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A crane lifts an airplane out of Culver Reservoir Monday, Feb. 27, 2017, as people on the ground help guide it after the plane crashed into the lake southwest of Berthoud. Two males were extricated from the plane while it was submerged and pronounced dead at the hospital. (Jenny Sparks / Loveland Reporter-Herald)
A student pilot was learning to enter and recover from aerodynamic spins when a plane carrying him and a flight instructor plummeted into a Larimer County reservoir near Berthoud last month, federal investigators say, killing them both.
The National Transportation Safety Board, in a preliminary report released Friday, says witnesses reported the Cessna 172 was steeply spinning toward the ground when the Feb. 27 wreck happened at Culver Reservoir.
“(A) witness also indicated that it was very common for airplanes to complete similar maneuvers in the airspace near her property,” the report said.
The NTSB found the single-engine plane was descending at a rate of 6,500 feet per minute in the moments before the crash.
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Patrick Blankemeier, a 58-year-old of Arvada, died of multiple blunt force injuries, according to the county coroner. He was a flight instructor employed as the chief pilot for Broomfield-based McAir Aviation, which owned the plane, according to the NTSB.
James P. Griffith, a 23-year-old from Denver, also died of multiple blunt force injuries. Air crash investigators say he held a commercial pilot certificate and was training toward receiving a flight instructor certificate.
The NTSB says radar data shows the plane decelerated to a stall speed, descending from 10,300 feet to about 9,300 feet before climbing to 10,800 feet. A few minutes later, it again decelerated to stall speed, descending from 10,800 feet to 6,800 feet before it went below radar coverage and crashed.
Plane successfully removed from Culver Reservoir just before 3pm pic.twitter.com/GJa0AFEywk — Larimer Sheriff (@LarimerSheriff) February 27, 2017
An eyewitness said the propeller plane made at least five turns as it spun down toward the reservoir.
The NTSB was able to examine the plane, including its engine, after the crash. “The post-accident examination revealed no evidence of a mechanical malfunction or failure that would have precluded normal airplane operation,” the report said.
It can take a year or more for air crash investigators to release a final report on the cause of an aircraft’s crash.
Blankemeier, according to his obituary, was the married father of two children. “He will be remembered for his joy and enthusiasm for life,” the death notice said. “Outside of flying, he loved going to the beach, cycling, off-roading, hiking and fixing just about anything.”
Griffith is survived by his parents and siblings. |
A chemical that affects people's moods also can transform easygoing desert locusts into terrifying swarms that ravage the countryside, scientists report.
"Here we have a solitary and lonely creature, the desert locust. But just give them a little serotonin, and they go and join a gang," observed Malcolm Burrows of the University of Cambridge in England.
The brain chemical serotonin has been linked to mood in people. It plays a role in sexual desire, appetite, sleep, memory and learning, too.
Under certain conditions, locusts triple the amount of serotonin in their systems, changing the insects from loners to pack animals, Burrows and his co-authors report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
These packs can be devastating. They affect 20 percent of the Earth's land. Last year a swarm nearly four miles long plagued Australia. They also occur in Africa and Asia and have affected the western U.S.
"Serotonin profoundly influences how we humans behave and interact, said co-author Swidbert Ott of Cambridge, "so to find that the same chemical in the brain is what causes a normally shy anti-social insect to gang up in huge groups is amazing."
Now that they know what causes the swarming behavior, scientists can begin looking for ways to prevent it.
"It opens up a whole line of inquiry into what we could to break apart these swarms before they develop," said co-author Stephen M. Rogers, who is affiliated both with Cambridge and the University of Oxford in England.
But, he added, "you need to get it at an early stage. Once you have several million or billion locusts, there is a limit to what you can do."
Calling the report a "breakthrough," Paul Anthony Stevenson of Leipzig University in Germany said it "harbors considerable potential" for finding ways to block swarming. But that will require a lot more research, said Stevenson, who was not part of the research team.
Researchers led by Michael L. Anstey of Oxford were studying the changes in locust behavior and tested them for a variety of chemicals. The only change they found was that when the insects were swarming, they had about three times more serotonin in their systems than when they were living as solitary creatures.
So the scientists took some solitary locusts and injected serotonin into them. Sure enough they changed in appearance and flocked together.
The Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde transformation took only a few hours.
It turns out that locusts produce more serotonin when circumstances force them together and they are stimulated by the sight, smell and touch of many other locusts. This can happen, for example, when drought reduces their food supply and causes locusts to gather at a few remaining sources of food.
Indeed, the scientists found that tickling the insects' back legs for a couple hours could induce the locusts to make more serotonin.
Once researchers determined that serotonin causes the change, they gave locusts drugs that blocked serotonin and then exposed them to situations that normally cause swarming. But the change didn't occur.
"To actually be able to stop it from happening, that was very exciting," Anstey said.
Now the question is how to target locusts without affecting humans or other animals.
Also part of the research team was Stephen J. Simpson of Oxford and the University of Sydney in Australia.
The research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council of England, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, England's Royal Society and the Australian Research Council Federation. |
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Ohio State arrived in Fort Lauderdale Sunday morning, but only after an hour delay in Columbus due to weather. And not every member of the team made it to South Florida, sophomore defensive end Noah Spence, the Buckeyes’ sack leader, is at home dealing with “personal issues,” according to head coach Urban Meyer.
Spence has 52 tackles, 14.5 tackles for loss and eight sacks on the season. If he were to miss the Orange Bowl, it appears Jamal Marcus would replace him in the lineup.
“Noah didn’t fly down with us,” Meyer said after Ohio State’s arrival. “He’s working through some personal issues at home. I hope [he will be here].”
Marcus is no stranger to the playing field. He’s been a presence on special teams and on defense as Spence’s backup. Marcus, a sophomore, recorded 15 tackles, two sacks and a forced fumble during the regular season.
Less than a month after a stinging defeat to Michigan State, which cost Ohio State a spot in the national championship game, Meyer said it’s all systems go for the Buckeyes. Disappointment lingered, but an opportunity to provide No. 7 Ohio State with a positive perception led the team to quit sulking and licking its wounds.
“I think the fact that we’re playing Clemson in a BCS bowl game wakes up everybody up real fast,” Meyer said. “You worry as a coach that fundamentally that you’re not in shape and fundamentally behind a little bit. That’s what we worked on yesterday, and I’m going to run them pretty good today and get Christmas out of them.”
Under 79-degree cloudy skies and constant buzzing from airplanes arriving at nearby Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, the Buckeyes went through a lengthy Sunday afternoon practice on the campus of Nova Southeastern University. All indications are Marcus Hall is again working with the first-team offensive line.
Ohio State’s trying to overcome that early December loss to the Spartans, but it appears history is on their side. During the BCS era, teams that lost its final regular season game or conference championship game with a berth in the national title game at stake are 8-3 in bowl games. The past six teams are 5-1.
If the Buckeyes improve on that record, it will most likely be thanks to the defense – and possibly Vonn Bell. The true freshman safety told a Chattanooga TV station that he would start in the Orange Bowl. Meyer didn’t confirm that statement. However, he did concur that Bell will see a significant increase in playing time.
Ohio State’s secondary came under fire all season. The final two games were at another level, though. The Buckeyes surrendered 755 yards passing and seven touchdowns through the air in back-to-back weeks to Michigan and Michigan State.
A probable secondary lineup for Ohio State on Friday is Bell at nickel, Tyvis Powell at free safety, C.J. Barnett at strong safety and cornerbacks Bradley Roby and Doran Grant. The odd man out in that scenario becomes Pitt Brown, who could be used in dime packages.
“Vonn is a really good athlete and a really good player,” junior linebacker Ryan Shazier said. “He changes up the game when he gets in. His athleticism and judgment on balls, I feel like he can help out a lot.”
Bell’s played sparingly, mostly on special teams, making 12 tackles. |
If a sodden rice paddy feels soft and forgiving underfoot, it is not a merciful place to set down an airplane at 200 mph. And that's only one of Mike Selby's reasons to look nervous as he watches his A-10 Warthog—a 10-foot-wide, 65-pound, hand-built model—begin its maiden takeoff roll down a rough asphalt runway near Bangkok, Thailand. Selby, who spent over $12,000 and the better part of a year fabricating and building this radio-controlled jet, stands runwayside with his thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans, trying to look relaxed as he draws on a Cuban cigar. But he can't stop tapping his foot. Next to him, pilot Ray Johns, a U.S. Air Force general and test pilot who has flown everything from Air Force One to the U2 surveillance plane, chews a wad of gum with anxious rapid-fire chomps and leans back against the weight of the control console hanging from his neck. It's been nearly a year since Johns last flew one of Selby's finished models, at the Top Gun competition in Lakeland, Florida, and the memory haunts them both. Top Gun, held each April, is the de facto world championship of radio-controlled scale-model aeronautics, an invitation-only event that hosts some 130 entries, jets and prop-planes alike, from around the world. Selby had spent the two years before the event building and tweaking his Embraer Tucano 312 (a Brazilian turboprop fighter trainer), and the plane had a grip on first place going into its final competition flight. But suddenly, as it went into a tight turn, the plane stopped responding to Johns's control inputs. "We saw it jink to one side, and then it just keeled over and dove into the forest," Selby says. "We had to rent a helicopter to recover the pieces." Now, half a world away, Selby's chance at redemption is taxiing into place on the runway: a sophisticated new plane that's already creating a buzz among the top echelon of the model-aeronautics community. "I wouldn't be surprised if he blows the event away with the A-10 this year," Top Gun organizer Frank Tiano told me earlier by phone. He's seen pictures and specs. "It's big, it's a jet, it's twin-engined, it has an extremely high level of detail and function. As far as I can tell, there's rarely been an airplane this ambitious, with as much character and as much charisma." But it's not an airplane—model or full-size—until it flies. Johns, from his position halfway down the runway at Bang Nam Prio, commands bystanders to silence and seems to grow taller as he pushes the remote-control throttle forward. The A-10's twin engines scream to life, turning the head of a straw-hatted woman herding a group of water buffalo on the other side of the runway. Hit up the gallery for a closer look at Selby's Warthog along as well as a few of its rival models. And be sure to check popsci.com/rcjet the week of April 20 to find out how the A-10 fares at this year's Top Gun competition. As the turbines spool past 100,000 rpm, Johns releases the brakes, and the A-10 begins to roll. With its twin rudders buffeted by a gusty crosswind, the fighter jet zigzags awkwardly at first, before Johns gets it straightened out. It shrieks past us at full throttle, tracking down the runway's centerline. Then, with a subtle tug of his index finger, Johns lifts the plane's nose, and it bounds into the air with an almost startling decisiveness. Selby squints and watches his creation climb and bank to the left, its silhouette tapering into the sun.
Fighter Command Johns, Selby and Davidson go over their calculations after the Warthog's inaugural flight. John B. Carnett
Best of the Best Scale-model jets are the apogee of radio-controlled model aeronautics: The technical challenge of building jet power in miniature is far beyond the abilities of the average hobbyist. Handcrafted by an elite cadre of backyard aviators, these models can fly at speeds of up to 300 mph, and at Selby's level of competition, they're built to look and perform exactly like their real-life counterparts. "We're at the obsessive end of the spectrum," Selby says. At the age of 53, he's thin and fit, with a calm, quick smile. He flew model airplanes as a kid in Rochester, New York, and brought his hobby with him when he began working in Asian finance in his 20s. Selby made prescient investments in everything from airfreight to fish packing, and after a stint as chief of staff for the sultan of Brunei, he now manages the assets of the Thai monarchy. He collects fast cars, big boats and Khmer art, and keeps his collection of rare guitars (including instruments signed and given to him by Keith Richards and Pete Townshend) in a dedicated room of the apartment he shares with his Thai wife, Lek. But Selby's greatest passion is building hyper-realistic scale-model planes. "Building and tinkering is so far from what I do work-wise, it takes my mind off it," he says. "Also, it's part of my attempting not to grow up." It is a pursuit that has become increasingly sophisticated over the past five years. For those like Selby, with plenty of resources, ambition and technical savvy, high-tech composite materials and miniaturized controls have enabled higher strength-to-weight ratios, and telemetry and digital engine-management systems have given RC pilots more power and control. Model kits are more realistic and reliable than ever before, and super-modelers like Selby, who build their own from scratch, are taking on larger, more ambitious projects. "Around the world," Tiano says, "there's a niche group of maybe 2,000 people who have as much dedication as these guys. There are about 200 who have the skills to execute what they dream up. And of these 200, there are maybe two dozen guys like Mike who can create something truly remarkable." Those people would be Selby's competition at Top Gun in April. Among them is Walt Fletcher, who retired from the U.S. Army Special Forces to run the Hobby Hut in St. George, Utah. He is readying a one-third-scale Fokker DR-1 triplane, flown by World War I flying ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen, a.k.a. the Red Baron. The pilot's head will turn left or right, and he'll be able to wave to the judges as the plane goes by, Fletcher tells me. "And it's got speakers that blast out sound bites of the Le Rhone rotary engine and the machine guns." David Wigley of Smithtown, New York, pilots Boeing 767s for American Airlines in what he calls his "full-size life." His entry in the Top Gun Masters class this year will be a Westland Wyvern, a British Royal Navy strike fighter from the early 1950s. Wigley designed and built the obscure plane from scratch over four years. Among its details are counter-rotating propellers, a droppable torpedo, and a functioning pneumatic tail hook for landing on model aircraft carriers. But Selby and Johns, also 53, have built a Top Gun dream team over the years, and the roster inspires confidence. Their crew includes Bangkok scale-jet-engine builder Pornchai "Hard Porn" Saechour and pit crew/logistician Bill Davidson. By virtue of his position as administrative assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, Davidson is the top career civilian in the U.S. Air Force, and he may know more about military aircraft than anyone alive. (According to his wife, Peg, he can sit inside their house and identify just about any overflying plane by sound alone.) Practice time for the flight crew is limited to a week each January, when Selby, Johns and Davidson rendezvous in Bangkok to shake out their latest flying machine, party, and prepare for Top Gun.
Death From Above Modeled after a specific plane, the A-10 has it all, from a spinning Gatling gun to a figure dressed like the real pilot, Captain P.J. Johnson. John B. Carnett
Even though Selby's team has never won the overall Team class at Top Gun, Selby has won more Critics' Choice awards—bestowed each year by the judges and a panel of "guest artists" for exceptional craftsmanship —than anyone else. In 2001 (the first year Johns and Selby flew together), they won it with an F7 Grumman Tigercat, a late-1940s fighter. In 2004, a Brewster Buffalo (which now hangs at the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida) brought them another, and in 2005 and 2006 it was a Vought Vindicator SBU-2 (a carrier-based dive bomber developed for the U.S. Navy in the 1930s). Last year, their Tucano was so impressive that even after crashing, it was still named a runner-up. This year's plane is an ambitious choice. The real-life A-10 Thunderbolt II, a.k.a. the Warthog, was the first Air Force jet specifically designed for close air support of ground forces. Its distinguishing characteristics make it an especially difficult plane to model. The A-10 weighs in at 30,000 pounds, and its engines produce 18,000 pounds of thrust. True to its nickname, the fighter, all bumps and protrusions, isn't sleek. Rather, it's built to take—and inflict—a beating. From a cockpit protected by a titanium "bathtub," a pilot can drop up to eight tons of bombs or fire a 30-millimeter Gatling gun at 4,000 rounds a minute. "On a battlefield," Davidson says, "there's probably nothing more intimidating than an A-10 coming at you on a strafing run." But the flight characteristics of the A-10 make it a tremendous engineering challenge. At Top Gun, a model must not only be built to scale, it must fly to scale as well. "They're judging realism in flight," Selby explains. "If the real airplane makes bombing runs at 300 knots, a smaller plane has to do its bombing runs at a much slower speed, or else it won't look realistic. You've got to duplicate whether it climbs steeply or gradually, whether it turns quickly like a fighter jet or sluggishly like a heavy bomber. The A-10 is a tough one, because it's known to have excellent maneuverability at low air speeds and altitudes, so we've got to make that happen." Although Selby's A-10 Warthog is strictly a hobbyist project (albeit an expensive one), it has the tacit support of the Pentagon, where his work has high-placed admirers. "A couple of years ago," Johns recalls, "[Air Force chief of staff] General Buzz Moseley was challenging us to fly an Air Force plane, instead of the Navy planes we had been flying for the past few years. It wasn't exactly an order, but he said he was getting impatient. He wanted to know when we were going to get around to putting one of our birds into the air." In the Team class at Top Gun, competitors replicate a particular aircraft, rather than just a type. Selby's team settled on an A-10 flown by Captain P.J. Johnson, who is now a colonel based in a Pentagon office just down the hall from both Johns and Davidson. The plane, built in the early 1980s and painted in the Air Combat Command's Flying Tigers color scheme, is based out of Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. In the first Iraq war, in 1991, Johnson's A-10 wing was partially blown off in combat. Remarkably, he managed to land safely. In early May, Davidson traveled to Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina and took walk-around photos of another full-size A-10 for reference, and Selby dug up a book of photos of Johnson's A-10. He also unearthed schematics and official guides to markings and heraldry. In the "static" part of the Top Gun competition, a team of judges meticulously checks the model's lines, markings and weathering against photos of the actual plane, right down to the scratches and dings. It must be an exact copy of that moment in the A-10's career. "If there's a defect on the real plane," Tiano says, "you'd better have the same defect on your model, or you're going to lose points." Small but Powerful Selby's model will be the first A-10 to fly in competition, and probably the largest jet ever to fly at Top Gun. About 85 percent of Top Gun competitors build from kits, but Selby designed and built nearly everything on Johnson's A-10 from scratch in his 1,500-square-foot workshop, just off the parking deck of his 30-story apartment building. The shop is a tech geek's dream, outfitted with a laser-cutting machine, computer numerical control mill and lathe, 3-D laser scanner, and plastic vacuum former. A scale modeler's biggest challenge is building a functional model that will look like the real plane, while using different materials and construction techniques, and keeping thrust-to-weight and lift-to-weight ratios within practical limits. "A plane with an overloaded wing will fly like a powered brick," Selby says. "In low-speed situations, you can run into stalls and control problems, and the sink rate on the plane is quite high."
Master Blaster Pornchai Saechour, who designed the jet's 120,000rpm engines, runs PST, a scale-jet business in Bangkok, with Selby. John B. Carnett
Starting with Davidson's photos and the original Fairchild Republic drawings of the A-10's wing, Selby scaled the wing down and modified the control surfaces, using design and airfoil-analysis software. The A-10's fuselage, wing and control surfaces are made of lightweight fiberglass, carbon fiber and Kevlar. To make the skin look authentically weathered, Selby bound pastels into the paint and then rubbed it with steel wool—a particularly impressive feat considering that he's partially color-blind. Real A-10s are equipped with turbofan engines, which drive a fan that feeds extra air into the burner, but to stay aloft, model jets typically use lighter and simpler single-stage axial turbines. Unfortunately, most single-stage turbines take several seconds to accelerate from idle to full throttle. This lag time can sometimes make the difference between being able to abort a landing, and crashing. Selby and Saechour's Bangkok-based scale-jet company, PST Engines, boosts its miniature jet engines' acceleration by adding extra vaporizers in the combustion chamber and sophisticated digital fuel controls. Built out of heat-resistant superalloys and kitted out with full ceramic bearings, the A-10's engines rev up to 120,000 rpm and develop up to 29 pounds of thrust—more thrust for their weight, Saechour claims, than anything else on the market. With both wings attached, Selby's 5.5:1-scale A-10 stretches 10 feet across and weighs 65 pounds at takeoff. Inside the fuselage, carbon fiber snakes like spaghetti around five Kevlar fuel tanks, which hold 8.5 liters of jet fuel, enough for about 15 minutes of flight. Selby designed the plane's electrical system with enough redundancy to make NASA proud. A power box distributes signals from the two radio receivers to 24 servo motors, which operate the control surfaces. The redundant radio system calculates which receiver has a stronger signal and constantly switches back and forth. Two separate electrical systems run the microswitches and small microcomputers that handle sequencing, and backup lithium-polymer batteries guard against catastrophic loss of power. Selby also built a high-pressure pneumatic system to handle the landing gear, gear doors and braking system. He designed and machined his own hydraulic shock absorbers out of aircraft-grade aluminum and even molded his own rubber tires. Up front, there's an onboard replica of the A-10's Gatling gun. When the A-10's canopy opens, it reveals an action figure wearing a jumpsuit meticulously sewn by a Bangkok dressmaker to match P.J. Johnson's. On the tiny plastic control panel, each instrument is laser-engraved; the panel even pulses and appears to acquire a target. "There are no extra points awarded for cockpit detail," Selby says, "but if you're going to go to this much trouble, you might as well take it all the way."
Inside the Warthog L-Dopa
Small Plane, Big Risk Considering the time, craftsmanship, dedication and money that has gone into this airplane, it's a wonder that Selby can summon the guts to send it into the air. But that's the nature of the Top Gun competition: Build a complex, delicate machine, and then risk destroying it. Selby and Johns suspect that radio interference might have caused their Tucano's crash at Top Gun last year. If that's the case, the "radio hit" must have come from somewhere off-field, since all other competitors' radios are impounded and disabled during competition. But according to Top Gun organizer Tiano, radios have become so sophisticated that they are rarely the cause of crashes anymore. "When we do have equipment failures," he says, "it's usually a problem with fuel or with batteries. But even those are getting more rare." Tiano, who was standing next to Johns when the Tucano went down, thinks the plane probably didn't have enough airspeed as it entered a turn, causing it to stall and plunge to the ground. "It looked a little slow to me," Tiano says. "But we'll never know for sure." Selby has learned his limits the hard way, losing several planes over the years. Although he was once a commercially rated multiengine pilot, Selby claims he doesn't have the right stuff to fly the model planes he builds for competition. "I'd probably consider it," he says, "if my best friend didn't happen to be one of the world's best pilots." Ray Johns made his first solo flight at 16 and studied the certification of commercial aircraft for military applications while getting his master's degree. As a flight instructor, he's flown most of the Air Force's fighter and air-to-ground jets and was the chief test pilot for an Air Force One project in 1990 in which the military radically modified a Boeing 747-200 for presidential use. Johns got into model airplanes as a kid, and he continued the hobby as an adult in the Air Force, wherever his duties took him. On a visit to Singapore in 2000, the deputy American ambassador introduced him to Selby. As a three-star general and deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and programs, Johns rarely has the chance to fly in a single-seater plane like the A-10. So he gets his fix in miniature. To hear him describe it, it's in many ways more difficult and more satisfying.
Model Control U.S. Air Force general Ray Johns pilots the A-10 jet. John B. Carnett
"Flying a model is actually much harder than real flying," Johns says. "For starters, when you have a new plane, you don't have any idea about what speed it will take off, land, or stall. When you get it in the air, you don't have the direct feedback that pilots rely on to stay oriented. You only have control when the plane's in your line of sight, and your perspective is usually all wrong. For instance, when you're landing and you're looking at the plane coming toward you, the controls are reversed. You need to remember to push the stick left to go right, and right to go left." Fire Up the Engines "The trick when testing airplanes," Johns says as our caravan of three vehicles pulls up to the airstrip for the second day of flight time, "is to expand the envelope a little at a time." Only one part of the process should be unknown at any given time, he explains, "so if you screw up, you have room to recover. That's the same whether you're testing Air Force One or one of Mike's models." The airstrip is deserted on this hot Saturday morning. This is flat, green, fertile country, in the heart of the rice belt just outside Bangkok's sprawling eastern suburbs. We unload to the sounds of chirping birds and lowing buffalo, and Selby and Saechour carefully spread their tools and parts out on bird-marked tables in the shade of a wooden pavilion. As their teammates assemble the plane, Johns and Davidson go out to walk the runway. Selby and Johns are constantly on the move, chewing gum or, in Selby's case, smoking a cigar. Bill Davidson, a larger man, provides an anchoring presence, moving as required, his large glasses hiding soft eyes that offer few hints of the intrigue that he has known in his career at the Pentagon and, earlier, in two decades as an agent of the Air Force's secretive Office of Special Investigations. "You know how people say, 'If I told you that, I'd have to kill you'?" Johns had commented to me earlier. "There are guys who are just playing around—and then there are guys like Bill." When Johns and Davidson return from their runway inspection, the A-10 is assembled and fueled. Saechour clears everyone from the area behind the plane—the turbines exhale gases at a toasty 1,1000F—and starts the engines with a butane/propane mix. Once the engines reach a stable rpm and temperature, the fuel supply switches over to the pure Jet A formula in the internal tanks. After Johns and Selby double-check the pneumatic pressure, control surfaces and radio, Johns takes the controls, taxiing the plane out to the runway for the day's first takeoff. If yesterday's first takeoff was a little wobbly, today's is rail-straight—but the landing is downright harrowing. Just before touchdown, a gust catches the A-10's double rudders and yaws it sideways. The plane veers to the left, then back to the right. As the tires catch the pavement, the plane darts toward the edge of the runway, where Davidson is videotaping the flight. Davidson keeps his cool as Johns works the stick frantically and gets it redirected, and the A-10 skids sideways to a bootlegger's stop a few feet from Davidson. There's a long silence. "You had me holding my breath," Selby says finally, letting out a sigh. "And I think you had Bill wetting his pants."
Heavy Lifting John B. Carnett
Smoothing it Out After the day's first flight at Bang Nam Prio, Selby and Johns decide to wait out the crosswind gusts and do some troubleshooting. On his control console, Johns modifies the A-10's stick movement to "soften up the middle" and make the controls less touchy. Selby and Saechour try to figure out why the nose wheel keeps fouling on its hatch when retracting, and eventually trace the problem to the fake hydraulic cap on the side of the nose structure. "You get so involved in putting these little tchotchkies on to make it look real," says Selby, as he lies down on the cement floor under the landing gear, "that you can forget that it needs to reliably function and fly." The A-10 takes off again and, as it climbs, the landing gear functions flawlessly. Johns sends the A-10 into a steep climb and then pulls it into a half-loop and rolls it 180 degrees—a rapid-reverse maneuver known as an Immelmann turn. Johns brings the plane around for a low-level pass over the runway. As it roars past us at palm-treetop level, it couldn't look or sound any more realistic. Standing in his jeans and topsiders, Selby smiles and whistles, starting to relax. On the next flight, the A-10 carries four fiberglass "bombs," but during the bombing run, they fail to release. For Selby and Johns, the situation brings back memories of the 2006 Top Gun competition. "We were sitting in first place with our Vindicator when Ray brought it in for the run. He called out, 'Bomb drop.' But nothing happened. We would have won overall Team, but we came in second—only two tenths of a point behind the winner." Between flights, Selby and Saechour shorten the release pins, while Davidson and Johns review the video. Johns is critical of his own flying. "The high-speed pass was too high," he says. "The Immelmann was sloppy, and that was a wussy split S—but at least the landing flare was better." Final Pass There's time for one more flight today, and then the men and their wives will head off to the islands for some beachside R&R. In the few weeks before Selby airfreights the plane to Florida, he will do some cosmetic work on the aerial-refueling hatch and add a GPS-based telemetry system. The system will include a voice synthesizer that will call out various data points, such as altitude, airspeed, and engine rpm and temperature. "That way," he says, "Ray can plot his turns and we can figure out the stall speed, which will allow us to land slower, which will look more realistic and more to scale." Johns taxis the A-10 back out to the runway. "Let's make sure that we don't go home with more pieces than we came to the field with," he says. He pushes the throttle forward, looking confident as the A-10 screams down the runway and into a steep, arcing climb. He brings it around for the bombing run. This time, the bombs release and come down in a perfect trajectory, sinking deep into the mud at the opposite side of the runway. He takes the plane through a military roll and a split S, then an attack approach and a half-reverse Cuban eight—maneuvers he will attempt at Top Gun to wow the judges. Selby is beaming. "Next, General Ray's going to show you the Jimi Hendrix maneuver!" he says. "First he'll fly it behind his back, then with his teeth." Johns brings the plane in for a perfect landing and taxis it over to the tarmac. As it coasts to a stop, the canopy opens, as if the pilot-in-miniature were seeking some breezy relief from the tropical sun. The turbines shut down, and Davidson pulls the video camera's viewfinder from his eye. He walks over to Johns and Selby, his normally impassive face stretched into a grin. Looking around at his partners and then at the plane, he quietly delivers his verdict.
"Flies like an A-10," he says. Hit up the gallery for a closer look at Selby's Warthog along as well as a few of its rival models. And be sure to check popsci.com/rcjet the week of April 20 to find out how the A-10 fares at this year's Top Gun competition. Contributing editor Tom Clynes profiled Arctic climatologist Konrad Steffen in the August 2007 issue.
Skimming the Palms Mike Selby's radio-controlled A-10 Warthog jet is a painstakingly accurate 1:5 scale version of the real thing John B. Carnett
(Mini) Rudder and Stick Since there's no tactile feedback, flying models is harder than flying the real thing. John B. Carnett
Note For Note Every feature of a real A-10 is accounted for, from the working landing gear... John B. Carnett
Armed to the Teeth ..to the Warthog's famous Gatling gun, which does everything but fire real live ammunition. John B. Carnett
Preparing For Takeoff Selby and his team, which includes a three-star Air Force general and a top Thai jet engineer, prepare the model for a test flight in Thailand. John B. Carnett
Pre-Flight Inspection Selby makes an adjustment prior to a test flight. At such a small scale, the model's complex systems require exact tuning to avoid a potentially disastrous crash. John B. Carnett
Best of the Best Selby's models are always the planes to beat at the annual Top Gun competition in Lakeland, Florida, where high-end modelers gather to show their latest creations. John B. Carnett
In Good Hands The insane detail doesn't cease at the outside; an action figure inside is dressed and modeled to resemble the real-life pilot of the Warthog on which the model is based, Captain P.J. Johnson. John B. Carnett
At the Controls Ray Johns, Selby's long time partner and pilot, has flown nearly every real-life Air Force jet as one of the service's top flight instructors John B. Carnett
Hall of Fame Selby's past winners line the walls of his enormous Bangkok workshop. John B. Carnett
Sophisticated on the Inside The pneumatic landing-gear drive, like everything else, is a hand-built system. John B. Carnett
Taking the Title? Selby and the team hope their A-10 will have enough to take 2008's Top Gun title. Check back at popsci.com/rcjets for a report from this year's competition, being held at the end of April. John B. Carnett
The Competition: MiG-15 Selby and company will be up aginst the most sophisticated and dedicated RC-jet makers in the world. Here, Johnny Hernandez's 1:6-scale Russian fighter weighs only 24 pounds. Frank Tiano Archives (courtesy)
The Competition: F/A-18 Super Hornet Jorge Escalona built 50 pounds of thrust into the jet's turbine engines. Frank Tiano Archives (courtesy)
The Competition: F-4 Phantom The colors of Tim Redelman's 200mph fighter orient the pilot at a distance Frank Tiano Archives (courtesy) |
Android gives you the ability to deny your sensitive data to apps
Android privacy just got a lot better. The 4.3 version of Google's mobile operating system now has hooks that allow you to override the permissions requested by the apps you install. So if you download a flashlight app that wants to harvest your location and phone ID, you can install it, and then use an app like AppOps Launcher to tell Android to withhold the information.
Peter Ecklersley, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has written up a good explanation of how this works, and he attributes the decision to competitive pressure from Ios, which allows users to deny location data to apps, even if they "require" it during the installation process.
I think that's right, but not the whole story: Android has also always labored under competitive pressure from its free/open forks, like Cyanogenmod.
In the days when Android didn't allow tethering (as a sop to the mobile carriers, who are the gatekeepers to new phones for many people), Cyanogenmod signed up large numbers of users, simply by adding this functionality. Google added tethering to Android within a couple of versions. Some versions of Cyanogenmod have had the option tell your phone to lie to apps about its identity, location, and other sensitive information -- a way to get around the "all or nothing" installation process whereby your the apps you install non-negotiably demand your "permission" to plunder this information. I'm not surprised to see the same feature moving into the main branch of Android.
This dynamic is fascinating to me: Google has to balance all kinds of priorities in rolling out features and "anti-features" (no tethering, non-negotiable permissions) in Android, in order to please customers, carriers and developers. Free/open forks like Cyanogenmod really only need to please themselves and their users, and don't have to worry so much about these other pressures (though now that Cyanogenmod is a commercial operation, they'll probably need to start playing nice with carriers). But because Android competes with Cyanogenmod and the other open versions, Google can't afford to ignore the featureset that makes them better than the official version. It's a unique, and extremely beneficial outflow of the hybrid free/commercial Android ecosystem.
In the early days, that model was at an improvement on its major competitor, Apple's iOS, which didn't even have a permissions model. But after various privacy scandals, Apple started forcing apps to ask for permission to collect data: first location and then other categories, like address books and photos. So for the past two years, the iPhone's app privacy options have been miles ahead of Android's. This changed with the release of Android 4.3, which added awesome new OS features to enhance privacy protection. You can unlock this functionality by installing a tool like App Ops Launcher. When you run it, you can easily control most of the privacy-threatening permissions your apps have tried to obtain. Want to install Shazam without having it track your location? Easy. Want to install SideCar without letting it read your address book? Done.2 Despite being overdue and not quite complete, App Ops Launcher is a huge advance in Android privacy. Its availability means Android 4.3+ a necessity for anyone who wants to use the OS while limiting how intrusive those apps can be. The Android team at Google deserves praise for giving users more control of the data that others can snatch from their pockets.
Awesome Privacy Tools in Android 4.3+ |
If you have ever been traveling and wanted to know where the best place to get gas is, you might know that this can be kind of difficult at times. Gas station X might be near you as you search for options, but is it on your route? Or, you don't want to stop just yet, making that problem even more complicated. Well, Google Now has added a card to help with that.
Those we have heard from were not navigating when this card popped up, but they were driving. Google is noticing the speed you are moving and making a prediction about where you're headed in order to give you this information. Of course, it probably will also come up when using navigation.
And, per usual, it will not always be right about whether you are traveling and where you're headed, but it is just a swipe away from being out of your hair. This card is not on Google's official list, but they might be considering it part of the traffic and navigation card functionality. |
A team of researchers from The University of Western Australia has made a breakthrough that could assist the future development of crops to cope with production in salty soils worldwide.
Soil salinity impedes crop production in many parts of the world, including large areas of farming land in Australia.
Professor Timothy Colmer from UWA's School of Plant Biology and Institute of Agriculture, who led the study, said his team studied how salt affects the reproductive processes in chickpea plants.
Working with research partners at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), scientists specifically looked at whether the effect of salinity on reproductive processes in chickpea was associated with ion concentration in specific tissues.
"This is the first detailed analysis of ion concentrations in specific cells of reproductive structures of plants subjected to salt stress, made possible by the techniques available at the UWA Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation and Analysis," Professor Colmer said.
Early reproductive tissues of developing ovules and pods between a known salt tolerant variety, Genesis836, and a known salt sensitive variety, Rupali, were analysed after they were subjected to varying concentrations of sodium chloride applied to soil.
"No differences in the accumulation of sodium or chloride in these structures were found between the contrasting genotypes," Professor Colmer said.
It was previously thought that the accumulation of salt ions in the reproductive structures of chickpea plants was responsible for its sensitivity to salt. The new results, recently published in the prestigious international journal Plant, Cell and Environment, have shown this is incorrect.
"Our findings, together with other experiments on responses of photosynthesis and sugar supply for seed filling in saline conditions, are exciting because they provide greater understanding of chickpea's salt tolerance, but also how different genotypes express their resistance to saline soils," Professor Colmer said.
"These are important initial steps towards enhancing future breeding strategies aimed at improving crop performance in mild-to-moderately salt-affected soils."
Explore further: Salt-tolerant chickpea project to boost crop production
More information: "Salt sensitivity in chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.): ions in reproductive tissues and yield components in contrasting genotypes." Plant, Cell & Environment. doi: 10.1111/pce.12506 |
[JURIST] The Massachusetts state Senate [official website] unanimously passed [docket] a resolution [text] Thursday to repeal a law requiring a driver’s license suspension of at least six months for anyone convicted of a drug crime. The law required the driver’s license suspension in all circumstances of drug offenses, even if unrelated to vehicle operation. The bill, brought at the initiative of Senator Harriette Chandler [official profile], also includes a record expungement provision for past driver’s license suspensions under the law, and is viewed as a step towards criminal justice reform in Massachusetts. The news was shared [tweet] by the official Twitter page of the Massachusetts Senate [social media website] with the hashtag CJreformMA.
Calls for criminal justice reform have become commonplace across the US recently. In July US President Barack Obama spoke at the NAACP Annual Convention and urged [JURIST report] Congress to reform the criminal justice system by enacting legislation that would enforce criminal laws fairly and reduce sentencing disparities. Earlier that week Obama commuted the sentences [JURIST report] of 46 drug offenders in what he said was part of an effort by his administration to remedy the unfairness of the criminal justice system. In 2010 Obama signed legislation that reduced the sentencing disparity [JURIST report] between crack and powder cocaine offenses from 100:1 to 18:1. |
MUMBAI: The benchmark sensex on Friday crossed record 23,000 level for the first time but closed a tad lower at 22,994.23, posting its biggest single-day gain of 650.19 points since September 2013, on strong FII buying in banking, auto and power stocks ahead of election results next week.In the day trade, the 30-share BSE barometer scaled its all-time high of 23,048.49 points as ICICI Bank , Tata Motors and Reliance Industries spurted.The broad-based Nifty of the National Stock Exchange too spurted by 198.95 points, or 2.99 per cent to settle at record closing of 6,858.80. It touched an all-time intra-day high of 6,871.35 points, breaching previous record of 6,869.85 reached on April 25.Both the indices posted their biggest single-session gains since September 19, 2013.Buying activity gathered momentum as funds and investors were seen creating positions before the outcome of ongoing general elections next week."As the election D-day is approaching closer, the markets are rallying on anticipation of a favorable outcome," Dinesh Thakkar, Chairman & Managing Director, Angel Broking, said.ICICI Bank rose the most by 6.63 per cent among sensex scrips, while Tata Motors spurted by 5.57 per cent.Hindalco (5.35 per cent), HDFC Bank (5.31 per cent) and BHEL (5.21 per cent) were among top five gainers among index stocks. Besides, ONGC (4.13 per cent), HDFC (4.07 per cent), RIL (3.93 per cent), SBI (3.88 per cent) and L&T (3.29 per cent) supported the rally.A firming trend at other Asian bourses were other factors behind today's rally, brokers said.In sensex components, 27 stocks gained, while 3 declined. The banking sector index gained the most by surging 5.34 per cent to 15,721.36 followed by realty index by 4.38 per cent to 1,420.52.The power index rose by 4.12 per cent to 1,743.52 and PSUs index by 3.57 per cent to 6,767.66. |
Male Sexual Assault in Supernatural
Season 1
Season 2
I usually like to be warned before I'm violated with demon tongue.
BOBBY: Charms. They'll fend off possession. That demon's still out there; this'll stop it from getting back up in you.
DEAN: That sounds vaguely dirty, but uh, thanks.
DEAN: Dude, you, you like, full-on had a girl inside you for like a whole week. (laughs) That's pretty naughty.
Season 3
HENRIKSEN: Oh, yeah. I forgot. You fight monsters. Sorry, Dean. Truth is, your daddy brainwashed you with all that devil talk and no doubt touched you in a bad place. That’s all, that’s reality.
Season 4
ALISTAIR: Come on, Dean. Don't you recognize me? Oh,I forgot -- I'm wearing a pediatrician. But we were so close... In hell.
Heaven, I’m in Heaven, and my heart beats so, that I can hardly speak. I seem to find the happiness I seek, when we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek
ALISTAIR: You have not disappointed me so far. Come on. You gotta want a little payback for everything I did to you. For all the pokes and prods. Hm?
...
ALISTAIR: But daddy's little girl, he broke. He broke in thirty. Oh, just not the man your daddy wanted you to be, huh, Dean?
Okay, well, uh, brain-stabbing imagery aside... So far, all you've told me about is a manipulative bitch who, uh, screwed you, played mind games with you, and did everything in the book to get you to go bad.
Season 5
“Oh, yeah. Life as an angel condom. That's real fun. I think I'll pass, thanks”
“...and there's an archangel there wanting me to drop the soap”
Season 6
BALTHAZAR: Well. The plot thickens. Where's your soul, Sam? Good God, no. It's not still...It is.
SAM: My brother found a way to put it back in me. I don't want it.
BALTHAZAR: No, you don't. No, no, 'cause Michael and Lucy are hate-banging it as we speak.
