr/share/kolla-ansible/etc_examples/kolla /etc/kolla/ # cp /usr/share/kolla-ansible/ansible/inventory/* .
Configure kolla/globals.yml configuration file with the following content.
Change values when necessary (IP addresses, interface names).
This is a sample minimal configuration:
# vi /etc/kolla/globals.yml --- kolla_internal_vip_address: "172.28.128.10" kolla_base_distro: "centos" kolla_install_type: "binary" docker_registry: "172.28.128.3:4000" docker_namespace: "lokolla" network_interface: "enp0s8" neutron_external_interface: "enp0s9"
Configure designate options in globals.yml.
dns_interface must be network reachable from Nova instances if internal DNS resolution is needed.
enable_designate: "yes" dns_interface: "enp0s8" designate_backend: "bind9" designate_ns_record: "sample.openstack.org"
Configure inventory, add the nodes in their respective groups.
# vi ~/multinode
Generate passwords.
# kolla-genpwd
Ensure the environment is ready to deploy with prechecks.
Until prechecks does not succeed do not start deployment.
Fix what is necessary.
# kolla-ansible prechecks -i ~/multinode
Pull Docker images on the servers, this can be skipped because will be made in deploy step, but doing it first will ensure all the nodes have the images you need and will minimize the deployment time.
# kolla-ansible pull -i ~/multinode
Deploy kolla-ansible and do a woot for Kolla 😉
# kolla-ansible deploy -i ~/multinode
Create credentials file and source it.
# kolla-ansible post-deploy -i ~/multinode # source /etc/kolla/admin-openrc.sh
Check that all containers are running and none of them are restarting or exiting.
# docker ps -a --filter status=exited --filter status=restarting CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
Install required python clients
# pip install python-openstackclient python-designateclient python-neutronclient
Execute a base OpenStack configuration (public and internal networks, cirros image).
Do no execute this script if custom networks are going to be used.
# sh /usr/share/kolla-ansible/init-runonce
Create a sample Designate zone.
# openstack zone create --email [email protected] sample.openstack.org. +----------------+--------------------------------------+ | Field | Value | +----------------+--------------------------------------+ | action | CREATE | | attributes | | | created_at | 2017-02-22T13:14:39.000000 | | description | None | | email | [email protected] | | id | 4a44b0c9-bd07-4f5c-8908-523f453f269d | | masters | | | name | sample.openstack.org. | | pool_id | 85d18aec-453e-45ae-9eb3-748841a1da12 | | project_id | 937d49af6cfe4ef080a79f9a833d7c7d | | serial | 1487769279 | | status | PENDING | | transferred_at | None | | ttl | 3600 | | type | PRIMARY | | updated_at | None | | version | 1 | +----------------+--------------------------------------+
Configure designate-sink to make use of the previously created zone, sink will need zone_id to automatically create neutron and nova records into Designate.
# mkdir -p /etc/kolla/config/designate/designate-sink/ # vi /etc/kolla/config/designate/designate-sink.conf [handler:nova_fixed] zone_id = 4a44b0c9-bd07-4f5c-8908-523f453f269d [handler:neutron_floatingip] zone_id = 4a44b0c9-bd07-4f5c-8908-523f453f269d
After configure designate-sink.conf, reconfigure Designate to make use of this configuration.
# kolla-ansible reconfigure -i ~/multinode --tags designate
List networks.
# neutron net-list +--------------------------------------+----------+----------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+ | id | name | tenant_id | subnets | +--------------------------------------+----------+----------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+ | 3b56c605-5a01-45be-9ed6-e4c3285e4366 | demo-net | 937d49af6cfe4ef080a79f9a833d7c7d | 7f28f050-77b2-426e-b963-35b682077993 10.0.0.0/24 | | 6954d495-fb8c-4b0b-98a9-9672a7f65b7c | public1 | 937d49af6cfe4ef080a79f9a833d7c7d | 9bd9feca-40a7-4e82-b912-e51b726ad746 10.0.2.0/24 | +--------------------------------------+----------+----------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
Update the network with a dns_domain.
# neutron net-update 3b56c605-5a01-45be-9ed6-e4c3285e4366 --dns_domain sample.openstack.org. Updated network: 3b56c605-5a01-45be-9ed6-e4c3285e4366
Ensure dns_domain is properly applied.
# neutron net-show 3b56c605-5a01-45be-9ed6-e4c3285e4366 +---------------------------+--------------------------------------+ | Field | Value | +---------------------------+--------------------------------------+ | admin_state_up | True | | availability_zone_hints | | | availability_zones | nova | | created_at | 2017-02-22T13:13:06Z | | description | | | dns_domain | sample.openstack.org. | | id | 3b56c605-5a01-45be-9ed6-e4c3285e4366 | | ipv4_address_scope | | | ipv6_address_scope | | | mtu | 1450 | | name | demo-net | | port_security_enabled | True | | project_id | 937d49af6cfe4ef080a79f9a833d7c7d | | provider:network_type | vxlan | | provider:physical_network | | | provider:segmentation_id | 27 | | revision_number | 6 | | router:external | False | | shared | False | | status | ACTIVE | | subnets | 7f28f050-77b2-426e-b963-35b682077993 | | tags | | | tenant_id | 937d49af6cfe4ef080a79f9a833d7c7d | | updated_at | 2017-02-22T13:25:16Z | +---------------------------+--------------------------------------+
Create a new instance in the previously updated network.
# openstack server create \ --image cirros \ --flavor m1.tiny \ --key-name mykey \ --nic net-id=3b56c605-5a01-45be-9ed6-e4c3285e4366 \ demo1
Once the instance is “ACTIVE”, check the IP associated.
# openstack server list +--------------------------------------+-------+--------+-------------------+------------+ | ID | Name | Status | Networks | Image Name | +--------------------------------------+-------+--------+-------------------+------------+ | d483e4ee-58c2-4e1e-9384-85174630428e | demo1 | ACTIVE | demo-net=10.0.0.3 | cirros | +--------------------------------------+-------+--------+-------------------+------------+
List records in the designate-zone.
As you can see there is a record in designate associated with the instance IP:
# openstack recordset list sample.openstack.org. +--------------------------------------+----------------------------------+------+-------------------------------------------+--------+--------+ | id | name | type | records | status | action | +--------------------------------------+----------------------------------+------+-------------------------------------------+--------+--------+ | 4f70531e-c325-4ffd-a8d3-8172bd5163b8 | sample.openstack.org. | SOA | sample.openstack.org. | ACTIVE | NONE | | | | | admin.sample.openstack.org. 1487770304 | | | | | | | 3586 600 86400 3600 | | | | a9a09c5f-ccf1-4b52-8400-f36e8faa9549 | sample.openstack.org. | NS | sample.openstack.org. | ACTIVE | NONE | | aa6cd25d-186e-425b-9153-699d8b0811de | 10-0-0-3.sample.openstack.org. | A | 10.0.0.3 | ACTIVE | NONE | | 713650a5-a45e-470b-9539-74e110b15115 | demo1.None.sample.openstack.org. | A | 10.0.0.3 | ACTIVE | NONE | | 6506e6f6-f535-45eb-9bfb-4ac1f16c5c9b | demo1.sample.openstack.org. | A | 10.0.0.3 | ACTIVE | NONE | +--------------------------------------+----------------------------------+------+-------------------------------------------+--------+--------+
Validate that designate resolves the DNS record.
You can use Designate mDNS service or directly to bind9 servers to validate the test.
# dig +short -p 5354 @172.28.128.3 demo1.sample.openstack.org. A 10.0.0.3 # dig +short -p 53 @172.28.128.3 demo1.sample.openstack.org. A 10.0.0.3
If you find any issue with designate in kolla-ansible or kolla, please fill a bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/kolla-ansible/+filebug
Regards,
Eduardo Gonzalez
This post first appeared on Eduardo Gonzalez’s blog. Superuser is always interested in community content, email: editorATsuperuser.org. |
In a remarkably blunt analysis of the massive migration from North Africa to Italy in 2016, the European Frontex agency has denounced human traffickers’ exploitation of NGOs to efficiently transport African migrants from Libya to Italy.
The NGOs, the report suggests, whether knowingly or not, have become accomplices to people smugglers by providing a reliable shuttle service for migrants from Africa to Europe, lowering smugglers’ costs and improving their “business model.”
The assistance by NGOs has virtually eliminated the need for traffickers to procure seaworthy vessels capable of making the dangerous voyage across the southern Mediterranean, the report notes, since traffickers need only transport their passengers a few miles off the Libyan coast where they will be picked up by “rescue” vessels. It also allows traffickers to operate without fear of arrest by law enforcement.
Frontex, the European agency in charge of control of the EU’s borders, has identified a major shift in maritime rescue operations from military vessels to NGOs, a shift intentionally orchestrated by traffickers.
Midway through its 64-page report, Frontex notes that in throughout 2015, and the first months of 2016, NGO vessels were involved in less than 5% of rescue operations, whereas from June until October 2016, “the pattern was reversed” and NGO rescue operations “rose significantly to more than 40% of all incidents.”
This happened because of a change in strategy by the people smugglers, the report notes.
During the first period, “smuggling groups instructed migrants to make satellite phone calls to the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Rome to initiate targeted rescues on the high seas,” the report states. More than 50 percent of all search and rescue (SAR) operations were initiated in this way, and the missions were mainly undertaken by Italian law-enforcement.
As of 2016, however, satellite phone calls to MRCC Rome decreased sharply to 10 percent and the military began playing a significantly diminished role in rescue operations.
Since June 2016, the report continues, a significant number of boats have been intercepted by NGO vessels “without any prior distress call and without official information as to the rescue location.”
These rescues did not occur somewhere out in the Mediterranean, but extremely near the Libyan coast, and sometimes even in Libyan territorial waters. “NGO presence and activities close to, and occasionally within, the 12-mile Libyan territorial waters nearly doubled compared with the previous year,” Frontex states, and as a result, “the overall number of incidents increased dramatically.”
According to statistical data, criminal networks, particularly Libyan-based smugglers, have relied heavily on SAR missions, as well as humanitarian assistance efforts, “turning it into a distinct tactical advantage,” the report states, adding that “the scope of the problem is alarming.”
Frontex delicately adds that “all parties involved in SAR operations in the Central Mediterranean unintentionally help criminals achieve their objectives at minimum cost, strengthen their business model by increasing the chances of success.”
Moreover, the report continues, “Migrants and refugees – encouraged by the stories of those who had successfully made it in the past – attempt the dangerous crossing since they are aware of and rely on humanitarian assistance to reach the EU.”
The Frontex report found that the ready availability of effective SAR operations has served to stimulate demand for smugglers services, by making migration to Europe more accessible, resulting in what Frontex describes as a “pull factor.”
SAR missions near the Libyan coast have had “unintended consequences,” the report states. “Namely, they influence smugglers’ planning and act as a pull factor that compounds the difficulties inherent in border control and saving lives at sea.”
“Dangerous crossings on unseaworthy and overloaded vessels were organised with the main purpose of being detected by EUNAVFOR Med/Frontex and NGO vessels,” the reports adds.
All in all, in 2016, the Central Mediterranean “saw the highest number of migrant arrivals ever recorded from sub-Sahara, West Africa and the Horn of Africa,” totally 181,459 migrants, or an increase of 18 percent over the previous year.
This trend shows that the Central Mediterranean “has become the main route for African migrants to the EU and it is very likely to remain so for the foreseeable future,” the report states.
In its report, Frontex proposes a remedy to the uncontrolled migrant flows presently in effect by pointing to a strategy that has already yielded promising results elsewhere.
The dangerous Western African route, the report notes, “was closed thanks to an effective combination of border surveillance, return operations, and joint law-enforcement work with countries of origin/departure.”
“This model represents one of the best ways to prevent a future migratory crisis in the Central Mediterranean,” it concludes.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome |
DRAWN & QUARTERED
Manga with a higher calling
In the United States, manga have been regarded largely as a form of entertainment, an escapism that can be read at the beach or in a comfy chair or someplace similar.
Japan, though, has a much broader view of manga. It's become a part of daily life, after all. Not only is manga entertainment there, it's also been used to educate audiences about certain people, places or things.
Now that manga's become popular across the Pacific, some of those educational manga are coming over as well. Here are a few examples of educational manga that have caught our eyes in recent years.
The 'Edu-Manga' books
Albert Einstein, Ludwig von Beethoven, Anne Frank, Helen Keller and Mother Teresa -- all of them were great people in their respective eras, and all of them are profiled in the "Edu-Manga" line of manga being released stateside by Digital Manga Publishing.
Astro Boy, Osamu Tezuka's classic star of anime and manga, acts as the anointed "guide through the 'Edu-Manga' adventure," This basically translates into Astro and his family doing something that's somewhat related to the featured character's area of expertise, someone asking, "Oh, hey, what was [INSERT FAMOUS PERSON'S NAME HERE] like?" and the biography beginning in earnest ... without Astro ever appearing in the manga again.
The Beethoven manga reads like a typical "shoujo" (young girls') romance, filled with angst for the main character. The composer is depicted as a tragic figure, abused by his father, losing the young woman he loved to another man because of class differences and an affliction with his hearing.
At least the Beethoven manga is entertaining reading. The Einstein manga instead reads like an illustrated physics textbook, rattling off the scientist's theories and adding the slimmest of biographical flourishes to force the story slowly along.
Mother Teresa's manga offers an overview of her life, with an emphasis on her charity work, her care for the destitute and dying in India and her trip to Japan in 1981. Meanwhile, the Anne Frank manga plays out main events in the book "Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl," with additional scenes of the rest of her brief life in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Helen Keller's story is much like other versions that have introduced young readers to the deaf and blind woman: It focuses on Keller's distressing childhood and the tireless efforts of her tutor, Anne Sullivan, who taught her not only language, but manners and etiquette as well. The strong focus on Sullivan and others who support Keller makes the manga worth a read.
The Edu-Manga books share the unfortunate characteristic of presenting lists of important related people in a drab, crowded layout that overwhelms the reader before one word is actually read.
That aside, the Edu-Manga series will likely inspire readers to learn more about the chosen subject, which is perhaps the main reason for these books in the first place.
'Project X: Cup Noodle'
It's always a trip to read about the history behind the everyday gadgets and conveniences that we take for granted, and "Project X: Cup Noodle," also published stateside by Digital Manga Publishing, certainly soaked up our attention.
The manga details the arduous process from conceptualization to reality and, ultimately, success of the world's first instant ramen in a container, Cup O' Noodles (originally named "Cup Noodle" in Japan), by Nissin Foods founder and director Momofuku Andou and his development team.
The inclusion of archival photos, from the Nissin research lab to a picture of youths walking and slurping up the noodles at the Pedestrian's Plaza introductory sales events, and an interview with one of the development team put a nice realistic touch on what could otherwise be dismissed as an overdramatized retelling. (Although we do have to question the repeated remarks of "Ooh, there's shrimp!" and wonder whether people really did react that positively to the inclusion of that particular garnish.)
Still, "Cup Noodles" is a thoroughly fascinating read. The struggle to create any successful product makes for great material, and the story of Cup O' Noodles reads as well as any drama, with the right splash of humor included. It definitely made me go out to buy -- and eat -- a few servings.
For those hungering for more, publisher DMP has released other books in the "Project X" series detailing the rise of 7-Eleven and the Datsun Fairlady Z (the 240Z in the U.S., whose latest incarnation is the Nissan 350Z).
'Manga Cvn 73: uss George Washington'
With the nuclear aircraft carrier USS George Washington due to make Yokosuka, Japan, its home port in August, the U.S. Navy wanted to find a way to explain the carrier's mission to its future neighbors in a way that went beyond a typical pamphlet. Their solution was to commission writer Harumi Sato and artist Hiroshi Kazuma to produce a manga about the carrier. The strategy worked; the military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported that about 800 copies of the manga's 30,000-copy print run were given away June 8 ... in three hours.
Fortunately, curious American fans don't have to wait in line in Japan to get a copy ... or know Japanese, for that matter. An English-translated PDF file (requiring the free Adobe Acrobat reader) is available online at tinyurl.com/6d2v8o. The art retains its original, right-to-left orientation in the translation.
In "CVN 73," readers meet Petty Officer 3rd Class Jack Ohara, a Navy sailor on his first overseas assignment and his first tour of duty on board a carrier. Between the carrier's departure from (presumably) San Diego and Yokosuka, Jack transforms from a seasick rookie to THE MOST AWESOME NAVY SAILOR EVER.
There's no other way to explain it. Halfway through the book -- about 100 pages -- he declares that he's accustomed to ship life. He helps fix aircraft. He puts out a laundry fire. He pushes a dumbfounded guy out of the way of an oncoming jet. AWESOME.
That rah-rah spirit prevails throughout "CVN 73." Sure, readers get to see what life on board a carrier is like, but it all seems so sterile and efficient, one big happy family working together to defend allies and warn off potential enemies. The most contentious issue regarding the carrier's arrival in Japan -- its nuclear-powered core -- gets boiled down to two sentences: "Not only does the heart of GW have approximately a 50-year lifespan, it efficiently provides stable energy and doesn't require refueling. Considering the lifespan of the vessel, it could be said that GW can virtually sail infinitely."
The translation can get a bit clunky at times; prepare to see lines like "I'm Jack Ohara. Nice meet to you" and "This ship is built with a-few-inch-thick ultrahigh-strength steel, it weighs 97,000 tons you know?" The PDF file format also ends up breaking up several two-page spreads into single pages, making for a few awkward transitions.
Sure, "CVN 73" may be nothing more than a curiosity to Western audiences in the grand scheme of things. But it does offer an intriguing, somewhat entertaining peek into the inner workings of a carrier at sea. And if that's what the Navy wanted to do with this manga, then mission accomplished. |
Triggering the bad flashbacks of PTSD: It's apparently possible to trigger flashbacks without resorting to any of the chemical hallucinogens that are famed for producing this sort of effect. The downside is that you have to send electric currents into specific areas of the brain. "Electrical stimulation of the temporal cortex in awake human subjects, mostly in the right hemisphere, can elicit the reenactment and reliving of past experiences," according to a paper on post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD patients suffer from flashbacks, and the new paper suggests that they have overactive neural connections in this area of the brain—in essence, their neurons act as if they've been hit by an electric shock.
The genome of a weird nonscientist: There's no paper here, just the fact that the latest human to have his genome sequenced is Ozzy Osbourne. The finest joke I've seen so far is a reference to "heavy Mendel." Some of the better coverage is at Technology Review. In the end, though, there probably won't be much to say about the completion of Ozzy's genome that couldn't be said about any of the others on the rapidly expanding list—we simply can't link any of the features that make a genome distinctive with much of the traits that we identify in a person, even if that person has Ozzy's oversized personality. In fact, we probably get more out of the sequencing from a completely different ethnic group.
So, in many ways, the story is a non-story. But that hasn't stopped people from trying. One of the weirder aspects of this is that people are claiming various percentages of Neanderthal DNA in Ozzy's genome and elsewhere. As of my last check of the literature, we don't actually know enough about which sequences are likely to be derived from Neanderthals to really say anything like this.
The genetics and environment of liberalism: This is a really fascinating study that's getting buried with headlines about a "liberal gene." The authors are actually working with the hypothesis that an exposure to diverse views during adolescence helps promote a liberal outlook, but that genetic factors influence this process. And that's precisely what they found. Using a population of over 2,500, they checked the genotype of a dopamine receptor gene.
Among those that carry a form of the gene that's associated with novelty seeking behavior, having a large number of friends in adolescence ended up being associated with adopting a liberal outlook. A lower number of friends, and there was no connection; same thing if this specific variant is missing (so, in some ways, there are a bunch of conservative alleles, too). It's a great example of how genetic and environmental influences can combine to create a complex behavior.
A scientific platform with a hint of unicorn about it: Getting any data from the Arctic in winter is a challenging thing, but that hasn't stopped some scientists from finding a way. "We report on wintertime data collected from Baffin Bay and northern Davis Strait, a major gateway linking the Arctic with the subpolar North Atlantic, using narwhals (Monodon monoceros) as an oceanographic sampling platform," the authors write, and go on to describe how, thanks to the narwhal's feeding habits, most of the dives sampled the temperatures all the way to the ocean's bottom, in some cases 1700m down. Thanks to depth and location readings, the narwhal data helped them identify various currents in the bay, and demonstrated "the feasibility of using narwhals as ocean observation platforms."
Surprise! Truffles have sex: Truffles are a prized culinary ingredient, but they remain extremely expensive because we've not figured out how to culture them. Some researchers have now figured out why. In two papers, they show that truffles carry genes that suggest there are different sexes, and find that these sexes aren't evenly distributed in the truffle's natural habitat. Maybe now that we know that they mate, we'll have better luck with domestication.
Doing more with the same thing: There's lots of talk about how the blind manage to get more out of their other senses, but not quite as much in the way of actual evidence. That's started to change recently, and a new study extends the evidence to experienced Braille readers. Apparently, the blind are no more sensitive to vibrational differences in their fingers, but can greatly outperform their sighted peers when it comes to taking what they can sense with their fingers and integrating it into a complete picture, which suggests that their brains are reorganized in a way that enhances perceptual processing of touch input. |
If you want to be the calm at the eye of the storm, it helps to be calm. Justin Trudeau is figuring that part out.
On Monday, Trudeau’s (pause to count on fingers) ninth day as leader of the plucky underdog Liberal party, the wavy-maned MP for Papineau exited the House of Commons and parked in front of a scrum microphone in the Centre Block lobby. He was greeted by the customary mob of journalists badgering him for autographs. Just kidding! No, we had Tough Questions for him.
What did he make of his latest exchange with the Prime Minister, which came after five questions from the NDP, a party the scribes are basically ignoring this month? “I asked a substantive question,” Trudeau said, once, twice, three times. But Stephen Harper preferred to send mockery in return.
Surely this will be a theme of Trudeau’s spring: he would like to be considered more than a pretty face. He asks substantive questions. If Harper can’t give substantive answers, or won’t, Trudeau hints, well then we’ll know who’s low on substantivity, won’t we? Substantivosity. Substantiveness. Substance? Never mind. We’ll know what needs knowing.
One of the scribes asked Trudeau about the root causes of the Boston Marathon bombing. The goal here was to get him to say something reminiscent of the answer he gave Peter Mansbridge less than two hours after the murders happened: “There is no question that this happened because of someone who feels completely excluded, someone who feels completely at war with innocence, at war with society.”
That comment, which could be taken as eagerness to sympathize with terrorists instead of hunting them down, led to a week’s excitement in Ottawa and wherever Conservatives worry about a Liberal renaissance. Harper came out of the London funeral for Margaret Thatcher and, before any of the reporters there had raised Trudeau’s name, said: “When you see this kind of violent act, you do not sit around trying to rationalize it or make excuses for it or figure out its root causes. You condemn it categorically, and to the extent you can deal with the perpetrators you deal with them as harshly as possible.”
In turn, Trudeau said Harper was politicizing a tragedy. Later he announced he would use a regularly scheduled Liberal opposition day to encourage backbench Conservatives who are quarrelling with Harper’s office over the amount of freedom they have. The government’s House leader, Peter Van Loan, promptly announced he was postponing the Liberal opposition day so MPs could debate a terrorism bill that has been wending its way through the Commons in lethargic fashion.
Van Loan could not explain why he saw no need to debate the bill for the first three days after the Boston bombing, before upending the schedule of business on the fourth. It began to seem that the Conservatives’ legislative schedule is determined by the need to hurt Trudeau before he hurts them.
Over the weekend I reported that Harper’s government has budgeted $10 million for a five-year program of research into the causes of terrorism. So Harper’s government is actually keenly interested in root causes, except when it’s Trudeau talking about them.
By Monday, much of the righteous fury had gone out of all parties. In debate on the terrorism bill, the Conservatives had nothing fiery to say. In his Monday scrum, Trudeau demonstrated that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. What about those root causes? “There are a lot of questions still to be asked,” he said blandly. But the first thing to do was to thank the police for dismantling an apparent terrorist ring in Canada. “This is the kind of work that the men and women of Canadian law enforcement agencies need to continue doing,” he said, “and they have our thanks and our full support on that.”
I pressed him on the proper treatment of terrorists. “We support [the government bill] broadly,” he said, “and we have supported it throughout the long time that it has wended its way through the House.” A pirouette and he was gone. Short answers with few moving parts. Something new.
All Harper had to do was zip up, and Trudeau’s comments would have stood alone for all to judge by their lights. He didn’t figure that out until after he had used a funeral to pick a fight. For the leader of a party that will be lucky indeed if it can simply stop losing seats, Trudeau has a knack for making his opponents do dumb things—simply, as far as I can see, by existing. In Quebec City, Trudeau paid a courtesy call on provincial party leaders. Jean-François Lisée, normally the brains of the Parti Québécois, convened a news conference to denounce Trudeau as a “young prince” who had summoned all three leaders like “vassals” to a single meeting. Problem: Trudeau had made no such request. Lisée wound up apologizing lamely on Twitter.
When Pierre Trudeau died, Stephen Harper wrote that he “took a pass” on the fights against Nazism and Communism. He believed, surely still believes, the old man was evil, or blind to evil, which is the same. He suspects the same of Justin. Anger wrecks his judgment. He has that in common with Lisée. In my years in Ottawa I’ve seen other politicians who polarized debate so effortlessly they drove furious opponents to dumb mistakes. Jean Chrétien was one. Harper himself is another. Apparently young Trudeau has some of that too. It’s a handy attribute.
On the web: For more Paul Wells, visit his blog at macleans.ca/inklesswells |
News and notes from around the NBA, particularly as they relate to Thursday’s draft:
• Interest is building league-wide in lottery picks, particularly in the Cleveland Cavaliers’ first overall pick — and even more so in the second and third overall selections, owned by the Orlando Magic and Washington Wizards, respectively, sources said.
• After attempting to work on something big, the Cavs’ recent discussions have been described by one inside source as “exploratory (and) touching base, but nothing serious.” The source indicated that some of those conversations have taken place with the Minnesota Timberwolves.
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• A Sirius Radio report earlier in the week said the Cavs and Timberwolves were “on the verge” of making a trade in which the Cavs would send the No. 1 pick to Minnesota for forward Derrick Williams and the ninth pick. That was never true.
• Williams was the second overall pick (behind Kyrie Irving) in 2011, and his pro career has been fairly uneven and somewhat disappointing. The majority of his struggles have come defensively, as he’s too small too guard power forwards and not quick enough for small forwards.
• Talent-evaluators, including some employed by the Cavs and Timberwolves, feel that Williams is “too stiff” on defense. However, if Williams were a little lighter, and “coached up” by the right staff, many around the league feel he could be an adequate defensive small forward.
• Regardless, outside of power forward Kevin Love and point guard Ricky Rubio, the Timberwolves view Williams (and the No. 9 pick) as the piece that can land them in the top three of the draft.
• While everyone expects the Washington Wizards to draft D.C. product and Georgetown small forward Otto Porter if he’s available, he’s no shoe-in. The Wizards are actually debating between Porter and UNLV forward Anthony Bennett, according to one source.
• Indiana guard Victor Oladipo was described by one source as “explosive” during his workout with the Cavs. That’s a little different than the finding related to Kansas guard Ben McLemore. Sources said McLemore didn’t “lay down the effort” of Oladipo.
• That said, as of earlier in the week, it was believed Oladipo was not in the equation for the Cavs at No. 1 pick. He could be a possibility in a trade-down scenario, however.
• According to one report, the Cavs and Boston Celtics are discussing a trade involving the Cavs’ two second-round picks (Nos. 31 and 33) for Celtics forward Paul Pierce. FOX Sports Ohio has been unable to confirm that report.
• The Milwaukee Bucks have also had conversations with the Celtics about Pierce, sources said.
• Whether the Pierce rumors are true or not, there’s little doubt the Cavs have had discussions about trading their second-rounders and 19th overall selection to move up in the draft.
• Memphis Grizzlies point guard Mike Conley Jr. told FOX Sports Florida that former No. 1 overall pick Greg Oden is interested in signing with the Heat. Conley and Oden are close from their time together in high school and at Ohio State. Oden is expected to meet with Heat president Pat Riley when the free-agent negotiating period begins July 1.
Twitter: @SamAmicoFSO |
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A worldwide shortage of cocoa by 2020 could threaten the future of chocolate bars, a confectionery expert has warned.
The nation’s best loved treats could become choccy horror slabs of palm oil and vegetable fats packed with raisins and nougat to bulk them out and make them taste better.
According to Angus Kennedy, editor of industry bible Kennedy’s Confection magazine, diminishing cocoa supplies could see chocolate transformed from the melt-in-the-mouth pick-me-up to a “sludgy” imitation.
Mr Kennedy - who has been given a sneak preview of a futuristic chocolate bar - revealed it was a far cry from Cadbury's Dairy Milk.
“I have tasted the chocolate bar of the future and it’s nothing like the chocolate we know and love,” he said.
“It will be much sweeter as sugar is the cheapest ingredient and can be used to hide the fact that there is less cocoa powder.
“Cocoa Butter and cocoa are the most expensive ingredients in the product and will be replaced with cheaper ingredients like raisins and nougat.
“High quality chocolate snaps because of the level of cocoa butter.
“But in the future it won’t as more vegetable fat will be used - the product will be more bendy and sludgy in texture.”
With cocoa crops being chopped down to make way for more profitable rubber plantations, Mr Kennedy predicted we would run out of beans in seven years.
Figures show cocoa beans have rocketed in price by 63% in the last two years while whole milk powder has soared by 20%.
According to Mr Kennedy futuristic “Chocolight” bars will shrink to around 50g but shapes will be funkier to attract shoppers.
He said: “Shapes are already starting to change - Dairy Milk have rounded the corners of their bars. It makes people think that they are getting something exciting and completely new.” |
Spurs' Tony Parker: Warriors need more titles to be called the greatest
Tony Parker had some words for the Warriors.
Click ahead to see what the world was like the last time the Spurs missed the playoffs ... all way back in 1997. Tony Parker had some words for the Warriors.
Click ahead to see what the world was like the last time the Spurs missed the playoffs ... all way back in 1997. Photo: TOM REEL, STAFF / SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS Photo: TOM REEL, STAFF / SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS Image 1 of / 44 Caption Close Spurs' Tony Parker: Warriors need more titles to be called the greatest 1 / 44 Back to Gallery
The Golden State Warriors’ pursuit of an NBA-record 73 wins swings through San Antonio on Saturday, in another ultra-hyped battle of the NBA’s top two teams by far.
If the Warriors, 61-6 heading into a game tonight in Dallas, eventually complete their rundown of the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls as the winningest team in the league history, there will be a rush to paint this Golden State club as the best ever.
Not so fast, Spurs point guard Tony Parker said. With all due respect.
RELATED: Toandny Parker his chef reveal Spurs star's favorite foods
“I’ll say they’ve been having an unbelievable season,” Parker said. “Being in the league for 15 years, it’s tough to try to get 70 wins, with all the back to backs and all the great teams you have in the league. So it’s pretty impressive.”
But?
“Compare them to the Bulls,” Parker continued. “They won six (titles) in eight years. So you have to give a little bit of time to that (Warriors) team to see how well they’re going to do over 10 years, the longevity. Like us, the Spurs, we won five titles since ’99. That’s how you judge teams.”
RELATED: Tony Parker's cute kid gives San Antonio's 'I love my Spurs' wall his tiny approval
This is the part where it’s only fair to point out that Parker grew up a fan of Jordan’s Bulls and, of course, played for four of those Spurs championship teams. It’s also worth pointing out that the Warriors likely wouldn’t disagree: When it comes to denoting the best, rings are the thing.
Click through the gallery above to see what the world was like in 1997 — the last time the Spurs missed the playoffs.
jmcdonald@express-news.net
Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN |
Italy
Geldenhuys captains Italy on summer tour
ESPN Staff
Quintin Geldenhuys will skipper Italy © Getty Images Enlarge
Italy have named a 30-man squad ahead of their three-Test June schedule.
Jacques Brunel's side will play Fiji on June 7, Samoa a week later in Apia and then Japan in Tokyo on June 21. Quintin Geldenhuys will captain the side, in the absence of Sergio Parisse, while Martin Castrogiovanni is rested.
There are three uncapped players in the squad - Zebre's Dario Chistolini, Andrea de Marchi and William Palazzani.
Italy:
Forwards: Matias Aguero, Dario Chistolini, Lorenzo Cittadini, Alberto de Marchi, Andrea de Marchi, Leonardo Ghiraldini, Davide Giazzon, Andrea Manici, George Biagi, Marco Bortolami, Marco Fuser, Quintin Geldenhuys, Robert Barbieri, Mauro Bergamasco, Paul Derbyshire, Joshua Furno, Manoa Vosawai
Backs: Guglielmo Palazzani, Tito Tebaldi, Tommaso Allan, Luciano Orquera, Michele Campagnaro, Angelo Esposito, Gonzalo Garcia, Tommaso Iannone, Andrea Masi, Luke McLean, Leonardo Sarto, Alberto Sgarbi, Giovambattista Venditti
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd |
Doyal claims accusations politically motivated
Craig Doyal For story slugged MOCO Elections Craig Doyal For story slugged MOCO Elections Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Doyal claims accusations politically motivated 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
Montgomery County Judge Craig Doyal denies accusations that he allowed a former county employee to use county equipment for work on his campaign while on and off the clock in 2012.
