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The US military has dismissed two high-ranking officers – one of whom was found to be having an extramarital affair, it was learned on Friday.
Brig. Gen. Michael Bobeck, an Army National Guard general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was fired after an internal investigation found that he had been having an affair, according to USA Today.
Engaging in an extramarital affair is a violation of military rules.
Bobeck was also found to have lived rent-free in an apartment owned by an executive from a company that has links to arms contractors who conduct business with the Department of Defense.
Brig. Gen. Michael Bobeck, an Army National Guard general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff (left) and Army Maj. Gen. Wayne Grigsby (right) were dismissed from their jobs
The company, Peduzzi Associates, is a consulting firm based in Alexandria, Virginia. Its aviation division supports defense firms that have business ties to the Pentagon.
Peduzzi is known to be a lobbyist for Sikorsky, a division of Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of military equipment.
The executive, Joe Ferreira, is said to have allowed Bobeck to stay in the basement of his apartment. The two men are also said to have discussed a possible job for Bobeck, according to USA Today.
The military and the US government are vigilant in enforcing rules that would prohibit any relationship between actively serving military members and defense contractors since such ties could breed conflicts of interest.
A Department of Defense (above) review found that Bobeck was having an extramarital affair and was living rent-free in the home of a businessman linked with defense contractors
Bobeck’s attorney, Lt. Col. Adam Kazin, denied that there was anything untoward as it relates to Bobeck’s living arrangement.
“Any implication that there was any wrongdoing is very upsetting to him,” Kazin said.
“Abusing his position to enrich himself is not in line with how he views himself.”
Ferreira told USA Today that he has known Bobeck for 35 years and that their friendship was the reason that he agreed to allow the general to stay in his apartment.
Bobeck had just recently divorced his wife, Ferreira said. Allowing him to stay in his home was an act of friendship that had nothing to do with business, he maintained.
Bobeck has been reassigned within the military pending the investigation.
Last month, Maj. Gen. David Haight was fired after it was learned he had been having an affair and was living a 'swinger lifestyle'
Meanwhile, the Army also announced on Friday that Maj. Gen. Wayne Grigsby, the commander of the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas, was dismissed, according to USA Today.
The military, however, did not specify the reason for the dismissal.
Last month, US Army Maj. Gen. David Haight was fired after leading a decade-long double life including an affair and a 'swinger lifestyle' with multiple partners and sex parties, leaving him at risk of blackmail.
Haight was investigated earlier this year and fired in May from his senior position at US European Command, a position in charge of the United States military's attempts to confront Russia's aggression in Eastern Europe. |
Oliver McManus tells us the story of Jean-Pierre Adams.
Jean-Pierre Adams is an extraordinary man with an extraordinary tale to tell and if you were to whisper his name outside of his home nation of France, people wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
Despite being capped 22 times by the France national team, it is not his exploits on the pitch for which I’m writing about but rather his misfortune off it; aged 69, Adams has been in a coma for over half his life – since 17th March 1982 – and when I’ve been doing my research about him there is always one overwhelming theme to the years that have followed and that, very simply, is one of love.
To profile his playing career firstly before moving onto his current coma; born in Dakar, Senegal (at the time French West Africa), Adams left his native country with his grandmother on a pilgrimage to Montargis, a tiny village in the north-central region of France, where he was enlisted in the Saint-Louise de Montargis school before being adopted by a French couple.
Playing initially as a second striker for the youth teams of US Cepoy, CD Bellegarde and USM Montargis, Jean-Pierre Adams joined semi-professional RC Fontainebleau in 1967 when he was aged just 19; quickly persuaded into dropping back into defence by the coaches, he helped the club win the Championnat de France Amateur (4th division) twice before signing professional terms with Ligue 1 club, Nimes Olympique, in 1970.
Staying with the club for three years, he helped the club to a best-ever 2nd place as they secured UEFA Cup football for the following year with 21 wins, 76 goals and a goal-difference of +39.
Between 1973 and 1977 he played for Nice, again in Ligue 1, during a phase of ambition for the club – having been relegated from the top-division in the 1968-69 season with a measly 21 points, they were out to prove a point and nearly succeeded in bringing Jairzinho to the club.
This ambition was not, however, matched by their on-field ability but Adams somehow managed to enhance his reputation despite being part of a, relatively, struggling squad; being named in France Football’s team of the 1975-76 season with the newspaper going on record as stating “Adams remains without a rival in his role, where his extraordinary athletic qualities can match the best”.
The following season would prove to be his best ever (on paper) with Nice running Saint-Etienne close but eventually finished 2nd in the league with their failure to claim the title put down, in large parts, to an onslaught of injuries across the team – unfortunately, though, Adams was to be slain at this peak as during the season he was one of those to suffer from such issues and his time at the club came was to draw to an unfortunate close.
Internationally, Jean-Pierre Adams was first recognised in 1972 when he was still at Nimes as the, then, 24-year-old came off the bench against an “Africa Select” team when he replaced Marius Tresor in a tournament dubbed the Taca Independencia taking place to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Brazil’s independence from Portugal.
The name Marius Tresor, in France, is synonymous with that of Jean-Pierre Adams and vice versa owing to their “Garde Noire” which, admittedly looking back with my GCSE French goggles the nickname probably has some racial overtones to it, was a fabled partnership in French football throughout the 70’s.
It was such a good partnership for the reason being that they were completely different to each other stylistically – Tresor was a robust, technical player and Adams was a young, sprightly, athletic defender.
Like his spell at Nice, his international career would be put to bed by the injury he suffered in the 1976-77 season with the last of his 22 international appearances coming in 1976 against Denmark.
Still Adams would go on to play for Paris Saint-Germain between 1977 and 1979 before his 9 year spell in Ligue 1 would end as he joined, firstly, Mulhouse and then Chalon before announcing his retirement aged 33, in 1981.
On the 3rd day of a coaching course in Bourguignon in the spring of 1982, Adams suffered a knee injury and headed to a hospital in Lyon the morning after. The first scan showed that the tendon towards the back of the knee had been damaged but an unplanned meeting with a surgeon on his way out of the hospital would prove to be the turning point in his life.
The brief conversation that they had would lead Adams to decide that the best option of treatment would be to have an operation as soon as possible and, so, he was booked in for the operation on the 17th March.
After three calls to the hospital his wife was finally told to “come here, now” and being in such an emotional state, she was joined by two official Chalon officials to the hospital where they were told that her husband had gone into a coma.
For 5 days and 5 nights, Bernadette (Mrs Adams’ first name) sat by his bedside desperate for his condition to change with their two young children, both boys, being looked after by their grandparents.
The question that needs to be answered is how did a simple knee operation result in someone slipping into a coma and the answer is both simple and complicated so, here goes;
The simple part is that there was a problem with the administration of his anaesthetic which created an unwanted air bubble, causing something known as a bronchospasm – which covers a whole array of breathing difficulties from very mild asthmas all the way up to what Adam’s has where his brain is starved of oxygen, forcing him into a coma.
Negligence then, you’d assume? Again, yes and no because this is where the complicated (ish) part comes into play, the anaesthetist was overworked no-end by the hospital and at the time of Jean-Pierre’s operation he was also in charge of eight other patients, including a young child requiring a particularly delicate procedure.
In November he was moved out of the hospital into a smaller one in Chalon, where the couple lived. Despite the obviously precarious nature of this situation there was still a lacklustre approach from the staff with Adams losing 11kg in the space of a month and having to undergo another, unnecessary, operation as a hospital infection has spread to his bones.
In August of 1983 the hospital suggested that he should be moved to an elderly residence but Bernadette rejected this and instead opted to bring him back home where she would look after him.
She would sit with him hour after hour, sleep with him in the same room and turn him over in the middle of the night, every night. She did this not out of necessity, because there were other options, but out of love and devotion to her childhood sweetheart.
A custom built house dubbed “Mas du bel athlete dormant” (House of the Beautiful Sleeping Athlete) with the help of some of Adams’ former clubs as Nimes and PSG provided 15,000 French Francs (as the currency was back then), with the French Football Federation (FFF) contributing an initial 25,000Fr followed by 6,000Fr per week in an offer that would, nowadays, equate to over EUR 1,140,000 a year (as the currency is now).
The whole issue of how this come came about was slogged out in the French courts over a lengthy period of time with the relative authorities finally coming to a conclusion towards the end of 1993 with the anaesthetist and trainee operation manager being given suspended jail sentences (1 month apiece) and measly fines surmounting to less than 1,000Fr.
35 years after Jean-Pierre went in for that knee operation, Bernadette is still caring for him with hospitals unable to provide staff to look after him but improvement is being made – Adams can’t speak, walk or talk, but is able to breath by himself, digest his own food and open and close his eyes.
Everyday Bernadette gets him dressed and just sits by his side, talking to him , just passing the time and, in an interview with CNN, she said “I’ll buy things so that he can have a nice room, such as pretty sheets or some scent… no-one ever forgets to give Jean-Pierre presents, whether it’s his birthday, Christmas or Father’s Day”.
12,917 days (as I write this) since Jean-Pierre Adams’ entered into his coma, Bernadette hasn’t lost hope that his situation, nor has she lost love for her husband and that’s what this story is about – yes it’s also about football, it’s about tragedy but it’s foremost about just the sheer incredible strength of humanity. |
While the Megami Tensei series never quite enjoyed the same kind of success the other two big JRPG series Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy have, it still is one of the major RPG franchises in Japan, spawning many sequels and countless spin-offs which in turn often grew into their own series, like Devil Children for Game Boy or Devil Summoner for disc based consoles. The anime-heavy Persona spin-off series even surpassed the original series‘ success and also put Atlus on the Western JRPG publisher map during the Playstation era. After the first real Megami Tensei game published outside Japan, Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne, was released in the US in 2004 Atlus USA started slapping the SMT moniker on every spin-off title including the recent Persona games but not many Western players are aware of the roots of the franchise which is based on a light novel series by NISHITANI Aya published starting in 1986.
Megami Tensei was actually the subtitle of the first book in the Digital Devil Story series1 Digital Devil Story might remind some readers of the Digital Devil Saga games for PS2 which were named to allude to the series‘ roots. which started as a trilogy but got an even longer running sequel. Like other light novels the DDS books feature manga-styled covers and both color and b/w illustrations, the former at the beginning and the latter spread throughout each volume, drawn by KITAZUME Hiroyuki. The story is a mix of SF, fantasy and horror and its aesthetics and subject matter strongly appeal to fans of manga and games which is typical of light novels. The original trilogy follows the adventures of genius programmer NAKAJIMA Akemi2 中島朱実. NAKAJIMA’s first name is sexually ambiguous, like many Japanese names it can be both male and female, this one being more commonly female. This fits in with NAKAJIMA often being described as effeminate and rivaling a girl’s beauty. The author’s first name Aya is equally ambiguous. and his female classmate SHIRASAGI Yumiko. NAKAJIMA writes a program that unleashes digitally summoned demons into the world, in part because, like any genius scientist who discovers something new, he can, but also because he wants to get revenge on two other classmates, the ruffian jock KONDŌ Hiroyuki and TAKAMIZAWA Kyōko, who instigated KONDŌ to beat up NAKAJIMA for allegedly harrassing her the day before. Realizing what he has done he rises to become the hero to fight the demons he himself unleashed. He gets help from the recently transferred3 Yumiko being a transfer student (転校生、tenkōsei) is linked to her being reincarnated by the characters used to write the word. If just one is left out tenkōsei becomes tensei, which means reincarnation. Yumiko, who not only becomes his lover but also turns out to be a reincarnation of Izananami-no-mikoto, an ancient goddess,4 Fußnotenauszug: Izanami-no-mikoto is also the mother of the world. In the Japanese world creation myth a human-like goddess gives birth to the world after discovering sexual intercourse with her husband, Izanagi-no-mikoto. This myth is much more concrete and founded in real life experience than the Judaism/Christian equivalent, i.e. in the bible world creation (by an abstract being) and discovery of sexuality (by... hence the title Megami Tensei (Reincarnation of the goddess).
The demons lead by the norse god Loki aren’t willing to retreat from the world once summoned and soon endanger Yumiko. With her divine abilities and NAKAJIMA’s demon summon program they manage to fight back Loki, getting help from another demon, Cerberos, who NAKAJIMA befriends. The demons represent NAKAJIMA’s violent and dangerous feelings, resulting in Loki killing NAKAJIMA’s classmates, as much as his potential for heroism, wielding a flame sword and riding Cerberos. In the world of the DDS novels NAKAJIMA’s ability to program computer games that make professional efforts pale in comparison, as his friend TAKAI comments, is exaggerated in the fantasy narrative enabling him to summon real demons by simulating their every detail on his computer. The esoteric and mysterious sounding assembly code becomes actual spells, IT becomes the spiritual successor of Kabbalah and witchcraft. It seems like a childish fantasy but is actually an interesting allegory for how games can be perceived by the player. It’s like the gruesome scenes seen in some games have become reality. Every game has its hero fighting the cruel villain but NISHITANI actually acknowledges the programmer’s role in also creating the adversary, the adversary actually being a part of the creator.5 Fußnotenauszug: Hero and villain necessitating each other also is common theme in American superhero comics since the late 70-ies, when the mutant heroes of the Uncanny X-Men were becoming as feared as their evil counterparts. Should the victims be thankful of the hero saving them from the villain or the hero be thankful of the villain for making his adventures more interesting than saving cats from trees and cat...
But the story is also one of coming of age and of sexual awakening. Like Yumiko NAKAJIMA is a reincarnation of an ancient god, Izanami’s husband Izanagi. Rescuing Yumiko from the demon attacks, like Loki’s tentacles, he often gets to hold her naked body aftwards. The aggressive sexual assaults of the demons are juxtaposed with NAKAJIMA’s own timid affection towards Yumiko. Unlike Kyōko, Yumiko is kind and doesn’t ridicule him for his effeminate looks, unlike his absent working mother she is there for him and stands by his side. A reincarnation of a kind ancient mother goddess she’s the one he chooses to protect, to be his lover.
In the second novel Mato no senshi (The Warrior of the Demon Capitol) NAKAJIMA’s teacher EBARA, who was raped by Loki in part one, gives birth to Seth, another demon adversary, but only after killing NAKAJIMA’s mother before his and Yumiko’s eyes to get revenge for him slaying Loki. The demons infiltrate more and more of the world including the sphere of politics and the younger brother of Charles Feed of the MIT (a friend of Richard Craft who helped NAKAJIMA write the demon summon program) decides to use the demon summon program again even though NAKAJIMA chooses not to. Yumiko is summoned to a mythical plane to be trained by the real Izanami how to use her divine abilities while NAKAJIMA and his American friends keeps the demons at bay in their home town. They even go to outer space from where the demons start their big invasion.
When faced with the decision to either save the whole world from being overrun by demons or save Yumiko from dying he chooses to save his lover. After losing his mother, first to her career, then to his evil pregnant teacher (who in a way is the antithesis of his mother as the villains Loki and his son Seth are the antithesis to the heroic NAKAJIMA), he cannot bear to also lose the girl that is supposed to be her substitute, the reincarnation of the mother goddess.
In the last volume, Tensei no shūen (End of the Reincarnation), NAKAJIMA and Yumiko face off with Lucifer himself, whose advent to the human world is heralded by a spreading cult which the frightened humans succumb to. But first NAKAJIMA has to find a cure for Yumiko’s loss of her eyesight. NAKAJIMA seems destined to become the world’s Messiah but like Jesus he is seduced by Lucifer and unlike Jesus he cannot resist Lucifer’s control over his actions. Izanami has to kill NAKAJIMA as he turns on Yumiko. Of course the story doesn’t end with NAKAJIMA’s death, there’s a 6 volume sequel series, Shin Digital Devil Story (The New Digital Devil Story) which continues the battle against Lucifer.
The game adaption, which NISHITANI also wrote the scenario for, shares the same title as the first novel, Digital Devil Story Megami Tensei6 The only difference is that Story is written in Chinese characters instead of Latin or Japanese characters like in the novels but it still is meant to be read as Story. and adapts the story of NAKAJIMA. The game skips the exposition and depictions of real life Tokyo and instead starts right with NAKAJIMA and Yumiko entering the demon lair and is basically one big dungeon separated into five areas. NAKAJIMA and Yumiko have to fight off and negotiate with demons to make the needed allies to get through the dangerous mazes until their final confrontation with Lucifer. Unlike the book NAKAJIMA can become the Messiah this time. The series‘ mainstays like befriending demons and the fusion system to make stronger demons are already introduced in this first installment. Unlike most other original Japanese RPGs of the time it also used a first-person perspective and an alignment system differentiating along the axis of Good-Neutral-Evil, which both were common in Western RPGs.
The sequel Digital Devil Story Megami Tensei II was made without NISHITANI’s involvement and continues the story established in the first game ignoring the novel sequels. It actually has a much stronger narrative than the first game and introduces another element typical of the later Megami Tensei games, choice. The player still can’t choose or in any way affect his alignment, which remains fixed at Good, but depending on a few choices at crucial plot points he can get a different ending than the standard one.
The story is set in a bleak future after World War III. The atom bomb has been dropped on Tokyo and people hide in shelters. In one such shelter a boy and his friend, both named by the player, play a video game called Devil Buster7 In the ending Devil Buster is revealed to be the demon summon program written by NAKAJIMA Akemi.. It is very similar to the first DDS: MT game but with a top down perspective switching to first person for the battles, reminiscent of the Dragon Quest style of presentation. A male hero is coupled with a magician girl, like NAKAJIMA and Yumiko in the first game. They befriend demons to beat the boss of the dungeon. Once the boy and his friend clear the dungeon something weird happens. A demon addresses them and tells them about demons coming to their own reality. He explains to them how they can use the game soft to summon demons in the real world and that they have to use them to save the world. When they stop playing they find themselves in the shelter which is seen from a first-person perspective indicating their return to the „real world“. The Dragon Quest-style game fantasy has been replaced with the more realistic game setting of Megami Tensei again.
The boy’s friend takes the place of the girl from the game and they travel ruined Tokyo together. Until they make their way to Tokyo Tower where they meet the girl from the game in the real world.8 The girl in the game is of course a symbol and a projection of the hero’s image of women as based on his closest female reference, his mother. Finding her in the real world outside the game is an allegory for the shift from affection towards the mother to love for same age girls. She seems to know how the player can become the Messiah but the boy’s friend doesn’t want him to listen to her. The player doesn’t have a real choice here and must ask the girl into the party at some point which causes him to have to split up with his male friend. Who then becomes an evil demon summoner trying to stop the player from restoring the world.
At a later stage the player can show mercy to a defeated boss turned frog. This decision leads to the possibility of uniting him with another boss to restore the god Ba’al who then can join the player. With Ba’al in his party the player doesn’t have to fight Lucifer who instead explains to him that devils are just gods of other religions.9 The two demons reunited as Ba’al, Bael and Beelzebub, are actually both interpretations of the same god Ba’al as an evil devil. The player can then choose polytheism over becoming the Messiah of a monotheistic god. This is actually the true ending which leads to the world being restored. If the player decides to become the Messiah he helps build the biblical 1000 year kingdom in which according to the game only the strong survive.10 This becomes the law ending in the later Shin Megami Tensei games. This can be seen as an expression of the mixed feelings of the Japanese towards the patriarchal values of post war Japan stressing importance of education and achievements in school and the work place and the suppression of some more lenient Japanese values like maternal kindness.
For the next installment developer Atlus chose to reboot the series and interpret the original narrative of NISHITANI’s novel in new ways. The title was shortened to just Megami Tensei but with the prefix Shin added. Shin usually means new, as in the New Adventures of or the New Tales of, but here it is written with the character indicating true. In the opening someone is entering cryptic computer code that turns into ancient spells and when he enters the title Shin Digital Devil Story the beginning part Shin is at first converted to the usual New, then to God and finally to True. Digital Devil Story is then converted to Megami Tensei making the title read The True Reincarnation of the Goddess.
Major story motives of the original, like the demon summon program (this time written by Steven, a man in a wheel chair), the death of the hero’s mother, the friendly demon Cerberos (who is created by fusing the hero’s dog Pascal with any demon), politicians controlled by demons11 In the game the American ambassador Thorman turns out to be the Norse god Thor who drops an atom bomb on Tokyo because of the Japanese millitary allying themselves with demons. Thorman (トールマン) is obviously a play on words; if one character is displaced it becomes Truman (トルーマン), alluding the ambassador’s decision to the historical bombing of Hiroshima in World War II. and cults spreading are reinterpreted. Also a new alignment axis is introduced: Good-Neutral-Evil is changed to Light-Neutral-Dark and Law-Neutral-Chaos is added12 These are the same two types of alignment also present in D&D, the original RPG to come up with the alignment system in the first place.. This latter alignment changes with the player’s actions. There’s also two more heroes, the law hero who is accused of having killed his girl friend and the chaos hero who is beat up by ruffians. The law hero actually dies and comes back to life after 3 days to become the actual Messiah13 The alleged murder of the law hero’s girlfriend can be seen as a symbol for war crimes the generation of the law hero haven’t themselves committed. The law player seeks to distance himself from this past and becomes a Messiah type hero. while the chaos hero seeks strength so desperately that he decides to fuse with a demon to gain its power14 Being frequently bullied the chaos player seeks a way out of being pushed around, resulting in radicalization.. Both try to convince the player to join their side but it’s up to him to remain neutral or choose either one. Law is linked to the Messiah church and chaos to the Gaia church, the former representing patriarchal systems like Christianity in which the mother only serves to enforce male values, the latter maternal goddesses of the world which are similar to Japanese folklore.
Choosing when to fight, choosing who to treat as friend or foe, choosing your own actions and ideology to follow, if the game is a virtual mirror of the real world then giving the player this kind of freedom must be empowering. Shin Megami Tensei also avoids associating either religious stream with light/good or dark/evil. In fact both the law hero and the chaos hero are aligned with light.
This element of choice made a big impression on the Japanese gaming scene and NISHITANI was inspired by this game to revisit his creation, writing his own version of Shin Megami Tensei (The True Reincarnation of the Goddess). The hero-heroine team of reincarnated ancient Japanese gods is replaced by a heroine becoming the mother of god and a secondary hero protecting her (or failing to protect her from the demon rape). In the afterword of the first volume NISHITANI explains his aim with this new novel:
I belief that no work of art is ever created by just one single individual. The music of Wagner for example could only exist because of traditional German folk tales, opera, the environment of his family and the harsh historical background he lived in. The Pillow Book15 Makura no sōshi, written by court lady SEI Shōnagon in the Heian period. also is a literary work which could only exist because of the overripe culture of the nobility, the life at court and the author’s hereditary genius. A great artist is like a priestess medium, sucking a certain something out of his era. The part emerging as a work of art is but the tip of the iceberg and in the depths of it there is a hidden huge core, of which the artist isn’t even aware. The bigger this hidden core is, the deeper its layers and the more profound its meanings. The game Shin Megami Tensei seems to me like a large bloom coming out of the border line of such a core. I’ve heard that most of the development staff of Shin Megami Tensei created the game leaning towards chaos or neutral. Among the people close to me at least there is no one who played the game taking the lawful route. As for myself, I only beat the game the lawful way. Many people assume that the lawful hero route is, in a nutshell, just like any other RPG, but I don’t agree. Law is not about doing what is right but believing in an absolute ruler and accepting the fate you’re given. The conduct of a typical benevolent hero like the one in Ultima is not what you would call lawful virtue in theological theory. That is nothing more than a relativistic law. In fact Shin Megami Tensei is the only RPG that contains a lawful standpoint in the true sense of the word. But there’s something severly missing from the lawful world portrayed in Shin Megami Tensei. I’m speaking about „Mary“. Christianity, which represents the lawful ideology, could only become a world religion because of Mary worship. The protestants deny Mary worship but in catholic belief Mary, who in theology is positioned only slightly beneath Jesus, sustains Christianity. A few years back when I visited Jerusalem I went to a graveyard church built on mount Golgotha, the most holy of places. The statue of Mary standing there didn’t smile gently like the depictions of the holy mother usually do. She was grieving for her crucified son, shedding tears and calling to the heavens. As I saw her sobbing expression all the doubts I had about Christianity were suddenly cleared up. The world portrayed in the game is truly like the year 0. It’s the world just before Mary would give birth to the son of god. Just like the prophets of old were telling of coming change this game is now telling of something being born. I’m giving my all to draw out the lawful element in this.
NISHITANI understands that his novel has taken a life of its own, that it has grown into something bigger than what he created. His world is now shaped by the software developers he teamed up with earlier. So maybe he seeks to claim his part in forming this techno pseudo religion. But he also stresses that Shin Megami Tensei’s achievement isn’t just to provide an alternative to the standard good RPG hero. He points out that this law stance is unique to Shin Megami Tensei and that it might have more in common with the chaos stance than is first apparent. For NISHITANI law is still a viable choice and Shin Megami Tensei includes this option as well.
Stichworte: Atlus Autor: Kay |
This post originally appeared on Korea Real Time.
When North Korea purged dictator Kim Jong Un’s uncle in December one question raised was whether the move would impact economic ties with China. Jang Song Thaek was seen as a key interlocutor with Beijing and a proponent of business links.
Initial data shows there’s been no immediate negative effect on the trade relationship between the countries.
Trade volume between North Korea and China rose 16% on-year to $546 million in January, according to the Korea International Trade Association, which compiles data based on Chinese customs statistics.
Among the litany of crimes attributed to Mr. Jang before his execution was an accusation that he sold off coal and other resources "at random." That suggested North Korea would seek to renegotiate export deals with its only big trade partner, China.
While that may be the case, it has yet to show up in the data.
“Bilateral trade has probably yet to feel the impact of Mr. Jang’s execution,” said Cho Bong-hyun, research fellow at Seoul-based IBK Economic Research Institute.
“Both sides are still acting on trade contracts that have already been signed and usually take effect for six months,” Mr. Cho said.
Mr. Cho said he expects the impact from Mr. Jang’s purge will begin to appear in the data from the second quarter of this year. North Korea may also increasingly turn to trade with South Korea following a thawing of ties and the reopening of a jointly run Kaesong industrial park, he said.
The KITA data show inter-Korean trade volume shrank 42% to an eight-year low of $1.15 billion last year, when the Kaesong complex was closed for several months after North Korea pulled out its workers.
North Korean-Chinese trade volume hit a record high of $6.54 billion last year, according to KITA, as North Korea exported natural resources such as coal and iron ore, while importing fuel and electronics goods.
The Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, Seoul’s state-funded trade agency, said in a report last year that North Korea’s bilateral trade with China accounted for 88% of Pyongyang’s entire external trade in 2012, up from 53% in 2005.
-Kwanwoo Jun
Follow @ChinaRealTime on Twitter for the latest updates. |
A Winnipeg judge has granted bail to Leslie Colmer, who faces 25 fraud charges for allegedly posing as a medical doctor.
The 66-year-old former chiropractor had been in custody since he was arrested earlier this month for allegedly treating patients in communities across the province without a medical licence.
Entering the courtroom for Monday's bail hearing in shackles, Colmer was heard asking his lawyer, "Am I getting bail? What do you think?"
Colmer's bail was set at $25,000, and an assurity was set at the same amount.
Under the conditions of his release, he must live with his 86-year-old mother in Beausejour, Man., and report to the RCMP every week. He can still travel to his family cabin at Lake of the Woods.
As well, Colmer is prohibited from providing any medical, dietary or alternative medical services, and he cannot identify himself as a medical doctor.
He is not allowed to contact the complainants, obtain a passport or possess weapons, according to the court.
Upon hearing his bail conditions, Colmer said, "Thank you" and told the judge he understood those conditions.
At the time of Colmer's arrest, RCMP said he treated patients in the Steinbach, Winnipeg and Selkirk areas.
Police said there may be more potential victims in those communities as well as in the Brandon and Beausejour areas.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba has said Colmer was never licensed to practise medicine in Manitoba.
Colmer's chiropractic licence was stripped in 2002 after two female patients went to the Manitoba Chiropractors Association with sex allegations. |
Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968) was an American politician. As Attorney General, Kennedy layed the smackdown on organised crime, spoke out for civil rights and was chief counsel to his brother, President John F. Kennedy. After his brother was assassinated, Kennedy served as New York senator before running as a presidential candidate for the 1968 election. Committed to improving the conditions of the poor and racial minorities, Kennedy was the favourite to win the Democratic party nomination until he was also tragically assassinated.
This quote is taken from Kennedy’s famous Day of Affirmation speech, given in South Africa in 1966. Kennedy’s five-day visit to South Africa, where he spoke out against apartheid, inspired millions of South Africans. You can listen to the audio of the quote here, and it is now inscribed on Kennedy’s memorial.
One of Kennedy’s favourite quotes, which he used often in speeches, is by George Bernard Shaw:
“There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
This is the latest comic featuring the boy Dragonslayer. Read his previous adventures:
PART 1. CALVIN COOLIDGE: Never Give Up
PART 2. OSWALD CHAMBERS: Mountains and Valleys
PART 3. SAMUEL BECKETT: Ever Tried. Ever Failed
PART 4. WINSTON CHURCHILL: Never Yield to Force
– Thanks to Daniel for submitting this quote. |
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Several people's credit card details, including expiry dates and addresses, have appeared online
Fitness website PayAsUGym has admitted that members' financial details were stolen when one of its servers was hacked on Thursday.
The discovery was made by security experts who found partial card numbers and home addresses on a public website.
The company acknowledged there had been "confusion" over earlier claims that it did not hold any card details.
Security expert Troy Hunt advised customers to cancel their credit card if they think details have been stolen.
PayAsUGym, which sells passes for gyms around the UK, alerted its members to the security breach in an email on Friday which said "one of the company's IT servers was accessed by an unauthorised person".
While it said email addresses and passwords were accessed, it claimed "we do not hold any financial or credit card information".
The company said 300,000 customers details had been stolen.
Partial card details
However, several customers' credit card details - including 10 digits of their card number, the expiry date and their home address - appear to have been published online.
Once alerted by BBC News, PayAsUGym chief executive Jamie Ward said "we didn't consider" that PayAsUGym holds partial credit card details.
He said customers could contact PayAsUGym directly to find out the exact information they hold.
He added: "We've been completely clear with every customer that has contacted us since our original statement on what we hold."
Security expert Mr Hunt, who tracks breached websites, said he came across several people's details online.
Mr Hunt said: "If it was me, and that information was public, I would cancel the card straight away."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Security expert Troy Hunt provides safety tips
He said the first six digits and last four digits of people's cards had been "dumped on a website, presumably by the perpetrator".
Mr Hunt explained that fraudsters can use computer algorithms to work out complete credit card details "within seconds".
"PayAsUGym has stated that there is no card data at risk, yet here we have a screen grab of a large amount of card data," he said. "There's some transparency lacking here."
PayAsUGym said it had started using new servers after speaking with cyber security professionals.
The website said it used a "tokenised system" for customer payments which, it says, means card details are stored at the payment gateway - not on its servers.
PayAsUGym's Mr Ward added: "We don't hold the full number for security reasons. The payment is then made using a tokenised system."
The company advised concerned customers to contact them. |
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Saturday that Canada will welcome refugees rejected by President Donald Trump.
Trudeau also plans to discuss the success of Canada's refugee policy with Trump.
Trudeau reacted to Trump's visa ban for people from certain Muslim-majority countries by tweeting, "To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength. #WelcomeToCanada."
To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada — Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 28, 2017
Trump signed an executive order on Friday that he billed as a necessary step to stop "radical Islamic terrorists" from coming to the U.S. A 90-day ban on travel to the U.S. by citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia or Yemen and a 120-day suspension of the U.S. refugee program was also issued.
Trudeau posted a picture on Twitter where he is greeting a Syrian child back in 2015 at the Toronto airport.
Trudeau oversaw the arrival of over 39,000 Syrian refugees soon after he was elected.
"The Prime Minister is looking forward to discussing the successes of Canada's immigration and refugee policy with the President when they next speak," spokeswoman for Trudeau, Kate Purchase said.
Toronto Mayor John Tory weighed in, calling the city the most diverse in the world. "We understand that as Canadians we are almost all immigrants, and that no one should be excluded on the basis of their ethnicity or nationality," Tory said in a statement.
Trump's order singled out Syrians for the most aggressive ban, ordering that anyone from that country, including those fleeing civil war, are indefinitely blocked from coming to the United States.
"We have been assured that Canadian citizens traveling on Canadian passports will be dealt with in the usual process," Purchase said.
Earlier the U.S. State Department said that Canadians with dual citizenship from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Libya would be denied entry for the next three months.
Trudeau also posted a statement on Twitter with the hashtag, "ACanadianIsACanadian."
The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
An Analytics Extension for Flask
Flask-Bitmapist is a Flask extension that creates a simple interface to the Bitmapist analytics library. It is easy to set up and start collecting data on how users are interacting with an application, then to work with that data and build out cohorts to learn more about user engagement and retention.
What We Wanted and What We Built
For the most part, current analytics libraries were not meeting our needs. Available options tended to be prohibitively expensive, particularly for use with small projects. Otherwise, they were too resource-intensive to implement for repeated use across projects to be appealing.
We found and liked the Bitmapist library because it addresses the first issue in an open-source way. We were also excited about the bitmap-based approach they took, which allows bitwise operations to be performed on the data; this means that the library’s operations can be extremely fast and lightweight. You can read more about the what, the why, and the how of Bitmapist in the author’s Medium post.
Still, we wanted something that we could essentially drop into a project each time without having to do much else. Most of our projects to date have been built using the Flask microframework for Python, so we decided to write a custom Flask extension.
Thus was Flask-Bitmapist born: a Flask extension that, once installed, requires only three lines of code (one line to import, two lines to initialize) to be ready to register events (i.e., to record a given user action and when it occurred).
How to Get Set Up
One of our major goals for Flask-Bitmapist was for it to be easy to set up.
To add it to a project, just pip install flask-bitmapist as you would any other package. Then, import and initialize Flask-Bitmapist with your Flask app, and you are ready to start registering events.
View the code on Gist.
Note: Since Bitmapist uses Redis to record the registered user events, Redis must also be running for Flask-Bitmapist to work.
How to Register Events
Once you have set up Flask-Bitmapist, you get not one, not two, but four ways to register events.
If you are using Flask-Login, user login/logout events will be registered automatically. Add a mixin to your user model to register changes made to database objects. Use a decorator to register an event for a given view or function call, or call a function directly wherever else you might want to register an event.
Examples of when you might want to use each method:
Flask-Login: You are already using Flask-Login for user session management, and you want to record when users are logging in and out of your application.
ORM mixin: You are using SQLAlchemy, and you want to record when changes are being made to (user) objects in the database. (See the “Moving Forward” section for details about additional ORM support.)
Decorator: You want to register an event for whenever a user accesses a particular view (e.g., to render a template, submit a form, access an API, etc.).
Function: You want to register events at multiple points throughout a single process, or you want to register different events based on branching or conditional results within some process.
Flask-Login
Flask-Login is a popular library for user session management in Flask applications, so it was important for us to have built-in user login/logout event registration in Flask-Bitmapist.
Setting up Flask-Bitmapist to work with Flask-Login requires nothing beyond setting up both as you normally would: initialize Flask-Bitmapist and Flask-Login with the Flask app, create your User class (e.g., with the UserMixin), and Flask-Bitmapist will automatically listen for the user_logged_in and user_logged_out signals from Flask-Login to register the corresponding events.
View the code on Gist.
Note: The registered event names will be ‘user:logged_in’ and ‘user:logged_out’ for users logging in and out, respectively.
ORM Mixin
As with session management, we wanted event registration for changes to objects in the database to be straightforward.
Import the Bitmapistable mixin and add it to your User class definition. Flask-Bitmapist will then automatically register the appropriate event whenever a user is created, updated, or deleted.
View the code on Gist.
Note: We started with the ORM we most commonly use (SQLAlchemy), but we are looking to add support for others (Peewee, MongoEngine, etc.) in the future.
Note: The mixin is currently intended for the application’s User (or equivalent) class only, pending implementation of a flexible (i.e., not dependent on using Flask-Login) means of retrieving the current session’s user id.
Decorator & Function
Import the mark decorator function from flask_bitmapist and attach it to the desired function, providing the event name and the id of the current user (e.g., Flask-Login’s current_user ).
View the code on Gist.
Import the mark_event function from flask_bitmapist and call it with the event name and user id.
View the code on Gist.
Note: The event name structure ~ ‘user:action’ is merely a convention. You could, potentially, name events any number of ways, including breaking them down by domain (e.g., ‘support:bug_reported’) if you so wished.
Note: In most cases, you will probably want the decorator and function to use the current time for registering the event. You can, however, specify a datetime for the event, by passing it with the now argument.
How to Use the Data
Flask-Bitmapist provides multiple ways to retrieve and process the data as well.
You can get all of the users registered with an event for a given time/time scale using the get_event_data function. To get a user cohort based on multiple events over a given time frame/time scale, the get_cohort function will serve. Additionally, Flask-Bitmapist by default registers a blueprint with a sample interface for generating a heatmap, a table constructed to visually present the cohort data based on the selected inputs.
Single Event at a Single Time: get_event_data()
The get_event_data function is what you will want to use to get the registered events for a single event (e.g., ‘user:spilled_soda’) at a single point in time. The optional time_group argument determines the span of time to include (i.e., get the events spanning one day, a week, a month, or a year) and defaults to a scale of ‘days’; the optional now argument determines when to pull the events from (e.g., right now, last month, or October 21, 2014).
View the code on Gist.
The function returns a Bitmapist events collection object, which allows you to use Bitmapist’s built-in operations (e.g., BitOpAnd , BitOpOr , etc.) to further combine with other Bitmapist event collections. Or, if you prefer, you can cast the collection to a list to get just the list of user ids for those users registered with the event within the given time frame.
View the code on Gist.
The resulting user_ids will be a list of the ids for the users who either spilled popcorn OR spilled cheesepuffs (today, with default time_group of ‘days’ and default now of datetime.utcnow() ).
Multiple Events Over Time: get_cohort()
The get_cohort function takes, at minimum, two event names that form the foundation of a cohort. Optional arguments for additional events (to further refine the cohort’s users), time group, and the size of the returned results are available as well. The function returns a tuple containing the cohort with its dates and totals; the returned cohort is a list of lists, with the items in each nested list containing the count of users who were registered with both the primary event and the secondary event (and any additional events provided) at that time. This perhaps makes more sense with an example.
Say you wanted to look at users who had ordered products from infomercials in the last six months and then, over the next four months, made the first of two easy payments AND either made their second easy payment OR returned the product. The first two event names would be passed as required positional arguments to get_cohort (‘user:ordered_infomercial_product’ and ‘user:made_first_easy_payment’ in the example below).
The latter two events would be passed as the optional additional_events argument, with their corresponding operations 6 (see assignment to additional_events in example). The number of rows corresponds to how far back to get results ( num_rows = 6 for looking at the last six months), and the number of columns corresponds to how far forward from each date to get results ( num_cols = 4 for looking at four months from whenever the user ordered the product).
View the code on Gist.
The get_cohort function returns the cohort, the cohort dates, and the cohort totals.
The cohort itself is a list of lists, structured like a matrix or a table, with each element containing the number of users who, from the initial event (e.g., ordered product in May 2016), were registered with the subsequent events (i.e., made first payment AND made second payment OR returned product) for the given date offset (e.g., + 2 months). See the heatmap example below for a visual representation; that table is laid out based on the cohort data’s structure.
The cohort dates will be the list of dates calculated for defining the cohort. If today were September 12, 2016, the cohort dates returned would be (the first day of) April 2016, May 2016, June 2016, July 2016, August 2016, and September 2016.
The cohort totals will be the count of users for the primary event at each of the above cohort dates. For example, if the first cohort date were April 2016, and 416 users ordered a product in April 2016, the first cohort total will be 416.
Note: Currently, cohort generation prioritizes OR in the order of operations, and allows OR to operate only on its immediate predecessor. For example, first AND second AND third OR fourth will be handled as first AND second AND (third OR fourth) , since progressing through the chain of events otherwise would give ORs too much weight, e.g., (first AND second AND third) OR fourth .
Visualizing a Cohort: Heatmap
By default, Flask-Bitmapist will register a ‘bitmapist’ blueprint – this can be disabled by setting the BITMAPIST_DISABLE_BLUEPRINT configuration option to True . With the blueprint enabled, visiting ‘/bitmapist/cohort’ will provide you with a starter interface to retrieve a user cohort based on given events (pulled from your existing Bitmapist event names in Redis) and selected settings. The generated cohort is used to build a heatmap to display the data and help you visualize the results.
Moving Forward
But wait – there’s more! We’ve got big goals for Flask-Bitmapist moving forward. In the near future, for example, we are planning to add:
A more robust and flexible object-oriented back-end structure
Broader ORM support, to include multiple ORM options (Peewee, MongoEngine, etc.)
Better ORM support, for flexible user id configuration (i.e., so that using the mixin with non-user models will not be dependent on a specific user session manager)
If you’d like to read through the code, or if you’d like to contribute, check out the project on GitHub. We’d also like to see a similar Django integration for Bitmapist, so hit us up if you’re interested in helping out. |
New character breakdowns for DC's Titans hint at the introduction of Bruce Wayne and possibly a new Robin on the live-action series.
RELATED: DC's Titans Series May Be Casting Its Donna Troy
The first breakdown from That Hashtag Show calls for a white, short, young male who isn't afraid of heights, which sounds a lot like the Boy Wonder. The only question is, would this person be a young Dick Grayson seen via flashbacks, or could Titans introduce another Robin (Jason Todd, Tim Drake or Batman's son, Damian Wayne) to take Dick's place now that he's graduated to Nightwing status?
[YOUNG JOHN CROSSLAND]Male, Caucasian, To play 10-13, athletic, lean, approximately 5’0″ and not afraid of heights. Please list height on submission. RECURRING GUEST STAR
If young Dick or a new Robin does make an appearance, then Batman shouldn't be far behind. The second character breakdown seems to look for an actor that embodies a number of Bruce Wayne's characteristics.
[DAVE STORY]Male, mid 30s-40s, Caucasian. The downfalls of others only make this man stronger. Polished. Unwavering. Think a young Jack Nicholson. RECURRING GUEST STAR.
RELATED: What The First Look at Robin Says About DC's Titans Series
The Titans series was first announced as in development in 2014, at the time targeted for TNT. Earlier this year, news broke that it had moved to DC’s digital service, along with Young Justice: Outsiders, the third season of the fan-favorite animated series, which is making its return after ending in 2013. Last month, a Harley Quinn animated series was announced for the service.
Titans is executive produced by genre veterans Akiva Goldsman, Geoff Johns, Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter. The series will star Brenton Thwaites as Dick Grayson, Anna Diop as Starfire, Teagan Croft as Raven, Ryan Potter as Beast Boy, Alan Ritchson as Hawk, Minka Kelly as Dove and Lindsey Gort as Amy Rohrbach. |
Belgians are beer drinking, chocolate eating, too down to earth for their own good, compromisers. That live next to Dutch trailer pulling, cheap, orange, cheese eating, tulip lovers :) Or at least that is what the stereotypes say ;) I'm a Belgian and have spend the last two years traveling between Brussels and Amsterdam. The two questions I get the most is: "How long did you drive?" and "Do you see a difference between Belgian and Dutch people?" My answer to the first question is mostly, 'too long'. To the second one, 'I do', and it is not the stereotype cultural differences you would expect. Below are 5 differences that I experience when it comes to working together and doing business.
Cappuccino Monday VS. It was good
The first cultural difference between Belgium and the Netherlands starts first thing Monday morning. Having a meeting on Monday in the Netherlands always requires you to add an extra hour to the meeting time. It starts off with a chat with the rest of the world at the coffee machine. Here you don't make a black depressing Monday morning cup of comfort, but a nice happy flappy stylish cappuccino. If you manage to get out of the coffee corner before the end of the week, you can all go to the meeting. A meeting that always starts with everybody introducing themselves, even though most of the people in the room already know each other. BUT there could well be a spider in the room that wasn't there the last time and we don't want to exclude anybody now do we. Somebody will then pose the million dollar question, 'How was everybody's weekend?' (Here is where you need the extra hour). When a Dutch person asks you how your weekend was, that is a question not to be taken lightly. When a Dutchman asks you this, he genuinely wants to know how your weekend was. Not only from you, but of the entire room :) And please, don't be afraid to go into detail. The remarkable thing is, a Dutchie will actually listen and is really interested, because you may have passed your story on as just something you start the week with, but he will ask you a week later if your cat is already feeling better after that big hairball last weekend.
On the other side you have Monday morning in Belgium. The coffee is black and the conversation short. It doesn't mean we are not friendly, we just love being efficient. So the question, 'How was your weekend?', is mostly answered by, 'It was good, now back to business.' :)
Listen to the boss VS. What does the cleaning lady think
In Belgium it doesn't really matter how many people you put into a meeting room, because there is an orgchart to respect. For a Dutch person an orgchart is something that is just there to show him the way to the top and how many levels he is still away from success, but for a Belgian it actually means something. When in a Belgian meeting it mostly comes down to who has the biggest paycheck in the room. This person will make the final decision and he or she will speak first before the minions take a stand :) (I know I'm exaggerating this a bit, but it is for the good of the blogpost)
While in the Netherlands it is a whole different story. There everybody has to have an opinion, which is ok, but also everybody is asked that opinion. Even the cleaning lady will have to come in and do her say. No disrespect to cleaning ladies of course, but everybody has their expertise. It is sometimes even hard to tell who is the biggest honcho in the room. In Belgium you would look at the size of the car, but with Dutch car taxes versus ours, the presence of one Belgium in the meeting might cloud this parking lot strategy.
We see you there VS. Do you have some time
When the Dutch know what they want, they take it. If they think you are useful to their cause, they will not hesitate to contact or involve you in their mission. While the Belgians want the same thing, but are a bit more polite by asking first. There is something to say about both approaches, but in the end it comes down to having a week full of Dutch meetings, while Belgians are still trying to squeeze in some time. The same thing goes when the meeting is actually there. The Dutch walk in and say, coffee, nice, want some! While Belgians first apologize for their presence, ask if it bothers anybody if they breath and than answer to the question, 'Do you want some coffee?' 'Well, if it isn't too much trouble.
Screw it let's do it VS. We will get back to you
Judging by the traffic situation in Brussels and Antwerp you wouldn't say Belgians are very efficient, but I dare to state the opposite. I always compare Belgians to Hobbits. Not to offend them or myself, but to describe their way of working and looking at the world. We are small as a country, half of the world still thinks we are the capital of Brussels or do not exist at all, even though we host the European Union. We aren't the loudest bunch of people and because of our small market, don't always have the biggest budgets to work with. But due to those restrictions and humble approach we are very efficient and get things done. (Talking about our way of working, not our politics) The Dutch are more like the dwarfs, more gold, so more money to spend, louder and maybe a bit bigger. When they go for something, they also get things done, but it might not always be the most efficient way. Although they will make it look like that afterwards ;) The big result of this difference is that a Dutchman will invest in an idea if he believes in it and will take the hit if it fails. A Belgian will analyze the risk and will back down if the risk of failure is too high. They often say, let the Dutch try it first, if it works, we will take it and make it better.