The references to rape have been made mostly by or about Dean. In 6.09 they are played primarily for laughs (the lines about alien probing and “servicing” Oberon), but in my opinion the jokes are muddied by the fact that Dean's reactions, his anxiety and revulsion, are played fairly realistically and straightforward and without the over the top slapstick humor of some of the other episodes which poke fun at his averse reactions to an event, such as the first half or so of “Yellow Fever.” [...]Instead, Dean comes off extremely defensive when he makes them, especially to Meg's lackey (“Are you gonna kiss me?”) and to the two ghouls sent to eat him (the Shawshank line, which is the second reference to rape and showers in the episode and the third between 6.09-6.10).... I think we can easily throw in "Live Free or Twihard," 6.05. Not only is the entire opening sequence played like a seduction followed by a rape, but we have Dean making references to how "rapey" the twilight-knockoff books are; Dean being violently assaulted, held down, and turned into a vampire against his will after being called "pretty;" the later subtext of sexual coercion between Dean and the vamp who turned him in the "private tour" line; the allusions to trafficking in the way the vamp in charge of the nest treats the women he's "recruited;".... I am probably oversimplifying by stating that some of the rape references are not being played as jokes, and I realize many people will disagree with me as to the writers' intentions. For the most part they do occur when Dean is making a joke; but it seems an odd coincidence that suddenly most of Dean's defensive jokes are rape-related. And most of these jokes barely come across as jokes, per se; instead they seem to be the result of Dean covering discomfort or anxiety.
SAM: You should take a shower.
DEAN: I should take a shower. I’m gonna, I’m gonna take a shower now.
LUCIFER: Hi, Sam. Long time, no spooning.
And...
LUCIFER: You’re still in my cell. You’re my bunkmate, buddy. You’re my little bitch, in every sense of the term.
Behold: My very first fanvid ever...it's not perfect, but hopefully it's passable?Song Title/Vid Title: Supernatural Type ThingArtist: Stone Temple Pilots - Sex Type Thing.Category: MetaCharacters: Sam and Dean WinchesterWarnings: This vid is about sexual assault - so, yeah...enter at your own riskSummary: An exploration of sexual assault against Sam and Dean so far.AVI versions:Notes: There aren't any songs out there about sexual assault against males, so I had to make do. Though, by using this song, I did get an awesome opportunity to compare Sam's body to a sexy dress.One of the things that first drew me to Supernatural (other than the fantastic characters, actors, and story) was the fact that it had this subtheme of sexual assault against males. Not many shows go there, or at least, not any shows that I’ve ever watched. Supernatural doesn’t shy away from it, and, if anything it’s become increasingly important over the years.Come with me, while we explore some of the major events of this theme throughout the series...Supernatural dives right into the theme, when Sam is sexually assaulted in the PILOT! The Woman in White forcibly locks Sam in the car, commanders the vehicle, and when Sam still refuses to bend to her wishes, she straddles him and begins to grind against him and kiss him – whilst Sam winces below her. In this case, as the woman is a Supernatural being, we do not actually know the strength of the force she is holding Sam down with.Sam eventually tries to use her distraction to his advantage and reaches for the keys, which, of course, is when the ghost decides just to kill him and Dean comes to the rescue.Next we have Meg. It’s true, when Sam first meets her and thinks she is human, there is some flirting; however, I hardly think that gives her consent to tie both Sam and Dean to posts and then molest them (Sam especially), once they discover she’s a demon.Again, in this instance, Sam eventually uses her distraction to his advantage – making her focus on him instead of the fact that both he and Dean are trying to cut through their bonds.We have the good old Yellow Eyed Demon, who takes over John – and this marks the first time that Dean is the focus of the attack, and also the first time it is a case of male>male “sexualized” violence. Now, granted, this isn’t an overtly sexual attack. It’s more of a leering threat. You could argue that the YED just likes to stand really close to whoever he is talking to – but in my opinion, there’s more than just that going on.Possession in itself is part of the theme. In Supernatural, Sam and Dean always speak of the possessed and the act of being possessed in sexual terms, “riding” being the most frequent verb. The entity is inside the person against their will (in the case of demons), and is controlling their body without their consent – it very much is a form of rape, where the person no longer has a say in how their body is used or treated as they are held at bay by a much stronger being (in cases of both demons and angels.)Usually, possession is used as a metaphor for man’s darker-side or alcoholism or mental illness – however, in Supernatural I’ve always interpreted it as a metaphor for sexual assault and I think that it symbolises the loss of control of one’s own body, and more importantly, the use of one’s body by a stronger sinister force for their own pleasure.So, in Devil’s Trap, we not only have John’s invasion of Dean’s personal space while they talk and his rather sinister leering, we also have John himself as a victim as well.Of course, Season 2 gives us the crossroads demon kissing Dean in Crossroad Blues. This doesn’t really count, as Dean doesn’t realize that this is how deals are sealed, and there’s not necessarily a sexual threat of anything else happening. Still, we get Dean’s great line of:Season two also gives us the return of Meg – and this time, she takes her treatment of Sam to the next level, by possessing him. As I said above, possession in Supernatural, is akin to rape.In this episode, we have another scene of assault where both parties are in fact being assaulted simultaneously by a third, unseen, party. This is the scene between Meg!Sam and Jo at the bar in Duluth. So, we have female>male>female violence. Sam, under seemingly varying stages of consciousness, must witness as his body not only murders a fellow hunter, but assaults Jo and shoots Dean.At the end of the episode, we get more talk of possession in a way that likens it to sex:And...In this episode, our boys end by laughing about the sexual-component of possession. This isn’t to make light of it, but rather doing what people do best and using humour and laughter as a defense against the darker aspects of what had just happened. In this case, Dean does it specifically to let Sam know that everything is going to be okay, to give Sam permission to “laugh it off” rather than deal with it – in later seasons, Dean does the same thing in order to put up walls and shields around his own experiences.Season 3 stays relatively sexual assault free. We do have a massive possession-themed episode in Jus In Bello, however, and that still ties in with our theme. In the same episode, we have Henriksen commenting on what he thinks he knows about the Winchesters:In this case, although Henriksen’s assumption is wrong, I think it’s interesting that this line occurs within an episode that features possession heavily.Here, we see Lilith for the first time since Jus In Bello. Once she takes over Ruby’s meatsuit, one of the first things she does is kiss Sam against his will.Season 4 is when they take everything to the next level. So, instead of going through episodically, I’m going to talk about two major events, but first...Again, with Dean’s trip to the past, we have the YED getting very up close and personal. He restrains Dean to a chair and then leans into his personal space – smelling him, and then just staying there and leering. Also, poor Samuel Campbell is being possessed and forced to kill his wife, himself, and make-out with his daughter.Now, the two major topics...When Dean returns from Hell, he lies to Sam and says he can’t remember any of it. However, we slowly see that all is not right with Dean – he drinks more, he sleeps less, he’s moody and irritable and despite a light moment here and there, generally unhappy. Dean finally admits to remembering, and eventually tells Sam a little about the experience.Dean talks about the torture, and how he turned torturer himself; however, people, particularly men, will sooner admit to being victims of physical violence than admit to being victims of sexual violence and, I believe, this occurs with Dean. Furthermore, I think, over time, that Sam comes to realize this (I’ll get to that later.)Season 4 is very much about emasculating Dean, and putting him in a more vulnerable and less “manly” position than we are used to seeing him in: In Yellow Fever, he gets a sickness that makes him extremely frightened; in Monster Movie, he’s dressed in a ridiculous costume (to American standards) and restrained to a table; in After School Special we see him in another ridiculous costume. Furthermore, more, we see him (in Wishful Thinking) having nightmares in which he cries out “No!” (one could assume it’s a denial against turning torturer, but one could also assume it’s a denial of any number of things.) All of these things, plus Sam’s previous failure to save Dean, lead Sam to take a more actively protective role towards Dean, which both complicates their dynamic and causes Sam to make bad decisions.When we do meet Dean’s torturer, Alistair, his dialogue to Dean speaks just as much to sexual assault as it does to physical. In his first scene, Alistair introduces himself:More telling, however is in On the Head of a Pin, when Dean enters the room Alistair in which Alistair is imprisoned, and Alistair begins to sing:A song that is far more fitting for a lover than just a torture victim. And throughout the torture session, the allusions to sexual violence continue:Of course, the act of turning Dean into a torturer is a kind of rape in itself – as basically it is forcing Dean to consent to do something he would not ordinarily consent to. We also don’t know if, in Dean’s turn as torturer, he may have used sexual violence on his victims as well. When Dean tells Sam about it, he describes it vaguely, referring only toFurther evidence of Dean’s time in Hell comes to use in Season 6, and I’ll discuss it more under that heading.Sam and Ruby are having sex throughout Season 4. We can infer this after the very first episode. We find out later that Sam is also using Ruby as a drug source. Before we discover Sam’s addiction however, we first learn how him and Ruby came to be in a relationship – through Sam’s own retelling.This is important: what we see is NOT consensual sex, even though Sam himself has recontextualized it by the time he tells the story – in no way was Ruby morally in the right during their first sexual encounter. When we think of rape, we tend to think of someone using physical force to restrain and violate another person. More often than not though, rape does not occur in that form – especially when rape occurs within the confines of a pre-existing relationship. It can also come in the form of someone who is emotionally/mentally vulnerable being manipulated into acts that they would not agree to otherwise.This is what Ruby does to Sam in the flashbacks of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Sam, riddled with suicidal grief, is drinking heavily, and Ruby takes full advantage of his compromised emotional state. Dean calls it out for what it was immediately after Sam tells him, saying:Sam hastens to tell Dean about how Ruby then subsequently saved his life, as though this forgives her for “playing mind games” with him. Dean makes the same mistake as Sam, and this seems to make a difference in his opinion of her. We all know of course, that just because your lover is kind to you the next day, doesn’t mean you should forgive them for emotionally/sexually abusing you – sadly, Sam doesn’t seem to know this. Instead, he decides to continue the relationship as though it were his choice to begin with – instead of admitting that Ruby took that choice away from him through her manipulation.Season 4 also gives us the first Supernatural Roofie – this time, in the form of Siren venom, which the Siren slips into Dean’s flask, thus bringing Dean under his control. While the Siren seems intent on playing a platonic bromance scenario, instead of a sexual scenario – the imagery is still one that is highly sexualized.Sam walks in to find the Siren sitting on the bed – in a red hotel room, I may add – at which point, Sam is tackled and restrained by a “roofied” Dean. The Siren then sprays Sam’s face with a bodily fluid that is ejected from a “stinger” type appendage in the Siren’s mouth. Sam himself is then roofied – the Siren, at this point, probably could have had sex with both of them (fanfic pwp!) but instead has them fight each other to the death.Angelic possession is the dub-con of the Supernatural world. The human must give consent, but hardly knows what they are getting themselves into. Furthermore, once they give consent, any further choice is stripped away from them. Did Uriel’s vessel know that he was going to be an agent of Lucifer? I doubt it. When Jimmy was without Castiel in The Rapture, we discovered that the once devote man was now embittered towards his religion and that he resented Castiel. His only reason for consenting yet again to Castiel at the end of the episode was to spare his daughter the horrible fate. Although Jimmy was not able to be aware for most of his time with Castiel, I would still say that had Castiel had sex while Jimmy was there, it would be a rape of Jimmy (in addition to the metaphorical rape of already being a vessel).Now, post S4, we cannot be certain whether Jimmy still resides inside his body. Presumably, both Castiel and Jimmy were destroyed by Raphael in Lucifer Rising/Sympathy for the Devil. Castiel was then resurrected by God. It’s not clear whether Jimmy was resurrected as well. In My Bloody Valentine, Castiel’s craving for hamburgers is blamed on his vessel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Jimmy’s soul is still present. As we see in Season 6, Sam’s body still has cravings as well and can function, even though his soul is not present.In Season 5, we deal mainly with the issue of possession – specifically angelic-possession. With the main storyline being that Lucifer wants to ride Sam and Michael wants to ride Dean, we are treated to a cornucopia of male rape innuendo, mostly, of course, coming to us through Dean’s reactions:And.....are the two examples that spring to mind immediately.Meg arrives as she means to go on. One of the first things she does is forcibly kiss Dean for absolutely no reason – or, just to remind us that she likes to molest the boys. In Abandon All Hope, she also has some heated interaction with Castiel.Also, I should mention that Bobby gets possessed in the first episode of Season 5 as well, making Dean the only character not to be possessed, until the Khan worm in Season 6.In Sam, Interrupted (5x11), Sam is tied to a cot in a padded room, while a female wraith licks the sweat off his forehead and then brandishes a phallic-like spike – though, she wants to stick it in his brain, not anywhere else. Also, I forgot to mention in Season 4, that Sam was tied to a table while two ghouls poked holes in him and then licked the blood from his skin. Really, I think “Sam tied down” could be a theme in and of itself.This is a storyline that spans three seasons – and it is really when they start getting more blatant with the theme.In Season 5, Lucifer introduces himself to Sam while in Sam’s bed disguised as his dead girlfriend. Sam, not realizing who it is, kisses “Jess” tenderly on the neck when he wakes to find her there. Lucifer, as Jess, then pets Sam gently while Sam talks to “her”. After Lucifer reveals himself and Sam leaps from the bed, Lucifer leaves the unmade bed, only to corner Sam against it.At the end of the season, when Sam says yes to Lucifer in order to defeat him. Lucifer continues to mention the sexual connotations of the possession, by telling Sam that they were “MFEO” (made for each other) – a term that is used for lovers.The Lucifer/Sam storyline gets a hiatus, as Sam first is soulless, and then cannot remember the tortures of the cage. Instead, the focus in this theme is brought back to Dean, and we get a further exploration of his experience with assault. That being said, we do get references to what might be happening to Sam's soul in the cage, and I think Balthazar puts it the most succinctly in Appointment in Samarra (6x11):But, back to Dean - There is a great meta about Torture and Rape in Season 6 by, and I think she is far more articulate than I am – so I suggest you check it out.Most importantly, I’d like to draw your attention to the following from amonitrate’s meta:I thinkhas a point about how Dean’s defensive jokes become rape-related, especially in the first half of the season, when he returns to Hunting after a year of healing at Lisa’s.From the first episode of Season 4 to the last episode of Season 5, Dean didn’t stop hunting nor take a break – the stakes were too high to focus on himself. He threw himself more into the work in order to avoid dealing with his own issues – as Sam points out at the beginning of Family Remains (4x11). I would imagine, that once Dean arrived at Lisa’s and did not have anything to distract him, there was a very large crash that occurred. Dean would have been forced to deal with at least some of the trauma of the past two years.That being said, I think his constant defensiveness when it comes to rape – his reaction to the assault in Live Free or Twi-Hard (which, was another blatant sexual assault) – is part of Dean trying to deal and recover from what happened to him in Hell.He also alludes to it in All Dogs Go To Heaven (6x08), when he suggests that they make sure that Mandy is indeed a werewolf before they hand her over to “an eternity of demon rape.” Now, Dean knows that they are handing monsters over to Crowley for “torture”, yet Dean specifically uses the term “rape” here, as though the two are synonymous...and because Dean has the experience of being tortured by demons, this only leads me to believe that they are in fact one and the same.Furthermore, in the very next episode, Clap Hands If You Believe (6x09), a line of Sam’s tells us that Sam could very well know full well about Dean’s past experience with being raped in Hell. When Dean gets back from his “alien abduction” – he tells Sam about in an extremely agitated state. Sam, being soulless, is not the most comforting presence, though he attempts to be. He tells Dean that it’s a “safe room” and when he mentions a possible “probing table” and Dean tells him “don’t say that out loud!” he doesn’t question why. After Dean is finished his story, we get this exchange:Dean’s reference to needing a “daily rape shower” in the next episode comes into play here – where Sam already knows that having a shower will make Dean feel better. To me, this all indicates that by the time Season 6 occurs, without having to be told, Sam has already logically figured out the full extent of his brother’s time in Hell.As I said, the theme of rape and sexualized violence is extremely heavy in the first half of the season, and relatively light in the second half. I think this is also deliberate. While Sam’s soul is still being continually assaulted in the cage, Dean is being continually assaulted on earth – it might be a stretch, but I think it fits with the mirror theme of that season.We get a return to “The Supernatural Roofie” in Season 7, Time for a Wedding (7x08) – when Becky drugs Sam into falling in love and then marrying her. This episode was mostly for laughs and no sex took place, the fact remains that Sam’s state of mind was forcibly altered in order to make him do something against his will. Not to mention the part where he is tied spread-eagled on a bed without his pants. Certainly, not something you want to do to someone who just returned from being raped by Lucifer for a year and a half...Season 7 starts off with the bluntly stated fact that one of the boys has been raped. This comes courtesy of Sam’s Lucifer hallucination. In the carry-through scene bridging Meet The New Boss (7x01) and Hello Cruel World (7x02). We have ‘Lucifer’ say the following lines:In this case, we do not have to rely on inference. We have it as fact, from Sam’s own memories and mind, that Sam was sexually assaulted by Lucifer while he was trapped in the cage for a year and a half.And that brings us up to the present. I have to wonder if Sam will ever outright TELL Dean about that part of his torture. Or perhaps, given Dean’s own experiences, Sam (and the audience) can safely assume that Dean already knows.It’ll be interesting to see where they take this theme in the future – is Sam as fine as he seems to be? Is this shared trauma between the Winchesters something they even need to talk about? Is the fact that both of our protagonists are PTSD-suffering rape victims of any plot importance whatsoever? Only time will tell.ETA: Some Follow Up Reading:has a meta on Sexual Objectification of Males on Supernatural. Including, in comments, a great paragraph about angel possession and Michael as representative of rape culture.has a two part meta. The first, about possession and sex in Supernatural , and the second, thorns and stings , clarifies her original argument, talks specifically about angel possession as well as depictions of male rape in media. |
Last week, I noticed this blog comment: "Romney was not my first, second, or third choice, but I will crawl over ground glass to vote for him."
A lot of Republicans -- and, judging from polls, a lot of independents -- feel this way. If there are enough of them, Romney will win, and win big.
Are there? Well, there are some signs. I've written here before that politics is all about showing up. And in recent months, people on the Right have been doing a lot of showing up. They've showed up at Romney-Ryan events in unprecedented numbers. They made Dinesh D'Souza's "2016: Obama's America" a huge hit despite a virtual blackout from traditional media. They stood in line for hours at Chick-fil-A restaurants to buy chicken sandwiches in response to politicians' bullying. They packed houses at the "Hating Breitbart" premiere.
Will they now pack the voting booths and vote for Romney, and against Obama, in similarly unprecedented numbers? If they do, Romney will win in a landslide.
It's hard to judge from the polls and the pundits. Last year, we were told that Romney couldn't win unless he could appeal to independents. Now that he's got a double-digit lead among independents in most polls, we're told that it doesn't matter.
Political junkies look to last-minute revelations and scandals, to shifts in the news narratives, and to ad buys and travel schedules. And all those things matter. But in the end, it always comes down to who shows up to vote.
Four years ago, Republicans were dispirited, and yet somehow also complacent. After eight years of GOP rule, many had forgotten what the Democratic Party was all about. Some actually believed Obama's pretense to be a nonideological moderate. And many were unenthusiastic about the lackluster candidacy of establishment Republican John McCain.
So they didn't show up. They didn't vote. They didn't donate. They didn't recruit friends and relatives and acquaintances to show up and vote. And it showed.
Democrats, on the other hand, were fired up. After eight years out of the White House, they wanted it more. Many Democrats (and quite a few independents, and even a lot of Republicans) liked the idea of America electing its first black president.
They had the enthusiasm. They showed up in unusually large numbers, and they won.
In 2008, there were a lot of Democrats who would have crawled across broken glass to vote for Barack Obama. This time around, there probably aren't as many.
Electing our first black president isn't a big deal this time around; we've already done it. And it's not as though Obama has lived up to his promises. Guantanamo Bay is still open, we're at war across the Middle East (waging it less competently, perhaps, but still at war, and in new places), the promised economic recovery has never materialized, and, heck, Obama's even cracking down on marijuana users. Where's the hope and change in that?
For the anti-Obama vote, on the other hand, there's no disappointment. Getting rid of Obama, as the quote at the beginning of this column illustrates, is goal enough. Even for those who weren't big Romney supporters in the primaries, a vote for Romney is a vote to get rid of Obama, and that's sufficient. Those who thought that staying home in 2008 would teach the GOP a lesson have mostly either reconsidered, or decided that the lesson was learned, or that further lessons would be too costly for America.
For a lot of people, the thought is that four years of Obama might be damaging but survivable, while eight years of Obama might -- in the president's own words -- "fundamentally transform America" in a way that they don't like.
Ultimately, the question is whether "a lot of people" will be enough people to overcome Obama's own showing-up mechanisms, which include unions' formidable get-out-the-vote operations and the still-extant remnants of organizations like ACORN.
There's no way to know the answer to that until next week. But if the answer is important to you, I have one suggestion: Show up.
Examiner Sunday Reflections Contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a University of Tennessee law professor and author of the Instapundit blog. |
The Red Bull driver’s overtake will join eight similarly entertaining moments from other FIA-sanctioned racing series on the Action of the Year shortlist, with fans invited to vote for their favourite.
The winner will be announced at the FIA’s annual Prize Giving Gala in Vienna in December.
Verstappen is aiming for an unprecedented third victory in a row in the category, having scooped the same award last year for his daring move around the outside of Sauber’s Felipe Nasr at Spa-Francorchamps’ fearsome Blanchimont corner during the 2015 Belgian Grand Prix. The year before he won it for a spectacular last-lap pass of current GP2 championship leader Antonio Giovinazzi in a European F3 race at Imola.
Verstappen also took home the Personality of the Year and Rookie of the Year prizes at the 2015 ceremony – the first time anyone had claimed more than one of the non-championship related awards in the same season.
To vote for Verstappen’s Brazilian overtake as Action of the Year, and to see the other contenders, click here.
WATCH: Verstappen passes Rosberg for second place in Brazil |
SOUTH RIVER, Vanuatu (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Each time teenager Freddy Sei hears the rumble of thunder, sees rains pound the earth in his small coastal village or watches strong winds whip palm trees, he is gripped with fear.
Freddy Sei, 15, poses for a photo for the Thomson Reuters Foundation in South River, a coastal village of nearly 200 people on Erromango island, Vanuatu, 12 December, 2017. THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION/Lin Taylor
The 15-year-old lives in Vanuatu, a Pacific island nation that two years ago was ravaged by monster cyclone Pam with Freddy watching as huts were blown away and water rushed in to submerge his village of South River on Erromango island.
“I was scared because the winds just took the houses away, there was heavy rain and the river banks was overflowing,” said Freddy, speaking through a translator.
“I’m scared that if it ever floods at night, it will come into my house and the flood will take me away. That’s one of my greatest fears,” said the small-framed boy, one of nearly 200 residents of the isolated seaside community of South River - vulnerable to flooding, landslides and rising seas.
A barrage of natural disasters across the low-lying Pacific islands is inflicting lasting mental trauma on children, with one healthcare expert describing it as a “ticking time bomb”.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) depression, anxiety, and suicide tend to increase after a natural disaster, according to a March report by American Psychological Association (APA).
People who survive multiple disasters, such as those living in disaster-prone areas, are likely to experience severe trauma, depression and other mental health problems, the APA said.
But children suffer the most.
“After climate events, children typically demonstrate more severe distress than adults ... Similar to physical experiences, traumatic mental experiences can have lifelong effects” and even impair brain development, said the report.
“TIME BOMB”
As climate change exacerbates the frequency and severity of natural disasters, mental health problems are going to worsen for children, said counselor Sisilia Siga from Empower Pacific, a mental health service provider in Fiji.
“It’s going to get worse, if (climate change) continues. Especially with children since it’s hard for them to handle all these things that’s happening,” she said in an interview in Fiji’s capital Suva.
Siga said she treated villagers in coastal areas during the aftermath of Cyclone Winston last year, the worst storm ever recorded in the southern hemisphere, which crashed into Fiji, killing at least 43 and leaving tens of thousands homeless.
She said she saw many children too traumatized to swim in the sea again, or having flashbacks when there were strong winds or when the ocean was at high tide.
Psychologist Loyda Santolaria, who was deployed in disasters like the 2010 Haiti earthquake, said children are often left to their own devices in the aftermath of a disaster, since many parents are too busy trying to secure food and shelter.
“The parents are unable to cope in a natural disaster, neither are they able to support their children’s vulnerability and needs,” Santolaria, who now works in Vanuatu with aid agency CARE International.
She said many of these children will grow up not knowing how to deal with these traumatic emotions and will become more susceptible to stressful situations.
This may lead to violence, depression, drug use or even suicide, said Alex Pheu, a mental health nurse working in Vanuatu’s capital Port Vila.
“It’s like a ticking time bomb. You have people who are scarred for life,” said Pheu.
“(Children) learn to live with it until someone commits suicide, or someone hangs themselves on a tree, which I’ve heard has happened.”
With few mental health workers in the Pacific region, Pheu said training villagers in psychological “first aid”, such as spotting signs of depression or anxiety before it becomes a full-blown issue, could help to boost resilience.
Children sit outside their homes in South River, a coastal village of nearly 200 people on Erromango island, Vanuatu, 12 December, 2017. THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION/Lin Taylor
“Prevention and detection - that’s the most important thing we should aim for,” he said. “But we always come too late and when we try to undo the knots it’s very, very hard to manage.”
As for children like Freddy, living in a small community accessible only by boat, surviving the next inevitable flood or cyclone preoccupies his young mind.
“Climate change is getting worse,” he said. “I’m scared of it because there could be another flood and I don’t want that to happen.” |
The ninth circuit court of appeal's ruling in Perry v Brown (pdf) that California's infamous Proposition 8 unconstitutional is certainly good news. The court's finding that the ban on same-sex marriage enacted by California's voters violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment has major potential implications.
Given the importance of the case and the rights and stake, the majority opinion by the liberal lion Judge Stephen Reinhardt might seem surprisingly narrow and cautiously argued. But this reflects the most important audience for Reinhardt's opinion: Justice Anthony Kennedy. Should the supreme court overrule the ninth circuit, the victory won in the lower courts would be not merely hollow, but actively counterproductive. Reinhardt's opinion seems written to maximize the chances that it will be upheld by the supreme court – and he might well succeed.
Given the near-certain votes of Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Chief Justice Roberts to uphold Proposition 8, as with so many others, this case is likely to come down to Justice Kennedy's vote. And while generally Kennedy is an ally of the aforementioned group of conservative Republican appointees, on issues pertaining to gay and lesbian rights, there is some reason for optimism.
When he was nominated for the supreme court by Ronald Reagan, after the Senate rejected Robert Bork, some conservatives objected to Kennedy based on his perceived sympathy to civil rights for gays and lesbians. These objections, fortunately for the country, were well-founded. In Lawrence v Texas, Kennedy authored the opinion for the court overruling the infamous Bowers v Hardwick, which had upheld a Georgia law banning "sodomy" in language rife with contempt for gays and lesbians and their rights. And even before Bowers had been overruled, Kennedy's opinion in Romer v Evans struck down a Colorado initiative that prevented any state institution or agency from providing civil rights protection to gays and lesbians.
Shrewdly, Reinhardt's opinion repeatedly cites Romer and argues that the case presents similar constitutional questions. "Proposition 8," argues Reinhardt, "is remarkably similar to amendment 2" (the Colorado initiative Kennedy held unconstitutional). Kennedy had argued in Romer that amendment 2 was constitutionally invalid because it "withdraws from homosexuals, but no others, specific legal protection". Proposition 8, Reinhardt notes, has the same key characteristic, singling out gays and lesbians for a particular legal disadvantage.
In particular, Reinhardt focuses on two key elements of Proposition 8: the fact that an existing right was taken away, and the fact that same-sex partnerships were legally identical to opposite-sex ones, except that the nomenclature of "marriage" could not be applied to the former. Both of these facts make Proposition 8 analogous to the invidious, irrational discrimination Kennedy held to be unconstitutional in Romer. Denying the term "marriage" to otherwise legally equivalent partnerships can only be justified in order to stigmatize the same-sex relationships. This cannot be consistent with the equal protection of the laws, and the fact that a right was taken away aggravates the effects of the discrimination.
And the fact that only the name "marriage" was denied to same-sex partnerships does not make the exclusion trivial. The term has unique connotations and meaning, and denying it to some citizens in otherwise equal relationships represents the kind of exclusion the 14th amendment was designed to prohibit.
In addition to citing Kennedy's landmark opinion repeatedly, Reinhardt's repeated citing of Romer demonstrates that the court can hold Proposition 8 unconstitutional without radically changing equal protection law. The California initiative, Reinhardt correctly notes, "has no apparent purpose but to impose on gays and lesbians … a majority's private disapproval of them and their relationships." This kind of animus cannot be said to be rationally related to any legitimate state interest. Hence, Proposition 8 is invalid even if one assumes (as the supreme court currently does) that classifications do not require "strict scrutiny" in the way that classifications based on race do. Particularly on such highly visible issues, the court is always more likely to favor a right if it is not required to create new doctrine to do so.
Admittedly, Reinhardt's argument against Proposition 8's constitutionality is not without its downsides. Because of the narrow focus on the specific facts of the California case, if the supreme court were to adopt the reasoning of the ninth circuit, the national implications of the ruling would be unclear. It's likely that lower courts would not immediately interpret such a holding as creating a right to same-sex marriage.
Reinhardt's logic, if the supreme court agrees, might restore same-sex marriage rights in Maine – where they were also taken away by an initiative – but lower courts may be reluctant to apply the right to different contexts. A ruling holding that classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to strict scrutiny, and that the denial of the fundamental right to marriage cannot possibly survive such scrutiny, would be preferable and more consistent with the values of the US constitution – if it were possible.
Still, Reinhardt's decision to go for a solid base hit rather than a home run represents a sound instinct. Kennedy is much more likely to uphold the ninth circuit if he believes such a ruling to be consistent with his own precedents. Forced to choose between a broad, immediate national right to same-sex marriage and upholding Proposition 8, Kennedy is quite likely to choose the latter. Creating a Bowers-like bad precedent would be a disaster, making it much more difficult to successfully litigate in the future – and also, possibly, allowing states to impose more disabilities on same-sex partnerships.
A ruling that immediately gave California's 37 million residents the right to same-sex marriage and creates a precedent that would likely expand that right to many other, if not all states in the future would still be a major victory. We have to hope that Judge Reinhardt has read Justice Kennedy correctly. |
The reason for Hitler's deputy making his solo flight to Scotland in May 1941 has kept conspiracy theorists busy for decades. He was arrested in Renfrewshire and spent the rest of his life in prison.
Nearly 70 years on, a fresh theory has emerged. Author John Harris claims that Hess was lured to Britain in an MI6 plot led by Tancred Borenius, a Finnish art historian who was working as an agent for the British secret service.
Borenius travelled to Geneva in January 1941 and convinced Hess that members of the Royal Family were willing to broker a peace deal with Germany, according to Harris. "Tancred was key in giving Hitler hope that Britain was interested in joining an alliance," he said.
Harris claims that Borenius's son, Lars, gave him the information shortly before he died. The theory is expounded in a book, Rudolf Hess: The British Illusion of Peace. |
This year just got so much better. Following Purity Ring's lowkey debut of new song "Push Pull" last month, the duo announce their long awaited second record, Another Eternity, scheduled for a 3.3 drop date via 4AD. Cue squeals of joy and contented sighs: just seven-ish weeks to wait!
Not only this, but above is another song from the album to whet our appetite. In many ways "Begin Again" is classic Purity Ring, with Megan's manipulated tones sounding fragile and assured over skittering hi-hats and heartbeat thuds, but the synths in the chorus spear, stab, and pulse like any chart demolishing EDM artist out there (Calvin Harris, Tiesto, we're looking at you). It's a banger alright, but thanks to Purity Ring's skewed pop nous "Begin Again" sounds dark—inky like the night sky and cosmically vast.
As for the accompanying visuals—very "Ringu."
Another Eternity Tracklisting:
1. heartsigh
2. bodyache
3. push pull
4. repetition
5. stranger than earth
6. begin again
7. dust hymn
8. flood on the floor
9. sea castle
10. stillness in woe
Pre-order this sucker!
Kim Taylor Bennett predicts "Stranger Than Earth" will the album's highlight. She's on Twitter. |
Fact: Kailyn Lowry, at this point in time, is probably the most controversial Teen Mom cast member of them all.
It may sound a little strange when you consider some of the other scandals this amazing reality show has brought us - for instance, Kailyn has never been filmed while high on heroin.
But it's true.
If there's any doubt, all you have to do is glance at her social media accounts ... you'll see what we mean real fast.
For example, last week, the Teen Mom 2 star tweeted that she was tired - understandable with a newborn, don't you think?
Her point was that despite this fatigue, she wanted to try to stay awake so she could watch the latest episode of The Sinner, a new TV show.
Someone actually commented: "You're staying up for yourself ...?"
That's the kind of reaching people are doing just to hate on her, and most of the comments she gets aren't as innocent as that.
She's dealt with people making racist remarks about her children, she constantly gets criticized for her looks.
(Which is silly because, let's be real, she's always been pretty.)
Then, when we learned that she'd suffered a miscarriage while married to Javi Marroquin, her ex-husband and the father of her second child.
That event would have been painful enough, even if he hadn't blamed her for it, or it hadn't put an incredible strain on their marriage.
Still, some particularly ruthless Teen Mom viewers felt the need to pile it on and start vicious rumors about that, too.
It's got to be awful for her.
Like, yeah, she did sign up for a reality show knowing full well that her private life would be filmed, edited, and presented as entertainment for the masses.
But the things people say about her go beyond fair criticism - far, far beyond.
... Why though?
If you actually look at her story, Kailyn has been through so much, and to come out of everything as well as she has is pretty amazing.
Her father abandoned her. Her mother was an alcoholic.
She's been open about the fact that she had to look out for herself from an extremely young age, because no one else was looking out for her.
When she got pregnant as a teenager, she was forced to move into the home of Jo Rivera (her ex-boyfriend and the father of her first child).
Judging by early seasons of Teen Mom 2, this wasn't exactly a picnic, living with Jo and his parents while she tried to figure life out.
After she broke up with Jo, she moved into an apartment with her son Isaac, working hard to support herself and that darling little boy.
In fact, there's a good chance she's worked more than any of the other Teen Moms, from those early years to the present day.
She continued working until the MTV money picked up and she was able to devote more of her time to her children and her education.
Speaking of, how many ladies from the show have their Bachelor's degrees?
One. And her name is Kailyn.
Of course she's had her controversial moments, some of which she's brought upon herself, but others which were undoubtedly blown out of proportion because cameras were rolling.
In any case, it goes along with the whole reality show gig, and she's always been quick to admit her faults.
But to come after her kids, to ignore her accomplishments, or to blame her for things that are completely out of her control?
It really just does not make sense.
What do you think, Teen Mom Nation?
Does Kailyn Lowry receive an undue amount of criticism and full-on hatred compared to other young moms in her position?
Do fans (term often used loosely) read too much into and judge her personal decisions which they know nothing about?
Or is this part of what she signed up for by not only starring on a reality show, but creating such a potent social media brand?
Hit the comments below and watch Teen Mom 2 online to follow the life and times of the controversial reality star on MTV.
There's never a dull moment. |
- A Palmdale man has been charged with misdemeanor battery and attempted vandalism after allegedly ejaculating into his female coworker's water bottles, food and smearing semen on her computer mouse and keyboard on several occasions, according to the Orange County District Attorney.
27-year-old Stevens Millancastro, who also goes by the name Stevens Millan reportedly masturbated at his La Palma work place and put his semen in the victim's water bottle, honey jar and on computer equipment. The two have worked together since 2014.
The victim noticed the water looked cloudy and threw the bottles away each time.
On Jan. 9, 2017, the victim noticed a third water bottle on her desk appeared to be contaminated with semen and reported the incident to her supervisor, who set up a surveillance camera in her office.
On Jan. 13, 2017, Jane Doe sat at her desk and touched her computer mouse, which was smeared with semen.
The surveillance footage showed Millancastro going into the victim's office prior to an incident when semen was found, according to the DA's office.
Millancastro has been charged with two misdemeanor counts of battery and three misdemeanor counts of attempted vandalism along with a sentencing enhancement for committing crimes for the purpose of sexual gratification.
If convicted, Millancastro could face up to two years and six months in prison, along with a lifetime sex offender registration.
Copyright 2017 FOX 11 Los Angeles: Download our mobile app for breaking news alerts or to watch FOX 11 News | Follow us on Facebook, Twitter , Instagram and YouTube. |
The US Navy's Littoral Combat Ship struggled in drills at sea when it was tasked with deflecting a small group of attacking ships, according to a report published by the Pentagon.During the exercise, held in August and September 2015, the LCS (Littoral combat ship) class ship was able to repel the attack, but the fast attack boats managed to get too close several times.Pentagon testing director Michael Gilmore said in his annual report that the " inability to defeat this relatively modest threat beyond 'keep-out' range routinely under test conditionsAccording to Gilmore, the ships raiseEarlier, the ships were brought to attention as they failures . The contract with Lockheed Martin and Austral envisages the construction of 26 vessels with a total value of $23 billion, according to Bloomberg wrote. |
Arvind Kejriwal has been rightly pilloried for forgetting to act on his allegations of corruption against Sheila Dixit by the BJP. Here is another case of amnesia afflicting a party soon after coming to power. The Rajasthan BJP has had a Rs 3,40,000,0000000 memory loss over corruption. What was a Rs 3.4 lakh crore scam for it before the Vidhan Sabha election has now become a zero-loss legitimate deal for it. And what exactly has changed in the past four months? Only the party in power and the chief minister.
In the run up to the Assembly election, the BJP had issued a ‘Black Paper’ on graft under Ashok Gehlot’s government. Apart from the usual punches at Robert Vadra, whose case we will discuss later, the biggest allegation against Gehlot was that his government had granted mining lease to a company considered close to the Congress.
“The lease granted for mining minerals in the Aravalli hills is against Supreme Court orders. This is a Rs 3.4 lakh crore scam,” the BJP alleged.
But the view from the chief minister’s room has changed now. In an affidavit filed before the High Court on Wednesday, the government justified the lease and argued that it should not be cancelled. It said complaints against the lease were found to be incorrect.
The BJP’s zero-loss theory has allowed the Congress to attack Raje. “Her promises, policies, allegations and ideas have something in common: they are all lies,” a Congress spokesperson said. Others, like the AAP, are pointing at ‘collusion’ between the two parties.
The BJP’s about turn is typical of the politics practiced by the two national parties in Rajasthan. As a thumb rule, they never practice in power what they preach in opposition.
Before 2008, Gehlot had claimed that he would probe ‘serious charges’ of corruption against Vasundhara Raje on coming to power. During his five years in the hot seat, he continued to make lots of noise but didn’t act. Similarly, the BJP had made serious allegations against Gehlot, his family and friends. “Gehlot, Munot, Kothari (two prominent businessmen of Rajasthan),” was Raje’s pet refrain as opposition leader. She hasn’t uttered the line even once after becoming the CM.
Another classic example of the BJP’s double-speak on corruption is the case of Vadra. Since forming the government, the BJP has shoved the Vadra case into cold storage. Some of its leaders keep bringing it out once in a while for electoral gains but concrete action on the charges has not been taken.
A few months ago, some BJP leaders, including Raje’s close aide Bhupendra Yadav, had sought an enquiry into the Vadra deals. Their demand for a probe, incidentally, coincided similar threats by the Congress to investigate Gujarat’s snoopgate. Since then the Raje government has done nothing except leaking information to the media.
Is the BJP really serious on corruption? Are its pre-poll utterances just vote-grabbing slogans? Is there a difference between the Congress and the BJP? Here is yet another example to seal the argument. While in opposition, Raje had opposed the Rajasthan government’s plan for setting up a refinery in Barmer. It had alleged that Congress leaders of Barmer had bought huge chunks of land from farmers on the basis of advance information on the location of the refinery.
Did the BJP government scrap the project after winning the election? On the contrary in the interim budget, it made financial provisions for the refinery. And what about the land grab charges? The biggest Congress leader of the area where the refinery was to be set up, the then Congress MLA, is now the BJP Lok Sabha candidate from Barmer.
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Luis R. Matienzo, 19, of the 1800 block of West Ohio Street, is charged with misdemeanor child endangerment in connections with the March 13 incident. View Full Caption Chicago Police Department/Rockstar Games Facebook
COOK COUNTY CRIMINAL COURTHOUSE — A West Town man played "Grand Theft Auto V" for up to 2½ hours while his 2-year-old stepson cried from a broken leg, according to a police arrest report.
Luis R. Matienzo, 19, of the 1800 block of West Ohio Street, faces a misdemeanor child endangerment charge. According to court documents, the incident happened in Matienzo's home on March 13.
After his arrest on Saturday, Matienzo told authorities that he knew his stepson had an injured leg and left the boy crying in his playpen, a police report states.
He said he played the video game for as long as 2½ hours before picking up his wife and calling for medical attention, according to the report. An X-ray later showed the toddler had a broken right femur, the report states.
The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services is investigating, according to spokeswoman Veronica Resa.
Judge James Brown ordered Matienzo held on $1,000 bail. |
De Blasio. | Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office City shares heavily redacted document related to $2M Uber study
After Mayor Bill de Blasio responded to Uber's multi-million-dollar public relations offensive by withdrawing his plan to cap its growth in New York City, his administration announced it would conduct a study of Uber’s impact on traffic instead.
The administration proceeded to task McKinsey & Company, a major management consulting firm, with the $2 million project.