Attorney Eric Yollick, of The Woodlands, brought the issue to light during public comment of the Nov. 23 Commissioners Court meeting.
"(The fact) a commissioner would permit such a situation to occur is reprehensible and reflects an attitude that the county property is there not to safeguard, but for the personal and political use of the commissioner," Yollick said during the meeting.
He said the situation is a waste of county dollars.
According to documents provided by the county, the termination occurred in March 13, 2012, when Doyal was Precinct 2 commissioner. He terminated office supervisor Melissa Goetz, whom Doyal hired in 2006, for using the equipment.
Doyal claims this has come to light only for political reasons.
The Montgomery County Employee Policy Manual states that employees are prohibited from ... removing county property without authorization.
"This is a four-year-old incident that was settled by the county attorney and (Human Resources) that I believe is being brought up today for political purposes," said Doyal, adding that since the incident, the county has tightened its policies on the use of county equipment.
Precinct 2 Commissioner Charlie Riley, who worked under Doyal at that time, said he saw Goetz bringing a printer back to the office on a Monday morning and later reported the situation to Doyal.
According to the documents obtained by The Courier through an Open Records request, Doyal stated in the termination paperwork, "It just came to my attention that on or about January 9, 2012, you returned a printer to the office which you admitted using to prepare campaign materials. The printer was owned by Montgomery County. You have been repeatedly warned to not use county materials, equipment or time to work on my campaign."
While the termination documents state her offense was so severe that pervious warnings were not needed, Goetz's personnel file indicates she was suspended for 2-1/2 days in November 2011. However, the paperwork, signed by Doyal, does not state a reason for the suspension and shows it was received by Human Resources on April 23, 2012, which was after Goetz's termination. Doyal said he did not recall the reason for the action.
Goetz's response letter to termination
In an April 17, 2012, letter to Human Resources Director Dodi Shaw, Goetz requested numerous documents regarding her termination. Goetz also outlined how Doyal instructed her to use county printers and other equipment to prepare campaign finance reports and campaign fliers.
"Personal direction from Craig Doyal regarding changes that needed to be made on his reports during work hours, request to create political program ads during work hours, requests to prepare and mail political checks during work hours, and requests to work on fundraisers during work hours led me to believe that not only were these activities approved by Craig Doyal, they were required of me as part of my regular duties," Goetz stated. "The time used to complete these activities was under his immediate direction."
Goetz, who claimed she was "wrongfully terminated" in the letter continued, "… other county employees working on campaign activities and fundraisers during work hours, also led me to believe that Craig Doyal approved of these activities." She noted that Precinct 2 crews built platforms used at Doyal's fundraisers in the county shop and that Riley made food purchases at Sam's Club for Doyal's fundraisers during work hours.
"(These) are just further indicators of Craig Doyal's knowledge of and approval of the use of county materials, equipment, or time to work on his campaign," she stated.
Riley denied Goetz's accusations.
"No, never did," Riley said of working on Doyal's campaign.
Shaw did not respond to an email regarding Goetz's personnel file and any further investigation into her accusations.
Goetz, who could not be reached for comment before press time, is the mother of Brian Goetz, 22, who was arrested and charged with two counts of intoxicated manslaughter and one count of intoxicated assault after he crashed his truck in October 2012 killing two of his passengers.
Following a week long trial, Brian Goetz was found guilty Nov. 9 of this year of a lesser charge of DWI and sentenced to six month in jail. He was released from the Montgomery County Jail less than two weeks after the sentencing for time served.
LEGAL IMPLICATIONS
While the Texas Election Code does not specifically address the use of county equipment for campaigns, the code does address the use of public funds for political advertising.
Section 255.03 states "an officer or employee of a political subdivision may not knowingly spend or authorize the spending of public funds for political advertising."
A violation of the section is a Class A misdemeanor.
Additionally, Texas Attorney General Opinion No. H-1165 states the use of public property, labor or service by a public officials or employee for private benefit constitutes the offense of theft.
According to Yollick, the statues of limitation for theft by a public servant of government property over which he exercises control in his official capacity is 10 years.
"Ms. Goetz alleged all of these activities to have occurred in the 2011 and 2012 time frame," Yollick noted.
Cultural atmosphere
While Goetz made the claims that others, including Riley, worked on Doyal's campaign using county equipment on an off the clock, she also claimed employees used other county equipment, such as chain saws and leaf blowers, for personal use.
"Again, conflicting practices regarding the use of county resource have confused the issue at hand," Goetz stated noting Riley's delay in telling Doyal about the incident was an "excuse to have me terminated."
Doyal declined to respond to Goetz's claims he was aware of her using the equipment on and off the clock but said there was no further action or investigation into the claims after she was terminated.
Goetz claims also indicate Riley and Doyal created an "atmosphere of leniency to exist in the commissioner's office."
Riley said was aware of Goetz's letter but had not seen it.
"I have not seen the letter. I hear there are two, and I don't care to see either one," Riley said.
Riley did say while crews do take county equipment home, it is not for personal use.
"They get called out 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Riley said. "Anything can happen at any time. It makes sense to do that." |
A pair of hawks nesting in a nearby tree after the birds attacked six people this week.
PORT ORANGE — County officials are advising library patrons to use umbrellas as shields from a pair of hawks nesting in a nearby tree after the birds attacked six people this week.
The six, including a library employee, were attacked by the two red-shouldered hawks, but only three of the people suffered scratches to their heads when the birds dive-bombed at them outside the Port Orange Regional Library, said county spokesman Dave Byron. No one was hospitalized, he said.
The hawks were trying to protect what appeared to be three babies in the nest by warding off anything deemed a threat, bird experts said.
“These birds have sharp talons and they are in protection mode,” Byron said, adding that because hawks are a federally protected species the county can’t remove the nest without a special permit.
“This leaves the county with few options as we don’t have the ability to move them and wouldn’t consider destroying them,” Byron said.
The birds shouldn’t be aggressive after the babies are able to fly out of the nest in about three weeks, Byron said. Until then, the library will provide escorts and umbrellas to ensure patrons’ safety, he said.
On Friday afternoon, a library employee escorted patrons to their cars with a large umbrella as the hawks flew back and forth to their nest. The hawks dove to the ground several times but did not collide with library patrons, many of them using their own umbrellas for protection. The county placed several large signs in the parking lot to warn patrons about the birds.
“Attention! Please Be Watchful!” read the sign with a photo of a hawk. “There are a pair of nesting hawks in a tree just outside of the library’s entrance who fly low to the ground.”
Daytona Beach Shores resident William Morrissey and his sister, Jayne Carney, sat outside the library with an umbrella overhead. The afternoon turned into an impromptu bird-watching expedition for the bird enthusiasts who came to the library to drop off books.
“After one swooped down close to us, we went the car and grabbed an umbrella,” Morrissey said. “I don’t think people are aware that they are here.”
Alex Kropp, a biologist at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said the majority of complaints received by his agency about dive-bombing raptor attacks are caused by red-shouldered hawks, which are the most common breed of hawks in Volusia County.
“It usually happens in a suburban neighborhood or in the parking lot of a business,” Kropp said. “We get everything from mild situations to situations where people get scratched pretty badly across their head or hit in the back of their head.”
Michael Brothers, director of the Marine Science Center in Ponce Inlet, said the aggression exhibited by the hawks is not uncommon. But what’s unusual is the location of the nest in such a well-traveled area.
“You don’t usually see nest sites that are so close to areas with heavy traffic,” he said. “The closer you get to the nest, the more likely you are to provoke a reaction.” |
SOUTH AFRICA may no longer have the chunkiest economy in Africa, now that Nigeria’s has been revalued upwards, but it still has the fattest people. This is evidence, to many South Africans, of the good life: fast food, a fast car, an urban lifestyle. Moreover, a chubby woman traditionally betokened health and beauty, whereas thinness smacked of disease. Among men, a big belly (a boep, in Afrikaans, the language of the country’s original Dutch settlers) is often thought to spell maturity, wealth and success. South Africa’s latest government is a portly crew, with many a ministerial suit bursting at the seams.
A recent global study published in the Lancet, a London-based medical journal, suggests that 70% of adult South African women and nearly 40% of men are overweight or obese. Even among children, a quarter of girls and a fifth of boys are too fat, and thus at greater risk of ill-health, from diabetes to heart disease. For years the government has been struggling to contain HIV/AIDS but now, some health experts are arguing, it should also concentrate on making people slimmer.
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South Africa’s latest ailment could herald a dangerous trend across the rest of Africa and the poor world, where obesity is projected to increase dramatically in the next two decades, along with urbanisation and economic development. It is a paradox that in places where malnutrition in children is high, adults are increasingly likely to be overweight or obese, say researchers.
Most South Africans sound comfortable with their waistlines. A health-and-nutrition survey published by the country’s Human Sciences Research Council found that two-thirds of South African men and women reckoned that they ate and drank healthily, with no need to change their way of life. Indeed, 88% of 25,500 South Africans interviewed indicated that the body image they deemed ideal was, in fact, fat.
A notable exception is the health minister, Aaron Motsoaledi. A medical doctor, he has made a point of slimming through daily morning walks and a healthier diet. He challenged his government colleagues to do the same, so far to little effect. Earlier this month members of parliament complained that their canteen offered too much junk food. Members are “nice and slim” when they are elected, said Sheila Sithole, an ANC MP, but “they all go out obese.” |
The Navy has released results of special and general courts-martial for November 2014. The cases are listed by the Navy Region in which they were tried:
NAVY REGION MID-ATLANTIC
General courts-martial
* In Norfolk, Virginia, OS3 Brian Fleck was tried for sexual assault, burglary and obstruction of justice. On Nov. 7, a panel returned a verdict of guilty to sexual assault and burglary and sentenced him to a dishonorable discharge, a reduction to paygrade E-1, forfeiture of all pay and allowances and confinement for five years.
* In Norfolk, OS2 Philip Jones pleaded guilty to sexual assault and sexual contact. On Nov. 13, the military judge sentenced him to a bad conduct discharge, a reduction to paygrade E-1 and confinement for 23 months.
* In Norfolk, ET3 Mario Rosa pleaded guilty to unauthorized absence and assaults consummated by battery. On Nov. 18, the military judge sentenced him to a reduction to paygrade E-3 and confinement for 45 days.
Special courts-martial
* In Norfolk, ABH2 Jean Hebert pleaded guilty to disrespect toward a superior commissioned officer, disrespect toward a petty officer and wrongful use of a controlled substance. On Nov. 4, the military judge sentenced her to a reduction to paygrade E-3 and confinement for 170 days.
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* In Norfolk, ABHC Raymond Saccoccia pleaded guilty to fraternization and wrongful use of a controlled substance. On Nov. 14, the military judge sentenced him to a forfeiture of $2,000 a month for six months, a reduction to paygrade E-5 and confinement for 89 days.
* In Norfolk, HA Antonio Taylor pleaded guilty to wrongful use of controlled substances. On Nov. 20, the military judge sentenced him to a bad conduct discharge and confinement for 60 days.
* In Groton, Connecticut, LT Emmanuel Buabeng pleaded guilty to conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman and making false official statements. On Nov. 20, the military judge sentenced him to a letter of reprimand and a forfeiture of $500 a month for 10 months.
NAVY REGION SOUTHEAST
General courts-martial
* In Jacksonville, Florida, an E-3 was tried for sexual assault and communicating a threat. On Nov. 5, the panel returned a verdict of not guilty.
* In Mayport, Florida, YN2 James Clancy pleaded guilty to sexual abuses of a child. On Nov. 7, the military judge sentenced him to a dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, a reduction to paygrade E-1 and confinement for 10 years.
* In Jacksonville, MM3 Erik Carrillo pleaded guilty to attempted murder, disrespect toward a superior commissioned officer, disrespect toward a superior petty officer, assault by intentionally inflicting grievous bodily harm, assault with a deadly weapon and disorderly conduct. On Nov. 13, the military judge sentenced him to a dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, a reduction to paygrade E-1 and confinement for five years.
Special courts-martial
* In Mayport, MAC Keith Elliott pleaded guilty to making a false official statement and uttering checks while dishonorably failing to maintain sufficient funds. On Nov. 12, the military judge sentenced him to a reprimand, a reduction to paygrade E-6 and hard labor without confinement for 46 days.
* In Jacksonville, AE3 Dylan Conkling pleaded guilty to attempting to commit lewd acts upon a minor, committing lewd acts upon minors and communicating indecent language. On Nov. 17, the military judge sentenced him to a bad conduct discharge, a reduction to paygrade E-1 and confinement for 10 months.
NAVY REGION NORTHWEST
General courts-martial
* In Bremerton, Washington, FT1 William Lance pleaded guilty to sexual abuses of a child. On Nov. 6, the military judge sentenced him to a dishonorable discharge, a reduction to paygrade E-1 and confinement for seven years.
* In Bremerton, EM1 Andrew Watson pleaded guilty to sexual abuse of a child and attempted indecent acts with a child. On Nov. 6, the military judge sentenced him to confinement for six months.
* In Bremerton, an E-8 was tried for sexual abuse of a child and child endangerment. On Nov. 21, a panel returned a verdict of not guilty.
Special courts-martial
* In Bremerton, EMFN Bradley Cohen pleaded guilty to wrongful drug use and wrongful drug possession with the intent to distribute and was tried for conspiracy and aggravated assault. On Nov. 4, the military judge convicted him of conspiracy and aggravated assault and sentenced him to a bad conduct discharge, a reduction to paygrade E-2, a fine of $3,032 and confinement for seven months.
* In Bremerton, ABHAN Natacia Garcia pleaded guilty to unauthorized absence and missing movement. On Nov. 5, the military judge sentenced her to a forfeiture of $500 a month for one month, a reduction to paygrade E-1 and confinement for 90 days.
* In Bremerton, ACAN Kielee Gould pleaded guilty to larceny. On Nov. 5, the military judge sentenced her to a forfeiture of $500 a month for three months, a reduction to paygrade E-2, a fine of $360 and confinement for 90 days.
* In Bremerton, MT2 Jeremy Kepner pleaded guilty to assaults consummated by battery. On Nov. 7, the military judge sentenced him to a bad conduct discharge, forfeiture of $750 a month for 11 months, a reduction to paygrade E-1 and confinement for 11 months.
* In Bremerton, ABH3 Sabrie Ashburn was tried for false official statement, check frauds and dishonorably failing to maintain sufficient funds. On Nov. 18, the military judge convicted her of false official statement, check frauds and uttering checks while dishonorably failing to maintain sufficient funds. The judge sentenced her to a bad conduct discharge, a reduction to paygrade E-2 and confinement for 280 days.
NAVY REGION SOUTHWEST
General court-martial
* In San Diego, BMSN Shannon Harris pleaded guilty to abusive sexual contact, larceny and unlawful entry, and was tried for burglary. On Nov. 5, the military judge convicted him of burglary and sentenced him to a dishonorable discharge and confinement for 52 months.
Special courts-martial
* In San Diego, AOAN Dyron Humes pleaded guilty to unauthorized absence, missing movement, false official statement, and wrongful use of controlled substances. On Nov. 6, the military judge sentenced him to a bad conduct discharge, a reduction to paygrade E-1 and confinement for 125 days.
* In San Diego, ADC Shannon Bavos pleaded guilty to wrongful appropriation. On Nov. 13, the military judge sentenced him to a reduction to paygrade E-6 and confinement for 80 days.
NAVY REGION HAWAII
Special court-martial
* In Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, DC2 Tiago Thomas was tried for abusive sexual contact, sexual harassment and assaults consummated by battery. On Nov. 25, the panel returned a verdict of guilty to sexual harassment and sentenced him to a reprimand and a reduction to paygrade E-4.
NAVY REGION JAPAN
General court-martial
* In Yokosuka, Japan, an E-5 was tried for sexual assault. On Nov. 5, the military judge returned a verdict of not guilty.
NAVY REGION EUROPE, AFRICA, SOUTHWEST ASIA
General court-martial |
Fri, 18 Dec 2009
As someone born in India, I sometimes look around and wonder, Where are the Indians (and other South Asians) in Free Software?
(I don't mean to exclude South Asians from other countries, so I will lump us together. I believe that we are more similar than we are different, although I know more about India than about the rest of South Asia.)
There is no shortage of Indians performing information technology jobs in the United States. The same is true in academia; the Computing Research Association uses National Science Foundation data to show about 15% of computer science bacholor's degrees are awarded to "Asians or Pacific Islanders." These are not precise numbers targeted at South Asians in particular, but they confirm a general feeling that plenty of technologists in the United States are from that part of the world.
South Asia is quite a populous region, coming in at over one billion people. It, too, has plenty of technology workers. So much FLOSS conversation happens in English, and India is well-suited to handle this; English is an "official language". Indian academia reports that there are 350 million English users and about 90 million English speakers.
So let's visually compare the Debian developers map for South Asia (over one billion people) and that of New Zealand, a country of four million.
India:
New Zealand:
These two countries have about the same number of Debian developers (at least, who have marked their location in the Debian LDAP database). About four.
South Asians comprise about one sixth of the world's population. There are about one thousand Debian developers; we represent at best 1% of that. These numbers are comparable to the under-representation of women in Free Software, especially when you compare the figure to South Asians' over-representation in the rest of information technology.
That makes me sad.
Take a look at the Debian developer map again. You'll see that Debian is certainly not an Americans-only project, or even an English-speakers-only project. South America has a respectable dotting of developers, and Western- to Central-Europe are packed.
I have strong feelings about Free Software. It emerges from an ethos of personal empowerment, and with open source it has become a dominant force in computing. Yet there are plenty of sharp people -- at least women and South Asians -- who, somehow, become culturally excluded from participating.
Why care about diversity?
Consider the diversity of contributors we already have. Some contribute to Free Software because of particular business needs, such as what caused Avi Kivity to write KVM, the new leader in Linux-based virtualization. Everaldo's art background gave us the "Crystal" icon set that set the standard for sharp-looking icons on the Free Desktop for years. Josh Coalson knew about compressing sound, and his Free Lossless Audio Codec is now the standard in high quality audio.
We already have a great deal of diversity. We should be celebrating!
Back in 2001, FLAC's users were celebrating. In that year, I decided to ditch proprietary operating systems because I felt I could achieve all my computing needs in the Free world. A happy user of FLAC myself, I lurked on the mailing list as I watched grateful people thank Josh for the great software he wrote.
Different contributions will excite different sorts of users. The more different people we have improving FLOSS, the more happy users we can make. Happy users of FLOSS are Free users. Happy users can become contributors, putting forth code, documentation, translations, and word-of-mouth marketing.
The first reason to improve diversity in FLOSS is to better suit our users' needs. The more diversity we have in our contributors, the more chance we have of tickling our users in the ways that please them the most. I wish to see an end to software that restricts users' freedom, so I want to see us build the tools that users want.
One thing that pleases me is when I see other people contributing who seem similar to me. When I went to Debconf, I was thrilled to be surrounded by people who cared about software freedom and technical excellence. I had even more fun being social, chatting about rainforests, mutual friends, websites, and music. I might have had the most fun playing the card game Mao.
A second reason, then, to improve diversity in FLOSS is to increase contributor retention by increasing joy. Mao was an example of a cultural bond I happened to share with a handful of Debianites. The more diversity we have, the more frequent these sorts of coincidences will be.
The final, most obvious, reason to reach out to groups of people who do not typically contribute is that we can increase our numbers. That by itself is so valuable. Ubuntu sees 100 new bugs per week, even after the bug squad's efforts. If we can do a better job of recruiting new contributors, the raw numbers give us more strength in creating and maintaining world-class software as well as letting the world know about it.
Changing the balance
I believe that there are plenty of South Asians quite capable of contributing to FLOSS. I believe the same of women. I believe the same of men.
Back to the topic at hand. Why do the South Asians vanish when we look at Free Software, not tech in general?
There are plenty of reasons I can dream up, based on my experience with Indians.
Plenty of South Asian parents urge their children to make low-risk career choices.
My mother reports that schools in India focus on memorization instead of creativity. This can leave little room for extracurricular pursuits.
It's tough for FLOSS advocates to work directly on these distant issues. But I think we can focus some problems we can help solve. Crucially, awareness of Free Software spreads best by social circles. I learned about Linux from a friend at a summer camp. I'll repeat that:
Awareness of Free Software spreads best by social networks.
So if you want to spread that awareness, try to be a bridge.
If you meet someone from an unusual background for open source who needs support or mentorship, try to help. That is an investment in the diversity and growth of Free Software. Those people can now unlock more "open source minorities."
What success looks like
Google Summer of Code helps some new contributors get started and provides that mentorship. Rachel McCreary was invited to the SciPy conference after a successful summer. Her father left a comment explaining how her sisters participated in FLOSS via Google's Highly Open Participation (GHOP) Contest:
Rachel was inspired and motivated by BOTH of her little sisters, each completing six GHOP tasks (if memory serves).
GHOP and GSOC has been a game-changer for these girls. Rachel's younger sister is applying to schools such as MIT with an interest in a science major. The youngest daughter now has a Caltech poster on her wall with the intent to eventually attend.
Their proud Dad
Soon, these stories will be commonplace. Until then, we have work to do.
(I'm still researching these topics. If you can help me find any sort of data to help me learn more about diversity in FLOSS, even if it seems like I wouldn't like it, leave a comment.)
[] permanent link and comments |
I like to think that in the Ubuntu project, we’re pragmatic about technology. This means keeping an open mind, considering alternatives, and evaluating them objectively. It means bearing in mind the needs of the user, and measuring ourselves based on how well we solve their problems (not merely our own).
It is in this spirit that I have been thinking about Qt recently. We want to make it fast, easy and painless to develop applications for Ubuntu, and Qt is an option worth exploring for application developers. In thinking about this, I’ve realized that there is quite a bit of commonality between the strengths of Qt and some of the new directions in Ubuntu:
Qt has a long history of use on ARM as well as x86 , by virtue of being popular on embedded devices. Consumer products have been built using Qt on ARM for over 10 years. We’ve been making Ubuntu products available for ARM for nearly two years now, and 10.10 supports more ARM boards than ever, including reference boards from Freescale, Marvell and TI. Qt is adding ARMv7 optimizations to benefit the latest ARM chips. We do this in order to offer OEMs a choice of hardware, without sacrificing software choice. Qt preserves this same choice for application developers.
, by virtue of being popular on embedded devices. Consumer products have been built using Qt on ARM for over 10 years. We’ve been making Ubuntu products available for ARM for nearly two years now, and 10.10 supports more ARM boards than ever, including reference boards from Freescale, Marvell and TI. Qt is adding ARMv7 optimizations to benefit the latest ARM chips. We do this in order to offer OEMs a choice of hardware, without sacrificing software choice. Qt preserves this same choice for application developers. Qt is a cross-platform application framework, with official ports for Windows, MacOS and more, and experimental community ports to Android, the iPhone and WebOS. Strong cross-platform support was one of the original principles of Qt, and it shows in the maturity of the official ports. With Ubuntu Light being installed on computers with Windows, and Ubuntu One landing on Android and the iPhone, we need interoperability with other platforms. There is also a large population of developers who already know how to target Windows, who can reach Ubuntu users as well by choosing Qt.
application framework, with official ports for Windows, MacOS and more, and experimental community ports to Android, the iPhone and WebOS. Strong cross-platform support was one of the original principles of Qt, and it shows in the maturity of the official ports. With Ubuntu Light being installed on computers with Windows, and Ubuntu One landing on Android and the iPhone, we need interoperability with other platforms. There is also a large population of developers who already know how to target Windows, who can reach Ubuntu users as well by choosing Qt. Qt has a fairly mature touch input system, which now has support for multi-touch and gestures (including QML), though it’s only complete on Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6. Meanwhile, Canonical has been working with the community to develop a low-level multi-touch framework for Linux and X11, for the benefit of Qt and other toolkits. These efforts will eventually meet in the middle.
Overall, I think Qt has a lot to offer people who want to develop applications for (and on) Ubuntu, particularly now. It already powers popular cross-platform applications like VLC, not to mention the entire Kubuntu distribution. I missed it when this happened last year, but Qt is now available under either the LGPL 2.1 or the GPL 3.0, which should make it suitable for virtually any Ubuntu application. It has strong commercial backing as well as a large developer community. No single solution will meet all developers’ needs, of course, and Ubuntu supports multiple toolkits and frameworks for this reason, but Qt seems like a great tool to have in our toolbox for the road ahead.
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More states frustrated over Real ID
Homeland Security starts writing checks but states are still frsutrated
By Zack Martin, Editor
Real ID came out of the 9/11 Commission recommendations suggesting states should do more to identify individuals applying for driver license and state IDs. This was in response to the fact that some of the 9/11 hijackers were able to obtain multiple driver licenses from different states.
To say the law is controversial is an understatement. The 2005 legislation is the new boogeyman. Some say it’s the first stop toward a national ID and eventually a police state where every citizen will have to present his or her “papers” on demand. Others say it’s a long overdue initiative to repair holes in a flawed system.
Many or most states, which have to implement new policies and procedures to comply with the law, don’t like it either and call it an unfunded mandate. They say billions of dollars will have to be spent in order to comply and what the federal government is giving them isn’t enough.
Some states disagree with the law so strongly they have passed laws saying they won’t comply. Arizona is the latest state to pass a law and at least 12 others have already done so.
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano signed a bill saying they won’t meet the requirements of the law. Napolitano’s biggest issue is the cost of Real ID. She cited a White House estimate that Real ID would cost at least $4 billion to implement. But thus far, she said, the federal government has only appropriated $90 million to help Arizona and other states comply with the measure.
Maine is another state that has passed a law saying it won’t comply with Real ID. The state did, however, accept a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to improve its driver license security.
Listen to the re:ID Podcast Episode 17: Maine has privacy concerns with Real ID At least 12 states have passed legislation saying they won’t comply with Real ID, the federal mandate to secure state-issues IDs and driver licenses. Lawmakers in Main have been particularly outspoken regarding the law. Regarding ID Editor Zack Martin speaks with Maine State Sen. Phil Bartlett about the law and why the state has some concerns. Listen now.
Maine Gov. John Baldacci told the Bangor Daily News that just because the state took the money doesn’t mean it’s going to comply with the law. “This is not Real ID. The description of the program says specifically that you do not have to be Real ID-compliant to access the funds. Everybody needs to read the details and see that this keeps us in conformity to the law [of Maine] and to the prior law.”
While publicly states may complain about Real ID, those in the motor vehicle departments know the recommendations make sense and need to be implemented, says Jeremy Grant, senior vice president and identity solutions analyst at the Stanford Group Company. “Do you want to be known as the state with the weakest licenses?” he asks.
Politically it might not make sense either, Grant says. Imagine the campaign ads depicting an individual against Real ID and the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. States are making noise so they can get the funds to make the necessary changes. “Everything we see shows states making the necessary security changes to their licenses,” Grant says.
And Homeland Security is starting to send some checks. The agency has announced $79 million in Real ID grants.
Verification hub seen by supporters as essential, detractors as ominous
Missouri was awarded $17 million to lead the development of the verification hub. This hub will be used as a central router to provide verification to motor vehicle departments of an applicant’s source documents. States will be able to verify the identity, lawful status and Social Security number of an applicant through this common interface. Four other states – Florida, Indiana, Nevada, and Wisconsin – were awarded $1.2 million to partner with Missouri for verification hub testing and implementation.
The Silver Spring, Md.-based National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems has been working with Homeland Security on the hub, says Garland Land, executive director at NAPHSIS. This has been a challenge because so many of the breeder documents, birth certificates, are still on paper. Also, there is no standard format for birth certificates and it’s difficult to tell if it’s authentic by looking at it.
The hub is a Web application where a DMV employee enters certain information from a birth certificate. This information is sent to he issuing state and it comes back with a match or no match within a few seconds, Land says. One of the initial concerns from states was that many of these records weren’t available electronically. Over the past few years, states have remedied that.
NAPHSIS already has been working with several state DMVs, the U.S. State Department’s Passport Office and the Social Security Administration on testing the system for the past few years, Land says.
Read the full story about Maine’s grant here. |
Businesses pursue particular lines of action for three principal reasons. The first one is profit. The other two are expanding market reach and reinforcing their relationship with their stakeholders. One company, Hustle Life, feels that you need to design your website carefully so that you can achieve these objectives, especially if you operate an e-commerce site. Ordinary businesses and personal blogs can benefit from it as well.
For example, adopting a minimalist approach on your homepage is an excellent idea. Remember, Minimalism is an art form that became popular in the 1960s and 70s. It emphasizes simplicity within a de-cluttered environment. In this case, your homepage would include relevant links only, a few pictures if any, social media buttons, and your contact information.
Other things that it should contain are a few lines about your business products and a call to action. Opting for minimalism on your homepage would be a brilliant move because it would keep people on your page. More specifically, the bounce rate would be low because online visitors would see what they want as they land on your homepage.
Make Your Site Navigable
You can start by creating a menu at the top of each webpage. More specifically, it can be at the header. Design it conspicuously so that people can notice it quickly. This menu would help them move to another webpage without much difficulty. Vertical navigation tools are an excellent idea as well. People can click on these tools to move to the top or bottom of the page.
Creating a footer that is full of relevant links is another way of improving navigation on your website. Some of the links should lead online visitors to web pages that focus on FAQ, terms of use, and contact information among other things. Remember, navigation is critical because it makes it easy for online visitors to find the information they want including checkout links.
Shift to a Mobile Responsive Website
Statistics show that people are using their smartphones to access the internet than they are their laptops or desktops. For example, did you know that internet usage on mobile phone devices surpassed that of PCs and Macs in 2016? Unfortunately, website owners failed when it came to adapting to this kind of change.
More specifically, they did not shift to responsive sites. Remember, responsive websites adapt to the device that you are using. That means you can view them on your smartphone with little or no difficulty. In contrast, nothing is as tedious as going through non-responsive websites on your phone. Consequently, smartphone users view these sites as uninviting.
Go for the Right Kind of Font to Improve Readability
Having an impact on your online visitors is impossible if viewing content on your site is difficult or impossible. Unfortunately, website owners fail when it comes to choosing the right setting for improving readability on their websites. That means online visitors will miss the information you have on your site because they cannot read it.