After work drink VS. Are you crazy, it's 5 pm
If you live in Belgium as a foreigner you will probably notice that it is very hard to make Belgian friends. Even for Belgians it is hard to do that, because if you weren't part of the team in high school, well then chances are you are never getting in. This makes friendships, deep, long and lasting, but also hard to expand. Looking at the business side of things, you see pretty much the same thing. Work in Belgium is work and after 5pm the will to go and get drunk with colleagues isn't as strong as with the Dutch. They are completely the opposite. The more people the better and any reason is a good reason for an after work drink. For example: The Belgians plan an event and discuss if there is still time for a drink afterwards. The Dutch start with planning the drink and go from there :)
Now I know what you are thinking, 'We still don't know why Belgians don't drink milk in a meeting?' Well, it's very simple. There are three kinds of people that drink milk; babies, Dutch people and BA Baracus. All the rest of us know it is just weird when you are an adult :)
Just to make sure, there is no right or wrong in this blogpost. I love doing business in both countries and I'm lucky I can. Working with different nationalities shows you the weird and funny habits, but also the good ones. The ones you can take back home to challenge your own way of working and dealing with people. PS. Before you think this the culture of my employer, trust me, my experience is broad enough to tell you this is general practice in both countries :)
Special thanks to Stefan De Groot for inspiring me to write this blogpost ;)
Find me on standupcompany.com |
Located on a gated parcel of private property within the million-acre Black Rock Desert, Fly Geyser is not a natural phenomenon. It was created accidentally in 1964 from a geothermal test well inadequately capped. The scalding water has erupted from the well since then, leaving calcium carbonate deposits growing at the rate of several inches per year. The brilliant red and green coloring on the mounds is from thermophilic algae thriving in the extreme micro-climate of the geysers. Unfortunately, Fly Geyser is not at this time open to the public. The property (Fly Ranch) was purchased in 2016 by Burning Man Project. Read more here.
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Click and drag to explore Fly Geyser.
Touch here for the HMD (Google Cardboard) version.
Click here to see the location in Google Maps. |
The good news is, Black Sails Season 4 is officially happening. The bad news is that Black Sails Season 4 will be the show's last. So let's enjoy it while it lasts, mateys!
Black Sails Season 4 Air Date
The next episode Black Sails Season airs on Sunday, February 5th. The episode is called XXX (of course, as it's the 30th episode). Here's what Starz has to say about it:
Flint accedes to Billy’s authority. Eleanor has a plan for Rogers. Silver seeks help from an unlikely source. Max is put on notice.
Check out a trailer and some clips from the episode!
Black Sails Season 4 Episodes
Click the blue links to go to our full reviews!
air date: January 29, 2017
Black Sails Season 4 Episode 2: XXX
Black Sails Season 4 Episode 3: XXXI
Black Sails Season 4 Episode 4: XXXII
Black Sails Season 4 Episode 5: XXXIII
Black Sails Season 4 Episode 6: XXXIV
Black Sails Season 4 Episode 7: XXXV
Black Sails Season 4 Episode 8: XXXVI
Black Sails Season 4 Episode 9: XXXVII
Black Sails Season 4 Episode 10: XXXVIII
Black Sails Season 4 Trailer
Check out the trailer, hinting at all of the Treasure Island inspired goodness (and badness) waiting for us on the high seas.
Video of Black Sails | Season 4 Official Trailer | STARZ
Check out the earlier teaser, too...
Video of Black Sails Season 4 - Teaser Trailer [HD]
And check out this exclusive video looking at the evolution of Long John Silver...
We have some cool new images, too!
Black Sails Season 4 Story
Well, it ain't much, but this is as close as we're coming to an official synopsis right now:
"The 10-episode fourth season of the stand-out high seas drama brings fans to the heroic conclusion of the Treasure Island prequel, and finds our pirates at war in the West Indies. The shores of New Providence Island have never been bloodier, but the closer civilization comes to defeat, the more desperately, and destructively, it will fight back."
We'll update this article with all of the official Black Sails Season 4 news (plus some rumors) as we hear them. Until then, you can keep up with all of our coverage right here. |
Officials at The Evergreen State College in Olympia evacuated the campus late Thursday morning because of a threat, and the campus will remain closed Friday.
“In response to a direct threat to campus safety, the college is closing immediately for the day,” college officials posted on Evergreen’s website. “All are asked to leave campus or return to residence halls for instructions.”
College spokesman Zach Powers told The Olympian that the closure was “out of an abundance of caution ... due to a violent threat against the college received by local law enforcement.”
Powers said the threat was called in late Thursday morning to the business line for Thurston 911 Communications, which dispatches emergency calls in Thurston County. Officials at that agency informed Evergreen Police Services about the threat, and they passed it on to college president George Bridges.
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Powers posted to the college’s website at 5:25 p.m. on Thursday evening, to suspend Friday’s classes. His post says college officials were notified around 10:30 a.m. about an individual using an unknown phone number, who claimed to be armed and headed toward Evergreen’s campus.
Powers said students and staff were notified of the original closure on Thursday morning through an emergency alert system that many subscribe to, and intercom messages that were broadcast in buildings, and through social media posts.
“Evergreen police are being supported on site by members of local law enforcement,” Powers said. “There are other (law enforcement) agencies on site as people leave.”
College spokeswoman Sandra Kaiser said Olympia police officers and Thurston County Sheriff’s deputies were assisting in the investigation, which was being led by the nine-person Evergreen police department.
During a news conference at 1 p.m. Thursday at the nearby McLane Fire Department, Kaiser said she didn’t know many details about the nature of the threat.
SHARE COPY LINK Officials from Evergreen State College held a news conference at the McLane Fire Department to answer questions about the 'direct threat to campus safety' that was made Thursday morning.
“It was evaluated to be serious enough that law enforcement thought it was prudent to recommend that we close campus temporarily,” she said.
The evacuation came after weeks of unrest on campus. Hundreds of students protested last week, citing institutional racism and bias on the campus by some of the college’s employees.
When asked whether there was any reason to believe that Thursday’s threat was connected to recent events on campus, Kaiser said: “There’s nothing that I know of that connects these things directly. But, of course, we live in troubled times and you’ve got to take public safety as a priority for everybody.”
Evergreen faculty member Ulrike Krotscheck said she was co-teaching a seminar for the course “Digging up Diseases” when her cellphone and many students’ phones began buzzing with texts about the emergency closure. After that, the announcement came over the loudspeaker. Krotscheck described the evacuation was “really calm and orderly.”
She said she was glad officials made the call to close campus.
“I was feeling all right about it,” she said. “The instructions were really clear and even if it were to find out that this was a false threat, I’m extremely grateful that (officials) treated it seriously.”
Evergreen’s sports information director Nick Dawson said when he arrived on campus about 11 a.m., students were emptying out of their classes in crowds.
He saw a campuswide email that the school was closing when he sat down at his computer and immediately alerted other coworkers, ensured everything was being shut down, and left his building with other faculty members.
“We got out of there in a timely manner,” he said.
Dawson said the parking lot was overrun with students and faculty trying to evacuate all at once, and many cars made use of a field that leads to a service road to exit more faster, but there did not appear to be any panic.
“There was nobody that seemed harried or concerned,” Dawson said. “People were very calm and very collected.”
Zeb Hoffman was one of the students evacuated from campus just after 11 a.m. Hoffman, a senior, said he was in the bookstore trying on graduation gowns when he was alerted about the threat.
“I heard one of the employees of the bookstore tell another student they needed them to leave because they were closing campus, and I followed suit,” Hoffman said.
“I grabbed my stuff, headed toward the (Costantino) Rec Center, and ran into a couple other student athletes. I asked if they knew what was going on, but all they knew was that we were being evacuated and (the school was) being closed.”
Hoffman, 37, walked home and said he heard speculation about the cause of the evacuation, but nothing has been confirmed. He said some students headed toward dormitories while others left campus completely. He agreed with Dawson that there was no disorder.
“I think a lot of people were happy to get to where they thought they were safe,” Hoffman said. “They were following directions.”
SHARE COPY LINK After weeks of brewing racial tension on campus, hundreds of students at The Evergreen State College in Olympia protested against the college administration and demanded change on Wednesday, May 24, 2017.
Hoffman, a track and field athlete at Evergreen, was in Alabama at the NAIA national championships last week when the protests began, but said he followed along on social media.
“I expected it to continue into this week,” he said.
The college has about 4,000 students and about 800 faculty members and staff members at its Olympia campus, Kaiser said. |
Notions of Equality in Swift
In this article I aim to discuss notions of equality, Swift’s Equatable protocol, how equality in Swift differs from equality in more conventional object-oriented languages, and how the two can be reconciled.
Notions of equality
The concept of equality is deceptively complex. In mathematics, we state that 2 + 2 is equal to 4 . In other words, when simplifying an equation or expression, any time we see 2 + 2 we can excise it and replace it with 4 . The two expressions are exactly equivalent.
But in the context of a windowing system, if two windows happen to be the same size, at the same position, and contain the same contents, are they interchangeable? Even if both windows’ representations in memory are identical, randomly taking some of the references to one window and making them point to the other is unlikely to result in anything but strange behavior. Only if two references point to the same window instance can they be said to be equivalent.
Swift supports both of these forms of equality. Let’s examine each in turn.
Value equality
Value equality is checked using the == operator, which returns whether or not two instances are equivalent to each other.
let a = 10 let b = 10 let c = 11 a == b // true; 10 == 10 a == c // false; 10 != 11 // Swift arrays are value types, and hence the following holds let d = [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] let e = [ 4 , 5 , 6 ] let f = [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] d == e // false d == f // true
Exactly what ‘equivalent’ means may vary based on the type of the instances being compared. However, value equality generally adheres to the following requirements:
It should be reflexive; any object of a type supporting equality is equal to itself: a == a .
. It should be symmetric; b == a iff a == b .
iff . It should be transitive: if a == b and b == c , then a == c .
Implementations of == that violate these properties invariably result in subtle bugs and confused programmers, and should be avoided if at all possible.
Reference equality
Reference equality is checked using the === operator, which returns whether or not two references refer to the same object. Reference equality is only meaningful when reference types are being compared, whereas value equality pertains to both reference and value types.
(If you do not understand the distinction between reference and value types, I recommend reading Mike Ash’s blog post on the subject.)
Two distinct instances of an object can be equal when compared using == , but two references, each pointing to one of those instances, will compare as unequal using === . See the following example:
// Here is a simple class. Assume we've defined two MyObjects as equal in value // iff both instance variables are equal across both objects. class MyObject : Equatable { let a : Int , b : String init ( a : Int , b : String ) { self . a = a ; self . b = b } } // ... let a = MyObject ( a : 10 , b : "foo" ) let b = a let c = MyObject ( a : 10 , b : "foo" ) a == b // true; 'a' and 'b' are equal in value a === b // true; 'a' and 'b' point to the same instance a == c // true; 'a' and 'b' are equal in value a === c // false; 'a' and 'c' are different instances
Note that, according to the reflexive property, if two objects are reference-equal, they are also value-equal.
The Equatable protocol
We will focus most of our attention on value equality, as reference equality’s semantics are quite well defined and the default implementation of === suffices for almost all use cases.
In Swift, types accrete attributes by conforming to protocols. A type can declare to other code that it supports value equality by conforming to the Equatable protocol:
protocol Equatable { func == ( lhs : Self , rhs : Self ) -> Bool }
The protocol definition gives us enough information to figure out what conforming to Equatable means: instance of a conforming type can be compared to another instance of the same type to check whether or not they are equal in value.
Self in the protocol definition is a placeholder referring to the conforming type. Both arguments to == are of type Self , which means that a type which wishes to become Equatable must provide an implementation of the == operator which compares two instances of that same type.
As such, value equality in Swift is homogeneous: trying to compare two instances of different types causes a type error, rather than returning a guaranteed false result. When the built-in type Int conforms to Equatable , the only guarantee we get is that we are allowed to compare an Int to another Int using == . When the built-in type String conforms to Equatable , the only guarantee we get is that we are allowed to compare a String to another String , and so forth.
Using Equatable
We can build a simple type that conforms to Equatable as follows:
struct Coordinate : Equatable { let x : Double , y : Double } func == ( lhs : Coordinate , rhs : Coordinate ) -> Bool { return lhs . x == rhs . x && lhs . y == rhs . y }
Then we can use it:
let a = Coordinate ( x : 10 , y : 20 ) let b = Coordinate ( x : 20 , y : 10 ) a == b // false
Now, for something different. It would be great if we could write a function which took in three equatable objects and returned whether or not they were all equal in value:
// Note: does NOT compile! func threeWayEquals ( a : Equatable , b : Equatable , c : Equatable ) -> Bool { return a == b && b == c }
This doesn’t compile! But what if it did? Remember that Int and String are both Equatable types as well. We could call the function with the following arguments:
let a : Int = 10 let b : String = "foobar" let c : Coordinate = Coordinate ( x : 10 , y : 11 ) threeWayEquals ( a , b , c )
The types check out. Int , String , and Coordinate all conform to Equatable . But we don’t have any guarantee that an implementation of == exists that can compare an Int to a String , or a String to a Coordinate , and if those implementations don’t actually exist, now the compiler is in trouble.
The actual Swift compiler complains that our protocol can only be used as a constraint on a generic parameter because its definition contains Self . We can fix our function to allow it to compile:
func threeWayEquals < T : Equatable > ( a : T , b : T , c : T ) -> Bool { return a == b && b == c }
This version of the function requires all its arguments to be Equatable as well, but also requires them to all be of the same type (a type that, therefore, conforms to Equatable ). In this case the compiler is guaranteed the implementation of == that it needs exists.
Object-oriented equality
Why is Swift equality so ‘different’ from equality in, say, Objective-C? Swift complains if we compare a String and an Int ; Objective-C is fine if we send the message isEqual: to an instance of NSNumber with a NSString as the argument. We can answer this question by looking at how object-oriented languages treat the concept of equality.
Basics of inheritance
First of all, many commonly used object-oriented languages ship with a designated base class from which all other classes should inherit. For example, Java and C# have Object , while Objective-C has NSObject (and NSProxy ). Swift is atypical in that it does not provide such a base class; any Swift class can serve as a base class.
In a program written in an object-oriented language, if B is a subclass of A , ideally instances of B can be used anywhere instances of A can be used without breaking the program. (This is the Liskov substitution principle.) We often say B ‘is-a’ A . If Cow inherits from Herbivore inherits from Animal , a Cow is a Cow , but also a more specific type of Herbivore , which is in turn a more specific type of Animal . In the Cocoa world, NSString is a more specific type of NSObject ; UILabel is a more specific type of UIView .
Creating a base class
In object-oriented languages with a designated base class, the base class usually specifies some overarching functionality, such as comparing an object with another object.
In languages like Java and Objective-C, the == operator applied to instances of objects checks reference equality like Swift’s === operator. In order to check value equality, an equals method is defined on the base class. This method invariably takes another instance of the base class and returns a boolean.
To illustrate how this works, let’s define a ‘sublanguage’ based off Swift. We’ll create our own class hierarchy, with our own designated base class ( AZObject ), and decree that all user-specified types must inherit from AZObject or one of its subclasses.
// Our base class class AZObject : Equatable { init () { } // Return whether or not an object is 'value-equal' to another object. func equals ( another : AZObject ) -> Bool { return self === another } } func == ( lhs : AZObject , rhs : AZObject ) -> Bool { return lhs . equals ( rhs ) }
Our AZObject base class provides an equals() method, since it’s advantageous to allow any object to be compared with any other object. We’ll decide that any one of our featureless AZObject instances can only be equal to itself, which means that value equality and reference equality for AZObject s are identical.
Some AZObject subclasses
If we create a subclass of our base class, for example AZData , that subclass can then override equals() however it wants. For example, two AZData s might only be equal if all their constituent bytes are equivalent to each other:
/// An object representing an immutable blob of binary data. class AZData : AZObject { private let ptr : UnsafeMutablePointer < UInt8 > private let backingStore : UnsafeMutableBufferPointer < UInt8 > override func equals ( another : AZObject ) -> Bool { if let anotherData = another as ? AZData { // Perform a byte-by-byte comparison of the data contained within the two buffers. let thatBackingStore = anotherData . backingStore guard backingStore . count == thatBackingStore . count else { return false } for ( index , item ) in backingStore . enumerate () { if thatBackingStore [ index ] != item { return false } } return true } // If the other object isn't a data blob, they're obviously not equal. return false } // ... init ( bytes : [ UInt8 ]) { ptr = UnsafeMutablePointer . alloc ( bytes . count ) backingStore = UnsafeMutableBufferPointer ( start : ptr , count : bytes . count ) for ( index , b ) in bytes . enumerate () { backingStore [ index ] = b } } deinit { ptr . destroy () } }
Two AZNumber s might compare some normalized representation of their numeric values:
/// An object representing a number. class AZNumber : AZObject { private enum NumberType { case Integer ( Int ), FlPt ( Double ), Boolean ( Bool ) } private let backingStore : NumberType override func equals ( another : AZObject ) -> Bool { if let anotherNumber = another as ? AZNumber { // For didactic purposes, use the floating point value as the normalized value // This allows "AZNumber(100)" to equal "AZNumber(100.0)" return flPtValue == anotherNumber . flPtValue } return false } var flPtValue : Double { switch backingStore { case let . Integer ( v ) : return Double ( v ) case let . FlPt ( v ) : return v // Please don't actually define your Booleans like this. case let . Boolean ( v ) : return v ? 1 : 0 } } // ... }
Different types may have very different notions of what value equality means, even though they all descend from the same base class.
All objects are equatable
In the system we’ve devised, comparing two objects that aren’t the same type is a valid operation; it just always returns false . As such, value equality for our AZObject -based sublanguage is heterogeneous. In effect, any object can be compared with any other object.
More specifically, this is possible because:
All subclasses of AZObject are also AZObject s (‘is-a’). An AZData is also an AZObject ; an AZNumber is also an AZObject .
are also s (‘is-a’). An is also an ; an is also an . Our contract on AZObject specifies that value equality is a meaningful operation defined on two AZObject s.
specifies that value equality is a meaningful operation defined on two s. Therefore, equating any two instances of AZObject subclasses is a meaningful operation, since it is equivalent to equating two AZObject instances.
In practice, this is how both Java and Objective-C implement value equality. All your custom types descend from Object and NSObject , so you get some notion of value equality ‘for free’ from the default implementation.
Limitations
What happens if we define a third class, AZJSONNode , but neglect to override equals() within our implementation? In that case, we fall back to AZObject ’s definition of equals() , the one that checks for reference equality. In many cases this is incorrect behavior.
Heterogeneous comparison is fraught with danger. Neither compile-time nor run-time checking will warn us if we forget to override equals() . Our default implementation of AZObject , so convenient and inviting at first, ends up breaking the Liskov substitution principle in cases where the default behavior is wrong.
At the very least, programmers who implement their own custom classes under such a system need to be aware of the differences between value equality and reference equality. They need to know that their types’ definitions of value equality default to reference equality unless they explicitly implement their own equals() methods. If they aren’t aware of all this (and unless they read the documentation closely they’re unlikely to be), they run the risk of writing seemingly-working code containing subtle bugs.
Solutions
If abstract methods existed in Swift, we might choose to make equals() abstract, forcing each type to provide its own implementation, but this would come at the cost of making it impossible to instantiate AZObject s. (Depending on our use case, this might not be a bad tradeoff.)
A better, more general solution is described in the Protocol-Oriented Programming video from WWDC 2015 (around the 40:30 mark). We can define a protocol AnyEquatable and a protocol extension that only applies when the type the protocol is applied to is also Equatable . AnyEquatable itself contains no associated types, and unlike Equatable can be used outside the context of generic constraints:
protocol AnyEquatable { } extension AnyEquatable where Self : Equatable { // otherObject could also be 'Any' func equals ( otherObject : AnyEquatable ) -> Bool { if let otherAsSelf = otherObject as ? Self { return otherAsSelf == self } return false } }
Note that the implementation of equals() is, structurally, a generalization of the equals() methods implemented for AZData and AZNumber . A downcast is used to ensure both arguments are of the same type, and if so value equality is checked using == . Otherwise, the comparison returns false .
Any value that is both AnyEquatable and Equatable can be compared with any other AnyEquatable value ‘for free’, and with the correct semantics. We need write no additional code except for a few empty extensions declaring conformance:
extension Int : AnyEquatable { } extension String : AnyEquatable { } class Foo : AnyEquatable { } // This compiles, and returns 'true', since Int is Equatable. 15. equals ( 15 ) // These return 'false'. 15. equals ( 16 ) 15. equals ( "hello" ) // This also returns 'false', even though Foo isn't Equatable. 15. equals ( Foo ())
Our AnyEquatable protocol isn’t a perfect replacement for Equatable . If we wanted to implement our threeWayEquals() using AnyEquatable , we’d still need to constrain at least one of the arguments’ types to be Equatable so we have access to our equals() method:
func threeWayEquals < T where T : AnyEquatable , T : Equatable > ( a : T , b : AnyEquatable , c : AnyEquatable ) -> Bool { return a . equals ( b ) && a . equals ( c ) }
However, if we already know at least one of the concrete types we want to compare, we no longer need to make our function generic at all.
func threeWayEquals ( a : Int , b : AnyEquatable , c : AnyEquatable ) -> Bool { return a . equals ( b ) && a . equals ( c ) }
Conclusion
Despite marketing slogans, Swift isn’t “Objective-C without the C”. It approaches many problems in a way very different from common object-oriented languages, often for sound underlying reasons. The differences between value equality and reference equality are subtle yet, to some extent, fundamental. Instead of papering over them, Swift makes the delineation between the two concepts explicit.
People often like to characterize programming languages as more or less ‘strict’. I would argue that ‘strict’ might not be the best analogy. Some languages provide a high level of convenience in exchange for semantics that are hidden away or made implicit. Other languages make the semantics more explicit, requiring a bit of additional work on the programmer’s end.
Even so, at every point along this spectrum your programs are being executed in a specific way, whether or not you are aware of what those specifics are. And I would argue that it’s important to be aware, whether you’re using an object-oriented or functional language, a statically-typed or dynamically-typed one.
Some of the work Swift makes you do is due to limitations of the type system. Some of it might be due to unfamiliarity. But some of it involves clarifying intent, resolving ambiguity, and making you think about exactly what you want your program to do. And in the long run, that’s a good thing. |
‘Starlite has a Q-value [an energy absorption rating] of 2,470. The space shuttle tiles have a Q-value of 1.’ Not only that, but because Starlite is so lightweight – 1mm thick, compared to 75mm for the space tiles – it’s actually ’2,470 x 75 times better’.
Ward’s conditions were unusual. He wouldn’t sign confidentiality agreements, which made government and defence companies uncooperative. In joint ventures, he insisted on keeping 51 per cent. ‘If they’d wanted to buy it outright, they could have had it. But they always wanted a licence, and if they wanted that they had to sign an agreement that says they won’t plagiarise or reverse engineer. If they don’t sign that, they get a sample and then they reverse engineer and why would they bother to get a licence?’ This was why NASA never signed up. It’s why BAE didn’t, or Boeing, or the dozens of other corporations and military establishments who got somewhere in negotiations but never to the end.
MickMay 17, 2011 12:21 PM
It's a shame Maurice. I think that you could make a reasonable fortune by anybody's standard and go down in history for revolutionising the world. However, you seem to be aiming for something more than anyone can offer and in the process I wonder how much progress that could have been made if you'd released Starlite has been lost and how many lives that could have been saved have also been lost.
For what reason? More money then you can ever spend? For fame? If you take the secret of this invention to your grave because of money, your legacy will be infamy and the withholding of a gift to the human race due to greed. You have every right of course to make money from your invention but isn't there something inside that gnaws at your soul when you see tragedies that could have been prevented if only you were prepared to settle for a simple fortune rather than wealth beyond reason? Of course you may have other reasons that you only know but from this observers perspective I feel that you have missed an opportunity to do great things and I fear that you will take your secret with you to death and you'll have left the world as you found it, no worse but no better either. I wish I had the opportunity that you had - just to do something sensational for mankind, the money bit would be a nice perk but the main attraction would be the legacy.
edit on 21-4-2012 by PhoenixOD because: (no reason given)
I was watching a new documentary from the BBC the other night about the importance of materials when they showed something that they claimed could be one of the most important materials ever invented. It was called Starlite. Starlite was invented by a former hairdresser from Yorkshire, England who could only be described as a amateur scientist at best.So what is Starlite? Its a a thermal shielding material (plastic) that has proved to be better than anything ever produced by the worlds top scientists at institutions like NASA. One small application of this material to something like an egg and you could hold a blow torch to it without cooking it in the slightest. All this and it was made by a guy in a back room who did science for a hobby from materials that he claimed where 80% organic.When tested using a military laser it was discovered that Starlite could withstand the heat flash from a nuclear explosion. They tested it to over 10000 centigrade , there is no known material that can survive that sort of temperature. Ive been trying to find out what is the most heat resistant material currently in production and i cant find anything that can withstand even 5000 centigrade. Also most of the heat resistant materials currently in production produce toxic fumes when heated, Starlite did not produce harmful fumes.This material has so many potential applications in the world today that it benefit mankind immensely. If applied to paint it could make houses burn proof, create heat resistant suits for fire fighters, it could shield military vehicles against nuclear blasts, even make something invisible to infra-red detection, protect missiles from lasers or be used in private space ventures.So what has happened to Starlite? As you would expect Maurice Ward kept the formula for Starlite super secret. He refused to patent it or let sample of it be analyzed though fear of someone stealing it. Apparently there were many attempts to steal it from him, at one point he caught someone trying to hide a small piece of it down their pants. So due to paranoia he never wrote down the formula and only told the secret of the 21 ingredients to a few close family members.Well after many years of Maurice Ward trying to get it to market he was finally in talks with NASA and Boeing. The problem is he wanted to retain a majority control of the product. He insisted on keeping a 51% share which may have been his biggest mistake as it stopped anyone going into business with him. The sadly in May 2011 after talks with Boeing broke down he died (ive not been able to find out how) seemingly taking the secret of his Starlite material to the grave.Its truly a loss to mankind that this material was never brought to market. There has been no word from the family about releasing the list of ingredients. But even if they did would anyone be able to work out how to make it? Just how many billions would a product like this be worth?While doing some research for this post I was looking at his blog and found this entry in the comments section for May 2011 (the month he died) which i found slightly creepy :Was this a threat or just coincidence that he died in that very month? Maybe it was a warning to the remaining family members not to hold on to the secret for to long. |
Sen. Chris Murphy Christopher (Chris) Scott MurphyMcConnell plans vote on Green New Deal before August recess Push to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Feehery: Defining what socialism is (and isn’t) MORE (D-Conn.) on Monday said Americans need to focus on healthcare even as President Trump targets former Democratic rival Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE and Attorney General Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsFormer Trump refugee director did not notify superiors about family separation warnings Court rejects challenge to Mueller's appointment Trump says he hasn't spoken to Barr about Mueller report MORE.
"Trump wants you to focus on Sessions, Clinton, and Scaramucci this week," Murphy tweeted, referring to the president's new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci.
"You need to focus on health care, health care, and health care."
Trump wants you to focus on Sessions, Clinton, and Scaramucci this week. You need to focus on health care, health care, and health care. https://t.co/Y5Y1B0S0lz — Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) July 24, 2017
Trump earlier on Monday questioned why investigators aren't looking into Clinton.
"So why aren't the Committees and investigators, and of course our beleaguered A.G., looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations?" Trump asked in a tweet.
His tweet comes amid multiple investigations into Russian election meddling and whether Trump campaign aides colluded with the Russians.
In an earlier tweet, Trump quoted Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer Charles (Chuck) Ellis SchumerBrady gun control group gets rebranding Brennan fires back at 'selfish' Trump over Harry Reid criticism Trump rips Harry Reid for 'failed career' after ex-Dem leader slams him in interview MORE (D-N.Y.), who said that Democrats should blame themselves for their election loss, not Russia interference.
Senate Republicans plan to vote this week on revised healthcare legislation. But the legislation faces a number of serious issues and appears headed for failure.
Earlier this month, Murphy said that repealing ObamaCare without a replacement would be a "humanitarian disaster of incomprehensible scale." |
For a moment Wednesday it looked like an already tough start to the season for the Heat might get worse.
Dwyane Wade rose up for a jump shot and then landed awkwardly on the court after drawing a shooting foul with 7:42 to go in the first half. Wade, lying on his side, reached for the back of his right thigh and hip.
It turned out to be just a false alarm. Wade was fine — better than fine actually. He poured in a season-high 42 points — his first 40-point game since Game4 of the 2012 Eastern Conference finals against the Indiana Pacers.
The rest of the Heat had a much rougher night.
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The Utah Jazz, loser of 12 of its past 13 coming in, shot 53 percent from the field, 14 of 25 from three-point range, and drilled the Heat 105-87 on Wednesday, handing Miami its fourth consecutive double-digit loss at AmericanAirlines Arena.
“Being aggressive like that was a positive for me,” Wade said. “I will take that. But as a team, we just have to be better man.
“It's hard when you lose even when you have a good individual performance. The way we lost, I’m not used to that. Not at home.”
Gordon Hayward led the way for Utah (7-19) with 29 points, seven assists and six rebounds. Five Jazz players finished in double figures. If not for a late three-pointer by Mario Chalmers, who finished with 11 points on 3-of-13 shooting, Wade would have been the only Heat player to score in double figures.
Miami, off to a 4-8 start at home, has six more chances to snap its home losing streak before the end of the year. The second of seven consecutive home games is Friday against the division-leading Washington Wizards. To put the rough home start in perspective, the Heat was 32-9 at home last season, 37-4 when it last won the NBA championship in 2012-13 and 28-5 at home the year before that in the lockout-shortened season. The last time the Heat dropped its fourth in a row at home was March 8, 2011 — the first season LeBron James was here.
“It’s something we have to figure out,” coach Erik Spoelstra said. “It’s not for a lack of want. Guys want to do it. You saw a little bit of a different personality [against Brooklyn on Tuesday] compared to [Wednesday].”
Miami’s injury woes have been well documented this season. The Heat’s lineup to start the second quarter told the story: Chalmers, Udonis Haslem, Shawne Williams and rookies James Ennis and Shabazz Napier.
None of those players — except Chalmers — were expected to play major roles this season. On Wednesday, Spoelstra put out his 11th different starting lineup this season with Chris “Birdman” Andersen making his first start.
“Just [wanted] a little bit more size — trying to take care of the paint and rebound,” Spoelstra said of his decision to start Andersen.
Leading scorer Chris Bosh, expected to miss a couple of weeks with a strained calf, watched in street clothes Wednesday as he missed his third game in row.
Wade, who fought off a stomach virus and scored 28 points in a 95-91 win Tuesday in Brooklyn, made it a point early to carry the scoring load again with Bosh out. He shot 12 of 19 from the field and was 16 of 21 from the free-throw line.
The rest of the Heat shot 15 of 51 from the field (29.4 percent) and 13 of 19 from the line.
“It’s encouraging for us to see him play a back-to-back like that,” Spoekstra said of Wade. “We just collectively have to play better.” |
An undercover FBI agent investigating weapon smuggling in the Philippines spent thousands of taxpayer dollars at brothels and clubs known to offer prostitution, including one that local authorities later raided for hiring underage girls, according to court filings.
Federal prosecutors on the case conceded in court filings that the government reimbursed the agent for $14,500 for entertainment, cocktails and tips over a period of less than a year in 2010 and 2011 in relation to the case. The expenses included $1,600 on a night in September 2011 at a club known as Area 51 in Manila.
In May, Filipino authorities targeted Area 51 on suspicion of trafficking minor sex workers and discovered 19 underage girls at the club. In a press release, the Philippines National Bureau of Investigation said minors danced in full nudity and offered “sex services” for a fee.
A public defender representing the lead defendant in the weapon-smuggling case last week filed a motion asking a judge to dismiss the case based on “outrageous government misconduct,” citing the agent’s actions.
Based on a defense investigator's interviews with witnesses in the Philippines, attorney John Littrell alleged that the undercover agent paid for sex for himself as well as the suspects in the case.
Littrell alleged the agent took his client and others to the clubs to induce them to participate in a weapons-smuggling scheme.
“The government’s actions in this case, if committed by a private citizen, would be serious federal crimes. These crimes were not victimless,” Littrell wrote in the motion. “The government’s conduct in this case went far beyond any standard of decency, and warrants dismissal of the indictment.”
A U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman said in an emailed statement: "We will contest the factual assumptions and legal significance of the defendant's challenges in due course." Prosecutors have not yet filed court papers responding to Littrell’s allegations.
Littrell represents Sergio Santiago Syjuco, one of three men who were arrested and indicted in January on suspicion of illegally importing a laundry list of high-powered weapons and explosives from the Philippines to the U.S. Syjuco, Cesar Ubaldo and Filipino customs official Arjyl Revereza were charged with smuggling assault rifles, grenade launchers and mortar launchers in June 2011.
In a press release at the time of the indictment, the U.S. Department of Justice said the Philippines National Bureau of Investigations provided “significant assistance” in the case.
The undercover agent approached the men under the name Richard Han, posing as a broker looking to obtain weapons for use by Mexican drug cartels in the U.S. Syjuco and Ubaldo are accused of selling weapons to the agent for tens of thousands of dollars; Revereza is accused of accepting $3,000 in a bribe to facilitate the shipment of the weapons to the U.S.
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-- Victoria Kim |
(CNN) Sam Clovis, President Donald Trump's nominee to be the Department of Agriculture's chief scientist, maintained a now-defunct blog for years in which he accused progressives of "enslaving" minorities, called black leaders "race traders," and labeled former President Barack Obama a "Maoist" with "communist" roots.
Clovis, a long-time Iowa political activist and former economics professor, wrote the blog posts on the now-deleted website for his radio show "Impact with Clovis," which aired for several years on Sioux City KSCJ. Copies of the show are not available online, but the blog is archived on The Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Most of the available blog posts are from 2011 and 2012.
Trump's nomination of Clovis, a fervent supporter of Trump during the presidential campaign, has drawn criticism from Senate Democrats and climate activists, who have attacked his lack of scientific credentials and skepticism of climate science.
Clovis is currently serving as the senior White House adviser to the USDA, but as his old blog posts highlight, his background is strongly rooted in the politics of conservative talk radio. His nomination requires Senate confirmation.
Clovis did not respond to an email from CNN's KFile requesting comment. A spokesperson for the USDA said, "Dr. Clovis is a proud conservative and a proud American. All of his reporting either on the air or in writing over the course of his career has been based on solid research and data. He is after all an academic."
A spokesperson for the White House did not return a request for comment.
In his writings, Clovis directed most of his ire at then-President Obama and the progressive movement.
In a post from September 2011, Clovis wrote in reference to Obama, "He was brought up by socialists to be a socialist. His associations were socialists or worse, criminal dissidents who were bent on overthrowing the government of the United States. He has no experience at anything other than race baiting and race trading as a community organizer."
The month before, Clovis said the 2012 Republican primary candidates needed to call out progressives for what they were — "liars, race traders and race 'traitors.'"
At times, Clovis adopted a conspiratorial tone in his blog postings, openly pondering whether the Obama Administration would place conservative activists on a kill list that included terrorists like Anwar al-Awlaki and accusing Obama-era czars of using taxpayer money to buy the support of academics who would claim science was settled.
In one blog post in April 2011, Clovis contrasted the successful recovery efforts following the 2008 floods in Iowa with the chaos in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, attributing the difference to Iowa's culture "focused on family, community and the primacy of faith in life."
Here's a lengthier look at some of Clovis's writings:
Clovis wrote in September 2011 that then-President Obama had "no experience at anything other than race baiting and race trading as a community organizer."
"The president, like the rest of us, is clearly a product of his upbringing, his associates, his education and his experience," wrote Clovis. "He was brought up by socialists to be a socialist. His associations were socialists or worse, criminal dissidents who were bent on overthrowing the government of the United States. He has no experience at anything other than race baiting and race trading as a community organizer. He has never run anything. Finally, his education at some of the best colleges in America was deeply influenced by socialists or worse on those campuses. He supposedly earned degrees in political science and law, but his actions reflect a shallow education and chronic underachievement in nearly every thing he has done."
In August 2011, Clovis wrote progressives were "liars, race traders, and race 'traitors.'"
"My caller was most concerned about the fact that our candidates seem to be afraid of taking on the race baiting," Clovis wrote. "I could not agree more. The current crop of candidates need to get that titanium spine we keep hearing about and call out the progressives for what they are -- liars, race traders and race 'traitors.'"
In the same blog post, Clovis said Democrats were attempting to keep minorities "enslaved" to the government. He said progressives wanted to eliminate people of color from America but saw government enslavement as a second option.
"We can go back 100 years and trace how the progressives, socialists and fellow travelers have done everything possible to keep minorities in this country enslaved to government. This is particularly true in the African-American community. The progressives have systematically attacked the individual, the black family unit, the black female and the black male to essentially eliminate people of color from the American landscape. Because elimination has become impractical, subservience to government is an acceptable second option.
In June 2011, Clovis wrote that civil rights icon W. E. B. Du Bois was "the first race-trader" for getting southern blacks to support Woodrow Wilson for President. (DuBois supported Wilson during the 1912 election, but later broke with him during his presidency.)
"After the Civil War, African-Americans voted almost en masse for Republicans," wrote Clovis. "That all changed in the election of 1912 when first term governor Woodrow Wilson was able to convince WEB(sic) DeBois to back his candidacy. That year, 60% of eligible African-Americans voted for Wilson. This loss of a small but homogeneous voting block to the other side hurt the Republicans and would continue to hurt them until the present day. DeBois was the first race-trader and did a magnificent job of convincing his fellow blacks to back a southern racist for president. What ever was the deal that would allow someone of DeBois's stature to side with such an incredibly flawed individual? To this day, I have not been able to find adequate scholarly work to explain this remarkable shift in allegiance. Wilson was a progressive and a racist. In my books, the two were, are, and will remain, synonomous(sic)."
Clovis said the minority community would some day "wake up" to their enslavement.
"Like putting the frog in the pot then turning up the heat, minorities have been enslaved by government operatives who care nothing for the nation and everything for power," wrote Clovis. "Someday, men and women of color will wake up to the incredible deception that has been visited on their communities. Someday, these wonderful, courageous Americans will rebuff collective dependency and will embrace individual accountability and the covenant we find in our Constitution.
In other blog posts, Clovis repeatedly argued that progressives were attempting to enslave citizens to the government.
"They want power for an elite group of individuals who want to perfect man through constant social engineering," Clovis wrote in July 2011. "These same people want to enslave people in a way of life that drains the very heart out of an individual, destroys the family, dismantles the efficacy of religion in our lives and destroys the fabric that holds our communities together. Through radical egalitarianism, progressives will take from those who produce and will give to those who will not--in turn enslaving both. There is nothing moral about slavery, and progressives want just that--total dependence on the state."
Clovis pushed this sentiment repeatedly.
Clovis also expressed a deep disdain for former President Obama, who he said hated American greatness and had an "anti-American mentality."
"These must be desparate (sic) times for the president as he seems to be recognizing that perhaps there are people out here who do not like his policies and have really stopped liking him as a person," Clovis wrote in September 2011. "He is clearly a progressive socialist who hates the greatness of this nation and is doing all he can to make permanent changes in the structure of the country before he leaves office."
"The President, as Chief Executive, is responsible for this the lawlessness of his administration," wrote Clovis in a May 2011 blog post. "What is perhaps most troubling is that the president clearly has disdain for the American people, American exceptionalism and the Constitution of this great nation. He is a threat to our domestic tranquility and must be voted out of office at the earliest opportunity."
In multiple posts in January 2012, Clovis refers to President Obama as "a Maoist" and "anti-colonist."
"Barack Obama is inherently dishonest, a pathological liar and a person who has surrounded himself with sycophantic, co-dependent people who are more clearly identified by their association with him than by their own accomplishments," wrote Clovis. "He is a Maoist, anti-colonialist who is also a pathological narcissist. This is a very dangerous combination."
He wrote a week later, "We need to make sure we have done everything we can to beat Barack Hussein Obama and his progressive, Maoist, anti-colonialist followers."
Clovis wrote in May 2011 that unions came out of the "Communist closet" to support socialist "Barack Hussein Obama" and wanted to seize the means of production.
"Though it comes as no surprise, headlines today reveal that the National Education Association, the largest union in the United States, public or private, has asked its rank and file to support the re-election of Barack Obama. Similarly, the Service Employees International Union came out of the communist closet over the weekend, letting the world know that they are fellow travelers in pursuit of seizing the means of production and irradicating(sic) personal property rights in our market system. When one examines the reach of unions in America, one is startled to find out that some 15 million foot soldiers stand ready to march into battle for the socialist we now know is Barack Hussein Obama."
Clovis speculated in an October 2011 post that the US might start putting pro-life, small government activists on the same terrorist kill list as Anwar al-Awlaki.
"Over the past three days on my radio show, we have been having a great discussion of the policies and consequences of the administration's latest actions in assassinating Anwar Al Awlaki. Along with Al Awlaki, Samir Khan, an American citizen as well, died in the Predator attack that killed Al Awlaki while he was in Yemen. What is not at issue is that Al Awlaki was a despicable human being who was bent on carrying out his jihad against America. He was likely the individual behind the underwear bomber and the Fort Hood shootings. Was he bad? No Question. However, he was an American citizen and he should have been extended his Constitutional protections. What is frightening is that a panel of mid-level bureaucrats is determining who gets killed and who doesn't. Are you comfortable with that? I am not, particularly when this administration wants to Mirandize enemy combatants on the battlefield and wants to try foreign-born, non-citizen terrorists in federal court with all the protections of our most sacred civil document. What am I missing here? This situation is not only indicative of being on a steep, slippery slope, but that we are sliding down this slope at breakneck speed. We already have documentation that this administration thinks that returning veterans, pro-life advocates and small government advocates are all potential terrorists. This is written down in Department of Homeland Security policy documents. Is it such a stretch to think that at some point that those who pose a threat to this administration might not move up the list generated by this secret panel? Possible? You bet. Probable? Who knows."
Clovis accused Obama-era czar's of buying academic support to say subjects of legislation were "settled science."
"As we continue this discussion of the amorality of the progressive movement in the country, we must include discussion of how this administration has circumvented the law and the Constitution by establishing over 40 'Czars' who have been charged with, among other things, ensuring support for administration positions by cooking the books," Clovis wrote in a June 2011 blog post. "The Czars are suspected of using taxpayer money to buy 'academic' support for controversial legislation. By coordinating responses to issues, the administration can create the perception that what they are suggesting is "mainstream" or "settled science" or "supported by rigorous studies." Of course, none of what is being advanced is even close to what is mainstream, settled or otherwise researched. By cooking the books and using taxpayer money to do it, this administration is conducting a nefarious, sinister propaganda campaign against the citizens they have sworn to protect. One can do a lot of things in politics, but deceiving the American people is not one of them. When the whole story of this is finally revealed, officials of this administration ought to be in jail."
Clovis wrote in April 2011 that a difference in culture is why people of Iowa reacted better to natural disasters than the people who faced Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. ta.
"Mapleton suffered the worst of the damage," Clovis wrote. "A large part of the town of 1200 was devastated by a F3 tornado that blew through about 7:30 pm. The little town was shut down by law enforcement until around 2:30 in the morning so that power lines could be restored and gas lines could be secured. By sunrise on Sunday morning, much of the situation had been contained and folks were already moving out into the little town to start the clean up. By the time the governor showed up--before noon--the streets were clear and people were out in force cleaning yards and policing up the debris around town. The power is back on but the gas lines will take a week or so to repair. Not to worry, this is Iowa. This type of resilience is so typical of this part of the country. From Texas to North Dakota and across the western part of the Midwest, the culture of this society is focused on family, community and the primacy of faith in life. Each episode like this seems to end the same way--neighbors helping neighbors get back to life as close to normal as possible. Thus, the difference in the reaction of the people in Iowa to the floods of 2008 to that of the nation during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita." |
IT STARTED out as LY110141. Its inventor, Eli Lilly, was not sure what to do with it. Eventually the company found that it seemed to make depressed people happier. So, with much publicity and clever branding, Prozac was born. Prozac would transform the treatment of depression and become the most widely prescribed antidepressant in history. Some users described it as “bottled sunshine”. It attained peak annual sales (in 1998) of $3 billion and at the last count had been used by 54m people in 90 countries. And, along the way, it embedded into the public consciousness a particular idea about how depression works—that it is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, which the drug corrects. Unfortunately, this idea seems to be only part of the story.
In science it is good to have a hypothesis to frame one’s thinking. The term “chemical imbalance” is just such a thing. It is a layman’s simplification of the monoamine hypothesis, which has been the prevalent explanation for depression for almost 50 years. Monoamines are a class of chemical that often act as messenger molecules (known technically as neurotransmitters) between nerve cells in the brain. Many antidepressive drugs boost the level of one or other of these chemicals. In the case of Prozac, the monoamine in question is serotonin.
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The monoamine hypothesis, though, is under attack. One long-standing objection is that, although drugs such as Prozac raise levels of their target monoamine quite quickly, the symptoms of depression may take weeks, or even months to abate—if, indeed, they do abate, for many patients do not respond to such drugs at all. Now, to add to that, a second objection has emerged. This is the discovery that ketamine, a drug long used as an anaesthetic and which is also popular recreationally, works, too, as a fast-acting antidepressant. Ketamine’s mode of action is not primarily on monoamines, so the race is on to use what knowledge there is of the way it does work to design a new class of antidepressant. This is a change of direction so radical that some think it heralds a revolution in psychiatry.
Special K
Ketamine works for 75% of patients who have been resistant to other forms of treatment, such as Prozac (which works in 58% of patients). Moreover, it works in hours, sometimes even minutes, and its effects last for several weeks. A single dose can reduce thoughts of suicide. As a result, although it has not formally been approved for use in depression, it is widely prescribed “off label”, and clinics have sprouted up all over America, in particular, to offer infusions of the drug (which must be taken intravenously, if it is to work). Anecdotal reports suggest that it has already saved many lives.
Ketamine’s rise has been gradual. The discovery of its efficacy against depression happened a decade ago. Conducting clinical trials of new uses for drugs whose patents have expired is not a high priority for pharmaceutical companies, which generally prefer to test new molecules whose patents they own—and without such trials, formal approval for a new use cannot be forthcoming. Now, though, novel ketamine-related treatments are emerging.
One such is esketamine. Normal ketamine is a mixture of two molecules that are mirror images of each other. Esketamine is just one of these “optical isomers”. Though it, too, is off-patent, Johnson & Johnson, a large American drug company that is developing it for use, hopes it will have the same positive effects as the unsorted isomeric mixture, but without side-effects such as hallucinations, dizziness and “dissociation”—a feeling of being awake but detached from one’s surroundings.
By changing its formulation so that it can be administered in the form of a nasal spray, the firm both makes esketamine easier to use than isomerically mixed ketamine and creates something patentable. Preliminary evidence suggests esketamine does indeed work, and the firm is seeking approval for it to be used to treat two conditions: major depressive disorder with imminent risk of suicide, and treatment-resistant depression.