Story Continued Below
In January, City Hall released its long-awaited "For-Hire Vehicle Transportation Study," which found that, contrary to the mayor's earlier assertions, Uber did not play a major role in clogging city streets.
That report drew on McKinsey's work, as well as that of other consultants and City Hall officials.
But City Hall declined to release McKinsey's work product itself until this week.
On Monday, City Hall provided POLITICO New York with “those portions [of] McKinsey Company's last submission to the Mayor's Office of Operations that are not exempt under Public Officers Law” relating to its work on that study.
The administration shared the document, such as it is, only after POLITICO New York appealed an earlier ruling denying a Freedom of Information Law request for the final McKinsey report.
The document given to POLITICO New York and viewable here contains no mention of McKinsey. According to City Hall, that’s because McKinsey worked with other non-McKinsey consultants and City Hall staff to prepare it.
McKinsey's role wasn't to author a report, officials said. It was to project-manage the report's creation.
Assessing the McKinsey "submission" is no easy task.
Ten of the document's 43 pages are fully redacted. Sixteen are partially redacted. The 17 remaining pages are the title page, four tables of contents, two graphic illustrations of streetscapes, and a page featuring “The City’s guiding principles for regulation,” which are “Simplicity,” “Flexibility,” “Balance,” “Enforcement,” and “Evenness.”
Five unredacted pages contain facts, few of them hard to find in the public realm. There’s a page explaining what sort of taxes different drivers pay. There’s a bar graph demonstrating that the “NYC metro area has the highest annual economic costs of congestion among U.S. urban areas."
The rest is redacted or partially redacted because, according to City Hall, it contains inter- or intra-agency communications that don’t involve statistics or facts.
They assert this even though page 17, part of which is redacted, deals with vehicle miles traveled in the central business district in 2015 and estimates of miles traveled for 2020; and page 22, part of which is also redacted, deals with revenues and costs per class of vehicle.
Those numbers, according to City Hall, "are projections and should be considered deliberative."
One of New York's top authorities on open government laws didn't find that explanation credible.
“There are whole paragraphs that have been redacted,” said Robert Freeman, executive director of the New York State Committee on Open Government. “Ordinarily, it’s fairly inconceivable that there’s no factual information there.”
To make up for the reticence of the de Blasio records office, the mayor's press office shared a separate document with POLITICO New York, an extensive data set that the administration created and that informed the final analysis that the administration released to the media in January.
It is presented as an appendix of sorts, containing all sorts of information compiled by various parties.
The 89-page Power Point contains information on the cities in which Uber has expanded, the cities that have banned it, different taxi app regulatory models, and so on.
The deck also contains the results of an online, anonymous driver survey, and some driver focus groups.
Asked for comment, a McKinsey spokeswoman said, "It is our firm's long-standing policy not to comment on or talk about our client work." |
I didn't expect it anymore, I thought that something had gone wrong and my socks exchange gift didn't made it somehow. But I was wrong! I received a package clearly marked with the redditgifts envelope up in the corner... and it sayed SOCKS! So I teared into it to discovere not one but two amazing pairs of socks absolutely up my alley. My santa really went through my details to choose them so well! They are both by "Sock it to me", seem of excellent quality and are beautiful knee-high that I always wear in the winter. The first pair is... help me say 'rainbow'! That's amazing, so colorful and with a beautiful pattern of patterned stripes: I love them. The other pair I love even more: it has science lab equipment drawn all over the socks! Protection goggles, test tubes, round flask, radioactivity danger sign, water molecule, atom symbol, microscope... everything you need :-) I graduated in physics and I really love strong colors, so that's a gift perfectly tailored to me, you did a great job, SockSanta! Don't worry for the delay, everyone has a lot of things to go through, and sometimes we can't do everything in time. Plus the mail service usually does its part in late-ing the gifts. It doesn't matter at all, I'm just happy you found a bit of time to send such a great gift! Thank you! |
Empowered by a new chief of staff and goosed by a president angry over a lack of progress, National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster is sweeping out some of the White House’s most fervent ideologues and Trump loyalists.
But McMaster has to move fast, senior administration officials tell The Daily Beast. The hardline nationalists at the core of Trump’s political base have declared war on the president’s top national security aide, and his own role is by no means secure.
“The president hasn’t liked the plans he’s been presented on Iran, Afghanistan, or ISIS,” one of the officials told The Daily Beast. “The process hasn’t worked like it should,” to produce the innovative plans President Donald Trump tasked his team with crafting—plans that look different from what the Obama administration, or even the Bush administration, tried before.
So McMaster has been removing anyone on his team who either obstructed his own vision or had trouble rallying the other agencies around particular policy, like NSC intelligence director Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who was let go on Wednesday. The officials said he’d had a “rough start” with McMaster as the two didn’t see eye to eye on some aspects of Mideast policy, and Cohen-Watnick—a holdover hired by now-resigned National Security Adviser Michael Flynn—was blamed for anti-McMaster leaks to the media. The former DIA analyst was also openly criticized by CIA officers who saw the 31-year-old as inexperienced, which didn’t help him win over the powerful agency. Cohen-Watnick could not be reached for comment.
McMaster has also removed anyone who was directly responsible for the plans that most frustrated Trump, like senior Mideast adviser to the president and retired Col. Derek Harvey.
Harvey himself was hawkish on Iran, but other agencies contributing to the discussion were reluctant even to answer questions about possible courses of action that might draw the U.S. into a shooting war with Tehran.
A senior administration official said Harvey was stuck in a Catch-22 situation. He struggled to get lower-level staff across the national security spectrum to answer questions in a timely fashion so he could turn requested policy papers around for McMaster, especially without Trump political appointees in place at the Pentagon and State Department to drive the debate.
But McMaster blamed him anyway. It didn’t help that Harvey was close to Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whose Mideast portfolio overlaps with McMaster’s responsibility, the senior official said.
A McMaster spokesman and Harvey did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.
Last month McMaster also fired Rich Higgins, an official in the NSC’s strategic planning office, after he penned and circulated a controversial memo alleging a conspiracy by “Islamists” and “cultural Marxists” to undermine the Trump administration. Higgins did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
The firings buy McMaster time to put his own people in place, but if he doesn’t come up with new plans quickly, his own role is at risk. The clean sweep drive has also made his tenure more precarious in that it has infuriated elements of Trump’s political base that see it as a purge of nationalist, anti-Islam ideological elements—officials dubbed by some in the White House as the Flynnstones, a reference to former adviser Flynn.
‘Weak’ War Plans
The leading Iran, Afghan, and ISIS plans that have either been presented to Trump or are under consideration by his Cabinet secretaries all resemble strategies assembled under the Obama administration, with slight modifications or increases to numbers of troops, or tightening of sanctions or cooperating on even more local forces.
A furious Trump has sent his National Security Council adviser and staff back to the drawing board on the Afghan plan and parts of the still-evolving Iran plan, griping in essence that doing the same thing as before and expecting a different result is the platitudinal definition of insanity.
The Iraq and overall ISIS plans are still being worked out, not ready for the Oval Office months after Trump had expected to review them, one of the senior administration officials said.
The recommendations on Iran were that the Trump administration re-certify that Iran is complying with the JCPOA—commonly known as the Iran deal—then discover new ways to enforce it, while also finding new ways to make life difficult for Iran and its proxies in places like Yemen and Lebanon. That was deemed as not creative or aggressive enough by Trump, according to the two administration officials.
On the Afghan war plan, Trump’s top Cabinet officials have all tacitly backed the Pentagon proposal to increase U.S. troop levels by up to 5,000 and keep the mission open-ended instead of setting a public deadline, as President Barack Obama did.
“None of the principals have spoken against that plan,” said one of the senior administration officials. “It’s other parts of the government that are lobbying against it,” one of the officials said.
He was referring to the America First-style nationalists who want to withdraw completely or outsource the problem to contractors, a sort of modern-day East India Company occupation of Afghanistan, put forward by former Blackwater chief Erik Prince.
“We keep going back and forth on it,” one defense official said of the wrangling with the NSC to come up with a new, more innovative plan.
A proposal to negotiate U.S. military assistance in return for commercial access to Afghan minerals was briefly hailed inside the NSC as the possible breakthrough Trump was looking for—showing his base that he wasn’t just going to keep spending U.S. blood and treasure in Afghanistan and get nothing in return.
But that plan has somewhat faded as other advisers pointed out that U.S. companies have struggled to safely access the areas they would mine. Nor do they have a cost-effective way of shipping such heavy cargo out for processing. It doesn’t help that China already negotiated lucrative deals with the new government shortly after the Taliban regime collapsed.
On Trump’s frustrations and internal administration divisions regarding Afghanistan, NBC News reported Trump was so angry with the proposed plan that he suggested replacing Afghan war commander Gen. John Nicholson. That would be a sort of “shoot the messenger” approach, as Nicholson bluntly told Congress the war in Afghanistan is being lost and he needs more resources to turn it around.
Sources close to Trump told The Daily Beast that the president has privately complained in recent weeks that U.S. strategy and the war in Afghanistan—where American forces are “losing,” according to Trump—is embarrassing his young presidency and making him look “weak” and “not good” on the international stage and at home.
As The Daily Beast reported last month, several of Trump’s closest advisers have been vocally against, or skeptical of, current plans for the Afghan war. These officials include chief strategist Steve Bannon, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, economic adviser Gary Cohn, and even Kushner.
Bannon, for his part, has tried to caution the president against further military involvement in Afghanistan by relaying to him the lessons of the failed Soviet occupation of the country to draw parallels to the U.S. predicament today. (The White House chief strategist is a military-history obsessive.)
“Six months ago, General Nicholson testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and warned that the United States was not winning the war in Afghanistan,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said in a statement Thursday, in defense of the general. “Our commanders-in-chief, not our commanders in the field, are responsible for this failure,” said McCain, who chairs the armed services committee. He added that if the White House hadn’t produced a new strategy by the fall, he’d introduce legislation to chart a way ahead.
Gorka Is Not a Goner
Two senior administration officials say the combative adviser to the president Sebastian Gorka is safe from the latest clean sweep, in part because the president likes him (especially when Gorka is on TV repping the White House and sparring with cable-news hosts); he reports to Bannon, not the NSC; and he’s popular with the Trump base.
“He’s one of the few people who can articulate Trump’s vision effectively,” one of the officials said. All of the officials spoke anonymously in order to describe staffing changes at the White House.
Still, the purge of other “Flynnstones” has riled Trump supporters who blame McMaster for leaks of sensitive White House information and for moderating key White House foreign policy decisions, such as its recertification of the Iran nuclear deal last month.
“Since McMaster took the job of National Security Advisor, he has systematically undermined the President’s policies,” wrote Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, a hardline foreign policy group supportive of the president. “America needs Rich Higgins in office, not H.R. McMaster.”
Mainstays of the pro-Trump media are all sure to register their disapproval of Higgins’ firing as well. Breitbart, the news outlet formerly run by Bannon, blared headlines across its homepage on Thursday accusing McMaster of being “deeply hostile” to Trump’s agenda.
Gateway Pundit, another prominent pro-Trump news site, dubbed McMaster a “globalist,” a common epithet among the pro-Trump “alt-right” movement—and even within the Trump administration. “Many eyebrows are being raised now as Nationalist advisors are being pushed out or put on the back burner while globalists trickle in,” wrote a Gateway Pundit blogger. “Was the ousting of General Flynn planned all along in order to stop Trump’s ‘America first’ agenda? Seems likely.”
Mike Cernovich, a controversial far-right blogger and self-help author, set up a website this week devoted to attacking McMaster and publishing leaked information about him. A cartoon leading the site shows McMaster and Gen. David Petraeus dancing on the ends of puppet strings held by billionaire hedge fund manager and right-wing bogeyman George Soros. |
Amazon is gunning to be the only way you make purchases or transactions. The company already has a great hold on the online side of payments, but it is now expanding into the real world with Amazon Local Register—the answer to Square and Paypal Here with a few competitive advantages.
Instead of dealing with banks and high setup fees, vendors and business owners can easily sign up to the new service on the Amazon Local Register site, then download the app (Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore), buy the secure card reader for $10, and be done. They can then start swiping or manually keying credit and debit cards, with the transaction amount either automatically deposited into their banks the next day or available for use on Amazon.com immediately. The app will also allow them to manage discounts, tax, tips, and track their sales.
Local Register is starting with better fees than both of its competitors. If you sign up before October 31, 2014, you'll be able to benefit from a reduced 1.75% rate on swiped transactions through December 31, 2015, after which the rate will go back to 2.5%. Compared to Square's 2.75% and Paypal Here's 2.7%, you may be saving a lot if you expect to deal with high transaction volumes. The competitive pricing also applies to manually keyed card payments.
Local Register also comes with Amazon's live support should you need it. All in all, it seems like a viable and cheaper alternative to the current established services. The one limitation to keep in mind is that the app is only compatible with a handful of Android phones and tablets: the Samsung Galaxy S3, S4, S5, and the Kindle Fire HD, HDX 7", HDX 8.9". Oddly absent from that list is the Amazon Fire Phone and any other Android flagship or mid-range device you may own.
Source: Amazon Local Register, Amazon Press Release, via Business Wire |
The Pittsburgh Penguins are locked into an organizational overhaul on the heels of a disappointing end to the 2014 playoffs. They’ve already welcomed former Carolina Hurricanes general manager Jim Rutherford as Ray Shero’s replacement, and some news on the coaching front is imminent.
The magic of Shero/Dan Bylsma appeared to have finally worn off, resulting in their dismissal. But the Penguins still have a more pressing issue to deal with this summer. It’s a depth thing. The Penguins don’t have any beyond their top two lines.
One player who would certainly help with the Penguins’ depth dearth is pending unrestricted free agent and former 30-goal scorer, Radim Vrbata.
Vrbata has enjoyed a great deal of success while remaining somewhat anonymous over the past five seasons with the Arizona Coyotes. He’s totalled 232 points in 352 games over that span, and he’s done so while riding shotgun on a line with Martin Hanzal. Vrbata eclipsed 20-goals for the fourth time in his career in 2013-14, and he drove the play while paired with Hanzal and a rotating cast of wingers that included Shane Doan, Martin Erat, Tim Kennedy, and Lauri Korpikoski.
Vrbata has been a positive possession player throughout his career (well, at least in the seasons where such data was tracked), and his ability to move the puck north was certainly illustrated last season when Hanzal shaded above 50% in Corsi while skating with Vrbata. Hanzal cratered to 40.1% Corsi for when not on the ice with Vrbata.
Now picture Vrbata on a line with Crosby and Kunitz. That line might keep pucks moving the right way.
The Penguins’ descent into perennial playoff failures can be traced back to the trade that sent Jordan Staal to Carolina. Bylsma seemingly had an effective thing going in Pittsburgh when he was flush with depth. Unsurprisingly, he faced some difficulty replicating those runs to the Final of 2008 and 2009 with the likes of Brandon Sutter, Joe Vitale, Tanner Glass, Taylor Pyatt et al attempting to play meaningful roles in the bottom six.
The Penguins won’t be dealing with a wealth of room under the salary cap this summer, but they should be able to address their depth issues both up front and on the blue line by getting creative with the roughly $16 million not already committed to the roster for 2014-15 and a little help from the trade fairies.
Crosby and Kunitz still have a pretty good thing going, but the days of plopping guys like Brian Gibbons and Lee Stempniak on the wing have got to go.
Enter: Vrbata.
The Penguins are unlikely to be players in the race for Tomas Vanek, Marian Gaborik, or Paul Stastny. There are still several attractive options beyond that trio, and players seeking similar long-term and lucrative deals. Vrbata made $3 million against the cap on his previous deal, and at the age of 33 he won’t be commanding the type of long-term deal that will hurt the Penguins down the road.
Vrbata would be a solid addition who could audition for a permanent spot alongside Crosby. He’s a good skater who proved capable of pushing 60-points in Phoenix while playing with Martin Hanzal and Ray Whitney just two seasons ago.
Make it happen, Jim. |
TechCrunch is reporting that Microsoft is trying to buy the Nook ebook and device ecosystem — for $1 billion. According to documents TechCrunch has obtained, Redmond hopes to buy the digital assets of Nook Media LLC; that's the Barnes & Noble subsidiary behind the ebook business, as well as the Nook e-readers and tablets themselves.
The documents also reveal that the current Nook tablets aren't long for this world. They reportedly state that Nook Media plans to discontinue its Android tablets like the Nook HD by the end of its 2014 fiscal year. The focus would then shift to what is referred to as "third-party partner" devices. It's not clear what those devices specifically would be, but according to the document they're scheduled to be introduced next year. There's no plan to immediately discontinue the Nook e-readers, however; they're expected to eventually be phased out as e-readers themselves become less of a focus for consumers.
The Nook business as a whole hasn't been performing well in recent quarters. In February, Barnes & Noble announced that revenue from the 2012 holiday season was down 26 percent compared to the prior year. However, while sales of the devices themselves was stagnating, content sales were actually up almost seven percent. Given that fiscal performance the move away from hardware doesn't come as a total surprise; in fact, rumors surfaced in February that the company was planning on moving away from its own hardware and towards licensing.
According to TechCrunch, the documents list the valuation of Barnes & Noble itself at $1.66 billion. While Microsoft's offer is an immense number, it would actually represent a tremendous dip: when Nook Media was first formed, it was valued at $1.7 billion. Microsoft already owns a 16.8 percent stake in the company, but in many ways taking it over would make sense — giving Redmond full control over an immense digital content library as it continues to battle it out with Amazon and Apple. |
A morning urine test is superior to all other tests for detecting declining kidney performance in patients with diabetic kidney disease, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). The results suggest that clinicians should monitor kidney function by measuring the albumin:creatinine ratio from a first morning urine sample.
Individuals with kidney dysfunction often excrete excess protein in the urine, a condition called proteinuria. Screening for proteinuria may help identify people at risk for kidney disease progression, but uncertainties persist as to how urine should be collected and which specific urinary proteins should be measured. Because the different screening methods available may confuse clinicians, it may hamper the use of proteinuria to manage patients with kidney disease.
Hiddo Lambers Heerspink, PharmD, PhD (University Medical Center Groningen, in the Netherlands) and his colleagues assessed and compared the ability of various proteinuria measures, including proteinuria versus albuminuria and 24-hours versus early morning sampling, to predict worsening kidney problems. Albuminuria, a large component of proteinuria, is more specific than total proteinuria and is defined as an excess amount of albumin in the urine. Four measures were compared:
urinary protein excretion from a 24-hour urine collection,
urinary albumin excretion from a 24-hour urine collection,
urinary albumin concentration from a first morning urine sample, and
albumin:creatinine ratio from a first morning urine sample (the amount of albumin in the urine sample normalized by the amount of creatinine).
The investigators conducted their analysis in 701 patients with type 2 diabetes and kidney disease who were participating in the Reduction in Endpoints in Non Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus with the Angiotensin-II Antagonist Losartan (RENAAL) trial. They defined worsening kidney function as the development of end-stage renal disease or a doubling of blood levels of creatinine (a breakdown product of muscle creatine). Kidney dysfunction diminishes the ability to filter creatinine, resulting in a rise in blood creatinine levels.
Dr. Lambers Heerspink and his team found that measuring the albumin:creatinine ratio in a first morning urine sample was the superior method to predict kidney problems in patients with type 2 diabetes and kidney disease. "From a clinical point of view, these results are very important, because they imply that collection of first morning voids, which is clearly more convenient than collecting a 24-hour urine, can be used for assessment of proteinuria," Dr. Lambers Heerspink said. The authors noted that standardizing proteinuria measures will improve methods for detecting and monitoring kidney disease.
The RENAAL study was sponsored by Merck & Co., Inc. Study co-authors include Ron Gansevoort, MD, PhD, Dick de Zeeuw, MD, PhD (University Medical Center Groningen); Barry Brenner, MD (Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard School of Medicine); Mark Cooper, MD PhD (Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Research Institute, in Melbourne, Australia); Hans Henrik Parving MD, PhD (University Hospital of Copenhagen, in Denmark); and Shahnaz Shahinfar, MD (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia).
In an accompanying editorial, Bryan Kestenbaum, MD and Ian de Boer, MD (University of Washington, Seattle) stated that "given data from this study and the considerable patient effort required for a 24-hour urine collection, we agree with the authors that the first morning albumin:creatinine ratio is in general the logical choice for quantifying proteinuria in clinical practice." |
Leaked emails show Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA and Hillary Clinton campaign surrogate, had a closer relationship than he cared to admit with the prominent United Arab Emirates ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba.
Some of the emails suggest that their friendship was mutually beneficial for both. Emails show the son of the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce discussing with the top Emirati diplomat potential UAE investment in a firm linked to the former CIA deputy director.
The leaked messages (embedded below) also show how Gulf regimes leverage their vast oil wealth to pull the strings of influential Washington, D.C.-based think tanks like the Middle East Institute. Perhaps more crucially, the emails show how easily one of the CIA's most visible and politically outspoken former operatives was influenced by the top diplomat of the country driving the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen.
Michael Morell made headlines this September when he resigned from his position as a senior fellow at Harvard University in protest of the school’s hiring of whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Morell’s angry resignation prompted a Harvard dean to abruptly cancel Manning’s fellowship. The whistleblower shot back saying she was “honored” to be the first trans visiting fellow to be disinvited by Harvard, condemning the school for “chill[ing] marginalized voices under CIA pressure.”
From 2010 to 2013, Morell served as the deputy director of the CIA under President Barack Obama. He also twice temporarily served as the agency’s acting director, in the transitions after former directors Leon Panetta and David Petraeus.
Since leaving the CIA, Morell has become infamous for defending torture and the U.S. covert drone assassination program. In a 2016 interview, Morell insisted that the U.S. should help kill Russians and Iranians in Syria and make them “pay a little price.”
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Leaked messages from Morell's personal email account after he left the CIA in June 2013 demonstrate that he regularly corresponded with Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the U.S. The two discussed business, coordinated trips and frequently traded compliments. Morell became familiar with the interior design of Otaiba’s home, and admired his aquarium of tropical fish and collection of fine wine.
Otaiba is one of the most influential diplomats in Washington, D.C., and notorious in his own way. As previously reported at AlterNet's Grayzone Project, Otaiba has worked the U.S. media to perfection, generating reams of pro-Saudi and pro-UAE op-eds. The Emirati diplomat has been a key figure helping to whitewash and rebrand the UAE, a brutal absolute monarchy notorious for extreme forms of torture and human rights abuses.
Raunchy emails first reported on by The Intercept also show how Otaiba, known in Washington diplomatic circles as “Brotaiba,” has been involved with a network of seamy characters immersed in Las Vegas' subculture of sexual exploitation.
The latest batch of leaked emails, reported here for the first time, expose Yousef Otaiba’s frequent correspondence with Michael Morell.
The emails were released as part of a larger cache of messages from Yousef al-Otaiba’s private Hotmail account, which were posted online at a domain name that was registered on September 10. The publicly available WHOIS information for the domain lists only the registrar and host; it does not provide any details about who is operating the website.
While the source of the emails remains unknown, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have waged a media war against Qatar since June of this year, when the two Gulf kingdoms attempted to impose a de facto blockade on their insufficiently compliant neighbor. Otaiba’s emails have gradually leaked out since this conflict began, the apparent result of a hacking campaign.
In July, Morell and Otaiba were interviewed by Charlie Rose. The duo bashed Qatar while defending Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Morell likened Qatar to Russia and characterized the Gulf nation's media network Al Jazeera as a uniquely malign influence within U.S. society. At the time, the fact that Morell and Otaiba were chosen to appear together seemed insignificant. These newly released messages, however, show that the men have closely collaborated for years.
The rest of Otaiba's emails are embedded below.
Discussing investments by Abu Dhabi’s huge sovereign wealth fund
Some of the newly leaked emails expose potential business ties between Yousef al-Otaiba and Michael Morell.
In 2014, the son of the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thanked the UAE ambassador for “assistance” in connecting a firm linked to his family to Abu Dhabi’s enormous sovereign wealth fund, with the former CIA deputy director acting as a mutual contact.
A May 1, 2014 email recalls a meeting that morning between Otaiba and two employees of the D.C. consulting firm Adelphi Capital. Morell was carbon-copied on the message, at his email address at the advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies, where he works as a senior counselor.
Adelphi Capital was founded by Thomas J. Donohue Jr., the son of the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to his bio on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s website, he is also a member of the board of the National Chamber Foundation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s research arm.
Former Chamber of Commerce CEO Thomas Donohue, his son Thomas Donohue Jr. and Michael Morell are all members of the Chamber of Commerce Committee of 100, which the body describes as “an elite group of chamber executives that represents the perspectives and needs of chambers and their members to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.” The three men were named in the Chamber of Commerce Committee of 100’s list of those attending an “island plantation resort” in September 2015.
At the time of Donohue’s 2014 meeting with Otaiba, Alfonso Martinez-Fonts Jr., a vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was also “affiliated with Adelphi Capital,” according to his official bio.
Thomas Donohue Jr. works at Adelphi Capital with his brother John, who described the firm on his LinkedIn profile as “a Washington, D.C. based merchant banking group that provides principal investing, transaction advisory, and strategic consulting solutions to middle-market companies and investment partners.”
Both Thomas and John Donohue had breakfast with Otaiba on May 1, 2014. In his email after their meal, Thomas Donohue sent Otaiba information about the company Columbia Capital and a new fund it had created. Donohue noted that the state-owned Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, “was an investor in previous Columbia funds, but it seems personnel changes inside ADIA have caused the two firms to drift apart.”
He hoped to mend that strained financial relationship. “We would very much welcome the change to re-introduce Columbia to ADIA and appreciate anything you might do to help facilitate that process,” Donohue wrote to Otaiba.
The Dohonue family is also linked to Columbia Capital, he made clear in his message: “Importantly, I’d like to stress that John and I have worked with Columbia for over a decade [on] numerous projects and our family has successfully invested side-by-side with them in transactions over the years,” Donohue wrote.
“Many thanks for your counsel and assistance,” he concluded his message.
Otaiba replied to Donohue writing, “It was great to see you again and meet John as well.” Otaiba then said he was going to prepare for Donohue’s “next visit later this month.”
The Emirati ambassador subsequently sent Donohue's email to a man named Mohammad bin Rouda Amri. “This is a fund I believe your team is already familiar,” Otaiba wrote. “Our friend, the former deputy director of the CIA, is now affiliated with them.” He noted, “They will be in Abu Dhabi May 28-29,” referencing the “visit later this month” he had mentioned in the other message.
“Is there any chance we can arrange a meeting for them with the appropriate people at ADIA?” Otaiba asked, connecting the dots.
He also forwarded the message and the names of Donohue and Morell to an email address at adia.ae, the official website of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund.
ADIA is estimated to have a staggering $800 billion in assets, and perhaps more, making it the second-largest sovereign wealth fund on Earth.
The Middle East Institute’s UAE boss
More leaked emails from Yousef al-Otaiba demonstrate how the Middle East Institute (MEI), a leading Washington foreign policy think tank, acts as a vehicle for UAE influence in Washington.
In April 2014, Wendy Chamberlin, a former top U.S. diplomat who for the past decade has served as the president of MEI, emailed Morell, inviting him "to join a thought leaders trip to Egypt" sponsored by the think tank. The so-called "thought leaders" would be meeting "with high-ranking Egyptian officials," Chamberlin noted.
Morell forwarded the invitation to Otaiba and asked, "Is this what you wanted me to do?"
Otaiba made it clear that the trip to Egypt was an Emirati project being laundered through the ostensibly independent think tank. "Yup," he replied, "We're doing it through Middle East Institute to make it less problematic for people."
Other messages in the trove show how the Middle East Institute is bankrolled by the UAE. One 2016 email, which was first reported on by The Intercept, exposes how, between 2016 and 2017, the UAE’s Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research (ECSSR) pledged $20 million to the Washington, D.C. think tank.
President Wendy Chamberlin noted the Emirati funding would help MEI “augment its scholar roster with world class experts in order to counter the more egregious misperceptions about the region, inform U.S. government policy makers, and convene regional leaders for discreet dialogue on pressing issues.”
An archived version of the the Middle East Institute’s website shows that the think tank did not publicly disclose its 2016 contributors until sometime after September 12, after The Intercept reported on its Emirati funding.
MEI’s newly published list of 2016 contributors reveals that Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs donated an additional $2 million for the think tank’s Gulf studies program. And the embassy of the United Arab Emirates gave another $1.5 million.
Coordinating UAE meetings
Just months after Michael Morell retired from the CIA in June 2013, he took a position at the prominent consulting firm Beacon Global Strategies. A powerhouse in Washington, Beacon advises top politicians on both sides of the aisle, from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz.
Morell joined former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta as a senior counselor at Beacon Global Strategies. The firm’s founder and managing director, Jeremy Bash, is another U.S. national security state apparatchik: as a senior advisor to Panetta, Bash served as both chief of staff to director of the CIA and chief of staff to the secretary of defense (where he celebrated the sale of U.S. warplanes to Saudi Arabia as a “Christmas present”).
Otaiba’s leaked emails show how Beacon staff regularly corresponded with the UAE ambassador, and appear to have had a financial relationship.
Bash coordinated with Otaiba to plan a February 2015 meeting with Morell, Panetta and Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi (who is referred to by the acronym MBZ).
"You will get an earful from MBZ, but you're used to that now," Otaiba joked in a December 2014 message to Morell, making it clear that the former CIA director was already familiar with the Emirati leader.
Bash also planned for meetings with Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s minister of foreign affairs, and other prominent Emirati officials and businessmen. (The meeting with Mohammed bin Zayed was delayed at the last minute, due to a health emergency.)
In July 2015, Jeremy Bash emailed Otaiba again asking to coordinate another meeting with Morell at the UAE embassy. Beacon Global Strategies employees and the UAE ambassador were so close, Otaiba was even keeping track of the founder’s pregnancy.
"Is it 5 days to go on the new baby? If so, good luck to both you and Robyn. Do you have a name picked out yet?" Otaiba wrote in a friendly August 2015 email to Bash.
The Emirati ambassador also referenced a financial transaction. “Regarding the payment, it's under process,” he wrote. Otaiba told the Beacon Global Strategies managing director to inform him if the payment had not been received within two weeks.
​It is not clear if Otaiba was referring to a payment by the UAE to Beacon. AlterNet contacted Beacon Global Strategies with questions and a request for comment. The firm did not reply.
Beacon does not publicly list its clients, so it is not clear if the UAE or any state-affiliated Emirati institution is among its clients. In an email, AlterNet asked if Beacon enjoys any relationship with the UAE.
'Deepest sympathy' for Emirati soldiers
On September 4, 2015, fighters from Yemen’s Houthi movement killed 45 Emirati soldiers who had invaded their country as part of a Saudi- and UAE-led war facilitated by the U.S. and U.K.
Early that morning, Beacon Global Strategies’s Jeremy Bash sent Otaiba a message of "condolences on the loss of life by your forces." Morell also extended his "deepest sympathy."
The war on Yemen has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Yemenis and generated the largest humanitarian catastrophe in the world, according to the UN, with cholera spreading rapidly throughout the civilian population as Saudi Arabia and the UAE tighten their siege.
Close friendship
Michael Morell and Yousef al-Otaiba also scheduled home visits, as friends would do.
Soon after leaving the CIA in June 2013, Morell reached out to the Emirati ambassador. In an October message to Otaiba, Morell asked if they could meet "to chat about what the U.S. is doing and not doing in the region, how that is being perceived by our friends and enemies there, etc."
Morell revealed he was planning a trip to Saudi Arabia and the UAE and proposed meeting over breakfast at the Four Seasons.
Otaiba replied alternately proposing that they get a drink at his house on November 7. Morell chose drinks. "I love your fish tank!!" the CIA acting director wrote, making it clear he was familiar with the interior of Otaiba’s house.
The following morning, Morell sent Otaiba a friendly followup message, thanking him “for very good wine last night.” He added, “It was great to see and your beautiful family. Have a good trip.”
Otaiba replied, “Always good to see you mike. I'll work on the issues we discussed right away.”
Yousef al-Otaiba's emails with Michael Morell can be read below:
Yousef al-Otaiba emails with Michael Morell by Anonymous 9DYCcnTmM8 on Scribd |
Today at its mobile event, Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Erick Tseng gave some (vague) answers as to why there still isn’t an official iPad application.
Zuckerberg was pretty blunt when it came to explaining why there wasn’t an iPad launch during today’s mobile event: “The iPad isn’t mobile”. He later qualified this statement to say that Facebook loves working with Apple, but that the iPad isn’t as mobile as a phone (he’s right).
Tseng stepped in to add that the rise of tablets isn’t going to be about the iPad alone — we’re going to soon see numerous additional devices running on Android and possibly other platforms. And given Facebook’s limited resources, it doesn’t really make sense to hone in on a single platform.
Facebook needs a solution that will let it deploy features across multiple devices quickly, so there isn’t a lag time like there has been between the Android and iPhone apps. In other words, we’re probably going to see a web-based mobile application that’s going to be targeted specifically at the tablet form factor. |
Students at the Inner Harbor East Academy for Young Scholars, a charter school in East Baltimore, have to vacate their school building on Friday because the school’s operator, Sojourner Douglass College, can’t pay its utility bills.
The college, which owns the building where the school is located at 200 North Central Avenue in Jonestown, is having financial problems, said Alison Perkins Cohen, of the city school system’s office of community engagement.
“We discovered that utilities at the school facility were due to be turned off for lack of payment,” Perkins-Cohen said.
The charter school will relocate to 2050 North Wolfe Street, the former William C. March Middle School, near Clifton Park. The building is currently used for staff development.
Financial Woes
Inner Harbor East Academy, which currently serves just under 300 students, is operated jointly by Sojourner Douglass and the East Baltimore Community Corp., according to school documents.
The K-8 school’s mid-year relocation is not a shock to anyone who has been following the travails of Sojourner Douglass, which lost its accreditation, is being sued for non-payment of rent on its now-closed Edgewater campus, and is struggling to make payroll.
The college’s financial difficulties have been known to the city school system for some time.
During the 2014 portfolio review, for example, City Schools gave Inner Harbor East’s operators a “not effective” rating for financial management and didn’t renew their contract. The charter school was slated to close this June.
Good Academic Ratings
The school’s audits showed “three years’ of negative net assets for significant amounts of money,” the review stated. (The school, however, was rated “effective” in teaching and academics, and “highly effective” in math proficiency in grades 6-8.)
“At that time,” said Perkins-Cohen, “we believed the operator had the capacity to finish out the school year. However, since that time the operator’s financial situation has become more serious.”
Inner Harbor East students will continue to attend school until Thursday. On Friday, the school will be closed to allow staff time to pack. District office staff will move the school to the new location over the weekend.
The Brew contacted Sojourner Douglass College for comment, but no one answered the phone. |
Promoted from our Community Blogs!
[Dtoid community blogger Jinx 01 shares his love of everyone's favorite meta game. Want to see your own words appear on the front page? Go write something! --Mr Andy Dixon]
I usually spend the Christmas holiday with my family at my grandmother's place. Unfortunately, this leaves me with no Internet access during the Steam Holiday Sale. For the last few years I've been running out to McDonald's or Starbucks with my netbook at 2:00 PM every day to check the new daily deals. Yes, I have sat in my car outside a closed McDonald's on Christmas day to get online to check Steam sales.
Last year my friend Kelly texted me each day's deals so I'd know whether it was worth driving out to hunt down WiFi. This year will be different, though; I have a Galaxy S2 and the Steam app for Android, so I can browse the deals and make purchases instantly over my phone. I am so excited about this I could burst.
The Steam app for Android. Also available for iOS.
Why all the excitement over the app? And why would I go so far out of my way to check the Steam sale every day?
Because Steam is, itself, a game. A game that crosses the lines of virtual spaces and real life -- a meta-game, if you will -- but a game of sorts nonetheless.
How so? Because Steam is about more than playing games. It's about collecting games, and getting the best deals possible while doing so. It's a shopping game, I suppose, almost the opposite of Recettear, because in this case it's Gabe yelling "Capitalism, Ho!" as we scramble to get the best deals on software we may never use.
It became clear to me that Steam was about collecting games at least as much as playing them when I found Lambent Stew's Steam Profile Analysis page earlier this year. While Steam Calculator is a great way to see how much your Steam catalog is "worth" (I'm over $3,400), the profile analysis tells you how many of your games you have actually played. (Mind you, even starting a game once will put it into the "played" category; that's pretty generous.)
So. Yeah. I'm only at 58%. I have 133 games I haven't so much as touched, yet I keep buying more. And my percentage may be on the high side. My friend Kelly is at an abysmal 22% played. Nevertheless, she and I have been gossiping eagerly on Facebook about the next Steam Holiday Sale, because we want more. If Steam was just about playing games, why would we want more than we could possibly ever play? Why would we have so many games sitting unplayed in our accounts?
That awkward moment when you go to buy a game... and realize you already own it.
Steam gives us deals so good that we addicts often can't say no, even if we have a backlog that could last us the next three years. If our collections weren't virtual, we'd probably be labeled hoarders for our compulsive purchasing.
Want more evidence that Steam is also a "game"? Valve added Badges during the last Summer Sale. In other words, Steam has its own achievements, just like any other game. Valve also breaks the fourth wall with their crazy ARGs, and the odd games they come up with during certain sales (remember all those potatoes?). By linking different games together through ARGs, allowing the trading of items within Steam, etc., they make the platform itself a game space.
But here's the thing: Steam is a damn fun game. I enjoy checking compulsively for deals on Steam and other sites. Part of the fun is seeing how good a deal you can get on a game, even if you could afford it at regular price. And playing "The Steam Game" can have benefits for your gaming diet in general. I find myself more likely to buy and play outside my usual comfort zone because most games eventually reach impulse-buy price levels. Some of my favorite games over the last few years have been indie games I picked up on sale, and if I'm unsure about a $60 AAA title I can always wait for the price to drop a bit so it's less of a risk. Finally, from an industry standpoint, purchasing more games but at lower prices "spreads the wealth" a bit more between AAA publishers and smaller developers.
In any case, the Steam Holiday Sale will be starting in a few days and I can't wait to play Steam: The Game during its yearly climax -- even if it's on my phone! I leave you with this great wallpaper PC Gamer made a couple years ago:
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Using Secure Hardware to Harden Casper for Greater Defense In Depth
Loi Luu Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 14, 2017
Loi Luu
National University of Singapore
(This work was done while interning at the Ethereum Foundation)
Tl;dr. We discuss several use cases of hardware root of trust, particularly Intel SGX, to harden proof of stake protocols, particularly Casper, for defense-in-depth. Specifically, we show how SGX can: help resolve long-range forks, harden efficient delegation, harden network time synchrony, and harden connectivity to trusted peer servers. We do not propose a SGX-based proof of stake protocol but propose solutions that omni-harden the security of existing PoS protocols. Although we use Casper, our proposals are agnostic to the underlying PoS protocol.
Background
What is SGX?
Many good references about SGX are available (e.g. this MIT paper and this documentation from Intel). I quote the description about SGX from this.
SGX is a set of instruction set extensions for CPUs released in Fall 2015 and available on recent CPUs. The key ability SGX provides is the notion of confidential, private execution with integrity guarantees. In essence, the chip has a special construct called an enclave. An enclave is like an ordinary program, except that the memory contents of an enclave are encrypted whenever they are off-chip, and accessible only on-chip, and only while the special enclave code is running. Further, the decryption keys are available solely to code with a certain hash: if you or a hacker were to hack the enclave code and change its hash, that hacked code will no longer have access to the encryption keys, repelling attacks. As a result, this ingenious technology does not permit anyone, even the owner of the machine who can modify the code arbitrarily, to peek at the contents of the enclave or to modify execution within an enclave. Further, the SGX hardware enables remote attestation, that is, the ability to prove to a remote computer that a given enclave is running a particular software distribution. In essence, the chip is able to issue a statement that says “I guarantee to any remote party that I am running this code with this particular hash,” which is a critical bootstrapping mechanism.
The nice thing about SGX is that the security guarantees are built into the CPU. SGX enclaves are secure against an attacker who has placed probes on the system bus, has special attack hardware on the USB ports, has modified disk contents and is able to forge network packets any which way. The only way to compromise these guarantees is to shave off the CPU packaging and place probes on the silicon wafer, a costly undertaking requiring a clean room and significant reverse-engineering effort. And users currently already trust Intel (or AMD) to execute their transaction signing code correctly.
Basically, SGX allows:
Executing one’s applications on an untrusted machine with guaranteed confidentiality and integrity of output.
Users to run the desired software in an untampered environment in a remote machine.
It is worth noticing that many recent works have leveraged SGX to build a new consensus protocol (e.g. SawTooth Lake with proof of elapsed time), or a trusted payment channel (e.g. Teechan protocol).