You can remedy this situation by creating a suitable contrast between the text in your website and the background to it. The font size has to be readable as well. For example, a 12pt font is too small. Instead, go for 16pt. Sans Serif fonts are also better than Serif fonts are. More specifically, they are easily readable so go for them. |
Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs
A WORD FROM YOUR SPONSOR: The following may be downloaded and read by any and all, but the author holds the copyright; none of the following may be reproduced in any medium, traditional or electronic, without written permission from the author ("markdery@well.sf.ca.us"). A hardcopy version, published by the Open Magazine pamphlet series, is available under the title Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs ($4). Most college and fringe culture bookstores carry Open Magazine pamphlets; they can also be ordered from The Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, POB 2726 Westfield, NJ 07091 U.S.A. (tel: 908-789-9608; fax 908-654-3829). The series also includes superb pamphlets by Mike Davis, Noam Chomsky, and Herbert Schiller, among others. * * *
I. The Empire of Signs "My fellow Americans," exhorted John F. Kennedy, "haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?" Of course, it wasn't actually Kennedy, but an actor in "Media Burn," a spectacle staged in 1975 by the performance art collective Ant Farm. Speaking from a dais, "Kennedy" held forth on America's addiction to the plug-in drug, declaring, "Mass media monopolies control people by their control of information." On cue, an assistant doused a wall of TV sets with kerosene and flicked a match at the nearest console. An appreciative roar went up from the crowd as the televisions exploded into snapping flames and roiling smoke. Minutes later, a customized 1959 Cadillac hurtled through the fiery wall with a shuddering crunch and ground to a halt, surrounded by the smashed, blackened carcasses of televisions. Here and there, some sets still burned; one by one, their picture tubes imploded, to the onlookers' delight. A postcard reproduction of the event's pyrotechnic climax, printed on the occasion of the its tenth anniversary, bears a droll poem: Modern alert
plague is here
burn your TV
exterminate fear Image breakers
smashing TV
American heroes
burn to be free In "Media Burn," Ant Farm indulged publicly in the guilty pleasure of kicking a hole in the cathode-ray tube. Now, almost two decades later, TV's Cyclopean eye peers into every corner of the cultural arena, and the desire to blind it is as strong as ever. "Media Burn" materializes the wish-fulfillment dream of a consumer democracy that yearns, in its hollow heart and empty head, for a belief system loftier than the "family values" promised by a Volvo ad campaign, discourse more elevated than that offered by the shark tank feeding-frenzy of The McLaughlin Hour. It is a postmodern commonplace that our lives are intimately and inextricably bound up in the TV experience. Ninety-eight percent of all American households---more than have indoor plumbing---have at least one television, which is on seven hours a day, on the average. Dwindling funds for public schools and libraries, counterpointed by the skyrocketing sales of VCRs and electronic games, have given rise to a culture of "aliteracy," defined by Roger Cohen as "the rejection of books by children and young adults who know how to read but choose not to." The drear truth that two thirds of Americans get "most of their information" from television is hardly a revelation. Media prospector Bill McKibben wonders about the exchange value of such information: We believe we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information. The effects of television are most deleterious in the realms of journalism and politics; in both spheres, TV has reduced discourse to photo ops and sound bites, asserting the hegemony of image over language, emotion over intellect. These developments are bodied forth in Ronald Reagan, a TV conjuration who for eight years held the news media, and thus the American public, spellbound. As Mark Hertsgaard points out, the President's media- savvy handlers were able to reduce the fourth estate, which likes to think of itself as an unblinking watchdog, to a fawning lapdog: Deaver, Gergen and their colleagues effectively rewrote the rules of presidential image-making. On the basis of a sophisticated analysis of the American news media---how it worked, which buttons to push when, what techniques had and had not worked for previous administrations--- they introduced a new model for packaging the nation's top politician and using the press to sell him to the American public. Their objective was not simply to tame the press but to transform it into an unwitting mouthpiece of the government. During the Reagan years, America was transformed into a TV democracy whose prime directive is social control through the fabrication and manipulation of images. "We [the Reagan campaign staff] tried to create the most entertaining, visually attractive scene to fill that box, so that the cameras from the networks would have to use it," explained former Reagan advisor Michael Deaver. "It would be so good that they'd say, 'Boy, this is going to make our show tonight.' [W]e became Hollywood producers." The conversion of American society into a virtual reality was lamentably evident in the Persian Gulf War, a made-for-TV miniseries with piggybacked merchandising (T-shirts, baseball caps, Saddam toilet paper, Original Desert Shield Condoms) and gushy, Entertainment Tonight-style hype from a cheerleading media. When filmmaker Jon Alpert, under contract to NBC, brought back stomach- churning footage of Iraq under U.S. bombardment, the network--- which is owned by one of the world's largest arms manufacturers, General Electric---fired Alpert and refused to air the film. Not that Alpert's film would have roused the body politic: throughout the war, the American people demanded the right not to know. A poll cited in The New York Times was particularly distressing: "Given a choice between increasing military control over information or leaving it to news organizations to make most decisions about reporting on the war, 57 per cent of those responding said they would favor greater military control." During the war's first weeks, as home front news organizations aided Pentagon spin control by maintaining a near-total blackout on coverage of protest marches, Deaver was giddy with enthusiasm. "If you were going to hire a public relations firm to do the media relations for an international event," he bubbled, "it couldn't be done any better than this is being done." In fact, a P.R. firm, Hill & Knowlton, was hired; it orchestrated the congressional testimony of the overwrought young Kuwaiti woman whose horror stories about babies ripped from incubators and left "on the cold floor to die" by Iraqi soldiers was highly effective in mobilizing public support for the war. Her testimony was never substantiated, and her identity---she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S.---was concealed, but why niggle over details? "Formulated like a World War II movie, the Gulf War even ended like a World War II movie," wrote Neal Gabler, "with the troops marching triumphantly down Broadway or Main Street, bathed in the gratitude of their fellow Americans while the final credits rolled." After the yellow ribbons were taken down, however, a creeping disaffection remained. A slowly-spreading rancor at the televisual Weltanschauung, it is with us still, exacerbated by the prattle of talk show hosts, anchorclones, and the Teen Talk Barbie advertised on Saturday mornings whose "four fun phrases" include "I love shopping" and "Meet me at the mall." Mark Crispin Miller neatly sums TV's place in our society: Everybody watches it, but no one really likes it. This is the open secret of TV today. Its only champions are its own executives, the advertisers who exploit it, and a compromised network of academic boosters. Otherwise, TV has no spontaneous defenders, because there is almost nothing in it to defend. The rage and frustration of the disempowered viewer exorcised in "Media Burn" bubbles up, unexpectedly, in "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)", Bruce Springsteen's Scorsese-esque tale of a man unhinged by the welter of meaningless information that assails him from every channel. Springsteen sings: "So I bought a .44 magnum it was solid steel cast/ And in the blessed name of Elvis well I just let it blast/ 'Til my TV lay in pieces there at my feet/ And they busted me for disturbin' the almighty peace." Significantly, the video for "57 Channels" incorporates footage of a white Cadillac on a collision course with a wall of flaming TV sets in obvious homage to "Media Burn." The ritual destruction of the TV set, endlessly iterated in American mass culture, can be seen as a retaliatory gesture by an audience that has begun to bridle, if only intuitively, at the suggestion that "power" resides in the remote control unit, that "freedom of choice" refers to the ever-greater options offered around the dial. This techno-voodoo rite constitutes the symbolic obliteration of a one-way information pipeline that only transmits, never receives. It is an act of sympathetic magic performed in the name of all who are obliged to peer at the world through peepholes owned by multinational conglomerates for whom the profit margin is the bottom line. "To the eye of the consumer," notes Ben Bagdikian, the global media oligopoly is not visible...Newsstands still display rows of newspapers and magazines, in a dazzling array of colors and subjects...Throughout the world, broadcast and cable channels continue to multiply, as do video cassettes and music recordings. But...if this bright kaleidoscope suddenly disappeared and was replaced by the corporate colophons of those who own this output, the collage would go gray with the names of the few multinationals that now command the field. In his watershed work, The Media Monopoly, Bagdikian reports that the number of transnational media giants has dropped to 23 and is rapidly shrinking. Following another vector, Herbert Schiller considers the interlocked issues of privatized information and limited access: The commercialization of information, its private acquisition and sale, has become a major industry. While more material than ever before, in formats created for special use, is available at a price, free public information supported by general taxation is attacked by the private sector as an unacceptable form of subsidy...An individual's ability to know the actual circumstances of national and international existence has progressively diminished. Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon level another, equally disturbing charge: In an era of network news cutbacks and staff layoffs, many reporters are reluctant to pursue stories they know will upset management. "People are more careful now," remarked a former NBC news producer, "because this whole notion of freedom of the press becomes a contradiction when the people who own the media are the same people who need to be reported on." Corporate ownership of the newsmedia, the subsumption of an ever-larger number of publishing companies and television networks into an ever-smaller number of multinationals, and the increased privatization of truth by an information-rich, technocratic elite are not newly-risen issues. More recent is the notion that the public mind is being colonized by corporate phantasms---wraithlike images of power and desire that haunt our dreams. Consider the observations of Neal Gabler and Marshall Blonsky: Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have gradually driven out the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous until there is no distinction between real life and stagecraft. In fact, one could argue that the theatricalization of American life is the major cultural transformation of this century. We can no longer do anything without wanting to see it immediately on video...There is never any longer an event or a person who acts for himself, in himself. The direction of events and of people is to be reproduced into image, to be doubled in the image of television. [T]oday the referent disappears. In circulation are images. Only images. The eutopic (literally, "no-place") territory demarcated by Gabler and Blonsky, lush with fictions yet strangely barren, has been mapped in detail by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In his landmark 1975 essay, "The Precession of Simulacra," Baudrillard put forth the notion that we inhabit a "hyperreality," a hall of media mirrors in which reality has been lost in an infinity of reflections. We "experience" events, first and foremost, as electronic reproductions of rumored phenomena many times removed, he maintains; originals, invariably compared to their digitally-enhanced representations, inevitably fall short. In the "desert of the real," asserts Baudrillard, mirages outnumber oases and are more alluring to the thirsty eye. Moreover, he argues, signs that once pointed toward distant realities now refer only to themselves. Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A, which depicts the sort of idyllic, turn-of-the-century burg that exists only in Norman Rockwell paintings and MGM backlots, is a textbook example of self-referential simulation, a painstaking replica of something that never was. "These would be the successive phases of the image," writes Baudrillard, betraying an almost necrophiliac relish as he contemplates the decomposition of culturally-defined reality. "[The image] is the reflection of a basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it masks the absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum." Reality isn't what it used to be. In America, factory capitalism has been superseded by an information economy characterized by the reduction of labor to the manipulation, on computers, of symbols that stand in for the manufacturing process. The engines of industrial production have slowed, yielding to a phantasmagoric capitalism that produces intangible commodities--- Hollywood blockbusters, television sit-coms, catchphrases, jingles, buzzwords, images, one-minute megatrends, financial transactions flickering through fiberoptic bundles. Our wars are Nintendo wars, fought with camera-equipped smart bombs that marry cinema and weaponry in a television that kills. Futurologists predict that the flagship technology of the coming century will be "virtual reality," a computer-based system that immerses users wearing headsets wired for sight and sound in computer-animated worlds. In virtual reality, the television swallows the viewer, headfirst.
II. Culture Jamming Meanwhile, the question remains: How to box with shadows? In other words, what shape does an engaged politics assume in an empire of signs? The answer lies, perhaps, in the "semiological guerrilla warfare" imagined by Umberto Eco. "[T]he receiver of the message seems to have a residual freedom: the freedom to read it in a different way...I am proposing an action to urge the audience to control the message and its multiple possibilities of interpretation," he writes. "[O]ne medium can be employed to communicate a series of opinions on another medium...The universe of Technological Communication would then be patrolled by groups of communications guerrillas, who would restore a critical dimension to passive reception." Eco assumes, a priori, the radical politics of visual literacy, an idea eloquently argued by Stuart Ewen, a critic of consumer culture. "We live at a time when the image has become the predominant mode of public address, eclipsing all other forms in the structuring of meaning," asserts Ewen. "Yet little in our education prepares us to make sense of the rhetoric, historical development or social implications of the images within our lives." In a society of heat, light and electronic poltergeists- --an eerie otherworld of "illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of material things"---the desperate project of reconstructing meaning, or at least reclaiming that notion from marketing departments and P.R. firms, requires visually-literate ghostbusters. Culture jammers answer to that name. "Jamming" is CB slang for the illegal practice of interrupting radio broadcasts or conversations between fellow hams with lip farts, obscenities, and other equally jejune hijinx. Culture jamming, by contrast, is directed against an ever more intrusive, instrumental technoculture whose operant mode is the manufacture of consent through the manipulation of symbols. The term "cultural jamming" was first used by the collage band Negativland to describe billboard alteration and other forms of media sabotage. On Jamcon '84, a mock-serious bandmember observes, "As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist...The skillfully reworked billboard...directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large." Part artistic terrorists, part vernacular critics, culture jammers, like Eco's "communications guerrillas," introduce noise into the signal as it passes from transmitter to receiver, encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Intruding on the intruders, they invest ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings; simultaneously, they decrypt them, rendering their seductions impotent. Jammers offer irrefutable evidence that the right has no copyright on war waged with incantations and simulations. And, like Ewen's cultural cryptographers, they refuse the role of passive shoppers, renewing the notion of a public discourse. Finally, and just as importantly, culture jammers are Groucho Marxists, ever mindful of the fun to be had in the joyful demolition of oppressive ideologies. As the inveterate prankster and former Dead Kennedy singer Jello Biafra once observed, "There's a big difference between 'simple crime' like holding up a 7-11, and 'creative crime' as a form of expression...Creative crime is...uplifting to the soul...What better way to survive our anthill society than by abusing the very mass media that sedates the public?...A prank a day keeps the dog leash away!" Jamming is part of a historical continuum that includes Russian samizdat (underground publishing in defiance of official censorship); the anti-fascist photomontages of John Heartfield; Situationist detournement (defined by Greil Marcus, in Lipstick Traces, as "the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one's own devise"); the underground journalism of '60s radicals such as Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman; Yippie street theater such as the celebrated attempt to levitate the Pentagon; parody religions such as the Dallas-based Church of the Subgenius; workplace sabotage of the sort documented by Processed World, a magazine for disaffected data entry drones; the ecopolitical monkeywrenching of Earth First!; the random acts of Artaudian cruelty that radical theorist Hakim Bey calls "poetic terrorism" ("weird dancing in all- night computer banking lobbies...bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks"); the insurgent use of the "cut-up" collage technique proposed by William Burroughs in "Electronic Revolution" ("The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of association...Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass media with total illusion"); and subcultural bricolage (the refunctioning, by societal "outsiders," of symbols associated with the dominant culture, as in the appropriation of corporate attire and Vogue model poses by poor, gay, and largely nowhite drag queens). An elastic category, culture jamming accommodates multitude of subcultural practices. Outlaw computer hacking with the intent of exposing institutional or corporate wrongdoing is one example; "slashing," or textual poaching, is another. (The term "slashing" derives from the pornographic "K/S"---short for "Kirk/Spock"--- stories written by female Star Trek fans and published in underground fanzines. Spun from the perceived homoerotic subtext in Star Trek narratives, K/S, or "slash," tales are often animated by feminist impulses. I have appropriated the term for general use, applying it to any form of jamming in which tales told for mass consumption are perversely reworked.) Transmission jamming; pirate TV and radio broadcasting; and camcorder countersurveillance (in which low cost consumer technologies are used by DIY muckrakers to document police brutality or governmental corruption) are potential modus operandi for the culture jammer. So, too, is media activism such as the cheery immolation of a mound of television sets in front of CBS's Manhattan offices---part of a protest against media bias staged by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) during the Gulf War---and "media-wrenching" such as ACT UP's disruption of The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour in protest of infrequent AIDS coverage. A somewhat more conventional strain of culture jamming is mediawatch projects such as Paper Tiger Television, an independent production collective that produces segments critiquing the information industry; Deep Dish TV, a grassroots satellite network that distributes free-thinking programming to public access cable channels nationwide; and Not Channel Zero, a collective of young African-American "camcorder activists" whose motto is "The Revolution, Televised." And then there is academy hacking---cultural studies, conducted outside university walls, by insurgent intellectuals. Thus, culture jamming assumes many guises; let us consider, in greater detail, some of its more typical manifestations. Sniping and Subvertising "Subvertising," the production and dissemination of anti-ads that deflect Madison Avenue's attempts to turn the consumer's attention in a given direction, is an ubiquitous form of jamming. Often, it takes the form of "sniping"---illegal, late-night sneak attacks on public space by operatives armed with posters, brushes, and buckets of wheatpaste. Adbusters, a Vancouver, B.C.-based quarterly that critiques consumer culture, enlivens its pages with acid satires. "Absolut Nonsense," a cunningly-executed spoof featuring a suspiciously familiar-looking bottle, proclaimed: "Any suggestion that our advertising campaign has contributed to alcoholism, drunk driving or wife and child beating is absolute nonsense. No one pays any attention to advertising." Ewen, himself a covert jammer, excoriates conspicuous consumption in his "Billboards of the Future"---anonymously-mailed Xerox broadsides like his ad for "Chutzpah: cologne for women & men, one splash and you'll be demanding the equal distribution of wealth." Guerrilla Girls, a cabal of feminist artists that bills itself as "the conscience of the art world," is known for savagely funny, on-target posters, one of which depicted a nude odalisque in a gorilla mask, asking, "Do women have to get naked to get into the Met. Museum?" Los Angeles's Robbie Conal covers urban walls with the information age equivalent of Dorian Gray's portrait: grotesque renderings of Oliver North, Ed Meese, and other scandal-ridden politicos. "I'm interested in counter-advertising," he says, "using the streamlined sign language of advertising in a kind of reverse penetration." For gay activists, subvertising and sniping have proven formidable weapons. A March, 1991 Village Voice report from the frontlines of the "outing" wars made mention of "Absolutely Queer" posters, credited to a phantom organization called OUTPOST, appearing on Manhattan buildings. One, sparked by the controversy over the perceived homophobia in Silence of the Lambs, featured a photo of Jodie Foster, with the caption: "Oscar Winner. Yale Graduate. Ex-Disney Moppet. Dyke." Queer Nation launched a "Truth in Advertising" postering campaign that sent up New York Lotto ads calculated to part the poor and their money; in them, the official tagline, "All You Need is a Dollar and a Dream" became "All You Need is a Three-Dollar Bill and a Dream." The graphics collective Gran Fury, formerly part of ACT UP, has taken its sharp- tongued message even further: a superslick Benetton parody ran on buses in San Francisco and New York in 1989. Its headline blared "Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do" over a row of kissing couples, all of them racially-mixed and two of them gay. "We are trying to fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights for attention," says group member Loring Mcalpin. "[I]f anyone is angry enough and has a Xerox machine and has five or six friends who feel the same way, you'd be surprised how far you can go." Media Hoaxing Media hoaxing, the fine art of hoodwinking journalists into covering exhaustively-researched, elaborately-staged deceptions, is culture jamming in its purest form. Conceptual con artists like Joey Skaggs dramatize the dangers inherent in a press that seems to have forgotten the difference between the public good and the bottom line, between the responsibility to enlighten and the desire to entertain. Skaggs has been flimflamming journalists since 1966, pointing up the self-replicating, almost viral nature of news stories in a wired world. The trick, he confides, "is to get someone from an out-of-state newspaper to run a story on something sight unseen, and then you Xerox that story and include it in a second mailing. Journalists see that it has appeared in print and think, therefore, that there's no need to do any further research. That's how a snowflake becomes a snowball and finally an avalanche, which is the scary part. There's a point at which it becomes very difficult to believe anything the media tells you." In 1976, Skaggs created the Cathouse For Dogs, a canine bordello that offered a "savory selection" of doggie Delilahs, ranging from pedigree (Fifi, the French poodle) to mutt (Lady the Tramp). The ASPCA was outraged, the Soho News was incensed, and ABC devoted a segment to it which later received an Emmy nomination for best news broadcast of the year. In time, Skaggs reappeared as the leader of Walk Right!, a combat-booted Guardian Angels-meet-Emily Post outfit determined to improve sidewalk etiquette, and later as Joe Bones, head of a Fat Squad whose tough guy enforcers promised, for a fee, to prevent overweight clients from cheating on diets. As Dr. Joseph Gregor, Skaggs convinced UPI and New York's WNBC-TV that hormones extracted from mutant cockroaches could cure arthritis, acne, and nuclear radiation sickness. After reeling in the media outlets who have taken his bait, Skaggs holds a conference at which he reveals his deception. "The hoax," he insists, "is just the hook. The second phase, in which I reveal the hoax, is the important part. As Joey Skaggs, I can't call a press conference to talk about how the media has been turned into a government propaganda machine, manipulating us into believing we've got to go to war in the Middle East. But as a jammer, I can go into these issues in the process of revealing a hoax." Audio Agitprop Audio agitprop, much of which utilizes digital samplers to deconstruct media culture and challenge copyright law, is a somewhat more innocuous manifestation. Likely suspects include Sucking Chest Wound, whose God Family Country ponders mobthink and media bias; The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, who take aim in "Television, the Drug of the Nation" at "happy talk" newscasts that embrace the values of MTV and Entertainment Tonight; Producers For Bob, whose pert, chittering dance tracks provide an unlikely backdrop for monologues about "media ecology," a McLuhan- inspired strategy for survival in a toxic media environment; and Chris Burke, whose Oil War, with its cut-up press conferences, presidential speeches, and nightly newsbites, is pirate C-Span for Noam Chomsky readers. Sucking Chest Wound's Wayne Morris speaks for all when he says, "I get really angry with the biased coverage that's passed off as objective journalism. By taking scraps of the news and blatantly manipulating them, we're having our revenge on manipulative media." Billboard Banditry Lastly, there is billboard banditry, the phenomenon that inspired Negativland's coinage. Australia's BUGA UP stages hit- and-run "demotions," or anti-promotions, scrawling graffiti on cigarette or liquor ads. The group's name is at once an acronym for "Billboard-Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions" and a pun on "bugger up," Aussie slang for "screw up." In like fashion, African-American activists have decided to resist cigarette and liquor ads targeting communities of color by any means necessary. Describing Reverend Calvin Butts and fellow Harlem residents attacking a Hennesey billboard with paint and rollers, Z magazine's Michael Kamber reports, "In less than a minute there's only a large white blotch where moments before the woman had smiled coyly down at the street." Chicago's Reverend Michael Pfleger is a comrade-in-arms; he and his Operation Clean defaced---some prefer the term "refaced"---approximately 1,000 cigarette and alcohol billboards in 1990 alone. "It started with the illegal drug problem," says Pfleger. "But you soon realize that the number-one killer isn't crack or heroin, but tobacco. And we realized that to stop tobacco and alcohol we [had] to go after the advertising problem." San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front, together with Truth in Advertising, a band of "midnight billboard editors" based in Santa Cruz, snap motorists out of their rush hour trances with deconstructed, reconstructed billboards. In the wake of the Valdez disaster, the BLF reinvented a radio promo---"Hits Happen. New X-100"---as "Shit Happens---New Exxon"; TIA turned "Tropical Blend. The Savage Tan" into "Typical Blend. Sex in Ads." Inspired by a newsflash that plans were underway to begin producing neutron bombs, a Seattle-based trio known as SSS reworked a Kent billboard proclaiming "Hollywood Bowled Over By Kent III Taste!" to read "Hollywood Bowled Over By Neutron Bomb!," replacing the cigarette pack with a portrait of then-President Ronald Reagan. Artfux, and the newly-formed breakaway group Cicada Corps of Artists, are New Jersey-based agitprop collectives who snipe and stage neo-Situationist happenings. On one occasion, Artfux members joined painter Ron English for a tutorial of sorts, in which English instructed the group in the fine art of billboard banditry. Painting and mounting posters conceptualized by English, Artfux joined the New York artist on a one-day, all-out attack on Manhattan. One undercover operation used math symbols to spell out the corporate equation for animal murder and ecological disaster: A hapless-looking cow plus a death's-head equalled a McDonald's polystyrene clamshell. "Food, foam and Fun!," the tagline taunted. In a similar vein, the group mocked "Smooth Joe," the Camel cigarettes camel, turning his phallic nose into a flaccid penis and his sagging lips into bobbing testicles. One altered billboard adjured, "Drink Coca-Cola---It Makes You Fart," while another showed a seamed, careworn Uncle Sam opposite the legend, "Censorship is good because -- --- ----!" "Corporations and the government have the money and the means to sell anything they want, good or bad," noted Artfux member Orlando Cuevas in a Jersey Journal feature on the group. "We...[are] ringing the alarm for everyone else."
III. Guerrilla Semiotics Culture jammers often make use of what might be called "guerrilla" semiotics---analytical techniques not unlike those employed by scholars to decipher the signs and symbols that constitute a culture's secret language, what literary theorist Roland Barthes called "systems of signification." These systems, notes Barthes in the introduction to Elements of Semiology, comprise nonverbal as well as verbal modes of communication, encompassing "images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these." It is no small irony---or tragedy---that semiotics, which seeks to make explicit the implicit meanings in the sign language of society, has become pop culture shorthand for an academic parlor trick useful in divining the hidden significance in Casablanca, Disneyland, or our never-ending obsession with Marilyn Monroe. In paranoid pop psych (Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, Wilson Bryan Key's Subliminal Seduction), semiotics offers titillating decryptions of naughty advertising. "This preoccupation with subliminal advertising," writes Ewen, "is part of the legendary life of post-World War II American capitalism: the word 'SEX' written on the surface of Ritz crackers, copulating bodies or death images concealed in ice cubes, and so forth." Increasingly, advertising assumes this popular mythology: a recent print ad depicted a rocks glass filled with icecubes, the words "Absolut vodka" faintly discernible on the their craggy, shadowed surfaces. The tagline: "Absolut Subliminal." All of which makes semiotics seem trivial, effete, although it is an inherently political project; Barthes "set out..to examine the normally hidden set of rules, codes and conventions through which meanings particular to specific social groups (i.e. those in power) are rendered universal and 'given' for the whole of society." Marshall Blonsky has called semiotics "a defense against information sickness, the 'too-muchness' of the world," fulfilling Marshall McLuhan's prophecy that "just as we now try to control atom-bomb fallout, so we will one day try to control media fallout." As used by culture jammers, it is an essential tool in the all-important undertaking of making sense of the world, its networks of power, the encoded messages that flicker ceaselessly along its communication channels. This is not to say that all of the jammers mentioned in this essay knowingly derive their ideas from semiotics or are even familiar with it, only that their ad hoc approach to cultural analysis has much in common with the semiotician's attempt to "read between the lines" of culture considered as a text. Most jammers have little interest in the deliria that result from long immersion in the academic vacuum, breathing pure theory. They intuitively refuse the rejection of engaged politics typical of postmodernists like Baudrillard, a disempowering stance that too often results in an overeagerness for ringside seats at the gotterdammerung. The L.A. Weekly's disquieting observation that Baudrillard "loves to observe the liquidation of culture, to experience the delivery from depth" calls to mind Walter Benjamin's pronouncement that mankind's "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." Jammers, in contrast, are attempting to reclaim the public space ceded to the chimeras of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, to restore a sense of equilibrium to a society sickened by the vertiginous whirl of TV culture.
IV. Postscript From the Edge The territory mapped by this essay ends at the edge of the electronic frontier, the "world space of multinational capital" (Fredric Jameson) where vast sums are blipped from one computer to another through phone lines twined around the globe. Many of us already spend our workdays in an incunabular form of cyberpunk writer William Gibson's "cyberspace," defined in his novel Neuromancer as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators...A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system." The experience of computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis, once novel, is becoming increasingly familiar: When I first met my wife, she was immersed in trading options. Her office was in the top of a skyscraper in Boston, and yet, in a very real sense, when she was at work she was in a world that could not be identified with any single physical location. Sitting at a computer screen, she lived in a world that consisted of offers and trades, a world in which she knew friends and enemies, safe and stormy weather. For a large portion of each day, that world was more real to her than her physical surroundings. In the next century, growing numbers of Americans will work and play in artificial environments that only exist, in the truest sense, as bytes stored in computer memory. The explosion of computer-based interactive media seems destined to sweep away (at least in its familiar form) the decidedly non-interactive medium that has dominated the latter half of this century: television. Much of this media may one day be connected to a high-capacity, high-speed fiber optic network of "information superhighways" linking as many homes as are currently serviced by the telephone network. This network, predicts computer journalist John Markoff, "could do for the flow of information---words, music, movies, medical images, manufacturing blueprints and much more---what the transcontinental railroad did for the flow of goods a century ago and the interstate highway system did in this century." The culture jammer's question, as always, is: Who will have access to this cornucopia of information, and on what terms? Will fiber-optic superhighways make stored knowledge universally available, in the tradition of the public library, or will they merely facilitate psychological carpet bombing designed to soften up consumer defenses? And what of the network news? Will it be superseded by local broadcasts, with their heartwarming (always "heartwarming") tales of rescued puppies and shocking (always "shocking") stories of senseless mayhem, mortared together with airhead banter? Or will the Big Three give way to innumerable news channels, each a conduit for information about global, national and local events germane to a specific demographic? Will cyberpunk telejournalists equipped with Hi-8 video cameras, digital scanners, and PC-based editing facilities hack their way into legitimate broadcasts? Or will they, in a medium of almost infinite bandwidth and channels beyond count, simply be given their own airtime? In short, will the electronic frontier be wormholed with "temporary autonomous zones"---Hakim Bey's term for pirate utopias, centrifuges in which social gravity is artificially suspended---or will it be subdivided and overdeveloped by what cultural critic Andrew Ross calls "the military-industrial-media complex?" Gibson, who believes that we are "moving toward a world where all of the consumers under a certain age will...identify more...with the products they consume than...with any sort of antiquated notion of nationality," is not sanguine. In the video documentary Cyberpunk, he conjures a minatory vision of what will happen when virtual reality is married to a device that stimulates the brain directly. "It's going to be very commercial," he says. "We could wind up with something that felt like having a very, very expensive American television commercial injected directly into your cortex." "For Sale" signs already litter the unreal estate of cyberspace. A New York Times article titled "A Rush to Stake Claims on the Multimedia Frontier" prophesies "software and hardware that will connect consumers seamlessly to services...[allowing them] to shop from home," while a Newsweek cover story on interactive media promises "new technology that will change the way you shop, play and learn" (the order, here, speaks volumes about American priorities). Video retailers are betting that the intersection of interactive media and home shopping will result in zillions of dollars' worth of impulse buys: zirconium rings, nonstick frying pans, costumed dolls, spray-on toupees. What a New York Times author cutely calls Communicopia ("the convergence of virtually all communications technologies") may end up looking like the Home Shopping Network on steroids. But hope springs eternal, even in cyberspace. Jammers are heartened by the electronic frontier's promise of a new media paradigm---interactive rather than passive, nomadic and atomized rather than resident and centralized, egalitarian rather than elitist. To date, this paradigm has assumed two forms: the virtual community and the desktop-published or on-line 'zine. ("'Zine," the preferred term among underground publishers, has subtly political connotations: grassroots organization, a shoestring budget, an anti-aesthetic of exuberant sloppiness, a lively give- and-take between transmitters and receivers, and, more often than not, a mocking, oppositional stance vis a vis mainstream media.) Virtual communities are comprised of computer users connected by modem to the bulletin board systems (BBS's) springing up all over the Internet, the worldwide meta-network that connects international computer networks. Funded not by advertisers but by paid subscribers, the BBS is a first, faltering step toward the jammer's dream of a truly democratic mass medium. Although virtual communities fall short of utopia---women and people of color are grossly underrepresented, and those who cannot afford the price of admission or who are alienated from technology because of their cultural status are denied access---they nonetheless represent a profound improvement on the homogenous, hegemonic medium of television. On a BBS, any subscriber may initiate a discussion topic, no matter how arcane, in which other subscribers may participate. If the bulletin board in question is plugged into the Internet, their comments will be read and responded to by computer users scattered across the Internet. On-line forums retire, at long last, the Sunday morning punditocracy, the expert elite, the celebrity anchorclones of network news, even the electronic town hall, with its carefully-screened audience and over-rehearsed politicians. As one resident of a San Francisco-based bulletin board called the WELL noted, This medium gives us the possibility (illusory as it may be) that we can build a world unmediated by authorities and experts. The roles of reader, writer, and critic are so quickly interchangeable that they become increasingly irrelevant in a community of co-creation. In like fashion, ever-cheaper, increasingly sophisticated desktop publishing packages (such as the software and hardware used to produce this pamphlet) ensure that, in a society where freedom of the press---as A.J. Leibling so presciently noted---is guaranteed only to those who own one, multinational monoliths are not the only publishers. As Gareth Branwyn, 'zine publisher and longtime resident of virtual communities, points out, The current saturation of relatively inexpensive multimedia communication tools holds tremendous potential for destroying the monopoly of ideas we have lived with for so long...A personal computer can be configured to act as a publishing house, a broadcast-quality TV studio, a professional recording studio, or the node in an international computer bulletin board system. Increasingly, 'zines are being published on-line, to be bounced around the world via the Internet. "I can see a future in which any person can have a node on the net," says Mitch Kapor, president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group concerned with free speech, privacy, and other constitutional issues in cyberspace. "Any person can be a publisher. It's better than the media we now have." The devil's advocate might well argue that Festering Brain Sore, a fanzine for mass murderer aficionados, or the WELL topic devoted to "armpit sex" are hardly going to crash the corporate media system. Hakim Bey writes, "The story of computer networks, BBS's and various other experiments in electro-democracy has so far been one of hobbyism for the most part. Many anarchists and libertarians have deep faith in the PC as a weapon of liberation and self-liberation---but no real gains to show, no palpable liberty." Then again, involvement in virtual communities and the 'zine scene is rapidly expanding beyond mere hobbyism: as this is written, approximately 10 million people frequent BBS's, and an estimated 10,000 'zines are being published (70 alone are given over to left politics of a more or less radical nature). These burgeoning subcultures are driven not by the desire for commodities but by the dream of community---precisely the sort of community now sought in the nationally-shared experience of watching game shows, sitcoms, sportscasts, talk shows, and, less and less, the evening news. It is this yearning for meaning and cohesion that lies at the heart of the jammer's attempts to reassemble the fragments of our world into something more profound than the luxury cars, sexy technology, and overdesigned bodies that flit across our screens. Hackers who expose governmental wrongdoing, textual slashers, wheatpaste snipers, billboard bandits, media hoaxers, subvertisers, and unannounced political protestors who disrupt live newscasts remind us that numberless stories go untold in the daily papers and the evening news, that what is not reported speaks louder than what is. The jammer insists on choice: not the dizzying proliferation of consumer options, in which a polyphony of brand names conceals the essential monophony of the advertiser's song, but a true plurality, in which the univocal world view promulgated by corporate media yields to a multivocal, polyvalent one. The electronic frontier is an ever-expanding corner of Eco's "universe of Technological Communication...patrolled by groups of communications guerrillas" bent on restoring "a critical dimension to passive reception." These guerrilla semioticians are in pursuit of new myths stitched from the material of their own lives, a fabric of experiences and aspirations where neither the depressive stories of an apolitical intelligentsia nor the repressive fictions of corporate media's Magic Kingdom obtain. "The images that bombard and oppose us must be reorganized," insist Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen. "If our critique of commodity culture points to better alternatives, let us explore---in our own billboards of the future---what they might be." Even now, hackers, slashers, and snipers---culture jammers all---are rising to that challenge. * * * Mark Dery is a cultural critic whose writings have appeared in Rolling Stone, Elle, Interview, The New York Times, Wired, and Mondo 2000. His column "Guerrilla Semiotics" appears in Adbusters and he edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press). Cyberculture, his survey of cybernetic subcultures, will be published by Hyperion in Spring of 1995. * * *
Acknowledgements I am indebted to Bill Mullen, a professor at Youngstown University and friend of many years whose close reading and tough- minded critique of this essay improved it immeasurably, and to Margot Mifflin, whose slashing red pen saved me, at the last minute, from my worst excesses.