Other companies, though, are taking a different approach, by studying ketamine’s mode of action and attempting to imitate the way it works. Many people think ketamine affects the action of a common neurotransmitter called glutamate, by blocking the activity of receptors for this molecule. One hypothesis is that it interacts with a glutamate receptor called NMDA that had never previously been thought to be involved in depression. Several firms are therefore seeking to mimic the effect of ketamine by aiming at the NMDA receptor.
One such is Allergan, an Irish company that last year paid $560m to buy Naurex, an American biotech firm whose NMDA-blocking drug rapastinel is intended as a once-a-week intravenous treatment. Evidence from an early trial shows rapastinel is well tolerated, does not induce hallucinations and seems to work quickly. Allergan plans to start more extensive trials later this year. Nor is Allergan alone in its interest in the NMDA route. Other firms working on molecules that interact with this receptor, or with a special flavour of it called NR2B, include AstraZeneca, Avanir Pharmaceuticals and Cerecor.
Reception committee
It would be a mistake, though, to think that science has now reached a neat conclusion about how depression acts in the brain. One surprise came earlier this year in the form of work published by Carlos Zarate of America’s National Institutes of Health, who is a pioneer in the field. This study suggests that, in mice at least, ketamine is not working directly on the NMDA receptor, but rather on another glutamate receptor. This finding will not matter to Johnson & Johnson, because esketamine mimics the effects of normal ketamine, which is known to work. But it may mean those taking the NMDA route with other molecules are barking up the wrong tree.
As to the specifics of Dr Zarate’s study, Husseini Manji, the head of neuroscience at Johnson & Johnson, says it is possible that this work identified an additional way to generate antidepressive effects. Even if ketamine is found to work via another receptor, this does not preclude it working via NMDA. Armin Szegedi, who runs clinical development of the drug rapastinel at Allergan, makes the same argument. He explains that all the glutamate receptors seem to interact with each other as well, and act as a complicated system.
Time will tell who is correct, but such minutiae will matter less than whether one of these new approaches works. Lots of drugs, for many indications, work well, even though no one knows precisely how. The important point, though, is that ketamine has opened up a new line of attack on a horrible illness—and that this attack is being pressed relentlessly home. |
Syrian women at home and abroad are leading efforts to safeguard Syria’s cultural heritage and ensure that traditions are preserved in the wake of years of conflict and widespread displacement.
BEIRUT – When Fadia Mrad, 25, graduated with a degree in fine arts, she never imagined she would end up at the vanguard of a group of women preserving Syria’s traditional cultural heritage amid the war.
“Women are capable of playing an important and influential role in this sector, but they need to be given opportunities to unleash their potential,” says Mrad, who works with the Day After Project, a U.S.-funded initiative to preserve Syria’s cultural heritage by teaching traditional handicrafts. Mrad, who first worked as a teacher following graduation, noted that in the past, women were often marginalized in traditional industries.
Syrian women – architects, journalists, academics, writers, filmmakers, collectors, craftswomen or cooks – both at home and abroad – are now leading efforts to safeguard their heritage. From sharing their stories to sharing their recipes, many are working to ensure their culture and traditions live on despite years of war that have scattered Syrians around the world.
Women also have more active roles than ever before in efforts to preserve Syria’s heritage sites, many of which have been damaged or destroyed during the war.
Archaeologist Lina Kutiefan has been with the Syrian state-run Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) for 27 years, and has worked on everything from restoration to registration of new sites for possible inclusion on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
With the start of the conflict, she was appointed director of Syrian World Heritage Sites at DGAM, and she and her team began documenting damage of heritage sites. Preserving “this irreplaceable heritage is in the public interest because it protects a vital cultural legacy for coming generations,” Kutiefan tells Syria Deeply.
“I believe that cultural heritage can provide an automatic sense of unity and belonging within the Syrian people, especially during this hard crisis,” she says. “It will allow us to better understand the unique history of where we come from.”
In addition to making the work of archaeologists more vital than ever, the war has allowed more women to “take center stage, notably in governmental jobs,” in this field, she says. Kutiefan’s advice for women interested in this sector is straightforward: “You must be able to work hard. You have to know more than anyone else. Learn to pay attention, read, attend educational seminars and join us in these hard times.”
Though the war may have helped highlight the important role women play in this field, working to preserve the country’s heritage still comes with significant danger and social stigma in some areas of Syria.
“Few women on the ground in Syria are active in preserving cultural heritage because of social taboos over women working in such a field, in addition to the lack of financial support,” says Nwayrat al-Qaddour, who works with The Day After project on emergency response to protect artifacts and archaeological sites in the northern province of Idlib.
However, according to the 27-year-old who studied history at the University of Aleppo before the war, it is key for women to take on a more active role.
“Woman make up 50 percent of society and are no less important than men. Cultural heritage is part of a larger Syrian national identity, and protecting this identity is as much a national duty for Syrian women as it is for men,” she says.
Noura Alsaleh studied architecture at the University of Aleppo before the war, where her primary focus was the rehabilitation of the buffer zone around the UNESCO borders of Aleppo’s old city.
“I did several studies and my graduation project on how can we preserve the cultural significance of that area and its heritage,” she tells Syria Deeply.
Today, Alsaleh is a scientific assistant at Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany, where she is writing her doctoral thesis on the post-conflict reconstruction of the old city of Aleppo and the role of cultural heritage in the rebuilding process. Her thesis is part of the research network supported by the German Foreign Ministry.
She is an active member of both UNESCO’s newly established young expert forum to safeguard Syria’s cultural heritage, and its expert roster for heritage on Syria issues that cut very close to home. Alsaleh’s home city Aleppo was destroyed last winter.
“I felt a personal responsibility to contribute to the reconstruction process of the Syrian cities and cultural heritage sites, of which many are still threatened by destruction and damage,” she says.
Alsaleh hopes that the rebuilding process “won’t be a second destruction caused by the unregulated urban reconstruction, which could cause more damage to our heritage than the one by the conflict itself.”
Archaeological sites are just one part of the larger effort women are making to preserve Syria’s cultural heritage. Some women have focused their efforts on documenting and preserving Syria’s culinary traditions, which became particularly important as roughly 5 million people fled the country.
In the cookbook, “Our Syria: Recipes From Home,” filmmaker Itab Azzam and author Dina Mousawi compiled stories of Syrian refugees scattered around Europe, along with their traditional recipes, “to bring to the world the glories of Syrian food and in the process honor these brave women who are fighting back against the destruction of their home with the only weapons they have: pots and pans.”
Syrian-American journalist Dalia Mortada used a similar concept to create “Savoring Syria,” a website dedicated to the stories and recipes in the Syrian diaspora. As a member of the diaspora herself, she knows the importance of traditional food when far from home. (She’s tested and tasted all the recipes herself, to be sure of the measurements, she said.)
“Even if I was born and raised in the U.S., my family is Syrian and I was raised that way,” Mortada tells Syria Deeply. “I arrived in 2011 to be a journalist in Turkey, and after a few years, more Syrians started settling in Istanbul, opening bakeries and restaurants. They came with their own ingredients, like the fresh coriander that was impossible for me to find here.”
In May 2015, she began organizing food-related events in the U.S., Europe and Turkey to help foster ties between local communities and refugees around Syrian dishes.
For her, telling the stories of Syrians displaced by conflict through food is a way to eliminate the “victimizing angle, because the war is not the whole thing, and taste and flavors have their place in their narrative.”
She also feels it is a way to preserve their culture and traditions: “It was so new that the recipes hadn’t changed yet, not adapted to the new ingredients and environment. It says a lot on the culture and history of a whole country, and I’m happy I got to know a lot about it through this project.”
But she expects that, with time, the recipes will be adapted, influenced by local flavors and changed. “My grandmother used to send my mother recipes by fax that my mother would copy and transform because some are impractical to make. Now, I use this same cookbook and copied it in English, adapting the recipes, too, exchanging new ingredients or developing other techniques.”
In a country that has been marked by war, with a population that has been forced far from home, more women have taken on the crucial mission of preserving ancient heritage sites, cultural history and even one grandmother’s tricks to roll the best waraq enib (stuffed grape leaves).
For more information on women in arts and culture in Syria, visit TIMEP’s website or download their policy brief here. |
Laborers carry sand from a cargo boat on the river bank in Gabtoli, Dhaka. (Photo: Asian Development Bank)
Contemporary global capitalism is characterised by extreme wealth concentration and a rapidly expanding and largely impoverished global labour force. Mainstream institutions such as the World Bank and International Labour Organisation encourage integration into global value chains as a development strategy that, they claim, will reduce poverty. In reality, employment within these chains generates new forms of worker poverty and contributes to global wealth concentration. That is why they should be labelled global poverty chains.
Global inequality has never been greater. For example, the wealth of the world’s richest 62 people, who between them have more wealth than half of the world’s population, rose by 44% between 2010 and 2015. Over the same period the wealth of the bottom 50% of humanity fell by approximately 38%.
Very large numbers, perhaps the majority, of the world’s labour force is poor. In 2010 there were approximately 942 million working poor (almost one in three workers globally living on under $2 a day). However, these figures are a significant underestimate.
The International Labour Organisation calculates poverty using the World Bank’s ‘purchasing power parity (PPP)’ international poverty lines of $1 and $2 a day — where $1 a day represents ‘extreme poverty’ and $2 a day simply ‘poverty’.
People who live above these poverty lines are held to be not poor. These poverty lines reflect the international equivalent of what $1 or $2 could have purchased in 1985 in the United States. Whilst the poverty lines have been updated since then, their purchasing powers hover around these symbolic figures. A moment’s reflection suggests that $1 or $2 a day in the US in 1985 could buy hardly anything. Quite obviously higher poverty lines are necessary. The problem for the World Bank is that depending on where they are set, they would show that much greater numbers of the world’s population live in poverty. And that reality contradicts the neoliberal celebration of global capitalism.
The World Bank’s poverty lines are uni-dimensional: they are only concerned with the costs of consumption (the meaning of purchasing power parity). They take no account of other, multidimensional, forms of poverty, such as back-breaking labour and unsafe living conditions. While hundreds of millions of workers across the global south earn more than $1, $2 or $5 PPP a day, these wages do not cover their subsistence costs. In order to survive they have to work many additional hours, with negative consequences for their health. But according to the World Bank these workers are not poor.
The Business Need for Poverty
So where do global value chains, or what more accurately should be called global poverty chains, enter this equation?
Since the 1980s increasing numbers of corporations have trans-nationalised by operating across borders. They are often headquartered in the global north while components are produced, assembled and sourced from across the global south. Northern corporations preside over systems of production and exchange based upon increasingly intense intra-supplier competition. In this way labour costs are reduced in at least three ways: 1) through outsourcing production from relatively expensive northern labour markets to relatively cheap southern labour markets; 2) by exerting downward cost pressures throughout the chain — where supplier firms are pushed to undercut each other in order to receive or keep their contracts; and 3) by using these pressures to intimidate northern workers to accept pay cuts, or lose their jobs off-shore. Supplier firms respond to these overbearing pressures rationally, by slashing wage costs.
Under these conditions of intense intra-supplier competition and worker exploitation, trans-national corporations are able to capture the lion’s share of the value created within these chains. It is not surprising, then, that employment for supplier firms in global supply chains is often predicated upon, and contributes to, the reproduction of mass poverty.
A well-known example of this dynamic — of corporate value-capture and worker impoverishment — is Apple’s supply chain. Its profit for the iPhone in 2010 constituted over 58% of the device’s final sale price, while Chinese workers’ share was only 1.8%. In 2010, Foxconn, one of Apple’s principal Asian suppliers, employed around 500,000 workers in its factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu. It rose to infamy that year following reports of 18 attempted suicides by workers, 14 of which were fatal. Foxconn employs a military-style labour-regime. At the start of the day managers ask workers ‘how are you?’ and staff must reply ‘Good! Very good! Very, very good!’ After that they must work in silence, monitored by managers and with strict limits on toilet breaks. Pay is very low, and overtime is often the only way that workers can earn enough to live on.
A similar dynamic operates in the global garment industry where approximately 30 million workers are employed. There are regular media reports about abusive working conditions in these industries, ranging from extremely low pay, to child labour and forced labour. Most horrifically, in Bangladesh in April 2013, 1,113 garment workers were killed and 2,500 injured following the collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-storey building in which textile factories operated. In his overview of the apparel sector across 17 countries, John Pickles documents how, from the mid-2000s onwards, “wage levels were driven below subsistence costs.” In India, Bangladesh and Cambodia, for example, basic wages as a percentage of living wages are 26%, 19% and 21% respectively.
In Cambodia’s garment industry, conditions are so harsh that workers regularly faint at work as a consequence of the intensity of the labour required of them. Overtime is a necessity as regular wages are insufficient to meet their daily needs. While the government limits overtime to two hours per day, this is not legally enforced and the economic pressures upon workers to exceed these hours are intense. Most workers in the large Cambodian textile factories work between three and five hours overtime a day.
The ‘choice’ facing workers in many of these burgeoning industries is to engage in very high volumes of health-damaging work in order to earn a subsistence, or live in very deep poverty.
Lead firms capture the lion’s share of value generated within global poverty chains because workers in these chains are ruthlessly exploited. Wealth concentration and mass poverty are two sides of the same coin of global capitalist development. A more equitable share of the value generated throughout these chains could contribute significantly to the genuine amelioration of these workers conditions and a reduction in the number of the world’s working poor. But it would also threaten, and potentially undermine, lead firm power and reduce profits. This is the trade-off that global policymakers and business must address if we are to rethink the global labour market and new ways of sharing prosperity more equitably are to be found. |
From http://www.nhaines.com/blog/2017/10/21/winners-ubuntu-1710-free-culture-showcase/
Every new Ubuntu cycle brings many changes, and the arrival of Ubuntu 17.10, the “Artful Aardvark” release, brings more changes than usual. The default desktop has changed to GNOME Shell, with some very thoughtful changes by the desktop team to make it more familiar. And of course, the community wallpapers included with this exciting new release have changed as well!
Every cycle, talented artists around the world create media and release it under licenses that encourage sharing and adaptation. For Ubuntu 17.10, 50 images were submitted to the Ubuntu 17.10 Free Culture Showcase photo pool on Flickr, where all eligible submissions can be found.
Amid the busy development work being done each cycle, a small group of community members votes on their favorites. These anonymous contributors work hard to make the community and software around Ubuntu even better. But this time around I would like to thank two additional contributors who were asked to look at the photo pool and vote. Their ballots held the same weight as each of the others.
The first is Barton George, who works at Dell and leads Product Sputnik, which produces some really nice Ubuntu-based laptops specifically for developers to use. It was nice of him to take some time to review the entries and give his feedback.
The second is Jane Silber, the outgoing CEO of Canonical, who for many years has helped guide Ubuntu and been very generous to the community with her time and energy. She was the first respondent when requests to vote were sent out—no surprise to anyone who saw her dedication firsthand—and I am happy that she was able to take a little time, during her last Ubuntu release as CEO, to recommend a few images.
The results are in, the new release is out, and I’m proud to announce the winning images that are waiting for you right now in Ubuntu 17.10:
A big congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who submitted a wallpaper. You can find these wallpapers (along with dozens of other stunning wallpapers) at the links above, or in your desktop wallpaper list in Ubuntu 17.10. |
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Some people with depression symptoms may not tell their family doctor about it — often out of worry they will be placed on an antidepressant, a new study suggests.
In a survey of more than 1,000 California adults, researchers found that 43 percent had at least some misgivings about telling their primary care doctor about any depression symptoms.
Their top concern was the possibility that their doctor would prescribe an antidepressant — a worry voiced by 23 percent of the whole study group.
Another 16 percent thought it was not their doctor’s job to “deal with emotional issues.” And a similar percentage worried that someone — like an employer — might see a diagnosis of depression on their medical records.
Researchers led by Robert A. Bell, of the University of California, Davis, report the findings in the Annals of Family Medicine.
“This study raises interesting issues that have not really been addressed before,” said Dr. David Hellerstein, of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University Medical Center in New York.
According to Hellerstein, who was not involved in the study, past research has generally focused on the doctor’s side of things — like whether and how they ask patients about depression symptoms.
Now it would be helpful for studies to look into the reasons that people harbor the attitudes that they do, Hellerstein told Reuters Health.
Regarding the finding on antidepressants, he said, “on one level, it doesn’t make sense. If you have depression, why would you worry about getting a treatment that’s effective?”
But some people may worry about side effects, or that medication won’t help them, Hellerstein noted.
The most common side effects of antidepressants include constipation, headaches, dizziness, sleep problems and weight gain. The drugs have also been linked to reports of suicidal behavior in children and young adults.
As for effectiveness, about 60 percent of people who go on antidepressants “feel better” with the first medication they try, according to the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
In the current study, though, people seemed to have more misgivings about antidepressant treatment than they did about “talk therapy.” Just under 14 percent said they might not tell their doctor about any depression symptoms out of concern they would be referred for counseling — versus the 23 percent who cited antidepressant worries.
Hellerstein said that 20 years ago, there might have been more stigma attached to “talking about your feelings.” But that may be lessening now.
The findings are based on telephone interviews with 1,054 California adults who were asked about their beliefs about depression, and “perceived barriers” to getting care for it. They were also screened for current depression symptoms, and asked about any past depression treatment.
Overall, 153 respondents screened positive for moderate to severe depression. And they were more likely than others to have an aversion to antidepressant treatment — 28 percent versus 18 percent. They also tended to see more obstacles overall.
“Ironically,” Bell’s team writes, “those who most subscribed to potential reasons for not talking to a primary care physician about their depression tended to be those who had the greatest potential to benefit from such conversations.”
Hellerstein said it was “kind of alarming” that about 16 percent of study participants thought that mental health was not part of their doctors’ job.
“Yes, this is something you can talk to your primary care doctor about,” he said.
And people who don’t want to take antidepressants should know they don’t have to. “There are different treatment approaches,” Hellerstein said. “But medication and psychotherapy can be effective.”
As for alternative remedies, there is some evidence from clinical trials that St. John’s wort — already used in Europe as a depression treatment — can help with mild to moderate symptoms.
The most common form of psychotherapy for depression is cognitive behavioral therapy, which usually involves between 10 and 20 sessions.
Some drawbacks are the fact that not everyone will have a therapist in their local area, as well as the cost: prices vary, but commonly range between $100 and $150 per session. Many insurance plans do at least partially cover the cost.
Antidepressants can be costly as well. The monthly price tag can range from around $20 to several hundred, depending on the medication and the dose. It typically takes about six weeks for people to feel a benefit, and then they are usually told to keep taking their medication for 6 to 12 months, or sometimes longer.
SOURCE: bit.ly/oxKPvX Annals of Family Medicine, September/October 2011. |
Nigger was a male black labrador retriever belonging to Wing Commander Guy Gibson of the Royal Air Force, and the mascot of No. 617 Squadron. Gibson owned the dog when he was previously a member of 106 Squadron. Nigger often accompanied Gibson on training flights[1] and was a great favourite of the members of both 106 and 617 Squadrons. He was noted for his liking of beer, which he drank from his own bowl in the Officers' Mess.[2]
Nigger died on 16 May 1943, the day of the famous "Dam Busters" raid, when he was hit by a car. He was buried at midnight as Gibson was leading the raid. "Nigger" (Morse code: -. .. --. --. . .-. ) was the codeword Gibson used to confirm the breach of the Möhne Dam. Nigger's grave is at Royal Air Force station Scampton, Lincolnshire.[1]
Name [ edit ]
The word nigger was used as a dog's name during the early part of the 20th century. A black explosive sniffer dog named Nigger served with a Royal Engineers mine clearance unit in 1944 during the Normandy Campaign.[3] The dog leading a sledge dog team on the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic (1910-1912) was also named Nigger.[4]
Portrayal on film [ edit ]
Censorship [ edit ]
Nigger was portrayed in the 1955 British war film The Dam Busters, in which he was mentioned by name frequently. In 1999, British television network ITV broadcast a censored version of the film, with all instances of the name removed. ITV blamed regional broadcaster London Weekend Television, which in turn alleged that a junior staff member had been responsible for the unauthorised cuts. When ITV again showed a censored version in June 2001, it was criticised by Index on Censorship as "unnecessary and ridiculous" and because the edits introduced continuity errors.[5][6][7] The code word "nigger" transmitted in Morse Code upon the successful completion of the central mission was not censored. More recently, in 2012, ITV3 had shown the film uncut a few times, but with a warning at the start that it contains racial terms from the period which some people may find offensive. However, in 2013 the film had been shown a few times by Channel 5 uncut and without any warning. On Thursday 17 May 2018 an uncut version was shown on the UK channel Film 4 with a warning explaining the film was historical and that some would find it to be racially offensive.
Some edited American versions of the film use dubbing to change Nigger's name to Trigger.[5][6]
Nigger's grave
Area around the grave
Symbolism [ edit ]
Film critics have observed that Nigger is used in the film as a symbol of the men's emotional attachment to one another, an attachment that is not directly expressed between the film's characters. Sarah Street notes that the film, while full of emotion, does not articulate it except through secondary devices such as the affection that the characters are shown giving to Nigger.[8] Christine Geraghty, a lecturer in media studies, observed that "Gibson's suppression of feelings is presented as appropriate rather than problematic, and the use of the dog as his most explicit emotional attachment is in keeping with the way in which class and masculinity are brought together in this isolated but self-sufficient figure."[9][10] James Chapman, lecturer at the Open University, adds to that the observation that the scene where Gibson is shown choking back his grief at the death of Nigger, silent and blinking awkwardly, is an example of the stiff upper lip behaviour characteristic of British war films of the genre.[8][9][10]
Renaming [ edit ]
Richard Todd, who played Gibson in the film, was interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme in 2005 along with Jonathan Falconer, author of a book about the film, about the name of the dog and whether any remake of the film should retain the name.[11] Todd, in a pre-recorded interview, said:
With political correctness which is a new concept of a way of life in this country and I think all over the world it didn't exist when we made the original film so Nigger was Nigger, but nowadays you can't say that sort of thing.[11][12]
In response to being asked whether the name should be censored in a remake, Falconer said:
No. I think it's a question of historical accuracy here … the film and obviously the events are very much part of the time they were made in and took part in and so I think tinkering with the historical accuracy of the film and of the story is a very dangerous and slippery slope to start down.[11][13]
In response to being asked whether he thought people would accept this as historical accuracy, Falconer said:
Well they ought to. If they are being objective about it then I think they should accept it as historical accuracy, but I can understand why some people may find it offensive.[11][13]
In the same interview, George Baker, who also acted in the film, in response to being asked whether any opinion had been expressed on the name at the time that the film was made, said:
No, none at all. Political correctness wasn't even invented, and an awful lot of black dogs were called Nigger.[11][14]
Peter Jackson, producer of the remake that later began, said in 2006 that "It is not our intention to offend people. But really you are in a no-win, damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't scenario: If you change it, everyone's going to whinge and whine about political correctness. And if you don't change it, obviously you are offending a lot of people inadvertently. … We haven't made any decisions about what we'll do."[7][15] Stephen Fry, writer for the remake, was asked to provide several alternative names for the dog, and came up with several suggestions. Executive producer David Frost rejected them all, saying "Guy sometimes used to call his dog Nigsy, so I think that's what we will call it. Stephen has been coming up with other names, but this is the one I want."[7][16] Jackson's assistant contradicted this a week later, however, saying "To stay true to the story, you can't just change [the name]. We have not made any decisions yet. The script is still being written; and that decision will be made closer to the time."[7] Later Fry said the dog would be renamed "Digger".[17]
Recently, one writer, James Holland, has commented that controversy over the dog's name seems to have overshadowed other aspects of the raid. When he told people that he was planning to write a book on the raid, 9 out of 10 replied "What are you going to call the dog?". He found that the three characters connected with the raid that most people had heard of were Guy Gibson, Barnes Wallis and Nigger the dog.[18]
References [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ] |
Hey there guys,on E3, KH Unchained X [chi] was pretty much insignificant next the newest Footage of Kingdom Hearts III, but who can blame it.Next to KHIII and I really can't wait for new Infos regarding the next epic installment, I can say for myself that I really look forward to KH Unchained X as well, maybe a little bit more because it "should" be released this year as told by Square Enix.Since there is, again, no life signs from Kingdom Hearts (I call it the Kingdom Hearts Info-Desert, loooooooong distances with no Info at all) are shown and there isn't even any more Information when KH Unchained X will be released.Specifically, I want to analyze the Battle System, seen in the Trailer of KH Unchained X:What is seen right at the beginning is the flashy, fast-paced action and the "Medal System" and every hit produces a lot of Orbs.HP Orbs which are pretty to spot - the Green, classical Orbs, which can heal you mid-attacking.The new Orbs are Orange and they actually fill up the Ability Bar, which is right next to your Avatars Face.Interestingly, if someone takes time to slow the Video down and looks at the whole System, you will see that next to those Medals - there are Numbers - in the brief Dwarf Woodlands Scene, where the Player rushes upwards the small bridge, his Ability Meter is pretty filled up - but there is a 0 before it. All "Medals", which are seen in that moment are:Riku 1 > Goofy 2 > King Mickey 1 > Cloud 2, those Attacks are regular and doesn't show off to be special Attacks.This changes however after the next scene when in Wonderland a Sora 2 Medal is activated, the Player uses 2 Bars of the 4 filled up Ability Bars and makes a flashy Attack.Those powerful Attacks are only unlocked for use, if the Ability Bar has enough Power to execute them - this is rather interesting, as you can see that there are many, many powerful Attacks you can execute through this, but with a cost.Covering any Form of Attack, the used Medal vanishes and the Wheel rotates one spot, I am very interested on how the Set will be replayed again, if you have a stronger Group of Enemies before you.The next thing would be the seen Hitpoint Damage. Every Hit the Player makes, is seen in traditional Final Fantasy Fashion with some Number-Indicator. You can see the Player HP Displayed with Digits and there are also Enemy HP Digits for the Bossfight Behemoth seen as well.In addition to this fashion, you can see a Powerful Attack against the Behemoth, which is listed as a Power Type, the Player uses a Sora Speed Type, which has a disadvantage in points of Damage. The next Special Attack is Donald Magic Type, which does massive Damage due to the Advantage of Magic against Power.The Rock>Paper>Scissors-esque System is seen in the lower right corner where it goes like this Power>Speed>Magic so Power is strong against Speed but weak against Magic.This will be helpful deciding, which Powerful Attack to choose for the biggest possible Damage in cost for the Ability Bars.In Olympus Coliseum, there is that small scene that the Enemies have a Turn - so to speak, the Medal Wheel turns and you have some possibilities to attack, then your enemies get a shot against you, starting your Medal Counter again.This looks like a fun and exciting edit of the original Battle System, where every card is a flashy attack Animation! Depending on the Ability Bar you can either attack normally or execute powerful Attacks to decimate your foes. Next to this you can/will attack a whole swarm of Heartless in one fight as well.The Keyblades have to be changed as well, I am really looking forward how they change them!I really hope for a soon release date of Kingdom Hearts Unchained X! I like the Browser Version, but my PC is way too weak to handle the Gameplay at a proper speed, so I can't wait for this game to be finally released on Android that I can play this beauty and have fun with it!So, how did you like that analysis of me? I hope you get the things I've noticed.Thanks for theYoutube Channel, which can provide that nice Video of the E3!See you soon,Max |
DECEMBER 2--A Colorado landlord is facing a felony charge after a motion detection camera recorded him having sex with another man in a tenant’s apartment, police report.
According to cops, Carlos Quijada illegally entered the Colorado Springs residence of Logan Pierce and Mikaela DiGiulio in late-November. While the married couple was not home, their four-camera Nest security system was guarding the condominium.
After Quijada, 39, entered the residence, Pierce received a notification on his phone that the Nest system had detected noise in the apartment.
When Pierce subsequently checked the camera feeds, he saw Quijada and another man inside his bedroom.
The video shows the men each removing their pants immediately upon entering the room and then climbing atop the bed. Following a six-minute round of oral and anal sex, Quijada’s partner used one of DiGiulio’s dresses--plucked from a laundry pile--to wipe his genitals. At one point, Quijada uses another garment to attack a lubricant stain left on the green bed sheet.
Pierce, who provided the X-rated security video to TSG, said that the blue dress used as a post-sex clean-up rag was worn by his wife at the couple’s March wedding ceremony.
Pierce and DiGiulio--who rented the $1100-a-month apartment after responding in July to a Craigslist ad--vacated the premises shortly after Quijada used their home as a hook-up spot. The couple is now living at a Super 8 hotel where DiGiulio is employed (and where Pierce works part-time).
After being provided with the security footage, the Colorado Springs Police Department issued an arrest warrant charging Quijada with criminal trespassing, a felony, and misdemeanor obscenity.
Quijada (right) and his partner are seen in the above screenshot from the security video. |
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is echoing President Donald Trump’s sentiments toward the violent El Salvadorian MS-13 gang, blaming “years of lax immigration enforcement” for their growing presence across the U.S.
Sessions made the comments during a meeting with law enforcement task forces handling crime syndicate issues, according to the LA Times:
“Because of an open border and years of lax immigration enforcement, MS-13 has been sending both recruiters and members to regenerate gangs that previously had been decimated, and smuggling members across the border as unaccompanied minors,” Sessions said. He added that “sanctuary cities dangerously undermine” attempts to battle the group. “Harboring criminal aliens only helps violent gangs like MS-13,” Sessions said.
Sessions also noted the brutality of the MS-13 gang, saying “they are not content to simply ruin the lives of adults — MS-13 recruits in our high schools, our middle schools and even our elementary schools.”
Sessions’ remarks are a close resemblance to those of Trump’s, who most recently slammed previous administration’s immigration enforcement for allowing the MS-13 gang to take root in the U.S., as Breitbart News reported.
“The weak illegal immigration policies of the Obama Admin. allowed bad MS 13 gangs to form in cities across U.S,” Trump said on Twitter. “We are removing them fast!”
The MS-13 gang made headlines this week after four young men, including an honor roll student, were found dead in a park in Central Islip, New York, with law enforcement tracing the murders back to the criminal organization.
Previously, the Center for Immigration Studies has reported how the mass immigration of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children into communities like Brentwood, New York have led to the region becoming a breeding for the MS-13 gang.
John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. |
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Feb. 27, 2013, 2:45 PM GMT By Erika Angulo
A New Mexico multimillionaire wants you to get off the couch and go searching for hidden treasure.
Forrest Fenn, 82, believes too many Americans spend their free time watching TV or playing video games. He hopes the bounty he hid — a chest filled with millions of dollars in gold coins, diamonds and emeralds, among other gems — will prompt some to explore the outdoors. "Get your kids out in the countryside, take them fishing and get them away from their little hand-held machines," he told TODAY.
Read these clues to find Forrest Fenn's treasure
Fenn hid the chest in a secret spot three years ago with two goals in mind: Getting people to fall in love with America's scenic trails and passing on what he calls the "thrill of the chase," something he has experienced over more than seven decades of hunting for rare objects.
"The Thrill of the Chase" is also the title of Fenn's self-published autobiography, which contains an unusual map to the treasure, a poem with 9 clues in it. "Begin it where warm waters halt, and take it in the canyon down, not far, but too far to walk," reads part of the poem. (On Wednesday morning, Fenn's site crashed after TODAY featured his story.)
Santa Fe jeweler Marc Howard has gone searching for the treasure 20 times. "If you read the poem, you'll go, 'Oh my God, how am I gonna find it from this?" said Howard, who makes custom engagement rings. He plans to use the bounty for designing new jewels. "What could a goldsmith want, but free rein with gold?"
Review the full text of the poem here
Treasure hunter Marc Howard, by the Battle Rock formation in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, where he's gone searching for Fenn's hidden treasure. TODAY / Today
The chest, weighing in at over 40 pounds, contains items Fenn has accumulated over more than seven decades of a life that reads like an adventure novel. His love for rare artifacts started at the age of 9, when he discovered a Native American arrowhead near his hometown of Temple, Texas. The son of a teacher, Fenn struggled with his grades and after graduation chose the Air Force over college.
"I couldn't see myself sitting in a classroom for four more years," Fenn said. During the Vietnam War, he flew hundreds of missions and said he was shot down twice, in South Vietnam and again in Laos. Even while fighting, the highly decorated pilot didn’t surrender the search for rare objects, flying to Pompeii in his off-time to find artifacts.
Twenty years later, he came out of the Air Force with a pension that helped him feed his family, but it was in dealing artifacts and art that he grew his savings into a fortune.
In the 1970s, the father of two opened Fenn Gallery on Paseo de Peralta in Santa Fe. The family slept on a mattress on the floor, but eventually moved into a house complete with a home office for his objects, made by Southwestern tribes that he either dug up himself or purchased. "I never went to college, I never studied business, I never studied art," said Fenn in his studio, surrounded by perfectly organized rows of leather moccasins, pottery, beaded dolls and book-filled shelves. "I had imagination, I had guts that made my imagination worth something to me and I was willing to work."
Story: Teen's chilly 10-mile trek for a job leads to Internet fame
Fenn in his "vault," where he keeps prized pieces. TODAY / Today
In 1988, Fenn was at the top of his career as an art dealer, with clients including Ralph Lauren, Robert Redford and Suzanne Somers, when he received devastating news: He had advanced kidney cancer. His diagnosis showed he had only a 20 percent chance of surviving the next three years.
So Fenn started to consider his legacy.
He worked on his clue-poem for years, and took his time collecting items to put in the chest. When he felt the treasure was complete and he was strong enough to carry it, he buried it.
"After I hid the treasure I walked back to my car feeling very proud of myself and laughing out loud," he said. "I asked, 'Forrest, did you really do that?' There have never been any regrets. Now it is for the ages and a big part of me in that treasure chest. I felt it go in as I closed the lid for the last time."
Story: Man wins $7.2 million on slots in friend's memory after funeral
Fenn's passion for collecting hasn't been without controversy. In 2009, federal agents raided his home as part of an operation tracking Native American artifacts that may have been illegally obtained. Fenn was never charged. "Out of thousands of objects (the agents) seized four artifacts, none of which were shown to be illegal," said Fenn's attorney Peter Schoeneburg.
Forrest Fenn reads some of the nearly 7,500 emails he's received from treasure hunters hoping for a hint. TODAY / Today
Today, the hunt for his treasure has attracted an international following. Fenn has received close to 7,500 emails on the subject. Some ask for guidance on whether to use a metal detector. Others thank him for inspiring a family vacation. One man who said his son always needs a tangible reward, like a milkshake, to go on outings, wrote "thanks for dangling a slightly more attractive offer in front of him to get him out with his old man again."
Some wonder if there is a treasure at all. But Howard, the jeweler, who knows Fenn well, sees no reason to question the collector's word. "Forrest is one of the most honest men I know," he said. "If he says he did something, he did it."
Another believer is filmmaker Dal Neitzel, who has traveled more than a thousand miles in his search, clues in hand. He has even plunged into freezing waterfalls because part of the poem reads “There’ll be no paddle up your creek, Just heavy loads and water high.”
Nietzel and Howard alone have fulfilled Fenn's goal of getting more people to fall in love with the outdoors. “What drags me out here is the beauty,” says Nietzel. “I’ve seen places I never would have seen.” Howard said his hikes have also taken him to places he would have never visited otherwise. "It's seeing America in the different light, he said. "It's bald eagles flying overhead and big horn sheep on the side of a mountain. It's all those things."
More Good News: Follow these clues to find Forrest Fenn's treasure!
Backpacker reunited with photos after Internet campaign to find her
Boy, 7, spreads message for suicidal soldiers: 'Ask for help' |
Theravada (pronounced — more or less — "terra-VAH-dah"), the "Doctrine of the Elders," is the school of Buddhism that draws its scriptural inspiration from the Tipitaka, or Pali canon, which scholars generally agree contains the earliest surviving record of the Buddha's teachings.[1] For many centuries, Theravada has been the predominant religion of continental Southeast Asia (Thailand, Myanmar/Burma, Cambodia, and Laos) and Sri Lanka. Today Theravada Buddhists number well over 100 million worldwide.[2] In recent decades Theravada has begun to take root in the West.
Many Buddhisms, One Dhamma-vinaya
The Buddha — the "Awakened One" — called the religion he founded Dhamma-vinaya — "the doctrine and discipline." To provide a social structure supportive of the practice of Dhamma-vinaya (or Dhamma for short [Sanskrit: Dharma]), and to preserve these teachings for posterity, the Buddha established the order of bhikkhus (monks) and bhikkhunis (nuns) — the Sangha — which continues to this day to pass his teachings on to subsequent generations of laypeople and monastics, alike.
As the Dhamma continued its spread across India after the Buddha's passing, differing interpretations of the original teachings arose, which led to schisms within the Sangha and the emergence of as many as eighteen distinct sects of Buddhism.[3] One of these schools eventually gave rise to a reform movement that called itself Mahayana (the "Greater Vehicle")[4] and that referred to the other schools disparagingly as Hinayana (the "Lesser Vehicle"). What we call Theravada today is the sole survivor of those early non-Mahayana schools.[5] To avoid the pejorative tone implied by the terms Hinayana and Mahayana, it is common today to use more neutral language to distinguish between these two main branches of Buddhism. Because Theravada historically dominated southern Asia, it is sometimes called "Southern" Buddhism, while Mahayana, which migrated northwards from India into China, Tibet, Japan, and Korea, is known as "Northern" Buddhism.[6]
The language of the Theravada canonical texts is Pali (lit., "text"), which is based on a dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan that was probably spoken in central India during the Buddha's time.[7] Ven. Ananda, the Buddha's cousin and close personal attendant, committed the Buddha's sermons (suttas) to memory and thus became a living repository of these teachings.[8] Shortly after the Buddha's death (ca. 480 BCE), five hundred of the most senior monks — including Ananda — convened to recite and verify all the sermons they had heard during the Buddha's forty-five year teaching career.[9] Most of these sermons therefore begin with the disclaimer, "Evam me sutam" — "Thus have I heard."
After the Buddha's death the teachings continued to be passed down orally within the monastic community, in keeping with an Indian oral tradition that long predated the Buddha.[10] By 250 BCE the Sangha had systematically arranged and compiled these teachings into three divisions: the Vinaya Pitaka (the "basket of discipline" — the texts concerning the rules and customs of the Sangha), the Sutta Pitaka (the "basket of discourses" — the sermons and utterances by the Buddha and his close disciples), and the Abhidhamma Pitaka (the "basket of special/higher doctrine" — a detailed psycho-philosophical analysis of the Dhamma). Together these three are known as the Tipitaka, the "three baskets." In the third century BCE Sri Lankan monks began compiling a series of exhaustive commentaries to the Tipitaka; these were subsequently collated and translated into Pali beginning in the fifth century CE. The Tipitaka plus the post-canonical texts (commentaries, chronicles, etc.) together constitute the complete body of classical Theravada literature.
Pali was originally a spoken language with no alphabet of its own. It wasn't until about 100 BCE that the Tipitaka was first fixed in writing, by Sri Lankan scribe-monks,[11] who wrote the Pali phonetically in a form of early Brahmi script.[12] Since then the Tipitaka has been transliterated into many different scripts (Devanagari, Thai, Burmese, Roman, Cyrillic, to name a few). Although English translations of the most popular Tipitaka texts abound, many students of Theravada find that learning the Pali language — even just a little bit here and there — greatly deepens their understanding and appreciation of the Buddha's teachings.
No one can prove that the Tipitaka contains any of the words actually uttered by the historical Buddha. Practicing Buddhists have never found this problematic. Unlike the scriptures of many of the world's great religions, the Tipitaka is not regarded as gospel, as an unassailable statement of divine truth, revealed by a prophet, to be accepted purely on faith. Instead, its teachings are meant to be assessed firsthand, to be put into practice in one's life so that one can find out for oneself if they do, in fact, yield the promised results. It is the truth towards which the words in the Tipitaka point that ultimately matters, not the words themselves. Although scholars will continue to debate the authorship of passages from the Tipitaka for years to come (and thus miss the point of these teachings entirely), the Tipitaka will quietly continue to serve — as it has for centuries — as an indispensable guide for millions of followers in their quest for Awakening.
Shortly after his Awakening, the Buddha delivered his first sermon, in which he laid out the essential framework upon which all his later teachings were based. This framework consists of the Four Noble Truths, four fundamental principles of nature (Dhamma) that emerged from the Buddha's radically honest and penetrating assessment of the human condition. He taught these truths not as metaphysical theories or as articles of faith, but as categories by which we should frame our direct experience in a way that conduces to Awakening:
Because of our ignorance (avijja) of these Noble Truths, because of our inexperience in framing the world in their terms, we remain bound to samsara, the wearisome cycle of birth, aging, illness, death, and rebirth. Craving propels this process onward, from one moment to the next and over the course of countless lifetimes, in accordance with kamma (Skt. karma), the universal law of cause and effect. According to this immutable law, every action that one performs in the present moment — whether by body, speech, or mind itself — eventually bears fruit according to its skillfulness: act in unskillful and harmful ways and unhappiness is bound to follow; act skillfully and happiness will ultimately ensue.[13] As long as one remains ignorant of this principle, one is doomed to an aimless existence: happy one moment, in despair the next; enjoying one lifetime in heaven, the next in hell.
The Buddha discovered that gaining release from samsara requires assigning to each of the Noble Truths a specific task: the first Noble Truth is to be comprehended; the second, abandoned; the third, realized; the fourth, developed. The full realization of the third Noble Truth paves the way for Awakening: the end of ignorance, craving, suffering, and kamma itself; the direct penetration to the transcendent freedom and supreme happiness that stands as the final goal of all the Buddha's teachings; the Unconditioned, the Deathless, Unbinding — Nibbana (Skt. Nirvana).
Because the roots of ignorance are so intimately entwined with the fabric of the psyche, the unawakened mind is capable of deceiving itself with breathtaking ingenuity. The solution therefore requires more than simply being kind, loving, and mindful in the present moment. The practitioner must equip him- or herself with the expertise to use a range of tools to outwit, outlast, and eventually uproot the mind's unskillful tendencies. For example, the practice of generosity (dana) erodes the heart's habitual tendencies towards craving and teaches valuable lessons about the motivations behind, and the results of, skillful action. The practice of virtue (sila) guards one against straying wildly off-course and into harm's way. The cultivation of goodwill (metta) helps to undermine anger's seductive grasp. The ten recollections offer ways to alleviate doubt, bear physical pain with composure, maintain a healthy sense of self-respect, overcome laziness and complacency, and restrain oneself from unbridled lust. And there are many more skills to learn.
The good qualities that emerge and mature from these practices not only smooth the way for the journey to Nibbana; over time they have the effect of transforming the practitioner into a more generous, loving, compassionate, peaceful, and clear-headed member of society. The individual's sincere pursuit of Awakening is thus a priceless and timely gift to a world in desperate need of help.
Discernment (pañña)
The Eightfold Path is best understood as a collection of personal qualities to be developed, rather than as a sequence of steps along a linear path. The development of right view and right resolve (the factors classically identified with wisdom and discernment) facilitates the development of right speech, action, and livelihood (the factors identified with virtue). As virtue develops so do the factors identified with concentration (right effort, mindfulness, and concentration). Likewise, as concentration matures, discernment evolves to a still deeper level. And so the process unfolds: development of one factor fosters development of the next, lifting the practitioner in an upward spiral of spiritual maturity that eventually culminates in Awakening.
The long journey to Awakening begins in earnest with the first tentative stirrings of right view — the discernment by which one recognizes the validity of the four Noble Truths and the principle of kamma. One begins to see that one's future well-being is neither predestined by fate, nor left to the whims of a divine being or random chance. The responsibility for one's happiness rests squarely on one's own shoulders. Seeing this, one's spiritual aims become suddenly clear: to relinquish the habitual unskillful tendencies of the mind in favor of skillful ones. As this right resolve grows stronger, so does the heartfelt desire to live a morally upright life, to choose one's actions with care.
At this point many followers make the inward commitment to take the Buddha's teachings to heart, to become "Buddhist" through the act of taking refuge in the Triple Gem: the Buddha (both the historical Buddha and one's own innate potential for Awakening), the Dhamma (both the Buddha's teachings and the ultimate Truth towards which they point), and the Sangha (both the unbroken monastic lineage that has preserved the teachings since the Buddha's day, and all those who have achieved at least some degree of Awakening). With one's feet thus planted on solid ground, and with the help of an admirable friend or teacher (kalyanamitta) to guide the way, one is now well-equipped to proceed down the Path, following in the footsteps left by the Buddha himself.
Virtue (sila)
Right view and right resolve continue to mature through the development of the path factors associated with sila, or virtue — namely, right speech, right action, and right livelihood. These are condensed into a very practical form in the five precepts, the basic code of ethical conduct to which every practicing Buddhist subscribes: refraining from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and using intoxicants. Even the monks' complex code of 227 rules and the nuns' 311 ultimately have these five basic precepts at their core.
Concentration (samadhi)
Having gained a foothold in the purification of one's outward behavior through the practice of sila, the essential groundwork has been laid for delving into the most subtle and transformative aspect of the path: meditation and the development of samadhi, or concentration. This is spelled out in detail in the final three path factors: right effort, by which one learns how to favor skillful qualities of mind over unskillful ones; right mindfulness, by which one learns to keep one's attention continually grounded in the present moment of experience; and right concentration, by which one learns to immerse the mind so thoroughly and unwaveringly in its meditation object that it enters jhana, a series of progressively deeper states of mental and physical tranquillity.
Right mindfulness and right concentration are developed in tandem through satipatthana ("frames of reference" or "foundations of mindfulness"), a systematic approach to meditation practice that embraces a wide range of skills and techniques. Of these practices, mindfulness of the body (especially mindfulness of breathing) is particularly effective at bringing into balance the twin qualities of tranquillity (samatha) and insight (vipassana), or clear-seeing. Through persistent practice, the meditator becomes more adept at bringing the combined powers of samatha-vipassana to bear in an exploration of the fundamental nature of mind and body.[14] As the meditator masters the ability to frame his immediate experience in terms of anicca (inconstancy), dukkha, and anatta (not-self), even the subtlest manifestations of these three characteristics of experience are brought into exquisitely sharp focus. At the same time, the root cause of dukkha — craving — is relentlessly exposed to the light of awareness. Eventually craving is left with no place to hide, the entire karmic process that fabricates dukkha unravels, the eightfold path reaches its noble climax, and the meditator gains, at long last, his or her first unmistakable glimpse of the Unconditioned — Nibbana.
Awakening
This first enlightenment experience, known as stream-entry (sotapatti), is the first of four progressive stages of Awakening, each of which entails the irreversible shedding or weakening of several fetters (samyojana), the manifestations of ignorance that bind a person to the cycle of birth and death. Stream-entry marks an unprecedented and radical turning point both in the practitioner's current life and in the entirety of his or her long journey in samsara. For it is at this point that any lingering doubts about the truth of the Buddha's teachings disappear; it is at this point that any belief in the purifying efficacy of rites and rituals evaporates; and it is at this point that the long-cherished notion of an abiding personal "self" falls away. The stream-enterer is said to be assured of no more than seven future rebirths (all of them favorable) before eventually attaining full Awakening.