Proof of Stake Protocols and Casper
Most popular cryptocurrencies are using proof of work as a mechanism to probabilistically elect leaders who propose new blocks of transactions. Proof of Work has successfully secured several billion dollars worth of cryptocurrencies. However, proof of work requires miners to burn huge amounts of energy. For instance, the Bitcoin platform may consume as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland, this motivates researchers to propose protocols using proof of stake. The high level idea here is to require users to control coins, or stake in the system, in order to generate new blocks. The protocol randomly selects users as the leaders who will propose and sign new blocks to extend the blockchain. Thus, often mining in proof of stake is called virtual-mining in which the cost of mining is much cheaper than in Proof of Work.
Several proposals for a provably secure proof of stake protocol have been presented recently (e.g. SnowWhite, Ouroboros) . Here we consider the Casper protocol, constructed and proposed by researchers from the Ethereum Foundation, in our discussion. Although the Casper protocol remains unfinalized, many details can be found from these blog posts (See Vlad’s the history of Casper series, Vitalik’s blog posts). In general, Casper makes following assumptions:
Among the online participants, the majority of the stake is controlled by honest or rational participants. The network is highly synchronous, i.e. recipients receive messages within a known, short, bounded delay. It is not possible to reverse the chain from a block which is too far in the history (ie., more than X blocks behind the latest block) (in SnowWhite), or users must know who are the latest participants in the protocol (Casper) in order to determine which chain is the correct one. This assumption solves the long-range fork attack in which an attacker, after cashing out, forks the chain at some previous block to create a new valid-looking chain. There exists some mechanism to incentivize users to participate in the protocol, otherwise no protocol is secure against an attacker who controls even 10% of the coin if only 15% of the stakes are used in the protocol. This assumption builds atop assumption (1). If we can incentivize users to join the protocol, condition (1) is easily satisfied.
This article shows how one can leverage SGX to realize these assumptions practically, thus strengthen existing protocols.
Hardening against long-range forks
New users joining the system are vulnerable to long-range fork attacks if they happen to be on the incorrect chain. Long-range fork is hard to defend against because rational users after sending their coins are incentivized to fork the chain from some previous block to control the coins again. Value at Loss (i.e. the amount of coins will be forfeited if some blockchain is not the correct, or “longest” one) approach in Casper alone does not work because it may turn out that 100% of the stakes have changed hands, so the new chain may have 100% of stakes backing it. Thus, new users just join the fake chain, because they see more stake invested there.
Running Ethereum full nodes in SGX enclaves which can provide the latest validator set to users in the network
In Casper, we assume users will be able to fetch the latest set of validators, and tracing down to the latest finalized block. Where do users fetch such information? Presumably from a third party like EtherScan, wallet providers, etc. Regardless of where users get the latest set of validators, this step is very important as getting a wrong set results in the users reading from the wrong chain. Thus, not having to trust any third party is ideal, since the whole point of going decentralized is to not have to trust on a single party.
Our improvement. We propose a solution to securely provide new users the latest set of validators. In our solution, we run a full node inside an SGX enclave and allow users to fetch the latest validator set from our node. Thus, instead of trusting some third party, users only have to trust:
Intel Corporation didn’t backdoor SGX.
The hardware protecting the enclave.
Our proposal is for users to run full Ethereum nodes inside SGX (there exists framework which helps you easily port your software to run within enclaves). Further, users can remotely attest if the software running inside the enclave is up to date before interacting. The connections between users and SGX are encrypted, so even the malicious OS cannot tamper the network packages. These are some properties that existing third parties like EtherScan cannot provide.
Lowering the barrier to validator participation
We next address incentivizing more users to participate. With the current design, not all coin holders can deposit their coins and be Casper validators because the minimum deposit amount may be of thousands of ether — -a high barrier to entry. Delegation protocols basically allow users to authorize some delegate to vote on their behalf (see Figure X). Thus, thousands of users each has only a few ether can still participate in the protocol, indirectly though, and do not need to be online. However, obviously if the delegates sign invalid blocks, delegated coins may be forfeited.
A naive delegation protocol in Casper which allows users with less than the Casper minimum stake, i.e. 1000 ETH in this example, to indirectly participate in the Casper protocol.
Our solution. We propose a solution to overcome the byzantine delegates problem. Our idea is to run the delegates inside SGX enclaves, thus guaranteeing that the delegates will follow the protocol directly (see the figure below). Each delegate will have a contract to allow users to deposit their coins to. Users also specify how long they want to keep their coins in the contract, i.e. allow the delegate to represent for them. After some time, users can withdraw their coins from the contract, and earn their reward from participating in the protocol.
Running the code of the delegate nodes inside SGX protect users from malicious delegator
There is some potential threat here since the OS which hosts the delegate enclave may be compromised and deny the enclave from participating in the protocol. However, such a threat won’t allow any attacker to steal user deposits. Users will still be able to get their coins back after their deposit periods are over, but without the expected reward (since the delegates couldn’t participate in the protocol). With further analyses, we expect to show that the attacker can only lock users’ coins for awhile.
One approach to resolve the coin-locking problem is to design a proper validation code in Casper, so users can directly request to withdraw their coins from the delegate once they detect that the delegate is malicious. This will be discussed further with more details later (thanks to Vitalik for suggesting this).
Hardening time-synchrony
We can also use SGX to build a globally shared timestamp to improve network synchrony. In the current Ethereum client implementation, a new node gets the global timestamp from a ntp server. These one-time trusts are also required in Bitcoin to some certain extent, and are often omitted from the public logic. A compromised ntp server is also able to disconnect a node from the network by returning incorrect timestamp. Using SGX, one can run ntp servers within different SGX enclaves to implement a global timestamp service for Ethereum nodes. However, this is not complete security as the os can delay the message from the enclave, thus making the timestamp returned from the enclave stale information to the clients. This is to say that SGX only slightly improves the security of the timestamp servers, but does not provide the highest security guarantee.
Hardening initial peer-joining
We can also use SGX to establish trusted peer servers. When joining, an Ethereum client talks to some peer servers which provide some seed nodes (or peers) for the node to connect to and fetch the latest state of the blockchain. It is easy to see that malicious peer servers can easily eclipse attack a node by providing a list of malicious nodes. Using SGX, we make it more difficult for a peer server to return a malicious subset of peers. Nonetheless, the protection is not complete. For example, an adversary can compromise the OS and control the network coming to/from the enclaves. Thus, a peer server inside an enclave may only receive information from malicious peers (the os drops all connections from good peers). Thus, the enclave ends up having information of malicious peers only.
Acknowledgement: Special thanks to Virgil Griffith, Yaoqi Jia, Shweta Shinde and Vitalik Buterin for their feedback in the early version of this blog post. |
An Australian team is building the foundations of the smart home of the future, with an alliance of the world's most powerful technology companies appointing local software developer Two Bulls to expand the AllJoyn internet of things framework.
Originally developed by Qualcomm, the open source AllJoyn framework allows smart devices to discover each other and work together regardless of manufacturer. The AllJoyn framework is now overseen by the AllSeen Alliance — formed in 2013 and backed by dozens of technology heavyweights including Microsoft, Cisco, Sony, Sharp and LG.
The smart house of the future will have its foundations built here in Australia. Credit:iStock
AllJoyn is already built into Microsoft's Windows 10 along with a wide range of devices including LG webOS smart televisions, LifX smart light bulbs and Icontrol Networks' Piper smart home security system.
As the internet of things (IoT) finds its feet, AllJoyn aims to be the glue that holds the smart home together, says Two Bulls chief operating officer Evan Davey. |
Dallas prep school disavows white nationalist alumnus Richard Spencer
Learn more about the Alt-Right up ahead. Learn more about the Alt-Right up ahead. Image 1 of / 34 Caption Close Dallas prep school disavows white nationalist alumnus Richard Spencer 1 / 34 Back to Gallery
An all-boys Dallas prep school recently denounced one of its most infamous alumni, white nationalist Richard Spencer.
Spencer - who is slated to speak at Texas A&M University next month - sparked widespread outrage after invoking Hitler-inspired chants and prompting Nazi salutes at a Washington D.C., event last weekend.
In a statement released online Friday, St. Mark's School of Texas Headmaster David Dini called the former student's views "hateful, divisive, racist, and anti-Semitic."
IN TEXAS: White nationalist scheduled to speak at Texas A&M
"This has been deeply troubling and terribly upsetting to our whole school community," he wrote of the unabashed white nationalist alumnus. "At St. Mark's, we reject racism and bigotry in all its forms and expressions. Our mission, values, and programs stand in direct opposition to these vulgar ideas."
Spencer, who heads up the controversial National Policy Institute and was recently banned from Twitter, garnered widespread media coverage for his support of Donald Trump and his chosen chief strategist, former Breitbart media mogul Steve Bannon.
Initially, Spencer's former high school declined to comment on its 1997 graduate, according to the Dallas Morning News.
ANGRY ON TV: CNN guest snaps over Neo-Nazi questions
Then on Nov. 19, Spencer addressed a crowd of supporters, shouting, "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" Onlookers captured on camera threw up Nazi salutes in response.
Spencer has long advocated for a separate "ethno-state" for whites and called immigration a "proxy-war - maybe a last stand - for White Americans," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The civil rights nonprofit described him as "a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old."
"America was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity," he told the capital crowd last weekend. "It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us."
ALT-RIGHT TWEETS: Ann Coulter draws ire on Twitter for defending American Nazis
In response, one day after Thanksgiving, Dini issued his scathing statement on the video, soundly disavowing Spencer's actions without mentioning him by name.
"We are proud that many of our graduates, parents, students, and other community members are expressing their outrage and disgust toward these ideas; while at the same time, they are demonstrating support for the school they know and love," the statement said.
Other St. Mark's alumni fired back at their former classmate with a crowdfunding campaign to help resettle refugees into the Dallas area.
"Spencer's views are un-American and a threat to civil society," the alumni wrote online. "We reject them and urge everyone to join us in condemning him and his agenda."
By Sunday morning, the campaign had netted more than $41,000 in donations.
Close to 10,000 Spencer foes signed an online petition denouncing the Dec. 6 event at Texas A&M, slated to take place in a building dedicated to the alumni who died in World War I and World War II. Spencer will define the "alt-right" in the speech, according to the event's organizer, former student Preston Wiginton.
Wednesday, State Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, urged the university to cancel the event, which he worried could incite violence on campus. One day later, the World Jewish Congress, an international nonprofit, also mounted pressure on the College Station university to call it off.
FROM THE FRINGE: Alt-right celebrates Trump's electoral victory
"This man is one of the worst hatemongers in America, and his white supremacist and other bigoted ideas are sickening. I urge the university to deny him access to any facilities on campus," WJC President Ronald Lauder said in a statement.
The university has maintained that it cannot cancel the event, as Wiginton scheduled the speech and reserved the event space as a private citizen.
"I don't think that's something we're able to do, no matter how reprehensible we find this individual's choice of words," said university spokeswoman Amy Smith, who also condemned the controversial speaker and said his views are "in direct conflict" with the university's values. |
After spending considerable time on the disabled list this past season, veteran left-hander Derek Holland is "100 percent healthy" and mulling a future in Pittsburgh, according to his agent, Michael Martini, following an eight-year run with the Texas Rangers.
"I'd say the Pirates are on our short list," Martini told Rob Biertempfel of the Pittsburgh Tribune on Saturday.
Holland, who turned 30 last month, had his $11.5-million option rejected earlier this week following another frustrating, injury-marred season in 2016. Once a fixture in Texas' rotation, Holland managed a 4.95 ERA (91 ERA+) and 1.41 WHIP over 20 starts and two relief appearances this year, missing time with shoulder inflammation and failing to eclipse 110 innings pitched for a third straight season.
Given his recent ineffectiveness and inability to stay healthy, Martini said the 30-year-old is amenable to a one-year contract and would be willing to sign with a team even without a guaranteed starting job.
"We'd prefer a guaranteed spot, but Derek is not afraid to compete for a job," Martini said. "We'll see how the market develops, but we would be open to a one-year deal."
The Pirates might be open to that, too. Outside of Gerrit Cole, who logged a career-low 116 innings in 2016 amid persistent elbow problems, the Pirates' tentative rotation for 2017 remains largely inexperienced, as none of Jameson Taillon, Chad Kuhl, Steven Brault, or Tyler Glasnow have made more than 18 starts at the major-league level.
Not only would Holland bring some experience to Pittsburgh's rotation, but he also has a relationship with Pirates manager Clint Hurdle, who became acquainted with the goofy left-hander while serving as the Rangers' hitting coach in 2010.
"Familiarity always helps," Martini said, "but it's not a key thing with us." |
Cue, an app for organizing your online personal information, collects data about its users and found that it now takes people around 10% longer, on average, to answer their email than it did just one year ago.
This may partly be because people are just getting more email. The Radicati Group, a market research firm, estimated in 2011 that the average corporate email user would be sending and receiving about five extra emails a day (pdf, p. 3) each year from 2011 to 2015 — or a 4%-5% annual increase.
But then there's all the extra time people spend on every other form of communication, like text messages, instant message chats, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat — all of which are frankly a lot more fun than email (and quicker, too). Given the increasingly tiny increments of time into which our days our divided, it's amazing we answer email at all.
On current trends, then, if email response times keep increasing by 10% a year, and assuming that an average postal delivery time in your country is two days, by approximately 2020 it will be faster to get an answer from someone by writing a letter than by sending an email.
At that point Google, in order to keep one of the pillars of its advertising business, may find itself obliged to take over the postal systems of the world. Which may be just as well, since nobody else will be able to afford to run them.
Photo courtesy of Flickr, Bruno Girin; Graphic courtesy of Cue
This article originally published at Quartz here |
Overview (4)
Mini Bio (1)
Michael Mantenuto was born on May 13, 1981 in Holliston, Massachusetts, USA. He was an actor, known for Miracle (2004), Surfer, Dude (2008) and Dirtbags (2006). He was married to Kati Vienneau. He died on April 24, 2017 in Des Moines, Washington, USA.
Spouse (1)
Kati Vienneau (? - 24 April 2017) ( his death) ( 2 children)
Trivia (16)
Played hockey for the University of Maine but ended up quitting due to a coaching change.
Worked on a fishing boat in Gloucester, MA.
Father was a hall monitor at Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough, MA.
Transferred to University of Massachusetts-Boston in 2001.
Had a daughter.
Got into a fight on the ice with another player who picked on him and other guys during tryouts for Miracle (2004). He apologized to director Gavin O'Connor afterwards, to which Gavin responded, "No, that was good," and cast him as Jack O'Callahan, the defenseman dubbed "the first one to drop his gloves.".
His last name is the past participle of the Italian verb "mantenere," which means "to maintain."
His father Ed, who was the assistant principal and hockey coach at Holliston High School, suffered a near-fatal stroke in 1993 that left him temporarily paralyzed and mute for three years. After years of rehab, he was able to walk and talk (at a slower pace) again.
Attended Holliston High School.
Had three sisters.
His father taught him how to skate and play hockey from the moment he could walk, while his sisters learned how to figure skate.
Played for the Walpole Junior Stars in the Eastern Junior Hockey League for three years before he was recruited by the University of Maine in 2000.
Was recruited to play hockey by Boston University, University of Maine and University of New Hampshire before ultimately deciding on Maine.
Mother was a therapist.
Was roommates with UMaine Black Bears teammate Todd Jackson before transferring to UMass. Jackson was recruited by the Detroit Red Wings in 2004.
Served in the US Army. Attended basic training in Ft. Benning Georgia in 2010.
Personal Quotes (2)
[on his movie debut in Miracle (2004)] It's always been my intention to pursue an acting career. Fortunately, my hockey background helped open the door for me to do that. |
Dmitry Davydov is a Chief Marketing Officer for Bitrix24, worlds fastest growing free CRM, project management, private social network and online collaboration platform created specifically for small businesses.
PR is hard. And expensive. Most of the time, you get nothing out of it. And when your company finally is mentioned in an article, even in a big publication, the results can be disappointing. One time, we got a whooping 169 visitors after being covered by ZDNet.
Over the past two years, I’ve made a lot of PR mistakes. I’ve also got Bitrix24 into Forbes, VentureBeat, ReadWrite, PCWorld, PCMag, TechRepublic, CIO, ITWorld and 200+ other tech publications.
I’ve learned that what you do with the article after it’s published is frequently a lot more important than what do you before. And I am happy to share my insights with you.
1. Get LinkedIn Inmail
LinkedIn Inmail is the cheapest and most effective way to pitch journalists. My account cost me $100 a month and at least 50 percent of all mentions of Bitrix24 in the press are results of LinkedIn pitches.
The most amazing thing about LinkedIn is that once you find one or two journalists, their network will actually show you who else to contact –editors in the same or other publications. It saves you a lot of time.
With Inmail, the results are guaranteed. You pay only for those messages that got read by their recipients.
2. Contributors are better than editors
Publishing industry is about pageviews – that’s how advertising is sold. To get pageviews, you need content. To get content, you need journalists. To have enough journalists in the world to cover the vast tech industry, you need to pay them.
That’s exactly why many popular publication now have guest blogger and contributor sections.
Your competition and traditional PR agencies are pitching editors, who receive dozens, if not hundreds of proposals every day. My personal experience suggests that contributors and experts are actually much better ‘targets.’
3. Twitter stalking
After you get to know most editors who cover your niche, you should start following their Twitter accounts. When you see a tweet that you can meaningfully respond to or comment on, do so.
If you consistently comment and retweet someone’s account for a couple of months, they’ll start noticing. Now you can pitch. I’ve found that the best way to do this is with a question.
4. Pitch in multiple formats
The same data can be presented in multiple formats – report, infographics, slideshare presentation, webinar, video and so on.
Last Christmas we did a report about social intranet use. We first pitched it as a study that got picked up by major tech publications, like ReadWrite. We then released infographics based on the same data and got a score of mentions again.
I now know that I should also include podcast and videocast friendly materials in my pitches (you can’t easily show infographics in a podcast, and podcasters are almost universally overlooked).
5. Content amplification (free)
We’ve got mentioned in Forbes twice, both times by contributors. One article had 50,000+ views within the first week. Another one got less than 2500 views in the same period of time.
Why the difference? Reddit and StumbleUpon. Your corporate Twitter and Facebook are a given. Submit articles that mention your product or service to Digg, Reddit, Delicious and other free content amplification tools to drive more traffic to them. You won’t always have 100 percent success rate, but when your articles get picked up by Reddit or StumbleUpon, the results are amazing.
6. Content amplification (paid)
If you can’t get your content amplified for free, don’t worry, there are affordable services like Outbrain (what we use) or Taboola that let you buy amplification.
There are several instances when using them makes sense. Some publications rank articles according to pageviews. By driving traffic to your article, you get more pageviews, ranking it higher.
Another instance is when your old article got tapped out and is buried so deep no one can see it.
7. SEO
Let’s face it – Google likes Forbes.com a lot better than your company site or ours. You can use that to your advantage.
For hyper-competitive phrases like ‘productivity tools’ or ‘collaboration tools’ where our own website has no chance of getting to the front page results, we use SEO (links with anchor text and social media mentions) to improve ranking of articles that mention Bitrix24.
Not only it’s easier to improve search engine results page (SERP) results for high authority domain, people trust publications a lot more than vendors sites.
8. Giveaways
When we launched the service, we decided to make it free to startups for a year, but journalists weren’t interested in covering this. So we changed our PR pitch to Bitrix24 announces $1.2 million grant program for startups. That minor tweak made all the difference.
We also routinely partner with other publications for giveaways (most recently, we raffled away a Parrot AR.Drone to TNW readers). Many publications are happy to promote your giveaways for free, but the advantage of giveaways is that you can run them all year round, and not wait for a new release or major product update to contact editors.
9. Lists
There are two ways to get onto lists. First way is to find a year-old article and contact the author, asking if he or she is planning an update. That’s how we got onto PCMag’s Best Free Web Apps list.
Another way is to impress a guest blogger to get them to put you in a list, which can extend to placements in a myriad of websites. The best thing about them is that lists beget lists. When I see our service mentioned on a list that I did not solicit, most of the time I know which older list was used as an inspiration.
10. Promote others
I try to mention as many other tools and services when promoting Bitrix24 as possible, even when these services partially compete with us. Most social media managers are happy to retweet any article that mentions their brand. A lot of time they’ll link to the article from their website or social media pages too. The more qualified traffic, the better!
There are actually a lot more techniques that we used to improve Bitrix24 visibility and drive traffic to our website. Through these strategies, we’ve increased our ROI by more than 10X after we dumped our last PR agency.
Unless we are running a big promotion, our PR related expenses are around $500 a month, and we get 10 to 20 new articles mentioning Bitrix24 during a typical 30-day period. Our last agency cost us $7,000 a month and delivered no results.
If you want ‘predictable’ and affordable PR, here’s what you have to do:
First, contact journalists directly via social media with short pitches, not press releases, and try developing relationships with them over time.
Second, keep looking for new formats, because you aren’t Google and nobody cares about your new release. Third, develop a solid post publication strategy to squeeze out as much traffic from each article as possible.
Finally, concentrate on ‘grassroot PR’ activities that improve your chances of being mentioned in media, without you pitching them directly. Good luck!
Read next: How to apply PR strategies to improve your company’s SEO
Read next: What you need to know about Stellar, the new open-source solution to international currency exchange |
The history of the blockbuster is one of periodic rejuvenation. It began in the 1970s, when Jaws and The Godfather defied convention with their nationwide theatrical roll-outs, drawing sidewalk-thronging crowds by making the movies an event. Then the events returned with sequels, bigger and, if rarely better, at least more expensive.
In the ’90s it was remakes that besieged us, from Godzilla to The Mummy to Father of the Bride; a decade later came reboots, in which a franchise near death could be reconceived, re-cast and thus, restored, quite miraculously, to full commercial health.
Presently, we’re witnessing the blockbuster’s latest evolutionary leap. It’s the dawn of the Extended Universe: a loose cluster of multi-million-dollar movie franchises that’s transforming the movie-going event into an unremitting siege.
In the realm of the modern blockbuster, the superhero movie reigns supreme. So naturally, superheroes have been instrumental in parlaying the Extended Universe from fad to prevailing trend.
Marvel Studios, in its capacity as Disney-owned entertainment juggernaut, set the early template: its film Iron Man would connect, somewhat tenuously, with The Incredible Hulk, Thor and Captain America, before the lot of them ultimately converged in The Avengers, a sort of glass menagerie of action heroes and the superstars who play them. Each instalment enjoyed the name-brand fame of a sequel without the stigma of repetition: Thor seemed enough like Hulk to attract its audience, but different enough to promise something new.
The strategy proved fruitful — The Avengers and The Avengers: Age of Ultron together earned nearly $3 billion worldwide theatrically — and, as a consequence, widely influential.
Every conglomerate in Hollywood rummaged through its catalogue of trademarked properties in a bid to find the best to seize upon and diversify. Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Transformers are in the process of expanding to a Universal scale as I write.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, meanwhile, continues to broaden: already a dozen films deep, it boasts another 11 in production for release over the next three years, with a supplementary Universe of television series already under way. Moviegoers have long complained that the titles on the multiplex marquee are too familiar. It seems they are poised to become more familiar still.
This Friday arrives Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and with it the newly established DC Extended Universe. About the complexity of the Universe trend this one may be instructive.
Batman and Superman, of course, are comic book characters developed for DC in the late 1930s. Together and separately they’ve appeared in dozens of movies, TV shows, and video games over the years, portrayed by many different actors and interpreted in many different ways.
Dawn of Justice is billed as a sequel of sorts to the 2013 film Man of Steel, also directed by Zack Snyder and in which Superman was also played by Henry Cavill. It shares characters and locations with the forthcoming film Suicide Squad, about a coterie of DC villains. And it will be followed in years to come by Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg, stand-alone features centered on characters to be introduced here.
There is a great deal more where Dawn of Justice came from, in other words, and the super-heroic deluge is en route. What’s confusing is that we were not exactly living long in these characters’ absence. Perhaps the decade that’s passed since Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns underwhelmed us is sufficient time to arouse some curiosity in the exploits of Clark Kent.
But Batman we’ve hardly just left: it was only four years ago now that The Dark Knight Rises brought Christopher Nolan’s dour caped crusader trilogy to an end, and already that material has been vaporized, in the mercurial flux of franchise canons, to clear the way for a Batman adventure anew. This is the blockbuster mentality in 2016. It isn’t enough to give the world a superhero movie. We have to be inundated by them, ever ready to mutate and multiply. Batman and Superman will doubtless haunt the cinema every few years until you die.
Certainly, there must be an upper limit to this phenomenon — a point at which a Universe extends itself a film too far, exhausting at last their commercial appeal. There does seem to be something distinctly enervating about these pictures, does there not?
It isn’t just a problem of volume: during the studio era, the Western was even more ubiquitous, and for the most part no less interchangeable. The Avengers isn’t exactly Stagecoach, true; nor are superhero movies especially dire, as blockbusters go. So what makes me vaguely dread Deadpool or Dawn of Justice, even if, or more usually when, they earn glowing reviews?
The problem, I think, has to do not with volume but magnitude. The movies that make up these Universes are colossal, their marketing campaigns deafening. The Western in its Golden Age was often cheaply produced and hastily released. The superhero movie, by contrast, is obliged to be an event.
Straining to be monumental, each new instalment in the ongoing adventures of Marvel or DC tries hard to distinguish itself as more than just another link in the blockbuster chain — even though that is, of course, precisely what it is. The Extended Universe necessarily spreads enthusiasm thin. How it could be otherwise? A special event doesn’t seem so special when it comes to pass 10 times every year. |
September 28, 2010 at 10:05 Tags Vim
I've written earlier about some problems I was having with the cscope tool for browsing Python code in Vim. Well, it turns out I was using an older version of pycscope for some reason, and the latest version actually does play well with cscope .
Interestingly, cscope wasn't really designed to support languages other than C. I've had an interesting email exchange with one of its maintainers, and I think the following quote from him is conclusive:
The program's name is "cscope" for a reason. It's not called c++scope, not javacscope, not pythoncsope, and certainly not "every programming language under the sun"scope.
Asked about the database format of cscope , he said that it's not documented by design, to make sure all tools go through cscope itself. Fair enough, I guess.
The author of pycscope , however, perused the code of cscope (open source FTW!) to understand the DB format and generate a compatible cscope.out file from his script, which made it possible to use the integration of cscope in Vim after all. |
The world lost one of its truly beautiful minds this Saturday, when a taxi carrying John Nash, 86, and his wife of nearly 60 years, Alicia, crashed on the New Jersey Turnpike. The two were killed on the spot when the driver of the Ford Crown Victoria lost control as he tried to pass a Chrysler in the center lane, crashing into a guard rail according to NJ.com.
The Nashes were ejected from the car according to State Police Sgt. Gregory Williams, adding that "It doesn't appear that they were wearing seatbelts."
The second vehicle also crashed into the guard rail, Williams said. The taxi driver was extricated from the vehicle and flown to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick with non-life-threatening injuries.
John Forbes Nash, Jr, was best known recently for the 2001 movie starting Russell Crowe "A Beautiful Mind" which depicted Nash's struggles with schizophrenia. His biggest accomplishment was his groundbreaking and pioneering work on game theory. Nash earned a Ph.D. degree in 1950 with a 28-page dissertation on non-cooperative games.
The thesis contained the definition and properties of what is now known as the "Nash equilibrium" - a crucial concept in non-cooperative games, it won Nash the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994.
As NJ.com reports, Nash spent his career at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He's considered a giant in mathematics, particularly in the field of partial differential equations, but won the Nobel Prize in economics for a paper he wrote on game theory, the mathematics of decision-making.
In addition to the Nobel, Nash has won the John von Neumann Theory Prize (1978) and the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Research (1999).
Nash was in Norway on Tuesday to receive the Abel Prize for mathematics from King Harald V for his work, along with longtime colleague Louis Nirenberg, on nonlinear partial differential equations.
Nirenberg, reached at his home Sunday, said Nash was a "wonderful mathematician" and person. Nirenberg had just flown back from Norway with the couple. The Nashes were taking a taxi back from the airport, he said. Nirenberg had known the couple since the 1950s.
Alicia Nash was his caretaker while he battled his mental illness. They became mental health care advocates when their son John was also diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Upon learning of the crash, Russell Crowe who was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for his role as John Nash took to Twitter to share condolences.
Stunned...my heart goes out to John & Alicia & family. An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts. https://t.co/XF4V9MBwU4 — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) May 24, 2015
We share in his condolences as the world has indeed just lost one of its most brilliant minds of the past century.
Follows a clip of Nash accepting the Nobel prize in 1994.
And here is an interview with Dr. John Nash at the 1st Meeting of Laureates in Economic Sciences in Lindau, Germany, September 1-4, 2004.
What may be one of Nash's last documented media appearances, here is the legendary mathematician speaking at Seton Hall University in 2012.
Finally, for those who may be unfamiliar with Nash's life and achievements, here is a National Geographic documentary of the game theory pioneer. |
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama doctor is accused of illegally prescribing drugs that contributed to the overdose death of longtime 3 Doors Down guitarist Matt Roberts earlier this year, court documents show.
Newly unsealed records show Dr. Richard Snellgrove of Fairhope, Alabama, is charged with illegally prescribing Fentanyl, an opioid pain medication, and another drug to Roberts days before he was found dead of a overdose in August in West Bend, Wisconsin.
Records show Snellgrove, 59, was named in a six-count federal indictment in October. The charges were not made public until a judge unsealed them last week.
An attorney representing Snellgrove, Dennis Knizley, said Wednesday that the physician did nothing wrong.
"If medication played a role in Mr. Roberts' death it was because of improper use, not anything that was attributed to anything Dr. Snellgrove did," he said.
Roberts lived in Spanish Fort, Alabama, near Mobile, at the time of his death; he was 38. A grand jury in Mobile returned the indictment.
Roberts' father, Darrell Roberts Sr., told a Drug Enforcement Administration agent that Snellgrove was a "celebrity junkie" who his son called "Snelly," according to a sworn statement by DEA agent Michael Burt. The two were "tight" and Matt Roberts sometimes had after-hours appointments with Snellgrove, whom he had seen as a patient since at least 2004, the statement said.
Roberts was found dead in the hall outside his hotel room while visiting Wisconsin for a charity performance. Roberts was wearing a Fentanyl patch like one prescribed by Snellgrove two days earlier, the statement said, and he also had pills matching ones the doctor prescribed.
Agents seized records from Snellgrove's two offices on the Alabama coast in September, the statement said. Burt wrote that there was evidence that Snellgrove illegally prescribed drugs including methadone and Fentanyl to Roberts six times dating to 2011.
The agent's statement said the Fentanyl and a narcotic pain medication, Norco, wrongly prescribed by Snellgrove were contributing factors in the musician's death. Fentanyl also was blamed in the death of rock musician Prince earlier this year.
Snellgrove remains in private practice but is not prescribing controlled substances, his attorney said.
"Dr. Snellgrove is a well-respected physician with an impeccable reputation. This case centers around one patient. Dr. Snellgrove treated Mr. Roberts ethically and professionally," said Knizley.
Roberts was a founding member of the Mississippi-based rock band but quit in 2012 citing health reasons. He is credited with co-writing the band's hit "Kryptonite."
Court documents say Roberts had fought substance abuse problems. |
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan changed tack on Friday and said Turkey will allow its Incirlik air base to be used by the United States to fight against "Islamic State" (IS) militants "within a certain framework." His confirmation came hours after Turkish warplanes struck IS sites inside Syria.
US and Turkish officials said the Turkish president had discussed the use of the southern Turkish base during a telephone conversation with US President Barack Obama earlier in the week.
Previously, Turkey had been reluctant to join the US-led coalition, which includes some Arab states, formed last year when IS seized swathes of northern Syria and Iraq.
On Friday, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the first ever Turkish airstrikes against IS overnight had "removed potential threats" to Turkey. He added that they could continue.
Three F-16 jets operating from the Diyarbakir air base in southeast Turkey had dropped so-called "smart bombs" on three IS targets, said a government official.
Turkish media claimed the targets were in the Syrian village of Hawar al-Naht, just inside Syria.
Incirlik closer to Syria
Incirlik, a NATO air base, lies in Turkey's Adana province. Its proximity to Syria would put US fighter jets closer to IS and allow a wider range of aircraft to take part in combat missions.
Erdogan was hesitant over Incirlik's use by the US
The US had been pushing Turkey since last year for use of the base. Until now, it has used bases in allied Arab nations.
Friday's Turkish air raids on IS coincided with the arrests of nearly 300 people during Turkish police raids in Istanbul and 12 Turkish provinces.
Davutoglu said among those arrested were 37 foreigners alleged to be members of either the IS or the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
Fast developments
Monday's suicide bombing aimed at pro-Kurdish youth activists gathered at Suruc near the Syrian border killed 32 people. It was widely blamed on IS.
Two Turkish police officers were then killed in what the PKK said was retaliation for their alleged collaboration in the Suruc attack.
Turkey on Thursday said one of its soldiers and an IS militant were killed in what the Turkish army said was an attack on a border post.
Turning a blind eye?
In the past, Turkey had been accused of turning a blind eye to extremists, including foreign recruits, who crossed into Syria from Turkey to fight against Syrian government forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.
The main US allies inside Syria have been the Syrian-Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) which since last year have pushed back IS.
Resulting incidents have stoked tension between Kurds in Turkey and Erdogan's government and stalled a 2013 peace process involved the PKK.
The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) headed by Erdogan and Davutoglu is still looking for a partner for a new coalition government. It lost its parliamentary majority in last month's election for the first time since 2002.
ipj/sms (dpa, AP) |
Dick Cheney praises NSA surveillance program The former Vice President also called Edward Snowden a "traitor," and President Obama "not credible"
Dick Cheney was unfazed by revelations about the NSA's broad phone surveillance program, saying in an interview on Fox News Sunday that if the technology was available at the time, "we might well have been able to prevent 9/11."
"As everybody who's been associated with the program's said, if we had had this before 9/11, when there were two terrorists in San Diego, two hijackers, had been able to use that program, that capability, against that target, we might well have been able to prevent 9/11," Cheney said. He continued with a pointed criticism of President Obama. "I find a lot of it is, in other areas — the IRS, Benghazi — not credible. I'm obviously not a fan of the incumbent president."
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Asked about Edward Snowden, who leaked information about the NSA program to the press, Cheney called him a "traitor."
"I think it's one of the worst occasions, in my memory, of somebody with access to classified information doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the United States," he said. |
Ravi Inder Gill takes a look at Axel Tuanzebe, Man Utd’s young defender waiting in the shadows.
In today’s game, modern centre-backs are a rare commodity. Defenders with the ability to keep up with the quickest of strikers, the physicality to get stuck in and win the ball, and also the ability to play crisp passes from the back are highly sought after across Europe. If your club are lucky enough to agree terms with a player of this ilk, expect them to pay through their nose for his services, especially with the crazy transfer market we live in today. With a dearth of options available on the market, many clubs have turned to their academies in the hope of finding the next Rio Ferdinand or Sergio Ramos. Premier League and European giants Manchester United, a club known to be a conveyer belt for talent, think they have unearthed the next budding defensive star in Axel Tuanzebe. There’s a lot to know about him.
Who is Axel Tuanzebe?
Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo on November 14th 1997, Axel Tuanzebe moved to England at an early age and was raised in the Greater Manchester town of Rochdale. He joined Manchester United’s famed academy in 2005 and was a member of the club’s Milk Cup Premier U16s winning sides in 2013 and 2014. Tuanzebe captained the academy’s Under-18s side as a first-year scholar in the 2014/2015 season and was awarded the Jimmy Murphy Young Player of Year at the end of the campaign. His U18s coach Paul McGuinness noted that Tuanzebe was the first first-year scholar to captain the academy squad since United icon Gary Neville did it back in the 1991/1992 season. The Rochdale-bred defender received his first call-up to the first-team in October 2015. He was selected for the match-day squad for the fixture against Crystal Palace on October 31 as an unused substitute. Newly appointed manager José Mourinho included Tuanzebe in his 2016 pre-season tour squad and remarked after the academy product’s eight minute debut against Wigan Athletic: “10 minutes is enough! The potential is there, you see it immediately.”
After impressing for the Under-23s in the first half of the 2016/2017 season, Tuanzebe was again called-up to the first-team and made his competitive Manchester United debut in the FA Cup against Wigan Athletic at Old Trafford on January 31. Four days after his professional debut, the club awarded the Congo-born centre-back with a fresh contract running to atleast 2020. Four months after his debut, Tuanzebe made his Premier League debut against Arsenal where he started at his secondary position right-back. Although United went on to lose the match 2-0, the boy from Rochdale was impressive in his debut neutralizing the attacking threat of Alexis Sanchez. He capped off the campaign by picking up the Denzil Haroun Reserve Team Player of the Year award in May. Alongside his club career, Tuanzebe is also a capped England international. The nineteen year-old made his England debut in June 2016 for the Under-19s and has since gone on to make nine appearances for the Three Lions’ Under-20s side.
What is his Style of Play?
Tuanzebe is a prototypical modern centre-back. He is an astute defender who also plays the ball out from the back quite comfortably. The nineteen year-old has a high footballing IQ and uses his intelligence to read the play well. You will rarely see him make a high-risk sliding tackle because his reading of the game is so sharp. Tuanzebe has pace in abundance and uses his athleticism to outmuscle attackers and move the ball out of dangerous areas. A leader, the Rochdale-bred defender is constantly talking to his teammates during the course of the match to ensure cohesion and on-field organization. The England U20s man is an aggressive, yet tactical defender and is often seen running from the backline into the middle of the park to confront defenders and win the ball before initiating a counter-attack. Standing in at 6’1″, Tuanzebe has good height and uses his size to attack set-pieces and chip in with a goal or two for his team.
What are his Strengths?
Tuanzebe has all of the tools he needs to develop into a world-class centre-back. He is a very good ball-playing defender and he has the confidence and ability to dribble past his marker where he will then look to make a good forward pass. The teenager is a calm and composed defender and he knows exactly when to stick out a leg to win the ball standing up and when to go to ground with a hard crunching tackle. Tuanzebe has very good positional awareness – a trait not commonly found in young players. The England international can be relied upon to cover for his teammates when they have been stretched out of position in pursuit of opposition attackers. If he makes an erroneous decision defensively, Tuanzebe will recover well and re-engage in the play until the danger has been averted. The Rochdale-bred centre-back is an aggressive marker and will stick to attackers like glue throughout the match – much like he did against Alexis Sanchez in his eye-opening Premier League debut against Arsenal in May 2017.
Going forward, Tuanzebe can pick a pass with ease and gives his team another option when it comes to launching attacks from deep. As mentioned earlier, Tuanzebe’s pace is another asset of his. The nineteen year-old is very quick for a centre-back and he is able to catch up to the quickest of strikers without a real fuss. His pace brings assurance to the backline as his teammates know that Tuanzebe will be able to cover for them if something goes awry in the defensive phase of the game. Although his future lies at centre-back, the United academy product also has the versatility to play in other positions. Tuanzebe’s reading of the game, ability to organize teammates, and his crisp passing allow him to step into the midfield as a defensive midfielder quite naturally. He can also do a job at right-back where he is able to use his pace and and dribbling to be a difference maker on both ends of the pitch.
What are his Weaknesses?
The only real weakness in Tuanzebe’s game is his inability to consistently deal with set-pieces. Too many times he is beaten in the air when defending corners or long-range free-kicks, gifting the opposition high-quality scoring chances. He needs to work on his positioning and decision-making to rectify this part of his game if he wants to be a trusted defensive cog for the first-team. This process can be expedited if the England youth international were to be paired with a experienced, commanding centre-half (e.g., Eric Bailly) who can organize the backline on set-pieces and take the initiative to attack the balls which are being delivered into the box. Additionally, while his physique is decent, Tuanzebe would do well to add a couple of pounds of muscle to better prepare himself for the next level. Premier League attackers are generally bigger and stronger than the players he faces on a weekly-basis in the Under-23s so there is a risk that he could be outmuscled in the top-flight and in Europe competitions. Tuanzebe is a already a top talent. If he can work on his aerial defending and physique he will only further raise his already elevated ceiling. |
Something that often, uh... bugs Go developers is the lack of a proper debugger. Sure, builds are ridiculously fast and easy, and println(hex.Dump(b)) is your friend, but sometimes it would be nice to just set a breakpoint and step through that endless if chain or print a bunch of values without recompiling ten times.
CC BY 2.0 image by Carl Milner
You could try to use some dirty gdb hacks that will work if you built your binary with a certain linker and ran it on some architectures when the moon was in a waxing crescent phase, but let's be honest, it isn't an enjoyable experience.
Well, worry no more! godebug is here!
godebug is an awesome cross-platform debugger created by the Mailgun team. You can read their introduction for some under-the-hood details, but here's the cool bit: instead of wrestling with half a dozen different ptrace interfaces that would not be portable, godebug rewrites your source code and injects function calls like godebug.Line on every line, godebug.Declare at every variable declaration, and godebug.SetTrace for breakpoints (i.e. wherever you type _ = "breakpoint" ).
I find this solution brilliant. What you get out of it is a (possibly cross-compiled) debug-enabled binary that you can drop on a staging server just like you would with a regular binary. When a breakpoint is reached, the program will stop inline and wait for you on stdin. It's the single-binary, zero-dependencies philosophy of Go that we love applied to debugging. Builds everywhere, runs everywhere, with no need for tools or permissions on the server. It even compiles to JavaScript with gopherjs (check out the Mailgun post above—show-offs ;) ).