Points of Departure "Billboard Liberation Front Manual," Processed World #25, Summer/Fall 1990, pps. 22-6. This and other back issues may be ordered from 41 Sutter Street, #1829, San Francisco, CA 94104. The BLF has also published The Art and Science of Billboard Improvement (San Francisco: Los Cabrones Press, $1.50). No more information is available as this is written; writing to Processed World, which acts as an intermediary for the BLF, might prove fruitful. William Board, "Alter a Billboard," CoEvolution Quarterly, Summer 1983, pps. 114-116. Do's and don't's for would-be "midnight billboard editors," written by a pseudonymous member of Truth in Advertising. $7, Whole Earth Review, 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito, CA 94965. Gareth Branwyn, "Jamming the Media," in Black Hole, ed. by Carolyn Hughes, (Baltimore: Institute for Publications Design, Yale Gordon College of Liberal Arts, University of Baltimore, 1992). This essay, as well as the companion pieces in this underground omnibus, explore the interstice between cyberpunk and culture jamming. Contact Gareth Branywn at 4905 Old Dominion Drive, Arlington, Virginia, 22207. Robbie Conal, Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of a Guerrilla Artist (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992). At last: the ideal gift for insurrectionists---a coffee table art book about a wheatpaste warrior. Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood, eds. (Tucson: Ned Ludd Books, 1987). Chapter 8, "Propaganda," includes sections on "Billboard Revision" and "Correcting Forest Service Signs." The jury is still out on Earth First!, which often veers disconcertingly close to neo-Luddite knee-jerking (hence the name of the publishing company). That said, the authors' folksy pragmatism, anarcho-libertarian humor, and iron-spined resolve in the face of bulldozers and chainsaws is truly inspiring. Abbie Hoffman, The Best of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1989). Chapter 43, "Guerrilla Broadcasting," includes nuts-and-bolts "how to" sections on pirate radio and outlaw TV. Loompanics Unlimited, a distributor of fringe publications, is an invaluable source for titles on hacking; psychological warfare; Zeke Teflon's Complete Manual of Pirate Radio; Muzzled Media: How to Get the News You've Been Missing!, by Gerry L. Dexter; and more. Loompanics' 1988 catalogue includes Erwin R. Strauss's "Pirate Broadcasting," a historical and philosophical inquiry into the titular phenomenon. Write P.O. Box 1197, Port Townsend, WA 98368 for a catalogue. Roar! The Paper Tiger Television Guide to Media Activism, The Paper Tiger Television Collective, eds. (New York: The Paper Tiger Television Collective, 1991). This thoroughgoing, irreplaceable guide to culture jamming proves, to mutilate Mao, that "power springs from the barrel of a camcorder." An essay by Schiller, together with a lengthy "how to" section, make this a must. Write to 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012.
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Submitted by Infinoid on Wed, 05/20/2009 - 01:22
On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 1.2.0 "Bird Brain." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.
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develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.
Parrot 1.2.0 News:
- Core + Fixes for pir classes inheriting from core pmcs. + Cleaned up headers and reorganized some sources into subsystem directories. + Clean up PMCs so libparrot.so exports far fewer vtable/method symbols. + Clean up the GC API. + Several unicode identifier improvements in IMCC. - Deprecations + Protoobject stringification is gone. - Documentation + Rewrite several core documents. + Many reworks, improvements & additions to the Parrot Book. + Installation PDD is launched out of draft. - Tools + Fixes for running the language shell generator outside the parrot tree. + Several fixes for developing and building HLLs from an installed parrot. + Configure.pl now has a --no-line-directives option to ease source level debugging. - Miscellaneous + Portability updates for macports, netbsd, mingw32, hpux. + Several (build time, runtime) performance improvements. + Lots of updates to examples and tests. + Various bugfixes, code cleanups, and coding standard fixes.
Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. Our next release is 16 June 2009.
Enjoy! |
DOOM’s Adult Swim singles series The Missing Notebook Rhymes has vanished from the internet. In a statement to Mass Appeal, an Adult Swim spokesperson said the network has ended its relationship with the rapper, cutting short the weekly trickle of new tracks that had been scheduled to continue until November 13: “Thus, the remaining Missing Notebook Rhymes will unfortunately have to remain…missing.” On Twitter, Adult Swim’s Jason DeMarco seemingly acknowledged the news and wrote, “😔.” A representative for DOOM confirmed the report to Pitchfork. Adult Swim reps declined to comment.
Releases in the series had included music with Kool Keith, Sean Price (“Negus, Jay Electronica, the Alchemist, and a song under his alter ego Viktor Vaughn.
WESTSIDEDOOM: “Gorilla Monsoon” (via SoundCloud)
While The Missing Notebook Rhymes is apparently no more, DOOM has joined with Buffalo rapper Westside Gunn for a new project called WESTSIDEDOOM. Listen to their first song, “Gorilla Monsoon,” above (via Hypebeast).
Read “Meet Jason DeMarco, The Reason Adult Swim’s Music Is So Good” on the Pitch. |
Would you believe that some of San Francisco’s most talented filmmakers in San Francisco work in … fetish porn? Independent filmmakers moonlighting as pornographers is nothing new (Wes Craven and Francis Ford Coppola are two of the notables who’ve fessed up to using XXX to hone their craft — and pay their rent.) Within the Kink.com Armory, however, the talent is no secret. The company even hosts regular screening sessions where filmmakers can show off their (non-porn) work.
So a few weeks ago, Kink.com (Kinky’s loving master) offered it’s production staff a chance to show off their skills by creating (non-hardcore) shorts about life inside the Armory, using the company equipment in a contest with a top prize of $3000. Done for the company’s Armory Tours arm, each highlights a different part of the Armory. The results were amazing — to say the least. Check out the winner — “The Creepy Bedroom,” and a few more of our favorites.
“The Enema Bathroom”
“The Fucking Machines”
“The Creepy Bedroom” (Winner)
You can check out more on the SF Armory Tours YouTube channel HERE (yes, they’re safe for work-ISH), and we’ll be featuring new ones every week or so until we cry out a safeword. |
The Louisiana History
When Louisiana opened its doors in 1958, the founder, Knud W. Jensen, intended for the museum to be a home for modern Danish art. But after only a few years he changed course, and instead of being a predominantly Danish collection, Louisiana became an international museum with many internationally renowned works.
Louisiana’s close contact and collaboration with the international arts and cultural milieu has since been one of the museum’s greatest strengths. And also one of the main reasons that it has been possible for Louisiana to present an exhibition program that has resonated so strongly with the public over the years. Louisiana has thus achieved a standing as one of the world's most respected exhibition venues, and in the future it will be able to attract exhibitions and artists at a level that few other museums – either in Denmark or abroad – can match. |
I've always felt intimidated by Scotch. Unlike some other spirits, it has an air of prestige, like you can't belong to the club of true connoisseurs unless you have oodles of cash to dole out on rare bottlings and have a smoking jacket or two hanging in your closet.
Luckily, as a member of the general booze media, I've had the opportunity to explore a ton of Scotch this month, attending portfolio tastings of Speyside-based Balvenie, the new super-exclusive Rare Cask from The Macallan, and the all-star Whisky Extravaganza in Chicago where dozens of brands like Lagavulin, Glenlivet, and Bowmore shared samples of their best products. It's been a delicious, but disheartening experience, as one clear truth has come to light through the process: Scotch really is one of the most expensive drinks out there. With price tags ranging from a payday-reasonable $40 up to the only-in-my-dreams $300, I couldn't help but leave each event wondering how I could ever afford to acquire a great knowledge (let alone collection) of the celebrated Scottish spirit on my own.
Why is Scotch such a hard hit to the wallet? There are a few reasons. First, it's an import, so there are a number of taxes associated with bringing the booze across borders. Second, Scotch is typically aged for longer periods of time than your average American rye or bourbon, so the price on the bottle is also partially compensating for the time it takes to mature in the barrel, the liquid lost to the Angel's Share during that period, the space needed to store casks, etc. While a great American bourbon will rest for two or more years, most Scotch brands don't get blended before three (and most typically five or above), which is a significant difference in cost when it comes to production.
The great news is, it is possible to find great Scotch for a steal, and it will still taste as interesting and complex as some of the more prestigious brands. The whiskies listed below are typically priced at $35 or less for 750mL. As a general rule, most brands that land around this price point are blends instead of single malts, but just because a Scotch is a blend doesn't mean it will taste less delicious. (Not certain on the difference between single malts and blends? You can read more about the distinction here.)
Some of our recommended finds listed below are heavily smoked and rich with malts, while others are lighter with a touch of flirty fruit. (The list is arranged from richest to lightest.) Knowing what kind of profile you prefer will help you choose between the tasty wallet-friendly options below, and with the holiday season rapidly approaching, any of these would make terrific stocking stuffers.
The Black Grouse
The well-known Famous Grouse ($23.99) is a solid value, with moments of warm honey and soft fruit, but its newer counterpart Black Grouse ($29.99) stands out as one of the best overall picks for your money, thanks to its thick malt flavor, full, rich body and pronounced smoke. There's an oaky spice that tingles at the beginning of each sip, with subtle hints of cocoa peeking through a finish that is long and luxurious. Peat-wise, it's not a smoke-bomb like Ardbeg or Laphroaig, but it's the most heavily smoked of the brands listed here, and a great introduction to the smokier side of the Scotch spectrum. Sip with a dash of water to open up the aromatics, or with an ice cube or two if you prefer chilled instead.
Isle of Skye Blended Scotch Whisky 8 Year
Ideal for those looking for a spark of smoke that's not overwhelming but still present, Isle of Skye 8 Year ($28.99) is a nice middle-of-the-road option. Vanilla and oak lead the flavors of the medium-bodied whisky, with a nutty walnut-like saltiness and sweet citrus emerging when you add a few drops of water.
Monkey Shoulder
A resounding favorite of the bartending crowd thanks to its versatility in cocktails, Monkey Shoulder ($35) is a great Scotch for mixing with other ingredients. An even blend of single malt whiskies from three reputable distilleries (instead of bulk grain whiskey, which shows up in other blends), the quirky product has a big honey personality that contrasts harmoniously with a gritty malt profile. Pops of orange oil appear when mixed into a smoky Old Fashioned.
Pig's Nose
Pig's Nose ($32) stands out on the shelves thanks to its bold label design, but the copper-colored liquor also stood out against other brands as a friendly option for those new to Scotch. It's relatively young, clocking in at a tender five years, so it has a somewhat thin body. Peaty smoke also takes a backseat to light cantaloupe-like fruit flavors and crunchy grains. When diluted, its slight edge mellows into a buttery texture, and thanks to its solid balance of smoke and malt, the "smooth as a Pig's Nose" Scotch plays great with other ingredients like vermouth in the Rob Roy cocktail.
Glen Moray Classic
Kind of the curve-ball of the group, the lightly-aged Glen Moray Classic ($22.99) is mellow and bursting with pear and soft creamy malts. It has the lightest body and smoke profile of these bottles, and I found it to be one of the most interesting interpretations of what a Scotch can taste like. It doesn't drip with oak, vanilla, and rich malts like many of its counterparts but instead has delicate perfumey moments with an understated brittle malty backbone. Because it only has wisps of smoke, it plays well with a splash of spice from a mixer like ginger beer, and also tastes delicate and sweet on its own with a touch of water.
Disclosure: All whiskies provided as tasting samples for review consideration.
Stock Your Home Bar!
The 10 Best Budget Bourbons »
The 10 Best Budget Rums »
The 6 Best Budget Ryes »
The 7 Best Budget Tequilas »
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INTRODUCTION Probably the most significant development in aviation history is one which most Americans dont even know happened. We worked hard to get our B-29 built so we could reach Japan, the retaliation that President Roosevelt so badly wanted. The Russians also wanted and badly needed a long range bomber as much as we did. The difference is, we engineered ours with ingenuity and perseverance, the Russians stole it. Read this fascinating story and you will find it hard to believe, but it actually happened. The B-29 is now as much a part of Russian aviation history as it is to American aviation history. RUSSIAN B-29 CLONE- THE TU-4 STORY After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had a burning desire to retaliate by bombing Japan. This soon became an obsession with him, but how were we going to accomplish this seemingly impossible feat? The only long range bomber in our arsenal was the B-17, and the idea of reaching Japan became increasingly remote. We needed a Super Bomber, but did not even have one on the drawing board. Roosevelt fortunately had a solution to his problem, with time almost ruling out such an undertaking. His solution was Gen. H.H. Arnold, better known as HAP. Gen. Arnold was already pushing for a more sophisticated Air Force with long range capability. He sent request to all the aircraft companies seeking designs for a Super Bomber. Boeing had been working on such a design and won the contract. They were to deliver two flying prototypes by 1942. It was to be the fastest, largest, heaviest plane ever mass produced. The U.S. ordered 250 sight unseen. Then Germany attacked Russia. The number was increased to 500 planes. On Sept. 21st, 1942, the Boeing XB flew out of the Seattle plant. This three billion dollar gamble was the largest government commitment ever to a single project, including the Atomic Bomb. There were residual benefits to this contract. It brought the country together. Boeing had four assembly plants, and hundreds of smaller plants making subassemblies. Finally in 1943 the first production model B-29 rolled out of the Wichita plant. Eventually over 4000 were produced, 1600 at the Wichita plant which employed 26,000 workers working seven days a week.
The first bombers were sent to the CBI area (China, Burma, India). Gen. Arnold realized we needed a place for damaged planes to land after bombing Japan. Roosevelt asked Stalin for permission to land in Siberia or Russia. Stalin evaded answering the request. Russia was not at war with Japan, and had their hands full fighting the Germans. They did not want to open up another front by taking on Japan. Our crews were told that after bombing Japan, only in an extreme emergency, to land in Vladivostok, Russia. On August 20, 1944, a B-29 was forced to divert to the Soviet Union. It crashed east of Khabarovsk after the crew baled out. The crew was interned in Russia.
A U.S. made version of the B-29 A U.S. made version of the B-29 About the same time three B-29s with emergencies landed in Vladivostok. One of the planes was the Ramp Tramp, another was the Ding Hao. Ironically the third plane was completely intact was the Gen. H.H. Arnold Special. The crews assumed the planes would be refueled and they would return to China. They were never to see their planes again. The crews and aircraft were all interned. Now the Russians were holding four crews and three complete B-29s. Desperate negotiations by the U.S. for the release of the crews and the aircraft were ignored.
Stalin was continually pressured for the release of the crews and planes, however it soon became obvious that he had no intentions of giving them up. He decided to steal them. He figured it would take over five years to design and build their own much needed long range bomber. A better way would be to steal these already in his possession and make a bolt for bolt exact copy of them. Stalin demanded the reproductions be ready in two years. The entire Soviet aircraft industry was mobilized to meet this seemingly impossible deadline. At that time any dissention was met with punishment, even death. That would be considered sabotage to question a project. This project received top priority. The Russians were completely dumbfounded when faced with the enormity of the situation. They were fascinated with the gigantic Silver Bullet. What better luck than to have three of them dropped right in their back yard.
Finally through some bizarre diplomatic negotiations between the US and Molotov it was arranged for the aircrews to escape to Tashkent, Russia, via the Trans-Siberian Railroad. They were given adequate treatment while interned. From Tashkent they were transported by train and truck to Tehran, Iran, for their release. However their release wasnt going to be that simple. They were warned not to talk to anyone, and had to sign top secret documents swearing them to secrecy. They were flown to Naples, Italy, and then shipped to N.Y. where they finally found freedom.
The Russian plan was to organize the best pilots, technicians, engineers, and aviation specialist to measure and catalog each of the 105,000 parts of the B-29. They decided to completely disassemble the Hap Arnold Special and use it for measurements. The Ding Hao would serve as a reference model, and the Ramp Tramp would be used for pilots training. Russian pilots would have a hard time figuring out the significance of the instruments, so their top pilot, fluent in english, labeled every instrument in Russian so their pilots could easily identify everything required to fly the B-29. The Russians were amazed at the quality of the workmanship and the technology involved in the manufacture of the B-29. The Soviet version would be called the TU-4, NATO code name BULL. After the Hap Arnold Special was completely dismantled they immediately realized the almost impossible task of reverse engineering the aircraft. It has been reported the Russians only had slide rules and even some used an abacus. All measurements had to be converted to metric sizes. Now they were running into major problems. Imagine the complexity of copying the giant R-3350 engine. They were not able to manufacture the wing fuel tanks. The compound curves of the plexiglass nose presented an unsolved problem, and pilots complained about distortion in the Russian copy. They did not have the capability to manufacture the huge tires. The massive landing gear also was a problem. The responsibility of copying the airframe went to Tupolev. There were miles of wires, and the sophisticated gunnery system presented the biggest problem. The Russians sent agents to the U.S. to try to purchase anything they could find in parts, plans, tires, or information pertaining to the B-29. The machine guns were replaced with cannons. The copying and manufacture of the R-3350 engine was turned over to Shvetsov. The TU-4 project was well underway early in 1945. An increase in quality control and sheer perseverance moved things along. The end of the war with Japan made no difference in the production effort. It was full speed ahead. The U.S. had previously not believed the Russians had the capability to clone the B-29, it seemed totally inconceivable. The public Russian debut in the Aviation Day parade in 1947 changed their minds. The U.S. found itself in a panic situation when they learned the TU-4 was indeed a reality, capable of hitting any target in the U.S. There were reports of one way missions by hundreds of TU-4s carrying nuclear bombs attacking the U.S. This forced the U.S. to beef up their Radar systems, surface to air missiles, and interceptor jet fighters.
The Russian version of the U.S. B-29 Russian designation to be known as the TU?4 NATO designation was ?BULL? The Russian version of the U.S. B-29 Russian designation to be known as the TU?4 NATO designation was ?BULL? Meanwhile, back in the Soviet Union, problems continued to plague the TU-4 project. The advanced avionics of the central fire control gunnery system remained unsolved. There were problems with the pressurization system, and the R-3350 copy was overheating, had short engine life, runaway props, and in general the total unreliability of the entire aircraft. The Russians toiled endlessly on solving these problems, and it was not until 1949 that the TU-4 became fully operational with some 300 in service.
The TU-4 never saw combat. Some 850 were eventually produced. Before the 60s arrived the TU-4 had been replaced by jet aircraft. A few were given to China, and there are reports these were kept flying as late as 1968. The Ramp Tramp and the Ding Hao were scrapped. The Hap Arnold Special was never put back together. The B-29 brought our country together, and made us a proud nation. The TU-4 became as much a part of Russian aviation history as the B-29 was to American history. As far as we know the only remaining TU-4 is displayed at the Yuri Gagarin Air Force Academy outside Moscow.
This story, as incredible as it seems, is all true. Just another page in aviation history. |
Great release; great news
We again made this release cycle a bit longer, mostly due to everybody being on holiday. Thanks to many contributions this release has some very nice new features besides the usual bug fixes and refactoring.
New features
Notable are:
The integration of the an EXIF library, to automatically display images with correct orientation
Mass import contacts from a file
A new command line switch to open the login window instead of a profile.
Experimental echo cancelling
We integrated an experimental audio backend that provides echo cancelling for when you’re using qTox with the integrated mic and speaker of a laptop. If the hardware/software combination supports it, there is a new checkbox in the audio settings. Feedback on how it’s working is highly appreciated!
Build system
One of the first commits after this release has removed the qTox.pro file, so for the main program qTox is exclusively using cmake now. Thanks to nurupo we now have a pretty solid cross-compiling process for Windows and also a good looking Jenkins setup. On the Linux side there has been some progress by anthonybilinski with setting up packages on the OpenSUSE-Buildservice, which will hopefully bring back regular Linux packages.
The usual stuff
Of course qTox also received the usual ton of fixes in this release cycle, the details can be found in our changelog.
Contributors
33 people contributed to this release. Kudos to them! :-)
tux3
Иван Пенев
Jonas del Campo
Attila Farkas
anonymous
sudden6
anthony.bilinski
remussatala
LittleVulpix
Nikolay Korotkiy
Jonatan Nyberg
positronium
drswinghead
Sonic Doom
tWido
Diadlo
cnzhx
Yuri
Kristjan Räts
prhtnsm
Zetok Zalbavar
Nils Fenner
Viktar Vauchkevich
Lionel HANNEQUIN
Gergely
Maxim Biro
Karl
Pan Efem
Moo
Guillaume Precioso
noavarice
Vincas Dargis
Allan Nordhøy
Listed in random order.
Thanks to everybody who made this release happen! |
The name Toronto was first applied to a narrow stretch of water between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching.
The word, Anglicized from Mohawk, was spelled tkaronto and taronto and used to describe an area where trees grow in shallow water.
The name, misunderstood and confused by various old-world explorers, bounced around the area between Lake Simcoe and Lake Huron. On various early maps it was applied to a canoe trail on the Humber River and Lake Simcoe itself.
Later, the Humber River, before it was named by John Graves Simcoe after a tidal estuary in northeast England, was called Rivière Taronto after the Portage Trail.
As the Humber carried south the water of countless creeks and streams, it also brought the Toronto name to the Lake Ontario shore.
The first colonial settlement on this part of Lake Ontario was Fort Rouillé, a French trading post depicted in drawings with a high wooden fence at what is now Exhibition Place, just beyond the foot of Dufferin Street.
The Seneca-Mohawk villages of Teiaiagon and Ganatsekwyagon (precise English spellings vary) were within today's city limits at the mouths of the Humber and Rouge rivers respectively.
The small complex - alternatively known as Fort Toronto - was founded in 1750 and contained a soldier's quarters, kitchen, a forge, and an ammunition store.
It and Magasin Royale, another earlier fortification on the Humber River near Old Mill, were built to attack vessels servicing a rival British trading post at Oswego, N.Y..
Rouillé was abandoned and burned by its own troops retreating at the end of the Battle of Quebec in 1759, a key battle that led to France ceding much of its land claims in North America.
34 years later, John Graves Simcoe, ordered a garrison built at what is now Fort York at the mouth of Garrison Creek. The English military leader believed the location inside the enclosed Toronto harbour would be easy to defend.
The Islands wouldn't become separated from the mainland for another 65 years.
The town of Dublin, renamed York by Simcoe for Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, the second son of then-King George III, developed on the waterfront to the east of the military base.
Prior to the construction of Fort York, a second encampment would be built on the other side of Garrison Creek. This short-lived base was destroyed in 1813 during the Battle of York. During the fight, the British army were forced to retreat to Kingston, leaving its armed citizens in the streets.
Before abandoning their garrison, the British set light to their artillery storage area and a ship, the HMS Sir Isaac Brock, under construction at the docks. The gigantic explosion that tore through the fort as the gunpowder ignited killed 38 soldiers, including American leader Zebulon M. Pike, and wounded 222 more.
The Americans occupied York for less than a week before deciding to leave with goods looted from across the town. Despite the wishes of their leader, the Americans raided and burned several buildings, including the town's printing press and Legislative Assembly building for Upper Canada, located on Front Street between Berkeley and Parliament streets.
The town was retaken by the British when the Americans departed for their original position further down the shore. The returning troops built what is present day Fort York near the destroyed garrison and repelled several raids in 1813 and 1814.
The town of York recovered from its temporary occupation and grew to surround the old fort. In 1834 the province's legislative council, the leaders of the area around what had become the largest city in Upper Canada, voted to incorporate the community as a city.
A group of local citizens thought then was as good a time as any to re-brand the community. The name Toronto, then recognized as an alternative name for the region, was favoured over York partly because the original York in England was considered so grim.
William Bent Berczy, a member of the Legislative Committee representing Kent, said Toronto had a "musical sound" and was " in every respect much better" than the original title. The others largely agreed, and the city of Toronto was officially founded that same year.
The York name lives on in East York, North York, York Region and the countless other York-related streets and communities in the GTA, while Toronto has continued to travel.
Cities named Toronto in the United States, Australia, and U.K. all derive their name from that narrow stretch of water near Orillia. |
Highlights [ ]
Several Github Pull Requests(PR) have been merged. "sweep_below" function in the CLI Heavier bias in output selection towards newer inputs. Smart Mining is enabled in the GUI Jaquee fixed up an iOS GUI visual issue. New translations added to GUI.
Renewed focus on ZeroMQ(0MQ)
Disposable addresses is pending review.
"Removed --confirm-external-bind from monerod and monero-wallet-rpc" Motion moved to close this PR.
"Remove the 1.25 multiplier for max transaction size" Mooo originally had some objections, but upon closer inspection, it's fine to merge. hyc... ... ...agrees
Add tip text to labels Fluffy suggests an overlay on first use that can provide help. And re-shows itself on a "?" click. Similar to this
MyMonero-in-tree - Is it appropriate for the new MyMonero supporting code to be included in the main Monero source? Fluffy views it as a working API for lightwallets. This could help fast-track development of new wallets. It uses a BSD "3 Clause" Everyone seems to agree that it's fine - as long as it doesn't require any proprietary dependencies. Will switch from MySQL to LMDB as the backend. It does *not* supercede the existing wallet-rpc application. Jaquee has started integrations with the GUI and this proposed MyMonero open backend. This may also allow for the MyMonero 13 word seed to be supported natively.
Next meeting is scheduled for May 21st, 2017.