But full Awakening is still a long way off. As the practitioner presses on with renewed diligence, he or she passes through two more significant landmarks: once-returning (sakadagati), which is accompanied by the weakening of the fetters of sensual desire and ill-will, and non-returning (agati), in which these two fetters are uprooted altogether. The final stage of Awakening — arahatta — occurs when even the most refined and subtle levels of craving and conceit are irrevocably extinguished. At this point the practitioner — now an arahant, or "worthy one" — arrives at the end-point of the Buddha's teaching. With ignorance, suffering, stress, and rebirth having all come to their end, the arahant at last can utter the victory cry first proclaimed by the Buddha upon his Awakening:
"Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done! There is nothing further for the sake of this world." — MN 36
The arahant lives out the remainder of his or her life inwardly enjoying the bliss of Nibbana, secure at last from the possibility of any future rebirth. When the arahant's aeons-long trail of past kamma eventually unwinds to its end, the arahant dies and he or she enters into parinibbana — total Unbinding. Although language utterly fails at describing this extraordinary event, the Buddha likened it to what happens when a fire finally burns up all its fuel.
Buddhism is sometimes naïvely criticized as a "negative" or "pessimistic" religion and philosophy. Surely life is not all misery and disappointment: it offers many kinds of happiness and sublime joy. Why then this dreary Buddhist obsession with unsatisfactoriness and suffering?
The Buddha based his teachings on a frank assessment of our plight as humans: there is unsatisfactoriness and suffering in the world. No one can argue this fact. Dukkha lurks behind even the highest forms of worldly pleasure and joy, for, sooner or later, as surely as night follows day, that happiness must come to an end. Were the Buddha's teachings to stop there, we might indeed regard them as pessimistic and life as utterly hopeless. But, like a doctor who prescribes a remedy for an illness, the Buddha offers both a hope (the third Noble Truth) and a cure (the fourth). The Buddha's teachings thus give cause for unparalleled optimism and joy. The teachings offer as their reward the noblest, truest kind of happiness, and give profound value and meaning to an otherwise grim existence. One modern teacher summed it up well: "Buddhism is the serious pursuit of happiness."
Until the late 19th century, the teachings of Theravada were little known outside of southern Asia, where they had flourished for some two and one-half millennia. In the past century, however, the West has begun to take notice of Theravada's unique spiritual legacy in its teachings of Awakening. In recent decades this interest has swelled, with the monastic Sangha from various schools within Theravada establishing dozens of monasteries across Europe and North America. Increasing numbers of lay meditation centers, founded and operated independently of the monastic Sangha, strain to meet the demands of lay men and women — Buddhist and otherwise — seeking to learn selected aspects of the Buddha's teachings.
The turn of the 21st century presents both opportunities and dangers for Theravada in the West: Will the Buddha's teachings be patiently studied and put into practice, and allowed to establish deep roots in Western soil, for the benefit of many generations to come? Will the current popular Western climate of "openness" and cross-fertilization between spiritual traditions lead to the emergence of a strong new form of Buddhist practice unique to the modern era, or will it simply lead to confusion and the dilution of these priceless teachings? These are open questions; only time will tell.
Spiritual teachings of every description inundate the media and the marketplace today. Many of today's popular spiritual teachings borrow liberally from the Buddha, though only rarely do they place the Buddha's words in their true context. Earnest seekers of truth are therefore often faced with the unsavory task of wading through fragmentary teachings of dubious accuracy. How are we to make sense of it all?
Fortunately the Buddha left us with some simple guidelines to help us navigate through this bewildering flood. Whenever you find yourself questioning the authenticity of a particular teaching, heed well the Buddha's advice to his stepmother:
[The teachings that promote] the qualities of which you may know, 'These qualities lead to passion, not to dispassion; to being fettered, not to being unfettered; to accumulating, not to shedding; to self-aggrandizement, not to modesty; to discontent, not to contentment; to entanglement, not to seclusion; to laziness, not to aroused persistence; to being burdensome, not to being unburdensome': You may categorically hold, 'This is not the Dhamma, this is not the Vinaya, this is not the Teacher's instruction.' [As for the teachings that promote] the qualities of which you may know, 'These qualities lead to dispassion, not to passion; to being unfettered, not to being fettered; to shedding, not to accumulating; to modesty, not to self-aggrandizement; to contentment, not to discontent; to seclusion, not to entanglement; to aroused persistence, not to laziness; to being unburdensome, not to being burdensome': You may categorically hold, 'This is the Dhamma, this is the Vinaya, this is the Teacher's instruction.' — AN 8.53
The truest test of these teachings, of course, is whether they yield the promised results in the crucible of your own heart. The Buddha presents the challenge; the rest is up to you. |
You know what, I'm actually really proud of this. I haven't arted for a long time (my last update was, what, November?), due in no small part to my general lack of motivation. I decide to take up the pencil once again, entirely unplanned, without a reference, and my random squiggles evolved into a Vinyl Scratch. Possibly one of my best pony pictures, too; certainly the best I've done without a reference. I'll maybe clean it up and shade it, and no doubt ruin it in the process. Still, I'm really happy with this, it's good to see that I haven't completely lost it. More to come soon.
Maybe.
Okay, yeah, probably not, see you in August.
*Edit* ok, so I improved it a bit. I think.
I am back! |
When strong jawlines and rippling abs no longer do it for you, consider this unusual object of desire: Shabani the hot gorilla.
Since the gorilla's move to Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Nagoya, Japan, people have flocked to see the strapping ape in the flesh, the Daily Mail Australia reports.
Shabani grew up at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney before moving to Japan in 2007. Only recently has the ape become a bit of a local heartthrob, Rocket News reports.
See also: Gorilla breaks zoo barrier glass while charging towards family
◇◆東山動植物園◆◇ 今日は旦那sanと二人で東山動植物園に 行ってきたよぉｰ(*^O^*)♪メディアにも 取り上げられる､あの有名な イケメンゴリラのシャバーニ君っ☆!! 上手く撮れんやったけん拾い画ですが…;; 本当イケメンだったｰ(*´∀｀)!!大人気!!!! また会いに行こう～っ(^3^)/ #東山動植物園#シャバーニ A photo posted by *SHIHO* (@shiho0601) on Jun 6, 2015 at 4:49am PDT
Shabani's good looks have inspired a Twitter following, where devoted fans refer to him as a ikemen, meaning a very good looking man. And, according to Rocket News, zoo officials claim that the gorilla is drawing more women to the facility.
The gorilla's meme-worthy looks have drawn comparisons to other, more traditional heartthrobs: |
Microsoft Comic Chat (later Microsoft Chat, but not to be confused with Windows Chat, or WinChat) is a graphical IRC client created by Microsoft, first released with Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996. Comic Chat was developed by Microsoft Researcher David Kurlander, with Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds Group and later a group he managed in Microsoft's Internet Division.[2]
Comic Chat's main feature, which set it apart from other IRC clients, is that it enabled comic avatars to represent a user; this character could express a specified emotion, possibly making IRC chatting a more emotive and expressive experience. All of the comic characters and backgrounds were initially created by comic artist Jim Woodring. Later, tools became available that allowed user-created characters and backgrounds.[3]
Comic Chat started out as a research project, and a paper describing the technology was published at SIGGRAPH '96.[4] It was an experiment in automatic illustration construction and layout. The algorithms used in Comic Chat attempted to mimic some basic illustration techniques of comic artists (particularly Jim Woodring). Character placement, the choice of gestures and expressions, and word balloon construction and layout, were all chosen automatically. A widget called the "emotion wheel" allowed users to override the program's choice of expression.
Although Comic Chat could be used in text-based chat rooms as well, it added a code at the beginning of every message to communicate the character's expression to other chat clients. This had a somewhat annoying effect on non-Comic Chat users (although it could be disabled).
Comic Chat was released with the full downloads of Internet Explorer 3, 4, and 5, as well as in the Windows 98 and Windows 2000 distributions. It also became the official chat client of MSN. It was localized into 24 different languages. Although the program can still be downloaded and still works with most IRC servers, it is infrequently used today because MSN decided to get out of the chat business, and turned off its servers.[2]
In December 1996, The Microsoft Network introduced a show-based format, in which high quality multimedia content was produced around several themes. MSN's MotorWeb was built around an automobile theme. MSN entered into a partnership with NPR’s CarTalk, and each day featured a new online Car Talk caller from the popular NPR radio duo of "Click and Clack" (Tom and Ray Magliozzi).[5]
Created and produced at MSN by Mike Klozar, the "Chat Show," as it was called, was an innovative combination of on-demand streaming audio, text (as cartoon bubbles) and comic strip characters all synchronized to display an animated cartoon comic strip created dynamically from the text input. An example of the show can be found at David Kurlander's project site, under [MSN CarTalk Comic Chat Show].[5]
Each episode depicted a caller (as a black and white default character) and color caricatures of Tom & Ray interacting in a unique closed visual chat. The visuals were generated dynamically by the Comic Chat client (already residing on the PC), given a timed, textual transcript of the show. This allowed an online comic strip to draw in exact timing with the audio/dialogue that was streamed via Real Audio (14.4 modems were the norm at this time). The show ran for one year. MSN moved away from the "show" format the following year, and CarTalk signed a contract with Cars.com. The online chat show ended at that time.
Microsoft Comic Chat installed a custom font, Comic Sans MS, that users could use in other applications and documents. In 1996 it was bundled with several other fonts in Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web project and subsequent versions of Microsoft Windows, leading to its notoriety among the internet.
It was renamed as Microsoft Chat 2.0, and was bundled with Internet Explorer along with the then new Outlook Express, in the late 1990s.[6] Version 2.5 bundled with Internet Explorer 5[7] was the last update.
Microsoft Comic Chat has been removed with Internet Explorer 6.
See also [ edit ] |
It’s fitting that Sidney Crosby will share time with Matt Cooke, the NHL’s most reformed player this season, in his Thursday return to hockey.
Cooke, having been suspended for 21 games last season and feeling organizational pressure to change his ways, came into this season with more than a few questions to answer. Answer them he has, fundamentally altering the way he plays the game in order to survive, and, thrive—Cooke has more points than penalty minutes this season, a career-first.
If Crosby’s going to outrun a third bout of concussion symptoms, he may need to alter his style of play as well.
“I guess I wouldn’t be totally honest (if I said) I don’t feel [nervous about the possibility of another injury],” Dan Bylsma said after Wednesday’s practice. “But I’ve felt that way about every player on our bench at some point in time.”
Crosby’s first return was marked by a stubborn willingness to play the game as he always had—hard along the boards, tenacious on the cycle, relentlessly spinning off defenders below the goal line in order to get to the front of the net. Crosby turned himself into one of the game’s preeminent goal-scorers by planting himself down low and creating offense from behind the goal line.
It’s a productive place to play, but one of the most dangerous. No area of the NHL sheet invites as much contact as the low boards. It was a hit from Tampa Bay’s Victor Hedman along the low-boards that put Crosby out for good last January, and an errant elbow from David Krejci in another battle along the high-boards was the most likely culprit for the second onset of symptoms.
In limiting Crosby’s time with third-line duties, placing him on the point of the power play and pairing him with two of the club’s more ferocious forecheckers, the Pens are forcing Sid’s hand, at least early, in the direction of change.
It’s not the first time Crosby has adjusted his game.
Crosby entered the league as a gifted playmaker, but wasn’t always excellent in the faceoff circle. He picked a summer to work specifically on his faceoffs, and the returns were immediate. Sid has since then been one of the league’s best on the dot.
In the 2009 postseason, Crosby set a goal-scoring pace that was a far cry from his usual tendencies to dish and assist. Before 2009, he never finished a season with 40 goals. He followed up with a 51-goal regular season in 2009-10. Last year, he was on pace for 64 markers before being hurt.
In the past, Sid has adapted his game to address areas of need, and often with smashing success. But those improvements were just gravy on top of an already solid game. Crosby didn’t have to score at a Rocket Richard pace to contribute offensively. The team already had its defensive center in the board-to-board wingspan of Jordan Staal.
The concussion saga is going to force a change. Crosby needs to buy into that sense of change with the all-in attitude that Cooke took in remaking his physical game this year, growing pains notwithstanding.
“I was getting frustrated at myself,” Cooke admitted of his reeducation. “I was screaming at the refs. I was turning away from legal checks. At the time I watched a lot of video with our video [coordinator], Jim Britt. We watched a lot of video of me skating all that way and then turning away. I didn’t trust the situation. I was struggling to stay focused on what I had to do, but I put in enough time watching and got it straightened out.”
Is anyone going to be upset with Crosby for spending a little more time floating high above the circles while Cooke and Kennedy get their noses dirty down low? Or for seeing a drop from his better-than-1.5 PPG pace while he adjusts to life with a little less contact?
Leaving Crosby up high on the power play is an indication that the coaches are A) happy with their down-low scorers of Malkin, Neal and Kunitz and B) they believe Crosby can be effective even when removed from his preferred scoring areas.
The Penguins have two scoring lines to fill the net and unlimited grinders to play the low-boards, crash-bang cycle game. What they haven’t had, in any abundance, is their captain.
If limiting his minutes and sheltering him in the open areas of the ice are the first steps in making this comeback a lasting one, they’re the right ones.
After all, if anyone can make the considerable shift of being taken out of their net-front kitchen and adapt to life above the circles, it’s Crosby. |
Tolls to cross the Severn Bridge and Second Severn Crossing into Wales will increase in the New Year.
From 1 January cars and motor caravans will pay £6.70 - up 10p - while tolls for small goods vehicles and small buses will rise by 20p to £13.40.
Severn River Crossing raises the prices each year in line with inflation.
Labour MP Jessica Morden said the toll was now nearing the minimum wage, but UK ministers plan to halve the tolls in 2018.
Prices for heavy goods vehicles and buses will rise by 20p to £20.
The average increase is 1.3%, according to the operating company Severn River Crossing plc.
The Severn Bridges Act 1992 allows for the tolls to be amended annually with the agreement of the UK Department for Transport.
Ms Morden, who is MP for Newport East, said: "For many of my constituents on the Tories' minimum wage, the cost of travelling across the bridge is now almost equivalent to an hour's pay, and is actually above it for people under 21.
"That means they are effectively losing an hour's pay every day that they cross the bridge."
The government's National Living Wage is currently £7.20, while the minimum wage is £6.95 for 21 to 24-year-olds and £5.55 for 18 to 20-year-olds.
Ms Morden added that the UK government had yet to explain what its plans were for when the bridges return to public ownership - expected around 2018.
"All we know is that the government have announced that the tolls will come down next year when the contract comes to an end, but there is still no sign of the public consultation that was promised," she said.
Labour's Shadow Welsh Secretary Jo Stevens said: "With these higher toll costs about to hit people who are already having to tighten their belts, we now need absolute certainty from the UK government about what exactly is going to happen."
'Tax on Wales'
In March, the then Chancellor George Osborne announced in his budget that the toll charges would be halved in 2018, when the bridges were expected to have been returned to UK government ownership.
Welsh MPs were told by Transport Minister Andrew Jones in July that the switch may come as early as October 2017.
Mr Jones said tolls may still be charged to cover maintenance, but added: "They are not a cash system... to fund a scheme in Kent or a scheme somewhere else."
In November, assembly members from all four party groups backed a call to scrap the tolls, condemned by UKIP AM Mark Reckless as a "tax on Wales".
However, Labour backbencher Lee Waters argued that the tolls should be kept and used to fund the South Wales Metro project to boost public transport.
A UK government spokesman said it had "announced its intention to halve the tolls on the River Severn Crossings".
"We will launch a consultation on the Severn Bridge and confirm further details in due course," he added. |
Instead, we're off to Parramatta Stadium, and if you've got a ticket, well done. If you don't, good luck. From a theatrical point of view, it would have been marvellous to stage the game at a bigger stadium. But could there be a more fitting place for the Wanderers to etch their name on the Premier's Plate? Most definitely not. And how they will love to rub Sydney's noses in it, too, if they do come away with the win. It has the potential to be one of the most memorable days in the long history of football in the region. You can just about bet that the Wanderers will sell more reserve seat memberships next season than any club except Melbourne Victory, too. After all, who would dare want to miss out on anything like this season? It is an incredible legacy being written by Popovic and his men.
But the stick in the mud could well be the Sky Blues - and how they would love to spoil the party. A win would not only deny their rivals the title but would ensure their participation in the finals. With the way the finals are structured this year, there is every chance they would meet the Wanderers in the second or third week (that's also a grand final this year) of the play-offs. That's a prospect beyond salivating. As if Sydney didn't have enough to play for already? They've got form, too, having gone west in round three and pinched the points after Alessandro Del Piero converted the rebound after Ante Covic blocked his penalty. It may well be Del Piero who needs to produce his best for Sydney to have a chance. He wasn't at his best against Melbourne Victory on Saturday night and that probably cost the Sky Blues all three points.
It is tough to criticise the Italian, for all he has contributed this season, but he will be stewing over that missed penalty and a late chance he would usually bury with his eyes closed. There are so many sub-plots beyond Del Piero that, no matter what happens, it's going to be a derby to remember. Sydney face a desperate Brisbane Roar in the final round - in front of a vocal Suncorp Stadium crowd, no less - so they really need to push the Wanderers all the way. They need to be smarter than Melbourne Heart, who, after an inventive opening half, soon collapsed into the Wanderers' trap at AAMI Park. Popovic's men hung in when it mattered most and when they advanced to a 2-1 lead, put their foot on the hosts' throat.
Following Iacopo La Rocca's delightful curling effort to seal the win, only fine saves by Andrew Redmayne from shots by Mark Bridge and La Rocca again prevented the score line from becoming embarrassing. That's how the Wanderers do business. That the conditions (atrocious) and the venue didn't bother them shows how resilient they've become. They will go in as favourites for the derby and every observer around the country will expect them to take the points. Western Sydney have met every challenge so far and answered every critic. Loading But it should be noted that Sydney have, in recent seasons, been at their best when their backs were against the wall. That's where they stand right now.
Let the countdown begin. |
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June 30, 2014, 5:07 AM GMT / Updated June 30, 2014, 6:38 AM GMT
The not-for-profit Mars One venture wants to send humans on one-way trips to Mars in the 2020s, but first it wants to send experimental packages to the Red Planet — potentially including the first interplanetary advertisements.
You could even put your company's name on the robotic lander that's scheduled to carry the experiments to Mars in 2018.
"What better way for an unknown phone brand to establish worldwide brand awareness and a image of innovation than by purchasing the naming rights for the first private Mars lander?" Bas Lansdorp, co-founder and CEO of Mars One, told NBC News in an email.
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On Monday, the Dutch-based venture began soliciting proposals for experiments to fly on the lander — including four projects that would demonstrate technologies for future human missions, an educational project, a university-based experiment that would be selected in an online vote, and two experiments that would be flown for a fee.
Those last two experiments could address a scientific question or a technological challenge, or they could be part of "marketing or publicity campaigns," Mars One said in its announcement. It'd be up to the buyers to suggest what they want to do, and how much they'd pay to do it. "These payload opportunities are for sale to the highest bidder," Mars One said.
The 2018 lander is considered a precursor for the multibillion-dollar human missions that Mars One intends to begin in 2025. More than 700 volunteers are vying to be sent to Mars with no guarantee that they'll ever return to Earth. The crew members are supposed to be selected, four at a time, during a series of reality-TV competitions.
Mars One hasn't said how much the lander mission would cost, but it's based on the same design used for the $420 million Phoenix Mars Lander that NASA launched in 2007. A similar design is being used for NASA's InSight lander, which is to be launched to Mars in 2016. The price tag for the InSight mission is $425 million, excluding launch costs.
Mars One project signs deal with TV producers
Lockheed Martin, which built the spacecraft for Phoenix and InSight, is producing a concept study for Mars One's lander mission. That work helped Mars One figure out how many experiments will fly, and how much room each of them can be given on the lander's 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter-wide) instrument deck. Now the venture is looking for specific proposals to fill out the deck.
"The ideas that are adopted will not only be used on the lander in 2018, but will quite possibly provide the foundation for the first human colony on Mars," Arno Wielders, Mars One's co-founder and chief technical officer, said in Monday's announcement. "For anyone motivated by human exploration, there can be no greater honor than contributing to a manned mission to Mars.” |
If an accidental disclosure from EA is correct, the PS4 has outsold Xbox One almost two to one
Total sales of the Xbox One haven’t yet hit 20m, if the chief financial officer of EA is to be believed. That’s not a favourable comparison to the PS4, which has sold 35.9m according to Sony.
Even though Microsoft quietly stopped telling the world total Xbox One sales in October, it seems it hasn’t been able to keep the rest of the games industry so quiet. In EA’s case, it appears it ended up spilling the beans accidentally.
Blake Jorgensen, EA’s CFO, told investors during the company’s third-quarter earnings call that the combined lifetime sales of the Xbox One and Playstation 4 was about 55m units. Although Jorgensen didn’t break down the split, Sony, which regularly reports sales for the PS4, provides enough information to reverse-engineer the Xbox One figure.
In January, Sony revealed that the PS4 had sold 35.9m, meaning that the sales for the Xbox One – if both EA’s and Sony’s figures are accurate – stand at around 19.1m.
“I think our business seems to be operating pretty consistent as it has been over the last couple of years,” Jorgensen said on the call. “The console purchases are up through the end of calendar year 2015. Our estimate is 55m units out there, which has exceeded virtually everyone’s forecast for the year and now almost 50% higher than previous console cycle so, all of that is very, very positive.”
While the Xbox One lags behind the Playstation 4 in overall sales, Microsoft also has its dominance of PC gaming to rely on. In March, the company said that the latest Xbox would likely be the last of its kinda, with the intention being to unify consoles and PCs using future versions of Windows. The head of the Xbox division, Phil Spencer, said “building out a complete gaming ecosystem for Universal Windows Applications” was the company’s focus in the future.
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment. |
WCBS TV reports that Lee Evans, an early suspect in the 1978 disappearance of five Newark, New Jersey teenagers, has been arrested for their murder along with another as-yet-unidentified man. The Associated Press reports that Evans had earlier been eliminated as a suspect after passing a polygraph test:
The boys, Melvin Pittman and Ernest Taylor, who were both 17, and Alvin Turner, Randy Johnson, and Michael McDowell, who were all 16, were last seen on a busy street near a park where they had played basketball on Aug. 20, 1978. They were with a carpenter, Lee Evans, who routinely hired teens to help him with odd jobs, police have said. Evans told police at the time that he dropped off the boys on a street corner near an ice cream parlor. Later that night, Michael McDowell returned home and changed clothes, then returned to a waiting pickup truck with at least one other boy inside. That was the last confirmed sighting of any of the teens. Evans was repeatedly interviewed in the months after the disappearances but passed a polygraph examination and was cleared as a suspect.
If Evans is indeed guilty of killing the “Clinton Avenue Five,” then this is yet another case where misplaced reliance on the pseudoscience of polygraphy led to investigatorial misdirection. Such cases include those of “Green River Killer” Gary Leon Ridgway, “Woodchipper Killer” Richard Crafts, “Angel of Death” Charles Cullen, and Dennis Donohue, the likely killer of Buffalo, New York teenager Crystallynn Girard. All passed polygraphs regarding their crimes.
Update: The Newark Star-Ledger reports that the second man arrested was Lee Evans’s cousin, Philander Hampton, 53, of Jersey City. |
On May 7, it was revealed that popular groupwould be holding their 15th anniversary live concerts titled "" on September 19th and 20th in Oahu, Hawaii.
SEE ALSO: Arashi talk about their hiatus at press conference
Reportedly, they will set up a special open-air stage with a view of the ocean in the suburbs of Honolulu, and a total of 30,000 audience members will attend the 2-day live concerts.
For Japanese fan club members attending the concerts, there will be a tour to Hawaii with a charter flight, and also, there will be reserved seats for the local fans.
Hawaii is a special place for Arashi members, as they held their debut press conference on the cruise ship off the coast of Honolulu, back on September 15 1999. After the debut, Arashi's live concert in Hawaii was once planned for November 2001, however, it was canceled in consequence of the September 11 attacks.
Although they held a fan event in Hawaii in 2002, they never had a chance to hold a live concert there.
Member Sakurai Sho commented, "That's the place of our start, so we always wanted to do that. We were wishing to hold an anniversary event in Hawaii." Fellow member Aiba Masaki added, "I want people who have been supporting us from way back to come to the concert. I want to share the memory with them."
Sakurai also revealed his idea for the concert, "Since it will be by the ocean, we want to do something special which can be done only there, such as entering the stage from the ocean or sky."
Source: Sanspo (1+2+3) & Daily Sports Online (1+2)
Image: Johnny's net
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Image caption Syrian state TV has shown images of weapons inspectors at work
Chemical weapons inspectors in Syria say they have completed nearly half of their work in the country.
A spokesman for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical weapons (OPCW) said the team was making good progress in its mission to inspect more than than 20 sites.
However he said security remained a concern for the 60 inspectors - who have been in Syria since 1 October.
"A few" sites remained inaccessible to the team for security reasons, he said.
The OPCW's mission to rid Syria of chemical weapons was set up by a UN resolution.
It followed international outrage at a chemical weapons attack near the Syrian capital Damascus in August.
The organisation's work in Syria marks the first time the international chemical weapons watchdog - which won this year's Nobel Peace Prize - has been asked to oversee the destruction of a weapons armoury during a conflict.
Hostage released
Image caption Syrian state media showed Canadian Carl Campeau, centre, being handed over in Damascus
'Cause for concern'
The OPCW, which is based in The Hague, said the team in Syria had completed nearly 50% of their work of inspecting sites and destroying equipment.
Syria's chemical weapons Syria believed to possess 1,000 tonnes of chemical agents including sarin and more potent nerve agent VX
US believes arsenal can be " delivered by aircraft, ballistic missile, and artillery rockets "
" Syria acceded to Chemical Weapons Convention on 14 September; it signed Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972 but never ratified it Chemical stockpile How to destroy chemical arsenal Q&A: Disarmament deal 21 August attack: What we know
Under the UN resolution, Syria's chemical weapons production equipment must be destroyed by 1 November and stockpiles must be disposed of by mid-2014.
The deadline for Syria to submit its "destruction plan" was 15 November, the OPCW said on Thursday.
OPCW spokesman Michael Luhan told the BBC that there had been a number of security incidents over the last few days which had given the inspectors "cause for concern".
On Wednesday night there had been a mortar attack near the hotel the inspectors are staying in Damascus and over the weekend a number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were detonated in cars nearby, he said.
Meanwhile, Syrian state TV reports that a Canadian United Nations worker, missing since February, has been released in Damascus.
Carl Campeau had been working as a legal adviser to the UN Disengagement Observer Force that patrols the ceasefire line between Syria and Israel in the Golan Heights.
The Syrian government says the Canadian was kidnapped by rebels but has now been handed over to a UN representative.
Image caption The UN confirmed that the nerve agent sarin was used in an attack on the Ghouta agricultural belt
An international conference on a political solution to Syria's conflict could take place in Geneva on 23-24 November, Qadri Jamil, Syria's deputy prime minister, said on Thursday.
He made the announcement after talks at the foreign ministry in Russia, Syria's main international ally.
More than 100,000 people have been killed in the fighting that has ravaged Syria for two-and-a-half years, according to the UN.
More than two million people have fled Syria and some 4.5 million have been forced from their homes within the country.
Casualty figures vary for the chemical weapons attack on the Ghouta agricultural belt around Syria's capital, Damascus, on 21 August.
It was estimated to have killed hundreds of people. The United States and other Western powers blamed the attack on President Bashar al-Assad's forces.
But Mr Assad accuses Syrian rebels of being behind it. |
From a field of more than 1,700 entries, the winner of the controversial Guggenheim Helsinki museum competition was revealed this week. The proposal the jury selected, named ‘‘Art in the City” and designed by the relatively unknown, Paris-based architecture firm Moreau Kusunoki, was praised for its sensitivity to the museum’s site along the Finnish capital city’s South Harbor.
The design envisions not one building, but rather a series of nine, low-profile buildings around a central “lookout tower” or lighthouse—or as the 11-member jury described it, “a fragmented, non-hierarchical campus of linked pavilions where art and society could meet and intermingle.”
Moreau Kusunoki Architects Low profile attraction.
Compared to other museums in the Guggenheim franchise, like Frank Gehry’s showy architectural bauble in Bilbao, Spain, or the expansive Guggenheim complex in Abu Dhabi, Helsinki’s design is fairly discreet, with references to the aesthetic of the patron saint of Finnish architecture and design, Alvar Aalto. The most distinctive feature may be the ebony “charred timber” façade, meant to symbolize “the process of regeneration that occurs when forests burn and then grow back stronger.” This is Moreau Kusunoki’s material metaphor for resilience—an allusion to Finland’s prolonged economic slump.
Riitta Supperi
The economic angle is key here. When Helsinki’s city planners bought into the Guggenheim franchise, they were hoping for the so-called “Bilbao effect,” referring to the idea that a vibrant cultural center can be the linchpin to a city’s economic renewal, as famously happened in Spain’s northern city when it invested in the Guggenheim Bilbao. Since then, the Guggenheim has been actively franchising and commodifying its name and model, earning a reputation for being the Starbucks of museums—a veritable outlet for “fast culture.” Helsinki was originally set to pay Guggenheim $30 million in licensing fees alone.
Architect and urbanist Michael Sorkin has been a vocal critic of the Guggenheim Helsinki project. Sorkin is co-organizer of the “Next Helsinki,” an open call for ideas for an “anti-competition” that invited architects, urbanists, landscape architects, artists, environmentalists, students, activists, poets, even politicians to submit counterproposals for the site—anything but another Guggenheim.
“Helsinki is the brand, not Guggenheim,” Sorkin tells Quartz.
“We initiated this project out of a sense of both outrage and love,” he explains. “Outrage at the march of the homogenizing multi-national brand culture emblematized by the imperial Guggenheim franchise … [and love] from our mutual affection for Helsinki, from a sense that it is a singular place, unique in setting, form, and culture.”
Sorkin also points out the irony in the Guggenheim Helsinki competition strategy. It seems that city officials bought into Guggenheim’s brand promise essentially without the two key ingredients to generate the Bilbao effect miracle: an iconic, if not gaudy, building design, and a recognizable starchitect’s name like Gehry—who is a brand unto himself.
Riitta Supperi Hiroko Kusunoki and Nicolas Moreau with a 3-D Model of their winning proposal.
If approved, it seems that Helsinki is about to sink $147 million into a rather subtle, low profile museum complex designed by a couple of undoubtedly talented, but still unknown (and henceforth media-shy) architects. Husband-and-wife duo Nicolas Moreau and Hiroko Kusunoki have intentionally avoided all publicity while working on the project, espousing a philosophy ”that architecture is best conceived in reserve and introspection, which are favourable to the emergence of poetic visions.” |
Pick over what's left of Rutgers University's reputation, and you'll quickly find that a pair of professors are largely responsible for blocking former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from addressing the university's commencement. They are a professor of poetry and a professor of history.
The first is Distinguished Professor François Cornilliat. The Frenchman says that his "research mainly focuses on the evolving role of poetry and poetics in the rhetorical culture of the Renaissance." That's ironic, given how the Renaissance was a time when Europe awakened from the medieval period of superstition to develop the scientific method and examine ideas on evidence. Professor Cornilliat's actions in blocking Rice's speech indicate that he has no interest in ideas other than those he already agrees with, whatever contrary evidence may exist. He also wants others blocked from hearing evidence that might not comport with his own worldview. He may consider himself a Renaissance man, but his actions place him more comfortably among the medievalists.
His professor page at Rutgers is about as gassy as one might expect. It claims that the Frenchman has "worked on the use of verbal ornament in the epideictic verse and prose of the so-called 'Grands Rhétoriqueurs,' on the conception(s) of truth, praise, pleasure, beauty and persuasion developed by later poets from Marot to the Pléiade, and on the experience of 'poetic failure.' My last book studied the notion of subject matter in Renaissance poetry from Petrarch to Ronsard, which was another way to examine how poetry manages (or fails) to promote itself as a specific art; areas of investigation included genre theory and practice, the antagonistic roles of glory and love, and the poet's actual or imagined relationship with the prince."
He has apparently spent some time in culinary training. He sure knows how to build a word salad.
Professor Cornilliat distinguished himself a few years back when SUNY was facing budget cuts. In an open letter he titled "SUNY Under Siege," the Frenchman called the university's decisions to cut some departments "brutal," and ironically called on the university to exhibit "human decency and institutional fairness." Those are values that Professor Cornilliat did not extend to Professor Rice.
The other professor who led the protests against Rice, the first black woman in history to represent American foreign policy to the world, is Distinguished Professor Rudolph M. Bell. Bell is a history professor, who writes "I work in all aspects of Italian history but with particular attention to religion, gender, popular culture, mysticism, and the history of the book."
Bell hasn't left quite the hypocritical paper trail as his colleague, though both obviously share an intolerance for views they do not happen to agree with.
He is the author of a book, called Holy Anorexia, which seeks to establish a link between the Christian idea of fasting for the sake of spiritual cleansing, and the very secular idea of tossing one's already eaten cookies for the sake of trying to look like a skinny supermodel. I don't even have to read beyond the blurb to know that Professor Rudolph really isn't onto anything. The connection is facile, at best.
Neither Cornillat nor Bell evidently had any problem with their university, which shut its doors to a former secretary of state because they wanted it to, opening those same doors -- and the university's wallet, to the tune of $32,000 -- to Jersey Shore's Snooki. |
– So after all the flap, the fine and the folderol,was asked if he would consider a simultaneous resting of the Hall of Fame wing of his roster again.
“I don’t have a crystal ball,” he replied.
Too bad, because then he might be able to gaze into the future and give us a peek at Tim Duncan still tearing it up in the 2022-23 season against LeBron James Jr. or Michael Jordan III.
Is there a reason to think that The Big Fundamental at 46 won’t still be teaching the ABCs of the front court game he’s drilling into the heads of NBA’s current class at 36?
Ask Marc Gasol.
“He’s a handful,” said the Grizzlies center after getting posterized by Duncan in the first quarter Saturday night. “He knows how to adjust his game to himself and his team knows how to bring it to him in the right spots.”
When Duncan got the ball on the left block, wheeled and threw down a monster one-handed slam midway through the first quarter, that spot was smack in the middle of Gasol’s forehead. It was a stunning display of quickness and power that brought an uncharacteristic yelp from Duncan and transported most of those inside the AT&T back nearly a decade.
“That was MVP Timmy,” said point guard Tony Parker. “Every single time we threw it to him, and every single time he scored.”
Parker was talking about the 21-point first half by Duncan on Saturday night, but could have been referring to any time in the first month of the season.
Just 18 months after he looked like a tired old man shouting at the kids to keep off the grass in a playoff loss to Memphis, Duncan has become healed, hearty and turned into the basketball version of Methuselah.
Here’s how his start stacks up to the seasons of former NBA greats at the same age:
Duncan, 2012-13 — 18.9 ppg, 10.1 rpg, 53.7 FG%.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 1983-84 — 21.5 ppg, 7.5 rpg., 57.8 FG%.
Karl Malone, 1999-2000 — 25.5 ppg, 9.5 rpg, 50.9 FG%.
Robert Parish, 1989-90 — 15.7 ppg, 10.1 rpg, 58 FG%.
Wilt Chamberlain, 1972-73 — 13.2 ppg., 18.6 rpg.,72.7 FG%.
Larry Bird, 1992-93 — first year retired.
Bill Russell, 1970-71 — retired two years.
It is stunning to compare edition of Duncan that looked like the faded yellow pages of an old newspaper in that playoff wipeout in Memphis two seasons ago to the slick, online e-zine Timmy who is the wireless hotspot in the middle of the Spurs lineup today.
Pop always says its just about the way Duncan takes care of himself, carefully watches everything he puts into his body.
Duncan lost weight two summers ago, worked on his flexibility and has come back now with a vengeance. When his string of 13 consecutive All-Star Games appearances ended last season, Duncan didn’t get mad. He just got rejuvenated and got better.
Is there any other single reason to explain the league changing the All-Star ballot this season from selecting forwards, centers and guards to just frontcourt and backcourt than finding a way to accommodate him? If the fans don’t vote him in this season, will the coaches of the Western Conference be foolish enough to leave him off the roster again?
Of course, the only thing that really matters to Duncan is getting the Spurs back to their usual 50-plus wins and another crack at the playoffs and that fifth championship.
Two years ago, Duncan and the Spurs were supposedly on the downward path and the Grizzlies a young team on the rise. A season ago, Duncan and the Spurs held a 2-0 lead on Oklahoma City in the Western Conference finals and lost the series to the other ascendant power.
Now the Thunder are learning about life without James Harden and the Grizzlies are learning that you still can’t walk into San Antonio and expect to see anything but an ageless Duncan.
The Spurs are a factor in the West because he is. We don’t need a crystal ball to see that.
Category: HT News / Tags: , Bill Russell, Fran Blinebury, Gregg Popovich, Grizzlies, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Larry Bird, Marc Gasol, Robert Parish, Spurs, Thunder, Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Wilt Chamberlain / 79 Comments on Duncan Having Season For The Ageless / |
CeBIT 2011: The Kolab Perspective
Google Calendar and GMail have brought the groupware concept out of the office and into everyone’s daily personal routine. In an odd way, so has Facebook. Has this had an impact on how groupware is presented at CeBIT?
As you walk around Hall 2 you will find many alternatives to the market dominator; Exchange. Each has its own target audience. Some are web-focused, some are focused on Outlook compatibility, some on phone synching… One must be careful to choose wisely so as to dodge the neo-proprietary bullet, of course.
These days almost all personal and corporate infrastructures are heterogeneous. Groupware needs to play nice with Windows, Mac, Linux, MeeGo, Symbian, Android… Historically the answer to this was to move to the web as your primary client. Neat.
But what do you do when you’re on a train or living in an area with poor telecoms? That snazzy-looking webclient is not so cool now, eh?
Kolab, of course, has a webclient; Horde. But the magic lies in its smartclient; Kontact. It runs natively on all the major desktops, Windows Mobile 6.5 and on MeeGo… For all these platforms Kontact delivers full offline capability with an indexed and easily searched cache of all your content. This is important.
There is a Kolab-shaped hole in the groupware market and it looks a bit like this… Kolab is /the/ groupware for those wanting to migrate away from proprietary desktops to completely Free infrastructure. This migration will inevitably increase heterogeneity for a period… So the last thing you want to do is maintain multiple different clients for your groupware. By treating the client and server as equally important, Kolab does for groupware what LibreOffice does for productivity suites.
So whether you want to run Kolab on a Sheeva plug for your family, or in a server farm for all the school children in your region, Kolab provides the peace of mind that you will always have your data everywhere… Even if you decide to migrate your desktop later.
This is good news for users; Kolab provides scaling on the server and flexibility in the client. It is great news for Free Software; one more migration path from the proprietary desktop is handled.
The culmination of all these points? When walking around CeBIT, do you want to be sold an inflexible open-core product? Or would you choose the peace of mind that the collective experience of the Kolab Groupware Solution with all its associated communities such as KDE can deliver? |
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers found more than 34 pounds of cocaine within the back seats of a smuggling vehicle.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection found over 13,700 pounds of marijuana hidden in a shipment of bell peppers
- Authorities say more than 13,700 pounds of marijuana hidden in a tractor trailer with a load of bell peppers has been seized in southern Arizona.
Officials with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the Port of Nogales say the marijuana had an estimated value of more than $6.8 million.
The big rig underwent a secondary inspection Saturday at the Mariposa Commercial Facility. CBP officers searched the semi with the help of a drug sniffing canine and found the marijuana hidden among the bell peppers.
On Saturday night, officers at the Dennis DeConcini Crossing used a drug-sniffing dog to search a suspicious SUV. They reported finding more than 34 pounds of cocaine hidden in the truck's back seats.
Authorities say the cocaine had an estimated value of $386,000.
The drivers of the vehicles were arrested and turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations. Their names were not released.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
First, the vinyl itself through disc one and starting disc two is nearly perfect. This pressing is "hot". Loud in co.parison to almost everything excepting few that arent known to be or MFSL. My example is also quite clean and clear. About the muddy comments others have left see the last paragraph.
The only thing to note is there is a little lead in noise on disc 1 side one and disc 1 side two the lead it is AGGRESSIVELY sloped so, unless I am extremely careful with an already nice and slow cueing mechanism, starting side two will just slam the stylus mid initial riff. No drama at all on disc 2 side one...
Now I happen to have original mastering, original pressing singles of Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova, and She's Electric. All three see regular enough playback to where I am comfortable making some commentary on the remaster vs the originals. I can understand why one might think this pressing is muddy in comparison because the first think I thought hearing "Hello" and everything so far (ready to flip to play disc 2, side two) is that the moved the electric guitars along with the acoustic, and brought the bass forward some.
I am not sure about the vocals. Seems to vary from track to track what was done... that's my initial assessment. Everything sounds well defined and clear but it is quite a different sound and a slightly different feel vs the original mastering on my vinyl singles and CD. I haven't a digital copy of the remaster yet so I can't directly a/b this album to the results through a Schiit Audio Yggdrasil DAC and the rest of the audio chain shared.
Now that I have played through all four sides I think my brain has adjusted to the mix and I like it fine. I could even see it growing on me.
I rate this as a No Brainer LP add if you are partial to the album and have a turntable
Morning Glory sounds particularly good here |
Editor's note: Unless otherwise stated, all names in this article have been changed.
On a short stretch of Market Street, sandwiched between the headquarters of Twitter and Uber, one of San Francisco’s most lucrative economies runs its daily course. Here, in the street, men lean against walls in the shadows, muttering their wares to passersby:
“Weed...Hey, you want some marijuana, man?...I got Addies...Roxies...”
In many ways, they are consummate salesmen: To evade patrolling cops, they often rely on subtlety rather than obtrusiveness. They are experts at identifying their customer base. They realize, just as lucidly as the men in the offices above them do, that if a product is good enough, it doesn’t need to be heavily marketed.
Throughout the city of San Francisco, there are hotspots for certain drugs. Venture to Haight-Ashbury, and you’ll find a variety of psychedelics, ranging from psilocybin (“shrooms”) to the mind-bending Dimethyltryptamine (DMT). In the Tenderloin, just a few paces from the police station, crack, heroin, PCP, and even bath salts can be had — sometimes all from the same dealer. On Market Street, the specialty is weed, though with a bit of querying, a wide variety of prescription pills are ripe for purchase.
These illicit drug sales represent a massive market in the city — one with an estimated value of $400 million. Despite this market’s open-air nature, its economics are largely underground: only those who are a part of the network understand the complex menu of prices.
To better understand what drugs cost on the street, we decided to talk to a few ex-drug dealers and users who are familiar with the city’s drug landscape. We then took their answers and cross-referenced them with drug pricing discussion forums, like r/Drugs, Erowid, Streetrx, and Bluelight.
Obviously, there is a wide range in price for any given drug, depending on a number of factors: who you buy from, how good your hook-up is, the drug’s purity and quality, and even the day of the week. The prices below represent averages for common drugs in the city, as purchased from a dealer on the street.
*Ecstasy pills typically mix MDMA with caffeine or another substance, and purity levels vary; all pill listings here represent one unit.
Typically, prescription pills are the cheapest, ranging from $3 to $7. Since these pills are so cheap, turning a profit is all about moving big volumes.
“Most of the time, the pill dealers are moving 10 or 20 pills per sale,” Cody, an ex-street dealer, tells us. “If you know what you’re doing, you can usually make around $800 in a day...one year, during the Gay Pride Parade, I made $2,500 in three hours.”
Pill dealers are particularly apt at identifying when users are going through a withdrawal, and use this information to toggle the price. “If someone looked sick,” says Cody, “I’d charge them twice as much.”
It’s easy to get a script for anything — the hard part is finding a “shady” doctor who is willing to both reliably supply the pills and completely abandon any faithfulness to the Hippocratic Oath. For Cody, one fruitful connection led to a formidable business operation.
Vicodin pills exchange hands in front of Episcopal Community Services, a homeless resource center at Howard and 8th Streets; Photos: Zachary Crockett
Ecstasy, a man-made pill, is also particularly lucrative.
“There aren’t many manufacturers,” says Bryce, an ex-user/dealer. “The people producing them are making them in the hundreds of thousands.” Back in the day, Bryce would buy 1,000 ecstasy pills at a time (known as a “boat”) for $3,000, flip the majority of them for a profit, and still have enough left over for his personal use.
A once-ubiquitous club drug combining 100-200 milligrams of MDMA with “uppers” (amphetamine, caffeine, etc.), ecstasy has since been usurped in popularity by Molly, a pure MDMA equivalent. Likewise, OxyContin, an opiate that is released gradually over a 12-hour time period, has been upped by Roxicodone — essentially the same drug, except with a much shorter kick-in time.
While pills generally hover around similar price ranges, “harder” drugs fluctuate tremendously, mainly based on purity.
“In the Tenderloin, you get can dope [heroin] for $40 to $50 per gram — but they cut it up so much that it tastes like vinegar, smells like shit, and barely gets you high,” says Bryce. “If you buy from a dealer you know, it’s more like $100 per gram, but the quality is much, much higher.”
Cocaine and crack present a similar case. While both are essentially the same drug, one is considered “purer” while the other is more commonly adulterated and cut with chemicals. “Crack doesn’t have much pure cocaine in it,” one user tells us, “but you can consume less of it and get equally high as you can with cocaine, and it’s cheaper.”
A user smoking crack cocaine
In San Francisco, there also exists a strong psychedelic contingency — a group of explorers known as “psychonauts.” Randy, a 27-year-old who has since stopped using, was once a regular user of Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a drug capable of “transmitting users to a dimension of reality that you couldn’t even imagine.”
“There isn’t too much DMT on the street — usually, you just get it from friends,” he clarifies. “Psychedelics generally attract very intelligent people who are interested in chemistry, and who want to explore the mind a lot.”
With a little guidance, drugs like DMT can be synthesized relatively easily at home, but measuring doses requires relatively high-powered scales that measure down to the 1/100th of a gram. “This stuff is so powerful that the difference between .05 and .08 of a gram is the difference between being okay, and being completely fucked,” adds Randy. “You really have to be careful, or you might not come back the same.”
On the other end of the spectrum, dealers of weed (arguably the city’s least harmful drug) are usually fairly liberal with their measurements.
Bryce, the aforementioned ex-pill dealer, also once dabbled in dealing weed on Golden Gate Park’s “Hippie Hill.” He never carried more than one ounce on him at any given time. From a large bag, he’d eyeball the typical purchase — one-eighth of an ounce — and covertly dump it in the customer’s hand on a side-street.
Bryce typically carried no more than a "zip" (or an ounce) of weed at any given time
Using this method, he often gave out extra, but avoided the brunt of legal danger: In California, if you’re caught with any amount of weed up to one ounce (28.5 grams) for personal use, it is only an infraction that comes with a $100 fee; if you’re caught with an intent to sell (including pre-distributing your weed into little baggies), you can be charged with a felony that is punished with thousands of dollars in fines and up to five years in jail. By staying “smart,” Bryce was able to turn a decent profit.
“You buy maybe five or six ounces at a time, for $150 each,” he says, “then break them into eighths, sell for $40 to $50 each (more for tourists), and get about $200 in profit per ounce.”