You might ask, "But does it get a decent runtime speed or work with big applications?" Well, the other day I was seeing RRDNS—our in-house Go DNS server—hit a weird branch, so I placed a breakpoint a couple lines above the if in question, recompiled the whole of RRDNS with godebug instrumentation, dropped the binary on a staging server, and replayed some DNS traffic.
filippo@staging:~$ ./rrdns -config config.json -> _ = "breakpoint" (godebug) l q := r.Query.Question[0] --> _ = "breakpoint" if !isQtypeSupported(q.Qtype) { return (godebug) n -> if !isQtypeSupported(q.Qtype) { (godebug) q dns.Question{Name:"filippo.io.", Qtype:0x1, Qclass:0x1} (godebug) c
Boom. The request and the debug log paused (make sure to kill any timeout you have in your tools), waiting for me to step through the code.
Sold yet? Here's how you use it: simply run godebug {build|run|test} instead of go {build|run|test} . We adapted godebug to resemble the go tool as much as possible. Remember to use -instrument if you want to be able to step into packages that are not main.
For example, here is part of the RRDNS Makefile:
bin/rrdns: ifdef GODEBUG GOPATH="${PWD}" go install github.com/mailgun/godebug GOPATH="${PWD}" ./bin/godebug build -instrument "${GODEBUG}" -o bin/rrdns rrdns else GOPATH="${PWD}" go install rrdns endif test: ifdef GODEBUG GOPATH="${PWD}" go install github.com/mailgun/godebug GOPATH="${PWD}" ./bin/godebug test -instrument "${GODEBUG}" rrdns/... else GOPATH="${PWD}" go test rrdns/... endif
Debugging is just a make bin/rrdns GODEBUG=rrdns/... away.
This tool is still young, but in my experience, perfectly functional. The UX could use some love if you can spare some time (as you can see above it's pretty spartan), but it should be easy to build on what's there already.
About source rewriting
Before closing, I'd like to say a few words about the technique of source rewriting in general. It powers many different Go tools, like test coverage, fuzzing and, indeed, debugging. It's made possible primarily by Go’s blazing-fast compiles, and it enables amazing cross-platform tools to be built easily.
However, since it's such a handy and powerful pattern, I feel like there should be a standard way to apply it in the context of the build process. After all, all the source rewriting tools need to implement a subset of the following features:
Wrap the main function
Conditionally rewrite source files
Keep global state
Why should every tool have to reinvent all the boilerplate to copy the source files, rewrite the source, make sure stale objects are not used, build the right packages, run the right tests, and interpret the CLI..? Basically, all of godebug/cmd.go. And what about gb, for example?
I think we need a framework for Go source code rewriting tools. (Spoiler, spoiler, ...)
If you’re interested in working on Go servers at scale and developing tools to do it better, remember we’re hiring in London, San Francisco, and Singapore! |
[gopher videoid=”55cd2fca776562743b000001″ autoplay=”yes”]
August 14, 1952:
On this day, Texas’ first freeway, the stretch of I-45 from Houston to Galveston better known as the Gulf Freeway, was complete and open for cruising.
The freeway was built in stages beginning in 1946. Two years later, the first section from downtown to Telephone Road was completed bringing forth a crowd of 500 that gathered on the Calhoun Road overpass to celebrate the first freeway dedication. It was also esteemed as “the best money can buy.”
By 1954, 90,000 vehicles were travelling on the road a day, and with those huge numbers came the notorious Traffic Jam! Houston was experiencing its first congested freeway and feeling the design flaws in the “best freeway money can buy.” Actually, the course of conversation changed from statements of positivity to negative one-liners like, “I just hope to live long enough to see the Gulf Freeway finished.”
In 1997, nearly 50 years after the initial opening, the completion of the huge stack interchange finally ended the non-stop construction of the freeway. Well, at least for a little while. But hey, let’s give the initial designers a break! It was the first freeway in Texas after all.
What do you do to prevent yourself from losing your mind in Houston traffic jams? Tell us in the comments below, or tweet our host, Michael Callahan, @MCallahanTV using #ForgottenDayHOU, and he’ll tweet you back! |
In an incredibly well-planned and executed move demonstrating a deep understanding of my personal interests, Zagat has set up a Tiny Cafe pop-up shop in New York City. The pop-up is to celebrate the new 2017 New York City Restaurants Guidebook and the relaunch of the restaurant review iOS app from the Google-owned company. The app offers restaurant guidance from editors who curate snippets from user reviews, with the data coming from Google's Local Guides program. Using that same concept — "small reviews are easier to digest" — the pop-up offers free, tiny versions of food from the top-rated restaurants on the app.
I'm a long-time lover of tiny food, so nothing was going to keep me away from my chance to eat microscopic versions of New York's best-rated, most Instagrammed meals. Standing around the outdoor pop-up in 40-degree weather, I waited for my food amid the deafening sounds of ambulance sirens and construction. My phone eventually shut down from the cold, and I anxiously waited for it to turn back on, using my own body heat to warm it. Yet I persisted; I had to do it for the 'gram.
After I finally received my food, I had my back turned for one second when disaster struck. A sharp gust of wind blew the tiny portions of tiny food away, shattering the doll-furniture plates and sending miniscule hamburger buns flying across the sidewalk. I laughed at the disaster and internally cried from the cuteness of it all, then patiently waited for another batch of tiny food to come out. Three bites and approximately 45 calories' worth of food later, it was over. Taste-wise, it was about the same as the originals. I'd had the $19 full-sized version of the burger from Emily before, and the experience was like taking an extremely small, crumb-sized bite out of it. But I wasn't there for the food, of course. Like any self-respecting millennial, I was there to be able to say I was there. I wiped my nose, and left to go get regular-sized lunch.
Zagat Tiny Cafe is located at Astor Place, New York and is open 11am-7pm until Saturday, Oct 29. |
Introduction:
All you need to know:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll2sZ0Imd0o
...And a normal map clear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKGtHjy4Jaw
Still confused as to what is going on? Let me explain!
Mechanics!
I will start off with the build enabling items. These gloves is the most important piece of gear for this build. Without these gloves, we cannot make this work.
The unique property "Knockback direction is reversed" is key. By gaining enough knockback from the knockback gem, and rolling jewels on tree, we can achieve 100% chance to knock back enemies on hit.
Note that jewels IS required in order to achieve this. Also note that over 90% is really all you need, getting to 100% is for perfectionists and those people who want absolute consistency.
Example jewels:
So now that we have reverse knockback, does that not sound dangerous?
That's where totems come in!
By using totems, we can stay at a safe distance while our totems take all the beating. Having our totems crowded with enemies means we can utilize the niché, but extremely powerful bow, Chin Sol.
The unique property "100% more bow damage at close range" is key here.
A good rolled Chin Sol can have over 250 Physical DPS. At close range this will effectively turn into 500 Physical dps, which is extremely good. We are not done yet though! The node "Point Blank" on the skill tree allows us to get an additional 50% more projectile damage at close range! This boosts our damage even further and allows us to wear down even the toughest of bosses.
The next build enabling uniques are directly related to totems.
Rain of splinters is an amazing jewel. It doesn't look much different from a LMP gem, but beeing "Reduced" damage instead of "less" is huge. It also saves up a socket on our main link, which is always welcome!
Skirmish is a new quiver introduced in 2.3 which is amazing for this build. it gives us some intelligence and mana regen, but most importantly, it allows us to place down an additional totem. We also want to grab the additional totem gained from Ancestral bond, so that we in total get 3 totems.
Remaining gear:
This build is very flexible. The rest of our gear can be all rares or you can try to fit in other gear types aswell. I was really lucky with my Cospri's Will, and managed to get a 6l. This item is not required at all to play this build. Until I had cospri's, I had a rare 6l ev/armour piece solely because of easy colouring. If you manage to get 4 off colours on Lioneye's vision, it would problably be best in slot as you get the free pierce.
Remaining gear:
You should prioritize stats in this order: Resists - Life - armour/EV- Physical Damage - attributes - anything else.
Note:
Strength can be really useful as we pick up Iron Grip. Since we also move alot on the left side of the tree, the bonus is quite nice. You should still focus on physical damage, as that is way better for our damage than a few points of strenght.
My current settup involves 3 curses. This is not necesary by any means, and even one curse should be more than enough. My intuitive leap jewel is also not a must, but rather quality of life.
Important: If you don't own a cospri's, do not spec into aura nodes. Run enfeeble in blasphemy and arctic armour + herald of ash.
Gem settups:
We want something that can hit alot of enemies. Tornado shot is in my opinion the best skill for this, as projecties will fly in every direction hitting alot of enemies, making them sucked in faster.
My current settup is: Ranged Attack Totem - Tornado Shot - Pierce - Physical Projectile Attack Damage - Faster attacks - knockback
For frenzy charge generation, we use frenzy - gmp. You can also add a curse here to curse enemies with an offensive curse while they are outside of your blasphemy radius.
My other gem settups can be seen on my gear display.
Ascendancy
We pick scion because of a variety of reasons. The two main resons can be found in the deadeye ascendancy. We get +1 projectiles, which means that our totems shoot one additional arrow. We also get 30% chance to pierce, which combined with our pierce gem puts us at 80% pierce. This is huge concidering the huge chunks of enemies we suck in with our totems. Hitting all of them means the ystay in place.
For my second ascendancy I picked chieftan. It increases our damage and gives us regen when we have a totem up. This helps since we want to be casting blood rage for even more attack speed. (alltough not necesary).
We also get 4 additional skill points, which is always nice.
Leveling
Leveling is very straight forward. We start off by taking the "harrier" node, to get some speed early game.
We then proceed either through the damage nodes into sentinel, or the life regen into Shaper. It is optional what you do.
I used bows to level with. Once you reach level 19, pick up a skirmish so you can have 2 totems at a time. Recomended leveling uniques are Storm cloud, doomfletch, and death's harp.
Other useful uniques: Meginord's girdle is amazing for packing some extra damage early on.
LEVEL 30 tree:
Spoiler
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAAAAPKXOyibXQOWqJpuPVpSe8NgQ76ASsiDCW6qZIS18gagNZL5vf6P2L1N4_4Kple3PjGeg8w8LYNfxq7E9hDMcqn-h6yq9zJ7IFnzfNn4kxo4cg-QVWaeJy9Y5SoTwxNaK6PylG9mVA==
LEVEL 52 tree:
Spoiler https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAAAAPKXOyibXQOWqJpuPVpSe8NgQ76ASsiDCW6qZIS18gagNZL5vf6P2L1N4_4Kple3PjGeg8w8LYNfxq7E9hDMcqn-h6yq9zJ7IFnz6hh82fiTGjhyD_jrkFWUb2aeFHEnL2ZUWOXZfA48KhPDE4IHOlJaK4ZgvJ8yfqPyYVIYke9OXhNAoHrvBS107Tbo_7AE5HXQ
Pick up any attribute nodes or "Tireless" if you feel you have problems sustaining your mana. "Dynamo" is also great early on.
Skip alot of nodes so that we can get to point blank and pick up the knockback nodes as we reach level 62.
Level 62 is when we can start to use Chin Sol. You should not follow this tree religiously. Deviating from the tree might be necesary.
LEVEL 62 tree:
Spoiler https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAAAAPKXOyibXQOWqJpuPVpSe8NgQ76ASsiDCW6qZIS18gagNZL5vf6P2L1N4_4Kple3PjGeg8w8LYNfxq7E9hDMr6dyqf6HHM6sqvcyeyArUFnz6hh82fiTDc0aOHIP-Ov-VJBVlG9mnhRxJy9mVFjl2XwOPCoTwxOCBzpSWiuGYLyfMn6j8mFSNugYke9O_7BeEwTkQKB10HrvIWAFLXTxdO0Y2xR1pMI=
This is when we unlock chin sol, so preferably we want the knockback and point blank to be in place. If you cant reach both at level 62, aim for knockback first and keep using chin sol until you get the point blank node.
You want to equip empire's grasp and Chin sol at the same time.
After this, you can do what you want to. Pick up the remaining life nodes and some totem nodes, And do as you wish with the remaining points.
Bandits: Oak - Kill - Kraytin
Notes:
When I first played this build I transitioned into ancestral bond by act 4 Normal.
I grinded Cruel dried lake until I got level 62. For some this might not be necesary, but that's how I did it atleast.
Have fun leveling and I hope you enjoy my build. Stay safe! :)
If you like this build, you might like my other builds aswell! I have plenty of other hipster builds on my youtube channel, so feel free to check em' out!
After alot of demand for me to make a guide, here it is :)All you need to know:Still confused as to what is going on? Let me explain!I will start off with the build enabling items. These gloves is the most important piece of gear for this build. Without these gloves, we cannot make this work.The unique property "Knockback direction is reversed" is key. By gaining enough knockback from the knockback gem, and rolling jewels on tree, we can achieve 100% chance to knock back enemies on hit.Note that jewels IS required in order to achieve this. Also note that over 90% is really all you need, getting to 100% is for perfectionists and those people who want absolute consistency.Example jewels:So now that we have reverse knockback, does that not sound dangerous?That's where totems come in!By using totems, we can stay at a safe distance while our totems take all the beating. Having our totems crowded with enemies means we can utilize the niché, but extremely powerful bow, Chin Sol.The unique property "100% more bow damage at close range" is key here.A good rolled Chin Sol can have over 250 Physical DPS. At close range this will effectively turn into 500 Physical dps, which is extremely good. We are not done yet though! The node "Point Blank" on the skill tree allows us to get an additional 50% more projectile damage at close range! This boosts our damage even further and allows us to wear down even the toughest of bosses.The next build enabling uniques are directly related to totems.Rain of splinters is an amazing jewel. It doesn't look much different from a LMP gem, but beeing "Reduced" damage instead of "less" is huge. It also saves up a socket on our main link, which is always welcome!Skirmish is a new quiver introduced in 2.3 which is amazing for this build. it gives us some intelligence and mana regen, but most importantly, it allows us to place down an additional totem. We also want to grab the additional totem gained from Ancestral bond, so that we in total get 3 totems.This build is very flexible. The rest of our gear can be all rares or you can try to fit in other gear types aswell. I was really lucky with my Cospri's Will, and managed to get a 6l. This item is not required at all to play this build. Until I had cospri's, I had a rare 6l ev/armour piece solely because of easy colouring. If you manage to get 4 off colours on Lioneye's vision, it would problably be best in slot as you get the free pierce.Remaining gear:You should prioritize stats in this order: Resists - Life - armour/EV- Physical Damage - attributes - anything else.Note:Strength can be really useful as we pick up Iron Grip. Since we also move alot on the left side of the tree, the bonus is quite nice. You should still focus on physical damage, as that is way better for our damage than a few points of strenght.My current settup involves 3 curses. This is not necesary by any means, and even one curse should be more than enough. My intuitive leap jewel is also not a must, but rather quality of life.Gem settups:We want something that can hit alot of enemies. Tornado shot is in my opinion the best skill for this, as projecties will fly in every direction hitting alot of enemies, making them sucked in faster.My current settup is: Ranged Attack Totem - Tornado Shot - Pierce - Physical Projectile Attack Damage - Faster attacks - knockbackFor frenzy charge generation, we use frenzy - gmp. You can also add a curse here to curse enemies with an offensive curse while they are outside of your blasphemy radius.My other gem settups can be seen on my gear display.We pick scion because of a variety of reasons. The two main resons can be found in the deadeye ascendancy. We get +1 projectiles, which means that our totems shoot one additional arrow. We also get 30% chance to pierce, which combined with our pierce gem puts us at 80% pierce. This is huge concidering the huge chunks of enemies we suck in with our totems. Hitting all of them means the ystay in place.For my second ascendancy I picked chieftan. It increases our damage and gives us regen when we have a totem up. This helps since we want to be casting blood rage for even more attack speed. (alltough not necesary).We also get 4 additional skill points, which is always nice.Leveling is very straight forward. We start off by taking the "harrier" node, to get some speed early game.We then proceed either through the damage nodes into sentinel, or the life regen into Shaper. It is optional what you do.I used bows to level with. Once you reach level 19, pick up a skirmish so you can have 2 totems at a time. Recomended leveling uniques are Storm cloud, doomfletch, and death's harp.Other useful uniques: Meginord's girdle is amazing for packing some extra damage early on.LEVEL 30 tree:LEVEL 52 tree:Pick up any attribute nodes or "Tireless" if you feel you have problems sustaining your mana. "Dynamo" is also great early on.Skip alot of nodes so that we can get to point blank and pick up the knockback nodes as we reach level 62.Level 62 is when we can start to use Chin Sol. You should not follow this tree religiously. Deviating from the tree might be necesary.LEVEL 62 tree:This is when we unlock chin sol, so preferably we want the knockback and point blank to be in place. If you cant reach both at level 62, aim for knockback first and keep using chin sol until you get the point blank node.You want to equip empire's grasp and Chin sol at the same time.After this, you can do what you want to. Pick up the remaining life nodes and some totem nodes, And do as you wish with the remaining points.Bandits: Oak - Kill - KraytinNotes:When I first played this build I transitioned into ancestral bond by act 4 Normal.I grinded Cruel dried lake until I got level 62. For some this might not be necesary, but that's how I did it atleast.Have fun leveling and I hope you enjoy my build. Stay safe! :)If you like this build, you might like my other builds aswell! I have plenty of other hipster builds on my youtube channel, so feel free to check em' out! Last edited by c9q9md on Sep 2, 2016, 11:48:02 AM Last bumped on Dec 31, 2016, 6:08:29 AM |
We are excited to announce that Toronto Booze Hound and Amsterdam Brewery are giving away a #Dam6pack!
You can win a free 6-pack of any of Amsterdam’s core brands (listed below) and all you have to do is tweet!
Here’s how it works:
1) You follow both @TOBoozeHound and @amsterdambeer on Twitter.
2) You tweet why you deserve a #Dam6pack (yes, you have to use that hashtag, we’re jerks like that).
3) If you win, you sit back and enjoy the sweet flavour of a free 6-pack from Amsterdam Brewery.
Which 6-pack do you get? Well you can have your pick from: Blonde, Big Wheel, KLB Raspberry Wheat, Boneshaker, Downtown Brown & (416). We know, we know, it’s a tough decision but we’re sure you can do it. If it helps you can check out the Toronto Booze Hound review of Boneshaker here. The prize can be collected at either the downtown brew-pub or the Leaside outpost.
Rules are pretty simple: must be an Ontario resident and must be of legal drinking age (19!). The best reason to get a free 6-pack wins, and we will post our top 5 reasons on this blog.
Now go tell us why you deserve a #Dam6pack!
November 22nd, 2014 is the last day of the contest and a winner will be chosen on November 23rd. |
The Motorola Moto 360 smartwatch is nearing its launch in India along with the new flagship Moto X phone. On the other hand, the second generation Moto G went up for grabs only a few hours after Google unveiled it to the world. Like all other devices from the OEM, the accessory will also be exclusive to Flipkart and it has finally been listed on the e-commerce website.
This actually indicates that the Motorola Moto 360 could go on sale any day now, probably sometime next week or before the month ends. The device has been listed in grey, but no price has been revealed as of now. In the wearable category, this accessory was the first to offer a refreshingly round display and its arrival has been highly anticipated for months.
The Motorola Moto 360 smartwatch has an elegant design which resembles a classic wristwatch and it features durable materials. The main body is crafted from stainless steel, while the screen is protected by Coring Gorilla Glass to prevent scratches. The overall form factor is IP67 certified water-resistant and the strap is made from Horween leather.
Also See: Adidas miCoach Smart Run smartwatch launched in India for Rs 24999
As you probably know, the smartwatch is fueled by the Android Wear platform and it supports phones running Android 4.3 and above. You’ll be able to get all of your updates and notifications straight to your wrist and even send text messages, check the weather as well as set reminders through ‘Ok Google’ voice commands.
Motorola Moto 360 smartwatch key specs:
– Android Wear OS
– 1.56-inch LCD display with Gorilla Glass 3
– TI OMAP 3 processor
– 4GB storage, 512MB RAM
– 49 grams weight
– IP67 certified water and dust resistant
– 320mAh battery w/ wireless charging
Be sure to check out the Motorola Moto 360 Flipkart store for more details on the smartwatch. |
Plant a tree in a city, and it pays off in dividends. You’ll get carbon sequestered, pollutants and rainfall absorbed, a provision of oxygen, shade and cooling, and psychological boosts to boot. Especially as climate change worsens heat waves (already the world’s leading weather-related cause of death), and as growing urban populations generate more harmful fine particulate matter, trees are one of the single best infrastructure investments cities can make, and an emerging body of scientific literature proves it.
In fact, a major new report by the Nature Conservancy concludes that trees are essentially the only cost-effective solution addressing both deteriorating air quality and rising urban temperatures. Some of the world’s largest cities could dramatically improve public health by those standards by investing just $4 per capita in their canopies, it finds. Crunching some numbers on how additional street trees (coniferous or leafy—palms don’t count here) could reduce pollution and heat inside the world’s 245 largest cities, the report shows that the residents of ultra-dense, ultra-populated, and ultra-polluted metropolises of Southeast Asia would see especially high ROIs, since the trees’ benefits would spread to so many people per square mile, and since material costs are comparatively affordable.
(The Nature Conservancy)
In Beijing, for example, levels of PM2.5—microscopic particles emitted by cars, factories, and heating systems that are easily breathed into human lungs and are estimated to cause 3.2 million deaths per year globally—have been known to exceed 600 micrograms per cubic meter in multiple locations. (The World Health Organization has declared a “safe” daily average of PM2.5 to be 25 micrograms per cubic meter.) Tree leaves can absorb anywhere between 7 to 24 percent of these particles in a range of roughly 100 meters, the Nature Conservancy reports.
“Cities often think about tree planting budgets totally separately from their health budgets. We want cities to see the link between the two.”
The new study estimates that for an annual additional investment of $2.9 million in street trees, 2.2 million Beijing residents could see a reduction in PM2.5 greater than 1 microgram per cubic meter per 24-hour period. Most people would see a far greater reduction, exceeding 10 micrograms per cubic meter. And more than 2 million people would also feel a reduction of 1.5° C (2.7° F) in summertime air temperatures.
(The Nature Conservancy)
Other dense, highly polluted cities in the global south, such as Jakarta and Hong Kong, would see similarly high returns-on-investment. Tree planting could be even more cost-effective in poorer cities like Dhaka and Karachi. |
I recently spent a couple of days at Disneyworld with my sister and brother and their families, who were visiting from Israel. As we walked through the parks, a few of my nephews and nieces independently shared the same observation: “Why are people in America so fat?” While their comment may not be politically correct or sensitively articulated, it is accurate. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, over one third of adults in America are clinically obese.
In fact, a few years ago Disney had to shut down its signature “It’s a Small World” ride for major renovations. Interestingly, when it reopened, it looked exactly as it had beforehand. So what did they renovate? It turns out, Disney had to widen the boats and deepen the ride’s channel in order to accommodate for the weight increase in the average visitors to Disney.
The ride was originally designed and built in 1963 on the statistics of the time that indicated an average adult male rider would weigh 175 pounds and a female rider 135. However, with the increase in fast food, junk food, and “super-sized” food, adults today frequently weigh north of 200 pounds. Increasingly, over-weighted boats would get to certain points in the ride and bottom out, becoming stuck in the flume.
Forbes magazine reported at the time that, ironically, customers whose boats got stuck and whose rides needed to be aborted were given free vouchers for the food court to compensate them. It may be a small world after all, but we, the inhabitants of that world, are getting larger and larger, heavier and heavier, every single day.
Safeguarding our health and preserving our wellbeing are fundamental Torah values. “V’nishmartem m’od l’nafshoseichem.” Though the verse in context is actually referring to something else, our Rabbis have encouraged us to interpret it to mean, “be exceedingly cautious regarding your well-being.” The Rambam (Hilchos Dei’os 4) writes: “For the body to be healthy and wholesome is among the ways of Hashem…therefore a person must distance himself from those things that cause his body damage.”
Many explanations and reasons are suggested for the Torah’s kashrus laws, though ultimately they remain a chok, a divinely ordained diet. Whatever the reason, it is clear that a commitment to a rigorous kosher lifestyle is to ingrain within us a sense of discipline, self-control, restraint, and the capacity to honor limits and boundaries. These are the exact same attributes and qualities necessary to have healthy eating habits.
It is ironic, therefore, that many of us who are strict and disciplined adherents to the laws of kashrus, struggle greatly to apply the same vigilance and mindfulness to portion control and eating only healthy foods. I know first hand the challenge of healthy eating habits as I have struggled personally and every time I think I have changed my eating lifestyle permanently, I find myself reverted back to bad habits and bulging belt. My intent is not to be judgmental or critical. For some, weight is a function of genetics and factors beyond just self-control. I am also very sensitive to the issues of body image and eating disorders and the danger of overemphasis on weight and diet. I am simply trying to call our attention to an unintended consequence of elaborate and endless shabbos and yom tov meals.
This week, our local JCC and Winn Dixie supermarket hosted Susie Fishbein, author of the Kosher by Design cookbook series. The room was overflowing for her demonstration as her fans turned out in droves to learn more about her techniques, recipes and presentations. The event was a phenomenal success and we are indebted to her for coming down to promote kashrus in our community. In 2008, the Forward listed her as one of the 50 most influential Jews in America. There is no doubt that Susie and authors of cookbooks of a similar genre have done a great service to our community by raising the level of sophistication of Kosher recipes and food. However, I worry that there is an unintended consequence of advances in kosher recipes also raising the levels of expectation, competition, effort, cost, and consumption at today’s typical Shabbos and yom tov meals.
Do you remember when a shabbos meal consisted of a piece of fish or a slice of melon, or a bowl of soup followed by one main dish, one side dish, and one kugel and ending with dessert of fruit or one cake? Now our meals have endless courses, multiple main dishes, countless side dishes, and practically a Viennese table of dessert. Our Bubbie’s gefilte fish, chicken and matzah ball soup and simple recipes are not sophisticated enough for us. We need tri-colored gefilte fish, tri-colored matzah balls, and menus that would challenge the Next Iron Chef.
Of course I am not blaming Susie Fishbein or authors of similar kosher cookbooks. To her credit, Susie has written a cookbook on healthy living called Kosher by Design Lightens Up. The Kosher by Design series is an indispensable part of every kosher cook’s library and Susie deserves to be commended and praised for what she has provided us. She gave us incredible recipes. How many of them we make at a time, the portions of them that we eat, the money we spend on them is entirely up to us. Scaling back Shabbos and yom tov meals, is our responsibility and changing the culture of expectation and competition lies solely with us having nothing to do with her.
Ultimately, the responsibility falls to us to limit our menus, choose healthy recipes and bring the same mindfulness to the health impact of what we eat that we do to the kashrus of what we eat. Together, we can create a new culture of simplified meals presented in a healthier fashion. It begins in our homes, at our kitchen and dining room tables, but it extends to the menu and options at kiddushes at shul and the snacks we provide through the youth department.
Fewer courses and fewer options at our Shabbos meals will lessen the financial burden, physical drain and even emotional stress on those shopping for and preparing the meal. Setting food up on a buffet rather than leaving it on the table will eliminate mindless nibbling and noshing at endless meals. Being forced to get up to get more food will likely increase thoughtfulness about whether or not we are really still hungry. Even if we enjoy spending all evening or afternoon with friends, we should bentch as soon as the meal is done and enjoy each other’s company on the couch or around an empty table, rather than sit there and continue to eat, even though we are beyond full.
This past Sunday, our wonderful BRS Sisterhood sponsored an incredible Women’s Health and Halacha Day. Close to 150 women from all over South Florida gathered to address topics such as genetic testing, birth control, the agunah crisis, domestic violence and intimacy. Programs such as this can effectively inspire our community to elevate our commitment to living healthier lives. We are already working on next year’s program that will focus on nutrition, raising healthy children, health challenges of aging and more.
A good friend, Rabbi Zvi Engel recently wrote a message to his congregation about Friday’s fast, Asara B’Teives. He began:
“A friend recently sent me the following line now making the rounds: Black Friday: Because only in America do people trample over others for sales, exactly one day after being thankful for what they have.
Tomorrow we observe a Black Friday of another kind, as we recall the dark day when the Babylonians laid siege to Yerushalayim, a precursor to what we would soon lose with the churban, the destruction of the First Beit HaMikdash. If we ever take Yerushalayim for granted, this date calls us to remember a time when our nation was on the brink, about to lose its central address as a people, and to recognize that a Yerushalayim isolated and besieged ought to cause us discomfort, an awareness of hunger in an empty stomach that longs for sustenance.”
Upon seeing the message, a mutual good friend, Rabbi Shalom Baum remarked, “And how will we behave at kiddush the day after our black Friday.” The truth is, we don’t even need to wait until Kiddush on Shabbos morning to determine if we have retained the lesson of Friday’s fast.
Changing eating habits is incredibly hard if we do it alone. However, if we work together to create a culture of simplicity and healthy choices at our shabbos and yom tov meals, we can radically improve the well-being of our community. At dinner tonight, after breaking our fast, which was designed to remind us that we can live without food, let’s show that for now on we eat to live instead of living to eat. |
But already during that time great changes came about. The beginning industrialisation reached also the remotest valley in the Scottish Highlands. The tax on alcohol and whisky had been established long before, and the law allowed only licenced distilleries to produce whisky. The time of illicit distilling was over.
In the middle of the 1880s Alfred Barnard visited the malt whisky distilleries of Scotland and described them in his book 'The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom'. From today's perspective the old world seems idyllic. Many small whisky distilleries handcrafted the malt whisky Alfred Barnard and we appreciate so much.
In the middle of the 1880s Alfred Barnard visited the malt whisky distilleries of Scotland and described them in his book 'The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom'. From today's perspective the old world seems idyllic. Many small whisky distilleries handcrafted the malt whisky Alfred Barnard and we appreciate so much.
A world economy in the narrow sense was not yet really existent at the turn of the century. The Commonwealth with the British crown colonies and the independent United States were the preferred markets for whisky, with America being even more important since only the small, ruling upper class of the colonies could afford whisky.
The big success of the blended whiskies made the corporations grow until 1914. The brands and their taste were consolidated. Since malt whiskies are the most important and taste-defining ingredient of the blends, the corporations became dependent on the supply of malt whiskies. They began to secure their 'whisky sources' and bought preferably the distilleries from which they already bought casks for their blends. They paid in a currency that was as valuable for the buyers as it was cheap for the sellers. Stocks! Consistent and laborious work in the barren highlands was rewarded with shares of the corporations.
At the end of the 19th century, the concentration process that had been triggered by licencing was continued. The rural farms with distillation as a sideline became economically independent companies. New train routes reached the farthest corners of Scotland, and the malt whisky could be easily transported into the cities. Here it was predominantly used for blending with grain whisky, which had been introduced a few decades before with the column stills. During this period of boom, important blended whisky brands such as Dewar's and Haig emerged. Single malt whisky led a shadowy existence and was only appreciated by the Scots themselves and as 'spice' for the blended whiskies, which were meanwhile sold worldwide.
But already during that time great changes came about. The beginning industrialisation reached also the remotest valley in the Scottish Highlands. The tax on alcohol and whisky had been established long before, and the law allowed only licenced distilleries to produce whisky. The time of illicit distilling was over.
High debt and the first closures subsequently shocked the Scots. The recovery came with the end of prohibition in 1933, when Britain was allowed to pay its war debts to the USA in whisky. The Distiller’s Company Ltd. became the uncrowned winner and could take over many companies and distilleries. They have now evolved into the biggest spirits corporation of the world, Diageo.
Since the whole industry depended on only few countries, World War I led to a drastic decline of the whisky production. The smuggling of alcohol into the USA could compensate for a small part during prohibition (1919-33), but the production didn't reach pre-war levels anymore. This led to serious problems for the whisky companies.
3. Concentration
After the war the concentration happened even faster, and out of more than two dozen big companies only eight are left today. The global expansion, led by the USA and Britain, fuelled competition, so the companies either merged or were taken over by the big players.
For 20 years the big corporations haven't been focusing on whisky alone anymore but are now operating on the entire spirits market. The cost advantages are too big when you can distribute vodka, gin, cognac and rum beside whisky using the same infrastructure.
But the takeover of Seagram's and Allied Domecq by Diageo and Pernod Ricard showed that the takeover business has almost come to a standstill. The competition guardians in the USA and Europe only approved of the takeovers under strict conditions. The concentration is already so high that there are fears that one company could achieve a dominant position.
This allowed the corporations in pursuit to catch up. The new star in the whisky sky is the French company Pernod Ricard, which challenged the long-established Anglo-Saxon companies by taking over Chivas Brothers and Glen Grant. The American competitors are also not far away. Jim Beam, Jack Daniel's and Bacardi are catching up fast. But also Asia plays a big role now. Jim Beam first took over Whyte & Mackay, only to be taken over by Suntory, which thereby became the global number 3.
While the corporations pondered on Asian growth rates and the relations between whisky, rum, vodka, cognac and gin, a development was set in motion from which we connoisseurs benefit today. At first unnoticed by the big players, Glenfiddich sold their whisky on the duty-free market. The success was so big in the 1980s that the malt soon followed the travellers into the local supermarkets. Until the big players woke up, Wm. Grant & Sons, the owner of Glenfiddich, had occupied the market. Today Glenfiddich is by far single malt whisky market leader, and even Diageo admits that the sales figures of the 'Classic Malts of Scotland' don't come near those of Glenfiddich.
But the giants have awoken and develop the single malt market. One bottling follows the other, and the big players of the industry empty their warehouses for us.
Who would have thought ten years ago that we would see original bottlings of Port Ellen or Ladyburn again? Almost all the corporations are stock companies, and the shareholders demand short-term successes. If there was a market, some people would perhaps even sell their mother-in-law.
But in the wake of Glenfiddich, other smaller Scotch whisky companies seized their chances. And they seized them well. InverHouse and Edrington got a significant share of the cake with several hundred millions of dollars in sales. While the billion dollar corporations used their cost advantages in distribution, smaller whisky companies could make their profit with valuable special bottlings. |
By Ian Parry
The time has come to end hand wringing on climate strategy, particularly controlling carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions. We need an approach that builds on national self-interest and spurs a race to the top in low-carbon energy solutions. Our findings here at the IMF—that carbon pricing is practical, raises revenue that permits tax reductions in other areas, and is often in countries’ own interests—should strike a chord at the United Nations Climate Summit in New York next week. Let me explain how.
Ever since the 1992 Earth Summit, policymakers have struggled to agree on an international regime for controlling emissions, but with limited success. Presently, only around 12 percent of global emissions are covered by pricing programs, such as taxes on the carbon content of fossil fuels or permit trading programs that put a price on emissions. Reducing CO 2 emissions is widely seen as a classic “free-rider” problem. Why should an individual country suffer the cost of cutting its emissions when the benefits largely accrue to other countries and, given the long life of emissions and the gradual adjustment of the climate system, future generations?
From burden to benefits
This argument crucially ignores immediate domestic environmental benefits from reducing CO 2 . Fossil fuel combustion, especially coal, is a leading cause of local outdoor air pollution which, according to World Health Organization figures, is estimated to cause over 3 million premature deaths a year worldwide—through increasing the risk of heart disease, lung cancer, and so on. Taxing the carbon content of coal will increase its price, and decrease its use, leading to both fewer CO 2 emissions and better public health due to cleaner air. A carbon tax would also increase motor fuel prices, which will reduce traffic congestion and accidents as people economize a bit on their use of vehicles. This again spurs domestic economic benefits, at least in countries where people are not already fully charged for these adverse effects through existing motor fuel excises. These health and other “co-benefits” from reducing fossil fuel use add to the gains in economic efficiency that start with pricing CO 2 emissions.
Ideally, governments would use other policies to address domestic environmental problems, like charges for local air pollution. However, until these policies are fully implemented (likely a long time), policymakers should look at how the indirect impact of CO 2 pricing can help alleviate these problems when they consider shorter-term climate policies.
So how important are these domestic co-benefits? A new IMF working paper assesses how much CO 2 pricing is in countries’ own national interests by looking at the domestic co-benefits alone—before even counting the climate benefits. The findings, summarized in the chart below, are striking in two regards.
First, a substantial carbon tax (or CO 2 pricing through trading systems) is justified by national interests, on average $57.5 per ton of CO 2 across the top twenty emitters. This is several times the recent prices in the European Union’s Emissions Trading System, and 60 percent higher than the climate damages per ton of CO 2 estimated by an inter-agency group for the U.S. government. The implication is that countries need not wait on an international agreement to move ahead with their own CO 2 pricing schemes.
Second, prices that are efficient from a national perspective vary considerably across countries. For example, they are relatively high in China and Poland—where most of the CO 2 reduction would come from less reliance on coal and there is high population exposure to coal pollution—and they are relatively low in Australia, where population exposure is far more limited. The implication here is that any international regime should be flexible, allowing some countries (with high co-benefits) to set higher CO 2 prices than others (similar to value-added and excise taxes in the European Union, for which member states can set tax rates higher than the agreed upon floor).
A Message for Finance Ministers
CO 2 pricing through carbon taxes or trading systems with allowance auctions would also raise significant new government revenues. And, as with any new tax, it is important to use these revenues productively—most obviously to lower the burden of other taxes. Environmental tax reform is generally about smarter taxes not higher overall taxes.
This last point underscores the potentially pivotal role of finance ministries, which to date have largely taken a back seat in climate negotiations, in integrating carbon pricing into broader fiscal reforms. They have good reason to urge effective carbon pricing, and this may not happen without their strong advocacy. And carbon taxes, in particular, would represent a straightforward extension of existing motor fuel excises, which are well established in many countries and among the easiest of taxes to administer, by building a carbon charge into them and applying similar charges to other fossil fuel products.
New York, Paris, and beyond
These findings complement other important work in the area, such as the report recently issued by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate. They should also hearten participants at next week’s Climate Summit, which is set to catalyze commitments ahead of the pivotal December 2015 meetings in Paris, at which policymakers hope to finalize an international climate agreement. There is no need for action to await coordinated measures adopted by many countries—a lot can be achieved simply by looking at national self-interest.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCCkKu09CJE?rel=0&w=560&h=315] |
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“We have literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi. Three blocks from the Capitol sits the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. A bill was drafted. It said, if you would perform an abortion in the state of Mississippi, you must be a certified OB/GYN and you must have admitting privileges to a hospital. Anybody here in the medical field knows how hard it is to get admitting privileges to a hospital…
“It’s going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to– Roe vs. Wade. So we’ve done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger.’ That’s what we’ve heard over and over and over.
“But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.” |
Wounded Warrior Family Support Donates Van To Lakota Sioux Tribe
A donation from Wounded Warriors Family Support, a group based in Omaha, will have a large impact for veterans on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
The group presented a van donation Monday morning to representatives of the Lakota Sioux tribe.
It seats 10 people – and will be used primarily to take veterans to VA facilities.
John Yellow Bird Steele, President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, says considering how large Pine Ridge is, this gift will benefit a lot of veterans.
“We’re rural, we need transportation,” Steele said. “The veterans have a hard time making appointments and the wounded warriors association out of Omaha found out about our problem and is helping to take care of it.”
Drivers picking up veterans need to travel anywhere between one to 90 miles on Pine Ridge. The nearest hospitals are then 60 to 120 miles away. Colonel John Folsom, president of Wounded Warriors Family Support, says this gift honors many Native Americans who served in the military.
“The American Indian, for the size of the population, gives more of its people as soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and any other demographic group in America,” Folsom said. “We need to appreciate that, we forget that.”
Folsom says the van was originally supposed to be delivered in March 2016. But executives at Ford fast-tracked the project, so the van could be donated Monday. |
Two hundred billion - here, two hundred billion - there: before you know it we’re talking about a lot of money! When I introduced you to the Weimar dollar, the government’s proactive devaluation of the currency had just begun. On February 5, Congress and Bush approved a plan to “stimulate the economy” by distributing tax rebates of just $600 to millions of middle-income taxpayers. To each taxpayer, of course, it’s a drop in the bucket that will neither change their lives nor stimulate the larger economy, as the effect of merely printing all that money will be to devalue the currency, thus creating inflation in the most basic imported commodity (oil), and in the end, that money will, therefore, end up in the hands of the oil companies only. Meanwhile, the damage to the currency will have begun.
Then the Federal Reserve announced a $200 billion swap of government treasury bonds for the (valueless) bundled security funds being held and traded by large financial institutions. More dollars created from thin air, and once again, reducing the value of the currency. Nevertheless, Wall Street investors reacted jubilantly. For one day. Reality then set in, and investors immediately started dumping stocks; trying to take profits off the one-day spike.
This weekend, the Bear Stearns debacle: Once again, the Fed creates $30 billion for JPMorgan Chase to take over the insolvent entity, the only real asset being the Bear Stearns Corporate Headquarters on Madison Avenue. Twelve months ago, the stock value alone of Bear Stearns was in excess of $22 billion. JPMorgan is purchasing it for roughly $300 million, and a billion more if they want the office tower, though, frankly, why bother, since after they lay off the 14,000 employees of BS (how deeply ironic, that), who’ll staff the building, anyway?