Full Log [ ]
<fluffypony> 1. Greetings <fluffypony> 2. Brief review of what's been completed since the previous meeting <fluffypony> 3. Code + ticket discussion / Q & A <fluffypony> 4. MyMonero-in-tree discussion <fluffypony> 5. Any additional meeting items <fluffypony> 6. Confirm next meeting date/time <fluffypony> so let's start with 1. Greetings (aka roll call) <fluffypony> hi <_Slack> <johnalan> hi <vtnerd_> present <_Slack> <sgp_> hello! <fluffypony> tewinget apologises, he'll be late <_Slack> <ajs> Sup <endogenic> o/ <_Slack> <rehrar> Yo <fluffypony> hyc / luigi1111 / ArticMine / othe / smooth / anonimal / binaryFate / dEBRUYNE / dnaleor / gingeropolous / iDunk / IPGlider / Jaquee / jwinterm / kenshi84 / knaccc / luigi1112 / luigi1115 / NoodleDoodle / papa_lazzarou / pigeons / RedLion[m] / redlion_ <Jaquee> hhelo <pigeons> :) <vtnerd_> also me <Jaquee> medusa_ <fluffypony> anyone I forgot <iDunk> o/ <vtnerd_> oh those are not present whoops <fluffypony> lol vtnerd_ <fluffypony> ok so <fluffypony> 2. Brief review of what's been completed since the previous meeting <fluffypony> merged a bunch PRs <fluffypony> kenshi84's GPG key changed <fluffypony> I've confirmed it via sidechannel <fluffypony> we have a new sweep_below function in the CLI, which you may find useful <fluffypony> we also have a new heavier bias in output selection towards newer outputs <fluffypony> moneromooo can fill us in on that <ArticMine> Hi <othe> oi <fluffypony> smart mining is enabled in the GUI <fluffypony> as in the selection box <moneromooo> Hmm, I just twiddled the settings for the recent output selection, really. To match some data in the Miller et al paper. <fluffypony> which is pretty cool * Biilly_ (adefe1c4@gateway/web/freenode/ip.redacted) has joined <_Slack> <sgp_> indeed * lalu_ has quit (Remote host closed the connection) <fluffypony> also Jaquee has done some work on getting iOS back on track after it borked (visually) <fluffypony> well iOS / mobile <fluffypony> which brings us to <fluffypony> 3. Code + ticket discussion / Q & A <Jaquee> yes. and there's some new translations added to gui <fluffypony> we have a number of open PRs <fluffypony> when tewinget is off his bus he can update us on 0MQ <fluffypony> which I'd REALLY like to move forward with ASAP <fluffypony> it's been sitting in a holding pattern for ages <fluffypony> Snipa: also if you're around maybe you can update us on the testing on that ? <moneromooo> I'd like it to be optional, so it can be merged (and thus tested), without causing massive breakage if it does break. <fluffypony> afaik that was the case <Jaquee> sounds like a good idea <fluffypony> also disposable addresses is still hanging around - I think that's pending a review from one of the luigis? <moneromooo> AFAIK yes. Also RandomRun had an idea to make it better. <fluffypony> I don't think there's a problem with that hanging around and being improved <fluffypony> as long as the parallel MRL write-up is there <fluffypony> I'd like to discuss 1998 <fluffypony> the PR, not the year <fluffypony> https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/1998 <fluffypony> at this point in time I'm still swaying towards prevent-user-stupidity-by-default <fluffypony> at the slight inconvenience for a power user / sysadmin who might go "omg really" and then add the flag * barry95 has quit (Remote host closed the connection) <fluffypony> I know vtnerd_ feels the same way, which is why he added it in the first place <fluffypony> I'd be interested in strong arguments for removing the flag <Jaquee> wouldnt a text disclaimer be enough? <Jaquee> i don't have a strong opinion <fluffypony> Jaquee: if you try bind externally and start it without the --confirm-external-bind flag then it refuses to start <fluffypony> and it tells you why <Jaquee> ok. apparently hyc started the discussion. Are you around? <fluffypony> I know hyc doesn't like it <fluffypony> vtnerd_: has anyone else expressed disdain for it? <vtnerd_> AFAIK, just the people on that PR and the one referenced <vtnerd_> and _possibly_ one person in IRC, but they seemed to be questioning why it was necessary (I think) <vtnerd_> its somewhat low effort to get around it, so most people just add the flag I thnk <vtnerd_> no one has privately contacted me about it for any reason if that was the question <fluffypony> ok <fluffypony> unless hyc comes in I move to close the PR, we can always re-open it later * lalu_ (~lalu_@redacted.rev.sfr.net) has joined * peteyb (~chatzilla@p4FC0D4AF.dip0.t-ipconnect.de) has joined <Jaquee> ok with me <fluffypony> ok next PR for discussion is 2011 <fluffypony> moneromooo had concerns that it was touching consensus critical issues <fluffypony> so/issues/part of the code <moneromooo> Yes, but it turns out it's actually bypassed when a tx comes from a block. The patch is fine. <moneromooo> I OK'd it since. <fluffypony> ah ok' <moneromooo> Well, wait. * fluffypony stops...hammer time <moneromooo> It's really uneeded (only the wallet bit was wanted). But it's not forkworthy. That said... * xyxyxyxyxyx (415e17d3@gateway/web/freenode/ip.redacted) has joined <moneromooo> Older wallets *might* create txes which aren't relayed by newer daemons. <moneromooo> That's fairly unlikely, since my code targets 2/3 of max size, but the size approximation is not very precise. <moneromooo> That said, I think it's fine to merge. * maitscha (d5e107de@gateway/web/freenode/ip.redacted) has joined <hyc> hey. just popped in. reading history <fluffypony> hi hyc ! <dEBRUYNE> Re: 2011, perhaps it also should be dependent on the fee priority level used * fluffypony plays elevator hold music * maitscha has quit (Ping timeout: 260 seconds) * monero (~monero@redacted) has joined <monero> [monero] moneromooo-monero opened pull request #2017: wallet2: fix sweep_unmixable assuming wrong minimum mixin at v5 (master...suv5) https://git.io/v9wdD * monero (~monero@redacted) has left <hyc> ok, if n0b0dy else cares about that external bind thing then whatever. to me it's redundant <fluffypony> ok <hyc> since you had to explicitly request a non-localhost address already <fluffypony> sure, but you'd be surprised how few people know that 0.0.0.0 exposes everything :-P <endogenic> ^ <hyc> it d0esn't protect against typos/accidents. it only pisses off people who expect the computer to do as it's told <fluffypony> hyc: view it like a weak password warning <fluffypony> you can't just expect the computer to accept 1234 as a password <hyc> yeah, ok... <moneromooo> Well, I would... <fluffypony> lol <fluffypony> moneromooo is the exception to every rule :-P <fluffypony> now on the GUI side, the only thing I wanted to bounce around is 688 <fluffypony> tooltips are fine, but if we're going to do some sort of unified help then I would veer towards an overlay that shows once the first time you enter a screen, and can be re-called by clicking the [?] button on the taskbar <fluffypony> https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/c1/e1/bf/c1e1bfd7fb2770f6745d95af8bf89865.jpg <_Slack> <johnalan> like that style <fluffypony> https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/43/6e/74/436e746b35142f41d5f9bb8e765963e4.jpg <fluffypony> http://eyeviewportal.com/_filecache/b38/73d/85-cropped-w545-h409-of-1-FFFFFF-ev_appguiguide_contentimage_002.jpg <fluffypony> like that <hyc> sounds good <_Slack> <johnalan> :+1: <Jaquee> problem is [?] is not around if you use native title bar <fluffypony> Jaquee: where else could we add a help button? bottom left? <endogenic> one suggestion i'd make for that is to make it c lear to the user they can recall it easily by doing "X" so that they don't fret about having to memorize everything before it's closed <endogenic> recall it -> the help screen <Jaquee> i think ^ is good as a start <moneromooo> Where is it on the title bar then, since it's not a WM thing ? <fluffypony> endogenic: agreed <moneromooo> s/Where/Why/ <Jaquee> but some buttons could need longer desriptions <Jaquee> like sweep_unmixable and payment_id for example <fluffypony> Jaquee: there's enough space in the help overlay, we can use a smaller font to explain them <redlion_> how breadwallet on ios handles it when setting up is quite good <fluffypony> or move the help to somewhere where there's space <fluffypony> and use an arrow <Jaquee> yeah. we could find a place for that help button * bigreddmachine has quit (Quit: Leaving.) <fluffypony> ok - any other PRs that need discussion or can we move on? there's general Q&A shortly <_Slack> <sgp_> I'd like to merge 261 on monero-site <fluffypony> sgp_: there's a website meeting after the Kovri one <fluffypony> so we can discuss it then <_Slack> <sgp_> ok <fluffypony> ok so <fluffypony> 4. MyMonero-in-tree discussion <fluffypony> so basically this is about nose-covering and making sure I'm not abusing my position as a maintainer and member of the Monero Core Team <fluffypony> currently MyMonero has a working API (largely unspecced to be sure), two client implementations (website and app), two server implementations (the live backend and OpenMonero), with a third one coming <fluffypony> I'd like to make sure there is general acceptance and buy-in that the API can be implemented as the general API for lightweight wallets (ie. wallet that use remote viewkey scanning) <hyc> is it carved in stone now <hyc> if we need to tweak it we can still do that? <redlion_> is the license unrestricted? <fluffypony> and that MyMonero-written or MyMonero-derived code is generally acceptable to be merged into the source tree (ie. the open-source backend implementation that vtnerd_ is working on) <fluffypony> redlion_: BSD 3-clause <fluffypony> hyc: as long as mWo12 changes it, and we match the changes in the live backend and the new backend then yse <fluffypony> yes <fluffypony> we can make any changes, and we WILL make changes to make it smarter <moneromooo> If it's beneficial to monero and it works fully by itself without needing proprietary gunk, then I'm OK with it. <fluffypony> eg. tx history comes in raw, instead of paginated <fluffypony> so that needs to change <hyc> +1 moneromooo <fluffypony> moneromooo: yeah the new backend will use LMDB instead of mysql <fluffypony> so it will be unencumbered in the source <ArticMine> As long as there are no proprietary dependencies I am fine <hyc> I like it even more now ;) <_Slack> <johnalan> I think it beneficial too <moneromooo> Maybe a separate repo (similar to monero-core) might be best, but that's details. <_Slack> <johnalan> *its <moneromooo> it's <iDunk> it's <_Slack> <jollymort> can't wait to run a mymonero node myself! <vtnerd_> also the current "primary" wrapper around the DB is actually C, so theres that for you guys <fluffypony> moneromooo: I thought about that, but it's a single daemon that *should* exist in the repo alongside the wallet RPC etc. <hyc> doesn't it supersede wallet-rpc? <fluffypony> now <fluffypony> hyc: no <fluffypony> wallet-rpc is good for integration, this isn't <_Slack> <johnalan> there is obviously an element of centralisation, but it’s nearly impossible to avoid <fluffypony> also on this topic <fluffypony> Jaquee has begun working on client integration in the CLI and GUI <moneromooo> "client integration" ? <vtnerd_> you mean for light-wallets? <fluffypony> that will mean that both CLI and GUI will be able to run in lightweight / remote-scanner / MyMonero mode <fluffypony> moneromooo: as opposed to implementing the server protocol <hyc> sounds good <moneromooo> Oh, mymonero client integration ? <fluffypony> moneromooo: let's call it something else <moneromooo> That went pretty damn fast :D <fluffypony> "lightweight wallet" <_Slack> <jollymort> it's not really centralization if any `monerod` acts as a server <hyc> but I'm still missing why we need old wallet-rpc if this mymonero api exists <_Slack> <jollymort> it's literally my monero :) <fluffypony> hyc: wallet-rpc is completely different <_Slack> <johnalan> so the core GUI will be able to interact with MyMonero backend too? <vtnerd_> for people that want to run VPS node but keep their viewkey ? <moneromooo> Yes, would be nice to see what bits are needed where, and the actual API (even if roughly). <fluffypony> it provides an API for integrators <fluffypony> @johnalan yes <fluffypony> so basically <_Slack> <johnalan> is this needed with the MyMonero Desktop wallet? <ArticMine> With what as the backed / server <moneromooo> That can be posted later though, :49 now. <ArticMine> monerod? <fluffypony> lightweight wallets will have 3 server options: <fluffypony> 1. OpenMonero <fluffypony> 2. the new in-source backend that vtnerd_ is working on <fluffypony> 3. the live MyMonero backend <fluffypony> it will also have multiple client options: <hyc> afaik the main difference btw an ordinary wallet and mymomero is you tell mymonero your viewkey <fluffypony> 1. OpenMonero's web wallet (clone of the current MyMonero web wallet) * PuebloZag (506d1957@gateway/web/freenode/ip.redacted) has joined <hyc> and the ordinary wallet has all your keys <fluffypony> 2. the MyMonero applications <fluffypony> 3. monero-wallet-cli <fluffypony> 4. monero-wallet-rpc <fluffypony> 5. the Monero GUI <fluffypony> hyc: monero-wallet-rpc can still use this on the backend <fluffypony> so it's unrelated * DrOlmer has quit (Ping timeout: 260 seconds) <hyc> ok <ArticMine> ok <_Slack> <jollymort> about #2011 - you could modify it to (median)+0.6% for it to be mine-worthy, or even have the wallet check for fee setting and then it would be matched like 1: +0.6%, 2: +2.4%, 3: +12%, 4:+100% <fluffypony> also this will mean that the GUI / CLI may end up supporting the MyMonero 13-word seed derivation by virtue of the integration effort <fluffypony> does anyone have a fundamental issue with that ? <ArticMine> no <fluffypony> I mean, I do, because I don't want to be abusing my position, but it is what it is :-P <_Slack> <jollymort> didn't you deprecate 13-word? <moneromooo> Did you not say the 13 word seed was going to be obsoleted ? * DrOlmer (~DrOlmer@unaffiliated/drolmer) has joined <endogenic> jollymort: working on it <_Slack> <johnalan> no <endogenic> but client still needs to be able to read 'em <redlion_> electrum/mycelium support a few different seed lengths iirc <redlion_> works well <_Slack> <jollymort> also luigi was playing around with an idea for 17-word, integrating creation height in it etc <fluffypony> moneromooo: it's import only <fluffypony> not create <endogenic> https://github.com/mymonero/mymonero-app-js/issues/77 <knaccc> doesn't it put a huge load on mymonero when someone asks it to scan the blockchain from zero with their view key? How long does mymonero take to scan the entire blockchain? <moneromooo> Anyway, I'm fine with that as presented. <hyc> that all sounds like a win to me. people have been whining about not being able to import their 13-word seed into regular CLI wallet <shuan_nelson_> so monero-wallet-cli/monero GUI will not be able to create light-wallets? <fluffypony> knaccc: yes it does - about 10 minutes <_Slack> <jollymort> yeah import only sounds lovely <ArticMine> If we are setting the stage for a competitive market based upon FLOSS then I am fine with it <vtnerd_> I do have the ASM code working, so hopefully that will tighten up some too (altough there is something else blocking that) <fluffypony> shuan_nelson_: yes they will <fluffypony> but with 25 word seed, not 13 <fluffypony> we have 7 minutes left - so I'd like to move on to the last item <shuan_nelson_> awesome! <fluffypony> we can discuss MyMonero more after the meeting <redlion_> @shaun_nelson, I think it's just that the CLI/GUI won't create 13-word seeds, but will accept already created ones <hyc> yeah sounds fine <fluffypony> 5. Any additional meeting items <knaccc> 10 mins is quite a speedup vs downloading the entire blockchain, so sounds awesome. <_Slack> <jollymort> any thoughts on future of penalty/blocksize? i kind of left the research open-ended <hyc> ^^ get a faster CPU and it'll be quicker ') <redlion_> Does anyone have a _working_ monero-core or mymonero build on ios currently? I've been fiddling around and I can't seem to get either properly functional on the sim/device, though I may be missing something <fluffypony> lol hyc <endogenic> redlion_: pls come join #mymonero but yes i do :) <Jaquee> redlion_: i have. it has some nasty bugs but it's running <redlion_> ok thanks, I'll talk to you after this <hyc> btw iOS still limits process VM size to 4GB so we won't be running monerod native on iOS any time soon <fluffypony> @jollymort let's discuss it after the meeting, or maybe next week - there are 2 more meetings to go tonight :) <fluffypony> and that's a large topic <_Slack> <jollymort> sure, another time <redlion_> thanks jaquee, are there any build instructions or a (sort of) working build posted somewhere? <fluffypony> 6. Confirm next meeting date/time <fluffypony> May 21 <fluffypony> day before Consensus <hyc> cool <endogenic> 👍 <hyc> oh. this week I expect to have wolf miner fully ported to Android, with GPU support too <fluffypony> endogenic can come to my hotel and we can do the meeting together :-P <endogenic> oooh <fluffypony> and with that <fluffypony> we end the meeting on time <hyc> (whether the hashrate is enough to bother is still an open question) <fluffypony> with 2 minutes to spare <fluffypony> because we're that cool |
My secret santa definitely did their homework on me. I am a huge eagles fan, big car person, and I am in grad school for accounting.
During the week of finals they sent me a starbucks giftcard separate from the gift to help get me through. Then my gift came yesterday.
1month of reddit gold- I have never been guilded before outside of the reddit survey. This is a big moment. I think I will probably frame it (already redeemed it though too)
Eagles scarf - Part of my job takes place outside. I will be switching to third shift soon, so anything to keep me warm out there. PLUS its Eagles Merch. You can literally never have too much team Merch.
Eagles lisence plate - See previous update: CAN NEVER HAVE ENOUGH EAGLES MERCH!. Also, as a car person, I definitely appreciate the plate. Sadly my front lisence plate mount broke off of my car, but this will look bitchin hanging over my desk with the sign.
The sign: Keep calm and calculate on. My SS was also a student, so they get the stress. I think during finals I slept about 8 hours over the course of a week. Little reminders like this go a long way to help you get through.
Thank you Secret Santa |
Gems: Attempting a Community-First Token Sale
Jonathan Tompkins Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 23, 2017
“Gems is a protocol for contracting workers to perform micro tasks. Workers stake tokens in order to prove validity of their tasks and earn a reusable computed trust score, enhancing the cost-efficiency of the network while democratizing access to scalable micro task workers.”
When quickly evaluating blockchain projects there are a couple things that catch my eye and hint that it may be a good application of blockchain technology (There are obviously many other great use cases, these are just easy to catch criteria that could lead to a better chance of success).
If I was working in this industry would I be frustrated in how much I pay for administration of the network? Is the industry already based on an internet marketplace?
Answering yes 2/2 on these, Gems recently caught my eye. Gems is a project on the ethereum network that is looking to improve the Mecahnical Turk (MTurk) marketplace. MTurk is a marketplace for the sourcing micro tasks that require human involvement .
Blockchain solutions are uniquely suited to improving systems that rely on and pay fees to a central authority for trust and payment management so there definitely appears to be a legitimate opportunity.
Mechanical turk, not twerk
I recommend checking out the team, whitepaper, blog, and FAQ — all check most of the boxes I have when initially evaluating projects. You may notice though that missing from all of this information is the token economics which brings me to why i think this is an interesting case study in this whirlwind world of ICOs we live in. Most decentralized projects really emphasize community and use the ease of distributing cryptographic assets as a way build a group of people with stake in the project and and then leverage communication channels and social media to keep them engaged and bootstrap marketing. In a perfect world benefit from a project in proportion to the effort they put into its success and tokens can be distributed in a way that everyone who wants to participate can do so. In practice though most ICOs are dominated by large investors or those able to sit by their computer and act fast when a sale opens up. There have been many legitimate attempts at creating a better model (I still like how civic did their token sale, idea was good but the network couldn’t handle it at the time leading to issues) but nothing seems to have done the trick. Creating maximum investment limits can lead to underfunding, throttling price by time incentivizes rushing in at the beginning or waiting till the last minute, giveaways and bounties lead to dumping when tokens are listed. What you need is for investors big and small to have a legitimate interest in the projects success.
Gems is trying a new approach by introducing the Gems Community Program which requires some act of bootstrap marketing for the project to gain access to the whitelist for the token sale. Too much work? No love lost, find another project. Super excited about the project? Take some time to leverage whatever resources you have to help build support for Gems.
This is my contribution but I will be doing standard analysis of the token economics before making any decision to invest. As the token sale information comes out I hope they keep the community first focus and find a way to reward smaller investors that have been supporting the project. No one has come up with a great model yet but what Gems is doing seems to at least be a good first step and I am excited to see how they decide to move forward.
Join Gems telegram — https://t.me/GemsOrg
Gems twitter — https://twitter.com/gems |
In a few short years, the Hyperloop might make nearly supersonic commuter travel as common as a subway swipe, realizing a dream of impossible speed first outlined in a 2013 white paper by Elon Musk. And Hyperloop One, the first company with a functioning prototype, says those speeds are already mathematically possible.
On Wednesday, Hyperloop One announced that it had conducted its second full-scale test of a Hyperloop system, propelling a pod through a vacuum-sealed tube at more than 192 miles per hour. But Rob Lloyd, CEO of Hyperloop One, says that speed wasn’t even pushing the system’s limits — they just ran out of tube to fling it down.
“It’s constrained by the length of the tube,” Lloyd told Inverse on Wednesday. Hyperloop One’s test tube, know as the “DevLoop,” is 500 meters long (its engineers use the metric system — that’s about 1,640 feet). In the DevLoop’s first full-scale test in mid-July, engineers got the pod moving at 69 miles per hour. During the second test, which took place on July 29, the company increased the length of “motor” in the tube (the pushing mechanism that makes the pod go) by a factor of 10 (30 meters to 300 meters) and tripled its horsepower. Lloyd says on a much longer system — a track that measured in miles, not feet — the company could scale their system to hit Elon Musk’s seemingly impossible speed goal.
“We know if we increased the length of motor from 300 meters by another 2,000 meters, we would go 700 miles an hour,” Lloyd says. “Specifically, we know that. It’s mathematically proven. We can put more juice into the system, and we can hit 700 miles an hour. The question is, do we want to do that now?”
Lloyd’s reservations make a lot of sense. It’s hard to get a good sense of how fast 700 miles per hour is. Aside from fighter pilots and astronauts, it’s highly unlikely that any normal human being has traveled at that speed. Modern commercial jet liners pretty much top out in the 600 mph range at cruising altitude, and making anything go at that speed on land is a great way to make a really big explosion or heap of tangled metal.
The pod on tracks before going into the tube.
Hyperloop’s potential rests on two factors: the lack of air resistance and magnetic levitation technology. The pods will travel in a vacuum, meaning that they don’t have to pass through any air or other matter that provides resistance. They will also use magnetic levitation to literally float above the tracks, cutting out any friction from wheels or treads. The world’s fastest train, Japan Railways Maglev, uses the same concept to hit 374 miles per hour, but that’s on an outdoor track with plenty of air and wind resistance, both of which limit its top speech. Japan’s train isn’t commercially viable yet (it’s still being tested), but there’s a similar passenger maglev train in Shanghai that goes 288 mph regularly.
The pod going into the tube.
Hyperloop has the potential to be so fast, in fact, that it almost becomes self-defeating — human physiology just isn’t well-equipped to handle acceleration and deceleration at that level. In other words, people would probably puke a lot. But right now, that’s all still conceptual. Lloyd said that for safety and regulatory reasons (also understandable!), the company isn’t expecting to put a human being in the pod for a couple years at least. |
I became interested in photography in 2011 after seeing some of the beautiful pictures my brother-in-law was taking of sunsets while we were on a family trip. I studied up on lenses and cameras and settings for six months and then I started photographing every stadium I had the good fortune of playing in. I did it because I knew I was so lucky to play baseball for a living. From city to city, ballpark to ballpark, I never took for granted that I was living my dream. The photos were my way of never letting myself forget.
Photographs by Michael Cuddyer
Camden Yards. Miller Park Rogers Centre Target Field Clubhouse Tropicana Field. Tropicana Field. Camden Yards. Camden Yards. Target Field Clubhouse Fenway Park. Fenway Park. Fenway Park clubhouse. Fenway Park. Chase Field. Chase Field. Miller Park Clubhouse. Miller Park. The Ballpark at Arlington. Oakland Coliseum. Angels Stadium. Wrigley Field. Wrigley Field. Wrigley Field. |
Longer lives mean lower annuity yields - the guaranteed income for life most private sector pensions now rely on - and you would need to save nearly £206,000 to buy annuity income equal to the current minimum wage.
State pension age is already set to rise to 67 by 2028 and Chancellor George Osborne announced earlier this year that future rises in retirement age would be linked to average life expectancy.
Danny Cox of wealth managers Hargreaves Lansdown said: “The Government is talking about longevity links and I think it is safe to assume that state pension age will have risen to age 70 by around 2040; possibly even sooner if the public finances deteriorate further.”
Women born after April 5, 1960, are already having to wait longer than expected to receive state pensions. Since April 6, 2010, the state pension age for women has been gradually rising from 60 to 65 to match the current retirement age for men.
Billy Mackay of pension specialists AJ Bell said the ONS figures should serve as a wake-up call for people who are not saving enough: “Many aspire to having a standard of living in retirement that is consistent with their best earning years and at odds with state benefits at or around the minimum wage.
“However, we are all living longer and the economic conditions mean that annuity rates are extremely low. To demonstrate the impact of this it is worth thinking that someone wanting to have income in line with the above will need a fund that is sufficient to purchase an annuity of £12,000.
“A £100,000 fund for a 65 year old male or female on typical market rates will provide an annuity of £5,830 on a single life basis with level payments. On that basis, to get an income of £12,000 a year you will need a fund of £205,832.”
However, some experts take different views. Steve Bee of Paradigm Pensions said: “A 10-year retirement these days doesn’t really cost a lot more to fund than a ten-year retirement would have cost many decades ago.
“When people talk of it costing more to buy an annuity what they’re really saying is that it costs more to fund a longer retirement. If as age expectancy rises we expect longer and longer potential retirements then we should really expect to put more aside to fund those extra years.
“I’m not at all sure that talking about this issue in terms of pensions costing more or annuities being worse value is all that helpful.”
And Billy Burrows of the Better Retirement Group pointed out that pensioners no longer need to spend three quarters of their savings on an annuity but can instead leave their fund invested and retire with an income drawdown scheme: “The annuity problem is that people need to plan long term about retirement but they think short term
“This means that investors should consider investment linked options rather than locking into low interest rates. It does involve taking some investment risk but the parodox is that unless people take some risk they risk not having sufficient income.”
If you want to know when you will receive your state pension click here. You can also get an official calculation of what that state pension is likely to be by clicking here. Alternatively, you can request a written statement by calling 0845 3000 168 or writing to the Future Pension Centre, Department for Work and Pensions, Tyneview Park, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE98 1BA.
• What's your story? Email us at money@telegraph.co.uk |
The European Commission has found the Spanish scheme supporting electricity generation from renewable energy sources, high efficiency cogeneration of heat and power and waste to be in line with EU State aid rules. The scheme will further EU energy and climate goals whilst preserving competition.
Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said: "I am pleased to see the latest Spanish renewables auctions have shown the positive effects of competition: companies are ready to invest in new installations with very low levels of State support. Spain's transition to a low carbon, environmentally sustainable energy supply is important and this support scheme will help."
Under the scheme, beneficiaries receive support through a premium on top of the market price of electricity, so that they have to respond to market signals. This premium is meant to help these facilities compensate for costs that cannot be recovered from selling electricity in the market, and obtain a reasonable return on investment.
The scheme has been in place since 2014 and applies to new beneficiaries as well as to facilities that were benefitting from previous support. In total, the scheme has around 40,000 beneficiaries. In 2016, the annual payments under the scheme amounted to €6.4 billion.
Since 2016, support to new facilities is granted through competitive auctions. Different technologies have competed with each other in the latest auctions of May 2017 and July 2017. In total, support for capacity of slightly more than 8 gigawatts was awarded, essentially to wind and solar panel plants. As a result of these auctions, beneficiaries will receive compensation only if, in the coming years, the market price drops to a level significantly below today's market prices. This protection against an unexpectedly sharp fall in market prices helps developers to secure project financing, and therefore complete the projects on time. This will help Spain achieve its 2020 environmental and climate change objectives.
The Commission assessed the scheme under EU State aid rules, in particular the Commission's 2014 Guidelines on State Aid for Environmental Protection and Energy. In particular, they require competitive auctions for renewables support since 2017. They ensure that the use of public funds is limited and there is no overcompensation. On this basis, the Commission concluded that the Spanish measure will boost the share of electricity produced from renewable energy sources, in line with EU environmental objectives, while any distortion of competition caused by the state support is minimised.
The scheme is accompanied by an evaluation plan to assess its impact. The results of this evaluation will be submitted to the Commission by December 2020.
Background
The Commission's 2014 Guidelines on State Aid for Environmental Protection and Energy, enable Member States to support the production of electricity from renewable energy sources (including from renewable waste) and high efficiency combined heat and power plants, subject to certain conditions. These rules are aimed at meeting the EU's ambitious energy and climate targets at the least possible cost for taxpayers and without undue distortions of competition in the Single Market.
The Renewable Energy Directive established targets for all Member States' shares of energy renewable energy sources in gross final energy consumption by 2020. For Spain, that target is 20% by 2020.
More information on today's decision will be available, once potential confidentiality issues have been resolved, in the State aid register on the Commission's competition website under the case number SA.40348. The State Aid Weekly e-News lists new publications of State aid decisions on the internet and in the EU Official Journal. |
Huh Gak ,�who previously revealed he's in a serious relationship with his first love, will be getting married this October!
[SEEALSO]http://www.allkpop.com/article/2013/07/huh-gak-announces-hes-in-a-serious-relationship[/SEEALSO]
Huh Gak alerted fans that he is dating someone with marriage in mind earlier this year, and it turns out they've now set the date for next month.
He and his fiancee started dating in February of last year. They were each other's first loves and dated back in middle school. They then came across one another by chance 13 years later, and everything just fell into place.
Huh Gak shared the news on his fan cafe on the 5th, writing,
"I am sharing some surprising news to everyone today. I am finally getting married. October 3! I have exactly 28 days left. Since this is good news that happens once in a lifetime, I wanted to announce it personally. This day even comes to a person who is lacking a lot like me. It still feels surreal that I will be the man of one woman. As I prepare for my wedding, I learn and feel a lot. Huh Gak who will continue to mature through all this learning. Huh Gak who will always pursue music. I hope that you look forward to me. If you would give me your round of applause for the road ahead, I will take each step with more strength. I am always thankful for and love my fans, who have been a strong source of support for me."
Congrats to Huh Gak and his fiancee! |
Russian Regulators Consider Establishing a ‘Crypto-Detective Agency’
At a recent State Duma Financial Market Committee meeting, an initiative to create a “crypto-detective agency” in Russia was proposed. This specialized agency will primarily collect all information on Russian companies planning to launch an initial coin offering (ICO) as well as create a registry of them.
Also read: Putin Orders the Issue of Russia’s National Cryptocurrency – the Cryptoruble
Proposal for Crypto-Detective Agency
At the State Duma Financial Market Committee meeting of the expert council on the legislative support of financial technologies last week, the issue of cryptocurrency regulation in Russia was discussed. Representatives from the regulators and major domestic banks attended, reported Izvestia Russian Daily.
The Internet Development Institute (IRI) is an organization whose goal is to develop and operate the industry of modern technologies in Russia. IRI Foundation president Alexei Fyodorov proposed an initiative at the meeting “to create a specialized crypto-detective agency,” the news outlet detailed and reported him explaining:
To protect investors in cryptocurrencies in Russia, it is planned to create a specialized crypto-detective agency. It will collect information on Russian companies intending to launch an ICO. Information will be stored in a special register.
This registry will contain all of the information about these companies that can be found, he described.
“Our agency will be able to extract information about their beneficiaries and their real state of affairs. Is this a startup or an attempt to solve the company’s current problems with the help of the ICO,” he asked, before detailing the need for this agency. “Our task is to protect investors. When a company that has attracted funds from a large number of people fails, its investors will seek protection from the state.”
Ineffective Method
Russia’s internet ombudsman, Dmitry Marinichev, acknowledged the need to collect such data.
In August, news.Bitcoin.com reported about him building a mining infrastructure in Russia to challenge China’s bitcoin mining supremacy. His company, Russian Miner Coin (RMC), recently held an ICO which raised 1,205 BTC, 4,022 ETH, and $37 million, according to the company’s website. The RMC tokens “have rights to 18 percent of the revenue earned with the company’s mining equipment, according to a presentation posted on its website,” Forbes described.
Regarding a registry of companies planning an ICO, Marinichev said “to force a company to register on the register is pointless,” Izvestia wrote and quoted him saying:
Mechanisms for controlling ICOs are needed…But the registers are ineffective.
Eugene Gordeev, Managing Partner at Russian Ventures, believes that “any initiative to register companies is not needed by the market,” the publication wrote.
“It’s like trying to create an agency that evaluates startups at the seed stage when the project has only an idea and a team,” he said. “At this stage, the project has a lot of data that cannot be analyzed. But investors, in case of success, will receive a thousand times more than they invested.”
What do you think of this “crypto-detective agency”? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
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“Dylan! Dylan! Get out of bed!”
I was in a deep sleep when my mom suddenly burst into my room and started yelling at me.
I sat up, confused. Just a few hours before this, I had returned from a couple of grueling days at a football camp and collapsed on my bed the moment I got home. I wanted to say something but I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t get any words out.
She was whispering, but not that softly. I could tell it was urgent. “Dylan, hurry!” she said. “Wake up! Come downstairs now!”
I rubbed the crust out of my eyes. Everything was still blurry. You know when you get woken up from the middle of a really good sleep, and you’re just stuck? You see things, but your mind can’t process them fast enough to understand what’s going on. That’s what was happening to me.
“Mom, what’s going on?”
She didn’t answer, she just left my room and ran downstairs. I ripped off the sheets, jumped out of bed and followed behind her.
With each step, things got more and more confusing.
What time is it?
What’s downstairs?
Where’s Dad?
When I got into the kitchen, I glanced at the clock on the microwave. It was 4 a.m. I looked at the table and saw my dad sitting there. All the lights were off, but his face was illuminated by a white glow of his computer screen. The only thing I could really see was his mouth.
He was smirking.
“Dylan, come over here and read something,” he said.
I shielded my eyes from the glare, bent down and, when my eyes finally adjusted, I made out the big, black letters spread across the web page.
My mom was standing behind me with her arm on my shoulder, and my dad was looking up at me, still flashing his huge grin.
All I could think was, Why did you guys wake me up to look at this?
I turned to my mom, and then back to my dad. Then it kind of hit me.
Whoa, I thought. LSU offering an eighth grader. That’s crazy. I wonder who it is?
I squinted my eyes and read the smaller letters below the headline.
I saw my name.
Then it really hit me.
The eighth grader was me.
I was just nine years old when I really started to focus on football.
I was an only child until I was eight years old, so sports was how I interacted with other kids. My dad had signed me up to play in our hometown of Alexandria, Louisiana, when I was eight. I did O.K. that first year, but I was still just getting my feet wet and learning the basics. My dad thought he saw that I had some potential as an athlete, so he set up a training regimen for me.
We had a big field just across the street from our house. Starting when I was nine, my dad and I would go out to that field and train three mornings a week. I’ve been grinding ever since.
We’d wake up at six and get started. Four hundred push-ups, 800 sit-ups, 10 minutes of jumping rope and a one-mile run. After 90 minutes or so, we’d go back home, and then I’d shower before catching the bus to elementary school. As soon as school was over — and if I didn’t have track practice — I’d get back on the bus and go home, where my dad would be waiting for me. Then we’d head back over to the field to train some more.
In the summer, we’d do three-a-days. I’d train at 6 a.m., at noon and then again at 5 p.m.
Some people might think my dad and I were crazy doing all this when I was so young, but truthfully, it wasn’t all about football — it was about where football could take me. I can vividly remember my dad saying, “I want you to get a degree one day. That’s goal No. 1. Get that degree.”
At first, I didn’t really see the value of a degree the way my dad did. It all seemed so far away. But the reason it was so important to him eventually dawned on me. See, outside of my parents, somebody in my family graduating from college was rare. Not many kids from my neighborhood get a chance at higher education. But my dad and I knew that, if I kept my grades up and committed to football, college would one day be a possibility. I wasn’t training just for me — I was doing it for a lot of people.
When I wasn’t in school or playing on that field, I spent a ton of time with my friends, playing hide-and-go-seek or throwing water balloons at each other. As we got older, I started to notice that I could run faster and throw harder than most of them. If we were playing tag, I barely ever got caught.
Over the years, one guy who always kept me in line and helped me to stay focused on the ultimate goal was my uncle. He’s only eight years older than I am, so he treated me more like a younger brother than anything else. We had fun times running around the neighborhood and wrestling in the house.
And even though he was older, he didn’t hold back on the football field. He’d tackle me me like any older brother would: hard.
I remember when I was 10 years old, my uncle and I would play football on the field near our house. He’d invite a bunch of his friends over and we’d go at it. Full tackle, no pads. It was only fair, they’d say, because even though they were 18 and I was 10, I was just as big as they were — around six-foot and 200 pounds.
I’ll never forget those afternoons. Those football games taught me a lot about pride. There was no way I was going to allow myself to get embarrassed after a big hit. I’d pick myself up out of the mud and keep going. My speed and strength might have been what caught the eye of college recruiters, but I’ve always been most proud of my toughness.
I’d like to think I brought that mentality with me to my first youth football camp.
I first attended LSU Football Youth Camps & Clinics when I was in the sixth grade. The camps lasted only two days, but we’d always do a lot of drills, one being the 40-yard dash. I remember looking out across the field at my first camp and seeing hundreds of kids lining up and whatnot. It wasn’t an easy place to stand out.
When I ran the 40, I clocked in at around 4.6 seconds. I think I caught the attention of a lot of coaches with that number. I watched them show their stop watches to each other and laugh.
I was in eighth grade when I went to the camp for the third straight summer. By that point, I had begun to make a name for myself in my hometown — but not much further beyond that.
All that was about to change.
The coaches called my name and I lined up for the 40.
Someone blew the whistle, and then….
Go.
A few moments later, a coach yelled out a number: “4.5!”
I looked back at the coaches with the stopwatch. I was smiling. That was the fastest I had ever run.
By the end of the camp, the LSU coaches had already talked to my father. A month later, I was back on LSU’s campus for another camp, but this time, I was invited to workout with high school kids, some who were 19 years old.
The first thing I did?
Ran the 40.
My time: 4.4.
Now … that was the fastest time I had ever run. After I caught my breath, I looked around and saw coaches, kids, ball boys — everyone — staring at me. I think they were wondering, Who is this kid? I didn’t really know what to do. I was just staring back like, Hey, I’m Dylan.
In the afternoon, we were put on teams for seven-on-seven games. I think the coaches wanted to have some fun, because when I heard them calling out our names, I heard some pretty talented dudes get picked for the same team.
“Alright, over here, we’ll have Fournette, Guice….”
The final named they called?
“… and Moses.”
Man, I felt like I was on the Dream Team. I had heard about Leonard Fournette for ages — he was a pretty big name in the Louisiana recruiting scene for a while — and Derrius Guice and I had been friends ever since we were like eight years old (for real, we go way back … Derrius is my Day One dude).
The coaches told me that they had been impressed with my performance throughout the camp, which made me feel good, but I didn’t really know what was going to happen next. After saying goodbye to a couple of friends, my dad arrived to pick me up. I was dead tired. So after the two-hours drive home from Baton Rouge, I immediately went up to my room. The last thing I remember was collapsing onto my bed.
Early the next morning, my mom barreled through my door and basically dragged me out of bed. That was when I found out that LSU had given me an offer.
That was when things got pretty real.
Life started moving pretty fast. Let me tell you right now: It was as crazy as you’d think.