Bryce's prices are typical on the street, though it's not unheard of for eighths to go for as little as $30 and as much as $75, depending on the strain. This range is fairly consistent with San Francisco's approved medical dispensaries, where prices range from $35 to $80 (for secret, or more potent strains) — though in general, the city's dispensaries offer weed that is both cheaper and of a higher quality than the average bud sold by people like Bryce.
"I was selling Mexican stuff," he admits. "Obviously, it wasn't as good as what you'd get in a club, but I charged more because the market rate is different on the street. Most people buying out there aren't looking for an artisanal experience; they just want to get high."
***
In San Francisco, 13% of all residents report regularly using recreational drugs — 5% higher than the national average. The city has been unequivocally deemed “number one” for drug use in studies conducted by RAND and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — and contrary to popular belief, it’s not just junkies who are fueling this market.
Rehab centers around the Bay Area have reported an increase in upper middle class entrants, many of whom work in tech.
"I've had [people] from Apple, from Twitter, from Facebook, from Google, from Yahoo — it's bad out there," one addictions coach told The San Jose Mercury News. "And it's a lot worse than what people think because it's all covered up so well. If it gets out that a company's employees are doing drugs, it paints a horrible picture." She estimates that she’s helped more than 200 tech workers get over addictions to “everything from cocaine and heroin to painkillers likeo oxycodone and stimulants like Adderall.”
Prescription opiates like hydrocodone are widely administered in the San Francisco Bay Area — and widely abused; via johnofhammond (Flickr)
"What I'm seeing at meetings is a lot of people getting hooked, courtesy of their doctors," another worker adds. "You see very few of the old-school addicts; most of these are college-educated folks who either started abusing pain meds after an injury, or because of the stress of these tech jobs they start doing cocaine to stay up and oxycodone to relax. Working 80-hour weeks and making crazy money extracts a terrible toll on you."
Bryce corroborates this: “When you’re dealing, you see all types of people — guys in suits, lawyers, programmer types,” he says. “There’s no one type of person who buys drugs. At the end of the day, they’re all just looking for a fix.”
Though it is nearly impossible to quantify drug use in any given municipality, a rough idea of which drugs are more popular can be had through examination of DEA seizure data. According to the National Forensic Laboratory Information System, methamphetamine has a stronghold over San Francisco — but prescription pills dominate the list of most commonly found drugs:
Data via the DEA (National Forensic Laboratory Information System)
According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the city by the Bay is particularly pill-crazed. Between 2011 and 2013 alone, 5.1 million hydrocodone prescriptions were handed out by doctors, in addition to 370,216 for codeine, 221,208 for morphine, and 271,285 for oxycodone. All of these are highly addictive opiates.
“I felt bad about selling stuff,” admits Bryce, “but the pharmaceutical companies should feel bad too. They’re usually the ones getting people hooked in the first place, and they do it without the fear of going to jail.”
***
For our next post, we examine the strategic merits (or lack thereof) of gratuitous name-dropping. To get notified when we post it → join our email list.
This post was written by Zachary Crockett. You can follow him on Twitter here. |
A view of Wall Street from the steps of Federal Hall in lower Manhattan. A quarter of Wall Street and British financial executives think unethical or illegal conduct is needed to succeed, according to a survey by law firm Labaton Sucharow released Tuesday. (AFP Photo/Timothy A. Clary)
A quarter of Wall Street and British financial executives think unethical or illegal conduct is needed to succeed, according to a survey by law firm Labaton Sucharow released Tuesday.
A full 24 percent of senior managers polled by the New York-based firm said they “may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct in order to be successful.”
And 16 percent admitted they would commit a crime, like insider trading, if they could get away with it.
The survey comes after a string of controversies, legal investigations and denunciations of the financial profession, which is blamed for helping to run the global economy into the ground via the 2008 financial crisis.
“When misconduct is common and accepted by financial services professionals, the integrity of our entire financial system is at risk,” said Jordan Thomas, chair of Labaton Sucharow’s whistleblower representation practice.
The latest controversy to hit the industry has involved allegations that Barclays Bank traders manipulated key inter-bank lending rates that underpin the entire banking system.
The controversy forced Barclays’s chief executive Bob Diamond to step down.
The survey also showed 39 percent of respondents believe their competitors have engaged in illegal or unethical activity.
Thirty percent said their pay or bonuses put pressure on them to violate ethical standards.
One third said securities regulators on both side of the Atlantic are a deterrence.
The survey was conducted in June and included 500 respondents in the Britain and the United States. |
Social Democrats Claim Current Negotiations are Simply Postponing the Inevitable
The Social Democrats have ruled out participation in a minority Government led by either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil.
Social Democrats Co-Leader Catherine Murphy said the party had come to the conclusion that the current exercise of both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael talking to smaller parties and Independents is only postponing the inevitable;
“It is clear there is no possibility of either a majority or a minority Government without some agreement between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and we would actively encourage the two parties to accept that reality. Any discussions regarding policies are meaningless until Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have made a decision about whether or not they can work together in some form of arrangement.”
The Social Democrats welcomed the establishment of all party committee on political reform which is due to meet soon and bring proposals to the Dáil in the coming weeks. This offers the potential for a high level of cooperation among all members of the Dáil and we would propose a similar collaborative approach to tackling the big challenges facing the country in the areas of housing, health and child poverty for example. The Social Democrats believe this collaborative approach can facilitate more constructive engagement by all sides in the 32nd Dáil.
15th March 2016
ENDS
For further information please contact:
Anne-Marie McNally
01-618 3591 / 086-3754315
annemarie.mcnally@socialdemocrats.ie
@amomcnally |
DAVIS (CBS13) – A Davis teenager is using his love for animals to help people in need by breeding service dogs.
A list of color coded collars hangs on the garage wall for each pup. There are nine puppies, eight yellow, one black and mom Deedee is always nearby.
“This is her third litter,” said Josh. “This is a great thing we have done.”
It has been two years now since a then-13-year-old Josh started searching for a bar mitzvah project when he noticed a dog in a Canine Companions for Independence vest.
“I started asking a lot of questions about what they were going through and what it was for,” said Josh.
At 8 weeks old, he got Deedee with plans for her to be a service dog. At 2 years old, he turned her in.
“I was scared she was going to be released to us, not a bad thing, but my vision was for her to help someone,” said Josh.
To his surprise, the news was even better. Deedee was chosen to be a breeding dog.
It’s a labor of love for his whole family, and now this is what they all do.
“I enjoy it because I am a dog person. I love taking care of animals and I want to help the community,” said Josh.
These dogs are not just sent to the surrounding areas, but all over the country as companions for people with different needs.
Josh, at his young age, is able to separate himself enough to hand them off.
“They’re hard to let go, but I have to let them go because I want them to go to someone who really needs them,” said Josh.
Josh’s family started a Yahoo! group to keep track of all the puppies that have been released.
Support from Canine Companions for Independence is free to all of those who qualify. |
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch (Photo by Andrew Harnik for The Washington Post)
“The FBI conducted its ninth annual ‘Operation: Cross Country’ initiative against those who traffic in children for sexual exploitation, resulting in the arrest of hundreds of sex traffickers.”
—Attorney General Loretta Lynch, remarks at the 84th Interpol General Assembly in Kigali, Rwanda, Nov. 3, 2015
This is a story about how the language regarding the crime of sex trafficking has become so fuzzy that even the nation’s top law enforcement officer can speak before an international audience and utter wildly inflated statistics.
Throughout 2015, The Fact Checker has dug into dubious statistics concerning sex trafficking, so this recent speech by Attorney General Lynch caught our eye. Lynch has taken a keen interest in sex trafficking, recently announcing more than $44 million in grant funding to combat human trafficking in the United States, including supporting law-enforcement task forces and victims services organizations. She devoted a significant part of her speech to Interpol to discussing sex trafficking.
But laudable efforts to help victimized children can be undermined when advocates resort to hyperbole to tout their success. Let’s explore how that happened here.
The Facts
“Operation Cross Country” is an annual event that in which sting operations are conducted in more than 100 cities — in hotels, casinos, truck stops and the like — in an effort to find children ensnared in the sex trade. The three-day effort, first begun in 2008, generates a lot of media publicity, but the sweeps result in far more adult prostitutes being arrested than children being located.
Calvin Shivers, chief of the FBI’s section on violent crimes against children, said that Operation Cross Country is “an opportunity to focus in” on the problem and “creates a lot of media attention.”
The FBI’s news release in October noted that the nationwide sting operation resulted in “the recovery of 149 sexually exploited children and the arrests of more than 150 pimps and other individuals.” The news release said the “enforcement action” took place in 135 cities; so slightly more than one child per city was found.
First, note that Lynch spoke of “hundreds of sex traffickers” and the FBI release only mentioned “more than 150 pimps.” How does that math work?
Peter Carr, a DOJ spokesman, blamed an editing error when Lynch’s speech was written. The speech initially referred to the collective Cross Country operations, he said, but it was then changed to only focus on this year’s effort — and officials failed to correct the figures. He said the sentence was originally supposed to say: “Collectively, thousands of law enforcement officers from hundreds of agencies have participated in the Cross Country operations, resulting in the arrest of hundreds of sex traffickers.”
But this revised sentence is also problematic. Neither DOJ nor the FBI can provide evidence that “hundreds of sex traffickers” have been arrested through Operation Cross Country — unless one plays fast and loose with legal language.
The FBI, for several years, used to reveal exactly how many people were rounded up through Cross Country, essentially exposing the fact that the effort to find exploited children also led to the arrests of hundreds of adult prostitutes and their customers. (By recovered, the FBI says it is referring to “the removal of the child from the victimization and work with social service entities to place the child victim in a safe environment.” The FBI insists no one under the age of 18 is arrested for prostitution.)
Here are the numbers:
June 2008: 389 people arrested (21 children recovered)
October 2008: 642 people, including 518 prostitutes, arrested (49 children recovered)
February 2009: 571 people arrested (49 children recovered)
October 2009: “nearly 700” (52 children recovered)
Nov. 2010: “Nearly 885 others” arrested (69 children recovered)
Then, after 2010, the “others” arrested was dropped from the news releases. Instead, officials only listed the number of juveniles recovered and “pimps” arrested, though there is little indication that many of the pimps were related to the children recovered.
The next FBI news release, issued in June of 2012, said 79 children were recovered and 104 pimps were arrested, a suspiciously high pimp-to-child ratio.
In all, nearly 3,200 people, almost all adult sex workers, were arrested between 2008 and 2010 by local authorities as part of the effort to find 240 children involved in the commercial sex trade.
FBI officials say they no longer report these numbers because this is a matter for local jurisdiction.
“We conduct these operations with a large number of state and local law enforcement counterparts,” said FBI spokesman Christopher Allen. “Many of those other law enforcement agencies make arrests pursuant to non-federal charges. The FBI no longer attempts to collect such numbers for non-federal arrests. We did once; we do not now.”
Sex worker activist Emi Koyama checked local news releases and found that 944 adult sex workers were arrested in 23 of the 76 cities that released data in the 2013 operation (105 children recovered) and 985 sex workers were arrested in 28 of the 106 participating cities in 2014 (168 children recovered).
Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason magazine found at least 300 sex workers were arrested as part of the 2015 operation, by doing a spot check of various news releases by local municipalities, but it’s an incomplete list. We also have no data for the 2012 operation. But overall, the numbers suggest that at least 6,000 adult sex workers–and probably far more–have been rounded up as part of an effort that found 738 children engaged in the sex trade. That’s an 8:1 ratio.
In some cities, the ratio is startling. During the 2015 operation, for instance, the Sacramento FBI field office announced that it had located five underage children, seven pimps and also arrested 90 adults “for various offenses including probation violations and prostitution-related charges.” In Iowa, 10 adults were arrested (five for prostitution and five for soliciting sex), but no minors or pimps were found. In Mississippi, two minors were found, 24 adults were arrested on prostitution and other charges — and no pimps were arrested.
Moreover, the FBI numbers are based on initial reports but apparently are not updated for actual charges. After Operation Cross Country in 2014, the FBI announced three pimps had been arrested in Anchorage, but Tara Burns, a sex worker activist, filed a public records request and found no charges were ever filed. In Virginia Beach this year, the FBI initially announced 10 pimps had been arrested, but the Virginian-Pilot later reported that two people had been released after determining they were not involved in prostitution — and two more of the alleged pimps were juveniles themselves. (Juveniles are not charged under federal sex trafficking laws.)
The Justice Department cannot provide evidence that hundreds of sex traffickers were arrested through Operation Cross Country, but argues it is justified to make the claim. “We believe it’s well within reason to state that among the thousands of adults arrested in conjunction with these 738 children rescued, ‘hundreds’ of these adults were engaged in the prostitution of children,” Carr said.
Officially, the data show that at least 920 pimps have been arrested. Allen of the FBI said that the FBI considers every pimp to be a sex trafficker.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) includes language that allows politicians and law enforcement officials to offer such slippery reasoning. In the law, there is a broad definition of sex trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.” But the operational part of the act for federal crimes — what is used for prosecutions — says that sex trafficking occurs when a “commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age.”
Janie Chuang, an American University law professor who has closely studied the law, said that when it was drafted there was a “huge fight” over whether to include the force/fraud/coercion requirement. “The compromise was to include ‘sex trafficking’ (not requiring FFC) as a defined term in the legislation, but to reserve most of the operational provisions of the TVPA (e.g., criminalization, victim protection) to ‘severe forms of trafficking in persons’ (requiring FFC),” she said. “So we could use the rhetoric of sex trafficking more broadly, but government interventions would focus on the severe forms.”
In other words, law enforcement officials rhetorically claim they have caught sex traffickers, even though under the law they could not bring such charges unless they could prove the pimp was arranging for the sale of children or using force, fraud or coercion to promote prostitution.
“Those arrested in conjunction with this operation who are engaged in the prostitution of children fall within the definitions provided by the TVPA, regardless of whether or not the individual arrested is ultimately charged under federal sex trafficking laws,” Carr said.
As we have shown from examining numerous local news accounts of the arrests, there is little evidence that many of the pimps arrested were trafficking in underage women. Moreover, two major studies of children in the sex trade in New York City and Atlantic City, funded by the Justice Department, found that 90 percent reported that they had no pimp. That would suggest that even with 738 children recovered, the number of associated pimps (“sex traffickers”) was under 100.
Operation Cross Country — the cost which the FBI declined to reveal — is just one part of the government’s effort to recover children in the sex trade. A yearlong effort known as Innocence Lost, begun in 2003, has recovered 5,132 children over 12 years, including 968 alone in the 2015 fiscal year, the FBI said.
While Operation Cross Country is supposed to focus on juveniles, in recent years it ended up yielding at least five times as many adult sex workers as children. Perhaps that is a factor that encourages local law enforcement agencies to participate, as it helps boost their vice arrests. Since 2008, more adult sex workers have been arrested through Operation Cross Country than all of the juveniles who have been recovered through Innocent Lost.
The Pinocchio Test
As always, the burden of proof rests with the speaker. Lynch’s speech, as delivered, was clearly false, and a prominent correction* should appear on DOJ’s Web site. But even the revised language is misleading and unproven, given there have been no records kept of the number of pimps who were arrested specifically for trafficking in underage children.
Instead, government officials appear to believe they can boost their success rate by slapping the word “sex trafficker” on adults who have been arrested even though such charges have not — and could not— be brought in a court of law. The goal of rescuing children from the sex trade is laudable, but the effort is undermined when the statistics are cooked.
(*After this column appeared, the Justice Department changed the text of the speech, still listed as “remarks prepared for delivery,” without noting it had been corrected–and still making the false assertion about sex traffickers that earned Lynch Four Pinocchios.)
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Previous fact checks on human trafficking statistics:
The fishy claim that ‘100,000 children’ in the United States are in the sex trade
The Four-Pinocchio claim that ‘on average, girls first become victims of sex trafficking at 13 years old’
The bogus claim that 300,000 U.S. children are ‘at risk’ of sexual exploitation
The false claim that human trafficking is a ‘$9.5 billion business’ in the United States
Are there hundreds of thousands of sex-trafficked runaways in the United States?
Why you should be wary of statistics on ‘modern slavery’ and ‘trafficking’ |
Participant recruitment and survey Between September 2011 and May 2012, telephone interviews were conducted with the Western Australian community (18+ years). Western Australia is representative of the broader Australian population in terms of key health and socio-demographic indicators [40]. Residential telephone numbers were randomly selected from the Australian Electronic White Pages telephone directory. The availability in Australia of a single telephone directory in computer format presents a comprehensive and cost-effective listing of residential “land-line” numbers [2, 41]. So as to be representative of the Western Australian population, (1) the survey research centre was given a sample target for location (30 % country) and sex (50 % female), and (2) once contacted, the adult in the household who would next be celebrating a birthday was invited to participate in the study. The telephone survey was developed by the research team and guided by an online survey of 280 international experts in the field of the arts or arts-health regarding the definition of arts engagement for population based research [16]. The resulting telephone survey was reviewed by a panel of ten experts with experience in market research, the arts and/or public health and carried out by trained interviewers using a computer assisted telephone interview system [42]. The survey took 15 min to complete and included questions about mental well-being (dependent variable), arts engagement over the previous 12 months (independent variable), and eleven possible confounding or effect modifying variables to the arts-mental well-being relationship (i.e. sports engagement, religious activities, holidays, general health, and demographics).
Dependent variable: subjective mental well-being The dependent variable in this study was subjective mental well-being and measured by asking respondents the 14 items contained in the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS), i.e. I’ve been feeling … optimistic, useful, relaxed, interested in others, good about myself, close to others, confident, loved, cheerful; I’ve had energy to spare; I’ve been … dealing with problems well, thinking clearly, able to make up my own mind and interested in new things [43]. WEMWBS measures the mental well-being of the general population. The scale includes hedonic (i.e. happiness, life satisfaction) and eudaimonic (i.e. positive relationships, psychological functioning) items which together measure mental well-being [44]. WEMWBS is designed to assess mental well-being itself and not the determinants of mental well-being (i.e. resilience, problem solving, etc.) [43]. WEMWBS was scored by summing responses (i.e. 1 = none of the time to 5 = all of the time) to each of the 14 items. WEMWBS population scores approximate to a normal distribution, with a minimum possible score of 14 and a maximum score of 70 (population average = 51) [43]. The scale has good face validity, test-retest reliability (Cronbach’s α = 0.83) and internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.89) [43]. WEMWBS has been adapted for cross-cultural use in a number of different countries and has been translated into several languages [45]. Permission to utilise WEMWBS was granted by the University of Warwick.
Independent variable: hours engaged in the arts 46 49 1 The independent variable in this study was total hours engaged in the arts in the last 12 months. Quantifying engagement by asking questions about: (1) activities and events over the last 12 months, and (2) measurement in terms of time, are common in the literature []. As shown in Fig., arts engagement was measured by asking 14 questions, that is, attendance at arts events (6 questions), participation in the arts (5 questions), learning (1 question), work/volunteering (1 question) and arts related membership (1 question). For each survey item, respondents were asked if they had engaged in the arts in the previous 12 months (yes/no). If ‘yes’, they were asked to describe the activity or event. Respondents were then asked approximately how many days in the last 12 months they had engaged in each type of activity or event, followed by (on a typical day), how many hours they spent engaging in that activity or event.
Confounding and effect modifying variables 1 Variable Level n % 2011 Western Australian population % (n = 2.3 million people) Arts engagement prevalence WEMWBS % Engaged in the arts p-value Mean score SD p-value Demographics Sex Male 351 50.0 50 % 75.5 p < 0.001 53.2 7.5 NS (p = 0.41) Female 351 50.0 50 % 90.3 53.6 7.3 Age Group 18–29 years 63 9.0 15 % 90.5 p = 0.013 52.8 6.8 p = 0.021 30–39 years 61 8.7 14 % 85.2 51.5 6.2 40–49 years 115 16.4 15 % 89.6 52.6 7.3 50–59 years 170 24.2 13 % 84.1 53.1 7.4 60 years and over 293 41.7 18 % 77.5 54.4 7.6 Location Metropolitan 487 69.4 76 % 83.0 NS (p = 0.96) 53.3 7.2 NS (p = 0.57) Country 215 30.6 24 % 82.8 53.6 7.8 Household Income ($AUD) Less than $39,999 195 27.8 26 % 77.4 NS (p = 0.10) 53.2 8.6 NS (p = 0.87) $40,000 to $79,999 123 17.5 21 % 82.1 53.2 7.5 $80,000 to $119,999 125 17.8 19 % 87.2 53.4 6.2 $120,000 or more 150 21.4 22 % 87.3 54.0 6.8 Refused 109 15.5 12 % 82.6 53.3 7.1 Education High school or less 293 41.7 44 % 76.1 p < 0.001 53.5 7.8 NS (p = 0.48) Trade certificate or diploma 162 23.1 26 % 86.4 52.8 7.4 University degree or higher degree 247 35.2 19 % 88.7 53.7 6.8 Refused 0 0.0 11 % Married or de-facto relationship Yes 464 66.1 60 % 84.3 NS (p = 0.18) 54.0 6.7 p = 0.004 No 238 33.9 40 % 80.3 52.3 8.5 Children in household Yes 202 28.8 59 % 87.1 NS (p = 0.59) 53.5 6.6 NS (p = 0.55) No 500 71.2 41 % 81.2 53.1 7.7 In the previous 12 months Sports engagement Yes 465 66.2 67 % 87.1 p < 0.001 53.8 7.0 NS (p = 0.06) No 237 33.8 33 % 74.7 52.7 8.0 Attend religious services or events Yes 267 38.0 - 88.0 p = 0.005 53.8 7.5 NS (p = 0.30) No 435 62.0 - 79.8 53.2 7.3 Holiday Yes 384 54.7 - 88.8 p < 0.001 54.5 7.1 p < 0.001 No 318 45.3 - 75.8 52.0 7.5 General health Very bad 9 1.3 4 % 77.8 NS (p = 0.66) 45.9 9.7 p < 0.001 Bad 23 3.3 73.9 45.1 10.0 Fair 123 17.5 10 % 80.5 50.5 7.5 Good 304 43.3 30 % 84.2 53.4 6.6 Very Good 243 34.6 56 % 83.5 56.0 6.5 To control for the influence of confounding and effect modification, information about eleven possible covariates to the arts-mental health relationship were collected (Table). This included demographics (i.e. sex, age group, location, income, education, marital status, children) and a self-assessment of general health. Respondents were also asked if during the last 12 months, (1) they partook in a holiday or break from work for two or more consecutive weeks; (2) if at least once a week for most weeks, they attended a religious service/event at a place of worship (e.g. church, mosque, temple); or (3) if at least once a week for most weeks they engaged in sport (i.e. participation in sports activities, and/or attendance at sports events as a spectator, and/or membership of a sports organisation, society or club).
Data analysis The analysis strategy involved a descriptive investigation of the data followed by Pearson chi-square tests to explore differences by arts engagement and ANOVAs to explore differences in average WEMWBS scores. Arts ‘attendance’ in the previous 12 months was calculated based on respondents indicating they had attended one or more of the six survey items relating to attendance. Similarly, ‘participation’ in the previous 12 months was calculated based on respondents indicating they had participated in one or more of the five survey items relating to participation. A respondent was considered to be engaged in the arts in the previous 12 months (prevalence) if they had attended an arts event, and/or participated in the arts, and/or took part in arts related learning, and/or worked or volunteered in the arts (on a non-professional basis) and/or had been a member of an arts organization, club or society. ‘Total days engaged in the arts in the previous 12 months’ was calculated by summing together the number of days respondents spent attending, participating, learning, working/volunteering or being a member of an arts organization, club or society. ‘Hours per day engaged in the arts in the previous 12 months’, was calculated by first multiplying hours on a typical day by number of days engaged in each type of arts activity over the last 12 months, this was then summed and the total divided by the sum of days engaged in each type of arts activity. ‘Hours per year engaged in the arts’, was calculated by first multiplying hours on a typical day by number of days engaged in each type of arts activity in the previous 12 months and summing each sub-total together. As the distribution of arts engagement was positively skewed (i.e. 17 % did not engage in the arts at all, median = 23 hours/year and 75th percentile = 100 hours/year) and the relationship between mental well-being and arts engagement was non-linear, ‘hours per year engaged in the arts’ was grouped into four categories: no art = 0 hours/year, low arts engagement = 0.1 to 22.9 hours/year, medium arts engagement = 23 to 99.9 hours/year and high arts engagement = 100 or more hours/year. This was followed by linear regression analyses to investigate the association between arts engagement and WEMWBS scores. Overall, three models were fitted. The first model estimated the direct (unadjusted) effect of arts engagement; the second model estimated the effect of arts engagement after adjustment for demographics (i.e. age, sex, location, income, education, marital status and children); and the third model adjusted for demographics, general health, engagement in sport, religious activities and holidays from work. With the exception of the effect modification (i.e. interaction) analyses, results were assessed at the 0.05 level of significance. Effect modification was assessed at the 0.01 level of significance to reduce the possibility of a finding due to chance. The data were analysed using SPSS for Windows (Version 21) and SAS for Windows (Version 9.3). |
The two demo choices from the TGS 2010 trial version -- a meeting with the cat king, or a trek through the waterfall corridor to fight a boss. Text: "Hey! How many times do I have to say it? I'm the great fairy, Master Shizuku!"
TOKYO – It is difficult to describe how it feels to grab a PlayStation 3 controller and explore an environment that is barely different from what one would see in the latest Studio Ghibli film.
I'll have to settle for "breathtaking."
Level-5 is showing a playable demo of the PlayStation 3 version of its collaboration with the masters of Japanese animation, Studio Ghibli, at Tokyo Game Show this weekend. Ni no Kuni: The Queen of White Sacred Ash is scheduled to be released in 2011, following the Nintendo DS entry in the series.
The portable game looks good, but the PS3 version is unbelievable. The movements are amazingly fluid, and animations happen with no less precision than in the detailed frames in Hayao Miyazaki's films. Moving Oliver, the main character, through the waterfall corridor in the demo was so much fun that I didn't even try to advance through the field, worrying the Level-5 attendant next to me that I was having some serious trouble with the game.
I was completely immersed in the colorful, relaxing scenery, so much that I found myself running back to dead ends just to check one more time on the detail that had been put into the minute corners of the forest.
Oliver exhibits a variety of movements as you control him. He cutely tiptoes over log bridges, reacting in realistic movements to the objects around him. Despite all the work put into Oliver's animation, however, he is actually not the character that takes part in the battles. That's reserved for the "Protector Warrior," or "Imagine," a stuffed-animal-looking creature that Oliver controls and shouts out orders to in battle.
This may immediately call Pokemon to mind, but from what was shown in the Queen of White Sacred Ash demo, each character has its own solitary creature to control, so I doubt it has anything to do with catching 'em all.
The battles in the PS3 title are more action-oriented than the DS game, and are a lot of fun to watch. The Imagine creatures dance around the enemy, attacking at intervals whenever their Active Time Battle-like energy bar fills up. Once, I tried to attack too soon, and Oliver shouted, "You can't!" to let me know that I had to wait. There is also a special option next to the attack command, which I imagine is different for every creature. In this case, the Protector's was "Charge," which allows him to charge up strength for a stronger attack.
At the end of the waterfall corridor, I ran into the Horn Taurus, a tall beast with antlers that would give the Shishi God from Princess Mononoke a run for its money. Numerous times during the battle, the enemy would get angrier and angrier, resulting in a cool cinematic scene that depicted its stance and countenance transformations. Toward the end, Oliver's friend Shizuku popped in to give me pointers and lend a hand. All in all, it made for one exciting boss battle, and the time flew by very quickly.
I am really excited about the PS3 version of Ni no Kuni. It is going to be great to just sit down, relax and explore a massive, interactive Studio Ghibli world. I hope the game is moderately expansive, but judging from the emphasis placed on story, I doubt it will be very open-ended.
There was no menu available and the demo was rather short this time, so I suspect I've merely scratched the surface of what this game has to offer. I hope the 2011 release date comes soon, but I'd honestly like Level-5 to take its time on this and make Ni no Kuni: The Queen of White Sacred Ash as immersive and vivid as possible.
Images courtesy Level-5
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New Delhi – 28-02-2014: A girl and a boy from Northeast India were assaulted by drunk men today evening at Vijay Nagar, North Delhi. The incident happened near Delhi University and the police are believed to be searching for the culprits. So far, one has been arrested by the police. Hundreds of students from North-east India have reportedly gathered at Vijay Nagar to protest against the continuous attack on students from North east.
According to the report, the drunk men started peeing in front of the girl and boy when they were walking in the park. The boy confronted with the drunk men, and suddenly they started beating the boy. When the girl tried to stop the fight, she was also beaten up by the men.
The girl, who is from Ukhrul, Manipur is a student in Delhi University. Further report says she was assaulted and molested by the men. The men also attempted to rape her.
North east people, who are of mostly mongoloid descent, have been facing an increasing attacks and racial discrimination in the mainland Indian regions, the recent attacks have been mostly concentrated in Delhi, capital of India. |
The Sink-Urinal by STAND has generated numerous mixed reviews. Some people find it a great idea, others find it disgusting. So let’s see what this STAND thing is.
A designer from Latvia named Kaspars Jursons created this product having in mind several problems of modern society. First of all, the water shortage, and secondly, the fact that men often skip washing hands in public toilets. So his idea was to address both problems with just one product. This is how he came to the idea of a sink and a urinal all in one.
The sink is right above the urinal and the water you use to wash your hands is also used to flush the urinal. The tap is sensor activated, meaning that you will not need to touch it. For any reason.
Another idea is that this kind of a product will serve as a reminder for men to wash their hands due to the fact that the tap is right in front of you and that you need to use it to flush.
Now the mentioned mixed reviews. The negative ones claim that many men will see this as a challenge (which is probably true), deliberately aiming where they shouldn’t and that the entire concept puts two hygienically opposite actions a bit too close for comfort.
On the other hand, apart from the mentioned advantages, we feel that men are already gross when it comes to public toilets, so they can’t go much worse. And you do not need to touch anything, while you do need to shake hands with the people who skip washing hands.
So, maybe this is not such a bad idea. The only objectively viewed negative point is the price of $590 per unit.
[via Design Taxi] |
Mayor John Tory visited the National Post editorial board Thursday to defend his plan to toll the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway, putting the proceeds toward some $33 billion in approved-but-unfunded capital projects, notably public transit.
“There was no sense having a traffic and transit plan … if you didn’t have the answer to the one question that’s been elusive over time: How are you going to pay for it?” Tory said. “Our map of transit lines is pathetic, compared to any city (in the world) of our size, sophistication and wealth.”
And if you don’t like his plan to pay to improve it, he said — to everyone implicitly, and explicitly to Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown — where’s yours?
It remains a remarkably bold gambit. But the plaudits died down by the end of the day he announced it. Then, and since, Toronto’s air raid siren of complaint has been fading back up toward full volume.
“In Toronto, whenever the going gets tough, politicians turn to the panacea, road tolls,” Coun. Shelley Carroll wrote, bizarrely, on her website. No one suggested tolls were a panacea, and it is demonstrably not the case that Toronto politicians always turn to road tolls when the going gets tough. Hence the lack of road tolls.
Left-wing Coun. Gord Perks called the announcement a “giant distraction” from the city’s overall revenue situation. Well might perhaps $8 billion over 30 years distract one’s attention — it’s a game-changing amount of dough. But could it not just as easily focus our minds on precisely that? If we’re suddenly getting serious, let’s get serious.
Others complained tolls won’t balance the 2017 budget, which no one said they would. Bringing back the vehicle registration tax would be quicker and potentially just as lucrative, some pointed out. Ah yes, the Tax that Made Rob Ford Mayor. What could go wrong?
Tolling the Gardiner would reduce traffic, some argued, making the approved Gardiner East rebuild an even more questionable financial proposition. The rebuild passed council 36-5 in March but never mind, let’s reopen the debate! And the price of rebuilding the Gardiner as a whole went up by $1 billion in the latest staff report. Hey, people cried, let’s tear the whole thing down!
Our map of transit lines is pathetic, compared to any city (in the world) of our size, sophistication and wealth.
No one on Council should be surprised the price increased. The price always increases, because Council makes decisions based on incredibly preliminary and rushed estimates. If Council approved different plans, chances are the same thing would happen. It’s indefensible planning; somehow, it has to stop; but in the meantime it’s exactly why accepting the good over the perfect and sticking to it is the only way of getting anything big done in this city.
Talking of which, many enthused, let’s reopen the Scarborough subway debate! Again! And SmartTrack! Boo, Smart Track! Now that we’re finally raising money to pay for stuff, went the reasoning, we can’t possibly spend it on stuff that mightn’t be perfect. No, no, that wouldn’t be very Torontonian at all.
Meanwhile, up the road at Queen’s Park, one of the only positive things you can say about the Liberal government is that it seems willing to let Toronto choose to implement road tolls if it pleases. The New Democrats haven’t said they wouldn’t, but they deplore “Lexus lanes” in all their forms.
Here’s 67 words of Andrea Horwath: “I don’t believe the debate should be about how much more that people who are low-income folks, who are working poor, who are working class people, are going to have to pay to take the bus and use the roads as opposed to the debate around what the other levels of government are doing to help struggling municipalities to pay the bills and provide good transit systems.”
And then there’s Brown. Last year, he told the Association of Municipalities of Ontario that cities “need to be given the resources and support they require to attract investment and grow.” Now he not only opposes Tory’s market-based plan; he vows that as premier he would prevent the city from implementing it. Behold: Conservatism in action!
“Fine, if you don’t like road tolls, I get that,” Tory said Thursday, as if addressing Brown. But people in this city love to complain about public transit. They clearly desire better. If the no-tolls crowd “don’t think road tolls are the way to pay for the transit plan,” Tory asked, “then what would they propose?”
“Build nothing” is a legitimate answer, as Tory says. We’re damn good at it. Building nothing is always an option. But toll opponents have to be honest about it. We all do.
• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter: cselley |
Best Resource Sites for Beginner Web Developers to Learn Angular.js
At present, AngularJS is one of the most widely used JavaScript frameworks. The open source web application framework is also maintained by Google, along with a large community that includes both individual developers and companies. Unlike other JavaScript frameworks, AngularJS can be embedded into a HTML page through the <script> tag.
The developers can further use the framework to extend HTML attributes with directives, and use HTML as a template language. The beginners can learn and use the JavaScript framework without putting extra time and effort. They also have option to refer to various resource sites to learn all aspects of AngularJS within a shorter amount of time.
Resource Sites that Help Beginners to Learn AngularJS Easily and Quickly
AngularJS
Before looking for AngularJS resource sites, the beginners must visit the official website of the JavaScript framework. The website contains comprehensive design documents and notes. The beginners can read the information posted on the website to understand the key features and components of AngularJS. At the same time, they can refer to the tutorials posted on the website to learn how to build AngularJS applications.
TutorialsPoint
The text-based online tutorial enables beginners to understand both basic programming concepts and components of AngularJS. In addition to understanding the overview, environment setup and MVC architecture, the learners can also know key components like Directives, Expressions, Controllers, Filters, Tables, Modules, Forms, AJAX and HTML DOM. At the same time, they can also check the examples of applications developed using HTML, CSS and AngularJS.
Thinkster
The online text-based course aims to cover each AngularJS topic in a comprehensive and easy-to-understand way. But it requires learners to meet certain prerequisites like basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript; and understanding of MVC design pattern and DOM. The beginners can learn directives, filters, templates, animations, routing, HTTP and server interaction, and other key components of AngularJS by reading elaborate blogs written by seasoned professionals.
MediaLoot
The website provides unlimited access to more than 1500 AngularJS resources for a fee. It further sends tutorials, blogs and design tips to each learner through emails. However, the text-based tutorial is designed by keeping beginners in mind. Any developers familiar with HTML, CSS and JavaScript can join the course to learn various aspects of AngularJS application development within a shorter amount of time.
Learn and Understand AngularJS
The online course from udemy helps beginners to learn AngularJS 2, along with understanding the JavaScript concepts behind it, how to design custom directives, and how to create single-page web applications. It includes 55 lectures and 7 hours of video content. Any developers with basic understanding of HTML and JavaScript can join the course to learn various aspects of AngularJS within a shorter amount of time. However, the beginners have to spend $99 to take the online course.
Shaping up with AngularJS
The course sponsored by Google enables beginners to learn AngularJS application development in a game-based learning environment. It includes 12 videos along with 27 challenged and 6 badges. Also, the online course helps JavaScript programmers to learn Flatlander’s Gem Store, Built-in Directives, Forms, Custom Directives, and Services.
Websites for downloading eBooks
The beginners also have option to learn various aspects of Angular.js by downloading eBooks from several websites. As they can easily read the eBooks on their mobile devices, it becomes easier for the beginners to learn the JavaScript development framework at their own pace and convenience. However, the content and purpose of individual eBooks will differ. Also, the books are written by different authors. A beginner can always consider downloading popular eBooks like Practical AngularJS, Recipes with AngularJS, and ng-book.
The beginners can use any online search engine to gather detailed information about the AngularJS resource sites. But the nature and type of resources provided by each website will vary. Hence, the novice web developers must refer to multiple resource sites to understand various aspects of the JavaScript framework clearly. The need of JavaScript for Web developers, It is also important for beginners to choose resource sites that help them know the new features and functionality included in the most recent version of AngularJS. |
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Thousands of flowers, wreaths and tributes left on Liverpool's Anfield stadium pitch in memory of the 96 soccer fans who died at Hillsborough
A newspaper has apologised for publishing an article that appeared to link football hooliganism with the Hillsborough disaster.
The Reading Chronicle article suggested Hillsborough had been a symbol of the game's ills.
It also cited hooliganism involving Reading Football Club fans leading to the club banning the paper.
Berkshire Media Group apologised "for appearing to link football hooliganism with the Hillsborough tragedy".
"It was never our intention to do so and we fully accept that hooliganism played no part in the tragic events of 15th April 1989," it said in a statement.
'It's disgraceful'
Ninety-six Liverpool fans died as a result of a crush during an FA Cup semi-final game with Nottingham Forest on that day in 1989.
Louise Brookes, sister of Andrew Brookes from Bromsgrove who lost his life in the tragedy, said: "It's disgraceful.
"It's unfair that they have been allowed to print such rubbish - there is no connection with hooliganism at Hillsborough."
Headlined the "Other Side of Football", the front page article also claimed Reading fans make Nazi salutes, are drunk, and fight with visiting supporters.
In an open letter on the club's website responding to the piece, Reading's chairman Sir John Madejski said the article was "an unwarranted and sensationalised attack".
The club said only one Reading fan was arrested at its stadium last season.
'Deeply offended'
"We have decided to suspend our relationship with this particular publication," Mr Madejski said.
"We are sure our supporters will agree that we cannot allow the fans' good name to be besmirched in this way.
"The newspaper also contains a comment relating to the Hillsborough tragedy that has deeply offended many of us in the football family."
Thames Valley Police said out of 18 fixtures at the stadium last season, only two were policed.
Supt Stuart Greenfield, area commander for Reading, said: "We would say that Reading Football Club is one of the best run football clubs in the FA.
"It's irresponsible and I don't think it portrays the right picture of Reading football club at all." |
The U.S. Department of Justice has resurrected a 1965 case to impose its will on a Mississippi school district, ignoring local efforts to integrate through school choice.
In the heart of the Mississippi Delta stands a city that has overcome an economy built and sustained on slave labor, a cotton industry built on the backs of field hands, and now a high school that has integrated itself more equitably than any school in the Delta.
But while Cleveland, Mississippi, has transformed itself from the land up, federal government has chosen to make the city’s schools a national example, forcing local schools to consolidate in the name of desegregation. But many local families of all races don’t want that, and they don’t necessarily consider the effects their individual choices to constitute systemic racism.
U.S. courts hold a legal responsibility to eliminate forced integration. So last May, Judge Debra Brown ordered Cleveland’s middle and high schools to consolidate, in keeping with a 2011 U.S. Department of Justice motion “to enforce the previously-entered desegregation orders governing the district and compel the district’s compliance with federal law.”
This meant combining the mostly African-American East Side High with the racially mixed Cleveland High. Yet the demographics of Cleveland schools are due to parent choice, not forced integration, and occurred naturally. The government’s intervention is heavy-handed and far-removed from the reality of life in Cleveland.
The DoJ has resurrected a 1965 case, Cowan v. Cleveland School District, to impose its faraway will on local schools, ignoring the district’s efforts to integrate the education system since the 1960s through school choice instead of government force.
“East Side has an award-winning and highly respected principal—who happens to be white—and many white teachers who prefer teaching there over teaching at Cleveland High,” said Michael Carr, a public defender in Bolivar County and graduate of Cleveland High School. “CHS had a black student body president last year who won top awards at the MS High School Mock Trial Competition and got a full ride to Ole Miss. It’s not just ‘us’ and ‘them.’ We are all mixed up here. And that’s on purpose and how we want it. This lawsuit has just brought race to the forefront when it really was not headline news in our town.”
Local Problem-Solving Versus Federal Race Quotas
Since the landmark U.S. Supreme Court desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, public schools across the country have seen an “alarming” increase in segregation, said Leslie Hiner, a vice president at EdChoice. But Cleveland’s public schools are not following this national trend.
“Fifty years ago, desegregation focused on improving academic opportunities for African-American children who had been forced to attend under-funded, under-performing public schools,” Hiner said. “Today, in Cleveland, African-American children have the right to choose the public school, and public school classes, they wish to attend.”
In other words, forced desegregation was a policy for times in which individuals had less leverage to solve their own problems, before today’s greater access to school choice. Since Cleveland lets families choose which school their kids will attend, the fact that East Side is majority black is only so because families choose to put their children in a school with that composition. The federal lawsuit is telling these mostly African-American families that their choices have created systemic racism that requires federal intervention.
“Cleveland School District has genuinely tried to find ways to continue black and white students going to school together while keeping the character and identity of neighborhood schools,” Carr said. “East Side is a neighborhood school, and that neighborhood happens to be black. It’s the majority race in Bolivar County. It has always been that way since our county was founded.”
Following a series of parent meetings and focus groups prior to trial, the Cleveland school board decided their bottom-up approach to social and racial integration is better than the Obama adminstration’s top-down demands. So on July 11, the Cleveland School Board formally appealed the court’s order.
Atop local choice policies, the state legislature has been attempting to address Mississippi’s long history of offering some of the nation’s worst public schools. Vouchers for disabled students and an education savings account law for special-needs children became law in 2011 and 2012, and have proven popular with parents. Washington bureaucrats descended on the state precisely as these local efforts to offer greater opportunity to needy children materialized, Hiner said.
“Ordering schools to consolidate as a means to desegregate goes against local efforts of parents, teachers, and public school administrators to build an educational culture in the schools that offers greater opportunity for all students, regardless of their school of enrollment,” Hiner said. “If a school’s enrollment remains segregated as a result of the free choice of African-American families, does the government have a right to force these families to send their children to a different school against their wishes?”
Cleveland: A History of Poverty, Poor Education
Black Americans are used to outside entities overriding their education choices. It’s part of Mississippi’s disgraceful history.
“There were a lot of race issues [in Mississippi], and white supremacy dominated the thinking for much of the twentieth century,” said Ellen B. Meacham, a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi. “Many of the state’s leaders did not see the point of funding the education of someone they thought was only going to work in the fields.”
Prior to mechanization, farming in the Delta was labor-intensive, and farmers used debt and even force to make it difficult for poorer workers, who were mostly black, to leave, Meacham said. The mechanization of agriculture in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including equipment like the cotton picker and harvester, contributed to a huge displacement of workers from 1960-66.
“You had thousands of people working in the Delta who were suddenly put out of work and generations of people for whom the state had been resistant to providing any kind of education for their poor population because they needed them for agricultural purposes, and then suddenly they no longer needed them,” Meacham said. “They hadn’t been educated and there weren’t any jobs left. They were in quite a bind.”
These folks had often received only a third- or fourth-grade education around the cotton season in inadequate schools, many of which had no school books and no school buses, Meacham said.
Today, an Oasis of Choice in the Delta
According to locals, while poverty and uneven funding for public schools still remain, the racism that once dominated Cleveland’s education system is not foremost in the high schools today. In fact, Cleveland parents’ ability to choose which public schools to enroll their children in allows for more freedom than many school districts nationwide, let alone the Delta.
“Cleveland High School is the last truly integrated public high school in the Mississippi delta,” Carr said. “It is literally 50-50. You will not find another integrated high school until you get to the hills, at least a one-and-a-half hour drive in any direction.”
‘This would perpetuate re-segregation, and would undo all the progress we have made since the 1970s.’
Carr could have attended East Side, but chose to attend his neighborhood school, Cleveland High. Nevertheless, the students in both schools regularly spent time and exchanged classes with each other.
“We also went to East Side every day to take certain classes, like calculus and French,” he noted. “East Side students came to Cleveland High to take drama and Spanish. And we all went to a local vocational tech center to learn trades… They still do it to this day.”
When parents are the ones making the decisions about where their children will attend school, it takes away the worry that racism has influenced someone else’s placement decisions, Cleveland school board attorney Jamie Jacks noted: “Parental choice is a key component in maintaining community buy-in for a school district.”
In fact, the Obama administration’s push for racially gerrymandering schools could make segregation worse.
“From a strict interpretation legal analysis, [Judge Brown’s] ruling is absolutely right,” Carr said. “However, I am concerned this ruling will unintentionally have a negative impact on integration in our school system. I’m afraid that white parents, if their son or daughter is suddenly made into an overwhelming minority group in what is already only a ‘C’-rated high school, with no promise of a new facility, better teachers, or new technology, will place their children in segregated academies. This would perpetuate re-segregation, and would undo all the progress we have made since the 1970s.”
The federal lawsuit makes a race issue out of what is really a funding issue, Carr said.
“The state or the Feds aren’t going to build us a sparkling new school where I can send my kids,” he said. “It would have to be funded by a massive local bond, and we don’t have the tax base for it.”
It could take a year for the district’s legal appeal to be heard and decided.
In this case, “the Department of Justice appears to be arbitrary and unfair to African-American parents, who stand to lose their freedom to choose what’s best for their own children,” Hiner said. “African-American children are being pushed around by bureaucrats in Washington to achieve what the bureaucrats believe is a perfect balance of the races—regardless of the wishes of parents, regardless of the impact on those children and the quality of their lives.” |
Veteran off-spinner Harbhajan Singh says that he is not given the kind of 'privilege' that Mahendra Singh Dhoni gets when it comes to selection for Team India. Harbhajan was referring to Dhoni being named for the Indian squad for the ICC Champions Trophy. The BCCI Chairman of Selectors, MSK Prasad, had said on Dhoni's selection that he brought much more to the table than just his batting in the form of experience and his tactical brain. Harbhajan weighed in on the matter with a straighter one, suggesting that he too was a senior player and brought a lot more to the table than just his bowling or batting but in his case it is not taken into consideration.
'Yes there is no doubt that Dhoni brings a lot to the table apart from his batting, whether he is in form or not. Obviously we have seen that he is not hitting the ball as well as we have seen,' Harbhajan told NDTV.
"But he has been captain and he understands the game and having him in the middle will help lot of youngsters and people out there who are not feeling great in particular moments. So he has that edge.
"But when it comes to me. I do feel that we are not given that sort of privilege," the bowler added. "We too have played for 19 years and won and lost India matches. I have won two World Cups too. So this privilege is for some players, and for some it is not and I'm one of those for whom this privilege is not there. I don't know why that is the case.