So, The Dow jumped over 400 points in one day, then, realizing the really damnable awfulness of this whole transaction, I have never used this word before in a column here - but this is the first blatantly transparent transaction that qualifies as purely fascist, the complete integration of government and corporations – not nationalizing the bank when giving it our money, but just using OUR dollar to enable their massive acquisition. This begs two important questions: First, why does the 2nd largest American bank, JP Morgan Chase, need the government’s money to guarantee anything they buy? Are they so unable to finance it themselves? And is the entity they’re purchasing so dodgy that it’s uninsurable? Second, if the Fed is putting up all the money, why isn’t the Fed getting Bear Stearns? In other words, why isn’t it being nationalized, if only so it can be placed in receivership until it has been set right, and then spun back off as independent and the money returned to the Fed?
The questions, of course, are rhetorical. We know the answer to both. It is the realization of the corporatization of the United States, and the first fully flowered fascist daffodil of March. (No slur meant to daffodils)
Now comes news that Congressman Barney Frank, and Senator Chris Dodd have come up with a plan to loosen availability of mortgage funding by lowering the collateral margins required of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Ostensibly, this is a move to reinvigorate the moribund housing market. Sorry, fellas, but allowing these lenders to retain less collateral will just exacerbate the problem at the root of the whole collapse.
Amidst all this turmoil and one reckless, desperate move after another, suddenly, the bedrock commodities tumbled in value. What’s that, you say? Why would Gold and Oil drop if the dollar is being whittled away? Shouldn’t they be soaring? Well, yes, ordinarily, but not when investors, both individuals and enormous funds – find it necessary to liquidate the strongest thing in their portfolios in order to meet margin calls, thus driving down the value of precious metals, oil futures, and very valuable crop futures.
But the commodities will bounce back first, because they are the only real thing in this whole economy. Bernanke’s box of Band-aids is just about empty.
Benjamin Franklin said, “Money makes money, and the money money makes, makes more money.” Franklin never did it with his printing press, however. This is so very much not what he had in mind.
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About author Michael Fox is a freelance journalist and the former editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas. He is the coauthor of the books Michael Fox is a freelance journalist and the former editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas. He is the coauthor of the books Venezuela Speaks and Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions . He tweets at @mfox_us |
Two University of Windsor professors have designed software they say can predict an epileptic 17 minutes before it happens.
“Up until now, the best prediction was a few minutes ahead and had an accuracy of 50 to 60 per cent,” Prof. Robin Gras said in a post on the University of Windsor's website. “We got 17 minutes with 100 per cent accuracy."
Gras and Abbas Golestanti, a PhD student in the School of Computer Science, analyzed the brain’s electrical activity, specifically the electroencephalography (EEG) readings of patients.
Thirty minutes of readings plugged into the software is enough data to give someone with epilepsy 17 minutes of advance warning of a seizure.
The researchers based their findings on data from 21 epileptic patients.
Their test results were published in Scientific Reports in October.
Gras and Golestanti have patented the software, and now need a device that can constantly monitor a patient’s EEG.
“If you have this device on you all the time, it reads your EEG values and 17 minutes in advance it can ring and say: You will have trouble in 17 minutes. Stop your car. Go to a safe place. Phone someone to help you,” Gras said.
Gras said the method is "innovative" and based on chaos theory, which allows people to make long- term predictions of the evolution of complex systems.
The pair originally developed the software to predict the next financial crisis. They've also analyzed 100 years of climate data and evaluated the next 30 years for climate change.
"We used financial time series, medical time series and climate time series to evaluate our method," reads the pair's research in Scientific Reports. "The results we obtained show that the long-term prediction of complex nonlinear time series is no longer unrealistic."
Gras believes their method can potentially be applied to many other events, such as predicting heart attacks, earthquakes and the onset of Alzheimer's disease. |
If there’s any lasting cultural impact to this latest film adaptation of Stephen King’s “Carrie,” it’s that it confirms the material’s status as an archetypal mythos. Like the Passion Play and “A Christmas Carol,” this is the kind of engrained fable that gets told over and over again, even when almost everyone in the audience knows every beat of the plot.
The story has become a touchstone to generations of misfits and outsiders; in between its two big-screen versions, it spawned a movie sequel (“The Rage: Carrie 2”), a small-screen adaptation written by Bryan Fuller (“Hannibal”) and even an infamous Broadway musical.
There will be more versions of “Carrie” in the years to come, and perhaps one of them will rival Brian De Palma’s 1976 film as a portrait of adolescent outsider-dom and as a purely terrifying piece of horror cinema. This new one is neither; it doesn’t do anything strikingly wrong, it’s just unnecessary.
See video: ‘Carrie’ Cafe Viral Video Scares the Coffee Out of Patrons
Any hope that director Kimberly Peirce might inflect the material with the gender insight of “Boys Don’t Cry” or the working-class ethos of “Stop-Loss” is quickly dispelled. It’s one thing to respect the source material, but something else entirely to waver from it so little.
De Palma’s screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen shares credit here with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a scribe whose teen angst bona fides have been established everywhere from “Glee” to Archie Comics, but apart from some references to YouTube and home-schooling, you’d be hard-pressed to find much difference between the two scripts.
So it’s a story you already know, told in a way you’ll recognize: Sweet, shy Carrie (Chloë Grace Moretz) is tormented by the popular girls at school and abused at home by her unhinged evangelist mother (Julianne Moore). Prom date, pig’s blood, dirty pillows, second verse same as the first.
Also read: 5 Breakout Movie Stars of Fall
It’s up to the actors to try to make this their own, but none of them fill the shoes of their Me Decade predecessors. Moretz probably comes closest to capturing Sissy Spacek‘s blossoming into womanhood, although Moretz is less convincing as a misunderstood wallflower. Unlike Spacek, she has been directed to find excitement and possibilities in her newly manifesting telekinetic powers, resulting in a Carrie who feels at least a little more in control of her destiny.
Moore, as talented is she is, can’t rival Piper Laurie’s Bible-thumping gorgon in either terror or ecstasy, although her version of the character provides more opportunities for bloody self-mortification. Judy Greer is, as always, a standout as the sympathetic gym teacher.
Also read: 20 Movies We’re Dying to See This Fall
As for the school’s popular kids — well, not to go all Norma Desmond, but they had faces then. Audiences seeing the De Palma version were, generally speaking, seeing Amy Irving, William Katt, Nancy Allen, P.J. Soles and John Travolta for the first time, and those actors immediately registered in the public consciousness. I would have a hard time picking their modern counterparts out of a police lineup; they all have the bland, interchangeable attractiveness of stars from the CW network.
It’s not that this 2013 “Carrie” embarrasses itself — they’re not all going to laugh at you — but it’s destined to be, at best, a footnote to its forebears. |
If you look at the low-end ($200-$300) Windows laptop market in 2016 you’ll notice that the hardware spec is mostly the same regardless of which brand name is on the casing. We get the same low-end processors, RAM limited to no more than 4GB (but usually 2GB), and those infuriating 32GB SSD/eMMC drives that are quite slow and way too small to be useful.
You may think the spec is so limited because manufacturers have to hit a target price to retain a profit margin while still being able to sell in the $200 range. While that’s true, it’s actually Microsoft who is imposing a strict upper limit on the hardware available in this category of laptop.
It all comes down to Windows 10 licensing rules and restrictions. Microsoft offers large discounts to manufacturers on volume licensing depending on what type of device they want to install Windows on. In the case of laptops, a Windows 10 license can be had for between $15-$30, but only if the hardware spec comes in below a Microsoft-imposed limit.
What that translates to is laptops with displays no larger than 14.1-inches, a low-end CPU (Bay Trail, Cherry Trail, Braswell, or Apollo Lake), no more than 4GB RAM, mandatory use of an SSD/eMMC with no more than 32GB of storage space, and no option of a hard drive or optical drive. Hence, we get lots of cheap laptops costing roughly the same and all bumping up against this Microsoft-imposed hardware limit in order to ensure a cheap Windows license.
Increasing the spec beyond this limit means paying full price for a Windows license, which will increase the price considerably and make a laptop look expensive compared to the competition. It may include a faster processor, more RAM, and a usable amount of storage, but then it’s going to be at least $100 more expensive I imagine. Geeks will notice the spec bump and know the extra $100 is worth it, but the general public? They’ll opt for the $200 machine they’ve seen also runs Windows and without knowing the severe limitations such configurations have.
The only way this will change is if Microsoft relaxes the restrictions. Then we’d see a more variations in hardware spec and more competition, which is great for consumers and the market in general. Microsoft would likely sell a lot more $30 Windows licenses, more than making up for previous volume license sales at the higher price/spec tier. |
It's no secret that GOG.com (the platform and the community gathered around it) is growing at an exceptional rate all around the world. We're trying to keep that in mind as we look for new ways to improve our service for everyone. Obviously, one of the most important functions for all of you is downloading your games - preferably as fast and as reliably as possible.For some of you this might sound familiar (yep it’s our 3rd time!), once again we are in the process of benchmarking various download locations and trying to get the most representative sample of worldwide results. That means wee need to look at as many unique ISPs / cities / countries as possible, and we need a little help from you! Below you will find a simple test that requires just one click and won't take more than 2 minutes of your time to complete:Your help is greatly appreciated here! Of course you can run the test as many times as possible (preferably at different locations and different times of day). Oh, and keep in mind that we used a little bit of Flash in this test, so if you want to participate please make sure you have the flash player installed and/or you are not using any flash blocking plugins in your browser. |
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Pacific Rim: Maelstrom is continuing to cast up, and today the Monsters v Robots sequel has set its sights on a leading lady. Variety reports newcomer Cailee Spaeny, a young American actress and pop singer, will star opposite John Boyega as the female lead in the follow-up to Guillermo del Toro‘s 2013 action epic. In addition to Spaeny and Boyega, who plays the son of Idris Elba‘s heroic Stacker Pentecost from the first film, Scott Eastwood is set to star in an unknown role with Daredevil Season 1 showrunner Steven S. DeKnight taking over for del Toro as director.
So far, none of the film’s original cast, which included Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Robert Kazinsky and Ron Perlman, is confirmed to return and indeed, Pacific Rim lead Charlie Hunnam recently said he would sit the sequel out. However, recent quotes from del Toro seem pretty confident that a few of our favorite Kaiju-slaying heroes would return, saying “I can tell you this — a lot of the cast from the first movie is coming back.”
This is a breakout role for Spaeny, who has so far only appeared in the indie thriller Counting to 1,000. Character details for Spaeny and Eastwood’s roles remain a mystery at this point, but it is interesting that the new cast seems pretty resolutely aged down from what we saw in the first film. Production on Maelstrom is slated to begin this November (so expect a lot more casting announcements in the coming months) in Australia, with a portion of filming also taking place in China. The film is scheduled to land in theaters on February 23, 2018.
For more on Pacific Rim 2, check out our latest coverage in the links below. |
Despite all the hysteria from media and political elites that claimed the UK would stagnate if British voters passed Brexit to leave the EU, it turns out that UK stocks are higher a week later while the other stock markets are still down.
In perhaps the most arrogant establishment response on the first day after the Brexit vote, Harvard educated James Traub, wrote in the elite Foreign Policy Magazine: “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses.” Traub demanded that elites use their power to nullify the vote by the “fist shaking” British rabble, because it represented an “utter repudiation of the bankers and economists and Western heads of state who warned voters against the dangers of a split with the European Union.”
But a week after the referendum victory for the “leave” voters, the British stock market index is up +2.6; while the French shares tanking -8.3 percent, German equities tumbling -5.3 percent and U.S. stocks down about 1 percent.
The UK remains a member of the European Union, and will do for some considerable time to come. Which means for the terms of trade, regulation, free movement and so on, the UK government and private sector are operating under precisely the same rules as they did a week ago.
Any “impacts” therefore are the result of expectations – or uncertainty – about what will change in the future. According to the stock markets where individuals put real money behind their expectations, the UK is financially better off from the Brexit; while France and Germany are worse off. For the United States investors, the Brexit is not financially a big deal.
As Breitbart News predicted, Brexit caused a 10 percent decline in the exchange rate of the British pound versus the euro. But this means that British exports are cheaper and more competitive in continental Europe; while the Continent’s goods are more expensive. This explains why UK stocks are up.
Breitbart News also predicted that the UK’s sovereign credit rating would be cut, but markets already expected the downgrade and UK bonds traded up as interest rates fell to the lowest point since the mid-18th century.
The Brexit vote has already slowed immigration to the UK and there appears to be the possibility of a sharp reversal of migration flows between the UK and the rest of Europe.
In first hours following the June 23 Brexit vote, the pro-EU establishment demanded that the United Kingdom pay a punitive economic price for having the audacity to threaten the EU’s viability. According to EU President Martin Schulz: “The British have violated the rules. It is not the EU philosophy that the crowd can decide its fate.”
The only punitive suggestion against the UK so far is that the European Parliament threat to eliminate English as the official government language. But English is the only language spoken by the majority of the other 27 nations of the EU. Despite Germany’s financially domination of the EU, few of the 26 other member states speak “Deutsch.”
Europe and the United Kingdom had already created a tariff-free-trade-zone across the western continent by the 1980s, through the European Economic Community and the European Trade Association. So Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, famously said in 2007, “The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe.” |
Until now, I’ve been kinda torn on Heat Street, the supposedly Anti-SJW news and opinion site headed by former conservative MP Louise Mensch. While Mensch regularly makes a fool of herself on social media (most recently, she tried dismissing the weekend’s terror bombing in New York as a non-event), the site itself has published a number of decent anti-SJW articles. Still, many on the Anti-SJW right have been understandably wary about embracing a Murdoch/Neocon site that has already hosted some pretty shady contributors – including a pedophile!
Moreover, having a Hillary Clinton-supporter run an Anti-SJW site never really made any sense – as should be clear by now, Hillary is easily the closest thing we have seen so far to a SJW presidential candidate. A vote for Hillary is a vote for more of everything Anti-SJW people are supposed to be fighting, be it misandrist and anti-white identity politics, political correctness or censorship. Pretending to fight SJWs while simultaneously trying to get a mainstream SJW elected president of the US is hardly a tenable position – at some point you will either have to firmly stand against Hillary, or expose yourself as a SJW Lite at best.
In the case of Heat Street, the surrender to SJWs was declared under the most absurd of circumstances – an editorial by Louise Mensch stating that the online meme Pepe the Frog was indeed anti-Semitic, just as Hillary Clinton had claimed, and even apologizing for an earlier article disputing that claim. The author of that older piece, former Nazi/former SJW Ian Miles Cheong, fessed up to wrongthink like a good little Cuck.
Of course, normal people will at this point be feeling like they’ve been taking Crazy Pills. It’s one thing when the consistently clueless MSM and old, sick Hillary Clinton label a beloved internet meme as anti-Semitic, but for supposedly internet-savvy Anti-SJW people to do so makes no sense. Indeed, going by the online reactions the article has gotten, a number of people assumed it was a joke, a clever troll piece. However, by all hallmarks the article is all-too-sincere.
That’s not to say it is well-argued. Indeed, the only argument the article makes is that a lot of anti-Semitic Pepe memes have recently popped up, which apparently means that Pepe himself is now a Nazi symbol. That line of reasoning is of course complete nonsense. It took me just a few seconds to find anti-Semitic Vivian James memes – does that make Vivian or GamerGate anti-Semitic? Does GamerGate have to disavow Vivian James, or be smeared as Jew haters by people who are supposed to be our allies?
The article manages to get even dumber near the end, as Mensch (and by extension, Heat Street) apologizes to Pepe’s Victims for having suggested earlier that the cartoon frog wasn’t in fact a Nazi icon. Pepe is “actual racism” Mensch concludes, as she wraps up the article with a handful of Nazi Pepes sure to shock people who don’t know how the internet works. It very much reads as Louise Mensch laying out Heat Street’s official editorial stance too, not just her personal opinion, so don’t be surprised if the site from now on makes a big show of condemning the unholy trinity of Adolf Hitler, David Duke and Pepe the Frog.
https://twitter.com/ChristiJunior/status/777901312075792385
As for me, I have pretty much learned what I need to know about Heat Street – a site whose editor so readily labels classic internet memes as anti-Semitic on the say-so of Hillary Clinton is hardly an ally you can trust in the fight against SJWs. What if Hillary drops all pretenses and explicitly calls GamerGate misogynistic? What if the MSM decides that criticizing George Soros now suddenly counts as anti-Semitism? What if Cuckservatives conclude that the term Globalist is code for Jew-hatred? Oops, turns out that last one already happened!
Basically, if/when Heat Street ends up turning against key Anti-SJW allies, I for one won’t be the least bit surprised. |
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET
Macs, iPhones and iPads are often the computers of choice for the creative sort that Adobe Systems caters to. But the company just announced a partnership with Microsoft that aims to bring some of that attention to Microsoft's Windows operating system and Surface Pro tablet-laptop hybrids.
Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella took the stage with his Adobe counterpart, Shantanu Narayen, to announce the deal on Monday at Adobe's annual Max conference in Los Angeles. And Nadella announced a big incentive to lure the thousands in attendance into the Microsoft fold.
"I'd like to give each one of you a Surface Pro 3 to take with you to get started," Nadella said, throwing a year's subscription to the Office Pro 365 software into the mix. The attendees greeted Nadella's promotional largesse with a standing ovation. A Surface Pro 3 costs $800 for a lower-end configuration, and another $129 for the detachable keyboard.
Narayen, too, exhorted them to try Adobe software on a Microsoft foundation. "Go ahead, give it a spin, and try it on Windows," he said. "I'm sure you'll be really excited to see what's happening."
The partnership, while unusual for the creative domain, makes sense for two companies struggling to adapt to new computing realities. Microsoft and Adobe both have businesses tightly linked with the old era of personal computers, but they're trying to expand to the new era of tablets and smartphones, too. Those mobile devices are drawing programmer attention along with consumers' time and money, and earlier market power is no guarantee for success in the new market.
Microsoft is pushing touch-enabled PCs in particular -- something Apple has yet to offer. That offers an attractive future for Adobe.
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET
Specifically, it's begun adapting its core Creative Cloud software, starting with Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and After Effects, for touch interfaces. That's tricky, but it's a lot easier than building entirely new apps for iPads and Android tablets.
Indeed, Adobe announced at Max a new version of Illustrator that adds a new touch workspace designed for using the graphic-design software not just with touch-screen laptops but also on tablets.
The Microsoft alliance is hardly exclusive. Adobe also is pushing mobile apps, mostly for Apple's iOS operating system. That includes new apps announced today such as Premiere Clip for video editing. Adobe's newer mobile apps are designed to link projects seamlessly with more powerful PC-based apps so designers can move among the different devices. With the Surface Pro, though, it's simpler, since the tablet and the laptop are the same device.
Microsoft "gets a kick" out of enabling productivity and now creativity, too, Nadella said. "We want to enable this in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, because that's the new paradigm."
The companies also demonstrated various tablet-enabled features, including touch gestures to edit curves and drop shadows, moving a tablet around to change the perspective in a 3D room view, swipe gestures to move the limbs on a sketched model, and smartphone shakes at a tablet for Jackson Pollock-style painting.
There's more to come as Microsoft and Adobe work to integrate the Creative Cloud subscription for software and online services with Microsoft's Office 365 subscription, Nadella added.
"There's a lot going on in the cloud between the two of us," Nadella said. "This is the beginning of a journey that can be really exciting for the two companies and for the creative community." |
Donald Trump's bold promises earlier this week to finally blow the lid off the JFK assassination mystery by declassifying reams of secret documents turned out to be a gigantic tease. The National Archives ended up making public only a fraction of the JFK documents last night.
Still, the 2,800 papers included in the new document dump confirm some salacious details of America's decades-long quest to kill or depose Fidel Castro — including a fairly shocking plan by the CIA to sow terror in Miami.
After Castro's revolution succeeded and thousands of Cubans fled to South Florida, the agency actually considered murdering a boatload of refugees, assassinating exile leaders, and planting bombs in Miami — all so Castro could be blamed for the chaos.
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The basic idea was to turn world opinion against Castro and possibly justify a U.S. military invasion by pinning the atrocities on him. The details of the sinister plot are included in a summary about Operation Mongoose, a 1960 covert op hatched by the CIA under President Dwight Eisenhower with the aim of toppling Communist Cuba.
The campaign was included in a report on "pretexts" the U.S. could conjure up to justify a military intervention in Cuba. The paper was sent by Gen. Edward Landsdale, a top Cold War officer who worked with the CIA to plot out Operation Mongoose; he sent the report, which included nine other "pretexts," on April 12, 1962, to Gen. Maxwell Taylor, who would soon become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Here's how the report described the plan:
via National Archives
Just to reiterate how crazy this idea is: The CIA thought about blowing stuff up in Florida and murdering innocent refugees simply to make Castro look bad.
Thankfully, that plot was apparently never carried out. The Mongoose doc includes other frightening plots hatched by the spooks in Washington, including an idea to use biological weapons to ruin Cuba's crops, possibly leading to famine and an uprising against Castro:
via National Archives
That plan was also apparently spitballed.
Operation Mongoose has hardly been a secret. The covert project, which for a time was headquartered in a secret base in Opa-locka, has long been studied by Cold War scholars and JFK conspiracy buffs. It's not even immediately clear whether the details about sowing terror in Miami are new, though a quick web search doesn't yield any stories about that particular idea. (Update: As some astute readers have noted, much of the newly posted Mongoose details at the National Archive were already released as part of a plot called Operation Northwoods, which President Kennedy reviewed but rejected.)
Other documents confirm some of the sillier pieces of the plot, including the CIA's infamous plans to use absurd devices, such as exploding cigars, to kill Castro. The newly released papers include reports detailing plots to use a poisoned wetsuit and an exploding seashell to murder him and describe the CIA's willingness to collaborate with the Mob to oust the Communist leader.
None of those details are particularly new — the wetsuit and seashell ideas were outlined in 1979 in a book about the CIA by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Powers.
Americans will have to wait at least another six months to find out whether the hundreds of documents the CIA refused to include in yesterday's dump include any clues as to JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's deeper ties to intelligence agencies or the Soviet Union.
In the meantime, let's just be grateful the CIA decided not to blow up Miami in the name of going after Castro. |
Fiji sevens team are too good once again for the All Black sevens as they run rapid in Las Vegas
Fiji ran rampant in the USA Sevens final in Las Vegas on Monday afternoon, brushing aside a tired New Zealand team 35-19.
An injury affected New Zealand side couldn't match the power and pace of Fiji in the final, but restored some pride with a late barrage.
With Joe Webber, Gillies Kaka, and Murphy Taramai unavailable for the final through injury, not to mention the first choice players of DJ Forbes and Tim Mikkelson watching from the couch in New Zealand, the Kiwis were always going to struggle.
Getty Images FLYING FIJIANS: Samisoni Viriviri and his Fijian teammates were too good for their New Zealand rivals in the USA Sevens final.
Webber, who had been superb in Las Vegas, was ruled out after suffering a concussion during the semifinal win over the United States.
But the performance of Gordon Tietjens' young team gave the master coach plenty of reason to smile.
"I thought we came back brilliantly at the end to score 19 points," Tietjens said.
Getty Images FAN-TASTIC: Fiji fan Steven Prasad has every reason to smile during the USA Sevens in Las Vegas.
"It's been a tough week. It was always going to be quite demanding getting into a final, 10 minutes each way against a team like Fiji, but we learn from that.
"We started slowly and you can't start slowly against a team like Fiji. They got a lot of loose ball, they've got a lovely set of skills and they scored some great tries."
For Fiji, it was their second win of the World Rugby sevens series season after a first-up win on the Gold Coast in October last year.
They had massive support from the Fijian American community at Sam Boyd Stadium, with people flying in from all around the country to fly the Fijian flag.
That enthusiasm brushed off on the team, who were superb throughout.
New Zealand enjoyed good early possession and territory, pushing Fiji deep into their own half.
But Fiji were ruthless when they eventually won the ball back, with Jerry Tuwai sprinting 70m to open the scoring after some sloppy play at the breakdown.
Tuwai doubled the advantage two minutes later when Fiji worked their way into New Zealand's half of the field, skipping through the defence to get under the posts.
With a minute remaining in the first half Beaudein Waaka was harshly handed a yellow card for throwing the ball away, when he appeared to pass it as the referee blew his whistle for a penalty.
Fiji capatilised on the extra man, Savenaca Rawaca powering through the defence to score.
That gave Fiji a 21-0 lead at the break, and saw five streakers take the field as the teams ran through their halftime messages.
Once they were cleared the teams returned and Fiji continued as they had finished the first half when Semi Kunatani crossed for his team's fourth try.
Jack Goodhue struck back for New Zealand with seven minutes remaining, but the Kiwis seemed to be lacking energy and injuries were taking their toll.
Kunatani grabbed his second soon after, before Ambrose Curtis replied with a quick fire double off the bench, giving New Zealand some respectability on the scoreboard.
It was too little, too late for New Zealand, giving Fiji a deserving victory.
The next leg of the world series is in Hong Kong next month and Tietjens said he will have to wait and see on the fitness of Webber, Kaka and Taramai, not to mention Forbes and Mikkelson.
"To have four of our players out injured and unavailable, that really tests your depth and I think we've done really well considering that." |
I'm late to the game with this album, but it doesn't get much better than this.
I got turned on to the Avett Brothers after seeing them live this summer, and after getting "Live and Die" stuck in my head, I decided to buy this album. Having listened to most of their others, I think this is their best. It's right where they start to go from wild and energetic bluegrass to a more polished, refined folk sound. After this album, the Avett's seem to have gotten a bit too mellow, so this is the sweet spot.
The songs themselves are absolutely brilliant. I think of them as an American folk version of the Beatles with the memorable memories and strong harmonies. From the opener Die Die Die through The Ballad of Love and Hate, it's a great stretch of songs that range from poppy and upbeat to emotional. It drops a bit then picks up with the amazing All My Mistakes through I Would be Sad, another great stretch of songs. The last few drop off a bit more but that's fine.
Sonically, the album is a bit raw and has a nice balance of crispness to a lively sound. Probably my favorite of the albums of theirs I've heard, where the early ones are too raw and unpolished and the newer ones are a bit too perfect (although the Carpenter has a wonderful mix, I and Love and You was a bit dark and dead for my tastes). Maybe this is because my first exposure to them was the live show.
Typically I'd only give five stars for an album that I feel is "perfect" all the way through, but the quality of the songs are so high than they transcend the lesser tunes. I've recommended this album to many people this year and many fell in love with it as strong as I have. |
While we’re confident that this is in no way “official” Phish news, it seems as though the West Coast may be in for some dates this summer. Pollstar.com is showing that the band will be playing in San Francisco at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium on Monday, August 18th and Tuesday, August 19th. (Hat tip to Luke Sacks for the headsup). We’ll believe it when we see it from the band officially, but for now, if you’re an out-of-towner, you may want to put a hold on a hotel room or two.
We’ve also heard that there are good chances the band will be playing the newly renovated Forum in Inglewood, but for now, all of this is just rumors.
Update: we almost forgot about the Trey Anastasio Band being booked at the Peach Music Festival in Scranton, PA the weekend right before these potential dates, which could make these Phish dates pretty bunk.
Update (2/22): Ticketfly is also showing this as a set of dates as well. |
The BSE Sensex hit a record high on Friday on hopes the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party would win a majority in elections set to conclude next week, sending blue-chips such as ICICI Bank sharply higher.
The five-week-long elections are set to conclude on Monday, with exit polls from media organisations to be issued after the last votes are cast. Actual results will be unveiled on 16 May.
Polls have consistently shown the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi ahead, raising expectations the opposition party, which is seen by markets as being more investor-and business-friendly, will either win or come close to an outright majority.
Sectors seen most likely to benefit from a Modi win led the gains. Infrastructure shares such as Ambuja Cement surged, while the Bank Nifty hit a record high on hopes a new government would frame policies that would aid the economy.
"There is optimism that markets are getting re-rated after the election, and people are betting on that," said Deven Choksey, managing director at KR Choksey Securities.
"People are buying into quality blue-chip stocks, such as ONGC or Reliance. We also advise clients to stay invested in known ideas," he added.
The Sensex touched a life high of 22,999.11 points. The Nifty was up 2.9 percent, not far from its peak of 6,869.85 posted on 25 April.
Gains were broad-based, with 29 out of 30 listed companies in the benchmark Sensex rising.
Banking stocks were among the leaders, with the Bank Nifty gaining as much as 5 percent to a record high.
ICICI Bank surged 6.4 percent, while State Bank of India rose 3.6 percent.
Meanwhile, infrastructure shares rose on hopes a BJP-led government would revive a stagnant investment cycle. Ambuja Cement gained 7.6 percent while ACC Ltd rose 5.3 percent.
Index heavyweight Reliance Industries Ltd gained 3.8 percent while Oil and Natural Gas Corp. surged 3.7 percent.
Reuters
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Heartbreaking video shows a starving polar bear scavenging for food on dry land.
The scene in Canada's Baffin Islands was taken by National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen.
Nicklen said he and his crew were "filming with tears rolling down our cheeks."
A video of a starving wild polar bear roaming around dry land looking for food has gone viral.
In the heartbreaking footage, taken in Canada's northerly Baffin Islands, the bony male polar bear slowly ambles along dry land.
Head down, he rummages in a nearby rubbish bin looking for food. When he finds nothing, he slumps to the ground.
Canadian photographer Paul Nicklen, who recorded the scene with conservation group Sea Legacy, told National Geographic: "We stood there crying — filming with tears rolling down our cheeks."
The bear most likely died "within hours or days of this moment," and there was nothing Nicklen could have done to save him, he said on Instagram.
Feeding wild polar bears is illegal in Canada, and even if it weren't, feeding the bear would only prolong his misery, National Geographic said.
Nicklen added: "It's not like I walk around with a tranquilizer gun or 400 pounds of seal meat."
Watch the video, which Nicklen posted on Instagram on Tuesday, here:
My entire @Sea_Legacy team ... @ paulnicklen
The photographer wrote in the accompanying caption:
"My entire Sea Legacy team was pushing through their tears and emotions while documenting this dying polar bear.
"It’s a soul-crushing scene that still haunts me, but I know we need to share both the beautiful and the heartbreaking if we are going to break down the walls of apathy.
"This is what starvation looks like. The muscles atrophy. No energy. It’s a slow, painful death.
"When scientists say polar bears will be extinct in the next 100 years, I think of the global population of 25,000 bears dying in this manner.
"There is no band aid solution. There was no saving this individual bear. People think that we can put platforms in the ocean or we can feed the odd starving bear.
"The simple truth is this — if the Earth continues to warm, we will lose bears and entire polar ecosystems. This large male bear was not old, and he certainly died within hours or days of this moment.
"But there are solutions. We must reduce our carbon footprint, eat the right food, stop cutting down our forests, and begin putting the Earth — our home — first." |
A Chinese student probably had less than a month's driving experience before a fatal crash on the Lindis Pass, an inquest has heard.
Grant Roberts, 43, and Dennis Pederson, 54, were killed when a rental car driven by Kejia Zhang, 20, crashed into their convoy in November 2012.
Zhang hit gravel, over-corrected and crossed the centre line.
Family members, including Roberts' mother and his former partner, Mel Pipson, attended an inquest before coroner Richard McElrea in the Queenstown District Court today.
The bikers were part of a northbound convoy of 10 motorcycles returning from the Burt Munro Challenge in Invercargill when Zhang collided with the group at 2.15pm near Goodger Rd, 20 kilometres north of Tarras.
The two men died at the scene, a female pillion passenger was seriously injured and another biker suffered minor injuries.
Forensic crash analyst Senior Constable Alastair Crosland, of Alexandra, told the court that Zhang had little independent driving experience – probably less than a month – since gaining a licence in China and none in the 10 months before the crash.
She had been in New Zealand one day when she crashed the rental car.
"The collision was a direct consequence of Zhang losing control of her vehicle after moving too far to the left," Crosland said. "[She] was not a competent driver in these circumstance."
Zhang was convicted in the Alexandra District Court, disqualified from driving for two years and ordered to pay $10,000 in emotional-harm payments for causing the deaths of the two men and injuring two others.
The inquest continues, and the coroner said his findings would be reserved.
SUPPLIED GRANT ROBERTS: With his sons Sean and Cody. |
Winnipeg Jets goaltender Ondrej Pavelec did not return to Tuesday’s game against the Minnesota Wild after suffering a lower-body injury.
It’s unclear exactly how the injury occurred, as the netminder appeared to remove himself from the game at around the 6:15 mark of the second period after speaking with trainers. He let in three goals on 14 shots prior to his departure, but despite some confusion, he was not pulled due to his performance.
Ondrej Pavelec's Stats (Record, Goals-against average, save percentage)
2016-17
4-4-0, 3.55, .888
2015-16
13-13-4, 2.78, .904
2014-15
22-16-8, 2.28, .920
2013-14
22-26-7, 3.01, .901
Connor Hellebuyck took over the crease in his place.
It has been a difficult season for Pavelec, who has spent much of 2016-17 with AHL affiliate Manitoba Moose. The 29-year-old appeared to be turning his fortunes around after being called up in mid-January, getting the start in eight of the Jets’ last nine games and earning his way back into the No. 1 spot. |
AUSTIN (KXAN/AP) -- If you are so proud you made it to the polls you feel the urge to snap a picture of yourself in the voting booth, think again, if you're in Texas.
Texas law prohibits voters from using a "wireless communication device" or "any mechanical or electronic means of recording images or sound" within 100 feet of a voting station. Yes, that includes cell phones.
"It's okay to check messages while you're standing in line, but put it away when it comes time to vote," said Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir. "And certainly don't take a picture of your ballot."
Still, the section of the law banning use of cell phones doesn't list specific penalties, except for asking violators to leave or turn of their phones.
A Colorado lawmaker and voter filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday seeking to overturn a state law that bars people from taking photos of their ballots.The suit was filed by Republican state Sen. Owen Hill, of Colorado Springs, and Scott Romano of Littleton. "Ballot selfies" are a misdemeanor in Colorado.
A review by The Associated Press found 18 states have laws against sharing ballot photos. Six other states bar photography in polling places but permit photos of mail-in ballots.
Courts have struck down bans in New Hampshire and Indiana, and rules have been changed in California and Rhode Island.
Justin Timberlake flew from California to Tennessee in order to vote early. The singer posted a picture of himself at the voting booth on Instagram Monday, noting that if he could make that effort, then there are, "No excuses, my good people!" As of Wednesday morning, Timberlake has taken down the photo from his Instagram account.
A Tennessee law that took effect earlier this year bars voters from taking photographs or video while inside a polling location. Tennessee secretary of state spokesman Adam Ghassemi says officials are "thrilled Justin can't stop the feeling," but reminded voters to use their phones inside polling locations only to help them vote.
Timberlake lives in California, but grew up in the Memphis area and owns property near Nashville. Back in Texas, DeBeauvoir doesn't think the laws will change. She points to last legislative session when a bill to allow cell phones for research purposes at the polls failed to pass.
"I don't think [the recent ruling in the New Hampshire case] is going to mean anything in Texas because I think there's this strong sense of protecting privacy," said DeBeauvoir. |
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Microsoft has some catching up to do: Xbox and gaming revenue fell 9 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2016, the company revealed in its latest earnings statement.
With the imminent release of the Xbox One S, it seems that gamers are holding out on investing in the Xbox ecosystem.
Microsoft is attributing the decrease in revenue to declining console purchases and the cheaper price of the current Xbox One. This equated to a $152 million decrease during its fiscal fourth quarter. Microsoft could be aiming to liquidate current stock as the slimmer Xbox One S is about to hit stores. During E3, Microsoft also unveiled Project Scorpio, a new, more powerful and VR-capable console that’s set to launch sometime next year. This too could also be the reason why some are waiting to buy a new system.
The Xbox One has seen a troubled life. While outpacing its predecessor, the Xbox 360, in sales, the Xbox One has had some marketing gaffes. Most notably, the launch edition of the Xbox One was $100 more expensive than Sony’s PlayStation 4 and came bundled with Kinect. The motion tracking accessory failed to capture imaginations, and Microsoft quickly dropped it from the system.
Microsoft has since been on a laser-focused course to win back the hearts and minds of gamers. Now that Phil Spencer is heading Xbox, Microsoft’s recent E3 press conference was all about the games. Microsoft also made a strong push to expand into PC gaming in Xbox Play Anywhere. It announced that a slew of first-party titles would be coming to PC. With that, Microsoft will also enable cross-buy, meaning that if gamers purchase a copy of a game on Xbox One (digitally) it too will be available on PC. This announcement caught the ire of those deeply entrenched in the console war, but saw unanimous praise from the larger gaming audience.
Even with the recent dip in sales, Microsoft seems to playing the long game. |
It was implausible that FBI Director James Comey was fired in May 2017 for actions committed in July 2016 — the rationale contained in the memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
It was implausible that Comey was fired by Donald Trump for having been too tough on Hillary Clinton, as when, at that July news conference, he publicly recited her various email misdeeds despite recommending against prosecution.
It was implausible that Trump fired Comey for, among other things, reopening the Clinton investigation 11 days before the election, something that at the time Trump praised as a sign of Comey’s “guts” that had “brought back his reputation.”
It was implausible that Trump, a man notorious for being swayed by close and loyal personal advisers, fired Comey on the recommendation of a sub-Cabinet official whom Trump hardly knew and who’d been on the job all of two weeks.
It was implausible that Trump found Rosenstein’s arguments so urgently persuasive that he acted immediately — so precipitously, in fact, that Comey learned of his own firing from TVs that happened to be playing behind him.
These implausibilities were obvious within seconds of Comey’s firing and the administration’s immediate attempt to pin it all on the Rosenstein memo. That was pure spin. So why in reality did Trump fire Comey?
Admittedly, Comey had to go. The cliche is that if you’ve infuriated both sides, it means you must be doing something right. Sometimes, however, it means you must be doing everything wrong.
Over the last year, Comey has been repeatedly wrong. Not, in my view, out of malice or partisanship (although his self-righteousness about his own probity does occasionally grate). He was in an unprecedented situation with unpalatable choices. Never in American presidential history had a major party nominated a candidate under official FBI investigation. (Turns out the Trump campaign was under investigation as well.) Which makes the normal injunction that FBI directors not interfere in elections facile and impossible to follow. Any course of action — disclosure or silence, commission or omission — carried unavoidable electoral consequences.
Comey had to make up the rules as he went along. He did. That was not his downfall. His downfall was making up contradictory, illogical rules, such as the July 5 non-indictment indictment of Clinton.
A series of these — and Comey became anathema to both Democrats and Republicans. Clinton blamed her loss on two people. One of them was Comey.
And there’s the puzzle. There was ample bipartisan sentiment for letting Comey go. And there was ample time from Election Day on to do so. A simple talk, a gold watch, a friendly farewell, a Comey resignation to allow the new president to pick the new director. No fanfare, no rancour.
True, this became more difficult after March 20 when Comey revealed that the FBI was investigating the alleged Trump-Russia collusion. Difficult but not impossible. For example, just last week Comey had committed an egregious factual error about the Huma Abedin emails that the FBI had to abjectly walk back in a written memo to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Here was an opportunity for a graceful exit: Comey regrets the mistake and notes that some of the difficult decisions he had previously made necessarily cost him the confidence of various parties. Time for a clean slate. Add the usual boilerplate about not wanting to be a distraction at such a crucial time. Awkward perhaps, but still dignified and amicable.
So why did he do it? Now we know: the king asked whether no one would rid him of this troublesome priest, and got so impatient he did it himself
Instead we got this — a political axe murder, brutal even by Washington standards. (Or even Roman standards. Where was the vein-opening knife and the warm bath?) No final meeting, no letter of resignation, no presidential thanks, no cordial parting. Instead, a blindsided Comey ends up in a live-streamed O.J. Bronco ride, bolting from Los Angeles to be flown, defrocked, back to Washington.
Why? Trump had become increasingly agitated with the Russia-election investigation and Comey’s very public part in it. If Trump thought this would kill the inquiry and the story, or perhaps even just derail it somewhat, he’s made the blunder of the decade. Whacking Comey has brought more critical attention to the Russia story than anything imaginable. It won’t stop the FBI investigation. And the confirmation hearings for a successor will become a nationally televised forum for collusion allegations, which up till now have remained a scandal in search of a crime.
So why did he do it? Now we know: the king asked whether no one would rid him of this troublesome priest, and got so impatient he did it himself.
Washington Post |
After nine years hosting one of the most popular comedy programs on air, it’s hard to remember a time when Stephen Colbert might have been mistaken for the kind of conservative commentator he satires. Yet before Colbert became an international celebrity, some people didn’t know what to make of him—especially if they agreed with what he seemed to be saying.