Suddenly, my name was popping up on ESPN shows, in newspaper articles and on the radio. People knew me as the eighth grader who had been offered a scholarship by LSU, and they wanted to know more. Coaches from other schools started reaching out to me on social media. Our mailman must’ve been so confused because, after LSU made its offer, we started getting around 400 letters per week. Four hundred.
Like what!
About a month after LSU sent me an official offer, we were sifting through the mail when one letter in particular caught our eye. The return address?
Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Bama had already contacted me, but this was the real deal. My parents and I opened the envelope and had to take a couple of deep breaths while we read. It was an offer. I couldn’t believe it. I was 14 years old and had offers from two of the best programs in the country.
Like I said, crazy.
It wasn’t easy, man. I like to keep to myself. Part of that probably comes from being an only child for so many years, but my dad is the same way. We’re more about action than words. I’m not an attention seeker. I like being in my own space. It’s not that I’m a jerk, it’s just what I’m comfortable with.
Three months after I received that first offer, I verbally committed to LSU. Problem was, I was only in ninth grade then. Things change.
When I committed to the Tigers, I was listening to a lot of people, but I don’t think I was paying attention to what I wanted. The honest truth is that no one that age probably has a good idea what they’ll actually want when they’re 18. I was committed to LSU for two years, and it was great, but I learned that it’s very easy to be influenced by those who may not always have your best interests at heart. It’s important to have a steady voice in your ear. For me, that was my mom and dad. And, like I said, all my dad wanted for me was a great education — that was the reason behind every one of those early-morning workouts. Both of my parents wanted me to be happy. So they asked me to think long and hard about what I had decided to do.
In August 2015, I decommitted from LSU. My decision had nothing to do with my feelings about the program. I just realized that I only had one shot at picking a school, so it was really worth it to explore my options. Everybody has an opinion about where you should go, but ultimately you’re the one that will have to grind on the field and in the classroom. So make the decision for you. My parents told me that, and I took it to heart.
People say you only have one chance at a good first impression. My official visit to Alabama left an impression on me that I’ll never forget.
Yes, the Crimson Tide have amazing facilities, but that’s something many teams offer. What really captured my attention was something you can’t really see or feel. It was a general vibe.
One of the first things I did on my visit was sit in on a team meeting. As we waited for it to start, dudes were hollering at one another, looking at their phones and making noise. But when the door opened and Nick Saban walked in, the entire room went silent. I promise you, the entire room went silent.
You legit could have heard a pin drop.
I had similar measurables to pretty much all of the kids in that room. (Many of them are in the NFL now.) And every single one of them showed absolute and total respect for this man.
At that moment, I knew I was going to commit to Bama.
The way those great players treated to their coach was something you can’t fake. It showed me in an instant exactly why the program has had the success that it has. The respect that the players showed to Coach Saban was because of two things: How they feel about him and how they feel about each other. Even if you’re the weakest link, they’ll pick you up. They’re all really in it together. It was something I couldn’t turn down.
So this past September, I made a hard commitment to go to school in Tuscaloosa. After four years and thousands of letters and conversations with different schools, that’s what my heart and mind were telling me to do.
I know that a lot of people were surprised when I changed my mind. But I don’t really understand why. I mean, I get it. I had been associated with LSU for so long. But the recruitment process is one of the only times in your life where it’s O.K. to be selfish … it’s O.K. to put you and your family above everything else. And, in my mind, Bama was the best option for me.
Yeah, I’ve made some mistakes along the way. At times I felt like I had to rush into things instead of waiting for the future. But I’ve tried to learn from every experience, and now as I move on to college, I’m really looking forward to enjoying what I’ve been working toward since I was a little kid.
I have plans to major in business and minor in communications. Bama has a great business school, and getting a degree from it would go a long way toward preparing me for a life after football.
One day I want to go back home to Alexandria and build a state-of-the-art training facility for inner-city kids. I spent the past year at the IMG Academy down in Florida, and my experience there inspired me to try to create more opportunities for kids who share the same drive and passion as me. That’s my dream.
For now, I couldn’t be more ready to get started at Bama. I’ve been looking forward to getting to a college campus for a looooong time — probably since I got that scholarship offer way back in eighth grade. But just getting to college has never been my goal. Not at all. The way I see it, it’s just another step. And I’m ready to roll.
An earlier version of this story contained three factual errors: that nobody in Dylan’s family has ever graduated from college; that he was an only child; and that he and LSU running back Derrius Guice have been friends since they were seven years old. The errors have since been corrected in the text of the story. |
CLOSE The excavation of the A-24 platform at Ceibal revealing the earliest known monumental construction in the Maya lowlands. No audio available. Takeshi Inomata
Soaring pyramids, ceremonial platforms and ritual plazas, signatures of the ancient Maya, owe their origin to a broad cultural shift in Central America around 1,000 B.C., the ruins of Ceibal suggest.
A carved stone head excavated from the lowland Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala (around 400 BCE). (Photo11: Daniela Triadan; Takeshi Inomata; AAAS) Story Highlights Researcher: Ceibal's ceremonial complex is earliest in Maya lowlands
Ceibal is in modern-day Guatemala
The ancient Maya started building their storied cities amid a construction boom in Central America as early as 1000 B.C., archaeologists reported Thursday.
New radiocarbon date samples from the ruined plazas and pyramids of Ceibal, in modern-day Guatemala, point to an earlier spread in growth of ancient Maya city building than people had previously believed, suggests a team led by archaeologist Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona-Tucson.
"Ceibal's ceremonial complex (is) the earliest in the Maya lowlands, predating other examples by roughly 200 years," Inomata said. "This also means there was a drastic social change at the time" as the Maya switched from largely hunter-gatherer lives to farming.
Anthropologists study the origins of civilizations for clues to the ties that bind us together. The Maya offer an interesting example of a society that started building cities uninfluenced by the Old World's Egyptian and Fertile Crescent civilizations.
More than 6 million Maya people still live in Central America. Accounts of their ancestors' jungle-draped ruins have been objects of popular fascination since the 1840s, when U.S. explorer John Lloyd Stephens, "the father of American archaeology," wrote best-selling accounts of these lost cities and crumbling pyramid temples. More recently, scholars have held a "heated debate," Inomata says, over whether the ancient Maya cities sprang from the even older Olmec civilization of Mexico's Gulf Coast or started their building habits on their own.
Instead, the famed pyramid-builders of Central America probably owe the beginnings of their city building more to broad cultural changes taking place there at the time, Inomata says. A ceremonial platform built at Ceibal around 1000 B.C. appears to precede the pyramid and plazas built in the Olmec city of La Venta around 800 B.C., his team reports in the journal Science. Around that time, a pyramid also appears to have been built at Ceibal.
"The exciting thing about this (study) is not about a 'cool' find as much as about supplying a realistic, practical, complicated, story on the origins of things Maya," says archaeologist Lisa Lucero of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, who was not part of the study team. "Human history is complicated and based on continual feedback from neighbors, foreign or no."
The team reports 54 radiocarbon date samples at Ceibal, largely taken from charcoal deposits at the site, and compares them to reanalyzed radiocarbon dates, taken from charcoal at La Venta, an Olmec ruin.
Numerous other Maya sites and related ones on the Pacific Coast show signs of growing from towns to ceremonial centers around 1000 B.C. in Central America, pointing to a broad flowering of urban activity at the time. Inomata speculates that corn began providing enough calories, even when grown in poor rainforest soil, to trigger a move to more settled existence then.
Olmec sculptures displayed at a Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition in 2010-11. (Photo11: National Institute of Anthropology and History)
Archaeologist John Clark of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, suggests the results still point to a heavy influence by the Olmec, widely seen as the New World's earliest civilization, on the ancient Maya. He points to artifacts such as greenstone axes buried as offerings in the oldest plaza of Ceibal and an even older but less elaborate Olmec city nearby called San Lorenzo, which dates to as far back as 1400 B.C. "The data mean that Maya civilization is indeed older than has been recently claimed, and it also means they had more of a hand in the overall direction of Mesoamerican (New World) civilization at an earlier time," Clark says. "It does nothing, however, to bring the origins of Maya civilization back to the beginnings of Olmec civilization at San Lorenzo. There was no symmetry of contribution here. One was early and important, and the other was later and important in lesser ways."
Inomata and his colleagues suggest a "power vacuum" took place in Central America around 1000 B.C., when many people began moving into cities centered around plazas for religious rituals that marked a more organized society. For the Maya, whose ancient cities were widely abandoned around 850 A.D., the decision to start building appears to have been an ancient one, they conclude.
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Good Food Markets in Northeast Washington is one of a handful of small-scale neighborhood grocery stores that have opened across the city in the past two years. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)
On a stretch of Rhode Island Avenue that for years was a food desert stands Good Food Markets, a small neighborhood grocery store that opened in January 2015.
Arranged neatly on shelves inside a tiny retail space of a mere 800 square feet is a diverse selection of fresh, packaged and prepared items. There’s pasta and canned tomatoes for a quick weeknight dinner, but also fresh fruit and vegetables, organic quinoa in bulk and even Vietnamese spring roll wrappers.
“I love it,” said Senait Teklehaimanot, 48, a resident of nearby Woodridge who does almost all of her weekly shopping at Good Food Markets. “They’re reasonably priced and have good products.”
Good Food Markets is just one of a handful of neighborhood grocery stores that have opened across the District recently, part of what appears to be a resurgence of small-scale groceries catering to neighborhood residents — in stark contrast to the trend of disappearing mom-and-pop stores in small towns across the country.
Even as more openings are in the pipeline for large retail chains such as Whole Foods and Wegmans, the smaller neighborhood stores are making their mark. By one count, at least six have opened since 2015, and more are in the works.
Good Food Market is part of a trend of small-scale neighborhood grocery stores that opened up across the city in the past two years. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Of course, neighborhood groceries are not new to the city. The family-owned Rodman’s has been a fixture of Northwest Washington since 1955. And Yes Organic Market, which now has six stores across the District, traces its roots back to 1970, when it opened under its original name Yes Food Shop in Georgetown.
But the most recent spike suggests a shift in the dynamics of the city’s grocery business.
There is a “renaissance of the neighborhood,” said Keith Sellars, president and chief executive of the Washington D.C. Economic Partnership, a nonprofit, “and people want services that they can walk to” as well as “convenience on all levels.”
The new corner groceries are part of a broader back-to-the-city movement in parts of the country, said Brett Theodos, a senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. That trend, Theodos said, is driving demand for a “job-rich, transit-rich environment” and “the meeting together of commercial and residential sectors in a way that feels very authentic and vibrant.”
D.C. history through its stores
Grocery stores, writes Michael Ruhlman in his new book “Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America,” are “a barometer of our country’s collective state of mind.”
On a more local level, corner grocery stores can also trace the contours of a changing city. As the District has developed over the years, its grocery stores have also evolved with it.
Between the late-19th to early-20th centuries, hundreds of eastern European Jews, lured to the United States by the promise of religious freedom and economic opportunity, opened small grocery stores in the Washington area.
In the early ’20s, a dozen of these grocers teamed up to establish a cooperative: the District Grocery Stores. At its peak, the cooperative boasted 300 stores across the city and surrounding suburbs. But the arrival of the first Giant supermarket in 1936 presaged disruptive changes to the existing grocery market. Already,“the writing was on the wall,” as a Washington Post story put it.
Still, the District Grocery Stores chugged along. The 1968 riots that rocked the city, however, destroyed many stores, and the cooperative dissolved in 1972.
Then came the Koreans, a group of new immigrants who brought about a renaissance of the mom and pop corner grocery store. By 1980, Koreans owned an estimated half of the District’s corner stores. But this also gave rise to resentment from the black community, and confrontations over money, territory, and race played out over grocery store counters.
In recent years, corner grocery stores have earned another reputation: as suppliers of liquor and highly processed, unhealthy foods.
Efforts have been made to improve the offerings, but many still fall short of stocking the necessary goods for a nutritious diet. This leaves a large gap between retail chains and corner stores — a gap that the new neighborhood grocery stores are trying to fill.
Reviving the local store
When Tracy Stannard and John Fielding opened Broad Branch Market in the District’s Chevy Chase neighborhood in 2008, they decided to stock high-quality fresh produce and fresh fish and butchered meats in addition to the usual beer and wine, candy and prepared foods.
Their decision to go into the grocery business had everyone telling them, “You’re crazy,” they recalled. The neighborhood market, which dates to 1919, had sat vacant for several years. On top of that, neither Stannard nor Fielding had any experience selling groceries — both had come from restaurant backgrounds.
The partners succeeded, anyway — perhaps due in part to their great timing. They were at the forefront of the corner store revival, right on the cusp of the city’s demographic boom driven by an influx of millennials.
Now, almost 10 years later, Broad Branch Market is in the company of numerous other neighborhood grocery stores. There’s Glen’s Garden Market in Dupont Circle and Shaw; Streets Market and Cafe on 14th Street and on the corner of 13th and Massachusetts Avenue; Union Kitchen Grocery on Capitol Hill and in Shaw; and Good Food Markets on Rhode Island Avenue. Stannard and Fielding also recently opened Soapstone Market in Van Ness, in November 2016.
Rising demand spurred by a growing population and increasing income levels helps explain the trend, said Theodos of the Urban Institute.
Consumer tastes have also evolved in recent years.
“The general person has much more food knowledge than people did 20 years ago” and are looking for more and higher-quality options, said Fielding, co-owner of the Broad Branch and Soapstone markets.
And people might just have had enough of big-box stores. Half of U.S. consumers shop at three or more stores to get all their groceries, which include a growing number of specialty items, according to Magid, a Minnesota-based research firm.
“A lot of people are sick of how big they are,” Fielding said of the large retail chains.
But beyond reflecting market trends, these neighborhood grocery stores are also where pressing questions facing the city are playing out: How should the District balance the need to revitalize some of its neighborhoods while avoiding the worst outcomes of gentrification, such as rising costs, and ensuring equitable food access for all?
A balancing act
On a recent Monday morning, Lysaundra Campbell, 26, stopped by the newly opened Streets Market and Cafe on Massachusetts Avenue to pick up milk and a box of cereal on her way to work. She commutes from Anacostia every day and doesn’t usually have time for breakfast at home — so the addition of this grocery store has been very convenient, she said.
Still, she would hate to see a store like Streets Market and Cafe in her own neighborhood because “it’s a sure sign of gentrification,” she said, which in her view means the eventual displacement of longtime residents and loss of neighborhood character.
Owners of these newer neighborhood grocery markets push back against the idea that their stores, which often stock more expensive, specialty items, price out lower-income consumers and are yet another instance of gentrification.
For one thing, many of the new stores have opened in spaces that had stood vacant for some time. And Soapstone Market, in Van Ness, has been part of a broader effort to revitalize the neighborhood.
“The neighborhood really needed a hangout space, kind of a third space,” said Theresa Cameron, executive director of Van Ness Main Street, part of the D.C. Main Streets program that works to revitalize traditional business districts in the city. Now, Soapstone — a combination of grocery store, deli, bar, and cafe — is providing just that, she said: a gathering space for the community.
On Rhode Island Avenue, Good Food Markets is also serving as an anchor for the community.
“It is absolutely building a sense of place” to have the Good Food Markets in the neighborhood, along with the capoeira studio next door and a coffee shop nearby, said Kyle Todd, executive director of Rhode Island Avenue Main Street.
But this still leaves the question of whether the new corner grocery stores are affordable to the general population.
Danielle Vogel, owner of Glen’s Garden Market, said that she consciously price-matches her retail chain competitors.
Cullen Gilchrist, the chief executive and co-founder of Union Kitchen, which operates two grocery stores specializing in local products and has plans to open more, said that his company aims to attract everyone, from young professionals to construction workers.
“In building a local economy, we can’t just serve a subset of people,” he said.
And at Good Food Markets, the driving mission of the entire business is “bringing the overall progress of prosperity and development across the District,” co-founder Kris Garin said.
Good Food Markets intentionally chose to open on Rhode Island Avenue between the two Northeast neighborhoods of Woodridge and Langdon, where close to a quarter of the population are food stamp recipients, said Philip Sambol, the vice president for operations. The goal is to make healthy food accessible to everyone.
“Access means it’s affordable, culturally appropriate, and you feel comfortable walking into the store itself,” Sambol said.
For Teklehaimanot, a Good Food Markets regular, this focus on access is a relief.
“Usually when a neighborhood gentrifies, the new stores that open are mostly very expensive,” she said. But Good Food Markets has kept things affordable, even as it also stocks a selection of specialty organic and local products.
“It’s good for everyone,” she said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the origins of Yes Organic Market. This version has been corrected. |
New Delhi: The government has allowed women working in industries to take six months’ maternity leave, pre-empting parliamentary approval on the maternity benefit amendment bill that is pending in the Lok Sabha.
Through an executive order, the labour and employment ministry has doubled maternity leave to six months from three for industrial women workers. However, the benefit will be restricted to women who make a monthly contribution to the employees’ state insurance corpus from their salaries. This means about 2.9 million women working across various industries will get the benefit.
Under the Employees State Insurance Act, eligible employees contribute 1.75% of their salary (basic + allowances) and employers contribute 4.75% to the ESI corpus every month. There are at least 20 million insured persons under the ESI scheme, of which 2.9 million are women.
“In rule 56, in sub-rule (2),… for the words “twelve weeks of which not more than six weeks", the words “twenty-six weeks of which not more than eight weeks" shall be substituted", said the new rules, a copy of which has been reviewed by Mint.
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Besides, a woman will be allowed to take three months of maternity leave in case she is adopting a baby or taking possession of her baby from a surrogate mother.
All these provisions are part of the original Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill, 2016, which is awaiting approval in the lower House. The Rajya Sabha approved the bill in August 2016.
Once it becomes law, all the provisions will be applicable to all working women across India, and the present rules for industrial women employees will be subsumed in the bill.
An ESI Corporation spokesperson said the organization has asked all its regional offices to effect the change without any delay. Amarjeet Kaur, a board member of ESI Corp., said the labour ministry was initially hesitant as the amendment bill is pending in Lok Sabha, but finally agreed to extend the benefit.
“Political considerations aside, we feel women working in industries must enjoy a longer leave for child care," added Kaur, who is also secretary, All India Trade Union Congress. |
Dexter Filkins On ISIS And The 'Bitter Consequences' Of The Iraq War
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. After covering the war in Iraq, my guest, Dexter Filkins, continues to cover its aftermath. In the current edition of the New Yorker, he writes about the militant Sunni Islamist group ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which now occupies important areas of Syria, as well as large areas of Iraq, including Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul. Filkins writes, quote, "within a day after sweeping into Mosul, ISIS militants freed thousands of prisoners, looted bank vaults and declared the imposition of sharia law. From now on, the group said, unaccompanied women were to stay indoors and thieves would be punished by amputation. The conquest of Mosul by a group of Islamic extremists is a bitter consequence of the American invasion," unquote. We asked Filkins to talk with us about ISIS, how it compares to al-Qaida, the power it now has in Iraq and Syria and how its war is beginning to de-stabilize neighboring countries. Filkins shared a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He received two George Polk awards and won a National Book Critics Circle award for his book "The Forever War." He's been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 2011. Dexter Filkins, welcome back to FRESH AIR. First of all, what's your reaction seeing what's happening now in Iraq and the gains that ISIS is making after you having covered Iraq since the start of the war and covered the region even before that?
DEXTER FILKINS: Well, you know, it's pretty depressing (laughing). I mean, these guys are - I mean, some of those guys, you know, ISIS are just full on psychopaths. You know, these are the people that make beheading videos. It's not all of them. But there's a lot of them in there. And, you know, it's sad. I mean, it's not terribly surprising I have to say. You know, I was there a few months ago and it wasn't difficult to see what was happening. You know, I didn't - I certainly didn't predict what would ultimately happen. But everything was really fragile, there was so much anger and unhappiness that it looked like, you know, we're kind of one big event away from everything coming apart. It wasn't hard to see.
GROSS: What's the difference between al-Qaida and ISIS in philosophy?
FILKINS: Well, this is really - I mean, this is one of these, you know, how many angels can you dance on the head of a pin?
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FILKINS: But essentially, I really - honestly, I think it's about power more than anything. And it goes back to - it goes back to the Iraq war. You know, al-Qaida obviously was basically centered in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And in Iraq, once the Americans invaded, you had essentially these guys come together and say we're al-Qaida in Iraq. You know, we swear allegiance to Osama. And then they fought the Americans, you know, very hard. They were virtually wiped out by 2006, 2007. But what happened, to answer your question, what happened was - so basically a power struggle. You know, the Syrian war started and a group of guys from Iraq, and they're called the Jabhat al-Nusra, which is basically the Nusra Front. They crossed into Syria and formed a group that was essentially al-Qaida's franchise. You know, you guys are the designated al-Qaida people. They didn't really advertise themselves as such but they were. And so they started fighting in Syria. And then ISIS didn't really like that. And ISIS wanted to be - ISIS wanted to be top dog in Syria as well. And so they got into this kind of spat over, you know, over who was the official kind of al-Qaida guy in Syria. And then, literally, Zawahiri got involved...
GROSS: Who's the head of al-Qaida now.
FILKINS: The head of al-Qaida now, yeah, the deputy, Osama's deputy. He got involved and said, look, you know, you guys have to settle your differences. But al-Nusra is the real, you know, al-Qaida affiliate in Syria. And then ISIS basically said - the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, basically said, well, the heck with you. We're doing our own thing. I'm not listening to anybody. So that's kind of what happened. But I think without going into too much detail here, the really crucial difference, I think, the thing that makes ISIS stand out is their brutality. When say, by contrast, when Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria goes into a town, they're very nice. You know, they're an al-Qaida affiliate, but they kind of make nice. They don't, you know, impose fourth century Islamic law. I think they plan to, ultimately, but they're playing a very long game, whereas ISIS goes in and just, you know, they crucify people, literally. They cut people's hands off. They do, you know, we've seen this movie before. And this is what they've done in Eastern Syria and it appears to be what they're doing in Western and Northern Iraq in the parts that they're taking over. So they're really, really - ISIS is really hardcore. And they're not listening to anybody. They're doing their own thing.
GROSS: Now, ISIS is a Sunni group that's opposing Shia government in Iraq. And according to what I've read, the ISIS people think that the Shia are apostates, that they're not true Muslims and therefore, they should just be killed.
FILKINS: (Laughing) Yeah. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, one of his deputies delivered this absolutely bizarre statement the other day, saying we need to settle our differences with the Shia once and for all. And we're going to do that in, you know, these filthy Shiite cities, in Karbala and Najaf. And he referred to Maliki as an underwear merchant. But yeah, it's basically - that is about religion. I mean, it's also about power. But they're not going to go into Baghdad. I mean, Baghdad is basically a Shiite city. And if they went into - if ISIS went into Baghdad, they'd get massacred. And I think what ISIS wants they're rapidly getting or they already have, which is they want the Sunni majority areas, which is basically Western Iraq and Northern Iraq. And they've taken, you know, they've taken virtually all of that. So I think that's what they want. I think they see Maliki and the Shiite government as being totally sectarian, not representative, often brutal. I think they're right about that. And so I think that, you know, that what they imagine is they're just going to grab this territory and they're going to hold on to it. And whether that means an independent state or some kind of autonomous area, we'll - you know, we'll see.
GROSS: Well, they seem to want a caliphate, like a fundamentalist, Sunni state that stretches across borders. And that would include territory from Iraq and Syria and I don't know where else. But they want to like undo the boundaries that were created in World War I, like at the end of World War I, when the victorious powers carved up the Middle East. So what do you know about what they're envisioning for this caliphate?
FILKINS: Well, it's pretty amazing. You know, the modern Middle East was formed really all but on the back of an envelope. You know, after World War I, you had the Ottoman Empire, you know, ruled out of Istanbul, which, you know, governed most of the Middle East, collapsed after World War I. And then the British and the French basically just, you know, took out the pen and then started drawing the borders. And these are the borders that we have today. And they really, you know, they don't represent really much of anything other than the whims of the colonial powers at the time. They don't, you know, they don't - they're not aligned with tribal identities or religious or sectarian or ethnic groups or mountains or rivers or anything. I mean, look at Iraq. It's a bunch of straight lines drawn with a ruler. And so - but, you know, and this is sort of famously referred to as the Sykes-Pico Agreement. It's named after these two colonial administrators that first drew up this map back in the first World War. And this across the Muslim world, I think it's fair to say is - it's notorious. It's, you know, this is when - first of all, the caliphate was destroyed. The Ottoman Empire, which was the seat of, you know, Islam. The caliphate was destroyed. And then these colonial boundaries were imposed on us. So among, among radical Islamists, the dream is to revive that caliphate. And that means erasing the borders, these artificial borders that were drawn, you know, 90 years ago, 100 years ago after World War I. And that's what they want to do. Now, what do they really have in mind? I think for the immediate future is - if you look at ISIS, it stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and also al-Sham, which is the reference to Syria and Lebanon. And so I think for starters, what ISIS imagines it can do, and has already done quite a bit of, is control the vast area of essentially Eastern Syria and Western Iraq. And that's basically a big desert with the Euphrates River and the Tigris River kind of forming its borders. So from sort of Aleppo in Syria, running east, all the way to Mosul. And that's a pretty big area. And they - ISIS already controls a whole string of towns in Eastern Syria, along the Euphrates River and other places. They actually control a provincial capital in Syria, where they've ruled very brutally. They've begun to impose - it looks like Islamic law in Mosul, in Iraq. And so this is what they have in mind. I mean, this is the beginning, I think, of, you know - they call it the Islamic state, but what they really want is a return of the caliphate.
GROSS: So when Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaida, basically disavowed ISIS, was that just for power reasons? Like he's putting his money on the other group, or is it also that the philosophy and the tactics of ISIS are too extreme even for al-Qaida?
FILKINS: I think that's right. I think they're too extreme even for al-Qaida. Going back to the American war in Iraq, the American occupation, the head of al-Qaida in Iraq was Musab al-Zarqawi, who's now dead. He was killed in American airstrike in 2006. He was an absolutely psychopath. I think it's fair to say his idea of victory, and his idea of winning the war against the Americans was basically to start a civil war in Iraq. And he was very explicit about this. And he did that by basically waging war, yes against the Americans, but predominantly against Iraq's Shiite majority. So suicide bombings, car bombings, truck bombings of Shiite mosques. You know, Shiite neighborhoods, killing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Shiite civilians, in the hope of, you know, in his twisted vision - in the hope of igniting a much broader kind of sectarian war. I mean, this was a very nihilistic kind of vision. We will burn everything. He actually said that at one point. Al-Qaida in that period sort of al-Qaida proper back in Afghanistan, there's actually messages that you can read on the Internet. And messages that have been intercepted and it's literally a dialogue between this Ayman al-Zawahiri, at the time the number two guy in al-Qaida, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, of al-Qaida in Iraq. And he is chastising Zarqawi. He's saying you're being too brutal. This isn't going to work. Why do you have to behead people? Why do you have to car bomb Shiite mosques? Is it really this necessary to be so brutal? And so there was a tension between those - the head of al-Qaida's - essentially the headquarters and the local affiliate. And they're saying you're being too brutal, you're just going to alienate the population, which is of course exactly what happened. And then this was why al-Qaida and Iraq by 2007 was virtually wiped out. And so - there is a difference of philosophy. And I think it's fair to say that the modern version of that, ISIS, with - and the head of ISIS is this guy Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, he appears to come from the, the same school as Zarqawi, which is we are going to wage war against the Shiites. We are going, you know, we are going to behead them. We are going to be as murderous as we need to be to achieve our ends. And so that ultimately - you can see this dispute resurfacing again. Al-Nusra in Syria, it's an al-Qaida affiliate. They fight with other groups but they haven't - they've been pretty careful not to alienate the local population. They've been much more savvy about it. And so you can see the same philosophical split reemerging again.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Dexter Filkins, and he covered the war in Iraq for the New York Times. Now he's with the New Yorker, where he continues to cover Iraq and the region. And he's been writing about the latest developments in Iraq for "Talk Of The Town" in the New Yorker. Let's take a short break and we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, we're talking about Isis, the extremist Sunni group in Iraq that has taken over a lot of territory, including several border crossings. My guest is Dexter Filkins, he covered the war in Iraq for the New York Times and won several awards doing it. He now writes for the New Yorker and has continued to cover Iraq and the region for the magazine. Have you interviewed or met any of the people in ISIS?
FILKINS: I haven't. But I can - when I was in Iraq, I mean, this was during the American war, I did interview Sunni insurgents who had begun to turn against al-Qaida. And al-Qaida - and essentially what is now ISIS. And I'm thinking of one interview I did. It took two days and several hours, and it was a group of Sunni insurgents who had spent the last few years basically blowing up Americans. And they were describing to me how they were predominantly Sunni but they had Shiite relatives. You know, there was intermarriage and what not. And al-Qaida had killed one of these guys - like his mother-in-law who was Shiite, or his aunt. And they were just enraged at al-Qaida. And they told us - they told these long, extraordinary stories of how they were beginning to take revenge against al-Qaida in Iraq. And the ambushes that they were - so they were essentially - they switched their enemy from - it went from being the Americans to al- Qaida. And that is essentially the story of the Sunni awakening in Iraq. I mean, that's basically one of the main things that turned the war in America's favor, which was al- Qaida in Iraq was so brutal that the local insurgents, who really just wanted to kick the Americans out, they had this kind of change of heart. And they came to the Americans essentially and said look, we don't like you that much. But the main enemy right now is al-Qaida. And here's where they live, you know? And...
GROSS: Of course we paid them for that too. We paid them for the information.
FILKINS: Yeah (laughing) lots and lots of bags of money. But it worked. So that - I mean, to get back to say when the Americans left, you know, the last American troops departed in December 2011. Al-Qaida was - al-Qaida in Iraq was, you know, ISIS basically was, they obviously weren't wiped out. But they had been really, really, thoroughly degraded. The violence was way down. Al-Qaida had been decimated largely by the Sunni awakening with the help of the Americans. And so, you know, this is a sad story for a lot of reasons. But that's one particularly sad note I think, which is al-Qaida was wiped out a few years ago. And from virtually nothing, you know, kind of the remnant leadership, they've made this extraordinary comeback.
GROSS: You've called the people in ISIS psychopaths, or that a lot of them were psychopaths.
FILKINS: Definitely.
GROSS: Do you think that ISIS is kind of a magnet for a certain type of politicized psychopath?
FILKINS: Yes, yeah. Absolutely. I used to - during the war, when, you know, during the American war - it's amazing how much stuff you can find about these guys on the Internet that they post themselves. You know, and they literally have dialogues with each other inside the group, with other groups. And if you're very, very patient and you have, you know, very good translators you can read this stuff. And you can watch their videos. And there's a level, you know, or there's a - I should say there's a type of jihadi, the sort of al-Qaida jihadi, or in this case the ISIS jihadi. And they're crazy. And, you know, yeah, in this case they wanted to get the Americans out. But they were having a great time. And it made you wonder why are they really in business here? Is it to get the Americans out? Or is it just because they love killing so much? And so for instance, they used to make these videos - they used to call them their greatest hits videos. And they would - the jihadis would - the al-Qaida guys would post these videos online of just the best and biggest suicide bombings that they had done. And so it was just clip after clip after clip of people, mostly Iraqis, you know, just being blown to pieces. You know, mass-murder videos basically. I mean, these guys were getting off on it. You know, it was like war porn. And so yes, I think the answer is that at that end of the spectrum, these guys are so extreme, that it attracts the psychopaths and the sociopaths. It doesn't mean they don't have a political program. They do. But these guys - a lot of these guys are just nuts.
GROSS: And how do you think it's affected the ranks of ISIS, now that ISIS has broken into a couple of prisons, freed the prisoners and a lot of those prisoners have joined the ranks of ISIS?
FILKINS: Well, look, I think, you know, there's no way to tell what's going to happen. But my guess is that they're going to end up having the same problems that they had before, which is the Iraqis aren't going to go for this ultimately. These guys, they've proven this before. They don't really have an interest in governing. They don't know how to govern. They're not very sophisticated. What they really like to do is kill people. And this is what happened when the Americans were there. It backfired ultimately because ordinary Iraqis were disgusted and appalled and found a way to get rid of them. Back in 2006 and 2007, what they did was they went to the Americans. And they said look, you help us, we help you. And here's where they live. And literally, you can have discussions - and I had discussions with Sunni Sheikhs, guys who were very, very close to the insurgency. They went to the Americans, literally with lists of names and said here are the al-Qaida guys. Here's where they live, go at them. And that's how - and so you had just in areas of Anbar Province, where ISIS is now, the violence just plummeted, you know, over the course of a few months. It went from being apocalyptic to very, very peaceful. I think what makes it difficult now is that, you know, the Americans are not around basically. And so who are they going to turn to?