"That question of 'why', needs to be asked to the selectors. I don't want to sing my own praises but the amount of cricket others have played even I understand the game as much and what they bring to the table we also bring to the table. We too wish to play for the country as much," he added.
Harbhajan was also critical of the fact that neither Gautam Gambhir nor his name was discussed at the selection committee meeting for the Champions Trophy at a time when both have done so well at the IPL recently (as was reiterated by Prasad as well). Harbhajan had the best economy rate for Mumbai Indians at 6.48 on their journey to winning the 3rd IPL title.
'It is not fair to be honest. Why do we play such tournaments (like the IPL)? We play to get selected to play for India. If people are doing well. Let's talk about Gautam Gambhir. He has the most number of runs consistently. If I talk about myself, yes, you know we all were hoping that we might be somewhere in the mix. But knowing that in my scenario I knew that If Ashwin will be fit then he will be there in the team and if he is not then I have a chance.
"He (Ashwin) was rested for the IPL because he needs to get fit for the Champions Trophy. I understand all of that. But if you do well, you should be rewarded or considered at least. Aisa naheen key humney discuss naheen kiya, next question. Why do we have two different rules for two different people?'' the bowler asked.
Asked about the possibility that the selectors may not have considered him or Gambhir for the Champions Trophy because their fielding perhaps doesn't match up to the level of the younger lot, Harbhajan retorted by saying, ''See if someone comes and tells me that this is one thing that is lacking in you that's the reason you're not there in the squad but nobody has told me. There is no communication. If someone tells me this is how fit we need you to be, at the end I want to play for India so I will work on it.
"I don't know my weakness because nobody has spoken to me. None of the selectors, no one actually. But I've always felt that when I do I get somewhere so I'm working hard and I'm sure I'll get somewhere," he added.
MSK Prasad, when he had first taken up the position of Chairman of Selectors, had made it clear that no player once injured would be allowed to return to the Indian Team without proving his fitness in a match like situation. But in the case of Ashwin that is unlikely to happen considering he did not play in the IPL and the Champions Trophy is immediately after.
However Harbhajan felt that for top players like Ashwin making an exception is understandable.
''Because he was rested by the team management itself, given the thought that we need him totally fit for the Champions Trophy so in scenarios like this with one or two players we can make this exception. But even in the case of Ashwin I'm sure a fitness test will happen. Knowing Virat and Anil bhai (Kumble) I'm sure they would not want to have an injured player in the squad.
"And knowing Ashwin, he is a champion bowler, he will not say that I'm half-fit but take me. He will say if he is feeling a niggle. I wish he is okay and I wish him all the luck to do well in the Champions Trophy,'' added Harbhajan. |
Founding partner of United Autosports Zak Brown has announced that he is putting his share of the business up for sale with immediate effect.
The team, which Brown co-owned with Richard Dean, contested a variety of Touring Car and GT Series in 2014 as well as taking care of Zak Brown’s extensive collection of active historic race cars.
The full statement from Zak is as follows:
Due to Zak Brown’s increasing business commitments around the world he has decided to put his share of United Autosports’ British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) team up for sale with immediate effect. The team ran two Toyota Avensis cars in the 2014 BTCC.
“I want United Autosports to be successful in the BTCC and, with my growing business commitments, I can’t dedicate myself to that as fully as I would like,” said Brown. “The BTCC is a high-profile and professional series and to run at the front takes time and I simply don’t have enough time to dedicate to the BTCC programme. United will continue to prepare and maintain my collection of historic cars and I very much look forward to competing with them in the future.”
United Autosports entered the BTCC in 2014 as well as contesting the Ginetta GT4 Supercup, British GT with the Audi R8 LMS ultra, GT Cup with a McLaren MP4-12C and Historic series and events in the UK and abroad. Since the formation of the team in 2009, United Autosports has had victories and podium finishes in GT races around the world and won the 2013 European Supercar Challenge, the Ginetta GT4 Supercup Teams Championship in 2014 and lead this year’s GT Cup standings with one round remaining. |
Algorithmic Citizenship is a new form of citizenship, one where your citizenship, and therefore both your allegiances and your rights, are constantly being questioned, calculated, and rewritten.
Most people are assigned a citizenship at birth, in one of two ways. You may receive your citizenship from the place you're born, which is called jus soli, or the right of soil. If you're born in a place, that's where you're a citizen of. This is true in a lot of North and South America, for example - but not much of the rest of the world. You may get your citizenship based on where your parents are citizens of, which is called jus sanguinis, or the right of blood. Everybody is supposed to have a citizenship, although millions of stateless people do not, as a result of war, migration or the collapse of existing states. Many people also change citizenship over the course of their life, through various legal mechanisms. Some countries allow you to hold more than one citizenship at once, and some do not.
Having a citizenship means that you have a place in the world, an allegiance to a state. That state is supposed to guarantee you certain rights, like freedom from arrest, imprisonment, torture, or surveillance - depending on which state you belong to. Hannah Arendt famously said that "citizenship is the right to have rights". To tamper with ones citizenship is to endanger ones most fundamental rights. Without citizenship, we have no rights at all.
Algorithmic Citizenship is a form of citizenship which is not assigned at birth, or through complex legal documents, but through data. Like other computerised processes, it can happen at the speed of light, and it can happen over and over again, constantly revising and recalculating. It can split a single citizenship into an infinite number of sub-citizenships, and count and weight them over time to produce combinations of affiliations to different states.
Citizen Ex calculates your Algorithmic Citizenship based on where you go online. Every site you visit is counted as evidence of your affiliation to a particular place, and added to your constantly revised Algorithmic Citizenship. Because the internet is everywhere, you can go anywhere - but because the internet is real, this also has consequences. |
NYC's most distinct underground figure is the stuff of urban legend: a blind homeless composer, dressed as a viking, who influenced a wave of seminal artists. Now a film is finally bringing his story to light.
NYC's most distinct underground figure is the stuff of urban legend: a blind homeless composer, dressed as a viking, who influenced a wave of seminal artists. Now a film is finally bringing his story to light.
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In late ’60s New York, anyone wandering between Sixth Avenue and West 52nd Street would be swamped with suits – some filing in and out of the newly built CBS building, some swarming around the nearby ad agencies and corporate headquarters.
Yet in the middle of it all stood a unique figure: a blind man wearing a cloak and Viking helmet, either composing music, selling art or having his photograph taken with tourists.
“He brought such an unusual thing to such a banal place,” says Jim Sclavunos of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.
Jim is speaking in The Viking of 6th Avenue, a new documentary about the inimitable street poet, avant-garde musician and underground icon known as Moondog.
The film gathers a spectrum of fans and collaborators to tell a story unlike any other in American subculture – one that touched the lives of everyone from Janis Joplin and Charlie Parker to Allen Ginsberg and David Bowie.
Back in 2009, British filmmaker Holly Elson stumbled across a photo of Moondog on the BBC’s website and felt compelled to investigate his music. It sounded otherworldly yet somehow familiar.
But when she discovered the breadth and reach of his artistic output, she was hooked.
“I thought, ‘This is such a good story, someone must have told it already,’” she says. “The more you go into it, the more magical it becomes.”
Yet despite Moondog’s stature among artists such as Anohni (formerly Antony and the Johnsons, who covered his music), Philip Glass (with whom Moondog lived for a year) and Elvis Costello (who invited him to perform at London’s Meltdown Festival while he was still alive), much of that legacy remained buried in dust-covered boxes, unprocessed rolls of film and Braille scores that have never been heard.
“In many senses, it’s a pre-internet story,” says Holly. “There’s a lot of stuff online – even more so since we started this process – but at the time there was a finite amount of information and a lot of the people he worked with were essentially offline.
“That took real hard work to piece all this together and to find out where this guy has come from. It’s very much a detective story.”
Born Louis Hardin Jr. in Kansas, 1916, Moondog taught himself music, fashioning his first drum kit at the age of five.
After losing his sight in a farming accident as a 15-year-old, he learned to score music in Braille and invented his own instruments, including the trimba: a wooden box-based percussive device that’s still used to this day.
Determined to become an established composer, Moondog moved to Manhattan in 1943 with few contacts and barely any money.
Unsure of where to go, and hoping to bump into other musicians, he gravitated to the area around Carnegie Hall.
For decades he survived by selling yearbooks – filled with poetry, music or photographs – and became embedded in New York’s cultural fabric, drawing inspiration from the sound of the streets.
Although many perceived him as just a homeless eccentric, the reality was that Moondog willingly lived rough for the sake of his art.
“Getting his Braille transcribed and notated into music could be an expensive, lengthy process so a lot of his money would go on that,” says Holly.
“Often he would choose not to rent an apartment and just stay in people’s basements, on a rooftop or in a doorway.”
The music itself would traverse genres, weaving between accessible melodies and avant-garde experimentation.
It’s the reason Moondog has featured on film scores from The Big Lebowski to Pineapple Express but it’s also one of the reasons why Moondog’s name is not as synonymous with New York counterculture in the way the likes of Bob Dylan are.
“He was always trying to do something different,” says Holly.
“Some of it is jazz, some of it is classical, some of it is more folky. When someone does something, you expect them to follow in the same path but he was great at giving the audience or commentators exactly what they weren’t expecting next. He defied categorisation.”
In 1974, Moondog accepted an invitation to perform in Germany and decided to stay permanently.
To New Yorkers who considered him a sightseeing fixture, he simply disappeared – adding to the sense of urban legend – but Moondog continued to release an eclectic stream of music until his passing in 1999.
“Pre-internet, people just thought he was dead,” says Holly. “Even people like Philip Glass didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.”
But it’s that air of mythology that has inspired Holly to document Moondog’s history and share it with a wider audience.
After a successful funding campaign through Kickstarter, The Viking of 6th Avenue will finally be released later this year, bringing that commitment to fruition.
“When you hear descriptions of how he’d be composing under his cape in the middle of winter, under three layers of fur with a little Braille punch… that stays with you.”
This article appears in Huck 58 – The Offline Issue. Buy it in the Huck Shop now or subscribe today to make sure you never miss another issue.
Find out more about The Viking of 6th Avenue.
Enjoyed this article? Like Huck on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. |
Pngcrush [DOWNLOAD] [CHANGELOG] Pngcrush is an optimizer for PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files. It can be run from a commandline in an MSDOS window, or from a UNIX or LINUX commandline. Its main purpose is to reduce the size of the PNG IDAT datastream by trying various compression levels and PNG filter methods. It also can be used to remove unwanted ancillary chunks, or to add certain chunks including gAMA, tRNS, iCCP, and textual chunks. Pngcrush, when statically linked to the supplied zlib code, is believed to be immune to the zlib-1.1.3 "double-free" bug, since by default it detects and rejects any "double-free" attempt. It merely generates a "Decompression Error" message and rejects the file. Pngcrush is open source and may be used, modified, and redistributed by anyone without paying a fee. The license, embedded in the file pngcrush.c, is equivalent but not identical to the libpng license found in the libpng file png.h. The current version of pngcrush is identified here. The source code for pngcrush is here. The source code for pngcrush can also be found in the "pmt" git repository. You can access it by cloning from git.code.sf.net/p/pmt/code or github.com/glennrp/libpng". At present, the pngcrush source is located in the "pngcrush" branch. Binary executables are here. Pngcrush uses libpng and zlib, both of which are included in this pngcrush source distribution. They are slightly modified: libpng's pngconf.h is modified to "#include pngcrush.h" which is used to "#define out" unused parts of the library #define PNG_SETJMP_NOT_SUPPORTED #define PNG_ABORT() to set the IDAT buffer size to a large value, and
zlib is modified to set the TOO_FAR macro to 32767 in deflate.c
High resolution PNGCRUSH_TIMERS are included in pngread.c and pngwutil.c.
pngwutil.c is modified to avoid evaluating ADLER32 checksums while writing trial outputs. If you prefer, you can compile only pngcrush.c from the pngcrush source distribution and run it with the stock libpng and zlib, which can be found at the PNG web site, www.libpng.org/pub/png/. If you do this, The iTXt chunk will not be supported if your version of libpng does not support it. Libpng will start supporting the iTXt chunk by default with version 1.4.0.
pngcrush will be vulnerable to various overflow conditions that were fixed in August 2004, if you use an unpatched libpng version earlier than version 1.2.7/1.0.17.
pngcrush will be vulnerable to the zlib-1.1.3 double-free bug, if you link pngcrush with zlib-1.1.3 and a version of libpng such as any 1.0.x that does not have PNG_USER_MEM_SUPPORTED enabled.
TOO_FAR will be 4096 instead of 32767 in deflate.c, which will result in slightly larger files and slightly faster execution.
Execution will be a little slower because the ADLER32 checksum is always evaluated.
Some high resolution timing detailed results will not be reported.
also, you will be unable to read erroneous PNG files with "Too many IDAT's". Precompiled binaries for Windows (runs in MSDOS window) are here A fork of pngcrush development exists, by Cosmin Truta, with a slightly different feature set and search space. See http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cosmin/pngtech/optipng/" Pngcrush is a commandline application. If you prefer a draggity-droppity GUI, several are available, including these which embed pngcrush along with other commandline image compressors/optimizers: ImageOptim for Macs, free, GPLv2 license
Trimage for Linux, Windows, Mac, free, MIT license Apple distributes a modified version of pngcrush. It claims to be the real pngcrush and does not inform the user of the changes as the pngcrush license requires. It creates files that are not valid PNG datastreams, since they begin with the CgBI chunk instead of the IHDR chunk. The Apple-modified pngcrush is capable of reverting the "iPhone optimizations" (except for unavoidable loss of precision in the underlying color values of non-opaque pixels). There are also third-party applications such as the public domain, open source pngdefry application that can be found on the net. I am required to note that Apple and iPhone are registered trademarks of Apple, Inc. Links to translations of this page, or older versions of it, are available. The author of pngcrush is Glenn Randers-Pehrson, glennrp@users.sf.net
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Dear Seth,
You’re only three years old, and at this point in your life you can’t read, much less understand what I’m going to try to tell you in this letter. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the life that you have ahead of you, about my life so far as I reflect on what I’ve learned, and about my role as a dad in trying to prepare you for the trials that you will face in the coming years.
You won’t be able to understand this letter today, but someday, when you’re ready, I hope you will find some wisdom and value in what I share with you.
You are young, and life has yet to take its toll on you, to throw disappointments and heartaches and loneliness and struggles and pain into your path. You have not been worn down yet by long hours of thankless work, by the slings and arrows of everyday life.
For this, be thankful. You are at a wonderful stage of life. You have many wonderful stages of life still to come, but they are not without their costs and perils.
I hope to help you along your path by sharing some of the best of what I’ve learned. As with any advice, take it with a grain of salt. What works for me might not work for you.
Life Can Be Cruel
There will be people in your life who won’t be very nice. They’ll tease you because you’re different, or for no good reason. They might try to bully you or hurt you.
There’s not much you can do about these people except to learn to deal with them, and learn to choose friends who are kind to you, who actually care about you, who make you feel good about yourself. When you find friends like this, hold on to them, treasure them, spend time with them, be kind to them, love them.
There will be times when you are met with disappointment instead of success. Life won’t always turn out the way you want. This is just another thing you’ll have to learn to deal with. But instead of letting these things get you down, push on. Accept disappointment and learn to persevere, to pursue your dreams despite pitfalls. Learn to turn negatives into positives, and you’ll do much better in life.
You will also face heartbreak and abandonment by those you love. I hope you don’t have to face this too much, but it happens. Again, not much you can do but to heal, and to move on with your life. Let these pains become stepping stones to better things in life, and learn to use them to make you stronger.
But Be Open to Life Anyway
Yes, you’ll find cruelty and suffering in your journey through life … but don’t let that close you to new things. Don’t retreat from life, don’t hide or wall yourself off. Be open to new things, new experiences, new people.
You might get your heart broken 10 times, but find the most wonderful woman the 11th time. If you shut yourself off from love, you’ll miss out on that woman, and the happiest times of your life.
You might get teased and bullied and hurt by people you meet … and then after meeting dozens of jerks, find a true friend. If you close yourself off to new people, and don’t open your heart to them, you’ll avoid pain … but also lose out on meeting some incredible people, who will be there during the toughest times of your life and create some of the best times of your life.
You will fail many times but if you allow that to stop you from trying, you will miss out on the amazing feeling of success once you reach new heights with your accomplishments. Failure is a stepping stone to success.
Life Isn’t a Competition
You will meet many people who will try to outdo you, in school, in college, at work. They’ll try to have nicer cars, bigger houses, nicer clothes, cooler gadgets. To them, life is a competition — they have to do better than their peers to be happy.
Here’s a secret: life isn’t a competition. It’s a journey. If you spend that journey always trying to impress others, to outdo others, you’re wasting your journey. Instead, learn to enjoy the journey. Make it a journey of happiness, of constant learning, of continual improvement, of love.
Don’t worry about having a nicer car or house or anything material, or even a better-paying job. None of that matters a whit, and none of it will make you happier. You’ll acquire these things and then only want more. Instead, learn to be satisfied with having enough — and then use the time you would have wasted trying to earn money to buy those things … use that time doing things you love.
Find your passion, and pursue it doggedly. Don’t settle for a job that pays the bills. Life is too short to waste on a job you hate.
Love Should Be Your Rule
If there’s a single word you should live your life by, it should be this: Love. It might sound corny, I know … but trust me, there’s no better rule in life.
Some would live by the rule of success. Their lives will be stressful, unhappy and shallow.
Others would live by the rule of selfishness — putting their needs above those of others. They will live lonely lives, and will also be unhappy.
Still others will live by the rule of righteousness — trying to show the right path, and admonishing anyone who doesn’t live by that path. They are concerned with others, but in a negative way, and in the end will only have their own righteousness to live with, and that’s a horrible companion.
Live your life by the rule of love. Love your spouse, your children, your parents, your friends, with all of your heart. Give to them what they need, and show them not cruelty nor disapproval nor coldness nor disappointment, but only love. Open your soul to them.
Love not only your loved ones, but your neighbors … your coworkers … strangers … your brothers and sisters in humanity. Offer anyone you meet a smile, a kind word, a kind gesture, a helping hand.
Love not only neighbors and strangers … but your enemy. The person who is cruelest to you, who has been unkind to you … love him. He is a tortured soul, and most in need of your love.
And most of all, love yourself. While others may criticize you, learn not to be so hard on yourself, to think that you’re ugly or dumb or unworthy of love … but to think instead that you are a wonderful human being, worthy of happiness and love … and learn to love yourself for who you are.
Finally, know that I love you and always will. You are starting out on a weird, scary, daunting, but ultimately incredibly wonderful journey, and I will be there for you when I can. Godspeed.
Love,
Your Dad |
In 2007, Gordon Ramsay ripped apart struggling New Jersey chef Joseph Cerniglia on “Kitchen Nightmares,” screaming: “Your business is about to f - - king swim down the Hudson.”
Three years later, Cerniglia jumped off the George Washington Bridge.
His shocking death was one of at least 21 reality-contestant suicides since 2004 — afflicting lesser-known programs such as “Storage Wars” as well as ratings mammoths like the “Bachelor” franchise, which has lost three former stars to suicide.
Insiders raise questions about the types of people attracted to these shows — and the screening process and support offered.
Dr. Richard Levak, a California-based personality expert who has worked on several reality shows, including “Survivor,” says the spate of suicides among reality-TV stars boils down to a chicken-or-the-egg debate.
“Does [appearing on reality television] attract people with a higher rate of instability?” Levak asks. “Are people who are unstable more interested? Or do the vagaries of reality TV precipitate people killing themselves?”
Two weeks ago, “The Bachelor” Season 14 contestant Alexa “Lex” McAllister, 31, became the latest fatality when she overdosed on prescription pills. Gia Allemand, from the same season, hanged herself in 2013. Three years earlier, 35-year-old Julien Hug, a 2009 “Bachelorette” contestant, shot himself in the head.
Even periphereal players like Russell Armstrong, husband of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Taylor Armstrong, aren’t immune. He hanged himself in 2011 after his financial woes and marital problems were aired on Bravo. Prior to his death, he told RumorFix of the pressures of being on television.
“[It] was pretty overwhelming,” he said. “It took our manageable problems and made them worse.”
Jesse Csincsak, the fourth-season winner of “The Bachelorette,” tells The Post that the pressures and struggles that come with appearing on reality television can drive some people over the edge.
‘People aren’t screened [by the shows] as well as they should be. A lot of people have trouble dealing with the aftermath.’ - Eliza Orlins, who starred on two seasons of “Survivor”
“I think people don’t realize the repercussions when they sign up,” says Csincsak, who was friends with both McAllister and Allemand.
He says one of the biggest problems is being thrust into the spotlight with minimal preparation for the fanfare, hatred and exposure about to overtake one’s life.
“Over the course of eight episodes, 50 million people saw them. Everywhere they go — walking down the streets, on Facebook — all these people are judging them,” says Csincsak, who had trouble finding a job after his 2008 reality-TV debut (he now works in property management in Scottsdale, Ariz.).
“They didn’t sign up to be portrayed as the bully or the slut or the drunk or whatever,” he says, “but they were, because that creates ratings, and ratings equal dollars.”
Eliza Orlins, who starred on two seasons of “Survivor,” recalls perusing an online message board after she completed the show the first time around in 2004.
“Half the people were saying, ‘That anorexic bitch should eat a cheeseburger,’ and the other half were like, ‘Oh my God, look at her fat thighs.’
“People aren’t screened [by the shows] as well as they should be,” says Orlins, now a lawyer in Manhattan. “A lot of people have trouble dealing with the aftermath.”
The screening process for reality-show contestants typically starts with casting directors who “make sure [applicants] are emotionally stable enough,” says Lisa Ganz, who owns a Manhattan casting company and has worked with shows “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Nanny 911.”
Once they get OK’d, nearly all candidates undergo a thorough background check, including an STD exam if they’re on a romantic show like “The Bachelor,” and a written and in-person psychological test.
Csincsak’s psych evaluation included 1,200 multiple-choice questions, such as “Do you feel sad?” and “Do you ever think about killing your mother?”
But the “Bachelorette” champ claims the questions were less about deducing stability and more about gathering ammo for later.
“You say you’re scared of snakes, they’re going to take you to the zoo. If you’re afraid of heights, they’ll make you jump off a cliff,” he says.
“Now they’re even more in-depth, and they ask for your best friend’s number and five past girlfriends. They want to know dirt so they can create a story around you.”
Levak admits there’s an allure to having a degree of volatility on TV.
“Generally, the producers would like people that I was uncomfortable with for psychological reasons,” he says.
“They were obviously the most interesting and attractive,” he adds, noting that a show’s honchos would normally heed his professional advice, even if it required a battle.
But nothing’s a perfect science, Levak concedes, especially when people are willing to sacrifice health for fame.
Take Kathy Sleckman. She endured an exhaustive 10-day interview and background check in Los Angeles — all while essentially quarantined in her hotel room — when she applied for Season 9 of “Survivor” in 2004.
“You’re not allowed to talk to the other contestants. You eat by yourself,” says Sleckman.
The Wisconsin native didn’t make the cut, but three years later, she was called back to interview for Season 16 of the show. This time, she was in LA for two days of meetings. In the intervening years, and unbeknownst to the producers, Sleckman had become a mother and suffered from severe postpartum depression, and was on the antidepressant Zoloft.
“I hid it,” admits Sleckman, who paid for her doctor appointments in cash to ensure there’d be no trail of her psychiatric appointments.
She made the cut and quit Zoloft cold turkey when she left for Palau to film “Survivor: Micronesia” with Orlins, among others.
“I thought they’d search my luggage,” she explains.
‘No matter how you’re portrayed . . . you’re kind of set up for failure down the road.’ - Jesse Csincsak, fourth-season winner of “The Bachelorette”
Sleckman, now 53, was soon plagued with serious thoughts of self-harm while filming.
“While I was out on the island, my mind went to, ‘My husband’s seeing someone already,’ ‘My daughter’s going to hate me . . . and become a crack whore’ . . . I was mentally going down a rabbit hole.”
Not wanting to quit, on Day 19 of filming, Sleckman decided she would chop off the tip of her pinky finger and go out — gracefully — on medical leave.
Instead, Sleckman confided in one of the producers and was sent off-site, where she was given an emergency pack of Zoloft and met with the on-set therapist, Dr. Liza Siegel. She was sent home four days later. Viewers were simply told she had quit the show. Nothing about her mental breakdown aired on the program, which was a surprise to Sleckman.
(Mark Burnett Productions, the creators of the show, did not respond to The Post about Sleckman’s account.)
“There’s no family or friends,” says Sleckman. “You’re starving and out in the elements. It’s probably one of the worst situations to be in if you were off your meds.”
One producer, who asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, says that a suicide threat can derail an entire show season.
“We have a responsibility to hook them up with [a therapist] and not shoot again until they’re emotionally stable,” the producer says, adding that the confessional-heavy setup of these shows can expose deeply rooted issues.
Some who have lost loved ones, like Joseph Cerniglia’s mother, Patricia Hansen, don’t blame the shows.
“Listen, the restaurant business is the worst business that you can be in,” says Hansen. “We were happy with [‘Kitchen Nightmares’]. It was fun. Gordon was great.”
But Csincsak argues that nearly everyone experiences some type of fall after filming.
“No matter how you’re portrayed . . . you’re kind of set up for failure down the road,” says Csincsak.
After jetting around like a king to private islands in private helicopters, “you go off the show and back to your job at Target or bartending, and all of a sudden you’re depressed,” he says. “It’s just inevitable.”
Csincsak says the networks ought to require a post-show mental evaluation for rejected contestants, rather than liquoring them up and sending them home in tears.
“Maybe they [should] put you in a hotel for 48 hours to decompress with a therapist to allow your brain to process everything,” he says.
Levak expresses worry that as the genre continues to need more and more contestants for more and more shows, “the vetting procedure might be compromised.”
Says Csincsak: “I guarantee you that there are other people, who are on the verge of maybe not wanting to live anymore, on the show, and they see [what happened to] Lex and Gia and they think, ‘Oh, their pain is over with and gone. That could be me.’ ”
If you — or someone you know — needs help, please call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. If you are outside of the US, please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of international resources. |
Mile Jedinak looks set to be charged with violent conduct by the Football Association after an elbow on Diafra Sakho during Crystal Palace’s win at West Ham.
Jedinak will be banned for four games if the case is proven as it will be his second red card offence of the season.
He was sent off against Sunderland in November.
Mile Jedinak (15) looks set to banned for four games if the FA find him guilty of violent conduct
Diafra Sakho (right) was lucky not to be more seriously injured in the clash with the Crystal Palace captain
The Palace captain was making his first appearance for his club since December, having returned from international duty for Australia in the Asia Cup.
Jedinak had chased back to hook the ball clear from his own penalty area when he caught Sakho with an elbow to the side of the head.
No foul was given, and the Aussie claimed afterwards it was not intentional and was unsure how it happened. |
History, with its insights, analogies, and narratives, is central to the ways in which the United States interacts with the world. Historians and policymakers, however, rarely engage one another as they should. This book bridges that divide, bringing together leading scholars and policymakers to address the essential questions surrounding the history-policy relationship. Chapters include:
Mark Lawrence on the numerous, and often contradictory, historical lessons that American observers have drawn from the Vietnam War.
H. W. Brands on the role of analogies in U.S. policy during the Persian Gulf crisis and war of 1990–91.
Jennifer M. Miller on the Potsdam Declaration and Japanese Rearmament in 1945-50
Jeremi Suri on Henry Kissinger’s powerful use of history.
James Steinberg on how various forms of history informed U.S. responses to the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Peter Feaver and William Inboden on the roles that historical knowledge and analogies played in several key policy initiatives undertaken during their time at the National Security Council from 2005 to 2007.
Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, offers a broad and rich discussion of what kinds of lessons history actually offers.
Hal Brands teaches in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He is the author of three books on U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy, most recently What Good Is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (2014).
Jeremi Suri is the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. He is the author or editor of six previous books on international affairs, including Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy (coedited with Robert Hutchings) and Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama. |
(Photo: Anna Demianenko/Dreamstime)
Most Ivy League students and upper-middle-class progressives don’t practice the anything-goes lifestyle they endorse for others.
One of the great conceits of progressivism and a certain brand of apocalyptic conservatism alike is that each generation grows up to reject the moralism of its parents: Out goes Betty Draper; in comes Betty Friedan. Each generation is the most socially liberal generation that has ever existed. “This is the end of marriage, capitalism, and God,” a leftist at Salon celebrated last year, voicing a pretty typical sentiment among certain corners of the Left. On the right, Pat Buchanan worries that the spread of same-sex marriage means “the death of moral community” (as he titled a 2011 essay) and traditional institutions.
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Young Americans are, indeed, socially very liberal. According to 2017 Pew surveys, Millennials report greater support for same-sex marriage than any other cohort in the history of public opinion polling. They also more liberal on abortion, the death penalty, and more or less whatever else you care to mention. Much of this, of course, is just the historically constant reality that people tend to become more conservative as they age: Indeed, as a cohort, Millennials are not necessarily as liberal as it is commonly supposed. High-school seniors and college freshmen are more likely to identify as conservative now than in the 1970s or 1980s. Although middle-aged Americans have grown more liberal on abortion, young Americans are as likely now to say that abortion should be “legal under any circumstances” as they were in the 1980s or the late ’70s, and less likely than in the 1990s.
But it really is true that a segment of American Millennials, particularly the well-educated and the affluent, subscribe to social beliefs far to the left of the American mainstream, current or historical. This won’t be news to anyone who has followed developments on American campuses over the past several years: social conservatives shouted down or assaulted; professors harassed and forced to leave for the most anodyne departures from consensus; student groups that accept as gospel positions on gender and sexuality that most Americans would find literally unbelievable, if not incomprehensible. Take it from a current university student: It is, at least in public spaces, treated as gospel that abortion is a right almost without limit, that hookups or polygamous relationships are morally acceptable, that one should never feel guilty for consensual sex.
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Funny thing, though: We don’t practice what we preach. For starters, all the “sex positivity” notwithstanding, we don’t actually have very much sex. Millennials are more than twice as likely to have had no sexual partners in their early 20s than those born in the 1960s. In general, Millennials have about as many sexual partners as Baby Boomers and considerably less than Generation X-ers — those born in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. If anything the trend is more pronounced at top universities: Nineteen percent of Harvard students graduated the university in 2017 as virgins, the Harvard Crimson reported, and 49 percent of graduating students had two or fewer sexual partners over their four years.
Among those students who do have sex, neither hookup culture nor polyamory — relationships with multiple consenting partners — is particularly prevalent. Take Brown, which doesn’t particularly have a reputation for prudishness among top universities. In the fall of 2012, the Brown Daily Herald found that 49 percent of students were either in an exclusive relationship or were hooking up; 24.8 percent were in an exclusive monogamous relationship; another 7.8 percent were consistently hooking up with just one person. Only 12.6 percent of Brown students were regularly hooking up with multiple people. And only 0.3 percent were in an “exclusive relationship with multiple people” — the much-discussed polyamorous relationship.
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One might think that lots of students want to engage in casual sex but are too socially awkward to do so. This too is wrong (although university students are in fact very awkward): Considerably more Brown students said they wanted to be in a relationship than actually were (75 percent vs. 49 percent), but the vast majority of these wanted to be in a committed monogamous relationship, and most of the rest wanted to consistently hookup with just one other person. Only 8 percent of Brown wanted either to hook up with multiple people or to pursue a polyamorous relationship. Brown isn’t exceptional here: A 2014 survey reported by the Stanford Daily found that 86 percent of students would rather be in a committed relationship than not, even though only 34 percent of students were in a relationship. It’s probably closer to the truth to say that a number of students want monogamous relationships but settle for casual sex instead.
Millennials are traditional in other ways, too: They are less likely to drink, smoke marijuana, or use cocaine than previous generations, although they are more likely to use painkillers, an artifact of the opioid epidemic. Only about half of Harvard students used marijuana by the time they graduated, and 20 percent reported drinking alcohol less than once a month. And on the economic front, for all the Marxists on campus, students at top universities are notorious for being relentlessly career-oriented. At the University of Chicago, clean-shaven economics majors in collared shirts and khakis, constantly scanning the horizon for the next consulting or finance internship, are considerably more visible than purple-haired Communists.
Beyond college, traditionalism also persists in elite circles. The marriage rate has been dropping across America — except among the affluent, who marry at about the same rate as they did in 1970 (rich men marry slightly less often, rich women marry slightly more often). College-educated white women are as likely to be married now as they were in 1950. The divorce rate has leveled off in American society writ large since the 1980s, but there has been a dramatic divergence based on education: The divorce rate for college graduates is about half that of those without a degree. America’s educated class spent decades decrying the importance of marriage and traditional familial structures to social life — and yet college graduates are the only cohort in America that acts as if it’s still the 1950s.
The most elite circles of American life are the most critical of traditional living and are, with the very notable exception of religious life, some of the most traditional in their own life choices.
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The picture, on the whole, is striking. The most elite circles of American life are the most critical of traditional living and are, with the very notable exception of religious life, some of the most traditional in their own life choices. College students have by and large turned back the clock on the sexual revolution, overwhelmingly preferring stable, monogamous relationships. They don’t smoke or drink very much. They focus on building careers. When they want to have children later in life, they get married, and, once they get married, they tend to stay married.
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This should lead us to a few conclusions. First, the concerns about widespread cultural collapse that have been in vogue since the late 1960s and that may perhaps be best encapsulated by Pat Buchanan’s Culture War speech, delivered at the Republican National Convention in 1992, are less pressing now. The current young generation holds more moderate, more sustainable, and even more conservative attitudes toward sex, relationships, and drugs than the generations before it. This does not mean that there are not serious challenges — in particular, there are very worrying signs of social collapse in working-class America, from the opioid crisis to the continued decline in marriage rates. But the resurgence of traditionalism among America’s young is real, and it’s something to celebrate.
Secondly, it’s clear that traditional institutions have very considerable staying power, at least among the elite. The very cohort that mocks marriage and monogamy as patriarchal and old-fashioned ends up in healthy marriages at historically high rates. It is clear to most elites, at least to judge from their personal preferences, that marriage and committed relationships offer something that casual sex, polyamory, and the bachelor life do not.
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This suggests that the threats to traditional marriage are less than some conservatives have feared: There is nothing about same-sex marriage, culturally liberal attitudes, or cosmopolitanism that inevitably leads to the culture-wide erosion of monogamy or of marriage as an institution. But it also suggests that there really is something special about a certain traditional type of living, something that doesn’t allow for substitution. Upper-middle class progressives don’t need to be told this — they know it well enough. But communities struggling with divorce, unwed parents, and drug abuse could stand to benefit from this message, and it is a terrible shame that America’s elites preach the opposite.
“All happy families are alike,” said Tolstoy. For 60 years liberals pretended to wage war on this claim. But it is clear now: leftists and progressives themselves have come to see the truth of Tolstoy’s words. Hopefully they can own up to it and join the good fight.
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READ MORE:
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Artists against Theater |
Newsletter #68
14 - 20 March 2015
BITCOIN PRICE (BITSTAMP)
Latest News
Evolution, a cryptocurrency dark market has disappeared. It isn’t yet clear how many bitcoins the two staff members allegedly took from the marketplace but estimates from moderators place the number at over 41,000 BTC.
An ambitious plan to launch bitcoin-enabled microsatellites has taken a step forward with a new business deal.
Rakuten, Japan's largest online retail firm, has announced that it will begin accepting bitcoin across its global marketplaces.
Market
Bitcoin technology is set to disrupt online gaming and the big players had better start paying attention, says Jon Matonis.
One of our Buffer developers is a bitcoin believer - so much that he's getting paid in bitcoin for part of his salary. Here's how and why.
“What is the right maximum blocksize?” This question is impossible to answer. There is no “right” blocksize, and everyone will have to lobby for their vision of the network.
Ecosystem
NEM added the importance factor to the network in addition to the stakes. This means that an individual with only high stakes, do not necessarily have a higher change of finding the next block in the blockchain.
FibreCoin, ex-member of the Blocknet community, developers of anon-centric OS, and anti-key-logger password interface, has left the platform to join the SuperNET.
Factom has announced it will launch its forthcoming crowdsale on 31st March at 15:00 UTC.
Mining
This is Lecture 5 of Princeton's Bitcoin class where the topic of Bitcoin mining is discussed.
Legal
Attorney Jared Marx discusses why securities law is problematic for bitcoin 2.0 companies operating in the US.
This week's news that the UK government will seek to regulate digital currencies made waves in the local startup community.
Learn
Ofir Beigel discusses 3 options in generating your own Bitcoin vanity address. |
The new Frozen fiefdom of Queen Elsa, Princess Anna and "counsellor" Olaf in Disney California Adventure's Hollywood Land is not just a way to solidify the already successful film franchise; it's a whole new version of Disney's most high-octane fuel-source: princess power.
And yet fewer than five years ago, Disney announced that it was done with princesses, at least of the traditional fairy-tale variety.
The Princess and the Frog had tanked, and company execs decided that a royal wedding as happy ending was out of date. Any self-respecting female over 5 had dreams beyond a fabulous dress and a prince.
On the other hand, those dresses still sold, as did all the ancillary merchandise. The best solution to the princess problem, then, was not revolution but re-education.
Rapunzel became Tangled, featuring anti-prince Flynn Rider and adventures galore, while Pixar's Brave side-stepped romance altogether to focus on mother-daughter issues.
But it wasn't until Frozen that Disney meshed the modern with the magic. Featuring not one princess but two, Frozen champions sisterhood and friendship to the point of satirising traditional fairy-tale "lerve." With Josh Gad's goofy snowman Olaf drawing a large male audience, not to mention an Oscar-winning song, the film became the coveted cross-over hit.
Now the cross-over is literal.
On January 7, after a three-week preview during the holidays, Arendelle officially annexed portions of Disney's California Adventure resort, bringing with it character meet-and-greets, a sing-along, a night-time party and a wonderland of real snow.
Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times LET IT GO: Performers lead the audience in "A Frozen Sing-Along Celebration".
Despite the Nordic quaintness that made Arendelle such a perfect fit in Fantasyland, officials at Disney resorts decided that Elsa (now a queen) and Anna (who previously greeted guests in Disneyland's Princess Central, Fantasy Faire) belong in California Adventure. There, at least until May, park-goers can experience a little "Frozen Fun."
Elsa and Anna are not the first royalty on the block. A spoonful of princess was the obvious answer to the initially foundering California Adventure. In 2012, Ariel's Undersea Adventure took over the space where once the "Golden Dreams" played, and other princesses soon began making appearances at the nearby restaurant Ariel's Grotto.
But the Arendellians will be the first royalty to have a quasi-permanent presence in both parks. Fantasy Faire's vaudeville show will revolve around "Frozen," the characters will continue to appear in the Disneyland winter parade and, perhaps most important, Arendelle is now part of the landscape of the Storybook Land Canal Boat ride.
"Frozen has all the hallmarks of traditional great Disney animation," says David Duffy, director of creative entertainment, "which allows us to celebrate the legacy of Disney. But there's a contemporary feel to the story, which fits in with California Adventure."
Indeed, Frozen made its debut at California Adventure in the 2013 revamp of the World of Color show, which, Duffy says, makes this more a homecoming than a migration. Still, he adds, a lot of the decision was based on space. "We have the facilities in Hollywood Land."
Those facilities include the Muppet's 3D Theatre, now transformed into the Crown Jewel Theatre, where two royal historians, interrupted occasionally by Elsa, Anna and Kristoff, take Frozen fans through a musical history of Arendelle called "For the First Time in Forever — a Frozen Singalong." (If audiences at one day during the holiday sneak preview were any indication, singing "Let It Go" at the top of your lungs remains a passionate pastime.)
When they're not singing, Elsa and Anna hold court across the street in a stately side room of the Animation Building. (Which, with its sofas, floor space, air conditioning, electrical outlets and constantly streaming animation scenes, is one of the resort's most peaceful respites.)
Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times WANT TO BUILD A SNOWMAN? Dressed as Princess Anna from Frozen, Miley Romero, 6, waves to a member of the Tubadors music trio.
This being a cross-over event, the cross-over character is the center of the biggest addition. Studio 17 has been transformed to Olaf's Snow Fest with, you guessed it, real snow. Not the sudsy stuff that Disney and other parks pass off as flurries during the holidays, but real cold, meltable snow. (Memo to mums: Bring spare pants for the little ones.)
Like so many things Disney, the new Frozen attractions work on several fronts. New is good, and Frozen is better — who doesn't want to see snow and sing along with Anna and Elsa (and if you don't want to sing, at least the Crown Jewel offers a welcome chance to sit).
More important, though, is the impact Frozen has on the park. The popular characters, and the whimsy, are certainly a boon to Hollywood Land, which still has some geographic challenges — much of it is tucked away behind storefronts — and an industrial feel not in keeping with the rest of the park (Silver lining: The Monsters Inc. ride rarely has a line).
The new Frozen attractions also might take some of the pressure off of Cars Land — where the wait for the FastPass tickets to Radiator Springs Racers is often as long as the line for an actual ride — while also proving that Disney princesses can break out of Fantasyland and don't have to travel in packs. (Except, of course, during parades.)
Which raises the question: Though the Matterhorn has already claimed snow monsters, bobsleds and Alpine architecture, is there room at California Adventure for a Frozen ride?
Duffy laughs. "We're staying focused on Frozen Fun," he says. "At least until May."
Los Angeles Times |
The Post's Ruth Marcus explains why Donald Trump Jr. is in legal jeopardy. Hint: stupidity is not a legal defense. (Adriana Usero,Kate Woodsome/The Washington Post)
All children, except two, grow up: Peter Pan and Donald Trump Jr.
“He’s a good boy,” President Trump said of his scandal-engulfed son, in remarks that started off the record and then became on the record, apparently because he liked them so much. “He’s a good kid. And he had a meeting. Nothing happened.”
Here I was thinking that he was a 39-year-old man with children of his own, but I apologize for the error. I was wrong. He is still a very promising young man. (Most white men accused of wrongdoing mysteriously turn out to be promising, a vague quality that adheres the moment someone accuses you of sexual assault and does not vanish until the moment it is revealed that you were the Zodiac Killer. Sometimes not even then.) I owe him an apology for assuming that he was an adult capable of conducting himself through the world.
He is not.
He is still very, very young. Getting younger all the time. It’s even in his name. Junior.
It wasn’t just Dorian Gray, it turns out. Any promising young white man rich enough to theoretically afford a giant oil painting of himself gets to remain young and innocent forever, and none of his actions have any consequences, whether there is magic involved or not.
“The kid is an honest kid,” a friend of his told The Post. He’s a rookie, and it was a rookie mistake.
How could he help himself? How could he know?
He’s just a boy, at 39. It is a medical mystery. Or a great miracle. Perhaps both. Maybe he is even multiple boys, cleverly hidden under an ill-fitting coat. Aw, look, he did a business! Or tried to, at least.
Never mind that other people his age are not nearly so young. That is their misfortune. Sure, as Dafna Linzer pointed out on Twitter, Don Jr. is just 10 days younger than Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. Sure, when Mozart was Little Don’s age, he had been dead for four years (and when Tom Lehrer first made that joke, he was still two years younger than Don Jr.!) and it never occurred to him to set up any incriminating meetings. Jesus did everything he did with his life and died on a cross with six years to spare. By the time he was Don Jr.’s ripe young age, Frederick Douglass had escaped from slavery and written his autobiography. Alexander the Great had already conquered an empire (sure, he had inherited a little of it from his dad) and then died. If only they’d known that they were still, functionally speaking, in diapers! They could have relaxed.
It is not Junior’s fault that he is so young. Or that he gets younger and younger, Benjamin Button-style, the more he is in the public eye. If he ever winds up testifying, we will have to wheel him in in a perambulator, so young and helpless will he have become. Hurry while he is still visible, before he creeps back into the womb — a position where he will be greatly respected.
We should not ask, “Why would he send such an email? Why would he take such a meeting? Is he, as the New York Post alleges, an ‘idiot‘?” Instead, we should marvel that he managed to type the email all by himself. The real story here is that he did not spend the whole meeting playing on his phone (like SOME people I could name) but instead listened politely, like a real grown-up. It is very impressive that he tried to help, and that is the spirit in which this should be taken, like when your 6-year-old announces that he has made something that resembles pancakes by lighting the kitchen on fire. Unless your 6-year-old is not white, of course.
Some boys never get to be boys. This is the price of men like Donald Trump Jr., who never have to be adults. All this prolonged boyhood must be squeezed out of somewhere. For all these adults to get to be children forever, some children are not permitted to be children — or allowed time to grow up. Tamir Rice never got to. Neither did Trayvon Martin. Or Tyre King. There is a whole long, sad litany of names of people who never got to make rookie mistakes, who were suddenly saddled with adulthood at 12 or 13 or 14, while men of 35 and 40 got told not to worry because they were boys and, well, they would be boys. This unnatural boyhood demands its human sacrifices. It is important to have enough privilege to spread around so that some men can remain carefree children forever, well into middle age, making their innocent, rookie mistakes.
Why, just think how promising and young Donald Trump Jr. will be in 10 or 20 years. Unless we force him to suffer consequences from his mistakes. Then he might have to learn or grow, and we would not want that. Then what excuse would he have? |
Donald Trump is currently leading all other Republican presidential candidates in a new nationwide poll.
The real estate mogul and businessman won 15 percent of support from registered Republican voters as their first choice to be the presidential nominee. Not far behind are former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (11 percent) and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (11 percent) in the new Economist/YouGov poll.
Trump is even more successful when Republicans are asked for their second choice — he garners 12 percent of support, while many others topped out at 7 or 8 eight percent.
However, Trump's lead may not necessarily transfer to success at the voting booth. Twenty-nine percent of Republicans think Bush is still the most likely candidate to become their party's 2016 nominee. Only seven percent of Republicans think Trump will capture the nomination.
Paul is seen as the second most likely candidate, at 12 percent, and he's followed by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who each got 8 percent.
The random poll of roughly 1,000 U.S. adults was conducted July 4-6 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.
The poll was released just a day after Public Policy Polling released numbers showing that Trump was the top candidate among Republican primary voters in North Carolina. |
I wish I could tell you that life is fair. I wish I could report that every person has your best interest at heart. I wish I could promise you success in whatever ambitions you choose to pursue. I can’t do any of those things, though. Life isn’t fair, people are selfish, and risk cuts both ways. Can you handle the truth? If so, click ahead for a reality check.
1. Life Isn’t Fair
Karma doesn’t exist. If it did, do you really think liars and crooks would be elected to lead countries? Even the most corrupt politician can leave office to move on to a lucrative career in consulting, lobbying, or public speaking. Just ask Keith Alexander.
I know what you might be thinking. “How do they sleep at night?” I don’t have a good answer to that question, but I can assure you they do – probably on an expensive bed that is a thousand times more comfortable than yours.
Please don’t read this as a defense of morally bankrupt behavior. I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself for authorizing drone strikes that kill civilians, intercepting private communications of innocent people, or starting a war on false pretenses. Some people can, though, and they are usually the ones who end up in positions of power. Isn’t that a comforting thought?