Some research has suggested that the mixed messages in “The Colbert Report” might actually make people more sympathetic to Republicans. In a 2008 paper in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan Morris, political scientists at East Carolina University, devised an experiment to explore how Colbert’s message was really coming across. They recruited over 800 college students and divided them into three groups: One watched clips of “The Colbert Report”; a second saw clips of “The O’Reilly Factor”; and a third group didn’t watch anything. Both sets of video clips concerned the same subjects, like the Mark Foley scandal and the U.S.’s policy on torture.
The students then took a survey about their political beliefs. Both groups—whether they’d been shown "Colbert" or "O’Reilly"—were more sympathetic to conservative points of view. This leaning affected issues of both policy and character: They were more likely to believe Republicans would do a better job than Democrats at managing the economy, and they reported more “warm” feelings toward George W. Bush. “Not everyone comprehends the nature of Colbert’s satire,” says Morris. “Early on in his career, people didn’t know where he was coming from. His character caught people off guard.”
“Not everyone comprehends the nature of Colbert’s satire.”
Students who watched "Colbert" also ended up feeling less confident about their understanding of politics: They were more likely to agree with the statement, “Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on.” (Similar research on “The Daily Show” shows the opposite effect: Jon Stewart—whose style invites his audience to feel like they’re in on the joke—leaves viewers feeling more confident in their political knowledge.) “The mixed messages contained in Colbert’s presentation create the possibility that young viewers may actually become more confused about politics,” write Baumgartner and Morris. |
JUST CAME OUT The Ferguson Riots Are A Jihad Against America Organized By Muslim Terrorists (STREET JIHAD IS COMING TO AMERICA) - Walid Shoebat
Tue, 02 Dec 2014 23:03
By Theodore Shoebat
The Ferguson riots are a jihad against America organized by Muslims. This is stealth jihad at work, and it foreshadows that major street jihad is coming to America. Muslim activists and organizers are using the rioters as a means to launch jihad in America. I did a whole video on this:
Shoebat.com was not the first to confirm the Islamic collection in the Ferguson riots. Fox News just released a whole report on the Islamic involvement in the Ferguson riots:
Muslim groups have stepped up efforts to co-opt protests over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., with a drive to equate the teen's death to the death of a radical Islamist shot during an FBI raid in 2009, a Washington-based security watchdog group is warning.
Using social media, conference calling and traditional outreach methods, leaders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) are portraying Brown and Detroit mosque leader Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah as African-American victims of police targeting, according to the Washington-based Center for Security Policy (CSP). In a conference call organized by CAIR-linked ''Muslims for Ferguson, a CAIR official called Abdullah a ''Shaheed,'' or martyr, and said both he and Brown were victims of a national security apparatus that had ''completely gone wild'' and engaged in ''demonizing and criminalizing Muslims.''
''The reality is that this country, in law enforcement, be it local, state or federal law enforcement, people with guns have always seen black men and black people as threats,'' Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR's Michigan Chapter, told the some 100 protest organizers on the call, made on the five-year anniversary of Abdullah's death and which was monitored by CSP.
Walid claimed Brown was a Muslim, although when pressed, Walid denied he had made such a claim. Brown was buried in August after a memorial service at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis.
Another Muslim activist behind the Ferguson chaos wrote that Muslims, including CAIR (Council of American Islamic Relations) have been involved since the beginning of this controversy:
From day one, Muslims have been on the ground in Ferguson. The Facebook group Muslims for Ferguson and other efforts were just later manifestations of what was already happening. Muslims were in Ferguson first and foremost because we live in the community like everyone else and are concerned about its well-being.
Along with Brothers Anthony Merrill and Naji Fakhrid-deen Adams, I was on the ground in Ferguson on the first night. I grew up in the area and have been talking about issues of violence and policing and surrounding economic issues for years.
For me, it was a no-brainer to stand in solidarity with those protesting in the streets. Brother Anthony also grew up in the area and has been vocal on local issues for years. Brother Naji is a reformed East St. Louis gang leader and substance-abuse counselor who works in the community every day.
Talal Ahmad was also on the ground from day one. A native of the O'Fallon Park Neighborhood in North St. Louis living in Jennings Brother Talal is a local independent-journalist who emerged as a protest leader with the group Tribe X. Brother Talal was instrumental in the successful occupation and subsequent negotiations with St. Louis University.
Brother Anthony Shahid of the Tawheed Youth Group and Masjid Tawheed is a long time St. Louis activist and veteran of the African-American struggle for justice. Brother Shahid was on the ground from day one and played a pivotal-role as a peacekeeper.
Missouri State Senator Jamillah Nasheed and her aide Eric Vickers, both Muslim, have also been mainstays at the protests. Ministers Donald and Akbar Muhammad, members of the Fruit of Islam security, and the Final Call News and others components of the Nation of Islam have also been active on the ground as have members of the Moorish Science Temple.
Mustafa Abdullah of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri has not only been active on the ground he has taken local police to court over the ''5 second rule'' and other egregious abuses of civil-liberties. Faizan Syed, director of the St. Louis Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations along with community-activist and Hafiz Abdul-Basit Syed, have also been of assistance to activists starting at an early date.
The Muslims are using the rioters, and of course race, as an instrument for jihad, and Obama is as well playing a major role in this. The entire movement is a conspiracy to weaken the American police force to further enable jihad in America. To prove this point here is a video of Ferguson Muslim Bassem Masri talking about demilitarizing the police:
By ''demilitarize'' and by saying, ''What happens when we demilitarize your police force, are you going to keep the badge?'' he no doubt means neutralizing the police force and bringing in anarchy to America.
Here is another video of Ferguson Muslim activist telling police that neither them nor their children will ever be safe:
This is a terrorist threat, and we must ask ourselves why the police are not arresting him? This is not something police officers tolerate. Some sort of measure must of have been done within the government to force the officers not to react to these low-lives.
God bless Police Chief Edward Flynn for expressing the truth: the people who hate the police don't care about African Americans, because African Americans kill each other every day, and if they really cared they would be focusing on that instead of trying to create sedition.
Obama wants to cause a race war in order to overthrow the American government. All of the violence in society comes from one view: complete freedom of speech. Some speech, like that of these despotic mobs, should not be given freedom. To use the words of Joseph De Maistre,
But of all monarchies, the hardest, most despotic, and most intolerable is King People.
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About The Author Addy Osmani is a Developer Programs Engineer on the Chrome team at Google. A passionate JavaScript developer, he has written open-source books like ‘ … More about Addy…
Journey Through The JavaScript MVC Jungle
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When writing a web application from scratch, it’s easy to feel like we can get by simply by relying on a DOM manipulation library (like jQuery ) and a handful of utility plugins. The problem with this is that it doesn’t take long to get lost in a nested pile of jQuery callbacks and DOM elements without any real structure in place for our applications.
When writing a Web application from scratch, it’s easy to feel like we can get by simply by relying on a DOM manipulation library (like jQuery) and a handful of utility plugins. The problem with this is that it doesn’t take long to get lost in a nested pile of jQuery callbacks and DOM elements without any real structure in place for our applications.
In short, we’re stuck with spaghetti code. Fortunately there are modern JavaScript frameworks that can assist with bringing structure and organization to our projects, improving how easily maintainable they are in the long-run.
Further Reading on SmashingMag:
What Is JavaScript MVC, Or Rather MV*?
These modern frameworks provide developers an easy path to organizing their code using variations of a pattern known as MVC (Model-View-Controller). MVC separates the concerns in an application down into three parts:
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Models represent the domain-specific knowledge and data in an application. Think of this as being a ‘type’ of data you can model — like a User, Photo or Note. Models should notify anyone observing them about their current state (e.g Views).
represent the domain-specific knowledge and data in an application. Think of this as being a ‘type’ of data you can model — like a User, Photo or Note. Models should notify anyone observing them about their current state (e.g Views). Views are typically considered the User-interface in an application (e.g your markup and templates), but don’t have to be. They should know about the existence of Models in order to observe them, but don’t directly communicate with them.
are typically considered the User-interface in an application (e.g your markup and templates), but don’t have to be. They should know about the existence of Models in order to observe them, but don’t directly communicate with them. Controllers handle the input (e.g clicks, user actions) in an application and Views can be considered as handling the output. When a Controller updates the state of a model (such as editing the caption on a Photo), it doesn’t directly tell the View. This is what the observing nature of the View and Model relationship is for.
JavaScript ‘MVC’ frameworks that can help us structure our code don’t always strictly follow the above pattern. Some frameworks will include the responsibility of the Controller in the View (e.g Backbone.js) whilst others add their own opinionated components into the mix as they feel this is more effective.
For this reason we refer to such frameworks as following the MV* pattern, that is, you’re likely to have a View and a Model, but more likely to have something else also included.
Note: There also exist variations of MVC known as MVP (Model-View-Presenter) and MVVM (Model-View ViewModel). If you’re new to this and feel it’s a lot to take in, don’t worry. It can take a little while to get your head around patterns, but I’ve written more about the above patterns in my online book Learning JavaScript Design Patterns in case you need further help.
When Do You Need A JavaScript MV* Framework?
When building a single-page application using JavaScript, whether it involves a complex user interface or is simply trying to reduce the number of HTTP requests required for new Views, you will likely find yourself inventing many of the pieces that make up an MV* framework like Backbone or Ember.
At the outset, it isn’t terribly difficult to write an application framework that offers some opinionated way to avoid spaghetti code, however to say that it is equally as trivial to write something of the standard of Backbone would be a grossly incorrect assumption.
There’s a lot more that goes into structuring an application than tying together a DOM manipulation library, templating and routing. Mature MV* frameworks typically not only include many of the pieces you would find yourself writing, but also include solutions to problems you’ll find yourself running into later on down the road. This is a time-saver that you shouldn’t underestimate the value of.
So, where will you likely need an MV* framework and where won’t you?
If you’re writing an application that will likely only be communicating with an API or back-end data service, where much of the heavy lifting for viewing or manipulating that data will be occurring in the browser, you may find a JavaScript MV* framework useful.
Good examples of applications that fall into this category are GMail and Google Docs. These applications typically download a single payload containing all the scripts, stylesheets and markup users need for common tasks and then perform a lot of additional behavior in the background. It’s trivial to switch between reading an email or document to writing one and you don’t need to ask the application to render the whole page again at all.
If, however, you’re building an application that still relies on the server for most of the heavy-lifting of Views/pages and you’re just using a little JavaScript or jQuery to make things a little more interactive, an MV framework may be overkill. There certainly are complex Web applications where the partial rendering of views can* be coupled with a single-page application effectively, but for everything else, you may find yourself better sticking to a simpler setup.
The Challenge Of Choice: Too Many Options?
The JavaScript community has been going through something of a renaissance over the last few years, with developers building even larger and more complex applications with it as time goes by. The language still greatly differs from those more classic Software engineers are used to using (C++, Java) as well as languages used by Web developers (PHP, Python, .Net etc). This means that in many cases we are borrowing concepts of how to structure applications from what we have seen done in the past in these other languages.
In my talk “Digesting JavaScript MVC: Pattern Abuse or Evolution”, I brought up the point that there’s currently too much choice when it comes to what to use for structuring your JavaScript application. Part of this problem is fueled by how different JavaScript developers interpret how a scalable JavaScript application should be organized — MVC? MVP? MVVM? Something else? This leads to more frameworks being created with a different take on MV* each week and ultimately more noise because we’re still trying to establish the “right way” to do things, if that exists at all. Many developers believe it doesn’t.
We refer to the current state of new frameworks frequently popping up as ‘Yet Another Framework Syndrome’ (or YAFS). Whilst innovation is of course something we should welcome, YAFS can lead to a great deal of confusion and frustration when developers just want to start writing an app but don’t want to manually evaluate 30 different options in order to select something maintainable. In many cases, the differences between some of these frameworks can be very subtle if not difficult to distinguish.
TodoMVC: A Common Application For Learning And Comparison
There’s been a huge boom in the number of such MV* frameworks being released over the past few years.
Backbone.js, Ember.js, AngularJS, Spine, CanJS … The list of new and stable solutions continues to grow each week and developers can quickly find themselves lost in a sea of options. From minds who have had to work on complex applications that inspired these solutions (such as Yehuda Katz and Jeremy Ashkenas), there are many strong contenders for what developers should consider using. The question is, what to use and how do you choose?
We understood this frustration and wanted to help developers simplify their selection process as much as possible. To help solve this problem, we created TodoMVC — a project which offers the same Todo application implemented in most of the popular JavaScript MV* frameworks of today — think of it as speed dating for frameworks. Solutions look and feel the same, have a common feature set, and make it easy for us to compare the syntax and structure of different frameworks, so we can select the one we feel the most comfortable with or at least, narrow down our choices.
This week we’re releasing a brand new version of TodoMVC, which you can find more details about lower down in the apps section.
In the near future we want to take this work even further, providing guides on how frameworks differ and recommendations for which options to consider for particular types of applications you may wish to build.
Our Suggested Criteria For Selecting A Framework
Selecting a framework is of course about more than simply comparing the Todo app implementations. This is why, once we’ve filtered down our selection of potential frameworks to just a few, it’s recommend to spend some time doing a little due diligence. The framework we opt for may need to support building non-trivial features and could end up being used to maintain the app for years to come.
What is the framework really capable of? Spend time reviewing both the source code of the framework and official list of features to see how well they fit with your requirements. There will be projects that may require modifying or extending the underlying source and thus make sure that if this might be the case, you’ve performed due diligence on the code.
Spend time reviewing both the source code of the framework and official list of features to see how well they fit with your requirements. There will be projects that may require modifying or extending the underlying source and thus make sure that if this might be the case, you’ve performed due diligence on the code. Has the framework been proved in production? i.e Have developers actually built and deployed large applications with it that are publicly accessible? Backbone has a strong portfolio of these (SoundCloud, LinkedIn) but not all frameworks do. Ember is used in number of large apps, including the user tools in Square. JavaScriptMVC has been used to power applications at IBM amongst other places. It’s not only important to know that a framework works in production, but also being able to look at real world code and be inspired by what can be built with it.
i.e Have developers actually built and deployed large applications with it that are publicly accessible? Backbone has a strong portfolio of these (SoundCloud, LinkedIn) but not all frameworks do. Ember is used in number of large apps, including the user tools in Square. JavaScriptMVC has been used to power applications at IBM amongst other places. It’s not only important to know that a framework works in production, but also being able to look at real world code and be inspired by what can be built with it. Is the framework mature? We generally recommend developers don’t simply “pick one and go with it”. New projects often come with a lot of buzz surrounding their releases but remember to take care when selecting them for use on a production-level app. You don’t want to risk the project being canned, going through major periods of refactoring or other breaking changes that tend to be more carefully planned out when a framework is mature. Mature projects also tend to have more detailed documentation available, either as a part of their official or community-driven docs.
We generally recommend developers don’t simply “pick one and go with it”. New projects often come with a lot of buzz surrounding their releases but remember to take care when selecting them for use on a production-level app. You don’t want to risk the project being canned, going through major periods of refactoring or other breaking changes that tend to be more carefully planned out when a framework is mature. Mature projects also tend to have more detailed documentation available, either as a part of their official or community-driven docs. Is the framework flexible or opinionated? Know what flavor you’re after as there are plenty of frameworks available which provide one or the other. Opinionated frameworks lock (or suggest) you to do things in a specific way (theirs). By design they are limiting, but place less emphasis on the developer having to figure out how things should work on their own.
Know what flavor you’re after as there are plenty of frameworks available which provide one or the other. Opinionated frameworks lock (or suggest) you to do things in a specific way (theirs). By design they are limiting, but place less emphasis on the developer having to figure out how things should work on their own. Have you really played with the framework? Write a small application without using frameworks and then attempt to refactor your code with a framework to confirm whether it’s easy to work with or not. As much as researching and reading up on code will influence your decision, it’s equally as important to write actual code using the framework to make sure you’re comfortable with the concepts it enforces.
Write a small application without using frameworks and then attempt to refactor your code with a framework to confirm whether it’s easy to work with or not. As much as researching and reading up on code will influence your decision, it’s equally as important to write actual code using the framework to make sure you’re comfortable with the concepts it enforces. Does the framework have a comprehensive set of documentation? Although demo applications can be useful for reference, you’ll almost always find yourself consulting the official framework docs to find out what its API supports, how common tasks or components can be created with it and what the gotchas worth noting are. Any framework worth it’s salt should have a detailed set of documentation which will help guide developers using it. Without this, you can find yourself heavily relying on IRC channels, groups and self-discovery, which can be fine, but are often overly time-consuming when compared to a great set of docs provided upfront.
Although demo applications can be useful for reference, you’ll almost always find yourself consulting the official framework docs to find out what its API supports, how common tasks or components can be created with it and what the gotchas worth noting are. Any framework worth it’s salt should have a detailed set of documentation which will help guide developers using it. Without this, you can find yourself heavily relying on IRC channels, groups and self-discovery, which can be fine, but are often overly time-consuming when compared to a great set of docs provided upfront. What is the total size of the framework, factoring in minification, gzipping and any modular building that it supports? What dependencies does the framework have? Frameworks tend to only list the total filesize of the base library itself, but don’t list the sizes of the librarys dependencies. This can mean the difference between opting for a library that initially looks quite small, but could be relatively large if it say, depends on jQuery and other libraries.
What dependencies does the framework have? Frameworks tend to only list the total filesize of the base library itself, but don’t list the sizes of the librarys dependencies. This can mean the difference between opting for a library that initially looks quite small, but could be relatively large if it say, depends on jQuery and other libraries. Have you reviewed the community around the framework? Is there an active community of project contributors and users who would be able to assist if you run into issues? Have enough developers been using the framework that there are existing reference applications, tutorials and maybe even screencasts that you can use to learn more about it?
Dojo And Rise Of The JavaScript Frameworks
As many of us know, the Dojo toolkit was one of the first efforts to provide developers a means to developing more complex applications and some might say it in-part inspired us to think more about the needs of non-trivial applications. I sat down to ask Dojos Dylan Schiemann, Kitson Kelly, and James Thomas what their thoughts were on the rise of JavaScript MV* frameworks.
Q: Didn’t Dojo already solve all of this? Why hasn’t it been the dominent solution for developers wishing to build more structured (and more non-trivial) applications?
Years ago, while the JavaScript landscape evolved from adding simple Ajax and chrome to a page, Dojo was evangelizing a “toolkit” approach to building complex Web applications.
Many of those features were way ahead of most developers needs. With the emergence of the browser as the dominant application platform, many of the innovations pioneered in The Dojo Toolkit now appear in newer toolkits. MVC was just another package that Dojo has provided for quite some time, along with modular code packages, OO in JS, UI widgets, cross-browser graphics, templating, internationalization, accessibility, data stores, testing frameworks, a build system and much, much more.
JavaScript libraries shouldn’t end at “query”, which is why Dojo, early on, focussed on completing the picture for enterprise grade application development. This is the same focus that is has today with MVC, it’s just another “tool in the arsenal”.
Why is Dojo not the dominant toolkit? Its goal was never to be the only choice. The goal was to provide an open collection of tools that could be used with anything else, within projects, and liberally copied into other work as well. Dojo was criticized for being slow and even after that was addressed, it was criticized for being slow. Trying to shake that perception is challenging. It is very hard to document a feature-rich toolkit. There are 175 sub-packages in Dojo 1.8 and over 1,400 modules.
That is not only a challenge from a documentation purpose, it also means that there isn’t one thing that Dojo does. Which is good if you are building software, but very difficult when you are starting out trying to figure out where to start. These are all things we have been trying to work on for Dojo 1.8, in the form of tutorials and significantly improved documentation.
Q: Why should developers still consider Dojo and what ideas do you have lined up for the future of the project? I hear 1.8 will be another major milestone.
In Dojo 1.8, dojox/mvc takes another step towards full maturity. There has been a lot of investment in time, effort, testing and community awareness into the package. It focuses on providing an MVC model that leverages the rest of Dojo. Coupled with dojox/app, an application framework that is designed to make it easier to build rich applications across desktop and mobile, it makes a holistic framework for creating a client side application.
In the typical Dojo way, this is just one of many viable ways in which to build applications with Dojo.
In 1.8, not only does the MVC sub-module become more mature, it is built upon a robust framework. It doesn’t just give you markup language to create your views, express your models or develop a controller. It is far more then just wiring up some controls to a data source. Because it is leveraging the rest of Dojo, you can draw in anything else you might need.
In Dojo 2.0 we will be looking to take modularity to a new level, so that it becomes even easier to take a bit of this and a bit of that and string it all together. We are also exploring the concepts of isomorphism, where it should be transparent to the end-user where your code is being executed, be it client side or server side and that ultimately it should be transparent to the developer.
The TodoMVC Collection
In our brand new release, Todo implementations now exist for the most popular frameworks with a large number of other commonly used frameworks being worked on in Labs. These implementations have gone through a lot of revision, often taking on board best practice tips and suggestions from framework authors, contributors and users from within the community.
Following on from comments previously made by Backbone.js author Jeremey Ashkenas and Yehuda Katz, TodoMVC now also offers consistent implementations based on an official application specification as well as routing (or state management).
We don’t pretend that more complex learning applications aren’t possible (they certainly are), but the simplicity of a Todo app allows developers to review areas such as code structure, component syntax and flow, which we feel are enough to enable a comparison between frameworks and prompt further exploration with a particular solution or set of solutions.
Our applications include:
For those interested in AMD versions:
And our Labs include:
Note: We’ve implemented a version of our Todo application using just JavaScript and another using primarily jQuery conventions. As you can see, whilst these applications are functionally equivalent to something you might write with an MVC framework, there’s no separation of concerns and the code becomes harder to read and maintain as the codebase grows.
We feel honored that over the past year, some framework authors have involved us in discussions about how to improve their solutions, helping bring our experience with a multitude of solutions to the table. We’ve also slowly moved towards TodoMVC being almost a defacto app that new frameworks implement and this means it’s become easier to make initial comparisons when you’re reviewing choices.
Frameworks: When To Use What?
To help you get started with narrowing down frameworks to explore, we would like to offer the below high-level framework summaries which we hope will help steer you towards a few specific options to try out.
I want something flexible which offers a minimalist solution to separating concerns in my application. It should support a persistence layer and RESTful sync, models, views (with controllers), event-driven communication, templating and routing. It should be imperative, allowing one to update the View when a model changes. I’d like some decisions about the architecture left up to me. Ideally, many large companies have used the solution to build non-trivial applications. As I may be building something complex, I’d like there to be an active extension community around the framework that have already tried addressing larger problems (Marionette, Chaplin, Aura, Thorax). Ideally, there are also scaffolding tools (grunt-bbb, brunch) available for the solution. Use Backbone.js.
I want something that tries to tackle desktop-level application development for the web. It should be opinionated, modular, support a variation of MVC, avoid the need to wire everything in my application together manually, support persistence, computed properties and have auto-updating (live) templates. It should support proper state management rather than the manual routing solution many other frameworks advocate being used. It should also come with extensive docs and of course, templating. It should also have scaffolding tools available (ember.gem, ember for brunch). Use Ember.js.
I want something more lightweight which supports live-binding templates, routing, integration with major libraries (like jQuery and Dojo) and is optimized for performance. It should also support a way to implement models, views and controllers. It may not be used on as many large public applications just yet, but has potential. Ideally, the solution should be built by people who have previous experience creating many complex applications. Use CanJS.
I want something declarative that uses the View to derive behavior. It focuses on achieving this through custom HTML tags and components that specify your application intentions. It should support being easily testable, URL management (routing) and a separation of concerns through a variation of MVC. It takes a different approach to most frameworks, providing a HTML compiler for creating your own DSL in HTML. It may be inspired by upcoming Web platform features such as Web Components and also has its own scaffolding tools available (angular-seed). Use AngularJS.
I want something that offers me an excellent base for building large scale applications. It should support a mature widget infrastructure, modules which support lazy-loading and can be asynchronous, simple integration with CDNs, a wide array of widget modules (graphics, charting, grids, etc) and strong support for internationalization (i18n, l10n). It should have support for OOP, MVC and the building blocks to create more complex architectures. Use Dojo.
I want something which benefits from the YUI extension infrastructure. It should support models, views and routers and make it simple to write multi-view applications supporting routing, View transitions and more. Whilst larger, it is a complete solution that includes widgets/components as well as the tools needed to create an organized application architecture. It may have scaffolding tools (yuiproject), but these need to be updated. Use YUI.
I want something simple that values asynchronous interfaces and lack any dependencies. It should be opinionated but flexible on how to build applications. The framework should provide bare-bones essentials like model, view, controller, events, and routing, while still being tiny. It should be optimized for use with CoffeeScript and come with comprehensive documentation. Use Spine.
I want something that will make it easy to build complex dynamic UIs with a clean underlying data model and declarative bindings. It should automatically update my UI on model changes using two-way bindings and support dependency tracking of model data. I should be able to use it with whatever framework I prefer, or even an existing app. It should also come with templating built-in and be easily extensible. Use KnockoutJS.
I want something that will help me build simple Web applications and websites. I don’t expect there to be a great deal of code involved and so code organisation won’t be much of a concern. The solution should abstract away browser differences so I can focus on the fun stuff. It should let me easily bind events, interact with remote services, be extensible and have a huge plugin community. Use jQuery.
What Do Developers Think About The Most Popular Frameworks?
As part of our research into MV* frameworks for TodoMVC and this article, we decided to conduct a survey to bring together the experiences of those using these solutions. We asked developers what framework they find themselves using the most often and more importantly, why they would recommend them to others. We also asked what they felt was still missing in their project of choice.
We’ve grouped some of the most interesting responses below, by framework.
Ember.js
Pros: The combination of live templates and observable objects has changed the way I write JavaScript. It can be a bit much to wrap your head around at first, but you end up with a nice separation of responsibility. I found that once I have everything set up, adding fairly complex features only takes a couple lines of code. Without Ember, these same features would’ve been hellish to implement. Cons: Ember has yet to reach 1.0. Many things are still in flux, such as the router and Ember data. The new website is very helpful, but there’s still not as much documentation for Ember as there is for other frameworks, specifically Backbone. Also, with so much magic in the framework, it can be a little scary. There’s the fear that if something breaks you won’t be able to figure out exactly why. Oh, and the error messages that ember gives you often suck.
Pros: The key factors: a) Features that let me avoid a lot of boilerplate (bindings, computer properties, view layer with the cool handlebars). b) the core team: I’m a Rails developer and know the work of Yehuda Katz. I trust the guy =) Cons: Documentation. It’s really sad that Ember doesn’t have good documentation, tutorials, screencast like Backbone, Angular or other frameworks. Right now, we browse the code looking for docs which isn’t ideal.
Pros: Convention over configuration. Ember makes so many small decisions for you it’s by far the easiest way to build a client-side application these days. Cons: The learning curve. It is missing the mass of getting started guides that exist for other frameworks like Backbone, this is partly because of the small community, but I think more because of the state of flux the codebase is in pre-1.0.
Pros: Simplicity, bindings, tight integration with Handlebars, ease of enabling modularity in my own code. Cons: I’d like to have a stable integration with ember-data, and integrated localStorage support synced with a REST API, but hey that’s fantasy that one day will surely come true ;-)
Backbone.js
Pros: Simplicity — only 4 core components (Collection, Model, View, Router). Huge community (ecosystem) and lots of solutions on StackOverflow. Higher order frameworks like Marionette or Vertebrae with lots of clever code inside. Somebody might like “low-levelness” — need to write lots of boilerplate code, but get customized application architecture. Cons: I don’t like how extend method works — it copies content of parent objects into new one. Prototypal inheritance FTW. Sometime I miss real world scenarios in docs examples. Also there is a lot of research needed to figure out how to build a bigger app after reading the TODO tutorial. I’m missing official AMD support in projects from DocumentCloud (BB, _). [Note: this shouldn’t be an issue with the new RequireJS shim() method in RequireJS 2.0].
Pros: After the initial brain-warp of understanding how Backbone rolls, it is incredibly useful. Useful as in, well supported, lightweight, and constantly updated in a valid scope. Ties in with natural friends Underscore, jQuery/Zepto, tools that most of my studio’s projects would work with. Cons: The amount of tutorials on how to do things with Backbone is inconsistent and at different periods of Backbones lifespan. I’ve asked other devs to have a look at Backbone, and they would be writing code for v0.3. Un-aware. Whilst not a problem Backbone can fix itself, it is certainly a major dislike associated with the framework. I suppose in theory, you could apply this to anything else, but, Backbone is a recurrent one in my eyes. Hell, I’ve even seen month old articles using ancient Backbone methods and patterns. Whatever dislikes I would have on the framework strictly itself, has been rectified by the community through sensible hacks and approaches. For me, that is why Backbone is great, the community backing it up.
Pros: Provides just enough abstraction without unreasonable opinions — enabling you to tailor it to the needs of the project. Cons: I would re-write (or possibly remove) Backbone.sync. It has baked in assumptions of typical client-initiated HTTP communications, and doesn’t adapt well to the push nature of WebSockets.
Pros: It’s extremely easy to get into, offering a nice gateway to MV* based frameworks. It’s relatively customizable and there are also tons of other people using it, making finding help or support easy. Cons: The fact that there’s no view bindings by default (although you can fix this). Re-rendering the whole view when a single property changes is wasteful. The RESTful API has a lot of positives, but the lack of bulk-saving (admittedly a problem with REST itself, but still) and the difficulty in getting different URI schemes to work on different types of operations sucks.
AngularJS
Pros: a) 2-way data binding is incredibly powerful. You tend to think more about your model and the state that it is in instead of a series of events that need to happen. The model is the single source of truth. b) Performance. AngularJS is a small download. It’s templating uses DOM nodes instead of converting strings into DOM nodes and should perform better. c) If you are targeting modern browsers and/or are a little careful, you can drop jQuery from your dependencies too. Cons: I’d like to be able to specify transitions for UI state changes that propgate from a model change. Specifically for elements that use ng-show or ng-hide I’d like to use a fade or slide in in an easy declarative way.
Pros: It’s very intuitive, has excellent documentation. I love their data binding approach, HTML based views, nested scopes. I switched from Backbone/Thorax to Angular and never looked back. A new Chrome extension Batarang integrates with Chrome Developer’s Tools and provides live access the Angular data structures. Cons: I’d like to have a built-in support to such functions as drag'n'drop, however this can be added using external components available on GitHub. I’d also like to see more 3rd party components available for reuse. I think it’s just a matter of time for the ecosystem around AngularJS to get more mature and then these will be available just like they are in communities like jQuery.
Pros: It minimizes drastically the boilerplate code, allows for nice code reuse through components, extends the HTML syntax so that many complex features end up being as simple as applying a directive (attribute) in the HTML, and is super-easily testable thanks to a full commitment to dependency injection. You can write a non-trivial app without jQuery or without directly manipulating the DOM. That’s quite a feat. Cons: Its learning curve is somewhat steeper than Backbone (which is quite easy to master), but the gain is appreciative. Documentation could be better.
KnockoutJS
Pros: I don’t necessarily use it all the time, but KnockoutJS is just fantastic for single page applications. Extremely easy subscribing to live sorting; much better API for so called “collection views” in Backbone using observable arrays. And custom event on observables for effects, etc. Cons: Feel like the API is quite hard to scale, and would probably prefer to wrangle Backbone on the bigger applications. (But that’s also partially due to community support).
Pros: I like the data binding mechanism and feel very comfortable using it. In particular I like how they have replaced templates with control flow binding. Cons: I don’t like that there is no guidance or best practice in terms of application structure. Aside from having a view model, the framework doesn’t help you in defining a well structured view model. It’s very easy to end up with a large unmaintainable function.
Dojo
Pros: Syntactically, Dojo is very simple. It allows for dynamic and robust builds, with the initial loader file being as low as 6k in some cases. It is AMD compatible, making it extremely portable, and comes out-of-the-box with a ton of features ranging from basic dom interactions to complex SVG, VML, and canvas functionality. The widget system, Dijit, is unmatched in it's ease-of-use and ability to be extended. It's a very well-rounded and complete toolkit. Cons: The dojo/_base/declare functionality is not 100% strict mode compliant and there is currently some overhead due to backwards compatibility, though this will mostly go away in the Dojo 2.0 release.
Pros: Good components : tabs, datagrid, formManager... Renders the same cross browser. AMD compliant. Easy to test with mocks.Integrates well with other frameworks thks to amd (I ll integrate with JMVC) Cons: Default design for components out of fashion. Not fully html5. So-so documentation Poor templating system (no auto binding).
YUI
Pros: YUI3 is a modular and use-at-will type of component library which includes all of the goodies of Backbone and more. It even (in my opinion) improves upon some of the concepts in Backbone by de-coupling some things (i.e. attribute is a separate module that can be mixed into any object – the event module can be mixed in similarly). Cons: I’d love to see YUI3 support some of the auto-wiring (optional) of Ember. I think that is really the big win for Ember; otherwise, I see YUI3 as a superior component library where I can cherry-pick what I need. I’d also like to see a more AMD-compatible module loader. The loader today works very well; however, it would be nicer if I could start a new projects based on AMD modules and pull in certain YUI3 components and other things from other places that are also using AMD.
JavascriptMVC
Pros: Has all tools included, just need to run commands and start building. I have used for the last 6 months and it’s been really good. Cons: The only thing I would do is to speed up development of the next version. Developers are aware of problems and fixing issues but its going to be another ¾ months before some issues I want fixed are addressed, but then I could probably patch and do a pull request.
Maria
Pros: Because Maria is a pure MVC framework that is focused on being just an MVC framework. No more and no less. Its clean and simple. Cons: A little more usage documentation outside of the source code, plus a few more test cases. A tutorial that drives home the real use of MVC with Maria would be good too.
Cujo.js
Pros: Real apps almost never fit perfectly into an MV* box, and the most important stuff is often outside the box. With cujo.js, you define the box. Yes, cujo.js has high-level MV*-like features for creating views, models, controllers, etc., but every app is different, and no framework can ever be a 100% solution. Rather than try to be all things, cujo.js also provides lower level tools, architectural plumbling, and a rich plugin system that can even be used to integrate and extend other MV* frameworks. Create the architecture that best suits your application, rather than constraining your app to fit inside someone else’s predefined architecture. Cons: The broader JavaScript community is totally unprepared and untrained to take on large-scale applications. Most of us don’t even know that design patterns and architectural patterns exist. Since cujo.js is so different from other frameworks, it needs more than a simple API reference and code snippets. Without tutorials, educational materials, and step-by-step examples, cujo.js might look strange and overwhelming to the untrained eye but documentation is supposed to be coming soon.
ExtJS
Pros: I think ExtJS works best in combination with Ext Designer. It gives it an edge beyond the other GUI frameworks by letting non-programmers mock up the UI so programmers can fill in the blanks. I think comparing it to MVC frameworks like Backbone doesn’t do it justice – its strength lies in creating rich GUIs, not lean Web apps. For rich, commercial back-office applications I think ExtJS remains the best choice when it comes to JavaScript solutions (i.e. not GWT etc). For public-facing Web apps I’d rather have something that gives me more control over the markup (and ideally something that degrades gracefully). Cons: It has a steeper learning curve than many of the other modern structural frameworks. One can argue that if you’re investing in ExtJS for the long-term this time spent learning will pay off, however I think solutions like it should aim to better minimize the time it takes to train teams up in using it.
Pros: I think a big feature of ExtJS 4 is that it throws you into the MVC mindset and the preferred filesystem structure right from the bat. With Dojo the initial tutorials seem to be mostly about augmenting existing websites whereas ExtJS assumes you’re starting from scratch. Using ExtJS doesn’t really “feel” like you’re dealing with HTML at all. The component library is rich enough to let you go a long way without touching more HTML than what is needed to bootstrap your app. It’d be interesting to see how both compare when Web components become more widely supported. This would finally allow manipulating the DOM without being afraid of breaking any widgets or causing your app’s internal state to become inconsistent. Cons: The licensing is considered restrictive and difficult to understand by some. More people would be investing in ExtJS if it was clearer what the upfront and long-term costs of using it are. This isn’t a concern with some other structural solutions but probably isn’t as much a worry for larger businesses.
Pros: ExtJS is a fantastic package for rapidly building out RIAs for internal use. I for one, love to build with HTML and JavaScript, and for me there’s great satisfaction in mucking around at that level. Even though ExtJS makes it feel like you’re not really working with HTML it still offers a great deal of power, especially if you’re using it to create a complex UI. Cons: That said…I absolutely agree that it’s very heavy and I don’t think I’d recommend it for an external facing Web application. My biggest beef with the package overall is actually that it’s more of a PITA to test with than I’d would like. Our tester actually ended up switching to Sikuli because it was becoming too much of a battle trying to work with it in Selenium.
Batman
Pros: It has a great and easy to use view bindings system. Plays with Rails very nicely and is all about convention over configuration. Cons: The documentation could be a lot better and I feel Shopify won't be adding the features that they say that they will.
Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment
Whilst it’s unlikely for a developer to need to learn how to use more than a handfull of these frameworks, I do encourage exploration of those you’re unfamiliar with. There’s more than mountain of interesting facts and techniques that can be learned in this process.
In my case: I discovered that Batman.js required the least hand-written lines of code for an implementation. I’m neither a frequent CoffeeScript nor Batman.js user but that in itself gave me some food for thought. Perhaps I could take some of what made this possible and bring it over to the frameworks I do use. Or, maybe I’d simply use Batman.js in a future project if I found the community and support around it improved over time.
Regardless of whether you end up using a different solution, at the end of the day all you have to gain from exploration is more knowledge about what’s out there.
Going Beyond MV* Frameworks
Whilst the MV* family of patterns are quite popular for structuring applications, they’re limited in that they don’t address any kind of application layer, communication between Views, services that perform work or anything else. Developers may thus find that they sometimes need to explore beyond just MVC — there are times when you absolutely need to take what they have to offer further.
We reached out to developers that have been taking MVC further with their own patterns or extensions for existing frameworks to get some insights on where you need something more.
“In my case, I needed something Composite. I noticed that there were patterns in Backbone apps where developers realized there was a need for an object that coordinated various parts of an application. Most of the time, I’ve seen developers try to solve this using a Backbone construct (e.g a View), even when there isn’t really a need for it. This is why I instead explored the need for an Application Initializer.
I also found that MVC didn’t really describe a way to handle regions of a page or application. The gist of region management is that you could define a visible area of the screen and build out the most basic layout for it without knowing what content was going to be displayed in it at runtime.
I created solutions for region management, application initialization and more in my extension project Marionette. It’s one of a number of solutions that extend upon a framework (or architecture pattern) that developers end up needing when they’re building single-page applications that are relatively complex.
There’s even a TodoMVC Marionette app available for anyone wishing to compare the standard Backbone application with one that goes beyond just MV*.
Derick Bailey — Author of Marionette
“While a good portion of problems can be decomposed into JavaScript MVC, there are some which simply cannot. For example, an application consumes a third party API at runtime, but is not given any information as to how the data will be structured.
I spent almost a year trying to solve that very problem, but eventually I came to the realization that shoehorning it into MV* was not a viable solution. I was dealing with an “amorphous model” and that’s where it all fell apart. In other words, if you don’t have a well-defined model, most modern JavaScript frameworks can’t help you.
That’s where Core J2EE Patterns come in. I got turned on to them while reading PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra, and I’m glad I did! The J2EE Patterns basically outline a request-driven process, where the URL drives the behavior of the application. In a nutshell, a request is created, modified, and then used to determine the view to render.
I’ve expanded on my experiences with request driven Javascript applications and J2EE patterns for anyone who would like to learn more. “
Dustin Boston — co-author, Aura
Conclusions
While there are several choices for what to use for structuring your JavaScript Web applications these days, it’s important to be diligent in the selection process - spend time thoroughly evaluating your options in order to make a decision which results in sustainable, maintainable code. Framework diversity fosters innovation, while too much similarity just creates noise.
Projects like TodoMVC can help narrow down your selections to those you feel might be the most interesting or most comfortable for a particular project. Remember to take your time choosing, don’t feel too constrained by using a specific pattern and keep in mind that it’s completely acceptable to build on the solution you select to best fit the needs of your application.
Experimenting with different frameworks will also give you different views on how to solve common problems which will in turn make you a better programmer.
Thanks to my fellow TodoMVC team-member Sindre Sorhus for his help with tweaks and a technical review of this article. |
Car of the day – 2007 Dodge Charger SRT8 on AG Forged Wheels 1920×1080 HD
Engine: 370 cu in 6.1-liter (6059 cc) HEMI V8 425 hp (318 kW) at 6000 rpm and torque of 420 lbs-ft (569 Nm) at 4800 rpm. The redline is at 6400 rpm.
This 2007 Dodge Charger with a rear-wheel drive system can accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h or ~0-60 mph in less than 5 seconds. A standing quarter mile can be driven in 13 seconds. The signature performance of SRT8 which is acceleration from 0 to 100 mph and braking to 0 mph, or ~0-160-0 km/h can be achieved in the mid 16 seconds range. It can fully stop from 60 to 0 mph or ~100-0 km/h in about 110 feet.