GROSS: Dexter Filkins will be back in the second half of the show. He's a staff writer for the New Yorker, where he's been writing about the aftermath of the Iraq war. I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Dexter Filkins. He covered the war in Iraq for the New York Times and continues to write about the region for the New Yorker, where he's a staff writer. We're talking about the militant Sunni islamist group ISIS, which has taken over significant territory in Syria, where it opposed the Assad regime, and Iraq where it opposes the Maliki government. The group is considered even more extreme and brutal than al-Qaida. ISIS preaches that Shiite Muslims are apostates, not true Muslims. And that therefore, ISIS is justified in slaughtering Shiite. So part of me just wonders like how can militants in the Arab world now focus their hatred on the West when there are so many militants within the Arab world who want to kill the other militants?
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GROSS: I mean - you know, I mean, seriously, like, Muslims are so...
FILKINS: Takes a lot of energy.
GROSS: ...under attack from other - that it seems to me they might think the West is the least of their problems right now.
FILKINS: I think they do. I mean, I think they do. Honestly - look, they're occupied. They are very, very busy. But, you know, these wars will end someday. I mean, who knows when. I mean, when you look at Syria, it's so horrible what's happening there. And frankly, I think we don't hear and see or read enough about it, in large part because it is so dangerous there. So many journalists have been killed and kidnapped that there isn't a lot of news coming out of there. But what we know is there's a 150,000 people dead. Something close to half the country is either displaced or in refugee camps. I mean, that's just mind-boggling. So you're talking, you know, the - polio has returned, something close to famine in certain areas and starvation. Civilians being bombed with these horrible, these barrel bombs, which are just enormous barrels of, you know, gasoline and oil and explosives that are thrown out of helicopters by the Syrian Air Force. I mean, it is the end of the world there. And that war could go on - I mean, the Civil War in Lebanon went on for 15 years. So it's - the war in Syria may go on for quite a long time. Are these guys going to turn their sights on the West at some point? You know, they might. I mean, they might. Who knows? But I think, you know, at the moment they're pretty busy fighting each other.
GROSS: Because Assad is such a tyrant and, you know, since the Civil War started has been slaughtering his own people, there have been calls to arm opposition groups. And of course, as we know now, one of the leading opposition groups is ISIS (laughing), which has been very empowered as a result of the Syrian Civil War. And is now made so many inroads in Iraq - did the United States ever come close to funding ISIS in Syria?
FILKINS: No. I think the answer's no. And I think it's the reason - the primary reason we haven't done very much in Syria at all because there's such a concern that anything that the United States tries to do, you know, sending in guns or whatever, sending in anti-aircraft missiles, which they're all begging for, are going to get in the wrong hands. And I really - so when you talk to people in the White House, that's basically what they say. But you have this very broad array of rebels who are fighting Assad in Syria. And you've got at one end of the spectrum, you have the lunatics, you know, it's ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, they also tend to be the most effective. They're the bravest. They are the hardest core. As they would be, it's not super surprising, they're very zealous. They're sort of fired by religion. What's happened over the course of say three years, and it's extraordinary because I mean, I've just been tracking it very closely and it's just an amazing thing over time. Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaida affiliate in Syria, didn't exist in 2011. They just came into being right at the end of that year. And they have just virtually overnight, gone from nowhere to being the most powerful group, same with ISIS. They came out of nowhere. And so they - the crazy groups, the real radicals have basically taken over the opposition against Assad. And they are actually, they're actually - opposition groups are fighting each other now. So and Assad has actually, believe it or not, come to the aid of al-Qaida in various instances that I'm aware of, when al-Qaida has been fighting against the moderate opposition, which is extraordinary. And so, if you kind of stand back and take a breath and imagine that again - why would the Assad regime, which is, you know, kind of secular, is fighting against the opposition - why earth would they come to the aid of groups like ISIS and the al-Qaida group al-Nusra? Why would they do that? It's unclear, except that, you know, this is the bogeyman. It's the - for Assad, he can say to the West look, I'm fighting al-Qaida. I'm doing the right thing. And you may hate me, but it's either me or it's al-Qaida. And so al-Qaida in a way is good for him. And he's figured that out, and so there's any number of instances where, in Syria, where - and diplomats have told me this, American officials have told me this, where there'll be a say, a firefight between ISIS and a member of the moderate opposition in Syria. And suddenly the Syrian Air Force will appear and will start bombing in - to rescue al-Qaida. So it's amazing. Anyway, it's a very complicated, very complicated three-way fight now. But really, I think Syria, you know, it must be the end of the world there - to be inside Syria, to be a civilian in the middle Syria now.
GROSS: I'm just trying to think through what you're saying - that Syria sometimes supports al-Qaida.
FILKINS: They would deny it, of course. But this is what's happened.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Dexter Filkins. And he covered the war in Iraq for The New York Times and won several awards for it. He now writes for The New Yorker. He's a staff writer and has continued to cover Iraq and the region. Let's take a short break, then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. We're talking about the extremist, Sunni Islamist group ISIS, which has taken over territory in Syria and Iraq. Let's get back to our interview with Dexter Filkins, who covered the war in Iraq for The New York Times and now writes about the region for The New Yorker. So what do you know about what the Obama administration is actually doing in Iraq right now? I mean...
FILKINS: Well, now this...
GROSS: We're sending in 300...
FILKINS: Yeah.
GROSS: Advisers - not really sure exactly what that means.
FILKINS: Well, this is the really - you know, this is what's front and center right now. I think, just to back up a little bit, I think that what people in the White House say is, they say they weren't surprised by the ISIS move into Iraq - that they'd been tracking ISIS and they've watched ISIS kind of take over towns in eastern Syria. And they've - so they weren't really caught off guard by it - maybe by the timing or whatever. But they were caught off guard by the utter collapse of the Iraqi army. They were surprised. I mean, this was an American project, and we spent $25 billion training the Iraqi army. But suddenly, now, the Obama administration is confronted - I mean, it's a bunch of bad choices. They are looking at the map of Syria and all these rebels. And who are the - what's ISIS? It's a bunch of guys in pickup trucks, you know, rolled into these towns. There's not that much you can do. I think that the options that the White House has - the military options are really pretty lousy. And they know that. And so what they're trying to do, and I think they imagine - I think they see that the only possible solution here is a political solution, not a military one. I think, frankly, it's probably going to be a combination of the two but that Obama wants to try, I think, to broker a kind of larger, political settlement between, you know, the Sunnis, and the Shia and the Kurds. And frankly, I think that means getting rid of the current Prime Minister, Nouri al-Malki. I think they see him as being, basically, at the heart of the problem. And so, you know, they'll say things like, this is an Iraqi decision, and it's an Iraqi process. But you can bet, and I think it's a pretty good bet, the administration is going to push pretty hard to try to get Maliki out of there. That's just me talking. But that's my impression.
GROSS: And Secretary of State John Kerry is talking to the Iraqis about an inclusive government, which the Maliki government is not. The Maliki government has basically thrown out Sunnis from the government.
FILKINS: Yeah, look. I mean, there's two reasons why all this is happening right now. The first reason is the Syrian civil war, right? That allowed ISIS to have a base, and to get stronger and to kind of, you know, do its thing and then cross over into Iraq. But the second reason is Malki. And it's probably the biggest reason of all. You know, I did a long story on Maliki earlier this year. And I sort of looked at his life. And what I really didn't know and it really struck me was, Maliki has been fighting this sort of Shiite sectarian war against the Sunnis his entire adult life. This is the main war for him. It's - you know, it's not bringing democracy to Iraq. It's bringing down the Sunnis and bringing the Shiites up. And he - you know, he sees himself the as the sort of, you know, the leader of the oppressed, Shiite majority that was oppressed for so long by the Sunnis. And he's been fighting that war his whole life, you know? And he was fighting it before we got there. And then when we got there, you know, he said all the right things, but he still kept fighting it. And so he's driven - he has driven the country to the point where it is. He has so marginalized and alienated the Sunnis. He has so cut them out of the political process. He's arrested or presided over the arrests of thousands of Sunni men, you know, without charges, disappearing into prisons. This is why this is happening now. And Maliki at the - Maliki's at the front of that.
GROSS: You wrote an article for The New Yorker about Qasem Soleimani who is the head of Iran's Quds Force, which is the Iranian paramilitary force. You described him as an architect of the war in Syria, fighting on a side of Assad in Iraq.
FILKINS: Yeah.
GROSS: Iran is on the side of Malki and his government because it's a Shiite government, and Iran is a majority Shiite country. So what's Iran up to in all of this?
FILKINS: (Laughing) Gets more complicated - it is just layer upon layer, but it all fits. Yes, Qasem Soleimani, who's the head of the Quds Force, which is this sort of external wing of the Revolutionary Guards. He's in Baghdad right now, and my understanding is that he's getting the Shiite militias ready to fight. And that's what he does. He's very good at that. He's a good commander. So...
GROSS: So those would be militias defending the Malki government?
FILKINS: Yes. So if anybody's going to go into those Sunni towns, it's going to be these really fired up, you know, 19-year-olds with their Kalashnikovs. I mean these are really, you know, that's how irregular they are. But if you stand back and look at the map, Iran has been trying to sort of build a kind of sphere of influence across the Middle East, and it's basically in areas that are either predominantly Shiite or kind of nominally Shiite. Like - so for instance, Hezbollah, which is a, you know, kind of big army and social service organization - Shiite. They were built, created, funded, sustained by Iran. That's in Lebanon. Next door to that, you have Syria, and that's the Assad regime which is predominantly Alawite, which is kind of nominally Shiite but very close to Iran and they - more important, they're the conduit to Hezbollah. They basically - the Iranians - basically turned the war for Assad. They rescued Assad. He was going to fall. And Soleimani basically flew into Damascus and took over the direction of the war, and the Iranians bailed him out. Now they're doing the same thing for Maliki, basically. They're bringing in, you know - Soleimani's there. They're organizing the militias. There are reports that there are Revolutionary Guards on the ground - I think that's probably true. And so this is a giant Iranian project as well. It's many, many other things as well, but it is a big Iranian project. They want a friendly regime in Baghdad. Maliki's been very good to them, and they want a friendly regime in Damascus. So these two things are linked, you know, very closely.
GROSS: And it's such a bizarre situation for the United States 'cause the United States - well, the Bush Administration, as you described it, basically chose Maliki as the leader of Iraq.
FILKINS: Yeah, yeah.
GROSS: So in Iraq, Iran is on the side of the administration that the United States helped put in there, but that we've now turned against. And in Syria, Iran is on the side of the dictator who the United States is against. So a lot of people are speculating, like, in Iraq are we on the same side as Iran? Do we form an alliance there? Like, what are your thoughts about what this means for American-Iranian relations?
FILKINS: It is one of the great ironies of the American war in Iraq - was that the guys who really got the most out of it were the Iranians. And they have us to thank for that. Yeah, I mean we basically put Maliki in power in 2006, but he has been - he's really not a friend of the United States. He's a friend of the Iranian regime. And he has, you know, served their interests, I think it's fair to say, far more than he's served American interests. So what does it mean now? I think - you know, a lot of people have speculated that, well, you know, the Iranians and the Americans have a common enemy in ISIS, so we're going to get together and we're going to go after ISIS together. You know, I think that's kind of overstated. Look, the Iranians and the Americans are rivals in the Middle East, and I think they will stay that way.
GROSS: What do you think are the odds that what's happening in Iraq and Syria is going to kind of blend together into a big regional war that will encompass other countries as well?
FILKINS: Well, it's kind of already happened, you know? If you just take the Syrian Civil War - I mean it looks like the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, really. It's like everybody's in. So who's supporting the Assad government? The Iranians and the Russians. Who's supporting the rebels? Well, you've got the Saudis. You have the Qataris. You have the Turks. You have the United States. You have Britain. So that Syrian war has basically become internationalized, but I think what the invasion, I think, of Iraq by Isis has done is it's essentially - or it threatens to kind of merge those two wars because you basically now have ISIS on both sides of the border. And you have - actually have ISIS in other countries as well. They carried out a huge car bombing in Lebanon in February - a huge car bomb near the headquarters of Hezbollah, who of course is also fighting in Syria. So that's three countries running, you know, from East to West, all linked together, all basically being pulled into the same war - Iraq, Syria and Lebanon - with all their neighbors involved. You know, this war is already spread. I mean if you look at just the refugee crisis, which is extraordinary, you know, I think the third or fourth largest city in Jordan is the big refugee camp up on the border. That's not a really sturdy monarchy. It's causing a lot of problems in Jordan. I think something close to 25 percent of the population in Lebanon is now refugees from Syria. Lebanon is a fragile, tiny place. It's just not going to last. So the whole region's getting pulled into this thing. But it basically starts, I think, with Syria.
GROSS: Do you see a possibility of Iraq dividing into, like, two or three states - like a Kurdistan, a Shiite state, Sunni state?
FILKINS: Yeah, I mean I think that's kind of already happened. You know, the Kurds are pretty much - you know, you saw that when ISIS moved into the Sunni triangle, basically, the Kurds did not push back. In fact what they did was they moved into the big, disputed city, Kirkuk, which was always one of the big flashpoints. You know, it's a third Arab, and it's a third Kurdish. The Kurds just grabbed it. It's Kurdish now. That's over. And I think that was - you know, the Kurds have been pulling away from the Iraqi state, basically for 20 years. You know, it's very different from the rest of Iraq. It's not Arab. They don't speak Arabic there. It's basically secular. It's very pro-western. It's democratic. It's a great success story, actually. They're kind of pulling away, I think. You know, they have oil there. They don't really need the rest of Iraq. Whether they declare independence or not, it's unclear. And then you have the Sunni lands that ISIS is now occupying. Yeah, I think they have no intention of reuniting with Baghdad. I don't think they want to have any part in it. And so that gives you, basically, an effective partition of Iraq. You know, if not in name - with everybody declaring, you know, this is the Sunni Republic of, you know, whatever - Mesopotamia. You know, whether they declare it or not, I think the country, at the moment, is rapidly breaking up into three parts.
GROSS: My guest is Dexter Filkins. He covered the war in Iraq for The New York Times and is now writing about the region for The New Yorker. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(MUSIC)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to our interview with Dexter Filkins, who covered the war in Iraq for the New York Times and now writes about the region for the New Yorker. Since Iraq and Syria and - you know, throughout the Middle East, now, there's so much instability. What does that instability mean for the United States and our interests?
FILKINS: Well, I think the main threat at the moment, amid this - all this instability, all this anarchy and chaos - you have this, you know, very visible and very immediate prospect of a huge, ungoverned space on the Syrian and the Iraqi borders, where, you know, every kind of lunatic or religious zealot can go and get military training and get guns and everything else. There are lots of foreigners there. There's lots of Americans. There's lots of Europeans. That's the immediate threat, I think. How far does it go beyond that? Well, you have, you know - the war in Syria, for the region, it's a kind of - it's a black hole. I mean, it's just pulling everything. It's pulling the whole region into it. And of course a lot of this comes back to oil. The instability's already begun to drive up oil prices and - because, I mean, all of this is fungible. And, you know, suddenly it's not difficult to imagine, you know, a lot of chaos across a huge area of the Middle East. You could really start to have, you know, supply disruptions and that sort of thing and that could be pretty catastrophic for the world economy.
GROSS: Have you been hearing people who wanted us to go into Iraq in the first place defending the war now?
FILKINS: No, that's not what I'm hearing. I haven't had too many of those conversations, but I've seen - you know, I've seen the guys who led the invasion are now criticizing Obama for having blown it. Let me just say, I think there's a reasonable criticism to be made of the Obama administration on the way that it left Iraq. I'm not really sure those are the guys to make it.
GROSS: So what do you think we could have done differently when we left Iraq?
FILKINS: Well, you know, hindsight is cheap. But we left Iraq - the United States - the last American soldiers left Iraq in December of 2011. So basically it's been - we've gone for two and a half years. And when we left, it didn't work at all is basically what it came down to. And I think - I was talking to Ryan Crocker about this, a former American ambassador to Iraq. He's a really extraordinary diplomat. And he said the problem is that we built ourselves into the hard drive of the Iraqi system. And it doesn't really function without us. And basically what he meant by that is, you know, the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiite - they don't talk to each other, and they don't trust each other. And they can't cooperate, and they can't make deals. And we were the only people who could really kind of do that. And that was just a fact of life. And so I think the question - you know, I think that's a fair - I think if you look at the record, the way in which the United States left Iraq, you can ask yourself, was there a moment in which, say, we could have left behind - agreed with Iraqis to leave behind, you know, a few thousand Americans - not in combat roles but in the Green Zone. And there were lots of discussions to do just that between Maliki and the White House, and they broke down. They didn't go anywhere. And it's difficult to know exactly why, but I think it's fair to say that the White House didn't push very hard for it. They wanted to get out.
GROSS: Is it also fair to say Maliki didn't want us there anymore?
FILKINS: That's difficult to say. I think he - it's hard to know exactly what he wanted in his heart. I can tell you that a lot of - a three-star American General said to me, who was the deputy commander at the time - Barbero, General Barbero said to me that every single Iraqi leader - the head of every single Iraqi political party told him, usually privately, that they wanted the Americans to stay - that they wanted them to leave people behind. My own sense is that he did ultimately want some Americans behind. I think he was under enormous Iranian pressure to get the Americans out, but he had shown himself to be willing to resist the Iranians before on that question. So we don't really know what would've happened, but I think it's fair to say that the White House was not as engaged on that question as they might have been. I mean, I spoke to Ambassador Jim Jeffrey who sat in through many of these negotiations, and he said, you know, we didn't have any direction. For many months, we had no direction from the White House at all. So the Iraqis - Maliki would sit across from us, and he'd say well, how many troops do you guys want to keep here? And he'd say - he'd kind of shrug and say I don't know. You know, because the White House isn't telling us anything. And so I think there was a - I think that reflected the ambivalence that the White House had itself. I think the White House was just, you know, pretty happy to get out of Iraq, just like everybody was happy to get out of Iraq. I mean, who wanted to stay in Iraq? It was really just a question not of what you wanted, but what you felt like you had to do, you know, to hold the thing together. And so again, it's this kind of really large question which is, OK, we went in in 2003. Whether you agree with it or not, we destroyed the Iraqi state and then we rebuilt this thing - this kind of rickety thing that doesn't work very well. And then we left, you know, and now it doesn't work at all. And so, what's our obligation to go back in and make it work again? It's a - that's a good question.
GROSS: Dexter Filkins, thank you so much for talking with us.
FILKINS: Thank you so much.
GROSS: Dexter Filkins writes for the New Yorker. He writes about ISIS and Iraq in the "Talk Of The Town Section" of the current edition. I'm Terry Gross.
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Jay Gruden issued a mea culpa on Wednesday after publicly dissecting his quarterback following the Washington Redskins' embarrassing Week 11 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Although Gruden backtracked on his excoriation of Robert Griffin III, the head coach made it clear to NFL Media's Albert Breer late Wednesday that the on-field results must improve substantially.
Breer: Gruden's assessment of RGIII In the midst of a media storm, Albert Breer. READ
In the midst of a media storm, Redskins coach Jay Gruden offers an honest appraisal of Robert Griffin III to
"Since the preseason, in the games that (Griffin) has played, our production from an offensive standpoint has been awful," Gruden told Breer. "I think five touchdowns in all the drives he's played, for whatever reason, and that's not good. We're still trying to figure that out."
Gruden concedes that RGIII is "very raw" because he saw so few coverages as a rookie in a gimmick offense, missed the entire offseason in 2013 and was sidelined for six weeks this season.
It's a "production-based business," conceded Gruden, though. The Redskins have struggled to score touchdowns and win games with Griffin, which has led to a groundswell of support for backup Colt McCoy.
"There's always pressure on the quarterback to perform," Gruden said." And if you don't perform, like any other position, somebody's behind you pushing you."
Breer's article also delves into Gruden's acknowledgement that Griffin has been "coddled for so long" and the organization's growing fatigue over the quarterback's off-the-field machinations.
With a 2016 option in the neighborhood of $16 million looming next offseason, Griffin's next month will be crucial for his Redskins future.
As Gregg Rosenthal pointed out in his Week 12 QB Index, Griffin essentially made no "NFL throws" beyond check downs and bubble screens last week. My own Game Rewind notes were just as harsh, citing the lack of passing-game structure with RGIII behind center.
Griffin has lost his confidence, devolved in his footwork, isn't sure how to decipher defenses and has authored too many negative plays. As a result, Gruden is in limbo, trying to build a game plan around a broken quarterback.
@gregcosell on RG3: "It's not very good (his tape). It's very bad. He's at the point where he needs remedial training. He needs QB class." â Adam Caplan (@caplannfl) November 21, 2014
The latest Around The NFL Podcast recaps the Raiders' shocking win over the Chiefs and previews every other Week 12 game. Find more Around The NFL content on NFL NOW. |
Enable slide to delete in UITableView.
Farhan Syed Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 16, 2017
I’m sure you’ve done it hundreds of times, whether it be sliding a message or sliding an email.
In iOS a lot of UITableViews have something that looks like this:
Good News!
To achieve this, it’s super simple to do.
It’s actually ridiculously easy.
I won’t be going over how to set up a UITableView though you need to have a working UITableView to achieve this.
If you would like, you can go over to my GitHub and download my project example I created for Fetch JSON using NSURLSession and populate a UITableView Part 1.
Hopefully by now you have a working UITableView with some data displaying.
Implementation.
This only takes a few lines so you can stop stressing out.
Add this func :
Inside this function we need to:
Check what type of edit was committed.
Remove the object from the array
Delete the row with an animation
We can do this like so:
Another way to implement.
This way is a lot better, mainly in my opinion due to no if else statements.
Because in the other method, if you were to have more options then you would need to implement if else statements to handle the actions.
Also you noticed I’ve added another option when sliding, a share button.
Done!
Yup, thats it! Pretty easy right?
I hope this article helped out so now you can go ahead and easily implement this into your applications.
Like always hope to get feedback.
Comments & suggestions are very much appreciated.
Let me know what to write about next!
Thank you. |
NOTE: THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN EDITED FROM A PREVIOUS VERSION THAT STATED IT IS ILLEGAL TO BURN THE U.S. FLAG. OTTAWA—Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government wants to make sure that citizens have the legal rights to wrap themselves — or their homes — in the Canadian flag.
The Conservative government is lining up behind a proposed bill that makes it more difficult to ban, limit or otherwise disrespect the Canadian flag. ( ADRIAN WYLD / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO )
So it is lining up behind a proposed bill that makes it more difficult to ban, limit or otherwise disrespect the Canadian flag, as part of what appears to be a more concerted, Conservative focus on the symbols of governance around the capital and the country. Heritage Minister James Moore wasn’t able to say on Wednesday what forms of display would be deemed as “desecration of the flag” under the proposed law, which has been put forward by a Conservative backbencher from the GTA, John Carmichael (Don Valley West.) In front of a table laden with flags and flag memorabilia in the Commons foyer, Moore hailed the bill as a measure to reward Canadian patriots with legal protections “to ensure that Canadians . . . have clear certainty, that if they wish to show pride in their country — to display the Canadian flag — they are free to do so, without any intimidation by condo boards or other neighbours.”
Article Continued Below
There have been a few cases in recent years where condo owners have been forced to take down Canadian flags, including a case in Mississauga, where Rose Wittemann and Richard Field were ordered to remove a flag from a tree outside their townhouse unit. Condominium management complained that the flag had been “tossed in the tree like a rag” and was dragging on the ground. Flag desecration has been illegal at times in the United States, but Canada has had no such law until now. Still, the Canadian flag has been a politically loaded symbol in the country for decades, from the heated battle over its design in the 1960s to the ongoing sovereignty debate in Quebec, where the choice between the blue-and-white provincial flag and the red-and-white maple leaf is often viewed as a statement of national attachment. In the mid-1990s, in the heat and aftermath of the last Quebec referendum, the then-Liberal government of Jean Chrétien chose to fight on this symbolic ground with the creation of an annual “Flag Day” and the distribution of thousands of Canadian flags. The effort was spearheaded by then-heritage minister Sheila Copps, who is now running for presidency of the Liberal party. Moore mocked that program on Wednesday, saying that the Conservatives were not trying for a reprise of that flag promotion.
“What we believe in is choice,” Moore said. “What the Liberals did was buy a bunch of flags, throw them at Canadians in a desperate attempt to try to hold on to government. We don’t think that’s the right way to use Canada’s symbol of our flag. What we’re doing here is underlining and protecting the rights of Canadians to celebrate the Canadian flag in the way that they choose, not the way in which Sheila Copps tries to impose on them.”
Article Continued Below
But the current, interim Liberal leader, Bob Rae, is accusing the Conservatives of obsessing over frills and symbols when they should be focused on the economy. “I just think these guys are obsessed with symbols,” Rae said. “It’s always a sign of what I call changing the channel.” In the past couple of months, the Conservative government has announced that Canadian forces would have the title “royal” returned to their names, and portraits and artwork of the Queen have been put up around Parliament Hill. Additionally, Ottawa’s old city hall building was named after former prime minister John Diefenbaker. Moore denied charges that the flag law was a diversion, or an attempt to enforce patriotism among the citizenry. “This is not in any way taking away from our principal focus which is the Canadian economy and the big issues … that are dominating the minds of most Canadians.” |
The hypocrisy of the Democrats going after James Comey and defending Hillary Clinton reached a fevered pitch over the past 96 hours. What a difference a month, or a week, makes, when James Comey was such their hero—despite deleted tweets by Democratic Party operatives, like Donna Brazile, praising Mr. Comey. But In Re: All This, eight thoughts:
1. If Hillary Clinton had never set up her private server, against all common sense and law, we would not be here. But this is part and parcel of the Clintons thinking the laws do not apply to them. Or, as George Will once put it: “The Clintons can find a loophole in a stop sign.” Jake Tapper was certainly right when he asked/told John Podesta over the weekend: “Do you accept the fundamental premise that the reason we’re here is because Hillary Clinton and her inner circle, not including you, made a horrible decision to set up her private e-mail server and everything that has happened since then is her fault?”
2. Slowly, but surely, the complaints by the Clinton defenders against what Mr. Comey did are melting away. For example, over the weekend it was, “There isn’t even a search warrant.” Well, now there is.
3. For all the Main Stream Media’s hounding of Mike Pence about whether he stands by statements he has made in light of various of Donald Trump’s statements, will the media start asking Tim Kaine about whether he stands by any of his previous statements, like, oh, say, this one a week ago: James Comey is “a wonderful and tough career public servant… he’s somebody with the highest standards of integrity.”
4. For that matter, for all the commentary about newspapers and Republicans that endorsed Hillary Clinton for the first time, how much attention will be paid to the comments of the likes of respected Democratic operatives such as Doug Schoen who said he is reassessing his support of Hillary Clinton and “I’m deeply concerned that we’ll have a constitutional crisis if she’s elected.” Will there be other Democrats? Shouldn’t there be?
5. For all the hand-wringing about James Comey dropping a bombshell like this investigation before the election, should not the question and prospective hand-wringing go the other way? In other words, if James Comey had opened this investigation and said nothing, and then, say, Hillary Clinton won the election, and then the investigation turned out to bear fruits of illegality, and then we were all informed the investigation began before the election, wouldn’t we all be up in arms for such concealment? That is: shouldn’t we want to know if a presidential candidate and/or his or her top aide is under FBI investigation? Isn’t it interesting Democrats—today—don’t think we should?
6. This is a reminder of what you get with the Clintons. This is the Clinton dialectic, this is Clinton, Inc: Allegations of wrong-doing, claims of innocence that blame the accuser(s) or prosecutors, temporary media reprieves due to those claims, investigations, then, soon after, evidence of even more wrong-doing. This is what you get with the Clintons, all the time.
7. It’s also a reminder of who the Clintons surround themselves with. Huma Abedin may be a great aide-de-camp. But that she chose, and for too long chose to stay with, Anthony Weiner says one thing about her. Her background and involvement with the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs says another. The Clintons hiring her in the first place and keeping her around says yet another.
8. If Hillary Clinton is elected, do we honestly think we won’t see more of this kind of thing All. The. Time? (See Point 6, Supra.). |
The following is a transcription of an “open letter” containing a witnessed confession of Hans Talhoffer in regard of a murder done by fellow mercenaries in the duty of Nürnberg merchants. The file is to be found in the Staatsarchiv Nürnberg Reichsstadt Nürnberg, Losungamt, 7-farbiges Alphabet, Urkunden 873. It was written at 1434 März 20.
The letter is a copy of the original document, it does not bear the sigil of the named witnesses but bears the sigil of Hans Talhoffer identical with the letter of receipt he gave to the archbishop of Salzburg and further letters.
Translation
I Hans Talhoffer say and tell openly by this letter to everyone of the evil and wrongdoing that I have done to the honorable and steadfast brothers Hans and Wilhelm von Villenbach. Therefore Hans von Villenbach had taken me into custody at the fortress of Salzburg to have me condemned as if it hat been my guilt. Thus the stern and steadfast knight Hans Kuchler and his honorable wife Katharina appealed to Hans von Villenbach to free me from imprisonment, if I would do an oath by god and by the saints to tell the truth: what happened to his brother Wilhelm von Villenbach (who he lost and was murdered), who had taken part in this, and who did this to him. Thus I will tell him the truth and will not cease whether be it because of love or sorrow, on the oath that I have sworn to him. The oath and the testemony was witnessed by the pious and steadfast Heinrich Pienzenauer, Hans Zaunrid, Johannes Hartlieb, and Jörg Schottel. All four are lay judges and here on my request for legal reasons in the following matter.
Hereby I Hans Talhoffer state by good free will and unforced by being set unbound and free, and on the oath I have sworn:Hans Siegwein and Jakob Auer of Nürnberg had talked to me and offered me a payment of 60 Gulden a year for my lifetime if I could capture Hans von Villenbach for them. So did the following persons: Hans Talhoffer, Hans Goldner, Rüdiger Freis (Jakob Auer’s servant), a servant of Schütz named Fritz Hiern, Lienhart Leutrer (Hans Lepach’s servant), all the time in duty of Nürnberg.
Furthermore I do state how Wilhelm von Villenbach was brought from life to death:This had been done by Andres Kräenzagel, Fritz Baier, Hans Pesler, Hans Ott, Fritz Stumpf, Albrecht Jud. The latter had told me personally he had stabbed him and that they had thrown him into the river Danube somewhere between Graisbach and Schönfeld. After that those four rode home to Nürnberg. Where they are in service all the time.
Furthermore I state that when the acts, how the former listed treated Wilhelm von Willenbach, became known to me, the mayors of Nürnberg, Volkmair and Hans Ortlieb forbid to tell anyone about it by my strict oath (of duty). In exchange they lend me a horse.
Furthermore Lienhard Ploben addressed me at Nürnberg, wanting to be a good customer and pay a ransom on Hans von Villenbach. I sent him to those named above. In what they agreed I don’t know.
All that said above will be documented and handed by me to Hansen von Villenbach and his heirs and friends in an open letter, sealed by the named strict and steadfast knight Hans Kuchler and brother Friedrich Lampordinger.
Attached sigils added below on my request without any loss of honor on my appeal by sealing are the witnesses the wise and steadfast Jörg Prakker, Nicklas Gernstetter, Friedrich Gainsberg, Stefan Dachsberger, Christian Squringer. These are honorable men enough. Written at Saturday before Palm Sunday, 1434.
Comments
Hans Talhoffer was not the only one who had the chance to win the ransom on the knights of Villenbach. Hans Kremser was in duty for 50 Gulden yearly from 1434 to 1438. He was offered a price of 100 Gulden if he would catch Hans von Villenbach [RHN-Sander].
“darum schuepfen sy mir ein pferd” means to give a mercenary a horse. The horse is not owned by the mercenary but by the city. If the horse dies of sickness or in a fight the horse is replaced. This would mean to raise the income of the mercenary as he is now a rider and not a soldier on foot anymore.
A great amount of the mercenaries accused had been in fact in service for Nürnberg reported by the account books of the city.
The place where the dead body of Wilhelm von Villenbach is dropped into the river Danube is near the mouth of the river Lech into the Danube. It is described by two small villages on both sides of the river delta ca. 4km direct distance from each other.
Article on the full Case of Wilhelm von Villenbach.