2. People Are Selfish
Want to make new friends, get a promotion, or start a business? If so, you better be prepared to add value. That doesn’t mean you need to bribe people with free booze in a misguided effort to convince them to hang out with you. But you do need to understand that life isn’t a charity.
No one owes you anything. Not friendship, not a raise, and certainly not a customer base. You must show a person that you are caring, interesting, and fun to be around before she becomes a friend. You must show your manager what a valuable asset you are before you can expect him to give you a raise. You must provide your target market with a solution to a problem before they will buy what you’re selling.
It’s interesting that being selfish is seen as a bad thing, despite the fact that we’re all that way to some extent. Of course, it is better to search for win/win situations, but even these are rooted in self-interest. Most people don’t network for the fun of it. All pleasantries aside, they network with the intention of meeting people who have talents or connections that might prove useful in the future. Admit it: you’re selfish. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Just don’t get arrogant about it.
3. Risk Cuts Both Ways
I hate this nugget of business advice that’s frequently given to people who consider pursuing self-employment: “You’ll never work hard enough to make things happen until you remove your safety net.” Only a delusional person can say this with a straight face.
I have to confess that I am biased. I removed my safety net once. As a consequence, I went from being financially stable to covered in debt. Starting a business is fulfilling, but not many people experience overnight success. You might have to bleed money for a few months (or years) before you get anywhere. Most people aren’t prepared for this reality, which could explain why 8 out of 10 new businesses in America fail within 18 months.
Given the dismal success rate of new businesses – not to mention how difficult it is to claw yourself out from a pit of debt – it seems 100% irresponsible to tell a person to remove their safety net before they have a proven idea. By “proven,” I mean, “profitable.” You have a lot of years ahead of you, so don’t get antsy. Don’t let me discourage you from pursuing your dream. I’m glad I pursued mine! You can accomplish anything as long as you’re patient and hustle consistently. That said; don’t quit your day job yet.
4. You Can’t Affirm Your Way to a Better Reality (You Can Only Affirm Your Way to a Better Attitude)
Abundance is a lovely concept, but thinking about it won’t make money fall out of the trees in your backyard. You might feel more inspired to reach out to potential clients if you have positive thoughts on your mind, though.
Affirmations are a great tool for anyone who struggles with negative thoughts. Some people need to speak an empowering thought out-loud several times before they believe it to be true. It’s hard to avoid procrastination when you think you’re a loser who can’t do anything right. An affirmation like, “I am the CEO of my life,” could inspire a person like this to take action and improve their life.
Affirmations become a problem when people buy into the ludicrous idea that they can attract something into their life by simply thinking about it. If you want to fall in love, then you have to put yourself in a place where you’ll meet potential suitors (lots of them if you’re picky!). If you want to be wealthy, then you have to work hard and cut unnecessary expenses without mercy. No amount of positive thinking can make up for a lack of action. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool and a liar.
Could any of the people you care about use a reality check? If you’d like to provide your friends with a healthy dose of tough love, click here to share this article with your friends on Facebook.
Read More Articles by Daniel Wallen: |
WASHINGTON Once bitter rivals, President Bush and Sen. John McCain met for lunch Wednesday at the White House, where Bush endorsed the Arizona Republican for president.John showed incredible courage, strength of character and perseverance, Bush said during a brief appearance with McCain in the Rose Garden. That's exactly what we need in a president somebody who can handle the tough decisions; somebody who won't flinch in the face of danger.McCain, who clinched the Republican nomination Tuesday with wins in Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas and Vermont, said he was humbled by Bush's endorsement and wants the president to campaign for him as he seeks to succeed him in the Oval Office.He and I had a very good competition in the year 2000, McCain said, referring to the bitterly fought battle for the GOP presidential nomination. I appreciate his endorsement, and I appreciate his service to our country.With approval ratings in the 30s, President Bush may not help McCain much simply by endorsing him but he can still raise huge sums of money for his campaign.I've campaigned against him, Bush said. And I've campaigned with him. This is a man who deeply loves his family. He's a man who cares a lot about the less fortunate among us. He will bring determination to defeat an enemy. |
Combing the MMA world like an afro-pick on Jamie Yager’s hair, we have culled the best of last weeks rumors and have compiled them in a bullet point presentation that would make even your community college professor proud. The Sunday Morning Rumor Mill is here and if you listen really close, it wishes a ‘Happy Father’s Day’ to all the dads out there who have received decorative ties they never really wanted. Enjoy.
A bout between Mariusz Pudzianowski vs. Kimbo Slice is on the verge on being promoted, although it will not be under the KSW banner.
is on the verge on being promoted, although it will be under the KSW banner. Celebrity ‘ Big Black ‘ will be an unlockable character in EA Sports MMA .
‘ will be an . Herschel Walker’s next fight in Strikeforce goes down in October . Still no opponent has yet to be named.
. Still no opponent has yet to be named. Something really huge is coming to Strikeforce this fall that will apparently set the MMA attendance record according to ‘Big Black’. Not sure what it is though.
HDNet may start live broadcasting Sengoku events by the end of the year and there is a chance they will add a DEEP Cage Impact event on a trial run basis.
event on a trial run basis. Earlier last week, Jamie Yager mentioned that he could ‘beat Fedor’. According to someone close to Yager, this is just a ploy at gaining attention from international media.
Once again, Strikeforce has no intentions on re-signing Jake Shields and instead, will have a middleweight tournament in the near future .
. Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz are still vying for a third and final rematch .
. Josh Koscheck has started dating Hugh Hefner’s ex, Holly Madison.
MFC president, Mark Pavelich, has been suspended by the River Cree athletic commission for failure to pay a certain licensing fee . MFC has now been replaced by ‘Let’s Get it On’ entertainment as the official MMA promoter of the River Cree Casino.
. MFC has now been replaced by ‘Let’s Get it On’ entertainment as the official MMA promoter of the River Cree Casino. Mriko Cro Cop may have mentioned that he was considering retiring, but he’s using it as leverage to get a title shot , however unrealistic that may be at this point.
, however unrealistic that may be at this point. Sergei Kharitonov vs. Andrei Arlovski looks it may be on the horizon for Strikeforce and will go down in Texas sometime this summer.
looks it may be on the horizon for Strikeforce and will go down in Texas sometime this summer. Fedor has been training with Igor Vovchanchyn for his upcoming bout with Werdum.
for his upcoming bout with Werdum. Lenne Hardt , female announcer for Dream/Pride, is in EA Sports MMA.
, female announcer for Dream/Pride, is in EA Sports MMA. When Shane Carwin was handed the UFC interim heavyweight champion belt, it was what some people refer to as a ‘replica belt’ made of lower quality materials when compared to Brock Lesnar’s heavyweight belt.
ZUFFA changed the UFC 116 promo where it states Shane Carwin’s wins have all come via ‘Knockout’ to the more accurate ‘All finishes’. Apparently this change was made as a direct result from the outcry on message board forums (specifically Sherdog and The UG).
There has been a discussion between Bellator and Strikeforce to host a New Years Eve Event similar to Dynamite!! in which we will see ‘Bellator vs. Strikeforce‘ matches similar to what happened at Dynamite!! 2009 with Dream vs. Sengoku. |
Authorities charged a Gurnee man who is accused of shooting and wounding a 21-year-old man in the Albany Park neighborhood on the Northwest Side about a week and a half ago.
Phakthra Savath, 19, was charged with one felony count of aggravated battery with a discharge of a firearm, according to a statement from the Chicago Police Department.
The 21-year-old man was standing outside in the 4400 block of North Kedzie Avenue when four or five men walked up to him yelling gang slogans around 1:10 a.m. July 20, police said at the time.
Savath was identified as the person who fired gunshots at the man, who was struck in the right thigh and left ankle, according to the statement.
The 21-year-old was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where his condition stabilized, police said at the time.
Savath, of the 100 block of Wellington Circle in north suburban Gurnee, is scheduled to appear in Cook County bond court Wednesday. |
Your portfolio probably isn’t getting much attention these days as vacation planning, holiday parties, Christmas shopping and year-end reports dominate the calendar. But investors who neglect the last month of the year often miss out on some pretty attractive opportunities.
Seasonal trends, tax-loss selling and even the general goodwill associated with this time of year can all have a significant impact on the market. Pay attention and you can strengthen your portfolio or make some extra cash to pay off those January bills.
The period from U.S. Thanksgiving to year-end is typically strong, and December is historically the best month of the year for 18 of the world’s 30 largest markets, notes Jordan Kotick, head of cross asset strategy at RBC Capital Markets.
Importantly for Canadian investors, the list of winning markets includes the S&P/TSX composite index, Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and Nasdaq, as well as the FTSE 100, ASX 200, Eurostoxx 50 and Nikkei 225.
This year might work out, too, because the ongoing weakness in Europe, slower growth in China, geopolitical issues in Ukraine and the Middle East caught many investors off guard, so they didn’t get into the market as much as they might have earlier in the year. Combine that with persistently low interest rates, and investors are now playing catch-up.
Money managers that have underperformed their benchmarks are also likely willing to push for higher returns into the end of the year, which should boost stocks.
“Managers probably weren’t as aggressive in the first half of the year as they should have been,” Mr. Kotick said. “So they are trying to chase the bull market into the end of the year.”
He notes that there are plenty of risks out there, but believes investors tend to push their concerns into the new year and focus on the positives in December.
Never underestimate the power of people being in a good mood at this time of year. Get a little extra cash into their pockets because of lower gasoline prices, and you have people looking to buy.
The political climate also tends to be more amiable in December. Politicians head home for the holidays, so investors can count on less confusion from their elected leaders. Likewise, central banks are often less aggressive in the final weeks of the year.
Less noise lets investors feel more confident in their positions since it is unlikely that a negative headline will pop up overnight. “From a trading perspective, it’s a cleaner read,” Mr. Kotick said.
Plenty of investors are on holidays, too, so there are some price anomalies to be exploited in December because there’s less market liquidity, which can make certain stocks and sectors more volatile. As volume dries up, moves can be fairly dramatic to the upside.
With nobody around, you can pick up some fantastic bargains
Tax-loss selling also can also contribute to sharp stock movements. In the Canadian energy and base metals sectors, for example, there will likely be some significant tax-related selling in the coming weeks.
“With nobody around, you can pick up some fantastic bargains,” said Matt Skipp, chief investment officer at SW8 Asset Management. “In Canada, December has traditionally been a wonderful time to pick up names that you think have been oversold because of the pressure from tax-loss selling.”
The strong performance by Junior Gold Miners ETF late in December 2013 through early January is a good example of the bounce that can occur following heavy tax-loss selling.
But if valuations get too lofty as a result, it might make sense to trim some positions and take the profits. After all, that new Xbox for the kids or your new smartphone won’t pay for itself.
Steven Palmer, chief executive of AlphaNorth Asset Management, found that the TSX since 1977 has posted gains 92% of the time from Dec. 15 to year-end with an average return of 2.3%. The TSX Venture index, meanwhile, has been up every single year since 2001, with an average gain of 6.4% — pretty impressive for a couple of weeks.
On several occasions, Mr. Palmer has capitalized on year-end selling by significant shareholders in mining stocks. Because of liquidity constraints, share prices dipped 50% in some cases, only to bounce back in the new year when markets resumed regular trading patterns.
The junior resource space is particularly vulnerable and the easiest spot to look for a rebound this year. But investors need to be positioned before the middle of December because plenty of tax-loss selling has already happened during the past couple of months.
“Use it as an opportunity to buy stocks at a discount,” Palmer said. “People probably don’t pay as much attention, but they should because that’s when there are more opportunities.” |
The Voluntary System of Accountability was born six years ago as a defensive act, seeking to demonstrate to politicians and critics that colleges and universities were willing to show the public how they were performing in key ways.
But the two college groups that created the VSA, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, are now revising it, in large part to encourage more public universities to participate.
The biggest change expands the ways in which institutions can report their student learning outcomes, to try to make it more useful for campuses themselves. But that adjustment seems unlikely to be significant enough to overcome the objections that have led scores of colleges to opt out of the voluntary reporting system, primarily because they did not like the system's dependence on standardized measures that allow for comparability across colleges.
And the discussion about the accountability system says a lot about what has changed -- and what has not -- since the debate about student learning outcomes roared into public view at the prodding of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in the mid-2000s.
While campuses are engaged in significantly more activity around assessing how much their students are learning, the fundamental tension remains: Is measuring student learning important primarily to help professors teach better and students learn more, or to give students and parents more information about which institutions are performing better?
The VSA Is Born
M. Peter McPherson was just three months into the presidency of the land-grant association when he told Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education that public colleges would band together to create a way of informing the public about their performance in terms of graduation rates, graduates' plans, and the like. The Spellings Commission had been beating colleges and universities up for their perceived recalcitrance to be more precise and public about how well they were educating their students and otherwise fulfilling their obligations, and the panel appeared -- to some -- hell-bent on establishing a federally mandated system to force them to do so.
McPherson's proposal -- and the Voluntary System of Accountability's formal release a year later in the form of the College Portraits website -- seemed to take the steam out of the drive for a compulsory reporting scheme.
But the approach also received significant pushback from campus leaders and faculty groups that criticized its requirement that participating campuses use one of three mechanized measurements -- the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (from ACT), the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (from the Educational Testing Service, now called But the approach also received significant pushback from campus leaders and faculty groups that criticized its requirement that participating campuses use one of three mechanized measurements -- the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (from ACT), the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (from the Educational Testing Service, now called ETS Proficiency Profile ) or the Collegiate Learning Assessment -- to report their progress in student learning.
In selecting those three tests and requiring participants to report the difference in how freshmen and seniors performed – to try to measure the “value added” contribution that institutions made to their students – critics said the associations were buying into the argument that student learning had to be measured in ways that were comparable across institutions to be useful to policy makers and the public.
"The university has concluded that using standardized tests on an institutional level as measures of student learning fails to recognize the diversity, breadth, and depth of discipline-specific knowledge and learning that takes place in colleges and universities today," the University of California’s then-president, Robert C. Dynes, wrote to the organizers of the accountability effort in 2007.
UC and its 10 campuses were among the highest-profile non-participants, but they were far from alone. About two-thirds of the roughly 500 members of the APLU and AASCU participated in the voluntary accountability system generally, and of those, only half reported scores using one of the three measures. The country's most prestigious public universities were disproportionately represented among those that opted out.
“The VSA continues to be unique among higher ed accountability systems in seeking to get substantial reporting on educational outcomes,” says McPherson, whose vow to the Spellings Commission helped him gain a reputation for political astuteness early in his tenure as a higher ed association leader. “But we want a larger group to report” their learning outcomes, he adds.
Why were relatively few institutions doing so? In selecting those three tests and requiring participants to report the difference in how freshmen and seniors performed – to try to measure the “value added” contribution that institutions made to their students – critics said the associations were buying into the argument that student learning had to be measured in ways that were comparable across institutions to be useful to policy makers and the public."The university has concluded that using standardized tests on an institutional level as measures of student learning fails to recognize the diversity, breadth, and depth of discipline-specific knowledge and learning that takes place in colleges and universities today," the University of California’s then-president, Robert C. Dynes, wrote to the organizers of the accountability effort in 2007.UC and its 10 campuses were among the highest-profile non-participants, but they were far from alone. About two-thirds of the roughly 500 members of the APLU and AASCU participated in the voluntary accountability system generally, and of those, only half reported scores using one of the three measures. The country's most prestigious public universities were disproportionately represented among those that opted out.“The VSA continues to be unique among higher ed accountability systems in seeking to get substantial reporting on educational outcomes,” says McPherson, whose vow to the Spellings Commission helped him gain a reputation for political astuteness early in his tenure as a higher ed association leader. “But we want a larger group to report” their learning outcomes, he adds.Why were relatively few institutions doing so? A 2012 analysis by the National Institute on Learning Outcomes Assessment of the VSA's four-year pilot project on student learning outcomes cited two potential reasons: the data presented are not particularly useful to users, and there was a lack of support within higher education for the the measures used in the VSA.
"We ... found that the standardized tests of student learning originally approved for inclusion in the pilot lack credibility and acceptance within a broad sweep of the higher education community which, in turn, serves to undermine institutional participation in the VSA," the report said. "Institutions participating in the VSA and other non-participating institutions would like to expand the number and nature of the student learning measures in order to more accurately portray student attainment and provide more useful and meaningful information for multiple audiences."
Stanley O. Ikenberry, a co-author of the report and former president of the University of Illinois and the American Council on Education, says the VSA had a huge political impact, in terms of showing that colleges and universities were not afraid of reporting on their performance. He also credits APLU and AASCU with "jumpstart[ing] the assessment movement across the broad scope of higher education."
Colleges and universities (and their faculties) are engaged in much more experimentation in terms of understanding and measuring their students' learning now than they were just a few years ago (and are much more sophisticated about it), and the VSA (and the push from the Spellings Commission) played major roles in that change.
But Ikenberry said the original vision of the VSA also embraced what he called an "overly simplistic" view (favored by many members of the Spellings Commission) that "we could find a single test score that could be comparable across the incredible diversity of institutions and students [in higher education] that would be meaningful.
"The evidence we've found since then is clear that that’s not a very realistic vision of what the field ought to be trying to accomplish," Ikenberry said.
Much better, the NILOA report argued, would be for the VSA to "expand the range of accepted assessment tools and approaches," such as portfolios and the Association of American Colleges & Universities' VALUE rubric, and to allow colleges to report data on student learning at the program level rather than solely at the institutional level, since that sort of information may be most helpful to students and to the colleges' faculty members themselves.
"[R]estricting the reporting of student learning outcomes to a test score may have led campuses to ignore the many other relevant indicators of student learning that might have been shared," the NILOA report said. "The design of the next version of the College Portrait template should serve an educational and advocacy role for alternative assessment methods that use authentic student work to make judgments about the quality of student learning."
Rebooting the VSA
In reworking the VSA to make it more useful to colleges and students, the public college groups have taken the advice from the NILOA report to heart -- to a point.
Beginning this year, public colleges and universities will have more options for fulfilling the VSA's student learning outcomes reporting requirement. They can continue to report "value added" scores for the three standardized measures (CLA, CAAP and ETS Proficiency), and they can also report senior-only scores for those three exams, as long as they compare the results to peer institutions.
In addition, they can, for the first time, report institution-level results for the AACU's VALUE rubrics for
Stanley O. Ikenberry, a co-author of the report and former president of the University of Illinois and the American Council on Education, says the VSA had a huge political impact, in terms of showing that colleges and universities were not afraid of reporting on their performance. He also credits APLU and AASCU with "jumpstart[ing] the assessment movement across the broad scope of higher education."Colleges and universities (and their faculties) are engaged in much more experimentation in terms of understanding and measuring their students' learning now than they were just a few years ago (and are much more sophisticated about it), and the VSA (and the push from the Spellings Commission) played major roles in that change.But Ikenberry said the original vision of the VSA also embraced what he called an "overly simplistic" view (favored by many members of the Spellings Commission) that "we could find a single test score that could be comparable across the incredible diversity of institutions and students [in higher education] that would be meaningful."The evidence we've found since then is clear that that’s not a very realistic vision of what the field ought to be trying to accomplish," Ikenberry said.Much better, the NILOA report argued, would be for the VSA to "expand the range of accepted assessment tools and approaches," such as portfolios and the Association of American Colleges & Universities' VALUE rubric, and to allow colleges to report data on student learning at the program level rather than solely at the institutional level, since that sort of information may be most helpful to students and to the colleges' faculty members themselves."[R]estricting the reporting of student learning outcomes to a test score may have led campuses to ignore the many other relevant indicators of student learning that might have been shared," the NILOA report said. "The design of the next version of the College Portrait template should serve an educational and advocacy role for alternative assessment methods that use authentic student work to make judgments about the quality of student learning."In reworking the VSA to make it more useful to colleges and students, the public college groups have taken the advice from the NILOA report to heart -- to a point.Beginning this year, public colleges and universities will have more options for fulfilling the VSA's student learning outcomes reporting requirement. They can continue to report "value added" scores for the three standardized measures (CLA, CAAP and ETS Proficiency), and they can also report senior-only scores for those three exams, as long as they compare the results to peer institutions.In addition, they can, for the first time, report institution-level results for the AACU's VALUE rubrics for critical thinking or written communication, either comparing their own freshmen and seniors or for seniors only (benchmarked to peer institutions). Unlike the other tools included in the VSA, the VALUE rubrics are not standardized, though the results can be reported using a numerical scheme.
But that's as far as the groups were willing to go to accommodate those who want to be able to use measures (such as electronic portfolios or home-grown tools created by individual professors or departments) that focus more on what and how much students learn within a particular program or college alone, without some way of comparing those results beyond the institution's own borders, says Christine M. Keller, executive director of the VSA and associate vice president for academic affairs at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.
"We know a lot of institutions are focused on setting forth a set of learning objectives for their own institutions and designing measures to meet their own internal objectives, and that's entirely valid," Keller said. "But I don’t buy the argument that you can’t use outcomes measures for institutional accountability and for internal purposes, and we decided that going down to the program level, or allowing measures that could not be benchmarked against other institutions, would be going too far afield from the original intent" of VSA.
"Everyone we spoke with felt the VSA just can't go there -- it needs some kind of comparison or benchmarking," she said.
Some Won Over
VSA officials are hopeful that the inclusion of the VALUE rubrics will, as the NILOA report predicted, entice more colleges and universities to participate (or participate more fully) in the accountability system.
It is likely to do so in the University of Kansas' case, says Paul Klute, special assistant to the senior vice provost there. Kansas has experimented with the Collegiate Learning Assessment and ETS's proficiency profile, but found that neither of the metrics was "useful for describing student learning at the University of Kansas," mainly because of concerns about how representative the data were, Klute said. So while the university has participated in the VSA, it has not reported data for student learning during the pilot project, and would be unlikely to do so given the current requirements.
But the university has been pleased so far by its experimentation with the But the university has been pleased so far by its experimentation with the VALUE rubric for written communication, and in its own pilot project, "every department that teaches undergraduates used them in some way," he said. A majority used the rubric in its original form, some adapted it in minor ways, and the rest "threw it out and created their own."
Kansas officials plan to "roll up" to the institutional level the scores that instructors in its various departments assign to students based on how well they fulfill the requirements of the VALUE rubric in written communication. And those institutional scores, presumably, will be comparable to the institutional VALUE rubric scores that other participants report to the VSA -- allowing for the kind of comparability that APLU desires, but in a way that Kansas faculty can live with.
"There's a level of comfort that's there with this [form of assessment] that wasn't there with the others," said Klute. Among other things, he said, "there's less of an imposition that somebody's going to come in and commandeer your class to give this exam" that isn't necessarily connected to the material.
Progress, But Maybe Not Enough
Although the University of California has been a high-profile demurrer from the VSA, there are many things about the accountability system that the university likes -- so much so that it has copied many of them in its own accountability system, said Hilary Baxter, interim director for academic planning, programs and coordination for the UC system.
UC's main objection all along has been the attempt to standardize something -- the quality and degree of student learning -- that varies enormously from student to student and program to program, let alone university to university, Baxter said. |
Steven Gerrard Set For Shock Nike Switch ?
Liverpool skipper Steven Gerrard over time has practically become synonymous with the Predator range by adidas, thus being a boot traditionalist at heart by remaining loyal to just a single silo.
However, a massive switch shockingly seems to be on the cards, as the Reds’ captain fantastic has trained with the latest Blue and Volt incarnation of the CTR360 Maestri ‘control’ football boots.
Image courtesy of UniSport.dk
The American brand of the Big Swoosh might have decided to make a move for the England international after recently securing the deal to become the nation’s main kit sponsor, so keep your eyes on Stevie G as pre-season training continues.
In fact, note that there could be other reasons for this, such as Gerrard misplacing or damaging his trusted Lethal Zones and waiting for a new pair to arrive in the Liverpool camp.
#gerrard #nike
Posted on July 22, 2013 Justin |
Paula Bennett’s housing denial a threat to New Zealand
24 May 2016
Paula Bennett’s housing denial a threat to New Zealand
Paula Bennett and her Government colleagues’ continual denial that there’s a housing crisis is the number one impediment to solving our country’s housing issues, the Green Party said today.
Green Party Co-leader Metiria Turei will today hold the Minister for Social Housing to account at Question Time for her part in the worsening affordable and social housing emergency.
“As long as Paula Bennett, John Key and Bill English keep saying there’s no housing crisis, we’re not going to see enough new state and affordable homes, which is what’s desperately needed,” said Mrs Turei.
“The fact is, New Zealand can solve its housing crisis, we just need a Government that’s prepared to build new homes and fix the ones we’ve already got.
“This Government is very good at denying there’s a problem but unfortunately for New Zealanders, they’re very bad at creating real housing solutions that allow more people to buy a home or to put a roof over their heads.
“Government inaction got us into this housing mess, and Government policies can help dig us out of it, but the first step must be to acknowledge there’s a problem.
“Paula Bennett has the power to make a real difference to the lives of New Zealanders who are living in cars, garages and on the streets.
“Unfortunately, Paula Bennett is more concerned with booting people out of state houses than building new ones.
“Last week, the Green Party released our Homes Not Cars policy, which enables Housing New Zealand to build around 450 new houses by removing the onus on it to return $207 million in dividend and taxes to the Government in the next year.
“Instead of engaging meaningfully with the policy, Paula Bennett yet again denied there’s a crisis, and started up with more mud-slinging and name-calling.
“Paula Bennett’s response is typical of a Government that’s got its head buried in the sand. There’s a housing crisis happening in New Zealand, but National is too gutless to call it what it is, and to take real action to fix it,” said Mrs Turei.
ends
© Scoop Media |
Advanced Tips for Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade on iOS
Yishan Wong Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 31, 2016
For some reason there is a lack of in-depth tips on how to play this game online. I’ve had to figure to more complex things out on my own, so I thought I’d share them here for everyone else.
First, we assume you have already read basic guides like this one and know how to play the game.
What do the different weapon types do?
Light Weapons
There two types, the Melta Gun and the Stubber. The Stubber is faster-firing, lower-damage. The Melta Gun is slower-firing, high-damage, armor-piercing.
The Stubber is best for mowing down large clumped groups of infantry. It is minimally effective against tanks, trucks, and the large enemies (gorkonauts, decimators, scorpions, helldrakes, etc — basically all the ones you have to melee). It is passably effective against the buggies, motorcycles, and aircraft (hellblades, dive bombers) but only because those enemies have little armor.
The Melta Gun is most effective against everything that isn’t infantry. It will kill infantry just fine, but it is slower firing so you have to very precise: wasted shots will run down the gun before you can finish off an entire clump if you’re not careful.
With both, you want to fire in short, targeted bursts to avoid overheating.
Heavy Weapons
There are three types, the Battle Cannon, the Gatling Cannon, and the Thermal Cannon.
The Battle Cannon has low damage, but very large blast radius (700 to 1100), around 6–7 round capacity, and slow reload (37–39 sec).
The Gatling Cannon has high damage, lower capacity (4 rounds, called “drums”), and faster reload (20–23 sec).
The Thermal Cannon has the highest damage, a smaller blast radius (400 to 700), 6-round capacity, and the slowest reload time (43–47 sec).
All Heavy Weapons are at least moderately useful against large enemies.
The Battle Cannon is the least effective against large enemies, but its large blast radius will take out groups of infantry (including those who are near a large enemy you might be firing at) in one shot.
The Thermal Cannon is best against large armored enemies. It has a small blast radius so you can take out half-clumps of infantry in a pinch, but it’s not as good as the Battle Cannon.
The Gatling Cannon has no blast radius whatsover, but it reloads quickly. That’s the most that can said for it.
Keep in mind that you can fire a Heavy Weapon multiple times in quick succession if you need to really pound a large enemy quickly.
Mounted Weapons
There are three types, the Rocket Launcher, the Missile Launcher, and the Autocannon.
The Rocket Launcher and Missile Launcher are hard to tell apart. They are best distinguished by the number of holes on the icon: the Rocket Launcher has more.
The Autocannon has the highest ammo capacity (21–23 rounds), low damage (100%), and shortest reload time (36–38 secs).
The Rocket Launcher is medium-capacity (15 rounds), medium damage (195%), and long reload time (48–50 secs)
The Missile Launcher is low-capacity (8 rounds), high damage (296%), and slightly less-long reload time (45–46 secs).
For all three, the weapon won’t fire off all the rounds in your mounted weapon if it can’t find enough enemies on the screen to hit. If you haven’t fired off all rounds, the weapon will take proportionally less time to reload (it only has to reload the used rounds).
If you are clearing a screen of weaker enemies (e.g. infantry), the Autocannon works best, since a single Autocannon round is more than enough to kill infantry.
Therefore, given that the total damage of a full firing is roughly the same across all three weapons (assuming equal wargear rating), you always want to use the Autocannon because if you are using either of the other weapons and there are more enemies onscreen than available rounds, some of the enemies will not be targeted, while others may be overkilled, thus wasting some of your available damage output. On the other hand, if you are firing at a smaller number of tougher enemies, the Autocannon will target multiple shots onto each larger enemy as necessary to destroy it.
Recommended Loadout
This is a matter of individual playstyle, but the best loadout I’ve found is to use a Melta Gun, Battle Cannon, and Autocannon.
Use the Melta Gun to destroy all non-infantry enemies, and use the Battle Cannon to destroy large clumps of infantry. Because the Battle Cannon has limited ammo and takes time to reload, you can also use the Melta Gun to precisely kill small numbers of infantry when they’re the only ones onscreen and you don’t need to prioritize its use for the armored enemies (tanks, trucks) or fast-moving enemies (buggies, motorcycles, flyers). Use the Autocannon to clear things out when tons of enemies appear at once and you get overwhelmed.
The reason to prefer the Melta/Battle-Cannon combo instead of the Stubber/Thermal-Cannon combo is because while the Thermal Cannon is also good at destroying armored enemies (it’s actually better than the Melta Gun, since it’s a Heavy Weapon with far greater DPS), there are typically more such enemies than you can kill using your available ammo. This means you’ll be trying to finish off a tank using your Stubber while the Thermal Cannon is reloading, which often goes terribly. The Thermal Cannon is also too slow to reliably hit fast-moving units, and it takes too many shots from the Stubber to kill them (it’s still not easy to track them for long enough to get all the shots in). You could substitute the Melta Gun for the Stubber but then you’ll be missing a good way to wipe out clumps of infantry effectively: the Melta is workable, but overheats more quickly.
The Forge
I haven’t figured out the exact numbers governing the Forge, but have discovered one important tip:
Using higher-quality/higher-level items in the forge does not always yield higher-level items!
Do not rely on the auto-fill button! The auto-fill button on the forge will automatically select your highest-quality gear that is not the last instance of that piece of gear (i.e. if your highest gear is an Autocannon but it’s your last Autocannon, it won’t select it). You can manually select it and it will warn you, asking you to confirm first.
If anything, I’ve found that using low-level items in the forge tends to yield higher-level gear, so make sure you experiment with putting in different pieces of gear, and use the lowest possible level gear to achieve the highest-level gear your forge can currently produce. This is because any gear you don’t use in the forge can be salvaged for ore, and the ore you get for salvaging a piece of gear is proportional to its level.
Note: With the new v1.3.0.0 update the Forge has become somewhat more logical, in that the 245 max gear level can be broken. You can now go up to 300, and occasionally when producing an “at least 300” gear it will yield a higher-level gear, up to 350. It also properly uses purple and gold items to linearly increase the chance of a gold item, and if an item’s rating is too low it will not produce an item above a certain range. While the effects of individual gear pieces have on the final product is still a little uncertain, producing the highest-possible items now requires using your highest level and highest quality gear.
Score Multipliers
The most important thing for getting a higher score is to keep your Kill Muliplier (the number in the upper-left corner) up. This number can range from 1x to 8x, so successfully getting it up to 8x and keeping it there is key to achieving higher scores and getting all three medals on campaign missions.
The key to doing this is ABD: Always Be Destroying.
You don’t want gaps of time where you’re not blowing something up. What you ideally want is a steady stream of destruction, punctuated by rapid massacres. Sometimes you may want to delay killing an enemy for a bit until the next one is about to appear so that you minimize between-killing delay. This takes some getting used to, because your Freeblade navigates and walks on its own, and you don’t have an infinite amount of time to kill that enemy before your Freeblade turns and walks down the next hallway. Other times, it will require that you kill all enemies in view before it will continue on. Those times, you want to wipe them out right away otherwise you’re incurring delay while the Kill Multiplier will go down. On top of this, you also want rapid massacres of many enemies at once because you get additional bonuses for that (more on that below).
One key to keeping the Kill Multiplier up when there are no enemies in sight is to blow up destructible objects. Blowing up a destructible object will raise your Kill Multiplier meter slightly, but most importantly, if you can keep up a steady stream of destruction, the meter won’t go down. It’s not entirely obvious by sight which objects are destructible. Here is a list:
those huge statues
those huge square pillars
the red generators
red barrels (these don’t do area effect damage to enemies, they just explode)
piles of grey ammo boxes, often near the red barrels
defensive barriers
Czech hedgehogs (those X-shaped things often found near defensive barriers)
the lighter-colored pipes (city and indoor maps)
the vertical-shaped yellow lights (city maps)
second-story waist-height walls (city maps)
the yellow lantern-on-a-post lights (forest maps)
yellow hanging lights (forest maps)
the white cylindrical lights (indoor maps)
The Stubber is the best at spraying and killing the destructible objects (most will blow up with a single round, except for the statues, pillars, and generators), but the Melta Gun will also work so long as you are precise and don’t waste your shots.
Streaks
The other important factor in getting as high a score as possible is streaks, i.e. killing as many things as you can in a very short period of time. You’ve probably noticed that when you kill a clump of enemies sometimes it’ll say “Brutal Streak!” or “Savage Streak!” or “MASSACRE!” These are additional score bonuses on top of the points you get for regular killing and can add many tens of thousands of points to your base score.
Sometimes you don’t want to kill something as soon as it appears on the screen. Rather, let as many enemies “accumulate” as you can, and then wipe them out all at once using your light weapon, multiple shots from your heavy weapon, and possibly even your mounted weapon: aim your mounted weapon, take note of what enemies it targets, and as soon as it fires (there is a bit of delay between when it fires and when the shots kill the targets), kill all the other enemies that weren’t targeted.
This is a little tricky to balance with the “Always Be Destroying” goal but you can do it if you’re careful: during the lulls between killing, when you’re letting the enemies accumulate, that’s when you shoot at the random crap scattered about to keep the multiplier up. Don’t “waste it” by destroying the destructible objects when you are killing enemies for a streak.
One key to helping you get more and bigger streaks is to realize that some vehicles “create” enemies, so you shouldn’t kill them right away. Wait until they drop off their troops. These include the Ork and Chaos infantry carriers, some Ork melee enemies that drop off infantry, and the Chaos infantry dropships. The troops are spawned when they get dropped off, and don’t “pre-exist” inside the vehicle, so if you shoot the vehicle before the troops appear, you don’t get credit for them. Wait for them to appear, then kill the vehicle and the clump of infantry. Troops spawning out of a dropship can be killed easily by blowing up the dropship, which falls on them and explodes.
Get All The Campaign Medals
After you’ve completed a campaign mission, it’s worthwhile to go back and play it again until you get all three medals.
Moreover, as you progress through more chapters, the missions in completed chapters will actually open up new additional variant missions you can run. Ultimately, most of the missions will have four variants. These variants are on the same map, but with different objectives and enemy deployments.
If you can’t complete these variants right away or you just can’t seem to get that third medal, don’t fret: you can come back later when your Freeblade’s wargear has been upgraded. Once you have better weaponry, it becomes far easier to complete the objectives and get all three medals. |
When Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (or, more often, one of his flacks) is trying to persuade a reporter or party activist that, as a presidential candidate, he'll appeal to young voters who traditionally shun the GOP, he often cites his familiarity with social media. At times, in fact, it seems as if Paul and his team think the senator's ability to use the phrase "social media" without evident discomfort will be enough to make millennials swoon. (My favorite example is when Paul tried to make his joining Snapchat a big event.)
But here's the thing about social media and politics that Paul either ignores or doesn't understand: Every candidate is doing it. Indeed, as is shown by "Controlling the Message: New Media in American Political Campaigns," a new edited collection from the University of Texas at Arlington's Victoria Farrar-Myers and Boise State University's Justin Vaughn, social media has already become an integral part of every serious U.S. political campaign. If you're running for office, the question no longer is whether you use social media; the question is, do you use it well?
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Recently, Salon spoke with Professor Farrar-Myers over the phone about the pieces she and Vaughn chose to highlight as well as the present and future implications of what political scientists have learned about social media and campaigning thus far. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.
Is the field of political science starting to take social media more seriously?
I think in general, communication scholars have been out in front on this particular question for a while now. As political scientists, one of the reasons why this book came together is because there was a real question about the changing notion of a campaign. As you can tell by the book title, "Controlling the Message," the real question was, what does this new environment do for the ability of candidates to craft a campaign message? Does this new media democratize the process? Does it have the negative potentiality— externality, I should say— of taking control of the message from the candidate and giving it more to the voters or the public at large? We really were motivated in two directions, by seeing whether ways in which campaigns are structured are changing, and then by seeing whether these tools matter or if they're just new bells and whistles like TV was.
What have people seen so far in terms of whether social media is changing the balance of power?
Our book takes a multi-method approach, and myself and my co-editor chose particularly to do our research in real time during the 2012 presidential election. The writers of the pieces in the book did research on the various different types of social media tools with a particular aim of trying to understand whether, say, Twitter matters more than YouTube or whether there's more commentary out there or whether the nature and the type of people who use these media are inherently different. In other words, instead of just having the attentive public, are we getting some mass public participation? What was interesting, I think, in all of the pieces, whether you're studying Twitter or YouTube or just general social media commentary on various mainstream news articles, what you're seeing is a couple of things. One, you're seeing selectivity bias — there's still a media selectivity bias. In other words, if I'm already conservative or already liberal, I tend to go to those news sources or I tend to gravitate toward the people who have the same kinds of interests as I do. I would retweet those or I'd be more likely to follow those or to tag those. You do see reification; instead of opening up the forum and giving people different ways of looking at things, you're actually seeing people close themselves down to selectivity bias.
The second thing that was interesting to see was the ways in which engagement happens. 2012 was considered the Twitter campaign, right? Everything in 140 characters or less. One of the the things that was interesting to look at from a campaign standpoint is that these are seen as different tools that are necessary in order to conduct a modern campaign. There was a lot of emphasis on using Twitter for outreach and to gain supporters. What you don't necessarily do is motivate the inattentive public, which one would hope to or want to expect to do that. One area where that's not the case is campaign finance. We did see in 2012 and a bit in 2008 that Internet fundraising from small donors increased, and you saw crowdsourcing increase. One of the nice things is that if you raise funds via the Internet, you can automatically use those funds; there's not a waiting period on that. In some senses, this is sort of a mixed picture. You have this reification of the staunch partisans using this as a way to amplify their existing message, but on the other hand, you see that there's this expectation that modern campaigns must make use of these tools in order to be seen as modern.
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Did you discover or learn anything that surprised or concerned you?
You're seeing this real pressure on campaigns to gather all this data, and the real question here, I think, that is not fully addressed by our edited volume but is something we raise and really want to get deeper into as political scientists is, when we get all this data, what happens to it? A lot of the data that's collected is held by private corporations; Obama used, for example, a lot of Silicon Valley developers who agreed to develop most of these things on shareware platforms, but immediately after the election the DNC stepped in and said, no, we want those. A lot of those data sets still exist, they're out there, but they exist in private corporations' hands. I think that raises a different notion about what data means. It used to be that campaigns would stand up, they'd run, and when they were done everything would go away— voter lists would go away, data would go away— but now we have an opportunity for campaigns to have institutional memory. The real question, then, is how that data is used. There's a mixed set of really interesting questions that are opened by this study but that also lead us in directions we might not have expected.
Do we have a sense yet of a standard operating procedure or best practices for social media usage in campaigns?
I think you'd be hard-pressed to run a campaign now without having the ability to use social media in an effective way. If you look at campaign structures as you see some of the 2016 candidates standing up, you're seeing a whole social media section of data analysts who are doing nothing but analyzing data on targeting voters, right down to the products they have. You have a whole section of people who do nothing but website development, down to things like green screens versus blue screens and how three clicks works better than five clicks to get people to donate and how much information to provide, and developing a website with the most important things in the left upper quadrant and the right lower quadrant. I think people would totally judge a campaign that did not have a YouTube channel or Facebook or Twitter or some way to interact with it. You saw a little of that pushback in 2012 on Romney when he was unable to catch up really quickly with his own data usage, and that shows us the hazards of social media and this voracity of need for information and the fact that information can get out from anywhere, even a person with a phone sitting inside a fundraiser where you thought everybody was a friend. I think you're seeing this notion that you have to have social media, but it's also something that needs to be tamed.
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Do you think there's any reason that voters might come to resent how campaigns are collecting and using data through social media?
I think there could be. The most obvious way is just voters tuning out, because there's just more white noise. It's like the saturation of TV ads we're seeing in swing states, where every five minutes you see an ad. You just turn off the TV, right? You see a lot of people disengage after a while. Being a political scientist, I was following everybody's Twitter account, everybody's feed, and I was just getting inundated with things. What was interesting to me was that I'm a mother and, obviously, a woman, and I started to get things that were tailored for women and for mothers. That made me wonder, Hmm, they're obviously collecting cookies from my behavior online to know more about me, and that's a question of privacy. A number of people are very concerned about the data that's not only being captured but also the fact that corporations that are now standing themselves up and offering these services to campaigns now have proprietary rights and the campaign no longer owns that information. I think that makes people very nervous, because there's somebody out there who's already got this information collected in a nice, neat database.
It's obviously very early, but from what you've seen so far of the 2016 candidates, who do you feel is using social media the best or the worst? Or is everyone just doing what you'd expect?
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I think best practices have set in. It is premature to ask that because we only really have three candidates who have affirmatively said, I'm running for the presidency, and the rest of them are still in the exploratory stage. You don't even see the full campaign staff developed yet, but even in the embryonic stages of all those three that have announced and then the others that are sort of just dipping their toe in the water, you're already seeing heavy use of social media. You're seeing releases of videos on the Democratic side, you're seeing policy papers and videos and blogs being used by Republican candidates ... Again, I think you really are seeing that social media is here to stay as part of the notion of a modern campaign. The question going forward is, is it just another tool in the arsenal, just like TV is required in some ways?
The question I have as a scholar is, is it going to make a difference in the outcome of an actual election or what voters are actually reached? Are we going to expand the voter base? Are we going to get deeper into the mass public who don't usually pay attention to these things? Are we going to give them information that they couldn't get before? One nice thing about social media is that it is at your fingertips, so if you want to know something it's there. Then again, there's that negative side of social media — which all the candidates going into 2016 know — which is that just as much as it can be a positive assistance to you, you are on 24/7 and any comment, anywhere, anytime can be potentially used against you. I think it changes the speed of campaigning as well, which really puts pressure on the candidate. |
This picture showcases a gravitational lensing system called SDSS J0928+2031. Astronomers are using NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations of this type of lensing to research how stars form and evolve in distant galaxies.
Gravitational lensing can help astronomers study objects that would otherwise be too faint or appear too small for us to view. When a large object — such as a massive cluster of galaxies, as seen here — distorts space with its immense gravitational field, it causes light from more distant galaxies to travel along altered and warped paths. It also amplifies the light, making it possible for us to observe and study its source.
We see two dominant elliptical galaxies near the center of the image. The gravity from the galaxy cluster where these galaxies reside is acting as the aforementioned gravitational lens, allowing us to view the more distant galaxies sitting behind them. We see the effects of this lensing as narrow, curved streaks of light surrounding both of the large galaxies.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gladders et al; Acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt |
The NYPD's Facial Recognition Unit used this photo to catch David Baez, who was arrested in connection to a Bronx assault. View Full Caption DNAinfo
NEW YORK CITY — Socializing online is landing criminals in custody.
Police are searching for suspects' photos on Instagram and Facebook, then running them through the NYPD’s new Facial Recognition Unit to put a face to a name, DNAinfo New York has learned.
Detectives are now breaking cases across the city thanks to the futuristic technology that marries mug shots of known criminals with pictures gleaned from social media, surveillance cameras and anywhere else cops can find images.
“It is the one time something you see on a television show is actually working in the real world,” said one top police official who went from a tech skeptic to a fan.
The official explained how the new technology worked after a recent street robbery where a woman reported her jewelry stolen by her gal pal’s boyfriend. She did not know his name, only that he was likely in photos on his girlfriend's Facebook page.
“We did not have his name, but we found a photo and the Facial Recognition Unit got a hit,” the NYPD official said.
“It saved a ton of time and potentially dangerous investigative legwork.”
The new technology is the latest weapon in the NYPD's crime-solving arsenal that already includes DNA databases, radiological detectors and sophisticated license plate readers. The new investigative entity was formally launched late last year, with eight cops working in teams of four manning the operations.
Facial recognition — which zeroes in on features and extracts size and shape of eyes, noses, cheekbones and jaws to find a match — is now revolutionizing investigations in ways not seen since fingerprint analysis was implemented generations ago.
“It’s really amazing,” said another top cop who has seen detectives arresting suspects based on information gleaned from images.
Take a recent case involving a rash of livery cab robberies in the Bronx where drivers were being held up at gunpoint.
Police said the suspect called for a ride, jumped in the back seat and immediately brandished a revolver, which he pointed at the back of drivers' heads.
The cops were stymied and there was fear that the next robbery might end in violence.
They had a rough description of the man — between 50 to 55 years old and about 5-feet-10, wearing a green army baseball cap and a green Army shirt.
During one of the heists, on Feb. 28, near 515 Rosedale Ave., the cops retrieved a photo of the suspect from a camera on the dashboard of the livery car.
The NYPD's Facial Recognition Unit used this photo to catch Alan Marrero, who was arrested in connection to a string of livery cab robberies. View Full Caption DNAinfo
The detectives shipped the image to the Facial Recognition Unit inside Police Headquarters, where it was scanned through a database of mug shots.
Within hours, they had a possible match — Alan Marrero, 54, an ex-con with a long history including two stints in state prison for burglary.
Facial Recognition hits are not legally considered “probable cause” for cops to make an arrest, but it provides investigators with a roadmap to follow to obtain other photographs to present to victims to identify suspects.
On March 7, four days after the most recent robbery, Marrero was picked up at his home on Bainbridge Ave. and charged with three robberies. He is presently being held on Rikers Island on $25,000 bail.
In Manhattan, several thugs crashed their way into the home of an elderly couple in Washington Heights, beating them until they revealed where they hid their life savings of $30,000. The couple did not trust banks, and the thugs had heard about it.
A surveillance camera in an elevator captured an image of one of the thieves.
The unit’s futuristic software spit out a match along with a name — David Baez, 31, a convicted robber who spent seven years in jail after putting a knife to a subway rider's throat during a robbery. He was paroled in November 2011.
Investigators quickly determined that Baez also fit the description of a thug wanted in the Feb. 9 beating of a Bronx man who was robbed of his cash and iPhone.
Although Baez has not been charged in the Manhattan incident, cops tracked him down and charged him for the Bronx case. Baez is presently being held on Rikers Island, facing at least three years in jail for violating his parole, in addition to robbery and gang assault charges in the February assault.