The car is 200.1 inches (5083 mm) in length. Car width is 74.5 inches (1892 mm). Height is 57.7 inches (1466 mm). Curb weight is 4160 lbs (1887 kg). The base model comes with 20 inches wheels, featuring sizes at the front – 245/45 R20, and at the rear – 255/45 R20.
This stunning black Charger SRT8 is on 22 inches AG Forged Series Wheels – Rolled Step Lip / F210 Form Reverse Lip. These Avant garde F210 wheels features sizes at the front – 22×10, and at the rear – 22×11. Avant garde F210 wheels are wrapped in Nexen N3000 tires. These tires features sizes at the front – 245/30, and at the rear – 255/30.
AG Forged Series Wheels features: OE TPMS and mounting hardware compatible, Italian Made chrome-plated, high strength 12pt standard hardware, Precision CNC production to your specifications for any custom application, Aerospace Grade 6061-T6 forged aluminum for optimum strength-to-weight ratio. Plus available in a rolled step lip (RS) configuration.
Originally a base model of this 2007 Dodge Charger SRT8 was priced at around 35,800 USD ($). Price in 2013 for this 2007 Dodge Charger SRT8 starts from around 20,000 USD ($), in good condition.
Car of The Day |
Never “SPHERE” Erika is here with another fab DIY idea!
Do you ever get in one of those moods where you wanna start a project, but not one that will take days…weeks…months to complete- just something easy, cheap, awesome and super quick.
Well then, I have just the project for you.
We’ve all seen ’em. In fact, some of you probably have some in your home.
They are decorative spheres.
Decorative spheres are totally the bomb. Just think of all the awesome things that are round…the earth…the sun…gumballs.
Spheres provide great filler for bookshelves and containers, and are the perfect accessory for tables, countertops or any empty space really. Spheres help add visual interest to any decor and can also add an element of softeness to a space.
The metal spheres I’m going to show you how to make would also be a great addition to an outside garden or sitting area. Just think of the lovely, rusted patina they would develop over time.
To begin, you need to gather your supplies:
Screws and bolts {8 of each are required for one sphere. A package like the one pictured above costs about $.98}
Metal strapping {$5- available at any home improvement store}
A round container for measuring your metal strapping {in this case a ginormous jar of peanut butter, cause that’s how we roll}.
Start by measuring your strapping. Do this by wrapping it around your circular container.
Do this four times.
Now you can begin assembling your sphere
Start by making one hoop and securing it with a screw and nut.
Then add a second hoop and secure the top and bottom with a screw and nut.
Then add a third hoop and secure it at the top and bottom as well.
Add your fourth and final hoop around the circumference of your sphere. This will stabilize and support your sphere. Be sure to add a screw and nut every where the the strapping intersects itself.
And voila! That’s it, you’re done. This project is super quick, super easy and super cheap. I love the cool, industrial look of these orbs. Somehow they also managed to stay classy and sophisticated. The one’s I made ended up on my bookshelf.
Look how awesome they could be with a rusted finish. eclectic outdoor decor design by Potted Once upon a time you could buy metal paint and rusting meduim. I want to try and track some down so that I can make my orbs look all old and rusty. They are fine they way they are, but I think a little rust might make them even that much better.
These powdered coated spheres are a fun variation. Something like this would look fabulous on a deck or patio table.
Now I am thinking of making one ginormous orb and turning it into a ceiling light. Something along the lines of this:
I really love the look of wood, so naturally I had to try out a wooden version too. I made these out of wooden embroidery hoops and thumb tacks.
These spheres are 8, 9 and 12 inches in diameter.
When it was all said and done, I ended up spending about $2 for each metal sphere. I was able to make 3, 4in. diameter spheres and 1, 7in. diameter sphere out of one $5 package of metal strapping. The wooden spheres cost about $3 a piece {each sphere took two embroidery hoops at $1.50 each}. I’m not sure how much something like these would cost retail, but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t get them for $2 or $3. |
The UK Data Service is entirely redeveloping its thesaurus management applications – as well as the thesauri themselves - through the ESRC-funded CESSDA-ELSST project.
The UK Data Service maintains both the Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET) and the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST). CESSDA-ELSST, which is now part-way through the first year of five years of ESRC-funding, will re-imagine the applications, processes and structures of these thesauri. It will deliver a new, streamlined thesaurus management application, as well as improved access to our thesaurus products for the wider community.
CESSDA-ELSST follows our extremely successful Jisc-funded project to apply SKOS to HASSET and to test its automated indexing capabilities (SKOS-HASSET). We have consulted with interested stakeholders, including international translators of ELSST, who represent a wide number of European archives, and now have a wish list for the new application. We have also presented our progress and plans at IASSIST.
We are in the process of refining our requirements. The functions that we will be researching further for potential inclusion in the application, are:
SKOS-ELSST
annual, version-controlled releases
a way of visualising the thesaurus
online, click-through licence for users
search and browse facility
inclusion, potentially, of Concept Groups
These functions represent a few of the high-level priorities. There are also a number of other, system-level, technical requirements which are being researched an in-depth, technical level and we are starting the work to make them become a reality.
For more information, consult our blog pages or get in touch. We would be very happy to hear from any interested parties who would like to feed into this process, or who would be interested in keeping touch about the project’s progress. |
Chris Samba: Set to leave QPR and return to Russia
The defender is one of relegated Rangers' highest earners but the club are set to recoup most of the club-record transfer fee they paid for his services in January.
Djibril Cisse has already left Loftus Road as Harry Redknapp reshapes his squad for the Championship, with further high-profile names such as Loic Remy expected to follow.
Samba arrived for £12.5m on a four-and-a-half deal with wages reported to be £100,000 a week - a figure that drew criticism from outsiders.
The former Blackburn player endured a difficult few months at the doomed London club and was drawn into a Twitter row with fans over his earnings after an error-strewn display in what proved a costly defeat to Fulham in April.
He later admitted that he was not ready for the rigours of the Premier League when he agreed to join the club in January. |
Ah, the Pretzel. So soft, so salty, so delicious. Aside from a cheese and cured meat platter, it’s one of my favourite companions with beer.
So it was a thrill to be invited to Kitchen Canada and attend a workshop on how to properly make an authentic, German pretzel, with suggested beer pairings by the folks at Great Lakes Brewery here in Ontario.
Said to be originally created around 610 AD by an Italian monk who used them as rewards for children who learned their prayers, the Germans, like cars, went with the original idea and perfected it. Of course though, there are many varieties of Pretzel out there from all different parts of the world.
Some fun Pretzel facts: – Spelled and pronounced “Brezel” in Germany. – Pretzels were a very common Easter gift. They would be hidden along with Eggs. – The famous shape of pretzels are believed by some to be the shape of hands in prayer. – The Pretzel was the symbol for South Germany’s Baker’s Guild. I like to imagine they were a kind of illuminati, but with more cupcakes and pretzels. – The “skin” of soft pretzels is made by dipping the unbaked pretzel in a solution of water and lye (yes, the stuff from Fight Club). A substitute of baking soda can be worked with as well. – Thanks to its heavy German population, Pennsylvania is the pretzel capital of the US. And here I was thinking the state was just the birthplace of the Crayola Crayon. – You can put anything on pretzels. Chocolate, cheese, chili flakes, pudding. The only limit is your imagination. – Famous former children’s entertainer Buggy Ding Dong likes his pretzels heavily salted.
The workshop, put on by Kitchen Canada at their lovely event space in Etobicoke, was taught by resident Bakers Marc Richter and Franz Dimplemier with Renee Navarro from Great Lakes Brewery providing beer samples. We learned about the ingredients that go in to making a pretzel dough, the importance of the lye or baking soda dip, and most importantly, how to properly roll and twist a pretzel (which the ever-patient Richter and Dimplemier retaught us several times when we attempted it). But more than that, as a group, we had fun. Figuring out the proper roll, teaching each other on how to knot the pretzels, talking about what other ingredients we wanted to stuff in to our dough for pretzel buns…these were fun things that made the workshop something worth going to. There were also a nice supply of mustards available for dipping and purchase (I may have bought a couple of bottles to add to my ever-growing mustard collection).
The beers were mostly a showcase of Great Lakes’ flagship beers (Red Leaf Smooth Red Lager, Crazy Canuck West Coast Pale Ale, and Devil’s Pale Ale), which was perfect for the crowd, many of whom had never even heard of craft beer. Like all events like that, it was fun hearing people discuss which ones were their favourite and asking questions to Renee, who was only too happy to answer. It should be said that a real crowd-pleaser were the cans of Harry Porter at the end. Although a version that includes Bourbon Soaked Vanilla Beans will be coming out to LCBOs next month, this version was the very tasty regular batch that I think turned a lot of people on to the idea of a dark beer beyond Guinness.
By the end of the evening I left the kitchen with two boxes of my own pretzels and stuffed pretzel buns, two bottles of mustard, and a full stomach. I have to say that it once again reminded me to go to these workshops/classes more often for myself. Although sometimes the recipe could be an easy one, the hands on experience, along with the fun social interaction with your fellow students, makes them a lot of fun to do with a friend or solo. That alone is often worth the price.
If you’re in the Toronto/Etobicoke area, The Kitchen Canada have another one of these Pretzel and beer workshops coming up in March. Apparently tickets go fast.
—
And because I don’t want to stop at just an event review, I’m going to include a recipe from David Ort’s Canadian Craft Beer Cookbook, which I wrote about last year. No, this isn’t his fantastic no-knead pretzel recipe, but instead it is my favourite condiment to have with pretzels: mustard. IPA Mustard, in fact. It goes without saying that this can be used in things that are decidedly not-pretzel and it is strongly encouraged to mess around with the different beers and variety of mustard seed. Either way, after first reading this recipe I now keep a mason jar filled with my homemade mustard in the fridge at all times. Here it is:
IPA MUSTARD
Recommended beer:
American-style India pale ale
Boneshaker India Pale Ale, Amsterdam Brewery (Ontario)
India Pale Ale, Southern Tier Brewing (United States)
makes 1 cup (250 mL)
preparation time 10 minutes, plus at least 4 hours to soak
scant ½ cup (125 mL) mustard seeds
½ cup (125 mL) India pale ale
4 tsp (20 mL) vinegar (your own beer vinegar is best, but cider or white vinegars are fine substitutes)
1 Tbsp (15 mL) brown sugar
½ tsp (2.5 mL) kosher salt
¼ tsp (1 mL) nutmeg
1. Soak the mustard seeds in the ipa for at least 4 hours or overnight.
2. Reserve a quarter of the soaked mustard seeds. In a mini food processor or blender, combine the other three-quarters of the soaked mustard seeds with the vinegar, sugar, salt and nutmeg. Blend for 1 minute or until most of the seeds have lost their individual texture.
3. Fold the reserved seeds into the mustard.
4. Pack into a scrupulously clean Mason jar, seal tightly and store in the refrigerator.
The mustard is ready to use right away, but will only get better with a few days to rest, and should last for at least 4 to 6 weeks.
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England’s European Championships home qualifying tie against Greece was streamed live on TheSPORTbible’s Facebook page on Tuesday night, after Table Tennis England came to a broadcast rights agreement with TheLADbible Group.
TheSPORTbible – one of the most visited sports media websites in the United Kingdom with over 8.5m likes on Facebook – partnered with 1080 Media to deliver the live video which included four cameras, full commentary and player interviews.
Broadcasted exclusively digitally, the match received a remarkable total of 2.1m views, marking a first both for sports governing bodies in England and the digital publisher.
Future of broadcasting for some Olympic / Paralympic sports?
Over 20k watching LIVE table tennis on The Sport Bible!https://t.co/kPlaoy5cB7 pic.twitter.com/ievBTNSbYb — ✌️????????♂️ ᑎIᙅK ᕼOᑭᙓ ????????✌️ (@NickHopeTV) November 1, 2016
Mark Taffler, Head of Commercial at Table Tennis England, believes that the broadcast could pave the way to a whole new market for sports rights.
“We proved last night that there is a market for this kind of broadcast – and that it’s a big market. By broadcasting through The SPORTbible we’ve bypassed the traditional sports rights market and gone to where the audience is. As a strategy, it’s proved incredibly effective.”
“On Tuesday night, the same night as Man City were playing Barcelona in the Champions League, there were 2.1m people watching table tennis. There is an appetite from people to watch our sport and, through a platform like The SPORTbible, we are finding them.”
The audience figures are a clear reminder of the market for stream-only sports events, and how rights holders can reach an audience demographic of millennials which mainstream broadcasters are finding increasingly difficult to engage with.
Furthermore, the live content may well have benefitted from the Champions League coverage on TV. As users headed to second-screen social media, they could briefly tune in to table tennis, without changing channel.
Funded by Sport England, TTE’s main aim is to market, develop and get more people playing table tennis. Reaching over 8M sports fans in one evening, then, is the perfect storm. |
President Donald Trump on Tuesday abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey in the fallout over Comey's probe of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's emails last year, saying Comey was no longer able to effectively lead the agency.
On its own, US President Donald Trump's letter dumping FBI director James Comey is curious.
Let's break it down, bit by bit.
May 9, 2017
REUTERS/YURI GRIPAS Trump's letter informing Comey of his sacking was brief and puzzling.
Dear Director Comey:
I have received the attached letters from the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General of the United States recommending your dismissal as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Our take: The memo from deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, also dated May 9, is headed "restoring public confidence in the FBI".
Rosenstein concludes that Comey's actions in the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email server undermined confidence in the agency.
He gives a detailed account of what he sees as Comey's missteps and breaks with the "fundamental principles" and "traditions" of the FBI in the Clinton email investigation. He reels off the critical views of a series of former judicial leaders about Comey's conduct.
The letter from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, also dated May 9, basically endorses his deputy's view. Sessions recommends to Trump that Comey is removed.
Back to Trump:
I have accepted their recommendation and you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.
Our take: Comey actually learned of his dismissal while addressing FBI colleagues.
According to the BBC's Jon Sopel, Comey was in the middle of a speech addressing agents in Los Angeles when he was handed a note.
"He read it and told staff he'd been fired," Sopel said.
Other reports said news of Comey's sacking was flashing across television news screens as he was addressing staff.
It's also been reported that a longtime Trump bodyguard, Keith Schiller, hand delivered a copy of this letter to the Justice Department headquarters in Washington DC.
Back to Trump:
While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.
Our take: Trump is referring here to Comey's investigation of alleged Russian interference in the US Presidential election. He's placing on record that Comey has apparently told him repeatedly that his investigation is not specifically targeted at him.
Why Trump mentions this at all is puzzling. Neither the Rosenstein nor the Sessions memos make any mention of Comey's election probe.
It perhaps betrays the real reason behind Trump's determination to remove Comey: He wants the ongoing investigation of possible Russian influence in his election victory nixed.
Back to Trump:
It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores the public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission.
Our take: This basically parrots lines from Sessions and Rosenstein. Comey's deputy, Andrew McCabe fills the job for now. Sessions will probably name an interim director soon while the search for a permanent replacement continues.
Back to Trump:
I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.
Our take: Here's a vague pleasantry. Go away now, please.
Back to Trump:
Donald J. Trump
Our take: Yep, he's still President of the United States of America. |
The Department of Finance was responsible for administering parliamentarians' expenditure during the period covered by this report. This is the last time the Parliamentarians Expenditure Report will be available on the Department of Finance website. Publication of all future reports will be on the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA) website at ipea.gov.au. Requests for further information and enquiries regarding the content of this report should be directed to enquiries@ipea.gov.au
The Department of Finance (Finance) has prepared the reports listed below on expenditure accessed by Parliamentarians, former Parliamentarians and surviving spouses or de facto partners of former Parliamentarians, in accordance with the relevant legislation.
Parliamentarians’ Expenditure paid by the Department of Finance
Includes expenditure, and adjustments, (including domestic travel, car costs, overseas travel, Travelling Allowance, office facilities costs, office administrative costs and family travel) for Parliamentarians during the relevant six-month period.
Former Parliamentarians’ Expenditure paid by the Department of Finance
Includes expenditure, and adjustments, of travel costs and, where applicable, family travel costs and costs of office facilities and office administration for all eligible former Parliamentarians and surviving spouses or de facto partners during the relevant six-month period.
These reports have been compiled by Finance and published on the Finance website every six months.
Parliamentarians and former Parliamentarians (including surviving spouses of former Prime Ministers and Life Gold Pass holders) are asked to certify that their expenditure was in accordance with the provisions legislated. Commencing from the period January to June 2011, information regarding Parliamentarians and former Parliamentarians’ certification of their expenditure has been published.
The supporting data underpinning the reports is available for all categories within the reports except for office facilities.
Following the establishment of the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA), all future expenditure reports will be published by IPEA.
Report Background
Process of Compilation
In accordance with current practice, Finance prepares the draft reports capturing data from its business systems used to process and administer work expenses for:
Parliamentarians
former Prime Ministers
other Life Gold Pass holders
post retirement travellers
surviving spouses or de-facto partners of former Prime Ministers
surviving spouses or de-facto partners of other Life Gold Pass holders.
Preliminary reports are provided to individuals to confirm their transactional information or notify Finance of any required amendments. If an amendment is advised, it is checked against the source data (such as invoices and records of payment held by Finance). Following a reconciliation of the data, an amendment (if appropriate) is made and Finance’s records adjusted. If required, copies of amendments are provided to the individual.
Expansion of Reporting
On 27 September 2001, the then Prime Minister announced that expenditure by former Governors-General, former Prime Ministers, other Life Gold Pass holders, severance travel beneficiaries and surviving spouses or de facto partners of certain eligible former Parliamentarians arising from benefits granted to them in recognition of public service, would be publicly disclosed.
The statement further indicated that this disclosure would be done on a six-monthly basis in conjunction with the Parliamentarians' expenditure. The document would contain the same level of detail, in the relevant category, as for Parliamentarians.
From the July to December 2009 reporting period, the reports were enhanced for Senators, Members and certain former Parliamentarians to include the following:
office administrative costs, including:
office consumables and services
printing and communications
publications
office facilities costs
travel allowances and travel expenses for both domestic and overseas travel, including family travel costs.
Final Reporting Period – July to December 2016
Prior Reporting Periods
January to June 2016
July to December 2015
January to June 2015
July to December 2014
January to June 2014
July to December 2013
January to June 2013
July to December 2012
January to June 2012
July to December 2011
January to June 2011
July to December 2010
January to June 2010
July to December 2009
Reports relating to the periods below for Senators, Members and former Parliamentarians included only the following:
travel allowances and travel expenses for both domestic and overseas travel
overseas study travel reports from Senators and Members.
January to June 2009
July to December 2008
Copyright Notice
This report is protected by copyright.
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With the exception of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms and the Department of Finance logo, all material presented in these reports is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence. To the extent that copyright subsists in third party quotes and diagrams it remains with the original owner and permission may be required to reuse the material.
Except where otherwise noted, any reference to, reuse or distribution of all or part of these reports must be attributed as Entitlements Paid by the Department of Finance.
Inquiries regarding the licence and any use of the reports are welcome at:
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Email: financepublications@finance.gov.au |
“Mothers and their children are in a category all their own. There's no bond so strong in the entire world. No love so instantaneous and forgiving.” -- Gail Tsukiyama
The relationship between mother and daughter is a complicated one, defined by lifelong adoration and momentary contempt.
We go from revering our mothers, refusing to leave their side, to contesting their very existence, resenting their advice and warnings. We then go from missing them, beginning to understand them and empathizing with them, to finally revering them again, longing for their advice and wisdom.
As a kid, many people told me I would spend my adolescence hating my mom, that the inevitable day would come when I'd loathe her very existence.
That day did come and lasted for a few rough years, until college, when missing her brought on stifled feelings, along with a new respect and admiration for a person I had previously longed to get away from.
I finally understood why she nagged me all those times to bring an umbrella and to tie my shoes. I understood why she questioned me about my homework and made me go to all those stupid summer camp programs.
I understood why she never let me have boys in my room or take trips with my friends to Punta Cana… because she loved me.
As we leave the nest, happily thinking we're flying on to better things, we cling on to anyone who is remotely kind, realizing that the love of a mother is rare and wonderful.
There are not many people out there willing to take you in, flaws and all, and love you with no qualms. There is nothing out there that is going to provide that unconditional, non-judgmental type of love.
Throughout failed relationships, romantic and platonic, I've come to realize that people are not easily reliable in this world. Friends come and go, no matter how strong the bond may be. Men most certainly don't love you the way they say they do and no one can actually keep a secret.
While friendships are wonderful and necessary, the only stable and consistent love you will ever have in this world is from your mother. She is the only one who will always be there in the middle of the night ready to answer your call. She's the only one who actually cares to hear about every moment of your day.
She's the one who will pick restaurants, keeping in mind that you don't like sushi. She is the only one who actually listens when you talk and doesn't mind spending four hours watching you try on jeans.
People also told me, throughout my days of contempt and misguided anger, that I would one day be great friends with my mother. One day, we would share drinks and stories like those mother-daughter scenes in every Diane Keaton film.
I told them they were delusional, and that my relationship was different than those storybook fairytales.
However, age brought wisdom and wisdom brought appreciation. That appreciation grew into respect, which blossomed into friendship. As the years passed and those strong friendships I thought would sustain some type of familial archetype began to disintegrate, I realized a pivotal truth in my life: My mother has always been and always will be my best friend.
Kristen Curette
She's the first one you call with good news.
She's the first one you call with bad news.
She's the only person you can actually shop with.
She will always make the trip to visit you, no matter how far away you are.
She will never forget your birthday, and she'll be the first to sing to you when the clock strikes midnight.
She will be honest when something doesn't look good on you.
She will tell you when you're being a brat.
She will listen to your dramatic stories and your stories with no end.
She won't judge you when you wear the same outfit three days in a row.
She's always got good advice, even if it's not what you want to hear.
She always has your best interest at heart.
She'd never screw you over for a man because you're the most important person in her life.
She pays your cell phone bill, even though you have overage charges every month.
She knows what kind of foods you like (and don't like).
Guille Faingold
She will never stay mad at you or hold a grudge.
She will buy you something spontaneously just because she knows you'll like it.
She will tell you if you're getting fat, but will say you look beautiful no matter what your weight.
She will watch movies with you even if she doesn't like the preview and ends up falling asleep.
She's the only person you can count on to text you every day.
She will be on call when you get too hammered to find a way home.
She's the one you can brag to about your accomplishments and express shame to for your mistakes, without fearing judgment.
She will drop everything to be at your beck and call when you're sick, whether it's a common cold or the flu.
She'll support your interests and encourage you to stay true to your passions.
Guille Faingold
She's the one who knows when something is wrong, no matter how many times you tell her, "Nothing!"
She's the only person who knows your annoying habits and still loves you for them.
She never fails to tell you she loves you at least once a day.
She's the one who bitches out your cheating boyfriend when you're not strong enough to do it yourself.
She's the one who sees there's only one cookie left for the two of you and suddenly says she's too full.
She will go above and beyond, through the toughest of conditions, just to make sure you're happy.
She's the one who's standing beside you, when everyone else has walked away. |
A coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia is fighting alongside al-Qaeda militants against Houthi rebels in Yemen, according to a report. A BBC documentary crew has filmed jihadists and pro-government militiamen fighting rebels near the southern city of Taiz, supported by UAE soldiers.
It is unclear if the two groups are working together to coordinate their assault on the city, which lies 160 miles (260km) south of the capital Sana'a. Saudi Arabia has been leading a coalition of nine Arab states in a bombing campaign against Shia-dominated Houthi forces loyal to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh since March 2015.
It has enforced an aerial and naval blockade on the country and seeks to restore exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's government to power. Nearly 6,000 people have been killed by the fighting and up to 80% of the Yemeni population is in need of some kind of humanitarian assistance, according to the UN.
Growing influence
In late-2015, documentary maker Safa AlAhmad filmed members of Ansar al-Sharia, an affiliate of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), attacking Houthi fighters on a key hilltop near Taiz, with pro-government troops nearby. She was reportedly told by the militants to stop filming them and that they were angered by the presence of a woman.
Houthi forces control all routes into and out of the city, according to the BBC, and are besieging a Sunni Islamist alliance of local forces holding the city centre. Coalition forces are attacking rebels on several fronts to the south and west of the city.
AlAhmad speculated that AQAP had sent its fighters to Taiz to increase its influence and build on gains it has made elsewhere in Yemen. With coalition forces focused on fighting Houthi rebels, AQAP has taken advantage of a security vacuum to seize swathes of territory in southern Yemen, including the port city of Mukalla.
The Saudi-led coalition, which is backed by the US and Britain, has been accused of disproportionately targeting civilians through air strikes by rights groups such as Amnesty International. |
We are nearing the end of the new cards from G Character Booster 02: WE ARE!!! TRINITY DRAGON. After today, there are only a couple cards left to cover until we have unfortunately seen the entire set. It is disappointing to reach the end of new spoilers, but the ride must end some time to let other clans have a chance. Pastel Deer is arguably the most interesting of the final few cards, so let’s take a look.
[AUTO](RC) Generation Break 1:When this unit is boosted by a unit with 20000 [Power] or greater, this unit gets [Critical]+1 until end of that battle.
This unit’s effect is extremely simple, but is unusual enough to be noteworthy. Rare is it to find a rear guard that can grant itself extra Criticals. All Pastel Deer requires to give itself that Critical is to be boosted by a unit with 20k power or more. In Great Nature, this is hardly a difficult accomplishment, especially in Bigbelly decks where you have the ability to distribute large amounts of power wherever you may wish.
Unfortunately, and feel free to color me a pessimist here, but I do not see much beyond a handful of negatives for this card. My first complaint is minor. As this card is restricted to GB1, there is no potential for early game rush tactics. Because its ability is limited to GB1, it becomes a unit that you never want to see early in the game. If you have to Ride the Deer, you become a wide open target for your opponent to freely rush down with extra Grade 1s they may have. A potential bright spot would be that this card is not limited to once per turn. However, as the Critical is gained only during the battle, there is also no extra potential for beatdown via restanding.
Even though restanding and re-boosting does not grant Deer a third Critical, restanding it could be very threatening to your opponent. If you choose to make this part of your strategy, know that it will be a difficult feat to accomplish without Stand triggers. Not only would you need to restand Pastel Deer after his attack, you would also need some method to restand the booster. The closest we may come to having a simple method for this is Anchor Rabbit. Keep in mind though, that this is still going to be awkward to attempt because Anchor Rabbit’s Success threshold is 20k. If you boost Pastel Deer with an Anchor Rabbit that is not at 20k or more, Deer will not gain its crit. If you get Anchor Rabbit to 20k before boosting, you will miss your window of opportunity to restand it post Deer attack because you must choose whether or not to Stand Rabbit as soon as it becomes successful.
My last gripe is that this card has no kind of Success skill itself. In Bigbelly decks, this makes it less desirable as Teacher’s Cane of Affection, Bigbelly needs as many Success-capable units in deck to make its on-Stride skill as consistent as possible. Regardless, I believe that Pastel Deer is a card to keep in the back of your mind. Going into the future, it would be very easy for Great Nature to receive some kind of support card that fixes enough of Pastel Deer’s issues to make it a real threat.
Remember, if you want to keep up to date with past, present, and futures articles published on this website, we have a Facebook page that will update whenever something new is posted here. Give it a like or a follow to make sure you get a notification when important things happen in the world of Great Nature!
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Since 2012, The Economy Has Changed — And So Has The Conversation
Enlarge this image toggle caption Richard Drew/AP Richard Drew/AP
Ah, 2012. You seem so long ago.
Back then, the economy was the star of the presidential election season, with more than 9 in 10 voters ranking it as Issue No. 1.
Voters worried about scarce jobs, expensive gasoline and a huge federal deficit.
Candidates proposed detailed solutions. Republican Mitt Romney's 87-page document covered topics from "human capital policy" to "regulatory reform." President Obama's 27-point plan included specifics, such as a 26.25 percent tax rate for manufacturers.
This year, the political conversation is very different, with much of the focus on non-economic issues: Republican Donald Trump's temperament and Democrat Hillary Clinton's trustworthiness.
And a Pew Research Center survey showed that the issue voters want to hear about most in a presidential debate is "keeping the US safe from terrorism."
Of course, economic issues remain extremely important, but they are different from 2012. This year, the hottest money topics involve income inequality, trade deals and immigrants.
To understand the shift in voters' priorities, let's look back at what was happening...
In 2012:
Jobs. The unemployment rate was a painful 8.1 percent in August, 2012. Many voters feared that as the Affordable Care Act phased in, the job market would get even worse.
The unemployment rate was a painful 8.1 percent in August, 2012. Many voters feared that as the Affordable Care Act phased in, the job market would get even worse. Gas prices. The average price of gas in August, 2012, was $3.69 a gallon, the second highest average on record.
The average price of gas in August, 2012, was $3.69 a gallon, the second highest average on record. Federal deficit. As the fiscal year was wrapping up, the annual deficit was $1.1 trillion, or 6.7 percent of GDP.
Since then, a lot has changed in those three areas. Here's how things look...
In 2016:
Jobs . The unemployment rate has plunged to 4.9 percent.
. The unemployment rate has plunged to 4.9 percent. Gas prices . Gas prices have tumbled this year, and now average around $2.12 a gallon.
. Gas prices have tumbled this year, and now average around $2.12 a gallon. Federal deficit. For fiscal 2016, the deficit will be $590 billion, or 3.2 percent of GDP.
Other factors also have improved greatly since 2012. For example, new home sales are back to pre-recession levels, and consumers are in much better shape, thanks to energy savings and low interest rates on mortgages, car loans and credit cards.
But while the economy is far healthier than four years ago, serious problems remain. Millions of Americans have not had a significant pay raise in years, which has fueled anger over income inequality. For example, in the second quarter of 2016, the median weekly earnings of all U.S. workers hit $824. Back in 2012, that figure was $771.
After adjusting earnings for inflation, workers have seen an increase in buying power of less than 2 percent. During that same four-year period, stock prices have shot up about 60 percent. In case you're not good at math, here's the recap: Stock owners are much richer; workers are not.
Because of that wage squeeze, many voters worry about income inequality, and fear that immigrant labor and foreign competition are pushing down wages. Those voters want to block immigration and thwart trade deals that might allow for more importing and outsourcing.
Michael Montgomery, an economist with the forecasting firm IHS Global Insight, says wages were slow to rise because unemployment stayed high for so many years. Wages were actually backsliding from 2009 to 2011, and then stagnating for a couple more years.
Finally in 2016, it's different, Montgomery said. With unemployment down to 4.9 percent, employers have to compete harder for workers. That means "real wages are going up faster now," he said.
The Labor Department says that over the year, average hourly earnings have risen by 2.6 percent, far exceeding the annual inflation rise of 0.8 percent.
But after having paychecks fall so far behind for years, "it will take a while to recover from what happened," he said. "Some things just take time." |
In parts of the far western Xinjiang district, Chinese officials have banned Muslim party members, civil servants, students and teachers from fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.
"China is increasing its bans and monitoring as Ramadan approaches. The faith of the Uighurs has been highly politicised, and the increase in controls could cause sharp resistance," Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the exiled group, the World Uighur Congress (WUC), said in a Reuters statement.
The Uighur leader saw this as China attempting to control their Islamic faith. He warned that the restrictions would force "the Uighur people to resist [Chinese rule] even further."
Raxit, the Sweden-based spokesman for the WUC, told Radio Free Asia: "They are extracting guarantees from parents, promising that their children won't fast on Ramadan."
According to the Chinese government's website, halal restaurants in Jinghe County, near the Kazakh border, were encouraged by food safety officials to stay open during day hours in Ramadan.
Chinese authorities have set restrictions on Uighur Muslims in the northwestern region of Xinjiang every Ramadan.
Officials are forced to give verbal as well as written assurances "guaranteeing they have no faith, will not attend religious activities and will lead the way in not fasting over Ramadan," state media reported.
Muslim shops and restaurants have also been ordered to sell cigarettes and alcohol or be shut down.
In December 2014, China banned the wearing of Islamic veiled robes in public in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region.
Beijing is continuing its campaign against "religious extremism", although human rights groups call it religious repression.
Xinjiang, which activists call East Turkestan, has been autonomous since 1955 but continues to be the subject of continued security restrictions by Chinese authorities.
There are eight million Turkish-speaking Uighur Muslims in the northwestern Xinjiang region. |
After irritating copyright holders once too often, RuTracker, one of the world's largest torrent sites, was blocked by Russian authorities forever. Somehow, however, the site still helps its users grab a million downloads every day, a figure completely unchanged from one year ago, when the site was open to all.
While the site doesn’t get a lot of press in the West, Russia’s RuTracker is one of the biggest torrent sites on the planet.
It’s easily one of the top ten most popular torrent sites online and indexes a massive range of local and international content. Those with Google translate and a modicum of patience report a treasure trove of material.
The situation with RuTracker is somewhat curious. While it is regularly visited by users from a range of countries, the majority of its user base comes from the Russian Federation. However, after drawing the ire of copyright holders, the site is blocked by all local ISPs, a situation that will persist forever.
This so-called “eternal” block was put in place last year and was expected to do the site serious damage. But according to the site’s operators, they’re doing just fine. In fact, not a great deal has changed.
Speaking with local news outlet Apparat, a RuTracker representative confirmed that while attendances have dropped a little, there has been no change at all in the numbers of files being downloaded.
“According to our statistics the number of downloaded torrents has not changed. Every day more than a million torrents are downloaded from Rutracker. We had the same number before the block,” the source reveals.
“The load on our trackers has fallen by no more than 10%. In this case, when we say tracker, we mean the service address [announce URL], where the BitTorrent client recalls the list of peers.”
While the blockades have failed to impact levels of infringement, they have managed to reduce the volumes of traffic reaching the site. Interestingly, RuTracker believes that the kind of device used to access the platform has played a role in whether a user has been able to easily bypass the blocks.
“Most of all, blocking has affected the users of mobile devices. With these it is slightly more difficult to configure a bypass than on a desktop computer,” the rep says.
“Therefore, those users who came to the forum from mobile devices just to talk – and there are so many of them – are faced with problems. For those who used the forum from ordinary computers, the block delivered a minimum of inconveniences: there, a bypass is configured in just two clicks.”
As previously reported, the court-ordered blocking of RuTracker prompted the site to break off cooperation with all copyright holders. The way the site viewed it, why take content down when the punishment for not doing so has already been issued by the court?
“For more than seven years, we had not a single problem with any major vendor, but we were blocked because of the songs of one local rapper, who at the same time put out his songs for public access on social networks. The reason was purely formal, and the decision was political,” the rep explains.
Freed from having to remove content every day, the site is now far more happy doing nothing. In fact, it says that life is now much easier, since all the time and resources spent on taking things down can now be deployed elsewhere. Not to say that the site has a small staff though.
Currently the site has five employees, including programmers and systems administrators, who reportedly earn a salary for their work. On top the site has several volunteer forum administrators and a massive team of moderators, numbering 200 in all.
But as they have done for many years, the site’s operators say they will continue to remain anonymous while earning enough from advertising to balance the books. There are no big profits to report and there will be no Pirate Bay-style posturing.
“We are not a political organization, we do not put forward any demands, we do not call or agitate anything. Deanonymization will not bring any advantages, instead we will receive increased attention from the marginalized, from scammers, and state groups too.”
The site’s operators say they are not against cooperation as long as its based on mutual understanding and a constructive approach. But they weren’t getting that in Russia, it seems, so they’ve skipped out of reach instead.
“We are both physically and legally outside the borders of this wonderful country,” they conclude. |
TAMPA, Fla. -- Tampa Bay Buccaneers rookie tight end Austin Seferian-Jenkins apologized Monday for drawing a penalty on a touchdown celebration and posting a picture of it on Instagram.
Rookie tight end Austin Seferian-Jenkins apologized for drawing a penalty on this touchdown celebration and also for posting a picture of it on Instagram. Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images
Seferian-Jenkins was flagged for using the football as a prop while celebrating a fourth-quarter touchdown in Sunday's loss to Atlanta. Seferian-Jenkins put his foot on the ball and mimicked the pose of the logo for Captain Morgan rum. The 15-yard penalty was assessed on the ensuing kickoff and helped give Atlanta good field position to start a touchdown drive that put the Falcons ahead for good.
After posting a photo of the celebration on Instagram, Seferian-Jenkins quickly heard from coach Lovie Smith.
"Once it came to my attention, then I confronted him," Smith said.
The picture quickly was taken down and Seferian-Jenkins said he regretted his actions.
"It's unacceptable," Seferian-Jenkins said. "I posted a picture. I shouldn't have posted it. We're in the middle of a 1-8 season, and I can see why people were upset with it for multiple reasons. The last thing I want to do is put myself in front of the team anyway. I want to let my play do the talking and not anything after we score because, at the end of the day, we got seven points but gave them 15 yards which led to a game-winning score.
"Can't have it. Need to be more mature. But when you're in the heat of the game, you're just having fun. You're enjoying it. You work so hard and you just do something fun. That's what it was. Looking back on it, literally as soon as I got back to the sideline I knew I shouldn't have done that. It was a lapse of judgment, and that's not what I want to be known for. And that's not what I want to be answering on a Monday. I do not want my coach having to answer questions about what I did after a touchdown celebration on a Monday."
Seferian-Jenkins said he'll learn from the episode.
"You make mistakes," he said. "That's life. You move on and you grow. That's life." |
Yet there is an actual small-but-vocal movement in favor of secession in Texas. Supporters nearly succeeded earlier this year in getting the state Republican Party to endorse a referendum on the question modeled on the Scottish independence vote that occurred in the U.K. two years ago. GOP delegates prevented a resolution backing a statewide vote from being added to the party platform in May. Former Governor (and presidential hopeful) Rick Perry infamously suggested at a Tea Party rally in 2009 that Texas could leave the Union if it wanted to. (Actually seceding might be messy, as it was in the 19th century: The White House told petitioners in 2013 that according to an 1869 Supreme Court decision, Texas did not have a right to leave the U.S.)
In the past, liberals who live on the coasts might have simply said ‘Good riddance’ to Texas, knowing that if the nation’s largest Republican bastion dropped out of the Electoral College, Democrats would all but clinch the presidency in perpetuity. But the demographic breakdown in the PPP survey suggests they might want to have a little more patience. The survey found Trump leading Clinton by just six points overall in a state Mitt Romney won by nearly 16. And the age gap is stark: While Trump is leading by a nearly 2-to-1 margin among voters 65 and older, Clinton has the edge among all others and is ahead decisively, 60-35 percent, among Texans under the age of 45. (Conversely, the idea of seceding from the Union is more popular with younger voters than it is with older Texans, which suggests increasing polarization.)
Clinton could benefit from the presence of Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson on the ballot. He drew 6 percent of the vote. But a new independent entrant, the ex-CIA officer and House GOP policy staffer Evan McMullin, isn’t faring as well. McMullin registered 0 percent in the PPP survey and has to sue Texas just to make it onto the ballot after he missed the May filing deadline by three months.
Democrats have been predicting that Texas would turn their way for years, arguing that the rising Hispanic population there would make the state competitive in presidential races after decades of voting reliably for Republicans. That shift has yet to occur. The GOP margin actually grew between 2008 and 2012, and recent statewide races for senator and governor haven’t been close, either. Could Trump accelerate Texas’s leftward move? It’s certainly possible. While the state might not be winnable for Clinton in 2016, Democrats will take solace in the finding that younger voters and Hispanics—by a 68-27 percent margin—are moving their way. The future viability they’ve long envisioned in the Lone Star State might finally be drawing closer—if only Texas doesn’t flee the U.S. before it arrives.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. |
About
Hello, my name is Brandon Ragsdale and I would like to extend the opportunity of helping me bring this idea to life. This idea will simplify the storage of a product that we all use, Shoes! With this in floor storage unit multiple shoe storage can be accomplished by placing shoes on a carousel style device, the shoes will rotate allowing for double or triple the amount stored depending on the style of shoes, using the same amount of space as before. Since the unit will be installed in the floor it will give a cleaner look and usable floor space in your closet with no clutter whatsoever all while your shoes will be protected and sealed in a airtight box right under your feet.
Thanks for your time, be blessed |
A 7-Eleven store in New York. Photo by Northfoto/Shutterstock.com
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 15 (UPI) -- Convenience store chain 7-Eleven announced its new delivery service includes an offered $20 "Date Night Pack" containing ice cream, candy, Red Bull and condoms.
The convenience store chain, which earlier this month announced a delivery service in some markets in partnership with startup DoorDash, rolled out its first delivery "convenience pack" options, including the "Date Night Pack."
The Date Night Pack, which costs $20 plus a $2 delivery fee, includes a container of Ben & Jerry's chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, a Hershey's chocolate bar, a can of Red Bull, an 18-pack of Trident gum and three Trojan Ultra Thin condoms.
Another convenience pack offered by the chain, the "Hangover Pack," contains extra-strength acetaminophen, a fruit punch Gatorade, a large pepperoni pizza and a sandwich containing smoked turkey and pepper jack.
Raja Doddala, 7‑Eleven's vice president of innovation and omnichannel strategy, said the packs aim to "redefine convenience."
The delivery options are currently available in Los Angeles, Chicago and the New York boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. |
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