Transcription
Ich Hanns talhoffer beckenn und vergich offenleich mit disem brieff und aller menchleich von solichs ubels und unrechts wegen So ich pegangen hann an den vesten hannsen und wilhalm von villibach gepruder darumb mich hans von villibach zu Salzpurg gefangen hat und ynn die franfest gelegt hat und mich mit recht geferttigt wolt haben als ich das wohl verschult han So hat mich der streng und vest
Ritter herr hanns kchuchler und die edel fraw kchartherina des obgenannten her hannssen kuchler hawsfraw erpeten das mich hanns von villibach der vanknus ledig gelassen hat auf Solich mas das ich ynn ain gelerten aid geswarn he mit auffgeboten umgern zw got und zw heiligen geswarn han ynn die warhait Zw sagen wie [radiert] seinen pruder wilhalm von villibach geschehen sey den er verloren hat und ym ermort ist warden von vem es her gee und wer diesem die es getan haben dabey So ich ym sagen die warhait und nicht lassen weder durch lieb noch durch laid und auff den aid den ich ym geswarn han pey dem aid und der Sag sind gebessen die frommen und vesten hainreich preczenauwer hans czawnrued hanns hartlieb Jorig Schotl all vier freischopffen die sind der ob und nachgeschriben Sach recht recht czewegen durch meiner fleissigen pet willen Also beken ich hans talhoffer mit gueten freyen willen und un peczwungenleich das ich ledig und las gestanden pin und auf den aid den ich geswarn han Also ist es an mich pracht wurden von hannsen Sigwein Jakoben awer von Nuernberg die czwen habe mit mir geret von hansen von villibach wegen wen ich yn pracht gefangen yn ir gewalt darumb haben Sy mir versprochen mein Lebteg jerleich zw geben Sechzig gulden Also haben wir nachgeschieben mit namen hans talhoffer hanns goldner ruedel frais Jakoben awers cknecht und ainer des schuczen chkecht fritz hiern lienhardt lauttrar hanns leppachs chnecht all die czeut der von Nuenberg chnecht. Item ich tue auch zewissen wie Wilhalm von villibach von leben zum tod pracht ist warden die haben die nachgeschriben mit namen getan Andre Kraczlan fritz pair hans pester hans ott fritz stumpf albrech Jud hat mir Selb gesagt er hab ym erstochen und haben yn zwischen graisspach und schanneldh yn die tunaw geworffen und Sind darnach zw vierd durch geriten haim gen Nuernberg und Sind die czeit alhir cknecht gebesen Item ich tue zw wissen da mir der handl ckund ward wie die obgenennten mit wilhalm von villebach umbgangen warn do verputten mir die purger maister zw nuernberg mit namen der volkmair und hans ortlieb per meinem starkken aid das ichs nimant mer sagen solt darum schuepfen sy mir ein pferd Item lienhart vboln ckam zw mir gen Nuernberg und sagt mir er wolt geut ckuntschafft machen und geben Auf Hansen von villibach den schikkat Ich zw den obgenannten die mit mir geret hetten wes er mit yn aing nanden ist des wiß ich ich nicht Aller obgeschriben sach und wart Zw urkund der warhait gib ich mich hannsen von villibach und al seinen erben und frwnten den offen brief versiegelt mit des obegenannten strengen und vesten ritter herhansen chuchler und mit des festen friedrich lamppottinger pruder anhang unden ynsigle die sy durch meiner fleige fleissigen pet willn darin gehengt haben yn und von erber ain schaden der pet umb die ynn Sigle Sind czeug die weyssen vesten Jorig prackker niklas gernstetter fridrich gaingsperg steffan dachsperger kristan sewesinger und sind erber Lewt genüg Geben am samstag vor dem Heilligen palem tag doman czelt von kristn gepurd virzehen hundert Jar darnach und dem vierunddreissigisten Jahre etc
Table of persons:
Mercenaries paid to capture Hans von Villenbach:
Hans Talhoffer, the later famous fencing master
Hans Goldner, probably Hans Pötlinger, a mercenary with a horse in duty for Nürnberg between 1431-1440, reference [RHN-Sander]
Rüdiger Freis (Riedel Freis), Jakoben Auer‘s servant, a mercenary with a horse in duty for Nürnberg between 1431-1440, reference [RHN-Sander]
Fritz Hiern, Schuzen’s servant. Hans Schütz was a mercenary with a horse in duty for Nürnberg between 1431-1440, reference [RHN-Sander]
Lienhardt Leutrer (Lauttrar), Hans Lepach‘s chnecht, probably Andres Leutrer, a mercenary with a horse in duty for Nürnberg between 1431-1440, reference [RHN-Sander]
The accused of murder:
Andres Kräenzagel (Kraczlan), a mercenary with a horse in duty for Nürnberg between 1431-1440, reference [RHN-Sander]
Fritz Baier (Pair), a mercenary with a horse in duty for Nürnberg between 1431-1440, reference [RHN-Sander]
Hans Pesler (Pestler), a mercenary with a horse in duty for Nürnberg between 1431-1440, reference [RHN-Sander]
Hanns Ott, a mercenary with a horse in duty for Nürnberg between 1431-1440, reference [RHN-Sander]
Fritz Stumpf, no reference found
Albrecht Rietenburger (Jud), a mercenary with a horse in duty for Nürnberg between 1431-1440, reference [RHN-Sander]
Paying for it:
Hans Siegwein is a successful merchant in Nuremberg had been in Venice at least in 1420, 1431 [Fondaco dei Tedeschi]
Jakob Auer, merchant in Nuremberg had been in Venice at least in 1418, 1420, 1431 [Fondaco dei Tedeschi]
Merchants of Mürnberg:
Hans Volkmair, member of a known Nürnberg patrician family of Volkmair, multiple references
Hans Ortlieb the younger, member of a known Nürnberg patrician family, member of the city council by heritage, connected to the Stromer merchant society. Multiple references.
Lienhard von Ploben (Lienhart vboln), member of the Nürnberg honorable family of Ploben, connected to the Stromer merchant society. Multiple references e.g. in Paradiesgarten oder Gefängnis?: das Nürnberger Katharinenkloster zwischen Klosterreform und Reformation, Barbara Steinke, 2006
Witnesses of the confession:
Heinrich Pienzenauer, a mercenary knight or squire, references:
Salzburg, Erzstift (798-1806) AUR 1427 VII 23, giving receipt at 23th July 1427 to Archbishop Eberhard.
Salzburg, Erzstift (798-1806) AUR 1427 IX 17 (27), giving receipt at 17th September 1427 to Archbishop Eberhard for service as a mercenary.
Salzburg, Erzstift (798-1806) AUR 1431 VI 30, declaration of commitment of duty as mercenaries at the 30 June 1431 to Archbishop Johann to fight for 3 months against the heathens in Bohemia.
Salzburg, Erzstift (798-1806) AUR 1430 VII 28, declaration of commitment of duty at the 28th July 1430 to Archbishop Johann.
Salzburg, Erzstift (798-1806) AUR 1431 VII 04, giving receipt together with Hans Lampodinger at 4th July 1431 to Archbishop Johann
Salzburg, Erzstift (798-1806) AUR 1432 V 05, declaration of commitment of duty given 5th May 1432 to Archbishop Johann
Salzburg, Erzstift (798-1806) AUR 1432 VI 16, giving receipt together with Hans Lampodinger at 16th June 1432 in Burghausen for expenses on the crusade in Bohemia.
Salzburg, Erzstift (798-1806) AUR II 27, giving receipt on expenses at 27th February 1436 to Archbishop Johann
Hans Zaunrid (Zaunrud), knight and bailiff of Möörmosen, references:
Sammlung historischer schriften und urkunden: Geschöpt aus handschriften, Bände 1-2, Max Freiherr von Freyberg, 1827, p. 235, transcription of a letter of Hans Zanrud as a juryman at a vehmic court 1424.
BayHStA Kurbayern Äußeres Archiv 1146, fol. 93r-94r, a dispute of Hans Zaunrud with Heinrich dem Reichen in regard of the jurisdiction of Möörmosen around 1441.
Johannes Hartlieb, well known medicus and doctor of science, multiple references and books
Jörg Schottel, serviceman to Archbishop Johann, references:
Salzburg, Erzstift (798-1806) AUR 1429 – 1440, sigil as witness
Allgemeine Urkundenreihe AT-KLA 418-B-A 1045 St, letter of receipt
Keeper of the document (copy):
Friedrich Lampodinger, mercenary knight or squire, part of the Lampodinger family in the service of the Archbishops of Salzburg, multiple references (see references for Hans Lampodinger)
Salzburg, Erzstift (798-1806) AUR 1431 VI 30, together with other mercenaries for services in Bohemia against the heathen at 30th June 1431
Salzburg, Erzstift (798-1806) AUR 1431 X 02, giving receipt at 2nd October 1431 for expenses on the crusade in Bohemia.
Hans Kuchler, high knight in the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg, multiple references, ordered a book by Johannes Hartlieb. See 1434 Hans Kuchler and Johannes Hartlieb
Witnesses of sealing:
Jörig Prakker, no references found
Niklas Gernstetter, no references found
Friedrich Gansperger, no references found
Stefan Dachsberger, there are several members of the Dachsberger family listed in the files of the Erzstift Salzburg in duty of the Archbishops but no “Stefan”.
Christian Seuringer (Kristan Sewrsinger), multiple namings of Seuringer family members but no Christian.
References
[RHN-Sander] Die reichsstädtische Haushaltung Nürnbergs, dargestellt auf Grund ihres Zustandes von 1431 bis 1440, Paul Sander, 1902, pp. 157
[Fondaco dei Tedeschi] Der Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venedig und die deutsch-venetianischen Handelsbeziehungen. Quellen und Forschungen, Henry Simonsfeld, Volume: 2, Stuttgart, J.G. Cotta, 1887
Special thanks
To Paul Becker for some really good hints that helped me in my research on this letter and the background.
Places
Salzburg, Austria |
CO2 levels hit 400 ppm at the South Pole in May; it's the last place on Earth to pass the global warming milestone. Photo by NOAA/NSF
WASHINGTON, June 17 (UPI) -- Carbon dioxide levels passed 400 parts per million at the South Pole last month, according to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It's the last place on Earth to hit the global warming milestone. Researchers say CO2 levels haven't been this high at the South Pole in 400 million years.
"The far southern hemisphere was the last place on earth where CO2 had not yet reached this mark," Pieter Tans, the scientists in charge of NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, said in a news release. "Global CO2 levels will not return to values below 400 ppm in our lifetimes, and almost certainly for much longer."
Carbon dioxide levels wax and wane of the course of the year, but average CO2 levels have gone up every year since 1958. It's unlikely 2016 will be any different. Last year's average was 399 ppm. This year's is sure to be above 400 ppm.
"We know from abundant and solid evidence that the CO2 increase is caused entirely by human activities," Tans added.
While climate change mitigation may be able to contain temperature rise, it's unlikely CO2 levels will drop below 400 ppm.
It's what many scientists are calling the "new normal."
"Since emissions from fossil fuel burning have been at a record high during the last several years, the rate of CO2 increase has also been at a record high," Tans said. "And we know some of it will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years." |
In order to function properly, the human brain requires the ability not only to store but also to forget: Through memory loss, unnecessary information is deleted and the nervous system retains its plasticity. A disruption of this process can lead to serious mental disorders. Basel scientists have now discovered a molecular mechanism that actively regulates the process of forgetting.
The human brain is build in such a way, that only necessary information is stored permanently - the rest is forgotten over time. However, so far it was not clear if this process was active or passive. Scientists from the transfaculty research platform Molecular and Cognitive Neurosciences (MCN) at the University of Basel have now found a molecule that actively regulates memory loss. The so-called musashi protein is responsible for the structure and function of the synaptic connections of the brain, the place where information is communicated from one neuron to the next.
Using olfactory conditioning, the researchers Attila Stetak and Nils Hadziselimovic first studied the learning abilities of genetically modified ringworms (C. elegans) that were lacking the musashi protein. The experiments showed that the worms exhibited the same learning skills as unmodified animals. However, with extended duration of the experiment, the scientists discovered that the mutants were able to remember the new information much better. In other words: The genetically modified worms lacking the musashi protein were less forgetful.
Forgetting is no coincidence
Further experiments showed that the protein inhibits the synthesis of molecules responsible for the stabilization of synaptic connections. This stabilization seems to play an important role in the process of learning and forgetting. The researchers identified two parallel mechanisms: One the one hand, the protein adducin stimulates the growth of synapses and therefore also helps to retain memory; on the other hand, the musashi protein actively inhibits the stabilization of these synapses and thus facilitates memory loss. Therefore, it is the balance between these two proteins that is crucial for the retention of memories.
Forgetting is thus not a passive but rather an active process and a disruption of this process may result in serious mental disorders. The musashi protein also has interesting implications for the development of drugs trying to prevent abnormal memory loss that occurs in diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Further studies on the therapeutic possibilities of this discovery will be done. |
EMC to be acquired by Dell in $67B deal 7:59 AM ET Mon, 12 Oct 2015 | 01:54
Dell announced a deal Monday with MSD Partners and Silver Lake to buy cloud computing company EMC for roughly $67 billion in cash and stock.
"We're creating an unbelievable powerhouse of an enterprise company," Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell told CNBC's "Squawk Box." "This is really all about bringing together complementary technologies and helping our customers address the challenges and opportunities that this digital future is creating."
EMC stockholders will receive about $33.15 per share in cash and a type of stock that is linked to "a portion of EMC's economic interest" in its VMware business, which will remain an independent, publicly traded company, the companies said in a statement Monday.
Read MoreEMC-Dell talks highlight hedge fund pro's clout
The transaction marks the largest technology sector deal on record, topping U.S. chipmaker Avago Technologies' $37 billion offer for rival Broadcom. That deal is still in process.
The acquisition of EMC is seen helping Dell diversify from the stagnant personal computer market and give it the scale to attack the faster-growing and more lucrative market for managing and storing data for businesses.
EMC will have a "go-shop" provision that will allow the data storage company to seek out other buyers and give EMC a discounted breakup fee if it finds a more desirable deal, EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci said on "Squawk Box."
"We will do our duty to make sure we get the best deal for our shareholders and time will show," he said. |
Memorials mark Nanjing anniversary
A series of memorials was held on Thursday and planned for Friday in the city of Nanjing to mark the 76th anniversary of the massacre that claimed the lives of 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers.
Nanjing was the scene of mass murder, genocide and war rape following the Japanese capture of the city on December 13, 1937, during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45).
Memorial events included a candlelight vigil, a prayer assembly for peace, and press conferences and seminars, according to Zhu Chengshan, curator of the Nanjing Massacre Hall.
As part of this year's event, a report on protection of oral histories of the atrocity was presented and a Sino-US collaborative project on oral history studies will be announced, Zhu announced.
"This is about expressing sorrow for those that perished and more importantly reminding people to remember history and to cherish peace," he added.
Meanwhile, two survivors, 82-year-old Wang Jin and 89-year-old Cen Honggui, will leave for Japan to attend Nanjing Massacre testimony gatherings by the invitation of Japanese non-governmental organizations. |
Five witnesses have reportedly been attacked by supporters of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn outside the courthouse in Athens where leaders of the far-right party went on trial on charges of operating a criminal organisation.
According to local officials at least one of the witnesses was hospitalised as the trial of 69 defendants – among them the party leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, and senior Golden Dawn officials – got under way.
While more than 40 defendants were present, however, neither Michaloliakos nor the majority of the party’s MPs were, in what has been interpreted as an effort to undermine the significance of the proceedings – the first time an entire party and its leadership have faced trial in Greece.
Michaloliakos, 57, and at least a dozen MPs could face 10-year prison sentences if found guilty of orchestrating a string of attacks against immigrants, leftists and gay people. Observers are divided over whether a conviction could lead to an outright ban on the party.
The trial, taking place at the Korydallos maximum security prison in Athens, is set to last for at least one year and involve 300 witnesses and 120 lawyers. On Monday it was suspended until 7 May because one of the defendants did not have legal representation.
Streets around the courthouse were closed off as a police helicopter hovered above. Neighbouring schools and municipal offices were shut over concerns that demonstrations by anti-Golden Dawn groups and party supporters could turn violent.
Around 200 Golden Dawn supporters, many in black helmets and led by Michaloliakos’s daughter, Ourania, showed up outside the prison as more than 4,000 people took part in a demonstration organised by anti-fascist groups and trade unions chanting slogans and holding banners demanding the conviction of the neo-Nazi party.
“This is an important trial for Greece and democracy,” said the Athens mayor, Giorgos Kamininis, outside the courthouse, which was filled with victims and the relatives of victims of attacks allegedly carried out by Golden Dawn.
“They are not on trial for their ideas but because of their criminal activities which undermine the institution of democracy and for a host of racist attacks against migrants,” he added.
The party vehemently denies its involvement in the attacks and claims it is being illegally targeted by the political establishment after some opinion polls in 2013 estimated its support at more than 10%.
Its leadership was jailed in 2013 pending trial for allegedly running a criminal organisation after a government crackdown in the wake of the fatal stabbing of Pavlos Fyssas, a Greek anti-fascist rapper, by a Golden Dawn member in 2013. Fyssas’s mother, Magda Fyssa, was present in court on Monday.
The party began as a far right fringe party in the 1980s but rose to prominence on a wave of public anger over Greece’s financial meltdown that began in 2009 and years of austerity.
Its anti-austerity and virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric struck a chord for many disaffected Greeks, and it entered parliament in 2012. Despite having had its state campaign funding axed, Golden Dawn became the country’s third largest party in national elections in January, with 17 seats in the 300-seat parliament, winning 6.28% of the vote. |
NORTH CANTON, Ohio — Weeks of bad press for himself and a sense of urgency among his opponents may finally be taking a toll on Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, who heads into Tuesday primaries looking at possibly his worst night of the campaign since he lost Iowa’s caucuses.
The billionaire businessman’s lead has evaporated in polling in Ohio, where Gov. John Kasich has surged. Meanwhile, in Illinois and Missouri, Sen. Ted Cruz is within striking distance.
Mr. Trump still holds a comfortable lead in polling in North Carolina and is poised for a massive win in Florida, which rounds out the Republican contests Tuesday.
But a loss in Ohio, where the winner gets all of the state’s delegates to the nominating convention, could be devastating for Mr. Trump, dooming him to fight it out at the Republican National Convention in July against a party establishment increasingly worried about his candidacy in the November general election.
Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, endorsed Mr. Kasich on Monday, saying the Ohio governor is the right candidate to stop Mr. Trump and take the helm of the party.
“You look at this guy and, unlike the other people running, he has a real track record. He has the kind of record that you want in Washington, and that is why I am convinced you are going to do the right thing tomorrow — agreed?” Mr. Romney said as he campaigned with Mr. Kasich in North Canton.
SEE ALSO: Polls show Sanders, Clinton neck-and-neck in Ohio, Illinois, Missouri
Mr. Trump is much less certain of the outcome than he had been going into previous primaries.
“I hope I win Ohio,” the businessman said as he campaigned in Tampa on Monday, just hours before he jetted back to Youngstown, Ohio, for a last-minute rally to try to stop his bleeding. “If we win Ohio and we win Florida, then everybody agrees it’s over.”
The momentum Mr. Trump had coming out of Super Tuesday and subsequent wins has appeared to slip. He has faced intense scrutiny over his business practices and over clashes between protesters and his supporters at his campaign rallies.
He has canceled a Chicago rally Friday after he deemed protesters a threat to safety, and his rallies since have focused heavily on trying to keep everyone safe — at times overshadowing his effort to get out his message.
The other three major Republican candidates still in the race have blamed Mr. Trump for some of the escalation, saying he is playing to voters’ fears and the clashes are a result of that.
“If we allow the Republican Party and the conservative movement to be defined as anger and frustration, we will not win,” Sen. Marco Rubio said as he campaigned Monday in Florida, with his own political future on the line.
Mr. Trump is poised to trounce the first-term senator in Florida, with polls showing the businessman maintaining a lead of about 20 percentage points.
“Florida is do or die for the Rubio campaign, but it looks like victory may have slipped from his grasp,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, whose own pre-election survey Monday showed Mr. Trump up 44 percent to 27 percent over Mr. Rubio.
Mr. Trump continued to show his strength in Florida, picking up the endorsement Monday of Attorney General Pam Bondi, a rising Republican star who said she and the businessman shared an outsider’s approach to trying to shake up government.
“You are speaking loud and clear, and Americans are speaking loud and clear,” Ms. Bondi told Trump supporters in Tampa.
Florida is Mr. Trump’s best state Tuesday, though he also holds a big lead in polling in North Carolina and a significant lead in Missouri — though polling there has been scarce. The latest survey in Illinois, taken by CBS News/YouGov, shows Mr. Trump with a slim 4-point lead over Mr. Cruz.
Ohio is where Mr. Trump has seen the worst slippage, with Mr. Kasich overtaking him in most polling.
Aware of his standing, Mr. Trump took aim at Mr. Kasich on Monday, calling him an “absentee” governor who spent more time campaigning in New Hampshire than in working for his state.
Mr. Trump said Mr. Kasich is “weak on the border” and criticized him for voting for NAFTA as a member of Congress and for supporting the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement, warning it will hurt American workers.
Mr. Trump’s supporters aren’t discouraged at the tougher-than-expected fight.
Janet Riley, 54, from Tampa, blamed the press for the Mr. Trump’s tumble, saying they media dismissed him at first but are going after him now that he has a real chance of winning the nomination.
Bob Walker, 62, from St. Petersburg, doubted the latest numbers showing a Trump slide.
“I would look at who’s paying for the polls. If you’re trying to smear him, like they are in the media, the best way to smear him is to rig poll numbers,” Mr. Walker said as he waited outside the Trump rally Monday afternoon. “You can create a poll to get any answer you want. It’s how you ask the question. They never tell you what the margins of error are.”
He said those polls will be proved wrong Tuesday.
“Oh, he’ll win. He’ll win. No doubt about it,” Mr. Walker said.
Mr. Trump has survived a full barrage of negative attack ads over the past few weeks and marveled Monday at his ability to survive. He said voters deserve the credit.
“The people of this country are smart. They get it,” he said.
• David Sherfinski contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. |
There's danger lurking in the Internet of Things.
At least, that’s the word from the Federal Trade Commission. On Tuesday, the government watchdog released a detailed report urging businesses to take some concrete steps in protecting the privacy and security of American consumers.
According to the FTC, 25 billion objects are already online worldwide, gathering information using sensors and communicating with each other over the internet, and this number is growing, with consumer goods companies, auto manufacturers, healthcare providers, and so many other businesses investing in the new breed of connected devices.
Such devices can help monitor your health, improve safety on highways, and make your home more efficient. But the FTC says that as manufacturers work to reduce the friction involved in using these smart things—to let people more easily gather data and send it to and fro—privacy and security is becoming a serious consumer concern.
So, last November, the FTC held an Internet of Things workshop, gathering input from leading technologists and academics, industry representatives, and consumer advocates, and Tuesday’s report is based in part on the workshop's findings.
Security First
The report recommends that companies bake security into devices from the beginning, rather than trying to built it in as an afterthought. And those aren't idle words.
According to a study from HP Security Research, 70 percent of the most commonly used Internet of Things devices had serious security vulnerabilities. And this issue was a recurring theme at the Black Hat and the DEFCON hacker conferences this past year.
The FTC also recommends training employees about the importance of security, emphasizing that security must be appropriately managed within each organization, and that includes any outside service providers that a company might hire.
Defense in Depth
To combat security threats, the report recommends a "defense-in-depth" strategy. In other words, instead of patching up a vulnerability or simply reacting to some breach after the fact, businesses should have a plan of action in place.
Plus, it urges businesses to carefully monitor connected devices throughout their expected life cycle, and to provide consumers with security patches for all known risks.
Best Data Practices
What's more, the agency urges companies to consider extra measures that can keep unauthorized users from accessing personal data stored by devices. Today, the report says, some smart devices are carefully to upload only nonpermanent snapshots of data to company servers for analytics—in order to improve systems down the road—and most companies anonymize data. Nonetheless, the report recommends that businesses limit the collection of data in the first place.
When it comes to protecting personal data, the report argues for choice. Though there is no one-size-fits-all approach, the FTC acknowledges, companies can be transparent about how they deal with consumers’ information, especially in notifying customers about how their information will be used. |
AFL recruiters don’t seem to like Sandover medallists, with South Fremantle’s Haiden Schloithe the fifth consecutive WAFL best and fairest to miss out on getting picked up.
Here are unluckiest of the WA-based players who didn’t realise their AFL dreams.
Haiden Schloithe (South Fremantle)
Despite interest from at least a couple of clubs, including Essendon, the former Dockers rookie didn’t receive a second AFL chance in Monday’s rookie draft.
Schloithe absolutely dominated the WAFL competition this year for the Bulldogs, averaging 28 disposals in 22 games this season to go with 30 goals to win the Sandover Medal by seven votes.
He joins Jye Bolton (Claremont), Aidan Tropiano (Perth), Aaron Black (West Perth) and Rory O’Brien (East Fremantle/Peel Thunder) as recent Sandover medallists to not get picked up.
Chris Scott (East Fremantle)
The 192cm defender was interviewed by five AFL clubs including Geelong.
The Geraldton product, 18, impressed for East Fremantle’s colts this year, earning a spot in WA’s under-18s side where he played the final two games against the Allies and Vic Country.
He also won Mel Whinnen Medal for best-afield in the Sharks’ first colts premiership since 2010.
Aaron Redhead (East Perth)
The 203cm ruckman-forward went from complete unknown playing on the NSW Central Coast before moving to Perth this year to pursue his dream of playing AFL.
Redhead joined East Perth’s colts where he pressed his case for a WA under-18s berth at the national championships.
The 19-year-old defied his size to record a 7.91sec agility test and 2.94sec in the 20m sprint at the state combine, where he was interviewed by six AFL clubs.
Sam Collins (Peel Thunder/Fremantle)
Collins couldn’t have done much more to press his case after an impressive final year on the Dockers’ list.
But the dual WAFL premiership defender was axed the same day he won Peel Thunder’s best and fairest, becoming the third Dudley Tuckey medallist in a row to get cut after Jacob Ballard (2015) and Matt de Boer (2016).
Camera Icon Sam Collins was delisted by Fremantle, despite winning Peel Thunder’s WAFL best and fairest. Picture: The Sunday Times
The 23-year-old, who played 14 games in two seasons at the Dockers, attracted interest from several AFL clubs, both in Victoria and elsewhere.
He trained with St Kilda in a bid to earn a rookie gig, but was unsuccessful.
Tom Lamb (East Perth/West Coast)
Lamb wasn’t seen again at AFL level after making his West Coast debut in round one of 2015.
The athletic 193cm forward put him some exciting WAFL performances for East Perth this season, including a five-goal haul against West Perth in round two and a 30-possession effort against East Fremantle in round 15.
Like Collins, Lamb joined pre-season training at St Kilda after getting delisted by the Eagles
The 21-year-old spent three seasons on West Coast’s list. |
Here's our team in batting order. Ashton Agar has "smooth and soft hands" says WA coach Justin Langer. Credit:Getty Images 1. Nathan Lyon – the spinner may not get many overs on the Ashes tour in seam-friendly England, but he is a proven nightwatchman. He should continue to hone his ultra-determined crouch in order to see out the first four overs of the innings. In a return to traditional values, he will be an opener played purely to get the shine off the ball. Scoring of any kind will be considered a bonus, and if he is still in after ten overs, he will be sacrificed via run out. 2. Fellow opener will be Peter Siddle, who showed with his pair of 50s when batting at No. 9 in the fourth Test in Delhi – a world first – that he has far greater determination to hold on to his wicket, and powers of concentration, than any so-called Australian batsman. 3. Into the fray after a maximum of 24 balls at 1-10, is counter-attacking budding all-rounder Mitchell Starc. He will either smash the bowling to all corners, or succumb quickly, but when the times he comes off will turn the game in Australia's favour. That skill set is shared by incumbent first drop Phillip Hughes, but Phil doesn't bowl handy spells at 145km/h.
4. At four, we will position elegant leftie James Pattinson. He has a temperament and technique to match most of the previous top order, and by averaging 28 in 10 Tests more than matched their recent output. His searing bowling will be a nice bonus. 5. At five, a controversial selection. We are going to sneak in Australia's best and most under-bowled spinner, left-arm tweaker Michael Clarke – even the greatest fast bowling line-up needs variation. The skipper will have to prove that he can handle sending down 36 balls per Test at the pre-tour bowler's boot camp, by carrying heavy weights over a commando course. He'll make it – in recent times, Clarke has carried the entire batting line-up for whole Test series. 6. Combative all-rounder James Faulkner gets his chance here after excelling under pressure in the Sheffield Shield final. He averages 36 from his five ODIs, and an improving 29 in first-class cricket, with eight 50s. 7. Because our stellar attack will beat the bat so often, and so often catch the edge, we'll be forced to name a keeper. Matthew Wade, who also sends down respectable medium pacers, will do, as long as he never again bats at six against spin. 8. Mitchell Johnson owns number eight, with an average over 20 and a blistering Test century already under his belt. Mitch's erratic, occasionally unplayable bowling will come off spectacularly, once, in the series. The rest of the time he will exploit his athleticism as a specialist fine leg and specialist lower-order thrasher.
9. Underrated Tasmanian all-rounder Luke Butterworth has earned a place ahead of Moises Henriques due to his superior seam bowling. A big-occasion specialist, he scored a ton and a 50 in a Shield final in his fifth game, made 86 in the final just decided and has first-class averages of 27 with the bat and 23 with the ball. 10. Twice in the 2012-2013 season, Ashton Agar's tailender heroics for WA single-handedly changed the course of matches. He helped them chase down 358 for victory in Hobart with 71 not out, when they had slumped to 6/203; and put on an unbeaten 68 for the last wicket to defy South Australia at the Adelaide Oval. Impeccable credentials for this team. Coach Justin Langer: "He can bat. He's got incredibly soft and smooth hands when he bats. I haven't seen anyone bat like it for a very long time." Agar will be our final secret weapon, driving the Poms to distraction just when they think they are finally done with our stubborn group of battlers. Agar's 10-year spinner's education will be furthered by giving him three overs at the Oval, if three of our quicks have broken down. 11. We figure we can carry one bunny with this stellar line-up, so 11 belongs to fast bowling jet Patrick Cummins. As he plays once a series before disappearing due to injury, we will bring a squad of bowlers who can bat to back him, and the other fragile pace demons.
And those back-ups are: NSW all-rounder Moises Henriques, who made a pair of 50s in India on slow decks; Victorian right-arm quick Clint McKay, a hard-hitting right-hander; WA veteran Michael Hogan (the other half of the match-winning partnership with Agar); rising NSW star Girender Sandhu (average 23); Queensland quick Ryan Harris (top Test score of 68 not out); Croweater Joe Mennie (first-class top score 79 not out); and crafty NSW trundler Trent Copeland (average 19.12) Kane Richardson, Jackson Bird, Nathan Coulter-Nile, Josh Hazlewood and Gary Putland? Hit the bowling machines boys. It's all very well being a highly promising fast medium in Australia, but come back when your batting average is pushing 20. Loading So here's how we see the First Test at Trent Bridge:
Australia 1st Innings
Lyon c Prior b Anderson 4
Siddle c Prior b Broad 17
Starc b Swann 18
Pattinson c Compton b Finn 21
Clarke b Anderson 67
Faulkner lbw b Anderson 16
Wade c Trott b Swann 38
Johnson b Swann 7
Agar c Anderson b Finn 19
Butterworth not out 18
Cummins lbw b Broad 2
Sundries 13
Overs 81
Total 240
Bowling: Anderson 21-7-51-3, Finn 18-4-59-2, Broad 22-5-65-2, Swann 18-8-47-3, Trott 3-2-5-0
England 1st Innings
Cook lbw b Pattinson 19
Compton b Cummins 7
Trott c Wade b Faulkner 39
Pietersen lbw b Agar 51
Bell c and b Pattinson 31
Root b Cummins 0
Prior c Wade b Cummins 11
Broad b Siddle 21
Swan c Clarke b Starc 27
Anderson b Starc 0
Finn lbw b Pattinson 6
Sundries 15
Overs 72
Total 237
Bowling: Pattinson 10-5-22-3, Cummins 9-3-23-3, Siddle 14-5-43-1, Starc 10-3-40-2, Johnson 8-0-29-0, Faulkner 7-2-29-1, Butterworth 5-2-14-0, Agar 4-1-19-1, Lyon 2-1-17-0, Clarke 3-1-2-0
Australia 2nd innings
Lyon b Anderson 1
Siddle c Prior b Finn 18
Starc b Swann 42
Pattinson c Trott b Swann 29
Clarke lbw b Broad 47
Faulkner c sub (Bresnan) b Swann 11
Wade lbw b Anderson 28
Johnson b Swann 5
Agar not out 22
Butterworth c Cook b Finn 19
Cummins b Finn 0
Sundries 11
Total 233
Bowling: Anderson 16-7-47-2, Finn 13-4-62-3, Broad 18-3-68-1, Swann 24-9-47-4,
England 2nd Innings
Cook c Pattinson b Siddle 67
Compton b Pattinson 0
Trott lbw b Cummins 1
Pietersen c Clarke b Starc 8
Bell lbw b Siddle 46
Root c Agar b Faulkner 17
Prior b Cummins 0
Broad b Starc 1
Swan lbw b Siddle 17
Anderson lbw b Pattinson 4
Finn not out 5
Sundries 13
Total 179
Bowling: Pattinson 12-6-22-2, Cummins 6-3-14-2, Starc 12-3-34-2, Siddle 18-7-56-3, Johnson 3-0-26-0 Faulkner 5-2-11-1, Butterworth 4-1-11-0
Australia won by 57 runs |
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