Facial recognition, however, is not foolproof.
The best results occur when images submitted to the unit are reasonably clear and primarily taken straight on. But with surveillance cameras virtually everywhere now and the widespread popular posting of photos on social networks, the NYPD is increasingly getting its hands of usable photos to help them identify possible criminals.
“We are solving tons of cases now thanks to the technology,” a veteran police official said. “We get a nickname of someone and track him on social media and now we have a photo and then hopefully a name.
“It's really changing the way we operate,” he concluded. |
The unveiling of a special monument, worthy of the sacrifice of the fighters of the DSE who fell in the battle of Florina in February 1949, took place on Sunday 14th of February during a special event organized by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece in Florina. This event was held in the framework of the celebrations of the KKE's 100th anniversary.
The monument was erected at a location where over 700 partisans of the DSE, men and women, are buried. It was designed by Memos Makris.
Thousands of people responded to the call of the KKE. They took part in a march that began in the centre of the town of Florina and reached the place where the unveiling of the monument took place.
The GS of the CC of the KKE, Dimitris Koutsoumpas, spoke at the event and stressed amongst other things:
"It is our duty and task to project the contribution of the heroic people's army, the Democratic Army of Greece in its harsh, unequal, bloody but just struggle. The battle of Florina was one of the most difficult and deadly battles that the DSE participated in. The bourgeois army had understood the intentions of the DSE in good time due to the major concentration of its forces in the area and its intensive exercises with live ammunition. The fact that the bourgeois army was prepared for this battle and having the balance of forces in its favour, made this military confrontation unequal for the DSE from the very beginning, as the DSE had lost the advantage of surprise, which resulted in it having a disadvantageous position from the outset. However, the partisans of the DSE fought with incomparable heroism and self-sacrifice in this battle, fully aware of their mission and duty. As in many other instances, they bravely attempted in unbelievably difficult conditions, with their unbending will and dedication to their just cause as their main weapons, to reverse the unequal balance of forces and to do the impossible.
Despite the defeat and heavy losses (over 800 were killed and 1,000 wounded), the moral and political superiority and indomitable courage of the DSE were clearly demonstrated.
After the end of the fighting, the bourgeois army committed an outrage. It gathered the dead fighters of the DSE and many wounded and buried them, both the dead and living, with bulldozers in a pit that it had dug in a field on the south east side of the city, in the area known as Agios Giorgos, i.e. where we are standing today.
The KKE bought this field in 2009 in order to erect a monument to the heroic and honoured dead of Florina, which we are unveiling today.
The monument was designed by the important artist, Memos Makris. His daughter, Kleio Makris, granted us the rights to this work."
As was stressed by D.Koutsoumpas "in the framework of the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of our party, the projection of the DSE's struggle is enormously important. We honour the DSE, its contribution and we are inspired by its titanic struggle. We study, we learn, we continue. This is the best and greatest way to honour the thousands of fighting men and women of the DSE who "fell in an unequal battle and struggle.
The struggle of the DSE was a just one. It was mass popular armed response to the ruthless attempt of the bourgeoisie to subjugate or exterminate the great EAM movement in order to consolidate its anti-people power. In order to achieve this goal, it used all means available, with murderous violence and naked mass terror as its main weapons, decisively supported militarily and economically initial by British and then later by US imperialism.
Almost a year after the heroic December of 1944 and the unacceptable "Varkiza Agreement", which imposed the disarming and dissolution of the people's liberation army, ELAS, the following against the EAM movement and the KKE :1,289 murders, 6,671 wounded, 31,632 acts of torture, 18,767 acts of looting and imprisonment, 84,931 arrests, 509 attempted murders, 265 rapes.
The stark choice for the party and movement: Submission or a new uprising. It chose, even if in a delayed way, to march on the path of conflict and not that of submission and humiliation. So, the mass armed popular struggle confronted the armed violence of the bourgeois state directed by the governments of the bourgeois parties and supported by the USA and G. Britain, which sought to secure their barbaric system of exploitation and to integrate the country into imperialist alliances.
The military conflict was harsh and year by year became even more unequal for the popular class forces. The "Truman Doctrine" and the "Marshall Plan" contributed decisively to the bourgeoisie's victory. The USA's napalm bombs were first used and testes against the DSE' partisans.
The DSE may have been defeated militarily, but despite the atrocities, bigotry and anti-communist vehemence of the bourgeois state after the civil war, which manifested itself through the savage terror of executions, mass persecution, imprisonments and exiles, they were not able to erase the magnificence of its struggle, it moral and political superiority.
For this reason, the mechanisms of the bourgeoisie never ceased their distortions and slanders against the struggle of the DSE and KKE. Opportunism has made its contribution to these efforts, as it characterizes the sacrifices as being in vain and the armed people's struggle as adventurism.
No struggle of the labour-people's movement and of the communists, no sacrifice was in vain. This is the lesson of the history of the peoples and the revolutionary movement. Through small and great victories, painful defeats and setbacks, the revolutionary movement of the working class learns, regroups and advances, becoming more capable and powerful in the struggle to overthrow capitalism and with more impetus drives forwards for the victory of the peoples.
The struggle of the DSE honoured the previous struggles of the people's movement and was the major inspiration for the struggles of the following generations. It continues to inspire and teach.
[..]
We hold firmly in our hands the flag that represents the greatest and most human ideals in whose service they fell. We raise it up high. So that we can put an end to the exploitation of man by man, wars, poverty. For socialism-communism.
No conciliation with the class enemy. The completely opposed and hostile worlds which confronted each other at that time, remain as hostile and irreconcilable today.
The working class, the poor popular strata, the youth suffer from the continuous assault against their most basic rights that aims to safeguard the highest level of profitability for the monopolies.
The SYRIZA-ANEL government continues its anti-people political line, picking up from where the ND-PASOK governments had left off. It is attempting to finish the dirty work at the expense of our people, with the support of domestic capital and the EU. The promises it gave to the people proved to be false, while the ideological constructs that "there is a political line which increases the profits of the capitalists and improves the lives of the workers", "that the EU can change" and other big talk have been proved to be traps in order to disarm the people's radicalization and indignation.
The capitalist system and its state bring only disaster to the people, regardless of who is in government. It is now historically obsolete, obstructs social progress, gives rise only to poverty, economic crises and wars.
The only way for the people to put an end to poverty, unemployment and ensure their own prosperity, peace and sovereign rights, is that of the people's alliance for the overthrow of the monopolies' power and the disengagement of the country from the imperialist organizations, with workers'-people's power.
And this path can be opened by a strong KKE and an emancipated people, who know their history and learn from and are inspired by it.
Every working man and woman, who are the victims of relentless exploitation, every young person who start their lives in this jungle, where the injustice of the powerful prevails, is in a position to understand the cause and aim of this ideological offensive.
The exploiters, their hangers on, the warmongers and their unions attack the ideology of class struggle, precisely because they worry about the future of their class's domination. They fear the working class, the poor farmers, the toiling self-employed. They take preemptive measures so that the working class cannot become conscious of its social position and historical mission. Their fear about the future is what makes them focus their ideological offensive on the youth. They want to assimilate their liveliness, creativity and militant stance into their plans. They will not succeed in this! The social contradictions cannot be controlled by the ideological constructs concerning so-called national unity and the alleged abolition of the dividing lines in society, which are propagandized by the SYRIZA government and the official opposition ND, with the chorus of approval of the eager servants of the system.
As history demonstrates, the great bourgeois revolutions, like the French Revolution in 1789, and the proletarian revolutions, above all the great October Socialist Revolution in Russia, brought humanity forwards. The decisive contribution of the Soviet Union to crushing fascist imperialism during the 2nd World War and to the national liberation movements, the struggle of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Cuba and Palestine brought the world forwards.
We are in solidarity with all the peoples that struggle for their rights. We fight to strengthen the mass political struggle in Greece. We know that the path is very difficult, and that the most difficult obstacles lie in front of us. But we have deep faith in the working class, in the radical popular forces.
The political line of the KKE can rally many more thousands of workers, unemployed people, pensioners, youth, women, small and medium farmers, self-employed, tradesmen, intellectuals.
The correlation of forces will change. What is needed is for this to happen as rapidly as possible. And for this manifest itself now everywhere.
In the everyday struggles, in the labour unions, the farmers' associations, the associations of the self-employed, in the schools, in the higher education institutions, in the local elections, in the parliamentary elections, whenever they are held.
This must be expressed through the weakening of all the bourgeois and opportunist parties, their memoranda, anti-people laws and their imperialist predatory alliances.
We must make the KKE as strong as possible, to raise it up ideologically, politically and organizationally so that is capable of rallying even more forces and strengthening the conditions for the creation of a new great social anti-capitalist anti-monopoly alliance for workers'-people's power.
There is no other way out for the people. The representatives of social-democracy and political adventurism, who trumpet the need for another "European model" as an alternative solution, are deceiving the workers.
We got to know the "middle way" through such governments in the past and present, in Italy, France, Spain, Cyprus, Portugal, today in Greece, in other European countries and all over the world.
In every instance hopes and expectations were disappointed, pro-capital measures were taken, the people were disillusioned, the people's-labour movement retreated or collapsed.
The allegedly realistic "third way" is capital's way, the path for the defeat of the people and the ridiculing of their ideals and dreams.
Together with the KKE, in the furnace of the class struggles of the people
Some apologists of the system and of the victors' hatred, who exorcise the civil war as if it were a curse, do this in order to justify the barbarity of capitalism that organizes and wages a civil war every day against the working class and popular strata.
Their goal is to denounce the legitimate right of the peoples to defend their rights, using all the forms of struggle available to them, and above all their right to and their struggle for a better life without the exploitation of man by man.
We are fully conscious that you must examine history objectively. That you must study the positive and negative aspects, with the mistakes and shortcomings. There is enormous experience from the class struggles, in particular from the struggle of the DSE. There must be no class hatred towards the children of the working class, the farmers, towards the people, Greek men and women, who were conscripted and fought, brother against brother, in the civil war in the ranks of the bourgeois army. The class hatred and the dividing lines are not aimed against the working people, regardless of whether they vote for "leftwing" or "rightwing" parties, or how they define themselves ideologically. There must be class hatred and indeed an intensification of it towards a system, a class, a state and their imperialist warmongering predatory alliances which massacre the peoples.
The workers, employees, popular strata that follow the social-democracy of SYRIZA, the neo-liberal ND, as well as other parties of the so-called centre-left or centre or right, in reality have no place in these formations. All of them, the ordinary people, have a place here: In the KKE and together with the KKE.
The attempts to blacken and to distort the historical contribution, as well as the current activity of the KKE, take on many different forms. One of them is the blatant slander that the KKE allegedly is not interested in the pressing problems of the people, in their demands, and that it refers everything to a distant socialist future. The relationship of a party, however, with the labour and people's movement cannot be formed on a contingent basis, or in an adventurist opportunistic way. The relationship of the KKE with the people was built on the fact that the KKE and KNE were always in the frontline of the struggle concerning all the social needs as they were expressed in each historical period.
And so today, we are in the frontline of the struggle, together with the people as a whole, so that the monstrous draft law which will destroy social security does not pass, so that there are no tax burdens, so that all the anti-worker anti-people laws are abolished. We are the first in the strike battles, the demonstrations and rallies, in the farmers' roadblocks, in the struggles of the self-employed, professionals and scientists, in the struggles of the students and school students, pensioners and women from the popular strata. The heart of our future beats here. This how the struggles and sacrifices for a better future will be vindicated. Here with the KKE in the furnace of the class struggles of the people, yesterday, today and tomorrow.
In the run up to the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of our party, in 2018, we swear in the memory of the hundreds of thousands of our people's heroes that we will continue along the same class-oriented line of struggle for the just cause of the salaried worker, employee and their families.
We are committed to struggling, in alliance with the farmers and self-employed, for the defense of the needs of the workers, unemployed, pensioners, refugees and immigrants.
We are committed to intensifying our initiatives to coordinate the communist line of struggle at a European and international level, in the struggle against exploitation, oppression and wars.
We are committed, with our Marxist education, historical understanding of the class struggle and the experience from the struggles as our weapons, to free the historical truth from the obfuscation created by capital to serve its class interests. We fight against the defeatist fake left adaption to the system as well.
HONOUR AND GLORY TO THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC ARMY OF GREECE.
HONOUR AND GLORY TO THE PARTISANS OF THE DSE WHO FELL HEROICALLY IN THE BATTLE OF FLORINA IN 1949.
HONOUR AND GLORY TO THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREECE.
19.02.2016 |
Nov. 8 is Election Day and, from now until then, I will be working as hard as I can to see that Donald Trump is defeated and that Hillary Clinton becomes our next president. But defeating Trump is not enough. On the day after the election I intend to work equally hard, with millions of other Americans, to make certain that the new president and Congress implement the 2016 Democratic Party platform, the most progressive party agenda in American history.
That agenda includes overturning the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, pay equity for women, a new approach toward trade, expanding Social Security, breaking up “too-big-to-fail” banks, making public colleges and universities tuition free for the middle class, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, aggressive action to combat climate change, raising taxes on the wealthy and large corporations, lowering prescription drug prices, a significant movement toward universal primary health care and major reforms in our criminal justice and immigration systems.
Despite the nature of media coverage, this election is not a popularity contest between Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump. This election must be about how the American people come together to reinvigorate our democracy and develop policies that address the multiple crises facing working families, the middle class and our environment.
Let us be honest. If this long and painful campaign has taught us anything it is that there are millions of Americans — supporters of Clinton and Trump — who are tired of a rigged economy, a corrupt campaign finance system and a media owned by a handful of giant conglomerates. They want fundamental changes in what is going on in our country.
They are tired of living in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but seeing the top one-tenth of 1 percent own as much wealth as the bottom ninety percent. They are tired of working longer hours for lower wages while 52 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent. They are fearful that, for the first time in the modern history of this country, their kids will have a lower standard of living than their parents.
Every day they see, up close and personally, an economy which benefits corporate America and the billionaire class at the expense of ordinary Americans.
While the top five drug companies made more than $50 billion in profits last year, 35 million Americans are unable to afford the medicine they need because of rapidly rising prices and the fact that we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
While Trump and his billionaire friends, and many profitable corporations, pay nothing in federal income tax, our roads, bridges and water systems are collapsing because of inadequate investment.
While the fossil fuel industry spends hundreds of millions a year on television ads, campaign contributions and lobbying, climate change is leading to devastating problems here and throughout the planet.
While the giant banks on Wall Street continue their reckless and illegal behavior, enriching the few at the expense of the many, not one major Wall Street CEO has been prosecuted. In other words, the large banks are not only “too big to fail,” their executives are too big to jail.
And, in the midst of all this, we have a corrupt campaign finance system which, as a result of the disastrous Citizens United decision allows billionaires and corporate interests to buy elections. As I write, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and other billionaires are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates who will protect the wealthy and the powerful. The extraordinary vision of American democracy — of one person, one vote — is being replaced by an oligarchic society in which the wealthy and powerful control our political life.
Election Day is an important day, but so is the day after. At this pivotal and dangerous moment in American history, our job is not just to elect a new president, but to bring people together to transform our country and create a government which works for all of us, and not just the 1 percent. When we stand united, regardless of race, gender, nationality or sexual orientation, there is nothing, nothing that we cannot accomplish.
Bernie Sanders is the junior U.S. senator from Vermont.
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Through hip-hop, Kang Chun-hyok raises awareness about conditions he escaped as a child. He has agreed to answer your questions about human rights, life as a defector and his music
Kang Chun-hyok is rarity; a young defector from North Korea who is forging ahead with a career as a rapper. He arrived in the South at the age of 16 – one of the 25,000 estimated to have made the journey over the past 20 years – and is now studying art at Hongik University whilst pressing ahead with his music.
He has said he has ambitions to be the best rapper out of North Korea – a career that few of his peers would ever even dream of pursuing. Music in the North, like much of the arts, is little more than a patriotic medium celebrating the state.
Kang has recently teamed up with Yang Dong-geun, a hip-hop artist and actor from the South, who has said he believes that hip-hop is a great avenue for North Korean defectors to communicate their emotions “with real freedom”.
Talking on camera about the collaboration, Yang said: “I think right now is the time to start caring more about the lives of those in North Korea”.
Kang has also appeared on the entertainment show Show Me The Money, hip-hop’s answer to The X Factor, but failed to make it through to the second round after stage fright stopped him from finishing a rap about his childhood, according to a Yonhap News report.
Kang draws on his experiences in his lyrics, which, like his fellow rappers, can be outspoken. Performing at the opening of an exhibition in Seoul earlier this month, Kang appeared to address the Pyongyang leadership when he rapped: “you took money that we made digging earth to fund nuclear weapons. Take out that fat from your pot belly.”
His performance earned him a comparison to Eminem from the Washington Post. In Show Me The Money he declared: “Public execution? Ain’t afraid of that. It’s why I’m here, public audition!”
Kang has agreed to answer your questions about human rights in North Korea, life as defector, and his hopes and aspirations for his career. He’ll be supported by the Citizen’s Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, a campaign group based in Seoul who advocate for improved conditions for North Korean citizens and defectors.
Any questions? Post them in the comments below before Friday 12 September and we’ll pass the best to Kang to answer and post the results on the site next week.
Please note that due to language and sensitivities around Kang’s personal experiences this will not be a live Q&A.
Update: Kang Chun-hyok responds to your questions here |
I know what some of you will think. I am thinking it myself. Careful, careful.
Remember the “invitation” by the Good Men Project Magazine to add our voice to a purportedly fair examination of the men’s rights movement on their website? Remember the knife-in-the-back set-up by Editor Henry Belanger painting us all as frothing, whining, tin-foil hat wearing nut cases, inviting his readers to deride and ridicule us – right out of the gate?
I remember it well. I put my trust in Henry and he fucked me for it. No problem. Scummy is as scummy does and his readers still got a face full of information that they were clueless how to respond to in any other way than to follow Henry’s low rent lead.
Now, I am about to prove that either Henry was representative of all of blue pill society and that the stench of misandry-disguised-as-men’s-movement has spread everywhere, or that there is reason to think otherwise.
An invitation has been extended, which I have accepted, from the promoters of the Ultimate Men’s Summit for me to present at that event. The (mutually) chosen topic is “Why some men are angry at feminism.”
I hope to speak well and in a way that justifies the incredible support I have been given by those who regularly frequent this website.
I also want to say that I refuse to allow my experience with Henry Balanger of The Good Men Project to reduce me to paranoia or to alter my values to the point that I refuse to extend trust until I am given reasons not to.
I have spoken at length with Lion Goodman, the summit liaison who approached me regarding an appearance. My impression of him thus far guides my conscious about participating. He strikes me as a bright, energetic man who is overly but unconsciously influenced by feminist propaganda (like the other 99% of men). That being said, he also gives me the impression he is open-minded, fair, principled and genuinely interested in what I/we have to say.
I could be wrong, but that is my honest impression and I am going with it.
That being said, I would like to ask AVfM supporters to register for the event and give a brief call in to my interview (each segment only lasts 30 minutes) to add your thoughts into the mix, as well as to phone in and participate in other presentations.
Thanks again in advance for your participation. This won’t be AVfM Radio, but I won’t be sugar coating either.
My appearance there will be Thursday, June 16th at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time, US.
Register for the summit HERE.
Read my summit profile HERE. |
By Rob Taylor
KABUL, Aug 26 (Reuters) - A senior U.S. logistics commander rejected accusations on Sunday from frontline combat troops that the complicated rollback from bases across Afghanistan and packing up of military equipment was disrupting NATO-led operations against insurgents.
U.S. Brigadier-General Steven Shapiro said around 400 bases had been successfully closed or handed to Afghan security forces from a high of around 800 last October as part of a withdrawal of foreign troops from combat operations winding up in 2014.
"To the soldiers out on patrol, it's transparent," said Shapiro, in charge of transferring excess non-military equipment to Afghan forces.
"Most of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines who are operating those vehicles don't see that business side of the army."
The pullout of more than $60 billion worth of war-fighting equipment from Afghanistan is expected to be one of the most complicated logistical exercises in recent history, much more difficult than the pullout from Iraq.
On top of mountainous terrain and Taliban attacks, NATO's task has also been complicated by unpredictable border closures enforced by Pakistan in retaliation against U.S. air strikes, shutting down vital land routes and disrupting plans.
During the Iraq withdrawal, U.S. and British forces were able to move men and equipment out to neighbouring Kuwait for packing, repair and washing to remove contaminants, whereas in Afghanistan the job must be done on local bases.
Soldiers say that with one armoured vehicle taking days or weeks to ready for transport and with more than 60,000 vehicles to shift, the preparation is a major distraction to combat operations and training of Afghan security forces.
Incoming U.S. units have also been cut in size as part of a 28,000-strong reduction ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama to be completed by September ahead of November presidential elections.
"It's a nightmare. We barely have enough guys to cover our area, let alone get ready to pack up," a U.S. officer recently told Reuters in volatile eastern Kunar province ahead of a pullout from several bases and transition to Afghan control.
But Shapiro said around 3,000 logistics troops were working out which non-military equipment would be left behind for Afghan forces, from base fridges to tables and chairs, to generators and air-conditioning units, easing the strain on combat troops.
And where they were handed over, bases would be fully operational, he said, with U.S. troops prioritising Afghan operational needs over American requests for vital equipment like generators.
U.S. commanders had learned lessons from the Iraq withdrawal, Shapiro said, the most important of which was the need for early planning to avoid bottlenecks and the buildup of equipment slowing the exit from the country.
NATO's Director of Engineering, Major-General Bryan Watson, earlier this month said that most bases closed or handed over so far were smaller combat outposts and observation positions, plus a handful of mid-size bases housing around 800 to 1,000 troops.
The biggest challenges would be ten to fifteen much larger bases like Shindand Air Base in western Herat province, as well as Kandahar and Bagram air bases, which are the size of small cities. (Editing by Nick Macfie) |
Earlier this week, the ACLU and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law each filed separate lawsuits against the Trump administration, alleging that its Commission on Election Integrity is violating federal law.
The lawsuits challenge the commission on the basis of transparency. "This process is cloaked in secrecy, raising serious concerns about its credibility and intent. What are they trying to hide?" said Theresa Lee, a staff attorney with the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, in a statement.
In truth, voting-rights advocates have a pretty good idea of what the commission might be trying to hide. The effort is widely seen as an attempt to scrounge up justification for Donald Trump’s purported belief that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton, causing Trump to lose the popular vote while still winning the electoral college.
The head of the voter commission, Kris Kobach, is notorious for his efforts to restrict access to the ballot in a way that helps the GOP. He's joined on the commission by a rogues' gallery of voter fraud conspiracy theorists who have found employment with the GOP in recent years. Unfortunately for them, their initial efforts through Trump's commission seem to be backfiring.
Last month, the commission requested states provide voter-roll information including the names, addresses, birth dates, partial Social Security numbers, party affiliation, felon status and other data for every registered voter in the country, but nearly every state in the US is resisting supplying at least some of the information the voter commission requested, and a handful are refusing to comply outright. "They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from," said Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hoseman, a Republican from one of the states that is refusing to comply. Even Kobach, acting in his capacity as Kansas' secretary of state, told himself, acting in his capacity as the head of the Commission on Election Integrity, that Kansas would not be able to fully comply with the commission's request.
At a meeting of secretaries of state last weekend, the election officials passed a resolution affirming that "states are responsible for protecting the integrity of their elections including the secrecy of the ballot, security of their election infrastructures and sensitive personal information included in the states' voter rolls" and reaffirming the secretaries' "commitment to strengthening election cyber security, improving processes, and increasing voter participation." It was a clear response to Trump’s Election Integrity Commission. (Kobach was conspicuously absent from the meeting.)
But on the same day last month that the Commission on Election Integrity sent out its ill-fated requests to states for voters' personal information, something else happened—something that could be far more threatening to states than Kobach inquiry.
A coordinated effort
On that day, the Sessions Department of Justice also sent a letter to 44 states demanding to know state procedures for maintaining voter registration lists under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, or the "motor voter" law, which sought to encourage Americans to vote but also detailed when voters should be kicked off voting rolls. The NVRA requires states to "conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists." Voters can only be removed from voting rolls after the state tries and fails to contact them to confirm their address—and, if after the state reaches out and doesn't receive a response, the person in question then does not show up to vote in the next two federal elections.
But voting rights advocates worry that the Trump administration’s ultimate goal may be to pressure states to purge their voter rolls under the excuse of eliminating voters who have become inactive or moved away. The timing of the two efforts—with both the Election Integrity Commission and the Department of Justice sending out letters to the majority of states on the same day—seems more than coincidental.
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"When states initiate large-scale removals without the appropriate protections, eligible voters could be kicked off the rolls and disenfranchised on Election Day," writes Jonathan Brater of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. "Unfortunately, we have lots of examples of bad purges. Most notorious were those in Florida in 2000, when eligible voters were confused with ineligible individuals."
Pushing state voter purges has been a longtime priority for some within the Republican Party, Brater writes. After the 2000 Florida recount debacle and the subsequent need for the Supreme Court to pick a president, the Bush administration recognized the difference a handful of votes could make, and pushed state officials to scrutinize their voter rolls. The Bush Department of Justice even sued Missouri to force it to conduct a voter purge and lost. Many of the same people who played a role in that effort have now been given jobs with the Trump administration.
The upshot is that when some voters who have not cast a ballot in a while show up at the polls for their next election, they may find that they are no longer registered. Given that voter purges tend to affect poor and minority voters, and that Republicans are concerned about a groundswell of support for Democrats in coming elections, efforts to purge voter rolls would likely end up disenfranchising those who would vote against the president's agenda.
Ultimately, Kobach and Sessions may be laying the groundwork for a repeal of the NVRA, writes election law expert Richard Hasen at Slate.
They will argue it is necessary to roll back the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (or "motor voter" law)—a law which folks like Kobach hate because among other things it requires states to offer voter registration at public service agencies. They'll want federal law to do what federal courts have so far forbidden Kobach to do: Require people to produce documentary proof of citizenship before registering to vote. In other words, show us your papers or you can't register.
The ongoing fight to vote
In Trump's Election Integrity Commission, voting-rights advocates see the shadow of fights to come. But there are also plenty of fights today. As the specter of Justice Department-backed voter-roll purges loom, Republican-governed states are also taking other signals from the Trump administration's DOJ—including that voter-ID laws of the sort fought by Eric Holder's DOJ under Obama—are now more acceptable. The latest iteration of Texas's voter-ID law, for instance, is being supported by the Sessions DOJ; the Holder DOJ opposed it in court. In total, eight states are seeking to implement or strengthening voter-ID laws this year, Jane Timm reports for NBC News.
These laws can make a difference: A study by the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA found that Wisconsin's voter-ID blocked as many as 200,000 people from voting in 2016. That's an order of magnitude more than the 22,000 votes that delivered the state to Trump. A Brennan Center analysis finds that as many as 21 million Americans—or 11 percent—may not have a photo ID. This group is disproportionately made up of elderly, poor, and minority Americans, and includes many city-dwellers (for whom a driver's license is less necessary). Millions more Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 do not have a photo ID that reflects their current name and address, the Brennan Center report found. In short, many Americans without IDs tend to be the sort of Americans who also vote for Democrats.
The Democratic Party is touting a new effort to fight gerrymandering, which has given as many 22 seats in the House of Representatives to Republicans. But if Democrats hope to retake Congress and rebuild their party, they'll also have to ramp up their opposition to restrictive voting practices—and any attempt by the Trump Election Integrity Commission and the Sessions DOJ to further restrict the franchise. |
A recent study by two Swedish economists has shed light on the world's most and least racially tolerant countries, and the results might surprise you. While the United States is ranked among the most tolerant on the globe (some may find this predictable, others may not), Europe presents a greater range of tolerance levels, with several countries in the second and third least tolerant ranges.
The study was aimed at discerning a correlation between a country's level of economic freedom and its racial tolerance. The latter was defined by one simple question, as asked in the World Values Survey: Whom would you not want as a neighbor? Those who selected "people of other races" were categorized as intolerant for the purposes of this investigation. Countries were then ranked by percentage of responses: the fewer "intolerant" respondents, the more tolerant the country. While the Swedish researches found no conclusive results regarding any strong correlation between economic development and tolerance, a recent Washington Post article article went back to the original survey source and compiled a greater sample of data for the purposes of determining other potential relationships between a country and its perceived level of tolerance.
According to this infographic, the U.S. falls into the most tolerant category, with only 0-4.9% of those surveyed responding that they would not want to live near people of other races. Our neighbor to the north responded in kind, while Mexico ranked in the second-tier of tolerance, making the totality of North America look like a big amalgamation of racial harmony. While this may or may not actually be the case (people lie on surveys, the Washington Post authors note) it certainly provides a compelling lens for analyzing the less concordant results of Europe.
Albania appears to be the least tolerant on the European continent in the second lowest 30-39.9% range. While potential explanations for such a severe distinction from its neighboring states abound, arriving at a concrete conclusion for intolerance is likely a futile pursuit. Croatia, for example, ranks in the 5-9.9%t category (the same as Mexico), achieving the most tolerant in the Balkan region. Both ethnic Croats and Albanians were involved in the conflicts that embroiled the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, and such ethnic strife undoubtedly contributes to a heightened sensitivity to ethnic and racial relations. However, given its distinctly intolerant stance, Albania, for reasons not easily explained by its history of conflict, seems to have lagged behind in recovering from regional tensions. While Albania's ranking may be difficult to explain, it is not the sole European state at the intolerant end of the spectrum. France ranked just above, in the 20-29.9% range. In contrast, adjacent Germany and Spain, fell into the same tier as Mexico and Croatia.
Rounding out the bottom of the list are India, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Hong Kong in the 40%+ range. A potential explanation for this, is that the less heterogeneous the society, the less tolerant. While this logic might follow for Albania, what is France's excuse? On the flipside, one might argue that changes in patterns to immigration or perceived and unwanted changes to a social fabric might play a role. Remember when France decided to ban religious garments in public? That was probably a good indication of where France was at on the tolerance spectrum, no survey needed.
Ultimately, the survey presents an intriguing model for analyzing tolerance between countries. But with the above in mind, it is only a small piece of the larger picture. Wherever states are suppressing civil liberties in broad and unapologetic ways, intolerance is likely lurking not too far below. |
Grand Rapids police say the people in this frame of cell phone video assaulted a man passing by them in downtown Grand Rapids on July 28, 2015. (Photo: Grand Rapids Police Department)
GRAND RAPIDS — The Grand Rapids Police Department wants to hear from anyone who can identify some assault suspects seen in cell phone video.
Police say the group of people seen in the video were punching and kicking a man who had been walking by them. Investigators say it happened around 10:15 p.m. July 28 near Rosa Parks Circle.
You can see the video here. Be advised it contains some coarse language.
"While this is not the most heinous of crimes, the community and the Grand Rapids Police Department will not tolerate this behavior in our city," Chief David Rahinsky said in a statement.
No one has been arrested, police said, adding that the victim refused medical treatment.
Anyone who can help identify people in the video should contact police at 616-456-3337 or Silent Observer at 616-774-2345 or www.silentobserver.org.
Grand Rapids police say the people in this frame of cell phone video assaulted a man passing by them in downtown Grand Rapids on July 28, 2015. (Photo: Grand Rapids Police Department)
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With power, style, a deep trick bag, an insatiable work ethic, and a passion for good times, Desiree Melancon put out one hell of a heart-stopping video part this year in Think Thank’s Brain Dead Heart Attack! Des has paid her dues over the years and worked hard to become the full-fledged hammer-throwing badass she is today. Which makes it all the more sweet to see her winning awards and getting her just desserts! But it’s not about awards for Des, it’s about shredding, filming, laughing and pushing herself; and I can say with absolute confidence that you ain’t seen nothing yet! – Jesse Burtner
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As her Northwestern University course "Social Inequality: Race, Class & Power" wound down for the semester, Beth Redbird decided to let the students choose the topic of the final unit. They settled on a contentious issue: immigration.
So Ms. Redbird, an assistant professor of sociology, invited a representative from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to speak to the class on Tuesday. She wanted the representative to answer students’ questions about the immigration system, and she had also invited an undocumented immigrant to speak later in the week.
Because of the sensitivity of the topic, Ms. Redbird gave students the option to skip the lecture and listen to a recording of it later. Some, though, were eager to "grill" the ICE officer.
As it turned out, the ICE representative, Manda Walters, never got to speak. Protesters compelled her to leave when they entered the classroom chanting, "ICE is for destruction, no need for discussion!"
Protests of controversial speakers, sometimes turning violent, have been a persistent problem on college campuses in recent months, with observers disagreeing on how to both ensure students’ safety and uphold the right to free speech. But the Northwestern incident stands apart from past incidents because of where it happened: in a classroom, during a class. And because the protest disrupted instruction, condemnations of it have been swift and harsh.
Among the most aggrieved parties were the students in Ms. Redbird’s class. "We were like, We’re gonna ask them all these questions, get the truth," Nefertari Bilal, a freshman, told The Chronicle. "We’re not gonna make it easy for them. We were looking forward to that. But of course that plan was totally dashed by the protesters."
The class began at 3:30 p.m. in Harris Hall. It was larger than the usual 85-person lecture because students had invited others who were interested in the discussion. About 100 protesters gathered outside the building, enough that administrators and the chief of the campus police department showed up. Some were told by administrators that they could enter the classroom if they didn’t disrupt the talk, according to a report in The Daily Northwestern, the campus newspaper.
“Our educational rights were violated in that moment, and I just questioned what was actually accomplished through this protest.”
About 30 protesters entered, Ms. Bilal estimated, after which the speaker left. Kate Lee, a fifth-year senior in the class, said they later shouted at and questioned the professor. Ms. Bilal said some students left the classroom crying.
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"We chose to be in that classroom, and as students we’re paying for the class," Ms. Lee said. "Our educational rights were violated in that moment, and I just questioned what was actually accomplished through this protest."
‘Free Expression Must Be Protected’
In a written statement, Morton O. Schapiro and Daniel I. Linzer, Northwestern’s president and provost, respectively, condemned the protest and suggested the university would take further action. "The behavior of our students in this incident was disrespectful, inappropriate, and contrary to the values of the university," the statement said. "Free expression must be protected and should be countered with more debate, close examination, and critical thinking — not censorship."
The protesters said that the administration’s viewpoint had posed a threat to safety.
"The university, in its fierce and uncompromising protection of the ‘free expression’ of ICE, legitimized state-sanctioned violence and, in so doing, undermined the well-being of students, faculty, and staff who have been violated," read a statement from the protesting group. “As students, we value academic spaces to learn dissenting views, but cannot compromise the safety of our community members.”
“The university, in its fierce and uncompromising protection of the 'free expression' of ICE, legitimized state-sanctioned violence and, in so doing, undermined the well-being of students, faculty, and staff.”
ICE arrests rose 38 percent during the first three months of Donald J. Trump’s presidency compared with the same period last year, the agency announced this week. With 41,318 arrests, that is more than 400 per day.
April Navarro, a sophomore who helped organize the protests, told The Daily Northwestern that giving an ICE representative the opportunity to speak in a class had made the university complicit in acts that "terrorize communities."
"We’re not interested in having those types of conversations that would be like, Oh, let’s listen to their side of it, because that’s making them passive rule-followers rather than active proponents of violence," she said.
Other students said they were worried that the officer’s visit would attract recruits. "There are people who would be listening to this ICE representative and agreeing with them and maybe one day becoming an ICE agent or co-signing and supporting them, and that in itself is violence," Danielle Douge told the newspaper.
But Ms. Redbird said she had taken similar concerns into account before issuing the invitation. "I specifically went looking for people who have no arrest power," Ms. Redbird said, noting that Ms. Walters is a public-relations officer for the agency. "Students had the choice to come or not come. I didn’t want anybody to feel unsafe." The professor continued: "I know a few undocumented students. I mentioned my speech to them, and they said, Can we come?"
She said she especially wanted the students to learn that ICE is situated in the executive branch, how it works with state and local law enforcement, and how much local autonomy the nearby Chicago office has.
Support From Student Government
Northwestern’s student government issued a statement supporting undocumented students and the stance of the protesters. (The student government passed a resolution two months ago asking the university to prioritize its speech-protection policies and to resist censorship.)
“Students certainly have the right to protest, but not in a way that interferes with the essential educational functions of the university.”
Following the protest, Ms. Redbird canceled the planned visit by the undocumented speaker, citing safety and privacy concerns.
Hans-Joerg Tiede, who handles academic-freedom issues for the American Association of University Professors, said the protest was inappropriate, much like other protests to remove controversial speakers.
"Whether inside or outside the classroom, we do not believe it is appropriate to shut down speakers," Mr. Tiede said. "Students certainly have the right to protest, but not in a way that interferes with the essential educational functions of the university."
Ms. Redbird said her students had been excited about the lecture, not necessarily because they agree with what ICE does but to learn about its functioning. "I spend a lot of time in my class telling my students knowledge is power. How can you ever expect to make change in the system if you don’t understand the way that system works?" Ms. Redbird said. "This was the chance to learn the way the process works, and I’m disappointed we lost that chance."
Ms. Bilal said she considered the whole incident a loss. "They didn’t have a lesson plan, they didn’t bring facts in," she said of the protesters. "That would have been more effective. If you’re just going to complain about people’s ignorance and disrupt their class but not do anything — not try to educate us, just try to villainize us — you’re part of the problem, helping keeping that ignorance in place." |
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He is the French economist who shot to international fame following his 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which dealt with inequality in the modern world.
Now Thomas Piketty has launched a new crusade - an attempt to change the debate on mass immigration, which he describes as an economic good.
In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, the chairman of the Paris School of Economics and visiting professor at the London School of Economics told me the European Union would benefit from a major increase in the inflow of people from the rest of the world.
"The European Union has the capacity to absorb a large flow of migrants, one million per year in terms of inflow net of outflow," he said.
"This is exactly what we had between 2000 and 2010 and this was working in the sense that unemployment was being reduced.
"The problem is - with the austerity policies and with the recession - now we are in a situation where it's very difficult in particular with southern Europe, with the terrible economic situation that we have created there in particular."
Mr Piketty was speaking to mark the launch of his new book, Chronicles On Our Troubled Times, a collection of essays he originally wrote for the French newspapers Liberation and Le Monde and published in English for the first time.
In the book Mr Piketty argues that, with a population of 510 million, the European Union is well able to cope with more immigrants.
The population of the EU has only risen by 0.2% a year since 1995, he argues, compared to 1.2% for the world's population over the same period.
According to Eurostat, the official statistical arm of the European Commission, a total of 3.4 million people came to the EU during 2013.
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Some 2.8 million left, leaving a net immigration figure of around 600,000.
Between 2013 and 2014, the UK saw non-EU net migration of 157,000, according to the Office of National Statistics, a figure that has risen since then.
Mr Piketty said that slow growth across the eurozone had been exacerbated not just by a lack of immigration but also by austerity policies aimed at reducing public expenditure.
"I think there has been an attempt, particularly in the eurozone, to reduce the public deficit too fast," he said.
"When you look at the growth trajectory of Europe as compared to the United States, I think it's very clear that we started a new recession in 2011, 2012, 2013 because we have tried to reduce the public deficit too fast.
"If we had taken our budgetary decision in a eurozone parliament in a democratic manner rather than through these automatic rules about budget deficit [we could have avoided] excessive austerity and the rise in unemployment and xenophobia right at the time when there was a true need for Europe to be more open with respect to the rest of the world, in particular regarding the refugee crisis."
I ask him, if he were an adviser to George Osborne, what he would be saying about the Treasury's target of creating a budget surplus by 2020, eliminating the deficit.
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He smiled in response - Mr Piketty knows he is not likely to be the chancellor's favourite economist.
"What I find particularly incredible in this policy is that, OK, we need to cut the deficit, we don't have money, we need a surplus," he said.
"But we have money to cut the tax of the higher income groups, so I think it's a complete contradiction and I think that's very hard to understand for the general public.
"I think you have some people in this country who have benefited from growth much more than others in the past decade and you cannot just give more and more to those who already have more."
The Treasury's analysis is different, with officials pointing to research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which says that income inequality has reduced since the 2008-09 recession.
Rather than looking at the impact of tax changes on income, the Treasury analyses taxes paid as a proportion of the total.
Their figures show that in 2010, the richest fifth of households paid 49% of all taxes whereas the poorest fifth paid around 6% of all taxes.
By 2020, the proportion of tax paid by the richest fifth will have risen to 52%, with the poorest fifth paying around the same proportion, 6%.
Mr Piketty says that income inequality figures mask a broader problem of wealth inequality which is still growing.
"If you compare the 1980s and the 1970s with today - 20 or 30 years down the road - there's absolutely no doubt that not only in the US but also in the UK and in most developed countries we have had rising inequality," he said. |
A frontiersman on a fur trading expedition in the 1820s fights for survival after being mauled by a bear and left for dead by members of his own hunting team.
In 1954, a U.S. Marshal investigates the disappearance of a murderer, who escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane.
In 1935, Indiana Jones arrives in India, still part of the British Empire, and is asked to find a mystical stone. He then stumbles upon a secret cult committing enslavement and human sacrifices in the catacombs of an ancient palace.
A seasoned FBI agent pursues Frank Abagnale Jr. who, before his 19th birthday, successfully forged millions of dollars' worth of checks while posing as a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, and a legal prosecutor.
A middle-aged woman finds herself in the middle of a huge conflict that will either make her a profit or cost her life.
Based on the true story of Jordan Belfort , from his rise to a wealthy stock-broker living the high life to his fall involving crime, corruption and the federal government.
The lives of two mob hitmen, a boxer, a gangster's wife, and a pair of diner bandits intertwine in four tales of violence and redemption.
In the dead of a Wyoming winter, a bounty hunter and his prisoner find shelter in a cabin currently inhabited by a collection of nefarious characters.
With the help of a German bounty hunter, a freed slave sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner.
When a simple jewelry heist goes horribly wrong, the surviving criminals begin to suspect that one of them is a police informant.
In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a plan to assassinate Nazi leaders by a group of Jewish U.S. soldiers coincides with a theatre owner's vengeful plans for the same.
After awakening from a four-year coma, a former assassin wreaks vengeance on the team of assassins who betrayed her.
The murderous Bride is back and she is still continuing her vengeance quest against her ex-boss, Bill, and taking aim at Bill's younger brother Budd and Elle Driver, the only survivors from the squad of assassins who betrayed her four years earlier. It's all leading up to the ultimate confrontation with Bill, the Bride's former master and the man who ordered her execution! Written by Anthony Pereyra {hypersonic91@yahoo.com}
Did You Know?
Trivia At the film's first test screening in Austin, Texas, the audience gave the film a five minute standing ovation. The reaction was so overwhelming, that At the film's first test screening in Austin, Texas, the audience gave the film a five minute standing ovation. The reaction was so overwhelming, that Harvey Weinstein did not have the research firm, conducting the screening, pass out response cards. See more
Goofs When The Bride is stuck in the coffin, and starts punching it, the first two times you can see cracks all around the place she hit, then when it comes back for the third and fourth times, all the cracks are gone. When The Bride is stuck in the coffin, and starts punching it, the first two times you can see cracks all around the place she hit, then when it comes back for the third and fourth times, all the cracks are gone. See more
Quotes [ first lines ]
: Do you find me sadistic? You know, Kiddo, I'd like to believe that you're aware enough even now to know that there's nothing sadistic in my actions. At this moment, this is me at my most masochistic.
: Bill, it's your bab...
[ BLAM! ]
See more » Bill : Do you find me sadistic? You know, Kiddo, I'd like to believe that you're aware enough even now to know that there's nothing sadistic in my actions. At this moment, this is me at my most masochistic. The Bride : Bill, it's your bab...
Crazy Credits Before the end of the list of credits there is a list of names under R.I.P., including Charles Bronson, Lucio Fulci and Sergio Leone. Before the end of the list of credits there is a list of names under R.I.P., including Charles Bronson, Lucio Fulci and Sergio Leone. See more
Alternate Versions Hong Kong version differs very slightly from the US version. The only difference is that some alternate shots were used in the scene where Beatrix drives to Esteban and the scene where she finally goes to him in the village. Hong Kong version differs very slightly from the US version. The only difference is that some alternate shots were used in the scene where Beatrix drives to Esteban and the scene where she finally goes to him in the village. See more |
Carolina Hurricanes goalie Manny Legace has faced a fair share of adversity in his career. After being drafted by the Hartford Whalers in the eighth round of the 1993 Entry Draft, the franchise apparently gave up on him and traded the young goalie to the Los Angeles Kings in 1998 for a conditional draft pick.
The Kings let him go shortly after that and he was eventually signed as a free agent by Detroit in 1999, but they put him on waivers early that season. The Red Wings had not completely given up on him though and claimed him back off the waiver wire a bit later. He stayed with the Wings for several years after that.
Playing the role of backup is nothing new to the veteran. While he was in Detroit, he served as understudy to the likes of Chris Osgood, Dominik Hasek, and Curtis Joseph. Not only was he a suitable backup, he stepped up and played a major role when one or more of the star goalies went down to injury.
In the 2000-01 season, he had a 24-5-5 record. In 2005-06, when Joseph and Hasek both fell to injuries, (and each had respective salaries of $8 million and $10 million), Legace held the fort with a 37-8-3 record at a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately for the goalie, when the Oilers eliminated the Wings in the first round of the playoffs that postseason, Legace got the brunt of the blame and was released that summer.
The St. Louis Blues signed the goalie that offseason and Legace played well enough to earn an All Star bid in 2008. Still, the netminder has not received much recognition. After three years with St. Louis, he was not offered another contract and was looking for work last summer. He was eventually given a tryout during the preseason by Atlanta, but was released before the season started.
The Canes picked him up from the Thrashers' AHL affiliate in Chicago back in November when Cam Ward was injured with a lacerated leg.
"I've been under-appreciated my whole career, but that's helped me to keep my head small, " Legace joked one day after practice. "But I made it to an All Star game and I've had some good years."
I asked the goalie how he was able to keep mentally prepared as a backup.
"I have been very fortunate to play with some real professionals, guys like Chris Chelios and Nicklas Lidstrom. You spend some time with guys like that and you learn what focus is all about."
Legace has not exactly had an easy stay in Carolina and had to compete with Michael Leighton in order to keep the backup job when Ward returned to action. But the veteran out-played Leighton, forcing the Hurricanes to put their previous second string goalie on waivers.
Now that Ward is out again, this time with a back problem, Legace has done more than his part to hold the fort. He has a 5-0-0 record with a save percentage of .941, a GAA of 1.59, and has the team's only shutout of the season.
But despite all of this success, Legace will probably be back to square one when the season is over and will be looking for a new contract from another NHL team. The emergence of Justin Peters means that the youngster will probably be Cam Ward's understudy next season.
Still, don't count out Manny Legace. He's been a fighter and a scrambler his entire career and he is making a good case for himself to get an NHL contract again next season, even if it is not with the Hurricanes.
He will have his hands full tonight in the Nation's Capital, but the Caps would do well not to under-estimate him.
Although, that's just the way the goalie likes it.
_____
(We will have the game preview up at about 2 this afternoon.) |
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